No Signature

by William Bell

  I looked up and down rue Mont Carmel—not that I could see very far in the blizzard—and noticed a sign hanging out over the sidewalk across the intersection. I crossed over to read the sign: Auberge des Gouverneurs. The building was a lot like the old man’s—block-shaped, built of stone.

  The room they gave me was a comer garret jammed in under the sloping roof, the kind of place you just knew was described in the hotel brochure as a quaint chambre dripping with old world ambience. The window looked out over the intersection.

  I dumped my pack on the floor, kicked off my soaking wet running shoes and stripped off my socks. I put the socks and shoes on the ancient radiator and hung my coat on the hook on the back of the door.

  Then I turned out the lights and sat at the window as I chomped through three granola bars. The wind moaned and whined around the corner of the hotel and under the eaves. Across rue Mont Carmel was a small park, empty and dark despite the lamps that glowed weakly against the swirling snow.

  Why was the old man in Quebec City? I thought Then I asked myself, why wouldn’t he be? He moved around so much you’d have thought he was dodging the cops or a credit card company. I looked down at the door to his building again. Maybe he wasn’t here at all. Maybe he had moved on again.

  I took a shower, went to bed, and dreamed I was in an old house running down endless corridors from room to room, frantically searching, searching.

  REPLAY

  Every day after school I burst through the wide glass doors, hopped on my BMX and raced home, pedalling like fury, flying down the hill, sweeping around the corner of our street, looking for his car in the driveway, hoping that everything would be all right again.

  Then one day the first postcard arrived—from Montreal. It had a big picture of a church on it and my name and address stamped on the back. But no message. And no signature. Just DAD in block letters. My name and address and DAD were made with those rubber stamps. I got a postcard almost every week after that, from Halifax, Vancouver, cities in the States, even one from Mexico.

  Why didn’t he say anything to me on the cards? I wondered. I wanted him to tell me what I had done wrong, why he left me, why we couldn’t have breakfast together any more. Just tell me what I did wrong, I’d say out loud as I looked at the postcard, staring at that single word stamped in block letters, gripping the card so tightly it creased in my little hands. Tell me, so I can fix it. Tell me and I won’t do it any more.

  I saved all the cards in a Nike running shoe box, and every night before I went to bed I’d get them out and look at all the pictures from cities where I’d never been, crying, frustration and rage jamming me inside like floodwater surging against a cracked dam, hating and missing him at the same time, hating myself because somehow I must have made him want to leave.

  At first I looked forward to getting the cards. Then, I don’t know, they seemed to mock me. I didn’t want them any more. I wanted him.

  One night I carefully, slowly, ripped the postcards into small ragged pieces, so small nothing of the pictures or the printing remained, and stuffed the pieces into a supermarket bag. The next morning I took four more bags and poured my Lego pieces into them. I didn’t want to be an engineer any more. I didn’t want to be an artist like him. I took the postcard bits out to the road and dumped them into the sewer. Then, one by one, I carted the bags of Lego to the sewer grate, pushing the bright coloured pieces through the slots. They sounded like rain as they struck the water.

  That day after school I didn’t go home right away. I rode out to where the railway trestle crosses the Etobicokc River. I pushed my BMX along the tracks. The wide tires jumped and bucked on the ties. When I was halfway across the iron trestle, I shoved the bike over the edge, watching it fall as if in slow motion to splash into the muddy river.

  When I got home my mom met me at the door and asked me a dozen questions at once. Where had I been? Why was I so late? Where was my bike?

  “I hate him,” I said. “I’m glad he’s gone.”

  Not long after that the postcards stopped coming.

  FIVE

  I AWOKE TO THE WHINE of a vacuum cleaner in the hall outside my room. Realizing I had overslept—the story of my life—I jumped out of bed and took a look out the window. It didn’t look much like an April morning out there. The sky was a hard porcelain blue. The wind of last night had carved long curved snowdrifts across the park and through the intersection, obliterating the sidewalks.

  I dressed quickly, glad my socks and shoes had dried during the night, and went down into the street. It was cold but the sun hinted that the snow wouldn’t last too long. There were no footprints leading to or from the old man’s building. I knocked on the door. No answer.

  After a sumptuous breakfast of doughnuts and coffee at a shop down rue Haldiman I trudged back, not too hopeful that anything had changed. I guess I was tired from my poor night’s sleep and bitchy from the tension and frustration, because I suddenly found myself pounding on the door and cursing. Seizing the doorknob, I shook it hard, turning it as I cursed. The door swung inward.

  How stupid do you feel, Wick? I asked myself. This is an apartment building, right? There’s a sign in the window, Appartement à louer, right? You could have tried the door last night.

  I found myself in a large dim foyer. There was a door to my right with a name tag over the bell button: Gauthier. Ahead of me, stairs. I took a deep breath and went up, gripping the banister to steady my hand. There appeared to be one apartment per floor, and the one on the fourth floor was empty. None of the name tags on the other apartments had the name Chandler on it.

  Which meant my old man was gone.

  Which meant I had wasted a lot of time, gas and money. Not to mention the hell to pay when I got home. But at the same time I was relieved.

