Faithful and Other Stories

by Daniel Karasik

  Of course I couldn’t be sure that he was — but I became obsessed with the possibility. For reasons I can’t explain but that consumed me from the moment I saw his portrait of me, I needed him to know of the life growing inside me. I needed him to see my adult face.

  Miles of dense forest, an earthen blur. I rolled down the windows, let the breeze dry my sweat. All the details the Segno Gallery’s owner had shared over e-mail looped inside me: a string of images, not quite real, sepia news footage from an alternate universe. My father comes into the Segno one day a little more than a year ago, a pile of canvases in the back of a pick-up truck. He’s exhausted, dejected after a day of visits to the city’s galleries, his hope almost gone that he’ll find one willing to display his work for sale. Helen Koreeda, the curator, wants his paintings as soon as she sees them. He entrusts them to her and drives off, disappears down this green-walled highway I now speed along. And then what? The reel goes blank. Ms. Koreeda had told me he hadn’t returned to her gallery since the day they’d met. She sent all correspondence to a post office box in a small coastal town about five hours northwest of Victoria.

  It was evening by the time I got there. I deposited my luggage in my room at the inn near the edge of town and wandered out to what seemed to be the main drag. Once a sleepy fishing and logging region, tourism had enlivened this part of the coast: there were a handful of newish stores, restaurants, and bed and breakfasts that catered to the surfing crowd in particular. The locals seemed friendly. They met my glance, smiled at me and my belly. I strolled along a pier from which I gazed out at the untroubled, undisclosing water. The bank, the library, the liquor store — all housed in old clapboard buildings. Never in my life had I felt more urban, more a citizen of the concrete canyon, wilderness of taxicabs. So much of what I observed I had no name for: the local tree species, the relationship of the ocean to the land: not a “gulf”, perhaps an “inlet”? And though there was hypnotic beauty here, the day’s last light glimmering on the water, I was also struck by the drabness of this town in whose environs my father had perhaps spent years of his life, its fog of parochial constriction. I didn’t want to stay long.

  I bought a sandwich, balm for my cramps, from a little rundown diner and found the post office just before it closed for the night. It was a claustrophobic room that in a hundred years probably hadn’t changed in any detail besides the introduction of florescent lights. The clerk, a woman around my age, eyed my belly. I told her I hoped to get in touch with the man who rented PO Box 59.

  “59?” she repeated.

  “That’s the one.”

  “A man?” She checked her register. “I just started working here, but according to the record there’s no man listed for that one. That box belongs to Patricia Bender.”

  “Who’s that? You know her?”

  She blushed. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”

  I wandered back down the road to the diner, which was almost deserted. The waiter who’d taken my sandwich order, a tall, husky-voiced guy probably in his sixties, noticed me and approached. I asked if he knew where I might find Patricia Bender.

  He became interested in one of his cuticles. “Oh, no. That family hasn’t lived here for years. Moved to Victoria a long time ago.”

  “But she has a post office box here.”

  “Don’t know anything about that.”

  My audition for the role of amateur detective had just started and already I felt worn down. Crampy again, my swollen feet aching, David doing calisthenics inside me, I bought some fruit and a granola bar and drifted down to the water’s edge. Dusk was settling, the day’s heat easing. I sat on the edge of a dock and peeled my orange. Boats’ rigging clanked in the wind.

  “Hey, miss.”

  I looked up from my orange. A boy no older than fifteen stood at the edge of the dock, his long blond hair tossed by the breeze in all directions, skinny arms poking out of a tank top.

  “You back at Campbell next year?”

  He looked at me as though he were sure he knew me.

  “Sorry, I think you must have me confused with someone else.”

  “You weren’t a substitute at Campbell once or twice last year? Grade Nine English?”

  “Nope, not me.” I thought I’d try my luck. “Maybe you can help me out. I’m looking for a painter named Jacob Belinsky, I was told he’s spent some time around here. Ever heard of him?”

  If he hesitated, it was for no longer than a fraction of a second.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “How about Patricia Bender?”

  This time the hesitation was pronounced.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “I think she knows the man I’m looking for.”

  He chewed his bottom lip. “Well, if you’re asking. No nice way to put it. The lady was a batshit crazy slut. Slept with anything that moved. Famous for it. They say she met some guy at the inn where she was working as a maid, some old guy with money, and he literally bought her as his personal whore and carted her off to a shack in the woods.”

  My heart hammered. “You shouldn’t talk about people that way.”

  “Whatever. Everybody knows about those two. Sometimes kids go out to their house and egg it.”

  I tried to hide the jolt this gave me. “So you know where they live?”

  “Everybody does.”

  “You mind showing me?”

  I fished the map and a pen out of my shoulder bag and passed them to him. He glanced at the map, at me, and jotted a mark near a logging road outside of town.

  “If you’re not from around here,” he said, “how’d you know her name? Who are you, anyway?” “Old friend of the family.”

  It was like I’d cast a spell and turned him to stone. He stared at me. When at last he revivified, he backed away.

  “Hey, hang on. What’s wrong?”

  But he was already hurrying off along the dock.

