Extensions (6 page)

Wanda tried the knob of the bedroom door, then banged. “The police want to talk to you, Terry. It's the lady again.”

“Terry?” I said, knocking. “May I come in?”

Wanda lit another cigarette and banged again. “Terry, get out here. You're embarrassing me.” After the next silence she turned to me: “You gonna break it down?”

I ignored her question and said softly: “Terry, I'd like to talk to you. Will you please let me in?” I tried the knob again and it was unlocked. I stepped into the room. Terry's eyes took me in, but he did not raise his head. He was a stocky boy with brown hair and a pasty complexion, much lighter than his mother's. He was sitting on his bed among rumpled, discoloured sheets. He had been crying.

“What's the problem, Terry? Why did you take the knife to your mother?” I spoke slowly.

“She keeps after me is what.”

“That's because you won't listen to me. You keep doing wrong.” She stepped closer to the bed, but I blocked her off.

“How old are you now, Terry?”

“Thirteen.”

“You know you can't go threatening people with knives without getting into trouble?”

He wiped his tears with a dirty hand and stared straight ahead.

“That's not all he does,” wheezed Wanda, taking a drag. “The neighbour behind us say he steal his hose.” The two witnesses had joined us in the bedroom, both speaking at once. “That's true,” said the mother. “He try to get Freddy to go with him and steal some drinks and pretzels from the 7-Eleven, but Freddy's a good boy, he won't do it. He come and tell me.”

“That's true, that's true,” Freddy repeated like a parrot.

“How old are you, Freddy?” I asked.

“Twelve,” he and his mother said in unison.

I thought of Sukhi and what we would have made of this pair later. “Why aren't you and Terry in school today?”

“The principal committed suicide at Terry's school so they took a holiday,” said Wanda.

“Where do you go to school, Freddy?” I bit my tongue before adding “Tattler's Elementary?”

“He got a doctor's appointment today,” said his mother, while he nodded on cue.

“So you decided to take the whole day off.” I spoke more harshly than any of us was expecting.

“He steal all the time,” Wanda continued, bringing the focus back to her son. “Last week he bring me flowers for my birthday and I find out he steal them from the flower shop. Look at this room.” She gestured toward some old crayon drawings on the walls that might have been done by a five-year-old. She picked up a dirty sock from the floor. One sock. From a floor covered with clutter. “How can I keep the place nice when he throw his socks around?”

Terry began to cry. “I come home last night and she's passed out again. I thought she was dead. How you think I feel?” He sobbed noisily. “I had to call my dad to come and take her to the hospital but then she woke up. My sisters do anything they want and she loves them to death. She want to put me in jail.”

When his shoulders stopped heaving, I spoke quietly but firmly above Wanda nattering “They're good girls.”

“Terry, you can't keep stealing or threatening people with knives or you
will
end up in jail. I don't want to see that happen, because I know you're really a good boy at heart. And I believe you'll try your best to prove it. Because you know it too, no matter what anyone says about you.”

Terry stared at me and the other three looked disappointed as I turned to go. Wanda followed me through the house, pointing out Terry's caked soup bowl that would otherwise not have been noticed on the coffee table among empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays. In the paper passage she stopped me and whispered: “I know he's doing drugs too.”

“Wanda, you'll have to try to sort things out with Terry. Maybe give him some praise when he does something right.” Our job was not to play psychologist, so I handed her a card. “Here's the name and number of a counsellor you might want to talk to. I don't think it's the police you need.”

“Oh, thank you, officer. I write down everything he does wrong so I can take that sheet along with me.” She smiled, as if we really did understand each other.

It was drizzling when I finally escaped. I gulped a breath of fresh wet air to cleanse my lungs of the stench. Just before I reached the car, Wanda came running after me. “He's swearing at me again. What should I do?”

“Call the counsellor.” I got inside as fast as I could. My hands were shaking more than Wanda's. The rain was pouring down now, and I knew I had to drive somewhere or she would come running out again. I turned the corner and parked in front of another house that probably had the same things or worse going on inside it. I had gone to hundreds of domestics in this area, seen a hundred Wandas and Terrys. Why was this different?

Seeing Ray this morning proved how vulnerable I was myself. I had attended the former calls as if they were part of a world to which I never could belong. Today the connection triggered a thunderstorm in my head. I felt as if I had skidded to a halt at the edge of a dangerous precipice. Retha and Ray could easily become my Terry. If you took away my security on all other fronts — financial, professional, family — I might be seeing Wanda when I looked in the mirror. It was not only her addictions, her squalor, or her poverty that made her helpless. It was her need for a scapegoat.

A counsellor would never untangle what was happening in that house, because Wanda needed her son to be the obstacle to her happiness. As if removing one dirty sock from a trash heap would make the trash heap fade into the background. The comfort of blame right there for the taking. For Wanda, for the witnesses, for Terry. And for me.

I was not sure if my limited visibility was due to the pounding rain on the windshield or the pounding now going on in my head. I told Sally I was coming in. As I crept along the streets to the detachment, I muttered,
Thank you, Wanda, for leading me where you will probably never
go yourself
. One look at me, and my corporal advised me to take the rest of the day off.

When I got to my apartment, there was a message from Dad. When I called, he said he had been going through boxes and found the picture of Sara and her sister I was looking for.

