The Divide

He thought about using force to extract the information from Tracy. Follow her home one of these nights. Beat it out of her, choke it out of her, whatever. She was scared of him already; it wouldn’t be hard.

But it would be messy and it might get him in trouble. Even worse—unless he could frighten her into silence—she might be able to warn Amelie. Dangerous.

But how else?

He was frustrated, thinking about it. He did a set of pushups, ate a frozen di

Inspiration came with the morning mail.

He had begun collecting Amelie’s mail, what there was of it, in case he needed it to flesh out the story he’d told at the Goodtime. The problem was that his sister had been getting junk mail and subscription ads and du

Today, however, there was an envelope with an illegible return address and a Montreal postmark … and Roch, sensing its importance, sat down to think before he tried to open it.

Amelie’s name and address were written in an arthritic scrawl across the front. Think, he instructed himself. Who did she know in Montreal? Somebody from school? But Amelie hadn’t been that tight with friends. Anyway, it looked like an old woman’s writing.

“Jesus,” Roch said out loud. “Mama?”

He held the letter in his hand as if it were a religious relic. The letter was important. It was the key. Roch was suddenly, intuitively certain of that. He could use this letter to pry Amelie out of her hiding place … somehow … but he had to be cautious; he bad to make plans.

He deliberately set aside the letter and watched TV for a while. He couldn’t concentrate, of course. Morning game shows flickered and vanished; the news came on. He forced his eyes to focus on the screen. It was an exercise in discipline.

The question occurred to him: was it really possible to steam open a letter?

He had heard about “steaming open” mail. But he had no idea how to go about it. And, of course, he couldn’t risk destroying the letter itself.

He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, put it on the stove to boil. While he waited he went through the mail he’d been collecting and selected three pieces: a book-club flyer, a phone bill, and a sweepstakes ad. All three were addressed to Amelie; all three were sealed. He cradled them in his hand, thinking hard.

The kettle whistled as it came up to steam. It was a hard, shrill whistle but Roch didn’t mind; he liked the sound. He took the book-club flyer and grasped it in a pair of kitchen tongs, then held it so that the gummed flap took the brunt of the steam. He held it there while thirty seconds ticked off on his wristwatch.

He realized as soon as he pulled it away that this had been a mistake; the envelope was a sodden mass. He waved it in the air to cool it and then tried the flap. The glue had been steamed away, sure enough. But the paper was drenched.

He tried again with the phone bill. This time he passed the envelope quickly through the steam, a little farther from the spout. He managed not to damage the paper, but the glue was still firm. After a second pass he was able to pry up an edge without tearing anything. A third pass and the envelope peeled open in his hand; it was damp but would probably dry to its original condition.

He practiced again on the sweepstakes flyer and did a little better this time. He figured he had the hang of it.

Now the letter from Montreal.

He carried it carefully into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He dried the tongs and then grasped the envelope. The kettle was still screaming. He turned to center it on the burner and then—disaster!—the Montreal letter slipped through the pincer-end of the tongs toward a sink full of dirty dishwater. “Shit!” Roch screamed. He clenched the tongs convulsively and managed to catch a corner of the envelope; it dangled over the water until he could snatch it away with his free hand.

His heart was beating a mile a minute. He forced himself to stand still, calm down.

The kettle continued to shriek, inches from his ear.

He took a deep breath and started again.

The second time was lucky. It worked like a charm. He worried out the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and sat down to read.

The kettle dried up and fell silent. Roch stood up to turn the heat off, but too late: the cheap aluminum was red hot and brittle. He threw the kettle in the sink, where it hissed and generated a white, astringent-smelling cloud. The kitchen was already tropical; the whole apartment was as humid as a hothouse. He imagined spores taking root in the old wallpaper, fungus breaking out in the dark comers of these narrow rooms. He was troubled by this thought, but only briefly. He sat down and concentrated on the letter. He had important things to do.

The letter was typewritten, pecked out on an ancient, faded ribbon. Roch had a hard time reconciling the text with his memories of his mother. Mama was a big woman who had often been drunk and sometimes aggressive. One time he’d seen her get into a fight with a shoe clerk at Ogilvy’s—she tore a flap of skin off the guy’s cheek. Whereas this letter was a whining, pathetic document, mainly about the lousy neighborhood she was forced to live in and how long it had been since Amelie wrote back.

Screw the old bitch, Roch thought. She never wrote tome.

But the bulk of his plan was already begi

In the afternoon he rode a bus down to the Salvation Army thrift shop and spent ten dollars on a clapped-out Underwood Noiseless typewriter. He took it home and discovered that the ribbon wouldn’t advance, but that he could produce legible copy if he cranked the spool by hand every line or two. He typed The quick brown fox and compared this with the letter from Mama.

The specimen was similar but far from identical. Still, Roch thought, who notices these things? He doubted that Amelie would have an older letter to compare it with or that she would bother if she did, as long as the counterfeit seemed authentic.

He inserted a piece of plain white bond into the Underwood and sat before it, sweating. He could not think of a way to begin … then realized that he could copy Mama’s letter as written, with a few critical amendments of his own. He smiled at the ingenuity of this and began pecking.

The cap came off the “e” key before he was finished, but he managed to wangle it back on without too much mess. He typed the penultimate paragraph from the original, then dropped the “you never write” complaints and added:

Because I want to see you I have bought bus tickets to Toronto and will be arriving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to find your Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortunately the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.

Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed, Your Loving Mother, and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.

Masterpiece.

The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, content with the state of the world.