Forgiveness (25 page)

Every weekend seemed to herald another party. A month after Terry moved in, there was a well-worn path between the duplexes. Revellers moved back and forth between two sides of the same party. Sometimes other children were around, sometimes not. Without a bedtime, and given our mom’s penchant to include us, we were just part of the festivities; in on (most) of the jokes, singing along, dancing in the living room, drinking iced tea instead of vodka coolers. I have pictures of my mom, laughing, wine glass in one hand, her arm around my shoulder, bunching my ‘86 Expo T-shirt up at the collar.

Invariably, they’d decide to find a place to go for last call. I hated it when they left for the bar. Deemed old enough to look after my five-year-old brother, I was still afraid of the dark. I would get Daniel into his Superman pyjamas and settled into bed. He’d usually fall asleep quickly. I’d just lie there, eyes wide open, scared of the creaks in the basement and the voices I could hear in the back alley. Scared that my mom was becoming less and less my mom by the day.

Sometimes, if it got too late, or I got too scared, I would quietly get out of bed. Mom would always leave the name of the bar and the phone number on the table in the kitchen. I knew each name: Cadillac’s, the country bar on the other side of town; Moby Dick’s, the English pub at the bottom of the hill; Mario’s, the downtown bar in the basement of an Italian restaurant. If she hurried, Mom could be home from Cadillac’s in fifteen minutes, Mario’s in seven, and Moby Dick’s in five.

I’d sit at the table and vacillate while I twirled the thick black spiral phone cord. Finally I’d dial.

A gruff voice would answer. The bartender must have struggled to hear me whisper, “Is Diane Sakamoto there?” over the sound of the patrons yelling, laughing, and ordering drinks and the twang of the slide guitar.

“Who? You gotta speak up.”

I couldn’t or Daniel would wake up and be scared that Mom was not home yet. I was his older brother, but still not old enough to exude the kind of reassurance that he needed.

I would cup my hand around the black receiver and repeat “Diane Sakamoto” in as loud a whisper as I could.

“Yeah, I just saw her. Hold on.” Medicine Hat was a small town. Bartenders knew everyone in their establishment.

“Di—your kid’s on the phone,” I would hear him call over the bar.

Moments later I’d hear “Hi, Mark, everything okay?”

I remember always being relieved to hear her voice; to be connected with her again.

“Are you coming home soon?” I’d ask.

“Yes. I’m just finishing up here.”

She was always just finishing up. She was never just finishing up. I knew it. There was always just one more glass of wine.

There would be a silence between us. There was really nothing else to say, and I was always mad at myself for having made that futile attempt. I was mad at my mom for not being with us, for lying to me, for leaving me. I knew, deep down, that my mom
was
leaving me. I think that was why I never wanted to hang up the phone. I would stand there in silence, phone to my ear, listening to her breathe on the other end of the line, the music and banter in the background. She would let the silence persist for a long time too. Maybe she felt the same way.

For a period of about six months, we would do this every weekend. She at the bar in her jumpsuit and high heels, me at home in my pyjamas. Lingering on the phone just before last call. Neither of us wanting to disconnect. Both knowing we would. Each goodbye a small one on a long road of goodbyes.

“Go to bed, sweetheart. I’ll be home shortly.”

“Please come home soon, okay?”

“I will, darling.”

She’d hang up the phone and I’d sit at the kitchen table alone, knowing she’d ordered another drink. Cigarette ashes, beer, and vodka-cooler bottles would be strewn in front of me.

Of course with the weekly parties, things got complicated. One day, after a particularly late evening, Mom was making Daniel and me pancakes when a blue minivan stormed up our driveway. I scrambled to the window to see the van half on our driveway and half in the hedge that lined it. Mom knew who it was without looking out the kitchen window.

“Into my bedroom, boys. Now.”

I could hear a woman’s voice screaming from outside as the minivan door slammed shut. I recognized it immediately. “Diane, you bitch. Send my husband out here. You slut!”

