The two police officers seemed about the right age to have young children of their own, and it seemed to me possible, even likely, that the story of what had happened would persuade them that I had done nothing more than preserve Philip from being removed from the country and from the arms of his mother by someone whose rights were murky at best. So I laid out most of the story of the past few days, but leaving out Rebecca and providing only the vaguest indication of where I had stayed in Quebec, while the two officers took notes on page after page of their small lined notebooks. When I had finished, the woman read her notes back to me and I initialed every page and signed and dated her record of what I had said at the bottom of the last page. I was hoping that my ready cooperation would buy me something and I asked for it when we were done.
“Please. I need to take my nephew to my sister now. I am sure we can sort this out tomorrow.”
“The child welfare authorities are attempting to reach the mother,” the woman officer said, not unkindly. “She will have to see whether she can come to an agreement with the child’s father on what should be done with him. If an agreement can’t be reached, it is possible that the child will be taken to a foster home until the question of custody can be decided. That is the usual practice in this sort of case.”
“Fathers have rights too,” the male officer said. His voice was thick with something more than authority. I glanced at him and saw that his mouth and brow had hardened into an aggrieved expression. His partner shot him a complicated look and he didn’t say anything more. The woman told me that I was being released on my own recognizance, and I signed a paper promising to be in court at ten o’clock on the morning on December 27.
Rebecca was waiting for me some distance down the corridor. “Lucy’s on her way,” she said. “She should be here in half an hour, and she’ll have her lawyer with her. I couldn’t reach Leo.” She touched my arm. “There’s nothing more we can do, Maggie. It’s out of our hands now.”
Hearth
My parents have never seriously challenged the decisions that Janet and Lucy and I have made in our lives. They believe in the gentlest of guidance, and that knowledge comes from the spirit as well as the head, from practice more than from instruction, from mistakes and trial and error and self-correction. To some extent my mother and father also consider that boundaries are designed to be put to the test, that a wealth of information about ourselves and the world can be found at and slightly beyond the margins. When we were girls, Janet and Lucy and I were usually permitted to work through issues and problems in whatever way we saw fit, and encouraged to measure our efforts and achievements for ourselves, rather than by reference to a grade or judgment or assessment conferred by someone else. So my parents accepted Rebecca’s and my arrival at their front door very late on Christmas Eve with an embrace, and a glass of wine, a plate of crackers, nut pâté, Edam cheese, and white apples sliced thin, a few questions, and certainly no recriminations. We arrived almost in the middle of a very clear, cold night, so cold that, outside, each molecule of air felt still and distinct and individually coated with frost. The house was warm and smelled of home, of cooking, rest, kind words, and well-being. A very young Bob Dylan was whirling on the ancient turntable singing of your sons and daughters “beyond your command.” The overhead lights were switched off. My parents had been sitting together beside the fireplace in which old wood burned—odd-sized boards and planks from one of my father’s failed fencing projects—drinking herbal tea and listening to Dylan and each other.
My father gentled the cork from the neck of a bottle of wine, and Rebecca and I sat and ate and talked with them until long past one in the morning. The house had cooled, the fire had died down, and the telephone had not rung with news. I tried calling Ryan’s number, but there was no answer, so we all went to bed hoping for the best, rationalizing that we would surely have heard bad news since it was more likely to spread wider and faster than good. I refused to allow fears for Philip to undo me, and forced away any image of him alone or frightened or untended. He was in good hands. He must be in good hands.
I was in the kitchen washing breakfast dishes when Lucy arrived the next day, Christmas morning. My mother had risen early and made coffee and pancakes and applesauce; we were both keeping busy against apprehension. I heard the front door slam and Lucy call out: “Maggie!” Her tone was weighted with accusation.
I put the dishcloth down and went to meet her. This was the first time that I could remember walking toward Lucy when she was in one of her rages, rather than trying to flatten myself into the background.
Lucy was striding along the hallway toward the kitchen. I stopped when I saw her, my nerve failing, but she came right up to me and pointed her finger in accusation.
“Why did you do it?”
I didn’t know how to respond. Which of my many efforts and failures was she referring to?
“Where’s Philip?” I answered.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Is Philip all right?”
