I pour myself another cup of coffee and pretend to mark grade ten history tests at the kitchen table. My mind plays tricks on me at this time of night. As I shuffle through my papers, I see a shadow move out of the corner of my eye, and my brain reflexively concludes that it’s Helen investigating why I haven’t come to bed yet. She’s been so long a part of my life that all but the most conscious part of me is convinced she’ll suddenly reappear. At this point, I usually remind myself that it’s just an illusion, like the phantom pain of an amputee whose foot was long ago consigned to medical waste. This time, though, I let the fantasy linger before I shatter it, and memories coalesce until she almost becomes whole before me. I feel her touch, smell the warmth of her skin. She wants me to put the papers away. She takes my face in her hands, lowers herself onto my lap. And then it all evaporates, and I feel the same sickening sense of free fall I did when I drove home from the hospital the morning she died.
A cold sweat clings to the inside of my shirt. It was at this very table that Helen first told Severn about her diagnosis. Helen explained to her as best she could about the surgery and the chemotherapy treatments, about how the doctor said there was still hope they’d caught it in time. I could see the fear in Helen’s eyes as she tried to convince us that everything would be all right. Severn could see it too. She looked at me, seeking reassurance that Mom had got it wrong, that it was all a misunderstanding that could be explained away. When Severn read the forced optimism on my face, I think she stopped hearing anything Helen was telling her. I saw a panic building inside her. Her eyes converged on empty space as she tried to grasp how this could possibly be happening to her mother. All she could comprehend was that her world, with all its unassailable assumptions about the future, had just fallen into the sun. Shaking with shock and anger, she turned and left the room. Not a word of solace or comfort for her mother. As we heard Severn’s bedroom door slam shut, Helen’s brave facade dissolved and she collapsed into a series of heaving sobs. The two of them couldn’t face each other for a long time after that. I’m not sure that I’ve fully forgiven Severn for her behaviour that day.
I should sell the house, I tell myself. Escape the apparitions that drag me into a pit of stillborn futures. I should leave town, find a new home for us. Somewhere they never knew Helen, and where Severn isn’t simply the poor, motherless girl. I imagine myself sitting in another kitchen, at a table I didn’t buy with Helen, looking at walls that aren’t covered with her wreaths or copper moulds or stencilled borders. But the walls of this imagined room are bare, as sterile as an oncologist’s waiting room. And where once an unrelenting throb of memories filled me with pain, a consuming emptiness now exists, like a cosmic black hole the size of a nickel, swallowing me from the inside.
I check the clock on the microwave. Five-fifteen.
She’s been run down by a drunk driver. Some paroled sex offender’s raped her and slit her throat. The police will be calling any second, wondering why I didn’t bother to pay closer attention to my only daughter’s safety.
As much as I despaired of the possibility earlier in the night, I begin to hope she’s with Avery, who’s become the least of all the evils I can imagine. I’d called his mother at about ten-thirty, after ruling out all Severn’s old friends. It was a conversation I hadn’t been looking forward to. I was almost glad there was no answer, except that it left me no closer to finding Severn.
I’ve worked myself up too much, I tell myself. Severn will walk through the front door the moment I’ve given up on her, as if to prove a point. This is another one of her tests. She’s waiting for me to blink first, just as I always do. I should go to bed and turn off all the lights. That would show her.
Instead I pick up the phone again.
Avery’s mother answers after only a couple of rings. I expect her voice to be thick with sleep, but it’s not. When I tell her that Severn hasn’t come home, there’s a wary pause.
“I thought so,” she says, as if I’ve just confirmed some suspicion she hasn’t bothered to share. She tells me that when she got home after work, both Avery and the car were gone. His toothbrush and contact-lens case were missing from the bathroom. He’d taken clean underwear, socks, a few shirts, and a tote bag.
“I don’t suppose you’ve noticed if any of Severn’s clothes are missing,” she asks, knowing full well I wouldn’t have, even if I’d looked. Because I’m a man. The implication is that I’m negligent for not having an inventory of her wardrobe ready for just such an emergency. It’s not as if I buy her clothes for her. Nor would she want me to, thank God. And when it comes to laundry, she’d be mortified if I handled her bras and panties, which is just fine by me.
Avery’s mother and I promise to call the minute one of us uncovers a clue that points to where our kids have headed. After we hang up, I go and stand in Severn’s bathroom, trying to decide whether the right numbers of lotions and hair clips are sitting on the vanity.
* * *
I’m not sure what I thought would be waiting for me when I stepped inside that Imprint store two days ago. Maybe an eagle-eyed security guard on the lookout for Cruickshanks set to storm the battlements one more time. Jittery staff who’d recognize me as the husband of that lunatic woman with the car. An irate manager eager to finally extract her pound of flesh. At least some lingering scars from the fury our late Toyota brought down upon them. But there was none of that. Instead what I found was a cheerful display trumpeting new arrivals near the entrance where our front bumper once came to rest, as well as a company of fresh-faced young staff, most of whom were probably still in high school when Helen mounted her glorious assault. The place was obliviously going about its business, with no thought to the past. I was just another customer. It was like being a veteran in a Remembrance Day parade that nobody had come to watch. The least the store could have done was have someone give me a dirty look, something to show me that Helen had stung them hard enough that they couldn’t simply forget her after a quick repair job and a fresh coat of paint.
A young woman in an Imprint golf shirt greeted me with a standard-issue smile at the information desk.
“I’d like to see the manager,” I told her.
As I waited, I surveyed the store. Past the magazine racks, in the upscale coffee bar, university students pretending to study were on the make. I’d heard tell that some arts students bought second-hand anatomy books and carted them to places like this just so they would be confused for medical students by eligible members of the opposite sex. Pretending to be something they’re not. In a way, this whole town was about being mistaken for someone or something else. London, Ontario. Not to be confused with the other London, the real London. Certainly not by airline ticket agents and baggage handlers. John Graves Simcoe must have been awfully homesick when he named this place. What possessed him, as he gnawed on that first supper of porcupine, to ennoble a mosquito-infested tract of wilderness with the same name as the capital of the empire he served? Not a castle, cathedral, or manor home in sight. His homeland so far removed in time and space that it could be only a faint, teasing memory. Perhaps it was his attempt at satire, a veiled record of his dissatisfaction with his superiors at home.
“Irving?”
The voice sounded familiar but out of place. I turned to see Will Graham, Helen’s right-hand man from the days of the family bookshop on Richmond Street, in a yellow Imprint golf shirt. He was a little greyer around the edges than I remembered. Yellow wasn’t his colour.
“It’s been a while,” he said, shaking my hand and patting me on the arm.
Will had jumped ship and gone to work for the competition when the family bookshop was going under. Not that he’d had much choice, given how few hours Helen was offering him near the end. Still, to Helen it had been an act of betrayal rivalling Macbeth’s. I knew that Will hadn’t made the move without remorse. Small and intimate, Donnelly’s Books had been home to him, the kind of quirky place he’d wanted to own himself one day.
“So you’re manager here now,” I said.
“Assistant,”