Four or five years, he’s known. And hasn’t tried to find her, or register his own information. But she needs to remind herself that he is very young: barely a young man.
He says, I was flying back from Maui during reading break when I saw the article with your picture. I nearly freaked out. I thought, I have to do this now.
They sit down at one of the round metal tables. She remembers to smile at him. Wow, she says. Four or five years. It’s hard to reconcile you, all grown up, with the baby brother I last saw.
The flicker of discomfort in his eyes, now. Had she intended to cause that?
I was afraid, he says, you know, when I was younger, that you might turn out to be — well, if I contacted you. Someone who was. . . .
She waits.
My mom works for legal aid, he says. She tells me about stuff. . . . I wasn’t ready to take on someone with a lot of problems.
Now she hears in his word choice, his inflection, an older adult speaking. His adopted parents, of course. If she were them, she probably would have also cautioned him.
She says, So you’re a university student.
Yeah. Third year of my degree. Then law school probably. But I might take a break first to do some travelling.
Law school, she says. It’s as if she’s interviewing a potential new barista: Her mind has stopped functioning except to pick up the most obvious pieces of information.
Yeah, he says. Both of my parents are lawyers. It seems I have no choice.
There’s no apparent nervousness, other than his paleness and occasional flushing: no stammering or stumbling over words. And this is a joke he’s made often, she can tell, to smiles and laughter. It’s the kind of thing she hears the students who frequent the café, that is to say, the better-off students, say. What it really means is not that he has no choice, but that he has too many choices, and for now he’s taking the default option in order to postpone a decision.
Where do you live? she asks. Did you grow up here? Do you have siblings? She can’t think, can’t process. He has Cleo’s eyes and colouring — except for his lighter hair. The same quick pink under the skin.
He says, I’m an only child. My parents — we — live in West Point Grey.
Of course they do.
I still live at home. He’s laughing. I mean it’s kind of embarrassing, right? But it’s close to campus.
There had been a time in her twenties when she had taken to bicycling around the Point Grey neighbourhoods, looking at the estates, the mansions, letting the conflicting currents of envy and disdain build a frothing riptide in her, a sort of anarchy fueled in equal measure by her own observations of social and economic inequity and her frustration at being excluded — as far as she could tell, forever — from possession of one of the truly beautiful houses she sometimes saw.
So her lost little brother, her stolen little brother, had been ensconced in that place of exclusion. While she had been bicycling around, grinding her teeth, she had not guessed that behind one of the driveway gates, the Architectural Digest homes, her little brother was an unwitting prisoner, an illicit treasure.
She has to shake herself: She let go of all of that toxic envy and judging long ago. No need to revive it now.
She asks him and he says he likes to snowboard and to surf (when I’m at my parents’ condo on Maui, he says). To read, but he doesn’t read enough. She predicts he likes to hang out with his friends and listen to music, and sure enough he says that next.
And then, like the well-brought-up boy he is, he asks her politely about herself.
She has to carry her answers through that strange tide of resentment or anger, then. It’s as if she’s struggling through a swirling muddy flood holding over her head something she doesn’t want dirtied. She says, trying only to elaborate on the article, fixing her attention on that rosy, tidy, safe portrait of her, that she has done part of a visual arts degree, that she’s worked at quite a few jobs, that she sort of fell into the job at the café, that she lives now in the neighbourhood. That she isn’t married, has no kids.
He asks, then, about the others. She’d put only her own contact information into the registry, but he knows — has been told — that he has other siblings.
Cleo, she says. (She thinks: Cleo’s going to be shocked. She doesn’t know if she’ll be happy.) Cleo, she says, lives in Coquitlam. She’s married. Has two little kids.
Really? Bodhi/Ben seems excited by the prospect of small relatives. Maybe Cleo is who he really wanted to find: a sibling who would bring him more connections. Or maybe he’s like her, at a loss, looking for something to connect with.
