by Sheena Kamal
He meets my eyes and suddenly his gaze becomes intense, almost pleading. “I do have a student waiting for me to go over her thesis, but please, feel free to contact me if you need any more information. I am a great admirer of Mr. Crow. He appreciates the finer details and for someone like me, that’s a valuable quality in a journalist. You see, people here are upset about our pipelines and our in-province extraction projects, but it’s a very unique situation where local populations can make themselves heard. No company is going to sanction mass murders and rapes here in Canada. But they do in other places in the world where people aren’t as protected. I hope you and Mr. Crow can help us get the word out.”
I shake his hand and leave him there, his ruddy cheeks flushed with altruism and purpose. My mind is filled almost to bursting. What I am able to dredge out and examine is how badly I’ve misjudged this man. Maybe I’ve seen too much darkness or just dwelled in it for too long, because I missed what was happening here. What I thought was an opportunist’s enthusiasm to increase the value of his speaker’s fees by being the talking head for an exposé was in fact a crusader’s genuine concern for the well-being of others.
I think of my sister, how these two would immediately take to each other. They would have a lot to talk about. Saving the environment and all that. They would be on the same page, bonding over the things about the world that bother them and need to change. And, as a side note, he would not mistake her for a man.
27
My sister is a do-gooder in the worst sense of the word. She has been an activist for most of her life and does it out of a true belief that her actions may directly obstruct the construction of a pipeline carrying bitumen and other nasty toxins dug up from the bowels of the earth, transporting them from the tar sands to the lovely coastline that she now calls home. Lorelei looks at pictures of whales and bears and wolves and salmon and pleads for their rights. They move her to tears.
But she does not budge for me.
When she opens the door to her East Vancouver house, the startled, curious expression on her face becomes hostile. Her stance turns to rock and her shoulders subtly block the entire doorway. She looks at my paint-splattered jeans and my ratty sweater. “Salvation Army is down the street” are the first words out of her mouth.
We haven’t seen each other in a year.
It has always been this way with her. She has an angel’s face but a tongue like a shrieking harpy. If anyone could stop an immovable force like pure, unadulterated greed, it would be her. She knows this and has equipped herself with a bland trophy husband, academic laurels, and carefully cultivated relationships with key environmental organizations in the province. There’s a new kind of political engagement within local communities and Lorelei wants to be at the front of it. She’s grooming herself for something big and I am the wrench in her gears.
Naturally, she mostly pretends I don’t exist.
“Did the pipelines collapse yet?” I ask politely.
I’ve learned that if you want something, you have to give something in return. For her, this is civility and maintaining her carefully constructed appearance of someone who is untainted by the social ills that are part of our colonial legacy, what some call cultural genocide while others omit the “cultural” part. She is a shining star, one who escaped, completely aboveboard, with a sharp mind and well-turned ankles. While she is busy connecting with parts of our father’s heritage that she has decided are hers, my connections to the same have slowly been eroding over the years. Because she ignores what I refuse to, which is that he is only part of our story. The other part is our mother, whom we know nothing about except that she was a foreigner and that she left us long before our father died. And never looked back.
Now my sister’s mouth is set in a grim line. I have that effect on a lot of people, but no one more than my sister. “Why are you here, Nora?” She steps onto the porch and closes the door behind her, putting herself between her home and me. “Do you need money?”
Why does everyone think that? I consider investing in new clothes.
“I need to borrow your car.” I look over at the new SUV in the driveway, gleaming silver. Though her husband, David, is a lawyer, he goes camping all of twice a year and thinks that it’s enough of a reason to justify a gas guzzler like this. But I don’t hold it against him. Nobody’s perfect.
It takes Lorelei a few seconds to process the request, then she laughs. “Come on, Nora. Be real.”
“I am real.” Her disapproval pins me to the porch. I’m suddenly seven years old again, and she is four. I remember the stolen chocolate bar melting in my hand as she goes crying to our aunt about how I am a thief. Staring at me accusingly through an ocean of fake tears. I remember being beaten with a belt in the yard, hot tears streaming down my face. What I wanted to say was that I never even liked chocolate, but the words never emerged. Lorelei did. She loved chocolate.
“Nora,” she continues, in a voice full of false concern, as if I haven’t spoken. “You’re an alcoholic. You don’t even have a driver’s license. I can’t lend you David’s SUV. He needs it for work.”
I look at her through the veil of distrust that has always lingered between us. She’s lying about David. He’s a junior partner who mostly takes the train into the city to avoid the impossible Vancouver gridlock. He doesn’t need the car. She’s not aware that I am up to speed on the events in her life, though, and I don’t cop to it. I’ve been keeping an eye on her since she was born, but she’d never know it.
“Okay.” I turn to leave. Did I really expect her to say yes? I could tell her about Bonnie, could tell her that I’m in trouble, but something stops me.
“Wait, Nora.”
I stop, but don’t turn. It hurts to look at her too long.
“Why do you even need it?” She is genuinely curious now, though not because I need help. She’s always taken that as a given. Because I’ve never asked her for help.
