The Road Last Taken

Anne Stone

By 2006, Rob had beaten the cancer. Or so it seemed. The surgeries had been successive, each a little more invasive, as they removed lymph nodes and tested for progression. In June of 2006, he had an MRI and, after months of remission, they found lesions. In the brain, the liver, the lungs. We’re discussing the MRI in the most matter of fact terms. I’m calm, taking my cue from Rob.

Rob tells me of the MRI and I ask him what’s next.

“Nothing,” is the disquieting answer. “We’re going to wait. After The Encantadas is out in September, we’ll see where we are then.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, “it looks like it’s spread, so why are they doing nothing.”

“There’s nothing they can do,” he tells me. “In three months, we’ll look again.”

Rob tells me about the conversation he had with his doctor. “So what have I got left, he asked? Two years?”

“Two years?” the doctor repeated, “try seven months.”

Rob asks me to tell no one and I understand. He’s chosen to give himself time untouched by the concern of others. When I get off the phone, my partner will ask me how Rob is doing and I’ll look at the floor and tell him, “I promised not to say.”

“I’m sorry,” Wayde will say, “I’m sorry.”

I’m twenty-two years old, living in a ramshackle apartment. Early in the month, I can afford to take the Metro, but by the last week of the month, I walk the two miles to Concordia where I’m an English student. Sometimes Jonny, the building Superintendent, gives me a few bus tickets. Jonny also gives me “Indian Tobacco” — leaves he picks off the bank of the Lachine canal and dries in his oven. He gives me an IGA bag full of dun-coloured leaves, desiccated and friable, the surfaces of each covered in a strange brown fuzz. In the fumoir at the old library building, I roll hand-mades that reek of skunkweed.

Behind the second floor of the building there is a series of wooden storage sheds. Jonny says I can use one if I want. He walks the Lachine canal, places old tin cans on the bare branches of low trees. They make a kind of music there. He gives me a bicycle lock, so no one can get into the shed and set it on fire. I move books and journals into the unheated shed, wear a parka while I write. Begin the notes to what will be my first novel, jacks.

That night, the shed is broken into. I come home from my classes to find the door ripped off of its hinges and books strewn across the floor. I pick up a copy of A Room of One’s Own, the middle torn out. On the margins, a long letter to me, written by someone who doesn’t much like locks on doors, a man who, sometime later, will walk backwards along the railway tracks as he slowly disappears into the past. On this night, though, there is no distant vanishing point on the horizon, no spot on which to rest the eyes, no where for me to go, but home, and so, for a long, long time, I sit in the dark, there, in that shed, Woolf’s pages blowing loose around me.

It’s March, 1992. A little later that month, I’ll walk out of St. Henri and up in the Plateau, enter a beautiful flat with carved moldings. The walls, a soft and matte yellow. Rob will be there, smiling in his famous Tillie hat. Someone will introduce us and Rob, recognizing my name, will tell me he’s read one of my stories.

I won’t believe him.

“Yeah, right, and you remember it,” I’ll say, pursing my lips.

“‘The Red Book’ right,” he’ll respond, and I’ll give him a second look.

Years later, he’ll remind me of this story, one of the earliest I wrote.

I’ll have forgotten about it, by then. I’ll burn my only copy of it later that year. In Rob’s cast iron stove. And soon after it’s consigned to flames, I’ll forget it ever existed.

Early April, and I’m walking down an endless corridor in the LaSalle building, inside of the kind of bad dream in which all of the doors are the same and though there are numbers on the doors, you can’t seem to remember what number is the number on the right door. A man in a Tillie hat spots me, cocks his head.

“You again,” he says and smiles.

I smile too. It’s as if running into each other in the most obvious place possible is fate of a kind. Perhaps it is.

Later that night, Rob and I meet at the Copa, to drink beer and shoot pool. I run the table for the first and last time in my life. Everything clicks. I can hold my beer and suddenly, I can play pool like the old men at the tavern in St. Henri, the ones with the big guts who work at the tobacco factory and who, to be fair to me, shoot with the butt end of the cue, eyes closed — and still hit three banks and pocket the ball.

Rob asks me back to his place in the country.

I pause.

Years later, Rob will show me the continental divide, a slim rise I can see before us, out of the window of our car. I’ll roll down the window and spit on either side, knowing, in slow motion, I’ve spit in both oceans at once. That night, there is a similar dividing line in my life. It’s the kind of night that spawns railway tracks.

I nod.

“We’ll get some wine,” Rob says.

“We could just get a big beer,” I offer, embarrassed by the expense of a whole bottle of wine. Rob shrugs the eight dollars off like it’s nothing, and smiles a quizzical smile I’ll come to know very well. Outside the dep, it’s a cool April night, and we walk a little ways.

The kiss, when it comes, is small. A touch of the lips. Rob always remembers that kiss as our first. Me, I remember the kiss after that. The one in Jan Draper’s old brass bed, the one with the badly sagging mattress that gathers our bodies up in the middle and holds them close together for the next six years.

Six years Rob and I will spend together in the cabin. A lifetime of sorts. And during that time we make each other promises. Break a few, too. We come to speak of life in the singular. He takes road trips and I get drunk on time alone. He writes me from the road, when he’s away, describes the “hundreds of humming miles of plain beneath the wheels, the hot summer air full of the smell of prairie grass, the wildflowers and motor oil, the horizon long across my eyes.”

