“No.”
“Let me rephrase that: are you
supposed
to be taking something but you’ve stopped?”
“No.”
“Do you like pudding?”
“Do I
what?”
“Chocolate pudding. I only have soft foods in the apartment.” I pointed to my jaw. “Wisdom teeth.”
We got out of the car and quietly walked to the building’s front door. The inside lobby was as cool as it had been the afternoon I returned from the exodontist. In the elevator I said, “You push the button.” When we arrived on my floor, he already knew the number of my suite.
He walked around the condo, checking things out. Unlike Donna from my office, Jeremy was no faker. “I’ve been in three orphanages in my life, and this place is more depressing than all three combined.”
“I don’t care. I don’t understand beauty.”
“But you like the flowers, right?” He placed the peonies in the sink.
I fished around inside a bottom cupboard for something I could use as a vase. “The thing about being single,” I said, “is that you never receive vases as presents. I think all single people should be issued vases by the government.”
He said, “Here.” He took a Royal Wedding cookie tin from on top of the fridge. “This is waterproof, let’s use this. I’ll trim the stems. Hold my hand.” He pulled me up. “These peonies smell nice. Like an old lady’s perfume mixed with lemon.”
He snuck one beneath my nose. I’d never noticed how peonies smell. They made me think of puffy summer clouds.
“I used to have to do the flowers at a church one of my foster families stuck me with. If I did the flowers, I could take my time and miss the talking in tongues. Not all, but most.”
He trimmed the stems with precision and speed. Before my eyes he transformed an old cookie tin and a bunch of flowers into the only truly beautiful thing my apartment had ever seen. He said, “There. You said something about food?”
My apartment seemed alive, and not ashamed of itself. Jeremy and I began to look through my cupboards and fridge, as I kept trying to sneak peeks at his face. He caught me at this and instantly knew why. “You don’t know who my father is, do you?”
“No.”
* * *
The moment we landed in Rome, my head became light and my stomach clenched like a fist. Once the group of us filtered in slow motion through Italian immigration, we sleepwalked into a European tour bus that stank of diesel, Turkish tobacco and disinfectant. By then I was having a hard time breathing. I thought that once I was sitting down again I’d feel better, but no. Our bus was unlike any bus I’d ever taken, made in some forgotten place, like Albania. Its windows were of unlikely sizes and shapes, and its brown body was covered in brown stripes and stars. It was alien and I hated it. I instantly hated Italy or anywhere that wasn’t home. The Italian roads seemed lawless and veiled in blue smoke, crammed with eggy little
parp-parp!
cars. Even the sun felt different. My sense of being somewhere other than home was overwhelming. I suspect that Europe is now one big IKEA, but back then you
knew
you were in a foreign place.
In any event, the bus promptly got stuck in a Roman traffic jam, and I started crying. Homesickness. The other kids on the bus were so spaced from jet lag they didn’t even ignore me properly. They simply closed their eyes or looked out the windows maybe once every forty-seven seconds.
I caught Mr. Burden raising an eyebrow at Colleen. Colleen made a letter P for “period” using her index finger, then shrugged. Mr. Burden sighed and became almost cross. “Liz, what’s up?”
I shook my head.
“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s bothering you.”
“I want to go home.”
“A bit late for that.”
“I do. Now. I want to go back to the airport and get back on the plane.”
“You’re just nervous about being in a new country.”
Again I shook my head.
“Here …” He reached into his coat pocket. “Take two of these.”
“What are they?”
“They’ll get you through the next short while.”
At that point I’d have swallowed a pineapple whole if I thought it’d ease what I was feeling. From nowhere Mr. Burden produced a bottle of Orangina. I took a swig, swallowed the two pills and entered a daze that lasted fourteen hours. During it, we were marched into this bunker of a place and given a hard-boiled egg and a slice of fatty prosciutto. The boys were taken away to some other building, no idea where. When the pills finally washed out of my system, I lay on a cot—suddenly clear-headed—in the darkness of our Italian hostel. The other girls were asleep.
