Читать книгу Adam's Peak - Heather Burt - Страница 9

It’s winter again. Christmas Day. Rudy has driven out from Toronto along with Susie and her family. Adam still lives at home. All in all, it’s an ordinary Christmas—messier now that Sue and Mark have baby Zoë. Mum’s absence no longer oppresses, as it did for so many years, though Dad still drinks too much arrack.

Rudy is at the kitchen table with the rest of the “children,” browsing an old issue of the Gazette while his aunt makes Christmas lunch and his father listens to the Jim Reeves Christmas album in the living room—right hand anchored to his drink, left hand lazily tapping the arm-rest of his chair, more in time with his own thoughts, it seems, than with the music. Bundled up in her multiple cardigans, chopping away, Aunty tells stories of the old days on the tea estate. Adam’s the only one paying any attention. He listens as a curious outsider would, tilting his head and widening his eyes, as if it were all fabulously exotic—as if peraheras and kavichchis and Peria Dorays were from a different planet. It’s vaguely embarrassing, Rudy thinks, the way his brother fawns over things that should be ordinary to him. But then Adam has never been home; he’s different from the rest of them.

“So, Aunty,” he says, rocking back on two legs of his chair, hands clasped behind his head, “were there any problems between the Tamils and the Sinhalese back in those days?”

In the living room Dad coughs. Aunty keeps on chopping.

“Ah, not like they have now,” she says. “Things were more peaceful then.” She brushes loose strands of hair away from her face with the wrist of her chopping hand. “People got along better, isn’t it.”

Adam frowns. “Well, they made it look like they did. But I can totally understand why they got fed up—the Sinhalese and the Tamils. I mean, I’d wanna start fighting too if I had second-rate status in my own country. Wouldn’t you?”

“Ah, maybe,” Aunty says, without conviction.

Dad coughs again. Rudy and Susie exchange a glance, then Susie retreats to the heavy manual she has brought with her from Toronto: An Introduction to American Sign Language. As far as Rudy is concerned, Sri Lanka’s problems aren’t real. Real is another frozen Christmas with crappy gifts and too much food. It’s Adam’s larger-than-life presence. It’s Susie and her husband finding out their tiny blue-eyed, black-haired kid is severely hearing impaired.

Watching his sister move her hands like pieces of newly acquired anatomy, Rudy senses a familiar impotence—a powerful but hopeless desire to be helpful, to be significant in some way. He remembers an afternoon, ages ago, in Aunty Mary’s garden, when Susie leaned too far over the edge of the well and got stuck. For several long seconds, she teetered perilously atop the narrow stone wall, screaming, feet kicking in the air, before Rudy got to her and yanked her back down by the hem of her skirt. In his mind, he’d saved his sister’s life, and for a brief, triumphant time he was her hero and protector. But he doubts Susie even remembers the incident. And in any case, it’s no longer Rudy she calls for in her moments of crisis, but Adam.

Adam’s interest in Sri Lankan politics seems to have fizzled. Whistling along with Jim Reeves, he slides his chair away from the table and slips into the living room, where he drops to the floor in front of Zoë, who’s playing with a pile of National Geographic magazines.

“Whatcha got there?” he says, signing “Zoë,” along with something Rudy doesn’t recognize.

Zoë looks up and slaps the magazine on the floor in front of her. Adam blows a wave of hair out of his eyes.

“Cool picture,” he says. “That’s a woolly mammoth. It’s like an elephant, only it’s bigger and hairier. And those things coming out of its mouth are tusks.” He exaggerates the signs for “big” and “hairy” and fingerspells “tusks.” He starts to read from the magazine—“‘The woolly mammoth ranged over North America, Asia, and Europe during the Pleistocene. It was—’” then interrupts himself. “Hey, Zoë, can you imagine if they used one of these things instead of a regular elephant in the Kandy Perahera? Wouldn’t that be crazy?”

Rudy hears his father clear his throat, and his own body tenses.

“What are you expecting her to understand from all this?” Dad says, his voice deceptively mild. “Point to the picture and say ‘elephant.’”

At the kitchen table Susie’s eyes again catch Rudy’s. Their father is the one member of the family who won’t sign.

“I don’t want her to learn anything from this,” Adam says. “I just want her to know I’m interested in what she’s looking at.”

