Once Upon a Time in West Toronto

by Terri Favro

  Some of the dead friend’s novels are on their bookshelf. Dad hasn’t read them yet. Benny says that Sophia shouldn’t read them until she’s older.

  “They’re a little raw,” says Benny. “Adventure sci-fi stuff from the seventies. A lot of fantasy stories about this superhuman guy called Giro. Some of it gets violent.”

  Benny is one of the few people who talks easily about Sophia’s mother to her father. At times, Benny sounds confused, accidentally calling Mom by another name—Claire.

  “Sorry,” says Benny, tapping his head when Sophia points this out. “Senior’s moment.”

  Sophia sits at her desk in math class and feels the numbers swim out of her head. All the little rules and tricks and memory aids that Dad gave her that made so much sense are gone. She sits and stares at the questions and makes a few attempts. It’s hopeless.

  The following afternoon, Mr. Lennon hands back the marked tests. Sophia is not surprised by her failing grade. There is a notation beside it: Please get your mother/father to sign and return tomorrow. It’s a standard note all teachers write on a test they want a parent to sign, but it always seems to Sophia that that’s exactly what she’s got: a mother/father.

  She puts the test in her backpack. Her father will be disappointed when he sees it. Deeply so. Not angry: he never, ever gets angry. Just disappointed. Sophia decides to take the failed test straight upstairs to the third floor of Our Lady of Lourdes Secondary School where Dad teaches the senior students, to show it to him and get him to sign it right away. Then she can get the disappointment part over with before dinner. It’s better if he hears it from her rather than in the staff room. Since Dad is the head of the math department, there’s the uncomfortable business of the teacher who failed her technically answering to Dad. Sophia often wishes she had gone to a different high school but her father wouldn’t hear of it.

  Up on the third floor, one of the music teachers sees her and calls out, “Sophia! Are you looking for your Dad? I just saw him in the science lab.”

  There’s a little storeroom where the science teachers keep all the beakers, Bunsen burners, and pipettes. If you enter the lab through the storeroom, you come out of a door at the front of the classroom, as if appearing from heaven. This is how she finds herself in the storeroom, her father’s voice drifting from the classroom through the adjoining door.

  “I’m sorry, Barbara. You have to understand that I have other priorities.”

  “Oh, I’m getting that,” a woman’s voice answers. “I’m trying to figure out what they are. Half the time I think you like being with me. The other half, you barely speak to me. If this is going nowhere, I’d just as soon know now.”

  Barbara is Ms. O’Leary, one of the chemistry teachers. She’s a very thin, tall woman with unconvincing red hair, who wears large, complicated-looking earrings and a cloyingly fruity perfume. She and Dad have gone out a few times.

  “I have my daughter to think about. She has no one else. I have no other family and neither did my late wife.”

  “So you’re telling me that there’s no way I could be a mother to Sophia?”

  Sophia’s heart speeds up, as if she’s just left the blocks for a hundred-yard dash. Be a mother to Sophia? Oh my God.

  “Sophia doesn’t need a mother; she’s got me. She knows she can depend on me one hundred percent for the rest of her life. That’s the way I want it. Just her and me.”

  Sophia suddenly feels as though she’s being pulled down into the earth by a heavy rope. She can see her whole life before her. Her father will continue to look after her, for now. Eventually, when he’s older, Sophia will have to look after him. She is never, ever going to be able to leave home. Or him.

  Quietly, so that they don’t know she’s back there listening to their lover’s quarrel (if you can call it that—Sophia suspects her Dad doesn’t love Ms. O’Leary), she opens her backpack, removes the math test, lays it on the counter, and sets a beaker on top of it.

  Then she starts walking. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She’s just going.

  From the front entrance of the school, she runs down the long winding cement steps to the street. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she has no plan or direction, no idea what’s going to happen next.

  She comes to a familiar corner where two high-rise apartment buildings stand side by side. Her friend Patrick lives in one of these buildings; she remembers walking him to the door once. She goes in, locates CHEN on the board, and presses in the code she sees next to the name. There’s a click on the intercom and she hears Patrick’s voice, “Yes”?

