Where She Has Gone (3 page)

Outside my building I passed groups of children from time to time on excursion from some nearby daycare. Their leaders, usually earthy young women in denim and bulky wool, strung them out along the length of knotted ropes to keep them in line, moving calm and slightly distracted at their edges like a protective rim around their microcosm of prankishness and wonder. The children formed assortments like cross-sections of the world, black and yellow and white, seeming oblivious in their hopskipping bravado to each other’s differences. Once, as I stood staring after a group of them, a small Asian girl toward the back briefly broke formation as she passed to perform a tiny jig for me, secretive and quick; and then in a twinkling she’d resumed her place, in giddy self-containment, casting back an impish grin before trailing off with the rest in the autumn sun.

Nearly three weeks passed before I saw Rita again. I seemed to be saving her like a reward I hadn’t quite earned, but then as the days went by and I didn’t call I began to feel a sense of guilt as if I’d been avoiding her. It had always been like that for us, this anticipation and deferral, and then afterwards always the sense of having to start again, of being able to take nothing for granted.

In the end it was Rita who called.

“I guess you’ve been busy with school,” she said.

“Sort of.”

I had her and Elena over for supper. I hadn’t seen Elena since before I’d gone off to Africa, but she seemed unchanged, only more what she’d always been. As she’d grown older her blonde hair had gradually darkened to its present auburn; but otherwise she might have been simply a larger version of the girl who’d first befriended Rita in the schoolyard of St. Michael’s years before, still lank and precocious and brooding, still carrying her attractiveness like a kind of dare.

“I was starting to think you’ve been avoiding me,” I said, trying to sound genial, though the words came out like an accusation.

“Just waiting for an invitation, that’s all.” And she shot a look at Rita as if sharing a private joke.

I’d set up a table for our meal in a sort of anteroom to the living room that had sat empty till then. The room’s high-ceilinged spareness imposed an odd formality on us – we seemed reassembled as if at the Sunday dinners we used to share in the Amhersts’ house, with their atmosphere of enforced familial harmony.

“Your place looks great,” Rita said.

“Thanks.”

Not once during the whole meal did Elena look at me when she spoke, her eyes directed at Rita even when her comments were directed at me. I tried to engage her but each time her attention would shift, with always the same implication of hidden meaning – it was as if she’d set up a kind of force field around herself that couldn’t be entered except through Rita. At one point, when I was clearing away dishes to bring in dessert, she got up from the table and began to wander around the apartment, inspecting things with what looked like genuine curiosity, the prints on the walls, the books on my bookcase, the knick-knacks I’d set out on my mantelpiece; but then she sat down again without a word.

At the end of the meal she got up almost at once to leave.

“I’m sure you folks would like to be alone for a while,” she said, speaking directly to me for the first time, though with an undertone of almost menacing irony.

When she was gone, it was like a parent or chaperon had left the room.

“What was all that about?” I said.

“That’s just Elena. She overreacts sometimes.”

“What could she have to react to? I haven’t seen her in years.”

“If you want to know the truth,” Rita said, trying to sound casual, though she got up suddenly and began clearing dishes away from the table, “she was angry because you didn’t call. Like I said, she overreacts.”

I felt strangely moved, as if I were being given a kind of permission, an order, to play a role in Rita’s life.

“I really didn’t think you guys took that much notice of me,” I said.

“It’s no big deal. Anyway you’re right that she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder. From being adopted and everything.”

“You were adopted.”

“I just hide it better, that’s all.”

We finished clearing away the dishes. I kept expecting her to make some move to leave.

“Would you like some more wine?” I said.

“I dunno. I feel pretty drunk as it is.”

“
In vino veritas
.”

“I’m not sure how far I’d want to go with that.”

We carried our glasses into the living room. Rita took off her shoes and curled up at one end of the overstuffed couch I’d installed there, made small by its padded bulk.

There was a sudden mood of closeness between us.

