Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  We met a few more times for coffee (me) and food (him, I paid), and, well, despite my misgivings I came to like him more and more. The last time we met, we talked about being middle-aged, which I’d never considered myself. He laughed that unless I was expecting to live to a hundred and fifty, I was long into my middle years. If I had any hidden dream, I’d better hop to it. Testily, I asked him when he’d started going bald. He grinned and said that already at thirty we’re entering middle age.

  I smirked. “So you’d say that Jesus Christ died a middle-aged man? Come on.”

  He peered into his coffee mug. “For a poor man of his time? Easily.”

  Whoever would have thought such a thing? So I relented, brushed the side of my head and pointed out how much grey I now had. “No delayed dreams, though,” I snickered. “Just the same old nightmares.”

  He smiled up at me. “It’s okay, Lorne. You’re dying, that’s all, but slowly.”

  “Yes, it seems to be a terminal condition with the living.”

  “Youth, hair, friends, children, it’s loss after loss after loss. Until we accept that, every evening like a prayer, we can’t begin to enjoy the trip. Death isn’t the enemy, Doctor.”

  “Get invited to many christenings, Bob?”

  He didn’t smile. “Your persona is oh so serious, Thorpe, yet you refuse to take anything seriously. You could trivialize the Apocalypse.”

  “It ends with a whimper, remember? It’s a wasteland out there, Bob, not Neverland.”

  “Why not a bang? It all began with a big bang. It could end with one too! In fact, now that I think of it, it will!”

  “Bang-bang, we’re all still dead forever. Your point?”

  “I give up.” He was rising.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like dealing on a daily basis with dying children?”

  He settled back and, strange to say, kind of leered into his coffee mug. “Yes, as a matter of sad fact, I do.”

  “But you’re talking abstractly or poetically or something.”

  “Am I?”

  He continued peering into his hugged mug as might a thirsty man a dry well. I watched his small gnarly hands massage the mug, noticed the old scars and fresher wounds, work-worn hands… I thought of my mother, who had read tea leaves for friends and neighbours, to my father’s eternal shame. She’d had a talent for listening to other people’s troubles. I don’t know if she really believed in the mystical business, because even as a child I could see that she was clearly advising people based on what she’d heard from them in the tea-talk beforehand, not in the pattern of some clumped leaves. It was a form of free therapy for them and I’d witnessed it work wonders on a person’s disposition. Her love really had saved my sanity more than once, even silently forgiven my sins. I felt a blow and suddenly missed her like a whole phantom body. I actually felt tears welling and fought them. I stopped fighting and the fear of humiliating myself disappeared with the gathered tears. I felt such relief, I can’t explain.

  “It’s just too sad to speak of,” I finally offered. “Even once seriously.”

  He still didn’t look up. “I know. But Khalil Gibberish or not, it’s death gives meaning to life and makes love essential, Dr. Phil.”

  “The paradox. Do you know the caduceus, Bob? Symbol of the medical profession?”

  “The what?… Oh, yeah, but I thought it was pronounced ca-doo-sis.” Don’t ask me why, but as he said it he flapped his arms like a big bird. The man clearly maintained a certifiable side.

  He settled. “But sure, snake on a pole, very ancient emblem. It’s alchemical or something, right?”

  “Well, symbols can be made to serve other interests. And it’s two snakes on a winged standard. It’s the symbol of my profession.”

  A bemused smile: “So you said. What do you think it means, Lorne?”

  “What heals can hurt, what hurts can heal.”

  “I’ve learned something. Good medicine. And goodbye for now.”

  “Wait, where did you have experience of dying children?”

  He wouldn’t look back. “Uh…big childhood accident, like, a school bus. Some other time, Lorne. See you yesterday!”

  A self-satisfied exit.

  The following day, when Marie LeBlanc’s parents came to pick her up, Bob Browne convinced them to drop their suit against CHEO and Foster and me and to accept a modest out-of-court settlement. How he did it, I do not know. Or I guess I do.

