by Bindu Suresh
For three weeks he peddled his father’s grainy, blown-up photograph to every convenience store, gas station, and motel in the vicinity. He wandered up and down the boardwalk near Lake Nipissing, thrusting the picture into strangers’ faces. He knew that, soon, he himself would be recognized; that within a matter of days he would run into someone from his old life, someone who would call his mother hundreds of kilometres away in Oka. He knew that she would discover, finally, what he had spent thirty-four years trying to hide from her: that the chain that slowed her steps—and had kept her from being able to commit to Lucas, the man she loved—bound him, too.
Afterwards, he hitchhiked from North Bay back to Ottawa, stopping in every town and hamlet on the way, wielding his father’s photograph, the vial of potassium chloride with its needle and syringe pushed to the bottom of his rucksack.
Another month passed. Around him, the northern boulders lay huddled and sleeping under a thick mantle of heavy snow. Lake Nipissing was frozen, the crack of its ice like thunder in the evenings, its back veined with the criss-cross of snowmobiles, of moose tracks.
He rented a car. When he’d called Pénélope at home for their insurance information, she had asked, coldly, almost uninterestedly, if he had found his father yet.
Almost, he told her. Tomorrow, he said to himself.
Driving through stone-flat fields, past lovers’ names etched large on highway rock, he felt the dried yellow grains of his old life turn and rush, headlong, into the smooth white sands of the new.
He retraced the familiar curves of the road like a man leading himself out of a maze, out of a forest with a trail of bread crumbs.
At first, the Internet searches using his father’s full name had turned up hundreds of seemingly useful results. Gabriel had, for example, immediately found an old interview in the Kingston Whig-Standard online archives that quoted his father’s name directly:
The volunteering program, founded in 1972 by prison guards Lise Desvallées and Marcel Tremblay, pairs local teenagers from Notre Dame Catholic High School and Queen’s University with inmates eager to complete their high-school education. “Over the last five years, we’ve had hundreds of inmates satisfy the requirements for a high school diploma, thanks to these kids,” said Desvallées. “Education is such an important part of the rehabilitation we do here.”
Gabriel had tried to find Lise Desvallées. He had driven all the way to her hometown of Medway, Maine, only to discover, seated in the microfilm room at the small public library, that she had died from cancer a few years earlier.
After this, the location of his father, as gleaned from Google, became more far-fetched. What were the chances, after all, that his father, so recently in North Bay, now operated a fly-fishing outfit on the Bow River? That he was on the guest list at a high-end nightclub in Vancouver? Still, certain only of his desire to see each lead wound down to the ends of its thread, Gabriel turned south, onto the I-95, and then west, toward Calgary.
On the way to Alberta, he called Pénélope. Recently, driving in increasingly erratic triangles—from North Bay to Ottawa, from Ottawa to North Bay, into northeastern Maine via Ottawa again, and now heading west, at least as far as Calgary, all the while moving, ostensibly, in tighter and tighter circles around his target, closing in on him like a noose—he found that his life had unwound itself from hers almost completely. He knew nothing about her day-to-day life: whether or not she had slept well the night before, which of her clothes still fit, what colour she’d painted the nursery.
So, slowly, he left Pénélope behind. It felt as if a ghost were marching him down a prisoner’s path, with shackles and chains around his feet—a single-file path marked for him alone.
When Gabriel reached Calgary, he pulled over on the side of the road and fell asleep, two blocks from the hotel he had booked online earlier that day. He was so tired he couldn’t follow the directions of the GPS, turning left on Glenmore Trail instead of right, and then missing the turnoff for Blackfoot Trail completely.
He felt drained from the non-stop drive from Saskatoon; this, combined with the exhaustion of having to look every single man he met directly in the face.
The last place Gabriel went before heading on foot into the Laurentians, only days before the thread guiding him out of the maze stretched and broke:
The prison stood before him like a fortress. This time, on the phone with the chief corrections officer, he had told the truth: that his father, Marcel Tremblay, had been employed there; that, after 1975, the man had disappeared without a trace; that Marcel Tremblay would soon have a granddaughter, and finding him was a matter of life and death.
Gabriel was met at the front gate by a woman in her late thirties. She’d already said she wouldn’t be able to help, that Marcel’s file had been closed years ago and was stored away in a dusty Ottawa office, that the penitentiary itself had lost track of him in 1974. Still, Gabriel asked to be let in—to see the officers’ stations, the empty cells, the grounds, the library—if only to be where his father had been, to know where to go next.
What Gabriel left out: that, sometime in the last three months, the desire to kill his father had turned out to be nothing more than a desire to know him.
XXII
An entire season had passed with no word. Pénélope had felt the baby kick; while shopping for maternity clothes, her water had broken all over the terrazzo floor of the Bay. It had been her sister, finally, who had accompanied her to the Royal Vic. During the delivery, between her contractions, she had turned her face to the wall.
