Watcher

by Valerie Sherrard

  Suleiman’s was the main place we went to eat when we had a little coin to spend on not-so-fine dining. The place had a certain character to it that you might call charming if you weren’t real fussy how you used the word.

  There were eight square tables and a counter, all pretty typical of your small family-run restaurant. Some effort had been made to decorate but it didn’t quite come together the way it was probably supposed to. Still, it was comfortable and familiar and we liked the feel of the place.

  We stuck to the cheaper things on the menu, like hummus with warm pita bread or falafel sandwiches.

  Suleiman, whom everyone called Sam, was both cook and owner. He came out of the kitchen now and then and stood at the counter, looking around and wiping his hands on his apron. When he spotted us, he always came over and shook hands and said something like “Good to see you gentlemen again,” or “I hope you’re finding everything satisfactory.” We always told him it was the best food anywhere.

  This might’ve even been true, for all we knew.

  There was no handshake from Sam that day, since he was at the back table drinking espresso with a big bearded fellow. He lifted a hand and nodded to us like we were important customers, then he went back to what seemed like an intense discussion.

  There was only one other table occupied at the time and the couple seated there was almost finished eating. The waitresses were wiping down display cases where they kept their desserts — stuff like baklava. (Lynn and I tried that once, the stacks of thin phyllo pastry layered with nuts and dripping in sticky syrup. Lynn thought it was the best thing ever but I felt like I’d been given a sugar overdose.)

  Sabra, a niece of Sam’s, came over to our table carrying iced water with lemon.

  “You guys gonna have the usual?” she asked. She’d waited on us lots of times over the years. She also flirted with us in a kind of nervous way. I was never sure if the nervous part was because she worried that her uncle would catch her or that we’d take her seriously.

  “Just hummus,” I said. “No falafel.”

  “Special today is stuffed vine leaves,” she said. “Very good.”

  “Nah. We got a bit of a cash flow problem.” Tack sighed.

  But when she came back with our order, she’d plopped a couple of the vine leaves on the edge of the plate, anyway.

  “You try for the next time.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “By the way, Sabra, there was a guy in here, oh, about a week ago, and I don’t know if he ordered anything, but he stood over there for a while, staring out the window.”

  “I think I know the guy you mean,” the other waitress, Helen, said from behind the counter. Helen was probably older than my mom but she acted a lot younger. She wore a lot of rings and makeup and she was real friendly. “He came in to use the washroom but, afterward, he didn’t leave right away. Like you said, he stood by the window and looked out for a few minutes. I thought it was a bit strange. He could have seen a lot more if he’d just gone outside.”

  “You ever see him before, or since?” I asked, though I don’t know what I was hoping to find out.

  “Not that I remember,” she said. “Why? Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I realized that if I started talking about someone following me, I’d come across as a bit whacko. “I, uh, thought he looked familiar, so I was wondering if I knew him.”

  That seemed to satisfy her and she told me she’d try to find out who he was if he came in again.

  Tack and I took our time eating, all the while keeping our eyes peeled for any sign of The Watcher. No luck, though, and after nearly an hour we gave up and left.

  I didn’t ask Tack to come up when I got to my place, because it had occurred to me that maybe Lynn could tell me something. She’d been older — seven years to my four — when he and Mom had split up.

  Only, Lynn wasn’t home when I got to the apartment. I’d normally have seen that as a good thing since I was so used to having the place to myself. It’d been weird lately, to walk in the door and find Lynn sprawled across the couch, or painting her nails at the kitchen table, or whatever.

  I made a grilled cheese sandwich and ate it while flipping through the channels to see what was on TV. After that, I ate a couple of dill pickles and wondered what Lavender was doing right then. I told myself maybe I should give her a call, just real casual, have a yak. It never got past a thought.

  I’m not sure what time I fell asleep but I woke up hours later feeling disoriented and groggy. The TV was still on and I heard someone talking from what seemed like a long distance off, about the Rideau Canal Waterway.

  I sat up, squinting and blinking, trying to clear my head.

  “That’s my bed you’re on, technically.”

  I jumped a bit and kind of yelled. Not scared, just startled.

  “What is wrong with you?” I demanded.

  Lynn just laughed. She was curled up on the armchair across from me, brushing her hair.

  “Well, it is,” she said. “My bed, I mean.”

  “Technically,” I said through gritted teeth, “this is not your bed. This is a couch, which you happen to be sleeping on these days because you’re a loser with nowhere else to go.”

  “There are plenty of places I could go,” she snapped.

  “Name one.”

  “I could stay with friends — I have lots of friends you know — or go back to Conor, or rent my own apartment. To name a few.”

  I was about to shoot her answers apart when I remembered that I’d wanted to talk to her. So, I swallowed my annoyance and said, “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.”

  She looked suspicious for a few seconds, but then she relaxed and settled back in the chair again.

  After a minute I mentioned that I could stand something to eat. She said she was kind of hungry, too, and we headed into the kitchen like a couple of combatants who’d formed a truce for the common good.

