In spite of it being the capital city, Ottawa has a certain small-town charm that Véronique likes. There’s a wholesomeness about it that Montreal does not have, a lack of attention to status and hipness that is a relief. When she thinks of Ottawa, she thinks of rosy cheeks and healthy hearts and outdoorsy people who bike-ride or ice-skate as their primary means of transportation. Maybe it’s because the heart of the city is the Rideau Canal, and depending on the season, you can either skate on or jog alongside it from one end of the city to the other.
She likes Carleton, with its sprawling campus and shabby residence buildings and its maze of tunnels, where students rush to their classes wearing pajamas and slippers, so that no one ever has to set foot outside when it’s cold. Her impression of college life is that it’s a bit cultish and self-involved; the campus is very much an island unto itself, completely disconnected from the rest of the world, moving to its own circadian rhythms, beholden to its strange customs and rituals—the Breeze on Tuesdays, Rooster’s on Wednesdays, the Market on Saturdays, frosh week, Panda, Midwinter Ball, Kosmic.
Callahan talks about these things as though everyone knows what they mean. All Véronique knows is Callahan sells tons of cigarettes around campus, and she in turn makes shitloads of money off him, just like her uncle promised. Callahan will page her and say, “Kosmic is this weekend, bring a few extra cases.” Or, “Double my usual order for frosh week.” Kosmic, frosh week—who knows what any of those are? She doesn’t care. All she knows is she makes tons of cash off them.
Once, he took her around campus. They went to the dorms first, delivering the cartons of cigarettes, where everyone greeted him like he was Santa Claus.
“The Marlboro Man is here!” they cheered, inviting him in, offering him weed or hash or mushrooms, asking him to join in a round of euchre.
Afterwards, the two of them shared a pitcher of beer at Rooster’s in the University Centre—he called it the Unicentre—and then they walked around the entire campus, ending up in the quad, where they got high. She could see the appeal of college life, the coddled, insular cocoon of safety and inclusion it fostered, but she wouldn’t trade her freedom for the experience. Not now, not at this point in her life. In the end, these kids would graduate and have to trade in their precious freedom for a regular job and a slot on society’s assembly line.
Callahan is in his fourth year, which means he’ll be graduating this year and he’ll have to pass the Marlboro Man torch on to another guy. Véronique is sorry to lose him as her point of contact and to have to start all over again with someone new, someone she might not like as much.
She can’t imagine what Callahan will do with his life. He’s not that intelligent. His best bet, Véronique thinks, would be to continue selling contraband.
When she shows up at his house on Glen Street, she can tell right away he’s stoned. Aside from the glassy eyeballs, he talks really slowly when he’s high. “Veronica,” he drawls. “Bienvenue! You made it.”
He helps her unload the cases from her trunk and invites her inside. Further evidence of his being high is spread all over his coffee table—a beer bottle with a hole in the bottom, tiny balls of tinfoil, broken cigarettes, sprinkles of hash that look like mouse shit, two burnt knives. The first time she saw the bottle with the hole, he had to explain to her it was a makeshift bong. Apparently, they like to use props in college—knives, bots, bongs. They get bored easily.
There’s a Pizza Pizza box on the floor, which she steps over on her way to the couch, and a rancid smell in the room—sweat socks mixed with hash and the faint breeze of garbage. He’s blasting Soundgarden. The place is a dump, which is to be expected from six twenty-something guys living together.
“You want?” he asks her, holding up the bottle bong.
“No thanks,” she says. “I can’t stay long.” Her English is pretty terrible, but she’s gotten better at understanding him.
“Why not?” he asks, lighting a half-smoked cigarette from the table. He’s wearing a baggy Roots sweatshirt and matching sweatpants. He has pale skin and blue eyes and reddish-blond hair that looks orange in the sunlight. His body is soft and milky.
“I have plans with James,” she says.
“How’s he doing?”
They met once, James and Callahan. James had to drive her here because her car had broken down.
“He’s fine.”
Whenever she’s with Callahan in his collegiate microcosm, she’s always reminded of what a grown-up James is, and even though she can appreciate what Callahan and his friends enjoy about this utopian pit stop on their way to the real world, she’s glad she’s with a man who doesn’t smoke hash from a Molson bottle.
“My roommate Perky’s friend was up from Montreal last weekend,” he says, over Chris Cornell’s wailing. They’re sitting side by side on the couch. “He told me something really fascinating.”
“Oh, yeah. What’s that?”
“I mentioned your name to him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I was just talking about you. Probably in the context of him being from Montreal. As in, Hey, I’ve got a friend from Montreal—”
She’s eyeing him.
“Dude, chill.” Callahan laughs. “He’s not a cop. Anyway, I mentioned your name—”
She doesn’t like where this is going. She’s been here before.
