Until I Find You (32 page)

“Why would I use my teeth?” he asked.

“Because you’re a kid,” Mrs. Oastler said. She patted her bikini briefs, which Jack still wore as a hat; then she plucked her panties off his head and threw them across the bathroom into an open laundry hamper. It was a good shot. She had a kind of athletic grace, boyish in nature. “I’ll find you a T-shirt, something to wear home. Tell your mom I’m sending your shirt and tie to the dry cleaner’s.”

“Okay,” he said.

Emma’s mom was in her bedroom, opening a drawer. Jack kept looking at himself, bare-chested, in her bathroom mirror above the sink—as if he expected to start growing in some observable fashion. Mrs. Oastler came back with a T-shirt. It was all black, like her bikini briefs, and with the sleeves for the upper arms cut short and tight, the way women liked them. Emma’s mom was so small, her T-shirt was only a little loose on Jack. “It’s one of mine, of course. Emma’s clothes,” she added, disapprovingly, “would be too big.”

His lower lip had finally stopped bleeding, but it was swollen and you could see the pinprick where the wire from Emma’s braces had stabbed him. Mrs. Oastler gently rubbed some lip gloss over the wound. Emma walked into the bathroom while her mom was doing this. “You look like a girl in that T-shirt, Jack,” Emma said.

“Well, Jack’s pretty enough to be a girl, isn’t he?” Mrs. Oastler asked. There was a noticeable measure of shame in Emma’s resentful expression and slouched posture, as if she’d taken her mother’s point to heart. (Jack may have been pretty enough to be a girl, but—in her mom’s estimation—Emma wasn’t.) “We’re telling Jack’s mother that he cut himself on a staple. He was trying to open a staple with his teeth, silly boy.”

“I want to see the fucking Rose of Jericho,” Emma said. “I want Jack to see it, too.”

Without a word, Mrs. Oastler, who wore a tight-fitting pair of black jeans with a silver belt, untucked her long-sleeved cotton turtleneck, which was also black. She unbuckled the belt and wriggled the jeans over her slim hips. Jack could see only the top half of the Rose of Jericho above the panty line of her black bikini briefs. She hooked her thumbs under the waistband of her panties, but before she slid them down, she said: “
This,
Jack, would be in the category of needlessly upsetting your mom—maybe even worse than kissing a sixteen-year-old, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh,” he said, as she pulled her bikini briefs down.

There it was. (
Not
the Rose of Jericho. Jack didn’t need to waste a second of his time looking at another one. His mom was a pro; he assumed that Daughter Alice’s Rose of Jericho was the same every time.) While Emma saw, with a gasp, the unmistakable
other
flower within the rose, Jack took a long, careful look at the real thing—his second sighting of an actual vagina in one day. Emma’s pubic hair was as unruly as she was, but Mrs. Oastler’s pubes were neatly trimmed. And if Jack ever doubted Emma’s authority—that he had an older-woman thing, as she put it—he didn’t doubt it now. If Emma’s vagina had left the little guy largely unimpressed, what was Jack to make of the quantum leap the little guy made in response to Emma’s mom? “That’s
disgusting
!” Emma said. (She meant the tattoo.)

“It’s a Rose of Jericho, like any other,” Jack insisted. “My mom does a good one.”

While he went on staring at her vagina, Mrs. Oastler rumpled his hair and said: “You bet she does, Jack—you bet she does.”

Emma suddenly hit him so hard that he took a short flight across the bathroom tiles and landed in the vicinity of the laundry hamper. Jack instinctively put a finger to his lower lip, to be sure he wasn’t bleeding again. “You weren’t looking at the
tattoo,
baby cakes.”

“Boys will be boys, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler told her daughter. “Be nice to Jack. Please don’t make him bleed again.”

Emma yanked him to his feet by grabbing hold of her mom’s skimpy T-shirt. In one of the bathroom’s many mirrors, Jack caught a glimpse of Mrs. Oastler pulling up her bikini briefs and wriggling her hips back into her jeans. “What’s the little guy think of my mom’s Rose of Jericho?” Emma asked Jack in her vaguely threatening way.

Mrs. Oastler, of course, didn’t realize that Emma was referring to Jack’s penis. She probably assumed that her daughter was being disparaging about the boy’s smaller size. “Don’t bully him, Emma,” Mrs. Oastler said. “It’s unbecoming.”

As Jack was leaving, he found it confusing that both Emma and her mom kissed him good-bye—Mrs. Oastler on his cheek, Emma on his undamaged upper lip. In the category of unnecessarily upsetting his mother, Jack was determined he would make no mention of his confusion to her—nor would he tell her about the rest of his eventful day at the Oastler mansion in Forest Hill.