I felt like a prisoner of conscience. My pillow was the size of a Chiclet, the mattress as thick as a saltine cracker. I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you’re past thirty, you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you turn bitter.
I’m jumping the gun. Back to that horrible little hostel with its thin-sheeted shabbiness and its aura of the ghosts of ten thousand homesick girls. Back to Italy and its striking plumbers and suddenly having to find a functioning toilet somewhere, anywhere. The hostel’s toilet might as well have been a bucket. I scrambled off my mattress and walked out into the Roman night. My homesick stomach was in free fall beneath the sodium street lights that bathed the industrial nothingness with a burnt yellow tinge. There was a droning from the
autostrada
bordering the hostel’s neighbourhood. This wasn’t the Europe I’d been led to expect. In hindsight I can see that we’d landed in the Europe of the future.
Though I was swamped with homesickness, part of me was also enjoying a sense of inner freedom that I now know evaporates after about the age of twenty-five. It was a small joy finding an all-night gas station called Elf, maybe a few hundred yards around the corner from the hostel complex. The guys inside saw me coming from a long way away, and I could tell they were used to having girls from the hostel visit in desperation.
Okay, here’s the reason we never told Mr. Burden about the gas station bathroom: its employees were the handsomest men any of us had ever seen, sculpted from gold, and with voices like songs. And there they were, in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, going to waste. They ought to have been perched on jagged lava cliffs having their hearts ripped out as sacrifices to the gods. On top of their physical blessings, these guys were charming and attentive—in both a humanitarian way and a frisky way, even charming to
me
—and … well … I’d never been flirted with before, nor has anybody flirted with me since.
They spoke their schoolboy English, with heavy Italian accents I’d always thought were a cliché:
Hello-a young-a lady. Good eve-a-ning.
All I could do was blush, and as I knew only Latin (B+) it was flummoxing to have to ask for a key, but obviously they knew what I needed, and handed it to me like a crystal champagne flute. I may have been desperate for that key, but I still dawdled; it was heaven. And best of all, the bathroom was spotless and even had a small bouquet of irises—plastic, but it’s the thought that counts. When I returned to the hostel, Colleen was just waking up. I told her about the station, and she returned a half-hour later, aglow, saying how much she loved Europe. By the end of the night, all the other girls loved Europe too. We couldn’t wait for daily sightseeing to be over so we could run to the Elf station. We were awful. Nature is awful.
* * *
I said nothing, and used a dishtowel and tap water to clean my hands and knees. I’d have thought Jeremy would be crushed to not know who his father was, but he accepted it calmly. “Was it rape?”
“No.”
“Incest?”
“No.”
“You simply don’t
know?”
“It’s more complicated than that, Jeremy. And seeing as we’re both starving, let’s eat first, okay?”
He pulled items from the fridge I’d barely remembered were in there. Chives. Some old cheese. A bottle of pickled something or other.
“You can cook,” I said.
“Vocational school. My ticket out of hell. It doesn’t matter what happens in the world, we’ll always need chefs. Even during Armageddon, the troops will still need their mashed potatoes.” He winked, and suddenly he was joking about themes that had so recently terrified him. After the highway incident I didn’t have the energy for religious debate.
He cracked open eggs, and then whisked them with confidence, adding pinches of things along the way. Bowls and utensils came and went, and for the first time I could see the reason TV cooking shows might be watchable.
“You know, I was with Family Number Six once, and—”
“Wait—Family Number Six?”
“Yes. The sixth family I was placed with.”
“Okay.”
“So I was with Family Number Six visiting some hillbilly agricultural fair up north in Lac La Hache. This guy who brought our hamburgers to the table had two different-coloured eyes. So I said, ‘Wow, one blue and one brown eye,’ and Family Number Six froze in their seats, and remained frozen until the waiter was well out of sight. I didn’t know what the big deal was, so I asked, and finally Father Number Six said, ‘Don’t you know what that means?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘It means
he’s related to himself.’
Isn’t that a hoot?”
“That was your
sixth
family?” I was still stuck on the number six.
