The Better Mother (15 page)

“You see?” she says. “I’ve never let myself go.” She smoothes down a wrinkle in her swimsuit. “I’ve been dying to wear this. It just came in at the store.”

Danny nods before closing his eyes. The light glows red through his eyelids. “What store?”

“I didn’t tell you? I work at the big department store downtown. Selling lingerie. I guess you can say I have a lot of experience with underwear.” Her laugh, loud and ringing,
spills out into the air around them. Danny wonders if the sound waves will ripple across the ocean and tickle the ears of someone in Japan.

Staring at the sandflies hopping around the blanket, Val says in a matter-of-fact voice, “You’re alone, aren’t you, honey? Why?”

It’s a question that people ask him all the time, but it’s a surprise nonetheless. His body feels jolted and goose-bumped; his spine tingles. He looks out at the beach and ocean, at the buoys bobbing in the distance. Val stretches and digs her red-painted toes into the sand.

“Well? Out with it. I don’t have much patience these days.” Val lets out an exaggerated cough and lightly pounds her chest.

Danny tells her of the evening he first met Frank, how everyone else in the restaurant receded into the dark. The falling-in-love part was quick and complete. No questions. No doubts.

“How long were you together?” Val asks, rubbing tanning lotion on her legs.

“Eight months.”

“And then what?”

After months of spending nights in Frank’s apartment (because Frank couldn’t bring his dog, Barton, over to Danny’s, even though Danny offered to sneak him up in a suitcase), there came a time when things began to descend and spin until Danny seemed to be tripping over his own feet wherever he went.

At first, it was little things. Frank not answering when Danny asked him a question, and looking out the window. On
a Friday afternoon, Frank would announce that he was spending the weekend at his parents’ so Barton could romp in their double-wide lot. “I want to leave before traffic gets bad. There’s no time for you to pack your things,” he said, while stuffing a canvas bag with Milk Bones and squeaky toys. “My parents love you, but I think it’s better if I go alone this time.” Once, Danny waited in his apartment for an hour and a half, with a special dinner congealing on the table, before Frank showed up, his face stony and hard, his apologies clipped and monotone.

He tried to convince himself it was his own paranoia, but he knew it wasn’t. Danny wondered if he should ask, sit down with Frank and hold his hand until something—anything—was revealed. Maybe it was the way Danny drooled when he slept, or his habit of saying nothing unless the words were brilliant and awe-inspiring. Because he could fix all that. If only Frank would tell him. If only Danny wasn’t so afraid to ask.

A few weeks later, after a long wedding during which the ring bearer refused to walk down the aisle and was carried, bawling, by his embarrassed mother, and the cake collapsed under the weight of its melting butter cream, Danny went back to Frank’s apartment to find Frank sitting on the sofa with his dog in his arms. He was stroking him slowly, down his unmoving flank.

“He’s dead,” Frank whispered.

Danny rushed over and put his arms around Frank, kissing the side of his head as Frank sat limply, bent over the body. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“He seemed sluggish all week and wouldn’t eat, and I thought maybe he was overheated. But then, a few hours ago, he crawled into my lap and began breathing funny.
I held up his head, but it didn’t seem to help. When I tried to get up to call the vet, Barton gave me this look, and so I didn’t move and kept patting him. He stared at me the whole time. And then he shuddered and it was over.” He paused and fell back into the cushions. “What am I going to do?”

Danny held Frank’s hand all night, sitting on the couch with the dog between them. He didn’t know what time he fell asleep, but when he woke up, bright sunlight was pouring through the window and Barton was gone. Frank stood in front of him, his hands on his hips.

“I wasn’t sure if we should have this conversation now, but why the fuck not? Danny, where is this relationship going?”

Danny, confused and groggy, said, “But where’s Barton? I don’t understand.”

“I took him to the vet this morning. They’ll call me when the ashes are ready.”

“Come here and we can talk about it.”

Frank pounded his fist against the wall. “My dog is dead. I want to talk about us.” He swallowed a sob and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“I thought we were happy, just like this.”

