Abby was my only real friend. Her father, Fletcher, had the bombastic and overbearing demeanour of an East German gymnastics coach. Forever dragging her off on bike rides or nature hikes that unfolded more like the Bataan death march. Of orangutang proportions, he was often seen in a sweatsuit with a digital stopwatch strung round his neck.
“Abby!” he’d call. “Bike ride!”
“I don’t want to ride my bike.”
“Who’s that talking? Is it Flabby Abby?”
“I’m not flabby.”
“You will be, my dear, if you don’t ride your bike.”
Fletcher was fanatical about his daughter’s fitness. Abby became a champion powerlifter. Her father credited much of her success to his “Energizer Bowls”: brown rice, broccoli, and amino acids concocted in massive batches and stored in a chest freezer in the garage. Abby said the last few bowls sat in the freezer so long they tasted like “a doomed Arctic expedition.”
The explosion shuddered the entire house. Volcanic wind blew up the ventilation ducts. Spumes of burning dust. Abby and I went to the window. The lawn sparkled with glass. Flames climbed the siding from blown-apart casements. Our squirrels scrambled down the downspout. We followed suit. Abby fell and snapped her wrist. A hole burnt through the roof as it collapsed into the foundation.
Teddy’s carbonized skeleton was later doused by firemen. Hands heat-welded to my father’s steel workbench. Skull pushed back on his spinal column from the force of the blast.
Insurance covered the rebuilding costs but my father assumed the neighbours blamed him. We moved away from Sarah Court, resettling way across town. Not long after the fire, my father told me I was adopted.
“Patience, sit there on the couch. A bit of a bomb I’ll be dropping.”
Less a bomb than a grenade lobbed between us — a grenade he’d feared would shatter my psyche, sense of self, my whatever else. It occasioned in me nothing but curiosity.
Where was I adopted?
“An institution north of here. I wasn’t an ideal candidate but a solid citizen.”
How did I end up there?
“Nobody saw the need to tell me. People do take on burdens that overmaster them.”
Why take me in?
“You needed adopting. I was in a position to do so.”
Did it ever scare you — being a father?
“There should be a training guide for new fathers. Either your head’s screwed on tight and gets unscrewed, or you come into it a wreck and fatherhood is a centralizing circumstance to an even greater crackup. Fatherhood destroys some men.”
He offered to help track my parents down. I’d no urge to find them. My father was Philip Nanavatti: this fact as cleanly connected to me as each finger at the end of each hand. The circle closed upon itself and I was content within its circumference. That I may still have a mother was no different than discovering I had an extra organ. A tiny sac or bladder that contributed nothing to my health nor brought about any sickness. A surgeon could excise it, yes, but since it was benign and I could quite happily exist with it somewhere within me, why bother?
“Your mother was not a bad person, pet.”
I never thought of her as bad. My mother is any one of a billion women in as many conditions. In prison or a boardroom or an oil sheik’s harem. A housewife in Paramus, New Jersey. A roller derby queen going by the name of Cinnamon Kiss in Poughkeepsie. A cipher, as the woman who stuffed baby Jane into a toilet was a cipher.
My mother died birthing me.
The only worrisome quality to not knowing your parents is you don’t truly know yourself. You never know what you are capable of, as you cannot see your roots. The skews of their braiding. What they touch, or fail to.
It’s that time of evening where the sun rests at that particular point in the sky: hitting your eyes directly, sunlight robs the world of dimension. Buildings become black cut-outs hammered flat by the refraction of the sun. A shape darts onto the road. I swerve, no thump, missing it.
Jane Doe sits in a car seat facing away from the dashboard. Otherwise if I crashed, accidentally or on purpose, the passenger-side airbag would deploy to crush the little-bitty bones of her face. I hit the QEW highway, going east. A squad car rushes past in the opposite lane. The highway wends past Niagara Falls to the Fort Erie border. It suddenly occurs to me that my mental state is not up to explaining Jane to the border guards.
I return to St. Catharines and park at the Big Bee convenience store near the bus depot. I pull in beside a minivan, unbuckle baby Jane, and enter the store. I microwave pablum in one of the baby bottles I’d bought. Another customer scans a low shelf with his back to me. I spy a pack of fireworks next to sacks of expired dog kibble. The microwave dings. I dab pablum on my wrist. Outside a man hops into the minivan and peels off. I angle the bottle so Jane’s lips clasp round the nipple. Press her warm body to my chest.
Tufford Manor is set off Queenston street. With its bevelled wrought iron gates inset with seraphim, its faux-granite facade shielded by second-growth willows, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for an upscale condo complex. Until you noted the proliferation of walkers and wheelchairs and oxygen canisters. Orderlies with the air of bored cattle wranglers.
The one behind the desk is a large black man. Above the starched white collar of his uniform, his head seems to float disembodied, in the style of a magician’s trick.
“Patience,” he says.
“Nice to see you, Clive.”
A man so ancient it is conceivable he’d seen his
first military engagement during the Boer War staggers into the lobby in his sleeping flannels. His body’s all shrivelled up like a turtle that crawled under a radiator.
“Where’d you sneak off to?” Clive spots the box of wooden matches tucked under the old man’s arm. “Give them here, Mister Lonnigan.”
The old man, Lonnigan, stashes the matches behind his back. They poke past his hipbone.
“Don’t make a nuisance,” Clive says, gently wresting them away.
“You sadistic bull Negro.”
“What have I told you about that trash?”
“Big as a bull, sadistic, and you’re a Negro.” Lonnigan pronounces it Negra. “Where am I lying?”
“You speak to wound. The preferred nomenclature is African Canadian.”
Lonnigan’s jaw juts. “When are you gonna fix my record player?”
“It’s been bust since they rolled you in.”
“You said you’d help.”
“Tomorrow,” says Clive. “Go on, now, give me peace.”
“Visiting hours are over,” Lonnigan says to me.
“Why fret every little thing, Mister L? Lighten up. You’ll live longer,” I say.
“Here’s a nudie club bartender telling me how to live. I lived plenty enough.”
“Nine-tenths of the time he’s demented,” Clive says to me. “But there’s that other tenth.”
Clive folds his arms across his chest. A puzzled but not aggressive gesture.
My father died seven months ago. His body’s interred up the road. His room presently occupied by someone else.
“I saw these fireworks and thought of Dad.”
“Long ways off the First of July, Patience.”
“Bad idea?”
Clive unknits his arms. “Long as we aim them over the golf course I can’t see the harm.”
The courtyard: clean-swept and hemmed on three sides by balconied terraces. Clive wheels Lonnigan out. A patchwork blanket is draped over the old man’s legs.
“Mr. L chummed around with your father,” says Clive.
“Didn’t know you were his relation,” Lonnigan says. “That your baby?”
Lonnigan appears to have forgotten we all start out so small. Jane grasps his index finger in her tiny fist.