27
SINCE BRANDON was twenty minutes early, he drove around the block twice, then parked and strolled past McGiver’s Café to scout the territory, debating whether to sit inside or out. Inside would be quieter, but outside he’d be able to see more. He picked a gap in the traffic and hoofed it across the street for another perspective, absently browsing an antiques shop, a used-clothing store and a locked nameless storefront with tinted windows and a long manifesto on its door about the Nazification of Canada. He got lost in the opening sentence: Drug prohibitions make gangsters and addicts and homeless people out of our children.
He walked in and out of the café three times before choosing a tiny wrought-iron sidewalk table where he sang softly to himself and gazed above the traffic at the rock pigeons strutting along the roof across the street. He was into his third iced tea refill by the time she showed up, twenty-five minutes late.
“You’re easy to find.”
He glanced around, confused, as if he should’ve sat inside, elated she was there and still her, but suddenly wordless and lost.
“Your shirt,” she explained. “Don’t see a whole lot of Hawaiian shirts around here, and I had no idea they made ’em that red or that big.”
She’d almost kept walking, the awkwardness of the lunch settling in, but he’d clearly spotted her before she saw him. Amazingly, he seemed to still be growing, demanding more space, his chest and shoulders expanding, his face rounding, his Adam’s apple settling into a fleshier neck. He had the same lopsided smile and unintentional pompadour, but didn’t come off as an overgrown child anymore. More like an overgrown young man—until he spoke.
Just seeing her relieved him, even though she didn’t look like the humorous tomboy on file in his mind. The thin hips, narrow shoulders, flat chest and monkey arms hadn’t changed, but there was a momentousness about her like he’d seen in brides before weddings. He also noticed the new geometrics of her smile lines, eye radials and half circles framing her lips. Her irises were a brighter gray-blue, her voice huskier. Still, her mannerisms, her origami-like flexibility—shifting effortlessly from cross-legged to one foot beneath her butt—and her fidgeting hands, all but three nails bitten back, were all comfortingly familiar. He looked around, surprised all the other men weren’t ogling her. And once he started talking, he couldn’t stop.
He told her about his father’s sick cows, then the Princess from Nowhere in limbo hell and the angry Chinese women hiding under a fish truck and another van full of scared aliens huddled like chickadees trying to keep warm in a birdhouse. And how trying to stop the buds and illegals was like trying to stop the tide or the sun or the wind. The words and stories just flowed. Talking to her was so easy!
Madeline realized she couldn’t fake this one. Too much was going on to smile her way through lunch. For starters she had a nervous belly and a fogged head from the night before, which had somehow included topless chess with some manipulative creep who’d convinced her to call him later and talk dirty while he—from the sound of it—popped balloons in a bathtub. Now she lacked the clarity or patience to converse with anyone, much less Brandon.
His gushing monologue swung from intriguingly detailed to remarkably irrelevant to occasionally incomprehensible, but always loud enough for the other nine outdoor diners to hear every word. Though he was more coherent than he used to be, the quirks remained, and it came roaring back to her how Danny used to provide the subtitles. He hadn’t even brought up that craziness about her father, yet why should she be surprised? He was incapable of hidden agendas. This was just Brandon Vanderkool unloading on the streets of Abbotsford, his eyes wandering above and behind and to the sides of her, his upper body rocking, his shoes drumming the concrete. Still, she felt something coming.
It was hard to talk over the traffic. Brandon could barely follow his own words and knew he’d jumbled some, what with all the distractions, including the congregating flocks—blackbirds on sagging telephone lines, crows displacing pigeons on the rooftops and a gaggle of purple finches in the collared sidewalk trees. He desperately wanted to point them all out, but if there was one thing he didn’t want to be today it was the bird freak. Suddenly she looked away and then back at him, as if preparing to leave.
“How’s your dad and sister?” he asked.
“Nicole is pretty much the same, just richer. And it’ll take more than MS to slow Dad down. But when you called, you said something weird about him shooting a camera. What made you say that?”
“It was easy to tell it was him.”
When she’d asked her father about it, his laugh was convincing, as was his aside that he wasn’t so anti-American that he was taking up arms. “But you said whoever shot it looked like a ghost, so how could you—”
“By build and posture, by how his left shoulder hangs lower, by the cock of his elbows, by the way he walks on the balls of his feet and the—”
“Okay, Brandon.”
“You wearing tinted contacts?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Really? I didn’t know eyes got brighter with age.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
“Are you ovulating?” he asked louder, with the same head-tilting curiosity.
She looked at him incredulously. “So,” she drawled, realizing that she was probably ovulating at that very moment, “why’d you want to have lunch?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said, jolting upward and knocking his chair over. “Please stay there.” He picked up his seat and looked past her. “Please,” he said again, then stomped off into the café.
It wasn’t until he was gone that she heard and saw the birds behind her. Was he still obsessed? He’d once coaxed her and Danny into bicycling to a small Blaine cemetery after dark. When they got there, all sweaty from the ride, he started into his goofy calls, sounding like a cross between a kazoo and a geezer faking enthusiasm. Who-ho-hooo-who-who. She and Danny snickered until something called back. The dialogue continued for several volleys until a stout owl broke free from the canopy, gliding toward them over tombstones of Icelanders with names like Benedictson, Friedleifsdottir and Gudmunsson before realizing it had been duped and banking back into the trees. As Danny liked to say, “You don’t forget time spent with Brandon.”
