The Figgs, page 20
“In a car accident,” June said quietly. “Several years ago.”
“Sorry, Dad,” Derek said. “I know you were looking forward to meeting him.”
“Thank you, Derek,” Randy said. “I’m sure he would have loved having a little brother.”
Derek reached across the table and gave his father’s shoulder a squeeze.
Randy sniffed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This was supposed to be for your mother.”
June scraped lemongrass off her chicken and mixed it in with her rice. “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Tom stirred his soup aggressively, causing it to spill over the bowl. “Where is Fergus?”
“I believe he’s in heaven,” Randy said.
“I meant physically,” Tom replied.
June spread a paper napkin across her lap. “He’s in Red Deer. That’s where he grew up.”
“He grew up in Red Deer?” Vanessa was nearly finished her meal.
“Fergus is actually his middle name,” Randy said. “His first name was Charles.”
The kids digested the information. The restaurant got busier. Parties of two, of five, of nine, were shown to tables and given tea.
“I have a brother named Charles,” Leslie said. She’d taken off her sweater and was wearing a cowl neck shirt that gathered in heaps at her collarbone.
“Does he live here in Calgary?” Randy asked.
She shook her head. “He works for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. In Newfoundland.”
Vanessa finished eating and filled a plastic tumbler with the remains of her can of Pepsi. “We should go visit him.”
“My brother?” Leslie asked.
“Fergus,” Vanessa said.
“Your father and I were planning a trip to the cemetery.” This was not true. Or at least she and Randy hadn’t discussed it, but it seemed logical, necessary.
“You’d want to come?” Randy said.
Vanessa shrugged so she didn’t appear too enthusiastic or thoughtful. “I guess,” she said. “He’s kind of our half-brother.”
“Oh, it would be wonderful.” Randy dropped his fork.
June worried he would cry. “We could have our road trip.” She hoped to inject some optimism into the conversation. It worked for Randy. He clasped his hands together in agreement. The kids, however, were less enthusiastic.
“I can’t go on a road trip,” Vanessa said. “Leslie and I are still house hunting.”
“And I need to work,” Derek said.
The table looked at Tom. “I can go to Red Deer,” he shrugged, “but it would have to be a day trip. I’d need to be back for work.”
Derek and Vanessa looked annoyed at Tom.
“Fine,” June said. “Not an overnight trip, just a day trip. We’ll go first thing in the morning, spend the day in Red Deer, and get back before Tom has to work.”
“But what about my work?” Derek said.
“It’s okay,” Leslie assured. “We can push the Arbour Lake job to Saturday if we need to.”
Derek wiped his face with a napkin and leaned back in his chair. “Okay,” he said. “Guess we’re going to Red Deer.” Randy looked poised to make another speech, but was distracted by a boy standing on a chair sucking on a towel at the next table. Hoards of people were pooling into the restaurant.
“We should go,” June suggested. “Give someone else our table.”
“That would be the right thing to do.” Randy took his slip to the front cash, while everyone else stood up and pushed their chairs in. June led the exodus through the narrow entryway and out onto the sidewalk to wait. Two Asian men were smoking and talking at a fast pace. June waved the smoke away and held her purse in front of her. Leslie’s phone rang. She walked past June and stood in front of a chiropractic office, which was closed and quiet. Vanessa joined her. June wondered what the deal was. She counted the orange vertebrae decals on the window. Leslie paced while she talked. Tom and Derek stood on her other side, both scrolling.
“We got it!” Leslie said.
“We got it?” Vanessa asked. Their arms were linked, hand to forearm, their faces a foot apart.
“It’s ours,” Leslie said.
Vanessa shrieked and jumped up and down. “You’re sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
Vanessa squealed again. One hundred percent. Those had been the words Derek used to assert his paternity. Vanessa turned to her mother. “They accepted our offer,” she said, beaming. “We got the house.” She ran her fingers through her hair and set a strand free into the wind. She was little-girl happy. Giddy and feminine. Leslie, too. They didn’t look like feminists or lawyers or lesbians. They looked like the girls at the mall who got good deals at Victoria’s Secret. They looked like Marissa.
