The Better Mother

PART THREE





THE INEVITABLE

1982


This street is one of his favourites. Mature maples line the sidewalk; neat little apartment buildings stand in the shadows, their walks lined with bright annuals and ferns. He feels refreshed here, protected from the sun by large leaves, enlivened by the dampness of the grass. These few blocks south of Denman are a part of the city that isn’t quite city. This is a place that blurs the line between merely surviving in a humid, outgrown mill town and really living in a place that coddles you with gentle sea breezes until you fall asleep.

This damned city, in Danny’s experience, is often both at the same time, in the same place.

He turns right and starts to cross the street, mindful of the mothers taking their children to the beach, mothers whose ears and eyes are trained on the hungry, whining children in the back seat and not on the men in the crosswalks. A blue sedan speeds past and a face turns to look at him from the back seat. He flinches. Maybe he isn’t as invisible as he thinks.

In the window of the diner, he sees the back of Frank’s head, the collar of his blue-striped T-shirt. Danny’s stomach turns over violently, and he pauses to steady himself at a newspaper box. Its metal top is burning hot from the sunshine, but Danny leaves his hand there anyway, almost savouring the sizzle of his skin, the numbness that washes over him once the first wave of pain dissipates.

“I am not a f*ck-up,” he whispers. An ancient woman, her hair permed, turns to stare at him and then hurries away, pulling a wire shopping cart behind her.

When he steps into the restaurant, it takes a minute for his eyes to adjust to the cavernous gloom. Most people sit alone or in pairs, some silently eating, their mouths full of ham and toast and french fries, some talking with barely touched plates of food congealing in front of them. One wall is completely covered with a frameless, tinted mirror intended to brighten up the place, but all it does is extend the sense of being underground in an endless suburban basement with a fuzzy television and a table-tennis set.

Danny waves away the hostess who comes to seat him and makes his way to the small table by the window where Frank is sitting, his face partially covered by the hand that props up his head. Danny sits down opposite him and picks up a menu. He hasn’t any idea what to say or where to look, so he stares at the list of sandwiches, hoping that all these letters will coalesce into some kind of sense.

“Aren’t you going to say hello?” Frank’s voice is soft, teasing.

When Danny looks up, he braces himself for the inevitable image of the Frank he dreams of, the Frank with wavy, abundant brown hair, the Frank with eyes that laughed and laughed and sometimes blazed, the Frank with broad shoulders and perfect posture.

But this is not the Frank he knows. This Frank sits there, hunched over a cup of coffee, his hands holding the mug as if he needs the heat to keep his blood moving. His eyebrows seem to have collapsed into his eye sockets. Slowly, he reaches up and scratches a dark red spot on his cheek, and then, like he is thinking better of it, drops his hand and rests it on the table. The stubble on his chin is grey. And his eyes. His eyes tell Danny everything in a way that spoken words can’t, in a way that is understood without thinking.

“I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else. Before it got so bad that other people started to notice.”

Danny wonders how anyone could miss this. Frank is not himself. Frank is indisputably, undeniably sick. Danny feels his hands twitch on his lap, but doesn’t reach over the table to grasp Frank’s arm. He simply stares. Frank smiles, lips closed.

“I feel pretty good right now. I haven’t lost much weight, and I only have a couple of these Kaposi’s spots. I hide them with makeup when I have to go to work.”

Outside, a mother, wearing a mint-green tank top and matching shorts, carries a screaming toddler, stopping once to shake him slightly, to glare directly into his eyes. The child continues to scream, to kick at his mother’s stomach.

“I don’t know how long the bank will keep me on. I’ve been telling them I’m getting over a lung infection, which is true, but not completely.”

The mother drops the toddler on the sidewalk, snatches away his brown stuffed bear and slaps him on the cheek. Danny jumps.

“I know it’s scary,” Frank says.

The child gulps in air, his mouth wide open, his eyes shut. Danny wonders if he is crying silently or if he hasn’t yet inhaled enough to make a sound.

“Have you been feeling all right?” Frank continues. “Because if you haven’t, then you should definitely go see a doctor, not that anyone knows anything right now, but still. Maybe the key is to go in before you start to feel even a little sick.”

The mother snatches up the toddler again and hugs him, holding his chubby body close to hers, her hand on the back of his head. He sniffles, nods when she speaks, and they are off again, heading toward English Bay.