“I wondered if you wanted to meet for supper at Wendy's and I could bring it. But you don't sound too well.”

“Headache,” I said, fighting the nausea mixing in with the painkillers. “I'm going to lie down now and should be all right by supper time.”

“We can make it another time.”

“No. I'll see you tonight. But let's not go to Wendy's. Let's eat at home. We can fix something together. In Mom's kitchen. Hot dogs, eggs, anything. I'm ready to go through those pictures.”

DAD HAD SCRAMBLED EGGS, sardines, and toast ready for me when I arrived. I had not eaten anything besides the toast and coffee at Denny's and was hungrier than I thought. I hated to admit Dave might be right about breakfast and headaches. Mine was now in its phantom stage, the hangover still there but the throbbing gone. Dad insisted I take a mug of camomile tea with me to the living room where he had set a large shoebox — his, not Mom's — on the footstool. He was excited about something.

“The picture is here,” he said, opening the box, “along with some old letters from your great-grandmother.”

There they were. Sara and Janet as young twins in long dresses and ringlets, one bow neat and one bow floppy.

“Damn,” I muttered. “I forgot to bring the other one.” When I left the apartment all I could focus on was finding my car keys and keeping my head still while my body moved. “Maybe I'm not seeing clearly right now, but I'm sure this is the same picture.” The angle of the girls' little black boots was the same. Both in third position, I knew from ballet classes. The hand of the floppy-bowed one was on the arm of the neat one.

“And the other picture came from Saskatchewan?” Dad asked in disbelief.

“Not just Saskatchewan — Willow Point, Saskatchewan. Point Zero.”

“You'll have to put them together to make absolutely certain. Maybe there are traces of
DNA
on the back of each photo.”

“You're always a step ahead of me.”

I lifted the top letter from the pile in the shoebox. It was written with blue ink on vellum paper that was beige now, if not originally. Its folds had begun to wear through, so I opened it very carefully. The date at the top read April 4, 1894, Nanaimo, B.C.

Dear Brother and Sisters,

Just a few lines in answer to your letter, trusting they will
find you better than when you wrote. We were glad to hear
that Margaret and Gwynyth were pretty well but sorry to
hear that Evan has been so sick. La Grippe is a terrible
disease in this country. Gomer has been laid up with it
for two weeks and Tommy is not feeling well but he never
misses work at the mine. It is all the worse here for it is
so wet
—
cold rain much of the time. We were also very
sorry to hear of poor Catherine so sick. We wonder if she
wouldn't like to come out here. We would so much like to
see her and all of you. Tommy said he would send money
at once. He is making our home here in Chase River
comfortable and Mama would brighten at a visit. She
is still weak but has her good days. There is never a day
passes that I am not thinking of you. I wish I had enough
money to carry me back to Wales. I would leave tomorrow.

I miss school very much, especially the small library in
our classroom where I often borrowed books to read. Miss
Maasanen gave me a copy of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
on my last day there and I treasure it. I have to remind
myself that the little money I bring in washing clothes adds
to Tommy's wages. I have two customers now, one is a
miner's wife and the other is a Negro gentleman who lives
in a cabin not far from us. He has an orchard here and
another farm on Salt Spring Island where his wife and
family stay. He is a kind, hardworking man. I am sleepy
now. Mind to write back by return mail, addressed to me. I remain your loving sister

xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jane
xxxxxxxxxxxxx

I stared at the letter in my hands. Why was I surprised that X was not a modern symbol for kisses? Words from more than a century ago as fresh as if they had just appeared on my e-mail screen, though much prettier in their careful, elegant script. The clear circles and swirls made me think of penmanship exercises when we first switched from printing to writing in Grade Three.

“Did you read these?” I asked Dad.

“A thrill, isn't it? A hundred-plus-year-old letter from the mysterious Jane Owens. Judging from her handwriting, her spelling and grammar, she seems to be, shall we say, a refined woman. Call me a snob, but I'm relieved about that. She must have had her own standards, because she could not have had much of an education. Sounds as if she was a teenager here, quitting school reluctantly to do laundry.”

“Do you know these other people? Catherine, Tommy, Gomer, Evan?”

“Catherine and Margaret were her sisters, but I don't know the name of the brother in Wales. Tommy and Gomer are her brothers in Canada. Evan and Gwynyth are Margaret's children, I gather. Uncle Thomas and his wife took Sara to live with them when Jane died.” Dad said Sara for my benefit — in case I wouldn't understand if he said Mother. “She wasn't happy there, mainly because of Aunt Lizzie. She was a discontented, jealous woman; Sara was prettier and worked harder than her own two lazy daughters did when they were at home.”

Yes, I remembered that account from Sara, especially when she called herself pretty. It was the truth, but at my early teenage stage you always put yourself down, so her honesty surprised me. “Where did Janet go?”

“To Gomer, I think, Jane's younger brother. But she died a year later, also from the flu. Sara told Janetta and me that the day Lizzie informed her Janet was gone was worse than her mother's death. At least she had her sister to share that with. And for a year she'd had hope of finding her again. What saved her after that was Laura, a baby born late in life to Thomas and Lizzie. Mother was able to swallow her tears when she took care of Laura. She came to think of her as a baby sister until Lizzie's jealousy got in the way. She would wait to have Laura to herself to play games and tell stories.”