My dad chopped mushrooms, added them to a pan. “Has Isaac come back from the garden?”
“Not yet.”
“Isaac?”
“Isaac is our son.”
You’d think that would’ve knocked me off my feet. But, maybe because I’d just been confronted with so many extraordinary realities, maybe because the thought of my father and this woman raising a child in that lightless shack in the woods seemed so singularly crazy that it had to be true, I wasn’t surprised. Flawless dream logic.
“How old is he?”
“Fourteen.” He lowered the heat on the stove. “Will you keep an eye on the food for a moment while I get him?”
As he left the house, daylight poured inside and escaped again.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, prodded the eggs with a spatula, glanced at Patricia. She sat motionless, her eyes vacant.
“You have a son.”
“Isaac was an accident.”
Her voice was ice slipped down the back of my shirt.
“Lots of kids are. Then they arrive and you love them regardless. So I hear, anyway.”
She was silent.
“I can’t imagine living out here with a child,” I went on. “So far from other people. Must be tricky for him to learn about the world.”
“Your father has taught Isaac more than most people learn by the time they’re your age. Our son has lacked nothing.”
“Sure, all I meant — ”
“He’s lacked nothing.”
I felt a throb of pure hostility towards her. It disturbed me. “My father tells me you’re ill. I’m sorry.”
“Your father’s a genius, but he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.”
“It must be hard to manage an illness out here.”
“My needs are nothing.”
The front door opened, daylight swept in, and my father entered with the wispy shape of a boy behind him. I realized Isaac and I had already met.
The kid from the harbour averted his eyes when he saw me, busied himself with unloading the handful of vegetables he carried: cucumbers, onions, tomatoes.
“Isaac, meet Hannah,” my father said.
“Hi.” He didn’t look up.
“He’s heard lots about you. The way you were as a little girl, of course.”
“So you’ve been honest about what happened.”
“I don’t want him to make the mistakes I made.” He took the vegetables from his son’s hands. “He can make his own mistakes.”
“You’re in high school?” I asked my newly minted half-brother, who gave the floor his undivided attention.
“Yeah.”
“Out here or in town?”
“In town.”
“How do you get there from here?”
“Dad.”
My father rinsed cucumbers, sliced them. “Isaac was homeschooled until last year, when we exposed him to the horrors of high school. He’s since become a monster.”
“Is that true? Are you a monster?”
“I dunno.”
With disconcerting ordinariness, we sat around the kitchen table for lunch. My father had made mushroom omelettes and salad; I ate with great appetite. When I’d finished, I watched the rest of them eat in silence. I felt I was observing a family whose practices I was ill-equipped to comprehend, products of another culture, a distant age. Yet this was my family.
I caught my dad staring at my wedding band.
“His name is Aaron.”
“And he … keeps kosher too?”
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s a work in progress.”
“How do you mean?”
I fiddled with my fork. Not convinced he had any right to know about my life. “We both grew up completely secular, and we both felt there was something not quite satisfying about that, so we … looked into it.”
“I went to church as a girl,” Patricia said. “Terrible. Everyone there to pass judgment and mark their place in the community.”
“I think a lot of what drew me and Aaron to Judaism was a craving for community. We’ve made many friends through our synagogue. I feel much less isolated than I used to.”
Isaac looked up at me. When our glances met, he averted his eyes.
“I’m happy you’ve found something in Judaism,” my dad said. “Certainly more than I ever did.”
“Would you like help with the dishes?”
“Don’t be silly, you’re our guest. Isaac, will you show Hannah the garden?”
Isaac rose, brought our plates to the sink, rinsed them. A dutiful, conscientious son. Raised in the wild like an animal or a god. Who, when asked about his parents by a stranger, mentioned no relation to the man who was his father and the woman who was his mother, instead described them as degenerates. I was fascinated by him.
He led me from the house through a small bedroom. A worn double mattress, tangled sheets, an ancient nightstand. Clothes in a heap on the floor, books in piles.
“This is their bedroom?”
“Yeah.”
“And where do you sleep?”
“Mine.”
Steps from the house, the woods enveloped us. There was no path, and he weaved and darted ahead of me. Nervous that I might lose sight of him and be lost, I half-jogged to keep up.
A few minutes later he stopped.
“This is it.”
When my father had said they had a garden, I guess it was my own metropolitan prejudice that had led me to picture the kind of plot you’d maintain as a hobby in your backyard. Their garden, if that’s the word for it, was magnificent. A wide clearing, deciduous trees in dense ranks along the periphery, walls of green and brown; a stream. In the earth on either side of that stream, an astonishing variety of plants. Some bore fruits and vegetables: strawberries, raspberries, onions, tomatoes. Others burst with flowers.
