Forgiveness

by Mark Sakamoto

  Two weeks later, Mom began crying almost hysterically.

  “Just looook at this kitchen!” she screeched as she ran her hands through her frosted hair.

  The portable dishwasher, full of dirty dishes, was hooked up to the kitchen tap. She hadn’t found the time to turn it on. The sink was full of three days’ worth of soaking pots and pans. Burnt crusts clung to the parts sticking out of the oil-tinged brown water. A few remaining soap bubbles hung in each rounded corner of the stainless steel sink. A mountain range of soccer jerseys, jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and socks sat beside the fridge waiting to be carried downstairs to the washing machine. Each day the pile grew. The fridge was near empty. Four utility bills and one mortgage statement were posted on the fridge—a constant reminder of our arrears.

  Daniel and I sat at the kitchen table, watching, waiting for supper, unsure what to do. Dad was working—he was always working. Mom was alone. She paced the kitchen like a caged animal.

  She went to the bathroom to get some toilet paper to blow her nose. Nose still runny, she marched back into the kitchen, grabbed an empty Kleenex box, and threw it to the ground. We were out of paper products.

  “My mother NEVER ran out of toilet paper!” Mom burst into tears again and slumped onto the kitchen floor, her back against the dishwasher, defeated. Daniel ran to the stove, grabbed the small kitchen towel, and handed it to her. “Don’t cry, Mom. It’s okay.”

  It was not okay. Mom decided, at that very moment, I think, that life could not go on like this. It had to get better. We needed a cleaner house. We needed more food in the fridge. We needed toilet paper. I remember the look in her eyes. She was determined to go it alone.

  The next night, I lashed out at my father. We were at grandma Sakamoto’s for dinner. Mom was not there. I was sitting on the kitchen counter, between the telephone and the sink. I was mad because he was not home when Mom was in need. I was mad that we had an empty fridge, a messy house, and past-due bills. I was mad that we didn’t have toilet paper. I lay in wait for an opening.

  He asked me a simple, fatherly question. Something like “How was your day?”

  “What do you care, you’re never around,” I said sulkily.

  I may have as well have taken out one of Grandma’s santoku knives and stabbed him.

  “Don’t you ever say that to me again,” he replied, his firmness masking his pain.

  I jumped off the counter and ran to the guest room, leaped onto the bed, and plunged my face into the pillow. Dad probably felt like doing the same.

  I think I have relived this moment more than any other. If I could take back but one sentence in my life, corral the words, and choke them back into my mouth, that would be the one.

  That week, during one of her 10:45 a.m. coffee breaks, Mom decided to end her marriage. She informed grandma Sakamoto that very afternoon at 4:15 p.m., when she arrived to pick us up. Grandma broke down and wept. She begged her to reconsider, but Mom would not be moved. It was decided. She loaded us into the car and we were off.

  Mom and Dad sat my brother and me down in our living room to tell us. The sun shone through the blinds against the bay window. Mom did the talking, Dad sat ashen-faced. He looked like he just wanted to wake up from a bad dream.

  Afterwards I fled to the park across the street, climbed a tree, and stared at my house. At eight, I was old enough to know life was about to alter dramatically. I felt fear for the first time.

  As far as divorces go, theirs was quite amicable, although we must have been shielded from some of the ugly moments that are bound to occur as two people unwind their life together. I recall only one screaming match, an early morning fight in the bathroom that woke me up. As I came out of my bedroom, I saw my dad standing in the hall, staring into the bathroom. “You go to hell,” he said with tears in his eyes. I had never heard my dad curse. I had never seen him cry.

  Three weeks later, we were all packing up: Dad to move to a rented house not far from our first place on Division Avenue, Mom, Daniel, and I to a duplex just around the corner and across the street from a subsidized housing complex. Mom had borrowed the down payment from grandpa MacLean. She hated to do so. She would rather owe the bank than her dad, but a single mother with a receptionist’s salary didn’t make for an ideal loan candidate.

  The fear that had introduced itself to me in the tree became a constant companion. The ground under our feet had shifted. Like an earthquake survivor, I spent my days on edge, waiting for the next tremor.

