The Cuckoo's Child (8 page)

“One of these days, Liv, it won't seem like treachery any more.”

So he understood. It was typical of his innate courtesy and consideration. But I had seen the hurt in his eyes, and I cursed myself for a fool, even as I felt relief. That night confirmed his gentle, almost imperceptible recoil. He began to spend more and more time in the studio, disappearing for hours, resurfacing looking bleary and bewildered as if he'd just woken in a strange bed with no idea how he had got there.

It was at this time, too, that his work changed significantly. He had always been a magnificent draughtsman but had a growing reputation as an abstract painter. Critics called his canvases “bold,” “confrontational,” “daring syntheses of colour and form.” One of the few things we did together then was to laugh at the overblown rhetoric, make a game of inventing more and more extravagant compliments that meant less and less. “Spot on!” said Neil when I came up with “incandescent vision of tonal nebulosity.”

“Pitch perfect!”

One day, though, I wandered into the studio to find Neil hunched over his worktable in front of a very bright light, peering through a magnifying lens. Curious, I looked over his shoulder. With a fine brush he was painting on a tiny piece of board, no larger than the oversized stamps they always produce at Christmas. It appeared to be a forest scene; meticulously he was filling in the tiny dark tree trunks, no thicker than eyelashes. At first I could see nothing else. Then I saw a spot of red and blue, and there was a tiny boy, tow-headed, and by his side, standing, sitting, scratching, tongues lolling, eyes bright, were wolves tame as spaniels.

“Stamps?” I asked. “Are you designing stamps?”

“Sort of,” he said, “but not for any country in this world.”

He hesitated, then pulled out a portfolio and opened it. More miniatures, maybe six to a page, and, yes, they did look like stamps but jewelled somehow, more like the tiny illuminations in a medieval Book of Hours. Each one had a recognizable geographic context: rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, prairie, all discernibly North American but not specific. All the scenes glowed, as if the air in those places were rarified, so that all the colours were more intense, the shadows deeper, the sun brighter. And in every one, sometimes hard to find, but there, somewhere, was the small boy. Neil was recreating the world, and Daniel roamed it, happy and safe.

But there was no place in it for me, and as Neil quietly withdrew into his fantasy, making it ever more subtle and comprehensive as he moved with his Boy from desert to jungle to Arctic waste, I slithered deeper and deeper into despair.

Daily routine became a numbing grind. Getting out of bed each morning involved a draining expenditure of willpower. Ordinary tasks like cooking and cleaning demanded more energy than I could command. As far as school work was concerned, I was an automaton, on automatic pilot in a strangely muffled world. Day after day, I trudged endlessly through a featureless wasteland, exhausted and aimless.

One end came the day I accidentally spilled a small vial of nitric acid on the top of the lab bench. It seethed venomously on the wood. I could not remember what to do with it. I stood there, Lot's wife, unable to move or think. An immense weariness overcame me, and I sank onto a stool and laid my head down on my arms. My grade 9 class found me, apparently asleep, quite unresponsive, while a small puddle of acid at my elbow smoked and gnawed at the bench top, filling the air with its stench. The sight apparently cowed even the brashest boy in the class to silence.

I floated on an uncharted sea, and events arranged themselves around me. The school board hastily granted me extended leave. The substitute teacher who had stood in for me before was summoned again. Somebody decided I should go for a while to Mum and Dad in Vanderhoof; they would look after me, and I could have a good rest, they said.

So, you materialized again to escort me north, Stephen, and on a sparkling April day, I let Neil pack me into your battered pickup.

As we turned onto the highway, I looked back. The lonely figure standing at the door, one arm raised, and Maisie twining her ginger form about his ankles, made my eyes prickle. The act of leaving felt significant in an undefinable way. There was portent in Neil's arm held in still salute, in the clanging approach to the dark hold of the ferry, in the widening gap filled with churning water as the boat pulled away from the dock at Langdale, in the seagull that for a time kept pace with us as we crossed the Sound and then, its mission completed, suddenly veered away and was gone.

