Until I Find You (115 page)

“There must be medication for it,” Jack said.

“He’s tried all the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—they upset his stomach. He’s like you—he doesn’t eat. You don’t eat, do you?”

“He’s thin, you mean?”

“To put it mildly,” Heather said. They had passed some tents for the Festival and were walking through the Meadows—a large park, the paths lined with cherry trees. A woman with a tennis racquet was hitting a ball for her dog to fetch.

“Where are we going?” Jack asked his sister.

“You said you wanted to see where I lived.”

They passed Bruntsfield Links, a small golf course where a young man (without a golf ball) was practicing his swing; the fields, Heather told Jack matter-of-factly, had been an open mass grave during the plague.

“Daddy takes glucosamine sulfate, a supplement—it comes mixed with chondroitin, which is shark cartilage. He thinks this helps,” she said, in a way that implied she didn’t believe it did anything at all. “And he puts his hands in melted paraffin, which he mixes with olive oil. The hot wax dries on his hands. He makes quite a mess when he picks the wax off, but he seems to enjoy doing that. It fits right in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“His what?”

“We’re not talking about the mental part, not yet,” his sister told him. “He puts his hands in ice water, too—for as long as he can stand it. This is a bit masochistic for someone who feels cold most of the time, but the hot wax and the ice water work—at least they give him some temporary relief.”

It was a warm, windy day, but the way Heather walked—with her head down, her arms swinging, and her shoulders rolling forward—you would have thought that they were marching into a gale.

“All the years I was growing up, Daddy told me every day that he loved you as much as he loved me,” Heather said, still not looking at Jack. “Because he never got to be with you, he said that every minute he was with me, he loved me twice as much. He said he had to love me enough for two people.”

Her fingers were playing on an imaginary keyboard of air; there was no way for Jack to follow the music in his sister’s head. “Naturally, I hated you,” Heather said. “If he had to love me enough for two people, because of how much he missed you, I interpreted this to mean that he loved you
more.
But that’s what kids do, isn’t it?” She stopped suddenly, looking at Jack. Without waiting for an answer, she said: “We’re here—my street, my building.” She folded her arms across her small breasts, as if they’d been arguing.

“You don’t
still
hate me, do you?” he asked her.

“That’s a work-in-progress, Jack.”

The street was busy—lots of small shops, a fair amount of traffic. Her apartment building was five or six stories tall—a wrought-iron fence surrounding it, a bright-red door. There were tiled walls in the foyer, a wood-and-iron banister, a stone staircase.

“You go first,” Heather said, pointing up the stairs.

Jack wondered if she was superstitious about stairs. He went up three flights before he turned to look at her. “Keep going,” she told him. “No woman in her right mind would want Jack Burns watching her go up or down stairs. I would be so self-conscious, I would probably trip and fall.”

“Why?” he asked her.

“I would be wondering how I compare to all the beautiful women you’ve seen—from behind and otherwise,” Heather said.

“Is the elevator broken?” Jack asked.

“There’s no lift,” she said. “It’s a fifth-floor walk-up. Lots of high ceilings in Edinburgh—high ceilings mean long flights of stairs.”

The colors in the hallway were warm but basic—mauve, cream, mahogany. The flat itself had the high ceilings Heather had mentioned, and brightly painted walls; the living room was red, the kitchen yellow. The only indication of the five roommates was the two stoves and two refrigerators in the kitchen. Everything was clean and neat—as it would have to be, to make living with five roommates tolerable. Jack didn’t ask how many bathrooms were in the flat. (There couldn’t have been enough for
five
roommates.)

Heather’s room—with a desk and a lot of bookshelves and a queen-size bed—had mulberry-colored walls and giant windows overlooking Bruntsfield Gardens. The books were mostly fiction, and—as at her office at the university—there were more CDs than books, and some serious-looking stereo equipment. There was a VCR and a DVD player, and a television facing the bed. Jack saw some of his films among the DVDs and videotapes on her bedside table.

“I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,” his sister said. “Sometimes without the sound.”

