Border Songs (31 page)

“I was looking for owls.”

“Owls?” She smiled. “That’s the reason you were there?”

“Yep.” How drunk
was
she? Some of her words dragged, and she had a boneless quality to her. He was determined not to miss any body language this time.

“There wasn’t any tip or anything?”

“Just the heron and the ducks,” he said. “The mallards were going crazy.
Wack-wack-wack-wack-wack!”

She lingered on a painting that looked like kids with psychedelic skin holding hands and rising off an invisible trampoline. She moved to the next one, then returned to the bouncing children: a huge boy and a slender, dark-haired girl. “You believe in heaven, Brandon?” She suddenly felt like she might start bawling.

“I believe in reincarnation.”

She grinned up at him. “So what did someone do to come back as you?”

He paused. “Doubt it was a person,” he said, then started listing the animals he felt closest to—Jersey cows, snowy owls, Australian shepherds, blue herons and so on—until he noticed her flexing forehead and wandering eyes. When he heard the western meadowlark’s insecure melody, he wished like hell he’d turned off that CD.

“Why do you keep calling me?” she asked, her eyes fixed on
another startling painting, a flock of birds with Asian faces. “Haven’t I scared you off by now?”

“I like you, Maddy”

“In what way?”

“Every way.”

She focused again on the paintings, specifically a canvas of tiny but remarkably vivid faces, mostly gaping mouths, crammed inside what appeared to be the interior of a van. She caught his crooked smile on her. “Even after I tell you to get lost?”

“I shouldn’t have sung ‘Blackbird’ at the restaurant,” he said. “That was really stupid.”

She felt ready to cry again. “No, that was fine. A little weird, but sweet. I need to lay down, Brandon.”

She reclined on the bed and then, after a long moment during which he just watched her, she sat up, crossed her arms at her hips and started to pull her shirt off.

“I’m not good with—”

“Should I stop?” She froze midway, just above the pink birthmark next to her belly button.

“I’m good not—”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think—”

“No?”

“I’m not in bed good, Maddy. I mean, I—”

“You prefer the floor?”

“No, it’s just—”

She pulled off her shirt and dropped it on the floor.

“Fox sparrow,” said the stereo, followed by a lewd whistle.

Brandon lay as still as he could as she pulled his pants and underpants over his long legs and enormous flat feet. She giggled when she saw he was too shy or scared to look below her chin. She climbed up beside his head and whispered, “Simon says kiss me.”

He mimicked her every move. When her lips pressed harder, he returned the pressure, careful to keep his teeth covered. He tried to
remember everything: the smell of her smoky hair and peppermint mouth; the rash on her arched neck that reminded him of a red-throated loon; the bulb of her chin; her oval nostrils; the white slits of her almost closed eyes; the yamlike shape of her right breast, slightly larger than its partner and leaning outward, as if pointing to something across the room.

He slowly raised a hand to align that breast with the other, astonished by its luxurious smoothness. There weren’t any surprise ledges, headboards or bedside tables to worry about. Everything felt suspended in this safe slow motion.

Ten minutes later—or maybe twenty or thirty, while he concentrated on not moving, on not hurting her or himself, on not missing any sensation—she was suddenly, amazingly on him. Weightlessly, half-suspended, almost nonchalantly, as if it weren’t some tricky, anatomical safecracking or awkward skirmish of elbows, knees and teeth. He marveled at the simplicity of it if he just let her do all the moving, her slender left arm with the mole near the elbow flung out to the side for balance. He watched her concentration escalate as it had when as a child she’d tried to convince him and Danny that she could do things with her mind like turn up the stereo. And the sounds!
Her
sounds! Madeline Rousseau’s sounds! Her light growl got the dogs yipping, first Leo and then Maggie before Brandon snapped his fingers. She leaned forward and whispered that in a moment she would let him move
just
a little bit. No Simon says now, just a slight pleading for him to move—but not yet. When she finally, breathlessly, told him precisely how to move and he obeyed, her shudder reminded him of those old rockets that shook like they wouldn’t make it out of the atmosphere without ripping into a billion pieces before they popped through effortlessly to float freely above the blue earth.

