My parents lived in a suite attached to my sister and brother-in-law’s house. Dad had built an extension so he and Mom could have their own kitchen, appliances, and dining room, but the boys and I slept on my sister Criselda’s side of the house, which was much bigger.
As we pulled onto the driveway, Criselda came out to greet us. She had the same hazel eyes as my aunt Lil. She hugged the boys and me extravagantly, and then we hauled our things inside. Her husband Bart offered me a beer, which I happily accepted, and her daughter Katya, my niece, showed the boys a new video game.
Later we had dinner with my parents in their suite. My dad now did all of the cooking and serving of food. At the table the boys were stir-crazy from confinement in the car all day.
“Are they usually this loud?” my mother asked me, as if Peter and Bohdan weren’t there. Her hands shook and she ate only thin strips of soy cheese and drank insipidly weak tea. She complained about a vague stomach ailment and how tired she felt.
“How is Mom doing?” I asked Dad as we cleaned up the dishes.
“She’s OK.” He shrugged, worried that Mom would hear him. To see my mother sitting and watching television while Dad cooked and cleaned astonished me. From the living room she kept repeating a story about one of my cousins from three years ago. My mother used to be sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, and the best source of family gossip. It was depressing and painful to see her, stooped over, with her beautiful long fingers clenched in her lap. She had lost her keen mind and with it, most of her words.
The boys and I spent the next day at the wave park in the West Edmonton Mall. They went down the biggest, highest slides allowed by the park rules, and I felt frightened; I don’t like heights, and the boys lacked any healthy fear. We spent a solid, enjoyable couple of hours together in the wave pool, letting ourselves be tossed over the giant artificial waves in rubber tubes, Bohdan shrieking, Peter attracting extra attention from the patrols when he got too close to the edge. Satisfied they were well-occupied, I snuck off to the chairs at the side to read a novel. That evening my sister asked us to have our meals on their side of the house, so that Mom wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the boys’ volume and energy level. Dad did not come over much because he needed to stay with Mom, Criselda informed me; Mom panicked without him in the suite.
The second day of our stay, the boys ate breakfast with me in my sister’s kitchen, and then I left them to play with Katya’s toys while I went to see my parents in their suite.
Mom sat mutely on the couch. She handed me the TV remote because she no longer knew how to operate it. I turned on “Days of Our Lives” for her and found my dad in the kitchen. He washed up their breakfast dishes and I dried, and we talked about the weather and the Lakers for a few minutes, as always. He put the kettle on the stove and motioned me to the table and we sat down.
“How is Peter doing?”
“He’s good, mostly.”
“Does he remember anything from before you adopted him?” This question surprised me.
“Not much. His first conscious memory is when they drove him in an ambulance away from his brother, to the older kids’ orphanage out in the country. He was four and about eight months.” I hesitated, then said, “What is your first memory?”
“Ah, that would be from the war.” He paused and his facial expression stiffened under his white, closely trimmed beard. My father has pure blue eyes, just like mine. “I saw people shot so they fell into a ditch. Later I found out that they were Jews.” He remembered the bodies falling down into the ditch, he said, the thud as they landed.
“How old were you?”
“Four or five.” He swallowed.
The whistle on the kettle blew then and Dad took Mom her cup of hot water together with an herbal tea bag on a saucer. I could hear them murmuring over the soap opera theme music.
On our last full day in Edmonton, disappointed that the boys had not seen much of their grandfather, I proposed that the four of us go together to the nearby YMCA and swim. Dad loves swimming, although he didn’t get out much anymore because of Mom’s condition, and the boys enjoyed the water too.
