The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  * * *

  —

  She’d bought the condo in Vancouver with money she inherited when her father died two years before, plus her half of the money from the sale of her father’s house in Toronto. Elinor had moved in with Sandra Hedley in 2014; her father lived in the house by himself after that; he and Elinor remained unreconciled (on his part) though cordial (on hers) until the end. When Daphne flew to Toronto to look after him in his final months, she and Elinor and Sandra became close again. She felt she was on a new footing with Sandra, no longer therapist and patient but two women with a shared history. She doesn’t know whether it was Sandra’s therapy or her father’s death that turned her around, but something had, maybe a combination of the two, plus getting away from Paul and Wendell. And meeting Tom. She isn’t exactly sure what her relationship with Tom is, it isn’t sexual but it’s more than professional, but she knows she values it. She hasn’t valued much for a long time, but she’s more willing now to allow people in. Maybe she should write herself a letter about it.

  * * *

  —

  They drive to the end of the road, where a small parking area leads to a path that weaves among the giant trees. Tom locks the SUV, and she tells him it’s a bit of a hike to the main house, but the trail is well maintained and it’s a nice day for a walk in the woods. It takes twenty minutes, Tom getting more worried with every rise and turn: he wonders aloud how he would get a crew in here, with all their gear and cables and equipment. It’s an island, she reminds him; everything can be floated in. Finally they reach a large board-and-batten building that Daphne remembers was the commune’s workshop. It’s locked, but they picked up keys from the management company on the way up, and they go in. Tom nods appreciatively at the various sizes and shapes of handsaws, planes, brace and bits and squares, all precisely arranged on a pegboard that covers most of one wall. On another wall another pegboard with a range of screwdrivers and clamps, an assortment of hammers, cat’s paws, pry bars, and a row of shiny chisels, sharpened, oiled, and in excellent repair. Shelves of mayonnaise jars filled with variously sized screws and nails.

  “Jesus,” says Tom, “whoever these cultists were, they had money.”

  Daphne scoops a handful of sawdust from the workbench and smells it. Red cedar. There is no sawdust on the tools or the floor. “It was a hippie commune,” she says. “According to the property managers, they built settlements like this in Hawaii and California and ran them along the usual utopian lines. No state influence, hence no banking, no electricity, no private ownership. Everyone shared everything, including each other. Grew their own food, built their own houses, made their own rules.”

  “Sounds like the father and daughter in our film.”

  “That’s what I thought. Wait until you see the rest of it.”

  She did, of course, read more of the script, and it surprised her. It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet after all. The father is approached by a local contractor named Jimmy Crimson, who lives in the village and has been nursing big ideas about building a high-end resort on the island, with a twenty-slip marina, helipad, private guest cottages, and a five-star restaurant that would draw the rich and famous from afar. There are several such resorts in the Discoveries already, he says, and Daphne knows that’s true, some of them even remoter than this one, can’t even be reached by ferry, and they are packed all summer with people who get to them by yacht or helicopter and pay up to twenty-five hundred dollars a night, “American,” Crimson says. There’s little doubt that Crimson, who is in his late thirties, has his eye on the daughter, but mainly as a side benefit. She is, after all, only sixteen. And a naive sixteen. When Daphne was that age she’d have twigged to a man like Jimmy Crimson in two seconds, as would her father, who would have sent him packing. White Falls had had its share of sexual predators, but it also had plenty of boys her own age to experiment with, boys like Kyle, and the pervs had had to content themselves with the more desperate high-school dropouts who knew they’d be working in Walmart or Price Chopper for the rest of their lives unless they met someone older with a car and a job. Getting in the back seat with one of them was a fifty-fifty proposition, but that was better than their chances if they didn’t. But the daughter in the film doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what Crimson is up to. Her response to him could be interpreted as encouraging. A virgin on the verge. If guys like Crimson aren’t cut off right at the outset, they start growing extra hands. Tensions mount. The father rages, the daughter affects not to know what he’s yelling about, and Crimson cajoles, apparently believing he can get to the father through the daughter, or maybe vice versa.

  From the workshop, the path continues through a high wattle fence onto the grounds proper, which even this late in the season and after two years of neglect are in bloom. It’s early fall, the sunlight is slanted and sharp and the wind is still high in the Douglas-firs. Ornamental cherry trees and shrub roses block their view of the house. Flower beds hold their orange and pink blossoms in tightly packed but obviously carefully planned rows. In the vegetable patches, winter squashes, Brussels sprouts, and four kinds of bluish-green kale, all quite extravagantly beautiful, are bolting confidently to seed. She and Tom follow a row of espaliered fruit trees that stand like sentries along a wire fence leading past an open communal shower enclosure—“The crew will love that,” Tom observes—to the main building, the one where Daphne and Janet had their lunch and watched the sea. She feels again the sense of calm that settled over her on that earlier visit, nature seeping into her, and wonders if Tom senses it, too, a softening, a letting go. The kind of giving in that feels more like victory than defeat. Her mind resists the word, but it comes anyway: wellness. Like her dad, she would have scoffed at the word before working with Sandra, but now she actually loves the sound of it. The feeling of reverberating depth and longing it conveys.

