The Forgotten Daughter

by Joanna Goodman

  “It’s actually kind of cathartic. I’m so used to not talking about it.”

  Véronique is always struck by Elodie’s pragmatism. She approaches her life without melodrama or mawkish grandstanding, never trying to call attention to herself. She’s managed to raise a child, find her birth mother, support herself, share her story, and now seek justice in a system that wants to keep her silent and oppressed, and she does all of it with her dignity intact.

  “You can’t bury something that’s still alive,” Elodie says. “I’m just starting to figure that out now.”

  “That’s how I feel about the October Crisis,” Véronique admits, thinking about her father’s legacy. “I can’t seem to get out from under its shadow.”

  “Everyone has their own October,” Elodie says, swirling the ice cubes around in her glass of Pepsi. “No one comes through life without experiencing something that changes who they were going to be.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  “I’ve tried to shield Nancy from my past,” Elodie says. “I’m not sure I succeeded. A parent leaves a legacy no matter what. She’ll have her own October Crisis to deal with. I can’t see how she won’t.”

  “Does she come back to visit often?”

  “Not really. She likes adventure.”

  “Where’s her father, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Probably dead,” Elodie says. “He was American, going off to Vietnam. He was spending his last weekend of freedom in Montreal. I never even knew his last name. He probably died over there.”

  “But you don’t know for sure?”

  “Most of them died,” she says. “I just assume he did, too. I’ve just tried to move forward, not be defined by my past.”

  Véronique takes a sip of coffee, thinking about James’s article. “I don’t think you’re defined by your past, for what it’s worth.”

  “You asked me if I ever think about revenge,” Elodie says. “I do secretly fantasize about smothering Sister Ignatia with a pillow or spitting in her face.” She laughs nervously, embarrassed. “But if I become the monster they believed me to be—or wanted me to be—then they’ve won.”

  “Not if they’re dead.”

  “Even if they’re dead. The only power I ever had was in not letting them destroy me. I mean, I’m still here, aren’t I? I got out and I made a life. I had a child. I’m not a terrible person.”

  “You’re a beautiful person,” Véronique says. She hasn’t known Elodie very long, but she recognizes in her a kindred spirit, a surrogate big sister who understands her and never judges.

  Elodie waves her hand in the air, shooing away the compliment. Véronique looks at her watch and frowns. “My shift starts in fifteen minutes.”

  “Talk to James,” Elodie says. “Maybe he sees something in you that you don’t even see in yourself yet.”

  Véronique considers Elodie’s parting words as she heads the few blocks over to Stanley Records. Maybe she doesn’t know who she is yet, but she knows she’s her father’s daughter. She will always be the woman Léo taught her to be, someone willing to cross the line when it’s justified.

  She loves James, but if he can’t accept that about her, they won’t make it. This is what worries her most, even during this current truce. Eventually he’s going to figure out that her job at Stanley Records is a placation tactic, and that even if she were to give up smuggling, she will still and forever be a smuggler at the core. This is who she is.

  When she arrives at work, the guy at the door greets her with a bored hello. It’s a shit job, sitting there all day on a stool, greeting people and checking their bags when the alarm goes off. And in turn, he does a shitty, lackadaisical job. It’s an empire run by teenagers, most of them lazy and uninterested. Someone scribbled Smells like teen shit on the bathroom wall, and it fits.

  Stanley Records is an institution. It used to be a small record shop on Stanley Street when it first opened, but moved to this much bigger location in the late seventies. It’s essentially a massive warehouse—garishly bright with industrial carpeting and serviceable fixtures—with the best selection of music anywhere in the city. The kids who work here are mostly between sixteen and twenty-five years old, and generally they’re all into music.

