The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty. She’s been out there for just over two years.”

  “School?”

  “Yes, UBC.” This reminds him that he hasn’t heard from Winston Curtis. He’ll try calling from the departure lounge. “I’d better get to my gate. Nice seeing you again, George. We’ll have you over for dinner when I get back.”

  “Safe travels, Harry. And good luck with your daughter.”

  Is it written on my face, Harry thinks as he walks to his gate, this trouble with Daphne, or did Elinor say something in Cape Town? Did she consult with Cramb about drug use and personality disorders, mention his futile attempts to reach Daphne? Was it all just typical behaviour? Would George have heard the concern in his voice? If so, wishing him luck could have been a way of telling him that the problem was too complex to go into in an airport, she needed long-term professional help. Elinor didn’t offer much in the way of advice, either, when he comes to think of it. He feels he is on his own.

  Already uncertain about this trip, he continues to stew as he takes his seat in the plane. For most of the five hours of the flight his breathing is shallow, and he feels that insufficient oxygen is getting to his brain, as though he’s in a state of twilight anaesthesia. His limbs feel heavy and slow; he is a dinosaur watching the comet getting bigger and bigger. He’s even afraid to get up to go to the lavatory, worried that his legs will give out and he’ll fall in the aisle and a flight attendant will stop everyone from helping him. No, leave him, he ruined his daughter’s life! He watches the sloth-like progress of the airplane’s icon on the screen in front of him, not wanting the flight to end. He has no plan, not the foggiest idea of what he will do when he lands. He’s flying to his daughter’s aid, not away from trauma. His face reflected in the screen looks angry. He tries to set his features in repose, to take on an expression Daphne won’t run from—concern, openness, contrition—but succeeds only in making himself look like an inebriated troll. What will he say to her when he finds her? What will she say to him? “I’m tired of you interpreting my behaviour in a way that exonerates you and Elinor from any responsibility for it. That’s what you do, both of you. There was a time when I needed that, but that time has passed. There was a time when I wanted you to listen to me, but you didn’t, and that window has closed, too. So goodbye.”

  When he tires of staring at his face, he looks through the window. The tops of the clouds remind him of tobogganing parties when he was a boy, thermoses of hot chocolate, woollen mittens drying by a wood stove. He remembers taking Daphne tobogganing, how she held on to the side ropes and shrieked with delight and terror. Again, Daddy! He tries to stop his mind from wandering but is powerless to bring it back. He sees Millie disappearing into the shrubbery, following her own indeterminable itinerary, indifferent to his yearning for her to return. What is his longing to hers? The word “itinerary” reminds him of Kronkman, which plunges him deeper into a black, bottomless pit. He mustn’t let Simon get anywhere near Kronkman. On the screen, the furrows across the brow deepen, the eyes fill with tears.

  Anguish, he thinks, takes your mind off the big things and spreads it out over a thousand little things. It compels you to take the in-flight magazine from the pouch in front of you and read up on the restaurant scene in Hong Kong, memorize the names of five new bars in Amsterdam. The latest rage in cocktails in Berlin is something called a Painless Death. All written in that light, breathless sans-serif tone he disliked during his journalism days. How many seats in a Boeing 767? Of the seven hundred pieces of luggage in the hold, how many likely do not belong to any of this flight’s passengers? If an airplane takes off from Toronto at noon and flies 350 miles per hour, what time will it land in Vancouver if the time difference is three hours and the plane is forty-three minutes behind schedule? How much does an eagle’s flight feather weigh?

  How can she call him a quitter? He didn’t quit those jobs—he left them to move up to better jobs. Okay, to move from reporter to teacher to professor to solopreneur may not be everyone’s preferred trajectory, but if he’d remained a reporter all his life, chasing fire trucks and writing about rescue dogs, wouldn’t that have been quitting? Wouldn’t Daphne have called him a loser? Lacking in ambition?

