The Hour of Bad Decisions (18 page)

You'd eat a candy from the dish at his place at your own peril: they could as easily have been put out a year ago as last week. Things would be on the floor that he'd dropped and hadn't seen. Before we'd agreed
that candles might not be such a good idea, I'd occasionally come in and gather up small handfuls – like pick-up-sticks – of lost strike-anywhere matches.

But this time, the mess was different. Somehow, it looked more involved, more thorough.

Like any house, there were drawers that might not be opened for a full year: the box with the silver, for example, and the cupboard holding what had been my mother's tea set. But everything seemed to have been opened and then carelessly closed again.

The small kitchen was filthy, the garbage over-flowing, dirty dishes piled in the sink. Every piece of cutlery seemed to be dirty; some of it was crusted and even mouldy. I was beginning to get really angry: it wasn't supposed to be like this.

The worst was the spare room.

The television I'd gotten for him a couple of Christmases ago was set up in the spare room, sitting on top of a slim silver dvd player I'd never seen before. There were dirty plates on the floor, and a plastic dvd box – porno – next to the light. The bed was unmade, the covers thrown back. The dresser drawers weren't quite closed, as if they'd been emptied and no one had cared to push them fully shut. Someone had been living there, that was obvious – but it looked like they weren't living there any more.

I'd been paying for home care, an arm and a leg really, and I tried call to the agency from the phone in the apartment. The phone wasn't working, so I made the call on my cell. They told me their file had been closed four weeks earlier – that Frank Otanski
had called and said there wasn't any need anymore, that a family friend had taken over.

Well, I'm Frank Otanski, I said, and I hadn't called anyone.

“The last bill was paid off on Mr. Otanski's visa card,” I was told primly, including the $100 penalty for dropping the service before month-end.

I sat on Dad's couch for a few moments, dazed, looking at the dusty pictures of my brother and me. Stephen, who had done science in university, who even now was banding scared and puking seabirds on some desolate strip of sand off the Nova Scotia coast.

Just like Stephen to leave it all here in my hands. Sure, Dad thought the world of Stephen, but that didn't mean Stephen actually did anything. I managed Dad's affairs, paid the condo fees and the home care fees, paid to have Dad taken to the doctor and the dentist. I did the work, and Stephen would fly in for a few days every four or five months like the lost sheep, and you'd think Dad's face was going to split, he was so happy. After a couple of days, Stephen would be gone again, and it would still all be on my shoulders.

Looking around the room, I suddenly realized what was different about it. It looked looted.

There was a space on the wall where there had been one small picture – a watercolour my father had bought my mother in an uncharacteristically romantic moment, a watercolour that had actually wound up being worth a few thousand dollars.

My father had pulled on his beard and smiled when it had turned out to be valuable. Proof to him,
I guess, that the rigours of science could be used to winkle out the answers to art as well. But it was gone, and so was the silver. Yes, family silver. Sounds trite these days, but it had been a full set of sterling silver, with stylized “Os” on the end of each piece – all of it in a rosewood box, set down in deep green velvet trenches. Murder to keep clean, probably black with disuse, but silver.

Every room was the same: just the valuable stuff was gone. Watch and cuf flinks in the bedroom, chequebook and stamp collection. Candlesticks and coins and the healthy wad of cash that he kept under the head of his mattress, and could never be talked into putting in the bank. And something else – the shoes. The brogues, I mean. They were gone too – I should have noticed right away. They were always in the same place, just inside the door on a rubber tray. The tray looked bare without them. You had to know those shoes – Dad had spent good money on them, once, and they were one of his favourite lessons. Friday nights, he'd polish them with a brush and then buff them with a soft cloth, and the leather would come up as bright as glass. He'd had them resoled many times, and the tops were as soft and wrinkled as the skin at the corners of his eyes.

“Size twelves. You can tell quality,” he would say, holding up one shoe. I'd never gotten much past size nines myself – my father was over six feet tall, and I was a good six inches shorter.

