Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  I still think of that first night sometimes, even now, when I lie awake. The darkness is short-lived in Winnipeg in the summer but that night seemed to last forever. Finally the sky began to lighten and my dad came home again and Helen began to putter in the kitchen. My mum sat stiffly at the dining room table. I wondered if Sunny was dead.

  The paper that morning ran the headline: CITY LAWYER’S BABY SNATCHED. My dad and Helen tried to hide it from my mum but she was too fast for them.

  “So, it’s official,” she said to my dad. “Our baby is gone.”

  Posters were made with Sunny’s description: ten months old, sixteen pounds, blonde curly hair, pale blue eyes, long lashes, fair complexion, good-natured, wearing pale yellow sleepers.

  My mum objected to the inclusion of the fact that the baby was wearing sleepers because she thought it would reflect badly on her as a mother.

  “What kind of mother takes her baby downtown in sleepers?” she asked my dad.

  “A beautiful and good mother,” he answered and her sore red eyes filled again with tears.

  The police told my parents to expect a “ran some” note. I didn’t know what that was but I waited for it along with everyone else. I knew it meant that Sunny would come home if she wasn’t dead and that my life would return to the way it was.

  No note came.

  My dad offered a reward to anyone with anything that could help lead us to Sunny. I don’t remember how much he offered but it was a lot.

  The police questioned all the known criminals in Winnipeg, even the Willis twins who lived in our neighbourhood and were well-known to us. It seemed far-fetched to me that those two fourteen-year-old boys, even in and out of reform school as they were, could have anything to do with a man in a tan suit and an act so cunning. I knew them. They knew me and my mum and even Sunny from our walks through the streets with the carriage. My mum tried to avoid them but sometimes couldn’t manage it.

  “Hi, lady,” they said. “Hi, girl.”

  They didn’t say hello to Sunny but that would have been because they knew she was too young for it to be of any benefit.

  My mum warned me that they were bad.

  “Bad how?” I asked.

  “They steal things from people and once they attacked an elderly man in his own home.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said my mum, “but it was terrible. They hurt him so badly he had to go to the hospital.”

  “That’s worse than stealing,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  We heard that the Willis twins had joined in the search for Sunny. The reward money would have been impossible for them to ignore.

  “I don’t want them to be the ones to find her,” said my mum.

  “They wouldn’t hurt her,” said my dad. “And it’s unlikely they’ll find her.”

  “What do you mean?” my mother cried.

  “Oh, Anne, I don’t mean anything,” sighed my dad. “I just meant of all the people in the world looking for Sunny it would be unlikely if the Willis boys were the ones to find her. Someone will find her, just not them.”

  And my mum fell asleep sitting up.

  In those first days my mother became irritated if anyone mentioned something day-to-day like it looked like rain, or how about a soft-boiled egg? or would she like a blouse pressed?

  “Of course not,” she would snap and shake her head back and forth quickly, over and over.

  Then she would go quiet again.

  I remember sitting next to her on the couch trying to rest up against her rigid body.

  “Could you please leave me now, Violet?” she said. “Run along and sit somewhere else.”

  At first I felt like she sometimes wished it were me that was stolen. Gradually I came to know that she always felt that way. I wasn’t the child left behind, to cherish. I was a living presence that should have been an absence.

  My dad didn’t make me feel that way, so I began to stay away from my mother and turn towards him and Aunt Helen. My aunt would lie down with me sometimes at night till I went to sleep. I loved it when she did that because I knew then if the kidnappers came for me that she wouldn’t let them take me away. She would fight them off. Aunt Helen was a lovely strong wall of fragrant protection.

  Police departments across Canada aided in the search. There was talk of shady adoption outfits operating out of the east, babies bought and sold for large sums.

  And there were rumours: a young woman from a Métis shanty-town on the south side of the city was seen carrying a small crying bundle into the camp; a baby in yellow sleepers was spotted alone and asleep on the Transcona bus.

  There were crank calls: we have your baby; we’ve seen your baby; we roasted and ate your baby. Someone even held a crying infant up to a phone so my mum could hear its wails. And there were crank letters: our neighbours have your baby; a wolf took your baby; your baby is a witch, you’re better off without her. All calls and letters were followed up by the police and discarded as groundless.

  The sincere calls were almost as hard to take, well-meaning women with too little in their lives to keep them from reaching out to strangers about something that was none of their business. My mum stopped answering the phone and Aunt Helen dispatched the callers with a no-nonsense brusqueness. They never called twice after dealing with Helen.

  There were even gawkers. Whole families would come to look at the house where the kidnapped baby had lived. My dad called the police whenever that happened and they were driven away, hopefully in shame. For a time a policeman was stationed outside our house to keep those sorts of people away.

  “It’s unconscionable,” said Aunt Helen.

  “Yes!” I said. The word sounded to me like it fit the occasion perfectly.

  My dad looked like an older man now, with lines running up and down his face. The lines didn’t suit him.

  “Go to sleep, Daddy,” I said on some days when the way that he looked upset me.

  “Listen to your daughter,” said Aunt Helen. “You look a fright, Will.”

  And he would lie down on the couch and close his eyes but I don’t think his sleeps were ever very deep.

