And my heart aches, suddenly wanting, longing, believing and not having.

Lighten Up

Time was of no consequence and I just hoped that eternity would start now. The person I used to be had suddenly ceased to exist. I was melting and being remodeled into nothing but the hand he was just holding right now.

...

I think I'm you and he thinks he's me.

Something changed and I couldn't pinpoint when.

"And as much as I want to own you, I know I don't."

I gave him a book of these words and I wondered if he tried to read it like brail, fingers first. If he got lost in all the things I am that remain unseen. What medicine do you give the blind? I knew he was tired and all I wanted was for him to reach for me.

"Do you remember when I loved you before?"

"Vaguely."

"You had red hair."

"I always knew I was meant to have red hair." I had spent months speaking to him all alone.

I didn't know when or why, but things changed. There were two ways to look at it. In one exact and precise moment, everything had shifted and I was too dumb to notice. Or, the abstract wind in which we lived blew left instead of right, and suddenly, we were just fine.

I was always good at finding something beautiful in the ordinary.

Now, I saw the exquisite folded in the extraordinary.

I'm sorry for the long absence.

I have been shooting a lot recently, most notably a film called Ferocious to be released in 2012. I'm working on edits for my collection of short stories Eat Your Heart Out to be released in fall 2012 by the wonderful Brindle and Glass.

It's an exciting time but I have been missing the stillness I find here. I promise more updates through Christmas and the new year.

Here's to eternal sunshine.

Thinking of you.

xxx

Sometimes, one missing person makes the whole world feel depopulated.

I place my cell phone against me so that if he does call, I can be closer to him.

"Where does all the Goddam time go?" I asked like there was somewhere it got lost to. The Florida timeshare we had when I was a kid. My high school drama teacher's office. Some cardboard box with "Old Jeans + Lipstick You Lost" scribbled on it.

You wonder about creation until you realize you're created.
...

I admired him when I was a girl, almost a woman. He was older, sophisticated, talented. On my seventeenth birthday I ate dinner with my father, bored, lonely, and I pictured us slow-dancing. We were movie-lovers and in my mind, we remained so as time passed.

"You were the type of man I wanted to marry," I told him last night as a consolation.

"You were just so young, before."

This felt different, before.

"Those thoughts never crossed my mind then," he told me.

 I was confused because he knew I had nothing to give him. I'd sold my love to the missing man. He bought it off me so quick, I had no idea the bargain I gave him.

"This makes me feel sad to be a grown-up," I said to him. Maybe all these walls were never really there, nor the ceiling, nor the chair.

"The girl I first met, you're not the same person anymore," he told me. "You are an adult now. Things are more complicated."

I nodded. There were now two layers of deception between us. He didn't recognize how desperately I wanted things to remain untouched and until that moment, I didn't know how much I'd changed.

"I was Snow White but I drifted," I joked. I felt like crying and I couldn't explain why.

I wanted to have dinner with my father.

I have so many lives. I wish I could live them all concurrently, selecting the most beautiful pieces, instead of one by one. The comfort with Mike, the laughter with my brother, my mother’s necklace, my father, my father, my father. Oh, my father.

I hate watching things flicker, then extinguish.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

We are put on this earth, as best I can discern, to multiply.

Everyone inherits twenty-three matched chromosomes from their parents, forty-six all together. One set determines sex, matched X chromosomes if you’re a girl. The X a baby girl gets from their mother is a random mix of her genes, like overlapped pasts. However, the X she inherits from her father is his one and only. Complete. Undiluted. This means the father is twice as closely related to his daughter via X chromosome as her mother.

When I read this, I realized I didn’t have a fighting chance.

I married a man when I was twenty-one and we split up a year ago. The divorce won’t be official for another month. Of course, I didn’t realize we were strangers until it was too late. My whims are difficult to pin down. Like amoeba, they’ve got no bones.

“You were married?” people scream. Clearly, I don’t seem like the committed type. I get my loose view of forever from my father. He was married twice before he was twenty-five, three times all together.

“No, really, it was just for fun.”

The kind of fun that remains devastating when it ends. Sometimes, out of nowhere, there comes a feeling I thought I’d forgotten. My innards are a tangled mess of things I’ve fucked up, of people I’ve left behind.

I guess nothing bonds two humans like being on the run.

“Do you think we were too comfortable too quickly?” my husband asked.

We moved together like water from the sky, without parachute, without wings, and fatefully, without a safety net.

He broke up with me because I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. I broke up with him because he didn’t understand that everything’s true, it’s just a matter of when. Since my separation, I’ve found my belief system: You Never Have Any Fucking Idea What’s Going To Happen Next.

People ask how I could have missed that my husband was a Jesus freak. I want to ask those same people how I spent nineteen years being head over heels in love with my father. I want to ask those people if they’re really standing on such solid ground.

I am some strange cosmic sacrifice.

If something can get fucked up, it will, in the most meaningful way. Everyone’s life has a tone. I am an ironic comedy, the unfortunate part being that I have no sense of humor.

“It’s best just to accept that you can simply never overcome most points of your personality,” my father always said.

It’s true that only a person’s DNA survives after their death.

I Have The Heart Of A Small Boy

I lay against him in the cab.

I am so happy.

I moved towards brightness, the screaming levity. Orange had been thrown across the night sky and it was bleeding down on me. Everything had quieted. I held him and for the first time, I wasn't thinking about when I would let go.

"It doesn't matter about tomorrow," I told myself. "It doesn't matter what happens."

In that moment, we were fused, glowing, incandescent.

I knew that this would later expand and become something else. I knew we were living on borrowed time, but who cared?