We went after dinner for a family swim hour when the pool was divided up into open areas and reserved lanes. All four of us got in the water, Dad and I just treading water and watching the kids. Bohdan floated on his back in the shallow end and played with a toy he could retrieve by diving to the bottom. Peter strayed toward the lanes reserved for people swimming laps. I called to him from the shallow end to come back and he ignored me. He did a lazy backstroke at random angles into the pool, and the second time he bumped into a grownup, I yelled at him. Then I got out of the pool and told Peter to get out. When he still refused, I got in and picked him up, carrying him to the corner while he shouted. In my peripheral vision I could see Dad staring at us.
“That’s it, Peter, you’re in time-out. You have to pay attention to other people in the pool.” His face was set in a stubborn rictus and he acted as if he could not hear me. Dad, Bohdan, and I played in the water for ten minutes more, then I invited Peter back into the pool. He refused, and did not speak on the way home.
The boys and I slept in a room in the loft that contained many of their teenage cousin Katya’s toys from her childhood, and I had to constantly check on them after they went to bed to be sure they weren’t playing instead of sleeping. On our last night I was trying to have a glass of wine with Criselda but had to keep getting up because I could hear them getting out of bed, talking loudly, and knocking over pieces of furniture. Once I found them putting on Katya’s dress-up costumes and jewellery. After finally getting them settled, I joined my parents in their suite to watch the late news, and came back to the room just after eleven.
I opened the door to find Peter’s DS and toys scattered all over his bed and Peter scrambling to get under his covers. Bohdan was pretending to sleep but he was in the wrong position. I yanked the DS out of Peter’s hands, grabbed the toys and threw them out from under his covers while he began screaming. I put my hands over his mouth and said “Stop, what’s wrong with you?”
Bohdan sat bolt upright in his bed, not pretending to sleep anymore. “If you do that to my brother, I won’t go to sleep either!”
“Christ, Bohdan. You’re not asleep anyway.”
I spent half an hour threatening, negotiating, cajoling them. In the end I said fine, do what you want, and fell onto my bed for a few hours of exhausted sleep.
In the morning we started late because we’d overslept. We said a hurried goodbye to my parents and sister, called Betsy to let her know we were on our way, and then I steeled myself for the long ride home.
Our hyper-athletic cat Alty became ill and died that summer; the anti-social Ranger had died the previous year. Alty ignored the boys, and Ranger ignored everyone, so Peter and Bohdan never really bonded with them and hardly noticed their absence.
In September Betsy and I decided to find some kittens for the boys. Peter and Bohdan became the proud owners of a sibling pair of orphans. They’d been rescued from a barn where they were the lone survivors of their mother’s disappearance. Their littermates had starved to death. They were so young they had to be bottle-fed. As a result, they loved being held on their backs.
Peter named his male kitten January, because he’d dreamed of having a white cat, and even though January was a gorgeous grey tabby, Peter stuck with his original name. Bohdan called his female cat Gracie Flames, for the orange highlights on her brown and white calico coat. Probably because the cats were theirs, the boys were much more affectionate with them than they’d been with Ranger and Alty, playing with them, stroking them, talking to them. When the cats started going outside, Gracie liked to bolt across the street and wander around the neighbourhood. Peter was especially gentle with January, who stayed mostly on our porch.
That fall, when Peter was eight and Bohdan seven, we decided that it was time for them to begin walking to school on their own. We gave the boys detailed instructions about their rout
e and how we expected them to behave. They left for school at twenty minutes to nine, just early enough to get in for first bell. We let their teachers know so they’d notify us immediately if the boys were late.
For two weeks everything seemed fine. Their teachers reported no tardiness, and the boys were cheerful and on time after school — we allowed twenty minutes to get home as well.
Then came a call from the principal. They had been spotted by other parents who saw them wrestling each other in the street, pulling lumber out of backyards, smashing bottles on the sidewalk, and screaming obscenities into apartment block intercoms. After lengthy and separate interrogations we found out that Peter was the instigator of these follies, Bohdan the good soldier. We put Bohdan under strict orders to report to us when his brother did crazy stuff. But he was foolishly loyal and maybe we asked too much of him. In any case Betsy and I resumed our old routine, Betsy playing chaperone in the morning, and I in the afternoon.
