A few weeks later, after a long wedding during which the ring bearer refused to walk down the aisle and was carried, bawling, by his embarrassed mother, and the cake collapsed under the weight of its melting butter cream, Danny went back to Frank’s apartment to find Frank sitting on the sofa with his dog in his arms. He was stroking him slowly, down his unmoving flank.
“He’s dead,” Frank whispered.
Danny rushed over and put his arms around Frank, kissing the side of his head as Frank sat limply, bent over the body. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”
“He seemed sluggish all week and wouldn’t eat, and I thought maybe he was overheated. But then, a few hours ago, he crawled into my lap and began breathing funny. I held up his head, but it didn’t seem to help. When I tried to get up to call the vet, Barton gave me this look, and so I didn’t move and kept patting him. He stared at me the whole time. And then he shuddered and it was over.” He paused and fell back into the cushions. “What am I going to do?”
Danny held Frank’s hand all night, sitting on the couch with the dog between them. He didn’t know what time he fell asleep, but when he woke up, bright sunlight was pouring through the window and Barton was gone. Frank stood in front of him, his hands on his hips.
“I wasn’t sure if we should have this conversation now, but why the fuck not? Danny, where is this relationship going?”
Danny, confused and groggy, said, “But where’s Barton? I don’t understand.”
“I took him to the vet this morning. They’ll call me when the ashes are ready.”
“Come here and we can talk about it.”
Frank pounded his fist against the wall. “My dog is dead. I want to talk about us.” He swallowed a sob and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“I thought we were happy, just like this.”
“Danny, I’m thirty-five years old. I would like to buy a house someday, have a home with you. My parents are on board. There’s nothing to stop us.”
Danny rubbed his hands together. “You know about my parents. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“That you’re gay, for fuck’s sake!”
“They’d be so angry. I couldn’t ever see them again. My father—”
“I don’t understand why this is even an issue. You never speak to your father anyway. If you come out to them, the same thing will happen to you that happened to all of us. Your father will rage and shout and then ignore you for months and months. Your mother will cry and try to be brave. Everyone gets over it eventually, and even if they don’t, then at least they know, and we can live our lives without hiding anymore, without being afraid we’re going to run into them on the street. God!” Frank slumped against the wall.
Danny stood up and put his hands on Frank’s shoulders. “Can’t we talk about this later? You’re still upset and maybe this isn’t the right time to have this conversation.”
Frank shook him off. “No, this is the only time. Don’t you see? The longer you hide from your parents, the longer it’ll take you to get on with your life.” Frank waved at a stack of photos on the coffee table. “Those pictures are just sitting there, Danny, waiting for you to do something.”
“I know, I know. I just have to figure out a plan.”
“A plan that does what exactly? Makes your parents disappear? Makes me disappear?” Frank’s face was wet and shiny with tears. When Danny moved to wipe them away, Frank stepped back and turned his head toward the wall. “Did it ever occur to you that while you were trying to avoid being a good Chinese son, you became a gay stereotype instead? Look at you: well-dressed, skinny, afraid of commitment. It’s almost funny.”
“That’s not fair. I want you. I want us,” Danny whispered.
Frank laughed, even while his nose was running. “If that were true, you’d want a different life. Maybe it’s all too domestic. Maybe having happy Christmas dinners with my parents is too weird for you. Not that it matters. We want different things. That’s all there is to say.”
“I can do anything you want. Really. I just need time.”
“Sure, whatever you say. Listen, why don’t you go home and call me later when you’ve thought some more, okay? I need to sleep.” He walked to the front door and opened it. “Why are you so afraid, Danny? When will you stop running away?”
Danny didn’t answer.
The next morning, Frank called to say that unless Danny could come out to his parents, it had to be over. And, just like that, it was done.
Val leans back on the log behind them. “Very sad, honey. Do you think about him much?”
“Every fucking day,” Danny says, drawing a line in the sand with his fingers.
“Do you ever see him now?”
