The Forgotten Daughter

by Joanna Goodman

  “We have about an hour before we need to get ready,” she says, coming up behind him and wrapping her arms around his waist.

  “Great. I’ll try to finish my chapter.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He stops peeling the carrots and turns to face her. “What did you mean?” he asks, kissing her neck.

  “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “Let’s stay right here.”

  “The kitchen is a mess,” she says. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Easier just to go along with her before he loses his erection. He follows her upstairs, and they fall onto the bed together. He never gets tired of her body. She works hard to stay fit, and he appreciates all the work that goes into it. She’s always smooth and buff and fresh-scented. Sarah cares about things like fitness, manicures and pedicures, flossing, professional waxing, strict moisturizing regimes. Véronique didn’t give a shit about that stuff. Not that one way is better than the other; it’s just different.

  When he attempts to pull Sarah on top—the only way she can come—she puts a hand on his chest to stop him. “Do you mind if I’m on the bottom?” she says. “My lower back is spasming.”

  When he finishes, she pretends to orgasm at the same time, which doesn’t really bother him. He collapses on top of her, flattening her into the mattress.

  “I love you,” she says, and he can feel her heart beating against his rib cage.

  “I love you, too.”

  He thinks he means it. He really does. He keeps a mental list of all Sarah’s pros and cons, and there are definitely more pros. He kept no such list about Véronique. Had he ever thought to, it would have been all pros and one glaring con: she was a criminal. Sarah’s are minor by comparison, a collection of innocuous quirks and idiosyncrasies that run the spectrum from perfectionistic to slightly controlling. On the good column, she’s a teacher; she loves children; she takes great care of herself, loves to cook for him, shares his political views—or doesn’t have any at all—and, of course, she has those legs.

  “I’m going to shower,” she says.

  “I’ll finish my chapter.”

  Sarah rolls out from under him and swings her legs over the bed. “You don’t really have time,” she says. “I’m going to need you to set the table, choose some music.”

  He almost says, I didn’t want to have this goddamn party. “Sure.”

  Sarah has known the same group of friends since seventh grade. She went to an elite, private all-girls school called Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s, much like the school where she currently teaches. It’s situated on bucolic Mt. Pleasant Avenue, cloistered among the oak and chestnut trees of Westmount. So fond are Sarah’s memories of this era, she actually brought James to see it one afternoon when they were visiting her parents. Her friends’ names are Courtney, Carrie, Alexandra, and Wendy. Their husbands and boyfriends are Will, Beckett, Gavin, and Ryan, all from good Irish or Scottish stock. James speaks English with them, but feels outnumbered.

  “Listen, I’m all for scientific advancement,” Sarah is saying, “but cloning? There’s something really creepy about that.”

  “I agree,” says Beckett, named after the Irish novelist. “Cloning is not something humans should be experimenting with.”

  “First it’s a sheep, then it’s the child you designed and manufactured.”

  “I don’t think that’s an inevitability,” says Courtney. Or is it Carrie? James gets them mixed up. They both have chin-length white-blond hair, layered and straightened like Jennifer Aniston’s.

  “This is just the beginning,” Beckett says. “Dolly has opened the door to all kinds of dangerous genetic engineering.”

  James reaches for the champagne and makes a tour around the table, refilling all the empty glasses. They already toasted the newly engaged couple. Everyone clapped, and the guys said things to Will like It’s about time! and Welcome to the club, bro.

  One of the girls leaned over and said to Sarah, loud enough for the rest of them to hear, “You’re next, Sass.” Their nickname for her is Sassy.

  “How hilarious was Friends this week?” Alexandra says. She’s the only one with dark hair. A real beauty.

  “Oh, my God, when Ross is at the Lamaze class? Gav and I were hysterical.”

  Sarah gets up and starts clearing away the main course. Thank God, James thinks. They’ve been lingering over dinner for more than two hours. “James? Give me a hand?”

