I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith.
But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Within weeks, Jake and I would find our way to a recovery meeting in a church basement. He held my hand while tears rivered down my cheeks. For an hour I listened to a roomful of seemingly happy people share their stories, their faith, their gratitude. As they started to stack the chairs, a tall black stranger in a funky hat came up to comfort me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “believe me, whatever you did wrong, I did way, way worse.”
Every season has its own soundtrack: that summer, it was Keith Jarrett’s introspective Köln Concert wafting over pink-streaked granite, keeping us company as we drank cranberry juice and soda with our meals. Jake’s precious mother had just died a difficult death. When Jarrett felt too haunting, Jake would toss in a little Frank or Van to keep the tone romantic. “I’m making love to you with my playlist,” he’d call out from his computer, and I’d be enveloped, newly sober, in a fresh cocoon of sound.
But for the rest of the world, the summer of 2007 belonged to the defiant Amy Winehouse: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said No, no, no!” An earworm if ever there was one. The point wasn’t lost on me as I headed back to McGill, having tallied my first seventeen days of sobriety in the north woods of Ontario. Checking my BlackBerry as I cabbed in from the airport, I found myself humming along. “No, no, no!”
Little did I understand that it would be more than a year before I was able to secure any meaningful sobriety, to put alcohol somewhat solidly in my rearview mirror. It would be three years after that before I regained what could be called a true sense of equilibrium. And it would take all my journalistic skills to put what was killing me—and as it turns out, a growing number of women—into some profound and meaningful context.
In the meantime, I was about to lose many things I cared about: my livelihood, my heart, my gusto. And before things got better, they were going to get as tough as tough could be.
A FAMILY UNRAVELS
One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.
—ROBERTSON DAVIES
I had a bifurcated childhood, split perfectly down the middle between joy and distress. Most of the latter was alcohol-fueled. My sister and brother will attest to this, and my mother will as well: there was great happiness, despite the extended absences of my peripatetic father, followed by years of terrible despair, years we barely survived.
What we don’t agree on is when it all changed. For me, it split pretty tidily this way: before South Africa—a move we made when I was nine—and after South Africa. South Africa was the hinge experience. Once we had been there, it seemed there was no turning back.
Before we moved, there were many memories, but none so dominant as my mother’s devotion to her parents. Night after night, I fell asleep to the sound of her typewriter keys as she wrote her long letters home. Handel or Beethoven on the record player, clackety-clack. Telling them of her life in a small northern mining town, with three small children, where the whistle blew every evening to signal that the miners’ day had ended. Clackety-clack. Writing of life alone with those small children. My father in Africa or Australia, a geophysicist overseeing exploration in the outback. Clackety-clack. Once in a while she would go to her bridge club. Kissing me when she returned, she smelled of cold air and clean hair and Guerlain’s l’Heure Bleue. But those evenings were rare. Most evenings, I fell asleep to the comforting sound of her keys.
And then glorious silence: come June, the typing would stop and we’d hit the road.
Year after sunburned year—long before people worried about global warming or SPF—we would escape for the entire season. As soon as school was out, my mother would load up the car and head off down the highway. In the trunk would be our tartan cooler, the car rug for picnics, plus an entire suitcase of library books. In the backseat: the dog, my sister, my brother, and I, unencumbered by care—or seat belts, for that matter.
On paper, my mother would say we were Protestants. But in reality, heading to the cottage was our religion: we were the true believers. Not that we worshipped in just one spot. As newlyweds, my parents had honeymooned at my father’s family place, a log cabin on a sheltered teacup of a lake near Algonquin Park, the same lake where iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson planned to honeymoon before he mysteriously drowned. But after that initial trip, they split their vacation time between their families’ summer homes. And since my father’s holiday time was limited, more often than not we would find ourselves nestled in the bunk beds of my mother’s childhood cottage on a stretch of Georgian Bay, a place where August storms swaggered in at night, tossing sailboats at their moorings, working their bonsai magic on the pines.
Thanks to my two grandfathers—both of whom had fought in the First World War, one as a fighter pilot, the other having his leg shattered at Passchendaele—there were two log cabins we called home. During the 1930s, they and their spunky wives had searched the north country for land, tenting with their children before the cottages were built. In my maternal grandparents’ case, they bought a local farmer’s log home for five hundred dollars in 1930 and had the thick hemlock timbers numbered and transported by horse and wagon to be reassembled by the shores of Georgian Bay. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, built a tidy one-room log place from scratch, adding little pine bunkhouses along the shoreline as their family grew.
As a result, we gorged on summer in two distinctly different places. At the little lake cabin, we would fall asleep to the mournful call of loons, snug under heavy red Hudson Bay blankets, in flannel pajamas my mother had warmed by the fire, our hair smelling of wood smoke. My sister Cate and I would whisper by the dying light of the woodstove. What was that noise? Was it a bear? Or a ghost? I was sure there were ghosts. Poor Tom Thomson, vengeful in his soggy plaid shirt, rising from his watery grave to return to his never-to-be honeymoon spot, wielding an axe. Always an axe, to give us forty whacks.
Before I knew it, morning would break with a slam, my grandmother’s screen door announcing she was up, coffee on, porridge started. Time for the morning paddle to the lodge to see if the paper had arrived. Within minutes we would be off, her voice ringing clear across the mirrored water: “By the li-i-ight of the sil-ver-eee moo-oo-oon …” Another day had begun, a day of snooping in the woods, racing to the raft, horsing around with the Patterson boys.
At the other cottage, days and nights were different. There I would fall asleep to the sulky rhythm of Georgian Bay and the tinkling sounds of masts, the sweet taste of marshmallow in my mouth and even sweeter comfort of my cousins. By day I’d wake to thick wedges of sunlight on the painted floorboards and the whirrrr-dee-dee-dee of the birds. In a flash, I’d be downstairs, joining Dougie as he cracked open a new variety pack of little boxed cereals, dousing his bowl of Frosted Flakes in chocolate milk because shhh, the mothers were still sleeping. Off we would tramp in our still-damp bathing suits to our secret fort at the Point. Back to the cottage to head out in the Swallow, our bathtub of a homemade rowboat. Adventure after adventure, punctuated only by meals, served by my mother and aunts and grandmother on little birch-bark place mats, ones sold by the “Indians,” said my mother, “when they used to tent on the Point.”
All week long the cottage was a women-and-children affair. But on Friday afternoons the air would