“What’s going on?” Randy said, sticking his wallet back into his pocket. “What did I miss?”
“We got the house,” Vanessa said, more composed. “The condo by the Safeway. The one we wanted.”
“That’s wonderful!” Randy said. He walked over to Vanessa and Leslie and awkwardly hugged them together. “You see this, June? Happiness. Love. Love doesn’t discriminate between gay or straight. Adopted, or un-adopted.”
“I think you mean the condo owner doesn’t,” Tom said.
“We had the highest bid,” Leslie explained.
“Yes, but when we have love in our lives, it can overcome all sorts of things,” Randy mused.
“Like when you connect two unrelated events and make them seem related?” Derek asked.
June made eyes at her son.
“What?” he said.
June turned her attention to Leslie. “When do you close?’”
“June 1.”
“June 1?” Randy said. “That’s in a couple of weeks.”
June felt a pang of anxiety zip through her body like lightning. It was not how she imagined her daughter moving out. With a partner old enough to start worrying about bone density. How would they decorate? Did Vanessa even know how to pay bills or operate a vacuum? Would she know to lock the door at night? Shovel the front step? Leslie would. June was sure.
She climbed into the van and watched Leslie and Vanessa get into Leslie’s vehicle, where they shared a quick kiss. Curt, but sweet. She thought of the place in the mall that sold extravagant candy apples. Then Leslie’s hand wrapped around the gearshift, the muscles in her forearm engaged like she was about to operate a crane. She put the car in reverse and looked behind her to make sure the parking lot was clear. All the while, Vanessa smiled, long and hard like she had when she was little, feeding goats at the petting zoo, wrapping Christmas presents, rearranging her room. June watched until the car turned and all she saw was the back of Vanessa’s head.
Randy filled a Mason jar with water, cut the end off the pink carnation, and placed the flower inside. “That was a nice dinner,” he said, patting his stomach. “Would you like a cup of tea? To take out to the porch? The boys went to pick up more diapers. I thought I’d clean up a little.”
But June didn’t want tea. She had drunk four cups at the restaurant. She was thinking about Glenda. About Fergus the love child. About whether things would have been different if they’d been allowed to keep him. Would they still be lovers? Was she still long-haired and nearly blind? Would they be shopping around for condos in Phoenix like Birte and Earle? Would Fergus still be alive?
“Have you spoken with Glenda?” June immediately regretted asking because for the moment, Randy’s emotions were in check.
“Only briefly,” he replied. “Over email.”
She twirled the Mason jar and observed the tiny pink leaves, crimped and delicate yet hearty, like a cabbage. “Did she ever get to meet him?”
Randy shook his head. “She only found him a few years ago.”
“How?” June rested her elbows on the island.
“Through a patient that knew his parents.”
“But I thought the adoption was all closed and secret?”
“It was, sort of. Her name hadn’t been blacked out on one of the papers. A clerical error. His adoptive parents always knew her name.”
“Well, how did the patient know?”
“The patient was Fergus’s aunt. Laura Zacharellis’s sister.”
“How does that happen? What did she say? Hey, my tooth hurts. I’m your son’s aunt.”
Randy shrugged. “Something like that. I don’t know the details, but it was his aunt that sent Glenda the obituary.”
“Has she been to his grave?”
“Yes.” He went to the cupboard above the fridge and took out the Advil. “I have a terrible headache.”
“Why don’t you lie down for a bit?”
“No.” He opened a bottle of water. “If you don’t need me to tidy up or anything, I’m going to work on the table. I need to get it done if we’re going to Red Deer tomorrow.”
