by Sheena Kamal
Lam nods. “Of course. I own the place.”
“Of course,” Brazuca murmurs. “I’ll get started right away.” He doesn’t have to say the “sir” because it’s implied. Bernard Lam, whose life he saved several years earlier, is oblivious to this dig.
4
I’m here again at my sister’s house in East Vancouver. It’s Saturday, and you can only tell it’s afternoon by the clock. The haze is not as thick as it was yesterday, but it’s still there. Still obscuring the daylight and conjuring frightening images of smoker’s lung to the health nuts of the city, who will not quit hiking or cycling in these conditions but will complain incessantly while they do it. I hear there’s another forest fire on the Sunshine Coast and the winds are blowing the smoke over this way.
Vancouver isn’t on fire, but it sure as hell seems like it is.
I’ve waited until Lorelei’s car pulls out of the drive to approach the narrow gate leading to the backyard. Her husband, David, is sitting on the small deck, contemplating his shitty garden. There are a few herb plants mustering some strength, but they are no match for the mint growing like weeds, even in this postapocalyptic atmosphere. He looks like he’s trying to stay positive, but failing. I feel sorry for men like David, the decent, hardworking men of the world. Try as they might, the simplest things seem to overwhelm them. He can’t even succeed at coaxing something edible from the earth.
He’s drinking a light beer and doesn’t bother getting up when I round the corner. The last time we laid eyes on each other, he had thrown some money at me and asked me to stay away from Lorelei for a spell. He doesn’t seem surprised now that I have broken our agreement. Then he sees Whisper and a delighted smile crosses his face. Part of the reason I brought her with me is that dog people are so easy to manipulate. She understands her role well enough to trot over and say hello to his crotch with her nose. Bam. Nice to see you.
“Who’s a good girl?” He grins, reaching over to scratch behind her ears. “Who’s a very good girl?”
And then he looks at me. The grin disappears. I try not to be offended. Good girls are overrated anyway.
“The yellow box,” I say. There’s no reason to beat around the bush.
He considers this for a moment, then makes a decision. “Upstairs, in the guest room closet. Top shelf.”
I walk past him and into their house. My visits to my sister’s home are usually of the clandestine sort so, at first, I’m not sure how to proceed. Am I supposed to move differently now that I have permission?
Lorelei’s house is much like her personality. Spare, uncluttered, and a little nauseating in its blandness. There’s no room for surprises here. The box is exactly where he said it would be. When I come back outside with the yellow shoe box tucked under my arm, I find that things have progressed for Whisper. She is busy enjoying the touch of a man. She’s on her back now, and has offered her stomach for a thorough rubdown. The nympho.
“Thank you,” I say, when David looks up at me again.
He nods.
“Will you tell her I’ve been here?”
“Not unless she notices the box is missing. But she hasn’t opened it in years, so I wouldn’t worry.”
I nod, too, and both of us are doing a thing with our necks that is attempting to smooth over the rough patch we’ve hit. We now have an understanding between us. A secret. My sister’s husband and I have agreed that she is not to know that I’ve been here and that I’ve taken something from her. I won’t tell her because she no longer speaks to me. His silence on the subject is probably due to a misplaced guilt over our tense relationship. Even though it has nothing to do with him. But David is a good man and would not deny me what I have left of my father, all conveniently contained in a box that used to hold a pair of Lorelei’s nude pumps, size seven.
I close my legs a notch. The pressure builds slower than I like. Slower than I’ve become used to. And then it is over, several excruciating moments longer than it used to take. I’m not ashamed, which I suppose is in its own way progress, but then again I’m not much of anything, really.
I still feel like I’m being watched but the angle is all wrong.
As I remove my knees from their indentations beside the stranger’s head, I wonder—was it worth the trip over here? The answer doesn’t come to me, not when I put on my jeans or even when I untie his hands from the bedposts and make for the door. Like the cliché I have become, the money is in an envelope on the dresser.
