Unpaved

1

Memory is often an uninvited guest. It spends its time spinning the fine silk of recollection in the anterooms and cellars of the mind. Bleak or painful memories remain there in waiting, biding their time until they scratch and claw and plead to be let out. When they arrive, we find ourselves wishing instead that they would remain buried or slip hastily through the fingers of the here and now.

Memories flow through Russell Nowak-McCreary as he rides clouds high above the earth, heading north to Canada for the first time in years. And the same spill of memories stops only when the plane encounters turbulence. Then his thoughts are jarred into more immediate considerations.

The woman seated next to him, a middle-aged corporate type and ostensibly a seasoned air traveler, glances over at him. Are you doing, okay?

It’s unclear if she is being patronizing or demonstrating genuine concern. He is a nervous flyer. During a lifetime, we all gather our own assortment of unconquerable fears. Russell’s discomfort with flying tops the list as the one he knows he will never overcome. His trepidation, a fount of disconnectedness, is stranded in limbo as he glides the slipstreams between heaven and earth.

Still, it’s been impossible for him to avoid commercial air travel, given the trans-Atlantic reality of his life and the frequency with which his career demands it.

Just the turbulence, he responds. When it’s this rough, it always makes me jump a bit. Believe it or not, I fly quite often.

It always works to remind myself that these things practically fly themselves these days, she says. Technology has made flying the safest form of transportation.

Russell ascertains that she is being neither patronizing nor particularly concerned. She’s simply looking for conversation.

When I think about the number of cheap electronics I’ve purchased over the years, only to have them malfunction within months, I have to say my confidence in machines is guarded at best, he says, imagining a minuscule circuit deep in the entangled viscera of the jet shorting and sending the entire contraption into a death spiral. Especially up here where we are tickling the bottom of the ozone layer.

Russell thinks technology is second only to Mother Nature in its proprietorship over disaster.

Russell turns his head slightly toward the woman. To tell you the truth, I thought I had perfected the art of hiding my little tense-ups when a bad patch of air pressure hits.

I’m a clinical psychologist, she blurts. I like to think of my observational skills as first-class. They should be. I’ve been practicing for two decades.

Maybe I can still fool the non-psychologists into believing I’m a confident passenger, then.

She trains her eyes to the armrest between them and shoots him an insightful smile. It was your knuckles that gave it away.

He is squeezing the armrest.

Ha, well that is pretty obvious I guess, isn’t it? He returns the smile.

This seems to satisfy her need for discourse. She faces the entertainment monitor on the seat back in front of her and digs in her laptop bag for a set of earphones.

Were she to ask his destination or reasons for subjecting himself to this self-imposed torture, Russell would probably respond with a casual just a quick visit with friends. He’s not generally one for superfluous conversation. Someone once suggested to him that his reticent nature grew from having been an only child. He smiles quietly to himself at the thought while enduring another bump of the aircraft and thinks that maybe it would be more fitting to classify himself as an orphan if the term could be applied to someone in their forties.

Russell’s mother, the only parent he had ever known, passed away almost four years ago, and after many months of procrastination, he is traveling to Toronto to finalize her will and put her so-called affairs in order. The consistent urging of her estate lawyers and his career turning into complete chaos over the past year made it seem suddenly worth it. It is the only reason he has strapped himself into the window seat of this Airbus 333, fingers drumming on the empty plastic meal tray as the turbulence endures.

He checks the time on his iPhone, as he habitually does every couple of minutes. According to his calculations, the plane should land in Toronto in about an hour. After a delay at Logan, he’s now eager to be reunited with the dependable ground and visit the city of Toronto for the first time in years. By the time he reaches his downtown hotel, his nerves will have settled enough to allow for a decent sleep before meeting with his mother’s attorney in the morning.

I’ll never become a full-fledged Brit, his mother would often proclaim. I must hold on to my Canadian roots.

He would usually appease her with, Completely understandable, Mom.

She had been lured to London by the prestige and financial benefits available to her early in her career before she became one of the world’s leading cardiac surgeons. Although London eventually became her much beloved home, she insisted on maintaining her Canadian citizenship, resolutely refusing to apply for anything more than permanent residence in the UK. Of course, his mother, Dr. Judith M. Nowak-McCreary, was strong-willed and steadfast about anything that caused her emotions to surface, which they rarely did.

