He climbed aboard, his sisters after him. Momoye looked him up and down. He stood tall and distant in his fine suit and overcoat.
“Fu-ranki,” she snapped at him, as if he’d just spilled her precious sake.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Give the girls their money.” She held out her palm and jabbed her finger in it. The girls weren’t asking for much—a drop in the sea of his good fortune. They were middle-aged now, thick at their ankles and their middles, though they hadn’t borne any children.
“I didn’t take money. I made money,” he said.
The shame of him hoarding his pennies when the girls were so shabby.
Aki tried to hand him a book—a bookkeeper’s ledger—but he wouldn’t take it. He planted his hands in the pockets of his fine coat and shook his head. She opened it to show him: more numbers, small amounts tallied up at the bottom of the page and carried over, page to page to page. With dates as far back as when he’d left Tashme. He recognized the hand.
“Papa kept this,” Aki said. “We never asked him to, but he said it was important.”
Frankie had never taken a penny from the girls that they themselves hadn’t given away; nothing he didn’t grow for them into something bigger and greater than their theatre of rickety hopes where they’d chosen to stay, stubbornly timid as mice.
Here they’d have been looked after. They knew he would take care of them; it was insulting to be made to even say it! He was, and would forever be, Man of the House.
How could his mother not know this? She used to know everything before he did. There’d been no asking. Now she was putting his sisters before him. The sisters who made him know he was the outsider with strange blood. Who cared and cried for Yas as they never had for him.
Who cared for Frankie? Who was for Frankie?
His mother stared right into his eyes. Her brows arched as fiercely as ever. “Give the money back,” she said.
“Mama!” he cried. He took the ledger and threw it down, his face reddening with stopped-up tears. They trickled inside him, scalding his throat as he climbed out of the boat.
CHAPTER 13
The Man Who Couldn’t Cry
Frankie knocked at the front door of the Kidney. How strange to be at the front entrance, a visitor, when he’d slipped in the back door all those years. The makeshift see-through roof had been replaced with a shingled roof, and the trees and bushes around the house had grown so thick that even the doorbell was wreathed in green. It was spruced up, yet overgrown.
His calls to Uri and Hannah had not been returned in weeks, not since those pictures of children had begun to appear in the newspapers. If their partnership was to end, no matter, Frankie told himself: he’d learned everything he needed to know. But Hannah: why had she not called? When after weeks of this silence, Frankie was summoned to the Kidney, he was relieved but uneasy.
The door opened. It was Noriko. Hair grey now, but the same.
How frail Hannah looked. How slight she felt in his arms when she embraced him. Purple chiffon still draped her shoulders, but her face was narrowed and angular, her eyes all the larger and darting.
“Frank, there’s someone here who would like to see you.” His heart skipped with a memory. Anne? Annie?
She led him into the living room and on the chesterfield sat an elderly woman, Uri beside her. She looked familiar but he couldn’t place her. He held out his hand but she ignored it.
“Frank, this is Mrs. Mayfield.”
The woman stared at him in silence, letting herself be stared at in return. He should know her. After a moment she spoke. “You bought our home after the hurricane.”
Then he remembered: the couple who’d left with only their all-you-can-carry. They’d refused his help. He’d had to cart the things they left behind to the Salvation Army.
“You paid us a pittance. The other families too.” Pittance. The same word Hannah’s friend in the caravan had used. They’d accept a pittance, she’d told him. Out of desperation.
“It was all I could afford,” Frankie told her, “at the time.” It was true. He’d drained his savings to buy the four houses. But now he felt his insides draining into a burning hole in his belly.
“But the City paid you more. Much more,” Uri suddenly said. “You knew they would.” Uri stood. “You knew because I told you, in confidence.”
Uri gazed down at him. Instantly, Frankie was reduced back into that kowtower—worse—that servant who’d learned to sip martinis on this very seat.
He wanted to make excuses. To voice the uncertainty and fear he’d felt at the time. How he’d convinced himself he was helping these people, relieving their burden so they could get on. Explain how it had been his one chance, the only chance for him to get on.