“I always felt bad about that talk we had,” she said. “Before you left for Africa. About our mother.”

The subject had only come up that once between us, and then awkwardly, too weighted by that point by all the years
of silence. But now it seemed imbued with a special allure exactly from having been so long avoided.

“That was my fault,” I said. “It’s not as if it has to be any big secret or anything.”

“I always used to wonder what she looked like. I’ve never even seen a picture of her.”

“Sort of like you, I guess. Dark-haired. Pretty.”

“Thanks. Seriously though.”

“To tell you the truth, sometimes I can’t even remember. It was quite a long time ago.”

I thought of mentioning her eyes – I remembered them as unnaturally dark, almost black, though perhaps only because I couldn’t think of them now except in contrast to the blue of Rita’s.

“It always seemed pretty wild to me,” Rita said. “People having affairs in a village like that. I used to think there’d been a mistake or something, that people just didn’t do that sort of thing back then.”

She didn’t ask about her father. That question had never been broached, seemed somehow less removed from us by time, less neutral. There was little I could have said of him in any case, a few shreds of gossip I’d overheard, a shadow I’d seen emerging from a stable door. In my mind he was not so much a person – someone with a history, a name – as an event, a thing that had happened and then been moved past.

It grew late. I offered to walk Rita back to her residence. We were plainly drunk now and yet the drunkenness had made us timid. Coming down the fire escape of my building Rita stumbled and fell against me, her hands grabbing hold of me as she struggled to regain her balance. I had an urge then
to gather her up on my back like a child, so pleasant was the weight of her against me, so supple and frail.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

We walked to the residence in silence. The air had turned brisk, Rita’s cheeks colouring with the cold.

“So maybe we could see a movie or something,” I said.

“That would be great.”

“How about on the weekend?”

“I think that’s all right. I mean, I have mid-terms but I wouldn’t mind a night off.”

“I’ll call you, then,” I said.

She laughed.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“If you don’t, you’ll have Elena to answer to.”

And when she turned I thought there was a lightness in her step at the prospect of our seeing one another again.

We began to see each other regularly, as much as two or three times a week, usually at my apartment and usually alone. I was always aware when we met of the shadow of Elena behind Rita, but we seldom spoke of her any more; and though Rita never betrayed the sign of any rift, I sensed that our time together was a sort of retreat from Elena for her, an unconscious shifting away from an intensity she couldn’t quite fathom.

I’d given her a key to my apartment. On school days I’d come home and often she’d be at work at my kitchen table, books piled high around her or pages spread out filled with her loping script. For hours sometimes then we’d go about our separate tasks, she in the kitchen and I at my desk in the bedroom. From a certain angle of doorways and passages I could catch glimpses of her from my room as she worked, the hunch of her shoulders, the sweep of a hand as it came up to brush back her hair. While I’d been in Africa we’d written letters to each other, full of tentative self-revelations; and yet
all that I’d gleaned of her then seemed nothing next to these glimpses I stole, to the sense of her presence there in my kitchen working unawares while I watched.

She had befriended the building’s black superintendent, Eddy. Eddy was known in the building mainly for his frequent late-night arguments with the white boyfriend he lived with, arguments that seemed intended both to announce and deny what the relationship between them was. There was an evasiveness to him that made him appear almost simple at times, a tendency to stare off, to avoid the commitment of eyes; but he kept a close tally of the building’s comings and goings. In the warmer weather he’d kept vigil from across the street, or from an old lawn chair he would set outside the window of his ground-floor apartment under a leaning sumac tree; and then when the cold had come on he’d taken up a post just inside the front entrance. I’d hear his voice filtering up from there whenever Rita came by, laconic and flip, conceding nothing, a cross between aging drag and Southern drawl.

“You again.”

“That’s right. You can’t seem to get rid of me.”

“Well someone should tell Victor up there to watch the company he keeps.”

