by Jamie Zeppa
He hadn’t thought of what he would say, beyond the initial question. He had been expecting her to know him instantly, and only now did he wonder what he would do if she said, “Yes, I’m Grace Turner,” and then just stood there like she was waiting for him to produce a telegram or a ticket. He needed to give her a clue, something like, I can see why you might not recognize me, it’s been seventeen years. Or even I’m from Sault Ste. Marie.
That’s all he’d give her. If she didn’t recognize him, he would never forgive her, but at least he wouldn’t be standing in front of her stammering about a locked box in the closet.
Inside, he approached a glass-fronted office. Behind the large window, a woman sat at a desk, surrounded by filing cabinets. He studied her profile: her grey hair was coiled in a braid around her head, and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. She sat straighter than he had ever thought it was possible for a human being to sit. She hadn’t looked up from her typewriter, and he hadn’t knocked on the glass, but she called out, “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone,” Dean said, and felt the words bounce off the glass. The woman kept punching keys. He bent his head so that he could speak directly into the slit at the bottom of the window. “I’m looking for someone. One of your employees. A woman—a lady—her name is—”
“You’re getting fingerprints on my glass,” the woman said.
Did she have eyes in the side of her head? He pulled his hand away from the window.
“Her name is Grace—”
The phone rang and the woman picked it up. “This is Mrs. Thurman,” she said. “No. Yes. That is correct. You are welcome. Goodbye.”
Dean straightened up, cleared his throat. “Uh, ma’am?”
Mrs. Thurman pulled the sheet of paper from her typewriter and held it up. Satisfied, she laid it beside the machine.
“Her name is Grace Turner? The lady I’m looking for? She works here.” The woman was rolling another sheet of paper into her machine and still gave no sign that she could hear him.
He tried to slide the window open all the way, but it was clamped with something. “Hello? I’m looking for Grace Turner. It’s a—an emergency. Her brother is sick.”
“Hands, please,” the woman said.
She could see out the side of her head.
“Is she here today?”
“She is not.”
His mouth opened, but no sound emerged. He had found her. She wasn’t here today, but she was here.
“Well, can you tell me where she lives?”
“I cannot.”
“But it’s an emergency. Her brother is very sick. I came all the way from Sault Ste. Marie.”
“Then I am sorry for you, young man. But I cannot tell you where she lives.”
Anger, hot and sour, flooded up from his gut, past the hard knot in his throat, and coated his coffee-burnt tongue. Easy, he told himself, and tried to breathe normally.
“I’m sorry to trouble you. I can see you’re quite busy, but why can’t you tell me?”
“She doesn’t work here. She hasn’t worked here since the war.”
Dean dropped his head, struggling to clear his throat of the painful blockage. He had lost her again. She’d been here behind the wall of clocks, and as soon as he asked for her, she’d disappeared. Just as she’d been hidden in a box all those years until the moment he had discovered her. The closer he got, the farther away she slipped.
But this woman had known her. This woman had worked with her, had probably seen her every day for years. She was real, Grace Turner, and she had been here. “Do you know where she works now?”
“I do not.”
“But do you know where she lives, then? Does she live in the same place? Could you check your files?”
“We wouldn’t have those files now. It’s been fifteen years since she worked here,” the woman said.
“But I need to find her,” Dean said. The anger was gone, replaced by a dark, shameful urge to weep. “It’s an emergency.”
The woman frowned at her typewriter. Dean lifted his hands and pressed them against the window. They were good and sweaty. He smeared them up and around. Behind the now streaky glass, she got up, fetched a small spray bottle and a square of newspaper and came to the window. She widened the opening and passed them through. She said, “Ruth Ellis’s boarding house. Wellington Street. That is all I can tell you, because that is all I know. Now I’m going to ask you to please remove your fingerprints from my window, and then we will say good day.”
“Whoa, whoa. Ruth Who? Wellington Street. What’s that?”
“Last known address.”
“But does she live there now?”
“I don’t believe so. Window, please.”
