The Divide (18 page)

But it would be messy and it might get him in trouble. Even worse—unless he could frighten her into silence—she might be able to warn Amelie. Dangerous.

But how else?

He was frustrated, thinking about it. He did a set of pushups, ate a frozen dinner, and watched a
Movie of the Week
on TV. Nothing. He went to bed.

Inspiration came with the morning mail.

He had begun collecting Amelie’s mail, what there was of it, in case he needed it to flesh out the story he’d told at the Goodtime. The problem was that his sister had been getting junk mail and subscription ads and dunning letters from the credit department of a downtown department store, but not much else—not the sort of thing anyone would go out of his way to pass on.

Today, however, there was an envelope with an illegible return address and a Montreal postmark …and Roch, sensing its importance, sat down to think before he tried to open it.

Amelie’s name and address were written in an arthritic scrawl across the front. Think, he instructed himself. Who did she know in Montreal? Somebody from school? But Amelie hadn’t been that tight with friends. Anyway, it looked like an old woman’s writing.

“Jesus,” Roch said out loud. “Mama?”

He held the letter in his hand as if it were a religious relic. The letter was important. It was the key. Roch was suddenly, intuitively certain of that. He could use this letter to pry Amelie out of her hiding place… somehow… but he had to be cautious; he bad to make plans.

He deliberately set aside the letter and watched TV for a while. He couldn’t concentrate, of course. Morning game shows flickered and vanished; the news came on. He forced his eyes to focus on the screen. It was an exercise in discipline.

The question occurred to him: was it really possible to
steam open
a letter?

He had heard about “steaming open” mail. But he had no idea how to go about it. And, of course, he couldn’t risk destroying the letter itself.

He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, put it on the stove to boil. While he waited he went through the mail he’d been collecting and selected three pieces: a book-club flyer, a phone bill, and a sweepstakes ad. All three were addressed to Amelie; all three were sealed. He cradled them in his hand, thinking hard.

The kettle whistled as it came up to steam. It was a hard, shrill whistle but Roch didn’t mind; he liked the sound. He took the book-club flyer and grasped it in a pair of kitchen tongs, then held it so that the gummed flap took the brunt of the steam. He held it there while thirty seconds ticked off on his wristwatch.

He realized as soon as he pulled it away that this had been a mistake; the envelope was a sodden mass. He waved it in the air to cool it and then tried the flap. The glue had been steamed away, sure enough. But the paper was drenched.

He tried again with the phone bill. This time he passed the envelope quickly through the steam, a little farther from the spout. He managed not to damage the paper, but the glue was still firm. After a second pass he was able to pry up an edge without tearing anything. A third pass and the envelope peeled open in his hand; it was damp but would probably dry to its original condition.

He practiced again on the sweepstakes flyer and did a little better this time. He figured he had the hang of it.

Now the letter from Montreal.

He carried it carefully into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He dried the tongs and then grasped the envelope. The kettle was still screaming. He turned to center it on the burner and then—disaster!—the Montreal letter slipped through the pincer-end of the tongs toward a sink full of dirty dishwater. “Shit!” Roch screamed. He clenched the tongs convulsively and managed to catch a corner of the envelope; it dangled over the water until he could snatch it away with his free hand.

His heart was beating a mile a minute. He forced himself to stand still, calm down.

The kettle continued to shriek, inches from his ear.

He took a deep breath and started again.

The second time was lucky. It worked like a charm. He worried out the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and sat down to read.

The kettle dried up and fell silent. Roch stood up to turn the heat off, but too late: the cheap aluminum was red hot and brittle. He threw the kettle in the sink, where it hissed and generated a white, astringent-smelling cloud. The kitchen was already tropical; the whole apartment was as humid as a hothouse. He imagined spores taking root in the old wallpaper, fungus breaking out in the dark comers of these narrow rooms. He was troubled by this thought, but only briefly. He sat down and concentrated on the letter. He had important things to do.

The letter was typewritten, pecked out on an ancient, faded ribbon. Roch had a hard time reconciling the text with his memories of his mother. Mama was a big woman who had often been drunk and sometimes aggressive. One time he’d seen her get into a fight with a shoe clerk at Ogilvy’s—she tore a flap of skin off the guy’s cheek. Whereas this letter was a whining, pathetic document, mainly about the lousy neighborhood she was forced to live in and how long it had been since Amelie wrote back.

Screw the old bitch, Roch thought. She never wrote to
me.

But the bulk of his plan was already beginning to take its final shape. It was a grand, glowing edifice, and he was its architect. A brace here, a capstone there. He smiled and set the letter aside.

In the afternoon he rode a bus down to the Salvation Army thrift shop and spent ten dollars on a clapped-out Underwood Noiseless typewriter. He took it home and discovered that the ribbon wouldn’t advance, but that he could produce legible copy if he cranked the spool by hand every line or two. He typed
The quick brown fox
and compared this with the letter from Mama.

The specimen was similar but far from identical. Still, Roch thought, who notices these things? He doubted that Amelie would have an older letter to compare it with or that she would bother if she did, as long as the counterfeit seemed authentic.

He inserted a piece of plain white bond into the Underwood and sat before it, sweating. He could not think of a way to begin… then realized that he could copy Mama’s letter as written, with a few critical amendments of his own. He smiled at the ingenuity of this and began pecking.