I consider telling her the truth. Coming clean. But I realize now that some things never change. “It’s not important.”
But we both know that it is. We both know that me standing there, asking for a favor, is a pivotal point in our relationship. Her turning me down is her attempt to put me back in my place, and to keep her in hers. I don’t blame her for being the way she is. Grasping at whatever she can control, trying to fit in wherever she can. I gave up on that a long time ago. We are a patchwork, Lorelei and I, stitched together from different fabrics. Hers are more beautiful, but the edges are just as jagged. She doesn’t allow you to see her seams and I may be the only person in the world who knows she even has them. This is why we are barely on speaking terms. I have always let my seams show.
That night, after the lights go out in the house, I pick the lock on the side door, sneak inside, and grab the spare keys for the SUV from the garage and a loaf of bread from the kitchen counter. A girl has to eat, after all. Lorelei doesn’t know that I figured out her alarm code, or else she would have changed it by now. It is the date of her wedding, backward.
28
I knock on Seb’s door with a red feather boa that someone left behind on the bus scrunched up in my hand. He’s shocked to see me when he opens it. I don’t do home visits and neither does he.
I hand him the boa. “A present.”
“Thank you, this is . . .” He’s not quite sure what to say. He thinks I’m stereotyping him but, despite our recent spat, he values me as an employee and is weighing his response.
Leo elbows him out of the way and wraps the boa around his neck. “Nora, I love you! How did you know I lost my boa in the last move? It was blue, but still. This is awesome.”
I didn’t know, but I take the credit anyway. They motion me inside. I stay where I am on the porch. “I’ll be going away for a few days,” I tell them.
Seb frowns. “Nora, I think we need to talk and I’m glad you came over. Mike Starling was found dead yesterday and I think . . . I think you might be in danger. Who was that man who cam
e into our office?”
“And did you really break into a security firm?” Leo adds, not wanting to be left out.
Seb glances over at him. A look passes between them. “If this is about you living in the basement, we can find you a safer place to stay.”
“No,” I say, surprised. I didn’t know that they knew, but now that they do, I decide this could work to my benefit. “But if you could look after my dog . . .”
I whistle. Whisper bounds through the open hatch of David’s SUV and lands on their lawn. Leo gasps. “Is that a wolf?”
“Hang on,” Seb interjects, involuntarily backing up a step. “You’ve had a dog all this time?”
Leo stays where he is. He stares at Whisper, enchanted. “In our basement?”
“She’s very quiet.” I look at Seb. “You said I could trust you.”
Whisper approaches, cautious. Seb kneels and stretches out his hand. Whisper sniffs it and then gives it a cursory lick. She buries her face in Leo’s crotch and susses out the situation there.
Seb stares at me for a long time. “I did say that, but I wasn’t talking about a dog.”
“I get it.” I try to keep my voice even, but can’t hide my disappointment.
He sighs. “Do you, Nora? Sometimes I wonder. We’ll keep the dog for you but if you’re not back in a week, she’s going to the pound.”
Leo opens his mouth to protest but Seb puts a hand on his shoulder to quiet him. “You have one week.”
I scratch behind Whisper’s velvet ears. Seb would never put my dog in the pound and he knows that Leo would never let him. What he’s telling me is that I have one week before he comes looking. One week to find the girl. It’s plenty of time, considering that I could be dead by nightfall. With my luck. I pull her leash from my back pocket and hand it over to Leo. “Okay. Her name is Whisper and she’s not picky. She’ll eat whatever you do, but she likes steak and roasted chicken mostly.” Then I make a decision to extend the trust that I can. “What do you know about immigration to Canada in the nineties?”
“That’s a pretty big topic,” Leo says. “Any way to narrow it down?”
I think about what I learned from Starling’s storage locker and from my meeting with Angus Holland. “From Asia, I suppose.”
Leo shakes his head. “We’ve always had a Pacific connection here on the west coast with Asian communities. Can you do better than that?”
“No, not really. I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Just anything that stands out.”
Seb is quiet for a moment, then looks at me. “There is something I remember from my time at the Post. It was a big scandal back then. The Los Angeles Canadian consulate was notoriously corrupt. They approved immigration applications without doing background checks. Some people with criminal connections wouldn’t be vetted, if they provided the right bribes, and would get approved. They would bring their families over and be free to go on with their criminal activities in their own countries, and sometimes here, too.”
“Anyone in particular? That maybe Starling was interested in?”
“A man who was allegedly the head of a criminal organization in Taiwan faced most of the heat, but there were others. That consulate continued unchecked for quite a few years. It became well known in criminal circles. Some speculate that the west coast triad connections were born from the applications that were approved in that period, and from that consulate.”
Seb pauses as something occurs to him. “Mike Starling did a lot of coverage for that story. He even investigated some other potential criminal ties and was obsessed with another Hong Kong businessman who he suspected was deeply entrenched with one particular triad. But he got stalled. I remember he couldn’t get sources on it, was just spinning his wheels and wasn’t handling his other stories very well. It was around the time he was put on leave and when he came back they gave him human interest stuff for another year. He wasn’t happy.”
