I had come home from work to find a rental car with Quebec plates parked out front on the street, Sadhana and Quinn inside the house, deep in discussion, so absorbed they did not hear me unlock the door and approach.
“So you’ll help me?” Quinn was saying. His voice sounded fervent with gratitude.
“Of course, baby, if that’s what you want. It might not be a good idea, but I understand how you feel.” I heard a clink like a cup being set down on a saucer. “If I had a way back to my Papa, to get to know him, I’d do anything I could.”
I turned the corner of the hallway into the living room. “What the hell is going on here?”
Quinn looked terrified, but Sadhana was composed. “Bee, I was just telling Quinn I’m going to help him find Ravi. He wants to meet him, and I think he’s old enough to decide for himself now.”
“No,” I say.
“You don’t have to be involved,” said Sadhana. “If you’re worried about seeing him again.”
“I’m not,” I said, indignant, though fear was clutching at my stomach from the back of my spine. I let my purse drop from my hand to the rug. “You’re the one who always said he’s not even worth knowing.” Having Sadhana firmly in that camp had given me the magnanimous freedom to blame Ravi’s shiftlessness on his youth, to keep up the appearance of giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“And I still think that.” Sadhana looked over at Quinn. “I definitely haven’t changed my mind on that one.” From habit, I examined her neck as her head turned in profile, and the lines were not the sharp, rangy contours presaging danger. “But you’re the one,” she came back to me then, “who said he was just a kid. And people do change.” She picked up her cup and put it down again, looking thoughtful. “I’d like to think that people might change with the right kind of encouragement.”
Quinn, still looking spooked, dropped his hands to his knees, as though trying to brace himself or clamp down his nerves. “Mom,” he said, with a peacemaking air, “we didn’t want you to have to find out about any of this.” I caught Sadhana shooting him a warning look.
“Excuse me?”
“We,” he said, and faltered. “We weren’t going to worry you.”
“So you were going to lie to me. That’s nice.”
Sadhana sighed. She stood up and paced to the kitchen, turning on the tap to run water into her cup. She twisted the faucet closed so tightly the pressure in the pipes gave a little gasp. “I didn’t come here to start a fight.”
“Just to conspire with my kid behind my back?” I felt the shadow sentiment of how I might be feeling if I hadn’t caught them in this dialogue — if I could have just relished the pleasure inherent in a surprise visit from my sister — and the lost enjoyment made me even angrier. She had visited just the weekend before, for Quinn’s seventeenth birthday, and of her own volition had eaten an entire piece of tiramisu. We had toasted Quinn with champagne, and we had stayed up late, laughing on the couch. In the past year, I had felt myself letting go, little by little, of the feeling that I was in charge of my sister’s illness. It was beginning to feel possible to reclaim an uncomplicated, or less complicated, friendship. If the fight wasn’t happening, we might be making supper, or debating which restaurant to go to. Or maybe Sadhana and Quinn would have decided together before I got home, and they would each have taken one of my arms and turned me right around and marched me back out the front door towards our lovely evening together.
“Can’t we talk about why you’re so against this?” Sadhana was taking refuge behind the counter, and Quinn was rotating in his chair so he could keep us both in his sightline. I felt a pang to see how invested he was in the outcome of this discussion. A pang and then a stab of betrayal.
“No. We can’t. This is between me and my son. My son.” I wanted to hit something. Instead I yanked off my coat and tossed it on the couch where Sadhana had been sitting. “I’m the only one who knew him,” I said. I hated saying his name. “So it should be up to me.”
“He’s my father,” said Quinn with hesitation.
“He’s a sperm donor,” I threw back. “He’s nothing.”
“Then why do you care so much?” said Sadhana.
I yelled then. I swore. I told her to mind her own fucking business, and Quinn got up and tried to intervene. I shook his hand off my arm.
“There’s a reason I moved away, you know,” I said, taking a step closer to the kitchen. My voice was raw from screaming. “To get away from you. And it’s about time you took the fucking hint.”
