Chapter 23
The kids tore toward the beat-up wooden play structure; Bella made a beeline to the swings, while Charlie circled the structure and waved back to Izzy before climbing a ladder to the slide. Izzy smiled at the sight of her niece and nephew—all gangly limbs and excited shouts—lost in play. It was a warm early June day, and the park was busy with parents and kids taking in late-afternoon sunshine before putting the weekend to bed.
Izzy had picked the kids up from playdates, and the stop at the park was a small detour on the way home. She texted Sarah to let her know, reasoning her sister could use a little time to herself after everything Rob Boychuk had just told them. A secret family, a mystery bank account, and now to hear her husband is likely dead. It was a lot to process. The more Matthew’s story unwound, the more it seemed like Sarah was trapped in the pages of an airport paperback. What’s next, Izzy thought, mob bosses and murder?
“Watch me, Auntie Izzy! Watch me!” Bella called out, before stepping off a platform to hang from monkey bars. Izzy’s heart ached for the new world the kids would grow up in; their lives split by the before and after of their father’s disappearance.
It had been eight months since the canoe trip. For the first little while, the kids had asked about Matthew daily. Where was Daddy? When was he coming home? Can we go see him? Over time, the questions diluted in a sea of homework, gymnastics classes, and regular routine. Still, they carried a quiet sadness in them; Izzy wondered how deep it went and how it would affect their futures.
“The slide,” Bella yelled.
“Me first. Me first,” Charlie shouted.
Well, at least they had each other, Izzy thought ruefully.
Though she would never admit it to Sarah, Izzy hadn’t been completely shocked when the truth about Matthew came out. Certainly, none of it clashed with her impression of her brother-in-law. She had never been able to shake the idea that Matthew was someone other than the man he presented to the world. She could never have imagined the extent of his lies and cowardice, but in some ways, it felt like a missing piece had finally been forced into place.
Izzy made her way to a small bench within sight of the playground, joining a flock of parents hovering along the edges. She smiled at them but kept her distance. She was a stand-in parent at best and not really at home with the talk of good piano teachers and cures for eczema. Sarah seemed to be doing okay now, so Izzy would leave that stuff to her; but no matter what, she was always going to be there for her sister, even if Sarah didn’t know it.
After her first meeting with Matthew on that long-ago winter night, Izzy had kept an eye on him. She’d returned to Toronto and followed up her suspicions with an internet search and discreet inquiries. Matthew Anderson had no social media presence—not even a Facebook or Myspace account—though that was hardly surprising in 2007. His name did appear in a few Google search results, but Izzy had no way of confirming whether the name matched the man she’d met. She even went so far as to call the University of British Columbia to confirm he’d graduated from there, and Matthew Anderson had indeed been a student there. And yet something still didn’t sit right with her about the Matt Anderson she’d met. She never dreamed he was not using his actual name. Over the years, there seemed little basis to her suspicions. But she continued to watch, even though her overt distrust had repeatedly offended Sarah and built a wall between the sisters. In the end, she decided to watch from a distance. Until Sarah had called to tell her Matthew was missing.
Izzy’s decision to move to Ottawa in January had been spontaneous, but she didn’t regret it. “So, before you argue or protest, you should know, it’s done,” she had told Sarah just before Christmas. “I take possession next month.”
“What are you talking about, Izzy?”
Izzy hadn’t shared her plans, knowing Sarah would only try to stop her. “I’m moving to Ottawa.”
“Izzy, you can’t. You have a life in Toronto. You have the gallery, your career, your friends.”
“And I will continue to have all of that. I’m keeping the condo. I may rent it out as a vacation property when I don’t need it, but it’ll be there for me when I want it. I’ll commute to Toronto once or twice a month, make sure the gallery is still standing, attend some lavish fundraising function, hold the hands of a few artists, but you need consistent help, Sarah, and I can’t give that to you from Toronto.”
“I can’t let you do this.”
“You’re not letting me do anything, baby sister. You’re not the boss of me. You don’t have any say in this. It’s my decision, and it’s done.”
Sarah’s silence was telling. The old Sarah would have tried to talk Izzy out of it, in her quiet but serious way. This newer version of her sister—lost in a stranger-than-fiction drama—had nodded her assent, her expression unreadable.
Izzy leaned against the bench and tilted her face toward the sky, eyes closed. Her muscles relaxed under the warmth of the sun; all that money on massages and spa treatments when all she needed was a sunny day and a west-facing bench. She chuckled at the thought just as a shadow blocked the sun. Izzy opened her eyes to see a short woman with black curls and a polite smile standing in front of her. Her movements were clipped, like one of the birds darting around the park.
“Excuse me. Your daughter is crying,” the woman said.
Izzy looked beyond her to where Charlie and Bella had been digging in the sand with a now-discarded shovel and bucket. Both were gone.
“What do you mean?” Izzy said.
“Over there.” The woman pointed to the edge of the play area. “I think she got into a fight or something. She started crying and ran toward the trees.”
Izzy stood and marched toward Bella with a mumbled thanks to the stranger. In the last eight months, Izzy had not seen Bella cry. Not when she’d fallen off her bike or when, helplessly overtired, she’d screamed at her mother for not letting her stay up to watch a movie.
“Hey, Bella, what’s up?” Izzy kept a calm exterior and sunk to crossed legs on the grass.
Charlie, the familiar expression of worry on his face, sat at Bella’s other side.
