The Better Mother (3 page)

“My boy,” Betty whispers in Chinese, “you’re here.” She rubs his arm with both her hands. “You’re so thin. And look, wrinkles. How can you have wrinkles?”

“I’m older, Mom, that’s all,” Danny replies, laughing at his mother’s chatter, despite himself. He feels strangely soothed.

“You’re old enough for a girlfriend then, aren’t you?” Her small eyes search his face. He shifts from one foot to the other and she taps a finger against his chest. “All you do is go out with your friends, isn’t that right? You must make time for girls too, you know.”

Cindy has turned around from the kitchen sink, her hands full of dripping greens. In her face, Danny can see his own—same full mouth and upturned nose, same smooth cheeks. The one difference is their eyes: while Cindy has the long, snaky eyes of their father—the kind that can hold secrets and laugh at you behind their thin, wrinkled lids—Danny has the
eyes of their mother: round, dark and seemingly innocent.

“Mom, enough of that. Look, the water’s boiling,” Cindy says, pointing.

The lid on the noodle pot clatters and Betty rushes to the stove, forgetting that Danny hasn’t responded. He looks up at a spider on the ceiling and touches his forehead. The nerves in his skin are outgrown and bare, tingling with a sensation that is more than pain, that is amplified sharpness, the bright of noontime and a sound like mice screaming in their traps. His mother was this close to unravelling it all, to picking at the right scab to see the baby-pink skin underneath.

Betty sprinkles sliced green onions on the last dish—braised pork belly—and brings it to the table. As they begin eating, she talks and talks. Her voice fills the room, rising and falling, asking questions that remain hanging until she answers them herself.

“Do you know what happened to Mrs. Chang? Her husband left her. It turns out he was having an affair with a younger woman. What sort of girl wants an old man like that? I’ll tell you, a girl who’s not right in the head. I said to Auntie May, ‘Maybe this girl is retarded,’ but she said no. She’s a flight attendant and isn’t in town much. So then I thought maybe she has an old man in many different cities. A very bad girl, I think. A good girl doesn’t leave her parents for a job. No, she waits for the right husband and buys a big house that will fit everybody. A daughter can’t be separated from her parents.” Betty smiles at Cindy, who drops her eyes.

Danny thinks he might laugh and spray the table with rice and pork. Betty picks up an especially fat prawn and places it in his bowl, nodding as he pokes at it with his chopsticks.

Cindy leans toward Danny and says in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, “She’s gone bonkers. She’s so happy you’re here, I’ll bet she doesn’t even know what she’s saying.”

Doug chews. The dishes in the middle of the table steam, blowing smells toward the ceiling. “Good daughters, good sons—no such thing,” he says in English, eyes fixed on the tablecloth. “We should have had at least five grandchildren by now, all living under one roof.”

Danny looks at his mother, whose face has brightened.

Cindy rolls her eyes. “Here she goes again. I swear: she hasn’t talked this much in a month.”

“Yes, grandchildren.” Betty lays down her chopsticks and points around the table. “I know why you two don’t get married. It’s because you, Miss Cindy, are too shy. Always walking around with your head down. Who will see your face then? And you,” she turns to Danny, “think no one is good enough. The right girl won’t be perfect, you know. And it’s not as if you’re so perfect yourself. Always hanging out with your friends; never coming home to see your mother and father. How will you ever become a good family man?”

Danny was ready for the hard questions. That morning, he lay in bed, imagining all the ways his parents could say
you’re not good enough, why don’t you do what we know is best, we are disappointed
. Even so, their words sink like stones and he droops in his seat. All he can think of is the failure raining down on him and pricking his skin. Not a good son. Not a famous photographer. Not the love of anyone’s life.

He can feel Betty’s gaze on his face as he stares at his rice bowl.

“You will never be the man you could be, Danny, unless you try to change,” she says softly. “You must try.”

As soon as Cindy stands up and begins collecting the empty dishes, Danny rises. “I have to work tomorrow,” he mutters. “One of the brides is in a hurry for the prints.”

Cindy dumps the pile of plates and bowls into the sink and the crash startles him.

