Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  Verna blinked at her. “I’m sorry. Closure? Baggage?”

  “Oh, come on, Auntie Verna!” Paisley sounded miserable and exasperated all at the same time. “What baggage do you think? Family baggage. Family issues. Mom issues. Romy and Tai issues. The way it all went down. The way everything came undone. The fact that we were lost and nobody came looking for us. That we were a family and then, suddenly, we weren’t. The fact that Mom did things that put us at enormous risk and didn’t stop to think of the consequences. And now I find, to top it all off, she’s up and died. So I can’t ask her why she did what she did, which means I can’t forgive her. And I want to forgive her. I do. But I can’t. Because she’s dead. Why the hell else do you think I’m here?”

  “I see,” said Verna, suitably chastened. “That baggage. Of course.” How much of this was her fault? she wondered. Surely she could not be held to account for Fern’s mistakes. Still, hadn’t she been glad when the children were taken away? Secretly. Seeing Fern get her comeuppance? She stared into her stew. She didn’t feel very hungry. “Paisley,” she ventured, “what happened? I know that Ben came and got you, but that’s all I know. Romy can barely remember your mother and God knows where Tai is. What happened that split you all apart?”

  “You never knew?” Paisley sounded surprised.

  Verna shook her head. “Fern never talked about it. As a matter of fact, she refused to talk about it. ‘Sunny side up!’ she would say whenever you or the others were mentioned. ‘Water under the bridge.’ Then she’d change the subject. Fast.” What Verna also remembered, but did not mention was the stab of pleasure she had always felt in seeing Fern flinch at the mention of her children’s names, then turn away. What a monster she had been. It shamed her now.

  “Wow!” Paisley was clearly taken aback. “I thought you knew. You really didn’t know? You and Granddad?”

  Verna shook her head.

  “Okay, then.” Paisley put her soup bowl on the coffee table and sat back in the big chair. “Tai was the first to go. That happened when we were in the Kootenays. The Patels came and got him in the middle of the night. Not Jag. The family. Or some of the family at least. A gang of them. All I know was that one minute we’re asleep — Tai and I were sharing a bed — and the next minute I’m waking up to this jabbering sound — it sounded like a flock of seagulls had descended upon the bed. They had just swarmed us — a whole pack of them — and snatched Tai. We never saw him again.”

  “Jesus!” Verna murmured.

  “It was terrifying,” Paisley said. “And absolutely chaotic. Dogs were barking. Hell, wolves were howling from the nearby park. Mom and I were both screaming our heads off. Romy was bawling …”

  “How awful!”

  “Apparently Jag’s family had finally managed to talk him into an arranged marriage — some girl from India — and decided that she should raise Tai, not Mom, so they just came and took him.”

  “And Fern didn’t call the police?” Verna asked. “Surely it was a clear case of child abduction.”

  “Ah, now there’s the rub.” Paisley laughed ruefully. “The house we were living in was a grow-op. We were living there for free in exchange for Mom tending the crop. She was what is called a farmer. So calling the cops in was not an option.”

  “I see,” said Verna.

  Paisley stood, crossed over to the fire, and, kneeling down in front of it, scrutinized it critically, her head canted to the right.

  “So what about you? What about Romy?”

  Paisley took a poker from the stand and prodded the fire experimentally. “Maybe a year after they snatched Tai, Mom met this guy, Diego. He was a real spiritual guy. At least he thought he was. And Mom thought he was too. She was pretty frigging gullible. And she was still pretty cut up about Tai. Depressed. You know. So the next thing we know we’re off to Brazil with Diego.”

  “I always wondered how you ended up there. It was such a weird place to hightail off to — Brazil.”

  Paisley replaced the poker. She stood. “You don’t know the half of it, Auntie Verna. It just so happened that Diego was a member of the Children of God.”

  “The who?”

  “The Children of God,” Paisley repeated, “C.O.G., aka the Family of Love, aka Heaven’s Magic, aka the Family …”

  Verna interrupted her. “You mean the cult?”

  “The cult.” Paisley sat back down in the chair.

