by David Bergen
And too, there was the unexpected shame she felt. During the court case, Ilke’s father had been present, flanked by his own parents. They had made quite the trio, finely dressed, smelling of money, and against her will, Hope had found herself sneaking glances at them, even admiring the new grandmother’s clothes, her hair, the cashmere wrap around her shoulders. She realized that Rudi and Ilke would be very fortunate. They would want for nothing.
Penny had taken time off work at the hospital to join her parents in the courtroom. She sat beside Hope and took notes in a little beige book. Hope wondered what the point was. What would she do with all this useless information? Penny, it turned out, had little empathy for Conner, who she felt had always been sloppy in life and probably knew subconsciously what mischief Charlotte had been up to. And if he hadn’t? Well, that was idiocy in itself. Penny felt sorry for the children. Adults, she liked to say, tended towards greed and disorder. Children were inclined towards health. Somewhere, perhaps at the age of nineteen or twenty, the curiosity and life force of the child was tossed aside for a mind-numbing existence of acquisition and complacency. She knew this because she herself was an adult.
Penny would not have children. She had married a man named Ted, a biophysicist who claimed that the world was nearing a sixth extinction. He announced this with perverse glee. Well, thought Hope, of course he didn’t mind that the world was ending. He had no progeny. He was fifteen years older than Penny, which made him almost closer in age to mother than to daughter. He was solid and faithful and boring. This was Penny’s description, and she took great delight in it. She found no significance in beauty or wealth or age. The opinions of others carried little weight. She liked Ted because he had no expectations of her.
Hope felt that she was disappearing. Rudi and Ilke represented her lineage. And now, how would she be remembered? This was not a new feeling. Her whole life had been one of disappearance, of slipping silently through the world, unnoticed. She told this to Penny one afternoon in the middle of the winter, after they had left the courtroom and stopped for coffee at a nearby café on Broadway. They were alone. Penny, on that day, appeared to be quite curious about her mother’s feelings. She had her beige notebook, and her pen, and she opened it occasionally and jotted something down. Hope said, “When you were little, we had to tear your notebooks away from you. Otherwise, you would have forgotten to eat and sleep. What are you doing?”
“Oh, just keeping track.”
“Of what?”
“Of you.”
“Oh, why ever?”
The previous summer Penny had taken a month off to fly to a writers’ colony in Italy, where she worked at a collection of short stories that, she explained to her mother later, were quite bad. Full of artifice and dead ends and characters who spoke in paragraphs. Paragraphs. She had worked with an older American writer who one night after a late dinner said that he would like to sleep with Penny. He found her very attractive.
“Is it my breasts you like then? Or perhaps my ass? Or is it my crooked bicuspid? Put a bag over my head and the bicuspid would no longer exist. And would you still want to sleep with me? I prefer older men.”
“But I am older.”
“Not old enough.” And she kissed the writer on the cheek and said good night.
She called Ted that night in Canada and told him about the writer, and together they had a good laugh. She came away from the conversation thinking that Ted wouldn’t have minded if she had slept with the writer.
She told Hope that the following day she sat in the shade of a lemon tree, and all in a three-hour rush, she wrote a story about a plastic surgeon who attaches the heads of horses to young female bodies and keeps the women in a stable. The American writer loved it. “You can publish this,” he announced, and she did.
When Hope read the story, printed in a small magazine out of Boston, she was mystified. Why didn’t her daughter just stick to ears and noses and throats? She was a doctor, not a writer.
The routine was for Conner to drop by on the Saturdays when he had the children, and the family would go out to the planetarium or the zoo and then return to the apartment for dinner. Hope would cook hot dogs or Kraft Dinner or she might make French toast. One Saturday, the family sat around the table and Rudi announced that he had two fathers. He said this in a matter-of-fact manner, his small mouth working around the word “fathers.” Conner lifted his head sharply and asked, “Who’s your favourite father?”
