by Jamie Zeppa
He wouldn’t put it in his book, because he hadn’t developed it himself, but he knew how to make another person disappear. Remove photos of said person from all albums (don’t forget to check cardboard box of miscellaneous pictures). Go through the house and collect personal effects: clothes, shoes, monogrammed gloves, alphabet key rings. Check books for the person’s name written in fading ink on the flyleaf. Shake out books just in case the person left something pressed between the pages: a letter, an address written on a slip of paper. Never, under any circumstances, mention the person. That wouldn’t be hard once all physical traces had been removed. And even removing the physical evidence was probably not so hard after you got rid of the actual person.
He had no idea how they’d accomplished that part. He could only say that there was nothing of Grace Turner in the house.
Their only oversight had been leaving the photo and the birth certificate in the box in the closet. And they’d corrected that.
He kept his investigations to himself. It wasn’t difficult. When adults wanted you to be something badly enough, they’d take anything as a confirmation that you were becoming it. They wanted you to be a doctor, you got 87 on a biology quiz, and bing, bang, boom, you were on your way to medical school. Never mind that Mrs. Agnew had been using the same biology tests for five hundred years and anyone could get a copy with the answers for a quarter and, in fact, you yourself were selling the copies this year. Or they wanted you to have settled down, and weeks passed where nothing happened except you came home and did your homework, and on Saturday you raked Mrs. May’s lawn and she sent you over to her sister Mrs. Murphy’s house to do some yardwork, and lo! you had settled down. Never mind that you were undercover the whole time, taking notes and cracking codes. They wanted you to put this adoption business behind you; you said you would, and be-bop-a-loo-bop, you had put it all behind you.
He had slept in the back seat all the way home from North Bay, waking to the crunch of Vera closing the passenger door. For a few moments, it was just him and Frank listening to the engine click and sigh. Frank took off his glasses and began cleaning one lens with a handkerchief. “It’s hard for her to talk about,” he said.
Hard for her to talk about? Dean thought. Think of what you’re putting them through. How could you do this to us?
Frank looked at him in the rear-view mirror. “We didn’t tell you because we thought it would be better for you not to know. We couldn’t have children of our own. We tried, but she had to have an operation, and—”
Dean didn’t care about any of that. “Where did I come from?” he asked. “Who are my real parents? Where are they now?”
Frank breathed on the other lens and began to polish it. Dean wanted to grab the glasses and throw them out the window. He was reaching for the door handle when Frank spoke up. “The woman couldn’t keep you. She was young and not married. That’s all I can tell you.”
“That’s all you know or that’s all you can tell me?”
“That’s all we know.”
Dean’s face tightened into a mask. They should know better than to lie to an expert.
Frank said, “The best thing is to just put it out of your mind. Don’t let it be a monkey on your back.”
“Fine,” Dean said. He knew how to play that game. He got out of the car. “I’m going in.”
Vera was in the kitchen, breaking eggs into a mixing bowl. He opened the refrigerator and stood peering in. From the corner of his eye, he could see that she had put down her wooden spoon and was looking at him. Even though it was too late, because he was on his own now and there was almost nothing she could say to change that, he waited. The clock ticked; on the stove, the coffee pot began to burble.
“Don’t stand with the fridge open,” she said. “And wash your hands.”
It was Mrs. May who told him. “Grace Turner? Why, that’s your aunt. Your father’s sister. She went to work down south.” Her sister Mrs. Murphy told him even more. Sometimes, he was sure he was two steps away from unravelling the whole thing. Other times, what seemed like a brain-swelling, throat-choking revelation shrank into some scrap of common information by the time he got to the next clue. The hardest part about being undercover was that he had to pretend he knew nothing and wanted to know even less. It took him almost two years to put it all together. But Cooper might have been right about one thing: You think you want to know. But you don’t.