“Danny, I’m thirty-five years old. I would like to buy a house someday, have a home with
you
. My parents are on board. There’s nothing to stop us.”

Danny rubbed his hands together. “You know about my parents. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“That you’re
gay
, for fuck’s sake!”

“They’d be so angry. I couldn’t ever see them again. My father—”

“I don’t understand why this is even an issue. You never speak to your father anyway. If you come out to them, the same thing will happen to you that happened to all of us. Your father will rage and shout and then ignore you for months and months. Your mother will cry and try to be brave. Everyone gets over it eventually, and even if they don’t, then at least they know, and we can live our lives without hiding anymore, without being afraid we’re going to run into them on the street. God!” Frank slumped against the wall.

Danny stood up and put his hands on Frank’s shoulders. “Can’t we talk about this later? You’re still upset and maybe this isn’t the right time to have this conversation.”

Frank shook him off. “No, this is the only time. Don’t you see? The longer you hide from your parents, the longer it’ll take you to get on with your life.” Frank waved at a stack of photos on the coffee table. “Those pictures are just sitting there, Danny, waiting for you to
do
something.”

“I know, I know. I just have to figure out a plan.”

“A plan that does what exactly? Makes your parents disappear? Makes me disappear?” Frank’s face was wet and shiny with tears. When Danny moved to wipe them away, Frank stepped back and turned his head toward the wall. “Did it ever occur to you that while you were trying to avoid being a good Chinese son, you became a gay stereotype instead? Look at you: well-dressed, skinny, afraid of commitment. It’s almost funny.”

“That’s not fair. I want you. I want us,” Danny whispered.

Frank laughed, even while his nose was running. “If that were true, you’d want a different life. Maybe it’s all too
domestic. Maybe having happy Christmas dinners with my parents is too weird for you. Not that it matters. We want different things. That’s all there is to say.”

“I can do anything you want. Really. I just need time.”

“Sure, whatever you say. Listen, why don’t you go home and call me later when you’ve thought some more, okay? I need to sleep.” He walked to the front door and opened it. “Why are you so afraid, Danny? When will you stop running away?”

Danny didn’t answer.

The next morning, Frank called to say that unless Danny could come out to his parents, it had to be over. And, just like that, it was done.

Val leans back on the log behind them. “Very sad, honey. Do you think about him much?”

“Every fucking day,” Danny says, drawing a line in the sand with his fingers.

“Do you ever see him now?”

“No. Although he called me out of the blue and we’re meeting for lunch tomorrow.”

“What do you think he wants?”

Danny looks up at the glittering sky. “I have no idea. Sometimes, I think he wants to get back together. Other times, I think he wants to tell me something totally unexpected, like he’s getting married.”

Val chuckles. “That would be a punch in the gut, wouldn’t it?”

“What if I see him and fall in love all over again?”

“Well, then, I guess you’ll get what you deserve.”

When Danny looks over at her face, he sees his reflection in her oversized black sunglasses. Without her eyes, her expression is unreadable.

Danny drops Val off at her apartment after an early dinner of fish and chips, and he hands her the photograph from the wedding. Val stares at the print for a few minutes before slipping it into the pocket of her jacket. “I don’t photograph so well when I’m not posing,” she quips. “That’s an old lady in that picture, my alter ego.”

“I think you look beautiful. Human.”

Val snorts. “I took some publicity shots when I was younger. Talk about beautiful.”

“You look like you’re going to cry here. What were you thinking?”

She opens the door and steps into the lobby before answering. “Who knows? Maybe I was wondering what my own daughter would look like.” She frowns. “Maybe I was remembering what it was like to be young.”

She props open the glass door with her foot and looks at him, no hint of a smile on her face. “All right, don’t just stand there. Come on up for some tea and maybe I’ll tell you something about it.” She points her finger at his nose. “But only because you took me to the beach. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care about you at all.” She winks and chuckles.

