Close to the Heel (13 page)

“How is he?” I asked.

“How is who?” asked Brynja.

“Your afi,” I said. “He wasn't feeling well.”

Brynja turned to her father, who assured her that everything was under control. The doctor was coming to see him this evening.

“But what happened?” Brynja asked, a note of panic in her voice.

“He was feeling ill,” Einar said.

“He didn't recognize me,” I put in. “He thought I was my grandfather.”

Brynja said something in Icelandic to her father. She sounded upset. He put an arm around her, and his response had a soothing tone to it.

“Let's all go back into the house and have dinner,” Einar said. “Brynja, you can set the table.”

She jogged on ahead. My guess: she was going to see her grandfather and the table could take care of itself.

“I'm sure this isn't what you bargained for when you came over here,” Einar said. “All this family drama.”

“Stuff happens,” I said. “It's no one's fault.”

He smiled, but there was a weariness behind it. “So I noticed you discovered a bit of our history.”

Huh?

“The turf hut,” he said, nodding at the grass-covered structure. “It's what people used to live in, in the old days. With trees so scarce—well, virtually nonexistent—the old-timers built their homes out of rocks and turf, very much like some of your settlers used to build sod houses. The only difference is that your sod houses were very temporary. People lived in them only for as long as it took to build something more substantial. But here, people lived in turf huts for generations.”

“Someone actually lived in that?” I said, staring in wonder at the small structure.

“In that particular hut, no,” Einar said. “It's been a storage shed for as long as I can remember. It's filled with junk—stuff from the old days. I don't think anyone has been in there in years.” He nodded toward the house. “Come on. Let's go and have dinner.”

I followed him into the house, but as I walked across the lawn, I couldn't stop thinking about the old man and what it was that he'd wanted to show me. He had pointed in the direction of the turf hut. It was the only structure between here and the horizon, which meant it was the only thing he could have been pointing at besides the stream or the distant farmhouse in the meadow. But what secret could an old turf hut be hiding? Einar said that it had old stuff in it and that no one ever went inside. Had the old man stashed something in there? Was it something to do with the woman whose face filled the pages of my grandfather's journal? The old man didn't want me to show it to Einar or Brynja. He didn't want me to tell them anything about it. But he wanted to show me—well, my grandfather—something. Something he had seen that was wrong. It had to be something about the woman. If so, what? I wondered. Boy, did I wonder.

The meal that night reminded me of dinner at my place after my mother died. On the nights when the Major didn't make it home until late or when he was on assignment somewhere, he left me in the haphazard care of Mrs. Fernie, the woman who came in several times a week to clean and, when I was younger, to make sure I did my homework. She cooked, too, and, when the Major couldn't be there, stayed over, sleeping on a pull-out couch in the den. I liked Mrs. Fernie, even though she was a terrible cook. She had a boys-will-be-boys attitude to supervising me and never minded if I wanted to horse around with my friends or stay out later than my nine o'clock curfew, which she regarded as overly restrictive. The Major though—he was another story.

When it was just the Major and me, dinner was a dismal affair. The meal was always perfectly balanced and excruciatingly nutritional. We had our protein, our carbs and our veggies. Lots of veggies. Stuff like broccoli, spinach, kale, Brussels sprouts. Fried foods were out. Sugar—forget about it. A meal for the Major wasn't about the food. It was about fuel designed to power a soldier. And it was consumed to the rhythm of the Major's knife and fork chinking against the dinner plate at precise bite-chew intervals, punctuated by an occasional irritated “Eat it before it gets cold, Rennie.” The Major never talked about his day—everything he did was cloaked in confidentiality—and I sure didn't talk about mine. Anything fun I did he would have disapproved of, and anything bad I did, any trouble I got into, he'd hear about soon enough without me having to confess. I couldn't wait until he'd set down his knife and fork and tell me to clear the table and wash the dishes, which he did every night, even though I did exactly that, every night. I used to wish the words would appear above his head in a cartoon balloon, so that I could grab them and ram them down his throat.

The meal in Einar's kitchen that night wasn't much better. Sure, the food was different—grilled fish, boiled potatoes and mushy canned peas. The faces around the table were different. Brynja kept looking anxiously through the door at her grandfather and, if her eyes accidentally met mine, made it clear that she wished I wasn't there. Einar, like the Major, ate in silence until, I guess, he remembered I was there. Then he asked how I had amused myself all day. When I said I'd just been sightseeing, Brynja scowled at me. Einar didn't notice. The meal broke up when the doorbell rang. Brynja raced to answer. It was the doctor. Einar and Brynja followed him into the old man's room. I made myself useful clearing the table and doing the dishes, just like at home.

I was in the living room, the same less-than-gripping novel in my hand while I stared out at the back of the turf shed, when the doctor came through with Einar. They were talking in Icelandic, but their somber voices told me that things were not well with the old man. After Einar showed the doctor out, he turned to me and said that our trip would be delayed by a couple of days.

