Bone and Bread (32 page)

“Looking for stuff about my dad.” He said this carelessly and without bitterness, as though his father was only a chum he hadn't met yet.

“He's not your dad. Don't even use the word.”

He didn't turn from his task, but pushing one desk drawer closed, he moved on to the next. “You sound like Auntie S.”

“Well, maybe she's right about this.”

He took all the file folders, the bills and the half-written stories and the newspaper clippings, and dumped them on the desk, spreading them with his hands like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

“Stop it.”

“No.”

I came up behind him and grabbed both his wrists, then held them together in my right fist. I pulled him away from the desk.

“Ow.”

“I don't go through your stuff, do I?”

“I don't know. Probably.” He sounded so angry. I had never seen this anger in him before.

“No, I don't. And there's nothing here.” I let go. “Everything I know, you know.”

“I don't believe you.” He shook his wrists free. “You never talk about him.”

“That's because there's nothing to say.”

Whether or not he believed me, something in my manner made him let it go. It was three years before he mentioned his father to me again.

Quinn's birthdays, our own birthdays — these were the markers of how far we had all come, how long it had been. There was a wave-pool birthday party, a bowling-alley birthday party, and a laser-tag birthday party, and then Quinn was in high school and parties were verboten, and I was allowed to bake a cake but nothing else. Every one of his birthdays brought a visit from Sadhana, and every year she was still fine. I didn't know what Quinn wished for every year, but I was superstitious enough to start baking my own birthday cakes. We were not the kind of family that could squander wishes.

For his fifteenth birthday, Sadhana and I woke up before the sun and baked chocolate layers cut into the shape of a lightning bolt. While Sadhana finished putting on the yellow icing, I went upstairs with a glass of orange juice and shook Quinn awake. Between the floor and the desk I counted three empty cereal bowls.

“Mom,” said Quinn. “It's Saturday.”

“So? You used to love getting up early on Saturday.”

Quinn rolled onto his stomach and pulled the sheet over his head. His voice was muffled. “That was for cartoons. I haven't wanted to get up early on the weekend since I was ten years old.”

“We're going to celebrate your birthday at the actual time you were born.” There had been that whole, long night of labouring alone before the morning came, with Quinn.

After thin slices of cake, we went around the corner to Ned's, the diner we visited so often that Ned had added “The
Quinn” to the menu: an all-dressed sandwich on rye with pickles and spicy Hungarian salami. Of all meals, breakfast the way it was served in a diner bore the least connection to anything we had grown up eating. It was nourishment without attachment, merciful food. Every piece of bacon was like starting over as someone else. We ordered our eggs soft-boiled, and it was not hard to imagine that we were like any ordinary family eating together in a restaurant, dipping toast triangles into yolks with calm enjoyment instead of pretending not to watch each other with the strained truce of animals around a watering hole.

We all held out our mugs for coffee refills as Ned passed by. Quinn paused in his routine of pouring in six packages of sugar. “Do you suppose,” he said, “my father thinks about me on my birthday?”

Sadhana looked to me to respond, and for all her misery, I had rarely seen her appear so openly sorrowful.

“He doesn't know when your birthday is, Quinn,” I said. “Unless he made some special, secret effort to find out from somebody.”

Sadhana said, “He probably thinks about you a lot, all the time.” Then she caught my warning look, which must have been mixed with surprise. This was a new tack for my sister when talking about Ravi. She amended. “Maybe even when he doesn't realize he is.”

I tried to get us out of the house when Sadhana visited. Quinn spent so much time inside on his computer or doing homework. After breakfast we rambled downtown to the Parliament Buildings. We stopped at the Centennial Flame, flicking in pennies for wishes, and watched as a small group of protestors mustered on the lawn, their signs demanding
BETTER PENSIONS FOR VETERANS!
Leaving them, we strolled around the back of the imposing buildings, taking in the cat sanctuary and the statues of queens and former prime ministers. We were surprised to find a gazebo behind the Centre Block, and Sadhana got up and danced for us before pulling Quinn up alongside her to try teaching him how to pirouette.

When Quinn had resisted long enough that Sadhana finally gave up, we walked down to the fence and looked out over the escarpment to the Ottawa River.

“It's beautiful here,” said Sadhana.

“Montreal is beautiful,” said Quinn. He was always loyal.

Once we had finished our circuit and had come out on the other side of the Parliament Buildings, Quinn begged to be allowed to run ahead to the mall, where we had told him he could pick out a new video game. “I'll meet you there, and you guys can keep strolling.”

“Sure,” I said, and he hurried off. Sadhana smiled at me as the sun came out, and we let it warm our hands and faces as we passed the War Memorial and the Rideau locks and the great clean, landscaped centre of the city. It was early November, but the little snow that there was hadn't stayed, and downtown was filling up. Everyone we noticed seemed to have the same grateful, reckless look of wonder at a beautiful Canadian Saturday as we headed into the winter.

On the streets of Montreal, people stared at each other. In Ottawa, they looked away. My sister liked this. “Except that when people look at you in Montreal, it makes it okay to look at them.”

“True.” We had already been staring a little too much for other people's comfort.