June was sorry she’d suggested the road trip so soon. She was exhausted, but then she remembered the email. I may be your daughter. I am the girl with the one blue hand. She pushed past Randy who was still trying to get the second Advil down. He’d almost finished the bottle of water but was gagging between sips. She braced herself on the handrail and thumped down the stairs, her legs heavy as wet towels, to the computer. Her normally sweat-slicked menopausal hair blew away from her face. She went to her email. Two new messages. A Groupon for laser hair removal and a message from Doris Nickerson. Doris Nickerson? Was this Doris Chaney? Was Doris Nickerson at some point Doris Chaney? She opened the message.
Dear June,
I prayed this day would come and now I can barely even type (my hands are shaking too much). So here goes. Let’s start from the beginning. (Your beginning, not mine — mine is actually quite boring). Your father and I were fifteen when we got pregnant. His name is Russell. His father worked for a commercial bakery and every Sunday he would give us a pound cake. Russell and I would walk down to the Bow River after church and have what we called our weekly “pound cake picnic.” Russell was a ginger. Freckles all up his arms, but he had blue eyes, which was rare (nowadays you see blue-eyed redheads all the time — they use coloured contacts).
June stopped reading. She wanted to slap the screen. Coloured contacts? Pound cake? Where were the pictures?
Russell and I liked each other quite a bit. We had a lot in common. We both had pet hamsters and we liked bike riding and building things out of snow. That’s where you were conceived — in a fort we carved out of a snowbank. It had three separate rooms and an old muffler for a smokestack. Anyway. We didn’t tell anyone for a long time about the pregnancy. As soon as we did, our parents said we couldn’t keep you. But that was our first plan. To have you. To keep you. To bring you along on our pound cake picnics, to take you on bike rides. To show you all the things you could make out of snow.
I never had any more kids because I had a hysterectomy when I was nineteen. Neither did Russell. We just have hamsters.
Doris (Mom)
We just have hamsters? Did that mean that Russell and Doris were still together? Had she found her mother and her father? Were the hamsters her half-siblings? She felt confused and intrigued. Her mom said nothing about enjoying the ukelele or tea. Her parents didn’t have kids or grandkids. How could they relate? And they liked snow. She hated the snow! Maybe because she was conceived in it. She was cold from conception. But she was wanted. They’d wanted to take her on picnics and bike rides. June hurriedly typed. Can you send a picture? Within a minute, a reply.
Scanner quit, but Russell went to Shoppers Drug Mart to put some pictures on a flash drive. I’ll email you as soon as he gets back.
She was there. Alive and on the other side of the screen. She’d just sent an email in real time. Real time, which felt false and stalled. Unbelievable, but true. Her other mother, sitting behind a computer monitor, petting her half-siblings while her father — her father! — was scanning pictures at Shoppers Drug Mart. She tried to imagine what they looked like. If she got her red hair from her father, then maybe Doris was blond. But maybe she was dark. Was she on a laptop in her kitchen? Did her kitchen have a nook? A toaster oven? A lazy Susan? Roosters?
“Randy!”
Randy came out of his workshop, looking worried. “Is everything okay?”
“I found her!”
“You’re yelling,” Randy said.
“I know!” June yelled as if she had to talk over a jet-propelled aircraft engine. “I can’t control it!”
He winced at her volume and knelt by her side. “Do you have a picture?”
She shook her head. “They have hamsters.”
“Who’s they?”
“My parents.”
“They’re together?
“Yes!” she laugh-cried. “Can you believe it? They like making things out of snow.”
“I don’t get it,” Randy said.
“I don’t really either,” she said. “But that’s what they like doing. I was conceived in the snow!”
“You hate the snow.”
“I know!” She wiped away tears. She exhaled and laughed, and then she thought of her real mother, who was alone with a seal in a home, and she wanted to hug her desperately. She wanted to apologize to her. She squeezed Randy.
“Where do they live?” Randy adjusted his glasses, which June had somehow managed to knock off.
“I don’t know, but they wanted me. They wanted to take me on a picnic.”
“They’re taking you on a picnic?” He looked bright and snapped his fingers. “I told the kids people still had picnics.”
“It’s true,” she said. “Well, they used to.”
Vanessa walked into the room. “If you think I’m going on a picnic tomorrow, you’re dead wrong.”