It was nine in the morning, but this woman’s world was coming undone and she had lost all care for manners somewhere in the wee hours of her sleepless night. She was thinking about her little girls, about her husband’s betrayal. She wasn’t thinking. She was acting on instinct. I heard the latch click as my mom opened the door just a fraction. The woman’s voice echoed through our house. Horrid words spewed up the stairs from the landing as our pancakes got cold. My mom kept calm.

“There are two sides to this duplex, dear.”

Mom’s bedroom shared a wall with Terry’s next door. Through the wall I could hear two people frantically moving about, getting dressed. Mom opened her bedroom door. Daniel and I must have been wide-eyed, because she immediately kneeled beside the bed and brought us both close.

“It’s fine—let’s go back to breakfast,” she said.

From the living room window I saw the woman get back into
her minivan. She backed it out of our hedge. The cool guy with the jean jacket followed on his motorbike.

Then Mom met a new man.

Stephen introduced me to violence.

I was a fireproof house. I had been untouched by it, never close to it. I never suspected it. I never saw it coming.

Life took a decidedly dark turn when Stephen came into Mom’s life. Her party with Terry and the gang ended as abruptly as it had begun. Mom met Stephen at Moby Dick’s Tavern. She was forty, he was twenty-eight. He lived with his mother just around the corner from the bar, above a dry cleaner.

Stephen was a well-built, clean-cut man with sinewy muscles. He had a moustache and wore dark glasses that shaded his eyes from view. He drove a gun-metal grey Chevy Beretta. It had racing stripes and it was fast. The first time we met, he took me out on the service roads to the north of town in the light industrial area. The roads there are well paved and, given the prairie landscape, you can see an approaching car miles away. We spent the afternoon pretending to be stock-car racers.

Their relationship moved as fast as his car. Mom was racing my dad in getting on with life. Stephen moved in shortly after they met. He and Mom were married even before all his CDs were unpacked.

Living with Stephen was like having a new roommate around. We got a better stereo system with new CDs, mostly stuff from the ‘70s: Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin. The ‘70s were Stephen’s glory days.

Soon after the wedding, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Mom and I were in the kitchen having lunch. Daniel was out with Dad that afternoon. Stephen was listening to The Black Crowes in the living room and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. He hadn’t said much all day. Mom told me he was in a mood. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I understood I was to lie low, like you’d see in the movies when someone stumbled onto a bear or a cougar. It felt like we had a wild animal in the house. No quick movements. Avoid eye contact. No rash noises. Be slow and careful. That was the way to act. Hopefully, he’d just move on.

Nope.

Stephen got his campaign of violence underway. He declared war with a long, guttural growl. I don’t recall what set him off, though it could have been absolutely anything. I remember the sound emanating from the living room. Then I heard him leap off the couch. He landed with a thump, so he must have flung himself into the air. He was around the corner before I was even standing. He was in a rage. He was shouting, baring his teeth.

Mom stood up to brace herself against his assault. Unsure what to do, I stood beside her. We hugged each other as he circled around us—pacing, stalking. There was vodka on his breath. I remember his spit hitting my face as he came in close. We said nothing. I felt my mom’s heart pounding. I felt my heart pounding. My mouth was dry and I tasted metal. I had never been exposed to anything like this before. I hung onto my mom as if she were a tree in the middle of a storm.

Stephen punched the fridge twice and left the house. He peeled out of the alleyway. I could hear rocks hitting our fence.

Mom sat down and lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking. I remained just where I was, shell-shocked. Then I walked into the
living room and picked up a pillow that had fallen off the couch. I stood in the centre of the room. Somehow it looked different.

Stephen returned two hours later and went into the bedroom. There was not a sound for another two hours. Mom and I held our breath. Otherwise she tried to act as if nothing had happened. She made dinner.

Stephen came out of the bedroom. Mom was still in the kitchen, and I was alone in the living room, eating spaghetti and watching CNN. He was a different person. The storm had passed. He declared a truce; he apologized for his behaviour. He said he was sorry if he had scared me; he would never act like that again.

That night, at the age of twelve, I learned what terror was. I learned what it felt like to know your enemy.

And so, the predictable cycle of unpredictable violence began. Every few months the fighting would erupt. Stephen would harm my mom. He would shove her to the ground. He would lord over her. He would slap her. He wanted her to know who was boss. She was the only thing he could control and he set about doing it completely.

