Into That Darkness (25 page)

They watched the dog slip long and thin around the building and into darkness.

Where do you think he's off to? Lear muttered.

He must have heard something.

They always look like they know exactly where they're going.

Jesus, she said suddenly, angrily. This time last week it was a different world altogether.

It wasn't.

She swallowed.

I didn't mean it like that, he said. I'm sorry.

I know.

Tell me what happened.

With what?

Your daughter. In the department store.

Oh. She had been thinking of the barber's wife and she glanced at him guiltily and gave a short laugh. I was desperate. They were stealing children back then, it was just starting up again. It was on the radio all the time. She of course never even knew she was lost. She'd crawled under one of the clothes racks and was sitting there behind the clothes watching us the whole time. I don't know what she was thinking. I could've killed her.

A helicopter whupped high overhead and she stared at the dark underbelly, the dome of glass glinting and vanishing in the late sky. She watched the bank of cloud into which it vanished for many minutes. The chop of its blades fading.

I used to think I was a poor mother, she said.

I'd guess if you worry about it, that probably means you're not.

You never had any children?

No.

You didn't want any?

I never thought I did, he said quietly. Callie died so young. I don't know what would have happened if she'd lived.

She was silent for a time and then she glanced down at the projection room. Her son was poking about on the shelves, clattering his iron bar along the metal grates. Mason, she called in. What are you doing?

Her son looked up at her.

I have something to ask you, she said to the old man.

What is it.

I want to know what it was like in there. What you found.

I found you. And Mason.

But what was it like?

He rubbed his eyes. I was so tired. I can't remember.

Mason remembers, she said.

I know he does.

I wish he could forget it.

I wish all of us could.

They were both peering down into the projection room where Mason crouched reading an old film magazine, turning the thin pages.

She said after a moment, His father and I never married.

Mason never talked about him.

We were just kids when I got pregnant with Kat. We met at the university. We were both students in our first year. He had this big, broken shovel of a nose. I thought it was terribly romantic. We went backpacking through Thailand and Cambodia and that's when it happened. Of course we didn't know it until later. I think it does funny things to a man. Getting his girlfriend pregnant. At least it did to him. I don't know. He was a good man. We had our differences but he was a good man.

Lear shifted and studied the boy. Is he in Mason's life at all?

Not really.

You don't miss him?

It's just how it is, she said with a shrug. He was gone and back for six years until I got pregnant with Mason. Then I decided it was time. But things were never smooth with us. I guess we were young, I don't know. Maybe that trip to Asia did something to us. You imagine you're seeing the real country. But you're not. That's a myth we make up, there is no real country, not like that. That's why you never do make any sense out of those countries. Places like that. They live closer to death than we do.

Lear shifted his back and groaned. He had large irregular ears and they were very pale in the twilight and when he turned his head slightly the shadows fell across obscuring his face like a dark storm descending.

She closed her eyes. The hot mingled stink of cooking and laundry and trash in the streets and the rough fingers picking at their sleeves and the crowds of the friendly poor. The ancient cities in the jungle carved with the terrible visages of vanquished gods. Mud streets. The staggered signs along the roadbeds indicating land mines. Beggars in swaddled robes with feet and hands missing and bowls cradled between their raw ankles. The chickens in hostel yards and the squeal and spray of slaughter. And the tower of human skulls and the elementary school with its tiny caged rooms and the black stains on its floors and the images of the bloodied incarcerated men and women and children and her standing beside a tree and digging with her shoe a small pale root which was no root but a fragment of bone from the thousands buried in the killing fields as if the earth itself were the author of such brutality.

She scratched at her shattered hand. But out of it all, I got her, she murmured.

They were silent for a time. The streets darkened. She could no longer make out the old man's face when he shifted on his haunches.

Anna Mercia? he said.

Mm?

Do you want to tell me who you saw at the roadblock?

She gave him a sudden hard look. No, she said.

She could see him nodding in the darkness.

It wasn't Mason's father though.

Jesus. No.

Well. I just thought.

Why would you think that?

I don't know. I just thought it might have been.

It wasn't.

He nodded again in the darkness. I haven't been sleeping, he said. I keep seeing her when I close my eyes.

Who?

Callie.

Something in his voice arrested her and she leaned across and took his big cold hand in hers. Somewhere far off the faint clashing of cathedral bells could be heard. He rubbed at his face as if only just waking. A wind blew scurls of dust through the deepening intersection and a dark cat passed without sound in the street. The old man sat and she sat with him and they waited like that as if guests in a house not of their choosing. Which in a way they were. As are all the living in this world.

Escape isn't about ropes and cages, dark closets, prisons, bad marriages.
True escape is absence. It eludes you, it's what you can't have.

My father's an ongoing escape. He's a door I can't quite close. I wonder
if I will see it closing in Mason or Kat, if that's how it will end. I
don't know. He wanted back in our lives though I couldn't see why he
should be given that privilege. He wanted to know his grandchildren.
He came back to Victoria after my mother died. I don't know why he
waited, he shouldn't have waited. But he did. He bought a café in Fernwood.
I didn't know what to think. He didn't call us. I only heard about
his return through friends months later. Imagine that. I didn't believe
it, walked down to that corner in Fernwood and stood in the doorway of
a barbershop across the street watching the little brick café. It was like
seeing a ghost. He looked so old, and tired, and unhappy. I didn't go over.
He's been buried three years now and I'm still angry.

He wasn't a bad man. He was never a father, but he wasn't a bad
man. I tell myself this over and over, thinking maybe it will stick. In the
late sixties Trinidad like everywhere else had been corrupted and was in
strife and my mother could see it burning in him, that desire to go. She
called it that. A desire. It was already a kind of infidelity. It was more
his blood than we were.

