The Box Garden (25 page)

“We’re not sure. That is, the police can’t figure it out unless she was just crazy to have a kid of her own. But I tried to tell them I don’t think that’s it. I’ve got a crazy hunch—this sounds really crazy—but I think maybe she’s trying to take Seth to Watson.”

“Watson?”

“I know it sounds insane, but you know Greta. She might take it into her head that Seth would be better off with Watson. You know how she idolized the guy, always has. And she was, well, a little uneasy in her mind about Eugene and all that, you know how she is sometimes ...”

“You really think ...”

“It’s just a guess, that’s all. That’s why I came out here, out to Weedham. But the kids here haven’t laid eyes on him for a couple of years.”

“Greta is taking Seth to Watson?” I repeat this numbly.

“That’s all I can think of. I’m going crazy trying to think. That’s why I’m two hours late calling you. I turned my watch back instead of forward when the time zone changed, I just found out, that’s how mixed up I am. I’ve just been looking and looking all week and I’m just about out of my mind.”

“We’ll find them,” I say falteringly, unbelievingly.

“Look, I’m sure Greta knows where Watson’s living. I mean, I know she writes to him now and then.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Look, Char, I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea yourself where Watson might be.”

I think for a quarter of a minute and then I say, “Yes.”

I give Doug the address very slowly so he will be able
to write it down.

Standing in my mother’s crowded little hall, we make hurried plans. Eugene and I and one of the policemen will go to the meeting point and wait for Doug Savage. The police will send reinforcements immediately.

The other officer will stay here with the family. He has just received a message, he tells us a motel operator near Parry Sound reported renting a room last night to a middle-aged woman who was driving a dark coloured Volvo with B.C. plates. Was she alone? The report is not entirely clear, the officer explains. It was late at night, very dark, and no one is sure whether she was alone or not.

“We can take my car,” Eugene says.

“Your car?” Martin asks.

“A rental,” Eugene explains shortly. “They’ve just brought it over.”

“God,” Martin says, “that was quick.” He says this with mingled surprise and admiration, and for a moment all of us turn and regard Eugene who is checking his wallet for his license. Such a simple thing, renting a car; Eugene would never be able to understand why my family stands in awe of such simple acts. I pick up my purse in the kitchen, and Eugene and I follow the policeman out the back door.

It is a big car, hugely clean, and the three of us fit in the front seat easily, Eugene driving, I in the middle, the policeman enthusiastically giving directions from the right. Eugene turns the car south toward the lake.

For me every passing car takes on extraordinary significance; each one must be checked off against Greta’s blue Volvo.
She is sure to be in the city now.
I strain in the dark to see.

Vancouver, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Parry Sound, what could it signify? Perhaps a straight meaningless sweep across the whole country. What if they kept going, across Quebec, across the Maritimes, what if they dropped senseless into the sea like lemmings?

Then suddenly I am overcome with flooding despair. A moment ago, hearing the gassy zoom of the rented car I had felt temporarily buoyant. Now, from nowhere, comes the knowledge that Seth is dead. The certainty arrives in the middle of a breath. I had inhaled with hope and by the time my breath left me I was certain he was lost forever. This dark road, this silence.

It was a night like this when Seth was born. A spring night, the streets dry and dark with only a cold knot of a moon in the sky. Watson was out at a peace rally and I, drinking coffee in the apartment and feeling the first kick of pain, had been shocked and frightened and then, suddenly, for no reason, I had become serenely confident, packing quickly and neatly, phoning the doctor, locking the windows, calling the taxi, and then riding down the tree-arched Vancouver streets, sucking in the cool, friendly darkness as though it were somehow edible, exaltation knocking inside my heart. This was it, this was the beginning of my life, the only life that was going to matter.

“You want to take a left here,” the officer advises Eugene after a mere ten minutes. “This is a one-way.”

“Okay.”

“Now, you want to jog right at the stop sign. I know this neighbourhood pretty well.”

“Parking?”

“Anywhere now.”

Eugene slows the car. “Maybe we’d better not park right in front of the building,” he suggests.

“Squeeze in there by the hydrant, what the hell. Anyway there it is, that’s the house. That big bugger on the left.”

This is a certain type of Toronto street—narrow and, despite the streetlights, deeply shadowed. Cars park all along one side. The houses are tall and narrow and old; wooden porches hang on to their blackened brick fronts. It’s a warm night, and here and there people are sitting out on their front steps; I can see the glowing red tips of their cigarettes. The front yards are small and, though I can’t see in the dark, I know they are made up of packed earth and clumps of weeds; this is the kind of neighbourhood where there are always too many children and where it is shady even on the brightest days.

The blue flicker of television sets fills most of the front windows. Eugene turns off the ignition and says, “Let’s go.”

The policeman stands outside for a moment checking the other cars on the block. “That’s one of ours,” he says pointing to an unmarked Ford. “And those two guys are ours too.”

“Let’s go in,” Eugene presses.

“But Doug Savage isn’t here,” I say, suddenly confused.

“They’ll be a few minutes yet,” the policeman says, checking his watch, “all the way from Weedham. Even in good traffic that’s a fair run.”

“No sign of a Volvo,” I hear Eugene saying.

“She could’ve ditched it anywhere.”