“Because of the roommates?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to them if the sound is on or off,” she said. “It’s because I know all your lines by heart, and sometimes I feel like saying them.”

There was nowhere to sit—only the one desk chair or the bed. It was basically a dormitory room, only larger and prettier.

“You can sit on the bed,” Heather said. “I’ll make some tea.”

On her desk was a framed photograph of a young-looking William Burns playing the organ with Heather-as-a-little-girl in his lap. When Jack sat down on the bed, Heather handed him a leather photo album. “The pictures are reasonably self-explanatory,” she said, leaving him alone in her room.

She was kind to have left him alone; she must have known he’d not seen many photographs of their father and would prefer seeing so much of him, so suddenly, by himself.

The album was chronological. Barbara Steiner was small and blond, but fuller in the face than her daughter—not nearly as pretty. Heather’s good looks came from William. He had kept his long hair—Miss Wurtz would have been pleased—and he got thinner as he grew older. There were many more pictures of him with Heather—as a little girl, and as a teenager—than there were of Heather with her mother, or of William Burns with Barbara Steiner. Of course it was Heather’s album, and she must have selected which photos to put in it.

She seemed to be most fond of the photographs from those father-and-daughter ski trips; postcards from Wengen and Lech and Zermatt were intermingled with photos of Heather and William on skis. (A cold sport for someone who was inclined to feel cold, Jack thought, but William Burns looked comfortable in ski clothes—or else he was so happy to be skiing with his daughter that the feeling warmed him.)

There was nothing complaining about Heather’s mother’s expressions in any of the photographs, nor could you tell that she’d once had a wonderful singing voice. There
was
something overposed about her—especially in the photos when she was wearing a wig—and then she simply disappeared without a trace. Jack turned a page in the album and Barbara Steiner was gone. He knew exactly when he had passed the moment of her death; all the photographs from that point forward were of Heather and her dad, just the two of them, or one or the other alone.

There had been concert brochures attached to the earlier pages, but from the time Heather appeared to be twelve or thirteen, there had been no more concerts for William Burns.

Jack recognized the interior of the Central Bar, where—in addition to Heather playing her wooden flute—there were photos of William playing a piano-type instrument, both alone and with his daughter accompanying him on her flute. It was some kind of electric keyboard—a synthesizer, Jack thought it was called—and from the look on William’s and Heather’s faces, Jack doubted they were playing anything classical.

Jack knew why his father appeared to be overdressed in many of the photos—that is, too warmly dressed for the season. (William often felt cold, except when he was skiing.) But even in those summer-vacation snapshots, when William was on a beach in a bathing suit, his tattoos were not very clear or distinguishable from one another. Music, when it’s too small to see in detail, looks like handwriting—especially to someone like Jack, who couldn’t read music.

Jack was ashamed he’d told Claudia that he
never
wanted children—“not till the day I discover that my dad has been a loving father to a child, or children, he
didn’t
leave,” was how he’d put it to her.

Well, Jack held the evidence of that in his lap—Heather’s photo album was a record of her love for their dad and William’s love for her. Jack had finished the album, and had composed himself sufficiently to be making his way through the pictures a second time, when Heather came back to her room with the tea. She sat down beside him on the bed.

“There are some places where you removed photos, or they fell out of the album by themselves,” he said to her.

“Old boyfriends. I removed them,” she said.

Jack hadn’t seen anyone who could have been the Irish boyfriend; he got the impression that the boyfriend was clearly less than the love of her life, but he didn’t ask.

He turned to the photos of Heather and William Burns playing their instruments at the Central. “I went there yesterday, to have a look at where you play your flute,” he said.

“I know. A friend saw you. How come you didn’t ask me to go with you?”

“I was looking around Leith, mostly at places I remembered hearing about from my mother,” Jack explained.

He turned to the end pages of the album, where their father was wearing gloves. “What’s
wrong
with him?” Jack asked. “I mean the mental part, not the arthritis.”

