by Camilla Gibb
“Who’s this boy your sister’s seeing?” he asked Blue.
“Guy named Andrew. University student. A total geek.”
“And she’s living with his family?”
“Yup. You know that massive house just past the botanical garden?”
“The limestone one,” he nodded. “I delivered an antique headboard there once.”
“That one. Well, that’s their ‘country home,’ ” Blue said, rolling his eyes.
Although their conversation meandered from there, Oliver came back to it after he’d downed another gin and tonic. “I wonder what sort of favours she’s giving him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sexually.”
“What?”
“Her rich boyfriend.”
“Uh, Dad. I don’t think it’s like that. She thinks she loves him. I mean, it might be that she’s more in love with the idea of him, but it’s not what you think.”
“What do you know about what I think, Blue. Huh?” he said, poking him in the rib. “Don’t tell me what I think.”
Blue blinked back tears, swallowed hard, and tried to change the subject to Oliver’s upcoming interview. But Oliver, now that he was on a roll, could only shut his son down. “I’ve had plenty of interviews in my time. I hardly think you should be giving me pointers.”
Blue bit his tongue, silencing himself, thinking, The last time you had an interview must have been before I was born. Instead, he resorted to saying the things he imagined Oliver wanted to hear: “You look great in that shirt. I’m sure you’ll get the job. You’re more than qualified …”
What Blue refused to see, though, was that which was obvious to everyone in the restaurant around them. They saw a crazy, homeless man wearing a starched white shirt and a tie under the sleeveless lining of a winter coat, barking at some big bald boy picking at his dinner. The boy looked despondent. Uninterested in his food. His head hung down like he was used to being yelled at. The man’s grey pants were stained with grass marks from some earlier season and he’d nicked his chin in six or seven places. While he looked more respectable than he probably had in years, Oliver had long ago lost the ability to pass for a well-adjusted human.
Blue was used to people staring at his father. When he and Emma were little, Oliver had already developed a few habits that invited stares from people passing by on the street. They had learned to stop asking, “Who are you talking to, Daddy?” They had learned to hear the relentless machinations of his strangely wired brain as normal speech, Daddy speech.
When Blue went to the warehouse to take a photograph of Oliver the day before his job interview, he found him crawling on all fours in the dirt wearing nothing but Blue’s white shirt. He was looking for something, although he couldn’t articulate what, but given the desperation of his search, it was clearly something essential. There was blood at the corner of Oliver’s mouth and Blue eventually realized Oliver was looking for his tooth. It seems he’d anaesthetized himself with gin the night before and yanked out the molar that was bothering him. Only in the sober light of day, did he realize he’d pulled out the wrong tooth.
Blue had hoped to give Oliver back a picture of himself that day—posing proud and ready to re-enter the world wearing a clean white shirt and an affable expression. The potentially proud moment collapsed into tragedy and the photo Blue came away with said it all: Oliver had become animal.
Two weeks later, Blue knew he’d have to call someone. Oliver had slipped over to the dark side and lost his legs. Blue came away from his final visit with a secret, without breath, with a battered face, and without much will to speak. He’d seen something he hoped there were no words for. All he could say was that his father definitely wasn’t right. Faith cleaned up his face and suggested calling the Board of Health rather than the police. She made an anonymous call on his behalf from a phone booth and he took a tab of acid and swam back on a current of guilt to Niagara Falls. He slept for a week, burying secrets without words in hidden caves. He lost his job, took another tab of acid, and decided he couldn’t afford to feel any more.
Bitter Trail
It had been several years since Emma had had any communication with her father at all. So when he called her up a week before her eighteenth birthday she nearly choked on her own spit. “Dad,” she cried. “Dad? Where have you been?”
“Em,” he said gently. He almost sounded affectionate to Emma. “Just had to get my life sorted out, you know?”
“Yeah,” she sighed with the irrational instantaneous forgiveness that sets murderers and rapists free in the minds of their loved ones. How he’d ever found her at Andrew’s house would remain a mystery. It never occurred to her that Blue could have inadvertently communicated the coordinates. It never occurred to her that new coordinates couldn’t obliterate the fact that she was still, and would always be, Oliver Taylor’s daughter. Her father had done a reverse Houdini, and while she felt relieved, she was wary, and rightly so, because although the pretence for the call was her eighteenth birthday, what motivated Oliver was something less benevolent.
“I know you don’t want to know,” Blue said when she told him the next weekend. “But I’ve got to fucking tell you, it’s a bad situation,” he said, throwing the photograph of Oliver on all fours across the table at her.
“But it doesn’t even look like him,” she said, staring at the image so hard she could have burned a hole through the paper with her eyes. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s looking for something.”
“What?”
“No idea. Maybe his mind.”
“But I just assumed he was living in some apartment in Toronto and getting on with his life,” she stammered. “You know—like he even had some whole new family and everything.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t want to know, right?” Blue said, a tinge of bitterness in his voice. “I did what I could.”
“But he sounds okay, you know?” Emma said, hopeful. “I mean, he remembered my birthday and everything. My eighteenth birthday.”