He had started his detective work by knocking on Mrs. May’s door and asking if she had any yardwork he could do. She had babysat him when he was a kid, on the rare occasions Frank and Vera went out. Her children were all grown up and her husband had died years ago. She would be lonely, he thought. She would welcome the chance to talk. And she had to know something; she’d lived at the end of the road, in the small white house with blue shutters, for years. But she turned out to be discreet; she’d stop mid-sentence and say that she had already told him too much, after spending twenty minutes telling him nothing at all.
He had much better luck with Mrs. Murphy, who lived in a much bigger house with a bigger yard across town. The sisters had nothing in common except that they were both fat, and not even that was the same. Mrs. May was the soft kind of fat and called him “Dean, dear” and always sounded breathless. Mrs. Murphy was the hard kind of fat, addressed him as “Boy” and had a voice like a can of nails. Her house had a complicated system of eaves and gutters and mouldy waterspouts, and there was no one to help her with the upkeep. Her children were ingrates, her neighbours were criminals, and her husband was dead—poisoned, Dean was fairly sure, by Mrs. Murphy herself, although a cast-iron frying pan over the head was not out of the question.
“You just do your work there and don’t listen to her,” Frank had advised the first morning Dean set out on his bike. But it was impossible not to listen: she talked constantly, and swore more inventively than he did.
It was easy to get her to talk. All he had to do was mention a person and she went off like a firecracker. Father Croce. Father Croce was a drunk, and Dean couldn’t tell her he hadn’t smelled the goddamn drink on him. Father Dougherty. The principal of Dean’s school had his finger up his arse. (He agreed with her on that point, even though he wasn’t sure what it meant.) Dr. McCabe. Dr. McCabe had been screwing his secretary all these years, and Mrs. McCabe knew it, but that didn’t stop her from flouncing around in her silk this and her fur that.
Vera. Well, Vera certainly did well for herself, considering what she came from. Vera’s father had been a drunk, hawked everything he owned for the drink and even sold the pots and pans when there was nothing else left. Vera’s sister had married a man just like him, only he was well off, so she kept her pots, but Vera got lucky. What was Dean doing with the leaves over there? He was going to walk through them and scatter them all over hell’s half-acre. Frank. Now there was a sad story. Frank’s mother had died of creeping paralysis, and Frank’s father had died of septic shock. And Frank had to bring up his younger sister, Grace—
“My dad has a sister? Really?” Dean said. “He never talks about her.”
“Well, I’m not surprised.”
Dean stopped raking. “What do you mean?”
“She got knocked up and had to go down south. Why are you holding the rake like that?”
Dean bent down and pretended to free something from the end of the rake. If she got onto the subject of his crappy workmanship, he might never be able to steer her back.
“Where down south?”
“Oh, I can’t remember. It was a long time ago. Peterborough or Kingston.”
“And then what happened to her?”
“How should I know? I had enough worries of my own with that lout I was married to.”
“She, Grace, wasn’t married?”
“Why do you think she went down south?”
“Who was it … the father, I mean?”
“What do I look like, the FBI? Watch what you’re doing there. If I wanted the leaves smeared around, I�
�d let the wind do it for free.”
When he’d tried pressing Mrs. May for more information, she said, “Oh, I’m not one to gossip, Dean, dear. You’d have to ask your mother and father about Grace. She was a sweet girl. She used to pick flowers over in the field where Donaldson’s store is now. I hardly remember her.”
But Mrs. Murphy said, “I remember her, all right. She was soft in the head.”
He almost dropped the rake. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Are you soft in the head yourself?”
Dean scowled at the ground. “I mean, was she crazy? Stupid?” He didn’t know what he would do if Grace turned out to be retarded or something. Those records are sealed for a reason.
“No, no.” Mrs. Murphy waved him back to work impatiently. “She was just off.”
He held on to the “just.” Just off. Like milk. You could still drink it. It had just been left out too long. He started to ask about the baby, but Mrs. Murphy said she’d seen enough of his leaf-arranging, thank you very much; the Pronger boy two streets over did a much better job.
