Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
“My name is Hazel Micallef, Mr. Wetherling. I’m a woman.”
“All right then.”
“Can I ask you your date of birth?”
“You can. We were born Jan’ry ninth, ought nine.”
“We?”
“Myself and Ewan. He’s been dead these fifty-one years now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. May I ask you: have you ever heard of a person called Claude Wetherling, or Claude Miracle? Mohawk Indian; he was adopted.”
“Claude. Black boy, right?”
“No. I don’t think so. Could he have been Indian?”
“Maybe. I’m not so good with names anymore. Cousin Angie on my mother’s side I’ll say, could be wrong. Her parents had a boy when she went off to college. Got lonesome and adopted a boy.”
“Up in the town of Lake Gannon?”
“Sir, it might have been, but I’m ninety-seven years old and on these blood-thinner pills and r’membrin’ medicine, so I can’t tell you about that.”
“Is Cousin Angie still alive?”
“Oh gosh,” he said.
“Could you give me her number if you have it?”
“Oh, she’s moved a dozen times or more. Last I knew she was in the city.”
“All right, thank you Mr. Wetherling.”
“You’re welcome, young man,” he replied.
She replaced the phone gently. “Jesus,” she muttered. She picked it up again and dialled Wingate. “Do I sound like a young man?”
“What?”
“Please tell me you are making the tiniest amount of progress.”
“I have staff directories for some of the years at both places. It’s pointless, though. People moved around. Half the staff of Dublin Home started there but did a stint at Charterhouse and versa vice. Both places had some lifers, like superintendents. Maybe one of them is alive.”
“Don’t bother with brass,” she said. “See if you can find an administrator, maybe a nurse. Someone who served a while in both homes. I’d like to talk to one of those people.” She hung up and looked at the clock: 1:30. She was going to have to eat lunch at her desk.
Brendan Givens left He Brews at 1:30 and started walking up to his hotel at the top of Church Street. Once he was out of Boystown, the neighbourhood turned drab. Construction hoardings advertised the condos that were going to appear in the hole behind them.
Life is easier – and cheaper – in Tournament Acres!
That had been the radio spot. It had sold a lot of bungalows. Here they built cubbyholes high in the air. When this all cleared up, he’d land on his feet with a more reputable company. He’d start again. He’d started again many times.
He strode past the billboard pitching
High-Class Living in the Heart of Downtown
, and he thought of the bottle he’d
left behind in the suite. He still had the flask, though, and the flask wasn’t empty. He was reaching for it in his hip pocket when he felt the ground jar beneath his feet. Then he was suddenly alert – a car mounted the sidewalk and blew past him a foot away from his body. He pressed himself against the hoardings, trying to catch his breath. “Why don’t you learn how to drive?!” he shouted, but the car was long gone.
The hotel was an old apartment building converted to cheap suites, but they’d given it a highfalutin name:
Bristol Manor
. Givens said hello to the man behind the desk, a nice ruddy-faced man with a nametag that identified him as Tic.
He took the elevator to the third floor. In the room, he couldn’t get a signal on his shitty Nokia. He went out onto the balcony and held the phone up. No texts. Just the one he’d gotten at 4:00 a.m. the day before. It had been pretty clear:
I know you have the files, Brendan. Why don’t you bring them back? No questions asked
.
As soon as he stepped back into the room, the phone in the suite rang. His heart was in his mouth, hammering. He felt his rib cage throb like a subwoofer. The phone rang and he stood paralyzed in the doorway. Then it stopped and a light on the handset flickered weakly, yellow and red, and in the sudden silence it felt like something had found him.
He checked the message, holding the phone not quite against his ear.
“Sir, Mr. Givens, the airline representative is
here with your missing luggage. I send him up.”
Givens dialled the front desk. It was a woman’s voice.
“Hello, Mr. Givens. How may I help you?”
“Uh, did your co-worker send someone up? Can I speak to him?”
“Who?”
“Uh … Tic.”
“He’s off now, Mr. Givens.”
“But he just called me.”
“He’s off now, sir.”
“Did you see the person he sent up?”
“Who?”
“The man from the airline!”
“I know no man from the airline.”
He hung up and stared at the phone. It rang again, and he picked it up. “Yes?”
