“I have to call my mother.”
Chris topped up their wine glasses and folded his tall frame into the adjacent chaise longue. The remains of dinner still sat on the patio table amid sparkling tea lights. “I don’t get it. How can your family just wipe out the existence of one of its members?”
“Not wipe out, exactly,” Amanda said. Her world had stopped spinning, and some sense of normal thought had returned. “I remember a Jonathan being mentioned at our infrequent family get-togethers, but I thought he was a cousin of my mother’s. I have a few cousins I rarely see because my grandmother had a feud with her brothers when their parents died — a dispute over the will — and so she never saw them.”
“It sounds like your family has a habit of cutting people off.”
Amanda turned the observation over in her mind. She knew Chris was referring to her own relationship with her mother. It was easy to make that quick conclusion. Her mother was judgmental, brooked no dissenting views, and never suffered fools. Only a select few retained their place in her inner circle.
Chris came from a warm, boisterous Ukrainian farm family. Only last week, she’d felt the enveloping welcome of their arms, so alien and smothering to her that she’d had to take long walks out on the prairie to restore her equilibrium. Luckily, she’d had the excuse of Kaylee.
Chris couldn’t begin to understand her own family’s chilly, arms’ length restraint. Her family lived their lives apart, turning inward instead of to each other for comfort, advice, and strength. Amanda couldn’t remember it being any different. She couldn’t remember sitting on her mother’s lap for storytime or running home for help with a scraped knee. Bedtime had been a peck on the cheek and a quick tuck of the covers. By the time Amanda was four months old, most of the nurturing had been delegated to a succession of daycares and babysitters while her mother returned to graduate studies.
Looking back through adult eyes, she realized her mother had never been taught to nurture. Her own parents had been distant, their marriage and mental health wrecked by the trauma of the Second World War. As a child, her mother had learned to fend for herself and believed she’d managed so admirably that it was a parenting model worth emulating. She should probably never have had children; they posed an inconvenience in her pursuit of her two great passions: her career and her causes. Although no one had ever said so openly, Amanda suspected the pregnancy during her graduate studies had been an unwelcome surprise following an affair with her professor. Nowadays that was a firing offence, but in those days it was almost a rite of passage for young female grad students. Her marriage to the man had been the most passable solution. After all, he was a tenured professor with a respectable intellect and good genes. Good enough, in fact, to permit the conception of Amanda’s brother two years later.
That was possibly the last time they ever slept together, Amanda had often thought wryly, for in the intervening thirty-three years, her father had rarely lowered his head out of the clouds. The clouds were familiar and comfortable; they never argued or judged. Her mother seemed happy to have him out of her hair, so in this fashion, the whole family limped along.
Now Chris’s veiled criticism touched a nerve. Irritation flashed through her. “My family didn’t cut me off. We still talk. Just not about feelings. If anything, I cut them off. My mother judges everything I do. Mine is not a career path she can be proud of. Not ‘my daughter the world-renowned Harvard researcher or Nobel laureate.’ Instead she got a daughter who mucked around in the sordid trenches of failed states and almost got herself killed by thugs in Northern Nigeria.”
He slipped his hand through hers. “She’s not going to like me, then.”
“Maybe not. But even from her rarefied perch at the top of the ivory tower, she’s hung on to some of her socialist views. She might view your background as romantic and noble. Son of immigrant parents who came to this country with just the shirts on their backs and all that.”
“You make her sound like a terrible snob.”
Amanda shook her head. Her mother was a terrible snob, but not in the social climbing sense. “She cut her teeth on the Vietnam War and Ban the Bomb protests, and she’s been waving placards for great causes ever since, now mostly in the pro-environment and anti-pipeline movements. We never had a lot of material goods — one car and a modest house — but we drowned in books. Every wall in the house was made of bookshelves. No, she didn’t want me to get a Harvard Ph.D. so she could brag about it. She wanted me to fulfil my potential.” Amanda used air quotes. “I was always good in school, so she and Dad figured I’d go all the way. To Mum, education was power. Without it you can’t effect change in the world. To Dad, academia was the only world worth knowing. They weren’t thrilled when I got my M.A. in global development — too wishy-washy for them — but at least it was an M.A. Mum was not happy when I stopped there. ‘You can’t change the world from out there in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You need to make policy. Use your talent and creativity on the broader canvas.’”