“Danny! Say something!” Frank slams his fist on the table, rattling the forks and knives, spilling the coffee.

There are many things Danny could say. He could say that Frank falling ill is another indication that his worlds are collapsing into each other. Ever since they met, Danny has carried within him a miniature Frank who understands Danny like no one else. And now the most intimate participant in Danny’s life is a news story, his gayness a headline that invites public commentary. Danny is dizzy with the wrongness of it all. He could say, “I love you,” but he doesn’t know if this is true anymore, or if he would be saying it to comfort them both.

Danny stares at the menu, runs his eyes down the list. “A club sandwich,” he says. “I haven’t had one of those in years.”

Frank starts to laugh, but Danny sees the tears welling.

“I guess there’s no other response, is there? What can anyone say about a disease that has no name, that no one knows how we catch? Club sandwich is as good a reply as any.”

Danny waves the waitress over and places his order. Frank asks for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, and then he relaxes into the seatback. When the waitress leaves, Danny looks out the window again. The sunshine is directly overhead and so bright that there are no shadows, only pockets of shade in recessed doorways.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

Frank brings his coffee to his lips and takes a tiny sip. “Sometimes I think I might drown in everyone else’s apologies. Maybe that would be easier.”


The fear has gripped him, and he knows that escaping it is impossible. When he is sleeping, he writhes in his sheets, turning until he can no longer work his arms and legs free, until he is trapped in a straitjacket of his own making. Something sharp and stinging travels under his skin; he imagines it’s the infection slowly pumping through his body. He can see it, painful and clear, whenever he closes his eyes—tiny pulsing organisms floating in a thick red soup, multiplying as they bounce off the walls of his arteries.

The fear has many features—inexplicable scabs, bleeding gums, bowels that leak. But the one he returns to is this: if he gets sick, there will be no hiding it from his parents.

He opens his eyes, sees the reassuring whiteness of his apartment ceiling. Turning over, he reaches into the drawer of his nightstand until his fingers brush the edge of a small box. He sits up and opens the lid. Inside is a pile of photographs. On the very top sits a portrait of Frank, his eyes like half-moons as he laughs into the camera, at something Danny has said. They had been hiking on a fall day, and, even though the photograph is black and white, Danny can see the shades of grey in the leaves behind that mean red and orange and yellow. He lifts this picture out and, underneath, another. Frank at the beach. Frank with the dog. Frank standing beside a sign in a diner window that reads, “Holiday special: franks and beans, $1.75!”

Their first Christmas together, Frank took Danny back to his parents’ house, a ninety-minute drive away in the Fraser Valley. There, his mother insisted on serving Danny her favourite wine, a sweet, syrupy drink that reminded him of powdered Tang and coated his tongue. Frank’s father pointed at the newly constructed back porch and said, “That’s some fine cedar decking. If you ever need to buy some, I can get you a deal.” Danny couldn’t imagine when or how he would ever need cedar decking, but he nodded anyway and politely sniffed the planks when Frank’s father told him to. “Clears out your sinuses, I’m telling you.”

At dessert, his mother held up her mug of chamomile tea and said, “A toast to the newest member of our family.”

“He’s not the prettiest daughter-in-law I’ve ever seen, but he’ll do, Frankie,” boomed his father.

And everyone laughed, except Danny, who stared at the popcorn ceiling, his feet itching like they were about to burst right out of his shoes.

During the drive home, Frank reached across the console to pat Danny on the thigh. “I’m sorry my parents were acting like we were about to get married. They’re just excited. I’ve never brought anyone to meet them before.”

Danny nodded and kept staring through the windshield at the black highway. Just follow the white lines. No need to think about it.

“Did it bother you?”

“Did what bother me?”

“That stuff my parents said about welcoming you to the family.”

How was Danny going to pretend like this night never happened if Frank didn’t stop talking? “No, it was fine. They were just being parents.”

Frank looked away and out the passenger window. “Okay. As long as you know that I didn’t put them up to it.”

But Danny knew that nobody’s parents said things like that unless they had seen a quiver of want in their child’s face. Maybe Frank had told them—years before—that he wanted a house, a partner, a garden where he and his lover could grow beans and squash and cook it all together on a stove they bought after haggling with a salesman at a discount appliance store. Danny had never told his parents what he wanted. And they had never asked.

