The Better Mother

PART ONE





THE RETURN

1982


This neighbourhood. Crooked sidewalks cracked by tree roots, eroded from rain and the burdened feet of people hurrying to work or hurrying home. Garbage from the twenty-four-hour convenience store is piled around the bus shelter. A cat meows. The dampness in the air shimmers as it rises, and Danny stands, staring at his parents’ house through the haze.

Everything looks the same, only greyer and smaller. The same windows fogged over with years of cooking grease. The same front steps that tilt to the right. The same gutters, choked with twigs and old leaves. He blinks slowly. When he opens his eyes, he is still here, his hand on the gate, sweat coursing down his back and pooling in his waistband. He might just pass out.

Fourteen years ago, he left this place in the early morning. Every sinew in his body was stretched taut as he rushed westward, headlong into the crush of buildings and traffic and the ever-present noise of downtown. He swore to himself, I am never going back. That is not where I belong. He stayed away completely, taking winding and circuitous routes whenever he came within ten blocks of this place. He had removed this yard and those windows from his head on purpose. And yet he is here, all because Cindy’s eyes drooped at lunch last week describing their mother’s sallow and soft face in the living-room window as she waited for Cindy to come home from a date.

“I can’t do it by myself anymore,” she said. “All they do is wonder where I am.”

And he’s back because maybe this visit will exorcise the reverberations of his father’s voice in his ears.

“You’re weak.”

“What kind of boy are you?”

“A dog would be more useful than you.”

In all this time, Danny has only heard his parents’ voices on the phone when he called at Chinese New Year or Christmas. In person, he hopes his father will be less viciously articulate, and be round and jolly instead. He doesn’t dare hope anything for his mother.

His eyes travel over the chipped wooden siding. He looks behind him at the cars speeding down Dundas, each revolution of their wheels making a rhythm: run run run. When he was younger, his dreams beat to the same pace. Unrelenting. Continuous. At eighteen years old, he hurriedly and silently packed a small suitcase. As he drove off in his best friend’s car and counted every block they passed, it took all his willpower not to say the numbers out loud.

He had jobs, learned how to be a passable wedding photographer and lived in apartments in squat buildings that were half hidden by the high-rises blotting out the sky. He looked for and found lovers who asked him no questions. Living in a world of his own making and escaping from a house in which he never belonged are his two successes. He is, after all, not the famous photographer he thought he might be, or the spectacularly dressed owner of a high-rise penthouse on English Bay. But everything else he dreamed of at eighteen and worked for is his. His own apartment. A little bit of money. No one sitting in the dark when he gets home at night, asking him pointed questions about where he’s been, or whose smell he carries on his breath.

Still, when he’s being honest with himself, he remembers how he sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, groggily wondering when his mother will call him for breakfast, or if his father will hustle him out the door to help in the shop. These moments never last, but they are numerous enough that Danny notices them. Even as he tries to forget.

But right now, he can feel himself leaning toward the house, his feet stepping down the front path by instinct. He remembers the feel of his mother’s hand on his feverish forehead, the baby-soft flannel sheets in which he cocooned on wet, windy nights. The grunt his father made every time he sank into his armchair at the end of the day. He closes his eyes and counts to ten. If he isn’t careful, this will begin to feel like home, even though home was hardly ever nice or warm or peaceful. And he fears that, at thirty-two, he is now too old to twist himself free again.

Heart beating, he pushes open the gate.

Cindy stands in the small vestibule, her thin hands holding open the front door, her feet in red Chinatown slippers. He wonders if anyone from her outside life—her friends, her co-workers at the bank, even the homeless man who sits in the same spot at the corner of Robson and Burrard every day—would recognize her in this house. Is the real Cindy the sister he has been meeting for drinks once a week for the last thirteen years, with the glossy hair and wide smile, bright dresses and matching pumps? The one who only mentions their parents if she has four glasses of wine? Or this one, with the unpainted face and shoulder blades like arrowheads underneath her pilly blue T-shirt?