Cleo’s son Sam is a year and a half, Mandalay thinks. The same age as Bodhi when. She doesn’t mention that.
And Cliff, she says. He lives here too. Off Main. Somewhere around there.
He’s close to my age?
Yes, she says. (How much has he been told? Had his adoptive parents been provided with a lot of information about Bodhi’s biological family, while they had got none about him, where he had ended up?)
Cliff is twenty-six, she says. He works as a landscaper.
Landscape architect?
No, she says. For a landscaping service. Kind of a gardener, I guess.
Bodhi/Ben nods. His parents would employ a landscaping service, Mandalay realizes.
I think he does well at it, she says. I think he enjoys it. Being outdoors, and so on.
Cool, he says. She thinks: He’s trying to get his head around all of this new information, around Cleo and Cliff. They’re not real to him. What can she say about them, though, without reducing them to a few symbolic phrases? It’s too early for family stories. Even if those existed. Even if that was what he wanted.
And you see them often, Cleo and Cliff? he asks.
She says, not often. If he’s after a new family, a close-knit one, he’s out of luck. We were in separate homes from the time Cleo and I were twelve and thirteen, she says. Then Cliff ended up with Cleo. We hardly saw each other for ten years or so. We’ve all grown up different people. It’s kind of surprising how little we have in common.
Why has she said this? She isn’t even sure it’s true. It’s as if she’s trying to discourage him, to wall him out, or maybe she just doesn’t want him to get his hopes up too much. Or maybe she’s trying to make him feel less excluded — not as if they all were a comfortable unit and he on the outside.
Where did you grow up? he asks.
Various places.
Butterfly Lake?
Mostly.
And — I was told I had two older brothers, not just one.
She says, flatly: Che. He was killed in a work accident a long time ago. Ten years ago.
He nods, looks solemn, but she knows that information will just be an abstraction to him.
It’s kind of funny we’ve all ended up here, though, he says. I mean it’s weird, isn’t it?
Not given that half the population of the province lives in the city, Mandalay thinks, but she says: Not if you’re from Butterfly Lake. If you have any gumption, you leave Butterfly Lake. And Vancouver’s the obvious place to go. The only bus out of Butterfly Lake goes to Vancouver.
I’d like to go there, he says. Butterfly Lake. I’ve heard about it but I’ve never been. Isn’t the scenery supposed to be spectacular?
It is.
Do you go back?
Not very often, she says. She remembers, with a start of guilt, Crystal. Our mom still lives there, she says.
Ben/Bodhi seems shaken, disturbed. He pales, then reddens. Cleo’s complexion’s like that, a pond open to whatever passes across the sky.
Our mom?
Your birth mother. Crystal.
My birth mother’s still alive?
A little dull stab of anger under her breastbone, then. Not that she hasn’t forgotten Crystal’s existence sometimes for months at a time. But for her to have been entirely erased.
Yes, she says. She had a long illness when you were a baby. That�
��s when you were adopted. But she recovered. She’s very much alive.
And in Butterfly Lake?
Yes.
I don’t fucking believe it, he says. I was always told. . . .
He’s unhappy, now. He’s confused, and unhappy. And his unhappiness is going to get bigger, the more he processes, she thinks. She can see the white and red burning in his face.
It occurs to her then that Crystal might turn out to be the kind of relative that her brother was afraid of finding, but she’s not going to be the one to say this. There’s a little burn of righteous anger in her now that Bodhi was told that his mother had died. She knows that there might be a reasonable explanation, but she doesn’t care. The little flame gives her a focus, now. She feels centred. She feels that she has a handle on the whole Ben/Bodhi thing. The reunion. It has been such a shock, so unexpected, so random, so disorienting, but now she’s got an angle, a handle, a lens. She feels she knows where she’s at.
Bodhi/Ben says he wants to meet them all.
One at a time or at once?
