I’ve turned the dishwasher on, but it could be a long cycle, and I may have to stop it now and again to load in another item or two.
For seven years I typed Informations—criminal charges—on multicoloured carbon paper. The yellow and pink copies were for our office, the white for the Court Registry.
Sixteen years later, I can still recite the section numbers for a variety of Criminal Code offences as if I were saying the alphabet: Section 267(1)(a), assault causing bodily harm; Section 348(1)(b), break and enter to commit theft, and Section 235, murder.
I began my stint at the Nanaimo Crown Counsel Office over a handshake and a promise that my part-time hours would grow into full-time. They did. Crime was on the rise. Back then, if I told anyone that I worked for the Crown Counsel they’d think I worked for a crown corporation—not the prosecutor’s office. We were invisible to law-abiding citizens; most weren’t aware that we existed. But the inmates at Wilkinson Road jail knew us well—our telephone number was written on the wall above the public telephone. Our small office included prosecutors and secretaries, and our clientele was the common criminal—mother, daughter, father, son—predator and prey.
The most eligible of the lawyers, Jack, had arrived from Dauphin, known as the perogy capital of Manitoba. There was also Gordon, a big man with a big heart, who introduced me to the margarita. I swear he carried a blender and frozen limeade in his briefcase. Then Rick, who worked evenings and weekends and always wore a grey tweed jacket and a red knitted vest over his white shirt. And Clive, the oldest, who had been an RCMP officer before he hung up his red serge and donned a black robe. A tough old bear, he thought my thirteen-year-old daughter had beautiful blue eyes and once sang to her Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet in an aisle of our local grocery store.
The secretaries or “support staff” (this politically correct term from Headquarters always made me think of hosiery) included Jessica, who could rattle off the Young Offenders Act while running in steel-tipped stilettos to a ringing telephone. Sandra, who had fire-engine-red hair and pumped out subpoenas when she wasn’t trying to pump water from the well at her rustic home. And then at the front desk there was Jana. It didn’t matter if you were a first-time offender or a career criminal with a record as tall as I am, Jana took no crap from anyone. Granted, she made an extra effort for those who said “please” and “thank you,” but she did not tolerate raised voices or swearing.
The office expanded and we grew to include a Victim Services Branch. Three great women came on board, who, for a number of years, made the scary adversarial court system more bearable for five-year-old victims or seventy-year-old witnesses. Those women, Pam, Lois and Susan, gave hope not only to our victims but also to the rest of us. When we felt frustrated, unable to stop the repeated violence, they reminded us that we were cogs in the wheel of justice and we all needed to do our part. They were our cream-puff-baking, spiritual angels. Then the government laid them off.
When our prosecutors needed a document in court, one of us would run it up the street to them—snow, rain or sleet. If they needed a rush release order sworn, we’d swear. Or, if they needed help lugging three large briefcases from our office to the courthouse, one of us would lug one while they struggled with two.
The prosecutors in their black robes gave us all a sense of pride in our role in the fundamental struggle between good and evil—we worked for the good guys, fought the good fight. There were no heroes, only victims, and every day we uncovered another tragedy. With the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we often felt our hands were tied, and the fight then became downright nasty—sometimes unfair.
The obtaining of physical evidence was fundamental to a strong case. But how that evidence was obtained was critical—sometimes even more critical than the allegation. “You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say may be given in evidence”—this was true only if the arresting officer had given the Official Warning before the accused started confessing to the crime committed. The last thing we needed was a judge ruling a confession inadmissible. Try explaining that to a victim.
Some horrors detailed in the police reports that passed over our desks were simply filed away because there was “no substantial likelihood of a conviction.” That was the test; the policy directive practised throughout the ministry. We could not charge what we could not prove. Again, try explaining that to a victim. Weak or strong, a case could swing sideways if a police officer didn’t show up or a witness changed his or her story. Either way, the prosecutor took the responsibility and the blame.
The Crown tried to shield us from the brutalities of our work. Most of the time binders of autopsy photos were labelled and secured with elastic bands. Yet sometimes, usually five minutes before court, an unsuspecting secretary frantically searching for a file would find herself looking at photographs of an old man stabbed twenty-five times in his own living room, or of children: babies beaten and bruised, some murdered. Those were the pictures that kept me awake at night, wishing that just once we could have saved instead of prosecuted.
Before each trial we gave our prosecutors a Superman’s send-off. I remember telling Gordon, “Go fight for truth, justice and the Canadian way!” Sometimes Gordon returned from court victorious, other times slaughtered, his shoulders sagging in defeat.
One time, near the end of the day, Gordon had returned triumphant after slogging it out in a ten-week murder trial. With a slight smile on his face, he hummed as he strolled past my desk and casually asked, “Margarita, Jo?”
But within a few months the Court of Appeal had overturned that murder conviction. A new trial was ordered. Gordon won a second time but again the Court of Appeal overruled him. The third time, he won; by then he could have done that trial in his sleep.
