Mother Love

by L. R. Wright

  “No.”

  Harry sighed. “I don’t want anything, Dad. Except to see a little more of you. Get a little closer.”

  “Bullshit,” said his father.

  This startled Harry a little. He clasped his hands in front of him and looked down at his gut, which had gotten too big. “I better take off now,” he said, trying to sound sorrowful. He glanced up, to catch the old man’s expression—but his father had left the room. Harry heard the sound from the TV get louder. He might as well go home.

  ***

  Richard hadn’t asked Maria a single question since she’d returned.

  Then on Labor Day morning, when Belinda had gone to work, he said, “We really should talk, Maria.” He unfolded his napkin and spread it upon his lap. “Whatever you learned in Saskatchewan, it’s preoccupying you. I think we should discuss it.” He surveyed her, calmly, with his bright blue eyes.

  Maria, sitting opposite him, remembered that when he was courting her she had mistaken his reticence for shyness and had thought his arrogance was self-defensive, a mask for uncertainty. But the sex had been good, she thought; and he had always tried, in his way, to be her friend.

  “I’ll tell you, then,” she said, and knew as soon as she’d spoken how immense would be her relief.

  “Well?” he said encouragingly, pouring milk over his cornflakes.

  “My mother is still alive,” she told him. “I saw her, talked to her.”

  “What’s her name?” said Richard, cereal spoon in hand.

  “Her name is Nadine. Nadine Gage.” “

  “What about your father?” His eyes sparkled with curiosity.

  “This is where things get a little complicated,” she said. She started collecting Belinda’s breakfast dishes because she didn’t want to sit there being looked at. “My mother’s husband died when I was an infant,” she called out from the kitchen, her face flushing as if she were telling a lie. “But he wasn’t actually my father.”

  “Good heavens,” said Richard, with distaste.

  She returned to the dining room. “I found him, too, my real father,” she said, trying to sound calm and confident, even though she knew her face was burning. “I’ve been to see him several times.”

  Maria squinted at her husband, wanting to take his face between her hands and stare into it; she was seeking compassion and love. And maybe she did see love there. Maybe. But there was no compassion. In fact, finally she had to laugh, standing there peering at her husband, because his face was positively swollen with disapproval, and she hadn’t even told him the bad thing yet.

  So she didn’t tell him the bad thing.

  “You mean he lives in Vancouver?” said Richard, obviously dismayed. There was no room in Richard’s life for Maria’s tainted family. She could feel his censure in the air.

  “That’s all,” said Maria, clearing the table. “That’s all for now.”

  (...Maria throws the infant child onto the bed, onto the double bed, and the shock of the fall for an instant creates a blessed stillness—and then the screaming begins, louder than ever, more desperate than ever. “Shut up!” Maria cries, clapping her hands over her ears. “Shut up shut up shut up!...”)

  She stood in the kitchen, shuddering, and then she left the house.

  She wanted solace from someone, but only Belinda could have given it.

  There was only one solace available to her. Only one that she deserved. Maria saw this suddenly, clearly, and with devastating calm.

  Chapter 35

  HARRY, HAVING breakfasted late at Flora’s Place, was walking aimlessly along Marine Drive, preoccupied again with the travel agent. He’d tried and tried to get her name from his father, but no luck. “It’s none of your business,” was all his dad would say.

  He’d hung around the vicinity of his dad’s house for most of a couple of days, lurking in the street, waiting for the old man to sneak off to meet her. But he never budged from the property. Harry had watched him out there, weeding or whatever the hell he did in the damn garden—wielding the hose, whatever—and he never left.

  In the late evening of the second day, just as dusk was falling and Harry, bored, was figuring he’d give up on the surveillance thing, a cop car had appeared, coming slowly along, crunching on the asphalt. It drew up behind Harry’s car, and the cop got out, ambled around, and shone a flashlight on him, smack in his eyes.

  “Can I see your license and registration, sir,” said the cop.

  Harry fumbled the license out of his wallet and the registration out of the glove compartment and handed them over.