She hands him a pair of slippers, identical to hers but bigger. “Here, wear these,” she says. “No shoes in the house, remember?”

“Cindy, I think I’m going to be sick.”

She frowns. “You won’t feel better standing here. They’re waiting.”

“I want to go. I want to leave right now.”

She grabs him by the shoulder and gives him a little shake. “You can’t. If you leave now, I’m never going to speak to you again,” she hisses.

“We could leave together. Let’s get the hell out of here.” His voice rises to a glass-clear pitch.

She bites her lip. He knows what she is imagining: a twirling life, red shoes, drinks with condensation pooling on coasters in an apartment with high, wide windows. Something brighter, with music, where lovers laugh at the coming dawn and hold up their glasses for more. No pained looks when she comes home after eleven o’clock. No statements that seem small but are really about husbands and grandchildren and disappointment.

“Get your shoes. My car’s right outside,” Danny whispers.

Cindy’s face resettles. Her voice is clipped, a businesslike tone that Danny has heard her use at the bank when counting out money for customers.

“They need me. Maybe you’ve forgotten, Danny: I’m not you.”

She turns her head and moves down the hallway, the bottoms of her slippers slapping at the badly worn hardwood floor. She pulls on her ponytail and disappears into the kitchen. Danny takes in a deep breath, smells the unmistakeable scent of mildew that grows in the hidden crevices beyond his mother’s reach. He sniffs again, and his nose fills with ginger and garlic. This house. Like no other.

In the living room, Danny’s father, Doug, sits in a faded yellow armchair, his thick hands firmly gripping the armrests. The television sends blue and white and green light into the room, making Danny’s eyes water. The news anchor stares fixedly. “A young man was found dead in Stanley Park early this morning,” he intones. Danny jumps, but his father doesn’t notice and merely drums his fingers against his thigh. The voice continues, “Police are not releasing any details, but already those who live in the area are saying the victim was targeted for being a homosexual.” The newscast cuts to a shot of a heavily wooded area near Lee’s Trail, cordoned off with yellow police tape. Danny can see a suede shoe with a tassel poking out from under a tarp. He saw a man with shoes just like that, walking in the park at night.

Danny chokes back the heaving in his stomach as his father turns his head and stares.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Danny. Why do you look like that? Are you sick?” Doug reaches for the half-drunk bottle of beer on the table beside him. A grease stain in the shape of a misshapen heart wrinkles on his thin blue work shirt as he moves.

“No. It’s just warm out, that’s all.”

“So, you’re back,” Doug says.

Danny shifts on his feet. His father doesn’t invite him to sit. “Just for dinner.”

“Why?”

Danny thinks he hasn’t quite heard. “What?”

“Why? Why are you here now?” For the first time, Doug looks at Danny’s face, and his eyes twitch. The bottom lids are red and watery. Danny suspects it’s from the beer and not his own long-delayed presence.

“I thought it would be nice to see everyone again. Cindy said you wanted to see me.”

“You haven’t visited once all this time. What makes you think I want to see you?”

Danny remembers those first weeks after he ran away, the fear that he might pass his own parents on the street or that they might descend on his best friend and nag him until he revealed Danny’s hiding spot. When he finally saw Cindy again at a pre-arranged time at a bus shelter near the Granville Bridge, he was shaking with anxiety, eyeing every bush in case his mother might pop out and grab his arm with a resolution to never let him go. But Cindy said they didn’t look for him. Doug yelled at his wife, saying, “This is all your doing,” before throwing out everything Danny left behind in his bedroom. He shook his finger in Betty’s face. “I don’t want anyone to know. If people ask, we say he moved away for a good job. Understand?” Betty wept every night for a week, her head on the kitchen table. She cornered Cindy when Doug wasn’t home, but not once did either of his parents drive or walk through the city, looking for their son.