  Aunt Helen had taken an indefinite leave of absence from her nursing job out west but her employers wanted her back. That scared me more than anything, more than the kidnappers coming for me. I prayed to God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost that she would never leave. I wasn’t sure who or what the Holy Ghost was but I wanted to cover all the bases. Aunt Helen caught me once, on my knees beside my bed. She was very kind: she thought I was praying for my sister to come home.

  Then one morning she left in her brisk and smiling way. For me it was the worst thing that could happen: worse than Sunny never coming home, worse than my mum dying. My dad and I saw her off at the train station.

  “Don’t go,” I said quietly as she crouched to kiss me goodbye.

  She touched my cheek and boarded the train.

  “Bo-oard!” shouted the conductor and we watched through the windows as Helen found her seat and settled in.

  She waved at us and tried to be gay, but I knew her smile was an act, just for me. Her parting gift.

  I practised her pretend smile on the ride home from the station.

  “What are you doing, Violet?” my dad asked nervously as he manoeuvred the car over the bumpy roads.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I practised some more in front of my bedroom mirror but I looked nothing like Helen and I wasn’t going to be able to comfort myself with any version of her pasted-on going-away smile.

  My mother took to calling Sunny “Mary” and referring to her in the past tense as if she were dead, as if there were no hope. My dad did neither of those things but he didn’t fight with Mother about it. He was afraid of her. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me — afraid of what she was turning into. His grief was different from hers. It was grief, where my mum’s was something else that didn’t have a name that I knew of. I think that wa
s because she was aware that if she had behaved just a little differently that day, if she had sat down at the table and waited for a waitress to come, or if she had ordered me to stay with Sunny while she picked out our treats, or if we had just waited up in my dad’s office for him, then it would never have happened. It was down to her. Just like I believed it was down to me.

  She didn’t sleep normally anymore. Sometimes she nodded off for hours fully dressed in a chair. It seemed she was always fully dressed. And she lost so much weight her bones stuck out; she was all pointy edges. Her beautiful thick brown hair turned dull; some of it turned white and a lot of it fell out. She became a thin-haired person.

  My mother seldom left the house. Sometimes she would sit in the backyard while I played, but she wouldn’t play with me. I was pretty much left to my own devices.

  We had a milkman and a bread man and an egg man who delivered their goods right to our back door. Meals were makeshift affairs, with my dad going to the fridge and bringing an assortment of items to the kitchen table: pickles, cheese, canned salmon, soda crackers. He did it for me and I wished he wouldn’t. I would have been happier starving along with them.

  “Her little feet get cold,” my mother said one day. And she wouldn’t let it go. “Will, tell someone to tell them to keep Mary’s feet warm.”

  My dad didn’t know what to do. Finally he phoned his friend, the chief constable, and told him that Sunny’s feet sometimes got cold. The chief phoned his friend, the editor of one of the daily papers, who saw to it that a plea was sent out to the captors to look after the baby’s feet. The other paper followed suit.

  The search went on for months, but my sister wasn’t found. I thought it was time my mother got back to her remaining child, me. I tried my best to be good.

  In late July the police chief came to our house and brought Patrolman Ennis Foote with him. My dad was at home, thank goodness. He tried to get my mum to come downstairs but she wouldn’t. I came, though, and the two men were very nice to me. I realized now that Mr. Foote was Fraser Foote’s dad. Fraser was a boy in my Sunday school class who I liked a lot.

  The chief told us that they weren’t by any means closing the case but that they did have to let up a little on the search. They simply didn’t have the manpower.

  So they weren’t shutting it down but everyone knew that keeping it open was just for show.

  On August 16th, that summer of1925, the first cool day announcing the coming of fall, my mother took Dad’s Ford and drove it at full speed into the brick and limestone wall of the Nutty Club building downtown. Her neck broke and her skull smashed and it was over for her. I guess the idea of dragging herself through the winter ahead without Sunny was more than she could face.

  There was an effort to protect me from this, from the way it happened, but I managed to bust through that protection and I don’t think I missed much.

  “What about us?” I remember asking my dad. He held me close and buried his face in my hair. I felt his warm tears on my scalp.

  When my mother died Aunt Helen came back to us from her home in the Queen Charlottes. She stayed for a few weeks and then went home again. My dad cooked a bit now: pork and beans, bacon and eggs, and lots of Cream of Wheat. We also ate toasted tomato sandwiches till they came out of our ears. Then, after a few more weeks, Helen returned to us and stayed.

  Dad worried about her leaving a whole life behind: her job, good friends, her small rented house. But Helen stressed to him that her situation out west was never meant to be permanent, that one of the reasons she’d become a nurse was because she’d liked the idea of pulling up stakes from time to time. She could find a job anywhere in the world.

  “I’m sure you could come up with a far more exotic location than Winnipeg,” argued my dad.

  “Exotic!” Helen argued back. “After Vimy Ridge, Winnipeg is plenty exotic for me.”