“Yes,” said Frankie. “I knew.” He watched Hannah turn away from him and then enfold the woman’s one hand in both of hers, just as she’d once held his.
Noriko was waiting to let him out. He slipped past quickly, but she gripped his arm and looked into his eyes.
“You were smarter,” she whispered, then shut the door.
* * *
—
What would the Chairman have said? What would he have told him to do? Frankie opened his desk drawer and poured himself a glass of Scotch whisky, then another and another. There was no one left to ask.
In his sleeplessness, he’d watched Hannah turn away from him again and again. When he finally dozed off, he was roused by chanting and singing below. Tear down the wall! All day and into the night, it seemed: into his dreams.
Light it up! the Chairman would’ve said. They’ll love you, Frank, my boy!
So Frankie did. The very next night. He ordered every bulb in every socket inside each built or half-built building turned on: wall to wall, floor to ceiling. He ordered Christmas lights strung up too. His wall afire, blazing in the night, spreading on water. Frankie stood on the observation deck at midnight. It was something to see. Greater than the beehive burner on Alberni Strait. Brighter than the noonday sun.
It blazed across the waterfront atop the wall, above Captain Jim’s boat, high in the sky like a sunset, visible in Rosedale, where Uri saw it from the bedroom window as Hannah at last succumbed to sleep.
* * *
—
The night Baby Yuri disappeared, Hannah hadn’t waited for the elevator amid the crush of people leaving. Foolishly, she’d rushed down the steps after Frank. At last, into the April night that should not have been snowy and so cold. Her heart still grieved the loss of Frank’s boy.
Uri had followed his wife’s stocking-footed prints pressed in the snow—her slender toes achingly articulated—and found her calling out to Baby Yuri, then to Frank, her voice growing hoarse. In her desperation, he couldn’t help but notice how ravishing she appeared to him: hair streaming and flecked with snowflakes, skin blanched white as snow beneath its veil of violet. She held out her chapped red hands to him. Uri, find Baby! Find him! Her hands burned in his. Help Frank!
It was not his first time grazed by jealousy. But Uri understood she must do everything for Frank, to keep him safe under her wing. She believed in his suffering as she believed in her own. Everything followed as a consequence or in spite of that. Even this swindling could possibly be forgiven, betrayed though she felt.
At five o’clock, the morning after Frank’s show of lights, Uri roused his wife, as he did three times a week. No more languorous night-before martini sipping. They ate toast and sipped tea in the cool stillness, windows blind to the garden beyond it. At six, he bundled her up in black mink over her purple chiffon. They drove through quiet streets to the hospital where for five hours he would sit opposite where she sat, her eyes closed; him not knowing if she slept or not, if she was in pain or not, as a mechanism pumped cleansed blood through her veins. A compact, high-functioning machine stood by her side, sleekly encased, doing the work her body no longer could. Uri had grown into the habit of these early risings, attuned to the machinery of he
r life. They had grown into it together. They could live on indefinitely, he told himself: he, Hannah and the Machine.
Each morning Uri coaxed his beloved out of their bedroom to walk, to eat—though he had to guide her through a dietary minefield. To once again utter those words he’d joyously given up—My Hannah, she won’t be down today—that was no longer the worst thing he could imagine. The worst was much worse, as he’d always known.
It was later in the morning, nearing the end of Hannah’s treatment, when the sun’s rays in the east-facing room pooled with the heated output of the hard-working machine. Uri swam in a flooded yard of half-dreams, with Hannah leaning just out of reach with her fishing line; the suck-and-pump sound of the dialysis machines was his own held breath and heartbeat underwater.
When the machine stopped he woke. He knew the routine: the nurse checking levels on the machine, then disconnecting Hannah from it. But this time, her blood, cleansed and precious, spurted and ran down her arm to the dirty floor. A faint mist rolled off it like fog from a sea. Everyone gasped, instinctively lifting their feet.
