“You two almost-Canadians will go the whole hog now, I imagine,” Grace had said to us. We knew the raging puberty business was Grace’s version of what was about to wreak havoc in her household. She’d met “someone serious,” as Grace put it. Jeremy was a younger man; he was also in publishing.
“You should definitely try a younger man—I like it better than I thought I would,” Em had told Grace.
Jeremy had two young daughters, not a lot younger than Matthew. “They soon will be starting puberty,” Grace had forewarned Matthew. For now, Matthew liked the girls, and he liked Jeremy. Matthew admitted to Em and me that his mom had made him anxious about his own puberty; the onset of the girls’ puberty sounded worse. Grace was projecting her experience with puberty onto the girls. She’d told me stories of her painful periods; she’d had terrible tampon problems. Poor Matthew was imagining these girls he’d met and liked—how they would be changed by their excruciating bleeding.
“The girls will soon be over puberty, as you will soon be over it,” I tried to assure Matthew, but he remained wary; his mother made it sound like puberty would be raging all around him. It was Em who got through to Matthew, by being funny about it.
“When you can’t put anything anywhere without getting blood all over it, that’s a good time to come see us in Toronto,” Em told him. “Or you can bring the girls to Toronto, and they can bleed with us for a while—it may be your mom who’ll need a break from all the puberty that’s happening,” Em said. Then Em did a little puberty pantomime; it wasn’t too explicit for Matthew. Em just danced around, like she had her period coming on. She was singing her own version of the Jerry Lee Lewis song—“a whole lotta bleedin’ goin’ on,” she was singing—when Matthew started laughing, and he sang along with her. For now, the raging puberty wasn’t a problem.
Em and I had met Jeremy, and his girls. We liked them, too, and we wanted Grace to be happy. I knew the only song Em was seriously singing. Em really meant what she sang to me in my sleep, when she was brainwashing me—and now I was the one singing it. It’s not hard to learn “O Canada,” but I was trying to learn both the English and the French versions. I knew one day I would have to sing it. At my swearing-in ceremony, when I took the Oath of Citizenship, I would also sing my new national anthem.
For now, the old Norwegians’ guns had gone down to Dixie, but the old patroller was gone forever—not just down south. “In America, kiddo, the guns don’t ever go away—they just turn up somewhere else,” was the way Em put it.
When it came to missing Molly, there would be no fooling around about it; there was only the missing part, or the part about seeing her in my heart. Molly was all business, no fooling around; in the old patroller’s opinion, ghosts were just fooling around. When I missed Molly, if I wanted to see her, I had to look in my heart.
Sometimes in my sleep, or in my dreams, I’m standing at the top of the Blue Ribbon Quad on Bromley Mountain. I’m looking at the foremost, downhill-facing chair on the lift—the chair closest to the edge of the loading platform, where the safety net is. It’s too early in the morning for the chairlift to be running. I can see the sign that says NO DOWNHILL LOADING when I look east—in the direction of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire—where the sunrise is. But I’m not in this dream to see the sunrise. The chairlift is a hearse, a waiting hearse; all that’s missing are the bodies.
Sometimes the old patroller and I are climbing up Bromley Mountain. We’re near the top of Upper Twister, where what Molly called the Rock Garden is—that was where we noticed how the earlier climbers’ tracks changed. My mother had some trouble on the second steep part of Twister. The old patroller and I saw only the snowshoer’s tracks the rest of the way. That was when we knew Elliot Barlow, the only hero, carried her piggyback to the top.
Loved ones leave us and we go on—ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly’s, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.
Matthew and I knew that all the Christmas trees in Canada were blue to Em. We understood that the blue Christmas trees were “psychologically” true—“in Em’s mind,” was the way we put it. In the last week of January 2006, when we lost Molly, Matthew was fourteen—almost fifteen. He was beginning to be comfortable with words like psychologically.
Some confusion was caused by the appearance of an actual blue Christmas tree in Toronto—a big one. Matthew said the blue tree was part of a neighborhood program called the Cavalcade of Lights, but everything about the giant blue Christmas tree would remain a mystery to me. I just remember the first Christmas season we saw it, the Christmas and New Year’s of 2005–2006, because that was when I heard about the old patroller.
“The tree is fifteen meters, almost fifty feet, and they’re talking about making it taller,” Matthew told us. He knew Em and I were too old, or too American, to learn the metric system. We would never know how to tell the temperature on the Celsius scale; Em and I were Fahrenheit people. The sculpture of a Christmas tree with blue lights looked even taller on the Canadian Pacific Railway overpass at Yonge Street, just north of Scrivener Square—an enormous blue Christmas tree, atop the trestlework of a railway bridge in midtown Toronto. Matthew and I loved the blue tree, but Em scarcely noticed it.
“Another Christmas tree—it must be almost that time of year,” was all Em said, when she first saw it.
“It’s blue,” I pointed out, but Em just shrugged and scuffed her feet—in Little Ray’s indifferent, jock-walking way.
Those two ghosts took some interest in the blue Christmas tree. Aboveground, my mom and the snowshoer didn’t venture far from the Summerhill subway station, but the big blue tree captured their limited attention for a while. I saw them occasionally in the underpass, beneath the railway bridge, where the noise of the traffic on Yonge Street was exaggerated. Those two seemed to like the whooshing sound, or the heightened roar of the engines. They were piggybacking each other around, in their juvenile fashion; when they saw me, they just waved and disappeared, or they went back to the subway.
It was early one morning, the third week of January 2006—bright and cold in Toronto. I’d brought my old ski clothes to Em’s house on Shaftesbury Avenue, because Toronto was a good city for winter walks. I was out walking, a bit after sunrise; I went north on Yonge Street, heading into a northeast wind. The wind was getting to me at Eglinton, where I took the subway back to Summerhill Station. It was crowded and warm on the subway, standing-room only—the morning rush hour on the trains going downtown. I had no idea what my mom and the snowshoer thought about rush hour, or if they thought about it. I didn’t know if they thought about anything—all those two did was fool around. At first, I didn’t see them on the crowded train.
The standing-room only must get in the way of their piggybacking, I was thinking—their single-leg lunges wouldn’t work at rush hour. I was about to get off the train when I saw them. Little Ray was curled up in Mr. Barlow’s lap; they were huddled together in a seat by the door. My mom was sobbing, but the little English teacher was looking straight at me. I could read her lips before the door closed: Go home, the snowshoer was telling me before I got off the train. I was frightened, not knowing what was wrong. My foremost fear was for Matthew. It was a school day in New York; something could have happened there. I imagined Em was still in bed, or she might be making her breakfast when I got back to the house. Maybe something had happened to Em, I was thinking, as I ran along Shaftesbury Avenue.