by William Bell
Aidan was pleased to see that Chang, for the first time since Aidan had met him, seemed puzzled.
“You know, like in a mafia movie,” he added.
“Ah, I see. A joke. No, Aidan. You have a friend. Treasure that fact.”
Not really, Aidan thought. Nobody made a promise like that without strings attached. In any case, it didn’t matter. Once out of the car, he’d be through with Chang, Bai and the little jerk Wesley.
“Well, thanks for the ride,” he said, opening the car door.
Aidan got out, but before shutting the door he said, “You never told me who tried to grab Wesley.”
“Let us call them business rivals and let it go at that,” Chang replied in his smooth, superior way.
Aidan flared, felt the heat rise into his face. The tension of the meeting broke through.
“I get it. You tell me I saved Wesley’s life, make promises, and when I ask you a simple question you give me the brush-off.”
Chang thought for a moment before answering. “Very well, Aidan. Mr. Bai’s business dealings are extensive, but you’ll never see or hear his name on the news. He guards his privacy jealously. One of his projects is a very large real estate development—I won’t bore you with details—and his acquisition of this extremely valuable parcel of land created a certain amount of envy among rivals who had also bid on the land, and lost. This organization then attempted to purchase the land from Mr. Bai. Of course, he refused. Hence the kidnap attempt. Wesley was to be a sort of bargaining chip.”
“Okay,” Aidan said. “I get it.”
Chang offered his cold smile. “Goodbye for now.”
Aidan turned and walked up the street toward the house where he lived.
FIVE
AIDAN SAT AT THE SMALL pressboard desk in his room at the top of the attic stairs, looking out the dormer window at a sky streaked with cloud, thinking about the months to come. A week-long holiday from practices and games—then hockey camp. Why it was called camp was a mystery. To Aidan the word suggested a lake with tents along the shore, bonfires at night and canoe or sailing lessons under a hot sun during the day—not an arena echoing with shouts and whistles and the scrape of skate blades on ice, and humid dressing rooms smelling of socks and liniment.
He allowed himself to daydream of a real camping trip. It was easy to do, since he had no experience to contradict his fantasies. He imagined day after day of unplanned time, every hour filled with nothing but possibility. But his reverie was broken by the ring of a phone downstairs, followed by a torrent of words from Beryl. Aidan got up and closed the bedroom door, trying without success not to think about the topic of Beryl’s excited conversation. In mid-August the Boyds—plus Aidan the boarder, if he wished—would be moving to Calgary. For good.
He didn’t wish.
On the day after Aidan’s interview with Mr. Bai, Beryl and Henry finally broke the news that Beryl had been holding in for the last while. Henry had come home from work on time for once, and when the family sat down to supper he explained in a voice as calm as Beryl’s was bubbly that he had accepted an offer to run his own real estate franchise in Calgary, Alberta.
“He’ll have six agents working under him!” Beryl crowed.
The twins were swept along in the current of their parents’ excitement.
“What’s a calgry?” April asked, her eyes bright with borrowed enthusiasm.
“Calgary, honey,” Henry replied. “It’s a big city out west with parks and movie theatres and—”
“—and a river that flows right through the middle of it,” Beryl chimed in.
“And a famous hockey team,” Henry added, with a glance at Aidan.
“Can I be on that team?” May asked.
Aidan had thought he was prepared, but when he heard the news his stomach dropped and a sick, empty feeling crept over him. He swallowed and tried to stifle his feelings. He began to work out what Henry’s decision for his family meant for him.
Would the Boyds really want him to move to Calgary with them? Or was Beryl, who Aidan knew was kind-hearted underneath all her noise, just trying to let him down easy? If he didn’t go west, he would be absorbed back into The System until his caseworker found another family who would take him in. Teenage boys, he knew, were hard to place.
Did Aidan want to move? In Calgary, almost 3,000 kilometres away, he’d be absorbed into a different province’s system, with a new caseworker.
Either option meant a new school, a new hockey team, new pals—if he made the effort to meet friends, something he hadn’t really managed in the last few years. What was the point, when he might have to say goodbye to those friends if everything was yanked out from under him as it had been before?
There was a third choice, but it was fantasy. It would be about two years before he could walk away from The System and be on his own, with nobody telling him where to go and what to do when he got there. Was that freedom, when he had nowhere to go? No job? No place to live? Panhandling on the streets and sleeping in a box had no appeal either.
Aidan got up from his desk and fell onto his bed, hollowed out by fear and loneliness.
When Aidan was in grade six and living with the Foster-McCallums in Woodbridge, Linda would sometimes let him stay up late and watch TV with her. He liked Linda. She never showed him anything but kindness. She was a chubby blonde who wore a lot of makeup and clothes that were usually too tight. Aidan was old enough to know that Fred, her husband, liked her that way.
Fred worked rotating shifts and sometimes didn’t get home until ten-thirty or so, and Linda felt a little lonely in the evenings. One night she tuned in an old movie Aidan had never heard of. The main character, Huckleberry, was a boy about Aidan’s age. A sort of foster child who lived with the Widow Douglas in a little town in Missouri on the Mississippi River in the 1800s, Huck had grown up wild. Widow Douglas did her best to civilize him, making him go to school and do chores and wear unfamiliar, itchy clothes, and sit still when company came. One day when Huck couldn’t stand the strict discipline anymore he lit out with a neighbour’s slave. The two of them escaped down the Mississippi on a raft.
