Where She Has Gone (2 page)

“We haven’t really had much of a chance to see it yet. With orientation and all that.”

The room had already been arranged like a mirror of the one that she and Elena had shared in the Amhersts’ house back home in Mersea, pink comforters covering the beds, small knick-knacks set out on bookshelves and sills. I remembered the visits I’d made to her at the Amhersts’ after she’d left us, how the prim domesticity of her and Elena’s room, its careful pretence that they were sisters, that they were daughters, had always instead seemed the reminder that they didn’t quite belong there, were both only adopted, like orphans taken in by some strict but benevolent home in a Victorian story. Now, though, seeing this replica before me, I had the sense they’d been infiltrated, that what had been merely imposed had slowly become part of them. The room’s lone discordant element was a Dali print Scotch-taped above a dresser, of a naked Leda and swan against a background of sea, its Raphaelite contours and hues seeming at once an embodiment of the room’s tidy femininity and a mockery of it.

I’d remained standing at the doorway as Rita finished her preparations, uneasy somehow at the intimacy of going inside.

“Elena’s not around?” I said.

“She went down to the caf.” But I sensed Rita was covering for her. “She said to say hi.”

“I make her nervous.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Oh, you know. The gloomy half-brother always lurking in the wings.”

“You’re not
her
brother.”

“Maybe that’s the point.”

We walked the short distance from the campus to Chinatown. Dusk had settled in and the streets there were awash in neon like in some gambling town or resort. I watched Rita taking things in, the tiny shops, the unknown vegetables and fruits arrayed outside, and seemed to understand for the first time that she was here in front of me, felt a flutter like a traveller in a foreign city seeing a familiar face in a crowd.

“My place is just around the corner from here,” I said. “About a five-minute walk from your residence, actually.”

“That’s great.” There was just the smallest bit of distance in her voice, the old self-protectiveness, the unsureness of what we were to each other. “We can see each other all the time then.”

We had supper at a restaurant I’d begun to frequent in the neighbourhood, just an unmarked door at street level leading down to a small basement room whose walls were covered with chalkboard menus. The place’s few rickety tables were already nearly filled when we arrived.

“This place is wild,” Rita said.

We sat at a tiny table for two in an alcove at the back. For a moment the intimacy of being crammed like that into such a narrow space made us shy.

“So are you settling in all right?” I said.

“It’s okay. I feel like a bumpkin half the time – everyone’s parents are president of this or that or an ambassador or something. But it’s good having Elena around. There isn’t much that fazes her.”

We talked about school, about leaving home. I could feel a niggling sense of obligation between us to bring up the subject of my father; but the more we skirted it, the more it seemed inessential. Though only a few months had passed since his death, already it felt like an eternity: there’d been the first torpor and shame afterwards but then a lifting, the thought,
Now it is over
.

There was also the codicil to his will that I hadn’t told her about, his wish that I use my inheritance to help provide for her if she should need me to. He had neither fathered Rita nor been a father to her, had never really forgiven her for the betrayal she was the product of; but he’d carried the guilt of her to the grave. I ought to have brought the matter up now and made an end of it.

“Are you doing okay for money?” I said.

“I think so.”

“I suppose the Amhersts are looking after school and all that.”

I still couldn’t bring myself to refer to them as her parents even though they had been that to her for the better part of her life.

“Mostly. Dad had some problems with the store for a while but I think it’s all right now.”

“Well, if you ever need anything –”

“Thanks.”

The meal was served in a brusque onrush of sizzling meat and steaming vegetables. There were no forks; I expected Rita to struggle with her chopsticks but she handled them with an unthinking expertise. Always I felt this disjunction with her, the expectation of her innocence and then her instinctive at-homeness in the world like a reproof.

We talked a bit about her plans for the future. There was an uneasiness in me whenever conversation came around to the general shape of her life, the fear that some seismic injury would be revealed, some fault line leading back to her years with us on my father’s farm. But she seemed like any healthy young woman her age, exploring her options, not quite certain what the future held but not afraid of it.

“Maybe I’ll just live like you do,” she said. “Travelling. Doing what I want.”