  Bewildered and hopeful, in that order, I rose and walked back into town.

  “I’ll be home before you know it.”

  Phone pinned between shoulder and ear, my hair still wet from the inn’s unenthusiastic shower, I transferred some essentials (maps, snacks) from my suitcase into my shoulder bag. I’d try to find my father tonight. I couldn’t wait till morning, not when I had so little time to spend here.

  “Just a week.”

  “I have it marked on my calendar,” Aaron said. “Believe me.”

  “You’re still angry.”

  “I was never angry. I just don’t understand why this couldn’t wait till after you deliver the astronaut.”

  “I’m not going to go into labour at five months, baby.”

  “You’re putting yourself under a lot of strain.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  “I will. Promise.”

  I hurried out to the parking lot, tossed my shoulder bag into the passenger seat of my rental car, stole a bite of the pasta dinner I’d ordered from the inn’s restaurant. As I drove out of town, the sky was beginning to grow dark.

  It was star-speckled navy by the time I reached my exit from the highway. I turned onto a narrow dirt lane, pulled up to the shoulder and wolfed down my food, got back on the road. The mouth of the woods soon swallowed me, the trees’ canopy nearly concealing the sky. I snapped on my high beams.

  My thoughts circled what the boy by the harbour had told me. Was that my father? A man who’d abandoned the most enviable of lives to shack up with a younger woman in a small town? What a joke. Nauseating. Yet maybe even nausea was an overreaction. I didn’t know the man. Would any debauchery make his absence worse?

  There was a part of me that didn’t care what he’d done, simply wanted to hear him apologize and say he loved me. He’d loved me when I was a girl, I know it. Not enough, you might say. But sometimes love can see itself clearly only with absence, with the passage of time. Sometimes love can know itself only as regret.

  Abso
rbed in this fantasy, I’d probably been lost for fifteen minutes before I realized it and panicked. I hit the brakes; the car squealed to a stop. I peered at the uniform black woods around me. How far would I have to drive before I found an inn or motel? How much gas did I have left? What if I drove for hours in search of a bed and was left without enough gas to get the car back to town?

  I parked well off the road, checked the locks eight times.

  In the morning it wasn’t long before I found the place I was looking for.

  Deeper into thickening woods and then a clearing. Sunlight. At the end of a dirt road, a squat cottage. I stopped the car as soon as I saw it, concerned that he’d hear the engine. That if he heard me he’d take fright and bolt like a hunted animal. How many times had I pictured this moment? I wished that Aaron were with me and then felt glad he wasn’t. Of course I had to do this alone.

  Car door clicked shut. Crunch of leaves underfoot. No other cars here, or none in sight. Birdsong in the trees, endless forest around the house. Maybe he’d been enraptured to discover this place. Had he bought it, or had he stumbled across it like a lost boy in a fairy tale? Had he settled in for good, resolved to end his days here? Would I bring my child here? Impossible. The house might’ve been made of gingerbread for all I believed in its reality. And yet. Sweat on my brow, along my sides, between my legs. My hands to my belly, instinctive. I climbed the rickety porch steps, crept to the door, and knocked.

  Nothing. No sound of movement within. The woods around me still and indifferent. I waited. Knocked again. No response. Then, inside, footsteps. A creak of floorboards. I took a step back, composed myself; considered the skirt I was wearing, light and summery and not long, wondered whether it were the right attire for a reunion with your resurrected father, oh well, too late; prepared my face, not a smile but also not an anxious grimness that might make him think I’d grown into someone smileless. I considered what I might say to him when he appeared in the doorway — earnest acknowledgements, stoical grunts, stiff jokes — and when at last the door opened, after what felt like an hour and was probably a quarter of a minute, my mind went blank.

  Not him.

  A woman. She remained in the house, the door opened no more than a cautious crack. If this was Patricia Bender, she wasn’t as I’d pictured her. Emaciated, her face pasty, the woman in front of me might’ve been in her forties — I intuited that she was, or not much older than that — but she could’ve passed for sixty. She radiated infirmity.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Are you lost?”

  “Patricia,” said half my voice.

  “Yes? Who are you?”

  “I’m looking for Jacob Belinsky.”

  She opened the door a little wider. Stared.

  “Hannah,” she said, with an impossible glimmer of recognition.

  My laugh was unnatural, strangled. “That’s me.”

  Dark and humid, smell of mildew. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. We passed through a cramped foyer, firewood stacked against the wall, into a large room that seemed to take up most of the cottage. There I discovered the reason for the darkness: all the windows, their casings tall and wide, had been boarded up. Slivers of daylight snuck inside through gaps between plywood and window frame. The obstruction made the cottage feel like a crypt. Along the back wall of the main room was a basic kitchen — gas range, paint-stained steel sink, jarringly modern blender — with a pair of doors beside it. The rest of the room was occupied by rickety wooden furniture, flimsy lamps, and a couch with ripped flower-print upholstery, set too close to a fireplace. A few books were stacked on the kitchen table, the text on their spines illegible in the dimness. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed many other books scattered on the floor, in piles and singly. I also noticed, along each wall, an odd beige paneling, waist-high.