At home, he searched for her again and again in the bookcases and the cupboards, in between cookbooks and among the spice jars. She had been here. She had grown up here with Frank, who was not his father but his mother’s brother. She had touched these walls and sat under these lights and walked through these doors. But they’d erased every trace of her, or else she’d taken everything with her. She had left nothing of herself behind. Except him.
He waited several weeks after Mrs. Murphy dismissed him before he brought up her name to Frank. They were in the basement, painting two wooden benches Frank had built for the front lawn. Dean said, “Mrs. Murphy says I have an aunt named Grace.” He watched Frank carefully.
Frank smoothed another band of dark green paint onto the pale wood. “My sister,” he said.
“Where does she live?”
“Down south. She went down there to work during the war. She got a job in a big clock factory. Watch what you’re doing there, Dean. You’re dripping everywhere.”
“How come she never visits us?”
“She has her life down there, I guess.”
“But she’s your sister.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, she and Vera didn’t get along very well. They were like chalk and cheese.”
“Does she ever write to you? Does she know about me?” Dean asked. His hand was shaking. He put down his brush.
The door to the basement opened and Vera called down, “Frank, bring me up some potatoes.”
Frank said, “Bring your mother some potatoes. And Dean, don’t mention Grace to her. It upsets her.”
I’ll bet it does, Dean thought. In the root cellar, he counted out potatoes. All the pieces of a new plan were whirling around in his head. He didn’t have to break open sealed records; he only had to find a big clock factory in southern Ontario, and how many big clock factories could there be?
KNOCK AND YOU SHALL FIND
He went to Marie, the bank teller Frank and Vera usually went to. “Hello, Dean,” she said, smiling warmly. “We haven’t seen you in here in a while. And you used to be one of our regulars!” This was true: they used to bring him in once a week, dressed up in his church clothes, his hair slicked back. Vera had often pressed a spit-dampened handkerchief to his chin and cheek at the last minute. What would people think if he went into the bank looking like a ragamuffin? (Sit down. Be quiet. Stop that. What would people think?)
And all this time, what had people been thinking? There goes Dean Turner. His mother was odd, off, something wrong in the head, his father was unknown, name Not Given, a drifter, a grifter, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, a thing that went bump in the night.
“I think the last time I saw you, you needed all those nickels, remember? For the school bingo? That was a couple of years ago. Are you still doing that?”
“No, that was a one-time thing.”
“How’s your mother, Dean?”
Did she know? Maybe every time she saw him with Frank and Vera, she wondered. She was waiting, like everyone else, to see how he would turn out, what would show through, the face of his real mother, the bad blood of his father.
“She’s still sick,” he said. “My father was looking after her, but now he’s starting to come down with it.”
“Oh, the poor things.”
Dean pulled the cheque from his front pocket. “He’s down at Maniaco’s, getting chicken to make soup. He sent me to cash this. Should we wait for him, though?”
“No, no,” Marie said. “Did he sign it? As long as he signed it.”
Dean turned the cheque over. Frank Turner, small, neat n’s and r’s. His best work yet. Marie took the cheque and stamped it. “Did he give you his bank book, Dean?”
“No, he left it on top of the fridge. He was going to go back for it, but he wanted to get the soup made before my mom woke up.”
Marie nodded sympathetically. “It’s hard when the woman of the house is sick, isn’t it? Everything is topsy-turvy.” She counted out the bills. “Now, how are you going to carry this down to Maniaco’s?”
“Oh, I have my wallet,” Dean said, showing her.
Marie laughed. “Well, won’t you feel like Mr. Rockefeller for two and a half blocks!”
Dean smiled. Maybe she didn’t know. It was possible. The town wasn’t that small.
“You give your parents my best wishes,” Marie said.
“I will,” Dean promised.