It comes when I’m already halfway to the motel’s parking lot.
I will sit on your face, says the ad I placed online. And your hands will be tied. When it’s over, I’ll leave. NSA. No fuss. No games. My teeth are sharper than yours.
Then I name a reasonable rate that I’m prepared to pay.
All things considered, it’s an insulting ad. I have come to hate myself more than the lonely schmucks who answer it, but I haven’t taken it down yet. I come, then I go, and it had all worked out well at first.
My old Corolla takes a minute to get used to the idea that something is expected of it and while I wait I’m left with the unsettling answer. It’s not enough anymore. No matter how many strangers whose faces I try to erase with my thighs.
About an hour later, I park next to the restaurant at Burnaby Mountain and head to a spot about halfway up the lawn. The air is cleaner up here, plus the view of the beautiful Japanese wood carvings beneath me and the city of Vancouver to the west can’t be beat. I’m at this spot because my journalist friend Mike Starling loved coming to this place to think, or so it claims in his obituary last year, after he was found dead in his bathtub with his wrists slit. To me, Starling wasn’t the type to sit around on mountains and contemplate life but, admittedly, my memory isn’t the greatest. What I remember the most about him was his disdain for drinkers of multisyllabic coffee and what he looked like in death, in a tub full of bloody water.
My support group friends assure me that I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about because I’m not the one who killed him—but what the hell do they know, anyway? It’s not like their judgment is exactly sound. And what they don’t know (because I haven’t told them) is that I’m the reason he’s dead. He was killed because some dangerous people had come looking for me and he’d made the choice to protect me. He may have even sat here while he thought about it and decided that my life was worth fighting for, and he’d be looking into who painted the target on my back.
I sip at the coffee I brought with me—four syllables—and pour a little on the ground beside me for him. So he’ll know the woman he gave his life to save still has a sense of humor. Maybe he did like to come up here, and maybe there’s a little bit of him left behind in this place, too, because it seems to me Mike Starling could never walk away from a mystery.
Clearly, I can’t either.
5
It’s late. The contents of the box are spread out on the coffee table in front of me and I’m slumped on the floor, staring at them at eye level. There isn’t much there. A love letter. A strip of crumpled blue silk. Five postcards from an address in Detroit. A few faded photographs. One is of a woman in bed, holding a baby. The woman’s head has been cropped out, perhaps deliberately, and she’s cradling a wrinkled infant in her tanned arms. The date on the back of the photo tells me that the sleeping infant is me.
I put it aside.
The other two are of my father, Lorelei, and me. These photos don’t have a date on them, but all three of us have changed drastically from one photo to the next. Lorelei and I are growing with the speed that children do, but my father’s aging has taken a dramatic turn. In both, his hair is straight and black, his eyes dark. It’s the deepening lines on his face that have changed him. In the first he looks like a content but tired father. In the second, he looks like a haunted man with one foot in the grave. Raising children isn’t for everyone.
“What are you doing?” says Seb, from the doorway. My own living ghost has decided to put in a stealthy appearance, h
is face gaunt and pale.
“Hungry?” I gesture to the box of pad thai that I picked up from his favorite place, just around the corner from the town house. I buy some every couple of days, just in case he’s in the mood for a heavy dose of sodium and carbohydrates. I always end up eating it the next morning because he never is. Though he assures me that he eats, I rarely ever see it. I, on the other hand, have put on about ten pounds since I moved in. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s letting food go to waste. Because then you have to figure out how to get more.
He shakes his head and drifts toward the photos. “Who are these people?” he asks, peering over my shoulder.
“My father and my sister.”
“And you. Beautiful.” When he smiles, the room brightens and I almost forget that he is about to die. “Why the trip down memory lane?”
We keep no secrets from each other anymore. There’s no time for that. I tell him about the man from last night and how he claimed to know my father.
“Weird,” he says, collapsing on the stiff armchair beside the coffee table. One of the few pieces of furniture that his lover Leo, my former boss, left behind in a scorned rage. “After all this time. Why bother?”