In that moment, I was infinite.

The Long Goodbye - Personal Essay Excerpt

Later still, when I was dancing on a platform in my black dress, I saw him watching me from the bar.

He looked at me longingly, like when you watch home videos of someone you love who’s dead. He looked like he wanted to be next to me but that he couldn't do it; that it would be bridging an impossible gap. I acted like I didn't notice him staring, I laughed with my girlfriends about something I don't remember.

I glanced down at my purple shoes, and when I looked back to see if he was still watching me, he'd gone.

As he got closer, I saw the distraught look in his eyes.
There are moments when he looks at me and I can see his primordial cells. He is lost and scared but the fragility and the strength, compounded, hold each other in the darkness.

He loves me so much that I have burnt through him and replaced all else.

Like Father Part Eight

Sometimes, you need music to write to.

"I was sitting with your brother having breakfast and he says, 'Dad, why are you wearing that ratty jean vest?' and I said, 'What gave you the impression I give a fuck what you think?'"

I admire my father.

"Am I a bad daughter, Dad?"

"Are you crazy?" he asks.

Maybe.

I drink a soy latte and he eats a pumpkin muffin. We go to Starbucks because the old Scottish woman who usually guards the patio is gone tonight. My father stopped speaking to her when she started scolding him for being married four times.

"Listen, who you fall in love with, who you love, who you like, who you like a lot, that's a deeply personal choice," he tells me.

"I know I'm right. I know my instincts are special."

"It's your ass up the flag pole. The higher up you get on that flag pole, the bigger the target is. It's your life."

I laugh.

"Don't laugh. Listen. You have to assume that you are the sane one. That's the only way life is livable."

"I am sane, right?"

He looks at me like I'm crazy.

"It's your movie, baby."

"Yeah, until you have kids."

"No. It's my movie still, baby."

He laughs.

The flat finality of that spectacular confession led me up a staircase of thoughts and from their peak I couldn't find my way down.

Sympathy For The Devil

I met him three years ago at a Christmas party. We bumped into each other on the patio, smoking, me in a t-shirt and him in a leather jacket. He looked like James Dean. We were both freezing.

I was incredibly drunk so I don’t remember what we said to each other. I only remember his first questions to me.

“What do you do?” he asked.

“I’m an actress,” I said.

“Are you a good actress?”

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

I bummed a cigarette from him and left.

It’s always funny, the first picture you minds eye takes, of someone who will mean something to you. For years we’d float in and out of each other’s life, sometimes happily, sometimes not. I wasn’t ready for him when we first met. To deal with how he made me feel, I’d get drunk and be reckless with his heart.

On a date where I ended up so drunk that I couldn’t see I asked him what his birthday was.

“Valentines day.”

“No!”

“What?”

“That’s mine! I’ve never met anyone with the same birthday!”

He thought it was special, too.

“Do you think we’d get along if we weren’t actors?” I asked him years later.

“I kind of think we’d be married. We have the same birthday.”

Then he shrugged.

...

On our third first date that night at a bar across the street from where he lives, he spoke about religion, life and death in sweeping ideas and I felt like I could drown in him.

When he kissed me, I thought of Leonard Cohen as every breath we drew was hallelujah.
“I really like you,” I told him.

I wasn’t lying. There was an intoxicating seriousness to him, a seriousness that would soon permeate us, one that I couldn’t ignore. He shook me to my shadow.

As we fell asleep, we watched his “Life On Mars” DVD, the original, better British version. In the pilot, the main character finds himself magically transported into 1973 after his girlfriend’s kidnap and murder. He spends the whole episode running around the 70s thinking everyone’s tricking him, asking how this could happen, wondering how his life took this turn, utterly fucked in bellbottoms.

In his arms, I could relate.

The truth is, I knew I loved him. The more time I spent with him the more I felt things changing in me.

...

Since we’ve started seeing each other I don’t eat much and I can’t sleep solidly.

One night, we were walking to one his concerts, not speaking. Early on, I wanted our silences to be comfortable, but they were not, not for me.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“That I can’t see. I only have one contact in.”

“I have extra contacts in my purse.”

“What’s your prescription?”

“-1.75 in my left eye and -3.50 in my right.”

“No way.”

“Why?”

“That’s mine.”

I took that to mean we see things the same way.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

My next few memories are all identical, my father hurling his beliefs about politics; about God; about the price of shoes; on unsuspecting victims, defending himself against some imagined slight.

“Don’t you piss in my ear and tell me it’s raining!”

In every situation, I’d stare at my patent-leathers, waiting until he finished. Sometimes he’d ask, do you want me to tell you why I did that? I would say no, even if I did. Then he would answer, because it’s not your job to tell people what they want to hear. I asked, who’s job is it, then?

Apparently, I’d misunderstood him completely.

One time, we were eating lunch near a fountain in a park.

“Turn your head,” he told me. I did. I heard him unzip his jeans and the sound of a strong stream of urine landing against the marble fountain.

“Sir, what are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“You’re going to have to come with me.”


I turned and watched my father give the policeman this speech.

“Is it part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the world? This city is famous for it’s gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, Anarchists, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by the graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don’t make the mistake of bothering me.”

His dick was still in his hand.

“You can’t piss on public property.”

He zipped up, took my hand and said, quite proudly, “Showed him.”

I laughed until I cried all the way home.

One day, I realized he’d stole that whole speech from Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t remember when I began recognize the breadth of his lies, the scope of his indiscretions. Nothing he did came from him. You got the feeling everything, even how he loved you, was stolen from somewhere.

Last night, I awoke to him tap-dancing on my ceiling.

“Dad?”