  Obediently, he starts collecting the baby blue china dinner plates Sarah’s mother gave her when she moved in with him. They were her grandmother’s. He follows her into the kitchen and starts loading the plates into the dishwasher.

  “No!” she cries. “Those don’t go in there. We have to hand-wash them, babe. Leave it for now.”

  She runs the tap, filling the roasting pan with hot water and soap, and leaves it there to soak. “Should I serve dessert now or wait till later?”

  “It’s almost ten thirty.”

  Sarah sighs, not sure what to do. Dessert now or later? When James feels the familiar vibration of his pager on his hip, he almost cries out with joy. “I’m getting paged.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “I’ll just check in with Damian and see what’s going on.”

  Sarah purses her lips and reaches for the oven mitts. She’s got a pie warming in the oven. “Smells delicious,” he says, and leaves her pouting in the kitchen.

  Upstairs, he closes the bedroom door and sits down heavily on the bed. Exhales, calls Damian.

  “You watching the news?”

  “No. What’s going on?”

  “Another bomb just went off.”

  James was beginning to wonder if there would be another one. These things rarely occur in isolation. “Where?”

  “That clothing store across from the Bay. Camden Threads.”

  “Any damage?”

  “Definitely more damage than the last one. This one was much more powerful.”

  “Anyone injured?”

  “I don’t think so. The store was closed, but there were people on the street. I’m in Ste. Adele, so I can’t get there myself.”

  “Do they know who did it?”

  “No idea. Someone identified a guy taking off down the street after tossing the Molotov cocktail through the window. If it’s the same guy, he’s getting bolder.”

  “I’m on my way,” James says.

  He grabs his tape recorder and heads back downstairs to break the news to Sarah. He finds her standing at the head of the table, slicing into her pie. “Babe, would you mind putting on a new CD?” she asks him. “It’s gotten a little somber in here.”

  “I’ve got to head out.”

  Sarah stops what she’s doing and looks up at him. “Are you serious? On Saturday night?”

  “Another bomb went off downtown.”

  The friends look at each other nervously. They’re old enough to remember the October Crisis. They would have been little kids, but they would know about the bombs that were detonated in mailboxes all over Westmount.

  “Ali, would you finish serving the pie?” Sarah says. “James, can I speak to you?”

  Reluctantly, he joins her in the kitchen.

  “Do you really have to go?” she asks him.

  “Yes, I really have to go.”

  “Can’t Damian go?”

  “He’s in Ste. Adele. Besides, I’m the Quebec Affairs guy.”

  “You want to go!” she accuses.

  “Yes,” he says. “Of course I do. It’s my job.”

  She folds her arms across her chest and glares at him. “There’s no one else who can go?” she says. “We have people over.”

  “They’ve been here for hours. Dinner is over.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You’re right. The point is there’s a breaking story on my beat and I have to go.”

  “It’s not just tonight,” she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. “This is a pattern.”
/>   “A pattern?”

  “You care more about work than you do about our relationship.”

  “We’re not going to do this now,” he says, shutting her down. “I have to go.”

  “You’re barely present with me,” she says, her eyes welling up. “Even tonight, you’ve been disconnected, distracted. You’d rather be anywhere than here with me. You work late all the time. I mean, who stays at the office until two o’clock in the morning, James? You’re not a surgeon, for God’s sake! And when you are here, you’re locked in the bedroom writing.”

  “It’s an important story.”

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  “Maybe I should have paid more attention to how things ended with you and Véronique.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You chose your career over her. Isn’t that right?”

  “That’s low.”

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You would do anything for a story.”

  James turns to leave.

  “All this time I thought you loved her more than you love me,” Sarah shouts after him, “but it’s work you love most. It’s getting your story!”