  Mom never really did articulate her reason for divorcing Dad. I think she needed release. She needed to feel truly free. But she was walking a tightrope without a safety net. Her first steps out onto the wire were unsteady.

  On the surface, many things remained the same. Our morning routine was unchanged: waking up to a hug, breakfast cereal at the kitchen table, Mom watching us as she sipped Earl Grey tea. Off to school, home for lunch—Ichiban soup—babysitting Daniel from 3:10 until 4:45 p.m., when Mom returned. She watched Oprah in the living room from 5 to 6 p.m. while Daniel and I played with the neighbourhood kids. Then dinner, clean-up, homework at the kitchen table, The National newscast, and off to bed. Pretty routine stuff.

  But cracks began to appear. I kept my eye on them like a home inspector, hoping they wouldn’t impact the foundation. As I watched the small cracks grow, I wondered if anyone else saw them.

  In the new place, although my bedroom was downstairs and Daniel’s upstairs, we continued to sleep together. Old habits die hard. In bed at night, we would tap each other on the leg with our feet. One tap meant you weren’t tired; five meant you were close to sleep. It should have been the other way around, but that’s how we did it. We only started to do that after the divorce. We were scared; we had reason to be. In the half-light, we knew things were changing. We knew our mom was changing.

  At first, the tiny duplex took on the feel of a chaperoned teenage party. A new cast of friends came into my mom’s life. For the most part, they were a fun-loving, motley crew. Most were divorcees or folks in transitory stages of life.

  A woman named Terry moved into the duplex next door. She was also a recent divorcee and she lived with her son, Wade. A pretty woman with a vibrant laugh, she had that late-80s sex appeal down pat. She drank fruit wine coolers and blared “Walk Like an Egyptian” in the afternoon.

  Jerry was a neighbour who lived up the street. He liked to push the limits. He drove a fast car too fast. His favourite pastime was stabbing his hunting knife between his (or someone else’s) outstretched fingers. He was a dead ringer for Sting. At least once a month, he’d receive a free lunch somewhere in town because the server thought he was the rock legend. Jerry would never dispel their misconception. He would tell the waitress he was on a meditation retreat.

  There was a good-looking man who wore a very old and very cool jean jacket. He rode a motorcycle and had the confident ease of a guy who has been cool all his life. He didn’t flaunt it, but you knew it, and he knew you knew it. But as a father with two young girls and a wife at home, he was finding life was quickly becoming less cool. With him, you knew something was going to give.

  Rounding out the group was a fun-loving, carefree guy named Mike who rented a basement bedroom from Terry. Born on an aboriginal reserve in northern Alberta, Mike had spent his early adulthood trying to cram as much joy into his life as he could, trying to make up for lost time. In college, he started a Hug Society, where volunteers manned a booth and gave a hug to anyone who would take one. Like a man back from the desert with an insatiable thirst, Mike could not get enough affection.

  They danced, they laughed, they drank. They were merry.

  I was nine years old. The antics of my mom’s new friends excited me. We would have water fights in the backyard. We would all hop into a caravan and head to Echo Dale park, a man-made beach. The women would sunbathe while the guys played Frisbee. On one occasion, Mike gingerly untied Terry’s bikini top as she slept face down on her outstretched beach towel. He then
called her to ask if she wanted to go swimming. She got up and bounced halfway to the water before realizing she was the star of a burlesque show. Her scream only drew more attention as she dashed back to the safety of her towel. I sat, mesmerized, as her large milk-white breasts bounded in front of me. I had never seen real live breasts before. After the commotion died down, the gang decided to go for ice cream at the concession. I opted to stay lying on my towel.

  Every weekend seemed to herald another party. A month after Terry moved in, there was a well-worn path between the duplexes. Revellers moved back and forth between two sides of the same party. Sometimes other children were around, sometimes not. Without a bedtime, and given our mom’s penchant to include us, we were just part of the festivities; in on (most) of the jokes, singing along, dancing in the living room, drinking iced tea instead of vodka coolers. I have pictures of my mom, laughing, wine glass in one hand, her arm around my shoulder, bunching my ‘86 Expo T-shirt up at the collar.

