by Donna Milner
And, sure enough, shortly after Morgan left, Carl followed. They’ve all lived there since. Morgan and Ruth are married, but ironically, considering how they met, childless.
‘Ruth got two husbands for the price of one,’ Mom wrote. ‘Although Carl doesn’t live with them, his home is a pebble’s throw away. Close enough to share most meals with his brother and his wife.’
Ruth doesn’t seem to mind though. The few times I’ve seen them over the years, her shy, oval face portrays only love and acceptance; although I once caught a look of longing cross her eyes as she watched Morgan and Carl playing with their young niece, Jenny, when they visited us.
I often wondered whether Ruth ever tried to find the child she had given up at birth. Not wanting to dredge up unwanted memories or embarrass her, I once asked Morgan if they had ever searched for her baby. He told me that he’d wanted to but she had refused. Maybe, as Mom always says, it’s for the best. You can’t go back and repair the shattered parts of your life.
In Vancouver, I threw myself into school. And every afternoon I dropped a dime into a clinking glass box on the Hastings Street bus and rode downtown to the public library. I did my homework there, appreciating every moment of the hushed silence, the familiar smell of books. Then I would sit and read until closing time. After a few months, somebody must have either taken pity on me, or thought that if I was going to spend so much time there I might as well be working. I was offered an after-school job. I accepted. For the rest of the school year, I slept at the Beckett house, but the library was home. When summer came, I told myself, and my parents, that I would rather be cataloguing books than delivering milk.
After I graduated from high school I went to work for a small community newspaper, then moved on to The Vancouver Sun.
I married the first man who asked me, before I realized I didn’t need to be rescued.
Chapter Forty-Four
THE OXYGEN TANK drones on in the stillness of my mother’s room. I sit by her bed and watch her breathe.
‘Mom,’ Jenny’s hushed voice breaks into my trance. ‘The morphine has taken hold,’ she whispers. ‘Gram’s probably asleep for the night now. Why don’t we go and get you checked in next door.’
Now that I’m here I’m afraid to leave. But I nod and let my daughter lead me away like a reluctant child.
In my room at the Alpine Inn I sit down and take a sip from the glass of sherry in my hand. In the matching blue paisley wingback chair across from me, Jenny waits while I settle. I lean back and close my eyes.
‘Do you remember much about your father?’ Jenny’s father, my first husband, died before she was eight.
She considers the question. ‘Yes and no,’ she finally answers. ‘Sometimes I think everything I remember about him is what you’ve told me over the years, and from our old pictures. I do remember his hands were always ink-stained when he came home from work. And I remember him reading to me at night. But I have trouble picturing his face.’ She is quiet for a moment, then asks. ‘Did you love him?’
I open my eyes and smile at her. ‘You know I once asked your grandmother the same thing about my father. Yes, I think I did, as much as I was able to at the time. I was so young, looking for a saviour. I probably half fell in love with the illusion of who he was. He was older, the editor of a newspaper. And very handsome.’
‘He looked like Uncle Boyer,’ Jenny says.
He did? Yes, I suppose in a way he did. Funny I never thought about that before.
‘So did Ken,’ she says, ‘and Bert.’
I am startled by her words. With a jolt that is physical I realize the truth of the observation. All of them, all the men in my life, except Vern, have had some resemblance to Boyer. And to River, although she can’t possibly know that. The implication of what she is saying is not lost on me. Is that what I do? Leave them, run away, when I realize they’re not Boyer – or River?
And Vern? What does this say of him? Vern with his brown eyes and thick dark hair. He is nothing like the others, in any way. He’s not a teacher, an editor, or a writer. Like my father, Vern wears the dirt of the earth under his fingernails. And I have been with him the longest.
I’m too weary to think about this now. I drain the last sip of sherry, set the glass on the night table and push myself up.
‘I know about the baby,’ Jenny says quietly.
So this is it. This is what she couldn’t talk about on the phone. I sink back into my chair. ‘How long have you known?’
‘I heard the rumours years ago,’ she says. ‘It’s a small town, Mom.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I thought that if you had wanted me to know, you would have told me.’
