Prologue

 It seemed like nothing more than an ordinary phone call.

It was early in 1996. I was living with my grandmother and my uncle Ralph in a small apartment, and the afternoon had been much like any other. A radio played softly in the background while I sat in the living room, reading. We never had cable television; the radio was always enough. Looking back, I’ve often wondered why neither my grandmother and Ralph bothered getting it—it would have given them something to do during those long, quiet evenings. But they never seemed interested.

And then, the telephone rang.

I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello,” the man replied. "This is MT&T.” His tone was calm and businesslike. “We’ve been having some problems with the telephone lines, and I’d like to verify the name associated with this number.”

There was nothing unusual about the request. I assumed he was a telephone company employee doing his job.

“Okay,” I said.

He read back the telephone number first. Then he gave the name on the account.

It wasn’t my grandmother's name.

It belonged to my grandfather, who had passed away in June of 1970, more than twenty-five years earlier. My uncle had been named after him, but the telephone account had never been changed. My grandmother simply kept paying the bill each month, and MT&T continued to list the service in his name.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s correct.”

“Would you mind holding for a moment while I check something?”

“Sure.”

The line fell silent.

As I waited, I wandered over to the living room window. Across the street, an MT&T van was parked at the curb. A lineman had a ladder propped against the telephone pole and was working on the overhead lines. I assumed whatever he was doing was the reason for the call.

A minute or so later, the man’s voice returned. “Everything checks out,” he said. “Thank you for your time.”

“No problem.”

He wished me a good afternoon, and I hung up the phone.

That was the end of it.

Or so I believed.

Chapter One

Every weekday began the same way.

Just before eight, my uncle Ralph would come out of the apartment carrying his lunch pail. I’d already have the car warming up while he locked the door behind him. We climbed in without much conversation. There was little to say after following the same routine day after day.

Ralph wasn’t one for complaining. If something bothered him, he usually kept it to himself. He worked hard, came home tired, ate supper with my grandmother, and settled into his chair for the evening while the radio played softly in the background.

He’d worked at the wood-preserving plant in Bible Hill for more than twenty years. Officially, the company had changed its name from Domtar to Stella-Jones in 1993, but Ralph still called it Domtar. I don’t think he ever intended to call it anything else.

He owned an old K-car, but it seemed to spend as much time needing repairs as it did on the road. Instead of sinking more money into it, he asked if I’d drive him instead. It quickly became our routine. I’d drop him off each morning and pick him up at five.

The drive usually took about ten minutes, depending on the traffic lights. Ralph always had me drop him off at the Riverside Avenue entrance rather than the one on Park Street. I think it was simply closer to the part of the plant where he worked.

Gradually, I began to notice something had changed.

At first, it was easy to dismiss. Every few minutes he'd shift in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position. Sometimes he'd lean slightly to one side before settling back again. I figured he was still recovering from the operation he'd had the previous fall. He never complained, and I never asked.

As the days turned into weeks, the shifting never really stopped. Some mornings he’d brace himself with one hand against the dashboard as I rounded a corner. Other times he’d ease himself back into the seat with a quiet sigh before staring out the window for the rest of the drive. No matter how uncomfortable he seemed, he still insisted on going to work every day.

I don’t remember exactly when I realized something wasn’t right. There wasn’t a single morning that stood apart from the others. It was the little things. He seemed more tired when I picked him up after work. The walk from the plant to the car became slower. Conversations that had once filled the short drive home gradually gave way to long stretches of silence.

Then one morning, the routine changed.

I started the car as I always did and waited for Ralph to come out. A few minutes passed, but I never saw him. Thinking he might have overslept, I went inside to check.

He was still in bed.

“I can’t go to work today,” he said quietly. “I think I need to see the doctor again.”

He looked exhausted and in pain.

After he got cleaned up, I drove him to the Outpatients Department at the hospital. I remember thinking they would examine him, prescribe something, and send him home. It never crossed my mind that he wouldn’t be coming back with me.

Outpatients was as busy as it always seemed to be. People filled the waiting room, some sitting quietly with magazines while others talked among themselves. We checked in at the desk and found a couple of empty chairs to wait.

I don’t remember how long we waited. Time always seems to stretch and stall in a hospital waiting room. Every few minutes, a nurse would appear in the doorway, call a name, and disappear again. Finally, she called Ralph’s.

“I'll see what they tell me,” he said as he stood.

I gave him a nod and watched him disappear through the doors.

Left alone, I picked up a magazine from the table beside my chair and flipped through it without really reading a word. Every so often I’d glance toward the doors, wondering how much longer it would be.

After what felt like quite a while, a nurse came back into the waiting room.

“Ralph would like you to come with me.”

I followed her through the doors and down a short hallway into the examination area. It wasn't a room so much as a space divided by curtains. Ralph was lying on his side on an examination table, wearing a hospital gown. Seeing him there felt strangely out of place. Only days earlier I’d been dropping him off at work. Now he looked tired, waiting for someone to tell him what was wrong.

A doctor stepped behind the curtain carrying a chart. He introduced himself, then pulled up a stool beside the examination table.

He asked Ralph when the discomfort had started and whether it had been getting worse. Then he asked a question I still remember all these years later.

“How have your bowel movements been?”

The doctor asked a few more questions before beginning the examination. The curtain gave us some privacy, but I could still hear nurses talking, the overhead paging system, and the muffled conversations of people waiting beyond the curtain. Outpatients carried on around us as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

When the examination was over, the doctor removed his gloves and set the chart down on a nearby counter.

“I’d like to admit you,” he said. “We’ll run some tests and see what’s going on.”

Neither Ralph nor I questioned the decision. If anything, it caught us both by surprise. We’d expected to be back home before long.

The doctor explained that a room would be arranged as soon as one became available.

I remember looking at Ralph. It was the first time I’d seen real concern in his face. Even then, he said very little. That was who he was.

There wasn’t much more I could do. I told Ralph I’d be back later and left the hospital.

The drive home felt different. For weeks, Ralph had been sitting in the passenger seat beside me. Now it was empty.

Chapter Two

The apartment felt strangely quiet the next morning.

For the first time in weeks, there was no rush to get ready for work. Ralph wasn’t carrying his lunch pail to the door, and I wasn’t warming up the car. His bedroom sat empty while my grandmother moved quietly around the apartment, trying to keep herself busy.

Neither of us expected to hear from the hospital so soon. We assumed Ralph would be there for a few days while the doctors ran their tests. At that point, we still believed they were trying to figure out what was causing his problems.

Late that morning, the telephone rang.

My grandmother answered it. “Hello?”

I remember watching her expression change almost immediately. Fear. Then anguish.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.”

I looked at her from across the room. “What’s wrong?”

She slowly lowered the receiver. “Ralphie has cancer.”

For a moment, neither of us said anything.

Cancer.

The word hung in the room, impossible to grasp. Only the day before, I’d taken him to Outpatients expecting he’d be examined, given some medication, and sent home. Instead, he was lying in a hospital bed with a diagnosis no one had been prepared to hear.

My grandmother sat down without saying a word. She looked completely stunned.

So was I.

I tried to reassure her. “They’ll get on top of it,” I said. “He’ll be all right.”

Looking back, I had no idea what I was talking about. I was thirty years old, and although I knew cancer was a serious disease, it had never affected me personally or anyone in my family before. I had no real understanding of what lay ahead. I was trying to comfort my grandmother as much as I was trying to convince myself.

I knew I had to tell my mother.

She was still at work, so I waited until I knew her shift would be over before calling. When she answered, I told her what the hospital had found.

She didn’t hesitate. “I’ll be right there,” she said.

Before long, she was at the apartment. There wasn’t much to discuss. We were both still trying to come to terms with the news we’d received only a short time earlier. We got in the car and drove to the hospital.

The drive seemed longer than it had the day before.

Neither of us talked very much. I think we were both lost in our own thoughts, wondering what we were going to find when we walked into Ralph’s room.

At the information desk we asked which room Ralph had been moved to. A young woman gave us his room number and pointed us in the right direction.

Ralph was in a semi-private room. There were two beds separated by a curtain that had been pulled back. He was sitting up in bed when we walked in.

The other bed was occupied by an older gentleman. He was lying on his side facing toward us, quietly watching as we came into the room.

Ralph looked tired, but he managed a smile when he saw us. The conversation turned almost immediately to what the doctors had told him.

“They want to operate,” he said matter-of-factly. “The doctor says I’ll get another twenty years.”

It was exactly what we wanted to hear. Then something happened that has stayed with me ever since.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the older gentleman in the next bed slowly shake his head. He didn’t say a word. There was only a softened look of sympathy on his face.

At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he hearing something Ralph wasn’t telling us? Or was Ralph trying to spare us from how serious the doctors believed his condition really was?

We stayed with Ralph for a while before saying our goodbyes. He seemed to be in good spirits and talked about the operation as though it would solve the problem. As much as I wanted to believe him, I couldn’t shake the image of the older gentleman in the next bed slowly shaking his head. The look on his face had said more than words ever could.

As my mother and I stepped into the hallway, we ran into the same doctor who had examined Ralph in Outpatients the day before. He recognized me immediately and stopped to ask how we were holding up. After a few moments, he turned his attention to my mother. I remained outside Ralph’s room while the two of them walked a short distance down the corridor and continued talking.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I remember watching the conversation unfold. Suddenly, the doctor reached out and caught my mother’s arm. She looked as though she was about to faint. A bench sat against the wall nearby, and she slowly lowered herself onto it while the doctor stayed beside her for a moment.

A short time later, he walked into Ralph’s room.

From where I stood in the hallway, I couldn’t make out everything that was said, but I clearly remember hearing Ralph’s voice.

“What the hell did you tell her that for?”

It was the only time I can ever remember hearing him speak like that.

When the doctor came back out, I walked over to my mother. She looked pale.

“Ralph’s very sick,” she said.

I guided her toward the exit. She stared straight ahead, saying nothing.

I don't think either of us knew what to make of what we’d just learned. We’d arrived believing the operation would fix everything. We left knowing the situation was far more serious than either of us had been led to believe.

Chapter Three

 The next few days settled into an uneasy routine.

Ralph was discharged from the hospital while we waited for a scheduled operation date. The doctors told him someone from the hospital would contact him as soon as everything had been arranged. Until then, there wasn't much any of us could do except wait.

Before the surgery, Ralph would have to attend an information session to prepare him for what lay ahead. A nurse explained that the operation would leave him with a colostomy. He would have to learn how to care for the stoma, change the appliance, and adjust to a way of life he had never imagined.

It was an overwhelming amount of information to absorb.

Ralph listened quietly, asking only a few questions. He’d always been that way. If something worried him, he rarely let it show. Instead, he seemed to accept each new piece of information as another obstacle to overcome. Whatever the operation required of him, he was prepared to do it if it meant getting his life back.

Watching him, it was easy to believe everything would somehow work out.

In hindsight, I don’t think any of us realized how much our lives were about to change.

There was one thing Ralph was adamant about: he didn’t want my grandmother to know how serious his condition might be.

She was eighty-five years old, and despite everything he was going through, Ralph’s greatest concern was how she would handle the news. As far as she knew, he just needed an operation. That was all he wanted her to know until the doctors could tell him more.

We respected his wishes. Conversations around the apartment became carefully measured. We talked about hospital appointments, surgery dates, and the information session, but we avoided saying anything that might alarm her. Looking back, I’ve often wondered how much she really understood. Parents have a way of sensing when something isn’t right, even long after their children have grown up.

A few days later, my mother accompanied Ralph to the hospital for the information session. When they returned home, Ralph was carrying a stack of pamphlets. He set them on the kitchen table while my mother told me about everything they had gone over.

Before leaving the hospital, Ralph had asked if he could stop by and see the older gentleman who had shared his room.

The nurse hesitated for a moment before quietly telling him he had passed away.

The news seemed to shake Ralph. None of us had realized the man had been that sick.

After the information session, Ralph called Domtar and arranged to take a leave of absence until after the operation. There was never any question about trying to work in the meantime. His health had deteriorated to the point where simply getting through the day took all the energy he had.

Most days he settled into his chair in the living room with the radio playing softly in the background. Every so often he’d pick up one of the hospital pamphlets and flip through it, then set it back down again. I don’t know how much of it he actually read. There wasn’t much else he could do except wait.

My mother returned to work at the textile plant while we counted down the days until the surgery. My grandmother carried on with her own routine around the apartment, doing what she could. At eighty-five, however, her eyesight had failed to the point where we didn’t want her using the stove anymore. More often than not, I took care of preparing our meals.

It hadn’t always been that way.

Decades earlier, when my grandfather’s heart condition forced him to stop working, my grandmother had taken a job at Murphy’s Restaurant on Prince Street to help support the family. She was an excellent cook. Meat and potatoes were staples in their home, but she could make just about anything. Fish cakes, baked beans, hearty stews, scalloped potatoes, meat pies, and homemade fruit pies had all found their way to the table over the years.

After my grandfather died in 1970, life changed again. My grandmother was left on her own, and although my mother and my older uncle had families of their own, Ralph stayed with her. Looking back, I’ve often wondered if he felt it was his responsibility. After everything the family had already been through, I think he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her alone.

A few days before the operation, the hospital asked Ralph to come in for a series of pre-admission tests. My mother and I went with him.

The morning seemed to consist mostly of waiting. We moved from one department to another while the staff prepared him for surgery. Blood was drawn, an electrocardiogram was performed, and he was sent for a chest X-ray. Every test seemed to bring us one step closer to the operation.

We also met with members of the surgical team. The anaesthesiologist explained what Ralph could expect on the day of the operation, while another nurse went over the practical side of living with a colostomy once he returned home. She carefully examined his abdomen before marking the spot where the stoma would be created.

Until then, the operation had still seemed some distance away. Seeing that mark on his abdomen made it feel real.

Before we left, we were given instructions for the day before the operation. Ralph would be restricted to clear fluids and would have to complete the bowel preparation at home before fasting overnight. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but the nurses stressed how important it was.

Through it all, Ralph remained remarkably calm. He listened carefully, nodded as the nurses explained each step, and asked a few practical questions whenever he needed clarification. There was a quiet optimism about him that never really faded. He seemed convinced that once the operation was over, life would slowly return to normal.

We wanted to believe that too.

Chapter Four

 The alarm went off long before sunrise.

Ralph’s operation had been scheduled for early that morning, and the hospital wanted him there well before dawn. The apartment felt unusually quiet as everyone got ready. There wasn’t much to say.

Ralph had followed the bowel preparation instructions the day before and hadn't been allowed to eat or drink since midnight. By morning, he looked entirely exhausted. Even so, he never complained. He simply got dressed, gathered the small overnight bag he’d packed the day before, and waited by the door.

My grandmother wished him good luck before we left. I don’t remember exactly what was said, only that she tried to smile. I think she was doing her best to hide how worried she really was.

My mother and I drove Ralph to the hospital in near silence. The streets were still dark, and there was very little traffic. Normally, it was only a short drive, but that spring morning it felt much longer.

Inside the main entrance, everything felt strangely calm. Although it was early, the hospital was already beginning to come to life. We checked in at the registration desk, where a clerk confirmed Ralph’s information, reviewed his paperwork, and fastened a plastic identification band around his wrist.

Once the registration was complete, we were directed to the Day Surgery unit.

A nurse greeted Ralph, reviewed his chart one last time, and led him into the pre-operative area. My mother and I followed as far as we were permitted before she stopped and explained that only patients were allowed beyond that point.

Ralph looked back at us and smiled. “I’ll see you later,” he said.

Then he disappeared through the doors. From that moment on, he was in the hands of the surgical team. There was nothing more we could do.

My mother still had to work that day, so after we left the hospital, she headed to the textile plant. I stopped by the apartment to check on my grandmother before trying to keep myself occupied.

For several years, I’d been a regular at the YMCA. I had no ambitions of becoming a bodybuilder or a powerlifter; I simply enjoyed lifting weights. It was a good way to relieve stress and clear my head. That morning, however, the gym wasn’t much of a distraction. No matter how hard I tried to focus on the iron, my thoughts kept drifting back to Ralph. I found myself wondering if the surgery had begun, whether everything was going as planned, and exactly how he was doing.

When I got back to the apartment, my grandmother was sitting in her chair waiting for news. She looked up as soon as I walked through the door.

“Have you heard anything?”

I shook my head.

She worried all day. I tried to get her to eat something, but she refused. No matter what I said, she simply wasn’t interested.

She had already endured more loss than anyone should. In 1969, she had buried her youngest son, David, after a car accident. The following year, my grandfather died suddenly at home. Although my oldest uncle had long since married and started a family of his own, Ralph had remained at home with her. Now he was undergoing major surgery, and she had no way of knowing what the outcome would be.

The afternoon crawled by. Late in the day, the hospital finally called my mother at work with the news that Ralph was awake and asking to see us. She picked me up from the apartment immediately after her shift, and we drove back to the hospital. While it was a relief to know the surgery was over, the heavy weight of the unknown sat between us; we still had no idea what the surgeon had actually discovered once they got inside.

Before going into Ralph’s room, my mother stopped at the nurses’ station to ask how the procedure had gone. The nurse paused, her hand resting on a chart before she looked up at us with a quiet, guarded expression.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said softly. “Maybe you should wait and speak with the doctor.”

A cold weight dropped into the pit of my stomach. The nurse hadn’t given us a diagnosis or a clinical breakdown, but those few words told us everything we dreaded to know.

Ralph was lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. An oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth, his breath fogging the plastic with a faint, rhythmic hiss, while a web of intravenous lines ran into his arm. He slowly turned his head as we walked into the room, his eyes heavy but recognizing us.

