This, Rudy knows, will not happen.
“Can I choose his name?” he says.
Dad rises slowly from the chair and presses his palms to his lower back, like an old man.
“And what name would you choose, Rudyard Alexander Van Twest?”
“Adam.”
A telling smile curls one corner of Dad’s mouth. “Adam,” he repeats. “The first man ... the first of our family to be born in the new country.” He takes Rudy’s head in his hands and tousles his hair. “That’s not a bad idea, son. We’ll see what your mother thinks of it.”
Over by the murunga tree, Aunty Sheryl is gathering everyone together for one Last Family Photograph. Rudy ducks away from his father’s grasp and bounds across the lawn, arms flapping, to join the others.
AUGUST 1971
It’s a stifling day. They’ve been running through the sprinkler on the front lawn, Clare and Emma and two of Emma’s brothers, and now they’re sitting on the wet grass in their bathing suits, watching waves of hot air ripple over Morgan Hill Road. Clare’s new one-piece is light blue and has a skirt like a ballerina’s. She and Emma are sharing a package of Kool-Aid—dipping their fingers in the orange powder and licking it off. A special treat. Only nothing feels special. It’s the kind of day when everything goes in slow motion and nothing ever happens.
But then, miraculously, as if God or someone has taken pity on them, something does happen.
From the direction of the Boulevard, the Vantwests’ car comes speeding, really speeding, down Morgan Hill Road and into the driveway across the street with a squeal that slices the stale air. Excited, in an uncertain kind of way, Clare sucks her finger while Emma and her brothers shout.
“Whoa! He should get a speeding ticket for sure!”
“Whaddya think’s goin’ on? D’ya think he’s drunk?”
Mr. Vantwest, the driver of the car, gets out and runs to the house.
“Hey, he left the car door open! Someone could steal it!”
“Who’s gonna steal it? That’s so dumb.”
“He left the front door open too!”
“Maybe there’s a burglar in the house, or a murderer, and his wife called him for help.”
“She wouldn’t call him, you retard. She’d call the police.”
Determined not to say anything that might give Emma’s brother reason to call her a retard, Clare sits in silence, staring at the house across the street, while the Skinner children keep talking.
“Mom thinks it’s weird that people like them have a name like Vantwest. She says it’s a Dutch name.”
“So? What’s weird about that?”
“Dutch people are white, like us.”
“So how did people like them get a white name?”
“Mom says they probably intramarried. Their kids go to the Catholic school.”
Clare wonders if Mrs. Skinner has ever been inside the Vantwests’ house. She sells Amway stuff, so it’s possible. Sometimes she comes to Clare’s house with samples, but her own mother always says “No, thank you,” then talks about something else.
“Hey,” Emma begins, “did you know, at the Catholic school they have to—Oh, look!” She points across the street, where Mr. Vantwest is scooting his son and daughter out the front door. When Mrs. Vantwest appears behind them, Emma squeals. “Whoa! Look at that! I bet she’s gonna have her baby!”
It seems Emma may be right. The enormous Mrs. Vantwest is leaning against her slender husband, and the two of them are slowly making their way to the car. Clare dips her finger in the Kool-Aid and sucks distractedly. Emma has told her how babies get out, and even what makes them start growing in the first place, but Clare has never really believed any of it, never believed that she could have come to the world that way. For if such horrible and outrageous things were true, then surely her mother would have told her. Now, though, she isn’t sure what to think. She wonders if terrible secrets have been kept from her ... or if, perhaps, her mother would be as astonished as she herself was to hear Emma’s explanations. The second possibility seems most likely; still, as Mrs. Vantwest reaches the car door, clutching her belly and squatting awkwardly, Clare looks away.
Off to the right, the Vantwests’ son is hauling two small suitcases across the lawn. She fixes her eyes on him. He’s a strange-looking boy, like an undersized grown-up, stiff and serious, with his legs poking out from a pair of school uniform shorts like two halves of a yardstick. He goes to Catholic school, whatever that is. To distract herself from Mrs. Vantwest, Clare wonders about the suitcases—what’s in them, where the boy is going. She pretends one of them is for her, and that she and the Vantwest boy are going to run away from Morgan Hill Road on an adventure, like the Famous Five. They’ll sneak off while Emma and her brothers are watching Mrs. Vantwest, and they’ll go to the train station and sneak on a train. She licks her orange fingers. Then the Vantwest boy looks across the street, right at her it seems, and a terrible awkwardness comes over her. She wipes her hand on the wet grass. The Vantwest boy smiles. It looks like he’s smiling at her, but that’s impossible. It has to be one of Emma’s brothers, or Emma herself. Clare gets up and walks back to the sprinkler, shaking out the skirt of her new bathing suit. Standing under the fan of water, she blocks off streams by covering the holes with her big toe.
1
March 26/96. The thermometer says 32°, but I don’t believe it. It must be 37 at least. They’ve taken my portable fan for an assembly in the auditorium, and I have to keep the ceiling fan on low or it scatters the kids’ stuff. The windows are open but it makes no difference. Sigh. If I’d never moved away from here, would I be comfortable in this wretched heat? I know, I know. It got hot where you and I grew up, but this is different. There’s no winter here. I think my body underwent some sort of mutation over all those Canadian winters. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Or am I just a born wimp? Hmm. I can see you smiling, Clare. You know the truth. First-class whiner and complainer, that’s me, no? But my life is here now. Or it will be. I’m not going back. Where I should go is to the staff room (it has air con), but I’m not in the mood to socialize. Anyway, the break’s just about over. English 12 next. More essays coming in today—sigh again. Thank God for Easter holidays.
RUDY CLOSED HIS DIARY and glanced up at the clock. Wistfully he tried to imagine being cold, to conjure up the sensations of stinging cheeks and frozen nostril hairs, but a trickle of sweat meandering from his temple to his ear distracted him. Something had happened to him in his twenty-five-year absence. The heat in which he used to play cricket and hunt for snakes now tortured him. On particularly oppressive days, his hands and feet swelled up and he moved like an old man through the viscous air. The weight he’d put on from his aunt’s cooking slowed him down all the more. And he sweated—unstoppable streams that pooled in any crease or depression, dripped from the hooked tip of his narrow nose, salted his lips and stung his eyes. As students began wandering in, he recalled the day he’d confiscated a crumpled drawing depicting a naked Mr. Vantwest (the maple leaf covering the nether regions gave it away) spraying sweat over the school flower beds. Embarrassed, but also amused—it was a damn good cartoon—he’d slipped the paper into his pocket and carried on with the lesson while wide-eyed glances darted back and forth across the room.
Today, however, he was quite certain