Sue, I didn’t mean to ...”
Susie smiles weakly. “It’s okay. Let’s just eat,” she says, and goes back to feeding Zoë.
Dutifully, Rudy takes a forkful of rice. At the head of the table, Dad reaches for a pappadam. He breaks off a piece and places it on his tongue like a Eucharistic host. “Excellent meal, Mary,” he says. “Just like the old days.” In his voice and posture there is a hint of resignation. The skin under his staring brown eyes is loose and tired.
LATE THAT NIGHT, Rudy finds his sister in the trophy room. The lights are out, and she’s sitting cross-legged in Dad’s chair.
“Are you okay?” he says from the doorway.
“Yeah. Fine. Just thinking.”
“About this afternoon?”
“Sort of.”
“Adam shouldn’t have gone on like that.”
Susie unfolds herself from her lotus position. “It’s okay. What he was saying made perfect sense.”
“Yeah, but ...”
“No, really, Rudy. I’m not upset about anything Adam said.” She comes into the hallway, where she lowers her voice. “He’s been having a rough time with Dada lately. Coming out and everything. He needs our support.”
Rudy nods. “It’s late. I’m gonna hit the couch. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When his sister has disappeared up the stairs, he goes into the trophy room with his diary and turns on the light. He examines the photographs on the wall. His favourite was taken long ago at the summit of Adam’s Peak. It’s a black and white portrait of two young men standing on either side of an ancient bell. One of the men is a tea taster from Grandpa’s estate. The other is Uncle Ernie. He leans in to get a better look at this uncle he has never met, the black sheep who left home and was rarely heard from again. He’s a handsome fellow, more European in appearance than Dad, though the family resemblance is evident. The square jaw has resurfaced in Adam, along with the cheeky smile.
“Maybe a few other things as well,” Rudy muses aloud. “Things that would have made you a real black sheep back then, eh, machan?”
Renée can’t understand that he could have an uncle living somewhere in the world—Sri Lanka probably, though not necessarily—and yet have no particular desire to meet the man. He isn’t entirely sure himself, but it seems to him just as logical to wonder why, apart from the indulgence of a mild curiosity, he would want to meet his uncle.
He sits in the armchair and opens his diary. Glancing out the trophy room window, he thinks of Clare Fraser. Though he can’t actually see the Fraser house from the trophy room, he imagines her at her window, watchful and quietly receptive, just as she was the first time he ever really noticed her, standing under a sprinkler on a deathly hot August day. The opportunity will never arise, he is certain, but if Clare—the solemn, watchful creature behind the glass—were to ask him about his family, he wouldn’t resent it. He would welcome her detached interest.
He dates the page and taps his pen. He writes “Hello, Clare” then pauses, considering the move he has just made. Strange ... silly even. But he carries on:
I’m sitting in my father’s trophy room, looking at the old photos. Uncle Ernie on Adam’s Peak, Susie’s first communion, Grandpa and his cook, the last family gathering on Grandpa’s tea estate before we left for Canada, etc. etc. It was on that visit that I first learned who Ernie was. And so much else, of course. I don’t remember most of the details, just the emotional extremes. How I started off bored and glum like everyone else and ended up ecstatically happy.
He stops writing. It seems he has opened a floodgate, or a vein. The release could fill an entire book, he suspects—all his frustration and guilt spilling onto pages previously devoted to straightforward records of dates and events. For the writing is suddenly different. He has a listener, an intercessor. A calm, detached presence to stand between him and all the confusion in his life. Pleased with the discovery but too tired to write any more, he closes his book, switches off the lamp, and gazes at the scattering of tiny snowflakes dancing outside the trophy room window.
3
BY THE TIME SHE WOKE UP on Good Friday, the morning was almost gone. Sunlight peered around the blind, and the clock, half-hidden behind a half-read copy of the unabridged Clarissa, read eleven-something. Clare stared at the beige expanse of her ceiling and listened to the distant clatter of the dishwasher being unloaded and her moth-er’s heels tapping back and forth across the kitchen floor. Her trip to Vancouver no longer existed. Not in the way these other things did—the beigeness of her room, the numbing familiarity of Isobel’s kitchen noise. The pattern ...
She got out of bed, untwisted her nightgown from around her hips, and raised the blind. It was a brilliant day—snow melting from branches and eaves in sparkling drips, the sky an unbroken blue. She leaned her forehead against the windowpane, and Morgan Hill Road rippled through the streams of water trickling down the glass. The street was empty.
Clare turned from the window and lifted her suitcase onto the bed to finish unpacking. She pulled out the gypsy skirt that she’d worn on her date with the Jazz Studies Director—too hippy-dippy, according to Emma—and the pink, low-cut sweater that Emma had convinced her to buy. Under the sweater, she discovered a slender parcel wrapped in yellow tissue paper. It was tied at either end with gold ribbon, and attached to one of the ribbons was a heart-shaped tag. Clare flipped it over and read: “To be used solo, or maybe with??? P.S. I got one for myself too!”
She yanked one of the ribbons. The thing inside tumbled out, alien and intrusive. Mortifying. It was translucent orange, phallic, attached by a cord to a dial switch. Clare turned it on, and it trembled in her hand. She adjusted the dial, and it writhed about like an exotic eel.
Emma—
What?
Did you actually think I’d use this thing?
She turned it off and stuffed it back in its paper. Then she wrapped the whole package in a T-shirt and looked around the room for a place to hide it. Riskier than throwing it out. If she were to be hit by a truck, someone—her mother, no doubt—would have to go through her belongings. But she’d noticed the price of these things in the shop Emma had dragged her to. As a compromise, she went to her closet and slipped the parcel under a pile of sweaters, away from the unaccommodating patterns of her life.
She knew what Emma would say: You’re sick of those patterns, Clare. They’re killing you. You need to change. And her diagnosis would be mostly correct. But not the cure.
Clare shut the closet door and snatched her bath towel from the back of a chair.
In the shower, though, Emma’s gift haunted her, and she found herself locked in her body, inescapably physical: curves and sharp angles; stretches of skin with their particular geography of moles and creases and dark blond fuzz; the necessary back and forth of air; the building up, somewhere inside her, of her next period (useless sacrifice) and of other unspeakable things. She closed her eyes and shampooed her hair, fingers clawing at her scalp, massaging her cerebral existence back to life. But the thoughts that came to her were of her mother’s revelation—Isobel and Alastair in some dark, secret place.
She lathered more vigorously. It wasn’t necessarily like that, she told herself. Then, to Emma, to the intruder back in her closet: I bet it was all planned. My mother probably set the whole thing up, so she could come to Canada. She was desperate to leave Scotland. She tilted her head back under the spray. It makes sense. My father was just like me.