My dad drove my mother back to the psych ward, and I sat in the back seat of the station wagon. For months, my mom was convinced my father would poison her, and for a while, the meds they gave her to take home seemed to work. Then she started accusing him again.

Now she was heading back to the ninth floor of the hospital. It would all be familiar: the pills and overcooked food in plastic trays, nurses flicking the IV bag next to her bed, changing it up when the liquid was gone, and drawing her blood.

My mother walked to the door like she had before her breakdown, as she called it — long strides, steady gaze, head tall. I walked behind her. The smell of disinfectant and cafeteria food caught at the back of my throat, and I knew it would stick to my skin.

Over the next few weeks, my dad drove me to see her on his day off from driving a city bus. Sometimes he waited in the station wagon in the parking lot because he said she didn’t want him to come up to the ward. Other times he paced the hallway and I sat next to my mom’s bed. Eyelids heavy and mouth dry from the medication, she went on about my father and how it was his fault she was in hospital again. And she talked about the poison.

One night, close to 11:00, the phone rang at our place. My dad probably on his way home from work. It kept ringing, so I went to the kitchen and answered. It was a nurse from the hospital, her voice strained. Had my mother called or come home? When was the last time I’d talked to her?

They’d let her go for a walk and she hadn’t returned. My mom had tripped up the system and fled with the one set of clothes she had, her canvas tote bag, and puffy burgundy jacket.

I wouldn’t have to sit through more visits in my mother’s hospital room, nurses coming in and out, my mom laying out her fears for me. There’d be no more pretending that if she got to eat with my dad and me in the cafeteria it was something to celebrate. And I wouldn’t have to leave her before visiting hours ended so nurses wouldn’t glare at me.

Had my mom fled to the prairies like she told me she would to take pictures of grain elevators and paint them as watercolors? Had she made her way downtown and boarded a Greyhound?

I left a note for my dad on the counter to call the hospital. When he got home, I heard him talking to a nurse.

“No clue,” he said. “She didn’t tell me anything.”

He listened for a while, then didn’t hold back.

“When you can tell me what you’re doing to find her, call me,” he said and put down the phone. Then he got out his scotch bottle.

We lived in a narrow old house in a lane, and a couple of coyotes started coming around. The animals were thin, had arched backs, and wispy tails. Cats went missing on the block, and neighbors put up signs on light posts. What would they say if I made one about my mom?

My dad didn’t mention my mother. He pulled extra shifts. On his next day off, he started packing her things. His eyebrows were stark and he pressed his lips firmly together. He began with her paintings and carried them to the basement. For years, she’d sat in the spare room at the end of the hall making her art. My dad lifted frames from the walls and pulled out hooks and nails. My mother’s paintings disappeared. Watercolors of Terra cotta pots half submerged under snow on our back porch. Others of geraniums, snapdragons, irises, lilies, and snow peas. Once I asked if she had a favorite flower. She laughed. It was an impossible question.

Inside my mom’s art room, packing tape screeched as he sealed cardboard boxes. I suspected he’d take her things to the Salvation Army. Dozens of metallic paint tubes, graphite pencils, and sea sponges she’d used to soak up water on paper. Kneaded erasers, sable brushes, blocks of watercolor paper, and pallets with dried paint. Her glass bottle of pale yellow linseed oil and red and white turpentine canister. All of it would be gone.

My dad took their marriage certificate off the wall of the bedroom they’d shared. It was a white laminated page with red floral trim from the city of Vancouver issued in 1967. My father had hung it there when we moved in.

He lined up my mom’s spice bottles on the kitchen counter. Her basil and cumin, cardamon and cinnamon, oregano and paprika. With his forearm, he swept them into the garbage. We’d continue to live on frozen food.

He leaned against the kitchen counter, clutched his neck with his palm, and closed his eyes. I made out lines in his brow. For so long, he’d tried to help my mother, taking her to hospital, reminding her to take her pills when she came home, and not reacting when she said he was plotting her murder. Now he was done. He moved to the living room, packed her records in a box and carried them to the basement. Then he carted her antique Singer sewing machine away.

I’d considered if my mother left, he and I might bond. If it was just the two of us, and he didn’t have to think about my mom, he could make time for me. Maybe he’d take me to rent a movie or go bowling. We might go camping. But she’d been gone a short while, and I knew that wouldn’t happen.

He called his friend Brian. Like my father, he’d worked as a bus driver, until he lost his leg in a car crash taking his family to Florida. My dad sat on his bed with the door shut. I listened from down the hall.

“It was bad enough when she called me a murderer and brainwashed my kid,” my dad said. “Now this. Aziel’s following me around the house. I don’t know what to tell him.”

The next day after school, while my father was working, I went to the basement. I found a screwdriver in his toolbox and slid it across the tape that ran over a box with my mom’s clothes inside. I peeled back the cardboard flaps. A leather purse she’d used when I was younger lay on top of the clothing. Beneath it were jumpsuits and seersucker dresses she’d sewed before she got sick.

I drove my hands into the box, its edge digging into my gut. I felt her turtlenecks, jeans, and sweater vests. Then I tilted the box toward me and went deeper.

My fingers touched a smooth garment among folds of denim and wool. I seized an edge of the cloth with my finger and thumb and pulled it out. It was my mother’s nightgown with purple and orange flowers. That night, I pulled off my pyjamas. Then I put my head through the nightgown’s scalloped collar and brought the material down my chest and belly to my ankles. It was soft on my skin, but I felt even more disconnected from my mom.