The nurse quickly stopped it up at the spout on Hannah’s arm, restoring the flow to inside her veins. She gave a terse smile. “Lots more where that came from.”
An orderly mopped around Hannah’s feet, the red swirling to pink, then muddling into the dull brown of the linoleum. Her chiffon was stained. Uri draped her mink coat around her shoulders and led her out. She leaned heavily on him. “I’m wilted, Uri,” she said. He could barely feel her beneath the fur.
He took Hannah home and settled her onto the couch with a blanket to rest by the window to their barren yard.
Hannah turned her back to her husband’s charmless fussing. Instead she looked out to the spot where her iris isle had once flourished. A muddy pit was all that remained. She refused to meet Uri’s eyes, flooding with worry, imploring her to be well—as if she’d willed the affliction and could will it away.
On the mornings they didn’t go to the hospital, he lay awake in the chaise he’d placed beside the bed. Lately he’d pained her with seismic shifts in the night, rolling this way and that. Now he waited anxiously for her to wake and rise. Some days she could and would rise, though every part of her body ached in its own right and way. She held out an elbow to be rubbed, doubled up when her belly burned. Bring me my mink, will you? She was perennially cold.
“How’s my Hannah today?” Uri asked each morning. She resented the question, the fresh new slate he posed, as if he weren’t one to be haunted by what had come before. He, Mr. Knew-It-All.
Time and again over the years, Hannah would hear and read Uri’s waxing lament of what might have been, on radio, and in magazines. What had become of Uri Slonemsky’s Modern Architecture, his alphabetical project barely begun with a “U” and an “I”? The what-might-have-been. He would pause and let the interviewer fill the space. The implication he let settle was that he’d turned his attention to Hannah, his beloved muse. Listening, Hannah could not help remembering those he’d turned away, evicted despite her pleas, so that his gold-paned Towers of Finance might rise.
* * *
—
Through the long lit-up night, calls had come. Complaints, compliments, condemnations. Frankie listened, hung up, then stopped answering. He swilled some Scotch and fell asleep at his desk.
In the morning, another call: it was the police.
They’d found Baby Yuri, what remained of him. A few bones of a small boy nesting on a shore west of the city were discovered, embedded with stray threads of the navy sailor suit Baby Yuri had been wearing the night he’d disappeared.
Frankie sat for minutes, hours. The day passed into night and back again. Sounds of chattering children and mothers drifted in and out of his head. It was a journey, round and round in his rotating tower getting nowhere. It was like being in the Ladies’ little home, drifting without leaving, and no one coming for him.
He closed his office door. The phone rang, letters and papers and deliveries piled up outside. He was weak from not eating, unable to open the door, to climb down from his tower.
He settled in his chair as his mother had in their house on the sea. He’d been a monkey climbing over and under her. Not unlike Baby Yuri who’d been something else: fish? eel? A creature apart. There was not even a whole human body left to bathe, to swathe, to put to rest and let pass in peace to the next world. He knew he had to call Reiko, but he couldn’t.
For the first time, he ventured into the stairwell and climbed the steps from his office to the observation deck.
The wind snatched at him as he opened the door. He stumbled forward beyond the fenced area to the gate that allowed maintenance crews out. He unlocked it and stepped onto the unprotected ledge. He wanted to see the lake—his sea—unobstructed. The clouds were close enough to touch. He inched out bit by bit. This ledge was smoother than a felled trunk, though levelled and no wider. He followed flecks of light here to there, each dissolving or resolving into bird or cloud or thin air. He spied a small creature darting over the water, then diving down. Frankie leaned out farther; the keys slipped from his hand, slunk into the distance below, sparkled, gone.
Then down, down, down he went. Down between the logs that rolled out from under his feet; down from the peak to the lowest rung his fingers slipped. Down through the deepest crack in the sea.
No one could pull him up. Not Taiji, not his mother. Not even the Priest. Frankie’s keys bounced off the pavement. The sparkle and clink of them startled the woman at whose feet they fell.