Dad doesn’t answer. For a moment the only voice in the house is that of Jim Reeves, crooning the final verse of “Blue Christmas,” his velvet melody pocked with record crackles that have become part of the music itself. Then Zoë laughs as Adam swoops her up off the floor and steers her like an airplane, through the kitchen and down the hallway, past the trophy room and the dining room, across the entrance hall, and back into the living room, where he deposits her with a fading whistle next to the pile of toys beneath the Christmas tree.

“Now, let’s see what we have to play with here,” he says. “Stuffed doll ... stuffed dog ... stuffed platypus ...” One by one, the toys fly over his shoulder. “Hey! Giant Lego! I believe this is from your Uncle Rudy. Hey, Uncle Rudy, wanna play Lego with me and Zoë?”

Rudy shakes out his paper and turns to a new page. His brother’s invitation strikes him as a challenge.

“Uh, no thanks. You two go ahead.”

He detects the shadow of disappointment that crosses Adam’s face, and briefly he regrets his answer. But his regret muddles with irritation, and as Adam dumps the tub of Lego out on the floor, Rudy stares hard at the page before him, unable to make himself concentrate. He decides to go out.

Beside him Susie closes her book and begins straightening the clutter on the table.

“Mark and I are going to have a rest upstairs,” she says. “Adam, would you mind watching Zoë?”

Outside, Rudy walks as far as the end of the driveway and leans back against the juniper tree stationed like a sentry at the corner of the lawn. The sky is low and grey; the air has that particular about-to-snow sharpness to it. He buries his hands in his pockets and inhales the cold. He doesn’t really plan to walk any farther.

Stretching out to his left and right, Morgan Hill Road—chemin de la Côte Morgan, officially—is perfectly straight and, despite the name, flat. The snow on its front yards is still untrampled after the latest fall. Its houses, from the bricks of their living room levels to the aluminum siding strips of their bedroom levels, are ordered and straight. Most of them have their Christmas lights on, and these strings of lights, too, conform to the right-angle geometry of the street.

Rudy looks back at his father’s sagging lights, the exception on the block. Complementing the red shutters and door, the bulbs are green and red, but the wires hang in loose arcs along the eaves and under the windows. “Like the lights at the Kandy Perahera,” Adam apparently said when he put them up. Dad said they looked sloppy and apologized for them when Rudy and the others came home. “Kandy Perahera!” he huffed, shaking his head. “The boy has never even seen a perahera. The neighbours must think we’re completely ignorant.”

Rudy turns back to the street. “You should have been born in the old country, machan,” he muses to his absent brother.

Rudy himself is tired of being Sri Lankan. Or, rather, of being only Sri Lankan—especially to women. His relationships follow a pattern as regular as the lines and angles of Morgan Hill Road. Currently it’s Renée, who took the initiative and asked him out. At first, she found him exotic (that word he has grown to despise) and therefore incapable of being boring. And he, in the interest of boosting his desirability, became in her presence someone not quite himself, peppering his descriptions of “home” with tropical flavours and smells, using Sinhala words whose meanings had escaped him, admiring the contrast in their skin tones when they made love. It worked, for a while. Then Renée asked about his name, and on discovering he was neither Sinhalese nor Tamil, but a hybrid with European ancestors, began to find entirely ordinary faults in him. Soon, he’s sure, they’ll break up, and once again he’ll vow not to take part in this embarrassing routine.

As if to assert his Canadianness, he crouches and scoops up some snow with his bare hands. It doesn’t pack very well, but he manages to form a lumpy little ball, which he fires across the street at the Frasers’ Oldsmobile. He crouches to scoop up more snow, but as he does so the Frasers’ front door opens and Mrs. Fraser and her daughter come out. For an instant, Rudy worries they’re going to bawl him out for hucking snowballs at their car, the way Mr. Fraser once did. But Mrs. Fraser and her daughter seem oblivious to his presence. Mr. Fraser himself—odd, sullen guy—is no longer around to care. Apparently his heart gave out on him in the summer.

Rudy straightens up slowly and leans back into the juniper, grateful that his jacket isn’t far off the green of the bush. To step out into the street would probably call for a greeting—something he’d rather not bother with—so he stays where he is, waiting for the two women to get into the car and drive off. Curiously, though, they stay where they are, hovering by the front door, as if trying to decide where to go or what to do. Mrs. Fraser, in a fur-trimmed coat, is cradling something in one arm, gesturing toward the middle of the lawn with the other. Her daughter, Clare, looks frozen in a turtleneck and jeans. Her arms are folded across her middle and her head is bowed, long hair hiding her face.