“Maddy?” he said, once he couldn’t bear the quiet any longer. “Are you floating?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you remember in school when they’d show videos of those old
Apollos
, back when they—”

“Brandon?” Her thoughts flopped between thinking it was the sanest, gentlest sex she’d ever had and sensing she’d hit a shameful new low.

“Yes?” he replied.

“Please just be real, real quiet.”

He didn’t notice the catch in her voice or the tears rolling into her ears. “Astronauts,” he whispered.

“Please.”

“It’s just a sentence. You’ll like it.”

“Okay.”

“Astronauts’ footprints stay on the moon forever,” he whispered, “because there’s no wind to blow them away.”

S
OPHIE LISTENED
to Tony Patera whine about the media underplaying Swamp Man and his ominous load of thirteen handguns and $320,000. But there was little time to contemplate that bust before it was steamrolled by an unrelated
Seattle Times
story that became international fodder by noon.

Rosellini’s former friends and coworkers described a troubled rebel who loved pot and couldn’t hold a job. “He reinvented himself five
times by the age of twenty-two,” said one old friend. He was a punk rocker, a Nietzsche reader who liked to detonate homemade bombs in abandoned quarries. More recently, he frequented a Seattle mosque to show his support for oppressed Muslims and to agitate his Presbyterian parents. Three photos showed his progression from a clear-eyed senior to a shaggy Alaska deckhand to a bearded Costco worker who, with his mother’s East Indian coloring, arguably resembled Shareef Hasan Omar, also pictured.

With the help of federal sources, the newspaper pieced together Rosellini’s recent exploits. A letter from a Seattle imam introduced him to leaders of a radical London mosque, but he was not embraced. He showed up next at Toronto mosques, exaggerating his ties to a London imam. Again he wasn’t trusted, though somehow he acquired fake identities—one of them was Hassan Mahjoub, a reputed alias for Omar—as well as explosives.

It was unclear what, if anything, he had targeted. The Space Needle map found in his vehicle turned out to be a tourist pamphlet. Rosellini’s unconscious fingerprint didn’t help much, because neither he nor Omar had ever been arrested and printed. The mystery, however, was over once he awakened. The FBI’s only public comment was that he was being held on drug, explosives and other potential charges, including conspiracy to levy war against the United States.

Friends were split on whether Rosellini was a con man, a believer or a wannabe, though none of them believed he was capable of harming anybody but himself.

Sophie watched the news sink in, nobody knowing quite how to react. A collective attention-deficit disorder took hold. People half-listened to one another, and even the prime minister couldn’t contain his smirk when asked if he found it ironic that Canada had caught so much hell from Washington, D.C., over someone who turned out to be a U.S. citizen.

Sophie received multiple copies of a
Maclean’s
cover story called
“America’s Clumsy Wars on Drugs and Terror” in which former UBC professor Wayne Rousseau was quoted as saying, “The U.S. is the paranoid bully of the world. From where I’m sitting, it looks like Americans are being terrorized by themselves. It’s a new wrinkle on FDR’s famous apothegm: All we have to fear is …
ourselves
.”

T
HE FATHERLY
thrill that came with seeing both his daughters in his house at the same time quickly faded. The same tension that used to take hours to surface arose immediately with Nicole’s forearms-only embrace in exchange for Maddy’s bear hug. Meanwhile, her mannequin husband arrived with the wincing smile of someone serving soup at the Salvation Army for the very first time. Wayne’s friends, Lenny and Rocco, acted subdued from the beginning, nibbling around the kitchen, peeking at him to see if he was missing the undercurrents. Nicole dominated the dinner conversation, as if afraid where it might lead without her guidance, rattling on about neighborhoods getting renovated in Vancouver. Wayne resisted pointing out that gentrification is hardly a synonym for progress. He winked, smiled and passed the curried vegetables Maddy had cooked, which Rocco and Lenny praised, and Nicole and Mitchell picked through.

