Until I Find You (74 page)

In any case, Jack hadn’t heard the wheelchair behind him; the wheels on that smooth linoleum floor didn’t make a sound. (He was, after all, on haunted ground.) “Jack,” the woman in the wheelchair said, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He’d expected to be confronted by Mrs. Malcolm—ever the protector of those girls, whose violation, she imagined, Jack sought. But the woman in the wheelchair was an attractive, forty-year-old real estate agent in a black pantsuit.

Bonnie Hamilton had managed to park her wheelchair in some out-of-sight place, near the back of the chapel, and limp to and from her pew unseen. She’d been successful in the real estate business, she would tell Jack later, because she always left her wheelchair at the front entrance and limped with her clients from room to room—even, as Leslie Oastler had cruelly suggested, up and down stairs. “My clients must feel sorry for me,” Bonnie would joke. “Nobody wants to disappoint a cripple—to add insult to injury, as they say.”

But at public events, or whenever there was a crowd, Bonnie Hamilton was also successful at keeping her limp to herself; she had a knack for sneaking in and out of her wheelchair without anyone seeing her. In the wheelchair, she looked elegant; she was as beautiful to Jack as she’d been when they were students together.

Jack was still speechless from his encounter with Mrs. Machado, real or not—and how grotesquely he now recalled the lost details of everything Mrs. Machado had done to him. It was too much for him, on top of all that—to be rescued by Bonnie Hamilton, who’d tried her hardest to protect him from her sister and Ginny Jarvis when he’d been nine or ten.

Jack dropped to his knees and burst into tears. Bonnie, wheeling closer, pulled him headfirst into her lap. Bonnie must have thought that
she
had made him cry; it must have been Jack’s memory of being
coerced
to ejaculate on her sister’s forehead that was traumatizing him still! (That terrible loss of his innocence in the big girls’ residence when he’d been a frightened little boy—this in addition to his losing Emma, no doubt, had undone him.)

“Jack, I think about what an awful thing we did to you—every day of my life, I think of you!” Bonnie cried. Jack tried to shake his head in her lap, but Bonnie probably thought he was attempting to get away from her; she held him tighter.

“No, no—don’t be afraid!” she urged him. “I’m not surprised it makes you cry to look at me, or that you dress up as a woman or do other weird things. After what we did to you, why
wouldn’t
you be weird? Of
course
you’re weird!” Bonnie cried.

She’s completely crazy,
Jack thought, struggling to breathe; she gripped his hair with both hands, squeezing his face between her thighs. Bonnie Hamilton felt very strong; she clearly worked out a lot. But you can’t
wrestle
a woman in a wheelchair; Jack just let her hold him as hard as she wanted to.

Bending over him, Bonnie whispered in his ear: “We can put it all to rest, Jack. I’ve talked to a psychiatrist about the best way to get over it. We can just move on.”

She didn’t hear him ask, “How?” in her lap; Jack’s voice was muffled between her thighs. Her fingers, combing through his hair, stroked the back of his neck.

“
Normal
sex, Jack
—that’s
the best way to get over an upsetting experience,” Bonnie Hamilton told him.

How Jack wished Emma had been alive to hear this! Wouldn’t she have gotten a kick out of the very idea of
normal
sex?

Wasn’t it destiny, after all? Hadn’t Bonnie and Jack once looked at each other and been unable to look away? And that had been when he was in fourth grade and she in twelfth!

Besides, he was Jack Burns. Wasn’t he supposed to sleep with everybody? Just how would it have made Bonnie Hamilton feel if he
hadn’t
slept with her, a cripple?

Still, it gave Jack pause—she was definitely nuts. Bonnie must have seen the reservation on his face when she finally released his head from her lap. Her confidence wavered; she became unbearably shy. “Don’t feel that I’m
forcing
you, Jack. You poor boy!” she cried. “You’ve been forced enough!”

She backed her wheelchair away from him; it was a disturbing image. Jack had the idea that they were rewinding a film; they were returning in time. At any second, Mrs. Machado would reappear; he could sense her coming around the bend in the corridor, reemerging from the shadows.

Under the circumstances, Jack chose to leave with Bonnie.