“Oh, yeah!” Leo says. “I remember he did a string on sexual assault victims, one in particular who he found in the woods. It was a great series of articles. You were pretty jealous of him, babe. What was it that he won? A Canadian Association of Journalists award?”
“He was nominated,” Seb says, his expression dark. He is careful not to look at me.
“That’s why you asked him for research help when you were doing your piece with Rebecca Pruitt,” Leo continues. “That’s when you met Nora.”
Leo smiles over at us, then the smile on his face dies. Seb and I are studiously looking everywhere but at him. He sees a new connection that he’s never noticed before, one that has been right in front of him for several years. “Oh.”
It is always hurtful for me to look at someone’s face when they realize. The pity, then the false cheerfulness. It changes relationships, not that I ever had many After. Starling was careful not to reveal the truth about my past when he introduced me to Seb, and I’ve never said anything, but I’m sure Seb figured it out a long time ago. Leo is silent now, as my behavior and my habits click into place.
Seb clears his throat and tries to smooth things over. “Before you go . . . What about Melissa’s case? Did you find Baichwal?”
I shake my head. “He’s long gone. Stevie might have better luck.”
“He’s on something else and you know how he can be.” Leo sighs. “We really could have used that money.”
Seb just stares at me, a peculiar frown on his face. Despite my quirks, I have always come through on cases. But I can’t forget the look of fear on Harrison Baichwal’s face. Fear for his family. It moved something in me.
I walk away from them then, without a second glance at Whisper. I’m afraid that if I say anything to her or look into those sad eyes, I’ll change my mind. Before I met her, this kind of affection for a dog would have been unthinkable to me. I leave her there on the porch and get into the SUV. My foot aches as I press down on the gas pedal but the pain feels good and I use it to focus on what’s ahead, rather than what I’m leaving behind. As I drive away, I decide that I’m imagining the long, desperate howl that fills the air.
29
The girl remembers her name now.
It has eluded her all this time she has sheltered, cold and exhausted, in the heart of the tree. Since she crawled from the rocks and into the forest, she has not known her name or where she came from. Just flashes of the glass castle nestled in the forest, glimpsed from her frightened looks behind her, as she willed herself to dip the oar into the water, to keep her weak arms moving.
Her name . . . well, she doesn’t have the strength to say it, but at least she knows what it is. She feels a sense of accomplishment at this, but it’s short-lived because now that she knows what she’s called, she has to figure out the other parts of it, too. Questions, always questions. Running around in her head, stabbing at her brain. She huddles in the hollow tree and closes her eyes. And then opens them again. There’s a noise outside. The girl curls into a ball and waits, frightened. She’s starting to remember who they are now, the people who took her, the room with no windows in a house full of them, the high-pitched cries that seemed to come from inside the walls . . .
If they find her now, they will take her back to that place. Her exhaustion soon overwhelms her fear, though. She knows the fear will be back, but for now she is so tired.
Part II
1
Ah, the open road. Canada is not the second-largest country in the world for nothing. Open road here leads to open road, and then to an empty highway and back onto some more open roads where you can see mountains so high, forests so green, and lakes so crystal clear you’d swear they were something from a picture come to life. If you’re on the coast like I am and drive inland for more than two hours, you’ll see so much unused space that your vision will start to blur from the vastness of it all. When the terrain turns from damp and gray to sunny but covered in snow, I am grateful for the foresight that prompted me to steal David’s SUV, equipped with sturdy all-season tires, inste
ad of trying my luck with the Corolla. Though the not-cops have a definite head start on me, I hope that they haven’t reached Tommy yet. Unlikely, I know. But I’ve been in a dangerous mood since I left Whisper.
I feel like taking chances.
I wipe the sleep from my eyes, drink so much coffee that the corner of my mouth develops a twitch, and play I Spy to pass the time. Lorelei and I attempted this once, when we were taken from our aunt’s house and on our way to our first foster home. I knew somehow that our lives had just changed forever, but she was still too young to understand the feeling you get when someone gives you away. She was only five years old. She kept spying the same thing over and over again, red stop signs, and after twenty minutes of this, I ignored her. She got angrier and angrier and pinched the skin on my forearm until it became bruised and swollen. She eventually kissed the skin that she’d pinched so hard, just to see if she could heal it, and was quiet for the rest of the trip.
On this trip, in her husband’s stolen car, I play by myself. It is a long drive to Kelowna.
I spy some more trees. On the west coast, trees are not in short supply.
I spy a blue five-wheeler in front and a silver sedan behind.
I spy a mountain to my right and a lake to my left, as I take a winding pass at over a hundred kilometers an hour. David’s SUV is a beautiful thing, meant for hard driving at high speeds. I give it some lead and feel like I’m soaring.
I spy a stretch of road so straight that I can see for kilometers ahead and behind me.
I spy the silver sedan slow down until it is barely visible in my rearview mirror. I reach the end of the long, straight stretch of road and a mountain rises up from the earth. The silver car plays peekaboo as we spiral up the mountain.
