I saw Rita again toward mid-September, in Toronto. Autumn was just settling over the city then, the light giving itself over to September’s peculiar half-tones and the trees that lined the city’s sidestreets showing the first tinctures of russet and gold. In little more than a month the autumn colours would already have given way to the grey-limbed monotony of winter; but now the whole city seemed on the brink of some revelation, some last redemptive sigh before the winter’s cold and snow.
Rita had started school at the university downtown and was living on campus with Elena, their residence tucked away at the heart of the ivied island of quiet the campus formed in the city centre. It was early evening the first time I went by for her, sunset lighting fires in the leaded panes of the residence windows. Inside, trim young men in blue jeans and young women in cardigans and pleated skirts came and went, the air electric with the first tense promise of the beginning of term.
The door to Rita’s room was open. At my knock she turned from the mirror she’d been staring into, the gold shaft of a lipstick bright in one hand.
“Hi, stranger,” she said.
She looked indistinguishable from the young women I’d passed in the halls, fresh-faced and blithe, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to set off the red of her lips, the blue of her eyes, like tiny gifts. Outside the oppressive familiarity of our home town, what had kept us children there, all our sibling confusions seemed made small.
“So you finally made it up to the big city,” I said.
“We haven’t really had much of a chance to see it yet. With orientation and all that.”
The room had already been arranged like a mirror of the one that she and Elena had shared in the Amhersts’ house back home in Mersea, pink comforters covering the beds, small knick-knacks set out on bookshelves and sills. I remembered the visits I’d made to her at the Amhersts’ after she’d left us, how the prim domesticity of her and Elena’s room, its careful pretence that they were sisters, that they were daughters, had always instead seemed the reminder that they didn’t quite belong there, were both only adopted, like orphans taken in by some strict but benevolent home in a Victorian story. Now, though, seeing this replica before me, I had the sense they’d been infiltrated, that what had been merely imposed had slowly become part of them. The room’s lone discordant element was a Dali print Scotch-taped above a dresser, of a naked Leda and swan against a background of sea, its Raphaelite contours and hues seeming at once an embodiment of the room’s tidy femininity and a mockery of it.
I’d remained standing at the doorway as Rita finished her preparations, uneasy somehow at the intimacy of going inside.
“Elena’s not around?” I said.
“She went down to the caf.” But I sensed Rita was covering for her. “She said to say hi.”
“I make her nervous.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Oh, you know. The gloomy half-brother always lurking in the wings.”
“You’re not her brother.”
“Maybe that’s the point.”
We walked the short distance from the campus to Chinatown. Dusk had settled in and the streets there were awash in neon like in some gambling town or resort. I watched Rita taking things in, the tiny shops, the unknown vegetables and fruits arrayed outside, and seemed to understand for the first time that she was here in front of me, felt a flutter like a traveller in a foreign city seeing a familiar face in a crowd.
“My place is just around the corner from here,” I said. “About a five-minute walk from your residence, actually.”
“That’s great.” There was just the smallest bit of distance in her voice, the old self-protectiveness, the unsureness of what we were to each other. “We can see each other all the time then.”
We had supper at a restaurant I’d begun to frequent in the neighbourhood, just an unmarked door at street level leading down to a small basement room whose walls were covered with chalkboard menus. The place’s few rickety tables were already nearly filled when we arrived.
“This place is wild,” Rita said.
We sat at a tiny table for two in an alcove at the back. For a moment the intimacy of being crammed like that into such a narrow space made us shy.
“So are you settling in all right?” I said.
“It’s okay. I feel like a bumpkin half the time – everyone’s parents are president of this or that or an ambassador or something. But it’s good having Elena around. There isn’t much that fazes her.”
We talked about school, about leaving home. I could feel a niggling sense of obligation between us to bring up the subject of my father; but the more we skirted it, the more it seemed inessential. Though only a few months had passed since his death, already it felt like an eternity: there’d been the first torpor and shame afterwards but then a lifting, the thought, Now it is over.
There was also the codicil to his will that I hadn’t told her about, his wish that I use my inheritance to help provide for her if she should need me to. He had neither fathered Rita nor been a father to her, had never really forgiven her for the betrayal she was the product of; but he’d carried the guilt of her to the grave. I ought to have brought the matter up now and made an end of it.
“Are you doing okay for money?” I said.
“I think so.”
“I suppose the Amhersts are looking after school and all that.”
I still couldn’t bring myself to refer to them as her parents even though they had been that to her for the better part of her life.
“Mostly. Dad had some problems with the store for a while but I think it’s all right now.”
“Well, if you ever need anything –”
“Thanks.”
The meal was served in a brusque onrush of sizzling meat and steaming vegetables. There were no forks; I expected Rita to struggle with her chopsticks but she handled them with an unthinking expertise. Always I felt this disjunction with her, the expectation of her innocence and then her instinctive at-homeness in the world like a reproof.
We talked a bit about her plans for the future. There was an uneasiness in me whenever conversation came around to the general shape of her life, the fear that some seismic injury would be revealed, some fault line leading back to her years with us on my father’s farm. But she seemed like any healthy young woman her age, exploring her options, not quite certain what the future held but not afraid of it.
“Maybe I’ll just live like you do,” she said. “Travelling. Doing what I want.”
“I wouldn’t exactly think of myself as a role model,” I said.
The room was a steamy bustle now of serving and eating and talk. Rita had pulled the band off her ponytail, her hair falling silky black to the shoulders of the sweater she wore. She seemed resplendent somehow in her unquestioning calm, in the anonymity of seeing her here in this world of strangers. It was a kind of wonder to be with her like this, without ambivalence: we seemed released suddenly into the miracle of our lives, to do with as we wished.
When we were walking home I invited her to stop by my apartment.
“I don’t know. Maybe not tonight.” I could see that she wanted to come, that she was thinking of Elena. “There’s a pub crawl or something we’re supposed to go on.”
“Maybe some other time, then. I’ll have you over for supper.”
“I’d like that.”
I left her at the door of her residence.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said. “Maybe things can be a little more normal between us now than they used to be.”
“They weren’t so bad before.”
There was an instant’s awkwardness and then we kissed.
“Goodnight, then.”
I stopped off for cigarettes on the way home at the variety store on the ground floor of my building. The owner, a canny Korean man who went by the unlikely name of Andrew, drew a Kleenex from a box as I came up the counter and reached out to wipe a smudge of lipstick from my cheek. I expected some joke from him but he merely winked, rapid and mocking.
“My sister,” I said.
“Ah.”
It was the first time in the weeks I’d been frequenting his store that he’d been so familiar with me. He had a little ritual of goodwill with some of his regular customers, offering them a free selection from the display of penny candies he kept on the counter. Now, finally, he extended the gesture to me, waving a hand over the display with a casual flourish like some smiling tempter offering the world.