The Cuckoo's Child

“Thompson has a wonderful eye for details.” —
Ottawa Citizen

“Lush yet charming prose.” —
January Magazine

“There is nothing mundane about her prose. On the contrary, it's a delight to read.” —
Georgia Straight

“Her characters are so vital that the pages almost have a pulse.” —
Prince George Free Press

“Memorable . . . Thompson finds an integrity even in these forlorn places that exist.” —
The Goose

“Poignant.” —
Writers' Choice Reviews

“Thompson's descriptions . . . are reminiscent of the writings of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon
).” —
Animal Literature

“Heartwarming and relatable. The [stories] will make you laugh and cry.” —
Ladysmith Chronicle

“Thompson's writing is charming and insightful.” —Robert Bateman

“Thompson writes with eloquence and authority, making this book a joy to read.” —Cora Taylor

“The strength of Thompson's writing is its ability to embody that endless commentary in the mind that in some way defines personality.” —Ross Leckie

Every night watchman must find a way to fill the darkness, Stephen, and I am no exception. The monitors beside your bed spell out their hidden story in green light: blips and digits and spiked lines that tell everything and nothing, certainly not what it feels like to be dying. I, too, have a tale to tell. It has been a long time in the making, so many sinkholes and rockfalls fouling the way that any sort of happy ending seemed illusory at best. And just when there could be better times to share, you are slipping away, out of my reach.

The room is very quiet. I think you're sleeping, but perhaps you're even further away than that. I can't tell. Your face is closed off, almost stern, and quite calm. If I lay my head beside yours on the pillow, like this, will you hear how much I want to talk to you, want to listen to your voice telling me that everything is unfolding as it should? Will I pick up your whisper, like I used to do when we went camping years ago, that breathy, insistent “Sis, Sis, you awake?” in the smelly blackness of the tent, and know that you're my brother still, in the only sense that matters, and nothing can take that away, no matter what.

It's a relief to rest my head. It's too heavy, too full. I'm tired of sitting up as if I'm in command of myself, being calm. Soothing. Worrying about Holly and the kids. Mum and Dad. (Did you notice that? That little hesitation? The familiar even now feels awkward, ever so slightly false.) Neil saw—of course—how much I needed to be left to myself and you for a while. He's persuaded them to go for a meal and a few hours' much-needed sleep in their own beds.

“Do you good,” he said to them, “have a breath of air and a bite,” and when they hesitated, “You've got room for a hamburger, haven't you, Jason?” he asked our nephew.

The boy's nodding head gave the others permission, and they glanced at one another and stirred on the uncomfortable chairs round the bed where you lie, being remote.

“Livvy'll be here, won't you?” Neil said and got them all to their feet, shuffling through the door with apologetic glances as if they felt crass to long for escape, talk, food, all the things that would reaffirm their hold on life while you were so intent on letting it go.

Neil understands how exhausting a wait can be. Both of us, past masters at the art. This one, at least, will end soon. I think I knew it would, right from the start, when I first found out I could be no use to you. Did you realize, Stephen, just what you set in motion for me with that discovery? Will I have enough time to lay it all out, make it plain for you, before you cut the waiting short and go?

Where to start?

Maybe here? On a cold night at Thanksgiving, memorable for most because of a freakish rainstorm that congealed instantly on every power line, every traffic signal, every roof, every branch and twig until they tottered under the weight of ice, I discovered I had no idea who I was.

That sounds so melodramatic! Yet it was true, and no words could possibly convey the panic as the bedrock of my life fell away beneath my feet and I gazed on everything familiar as a stranger.

I wanted to look in the mirror to see if I had changed as much as I felt I must have, but of course, the revelation changed nothing about me at all. Friends would still have expected a response if they called me Livvy and invited me to lunch. Neil would not have stared at me, bewildered, and wondered where the person he thought usually dished up the spaghetti or dented the pillow next to his had gone. My students, too, despite their almost feral capacity for sensing weakness, like dogs smelling fear, would have noticed nothing worth paying attention to, just the old bag stewing over something, no big deal. Rita and Molly at the post office would have gone on stuffing mail addressed to Mrs. Olivia Alvarsson into our mailbox with every expectation that I would turn up with the appropriate key and remove it.

My question had been simple enough. All it needed was an equally simple answer, yet Dad would not meet my gaze and shifted from side to side as if his chair had suddenly become uncomfortably warm. He cleared his throat, ran a finger over his moustache as if to assure himself it was still there, looking just like Dr. Crippen, another meek little man hiding secrets.

