As she reached once more for her coat, Álvaro clenched his fist around the broken porcelain.
15
Janna’s first mistake had been to write Amy’s mother’s name on her university application form as her emergency contact.
“What was that all about?” Amy had asked in the hospital room where Janna was hooked up to an IV line — for rehydration, they’d said. Amy was doing an agitated little two-step, bracelets jangling and beads clacking. It was making Janna dizzy. That and whatever else they’d injected into her IV line.
“I get this call from my mom’s business partner wondering what the hell Isabel Lee’s daughter is doing putting my mother down as her next of kin.”
“I always liked your mom,” Janna said. “Maybe we could trade.” She’d do better, she thought, with the pleasant accountant who came to high school careers day wearing very nice clothes, talking about how she’d started out training to be secretary, and now she had her own secretary and a little BMW.
“Janna, my mother is dead.”
Janna hadn’t known that. She must have actually had breast cancer when she’d modelled clothes in the breast cancer fashion show Isabel helped organize every year. What Isabel’s mother had died of.
“She had cancer forever. Always making these miraculous recoveries. You kind of stop believing it after a while,” Amy said. “I was in Guatemala. When I came home for the funeral, my dad looked like shit. He tells me his liver’s buggered and could I stick around until it’s over.”
Janna didn’t know that part either.
“You’ve got at least one perfectly good parent,” Amy had said. “Figure it out.”
The second mistake was thinking Greg might be just the ticket to rescue her from Amy. As soon as they met, they joined forces and his vaguely threatening explanation of how Janna’s illness had gone completely unnoticed for almost ten days until he’d insisted a janitor let him into her room added weight to Amy’s work. She had talked Janna’s program advisor into letting her repeat her statistics course, start her financial audit course two weeks late, and still keep her scholarship.
Her third mistake was agreeing to stay with the Colemans while she regained her strength. They were in the business of rescuing waifs, Amy said, and Janna fit the bill. Overhearing Amy talk about Isabel brought back all the memories of the aunties cluck-clucking over her poor kids. How she just couldn’t seem to keep her panties on. Janna had wanted a grenade to flip into the middle of that dinnertime conversation. Until Thomas Coleman lobbed in his own explosive. Rape.
It would explain so much. Isabel’s patience when Janna asked and asked and asked. Her lectures to the boys about respecting women. Even when they don’t respect themselves. Even when they’re nasty. You never know, she’d say, what else is going on in their lives. Leave if you want, but don’t ever, ever, ever hit them. But how could she look at Janna and not hate her?
“Did she tell you that?” Amy said it right out.
“No.” Janna was trying to force down a bagel Amy had heated in her microwave.
“So why the big breakup?”
“None of your business.”
“I don’t think it’s what happened,” Amy insisted. “She’d have done something about it.”
“Abort me?” As soon as the words were out, Amy looked ready to slap her. She started talking about what an idiot Janna was and she was damned if she was going to hang around and listen to her badmouth a friend who had taken her in when her parents had both died, for Christ’s sake, was worried about her daughter, had stopped drinking as far as she could tell.
Janna watched Amy’s pudgy little mouth moving. Even when she stopped talking to breathe, it still hung open. How could her trim and gracious mother have given birth to someone like Amy? Dying all that time and still elegant.
It wasn’t until Amy had stomped off that Janna heard the words about Isabel having stopped drinking. She went to the window, but stepped back when she saw Greg leaning against the next building looking up at her. He raised an arm. His head turned and he smiled at Amy coming out the downstairs door. A gust of wind blew through the ragged square and Amy shivered and struggled with the buttons on her jacket. Greg bent to help her, unwrapped his scarf, and wound it around her head. Then, in an awkward shuffle, he took Amy’s face in his hands and kissed her. She wriggled against him like a walrus pup, took his hips, and shook into a little dance step. They leaned together, arms around each other, and walked away.
