Flood (2 page)

Andy decided that he did not like his Aunt Mona very much, didn't like what his eyes could see, hadn't liked her from the beginning, when she'd looked down at him with stern black eyes, thin hands ungloved and clasped, body straight as a pencil, shoulders stiff, saying “your father” as if he'd committed a murder.

They drove along Marine Drive toward the bridge. Aunt Mona said, “You don't say much.”

Andy stared out at the fog.

“You're eleven, right?”

He feigned deafness.

“You're small for your age.”

He didn't need to be reminded that he was small; he already knew that, thank you very much. He glared at his aunt. She stared back at him. Her dark eyes seemed as
impenetrable as the October fog that surrounded them. Gray hat, gray skin, gray coat; if she stood outside in the fog she'd be invisible.

“Your mother was much younger than me, only a slip of a girl — barely nineteen when she married your father — and twenty-one when she left Halifax to come here with him. You were a baby, barely walking.”

Andy stared out the window.

“Does your father ever write to you?”

“Huh?”

“What am I saying! Doesn't Vincent Flynn think only of himself. He wouldn't lift a finger to write a letter to Pontius Pilate if it was to save Jesus Christ Himself.”

“My father is dead.”

“Stuff and nonsense! Children should not be told lies.”

Andy pushed his hair out of his eyes. “It's not a lie! He died in the war.”

“Judith told you a lie. For a good reason, I'm sure. Your mother meant well. But the truth is all we have, child. 'Turn your horse off the path and be caught in the bog,' my father used to say.”

Andy wanted to say, You're the liar, not my mother! But he didn't say it; he said instead, “My father died in the war. He was a hero.”

Aunt Mona gave a sniff and tilted her chin.

Andy said nothing more as he stared resolutely at the cars passing foggily by in the other lanes, his jaw muscles clenched.

Finally Aunt Mona said, “Hero is as hero does. Believe
what you like, but Vincent Flynn is alive and large as life, walking the streets of Halifax, and was never in any war. There was a time, when I first knew him, when he might have been a hero, but he threw it all away. There. Now you know. That's the truth of it. The only war familiar to your father is the one he fights to pay for all the Guinness and whiskey he drinks, and to find money to throw away on the gambling. God knows I'm not one to lie. And I'm not an uncharitable woman. But he dragged you and your mother off to British Columbia and never did a day's work once he got there. After years of poverty and heartbreak, your poor mother finally came to her senses and threw the rascal out. You would've been only five or so. Your bold father came running back to Halifax like a rat to an old but sure ship; there's the brave hero for you.”

“He's really alive?” Andy felt a heart-jumping rush of excitement.

Aunt Mona shrugged. “I've not seen the scoundrel in years — nor do I want to — but the last I heard, he was living in the north end, sitting every afternoon and evening with his degenerate companions in Dan Noonan's pub. Either he's there or he's in jail.”

Andy drew a deep breath. His father alive! He was finding it difficult to breathe.

“Vincent Flynn would charm the birds off the trees. If anyone ever kissed the Blarney Stone, then it was himself. Except for six or seven months in the brewery, where he met your poor mother, Vincent Flynn never did a day's work in his life. It grieves me to say it, but he was once a
man who could've been anything he wanted, but he threw it all away for the drink. And now he's nothing but a waster and a thief.”

They drove along in silence for a while, Andy thinking furiously. He stared at his aunt's hands on her lap; they were a bloodless white with prominent blue veins, the fingers like the slender votive candles in All Saints' Church. On one of the fingers she wore a plain gold ring.

“He was a gambler and a drunk. Your mother was a blind fool to put up with him for so long; nobody was surprised when she finally threw him out. She was better off without him.”

Silence.

Aunt Mona turned her head. “D'you remember him at all?”

Andy made no answer. He could not remember his father's face, for that had faded and his mother kept no pictures of him, but he remembered his voice, or thought he did, telling him stories of the Faeries, or the Sheehogue, as he called them.

“Judith was better off without him,” Aunt Mona said again. “Good riddance to bad rubbish!”

Andy sat quietly, the hatred for his aunt circling the emptiness inside him and scraping the bony arc of his ribs. He examined her again out of the corner of his eye: the frowning, worried face; the thick black hair with its few gray strands, short, barely covering her ears; the thin pale lips, bare of lipstick. He turned away and closed his eyes.

His father alive! And all these years he had thought
him dead. But he wasn't dead: he was alive, in Halifax. The hatred for his aunt was temporarily forgotten as thoughts of seeing his father began to fill his emptiness and he felt a new sense of purpose. He straightened his shoulders. He was leaving Vancouver, British Columbia, the only home he could remember, and he was setting out for Halifax, Nova Scotia, his birthplace.

Where his father lived.

Aunt Mona sat upright in her seat, peering ahead into the fog. They drove over Lions Gate Bridge, rising in a vaporous arc above the waters of Burrard Inlet. The fog was thicker here. The traffic crawled. The haunting moan of the nearby Prospect Point foghorn was answered by another far away along the coast at Lighthouse Park. They sounded like two lonely creatures of the fog calling to their lost child.