“Get quality, and it will last.” Yeah, he'd say that, and with the next breath, it would be that the world
was going to hell in a handbasket and nobody knew how to make anything good anymore.

But they were gone – and who the heck would take an old man's shoes?

One thing was for sure – everything else of value was gone. And whoever had taken it had plenty of time to sort out what was worth taking, and what wasn't.

Looking around, it was obvious that whoever it was had to have been seen by someone else in the building. But talking to the neighbours didn't turn out to be much help.

There was Mrs. Hennessey, who wouldn't take the chain off the door when she talked to me. I could see her nose and one of her eyes through the gap between the door and frame, and a slice – just one side – of her mouth.

“He liked Terry,” Mrs. Hennessey said. Terry, who had arrived “a month or so ago,” and had started helping Dad by moving some things from the condo down to the basement storage room. Terry, who had moved into the condo, Terry who had his own key.

Terry, who I had never even heard of.

No, Mrs. Hennessey said. She didn't know Terry's last name.

Down in the storage room, all of Dad's suitcases were gone. They hadn't been moved in years – I could see those brown suitcases so clearly in memory that I could imagine that there were marks on the dusty floor where they had been standing. I didn't know where the cases could be – but I was sure that Terry did.

Waiting for the superintendent to come down to his office, I thought about seeing my father in the hospital. It was hard to think of Dad like that, huddled and small there under the blankets. Not that he had been a big man physically, but he'd been big in a room, a presence, and he had been big enough, too, to push back out of the comfortable cocoon of professional science when my mother had died unexpectedly, big enough to be both parents to my brother and me.

I'd known the superintendent ever since Dad had moved in. His name was Ken, and I think I would have remembered that even if I hadn't been able to read it on his shirt. Ken brought a set of faucets with him into the office, struggling to pry the disk with the letter “c” off the top of the cold water tap. Ken was a large, square, helpful man, with hands so big it was hard to imagine them packed in under a sink, emptying the coffee grounds out of some old lady's sink trap.

“Terry moved out Wednesday,” Ken said. “Nice guy. Handy with tools.”

After Mrs. Hennessey's reaction, I didn't want to be too direct.

“So, did he leave a new address?” I said. “Any place I can find him? I'd kind of like to get in touch.”

Sometimes people's hands freeze when something you say makes them suddenly think – it's like a curious, obvious silent alarm. I watched Ken's hands stop, the faucets forgotten.

“He was devoted to your dad,” Ken said, in a tone that sounded accusing. “Helped him with the shopping,
ran errands. Would even bring the mail up. Said that with your dad in the hospital, he'd be finishing up.”

“You knew my dad was in the hospital?”

“Yeah. Terry was taking care of that. Said he'd make sure you knew.”

Well, Terry didn't know my father had always hated hospitals, or that he hated them even more after my mother was admitted. I can remember watching my father swear in frustration while the eggs burned black in the frying pan in front of him as he tried to figure out the controls on the stove, and I can remember being late to school that day and many more. Men in his generation didn't ever have to cook, they moved straight from mother's embrace into the comfortable routine of marriage without even a pause – from coddled to cared-for without a step in between. But that didn't mean he couldn't learn.

Sure, he was lost at first: one day, Mom was there, and she could make home-made soup even though she was fading away so fast it was like she was making it out of herself. Standing there by the stove, wreathed in steam, her legs shaking. That's how I remember it – one day, she was cutting a whole chicken apart for dinner, breaking the joints backwards – and the next her own joints looked like the chicken's, knuckled out and bony, covered loosely with chicken skin. And then, just like that, she was gone. Not quite what a tenured professor usually expects, especially not my father.

“Said he'd come back to pick up any mail,” Ken said.

“What?” I said, distracted.

“Terry. He said he'd come back now and then to see if there was any mail.”

