Guilty (14 page)

“I never did.”

“I know.”

“But he learned,” I say.

“He struggled, and he learned. And then he started to read. He enjoyed it.”

“I found some books about hockey.”

Peter Struthers smiled. “I used to tease him. I used to tell him he already knew everything there was to know about hockey and that he should find a new subject to become an expert on. I liked your dad, Lila. I wanted to tell you that. He was smart and funny, and he was doing really well. Once he got settled, we were going to talk about getting him into some training, you know, so he could get a better job. But—” His voice trails off, and he doesn't have to explain why. He never had the chance to get together with my father. And now he never would.

We talk for a while longer. When we finally leave the café, Peter Struthers says, “If there's anything I can do, Lila, if you need anything, Janet and I would be happy to see what we can do.”

I thank him. Then I tell him that I will be going home soon to my Aunt Jenny. He nods and tells me he's heard she's a good person. My dad must have told him that.

My hands are shaking as I pick up the first of what I now know are my father's notebooks. I'm sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of tea at my elbow. It takes a few moments before I can make myself focus on the cramped, almost reluctant, handwriting on the first page. And then I start to read.

My father has written down what he remembers of his father, who I never met. I always thought he was dead. But he isn't. Or, at least, he wasn't when my father wrote about him. He was living in a cabin somewhere in the bush in northern Quebec, where he's apparently been ever since his wife, my grandmother, died before I was even born. As I read, I try to picture my father as a child, living with his man who was his father, this man who, according to my father, never amounted to much and resented the world for it.
I do not know what my père
wanted to be when he was a boy
, my father wrote.
Did
he want to be rich? Did he want to be successful? Or did
he want to be the mean bastard that he really was?

I stare at that line and understand why my father never spoke about his father. I understand, too, why my father couldn't read and write.

Trapping, fishing and hunting was his life
, my father wrote.
He made it my life too, even though I hated it.
I hated to see the foxes and rabbits dead or dying in leg-hold
traps. I hated killing them if they weren't dead
already and skinning them. I hated all the blood. My père
called me a sissy. I hated pulling the fish out of the water
and bashing their brains in. I hated pointing a rifle at
a deer and pulling the trigger. I hated that that was the
way he lived and ate. Most of all, I hated the smile on
my father's face when he made me do it or when he did it
himself. I hated it all.

There were other things that my father hated. He hated that his father drank—ironic, considering the amount of alcohol and drugs my father consumed in a lifetime. Or maybe that explained my father.

He hated his father's eruptions of rage, some of them predictable, the result of too much drink, and some of them—the worst of them—seemingly without warning.

He hated his mother's begging:
Please, Christophe,
don't hurt the boy. Please, Christophe
. So many pleases.

And he hated himself. That was the worst thing to read, but there it was in my father's clumsy, blocky handwriting.
All the guns, all the knives, it would have been so
easy. He kept them locked. He kept everything locked. The
guns, the knives, the food. But I could have done it. I could
have saved her.

I leaf through all the notebooks after that, trying to find the answer: Save her from what? From whom? But there is nothing about her. All I can do is wonder: exactly how did my grandmother die?

I set the notebooks aside. I tell myself that I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but that's not true. I am going to keep them. I am going to take them to Aunt Jenny's with me. I will never destroy them.

Twenty-Three

FINN

T
here are no butterflies in my stomach as I approach her place this time. There's no wondering if I'm doing the right thing. I bound up the front steps and hammer on the door. I keep right on hammering until I see her frowning face peek through the little square of glass.

She's still frowning when she opens the door.

“What are you—?” she begins.

But I push past her into the house. I don't apologize for being rude. I don't apologize for shoving her out of the way so roughly and abruptly that she almost loses her balance. No, I just start right in on her.

“Who are you?” I yell. “Who the hell are you? Why were you at my stepmother's funeral? Why were you at the police station? And my father's club?” She looks surprised at the last question. “I know you were there. I know you talked to Dodo. You were asking about Tracie. Why?”

For someone whose place has been invaded by a hostile force—me—she's remarkably calm. And sad. That throws me a little. She looks so sad.

“I wasn't asking about Tracie,” she says.

But I'm not listening. I don't want to hear what she has to say, not until
I
finish what
I
have to say. I'm standing there in the bare dingy foyer to her pathetic little apartment, ready to lambaste her again, when I see papers all over the battered coffee table. I see a name in big print on the top of one of them—
Angela Fairlane Newsome
.

“That's my mother!” I shout at her. I stride into the room and grab the papers and scan them. “What is all of this?” I wave the papers at her. “What are you doing with all this stuff about my family? Who are you?”

She comes into the living room and gently pulls the papers from my hands. She straightens them out so that they're all lined up. She's staring at me in a way that kind of spooks me. What if she's crazy, some psycho chick who maybe has a nice sharp ax tucked away behind the living room door? You never know, right?

“I'm Lila Ouimette,” she says.

I stare at her. She's saying it like it's supposed to mean something to me, but it doesn't.

At first.

Then it kicks in.

Ouimette.