My mother and I pulled our chairs up close beside the mattress, moving quietly as if any sharp noise might break something fragile. For a few long moments, no one spoke. The only sounds were the hum of the hospital equipment and the steady hiss of oxygen through Ralph’s mask. Finally, his composure gave way. He began to cry, tears tracking down the sides of his face.

“It spread all over," he said, his voice muffled by the plastic mask as he slowly moved his hand across his abdomen. “I should’ve never had this done.”

My mother just stared at him, wordless for a moment, the shock freezing her in place. I lowered my head, staring down at the floor as a wave of nausea hit me.

After a few moments, my mother finally found her voice and asked him what the doctor had said.

Ralph looked toward her, the oxygen mask shifting slightly as he spoke. “He said it’s everywhere,” he replied. “It’s all through my prostate... everything.”

The words hung in the room. We had gone into that day hoping the operation would remove the cancer. Instead, the surgeon had discovered it was far more extensive than anyone had expected.

We stayed with Ralph for a while, talking only when he felt up to it. The medication gradually began to make him drowsy. His replies became shorter, and before long his eyes drifted closed. My mother quietly reached over and squeezed his hand before we slipped out of the room, leaving him to rest.

We walked out to the parking lot in silence. The drive home was much the same. Neither of us spoke; there didn’t seem to be anything left to say. My mother had held herself together ever since we arrived at the hospital, but several minutes into the drive she suddenly pulled the car over to the side of the road. She gripped the steering wheel, and the composure she’d maintained all evening finally gave way.

She broke down. “What are we going to do?” she kept saying through her tears. “What are we going to do?”

I didn’t have an answer. After a few moments, I gently suggested that I drive. She nodded, and we switched places. I drove the rest of the way to her house, and once we arrived, her husband offered to take me back to the apartment.

My grandmother was still awake when I walked through the door. She had been sitting in her chair waiting for news and slowly rose to her feet as soon as she saw me.

“How’s Ralph?” she asked.

The words caught in my throat when I saw the hope in her eyes.

“He’s doing better,” I finally managed.

It was all I could bring myself to say. I couldn’t tell her what we had just learned.

Ralph wouldn’t have wanted me to.

Chapter Five

It would be a while before we fully understood what the surgeon had discovered during the operation.

Until then, life became entirely focused on Ralph’s recovery. Although the surgery hadn’t gone the way anyone had hoped, he was healing well physically. The doctors kept him in the hospital for nearly a week to monitor the colostomy, ensure the stoma was functioning properly, and slowly reintroduce solid foods. Before he could go home, they wanted to be certain his body was adjusting to the major changes the operation had left behind.

I visited him several times while he was in the hospital. Each visit, I was encouraged to find him out of bed. The nurses had him walking as much as possible to rebuild his strength, and Ralph did exactly what they asked. Dressed in a hospital gown, he slowly made his way along the hallway with his intravenous pole rolling beside him. He tired easily, but each day he seemed a little steadier on his feet than the one before. Watching him walk, it was easy to believe he was finally beginning to recover.

The emotional wounds, however, were another matter.

As Ralph slowly regained his strength, the formal biopsy results came back, confirming the surgeon’s worst suspicions. The cancer was an aggressive Stage IV carcinoma, and because it had already spread so extensively, surgery alone could not stop it. The operation had relieved the immediate danger of a bowel obstruction, but there was no longer any possibility of removing all of the disease.

Before Ralph was discharged, the surgeon explained that the next step would be treatment at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax as soon as he had recovered enough from the operation. Chemotherapy and radiation were both discussed, along with what each would entail. Ralph listened quietly before making up his mind. He didn’t want chemotherapy. The thought of losing his hair bothered him deeply, so he chose radiation instead. It was his decision, and we respected it.

A few days later, the doctors were satisfied that the colostomy was functioning properly and that Ralph was able to tolerate solid food. They removed his intravenous line, reviewed his discharge instructions one final time, and told him he could go home.

As we left the hospital, Ralph surprised us with a request. “I could really go for some fish and chips.”

Hearing him ask for a proper meal brought an instant smile to my mother and me. After nearly a week of hospital food, it seemed like a good sign. Instead of heading straight back to the apartment, we stopped at a local fish-and-chip shop and picked up a six-piece order to take home.

My grandmother was waiting for us when we arrived. The worry she’d carried throughout the past week seemed to melt away the moment she saw Ralph walk through the door. She welcomed him home, and immediately fussed over him, asking if he was comfortable and whether he needed anything. The apartment suddenly felt warmer than it had in days.

We spread the fish and chips across the kitchen table and shared supper together. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but after everything we’d been through, it felt special. Ralph seemed to enjoy every bite, and for a little while our conversation drifted away from hospitals, surgeons, and cancer. We talked about ordinary things instead, grateful simply to have him home again.

It didn’t take long for us to settle into a different way of living.

The hospital had sent Ralph home with boxes of colostomy supplies, instruction booklets, and a long list of follow-up appointments. Everything was new to him, and there was a learning curve none of us had expected. My mother quickly became the one who helped him through it all. She learned how to change the appliance, care for the stoma, and recognize the signs of a problem. Ralph wanted to be as independent as possible, but there were days when he simply needed an extra pair of hands, and she was always there.

For the most part, he tried not to complain. He spent much of the day in his favorite chair with the radio playing quietly in the background, resting whenever he became tired. Even simple tasks took more out of him than they once had, but he remained determined to keep moving. Every now and then he’d get up and slowly make his way around the apartment, convinced that the more he walked, the stronger he’d become.

My grandmother watched over him in the only ways she could. At eighty-five, her failing eyesight made it impossible for her to do very much physically, but she was always asking if he needed anything or whether she could make him a cup of tea. After spending the previous week worrying about whether he'd even come home, she seemed content just having him back under the same roof.

I tried to keep my own routine as normal as possible. I still went to the YMCA most days. Working out became my escape. For a couple of hours, I could leave the stress behind before returning home to the reality we were all living with.

Not long after returning home, my mother and I drove Ralph to Halifax for his first appointment at the Cancer Center.

After checking in, we took our seats in the waiting room and waited for Ralph’s name to be called. As we waited, we couldn’t help but notice the other patients around us. Some were elderly, others were closer to Ralph’s age, but what struck us most were the young children sitting quietly beside their parents. Seeing them there was heartbreaking.

When it was Ralph’s turn, we met with members of the oncology team, who reviewed his diagnosis and discussed the radiation treatments he would soon begin. They explained what he could expect, answered his questions, and outlined the weeks ahead.

As we drove home, Ralph was unusually quiet, staring out the window as the highway stretched out before us. After a long silence, he finally shook his head.

“It’s just not right,” he said softly. “Kids shouldn’t have to go through something like this.”

He rarely spoke about his own illness. Yet those children stayed with him. More than anything else we experienced that day, they were what he carried home.

Chapter Six

Not long after our visit to the Cancer Center, Ralph began his radiation treatments in Halifax.

Because my mother was still working, her husband, Doug, drove him to the Victoria General each day. Ralph had been given the option of staying in Halifax while the treatments were underway, but he wanted to come home every evening. Home was where he felt most comfortable, and he wasn’t about to spend weeks away from the apartment if he didn’t have to.

The trips soon became part of their routine. They left early each morning, spent most of the day in Halifax, and returned to Truro later that afternoon. Ralph appreciated everything Doug was doing for him, but he refused to let him absorb the cost of the travel. He insisted on paying for the gas. No matter how many times Doug told him it wasn’t necessary, Ralph wouldn’t hear of it. He had always been independent and believed that if someone was helping him, the least he could do was contribute.

The treatments had only just begun when the oncologist ordered additional scans to get a clearer baseline. What the imaging revealed wasn’t a sudden setback, but a grim confirmation of just how widespread the cancer already was when he first started.

The scans showed spots on his liver.

Until then, Ralph had held on to the belief that the cancer was confined to his prostate and lower bowels. Learning it had already reached his liver forced all of us to confront just how advanced the disease really was. Even so, Ralph never talked about giving up. He continued with the radiation treatments, believing they might help. As long as there was another step to take, he was determined to keep taking it, and the rest of us walked beside him.

As Ralph continued with his treatments, I found myself thinking more and more about the operation he had undergone the previous fall.

Something about it had never seemed quite right. I couldn’t explain why, but the questions kept returning. The cancer had now been found in his prostate, bowels, and liver. It was obvious that a disease that widespread hadn't appeared overnight.

I wasn’t a doctor, and I had no way of knowing whether an earlier diagnosis would have changed anything. Even today, I can’t say with certainty what difference it might have made. Likely not.

But one question refused to leave me: How had all of this been missed only months earlier?

I never asked Ralph about it. He tended to open up more with my mother than he did with me, and I respected that. He was the kind of man who carried a great deal quietly rather than burdening others. If there was something he wanted me to know, I trusted he’d tell me when he was ready.

It wasn’t long afterward that my mother and I found ourselves talking about those exact doubts.

During one of our phone conversations, she told me Ralph had opened up to her about the operation he’d undergone the previous fall.

“He told me the doctor never even examined him,” she said. “He just told him he had hemorrhoids and scheduled the surgery.”

I was silent, trying to process what she was telling me. Then she added something else Ralph had shared. According to him, one of the nurses had openly questioned whether the operation should even go ahead, warning the doctor he shouldn’t be operating.

The doctor had dismissed her concerns with three words: “Just watch me.”

Neither of us spoke for a long moment. Finally, my mother broke the silence.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“So do I,” I replied.

At that moment, all we had were questions. Something about Ralph’s earlier care didn’t add up, but neither of us knew what to make of it yet.

In the days that followed, I began hearing whispers at the YMCA.

The gym had always been my escape. No matter what was happening at home, I could spend a couple of hours there, work out, clear my head, and, for a little while, leave the stress behind.

Like many small towns, Truro had its share of gossip. News traveled quickly, and so did rumors. Before long, people often seemed to know—or thought they knew—more about your life than you did. Over the years, I’d heard my own name come up often enough that I learned to pay little attention. Most of it wasn’t true, and none of it was worth my time. 

At first, I treated these conversations the same way.

Then I began hearing words that made me stop.

“Doctor.”

“Murder.”

They were only fragments, spoken quietly as people passed one another or gathered between workouts. On their own, they meant very little. But I couldn’t ignore the uneasy feeling they left behind.

For the first time, the YMCA no longer felt like a refuge. Instead of leaving my worries at the door, I found myself wondering why complete strangers were suddenly whispering about something that hit far too close to home.

 Chapter Seven

 Instead of focusing on my workout, I found myself watching the room and straining to listen. The whispers I had dismissed only days earlier had become impossible to ignore.

The YMCA’s two weight rooms sat side by side, connected by an open doorway. Even with music constantly pumping through the speakers, voices carried surprisingly well between them. People rarely spoke right beside me. More often, they gathered at the far end of the room or in the adjoining weight room, assuming the music and the distance would keep their conversations private.

Most of what I overheard came while I was resting between sets. Catching my breath, I’d sit quietly with my eyes lowered, listening as fragments of conversation drifted through the doorway before voices suddenly dropped or faded away. Whatever was being discussed, it wasn’t casual. They carried a surprised, serious tone.

What bothered me most was that I hadn’t said a word to anyone at the gym. I hadn’t even told my closest friends there about Ralph’s diagnosis. Our family’s struggle was something I’d deliberately kept private.

Yet somehow, people I barely knew seemed to know far more than they should have.

My mother and I had spent countless hours talking about doctors and trying to make sense of what had happened to Ralph. But never once had either of us uttered the word murder. Hearing complete strangers mention doctors and murder in the same breath was deeply unsettling.

I tried convincing myself it was nothing more than the usual small-town gossip. Rumors had a way of taking on a life of their own, and I’d ignored them for years. But this felt different. There was something about these conversations that left me with the unmistakable feeling that I was missing a piece of a much larger puzzle.

Each time I returned to the YMCA, I heard something new.

Sometimes it was doctor. Other times it was murder. Then came fragments that were even more bewildering:

Psychopath.

FBI.

Wanted by the cops.

Most of what I overheard were snippets of conversation drifting across the doorway between the two weight rooms, disappearing into the background music before I could make full sense of them. I couldn't tell who they were talking about or why those words kept surfacing, but hearing them repeated day after day left me with the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right.

I found myself wondering whether people were simply making these stories up or repeating something they’d heard from someone else. If they were repeating them, where had they started? More importantly, how could anyone outside my family know enough to weave together rumors that seemed to brush so closely against our private lives?

While those questions continued to occupy my thoughts, life at home revolved around Ralph.

Not long afterward, I drove him to a follow-up appointment at the hospital’s Outpatients Department with the surgeon who had first discovered the cancer. The visit was routine—a check to see how he was healing from the procedure and to assess his colostomy.

As we made our way through Truro, I couldn’t stop thinking about what my mother had told me regarding the previous fall's operation. The question had been gnawing at me ever since.

“Did you ever say anything to that doctor who operated on you last year?” I asked.

Ralph looked over at me, surprised. “What do you mean?”

I told him what my mother had shared—about the nurse questioning whether the surgery should go ahead, and the doctor brushing her off.

He slowly shook his head. “No. I never said anything to him.” He paused. “Why do you want to know?”

“I was just wondering,” I said.

That was all.

That was all I let slip. I believed him. Ralph wasn’t the kind of man to confront people; he kept his thoughts close to his chest, and I had no reason to doubt him now. Besides, he was carrying more than enough as it was. The last thing I wanted to do was drop the weight of my own suspicions onto the heavy burden he was already living with every day.

When we arrived at Outpatients, we checked in and took our seats in the waiting area until Ralph’s name was called.

The surgeon greeted him warmly and asked how he’d been managing since the procedure. Most of the appointment focused on his surgical recovery—the doctor examined the colostomy, checked the incision site, and was pleased with how well everything was healing.

Then he examined the skin where Ralph had been receiving radiation.

He frowned. “They’ve burned you all to hell,” he said.

There was no anger in his voice, only genuine concern. The skin was raw and severely irritated from the daily treatments. He wrote out a prescription for a medicated cream to help ease the burns and carefully explained how to apply it.

That was the extent of the visit.

As we left the hospital, neither of us said much. Ralph had never been one to dwell on things he couldn’t change. Once the doors closed behind us, he simply accepted what the surgeon had said and prepared himself for the next round of radiation.

I admired that about him. No matter what bad news came his way, he always seemed able to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.

The next time I walked into the YMCA, I hoped with everything I had that the conversations I’d been hearing had been nothing more than a coincidence.

They weren’t.

 Chapter Eight

 By then, our family’s days revolved around Ralph’s radiation treatments.

Every weekday, Doug drove Ralph from Truro to Halifax. It was a long, taxing trip for a procedure that lasted only a matter of minutes before they turned around to make the drive back home. Day after day, they followed that exact routine, holding onto the hope that each session was bringing Ralph one step closer to beating the disease.

One evening, I asked him what the radiation was actually like.

“They have me lie naked on a table in the middle of the room,” he said, his voice completely matter-of-fact. “Then everyone leaves, and the machine starts zapping me.”

He described it as though he were talking about a routine tune-up on his old K-Car.

As the weeks dragged on, the treatments took a heavy physical toll. The skin across his pelvic area turned deep red and raw, eventually peeling like a severe sunburn. Ralph religiously applied the medicated cream the surgeon had given him, doing his best to soothe the constant burning. The long commute to Halifax drained what little energy he had left, and by the time he got home each evening, exhaustion hung over him.

Yet he never complained.

That was just Ralph. He wasn’t a man to dwell on his suffering or invite anyone to feel sorry for him. If someone asked how he was doing, he’d give a quiet smile and tell them he was fine. Whether that was true or not, he kept the reality to himself. He accepted what the doctors told him, did what was asked of him, and quietly carried on.

Life outside of his treatments continued as normally as it could, which meant I kept going to the YMCA.

The fragments I’d overheard kept gnawing at me. I’d tried to convince myself they were nothing more than a passing coincidence, but hearing those same hushed words over multiple visits changed things. Whenever I walked through the doors, I found myself listening more carefully than I ever had before.

Not because I believed any of it.

Because I needed to understand it.

Over time, you get used to the rhythm of a place like the Y and the familiar faces who fill it—the early-morning retirees, the guys who practically lived in the weight room, and the couple of local cops, like the older sergeant who usually kept to himself.

After a while, you notice when the rhythm changes.

The weight room looked the same. The equipment hadn't moved. Most of the regulars were still going through their usual routines. But mixed among the familiar faces were people I didn't recognize. Since I was only at the Y for a couple of hours each visit, I assumed they were members I'd simply never crossed paths with before.

As the weeks passed, though, I began to notice that many of the unfamiliar faces were police officers.

Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought—police officers had as much right to use the YMCA as anyone else. But after weeks of overhearing whispered fragments about doctors, murder, the FBI, and someone supposedly being wanted by the cops, their presence took on a whole new meaning. I couldn’t help wondering if there was a connection, even though I had no idea what it could possibly be.

Most worked out alone. Some moved steadily from one machine to the next, while others seemed content to do a set or two before sitting for several minutes. There was nothing unusual about any one of them. It was simply that, against the backdrop of everything I’d been hearing, I found myself watching them more closely than I normally would have.

After several visits, one officer gradually began to stand out from the rest. I recognized him from a couple of spot checks I’d gone through over the years. He was a Truro constable who, unlike most of the others, occasionally worked out with another officer from Halifax.

I didn’t know it then, but over the weeks that followed, he would become the one officer I found myself watching more than any other.

 Chapter Nine

 Five weeks after they began, Ralph’s radiation treatments came to an end.