“And it turns out he knows you.”
“Does he.”
“Well, he doesn’t know you know you. He knows of you.”
She can feel her neck tensing, that familiar ripple of panic inside her chest.
“Your dad is, like, Léo Fortin, the FLQ guy who kidnapped that politician.”
Véronique is quiet.
“You’re famous,” Callahan says, smiling stupidly.
“Hardly.”
“Is your dad still in jail?”
“No,” she says, quietly seething.
She doesn’t want to overreact and make this a bigger deal than it is, but something feels broken now. She’s always enjoyed her anonymity here; the way she could pretend, even just to herself, that she was a regular undergrad without any history.
“Did he actually murder the guy?” Callahan asks her, leaning forward on his knees. “Are you a separatist?”
When she used to get bullied as a kid, her mother would say to her, “This will always be your cross to bear.”
She remembers in grade six, one of the boys in her class had found out about her father. She overheard him talking to his friends about it. “Her father is Léo Fortin, the FLQ murderer!”
It was 1981. Kids her age were old enough to know about the October Crisis; it was already lodged in their collective consciousness. But Véronique didn’t really understand what her father had done; all she knew was she had to visit him in prison and tell people her parents were divorced.
When she overheard those boys talking about her father, she could feel her face getting hot, her hands curling into fists. She didn’t turn around, but a cluster of kids soon surrounded her in the hall.
“Véronique’s father is an FLQ murderer,” one of them said.
Shock moved through the group in a wave. She watched their expressions change, from curiosity to surprise to disgust.
“He’s still in jail, isn’t he?”
“Did he also plant those bombs in the mailboxes?”
“They murdered a bunch of people,” someone said. “They bombed factories and buildings.”
Véronique was fighting back tears.
“I knew there was something sinister about you, Véronique.”
She ran out of the building, humiliated. She never forgot that word. Sinister.
She was ostracized for a couple of weeks, but eventually, as with most gossip, her story lost its sheen and became old news. After a while, no one cared anymore. In fact, as she got older, it became more of a badge, something cool and differentiating at a time in their lives when everyone desperately wanted to be different. As the years went on, the separation movement started gaining momentum again and her father’s story made her less of a pariah and more of a rock star. She was very popular in high school.
Still, she will never forget the first time her secret came out in public. How the word sinister had embedded itself inside her and remained there all through high school, no matter how popular she became. In the end, her father’s crime would always impact her reputation, for good or bad. How could it not?
“I’ve got to go,” she says, standing up. Callahan is watching her, bewildered.
“You just got here,” he says, sounding disappointed.
“Can you get my money, please?”
“Sure, come on up.”
She follows him upstairs, remembering the last time she was here. The house had been full of people—one of his roommates was having a keg party before the big Panda football game. Callahan told her he wasn’t in the mood—he was over it, had been to enough of them—and he asked her if she wanted to listen to music in his room before she had to turn around and drive back to Montreal.
They’d known each other for a while at that point, and he’d never tried anything or given any indication of an attraction—she thought of him as a harmless mascot, the Marlboro Man gamboling across campus—and so after a split second’s hesitation, she said, “Sure.”
They listened to music. She sat in a chair, and he lay on his bed. He played her the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead. It was the first time she’d ever heard the song “Creep,” and she loved it. It was a languid afternoon. They passed a joint around. She wasn’t in a rush to jump back on the road. The drive to and from Ottawa is long and tedious, especially back-to-back.
“You’re not pissed at me, are you?” he asks, obviously sensing he may have crossed a line talking about her father.
“No,” she says, trying to sound neutral. He’s a good customer. She can’t be a bitch to him.
“Hey, let me play you something,” he says, bending over a crate of CDs.
She looks at her watch. She wants to get home to James, but there’s a certain amount of customer service involved in her job. She sits down on the chair next to his desk. She tries to imagine him doing homework here and can’t. She can’t figure out how he’s managed to get to fourth year, let alone graduate soon.
“This song reminds me of you,” he says, popping a Lemonheads disc out of its case.
He slides it into his deck and presses play, then lights a joint and hands it to her before flopping backwards on his bed. “It’s called ‘My Drug Buddy.’”
“Is that what I am?”
“Sort of. And my cigarette dealer, of course.”
Callahan sings along. “‘She’s coming over. We’ll go out walking. Make a call on the way . . .’”
“It’s good,” she says, humoring him. After a measured beat, she says, “I should really get going.”
“You sure you can’t hang for a while?” he asks, his voice slightly supplicating. He’s looking at her with stoned, reverential eyes.
“I’ve got to go. I have another delivery.”
“Sure,” he says, disappointed. He pays her and gives her an awkward hug, and she lets herself out.
