The Hidden World

Epilogue

He stood at the back doorway, feeling awkward. It was a door he knew well, one that he had run into and out of hundreds of times as a child. Now he hesitated before it as though it were a stranger's.

Ellen answered his tentative knock, her familiar face a reassurance, but her smile was troubled. "Oh, Robert. I'm so glad you could come here, on such short notice too. Come in! Why didn't you call? We'd have picked you up at the airport." 

"There was no need. I took the bus." He cleared his throat, a nervous habit of his since childhood. "Roy's in, is he?"

"Yes, here he is."

His brother looked so much older, and he wondered bleakly if he looked the same to Roy. Or was it age that made Roy's face look so pale, so drawn? He had lost his customary cheery look; his hazel eyes were tired, concerned, showing the lines at their corners. Ellen discreetly left the room so that the two of them could talk alone.

"It was easier than I expected to get a flight," he said when they were sitting at the kitchen table. "I went on stand-by." The truth was, he hadn't been sorry to get away. The stress in the house had been palpable—ever since Maeve left, he thought.

Roy seemed as uncomfortable as he was. "I just thought you should know, Rob. It wasn't really necessary to come all the way out here...."

Yes, it was, his brother wanted to say. It was necessary for me, because it gave me a reason to leave. He cleared his throat again, glanced out the window at the bay. Under the overcast sky, the water was leaden grey. "You said you were worried about Maeve."

"I just thought she needed her parents. Rob, I don't want to interfere with family matters, but it's been so hard to watch her. She just seemed listless at first, but lately she's appeared to be... almost frightened. She won't open up and talk about it, though. Whatever's going on with you and Maureen, I think she needs to hear about it from you directly."

"She will," he said dully. "I guess I've been putting it off." He continued to stare out the window. There was a long pause before he spoke again. "You know, Roy, I just couldn't wait to get out of here as a kid, get to the mainland and the big cities. I thought you were a real stick-in-the-mud not to leave. And you're here still. Imagine."

Roy also gazed out at the meadow and the stony beach, at the small wooden houses scattered along the bay. "I couldn't bear to leave this place," he said quietly.

His brother looked him in the eyes. "Exactly! That's because this place is real. Things that matter in the wealthy provinces don't matter here. Mary's Bay never changes—thank God. How I've come to yearn for a place without progress, a place where the countryside isn't being devoured by housing developments and strip malls, a place no one's trying to improve. I'm so sick of the urban jungle— the drive to get ahead, to flaunt and impress, to beat everyone else down. Did you hear about that Toronto stockbroker who committed suicide last week by jumping off a skyscraper? People don't do things like that here."

"Possibly due to the shortage of skyscrapers."

"You know what I mean. These people have every reason to give in to despair—more reason—but they don't. Why?" 

"Search me."

"You know the answer, though." His gaze returned to the window. "Early in life, Roy, we approach the world with joy and wonder. That experience is still inside some of us—the way the young tree is still inside the old one, deep at the centre of its growth rings. But most of us lose that ability to connect with the world, and then we're like a tree that has rotted away inside. We have no centre, no inner life. We accumulate possessions for others to admire—big houses, fancy cars—because our life is all on the outside, and we don't really exist inside ourselves any more. Then we throw ourselves off skyscrapers. That's what I'm really afraid, of, for Brandon and Maeve."