The daily drives to Halifax were finally over. After everything he had endured—the grueling exhaustion, the raw, burning skin, and the long hours on the road—we all hoped the treatments had bought him some precious time. None of us expected the cancer to simply disappear, but we wanted to believe there was a reason he had gone through it all.

When I got home that afternoon, I knew something was wrong.

Ralph was lying on the chesterfield, tears in his eyes. My mother sat beside him, while my grandmother sat quietly in her chair across the room. No one said a word. Ralph stared into the distance, as though he were still trying to process whatever he had just been told.

“What happened?” I asked.

My mother looked up at me and gave a slight shake of her head.

I let the question go. Whatever had happened at Ralph’s follow-up appointment, this wasn’t the time to ask about it.

A few minutes later, my mother slipped into my room and quietly closed the door behind her.

She told me that the oncologist had informed Ralph the cancer was terminal. There was nothing more they could do. He'd been told to get his affairs in order and that, in the doctor’s opinion, he had about three months to live.

I sat there in silence, trying to make sense of what she’d just said. Five weeks earlier, we’d begun radiation believing it offered hope. Now that hope was gone, replaced by a brutal timeline. It felt as though the ground had shifted beneath my feet.

We said nothing about it to my grandmother.

Ralph never wanted her to know how serious his condition had become. He believed that, at her age, losing a son would be more than she could bear. He was convinced that if anything happened to him, she wouldn’t be far behind.

After my mother left my room, I walked back into the living room and sat down.

The silence was almost unbearable.

Ralph never said a word. He remained on the chesterfield for quite a while, staring quietly at the ceiling before finally getting to his feet and disappearing into his bedroom. He closed the door behind him.

My grandmother watched him go then turned to my mother. “How’s Ralph?” she asked.

My mother forced a small smile. “He’s just tired. He wants to go lie down and get some rest.”

It wasn’t entirely untrue. The treatments had left him exhausted. But it wasn’t the reason he’d gone to his room.

My grandmother accepted the answer without another question. Sitting there, knowing the truth while she remained completely unaware of it, was one of the hardest moments I can remember. My mother and I were honoring Ralph’s wishes, but that didn’t make carrying the secret any easier.

That evening, we went through the motions of supper as though it were any other day.

My grandmother had no reason to believe anything had changed. She chatted about the ordinary things families talk about around the dinner table, while Ralph picked quietly at his food. He ate very little before setting his fork down. No one commented. After five weeks of radiation treatments, it wasn't unusual for him to have no appetite, and my grandmother accepted that as the reason.

Over the next couple of days, the reality of Ralph’s diagnosis slowly began to settle in.

He didn’t talk about it very much. That wasn’t who he was. But one afternoon, he asked my mother if she and I would help look after him if he reached the point where he could no longer look after himself.

There was one thing he was certain of: He didn’t want to die in the hospital.

My mother didn’t hesitate. She told him we would take care of him at home for as long as we possibly could.

It was a promise that carried enormous weight. My mother was only fifty years old. She was still working and had no pension to fall back on. None of us knew what caring for someone in the final stages of cancer would involve. At the time, none of that seemed to matter. Ralph was family, and we were going to do everything we could to honor his wishes.

The following day, my mother called the oncologist.

She wasn’t looking for someone to blame. She simply wanted to understand. After everything Ralph had endured, she needed to know whether there had ever been any real hope.

The answer left her stunned.

The oncologist told her that from the moment he first examined Ralph, he knew the cancer was too far advanced. In his opinion, Ralph had never stood a chance of beating it.

When my mother called me afterward, I could hear the hollow disbelief in her voice.

“He said he knew from the start,” she told me.

I didn’t know what to say.

For five straight weeks, I’d watched Ralph make that grueling, exhausting trip to Halifax every single weekday, believing the treatments were giving him a fighting chance. Now I was left trying to comprehend why he had been put through all that suffering if the outcome was already written.

Was there a small chance the radiation might have slowed the disease? Were they hoping to buy him just a little more time? Or was it simply the standard protocol, administered even when everyone knew the prognosis was hopeless?

No one ever explained it to us.

Over the days that followed, Ralph quietly began putting his affairs in order.

He met with representatives at the bank to go over his accounts and investments. He made an appointment with a lawyer to update his will. They were tasks no one ever wants to face, but Ralph approached them the same way he had faced everything else since his diagnosis—with quiet, steady determination.

One meeting, however, hit him especially hard.

When he learned how much of his hard-earned savings would ultimately be lost to taxes, it upset him deeply. After working and saving for most of his life, it was agonizing to realize that so much of what he had built would never reach the people he intended it for.

One evening, the two of us were sitting together when he said something I have never forgotten.

“If I’d known this was going to happen to me,” he said quietly, “I would’ve done things differently.”

I didn’t ask him what he meant. Knowing Ralph, he probably would have shrugged and changed the subject.

But I’ve often wondered.

Maybe he wished he’d settled down, married, and started a family of his own. Maybe there were quiet dreams he’d set aside over the years, believing there would always be more time.

Or maybe he meant something else entirely.

I never asked, and now I’ll never know.

Chapter Ten

 Life settled into a different routine after Ralph’s diagnosis.

My mother continued to work, though it wouldn’t be long before that had to change. Ralph, meanwhile, went about quietly putting his affairs in order. Beyond the bank visits and updating his will, he turned his attention to the smaller details that needed settling.

One of them was his old K-Car.

It wasn’t worth much, but Ralph told Doug to sell it and keep whatever money he could get for it. After that day, Ralph never drove again.

With no daily commute and nowhere he needed to be each morning, time seemed to slow down. Ralph had officially left Domtar and spent most of his days at the apartment. Every so often, I’d take him out for a drive. He never asked to go anywhere in particular—I think he just wanted to feel the road beneath him and get out of the house for a while.

Even the short trip back up to the apartment afterward was beginning to take its toll. We lived on the top floor, and as the days went on, I noticed him stopping more frequently on the stairs, pausing on the landing to catch his breath before forcing himself to tackle the rest of the way up.

During one of our drives, Ralph asked me to take him to Prince Street. Tucked back in a small lane stood the duplex where he and my grandparents had once lived, across from a small apartment building. Aside from a few updates over the years, it looked much the same as I remembered it.

When we reached the lane, he asked me to pull over.

For several minutes, he sat in silence, staring out the window at the old house. Neither of us said a word.

Seeing the building brought back my earliest childhood memory.

I was only three years old. My mother was at work, leaving my grandmother to look after me. I remember my grandfather going upstairs to use the bathroom. A moment later, a loud bang echoed through the house. My grandmother rushed up the stairs, and the only other detail I recall was the panic in her voice, repeating over and over, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

My grandfather had died in that very duplex twenty-six years earlier.

Sitting beside Ralph in the car, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking about his father.

He never said what was on his mind.

After a few long minutes, he looked away from the house.

“Can we go?” he asked.

On another day, we drove over to look at a new show home that was featured in a local home lottery in Truro.

It was a beautiful place, freshly built and spotless. We wandered through the rooms together, walking over the hardwood floors and looking out the clean windows, talking about the layout and how nice everything looked. For a few minutes, it felt almost normal—just two people admiring a well-built house on a weekend afternoon.

At one point, we ended up in the spacious living room. Ralph stood near the center of the floor, looking around at the vaulted ceilings and sunlit windows.

He paused for a long moment then turned to me. “Maybe I should buy a ticket.”

For a brief second, the faint humor in his voice sounded just like the old Ralph. Then his expression softened into a faint, sad smile, and he slowly shook his head.

“The way I feel,” he said, “I’d probably never live to see it even if I won.”

Neither of us said anything after that. The silence settled over the living room, heavy and unbreakable, as the brief illusion of normal life faded away.

Those quiet afternoon drives with Ralph made my morning workouts at the YMCA feel increasingly surreal. Over the next few weeks, the rumors in the weight room took on a far darker tone.

It wasn’t just the strange stories about doctors, murder, or the FBI anymore. The Truro constable I’d found myself watching over the previous weeks became impossible to ignore. More than once, I overheard him talking with the Halifax officer about my uncle.

They spoke about Ralph’s cancer and about the fact that he was dying.

I couldn’t understand it. Outside of our immediate family, no one knew how serious Ralph’s condition was. We hadn’t told friends. We hadn’t told neighbors. We hadn’t even told my grandmother the truth.

So how could a Truro police constable possibly know?

I couldn’t explain it.

Maybe someone at the hospital had recognized Ralph. One of the nurses I’d seen during his appointments also went to the Y and took part in the women’s fitness classes. Had she noticed me there and mentioned something to someone? It seemed possible.

But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. When she’d seen Ralph, no one even knew he had cancer yet. She couldn’t have known what the Halifax specialists would later tell us—that his cancer was terminal and that he had only months to live.

So how had information my family had worked so hard to keep private found its way into that constable’s conversations?

It wasn’t long afterward that I overheard a conversation I will never forget.

The weight room wasn’t that big. I was always aware of who was in there. That morning, the Truro constable and the Halifax officer were standing near the pulldown station, talking with someone I had once considered a close friend. We had stopped speaking some time earlier, and though we frequently found ourselves in the same room, we always kept our distance.

I was over by the weight benches, waiting for my next set. As I sat there, I heard my former friend say something that immediately caught my attention.

“Why don’t you just bring him in and rough him up?”

The Truro constable and the Halifax officer answered in almost unison. “You can’t do that. You're not allowed to touch people.”

My former friend didn’t hesitate. “I could help you catch him.”

I watched them in the mirrors, trying to process the absurdity—and the immediate threat—of what I’d just overheard.

I couldn’t shake the feeling they were talking about me.

None of it made any sense. Bring me in for what? Rough me up over what? And what the hell did he think he could do to “help them catch me”?

When I got home after lunch, everything seemed strangely ordinary.

Ralph and my grandmother were sitting together in the living room, the radio playing softly in the background. It had become part of their daily routine—sitting side by side, talking now and then, or simply listening to the music.

But Ralph couldn’t stay there for very long anymore. Before too much time had passed, he’d slowly get to his feet and make his way to his bedroom to lie down.

After his door closed, my grandmother came over to me.

“Is Ralph all right?” she asked.

“What did he tell you?”

“He says he’s all right.”

I hesitated. “Then I’m sure he is.”

She searched my face, as though she were looking for something I wasn’t saying. “Are you sure?”

I paused again. “Yes.”

It was one of the hardest lies I ever had to tell.

That night, I sat alone in my room with the lights off, unable to sleep.

My thoughts kept drifting back to the YMCA.

Part of me wondered if I should just stop going. There was already too much weighing on me. Watching Ralph slowly slip away was devastating enough without walking into a place where rumors seemed to follow my every step.

But every time I considered staying away, I came back to the same question: What was really going on?

The things I’d overheard made no sense. The Truro constable somehow knew private details about Ralph’s condition that should have been impossible for him to know. And now, a former friend had suggested the police “bring me in and rough me up,” offering to help them “catch me.”

I couldn’t simply ignore it.

As much as I wanted to walk away from the YMCA, I knew I wouldn’t.

I needed to understand what was happening.

Chapter Eleven

Over the coming days, the rumors never let up.

They were no longer confined to the occasional whispered comment. By then, it felt as though everyone in the weight room was in on them. Every now and then, someone would glance in my direction, leaving me to wonder what they knew—or thought they knew.

Then, on one particularly busy morning at the YMCA, I overheard part of a conversation.

A female RCMP officer was standing just a few feet away from me, talking with one of the regulars, a man named Scott. He and I weren’t friends, but we’d crossed paths often enough that I knew who he was. He owned a Dalmatian I’d seen with him several times.

I have no idea how their conversation started, and I wasn’t paying attention at first. But as I rested between my set, her voice carried over the noise of the weight room, and I caught the tail end of what she was saying.

“They never got a warrant, either. That’s one charge he’s got against them right there.”

I sat there on the bench, trying to process what I’d just heard.

A warrant? A warrant for what?

I couldn’t hear Scott’s response. A moment later, the Mountie turned and headed upstairs. I never let on that I’d heard what she’d said.

Before long, the Truro constable came down into the weight room with his training partner from Halifax. As usual, they made their way over to the power cage.

Scott spotted them and walked straight over. He didn’t waste any time. The first words out of his mouth were aimed right at them:

“If what you've been saying in here isn’t true, he could sue you.”

The Truro constable’s reaction was immediate—and explosive. He didn’t just brush it off; he grew visibly agitated.

“We would laugh him out of court!” he snapped, his voice sharp. “We have a file on him two inches thick!”

As he spoke, he held his thumb and index finger apart, aggressively emphasizing the thickness of the file he claimed they had.

I watched the exchange from across the room, trying to make sense of the sudden escalation. Only moments earlier, I'd overheard the Mountie mention a warrant. Now, when Scott suggested I had grounds to sue, the Truro constable’s response was to claim the police had a file on me.

Part of me wanted to walk over and confront him right then and there. I wanted to ask what file he was talking about and why Scott believed I had grounds to sue. But I already knew how that would go. He would deny everything, tell me he was talking about someone else, and I’d walk away no closer to understanding what was really happening.

Once Scott stepped away, the constable never seemed to settle back into his workout. He paced around the power cage, muttering stuff with the Halifax officer, but never appeared able to focus on exercising. A few minutes later, he picked up his gym bag and headed for the stairs, leaving his training partner behind.

After that morning, I noticed I saw much less of the Truro constable in the basement. Whether he’d changed his workout schedule or whether it was simply coincidence, I couldn’t say. I only knew that our paths crossed far less often after that.

What stayed with me were the conversations I’d overheard that morning. The Mountie’s comment about a warrant. Scott’s warning that I could sue. The Truro constable insisting the police had a massive folder on me. None of it fit together.

A file on me? For what?

I didn’t even have a parking ticket. I’d never been arrested, never been charged with a crime. If something like that really existed, I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be inside it.

Nothing. I knew it.

It seemed Scott had touched a nerve. The constable was a police officer—someone the public expected to be honest—yet there he was in the middle of a busy gym making serious allegations about me. When Scott suggested I could sue if those stories weren’t true, he didn’t laugh it off or dismiss the comment. Instead, he became angry.

But it wasn’t the constable’s reaction that lingered in my mind the most.

It was the Mountie’s comment.

“They never got a warrant, either.”

Those words replayed over and over in my mind. If they hadn’t gotten a warrant, what exactly had they needed one for? The only explanation I could think of was our telephone.

I began to wonder if someone had been listening to our conversations.

If they had, how?

Chapter Twelve

Life didn’t slow down just because I had more questions than answers.

Ralph and I returned to the cancer clinic in Halifax for another follow-up appointment. My grandmother had stayed behind at home. She still believed he was getting better, and neither of us had the heart to tell her otherwise.

As we sat in the waiting room, I found myself looking around at the other patients. Some looked healthy enough that, if you'd passed them on the street, you’d never know they were sick. Others carried visible reminders of what cancer had taken from them. One man sitting across from us had one side of his neck noticeably swollen. He stared silently at the floor while his wife sat beside him, holding his hand.

It was impossible not to wonder what each of them was going through. Until Ralph became sick, I don’t think I’d ever realized just how many people and families were living with cancer. It seemed as though every chair in the waiting room held another story.

When Ralph’s name was called, we followed the nurse down the hall to an examination room.

The appointment didn’t take long. A nurse went through the routine questions first, checking on his pain levels, fatigue, appetite, and sleep. Ralph had already undergone blood work and a CT scan in Truro earlier that week, and the results had been sent ahead to Halifax.

When the oncologist came in, he didn’t waste time with small talk.

He explained that the cancer had continued to spread, reaching Ralph’s liver and lymph nodes. The radiation treatments had done all they could, and there was nothing more they could offer except to keep him as comfortable as possible.

Before we left, he handed Ralph a prescription for morphine.

“Hopefully you won’t need this for a while,” the doctor said. “But if the pain gets worse, I don’t want you waiting.”

Ralph thanked him, folded the prescription, and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

Before leaving Halifax, we stopped at a coffee shop to get something to eat. Ralph barely touched his food, his appetite already fading.

The drive back to Truro was a quiet one.

Ralph spent most of the trip staring out the passenger window. Occasionally, he'd shift in his seat or fold his arms, but otherwise he hardly said a word. The folded prescription remained visible in his shirt pocket.

Over the years, I’d heard Ralph say more than once that once the doctors gave you morphine, it meant the end wasn’t far away. Whether that was true or not didn’t matter. He believed it.

I didn’t know what was going through his mind, and I wasn’t sure there was anything I could say that would make the news we’d just received any easier to accept.

Back in Truro, I drove him to the pharmacy to have the prescription filled. We handed it to the pharmacist, who told us it would take a little while. Ralph stood beside me for a short time before saying he was going to wait in the car.

I stayed with him until the prescription was ready, then went back inside to pick it up.

When we finally reached the apartment, he took the stairs slowly. Halfway up, he leaned against the railing to catch his breath before making his way to the top.

Inside, my grandmother was waiting for us. “What did they say?” she asked.

Ralph gave her a faint smile. “I’m about the same,” he said. “No better. No worse.”

She nodded without saying anything else. Whether she believed him or simply wanted to, I never knew.

The radio played softly in the kitchen, as it usually did. Supper that evening was quiet. Ralph picked at his food, eating only a small amount before pushing his plate away.

Later, my mother stopped by to see how the appointment had gone. Ralph told her what the oncologist had said—that the cancer had continued to spread into his liver and lymph nodes, and that there were no more treatments to offer. Only pain relief. He showed her the bottle of morphine.

The conversation gradually turned to what came next.

None of us knew much about what to expect or what kind of help might be available. Mom said she’d start asking questions. She thought there might be a registered nurse or someone from the VON who could stop in from time to time if Ralph needed the extra help.