  But even as he has these thoughts, he knows that the very act of defending himself from her charges validates those charges. If he’d stayed in White Falls, she might say, he would have been a real father. He would have picked her up from school every day, taken her to movies and the shopping mall, been there when she went to her first dance. After her first heartbreak, he would have explained to her that all males are raised to be callous, self-centred shitheads. He knows he wasn’t there for all that. But didn’t he get her out of White Falls, too? Didn’t he show her there was more to life than settling for the first job, the first boy, the first option that came along? When he finds her, if he finds her, and if she speaks to him, will she tell him that whether or not he is guilty of the charges is irrelevant, her decision to cut him out of her life is still a valid one? He can’t win.

  Pain makes your thoughts flow out over a thousand trivial things, but the mind itself remains tethered to the one big thing. Happiness sometimes lets you forget what is making you happy, but pain never does. Pain is its own narcissistic personality disorder.

  * * *

  —

  When the car-rental clerk asks him how long he wants the car, he says one week, although he knows one week won’t be enough. He needs to be positive, not realistic. When Elinor told him to stay as long as necessary, “Get an Airbnb,” he thought she was being too pessimistic. So he takes a car for a week and books a room at the Sylvia Hotel for three days. Not because he’s certain he’ll find Daphne that quickly but because he needs to pretend that he will. He almost needs to convince himself that Daphne is looking for him, that somehow she’ll find out he’s in Vancouver and want to mend their relationship. In which case, she’ll look for him at the Sylvia. If he didn’t believe that, how could he have got on the plane at all? What’s the point of looking for something if you don’t believe you will find it?

  Life, generally, has other ideas. The room they give him doesn’t look across the street, it looks out over English Bay, where the snow is falling so heavily he can barely make out the phantom freighters resting offshore. Not two hours and already the absurdity of his situation has hit him. He lies on the bed, unable to move, futility pressing him into the mattress. Perhaps the real reason he took the car and the room for such a short time is so he can call off the search and go home without it costing him too much.

  He must get off the bed and consider what is to be done, since in bed his meditations will come to no sensible conclusion.

  What does he have? He has two phone numbers: Daphne’s landline and Winston Curtis’s office. He knows Daphne’s boyfriend’s name, and that he’s a lawyer. He has the address of Daphne’s apartment. She almost never goes there, but she must have to collect her mail or water her plants or something, and he can sit in his car outside her building until she shows up. He has the mystery novel, which he can read while he’s waiting. It’s the one in which the missing woman is still missing, possibly, he thinks now, because they have the wrong missing woman. They’re focusing on the man’s wife, while all the time it’s his daughter who has disappeared. He feels giddy, as though he’s being held in suspension between art and life. Elinor would say a mystery novel isn’t art, and Daphne would say what he is doing in Vancouver isn’t life. Maybe they’re both wrong. That would be something.

  His cell phone is on the nightstand, beside the novel. Of the two numbers he has, only Winston Curtis is likely to be in and willing to speak to him. He sits up and calls Winston’s number. After five rings his call goes to voicemail and he leaves his name and cell number and says he’s in Vancouver trying to find Daphne. “I’m just wondering if you’ve heard from her yet,” he says, “or if you know where I might look for he
r.” Not so long ago he thought he’d be doing this in South Africa, and Elinor turned up safely in the end. The thought should afford him some relief, but it doesn’t.

  How hard can it be to find a lawyer in Vancouver? On his phone, he googles “lawyers in Vancouver,” and learns that there are 10,700 of them in Greater Vancouver. Slightly daunted, he goes to the Yellow Pages. There are ninety-seven pages of lawyers and legal firms. He scrolls through page after page until, thirty-seven pages in, his eye is caught by an entry: “Ogilvy Robinson, Attorneys at Law.” Would Daphne’s boyfriend be old enough to be a name partner in his own firm? He clicks on a button marked “Website” and finds links to sixty-seven lawyers, listed alphabetically, and yes, there is a Paul Ogilvy Sr. and a Paul Ogilvy Jr. At the top of Paul Ogilvy Jr.’s page is a button marked “Call.” He clicks on it and listens to a phone ringing.

  “Ogilvy Robinson, please hold.”

  He holds, his heart racing a little. This is too easy. He gazes through his window at grey static outside and hears his father telling him to get up and adjust the rabbit ears on top of the television set. That was before his father died a quick, painless death. He must remember to buy some Tums. And a bottle of Scotch.