Amanda paused to take a sip of wine and reflect. To her surprise, it felt good to talk about the thoughts she had always kept private. Chris was a good listener. She felt his warm hand in hers, encouraging her to dig deeper. “So now, here I am, back in Canada after an epic failure in the trenches and not sure what to do next. They’ve started up the mantra again. Mum thinks this Fun for Families project is a waste of my time and talent. Now’s the time to go back to school, she says. You’ve seen the view from the battlefield, now get into the general’s chair.”
“Maybe she’s just afraid of what you went through.”
She flashed him a smile. “You’re so sweet. You think of this from a mother’s perspective.”
“But she is a mother.”
Amanda fell silent, sobered by the insight. Her mother stirred so many confused feelings of hurt, anger, and defensiveness that it was easy to lose track of the basics.
“With a tougher skin than any mother I’ve met,” she replied. “Mum was always right, her causes always the most righteous. No one else’s views and causes amounted to a thing. My mother never failed. And yet look at this! How does one lose a brother? A twin! How did my parents fail to mention, in thirty long years, this crucial missing part of their family either to my brother or me?”
“If the photo was taken around 1990, you would have been a little kid. Five or six? Do you remember him at all?”
She studied the photo on the phone then slowly shook her head. “There’s something vaguely familiar, but it’s more a feeling than a memory. A feeling of fun. And laughter.” She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock, which meant eleven o’clock in Ottawa. Late but not too late. Her mother was a night owl. She belonged to various global think tanks and institutes and often communicated with colleagues in Europe or Asia in the middle of the night.
The phone rang a long time, and Amanda was just wondering if she had indeed called too late when the phone picked up. First, breathing. Then “Amanda,” in a voice so low and hesitant that Amanda felt a twinge of alarm before understanding clicked in.
“Aunt Jean told you.”
“Yes. I suppose I should have told you years ago.”
“What’s going on? You make it sound like some deep, dark secret. Like he’d done something terrible.”
Silence on the phone. “No. Not really. It’s just … we chose different paths. We argued, and we both said things. The longer he was gone, the harder it was to reach out.”
“How come you and Aunt Jean never mentioned him? You never showed us pictures? He was your brother!”
“Yes, and how often do you mention your own brother?”
Amanda didn’t buy it. Perhaps of her mother, but not of Aunt Jean. “Mum! I may have zero in common with my brother and may not talk to him for a year, but at least I know where he is! And if one of us needed the other, we’d be there. What happened?”
“It’s in the past. We were young and angry. Now, it seems too late.”
“It’s never too late! I’ve seen families separated by war who reunited after half a century. When was the last time you heard from him?”
Her mother’s voice firmed, and Amanda could almost see her setting her jaw. “I don’t appreciate your tone. He chose to leave. I never heard from him. Jean did, for a while, but the two of them were always closer.”
“But he was your twin.”
“Twins, but as different as night and day.”
“Didn’t you ever try to find him?”
Silence descended again. Amanda glanced at Chris, who was frowning at her in disapproval. She felt a twinge of guilt. Something had happened to break the family apart, and her mother deserved a gentler approach. Just as she was searching for softer words, her mother sighed.
“Once, when your grandparents died. I mailed a letter to the Norsands office in Fort McMurray, where he was working. It came back addressee unknown. I even phoned them. They said Jonathan had left the oil sands four years earlier, in 1990. They said it’s a pretty transient workforce as the oil business goes up and down.” Her voice dropped sadly. “Wherever he went, he never thought to inform his family. Ours hadn’t been the happiest home when we were growing up, Amanda. I guess he wanted to put it all behind him.”
“Maybe he’s built a whole new life for himself out in Alberta. We could have a whole family of cousins and in-laws out here.”
“Yes.” Her mother’s voice lost its wistful tone. “One that he clearly didn’t want us in. He knew where we were, at least. Don’t forget, this was before the Internet. You couldn’t just Google someone’s name or look them up on Canada 411.”
“But now you can. Aunt Jean wants me to look for him. She says it’s time.”
“I suppose she’s right. Well past time.” Her mother heaved a deep sigh, sounding every one of her sixty years. “It’s been one of the few regrets of my life.”
Those words held the weight of a lifetime. Her mother wasn’t sentimental or inclined to waste time on past mistakes. For her to sound so old and sad, Amanda knew there must be layers left unsaid.