“How much is that going to cost?” Ralph asked.

“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I’ll find out.”

Ralph shook his head. “I don’t need anybody yet.”

No one argued with him. The conversation drifted to other things before Mom headed home for the night.

Ralph stayed in his chair for a while longer, listening to the radio with my grandmother. Eventually, he said he was tired and made his way to his bedroom.

He never closed the door.

My grandmother stayed in the living room for a while before turning in for the night. I eventually headed to my room as well.

Sometime later, I got up and went into the kitchen for a snack. The apartment was quiet. As I stood there by the counter, I heard a couple of muffled sniffles coming from Ralph’s room.

Then, after a brief silence, I heard him softly say a single word.

“Jesus.”

As long as I’d known Ralph, I’d never thought of him as a religious man. I couldn’t remember him ever talking about faith or turning to religion. Hearing that one word caught me completely off guard.

I thought about going to his room to make sure he was all right, but something stopped me. Whatever was going through his mind at that moment felt deeply personal, and I didn’t want him to know I’d overheard him.

I went back to my room, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. For the first time, I began to wonder if Ralph was carrying fears he had never shared with the rest of us.

Chapter Thirteen

Ralph’s illness consumed most of my attention, but it didn’t erase the questions that had been building in the back of my mind.

Whenever I found a quiet moment, I’d catch myself replaying everything I’d heard at the YMCA, trying to make sense of it. The stories, the rumors, the things complete strangers somehow seemed to know. None of it fit together.

At first, I could explain some of it away.

In a place like the Y, news about Ralph’s illness could easily spread. Hundreds of people passed through the building every day. Some worked at the hospital. Others knew someone who did. I’d even recognized one of the nurses from Outpatients in the gym. If people knew Ralph had cancer, there were any number of innocent explanations for that.

But that wasn’t what bothered me.

What I couldn’t explain was hearing things repeated that had only ever been said inside our apartment.

More than once, I’d heard private conversations repeated back to me almost word for word. They weren't rumors or educated guesses. They were things that had only ever been discussed during telephone calls between family members.

That was why the Mountie’s comment stayed with me.

“They never got a warrant, either.”

I didn’t know everything about the law, but I knew enough to understand that police couldn’t simply decide to intercept someone’s telephone conversations. They needed judicial authorization. A judge would have to be convinced there were legal grounds to issue a warrant.

That was what troubled me.

I had never been arrested. I’d never been charged with a crime. What grounds could anyone possibly have presented to a judge?

And if the Mountie was right—if no warrant had ever been obtained—then another question took its place.

How were they doing it?

At the time, I didn’t have an answer. I kept turning the question over in my mind, but nothing fit. The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I became, feeling as though I was missing some vital piece of the puzzle.

Then, gradually, another memory began to surface—something I’d completely forgotten about.

It had happened months earlier, before Ralph was ever diagnosed.

I remembered receiving a telephone call from an MT&T employee. He'd said they were having problems with the telephone lines and wanted to verify the name associated with our telephone number. I answered his questions, looked out the living room window, saw the MT&T van parked across the street with the lineman working from his ladder, and never gave the call another thought.

The memory lingered. The more I thought about it, the more I found myself replaying that afternoon in my mind.

I could still picture that lineman on the pole outside our apartment.

Almost without thinking, I walked over to the living room window and looked across the street at the same telephone pole where he'd been working. I couldn’t help but wonder how someone would even go about tapping a telephone line.

Everything I thought I knew came from television. Crime dramas made it look as though detectives could simply park an unmarked van nearby, clip onto a telephone line, and listen through a pair of headphones.

As I stood there staring at the pole, my gaze wandered over it.

That’s when I noticed it.

Mounted beneath the streetlight was a small gray box facing the street. I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before. It wasn’t something that caught your attention unless you were looking for it, and until that moment, I’d never had a reason to.

I couldn’t make out any details from the living room window, so I slipped on my shoes and headed outside.

Crossing the street, I stopped at the base of the pole and looked up. There was a small label on the front of the box, but it was too high to read from the ground. Whatever it was, I couldn’t tell.

It might have been nothing more than an ordinary piece of telephone equipment.

I needed to read that label.

Chapter Fourteen

I didn’t own a camera, so I had to borrow my mother’s Pentax, the same camera she’d had since the 1970s. It wasn’t exactly the kind of camera you’d use for taking a close-up photograph of something mounted high on a telephone pole, but it was the only one I could use.

There were still a few exposures left on the roll of film. With my grandmother’s eighty-sixth birthday coming up on May 29, Mom said she’d use the remaining shots to take pictures of her.

That meant I had to wait.

I took the camera outside and aimed it at the box on the pole. I focused as carefully as I could and took the picture. The distance made it difficult to tell how much detail the photograph would capture, but I hoped it would be enough to make out the label.

When I gave Mom back the camera, I pulled her aside and warned her to be careful about what she said over the telephone. I told her I had a feeling the police were listening in.

She gave me a concerned look, the way any mother would. “Why would the cops be after you?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think it might be linked to the gym.”

I had begun to wonder if someone at the YMCA had instigated all of this. Maybe one person, maybe several. Why else had so many police officers suddenly begun showing up there? And why were there so many accusations being made about me?

I kept thinking about that Truro constable who had claimed they had a file on me two inches thick. Had he been the one passing the rumors along? Had he started some of them himself? Was he acting on his own, or was someone above him directing this?

Maybe even the police chief.

I asked my mother not to say anything to Ralph. With everything he was already going through, the last thing he needed was to worry about me.

It turned out she couldn’t keep it to herself.

A few days before my grandmother’s birthday, Ralph and I went out to get her a card. On the way to the store, I found myself studying nearly every telephone pole we drove by, looking for another box like the one across from the apartment. I couldn’t find anything like it.

Ralph sat quiet beside me for a mile or two before he finally spoke up. “Your mother told me you think the cops are after you.”

His comment made me pause. For a moment, I was at a loss for words. Why were they after me?

If they hadn’t obtained a warrant, anything they might have heard over our telephone line couldn’t be used against me in court. Surely they knew that. So what was the purpose?

Was it simply to scare me? Or was there another reason?

The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. It was almost as though they wanted me to know what they were doing.

“I’m not sure what’s going on,” I said at last. “There’s been a lot of shit going around the gym that makes me believe they’re listening to our phone conversations.”

Ralph turned to me and asked much the same thing Mom had. “Why would they be after you?”

I looked out at another telephone pole as we passed it. “Dunno. But whatever they’re doing, I don’t think it’s legal.”

Ralph fell quiet after that. He lowered his head, and I could tell he was thinking.

I inwardly winced. Despite my best efforts to keep this from him, there he was, carrying the weight of it anyway.

When we reached the store, Ralph decided he didn’t feel like going inside. He stayed in the car while I went in to pick out a card for my grandmother. I found one for him, too, and then chose one for myself.

Back at the apartment, I helped Ralph up the stairs. Physical exertion seemed to be wind him more and more with each passing day.

I set the cards aside once we were inside. Like most of us, my grandmother never made much fuss over her birthday. She always remembered ours and made sure we had a card and a gift, but when it came to her own on May 29, a simple card was always enough.

Mom baked her a cake, and on her birthday, we gathered around the kitchen table with the cake set out in front of her. Mom used the remaining exposures on the Pentax, taking pictures of my grandmother as she sat there.

We each had a piece of cake, including Ralph. It was a simple celebration, but for a little while, things felt almost normal.

A couple of days later, my mother took the roll of film down to Carsand-Mosher on the Esplanade to be developed.

When the prints came back, she drove over to our apartment with them. She pulled one of the photographs out, stared at it with an expression of complete incredulity, and handed it to me.

“This must be yours,” she said.

I took the photo from her.

Before I could even look down at it, she said, “You wanted a picture of a telephone pole?”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Yup.”

Mom just shook her head. As she left my room, I studied the photo. The quality wasn’t the best. The Pentax had captured the top of the weathered pole against the bright sky, tangled in a web of black wires and cables. High up on the wood sat the gray rectangular box, tucked right into the mess, with lines running out of it and branching off into the rest of the wires.

I squinted at the dark label affixed to the front. The bold white lettering stood out from it, but the distance made it grainy and hard to read. I could just barely make out the letters AML, followed by a hyphen and a two-digit number. Looking closer, I couldn't tell for sure if it was a 48 or a 40.

I had no idea what AML meant, nor did I know what the box was actually for. But there it was—mounted right where I’d watched the MT&T lineman working the day he called our phone.

I wondered if that gray box was how the police were listening in on our calls. I didn’t have the answers yet—it would take a lot of digging and research down the road to finally understand what I was looking at. And I knew I’d have to go back to that pole later with a better camera and a longer lens to capture a clear shot of the label.

But for now, I had something concrete. The box was mounted right there on the wood, and I had it captured on film.

Chapter Fifteen

Ralph had already lived beyond the three months the oncologist had given him. By then, we had stopped trying to guess how much time he had left. We simply went on with each day and adjusted to whatever came next.

The changes came gradually. Ralph started having trouble sitting in a regular chair. The straight back left him uncomfortable, particularly as his abdomen began to swell. Mom brought an outdoor lounger to the apartment so he could adjust the recline to find a position that eased the pressure. It was light enough for him to carry onto the deck, and with summer approaching, he liked sitting out there whenever the weather was nice.

The swelling eventually became more noticeable in his feet and legs. The doctor explained that the cancer was blocking his lymph nodes, interfering with the normal drainage of fluid through his body.

Our drives became less frequent. Ralph found it harder to sit for any length of time, and slowly, the outings that had once been part of our routine stopped altogether.

Ralph had made his wishes clear. He didn’t want to go into the hospital. More than anything, he didn’t want to die there. He wanted to remain at home.

As he needed more help, Mom put in her two-week notice at work. It was no easy choice. She was only fifty, with another ten years before she could begin collecting CPP and fifteen before she would be eligible for Old Age Security. Leaving her job meant giving up her income years before she had planned to retire.

Ralph recognized the weight of her sacrifice and made sure to provide for her in his will, helping to ease the financial uncertainty that came with her decision. Even so, stepping away from her livelihood was a daunting leap.

My mother and I continued to take care of him together. There were some things he felt more comfortable having Mom handle, particularly his colostomy and the more personal aspects of his care.

A VON nurse began coming to the apartment, and Mom watched her closely, learning everything she could. She wanted to know how to care for Ralph herself and help make it possible for him to stay at home, just as he had wanted.

Once Mom left her job, she spent her days at the apartment helping care for Ralph, returning home in the evenings. As he grew more dependent on us, my grandmother gave him her bed—it was higher than his own, making it easier for him to get in and out of. We had always tried to shield her from the worst of it, but I thought giving up her bed was her quiet way of acknowledging what was happening without any of us having to say the words out loud.

She spent much of her time in her old wooden rocking chair beside him. It was an antique she’d owned for years, complete with its two-piece cushion set. She would settle in and stay for long stretches, as though being there was simply where she was meant to be.

I began noticing another change in Ralph. The skin on his face took on a yellowish tinge, and the whites of his eyes were beginning to turn as well. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or if the light in the room was playing tricks on me. But over time, it became impossible to ignore.

The doctor confirmed that Ralph was jaundiced. The cancer had spread throughout his liver, and his liver was no longer functioning the way it should. The yellowing was another visible sign of how far the illness had progressed.

Through all of it, Ralph never complained. He rarely spoke about how he felt, and the bottle of morphine remained unopened on his nightstand. I sometimes wondered if he was in pain, but if he was, he never gave us any indication of it.

The VON nurse came a couple of times a week, but most of Ralph’s care fell to Mom and me. A few of his co-workers also stopped by after work to see him. When they came, he would sit in the lounger in the living room, adjusting the back until he was comfortable. I would leave them alone and give them their space. It was good to see people from his life still coming through the door to spend time with him.

My cousin Leo came to visit as well. He and Ralph spent some time talking privately. Afterward, Leo pulled me aside and told me that Ralph had asked him to get his .22 rifle out of the bedroom closet and shoot him.

The words left me stunned. Ralph had never expressed anything close to that to Mom or me. To us, he was still the same stoic man who bore every physical humiliation without a single complaint, the man whose morphine bottle sat unopened on his nightstand. We had taken his silence for quiet resignation. Now I wondered how much pain and desperation he had been keeping to himself.

Leo was Ralph’s nephew too, but he stood outside the daily rhythm of our caregiving. Somehow, Ralph had felt able to confide in him about something he had kept from Mom and me.

I felt terrible for him. To be in so much pain that you’d ask your own nephew to end your life was a devastating place to be. But I also thought about Leo and the unbearable position Ralph had put him in—the sheer horror of the request, not to mention the legal consequences that could have changed his life forever.

I never brought it up with Ralph. I didn’t know how to ask him about something he had worked so hard to hide from us.

Later that evening, I stood in the doorway of my grandmother’s room and looked at Ralph. He was back in her bed, pillows propped behind him. The swelling made it difficult for him to lie flat, so he sat there quietly, almost motionless.

Leo’s words echoed in my head. My mind drifted to the bedroom down the hall, to the closet where the rifle was stored.

I wondered if I should go in there and hide it.

Chapter Sixteen

The next morning, I was back at the YMCA.

The gossip hadn’t lost any steam. But that’s the way it is in a small town like Truro—rumors take root quickly, and once they start, they’ll likely outlive you. The same fragments drifted through the weight room, sometimes spoken quietly, sometimes carried above the gym music. I had stopped trying to make sense of most of it, but the sheer persistence of the chatter was wearing on me.

By then, I was convinced most of the noise was being fed directly by the cops—and that it had all started right here on the gym floor. I kept thinking back to a group of troublemakers who worked out in the evenings, one of whom had a father close with the police chief. It started as pure speculation, of course, but seeing officers routinely show up at the YMCA sealed the theory in my mind. 

They weren’t there asking questions; they were the ones spreading the lies—like the local constable who always worked out alongside that Halifax cop. The pipeline was obvious. Not to mention the strange unit mounted high on the telephone pole across the street—that AML I’d snapped a photo of with Mom’s Pentax. I was convinced they were listening in. What exactly was said to instigate all of this?

That morning, though, I found it almost impossible to care about their surveillance or their games.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the .22.

After Leo told me what Ralph had asked him to do, I had walked into his bedroom, taken the rifle out of the closet, and hidden it in my own. I hadn’t told Mom. I hadn’t told Ralph. I hadn’t told anyone. It seemed like the only logical thing to do, but keeping it secret felt like taking on a piece of the burden myself.

Ralph had owned that rifle for as long as I could remember—just an old, dusty piece of metal in the back of a closet that I never thought about. Now, its presence in my room was overwhelming. Hiding the gun hadn’t hidden the desperation behind it.

We had watched Ralph grow weaker over the months, assuming his silence meant he was quietly accepting what was happening to him. Sitting there on a bench in the gym, I realized how wrong we’d been. His silence hadn’t been acceptance. It had been a wall, hiding how far he’d fallen.

I didn’t know if he was considering suicide. Leo’s story was the first time anyone had given me reason to think he might be. Until then, I had seen Ralph as someone who was enduring what was happening to him, not someone who wanted to end it.

But then I remembered something the doctor in Truro had said to him. During his last appointment, he had warned Ralph not to do something stupid. I don’t recall the circumstances that led to those words, or exactly what the doctor thought Ralph might do. I only remembered them now, and after what Leo had told me, they took on a whole new meaning.

Still, I couldn’t imagine Ralph trying anything at the apartment with his mother there. Protecting her had been important to him from the beginning. We had kept the seriousness of his illness from her because he didn’t want her to know how bad things really were. I couldn’t see him doing anything that would leave her to deal with something she was never prepared to understand.

But what does a person feel when a doctor tells him he has three months to live? I had no answer for that.

Maybe the first reaction was simply disbelief—the mind unable to absorb it all at once. Three months was such a precise number, yet it must have felt impossible to comprehend that your life had suddenly been reduced to a handful of weeks.

There might have been fear of the pain still to come, fear of dying, or fear of leaving the people you loved behind. There might have been anger or grief for the ordinary future that had suddenly disappeared.

Maybe there was hope, too.

Ralph had heard about a cancer treatment being developed in the United States that sounded promising. He had asked the doctor about it, only to be told that the drug wasn’t available here in Canada yet. I remembered that because it revealed something about Ralph I hadn’t fully understood at the time: he was still looking for something. Maybe he believed the treatment could save him, or maybe he simply needed to believe there was another possibility.

I don’t know.

People facing the end of their lives don’t move neatly from one emotion to another. Hope can exist beside fear. Acceptance can disappear the moment a new possibility presents itself. A person can be grateful for the time they have and still desperately want more.

And maybe that was where Ralph was.

I couldn’t know what was happening inside him. He didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t know how to ask. All I could see was the man in front of me—the man who rarely complained, who endured the pain and humiliation of his illness without asking much of anyone, and who was still looking for something that might give him more time.

Then there was what he had asked Leo.

I couldn’t reconcile the two.

When I got home from the YMCA, Ralph was sitting outside on the lounger, the back angled slightly down so he could rest. He had a can of Ensure in his hand—the doctor had told him he needed the nutrition, so Mom had picked up a case for him.

It was a beautiful June day—warm without being overly hot, the sun bright on the quiet deck. I reached the top of the steps, set my gym bag down by the door, and walked over to sit in a chair beside him. There was nothing unusual about it; we’d done it a hundred times before.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

Ralph spread his hands, giving a small, resigned shrug. “About as good as can be expected. How was your workout?”

“All right.”

“Stuff still going around in there?”

“Hasn’t stopped,” I said.

He just shook his head, looking out toward the yard. “Truro,” he muttered.