As if the similarities between Huck’s situation and Aidan’s weren’t enough to keep him interested in the movie, he was hooked by the idea of leaving all his cares behind and drifting away on a broad, beautiful river that seemed to go on forever. What could be better?
From then on, Aidan loved rivers. Any time a school project was assigned he asked to do a report on one. To him, rivers were fascinating, more mysterious than the sea, more exciting than the call of a distant train. A river always changed, yet stayed the same. It began at your feet and could take you to another place and, Aidan thought, maybe another life.
Whenever things got bad for him he would tell himself, somewhere there must be a river.
The next morning gusts of icy wind flung fistfuls of rain from a dirty sky. Aidan left the house at the usual time, the hood of his raincoat cinched tightly, his backpack thumping between his shoulders like a nagging pain, his mood as foul as the weather. During his first class, English, he was barely conscious of Mr. Topp’s lecture on writing the short story. He stared at the streaks of rain on the classroom window, following one after another as it took its zigzag course to the sill.
“… the so-called third-person narrative,” Topp droned, “gives us a tale told by someone other than the main character—the protagonist. Take, for example, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Robert Jordan is the protagonist, but not the narrator. You recall Robert Jordan, do you not, Aidan?”
Aidan’s mind snapped into focus. “Yes, sir. Spanish Civil War. He, er, dies at the end?”
Topp barely acknowledged the reply before marching on. “In third-person storytelling we have a number of advantages which I will explore later. On the other hand, to use Aidan here—who appears barely able to stay awake for this lesson—as an example, we have the first-person narrative.”
Aidan flushed as scattered laughter erupted arou
nd the room. He began to pay attention.
“If Aidan says, ‘I this and I that,’ ‘I thought such-and-such’ or ‘I ran toward my future,’ he is telling his own story,” Topp continued. “In first person, as we say. The first-person narrator speaks directly to the reader. He tells a tale about himself. Think of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. The narrator may omit facts or include them, exaggerate or not, give us half-truths or the whole truth, all according to his own personality. The main point here, young ladies and gentlemen, is that the first-person narrator may tell us what he wishes, in the way he wishes. After all, it is, as I said, his story.”
For a split second Aidan felt dizzy. His fingers gripped the edge of his desk, his thoughts whirling. Telling your story. Painting your picture. The metaphor was different, but the meaning was the same.
He glanced toward the window, where rain continued to stream down the glass. The time had come. He knew it. What he had been waiting for since the day at the art gallery and the girl with the blue beret and the falling but not falling snow—what he had almost come to believe would never happen—had burst into view, riding on the words of his English teacher like foam on the crest of a wave: “He tells his own story.”
The moment the bell sounded to end the lesson, Aidan was on the move. To his locker, out of the school, down the street through the pounding rain to a convenience store where he knew he could find a pay phone. He pushed through the door, dropped his backpack on the floor, pulled out his wallet, removed a business card, jammed coins into the slot, punched in the number printed on the card.
After one ring, a neutral voice: “State your name.”
“Aidan.”
“You’re calling from where?”
Aidan told him.
“Number?”
Aidan read out the digits printed above the phone’s keypad.
“Hang up and wait.”
There was a click. Aidan replaced the receiver and stood staring out the store window, the rain-lashed glass blurring his view of the street outside, the air in the shop hot and damp. He felt enclosed, cocooned. His jaw muscles clenched. The phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Aidan, how pleasant to hear from you.” Chang was as smooth as ever. “How can I help?”
“You told me Mr. Bai would give me anything I wanted.”
“He would indeed.”
“Can he make me disappear?”
PART TWO
LIFE IN THE FIRST PERSON
It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars.…
—Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
SIX
AND SO “AIDAN” DROPPED OFF the face of the earth, like a speck of dust.
How could I give up my name? Easy. The way I pictured it, a person was like the solid disc at the centre of a target, encircled by concentric rings. The nearest and strongest ring was made up of parents, brothers and sisters. The next one was grandparents; then aunts, uncles, cousins and so on—all bonded by blood and branded by name.
But I had no family. I knew nothing about anyone who might be related to me. Take away the rings and what was left? Just me.
Put another way, “Aidan” was like one of those labels attached to a package with a bit of wire. Tossing away a used tag and twisting on a new one was simple.
I never knew why I’d been called Aidan in the first place, or who chose the label, and I didn’t care. For all I knew the name hadn’t been given to me by a birth parent at all. It could have been selected at random by a delivery room nurse or a social worker who ran his finger down a list and didn’t get past the As.
“Julian Paladin,” my new handle, was a fresh beginning. It made me feel a little different; it gave me another chance, like a hundred January firsts rolled into one.
