The Cuckoo's Child

  “Liv, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  On the way home I’d been rehearsing answers to these questions, simultaneously chiding myself for letting your plight slip to the back of my crowded mind. “I’ve just discovered I’m Jane Doe,” seemed too melodramatic and oblique; “I’m not who you think I am,” too ambiguous; “My parents aren’t my parents,” too bald. Besides, was any of it true? Mentally, I kept tripping over my birth certificate, that worn pink sheet, fragile at the folds, with the careful copperplate writing in each column, unmistakably official, identifying me as Olivia Mary, born April 3, 1940, daughter of William and Mavis Potter. There had to be some rational explanation. Neil was waiting for an answer.

  “I can’t help Stephen,” I said finally. “I’m not a match.”

  Neil’s face crinkled with concern. “Oh, Liv, I’m so sorry. I know it meant a lot to you. But . . . it’s the luck of the draw. There’ll be someone else.”

  I could not accept the comfort.

  “That’s not all. I can’t do anything for Stephen because I’m not related.” I felt Neil’s hands stiffen round mine. “Those tests showed that my parents didn’t produce me, no, they couldn’t have produced me. But I know they produced Stephen. So if what they say is true, Stephen’s not my brother, he’s never been my brother, or half-brother, or even stepbrother. But I have a birth certificate, don’t I? You’ve seen it. How could I possibly have that birth certificate if I’m not my parents’ daughter? It doesn’t make any sense at all.” Neil stared at me, still holding both my hands.

  “That’s really weird,” he muttered finally and belatedly set the lid on the teapot. “There’s got to be a mistake of some sort. The lab must have switched samples or something.”

  “No.” I had already thought of that, but the doctor had shaken his head. There was no possibility of error; they had checked.

  “Maybe the mistake is even further back, then.” Neil’s voice became more urgent as his idea took shape. “You were born at a pretty chaotic time, after all, war and air raids, all kinds of upheaval. Suppose you were switched with another newborn, by accident? Got sent home with the wrong parents? Who would ever be the wiser if it wasn’t noticed right away?”

  “Oh right,” I said. “I’m really a princess! Now I can reclaim my throne! Neil, that only happens in fairy stories.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said stoutly. “I was just reading about a case the other day. A judge is having to decide what to do about two babies who were switched at birth because of some snafu with identity bracelets. They’ve lived for three years with the wrong parents, and nobody the wiser. Now one set of parents wants to change over, and the other won’t agree.”

  “It’s awfully hard to believe in something like that.”

  “But it’s the only thing I can think of to explain how you come to have that birth certificate. Otherwise there has to be something wrong with the certificate. Do you see your dad as a forger?”

  “Give me a break!”

  “There you are, then. You’ll just have to ask your mum. Well, your dad might be a better bet, at least he’s got a grip on the real world. You’ll see them this weekend.”

  “Yes, but Stephen will be there too and the kids. I’ve got to get this sorted out before I talk to Stephen. I’ll have to phone tonight and hope Dad’s there.”

  Fat chance. When I called, it was Mum’s girlish treble, the flat Cockney vowels still distinct after nearly forty years away from London, that breathed in my ear. I can still hear her.

  “Hello, my duck. Now don’t you tell me you’re not coming for Thanksgiving because I don’t want to hear it. I’ve got a lovely bird all ready—it’s a fresh one too, none of your frozen muck—and the giblets and the neck to boil up for a nice drop of stock, there’s nothing like a good stock if you want a good gravy, most people over here haven’t a clue about gravy, putting that brown gluey stuff all over their chips and all, I don’t know how they can face it . . .”

  “Mum!”

  “What, dear? There’s no need to shout, you know, I’m not deaf, well, not really, though . . .”

  “Mum! We’ll be there on Sunday. But I need a word with Dad. Is he around?”

  “No dear, he popped in to Prince George overnight, something to do with his Lions or Kinsmen, I couldn’t tell you, anyway he’s staying overnight with a mate of his, I’m not sure when he’ll be back, daft I call it, he can never sleep in a strange bed, but there you are, he would go, never mind . . .”