* * *
—
“It’s Mr. Hanes,” someone said, and everyone turned toward the figure who’d appeared among them.
The swishing crowd tightened into a ring. Mother and child, mother and child, mother and child.
There were not as many as Frankie expected. Fewer than the newspapers were making it seem. They all stared. They were poor. He knew how that looked and how it felt: their faces lean and pale and stained, small enough to cup, one cheek in each hand as he’d thought to do so many times with Baby Yuri but hadn’t. His boy had been pint-sized but strong and nourished—he’d made sure of that. A busy body. A tight bud yet to unfurl. Frankie had felt it in his hands whenever he hauled the boy from wherever he shouldn’t be.
Frankie felt a tug at his pant leg. He looked down at the small head there and patted it; so small under his palm, the hair soft: not as thick or coarse as his son’s.
An adult hand thrust a sheet of paper in front of him: a lump of yellow and lines wriggling out from it. BRING BACK THE SUN, it read in bold grown-up letters: STOP THE HANES DEVELOPMENT.
The hand stayed there until he took the sheet.
“Frank?” A face he knew was looking back at him.
“My father? Did my father build the wall?”
He touched a hand to her shoulder and she flinched.
She’d changed a little: creases at the eyes, lips thinned, down-turned at the ends; her face wore its cares. That hair, that flying mass darker than her mother’s, was tied back. Frankie recognized the blouse as the same or something like the one she wore the night they’d met. Of course he remembered. Annie. Anne.
All in a second he looked back to her eyes, which were spilling over with the question. In her other hand, she clutched a set of keys: his keys.
“No,” he said. He held an accusing hand to his chest. “I did this.”
CHAPTER 14
Eclipse
Frankie stood on the deck of the early-morning ferry, watching a scrap of wood float past. The wind bit his face; autumn had turned to winter in a day. He retrieved the letter he’d folded neatly and tucked into his breast pocket.
Dear Frank,
I have questions for you, my dear boy. Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have? Secondly, if success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how you are and what you do, how would you be? what would you do?
These are que
stions I have asked myself.
I am responding in your hour of need to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.
Yours truly, Bucky
He disembarked on Toronto Island. Striding off the gangplank, he was jostled from behind only to knock a man pushing a cart filled with dry goods. Cans and boxes that skittered across plank after plank and into the lake. Bags of Five Roses flour and cans of Spam, salmon and tuna slowly sank. The waste! He might have waded in after them if not for the cold.
“So sorry,” Frankie muttered, reaching for his wallet.
The man retrieved his upended cart; without a word or glance, he turned it around back onto the ferry.
Frankie stood on the quay and gazed at the city. What he saw was his wall and just above it, Cloud Tower; not much else was visible: the Five Roses plant exhaling its floury smoke. Cranes: their arms crooked over his many buildings still rising. And then, between him and the city were the waves, churning up froth, and that made him shiver: this island sat low in the water. He felt marooned at the moment, that feeling of unsteadiness that lived in his stomach as a boy rowing out to sea to get home.
He drew away from the quay and began to walk following the directions he’d been given. He crossed creeks overhung with bowing willows. He passed the odd person and each time thought to ask about Anne or Annie Slonemsky. Each time, he remembered too late and felt sheepish to double back. He walked until he realized that he was walking where he’d walked before. The lights in the tiny frame houses he’d passed earlier were coming on now. Silhouettes appeared in windows.
It was beautiful along these winding paths, really, once he let go of his worry. All was quiet and quaint: a community of small people in small boxes of different colours—white, green, even pink and purple—low to the ground. Faces or figures adorned walls, doors and mailboxes like hieroglyphs; wind chimes dangled from porches and tree branches; windmills were planted in the ground. In one or two windows, he noticed a sign: SAVE OUR HOMES! There were footprints in the soft earth, yet wherever he turned, all was still. Apart from life elsewhere. Each shack resigned to being a home just where it was.
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