“You’ve completely screwed up my chances to keep that baby, do you know that?”
“Where did Philip go last night? Who has him?”
“If I had had the baby, the judge would have let me keep him. That’s what he said, right in the courtroom. Now we’re completely fucked.”
“When can I see him?”
“How could you just hand him over to Gian Luigi?”
“Oh, God. Gian Luigi doesn’t have him, does he?
“Bloody typical, Maggie. Whatever you were trying to do, you did a piss-poor job of it.”
“Lucy.” My mother’s voice interrupted. She and Rebecca had come down from upstairs. “You know perfectly well that Maggie was only trying to give you and Ryan time to try to fix this thing, to sort it out. She didn’t plan to keep the baby forever, just for a few days. She had no way of knowing that man would be waiting at the airport.”
Lucy’s eyes glittered. “I just want—” she said. Her voice failed and she paused and drew a fresh breath. “I just want Gian Luigi to go back home with his stupid cow of a stupid wife and leave Philip and me alone.”
“And I want to know where Philip is.” I raised my voice. “I’ve spent a week taking care of him. I think I am entitled to know who has him and whether he is all right.”
It took a few minutes longer for my mother to persuade Lucy to sit down at the kitchen table and tell us what had happened at the airport. Lucy described a boisterous conference involving Lucy, Ryan, Gian Luigi, Ivetta, the two police officers, and a child welfare worker who had been pulled from bed to help decide what should be done with Philip. Neither Gian Luigi nor Lucy would allow the other to have Philip overnight. Nor would Gian Luigi agree to permit someone else—a friend or relative of Lucy’s or Ryan’s—to take Philip until the appeal was heard. Gian Luigi had the advantage of custody orders from two courts and would not accept any arrangement that might weaken his lead in the contest. Lucy was working from the primal strength of a mother whose child has been taken from her. They were thus perfectly balanced in their intensity and conviction, the kind of draw where it is perfectly possible for neither side to win. It hadn’t taken long for the welfare worker, whose first priority was to go home and back to bed, to conclude that resolution was impossible and that Philip should be taken to a foster home for the few days until the appeal court could be persuaded to hear Lucy’s application on an expedited basis.
In Lucy’s analysis, everyone and everything was either at fault or a participant in a scheme of conspiracy against her interests—me, Gian Luigi, Ivetta, the justice systems of Italy and Canada, the police, the child welfare system, even Ryan, whose errors were unspecified. Lucy alone was, on her telling, without failing, a blameless young mother, whose conduct was misunderstood and whose perfectly legitimate needs had been utterly disregarded by all.
Rebecca always tries to understand the essence of a matter. “May I ask a few questions?” she said, when Lucy’s torrent
of words and indictments finally slowed.
“It isn’t clear to me yet whether you are upset with Maggie because she took Philip in the first place, or because you believe she has harmed your case against Gian Luigi, or because she gave Philip to Gian Luigi instead of guarding him with her life. Also, you are clearly very angry at Gian Luigi and his wife because they want to take Philip away. Can you tell me, though, whether Gian Luigi is Philip’s father? This is bound to come out sooner or later, and I expect it is going to be important. In fact, everything will likely turn on it.”
Lucy opened her mouth and closed it again.
The telephone rang. No one moved. We were all waiting to hear what Lucy would say. It rang again. I moved toward it. “That might be Ryan,” I said, picking up the receiver. “He’ll want to know what’s going on.”
The call was for me. I put my hand over the receiver. “It’s my friend Charles’s daughter, Sarah,” I explained. I carried the phone into the living room.
“Oh, Maggie. I’m so glad I found you. You’ve been hard to track down.” Sarah was a calm, gentle woman in her mid-twenties. She ran a successful veterinarian practice with her brother Roger in West Vancouver.
“I have bad news, I am afraid.” I sank down onto my father’s ottoman; it exhaled slowly under my weight.
“Listen. I am sorry to have to tell you like this, over the telephone, but I knew you’d want to know. Dad died over the weekend. It happened quite quickly. He drove himself to the hospital and had a cardiac arrest in emerg. His dad died of a heart attack at about the same age, and his grandfather did too, but we never thought . . .” She started to cry. Her sobs were small, polite, subdued, brave.
