The Dime Box
Page 23
“Can’t get my mom out of my mind.”
“Won’t be easy, what I’m about to say… This is the stuff that came up at our deepest counseling sessions.”
“Hearing about it won’t be harder than worrying all the time. Wondering about someone the same age I am now.”
Greta looked around the parkette. The seat felt familiar. It was her bench. Except this time, she wasn’t sleeping on it. Not that she was sharing any of her history with Colleen. She wasn’t quite ready.
Colleen passed her a cup. “Hot chocolate.”
She took it, her face lighting up. “Thanks.”
“With a lid.”
“Whip?”
Colleen groaned. “Forgot about that.”
Greta smirked. The last time she’d left Colleen she’d been out of breath. It could have been because of what they’d talked about. It could have been because she was out of shape. Maybe it was a little of both. Either way, she was done putting anything that remotely resembled a petroleum by-product in her mouth.
“Where should we start?” Colleen crossed her ankles and ran a finger down the crease of her pant legs.
“After Hannah’s accident?”
“Your mom and I discussed your Aunt’s death at length in counseling, but not a lot about what came next.”
“How about after she ran off with my Dad?”
“I don’t have those details either. I met your mom in Bracebridge four years later and some details she just wouldn’t share with me.”
Greta sighed. Four years was a huge block of unanswered time. How could Colleen not know? Surely her mother would’ve said something. What about the places she’d told her she’d lived the evening they’d sat on the back patio together at the cabin. She perked up.
“How about Lindsay? Peterborough? Either ring a bell?”
“That’s pretty vague. The night your mom came to the shelter, I was on intake.”
“Intake?”
“It’s what happens when clients first arrive. We sit down and talk.”
Greta leaned forward, eager to hear.
“Not questions from a list. More a conversation to get their story.”
Greta imagined what her mom must have been through—and not just her mom, but any woman in the same situation. The last thing they’d want to go through was an inquisition.
“What’d she say?”
Colleen pressed her fist to her forehead. “She was pale. Thin. Her face was strained.”
“Like how?”
“She looked older than she was.”
Greta imagined her mother would have felt defeated.
“I got the sense she knew leaving Brantford with your father had been the beginning of the end.”
“Did she say that?”
Colleen shook her head. “Not in so many words. But I could tell everything in between then and her sitting there proved it.”
Greta’s heart hurt.
“She mentioned Lindsay. I remember it because it was the last place she’d lived where she felt safe. Something about an old lady upstairs?”
Greta thought back to what her mother had told her. She’d definitely said she’d liked her. “There’s gotta be more.”
“Nothing else that night.”
Greta slumped back on the bench.
“These things take time, you know.”
“How much?”
“There’s no recipe. It takes what it takes.” Colleen gazed out across the parkette. “Your mom and I only got to know each other after she started to trust me.”
Greta leaned forward, her head in her hands. “So, once she did—trust you, I mean—what’d she say?”
“She told me more about Lindsay. How she was grateful for being separated only by floorboards.”
“The old lady heard them fight?”
“When she found out how bad it was, she kicked them out.”
Greta sat up. Dots in her mind connected. The lady wasn’t frightened by something. She wasn’t spooked, as her mother had said. She was frightened by her father. Her own father. That made so much more sense.
“That’s why they moved to Peterborough…” she said.
“It didn’t matter. The abuse didn’t stop. But that’s where your mom told me she was done. She’d waited for your dad to go to work and then packed up and walked out.”
Greta exhaled. “Brave, huh?” She’d never assumed strong was loud and quiet was weak. Her mother, and everything about her, had always made that quite clear. Quiet people, thinking people, could actually be stronger than the louder ones.
Colleen smiled. “She was. But he found her a few days later.”
“At the shelter?”
Colleen nodded.
“How’d he do that?”
“No idea. He begged her to come back to him. He said he’d manned up, would you believe.”
She scoffed.
“It happens all the time, Greta. Empty promises…”
“Broken ones.”
Colleen nodded. “Mostly broken. They seem to have a certain power. But anyway, she did—go back to him, that is—and, within a few days, he was beating her up again. Even the curtains couldn’t hide it.”
Curtains? They had no curtains in Ravensworth. Her mother had told her that her father said they didn’t need them living out there in the boonies. Again, that wasn’t true. It was her mother who hated them. And now she understood why. It was her choice not to have them. Yet her choice had everything to do with him. Why did everything have to come back to him every time? She pressed her hands into the bench and tried not to scream. He infuriated her.
“When she left him the second time,” Colleen went on, “Ian knew he’d found her before, so she needed a clean break. They called us in Bracebridge and we took her in.”