He took another slow drink of Ensure, and for a long time after that, neither of us said anything.

The sun warmed my face. I leaned my head back, shutting my eyes and soaking up the rays. Somewhere down the street, I could hear a lawn mower running, and a soft breeze rustling the trees. The kids who lived below us were playing in the backyard, their laughter carrying through the air.

After a while, I opened my eyes and looked over at Ralph. Resting there in the sunshine, he actually appeared peaceful. I stayed beside him, letting the afternoon pass.

Chapter Seventeen

Ralph wanted a haircut. It was a small thing, but by then, even small things had become difficult. He was in no shape to sit upright in a barber’s chair, so going down to the shop wasn’t an option.

His barber was Butch, an old-school guy who still shaved the back of your neck with a straight razor. Most of the family knew him. His shop in Bible Hill opened around six in the morning and stayed open well past supper, five days a week. He had weekends off, but when we called and explained the situation, Butch didn’t hesitate. We arranged a time for the weekend, and right on schedule, he showed up at our door.

He came inside carrying a black kit bag and walked over to where Ralph was resting in his lounger in the living room.

“How are you feeling?” Butch asked him.

Ralph raised his eyebrows and blew out a breath. “Hanging in there.”

I caught the crack in his voice as he answered.

Butch didn’t press him. He just set his bag down and began arranging his equipment beside the lounger. He took out his clippers and a barber’s cape, draping it around Ralph and securing it at his neck.

As the clippers buzzed and Ralph’s salt-and-pepper hair fell onto the cape, Butch talked easily about nothing in particular, keeping things light and familiar. Watching them from across the room, it was as if the apartment faded away for those few minutes and the atmosphere of the old barbershop took over.

When Butch finished, Ralph reached for his wallet.

Butch shook his head, putting the clippers back in his bag. “No. Put that away.”

Ralph extended the cash. “Take it, Butch.”

“Not today. I’m just glad I could help.”

Ralph tried again, but Butch held his ground, refusing to take a cent. He headed for the door, then paused and glanced back over his shoulder.

“You take care, Ralph.”

Ralph bit his lip and looked away. For a moment, his composure slipped, and I caught the raw emotion on his face.

When my grandmother asked him if he felt better with his new haircut, he just her a quick chuckle and shook his head.

“Oh, never better,” he muttered.

By then, he was having trouble sleeping through the night. His legs had started to ache, and I found myself wondering if the pain was due to the swelling, which seemed to be getting worse. The VON nurse had suggested we get him some compression socks to help ease the fluid buildup, so Mom went out and bought a few pairs.

They helped a little, but the sleepless nights continued. To give him something to pass the time, I had wheeled my TV and VHS player into my grandmother’s room so he could watch a movie or two when he couldn’t rest. Mom would stop at Truro Home Video on her way over and bring in a couple of tapes every few days, leaving them beside the bed to occupy those long, quiet hours.

Later that evening, after the apartment had settled down, I went to my room and pulled out the photograph I’d taken of the box on the utility pole across the street. My gut told me the police were somehow using it to intercept our phone calls.

I couldn’t find another device like it anywhere else in Truro, and the location bothered me most of all—mounted right on that same pole, right where the MT&T lineman had been standing on his ladder months earlier when he called our phone.

Maybe someone else would have chalked it up to coincidence, but I didn’t believe that for a second—not after everything I’d overheard down at the YMCA.

I kept wondering what the letters AML stood for and what the number after them meant. The picture quality was too grainy to be certain, and no matter how close I held the photo to the light, I couldn't make out whether the print read 40 or 48. Maybe even 43. Whatever it was, I figured it had to mean something.

The summer of 1996 wasn’t a time when you could simply type a description into a search engine and get an answer. Dial-up internet was beginning to find its way into places like Truro through small local providers, but I didn’t have a computer, and even if I had, there was no Google to search for equipment specifications.

If I wanted to find out what AML referred to, I’d have to look somewhere else.

I thought about the public library. It was right across from the YMCA, sharing the same parking lot. I hadn’t been inside since I was a kid, when I’d used my library card to borrow books. Now it seemed like the obvious place to start.

Chapter Eighteen

The next morning, after my workout, I walked across the parking lot to the library.

I found one of the library’s computer terminals and sat down in front of the screen. There was no mouse, just a keyboard and a text-based catalog that bore little resemblance to the computers I would use years later. I typed in telecommunications, then tried telephone equipment, hoping to find a trade manual or reference guide with hardware diagrams.

The terminal gave me a list of results. I wrote down a few call numbers on a slip of scrap paper and headed into the stacks.

Most of what I found was history. There were books about the development of the telephone, the early days of telecommunications, and the companies and inventions that had shaped the industry. They were interesting, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I needed something that dealt with the equipment itself.

I carried several of the heavier volumes over to one of the wooden tables near the windows. Sitting in the quiet room, surrounded by empty chairs, I flipped through the pages, trying to find an illustration, a schematic, or a photograph—anything that might match the gray box mounted on the pole across the street.

I found plenty of pictures of old telephones and early switching equipment, but nothing similar to the device in my photograph. I went back for a few more books on electronics and telephone networks, but they didn’t help either.

Nothing did.

After a while, I put the books back on the shelves. I had walked in hoping the library might offer a lead on what had been installed on the pole. Instead, I walked out into the early-afternoon sun with no answers.

When I returned home, I noticed Mom’s car in the parking lot. Ralph’s lounger was still outside on the deck where he usually rested when the weather was nice.

I went inside and found the kitchen and living room empty. Everyone was in my grandmother’s bedroom. My grandmother stood just inside the doorway, watching.

Ralph was lying in bed, pain etched across his face. He winced as Mom worked her hands over his right calf, trying to massage the tender tissue.

By then, his legs had swollen to nearly twice their normal size. Fluid was building up faster than his body could clear it, and the compression socks had helped only a little. The swelling was getting worse.

On the night table beside the bed sat a prescription bottle of morphine pills. It still appeared unopened. I remembered Ralph saying that once a doctor puts someone on morphine, their time is almost up. Was that why he refused to take it?

I stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it in. Just a few days earlier, I had been sitting outside with Ralph in the sunshine, watching the kids play in the yard. Now he was spending more and more time in bed, and Mom was trying to ease the discomfort any way she could.

She continued massaging his calf for another few moments. Ralph finally gave her a small nod.

“Okay,” he said, as if the pain had eased enough for the moment.

Mom stepped out of the bedroom, and I followed her.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“There are lumps in his legs,” she said. “I can feel them when I massage them. That’s what’s hurting him.”

“Lumps?”

Mom nodded. “There are some under his armpits too.”

That worried us. We didn’t know what the lumps were. Blood clots? Something else? We had no idea.

We called the VON, and although the nurse wasn’t scheduled to visit that day, she made a special trip to the apartment. She examined Ralph’s legs and felt the lumps herself.

Afterward, she told us that Ralph should be in the hospital. We knew he didn’t want to go, and we were still honoring his wishes.

She told us to keep his feet elevated as much as possible. He already had pillows propped behind his back because he couldn’t lie flat in bed, so we adjusted them to keep his legs raised.

She explained that with the cancer so advanced, the lymphatic system was likely being blocked, preventing the fluid from circulating properly. The swelling had become so severe that the skin and tissue were being stretched to their absolute limit. That was where much of the pain was coming from.

There wasn’t much else we could do but try and make him as comfortable as possible.

Later that night, I was asleep when I felt someone gently nudging my shoulder. I opened my eyes and found Ralph standing beside my bed, wincing. He gestured toward his leg, then motioned for me to follow him. I got out of bed and followed him to my grandmother’s room.

He lay back down, and I sat beside him. He was still wearing his compression socks. Without saying much, I began massaging his calf through the fabric.

For the next hour, I worked my hands over his leg. I could feel the lumps Mom had told me about. Everything felt hard and swollen, the skin stretched tight.

Gradually, the lumps began to smooth out beneath my fingers, or at least they felt like they did. The longer I continued, the more I understood how badly he was suffering.

Ralph had his head tipped back, grimacing. After a while, he let out a quiet breath.

“Okay,” he said softly. “That’s good.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He thanked me then settled back against the pillows.

I went back to my room and climbed into bed, but sleep remained frustratingly out of reach. I lay there staring into the darkness, unable to settle my mind. Part of me expected Ralph to return and wake me again, but he never did. I couldn’t stop worrying about what lay ahead and how much worse things were going to get.

Chapter Nineteen

Over the next week, I dedicated more time to helping Ralph with the pain in his legs. It seemed to be his right leg that bothered him most. Some days, I would massage it for a while, trying to give him whatever relief I could. There wasn’t much else I knew to do.

He began spending longer stretches in bed. Getting up took too much out of him, and there were fewer reasons for him to leave the bedroom. I noticed the skin of his face and the whites of his eyes were becoming more jaundiced. His voice, normally deep, had begun to weaken. It had taken on a slight rasp, and there was something unfamiliar about it. It didn’t sound like Ralph anymore.

There was no denying that he was on the decline. Mom began spending the nights at the apartment, staying close by in case he needed her. During the day, she would go home for a few hours to rest and take care of things there before returning. The apartment had become quieter, and increasingly, our days revolved around Ralph and what he needed.

The VON nurse’s recommendation stayed with us. We both knew she had been right. Ralph was getting to the point where we were struggling to manage his care at home, and the physical and emotional strain was beginning to take its toll on everyone. But the fundamental problem remained: Ralph was adamant that he didn’t want to go to the hospital.

When Mom and I finally sat down to talk about it, there were no easy options left on the table.

I looked at her and asked, “How are we going to convince him to go?”

She shook her head and shrugged. In a quiet voice, she said, “I don’t know.”

We couldn’t simply make the decision for him. Ralph had been explicit about what he wanted from the very beginning, and we had honored that throughout his illness. But now we were watching him suffer, and the line between respecting his wishes and prolonging his agony was beginning to blur. Forcing the issue felt like a betrayal, but doing nothing felt like abandoning him to the pain.

Eventually, Mom went into the bedroom to discuss the situation with him. She gently brought up what the VON nurse had said, trying to explain that the hospital could do more to manage his pain and the swelling than we could at home.

Ralph squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t want to go back there,” he said.

Up until then, I had never given much thought to where I would want to spend my final days. When you’re young, death is an abstract concept, something that belongs to a distant future you can’t really imagine.

But watching Ralph, surrounded by the familiar sounds of home—the kids outside, the kitchen, the people he loved moving around the apartment—I found myself wondering what I would choose if I were in his shoes. Would I want to spend those final days in a hospital, surrounded by people I didn’t know, or stay where everything was familiar?

Looking at him, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to stay home. I think I would have chosen that front bedroom, too.

When Mom stayed overnight, she would sit with Ralph and watch movies with him. It quickly became part of their routine during those long, restless hours when the pain kept him awake.

Every now and then, they’d ask if I’d heard of a decent movie to rent. I was more into books and music than movies, although I used to watch one on the weekends with a couple of friends up the street. Still, I’d tell them whatever titles I’d heard people talking about. Ralph was especially partial to comedies.

It made sense, looking back. When I was younger, I remembered him watching old sitcoms like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Maude. He loved a good laugh, just like he loved the drama of professional wrestling. Years earlier, whenever Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling came to town, he’d go down to the Truro Stadium to watch the matches, quietly cheering for guys like Killer Karl Krupp, the Cuban Assassin, “Leaping” Lanny Poffo, Lanny’s brother Randy Savage, and even Rowdy Roddy Piper, before he became famous.

In a room where everything had become so heavy, Ralph was still holding onto that same appetite for a bit of entertainment, something to take his mind off the pain.

Whenever I passed by the doorway late at night, I would see them there, bathed in the soft glow of the television. My grandmother would often sit with them, watching quietly from her rocking chair. Sometimes they talked about what they were watching; often they just sat together, letting the movie play. For an hour or two, they had something else to think about besides his illness.

But the night eventually gave way to morning, and the flickering glow of the television was replaced by the gray light filtering through the kitchen blinds. As Mom headed home to rest for a few hours, the quiet routine of the day began again.

I was standing by the washing machine, waiting for the rinse cycle to finish when my grandmother came up to me. She looked toward Ralph’s doorway, her brow furrowed in genuine concern.

“Why isn’t Ralph getting out of bed?” she whispered. “He’d feel better if he got up and moved around.”

It was killing me not to tell her. She was eighty-six years old, standing in her own home, watching her son wither away in slow motion without a single word of explanation. She deserved the truth. But it wasn’t my secret to tell, and Ralph had made us promise to guard it.

I froze for a long, heavy moment. I didn’t look at her. Instead, I stared down at the washing machine, feeling its constant vibration beneath my hands without really noticing it, trying to pull myself together.

Then I delivered the safest, most hollow lie I could muster. “He’s just not feeling well.”

My grandmother frowned. “Well,” she said, her voice rising slightly, “what’s wrong with him?”

I kept my hands planted on the machine, staring down at the dials while I scrambled for something—anything—I could tell her without giving away the truth.

“His legs are bothering him,” I said. “He just needs to rest.”

Even as the words left my mouth, I found myself wondering what would happen to my grandmother when the end finally came. That was the real reason we had kept the truth from her. Ralph had always been terrified that losing him would be too much for her to bear. At eighty-six, she was already frail, and he truly believed that the news of his death might carry her off right behind him.

She didn’t ask anything else. She just turned and walked slowly back toward the bedroom. I stood there watching her, having no idea whether she actually believed me or was simply too tired to question it. But as her small frame disappeared from view, Ralph’s fear came back to me, and a terrible thought took hold.

What if he was right? What if I was about to lose them both?

Chapter Twenty

By mid-September, the weather had turned sharply, the summer warmth giving way to cool, heavy air. Down off the Atlantic coast, Hurricane Hortense was tracking straight for us. Early on the morning of September 15, it made direct landfall at Sheet Harbor—the first hurricane to hit Nova Scotia head-on in twenty-one years.

Sheet Harbor was barely an hour and a half southeast of us. With Hortense heading our way, people across town were getting ready, bringing in lawn furniture, securing anything that could be blown around, and preparing for possible power outages and flooding. The trees were still in full foliage, which added another concern. There was plenty for the wind to grab, and everyone knew that falling branches could mean trouble for the power lines.

We were already stretched thin. Ralph was spending most of his time in bed now. He could still make the short trip down the hall to the bathroom, but even that was beginning to wind him. Mom had brought in a TV tray so he could eat in bed, saving him the effort of getting up for meals. His world was becoming smaller, little by little, as his strength continued to fade.

If we lost power, we wouldn’t be able to cook, and even a few hours without it would make things more difficult. Mom had an added worry. She lived in the countryside, where the water pump depended on electricity, so she would lose her water, too.

She wasn’t with us when the storm hit. It was just the three of us in the apartment: me, Ralph, and my grandmother.

As Hortense moved closer, the sky darkened and the wind picked up. I went out and sat under the roofed deck for a while, staying dry as I watched the storm. Thick sheets of rain cascaded down, and the trees out back, still full of leaves, whipped back and forth.

Every so often, a heavy punch would hit the building hard enough that I could feel it from where I sat, but the place was relatively new and held up well. On our side of the storm in Truro, we mostly got drenched rather than battered. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

We did lose power for a few hours. Since it happened during the day it was more an inconvenience than anything else. Without the television, the apartment fell unusually quiet, with little more than the sound of rain against the windows.

Outside town, Mom and Doug fared worse. Their power went out early and stayed off long after ours came back on. Once the worst of the rain passed, they drove into town to check on us and fill up several large plastic jugs from our taps. Without electricity for their pump, they needed the town water just to flush the toilet back home. They had a barbecue if they needed to cook, but watching Doug haul those water jugs out to the car brought home how quickly a storm could disrupt the simplest parts of everyday life.

Mom stayed behind with us at the apartment, while Doug headed back home alone to wait for their power to be restored.

We had supper that evening, though Ralph barely touched his food. He ate in bed from the TV tray Mom had brought in. Looking in on him, I noticed how gaunt he had become. His cheeks sank inward, drawing his face thin over a short few weeks. The pain in his legs never let up because of the swelling, and we took turns massaging them when it became too much for him.

The bottle of morphine still sat on the nightstand. As far as I could tell, Ralph had never opened it.

By then, Ralph had stopped watching movies. I don’t remember exactly when he lost interest, but the television no longer played in the bedroom the way it used to. The small distraction that had filled his days was gone, leaving the room trapped in a heavy, hollow quiet.

My grandmother continued to sit with him, usually in her rocking chair near the bedroom door. Every once in a while, I would catch Ralph looking over at her, wincing and slowly shaking his head. I often wondered what was going through his mind in those unspoken moments.

He had never left home. Never married. Never had a family of his own. After his father died, he stayed on with my grandmother, perhaps out of routine, or maybe because he couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone. They had spent his entire life together under the same roof. Now she sat beside his doorway, keeping a soft vigil over him, unaware of how little time they had left together.

I couldn’t help thinking about what it was like for him to look at her and know he was leaving. Was he wondering how she would manage once he was gone, or simply grieving the life they were about to lose?

Later that night, long after the rest of the apartment had settled, Mom came into my room. I was lying in bed, music playing softly, when she told me about lumps she had found on Ralph’s neck.

“Lumps?”

She nodded. “Come see.”

I got up and followed her down the hall. Ralph lay awake in the dim bedroom. I stepped to the side of his bed, trying to act casual so he wouldn’t realize I was searching for them. Looking down at the left side of his neck, I saw what Mom meant.

I hadn’t noticed anything there earlier—then again, I hadn’t really been looking for them either. But now, a series of knots stood out in a line beneath the skin, one after another.