  Chapter 5

  A few days after Bob’s disappearance I read in the abstract of an online medical journal that arsenic, while being the cause of various cancers, was being used in the treatment of some leukemias. A perfectly paradoxical caduceus. I realized with some surprise that I was dying to tell Bob Browne. But I didn’t know how to find him — except through Foster — and would never bring myself to initiate contact anyway. I’d just have to continue dying to tell him, if slowly. Then a bit of luck came my way.

  In the midst of my starring role in the arsenic case and the media frenzy over OUR POISONED PLAYGROUNDS, the Troutstream Community Association had turned to me for advice, as I was already its go-to guy on health issues and had recently agreed to be a member of its executive committee (thank you, pushy Veronica). I had to concur with Debbie Carswell, our over-eager chair, for whom a health-safety crisis was manna to a Munchausen’s momma: all of Troutstream’s treated-cedar playground equipment and the surrounding earth would have to be removed.

  At the rare public meeting of the TCA executive, I first had to convince the committee that the appearance of conflict of interest was as damaging as the reality. I thereby earned the ire of Larry and Gary Lewis, owners of Troutstream’s Twin Bros. Builders who, though on the executive committee, had assumed the contract to clean up the playgrounds was theirs, as per past practice. That was TCA reality, I was learning. Debbie hammered the table and pooh-poohed some trembling old guy’s question about why the contract wasn’t being put out to tender, as it was in wherever he’d just moved from. That gave me my opportunity to offer that I knew of someone who could clean up our contaminated playgrounds and would likely do so at a bargain-basement price, given the enormity of the job.

  My offer had been received by the attending public like the announcement of a royal birth— Saved! Saved! Our children are saved— if not so by the old boy who’d questioned our questionable process, nor by the fuming, red-faced Lewis brothers; nor apparently were Chair Debbie and Treasurer Frank Baumhauser thrilled with the way matters were proceeding, though Secretary Alice Pepper-Pottersfield had applauded petitely, her fingertips tapping the heel of her other palm like she was merely miming applause. My immediate motion for us to consult with Bob was instantly seconded by Alice, and in the raucous applause that accompanied our procedure, intimidated Debbie forgot the necessity of a committee vote and simply hammered home the arrangement. I was only a bit ashamed that I’d made the crookedness of the crooked committee work in my favour, if all for Bob Browne’s sake, of course. Or not all, to be honest.

  Why had I done it, taken such trouble, exposing myself to official censure and future entanglement with, and maybe even indebtedness to, the TCA? What can I say? I liked him, I liked Bob Browne. I liked his radical difference from much of what I believed myself to be. I liked his eccentricity, his mysteriousness, his methods and his madness, his inability to threaten me even as he challenged most of what I held sacred: reason, science, proven methodology, etc. And this, the craziest of all: he reminded me of my mother, especially those beady green eyes of his (though hers were beady brown). I was in unfamiliar territory, and I can explain no more.

  As I said, I didn’t have a contact number for Bob Browne. I googled his name — and various versions and combinations of “landscaping” and his name — searched every online directory, clicked every link, but came up with nothing. In the end I had to go hat-in-hand to Art Foster, who had no numbe
r either.

  “Listen,” said Foster, “I’ll contact my patient’s mother and get her to get her friend to pass a message to Bob Browne, but only if I can borrow your vintage Cadillac for a weekend.”

  “Come again?” said I. “You’ll put me in touch with Bob Browne only if I lend you my Caddy for a whole weekend? Look, Foster, I’m trying to do your friend Bob Browne a favour here. So no fucking way, my Caddy means more to me —”

  “Have it your way. He’s no concern of mine.” He turned away.

  “Okay, okay, wait!”

  He turned back.

  “Why do you want my Caddy?”

  The hard bargainer left his face and something puerile grinned there. “A new lady friend of mine is absolutely crazy for Cadillacs, and the older the better.”

  “And she knows about my Caddy?”

  “Everybody knows about Dr. Lorne Thorpe and his vintage white Cadillac.”

  “You told her.”

  He placed right hand over his heart. “On my mother’s grave, I didn’t.”