  “Ogilvy Robinson, how may I direct your call?”

  “Is Paul Ogilvy Jr. there, please?”

  “May I say who is calling?”

  “Harrison Bowes, I’m Daphne Bowes’s father. I’d like to speak to Paul, if I may.”

  “Mr. Ogilvy is out of the office, I’m afraid. I’ll transfer you to his voicemail.”

  “No, wait. Can you give me his—”

  But he’s too slow. He’s always too slow. He hears the familiar series of clicks and bleeps and waits for the beep. “Hi, Paul. This is Harry Bowes, Daphne’s father. I’m in Vancouver and trying to get in touch with her, but she isn’t picking up. I’m staying at the Sylvia, and I’ll leave my cell number. Please call me as soon as you can and let me know how I might reach her.” He pauses for a second, then adds hastily: “It’s rather urgent. Thanks.” He leaves his number and clicks “End call.” “Rather urgent” doesn’t really cover it, but it’s more informative than his usual blather. He wonders how many messages Paul Ogilvy gets in a day, and calculates the odds that Paul will return his call to be about ten thousand to one.

  Still, it’s a start. He can’t just lie insect-like in his room, letting anxiety migrate deeper into his reptilian complex. He casts a last look through the window, darkness and snow falling as steadily as ever, puts on his coat, hat, and gloves, and leaves the hotel. On the front steps he pauses to look up into the night. He has not seen snow in Vancouver before; it feels alien, as though part of a parallel universe has slipped through the curtain. His car is parked on a side street, and now it’s a mound in a line of semi-buried cars. He presses his key fob and one of the mounds beeps at him. There is no snow brush in the car, of course, and probably no snow tires on the wheels. He clears the windshield and the side and rear windows with his sleeve, unlocks the driver’s door, gets in, starts the car, and turns on the windshield wipers, heater, and defrosters. Then he sits, waiting for the windshield to clear and a plan to occur to him.

  Let’s say Daphne is suffering from some kind of psychological distress, as Elinor suggested. And further, that such people tend to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, as George Cramb said they do. Daphne may be somewhere in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He may find her on East Hastings or one of its tributaries. It’s also possible she’s in an expensive uptown bar, or in someone’s penthouse apartment—not all the drug users in Vancouver are Downtown Eastsiders—but he has to act, and he doesn’t know any expensive bars or penthouses, and so he may as well do what he can until either Winston Curtis or Paul Ogilvy call him back.

  He turns on the headlights and drives towards the centre of the city. Skidding towards Skid Road.

  There are few other cars on the streets. Street lights are coloured smudges hung in the grey darkness overhead. Every time he touches the brake the car fishtails. This, he tells himself at every corner, will not end well. But eventually he recognizes Gastown, the steam whistle, the statue of Gassy Jack. He drives along Powell to Jackson, down Jackson to Cordova, along Cordova to Gore, up Gore to Alexander or Railway, then down Dunlevy to Oppenheimer Park. It’s a random circuit, but he repeats it several times until it begins to feel like a pattern. Dim figures huddle on the sidewalks and in the spaces between buildings, to be again engulfed in snowy obscurity when he passes. He makes the loop twice more, then decides he needs a better plan.

  Twenty minutes later he is parked in front of a three-storey complex, in which Daphne’s apartment is number 3. The building looks deserted. No lights in any of the windows. No tracks in the snow at the front door. To the left of the building is a laundromat, a small restaurant, and what looks like a realtor’s office. To its right is a parking lot with two cars in it, both covered with snow. When he enters the building he is in a small, dim foyer with mailboxes and buzzers. The inside door is locked. He rings the buzzer for apartment 3. Nothing happens. He takes a slip of paper from his wallet and writes a note on it—“Hi Daphne, I’m in town, give me a call, Dad”—and pushes it into the slot in Daphne’s mailbox. He goes back to his car and returns to the Sylvia. He has done something. He has mapped the territory. The clock on the car’s dash says five thirty; no one will be returning his calls today, but he’ll call Winston and Paul again tomorrow.