Pénélope sat completely still. Her shoes were untied, the black laces springing up like the unsewn stitches of a wound. For the last hour, she had found herself incapable of bending down and tightening them, and therefore unable to stride out the door, walk down the stairs, and buy fruit from Atwater Market.
Chloe lay sleeping in the next room. Pénélope willed her to wake up, to cry, to force Pénélope to stand, walk over to her.
How to escape the days she spent half-asleep and the nights she lay half-awake, the four hours it took to eat any meal, the moans through the wall that woke Chloe, the long afternoons of tears that left her curled like a dried husk on the tiled floor?
And then, finally, a month after his daughter’s birth, Gabriel made an early-morning long-distance phone call to Montreal. He heard Pénélope’s tired voice, followed by silence when she realized it was him.
“This isn’t worth it,” he said. “If I don’t find him in the next day—in the next twenty-four hours—I promise I’ll come home.”
Pénélope remained quiet. In the distance, behind her, he heard the scrape of morning street cleaners on Saint Augustin. Then her attempt at words: her voice high-pitched, her breath jagged. Over her, he said, “I’m coming now, right now, I’ll be there by tonight, I completely fucked this up, I’m such a fool.”
Pénélope hung up.
XXIII
When his fingertips brushed hers on the train paused at Lionel-Groulx, on a warm August afternoon four years after they had first met, Araceli looked up at the tall man who had touched her, and for a second did not recognize Adrien’s widely spaced eyes, his earnest face.
Together, they strolled by the canal. When Araceli mentioned that she’d just moved back from New York into an apartment nearby, and that she didn’t have any evening plans, they walked to Atwater Market and bought steaks and asparagus to grill for dinner.
“Well, I did leave because of you,” Araceli said. “I just didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to feel bad. And you shouldn’t, because New York turned out to be great for me.”
“I’m so sorry,” Adrien said. “I don’t remember the details, but I don’t think I handled that well.”
Araceli didn’t reply, but laced her arm through his, so that they continued on arm in arm.
Adrien told her of his break-up with Pénélope, the child that wasn’t his, about running into Pénélope months later
.
“She was in good spirits. I think she was five or six months’ pregnant at the time, and her husband, the guy she had left me for, had just left on a big trip,” he said. “I ran into her again after their daughter Chloe was born. Her husband still wasn’t back yet.”
Adrien described walking Pénélope home, and then helping her carry her stroller up the stairs.
“And then, to see her apartment,” he said slowly. “Clothes everywhere. A slipper here, a slipper there. Dried chicken bones on a plate, left on the floor. Envelopes piled up outside the door.”
He told Araceli how, after that, he had started to stop by every week, to check on her.
“I think I will always want to help her,” he said. Adrien thought back to his partitioned soul, to the broken rem-nants of a love he hadn’t known what to do with, and to his eventual solution: to care for her without being in love with her, to allow himself to love someone else.
That night, having talked and laughed for hours, they fell asleep together, inches apart, in Araceli’s new bed.
XXIV
I miss you—the words were powerful now, now that they had been said once, and meant once. Pénélope would never be able to use them again, having heard Gabriel say them to her; to do so would be to spit on an unguarded memory, on the flesh of a shivering white mollusk, vulnerable out of its shell.
She wanted to punish him by speaking smoothly to him. To throw his way the lake, unrippled, with a staring moon. No more the waves, dark, heavy, rough, battering; the deep blind fish, swimming slowly. To slide across to him like ice.
Pénélope thought: I want to turn you into a relic, a brown god, enclosed roughly in rocks, bowed down to; I want to see you in an alcove above me, another’s limbs tied into mine.
Oh, to enter the earth as if born on this day. To arrive before old loves darken the sunrise, before the heavy tread sinks into one’s heels.
To have avoided, forever and eternally, that night in April, Gabriel’s dark eyes lingering against hers, her bare knee touching his as the bistro dimmed the lights, closed the shutters. To have avoided standing beside him, the closeness of his body as he waited, his arm extended, for a car in the night rain; the soft wool cuffs of his trousers already wet.
She would scheme, to make it seem like she’d died; she would have a child with another man, so that the blend of their features would haunt Gabriel.
Pénélope thought: Oh, to be able to say, as a family at an airline check-in counter, “Yes, we packed the bag ourselves,” and hold our daughter by the hand.
Pénélope prayed for time to run out. She prayed for it to drop out from under her, like a trap door. To bring her to where she could lie, still on cold wooden boards, a coarse cloth over her face like a shroud.
Oh, she wanted to tear out her love.
But it had sunk through her now. It was lead, and like lead tied to one’s ankles, it pulled her down.
The memory of that afternoon in Havana: a bird scratching the windowsill, his hands under her billowing white blouse, his eyes open as if a dam had broken.
It will sink, sink, sink.