  “Mum,” I interrupted, “stop talking and just listen, will you?”

  “What’s the matter, love? You sound so upset. It isn’t anything bad, is it? I’m just so fed up with bad news, there’s never anything good, I was just saying to Dad, not two days ago, or was it yesterday? Never mind, all we seem to hear about is disasters and crimes and wars, doesn’t anything good ever happen? And then there’s Stephen on top of all that, but what can you do, we just have to grin and bear it, that’s what I say, not that it isn’t depressing, but we do seem to have more than our fair share, don’t we?”

  I gave up. Feeble of me, but there was nothing to be gained by telling Mum or asking her questions. You know what she’s like. Any comment, no matter how mundane, prompts the same torrent, the flow instantly deflected by the smallest pebble of memory or association into a thousand smaller streams, straying farther and farther away from the source. Forcing her to concentrate on a specific topic has as much chance of success as nailing jelly to a wall or keeping dropped ball bearings together.

  “It’ll keep until Sunday!” I shouted. “I’ll wait until I see Dad.”

  And Mum allowed that that was probably the best idea. “After all,” she said, “you always did take your troubles to your dad, didn’t you, even when you were a little girl?”

  Yes. And I wonder why that was? My anger took me by surprise, but I put down the phone very gently.

  ELEVEN

  There was never anything as tedious as that journey north. Normally, I would have enjoyed the ferry trip simply because of the licence it offered to do absolutely nothing but enjoy the sea. This time, I was enraged by its slowness, poking along, butting through the waves, easily outpaced by seagulls. Trudging around Vancouver uncovered a conspiracy involving the traffic lights, which I could swear had reproduced like fruit flies since I last saw them, and construction crews removing the very lanes we were occupying. Even at 3:00 PM the Trans-Canada was choked, with more and more vehicles barging in at every on-ramp. When does anyone work in Vancouver? Or do they all simply commute?

  The crowd had thinned by the time we reached Hope, and the country had tilted on its axis to become vertical, infinitely more interesting than the horizontals of the floodplain. But the light was dying, and at the bottom of the canyon deep shadows masked the leaping water and the stark eroded rock that reared from it. The winding road became no more than a yellow pencil of light boring through the darkness, briefly illuminating tiny graveyards with wooden crosses, startled eyes, abandoned orchards, the dead trees bare as midwinter, elderly motels, the shabby little cottages locked tight and dark with NO VACANCY signs flickering overhead. The tunnels were brief orange chutes pitching us out into a darkness even more profound; the huddles of houses and gas stations and cafés merely toys dropped by the road by a forgetful child. We stopped for the night in Cache Creek, a place that always seems to me like those flimsy Western towns built on movie lots, all fronts with nothing behind. The motel was called the Castle Inn. It had wooden battlements and a single phone in the hallway that would permit only outgoing calls. Its basement level was a labyrinth of hallways with hidden alcoves, pictures of soldiers in battledress and old Legion magazines littering the shabby coffee tables.

  Neil and I ate something, somewhere. After that, we went for a walk, searching out the side streets that led away from the two highways that intersected downtown. We followed quiet streets lined with old frame houses held up by vines and creepers. Invariably these roads eventuall
y bumped into the soft curves of the hills and stopped, forcing us to retrace our steps. Finally we found a newer road that climbed one of these hills, winding higher and higher until the houses petered out and there were only streetlights humming over yellow pools on the tarmac as they waited for developments. Up there, the noise of the constant traffic below was insignificant, the neon glare muted. There was nothing but wind and darkness, the breath of sage and savage stars an arm’s-length away.

  “Just one stride and we could step into space,” Neil murmured.

  I’ve lost track of the number of times he has echoed my thoughts.

  “I don’t think there’s anything but space,” I replied. “No earth yet. It’s only the Second Day.”

  I could just make out the pale disk of his face turning toward me.

  “So no people either?”