He sprayed the window and wiped it down. She took back the spray bottle and paper and said, “Thank you.”
He got to the door before he realized he didn’t have a street number. “Excuse me, but do you have the address? On Wellington Street?”
She was back at her desk, rolling another sheet of paper into the evil black typewriter. She said, “Knock and the door shall be opened.”
“What?”
“Seek and ye shall find. Good day, young man.”
“Good day,” he said, and added under his breath, “old bat.”
He found it right away. It was the first house he went to, a large house of orange brick with freshly painted trim behind a hedge that was all covered in burlap. He opened the mailbox at the gate: two letters addressed to Miss R. Ellis, one to Marcy Cole. On the veranda, he examined the knocker: a snake swallowing itself. The wind lifted, and from the rafters above him came the sound of small bells; he craned his neck and saw a row of wind chimes. He grabbed the knocker and rapped sharply. Just then, he noticed the plaque underneath. KNOCK AND THE DOOR SHALL BE OPENED. Maybe this was the town motto. A plump young woman with long brown ringlets answered the door. Ruth Ellis, she said, was in the hospital, but when he said the next name, her face lit up.
“Grace Turner! Oh, she moved to Toronto a long time back.”
He wanted to collapse right there on the porch. Toronto. Again she’d slipped away. Still, this was another person who knew her. “But you knew her? She lived here?”
“Oh, yes. Only I didn’t know her, of course. She was before my time. But Ruth keeps in touch. She keeps in touch with all the women of the house. She’ll have that address in here somewhere. Come in and I’ll try to find it.”
It was the weirdest house he’d ever been in. He was afraid to move for fear of knocking over a pile of books or bumping a picture off the wall, and it wouldn’t be an ordinary picture, either, but a photograph of three people, men, women, who could tell, whirling around in white skirts and tall hats, their heads thrown back, or a painting of a blue-faced man with an extra eye in his forehead, wearing a skirt and playing a flute.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman, looking up from a drawer. “How did you say you knew Grace?”
“I’m her—nephew,” he said. “My father lost touch with her, and I was passing through Peterborough and thought I’d look her up.”
The woman kept talking to him while she rummaged through a cabinet. Her name was Marcy, she was a teacher, like Ruth used to be, and in fact, Ruth used to be her teacher, oh, a long time back, and what a teacher she was, she had opened their eyes to the world, all their eyes to all the strange, precarious, blinding beauty of the world, and now dear Ruth was laid up in hospital and they didn’t know—they didn’t think—here Marcy had to stop looking for the address and begin to look for a handkerchief. When she regained possession of herself, she offered him coffee and strawberry-rhubarb pie, milk and chocolate cookies, a bowl of soup. She couldn’t find the address.
“I know it was Baldwin Street—that much I do remember—because I mailed letters for Ruth, and I remember Baldwin Street, Toronto, clear as day.”
She said she would write it down for him. She did not remember the number, she was sorry.
“It�
��s okay,” he said, taking the paper. “I’m getting used to that.”
“I’ll ask Ruth. When I go to the hospital this afternoon,” Marcy said. “You call back this evening and I’ll have it for you. If Ruth’s awake. Sometimes she’s not. Sometimes she’s—” Marcy broke off and cried quietly into her handkerchief.
Dean said he would come back later. As he was leaving, he said, “But did Ruth ever say anything to you about Grace? About her being—you know, off?”
“Off to where?”
“No. Off like odd or something? Not very smart?”
“What a strange question. No. Not at all. Grace started her own business, I believe.”
He gave her his most brilliant smile. “Thank you! Thank you so much.” He flew back through the town, over to the bus depot. He had no time to wait for street numbers. Knock and you shall find, he said to himself. “One ticket to Toronto,” he said to the clerk.
He fell asleep on the bus and dreamed he was standing outside a house on Baldwin Street. He knocked and a voice from inside called, “Who is it?” “I’m here to see my mother,” he tried to say, but his mouth wasn’t working properly. “Muther,” he said. “Buther.” He knew with inexorable dream logic that he was at the wrong house. At the next house, no one answered his knock, but the handle turned freely in his hand. He went in and he was in his living room at home, the same brown carpet, the same reading lamp, Vera knitting in the armchair, Frank on the sofa reading the paper. From deep in the stillness of the house, a clock ticked. He had gone home by mistake.