  “What are you doing here, sir?” said the cop, studying the documents.

  “Spying on my old man.”

  This got the cop’s attention. “Beg pardon?”

  “My old man lives in there,” said Harry, pointing. “He’s getting kind of senile. I keep an eye on him.”

  “And why do you do this from the street?”

  “Because he doesn’t want me to look out for him. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with him, see?”

  The cop climbed back in his cruiser and picked up the radio. Checking Harry out. Harry wasn’t worried.

  After a few minutes the cop returned and gave him back the license and registration. “You’d better find another way of dealing with your dad,” he said. “We got a complaint about somebody loitering.”

  “Yeah, right, okay,” said Harry.

  He figured he’d be a lot better at shadowing than he was at surveillance. If only his father would damn leave, so he could follow him.

  He peered listlessly through the window of Everett’s bookstore, which was closed on Sundays. He could play pool in North Van with whoever happened to be around. He could go bowling with the guys over in Surrey.

  He could go home and do his laundry.

  He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at his reflection in the bookstore window. Wishing he were taller. More—svelte.

  Maybe he’d buy some magazines, he thought. Or rent a dirty movie. Or both.

  But he decided instead to drop in on the old man again. He’d offer to help him aim the hose around in the backyard, or maybe there was something in the house that needed fixing. And maybe while he was there his father would announce that he had an appointment, and Harry would leave, quick fetch his car, and poise himself to do a tail.

  Morning had become afternoon while he wasn’t watching, and by the time he’d turned into his father’s narrow street he was hot and sweaty. He had tugged off his jacket and was carrying it over his arm, and his feet were slapping moistly around in his leather sandals. He went through the fence and across the yard, down the steps, and around to the front door.

  The sliding doors were open, and martial music was issuing from the living room. Harry stepped inside and saw the old man lying on the floor, doing exercises. He wore shorts that revealed thin white legs, knobbly-kneed and unaccountably freckled, and an underwear vest. His eyes were winched shut, and there was sweat on his forehead. The sight of him lying there made Harry nauseated.

  He tiptoed delicately backward onto the patio and arranged himself on a chaise longue that was next to the table with a big sun umbrella stuck in the middle of it. At least there was a breeze off the water—it had to be ten degrees cooler than in the village.

  After what felt like a very long time, the music was turned off. Harry dozed on the chaise.

  “I wish you’d wait for an invitation.”

  He looked up to see his father, who’d replaced his shorts and vest with a pair of old gray pants and a faded yellow T-shirt. He’d also donned a straw sun hat with a fraying brim.

  “And I wish you were a darn sight friendlier,” said Harry, “to your one and only son.”

  “I’ve got work to do.” His father trudged past him and disappeared around the house.

  Harry struggled up out of the chaise and followed him.

  The old man was pawing through a bunch of stuff in the shed on the back patio.
He came out of there with a carryall into which he’d packed several tools and a sprayer.

  “How can I help?” said Harry.

  His father gave a hoot. He climbed the steps, followed the paving stones through the rock garden, and took off across the lawn for the gazebo. He put down the carryall and unloaded it on the grass beneath a monkey puzzle tree that grew near the fence. Leaning his hands on his knees for support, he peered for a minute at the collection of tools spread before him, then selected a spading fork and turned to the rose garden. Harry couldn’t see any weeds, only bark mulch. But his father got down on his hands and knees and ferreted some out, tossing them over his shoulder to land on the grass. Harry, watching, felt his restlessness growing, and his resentment, too. He didn’t know how to get at this man: he felt as if he were poking around in a fog.

  “Have you decided where you’re going yet?” he said finally.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said his father, flinging weeds.

  “You know, your trip. That you’re setting up with the travel agent broad.”

  Curiosity killed the cat, his mother used to say, and someday it’s going to kill you, too, Harry boy. He figured she was probably right. But it was a burning in him, his curiosity. It was exactly like the excruciating burning sensation produced by a urinary tract infection he’d once had. There was nothing he could do about it.