All at once, he says. She can see that he’s choosing badly, choosing the difficult thing, but that he’s agitated and reactive now and that he’ll act impetuously. He won’t be satisfied to take cautious first steps, as he has been up until now. He’ll be impulsive. He’ll go for the drama.
Just as she would have at his age.
It’s only after he leaves — clutching the list of phone numbers she’s written down for him — that she realizes that she has not drawn a full breath since she walked up to him. It feels like she hasn’t breathed this entire hour and a half.
The Golden Gates
ON A BULLETIN BOARD in the school hallway Cleo sees the notice: Kindergarten Registration, and the date, and the times: an afternoon, an evening, doesn’t pay attention to it at first, and then is struck by the rest of the notice. Children born in 1994. That’s Olivia.
It’s six months away, the start of school. She had not been thinking about it. She wonders, now, what would have happened if she hadn’t seen the notice? But it’s in the newspaper that week, too, and on the bulletin board at the library, and at the public health clinic.
She says to Trent, it’s so funny: I never thought you would have to register children for school. It never occurred to me.
Of course you do, Trent says. How would they keep track? How would they know how many kids to expect?
It makes sense: It just hadn’t occurred to her, and it seems strange, anomalous in some way. Maybe alarming, this early intrusion of bureaucracy into Olivia’s four-year-old life. Or maybe it’s just that she has carried with her a child’s perspective of the educational system: that schools, or their personnel, are all-seeing, all-knowing. At her school, in Butterfly Lake, she remembers, all of the teachers knew who she was, knew her parents and her siblings, where she lived, from the first day. Maybe she had assigned that apparent omniscience to everyone connected with schools, then, not realizing that she was part of a very small community.
What about when you were living with your foster family? Trent asks, reasonably. You must have had to register at a new school then.
She can’t remember. She can’t remember most of that first year.
On the scheduled day — it’s not a preschool day — she walks down the street to the school, Sam in the stroller, Olivia lollygagging, talking to her imaginary friends or just babbling — Cleo doesn’t always listen that closely — crouching to look at rocks, plants, a bird. It is a long journey, but it doesn’t matter — they don’t have to be there at a specific time.
At the school she doesn’t recognize any of the other children from Olivia’s preschool class, nor their attending adults, in the large group milling around the gymnasium. It appears that a lot of the people here know each other, though. They’re chatting and eating and drinking, ignoring the signs on the walls: No Food In Gym, and the couple of secretaries who are trying to corral them into a line. Cleo feels anxious, a little dazed, at first. It’s like walking into a party as a stranger. She can feel Olivia hang back, too, and sense her trying to make herself invisible behind Cleo’s legs.
Then a plump woman with a pleasant face and round glasses smiles at Olivia and says hi, and introduces herself to Cleo, and says, My boy is motoring around here somewhere — and then another and another. The room is full of women about Cleo’s age, it appears, all friendly, all with four- or five-year-old offspring, many with infants or toddlers too. And men! Not a lot, but a few men, young men. One or two perhaps gay.
How is this possible? How has this group of likeable, friendly people come together, existed in her neighbourhood, without her stumbling upon it earlier? She feels dazed or stunned. She knows that later she’ll have to figure out where she took the wrong route, how she has not discovered this country before, but their friendliness is astonishing. She has perhaps not spoken to that many adults in their thirties — most are in their thirties, she estimates, though there seem to be a couple of slightly older men or women, and a couple of women, one heavily pregnant, who are not past twenty-five — cumulatively, in her entire adult life.
She’s bewildered also because at first there doesn’t seem to be a line or anything happening, but eventually — after the secretaries harry and nudge for a while — people start sitting at tables, and filling out forms, and then start a line at another table, where the secretaries seat themselves.
There’s a long paper form to fill out, both sides: It asks for information Cleo doesn’t really have to hand: the telephone number of the family doctor, the family dentist (dentist?), an emergency contact. There are lines and lines she leaves blank: previous schools attended, medical conditions, legal guardianship, custodial parent.