  “Patrick, it’s Sophia.”

  There’s a pause. “Who?”

  “Sophia! Your friend from school?”

  There’s another pause. “What’s the password?”

  Sophia has forgotten that Patrick is a latchkey kid. Sixteen years old and he’s still not allowed to let anyone in unless they know the password. His parents are even more protective than her father.

  “Patrick, come on! How would I know your password? Look, it’s me! We eat lunch together every day! You know my voice, right?”

  There is another long pause. “What’s the funny name Sophia calls her dog?”

  Sophia realizes what he’s trying to do. Smart.

  “His real name’s Astro but I call him Astroturf,” she answers.

  “Come in.”

  The buzzer sounds.

  Patrick lives on the seventh floor. The elevator creaks its way up as though it’s not sure it can make it without having to stop and cough something out of its gears. On the second floor, the doors grind slowly apart to let in a woman in a long black dress and headscarf, carrying an overflowing laundry basket. A group of children enter with her; the two boys are in striped T-shirts and jeans, wearing small, round hats on their heads; the girls are in headscarves and long dresses like their mother, but with running shoes on underneath.

  “You go down?” the mother asks Sophia.

  “No, up.”

  The mother shrugs. “I go for ride,” she says, resigned.

  One of the kids—a boy, of course—presses all the buttons on the panel. It’s going to be a long ride up, stopping at every floor. The little boy smirks triumphantly at Sophia as if saying, Just try and stop me being bad!

  “Tzk, tzk, tzk!” the mother chides him.

  When she gets to Patrick’s apartment, he peeks out at her through the peephole, then opens the door with the chain still on, and sticks his eye to the crack. “Hi Sophia. What are you doing here?”

  “I just thought I’d come for a visit. Maybe we can, I dunno, watch a little TV.”

  Patrick unchains the door and lets her in. “I’m playing pong right now, but we could watch afterwards.”

  “Cool,” she says.

  Patrick Chen is almost as tall as Sophia. He has a round, sensitive face that has recently broken out in an explosion of acne. Patrick pours glasses of juice for both of them and sets out a tray of cheese and bread. The two of them settle down in front of the pong game and start hitting the tiny white ball back and forth across the screen. The room is quiet except for the game noises, and the distant sound of rap music several floors away.

  Cooking smells are starting to waft through the apartment door. Sophia is not sure what she’s smelling, but it isn’t any of the things her father makes.

  “Where are your folks, anyway?” asks Sophia, to be sociable.

  “Working.”

  “Both at the same time?”

  “Yup. Game over! Okay let’s see what’s on the tube,” he says, obviously copying something someone at school said. Patrick’s speech is heavily accented; the Chens came from China just a couple of years ago.

  Sitting on the floor in front of the TV, Sophia is suddenly blissfully happy.

  Just try to make me not be bad, she thinks to h
erself.

  Marcello is working on new math curriculum guidelines. The draft is due tomorrow. He stays at his desk until five o’clock, packs up his work, and leaves his classroom, just as the music teacher walks by lugging a cello case. “Did Sophia find you?”

  “Sophia? No. Was she looking for me?”

  “I told her you were in the chemistry lab. Maybe she couldn’t find you and went home?”

  “Maybe,” says Marcello doubtfully.

  On impulse, he goes back to the lab and enters through the back storage room. That’s when he sees Sophia’s math test sitting beside the sink, under a beaker, marked with an “F” and the note: Please have your mother/father…

  Marcello suddenly thinks he knows what might have happened. He pictures Sophia coming into the room while he was talking to Barbara. Damn it all. What did he say, exactly?

  Feeling as though he should have been home an hour ago, he rushes out of the school.

  At home, Marcello calls out Sophia’s name several times but only Astro the dog comes waddling out to meet him. He stands in the middle of the house, heart thundering. He’s having trouble breathing. Where is she? Maybe a friend’s house? She’s never gone anywhere without permission so Marcello doesn’t have phone numbers for any friends she might visit. He always drives her and picks her up. Why would he need phone numbers?