She flagged the waitress, ordered sandwiches for them both and lit a Camel to ease the pinging in her head. There was no grand scheme behind this lunch. Her unease dissipated with the smoke and turned to amusement when she thought of the super-serious questions Toby had told her to put to Brandon, but she knew she’d ask them. She had to stay on Toby’s good side so that when it was time to get out, he’d let her. She ground the last half of her cigarette beneath her heel as she watched Brandon stride back, glancing at the trees, roof and phone lines before laying two photos faceup in front of her.
“You on assignment, Agent Vanderkool?” she asked without looking up.
“In this shirt? Just wanted to warn you that your friend there’s supposedly in the dope business. But you probably know that.”
“Met him at a weird party,” she began breathlessly, pointing with her pinky. So Toby was right. There is a mole. “Sees himself as a lady’s man, I guess. Led us around like show dogs. Didn’t catch his name.”
“Tobias C. Foster.” Brandon was delighted. She barely knew him! “They recorded him talking to Hells Angels in Peace Arch on the Fourth. You’re not in the dope business, are ya, Maddy?”
She closed her eyes and bobbed, as if listening to jazz, then forced a smile. “I come from a long line of wine drinkers.” Once she got past the alarm that people were secretly snapping photos of her, she realized this was a heads-up, a favor. Brandon was looking out for her.
He could barely contain himself. She’s clean—and smiling at him! “Well, I guess the Mounties assume you’re in it because they know this guy’s in it, right?”
“Whatever you say.” She slid the photos back, having memorized when and where and at what angles they were shot. “What bird is that singing?” she asked, eager for a new topic.
“A starling. You hear a bird, it’s probably a starling. People hate ’em, but they can sing anything. Mozart had a pet starling that helped him improve a melody by changing it to G-sharp. He had a funeral for it when it died. People got dressed up and everything.”
Unbelievable. She asked about his work, the hours, the shifts, the upsides and downsides, then clicked through Toby’s queries about the tools and habits of the patrol—how many agents, rigs, helicopters and boats, their staffing at nights, how often they patrolled the Cascades and the bays. She felt guiltier with each question.
She was interested in what he was doing! The last few times he’d seen her, it had been hard to sustain her attention. Now she found everything so interesting! He explained his strategy of rotating stakeouts on smuggling routes, then told her about all the ratting-out of locals and the drug busts of people she might know.
“Pot never was my thing,” she finally said.
“Me neither,” he said. “Only time I tried it was with Danny.”
Just the thought of this amused her.
“It was the third Christmas he came back from college. Said he had something I had to try called Paul McCartney pot. Kept saying it was the stuff Paul McCartney smoked whenever he went to New York. ‘Makes you happy,’ he kept saying. ‘Happy happy happy! All you do is laugh!’” Madeline started giggling, so he repeated it, louder, “Happy happy happy.” He wouldn’t stop snorting until she urged him on. “So we smoked some the day he left, just a little, because we didn’t want to get too happy seeing as how he had to get on a plane. But we didn’t get happy at all. We didn’t say anything for a couple hours. Danny barely moved. I drove him to the airport, then got lost coming home.”
Madeline’s laugh had everyone staring at their table. He scrambled to say whatever he could to keep her laughing, but couldn’t think of anything to add. “You probably know this,” he said, “but you laugh when you’re beautiful.”
She rearranged the words. The most she could recall being called was cute or appealing or, her least favorite, not unattractive. But beautiful? That was her sister’s adjective. She tilted her head back so her eyes wouldn’t overflow.
He tried again. “When you are laughing … What I—”
“Thanks, Brandon. Got it.” She watched him demolish his Reuben and plow into the helpless fries, as focused on the food as if he were eating alone. “Still doing your art?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know how to stop,” he said, not looking up.
“Still painting birds?”
“And people.”
“Getting better?”
He shrugged.
Awkward with the silence, she said, “How’s your mom doing?”
“She just took some big memory test to see what’s wrong. Could just be menopause, you know? But she couldn’t remember her favorite song the other night, and that really bothered her. She knew the notes, but none of the words or even the title.”
“What was it?”
“A Beatles song.”
“Back to Paul.”
“Who?”
“Which song?”
“‘Blackbird,’” he said, unable to resist singing the rest of the opening line. Again, conversations stopped at the other tables.
“All right, Brandon,” she said, reddening.
He couldn’t see her expression because his mouth was skyward and bursting into “‘Take these broken wings and learn to flyyyy …’”
She simultaneously tried to shush him and memorize the moment, so busy thinking about how to describe it, how to do it justice, that she missed the disbelief and pity on people’s faces. He missed every high note, French fry smithereens gathering in the corners of his lips. “‘All your life’”—she signaled the waitress for the check—“‘you were only waiting for this moment to ariiise.’”
To Brandon, the song sounded so perfectly executed that it was hard to resist starting at the top again, but he felt Madeline’s hand squeezing his and when he looked down she was leaning toward him, sunburned, an eyebrow twitching, clearly moved. She was close enough to kiss. But how to get from here to there? He dared any of the jealous diners to think about wooing her. If necessary, he’d pound his head against a drainpipe five hundred times a day for Madeline Rousseau. When he opened his mouth to start singing again, she squeezed his hand harder. He felt hers trembling and covered it with the fingers of his other hand until it stilled.