The boys went to daycare for the after-school program from 3:30 until 5:00, so I could write and do freelance work for a full day. The truth was that I had trouble handling them with Betsy away from home until dinnertime.
On a Tuesday afternoon in December I walked into the daycare centre a few minutes early and saw the boys playing together. Bohdan came skipping toward the door but Peter pretended not to see me. Somebody called him and pointed at me in the doorway. Peter ambled over.
“Hi Peter. We need to hurry home and get supper started,” I said.
“Mm,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
I recognized this response; he was in trouble for something, God knew what. Peter’s teacher marked his agenda every day to tell us if he’d stayed in his desk when he was supposed to, and if he was on time for the start of class. When he didn’t get his teacher’s initials, his consequence was that he ate oatmeal and a plain slice of bread for dinner. He hated oatmeal, preferring chef’s salad and exotic cheese. I felt sorry for him, but we’d tried everything else: incentive systems, deductions from his allowance, confiscating toys, tearful lectures. None of it worked. And we didn’t want to use corporal punishment at all.
At the daycare locker Peter deliberately collapsed on the floor in giggles. Then he ran around the corner and hid. My stomach knotted up the way it had when I was seventeen and drank half a mickey of lemon gin as an experiment in losing control.
Bohdan meanwhile had quietly put on his winter things. It was so cold that exposed skin froze in two minutes. I had to stand over Peter to make him get ready. He kept looking up at me mockingly. After about ten minutes the boys and I left the daycare centre.
“I’m going to run away,” Peter said. And he ran across the street without checking for traffic. I chased him, also without checking. Bohdan stood on the sidewalk watching us.
“You have to walk with me.” I grabbed Peter by the shoulder and shook him hard.
“No I don’t.” He laughed. This time he ran up a back alley and I chased him again. He threw himself down and I pulled him to his feet and dragged him back along the icy sidewalk, my now ungloved hands stinging with cold. Someone came past us with a dog. I smiled as if to say that everything was under control.
Peter was a solid kid, and my arms ached from trying to frog-march him. Bohdan pulled on me from behind, while Peter giggled and thrashed, breathing in the painfully cold air.
“Bohdan, you’ve got to stop. I’m not hurting Peter. Let’s go.” Our breath hung above us like a storm cloud.
Peter stared at me defiantly from under his brows and shouted, “You can’t make me go with you!”
He let his legs go limp and stared at me insolently, as if daring me to hit him. Then he ripped his hat from his head.
“Stop that,” I bellowed. “You’ll get frostbite, you little shit!”
Instead of twenty minutes the walk home took over an hour. I marched Peter in the front door with me instead of sending him to the back and gave him a hard push when he walked into the house. He fell theatrically on the floor in the front hall, then scrambled back to his feet and made a dash for the door. Bohdan jumped out of his way.
Peter careened into the wall as he tried to escape out the front door. Bohdan watched from behind me. I blocked the door and wrestled Peter down again, pinning his legs under mine so he couldn’t move. We both gasped for breath, gulping in the warm air from the ancient steam heat system.
Just then Betsy walked in the front door and had to step over me and Peter sprawled out in the hallway. Over Peter’s howls of rage, I told her what happened. Betsy did not hesitate.
“Do you still want to run, Peter?”
“Yes!” he said, with tears irrigating his face.
“Let him up, Maurice.”
Peter shuffled to his feet.
“If you run away, Peter, you cannot take any money or toys, you know. And you will be lonely without Bohdan but he is too small to run away. Do you still want to go?”
Peter emptied his pockets onto the hardwood floor.
“And you will need your hat and mitts,” Betsy said, putting them on Peter as she spoke, even though he resisted. “It’s very cold. Do you still want to run away?” Peter wrenched open the door and ran down the street toward Maryland Avenue. Bohdan and Betsy and I stared at one another uneasily.
