by Martyn Burke
She was sitting there staring out across the canyon at the wreckage of her fortune, the shards of what she and Albert had bought lying there in temblor-loosened mockery. I expected another tirade about Albert. But there was only an unusual and serene silence as she sat drinking her tea and searching my face for clues that were obviously not hard to find. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“So,” she said with finality.
“Yeah,” I answered, nodding. And that was all.
The silence went on. I sank into the leather couch, joining her in the view of the canyon. The light caught her face in a way that shed years, giving clues to the beauty that had captivated London and Paris way back in those analog days.
“You found her,” she said. Not as a question. “I knew you would. You had to. I understand that.”
“You win,” I said. And I meant it. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so depressed, so uncertain about what would happen next in my life. But as those words left my mouth I wanted to take them back. I felt like I was leaving myself defenseless. Annabelle could climb the riggings of your emotions, a verbal knife between her teeth, before you even knew you’d been boarded.
But something happened. It was my mother who appeared. My real mother, not the one I had known for most of my life. “There is no winning. There’s only living. And we all lose. It’s just life.” She was talking quietly without any of the drama that always came draped over whatever words she spoke. “I’ve just lost something precious myself.”
“What?” Usually I wouldn’t have asked, learning long ago when not to fan flames in our brittle little forest. But this seemed different.
“My anger.” She actually smiled when she said it. “I’ve lost it. Albert showed up yesterday. He paid me back as much as he could. Almost everything. I realized later that it wasn’t the money I wanted from him. It was his badness. That was what I wanted. So I could be angry. So I could have a reason why it hasn’t turned out all that well for me. A reason that wasn’t me.”
She looked across the canyon to the wreckage of the house. “I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“That I was a lousy mother.”
“Oh, stop.”
“I’m too wrapped up in myself. That’s what you’re thinking, right? You’re wondering why I haven’t asked you anything about fighting your war and all that. You’re wondering how you got stuck with someone like me as your mother.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” I lied.
“Then you’re dumber than I thought. You’re stuck with a mother who never figured out how to be a mother. I was too busy figuring out how I could get someone to take care of me.” She walked away and was standing looking out over the ocean, turning away from the wreckage, her long mass of curls blowing in the breeze. All the theatricality had spent itself. “Someone who would just back off and let me go on making all the same mistakes,” she said quietly.
That was when I remembered what I’d read somewhere: Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle. “Hey, Mom, it’s going to be okay.” It was as if she hadn’t heard me. She walked farther out to the edge of the little canyon where the view of the ocean stretched to infinity.
“Yes, it will be.”
I waited for what was to follow. Nothing followed. “I tried,” I said. “Annie doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Of course she does.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said with that Annabelle certainty of hers. “She does.”
“You know, do you?”
Which is when she told me that she did know. It came in a confession of sorts—at first I thought it was praising the mirror in the way she did. But it was more than that. Because Annie was her. Didn’t I see it? Annie was all that Annabelle once was. “Surely, you must have seen me reliving all those days? Through her? The days when I mattered.”
I tried to see it. But like images overlaid on one another, Annie and Annabelle just did not come into focus as a single soul. Not even close. So instead I told her that I had heard of her grand days of modeling in Paris, of almost owning the 8th Arrondissement with her beauty, and fending off Greek tycoons bearing yachts.
Just as Annie, with her beauty was now—the thought froze me as it sifted into my words.
“No, no, no,” Annabelle said so quietly that I hardly heard the word over the whisper of traffic from the distant Pacific Coast Highway. “I invented my beauty after I had it,” she said. “Back when I was physically beautiful I didn’t even understand the word.” Then she did something she hadn’t ever done before. She reached out and took my hand, holding it as if it gave her strength.
“I spent three years living in ways that no mother can ever tell a son. I had been in love with a man, an American who worked in Paris, who loved me more than I deserved. And because he loved me, I hated him, or so I told myself. Couldn’t he see that I didn’t deserve him? No, he couldn’t see that, the fool. So I was determined to make him see it. And I put him through hell. For three years. Because I thought I was saving him.
“That was how much I loved him.”
A question wedged itself loose. The question that in different words, over all the years, had flickered and then extinguished itself in the darkness.
“My father?”
She nodded ever so slowly.
“Where is he now?”
“I have wondered that. Every day of my life.”
“It’s not the same with Annie.”
“Oh but it is. Don’t let her do what I did. Find her.”
25
We were hours away from having to head for the airport.
But there was no sign of Danny at the Star-Brite motel except for the handwritten note tucked into the torn aluminum screen on the room we’d stayed in, saying, Back in the belly of the beast. Plse join. 12 noon session. I parked Eugene’s Dodge down the street from Constance’s apartment and waited. Sometime around noon, Danny came shambling out of the building, his shirt flapping behind him as he loped through the daze he was in.
“You okay?” I said from across the street.
He looked over as if he’d just been yanked out of some fragile thought. “Naw, not really. You?”