  His father continued to root around in the garden, looking for weeds, ignoring Harry.

  “Listen, I want to know who that woman is,” Harry finally blurted. “I want to know what’s going on there.”

  His father, astonished, sat back on his haunches and stared at Harry indignantly through his bifocals.

  “I know you’re going to tell me it’s none of my business,” said Harry, “but I want to know anyway.” He heard the whine in his voice and hated it. He was rubbing the palms of his hands on his thighs, drying the sweat on the denim of his jeans while listening to himself babble away. Shit, he thought, humiliated. His father said nothing, of course. Harry finally allowed himself to wind down, and then he waited, aware that he was out of breath.

  “She’s your sister,” his father said finally.

  Harry laughed. Waited. Laughed again. Then crouched down so as to stare right into his father’s face.

  “She was a love child,” said his father.

  Harry squinted at him, as if narrowing his eyes might improve his powers of comprehension.

  When he finally grasped what his father had said, it took him a full minute to regain his power of speech—and even then he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Chapter 36

  “YOU MEAN YOU’RE following her?” said Everett, incredulous, on a Monday in mid-September.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus, Harry—that’s a dumb ass thing to do.”

  “I disagree,” said Harry, feeling hurt. “I needed to follow her. I know a lot of things about her now that I didn’t know before.”

  “Like what?” said Everett.

  “I know where she lives. I know she doesn’t go to work. I know she likes to drive—does she ever like to drive. Christ. I’ve been all over the goddamn Fraser Valley.”

  They were sitting on a bench next to the sea walk that stretched from Dundarave to Ambleside Park. Everett was having a cigarette. Harry, when he thought of it, waved the smoke away from his face in an exaggerated fashion. Everett paid no attention to this.

  “But what’s the point, Harry?” he said, puffing on his smoke. “Why does it matter where she lives, or whether she’s got a damn job? Where does she live, by the way?”

  “Kerrisdale. And it matters, Everett, because this woman is a significant impediment to my plans for a comfortable retirement.” He looked unhappily out to sea, waiting for an elderly woman in a white sweatsuit and a straw hat tied under her chin to jog slowly past.

  “You’re talking about your old man’s money, right?”

  Harry turned to look at Everett, who was wearing a dark brown suit and a shirt the color of maple syrup. Everett’s voice had a rich, confident, caressing timbre. It was his voice that got him his TV work. He was a quick study, though, too, which Harry figured also helped him land the TV commercials that kept him in gambling money. It always gave Harry a charge to see one of Everett’s spots. Just that morning he’d turned on the TV and there, like an omen, was Everett galloping among a field of grandfather clocks on behalf of the Chrysler Corporation. Harry had laughed out loud. He’d whooped and slapped his knee and pointed to the screen. “Hey, Everett, hey, buddy!” He’d watched the commercial intently, and when it was over he’d shut off the TV, drawn open the curtains, and looked around for his sandals. Then he had ambled over to the bookstore and persuaded Everett to come out for a walk.

  Except for the gambling, Everett was a down-to-earth, practical kind of a guy. Harry often needed another point of view, and Everett’s was invariably sensible, if uninspired. Harry needed somebody to keep him earthbound. He knew that and appreciated Everett for having assumed this role.

  “Yeah, I’m talking about his money,” he said to Everett now. “What else would I be talking about?”

  “He’s not going to give your inheritance to some broad who, whichever way you cut it, she’s a total stranger who’s dropped into your life.”

  “Yeah. Dropped into it like a great big old cow turd,” said Harry glumly. “You don’t know the old guy, Everett. I think he’s getting senile. He could be a pushover for her.”

  “What are you going to accomplish by spying on her, though?” said Everett, pulling a pair of sunglasses from a case in his jacket pocket and fitting them over his nose and ears.

  And Harry didn’t know. He had at first had vague hopes about finding skeletons in her closet. But even if there were any, how the hell was he going to find them, driving around in her wake all day long?