Were it not for his mother’s inimitable qualities, it is highly improbable that he would be on this plane, piercing the clouds somewhere over upstate New York. The same Toronto law firm, Haplich, Hauz, and Zubnig, still handled all her Canadian legal concerns.

Dr. Judith had once revealed her logic. The original partners of that law firm are now probably resting in some quiet cemetery or sinking an endless stream of double-bogies in Arizona retirement villages. But their institution has earned my trust, and that’s worth my enduring loyalty.

This was just one of the many personal edicts by which she had managed to simplify her complex existence. In the end, Russell had to admit that he was glad that she was so dependable in her resolve. On many occasions, he has thought about making this journey north to Canada. Now, with his mother’s Canadian will sitting in a file fifty-four floors above the pavement of Toronto’s Bay Street, he has a compelling reason to take it.

He hasn’t been back to Canada for almost two decades. The last visit occurred under the auspices of another melancholy event, when his resilient grandmother, his mother’s mother, died of heart failure at the incredible age of ninety-four. Russell was in his mid-twenties when it happened. He recalls skipping a week of university classes to accompany his bereaved mother on the unfortunate trip back home, as she was fond of calling her country of origin.

That trip holds some pleasant memories for him; flying over the cold north Atlantic from Heathrow to Montreal and then, taking the VIA train across a snow-whitened world to Toronto, followed by another train ride north to the tiny town of Collingwood. It was one of the rare instances in his adult life when a feeling of implicit, unspoken intimacy existed between himself and his mother.

I miss the winters sometimes, don’t you? she had asked him during that train ride. Out here in the countryside, the snow is so pristine.

I wouldn’t say I’ve missed the cold too much, Russell avowed.

It gets cold enough in London at times.

Yeah, but not for five straight months. Maybe neither are ideal options, he had suggested in response. Give up warmth or give up sunlight for almost half the year.

You’re being dramatic, Russell.

And, with that, the discussion concluded. He knew her conversational patterns intimately and when an exchange of information or ideas was over for Dr. Judith, it came with unspoken yet very perceptible clarity.

This is not to suggest that she was cold or indifferent. Her career and how she treated all aspects of her life with unwavering pragmatism kept her sometimes expressively remote. Her affections manifested to him more through respect and obvious devotion than outward sentiment.

Her life had not been an easy one.

His mother had raised him single-handedly while putting herself through medical school and excelling at her demanding career. A survivor like his mother does not achieve that character by being soft and malleable, but rather through sheer toughness and unyielding tenacity.

On that memorable journey back to the place of her upbringing, to nurse her own mother in her final days, her aloof exterior had peeled away and revealed layers of tenderness that Russell had not often experienced before.

In fact, when they arrived at the hospital, she had taken his hand as they walked from the snow-covered parking lot into the building. They walked down the corridors of the Sunny View Home and Hospice hand-in-hand, like young friends who gain some form of needed reassurance by displaying their unity to anyone who happens to notice.

This is not going to be easy, she had stated as they navigated the hallways of Sunny View. I’ve sort of put off facing this day, even though it was always there, floating right in front of me in some imminent state.

I know, Mom. Russell had stated, at first taken aback by the introspective and candid admission. It’s been a long time you’ve been watching over her. I know how sad and challenging it has been for you.

Not as hard as it is going to be. I honestly believe that. His mother continued. "I’ve known ever since she came to Sunny View that it was her final home, that she would ultimately die here. I just pushed it out of mind but probably would have been less of a blow if I had admitted it more directly and pre-bereaved a little in preparation."

It’s definitely not sudden, but that doesn’t mean the grief is any less, he offered.

We all find ways to construct these mental barricades when it comes to our most unpleasant worries, she replied. I’ve done it with your grandmother. I’m a physician but I am also a daughter whose maintained a self-erected obstacle of denial.

He remembers the distinct contrast between Sunny View and the familiar, weathered interior of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, not far from the Thames and St. Paul’s Underground station where, as a child, he had wandered the hallways unnoticed on countless after-school incursions while waiting for his mother to finish her shift. While St. Bart’s was an ancient, perpetually frantic, and hurried place by nature, Sunny View was modern, placid, and composed. Nurses did not race down decades-old hallways; patients could not be heard bellowing from their rooms, and no intercom system buzzed every thirty seconds to summon doctors by codes in a lexicon that only they could comprehend.