Where was it, Janna wondered as jealousy prickled through her, where was it you thought other people went when they went away? What was it you thought they did? When Greg wasn’t home on Christmas Eve, did she think he’d been waiting sorrowfully for her to call? And Amy? She’d never seen Amy’s place. Who she lived with. Did she and Greg lie in bed together, Greg’s deranged father bleating at the door, and laugh at pathetic little Janna?
Even as she tidied her room and emailed a stats assignment to her professor, she felt once more adrift. Adrift somewhere between the blue plastic chair and the sad little bed, her feet cold on the linoleum.
She dressed and walked to class, eyes closed against the slanting rain. In her financial auditing class, the professor explained how every transaction should be traceable back to a real exchange between humans. Goods or a service and some form of cash. Hours worked. Vacation taken. A complex genealogy. An unbroken line from conception to the grave. The marker on the grave where, if you dug, you would find evidence.
If there was a gap in the life history of a transaction, the professor went on, it could mean several things: ignorance, carelessness, incompetence, or intent. And if it was intent, then there was usually something to hide: tax evasion, fraud, embezzlement.
It wasn’t ignorance. Her mother knew who her father was. She stretched her hands out on the keyboard of her laptop and looked at them, searching for his signature. It couldn’t have been rape. When her mother spoke about her father’s beautiful hands, there’d been powerful emotion in her voice. Sorrow. Love, perhaps. Janna typed a few more notes, the fingers automatic on the keys, turning the professor’s moving lips into something for later retrieval. She felt relief wash through her, relief for both her mother and herself. Eyes closed, she typed and typed until the man’s voice stopped and the students around her were gathering their coats and pushing past her. She followed them outside, around the corner and through the doors of the café into a lineup. She needed to eat, to speak to someone and enter into a monetary transaction.
Even before the man in front of her started to turn, she realized it was David. Just what she didn’t need. As she stumbled back, trying to get away, the colour rose up from under his collar and flushed his face with venom. He made an ugly sound, cunt, he said, fucking cunt, and his friends turned to see what was happening. He twisted up his hand to give her the finger, a gesture that carried a clear threat. She turned and fled, bumping into a man holding the door open for her, his dark eyes full of concern. As she pushed past him, she thought she’d seen him somewhere before. But she wanted to get away from all those people in there, turning to look, to wonder what she’d done to make that guy so mad.
Back in her room, she dumped her coat on her bed and stared at the tapestry she’d hung on the wall at the foot of her bed. Trevor, she thought. She could put his name down on the school form. And Jason. Remembering calmed her. Reattached her to her body. She sat down in the chair and stared at the birds sitting so calmly on the branch, one, two, three in a row. Three eyes looking her way. She lifted her hair off the back of her neck. She had planned to go to the gym but could not imagine walking into the clanking weights and hum of track machines. She took a deep breath, pulled on her jacket, her running shoes, and a scarf. She was not going to be afraid.
16
Margaret had called Chris Mundy from the emergency room that night. Thomas waiting for a cast, Álvaro getting his hand stitched up. Making him promise not to hurt himself again. Or anyone else, she’d added, her face so whi
te, the exhaustion so etched into the skin around her eyes and mouth, the nurse brought her a pillow. And then she’d left him to it, her withdrawal as clear as her determination to continue to support him. He’d seen her kneeling one evening, a crack in the door to the bedroom, a candle flickering, her spine straight in its white nightgown, her hair braided down her back. The dim light turned the grey to a vague shadowed lightness, turned the tired woman into a young girl at her devotions. A flush of shame sent him back to Chris.
He had already told her about Ana Elisabeth and Vinicio, about the torture and her death. He had told her what Vinicio had said about his mother. How he thought he’d never know if it was true, but he would not judge his mother for what happened.
He hadn’t told her everything about Clara. And he hadn’t told her about Isabel. His new-found sanctuary.