“It’s like they knew you would never stay, even if they found you,” Cindy had said as she shivered in the early morning wind. “How could they make you come home? Besides, it’s a big secret. God forbid any of their friends should figure out we’re actually a completely messed-up family.”

Danny puts a hand out behind him and touches the familiar, warm front window. If he could, he would launch himself through the single-paned glass right now. He pushes on it. The frame gives slightly but manages not to break.

His father mutters, “You’re home now. Nothing I can do about it.”

Danny reaches into his mind for the safe discussion topics he thought up that morning. “How’s work, Dad? The store still busy?”

Doug grunts and scratches his lower back with his free hand. “You know, always the same. People look, don’t buy. Some days, I sell nothing.”

“That can’t be true. Now that it’s June, there must be people looking for souvenirs. When I used to work there in the summers, it was packed with tourists.”

His father fixes Danny with a hard stare. “That was a long time ago. When’s the last time you were in the store? Fifteen years?”

This is not how the conversation was supposed to unfold. Danny closes his eyes and focuses on the darkness. When he opens them again, his father is once more staring at the television, his hands clasped and resting on his stomach.

“Well, I guess I should go and see if Mom needs any help in the kitchen.”

Doug nods. “Yes, you go and see. She’s cooking a big meal, all for you.”

The kitchen steams and spatters. Every surface is covered in food: snap peas, bean sprouts, thinly sliced chicken, butterflied prawns. Danny can feel the oil from the cast-iron wok hurling droplets through the air and settling on his hair and skin. He squints and his mother’s outline emerges through the hot, greasy fog.

She looks so happy, he thinks. She’s smiling like she is about to crack in two. Danny stares at her stained apron and the cheap polyester shirt she wears underneath and takes an instinctive step backward. God, will she ever pull herself together?

“My boy,” Betty whispers in Chinese, “you’re here.” She rubs his arm with both her hands. “You’re so thin. And look, wrinkles. How can you have wrinkles?”

“I’m older, Mom, that’s all,” Danny replies, laughing at his mother’s chatter, despite himself. He feels strangely soothed.

“You’re old enough for a girlfriend then, aren’t you?” Her small eyes search his face. He shifts from one foot to the other and she taps a finger against his chest. “All you do is go out with your friends, isn’t that right? You must make time for girls too, you know.”

Cindy has turned around from the kitchen sink, her hands full of dripping greens. In her face, Danny can see his own—same full mouth and upturned nose, same smooth cheeks. The one difference is their eyes: while Cindy has the long, snaky eyes of their father—the kind that can hold secrets and laugh at you behind their thin, wrinkled lids—Danny has the eyes of their mother: round, dark and seemingly innocent.

“Mom, enough of that. Look, the water’s boiling,” Cindy says, pointing.

The lid on the noodle pot clatters and Betty rushes to the stove, forgetting that Danny hasn’t responded. He looks up at a spider on the ceiling and touches his forehead. The nerves in his skin are outgrown and bare, tingling with a sensation that is more than pain, that is amplified sharpness, the bright of noontime and a sound like mice screaming in their traps. His mother was this close to unravelling it all, to picking at the right scab to see the baby-pink skin underneath.

Betty sprinkles sliced green onions on the last dish—braised pork belly—and brings it to the table. As they begin eating, she talks and talks. Her voice fills the room, rising and falling, asking questions that remain hanging until she answers them herself.

“Do you know what happened to Mrs. Chang? Her husband left her. It turns out he was having an affair with a younger woman. What sort of girl wants an old man like that? I’ll tell you, a girl who’s not right in the head. I said to Auntie May, ‘Maybe this girl is retarded,’ but she said no. She’s a flight attendant and isn’t in town much. So then I thought maybe she has an old man in many different cities. A very bad girl, I think. A good girl doesn’t leave her parents for a job. No, she waits for the right husband and buys a big house that will fit everybody. A daughter can’t be separated from her parents.” Betty smiles at Cindy, who drops her eyes.

