Mother Love

by L. R. Wright

  “Take a look at these, will you?” Alberg handed over the reports, and Sokolowski flipped through them. Alberg took off his own glasses and slid them into his jacket pocket. “It’s getting more frequent and more aggressive,” he said.

  “I’ll look into it,” said the sergeant heavily.

  Alberg looked at him more closely. “You’re sure you’re going to be all right?” Sokolowski’s wife, Elsie, had recently left him, a state of affairs the sergeant found as bewildering as it was painful.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Work’s the best thing.”

  Not always, thought Alberg now, listening to Cassandra splashing in the bathtub. Sometimes a holiday was the best thing. And retirement—who knows—might be even better. “How’re you doing in there?” he called out.

  “Fine,” she called back.

  Maybe she’d start to sing, he thought hopefully. That would be a sure sign of recovery. He kept listening but heard only splashing and then the sound of the tub draining.

  ***

  The next day they drove east through range after range of mountains. In the national parks a small white flag had been planted wherever an animal had blundered onto the highway, been struck by traffic, and blundered off, to die: there was a forest of small white flags. High wire fences had been raised wherever possible to keep elk and moose and mountain goats and mountain sheep from wandering onto the road. Yet twice Alberg pressed hard on the brakes to avoid elk, who moved regally out of the woods and across four lanes of pavement, in front of several cars that had managed to stop in time. “Christ,” said Alberg, watching the huge animals disappear into the forest on the opposite side of the highway.

  From the eastern boundary of Banff National Park the land descended rapidly, becoming rolling foothills and then prairie. It was late afternoon and the sun slanted rich and golden upon Calgary. Alberg observed again that there was something different about the light in southwestern Alberta. More than mere illumination, it had substance and texture. It existed in and of itself, as tangible as if it had taste and fragrance.

  He had suggested that they stay in one of the downtown hotels, but Cassandra, although she at first agreed, had changed her mind by the time they reached the city. “I want to stay in something that’s only one story high,” she said firmly.

  “You got it,” said Alberg, and he headed for a motel on Sixteenth Avenue.

  When they were settled in their room Alberg called Maura, to ask if anybody else was giving Janey silver, and learned that his attendance was required the following afternoon at a wedding rehearsal.

  “The stores are open late tonight,” he said to Cassandra when he was off the phone. “I guess we better go shopping.”

  They bought a sterling silver service for four, in a pattern the salesperson assured them would be available throughout eternity.

  Chapter 4

  ABBOTSFORD

  Probably she was no longer watched. Not after seven years. But if she ever was, thought Maria, this was the most likely time—right after the arrival of the check.

  So for a couple of days she did nothing. This was extremely difficult. She felt a strong sense of urgency.

  (The knock on her door had reverberated through the house like thunder. She had looked through the window—and there he stood: her unlikely nemesis.)

  On Friday morning Maria sat on the sofa with her photo album. She studied each page intently, as if she’d never seen it before, and then she added the new picture.

  (He had come to threaten her, or that’s what he thought; but instead he had brought salvation.)

  Maria closed the album. For a few seconds she looked at the wall, at nothing.

  Sitting in her small apartment, seven years having vanished like early morning mist, Maria looked blindly into the past and acknowledged that she had done wrong. She had tried to protect herself and her daughter, but she had failed them both; she knew that now. She had had a failure of courage. Realizing this, it was now as though she had awakened from a troubled sleep, relieved to escape a nightmare, only to be told that she had murdered in the night.

  SECHELT

  In front of a small house on a large lot on the outskirts of town, Belinda’s husband, Raymond, was washing the maroon-and-silver cab of his Mack truck, whose name—“Buster”—was written in elegant script on each of the doors. Raymond, who was twenty-five, was a couple of inches short of six feet tall and had long legs and broad shoulders. He was wearing a T-shirt, baggy sweatpants, and running shoes, and he was scrubbing that truck, making it gleam, making it shine, polishing it for the trip to Penticton later that morning.