Rudy hasn’t seen Clare Fraser in years. In his time away from Morgan Hill Road, he’s forgotten her, and only now, watching her like this, does he recall with an unexpected wave of nostalgia that she used to be a fixture in his life. He never spoke to her; they weren’t friends. But she was regularly there, the girl across the street, about his age, a presence he could count on.

His mind begins to drift, until Clare and her mother walk out to the driveway. Rudy presses his body farther into the juniper. The Christmassy smell fills his nostrils. “Come on, you two,” he mutters. “I feel like an idiot here. Get in the car.” Cupping his hands around his mouth and nose, he prepares to slip around the bush and back to the house. But then the scene across the street changes.

The two women march through the fresh snow to the pine tree in the middle of the lawn. Mrs. Fraser circles the tree, examining its branches, while Clare stares at the ground. Rudy squints at the thing cradled in Mrs. Fraser’s arm, craning his neck to get a better view. It’s a container of some kind, he guesses. Then, teetering into the shrub, he gets it: an urn.

“Jesus,” he whispers.

He steadies himself then squats down, making his body as small as possible.

Mrs. Fraser says something. Clare’s head is still down, her arms folded. If she answers, Rudy doesn’t hear it. He imagines her heavy-hearted but restrained. He knows the feeling. She wants the whole thing to be over with, he imagines—and, for her sake, so does he. But Mrs. Fraser, fondling a branch of the pine tree with her free hand, seems to be in no hurry. Rudy shifts his weight. His knees are complaining, but to get up now is out of the question. Waiting, he notices that the Fraser house is the only one on the block without Christmas lights. Though reasonably well tended, the place wears a vacant stare of abandonment, as if, despite Mr. Fraser’s grumpy manner, the house can’t manage to look homey without him. Rudy knows little about the circumstances of his neighbour’s death. Living in Toronto, he received only a sketchy account. But it occurs to him that even if he’d been living here on Morgan Hill Road, he’d not have known much more. For though the Frasers have lived across the street for as long as he can remember, the distance between their house and his own has proven itself, for no straightforward reason, to be unbridgeable.

Holding the brass urn in both hands now, Mrs. Fraser offers one side of it to her daughter, but Clare shakes her head. Her mother turns to face the pine tree then takes a step back. Rudy’s eyes are fixed on the urn. He’s never seen ashes before; he’s heard there’s more to them than one might expect. And indeed, when Mr. Fraser’s remains spill out into the branches of the pine, onto the snow, upward in great, whitish gusts, their quantity is surprising.

That’s what we amount to, Rudy tells himself, though he doesn’t quite believe it.

Mrs. Fraser wraps her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and together they stand, facing the tree. It would be fitting, Rudy thinks, for the snow to start now. He searches the sky and in the absence of any climactic flakes tries to honour the Frasers’ small, quiet ceremony with a memory of his mother’s burial. It’s an event that should have stuck, but all that comes to him of that muggy August afternoon is the car ride from the cemetery to the house: he and Susie in the back seat with a large 7-Up to share, baby Adam screeching on Aunty Mary’s lap.

His knees are killing him. Seeing Clare retreat, head down, toward her house, he straightens up painfully, extracts himself from the juniper, and tramps back across his own yard. He’s halfway to the steps when the front door opens a crack.

“Rudy! Lunch in ten minutes!” his aunt calls, loud enough to be heard several houses away.

Rudy groans into his collar. He could carry on to the house without looking back—he’s almost there—but he stops and turns.

Mrs. Fraser is looking in his direction, clutching the empty urn. He expects her to ignore him, or dismiss him with a friendly wave. But instead she starts walking toward the road, her free arm out for balance, as if she’s on a tightrope. Awkward and baffled, Rudy watches her for a few steps, then he backtracks across his yard.

“Rudy? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

The Scottish accent is a surprise. He’d forgotten it, along with other quirky things about Mrs. Fraser that used to captivate him in a confusingly sexual way when he was a kid—the fiery hair, the makeup, the pretty clothes. Though he understood her relationship to Clare, it was always difficult to imagine Isobel Fraser as a mother.