Danny thinks he might laugh and spray the table with rice and pork. Betty picks up an especially fat prawn and places it in his bowl, nodding as he pokes at it with his chopsticks.

Cindy leans toward Danny and says in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear, “She’s gone bonkers. She’s so happy you’re here, I’ll bet she doesn’t even know what she’s saying.”

Doug chews. The dishes in the middle of the table steam, blowing smells toward the ceiling. “Good daughters, good sons—no such thing,” he says in English, eyes fixed on the tablecloth. “We should have had at least five grandchildren by now, all living under one roof.”

Danny looks at his mother, whose face has brightened.

Cindy rolls her eyes. “Here she goes again. I swear: she hasn’t talked this much in a month.”

“Yes, grandchildren.” Betty lays down her chopsticks and points around the table. “I know why you two don’t get married. It’s because you, Miss Cindy, are too shy. Always walking around with your head down. Who will see your face then? And you,” she turns to Danny, “think no one is good enough. The right girl won’t be perfect, you know. And it’s not as if you’re so perfect yourself. Always hanging out with your friends; never coming home to see your mother and father. How will you ever become a good family man?”

Danny was ready for the hard questions. That morning, he lay in bed, imagining all the ways his parents could say you’re not good enough, why don’t you do what we know is best, we are disappointed. Even so, their words sink like stones and he droops in his seat. All he can think of is the failure raining down on him and pricking his skin. Not a good son. Not a famous photographer. Not the love of anyone’s life.

He can feel Betty’s gaze on his face as he stares at his rice bowl.

“You will never be the man you could be, Danny, unless you try to change,” she says softly. “You must try.”

As soon as Cindy stands up and begins collecting the empty dishes, Danny rises. “I have to work tomorrow,” he mutters. “One of the brides is in a hurry for the prints.”

Cindy dumps the pile of plates and bowls into the sink and the crash startles him.

“What about dessert?” Betty rushes to the fridge and begins pulling out a dish of sweet tofu pudding.

If he doesn’t leave now, his parents will ask him more pointed questions and he will lie at first, but eventually, exhausted, he will speak the truth. His parents’ disapproval will break him, make him want to hide forever in his old bedroom, surrounded by the boxes filled with extra stock from the store. His life outside that front door will evaporate, and he will have wasted all those years he spent carefully building his uncontaminated freedom. He will grow immune to his mother’s dowdiness and his father’s sarcasm. The local schoolchildren will whisper about his face in the living-room window, pale and unsmiling, and make promises to each other that they will never approach, not even for trick-or-treating. His socks stick to the kitchen floor; perhaps it’s the spilled grains of cooked rice, or perhaps the house itself is clinging to him, pulling on any available part of his body. If this is home, then home is not what he wants.

“No, I’m sorry, Mom. I have to go.” He hurries toward the front hall, wiping his hands on his pants as he goes. He bursts outside into the humid air, not daring to look behind.


In that pre-dawn all those years ago, Danny took this same route, riding in someone else’s Cadillac as it drove too quickly down these same streets. His body braces, anticipates the bumps and pits in the road. The railroad tracks run parallel to the street and abandoned train cars sit to the side, some rusting from the top down, others settling into the ground, surrounded by crab grass and salal. Shadows move in the doorways of the warehouses and shipping companies. Danny doesn’t look closely at the people he perceives hiding in the evening dim. Men trading money for heroin or cocaine. Women trading all sorts of things for five dollars, sometimes ten.

He rolls down the window, and the smell of the fish cannery, drying weeds and salt blows into the car. He breathes it all in; after all, this fetid air means that he is driving away.