  Lynn whipped up a couple of cheese omelettes; I made toast and we sat down to eat. I figured this was as good a time as any to find out what she knew.

  chapter sixteen

  “Do you remember anything about our father?”

  Lynn’s head jerked up at my question, panic written on her face.

  “Are you crazy? We are never to talk about him,” she whispered. Her eyes darted around as though there were hidden listeners.

  “Why not?”

  “Have you lost it altogether?” She looked around again. “Where’s Mom?”

  “I dunno. Out somewhere, I guess.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, how do you know she’s not in her room lying down or something?” She leaned forward, looking past me. “Her door’s shut … she could be in there.”

  “Her shoes aren’t here,” I said, pointing to the doormat where she always slipped them off when she came in. “Just calm down.”

  “You haven’t been through what I’ve been through,” Lynn said, “so don’t tell me to calm down. She goes ballistic if you even mention him.”

  “Was he that bad?”

  “He was a monster! Why do you think Mom freaks out if you bring him up?”

  “So you’ve tried to talk to her about him?”

  “Not for years. It was too painful for Mom. She’d get more and more worked up until she was nearly beside herself and I didn’t find anything out, anyway.”

  “But you must remember things about him. You were seven when they got divorced.”

  “It’s kind of jumbled in my head.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I used to think I remembered a lot of things, but as I got older some of it got confused. Now, I can hardly tell which things I actually remember. A lot of it seems to be stuff Mom told me about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, it’s hard to sort things out sometimes. When I try to bring back the actual details, it’s all messed up in my head. Mostly, I remember Mom telling me to be careful and how if I ever saw him I should scream and run. It
bothers me that I can’t remember clearly, but that’s probably trauma from the things he did, you know?

  I knew what she meant. It was exactly what had been bothering me lately.

  “One time that I had to talk to a guy — I think he was a social worker, Mom went over and over the things Dad had done to me, so I’d remember what I had to tell him. Only, she said when I told about it I had to say I remembered it. Otherwise, the guy wasn’t going to be able to protect me. But later, I heard her telling the social worker that she hadn’t known this stuff was happening until after Dad moved out and we started telling her what had been going on. It sounded like she’d never seen it herself, but it felt like she had told me about it. Her voice seems to be in the background in a lot of my memories.”

  All of a sudden I felt as if someone had sunk a fist in my gut. “Mine are like that, too!” I told her. “It’s as if they have her voice narrating them. I wish they were clearer.”

  “Yeah, well, you were pretty young,” Lynn said. “And it must have been hard on Mom, having to talk about those things. She suffered so much. We all did. But, remember how she tried to make it better for us?”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Buying us things, taking us for ice cream or doughnuts. Stuff like that.”

  “All parents do that,” I said.

  “Yes, but she always got us something special anytime we’d had to talk about him, and the things he did to us. She loved us so much. Not like him.”

  She looked like she was going to say more but she just swallowed hard a couple of times. Then she started crying.

  I felt sick. What was I doing, anyway, getting her all worked up and bawling over stuff from the past? And why? Because my memories were hazy? Because there was someone watching me and I had a vague idea he might be my father?

  “Hey,” I said. I touched her arm. “Let’s just forget it. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “No!” She whirled around and glared at me. “I do not want to forget it. I want to know—”

  “What?”

  “I’m not even sure. I’ve just always felt like there was more.” A tear burst out of her right eye and skated off her cheek, exploding on the table. “Like there’s something missing and that if I just figure it out I can deal with it and stop having strange dreams and thoughts. I want the questions in my head to stop!”

  “Me too, I guess,” I admitted.

  “I always told people I hated him,” she said. Her eyes shifted to look down, away from me. “I said I never wanted to see him again.”

  “Yeah, so did I.”

  “But, sometimes ... I wonder about him.”

  “What?”

  “I wonder … if he ever thinks about me. I mean, us. Or why, in all the years since they broke up, he never got in touch, not even once.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know where we were,” I said, thinking again of the man who’d been watching me.

  “I dream things that don’t make sense sometimes,” Lynn said. A hint of a smile struggled through for just a second. “I dream that I’m little and we’re at the zoo and he’s carrying me on his shoulders so I can see the animals better. And I feel so safe way up there.”

  Something leapt in my gut and a flash of a scene went by, a quick vision of being up in the air, running alongside a giraffe.

  “Do you see any giraffes in your dream?” I asked.

  “Giraffes? No, but you used to want to race them,” she laughed. “You’d say, ‘fasser, fasser’ while Daddy …”

  Daddy.

  Lynn’s voice trailed off, her smile chased away by a look of panic. “I must have dreamed that, too,” she said. She shook her head, like that would clear things up.

  “I don’t think so. It, I dunno, felt real, and I had a flash of something about it before you said that.”

  She let that sink in, which was fine with me. I had my own thoughts — and questions — to contend with right then.

  “Do you remember what he looks like?” I asked, breaking the silence at last.