  “Good Lord!” Verna considered this new information. “Fern joined a cult.”

  “She did,” said Paisley grimly. “And it was a pretty freaky place. Lots of crazy shit going on, mostly having to do with sex. Not a good scene. I mean, I was just eleven, and I knew it was not a good scene.”

  Verna was dumfounded. “I guess not.”

  “So we had been in this commune in Saõ Paulo for maybe a half a year and then, one day, out of the blue, there’s my dad and Romy’s dad, Paul. They show up at the commune’s gate with somebody from the Canadian consulate and the next thing I know I’m on one plane headed back to Ontario with Dad and my little sister’s on an entirely different plane with Paul and headed for God knows where. It turns out that Dad had always kept tabs on me and when he found out where Mom had gone and with whom, he contacted Paul and together they flew down to Brazil to rescue us. Paul was sort of a self-centred flake and probably wouldn’t have come if Dad hadn’t guilted him into it — he left Mom before Roo was even born, just walked out. Which was the reason we ended up living in the Kootenays grow-op.”

  “Wow!” said Verna. “That’s some story.”

  “They showed up just in the nick of time, too,” said Paisley. “I was about to turn twelve in a couple of months.”

  Verna raised her eyebrows, questioning.

  “According to C.O.G. rules of the road that’s the age for sexual initiation,” Romy explained. “When they can rape you with impunity, in other words. That was just about the time that sex with minors was forbidden — the leaders had taken a lot of heat on that issue — but, believe me, it was still going on.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Verna. So the men had been right all along. Fern really had been an unfit mother. Of course, that was also what Verna had always thought — that she was an unfit mother, an unfit anything. Then why should it surprise her to find out it was, in fact, true? Surprise and distress her?

  “Yeah, so I was pretty glad to see Dad,” concluded Paisley. “And grateful, too. I still am. For saving me. Only I never saw my mother or sister again.”

  Verna remembered Fern returning from Brazil without the girls. She had stayed with Donald for some months and would never say what she had been doing down there or whom she had been with, but only that Ben and Paul had come and taken the girls from her; that they had called her an unfit mother and that she supposed she was. She had been very subdued at the time. What Verna had taken for blitheness, for insouciance, could that have been despair?

  “I made a second call when I came downstairs,” said Paisley.

  “Oh?”

  “I called Tai.”

  Verna looked up in alarm. “Tai?”

  Paisley nodded.

  “You know where Tai is?”

  “Yeah,” said Paisley evenly. “He’s in medical school. At Western.”

  “But … how did you find him?”

  “I went online to 411.ca and searched Ontario for his father. There were eighteen J. Patels. Then I called each of them until I found the right one. Number Seven. He lives in Brampton now. Jag, that is. Not Tai. His wife was pretty pissed off. She didn’t want Jag to tell me where Tai was. I got the impression she hated anything to do with Mom. Maybe she was jealous.”

  “Everyone was jealous of Fern,” said Verna. “I certainly was.”

  “In any case, the two of them are having this big-ass fight on the other end of the line. She’s screeching at him and he’s yelling at her and the two of them are grabbing at the phone. But in the end he got it away from her long enough to tell me how to get in touch with Tai.�
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  “Medical school,” said Verna. Little, snivelling Tai, always hanging off of Fern like a little monkey. A cling-on, that’s how Bob had described him. Contemptuously, of course.

  “I think Jag still carries a torch for Mom,” Paisley said. “When I told him that she was dead, I thought I heard him … you know … sobbing. It was hard to tell with all the noise his wife was making.”

  “Jag was a sweet boy,” remembered Verna. “Awfully young.”

  “In any case,” said Paisley, “He should be heading out about now. Driving through the night. He’ll be here by morning.”

  “Who?” Verna asked. “Jag?”

  “No. Tai.”

  “Tai? Tomorrow?”

  “Driving up. From London.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To scatter Mom’s ashes, of course! And to meet me and Romy. And you, Auntie Verna. He has to be back by Tuesday, so he thought he’d better come right away.”

  “Well,” said Verna, her heart sinking. “The more the merrier.”

  “Hey, Verna!”

