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heart. You can tell him all the things you want to in your heart.”
    “Can I talk to him with you sometime?”
    “We can do it right now if you want.”
    My eyes were starting to water, but I didn’t want to cry in front of Luc. I took a deep breath, and carried him up to his bedroom. I could hear Maman below us. In the kitchen, the tap was running. Luc pulled on his socks and I handed him his teddy bear.
    We knelt at the foot of his bed, and I showed him how to fold his hands and pray, something my family didn’t do a lot, except for funerals, baptisms, and weddings. To tell the truth, I had no idea what I was doing, but Luc was looking at me with such trust that I knew I had to wing it.
    “Okay, this is what you do, Luc. You have to repeat after me.”
    “After me,” he said, squeezing his eyes tight shut.
    “Papa.”
    “Papa,” he said.
    “Good night from the bottom of my heart.”
    “Good night from the heart of my bottom.”
    “Stop it. That’s not funny.” I tried to sound stern.
    “Sorry. Good night from the bottom of my heart.”
    “Papa, I love you so much.” I whispered the words.
    “Me too,” he said.
    I kissed him on the cheek and gave him a bear hug. He climbed into his bed. I straightened his covers around him and smoothed his hair.
    There was a photo that I took last May in a Snoopy frame on the little table beside Luc’s bed. The crabapple tree in the backyard was in full blossom. Maman stoodin front of it, next to Papa. Luc was perched on Papa’s shoulders, laughing right into the camera. The blossoms surrounded them in a pink halo. I looked at the photo, turned off the light, closed the door, went to my bedroom, and cried.

4 | S ADNESS
    1 993. Bill Clinton succeeded George Bush as president–no more vomiting on the Japanese prime minister. In New York City, a van bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center went off, killing six people and injuring over a thousand. Kim Campbell became Canada’s first female prime minister. For about five minutes. Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in Washington, DC after signing a peace accord.
Jurassic Park
, and
Schindler’s List
were released, and k.d. lang with Eric Clapton won a Grammy for the best pop vocal performance. I started to notice these things, but there was still a hard slog ahead of me.

    As the winter dragged on I began to spend Friday afternoons riding my bike to the Mount Royal Cemeteryinstead of going to school. It’s a good twenty-minute ride, all up hill, which I’m here to tell you is long enough to freeze off your ears and your nose twice over. I didn’t want anyone to know, especially Maman. I knew she went to the cemetery too, because there were often footprints in the snow and fresh flowers on the grave, but I didn’t want her to find out what I was doing. She would have flipped about my cutting classes, for one thing. But mostly it felt like something so personal and so private that I had to keep it to myself. I would take a book to read and sit by the tombstone until I was too cold to stand it. Sometimes I had whole conversations with him:
    “Hey, Papa! How’s life up there? Do you know how much I miss you? Luc talks about you all the time. He thinks you will come back. I’ve tried to explain, but he doesn’t get it. Sputnik doesn’t get much exercise these days. Are you mad that mostly we just let him out in the backyard? For Maman, it’s different. She barely talks anymore. She goes to work, comes home, peels onions, cooks dinner, washes the dishes, and sits in front of the fire. That’s about it for her. We haven’t touched your slippers or your jacket since you’ve been gone. It’s strange to say
gone.
If only I knew where you’ve gone, but I don’t.”
    Sometimes I felt close to him. Other times I felt like he was a galaxy away.

    It was the last gray day of a damp and frigid March. Aunt Sophie had picked up Luc for an excursion to the doughnut shop, and Maman was still at