“Just doing my cardio.”


Then he winked and I turned around, pissed, trying to show him I was sleeping. Of course, my father has interpreted death not as a great sleep, but the final awakening.

Yeah, I won’t lie. Things aren’t great.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

“So, what do we do today?” he asks.

“You tell me.”

Asking him that feels like an admission, an acknowledgment of a lie.

I want to ask my Dad what to do. He can hear us. He does not sleep. He is not dead. I angle my face away from Matt’s. “I want to talk to those women who said they were married to him. Is that stupid?”

He waits until I look at him again.

“Marla, you know the answer to that.”

“Why do you think Dad hid everything from us?”

Eventually, the shepherd must slaughter his sheep.

“I don’t know. Because he was ashamed of himself? Because he was an asshole?”

Looking at my brother, I feel my blood being squeezed out, drop by drop.

Now, the people I love are like celebrities to me, surrounded by rumor and fanfare. Parts of my past come forth like scenes. Nostalgia obliterates reality but this dialogue feels realer than real. My mother lives on a movielot. I want my father’s autograph. I want my brother’s picture.

“I have a lot of questions about his family. Do you think this woman would be a good start?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell with people that knew you when you were a younger you.”


“What does that mean?” I tear my nail almost down to the quick.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

A year after they separated, Patty came to Frank’s house in Montreal. She stood on his doorstep, weeping.

“Take it easy,” Frank said in his doorframe.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She walked past him and lay on the couch they shared as man and wife. She was wearing a wind-breaker, a nightgown and sneakers. She'd lost weight since she moved out. He had wanted to see her, but not like this. He thought of what his father always said, "Y'know, son, one doesn't like to be deceived, but one likes less to be undeceived."

“Are you drunk?” Frank asked.

“Well, you’d know wouldn’t you?”

He had been five years sober earlier that week.

She stumbled and then pushed her head against the leather cushions and lay like a child on her stomach. “I did love you, you know.”

He sat in the space next to her and put his hand on her back.

“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, moving his palm down her spine.

She smelt like liquor. When had she started drinking liquor?

“Don’t be hateful. Please. This is hard enough.”

He moved closer to her again, pushing them against the leather arm of the couch. He felt his sturdy weight against her and wondered if he could crush her into dust.

“I’m being truthful. I feel sorry for you.”


“Why? I left you.”

“It’s not an easy life.”

She cried louder, moving her body against his. He held her like a baby.

“You know, Una blames me for making you a dyke,” he said.
 He hoped she'd appreciate that. She always liked brutality more than honesty.

“Frank, it’s not your fault. You were a good husband.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t say anything. He was going to say that deceiving others was what the world called romance, but he'd used that on her before. She knew it was Oscar Wilde's, not his, and footnotes were for fags. He searched the room for Sean. He felt his dead friend but he could not see him, and in this moment all he wanted was to see his face, to know he wasn’t alone, but he only captured the feeling in his chest.

"I wasn't a good husband. I fooled around."

As time passed, he couldn’t understand why a year after the fact, he had wanted so desperately to clear his guilty conscience.

“I didn’t like myself while I was doing it.”

“I don’t like myself either,” she told him.

But then, Frank had always believed his life was a miracle of bad luck.

"I guess we both had secrets," she said as she was leaving into the kind night.

The next time he saw her was her funeral.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

The truth is, my father’s life was a deeply touching failure.

Despite being declared the greatest journalist of his generation time and time again, he could never keep a job. He holds the simultaneous Canadian record for numbers of newspapers worked at, number of newspapers fired from. At first impression he made a lasting impression. He wrote two best selling novels on baseball players. Almost every reviewer said he chose the wrong protagonist.

He should have lived on those pages.

My father was a star. He was a liar and a cheat. Tell me, how could a four year old be dancing on the ceiling while you’re still eating your potatoes?

Like most sad people, he remembered his childhood best. He idolized his dead family, his brick house at 742 Woodbine Avenue, the 1950‘s. The present was always completely fabricated. I grew up being told to believe everything he said was a lie.

But now, years double back and skip forward.

Snippets of My Day

I sit at my computer, which rests on a collapsing table. We used it for dinner when I was a child. It was folded up and pushed against a wall as we grew older, as my mom worked more and didn't need the money from renting out the downstairs, where the bigger, better dining table lived.

We use it since my parents separated, now that we live upstairs again.

The table is my father's family heirloom. I remember when he refinished it one summer, how he sweat under the sun, the stains on his peach t-shirt.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror across from the table and I decide what's wrong with my face. Mirror-gazing is my favourite pass time because time does not weigh upon me. I remember when my hair was longer, how I was prettier then, softer, younger.

Why do women always change their hair when things go to shit?

I decide I should shower before speaking to my editor. A piece of stray hair falls past my face, and I watch it from the corner of my eye, sure it's a bat.

The cyclical nature of life seems unfair.


...

I call a divorce lawyer with my mother's last name who has an office in the Scarborough Town Center. My father used her to divorce his third wife after my brother was born. They had been separated for ten years, but seeing my mother's last name on the lawyer's store front, he took it as a sign to severe ties.

This was, to him, a romantic gesture.

"Can I come in tomorrow?"

"10:30?" said the woman on the phone.

"Any later?"

I hang up and I have a craving to call my father, but I promised myself I wouldn't until all was said and done.

...

I am sitting in a park with two new friends. They are bohemian and beautiful and I feel strangely at ease in their company. They suggest we do a play reading and I oblige when normally, I hate doing things in front of people.

There is one speech that my friend reads about a exposing herself to a man she loves and I think about it all afternoon.