He writes me letters that keep us drunk on love. He writes promises of forever from the Carlsbad Caverns, from the Gulf Islands, in notes he leaves on our kitchen table when he drives into town for a newspaper.

“You’re in Ayer’s Cliff,” he writes me from the road, “I think we’ll always be here and of course always together.”

“Whatever it is that life means, or adds up to,” he writes, “is here.”

He writes me on motel stationary from Kentucky, with bright red letterhead, and on postcards from Arizona with its sad lizards and singing cowboys. And always, the talisman I made for his first trip, burnt wood, wax, a lock of my hair, went with him.

“You’re asleep now, darling,” he writes, “and I’m almost halfway through my odyssey. I’m skinnier, browner, unshaven, and altogether disreputable looking,” he writes, and a thousand miles away, I smile, recognizing him still. Sometimes, I would see the transformation myself as, on the road with him, we’d watch the whole of this country and the next pass us by. And always, the talisman was there. A traveler’s talisman. To keep the traveler safe.

We spent six years living in a cabin that amounted to little more than a parenthesis, on a cliff Chester Wilson’s parents used as a junk heap, and on the edge of what Rob would later mythologize as the Jimmie Walker swamp. When we left the cabin — a place that, for a long time, we conflated with the very best of ourselves — it took some time, a year or two, before we found a way to be friends. Rob was a good friend to me. Among my closest. The kind who, when something almost wonderful falls to pieces, comes by and suggests a road trip.

In one of our last beautiful rides together, I’m inconsolable, and Rob, always wise with the pain of others, is gracious. We drive down the Eastern sea-board, through the salt flats. While I claim to be heart-broken, Rob laughs and insists it’s only a fracture. After a weekend of strip motels and sandwiches from the Piggly-Wiggly, I have to admit he’s right.

Most telling, though, is the way he’s gracious when I fall in love (and don’t screw it up). Wayde and I make a home in Vancouver, and Rob stays with us on trips across country. Some nights, I wake at four in the morning to find him and Wayde in the midst of a long conversation, a bottle of single malt close to done. Some nights, it’s Rob and me talking long and late, as he tells me about a girl he loves, and I read the road signs, try to see if there’s a future for him there.

His Encantadas, a poem that took twenty-five years to write, was launched in September, 2006. Two days after the launch, Rob was scheduled for another MRI. The results were predictable. Melanoma is an aggressive cancer, and once it’s spread, it’s pretty much incurable. At that point, there’s a 95% failure rate for treatment — and the treatment makes you very ill for what little time is left. The summer before, knowing the house had the odds, Rob chose time over faint hope. But time was running out. He’d had a good few summer months, but now that the illness was making itself felt, and chemo, he thought, might not be a bad idea. It might buy time.

“I can be on a plane tomorrow,” I said to him.

“No, not yet,” he told me. He wanted me to fly out in November, to be with him during the chemo and, he said, he wanted me there at the end.

The end came sooner than either of us expected.

In October, for the first time, I heard the answering machine message on his cell phone. When twenty-four hours passed and I’d still not heard from him, I began to panic. I called family and friends. Within two days, I’d be on a red-eye to Toronto, to meet Rob’s sister, Vivienne, and his friend, Dave, at the hospital. After I helped Vivienne drive Rob home, I would stay with him in the cabin we shared all those years ago. He wanted to be at home for as long as possible, and it was one thing I could give him. He’d just had palliative radiation, but wouldn’t live out the few weeks it would take to see the results.

In Toronto, I stood outside of his hospital room for a few moments. Rob and I had been in constant contact by phone, but we hadn’t seen each other in months. I thought if I breathed deep, I’d be prepared.

It didn’t make a difference. You can’t be prepared.

I walked into the room. Saw the difference in weight. The frailty. The way that he looked like he’d been washed up on the bed by a strong and indifferent wave. The bed wasn’t something he owned, the bed was an object that had, by chance, broken a terrible fall. His posture, on that bed, seemed like evidence of some awful accident.

I took another deep breath.

Rob looked up, saw me. We let each other sink in. Didn’t speak.

I couldn’t speak.

I’d like to say that one of us said something clever then. That he looked up, smiled, and repeated words that were old and familiar between us. “You again.”

But no.

I touched his hand, smiled, and quietly said, “Rob, I’m here to take you home.”

The next day, unpacking the bag he’d taken to Toronto, I’d find it. The talisman I’d made for him when I was twenty-two. Alongside a change of clothes and a copy of Infinite Jest. I sat down on the edge of his bed and began to braid a lock of hair, clipping it close to my scalp. I added this second lock to the first, and said, “It’s a second circle, a stronger one. To help keep you safe.”

Three weeks later, Rob’s son stands next to the bed, his hand on his father’s forehead. Behind us, Jon Paul is crying. My head rests on Rob’s shoulder. He holds my hand and my hand is pressed flat against his heart. His breaths are slowing. The pause between each grows so long you think the next will never come. Finally, you are right. The nurse, she touches your shoulder, tells you he is gone.

You don’t believe her.

In his pocket, a talisman to keep the traveler safe.