  She doesn’t really mind the job, especially now that she’s found a way to supplement her meager hourly wage. She’s a cashier, so she’s always busy, and the shifts tend to fly by. The music is good, she’s always on the cutting edge of what’s new, and her coworkers are okay—some more okay than others. Occasionally, famous people show up and everyone stops what they’re doing and there’s a festive vibe in the air. The other day, Weird Al Yankovic showed up to promote his Alapalooza album—he brought Dunkin’ Donuts for the staff—and when Iron Maiden dropped by in December, Bruce Dickinson gave her tickets to their show. (She sold them.) She can wear jeans to work and not comb her hair and mostly be herself, which is more than she can say for many other jobs of this ilk.

  She walks through the security detection system and then downstairs to punch in for her shift. The break room is in the basement. There’s a microwave, a TV, a wall of lockers, and a high-school-cafeteria-style table, around which the employees smoke and eat fast food or warmed-up leftovers in Tupperware.

  Roger is there, smoking while eating his poutine. Roger works upstairs in the warehouse. He has shaggy blond hair, piercings in his eyebrow, nose, and lip, and a tattoo of one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on his chest.

  “Your food must taste like cigarettes,” she says, disgusted.

  He shrugs.

  “You have hockey tonight?” she asks, sitting down across from him.

  “Yep.”

  Someone else joins them—the beautiful Italian girl from International Music on the mezzanine—and Véronique turns toward the TV, where news is breaking on CNN about a figure skater being attacked by another figure skater.

  Roger stubs out his cigarette in what’s left of his poutine, gets up from the table noisily—pushing his chair back, burping—and dumps the container in the trash. He doesn’t make eye contact with Véronique, doesn’t acknowledge her when he leaves the break room.

  This is mainly for show. They have an understanding—act polite with each another, but not too friendly. They’re an unlikely pair—she’s beautiful, intelligent, seemingly untouchable in all ways, while Roger is crude, ugly, not very bright. No one would associate them together, which is exactly how she planned it. This way no one will ever suspect they’re business partners in a surprisingly lucrative CD-stealing operation.

  She first got the idea when she saw Roger leaving the warehouse after work one day with a hockey bag over his shoulder. The warehouse is on the fourth floor, above the offices, with a freight elevator that goes directly down to the loading dock out back. No one checks the staff’s bags at the loading dock door. The warehouse guys load and unload the stock completely unsupervised.

  The following week, she saw Roger walk through the store again with his hockey bag over his shoulder. She started to formulate a plan—both to challenge herself and to earn some extra cash. On a Friday night after work, Véronique joined the gang at the St. Regis pub for the usual gathering to bitch about their jobs, gossip about management, and mock the customers.

  Someone asked me where to find the Traveling Blueberries. Some guy got pissed off when I removed the security box from his CD. He thought it was included in the price! She didn’t have to tell the shift manager I was “anti-English” just because I didn’t understand “Jeff Beck, Beck-Ola.”

  After a while, when everyone was pretty drunk, a few of them started pulling CDs out of their backpacks and comparing what they’d stolen. The new Alice in Chains. Jean Leloup. The Beatles’ White Album.

  Stealing music is like a rite of passage at Stan’s. Everyone does it. First of all, no one likes the owners, Maury and Rosalie Zimmerman. They’re much older, rich and aloof, and never interact with the staff. Maury is the son of the guy w
ho opened Stanley Records, so he acts very self-important, like he’s some kind of legend. If he ever has anything to say to any of the employees—usually a critique of some sort—it’s relayed through the managers. The Zimmermans do not speak to anyone else other than to fire them or interrogate them when one of the tills doesn’t balance.

  Also, the security is really lax. If the alarm goes off when someone is leaving at the end of their shift, a manager will give his or her backpack a half-assed search. But the alarm rarely goes off because everyone demagnetizes the CDs before stealing them. Even the managers steal. It’s part of the culture.

  Véronique was never interested in stealing CDs. She had a much bigger vision. That night at the St. Regis, she recruited Roger into stealing an entire hockey bag full of CDs straight from the warehouse, which she would sell off. She proposed charging ten bucks a CD, and splitting the earnings evenly with Roger.