Turning down Davie Street, he sees that, even though the sun has not set, the night has already begun. Women stand on the sidewalk, fixing each car with looks of disdain or invitation. Their short skirts cling to their thighs and asses and stretch almost to ripping whenever they walk or shift their weight. In the doorway of a boarded-up restaurant, a group of uneasy men and women in walking shoes eye the prostitutes warily. One man fingers a stack of picket signs leaning against the wall behind him, seemingly unsure of the right time to begin marching up and down the street and screaming at the cars that slow down, “Shame, shame, shame!” Through the passenger window, Danny can make out one of the hand-lettered signs: JONNS GO HOME! And the cars keep coming, one after the other, with heads swivelling to see better out the side windows. The drivers sit in shadows, but Danny imagines they look the same: unremarkable; hair, eyes and skin all varying shades of brown and beige. In the apartments above the storefronts, curtains sway, moved by the wind or by the tenants hidden behind them.

Around the corner, huddled in a small group on a side street, six boys stand in their white T-shirts and tight jeans, their hands stuffed into their pockets. They, too, eye the cars cruising past, but look directly at a driver only if the driver looks first. Like a flight of swallows, they seem to be one pulsing creature, until a single boy, tall with dark hair, breaks away to lean against a lamppost and light a cigarette.

These boys stand like his eighteen-year-old self, the one who slumped and slouched down the sidewalks, watching how others conducted their public, street-level lives. Years ago, he might have sidled past them, maybe even asked for a light just so he could more closely study the way their hair flipped along their collars.

He turns right onto Jervis and eases his way into a parking spot, tight between two other cars. Looking up, he can see the dark windows of his apartment. His neighbour has installed two planter boxes, both filled with begonias and pansies, and her curtains—yellow with blue dots—are backlit by a soft lamp. As he reaches down to roll up his window, a brief muggy breeze blows through the car, raising the hairs in his nose. He looks up once more at the third floor before pushing open the driver’s door, stepping onto the sidewalk and walking in the opposite direction, away from the quiet of his apartment above.


This is Vancouver, the city that he loves for its very wetness, for the cool rain that trickles down awnings on November evenings, the slippery sidewalks, the inlet that promises escape to other, farther places if he should ever feel the need. This is the place where land and water meet, where the shoreline is forever shifting, waves ebbing over the rocky sand or crashing against the roots of rust-coloured arbutus, cold and wind tearing away layers of bark. The buildings of downtown rise above it all, winking through the mist, attracting boys and girls from the suburbs, the Eastside, the North Shore.

This is the damp Vancouver that Danny knows. The Vancouver he hurries across, where the shadows and crowds and fog provide cover for the men who populate his open nights. This is the Vancouver where he sometimes sees glimmers of old lovers through the rain; one stands ghostlike in half-lit alleys, blue eyes pulsing through the gloom.

Tonight the hot air opens his pores. He walks along the seawall in Stanley Park, under the shade of Douglas firs and cedars, avoiding the piles of fallen needles and dust that have collected in the dips and cracks of the concrete. He can hear a car radio through the trees. “This may be the hottest summer on record, folks. Temperatures will remain in the thirties for the next week at least. Watch out—1982 is turning out to be a scorcher!” Danny looks up at the dark sky—cloudless, with stars barely visible from this swath of green that flirts with nature but is really a city park, made and marked by machines and the humans who travel its paths. By the men who walk with disguised purpose between trees in the night.

He turns onto a narrow gravel trail and his stomach clenches in expectation. Branches brush his ears, poking the thin skin like sharp words. His shoes press down on the rocks and dirt, his steps making as little noise as a raccoon’s pointed, furry paws. He wonders if the police tape is still there, past the trees on his left. A ripple of fear builds in the bottom of his spine and snakes its way up into his neck, his ears. He thinks about turning back. Perhaps the murderer is waiting for one more victim, maybe a nervous, jumpy Chinese man. He passes a group who look over their shoulders at every sound.

“Someone told me it was Wayne. You know, that short guy from back east.”

“I heard it might have been someone he was sleeping with.”

Danny shivers in a gust of warm air. And decides to stay in the park. If he left he would be scared and lonely. Here, he’s only scared.