“Not really.”
“What’s with you?”
I told him of my night on the beach. And he told me of how Constance had peered silently into that black mirror for what seemed like the whole hour.
We ended up on the other side of the L.A. airport, in Manhattan Beach, with its expensive houses jammed together in miles of California wholesomeness. It was Venice Beach without the freakiness, the family-pak of beach living, the amalgam of money and the quest for the eternal summer. But the bars on the streets that descended steeply toward the sand were good enough for what we needed, which was pretty much just a place to sit on some patio watching the sun get lower until it was time to head to the airport.
By two margaritas into the afternoon I must have heard Ariana’s name a dozen times or more. Danny had suddenly become talkative in the way he got sometimes when he stepped outside of himself, when he didn’t want to cope with what he saw before him. The other eight people in the bar, including the waitress, were drawn into rollicking conversations about everything from the surf conditions to their new betting pool on the beach volleyball game going on below them. First names were thrown around—Jack, this is Tom and I’m Danny and this is Hank and that’s—Even the karaoke machine was hooked up, but against all their best efforts it played only the old Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive,” which they all took turns at mangling.
I sat back and watched, saying nothing until, just as suddenly, Danny sank into some other world, one that Jack and Tom and Connie and all the rest of the world could never begin to peer into. About how it was his fault, he could have saved her, he could have stopped Omar from doing what he did.
“Omar came back evil,” he said twice. “And I didn’t prote
ct her from him. Even Constance figured that out.” It was that same old wound that just got ripped opened again. And again.
It was the way he talked about Ariana—dark-haired with big eyes, wild and fearful all at once, with her impenetrable independence tethered to a contradictory millennium of ancient customs. It was almost as if she was there, sitting across from us, sculpted out of pain and longing.
But I didn’t understand why he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see the vast avalanche of destiny that had come crashing down on him. He was fighting what had been foreordained. What she had been bred into. He was trying to change the immutable.
But then, maybe, so was I.
“Constance tried to bring her in today.”
“I get confused. One day you think Constance and all that stuff is bat-shit crazy. And the next day you’re simpering all over her.”
“She’s all I’ve got.” He was looking slightly desperate. “How else am I going to hear from Ariana?”
“Yeah . . . So, what did she say?”
“Constance couldn’t bring her in. She said all she heard was a baby crying. Oh god.”
“Oh god what?”
“A baby.”
“What’s a baby got to do with anything?”
“You don’t understand.”
Toronto
26
Omar had been gone almost two years. Danny knew that Ariana and her mother received letters he wrote from the madrasa in Miram Shah and, every month or two, a brief phone call. But he never asked what had been said, never mentioned Omar’s name, or even thought to enquire how he was doing. It was not anything Danny had thought through; it was just what evolved as Ariana became so much more relaxed without the presence of her brother. There were more smiles, tiny jokes, and secret touching than he had ever known.
And there was the piano, the one that Mrs. Cach proudly pointed to when he met her by chance while passing her Polish restaurant on Roncesvalles Avenue. “She come back. She play. Only for me. Beautiful.” The stubby finger was guiding Danny’s gaze through the reflections on the window to the old upright piano inside.
“Thank you.” Danny said it several times, staring through the reflections and not knowing how to explain to Mrs. Cach why he was laughing.
• • •
Ariana went back to the school and waited for the music teacher to finish rehearsing the student orchestra. He looked startled to see her, instantly remembering the way she had played. It had haunted him, he told her. And, he added, it infuriated him that she had walked out on all that talent.
“I need to keep playing.”
“Then play,” he snapped, peering at her through those little wire glasses that seemed smaller on his round, blotched face. “No one’s stopping you.”
“Yes.” She never looked away, not even when his expression tightened into the fierce gaze that had intimidated two generations of student musicians. “I am so sorry for wasting your time.” She turned and walked away, her footsteps making a staccato echo in the empty hallway.
“Wait,” he called out before she got to the heavy double doors. She stopped. “I phoned your parents. After you walked out on all your God-given talent. And no one ever returned my call. Why?”
“For the same reason I am here now—in secret.” There was something in her voice, some pleading mixed with defiance, that made him reconsider.
“How can I help you?”
They talked until the music teacher ran out of questions. She answered whatever he had asked, and then when there was nothing else to say, he looked away as if he was in a fog of his own thoughts. Then he said, “I’ll arrange something.”
A week later he told her that rooms could sometimes be made available in the Royal Conservatory of Music. The old building was about to be closed down for renovations and by calling in favors, he said he could get access for her. He did not tell her that in order to keep the rooms open after hours he would be paying the janitors himself.
Danny went to the looming Conservatory building next to the museum. It was a century-old Romanesque, red-brick structure, compacted and somehow foreboding as if tortured genius had been nourished in its gloom. Darkness fell as the music teacher approached from the subway station and entered. Danny watched and waited until he went in. After several minutes, Danny followed through the big wooden door, and after signing in with the security guard as family, he climbed the creaking stairs as if on some invisible thread that was reeling him toward the piano music coming from the only lighted room at the end of the high-ceilinged corridor.