He opened his eyes. The bus had pulled into a station, and a stout woman in a rust-coloured coat was arguing with the driver about her ticket. Dean squirmed in his seat and peered out the window. In a parking lot across the street, a man in a suit got out of a gleaming white Cadillac and ran around to open the back door. A huge puff of white skirt billowed out, followed by the rest of the bride. Her hair was a dark three-tiered cake decorated with thin loops and bands of icing. Dean watched the man and his cake-headed bride walk up the steps to the banquet hall. He hadn’t thought about this possibility: Grace, married. She could very well be married, with other children, kids that she’d kept, that had turned out. Her husband wouldn’t know about the baby she’d left behind. And now Dean was going to show up on her doorstep and tell everything.
She wouldn’t want to see him. She would try to close the door, beg him to go away. “It’s nobody,” she would call out over her shoulder, and when she turned back to him, her voice would go hard and cold. “I don’t know you. You’re nothing to me. Get out of my sight.”
He wouldn’t be able to bear it. He would throw himself off a bridge.
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. It might not happen like that, he told himself. Her hands might fly to her cheeks. She might cry out and welcome him in. She would tell him that she’d waited so long. There would be an explanation, a reason why she had left him there in Sault Ste. Marie with his aunt and uncle. It would all make sense, and she would put her arms around him and say, “At last, at last.” She would introduce him to her husband, and he would shake Dean’s hand firmly and warmly. She would say, “Come and meet your brothers and sisters.” They would be shy at first, but then they would come forward and want to show him their rooms and their stuff.
Or he would not find her at all. And then what? He didn’t know what. He was too tired to think about then what.
Outside, fields were flowing by in the dying afternoon light. He was thirsty and hungry. He wanted to eat three of Vera’s golden butter tarts, drink two glasses of cold milk and then lie down in his own bed, in his own room, in his own house. No. What he really wanted was to go back in time: he wanted to know nothing. What you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt you, unless you found out that you didn’t know it. Then it was like a wildcat trapped inside you, slashing and scratching and howling to be let out. Nor did letting it out help: it just clawed and bit you and made a mess of things. He wanted to go back to the day of the light bulb trick. He would realize that Wharton was on to him and he’d substitute another trick. He’d go home with Wharton’s money in his pocket and wait for his mother to get back from Mrs. May’s. He wouldn’t open a box or steal a car or forge a signature on a cheque. He’d be Dean Turner, son of Frank and Vera. He’d ask them no questions, they’d tell him no lies.
BALDWIN STREET
The plan was to buy a map at the bus station kiosk and sit down with a bottle of Coke and figure out where he was and how far he was from Baldwin Street, but as soon as he stepped off the bus into a cloud of exhaust, he was jostled into a fast-moving crowd and carried along for blocks. The city soared up all around him in walls of concrete and glass and stone. People poured out of buildings, pooled at corners, trickled down side streets. He tried to memorize the street names—Yonge, Queen, Bay, University—so that he could find his way back, but then he stopped thinking and just walked and looked. He could feel the city’s pulse in his veins. It pulsed with traffic and with something else. Everything was lit up like a Christmas tree, even though Christmas was four months gone: everywhere something twinkled or blinked or buzzed, inviting him to use Kodak film, have a coffee, buy tickets, cut keys, visit the future, drink a milkshake, come in and see the show: The Guns of Navarone or West Side Story or Splendor in the Grass or five others he had never heard of. Every movie in the world was playing here.
The city pulsed and now he was pulsing too.
From around the corner, a man appeared with a wooden signboard around his neck. He stopped in front of Dean and rapped the top of his board, where the writing started off huge—THE DAY OF THE LORD IS AT HAND and then got smaller and crazier until Dean couldn’t make out anything. Something was coming and it wasn’t good, was the gist of it. The man rapped the board again and Dean said, “Yeah, yeah, I got it.” The man moved on.