  She had never married. When I asked my dad about that he told me that she’d been in love with a soldier once, back in 1917. She’d cared for him at a casualty clearing station near the front lines. Then she’d met up with him again in a hospital on the coast of France where she was stationed for a time that same year. Artillery shrapnel had taken one of his legs and bayonet lacerations went so deep that he didn’t stand a chance. I pictured him oozing and bleeding beneath his thin hospital blanket.

  “Helen was with him when he died,” said my dad.

  “He was lucky,” I said.

  “Lucky?”

  “To have Helen looking after him while he was dying.”

  I think Dad had missed her when she was gone almost as much as I had. When she came back to stay, his newly hunched shoulders straightened slightly and he no longer forgot to pick up his feet when he walked or wore his bedroom slippers outside in the yard. That new habit of his had worried me terribly. It seemed a very slovenly thing for my dad to do.

  We could have made it, the two of us, but it was much better having Helen around. Her bustling female presence went a long way in filling up the gaping chasm that my mother had left behind.

  The baby’s absence made a hole too, and I felt it, but on an entirely different plane. I’d had so little time to grow attached to Sunny and that had been in a kind of audience capacity. She was like a little moving picture that blew spit bubbles and raised the odd stink. She was too young for me to play with. The criminals stole her from us when I was six and Sunny hadn’t yet celebrated her first birthday.

  It must have been during those terrible months in the spring and summer of ’25 that I started my lifelong habit of conjuring up in my mind The Worst That Could Happen. In the beginning, all my imaginings featured Sunny. I turned her into a cripple before she even arrived at her new home: she lost the use of her arms and legs. To me, that was the worst thing on the planet Earth that could befall anyone, worse even than crashing head first into the Nutty Club. At least if you did that you wouldn’t be around to realize what had happened to you.

  Our family’s primary claim to fame before that summer was that my dad’s dad, Grandpa Palmer, had gone down with the Titanic. I knew it, but didn’t feel it, so it was easy to talk about. Even my dad didn’t mind when I brought it up on occasion. But Sunny’s kidnapping and my mother’s death never took on enough distance for us to be able to talk about them comfortably even among ourselves.

  Every year on the anniversary of Sunny’s disappearance my dad put an ad in all the major papers across Canada. Each time he worded it a little differently, according to how old she got to be and how much he imagined her to have grown. He never got a serious answer. There are an awful lot of cranks out there in the world.

  Chapter 1

  Eleven Years Later

  My family had been out of quarantine for a fortnight when I finally persuaded Fraser to go with me to see the boys.

  At first, Johnny Lee was reluctant to talk to us.

  “I thought it was just a pile of thistles,” he said at last.

  So the part about the Russian thistles was true.

  We sat around the dining room table at a big house in Riverview: Johnny Lee, Fraser Foote, and I. We had been lucky enough to catch Johnny when his mother wasn’t home.

  The boy started to cry. I was sorry for putting him through this, but not sorry enough to stop.

  “It must have been hard for you,” I said.

  “Leave my brother alone.”

  We hadn’t noticed a little girl standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Go play in the backyard,” Johnny said roughly.

  “No.”

  “Go play in the backyard, Muriel, or I’ll tell Mum you snuck cookies.”

  “I didn’t sneak,” Muriel said quietly as she backed away from us through the kitchen. “You snuck.” The screen door closed behind her.

  “That’s my sister,” Johnny said. “She’s five.”

  A familiar sad worm wiggled inside my chest. Seven years ago our Sunny would have been five and I’d missed it.

  “Doe
s Muriel know about what you found?” I asked Johnny.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. She knows something bad happened.”

  In late August of 1936 two eleven-year-old boys from Riverview became famous because of something that they found by the railway tracks. Johnny Lee was one of those boys and the other one was Artie Eccles. Their names weren’t in the paper but news like that travels fast and their identities were bandied about soon enough. Fraser pestered his dad into confirming the names for us. His dad was a cop.

  The phone book told us where we could find the boys. Riverview is on the other side of the Red River from the Norwood Flats where Fraser and I lived. It was a part of town that we mostly saw from across a muddy expanse of water. People just like us lived there, I’m sure, but they had always seemed exotic to me simply because they were as tiny as toy soldiers and they lived west of the Red. It was more like south-southwest at that bend in the river but there were too many curves to label them all with particularity. West held an allure for me probably because everything I knew best was east of the waterway. We had the motorboat launch and the Rowing Club and even a golf course on our side, but somehow Riverview’s westness beat out all three, in my mind.

  On a larger scale, reports of drought and wind and misery from the western provinces seemed to me more fascinating than the tales of grief from back east. And west coast salmon was far more enticing than the cod that bullied its way in from the east. No one liked that salty cod.

  It was a Saturday afternoon in September when Fraser and I trudged through St. Vital, across the Elm Park Bridge to Jubilee Avenue. I knew there was a shorter way, but Fraser insisted on being the navigator and I was so grateful to him for coming with me that I didn’t argue.

  The sun slanted down on us from a deep blue sky fancied up with puffy white clouds. The days as we moved into autumn had become oddly clear of dust and no wind disturbed the stillness of the day. It was hot for that time of year, but hot was nothing new; we were old hands at hot. The leaves were turning and they hung motionless from the trees that were too young to provide much shade — just a dappling here and there.