Bella was sobbing—a full-on, staccato-breathed, runny-nosed kind of sob. Speech was clearly beyond her. Izzy had no idea what to do or what to say. She rubbed Bella’s back and whispered to her.
“Shhhh, just breathe. Deep breath in, deep breath out. That’s it. Just breathe.”
Charlie rested a tentative hand on Bella’s ankle.
“Charlie, do you know what happened?”
“She—she—she ... she bumped that boy, over there. On the slide. He was at the bottom, and Bella was super fast. And he didn’t move. So she bumped him. And he fell over.”
Izzy looked around the playground to a blond-headed boy wiping away spent tears with his father kneeling in front of him. The dad caught Izzy’s eye and offered the universal nod that she’d come to understand as all good between parents.
“Look, Bella. It’s fine. He’s fine. That little guy is with his dad. He’s not even crying anymore.”
“I hurt him. Now bad things are going to happen.”
“No, no, he’s fine! Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“I hurt Daddy,” Bella sobbed into her hands. “That’s why he’s gone.”
Izzy sat back on the bench, absorbing what Bella had just told her. Through tears, Bella told Izzy that Matthew had gotten angry with her for sneaking out of the tent. The girl blamed herself for his disappearance. Though Izzy knew it was the truth as Bella saw it, she didn’t know how to slot the information into the broader context. Whatever happened, she knew Matthew would not have left his family in the wilderness because his little girl angered him. There was more to the story. Izzy was puzzling it out when Sarah stepped through the gap in the chain-link fence, a sweater tied loosely around her waist and a small nylon cooler bag over her shoulder. She waved with both hands when she caught sight of Izzy.
“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Sarah said as she sidled up to the bench and surveyed the play structures. She gave a lackluster wave to some of the parents she knew across the way.
“Mommy, Mommy.” Charlie came running. “We’re building a big sandcastle. Come see.”
“In a minute, baby.” Sarah kneeled to eye level with her son. “I’m going to chat with Auntie Izzy for just a sec, and then I’ll come see. Okay?”
Charlie ran back to his creation, and Sarah spun to face Izzy seated on the bench. “Can I offer you a beverage?” She reached into her bag and pulled out two beers, extending them with a flourish of her arms; beads of sweat rolled along the necks of the bottles.
Izzy took one and downed half the bottle, while Sarah went to look at the sandcastle. How was she going to tell Sarah what Bella had just told her?
Izzy watched her sister, so different from the woman who came out of the forest near Patricia Bay eight months ago. That Sarah was shrunken, unseen weights bending her toward the ground and dulling her movements. This woman, the one who laughed as Charlie dumped a bucket of sand on her toes, moved outside the limits of gravity, her limbs buoyant and graceful. Maybe this was a return to the Sarah of before, but Izzy was no longer familiar with that sister.
Izzy let her mind crawl through the crevices of Bella’s story, wondering whether she could look the other way. The child had woken up in the middle of the night to find Matthew leaving the tent. She went looking for him and found him by the canoe. She ran to him, but he must have been startled in the middle of doing something, because he fell over and got angry with her. What was he doing out there in the middle of the night? According to Bella, he’d hugged her and sent her back to bed. In the morning, he’d been gone.
“Watch, I’ll get arrested for having open liquor,” Sarah said as she flopped onto the bench beside Izzy. The beer bottles between them sweated into the cracked wood. Sarah propped both elbows on the bench back and hummed “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics under her breath.
Izzy looked at her sister. Sarah’s lithe body was relaxed, and a half smile rested on her face as she watched the activity all around them. It was a moment of contentment—a cold beer on a warm day, the sounds of laughter, a gentle breeze. What right did Izzy have to destroy this? To decide on Sarah’s behalf? Ah, but there’s the rub, thought Izzy. She didn’t have the right either way—whether to share what she knew or keep the secret. Either or both were wrong. What could she do? She opened her mouth and let potential poison seep from her lips.
Izzy shared what Bella had told her, along with her speculation that Matthew had been injured in some way, though she didn’t venture an opinion on what might have incapacitated him. It was absurd, she knew, but no more so than a disappearance into thin air. Sarah listened, head back. Afterward, Izzy stared into her empty bottle, swirling it around and then peering in as if answers could be found inside.
“It’s a funny thing,” Sarah finally said. “The wilderness is probably the purest expression of beauty there is in the world. There’s no right, no wrong, no good, no bad. The wild deals in life and death just as easily as we breathe. It’s primal and true. We can walk within it, even fool ourselves into believing we’ve tamed it, but disrespect it and it will swallow us.”
Izzy looked up from the bottle. She’d never heard her sister talk in aphorisms and existential drivel. Sarah’s expression was calm, her tone matter of fact, but her words sounded like the narration of a nature documentary, impartial and above.
“Take the river, for example,” Sarah continued. “Sure, it’s needed. I mean, water’s a necessity for survival, right? It’s used for drinking, for fishing, it’s a transportation route. The river has everything we need to survive. But wrong her and she can be vicious.” Sarah’s voice was razor sharp on the last sentence.
Izzy shivered and read a previously unseen truth in her sister’s face. It seemed so clear. How had Izzy missed it? Images of Sarah from their childhood flickered through her mind—the high school bully, Sarah’s thirst for fairness. Her steadfast belief that the universe demanded a counterbalance and would respond. Good offset bad; right aligned wrong; the universe made it so.
“Sarah, what happened?” Izzy said in a whisper.