The cap came off the “e” key before he was finished, but he managed to wangle it back on without too much mess. He typed the penultimate paragraph from the original, then dropped the “you never write” complaints and added:

Because I want to see you I have bouhgt bus tickets to Toronto and will be ariving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to findyour Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortuntly the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.

Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed,
Your Loving Mother,
and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.

Masterpiece.

The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched
Wheel of Fortune,
content with the state of the world.

On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:

What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?

There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.

Or maybe—another new thought—she was too far away. Maybe she’d left the city. She might be in fucking Timbuctoo, although Roch suspected not; it wasn’t her style. But who knew? Anything was possible.

No, he thought, better not to borrow trouble. If the letter arrangement fell through, he’d try something else. He had the connection through Tracy; that was secure and that was enough for now.

Tracy recognized him when he sat down at the table by the window. He saw her say something to the manager, who looked impatient and sent her scooting over with a glass of water and the order pad. Roch smiled his biggest smile and ordered lunch. When she came back with the food he reached into his jacket pocket, very casually, and brought out a wad of mail including the spiked envelope.

“I remembered to bring these,” he said. “Thought maybe you’d want to pass ”em on.“

Tracy took the envelopes but held them at a distance, as if they might be radioactive. “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“If it’s convenient,” Roch said.

“Oh,” Tracy said.

One more thing, one more small item to take care of, and then he’d be ready. Everything would be in place.

That night he walked down Wellesley to the corner where Tony Morriseau, the drug dealer, was hanging out.

Roch didn’t know Tony too well. Roch didn’t believe in doing drugs; drugs fucked up your mind. He had, admittedly, sometimes scored a little of this or that from Tony, when the inclination took him or he wanted to impress somebody. But he was not a regular customer.

Tony stood on the snowy streetcorner done up in a khaki green parka with a big hood, his breath steaming out in clouds. He regarded Roch from this sheltered space with an expression Roch could not decipher. Tony seemed more paranoid these days, Roch had observed.

Tony rubbed his hands together and said, “It’s fucking cold, so tell me what you want.”

“Something serious,” Roch said.

“Speak English,” Tony said.

Roch mimed the act of holding a hypodermic needle against his arm and pressing the plunger.

Tony looked ill. “Christ,” he said, “don’t do that, all right? You don’t know who’s looking.” He seemed to withdraw into the depths of the parka. “I don’t deal with that.”

“You know where to get it,” Roch said.

“Matter of fact I don’t.”

“If you can’t sell it to me, tell me who can.”

“I don’t like your tone of voice,” Tony said. “I don’t have to do you any favors. Christ!”

Roch stood up straight and looked down at Tony, who was at least a head shorter. “Tone of voice?”

Tony cringed.

Then Tony looked at his watch. “Oh, well… from now on you don’t come to me for this. Go to the source, okay? It’s really not my territory.”

Roch nodded.

They walked down the street to Tony’s car—a battered Buick. “Hey, Tony,” Roch said. “What happened to the famous Corvette?”

Tony scowled and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

It was a cool Southern California winter day, but Susan was comfortable with a sweater wrapped around her. She was able to stand for a long time on the exposed, sunny hillside where her father was buried.

She had been given a week-long leave of absence from the big house north of Toronto and she wasn’t sure whether to resent this or not. Dr. Kyriakides had practically hustled her onto the airplane, claimed that the trip would be good for her, that she had driven herself to the point of nervous exhaustion—that “Benjamin” would probably be around for a while longer and there was nothing helpful she could do. “We’ll need you more later,” he said. During the crisis, he meant. When John’s neurological breakdown reached its apex.

But no one could say for sure when that crisis would come, or what the final resolution might be. Therefore, Susan thought, it was a terrible risk to be away from him. But Dr. Kyriakides had been persuasive… and it was true that she owed her mother a visit. Susan had promised at the funeral that she would be home every Christmas. A promise she’d broken this year.

So she had spent five days in this quiet suburb, driving to the malls with her sixty-five-year-old mother and-dodging questions about her work. She said she was doing “an exchange project” with the University of Toronto, to explain her Canadian address. Fluid transfer in mitochondria. Too complex to explain. Her mother nodded dubiously.

And today—the last day of Susan’s visit—they had come here to this grave, where Susan had stood frowning for the last forty-five minutes, poised on the brink of a mystery.

She was distressed to discover that she could not summon up a concrete image of her father. She tried and failed. She could remember only the things she associated with him—his clothes, the mirror polish on his shoes, the brown sample cases he had carried to work. The rest was either hopelessly vague or, worse, deathbed images, his emaciated body and hollow eyes. She remembered the sound of his voice, the soothing rumble of it, but that was a childhood memory. His laryngeal cancer had ended all that, of course; but it seemed to Susan that he had fallen mute years before the operation, a functional silence in which anything meaningful must never be pronounced. His way of protecting her from the divorce, from his own fears, from adulthood. She was trying hard not to hate him for it.

How awful that sounded. But it was true: she had never forgiven him for his silence, for his cancer, for his callous descent into the grave. It was a monumentally selfish thought. A
childish
thought… but maybe that was the heart of the matter: she could never come to this place
except
as a child, suspended in time by his withdrawal and his death. She would never be his “grown-up daughter.” She couldn’t say any of the things she needed to say, because he couldn’t listen.

She was startled by the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, Susan. We’ve been here long enough.”