Sanctuary Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

was burned by vandals at least fifteen years ago.
    I once tried to find the cargo terminal at the city airport in an effort to understand what it must have been like for Teo to arrive and depart from there, being human and not, therefore, technically cargo; what it would be like to be picked up and delivered like office supplies, or mufflers for cars, or, I suppose, more accurately, farm equipment, then transported from the shipper to the receiver. But that airport is so large now, and the cargo terminals so numerous, it was impossible to tell one industrial building from another. That’s the way it is: terminals, orchards, and dance halls, all gone now, or lost, or just indistinguishable among the clutter of everything that follows. “I wanted to stop it,” my uncle said the following morning, his voice hoarse, almost a whisper, “but what could I do?” Was he talking to himself or to me? Should I have answered? Could I have dug even the briefest of responses out of my teenagedheart? We turned from each other then, my uncle and I, both of us disappearing in our own private way into the abrupt end of the summer. No more apples on the bough, no more swimming in the lake.
    Goodbye, goodbye, to everything .

 
    Every few days I visit my mother at the seniors’ residence in the nearby town. This is, in part, so that we can talk about the past, or at least those aspects of the past she is willing to discuss, and in part because I am at least as lonely as she is. I miss Mandy, though her leaves had been sporadic and our time together often fractured by her need to please everyone. I miss the long, trans-oceanic phone conversations we had in the middle of her night or mine, even though she often placed the calls because she could no longer bear the suffering brought to her by the man she was involved with, and sometimes, I admit, I resented her inability to stray from that subject. Now that I am living in this place, I miss the children we all used to be before everything broke apart, and I miss the children who should have replaced us but haven’t.
    The Golden Field is not really objectionable as these places go, and I am not as put off as I thought I might be when I park my car in the lot, pass through the entrance, and walk down the hall to the door with my mother’sname, Beth Crane , printed on a small card and thumbtacked into the wood. I was baptized Elizabeth in honour of my mother, but she was always called Beth and I was always simply Liz. Crane, of course, was my father’s name, which separated both of us just a little from my mother’s family, the Butlers, but not so much that that family would not always be home to us. This was not entirely because of my father’s death, though I’m sure it would have had a certain amount to do with it. There was a saying among us, “You can marry into the Butler family, but you can never marry out of it.” In the case of my uncle’s wife, Aunt Sadie, a Butler herself and second cousin to her husband, the problem would never have come up. She, by the way, also lived at The Golden Field for a few years before her impending death made my mother want to bring her back to this house. But she was in a different wing, one that is not so pleasant to visit.
    Odd to think of those two women alone, and then together, only on and off. My aunt remained alone in the house after her sons left for university and Mandy went to the military college, until my mother retired from her city job and joined her. Then they were together here, until my aunt’s dementia became unmanageable and Mandy and the boys found a place for her in the wing I just mentioned. After my aunt died, my mother stayed for a while in this house, and could still be here if she wanted to be.
    I often think of my aunt, and when I do, I think of thestriking woman she was during those early summers and not of the woman she became – the sad, confused woman in that wing. Fiercely intelligent and very American, she brought