She talks about the philosophy that only we are real, that everything else is a dream. That the man she loved was a dream. That she made him up. That she fell in love with the wall. That he was the one person she exposed everything to. She trusted him with her deepest, darkest secrets, but that she could only do that because he wasn't really there. That she chose him for that reason. That she fell in love with him because he was fake.

But don't we all fall in love with dreams?

...

At a diner with my brother, I turn to him while eating poached eggs. "I'm just disappointed that he wasn't who I thought he was."

He drinks his coffee, thoughtfully. It's 4 pm and he's just woken up. He takes the DROPOUT cap that he had made off his head. My brother stands on shaky, hopeful ground so it's fitting that he would take what he hates most about himself and stitch it across his forehead.

His curls are so matted. How did they get so matted?

"The thing is, he was. Everyone always is who you thought they were while also being who they became to you. They're both. He is, and was, sometimes, who you thought he was."

"That's deep, Mike," I say.

He shrugs. "Yeah, I'm in an everything is true phase."

"Be careful."

"Why?"

"It's really confusing."

"No."

"Trust me. You're new to it."

If everything is true, who do you blame?
...

I do a photo shoot for my friend. She was my book buddy in grade one and it took me awhile to realize I knew her when we met again. She recently travelled the world and as I an putting on a ball gown, she tells me about Cambodia. She has heart problems and ever since her diagnosis, it is like seven hearts beat in her and she can't live enough.

"There was this little girl, she couldn't have been more than fourteen. She would follow you through the streets and could beg in every language. Fluently. She must have spoken eight different languages."

"No."

"Yes. English. Spanish. German. You name it, she spoke it. My friend from Ireland went to Cambodia shortly after me and I told him, 'Be careful, just speak to them in Gaelic and they'll leave you alone.' I swear to you, it was the same girl that he met. He started speaking to her in Gaelic and they had a full conversation."

"In Gaelic?"

"Yes."

"No one speaks Gaelic."

"I couldn't believe it. How did she learn those things?"

"It's so sad."

"I know. The resiliency of the human spirit is unbelievable."

Looking at her, feeling her seven heartbeats, I agree. I think of how smart that little girl must be, how I could never learn French even when I tried.

Maybe I just didn't have to. Maybe we can always do what we have to.

...

I lie with him in his bed. He just bought us new sheets from the dollar store. On my skin, they feel like silk.

He holds me from behind and with his arm near my breast, I have never felt more committed.

Like Father Part Seven

In front of other people, I see no separation between my father and I.

"Dad, do you still have recurring dreams?"

"Yes."

"The flying one?"

"I have one where I'm driving from the back seat of a car. Naked."

"I wonder what that means," I laughed.

He looked at me like any explanation would have been bullshit, like nothing motivated thoughts sewn together by the night.

"The one I have most often," he said, "is where I am walking, slowly, looking at my feet, and then I begin to fly. That's nice."

I felt God right there.

"Are they lucid?"

"What?" He didn't hear me.

"Do you know you're dreaming?" I said louder.

"My dreams are very logical. No strange characters. Just ordinary. I have the most ordinary dreams."

I wondered if he lived his waking hours in such distorted reality that once he fell asleep his imagination collapsed all together.

"Me, too," I lied.

I haven't got a lot to say.

Or there's a lot to say but it won't come out. Sometimes, not being in control is the most beautiful thing in the world. Sometimes, it's the most excruciating.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

I end up on Mike’s doorstep.

“Why is your scarf around your face?” he asks.

“Oh,” I move it away. “My cheeks were cold, or something.”

He’s not wearing a shirt.

“Why are you shirtless?”

He’s embarrassed and covers his chest. “Did you text me to tell me you were coming over?” Why is he hiding himself? Why is he acting like its wrong for me to see him in a vulnerable state?

“No. I just missed you,” I say to bring him closer. I start laughing. My smile is not catching and his face won’t move. A feeling passes between us, I am not alone. He is not happy to see me.

“You have to leave,” he tells me with no change in his voice.

“Oh, come on, Mike.”

“Go home and be with your boyfriend.”

“What the fuck?”

“Don't come here anymore.”

"My Dad just died and we’ve been in each other lives for six years and you’re kicking me out of your apartment? Are you fucking --”

“Don’t,” he yells. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“I love you.” I have never seen him so angry at me. I didn't think it was possible for him to be this angry with me.

“Mike --”

“Leave him. Leave him and be with me,” he is looking at me with such a scorching kindness, a searching hopefulness. The anger has left and this is the one moment of truth I'll see all night.

I shake my head, “Mike,” I plead. I know what he wants me to say and I can’t do it.

“I'm not going to fuck you in secret.”

“Can we talk about this?” Everything is falling down my face. I sit on his steps. I am sweating and I move my scarf down to my neck. I can’t lose him, not him, too.

“How many times have you broken up with me?”

“Are you going to tell him?”
 I know quickly that I have said something very wrong. “Don’t look at me like that. My Dad just died and I’m so fucked up and I’m not the bad guy here. You wanted to sleep with me. The two of us are doing this to each other, it’s not just me --”

“You’ve got a lot to say for the one who walked away.”


Then he turns around and a door slams in my face.

“I know you’re right,” I scream.

I want to keep holding on but the rope burns my hands.

He doesn't come back.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

When he as five, Frank lay on his bed, bothered by time and how it insisted on passing. It was pretty mean especially when he was playing baseball, when he was watching a John Wayne movie, when his brother Owen was being nice to him.

“If you find me, hide me. I don’t know where I’ve been,” he told Owen last night in the middle of Cowboys and Indians.

