was a knock. Clare stopped playing.
“Sorry to disturb you, pet,” Isobel said, nudging the door open. “I was just wondering if you were hungry.”
“Not really. No. Thanks.”
The voice with Rudy Vantwest’s face was gone, and suddenly it was Emma back in her head.
Ask her now! Come on, you promised.
Clare clenched her fists between her knees. “Can I ask you something, Ma?”
“Of course, pet. What is it?”
“Was I really premature?”
“What do you mean?”
She couldn’t tell if her mother was flustered or angry or genuinely confused. “I mean was I really born early, or did you get pregnant before you and Dad were married?”
Isobel approached the piano slowly, rubbing her arms. She breathed in and straightened her shoulders. “Things were different back then, pet.”
Clare nodded. She didn’t need to hear any more.
Her mother traced a finger across the dusty piano top. “I should have said something a long time ago.”
“It’s okay. I figured it out.”
She lowered the fallboard and stood up. She would go to her bedroom and unpack, maybe read a little or call Emma. It was still early in Vancouver. But her mother’s eyes were fixed on her, following her.
“I should have told you, Clare. Are you—”
“It’s fine. It’s no big deal.”
She picked up the National Geographic. At the doorway joining the studio and the bedroom, another question came to her—Did you love Dad? But at the sight of her mother absently running her sleeve across the piano top, she let it go. “I’m going to unpack,” she said.
In the bedroom she unzipped her suitcase and tossed clothes into the laundry hamper until her mother’s footsteps sounded on the creaky stairs. Then she went to the window and stared at the dark boughs of her father’s favourite tree—the pine he’d brought with him from Scotland. His final resting place.
It was good we did it on Christmas. You always loved Christmas, didn’t you ... the rituals anyway.
Oh, aye.
It’s been six years already?
So it has.
What have I been doing?
Och. Carrying on.
Not even. I feel like I’m still standing out there in the snow with your ashes.
DECEMBER 1990
It’s winter again. Christmas Day. Rudy has driven out from Toronto along with Susie and her family. Adam still lives at home. All in all, it’s an ordinary Christmas—messier now that Sue and Mark have baby Zoë. Mum’s absence no longer oppresses, as it did for so many years, though Dad still drinks too much arrack.
Rudy is at the kitchen table with the rest of the “children,” browsing an old issue of the Gazette while his aunt makes Christmas lunch and his father listens to the Jim Reeves Christmas album in the living room—right hand anchored to his drink, left hand lazily tapping the arm-rest of his chair, more in time with his own thoughts, it seems, than with the music. Bundled up in her multiple cardigans, chopping away, Aunty tells stories of the old days on the tea estate. Adam’s the only one paying any attention. He listens as a curious outsider would, tilting his head and widening his eyes, as if it were all fabulously exotic—as if peraheras and kavichchis and Peria Dorays were from a different planet. It’s vaguely embarrassing, Rudy thinks, the way his brother fawns over things that should be ordinary to him. But then Adam has never been home; he’s different from the rest of them.
“So, Aunty,” he says, rocking back on two legs of his chair, hands clasped behind his head, “were there any problems between the Tamils and the Sinhalese back in those days?”
In the living room Dad coughs. Aunty keeps on chopping.
“Ah, not like they have now,” she says. “Things were more peaceful then.” She brushes loose strands of hair away from her face with the wrist of her chopping hand. “People got along better, isn’t it.”
Adam frowns. “Well, they made it look like they did. But I can totally understand why they got fed up—the Sinhalese and the Tamils. I mean, I’d wanna start fighting too if I had second-rate status in my own country. Wouldn’t you?”
“Ah, maybe,” Aunty says, without conviction.
Dad coughs again. Rudy and Susie exchange a glance, then Susie retreats to the heavy manual she has brought with her from Toronto: An Introduction to American Sign Language. As far as Rudy is concerned, Sri Lanka’s problems aren’t real. Real is another frozen Christmas with crappy gifts and too much food. It’s Adam’s larger-than-life presence. It’s Susie and her husband finding out their tiny blue-eyed, black-haired kid is severely hearing impaired.
Watching his sister move her hands like pieces of newly acquired anatomy, Rudy senses a familiar impotence—a powerful but hopeless desire to be helpful, to be significant in some way. He remembers an afternoon, ages ago, in Aunty Mary’s garden, when Susie leaned too far over the edge of the well and got stuck. For several long seconds, she teetered perilously atop the narrow stone wall, screaming, feet kicking in the air, before Rudy got to her and yanked her back down by the hem of her skirt. In his mind, he’d saved his sister’s life, and for a brief, triumphant time he was her hero and protector. But he doubts Susie even remembers the incident. And in any case, it’s no longer Rudy she calls for in her moments of crisis, but Adam.
Adam’s interest in Sri Lankan politics seems to have fizzled. Whistling along with Jim Reeves, he slides his chair away from the table and slips into the living room, where he drops to the floor in front of Zoë, who’s playing with a pile of National Geographic magazines.
“Whatcha got there?” he says, signing “Zoë,” along with something Rudy doesn’t recognize.
Zoë looks up and slaps the magazine on the floor in front of her. Adam blows a wave of hair out of his eyes.
“Cool picture,” he says. “That’s a woolly mammoth. It’s like an elephant, only it’s bigger and hairier. And those things coming out of its mouth are tusks.” He exaggerates the signs for “big” and “hairy” and fingerspells “tusks.” He starts to read from the magazine—“‘The woolly mammoth ranged over North America, Asia, and Europe during the Pleistocene. It was—’” then interrupts himself. “Hey, Zoë, can you imagine if they used one of these things instead of a regular elephant in the Kandy Perahera? Wouldn’t that be crazy?”
Rudy hears his father clear his throat, and his own body tenses.
“What are you expecting her to understand from all this?” Dad says, his voice deceptively mild. “Point to the picture and say ‘elephant.’”
At the kitchen table Susie’s eyes again catch Rudy’s. Their father is the one member of the family who won’t sign.
“I don’t want her to learn anything from this,” Adam says. “I just want her to know I’m interested in what she’s looking at.”
Dad doesn’t answer. For a moment the only voice in the house is that of Jim Reeves, crooning the final verse of “Blue Christmas,” his velvet melody pocked with record crackles that have become part of the music itself. Then Zoë laughs as Adam swoops her up off the floor and steers her like an airplane, through the kitchen and down the