  Raymond, laboring, was getting hard, as usual, which was why he was wearing the baggy sweatpants. He wondered if anybody else in the world got turned on by washing his goddamn truck. He tried to think of something else, but no dice. The sunlight fractured itself in the chrome, blinding him for an instant, and Raymond polished harder—and then the front door of the house opened and Belinda came outside, wearing jeans and a denim shirt, carrying a tray.

  Raymond stopped, startled. “What’s this?”

  “Coffee and a cinnamon bun.”

  “For me?”

  “Who else?”

  Raymond sat on the front step. “Thanks, hon,” he said, and started eating, taking glances at Belinda, who had sat down on the lawn, just out of his reach. She pushed her long brown hair away from her forehead and stretched out her legs in front of her. Raymond liked to look at Belinda in profile. He liked to be able to look at her and think about her at the same time, which wasn’t really possible when she was looking back at him. There was something disconcerting about the way Belinda regarded people. Her gaze was so direct that it was alarming even to Raymond.

  “What’re you going to do while I’m gone?” he said.

  She drew her feet toward her and sat cross-legged, plucking at the dry brown grass. “You’re only going to be away for a day, Raymond. And I work tonight.”

  She sounded preoccupied, and this worried him. Belinda’s powerful directness was something easily used as a shield. She was reticent—Raymond was the talker in the family. And he often felt that his reach, when he tried to get her to open up to him, was clumsy.

  He slid to the end of the step and put his hand on her back, firmly, wanting her to feel reassured. A few seconds passed before she turned to him.

  “I don’t want to cause you distress, Raymond.”

  He nodded, as if he understood. He felt cold, despite the warmth of the day, and found that this time he didn’t want her to open up.

  Bewildered, Raymond put his arm around his wife and pulled her close.

  CALGARY, ALBERTA

  At lunch that day Cassandra said to her brother, Graham, “What’s it like, being in your fifties?”

  He ate some of his linguine with clams and then laughed. “That’s right. It’s coming up in a few weeks, isn’t it? The big five oh.”

  His face was a touch florid, she noticed, and more wrinkled than when she had last seen him; but his hair was still thick and dark. Maybe he dyed it.

  “You worry about your retirement, your old age,” said Graham. “That’s what the fifties are all about.”

  “It sounds like a hoot,” said Cassandra dryly, dragging her spoon through her clam chowder. She imagined she heard her mother’s voice, telling her not to play with her food. A very old memory.

  Graham looked at her more closely. “I hope it’s okay to ask this, but—are you all right now, Cassandra?” He was eyeing her uneasily across the table. “It’s hard to tell, just talking on the phone.”

  He looked concerned, she granted him that. And he probably was concerned, since he’d driven all the way down from Edmonton to see her. But he also looked furtively curious. It was an expression Cassandra had seen on other faces. He was wondering exactly what had happened to her.

  “Yes. I’m all right.” There was no need to tell him that she couldn’t be alone.

  “What an awful thing
,” said Graham, shaking his head.

  Cassandra, when she had to refer to it, told her story in one sentence: “I was abducted by a psychopathic librarian.” Abducted, kept prisoner, bizarrely courted by a person of wealth and intelligence who also happened to be insane. Now, watching her brother eating his pasta, she thought Graham was probably one of those people who couldn’t help but think that whatever had happened to her had been in some measure her own fault.

  “Are you getting therapy?” her brother asked.

  Cassandra ducked her head to hide her anger and concentrated on her salad. “I don’t need therapy,” she said flatly. “What I need is to see the son of a bitch thrown in jail for the rest of his natural life. Which I’m sure will happen. When are you coming out to see Mom?”

  “We thought we’d invite her to come to us for Christmas.”

  “A good idea whose time has passed,” said Cassandra. “She’s afraid to travel alone now.”

  “Oh, come on, Cassandra. You’d take her to the airport there, we’d pick her up here—nothing to it.”

  “You think her heart condition’s gone into remission, after eighteen years?” she snapped.