I gave Mom a look, raising my eyebrows, then turned and walked out. She followed me into the kitchen.

“What do you think they are?” she asked, keeping her voice hushed.

“Tumors, maybe,” I said. It was the only thing that came to mind.

I knew the cancer was spreading; there was no point pretending otherwise. When he was diagnosed, the oncologist had given him three months to live, and he was now seven months into the diagnosis. He had already outlasted the timeline by four months, but looking at those lumps, my thoughts jumped straight to the worst possibility. What if the cancer had finally reached his brain?

Chapter Twenty-One

Back at the YMCA, the rumors about the police still circulated. After months of picking up bits and pieces, I wondered if I should just ask someone directly.

I had wrestled with the idea for a long time. Would they tell me? Or would they wonder why I was asking and realize I’d been listening in? I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, but I needed to know what was actually going on.

Eventually, I decided to take the chance.

I settled on a woman whose husband I had done some work for. I knew them both well enough—I’d been out to their place for the occasional party, so bringing it up wouldn’t feel entirely out of left field. The real reason I focused on her, though, was that several weeks earlier I had caught her mentioning the situation to someone else in the weight room. She knew something, and she was talking about it.

Even then, I hesitated. I kept weighing whether the answers were worth the awkwardness of asking. But if anyone was going to give me a straight answer, I figured it was her.

When I finally approached her, I tried to sound as offhand as I could manage.

“Have you heard anything about the cops saying stuff about me in here?”

She paused, looking at me with an almost total lack of expression—the kind of innocent blankness that takes deliberate effort.

“No,” she said smoothly. “I never heard anything.”

That was it. No pause to process it, no sudden curiosity.

I almost laughed. I had expected at least a follow-up question. If a friend told you the police might be saying things about them, wouldn’t your immediate instinct be to ask why? What do you think is going on? What are they saying? I got none of that. Just a clean, flat denial.

I said okay to her and went back to my workout. I never mentioned it to her again, and neither did she.

I couldn’t really blame her. The truth was, most people in town probably didn’t know the full story anyway. And even if they had picked up snippets of gossip, there was a big difference between whispering among themselves and stepping into it directly. Once the police were part of the equation, people built a wall around themselves.

I walked away from that gym floor without a single new fact, but the interaction made one thing entirely clear: whatever was going on, nobody was going to help me figure it out. I was on my own.

I drove home through town, sitting with the frustration of it all. By the time I pulled up to the apartment, though, I tried to leave it in the car. There was no sense bringing it inside with me.

Walking through the door brought me back to what really mattered. The rumors at the Y and the police showing up there were still in the back of my mind, but they seemed less important the moment I stepped inside.

The noise of the gym faded, replaced by the familiar, heavy routine of the apartment. Mom was there, moving quietly around or sitting in the living room, carrying her own silent exhaustion. Ralph was in his bed, his world shrunk down to the four walls of that room.

I opened the fridge to see what I could find for dinner. On the bottom shelf, I was surprised to find a case of Labatt Blue. I froze.

The beer felt completely out of place. It wasn’t mine, and Ralph hadn’t had a drink for as long as I could remember. I called out to Mom and asked who it belonged to.

She walked into the kitchen and told me Ralph had asked her to get Doug to pick it up for him.

“Why?” I asked.

Mom shrugged. “I don’t know.”

That dumbfounded me even more. Ralph was in no shape to drink. I closed the fridge, staring at the door for a few seconds, wondering what had prompted him to ask for it now.

Later that night, as I walked past his bedroom door, he called out to me. I stopped and stepped inside. He sat propped up against his pillows, the lamp on the night table casting a dim light. On the floor next to the bed, I noticed a small pail that hadn’t been there before. I wondered if he had been getting sick.

Before I could ask, he looked up at me.

“Go get us a beer,” he said in his strained voice. “I want to have one with you.”

I stood there, caught completely off guard. I hesitated for a moment. I knew in my gut it wasn’t a good idea—his body was far too frail for alcohol—but looking at him sitting there, I couldn’t bring myself to say no. I turned, headed back to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and pulled two bottles from the case.

When I came back, I twisted the cap off his bottle and handed it to him before sitting down. He held the cold glass in both hands, brought it to his lips, and took two small, slow mouthfuls.

Almost immediately, his body rejected it. He leaned heavily over the edge of the mattress and threw up into the pail on the floor.

The sound filled the room, sharp and terrible. As he straightened back up, his face was flushed and damp. He set the bottle down on the nightstand beside the bottle of morphine and rested his hands in his lap, trembling slightly. He didn’t look at the beer again.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Ralph just gave a small, slow shake of his head. No.

I felt so bad for him. I stayed there with him for a long time, neither of us saying much. The untouched bottle rested on the nightstand, sweating onto the wood.

I wondered why he had wanted to do this in the first place. Maybe it wasn't really about the beer. Maybe he just wanted to share something ordinary with me, something the two of us could do together when there wasn't much left that felt ordinary.

It made me think back to a story my grandmother had told me years before, when they were still living in their other house. Back then, I used to see an old case of Ten Penny sitting untouched on the cellar steps. One day I finally asked her about it, and she told me what had happened. A few nights before Ralph’s brother David was killed in a car accident in 1969, he and Ralph had been together, drinking from those squat stubby bottles with their gold metallic labels and bold red lettering. After David died, Ralph never drank another bottle from that case. He kept those remaining beers for nearly three decades, preserving them as a reminder of the last thing he and his brother had shared.

Sitting there with Ralph now, I couldn't help thinking about that old case of Ten Penny and the story behind it. Maybe that was why the Labatt Blue had mattered to him. Maybe he wasn’t looking for a drink at all. Maybe he was looking for one last ordinary moment with me.

The noise and paranoia I’d carried home from the YMCA had completely disappeared. None of it mattered in that room. There was only Ralph, sitting beside me with his untouched beer on the nightstand.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Over the next month, the shift in Ralph was undeniable. There was nothing new happening down at the YMCA—just the same stale rumors being chewed over and recycled on the gym floor. I’d stopped paying attention to any of it. I no longer expected anyone to tell me what was really going on, because the only reality that mattered anymore was happening inside our four walls.

At home, Ralph was slipping away faster. The weight loss had carved out his face, hollowed his cheeks, and stretched the skin so tight across his jaw that his lips seemed to pull back from his teeth. He had grown weaker by the day, and just getting out of bed had become increasingly difficult. Even sitting propped against his pillows was a struggle. His body would gradually slide sideways across the mattress, leaving us to reposition him.

The VON nurse suggested we call a medical supply outlet in Truro to rent a hospital bed. She recommended one with a handheld controller so Ralph could raise or lower his head and upper body himself, making it easier for him to breathe and swallow without having to rely on us every time he needed to shift position. It would also allow us to elevate his legs. By then, simply keeping him comfortable had become a job in itself.

Instead of calling, we went down to the outlet ourselves. We didn’t want to explain everything over the phone. When we got there, though, they told us there was a backlog. It would be a week or more before they could deliver a bed to the apartment. That felt like a lifetime. Still, we had no choice but to wait.

The days that followed seemed to drag by. We continued doing what we could for Ralph while we waited for the bed to arrive. Then, one night, Mom walked into my bedroom.

She stood in the doorway for a second, holding out her forearm toward me. Even in the dim light, I could see the skin raised in sharp, cold goosebumps.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Ralph says he’s seeing people at the foot of his bed,” she whispered, her voice barely carrying across the room.

I raised my eyebrows. “People?”

Mom gave me a slow nod. She looked genuinely spooked.

“An older man and a young girl,” she said. “He told me they spoke to him. They said they were coming back to get him at Halloween. That he’d suffered enough.”

I got up from my bed, walked down the short hallway, and leaned against the doorway of his room. I paused there, watching Ralph. He had his head tipped back against the pillows, staring up at the ceiling. My gaze went to the lumps in his neck.

I wondered if the cancer was in his brain. Maybe that was causing him to see people. Or maybe it was the morphine he’d just started taking.

I’ve never been a religious man. To me, religion was always just a man-made construct—something people invented to give comfort or find reasons for things we couldn’t explain. But standing in that doorway, looking at Ralph’s sunken face, Mom’s words brought back a memory from many years before.

It went back to the house on Prince Street, back when my grandmother was still living there after my grandfather had passed. Before she was ever diagnosed with the severe gallbladder problems that eventually put her in the hospital to have it removed, she would sometimes be struck by sudden, agonizing spells that left her bedridden for two or three days at a time.

She told me that during one of those spells, on a bright, sunny afternoon, she opened her eyes and saw a young man standing at the foot of her bed, directly in front of the window. He had long, straight black hair that rested on his shoulders and wore a dark suit. My grandmother looked at him and asked who he was and how he had gotten into the room, but he didn’t answer. He simply stood there in the daylight, one arm crossed over his chest, his other elbow resting on it, his hand propped beneath his chin. He smiled down at her without saying a word.

When she tried to sit up, he slowly faded away, disappearing through the sunny bedroom window until he was gone.

She always believed it was David, her son who had been killed in that car accident back in 1969. She knew it down to her bones because of the way he had stood. That exact pose, with one hand tucked beneath his chin, was how David had always stood when he was alive.

The memory stayed with me as I stood in Ralph’s doorway. I looked at him again, his head still tipped back against the pillows, his eyes closed now. I had never encountered anything myself that made me believe in spirits or angels, but for the first time, I wondered if there might be something to what my grandmother had told me all those years ago.

Mom went into the room and sat quietly beside him. I remained in the doorway for a while, trying to make sense of what was happening. Part of me still looked for a practical explanation—maybe the morphine was affecting his perception, or maybe his illness was affecting his mind in ways none of us understood.

Yet I couldn’t completely dismiss what he had told Mom, especially with that old memory fresh in my mind. Then a sudden, quiet dread began to settle in the pit of my stomach.

Halloween was less than a week away.

Chapter Twenty-Three

As the calendar turned toward the end of October, the atmosphere inside the apartment grew thick with an uneasy, unspoken anxiety. Mom and I were both on edge, watching the clock and watching Ralph, neither of us knowing what to expect. Halloween was no longer just a date on the calendar; it felt like a deadline. Ralph had been serious when he said the older man and the young girl told him they were coming back for him on that specific day. I tried to push it out of my head, searching for any rational, physical explanation to anchor myself to, but with every passing day, it became harder to convince myself. What he was describing was like nothing I’d ever dealt with, and the waiting was wearing us both down.

Then, just a couple of days before the end of the month, he saw them again.

Mom was sitting in the chair beside his bed when Ralph suddenly straightened up. The heavy, vacant look left his face, replaced by a sudden, unmistakable spark of joy. His features lit up, and he lifted a thin arm, pointing directly at the foot of his bed.

“There they are,” he said, his voice clearer than it had been in days. “There they are.”

When Mom told me this and that it had scared the shit out of her, I could understand why. I was still trying to hold on to reasonable, medical explanations, searching for some way to make sense of what Ralph was experiencing. He didn’t seem to know the two figures either, which made the whole thing even harder to understand.

The most unsettling part wasn’t that he was seeing things. It was how he reacted to them. He seemed neither frightened or confused. He looked genuinely happy, like a man looking up to see old friends standing at the foot of his bed, coming to visit him.

Yet when Mom looked at the foot of the bed, there was only empty air.

I couldn’t stop thinking about who those two figures could possibly be, if they were real at all. My grandmother had known, or at least felt, who stood in her bedroom on Prince Street. It was David, her son, identified down to the very way he rested his hand under his chin. But Ralph’s visitors were strangers to us. The older man was one thing, but the young girl pulled at my thoughts the most.

There was an old story in our family about my grandmother’s sister, Maggie, who had lost her daughter, her daughter’s husband, and their children in a terrible house fire many years earlier. One of those children had been a young girl. Could she have been one of the figures Ralph was seeing?

I wasn’t convinced. Ralph was nearing the end of his life, and I read that people sometimes experienced visions as death approached. That seemed like a reasonable explanation. But I had experienced strange things myself in the place we had lived in. It had been an older house, built in the early 1900s.

The television sometimes switched channels on its own. Lamps turned on during the night, and I heard my grandmother’s rocking chair creak as though someone were sitting in it, even when there wasn’t. I remember telling Ralph about what was happening. He laughed, as I expected him to.

Then one night, his two budgies, whose cage he covered with a towel before going to bed, suddenly went crazy. They screeched and flew around inside the cage, beating their wings against the bars. Something had obviously spooked them.

The next morning, while Ralph sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast before work, the kitchen door clicked and swung open. He told me afterward that he had felt a cold chill up his spine.

There might have been rational arguments for all of it. The house was old, and the electrical system might have had faults. A draft could have pushed the kitchen door open, even with the porch door closed. The birds might have been startled by something we couldn’t hear.

But I had wondered at the time whether there was a ghost in the house. The weird occurrences happened in November, over a period of a couple of weeks. Then they stopped, and nothing else happened until the following November.

The night before Halloween arrived with a cold, uneasy stillness. Mom barely left Ralph’s side, sitting beside his bed, and my grandmother remained in her rocking chair in the bedroom, keeping watch. None of us talked much. There was little left to say that hadn’t already been said. We were waiting, checking our watches and listening to the hours pass, wondering whether something would happen.

I didn’t sleep very well. Every small sound woke me, and I half expected to hear voices coming from Ralph’s room.

When Halloween arrived, Mom and I were all on edge. The day passed normally outside, but our world had narrowed to that single bedroom, the faint, rhythmic creak of my grandmother’s chair marking the time.

By evening, the distant sounds of neighborhood kids trick-or-treating began to filter up through the glass—muffled laughter, boots crunching on dry leaves, doors opening and closing down the block. The contrast was surreal. Outside, children were playing at ghosts and monsters for fun; inside, we were holding our breath, waiting to see whether the two figures Ralph had described would appear again.

A few trick-or-treaters came to the door that evening, mostly from elsewhere in the building. Our apartment was around the back, at the top of an exterior flight of wooden stairs, so most of the neighborhood didn’t know it was there. Each knock brought a quick jump of nerves, but it was only ghosts and goblins looking for candy.

As the night wore on, the sounds from outside gradually faded. My grandmother eventually went to bed, leaving Mom and me awake with Ralph. I kept checking the clock, waiting for something to happen. Eight became ten, then midnight. Ralph remained quiet, and the two figures never appeared.

After a while, I went to bed too, though I hardly slept.

The next morning, November 1, I walked down the hallway and checked in on Ralph. He was awake, his head turned on the pillow, and he looked right over at me.

I gave him a smile, feeling like a ton of bricks had lifted off my chest. Halloween had come and gone, and Ralph was still here. The dread that had been hanging over us seemed to ease, for now.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Saturday, November 2, began with a phone call from the medical supply store. The adjustable hospital bed we had requested for Ralph was finally available, and they told us they would deliver it by noon.

My grandmother had been sleeping in Ralph’s bed while he used hers. Before the van arrived, I went into his old room to clear out space. I unbolted the frame, lifted the mattress, and carried everything out into the living room, leaning the pieces against the wall to give the workers a clear path.

Two men arrived. They came inside first to see where the bed would go. As Mom went to show them, I decided to close the door to my grandmother’s room a little, giving Ralph some privacy.

He gestured at me and asked in a voice barely above a whisper, “Who’s that?”

“Your bed,” I told him. “They’re bringing it in.”

The men carried the bed and mattress in separately. The bed was too wide to fit through the back door flat, so they folded the wheelbase underneath and tilted the frame onto its side. Once it was in place, they showed Mom and me how the side rails worked and how the controls raised and lowered the mattress.

Once the men had gone, Mom and I went in to help Ralph move into the new bed. We helped him to his feet, but he almost immediately sat back down, wincing and struggling for breath.

“Tomorrow,” he rasped. “Do it tomorrow.”

I stood there for a long moment, watching him settle against the pillows. My heart ached. I remembered what he had told us the two figures said—that he had suffered enough. Indeed, he had. I wondered how much longer it would continue.

The new bed sat empty in the other room, assembled and silent.

I slowly left the room, wondering what to do with the afternoon. I hadn’t been to the YMCA in several days. Ralph’s revelation had made me reluctant to go, and I was getting sick of the place anyway.

I had never been in the habit of lifting weights on weekends. Years earlier, I had worked a graveyard shift in a dye house, starting at 11:15 on Friday night and finishing at seven Monday morning. The three shifts pressed together, adding up to thirty-two hours, but I was paid for forty. It was a little incentive to give up your weekends.

In the end, I did go back to the Y. Instead of heading downstairs to the basement weight room, I went to the top floor and worked out on a few of the Nautilus machines. I just needed to get out of the apartment. The past several days had been tense, with Halloween approaching and all of us waiting to see what, if anything, would happen.

Someone might wonder why I kept returning there with everything that had been happening—the serious rumors being started and spread by police, and the personal details of our lives in the apartment that somehow found their way into the talk. Maybe I was just stubborn. I had never been one to run.

Besides, weightlifting had been a big part of my life for more than ten years. I wasn’t about to give it up because of them.

When I returned home, Mom and my grandmother were sitting in the living room. The radio was turned low in the background, just enough to fill the silence.

There is a distinct atmosphere in a place when someone is slowly dying—a heavy, suffocating stillness that settles over everything. You go through the motions of living, eating, and passing the hours while watching a life fade right in front of you. It is a slow, relentless weight, and no matter how many days or weeks go by, it is something you never get used to.

I asked how Ralph was doing.

“About the same,” Mom said, shrugging.

No worse. At that point, that was good news. It felt like a small win—every minute, every day, every week felt like that for us. But I knew Ralph was suffering, and it had been hard to watch.