XXV
In a way, Gabriel had known it would come to this—to ground warfare, hand-to-hand combat, a scorching of the earth. The small blue rental Corolla was parked kilometres away from where Gabriel now stood in the forest, his arms by his sides, a gruff, two-day-old beard on his jaw and neck. Gabriel had seen this path in his dreams—had stumbled down it, his hands stretched out in front of him, as if blind; now he followed his father’s footsteps, the shoe prints frozen into the hardened mud.
He was exhausted. For two days he had cracked the ice skin of morning puddles with his sharp heel, kneeling to dip first his ear, then his stubbled cheek, and then the corner of his mouth into the murky water. He had eaten only a crumbling Hershey’s bar.
And then Marcel’s tracks completely disappeared, but this didn’t surprise Gabriel. In the last few hours he had started to wonder: the ranger who had crinkled his old eyes over his father’s photograph and then pointed to the path into the hills—what did he know? The large, rugged footsteps Gabriel had been following, literally placing his own feet in them as he walked—whose were they? Did they really belong to Marcel Tremblay? Was Marcel Tremblay really his father? And, of the hundreds of Marcel Tremblays born in Canada over the last fifty years, how could he be sure he’d ever been chasing the right one?
And then, the biggest question of all: when you and your life’s happiness part ways at a forked path, when do you admit the mistake and turn back, and when do you set yourself belligerently forward?
Gabriel turned around. He set his brave feet along the sunnier path. The white sands rushed back into the other half of the hourglass, but it was already too late. Gabriel, unaware, walked briskly over spring shoots and small shrubs, imagining himself in Montreal by midnight.
A few hours later, having emerged from the forest onto the highway that would take him home—but first, on a walk a few kilometres south, to where he had parked the Corolla—Gabriel failed to see the pickup truck as it rounded the corner and sped toward him.
The driver, too, failed to see Gabriel, concealed in dusk’s half-light, in muddied clothing, in this completely unexpected place. The seconds slowed; Gabriel felt time yawn open to accommodate every possible avenue of escape, but the ditch was too far, and the truck too fast, for him to leap aside or to jump.
In the instant before the grille of the truck bore into the bones of his legs, the flesh of his torso, in the moment before he pushed through the eye of the needle, time gave him one last gift: he saw in a flash Chloe, as a woman—a lanky girl with long slender legs, a swan’s neck, and her mother’s bright, ingenuous eyes. And as the truck crushed his knees, he felt his love for her like a deep inhale with no end.
XXVI
Every evening, swinging a crying Chloe near her crib, Pénélope contemplated a different set of knives. How, now, to open every suffered wound on his body?
And how to punish Gabriel for leaving her when he still loved her: how to take revenge for that?
Pénélope never thought to check the obituaries in the Montreal Gazette. She had thought of everything else: she had attended every neighbourhood party, wineglass in hand, to catch any echo of his name tied to another’s; she had walked by his ex-girlfriend Caroline’s window; she had even called Gabriel’s uncle, whom she had never met, who didn’t even know she existed.
Pénélope had no way of knowing that Gabriel was dead. She didn’t know that the driver of the pickup truck had backed up, swerved in a wild arc around Pénélope’s husband’s crumpled form, and then stopped ten kilometres down the road to vomit. She didn’t know that it had taken forty-five minutes for Gabriel to actually die, and another five hours for a patrol car to find him. She didn’t know about the abandoned rental car that had eventually been stolen, or that his wallet still lay where it had fallen out of his pocket among the moss-covered stones on a forest path. She had missed the three-inch article, “Man Killed Near Saint-Sauveur,” because love cannot accept anything as impartial as death; in his disappearance, Pénélope could only read betrayal.
A plan unfolded. It was utterly unforgivable; it was perfect; it would set the future as a bleak, charred expanse between them.
“I actually considered ringing the doorbell and just leaving her on the doorstep,” Pénélope said wryly, as Adrien opened the door. “Maybe with a note. You would have loved that.”
Adrien smiled as he reached for Chloe. The baby kicked her legs happily against his familiar ribs.
“Do you need me to keep her for a few days?”
“It might be more than a few,” Pénélope said lightly.
Adrien looked up. Pénélope seemed taller, thinner; her deep brown eyes had sunk into her face. She looked as if a warm wind could blow her off the face of the earth.
Adrien reached out and touched her cheek. Pénélope bent her face toward his hand. He was allo
wed this small affection, now; now that he had Araceli upstairs, recently moved-in, her books alongside his books, the weight of her head on his chest in the mornings.
“He’s not back yet.”
“No.”
Adrien held the baby tightly against his shoulder.
“Chloe can stay here as long as you need.”
Adrien had no way of knowing that three weeks would turn into three years, into thirteen years, into a lifetime of shielding his adopted daughter from the truth—that he had half-expected the phone call that came two weeks later, the notification of the next of kin. That he was unsurprised when the consular official told him, in her bad-news tone, of Pénélope’s drowning off Cuba’s coast, of the six scuba-tour witnesses, of the group leader who swore up and down that he had seen her dark head sink beneath the rough waves of the sea.