  I shook my head. “I might have known. Lady friend. More like cougar skank with a Caddy fetish. Where do you find them, Foster? Single moms of your patients? Or does single even come into it?”

  “You won’t believe it, but she found me, and she’s definitely no cougar.”

  “You’re right, Art.” He grinned. “I don’t believe it.” He was turning away again. I hurried, “Okay. But only on these conditions: I hand over the keys down at my parking spot this Friday at six sharp. You return it on Sunday eve —”

  He turned back. “Monday morning,” he grinned, “and from Thursday. And not this weekend, next.”

  I hemmed and hawed but knew I’d comply.

  “Okay, returned Monday morning, but at my house, at O-eight-hundred on the dot. I’ll drive you to work or to a de-lousing clinic. But you have my Caddy at my house Monday morning at eight sharp. Absolutely no sex in the car. And the less Veronica knows about this, the better.”

  Foster continued the grin. “Don’t worry about your precious back seats, I’m no randy teenage boy.”

  “Yes, you are, Foster.”

  “Do we have a deal, Lorne?”

  “I’m not touching that hand. But, yes, deal. Don’t make me regret it, which I already do.”

  But Bob Browne was as good as assured the contract, without a formal tendering process, and it would put a pretty penny or two in his pocket, and his special friend’s.

  Chapter 6

  After Detective Beldon left, Veronica, Owen and I faked our way through Monday’s supper, at which only Owen even pretended to nibble. His mother had responded with silence to his “any news?” I was hurt by his hurt look after I snapped, “About your sister or the Market Slasher?” He slouched away, with a more troubled look on his face than I’d thought him capable of.

  I announced to Veronica that I was keeping my appointment with the TCA’s executive committee that evening. No response. I said that my absence from the so-called emergency session could draw the sort of attention Detective Beldon had warned us against. But Veronica gave no sign of caring or even of hearing. Anyway, she could hardly object, as it had been her idea that I join the TCA in the first place, as I may have said already. The sad truth is I needed to get out, away from it all. And I owed it to Bob to go.

  I’d already arranged the meeting between Bob and the TCA executive. We’d abused our power and exploited his need in order to arrive at a shameful deal, contrived chiefly by the Lewis brothers: no deposit, and Bob would be paid in cash only after he had shown that he could do the work to Larry and Gary Lewis’s satisfaction. He did so in one park, proving up in what I expect was for him a most costly probation, and still he’d not been paid a penny, pretty or otherwise.

  So off I went.

  The new Troutstream Community Centre had failed as a gathering place for kids. Just why our youth preferred the dusky corners of playgrounds and baseball fields to the garishly lighted activity zones of the community centre still baffled Debbie Carswell, chair of the Troutstream Community Association. “Like rats!” was how Debbie had described Troutstream’s children during her campaign for a community centre. “These juvenile thugs and their molls congregate like rats in our parks at night! And you know what rats are always getting up to?” She’d nod round. But our children, those oversexed rodents, stayed away from the community centre in their randy packs. In point of fact, the only constituency still being served by the centre was the TCA’s own proliferating committees, all chaired by Madam Chair Debbie.

  Outside and inside it was painted white, with windows set too high in the booming space pointing to an A-frame ceiling. It felt like being trapped inside some big-rock candy mountain. When we took our seats at the long flimsy table, we were as shifty as movie gangsters meeting in a warehouse to plan a job. Which wasn’t far from the truth, as we were welshers on a handshake contract with Bob Browne, met to reassure one another of our righteousness.

  I sniffed twice. There was an acrid odour in the air, not hospital smell, but garage diesel, as if Debbie had parked her school bus inside.

  She had brought along her own five kids, likely to proof the centre against charges of failure. In a show of discipline, she lined them all up to greet her school-bus assistant and TCA secretary, her lackey, Alice Pepper-Pottersfield, which the kids did in drawn-out singsong:

  “Good afternoon, Miss Pepper-Pottersfield!”

  Debbie dismissed them and hammered her gavel, then trilled her loonish Debbie laugh: “We do have work to do-oo!”