As we approached the mall, Sadhana said, “He's not going to let it go, you know. Asking about his father.”

I said nothing.

“Maybe we should all go back to therapy together so you can figure out how to talk to him about it.”

“You're kidding.” I looked up at her. “I thought we decided therapy was a disaster.”

“No, you did, Beena. You did. That's so typical.” She sounded peeved. “But you know, I've been back to see a therapist once or twice,” she said. “Alone, I mean. The first time, when it started happening again.”

I didn't need to ask what she meant. In spite of the sun, I felt cold. “When?”

“A couple of years ago now. When I was training for the marathon. But it's fine.”

I remembered now that she had not run in the race, citing some kind of minor ankle injury. I could not focus on what she was saying about Quinn, for I was panicked that her illness had resurfaced and I had not known.

“Fine?” I said.

Sadhana touched my arm. “This is a good thing. It started, and I stopped it, and you didn't even have to know.”

Sadhana was right — he didn't let it go. It came up again during a hockey game. I was sitting in the stands and enjoying the crispness of cold air inside and the makings of a hundred Slush Puppies scraped up by hockey skates. I had a hot dog from the canteen. Quinn had played all through his gangly phase, and though he still spent hours learning programming languages on his computer, he was showing an interest in getting stronger and being competitive. He said I ought to come see.

“The games are getting a lot more interesting,” he had said, shouldering the huge hockey bag it had taken me both hands to shove out of the middle of the kitchen where he'd left it. “I think you'll enjoy it if you come.” I promised I would. I thought that this was sometimes why people had children, to send a little part of themselves out into places they wouldn't ordinarily go. Like casting a line. A new trajectory.

Quinn scored a goal with two minutes to go, and I jumped to my feet with the other home-team fans, spilling crumbs down to the cement floor. The feeling of being one with the crowd was electric, something I hadn't felt in years. I hoped someone would start the wave.

I sat back down. A man next to me said, “That your boy?” Quinn was the only brown kid on the team.

“That's him.”

“He's coming along well,” he said. “A real sniper.”

I hoped that was a good thing. “I'm glad,” I said. “He practices a lot. I'd hate for it to be for nothing.”

The man had a close-cropped beard and a navy wool coat. He said, “If you keep coming, you'll find you get into it.” He looked down at the space between us on the bench, where I had laid my gloves as I ate my hot dog. I wondered if he spoke that way because I was a woman, until I realized that he must come to all the games and knew I didn't. Although I had, at the beginning. I wasn't sure when it had gotten away from me.

“I'm going to try,” I said.

On the ice we heard a pounding and a slamming of boards. Shouts and a whistle. People were booing before I realized it was Quinn.

“That's a penalty!” called out the man next to me. Other people were yelling. To me he said, “Go. It's all right.”

I ran down the steps. Quinn had already skated off to the bench. He'd taken a hard hit into the glass. With one hand, he held an ice pack up to the side of his jaw.

“Quinn,” I said. In case moms didn't do this, I tried for discretion. But everyone was watching the game. Thirty seconds left on the clock. Our team winning but out for revenge.

Shifting in his seat, Quinn turned to me. There would be a black eye, some swelling. His nose was fine, thank god. Through a mouthful of blood, he said, “I want to meet my father.” Then he leaned over and spat on the ground.

The last time I saw my sister alive, she was standing in my front hallway in her grey wool coat, calling me an idiot.

I had come home from work to find a rental car with Quebec plates parked out front on the street, Sadhana and Quinn inside the house, deep in discussion, so absorbed they did not hear me unlock the door and approach.

“So you'll help me?” Quinn was saying. His voice sounded fervent with gratitude.

“Of course, baby, if that's what you want. It might not be a good idea, but I understand how you feel.” I heard a clink like a cup being set down on a saucer. “If I had a way back to my Papa, to get to know him, I'd do anything I could.”

I turned the corner of the hallway into the living room. “What the hell is going on here?”

Quinn looked terrified, but Sadhana was composed. “Bee, I was just telling Quinn I'm going to help him find Ravi. He wants to meet him, and I think he's old enough to decide for himself now.”

“No,” I say.

“You don't have to be involved,” said Sadhana. “If you're worried about seeing him again.”

“I'm not,” I said, indignant, though fear was clutching at my stomach from the back of my spine. I let my purse drop from my hand to the rug. “You're the one who always said he's not even worth knowing.” Having Sadhana firmly in that camp had given me the magnanimous freedom to blame Ravi's shiftlessness on his youth, to keep up the appearance of giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“And I still think that.” Sadhana looked over at Quinn. “I definitely haven't changed my mind on that one.” From habit, I examined her neck as her head turned in profile, and the lines were not the sharp, rangy contours presaging danger. “But you're the one,” she came back to me then, “who said he was just a kid. And people do change.” She picked up her cup and put it down again, looking thoughtful. “I'd like to think that people might change with the right kind of encouragement.”

Quinn, still looking spooked, dropped his hands to his knees, as though trying to brace himself or clamp down his nerves. “Mom,” he said, with a peacemaking air, “we didn't want you to have to find out about any of this.” I caught Sadhana shooting him a warning look.