Danny kept his love for Frank to himself, underneath an expressionless, silent face.

Tonight, the photographs are nothing but paper in his hands. Frank is in another bed, perhaps feeling the spots on his body with his trembling, square-tipped fingers. Danny is light-headed and places the box back in the drawer. He lies down again, blinks at the ceiling. If only he never had to sleep.


Danny sits in his car, the windows rolled down to catch the warm breeze that slithers in from the street. He glances nervously at his side mirror, afraid to see his own red face staring back at him. Through the windshield, he can see the entrance to the bank. A security guard paces inside the glass doors. Finally, the last customer leaves.

Frank emerges from the bank, a binder in his hand and his jacket wadded up in a ball under his arm. He slowly walks west on Robson, away from Danny. He can see that the seat of Frank’s pants is starting to sag. Danny’s hands grip the wheel, but he stays inside his car.

After twenty more minutes, Danny watches as Cindy talks to the security guard. She laughs as he unlocks the door and holds it open for her. Danny waits until her camel-coloured pumps hit the sidewalk before he stirs. He stands up, half shielded by the open car door. He has to grip the top of the frame in order to stand up straight enough that he doesn’t appear deflated. The outside air washes over him and he feels dizzy.

“Cindy!” he croaks, reaching with one hand toward her.

She looks up and down the street, oblivious, and starts to cross.

“Cindy!” This time it comes out shaded with desperation.

She turns her head, sees Danny and rushes forward.

“Danny! Are you sick?” She grasps him around the waist. “Here—can you make it to that café over there? You need to sit and have a cool drink, that’s all.”

She helps him to the café and props him up in a chair near the back, away from the sunlight streaming in through the big front window. She goes to the counter and orders two iced teas. Danny leans his head back and wonders whether, if he stares long and hard enough, a picture will begin to form among the stains on the ceiling.

“Drink this,” Cindy says, sliding an iced tea to him as she sits down. “You look like shit.”

Danny gulps half the drink in one swallow. The cold liquid travels, sharp like broken glass, down his throat. He smiles at his sister, at her face tanned from hours of lying in the sun at Kits beach, her thick hair in a long ponytail, her glossed lips. So pretty, he thinks. What a waste.

“What’s going on, Danny? Did you come here to see me?”

“I—” He pauses. “I need you.” It’s out, but the urgency is gone. All that’s left is his own voice, boyish and soft.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw Frank.” He tells her the story, about the unnamed disease, the fear. He pauses to drink and looks away, for he sees that her eyes are changing: from sympathy to fear to anger to overwhelming pity. The ice in her untouched drink melts and a pool of water forms under her glass.

He had thought that talking to Cindy would somehow clear his confusion, would separate his thoughts so that he could consider things one at a time, like he used to. His family. His work. Cruising. After Danny finishes talking, he gulps down the rest of his iced tea and shudders.

Cindy pushes hers across the table. “Go ahead, I don’t want it.”

“What am I going to do?” he asks. Please, he thinks, give me an answer. Any answer.

“Do you need to see a doctor?” she says, scrutinizing his face with narrowed eyes.

“I don’t know. I don’t have any spots or anything. I feel all right. Well, scared and sleep-deprived, but all right.”

“Maybe they can give you a blood test or something, or an immunization.” He begins to hear an undercurrent of desperation in her voice, a thin line of brittle panic, yet her face remains smooth.

“There’s nothing. They know nothing.”

“You can’t go out and cruise anymore, Danny. You can’t go to the clubs or the baths or anything.” Her voice breaks, and she brings her hand to her throat. “What will Mom and Dad say?”

Years ago, on a still Saturday morning, Danny was polishing the insides of the shop windows with newspaper while Doug grunted in the back, unpacking a pallet of Chinese comic books. The sky was overcast, and there were no shadows on the street. Danny stared at the tiny fingerprints near the sill and wondered which child Doug had allowed to touch the glass. A pair of feet in grubby sneakers appeared outside the window. When Danny looked up, he saw a freckled face on the other side of the glass, grinning.

Danny knew this boy, whose father used to work mixing paint at the warehouse by the water. He was one year behind Danny at school, but swaggered through the halls as if he were student body president. At lunch, he sat by himself in the baseball diamond, digging holes into home plate with his penknife and smiling. Danny searched his brain for a name. Eugene? Gerald? No, it was George. George Mason. He frowned at George’s diabolical face. What on earth was he doing here at the shop?

