16. Luke
16
LUKE
I can’t believe it.
I cannot believe it.
Sylvia has a daughter, a teenage daughter, a daughter who is clearly a Cavendish. That one night had greater repercussions than I’d realized. The jug of ice water in my lap makes a lot more sense now, but not sixteen years of silence.
Merrie is making introductions like we’re at a bloody cocktail party, Daph is watching me warily, but I don’t care.
“How old are you?” I ask the girl, who is startled for only a beat.
“Fifteen,” she says with defiance. I patented that tone when I was a teenager. “What’s it to you, old man?”
I turn to Sylvia. “Fifteen? Fifteen ?”
“Sixteen in February,” Sierra provides.
Which means she was conceived in the spring. In May.
I fathered a child and I don’t even remember.
I did the one thing I always swore I would never ever do, and I didn’t even know it for sixteen years. There’s a failure of epic proportions.
The revelation makes me livid.
“What was in your head?” I demand of Sylvia. “How could you do this? How could you not tell me?”
She bristles, folding her arms across her chest. If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man. (Maybe Daph took pointers from Sylvia.) “It was none of your business,” she says, exuding enough frost to freeze half of North America.
“How can you say that?” I’m roaring now, not just because Daph has turned away. “How can you imagine that I didn’t have a right to know…”
Sylvia jabs a finger into my chest. “You. Did. Not. Turn around, Luke, and walk away. My life doesn’t concern you. It never did and it sure doesn’t now.”
I am incredulous. That she could cut me out of the life of my kid, that she would deliberately not tell me, is beyond every measure of decency. “You, you…” I’m sputtering. “I deserved to know.”
“Do you? Do you even remember that night?” she asks, her gaze hard.
It’s like she read my mind. I don’t. I remember running into her. I remember that she was upset with Mike for something. I remember encouraging her to come with me so we could pay Mike back for whatever he’d said or done.
I remember waking up on the porch at Una’s place, tucked under a quilt. (I remember puking in the woods.) I’ve never been able to stand the taste of J?germeister since.
The next time I saw Sylvia was in Merrie’s restaurant in Toronto.
She shakes her head in disgust. “How can you imagine that I would change my life for a night you don’t even remember? It wasn’t an incident worth shaping my future choices.” I wince at her tone and she notices. “Be serious, Luke. We’re adults. I made choices for the good of my daughter and they weren’t your concern.” She turns then, puts her arm around Sierra’s shoulders and leads the girl away.
Sierra looks back. “He’s my dad?”
“No,” Sylvia says, her voice hard. “You don’t have a dad. A dad is there when you need to be rocked to sleep. A dad is there when you have a fever, when you scrape your knee, when you get a good report card, when you ace your dance recital. A dad loves and cares for you, protects you and makes sure you’re safe. A dad cares. A dad remembers .” She tosses me a look. “You don’t have a dad, sweetheart, although I wish sometimes it was otherwise.”
“You didn’t tell me!” I bellow. “And I wasn’t hard to find!”
“Deal with it,” Sylvia says and the pair of them vanish into the diner.
I turn away, shaken, and find Daph watching me. She looks like she’s going to carve me up and toss me to the tigers.
“You knew,” she says.
“I had no idea. I didn’t guess. I didn’t know. I didn’t even wonder.”
She nods, looking after Sierra and Sylvia. “Well, then, you’ve got a lot of time to make up.”
And she goes around her dad’s car, gets in, starts it up and drives away. I watch until she makes the turn at Big Red and the tail lights disappear.
I’m left with Merrie—and all of my shattered assumptions.
“Are we still good?” she asks and I can’t believe she’s wondering about the diner.
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world,” she informs me. “I need to know if we’re still on here.”
It’s the last thing I care about in this moment. “Of course, we are. We signed a deal.”
Her satisfaction is complete. “Good.” She nods. “I think I’m going to like it here.”
“But Sylvia…”
“Has to do whatever she has to do. Doesn’t her grandmother live here?”
“Una,” I provide. “She, um, has cancer.”