He pulls his right hand from his pocket and waves. “Hi, Mrs. Fraser. It’s been a few years at least.”The Mrs. Fraser sounds ridiculous; she can’t be more than forty-five. But she doesn’t correct him.

At the edge of the road he stops, while she, on her side, does the same. A sensible position, Rudy thinks. With Morgan Hill Road between them, it’s easier to avoid the urn, not to mention the fact that in almost twenty years of living across the street from each other, he and his neighbour have almost never spoken.

“Is your family together for Christmas?” she says.

He’s forgotten about Christmas. “Oh. Yeah. My sister and her family are here, and my aunt’s out for her visit.”

He wonders if she has any idea where his aunt is visiting from—if she even knows where the place is. Renée didn’t, though she tried to hide it. But Mrs. Fraser, he sees, is smiling and nodding in a way that seems entirely genuine.

“Oh, that’s lovely. I must say, I always envied your aunt every time she went back home. I’ve dreamed of going to that part of the world ever since I was a girl.”

“Really?”

“Oh, aye. I think it would be marvellous. The lovely beaches, the temples ...”

Touristy stuff, he thinks, but still. It seems to him suddenly preposterous that Mrs. Fraser has never been inside his house, never had a cup of tea with his aunt. He takes a small step forward.

“You should go sometime.”

“I should, shouldn’t I. Well, maybe when things here are a bit more settled.” She shifts the urn in her arms.

Grateful for the opening, Rudy clears his throat. “I was really sorry to hear about your husband. Is everything all ... I mean, is there anything ...”

She shakes her head. “Thank you, pet. It was a terrible shock, but we’re managing quite well. It just takes time, doesn’t it.”

Pet, he repeats to himself, nodding. She’s speaking to him as if for all these years the Vantwests and the Frasers have been regular neigh-bours. He glances back at his own house. Through the living room window he can make out his brother, tossing Zoë up in the air. Adam’s build is slender, but he’s a swimmer, lean and strong.

“I shouldn’t keep you,” Mrs. Fraser says. “I heard Mary calling you in.”

“Yeah. I should probably go.”

“Well, it was lovely chatting with you, Rudy.”

“You too.”

“You’re still living in Toronto?”

“For a while anyway. I’ve got a teaching job in North York.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! Well, best of luck with it.”

“Thanks.”

He wonders if he should wish her a Merry Christmas, but a final glance at the urn dismisses the idea. He waves again then turns and retraces his steps through the snow and up the concrete stairs to the front door. With his hand on the latch he looks back to see Mrs. Fraser disappear behind her own door. His eyes travel to the upstairs windows of the Fraser house, and there, in the middle window, he catches Clare Fraser’s pale, pretty face, turning away from him then vanishing altogether. Odd duck, he thinks. And yet he watches a few seconds longer to see if she’ll return. He wants her to—wants her to come back and just be there. But she doesn’t. One last time he meets the vacant stare of the house across the street, then he goes inside.

Christmas lunch is almost ready. The counter is crowded with Aunty’s special dishes, and the air is heavy with the competing smells of curry spices and turkey. While Aunty and Susie fuss over last-minute details, Dad and Mark drink arrack and talk hockey. Down on the floor, Zoë struggles with the lid of an empty Tupperware container. Adam is rummaging through a drawer; Jim Reeves is still singing. Rudy hovers in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, staring out the front window. In all the noise and confusion of his own house, it seems suddenly impossible that across the street Mrs. Fraser has just disposed of her husband’s ashes. But she did. He was there. He could even say that, in a way, he was part of it.

“Found them!” Adam suddenly calls out. “Christmas oven mitts! I told you they were in here, Aunty.”

“Very good, son. Now take the turkey out before it dries up.”

Adam pulls on the mitts—ridiculous, ruffled things with reindeer on them—opens the oven door with a flourish, and slides out the rack on which the turkey pan sits. The bird is greeted with noisy enthusiasm. Adam lifts the pan and stands with it while Aunty Mary clears a patch of counter space and the others shuffle aside. Then, from the archway, Rudy sees Zoë race toward the oven on hands and knees. He guesses what she’s going to do, but he’s a kitchen’s length away from her. His father is closest.

“Dad!” he shouts. “Get Zoë!”

