The Cuckoo's Child (30 page)

“What made Jerry snatch another child after so many years, do they know?”

Neil's snort of laughter was humourless.

“Daniel got too big,” he said grimly. “Time for him to go to work. Bastard wanted a new puppy.”

I felt a surge of admiration for my son. Anger has its upside whatever the motive, I guess, and lucky for that other small victim that it does. But a little door slid shut in my mind as I contemplated the hell that living on that boat must have been, the dependencies and needs confined below deck like a cage full of alligators, hemmed all about by the indifferent sea. How do you recover from that? Or ever come to see it, after so many years, as the aberration, not the norm? Come to that, how normal would the replacement be? He might be our son, but it would be living with strangers again for Daniel, and trust had done nothing for him in life. The infant cuckoo never recognizes its parents, nor seeks them out to join its life to theirs.

I forgot about Magnus and my grandmother in the turmoil. So I was shamefaced when my uncle phoned, and his weary voice told me that the old lady had died. She had suffered a massive stroke, he said, the medical jargon awkward and unaccustomed in his mouth, and never regained consciousness. He had waited at the hospital until she died in the small hours of the morning. He apologized for not calling sooner.

“Had to get a bit of shuteye,” he said, “and then there's the arrangements, of course.”

Before he asked me to come to the funeral and I had to refuse, I hurriedly told him what had happened. He listened to the whole story without interruption. There was a weighty pause as I came to a halt. Then, “Life is powerful strange,” he said slowly.

“Powerful,” I replied, “and strange.”

“One taken,” he went on, “and one returned. There's a righteousness to that, wouldn't you say?”

“I would.”

“You'll be off then, back to Canada soon as possible?”

He was making it easy for me.

“Yes. This will have to be goodbye. I'm leaving tomorrow morning.”

“Well, don't forget us. There's a place for you here, you know . . .”

His voice trailed off, but I could have finished for him: especially now that my grandmother had gone.

“I know,” I agreed quickly, “I'll be back. I want you to teach me how to graft trees. I'll bring Neil and Daniel next time. Maybe it would be good for Daniel—new and beautiful. Neutral ground.”

“Ah. And there's another thing. When you can, I want you to send me the name, all the details, of that little mite who's buried with your mother. It's about time to put that right, and there's no better time than now. I'll have to be talking to old Walter about Mother's stone anyway, and he might as well do two as one.”

“I think that would make Mum and Dad happy,” I said, “and I won't be sorry to see the back of Rue Tribulation!”

The conversation ended as they always do. I felt sorry for Magnus, left alone after all the stalwart years of looking after his terrible mother, but at the same time I sensed the liberation he had to be feeling.

This was confirmed when I called Deirdre to say goodbye.

“Don't you go feeling sorry for him,” she said firmly. “Best thing that ever happened to him, I reckon. I'm going up for the funeral. I'll get some flowers from the two of us, shall I? Put your name on the card? He'll like that. He's agreed to come and stay here a while after the ceremony. Says he hasn't had a holiday in years and the seaside'll do him good. So we'll be fine.”

There was indeed a new briskness about Deirdre. She sounded competent and sure of herself, younger by far than the first time I'd met her. I asked after the cats.

“Well,” she said, “they're fine. I keep them to the ground floor now, and it's much better. I'll hang on to them, but there'll be no replacements as they die off. They're a real tie. I'd like to travel a bit. Maybe I'll come and visit you some day. Now I've got new cousins, I can't let you all disappear again!”

She had been typically bowled over by the fairytale aspects of Daniel's reappearance, but the new Deirdre emerged in her final question.

“Know something about anger management, do you?”

“Not much,” I admitted.

“Then you'd better find out,” she said. “If I were Daniel, I'd be madder'n hell.”

The three ladies were similarly sober. They were wonderful, of course, rallying to help me get a flight and pack and make my way to the airport. All three were overjoyed when they heard my news; Miss Plover's “Splendid!” kept erupting from her lips like buckshot. But when the euphoria passed, they, too, warned me that the way ahead might not be easy.