  He sits on the couch, trying to calm himself. It’s almost six o’clock. She’ll be getting hungry by now. Where is she? And how long can he wait before he calls the police?

  There is nothing he can do. Can’t work, can’t listen to music, can’t read. Time will stand still until Sophia gets home. By seven, Marcello can’t stand it anymore. He calls 13 Division and is put on the line with an Officer MacKay.

  “Well, she hasn’t been gone that long, sir. Are you sure she didn’t just go to a friend’s house? Have you tried calling around?”

  “Not coming home is out of character for my daughter. She wouldn’t wander away without telling me.”

  “Was she upset about anything? Any arguments, that type of thing?”

  “She failed a test. But she knows I wouldn’t get mad over that.”

  “Look, I’m taking the particulars but I think we should give it a little more time,” says MacKay. “Most sixteen-year-olds turn up eventually. If I were you, I’d search around, see if you can find names and numbers of friends you could call. But if she doesn’t get home in the next hour, call me back.”

  The officer gives Marcello his direct number, who jots it down with a shaking hand. Surely God wouldn’t punish him by allowing Sophia to be hurt. Surely not.

  But what will he do if a terrible tragedy has happened and he never sees his daughter again? He can’t lose his wife and unborn child and his daughter and be expected to keep living. Over the past ten years he’s become amazed by his body’s stubborn persistence, his heart continuing to beat stupidly in his chest. If Sophia never comes home, he’ll end up a shadow-man. He decides to appeal to God, but what comes out of his head is more like bargaining than praying: If Sophia comes home safely, I’ll make up for everything I’ve done wrong in my life. As if in response to his prayer, he hears a knock.

  Sophia forgot her key again, he thinks, hope soaring. But when he opens the door, it isn’t Sophia but two police officers, a man and a woman, their squad car parked at the curb.

  “Mr. Umbriaco? I’m Officer McKay,” says the male officer. “This is Officer Oleski. You sounded so worried we thought we’d better talk now.”

  Sitting on the living room couch, Oleski flips through her notebook while MacKay’s walkie-talkie, strapped to his belt, keeps squawking. Marcello feels uneasy in their presence. He can never completely shake that feeling of being wanted for questioning. Do the police still suspect he’s Kowalchuk’s murderer and Ida’s kidnapper? It’s been so many years. And he’s legally changed his name. Of course, there’s also the matter of Sophia’s forged birth certificate. If the police asked to see it, would they be able to recognize it as a fake? Maybe use forensics to connect her to the missing baby from Love Canal? He’s seen things like that happen on a new TV show, Law and Order.

  “I want to make sure I’ve got your name right,” says Oleski. She spells Marcello’s full name, first and last. “You’re a teacher, where?”

  “Our Lady of Lourdes.”

  “And you last saw your daughter, when?”

  Marcello walks Oleski through the series of events: the music teacher seeing Sophia in the hallway; the test sitting in the storeroom of the science lab; his suspicion that she had overheard his argument with a colleague.

  “Colleague?” says McKay.

  “She’s also a former girlfriend,” admits Marcello.

  “Are you separated? Divorced? Is it possible Sophia is with her mother?” asks McKay.

  “I’m a widower. Sophia’s mother was killed in an accident over ten years ago.”

  No matter how many times he says this, it still ratchets open the crack inside his heart a little wider.

  “Maybe the conversation upset Sophia, and she’s hiding somewhere,” suggests Oleski, looking down at her notes. She taps them with her pen. “There’s something about your name. It sounds so familiar.”

  Marcello braces himself for what she will say next: Aren’t you the guy we interviewed about that accident during World Cup? The one who said his wife’s car had been sabotaged?

  “Aren’t you that guy who got stuck under a house, back in the seventies? Some type of explosion?” asks Oleski. “I remember seeing you being rescued on TV when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah. That was me,” he answers warily.

