The Cuckoo's Child (9 page)

But it was her own outfit that completely demoralized Mum. She towed me into Prince George to find what she called “something special—but not too posh.” She couldn't define this more specifically than “maybe a nice dress, with a jacket, perhaps,” and seemed to hope that the perfect solution would rear up and there'd be a moment of mutual, relieved recognition.

She begged me to go with her.

“You always seem to know what to wear,” she said. “You've got
style
.”

It was news to me, but I went and steered her away from shiny polyester floral prints that made her look like an overstuffed sofa, ran interference between her and overzealous or patronizing sales staff, and fetched and carried a bewildering array of sizes and styles between rack and fitting room.

She hated every minute. She doesn't really fit any standard size, being short and dumpy. Everything was too big, too small, too tight, too loose, too hot, too revealing. On one return trip to the fitting room, my cautious knock revealed her standing in front of the mirror in her limp and faded slip, white flesh puffing beneath the straps and tears crawling down her flushed cheeks. I could see sweat pearling on her forehead.

“They don't make clothes for people my shape,” she said. “We might as well go home.”

Mum and I were never exactly close, but I felt for her in that moment. I knew exactly how hopeless she felt in that claustrophobic space, unable to ignore the mirror, every imperfection heightened by the ill-fitting, ugly garments, every one of which shouted at the top of its supercilious and overpriced lungs that she'd never, in a million years, be anything special.

I gave her a quick hug.

“Maybe we're going about this all wrong,” I said. “Why don't you get dressed and go and have a nice cup of coffee somewhere and I'll look around and find some possibles for you?”

It was a desperate throw—I had no idea what we'd do if I couldn't find anything—but she agreed with relief and I left her furtively easing off her shoes with a coffee in front of her.

I veered off into a fabric store and attacked the pattern books. It didn't take long to find patterns for a simple sleeveless dress and an elegant fitted jacket with a peplum. A bit more ferreting turned up a supple green fabric for the dress and a beautiful heavy shot silk that reminded me of a peacock's feathers for the jacket. Mum was enchanted.

“But who's going to make it?” she said. It was apparently a revelation that there were seamstresses who made a living that way.

“Saved the day, I hear,” Dad said, and that sort of approval made the remaining days buoyant. But the family could still take me by surprise.

I was talking to Neil a couple of days before he was due to arrive and we were speculating idly about the reception.

“Will there be speeches, do you think?” I asked. I couldn't imagine Holly's logger father making a speech any more than I could see Dad getting up in front of a crowd. “I suppose the best man will make one at least. I don't even know who the best man is.”

There was a little silence at the other end of the line.

“It's me. I thought for sure Stephen would have told you that!”

For a second I felt absurdly offended. Not at Neil being your choice, you understand, who better? Just at not knowing, at being no more in the know than the most distant second cousin twice removed among Holly's tribe. And the niggling, humiliatingly unworthy feeling that Neil was actually closer and more involved in the family than I was. I gave myself a shake.

“He probably thought for sure
you'd
tell me!”

Neil arrived for the ceremony, and we dressed up like mannequins and did our best to fill up the right side of the church. We gazed, somewhat bemused, at the crowded pews on the other side of the aisle. Mum, I saw, was checking the outfit Holly's mother was wearing, a strained-looking apricot sheath with a floating chiffon tunic, accompanied by a matching tulle hat like a meringue. “Could have done with a size larger,” she whispered, “and that hat does nothing for her, does it?” Dad smiled vaguely and you fidgeted in the front pew.

Then the noise died and the organ played and Holly came down the aisle with her father, and you turned to watch her with such pride and longing in your face that I could have wept on the spot except that Neil winked at me and for a while he was the only person there.

What do you remember most about your wedding now, Stephen? You were probably too nervous to register the vicar's mistake just after the
Dearly Beloved
bit—perhaps you were still waiting for someone to yell, “I object!” from the back and missed him addressing you both as Michael and Tiffany. I heard Holly's mother gasp, and Holly looked at you, but it was Neil who set him straight. I wonder if you'd have been really married if nobody had corrected him?

