Chapter 1

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NOW.

It is 1991. I stand in the field behind my father’s house near Woodstock, staring at the line in the grass. It stretches from just beyond the tips of my brown shoes, across the green, to a bank of trees marking the beginning of the woods beyond. 

I haven’t been back for months and yet there it is, a discoloured path, evidence that I have been before.

‘Do you walk along it when I’m gone?’ I ask my father later as we sit in the kitchen over coffee.

He smiles at me.

‘Of course not. It’s your line.’

And whether or not he’s telling the truth, I feel comforted.

Dad looks past me at the window over the sink. I turn towards it.

 

‘I might sell the house,’ he says.

I nod. We joke about adding a clause in the contract that once a year I will still be able to come and walk across the field to the

band of trees and back, like a returning ghost.

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*

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I write this upstairs in my father’s house, memories filling up my internal space until it feels as if my head will open up like a

flower: the sound of the wind in the poplar trees as I walk to school some thirty years ago, watching my father yesterday as he drops

off to sleep on the back porch in the fading light, visiting my sister’s memorial stone today and feeling unable to cry.

​

THEN. 1964

‘I want to try for a boy’, my mother said in the next room. Her voice was muffled through the wall.

I watched my sister drawing on a piece of paper. She was four years old and I was seven. My sister’s name was Alouette but

we called her Birdy. As I tried to listen to my parents, she continued her drawing. She was using a thick purple crayon to make swirls

and loops, pressing so hard she almost pierced the paper.

‘No’, my father replied.

I moved my chair closer to the wall to hear more clearly.

‘Jay-jay…’, my sister said. I made a gesture, bringing my fingertips to meet my thumb to tell her to be quiet.

‘We don’t need another one’, my father said.

​

‘Another what?’ I thought. But I knew. I wanted a brother too. I wanted whatever would keep my parents in the same house.

‘Jay and Alouette are enough’, Dad said, and I smiled.

‘Jay-jay!’, my sister insisted, and I went to her.

Together we looked at the drawing she had done, mostly on the paper and partly on the table-top. The purple loops entangled

themselves in each other magnificently.

‘It’s beautiful’, I said, and Birdie smiled.

‘It’s you,’ she said.

I laughed. I hugged her. She squirmed away frowning. My sister was like a cat. She took cuddles on her terms. I wondered if

our parents argued more than other people’s.

I took my sister’s picture and I pinned it to the refrigerator with a faded magnet, shaped like a jar of Hellmann’s mayo. It is

still there on the refrigerator in my father’s house. A different refrigerator, but still there. Maybe it is a drawing of me. Or maybe it’s

just how the purple crayon went that day.