  I stared at the door with no name tag. Had he really lived there? Then I thought, there’s only one way to find out.

  It was easy to force the lock with my pocket knife, just like the private eyes do in the movies. The apartment was bare and lonely, washed with flat grey light. I took a quick look around. There was a galley kitchen, a small room with a stripped bed and a night table, and one large airy room with a couple of threadbare stuffed chairs. The painted floorboards creaked softly as I walked over to the window overlooking the Parc des Gouverneurs and the St. Lawrence River.

  I caught the faint remains of a smell I recognized, and a Replay flashed through my mind. I looked around, searching the floor. There were a lot of gouges in the wood, as if someone had had a desk or table under the window. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the radiator. I picked up a small wood shaving, curled in tight loops. I smelled it. Sure enough, cedar.

  I looked out over the gently sculpted snowdrifts that stretched across the park. The tall old maples stood quiet, black against the snow and the hard blue of the sky.

  The old man had lived here, all right. He had sat at his carving table and seen what I was seeing now. What had he done in Quebec City besides carve his little sculptures out of wood? Did he have friends here? A wife? Why had he come here? Why did he leave? And where was he now?

  And why had he sent me that postcard after all those years?

  SIX

  I DROVE HOME THE SAME DAY. I won’t go into the details about the greeting my mother gave me. She didn’t know whether to be relieved that I was home safe or outraged that I had taken her car, made an “unauthorized withdrawal” from the bank—that’s what she called it—by forging her signature and went looking for the ex-husband she never wanted to talk about. She decided to be outraged. I didn’t really blame her. She made a lot of threats and asked a lot of questions that began with “How could you?” I figured my best bet was to look like I was sorry and not to argue, just wait until she ran herself down.

  It took her a couple of hours. We were in the family room, sitting across from one another. The TV was on to a sitcom but I had pushed the mute button long ago, pretending to listen to her. Then her ton
e changed and I really did listen.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I got a postcard from him. I thought … maybe he really did still care about me. See, Mom, when the postcards stopped coming, I thought he didn’t care about me any more. So I wanted to go and, I don’t know, say hello, see what he looks like now.” I didn’t add that I wanted more than that. Like explanations.

  My mother was staring into her lap and picking with long painted fingernails at the nubbly upholstery on the arm of her chair. She took a deep breath and said softly, “You got others.”

  “Other what?”

  “Other postcards.” She cleared her throat. “He’s been sending them all along. He never stopped.”

  “He never stopped? But—”

  “Don’t be angry, Stevie. I … I did it for you. I found them in the mail and threw them away.”

  “What do you mean, you did it for me? What the hell—”

  “Don’t you remember that day you ripped up all the cards he sent and threw the pieces down the sewer? You were so upset, it broke my heart to see you. After that I just threw them away. I didn’t want to see you hurt again.”

  “So—now let me get this straight. He’s been sending me postcards all these years, every month or so, like, he never stopped, and you let me think he did stop. And,” my voice was real calm, “and you let me think that he’d forgotten all about me. My own father. And you did it for me?”

  She sat there, her head down, linked her fingers together and squeezed. “I thought it would be better if you just forgot about him. Just put him out of your life.”

  “I can’t forget about him, don’t you see that? Just because you didn’t want a husband you decided I couldn’t have a father. I hate him sometimes, but I can’t forget about him.” I jumped out of my chair. “Sometimes I hate both of you!” I shouted as I ran from the room.

  REPLAY

  Hawk and I were snacking out at a doughnut shop on the Lakeshore one afternoon after school. Hawk had a passion for carrot muffins and every few days he’d tell me, “If I don’t get a CM I’m gonna die, Wick,” so we’d slip down to the doughnut shop and take care of his habit.

  The doughnut shop was so hot inside the windows were steamed up. Not many people were there at that time of day; a bag lady by the window, munching on an oversized chocolate chip cookie, a lonely-looking salesman type wearing a trench coat over his suit, sipping coffee, a portable phone beside him on the table. We placed our order and took our food to an empty table, hanging our school wrestling team jackets on the backs of the plastic chairs.

  “The Fanatic was a bitch today, eh?” Hawk commented, putting down his glass and wiping away a milk moustache.

  “Yeah, he must have had a flea in his jockstrap, all right.”

  Usually Coach Leonard was a pretty good guy, but not that day. “You’re wrestling like a bunch of geriatrics! The cheerleaders could kick your butts! Put some muscle into it, Richardson! Chandler, you move that slowly in a competition and you’ll spend the match looking at the lights!”

  “You know what I’d like to do?” Hawk said as he popped the last bit of muffin into his mouth. “I’d like to get some suds and go down by the lake and watch the waves for a while.”

  “Sounds good to me.” I knew he didn’t mean it. Hawk was death on drugs and alcohol ever since that time he got sick as a dog when we killed a six-pack and pierced my ear.

  “Ah, the hell with it,” he said bitterly.

  “Take it easy, Hawk. The Fanatic was just in a bad mood.”

  The bag lady got up from her chair and shuffled to the door, pulling her thin coat tight to her neck. A couple of leaves blew in as she left.