Merrie is walking toward the diner door, but she spins to face me. “Does Sylvia know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Una didn’t want to be a burden.”
Merrie props a hand on her hip. “How many people’s lives were you intending to mess up here?”
I fling out my hands. “I was trying to fix things!”
“You need more practice, then,” she says, then actually whistles as she ducks into the diner.
I don’t know whether to follow her or not but she makes the decision for me. Merrie turns the deadbolt in the door, just as the rain begins a cold steady onslaught.
And Bruno’s umbrella is inside the diner. I can see it but when I knock on the door, no one hears me. The women vanish into the back together, and I look up and down the abandoned street.
In this moment, it’s easy to remember why I wanted to leave this place so badly.
What’s incredible is that I don’t remember.
I have a great memory. I remember the smell of the little salon where my mom worked as a hairdresser. I remember the dandelions in the yard of the house my mom rented when we first moved to Empire, the squeak of the rusted swing set abandoned there, the smell of the bathroom that had something wrong with its plumbing. I remember the taste of blood when Jake decked me for saying we were brothers in school. I remember how cold the winter wind is when you have only a thin coat, or one that’s not quite big enough this year for you to zip shut.
I remember the sensation of freedom when I rode my bicycle out of Empire and down to Port Cavendish—without permission, of course—and how I learned to cobble together that bike of spare parts. I remember the sound of mocking laughter from other kids, whose bikes had been purchased new, with all the parts matching. I remember my mom trying to hide her tears in the kitchen when Patrick called her a whore, his wife standing by his side. I remember things about Empire that I’d rather forget.
But I don’t remember being with Sylvia that night.
At all.
My memory offers glimpses of many women, but not Sylvia. She’s completely absent, and I can’t figure out why.
I should go to sleep but I can’t. The enormity of my mistake is going to keep me awake forever. Is Taylor laughing at me now? Did he guess that there was something this epic for me to fix in my past?
It’s past three in the morning when I give it up. I wander down Queen Street. I don’t have the stones to go to Daph, not now, and it aches to have lost whatever that might have become before it really got started. The street is empty, the rain making it seem black and white, like I’ve stepped into a Fellini movie. I see in the distance that there are a few guys hanging around the taco truck and they sound as if they’ve been drinking. I’m not in the mood for a fight so I duck around the back of the Golden Lotus and walk down the alley. Someone is putting out the trash there, it must be Phil, but I wait in the shadows, avoiding any contact, until he goes back inside.
I met Sylvia in front of the Grand Hotel that night. I remember that. It was senior prom and there was a party there, in the bar, a celebration before the dance for those old enough to drink. She’d come out of there in some floaty long dress, tears on her cheeks, and I caught her when she stumbled.
She asked me to take her away. “Anywhere,” she said. “Just not here.”
I lean against the wall of the Grand Hotel, trying to remember. I could hear the party breaking up. They’d be moving on, going back to the school for the dance itself. It was maybe eight-thirty. I had no intention of going to prom and was just restless.
Like tonight.
Maybe looking for trouble.
Maybe I found it.
I stand in the alley in the rain and look back toward Queen Street, staring down the passageway between the Grand Hotel and the Legion. It’s narrow and empty, puddles gleaming. There’s a Dumpster behind the Legion, which is just as fragrant as I remember it being then. The one behind the Grand Hotel is empty, the lid thrown open. Is it really an empty shell now? I look up and there’s only one light in the entire hotel, in the window of the apartment at the back.
Cole Henderson inherited the Grand Hotel, while he was in the military. I remember my mom telling me that. She still kept up with some of the news from Empire, and she’d imagined him renovating the place. That hadn’t happened.
I can see barbed wire along the top of the two-storey addition that contains that apartment and the silent kitchen, and it’s new. Maybe you can leave Afghanistan, but Afghanistan might not ever leave you. Living alone in that huge space can’t be good for him, but I don’t remember Cole ever being interested in advice.
I remember Sylvia instead, following toward me down this alley. Her hand was cold in mine when she reached me and made her appeal. Her dress was peach and gauzy. All sorts of floaty layers, then beading on the front. Flowers. She looked like a fairy princess, hardly even real.