Greta sat on her bench dazed. Another secret or another lie? She wasn’t sure which, but it was now apparent her father’s job hadn’t moved them to Bracebridge. Her stomach lurched. He’d found her there. Her father had stalked her mother. Across the province? But he didn’t fool her: Greta knew he’d never manned up. He was a monster.
Colleen read the look on her face. She reached across the bench and gently squeezed Greta’s shoulder. “I felt sick, too, when he showed up.”
“How’d he do it?”
“I’ve no idea. But it took him a few months.”
“Did you meet him?”
”A couple of times.”
“Before she left?”
“When she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do.”
Bile rose in Greta’s throat. It was no wonder he’d reacted so violently when he saw Colleen in the candy store. Colleen wasn’t someone they needed to avoid, as she remembered she was led to believe. Colleen was her mother’s mentor. Her friend. The one who knew all her secrets and all of Ian’s, too. Colleen didn’t wreck Sunday. Her father did. And he’d wrecked everything.
Any tiny fragment of doubt, any sliver of hope that had lingered in her mind about what might have happened in the kitchen seven years ago, evaporated. Her father was a murderer; she knew it like she knew how to breathe. Instinctively.
Tears flowed down her cheeks. Were they her way of expressing her anger? Disappointment? Futility? More tears of rage followed. Her father had snuffed the light on their days, and the life right out of her mother.
“I tried, Greta. I really tried.” Colleen was crying, too. “Nothing was ever right about that man. Nothing was ever enough. When he and your mother moved out to that cabin in Ravensworth… Well, I was scared. It was so remote. Right off the grid.”
Greta nodded. She knew all too well. It had been her home, too. “My mom must have felt sick,” she said.
“More than that. I think at twenty years old she felt owned. Maybe she thought it was a peaceful place to live for an end she knew would be coming? I don’t know. I’m sure she didn’t know when that end would come, but I’m guessing she may’ve resigned herself to the fact it was inevitable.”
> Greta shuddered. “Then why adopt a baby? Why bring me into that?”
Colleen looked into her eyes and took her hand. “I don’t know. Only she did.”
Detective Perez flapped a hand at Greta. “Are you saying that on that day you asked Colleen the same question I asked you yesterday?”
“Which one?”
“When you’d gone to the shelter, Colleen wasn’t there. You found out your mom was a client. You were questioning all the lies. I said I was, too, because—”
“An adoption place wouldn’t put me in a violent home?”
The detective nodded. “And you ignored me.”
Red-faced, Greta sat up. “Because you accused me of lying.”
Phil interrupted. “I’m sure no one was accusing anyone of anything at that point.”
Greta pointed a finger across the table. “She was.”
Phil’s jaw tensed. He looked across the table to Astra for confirmation, who smiled awkwardly.
“And you carried on about your…’ Detective Perez flipped through her notebook, “dime box.”
Greta took what felt like her first breath in minutes. “I told you yesterday. My mom lied about it, too. But that lie was a good one—one she said to make me feel better.”
THIRTY-FOUR
G reta pulled her phone out of her pocket and showed Colleen the screenshot.
“What’s that?”
“My family,” she told her. “Or at least the ones I think I have left.”
Colleen stared at the three D Strachans on the screen. “And you know this how?”
“It’s what’s carved into the side of my dime box.”
“Your what box?”
Greta laughed and explained its whole history, with some of her own history spilling out, too. The timing was right. It was finally right.
“I think one of these Strachans might be my grandparents.”
“Wow.” Colleen squinted into the setting sun. “I’ve underestimated you. You’re quiet but there’s a lot more going on in that head of yours than I’d realized.”
Greta wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or pleased. What was Colleen trying to say? She wasn’t a child. She was seventeen.
“So what’s the plan?” Colleen asked.
Greta had spent more time considering the best way to contact the people she thought may be her grandparents than the time she’d spent pre-planning what she was going to do when she first stepped off the bus in Toronto two years before. What had she been thinking? It all could have gone so much more badly than it did. She realized then how lucky she’d been. “We’ve come up with three options.”
“We?”
“Latoya and me. We’ve been talking it through and figured it out.”
“Is that so?” Colleen said.
“Write. Call. Or you can drive me to Brantford and I’ll knock on their doors.”
Colleen’s eyes widened. “Don’t you think a first meeting face-to-face might be a little intense? For you? For them? If they really are your grandparents?”
Greta ignored her comment. Something told her that they were—one of the three anyway.
“Maybe. I guess so. Probably,” she mumbled. “Then that only leaves call. Because if they’re anything like my mother, they definitely don’t do social media. They may not even own a computer.”
Colleen looked puzzled. “What happened to the letter?”
“I’m not writing on dead trees,” said Greta, “or using snail mail. I could be twenty by the time they get it.”