Every five minutes Bohdan asked where his brother went. Peter would be back soon, Betsy reassured him. But after Peter was gone twenty minutes I took Betsy aside. She was pale and worried, and said, “He’s got to come back soon.”
“I’d better go find him,” I said, and she nodded, then went to heat dinner for Bohdan.
I searched for over an hour and then came home to see if Peter had returned in my absence. Bohdan lay in bed, crying, Betsy beside him holding his hand and talking to him in a low voice. I left again, the cold and the fear tightening their vise-grip on my body. I had horrible visions of him frozen to death or worse. Then at the end of Sherbrook I saw a familiar bright red parka stepping out of a pawnshop. Peter turned and saw me, and sprinted for the back alley.
I cornered him in the dead end of the alley by the garbage cans, tackled him, and dragged him home by the waist, screaming and kicking at me the entire way. At nine when we finally got home Bohdan still lay awake. He was terrified.
VI
We decided to make the rest of December as quiet as possible and crossed everything off our calendars that wasn’t essential. Betsy began coming home from work early so both of us would be there to pick Peter and Bohdan up from daycare; there would be no more experiments with letting him run. I locked our side door and hid the key so the house would have only one exit. Peter needed fewer options.
The first day that Betsy and I arrived at the daycare together, Peter came out in the hall without looking at us and sat down on the floor. I asked him to stand up. He did, but also put my hand on his head while he rammed it against the wall. It looked like I was pushing his head and so I snatched my hand back. Other parents in the hallway glanced nervously at each other.
Throughout the month Peter kept threatening to run away again. Bohdan clung to his brother in the day and cried every night. None of us slept properly. The third or fourth time Peter threatened to run, Betsy screamed at him. This time, in tears, she told Peter he was being a terrorist to our family. Peter grinned, although when I asked he could not define the word. Betsy forced herself to calm down and explained that a terrorist was someone who gets what he wants by making threats and even blowing things up, while Bohdan shook his head and sat by himself. To ourselves we would say that Peter was a terrorist of love, for love, and it was love and steady attention that he needed — every night while we drank large glasses of wine and binge-watched The Sopranos on DVD. Seeing people defend family values with violence seemed logical and satisfying.
When we went upstairs for the night, Betsy still read, but now she erected a Berlin wall of pillows between us. She was in peri-menopause, she said, and couldn’t sleep properly if I put my arm around her: it made her u
ncomfortably warm. We also had a fan stationed in the bedroom now, even in winter. I looked up “peri-menopause” on the web and what she said made perfect sense. But it didn’t make me happy.
We had regular fights about my incompetence doing household chores and what Betsy said was my bad attitude. In the past I’d challenged her to give me examples as they occurred, claiming that my failures were an occasional, infrequent result of absentmindedness and deadline pressure in my work. But now she gave me daily bulletins: I failed to turn up the furnace on some unpredictable mornings; I put food-encrusted dishes back in the cupboard; I spilled crumbs all over the couch while eating lunch; I snarled at her if she asked me for the third time when I planned to take out the garbage. At the height of our worst argument she said she’d been pulling most of the weight in the marriage, and now with the kids, for over a decade, and I needed to decide: was I in or out? Her voice shook with anger but her eyes filled with tears. What was wrong with me?
On Christmas Eve I walked with Peter to the corner grocery on Westminster, holding his hand because I still didn’t trust him, even though he seemed relaxed.
“Why is December so hard for you?” I asked, looking down at his hood.
“I remember things,” he said. “I remember with my body.”
On the second Friday in January Peter and Bohdan had no school. It was my turn to take a day off work. I gave Betsy a hug as she left for the bus.
“That’s a board hug,” she said. I dropped my arms.
Later in the day I told the boys I’d take them sledding. I made hot chocolate in the microwave and put it in thermoses. We hauled the various plastic and wooden sleds from the basement to the garage.
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