  The glass wall that arches above the garden is browed by four heavy fir logs arranged in a complicated cantilevered pattern that seems somehow natural, an extension of nature, as if the logs tumbled down from the island’s interior and landed that way and the house was built under them. The glass glints in the sunlight like an all-seeing but benevolent eye.

  “Creepy,” says Tom. “Which is good.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll have to make the guy an engineer or something,” he says. “All that glass, those huge logs. He must have had to set up some kind of tripod with block and tackle. He sure as hell didn’t get a crane or a backhoe in here.”

  “Are you going to show him building the place, or is it already built?”

  “Good point. I don’t know yet. It’s almost like a temple.”

  “I think that was the idea. The communes always included a central meeting house.”

  “We can work with that. The guy’s a kind of cult figure, right? I see him sitting up there on the deck in a big log chair, master of all he surveys, while his daughter is off in the woods shagging Jimmy Crimson.”

  “I don’t think she shags him.”

  Tom looks at her, seems about to say something. The daughter and Crimson aren’t having sex, she thinks, but maybe Tom meant it metaphorically. The daughter moving beyond the father’s sphere of influence, with this weird Garden of Eden he’s constructed in the middle of nowhere feeling more like a prison to her. She’s Eve looking around for an apple to bite into, and then Jimmy Crimson slithers into the scene. Although Tom, being a man, probably sees Crimson as a kind of James Dean figure, a nice enough guy but there’s a shadow in him, something broken. He loves the island, but like the daughter he needs to rise above the limitations imposed by it, and in the process ruins it. Maybe he has a wife and a kid back in the village, and he’s just as torn as the daughter is, half flirting with her and half pushing her away.

  “Let’s take a look at the house,” Tom says.

  It is as she remembers. Everything in working order, as if the former owners decamped only a f
ew hours ago intending to be back before dark. Dishes neatly stacked in the cupboards, cutlery and folded dishcloths in the drawers, kerosene in the lanterns, a few non-perishables in the pantry, Raincoast Crisps, quinoa crackers, steel-cut oats, carefully wrapped and untouched by mice. Tom, oblivious to the orderliness, paces the length of the main room, looks up at the corners, imagines camera angles, lights, actors silhouetted against the enormous window. “Go over and stand by the table,” he says to Daphne. “Now walk to the sink.” Daphne agrees that the daughter is about her shape, dresses much the same—jeans not skin tight, T-shirt, shoulder-length hair held back with a tortoiseshell grip. Simple jewellery, possibly her mother’s, a gold necklace, earrings. No piercings, other than her ears, definitely no tattoos. Tom squints at her. “It could work,” he says. “What are the other buildings like?”

  “The same,” she says.

  She shows him the meditation pods and the cabins built back in the woods, reached by gravelled paths that fan out from a square of bare rock that serves as a patio beside the house. The pods are like gnomish cells, made of stone with benches built into them and small windows situated high in the walls, so someone sitting on the bench would see nothing but sky. She supposes they called it something else, the Empyrean, or maybe Pure Light. The cabins are exquisite, spotless, each one made to sleep two, with two single beds that can be pushed together if need be, small but precise bathrooms with flush toilets and glass shower stalls, neatly customized vanities, mirrors as deep and clear as salmon pools. Double-glazed sliding windows, propane heaters. Tom turns everything on, lamps, valves, water taps, opens and closes the sliding windows, they all work. He flushes the toilets, opens the medicine cabinets, even sits on the beds, each time grunting his approval, as if the whole deal collapses if there’s a dead fly on a windowsill. She understands. Actors complain. Crews grumble. Electricians go on strike, carpenters walk off the set. But they’ll love this place, this feeling of wellness, there’s the word again, will descend upon them, as it has upon her and, she believes, is settling into Tom.

  Maybe it’s the absence of the smell of smoke. She hasn’t noticed it until now. No smoke, unlike Vancouver, and clear sky. It seems weird. The city is hundreds of kilometres from the wildfires destroying the southeast corner of the province, and yet the sky above it is yellow, the sun a dirty smudge, and the air thick with particulates. Paul’s forest-company clients must be pulling their hair out. She feels safe here, so much farther north. Safe is another feeling she’s learning how to have. Here, if there is any danger it will come from within her, not from somewhere far away, and she’s good with that. She welcomes it. That’s what Sandra taught her.

  She leaves Tom checking the rest of the cabins and follows an older path out to the writer’s cabin on the far side of the point. She and Janet went there, but they didn’t go into the cabin, didn’t even try the door. Someone, perhaps several people, had made a kind of shrine on the rocks between the cabin and the water, a firepit surrounded by a few small plates with Doritos on them, a plastic buffalo, a framed photograph of a woman who looked like Jackie Kennedy but was probably the writer when she was young, when her byline and face were well known up and down Vancouver Island. She had specialized in nature stories and local history—she would have been the one to tell them why Cortes Island is spelled the way it is, who the Campbell was of Campbell River, how much of the island had been logged and how much logging was permitted now. Daphne looks briefly at the shrine to see if anything has been added—it seems not—then tries the cabin door. It’s locked, but one of the keys opens it, and she goes in.