That sense of a door closing, of finality, was still with me when we stopped for the night in Hope. We stayed at the Swiss Chalet motel. Remember the tiny cabins with heart-shaped holes in their front doors?

We went to the Kan Yon restaurant and ate Chinese, or rather, you did while I picked at some fried rice, and then the empty evening loomed. The thought of sitting in my cabin appalled me. So did the effort of conversation.

“Why don't you go and watch
TV
?” I suggested. “I fancy a bit of a walk.”

Your face instantly took on an anxious doggy look.

“You sure? You'll be all right on your own? You don't know the place—perhaps I'd better come too. It'll be dark.”

“No!” It came out too sharp. “No, don't be silly. How can you get lost in a town this size? I won't be long, just need a bit of air.”

You were reluctant. Wary too, now that I think about it, but you gave in and opened your own front door.

“See you then,” you said.

I headed out of the back entrance of the motel and found myself on a road beside a large stand of firs. A wind stirred them gently, soft black feathers in a fan; it was quiet. The few steps I had taken had shut off the noise from the highway, muted the garish lights on the main drag. Another door closing behind me.

I walked along the road. My white runners gleamed in the half-light. Soon the path angled downward, and I passed the driveways of old wooden houses half buried in bushes and trees that obviously rested on the bank of the river. I could hear the soughing of the water. The path turned and dipped again. Now it led straight to the Fraser's edge. Overhead, the narrow highway bridge made a dark bar against the sky. Headlights stuttered by its railings and tires zinged across the metal road bed.

Down where I stood, the sounds and lights were an irrelevance. The river filled my consciousness. Its mass rolled by, even and unstoppable, its sombre green streaked occasionally by a little play of white as it encountered an obstacle on its way, the faint susurration it made a steady counterpoint to the whine of tires above.

I swear I had not thought of suicide up to that point. Not with the leaden weight of memory and guilt, not with the daily reminders of Daniel's presence in the house, not with the hallucinatory glimpses that teased with appalling hope only to be dashed the next instant, not even with the insomniac hours in the dead watches of the night. But at that moment, by the quiet hurrying water, it seemed the most natural, inevitable thing in the world to walk out and drop into the current and let it carry me away.

I even took the first step. Your voice stopped the second.

“Livvy, I'm getting married in June. I'll want you at the wedding, you know.”

I wrenched myself round to face you. You continued, straining to be light and matter of fact.

“Holly's got relatives coming out of her ears—her side of the church will be stacked. I'll have to bribe everybody I know to come, just so it'll look even.”

“
Holly
?” I managed and burst into tears.

You caught me in a bear hug. “She can't help her name, her mother loved Audrey Hepburn.”

You were silent a moment. Then, “It's not on, Liv. There's always a chance he'll be found, always a chance, as long as we don't know for sure what happened. You can't go while there's that chance.”

That night, for the first time since Daniel's disappearance, I wept uncontrollably. After a while, I stopped trying to mop up the tears and let them flow unhindered. They poured down, dripped in a steady rain from my nose and chin; my clothes were soaked; I left little puddles on the tabletop. I would have had to retreat to higher ground if exhaustion had not set in. Mice would have been swimming by, telling tales. But just as the river I had turned from the night before scoured its beds and banks, carrying all the debris away to the hidden sea, so my tears purged something in me. I woke, my face a pulpy, sodden mask, and felt lightness—not happiness, by no means, there's never any release from the daily wakening to loss—but a lessening, a more supportable burden.

As we drove north, past Spences Bridge and the herd of mountain sheep almost indistinguishable in their dun coats from the sage they browsed, past Cache Creek and the Hat Creek Ranch, past Clinton and 100 Mile House, into the rolling ocean of the Cariboo and a sparse landscape that had not yet quite forgotten winter, you told me about Holly and your plans. I was startled to learn this was nothing new; you had known her for a year or more, and the wedding day was fixed for June 24. With another pang of guilt, I realized how impervious I had been. What else had I ignored, buried head first in my own misery?