Alec looks down, and as the baby’s arms stretch upward, her eyes fixed on the oven rack, he calls to her.

“Zoë! Don’t touch!”

Zoë’s hands grasp the rack, and the kitchen is shaken by her scream. She topples over and strikes her head on the linoleum. Rudy winces.

Susie cries, “Oh my God!” and shoves past Aunty Mary to get to her wailing daughter. She gathers Zoë in her arms and struggles to open the child’s clenched hands—calmly at first, but as Zoë’s screams become more and more desperate, she snaps. “Dada, what were you thinking? She can’t hear! She’s—Oh God, never mind. Mark! Do something, for God’s sake. Don’t just stand there!”

Mark flounders. Aunty says, “Butter” and goes to the fridge.

Rudy is staring at the far kitchen door, through which his father has just disappeared, silently, unnoticed by the others. Startled back by his aunt’s suggestion, he calls “No!” and heads for the sink. But his brother is way ahead of him. Throwing off the reindeer mitts, Adam crouches next to Susie with a bowl of water, into which he plunges the baby’s hands. Zoë’s screams taper off to sobs.

“Somebody get the bag of peas out of the freezer,” Adam says. “She’s getting a bump on her head.”

Mark gets the peas and drops to his daughter’s level, nudging Adam out of the way. Adam doesn’t seem to mind. He offers to search for some first aid spray in the bathroom.

“Thanks, Addy,” Susie calls after him. “And turn off the damn music, would you? It’s driving me crazy.”

Rudy steps aside to let his brother pass. Dad, he notices, hasn’t reappeared. He knows where he is, of course, and as the commotion in the kitchen dies down he goes there, ambivalently.

From the trophy room, a shaft of lamplight cuts across the dim hallway. The small room is the place that houses Alec Vantwest’s past—the cricket trophies and English literature classics from his days at Trinity College Kandy, the old black and white photos taken at Grandpa’s tea estate, even a wooden tea chest, once used to ship family belongings from Colombo to Montreal. A puzzling room, Rudy thinks, given his father’s aversion to the past, but on the other hand everything in the room is neatly shelved or framed, kept in its place, and it’s possible to imagine that this museum-like containment is a comfort. At the moment, Alec, curator of the trophy room’s artifacts, is sitting in the armchair next to the tea chest reading table, staring at the wall of photographs.

Rudy raises his hand to the half-open door then lowers it. He knows what will happen if he enters the trophy room with words of consolation. His father will rise from the chair and put a hand on his shoulder. He’ll say, “Thank you, son,” all the while looking not directly at Rudy but somewhere just off to the side, as if he were blind, or Rudy were invisible. Then he’ll pour himself a drink, maybe offer Rudy one as well, and go to the bookshelves, where he’ll examine the spines of his books with a show of great interest. And that will be that.

Seeing Aunty and Mark carrying dishes to the dining room, Rudy steps away from the door. He suspects it isn’t sympathy or understanding his father wants—not his, anyway—and with this in mind he returns sullenly to the kitchen to help with the food.

At Christmas lunch he sits next to Mark. Dad has appeared, thankfully, though he had to be called to the table three times. Zoë seems fine. Seated in her high chair, she clutches a wet cloth in her hands and sucks on it. The turkey has been carved, the curries uncovered. The dining room is so cramped and the food so plentiful that the windows of the china cabinet are steamed up. In the living room, Jim Reeves has been replaced by Andy Williams.

“We should have a toast,” says Aunty, last to take her place. “Who would like to do that? Adam?”

Adam nods and raises his glass of rosé. “I’d like to propose a toast to Aunty Mary, for carrying on the old traditions and for keeping our stomachs satisfied over the holidays. Merry Christmas!”

Rudy clinks his glass against Mark’s, while underneath the table his right heel taps and his left hand forms a tight, aimless fist.

“And God bless us all,” Aunty adds. “Now, eat, eat. The food will get cold.”

Rudy drinks down half his glass. As he piles his plate, conversations begin around the table and the useless tension in his arm gradually subsides. He glances at his father and clears his throat.

“So, Dad, I hear Australia’s set to wallop England in the test match.”

“What’s that? Oh, yes.”

“Are you gonna watch?”

“Mmm? No, no.”

“Do you think the English have had it in the cricketing world?”

“I suppose so.”