There was one seriously bad moment. Holly's five-year-old nephew was a pageboy, dressed in a kilt and a black velvet jacket. I looked at him and saw Daniel and was nearly unseamed by the torrent of regret. But weddings are good for tears and nobody even noticed.

By the time you walked back down the aisle with Holly on your arm, your stunned look had evaporated, and I don't think you stopped smiling for the rest of the day. Your grin is there in all the wedding photos and echoed in all the faces pressing around you both. It continued through the reception at the church hall, through the lame speeches and Holly's brother having one too many Scotches and trying to do the limbo under a table, through the screeching feedback from the microphones as the band set up, through the garrulous uncles and gushing aunts, one of the cousins fainting in a corner, and the pageboy throwing up in the bushes by the front door.

For part of the time, Neil was busy with best man stuff, and knowing nobody, I could sit quietly and watch. It fascinated me to see this large family in action, to see the ones who would always be the organizers clutching arms, drawing people together, sending them on errands, jollying the shy ones, and carrying glasses and plates to the elderly. And I saw how easily you seemed to be assimilated into this throng of strangers, and how readily people talked to Neil. Even Mum was deep in conversation with a woman who could have been her sister, and Dad was standing in a knot of men with loosened ties, face flushed, drinking beer. Only I seemed disconnected and I wondered, not for the first time, why I had such a talent for isolation.

And then the dancing started, and Neil walked the length of the hall to collect me, saying, “Your turn” in my ear as we swept into a waltz and collided with Holly's Mum and Dad, and the rest of the reception folded in on us, became rhythm and warm contact, the soft slide of fabric on flesh, Neil's breath mingling with mine, and utter surrender to contentment and the climate of love.

As we drove away together afterward to return to Sechelt, Mum and Dad and many of the other guests crowded round the car, waving and smiling, banging on the trunk and tying ribbon to the aerial, as if we were the newlyweds, off at last on the honeymoon we had never been able to afford when we got married.

And the mood lingered so that when we got to Hope, we looked at each other, and without a word turned into the Swiss Chalet car park and fell, laughing, into each other's arms on a creaking, hollowed bed while the traffic whined by outside, unregarded.

Eleven years passed after Daniel disappeared.

Sounds like a fairytale, no? They always have those incantatory phrases, usually involving a magical number—a year and a day, seven years of bad luck, a hundred-year sleep—to invoke the power of a spell, the terms of the bargain, the respite between the curse and its fulfillment. Take your pick. There was an element of sleepwalking about them, moving through day after day, dulled by routine, but never forgetting, rasped raw by all the reminders. All it would take for the grief to rise and consume us again would be the turn of a child's head, a toy in a shop window, a lone miniature sock at the back of a drawer.

There were the deliberate reminders too: the yearly reports from Detective Mallory, still officially on the case; the faded pictures in the post office and the bus depot; the
TV
program on the fifth anniversary of Daniel's disappearance and the oddly familiar but utterly strange approximation of his nine-year-old face the police artist produced for the occasion. Worst were the hideous echoes—news of other abductions, or the discovery of skeletal remains, which always prompted the press to speculate and us to relive the agony of waiting for news that never comes. These are private griefs, but they have a public face. They never go away. We smile even, occasionally, but we carry open wounds beneath our clothes that fester and will not heal.

Eleven years passed. Neil became a celebrity. Alvarsson's Boy was a cult figure among the cognoscenti, a miniature Everyman, a symbol, as
The New York Times
had it, of “our perennial, fragile hope for a better world.” He continued to produce the stamp-sized miniatures, exploring every corner of the globe, every facet of life, and moved on to larger canvases too, all with the heightened reality of the world as he thought it ought to be.