“I wouldn’t exactly think of myself as a role model,” I said.

The room was a steamy bustle now of serving and eating and talk. Rita had pulled the band off her ponytail, her hair falling silky black to the shoulders of the sweater she wore. She seemed resplendent somehow in her unquestioning calm, in the anonymity of seeing her here in this world of strangers. It was a kind of wonder to be with her like this, without ambivalence: we seemed released suddenly into the miracle of our lives, to do with as we wished.

When we were walking home I invited her to stop by my apartment.

“I don’t know. Maybe not tonight.” I could see that she wanted to come, that she was thinking of Elena. “There’s a pub crawl or something we’re supposed to go on.”

“Maybe some other time, then. I’ll have you over for supper.”

“I’d like that.”

I left her at the door of her residence.

“It’s good to see you again,” I said. “Maybe things can be a little more normal between us now than they used to be.”

“They weren’t so bad before.”

There was an instant’s awkwardness and then we kissed.

“Goodnight, then.”

I stopped off for cigarettes on the way home at the variety store on the ground floor of my building. The owner, a canny Korean man who went by the unlikely name of Andrew, drew a Kleenex from a box as I came up the counter and reached out to wipe a smudge of lipstick from my cheek. I expected some joke from him but he merely winked, rapid and mocking.

“My sister,” I said.

“Ah.”

It was the first time in the weeks I’d been frequenting his store that he’d been so familiar with me. He had a little ritual of goodwill with some of his regular customers, offering them a free selection from the display of penny candies he kept on the counter. Now, finally, he extended the gesture to me, waving a hand over the display with a casual flourish like some smiling tempter offering the world.

I’d rented an apartment in an old brown-brick low-rise at the corner of Huron and College, the building flanked by a rusting metal fire escape that people often used in lieu of the main entrance. Across the road was an institute for psychiatric research: at night, sometimes, from the sealed windows of the upper floors, where the inmates were held, came muted bellowings or sudden shouts or screams like distant jungle sounds; but during the day, amidst the noise of College Street, there was nothing in the building’s blank façade to betray what it was. A few minutes’ walk from my place and I was in the heart of Chinatown, with its restaurants and shops, its smell of spices and rotting vegetables, its broken packing crates forever stacked at the curbsides; a few minutes more, to the west, past Bathurst, and I was in Little Italy, though perhaps out of an instinctive devaluing of the familiar I seldom ventured there, aware of it only as something known and therefore inconsequential.

Despite the income from my inheritance I was sparing with my money, my apartment ample but slightly ramshackle, my furnishings scoured from second-hand shops. With school it was the same: because I’d been offered a scholarship I had accepted a place in a Master’s program at my old alma mater, Centennial, on the city’s barren outskirts, though when I’d left there to teach in Africa three years before I’d thought I’d shaken the dust of the place from my feet. Four days a week now I made the drive out to the campus in the car I’d inherited from my father, a cobalt-blue Olds, my one indulgence. Amid the tiny imports plying the roads now, the car seemed in its seventies extravagance already an anachronism, from another era, hulking and ghostly and huge like some prehistoric thing stumbled out from reptilian sleep.

I had dinner one night with a friend from my undergraduate years, Michael Iacobelli. He had married since I’d last seen him, and had a son, the family living just west of the Centennial campus in a house Michael rented from his father. The floor of his entrance hall was littered with baby’s toys when I arrived.

“Victor, my boy. I expected you to come back with tribal markings or something. A little local colour.”

He seemed to have aged a dozen years, grown frail, his hair, already thinning when I’d known him, now starting to grey as well, though he was only thirty.

“So it must be a bit of an adjustment coming back,” he said.

“A bit. Though exciting too, a new start and all that.” But I said nothing about my father’s death. “My sister’s in the city now, which is kind of nice.”

“Yeah, I remember you talking about her,” he said, though I couldn’t recall ever mentioning her to him. “So I guess you guys get along pretty well, is that it?”

“Better than we used to.”

“That’s the funny thing about family. You spend all your life trying to get away from them and then they’re all you’ve got.”

Michael’s wife, Suzie, was a non-Italian, on first impression pretty and bland like her name but then beneath the surface seeming to bristle, like Michael, with under-exploited intelligence.