  Canvases. Dozens of them, faced towards the walls.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  I shook my head. She crept across the room, with an unsteadiness that made me wonder if her eyesight were failing, and sat in a rocking chair by the fireplace, a thin cushion beneath her. The rustle of leaves whispered into the house.

  “How did you recognize me?”

  “He painted you.”

  She released a torrent of coughs into her forearm. When the fit passed, she looked up at me, eyes watery.

  “He’s dead. I’m sorry. I buried him myself behind the house.”

  I felt like laughing long and hard but thought she would be startled, so I didn’t. Such relief. Incomprehensible — I’d longed to find him, I’d come all this way. And yet I felt a burden had been lifted from me.

  “How long ago …”

  “Last year.”

  If I’d searched harder for him when I was a girl. If I hadn’t made myself forget.

  “And these canvases. His work.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you please tell me about him?”

  She didn’t meet my eye. “He was a special man. I saw that from the start. And he was wounded when I met him. Deadened. He became whole again here. I was part of that. I helped him.”

  “Deadened … how do you mean?”

  She eased herself out of her chair. “It’s difficult to talk about him.”

  I was so overwhelmed that I might’ve just nodded and left it at that, but then the rattle of the leaves was pierced by another sound: a car approaching.

  She froze. My stomach churned, David kicked. The car drew close and stopped. Engine off. Car door clicked open, clunked shut. Heavy footsteps nearby, in the grass, on the creaky porch. The doorknob turned, the door swung open. Daylight flooded the house.

  My father stood in the doorway.

  I couldn’t feel anything at first. Just stared. By now he was well past sixty, but he looked a decade younger than that. He’d lost none of his bearing; the white hair seemed hardly to age him. That hair, always thick and wavy, had grown long. My hands went to my belly.

  “Hannah.”

  His voice hadn’t changed. Neither had his way of looking at me, gentle and attentive. His mouth seemed different. Somehow more ready to laugh.

  “Must’ve been a long trip,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

  I shook my head.

  “Let’s step outside.”

  Sunshine, birdsong. I trailed a few steps behind him, struck by the athletic confidence of his walk. Weathered blue jeans, an old plaid shirt, the back of his neck tanned deep brown. I was so angry with him, dumbstruck with anger. And so fascinated by who he had become. He glanced back, his eyes lingering on my belly; I felt a hot blush spread through me.

  We stopped at the edge of the woods, in the shade. Right on cue my eyes were full.

  “What is this, Dad?” Dad. Muscle memory. “What are you doing here?”

  He stared at his hands.

  “Well, you’re going to have a grandson. Thought you might like to know.”

  And I started to walk away. I had no idea what I was doing, but I sure was doing it.

  “Hannah.”

  “What? What?” Birds thundered from one branch to another above me. “What’s so important that you didn’t need to tell me for fifteen years, when you could’ve looked me up in the phonebook …”

  I felt ridiculous. I was twelve years old again, upset about some domestic injustice, ready to barricade myself in my bedroom in protest. I had no experience of what it was to be an adult with my father.

  “Please,” he said.

  “I don’t understand why you hated us so much.”

  “I didn’t hate you.”

  “You left.”

  He stared at the dirt. “It’s complicated.”

  “Fuck off. Really. Being thirteen years old and realizing your dad’s decided he doesn’t give a shit about you anymore, that’s complicated.”

  “You have every reason to be angry.”

  I laughed. I laughed with all of me.

  “I never wanted to hurt you and your mother. I never regretted anything so much as that.”
>
  “Nobody forced you.”

  “No, nobody forced me.”

  The birdsong deepened the quiet of the clearing.

  “She told me you’d died.”

  He blinked. “Trish.”

  “She buried you behind the house.”

  “She worries about my past catching up to us.”

  “Your past as in me and Mom?”

  “She’s unwell. She doesn’t always know what’s what.”

  I glanced at the cottage, its rotting boards and peeling paint. “Why are you living with a sick woman in the middle of the woods?”

  “She refuses to leave.”

  Squirrels scampered in the trees. I shivered in the sunshine, drenched with sweat.

  “How about I introduce you properly.”

  I followed him into the house. Furious. Elated.

  “Why do you keep it so dark in here?”

  “Patricia says it’s better for her. It wasn’t always this way. We boarded up the windows last year.”

  “Your father knows I’m not long for this world,” came her thin voice from the next room. “So any alterations he makes for my sake are temporary.”

  “You’re gloomy today.” His affectionate tone unnerved me. “But we can turn on a light, can’t we?”

  She didn’t respond. He tugged the chain of a yellowed lamp on a squat table; the room got very slightly brighter. He went to the stove, ignited the gas. “I think I’ll make some omelettes. Any food restrictions?”

  “Not firm ones. I usually keep kosher these days, though.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  He glanced at Patricia, still seated in her rocking chair. “Trish. My daughter Hannah.”

  “We’ve met.”

  “What do you do out here?” I asked her. “What keeps you busy?”

  “I ease the birth pangs of his work.”

  “And … when his birth pangs are all eased? Do you have work of your own?”

  “I manage the household.”