To make this. To renounce the life he’d made, with great cruelty, at great cost, and to make this. Of course it didn’t justify his behaviour, redeem him or the time I’d wasted, grieving and enraged, because of his betrayal. But I couldn’t help but be moved. It all seemed so formidable — the sophistication with which the garden was arranged, the sheer extent of it, the mixture of plants cultivated for their utility with others that did no more than affirm the genius of nature, its voluptuous consolations.
Isaac walked along the edge of the stream. “I’ve built a basic irrigation and drainage system. My dad helped me. It’s been set up here for almost two years.”
“You built an irrigation and drainage system when you were twelve?”
“Twelve and a half. It’s pretty simple. Low-tech. Just a way of taking advantage of the stream here, directing storm water.”
I trailed behind him. Glancing at the soil on either side of the stream, I noticed networks of ditches, furrows. “A lot of your food comes from here?”
“Not animal products, obviously. Or grains. We’re not proper farmers. We do eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, though.”
He skipped along. His comfort, his pride in this place were unmistakable. They made him look older.
“Why did you lie to me about your parents?”
“I told you what people in town say about them. Especially the guys at school.”
“But you could’ve mentioned they happened to be your mom and dad.”
“I didn’t know who you were.”
Yet he’d recognized me eventually. “The painting.”
“Huh?”
“You grew up with my face in the house.”
He shrugged. “I was just like, whatever. If you wanted to visit, great. Anything for a little change.”
“You’re not happy out here.”
“It’s so fucked up. I never realized how fucked up it all is. I’m such a freak.”
“Most people feel that way in high school.”
“I have to get out of here. It’ll kill me if I don’t.” He said it without glibness.
“You don’t even know,” he went on. “Such a f
airy tale life out here, right? My mom’s hated me since the second she laid eyes on me. It’s gotten even worse since she’s been sicker. It’s like she blames me.”
The way his mother looked at him, didn’t look at him. The caustic way she spoke about him. “How can she blame you?”
“All she cares about is Dad. Every minute I took away from her is a minute she didn’t fulfill her sacred mission to serve him.”
“Her sacred what?”
“She thinks he’s like a prophet or something. It’s totally fucking insane.”
“He must be flattered.”
“She’s got this degenerative neuro disease. Doctors in Victoria think it causes her psychosis, but they don’t really know. Dad’s been so busy with her lately, since she got sicker. I know they’d both find it easier if I just wasn’t around. So it’s not even like totally selfish that I want to get out of here. It’s for them, too.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. My responsible adult instinct was to talk him down, reassure him that at least one of his parents cared about him very much, that pretty soon he’d be old enough to make his own decisions about where to live and what to do with his life and could leave his parents’ home, if he wanted to, without much difficulty. My stronger instinct was to tell the kid to run.
“Is your baby a boy or a girl?”
“Boy.”
“And you’ve got a husband.”
“Yeah. The two of you might get along.”
“I don’t get along with most people.”
“Where would you want to go, if you left here?”
“Somewhere with millions of girls and a good library.”
I laughed. “That place exists.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon together in the garden. I told him about Aaron and home, my work at the Jewish community centre, the terror and exhilaration I’d felt since I’d found out I was pregnant. He told me again and again of his longing to get out of the woods, off the Island, away from his mother. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but he felt the education our dad had given him prepared him for anything.
We returned to the house just before dark.
“A nice spot, huh,” my father said. “Most of tonight’s dinner comes from there.”
With several antique lamps aglow, the house no longer felt quite so sinister. It was almost cozy.
“Stunning,” I said, apropos of the garden, conscious of how weird it was to compliment my father on anything. “How long have you been working on it?”
“I planted the first seeds the year Isaac was born. It’s actually a much simpler set-up than it seems. It was something to occupy myself with. I’m unemployed, you know.”
“You’re a famous painter,” Isaac said.
“After fourteen years of painting here for myself, I brought a few to a gallery. I’m not exactly a fixture in the art world.”
“Let’s just say you’re a famous painter, okay? That way we can pretend life here isn’t totally shit.”
“Fifteen years in the woods, just educating this one and growing a garden and painting. Of course Mom and I weren’t enough for you. You were looking for Eden.”
From the bedroom closest to the kitchen came a hacking cough.
“Obviously he found it,” said Isaac.
The silence of the night was uncanny. The moon had disappeared behind clouds, so I couldn’t see a thing when, after dinner, I stepped outside to call Aaron. I crept around the side of the house, guiding myself along the wall with my hands. My eyes adjusted a little and I could make out the tops of the trees, silhouetted against the sky. They fenced the clearing in, kept the world out.
“Do you smoke, Hannah?”
My father approached, a lit cigarette between his lips.
“Since when do you?”
“Little more than a year. Another bad habit of my youth I buried.”
“Another?”
“I thought I’d gotten rid of the painting, too. Funny how everything eventually comes back. If I were a believer like you, I think I’d go for one of the Eastern faiths. Cycles. Reincarnation. That sounds about right. It seems to me that most people are reincarnated a few times over the course of even a single life.”
“I never said I was a believer.”