“So damaged,” lamented Miss Plover. “You will need so much patience.”

“Sixteen too,” said Miss Hoar. “Rotten age, that. You'll have your work cut out.”

And Isobel added wistfully, “You won't forget to let us know how you get on, will you? You're almost family to us now, you know.”

So I left on one mission, and I returned to another, and my pattern-loving mind scrambled to find the connections. I was conscious of others on the move at the same time as me, all of us homing in on a single point, for a single purpose, the separate threads weaving together to make the cloth. Up there, with the North Shore Mountains clawing at us as we rocked over them through the thunderheads, and the whole city of Vancouver spreading itself out beneath us as far as the sea, gleaming like beaten gold in the distance, the notion did not seem fanciful.

I felt Neil waiting for me in the airport, tall, blond, dependable, and I remembered exactly how my son's hair swirls untidily from a double crown, just like his father's. I sensed Mum's and Dad's cautious progress along the Yellowhead to Prince George, where they would turn south toward Sechelt and the stranger they would call their grandson. I knew exactly how you and Holly were arranging your lives so that you could leave everything for a few days and come to us with Jason and Vanessa, both dying to meet the person Vanessa had begun to call “our long-lost cousin.”

All of us converging on a single point that was not yet visible, but coming, coming.

None of it was like that at all. What was I thinking? That we'd all converge in slow motion, running through fields of wild flowers while the music swells, and fall into a loving group hug as the credits roll?

Neil was the only one there to meet me. We clutched and clung to each other, both talking at once, my “Where is he? Where is he?” warring with Neil's “No, no, not yet, not here.”

I should have realized. The Americans weren't just going to ship Daniel back to us like lost baggage. He was a material witness in a kidnapping case, and one with a bizarre story they couldn't accept on face value without investigation, even if he was just sixteen and a victim of a similar crime himself.

Neil towed me to the gloomy coffee shop in the Arrivals area and told me all this, holding my hands on the tabletop between us as if to pin me down, stop me flying off on another wild search.

“We'll go down there,” he said. “We'll see him soon. We'll get him home the minute they let us.”

His pale eyes were so earnest, his voice so sure, I was soothed despite the disappointment. We made our way home, talking, but lapsing often into contemplation, breaking the companionable silence from time to time as one of us allowed a thought out and the other instantly picked it up, almost as if we were pursuing the same conversation inwardly all the time.

I pushed open the front door almost tentatively, but at once the familiar smell reached out to me and I went from room to room in a haze of delight, touching, fingering, straightening, stroking, gazing at the sea through the kitchen window as Maisie twined about my legs, purring thunderously.

“By the way,” said Neil at some point, “how did the meeting with the Holy Terror go?”

For a moment I stared at him blankly. Already, that world had receded, and events that had filled my waking hours such a short time before, had dwindled.

“It was a lot more than I bargained for,” I said.

There was a silence after I re-enacted that scene for him, and then he said, “Well, you don't get to choose your family, do you?”

“Some manage to!”

“You think that's what Jerry was doing?”

“Jerry? Of course not!”

But even as I denied it, I wasn't sure.

I'd been thinking of Mum and Dad lifting me out of the ruined doorway, and Neil's question shocked me. I could barely think of Jerry without loathing. When I spoke his name, the foulness of it flooded my mouth until I spat out the bitterness. Not for a minute had I considered his motives, just their result. And I didn't want to see Jerry now as a man without family stealing one for himself because that would make him pathetic and I wouldn't allow him that escape. What if it were true, though?

If I ever thought getting to see Daniel would be easy, I was soon disabused. At times it seemed as if a veritable army stood in our way: police, lawyers, social workers, immigration officials on both sides of the border, state functionaries of one kind or another demanding birth certificates and police reports, proofs of identity, medical histories, sheets and sheets of forms, affidavits, notarized this and that, and all with an insatiable need to hear our story over and over again.