My heart filled and teetered. I opened my mouth, not sure what words would come. “Oh, Sarah,” I said. “I am so terribly sorry. Your dad was a wonderful person. I was very fond of him.”
An image came to me, of Charles rising from the table after lunch that first day we met. He had held my hand in his for an instant before helping me on with my jacket. I could recall the cool pressure of his fingers as they cradled mine.
“What an awful, sudden loss for you and your brother and your mother,” I said into the receiver. I could hear Sarah struggling to recover her voice. “Your dad never said anything to me about being unwell.”
“He didn’t tell us, either,” said Sarah. “Roger and I, we think he didn’t want us to worry about him.”
I resisted making Sarah an impulsive offer of the loan of my own father any time she liked; I couldn’t imagine what her life would be like without her father to anchor it. Then I thought of how gentlemanly Charles had always been—gallant was the word that fell into my mind like a stone into a pond. An old-fashioned word. A good man.
“Your father was so fond and proud of you and your brother,” I told Sarah. “I am just heartbroken for all of you.”
I wondered for an instant whether my heart might be broken for myself as well, but realized that it would take a while longer to think through what Charles had meant to me, and to understand my own loss. He had, I realized, been a part of my imprecise vision of the future. His solidity, his decency, even his absurd self-assuredness had made me desire to fall into him, to lose myself a bit in his expansiveness.
Sarah promised to let me know when the memorial arrangements had been made, and we hung up. I sat on my father’s broken-down old hassock and wondered if I would lose my courage, whether I would be unable to find my way back to an ordered, commonplace life, whether it might all become too much to bear, until my mother called out: “Maggie! What’s become of you?” I put my feet under me, and rose up and stood. My knees held. I breathed in and out.
The telephone rang again almost immediately; this time the call was for Lucy. “Someone named Harold Gordon,” said my mother, handing Lucy the receiver. Rebecca tilted her head, interested. “The newspaper columnist?” she asked. My mother raised her hands to signal that she didn’t know.
“No,” said Lucy, firmly. “No.” A pause. “No.” Another, longer pause. Then another “No.” And finally, briskly, “Yes, all right.” She hung up.
“Gian Luigi has gone to the newspapers,” she said. “And he’s got some fathers’ rights group involved—Fathers Against Custodial Treachery, or something like that.”
“That is definitely not good,” said Rebecca. “Those guys are obsessed. They’ve dropped water balloons from the galleries in Parliament and they go around picketing judges’ houses to protest guardianship decisions. There was a story about one of them in the paper a few days ago. He broke into a courtroom and tried to place the judge who had awarded custody of his children to his wife under citizen’s arrest.”
“He wants to hear my side of the story,” Lucy said. “I said I would meet him in a half-hour at the coffee place on Twelfth.”
“Shouldn’t your lawyer be there?” I asked. But Lucy could not be dissuaded from meeting with Harold Gordon by herself. “He’s going to publish a story anyway,” she argued. “He might as well get the facts right. Gian Luigi lied to me. He lied to me about everything. That’s what people have to understand. It was all under false pretenses.”
Janet arrived a few minutes after Lucy had left. She was taking the twins skating at a nearby rink that was open over the holidays and had dropped by to borrow hats for them, and to see if she could leave Marie with Mom and Dad. John was at his bookstore getting the post-Christmas sale displays set up.
“Shit, Maggie,” Janet said when she saw me. “Look at you. A bad haircut and a bad dye job; you went all out. Lucy is so pissed. She’ll probably never speak to you again.” She gave me a light hug, and exhaled a plosive “mwah” into the air near my ear. “Then again, that might be a good thing, eh?”