“Mr. Givens?” A man’s voice now, but it wasn’t Tic’s. He couldn’t place it. “Mr. Givens? Are you there?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“We have your luggage. Where would you like us to put it?”
“Who is this?”
“I can just leave it on your bed and you can sort it later.”
He looked across the room, beyond the tiny, useless kitchen, into the hallway. He hadn’t noticed the door to the bedroom was closed. His heart came back up his throat.
“Well, how would you like it?”
“You can leave it on the bed. That’s fine.”
“All right, then. It’s on the bed.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome, Brendan Givens.” The man hung up.
There were no sounds from anywhere in the suite. Givens stood frozen to the spot, gripping the receiver. “Hello?” he called out. He walked as quietly as he could to the bedroom door and put his ear against it. The door handle was cold in his palm, and he held his breath to a count of three and then threw the door open.
There was no one in his room, but his suitcase was on his bed. He’d put it in the closet earlier in the day, but it was on the bed. He stood frozen in the doorway, his jaw set, breathing shallowly through his mouth. The phone rang again. “Oh Jesus … Jesus,” he muttered. “Just get me out of this.” It rang three times and then stopped.
Givens heard footsteps behind him. A man came into the hallway holding the phone receiver in one hand and a knife in the other. “I think it’s for you,” he said.
Givens leapt into the room and slammed the door shut. There was no lock. He backed up until he felt the mattress against his calves. The door opened.
“How did you find me?”
“Where are the files?”
“They’re back in the office. I hid them. To keep ’em safe.”
“And then you ran away?”
“I don’t take my orders from you!” Givens spat.
“And I don’t take mine from you,” the man replied. “Do you know who gives me my orders?”
“Look, I don’t know anything –
please
–”
“Please
,” said the man. “That’s nice. When people scream, it makes it harder.” He clasped Givens by the upper arm and pressed the tip of the knife into his ribs. Brendan Givens stood still.
“I’ll do anything,” he said.
The man clamped his hand over Givens’s mouth and leaned against the knife. “The first inch isn’t too hard,” he said. “The second inch is where the trouble starts.”
Givens doubled over, holding the man’s wrist with both hands. “Stop … stop …”
“Stop what?” He leaned down to listen to the answer and the knife-edge turned, eliciting a groan of helpless agony. They both watched the pool of urine spreading out of his pant leg, and the man slid one of his shoes away. He pulled the knife out and Givens sank to the floor.
“No,” Givens begged. “Don’t.” Blood poured out of his shirt.
“Have you protected
your
investment, Brendan?” the man asked, not without tenderness. He shoved the knife in again.
Givens said, “Oh,” very quietly. His sinuses cleared and the light started changing. It smelled like coffee. He thought of his mother.
By the end of November, it had already snowed twice. Northern New York State got six feet in one day and people lost track of their cars under it. Port Dundas was farther north than both Toronto and Buffalo, and far enough from the Great Lakes that the town rarely had any accumulation of snow.
Hazel was getting impatient for Christmas. Her father had been playing seasonal records since the first of December, trying to match his sweet tenor to Bing Crosby’s. She tried for the second year in a row to explain how Christmas was “coming” to Alan, for whom abstract concepts were difficult. She showed him the calendar on the kitchen wall. “Each row is a week, and one page is a month, and the whole thing – the whole
calendar
– is one year. Got
it? Mom can get you one and you can cross off the days as they go by.”
“What if you cross off the days that haven’t come yet?”
“Then your calendar will be a mess.”
He shrank from the word. “A mess?”
“What’re you getting upset for?”
“I’m not messy!”
“It’s all right, Alan. We were only talking about the days of the week.”
Sometimes she’d see her father looking distantly in Alan’s direction. He’d be staring over the table, watching Alan eat. Or he’d sit in his club chair, but instead of watching the television, he’d be looking at Alan.
Alan said, “The Philco Miss America Television receiver has wrap-around sound from three speakers.” This kind of stuff Alan knew. He had thin seams of genius. He could build a Meccano bull and make its tail move with a crank, and he knew the specifications of almost every television and radio receiver, as well as the makes of cars and the changes that had come in their subsequent generations. “It’s better than ours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with
that
colour television, Alan.”