  Verna’s heart bumped once in her chest, then, “Oh, of course,” she said. “Lionel! You gave me a start!” She had expected to encounter him, of course. That was why she had come downstairs, after all. Why, after she and Paisley had brushed the mouse dirt off her old bed and made it up with musty-smelling sheets that they found in the upstairs linen closet, Verna had not retired for the night, as Paisley had, but instead had gone downstairs, freshened up her drink in the kitchen, pulled on the black-and-white flannel shirt jacket she had worn the previous evening and wandered out onto the porch. To see Lionel, to get his take on things, maybe even, like Paisley, to get some answers. That she had expected him did not, however, seem to lessen the jolt she experienced upon actually seeing him. Encountering a ghost was probably never an easy thing, she reflected; it must always be more or less unsettling. She sank down into the Bar Harbor chair nearest to where he sat cross-legged on the floor, his broad back to her, his face turned in the direction of the lake. “It’s been quite a day,” she began.

  But Lionel motioned her to be quiet. After a moment he asked, “There! Do you hear that sound? That hum?”

  Verna frowned and leaned forward. She closed her eyes and listened intently. “That kind of high frequency hum?” she asked, isolating one strand from the bundle of night noises — the jug o’ rum ... jug o’ rum ... of frogs, the yodel of the male loon, the soft hooting of a grey owl. “Is that what you’re talking about?”

  Lionel nodded. “Know what that is?”

  She considered this for a moment. “Nope. What?”

  “Blackfly hatch.”

  Donald had been the resident expert when it came to blackflies. “Did you know that we have over seventy different kinds of mosquitoes in Canada?” he would ask the girls. “And one thousand different species of blackflies?” He made it sound like this was, if not a good thing, then at least a matter of some interest. According to Donald, a hatch was that interval during which blackfly adults, enclosed in air bubbles, escape from their underwater cocoons and rise to the surface of the lake with a resounding pop. If you could hear a hatch, he had told them, it meant that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of flies were emerging from the water all at once. “Ooh! Disgusting!” they had cried.

  “Great,” said Verna. “First Romy. Then Paisley. And now Tai’s driving up from southwestern Ontario. Through the night. And the blackflies are hatching.”

  “Do you know where blackflies come from?” Lionel asked.

  “Hell?”

  “Close,” said Lionel. “My no’okomiss says that the first blackflies rose from the ashes of a windigo, a cannibal manitou who roams the forests in winter looking for human flesh to feed on. That is why blackflies are so hungry.”

  “I met your no’okomiss today.”

  “I know,” said Lionel. “I was in the canoe.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments while Verna considered the pros and cons of asking him about the giant fish she had seen that morning. On the one hand, she didn’t want to appear overly credulous in regards to the possibility of having encountered mer-persons in the lake (if, in fact, it were possible to appear overly credulous to a ghost); on the other, who else could she ask and not appear insane? “I took your advice. I went for a swim this morning. You were right. It made me feel better. Much better, actually.” She reflected on this. Even now, hours later, she felt better than she had in … well, years, maybe. “Then later, when the skiff had overturned and I was diving to try and get away from Romy, I saw something. Like a fish. Only it was too big to be a fish.”

  Lionel nodded. “A Nebaunaubaequae.”

  “A mermaid?”

  “Sometimes they let you see them. Not always.”

  “Or it could have been a hallucination,” Verna countered. “Me seeing things that aren’t there. Like you.”

  “Could be,” said Lionel. “Maybe. You never know.”

  Tai arrived just as Verna was emerging from the lake. This time she had thought to wear a swimsuit for what she had determined the previous evening would be her daily morning swim. At least as long as she was here at the lake. It was an old suit — a purple Speedo. Portions of her shone whitely through the threadbare Lycra (she hadn’t worn a swimsuit for oh, so long), but it provided more coverage than nothing at all and would presumably prevent her sister’s children from being totally grossed out by her aging, sagging flesh. Not that Fern hadn’t skinny-dipped at the drop of anybody at all’s drawers, she thought, but she had been younger at the time and now, of course, she was dead.