  Hawk was looking into his empty glass. “No, it’s not him, Wick. It’s … Do you ever wonder where your old man is?”

  Hawk’s change in direction caught me off guard. “Yeah, sometimes.”

  “Well, at least you know who he is. Me, I don’t even know my mother’s and father’s names.”

  “Does it matter? I mean, the only people you remember are your mom and dad, right? How old were you when they adopted you? Three months or so?”

  “Less than a month.”

  “So what’s the problem? There was no relationship there. There’s nothing to remember. No memories, no loss. Right?”

  “I don’t know. Its hard to explain. My mother gave me up right in the hospital. I don’t know anything about her. Or about my father. All I know is that one of them must have been a real short-ass.”

  Hawk had made that comment more than once. He was a little sensitive about his height, even though he was pretty good-looking—straight black hair, clear pale skin. I hadn’t known him as a little kid, but I figured he got more than his share of abuse from other kids. I also figured that was what got him into weight training and sports. Now he was muscular enough that you could tell, even if he had his jacket on, that he wasn’t the kind of guy you threw insults at.

  Talking about his birth mother like that, he set off some painful Replays in my head, scenes that played themselves behind our conversation the way images dance and weave behind a TV show when the cable isn’t working and you’ve got two stations competing for the screen. I wondered what was worse, having memories that robbed you of sleep and hurt you like broken bits of glass lodged in the back of your mind, or having nothing except the knowledge that your own mother gave you away without looking at you, and that your father wasn’t even around when it happened.

  “I don’t even know,” Hawk’s words broke in on my thoughts, “if they were married. Or if they lived together. Or any damn thing.”

  “Why not ask your mom and dad?”

  “Don’t you think I have? They don’t know anything, either. The adoption people won’t tell the new parents anything.”

  “You can find out, though,” I said. “I saw a show on TV about it. You can go and ask the adoption people and they have to let you look at the records. You could search your mother out.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But I’d be afraid of hurting Mom’s and Dad’s feelings. So no matter what I do, I lose.” Hawk laughed without mirth and shook his head. “You know, Wick, you take a guy like Leonard today, babbling on and on about commitment to the team, and responsibility. Those are his two most favourite words, right? Commitment and responsibility. ‘You guys gotta learn these two things if you want to be treated as adults,’ he says. I think he’s talking to the wrong crowd, that’s what I think.”

  “You and me both.”

  I got up and ordered another coffee and a glass of milk from the woman behind the counter. I took them back to our table.

  “Maybe your mom and dad would understand,” I said. “I think they would. They’re pretty good that way.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “So why don’t you do it? Find out where your birth mother is. Go see her. Ask her about your father. I’ll go with you. Finding your parents can’t be that hard.”

  “I guess not. The thing is, though, I’m a little scared of what I’ll find out. What if it’s worse than not knowing?”

  “Nothing’s worse than not knowing,” I said.

  SEVEN

  ROMEO WAS STANDING in a silver patch of moonlight in Juliet’s garden, telling her, as near as I could make out between the thees and thous and wherefores, that he wanted to climb up the trellis onto her balcony, shove her into the bedroom and jump on her. But Juliet wouldn’t shut up. She was yapping away so much that I knew Romeo would never get near her.

  “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” she complained. What the hell was he supposed to say? “I didn’t like the name Humphrey”?

  Just as old Romeo started into another long hearts-and-flowers speech, a tinny voice from the front of the room cut in.

  “Excuse me, is Steve Chandler present this morning?”

  Ms. Cake, our English teacher, stood and pushed the pause button on the VCR, freezing Romeo with his mouth open. “Yes, he is,” she said to the inte
rcom speaker.

  “Would you send him to the office immediately, please?”

  Cake looked down the row of desks to me. “They’ve tracked you down, Steve. Away you go.”

  When I got to the main office the secretary told me to sit down and wait. It was at least twenty minutes before Mrs. Davis, the vice principal, came out of her office behind a scared-looking niner and, when the kid had left, she ushered me into her office like a stuffy head waiter in a snobby restaurant.

  She closed the door behind me and I sat in the chair opposite her desk. She sat down too and began to look through the file in front of her.

  Davis was one of those middle-aged women who thought they had to be tough or you wouldn’t take them seriously. She dressed very severely—a dark skirt and jacket, white blouse buttoned up to the neck, a short no-nonsense hair-do. There were granules of make-up in the crows-feet at the corners of her eyes.

  She closed the file and looked up. Her voice was flat and her look was firm. Boy, was I intimidated.

  “Where were you the last couple of days?”

  “I wasn’t here,” I said.

  She offered me a cold smile. “That is obvious, Steve. That’s why I asked where you were.”

  My mother had refused to give me a note to keep the school off my back. She said I had skipped school and would have to pay the price. I wasn’t going to lie about where I was. I wasn’t going to say anything. It was none of Davis’s business.

  She gave a hard stare to scare me to death and waited for me to speak. I looked out the window at the cars moving down Kipling Avenue.

  She gave in first. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Look, Steve. Let’s not fool around. You were truant for two days. You’re in deep trouble,” she said in a tone that suggested I had just murdered all the janitors in the school with a chain saw. “Now, where were you?”