She asked me to take her away from there, so I did.
I keep going, passing behind the Legion, hoping this exercise will help me recall what is undoubtedly my worst mistake. Someone is stacking cases of empty beer bottles behind the Legion in a container that locks and again, I keep out of sight. I catch a glimpse of a raccoon doing pretty much the same thing, but it vanishes to the south in the shadows. The convenience store is quieter than it was earlier, its lights bright against the night. The salsa music is going strong.
I pause behind the Foreman place. Here. I brought her here. I’d forgotten that, but now I remember. It was empty even then and the closest place I could think of where no one would see her. I pick the lock, just the way I did that night—my misspent youth has to be good for something—and the back door creaks as I open it.
I remember that, too, as well as the sense of doing something illicit. Sylvia caught her breath, I recall now, and her grip tightened on my arm. I ease inside, thinking. The bottle of J?ger was there, on the floor, proof that I wasn’t the only one who had ever taken refuge in this place. I would have never bought something like that—I was all about beer in those days—and it felt like winning the lottery. Sylvia laughed and said Una drank that junk at Christmas.
So, we took it upstairs, exploring as we went. The old floors creaked then, just as they do now. The building is empty, filled with shadows, lit by the streetlights on Queen Street. There was an old wooden desk on that night, a creaky chair with torn upholstery. A pair of plain plastic chairs in the front room. They’re all gone, now, maybe scored by some picker because they were vintage, and my footsteps echo in the emptiness.
I climb the stairs, feeling as if I’m lost in time, neither in the now nor in the then. Sylvia was wearing perfume. I remember smelling it once we were inside. Something floral and sweet. Maybe lavender.
At the top of the stairs, the door is open. I step through and I look around. It’s an empty apartment, just the way it was then. Living room at the front, facing over the street. Bedroom at the back on one side. Kitchen at the back on the other side, with the bathroom in between front and back, opposite the top of the stairs. It’s tiled in black and white, little octagonal white tiles that seem to glow in the darkness. There’s a door in the kitchen that must have once led to a porch, but now it’s boarded over.
We went in the front room that night. Dust stirs as I walk in there, hinting that maybe no one has been here since. I sit down, back against the wall just the way we did then. I remember the herbal taste of the liqueur and how much I disliked it. It had a heat, though, and a serious kick.
No bar service tonight. There’s just me and the darkness, and the realization that I recall nothing after that first sip. I woke up on Una’s porch, so I must have left under my own steam.
How can I not remember something so important?
What am I going to do about it?
I have a daughter. Even though Sylvia never told me about her, the responsibility is real. She might have expected that I’d be like Patrick and deny the results of my own actions, but that’s one thing I’ll never do.
Sierra is my daughter. Just because I haven’t had anything to do with her life so far doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. As much as I’d like to get to know her, that might not be possible. I’d never mess with Sylvia’s custody, but some time together might be a good thing. I feel even more responsible for her financial situation than I did before, but I can make it right.
Making a mistake doesn’t mean I can’t make amends.
There is a resonance in a right answer and I hear it in this one. I’ll pay support. I’ll ask Daph or her dad how such things are arranged, what amount would be appropriate, how to orchestrate that.
There’s one cornerstone to my life, and that’s my resolve to make different choices than Patrick has made. I’ve fallen down on that here, but it isn’t my fault. I didn’t remember and Sylvia didn’t tell me.
But I’m on a quest to straighten out the past, and I’m not going to stop.
I’m thinking about this when I see the flashing red lights of the cop cars coming down Queen. I figure something is going down at the taco truck and look out the front windows with curiosity. No sirens, but the cars stop right in front of me, parking at the curb. I can hear their radios, but can’t see the taco truck from this angle.
I’m not expecting to have a light shine suddenly up at the window, much less to have someone speak from behind me.
“Hands in the air,” says the cop who has come in the back way quietly. “Let me see them.”
I do as I’m told and turn around, realizing I’ve been busted.
Just like old times.