Split

My mother carried a secret that sent her searching for another kind of life

- Leah McLaren

On Good Friday, 1982, the year I turned seven, my grandfather died of a stroke and my mother quit ironing. At the time, these two events seemed unrelated, but in retrospect they were a two-step catalyst that culminated in the divorce of my parents, Cecily Ross and Jim McLaren. We lived in Cobourg, Ont., a small town on the north shore of the dinkiest Great Lake. A town with a golf club and a yacht club that got boarded up in winter, one Baskin-Robbins, two Chinese restaurants, a sub shop that doubled as a video arcade and a pub called Scotty's that served haggis all year round. It's still in business.

I never really knew my grandfather, not the one my parents mourned, but we hung out a lot. In my memory, he was a benignly worrisome presence, a slow-moving lantern jaw in a silk paisley ascot. He smoked a pipe and took daily "walks" round and round the main floor of my grandparents' house, whistling tunelessly on a contented stroll to nowhere, a grown-up man who was not allowed outdoors for fear he might get lost. He smelled of leather, cherry tobacco and woodsmoke. The single clear memory I have of him is of crawling into the warmth of his sunken corduroy lap with a Time Life book-it had a purple jellyfish on the cover-and asking him to read it. He looked at me with what I took to be tenderness, though it may have been confusion, and began patting down his pockets for spectacles. My grandmother appeared and shooed me away gently, whispering about aluminum pots and the holes they had put in his brain.