Seeming to read Danny’s thoughts, George reached behind his back and pulled a can of spray paint from his waistband. They were so close that Danny could see the colour printed on the label—Midnight Black. Danny stepped backward from the window and looked around for his father, but he was in the backroom. George, grin still in place, pulled the cap off. Desperate, Danny waved both arms in front of him and mouthed, No.

Everything seemed to happen slowly. Danny watched as George deliberately sprayed the words CHINKS GO HOME across the front window with a fine workmanship that was disorienting. George paused to admire his work before adding a smiley face with two slanted eyes. Even through the glass, Danny clearly heard the singular pitch of George’s laugh, like coyotes mating in the park.

From behind, Danny heard his father’s voice. “What the f*ck is going on here?”

Doug rushed outside to the window and glared at the words, now dripping down the glass and pooling around the row of bricks underneath. George, crossing the street, turned and waved. Doug pounded his fist against the wall and shouted, “Come back here, you little prick!”

Danny picked up the wad of newspaper he had dropped. When Doug came back inside the shop, Danny timidly said, “Maybe if I try to clean it now, while it’s still wet, I can get most of it off.”

His father cocked his head toward him. “Do you know that boy?”

“Yeah, he goes to my school.”

Every word that came out of Doug’s mouth seemed forced. “Younger or older?”

Danny shrank, just a little. “A year younger, I think. But he’s pretty tough. Once, I saw him in the alley and—”

Doug waved his thick hand to silence him. “Why didn’t you go outside and stop him? He’s no bigger than you. Why are you standing here like a sissy?”

“Dad, he’s tough. I’ve been trying to tell you,” Danny started, but Doug was already across the shop, opening the closet where they kept the cleaning supplies.

He turned back to look at Danny’s face. “You’re useless. How I ever had a son like you I’ll never understand.”

Danny now looks at Cindy’s face, the impeccable makeup shading her cheekbones, the precise blue eyeliner. “There’s nothing to explain to them, is there?” he says. They’re answering questions with questions, and Danny wants to laugh at the way this mysterious disease has turned even the words they speak into something shifting and thin.

Cindy says, “Still, do you want to come home with me tonight? At least you’ll get some of Mom’s cooking, not that it necessarily does anyone any good.” The dry edge to her voice is back, and Danny allows himself a small smile.

“No, I’m going back to the apartment. I haven’t been sleeping much.”

“Oh, Danny,” Cindy whispers. Tears are starting to form in her eyes. “I don’t know how to help you.”

“I guess I have to wait and see.”

He places his hand over hers, their identical brown hands. He realizes that waiting is the very thing that will allow him to wake up to another day. Without it, the lines of his life are final. For now, waiting is the best part.


This problem, this invisible disease that manifests in sores and coughing and germs that settle in their bodies and multiply, like unthinned mint in a small garden. Danny stumbles toward the dry cleaner, wishing he could shut his eyes against the sharp sunlight piercing his face. I want rain, he thinks. Where has all the rain gone?

He considers calling Edwin, but he will be no help. He will bring Danny a six-pack of beer and drink it all himself until he falls into a restless sleep. Besides, Edwin will repeat the whispers on the street, the rumours he catches and then releases.

An old woman totters past him, pushing a walker. Their eyes meet and she looks afraid. Surprised, he wonders if she is scared of him; if she thinks that he will try to snatch her purse and knock her down. But after she is a half block away, he realizes that the fear in her eyes was a reflection of the fear in his own, that blazing fear that others can instantly recognize and be repelled by.

He walks by a clinic on Davie Street. In its large window, his body looks so thin that it appears transparent. His eyes focus on something reassuringly solid taped to the window, black type on white paper.

“New disease affecting gay men and IV drug users now called AIDS. Information inside.”

It’s that tension of knowing and not knowing. He can hold what he knows in his head and pass it from one side of his brain to another. He can prepare. He can grieve. What he doesn’t know is less tangible than dreams, more like the shreds of dreams, what dreams would be if they were clawed at by raccoons. With not knowing, all he can do is stifle his horror at the possibilities, but also breathe with relief that the worst hasn’t happened yet. Stepping into the clinic will change everything.

