Would I Lie to You

by Mary Lou Dickinson

  “Then she was special,” Gwen had said. “Hans must be, too.”

  From inside the bag, Sue pulled out a tiny picture frame with a photograph of a child at around two years old. Dressed in overalls, she had dark curls forming a fringe around her head. Holding a small plastic shovel and smiling at the camera, the child seemed about to jump up and down. Sue wondered what the photographer had said.

  “It’s you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” Sue could not think of anything else to say, but she understood how generous a gesture this was. Her very first photograph of her child. It was monumental.

  “You’re welcome.” Gwen beamed.

  There was still the underlying fear, Sue thought. Even faced with this reality, from all the years she had not known where her daughter was still lingered that fear of what she had done to ruin her own child’s life.

  “You have a lot of courage,” Gwen said.

  Sue shrugged.

  “Well,” Gwen said. “You risked I’d be angry and unforgiving.”

  Courage is what it takes and takes the more of / Because the deeper fear is so eternal, Sue thought, remembering this line from a poem. Then, she recited it out loud.

  “That, too,” Gwen said. “I was afraid, too. That you might be disinterested or difficult. And maybe only curious.”

  “I guess my deepest fear was that you’d been hurt or neglected. Or both.”

  “And mine was that I would never find you. I looked for years, you know, and had about given up. That was awful. As long as I could hope you’d turn up, I felt reassured. But when I thought you might have died or just not bothered to look for me, I couldn’t stand it. Especially that you might be dead. I thought I would find you somehow if you were still alive. I always believed that. Or almost always.”

  Maybe this was her guilt, Sue thought, what she had to atone for with gifts to the homeless on the streets of the city. Her daughter had been looking for her for half a lifetime and she had done nothing until very recently to make that search successful.

  “I’m sorry,” Sue said.

  “For what? You’re here.”

  Sue felt bereft of words to express the thoughts that flooded through her. Florence’s lifeless hand. Sitting across from a lost daughter. Meeting Jerry’s son. Loving Hans. It felt as if she were finally ready for all of it.

  “It didn’t have to be quite so difficult for you. I could have made it easier.”

  “You weren’t ready, I guess,” Gwen said.

  “I guess not,” Sue replied. “Until now.”

  Gwen nodded.

  Sue was tempted to say something like “Hallelujah.” Instead, she just reached her hand across the table.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Margaret Arthur for the germ of an idea that kept on growing. To Katherine Wallace and Barbara Wehrspann for reading different versions and their perceptive feedback. Paula de Ronde, too, with her probing comments about whatever I have asked her to read. Elizabeth Greene and Heather Wood for sharing the journey.

  To my agent, Margaret Hart, and my editor, Luciana Ricciutelli. Both Margaret and Luciana have helped bring my three books thus far to publication. Both are talented and dedicated women to whom I am profoundly grateful.

  Moosemeat Writing Group for ongoing critique and good humour. What an interesting, talented group this is, so fortunate I am to have found it.

  As always, I am grateful for the support, encouragement and enthusiasm of my family. Andrea, Mark, Max, Phil, Therese, Stephanie, Michael. Geoff, Skye, Gillian, Stacey, and all the Winnipeg Cossers continue to be my ongoing support. As also are my friends. Ruby for her enthusiasm and special launch parties. Larry. Carol. Michèle. Gwen who would recognize her mystery reading namesake. Lee and Ron. Brydon et al. Ray and Shirley. Joan, Gene, Huong and Frank, Liisa and Gerry. Nelson, Anne and other northerners. Catherine. Colleen and Dieter, Trish, Lisa, Gero and other dancers. Neighbours. The community in the LIFE program at Ryerson. My McGill friends who have stayed the course. The wonderful women I met working at the Helpline. The list goes on. And on.

  I am grateful as well for my northern childhood. And for my mother who taught the neighbourhood children to dance. And for the people in my life who continue to dance!

  The lines, “Courage is what it takes and takes the more of / Because the deeper fear is so eternal,” are from Robert Frost’s poem, “A Masque of Mercy,” in the Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c1962).

  Photo: CA7 Creative

  Mary Lou Dickinson’s fiction has been published in the University of Windsor Review, Descant, Waves, Grain, Northern Journey, The Fiddlehead, Impulse, Writ and broadcast on CBC Radio. Her writing was also included in the anthology, We Who Can Fly: Poems, Essays and Memories in Honour of Adele Wiseman. Inanna published a book of Dickinson’s short stories, One Day It Happens, in 2007, and her first novel, Ile d’Or, in 2010, both to excellent reviews in The Globe and Mail, among others. She grew up in northern Quebec and currently lives in Toronto.