And me, Stephen? I became more of a fixture in the staffroom, one of the Old Brigade, testy about falling standards and the inadequacy of elementary schools, cynical about principals and ministers and people who called themselves educators, skeptical about the magical new band-aid of computers, happiest when left alone with the kids to get on with things in the classroom. The experienced teacher, I suppose, no different from thousands of others, with a comfortable enough home life and, as a new member of staff once remarked brightly, to a strangled silence, nobody to worry about, really, except ourselves.

Fast-forward then, to a January day in 1986.

I was sitting in the school library listening to Ed Watkins, one of the shop teachers, bickering with the vice principal about lunch duty. The staff meeting was already an hour and a half old; I had crossed through only half of the agenda. To my right, Miss Penfold's head was inclining backward to meet the bookshelves, and as she relaxed against volumes 3 to 5 of the
World Book
, her jaw slumped and the faintest of ladylike snores rattled in her throat. I caught Ella's eye and choked on a giggle.

Ed had flustered the vice-principal to his satisfaction and allowed the principal to wrench the meeting back on track. Balding—Mr. Spalding—was tentatively approaching a delicate topic. On my left, my good friend Sheila Oddy, queen of the English department, waited expectantly.

“Firstly of all,” said the principal, “we have to face the fact that we are going to have cutbacks next year. Secondly of all . . .”

“God,” whispered Sheila, “that makes seven times he's said that so far.”

She was keeping a score with neat blocks of four vertical lines crossed through with a fifth oblique stroke. These documents had become a legendary tally of Mr. Spalding's misuse of the English language during his lengthy monologues in staff meetings. The record was twenty-seven solecisms in an hour and ten minutes. Sheila could not have said what she intended to do with this mass of data, or even what it meant. On bad days she would mutter darkly, “They want to know what's wrong with education? I could show them!” Usually, she would laugh and call it The Impotent's Revenge. She was just an English teacher, after all, and Balding Spalding had vaulted to his present position after a career in physical education with a glowing reputation for administrative ability based, it would seem, on the impeccable organization of round-robin tournaments.

I came back from a contemplation of the ceiling fan sluggishly stirring the air far above my head. Several of my colleagues were restive. Hissing Ed was in full spate again.

“Will the administration give an assurance that any cuts they have in mind will not have an adverse effect on the level of service offered at the classroom level? They keep docking the money and telling us we've got to do more with less. They expect us to do everything for these kids—we're social workers and nannies, that's what, but no extra money, oh no. Why should teachers and programs get the axe when the fat cats at the board office never feel the pinch? What the hell do we need
three
assistant superintendents for?”

“Up the workers!” whispered Sheila as Ed came to a stop, breathing audibly, his chin stuck out as if daring the principal to throw a punch.

Mr. Spalding gathered himself.

“Firstly of all, we're all in this together, all part of the team . . .”

“Oh my God,” groaned Sheila and marked two more little strokes on her scorecard.

“Secondly of all, we don't have much choice in the matter. The board's running a deficit. We'll just have to tighten our belts and spread ourselves a little thinner.”

I felt intensely weary. Another invasion of the available resources. How far could they stretch before they burst like the unfortunate host in
Alien
? And how much did it all matter, anyway? Like Miss Penfold, I sagged against the reference section. The room was amazingly hot. I could almost believe the tired views and empty huffing rhetoric were literally raising the temperature, fuelling strong thermals that rose visible as currents in water. I could feel my own thoughts, caught by convection, rising helplessly out of my grasp, slowly widening the gyre, until they disappeared into a shimmering haze far above to glide in expanding circles about the twirling blades.

To recapture some grip on reality, or at least consciousness, and make the distant voices speed up once more into recognizable words, I rolled my head to look at Miss Penfold, gaunt after a day in special ed. Even as I took in the faint flush on her face, and the translucent blue eyelids, there came a sudden pause in the argument and in the stillness, the top plate of Miss Penfold's notoriously ill-fitting dentures fell with a clack on the bottom teeth and she woke, fumbling at her mouth with a tiny mew of distress.