  After eating in the hotel’s dining room, he drives back to the Downtown Eastside and resumes his blind combing of the streets around Oppenheimer Park. A few times he thinks he sees her, but each time when he gets closer he finds it isn’t her. He parks on Dunlevy and walks the circuit twice. Then he gets back into his car and sits in the dark with the engine running, trying to think of something productive to do. On his last trip, Daphne took him to Granville Island, a little centre of artistic nightlife tucked under the Granville Street bridge, to shop for organic vegetables. She said she sometimes attended poetry readings there, and he’d gone into a wine shop that sold some interesting West Coast wines. He decides going there would be better than sitting in the car on the off chance she happens by.

  He crosses Granville Bridge and finds the narrow, snow-covered street that runs under it onto the island, and parks in front of the public market. He’s surprised, indeed encouraged, by the number of people milling about, most of them so hooded and scarved against the weather that any one of them could be Daphne. Speakers on poles outside the shops chime out Christmas songs. He makes the rounds of the restaurants and coffee bars, walks through the crowded market building and along the seawall, passing the Emily Carr College of Art and Design, and goes into the bar of the Granville Island Hotel. Of course he doesn’t see Daphne. He’s not confident that he’s doing the right thing. In fact, he’s fairly sure he’s doing the wrong thing, and not even doing it that well. Should he have another go at the Downtown Eastside? Venture into the seedy hotels and the needle exchanges, the soup kitchens and the missions? Why is he so certain that Daphne is there? Because he needs her to be. Why couldn’t she be here on Granville Island, doing some Christmas shopping with Paul, popping into the Sandbar for a glass of mulled wine? His brain is too fogged to come up with anything more sophisticated than this crawling search. He goes into the wine shop and buys a bottle of Lagavulin and two bottles of an Okanagan cabernet he doesn’t know, then returns to his car, drives straight to the Sylvia. In his room, he pours a glass of Scotch and stands at the window, trying to pick out the ships anchored in the bay, emptied of their cargoes, abandoned by their crews, turning this way and that on their anchor chains at the whim of the outgoing tide.

  As a reporter at the Daily Observer, he was sent to an Ottawa hospital to interview a White Falls man who’d been in a severe car accident. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, his car had swerved into the oncoming lane, and he was struck by an eighteen-wheeler going eighty miles an
hour. His daughter, who was in the car with him, had been killed outright. The man survived, but with serious injury to the brain. He now had a rare form of functional amnesia: he couldn’t remember anything for more than twenty-four hours. Every morning he woke up with no recollection of having been in an accident, and every morning, he had to be told about the accident and that he had killed his daughter. He had to experience that suffering and guilt every day for the rest of his life.

  Whatever he is going through now isn’t that. It’s like that, but it isn’t that.

  * * *

  —

  At six the next morning, Thursday, he is sitting in his car across from Daphne’s apartment building. It’s still dark, and there are no lights on in the windows. He doesn’t know which apartment is number 3, but he decides it’s the one on the second floor, right side.

  At seven the restaurant opens, and he goes in, sits at the counter, and orders a toasted Western sandwich and coffee.

  “For here or to go?”

  “To go.”

  The waitress is young and looks tired. He shows her a photograph of Daphne that he has on his phone.

  “She must come in here a lot,” he says. “She lives in the building next door.”

  The waitress looks noncommittal. “I think maybe she moved,” she says.

  “Moved?”

  “She used to come in last year. I haven’t seen her for a while.”

  “She has a boyfriend.”

  “Why are you looking for her?”

  “I’m her father.”

  The waitress sets his coffee on the counter and says nothing.

  He takes his sandwich and coffee back to the car. She hasn’t moved. He’s still sending her the rent money. He leaves messages on her landline. He broods. He eats his sandwich and drinks his coffee. Surely she wouldn’t have moved without telling him. He thinks about the mailbox stuffed with uncollected mail. He looks up at the blank window. Why would she keep this apartment if she was living with Paul Ogilvy, hotshot lawyer, who has a big house in Point Grey and a cottage on Salt Spring Island? The sandwich tastes like pablum.