A Keeper's Truth Read Free

nice dreams with happy endings? Why are my nightmares filled with
strange, murderous men? Should it have been me to die that day?
    If I
believed in fate . . .
    A shiver
runs through me. I gather my stuff from the floor and climb back into bed.
    There is
no such thing as fate.

Mind Games
Late October

 
 
    T ime. It
has no healing power. It just buries grief under a crapload of moments that dull the senses. Time forces you to eat, sleep, put one foot
before the other, breathe. Everything that existed still exists, only altered:
crumpled and ironed, crumpled and ironed, then laid out and pinned flat until
it resembles something whole again.
    Of course,
I tend to be melodramatic. Without time I’d be a blubbering fool. Time and
painting pulled me through the worst of it, the endless daze and the gaping
emptiness of Meyer’s absence. Time, art, and of course, Abby. Always Abby.
    I slide on
my rubber boots—covered in paint splatter in various tones—and head
to the studio, burning my tongue on a piping hot tea as I slush through the
fallen leaves of the Niagara Escarpment, otherwise known as home. More than 450
million years ago, an Ordovician-Silurian Age sea abandoned 728 thousand
hectares, leaving a rigid shelf of shale and limestone stretching from Niagara
Falls to Tobermory , a horseshoe outcropping in the
heart of Ontario’s Greenbelt. Nowadays, the Niagara Escarpment is recognized as
one of the world’s natural wonders and designated a World Biosphere Reserve by
the United Nations. Hikers and bird-watchers flock to explore the caves and
trails rich with wildlife, and vast tracts of farmland part to entice golf
lovers and equestrians. Me, I came for an art festival and never left.
    I met
Meyer here, in the small town of Carlisle, on a similar Indian summer day in
October. Luckiest day of my twenty years. I lived in Toronto at the time, about
a forty-minute drive east, and a school friend was meeting up with a guy she’d
met at a party the week before. So I tagged along to see J.D Picoult , a local sculptor I’d met my freshmen year at the
University of Toronto.
    Only two
booths into the fair, my girlfriend ducked behind a tarp to make out with the
guy she’d come to see, leaving me to wander the fair with the dude’s buddy. He
was a slightly older guy with soft blue eyes and an easy smile, introduced as
Meyer Lemon, which I assumed had something to do with his yellow-blond locks.
We’d barely uttered a dozen words that first hour. As usual, I was enthralled
by the artistic talent hidden in tiny country towns and hardly noticed I had
company until we both stood back to admire a canvas and tripped over a
tethering cord, my entire cup of craft beer spilling down Meyer’s shirt.
    It was the
first time I’d spent the day with a guy who didn’t need to talk or touch. He
made me laugh. And when Meyer confessed he’d lost his parents in a boating
accident at fourteen, it was like some benevolent being pulled out a needle and
thread to sew us together. My mother had stopped eating three years before,
when I was seventeen. Which was, of course, when she really checked out, and
not the date, some months later, listed on the death certificate.
    I step
inside the studio, my sanctuary, and the past slips away, splashes of burnt
orange, yellow, and robust red surrounding me like a blanket. I stare at the
glass ceiling, the morning sun heating my face. A brilliant hummingbird
investigates a glass panel in the roof, his beak making tiny rat-a-tat-tat
sounds. I’m in heaven.
    My studio
is actually a large glass greenhouse nestled in a grouping of ancient white
cedars, exactly thirty-four steps from my kitchen and sixteen meters from the
Bruce Trail at Rattlesnake Point. Meyer built the greenhouse from a kit as a
gift for my twenty-fifth birthday, which was comical to watch since the man
wore his corporate white collar like a badge. It’s private, pin-drop quiet, and
although the trees block the bluster of early winter