Jack went to bed that night in Mrs. Oastler’s black T-shirt, although Lottie said she liked him better in his own pajamas. Lottie wrapped an ice cube in a washcloth and held it to his lower lip while she said her prayers over him. “May the Lord protect you, Jack, and may He keep you from harming others,” Lottie always began. Jack thought the latter was a ridiculous concern. Why would he ever harm others? “May the Lord keep Mrs. Wicksteed alive a little longer,” Lottie went on. “May I please be permitted to die in Toronto, and never go back to Prince Edward Island.”

“Amen,” Jack usually tried to say at this point, hoping that would be the end of it.

But Lottie wasn’t finished. “Please, Lord, deliver Alice from her inclinations—”

“Her what?”

“You know what, Jack—her tendencies,” Lottie told him. “Her choice of friends.”

“Oh.”

“May God keep your mother from hurting herself, not to put too fine a point on it,” Lottie continued. “And may the Lord bless the ground you walk on, Jack Burns, so that you are ever mindful of temptation. May you become the very model of what a man
should
be, Jack—not what most men are.”

“Amen,” he said again.

“That’s for me to say and for you to say
after
me,” Lottie always told him.

“Oh, right.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Wicksteed,” Lottie whispered, at the end—almost as if Mrs. Wicksteed were God and Lottie had been addressing Her from the beginning. “Amen.”

“Amen.”

She took the ice cube in the washcloth away from his lip, which was numb. But Jack was wide awake, and as soon as Lottie left, he went to his mother’s room and got into her bed, where he eventually fell asleep. (Jack had many vivid memories of his two-vagina day; it was impossible to fall asleep right away.)

It was his mom’s leg across his body that woke him; it was the T-shirt that woke
her.
Alice turned on the light to have a better look. “Why are you wearing Leslie’s shirt, Jack? Is Emma stealing her mom’s T-shirts now?”

So Mrs. Oastler was “Leslie”—another mild surprise. Even the T-shirt was more familiar to his mom than Jack had thought. He carefully explained that Mrs. Oastler had given him her T-shirt to wear because his clothes were all bloody—they’d been sent off to the dry cleaner’s—and any shirt of Emma’s would have been too big. Jack showed his mom his puffy lower lip, where he had poked himself with a staple he’d tried to undo with his teeth.

“I thought you were smarter than that,” Alice said.

Jack very slowly, and even more carefully, said that he understood his mom had tattooed Mrs. Oastler—it sounded like a Rose of Jericho from Emma’s description, he unconvincingly explained—but the tattoo was in such a private place that Emma’s mom wouldn’t show it to him.

“I’m surprised she didn’t show you,” Alice said.

“I don’t need to see another Rose of Jericho,” Jack went on. (Even to himself, he sounded too cavalier.) “What’s so special about hers?”

“Just the place, Jack—it’s in a special place.”

“Oh.” He must have moved his eyes away from hers. His mom was such a good liar, she was tough to lie to.

“Not every woman shaves her pubic hair in quite that way,” his mother said.

“Her what?”

“The hair is called
pubic
hair, Jack.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t have any yet, but you will.”

“Do you shave your pubic hair that way?” Jack asked his mom.

“That’s not your business, young man,” she told him, but he could see she was crying. He didn’t say anything. “
Leslie—
Mrs. Oastler, to you—is a very
. . . independent
woman,” Alice started to say, as if she were beginning to read out loud from a long book. “She’s been through a divorce, a bad time, but she’s very
. . . rich.
She’s determined to seize control of everything that happens to her. She’s a very
. . . forceful
woman.”

“She’s kind of small—smaller than Emma, anyway,” Jack interjected. (He had no idea what his mother was struggling to say.)

“You want to be careful around Mrs. Oastler, Jack.”

“I’m pretty careful around
Emma,
” he ventured.

“Yes, you should be careful around Emma, too,” Alice said, “but you want to be
more
careful around Emma’s mom.”

“Okay.”

“It’s all right that she showed you,” his mother said. “I’m sure you didn’t ask to see it.”

“Emma asked her to show me,” he said.

“Now tell me about your lip.”

Jack was learning that adults were better at concealing things than kids were, and he was increasingly aware that his mom knew a lot she wasn’t telling him. Mrs. Wicksteed’s health, for example: Jack knew she had arthritis because he could see it for himself, and because Mrs. Wicksteed had told him. But no one told him she had cancer, not until the day she didn’t get up in time to do his tie—and then Lottie told him, not his mother. (Maybe his mom had been too busy; it might have been the same week she’d been tattooing Mrs. Oastler.)

