an apartment here until my course work is done. As soon as this academic year is over, I’ll be moving home.”
I could hardly wait for the school year to end. Once my oral exams were over, I would be free to research and write my thesis, and I could do that in my own study in my own house. When I had first come to the city, I’d rented a tiny bachelor apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of a highrise, in a development in the suburbs near York University. The windows wouldn’t open and the elevator always stopped at every single floor going up or down, although no one seemed to be waiting for it. The walk to classes along Keele Street past strip plazas and car dealerships was a misery of slush, biting winds, and exhaust fumes. Living downtown meant I had a long transit ride out to campus, but I was close to the Robarts Library for my research. Everything I needed was within walking distance: Kensington Market for food, Chinatown for inexpensive but interesting meals out, bookstores, movie theatres, the University of Toronto campus with its sports complex and myriad cultural activities. Sometimes, I felt like an undergraduate again, twenty years old and carefree; and, far too often, lonely.
I missed my dog, Sadie, and our walks along the river close to our house. I missed Will. Our time together was always too short, a fever of talk and love-making. There was always so much to do: work on the house, work on my courses, seeing friends, shopping and laundry. I looked back almost with nostalgia on those long, slow days of underemployment, when I worked part-time at a bookstore. It was easy to forget how bored I’d been then.
Gianelli looked down at his notebook. “This street’s not exactly in your neighbourhood,” he said. “Are you visiting someone around here?” He managed to make his question sound suggestive.
“I was on my way to my aunt’s. She’d invited me to tea.”
“And she lives?”
“Right behind you.”
He swivelled and stared at the little house as if he’d never seen it before. The animal control officers slammed the van door on the final load of cats. They waved to Gianelli before driving away. He grimaced.
“Who’s this?” It was the man who had ribbed Gianelli about the cat scratch. He was younger than either of us, a black giant in a rumpled blue suit. His shoulders strained at the polyester fabric. From the way he balanced on the balls of his feet, I could tell he was one of those guys who worked on his muscles at a gym. A cop with a “Terminator” complex: what a cliché. His body was taut and sculptured now, but I shuddered inwardly to think how he would appear in thirty years when age took its revenge.
“Detective Wilson,” he shook my hand in a vise grip.
“You’re partners?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he laughed. “We work out of the same division. Happened to be on our way to lunch when the call came in and he wanted to check it out. I’d leave it up to the constables, but … my friend here is looking for a Big Case, get his name in the papers. Hey, Gianelli, you started frothing yet?”
“Lay off,” Gianelli growled. “This is a relative.”
“Of the old lady?” Wilson’s smile hardened. “How could you let her live like that? Die like that? You been to see her lately? Like in the last decade or so? You should be ashamed.”
“I’ve never even met her. I didn’t even know I had an aunt until she wrote me.”
“You got the letter with you?” Gianelli ignored the younger man and held out his hand to me.
I handed him the envelope. He compared the address on it with the one I’d given him and eased the letter out with care. He held it at arm’s length, squinting as he read the short message. He should have been wearing the bifocals I glimpsed in his breast pocket.
Wilson grabbed the letter away from him. “Can’t you read any faster? Where’re your glasses? Dear Mrs. Cairns — that’s you, I presume?”
I nodded. Gianelli pulled a silver cigarette case out from an inside pocket. He tapped it open and offered it to me. I shook my head. He chose a filter tip and made a show of lighting it with a gold lighter. The sun winked on the diamond in his pinky ring. He was exceedingly well dressed for duty.
Wilson continued to read: “I understand that you are the only daughter of my nephew, George Cook. It would please an old woman greatly if you were to forgive the neglect of the past, and come to visit me for tea next Wednesday, at three p.m., at the address above. You may find it in your interest to attend. I look forward to meeting you. I am, your dear Aunt, Beatrice Baker. Will you listen to that? Talk about formal.”
“What’s this about past neglect?” Gianelli demanded.
“I told you I never met her. My father left when I was just a baby, and my mother never talked about his family. I just assumed he hadn’t any, but was an only child like me. Only child of an only child — it was something special we shared. That I thought we shared.”
“You think she was going to give you something? Take you back in the bosom of the family?”
“I didn’t want anything from her. I wasn’t going to come at all at first, but I was curious. I might have cousins. She might have pictures of my father and my grandparents.” I blinked away sudden tears. “I just wanted to meet her. To see where I came from. Is that so hard to understand?”
Wilson folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. He hesitated before handing it back to me. I put it in my bag — so much for family.
“You were pretty cosy with that old fellow with the dog,” Gianelli said. “You been around already? Checking out the place maybe?”
“I’d never seen him before today. He just wanted to talk to someone. You know how old people like to talk.”
“Yeah.” He blew a long stream of thin smoke, a dragon tired of chewing up the little folk. “You’re not planning on leaving town, are you?”
“Give her a break, Joe,” Wilson smiled at me. “We may want to talk to you again — after we speak to Mrs. Baker’s lawyer.”
“Could I look inside?” I asked. I didn’t want to have come all this way for nothing. It was not just the time wasted on the long subway and streetcar rides, but the whole journey I’d gone through in the week since receiving the letter. I had struggled with the memories of my mother and the painful hate she had insisted on in every discussion of my father and his family. “They’ll never get their hands on you,” she would say. “They’re rotten, every last one of them.”
“Who?” I’d ask, when I still asked her questions about them. “Do I have an Oma and Opa like Annie does?” Annie was my best friend, daughter of the large and boisterous family who shared our duplex. There were constant streams of relatives coming and going downstairs. I was informally adopted into the tribe, but there were days when I was left behind: when the families gathered for a wedding or a christening at some uncle’s distant house. There wasn’t room in any of their cars then for me. My mother refused to talk about my father or any of the Cooks. “They’re dead to us,” she said, when I pressed her too hard with my queries. “They never wanted either of us when you were born. We don’t need them. We’ve got each other and that’s all we’ll ever want.” And that was all she’d say.
I sighed, and shook off the memories. I’d decided at long last to come here, and I had come too late.
Gianelli