“Well, maybe he got some help,” Blue shrugged. “Just be careful, okay?”
“You don’t want to come?”
Blue shook his balder than bald head and stubbed his cigarette out in the middle of Elaine’s favourite plant.
Emma didn’t sleep for a week. On the day of her birthday, she changed her clothes fourteen times and took a bus to Toronto where she met Oliver at Union Station. He was clean-shaven and wearing a brown tie with a worn navy suit jacket and he smelled like Ivory soap. In the photograph Blue had shown her, he didn’t smell like Ivory soap. He gave off the odour of wild, unwashed dog. But under the fluorescent light of the train station, he smelled clean and looked like the dishevelled relative of a human.
They took a taxi to the Ukrainian Credit Union where Oliver handed over a slip of paper and got a wad of cash in return. He led her across the street by the elbow as if she was an old woman and they descended the stairs into a dark restaurant, a Finnish diner, where they ordered pork chops and mashed potatoes and gin and tonic.
“I was kind of amazed to hear from you,” Emma told him.
“Why’s that? I’m your dad.”
“It’s just—you know—I haven’t heard from you in years.”
“Has it been that long?” he asked.
“Kinda,” she nodded, wondering if it was just that he’d lost track of time. “So what prompted you to call now?”
“It’s your birthday.”
“But you missed the last few,” she said, confused.
“This one’s special. Eighteen. You’re an adult now. I thought maybe you’d welcome some words of fatherly wisdom,” he smiled.
“But I could have used those years ago.”
“Well, better late than never,” he snickered. “So, tell me, my girl, what are your plans?”
“I’m starting university in the fall,” Emma answered. “I’m going to study archaeology.”
He paused, twisting the swizzle
stick in his drink, and she watched as the friendliness of his expression melted away. “Now what do you want to do a thing like that for?” he said, looking puzzled. “What good do you think that will do you?”
“I think it’ll be interesting,” she defended. “Remember the dinosaur teeth?” she said, hoping he’d remember.
“Dinosaur teeth?” he mocked.
“Yeah, from the back of my closet.”
“They weren’t dinosaur teeth,” he scoffed.
“But it was fun to pretend they were.”
“That was a joke, Emma. Not the basis of a career.”
But it was our joke, she thought. We unearthed a secret together, and you drilled a hole so I could carry that secret around my neck, and I wore it for so long—in and out of the bath and rainstorms and winter after winter—that the rope rotted and my neck turned green. I’m still carrying our secret around, Dad. Right now, under my sweater.
“Take it from me,” he said. “University is a waste of time. Didn’t do your mother or I any good. All it does is raise your expectations so your disappointments are that much greater. Spare yourself.”
“But you can’t get a job without a degree these days, Dad.”
“Oh, come on. I had a degree back in the days when they were still supposedly worth something and I still had to work my ass off to support the three of you. I don’t think you and your brother know what hard work is,” he said.
Emma knew it would be pointless to interrupt, tell him that it was Mum who had worked her ass off. She remembered Elaine receiving a cheque from Oliver after he left. Some attempt to compensate her for the money he had drained from their joint account. The cheque had bounced so high that it had disappeared like an Indian rubber ball over a schoolyard fence.
“Do you think you’re too good to work or something?” he continued.
“Pardon?”
“Where on earth did you even get the idea of going to university?” he barked.
Emma noticed his eyeteeth: long and yellow, projecting from his mouth. He was mutating into the wild, unwashed dog of the photograph. Clearly not from you, she thought. “I always had it,” she said defensively. “I just never knew I could do it. I didn’t think I was smart enough. But then I met Andrew and he really made me believe that I had it in me.”
“That your boyfriend?”
“Dad,” she protested, embarrassed that he was raising his voice.
“Who is he?”
“He’s this really smart guy, a brilliant scientist. And he makes me feel special. He makes me feel smart. He’s the guy I’m going to marry, Dad. When I finish university.”
“Did he say he’d marry you? Don’t be naive, Emma. Men’ll say anything for a screw.”
“It’s not like that,” she said, shaking her head. We’re in love. So in love, and we have a plan for our lives, a plan we’ve made together. We’re going to move to California. Get married amongst palms in botanical gardens in Pasadena. There will be ivy-covered tables sprinkled with rose petals. We will be happy. We will be professors with adjacent offices in some small college and have our graduate students round for potluck suppers. We will take sabbaticals together in Tuscany where I will unearth ruins and Andrew will invent theorems over red wine and dinner on warm nights. We will be friends with people like Julia Kristeva and Umberto Eco. We’ll have a rich and brainy life.
They would be just the sort of people that Oliver would despise.
Oliver just stared at her: his pupils swimming in a sea of yellow. Hepatitis, rabies, wolf-man. Possessed by something inhuman.
She said nothing more. He had ripped into every word she spoke like it was raw red meat. She recalled then what she’d tried to forget—that things that started out like normal conversations with Oliver tended to end up in some ugly place. Halfway through her potatoes, Oliver was sitting across a sea of smoke and starting to froth at the corners of his mouth. She had to force herself to remember this wasn’t the only place to be. That at another table, with other parents, people listened, and she had things to say.