Suddenly there was no one in the house who knew how to do a necktie, except Mrs. Wicksteed, who was dying! “Is she dying of
arthritis
?” Jack asked Lottie.

“No, dear. She has cancer.”

“Oh.” So that was why Lottie prayed every night for the Lord to keep Mrs. Wicksteed alive a little longer.

Peewee did Jack’s tie that morning. He was a limo driver; he did his own tie every morning. He tied Jack’s in a very matter-of-fact fashion, not making half the fuss that Mrs. Wicksteed had—even before her arthritis. “Mrs. Wicksteed is dying, Peewee.”

“That’s too bad, mon. What’s the lady with the limp going to do then?” So that was why Lottie prayed to be permitted to die in Toronto. Everyone, including Peewee, knew that Lottie didn’t want to go back to Prince Edward Island.

Maybe everyone had a Rose of Jericho hidden somewhere, Jack thought. Perhaps it wasn’t always the kind of tattoo you could see, but another kind—like a free tattoo. No less a mark for life, just one not visible on the skin.

13

Not Your Usual Mail-Order Bride

O
ut of concern for Mrs. Wicksteed, Jack asked Miss Wurtz if he could be excused from
Jane Eyre
rehearsals the rest of that week; after all, he’d played Rochester before. (He could do the part blind, so to speak.) But Connie-Turnbull-as-Jane had been replaced with Caroline French. Jack had never embraced a girl his own height. Caroline’s hair got in his mouth, which he found disagreeable. In the throes of that passionate moment when Jack-as-Rochester tells Caroline-as-Jane that she must think him an “irreligious dog,” Caroline nervously thumped her heels. Backstage, Jack could imagine her dim-witted twin, Gordon, thumping his heels, too. And when Caroline-as-Jane first took Jack-as-Rochester’s hand and mashed it to her lips, Jack was overcome with revulsion—both Caroline’s hand and her mouth were sticky.

It wasn’t only because Mrs. Wicksteed was dying that he wanted to miss a week of rehearsals; Miss Wurtz was reduced to tears all that week. Jack’s mom told him that Mrs. Wicksteed had helped Miss Wurtz out of a “tight spot” before. Whether the so-called tight spot had been the source of The Wurtz’s tastefully expensive clothes—the boyfriend Emma no longer believed in—Jack never learned. He was permitted to miss rehearsals. Caroline French was forced to imagine him in her sticky embrace.

His availability was of little use to Mrs. Wicksteed, who was hospitalized and enduring a battery of tests. Lottie assured Jack that he didn’t want to see the old lady that way. Jack’s mother, though she told him almost nothing of what she was feeling, was noticeably distraught. If, upon Mrs. Wicksteed’s death, Lottie would soon be on a boat back to Prince Edward Island, Alice confided to Jack in the semidarkness of her bedroom that they would be out on the street. Jack inquired if, in lieu of the street, there might be room for them in the Chinaman’s tattoo parlor. “We’re not sleeping in the needles again,” was all his mother would say.

Was their enemy Mrs. Wicksteed’s divorced daughter? She had never cared for their status as her mother’s rent-free boarders. But wasn’t she alleged to be Mrs. Oastler’s friend? Hadn’t she and Leslie Oastler attended St. Hilda’s together? Now that Leslie and Alice were friends, Jack suggested that maybe Mrs. Oastler would speak to Mrs. Wicksteed’s daughter on their behalf. All Alice said was that Mrs. Wicksteed’s daughter and Leslie Oastler weren’t the best of friends anymore.

It was only natural that Jack turned to The Gray Ghost for guidance in this troubling time, but Mrs. McQuat knew something she wasn’t telling him. Her strongest recommendation was that they pray together in the chapel, which meant only that they prayed together
more.
And when he asked The Gray Ghost if she’d been successful in persuading his mother that he would be “eaten alive” by those boys at Upper Canada College, Mrs. McQuat’s answer was out of character. It was not like a former combat nurse to be evasive. “Maybe UCC . . . wouldn’t have been . . . so bad, Jack.”

What did the “wouldn’t have been” mean? “Excuse me, Mrs. McQuat—” Jack started to say.

“You’re a bit
. . . young
to be a boarder . . . Jack . . . but there are schools—mostly in the States—where boarding is . . . the norm.”

“The what?”

They were in the second pew, to the left of the center aisle—the altar bathed in a golden light, the stained-glass saints administering to Jesus. What a lucky guy, to have four women fussing over him! Mrs. McQuat put her cold hand on Jack’s far shoulder and pulled him against her. She put her dry lips to his temple and gave him the faintest trace of a kiss. (“She gives him a paper kiss,” Jack would read in a screenplay, years later, and remember this moment in the chapel.)