All night, at the Four Seasons, Bonnie Hamilton never once limped for Jack. She didn’t limp when she was lying down. Once, when she got out of bed to use the bathroom—and again, when she got dressed in the morning—she asked him to look away.

Jack never fell asleep. He was too afraid of the nightmares Mrs. Machado might give him. In the dark, when he felt the first nightmare approaching—even though he was wide awake—Jack asked Bonnie if she’d seen the short, stout woman he’d been talking to in the corridor. Jack’s body might have blocked Bonnie’s view; down low in her wheelchair, she’d had the impression that he was talking to himself. “I thought maybe you were
acting,
” she said.

This didn’t prove that Mrs. Machado was a ghost, or that he’d only imagined her. There was a hair on Jack’s necktie; he saw it when he undressed for bed. (More gray and wiry than a hair belonging to Bonnie Hamilton or Jack, and no one else had put her head on his chest.) And then there was the second button of his shirt: it was already unbuttoned when Jack undressed that night. This made him shiver.

Naturally, the button trick was the source of the nightmares Jack feared would beset him—not because of the trick itself, which for so many years he’d happily forgotten, but because of what it led to. All those
other
games Mrs. Machado had played!

It was compassionate of Bonnie Hamilton to stay awake with him. Of course she thought of their night together as
therapy,
and maybe it was. For that night, if not all the others that followed it, Bonnie held the button trick at bay.

25

Daughter Alice Goes Home

A
lice and Leslie Oastler were perturbed with Jack for leaving Emma’s wake at St. Hilda’s without saying good-bye. A tough bunch of Old Girls—actually, Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates at the school—had invited Leslie and Alice out to dinner. Jack was expected to join them, or at least not run off with a woman in a wheelchair. (Given Jack’s older-woman reputation, his mother and Mrs. Oastler first thought that he’d absconded with Wheelchair Jane!)

No doubt the description of Jack’s emotional departure with Bonnie Hamilton was exaggerated by several eyewitnesses—that lip-biter Lucinda Fleming among them. Lucinda, probably in a silent rage, had observed Peewee folding Bonnie’s wheelchair and stowing it in the trunk of the limo. And while Alice and Leslie Oastler were wondering out loud what on earth Mrs. Malcolm and Jack had done with poor
Mr.
Malcolm, Penny Hamilton had a hissy fit in front of her own children—those darling little girls. “I
knew
it!” Penny cried, clawing at her pretty hair. “Jack Burns is fucking my crippled sister—that
slut
!”

Miss Wurtz, who’d managed to shed an uplifting light on
Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
now put a positive spin on Penny Hamilton’s announcement. “Thank goodness
that’s
been clarified!” Caroline told Alice and Mrs. Oastler.

“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey was overheard murmuring, in faithful appreciation.

The Old Girls, to a one, were stunned silent. Only the boarders, those irrepressible seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, continued to carry on a conversation, which they conducted in a kind of shorthand—comprehensible only to them.

The Wurtz, in her ongoing effort to cheer up Alice and Mrs. Oastler, said: “Well, it would have been more predictable, but not nearly as much fun, if Jack had left
as
a woman instead of
with
one.”

Jack checked out of the hotel pretty early the next morning—if not as early as Bonnie Hamilton, who had a seven o’clock appointment in Rosedale. They told him at the front desk that there’d been about fifty calls for Jack Burns, and no small number of increasingly irritable requests for Billy Rainbow, but no one had known to ask for Jimmy Stronach. He and Bonnie hadn’t been disturbed.

Jack took a taxi to Forest Hill. He fully expected that his mother would still be asleep and that Mrs. Oastler would have been up for hours. Leslie surely would have made some coffee. He wasn’t wrong about the coffee.

Mrs. Oastler told him that his mom had left the house before seven—an unheard-of hour for Alice to be up, much less dressed and going anywhere. (No one wanted a tattoo the first thing in the morning.)

Leslie looked as if she’d just got up. She was wearing one of Emma’s old T-shirts, which fit her like a baggy dress; evidently she’d slept in it. The T-shirt almost touched her knees, the sleeves falling below her elbows. Jack followed her into the kitchen, where the coffee smelled fresh. There were no dishes in the sink, and not a crumb on the kitchen table; it didn’t look as if Alice had eaten any breakfast.