My father showed up in my bedroom doorway and stared at me. Even if he’d come in, sat on my bed, and tried talking to me, I’d never have told him I’d salvaged the nightgown because I was alone. That I hated him for what he’d done with my mom’s things. How I was tortured and missed him. That it hurt how he dished everything to Brian and looked at me like I was trash.

I’d never say how it felt when he jogged ahead of me so he wouldn’t have to talk to me. What it did to me when he walked into the lake in summer, and I stepped toward him, and he straight-armed me so I’d back off.

I was too proud to tell him that wherever I was, I looked for his red and white bus, hoping to catch sight of him at the wheel. How instead of ignoring me when I tried helping him shovel the driveway and as he dragged the vacuum around, I wished he’d say something to me.

I’d never admit that the things my mother told me made me second guess him. That I felt guilty for thinking he could possibly poison her. And I wouldn’t say how it felt that my mom had left and he was a stranger.

*****

Even if my mom had died, nothing would have changed. My dad wouldn’t have said her name. We wouldn’t have sat shiva. And there wouldn’t have been a funeral, not because she wouldn’t have wanted one, but because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. Gloglowskis didn’t grieve like that.

When my zaide died, there wasn’t a service. He’d put in his will that he didn’t want my grandmother or dad holding anything like that. But my grandma came to stay with us for a couple of weeks, and she mourned in her own way by barely eating.

We met her at the airport, and she plodded into the arrival hall, holding a cane, face gaunt. In her crinkly black leather shoes with thick soles for folks with arthritis, my bubbe didn’t quite come to my shoulders.

My mom was in hospital, and most days, my father drove his bus. My grandmother made komishbroit, rolling dough with crushed almonds, slicing it into strips to make cookies. She baked salmon she bought at the docks near Vancouver and brought in a cooler on the plane. The house filled with the smell of knish, spinach and garlic filo pastry, kugel, and matzah balls. As I ate, she rested her head in her palm. The most she had were a few spoons of broth and used a fork to stir the bubbles from glasses of ginger ale.

My dad ramped up the house cleaning, getting every grease spot, dusting of flour, and pastry flake. He swept and mopped when he got home at night and vacuumed in the early morning before his shifts. My grandma shlepped in the kitchen and my father kept polishing the counters and flours, and I knew by the way he tracked each crumb she dropped that he despised her. How could he hate her while she did everything for him even as she was grieving? Meanwhile, my mom had abandoned me, and I’d have done anything to find her.

I sat on the couch with my grandmother. The TV was on. She rubbed her swollen, arthritic knuckles.

“Did my dad ever ask?” I said. I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me, because she kept her eyes on the TV, and I’d half swallowed my words.

I was thinking about the when she was a girl in Germany. How her father, a cantor, was chained and beaten by the SS. How her brothers were sent to camps and her mother was shot standing next to her, the bullet lodging in my grandma’s forearm. My mom had told me these fragments that my bubbe had shared with her, and I knew my dad had never been interested.

“I didn’t want him to suffer,” she said.

“But you did,” I said. “In the war.”

“Everyone talks about the war,” my grandma said. “But it started a long time before.”

“What?” I said.

“All of the bad ssings. Because we were Jews.”

******

I met my friend Khush at the school. We scaled the windows and he pulled me over the ledge onto the roof. My mom had been gone a couple of weeks. I hadn’t told Khush. After worrying so long that she’d leave, I was figuring out how it felt that she had. Like my grandmother in her grief, I tried starving myself, but couldn’t bear the hunger that long.

Khush said to make him faint first. I put my hand around his neck. His Adam’s apple was a walnut pressing against my palm. He told me to squeeze. His eyes were deep brown, and there were dark swoops beneath them. A vein in his neck quivered and his knees buckled. His body spasmed, and his blue and orange ski jacket rubbed against snow that had fallen on the roof. His toque came off and his bangs swept over his face. The shaking didn’t stop.

I needed him to get up and called his name.

After half a minute, he came to on the roof. Khush drew his hand over his face, wiping away sweat and melted snow. He didn’t stand up right away, just opened and closed his eyes a bunch of times slowly.

Then it was my turn. I went down fast, Khush cutting off oxygen and blood to my brain. When he tugged my hand, stirring me from my unconscious state, I got onto my feet, still dizzy. The first thought I had was of my mom, overmedicated, hand on the railing as she inched down the hospital hallway. Then I remembered, she’d vanished. I dreaded the thought of going home. My dad would likely still be at work.

Khush took a Rothman he stole from his mom from his pocket, ran his Zippo on his pant leg, and lit it. He took a long drag and passed it to me.

“They found my dad,” Khush said.

For years, he said his father had moved to the west coast, and I wasn’t sure what to think. Then he said his dad was hit by a car crossing the street, not on the other side of the country, but in Ottawa, not far from his mom’s place. Khush said he learned his father was living there the whole time. His mom got the call from the ER. His dad had kept her number in his wallet.

I passed the smoke back to Khush.

He said he went to the hospital. His dad was on life support. They’d shaved his head and cut his skull to reduce swelling from the accident and there wasn’t much time.

I hated his father for disappearing from Khush’s life when he was younger, and wished my friend could have heard his dad say his name one last time.

I moved to him and rested my hand on his shoulder. If I’d been him, I wouldn’t have known how to feel. Khush stayed quiet and scanned low-lying clouds. The cold numbed my legs.

“How long do you want to stay up here?” I said.

“I told my dad,” he said.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“He did his best.”

Where did Khush get that kind of grace?

“My mom’s gone,” I said. There was never going to be a good time to tell him.

“Where?”

“To the prairies, I think.”

He let one eye close and the other locked on me.

Then he said, “Some people need space.”