Her hands tremble as she reaches out to press the elevator call button, and he knows that soon he will be sitting on the sofa in her apartment, listening to the fine gravel of her voice as it travels through the years of her childhood and the flash and bang of her youth. He imagined this moment years
ago, that moment before the Siamese Kitten would reveal all her secrets because he was the one who could understand. Because he was a child who woke up every other morning expecting that his life had magically transformed overnight into a glittery, musical adventure, and was disappointed when he realized he was in the same old house on the same old street. Danny steps into the elevator beside Val. As it begins to rise, he realizes he is holding his breath.

PART TWO

THE HOUSE
1938 to 1946

It was a small house, a clapboard shack really. It sat on River Road, on a wooded lot choked with wild blackberry and dogwood. Even though there were other houses nearby, it was easy to believe, when standing on the porch or on a boulder in the backyard, that this was the only inhabited house for miles and miles and that they were the only family. From the kitchen, Val could just see the Fraser River through the trees. When she was a little girl, she spent hours staring at its winking, grey-blue surface. Once, right after her eighth birthday, she took her father’s axe, the one with his first name, Warren, carved crudely into the handle, and tried to slash her way through the bush and down the hill to get to the shore. After a half hour, her mother discovered her, covered in scratches from the thorns, dead leaves stuck in her dull brown hair, her hands covered in rust from the blade. Her mother said little, and finished cleaning Val’s scratches before sitting with her by the kitchen window in the late afternoon light, listening and watching for the fishing boats and logging barges.

“I love the river, Mum,” said Val, resting her hand in her mother’s lap.

“Yes. Me too. If you cross it and pass the island, you’ll find the city,” Meg said softly, as she waved her hand at Annacis Island, blue and blurry in the sunshine.

“Have you been to the city?”

“Once. Before you girls were born. It was lovely, you know. We saw a vaudeville show and looked at diamonds in a shop window.”

Val imagined her mother as a young woman with sparkly, lively eyes, sauntering down a glittering street lit with tall, wrought-iron lamps. She wore a white fur coat and high, shiny black shoes. She stopped at a bright window, pointed at a necklace winking on a blue velvet cushion. Val’s father, dashing in a black hat and coat, strutted into the store and came back out, necklace in hand. Val leaned her head on her mother’s arm as the story came to an end, the rough cotton tickling her cheek. She fell asleep to her favourite lullaby.

Her father promised that he would cut a path to the river the following weekend, but instead spent those two days sitting on a stump in the backyard, drinking beer with his old logging buddies, talking about the wild days they used to spend in the bush and the wilder nights they spent in the city. Before there was no more work to be found, before all a family man could do was line up for relief and take whatever was given to him.

Val and Joan were fifteen months apart and inseparable. In school, they were known as “Those Wild Nealy Girls.” Teachers sent home notes complaining that the sisters picked on the other girls, cutting off their braids with pocket knives, chasing them with dead rats they found in the schoolyard. Once, Joan took exception to another girl’s pristine white gloves and quickly but silently drove a sharpened pencil
through the creamy leather and into the back of her hand, where it stuck into her flesh as the little girl howled.

Joan—small and small-boned with white-blond hair and blue irises ringed in black—only stared blankly at the teachers and the other children when they were angry with her, sometimes allowing a perfectly formed tear to course slowly down her pale cheek. Val—taller and bigger with arms capable of killing field mice by throwing them against the schoolhouse wall—yelled back, her head vibrating with so much raging energy that her brown curls shook and stiffened from the sound of her voice.

Meg, in her faded cotton dresses, took the notes they brought home and left them on the kitchen counter, where they remained unread and eventually multiplied into a pile of meticulously folded foolscap, which Warren used to start fires in their ancient woodstove. Neither parent ever asked why the other children never came to the house to play or why, on sunny Saturday afternoons, Val and Joan stuck close to the house, holding hands as they lay on their backs in the yard and watched the clouds shift and blow through the sky. Perhaps Meg and Warren heard the whispers when they went to the general store for flour and salt and seed, those whispers spoken behind hands, with eyes averted.

“Those girls never speak to anyone besides each other.”

“I invited the mother over for tea two years ago, but she didn’t drink or eat. All she did was stare at me with those empty eyes. It gave me the creeps.”