We said nothing about the river. You'd rescued me as I'd once rescued you, and nothing needed to be said. Just before you left for Prince George, though, after delivering me like a valuable parcel to Mum and Dad, you caught at my hand and spoke urgently, forcing me to look you in the eye.

“Go to the doctor and get something for depression. If he tells you to pull yourself together and it'll be all right, go somewhere else. Got it? Will you do that?”

I nodded. You turned to Dad, and I saw the first of a new, authoritative Stephen. “You see she goes,” you said. “She needs treatment, not pep talks,” and Dad, also looking a bit startled, nodded agreement.

And so I arrived at a watershed of sorts.

At first, aided and abetted by Mum and Dad, and probably the medication their doctor prescribed, I did nothing but sleep. Lucky timing—a patient ducking out of his sessions just as the doctor referred me—got me in to see a therapist in Prince George. It was only after visiting her for a few weeks that I realized how rare a bird a psychological professional of any sort was up there. I could so easily have missed out on those conversations in the tiny office she had on the fourth floor of a grey cube of a professional building downtown. I think she won my trust right from the start with her honesty.

“I can do something about your depression,” she said, looking at me intently as she stuffed a green velvet cushion behind her back and settled in a corner of the couch opposite my armchair. “I can't cure your loss, though we can talk about it. Will that be helpful, do you think?”

It was. For a while those trips with Dad into Prince George to see Dr. Thorburn were the high points of each week, about the only things I could entertain Neil with when we talked on the phone. I couldn't get much mileage out of shopping with Mum at the Co-op or helping Dad pull chickweed out of the flowerbeds!

To tell the truth, I kept a lot of those sessions to myself. I may have made Neil laugh describing Dr. Thorburn's almost clichéd manner: head tilted on one side like a robin listening for a worm; her wordless pauses that compelled me to speak; her habit of answering questions with a question; the mantra phrases like “And how does that make you feel?” But she forced me to inspect myself, to pick at scabs, made questions lodge in my mind so that finding answers became a task, one that was not always pleasant or even fully accomplished. I think it was that half-baked feeling—that I hadn't really got it yet myself—that made me cautious when Neil pushed for details.

But when he asked if I was better, I could honestly say I was. I seemed to have regained the knack of getting through the days and finding some point to them. The general boredom of life at Mum and Dad's drove me to the river and bird watching again. I looked up old friends, the ones without houses full of children at least. The sight of a tricycle abandoned in a front yard, or tiny sneakers for sale in a store, even the lump of plaster that immortalized my own infant handprint, still displayed on the mantelpiece, made my eyes well. But I found myself longing for the feel of Maisie on my lap, for the smell of turpentine, the sound of the latch as Neil came in from the studio, even for the stupid jokes of the grade 9 boys.

I had instantly liked Holly when I met her, despite her aggressively rosy health and glossiness, the irrepressible chirpy smile and good humour of one whom life has barely grazed. Although she came across like an aerobics instructor on speed, there was an earthy kindness beneath the bubbles; it was easy to visualize her looking after sick and abandoned animals, as she did at the
SPCA
in Prince George.

She was frazzled at the time, of course, driven half distracted by all the preparations for the wedding.

“What did
you
order for vegetarian guests?” she asked me one day. I hadn't had any guests apart from you, Mum and Dad, and three friends from university, and not one of them would have been caught dead near tofu, so I wasn't much help. Nor did I have any diplomatic suggestions when one of her bridesmaids staged a revolt against peach lace.

“It's your day, Holly, and your choice,” I told her. “Tell her to put up or shut up.”

I was having problems of my own, anyway.

Mum was having an identity crisis on her own account, and on behalf of Dad, as Parents of the Groom. She had compelled me to review Dad's entire wardrobe with her. Useless for him to protest that his good navy suit would do just fine, it just needed cleaning, he'd only worn it a few times.

“Look at this,” she said, holding up the blameless navy pinstripe. “It'll never do, will it? We can't let Stephen down, can we?”

And when I cravenly said I supposed not, she said triumphantly, “There, Livvy agrees—you need a new suit!”