“Hey.” It’s Laurie. She’s got two mugs of coffee, and she hands one to me and sits on my bed. “I thought you were awake.”
I sit up and take it from her, blowing on it before I sip. It’s rich, with lots of sugar and cream. Just the way I like it.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I don’t know what she wants from me. It isn’t any of her fucking business, really. What does it matter to her, anyway? I doubt I’ll even be here long. I’m never anyplace for long.
“Marty from Boreal Retirement Home called the other day. He told me you’ve been doing a great job with the painting.”
I shrug my shoulders. I guess he has to keep Laurie and Bill in the loop as part of the whole restorative rehabilitation crap.
“He also said that you’ve been spending time with a woman who knew your grandfather?”
“Yeah.” I know he told her more than that. I was grounded.
We sip our coffee. Silent. I can hear the TV in the other room. Noise from the kitchen.
“They were lovers,” I say.
“Oh.”
“Before he met my grandmother.”
“Is that right?”
I take another sip of coffee. “I don’t remember my grandmother.”
She looks at me, her eyebrows crinkled together, and I can tell she’s thinking about something.
“You never would have met her. She was never in your life.”
“How would you know?”
“Well, before you came into our care, we had a meeting with your social worker. She told us about your family, whatever they knew.”
Somehow this pisses me off. A room full of people who are practically strangers, who don’t really give a shit about me, sitting around talking about me like I’m some fucking object, writing notes in a file, passing judgment, making decisions about my life, and I don’t have any say in any of it. But it makes me wonder what else she knows.
“Oh yeah? Maybe someone should think to fill me in.”
She puts her mug down, empty. “What do you want to know?”
“About my grandmother.” Not my mother. Not my father. I want to know about my grandmother. Because of Elizabeth.
She pauses for a moment. Maybe she won’t tell me anything after all.
“Your grandfather never married. He didn’t have any other children. He had only been living in Nipigon for a few years before you were born and was semi-retired, but sometimes worked on a commercial fishing tug. He’d lived in southern Ontario before that, but the file doesn’t say much more about where or what he did. There was a little bit about your mother, which you already know.”
I do. But she’s only a name on a piece of paper: Mother; Isabel Lambton. Father; unknown.
“She was from Toronto. Maybe your grandmother was someone your grandfather met when he lived in that part of the province.”
She doesn’t say it out loud, but I can hear the suggestion that whatever the relationship was, it didn’t last. Obviously they didn’t stay together, whoever she was.
“Your mother was older when she had you, and on top of that, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer after she found out she was pregnant. She was dying before you were even born. Apparently she tracked down your grandfather from the information on her birth registration. Sometimes people who have lost touch with their family feel compelled to find them and reconnect when they’re pregnant or really sick, and she was both. I suspect that your grandfather didn’t even know he’d had a child until she showed up in Nipigon.”
The thing about never knowing your mother is that you get to imagine her and make her whatever you want. When I did that, my mother was always strong and young and beautiful. And she had Grandpa. They shared the same things we shared. The nights by the fire. The music. The stories of the Lake. Now, just when I’m starting to pull together the fibers of my life, the fabric is being ripped apart again. I realize that the only person I ever called family might have been a stranger to my own mother. I didn’t know that the threads that linked me to my past were so fucking fragile.
“Your grandfather raised you after your mother died. She had named him as your guardian. It must have been a lot for him to take on at his age, but he did a remarkable job. He obviously loved you very much. They told me he taught you to play the violin and that you played beautifully. I”—she pauses and looks at me—“I didn’t realize just how well you played.”
I can’t imagine she looks at me and sees a remarkable job. I haven’t exactly made life easy for her.
“Why haven’t you told me any of this before?”
She sighs. “You’ve never asked before.”
She stands up and walks over to the window. I didn’t put the screen back properly last time I snuck out, and she snaps it back into place.
“Sometimes people say things with their actions that they can’t find a way to say with their words,” she says, one hand resting on the windowsill, her back to me. “If you have any other questions, I would be happy to help you find the answers.” I don’t say anything. She’s not talking about my family anymore. She knows about the window.
She comes over and stands beside my bed, looking at me. “At some point, we all ask ourselves, Who am I? The thing is, it’s not about who you are or who you were, it’s about who you can be.” She takes my empty mug from me, heads out the door. “Pancakes are ready.”
*
I spread newspaper on the sidewalk and set the paint can down, prying open the lid with a screwdriver. The day is mild, mild enough, Marty said, to finish up the last little bits of painting that have to be done, and then I’m free to go, my obligation to Boreal Retirement Home, my “restorative rehabilitation” for my thoughtless act of vandalism, finished. Anne Campbell, RN, Executive Director, will sign off on the papers, and I will never have to come back again. I pick up a wooden stir stick and mix in the skim of oil that floats above the white paint until it’s smooth, then set it down to rest on the lid of the can. I’m moving slowly.
The day is nice enough that several of the residents are outside. Mr. Androsky is here; his son and little Becca have brought the weekly milk shake, and a brightly colored plastic princess with oversize eyes and unrealistic hair is busy exploring the rock garden around the pond. I have not seen Miss Livingstone.