Jesus.

What you can't have. Mason was a miracle baby, he shouldn't have
happened. I'd been sick with uterine lesions and the doctor, under the
weight of his pouchy face, lifted his heavy eyes and told me I wouldn't
have any more children. David was crushed. He'd always wanted a son.
I don't know. I guess we kept trying, though there was something bitter
and desperate between us after that. Things got worse between us.
David already had one foot over the threshold when we learned I was
pregnant again.

That was Mason. It was enough to bring David back in for a time.

I'd hear him creeping about the house at night, going in to check on
Mason, on Kat. The floorboards in the hall shivering like a haunting.
After he was gone, sometimes even then I'd feel him there, padding
softly down the hallway.

In the afternoon of that fifth day they reached the black gate. Its iron spikes and ornate crossed bars wheeled back, standing wide.

Anna Mercia held her son's hand. He led her past the headmaster's house with its weathered yellow paint and she slowed and they looked down over the school grounds. It was a boarding school and a day school and she knew there would be many teachers and students down there yet. Sloping off and stretched flat across to the far staked fenceline lay two playing fields, their lime markings looking sutured in the weird light. A tendril of smoke vanished in the charcoal sky. Beyond the fields stood a cluster of hollowed-out buildings like a reef which the destruction had broken upon and fallen back from. The washed light on the wimpled brickface of the ruins.

The old man came slowly up. I know this place, he murmured. I know this school.

Kat should be down there, she said. But in her voice she heard something lift, strange and frightened, and she knew her son could hear it also.

Yes, Lear said.

Mason said nothing.

They went down. The grass they trod was grey and the brick walkways grey and mortar dust lay in a fine grey ash over all. Their heels crunching glass, stones, splintered chips of desks. Windows gaped darkly down. The school was built around an open quadrangle of grass and benches and she made her way among the ruins. Her neck was stiff and her fingers in her good arm ached and she felt nothing else that she would admit to. She did not want to think about her daughter until she had found her. The facing doors standing open on hallways buried in darkness. Men shouting in the ruins somewhere. Where the gymnasium roof had fallen a crane was dragging roped and tackled slabs of concrete to one side and the rubble scraped and boomed.

And then she could not go on. She stopped in the grass beside a jumble of metal chairs and stood amid the whorled dust with her one fist gripped tight and her face dark. When her son called to her she did not turn.

Mom, he called. Mom.

The old man approached her slowly and she raised her eyes and he said, It's alright, Anna. You don't know what's happened here. You just don't know.

She realized she was crying and she rubbed the heel of her hand in her eyes. A gash in the shingles of the main schoolhouse where the bell tower once had stood. She looked away.

A fireman with a broken arm saw them then and he lifted his own sling at her in greeting. His eyes troubled. You and me both, he said to the woman. You looking for someone?

My daughter, she said quickly. Katherine Clarke. She's in grade eleven—

But the fireman shook his head. His skin was leeched grey and streaked with grime and his eyes were very black. I'm not the guy to talk to, he said in his gravelly voice. Try the office. He wiped grimly at his nose with two fingers and then stood looking down. His fingers were black. My nose keeps bleeding, he said. What do you think that is?

Where's the office? the old man asked.

The woman nodded at the ruined schoolhouse. In there, she said.

No, the fireman said. They moved it to one of the boarding houses. You know the music teacher? Singh?

Ray Singh?

He's been in charge of the salvage these last two days. He might be able to help you.

Thanks.

He looked at the woman dully and then he nodded. Sorry I can't help you more.

It's alright. Thanks.

Sure.

The music teacher was a big dark bearded man. They found him standing in the lee of a shadowed wall in his shirtsleeves and with a tie tucked inside his shirtfront and he lifted his eyes at their approach. He seemed to stand shimmering in the shadows and he did not step out into the light. In his fist he held some manila document.

Mrs Clarke, he said gravely to the woman. He lifted his face, peered past the old man, the boy, to the ruined quadrangle. Where's Kat?

Anna Mercia shook her head. She's not here?

Isn't she with you? Then all at once the man understood. Jesus. You haven't found each other yet? He looked at her and stepped forward. You know she's alive, right?

Anna Mercia folded her arms and glanced at the goalposts standing against the skyline lean and polished like strange bones and breathed. She was afraid to speak. The music teacher gripped her shoulder and his meaty hand was hot on her skin.

He said, I saw her myself right after the quake. Right here. She's alive.

You saw her.

Yes. I saw her.

She felt herself starting to cry. She hardened her face, looked away.

Kat was right here, on the field, when we took roll. Jesus, and his voice drifted off. I would've told you at once. I'm sorry.

I knew it, Mason said. I told you.

The music teacher looked down at him quickly, then back at the woman. In the strange light a crescent of darkness scythed along his jaw and his eyes were luminous in the shine. Kat said she was going home. I think that's what she said. She was going to look for you.

We haven't been home yet, the boy said.

Anna Mercia has, the old man interrupted. No one was there.

Her head was still reeling. You're sure it was her? she said softly. You're absolutely sure.

Ray, a man was calling from the rubble. Hey, Ray.

The music teacher glanced back over his shoulder.

She blew out her cheeks and she saw that her legs were trembling and all at once she sat down and started to shake. Her son put his arms around her.

Mom, he said.

She wasn't hurt, the music teacher went on. I can tell you that much. Maybe she went to a friend's house? Most of the students got bussed home late Wednesday afternoon. Listen, I got to get back to this. He peered across at the salvagers then crouched down next to the woman where she sat. Go on up to the office, Mrs Clarke, he said. They have records up there. They'll tell you where Kat was heading off to.