Danny pushes open the door to the waiting room and stands awkwardly in a square of sunshine. The other people (small, they all seem, bodies crunched like discarded pieces of paper) stare at him. The receptionist looks up at him with dark eyes ringed by purple liner. She smiles.

“How can I help you?”

He steps up to her desk and leans over so that he is as close to her as possible. “The paper in the window,” he whispers. “It says you have information.”

She looks confused, and Danny points discreetly to the sign. “Oh,” she says. “Yes, we have some sheets typed up. Would you like one?”

He nods, and she hands him a photocopy.

“Thank you,” he says. He grasps her hand and shakes it. She smiles again, her lips frozen into an expression he imagines she settles her face into dozens of times a day.

He rushes to a bus stop bench and sits down, holding the paper as still as he can.

It’s simple: AIDS attacks the immune system. No one knows why, and no one knows how. Infected people are vulnerable to opportunistic infections and diseases, like Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia. Doctors think it’s passed through bodily fluids, like semen and blood, but they’re not sure. There are only a few cases reported in Canada, but doctors suspect there are many more that have been undiagnosed.

By the time Danny has finished reading half of the sheet, it becomes clear that all these words are meaningless, for there is nothing anyone can do. No one knows how to prevent it from spreading. Like an advancing tidal wave that you watch coming toward you, knowing it will consume you.

A bus stops and people stream off, their eyes fixed on the sidewalk or the displays in the shop windows. None of them allow their gaze to fall on his face. Even the passengers on the bus look straight ahead, at the power lines, perhaps, or the crows gathered on the rooftops.

Life and death are printed right here, in words that will define things to come: the silence of nightclubs, the drying-up of bathhouses, even the emptiness of the park at night. The weight of the words and his thoughts seem to have rendered him immobile. What if his parents have already heard of AIDS? Seen it on the news, discussed it with Cindy? And if Edwin dies of a mysterious illness his grandmother never names, what questions will his parents ask then? He holds the back of his hand to his forehead.

When he looks up, he sees a blond man hovering outside the clinic, staring at the same sign in the window. The fear is visible in the line of his shoulders, the quick steps he takes as he paces back and forth. Despite himself, Danny reaches out and his body forms itself into a half-hug. I may as well give him my sheet. As he stands and takes a step toward the clinic, the man turns around. Familiar eyes. A moustache he once gazed at in thin, shifting moonlight.

Danny could laugh hysterically or run away. He grips the white sheet with both hands and watches as the tall, blond man looks at Danny’s face, the paper he holds, and then back at the clinic window. Before thinking twice, Danny hurries forward and grasps the man’s sleeve. “Here,” he says. “Take mine. I don’t need it anymore.” Danny stuffs the paper into the crook of his ex-lover’s arm and walks away. He feels worse with every passing pedestrian, every shiny car that speeds down the street. He turns up Jervis, remembering there are prints to make and film to buy for the next wedding. He stumbles toward his own particular silence in his contained studio.


That evening, Danny steps onto the walk leading to his apartment building. The laurel shrubs on either side have grown taller than him and lean inward, their branches brushing his shoulders, their tops connecting like a roof. He is overwhelmed by the feeling that he is being swallowed by the bush, and he puts his hand out to swat away the glossy leaves.

A quacking duck flies through the dimming sky. Danny looks up at the sound and squints. As he pushes his key into the lock of the front door, his foot brushes a paper bag beside the welcome mat. He sees the message, FOR DANNY LIM, written in black marker across the front. He crouches down and unrolls the crumpled brown paper, so wrinkled it appears to have been used and reused, folded and stuffed into a drawer between uses. Inside is a glass pickle jar with its label scrubbed off. On the lid, a piece of paper reads, “Danny, some soup for you. From, Mommy.” He picks up the bag, one hand supporting the bottom, and carries it into the building. The jar’s vaguely green contents slosh as he steps into the elevator. He stares ahead at the textured light pink wallpaper, striated to look like linen, or, he supposes, Thai silk.

