Watcher (12 page)

I felt sick. What was I doing, anyway, getting her all worked up and bawling over stuff from the past? And why? Because my memories were hazy? Because there was someone watching me and I had a vague idea he
might
be my father?

“Hey,” I said. I touched her arm. “Let's just forget it. I'm sorry I brought it up.”

“No!” She whirled around and glared at me. “I do not want to forget it. I want to know—”

“What?”

“I'm not even sure. I've just always felt like there was more.” A tear burst out of her right eye and skated off her cheek, exploding on the table. “Like there's something missing and that if I just figure it out I can deal with it and stop having strange dreams and thoughts. I want the questions in my head to stop!”

“Me too, I guess,” I admitted.

“I always told people I hated him,” she said. Her eyes shifted to look down, away from me. “I said I never wanted to see him again.”

“Yeah, so did I.”

“But, sometimes ... I wonder about him.”

“What?”

“I wonder … if he ever thinks about me. I mean, us. Or why, in all the years since they broke up, he never got in touch, not even once.”

“Maybe he didn't know where we were,” I said, thinking again of the man who'd been watching me.

“I dream things that don't make sense sometimes,” Lynn said. A hint of a smile struggled through for just a second. “I dream that I'm little and we're at the zoo and he's carrying me on his shoulders so I can see the animals better. And I feel so safe way up there.”

Something leapt in my gut and a flash of a scene went by, a quick vision of being up in the air, running alongside a giraffe.

“Do you see any giraffes in your dream?” I asked.

“Giraffes? No, but
you
used to want to race them,” she laughed. “You'd say, ‘fasser, fasser' while Daddy …”

Daddy.

Lynn's voice trailed off, her smile chased away by a look of panic. “I must have dreamed that, too,” she said. She shook her head, like that would clear things up.

“I don't think so. It, I dunno,
felt
real, and I had a flash of something about it before you said that.”

She let that sink in, which was fine with me. I had my own thoughts — and questions — to contend with right then.

“Do you remember what he
looks
like?” I asked, breaking the silence at last.

“Kind of. I mean, I think I'd know him if I saw him.” She took a deep breath and glanced nervously at the door, like Mom might be crouched listening on the other side of it.

“The wedding pictures are in Mom's room,” she whispered.

“
What
?”

“The pictures from when they got married,” she said. “Mom has them in an album in that filing cabinet in her room. Or, she used to, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them once when I was waiting for her to get my birth certificate. That was when I was applying for my social insurance number. I was sitting on her bed and she unlocked the cabinet and started digging through.

“I don't think she realized she'd put the album on the bed. She'd tossed a bunch of things there while she rifled through some papers in the bottom, and I picked up the album and opened it.”

“Did she see you?”

“Yeah. After a minute or two she noticed and she just
freaked
. Grabbed it and screamed that I had no business touching her personal stuff. Her whole face turned red.”

“I wonder where she keeps the key,” I mused aloud. If I could get a look at that album, I might be able to tell if the guy following me was my dad.

“Yeah? Forget
that
. I've looked high and low for it.”

“So you could see the pictures again?”

“Yeah.” Lynn looked away, like she was embarrassed.

“It's too late to do anything tonight,” I said. “She could walk in any time. But tomorrow, when she goes out, let's take another look.”

“Sure,” Lynn said, “but you won't find anything.”

I didn't bother answering her, but I had a lot more confidence in myself than Lynn apparently had in me. I'd hidden a lot of things (okay, it was mostly weed) back when I had stuff to hide. I knew a lot more about hiding places than she did.

If the key to that cabinet was in Mom's room, I was going to find it.

chapter seventeen

“W
e'll be killed if we get caught.”

We'd barely stepped through the doorway into Mom's room when Lynn offered this dire prediction. She was exaggerating but it
was
safe to say if Mom ever found us snooping around in her room there would be a scene bad enough and loud enough that the neighbours would be giving us strange looks for weeks.

“Don't worry so much,” I said. I gave a wave of indifference to show her my total lack of concern.

“Boo!” she yelled, then laughed when I jumped.

“That was just reflexes,” I said. “Now quit messing around and let's do this.”

We got busy, searching carefully through all of the obvious places first. Even though we got fairly absorbed in our search, we flinched at every strange noise. For some reason there were a lot of them — sounds of footsteps in the hallway outside, keys turning in doors, creaking, rustling, and on and on. It was like the apartment had suddenly become haunted.

“You know,” Lynn said after a particularly unnerving noise, “if she
does
come through that door, we don't have a prayer of getting out of here before she sees us.”

It was true that the layout was working against us. The door to the apartment opened into the kitchen, with the living room just past it in one open space. The hallway to the bedrooms branched off from the kitchen, on your right just inside the door, and Mom's room was straight ahead at the end.

We'd talked about whether or not we should leave the door open or closed while we were in there. Open, Mom would definitely see it right away, because she always left it shut. Closed, we'd have even less time to cover our tracks if we didn't hear her until she opened the bedroom door and saw us there. Besides, being in there with the door closed would make us look even guiltier.

It took more than an hour to go through her dresser, carefully checking under and among the clothes, and pulling each drawer out to see if anything was secured to the bottom. We lifted the mattress on the bed, crawled underneath it and shone a flashlight at the underside of the box spring.