Would he, now? I'd be willing to wait and see. I looked on the key ring, and the mailbox key was still there, shiny and long – security keys, not the kind you can just get cut anywhere. Terry wouldn't be able to get the mail himself. He'd have to come to the superintendent – or to me.

Ken was watching me, his mouth turned down a bit at the corners.

“Mail comes around ten,” Ken said. “Terry liked to be there when the mailman came. That's your best bet.” When Ken turned back to the faucets, when his hands started to move again, I couldn't help but feel I had been dismissed.

After my mother died, my father could have hired help, could have had people in to look after us. Instead, he started to break a lot of rules, doing things that no one expected. Took Stephen with him to conferences in the States, took me at least once to Ottawa, where he talked to a Parliamentary committee about protecting seed varieties, while I chased pigeons in front of the House of Commons. We didn't think anything of it at the time. We weren't paying enough attention to realize that the other professors didn't bring their children to the departmental beer socials, or that we were invariably the only kids at get-togethers where the highlights were potluck suppers and the tweed jackets and the tie-dyed shirts all getting sopping drunk together on cheap Yugoslavian red wine.

He must have paid a price for that. Academe at that time had its own rules, and I know there were plenty of late nights where Stephen and I were the only kids toppling forward asleep into our dessert plates. Five, maybe ten years later, it would have been a lot different. By then, perhaps, it might have seemed almost normal. Ten years later, the rules were out the window, and plant scientists were doing crossover work with Mexican philosophers, and anything seemed possible and reasonable. Hard to imagine with the way things are now, but Dad must have been quite determined.

Every day, I tried to be at the apartment as close to ten as I could – and sure enough, three or four days later, there were a couple of letters addressed to Terry Traves, with my father's address on the envelope. Three on the first day alone, and I opened them all with hardly a pang – they were answers to a personal ad, all women. One with a picture: a dark-haired woman, pretty, looking half-on towards the camera with what was apparently meant to be an eager look. I threw it out – what I wanted was the picture he would have sent back to her. “Hi, I'm Terry. I'm single, white, and I like cold beer and making my living stealing from helpless senior citizens.”

Bastard.

But that first day, there was no Terry Traves. The second day, there was a mailout from his parole officer, changing the date of his next appointment. Three or four days in, right on ten, a little guy came in, brown leather jacket and slicked-back hair, and I
was out through the door and grabbing his sleeve, my other hand a first, before he could even take the mailbox keys out of his pocket – but it was the wrong guy.

I hadn't even seen the pest control van until he started pointing at it.

Then, a few days later, a cheque came in the mail from a second-hand consignment furniture store – a big cheque. I realized then that I hadn't even noticed the long table in the living room had disappeared.

I could remember that table from before my mother had died. It was supposed to be left to me in the end, a teak table with ivory inlay around the edge. You couldn't even buy anything like that now, could-n't even bring it into the country because of the ivory. That's when I called the police.

The police didn't impress me any more than the emergency room had.

An hour and a half in yet another plastic chair, waiting for a Sergeant Parsons to tell me he knew just who Terry Traves was, but that he wasn't sure just what kind of crime – if any – had been committed.

“See, if your father gave him the stuff – or told him he could take it – then there's not a lot we can do,” Parsons said. “He's an old man, sure, but it's not like you've got power of attorney or anything. He can do pretty much anything he likes.”

Parsons was a big man, in rumpled white shirt. He was sweating. I knew why – like the hospital, it seemed like the heat just wouldn't stop. The whole place was a dump, overcrowded with too many old
metal desks and wire baskets full of dog-eared paper and file folders.

“We'll interview your Dad, get his take on it.”

“Well, that'll be a bit difficult,” I said curtly. I know I was past rude by then, but I was completely frustrated. “He's had a stroke. He's not talking at all.”

“Can he write? Is he expected to get any better?” Sergeant Parsons asked me.

“I don't know. I suppose he might.”

“Then we wait. Check his bank accounts and change the locks, and we'll go from there.”