I had something to eat and took a shower. Afterward, as I walked toward his room, I heard the rattle of his pill bottle. He must have been taking a morphine tablet.

I didn’t speak to Ralph. I just looked in on him. He was sitting there propped up by the pillows with his eyes closed, resting. I didn’t want to disturb him.

I went back to my room, turned my own music down low, and sat there, lost in thought.

Then, shortly after suppertime, I heard my mother rush into the bathroom, followed by the sound of the toilet flushing. After a couple of trips, she passed my door again, and I stood up and pulled it open.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She stopped in the hallway. Her face was pale, her eyes scared.

“Something’s wrong with Ralph,” she said.

She explained that his colostomy bag was filling up uncontrollably. She had just emptied it and put a fresh one on before leaving the room, but by the time she walked back in, the new one was already full.

That didn’t make any sense.

“He’s not responding,” she added.

Then she told me the detail that sent a cold spike of fear straight through me: the stuff filling the bag wasn’t stool. It was a dark, black liquid.

My grandmother was standing in the hallway, confused by the sudden commotion.

“What’s wrong with Ralphie?” she kept asking, her voice laced with worry.

Mom tried to calm her and steer her back toward the living room, protecting her from seeing the worst of it while dealing with the panic and the mess all at once.

I followed Mom into the bedroom. Ralph lay against the pillows, slumped slightly to the right. His eyes were open, and his chest rose and heaved. Then the movement became shallow—nearly stopping—before the heavier rises began again.

“Ralph,” I called out.

Nothing. He didn’t respond.

There was no waiting around to see if he’d settle, no holding out hope that this was just another rough patch. Seeing him like that snapped everything into motion.

I grabbed the phone and dialed 911.

The line rang twice before the dispatcher picked up. I gave her our address and told her we had an emergency—that my uncle was unresponsive and struggling to breathe. I thought he might have been having a heart attack.

After I hung up, Mom called her husband, Doug, and told him to come right over. I could hear the frantic tone in her voice.

My grandmother came toward me, her face filled with worry. “What’s wrong with Ralphie?”

It felt like a cold hand had reached out and begun squeezing my heart. This was the moment Ralph had worried about. For months, we had hidden the truth from her at his request, hoping to spare her the knowledge that he was dying.

Now there was no way to hide it.

“We have an ambulance coming for him,” I said. It was all I could think of.

The paramedics arrived shortly after, their heavy boots loud in the apartment as they came in to assess Ralph and the layout of the place. The moment the first medic stepped up to the bed and looked at him, he turned to his partner.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” he said.

Doug showed up a few minutes behind them and hung back out of the way.

Because the bedroom doorway was too narrow to maneuver a wheeled gurney through, the medics went back outside to retrieve a soft stretcher with thick webbing handles around the edges. I don’t recall them bringing in any other equipment.

They grabbed Ralph by the legs, pulled him off the bed, and lowered him carefully onto the floor. The physical jolt seemed to rouse something inside him. For the first time, he appeared responsive. He slowly lifted a hand, placing it over his chest, and looked up at one of them.

“How are you doing, buddy?” the medic asked softly.

Ralph didn’t answer; he only stared at him.

Because he had swollen so badly and become so heavy, the two medics couldn’t lift him on their own. They asked Doug and me to assist them.

They placed him on the soft stretcher and dragged him into the hallway so we could reach the handles. As I reached down for the one near Ralph’s head, he gazed up at me. Then suddenly, he regurgitated fluid and a complete blankness washed over his eyes.

I stopped, my hands hovering over the strap. Something in me understood what had just happened. I felt, with a certainty I couldn’t explain, that Ralph had died at that moment.

“That’s normal,” one of the medics said. “That’s normal.”

I took hold of the handle, and the four of us carried Ralph down the back steps to the waiting ambulance in the parking lot.

The rear of the building sat below a small bank that rose toward the yard, where the staircase led up to our top-floor apartment. After we transferred Ralph onto the gurney, he remained outside the back of the ambulance, waiting to be pushed inside.

I walked up the slope and stood at the top, looking down at him. His eyes remained open, unblinking. One of the medics approached the foot of the bank below me.

“You did a good job, man,” he said. “You did a good job.”

I kept my gaze on Ralph. I wanted to feel something. Grief, perhaps. Relief. Anything. But I was completely numb. After all those months of watching him suffer, it was finally over.

Doug told me he would follow the ambulance to the hospital. I nodded, then slowly climbed the stairs to the apartment. Mom and my grandmother were standing together in the kitchen.

I winced inwardly the moment I looked at my grandmother. I turned to Mom and gave her a slight shake of my head. She bit down on her lip as if trying to catch herself before her face crumbled. She knew exactly what I meant.

Without really thinking, I went to the fridge and opened it. The case of beer Ralph had wanted was still sitting on the bottom shelf, with ten bottles left. I was never a drinker, but I reached in and pulled one out. I carried it to my bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and twisted off the cap.

I had taken only a few sips when the phone rang. It was my cousin Leo. While I was outside, Mom had reached out to his father—her other brother—with the news.

I informed Leo that Ralph had passed away. He asked if there was anything he could do, but I said no. We were still on the line when Doug came back from the hospital. He hadn’t been gone long.

I heard my grandmother ask him if Ralph was okay. I pulled the receiver away from my ear and listened. Doug paused.

Then, in a reluctant voice, he said, “No.”

My grandmother let out a low, anguished cry.

“Call another ambulance!” Mom yelled.

Abruptly, I ended the call with Leo and hurried into the kitchen. My grandmother had dropped to her knees, crying. Mom and I helped her to her feet.

She was deathly afraid of hospitals, but Mom’s words seemed to bring her back to herself. She wiped at her face and tried to compose herself.

Mom looked at me. “We’ll take her out to our place tonight. You come too.”

I shook my head.

“You can’t stay here tonight,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

Mom gaped at me in disbelief. For a moment, she seemed unable to understand what I was saying.

I went back to my room and got the beer. I took another sip, then returned to the kitchen.

While Mom got my grandmother into her coat and shoes, Doug told me what a doctor at the hospital had said. He claimed he could have brought Ralph back, but after looking at him, what sense would it have made?

The comment pissed me off. I mean, why would a doctor even say something like that?

Once my grandmother was ready, Mom and Doug led her out. Just before leaving, Mom turned back to me.

“How can you stay here after this?”

I didn’t have a real explanation for her. I just wanted to be alone. It probably wasn’t the right decision, but those were my feelings at the time.

After they were gone, I took another bottle of beer from the fridge. Maybe I was unconsciously trying to deepen the buzz I had begun to feel, or perhaps I was looking for something to numb me further.

I glanced through the doorway of my grandmother’s bedroom, picturing Ralph still lying there. Then I sat in the living room, the radio still playing softly. The atmosphere in the apartment felt different now—empty.

A short time later, the phone rang. It was Mom. My grandmother was wondering where I was and had started asking for me. I told Mom I couldn’t drive. She said Doug’s daughter was on her way into town from Stewiacke and would pick me up.

I couldn’t ignore my grandmother after what had happened. She had just lost Ralph. I got myself ready.

When Doug’s daughter, Debbie, arrived, she drove me out to the house. On the way, she glanced over and asked how I was doing.

I just shrugged.

“It’s all right if you want to cry,” she said softly.

“I don’t think I can,” I told her.

I found myself wondering why some women wanted men to show their emotions so much. I’d known women in my own past who were the same way. I guess I was just old school. Men of Ralph’s generation had been taught to internalize their feelings, and I had grown up in that environment. When something hit like this, everything inside me went quiet.

When I finally arrived, I found my grandmother sitting on my mother’s bed. She kept repeating the same words over and over: “Ralphie’s gone. Ralphie’s gone.”

I sat down beside her on the edge of the mattress and wrapped an arm around her. I tried to console her, telling her that everything would be all right and that Ralph was no longer suffering.

I stayed with her for a while, holding her as she cried. There wasn’t much else I could do. Mom eventually came back into the room, and I left them together.

I made my way down to the spare room in the basement and sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness. I don’t think I slept a wink that night.

Chapter Twenty-Five

We returned to the apartment the next morning. Walking through the door, the stillness hit like a wall. Everything looked exactly the same, but the place felt different without Ralph. Empty. Silent.

The blanket the paramedics had pulled from my grandmother’s bed when they dragged Ralph onto the floor still lay where it had fallen. Seeing it there brought the events of the night back all over again.

I looked into Ralph’s room at the hospital bed sitting there, completely untouched. We were supposed to try transferring him into it today because he’d been too weak when it arrived, but he never got the chance to use it.

There were practical things to take care of, though our main focus was my grandmother’s bedroom. Ralph had spent the last several months in there, and now his belongings had to be cleared out so she could have her room back. His slippers were still beside the bed, right next to the pail, a water glass, and a half-finished can of Ensure. We washed the blankets and changed the bedding. The medical supply store was closed because it was Sunday, so the hospital bed would have to remain where it was until Monday.

While we were clearing things out, Mom picked up Ralph’s morphine bottle and counted the pills that remained.

“Six,” she said, jerking her head back. “He only took six.”

I raised my eyebrows, a little shocked. After all the pain Ralph had been in, that was all he had used. I couldn’t understand why he had quietly allowed himself to suffer like that.

My grandmother seemed stoic throughout most of the day. She had already lost a husband and a son, along with relatives back in Windsor, and maybe all that past loss was what helped her hold herself together now.

Later that afternoon, her other son called. I was standing nearby when she picked up the phone, and as soon as she heard his voice, her fortitude cracked. She began to cry.

“Ralphie’s gone,” she said. “I’m going to miss him.”

Hearing her say those words ached my soul. She had just lost her son, someone she had shared so much of her life with. I had lost Ralph too. He had meant a great deal to me, especially because I had grown up without much of a father figure in my own life. There was a connection between us that I hadn’t fully appreciated until he was gone.

I wasn’t ready for how quickly the next few days came. Funeral arrangements had to be made. Mom and I went to Heritage Memorials to pick out a headstone for Ralph—a dark, polished granite stone with flower engravings in the corners and GOULD carved across a scroll in the center. Beneath his name, we selected an inscription that read, “Forever in Our Hearts.”

Mom had bought a casket for Ralph weeks earlier. She may have told me about it, but if she did, I had simply forgotten. There had been so much going on with Ralph, along with everything that had been happening at the YMCA, that much of that time had become a blur.

The next thing I knew, we were at the funeral home for the visitation the night before the service.

Ralph lay inside his casket, looking as though he were sleeping peacefully. He was dressed in the dark suit Mom had chosen from his closet.

It was a small gathering, mostly immediate family. My grandmother’s brother and his wife had driven up from Windsor and were staying at a motel for the night so they could attend the service the following day.

At one point, I watched my grandmother standing beside the casket. She just stood there, staring down at Ralph, her face blank and giving nothing away.

Everyone kept commenting on how good Ralph looked, which I found odd. Whoever had prepared him at the funeral home had done their job well. His face looked fuller, and his color seemed almost natural again. But after witnessing how much he had suffered near the end, seeing him like that felt surreal.

The next day, I was surprised by how many people had filled the room for the service. Many of the faces were unfamiliar to me. I assumed several of them were his old co-workers from Domtar, there to pay their respects.

I sat in the front row with my brother and my cousin Leo. Ralph lay in the casket right in front of us. Soft organ music filled the air, mixed with the rustle of coats and faint whispers from the crowded rows. My grandmother sat off to the left with Mom and her other son, along with the relatives from Windsor, her face still completely stoic.

Ralph had never told his mother about his terminal diagnosis, and he didn’t want Mom or me to tell her either. He had been terrified of how she would handle the news. He kept so much of his suffering to himself because he genuinely believed that knowing how sick he was might be too much for her to bear.

Yet here she was, holding up and dealing with it, at least on the surface. If nothing else, his silence had spared her months of agonizing worry.

Before the service began, the priest stepped up and closed the casket lid. Watching Ralph’s face disappear behind the polished mahogany was a heavy moment, a final, physical separation from him.

The priest moved to the pulpit. “Welcome, everyone,” he said. “We have come together to renew our hope in Christ as we remember Ralph. May the Lord be with you all.”

He spoke about God’s plan, peace, and the promise of salvation, his cadence steady and practiced. Every few minutes, the soft rustle of thin Scripture pages turning broke through the quiet. I sat there, listening to his words about a better place while staring at the casket only a few feet away. I wanted to believe him.

Near the end, he offered the final commendation:

“Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our brother, Ralph, in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, he will rise with him on the last day…”

He concluded, “In peace, let us take our brother, Ralph, to his place of rest.”

As the service drew to a close, Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes. The mournful sound reverberated through the room, and I watched my brother break down beside me.

Funeral home staff wheeled the casket out to the hearse while we made our way outside. My brother got into the car with me, my mother and grandmother went together in her car, and the rest of the family followed. We clicked on our hazard lights and joined the procession behind the hearse down to the cemetery on Robie Street.

The day was clear, with a sharp nip in the air that cut through our coats as the cars pulled into the narrow entrance road and the engines fell silent.

It had been years since I’d last set foot in the Truro cemetery. My grandfather was buried right next to David, his son, who had passed away just a year before him. Every spring, my mother and grandmother would make the trip down to place flowers on their graves. My grandfather had purchased the plots for the family back in the mid-sixties, never knowing who would eventually fill them. I imagined I would be here one day, too.

The funeral attendants opened the hearse doors and slid the casket out. My brother, Leo, and I stepped forward with them and took hold of the handles. As we carried Ralph across the cold grass, I noticed the lowering device over the open grave, covered by a frame of bright green artificial turf.

We set the casket down carefully and stepped back. The headstone for my grandfather and David stood only a few feet away. I looked at the names carved into the stone—Ralph Joseph Sr., 1895–1970, and his son, David William, 1948–1969. Ralph’s plot was in the row below theirs, while the space beside my grandfather had been saved for my grandmother.

Once the family had gathered around, we stood together in the cold, waiting for the final prayers. The priest opened his liturgical book, his breath misting in the air.

“Because God has chosen to call our brother Ralph from this life to himself, we commit his body to its resting place, for we are dust and unto dust we shall return. But the Lord will raise us up on the last day. May he rest in peace.”

He made a small sign of the cross over the casket and closed his book.

For a moment, nobody moved. The solemn silence of the circle stood in stark contrast to the steady whoosh of traffic on Robie Street, just a short distance away.

The priest approached my grandmother first, taking her hand in both of his and speaking a few quiet words. One by one, we each touched the casket before making our way back toward our cars.

Chapter Twenty-Six

 A few days after the funeral, I went back to the YMCA. It had been close to a week since I’d been there, and I hated taking layoffs. I was hoping the physical exertion would clear my head and get me back into some kind of routine.

It didn’t work. It’s hard to describe, but I felt the shift the second I walked downstairs into the weight room.

Despite never telling a single soul in that building about Ralph—not even the few people I occasionally talked to—it was obvious everyone somehow knew he had died. But of course they did. Out in the hallway, a woman I had never spoken a word to in my life walked past the open doorway and said to her companion, “I didn’t think he’d ever come back.”

I stood there listening to them disappear down the hall.

Never before had the people in that place filled me with such pure disgust. They could spread their lies and gossip about me all they wanted, but they had no right to bring my family into it. None of them knew Ralph. None of them had ever met him. Yet somehow his death had become one more thing for them to talk about.

Instead of leaving with a clear head, I walked out of there completely pissed off.

There was still work to be done at the apartment. In Ralph’s old room, I reassembled his bed and set it back up, just in case my grandmother had relatives coming up from Windsor to stay overnight.

After that, Mom and I began clearing out his closet. Sorting through his clothes—deciding what to keep, what to give away, and what to throw out—carried a painful weight, like we were actively erasing who he was. In the back, we found a brand-new pair of work boots my grandmother had given him for Christmas just two years before, still in the box with the tags on them.

As Mom started looking through his nightstand, she found his Bible with a small slip of paper sticking out like a bookmark. On it, written in Ralph’s familiar cursive, were four words:

Please forgive my sins.

She showed it to me and looked up with genuine confusion.

“What sins did Ralph ever commit?” she asked.

I simply spread my hands. None that I could think of. Was he looking for repentance in those last months of his life? For as long as I had known him, his life was as simple and quiet as it got. He went to work, came home, had supper, watched the news and a couple of shows on TV, and then went to bed. He had never troubled anyone.

But then my mind flashed back to that night months earlier when I’d gone into the kitchen for a snack. The apartment had been dead silent until I heard those muffled sniffles coming from his room, followed by that single, quiet word: “Jesus.” As long as I’d known him, he’d never talked about faith or turned to religion, and hearing it that night had caught me completely off guard.

Now, with those four words in his Bible, I wondered if that night had meant more than I had realized. Maybe Ralph had been thinking about his life and what was waiting for him. Maybe he had simply reached for something he had believed in at some point and never talked about. I had no way of knowing. Whatever was going through his mind in those last months, he had kept it mostly to himself.

We put the note back inside the Bible and continued going through Ralph’s things until the closet was empty and the room was back in order. Reassembling his bed turned out to be the right decision. Not long after, my grandmother’s brother, Gordon, came up from Windsor with his wife, Priscilla, to spend a week with her, giving them a place to stay while the family grieved together.

Meanwhile, life forced me back into my regular routine, which meant returning to the YMCA. But the atmosphere there remained tainted.

On another visit, I overheard a conversation that made my blood boil. A constable from the local department—a man who would years later become its police chief and whom I would eventually confront after discovering what the device on the telephone pole was and how it had been used to intercept our phone calls—was talking to a woman I occasionally chatted with.

Without a trace of hesitation, he told her they had considered coming over to our place the night Ralph died, but had decided not to.

