The Divide (12 page)

“He left! John, I mean. He got scared and he just, uh, left.” Should she be saying this? “What is it, Amelie, is there a problem?”

“It’s my fucking brother! I think he wants to kill me.”

Susan could not frame a response to this.

“I just thought if I could
talk
to somebody,” Amelie said. Then she added, “But you mean it, don’t you? You lost him, too.”

“Yes. Well, I— If you could get here soon, maybe we could talk. I have some time before I absolutely need to leave. Is this connected with John?”

“Partly. Look, I don’t want to make a problem for you—”

“No, no!—I mean, I
want
to talk.”

“Well, if there’s time—”

“Can you get here inside the hour?”

Pause. “Sure. It’s not that far.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Susan said.

They met in the lobby and then found a booth at the back of the coffee shop.

Amelie’s eyes were puffy and bloodshot; her hair was down in matted bangs across her forehead. She wore jeans and a T-shirt under an oversized red plaid lumberjack shirt. Susan, sitting across from her, felt instantly helpless.

“It’s Roch,” Amelie said. “He’s my brother.”

The girl seemed anxious to talk; Susan listened carefully. She was not accustomed to having people come to her with their problems. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to her. She paid close, somber attention as Amelie spoke.

Amelie had a brother named Roch who had followed her to Toronto from Montreal. “A real son-of-a-bitch. I mean, he has trouble dealing with people. I don’t think he registers people at all, they just don’t exist for him, unless they get in his way or humiliate him—and then his instinct is just to crush them, grind them under his foot. He can be pretty single-minded about it. I learned how to deal with it, you know, how to keep from making him mad. But it isn’t always easy. When we came here—”

When they came to Toronto they had lived in the streets and Roch had encouraged Amelie into occasional prostitution.

“But that sounds like—I mean, you have to understand, it was the kind of thing a runaway kid might do. It happened maybe four or five times and it was a question of having money for food, a place to stay. It was a long time ago.”

Susan nodded.

Eventually Amelie had found a job and a cheap apartment. Roch had taken a whole string of jobs, mostly lifting and carrying. He was strong, Amelie said, but he didn’t get along with people. He’d been working for the last six months at the Bus Parcel Express depot down at Front Street, but he lost that when he put a choke-hold on his supervisor and almost killed him. Roch was outraged when they fired him. His life, Amelie seemed to imply, was a continuous series of these outrages: he would be provoked, he would respond, he would be punished for it.… “Christ knows what the guy said to him. Some kind of insult. So Roch practically breaks the man’s neck, and he’s fired, and it’s business as usual, right? Except that, for Roch, every time this happens it’s like brand-new. Like he’s filing it away on some index card in his head:
fucked over again.”

Amelie had avoided Roch fairly effectively for a few years. But the BPX firing had been a point-of-no-return… now Roch was back, and he had changed, Amelie said; he was closer to the edge than he had ever been before.

“Like this thing with Benjamin. Suddenly Roch is jealous. For three years he ignores me altogether, then suddenly he resents this guy I’m living with. What makes it worse is that Benjamin—or I guess it was John—did this humiliation thing on him, the fight they had. No real physical damage, but the
contempt
—you could feel it shooting out of him. And Roch just soaked it up. Charging his battery—you know what I mean? You could say Roch is at a very high voltage right now.”

Amelie stopped long enough to finish the beer she’d ordered. Susan waited.

Amelie drained the glass. “Maybe it’s better Benjamin left. I don’t think he could stand up to Roch right now. I don’t think— I’m not sure I can, either.”

Susan said, “He’s staying with you?”

“I can’t make him leave.”

“Is he hurting you?”

Amelie looked across the table, then reached up and pulled her hair away from her forehead. There was an angry blue bruise underneath.

Susan drew in her breath. “My God!”

Amelie shrugged. “I’m just worried he’ll get worse.”

“You should call the police!”

She laughed derisively. “Have you ever seen a domestic dispute call? I have. You know what happens? Fuck-all, is what happens. And it would make Roch really mad.”