Sunny View was a sterile, private hospital, a place where wealthy patients in their fragile years came to quietly accept that their money would ultimately fail to save them from their own mortality. The antiseptic, polished decor was not enough to eradicate or even camouflage the many ghosts that drifted down those disinfected hallways. Underneath the soft waves of soulless shopping mall music, you could almost hear the hollow voices of many lives’ energies gathering in one consolidated final gasp. The attempt to disguise this as anything other than a place of finality seemed useless.

Will there be any relief in her passing? he had asked his mother. She’s been nearly comatose for the past several months from what you’ve told me.

There is some relief. Yes. Absolutely. Lamentable relief is what I would call it, Dr. Judith admitted. Before the coma, she was in the last stages of dementia, which was terrible to witness.

I’m glad you had a chance to visit her often just before she was too incoherent and stopped recognizing you, Russell had offered, hoping to reassure her. You made all the trips over to help her get settled here and take care of her.

Thank you for that, Russell. Over the years our relationship would sometimes be close and sometimes more distant. But the realization of her proximity to death served as a catalyst in cultivating a deeper fondness between us.

When they stepped into Ella Nowak’s warm hospital room, his mother had exhibited the assured countenance of a seasoned physician while Russell entered more tentatively. This was the first time he had been acquainted with death at its most profound level; his father died in a car accident before his mother had even detected her pregnancy, and his long-deceased grandfather, who unknowingly became one of the central archetypes of the man he has become, was buried in his absence after a sudden stroke ended his life.

He did not have the opportunity to attend his grandfather’s funeral, even though he had played a brief yet unequivocal role in Russell’s development. After he passed away, Russell’s mother insisted on his absence. She had encouraged him to center his reflections away from the end of his life, saying, Instead, I think it would be better for you to concentrate on all the memories you have of him during the amazing summer you shared.

With the phenomenon of human departure so common in her professional life, she felt the need to shield her only child from life’s most sorrowful virtue with which she was so familiar. Having since experienced losses that caused fault lines in the deepest layers of his soul, Russell now believes that her need to protect him from tragedy probably left him somewhat unprepared. He doesn’t blame her for this though; his mother parented out of pure love for him and her unique outlooks on life.

At first, in that hospital room at Sunny View, he had been shocked at the pathetic sight of his grandmother’s emaciated body in a fetal curl on the bed, a thick plastic hose protruding crudely from a slit in the front of her gown.

It’s a feeding tube, his mother had explained upon witnessing his reaction. He could see that there was no spirit housed in her dormant body any longer and, to Russell’s mind, that tube served as an insult to the life that had once resided there. His grandmother had long since abandoned her sickly body whose persistent heart was now beating by the mere force of inertia, like the engine of a car sputtering long after the driver had left.

He finds it difficult to stifle a smile whenever he recalls how his mother, forever the physician, had immediately assumed control, as though her afflicted parent were simply another one of her patients, checking her pulse, rolling her on her side, and propping up the pillows behind her, monitoring the IV drip, and dabbing a tissue to dry the beads of perspiration on her wrinkled brow.

Then, Dr. Judith had solemnly conferred with the demure physician who was assigned to care for her ailing mother, receiving silent nods of approval. Soon afterward, a nurse unobtrusively removed the feeding tube from under the gown as Russell and his mother sat on cushioned, polypropylene chairs at the bedside.

It took only one day for his grandmother’s ancient body to come to a standstill. Ella Nowak was buried within two days, and in another two, Russell and his mother were back on the train to Montreal for their flight back to London, still enjoying the same obscure yet mutually acknowledged sense of closeness that had remained with them throughout the trip.

When it came to her own death, Judith’s final hours were quite different. On a bed much like the ones in the hospital where she’d spent most of her life treating others, she sat pin-straight and alert. Although the essence of life had left his grandmother long before her final moment, it remained fully intact within his mother’s cancer-ridden frame. At sixty-three, the desire to continue living needed no prompting, but the sickness that feasted on her would not permit it.

She first told him about the metastasizing disease deep within her organs, in a typical matter of fact fashion. Russell had handled it with confusion and disbelief. For some reason, the idea of a doctor getting cancer seemed inexplicably illogical to him.