Hearing him say that, I just shook my head to myself. I didn’t know the exact protocol—whether police were required to attend a home when someone died—but I was surprised at how they could talk about it so casually.

Did these people not have any shame? Had none of them wanted to come to the apartment after eavesdropping on our phone calls for much of the previous year? They were comfortable listening in on our grief, but too spineless to show up at our door.

I wondered if any of these men had ever been tested on what kind of human beings they actually were? From where I stood, it didn’t seem like they had.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The weeks following Ralph’s passing moved with a strange, dishonest speed. Yet November second lingered like a fresh wound, even as his funeral had come and gone five days later. My grandmother’s brother, Gordon, and his wife, Priscilla, had come up from Windsor to spend a week with her, trying to see for themselves if she was going to be okay after losing him. They used to come visit every summer and stay for a week or two, but having them here now was different—a quiet, necessary check-in. Once they saw she was managing as best she could, they packed up and returned home, leaving us to the quiet reality of the apartment.

Suddenly, the month bled into December, bringing Christmas closer. None of us felt like celebrating.

For the first time, the approaching holidays didn’t feel like something to look forward to—they felt like an obligation we were bracing ourselves to endure. Sitting in that apartment, I found my mind drifting back to the Christmases of my childhood.

When my brother and I were kids, money was often tight for Mom. She was raising us on her own, never receiving a dime in alimony, but somehow she always managed to make Christmas happen. There were years when she went into debt just to make sure we had presents to open. Sometimes, when she came up short, she would borrow money from Ralph. I knew none of that at the time. All I knew was that Christmas morning came, there were gifts under the tree, and Mom had somehow made it work.

In those days, family dinners weren’t what mattered. You didn’t care about who was coming over or how long the food took; you just wanted to open your presents and spend the rest of the day playing with your new toys. It’s only when you get older that you look back and realize what those gatherings actually meant.

My grandmother would pull the dining table apart and slide the extra leaf into the middle so there’d be room for everyone to squeeze in. The whole place would fill with the aroma of her cooking—the old-style dressing stuffed inside the turkey, packed with potatoes, bread crumbs, and summer savory. In the living room stood her tree, covered in old glass ornaments—round balls, teardrops, strands of garland, and silver icicles. Back then, it was just the backdrop to the  festive season.

As the years went by and I grew older, I realized that Christmas had never really been about the presents. You outgrow the toys long before you understand what the day actually costs the people making it happen. The things that stay with you aren’t what was under the tree, but those moments around the table, the sacrifices made behind the scenes, and eventually, the weight of a vacant seat when someone is gone.

Mom asked my grandmother if she wanted us to put up her tree that year, but she declined. She just didn’t feel like it. We exchanged presents, as we usually did, but the house lacked the decorations that had once been part of the season. Mom still cooked a turkey dinner and brought a plate over for us.

It wasn’t the Christmas we were used to, but we made do with what we had. With Ralph gone, even the familiar traditions had changed.

January rolled in with frigid temperatures, bringing a harsh start to year. I had rarely gone out to New Year’s Eve parties or spent the night in bars—maybe once or twice over the years, but I had never seen the allure. To me, it was just another excuse for people to get drunk.

I never made New Year’s resolutions, either. I didn’t understand the point of it all—the grand declarations about “this year I’m going to do this” or “this year I’m going to do that.” If you wanted to change something or make a move, you didn’t wait for a date on the calendar. You just did it.

My goal for the new year was simple and non-negotiable: I had to get back into the workforce, earn a living, and put that apartment behind me once and for all.

I started putting in applications at various businesses around town while keeping up my regular routine at the YMCA. The rumors were still circulating in the background, but the few people who actually came up and spoke to me were different. Either they had never heard the talk to begin with, or they had enough sense to ignore it because they knew none of it held a shred of truth.

One of those people was an older man named Percy, a regular in the weight room whose energy and enthusiasm for lifting I admired. During one of our conversations, he mentioned that his training partner, Brad, was planning to start a security company. Knowing I was looking for a job, Percy offered to pass my name along to him.

The idea appealed to me because I already had a fair amount of experience in security. Most of it involved crowd control—dealing with people who had too much to drink, breaking up arguments, and intervening in fistfights. Brad had a different concept. He planned to approach local businesses in town and offer after-hours security to protect their properties against break-ins and vandalism. I thought it was a solid idea. Truro needed something like that, and I could see the potential in what he was proposing.

But finding a job was only part of what I needed to figure out. I also had to consider my grandmother’s future.

Ralph had told my mother that he wanted me to put my share of his estate toward buying a house—something he wished he had done himself. It wouldn’t be enough to buy a place outright, but it would make a strong down payment. That was what I planned to do.

Yet I couldn’t simply move on and leave my grandmother behind. She was too old to live alone, and Ralph’s death had left her without the son who had been there with her for so many years. Whatever plans I made for myself, I had to consider what would happen to her.

There was something else about the situation that struck me. When Ralph’s father—my grandfather—died in 1970, Ralph had been thirty years old, the exact age I was now. He had stayed behind to live with his mother. Twenty-six years later, here I was at thirty, living with my grandmother after Ralph’s death, facing a situation that felt remarkably similar to the one he had faced.

While I was weighing my options, Mom and my uncle, my grandmother’s other son, went to look at a senior care home on Pictou Road to see whether it might be suitable for her. My grandmother had no interest in going, and there were no rooms available anyway.

Over the telephone, she told my mother that I needed to find a good woman and settle down. I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation, so I could only guess at what lay behind her remark. I sometimes wondered whether Ralph’s death had made her reflect on the life he might have had if he hadn’t stayed home with her after her husband died. He had spent so many years looking after her. Perhaps she had come to recognize the sacrifices he had made, and perhaps that brought with it some regret. I couldn’t know for sure.

Just days after that phone conversation, gossip began circulating at the YMCA that a female police officer was interested in going out with me. It came from my former friend, the same one who had suggested that the Truro constable “bring me in and rough me up,” offering to help them “catch” me. I immediately connected the rumor to my grandmother’s remark to my mother. The timing seemed too deliberate to be a coincidence.

The constable himself soon added to my suspicions. He no longer came to the Y as regularly as he had when all this first started, but he still showed up on occasion. He never spoke to me directly. Instead, from across the weight room, he muttered comments about the female officer by name, apparently to himself but loudly enough for me to hear. He even mentioned that she was planning to join the Y, acting as though he was angry or disappointed at the prospect.

The whole thing struck me as absurd. These people had helped spread rumors about me for over a year by this time, and now I was supposed to believe that a female police officer wanted to date me, while claiming they had a file on me two inches thick and while her own department was listening to us on the phone. How was I supposed to reconcile those two stories? Did they think I was that stupid or naive? Or was the contradiction itself part of the point, another way to provoke me and let me know they could make me the subject of whatever story they chose?

I couldn’t say for certain what they hoped to accomplish. I didn’t know whether the woman knew anything about the rumor or whether her name was being used without her involvement. What I did know was that the rumor didn’t end at the YMCA. It followed me into workplaces years later, continuing long after she had married someone else.

What was happening at the Y led me to a sobering realization. Whatever was behind the rumors and the intrusion into my private life, I couldn’t see it ending while I remained in that apartment. If I wanted to regain control of my life, I had to get out.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

 Sixty days.

Under the Criminal Code of Canada, that was the maximum duration for a judicial wiretap authorization. Once those sixty days ran out, law enforcement couldn’t simply keep listening. They had to apply for a renewal, supported by sworn evidence, and return before a judge to justify continuing the interceptions.

The research I did on those legal requirements gave immediate credence to what the female Mountie had told Scott nearly a year earlier about not having a warrant. By that point, the intrusion into our lives had been going on for fifteen or sixteen months.

If the police had been listening to our telephone conversations continuously for that long, they couldn’t simply have obtained one authorization and carried on. At sixty days, they would have had to return to a judge again and again— potentially seven times after the initial permission—to keep the eavesdropping going. I knew they didn’t have the evidence for one warrant, let alone seven.

That raised another question for me. If the police chief was responsible for what had been happening, why hadn’t anyone in the department reported him? Were they afraid of him? Or were some of them more concerned with their own careers and advancement through the ranks?

I had no way of knowing. But if the chief had deliberately allowed something unlawful to continue for that long, what responsibility did the other officers have to stop it? And if they knew and remained silent, what did that say about them?

Then I learned that the chief had gone even further. At the time, I was undergoing various medical tests, and he had actually called my doctor and asked him questions about me.

I couldn’t understand what gave him the right to do that. My medical care had nothing to do with him, yet he had taken it upon himself to contact my doctor directly. Whatever authority he believed he had, it seemed to have extended well beyond anything I could have imagined. 

By May 1997, my life had finally begun to move in a different direction. Brad was just in the early stages of trying to launch his security company. He’d managed to scrape together a small cluster of local contracts to get off the ground—a Ford dealership, a paving company, and a print shop where his father knew the owner. It wasn’t a big operation; in fact, to start, it was just the two of us.

The job was a relentless seven-night-a-week operation. Brad and I rotated. He’d work a few nights, then I’d work a few nights. We never worked the same shift together; we took turns holding down the fort while the other rested or handled daytime business.

Because we were responsible for several properties at night, we needed a way to reach each other if something happened at one of the sites. Brad put a cell phone on his business account for me, and I paid the bill. From that point on, it became our main way of communicating.

From our post at the Ford dealership, Brad had his sights set on expanding. Directly across the street sat a Pontiac dealership, and if we could secure that account, we could cover both lots simultaneously. At the time, the Pontiac dealer was paying another security firm, but the owner suspected he was getting shortchanged.

During my night shifts on the Ford lot, I saw the truth of it firsthand. About once a week, a vehicle from that competing company would turn onto the Pontiac lot, make a quick, lazy loop around the property without stopping, and disappear. That was the extent of their “patrol.”

Brad used that glaring lack of service as his pitch. It didn’t take long for him to convince the owner to drop the other company and bring us on.

That rotating schedule—a few nights on, a few nights off—became my new baseline. The long, silent hours sitting in the dark monitoring those lots gave me something I badly needed at the time: work, a routine, and a reason to focus on something outside the apartment and the constant rumors surrounding me. During the days between shifts, I still had to deal with everything that was happening at home, but at least I was beginning to build something of my own.

Most nights were quiet. There wasn’t much to deal with. Occasionally, we’d find a car door left unlocked. We’d lock it back up and make a note of it in the report. Once in a while, a strange vehicle would come through the lot, notice us in our security clothing, and leave.

That was one of the main advantages of having a presence. We didn’t necessarily have to catch someone doing something wrong. Sometimes, just being there was enough to make people think twice.

But I remember one night in particular.

I was sitting in my car, parked in a strategic spot where I had a clear vantage point across both dealership lots. In the middle of an otherwise quiet shift, a Truro police cruiser pulled in and stopped directly behind me.

Two male officers sat inside. I watched them in my rearview mirror for a while, waiting to see what they were going to do, but neither of them opened a door or made any move to approach me. They just sat there in the dark, idling.

Eventually, I decided to open my car door and step out. Brad had explicitly informed the Truro Police Department that we were going to be working those lots at night so there wouldn’t be any confusion. I couldn’t help but wonder if the message had simply never been passed along.

The driver’s window was down. As I walked up to the door, the crackle of a female dispatcher’s voice came clearly over the radio:

“He’s our boy,” she said. “What has he done?”

The officer in the passenger seat let out a heavy breath, like a guy who had just been caught red-handed. The driver looked stunned for a fraction of a second, his composure slipping before he quickly covered it with a smirk. He looked up at me.

“Oh, are you working security?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just been running my plate.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How late?”

“Until four in the morning.”

Right at that moment, the female dispatcher’s voice started coming across the radio again. Without missing a beat, the driver reached over and promptly turned the volume knob all the way down, cutting her off mid-sentence so whatever she said next wouldn’t be heard.

An awkward silence followed, as though the driver didn’t know what else to say. I made my way back to my car and climbed inside. From the corner of the rearview mirror, I watched the two officers talking to each other for a couple of moments. Then they drove off.

I shook my head as I remembered the dispatcher’s words.

“He’s our boy. What has he done?”

That question had plagued me for nearly a year and a half.

What exactly had I done?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The summer of '97 passed without too much fanfare. Night after night, the routine remained the same: sitting in the dark monitoring the car lots or keeping watch nearby. Brad managed to pick up a few more contracts for the security company, including a billiards club just down the street from the Ford dealership. None of these was a major contract, but every little bit helped keep the business going.

By early September, as the summer heat began to fade, family matters came back into focus.

Ralph’s will was still making its way through the legal process, an ordeal that wouldn’t be finalized until November, nearly a year after his death. As things moved toward a conclusion, Mom brought his five nephews together at her place to explain how his inheritance would be divided among us.

We gathered in her living room—me, my brother, our cousin Leo, and David’s two sons, Johnny and Joey. Johnny was born in the same month and year as me, and Joey was just a year younger. Before David was killed in 1969, my grandmother used to babysit the three of us together.

I had no memory of those days. I was only two and a half when David died, too young to remember Johnny and Joey. My earliest memory came a year later, when my grandfather dropped dead on the bathroom floor.

Sitting in Mom’s living room as adults, I was seeing Johnny and Joey for the first time in all those years.

A friend of mine and Percy’s had recently started working for a real estate firm in Truro, so I began looking at houses with him. I wasn’t looking for anything extravagant, just a modest bungalow outside the town limits.

After nearly two years of unlawful surveillance at the apartment, with no sign of it letting up, I couldn’t trust that the police would stop if I bought a house in Truro. How could I be sure they wouldn’t try the same thing all over again? Moving outside their jurisdiction seemed the best way to put some distance between myself and what had been happening.

I also had something specific in mind for the layout: a room where I could set up a few pieces of gym equipment and train on my own. It didn’t have to be finished. Even a space in the basement would do.

I wasn’t just planning to leave the apartment. I intended to leave the YMCA as well and put the building, the people, and the rumors behind me once and for all.

Over the next few weeks, I looked at roughly twelve to fifteen houses. I planned to use a substantial portion of the inheritance I expected to receive in November as a down payment. That would reduce the amount I needed to borrow, lower my monthly payments, and help me qualify for a mortgage.

My grandmother’s needs became another major factor. At eighty-seven now, her mobility was limited, and I refused to put her in a place where she would have to manage stairs. That made a single-level bungalow non-negotiable.

Some of the houses required more work than I was willing to take on. I remember one in particular that was a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, with faded shag carpeting and saloon-style swing doors leading into the living room. The carpet had a lingering smell that meant it would have to be torn out. I passed on the place without much thought. Apart from the repairs it needed, there wasn’t enough room for the weight room I wanted.

Eventually, we pulled up to a bungalow outside town that stood out from the others.

The house was in good condition and needed no immediate repairs. But what interested me most was the basement. Most of it was finished, except for a back room the owners used as a workshop. It had a heavy wooden worktable fastened to the wall studs and a makeshift closet built into one corner. I stood in the doorway and considered what I could do with the space. If I removed the workbench and tore down the closet, there would be enough room to put some gym equipment.

Beside the workshop was a rec room with a pellet stove in the corner, keeping the space warm and comfortable.

The house met everything on my list: a location outside Truro police jurisdiction, single-level living for my grandmother, move-in ready condition, and the space for my own gym.

The only problem was the price. Even my agent thought it was out of my reach.

Before I made an offer, I needed to know whether I could secure a mortgage. My agent put me in touch with a broker he knew at another bank. I went in to meet with her, but my employment situation presented a potential problem. I had been working for Brad’s security company for only six months, and I wasn’t sure how the bank would view such a short employment history.

The broker contacted Brad directly, and he put in a good word for my work ethic and the reliability of my income. But the real turning point was the inheritance.

I explained that a substantial portion of my uncle’s estate would go toward the down payment, covering roughly half the purchase price of the house. With that much equity going down up front, the bank had very little risk to worry about. The mortgage was approved, clearing the last major obstacle before I could make an offer.

Still, I decided not to rush into buying the bungalow. With my financing in place, I had the freedom to take my time, and I wanted to see if a less expensive house might come onto the market first. I waited to see what else became available before making a decision.

Before long, Halloween rolled around, and the date held a particular significance for me that year. It was the anniversary of the night Ralph had said an older man and a young girl standing at the foot of his bed would come for him. They didn’t take him that night, but two days later, on November 2, he passed away. I hadn’t forgotten that story.

Halloween could be a troublesome night in Truro. Egging, pranks and vandalism were always a concern, particularly around businesses and car lots where vehicles could become targets. Brad and I were prepared for trouble, expecting that we might have to deal with damaged property or other mischief.

But the night turned out to be remarkably uneventful.

A Truro police SUV eventually pulled into the lot and stopped beside me. I recognized the sergeant behind the wheel. He used to frequent the YMCA, and I would see him jogging around town from time to time. At the gym, he never bothered anyone. He did his workout and left. I didn’t recall seeing him very often in the downstairs weight room, if at all.

Unlike the constable who trained with the Halifax officer, the sergeant seemed to mind his own business.

He lowered his window and asked if there had been any trouble. I shook my head and told him it was pretty quiet.

“Pretty quiet around town, too,” he said.

After a brief pause, I caught a fleeting expression of sympathy on his face out of the corner of my eye. I wondered if he felt sorry for me, or even a bit guilty about what was going on . He worked for the department and obviously knew what was going on.

He wished me a good night, rolled up his window, and drove off. I watched the SUV disappear down Robie Street, wondering what he had been thinking. Had he recognized the injustice of what was happening? If so, why hadn’t he or anyone else done anything to stop it? I had been asking myself that question for a long time, and I still had no answer.