Wheels of Time

There is a growth on the back of Kathleen’s neck. A mole is “flirting with the idea of becoming cancerous” despite the decades that the gardener has spent pulling on protective gear — collared shirts, hats, gloves — before working in the sun. She also feels a pain in her mouth, from “a molar that has been warning her off and on for years.” In Sarah Leipciger’s Moon Road, Kathleen’s body and mind are both at a precipice. Her ex-husband’s arrival has forced her to take stock of the way her grief has festered, accumulated, and, like a cancer, grown from passive abnormality into something more insidious.

Leipciger delicately explores confrontation. Her prose is quiet and reflects Kathleen’s tired, nearly hopeless spirit. One day, Yannick, who has long since remarried, shows up after decades of silence to see if she will join him on a cross-country road trip to British Columbia. The police in Tofino have discovered human remains that are a possible match to their daughter, Una, who disappeared twenty-two years ago. In the hope of getting closure, Yannick wants them both to do a DNA test and, if possible, visit the site where the body was found. Reluctantly, she agrees.

“Here is this man, again,” Kathleen thinks, as she watches Yannick, now seventy-three, drive. Time collapses in his old truck, and the rift between them shifts as familiarity takes over. Following them across Ontario, through the badlands and prairies of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, we glimpse scenes from their marriage. We also see moments from their last time in Tofino, shortly after Una went missing. They spent a few weeks following fruitless leads around the small town, wrestling with how little they knew about their daughter, and viewing CCTV footage of her as she paced anxiously on a pier. As they drive, the road slowly unravels them both. Without an understanding of what happened to Una, loss has stalled their lives in different ways. Leipciger writes elegantly of this paralysis: “With time? The ink gets soaked up by the paper and fades. All the thousands of possibilities that are not the truth spin you senseless, unless you stop the spinning yourself.”

Interspersed throughout are mysterious chapters that follow an unnamed young woman, later revealed to be Una, as she navigates the last day of her life. She wakes up in a tree, hitchhikes in the back of a truck, and ultimately finds herself on the moonlit jetty we recognize from the video, waiting for her old lover to arrive on a boat from the mainland. As the two narratives progress — and as we near an understanding of what happened to Una — Kathleen and Yannick are able to better grasp the enduring nature of each other’s pain.

Moon Road examines the extreme toll that mourning exacts on a person’s physical and emotional being. Its expansive scope attempts to hold the anguish of losing a child as well as losing one’s identity as a parent. There is no way to completely heal from that kind of grief, Leipciger suggests, and certainly no road map for doing so. Instead, there is just a search for oneself, however damaged, on the other end of sorrow.

In Moon Road, a cross-country trip ends a long period of stasis, but in Blessed Nowhere, hitting the road is a form of reckless escape. Where Leipciger’s novel softly weeps, Catherine Black’s wails. The young narrator, Abby, is racked with guilt after losing her six-year-old son, Joseph. Like Kathleen, she is single, stubborn, and, in her distress, an avid smoker. When a cryptic, upsetting letter arrives, she packs up her old yellow Volvo and leaves Toronto behind — along with her mother and sister.

The first few chapters follow Abby’s unhinged trek across Middle America. Fuelled only by compulsion, she buys useless knick-knacks, cuts her hair with nail scissors, and drives each night “until I pulled over and passed out.” After a few days, she ends up in a gas station in Garden City, Kansas, looking at a map. The attendant points out Route 83 —“the Road to Nowhere”— and explains that she can follow it north back to Canada or south all the way to Mexico. “Blame him,” she says at the start of the next chapter, as she’s southbound in Oklahoma. Eventually, Abby abandons her car and her belongings: “All of it. Junk. Excess.” After arriving in Mexico on a bus, she rents a room in a seedy town full of other transients called San Judas Tadeo, named after the patron saint of lost causes.

At times verging on melodramatic, Black’s novel is loud, messy, and rife with urgent, self-destructive behaviour. Abby quickly falls in with a crowd of charming misfits and further indulges in her drinking. Beyond being a break from her life back home, her first few weeks in Mexico are a physical manifestation of her fugue mental state: the hazy and sunlit afternoons seem unending, the booze-distorted evenings disappear, and she sleeps with another sad drifter because it “felt easier to say yes than to explain why not.” As she floats aimlessly through the hours, which feel like “the continuation of one long day,” an image of her fragmented and broken identity emerges.

Toward the end, the reader learns that Joseph was killed in a car accident. Abby recounts the tragedy to the woman who runs the local motel. Having repressed her story for so long, she breaks down: “The sobs that originated deep inside were deeper than marrow and pulse.” With this non-linear revelation, Black takes advantage of fiction’s ability to capture the way loss alters time, memory, and our innermost selves. When her mother eventually shows up in Tadeo, inflamed with worry, Abby is forced to confront how her pain touches and is mirrored by her own heartbroken parent. As they sit together in the moonlight, she notices her mom’s age for the first time, seeing “all the decades and all that grief upon her.”

In different ways, Blessed Nowhere and Moon Road both ask how a parent can survive losing a child. Grief permanently changes the way we experience the world, they remind us. Perhaps the only way forward is to abandon linearity altogether and seek an alternative expression of time, be it by narrative or by car.