The Divide

On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:

What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?

There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.

Or maybe—another new thought—she was too far away. Maybe she’d left the city. She might be in fucking Timbuktu, although Roch suspected not; it wasn’t her style. But who knew? Anything was possible.

No, he thought, better not to borrow trouble. If the letter arrangement fell through, he’d try something else. He had the co

Tracy recognized him when he sat down at the table by the window. He saw her say something to the manager, who looked impatient and sent her scooting over with a glass of water and the order pad. Roch smiled his biggest smile and ordered lunch. When she came back with the food he reached into his jacket pocket, very casually, and brought out a wad of mail including the spiked envelope.

“I remembered to bring these,” he said. “Thought maybe you’d want to pass ’em on.”

Tracy took the envelopes but held them at a distance, as if they might be radioactive. “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“If it’s convenient,” Roch said.

“Oh,” Tracy said.

One more thing, one more small item to take care of, and then he’d be ready. Everything would be in place.

That night he walked down Wellesley to the corner where Tony Morriseau, the drug dealer, was hanging out.

Roch didn’t know Tony too well. Roch didn’t believe in doing drugs; drugs fucked up your mind. He had, admittedly, sometimes scored a little of this or that from Tony, when the inclination took him or he wanted to impress somebody. But he was not a regular customer.

Tony stood on the snowy streetcorner done up in a khaki green parka with a big hood, his breath steaming out in clouds. He regarded Roch from this sheltered space with an expression Roch could not decipher. Tony seemed more paranoid these days, Roch had observed.

Tony rubbed his hands together and said, “It’s fucking cold, so tell me what you want.”

“Something serious,” Roch said.

“Speak English,” Tony said.

Roch mimed the act of holding a hypodermic needle against his arm and pressing the plunger.

Tony looked ill. “Christ,” he said, “don’t do that, all right? You don’t know who’s looking.” He seemed to withdraw into the depths of the parka. “I don’t deal with that.”

“You know where to get it,” Roch said.

“Matter of fact I don’t.”

“If you can’t sell it to me, tell me who can.”

“I don’t like your tone of voice,” Tony said. “I don’t have to do you any favors. Christ!”

Roch stood up straight and looked down at Tony, who was at least a head shorter. “Tone of voice?”

Tony cringed.

Then Tony looked at his watch. “Oh, well … from now on you don’t come to me for this. Go to the source, okay? It’s really not my territory.”

Roch nodded.

They walked down the street to Tony’s car—a battered Buick. “Hey, Tony,” Roch said. “What happened to the famous Corvette?”

Tony scowled and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

18

It was a cool Southern California winter day, but Susan was comfortable with a sweater wrapped around her. She was able to stand for a long time on the exposed, su

She had been given a week-long leave of absence from the big house north of Toronto and she wasn’t sure whether to resent this or not. Dr. Kyriakides had practically hustled her onto the airplane, claimed that the trip would be good for her, that she had driven herself to the point of nervous exhaustion—that “Benjamin” would probably be around for a while longer and there was nothing helpful she could do. “We’ll need you more later,” he said. During the crisis, he meant. When John’s neurological breakdown reached its apex.

But no one could say for sure when that crisis would come, or what the final resolution might be. Therefore, Susan thought, it was a terrible risk to be away from him. But Dr. Kyriakides had been persuasive … and it was true that she owed her mother a visit. Susan had promised at the funeral that she would be home every Christmas. A promise she’d broken this year.

So she had spent five days in this quiet suburb, driving to the malls with her sixty-five-year-old mother and-dodging questions about her work. She said she was doing “an exchange project” with the University of Toronto, to explain her Canadian address. Fluid transfer in mitochondria. Too complex to explain. Her mother nodded dubiously.

And today—the last day of Susan’s visit—they had come here to this grave, where Susan had stood frowning for the last forty-five minutes, poised on the brink of a mystery.

She was distressed to discover that she could not summon up a concrete image of her father. She tried and failed. She could remember only the things she associated with him—his clothes, the mirror polish on his shoes, the brown sample cases he had carried to work. The rest was either hopelessly vague or, worse, deathbed images, his emaciated body and hollow eyes. She remembered the sound of his voice, the soothing rumble of it, but that was a childhood memory. His laryngeal cancer had ended all that, of course; but it seemed to Susan that he had fallen mute years before the operation, a functional silence in which anything meaningful must never be pronounced. His way of protecting her from the divorce, from his own fears, from adulthood. She was trying hard not to hate him for it.

How awful that sounded. But it was true: she had never forgiven him for his silence, for his cancer, for his callous descent into the grave. It was a monumentally selfish thought. A childish thought … but maybe that was the heart of the matter: she could never come to this place except as a child, suspended in time by his withdrawal and his death. She would never be his “grown-up daughter.” She couldn’t say any of the things she needed to say, because he couldn’t listen.

She was startled by the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, Susan. We’ve been here long enough.”

Have we? Susan climbed into the car dutifully, a child, thinking: Maybe not Maybe if she stayed long enough, the right words would come to her. Talking to herself, she would talk to Daddy. And Daddy would answer. His buried words would rise up from the ground and hover in the cool, sunlit air.

But she couldn’t stay forever. And so the car carried her down the hillside in the long light of the afternoon, away from the stubbornly silent ground.

Her flight out of Los Angeles left an hour and forty minutes late, which meant she missed her co

She phoned Toronto with this news and then—on an impulse—rented a car for the day. She did not want to stray too far from the airport; Susan distrusted official scheduling and usually preferred to lurk near the departure gates. But she knew her way around this city and she recalled that John’s old neighborhood, the neighborhood where he had grown up with the Woodwards, was only a short drive from the airport.