My new identity came on a day at the end of April when Chang visited the apartment where I had been living since I disappeared a month or so before, and laid a small stack of documents on my kitchen table. He had been thorough. There were school records; a birth certificate that indicated Vancouver as my birthplace; a driver’s license showing I was now eighteen years old; a social insurance card (I’d need it for my new job); a health insurance card—everything, even a passport. I had two credit cards in my name. It was identity theft in reverse.
“Just a few things,” Chang said, “and I shall be on my way. Please listen carefully. You are a polite young man and you’ll naturally want to contact Mr. Bai and thank him for his assistance. Don’t. If you must communicate with him, go through me as I instructed you previously. That is his wish.” He placed an embossed business card on the table. “George Wang is a lawyer who serves Mr. Bai. Should you require legal assistance of any kind, get in touch with him. He has been briefed to respond immediately and to assist you in any way he can. He will charge you no fee.”
Chang closed the catch on his soft leather briefcase and began to button his coat. When he spoke again, his smooth, neutral tone toughened. “Finally, three most important points. If anyone—anyone—should ask you about Mr. Bai, you do not know him or anything about him. Indeed, you have never heard of him. That is absolute. If you wish to show him your gratitude, this is how you do it. Secondly, remember that you are to ignore the comings and goings in the two spare rooms downstairs. Thirdly, do not attempt to contact either me or”—he tapped the business card with a manicured fingernail—“this gentleman by means of the telephone in this apartment. Use a pay phone until I can provide you with a secure cell. I trust I make myself clear.”
I nodded, my mind racing, wondering if I had somehow landed in a spy movie.
After Chang left the apartment I heard his footsteps on the stairs. The sound of the front door closing sent a ripple of anxiety across my brain. I was free; I was alone; I had gotten just what I asked for. I felt like I was sitting on a makeshift raft of logs, floating down a broad river as an unfamiliar landscape slipped by on either side of me. It was exhilarating, and for just a split second it scared the hell out of me.
My apartment was one of three in an east-end house built a long time before I was born. A Scottish woman named Fiona lived in the attic apartment above me with her preschool son. An older man lived on the ground floor and gave mandolin lessons once in a while. His place was on the left when you came in the front door to a hall that extended through to the door into the garage. On the right of the entry, a staircase with a newel post and wooden bannister climbed to the second floor, occupied by my apartment, and further up to Fiona’s place. Behind the staircase, invisible from the entry door, were two doors leading to separate single rooms.
The house sat on a big corner lot in a residential neighbourhood of mature trees that canopied the streets. The landscaped front yard was enclosed by a low wooden fence with a gate, and guarded by an ancient oak whose roots buckled the sidewalk that bisected the lawn. The house, with its full-width verandah, was the kind of place you might see in an old movie—not at all like the newer suburb far on the western edge of the city where I had lived with the Foster-Boyds.
Mr. Bai had insisted, Chang told me, that I didn’t need to pay rent. I had argued that I did. The whole point of changing my identity was to be independent, and that meant free of obligations, at least as much as possible. But paying rent meant I needed a job, and it wasn’t long before Chang solved that problem for me too, finding me a part-time spot in a nearby convenience store. I worked mornings. Also, I became a sort of unofficial caretaker of the house. I collected the rents, mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, and I had a number to call if anything in the way of house maintenance was needed. I knew my rent was very low, but at least I wasn’t a parasite.
I couldn’t leave the Foster-Boyds in the lurch, wondering what had happened to me. I didn’t blame them for deciding to move to Calgary. At least, I tried not to. It was a great chance for them, with Henry’s new position and the opportunities it opened up for the family. The twins were young enough to get used to
a different school and new friends, and they were thrilled by the idea of a bigger house and yard and Henry’s promise to put in a duck pond. I admit I was put out for a while when they made their decision final and told me about it over the kitchen table, explaining that I could come along, that I’d be just as welcome as now. They meant well, but I wasn’t part of the excitement that thrummed like background music in the house. I didn’t expect to be. They didn’t owe me anything. It wasn’t as if I was hoping or expecting that they’d adopt me. Their decision was one more push in the direction I wanted to take anyway.
On the morning I shoved my raft away from the river bank I wrote them a note. Told them I was cutting out for good. Said not to worry, I’d be alright and I’d drop them a line now and then to prove it. Assured them the move to Calgary was not the reason I was leaving. I thanked them for being good to me and included a goodbye to the twins. I couldn’t think of anything to add.
I propped the note on the desk and picked up my backpack. I had stowed my few important belongings in it the night before. I stood in the bedroom doorway and took a look around the room. Down in the kitchen, April and May were chattering away while Beryl tried to hurry them up to get ready for school. I tried to count the number of bedrooms I’d stayed in over my life—the one- or-two-night perches and the places where I was there long enough to fill a dresser drawer or two and hang my shirts in the closet. Rooms in social services facilities with cheap furniture and the smell of cleaning fluids, with bedsheet corners pulled as tight as drumheads; rooms in chain hotels; rooms in real houses where I allowed myself to hope it’d be a long stay this time, and did my best to adapt to the new fosters.
This time, I told myself, it was I who was making the change. I went downstairs, said goodbye as I did every morning, headed down the street toward my school.
And kept right on going.