It irritated Wayne that Nicole hadn’t said a word about his cameo in
Maclean’s
. He hadn’t received so much praise since his retirement party, which allowed him to indulge the daydream that he might ultimately be remembered for his ability to elucidate American hubris and hypocrisy. Who knows? Maybe relations would hit such a flashpoint there’d be a CBC retrospective on him, with producers scrambling for footage of incisive lectures or tracking down bootleg videos like Sophie Winslow’s doozy of his impromptu jousting with Congress. He’d stayed up the night before making notes on future essays, just the fearless ideas themselves, each more provocative than the last. People
would want to hear his thoughts. It didn’t matter when or even if he published them. They wanted to
hear!
So he wrote and wrote, but the pot wore thin and he went from feeling like a modern Mencken to a washed-up simpleton. His comments in
Maclean’s
, he noticed for the first time, in fact, weren’t exactly what he’d said and suddenly sounded like arrogant cheap shots.

That, no doubt, was what Nicole thought. He told himself to let it go, but how could they not even mention it? He waited patiently for the mannequin to quit chewing. “So, Mitchell, what do you make of that scary Canadian terrorist turning out to be a wayward American?”

“Well, Wayne,” he began in his affected baritone, “it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got problems of our own, that our asylum policies are the most generous and foolish in the world.”

“That’s your reaction?” Wayne tried to control his voice. “Blame Canada anyway?”

“I think we just look at this sort of thing differently, Wayne. We don’t have to agree on everything, do we?”

Wayne caught Nicole’s glare and took another bite.

Lenny shifted the conversation to real estate and the crazy prices for Zero Ave. properties. “Even trailer lots are double what they were three years ago.”

“Location, location, location,” Nicole said. “If your business is drug smuggling what better place to be?” She glanced at her sister, then began lecturing everyone about the benefits of foreign index funds, hinting that Wayne desperately needed to finally get smart with what little money he had.

So there will be more for you? he wanted to ask.

“I think she may be right on this one, Wayne,” Mitchell added dulcetly “You seriously might want to get some guidance on some of this stuff, given that it’s not your primary area of interest or expertise.”

Money had never mattered to Wayne, even before he was dying. “Perhaps I’ll find someone,” he said through his teeth.

“Well, I
am
a broker,” Nicole blurted, rolling her eyes. “Earth to Dad! Your daughter’s a broker with Kunkel and Bradford.”

Madeline smiled at Lenny. “Welcome to our family dynamics. If you stick around long enough, you might get the impression that my sister isn’t bashful with her advice.”

Nicole dropped her fork. “Yeah, Larry, stick around and you’ll figure out that my sister’s a drug dealer.”

“Lenny,”
Madeline corrected.

“What?” Nicole snapped.

“And FYI, I don’t deal drugs, but I’d rather sell them than whatever it is you’re pushing.”

“And what, exactly, do you know—”

“Stop,” Wayne scolded. “Both of you.”

“It
is
a birthday party,” Rocco added with a smile.

Nicole cut a chicken breast into pieces so small there was nothing left to slice. “You’re not the least bit curious how she could afford to rent the Damant house?” she asked Wayne. “Didn’t that strike you as a bit odd? Hmmm, why would she want to live there?”

“To be near her father?” His eyes flickered between the two of them, his wife alive in both of their faces. “To get more space?”

“Smoke some more
medicine
, Dad. What about her Nissan? Pretty nice car for someone who quit her job at the nursery, eh? Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t know she quit, did you?”

“Refresh my memory,” Wayne said, “exactly how many kids have you raised?”

“That’s
your reaction?” She tugged at the neck of her blouse. “So happens that a doctor and a broker don’t have a whole lot of time left over to overpopulate the planet. But of course sixty-hour workweeks aren’t something you’d know a whole lot about.”