Rudy catches his aunt’s eye and shrugs. Aunty turns to her brother.

“Alec, you must tell me what you think of the beef. They didn’t have all the proper spices at the supermarket. No mustard seed, only the powder. And no green chilis.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, Mary.”

“Ah, but just fine isn’t good enough. Try it and tell me.”

“It’s delicious. Same as always.”

Suddenly, across the table from Rudy, Adam clinks his fork against his glass.

“I’d like to say something,” he announces, “so that we can all enjoy our lunch more.”

Turning to Dad, he continues. “About Zoë’s accident. Dada, it wasn’t your fault. I think you’re feeling badly about what happened, but no one is blaming you. You didn’t have time to grab her. It was an accident. Right, Susie?”

Susie nods. “Everything’s fine, Dada. Little ones fall and burn themselves all the time.”

Rudy watches his father uneasily. A public announcement isn’t what he’d have wanted. He would feel trapped. But Adam has never understood how to deal with Dad.

His expression unchanged, Alec swallows then sets his fork on his plate. “I appreciate your concern, Adam. But I think the root of the accident was that the child was left unsupervised. She should have been with Susie.”

At this, Susie’s eyes widen. “Dada, I can’t watch her every second! I was helping Aunty with dinner.”

“And besides,” Adam adds, “I was the one watching Zoë. Susie asked me to.”

Rudy stares into his plate, willing his brother to shut up.

“It’s just as I said,” Dad answers. “Zoë should have been with Susie.”

The reply—the particular emphasis on Susie—hangs over the table like the heavy clouds looming outside.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Adam says, his voice level.

Rudy shuts his eyes. If he had his brother’s nerve, he’d speak up. “You know exactly what it means,” he’d say. “You know precisely where this conversation is likely to end up, and you’re going there anyway.” Instead, he listens while Adam carries on.

“I don’t get it, Dad. Are you saying I’m not capable of looking after Zoë? It’s true I wasn’t right with her when the accident happened, but I was holding the turkey for Aunty. I don’t think it was any more my fault than it was yours.”

Here it comes, Rudy thinks. He looks at his father, whose face is now set in an expression of solemn concern.

“I take full responsibility for not intercepting the child sooner, and I apologize to Susie for that.” Dad nods in Susie’s direction. “But we are talking about a handicapped child who needs to be watched at all times, and I am simply suggesting that her mother—or her father—is a better person for that role than a boy who—”

“Alec!” Aunty Mary cuts him off. “Don’t spoil the lunch. You’re feeling upset about Zoë’s accident and you’re blaming everyone else. The thing is over now. Don’t think about it.”

“Who what?” Adam insists.

Rudy catches the faint sound of a skating needle. His father does-n’t answer. What could he say, really? That Zoë shouldn’t be left in the care of a young man who blows off a biology scholarship in order to take up history? That a young man who goes for long motorcycle rides with another young man shouldn’t be allowed to babysit? No. Observing the slight tremor in his father’s hands as he runs his fingers along the edge of the table, Rudy detects an uneasiness. Dad would rather call it quits, go back to small talk. But Adam doesn’t see this.

“What’s this really about, Dad? Is it about my babysitting abilities, or the rest of my life?” When Dad fails to answer, he presses stubbornly on. “I know you’re upset about my new plans, but I can’t change them. I know I made the right decision. Biology just wasn’t my thing. It’s not what I’m meant to do.” He pauses. “And if you’re talking about my sexual orientation, that’s not a choice. It’s like Zoë’s deafness.”

The word sexual sends Aunty Mary into a panic. “Adam! Such talk! You and your father are spoiling the lunch. Look—everyone has stopped eating.”

“What have your preferences to do with Zoë?” Dad finally says, frowning.

Adam turns to the high chair, where Zoë is sitting with one hand wrapped in the wet cloth, the other in her mouth. “Being deaf wasn’t a choice for her,” he says, shouts almost. “She was born that way. There’s nothing she or any doctor can do about it. And lots of people in the deaf community say it’s not even a real handicap anyway. It’s the same with me. Should I spend my life trying to change things I can’t change ... that I don’t even want to change?”