  The first time they did it, it went off seamlessly. Roger loaded up his hockey bag with the CDs she thought Callahan would like—the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo, Grateful Dead—and then he left work via the loading dock. Véronique had rented a locker at the Centre Eaton a few streets away, where he stashed the bag. She picked it up later, shoved it in her trunk, and drove to Ottawa the next day.

  Callahan bought her entire stash, sold it all right away, and asked for more. He started to put in orders. Smashing Pumpkins, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, Nirvana.

  That was two months ago. Now they’re making more money than either of them thought possible at Stanley Records, and it couldn’t be easier. She’s able to give her parents CDs whenever she sees them, which makes them happy. James is happy. Everyone is happy. The best part is Véronique doesn’t feel like she’s fully conceded to James by taking a “real” job; it’s her way of compromising, staying true to herself while doing something to assuage him.

  On the news, the injured figure skater is on the ground, swarmed by doctors. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she’s wearing a lacy white figure skating outfit that looks like a doily. She’s clutching her leg and wailing. Apparently her chance of winning gold at the Olympics may now be in jeopardy.

  Véronique gets up and goes upstairs for her shift. She’s in a good mood. The new Tribe Called Quest is playing, and her favorite manager is working tonight. After work, she’s going to pick up Roger’s hockey bag from the locker and dump it in her car, which is parked in an all-day lot on President Kennedy. James is taking her to see the Vilain Pingouin concert tonight and then tomorrow morning she heads to Ste. Barbe for a cigarette run, followed by a short trip to Ottawa the next day.

  Money is rolling in; her relationship with James is in a calmer place. Occasionally, she experiences a pang of guilt about lying to him, which is usually followed by a deep-seated uncertainty about their future together, but she loves him and she wants to be with him. Some secrets and lies are necessary to keep the peace.

  14

  James pulls into his mother’s driveway, kicking up snow as he comes to a stop. He decided to come home for a visit while Véronique is in Ste. Barbe, hopefully on her last smuggling expedition. She seems happy at the record store, working a normal job, and he’s hoping he can convince her to go back to school. He doesn’t want to come off as too controlling or invested, but he does want to see her fulfill her potential. She’s brilliant and strong—so much like his mother; he knows she could do great things. In the absence of constructive paternal advice, she seems to need a mentor. James has stepped in to offer some guidance and help her navigate her future.

  He gets out of the car and goes to the garage to get a shovel. It still breaks his heart, showing up at home and seeing such simple things that need doing—the walk shoveled, the eaves cleaned, the windows replaced. All things his father used to take care of that Maggie doesn’t have the wherewithal or physical strength to do herself anymore. James keeps telling her to hire someone to shovel and snowplow all winter, but Maggie refuses. “I can do it myself” is her standard, stubborn response. But she doesn’t.

  When he’s finished shoveling, he leans the shovel up against the side of the house and lets himself inside. “M’ma?” he calls out, kicking off his boots.

  “Kitchen!”

  He hangs his ski jacket on the porte-manteau and is brushing snow off his jeans when Maggie appears in the foyer. “Hi, darling,” she says, standing on tiptoes to hug him. “Good timing. I just got home from work.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Oh, terrible. All we sell is salt and discounted Christmas crap in January.”

  “I shoveled,” he says.

  “Thanks, love. I was hoping you would.”

  “Anything else you need today?”

  “I have a list,” she says, clasping his hand and leading him to the kitchen. “I can’t figure out how to program Oprah on my new DVD player, the light bulbs in my bedroom chandelier are all burnt out. My garburator is broken. One of the elements on the stove keeps flickering, and I’m afraid there’s going to be a gas explosion.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” James says, grabbing a warm brownie from a pan on the counter. “I should’ve come sooner.”

  He hasn’t been home since Christmas. His only excuse is love, which isn’t a very good excuse at all. Now he feels guilty for having neglected his mother, and he makes a mental note to come more often, even just for the day. “Smells good in here,” he says, sitting down at the long pine table. “It always does.”

