Part one

“Félix, my boy, go get the cards. I’m going to skunk you at cribbage.”

It was a Sunday afternoon in October, and my grandfather had just called me by my name. The Friday before, he had asked me who I was, and whether I was the guy who’d come to fix the furnace.

He’s eighty-one. According to my uncle, according to the doctor, according to the social worker from the CLSC, the local health clinic, who had come by in September with her questionnaire, Grandpa “doesn’t recognize anyone anymore.” He mixes up the days. He forgets to eat. He falls asleep in the middle of a sentence.

That Sunday, he won three games in a row. He counted his points faster than I did. Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six. He even told me about the old Forum, the 1993 Cup and the parade on Sainte-Catherine Street, where he swore he’d lost a boot.

He was himself. Completely.

And my uncle Sylvain wasn’t there.

I should explain how things work at our place.

The duplex is Grandpa’s. Rue des Écores, in Rosemont, with the spiral staircase on the front and the little shed at the back of the yard. Grandpa bought it in 1974, when he was a machinist at the Angus Shops. He raised his two kids downstairs, and he still lives there. My mother and I live upstairs. We pay $650 a month. At neighborhood prices, it would be three times that. Grandpa says it’s the rent for a daughter who comes to see her father every day.

My mother is a night-shift orderly at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital. She leaves at 11:15 p.m., gets home at 8 a.m. and sleeps until 3 p.m. I’m sixteen, I’m in Secondary Five, and I get home from high school around 4.

Since Grandma died two years ago, Grandpa has slowed down. That’s normal, everybody said so. But in the spring, it started going fast. Too fast. One day, he left a burner on. Another time, he walked to the dep in his slippers and couldn’t find his way home.

That’s when my uncle Sylvain started coming every day.

Sylvain is my mother’s big brother. He lives in Laval, he has a renovation company, a big gray pickup and a voice that fills a room. Since May, he’s been showing up every weekday around 11, with ready-made meals and a jar of applesauce, “Mom’s recipe.” He cleans, he sorts Grandpa’s pills into the pill organizer, and he leaves again around 2. My mother says she doesn’t know what we’d do without him.

Neither did I. At first.

When I got home from school, Grandpa was always in the same state. Asleep in his recliner, mouth open, the TV on the sports channel with no sound. When I woke him, he looked at me like a stranger. Once, he cried because he couldn’t find Grandma.

In the mornings, though, when my mother went down with his coffee after her shift, he was often fine. She said it was sundowning, that it happens with cognitive disorders, that people are better in the morning.

And on weekends, he was fine the whole time.

I started keeping notes, on my phone. For no particular reason. Because that’s what I do when something bugs me: I make a table. The day. The time. How he was. Who had come by.

After three weeks, my table had two columns. The days he recognized me. The days he didn’t.

There wasn’t a single exception. The days he didn’t recognize me were the days Sylvain had come.

I brought it up with my mother one evening, before she left for work. She was packing her lunch box in the kitchen.

“Come on, Félix. He comes when there’s something to do. It’s normal that he’s there on the bad days, that’s why he comes.”

“He doesn’t come on the bad days, Mom. The days he comes are the bad days.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she closed her lunch box.

“Your uncle spends his days here instead of on his job sites. Don’t you ever say that in front of him.”

The next day, I heard Sylvain on the phone in the yard. He was smoking by the shed. He didn’t know I’d come home early.

“The notary’s on November 4. Once the mandate’s homologated, I’m the one who signs. Downstairs and upstairs, empty, I’ll hand it over to you in July. No, don’t worry about my sister, I’ll handle her.”

I looked it up online that same night. Ten years ago, Grandpa had signed a protection mandate at the notary’s. If he ever became incapacitated, Sylvain would handle his affairs. For it to take effect, there had to be two assessments: one medical, one psychosocial. Then the notary had it homologated. And from that point on, Sylvain could do anything. Pay. Sign. Sell.

Both assessments had been done in September. On a Tuesday and a Thursday. Around 1 p.m.

October 23 was a professional development day. No school. Sylvain didn’t know.

At noon, I went downstairs to eat at Grandpa’s while he was already asleep in his chair. Sylvain had just left. In the fridge was the jar of applesauce, a Mason jar with a label written in marker: “DAD.” I love applesauce. I ate four or five spoonfuls, standing in front of the open fridge door, the way my mother hates me doing.

An hour later, I was lying on the couch upstairs and I couldn’t get up.

My mouth was dry, my head was heavy, my legs were like jelly. I watched the ceiling turn slowly. I tried to text my girlfriend, but my fingers couldn’t find the letters. I slept four hours straight, a black sleep, no dreams. When my mother shook me awake at 5 p.m., I didn’t know what day it was.

The next morning, before she got home, I went back downstairs. I took the jar out of the fridge. I emptied it slowly into a bowl, spoonful by spoonful.

At the bottom, stuck to the glass, were three small white pills, half dissolved.

Someone was drugging my grandfather.