“You stupid ginger,” said Owen and then it was all over.

“What does that mean?”

Kids had been calling him that at school. That, and dirty Dogan, but he knew what that mean. The Prods would find him when he walked home from school and beat him with sticks. It was a bum deal because they were seven and there were three of them so, he just lay on the ground until it was over. He knew when he was licked.

“It means you have ugly red hair.”

“Oh.”

That night, he wore his cowboy hat to bed.

“Stop crying, you girl,” Owen said when their mother made him check on Frank before bed.

I’m going to fly, he thought to himself. If I can fly, they’ll leave me be.

By morning, he had already made his first attempt. He was still wearing the cowboy hat and nothing else. “There he stands on the edge of his feather, expecting to fly,” his mother said when he jumped off his bed and bloodied his lip.

It was hot in his room. He was boiling. The summer day beat through the window, and it hurt him that he had been sent there for bad behaviour.

“Why are you so stupid you to throw yourself off your bed?” his mother asked.

He held ice to his lip. The house was so quiet he could hear the heat rise.

Forget them, he told himself. I am going to fly.

He put his ice on the bed-stand. He closed his eyes.

Fly. Fly, fly like a bird.

He first felt it in his feet. His head felt so light he couldn’t be sure it still existed. He saw his bed beneath him. He saw the floor moving farther and farther away.

He was lying flat in the air.

It only lasted a few seconds and then he collapsed back into his bed, disappointed and exhilarated.

I flew.

He spent the day drifting in and out of naked sleep, thinking when I have a family, we’ll be different.

...

Frank stood with Duffy. It was the middle of the night, the middle of February, the middle of Toronto. They drank hot whiskey and hid in the dark shelter of Withrow Park, but the snot froze in their nose.

They were sixteen.

“I’m a failure, Duff.”

“Like shit you are.”

“I’m the failure. My brother’s the king.”

“You’re just upset because Honor turned your down.”

“She said her mother wouldn’t let her see me. She said I didn’t have any future.”

“Forget her. She’s a stuck up bitch.”

He chucked the empty bottle across the park.

“Maybe I should just stop looking back.”

“That’s the ticket.”

Frank’s lip started to quiver.

“I just can’t do anything right.” He felt blue and pieces of green.

It was so hard to do when time knew no bounds. How do you look forward, trace the genealogy of feeling, when you don’t know where anything begins or ends?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Although I promised myself after I left his office that I would research my father’s columns, I couldn’t.

I told myself I’d come back. I told myself that one day I would be strong enough. I told myself that I would sit in that fire soon, but I can't yet. It is too visceral to be so close to his voice, his purest self. His talent was the part of him he left to God, and I don’t know that I can be near that yet. I don’t have the luxury of falling in love with him again.

I can’t be coaxed into forgiving him.

I take the streetcar home. As I watch the bright summer day happen to Queen Street, sweat and steam and sunglasses, I think that when he touched people's lives and they were never the same again, after he moved his hands away. The strength of his spirit, its hurting and howling ways, for better or for worse, moved people. He singlehandedly changed things. He mattered.

Maybe that’s all I could ever hope for, to keep mattering.

He left spaces in peoples lives that could never be filled and maybe that makes him a hero.

Then I wonder if he was unknowingly creating a place for his soul to go, if we all do that. I see him because he’s still here, living in these painful sores, cracked feelings, taking comfort in his permanence, the space he created.

He left the legacy of poignancy and maybe that’s okay. Everyone has to leave something behind.

Who wants to just fade away?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

That afternoon was special.

When things were falling apart, there were miraculous days between us of exquisite and suffering beauty.

On those afternoons, we were better than the best and I felt like nothing had changed. I believed that the chaos had made us stronger; that he loved me more than anything. These days were bright spots in the darkness that descended upon us. They were moments of hope that I clung to, proof that everything was okay.

The harder he made it, the more determined I was to need him.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Fifteen minutes later, he brings us gin.

By this point, we have gone over that although Andrew and I are going to break up, we haven’t yet. Or more, this is how I have lied to him. I lie to people not by omission or by statements, but by varying degrees of confidence. I have acted like I am certain we will break up but I am not.

I have never been certain of anything in my life.


“He thinks I shouldn’t go and talk to people about my Dad. That it will fuck me up and that I need to get out of Toronto. That I have to think about my career.”

The gin and tonic hit the glass together and it’s all I care about.

“You always wished I was more supportive of your career.”

I’ve aged a hundred years since being with him. A thousand years. Roles shift through us. I feel like a fifty year old man, drunk, who waked shoeless to his high school football field that is still around the corner from his house, propelled by nostalgia. Pathetic. Sad, how did it go so wrong?

I want to be anywhere but here.

“I know.”

“You two didn’t break up, did you?”

“I don’t know.”

He puts on Cosmic Dancer by T-Rex. He holds me close to him and we sway, naked.

“We were dancing when we were twelve,” I say and he laughs.

We spend the rest of the night getting drunk and laughing until we cry about the summer I was sixteen and my Dad trapped raccoons. He caught thirty-two, released them into the wild, a ravine around the corner, convinced they wouldn't return. I’d never seen him happier.

“You know I see him, right? That I have visions like he did?”

Mike doesn’t move.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask.

“No. I think this is hard.” He loves me.

“They’re becoming more real.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Reckless.”

He takes my hand and places it on his stomach and then he puts his hand on my stomach. This scene is familiar and it fills me with dread.

“Do you think I should go talk to everyone I want to?”

“You should do what you want to. You need to do what you have to,” he tells me.

“What if I don’t like what I find out?”

“That’s a risk you take, I guess. Are you happy with him?”
 He asks like they are not two separate statements.

