On the Saturday morning of the long Victoria Day weekend, Kip’s temperature rose alarmingly, and the weather, as if in mute sympathy, took a turn for the worse: the mercury plunged under a chill northern breeze that brought layers of grey cloud with it. This was to have been their first trip away from home as a broken family, and it would now have to be abandoned. Paul unpacked the car, and prepared for three days of domestic duties. Yet Sunday dawned bright and clear, and Kip showed no sign of fever.
Paul changed his mind, and decided to make the most of the remaining two days. After church, he promised the boys, we’ll leave for Vermont.
At the third verse of the final hymn, ‘Praise my soul the king of heaven,’ the adult choir stopped singing, permitting the congregation to hear the piping voices of the children’s choir:
Father-like he tends and spares us;
Well our feeble frame he knows;
In his hand he gently bears us,
Rescues us from all our foes.
Aiden’s clear treble could be heard soaring above the others. How his mother would have wept with joy to hear him! The anniversary of her death was only a week away, and Paul felt once more the weight of his own inadequacy to provide the maternal comfort and consolation both of her sons had lost forever.
After leaving St. Alban’s, the trio set off for Montreal, stopping for a late lunch at a Harvey’s on Jean-Talon, and arriving at the Port Kent ferry, waiting to be wafted across Lake Champlain to Burlington, before supper. As they were nearly an hour too early for the ferry, they passed the time kicking a soccer ball around on the apron of the jetty. An elderly couple in a superannuated Buick heavy with chrome worried they might lose the ball in the lake.
‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ Kip smiled, ‘we won’t let that happen.’
‘What a polite little boy,’ said the lady to her husband.
Once on board, the boys wandered off to explore, while Paul stood beside the car at one end of the Janus-prowed ferry, watching its bow furrow the still waters of the lake as the farther shore drew nearer. Above the throb of the engines, he could hear desultory snatches of conversation from a family of well-heeled New Yorkers gathered around a gleaming Mercedes-Benz at the front of the queue of cars, with a blonde mother at the wheel in flashy Oakley sunglasses. Father, fit and trim, and planted four-square by the chain, was speaking to son and daughter-in-law about real estate, with the easy assurance that experience and affluence confer upon the fortunate, the arms of a white tennis sweater loose around his neck, his arms on the shoulders of a grandchild. It was not the banal subject of their talk that depressed Paul, but their comfortable air of familial intimacy. His family was irretrievably shattered by Samantha’s death. A suffocating melancholy arose from within, bringing a clutching despair to his throat. He felt once again that crippling sense that he could not manage on his own. Instinctively he turned to look for the boys, and saw them at the railings on the half-deck above. Kip, self-contained as always, had been watching him below, and gave a shy, reassuring wave, as did Aiden beside him. Paul returned a sheepish acknowledgement in relief.
On the short drive to the hotel, Paul was more aware than usual of the empty seat beside him. Their new car had been bought for what would prove to be their last family trip together.
‘To the south and the sun!’ Sam had said at the outset of that summer’s drive to the sea islands off the Georgia coast, but the passenger seat had sat empty and silent since. Every day Paul noticed its newness contrast with the wear on the driver’s seat. Unless one of them was accompanying him on some errand, the boys preferred their own company in the back seat, as if, as a family, the front seat was still Mummy’s place.