“Have you talked to anyone at Penn about this? Asked them to help you out?”
Greta looked down at her shoes, humiliated. “That counseling thing? They set me up with a counselor, somebody named Kanza, but I don’t have anything to talk about.” Then she corrected herself. “Nothing I want to talk to her about anyway.”
Colleen smiled brightly. “Now you do.”
***
Detective Perez stared at Phil. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He shook his head. “I called Colleen last night.”
“She’s real?”
“Confirmed it all. She sat in with Greta and Kanza on the planning meeting.”
“I need her contact details.”
Greta watched them closely. After they exchanged information, the detective reached for her phone on the table. “Give me a minute, please.”
Her eyebrows furrowed, Detective Perez tapped at the keys. After a series of pings and a whoosh, she dropped her phone back on the table, reached for her glass, and took a long sip of her drink. Then another ping. Her arm shot out, but not before Greta snuck a look at the words on the screen.
Bringing her in now.
Her heart pounded. The one person to vouch for her and who knew Ian’s violent history. She prayed the message referred to Colleen.
Over the next few weeks, Greta, Kanza, and Colleen put together a plan. It took forever talking about the details, and Greta tried to be patient as they worked it all through. Her efforts paid off in a single phone call.
The following weekend, she and Colleen set out for Brantford. Slouched down in the front seat of her car, Greta’s legs jiggled as her mind flooded with the possibilities of what was to come. What if they’d moved since they’d spoken earlier that week? What if, when they met, they saw images of her mother? What if that conjured up painful memories and then decided they didn’t like her? If it was all too much? Maybe they’d never want to see her again. Everything made sense when they’d planned it out, but now everything felt muddled. What on earth had she been thinking?
Colleen’s GPS led them to a driveway of a small bungalow at the end of a quiet street. Greta didn’t have to look past the two-car garage, the manicured flowerbeds or up to the red wood front door to find what she was looking for: an older couple was already standing, arm in arm, at the bottom of the pathway. She opened the car door. As she heaved herself from the front seat, her knees gave way and she pitched forward, head-first, and stumbled out and onto the driveway. She glanced up at her grandparents to check if they’d seen. Then time froze. Not just froze; it reeled backwards. It was like staring into her mother’s face. But in two different faces at the same time.
Her grandfather burst into laughter. “How was your trip?”
Her grandmother looked at him in disbelief. “Are you serious, Daniel? That wasn’t funny when the kids were younger and it’s not funny now.”
The small-boned woman with a gray braided bun perched on top of her head walked over and extended her hand.
“Come on, love. Ignore him,” she said softly.
Greta couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Come on, love. That felt good; deep-down-in-her-bones good. She’d waited years to meet her grandparents.
Her grandfather shrugged and tucked his hands in his pockets. “Sorry about that, Polly.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Polly said curtly. “Apologize to your granddaughter.”
“Sorry, Greta.”
Her grandfather, a good foot taller than her grandmother, looked embarrassed. He didn’t need to; she could already tell he had a zany sense of humour. She liked him immediately.
Colleen, Greta and her grandparents walked up the flagstone pathway to the front door. Polly took Greta on a tour of the house. It was bigger than most houses she’d ever seen. It felt homey, and was decorated with a sense of subtle warmth. There were blankets in the living room, rugs underfoot and large, framed paintings and photographs on every wall. As Greta followed along behind her grandmother, she provided a running historical commentary through every room.
“This table is where your mother and her sister used to do their homework, when I could get them to sit and do it. And this is the finger painting your mother came home with in elementary school. Oh, and this bathroom used to have one sink, but we blew out the room beside it to make it bigger so now it has two”.
Greta laughed inside. Now she knew where her mother got her tendency for history recaps.
They spent the rest of the day catching up in the living room. They had lunch; turkey sandwiches with crusts. Most of the conversation was easy, yet there were times it ebbed and flowed. Some questions triggered difficult memories and not everything was straightforward.
Yes, she was adopted, which surprised them, but they said it didn’t matter. And since they brushed it off so quickly, she didn’t tell them she thought it did.
No, she didn’t like living in the cabin where she’d grown up.
Was the isolation difficult? Greta nodded and felt the bump in her throat grow larger. The location felt far out.
Her father? She wasn’t close to him. They had a relationship, but it was strained.
Her mother? They had questions about her, too; about the daughter they’d lost years before.
“How far did that conversation go?” Detective Perez said.
“I took my time explaining the best I could.”
“The first time you met them? Everything?”
“Almost. The way she looked. What she did. How much fun we had. What she’d taught me and how she was so much a part of me both then and when I was little.”
“Did you explain—”
“I said it was an accident.”
“So they don’t know about your parents’ history.”