“No. Although he called me out of the blue and we’re meeting for lunch tomorrow.”
“What do you think he wants?”
Danny looks up at the glittering sky. “I have no idea. Sometimes, I think he wants to get back together. Other times, I think he wants to tell me something totally unexpected, like he’s getting married.”
Val chuckles. “That would be a punch in the gut, wouldn’t it?”
“What if I see him and fall in love all over again?”
“Well, then, I guess you’ll get what you deserve.”
When Danny looks over at her face, he sees his reflection in her oversized black sunglasses. Without her eyes, her expression is unreadable.
Danny drops Val off at her apartment after an early dinner of fish and chips, and he hands her the photograph from the wedding. Val stares at the print for a few minutes before slipping it into the pocket of her jacket. “I don’t photograph so well when I’m not posing,” she quips. “That’s an old lady in that picture, my alter ego.”
“I think you look beautiful. Human.”
Val snorts. “I took some publicity shots when I was younger. Talk about beautiful.”
“You look like you’re going to cry here. What were you thinking?”
She opens the door and steps into the lobby before answering. “Who knows? Maybe I was wondering what my own daughter would look like.” She frowns. “Maybe I was remembering what it was like to be young.”
She props open the glass door with her foot and looks at him, no hint of a smile on her face. “All right, don’t just stand there. Come on up for some tea and maybe I’ll tell you something about it.” She points her finger at his nose. “But only because you took me to the beach. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care about you at all.” She winks and chuckles.
Her hands tremble as she reaches out to press the elevator call button, and he knows that soon he will be sitting on the sofa in her apartment, listening to the fine gravel of her voice as it travels through the years of her childhood and the flash and bang of her youth. He imagined this moment years ago, that moment before the Siamese Kitten would reveal all her secrets because he was the one who could understand. Because he was a child who woke up every other morning expecting that his life had magically transformed overnight into a glittery, musical adventure, and was disappointed when he realized he was in the same old house on the same old street. Danny steps into the elevator beside Val. As it begins to rise, he realizes he is holding his breath.
PART TWO
THE HOUSE
1938 to 1946
It was a small house, a clapboard shack really. It sat on River Road, on a wooded lot choked with wild blackberry and dogwood. Even though there were other houses nearby, it was easy to believe, when standing on the porch or on a boulder in the backyard, that this was the only inhabited house for miles and miles and that they were the only family. From the kitchen, Val could just see the Fraser River through the trees. When she was a little girl, she spent hours staring at its winking, grey-blue surface. Once, right after her eighth birthday, she took her father’s axe, the one with his first name, Warren, carved crudely into the handle, and tried to slash her way through the bush and down the hill to get to the shore. After a half hour, her mother discovered her,
covered in scratches from the thorns, dead leaves stuck in her dull brown hair, her hands covered in rust from the blade. Her mother said little, and finished cleaning Val’s scratches before sitting with her by the kitchen window in the late afternoon light, listening and watching for the fishing boats and logging barges.
“I love the river, Mum,” said Val, resting her hand in her mother’s lap.
“Yes. Me too. If you cross it and pass the island, you’ll find the city,” Meg said softly, as she waved her hand at Annacis Island, blue and blurry in the sunshine.
“Have you been to the city?”
“Once. Before you girls were born. It was lovely, you know. We saw a vaudeville show and looked at diamonds in a shop window.”
Val imagined her mother as a young woman with sparkly, lively eyes, sauntering down a glittering street lit with tall, wrought-iron lamps. She wore a white fur coat and high, shiny black shoes. She stopped at a bright window, pointed at a necklace winking on a blue velvet cushion. Val’s father, dashing in a black hat and coat, strutted into the store and came back out, necklace in hand. Val leaned her head on her mother’s arm as the story came to an end, the rough cotton tickling her cheek. She fell asleep to her favourite lullaby.