“I don’t trust myself to assess anything right now.”

“Is he happy with you?”


I don’t make him happy. I’ve ruined every man I’ve ever loved. What's haunting is that they are so convinced I am the cure.

“He wants to be,” I tell Mike.

“I heard a quote the other day. You’re only smart if you know how to make yourself happy.”

“I’m pretty fucking stupid, then, aren’t I?”

He shakes his head, and pulls me closer against him. He is so tall that I can feel my ribs digging into his lower abdomen. He is mine completely.

“Do you think it’s possible to love more than one person at once?” I ask him.

“No.”

He is so certain. I have a never felt worse.

“The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.”

Daniel Day Lewis

You Are Talking To God Now

"I always base everyone I write on a real person."

He had asked me to meet him for lunch. "When you're back in Toronto, come by the office so I can give you a squeeze." He always says that, give you a squeeze.

I met him after an audition and I walked quickly against the cold I didn't like.

"It's May! Why is it so cold?"

"You got me, doll." He always calls me doll.

"How are things?"

"Good. Great. It's getting busy in Toronto."

We sat in the corner of a cafe, on the second floor and overlooked Yonge Street. The waiter hovered and his eyes liked my dress, but we sat laughing.

Laughing exhausted him, I could tell.

"All he needs, right now, is Advil for the pain," is what our friend told me over the phone yesterday.

I ordered a Greek salad with chicken because I like routines. My life has no order so I ask for the same item at every restaurant, my vague and desperate attempt at sameness, predictability.

"And for you, sir?" the waiter asked him as he looked at me.

He didn't respond.

"Do you know what you want?" I asked him as I touched his hand.

He looked up at me and then, the menu, confused, like he didn't recognize anything being offered, like he didn't know my face, like he couldn't read the letters beneath him.

"I'll have the same."

He was sick. I should have known.

Looking back, there are always signs. They get heavy with the atmosphere of knowledge, they slip away and slide before you, teasing. They whisper, outlined with permanent marker, "You knew I was here all along."

"The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity."

We ate, fast or slow, I can't remember. We talked about my career.

"She said you go so deep into everything, like it was a bad thing. It's not a bad thing."

I felt a giant relief, like maybe everything would be okay. I felt so happy to be sitting with him. I think he was happy to be sitting with me, too.

"I woke up this morning, Katie, and I had the most beautiful feeling that you are going to get that movie. You are going to be shooting that movie next week."

"From your lips to God's ears."

Apparently, that day, his lips did have God's ears. If only my lips could have God's ears now.

This was the last time everything was still the same and somewhere, looking back, we both knew that, while not knowing it at all. The strangeness, beauty, tragedy of the world is that you both never know a thing and have always known everything. All along.

"Everything's going to be okay, doll. I just know it."

I hugged him goodbye outside the office and he hugged me back. I told him I loved him. I don't know that he heard me.

Meet Me In Montauk

"I thought maybe you were a nut, but you were exciting."

Come back and make up a goodbye, at least. Let's pretend we had one.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

When I get home, Andrew is waiting for me in my bedroom. He’s lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My tall, beautiful man hidden in flowered blankets.

“I thought you were leaving,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. His eyes are mourning.

“That was for show.”

I notice the suitcase, zipped at his feet.


“Your bags still packed.”

“I got that movie. I’ll say no if you want me to.”


“No, go. Go.” I’m not sure if I mean it. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“What time?” My heart is beating and it makes such an Almighty sound I know that he can hear it.

“First thing.”

“Well, it’s late. Let’s go to bed.”

Thank God, we’ll just miss each other at the airport.

I press my face against his chest.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, too. I have to go to L.A. to just...tie up some loose ends.”

“What?”


“I booked the ticket last night, drunk. I thought about what you said. You were right.”

That’s half true. I guess if I learned one thing from my father it was to shade your lies with truth.

“Are you drunk now?”

I nod.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving at breakfast?” he asks.

“Because I hadn’t really decided if I wanted to go.”

“Why do you have to go so soon?”

“It’s not a big trip. I just want to pack more clothes, tell my agents what’s happened in person. I’ll probably be here for awhile again.”

I can’t look at his eyes.

He nods. “I understand,” he says. He doesn’t though.

“Is it wrong if I ask you what’s happening with us?”
 he whispers minutes later.

“No.”

“So what’s happening with us?”

“I’m just really fucked up right now.”

“Are we breaking up?”


“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t think so. I just need some time to figure everything out.”

He turns on his side and puts his hand on my hip, awkwardly, beautifully. I kiss his chest and I tell him that I love him but he doesn’t notice. He’s too busy trying to wipe his tears.

I take off my dress, leaving me naked, vulnerable.

We don’t make love.

He leaves the next morning. I drop him off at Pearson International, and six hours later, when he has landed in Nova Scotia, I am back at Pearson, boarding a plane to Belfast.

Put your dreams away for now. I won’t see you for some time. I am lost in my mind.

I am lost in my mind.

Over the Atlantic, I drift in and out of sleep, twisted like a Chinese contortionist.

It helps that I stole some of my Mom's tranquilizers.

Black Sheep

"Shit, Marl, I’m sorry. Should I have told you when you suggested we meet here?”

“No. It’s okay. I knew he came here a lot...what’d he have to say?”

“Well, I asked him about you. I realized afterwards maybe I shouldn’t have. I just wasn’t sure what else to talk to him about, you know? He was pretty funny. He cracked a couple jokes. It was a pretty short conversation. I just asked him to get you to call me and then I felt really stupid for saying that after.”

“What’d he say when you brought me up?”