  “The old fool’s going to think he owes her something,” he said despondently, watching a Sheltie trot toward them, heeling expertly next to a guy in his twenties who was wearing only an eyeshade, a pair of shorts, and running shoes. Harry thought about the old woman who’d passed them a few minutes earlier, bundled incongruously in a sweatsuit, and his mind went on a temporary imagination binge, visualizing recording devices under the sweatsuit or maybe grenades strapped to the old lady’s body; maybe she’d planned to throw herself on top of him and blow them both to kingdom come.

  He groaned and massaged his temples. “It’s hard on my brain, Everett, all this crap. But I know he’s gonna think he owes her something. The only question is, how much?”

  ***

  He drove over there again that afternoon and parked down the street from her house, parked under a tree that turned out to be a kind that dropped some kind of sticky gloop as well as its leaves. What kind of a damn tree is that, for God’s sake? Harry wondered as he got out of his car. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, wet a corner of it with spit, and started rubbing delicately at one of the droplets clinging to the paint. But he soon discovered that this gloop had the consistency of varnish. He rubbed more vigorously and still got nowhere.

  Suddenly a kid zoomed past him on a bike, giving him a curious glance, a teenage girl with long dark hair and a book bag on her back. He watched her pull into the driveway of the travel agent’s house. Harry knew her name now, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her as the travel agent even though if she ever had been one, she certainly wasn’t working at it now. She probably retired, he thought gloomily, as soon as she’d tracked the old man down, and now she was just sitting back waiting for him to expire so she could scoop up her share of his wealth—completely unearned and undeserved—and live the life of Riley.

  He brooded upon this thought, staring through slitted eyes at the house in which she lived, a big and slightly battered-looking house with a small front yard, what appeared to be a big one in back, and a single-car garage. The red Toyota was parked on the street, so the garage must be for some other
car, which meant the travel agent probably had a husband. The teenager had dumped her bike in the middle of the driveway—

  Then it dawned on him.

  The teenager—it had to be her kid, of course: Maria Buscombe’s kid.

  Jesus, thought Harry, feeling sick. His goddamn father, he had himself a grandkid.

  THE PRESENT

  Chapter 37

  FLORA’S PLACE WAS on Marine Drive, in that part of West Vancouver known as Dundarave. Alberg slid onto a chair at a table for two and looked around: he saw nobody fitting Alan Stewart’s description of his son.

  There was a bell above the door that chimed whenever the door was opened. On each table in the café sat a small vase containing a single flower. The tables were covered with red-and-white-checked cloths over which smaller white cloths had been laid.

  Alberg ordered coffee from a waitress who wore a denim shirt, jeans, and a crisp white apron.

  “You sure that’s all you want?” she said. “We’ve got the meat loaf today.”

  Alberg smiled. “No, thanks. Just the coffee, please.”

  As he waited, he watched a woman who was energetically wiping a counter that extended across the back of the café. She was in her mid-forties, with long, bright red hair affixed to her head in a complicated series of loops. She was wearing a great deal of eye makeup, skillfully applied. She glanced at Alberg, and he knew she’d instantly made him as a cop: he acknowledged this with a little wave that she ignored.

  When the waitress set down his cup of coffee, the aroma triggered a sudden craving for a cigarette. He knew it wouldn’t last more than half a minute or so, but he felt resentful that it was there at all. In senseless retaliation he dumped cream and a huge amount of sugar into his coffee, which he had for a long time been drinking black.

  What nobody had told him, he thought despondently, watching the door, was that even when he had managed to quit smoking, he would not be the same nonsmoker he’d been before he’d started. Cigarettes had changed him permanently. Time, for instance, would never be the same to him again. The shape of his days would never be the same again. Cigarettes had punctuated his life, constituting a rewards system that had snicked commas and periods and semicolons among the events of his days, smoothing his hours, sculpting his life, giving it—he thought now, looking back wistfully, enviously, at his former self—giving it an elegance, a deliberateness, that it now lacked.