Neil was good at patiently countering every demand. I was more inclined to shout and cry with frustration. That is, until the day we talked to the court-appointed social worker looking after Daniel, a weary-looking individual with a bloodhound's face, who urged us to call him Preston. He infuriated me by referring to Daniel as Jimmy even when I protested.

“That's what he calls himself, you know,” he said reproachfully. “Just one of the little adjustments you'll have to make together.”

I exploded.

“And how are we ever to do that if we never get a chance to meet? We want to see our son! Now!”

Preston gazed at me mournfully.

“I know,” he said, “but we have to be sure Jimmy wants to meet you first.”

It was a shock. Neil felt it too. I heard him gasp.

“Of course he will,” I blustered. “Why wouldn't he?”

But I knew. He hadn't seen us for twelve years. We were strangers, and strangers he'd been convinced had turned their backs on him once at the time he needed them most, who had apparently broken their promise to come for him, who had abandoned him to the only alternative left. If he had survived, it was through his own resources, not through any guidance or assistance from us. Even if he no longer believed everything he had been told, we had been no part of his life for those critical years. What sort of weight should he give to these strangers who called themselves parents, whose values and personalities and experiences were unknowns, who might have nothing in common with him except shared chromosomes?

So I think we all approached our first meeting, on carefully chosen neutral ground, with trepidation. And it was awkward, at first. We were ushered into a small meeting room, the walls painted pale green and hung with soothing seascapes. We sat on chairs that contrived to look relaxed and institutional at the same time. After a while Preston came in and held the door for someone behind him, making encouraging noises as a lanky figure edged hesitantly into view. We both stood up.

“Daniel!” I said and instantly cursed myself. “Can I call you that? Do you mind?”

“I guess not,” he mumbled. “They say it's my real name. But it's weird.”

“We'll use whichever name you prefer,” Neil said, “but we've thought of you every day for sixteen years as Daniel.”

For the first time, he looked directly at us.

“You did?”

“Oh we did, every day, we missed you so!”

His face closed up and he stared off at a painting of sandpipers running at the edge of the waves.

“I don't remember you,” he said. “I forgot you.”

“Of course you did,” said Neil. “I can't remember a thing from when I was four or five either. I just know the things my parents told me about that time.”

I took my cue.

“We've brought our old photo album. Would you like to look at some photos of yourself when you were a little kid?”

Daniel edged slowly toward the table, where I was spreading the album, moving almost in spite of himself. Neil leaned over and started explaining the photographs, and I watched them both. Nobody could have any doubt that Daniel was Neil's son. I was sure that Neil at sixteen was exactly the same rail-thin six-footer with feet, nose, and shoulders he had yet to grow into. They had the same fine blond Nordic hair, though Daniel's was badly cut and unkempt, the same long head, delicate ear lobes, the same cool blue eyes. The same refined and elegant fingers—though again, Daniel's fingernails were chewed to the quick—pointed at the photos and turned the pages. I wanted to squeeze them both, but despite Daniel's growing animation and response to Neil, I sensed he wasn't ready for any smothering from me.

That first meeting paved the way for increased contact, for gradual acceptance. By the time Jerry's first hearing came around, we were constant companions and were able to sit with our son in court. It was the first time Daniel had seen Jerry since he'd left the boat; the first time we'd seen him in twelve years. I don't know who was the most apprehensive. I could feel Daniel thrumming like a taut wire beside me. His right knee kept up a frantic jigging that made the floorboards throb in sympathy. When I curled my hand round his, he didn't snatch it away.

Jerry's entrance was almost bathetic. Without any fanfare, two officers appeared on either side of a small figure in an orange jumpsuit. The years had not dealt kindly with Jerry. His face was lined and seamed, the skin a dark saltwater brown. The glossy black curly hair had greyed, and a pale spot like a tonsure showed where it had thinned at the crown. He had developed a little paunch. The jumpsuit he was wearing was too big; it bagged over his wrists and drooped at his heels. This, combined with the awkward shuffle imposed by the shackles he wore made him look shabby and impotent. He kept his eyes firmly on the ground.