  His words, ordinary enough, seemed charged with significance. The wind stirred about me and something inside was crumbling, trickling steadily down as if I were an hourglass emptying, leaving behind an empty, echoing shell. In its place, the wondrous darkness flooded in, through my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth, coursing among the roots of my hair, infiltrating every separate pore in my skin, seeking out capillaries and following the snaking blood vessels to my heart and lungs, surging along neural pathways and ganglia and pouring into my brain, filling it up and up until it lapped darkly at the very top of my skull and I disappeared.

  “No,” said my invisible mouth, “I haven’t been invented yet.”

  That night, protected by plywood battlements, I floated once more through the garden and the wood, and, in the hollow house above the water, waited in vain for a sign.

  TWELVE

  The weather that next day was downright insensitive, Stephen. As we got nearer to Vanderhoof, my mood darkened, but the sky was an improbable slab of ultramarine, the poplars, by contrast, lit from within to a shivering incandescent yellow. Hey, I wanted to shout, haven’t you guys heard of the pathetic fallacy?

  Neil, too, was unreasonably cheerful. He kept up a stream of observations, and the flora and fauna obligingly provided him with material: crows doing rollicking barrel rolls; a coyote trotting across the road with a dead chicken in its mouth; a particularly striking stand of aspen posing for maximum effect against some black spruce.

  I couldn’t muster any interest or admiration. The hum of the tires echoed a drone inside my skull, maddening as the whine of a mosquito in a darkened bedroom. What if there’s no mistake? If you aren’t who you thought you were, who are you? Where do you come from? What will become of you, losing yourself, bit by bit? This infuriating litany without responses filled the miles, filled my head with its upturned inflections. It was like being trapped with a Valley Girl in full spate, and the only way to turn her off was to confront my father, but the number of kilometres on the sign posts were shrinking far too slowly.

  At last, we turned left onto Highway 16. For the very first time, I welcomed the sight of Mr. P.G.’s absurd stick figure by the Tourist Information Office. Last lap. Climb up and up out of the bowl that holds Prince George and the stink of the pulp mills, past the farms with their great bales of hay stored in long lines, the newly cleared fields littered with piles of tree trunks waiting to burn, past the track where the trotting horses used to practise and now graze quietly, past the trees crowding to the edge of the road, past the mouths of logging roads, the small dark lakes, the beaver dams, the herd of goats and the Holsteins, past the sawmill and the tiny forest planted in the 1960s, then past the sign that lists all the churches in Vanderhoof, and down and down the long hill, past the Co-op and across the railway line, to the river and home.

  “Damn!” I said as we pulled into my parents’ driveway. Your big pickup was parked by the door. “I hoped we’d get here first. I wanted to talk to Dad before Stephen arrived.”

  Neil looked at me. “Take your time,” he advised. “Choose your moment. It’s waited for you more than forty years, it won’t go away now.”

  But I was like the child who sees all the presents piled under the tree on Christmas morning and is then compelled to wait until after breakfast to open them. Waiting, after all the waiting, seemed unthinkable; my legs were already striding across the driveway, round the side of the house to the back door, the statements, sounding strangely like accusations, and the questions lining up, jostling, just behind my lips. I threw open the kitchen door.

  Mum turned from the stove where she was attending to a large turkey. She was wearing quilted silver oven mitts and held a baster in one hand. Her glasses were steamed up. She looked as if she had been conducting some obscene medical procedure or, alternatively, welding the turkey’s orifices shut.

  “Oh,” she said, “there you are.”

  Mum always had an eye for the obvious.

  “Where’s Neil?” she went on before I could respond.

  “Here,” he said, stepping over the doormat and seizing her in a bearhug, whirling her around, feet off the ground, while she squealed and held the baster out of harm’s way.

  “Put me down, you silly bugger!” she commanded. “I’ll be getting grease all over your nice sweater.”