“The man who killed my mother—”

“Was my father,” she says.

I'm still for a moment. Still, as in stunned to a standstill. As in can't think, can't process the words. Can't believe them. Don't want to believe them. But I'm looking at her, and I see she's waiting for a reaction. Bracing for it, really, like she's expecting some kind of explosion.

And I feel it rising in me, the fuse already lit and burning down. Then the blast happens deep inside me. All I have to do is open my mouth to let it out.

“Your father?” I'm bellowing at her now. “Your father
murdered
my mother?”

I step toward her, my hands tight fists at my side at first, but coming up like a boxer's fists, ready to take that first swing, ready to get the fight started, get the show on the road, ready to do some damage.

“Your father murdered my mother!” I shout the words at her over and over, like I still can't believe it or, maybe, like I want her to show shame, I want her to show me that she has no right to even look at me, let alone talk to me. Who the hell does she think she is?

I'm so close to her that I can feel her breath on my face. It's coming fast in little gasps. She doesn't look scared, but those little puffs of air give her away. Still, she doesn't turn and run. She doesn't even back up.

“I should have told you who I was,” she says. “My father—”

The whole place, the walls, the door, the crappy furniture, even her face, is suddenly awash in red, thick and vibrant, like blood. I lash out with my fist—except that at the last minute I uncurl it so that when I hit her, it's a slap. But, still, it's full-force, a resounding slap that sends her reeling so that she has to thrust out a hand against the wall to steady herself. She never takes her eyes off me. She raises her hand to her face and touches it.

“I'm sorry,” she says. If I were capable of seeing straight, I might have laughed. I hit her, and she apologizes! But I don't see straight. I think, You
should
be sorry.

“You lied to me,” I scream at her. Part of me wants to lash out at her again. The rest of me is ashamed at what I've already done. But the shame doesn't block my fury.

“I never lied,” she says.

“You didn't tell me who you were.”

Her eyes stay on mine. She nods, but the gesture is barely perceptible.

“I was afraid to,” she said. “Afraid of what you might think. What you might do.”

I stare at the red mark that covers one whole side of her face. She was right to be afraid. My shame grows. I can't believe that I hit a girl.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “I wanted to ask you so many questions. But I was afraid.”

I'm still breathing hard, but slowly I'm coming back to myself.

“What did you want to ask me?” I manage to say.

“About what happened that night.”

“Which night?”

“The night your mother died. And the night your stepmother died.”

The way she says it makes me angry all over again.

“She didn't die. Neither of them died. They were murdered. Shot.” It takes every scrap of restraint I can muster to stop myself from doing something I know I will regret.

She nods.

“The night your mother was murdered,” she says. “Will you tell me about it again?”

“Tell you what?”

“Everything you remember.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to know.” She says it softly, and I know it's true. She does need to know. Somewhere under all my anger, I can understand. Her father is her father. He was who he was before she was even born. Is she to blame for what he did? No. But the need to know…I can understand that.

“I already told you everything. And I see you've been checking things out on your own.” I nod at the sheaf of papers that she has managed to hold on to.

“Please,” she says.

I don't want to, but I do it anyway: I launch into the story. I tell her about leaving the house with my father. I tell her about my mother needing a break (but I don't tell her that it was me she needed a break from). I tell her about going with my dad to his office and spending the night there fooling around. I tell her about my father scooting me out into the hall while he called my mom (but I don't tell her what I think they might be talking about—me). Instead, I tell her about playing with my remote-control cars out there until my dad finally took me upstairs to eat.

She asks me questions, which makes me angry. But then I see the red welt on her face, and I answer. I tell her how long I think I played out in the hallway with the cars. I tell her how long I think we were in the kitchen of the club, eating. I tell her exactly when I found my mother because I can still see the clock on her bedside table.

“What about the security system?” she says.

“What?”

“Your dad had a security system installed just before it happened, right? You told me about it.”

“Yeah.”

“They say my dad got in because he knew the code,” she says.

“They do?”

She looks surprised.

“Don't they?” she asks.

I realize I don't know, and I tell her that.

“My dad didn't tell me any details,” I say. “No one did.” And I know why: because I fell apart. Because I could barely function. Because I had to go into therapy.

Because I didn't ask.

Because I was weak.

“That's what they say,” she says. “Did you see a manual from the security company in your dad's office?”

I'm about to say no. But then I remember.

“He told me some guys were coming to the house to install it,” I say.

“But did he have a manual, you know, about how to operate it?”

“I've seen one,” I say. “My dad keeps stuff like that in his office. I think he's the only person I know who actually reads manuals. He has one for the phone system, for the computer system, for the accounting software—you name it.”

“So you've seen it.” She's breathing a little faster now.

“Yeah.”

“What does it look like?”

“What do you mean?”

“What does it look like? Does it have a big picture on it? Is it one of those things like they have for that furniture you assemble? You know, they're all pictures so that it doesn't matter what language you speak. You just look at the pictures and you understand?”

“It's an expensive security system, not an IKEA book-shelf,” I say.