“Oh, Conner, don’t,” Hope said. Her son seemed tired and worn out. He was losing his hair, which surprised her. She didn’t recognize him at times. She wondered if this happened to other mothers—that they arrived at a point in their lives where their children had become strangers.
“Don’t,” Ilke repeated. She had discovered imitation as the route to learning a language.
Later, alone in the kitchen, Conner told Hope that Charlotte was thinking of moving to Toronto. The kids would go along.
“Can she do that?” she asked.
Conner shrugged. “I’m not sure I care anymore.”
“Yes, you do.”
And it appeared he did, because two weeks later, Conner took the children and ran, driving west through the mountains to Vancouver. Hope learned of this on Sunday night when Charlotte called to ask if she’d seen him. The children had been dropped off at a friend’s house and Conner had picked them up without telling her. She was frantic, on the verge of hysteria.
“I hope you’re not colluding with him, Hope.”
“How or why would I collude? I haven’t seen them. You should know, Charlotte, that he was terrified you were going to take the children to another city.”
“I’m not moving. Anyway, they’re my children, not his. Your son has gone crazy, Hope. He threatened to kill me. And the other day someone burned down my shed. I’m sure it was him.”
“I don’t think so. That’s not Conner.”
“Then you don’t know your own son, Hope.”
Conner phoned Hope and Roy on Monday evening and said that he was staying in a motel on Vancouver Island. His voice was muted, the sound of the television in the background.
“The police are looking for you, Conner. And the children. You won’t hurt them, will you? This is what Charlotte thinks. And everyone else.”
“The only person I want to hurt is Charlotte. I could kill her.”
“Yes, well. She said you threatened her. And burned her shed. Surely you didn’t.”
When he did not answer Hope said, “That won’t do. You must go to the police there on the island and give your name and explain the situation. Perhaps they will be lenient.”
“I doubt that.”
“Think of Rudi and Ilke. They must be terrified.”
“Not at all. They think it’s great. Out of the clutches of their dragon mother.”
“You’re angry, Conner. Tell me where you are.”
“Why, Mom? You’re not going to call the police.”
“No. Give me your address. I’m going to come and get you. You stay put. I don’t want you to move. Wait for me, do you promise?”
Years later, when she thought back on her trip to Victoria, she recalled the sushi she ate on the flight from Calgary to Vancouver, something she had never touched before. And the young mother with a baby who sat beside her on the short hop over to Victoria—the baby was a squalling fat thing who repulsed Hope, even though she smiled and cooed and said, “Watchanamelittlefella?” as she chucked its ugly chin. And the light scattering across the snow of the Rockies, which reflected the shadow far below of her own airplane, a fleeting indication of her own existence.
She found Conner and the children huddled before a small television in a questionable motel at the edge of Victoria. The children clung to her and she thought, These are frightened things. That night she took everyone out for pizza. She had brought the children gifts—a puzzle for Ilke and Duplo for Rudi—and as they played she told Conner that she planned to phone Charlotte that nigh
t. He did not argue. He was out of money, had not shaved, and his clothes were dirty. “You foolish boy,” she said, and she turned back to the children.
Driving back alone with Conner’s car through the Rockies and across the Prairies, she imagined herself as a migrating animal that, while emancipated for the moment, was actually guided by some homing instinct that overpowered any notion of free will. She played Conner’s music, much of which she did not like, and then found under the seat a cassette of Kris Kristofferson, and she grew very fond of it. She dawdled. She drank coffee in truck stops where the drivers sat alone and ate beef. She took rooms along the highway, in motels with names such as The Flamingo and Hark Back Inn. She talked to Roy every night and gave him an update on her progress. She napped by the roadside and woke with a start and drove on, along a thin black ribbon. She wondered how she had never managed to do this before, to drive alone and with complete freedom on the Number One Highway that crossed Canada.