Heather tilted her head; it rested on Jack’s shoulder. He held her hand in one hand, his teacup in the other. The album lay open on his lap, with the man who looked so much like Heather and Jack looking up at them. “I want you to hear the Father Willis in Old St. Paul’s,” Heather said. “I want to play something for you, just to prepare you.”

They went on sitting together; Jack sipped his tea. With her head on his shoulder, it would have been awkward for Heather to sip hers. “Don’t you want to drink your tea?” he asked.

“I want to do exactly what I’m doing,” Heather told him. “I want to never take my head off your shoulder. I want to hug you and kiss you—and beat you with both fists, in your face. I want to tell you every bad thing that ever happened to me—especially those things I wish I could have talked to you about, when they happened. I want to describe every boyfriend you might have saved me from.”

“You can do all of that,” Jack told her.

“I’ll just do this, for now,” she said. “You want everything to happen too fast.”

“What is he obsessive-compulsive
about
?” Jack asked.

She squeezed his hand and shook her head against his shoulder. She’d had to sell the flat William had lived in—where she’d grown up, in Marchmont. “It’s a big student area, but some lecturers live there, too,” Heather said. It would have been perfect if she could have stayed there, but she’d had to sell the flat and find a less expensive place.

“To pay for the sanatorium?” he asked. Heather nodded her head against him. Most of her things, and all of William’s, were in storage. “Why don’t I buy you a flat of your own?” Jack said.

She took her head off his shoulder and looked at him. “You can’t
buy
me,” she said. “Well, actually, I suppose you
can.
But it wouldn’t be right. I don’t want you to do
everything
for me—just help me with
him.
”

“I
will,
but you haven’t told me what to do,” he said.

She sipped her tea. She’d not let go of his hand, which she pulled into her lap and examined more closely. “You have his small hands, but his fingers are longer. You don’t have an organist’s hands,” she said. She held up her fingers to Jack’s, palm to palm; hers were longer. “Every inch of his body is tattooed,” she began, still looking at their hands pressed together. “Even the tops of his feet, even his toes.”

“Even his
hands
?” Jack asked.

“No, not his hands, not his face or neck, and not his penis,” she said.

“You’ve seen his penis, or did he
tell
you it wasn’t tattooed?” Jack asked her.

“You’d be surprised how many people have seen Daddy’s penis,” Heather said, smiling. “I’m sure you’ll get to see it, too—it’s bound to happen.”

She had put together a smaller photo album for Jack; it was about the size of a paperback novel, with some of the same photos from the larger album or slightly different angles of those moments in time. The smaller album had no pictures of her mother—only of Heather and William. Jack and Heather sat looking at the pictures, drinking their tea.

“I could learn to ski,” Jack said. “Then we could all ski together.”

“Then you could ski with
me,
Jack. Daddy’s skiing days are over.”

“He can’t ski anymore?”

“The first thing you’ll think when you see him is that there’s nothing wrong with him—that he’s just a little eccentric, or something,” his sister said. She took off her glasses and put her face so close to Jack’s that their noses touched. “Without my glasses, I have to be this close to you to see you clearly,” Heather said. She pulled slowly back from him, but only about six or eight inches. “I lose you about here,” she said, putting her glasses back on. “Well, when you meet him, he’ll make you believe that you could take him to Los Angeles—where you would have a great time together. You’ll think I’m cruel or stupid for sending him away, but he needs to be taken care of and they know how to do it. Don’t think
you
can take care of him. If I can’t take care of him—and I
can’t—
you can’t take care of him, either. You may not think so at first, but he’s where he belongs.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He took her glasses off and put his face close to hers, their noses touching. “Keep looking at me,” he told her. “I believe you.”

“I’ve seen close-ups of you half my life,” she said, smiling.

“I can’t look at you enough, Heather.”

She ran her hand through her hair, wiping her lips with the back of her other hand. Jack recognized the gesture. It was the way he’d removed his wig and wiped the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove in
My Last Hitchhiker.
In a near-perfect imitation of Jack’s voice, Heather said: “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”