I have some disturbing news to give you, was how she had begun the conversation over the phone. It was a Saturday morning. I’ve been having some difficulty digesting. I asked Dr. Dhillon to run some tests. I’m in worse shape than I had hoped, I’m afraid.

Oh, God, he said and immediately asked, what’s wrong?

I have pancreatic cancer. It’s a very difficult one to detect and can often be at an advanced stage before you even know it.

Russell was silent as the surreal slap of shock hit him.

She added, It’s stage three, which means it’s already spread.

So, what can we do? What’s the treatment plan? he asked, still not fully absorbing the news. I mean, you know the best doctors in every field, there must be medicine, surgeries . . . something!

The prognosis isn’t good, she said. I’ll do chemo and there are some drugs that will help slow it down temporarily. I know the markers and progression though. As I said, the prognosis isn’t good.

The full weight of her words had swirled and then settled in his mind. He had a difficult time breaking free from the suspended state of disbelief. Eventually, after twenty minutes of asking more questions, there was nothing left to say.

His mother had delivered the news with little emotion, giving him all the information as well as her calculated analysis. Where she seemed calm and clinical, Russell’s chest cavity was left shaking.

Judith Nowak-McCreary had manufactured her strength of character from her father, a man of extraordinary fortitude, and she clung to this, her most laudable trait, until the very closure of her being. Russell remained at her bedside, and she had befittingly assumed this same demeanor that had enabled her to approach life’s ups and downs without fear.

On the final morning, after sleeping on a cot brought to him by a sympathetic nurse, his dry distended eyes met hers, dark and sunken with fatigue, a moment of unblemished understanding passed between them. They bridged the impalpable distance between one who is destined to continue living and another facing her own impending end.

Only then had he recognized a certain quality of defeat in her eyes. The sea wall of strength she had erected over a lifetime crumbled as disease consumed her. At her request, when her lungs failed her for the last time, the medical staff did not employ the respirator waiting in the corner of the room, and instead allowed her to depart from the world as Russell sobbed at her side.

The pilot has just announced their descent to Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Outside Russell’s window, the sun has set. It is the exact moment of twilight when an undefined gray foretells the onset of the evening’s shadows, holding them back for a final moment as an immaculate silver beam shimmers through the clouds. Far below, the patchwork quilt of countryside farm fields gives way to the jigsaw grids of metropolitan lines. Russell squirms in his seat, which elicits a deep sigh from his icy neighbor.

You know, most air disasters occur during either takeoff or landing, he wants to tell the woman next to him. Instead, he turns to her and remarks, Finally. I am not sure my knuckles can take many more of these jolts.

She looks again at his hand, still grasping the end of the armrest and smiles. I think you get a pass on this one. I’ll admit, it was a jarring ride overall.

Tell me about it, he mutters.

I do this same flight every week, and even I had a few tummy-flips.

I can’t tell you how much better that makes me feel, he exclaims.

Russell turns his attention to the front of the plane, where a woman is making her way down the center aisle with a child in tow. The woman is young, he guesses late twenties, and handsome in a smart tweed jacket with patches on the elbows above a long, dark skirt, her hair pulled into a loose ponytail. The child, a girl of no more than four or five, has a million freckles and short red hair and, by the devilish expression on her wide-eyed face, is taking delight in the realization that her restroom excursion has grabbed the passengers’ collective attention.

Isn’t she adorable? his neighbor poses.

Hmmm, Russell nods in agreement.

For a moment, he allows himself to be reminded of Anna, who became so detached in the last months of their marriage that she was no more familiar to Russell than this woman on the plane. He studies the duo until he is once again acutely aware of Anna’s distance, physically hundreds of miles away, light-years in the heart. But he can’t gather the necessary nerve to look at the child again. He is still haunted by too many apparitions, too many sorrowful memories resurfacing in a painful crush.

For a fleeting instant, they are Anna and his son Joshua, skipping down the cabin of the plane to greet him, smiling once he is spotted. And then, just as quickly, they are taken from him again and this unknown woman and child are restored to their true selves.

It is moments such as this one that cause him the greatest difficulty, when he comes to the distressing realization that his sadness has no schedule. An intruder arrives when he lacks focus on any single conscious thought, a force deceiving him into thinking