As he had done several times before, Danny watched from the hallway. The music teacher sat on the only chair in the middle of the big room as Ariana played the grand piano. The music teacher would sit with his eyes closed, his head swaying slightly. Occasionally he would say, “Ah-ah-ah,” in a gently scolding manner, and she would replay the previous few bars. He would allow himself the slightest of smiles and then close his eyes again. He was in his own kind of euphoria.
On this night, when Ariana had finished playing and the music teacher gave her his ecstatic comments, she thanked him as she always did, but this time allowing herself a smile he had never seen cross her face. After he had departed, she hurried out onto Bloor Street, looking for Danny, who would have been sure to leave the building just before the hour was up.
They were seldom together on Saturday nights because the logistics of the various cover stories for her were just too complicated. But on this night, Danny’s mother would be away for a weekend of Pentecostal devotion in Montreal and Ariana’s most trusted girlfriends had been enlisted and sworn to secrecy, a tiny network of the young and the loyal.
Wearing a headscarf even more concealing than usual and borne aloft by the joy that overwhelmed her from her hour at the Conservatory, Ariana hurried toward Danny’s car. She looked around quickly and then got in. “Hurry,” she whispered, and waited until he had turned south into the maze of the university streets. At a stop sign, she leaned over. “Wait,” she said. And then kissed him fiercely, leaning across the console between them, pressing herself against him.
It was the sharp honk from a car behind them that made her release herself, slowly pulling back, smiling. Her eyes remained locked on Danny’s. The horn sounded again and the headlights from behind pulled out beside them. She raised her head covering, shielding her face, staying covered by the folds of the headscarf until he turned onto Spadina Avenue, driving through the lights of Chinatown. He asked if having to wear the headscarf ever bothered her. It was one those questions he had always let drift.
“Yes . . . no,” she said.
“Do you actually want to wear it?”
“Not really.”
“But then why do you?”
“It’s what I have to do.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“I know,” she said, reaching over and taking his hand. “You can’t.”
They drove to the southern edge of Chinatown where the lights were less bright. He pulled over to the curb, reaching behind him and holding out something in his hands. “Well, do you think you’d want to wear this?” Ariana took the little leather box he handed her; she was almost breathless, frozen. Then she slowly opened it and cried and laughed at the same time.
He had spent days worrying that the diamond on the ring was too small, and now watching her shake her head over and over again, he had no idea how to interpret her reaction. It was her tears, seeping from the edges of her large dark eyes, that confused him the most. They were so at odds with her smile, and the way she shook her head slowly, endlessly.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shh.” She pressed herself closer against him. “I love you. You believe that, don’t you?” When he was silent for a moment, she repeated: “You know that.”
He wondered why she was so insistent.
Only later did she tell him her fears of leaving the Umma, the terror of being absolutely adrift from all that she was, all that had given the
structure of her life. “So we’ll have to go away, far away,” she said. “Where everything will be new. Where we’ll be starting as new people.”
“As far away as you want. It’s no problem. There’s nothing here.” Danny motioned around him, thinking of the stillness of his family home, small, gloom-ridden, and empty after his father had killed himself. Danny’s mother would increasingly spend days, sometimes weeks, away with her Pentecostal church group. “We can forget about the past.”
She looked out into the passing traffic. “No. We can’t.”
27
It didn’t look like Omar.
A few weeks later, walking along Bloor Street, Danny turned, jarred by the collision with a memory. The tall, thin man with the wiry beard that flowed down across white robes was almost unrecognizable. Danny could see almost nothing remaining of the boy who had been forced into the rusting Buick by Zadran’s bodyguards almost two years ago.
Danny had stopped on the street, struck by some vague sense of recognition. He turned to watch the figure who had just passed him. “Omar?” he called out.
The tall figure hesitated and then turned back to face him almost as a necessary courtesy. “Assalamu alaikum.”
It was the look in his eyes that unsettled Danny the most. The irreverent, hell-raising gleam had been drained off, replaced by some pale light that came from a distant place.
A few minutes later over tea at the Starbucks in the nearby bookstore, Danny awkwardly faced the austere presence seated in front of him. It was a facade, it had to be; it just had to fall away. And the old, wired, and crazy Omar would suddenly burst through with all that chaotic energy—Bonnie Frangilatta, man, I’m tellin’ you she’s—!
But instead, Danny found himself facing the uncomfortable fire of utter certainty. The specter across from him was only Omar in fragments. Something, someone, had replaced the Omar he knew. Now a man with a serene, unyielding gaze unnerved him and spoke in a soft, cold voice. The old stammer was gone and phrases like In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful were woven into talk of memorizing the suras, all one hundred and fourteen of them, at a madrasa in Miram Shah.