  She pretended to be cross, pounding his shoulder until he dropped her with a thump, but she was secretly pleased and giddy as a girl. Watching, I felt a familiar stir of envy. You could always tease her the same way, Stephen, but it fell flat whenever I tried it. What was it about me that made playfulness impossible? Around Mum I was still the little girl I had once been, held away, forced inward, but conscious all the time of the watchful eye, the unspoken criticism, and something else, something unnamed. Could it have been fear?

  “I could do with some help with the Brussels,” she said. “There’s a sharp knife in the drawer.”

  I opened my mouth to ask where Dad was, but Jason and Vanessa erupted into the kitchen at that moment.

  “Where are you going?” asked Mum.

  “We’re just going to play,” said Vanessa.

  “Stay away from that river,” said Mum. “If you fall in, I’m not going to jump in to rescue you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” She burrowed in a drawer. “Here,” she said, holding a knife out to me, “the sprouts are on the bottom shelf in the fridge.”

  “I rather wanted to talk to Dad.”

  “He’s in the living room, watching the football with Stephen and Holly. He does like his football, though what he sees in it I don’t know, there’s more stopping than starting in that game, and as for those silly costumes they wear, what’s the point of a game you have to wear armour for, that’s what I say, and those daft towels they have flapping about in front, how could grown men make themselves look so silly? But then, your dad enjoys it, and what’s the harm really, though I have to say it takes up an awful lot of time, and they run on into the regular programs far too often, that’s not fair, is it?”

  I got no help from Neil.

  “That’s for me,” he said.

  “Ask them all if they want something to drink,” called Mum as he disappeared.

  I started on the Brussels sprouts.

  While I was still carving Xs in their stumps, you came into the kitchen with Neil to rummage in the fridge for beer. I can still feel the weight of your arm slung around my shoulders, hugging me close.

  “Hey,” you said, “how’s tricks?”

  “Okay, how about you?”

  “As well as can be expected,” you replied with a grin. “Isn’t that what they say?”

  “You look good,” I said.

  You did look quite good if you didn’t look closely. Your head was furred with a bloom of pale hair and your colour was better. You had regained some weight and no longer looked as if you’d stolen the clothes of a much larger street person. But when I looked closer, I could see a puffiness about your face that was bloated rather than a healthy sleekness, and a wariness in your eyes that had never been there before, as if you were always listening for ominous sounds deep inside, inaudible to anyone els
e, that would herald some minute shifting, a crazing, hairline cracks that would signal imminent catastrophe.

  “Can’t complain,” you said, and I heard the despondency behind your familiar jaunty smile, the resignation forced to masquerade as upbeat optimism for the sake of Holly and the kids. Sadness had drifted down onto your life like tiny particles of silt, and I was about to add another layer to the sediment. In the meantime, like you, I could only take refuge in banalities.

  “Chin up,” I said, “you’re doing great.”

  “He certainly is,” Mum chimed in, looking up from the packet of stuffing she was reading, “and when he gets that transplant he’ll be right as rain, won’t you, love?”

  “Oh, right as rain,” you echoed. You looked out of the window, where a hard grey line now edged the sparkling sky, and grinned at me ruefully. It was so hard to meet your eyes.

  “I have to talk to you,” I muttered, “but not now. I really need to talk to Dad first.”

  Your smile slipped a notch and you held my gaze for a long moment. Then you squeezed my shoulder, nodded, and turned away.

  “I’ll go check on the kids,” you said. “Make sure they’re not drowning.”

  “Put a coat on,” Mum called after you, “we don’t want you getting a chill.”

  I thought I might be able to corner Dad after that, but Mum found me other jobs. I could almost believe she was trying her best to sidetrack me. I polished cutlery, lifted rarely used bowls from the top shelves of cupboards, washed and dried the best glassware, whipped cream and squeezed it into ornate patterns on top of a towering chocolate cake that was standing in for dessert. Mum had long ago fallen into the habit of Thanksgiving dinner but had resisted some of the North American trimmings, like pumpkin pie.

  “Can’t see what all the fuss is about,” she would say scornfully. “Anything that needs that amount of spice and sugar to make it edible can’t be worth eating in the first place.”