We numbed our losses with shots of tequila, but we couldn’t chase away the nightmares. Then there were the media to contend with, and the suits from Criminal Justice Headquarters, who demanded to know what went wrong.
Our victories were bittersweet and congratulations to the prosecutor awkward. Although a son had been found guilty of killing his father, a murder conviction would not bring his father back. After the thirty-day appeal period, I would close my file and put another life on the shelf. Tomorrow, next week or next month, I would come across yet another gruesome police report, open a file, categorize another horrendous act. And once again the Crown would prepare for a trial.
Despite the violence we waded through, we found time to laugh and tell jokes. At one point three women in our office had become pregnant at the same time. The joke was that they had all ridden the elevator with bachelor Jack and later returned with child. None of us would ride in the elevator with Jack after that! We also developed lasting friendships. We shared stories about our children. We knew each other’s spouses by their first names. We partied at each other’s homes. Our camaraderie and fun attracted attention: lawyers and secretaries from bigger cities tried to break into our circle. Shamefully, I’ll admit, we weren’t too inviting. We wanted to keep what we had.
Then, gradually, things started to change for me. I regarded every person on the street as a potential criminal. In one week I warned my daughter three times about sexual predators. My tolerance was wearing thin. I trusted no one. I had to escape.
There had to be life without crime.
My husband had also outgrown Nanaimo. He wanted to expand his career in the grocery retail business. On my advice, he threw his resume out there and got an interview for an assistant produce manager’s position in Victoria. He landed the job. Our lives were about to change.
By the time I left, Rick had been lured into private practice, defending criminals instead of prosecuting them. Gordon—well, he stayed in Nanaimo and became a Headquarters man. Bachelor Jack moved to Victoria. The only one still around was Clive. He retired three months after I moved on. Nothing was left of our original crew but scribbles on Post-it notes attached to dead files that would eventually be shredded or archived.
&n
bsp; The final change came three years later when Rick was killed in a car accident. He was one of the good guys—one of us. E-mail messages about his death blurred from our tears. Bound by our grief, we reached out to each other. Some of us car-pooled to his service while others stole away on their lunch hours to light candles and say goodbye in a local church.
No more red knitted vest or tweed jacket. Rick’s robe is draped on a hanger now and not on his shoulders. Things will never be the same. There will be no Beatles reunion.
For years I had earned a good paycheque. I hadn’t stayed at that Crown office because of the money though; I stayed because of the people. I was a female in the traditional female job—secretary. Growing up after the women’s liberation movement, I was conditioned by our society to believe that my chosen profession was not an important one. Little girls do not skip down the street singing they’re going to be secretaries when they grow up. But to the men and women prosecutors of the Nanaimo Crown Office, I was important. I was regarded as an equal. A Crown loss was our loss, a Crown victory our victory. Our respect for each other transcended gender, job titles and job descriptions.
No one was better than anyone else.
We were a motley crew but one hell of a team. We did our jobs to the best of our abilities. Lives were at stake—the police had passed the baton and the courtroom was our finish line. To say the work didn’t get to us would be a lie, although we’d never openly admit it. I’ve finally stopped triple-checking the locks on my doors at home. Twice is enough now.
Our office did not land the biggest contracts; we never achieved record sales. With what we were given, we tried to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt to a judge and a jury of twelve—and what a pain if it was a hung jury.
Trials are expensive, and when it comes to the administering of justice there are no bargain days at Sears. When we were successful the celebration was short-lived; another trial loomed around the corner. We didn’t want accolades because we knew they came at a price—a human life. Our rewards were sporadic and came in the form of a wood-carving or a child’s drawing. For the men, women and children whose lives had been robbed of innocence and trust, we couldn’t remove the scar, but we could help it heal.
Our crew has moved on but we still stay in touch. We’re coping with new jobs—all except Clive, who’s enjoying retirement on his boat. We all cling to one common thread—our time at the Crown Counsel Office.
At one of my recent jobs, I tried to replicate that experience. It didn’t work. Different time; different place; different people. Our Nanaimo Crown experience was unique and we knew it. We also knew that it was too good to last. That’s what made it special.
July 1995 Edmonton, Alberta
After my neighbour lost her beautiful newborn, who was missing half his heart, I knew I wanted a child. I had almost witnessed the child’s birth. It mattered not that as birth attendant, I missed the actual event when a trip to the hospital concluded a long labour. Five days later, in an afternoon crushed by grief, the infant corpse, yellowed by jaundice and too little time, lay in a small cradle at the foot of the family bed. As part of the memorial service, I called out “Finlay” once, and then “Finlay” and “Finlay” again, sounding out his small being in a sombre naming ceremony.
This cry, suspended in the hollow listening of mourning, was the moment of conception when my plot to become a mother was hatched. I knew I wanted to adopt. Even as I write this I hear thin brittle walls of fear crack open after decades of resignation to my infertility. That the Alberta provincial child welfare authorities deemed me too single and too old (at forty-eight) for domestic adoption would prove only a minor setback.
