Chapter Twenty-Three

After six months in Canada, Maris decided to go back to Singapore. Whatever she had expected to happen hadn’t, but she acknowledged that some baby steps had been taken in another direction. She had been drawing but not painting. It was a beginning, she told herself. Or a “new” beginning, as people referred to it, as if there was such a thing as an “old” beginning. She was caught now in a no man’s land between life in Canada and life in Singapore: neither in one nor the other. It was like the time she decided to stop using sugar in her coffee. She tried it for a month but did not enjoy coffee without sugar. So she decided to start adding sugar to her coffee again, and discovered that she didn’t like it with sugar either. So she stopped using sugar again and persisted until she began to enjoy coffee without it. It did not occur to Maris to give up coffee, just like it did not occur to her to give up painting. She understood that it was about process, a necessary progression in stages from one state of being or activity to another. Process took time and often seemed unproductive, but when you looked back over a period of time, you realized that many things had, indeed, changed, and usually, although not always, for the better. She recognized that she was in the middle of some kind of change of state and she needed to trust both herself and the process to complete the transition.

Just making the decision to go back seemed to energize her and Maris felt a sense of excitement she hadn’t felt since Peter’s death. The police had been unable to solve his murder and, after six months, the case remained open but no new evidence had come to light. Maris wondered if it would ever be solved. It wasn’t like television or the movies where there was always a resolution at the end. Life wasn’t like that. Some murders were never solved. They still didn’t know for certain who Jack the Ripper was, even after more than a hundred years. How do you live with something like that? she wondered. Never knowing. She didn’t believe there was such a thing as closure, but Maris did think that knowing was better than not knowing, even if the truth was horrible. You can live with certainty, she thought. It’s uncertainty that can drive you crazy. Certainty you could file away, bury, do whatever, and try and move on. But uncertainty kept returning, popping up to disturb whatever thin veneer you had covered it with. Uncertainty was like a sink hole that could never be filled, no matter how many truckloads of gravel and dirt you poured into it.

Her mother was disappointed, of course, because she wanted Maris to be closer to home. “Do you have to go so far away?” she asked. “Can’t you just go to California or Mexico?”

“It’s not about the distance,” she told Spirit. “It’s about my connection to the place. I don’t know what it is. A past life, maybe?” Maris said it in jest, but she knew Spirit believed in those things.

“It’s possible,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking for a home — a physical home and a spiritual home. How can I stop you from doing that? It’s what I would want. What I’ve always wanted, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. They were sharing a bottle of wine again, this time a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with wonderful undertones of lime, grapefruit, and a zinger of lemongrass. I’m going to miss this, thought Spirit. Drinking wine with my daughter. But Spirit had learned you can’t hold on to your children. God knows her own parents had disapproved of her marriage to Freedom Man. “Just trust me,” she had wanted to say to them.

Maris arrived in Singapore a month later and took a taxi with her stuff — including Peter’s trunk — straight to Dinah’s apartment in Yew Tee. It was northwest of the business district and had access to the MRT public transit. It still cost a fortune, even though just a couple of decades before farmers were raising chickens and ducks in what was a bustling village of three hundred inhabitants. There were no cheap apartments in Singapore.

Dinah had bought new sheets for the guest bedroom and prepared a five-course meal of all of Maris’s favourite foods. Even though Maris had been travelling for twenty-four hours, Dinah wouldn’t let her go to bed until well after dark. “It will help with the jet lag,” she said. “Your internal clock won’t be so turned around if you manage to sleep through the night and wake up in the daylight.”

Exhausted as she was, Maris obeyed and slept through the night, waking only once in the dark, and getting up at ten the next morning. Dinah had already left for the gallery, but there was fresh fruit in the kitchen and the coffeemaker was ready to be turned on whenever Maris got up.

Maris felt a little fuzzy headed, but did not feel like sleeping all day, which would have been a sure sign of jet lag. She turned on the coffeemaker and took a shower, then took her coffee, some fruit, and a custard-filled bun out onto Dinah’s postage-stamp balcony. Breathing in the steamy, slightly salty air, she thought, I don’t know why, but this feels like home.