Charlotte had flown out to the coast and then flown with the children back to Winnipeg. The police had arrested Conner, and Hope had made sure that Rudi and Ilke did not witness this. After the mayhem had subsided, Hope sat in Conner’s car and cried briefly, and this had surprised her, because ever since her time in Winkler, she had lost her ability to cry. But now she cried. And then stopped.
One evening, as the light fell away, she took a room on the outskirts of Regina in one of those chain hotels. She sat in a chair by a window that looked out onto the parking lot and nibbled at a takeout salad. A memory had arrived that day, during the last hour on the road, of Conner at the age of twelve. He had been caught shoplifting a hockey stick from the local hardware store. The strange thing was that Conner didn’t like hockey, had never been interested, and yet there he was, stealing a stick. She had driven over to talk to the store owner, Ben Fehr, in his office while Conner sat on a chair beside her. Ben said that he wouldn’t press charges. He trusted that Hope and Roy would set the boy straight. He looked at Conner. “You’ve got good parents, son, and you shouldn’t be humiliating them in this way.” Then he addressed Hope. “This isn’t the first time, Mrs. Koop. It so happens that two months ago Conner and I ended up in this same room. He was to tell you, and it disappoints me that he didn’t.”
“I’m disappointed as well, Ben.” She turned to address Conner, who appeared to believe that the conversation the adults were having was not about him at all. He seemed uninterested. “Why didn’t you tell me, Conner?”
He shrugged.
Hope felt that she was failing in every way.
“Your boy is spoiled,” Mr. Fehr said. He shook his head and said the word “shiftless.”
She nodded. She did not defend Conner. The hardest part was that Conner had witnessed her lack of fortitude. She had been devastated then, and she felt the residue of shame now.
Approaching the lights of Winnipeg the following April evening, she wished that she might have the courage to just keep driving. She did not miss Roy. Or her children. Or the small apartment. But she went home. First, she stopped and picked up some hot food for Roy, and then she brushed her teeth in the restaurant bathroom, tidied her hair, and inspected her makeup. She was sixty. Still young enough to care how she looked as she returned to her husband of forty years.
For two months Hope did not visit her son in prison. She sent cigarettes and biscuits and cakes along with Roy, but she herself stayed away in protest. She was still angry. When Roy came home from his weekly prison visits, she sat down across from him and asked after her son. The details he offered her were so bare that her imagination filled in the blank spots and she pictured Conner overwhelmed by the chaos and darkness of prison life. She visited him only once. Sat in the large room where visitors were allowed and folded her hands in her lap and studied her boy, who was thinner, with even less hair. She was aware of the other families gathered in bunches, of conspiratorial whispers, of children playing. She and Roy were the oldest people in the room. This fact was sobering.
“How’s the food?” she asked. When all other topics were off limits, focus on eating.
Conner shrugged. “Not French cuisine,” he said.
She laughed, a quick short yelp. “You never liked fancy food in the first place.”
Conner leaned forward, twisting his hands together. “Have you heard from Charlotte? The kids?”
“Not a peep.”
“I write them letters, but I don’t know if Charlotte lets the kids know. Could you call on them, Mom? See them?”
“Oh, Conner. I don’t think so. There’s a restraining order. You know that. Fact is, you aren’t supposed to even write letters.”
And so it was. Not only was Conner denied access to the children, but so were Hope and Roy. It was a shame, she thought. As if Rudi and Ilke would choose not to see their grandparents. Upon hearing of the restraining order she had fallen into a depression, and then lifted herself up through anger and rage, and then tumbled again, and finally settled upon resignation, which was a difficult and hard-earned emotion, according to Emily Shroeder.
“People see resignation as giving up,” Emily said. “It isn’t. It’s acceptance of a situation that is beyond your control. You have accepted the loss of your grandchildren. Which doesn’t mean you can’t picture them moving through the world, playing piano, going to school, making friends, thinking of Grandma and Grandpa Koop. Who knows, when they are older, they may come back to you.”