‘There was no reason to, the baby didn’t live.’ No reason not to either. Why hadn’t I? As a doctor I’m sure Jenny has heard far more shocking confessions. But not from her mother.
‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant,’ I tell her now. ‘And when the baby was stillborn it was as if it was nothing more than a miscarriage.’
‘Really?’
I open my mouth, close it, then say, ‘No.’
‘It was that baby Gram was talking about tonight, wasn’t it?’ Jenny asks.
‘I don’t know what she was talking about,’ I sigh.
Mom had become incoherent while I tried to soothe her. She mumbled something about Father Mac and Dr Mumford before the morphine took hold. It makes me sad to know my mother is still haunted by my mistakes. ‘Your grandmother and I have never talked about it, about the baby. But she couldn’t have heard him cry. The baby was born too early, never took a single breath. It was stillborn.’
‘No,’ Jenny’s voice is soft, almost a whisper. ‘No, he wasn’t.’
I feel as if a hot boulder has thudded into my chest.
‘What? What are you saying? Of course the child was stillborn. Dr Mumford, the nuns, they said—’ I shake my head. ‘No, the baby didn’t live.’
Jenny leans over, takes both my hands in hers, forcing me to look into her eyes. ‘Mom, listen. You know there were two babies born that night. The other baby, Ruth’s baby, was the one that didn’t live.’ Even though her voice is gentle, I can hear the urgency, the plea for understanding, for belief. ‘I don’t know how else to tell you, but it’s true,’ she says.
Confused, my mind races to make sense of her words, and to find denial as I pull my hands away. ‘No! That’s not right,’ I stand up quickly, then sit down again. ‘That’s impossible – how can – after all these years? How?’
‘There was a request for the medical records of the mother of a baby boy born on February 12, 1969,’ she says. ‘But when the records were searched, something wasn’t right. There were two births recorded for the date, both to the same mother. Both to Ruth, hours apart. The clerk brought the records to Nick and me. Nick confronted his grandfather. At first old Dr Mumford said it was a mistake. He insisted there was only one baby born that night. He refused to acknowledge the discrepancy. But he finally broke down and confessed. The baby who lived, your baby, was given to the adoptive parents who were waiting for Ruth’s child.’
There’s not enough air in the room. I cannot fill my lungs. I don’t want to hear any more. I stand again and turn to push open the window and gulp the cool air. ‘No,’ I insist with my back to her, ‘that can’t be right. The nuns! The nuns told me! They wouldn’t lie.’
‘Did the nuns actually tell you your baby had died?’ she asks gently.
Born too soon. I have never forgotten the nun’s no-nonsense tone as she said those words the next morning. ‘A baby boy, born too soon.’ And suddenly I relate them to Boyer’s childhood lesson about discretion, about using carefully chosen words to avoid the truth, the hurt.
I spin around and face her. ‘That’s enough!’ I say, fighting the hysteria that rises with my voice. ‘I don’t want to know any more. This conversation is over.’
‘But you need—’
‘No! No, I don’t. That child
was dead to me thirty-four years ago and he’s dead to me now. Why drag up the past? Why would you tell me this now?’
But I know the answer before the words are out of her mouth. ‘Because he’s coming, Mom,’ she says. ‘He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.’
Chapter Forty-Five
Nettie
THEY CAME TOGETHER.
Nettie heard the hesitancy in their steps. Their shoes shuffled, scratched, barely lifted from the tiled hospital floor. They came into her room so close together they could have been one dark messenger with two heads.
They have come to mourn me, Nettie thought. She had been back in the hospital for over a week now. The stays are getting longer. This will be the last.
But this was a good day.
Boyer stood at the head of her bed, which he had just adjusted for her comfort. Nettie lay with her head cushioned in pillows, watching as the two visitors approached the end of the bed. For a moment she imagined them as two old crows, both garbed in raven black, hovering over the foot rails.
Age had not cowered Dr Mumford. At eighty-five, his posture was still determinedly straight, but she noticed the slight tremor of his hands before he wrapped them around the metal bars.