  “I think she’s found a way to live with it,” he said. “I don’t think you give her enough credit.”

  Cassandra put down her spoon. Graham and Millie hadn’t been to Sechelt for three years. Her mother hadn’t been to Edmonton for five. Cassandra brushed at her lap and looked at her watch. “I think I’d like a martini,” she said to her brother.

  ABBOTSFORD

  Maria took only one precaution: she left in the middle of the night. In the afternoon she cleaned out her bank account and rented a car, no longer concerned about being traced, and parked it a couple of blocks away. She packed her things in bags and boxes during the evening. Shortly after midnight, when she knew the elderly woman would be asleep, she moved the car to the front of the house and loaded it. She left a note and a check on the kitchen table and at 2:00 a.m., Maria drove away.

  From her bedroom window, the landlady watched her leave.

  It was shortly after three when Maria left the Upper Levels Highway and weaved her way south down the mountainside into West Vancouver.

  She parked in a narrow street and sat still for a moment, collecting herself and visualizing this collection process, which was a gathering together of her several lives. She would live them all concurrently, for once, and then bring them all to a tidy, concurrent end: it was what she should have had the boldness to do seven years earlier.

  She started to get out of the car—then thought: What if he’s moved? What if she knocked on his door in the middle of the night and roused somebody else, roused a stranger?

  Maria closed the door and hugged herself. There were bound to be snags, unforeseen events around which she would have to improvise. She would wait in her car.

  Such tunnels of danger she must push herself through. Like the fire escapes in Winnipeg, she thought.

  Later, in the gray beginning of the day, she stepped out of the car. She went through the gate and across a wide lawn, leaving a trail of footprints in the silvery dew, and down to the house. Nobody responded when she knocked on the door. But everything she saw through the windows was familiar, so at least he still lived there. He must be away, she thought. She would have to do things in reverse order, that was all. She retraced her steps, climbed into her car, and headed back up to the highway and the ferry terminal at Langdale.

  She didn’t notice the small blue car that followed her.

  SECHELT

  Three hours later, Maria collected the key to her new apartment and moved her bags and boxes inside, stumbling frequently on the stairway in her haste. When the last item had been unloaded she leaned against the locked door and closed her eyes, profoundly weary. Then she set to work, unpacking.

  The suite was bright and sunny. From the living room balcony she could glimpse Trail Bay, and the bedroom looked out across rooftops to the wooded hillsides flanking the inlet. Maria wasn’t interested in the view, however. She had never liked Sechelt.

  The place was clean, too, and furnished just as the agent had described over the phone. Maria first laid the photo album on a shelf in the bookcase. Then she took a kitchen chair into the bedroom. She put it in a corner and carefully placed the doll on it, where she would be able to see it from the bed. She whispered to it for a moment, before putting her clothes away.

  Maria was in the small kitchen, digging in the last remaining box in a search for the coffeepot, when she looked back at the doll, and the reality of what she had done struck her, hard. She was flooded with exultation and robbed of breath. She leaned heavily against the countertop, both hands pressed upon it, staring at the floor and seeing her daughter, seeing Belinda, glimpsed through windows, followed on the street. Belinda. Striding on strong brown legs, the sun igniting sparks of gold in her dark brown hair. Belinda. Twenty-one years old last month.

  Maria turned and slumped against the countertop, wiping tears from her cheeks.

  Chapter 5

  BELINDA, HOUSECLEANING the next day in preparation for Raymond’s return, paused, several newspapers in her hand, and listened. But no. It was too early. She picked up another paper and dumped the pile of them in the recycling box.

  She did the bathroom next. And then she dusted.

  She stopped in the middle of her cleaning to acknowledge a fondness for many aspects of her present life. It was like the sixty seconds of silence offered up on Remembrance Day, though: a self-conscious moment of synthetic mourning. A mere pause, her attention elsewhere. Life really was a killer, she thought. One second there was still time; an instant passed—and it was too late.