  Invariably, they’d decide to find a place to go for last call. I hated it when they left for the bar. Deemed old enough to look after my five-year-old brother, I was still afraid of the dark. I would get Daniel into his Superman pyjamas and settled into bed. He’d usually fall asleep quickly. I’d just lie there, eyes wide open, scared of the creaks in the basement and the voices I could hear in the back alley. Scared that my mom was becoming less and less my mom by the day.

  Sometimes, if it got too late, or I got too scared, I would quietly get out of bed. Mom would always leave the name of the bar and the phone number on the table in the kitchen. I knew each name: Cadillac’s, the country bar on the other side of town; Moby Dick’s, the English pub at the bottom of the hill; Mario’s, the downtown bar in the basement of an Italian restaurant. If she hurried, Mom could be home from Cadillac’s in fifteen minutes, Mario’s in seven, and Moby Dick’s in five.

  I’d sit at the table and vacillate while I twirled the thick black spiral phone cord. Finally I’d dial.

  A gruff voice would answer. The bartender must have struggled to hear me whisper, “Is Diane Sakamoto there?” over the sound of the patrons yelling, laughing, and ordering drinks and the twang of the slide guitar.

  “Who? You gotta speak up.”

  I couldn’t or Daniel would wake up and be scared that Mom was not home yet. I was his older brother, but still not old enough to exude the kind of reassurance that he needed.

  I would cup my hand around the black receiver and repeat “Diane Sakamoto” in as loud a whisper as I could.

  “Yeah, I just saw her. Hold on.” Medicine Hat was a small town. Bartenders knew everyone in their establishment.

  “Di—your kid’s on the phone,” I would hear him call over the bar.

  Moments later I’d hear “Hi, Mark, everything okay?”

  I remember always being relieved to hear her voice; to be connected with her again.

  “Are you coming home soon?” I’d ask.

  “Yes. I’m just finishing up here.”

  She was always just finishing up. She was never just finishing up. I knew it. There was always just one more glass of wine.

  There would be a silence between us. There was really nothing else to say, and I was always mad at myself for having made that futile attempt. I was mad at my mom for not being with us, for lying to me, for leaving me. I knew, deep down, that my mom was leaving me. I think that was why I never wanted to hang up the phone. I would stand there in silence, phone to my ear, listening to her breathe on the other end of the line, the music and banter in the background. She would let the silence persist for a long time too. Maybe she felt the same way.

  For a period of about six months, we would do this every weekend. She at the bar in her jumpsuit and high heels, me at home in my pyjamas. Lingering on the phone just before last call. Neither of us wanting to disconnect. Both knowing we would. Each goodbye a small one on a long road of goodbyes.

  “Go to bed, sweetheart. I’ll be home shortly.”

  “Please come home soon, okay?”

  “I will, darling.”

  She’d hang up the phone and I’d sit at the kitchen table alone, knowing she’d ordered another drink. Cigarette ashes, beer, and vodka-cooler bottles would be strewn in front of me.

  Of course with the weekly parties, things got complicated. One day, after a particularly late evening, Mom was making Daniel and me pancakes when a blue minivan stormed up our driveway. I scrambled to the window to see the van half on our driveway and half in the hedge that lined it. Mom knew who it was without looking out the kitchen window.

  “Into my bedroom, boys. Now.”

  I could hear a woman’s voice screaming from outside as the minivan door slammed shut. I recognized it immediately. “Diane, you bitch. Send my husband out here. You slut!”

  It was nine in the morning, but this woman’s world was coming undone and she had lost all care for manners somewhere in the wee hours of her sleepless night. She was thinking about her little girls, about her husband’s betrayal. She wasn’t thinking. She was acting on instinct. I heard the latch click as my mom opened the door just a fraction. The woman’s voice echoed through our house. Horrid words spewed up the stairs from the landing as our pancakes got cold. My mom kept calm.

  “There are two sides to this duplex, dear.”