  On seeing the car — a late-model, champagne-coloured Toyota Camry — pull up, she had closed her eyes, taken a deep breath, and fiercely read herself the riot act. Romy and Paisley had surprised her. Caught her off-guard. But she had known in advance of Tai’s coming and she was determined — absolutely determined — not to be so … well, weird and hostile and defensive with him. And it would be good to have a young man around the place, wouldn’t it? Given that menacing stranger she and Romy had seen just yesterday. And a doctor, too, or a medical student, at any rate — perhaps he could tell her what to do about Romy; point her in the right direction. So get a grip, Verna, she told herself sternly. Suck it up. Tai’s being here is a good thing and, besides, what choice have you? Pay now or pay later. Wrapping a towel resolutely around herself, she strode along the beach toward the Camry, trailed by Jude. Jag must have done all right for himself, she thought, for his son to drive such a nice car — it was, after all, a doctor sort of car, the kind of car one expected a doctor to drive. The door on the driver’s side opened and a young man slid out. Jude took this as his signal to bark riotously and bound toward the car, tail whopping back and forth like a nunchakus. The young man — Tai — shrank quickly back, interposing the car door between him and the dog.

  “It’s okay,” called Verna. “He’s friendly!”

  Somewhat hesitantly, Tai pushed the door open again and braced himself. The Labrador lunged at him, then proceeded to sniff him up the way police pat people down, pinning him against the car, his hands raised and open in a gesture of surrender, his narrow shoulders hunched.

  Verna grabbed Jude by the collar and pulled him back. “You mustn’t mind him,” she explained. “He’s just … enthusiastic. About everything. You must be Tai. I’m your Aunt Verna.” Funny, she realized, but she was starting to enjoy the sound of those two words together: Aunt and Verna. Auntie Verna not so much.

  Tai blinked at her. He seemed taken aback. “Oh, yes. Hi. Sorry. It’s been a long time since anyone called me Tai. Actually Paisley asked if this was Tai the first time she called me, and, for a moment, I thought she had a wrong number.” He started to extend a soft-looking hand to her, but aborted the mission when he saw that she was holding the dog back with one hand and her towel in place with the other.

  “I don’t understand,” said Verna. “Tai’s your name. I was at your christening. Or your ‘wiccani
ng,’ at any rate. I think that’s what Fern called it.”

  “Yes, well,” said Tai forlornly. “My family didn’t approve. Well, my father didn’t mind it, but Deepa Auntie — my stepmother, that is … anyway, they always called me Kamal. After my paternal grandfather. I think they even had it changed … you know … legally.” He pointed at Jude. “I remember that dog. That’s Granddad’s dog. His name is Cato, isn’t it?”

  Verna laughed. “Cato was three dogs ago. Don’t worry. It’s an honest mistake. Dad always kept black Labs and they do look pretty much alike. No, this one is named Jude and he’s a good dog, isn’t he? Aren’t you, Jude? You’re a good dog!” She paddled him on his rear end. For some reason it rankled her that Tai’s family should have changed his name from the one Fern had chosen, this despite the fact that she herself had always made fun of it, saying that it was a hippie name. Well, it was a hippie name and what was wrong with that? And what kind of a name was Kamal, anyway? Oh, right. An Indian name.

  “Hey, Jude,” Tai greeted the dog. Then, getting it, “Granddad did that on purpose.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “I was sorry to hear that he died. From what I can remember, he was pretty nice.”

  “That he was.”

  “Kind of vague.”

  “That, too.”

  Now that she saw Tai in person, she dismissed the notion that he might provide any sort of muscle to their operation. He was diminutive — five foot five inches at the most, if that — and very slight in build. His features were delicate — a pale, perfectly shaped mouth, a Grecian nose, a square chin and lustrous eyes fringed by very long, dark lashes. His hair was a sooty, soft black and his skin was a light, even taupe. He looked like Jag had as a young man, but prettier. That being said, he did not strike Verna as effeminate so much as careful, precise. But, no, she acknowledged, he was certainly no bruiser. The lanky, overgrown Paisley would afford more protection than him.