  “Kind of. I mean, I think I’d know him if I saw him.” She took a deep breath and glanced nervously at the door, like Mom might be crouched listening on the other side of it.

  “The wedding pictures are in Mom’s room,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The pictures from when they got married,” she said. “Mom has them in an album in that filing cabinet in her room. Or, she used to, anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them once when I was waiting for her to get my birth certificate. That was when I was applying for my social insurance number. I was sitting on her bed and she unlocked the cabinet and started digging through.

  “I don’t think she realized she’d put the album on the bed. She’d tossed a bunch of things there while she rifled through some papers in the bottom, and I picked up the album and opened it.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “Yeah. After a minute or two she noticed and she just freaked. Grabbed it and screamed that I had no business touching her personal stuff. Her whole face turned red.”

  “I wonder where she keeps the key,” I mused aloud. If I could get a look at that album, I might be able to tell if the guy following me was my dad.

  “Yeah? Forget that. I’ve looked high and low for it.”

  “So you could see the pictures again?”

  “Yeah.” Lynn looked away, like she was embarrassed.

  “It’s too late to do anything tonight,” I said. “She could walk in any time. But tomorrow, when she goes out, let’s take another look.”

  “Sure,” Lynn said, “but you won’t find anything.”

  I didn’t bother answering her, but I had a lot more confidence in myself than Lynn apparently had in me. I’d hidden a lot of things (okay, it was mostly weed) back when I had stuff to hide. I knew a lot more about hiding places than she did.

  If the key to that cabinet was in Mom’s room, I was going to find it.

  chapter seventeen

  “We’ll be killed if we get caught.”

  We’d barely stepped through the doorway into Mom’s room when Lynn offered this dire prediction. She was exaggerating but it was safe to say if Mom ever found us snooping around in her room there would be a scene bad enough and loud enough that the neighbours would be giving us strange looks for weeks.

  “Don’t worry so much,” I said. I gave a wave of indifference to show her my total lack of concern.

  “Boo!” she yelled, then laughed when I jumped.

  “That was just reflexes,” I said. “Now quit messing around and let’s do this.”

  We got busy, searching carefully through all of the obvious places first. Even though we got fairly absorbed in our search, we flinched at every strange noise. For some reason there were a lot of them — sounds of footsteps in the hallway outside, keys turning in doors, creaking, rustling, and on and on. It was like the apartment had suddenly become haunted.

  “You know,” Lynn said after a particularly unnerving noise, “if she does come through that door, we don’t have a prayer of getting out of here before she sees us.”

  It was true that the layout was working against us. The door to the apartment opened into the kitchen, with the living room just past it in one open space. The hallway to the bedrooms branched off from the kitchen, on your right just inside the door, and Mom’s room was straight ahead at the end.

  We’d talked about whether or not we should leave the door open or closed while we were in there. Open, Mom would definitely see it right away, because she always left it shut. Closed, we’d have even less time to cover our tracks if we didn’t hear her until she opened the bedroom door and saw us there. Besides, being in there with the door closed would make us look even guiltier.

  It took more than an hour to go through her dresser, carefully checking under and among the clothes, and pulling each drawer out to see if anything was secured to the bottom. We lifted the mattress on the bed, crawled under
neath it and shone a flashlight at the underside of the box spring.

  “She’s going to know we were in here,” Lynn said at one point. “There’s no way she’s not.”

  “Not if we’re really careful about putting things back exactly as they were,” I said, but I had an uneasy feeling she was right. I think I’d know it if someone went through my stuff, no matter how careful they tried to be.

  “The key probably isn’t even in here, anyway. I bet she keeps it in her purse or something.”

  “She might,” I said, “but I think it’s more likely to be here.”

  By then we’d finished with most of her stuff, looked in the light fixture, under the carpet edges, behind the baseboard heater, checked for loose trim around the doors and window, and lifted down the few pictures Mom had hanging to see if there was anything behind them.

  Nothing.

  “There’s still the closet,” I said after we’d searched the rest of the room. Neither of us was keen to start in there because it was crammed full of bags and boxes.

  “We might as well get started.” Lynn sighed. “It’s going to take hours to go through this stuff.”

  But it didn’t, because when we started to look, the first thing I noticed was that an old winter jacket Mom hadn’t worn for years seemed out of place. Other things that were rarely worn — or retired — were all shoved to the back, but not this coat.

  I reached in and felt around in the pockets. Nothing. Then I thought to check if there were any inside pockets. Sure enough there was one on the left side of the coat, and a small key was tucked into it.

  I pulled it out and held it up for Lynn to see. She squealed and clapped her hands like a little kid and asked me how I’d known where to look.

  I told her how I’d figured it out while we went to the filing cabinet and knelt in front. The key fit, and it was that simple — a twist and the cabinet was unlocked, along with all the secrets it held.

  “You’re going to think I’m nuts,” I said to Lynn, but before we start looking at any of this, I think we should get a copy made of the key.”