  37

  Elodie stares straight ahead at the colorless sky, sucking quietly on a cigarette. If not for the steady inhalations, she wouldn’t be breathing at all. She hasn’t seen this place in almost thirty years, and she dares not turn her head to look. She’s parked across the street, which feels safer than pulling into the parking lot. A strong gust of wind causes the car to shudder. It’s minus thirty-five with the windchill, and they can feel the draft through the windows.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Maggie says, breaking the silence.

  “Yes, we do.” It’s taken her a few months to get up the nerve to come, but she’s here now and determined to face the demons before it’s too late.

  “They’re already preparing to demolish,” Maggie says.

  Slowly, Elodie turns. There are several bulldozers and excavators parked in the lot. The building, fittingly set against a backdrop of somber gray sky, stripped trees, and a wrathful wind, is remarkably unchanged since that night she arrived in 1957. The name, Hôpital St. Nazarius, carved in stone beneath the center spire, has a visceral effect on her. She lifts her eyes, gazing up at the top floor. Somewhere behind those white-trimmed dormer windows, she lived on Ward B.

  “Maybe this is enough,” Maggie says gently. “You don’t have to go inside.”

  Elodie turns to face her mother, anger pulsing in her temples. “I want you to see it,” she says.

  Maggie shrinks back. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “I grew up here. I’ll be fine.”

  Elodie opens the window a crack, flicks her cigarette outside, and reaches for another in her purse.

  “You’re smoking too much,” Maggie says.

  Elodie looks at her, saying nothing. Maggie turns away and stares quietly out the window. Elodie lights her cigarette with the car lighter and leans her head back against the seat. Her heartbeat is uneven, fast. So many unpleasant memories are churning close to the surface. What the hell did she expect, coming back here? She’s an adult now—independent, safe, free—but she feels as small and defenseless as she did back then. “Okay,” she says, putting the car in drive and turning onto the road that leads to St. Nazarius. “Let’s get it over with.”

  The parking lot is empty except for some construction trucks. She parks at the front entrance to avoid the cold, holds her breath, and opens the door. Outside, Maggie takes her hand, and they walk slowly toward the front steps. She learned early on at St. Nazarius to detach from what was going on around her. As she approaches the hospital now, her scalp tingles, and she has the familiar sensation of her mind floating away.

  She pushes on the doors, half expecting them to be locked. The hospital was closed down years ago, so she’s a little surprised when the doors swing open. Maggie turns to her, her expression vague, and they step inside to find a handful of workers milling around—two contractors by the abandoned information desk, an electrician on a ladder. Otherwise, it’s deserted. Wires are hanging from the ceiling. The lights are off, but there’s enough natural light from the windows that they can see. They both remember exactly how to get to the psychiatric pavilion, which is accessible via a long corridor off the main building. The walk there feels endless. They pass the turnoff for the boys’ wing—Wards E to H—and climb the stairs to the sixth floor of the girls’ wing.

  At the sixth floor, Elodie begins to feel light-headed. She hasn’t eaten today—didn’t have an appetite this morning—and now, between the chain-smoking and the six flights of stairs, her lungs are aching.

  “Are you okay?” Maggie asks her, looking worried. “You’re very pale.”

  “I’m out of shape.”

  “Is that all it is?”

  Elodie nods, dismissing her mother’s concern, and exits the stairwell into the girls’ psychiatric wing. Maggie goes straight to the intake desk. “This is where she told us you were dead,” she says. “She cost us twelve years together. To my dying day, I will never understand how someone could be so sadistic.”

  Elodie doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m the one she was trying to punish,” Maggie says. “I’m the one who sinned, not you.”

  Elodie walks toward the sign for Ward B, and Maggie follows. “This was the dormitory,” she says, opening the door into a huge, empty room. The walls are still beige with yellow undertones, completely bare except for some water stains and nails where the crosses used to hang above the metal cots. The floors are light brown linoleum with flecks of darker brown. There are six barred windows overlooking the other pavilions, an endless vista of concrete merging with sky.