Mrs. Oastler sat down at the neat table, her hands trembling a little as she drank her coffee. Jack poured himself a cup and sat down beside her.

“I had a bet with your mom, Jack. I said you were gonna get gang-banged by that bunch of boarders. Alice thought you were gonna go home with that overenthusiastic woman with the big dog. Nobody bet on the crip.”

“Where did Mom go, Leslie?”

“Another MRI,” Mrs. Oastler said. “
Imaging,
they call it.”

“Imaging for what?”

“Come on, Jack. Have you talked to her lately? I don’t get the impression that you’ve talked at all.”

“I’ve tried,” he told her. “She won’t say anything to me.”

“You haven’t asked her the right questions, Jack.”

There was a white envelope on the kitchen table; it stood perfectly straight, propped between the salt and pepper shakers, as innocent-seeming as an invitation to a wedding. If it were something Alice had left for Jack, it would have had his name in big letters on it—it would have had her drawing of a monstrous heart, bursting with motherly love for him, or some other over-the-top illustration of undying affection. But the envelope was unmarked and unsealed.

“Has my mom been sick, Leslie?”

“Envelope?
What
envelope? I don’t see an envelope,” Mrs. Oastler said, looking right at it.

“What’s in the envelope?” he asked.

“Nothing you’re supposed to see, Jack. Surely nothing
I
would ever show you.”

Jack opened the envelope, which of course was what Leslie wanted him to do, and placed the four photographs face-up on the clean kitchen table—as if they were playing cards in a game of solitaire with formidably different rules.

The photos were slightly varying views of a young woman’s torso, from her pretty navel to her shoulders. She was naked; her breasts, which were fully formed, didn’t droop. Her breasts and the smoothness of her skin were what indicated her youthfulness to Jack, but he was drawn above all to her tattoo. It was a good one, of what his mom would have called the old school. It was a traditional maritime heart—torn vertically in two, all in tattoo-blue. The tattoo was all outline, no shading. The heart was tattooed on the upper, outer quadrant of the left breast, where it touched both the breast and the heart side of the rib cage. It was exactly where, in Alice’s opinion, a tattoo of a damaged heart could best be hidden—and binding this broken heart together, like a bandage, were the words
Until I find you.
The words were in cursive on a scroll.

The tattoo was good enough to be his mother’s work, but Jack knew Daughter Alice’s handwriting by heart; the writing wasn’t hers. More traditional—instead of the
Until I find you—
was the actual name of the lover who’d left you or deceived you, or otherwise broken your heart.

Jack could easily imagine he was looking at a Tattoo Ole or a Doc Forest or a Tattoo Peter—or possibly Sailor Jerry’s work, from Halifax, long ago. The photos looked old enough. But Jack should have been thinking about the young woman, not her tattoo.

“You’re looking at the wrong breast, Jack,” Leslie Oastler said. “I don’t know why Alice bothered to keep that tattoo a secret from you all these years. The tattoo isn’t what’s gonna kill her.”

That was when Jack realized he was looking at pictures of his mother’s breasts—in which case, the photographs must have been taken about twenty years ago. Contrary to her unique reputation as a tattoo artist, not to mention what she’d told him, his mom had been tattooed—probably when William broke her heart, or shortly thereafter; certainly when Jack had still been a child, or even before he’d been born.

Alice’s insistence on hiding her tattoo from Jack was something he’d mistaken for modesty, which had never made the greatest sense alongside the opposite impression he had of her. It wasn’t modesty—not wanting Jack to take a bath with her, never allowing him to see her naked. (And this had nothing to do with the alleged scar from her C-section.) It was the tattoo that Alice hadn’t wanted Jack to see—and not only because she
was
tattooed, which contradicted her claim to originality among tattoo artists. Mainly it was the tattoo itself that she’d needed to conceal. Because the
you
in
Until I find you
must have been his missing father—it was
William
she’d kept a secret, from the start! And to mark herself for life
because
of him belied the indifference she pretended to—abandoning her search for William and refusing to talk to Jack about him.

The two-inch scar on the upper, outer quadrant of Alice’s right, untattooed breast was a thin, surgical line with no visible stitch-marks.

“She had the lumpectomy when she was thirty-one,” Mrs. Oastler informed Jack. “You were twelve—in grade seven, if I remember correctly.”