“You can leave, though, can’t you?”

“It’s my
apartment
!”

“I mean temporarily,” Susan said. “There must be a women’s shelter in the city. You could have a restraining order put on him—”

“A restraining order,” Amelie said: the idea was comic. But she added, “Are there really shelters?”

“Well—we can find out. Let me make a couple of calls.” Susan looked at her watch. “Oh, lord—my
plane!”

“That’s right,” Amelie said. “You gotta go.” She stood up; Susan fumbled out money for the check. Amelie added, “You expect to hear from him again?” Meaning John.

“I don’t know,” Susan admitted. “Maybe. Maybe you’ll hear from him first. We have to keep in touch. Listen, there are phones in the lobby… let me make a couple of calls for you?”

Amelie shrugged.

Susan stopped at the front desk, hunting in her purse for the room key. Check out, locate a shelter in case Amelie needed it, then take a cab to the airport—there was still time for everything, but only just. She tapped the bell and the desk clerk hurried over. “Ms. Christopher—”

“Yes,” she began. “I—”

“That call came through,” the clerk said. “I suppose the one you’ve been waiting for? Long distance collect.”

Susan just gaped.

“No message,” the clerk said. “Except that he would try again in an hour or so.”

Susan checked her watch a second time.

“When was this?”

“About twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Thank you,” Susan said. “I’ll wait up in my room.”

“Yes, ma’am. Was there anything else—?”

“No—not just now.” She turned to Amelie. “You can wait with me if you like.”

Amelie said, “Won’t you miss your plane?”

“Yes,” Susan said. “I will.”

John said he would meet her Wednesday morning at the ferry docks at Tsawassen.

Dr. Kyriakides wired the money for her flight to B.C. and two tickets back. Susan helped Amelie check into a YWCA, spent a sleepless night at the hotel, then caught a taxi to the airport and a westbound plane.

It was windy and cold at the docks. Susan bought a cup of bitter coin-machine coffee and huddled in the waiting room. She was excited but terribly tired. She slept for a few minutes with her back against the wall, woke up stiff and uncomfortable—and saw John standing a few feet away.

He looked thin and worn, a duffel bag in one hand and a grey visor cap pulled down over his eyes. He was sun-brown and his hair was longer than she remembered. But it was John, not Benjamin… there was something in the way he stood… she knew at once.

She stood up. She had envisioned this moment, played it over in her mind a dozen times during the trip from Toronto. She wanted to embrace him but decided she didn’t really know him well enough—it just seemed that way, after all the waiting.

She took his hands: a small, spontaneous gesture. “I’m glad you decided to call.”

He looked at her for a long time. He reached up to touch her cheek, and the expression on his face… Susan could not take the measure of it; but there might have been surprise, curiosity, maybe even gratitude.

She said, “Can I ask what it was—why you changed your mind?”

He took his hand away and held it up in front of her.

His hand was trembling. It was a pronounced, involuntary tremor; Susan was suddenly afraid, watching it. He
was
sick—he was admitting it now.

He said, “I found out that I don’t want to die.”

She called Dr. Kyriakides from a booth in the airport, confirming the meeting. “He hasn’t said it in so many words, but I think this is his way of telling us he needs us. That’s important, isn’t it?”

“Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides said. He sounds worried, Susan thought; or worse—he sounds frightened.

“Hey,” she said, “the battle’s over, isn’t it? We’re almost home.”

“No,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “I think you’re mistaken. I think the battle has only just begun. I think we’re a very long way from home.”

Maxim Kyriakides paid the taxi driver and watched as the automobile sped away, leaving him alone in the gravel driveway of the house north of Toronto in which he would be spending the next few months.

The house was a whitewashed pseudo-Georgian structure, isolated from its neighbors by groves of trees. Maxim had never seen it before. It belonged to a colleague, a University of Toronto professor named Collingwood, who was a member of what they had called “The Network” many years ago. The house was to have gone up for sale a week ago, but Collingwood had offered it to Maxim when Maxim explained the problem he was facing.