While Adam talks on, firing questions that Dad doesn’t answer, Rudy’s eyes dart to his sister. Her chin is puckered. Mark, plucking absently at his beard, doesn’t seem to notice. Certainly Adam doesn’t. If he did, he’d apologize, but he’s too wrapped up in his monologue. Under the table Rudy’s hand once again clenches against his thigh. Nothing has changed. Adam is still the bawling baby in the front seat. And just as it was on that car ride home from the cemetery, his voice is amplified by Dad’s brooding silence.

Finally, Aunty takes charge. “The food is getting cold,” she says. “Adam, you talk about these things later. It’s Christmas lunch and we’re here to enjoy our meal and be kind to each other, isn’t it.”

Adam looks around the table. At the sight of Susie wiping her eyes, he deflates. “Oh crap. I’m sorry. I got carried away. Sue, I didn’t mean to ...”

Susie smiles weakly. “It’s okay. Let’s just eat,” she says, and goes back to feeding Zoë.

Dutifully, Rudy takes a forkful of rice. At the head of the table, Dad reaches for a pappadam. He breaks off a piece and places it on his tongue like a Eucharistic host. “Excellent meal, Mary,” he says. “Just like the old days.” In his voice and posture there is a hint of resignation. The skin under his staring brown eyes is loose and tired.

LATE THAT NIGHT, Rudy finds his sister in the trophy room. The lights are out, and she’s sitting cross-legged in Dad’s chair.

“Are you okay?” he says from the doorway.

“Yeah. Fine. Just thinking.”

“About this afternoon?”

“Sort of.”

“Adam shouldn’t have gone on like that.”

Susie unfolds herself from her lotus position. “It’s okay. What he was saying made perfect sense.”

“Yeah, but ...”

“No, really, Rudy. I’m not upset about anything Adam said.” She comes into the hallway, where she lowers her voice. “He’s been having a rough time with Dada lately. Coming out and everything. He needs our support.”

Rudy nods. “It’s late. I’m gonna hit the couch. I’ll see you in the morning.”

When his sister has disappeared up the stairs, he goes into the trophy room with his diary and turns on the light. He examines the photographs on the wall. His favourite was taken long ago at the summit of Adam’s Peak. It’s a black and white portrait of two young men standing on either side of an ancient bell. One of the men is a tea taster from Grandpa’s estate. The other is Uncle Ernie. He leans in to get a better look at this uncle he has never met, the black sheep who left home and was rarely heard from again. He’s a handsome fellow, more European in appearance than Dad, though the family resemblance is evident. The square jaw has resurfaced in Adam, along with the cheeky smile.

“Maybe a few other things as well,” Rudy muses aloud. “Things that would have made you a real black sheep back then, eh, machan?”

Renée can’t understand that he could have an uncle living somewhere in the world—Sri Lanka probably, though not necessarily—and yet have no particular desire to meet the man. He isn’t entirely sure himself, but it seems to him just as logical to wonder why, apart from the indulgence of a mild curiosity, he would want to meet his uncle.

He sits in the armchair and opens his diary. Glancing out the trophy room window, he thinks of Clare Fraser. Though he can’t actually see the Fraser house from the trophy room, he imagines her at her window, watchful and quietly receptive, just as she was the first time he ever really noticed her, standing under a sprinkler on a deathly hot August day. The opportunity will never arise, he is certain, but if Clare—the solemn, watchful creature behind the glass—were to ask him about his family, he wouldn’t resent it. He would welcome her detached interest.

He dates the page and taps his pen. He writes “Hello, Clare” then pauses, considering the move he has just made. Strange ... silly even. But he carries on:

I’m sitting in my father’s trophy room, looking at the old photos. Uncle Ernie on Adam’s Peak, Susie’s first communion, Grandpa and his cook, the last family gathering on Grandpa’s tea estate before we left for Canada, etc. etc. It was on that visit that I first learned who Ernie was. And so much else, of course. I don’t remember most of the details, just the emotional extremes. How I started off bored and glum like everyone else and ended up ecstatically happy.

He stops writing. It seems he has opened a floodgate, or a vein. The release could fill an entire book, he suspects—all his frustration and guilt spilling onto pages previously devoted to straightforward records of dates and events. For the writing is suddenly different. He has a listener, an intercessor. A calm, detached presence to stand between him and all the confusion in his life. Pleased with the discovery but too tired to write any more, he closes his book, switches off the lamp, and gazes at the scattering of tiny snowflakes dancing outside the trophy room window.