In his kitchen, he pours the soup into a pot and sets it on a burner, watching as the coils turn red. The empty pickle jar stands on the counter, residual solids from the soup lining the bottom. Danny wants to pick up the jar and fling it across the room, watch it smash into shards that fall to the hardwood floor. He can imagine his mother, wearing a pair of long walking shorts and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt, riding the bus to the West End. The backs of her legs stick to the vinyl seat. Her thickly knuckled hands cradle the soup in her lap. She switches buses, walks down streets she memorized earlier only because her son chooses to live here and presses the buzzer by the front door to his apartment building. He can imagine her waiting patiently, buzzing once, maybe twice more. After several minutes, she carefully places the bag by the welcome mat, where Danny is sure to see it. She hesitates then tightens the lid once more so the raccoons, with their strangely human hands, won’t be able to pry it open. And then she walks to the corner and boards the bus to return home, where Doug will be silent and brooding because dinner isn’t ready yet, where she will lie and say she was visiting Auntie Mona and lost track of time.

His mother was here, standing at the front door to his building, peering through the glass doors, watching to see if Danny might step out of the elevator into the lighted lobby. He grips the counter with both hands. His mother has stepped into his carefully constructed life, bearing a gift that will taste like his childhood, those days he spent helping her in the kitchen, his skin absorbing the ginger-scented hot oil until he was sure if he sniffed himself, his nose would recognize each dish his mother cooked.

One particular Sunday, Danny walked into the kitchen, blinking against the blazing lights. He wore the new pyjamas his mother had bought him for his eighth birthday. It was the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, and he still wasn’t sure if it was morning or night. Betty moved from stove to sink to table, her hands covered in rice flour. A patch in her hair released a fine white dust whenever she stepped forward or turned around, as if she were slowly shedding her outer self in small puffs. Danny sneezed before the thick smell of pork broth coated the inside of his nose.

“You must help me or I won’t finish before the solstice is over,” his mother said. She took Danny’s hand and pulled him toward the kitchen table. “You make the balls,” she said, pointing to a mound of white dumpling dough in a bowl. She pulled off a piece the size of a Ping-Pong ball and began rolling it between her hands until it formed a sphere. “You see? Like that.”

The dough—thick and elastic, like drying glue—stuck to Danny’s palms, leaving a thin white layer that settled into his lifeline and the other spidery lines that snaked across it. He placed each ball on a floured cookie sheet, making rows and rows of smooth white spheres. When he looked up at the window, it was finally daylight.

“Such a good boy, Danny,” Betty said. “Your sister would never sit here for so long. Look at that, all the same size too.” She turned back to her cutting board, piled with peeled daikon waiting to be julienned. “We will have the luckiest solstice feast ever because you did such a good job.”

He could have left the kitchen, gone to join his sister who was outside in her puffy coat, looking up at the low sky, her mouth open in the hope that a few flakes of snow might fall. He could have cocooned himself in his room, rearranging his collection of department store catalogues by preference, his favourite one in the middle so it was protected from dust and damp. He could even have watched television with his father, who was sitting in his armchair as he always did on the one day of the week the shop was closed.

But Danny sat at the kitchen table, his legs folded underneath him, the hot steam from the boiling pots penetrating his thin wool sweater. He knew that the kitchen was the one warm room in the house. Everywhere else, the single-paned windows seemed ready to drop out of their rotting wooden frames. Doug could promise all he wanted, but they knew he would never get around to replacing them, so they huddled in their beds at night and wore layers of clothes as they hurried from room to room. In the kitchen, the warm air seemed to wrap around his body, and sitting near a simmering pot of pork bones was as comforting as sitting by a blazing fire in a stone fireplace. Danny sighed, and his small torso relaxed.

Betty placed a bowl of palm sugar lumps and hot water in front of him. “Stir until it melts,” she said, resting her hand on the top of his head for the briefest of moments before she turned away to shred the napa cabbage. Danny ran his fingers through his hair, and rice flour floated around him. He wondered if this was what it would be like to sit amongst the clouds, where everything was seen through a veil of white that softened edges and blurred lines so that each person appeared younger and prettier. His mother turned back, and Danny smiled at her. She nodded, and he picked up a spoon and started stirring.

Now, as Danny watches the pot on the stove, he smiles at the memory. He realizes that not every moment with his mother was painful. Still, it would be simpler to leave it all in the dusty cracks of his mind. It’s his fault for returning home. With this one jar of soup, he understands how bad a son he really is, how he is no longer happy to sit with his gentle-voiced mother in a steamy kitchen. Now, whenever he thinks of her, he is devising ways to avoid her completely. And here she is, travelling for an hour and a half in the heat, just for him. He wants to shake her, yell at her that she should take a bath or read a Hong Kong tabloid, anything that will keep her away from her particular cycle of work and bloodletting that leads to this pool of guilt Danny flounders in.