  Mom’s bedroom shared a wall with Terry’s next door. Through the wall I could hear two people frantically moving about, getting dressed. Mom opened her bedroom door. Daniel and I must have been wide-eyed, because she immediately kneeled beside the bed and brought us both close.

  “It’s fine—let’s go back to breakfast,” she said.

  From the living room window I saw the woman get back into her minivan. She backed it out of our hedge. The cool guy with the jean jacket followed on his motorbike.

  Then Mom met a new man.

  CHAPTER 13

  Breakdown

  Stephen introduced me to violence.

  I was a fireproof house. I had been untouched by it, never close to it. I never suspected it. I never saw it coming.

  Life took a decidedly dark turn when Stephen came into Mom’s life. Her party with Terry and the gang ended as abruptly as it had begun. Mom met Stephen at Moby Dick’s Tavern. She was forty, he was twenty-eight. He lived with his mother just around the corner from the bar, above a dry cleaner.

  Stephen was a well-built, clean-cut man with sinewy muscles. He had a moustache and wore dark glasses that shaded his eyes from view. He drove a gun-metal grey Chevy Beretta. It had racing stripes and it was fast. The first time we met, he took me out on the service roads to the north of town in the light industrial area. The roads there are well paved and, given the prairie landscape, you can see an approaching car miles away. We spent the afternoon pretending to be stock-car racers.

  Their relationship moved as fast as his car. Mom was racing my dad in getting on with life. Stephen moved in shortly after they met. He and Mom were married even before all his CDs were unpacked.

  Living with Stephen was like having a new roommate around. We got a better stereo system with new CDs, mostly stuff from the ‘70s: Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin. The ‘70s were Stephen’s glory days.

  Soon after the wedding, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Mom and I were in the kitchen having lunch. Daniel was out with Dad that afternoon. Stephen was listening to The Black Crowes in the living room and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. He hadn’t said much all day. Mom told me he was in a mood. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I understood I was to lie low, like you’d see in the movies when someone stumbled onto a bear or a cougar. It felt like we had a wild animal in the house. No quick movements. Avoid eye contact. No rash noises. Be slow and careful. That was the way to act. Hopefully, he’d just move on.

  Nope.

  Stephen got his campaign of violence underway. He declared war with a long, guttural growl. I don’t recall what set him off, though it could have been absolutely anything. I remember the sound emanati
ng from the living room. Then I heard him leap off the couch. He landed with a thump, so he must have flung himself into the air. He was around the corner before I was even standing. He was in a rage. He was shouting, baring his teeth.

  Mom stood up to brace herself against his assault. Unsure what to do, I stood beside her. We hugged each other as he circled around us—pacing, stalking. There was vodka on his breath. I remember his spit hitting my face as he came in close. We said nothing. I felt my mom’s heart pounding. I felt my heart pounding. My mouth was dry and I tasted metal. I had never been exposed to anything like this before. I hung onto my mom as if she were a tree in the middle of a storm.

  Stephen punched the fridge twice and left the house. He peeled out of the alleyway. I could hear rocks hitting our fence.

  Mom sat down and lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking. I remained just where I was, shell-shocked. Then I walked into the living room and picked up a pillow that had fallen off the couch. I stood in the centre of the room. Somehow it looked different.

  Stephen returned two hours later and went into the bedroom. There was not a sound for another two hours. Mom and I held our breath. Otherwise she tried to act as if nothing had happened. She made dinner.

  Stephen came out of the bedroom. Mom was still in the kitchen, and I was alone in the living room, eating spaghetti and watching CNN. He was a different person. The storm had passed. He declared a truce; he apologized for his behaviour. He said he was sorry if he had scared me; he would never act like that again.

  That night, at the age of twelve, I learned what terror was. I learned what it felt like to know your enemy.

  And so, the predictable cycle of unpredictable violence began. Every few months the fighting would erupt. Stephen would harm my mom. He would shove her to the ground. He would lord over her. He would slap her. He wanted her to know who was boss. She was the only thing he could control and he set about doing it completely.

  Invariably, the police would arrive at the scene. Mom would have called, or a neighbour. Stephen would spend the night in the city jail.