What? You didn’t know I had a sister?
Yes, Sally, a half-sister really. She was fifteen
years older than me, my mother’s daughter from
a turbulent first marriage. I saw her now and
again when I was growing up, but probably the
difference in our ages, a generation, and the fact
that she never lived with us, made her seem more
like a sympathetic aunt. She swatted me once,
just an impatient cuff on the back of the head,
when I was eight or nine—I’d knocked over a
flower jar in her kitchen—and I thought, You
can’t do that, you’re not my mother. And yet it
wasn’t quite like a quarrel with my brother, not
on the same level, so to speak, as with a peer.
How you feel about someone when you’re very
young, their stature in the world compared with
yours, sometimes never changes. Which made
certain moments between Sally and me confusing.
Especially later on.
By the time I was conscious enough to
wonder why things were the way they were, she
was already married. How such a lovely creature
(long face, dark hair) ended up with a blockhead
like Bruce Sanders, I’ll never understand. But I
suppose that’s the nature of people, even family:
you never really get to know anyone that well,
even when they try to explain themselves.
Anyway. For sixteen years, she endured
sulks, punishing silences and God knows what
kind of lonely moments, until one night she
didn’t; and the next day, Bruce Sanders woke up
in the guest room of his own house, the evening’s
final words thudding between his small
ears: “I’m leaving you.”
It may have taken her a while to get there,
but when she did, my goodness, she acted with
the efficiency of a guillotine. The straightest
line between two points. I was only a teenager,
but it felt as though I had just had my first
glimpse into affairs of the heart: when a woman’s
finished with you, she ’s really finished.
With Chloe, her twelve-year-old daughter,
in tow (her son stayed at home with Bruce),
she took a studio apartment in San Miguel de
Allende, a sun-baked town in the mountains
north of Mexico City, and resumed her career
as a painter—something for which she was
gifted but the execution of which had been
discouraged by a husband who thought the
whole business “unrealistic.” A few weeks
later, Sally attended an afternoon cocktail
party at a house on the Callejón de los
Muertos, tripped on the carpet, smacked her
head against the fireplace and broke her neck.
Returning to Toronto on a gurney, she spent
six months in rehab and the rest of her life
in a wheelchair.
Nice deal, eh? But she was a hearty soul,
and even with the wheelchair, the crutches,
the falling down here and there, she raised her
preteen daughter all but single-handedly. Her
ex-husband, Bruce, in a state of ill-disguised
pleasure at the hand life had dealt her, said,
“Move back in with me,” the implication being,
Now that you’re not in the game anymore, now
that no one else will take you, you might as well
come back.
But no handouts, thank you. Sally and
Chloe found a way to live and be happy. As
for me, I wasn’t around much, to say the least.
Sometimes I’d go up to her apartment in the
northern part of the city and drink too much
and get her to drink too much and then leave
for another year or two. The truth is, I was so
distracted with the failure of my own life that
it felt as though I didn’t have the time to go out
of my way, even momentarily, for anyone else.
Although God knows what I was doing instead.
Still, it makes me queasy with regret, even after
all these years, to think about it. Because I loved
her, I really did. But I was under the assumption
that she would always be there, this not-quite-mother,
not-quite-sister, that there was no need
to tend to it, to look after it like a garden. And
then, suddenly, it was too late by years. Simply
too late.
Looking back on things, I suppose it’s the
reason I did what I did that night, to make up
for all those times I glanced toward the top of
the city and said fuck it and went about my own
business instead.
Do the dead forgive us? I wonder. I hope
so. But I suspect not. I suspect they do nothing
at all, like a spark flying from a burning campfire:
they just go psssst and that’s it. How they
felt about you in that last second is where you
remain, at least in your thoughts, for eternity. Or
rather, until you go psssst too.
Excerpted from EXTRAORDINARY by David Gilmour. Copyright © David Gilmour, 2013. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.