“What about dessert?” Betty rushes to the fridge and begins pulling out a dish of sweet tofu pudding.

If he doesn’t leave now, his parents will ask him more pointed questions and he will lie at first, but eventually, exhausted, he will speak the truth. His parents’ disapproval will break him, make him want to hide forever in his old bedroom, surrounded by the boxes filled with extra stock from the store. His life outside that front door will evaporate, and he will have wasted all those years he spent carefully building his uncontaminated freedom. He will grow immune to his mother’s dowdiness and his father’s sarcasm. The local schoolchildren will whisper about his face in the living-room window, pale and unsmiling, and make promises to each other that they will never approach, not even for trick-or-treating. His socks stick to the kitchen floor; perhaps it’s the spilled grains of cooked rice, or perhaps the house itself is clinging to him, pulling on any available part of his body. If this is home, then home is not what he wants.

“No, I’m sorry, Mom. I have to go.” He hurries toward the front hall, wiping his hands on his pants as he goes. He bursts outside into the humid air, not daring to look behind.

In that pre-dawn all those years ago, Danny took this same route, riding in someone else’s Cadillac as it drove too quickly
down these same streets. His body braces, anticipates the bumps and pits in the road. The railroad tracks run parallel to the street and abandoned train cars sit to the side, some rusting from the top down, others settling into the ground, surrounded by crab grass and salal. Shadows move in the doorways of the warehouses and shipping companies. Danny doesn’t look closely at the people he perceives hiding in the evening dim. Men trading money for heroin or cocaine. Women trading all sorts of things for five dollars, sometimes ten.

He rolls down the window, and the smell of the fish cannery, drying weeds and salt blows into the car. He breathes it all in; after all, this fetid air means that he is driving away.

Turning down Davie Street, he sees that, even though the sun has not set, the night has already begun. Women stand on the sidewalk, fixing each car with looks of disdain or invitation. Their short skirts cling to their thighs and asses and stretch almost to ripping whenever they walk or shift their weight. In the doorway of a boarded-up restaurant, a group of uneasy men and women in walking shoes eye the prostitutes warily. One man fingers a stack of picket signs leaning against the wall behind him, seemingly unsure of the right time to begin marching up and down the street and screaming at the cars that slow down, “Shame, shame, shame!” Through the passenger window, Danny can make out one of the hand-lettered signs: JONNS GO HOME! And the cars keep coming, one after the other, with heads swivelling to see better out the side windows. The drivers sit in shadows, but Danny imagines they look the same: unremarkable; hair, eyes and skin all varying shades of brown and beige. In the apartments above the storefronts, curtains sway,
moved by the wind or by the tenants hidden behind them.

Around the corner, huddled in a small group on a side street, six boys stand in their white T-shirts and tight jeans, their hands stuffed into their pockets. They, too, eye the cars cruising past, but look directly at a driver only if the driver looks first. Like a flight of swallows, they seem to be one pulsing creature, until a single boy, tall with dark hair, breaks away to lean against a lamppost and light a cigarette.

These boys stand like his eighteen-year-old self, the one who slumped and slouched down the sidewalks, watching how others conducted their public, street-level lives. Years ago, he might have sidled past them, maybe even asked for a light just so he could more closely study the way their hair flipped along their collars.

He turns right onto Jervis and eases his way into a parking spot, tight between two other cars. Looking up, he can see the dark windows of his apartment. His neighbour has installed two planter boxes, both filled with begonias and pansies, and her curtains—yellow with blue dots—are backlit by a soft lamp. As he reaches down to roll up his window, a brief muggy breeze blows through the car, raising the hairs in his nose. He looks up once more at the third floor before pushing open the driver’s door, stepping onto the sidewalk and walking in the opposite direction, away from the quiet of his apartment above.

This is Vancouver, the city that he loves for its very wetness, for the cool rain that trickles down awnings on November evenings, the slippery sidewalks, the inlet that promises escape to other, farther places if he should ever feel the need. This
is the place where land and water meet, where the shoreline is forever shifting, waves ebbing over the rocky sand or crashing against the roots of rust-coloured arbutus, cold and wind tearing away layers of bark. The buildings of downtown rise above it all, winking through the mist, attracting boys and girls from the suburbs, the Eastside, the North Shore.