I shrug. “It’s just . . .” My eyes skip over the ceiling, the floor, Whisper, anywhere but at the photos.
“Just?”
“We never knew much about his life. After my aunt got sick we were put into care and these things are what I had taken with me at the time. When she died, she’d donated most of what she had to charity and everything else disappeared. We don’t have any records of his life left.” Or our early life, mine and Lorelei’s. I don’t say that, though, because it’s implied.
“Is that what’s bothering you? That you only have this box?” His voice is so light, so gentle that it floats over the tension that has reared up inside me. “Because you’ve described your dad as a Sixties Scoop survivor. Many children of indigenous heritage who were taken away from their families and put up for adoption knew less about their parents than this. Had less than what you have in this box.”
And some had more, and others had around the same amount. Years after the Canadian government implemented the residential school system, it also tacked on a policy of forced adoption that didn’t seek to help matters. Out of reserves, out of urban centers, the imposed assimilation came at communities where it hurt. If you think about it, this strategy is always the one that is most used when trying to erase people. In Canada, like it was elsewhere in the colonial world, they began with the children.
I know Seb is probably right that I should be grateful for what I have, but at the moment it doesn’t feel like I could possibly know less than I do right now. “What’s bothering me is that I can’t confirm any of what he said. It’s not that I have no information, it’s that what I have is incomplete.”
He reaches for the postcards. “And what about these? Who are they from?” There is no signature on any of them. Just my father’s name, scrawled in a sloping hand.
“He grew up in Detroit. It’s where the family that adopted him lived. But he never talked about them to me as a child. We never met. I found out about them from my aunt, but she didn’t know much, either.”
Seb stares past me, his eyes unfocused. With a sudden burst of energy, he rises from the chair and grabs hold of my hands. His voice, when he speaks, is low and urgent. “Sometimes these things happen for a reason, Nora. Don’t you see? This man comes into your life and forces you to look at what you knew of your father. And, you said yourself, there isn’t much. You’ve been holding on to your memories of him that you had as a little girl and maybe now is the time to get to know who he really was without the childhood blinders on.”
But he’s dead, I want to say.
I want to tell him to mind his own business and leave me out of his obsession with the past, but I don’t. Maybe it’s because I normally don’t speak of my father out loud. I have built a bunker in my heart around his memory. With concrete walls. Built to withstand a nuclear blast. What is striking in this bunker is not what’s in it, but what is absent. There are no answers there, only questions. This is why I have chosen to keep it buried so deep for so long. Because unlocking it only shows me what I don’t know.
“Go to Detroit,” Seb continues. “Find whoever sent these postcards. Whatever trouble there was, the person who opens the door at this address might know something about it. If you don’t go, you’ll always wonder. It will haunt you.”
Now I see what he’s doing. He is trying to save me from making the same mistakes that he has made. I should shut up, but I don’t. I don’t have any control over what I say next.
“Just like Leo will always wonder,” I say. “When you die. He’ll wonder why you didn’t tell him. And that maybe he should have known that you were sick.” Leo, his lover, who was devastated when I left him to work with Seb. Leo thinks it’s a professional betrayal, but it isn’t. It’s a personal one. I’m one of a handful of people who know of Seb’s illness and agreed to keep it from the others in Seb’s life.
Seb releases my hands as though they’ve scalded him and leaves the room without another word. Whisper rises gracefully from her spot by the window and trots after him. Like Seb, she refuses to look at me, as if to remind me that I don’t deserve either of them.
When I hear his bedroom door shut, I turn off the lights in the living room and stand at the edge of the curtains, staring for a long time at the park across the street. Just because I don’t see the veteran, it doesn’t mean he’s not there.
I call David, who up until now was unaware that I have his number. It’s good to have someone around who will always answer the phone when you call. Even if he doesn’t recognize my number on his call display, he’s too polite to let it slip to voice mail. “Hello?” he says, after the fourth ring. His voice is heavy with sleep.