Sadhana put her palms down on the counter, rings clinking. “Q-baby, do you want to get out of this madhouse?” she said.
I snorted. Quinn shot me a guilty look that was half fearful. I glared back. After that he kept his eyes down.
“I think I’d better stay here with my mom.”
A minute later she stood at the doorway in her grey wool coat, which was hanging open. She was wearing a yellow top patterned with purple, brushed silver earrings shaped like birds, dark blue jeans, brown leather boots. She had the keys of the rental car looped around the first two fingers of her right hand.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m leaving.” She was angry, I could tell, angry but calm. I was the one with tears running down my face and collarbone, soaking the neckline of my sweater. My body was tensed, shaking, beyond my control. It always gave way when I tried to be strong. She shook her head at me. “You’re being an idiot, you know.”
“Don’t come back,” I said, reckless, and her eyes hardened, and she was gone.
Ten days later she called on our birthday and asked to speak to Quinn, and I hung up on her. And that was the last time I heard her voice.
“Good morning,” I say to the red-headed stranger passing by in the other direction. He has already said “Good morning” and “Beautiful day.” His wife beams and nods. Evan makes a kind of salute with the brim of his black baseball cap. There is a charming etiquette to hiking. We are all friends because we are together outside. As we crest the rise, I can just see a flash of orange T-shirt in the distance. Quinn has charged ahead on the path.
Evan has his jaw set tight, his hands shoved in his pockets in an effort to seem casual.
“I put it off too long,” I say. “Is that it?”
Evan inhales deeply through his nose, exhales, and says, “Could be.” He’s being short with me today. It isn’t going how he planned. He picked us up at home in his truck and Quinn soon made it clear he was only coming along under extreme protest. He managed to shake Evan’s hand without obvious rudeness when I introduced them, but afterwards he slumped in his seat, grunting responses during the drive over the river, his face glued to the window, knee up against the dashboard. Quinn’s bad behaviour makes me nervous and guilty, as if he has somehow discerned my secret meeting with Ravi, now looming just five days away.
“It’s normal,” I say. “Best to take it slow with these things. He’s always wary at first.”
“Always?” The tip of Evan’s shoe makes contact with a rock, which skitters ahead and bounces off a tree trunk. “How many boyfriends have you introduced him to?”
I’m careful to make eye contact. “Two. Three counting you.” Three, anyway, in recent memory. A few when Quinn was small, all regrettable. But however bright and large Evan looms in my life at the moment, I won’t let him start shining into all the corners of the past. A new man can only try to reach back so far.
“Don’t worry,” he says, catching my look and scratching at the neck of his shirt. There are a few mosquitoes out here, close to the lake. They seem to hang in the air as though suspended by the humidity. “Interrogation over.”
“I’m supposed to be happy I have a guy who can read my mind, right?”
“You got it.” His hand is on my hip for a moment until the path narrows and I take the lead.
My ex-boyfriend Andrew brought bribe
s to his first meeting with Quinn: a chocolate rabbit, since it was close to Easter, and a package of hockey cards, a gift I found almost laughable, given our family’s almost complete ignorance of sports, but which Quinn tore open with enthusiasm and began carrying around in his pocket to show people.
Andrew teased me that I had managed to raise a jock in spite of overwhelming efforts to the contrary. “You should take him to some local games,” he suggested, “or at least sit him down to watch some hockey on television. He’s going to be hopelessly out of touch with the other kids.”
I’d shrugged, but I let Andrew wrestle with the rabbit ears on top of our battered television set to get decent reception for Hockey Night in Canada. It became something we did together on Saturdays, all three of us ranged on the couch like benched players, Quinn and Andrew taut and edgy, as though they might actually get tapped for the ice. After Andrew and I broke up, I tried to keep watching with Quinn, but he quickly became exasperated with trying to elbow my nose out of a book.
“That’s a penalty,” I’d say, when I felt his fists battering the cover. “That’s two minutes in the box.”