He folded something into the eggs and looked heavenward, counting his family history aloud to ensure he was correct. “Six. That’s right.”
“How many have you had?”
“If you don’t count repeats, eleven; with repeats, fourteen.”
“I always pictured you as living down the street from me in a friendly suburb.”
“That would have been nice. I was adopted by a family up north—moose, rifles, drunk drivers and Jesus. When I was in kindergarten, they made the mistake of telling me I was adopted, and their twins, who were a few years older than me, let me know it, too. It was bad: bruising and broken bones and a burn here or there. I ran away in grade two, and because of that I was labelled a problem child. Once that happens, you only ever move lower down the foster family food chain, until you’re living in what used to be a luggage storage room owned by otherwise normal-looking serial molesters who are there merely to collect their foster care cheque from the government—which is the only reason they don’t kill you, it’d cut their cash flow.”
What could I say? I said, “The omelette smells wonderful. I’m going to have a small shot of Baileys to go with it. Would you like one?”
“You have anything else?”
“Not really. Wait—some of that Greek stuff—ouzo.”
“That’s it? How come so little?”
“Because I’m afraid of keeping booze in the house because it’ll turn me into a spinster lush.”
“Let’s pour the Baileys into coffee. Do you have coffee?”
I did. I like coffee. I made some, topped up our mugs with the Baileys, and then we sat down to eat.
This may sound odd, but it felt like I was on a date—or rather, what I imagined a date must be like. The recognition of this temporarily froze me. My long-lost son shows up and I’m sitting there with him chatting about dog species, global warming and Mariah Carey’s career arc. More to the point, I was appalled by what we weren’t discussing: why he ended up being adopted in the first place, my own family history, my attempts to locate him … But that’s what family members are for. We crave them and need them not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid. Jeremy already felt like family.
We were almost done eating when the phone rang. Jeremy was closer to it and picked it up. “Liz Dunn residence.”
A pause.
“Uh-huh. No, she can’t talk right now.”
A pause.
“Because we’re having lunch. Whom shall I say called?”
A pause.
“No. As I said, we’re eating lunch. I’m sure she’ll phone you once we’re done.”
Pause.
“I’ll tell her that. Goodbye.” He hung up. “That was your sister.”
“You shouldn’t answer my phone!”
“Why not—are you ashamed of me?”
“Jeremy, chances are she’s already dialed
911
.”
“Why?”
“You know darn well why. Because in my entire adult life nobody’s ever answered my phone but me.”
“You never have people here?”
“What do you think? No.”
“You care what your family thinks?”
“Yes. I do. They’re all I have.”
“You have me now.”
“I just wanted you to meet them …”
“Meet them how?”
“Differently.” In my head I saw curtains being raised, an orchestral fanfare, flocks of dyed pigeons released on cue, and a long ramp lit by thousands of strobing flashbulbs.
Jeremy started clearing the dishes. I was immobilized by a small humming noise in my head. I sat at the table in this trancelike state and waited for Leslie to show up, which she did, maybe eight minutes later. She buzzed me from the front door and I let her in.
“Hello, Leslie.”
“Lizzie, who was the man that answered your phone? You never have men here.”
“Thank you, Leslie.”
Holding her cellphone, she whispered, “Should I call the cops?”
I said, “Is it really that odd that I should have a man at my place?”
“Of course it is.” She walked into the kitchen, expecting to see the man in my life. I followed her, but he wasn’t there. I heard water noises from the bathroom.
Leslie whispered, “What’s his name?”
“Jeremy.”
“Jeremy? No one our age is called Jeremy.”
“He’s not our age.”
At that moment Jeremy emerged from the bathroom, shirtless, saying, “Liz, do you have a shirt I can borrow? The one I was wearing is kind of shot.” He spotted Leslie and casually said, “Hi. I’m Jeremy.”
To judge from Leslie’s reaction it might just as well have been a dancing Snoopy emerging from the bathroom. She took the hand he offered, saying, “I’m Leslie,” in a voice that betrayed total inner confusion.
Jeremy asked, “Liz, let’s have some dessert. What do you have?”