She looked from him to Father Mac. The years had not been so kind to the priest. His shrunken frame was lost in the bulk of his great wool overcoat. His neck disappeared into his clerical collar.
The greetings were brief. Nettie was relieved her visitors did not ask how she was doing. They knew. Neither of her two old friends was about to waste time on polite lies and reassuring words. The priest spoke first. The timbre in his voice belied his diminishing body. Father Mac placed an arm on Dr Mumford’s shoulder. ‘Allen has something to say to you, Nettie.’
She saw the doctor bristle as the priest urged him forward, but he made his way to the side of the bed, next to Boyer.
He took Nettie’s hand, then asked Boyer. ‘Could we have a moment please?’
‘It’s all right, Allen,’ Nettie said. She paused for a moment, concentrated on breathing from the oxygen tubing in her nose, then went on. ‘There’s nothing you have to say to me, that my son can’t hear.’
‘Nettie,’ Dr Mumford began, but his voice cracked. Something inside him seemed to crumble. His shoulders sagged. Boyer pulled up a chair and the doctor slumped into it. ‘I don’t know how to tell you,’ he said. ‘Years ago … Natalie’s baby …’
Nettie’s heartbeat quickened as the stream of words came tumbling out of the doctor’s mouth. She listened in silence as he confessed to how he played God the night she brought Natalie to him. How he had lied about the child not surviving.
‘There was a family waiting for the baby – Ruth’s baby – it was so easy,’ he said when he was finished. ‘So easy. I thought it was the right thing.’ He lowered his head and wept onto Nettie’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry.’
‘I heard the baby,’ she whispered.
And she recalled the sound coming from behind the delivery room doors. The tiny cry she convinced herself later was Ruth’s child. But as the doctor sobbed his remorse at her side, she remembered. She remembered feeling the strong pull at the core of her being at that cry. It was the same overwhelming tug she had experience at the birth of each of her own children. The memory rose to the surface, a memory buried so deep, she’d never had to face the truth.
She searched the priest’s eyes. Although she’d never confessed this one sin, she had lived her life doing penance for her part in Natalie’s baby being condemned to purgatory. ‘The baby,’ she asked between strained breaths. ‘Did Ruth’s baby receive Last Rites?’
As the priest nodded, Nettie closed her eyes and felt relief wash through her.
She opened her eyes as Boyer asked, ‘And Natalie’s child? Where did Natalie’s baby go?’
‘The hospital didn’t keep the adoption records,’ Dr Mumford said. ‘Our Lady of Compassion and the Church handled that.’
Nettie’s eyes shifted to Father Mac.
‘I’m sorry,’ the priest said, ‘I can’t give you that information. Adoption records are confidential. But,’ he went on, his words slow and measured, ‘we had a written request from an agency searching on his behalf. I’ve spoken with a representative from the agency. The young man, she told me, is not looking for his birth mother. He doesn’t want to intrude on her privacy. But because he has a family of his own now he would like access to family medical history.’
His frail hand reached into the deep pocket of his overcoat. ‘What I can give you,’ he said, ‘is this.’ He held up a folded paper. ‘It’s the contact number of the agency that was inquiring on his behalf.’
Nettie watched as Boyer reached out and took the paper from the priest’s hand.
Chapter Forty-Six
THE AMBER GLOW from the bedside lamp reflects on Jenny’s face. A moth is trapped between the bulb and the shade. I hear the muted thuds as it throws its body back and forth in frantic attempts to escape. I know the feeling.
‘And me?’ I ask, my voice shaking, as I stand frozen by the window, my arms folded. ‘Why didn’t someone call me, tell me? You had no right! No right to search for him, to find him.’
‘He found us,’ Jenny says. I can see the excitement growing in her face as she rushes to explain. ‘Uncle Boyer sent him a message through the agency that was searching for his birth records. He called back right away. Uncle Boyer explained the circumstance of his birth. Told him how sick his grandmother—’
‘Didn’t anyone, anyone, stop to think to ask me if this is what I wanted?’ I demand. The heat of fear turns into shivers of anger. I whirl around and slam the window shut. ‘You had no right to decide for me.’