But he just sighed in a theatrical way and exhorted me to at least pretend I was paying attention. “If you don’t, I’m calling Andrew and telling him you want him back.” He used his hands to lever himself all the way back on the couch, and his legs stuck straight out as he kept them from touching the floor. He had his arms folded in a posture of severe concentration.
“You’re way too cynical for an eleven-year-old,” I told him.
Another man, Toby, a predecessor to Andrew and a six-week placid mistake, met Quinn by accident when he was dropping me off after our date. Quinn had fooled the babysitter into thinking he was asleep, then sprung himself on us at the front steps as soon as her car pulled away. “Hey mister,” he said, like some ragtag urchin about to plead for change. “Do you want to stay and play Go Fish? It’s better with three.”
Toby had been well informed of Quinn’s existence but still seemed shocked by the sight of his small, bouncing person. He handed Quinn the Styrofoam-packed leftovers of our meal in Little Italy. “Sorry kid, I’ve got to head out right away. Here’s a doggie bag, though.”
I plucked it from Quinn’s hands before he could go on a midnight tear. We were night owls, both of us, and it was bad enough contending with my own sleeplessness, let alone that of an eight-year-old fuelled by spaghetti and meatballs.
“Goodnight, Bee,” said Toby, waving, backing down the path to the sidewalk before we’d had a proper farewell. Sadhana would have said he was running scared. After that night, things tapered off decisively, and I felt so relieved that I considered instituting a policy whereby any gentleman caller would meet Quinn on the first date, just to root out the weaklings. But when Quinn wouldn’t stop asking about Toby, even after those unremarkable few minutes, I gave up the idea altogether.
Evan pauses from time to time to crouch at a bloom or a fern or to tap the side of a tree. He doesn’t volunteer a speech but I oblige by asking, not so much because I want to know but because I love to hear him say words like sap and canopy and wrestle with his natural reluctance to speak more than two or three sentences at a time. I wonder whether this reticence is straightforward modesty or just the quietness of being in the woods, or maybe even someone before me who tamped down that eagerness with her disinterest.
“This here’s a grey birch,” he says, pointing. “And a Canadian hemlock. This is fun, all these different trees out here I’m not used to. East versus west.” Then he looks a little sheepish.
“No, it is fun,” I say. I look for a way to join in and am surprised to find one. I grab his arm. “There’s a trillium.” We stoop to it, and it looks like a winged white tongue in the maple shade, its three pale petals bent open in a shrug. A ghostly thing, Ontario’s flower.
He says, “I once picked a western red lily for my mother. A gorgeous bloom, just like the one on the flag.”
“The flag?”
“The Saskatchewan flag. Of course, you’re not supposed to pick them. She told me, and I felt like a criminal. Just utterly miserable.”
“Poor kid.”
“I think she felt bad telling me, but she knew I would have run out and grabbed all I could find if she’d been nothing but pleased.”
As the path leads up to higher ground, the air around us gets warmer. Watching Evan turning brown in the sun, his flesh that I want to press to my lips, I wonder how much of love is a simple hunger. The desire to take something inside ourselves. “You and some olive oil,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“It must be time for lunch.”
I’m pinning my hopes on lunch, since food is the one thing that might keep Quinn at hand long enough for Evan to speak to him. Evan is so steeled for disappointment that the only thing that might catch him off guard is a lack of opportunity. Quinn has been outstripping us since we first set out from the truck.
We stop at a spot near a cliff face with picnic tables and brown garbage cans wide as rain barrels. It is a perfect day and we are all terribly flawed. The sun on my face as we come into the clearing feels like a reproach for my bad humour. A family at a table nearby has a brindle boxer that circles the rest area, ID tags jingling. Every time it comes close, it lets Evan grab hold of its jowls and listens, tongue lolling, as Evan assures him he is a good boy, such a good boy, in his absurd affectionate doggy voice.
“Did you guys ever have a pet?” asks Evan, as the dog wheels back to its family. He holds out his hands and I splash out some of the contents of my water bottle as he rubs them together.