“So I guess all this must look pretty boring to you,” she said.

“No, not at all.”

Michael brought up a gallon of his father’s homemade wine from the cellar and we began to get slowly drunk. He told the story of a feud he’d had with his father over an old maple tree in the back yard.

“It was a beautiful thing, it must have been thirty or forty years old. But it was something about the leaves or the shade, I don’t know what it was. So one day we come home from a camping trip and it’s like there’s a big hole in the sky out back, and where the tree used to be just this perfect pile of cut logs. The sad thing is he probably thought we’d be pleased or something when we saw how pretty it all looked, with the logs piled up like that. Maybe it’s some kind of immigrant thing. Man against nature. He thinks he’s a pioneer or something.”

The baby cried once or twice from a back room while we were eating and Suzie got up to quiet him, Michael leaving her to the chore with the unthinking air of a patriarch. But then at the end of the meal he got up to clear the table, he
and I doing the dishes together while Suzie sat with her feet propped on a kitchen chair having a smoke.

“So are there any women in your life?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Maybe we should fix you up with Michael’s sister.”

“Is she any prettier than he is?”

“About the same, I’d say. Less facial hair maybe.”

I had come up by transit to avoid having to explain my father’s Olds. Michael offered me a ride back to the subway. In the car, he grew suddenly candid.

“I’m not saying I regret any of it. But it’s not how I pictured it, the nine-to-five and all that. You’re trying to do things differently. I respect that in you.”

I felt a throb of affection for him, had an image of us standing elbow to elbow at his kitchen sink while Suzie smoked and the baby slept, and wanted to show him that I had nothing, had only my freedom.

“I guess we all make our own way,” I said.

And at the station door he got out of the car to shake my hand as if seeing me off on some tremendous journey.

I seldom thought much any more about my father’s death. It had remained, in a sense, the thing uppermost in my mind, and yet for that was perhaps more forgotten, already as unquestioned as air, something only the animal part of me made allowance for. I’d get a sense of him like a premonition whenever I got into the car, instinctively registering the lingering evidences of him still strewn about, the half-empty cigarette pack, Rothman’s, still on the dash, the muddied church program on the floor; and sometimes it seemed our whole history together flashed before me then, that he was suddenly
tangible there beside me on the car seat like on our old Sunday rides to mass at St. Mike’s. But beyond that visceral sense of his presence, there seemed nothing more to know of him. It was my mother, instead, who I found myself going back to, as if my father’s death had finally freed me to re-imagine her. Her own death, giving birth to Rita on our way to Canada, during a storm at sea, seemed the stuff of stories to me now, of other people’s lives, not mine. It surprised me how vividly the feel of that voyage came back to me now, the sense of hovering over a chasm, poised between the world we’d left behind and the unknown one where my father was waiting, by then a stranger to me, long gone ahead of us to prepare our way. In my child’s skewed understanding back then of my mother’s pregnancy I had expected some demon to emerge from her, snake-headed and vile. But I’d been offered instead a simple blue-eyed child, a sister, and then my mother’s slow bleeding to death like an afterthought.

I drove around the city sometimes in my car like a cruising teenager, following roads I’d never heard the names of out to their furthest, most banal retreats. It amazed me all the different congregations of things I knew nothing of, the unknown neighbourhoods with their different peculiarities and moods, the closed doors and the curtained windows. It was both uplifting and oppressive, the thought of all this life going on every day, every hour, with its own sense of importance and purpose; sometimes I seemed to hear all the million voices of it in my head like jumbled radio waves. And yet still I’d get the sense that the city was an outpost merely, just the endless repetition of what College Street looked like when I gazed westward from the corner window of my apartment, a long vista of dingy two- and three-storey storefronts like the
main street of some dusty frontier town. At dusk, with the sun settling in between the buildings there as if at the visible end of the world, the street seemed still only an instant’s remove from what it might have been a hundred years before; and I imagined then the wooden sidewalks and the clapboard rooming houses, the immigrant road gangs working bare-backed where the street trailed to mud to push the city out against the encroaching wild.