“The Sylvania Andover only has a twenty-inch screen, and the speakers are rotten,” he said. His voice had taken on a tinge of insistence or anger. “The Miss America has
three
speakers and pop-up tuning so you can see what channel you’re watching from across the room!”
They’d had a scare with Alan a few weeks earlier. He’d claimed to have found a necklace in the backyard with a silver heart-shaped pendant. There was a rabbit engraved into its surface. Hazel listened to her mother and father interrogating him in the kitchen well past both their bedtimes. She crept out of her bedroom to the top of the stairs. She heard her mother’s voice.
“This is serious, Alan. Daddy and I are not angry at you.”
“For now.”
“Evan,” her mother said sharply. Then, softer: “Alan – you’re not in trouble. But you do have to tell us where you found this pendant.”
Their father raised his voice. “We know you’re lying. And
you
know you’re lying. So let’s be done with the charade.”
Alan was crying: a reedy, wet sound. “What does that mean?”
“It means it’s time to tell the truth!” her father boomed.
“I found it in the backyard! Right by the fence! It was on the ground! It was in the grass!
And it’s mine!
”
Hazel heard the crack of her father’s hand on Alan’s skin. It shocked her. He’d never struck either of them before. Alan sobbed. There were footsteps and voices and then, without warning, her father began to ascend the stairs. He saw her right away and stopped. “Hazel Micallef,” he said. “Have you anything to add to this sad chapter in our family life? Seeing as you feel free to eavesdrop?”
“Why did you hit him?”
“Don’t question my –”
“He’s just a kid! He doesn’t understand!”
His face heated up, cheeks mottling red. “Do
you
?”
“Do I what?”
“Do
you
understand why your brother is in possession of a missing girl’s pendant?”
That stunned her to silence.
“Carol Lim’s necklace. It had a rabbit on it exactly like this. We’ve shown it to Gord Drury, he showed it to the Lims. So where did Alan get it? How is he mixed up in this?”
“
This
? Is Carol
dead
?”
Her father looked away, chewing on the corner of his mouth. “No one knows where the girl is. But her parents haven’t heard from her in more than a month. What would you be thinking?” She didn’t have to answer that. “Go back to your bed immediately, Hazel.”
Her mother’s love for Alan had never and would never falter, but her father was unhappy around him, and Hazel worried he would send Alan away. It roused an instinct in her to protect her adopted brother, even though he was vexing and dirty and seemed always to be stuffing something into his mouth. Her mother had said it was a reaction to being in the boys’ home for so much of his life. He’d never had enough to eat. It hurt Hazel like a punch in the stomach to think of him starving, and she couldn’t begrudge him his ways. But it was getting to her father.
She closed her bedroom door and stood with her ear against it. Their voices were lower now and muffled. She could hear Alan’s footsteps on the stairs and then he went past her bedroom, snuffling. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t want to get him into any more trouble. His door clicked shut and she heard her parents’ voices again, rising up from underneath her floor. “I will leave you to it then,” her father said.
“He doesn’t understand.”
“All the worse then! If he doesn’t understand –”
“I’ll keep him with me. He can be at the office sometimes.”
“Take him to see Gord Drury. Let Gord talk to him.”
On the Tuesday night, her father did inventory and her mother stayed late at the town hall. It was Hazel’s job, on nights when her parents weren’t home, to watch her brother. At almost fifteen, Hazel already knew how to make ten different things, including devilled eggs, fried baloney, and a billot log cake made out of chocolate wafer cookies and whipped cream. To her friends, Hazel referred to Alan as
Spaceboy
, but it was not the truth about how she felt. She was mystified by the instinct that arose in her when he came to her for help or asked her a question that involved revealing some part of the world to him, such as how calendars worked, or how voices came out of the radio.
For dinner, he wanted dippy eggs and toast soldiers. Since she’d come home from school, Alan had already eaten an apple and an orange, two chicken legs, a serving of leftover scalloped potatoes, and there was a tablespoon-shaped divot in the butter. Although he ate constantly, Alan had the body of an Olympic wrestler: small and lithe, a tight bundle of energy. Nothing elegant about him.