  When Daphne was very young, when her father was still a journalist, his office at home was just like this cabin. The same smell of paper and cigarettes, the same filtered light, the comfortable mess that seemed an extension of her father’s personality. A large desk occupies a bay window to the right of the door, the window overlooking the strait to the mainland, a tempting but ill-advised kayak paddle away. A splendid view when you’re not working, a fatal distraction when you are. Bookshelves along one wall; she’ll examine the books later. A sliding panel pulled out from the desk supports a massive Remington typewriter and an ashtray full of crushed cigarette ends. Above the desk, a shelf laden with folders and well-thumbed reference books: a thick dictionary, a Roget’s thesaurus, Harper’s Desktop Companion. The desk itself is strewn with a variety of writer’s fetishes: a small ceramic jam jar half-filled with paperclips; a coffee mug crammed with pencils and pens; an argillite letter opener; and a blackened toothbrush that she instantly knows was used to clean the typewriter hammers when the letters became clogged with ink; a 1993 desk calendar with a watercolour of the Empress Hotel, opened to October; a stainless steel Zippo lighter that feels like a polished stone in her hand; and an eagle’s wing feather, black and stiff and elegantly curved, all but weightless.

  The rest of the cabin serves the desk. The chair half turned from the typewriter; the single bed, not much more than a cot, but big enough, with a nightstand beside it; the wood stove in a far corner beside a pile of split fir logs. A small wooden table at the centre, painted bright red, and a cane leaning against the wall behind the door. Plates and mugs on a narrow shelf above a sink. Two coal-oil lamps, one on the nightstand and another on the drainboard; candles and matches on the desk.

  She wants to live here. She feels as though she does live here. She could turn the deadbolt from the inside and never leave. If she and Janet had come into this cabin in June she’d have bought the place months ago. She feels a rush of panic at the thought that the property might have been sold during her absence. She’d phone the property managers now if there were cell coverage, which, it turns out, there isn’t. Sitting in the chair at the desk, she finds a stack of blank paper in one of the drawers and rolls a sheet into the machine. Placing her fingers over the typewriter’s keyboard the way her father taught her—ASDF JKL;—she types her name, Daphne. The ribbon spool turns with a friendly nod. Daphne. Daphne Dad Daphne. Dad.

  She hears Tom calling her from a distance, and leaves before he finds this place and makes it his own.

  * * *

  —

  When they are at the wattle fence, ready to walk back to the SUV, Daphne tells him that she left something in the house and runs back. In the kitchen, she takes her notebook from her shoulder bag, tears a page from it, and writes: “It’s okay. We’re not the owners. We’re a film company and we’re leasing this property next June and July. Thanks for keeping it in such good shape.” And she leaves the note on the table.

  * * *

  —

  Back home in Vancouver, when she returns from her run and has showered and dressed, she takes a small cassette from her desk drawer and inserts it into an ancient tape recorder that her father used when he was a journalist. She found it when she was going through his house after his death. The cassette, one of several she has retained, contains voicemail messages her father left on the machine in her apartment when she was semi-living with Paul. She kept the tapes for reasons that are still obscure to her, unfinished business, an archival instinct she didn’t know she had, a connection with her father she didn’t know she wanted. She listens to them from time to time, the way some people listen to country-and-western songs that make them feel sad. She’s chosen a message he left a few weeks before he came out and pulled her from the dumpster.

  “Hi Daph, it’s me. Haven’t heard from you in a while, but I guess that means you’re all right. Busy working and all that. I’m fine. Still selling plonk. But I’m thinking of hangin’ ’em up, you’ll be happy to hear. Not as ambitious as I used to be, I guess. The weather here’s pretty good, getting a bit chilly now that it’s November. How is it out there? Pretty balmy, I’ll bet, except for the smoke. Anyway, here’s my plan: I come out to visit you, and you and I do that Okanagan Valley trip we’ve been talking about. Well, I’ve been talking about. It’s a bit late in the season, but it could be good, with the
grape harvest over and the wine tastings still under way. Remember how we used to go for drives in the country when we lived in White Falls? It could be like that again.” And here comes that little catch in his voice, as close as she ever heard him come to choking up, it’s the moment she waits for every time she listens to the tape. He stops, his message skips a beat, a silent sob hovers in the static, and then he recovers for the envoy. “I should go, give me a call when you get this. Elinor says hi. Love you.”

  Poor Dad, she loved him, too. He always called her landline, never asked for her cell number, as though he’d rather leave a message than talk to her. It used to bother her, which was why she didn’t return most of his calls, but now she thinks she gets it. They had this psychic connection—what is it Siri Hustvedt called it in one of her novels? An overlap?—the tangents of their separate lives intersecting to form a joint mental space. How else did he find her in that dumpster? She never had that with anyone but her father, but she thinks she might have it with Tom. Her dad would approve of Tom. She can see the three of them taking that Okanagan trip. She removes the cassette from the recorder and puts them both back in her desk drawer. If she were ever going to have another drink, it would be at a time like this.