“Nothing really. That he would get you to call me. I thought maybe he didn’t know that I knew. He didn’t seem angry or anything.”

“How did he seem?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Sad.”

“Sad how?”

“Alone.”

I am getting the shit kicked out of me.

“Can we not talk about my father anymore?”


“Okay. I’m sorry. What do you want to talk about? What do you want to do? We can do anything you want.”

...

“Look, you can pretend that you’re not totally fucked by the fact that Dad died and things were left between you how they were but I know the truth.”

“How is this different for me? He was horrible to you, too.”

“I know that, but I made my peace with him. We...were okay when he died. In our own fractured way.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Attacking me. I’m drunk all the time? Fuck you, Matt. You’re a fucking drug addict.”

He grabs me by the shoulders.

“Marla, listen to me. You can insult me all you want but you are fucked right now and you aren’t going to get better anytime soon. You can’t duck this.”

“I’m not ducking it.”

“No, but you’re trying.”

I can feel my eyes getting wet. Not now, not tonight, when things are light-hearted.

“Its just...why could you two work things out? Why didn’t he want to with me?”

“Well, we never worked them out, not really.”

“You know what I mean. ”

He nods. He stands before me, strong, silent. He looks exactly like my father did to me before I got lost in his malformed soul.

“How am I supposed to deal with this, Matt? I always somewhere thought if I got married, or if I had a kid... one day out of the blue, things would just work themselves out. That can never happen now. Things ended how they were. Broken. That was the end of our story.”

“I know.”

“No, no, I don’t think you do. When Dad was terrible to you, it pretty was one-sided.”

“I wasn’t easy.”

“No, but you were...”

“I was sick, you can say it.”

I swallow. I don’t want him to feel ridiculed. I don’t think I’m better than him.

“I let it happen like this, I had a hand in it. I ruined my relationship with Dad, too. Do you understand that guilt?”

Matt takes me by the arm.

“You’re not guilty.”

“I fucked everything up in a spectacular way.”

We stand in silence for awhile. He takes a smoke out, his hands shaking. Halfway through he looks back at me.

“Hey, Marla?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m here, you know. You need me and I’m here.”

I nod.

I sit on the concrete for the next fifteen minutes and slowly finish my drinks. I tell myself that I have to believe what my father always told me.

The belly of every black thing is white.

“What are we going to find out next? That he was a secret agent?” he asks.

I don’t have it in me to laugh.

“I just feel ripped off, you know?” I hear the sounds of weeping, heart beating, heartbroken, heartbreaking, my voice cracking. “Why didn’t he tell me he was married in Belfast? I would have understood how angry he was. Things could have been different.”

Matt hugs me.

“Don’t tell anyone I’m crying.”

“I won’t.”

“Are you crying over Dad?”

"Over it all.”

My brother stays with me for a few more minutes and I watch him as he walks back into the bar. The shock of his face reverberates off the sidewalk and hurts me, so I decide to leave, too.

Black Sheep

Isn't it conceivable that maybe my father loved too much?

Felt too much, lost too much, knew too much? That he couldn't continue? That he had no choice but to leave? That he was truly tenderhearted until life kicked it out of him?

Who am I to say I wouldn't have given up, too? Who's to say I won't?

Tonight, I promise him I am grieving his loss without hatred, violence, confusion and a simple, more ordinary sadness. I wear his red sweater to sleep and write B.F.F. in black permanent marker on the sleeve.

It stains my sheets but I don't care.

I decide, in a way that can't be undone, I am my father's friend even and especially after death.

Is it a sea he hears inside me, or echoes of himself? Lately, everywhere is mirrors. In him, in me, in the darkness of the room, the brightness of the day. Patterns of sound, the syncopation of change. Shifts in feeling, depth perception, things shattered and reconstructed.

Twist me like a kaleidoscope. No. Twist me like a kaleidoscope.

It isn't always easy to recognize God's grace.

"I don't know what happened with your father."

But she was young and in love once.

"You'll make the right decision. Whatever you decide, I'll stand behind you."

I guess he was young and in love once, too.

Through all their lies, everything I worry about never happens anyway.

Black Sheep

The night was black, lost.

His mother was sitting in his apartment, faded into the dark oak and heavy furniture, stuck in the chair. When Frank closed his eyes and opened them again she had become unstuck. No longer solid, moving like wisps of smoke. No one had ever appeared to him like that before; a movie ghost, see-through and saint-like.

“This is no place for a woman.” Her voice was fainter than it’d been even just two weeks before.

“Ma, I can’t hear you. Can you speak up?”

She shook her head. Frank felt his heart race but he wasn’t sure why. Everything became too small. He wanted to move and he couldn’t.

“I need you to find a woman.”

“What?”

“Its time. I watch this woman Laura. I watch her often. I want you with her.”

There was a silence between his lungs, no steady beats.

“You want to be with her, too.” Her voice wheezed.

“Ma, why are you so quiet?”

She smiled; slight, sad, scared. Frank sensed something was changing. He said a silent prayer that this was not goodbye.

“Please. Go to Laura.”

His mother moved backwards. The lines in her face danced and she faded into the walls. Frank could feel her disappearing.

“Don’t go.”

“I love you, my terror.”

“Say you’ll be back.”

She smiled once more and put her hand to her heart.

“Don’t go. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done. Don't go,” he said.

She turned around. Frank closed his eyes, hoping that if he glued them shut this moment would have no end. When he opened them, she was gone.

Goodbyes are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin. They never heal because there was never enough material.

Black Sheep

In the end we only have pieces of the puzzle, and no matter how we put them together, gaps remain.

