“AND AS FAR AS I KNOW,” said Edward Dixon, “she’s still there.”
Maria’s vision altered. She found this very curious. Light was suddenly sucked away from the room in which they sat, leaving Dixon shrouded in darkness, as though in a cave, with only a single pinpoint of illumination shining upon his face from somewhere. Maria asked him where it was, this place where her mother had been taken all those years ago, and his voice, when he answered, created luminous letters in midair: he opened his mouth, and letters of the alphabet swarmed into the air, glowing in the dark like phosphorescent alphabet soup. Maria studied the letters, but it was not an alphabet she knew.
She nodded politely, smiling, backed out of the house—or felt that she did—and made her way to the rented car parked in front. It was a small silver car, waiting obediently. Maria climbed in and had to tell herself all the things there were to do: close the door, lock it, insert the ignition key, put on her seat belt, turn the key—good. The motor started. Now move the gearshift into the “drive” position.
Maria sat perfectly still for a moment. Then she swiveled her head slowly to the right. Edward Dixon was standing in the window, looking out at her. Maria felt nothing. He lifted his hand in a gesture that was half wave, half blessing. She kept both hands on the steering wheel. Then she faced front again and drove away.
She turned left at the corner and soon reached a main street beyond which she could see the gray stone buildings of the University of Saskatchewan, where the man who wasn’t her father had gone to school. She headed for the center of the city and the Bessborough Hotel, where she was staying because as a child she had once stayed there with the people who weren’t her parents. As an eight-year-old she had opened a desk drawer, found a bottle of ink and removed the lid, and managed to spill it. She remembered the blue-black puddle creeping slowly across the bottom of the drawer and onto the hotel stationery. She had closed the drawer, slowly, and then spent an apprehensive evening waiting for one of her nonparents to discover the mess. But they hadn’t. She liked to think that somewhere in this hotel even now, today, there was a desk drawer containing a large but faded inkstain.
In her room—where the desk drawer was ink-free—she looked out the window at the South Saskatchewan River and the university rising from the opposite bank. It was a warm summer day. The river was a darker blue than the sky, and a brisk wind tossed the branches of the trees that were clustered along the water’s edge.
After a while Maria took a deep, steadying breath, pressed her palms against her chest, between her breasts, and sat down at the telephone table to call the institution where her mother had been housed for the last forty-eight years.
***
She drove there in her rented silver car with the window open, drove slowly along a two-lane highway. When there was a break in the flow of traffic, she often heard a meadowlark, one of the few birdsongs she could identify, and this sound created in her the singular feeling that was simultaneous pain and joy. It was a melody from her childhood. The flat expanse of prairie, the circular horizon, the thunderheads moving rapidly across the summer-blue sky—these were things from her childhood, too, as powerful, as exultant, as the mountainous, seaside landscape where she now made her home. Through the car window came the song of the meadowlark, the fragrance of canola, the rough prairie breezes—and Maria for a few sporadic instants was almost able to forget where she was going and why.
Eventually, though, she reached her destination.
It was a large, not unfriendly building—except for the bars on the windows—constructed of red brick. Maria wondered, getting out of her car—where did they get the brick?
Inside was a small reception area that felt like a police station. There was no entry into the main part of the building without going behind the reception counter. A Plexiglas wall with wickets cut out of it extended several feet upward from the countertop. Two women were sitting behind it, one working at a computer, the other peering through eyeglasses at paperwork that Maria couldn’t see.
Maria leaned forward to speak through one of the wickets. “I’m here to see Nadine Gage.” This got her a curious glance from the young, ponytailed woman at the computer.
“One moment, please,” the other one said with a smile. She was older and had a pair of crutches propped up in the corner where the counter met the wall. She got on the phone and murmured.
While she waited, Maria turned and looked out the window. The thunderheads were much nearer. By the time she left here the rain would probably have come and gone, a cool delicious shudder expelled by the returning sun.
“May I help you?”
Maria turned.