Rage flooded my head, red hot. How like him to squirm and temporize! I wanted to pin him down, nail him, stop his wriggling, in spite of the pleading in Mum's eyes and the concern in yours. So I persisted and forced an answer.

“Ah, well, mmm,” he ventured. “You
could
say that. In a manner of speaking.”

And as I stared at him, dumbfounded, the lights dimmed and surged twice, then went out altogether. And while Dad seized the chance of escape and delay, fetching propane lamps and candles and a tiny camping stove from the basement, I sat, extinguished, plunged into a darkness as absolute and chilly as any experienced that night under the remorseless accumulation of ice.

But knowing what I know now, Stephen, and haven't had the chance to discuss with you, maybe the beginning lies much further back. Maybe the dream isn't just a dream but a fragment of the start of things, just a glimpse of one of the bottom layers of the palimpsest.
In a manner of speaking.
For as long as I can remember, it has insinuated itself into my sleep, sometimes uncoiling like a film, which almost has a storyline, but more often like a collage, disjointed images drifting past.

I hover above a moonlit path. In the strange blue light that leaches away all colour, the path wavers across a garden. To my left, tall flowers with huge round faces, open as clocks, and wiry vines, covered with motionless butterflies. To the right, plants are lower and line up neatly. There is a feathery row and a mounded grave for a long, long man.

I know all this without knowing, just as I follow the path without walking, drifting like smoke toward the garden's end. A no man's land. Then, trees. I swim through the moonlight until a piercing cry squeezes my heart into my throat. Again it sounds—“Help! Help!”—somewhere above my head, and a luminous bird wearing a crown and a bridal veil watches me intently from the branch of a tree with smooth ghostly bark. Then it swells and shivers and vanishes.

A single white feather drifts to the ground, but it is in my hand too, like a wand.

I have no sense of destination, but I know that I am approaching the place. The way is steep now; tree roots snake across it like veins on the backs of old hands and jolt me off course.

And there it is: a tiny house against the sky. No walls. A lake below. No sound, except for lonely night noises. There I wait, for this is a waiting place. When it comes, this anticipated thing, it will be at once foreseen and unlikely. A rescue, perhaps. Or a portent. I wait for the wonderful to appear, anchored there in the possibility, but it fails me, always. I wake disappointed, every time.

But one day, I know, the waiting must come to an end.

Now that was a red herring. If I'm that easy to distract, how will I ever make sense of everything? I can just hear Neil. “I thought this was a story,” he's muttering. “Why don't you just plunge in?”

That would be rich coming from him, though. Neil is an artist, after all, quite used to false starts. If I close my eyes, I can see the hut at the bottom of our garden. It's just an old storage shed, really, but a bit of plumbing and carpentry and it turned into a studio. He spends a lot of time in there alone, working. Making image after image. Realistic yet not. Beautiful but disturbing.

Over the years Neil has moulded his studio to his own requirements, much as an animal will press its bedding to its own comfortable shape and construct its private place with its own unmistakable scent. Neil has much of Badger about him, such an old bachelor fug, such a rumbling reclusiveness at times—and Lord knows, that's easy enough to explain—that our marriage seems incongruous even to us at times and downright unlikely to our friends. Yet it has the ease of a favourite old sweater with just enough rasp to the wool that you don't forget you're wearing it. Whatever else, it's not boring. Neil is too honest.

I can remember my first encounter with his directness. I was still a student at the University of British Columbia, working hard at a
BSc
. Remember how baffled Mum and Dad were about that? They wanted me to get a nice job in a bank or an insurance firm—something safe—and anonymous too, now that I come to think about it. I wanted to be a biologist. I wanted to be Rachel Carson. I wanted to be Charles Darwin. What I became, of course, is a high school teacher, but the glow of that passion has never quite faded.

Neil, on the other hand, was already an artist. Another student, a nice, dull fellow in my genetics class, introduced us in a casual encounter on Robson Street, just outside the old law courts.

“Livvy,” he said, “meet Neil Alvarsson. He's an artist,” tossing the word like a live grenade into my Peter Pan–collared life. First impression of this explosive device? It was housed in a rangy body that stooped a little, as if it were trying to accommodate itself to a world just slightly too small. A long, narrow head, crowned with straight blond hair, and very pale blue eyes that bored fiercely into everything, like a hungry eagle. His grip as we shook hands was dry and abrupt. I could feel the bumps of his finger joints. The nail on the index finger of his right hand was coated in yellow paint. He was wearing black—black turtleneck sweater, black jeans ragged at the hem where they scuffed the ground, a black jacket long since divorced from the rest of the suit. He had no socks.