  “Small world,” says Oleski. “Do you have a picture of Sophia? Something recent? A school photo, maybe? Or a yearbook?”

  Marcello tries to quiet his breathing. “Give me a minute.”

  Going into Sophia’s room, he pushes through the clutter on her desk, searching for the envelope of school photographs. Finally he pulls open the top drawer where he sees a smiling Sophia in her school uniform, her face repeated again and again and again.

  When he pulls out the sheet, he notices a bundle of letters underneath it, the top one hand-addressed to Ida Fabbro Umbriaco.

  What the hell is this?

  He yanks off the ribbon holding the bundle together. There must be, what—ten letters here? All addressed to Ida. He pulls one out at random and skims it. The dense Italian script is full of phrases he recognizes instantly: I love you, I miss you, I wish you hadn’t run away … it’s a love letter. Signed by someone named Paolo.

  The letter is dated 1977. A love letter, to Ida.

  Ida was writing to someone back in Italy and keeping his letters to her, bundled lovingly with a ribbon. All that time they were together she was keeping secrets from Marcello, who loved her so much he would have gladly taken her place behind the wheel of the Chevy. If it weren’t for Sophia he would have found a way to join Ida long ago. Pills, the Falls, car exhaust and a hose through the window. Something.

  Perhaps—and this thought is so poisonous that it crawls over his mind like a spider—Ida never loved him. Maybe she kept meeting up with the other man when she was a flight attendant. What would stop her from taking a lover on a stopover?

  He’s often felt Ida with him, touching him, talking to him, trying to comfort him. Now even that hope has winked out like a dying picture tube. It’s all just a voice in his head. A stupid wish that once, he loved and was loved. He feels his heart slowing down and giving up.

  He places the letters back in Sophia’s drawer. The paper feels as soft as butter. It’s been handled a lot, the letters read and re-read. Cherished.

  Calm, calm, he tells himself. First things first. He’s got to find his daughter. As he scissors around the border of a photo, he hears the phone ringing in the next room.

  Sophia and Patrick are watching Law
and Order when the door of the apartment opens to the length of the chain. Patrick runs to unlatch it.

  “It’s my Mom, back from her cleaning job,” he tells Sophia. “Don’t tell her we’ve been watching TV all evening, or she’ll be mad.”

  Sophia grabs the remote and reluctantly turns off the TV. Mrs. Chen comes in, a small woman in battered Adidas and a pink wool coat that looks far enough out of fashion to be second-hand. Patrick and his mother trade words in Chinese; his mom sounds exhausted.

  Mrs. Chen smiles wearily at Sophia and says, “Hello, girl. You do homework with Patrick?”

  “Sort of,” mumbles Sophia.

  “It late,” chides Mrs. Chen. “Mommy want you home?”

  “I only have a father.”

  “You call him now, pick up,” urges Mrs. Chen, taking off her pink coat.

  “Dad? I’m sorry, I forgot to call. I’m at my friend’s. Can you come pick me up?”

  At the sound of Sophia’s voice, the clock inside Marcello’s heart, frozen for the last three hours, starts marking time again.

  On the ride home from the Chens, Sophia wipes tears. Marcello says nothing. At the first red light, he reaches out and puts his arm around her shoulders. Sobbing, Sophia explains that she can’t do math and that maybe she should switch to the remedial program that Mr. Lennon has been pushing, even though it is kind of embarrassing when your own father is the head of the math department. She also wants to quit piano and choir and spend more time at friends’ houses.

  Marcello listens and tries not to talk. At last, he says, “Everything but choir. Please stay in the church choir for one more year.”

  “Okay,” she agrees. “I’m sorry about scaring you, Daddy.”

  When they get home, he thinks about asking Sophia about the letters, but he can’t. She must know by now that her mother was involved with someone else.

  He can go back into Sophia’s desk and read the letters on his own, another time. Maybe when she’s at choir practice. If he can bear it. But what would be the point of tormenting himself further? He’s read enough to know what the letters are, what they mean.