“My father-in-law needs to go to the hospital for some tests,” he said. “He'll be transported there tomorrow. I'd like to see how that goes before I take you out. I hope you don't mind.”

“If you want, I mean, considering the circumstances, I could find someone else to take me.”

Einar shook his head.

“I signed on to do this. It means a lot to Sigurdur that you're here. He thought highly of your grandfather. I'd like to do the job if I can.”

I nodded, but really I wished he would pass the assignment on to someone else. What did it matter who took me to the interior so long as I did what my grandfather had asked me to do? And the sooner I did that, the sooner I could say goodbye to Brynja and her attitude.

“Let me see how things are after we get the test results,” Einar said. “Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” I said.

I couldn't get to sleep. I kept thinking about the old man, the journal with its sketches, and what the old man had wanted to show me. About my grandfather, too, and his journal, and the letter he'd left for me. In it, he'd written that he'd always suspected that Sigurdur knew something about the woman who had saved him, but that he was uncomfortable when the subject was raised. But now, here Sigurdur was talking about something bad that had happened. Talking about too many secrets too. He wanted to get at least one of them off his chest. He wanted to tell the one person he thought he could trust. The only trouble was, that person was dead.

I didn't know about my grandfather David McLean until after my mother died. It happened one night, maybe two weeks after the funeral, after all Mom's friends had stopped coming over all the time with food, after the whirl of decisions to be made about the funeral and the service and the burial site, after the Major's relatives (who had adored my mother) had all returned to Quebec, and after Grandma Mel, as stricken as the Major, had boarded a plane and flown back to Vancouver. It was a quiet night, with not a sound in the house because the Major forbade television on school nights and didn't think a person could study with the radio on and had refused to get me the iPod I'd asked for at least a dozen times. I was sitting at the dining-room table staring blankly at my history book. He was in the living room, reading some reports. And the phone rang.

I answered.

I could tell by the voice at the other end that the caller was an old man. He wanted to know if he had reached the residence of Major André Charbonneau. The husband of Suzanne Timson Charbonneau. I had never heard my mother referred to that way, but Grandma Mel's last name was Timson, so I said yes. Then he wanted to know to whom he had the pleasure of speaking.

I was just about to tell him to buzz off—I figured him for some kind of salesman—when the Major grabbed the phone from me and told me to get back to work.

My pleasure.

The Major talked—well, mostly listened—for a few minutes. He said he couldn't make any promises. He said he had to absorb what he'd just been told. He hung up the phone and sat down on the sofa again but didn't pick up his newspaper.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“He says he's your grandfather.”

I laughed. “Pull the other one. I know
Grandpère
's voice when I hear it.” One big clue: Grandpère Pierre always spoke French.

“He says he's your mother's father,” the Major said. He got up again, picked up the phone and dialed. A moment later I heard him say, “Mel?”

Secrets.

Secrets come out sooner or later. Like when Grandma Mel flew back a few weeks later to talk to the Major and me in person about when she was young and working in an art gallery while she finished her dissertation. In came a handsome (according to her) young (according to her) widower with four daughters and a keen interest in art. They chatted. They clicked. He invited her for coffee, which turned into the longest cup of coffee she ever had. They fell in love. Deeply in love. He started to talk about marriage. Then she got a job offer—in France. He didn't want to move his daughters so far away when their lives were so settled. Besides, he told her, there were plenty of job opportunities here.

“I hadn't even met the daughters yet,” Grandma Mel said. “Frankly, the notion scared me. It wouldn't be just David and me. It would be David and me and four girls, some of them already young women. I took the job and that was the end of it.”

Except for one small thing that turned out to be my mother.

“I never told him,” Grandma Mel said. “It would just have complicated things.”

It did anyway, because the death notice that the Major had placed in the national newspaper had given my mother's age and named her mother. David McLean had seen it. He'd figured it out. And now I had a grandfather—one who wanted to make the acquaintance of the grandson he never knew he had, the son of the daughter he never knew he had until it was too late.

“Sorry, Grandma Mel,” I said. “Not interested.”

“Sorry, Melanie,” the Major said. “If the boy isn't interested,
que'est-ce que je peux faire?
What can I do?”

End of story?

No way.

I started getting into trouble. It was small stuff at first—skipping school, blowing off homework, smart-mouthing teachers. From there it went to explosions of rage, mostly taken out in fights with other guys, which I usually got suspended for. That only gave me more time to get into trouble. I started breaking into people's houses—I don't even know why. I did it maybe half a dozen times before I got caught. The Major blew a gasket. And I ran. Where to? To the grandfather I never knew I had and who—let's face it—I'd been curious about.

It turned out I liked my grandfather a lot. He was superold, his body was slow, but his mind was as sharp as a tack. I hung out with him for a month before the Major came and dragged me back to, as he put it, “meet the music.” And that's how I ended up with Worm, Boot, Capone, Jimi and good old Gerard.

I thumbed through the journal again and made a second attempt to read the faded letter tucked into it. I glanced at my watch and wondered if it was too late to make a phone call. I dug out the phone number the Major had given me and made it anyway.