BERNARD STEEPLE was hunched over his workbench painting a miniature soldier. A hundred more were strewn around him, plastic, white and lifeless. Dec waited for his father to notice him standing in the doorway. He looked up at last. Contact. Recognition.
“Hi, Son.”
Dec nodded a greeting and shrugged off his backpack. His father’s attention returned to the tiny soldier in the tiny vice.
“Just touching up this squaddie here,” he said. “Took a while to get the colour right. K.D.”
Dec walked closer. “You’re painting him to look like Kraft Dinner?”
Bernard smiled. “Khaki drill,” he said. The glasses magnified his brown eyes, made him look a little crazy.
Dec leaned on the work table and imagined a wave of Kraft Dinner soldiers arriving on the shores of Normandy. He watched his father. He was giving the squaddie a face with the smallest paintbrush Dec had ever seen.
“Do you ever wonder what happened to Mom?” he said.
Bernard stopped painting for about as long as it would take to dot an eye. “What makes you ask?”
Dec shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been almost six years. It just seems weird she never got in touch.”
Bernard gently removed the soldier from the vice. “Is it all that surprising? Your mother never really cared about anyone but herself.”
She cared about me, thought Dec. He reached for an unpainted soldier.
“Your fingers, Declan!”
Dec snapped back his hand.
“Sorry,” said Bernard. “It’s just that the oil on your skin will resist the paint.” He was wearing see-through gloves like a doctor. Like this was surgery.
Self-consciously, Dec rubbed his fingers on his pant leg. It was only then that he noticed the wall. It startled him, as if it had snuck up behind him. It divided the workshop roughly in half. It was chipboard painted grey, the same dull grey that speckled his father’s work clothes and that he had noticed on his father’s skin from time to time lately.
“What’s this all about?”
Bernard looked up and took off his glasses. “Take a gander.”
There was an opening in the wall, a long, narrow slit about thirty centimetres high and at chest height. Dec peered through it at a miniature beach right at eye level. It sloped down from grassy knolls to the sea, the sea stretched to the far wall of the shop. There were miniature machine-gun pillboxes and mortar emplacements in the knolls, sandbagged and camouflaged with netting. The same netting hung across the front of the window. Gently, Dec moved it aside. The far wall of the shop had been painted to resemble an early-morning sky. Dawn was breaking on this empty diorama.
Bernard joined him, wiping his hands on a rag that smelled of turpentine. He leaned down to look, raked his eyes critically over the scene.
“Juno Beach,” he said. “The way the Wehrmacht saw it from their bunkers.”
Dec stared in wonder. There were no soldiers yet. The beach was an obstacle course of tiny geometric barriers painted to look like steel and concrete. There were rolls of barbed wire and black poles sticking up everywhere.
“Rommel’s Wall,” said his father. “The black things are called Teller mines.”
“Out of sight,” said Dec. He had seen battlefields in this room before: Greek and Roman battlefields, Waterloo and the Plains of Abraham, but never anything much bigger than a ping-pong table. This beach was close to six metres wide and four metres deep.
“Had to include a fair bit of ocean,” said Bernard enthusiastically. “That’s where a lot of the action takes place. Landing crafts, you know. LCTs and LCIs, half-tracks and ducks.”
Dec whistled under his breath. “Ducks,” he said. “Scary.”
“Amphibious vehicles,” said his father, not catching the irony in Dec’s voice. “I’m working at 1:72 scale. What you’re seeing is less than a quarter mile of beach, the coast near Courseulles-sur-Mer. The code name for this particular landing spot was Love.”
“Get out,” said Dec. “That’s perverted.”
His father didn’t seem to have thought about it. “It’s just what it was called. Everything had a code name. Operation Overlord was what they called the invasion itself. Twenty thousand Canadian troops would land right here,” he said, tapping the sand piled up outside the bunker window. “A very scary day.”
“Twenty thousand?” said Dec.
“Just in this one small area. There was sixty-five miles of beach invaded that day. The Yanks thataway.” He pointed to the left. “The Brits farther east. It boggles the mind.”
He returned to his workbench. Dec leaned his chin on the sill, imagining what it must have been like to sit there waiting for the invasion. Love, he thought. How weird was that?
“It’s strange,” he said finally.
“Nobody’s ever prepared to go into battle.”
“No, I mean, about Mom.”
His father said nothing.
“I’ve been thinking about her lately. I’d forgotten how moody she used to get. Fun one minute, blue the next.”
Still no response.
“Do you ever think about her?”
He glanced back at his father. Whatever pleasure he had seen in his eyes a moment earlier was gone.
“Not if I can help it,” said his father and leaned over a new white soldier. He was only a metre or two away but it was as if a gulf had opened up between them.
Dec shook his head and turned his attention to the beach. “We should go on a trip,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Get away somewhere. You know, a holiday.” He turned and leaned his back on the bunker wall.
His father regarded him oddly. “What’s gotten into you?”
Dec shrugged.
“Did you hurt yourself?” his father asked.
“Huh?”
“You’re rubbing your ribcage. Did you run into something?”
Dec dropped his hand to his side. “You could say.” He peered through the narrow window again, scanning the painted horizon. He could almost feel the invasion coming.
“We never go anywhere,” he said.
