by Keith Weaver
“I agree”, Sanford said.
He knew that a search to detect involvement by Jeffers was pointless, but he felt that he had a part to play in this charade, to bring things to a conclusion, to wrap everything up. He had no doubt that there would be loose ends that could not be tied off, but what else was new in life?
Twenty-three
Conway stayed two days in Stanley Falls, then he returned to Toronto. Sanford and Conway had two other heads-together sessions before Conway left, and Sanford decided he liked this somewhat odd investigator.
True to his word, Conway kept digging, and a stream of bits and pieces was directed Sanford’s way. Nobody knew where Jeffers was, and speculation started surfacing that he had been eliminated. The would-be abductor also turned out sometimes to go by the name Damion Plumb, something that soon unleashed a small raft of stupid jokes about jam, toast, and whatnot. Conway soon found connections between Plumb/Wakelin and other small-time hoods, all of whom started looking like laughable walk-on characters in a comic story of cops and robbers. The who and why of the attempted abduction remained unclear, and Conway thought his initial speculation was looking more and more likely, although he kept digging. Three days after he had left Stanley Falls, Conway sent Sanford an email saying that he was halting his efforts to trace more details on Jeffers and on the details of Julia’s attempted abduction. He was not coming up with anything new, he said, and he didn’t expect to come up with anything new. Conway said he would keep an eye on things, meaning a few hours a week making the usual rounds of contacts, and that he would send his invoice soon.
Sanford’s world relaxed somewhat, at least in regards to Julia’s safety. His previous world, the world he had known for as far back as he could remember, lay in ruins. The people closest to him, and for whom he had the strongest feelings, were not what he had believed they were. He himself was adrift, and in terms of family identity, well, he simply didn’t have one. But Sanford refused to let himself be dragged down by this.
He and Maxwell spoke regularly, Maxwell always telling him that his family had priority. The days went by quickly. Julia obviously enjoyed her time with her new friends, and was delighted when Sanford presented her with a new bicycle. It was blue and matched her shorts.
Four days before they were to leave for Italy, Sanford suddenly suggested that he and Julia head off to Toronto.
“I just realized that we need to buy you some luggage.”
“I can use one of Mommy’s suitcases.”
“Absolutely not! A world traveller can’t go around begging luggage from other people. Let’s start off right. Besides, maybe we’ll have time for a trip to the aquarium as well.”
Judging from the gleeful hopping about, the chance of an aquarium visit clinched a trip to Toronto, and put the final kibosh on borrowed luggage. They had an early breakfast, jumped in Sanford’s car, and drove off into the morning.
Julia was animated all the way to Toronto, partly because of a trip to the aquarium, partly because she suddenly realized that the luggage she was about to acquire would need to be shown to her new friends, probably also because of the dawning awareness that a big and exciting trip was about to happen, and possibly because of some faint, emerging primal urge to shop.
Picking luggage turned out to be an excruciating pleasure. Julia had no inkling that there were so many designs and colours of suitcases, and in three different shops, bags were dragged across the room to be placed next to other bags, a binary selection was made, then other candidates were dragged to sit next to one another. This went on for over an hour, while Sanford looked on indulgently, being in no particular rush. She finally chose a brilliant blue child’s suitcase that had fifteen or twenty national flags printed onto it at different angles, like old-time luggage stickers. This treasure was deposited in the car, and they then headed off to the aquarium.
It was another world, and Julia pressed her face to the windows, behind which there was marine life of all sorts floating, hovering, darting, or drifting through the crystal-clear water.
At four o’clock they headed back toward Stanley Falls, even though that meant struggling through heavy traffic. Julia was fired up on nervous energy from the day’s action, but Sanford knew that when they reached Joe’s place there would barely be enough time for a light supper before one small bundle of exhaustion would need to be carried to her bed.
Sanford didn’t notice, just after he had entered the expressway on his way to Toronto, the olive green Dodge Durango in the eastbound lanes travelling the opposite way, nor did he notice the same car travelling west at about six thirty when he was returning home. When they pulled into Joe’s drive, Julia was already fading fast, and had the energy to drink only half a glass of milk before the lights went out.
During the past several weeks, Anne had discovered the novelty of email, and had practised quite a bit by sending messages to Sanford. She had sent another one during the day, noting that a car had driven slowly past Joe’s place several times, and she passed on the plate number. But Sanford had to feed Reggie, being famished himself he had to make something to eat, and had still some planning to do for the trip to Italy, so he didn’t catch up to Anne’s email until the following morning.
Twenty-four
When Sanford finally read Anne’s email the next day, an alarm sounded in his head. He forwarded the car licence number to Conway, thought about the potential risk briefly, then shelved the matter. He had the euros he would need for the trip, their hotels were booked, Sanford had put himself through a crash course on tourist Italian, a new passport had arrived for him, one that included Julia, he had picked up two good tourist guides on northern Italy, and he had begun to lay out the things he would need to take. Once their plane left the ground, he felt that he could put local concerns behind him.