When she called him back to the counter, his knees wobbled. Had she compared signatures? But she only wanted to give him a pen with the bank logo printed in smeary ink: YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR BUSINESS. He put it in his pocket with his Rockefeller-thick wallet.
He wore his black winter coat over his school trousers and white shirt, and packed his tie and grey sweater into his rucksack. This time, he took the bus. On the bus, you were just a guy going to visit your Aunt Jean and Uncle Walter, or going down south to look for work like so many people before you. On the bus, you were unremarkable, unidentifiable if anyone asked, just one of several male passengers of average height, all in dark coats. Now, did he have a hat? Jeez, I can’t remember. Cars were trouble; they led to cops. A rule for his book. He’d never have anything to do with a stolen car again.
He took the night bus so he wouldn’t have to pay for a room. There was no way to know how long Frank’s paycheque would have to last. Also, the less of it he spent, the more of the original amount he would have when he was ready to pay it back. Dear Frank and Vera, he would write. Here is the money I borrowed. I wouldn’t have had to do it this way if I had my own money, which is in a bank account I don’t even know the number of. Speaking of that, you can keep that money as payment for all you have spent on my room and board all these years. I appreciate everything you have done for me. Yours truly, Dean Turner. He fell asleep in the darkest part of the night and awoke as the bus was lumbering off the highway into the town of Peterborough at dawn. He’d left the Soo in winter and arrived down here in spring. The snow was gone, and tiny buds glowed on the branches. The main street had a small square with benches and a clock tower, and stores with blue-and-white-striped awnings. They were still shut up, but beside the bus depot, a coffee shop was open. In the men’s room, he rinsed his face and ran his wet hands through his hair.
He ordered coffee, black, and eggs, sunny side up, but he couldn’t eat. The coffee stripped his tongue and turned to acid in his stomach. The waitress told him how to get to the clock factory. If he was looking for work, though, he was probably out of luck; they weren’t hiring. “I’m going to meet somebody,” he said. “Grace Turner. Maybe you know her? She’s been living down here for a while.”
The waitress shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
But that didn’t mean anything. In the Soo, the waitress at the Adanac Diner wouldn’t know every single person who worked at the steel plant. Grace Turner might be a person who didn’t eat in dine
rs. Frank and Vera never did: why pay an arm and a leg for something you could just as easily and far more cheaply make at home? He hoped she wasn’t like Frank and Vera, though. He hoped she was more like him.
Outside, he followed the waitress’s directions: down to the clock tower, walk to the river and follow the road up the hill until he came to the factory. “You’ll know it when you see it,” she said.
At home, the light was still hard and cold; here, it was lemon-coloured and smelled of earth. He liked the look of the place, like a holiday town with those awnings and the benches. There were more people out on the street now, men and women in coats and hats, a police officer (Dean nodded to him politely), a few cars. He kept his head up as he walked, scanning faces. His mother was here somewhere. She lived on one of these streets. She took her paycheque to the red brick bank on the corner, shopped across the street at the department store. Maybe she was walking to work right now. All he had was a faint image of a faded photograph; he couldn’t bring the face to mind. But he believed it was the kind of memory Brother Nick had told them about, where you cannot produce the answer independently but you can recognize it in a list of options. In a multiple choice test, he would know her when he saw her.
He recognized the factory from the picture in the library book. The librarian who had been suspicious of his adoption project had shown considerably less interest in his essay on industry in Ontario, waving him over to a shelf of cardboard-bound reports with barely a glance. He found Clockworks in Peterborough almost immediately. But Mrs. Murphy had said Peterborough or Kingston, so he called the operator: there was no clock factory in Kingston. And now here he was. Just inside the factory entrance was a wall of clocks. He was startled by one with a pale blue face and delicate black hands: it was the same as the clock hanging above the sink at home.
He found that he was counting the clocks on the wall.
You don’t have to, he told himself, putting his hand against the metal door. You can go back. Or go in. It’s up to you.