The first time he found this trail, he was living in a tiny, ground-floor apartment on Pendrell, where clouds of flies and the smell of cat pee drifted in through the window. For a week, he wandered from bed to toilet to stove, unsure of whether he should lounge in his underwear or clean the mould that grew on the sills. He finally went outside, where at least the streets looked familiar and walking from one place to the next was a simple decision. He stumbled on this path while exploring the park on an overcast, chilly night. His parents disliked the outdoors, especially in the dark, when fences and garages blended into the bush and the yellow eyes of unknown animals glowered from their perches between trees. And so Danny, restless, with nerves standing on end, decided to walk every trail he came across, touch each species of evergreen he passed. Eventually, he came to a clearing where three benches sat in a triangle. There, behind a thicket of vine maples, he saw two men clasping hands under branches that curved above their heads.

It was then that he began to come to the park every week.

Tonight, his nostrils twitch. He can smell the men, some standing in groups of two or three where the trail widens and forks to the left and the right. There’s no mistaking the smell that collects in arm hairs, the smell that is musk and breath and cologne all at once. The smell that lingers on Danny when he returns home, a slight smile playing across his lips as he lies alone in his double bed.

As he walks, he begins to forget the news, the eyes of his plain-faced mother as he sat eating the food she cooked. He forgets that he rushed out of his parents’ house unceremoniously. His muscles ache and his blood rushes, thinned by the heat around and within him. He continues to walk, and is exactly as he appears: a man who is as much a part of this protected, harbouring park as the decaying nurse log on his right, or the other men who lean against tree trunks, their bodies melting into the mass of vegetation around them. Even his name isn’t important anymore.

A voice behind him. “I’ve seen you here before.”

Danny turns, looks into the eyes of a light-haired man almost as tall as the trees behind him. Pressed polo shirt. Moustache and glowing teeth. Skin that looks pebbly to the touch, as if he has spent half his life working in a rough wind. He seems to carry his own spotlight, for how else could Danny see all these things in the dark?

There is, he knows, a spot accessible by squeezing through two oversized ferns, a spot that generates its own protective silence. He opens his mouth, but every word he considers is inadequate. All he can think is how hot it would be to have sex with this man, in the park where needles and dry grass are in danger of flaming up, where the slightest friction could cause treetops to catch fire like matchsticks. He thinks of sweat simmering between bodies.

Danny nods to his right and they silently enter the bush. In his favourite spot, there is enough air and ground for him and him on this sweltering night. Their outermost selves—the ones who drive to work in the morning, or who don’t answer the phone because they know their mothers are trying to reach them—have fallen away, expelled because of this need to feel the velocity of their bodies together. Danny’s breath emerges from his chest easily, without pain.

Branches crack in the quiet. If he leans forward, like so, he can rest his hands on the trunk of the tree in front of him. His narrow hips are grasped from behind and his body opens until he and this colossus of a man are no longer distinct as two separate people. They are an eight-limbed, brand-new creature, slick and burning, its double mouth closed in case a police officer happens to be walking on the other side of the trees. Danny relishes the feeling of another man’s hands holding him, encircling his body like he will never let go, like this one meeting will somehow turn into a lifetime of late brunches on Sundays. He wonders if he should ask his partner’s name, then thinks better of it, realizing that, in the months to come, he would rather wordlessly remember him with echoes of these waves that push and pull. Besides, asking might spur this man to question him in turn, and how would Danny ever explain his compartmentalized self to someone else? This is something he has never done in the park and he doesn’t want to start now. Please, not now.

For one second, a streak of moonlight falls through the tree cover, and their combined shadow, defined by lumps and the sharpness of joints, appears and is then gone. When they separate, the man kisses Danny on the lips before walking away, waving once before disappearing down the gravel path.

As Danny makes his way home through the downtown streets, he exhales in relief that neither of them had spoken. It’s the newness he craves, the change from face to face to face, the constant march of men through his nights, none of whom ask for details or stories of the past, just this sliver of a moment in the hush of the park. The fulfillment of his wants helps him believe that he is not a failure, that he is still running and immune from capture; words will only suggest the opposite.