family from MLAs on both sides of the aisle. My mother stored these in a shoebox she kept under her bed, and would take them out and reread them whenever she felt her grief was fading to unacceptable levels.
My mother, as winsome and as wise as she could often be, had a weakness for the drink even as a young woman, and, faced with the unfair, inexcusable death of the man she’d been infatuated with since high school, descended into an alcoholism that Heidi and I could only watch with a kind of perplexed horror. The rattle of empty beer bottles stacked in sagging cases in the kitchen, the chime of hidden gin and rum bottles that sounded each time we opened a linen closet, became the white noise of my childhood. Mom insisted that my father was worthy of such mourning. (I even got a sense of his reputation when, sixteen years after his death, I arrived at journalism school to discover that some of the older profs had known him, and thus anticipated great things from me.) And to imply that Mom needed to let go of her sense of injustice was the highest sin you could commit against her. I cannot tell you how many friendships she ruined in a drunken rage because someone had dared to suggest that she Move on with Her Life.
The truth is, Mom was unstable even before my father died; his death was merely the green light that her deepest-held insecurities had been waiting for. I will give Mom her due: I believe she was touched by genius. She could recite entire passages of Robert Browning from memory; she knew, down to the minutest physiological detail, the difference between a gecko and a salamander; she followed Ronald Reagan’s atrocities in Nicaragua with rabid condemnation. But she couldn’t find a way to channel all this undigested knowledge into the stability that our family needed so badly. And when, in 1984, seventeen-year-old Heidi fled our house after a marathon screaming session with her, never to return, my mother went off the rails completely. After that, the beer bottles disappeared. After that, she drank exclusively hard liquor. She drank it every day. And she drank it straight.
And Heidi? Oh, what can I tell you about Heidi. She has remained her mother’s daughter, only more so. In the last nineteen years, my big sister has left a half-dozen half-finished university degrees in her wake. She has slept on streets. She has hitchhiked across Canada. She has been a Wiccan, a vegan, a skinhead, a tattoo artist, an eco-terrorist, and through most of it, a single mother herself. As far as I know, she lives somewhere in British Columbia with her teenaged daughter, where she makes a not-very-good living selling her unimaginative folk art at farmers’ markets on the weekend. I have not seen Heidi since Mom’s funeral.
My mother died while I was in the middle of my journalism degree; I had not yet turned twenty-one. Funny, how hard it is to stop resenting somebody when you assume they’ll always be there. Thinking of her death reminds me of a line from Nora Zeale Hurston, something about what a waste it is when our mourning outlives our grief — and I think it doubly shameful that my mom failed to outlive either of hers. When she was gone, I refused to put the label of orphan on myself, even though that’s what I was. I think Cora’s presence in my life, then my girlfriend, soon to be my fiancée, had a lot to do with that. As long as she was by my side, I knew I was not alone. It took burying my mother for me to realize what it feels like to be in love.
And for a few years there, we got on with it. Graduated with good grades, got J-jobs right away, got engaged. You could find Cora traipsing the streets of Halifax on the hunt for the perfect sound bite, her jet-black hair pulled tight against her scalp. Meanwhile, I worked at the Daily News offices on the outskirts of town — researching topics, crafting sentences, interviewing people by phone when I had to. The Lifestyles section suited me because I could get away without asking tough questions if I didn’t want to. In the evenings, we’d reconvene in our small apartment on Shirley Street where we’d drink red wine and listen to Miles Davis, and Cora would lightly chide me about whatever risks I chose not to take that day. I believed, like a fool, that she not only tolerated my pathological shyness, but celebrated it as a part of who I was. Life was good. I felt like I had broken through a wall.
But then Denis-never-Dennis arrived in our lives and shut the whole show down. What a vertiginous feeling it is to watch the woman you love fall in love with somebody else. Denis-never-Dennis started out as just The New Guy at Work, described one night to me while we were doing the dishes. Soon Cora began referring to him as My Friend Denis. I wasn’t all that suspicious at first: the fact that he was ten years her senior provided me with a false sense of security, rather than a harbinger of the Nick Hornby-esque angst that I would experience later. Then came days when she’d mention that the two of them had spent a sunny lunch hour eating French fries together from Bud the Spud on the ledge outside the public library. She’d do so in passing, a peripheral detail to whatever she was talking about — as if I wouldn’t notice her subliminal subterfuge and call her on it. Then came the Friday nights where I’d come home and wait several hours alone in the apartment until Cora eventually arrived, obviously tipsy, and she’d say “Oh sorry, Denis and I just grabbed a glass of wine or two after work at the Argyle.”
Even when she started spending less and less time at home, she denied it. Even when the sex dried up, she denied it. I figure my relationship with Cora ended a full two months before I realized it. When she was ready to move out, she taped the small, pathetic engagement ring I had given her, all that I could afford, to a note left for me on the kitchen table. It read simply: I’m sorry, Michael. I truly am. But there is something in you that lacks.
And then sent her girlfriends over to get her stuff.
Was I enraged? Of course. Did that rage express itself through some vehicular vandalism in the CBC parking lot? Possibly. But more to the point: I was now ready to accept the labels I had been denying myself for years: orphan, rudderless, alone in the world.
In fact, with Cora gone I was free to descend into the charlatanism that I knew rested at the heart of my character. It began manifesting itself through my job, with me growing less fastidious about capturing accurate quotes from the people I interviewed. It sounds close enough to what they said, I would tell myself. Then I was making up entire quotes from interviews: they still came off like something my sources should have said, and I convinced myself that it was okay, that I could get away with such behaviour, because after all this was the Lifestyle section, with so little at stake.
I knew my negligence had taken a sharp turn when I found myself creating entire sources out of thin air. The topics of the stories were (at that point) still genuine, but when I couldn’t bother finding someone to say what I wanted, I made them up. By this point, I was addicted to the rush of not getting caught, day after day. And soon enough, I was in for a pound: I eventually fabricated entire stories — topic, news angle, sources, quotes, even the occasional post-publication letter to the editor from a fictitious interviewee.
I consider it a scathing indictment on modern journalism that my dalliances could go on for four years before I got busted. Like a serial killer or corporate criminal, I grew arrogant and reckless. The “story” that did me in involved a book club comprised of immigrant housewives from the Palestinian territories who read novels exclusively by Jewish writers as an act of cultural understanding. It wasn’t the story’s questionable premise that sent the red flags unfurling. It wasn’t even a single sentence within the story. It was a passing clause within a sentence, sandwiched between em-dashes and mentioning an organization that did not and could not exist — The Jewish Consortium for the Annihilation of Arab History — that finally raised the eyebrow of my managing editor and sent her digging. And digging. And digging.
The unearthing of (most of) my ruses took no time at all. Needless to say, the Daily News’s competition had a field day when they became public. The Herald ran several days’ worth of articles about my misdeeds and subsequent termination, column inches that went on and on, needlessly. (They even mentioned my father, his noble reputation and work with the province, a tsk-tsk sort of reference.) The Canadian Press picked up the story and ran it nationwide. I know the girl who wrote it — we had a one-night stand my first year at J-school before I started dating Cora.
I was, of course, done for. Let me remind you