We think there’s a kind of nobility in carrying the burden of painful secrets, Chris said when he told her about Janna and what it meant, not just the fact of her, but the fact of his own father. He had taken his place in her familiar room, amidst the paints and clay and bright toys in the sand tray only to find he couldn’t draw one thing. The crayon dangled loose in his fingers.
Why didn’t Isabel tell me, he raged. What right did she have?
“Don’t priests keep secrets all the time?” she countered.
“Walter, too. He’d have known,” he said. He flung the crayon down on the table, remembering Walter’s hesitation when he asked him to find out how Isabel was doing.
“When I left Smithers, I’d asked Walter to explain. To give her my apology. To ask for forgiveness. When I phoned and asked about it, he told me she already had another boyfriend.”
“Maybe she did.”
Not so soon, he insisted. They’d been talking about making a life together. She’d felt just as much as he did, he was certain. And Walter knew that.
“I made a good confession,” he said bitterly. “I doubt if he did.”
It’s what priests do all the time, she said, her hands rearranging a shawl full of sparkling fibre. She was watching him carefully, that clinical attentiveness. You know so much, and never tell. There’s power in that knowledge. Keeping secrets. Hiding babies. Protecting others.
“If I’d known,” he began and then stopped. If he’d known, what would have changed? Would he have left the priesthood? Would he be a happily married schoolteacher in Smithers with four or five kids? Would he be a divorced drug counsellor in Vancouver? His knowing wouldn’t have kept Vinicio from burning the people in that village, from stealing those children, it wouldn’t have stopped Clara’s pain, it wouldn’t have kept the beasts from snarling in Ana Elisabeth’s stomach. It wouldn’t have kept Juan Tzul alive.
“What do you tell? What do you leave unspoken? When do you lie outright?” Chris poured them each a cup of tea. It was cool in her office, and water condensed on the outside of the glass. “We are crowded with stories,” she said, “some truth, some lies, many of them not our own. I’ve begun to believe the body — and maybe the spirit your mother’s Mayan practice was so anxious to keep intact — knows the truth anyway. Unconsciously. It’s like the forest. All those plants and flowers and birds singing. We walk through it every day and think we know it well. But most action is taking place underground, the hundreds of little creatures living a complex life out of our sight. And we are all rooted in that.”
He left Chris’s office with a plan that began with Walter. Álvaro’s anger faltered when George brought him into the old man’s darkened bedroom. The skin had collapsed into the hollow cheeks and his frail body barely displaced the blanket. Álvaro was able to bend to him, kiss his cheek, and take his hand. The anger returned as he told him about Janna.
“Are you certain?” Walter asked. “She was known for her…” he paused, “…willingness.”
“The girl is my sister’s twin,” Álvaro said. “You must have known.”
“Your sister?” Walter pushed himself up on his elbow, the red flaming in his cheeks. “What sister? You never talked about a sister.”
George opened the door, reminding Walter to stay calm. His pale eyes flickered between the men.
“Get out,” Walter said. “This is none of your business.”
“I don’t care who knows,” Álvaro said, his voice rising. “I am an illegitimate bastard, I have a half-sister and brother by a man who probably raped my mother, and I apparently have a little bastard child of my own. One you’ve known about all along.”
George hovered in the doorway, his long fingers plucking at the T-shirt stretched over his small paunch.
“We’d have lost you if we told you,” Walter whispered. “We needed you more than she did. She always found someone else.”
Álvaro’s anger shifted again, shifted into something cold and implacable. As if Vinicio was in the room with him. The ways in which someone can say what happened and still be lying. There was no we. Walter did this all by himself. Not wanting the other priests to know what he’d let happen with the young man he’d been so eager to initiate into the full wonder and mystery of the vocation.
“The decision wasn’t yours to make,” Álvaro said.
The old man sipped water through a straw. The flush in his cheeks had faded leaving only the reddened splotches of broken capillaries. George had slipped away. Doors opened and closed. Low voices spoke urgently and the television in the priests’ living room was turned down.
