Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  I don’t know how much Gwen revealed to Warren at the time. She made me promise to leave it up to her and not go blurting things out to him. Eventually, I’m sure he heard all of it. He wasn’t the type of boy you held things back from.

  Gwen and Mary became good friends; they worked in the same office at Eaton’s. They rented a big beautiful suite together on the first floor of the Ladywood Block on Edmonton Street. Warren went to live with them there and enrolled after Christmas at Isbister School on Vaughan Street. Tippy joined them in their new home after several weeks at our house. By the following summer Warren walked with a barely discernible limp. And by the time he was in high school he was going by the name of Warren Wynchenko. Comfy Calipers fell by the wayside; Warren went on to become a builder of houses.

  The man who kidnapped Sunny was never found. And we never discovered how he got away. Jackson’s dad had not been involved at all. It was Evelyn Shirde who hired the man to find her a baby. My memory, if that’s what it was, of the man in the tan suit, was no more helpful today than someone else’s memory of him had been eleven years before. I mentioned it to Mr. Foote anyway. He was so happy for us, but he berated himself for the rest of his life for not trying harder to find our girl.

  Mrs. Shirde was judged to be incompetent, needing round-the-clock professional care, and was to be institutionalized for the rest of her life.

  Jackson would stay in touch with Sunny over the years, so to me he became like a half-brother once-removed or something at least as confusing. There was no real name for what we were to each other. It was strange at first, having loved him the way I had. Those kinds of feelings had no place in the new life. It was necessary to begin again with him in a completely different way.

  We never saw Benoit again, after he left on the train to take Tag home. Whether he finally slipped through a fissure or simply went back to Montreal, I don’t know.

  My dad went back to work at his law office in the fall and put off painting the garage till the spring of ’37. He asked Hedley Larkin to give him a hand and they finally got the job done.

  Helen worried me. That summer left her different. It was as though something had been stolen from her, something irreplaceable. Sunny’s sweet new presence went a long way, but there was something sucked out of Helen that never returned. The person I had always looked to for comfort was still there, but I had to search for her anew each time I needed her. Maybe it was someone else’s turn now. I think some people allow themselves to be squeezed dry by those around them and they have to change into someone else in order to continue on. This may be what happened to Helen. And I was one of the ones who squeezed her.

  As I came to see her more clearly, I knew that in my own mind I had skewed her feelings for Jackson. Maybe I hadn’t exaggerated the strength of her love, but I’d skewed it, drastically.

  Sunny never cut her hair after she came to live with us, except to trim the ends. She struggled and she wept for the mother she left in Montreal. But she also laughed and grew strong and pursued a career in nursing, like Aunt Helen. And she has never strayed far from her home. Sunny is a rare beauty; she looks like our mother.

  Eventually I returned to college where I took my arts degree, but I never could decide on a career. Motherhood took care of that and my regrets rear up just occasionally. Fraser Foote became a policeman like his dad and I became Fraser’s wife. It’s 1960 as I write these last words and we are the proud parents of a fine son named Frank. I worried when he was young that he would be snatched away from me as Sunny had been, but Fraser has helped me not to smother him.

  Jackson Shirt — I could never get used to Shirde — returned to Montreal but we continue to see him now and then when he comes to visit Sunny. I still like to think that he never kissed me because he thought of me as a sort of half-sister. Looking at him as time passes I struggle to find the boy I loved so much inside the man’s portly frame. I prefer to close my eyes and conjure up that summer of ’36. I hang on to it like it was a golden time, like it was really something.