Her father promised that he would cut a path to the river the following weekend, but instead spent those two days sitting on a stump in the backyard, drinking beer with his old logging buddies, talking about the wild days they used to spend in the bush and the wilder nights they spent in the city. Before there was no more work to be found, before all a family man could do was line up for relief and take whatever was given to him.
Val and Joan were fifteen months apart and inseparable. In school, they were known as “Those Wild Nealy Girls.” Teachers sent home notes complaining that the sisters picked on the other girls, cutting off their braids with pocket knives, chasing them with dead rats they found in the schoolyard. Once, Joan took exception to another girl’s pristine white gloves and quickly but silently drove a sharpened pencil through the creamy leather and into the back of her hand, where it stuck into her flesh as the little girl howled.
Joan—small and small-boned with white-blond hair and blue irises ringed in black—only stared blankly at the teachers and the other children when they were angry with her, sometimes allowing a perfectly formed tear to course slowly down her pale cheek. Val—taller and bigger with arms capable of killing field mice by throwing them against the schoolhouse wall—yelled back, her head vibrating with so much raging energy that her brown curls shook and stiffened from the sound of her voice.
Meg, in her faded cotton dresses, took the notes they brought home and left them on the kitchen counter, where they remained unread and eventually multiplied into a pile of meticulously folded foolscap, which Warren used to start fires in their ancient woodstove. Neither parent ever asked why the other children never came to the house to play or why, on sunny Saturday afternoons, Val and Joan stuck close to the house, holding hands as they lay on their backs in the yard and watched the clouds shift and blow through the sky. Perhaps Meg and Warren heard the whispers when they went to the general store for flour and salt and seed, those whispers spoken behind hands, with eyes averted.
“Those girls never speak to anyone besides each other.”
“I invited the mother over for tea two years ago, but she didn’t drink or eat. All she did was stare at me with those empty eyes. It gave me the creeps.”
“The blond one pushed my Jimmy into the duck pond and tried to hold his head down. Would have drowned him if Mr. Lumby hadn’t heard the ruckus.”
“Men who don’t help themselves only punish their families.”
Val knew that money was tight for everyone these days and that, years ago, when she was a baby or maybe even before she was born, times had been better. The stories her father told his friends were always the same: he was once the bravest logger in the whole province, and could climb the tallest spruce in his spiked shoes without even a shiver of dizziness or fear. Some men never got the hang of it and were relegated to sawing the logs into pieces after they came crashing down to the damp, mushroomy forest floor. But not her father. Sometimes he’d climb higher than he ever needed to, just so he could sway with the skinny branches and feel his whole body bobbing in the wind. The other men hollered up at him that he was as crazy as the crow they once saw eat her own chick, but he didn’t listen, only grinned wildly at the sunshine he never felt while on the ground.
They had been on relief for as long as Val’s memory stretched, but she knew that other children’s fathers had started to work again now that the sawmills were expanding and the trains were stopping to pick up wood and fish to ship east, and that the other girls in school were wearing new hair ribbons and sturdy boots. But Val didn’t care as much about those things as Joan, whose eyes flashed meanly when Beryl showed off her cashmere stockings at recess by dancing the Charleston in the schoolyard.
“My dad is the new foreman at the lumber mill,” she said as she smoothed down her sleek, dark hair. “He bought my mum a jar of special cold cream that cost a whole three dollars.”
That afternoon, Beryl went home crying, her legs bare and her arms tied behind her back with one ripped stocking. The other was tied around her head, with the foot stuffed unceremoniously into her mouth.
Once in a while, Val watched her father leave in the morning for a pickup shift at the rail yard, his lunch pail half full of bread and butter, an apple and beef jerky. He came back before bedtime, his face covered in a fine layer of dirt and his work pants covered in paint or smelling like whatever he had been loading and reloading into the cars. Other days, he would simply sit in the backyard or on the front stoop in an old kitchen chair, watching as people walked by, as the occasional car or truck rumbled down the road. Eventually, by dinnertime, two or three or four of his friends, those who had no children or wives and couldn’t get relief, would show up and Meg—her shoulders drooping with exhaustion, or perhaps disappointment—would have to search the house for more scraps of food to make a big enough meal for everyone. Val particularly hated the soup, which was dense with potatoes and not much else, and she felt sick every time she walked through the kitchen and saw it bubbling thickly on the stove, its smell seeping through the house like dirty clothes wet with rain. She swore she would never be like her mother. If she married, he would be rich. If she didn’t, she would take care of herself.