He thinks of Val. She feels, she rages, she can say, You’re a f*cking idiot. When, as a child, he had met her, he knew in an instant that she was not a woman like his mother. Val could slice open your cheek with a twist of her fingernail and kiss you afterward, love and hate commingling in the air like a heady perfume. She is the mother who would have understood the confusion that twisted within his belly when he thought of other boys, the longing to burst out of his humdrum shell and emerge as something new and wonderful. If you hated her or didn’t want to see her, Val would smile slightly and saunter away, every step seeming to say, If you don’t want me, I don’t want you either. His own mother is a turtle, sometimes poking her head out to watch the world with small black eyes, careful to upset nothing. Her smell speaks of work, days in the kitchen and cleaning other people’s homes, nights on her knees in her own narrow hallway. She doesn’t ask to be acknowledged, but the results of her drudgery are everywhere and speak for her when she is silent.

He rubs his eyes and tries to remember how he felt the first time he met Val in that alley. Awestruck. Comforted. For a second, his mother’s face hovers as he visualizes the stage curtains he hid behind, the spotlights that circled through the gloom. Now that he knows Val came from a small house like his parents’, her glamour is that much more impressive. If he thought she was strong before, he had no idea.

As the soup begins to boil, the phone rings. Even though she hardly ever called in the years after he ran away, he knows it is his mother, who has likely been calling every hour to see that the soup is safely in his apartment. The ringing is like a siren, persistent and unrelenting in its volume and shrillness. He reaches over to pick up the receiver then stops. He turns off the stove and grabs his keys from the hall table.


The dancers grind and spin, their platform shoes squeaking on the stage. The lights shine red on a girl’s belly, blue on her thighs. Some are barely awake, their eyelids drooping from a long day followed by this long night, or for a chemical reason. Danny no longer looks for the track marks, and he doubts that the other men in the club ever notice. Whether they are asleep or awake their breasts still bounce when they sashay up the stage, and the space between their legs looks the same.

Danny looks at his watch and realizes that he has been sitting in this chair, absorbed in examining every costume and every shimmy, for three hours. His head feels stuffed with cotton batting, and his mouth is dry from the beers he has been mindlessly sipping. He wonders what Val is doing, but can’t get past an image of Frank’s newly sunken face. He leaves his money on the table, nods at the waitress and leaves.

The night air blows thick and slow. Even here, standing at the mouth of an alley beside a strip club, Danny thinks he can taste the salt from the ocean, those tiny crystals that tickle the raw red tissue of his throat. He scratches his head, trying to slough off the dullness of beer. Thin clouds move across the surface of the moon. When he was a little boy, he always thought the moon had a woman’s face, the craters and shadows like the age spots spreading across his mother’s left cheek, the criss-crossing lines like the deep creases around her mouth. Not a face subject to the whims of makeup. Not a face that smiles unless she means it.

Behind him, the side door to the club opens, and a dancer steps out, dressed in a pair of light blue jeans, running shoes and a kangaroo jacket. When she hurries past him, he steps to the side, hoping that she doesn’t think he’s a pervert waiting in the shadows. She turns and he sees her face, lit from above by the street lamp, pale and young, freshly washed. Her eyelashes are blond and her chin is a small knob, tensed against the dangers that lurk in the street. It is the lines of her face, the smoothness of her cheeks that fascinate him. She’s like a little girl who pours imaginary tea for her grandmother and rubs rouge from her auntie’s vanity table on her round cheeks when no one is looking. This stripper, without makeup and looking faintly afraid of Danny’s gaze, is ready to break, as though she grew up only yesterday and has found that she is already cracking under the weight of adult responsibility.

Danny turns down the street, leaving the dancer to dash across the road and disappear into a waiting car. The next night, he returns with his camera. He waits in the side alley, his lens pointed at the backstage door of the club.

