“How much do you want for it?”
“Say, fifty bucks for the materials? If you’re serious. You play?”
“No,” Susan said. “But I have a friend who does.” She took the money out of her purse.
James Woodward accepted the payment; Susan picked up the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. The strings rang faintly under her fingers.
“I almost hate to sell the damn thing,” Woodward said. He looked past Susan, past these walls. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s the broken things that stay on your mind. Broken, bent, half-made or bad-made. You take them to the grave with you.”
She climbed off the plane in Toronto weary and dazed, collected her suitcase and the guitar from the baggage carousel. Dr. Kyriakides was waiting in the crowded space beyond the customs checkpoint.
She understood by his hollow smile that something was wrong. She followed him up to the carpark and loaded her baggage into the trunk of the Honda, daunted by his silence.
“John is back,” he said finally.
“That’s good,” Susan responded.
Dr. Kyriakides opened the car door for her. Ever the European gentleman.
“But Amelie is missing,” he said.
19
It was a long drive back to the house. A snowstorm had settled in from the west and wasn’t leaving; the car radio warned people to stay off the roads. Susan was grateful that Dr. Kyriakides had been able to maneuver the Honda all the way to the airport; she was even more grateful that she was able to drive it back. Visibility had closed in and the road was blanked out north of the city; the headlights probed into a swirling wilderness. For the time, she was too preoccupied with driving to press for details about Amelie.
The weather grew steadily worse, but the tires were good and there wasn’t much traffic and they were back at the house before long. Kyriakides brushed the snow from the car while Susan headed for the kitchen and a hot cup of coffee.
John was there, waiting for her.
It was John—no doubt about it.
He looked up as she came through the door. His expression was somber and utterly focused.
“I need to do two things,” he said. “First, I need to talk to you. There are a lot of things I want to say while I still can.”
Susan nodded solemnly. She was too tired to be shocked by this sudden volley; she simply accepted it. “Second?”
He said, “I mean to find Amelie.”
Susan slept for five dreamless hours between three and eight o’clock in the morning.
She woke to find the window of her room laced with frost. She stood for a moment, touching the icy surface of the glass with one finger and wondering at the intensity of the cold. Outside, the world was a blurred grey-white wilderness. The snow had obscured the driveway. The highway was empty save for a plough inching southward under its strange blue safety light. The sky was dark and the snow was falling steadily. She dressed in the darkness of her room.
She carried her portable Sony tape recorder down the hall to John’s door, raised her hand to knock—and then paused.
John was playing the guitar. She had given him the instrument last night, had explained about the layover in Chicago and the sale at the Woodward house. He had taken the instrument wordlessly, his expression unreadable.
The music came softly through the closed door. He was good, Susan thought. She didn’t recognize the piece—something baroque. Not passionate music but subtle, a sad melody elaborated into a cathedral of notes. She waited until the last arpeggio had faded away.
He put down the guitar when she came through the door, looked questioningly at the tape recorder.
“It’s for me,” she said. “I don’t trust myself to remember.”
He nodded. She felt his sense of urgency: it was like something physical, a third presence in the room. Because of his impending neurological crisis, Susan thought, his “change”—or because of Amelie. Or both.
He’s changed. He’s different.
But she put the thought aside for now.
“Sit down,” John said.
She plugged a cassette into the recorder and switched it on.
All that morning he talked about his childhood.
They skipped breakfast. Twice, Susan paused to change tapes. She was afraid she would miss something. It was a fear John didn’t share, obviously. The words poured out of him like water from a broken jug. A cataract of words.
She understood what he was doing. He had explained it to her last night. These were things he had never said, small but vital fragments of his life, and he was afraid they would slip away uncommunicated. She was not expected to learn these things verbatim or play them back to him—the tape recorder was superfluous. It was the telling that mattered. “Nothing is permanent,” John said. “Everything is volatile. You, me, the world—everything. But it’s like throwing a stone into a pool of water. The stone disappears. But the ripples linger awhile.”
She was that pool. He was the stone.
He talked about his mother.
Her name was Marga Novak and she was working through her apprenticeship at a hairdressing salon in downtown Chicago when she answered a classified ad in the back pages of the Tribune: “Pregnant, single women wanted for privately funded medical study.”
She had recently become pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old shingle and siding salesman who had promised to many her but who left town, or was relocated, a couple of weeks after she announced the results of the pregnancy test. For Marga, answering the Trib ad was a last resort. But the salon was sure to fire her when she started to show, and she needed some kind of income.
She passed two screening interviews and was introduced to Dr. Kyriakides, who explained that the treatment—to prevent low birthweight and “give the child a healthy start”—might involve some discomfort in connection with the intrauterine injections but would be perfectly safe for both mother and child. Moreover, the follow-up study would include a fully paid private educational program for the baby and ongoing medical care for both of them. In the meantime all expenses would be taken care of and housing would be arranged.
She agreed, of course. Was there a choice? The injections were uncomfortable but the delivery was easy, even allowing for the infant’s exaggerated cranial size. Mother and child were installed in a two-bedroom town house near the university district, and John’s schooling began almost immediately.
“How do you know all this?” Susan asked.
“I broke into Max’s office one night. Came in from the Woodwards’ house in the suburbs. I was twelve years old. He kept his files and his notes in a little vault behind his desk. I’d seen it there a few years before. I’d seen him open it.”
“After all that time? You remembered the combination?”
John nodded and continued.
Marga’s parents were Czechs who had come to America before the war. She hadn’t spoken to her mother or father for fifteen years; she didn’t know whether they were still alive. This baby was in effect her only family.