He slid to the ground beside me, leaned against the house’s splintered slats. He met my eye with an intensity that startled me. “Did I interrupt you? Have you made your call?”
I shook my head. “So what’s your plan now? Are you going to hide in the woods for the rest of your life?”
“It’s clear she doesn’t have much time left. Eventually I’ll leave with Isaac.”
“Does he know that?”
“We don’t discuss his mother’s condition. He leaves the room whenever I try to broach the subject. But I’d need to get out of here anyway, I’m running out of money. Isn’t that ridiculous. Fifteen years and soon I’ll need a job.”
He stubbed out his cigarette.
“For a long time I thought I was giving him everything, everything he might need. Now I wake up in a sweat convinced I’ve failed him, Trish has damaged him. I live in constant terror that he’ll run off. I’m sure he’ll do it. I’ll wake up one morning and the car will be missing, I’ll find it parked at the bus station in town. Not a doubt in my mind. Just a question of when.”
“Why him and not me.” Selfish, maybe. But it was all I could think. “Why so terrible to lose him but not to lose me.”
“It was terrible to lose you.”
“Bullshit. It was your choice.”
He didn’t say anything. His face looked bloodless.
“I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have minded if you’d bought an easel and paints, if that’s what you needed. Why couldn’t you let us in?”
The silence swelled to minutes.
“I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t paint. If I truly believed, my life would be enough. The other pieces of my life.”
The wind whistled. He brushed his hair from his face.
“I paint to inch towards an understanding of … something ultimate. But that’s madness. What kind of fool tries to paint his way to an answer when he’s sure no answer is possible? Why live for the mystery if there is no mystery? Why not just accept the pleasures of the world?”
He rolled the butt of his cigarette between his fingers.
“I didn’t tell you and your mother about my painting because I didn’t know about it then myself. My painting is the articulation of a question I suppressed very persuasively in those years. But for some people I think such questions might be permanent.”
His frown deepened.
“Sorry. I’m keeping you from your call. Your husband must be worried.”
I shook my head, but he’d begun to walk away already.
The moon rode high. David rolled over inside me, passing in his sleep from one dream to the next. Exhausted, I leaned against the house and called my husband. He picked up on the first ring.
“My pilgrim.”
“Guess what.”
My hands shook so much I thought I’d drop the phone.
“I found him.”
Startled from sleep. Cold sweat, full body ache. Everywhere dark.
I sat up and the room spun. Aware that I had seven or eight seconds at most before I threw up, I stumbled into my father’s tiny, mildewed bathroom. Afterwards, I tried to be as quiet as possible, checked that the area was spotless, washed my hands with the tap open no more than a trickle. No sounds from the rest of the cottage.
I crept back to the couch, unsteady on my feet, still nauseous.
Isaac watched me in the darkness.
I almost cried out, caught myself.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle. I heard you get up, wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“Everything’s fine. Thanks.”
“I’ll head back to bed then.”
He didn’t. He settled into a corner of the couch and wrapped his long arms
around my pillow, peered up at me.
“My dad says you’re staying.”
“Not for too long.”
Only after we’d finished dinner had it struck me that the sky was dark, my luggage back in town at the inn. And my last attempt to navigate the woods by night hadn’t been a success.
He avoided my eye. “I was wondering if I could ask you something. If you could help me.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“So. So, I. Um. Don’t know how to talk to girls.”
Another wave of nausea hit me, probably unrelated to his remark. “There’s no trick. It’s just like talking to guys.”
“No, I mean I actually don’t know how. I didn’t know a single girl until last year. Other than my mom, who obviously doesn’t count. I’d seen girls in town but never had a conversation with them. So when I met girls at school, I just acted towards them like men do in books.”
“Which books?” I was pretty concerned.
“Exactly. Books aren’t consistent. I mean, I wasn’t going around asking girls to touch my crotch or anything. I just told them the nice things I thought about them. And then asked if I could kiss them.”
My concern was leavened with amusement. “Maybe I can give you some pointers.”
“How did your husband win you over?”
“He was just himself. Kind, soulful. Funny. You’ve got all the same assets he has. You just need to find somebody who can appreciate them.”
“Right, yeah,” he said, with a peremptory nod. “And so, like, what did your husband say when he first wanted to have sex with you?”
“Uh.” Aaron had said, more or less, Shall we? The end — not quite the end — of a long third date. “Can’t remember exactly. But we’d gone through some preliminaries first.”
“Same here. I’d been in class with these girls for weeks before I told them how I felt.”
“It’s great that you’re honest with them. You never know, maybe next year you’ll be the school Casanova.”
“Fuck no. All I want is one. One real love. I find that, I’ll hold onto it for the rest of my life. I know what my dad was like when you knew him.”
My stomach somersaulted. “What? What was he like?”
“I’m not going to be that way, swear to God.”
He straightened my tangled sheets on the couch, fluffed my pillow.
Faithful and Other Stories Page 11