‘I know. We know. But it all happened so fast. There really wasn’t time. He called yesterday to say he was flying up from Vancouver tomorrow. Boyer, none of us, wanted to tell you on the telephone,’ she says. ‘Gram wanted to tell you herself. That’s what she was trying to say tonight.’
I face Jenny and feel my eyes narrow. ‘Well, I won’t meet him. I won’t! I don’t want to know his name. I don’t care I’m rambling, but unable to stop myself. ‘You have no idea what you’re asking of me!’
I read the disappointment that floods her face. Of course she would have expected my shock, but this – this aversion to meeting my own son – she cannot understand. How could she? She believes, they all believe, that this is the child of my teenage crush. They are each ready, eager, to accept him as family. If only it were that simple. If only he were what they believe him to be – River’s son.
Suddenly I am very tired. ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more.’ I turn my back on her and reach for my suitcase. ‘It’s been a long day. I’m going to bed.’ I know my voice has gone flat, devoid of the conflict of emotions that wage a silent war within me.
Behind me, I hear Jenny stand. ‘His name is Gavin,’ she says wearily. ‘He’s an airline pilot.’
When I don’t respond, she goes to the door. ‘He’s your son, Mom,’ she says. ‘But before you decide, for whatever reason you aren’t saying, that he means nothing to you, remember he means something to us. He’s the brother I never had. The grandson Gram never had. And the nephew your brothers and Aunt Ruth never had. And he’s the son of the man, who, from what I understand, is someone you all once loved. Is whatever stopping you bigger than that?’
Now. Now is the time to tell her.
Before the door opens, Jenny adds, ‘Uncle Boyer’s picking them up at the Castlegar Airport tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘Them?’ My voice is shaking.
‘Yes. He has a family. A wife and three-year-old daughter.’ The door closes. As I listen to Jenny’s footsteps fade down the empty hallway, I realize with a deep sadness that I’m letting history repeat itself. I’m doing exactly the same thing my mother and I did. I am allowing the unspoken, the things I’m not saying, to create a wedge between my daughter and me.
A sudden flurry of delicate moth wings hammers against the light
bulb and they turn to dust behind the lampshade. Like the moth, I am trapped, trapped between the heart-swelling excitement of my daughter’s revelation and the frantic need to flee. And, like the moth, this time for me there is no escape.
Chapter Forty-Seven
SLEEP ELUDES ME. I toss and turn in the strange bed while I fight back the faceless image of a son I can’t help wondering about. Jenny said he was flying in from Vancouver. Did he grow up there? Had I ever walked by him on some unremembered street? Who adopted him? Was he happy? What – who – did he look like? And did he ever wonder about me?
I dream of crows. The dream is so real that I am certain I’m awake and have sleep-walked in the night. I stand in the clearing by the lake behind our farmhouse. I have visited this place many times in dreams. And each time I wondered how I got there. Do my feet know some magic path my mind has forgotten?
Before me a carpet of black-feathered birds spreads across the meadow and along the shoreline. They fill the branches of the trees and look down from the moss-covered roof of Boyer’s cabin. Thousands of ebony eyes watch as I begin to move. They part as I approach and leave a pathway to the cabin door.
The forest has almost reclaimed the burned-out shell. Tangled Virginia creeper vines, their orange and red leaves withered, crawl up the charred logs. My feet carry me soundlessly to the door. It looks so solid, so real. I wonder what will happen if I reach through the vines and push it open? Will I find his ghost waiting inside after all these years, ready with accusations, explanations, forgiveness?
My hand lifts slowly and finds the iron latch. As my fingers touch the cold metal, the door, the walls, the roof, all turn to dust and collapse in a cloud of ethereal smoke, while the crows rise as one to the sky.
In the darkness of early morning I make my way through the empty streets of Atwood. Pink glow from the streetlights sifts down through the thick mountain mist. The rhythmic pounding of my runners rises from the pavement. When I reach Main Street I shiver, not from the crisp autumn air, but from the memory of last night’s dream, and the vision of a face rising in the dust of the disintegrating cabin. The face that appeared was not the one I expected. Instead of River’s face, I saw the scarred, unsmiling face of Boyer.