“No,” I say. “Quinn wanted a dog but I wasn’t convinced we were responsible enough to look after one.” Quinn says nothing, watching the family with the boxer. There must be six or seven of them, adults and children, all crowded around the table, the smallest kids getting up now and again to run with the dog before being called back in French.
I pass around the food, and over the egg-on-pumpernickel sandwiches there is some frank appraisal I can hardly bear to watch. Quinn is giving Evan what I can tell is meant to be a highly aggressive stare, though as a cop Evan has surely seen worse. Evan, for his part, is meeting Quinn’s gaze and eating even more slowly than I am, perhaps suggesting that he is more than willing to drag out the meal past its natural conclusion.
“Gorgeous day for this,” I say. “Hiking, I mean. Isn’t it, Quinn?” He shrugs. The conversation from the other table is so boisterous, so unflagging and punctuated with obvious warmth, that it is an embarrassing contrast to our staid lunch. Evan’s chewing is the loudest sound, rivalled only by the twitching of Quinn’s boot against the wooden leg of the table.
Finally I say, “Another sandwich?” I have everything in my knapsack on the bench beside me, doling out the food to keep Quinn from rushing. They both reach out and I give Quinn his sandwich first, Evan’s a second later.
Evan takes a couple of contemplative bites, one elbow on the table, then says, “So your mother tells me you’re heading to university next year.”
“Sure am.”
“Looking forward to it?”
“Hell, yeah.” Quinn crumples the wax paper into a ball. “I guess you didn’t do the whole university thing, being a cop and all.”
“I did. Criminology.” The dog traces another wide loop around the clearing, and Evan’s eyes move to it for a moment as it flashes past. “You’re right, though, you only need high school, but I’d like to be a detective.”
“When you grow up, you mean?”
“Quinn!” I am so alarmed I look at Evan, not my son, but Evan seems calm.
“Sure,” he says. “It’s still what I want to be. But it isn’t as easy as just saying you want to solve crimes. You’ve got to put in some time first. But a degree helps.”
Quinn grunts, and Evan finishes his sandwich. He holds out his hand f
or Quinn’s wax paper, which I end up handing to him, and he carries our garbage to the nearest trash can. I start hissing at Quinn when Evan is a few paces away.
“Please. Please be nice. Would it kill you to be nice?”
Quinn has his arms folded on the table, and he lowers his chin to his wrists. It’s hard for him to slump so far, given his height. He’s putting in a real effort. “Maybe. Would you risk the life of your only son?”
I’m huffing my way into a lecture when Evan comes back and cuts me off. He touches my shoulder. “Let’s not worry about it now, and just enjoy the rest of the afternoon, shall we?” He nods at Quinn. “Maybe we can save the getting-to-know-each-other stuff for another day.”
Quinn says, “That’s okay. I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you again.”
The hard line of Evan’s mouth betrays a moment of anger, but he shrugs it away as he moves his hands to his hips. His broad shoulders are square, like a drill sergeant’s. “Right,” he says. “Time to walk it off.”
With Evan shooing us, we start single file along a new trail that should close the circle and bring us back around to where we parked on the other side. It is an easy trail, but long. We are working our way through the wedge of land that is Gatineau Park itself, the rugged shoulder of the valley. Across from Ottawa, just over the river that marks Ontario’s border with Quebec, the park is a place that seems both in and out of time, an effect that fluctuates as we pass in and out of view of other hikers. There is a liminal sense in its silence, an indifference grown right into the trees as to whether their roots are buried in land that at different times might be described as French or English.
“Is that how you are with your young offenders? Mr. Nice Guy?”
Evan seems more relaxed since Quinn sniped at him. Quinn is still ahead of us, maintaining a lead that almost has me at a jog as we try to keep him in sight, though Evan, with his long legs, is still at an easy stride.
“I just keep trying to put myself in his shoes,” he says. “If it were my mom.”
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