Sanford had been priming Julia on how to be a good traveller, and he had helped her choose the clothes she wanted to take. He was a bit taken aback at her initial resistance to this, and he thought he could read something surprising in her face, such as “A woman doesn’t need help from a man in deciding what and how to pack”. This was so much like Helen and it brought before him images of a past that was now far in the distance. Regardless of whether his impression was based on something real or imagined, he had to smile. In stark contrast to this was Julia’s toiletry kit. He had bought her a small toiletry bag surreptitiously when they were in Toronto, and when he gave it to her and explained what it was for, she spent the best part of a day repeatedly packing her personal things in it and then unpacking them.
And then the big day arrived. Stephen Maxwell had offered to collect Julia and Sanford and deliver them to the airport, and the more Sanford attempted to decline the offer politely, the more insistent Maxwell became. He arrived about ten thirty, and they set off for Toronto just after eleven. By eleven thirty, Maxwell had become Uncle Stephen, much to his delight. Maxwell pulled into one of the nicer, smaller hotels in the airport strip at about one o’clock, and said they were going to have a light lunch, no arguments.
When they had finished a light but leisurely lunch, Maxwell drove the short distance to the terminal car park, helped Julia out of the car in a gallant flourish, and they headed off to the departure area. Their flight would leave at six o’clock so they were in good time, and Maxwell wished them bon voyage before starting back to his car. A last wave from far down the cavernous building, and then he was gone.
Julia had talked all the way from Stanley Falls, having more than a little encouragement from Uncle Stephen, and the palaver of checking their bags and making it through security and into the waiting area near the gate did nothing to dampen her loquacity.
“Are we sitting together, Daddy?”
“How long will it take us to get there, Daddy?”
“Won’t it be the middle of the night when we get there, and what will we do then?”
“Will we be able to go shopping right away?”
“Do they have ice cream in Italy
?”
“Who is Maria, Daddy?”
“Will I like Maria?”
“Did I pack my blue shorts, Daddy? I can’t remember.”
Sanford diverted the conversation away from a stream-of-consciousness question-and-answer approach, by beginning a narrative on where they were going, what they would see, what they could do, and what would be different. The business of boarding the plane, watching all the fuss and bother of people trying to get settled in the right seats, provided Sanford the usual entertainment, and judging from her suppressed giggling this had brushed off onto Julia. But anticipation grew as the preparations for takeoff were completed, and then the great roar of the engines and being thrust back into her seat fanned Julia’s excitement, and the exhilaration as the huge bird finally took to the air left her in open-mouthed wonder. Sanford had arranged for them to have window and middle seats in a bulkhead row, he had Julia take the window seat, and she was clearly enthralled at the bumpy climb, the plane banking to take up the long easterly run, but especially at seeing clouds up close for the first time, watching them race past, over, and around the wing. She gripped Sanford’s hand in that delicious, slightly fearful exhilaration of something entirely new, something having the power, both physical and metaphorical, to transport one suddenly into a different world.
She smiled broadly at Sanford.
“Oh Daddy! I think I’m really going to like this!”
For almost half an hour she was glued to the window, watching the first layer of fluffy clouds fall beneath her and begin looking like a peculiar albino landscape far below, then passing through the next layer of clouds, and eventually looking up to find that the sky above was no longer bright blue but a very dark blue, almost black. The drinks service began, Sanford ordered two white wines and an apple juice, poured a small amount of white wine for Julia and shushed her conspiratorially. They clinked plastic glasses and toasted “To Italy!” The meals were delivered, Julia ate most of hers, but then within about ten minutes she fell into that fathomless sleep of emotionally exhausted happy children, who are sometimes known as “tired little teddy bears”.
Sanford leaned back in his seat. He had something to read, and he also had some pondering to do. But his mind kept roving, uncomfortably, obsessively, over the past weeks and months. His life had been overturned, his past had become unknown, wreathed in heavy cloud, and lurking behind it all was the black reality he had uncovered at Joe’s farm.
Realistically, he expected none of this to be resolved during the present trip. He would make the acquaintance of someone from Joe’s past, Maria. Where any of this might lead, if indeed it could lead anywhere, Sanford had no idea.
From Sanford’s review of Joe’s personal notes, Joe had met Maria during a trip to Italy in his youth. She had obviously meant something to Joe, if only as a summer fling. He had been a young man, transferring himself willingly from his element and into a new culture. Knowing Joe, he would have grabbed this tree in both hands and shaken hard to see what fell out. The sharp tang of new surroundings, the feast of new settings, both urban and rural, that were steeped in history, the intellectual shiver of a new language refracting and stretching his mind, these were things Joe would have taken the time to explore. Turning these thoughts over in his mind, Sanford had experienced a small pang of expectancy. This was the special kind of time that had never been available to Sanford during any of his previous business trip forays into Italy, where the use of pretty much every second had been dictated by commercial exigency. He was determined to use the present trip to close that gap. And if there was anything more he could learn about Joe’s past, he would do that as well. But Joe’s trip there had been a long time ago, and Sanford had quite low expectations of learning anything new about his friend.