  Belinda rubbed her palms on her jeans, drying them, and lifted her hair away from her neck for a minute. She was sweating, even though it wasn’t a hot day.

  Their rented house was very small. It had a kitchen with a tiny eating area, a cramped living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, one of which Raymond occasionally referred to as the nursery—certainly a crib was about the only kind of bed it could have accommodated. They were using it now as a storage room. Poor Raymond, she thought, gazing in at the jumble of boxes and empty suitcases that lived there.

  She closed the door on the clutter and started to work on the kitchen. When she’d cleaned the counters and the sinks and the top of the stove, she began polishing the window and stopped again, to listen intently, her heart hovering somewhere between her chest and her throat...but no, she hadn’t heard his truck.

  The best thing about the house was the main bedroom, which was actually a sunporch. It was long and wide, and the top half of each of its outside walls was made of glass. One of Belinda’s favorite things was making love with Raymond while lying in a pool of summer sun, with more sunlight streaming in upon them, licking at their skin: hot flickers of light and passion. She put her hand palm down in the middle of the mattress, let it rest there like a water lily on the blue sheen of the bedspread. She wondered who would be the next lover in her life.

  She decided to pick up something at Earl’s Café for dinner. Something Raymond would particularly enjoy.

  Through the windows Belinda looked out upon their large backyard, fenced high on all sides. Fruit trees grew at the bottom of the garden: two cherries, an apple, and a plum. There were lilac bushes along one side and climbing roses along the other. Doors from the sunporch and the kitchen led out onto a disintegrating cement patio, next to which grew an acacia tree. The garden was overgrown, the grass was too tall, the flower beds near the house were flopped over and weedy.

  Belinda, gazing from the sunporch, was impatient with this mess. She belonged in a small apartment somewhere in Vancouver. It would have a window overlooking a busy street, and maybe there’d be a decent Italian restaurant nearby. She’d put a desk under the window so that while she was studying, or whatever, she’d be able to glance up and watch life on the street below for a minute...

  She was suddenly invaded
by a memory. It flooded into her head, evicting present and future, leaving only this fragment of the past.

  She saw herself opening the door to her parents’ bedroom. She must have been very young, for the door handle, which was made of glass, was above her head. She grasped it, turned it, pushed the door open a few inches, and peeked in. The big brass bed was on her right. Straight ahead was a window, with sheer white curtains hanging on either side. The window was halfway open, and a breeze made the curtains move. Belinda remembered a feeling of tranquillity, watching the curtains move. In front of the window was her mother’s desk, a small one, made of mahogany, with a matching chair. Her mother was sitting on the chair, her back to Belinda, head bent, writing a letter. Belinda, clinging to the door handle, said, “Mommy.” She had to say it again. And again. And still her mother had not heard her. Finally she said it very loud, with tears in her voice: “Mommy!” Her mother turned quickly around, and stared at Belinda for what felt like a very long time. Belinda thought for a minute that her mother had turned into a stranger—or else Belinda had: they didn’t seem to know one another. And then something in her mother’s face shifted, and Belinda’s heart pounded with relief.

  She didn’t remember what had happened next.

  Belinda passed a hand in front of her face, as if she’d collided with a cobweb.

  She hauled out the vacuum cleaner and plugged it in. But then she had to sit down for a minute, because her legs were suddenly too weak to bear her weight.

  Raymond, she thought, staring down at the carpet. Raymond.

  ***

  He got home an hour later.

  He bounded into his house and knew almost immediately that something was wrong. Maybe not wrong, he thought, staring at Belinda, but out of kilter.

  It was the way she wasn’t quite looking at him. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, and for a minute he thought there was somebody behind her. A vivid image entered his head of Belinda on her back, on their bed, with a faceless son of a bitch fucking her, and her legs were up over this guy’s shoulders. This picture was so real that Raymond could for a long moment neither speak nor move. And then Belinda came close and laid a kiss upon his cheek. He smelled her shampoo and thought, She’s washed her hair for me, and he buried his face in it.