Invariably, the police would arrive at the scene. Mom would have called, or a neighbour. Stephen would spend the night in the city jail.

Their lifestyle was a one-way road. In a matter of months, Mom lost her job at City Hall. She had been coming in to work smelling of cigarettes and cheap wine. She would go days without bathing. Alcohol and abuse were her constant companions. She was losing herself, losing her dignity. Her world was closing in on her.

As my mom was sinking, my dad was finding some ground beneath his feet.

One night in the dead of winter, he told us to grab our skates. We hopped into his green Pontiac Parisienne and made our way to Strathcona Park and a man-made pond created from water diverted from the South Saskatchewan River just before it passed through
town. The pond ice was bumpy, but the pavilion had better hot chocolate than any of the other city rinks. I ran ahead while my dad helped Daniel from the car. As I was lacing up in the skate shack, a pretty woman in a purple jacket approached me. She said hi and told me that she knew my mom and dad. I remember being a little rude; I was in a hurry to hit the ice. Her name was Susan.

Daniel and I sat side by side on the wooden plank bench. As always, Dad inspected our laces. He retied them tight. It felt like he had superhuman strength when he hunched over the way dads do at rink-side. Then we were off.

The ice by the pavilion had been shovelled and so had a path that circled the island in the middle of the pond. It was dark, but the street lamps poured a soft orange light across the falling snowflakes and the ice. There were only a few kids out that night. You could see the whole pond. Daniel and I became engrossed in a game of tag. I looked up to see Dad and the woman I had just met skating hand in hand around the island. The orange light made her purple jacket look red.

Susan had four boys, two from a marriage that had ended long ago. She was eighteen when she had Cameron. Her father had forced her to marry. Two years later, she had Chad. A few months after his birth, her husband ran off with her best friend. When he returned the next week, the locks had already been changed. A few years later she married Bob Dennison. A kind and bright man, Bob was an accountant. Bob loved numbers and he loved Paul Simon. They had a son, Carrick, and were happy. But just before Susan gave birth to their second son, Logan, a darkness befell her. She worried endlessly about the unborn baby. Logan was a healthy boy. But a tragedy was coming.

Bob died of cancer before Logan turned three.

Carrick was Daniel’s age. He had a red cowlick and, at nine, shared his father’s love for Paul Simon if not his love for numbers. He and Daniel soon became thick as thieves.

Susan had been a mother her entire adult life, and she welcomed
two more boys into her home. She lived in a house she had designed herself on the very edge of town, the fanciest part. The first time we went there, each home along her street seemed a castle larger than the next. Her back deck spanned the entire house. From it, the view was of nothing. Just a deep prairie valley. No neighbours, save a few antelope and stalking coyotes. Train tracks hugged the valley basin.

We spent the summer wading through the creek, tracking animals, and hiding from farmers patrolling their plots. By summer’s end, the single beds in the two basement bedrooms had been removed and bunks put in. By then, Susan had been dating my dad for thirty weeks. We were welcome there anytime. In her home, around her dinner table, and in her heart, there was always room for more. Soon after Dad and Susan added a baby girl to our newly formed band of brothers. They named her Kumiko Suzanne.

Dad went back into the food business. Porky Smith retired and the Medicine Hat Stampede Board called to see if Dad wanted to take over the business. He started a catering company called Shooting Star Events. He won business from the Stampede Board, three high schools, and most of the major oil companies. The first event he catered was McCoy High’s graduation.

Dad found a way to recreate the immigrant experience in the back kitchen of the Cypress Centre hall. He put his boys to work scrubbing through three thousand plates, fifteen hundred forks, and three thousand saucers. At 1 a.m., when we thought we were done, Pete, a lovable guy with more than a couple of brushes with the law, unloaded fifteen one-hundred-pound cauldrons from his Chevy Camino. It was all Carrick, Daniel, and I could do to get them loaded into the sink for scrubbing. We didn’t leave that night till 4 a.m. We were drenched. Every part of my body was wrinkled like a raisin. We had been on the receiving end of a thirteen-hour gravy-fuelled steam bath in that dish pit.