The house was suitably large. Maxim walked up the driveway to the big portico, fished a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock on the double doors. Open, they admitted a wash of December sunlight into the tiled foyer. The house was cold; the heat had been turned off for some days.

But the electricity had been restored yesterday. Maxim flicked a switch and the lights winked on. The entrance hall yielded to a kitchen, a living room, a library. These were furnished, though sparsely—valuables had been removed and there were blank, pale spaces where paintings had been taken from the walls.

Well, he thought, that was appropriate, too. We shall all be entering a new, unfamiliar space. All three of us… all four, counting the French-Canadian girl Susan had mentioned. No, even more than that. Five, he thought, if you allowed Benjamin as a separate entity.

Maxim ascended the staircase carefully. He was healthy enough to pass for ten or fifteen years younger than his age. He was large but not fat; he had always walked for pleasure, sometimes great distances, and he supposed that habit had helped preserve his health. Still, he was conscious of his age. At sixty-eight, stairs were a chore to be undertaken with some seriousness. He remembered his Uncle Constantine moving through the house in Macedonia at this same solemn, considered pace. Constantine had been a schoolteacher and a cynical Communist, a friend of the rebel Veloukhiotis. Maxim was then a teenager and already an ideologue; he had read Marx with great determination. Now… is it possible, he wondered, that as children we’re already learning how to be old? Had he been studying for infirmity under his uncle’s slow tutelage?

The second floor of the house on the outskirts of Toronto exuded a closed-in, musty atmosphere. He wanted to open a window but dared not; that would only make it more difficult to heat these rooms when the furnace kicked on again. He stood by a bedroom window and gazed through its double panes across a wooded ravine. The ravine was stark and bare, a swath of perhaps a hundred yards between the house and a housing project crowded up against a major highway. The ravine afforded at least a little privacy, and that was good. The house, he thought, was as close to stateliness as one could achieve in such a prefabricated landscape.

He paused to scold himself for this momentary class snobbery, to which he was not even entitled. Maxim, though no longer a Communist like poor dead Constantine, had once considered himself a socialist; certainly he had never been wealthy.

But the important thing, he thought, is that I can work here.

It was John who had insisted on staying in Toronto. Maxim had wanted him to fly to Chicago with Susan. But John believed he would be safer on this side of the border—which might even be true, though Maxim had no evidence to suggest it—and certainly he would be more comfortable, less disoriented, in a familiar setting. So Maxim had arranged a sudden sabbatical, ostensibly for reasons of health (no one inquired too closely—one of the advantages of seniority and tenure), and borrowed this house from his friend.

Everything was in place except for the people, and they would be arriving tomorrow. Susan, this young woman Amelie… and John, whom Maxim had not set eyes upon for many years.

Resting a moment in the darkened hallway, he silently framed the forbidden words:
My son.

Not literally, of course. Maxim had never married, never produced any children. Even his most intimate friends—possibly excepting those in the so-called Network—took him for an elderly bachelor of the generic sort, married to his research and his teaching. And that was, in fact, largely true. But no one’s life is as simple as his friends believe.

In a real sense, Maxim thought, I created John. What else is fatherhood? This was, if anything, even more profound. A virgin fatherhood.

He thought,
I could have raised him
.

It was one of those thoughts that came to him periodically, unbidden and unwelcome. Ordinarily, he would have shunted it aside. It was not useful. But now, with the prospect of facing John once again, there was no avoiding it.
If they hadn’t taken him away
—

If I hadn’t allowed them to take him away
—

But, no. He was too old to regret his life. You do what you do. And then you do what you can.

He sat down in a chair in the entranceway to wait for the deliveries he had been told to expect: a few pharmaceuticals, a tape recorder, his notebooks. Bundled in a huge coat and away from the wind, he was warm enough—except for his feet. Warm enough, anyway, to drift toward sleep.

Drifting, he was briefly assailed by a dream-image of John standing before him, John grown unnaturally tall, pointing a finger of accusation and pronouncing the word “Liar!” The vision was disturbing and it startled him awake; he sat up blinking.