Penny turned up her nose at what she called Emily’s fatalism. The other children might also have disagreed, but they weren’t around. Judith still called regularly from Paris, especially now that Conner was in prison. And Melanie was progressing in the world of high jump, training for the upcoming Olympics. One Saturday afternoon, Hope watched a track and field competition beamed out of Sydney, and there Melanie was, all limbs, mostly naked except for little bottoms and a tiny tank top, a twinkling stud in her belly button, no breasts to speak of. What did the girl eat? How elastic she was, so focused, rocking on her heels before beginning her approach, and then the colt-like steps, the bounce, and the takeoff into the Fosbury flop. Hope knew of the flop only because Melanie had explained it to her during a rare visit. She saw two of Melanie’s attempts, one successful, one not, before the camera switched to the steeplechase, and even then, as the runners moved around the track, there was the occasional glimpse of the high jump pit and the girls, perhaps Melanie, warming up.
Hope believed that Melanie would not have been as harsh as Penny in judging Hope’s notion of resignation. Melanie had always been more easy-going, forgiving, like-this like-that. She made few demands, except the singular demand she made upon herself to jump as high as possible. Penny was more rigorous and less sympathetic. In fact, there were moments when Hope believed that her middle daughter was simply too cold and calculating, that her expectations were too high. As a mother, it was much easier to love a child who had failed, because that was the child who came back home and said, “Hold me.”
Resignation, quite simply, brought peace. It was as if by saying “I am incapable,” she became capable once again. The sweetness of existence could be discovered only by forgetting herself. She now preferred to live without any thought of the future. She scampered, like a fox, between bliss and oblivion.
Roy died at night, in bed beside Hope. She woke, as usual, around 6 a.m. and knew immediately that he had left her. He was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Roy?” she whispered. “Are you there?”
Nothing.
She lay still, staring at the tiny grey hairs in his left ear. His lips were parted slightly, his eyes open.
“Oh,” she whispered, and she lifted a hand and touched his face. And pulled it away. She slid sideways, away from him. She sat up and studied him. In death he was still Roy, or so she wanted to believe.
She got out of bed and tiptoed to the door, opened it, stepped down to the bathroom and peed. She didn’t know what to do. She walked back to the bedroom,
paused, and then gently knocked. “Roy?” she called out. She stepped back into the room. He lay as before. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached under the blanket and took his hand. This was not his hand. Still, she held it and waited. Then she lifted the hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
For the next hour she sat with him and patted his leg through the blanket, and she tried to will herself to rise and go to the phone, but what was the point? There was no rush. Roy wasn’t going anywhere. Neither was she. She talked to him softly. “Here I am and there you are and who knew? Did you? I’m sorry to have slept through your passing. How lonely it must have been, me lying asleep beside you while you just floated away. In a bit, not yet, but in a bit, I’m going to call Penny, who will know exactly what to do. She’s always so efficient and competent, not like me, who seemed to hold you back with my needs. There were times, though I’ve never told you this, when I thought, He should have married a different woman, a woman who understood money, a woman with more love, more forgiveness. A bigger heart. But you got me, didn’t you. And now you’ll never know better.” She stopped talking. Waited. Then started again. “Funny thing, how one evening you’re eating fish and go to bed and kiss Hope good night, and the next morning you find yourself like this, in this state, and your wife sits and holds your hand and talks to you in a manner that she never talked to you before. With no expectations, no repercussions, just little old me throwing words down into a deep dark well. Can you hear? I think you can. I’m sorry I wasn’t better and I’m sorry I wasn’t the best. Not for trying, you know. My repo man. My sweet car dealer. You with the most beautiful hair. Tall and big-hearted and gorgeous. Goodbye.”
She waited. Placed his hand back inside the blanket. Closed his mouth and his eyes. That was better. She realized that she would have to begin making up her own life, by herself, working it out minute by minute. Starting now.