“It’s Nora. Did Lorelei ever go to that address? The one on the postcards?”
There’s a pause and I can hear the rustle of the sheets as he gets out of bed. A door opens, then closes. “No,” he says, his voice barely a whisper. “She wrote a few letters back in college but never got a response. She didn’t have enough money to check it out herself . . . and then she let it go. Are you thinking of making a trip?”
“I don’t know,” I say, after a moment. “Thanks. Keep doing you.” And then, on that positive note, which the first time I heard it I believed it to be a supportive statement about masturbation, I hang up. It’s always good to leave people a little confused. Keep them guessing, so they’ll answer the next time you call.
When Seb asked what was bothering me, I talked around it. But it’s as simple as this: When a bullet hits a skull, blood and brain matter are expelled forcefully. It tears through cranial bones, connective tissues, and membranes. Depending on how close the muzzle is, there is the chance of burning on the outer layer of skin from the smoke and gunpowder. The end result of a bullet to the brain is death, unless you are unspeakably lucky. My father was not.
What matters to me now, though, is why the trigger was pulled in the first place. Why two young children were abandoned to the system is heavy in my mind. When it comes to fucking over someone’s life completely, the motivation is important. And maybe Seb is right. Maybe Detroit holds the answer.
6
Several months ago, when Seb, Leo Krushnik, and I were still working out of the Hastings Street office together, Leo dropped a passport application on my desk with the reasoning that international travel might improve my sex life. “You’re not dead below the waist, you know,” he told me. “And it’s hard to get laid in this city.” Then he threw a wistful glance at Seb.
That’s when I first noticed the distance between them.
Now I walk toward the office before dawn, much earlier than Leo would ever consider coming in. His new business partner, however, is antisocial and keeps odd hours. I use my old key to get in and wonder that Leo hasn’t bothered to change the lock. It’s be
en a while since I’ve been in here, but the change is startling. A serious decorating overhaul has taken place. Any reminder of Seb’s presence has been ruthlessly eliminated. His pastry certification is nowhere to be found on these walls, and it’s not at the house, either, which makes me wonder if Leo has done something drastic to the only remaining proof that Seb knows his way around butter and flour.
Despite the office’s location in the middle of the shabby Downtown Eastside of the city, the interior is now quite chic. The new decor announces quietly that reasonably priced investigations are done here, rather than screaming it. When Seb gave me a choice to go with him, I didn’t hesitate, but for the first time I’m feeling nostalgic. My old desk is still in the reception area, but is almost totally obscured by a large vase of flowers.
Stevie Warsame, Leo’s new partner, has moved his good backpack into Seb’s office and has set up some kind of complicated computer station in one corner of the room. In the other corner is a second desk, which throws me off balance. Even though this isn’t what I’m here for, I can’t help but search it. I find nothing but a few spare phone chargers, some surveillance equipment, and a chart that compares the nutritional value of various vegetables when juiced. Leo has replaced me with a vase and given a desk in Seb’s office to some kind of juice freak?
“Find what you’re looking for?” says a familiar voice from behind me.
Brazuca, my old AA sponsor, is leaning against the doorjamb, eyeing me warily. I haven’t seen him since last year, when he told me he forgave me for drugging him and abandoning him in a chalet in the mountains. After I found out that he had been lying to me about his day job, and I was too stupid to realize it.
Now here we are again, both of us still looking a little worse for wear, him slightly less so—possibly due to the introduction of fresh vegetables to his diet. There is more color in his cheeks and his eyes seem brighter. For some reason, I imagine us fucking but it is an unpleasant thought. Neither of us has any give or take. We are stretched too thin, and pressing our sharp bones against each other is the least sexy thing I can imagine. No comfort can be drawn out of us. At least not with each other. If he replied to my online ad, I would have to delete his message. Self-preservation is a funny thing.