A girl with dark feathered hair steps out into the alley and pauses against the contrast of street lamp and dark night. Danny, his fingers itching, waits for a car to approach before he presses down on the shutter release, hoping that the glare from the headlights will make the sudden brightness of his flash unnoticeable. Tires squeal up the street. The camera flash is blinding, but only for a fraction of a second. By the time the dancer turns and looks around her, Danny has retreated into shadows and there is nothing to see but a line of speeding cars. She looks around once more before climbing into a cab. He lets out a breath and grins to himself as he advances the film.

All night he stands there, waiting for the girls to leave, hiding behind a Dumpster when the bouncers turn his way. It is easier than he thought, this lurking and snapping, capturing their faces, the faces he imagines they had when they were small, when they sat at desks in school and smiled openly at the teachers in front of them. These pictures will show them in their moments of transition and prove that none of them are inhuman, blow-up dolls come to life. On his way home, he walks with feather-light feet and fights the urge to skip down the sidewalks and swing his camera by the strap, singing as he goes.

In the morning, when he develops the contact sheets and brings them into the front room of his studio, he sees that he was right. The women look uncomplicated, like the ones you see at the corner store. And yet there is something about their beauty. Like moonlight, they are ghostly and transitory, as if they might disappear during your next blink. Behind them and above, the flickering neon sign of the club is solid and unmoving, the same in every shot, ugly in its explicitness, yet necessary—without the club, these women might be hairdressers or students or social workers, and their fragile beauty might never be seen.

Danny is euphoric at how clearly he can see their eyes, the arc of their lips. He can feel their breath on his cheeks, that rhythm that says, This is just me. No costumes, no makeup. These are their real and thin-skinned selves, as tangible to him as Val’s throaty laugh and be-ringed hand on his arm.

This is why he returned to the strip club again and again. It wasn’t for the glamour onstage. It was for this: flesh and despair, the things that make up these women, each neatly contained in one glorious shot. He looks up at the sunshine streaming through the skylight and thinks, Finally.


The next morning, he hurries to a Catholic church in Shaughnessy and then to a lunchtime reception at the bride’s father’s house. By four o’clock, he’s exhausted, and he drives to the studio with his eyes half closed. There, he handles negatives and contact sheets automatically, not even looking at the tiny images that emerge from the developer. All he can hear is the groom’s mother saying sweetly, “We need the proofs tomorrow. I’ll have the cheque ready for you when you drop them off.” He arrives at his apartment at three in the morning. Before he can submit to a wave of unconsciousness, he feels smothered and panicked, so he fights it, flicking at it limply with his open hand. But the sleep pulls him under, and he stops struggling as he realizes that this relinquishment of his day-to-day senses is what he really wants.

For the first time in years, he sleeps dreamlessly, floating in his own special, complete darkness. It pulses, and his heart pulses. It expands, and he feels his body stretching.

Breathe. It’s the only thing he has to remember here.

He could be in an ocean, the tide rolling over and under his body. He swats at the waves, irritated with the interruption. Then he hears it. A ringing, growing louder and louder. With each ring, the darkness dissipates and sleep recedes a little more until he can see the sunlight, bright and unrepentant, through the open blinds.

He stumbles out of his bedroom. What would happen if I dropped the phone out the window and never left the apartment again? He picks up the receiver and holds it to his ear.

A woman’s voice explodes, “Danny? What took you so long?”

“What? Who is this?”

He can hear her clucking in disapproval. “Have you forgotten me already? It’s only been a week since I saw you.”

Confused and foggy, Danny reaches for the wall to steady himself before he remembers. “Miss Val.”

“Well, that took you long enough.”

He stands up straighter and smoothes the front of his undershirt. “I’m so sorry. I was sleeping, and I’m a little groggy right now.”

“Sleeping? Danny, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

He smiles. “You know, for a second there, you sounded more like my mother than a stripper.”

“You little bastard.” She laughs. “And here I was phoning because I was worried about you. You were supposed to phone me two days ago so we could go out again, or do you not remember?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

“Sure, whatever you say, honey. I need to go somewhere today, and I was hoping you could give me a ride. What do you say?”

He knows if he simply delivers the wedding proofs and then returns home, he will want to replay memories: him and Frank in Banff, his mother combing out the tangles in his hair, the last time he embraced someone under a tree in Stanley Park. If he calls his sister, or goes to see his parents, he will risk the silence that inevitably descends on his family gatherings; the silence that would be too tempting to break with I am gay, or I think I might be dying.

“I’ll be there in an hour,” he says. “Wait for me out front.”