“The power God gives us moves in mystery, Álvaro, but to pretend we don’t have it is a great lie. I used what was given me in the way that seemed truest to his will. And I don’t regret it. Whatever nonsense people spout now, a child is a woman’s place. That care is her great gift. You were made for other things.”
“How can you say that without choking?” Álvaro spit out. “I have a daughter. It changes everything.”
“You’re a priest,” the old man said. “There’s no changing that. Leave the girl to her mother.”
Álvaro could not speak. Walter’s hands were swollen, the blood, George had told him, backing up from his heart. Álvaro looked out the window at Walter’s winter garden. The few withered corn leaves were half covered by the turned earth. The outer leaves of the winter kale were frozen stiff. Prickly rose vines splayed like hairy insect legs across the back fence. The silence stretched so long, Walter’s eyes closed, and his breath caught in a little rasp at the back of his throat.
George reappeared in the doorway, his green winter parka zipped up, black gloves in one hand, the other hand jiggling keys in a pocket. Another man stood behind him, like a bouncer ready to enforce the orders. Álvaro stood to leave.
“Do you remember learning how to float?’
They turned to look back at Walter, his voice clear and low. He was staring at the Oblate cross hanging on the wall beside his bed.
“I’ll never forget the day I leaned back into the water and trusted it to hold me up. It’s a miracle that we float, Álvaro. The water our Lord walked on, it holds us up too. You just lie back and trust it and there you are. It can hold up the whole damn world. This dying is a funny business. It’s almost like falling into the water.
“And soon, I’ll be right in the middle of it, breathing it in and out, not just bobbing along on top.”
Álvaro gave up, for the moment, his anger. “It’s no wonder you like fishing, old man.”
†
A couple of days later he met with the provincial superior in the warm study, a fire in the grate, Eloise anxious at the desk outside. The spectre of administrative and legal ramifications battled with the man’s genuine concern for Álvaro. Was it essential the girl be told at all? Álvaro thought for a long moment about Ana Elisabeth before he said yes. But it’s complicated, he said. She’s vulnerable right now.
“As are you,” the superior said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “You’ll want to have some clarity yourself so we can respond appropriately. Tell me how you were doing before you got this news. Did yo
u feel yourself on the way to some determination about your vocation?”
The wording of the question puzzled Álvaro. Like a job interview. “Right now, I can’t think of myself as anything but her father.”
The superior’s bark of laughter surprised him. “What fools we’ve been. If Walter wasn’t so fragile himself, I’d be tempted to teach him a lesson out in a back alley somewhere. I’d hoped even the older ones knew we can’t get away with these secrets anymore. Our Lord may forgive us, but while we’re in this flesh, the repercussions are endless and mostly profane.”
Eloise put her head around the door, reminding them that mass was about to begin. The superior’s arm insistent around Álvaro’s shoulders, leading him to the chapel and the surprise of an Ash Wednesday service. The realization that he had forgotten about Lent left Álvaro shaken. How far away from all that he’d travelled and in how little time.
Last year in Guatemala he’d shown the kids the way Canadians make pancakes to use up all the butter and eggs on the Tuesday before Lent. Then together they’d burned the palm fronds, saved from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. They clamoured for ash as a promise on their foreheads. The children understood perfectly the wild hope of Palm Sunday and loved to shout the hosannas. Like the Mayan brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque, he told them, Christ went down into the dark house, into the cold house, into all the places of fear, and like the brothers, he came up again. They believed in the resurrection for as long as it took the wafer to dissolve on their tongue. Then it was back to normal; another mutilated corpse.
How could he ask them to give anything up for that? But like the poorest people everywhere, they were the most generous. Armand stopped trying to score goals. He would only pass the ball, he said, and let others make the point. Juan Tzul requested a funeral service for the finger bones he’d carried everywhere, jiggling them in his pockets like lucky dice. Emilia dabbed her makeup on the little ones playing dress-up, leaving her own face bare. He would, he told himself, for forty days, give up anger.
The Taste of Ashes Page 21