She left him that night feeling more depressed and disillusioned than she had in years. He’d been gone for so long and she’d been angry because she loved him and hated him and missed him, but she wondered now if she would prefer to miss him than know him as strange and cruel.
She left him that night, but he wasn’t going to let her go that easily. Two weeks later, he showed up at Andrew’s parents’ house. She caught sight of him coming up the drive. “Fuck, Andrew. It’s my father,” she said anxiously.
“You’re kidding,” he said, pressing his face against the windowpane. “He looks …”
“He looks what?” she prodded him.
“Well,” Andrew hesitated. “Emma, sorry, but he looks like a bum.”
“I know. It’s bad.”
“Well, what’s he wearing?”
“Something like the lining of a coat,” Emma said, ashamed.
“I’ll get the door, okay?” Andrew offered.
“Mr. Taylor,” said Andrew, greeting him. “I’m Andrew. This is a surprise.”
“Emma here?” Oliver said abruptly, barely acknowledging him.
“I’m here, Dad,” she said from behind Andrew.
“I’ve got to talk to you about something,” he said over Andrew’s shoulder. “In private,” he added.
“Well,” she hesitated. “Okay. Do you want to come in?”
Oliver stepped inside and rubbed the soles of his running shoes repeatedly against the Persian runner. “Posh,” he muttered.
Andrew stood there protectively and said he would be in the library, putting a hand on Emma’s shoulder.
Oliver sneered, “I’m her fucking father.”
“I’m aware of that,” said Andrew. “And I’m just leaving.”
“Patronizing son of a bitch,” said Oliver as soon as Andrew had closed the door to the library. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“Dad,” Emma objected as she guided him down the hall into the kitchen. She put the kettle on and took a seat at the table. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” she asked him, trying to control her apprehension.
He remained standing. “Right. Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’ve got a business proposition for you,” he whispered.
“A what?”
“A business proposition,” he repeated. “This way, you won’t have to go to university at all.”
“But I want to go to university,” she said. “I mean, I am going to go to university. It’s all arranged.”
“But why waste four years when you could be making money? That’s what it’s about, Emma. Here, look at this,” he said, pulling a wad of Canadian Tire money out of his back pocket. The bills were stapled together at one end. “That’s what it’s all about,” he said, flapping the wad against his palm.
“Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it. I do, really, but I want to focus on my education at the moment,” she said, staring at his thick torn hands and wishing he would just disappear.
“Won’t you just hear your old dad out?” he pleaded. “You see,” he continued, undeterred, “security’s a real issue these days. And with all these welfare cases around today you want to make sure you’re protected … A man’s home is his castle!” he exclaimed. “Security starts in the home! And you know how many people have sliding-glass doors these days …”
“Sure,” she nodded, although she suspected that not a whole lot of people did.
“Then you see what I mean!”
“Not exactly.”
“Security risk!” he shouted. “Big security risk. Which is why”—he fumbled, reaching down into his pant leg—“which is why I’ve invented this!” he announced, waving what to her looked distinctly like a wooden pole.
“A broom handle?” she asked, dumbfounded.
“See? It’s the most simple yet ingenious thing. We could charge hundreds of dollars for this. You just place it at the base of one of the sliding doors and it
prevents the other one from opening. Even if it’s unlocked.”
“Uh-huh,” Emma nodded. “I don’t really know if people are going to go for it, Dad,” she said, apologetically. Better that than telling him she thought it might have already been invented. Once it was elaborate plans for global telecommunication, now it’s broom handles?
“Which is why I need you as my partner!” he went on.
She nodded, bracing herself to hear that she “lacked vision,” was “naive and unrealistic,” or was “missing the point altogether.” She stared her way blankly through his delivery.
He wanted her to make the pitch to potential customers because “marketing surveys suggest that the association of youth and femininity with a product appears to influence customer purchasing decisions.” While Emma was busy wooing and seducing, he would just whip to the back of the house and install it before they’d even had a chance to turn them away. “They won’t believe it unless they see it,” he explained. “People lack vision. They have to be shown.”
Emma retreated to her earlier stance. “Dad, you know, thanks for thinking of me and everything, but I really am going to go to university.”
“You’re just as bad as the punters!” Oliver shouted. “No fucking vision. No imagination. No drive. Just like your mother. I don’t know why I fucking bother to try and help you.”
“Sorry, Dad,” was all she could say.
He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared at the floor, shaking his head. “Yeah, well, just don’t come running to me when you haven’t got any money,” he said bitterly. “And by the way,” he added. “What about that twenty bucks you owe me for dinner the other night?”
“I thought that was your treat.”
“Well, nothing’s for free in this world, Emma. If you haven’t figured that out yet, then you’re really lost. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat.”
“Andrew?” Emma whispered in the dark.
“What is it, Emma?”
“I don’t know if he’s just crazy or whether he’s really evil. He’s so bitter and mean. Nasty. Sadistic even.”