“I’m Carol Hartley, the director. I understand that you’d like to see Nadine.” Her hands were clasped at her waist, and her head was tilted a little. She looked slightly amazed. Well, no wonder, thought Maria.
“Yes. My name is Maria Buscombe. I’m her daughter.”
“Really,” said Carol Hartley.
“I was adopted when I was a baby.” The woman was studying her critically, and Maria tried unsuccessfully to relax. “I discovered only yesterday that—that she’s here.”
“You’re familiar with the circumstances under which she was admitted?” said the director.
“I am. Yes.”
The woman’s gaze was abrasive. Maria wanted to avert her eyes and shift from foot to foot.
“Why do you want to see her?”
Maria, suddenly composed, considered several replies. “Forgive me,” she said finally, “but that’s a ridiculous question. The woman is my mother.”
“Let me put it another way,” said Carol Hartley, unruffled. “Why do you think she ought to see you?”
“Maybe she shouldn’t see me,” said Maria. “That’s something you’ll know better than I.” She realized that the women behind the counter were listening and felt a flash of anger that this conversation wasn’t being conducted in private.
The director sat on a bench near the door, gesturing to Maria to join her. “Nadine hasn’t been well,” she said, lowering her voice. Maria made no response. “She’s had a couple of heart attacks.” The director fingered the gold chain around her neck. Her long hair was pinned to her head in a series of tight loops. Maria smelled perfume. There must be people with allergies in this place, she thought. She imagined the director sailing through a dormitory and leaving in her wake elderly mad persons whose sudden sneezes were toppling them out of their beds.
“Do you think seeing me is likely to provoke another one?”
The director gave her that steady stare again. She was a little older than Maria, an individual who looked strong and confident physically and who had about her an air of impenetrable serenity. She stood up. “Come with me.”
Maria followed her down a long hallway with an abnormally high ceiling. Then into a long room split horizontally by a thigh-high counter that was itself divided by three-foot walls into ten cubicles, on either side of which was a chair. From the center of the counter a sturdy wire divider rose several feet and was secured to the four corners of the ceiling. The room was empty.
“Wait here,” said Carol Hartley. “I’ll see what she says.” She went back into the hallway.
Maria sat down at one of the cubicles.
Her side of the counter faced a wall with a row of windows, barred, at the top. Through the glass Maria saw the now darkened sky and a tree being whipped by the wind. There were two doors on the opposite side of the counter, one on either side of the room, near the windows. Maria had placed her handbag on the floor next to her chair. She moved the chair now to align it more precisely in the middle of the cubicle.
She thought she might be having a dream or acting in a movie. Her mouth was very dry—she longed to go outside and lift her face into the rain that had now begun to fall, to let it slide across her lips and into her open mouth. She started when the door behind her opened and Carol Hartley reentered the room.
“She says she’ll see you.” She was smiling a little. She sat down quietly on a chair by the door.
When the door on the other side of the counter opened, Maria’s heart took a tremendous leap. For an instant she thought it had literally stopped, and she wondered how long it would last, this flash of consciousness between death and the brain’s acceptance of death. An old woman in gray stepped through the door, followed by a male attendant dressed in white. Maria’s heart lurched back into action and assumed a shallow, rapid, but constant rhythm as she watched the elderly person who was her mother make her reluctant, unsteady way across the room. Maria heard the shuffling of her slippered feet and the sound of the rain slapping furiously against the windows: all sounds were echoey in the linoleum-floored expanse of this graceless, charmless room.
As the woman came closer Maria saw that she was thin and frail, dressed not in gray, but in sweatpants and a sweatshirt that were faded blue. She had long white hair in a single braid. Her back was slightly humped, and arthritis had contorted her hands, held hesitantly in front of her, into claws. The attendant pulled out the chair for her, and she sat down, rested her claws on the countertop, lifted her head, and gazed dispassionately through the wire at Maria. Her eyes were rheumy but alert. For what felt like a long time, there was silence.
“Do they still call you Maria?” It was a surprisingly strong voice.
Maria nodded.