I got an earful from one of the neighbours, that time. They seemed like decent people, or decent enough to feed Sabrina when Aimee would forget to come home. Kelly was their last name, as I recall. They were the ones who called the police when Aimee was found at the bottom of the stairs with her neck broken. Fallen or pushed or jumped, we'll never know.
I should have snatched Sabrina up, that day, and made off with her. Headed for Mexico. I would have done so if I'd known what was going to happen-that Winifred would snaffle her and lock her away from me, just as she'd done with Aimee.
Would Sabrina have been better off with me than with Winifred? What must it have been like for her, growing up with a rich, vindictive, festering old woman? Instead of a poor vindictive festering one, namely myself. I would have loved her, though. I doubt Winifred ever did. She just hung on to Sabrina to spite me; to punish me; to show she'd won.
But I did no baby-snatching that day. I knocked on the door, and when there was no answer I opened it and walked in, then climbed the steep, dark, narrow stairs to Aimee's second-floor apartment. Aimee was in the kitchen, sitting at the small round table, looking at her hands, which were holding a coffee mug with a smile button on it. She had the cup right up close to her eyes and was turning it this way and that. Her face was pallid, her hair straggly. I can't say I found her very attractive. She was smoking a cigarette. Most likely she was under the influence of some drug or other, mixed with alcohol; I could smell it in the room, along with the old smoke, the dirty sink, the unscrubbed garbage pail.
I tried to talk to her. I began gently, but she wasn't in the mood for listening. She said she was tired of it, of all of us. Most of all she was tired of the feeling that things were being hidden from her. The family had covered it up; no one would tell her the truth; our mouths opened and closed and words came out, but they were not words that led to anything.
She'd figured it out anyway, though. She'd been robbed, she'd been deprived of her heritage, because I wasn't her real mother and Richard hadn't been her real father. It was all there in Laura's book, she said.
I asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in The Blind Assassin. Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we'd thwarted her-disposed of this unknown lover somehow. Scared him off, bought him off, run him off, whatever; she'd lived in Winifred's house long enough to see how things were done by people like us. Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we'd sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we'd stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own.
She was not at all coherent, but this was the gist of it. You can see how appealing it must have been for her, this fantasy: who wouldn't want to have a mythical being for a mother, instead of the shop-soiled real kind? Given the chance.
I said she was quite wrong, she'd got things all mixed up, but she didn't listen. No wonder she'd never felt happy with Richard and me, she said. We'd never behaved like her real parents, because in fact we weren't her real parents. And no wonder Aunt Laura had thrown herself off a bridge-it was because we'd broken her heart. Laura had probably left a note for Aimee explaining all of this, for her to read when she was older, but Richard and I must have destroyed it.
No wonder I'd been such a terrible mother, she continued. I'd never really loved her. If I had, I would have put her before everything else. I would have considered her feelings. I wouldn't have left Richard.
"I may not have been a perfect mother," I said. "I'm willing to admit that, but I did the best I could under the circumstances-circumstances about which you actually know very little." What was she doing with Sabrina? I went on. Letting her run around like that outside the house with no clothes on, filthy as a beggar; it was neglect, the child could disappear at any moment, children disappeared all the time. I was Sabrina's grandmother, I would be more than willing to take her in, and…
"You aren't her grandmother," said Aimee. She was crying by now. "Aunt Laura is. Or she was. She's dead, and you killed her!"
"Don't be stupid," I said. This was the wrong response: the more vehemently you deny such things, the more they are believed. But you often give the wrong response when you're frightened, and Aimee had frightened me.
When I said the wordstupid, she began to scream at me. I was the stupid one, she said. I was dangerously stupid, I was so stupid I didn't even know how stupid I was. She used a number of words I won't repeat here, then picked up the smile-button coffee mug and threw it at me. Then she came at me, unsteadily; she was howling, great heart-rending sobs. Her arms were outstretched, in a threatening manner, I believed. I was upset, shaken. I retreated backwards, clutching the bannister, dodging other items-a shoe, a saucer. When I got to the front door I fled.
Perhaps I should have stretched out my own arms. I should have hugged her. I should have cried. Then I should have sat down with her and told her this story I'm now telling you. But I didn't do that. I missed the chance, and I regret it bitterly.
It was only three weeks after this that Aimee fell down the stairs. I mourned her, of course. She was my daughter. But I have to admit I mourned the self she'd been at a much earlier age. I mourned what she could have become; I mourned her lost possibilities. More than anything, I mourned my own failures.
After Aimee was dead, Winifred got her claws into Sabrina. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and she was on the scene first. She whisked Sabrina off to her tarted-up mansionette in Rosedale, and faster than you could blink she'd had herself declared the official guardian. I considered fighting, but it would just have been the battle over Aimee all over again-one I was doomed to lose.
When Winifred took charge of Sabrina I wasn't yet sixty; I could still drive then. From time to time I would make the trip into Toronto and shadow Sabrina, like a private eye in an old detective story. I'd hang around outside her primary school-her new primary school, her new exclusive primary school-just to catch a glimpse of her, and to assure myself that, despite everything, she was all right.
I was in the department store, for instance, the morning Winifred took her to Eaton's to get her some party shoes, a few months after she'd acquired her. No doubt she bought Sabrina's other clothes without consulting her-that would have been her way-but shoes do need to be tried on, and for some reason Winifred had not entrusted this chore to the hired help.
It was the Christmas season-the pillars in the store were twined with fake holly, wreaths of gold-sprayed pine cones and red velvet ribbon hung over the doorways like prickly haloes-and Winifred got trapped in the carol singing, much to her annoyance. I was in the next aisle over. My wardrobe wasn't what it used to be-I was wearing an old tweed coat and a kerchief pulled down over my forehead-and although she looked right at me, she didn't see me. She probably saw a cleaning lady, or an immigrant bargain-hunter.
She was done up to the nines as usual, but despite this she was looking quite tatty. Well, she must have been pushing seventy, and after a certain age her style of maquillage does tend to make you look mummified. She shouldn't have stuck to the orange lipstick, it was too harsh for her.
I could see the powdery furrows of exasperation between her eyebrows, the clamped muscles of her rouged jaw. She was hauling Sabrina along by one arm, trying to push her way through the chorus of bulky, winter-coated shoppers; she must have hated the enthusiastic, uncooked quality of the singing.