A young woman in a short fur jacket walked past him, and then turned and looked him up and down. He winked, and to his amazement, she winked back. Then she, too, was gone.
A woman and a man stumbled out of a doorway, laughing. The man caught the woman’s hand and spun her around. Her lipstick was a dark, glossy red.
Finally, Dean slipped out of the stream of walkers and leaned against a wall, his rucksack forming a cushion against the cold concrete. He had no idea how to get back to the bus terminal, and he didn’t have a map. It was probably too late to start searching, anyway. He would find a place to stay for the night. A hotel. A nice one. He’d have a shower, order a steak dinner, get a good night’s sleep. Why not? He had the money, and he couldn’t stand against a wall all night. Although here, he probably could. In the Soo, if you were propped up outside a building for too long, someone would want to know who you were waiting for and who you were related to and if it was hard work, heh heh, holding up the building. Here, no one even glanced at him. People moved at a fierce clip. He searched faces as they passed him, but no one except the woman who’d winked met his eye. Their eyes were fixed on some distant goal. They surged across intersections and disappeared, replaced by the next wave.
The sky was dark now. There were no stars, but who needed pinprick stars in this electric blaze? Dean finally pushed himself off the wall and stepped off a curb, and a car slammed on its brakes, stopping not an inch from him and honking long and loud. The man behind the wheel rolled down his window and leaned out. Dean patted the hood of the car. “I’m all right,” he told the man. “You didn’t hit me.”
“Eejit!” the man said. “Get the hell out of my way or I will.”
Eejit! Dean burst into laughter. He did a quick jig and tipped an imaginary hat. The man merely rolled up his window and drove on. Dean looked around: people had seen, but no one was watching. No one would report to someone who would pass it along to someone else who would mention to Vera and Frank that Dean had been seen acting up downtown, holding up traffic and dancing around like a leprechaun. He was in the City of Toronto. Town Motto: Act Up All You Want, Just Stay the Hell Out of Our Way.
Goddamn. It was impossible.
Baldwin Street.
He wasn’t ready to find it, but he turned left onto Baldwin Street anyway. His feet kept lifting and planting themselves. They stopped, rotated him a quarter of a turn and dragged him up the walkway of the first house. When he reached the door, there was nothing to do but knock. No one answered; the house was in complete darkness. He tried the next house. A man in an undershirt with a halo of greying hair shook his head. No one here by that name. At the next house, a tiny elderly woman answered. “Other side of the street,” she said.
A sudden plummeting. He reached for the banister to steady himself. “Are you sure?” he said. “Grace Turner from Sault Ste. Marie?”
“Oh, I don’t know where she’s from, but Grace Turner lives on the other side. Now is it 67? I think so.”
His stomach was cramping painfully, like he had swallowed pins and staples and nails.
At the other end of the street, the houses were joined together in twos. Number 67 was dark, but he went up the stairs anyway and stood on the veranda. It was clean and empty—not a plant or a chair or even a welcome mat. He knocked, and jumped at the sound of a window sliding open. He almost bolted, then realized it had come from the house next door. Someone there was trying to find a radio station. A phone rang. A dog started barking. Another dog started barking. Dean knocked more loudly. Next door, a man yelled, “Aunt Theresa! Phone!”
Dean knocked again. “Hello?” he called. He put his hand on the doorknob and twisted. Locked. Next door, the man yelled louder for Aunt Theresa. A woman yelled back, “Tell him I’m not home.”
“Why doncha tell him yourself?”
“Ha ha. Close the window, Danny, it’s freezing in here. And don’t tell your mother I took this call.”
Yes, for god’s sake, close the window, Dean thought. He put his ear to the door: nothing. (Although it was hard to tell with the racket next door.) He leaned as far as he could over the railing to look into the front room, but he could see nothing except curtains and the back of a sofa. Kneeling, he lifted the mail slot and peered through.