Again, silence. When he looked around, his father was gazing at him with a worried smile. “What’s up, Declan?”
“It would just be good…you know, to go somewhere. Dad, you’ve got all the money in the world and you never travel farther than Ottawa or Kingston.”
“Okay, Buffalo for a modellers convention.”
Bernard smiled. “When I was a boy, your grandparents and I travelled the whole country by train.”
“No way.”
“It’s true. We flew out to Halifax and then chugged our way across the continent, from sea to shining sea. I’ve got a scrapbook to prove it.”
Dec turned back to the beach and an idea occurred to him.
“We could go here!” he said. His father looked bewildered. “Juno Beach,” said Dec. “We could go see the real place. How about that?”
His father’s eyes seemed to entertain the idea but only for a heartbeat. Dec watched the lights go out.
“It’s not there any more,” he said.
Dec threw up his hands. “Dad, it’s France!”
“I realize that,” said his father. “No need to raise your voice.”
Dec shook his head in exasperation. “Think about it at least. We could run up the beach like in Saving Private Ryan. I bet there’s a museum. You’d love it.”
His father shook his head. “No,” he said. “Right now, the only travel I’m interested in is time travel. I want to go back to Courseulles-sur-Mer on June 6, 1944.”
He laid his paintbrush carefully on its saucer of khaki-drill green. He got up from the worktable and returned to the bunker, where he leaned on the sill and stared out over the booby-trapped beach.
“That was the only trip outside the country my dad ever took,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “He came back with a knee full of shrapnel and what would be called post-traumatic stress disorder nowadays, but was called battle fatigue then — something you were just expected to get over. He came home with a keen desire to settle down, run the family business and raise a family of his own. I was only eighteen when he and Mother died. You know about the car crash. The thing is, I share more or less the same aspirations he did. It’s as if I’m carrying on where he left off.”
“Dad, I — ”
“Don’t understand,” his father interrupted. “You think I’m an old stick-in-the-mud. Well, that’s your prerogative, Declan. But I’d appreciate it if you would respect my right to live the life I want to lead.”
He was angry. Dec could see it in his eyes, but you’d never have guessed it to hear his voice.
You’ve got to watch out for the quiet ones.
“Sorry,” said Dec, but there wasn’t much life in the apology.
“No, I’m sorry,” said his father. He was leaning hard against the bunker wall, his fists gripping the edge so tightly that his knuckles were white. “I’m a little strung out. I guess we all are.” He looked solemnly at Dec. “I do know this much, Son. Going away won’t help. You can’t run away from your problems.”
Dec’s jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I mean.” His father’s eyebrows bunched together gravely. Then he returned to his work station, picked up his paintbrush and started in on another soldier.
“Actually, I don’t know what you mean.”
His father glanced at him sharply. “Birdie and I really wish you’d reconsider about seeing a therapist.”
This was too much. “I suggest we go on a family vacation and suddenly I’m nuts?”
“Clearly you have been traumatized.”
“Dad, I’m fine.”
“So you say.”
“It’s under control. Stop worrying. You’ve got enough on your mind as it is.”
His father regarded him carefully. “Meaning?”
“D-Day,” said Dec.
His father frowned and looked down at the mass of squaddies still needing to be painted into life. “I wish this was all I had to fret about.”
Dec made an attempt to cross the chasm. “Are you worried about the inquest?”
His father nodded. “I don’t like all this attention.”
“I know,” said Dec. “But it might be kind of cool.”
His father looked at him incredulously. “You think so?”
“Sure. I’m looking forward to it.”
His father’s frown deepened. “You don’t really expect you’re going to be attending it, do you?”
Dec was taken aback. “I found the body,” he said. “I knew who the guy was. Of course I’m going.”
“Forget it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ve spoken to the coroner, Declan. He is in total agreement.”
“But — ”
“No buts, Son. There is no reason for you to be put through such an experience. Besides which, you cannot afford to miss school right before final exams. This thing could drag on for days.”
Dec folded his arms tightly across his chest to keep from punching the wall. “Dad, I could write my exams with my eyes shut.”
His father was unmoved. “The coroner will send his constable out to the house to talk to you. That’s all they need.”
“But, Dad — ”
“Enough! Do you understand? I don’t want to hear another word.” His voice was calm, but his eyes behind the magnifying lenses were huge and blazing. There was a nerve throbbing in his jaw. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
Dec shook his head in disbelief. He turned, picked up his backpack and headed for the door.
“Work,” he muttered scornfully.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
Dec stopped and turned. His father folded his big hands before him on the bench. “I serve on the library board and the museum board. I contribute time and money to a number of charities and I am a director of Steeple Enterprises. None of that is very impressive to you, I’m sure, but it is my way of doing my part and it keeps me busy enough. It is my choice. In time you will make your own choices. You’ll go off gallivanting all over the world. You’ll go to the best university there is, all expenses paid. You are a very lucky boy, Declan Steeple, and I’d thank you not to forget it.”
Dec dropped his head and turned to leave. But his father was not finished.
“You came in here asking about your mother,” he said. “This little display of yours — this acting out — reminds me of her. It’s just the way she was when she didn’t get her way.”
Dec stared, not quite able to believe what he was hearing.
His father frowned. “I sincerely hope this is not a foretaste of things to come.”