On nights like these, Val and Joan huddled together in their makeshift play tent made from fallen branches and an old tarp of their father’s, and pretended to cook a meal—Val doing the cooking while Joan organized their imaginary dishes.
“I’m going to make a lemon chiffon cake.”
“What’s a chiffon cake?”
“I think it’s a cake that has lots of bubbles in it; one that floats in your stomach when you eat it.”
“Oh. What else?”
“Bacon and toad-in-the-hole and roast chicken and jellied salad and champagne.”
“I think I would like some beef pie too, please.”
“All right, Joanie. Beef and mushroom pie it is.”
The other children at school were buzzing, their small heads bent together in class or at lunchtime. But this time, they weren’t whispering thoughts and observations (both true and untrue) about the Nealy girls. They were talking about war.
Words that Val and Joan had never even considered before became part of conversations they overheard wherever they went. Germany. Enlist. Fighter plane. Commonwealth. The older brothers of the other children at school were enlisting and, every morning, another girl or boy would brag about how Jimmy or Willy or Fred had made the decision to leave home and shoot Nazis. Once in a while it was even somebody’s father, usually a man who hadn’t been able to find work and whose children were as poor as Val and Joan. At home, however, the discussions were still the same, which meant that Warren still talked about the old days with his buddies, and Meg softly told the girls about her one visit to the
city, a story they knew so well that they repeated it silently whenever they had a quiet moment.
But news has a way of infiltrating even the most isolated house, even the one drowning in bush and the scent of decaying raccoons and squirrels, long dead and hidden in layers of salal and creeping Charlie.
One evening, their father sat down to dinner (trout from the river, small knobbly carrots from the garden and the last jar of applesauce from the autumn before) and smiled broadly at his family. His lips stretched far past his teeth and showed what Val thought was an unseemly expanse of gum. Banging his fork on the table, he announced, “I’ve found a job.”
Meg gasped and Joan gaped.
“You see, I told you it would happen,” he said, spearing a carrot. “There was never any need to worry.”
Val couldn’t remember if her mother had ever said she was worried. Then again, her mother didn’t say much.
“Where?” Meg asked, her hands resting on the tablecloth, her plate of food steaming in front of her. “How?”
“They’re reopening the fish cannery downriver. It’s going full steam, Meg, with shifts around the clock. The pay isn’t as good as I was hoping for, but I’m glad to be off relief. It hurts a man’s pride to take handouts like that.” Her father thumped on his chest with his fist.
Her mother said nothing, but Val sat up straight and looked around the table. “It’s because of the war,” she announced. “They need to feed the soldiers and they’re going to send them canned fish.”
Joan nodded and said, “That’s right. The war.”
Their father ignored them and nodded at Meg, who was lifting her first forkful of food to her mouth. “Bake us something sweet. The boys are coming by tonight to celebrate. It’ll be a party.”
Later, Val and Joan sat on the back porch, hidden by the holly bush that grew by the stairs. Warren and his friends smoked and drank, passed around bottles and stories, and threw rocks at the furry shapes that scurried around the perimeter of the yard. Crouched around a small fire, each man was indistinct and Val couldn’t tell whether the one closest to the outhouse was Johnny or Oliver or Buck. Their clothes were faded or stained the same shade of brown, and each of them had the same scratchy voice, a voice scarred by yelling, drunken singing and the sharp-edged whisky that clawed at their throats on the way down. The one she recognized was her father, with his narrow shoulders and scrawny neck, his outline sharp against the wavering firelight.
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