“I’ll go in,” I tell them.

“I wouldn’t advise that,” the policeman says, “you never know about these characters.”

“I’m going in,” I tell him again.

“I’ll come with you,” Eugene says.

“I think it would be better if I went alone, Eugene.”

“We could back you up,” the policeman says, thinking hard.

“If I could just talk to him alone. For a few minutes.”

The policeman ponders a moment and then asks, “Is he, well you know him, he was your husband. What I mean, is he a dangerous guy?”

“Is he, Charleen?” Eugene turns to me.

“No,” I almost smile. “He’s not dangerous at all. He’s like a ... like ... like a baby.”

The policeman checks with his friends in the parked car. When he comes back he nods at us and says, “Okay. We’ll have a go.”

It’s a large house, one of the largest on the street, a three storey with jutting bays and ugly round-topped windows. Even in the dark I can see that it’s in shocking condition. A few of the windows are broken, and most of them, except for two or three at the top, are dark. The front steps are shaky. The open porch is garishly lit by a naked bulb and it’s filled with dirty plastic toys, a wicker chair with a rotted cushion, a dead plant in a pot. I’m frightened now, reluctant; perhaps I’ve made a crucial error in coming here.

The three of us stand on the porch for a moment, and for some reason the policeman is telling us about himself. His name is Bill Miller, he says, and he doesn’t usually come out on jobs like this. He’s filling in, he tells us, because this is a special case. Of course, he says shrugging, every case is special if you think about it. “We’ll back you up,” he says again in what sounds to me like Dragnet dialogue. “If your boy’s up there, we’ll get him out.”

There are six doorbells stacked in a wiggly line on the door frame, but the name we want isn’t there. A man appears in the doorway, a short, scrawny man, neither young nor old, with a rabbitty neck and a small, sharp nose. He is so drunk he has to lean on the door jamb to keep from falling down.

“Yeah?” he challenges us.

I explain whom we want to see.

“Sure, sure, he’s up there,” he tells us. “Lives at the top. I told him I’d put up a lousy doorbell for him, but what the fuck for, no one ever comes to see him.”

“Is there anyone up there with him now?” Eugene asks.

“Naw. ‘Less they come up the fire escape. I been here all night.”

Bill Miller says, “Look, mister, what we want to know is, did a woman come in here tonight?”

“Woman, eh?” he winks obscenely. “I always tell him that’s what he needs, a good roll in the hay to straighten him out. He’s a real nut.”

“A woman with a boy?” Eugene asks carefully.

“Search me,” he shrugs. “Why don’t ya go up and have a look for yerself. Third floor. Name’s on the door, ya can’t miss.”

Eugene and Bill Miller position themselves on the dark second floor landing. The stairway to the third floor is narrower and there is no railing, but a dim lightbulb shows the way.

I am at the top of the house standing in a tiny hall; there is only one door and it is clearly marked in blocky, hand-painted letters, The Priory, Bro. Adam. (The diminutive “Bro.” is a warning.) Silence. Then the sound of my own breathing rushing out into the silence. I knock smartly on the door. Twice. Three times.

No answer, but through the old cracked wood I can hear something stirring. Like cloth being moved. Like someone sighing. Someone moaning.

I knock once more and wait. And then I turn the knob. It opens easily, a wide swinging, and I call out, “I’m coming in.”

Afterwards I could hardly believe that I spent less than five minutes in that room. A small square room under the eaves, and yet my first impression was one of blinding, dazzling space. It was the mirrors, of course, huge mirrors mounted on two facing walls and lining the sloping ceiling, so that the small space seemed endless and unbelievably complex, like the sudden special openings that sometimes occur in dreams.

It was like stepping into the warm, glowing, artificial interior of a greenhouse with its combination of plant life, glinting glass and stillness. The air, after the reeking hallway, was deliciously fresh and smelled of earth and new growth. A narrow window let in the fragrant early spring air and on the other side a door stood open to an iron fire escape.

The room was alive with tiny lights. They were strung on wires and they beamed like miniature suns on the wooden flats of grass. The whole room, except for a neatly made-up army cot, was carpeted with grass. In the rebounding arrangements of mirrors and lights, the grass stretched endlessly, acres of it, miles of it; it was like coming upon a secret Alpine meadow, like a pocket of perfect and perpetual springtime where there was no night, no thought of cold or death. Even time seemed to fall away from me, as though the endless grass lived in another dimension altogether where growth and fertility took the place of hours and days.

Watson sat on the bed in a lotus position; I was conscious first of his gleaming skull and then of a certain bodily heaviness under his robe of dull red cloth. A book lay open on his lap. “I was afraid you might try to come,” he said after a moment.

My throat closed soundless over his name: Watson, Watson, Watson. Still there, still there, that tender—no, no, more than tender—sliver of pain and youthful love lodged in the centre of my body. A twisting breathlessness like a rising funnel-shaped cloud of anguish pressed on my lungs, robbing me of speech and, for a moment, of coherence. What was I doing here leaning on this doorway, gasping for breath and for that portion of love that had surely died?

“Why are you here?” he asked again.

Then, like a stone sinking, I regained the powers of speech and thought.

“Brother Adam.” I pronounced the words with finality, as though they were a summation. He gazed at me with detached calm.