In one child’s going, mine would be born in south China, oceans away.
AUGUST 6, 1997
Dear Daughter,
Who dressed you in a special red quilt coat, swaddled tight in spite of August heat? Kissed you for the last time? Laid you wet with tears in another’s arms—grandmother, father, aunt, husband, lover?
Who bicycled before first light to cradle you on the ground under the shade of bridge or palm, near enough to the road so the one who crouched behind the still green leaves could watch?
Who waited in the shadows until you were found?
Did passersby notice your cry?
Who found you?
Who knew?
THE BLANK PAGE
I want to write in detail about that room in a city, town or village where my daughter was born, but her origins are mysterious, shrouded in secrecy and hidden in bureaucracy. A wide river flows beneath the bridge where my daughter was found not far from the orphanage. A woman writhed in an apartment or house nearby or in a far-off place, under a clay-tiled roof or beside a concrete wall, on a farm, in a hospital or clinic. Her story exists somewhere in a place that won’t be known. The map can’t lie flat enough on this table to tell me how I might navigate to a place that only exists as an adoptive mother’s dream.
JANUARY 1999, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
On this first journey to Maoming, by plane, train, bus, taxi and van, my mind was overwhelmed with anticipation of a child as I talked excitedly to my travelling companion, my mother, who calmly prepared to meet her new granddaughter. Occasionally, I turned on the rented camera, but the video looped and bumped with every turn in the road making the recorded image as nauseating as any arcade’s Drop of Doom. I remember the paved highway, fast-moving cars beside our bus, tense individual murmurs of eleven families anticipating their new child’s arrival, a blur of square whitewashed farmhouses, walled courtyards, a water buffalo’s lumbering gait, chemical belch of smokestack, cluttered metal of factory yard, the still pools of roadside water, green-spiked rice paddies neatly squared, ingenious farm plots snaking through ditch or road allowance, the scented shape of longan fresh from the tree.
Details of my daughter’s orphanage lodge in my memory like night lights in a home. We visit the courtyard only. No foreigners allowed inside. Vines and pink-trimmed balconies edge every floor of the main wing where my infant daughter grew, one of many sleeping two by two in blue metal cribs. The courtyard is deserted except for a few older children dressed against the winter chill. On seeing us, the nanny hurriedly rushes them inside. A line of dark laundry for tiny invisible children hangs from the balconies of an adjacent grey cement structure. Ribs of bamboo scaffolding hide a new wing under construction, funded by foreigners’ donations.
Mrs. Zhang, the orphanage director, asks whether I want to visit the place where my daughter was abandoned and without hesitation I say no.
How much does an adoptive mother’s life begin with dissimulation, a first refusal that makes the story begin again? Did I not want this memory for my daughter to keep? Much as I told myself to remember every second, to document, for my daughter’s sake, every location, every encounter, I wondered, did I want to erase this part of her history? What part of me liked to imagine my first meeting with my daughter as a new birth for the two of us, an erasure of long months of care by others?
ADOPTION, LIKE TRAVEL, EXPANDS THE WORLD YOU INHABIT
What is strange becomes familiar as the small being in your arms becomes as much of you as a child can be. And you become hers. At the end of five years you notice your behaviour has changed—sometimes for the better. While you never imagined your adoption to be a matter of altruism, you have become more generous with strangers. You seek nourishing communities and caring neighbours where you cultivate aunties and uncles for your daughter. Still an atheist, you join a compatible Unitarian congregation to surround yourself with others who care about what it means to live in a just world. Less mobile now that you clothe and feed and house a child, you contribute more to the well-being of those with less, especially motherless children. You are not able or willing to rush through life. You know more about your daughter’s birth world, a smattering of language. You acquire new music and a library of books.
JUNE 2004, MAOMING, GUANGDONG PROVINCE
Your daughter’s world opens you to the unexpected. Her questions become your own. When she is six, you return to her birthplace to seek a backdrop for the absent centre that is her first family. You want to people a landscape, find a substitute for the sudden erasure of genealogical connection.
In a small provincial Chinese city, you discover a rootless traveller’s ease. At home in a strange land, you reinvent your desire. You once loved McIntosh apples; here dragon fruit turns you on. You thought the big sky of prairie or taiga lipped by Rocky Mountains thrilled your heart, but here you love the spare horizon, the beat-up lineage of a seaside resort, the South China Sea. In settled Western Canada you followed the clean order of gridded urban routes, but here your mind bends through looped rings of narrow streets. You liked the comfort of barely peopled spaces, but now catch your breath, sigh in the crush of bodies, the swirl of crowded squares. You found comfort in shades of grey monochrome, but now your eye is nuzzled by gold-threaded cobalt and red silk. You preferred the plain speech of a secular life, but weep in the incense fog under this blackened Buddhist temple roof.
Your centre of gravity shifts.
MY DAUGHTER STANDS AT THE ENTRANCE TO HER ORPHANAGE
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