I went along to the rink with Janet and held sleeping Marie in her carrier sheltered against my stomach while Janet got Claudia and Thomas started taking shaky forward steps on their new, two-bladed skates between battered orange plastic cones at one end of the ice rink. Every now and again, Janet left the twins to stumble and bump along on their own—they clung together hand in hand—and glided off for a rapid turn around the rink. She had taken figure skating lessons for years, and she still looked steady, swift, and confident. She took the turns efficiently and precisely, blade over boot, and, on the long run down the boards, she tilted forward at an angle calibrated for speed and grace. After a few circuits, she would return and explode to a stop beside the twins, sending up a shower of ice from the surface of the rink into their blinking eyes. The blades of her skates made a slick, carving sound as she turned them crisply to one side, as if she were engraving her name upon the ice. Janet continued to circle the ice and practice crossovers and turns for almost an hour after Thomas and Claudia grew cranky. I helped them off with their skates and bought them cardboard cups of weak hot chocolate and paper bags of popcorn at the concession, and we sat together in the wooden seats and watched their mother speed and spin. I ran my hand over and over along the small dome of Marie’s head; it felt warm, hard, busy, and functional, like the rounded top of my mother’s ancient mixer just after it has been put to use.
“I wonder if you’d be interested in this?” I said to Janet, when at last she came over to sit with us. She looked up from loosening her gleaming white skates, and I handed her a notice that I had found pinned to a notice board. “Women’s morning drop-in hockey. You might be good at it.”
“Maybe,” Janet shrugged. She tossed the flyer into her sports bag. “I’ll think about it.”
Basement Stairs
Against everyone’s advice, I pleaded guilty. It seemed the simplest, most straightforward thing to do and, by doing so, I avoided implicating Rebecca or anyone else. Guilty with an explanation, was how I thought of it. Once he understood that I could not be persuaded to change my mind, Leo made an appointment with the prosecutor to negotiate a deal. “He’s asking for three months’ house arrest,” Leo reported afterward. “Way too much, but the press is watching this case closely to ma
ke sure the system doesn’t go easier on women than on men. He says his hands are tied.”
My case was scheduled for early May. The hearing took only a few minutes in the morning in a crowded courtroom on Main Street. The judge, a woman with a tired brow, and intelligent eyes, asked the prosecutor whether he really believed that three months was warranted, but gave me the agreed sentence after he assured her that defense counsel was in agreement as to the fitness of the term.
That afternoon, Sukhinder Singh, the adult probation officer who had been assigned to me, came to the house to attach an electronic monitor to my ankle. It was an oddly intimate moment. I took off my shoe and held my foot out to her, toes pointed, and she clasped the lock shut, briskly but not unkindly. The device was small, discrete enough, larger than a bulky wristwatch, but much smaller than the time-honored ball and chain.
Sukhinder straightened immediately after fastening the monitor, and asked me to sign what she called “a personal agreement, Maggie. A personal agreement between the two of us.”
She handed me a four-page document to review. It required that I abide by the monitoring conditions that were attached and comply with a twenty-four-hour curfew except for permitted purposes (medical appointments, education, any counseling that may have been ordered) and as may from time to time be approved in writing by Sukhinder, such permission to be carried on my person at all times when not in my place of residence. I was also to agree to permit staff members of the Corrections Branch to enter my place of residence at any and all times, whether with or without notice, in order to permit them to verify that the equipment had not been tampered with, and that I remained in complete compliance with all terms herein referenced. I signed.
Sukhinder was also responsible for what are called home visits, and she telephoned me between visits, less and less often, but at unexpected hours, to ensure that I was complying fully with the conditions of my sentence. When she came to visit, I usually made a pot of tea, which we drank sitting at the painted kitchen table. By design or chance, Sukhinder’s appearance mirrored her personality, or what she let me see of it. She bundled her long, graceful body into severe jackets and trousers. Her clothes were made of unyielding synthetic fabrics and were kept tightly closed at her throat and wrists and waist with buckles and belts and buttons—a jailor’s wardrobe. The impression she gave, of great strength of will in spite of her slender build, was reinforced by the weight of hair she balanced on her slender neck. Her glossy hair was scraped away from her face into a tight mass at the back of her head and contained in a circle of navy netting held in place by several dozen pins. After her visits I always found escaped hairpins on the floor. Once or twice I witnessed one of the pins launch itself from the taut surface of her head and spring out into the air, a small, isolated mutiny. In a dozen visits I collected twenty-seven pins. I kept the hairpins like talismans leaning together in an eggcup on the windowsill in the kitchen, miniature soldiers on furlough. She must go through hundreds of them.
The Sad Truth About Happiness Page 22