  She prepares a plate of brownies and a glass of milk for him, and then sits down where her typewriter is set up at the center of a messy pile of notes—sketches, diagrams, typewritten blurbs about seeds and flowers. She’s already working on the spring seed catalogue, something she’s been doing herself, on that same typewriter, for as long as he can remember. She won’t hire someone to do it, no matter how many times he tells her there are graphic designers who will do it for her, probably better. But no, the catalogue is her baby, and her work ethic has always bordered on compulsion—turning sixty hasn’t changed a thing.

  “I miss you,” she says. His beautiful, ebony-haired mother is finally starting to look her age. Her roots are silver about two inches long, which is unusual for her. She’s normally meticulous about dyeing it black. She looks thin to him, the lines on her face more pronounced.

  “You okay, M’ma?”

  “A little lonely,” she admits. “It comes in waves. It always does.”

  James nods. It’s the same for him.

  “Some days I miss your dad more than others,” she says. “It’s been one of those weeks.”

  “It always happens after the holidays.”

  “I know,” she concedes. “They’ve never been the same without him, have they?”

  “Nothing has.”

  “I keep thinking about the first time he ever saw you,” she says. “I don’t know why, but my mind keeps going there.”

  James was not quite a year old when his father first laid eyes on him. His parents had been together as a couple when she conceived him, but then Gabriel discovered that Maggie had given Elodie away without telling him, and he left her. Disappeared for almost a year, not knowing Maggie was pregnant with James. When Gabriel turned up on her doorstep, he had no idea he had a son.

  “I remember you spit up as I was handing you over to Daddy,” she reminisces, laughing. “But he took you in his arms as though he’d been doing it since the day you were born. I was amazed. He was so confident with you, so comfortable. Some men are terrified the first time they hold a baby, but your dad didn’t hesitate a second. It’s like he knew you. Like you belonged in his arms.”

  Maggie grabs a tissue from a nearby Kleenex box and touches the corners of her eyes. “He rubbed your little head and kissed your face. He was crying. He sang to you, ‘Fais do-do, bébé à papa . . .’”

  “You always said it was love at first sight.”

  “It really was,” she says. “For both of you. That was the same day my fa
ther died. Strange, isn’t it? I lost my father the day yours came into your life?”

  James gets up and goes around the table. He wraps his arms around her and she presses her cheek against his forearm. He can feel the wetness of her tears on his skin. “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time.”

  “It’s January,” she says. “I should have seen it coming.”

  She pats his arm and sits up a little straighter. “Why don’t you start tackling my list,” she says. “Let me finish up this last part of my catalogue before I start dinner. I’m roasting duck.”

  “Do you ever take a day off?”

  “The busier I am, the less time I have for feeling sorry for myself.”

  “You’ve always been this way.”

  “You mean a workaholic?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “I prefer to call it having a good work ethic.”

  “Dad was the same.”

  James grew up having those words instilled in him. Work ethic. Values. Purpose. Both his parents believed in hard work—work they loved, work that lined up with their values. His mother inherited her life’s philosophy from her father. Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds. Do the hard jobs first; the easy jobs will take care of themselves. You have to pay your dues. This was a big one. Everyone had to pay their dues. His mother’s office at the store is papered with those old-fashioned slogans, handed down from her father; her library is lined with his business and motivational books, written by his mentors and idols. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Gordon B. Hinckley. Maggie always said her father was way ahead of the self-help movement.

  James grew up watching his mother work six days a week at the seed store, come home and toil all night over her catalogues or a translation. His father was the same. In spring, summer, and fall, he was up at dawn tending to his family’s cornfield; in winter, he was working alongside Maggie at the seed store. Gabriel could have sold his family’s land and they could have lived well enough off the seed store, but he loved that land. Loved it like it was his fourth child. The cornfield was where he met Maggie, where they hid from her mother and fooled around, where she lost her virginity to him—so goes the family lore. Gabriel was devoted to the Phénix property. For his father’s name, for his sisters, for his own sake, he worked his ass off to keep it alive and thriving.