“She's going to know we were in here,” Lynn said at one point. “There's no way she's not.”

“Not if we're really careful about putting things back exactly as they were,” I said, but I had an uneasy feeling she was right. I think I'd know it if someone went through my stuff, no matter how careful they tried to be.

“The key probably isn't even in here, anyway. I bet she keeps it in her purse or something.”

“She might,” I said, “but I think it's more likely to be here.”

By then we'd finished with most of her stuff, looked in the light fixture, under the carpet edges, behind the baseboard heater, checked for loose trim around the doors and window, and lifted down the few pictures Mom had hanging to see if there was anything behind them.

Nothing.

“There's still the closet,” I said after we'd searched the rest of the room. Neither of us was keen to start in there because it was crammed full of bags and boxes.

“We might as well get started.” Lynn sighed. “It's going to take hours to go through this stuff.”

But it didn't, because when we started to look, the first thing I noticed was that an old winter jacket Mom hadn't worn for years seemed out of place. Other things that were rarely worn — or retired — were all shoved to the back, but not this coat.

I reached in and felt around in the pockets. Nothing. Then I thought to check if there were any inside pockets. Sure enough there was one on the left side of the coat, and a small key was tucked into it.

I pulled it out and held it up for Lynn to see. She squealed and clapped her hands like a little kid and asked me how I'd known where to look.

I told her how I'd figured it out while we went to the filing cabinet and knelt in front. The key fit, and it was that simple — a twist and the cabinet was unlocked, along with all the secrets it held.

“You're going to think I'm nuts,” I said to Lynn, but before we start looking at any of this, I think we should get a copy made of the key.”

“You're joking, right?”

“No, I mean it. There might be stuff in here that we don't have time to look at today — stuff that's important. If she suspects we've been in her things — like you think she will — she might start to carry the key with her, or hide it somewhere we'd never look. The only way to make sure we're going to get a look at everything in here is if we have our own key.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “But you go.”

I agreed, relocked the cabinet against Lynn's protests (though it didn't take long to convince her that we'd be dead meat if Mom came along and it was unlocked) and took off for the hardware store three blocks away.

All the way there and back I kept telling myself that chances were good Mom wouldn't even come home while I was gone, much less happen to look for the key. Still, it was a relief when I got back to the apartment and Lynn reported that everything was okay.

We checked to make sure the copy worked, then put Mom's key back in her jacket pocket and closed the closet door.

My chest thumped heavily as we pulled open the cabinet's top drawer for the second time. It was stuffed full, cards we'd given Mom, old artwork and things like that, all jammed in — some of it organized and secured with rubber bands, some of it just in there loose.

We closed that without looking at any of it and slid the bottom drawer open. The album sat right on top, two lacy bells crossed over each other on the front. It had been white once, but was yellowed with age and handling.

I sucked in air and flipped it open.

There he was, standing next to Mom, smiling out at me from an eight by ten glossy.

My father.

I stood there looking and looking, like I might be able to see more than the surface image, until I became aware that Lynn was trembling beside me.

“That's him,” she said, pointing at him like I needed that explained. “That's Daddy.”

Daddy
.

She tried to smile, still crying, and put her hand on my arm. Then she kind of sank against me and sobbed.

I put my arm around her (I'm not a total jerk) and held onto her until she got herself calmed down.

“It's okay,” I said. My throat hurt.

It was a few minutes before Lynn pulled herself together enough to keep looking through the rest of the pictures. We stood there, flipping pages, because we didn't want to sit on the bed and we didn't dare leave the room. We might not be able to get out before Mom saw us, but at least we could try to shove the album back and lock the cabinet without her seeing what we were up to.

It was pretty strange, looking at this smiling person who had his arm around our mom. She was right up against his chest in a lot of the shots, looking, I dunno,
sheltered
somehow. I had a flash of déjà vu but it was gone before I could catch anything from it.

“Where do you think he is now?” Lynn asked when we'd finished turning all the pages and had gone back to the first one.

“Who knows,” I said. I still wasn't ready to tell her about my suspicions.

Besides, I'd tried to compare his face to the guy who'd been following me, but too much time had passed for me to be certain. There was a resemblance, but I honestly couldn't say for sure if it was the same person.

I wondered, too, if I'd met him on the street and he'd looked exactly the same as he had when the pictures were taken, would I have known him? I had a feeling I would have. Even though I couldn't have brought up any kind of clear image in my head beforehand, as soon as I saw his picture I had an immediate and powerful sense of recognition.

After all, even though this guy was a stranger to me, he was still my father.

chapter eighteen

W
hen we'd finished looking at the album, Lynn and I agreed we'd better not press our luck. We locked everything back up, closed the door to the room, and sat at the kitchen table for a while, just yakking.

But something happened to me while Lynn was talking. I don't think it was because of anything she said but I can't be sure because her words had stopped registering in my brain a few moments before.

It wasn't one of those times when I just drift off and don't listen. In fact, we'd been in the middle of a heavy discussion about whether it was possible to do self-hypnosis to make memories clearer. Mostly, we wondered if that would help us figure out if what we
thought
were memories could really be things we'd been told often enough that they
seemed
to be memories. For some reason, that question kept coming up over and over.