  “There were sixty beds lined up in here,” she explains. “With no space in between. I tripped over a stray boot one night on my way to the bathroom and knocked over a lamp. Sister Ignatia punished me with an ice bath.”

  She points to the corner of the room. “There was a creepy statue of Jesus on the cross over there, always watching over us.”

  Maggie quietly takes it all in.

  “My bed was right here,” she says, standing in the spot that once lined up perfectly with the fourth window and an unobstructed view of Jesus. So much is coming back to her. The pills they gave her every night and the wild, hazy dreams that ensued; the constant lethargy and boredom; the nighttime silence of their shared terror. “The bathroom is over there,” she says, leading her mother across the room.

  Maggie gasps as they enter. The claw-foot white tubs are lined up in a row, rotting and rusted. The floor is checked linoleum in shades of brown, the ceiling a map of water stains, cracks, exposed pipes. Above each tub are crudely built wooden cubbies for soap and shampoo, towel and nightgown. She turns to the mirror, staring at the woman she’s become. You survived, she tells herself.

  She pictures her current bathroom, with its floral plastic shower curtain and purple tub mat, its spotless modern toilet and gleaming white built-in acrylic bathtub, and she can’t believe how far she’s come.

  “It’s like out of a horror movie,” Maggie murmurs.

  “You have to go through the bathroom to get to the Big Room,” Elodie tells her as they make their way to the common area, where she must have spent thousands of hours sitting in a rocking chair, staring emptily at the wall.

  “My God,” she says, pointing to a lone wooden rocking chair left behind in the corner. She goes over to it and crouches down to look underneath the seat.

  “What are you doing?” Maggie asks her.

  “There were numbers under each one,” Elodie says. “Look!” She flips it over easily—it’s small, the size of a child’s desk chair—and shows Maggie the spray-painted number. “Forty-three.”

  She stands back up, leaving the rocking chair upside down. “I’ll never forget the first time I set foot in here,” she says. “Talk about a horror movie. There were all thes
e girls rocking back and forth in these rocking chairs—dozens of them, staring out at nothing like zombies. They all had the same haircut, the same creepy stare. And that sound, the squeaking of the chairs.”

  Maggie looks past her, out the window.

  “I always used to check what number rocking chair I had,” Elodie says. “And I would count them all. It was something to do while I sat here. When we weren’t working, it’s all we did. We sat in those goddamn rocking chairs, listening to the pipes rattle. There were no books, no toys, no games. We weren’t allowed to talk to each other or to play or laugh. There was nothing to do but vegetate. This is where I really started to lose my mind. I thought I would die in here.”

  Maggie moves to hug her, but Elodie steps back, guarded. “You know I was transferred here exactly forty years ago?”

  Maggie nods, silent.

  Elodie feels a twinge of guilt. Isn’t this what she wanted? For Maggie to see with her own eyes the hell to which she condemned Elodie? That was the whole point of bringing her here today. And yet all she feels is a sickening hollowness. There’s no gratification in seeing her mother suffer like this.

  “I shouldn’t have made you come here with me,” she says, realizing with some disappointment that if revenge is to bring any sort of mollification, it will have to be directed at the people who actually deserve it. Maggie was an impetuous teenager, at worst guilty of poor judgment. She was careless with her sexuality, but what teenager isn’t?

  “It’s not your fault I wound up in here,” Elodie finally concedes, meaning it. “It’s Duplessis’s fault.”

  Maggie sighs, not seeming to take any satisfaction in being let off the hook.

  “Let’s go,” Elodie says, wanting to get as far away as possible. Maggie looks visibly relieved as they walk back toward the stairwell in silence.

  “M’ma?”

  “Hm?”

  “I think I need to find Sister Ignatia.” As soon as she says it out loud, she knows that no victory in the courts or written apology or sum of money will bring the kind of vindication she longs for. Those things would be welcome, but any meaningful sense of relief or closure will have to come from confronting the woman who all but destroyed her life.