Oddly shaped emptiness mapped by what surrounds them, what surrounds you, what you try to fit there. Rooms in your head get dim, clocks on walls tick on, people die. The past and the present try to meet up and make a deal, but what if they can’t? Does a piece of the puzzle you fought really hard for get taken away? Do you get left behind?

I looked out and saw my father, alone but not alone, in the hazy twilight of the night.

Sometimes wandering is better than a place.

I sat on the road waiting for day to break so we could go.

My little brother sat next to me. The gravel stuck in our legs. We had dirty hands and scraped up knees. The country air was cool and sweet and damp and in that moment, we were all we had. He was young and I was sick.

“It just feels really special with him,” I said.

“You’re just like me,” he said. “You think everything’s special. You sleep with someone, it’s special. You lie in bed with someone, it’s special. I’m a big special guy. I think everything’s so fucking special.”

“Well, maybe some things are special.”

"Its an easy way out, man."

"What do you mean?"

He was the only person on earth who held the keys to my most unfettered and fundamental self. I don't believe an accident of birth made us brother and sister.

“Things aren’t special if they treat you like shit.”

As day came, he jumped through fields screaming, "Lord, have mercy on my rough and rowdy ways!"

The morning moved slowly with nothing in front of us but a lot to be left behind.

Black Sheep

I am sitting with Matt at the bar around the corner. His curly hair is sticking up in every direction. His eyes wide apart and darkly likable are translucent tonight, like ale held to the light.

His new tattoo says, “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” It’s a Dylan quote. Its sprawled across the bicep of his left arm. We’re halfway though a bottle of Jack.

My brother is a lonely planet. A strange, singular orb in a universe that can sometimes sustain itself, sometimes not.

I search his eyes for some clues. I want to run my fingers along his face, treating it like a map with some destination I can get to. Has he just come out of a sadness or is he going into one? Is he manic right now? Are his pills making him dopey? Is this Matt? Is this the illness?

He is a language that I understand but don't speak.

I am never really insane except upon occasions when my heart is touched.

...

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll start crying. I can't stop. Everything inside comes undone, gets born, learns to die. Out of nowhere, these genuine feelings will rush to the surface and I don't recognize them. I have wondered if I'm a vessel, if other people had these feelings and didn't want them.

Even if their owner's had no room left, they existed and needed to find home.

It’s not one thing. When is anything ever one thing? Sometimes, I’ll start crying about everything sad that’s ever happened to anyone in the world. I’ll think, why’d my sister’s husband have to die? Why’d Mike have such a hard childhood? Why do you always remember what you want to forget and forget what you want to remember?

Or I’ll cry about nothing at all, because I miss my sister even though I saw her last week, because my Dad’s face looks older than it used to, because time's passing too quickly.

Or everything marvelous, beautiful, glittering, ecstatic.

I’m grabbing at these unspeakable things, these concepts, these waves of thought that stretch forever and farther.

I wonder if I prefer to have a broken heart.

If I’m lucky, for one small second, I can see the order of everything. It’s like I’m standing on a building, on top of the world, taller than anything I’ve ever known. I can see my Mom, the size of a pea in Paris, dancing around the streets and I think everything that’s sent here there was meant to be. That the cruelty had purpose. I can see the invisible red string that connects us all. No matter how it’s tangled and stretched it is never broken. It’s only a second though, a flash, a glimpse, a secret. I'm jumping off docks.

So, sometimes I’ll cry.

When I stop I fall asleep quickly without noticing.

It's over as quickly as it's begun and I wake up like it never happened.

My heart has left and I'm just going in tandem.

Black Sheep

And, it's just as simple as that. I see him. I can't reach out and touch him, hold him, be against him, but I can know that he's there and I can be anchored in the strong feeling that nobody else does.

Last night, Andrew looked at me, briefly, out of the corner of his eye.

“You want me to leave.”

I didn’t nod but I didn’t shake my head either.

My boyfriend gentle man with periods of violence. Not real violence, the emotional kind. His feelings kick the shit out of him. He’s tall, standing six feet two, although he swears he was once taller. We're twins. My feelings kick the shit out of me, too.

“Dad,” I say to the ceiling, “He’s leaving, isn’t he?”

The night before their separation, my father didn’t speak to my brother or my mother, just me.

I learned young there was no point in asking why.

“Your mother’s leaving me, isn’t she?” he asked, hacking a dart outside our house as the night laid upon the sky.

“Probably not.”


“She means it this time.” He looked so confused, like, how could she mean it this time? My question was, how had she not meant it before?

“No. Probably not.”

“Your brother is not going to take this well.”

“No, probably not,” I said again.

“You’re going to have to be strong for him.”

I nodded.

“I told you don’t get married, kid.” His hands were shaking and his coffee spilt over his pants. “Shit,” he said, not like he was shocked or burnt, just disappointed.

That’s how I see my father always, drinking coffee and smoking. But how much do you manipulate your memories? Do I just place the coffee in his hand, the smoke between his fingers?

I know that it’s only because he’s gone that these things spin around me, echoing on and on.

People think I’m like my mother because we both laugh a lot and have blonde hair. Those are ridiculous and superficial similarities.

Once, when I was a girl, my mother told me, “Your father suffers from a strange condition of chosen loneliness. He has a lot of friends and no one knows him. He knows he’s smarter than everyone but feels stupid a lot. People want to be close to him but he doesn’t let anyone in.” We were watching television. I remember the deadpan expression on her face, how she was laying on her stomach with her head in her hands.

And, “Oh shit,” I thought. “That’s me.”

I have always been my father’s daughter even though I never wanted to be.