Looking around the now-darkened plane, Sanford asked himself what he really expected to get from this trip. He had thought about that often and long enough, and felt certain that he wanted the trip to be, would make it be, a pivot point for Julia and for him, a point where they left the past behind and moved into their future. The impressions of Italy that he carried back from previous trips, a place of sunshine, animation, and zest for life, would be, he hoped, something they could take their time exploring in some depth, giving them a benchmark, a reference point, a turning point, for both their lives.
Simple ideas, dressed in elaborate costume. Put more bluntly, he needed to find any clues that would help fill in the gaps in his own past, gaps that he didn’t know existed until a few weeks ago. He needed to get Julia and himself out of the rubble of the recent past and onto a new track to the future.
From this musing about the immediate future, Sanford had fallen into a light doze, and when he awoke a pale purple stripe defined the horizon through the window. They were about two hours out of Milan. Sanford switched on his reading light, opened the book he had brought, and promptly dozed off again.
They passed through an area of turbulence, and it jostled him in continuous and irritating regularity.
Twenty-five
A week before the flight, Sanford had sent Maria a note, necessarily in English, using the address he had found in Joe’s little address book, which Sanford had found at the back of a drawer in Joe’s bedside table. There had been no time for a reply to reach him, he knew this when he sent the letter, but better some warning than none at all. He had told Maria the name of the hotel in Genoa where he would be staying and the day he would be arriving, and said that he would attempt to contact her once he was in the hotel. He was prepared for disappointment, since there was no guarantee that Maria was at the same address, even in the same city, or that if she was she would be interested in seeing Sanford. But he was convinced that he had to try, that this might be the only place remaining where he could learn more about Joe. Sanford had decided that on their return to Toronto he would ask Conway to have one more go at unravelling Sanford’s past, and that he would then close the book on the whole matter, regardless of how little they might find.
They made the tight connection at Milan for the flight to Genoa, and Sanford was now watching his daughter closely as the plane from Milan banked over the Ligurian Sea, aiming at Genoa’s airport lying on the waterfront to the west of the city. Above, the sky boasted its early morning cloudlessness. Below, the sea radiated a silent, irresistible aquamarine. The city revealed itself as being almost cephalopod, flowing into deep ravines and gullies, and, wherever it could do so, sliding upward over the steep hills that rose from the sea. The whole panorama and what it presented – the colours, the delightful jumble of buildings, the exotic-looking trees and shrubs that barely managed to cover the rocky hills – this was all new to Julia, and she was clearly trying to take in every detail.
In contrast to this quiet contemplation of his own daughter, Sanford revisited, briefly, the thoughts and unanswered questions that had kept resurfacing in his mind overnight. Why had he been blindsided by the two people closest to him on who he really was and on his background? When should he explain these things to Julia, something that surely he must do? There was no doubt in his mind that he had received a very caring upbringing, one that was filled by more love and guidance than those of many of the young people he had known. And yet, the way he viewed Aileen and Joe had now been cast into deep shade. How would this resolve itself over the coming months? How would his view of Aileen and Joe change? Both of them must have known what the withholding of that information would mean for him. Were they hoping that, somehow, he never would find out? Did they have a plan for explaining it all to him eventually? Was there something in the past they were trying to protect him from? Was there something that prevented them from explaining his past to him? If so, what could that possibly have been?
The plane bumped a little on the morning thermals, and the pilot turned on to the approach for landing. As they lost altitude, the sea below gradually was transformed from a deep, flat, mysterious, and psychologically soothing blue, to a two-dimensional surface hinting at features,
and then to water, and waves, and small boats. Features on the land side rushed past at increasing speed, and then the tires thumped and squeaked against terra firma, and soon they were stopped at the gate. Unloading from the smallish regional plane began almost immediately, and before they knew it Sanford and Julia were walking down the stairway in bright, humid morning air. Claiming their luggage took barely ten minutes. They were soon in a taxi, heading east along the coast, since Sanford had asked the driver to follow a route from which they could see as much of the city as possible, even if it meant that the trip took a bit longer. The back windows of the cab were down a little. The light, the sounds, occasionally the smells, and above all the history that seeped from every pore of the city wafted into the car and over them. Despite being tired and in a state of some circadian confusion, Julia was transfixed by all that was new, that had to be absorbed and understood.
Sanford had chosen a good small hotel off Via Cairoli, and had opted for a large suite, casting financial caution to the winds. They soon pulled up outside the hotel, the taxi driver’s Mediterranean energy being infectious as he unloaded the luggage, flashed them a big smile, and wished them a pleasant stay in Genova.
“Well, here we are, young lady”, Sanford said past a big smile.
“Oh Daddy! It’s really not like home at all!”
“No, that’s why we came here. Let’s get ourselves checked in, have a quick shower, change, and then go out and look around.”
Half an hour later, they were back on the street, each wearing a new pair of blue shorts. Julia’s grin reached both ears.
“What should we do first, Daddy”, the “first” apparently indicating one item in what Julia evidently hoped would be a long list.