When she gets home, she finds James on her couch, tapping away on his laptop. They usually spend weekends at her place, weeknights at his. He looks up when she comes into the room and smiles, holds out his arm to her. She takes his hand and lets him pull her onto his lap.
“What are you working on?” she asks him.
“My column about the Duplessis orphans. Tell me what you think so far,” he says, turning the laptop so she can read his piece. “It’s an opinion column. Every once in a while they let me have some fun.”
She settles in beside him on the couch and starts to read.
The Most Horrific Quebec Scandal You’ve Never Heard About
J. G. Phénix, Canadian News Association
Elodie de Ste. Sulpice is only 44 years old, but she’s resigned to the fact that she will never live a normal life, having grown up in one of Quebec’s mental institutions. But Elodie is not mentally deficient in any way. She was born to an unwed teenage girl in 1950 and sent to the Ste. Sulpice Orphanage in the hope that she would soon be adopted. Instead, under Premier Maurice Duplessis’s dark regime, all the orphanages in the province were “reclassified” as mental institutions, and little Elodie, along with thousands of other innocent orphans, was declared mentally deficient.
Why do such a thing? Because mental patients got more federal subsidy money than orphans did, so in collusion with the Catholic Church and the medical association, the provincial government concocted a scheme to effectively rob the orphans of their childhoods.
Elodie is my sister. I met her in 1974, when she showed up on our family’s doorstep. “I was a perfectly normal little girl,” she says. “But they declared me mentally deficient to line their pockets. It’s hard to get over that.”
Elodie has filed a criminal complaint with the Sûreté du Quebec, and is part of a class action lawsuit that was filed on behalf of the Duplessis Orphans Committee . . .
“What do you think?” he asks her.
“How can you write about your own sister like she’s a fictional character?”
“It’s called journalistic objectivity.”
“Even I can’t not think about the real Elodie when I read it. How do you separate out your emotion?”
“I’m a professional,” he says, full of self-importance. “The five core values of journalism are accuracy, independence, humanity, accountability, and impartiality.”
Véronique can’t stand this side of him. “It’s hard for me to read this,” she says, aware she’s being nasty, but annoyed that it’s in English. Annoyed he works for an English news agency.
“We both know you understand English,” he says.
“It’s still hard for me to read it.”
“You get the gist, though.”
“It frustrates me that you have to write in English,” she says. “You could be such an asset for our side.”
“Our side? What side? We’re on the same side, V. I’m a working journalist. I write the news. I happen to do that for an English agency at the moment. Why’re you in such a shit mood? Did something happen in Ottawa?”
“No.”
“If you want to talk about hating what your partner does for a living, let’s talk about your current vocation.”
“Forget I said anything,” she says, cutting him off. “It’s brilliant. Your article is brilliant.”
“If you’re going to bitch and complain about my job,” he goes on, “at least be willing to hear how I feel about yours.”
Here comes the lecture.
“I hate that you smuggle cigarettes,” he starts. “I hate how dangerous it is. I worry every second that you’re in Ste. Barbe on a run. Worried you’re going to get caught and thrown in jail. Worried someone’s going to shoot you.”
“Are you done?”
“No, I’m not. I hate that you hang out with college guys, partying with them and pretending to be friends with them.”
“You’re jealous?”
“Yeah! I’m fucking jealous!” he admits. “Frankly, I hate that my girlfriend is a professional criminal.”
“So you wish I had a real job.”
“Can you blame me?”
He’s mentioned this to her before, though with more subtlety. He went so far as to suggest that journalism would be a good career path for her, given her enthusiasm for politics. He even looked up journalism programs in Montreal, which irritated her. She’s of the opinion that journalists are sellouts. The constraint of having to report objectively on events that are meaningful to her, without being able to assert her opinion, holds absolutely no interest for her. Besides, she’s only twenty-three. There’s time for her cause to reveal itself. “It’s not who I am,” she says. “Being part of the grind.”
She can feel herself rebelling against his desire for her to quit smuggling, to become an upstanding citizen. The more he presses, the more she resists. She’s not asking for his approval, just some acceptance. Take me or leave me.
James throws his hands up, exasperated. “What the hell does that even mean, ‘It’s not who you are’?”
“You don’t know who I am.”
“All I know is I can’t stand that you’re part of that world.”
“That world is my family!” she cries, getting up off the couch and facing him with her hands on her hips.
“Callahan is not your family,” he counters. “The gangsters and smugglers on the lake are not your family. The guys on the reservation are not your family.”
“You just don’t get it.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t get it. I want better for you. I want you to want better for yourself. Some integrity at least!”
His words sting, more than she could have imagined. Her face feels hot, and she turns away, not wanting him to see her tears. How dare he judge her, awash in his own self-righteousness, tossing out that word integrity. At least now she knows what he really thinks of her.