A small Sheehogue work party accompanied the boy in the taxicab, sharing the empty seat beside the driver. They had saved a life. They had a responsibility. It was customary.

“HOW WILL WE GO?” they asked the Old One.

“Wherever the wind blows, so go we,” the Old One answered.

“But this is the airport!” protested a Young One.

“And that's an airplane!” said another, pointing out to the tarmac.

“Yes.”

“So what's all this 'wind blows, so go we' stuff?”

The Old One sighed. “Air Canada is quicker.”

They checked in at the airport, made their way to Gate 2B, then sat side by side, not looking at each other, waiting for their flight to be called.

Aunt Mona said, “Last night I went to your house — or the place where it used to stand, more like. Afterward I talked with your parish priest, Father Coughlan.”

She had arrived in Vancouver yesterday afternoon. Why hadn't she come to the hospital to see him? Andy wondered.

As if she had been reading his mind, she said, “I was unwell. I checked into the hotel and then tried to see you. Children's visiting was over at eight. I was too late. They said you were sleeping.”

Aunt Mona was a witch, Andy decided.

He noticed her hands trembling. From the cold? But the lounge was warm. Old age? Not yet; she wasn't an old lady like his friend Ben's grandmother; Aunt Mona was quite a bit older than Andy's mother but she wasn't really old, not like she was going to keel over and die any minute, and her hair was still black, and she walked like she had lots of energy, even if she was a bit stiff in the neck and shoulders. She had mentioned being unwell, meaning what? A head cold? Flu? Stomach upset?

Aunt Mona said, “I had a call from your stepfather's lawyer. We had a long talk.”

She was talking about Clay. Clay had owned a software business. Now he was dead. Andy felt nothing about that; but the thought of his mother squeezed his heart.

“The lawyer said the flood was an act of God,” continued Aunt Mona, chattering mechanically as though now she'd started she couldn't stop. “Floods and earthquakes and landslides, that kind of thing,” she said, as if talking to herself, “are acts of God, which means you're not covered by insurance, not usually, unless…”

Her voice ran on. Andy's head ached. He closed his eyes. He didn't want to hear any of this. His mother was gone, missing, and nothing was left: the house, the ground it had stood on, the cars in the garage. Everything, everybody,
gone, swept away, leaving only a hole in Andy's heart.

Aunt Mona's voice droned on. There might be some money coming from his stepfather's life insurance policy, she said, and if they were lucky there could be some from a government flood relief fund. Insurance would be paid on the two cars. But altogether it didn't sound as if it would be very much; it would do no good to get their hopes up; they would have to wait and see.

So that was it, thought Andy. The old witch was expecting to collect on the house insurance. Served her right there was none. Money was the reason! Money was why she had come three thousand miles to Vancouver, not to rescue Andy and bring him back safely to the place of his birth, as she'd told the hospital and Father Coughlan over the telephone. It was for the insurance money. He might have guessed as much. His aunt was a phony. Andy wasn't a baby: he was eleven years old — eleven and a quarter, to be exact. There had been no need for sweet, kind, considerate Aunt Mona to go to the expense and trouble of coming all the way to the West Coast for him. All she had to do was send the ticket and Father Coughlan would have made sure he got the right flight.

Old witch.

The hatred flooded his arteries and swamped his heart.

They sat together in the crowded airplane, Aunt Mona with her hands clasped in her lap, head back on the headrest, eyes closed. Her breathing seemed harsher; her hands trembled more than ever.

“Are you all right?” asked Andy.

“Of course I'm all right,” she snapped without opening her eyes.

Old cow.

Andy dozed fitfully most of the way, uninterested in the movie, waking only to eat and drink. His aunt seemed to be sleeping, too, eating nothing, drinking only water for the entire flight, refusing offers of meals and snacks from the busy flight attendants.

At one point when Andy woke up, he saw threaded through his aunt's thin, trembling fingers a string of rosary beads. Her pale lips moved silently in prayer. Andy hated people who prayed in public. He thought maliciously: she wants people to think she's good, but I know better: she's an evil old witch.

In his periods of wakefulness, Andy's mind replayed images of the flood, and he remembered his helplessness, and the noise and the hurt of it. Broken bodies. Death. Images of his mother and Clay, the house and school, friends, soccer. He would miss the other kids on the team. And he would miss soccer; he was one of the school's best players, tops at dribbling the ball through several defenders and then driving it into the goal. He was soccer mad, his mother said. He followed soccer on TV, had taped the men's World Cup last year, and most of the women's this year. The Canadian women's team wasn't good, but they had tried their best; the winners, the U.S.A., were an astounding team and deserved to win. He'd seen the women's final live on TV. China was a great team, too,
and so were Brazil and Nigeria. Andy's mother had worried about him watching so much women's sports. “But they're just as good as the men,” Andy had tried to explain.