Since Rita had started coming around, Eddy had begun to perform little favours for me, clandestinely though, as if to avoid the humiliation of being seen to be kind. He’d clear the snow from my fire escape when I was out; he’d bring my mail up from downstairs and slip it under my door. There was something so intimate in these gestures that I saw them at first almost as overtures, even if Rita was somehow the permission for them. But there was more to them than that, some subtle enfolding of Rita and me that was Eddy’s necessary type of
affection at a distance, his way of watching over whatever fragile thing he imagined Rita and I formed.

At some point I came around to discussing with Rita the codicil to my father’s will. I thought her knowledge of it would somehow bind us more intricately, but the subject seemed to make her uneasy.

“It was just his way of admitting that you were my sister,” I said. “It’s not as if you owe him anything for it.”

“It’s not that. It makes me feel strange, that’s all. I never told you this but I saw him on the street once in Mersea not long before he died. The way he looked at me, you know that way he had, like a cloud had just crossed his face – when I was a kid I used to think he was angry but that wasn’t it at all. He was ashamed. For the first time I could see that. It was as if he’d spent all his life trying to forget what had happened and then there I was to bring it back again. When I found out how he’d died all I could think of was that look in his eyes when he saw me.”

I knew from my father’s letters to me in Africa the volatile state he’d been in during that time, how little it might have taken to break him.

“There were lots of things going on then,” I said. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, what happened.”

We never mentioned the codicil again after that. But our awareness of it had its effect: it was as if a space had opened up between us where we were free again to be family, to count on each other in that way. An old protectiveness was rekindled in me, what I’d felt toward Rita years before when she’d been simply the unwanted child in our house; only now there was no other side of things to feel guilty about, no troubled
father looming in the background except in this sanction he’d given me to fulfil an obligation that he could not.

In December, Rita and Elena decided to move out of residence. For several days the three of us trekked through the cold and slush in the neighbourhoods surrounding the campus searching out
FOR RENT
signs in windows and tracking down listings from the classifieds.

“I suppose having you along will give us a little credibility,” Elena said.

But her resistance to me seemed to be losing its edge, as if she’d expected some betrayal that hadn’t come.

The places we saw that fell within their budget turned out mainly to be rooming houses. There was a whole string of them along Spadina Road north of Bloor Street, run-down places with shared kitchen and bath where roaches scurried for cover when lights were turned on, or shoddy renos parcelled into tiny “self-contained” bachelors with two-burner hotplates and beds that folded into the wall. There was a smell in these places of transience, of decaying humanity, though some of the residents, the old men who stared out from doorways, the women who came in dressed in tight skirts and stiletto heels, looked as if they had never known any other idea of home.

We saw a promising place on St. George, a one-bedroom on the tenth floor of a highrise with a view of the city skyline and beyond it of a shimmering sliver of lake.

“I keep a clean building,” the superintendent said. “No niggers. No Pakis.”

“Thanks, asshole,” Elena said, and turned and walked out.

On our fourth day out we looked at a place on Robert Street not far from my own. The house was a pretty Victorian painted in deep and pastel blues. But the apartment, which had been advertised as airy and bright, turned out to be in the basement, the ceilings so low I had to hunch to move beneath them.

“I’ve got something open on the ground floor as well,” the landlord said. He was a man in his early thirties perhaps, slick, well-dressed. When we’d arrived for our appointment his eyes had gone immediately to Elena. “It’s a little pricier than this one but very nice.”

The apartment took up the whole of the main floor, living room, dining room and kitchen and then a small, carpeted bedroom in an addition at the back. The previous tenants appeared to have left in a hurry – there were still odd bits of furniture and debris strewn about, a tattered armchair, an old rug, a few blackened pots and pans in the kitchen cupboards.

“All it needs,” the landlord said, “is a coat of paint.”

“Will you be doing that?” I said.

“Well, I suppose I could. For the right tenants.”