“No,” Randy said. “We’re not going on a picnic. Your mother just found her birth parents.”
“Her birth parents are going on a picnic?” Vanessa dropped the armload of laundry she was carrying. “Do you have a picture?”
“No!” June yelled, as though the plane was about to take off. “But he’s at Shoppers Drug Mart right now scanning pictures onto a flash drive. And my mom,” she pointed to the screen, “is sitting on the other side, right now, as we speak.”
She raised both of her arms in the air. She wanted high fives. No one knew what she was doing, so Randy and Vanessa stared.
“High fives,” she said. Randy raised his hands. She slapped them. “High fives!” She was hysterical. “I feel sick.”
“Why don’t you tell her about yourself?” Randy encouraged. “While you wait for the pictures.”
June faced the screen. “I do feel sick though. I don’t think I can type.”
Vanessa told her to move and took a seat in front of the computer. “What do you want to tell her?”
“Tell her about me.” Randy said.
Vanessa typed. I’m married and have three children. My husband’s name is Randy. I have two sons — Tom and Derek (Derek is the favourite) and a daughter, Vanessa. She’s a dyke. I also have a grandson, Jaxx.
“Vanessa!” June read back the words. “Don’t say dyke. And don’t say Derek is my favourite.”
“Tell her I’m romantic and build tables.” Randy was serious.
Derek came down with laundry in an empty Pampers box. He stepped over Vanessa’s discarded heap and made a beeline for the washer.
“Wait!” Vanessa called after him. “I was about to put in a load.”
“Sorry,” he said, jamming small things into the hole of the machine. “Jaxx shit all over everything.” He leaned against the washer as it filled with water and kicked the empty diaper box to the side. “Why are you all gathered around the computer?”
“Your mother found her birth parents. They have hamsters,” Randy said.
“Is there a picture?” Derek asked.
“That’s what we’re waiting for.” Vanessa straightened the keyboard. “Go get Tom.”
Derek sent Tom a text. Seconds later, June could hear Tom’s heavy feet mobilizing. He plunked down the stairs with a beer in his hand. “You found your birth parents?”
June took the beer out of his hands and drank the neck. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m thirsty. Vanessa is just sending them a message.”
Vanessa wrote: I’m married and have three children. My husband’s name is Randy. He is romantic and builds tables. He’s an optimist and is great at giving speeches. I have two sons — Tom and Derek, and a daughter, Vanessa. Tom runs his own cleaning company and likes older Asian women. Derek, the favourite, is a single dad. He used to work at a recycling depot. Vanessa recently bought her first home. In the fall, she’s going to art college. She is the most normal of the children.
“You’re the most normal?” Tom scoffed. “Vanessa’s a lesbian who tells inanimate objects to fuck off.”
“Tom likes elder porn,” Vanessa retorted.
“Don’t forget he has a foot fetish,” Derek added.
Vanessa typed. Tom likes elder porn and has a foot fetish.
“Stop it!” June said.
“I don’t have a foot fetish.”
“Write that I’m an amateur woodcarver and enjoy tennis,” Randy said.
June frowned. “When’s the last time you played tennis?”
“I said I enjoyed it. I didn’t say I played it.”
“Who’s your favourite player?” Derek asked.
“That British guy with the ears.”
“As opposed to the earless Swiss guy?” Vanessa said.
June interrupted. “Did you say you’re going to art college?”
“In September,” Vanessa said. “I got accepted last week.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” June opened her arms for a hug.
“That’s great, Vanessa,” Randy said. “Now tell them my macaroons are famous.”
“The baby’s awake.” Tom pointed at the ceiling. “I can hear him.”
Everyone strained to listen. “Fuck, I just put him down.” Derek rubbed his eyes.
“Maybe he’s still hungry,” June offered. “He’s probably having a growth spurt.” Derek sighed and took the stairs two, three at a time. He returned minutes later with Jaxx tucked in his elbow. The baby was wide awake and sucking his fingers like they were covered in butter.