  And as always with the TCA, I was back inside a bad TV sitcom, with irritating laugh track.

  I sniffed again: “What’s that smell?”

  Across the table, Alice Pepper-Pottersfield’s face came up from her intense recording and she levelled a blank gaze; her icy blues worked me over but good as a little blood came into her cheeks.

  Good God, had Alice farted? I hurried (though as a pediatrician I have no trouble whatsoever with that human bodily function), “I mean, it smells like gasoline or something. Are we safe in here, ha-ha?” I was failing to make it sound like a joke.

  Alice flashed a shutter-speed smile and cranked her face round on Debbie Carswell.

  Once when I’d forgotten never to make small talk with Debbie, I said, “Life must be a lot calmer on the school bus since calm Alice became your assistant.” And Debbie had done her scrunching baffled face, like carpenter ants were a-building in her sinuses, and responded, “So one would have presumed so, Dr. Thorpe. But our Miss Pepper-Pottersfield is not what she appears, methinks. With the children she is the most permissive assistant I’ve ever had. Whereas with me, her hierarchical superior, she is become more and more…familiar, shall we say?” I had immediately warmed to Alice.

  Debbie hammered the flimsy table again, actually stood and took two threatening steps towards the raucous children in the far corner, like some hippo making territorial display. Quite the sight, our chair in abrupt corporeal motion. Occasionally, as at the time, following one fad diet or another, Debbie rapidly lost weight, though it seemed actually to have dropped from her upper body to drape her pelvis like muffin tops. In sudden motion her rump and waist would shift vividly in mistaken Spandex and, when she twisted back suddenly, shimmy round her skeleton like hooped flesh.

  Raising his hand like an effeminate traffic cop, Frank Baumhauser, treasurer, said, “Madam Chair, point of order.”

  “Oh, shut up, Frank! We’re here for one reason and one reason only. To wit, how to finish the playgrounds apparatuses job that Mr. Bob Browne has apparently abandoned. Or should that be apparatti?… Alice?”

  The anemic Alice, a regular rack of rigid bones, was a recent British immigrant, so automatically colonial Debbie’s language authority. Alice always wore the same no-nonsense black pumps and plaid slacks, the same long-sleeved white blouses, the
same pastel cardigans cinched round her shoulders. She had mousy hair lank as March drizzle and a wedge of a face as responsive as a snow-covered graveyard.

  But meek Alice Pepper-Pottersfield nonetheless had a singular victory over mad Debbie Carswell. It had begun with Alice’s timid suggestion that, perhaps, the proposed Troutstream Spring Masquerade should, “one hesitates to forward the notion,” be changed to a Troutstream children’s history fair. She volunteered to organize the whole thing; she would even, as a token of her immigrant’s gratitude, operate a booth dealing with local history. Debbie had simply chortled as if humouring a child and begun assigning membership on the spring masquerade organizing committee. Alice cleared her throat and interrupted Debbie to raise the point again. A silence ensued. I broke it by suggesting that Alice make a formal motion, which I seconded. Without looking up, Frank Baumhauser, a high-school math teacher, voted with us and we carried the day, because Chair Debbie wasn’t allowed a vote but to break a tie.

  I’d been roped into taking Shawn to the children’s history fair. Veronica had argued that I had to go, being on the TCA executive and having supported whatsherpepper’s idea.

  Inside the community centre, the four curved walls had been given over to the booths of organizations devoted to helping children victims and runaways: Child Find, Go Home Kids, Save the Children, the RCMP’s Missing Persons Service, Amber Alert, Curb Appeal, and so on. Eoin McEwan, a lean and gruff Scotsman, chair of the Ottawa Children’s Aid Society and my Piscator Drive neighbour, personally manned a booth that took the historical title literally. In paintings and photographs, his “The Child in Time” showed the ways in which children had been viewed through the ages, from medieval mini-adults, to romantic innocents, to labouring Victorian urchins and little savages, to the present day’s confusion between the worship of eternal youth and opportunities for sex crimes. Impressive, but it couldn’t hold a candle to Alice’s whole corner display.