A woman sitting at her table says, I wonder if this stuff is allowable, under the Freedom of Information Act? I think I’m just going to leave this blank. Or put NOY B. She laughs. Cleo is astonished: It would not have occurred to her to take a cavalier attitude to the form. The other woman sharing her table, who looks just a little older than Cleo and has a mass of long black-brown curls says, God, I’m always afraid that I’m going to put different information on this form than I did on the other kids’. I have no idea who I put before for emergency contact, or if I gave them Jim’s cell number or his practice number.
Just put Look it up on one of my previous forms, the man sitting with them suggests.
It’s a novel idea, not to be afraid of school staff, Cleo thinks.
How many is this for you now, Mira? the first woman asks.
The woman with the curls says, four. But this is it, thank God.
All in this school? the man asks.
Yes, says the curly-haired woman, Mira. Seven, five, three and K, next year. I’ve heard they’re going to name one of the classrooms after us.
I think they’ll name the sickroom after my kids, the other woman says. I think the mattress on the cot still has bloodstains from Jeremy slicing open his knee.
It’s astonishing. It’s like finding yourself at the cool kids’ table in school, Cleo thinks, and not being told to leave.
The woman with the dark hair, Mira, asks her name, and Olivia’s. Her daughter is entertaining Sam in his stroller, with a professional air.
Oh, Mariah loves smaller children, Mira says. It’s a pity none of my others did. Never could get any of them to entertain their younger siblings. Only Mariah.
Such ease, such a casual humorous competent off-hand confidence they all have.
When Cleo’s turn comes at the secretary’s table, it turns out she has not brought the right documentation. She has Olivia’s Care Card, which she always has in her wallet, but has not remembered her birth certificate.
Well, she’s not going home for it. But what a nitwit she is. She resolves not to tell Trent.
Mira, behind her, says, Oh, you can bring it down anytime. They just want the number. Obviously your child exists.
The secretary says, I’m afraid we can’t process the registrat
ion without it.
That’s silly, Mira says, in a friendly way. I didn’t even have birth certificates for two of my kids until a couple of years ago. The ministry accepts Care Cards.
We prefer to have the birth certificate too, the secretary says.
It’s alright, Cleo says. I have it but it’s too far to go home and come back right now. I don’t have a car. Can I bring it this evening? She can feel the line of people, relaxed up till now, start to become impatient behind her.
The secretary purses her lips, then says, I suppose so.
When she leaves, Cleo says to Mira: You all seem to know each other. She thinks this might be rude to say and normally would just have gone on in ignorance, but it feels like what she thinks of as social propriety might be more relaxed in this room. She is emboldened.
Oh, that’s from preschool, Mira says. A lot of us go to the same preschool, Kid Planet.
That’s the other preschool, the one Cleo had rejected. She had seen that the ads for it said co-op and hadn’t liked the sound of that, for some reason. Or Trent hadn’t. And it was more expensive.
So she has sent her life, and Olivia’s, down the wrong trajectory already by choosing the wrong preschool. She feels a sort of hopelessness and anger. How could she have known? Now it feels that she has made a series of bad choices, lacking some mysterious important information, and will likely continue to do so. She adds wrong preschool to a list that she sees contains wrong university major, wrong neighbourhood, and possibly wrong husband. It isn’t fair. Why isn’t she ever given the key?
But maybe there’s some principle, some identifying characteristic, in choices like this: something lacking in her. She might just not be the kind of person who chooses the better thing. She might just not be worthy of the nicer things in life because she’s lacking the better instinct. What is it? Some generosity or something.
And now she has the long push up the hill still ahead of her, and Sam is complaining about being in the stroller, and Olivia doesn’t want to go: She’s found some other children to play with, is running around the gymnasium like a crazed pony and when Cleo intercepts her, catches her elbow, she stares at Cleo without recognition, and says, Let me go!
What is Going to Happen Next Page 11