This is the damp Vancouver that Danny knows. The Vancouver he hurries across, where the shadows and crowds and fog provide cover for the men who populate his open nights. This is the Vancouver where he sometimes sees glimmers of old lovers through the rain; one stands ghostlike in half-lit alleys, blue eyes pulsing through the gloom.

Tonight the hot air opens his pores. He walks along the seawall in Stanley Park, under the shade of Douglas firs and cedars, avoiding the piles of fallen needles and dust that have collected in the dips and cracks of the concrete. He can hear a car radio through the trees. “This may be the hottest summer on record, folks. Temperatures will remain in the thirties for the next week at least. Watch out—1982 is turning out to be a scorcher!” Danny looks up at the dark sky—cloudless, with stars barely visible from this swath of green that flirts with nature but is really a city park, made and marked by machines and the humans who travel its paths. By the men who walk with disguised purpose between trees in the night.

He turns onto a narrow gravel trail and his stomach clenches in expectation. Branches brush his ears, poking the thin skin like sharp words. His shoes press down on the rocks and dirt, his steps making as little noise as a raccoon’s pointed, furry paws. He wonders if the police tape is still there, past the trees on his left. A ripple of fear builds in the bottom of
his spine and snakes its way up into his neck, his ears. He thinks about turning back. Perhaps the murderer is waiting for one more victim, maybe a nervous, jumpy Chinese man. He passes a group who look over their shoulders at every sound.

“Someone told me it was Wayne. You know, that short guy from back east.”

“I heard it might have been someone he was sleeping with.”

Danny shivers in a gust of warm air. And decides to stay in the park. If he left he would be scared and lonely. Here, he’s only scared.

The first time he found this trail, he was living in a tiny, ground-floor apartment on Pendrell, where clouds of flies and the smell of cat pee drifted in through the window. For a week, he wandered from bed to toilet to stove, unsure of whether he should lounge in his underwear or clean the mould that grew on the sills. He finally went outside, where at least the streets looked familiar and walking from one place to the next was a simple decision. He stumbled on this path while exploring the park on an overcast, chilly night. His parents disliked the outdoors, especially in the dark, when fences and garages blended into the bush and the yellow eyes of unknown animals glowered from their perches between trees. And so Danny, restless, with nerves standing on end, decided to walk every trail he came across, touch each species of evergreen he passed. Eventually, he came to a clearing where three benches sat in a triangle. There, behind a thicket of vine maples, he saw two men clasping hands under branches that curved above their heads.

It was then that he began to come to the park every week.

Tonight, his nostrils twitch. He can smell the men, some standing in groups of two or three where the trail widens and forks to the left and the right. There’s no mistaking the smell that collects in arm hairs, the smell that is musk and breath and cologne all at once. The smell that lingers on Danny when he returns home, a slight smile playing across his lips as he lies alone in his double bed.

As he walks, he begins to forget the news, the eyes of his plain-faced mother as he sat eating the food she cooked. He forgets that he rushed out of his parents’ house unceremoniously. His muscles ache and his blood rushes, thinned by the heat around and within him. He continues to walk, and is exactly as he appears: a man who is as much a part of this protected, harbouring park as the decaying nurse log on his right, or the other men who lean against tree trunks, their bodies melting into the mass of vegetation around them. Even his name isn’t important anymore.

A voice behind him. “I’ve seen you here before.”

Danny turns, looks into the eyes of a light-haired man almost as tall as the trees behind him. Pressed polo shirt. Moustache and glowing teeth. Skin that looks pebbly to the touch, as if he has spent half his life working in a rough wind. He seems to carry his own spotlight, for how else could Danny see all these things in the dark?

There is, he knows, a spot accessible by squeezing through two oversized ferns, a spot that generates its own protective silence. He opens his mouth, but every word he considers is inadequate. All he can think is how hot it would be to have sex with this man, in the park where needles and dry grass are in danger of flaming up, where the slightest
friction could cause treetops to catch fire like matchsticks. He thinks of sweat simmering between bodies.