Until I Find You

together as therapy, and maybe it was. For that night, if not all the others that followed it, Bonnie held the button trick at bay.

25. Daughter Alice Goes Home

Alice and Leslie Oastler were perturbed with Jack for leaving Emma’s wake at St. Hilda’s without saying good-bye. A tough bunch of Old Girls—actually, Mrs. Oastler’s former classmates at the school—had invited Leslie and Alice out to dinner. Jack was expected to join them, or at least not run off with a woman in a wheelchair. (Given Jack’s older-woman reputation, his mother and Mrs. Oastler first thought that he’d absconded with Wheelchair Jane!)

No doubt the description of Jack’s emotional departure with Bonnie Hamilton was exaggerated by several eyewitnesses—that lip-biter Lucinda Fleming among them. Lucinda, probably in a silent rage, had observed Peewee folding Bonnie’s wheelchair and stowing it in the trunk of the limo. And while Alice and Leslie Oastler were wondering out loud what on earth Mrs. Malcolm and Jack had done with poor Mr. Malcolm, Penny Hamilton had a hissy fit in front of her own children—those darling little girls. “I knew it!” Penny cried, clawing at her pretty hair. “Jack Burns is fucking my crippled sister—that slut!”

Miss Wurtz, who’d managed to shed an uplifting light on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, now put a positive spin on Penny Hamilton’s announcement. “Thank goodness that’s been clarified!” Caroline told Alice and Mrs. Oastler.

“Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey was overheard murmuring, in faithful appreciation.

The Old Girls, to a one, were stunned silent. Only the boarders, those irrepressible seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, continued to carry on a conversation, which they conducted in a kind of shorthand— comprehensible only to them.

The Wurtz, in her ongoing effort to cheer up Alice and Mrs. Oastler, said: “Well, it would have been more predictable, but not nearly as much fun, if Jack had left as a woman instead of with one.”

Jack checked out of the hotel pretty early the next morning—if not as early as Bonnie Hamilton, who had a seven o’clock appointment in Rosedale. They told him at the front desk that there’d been about fifty calls for Jack Burns, and no small number of increasingly irritable requests for Billy Rainbow, but no one had known to ask for Jimmy Stronach. He and Bonnie hadn’t been disturbed.

Jack took a taxi to Forest Hill. He fully expected that his mother would still be asleep and that Mrs. Oastler would have been up for hours. Leslie surely would have made some coffee. He wasn’t wrong about the coffee.

Mrs. Oastler told him that his mom had left the house before seven—an unheard-of hour for Alice to be up, much less dressed and going anywhere. (No one wanted a tattoo the first thing in the morning.)

Leslie looked as if she’d just got up. She was wearing one of Emma’s old T-shirts, which fit her like a baggy dress; evidently she’d slept in it. The T-shirt almost touched her knees, the sleeves falling below her elbows. Jack followed her into the kitchen, where the coffee smelled fresh. There were no dishes in the sink, and not a crumb on the kitchen table; it didn’t look as if Alice had eaten any breakfast.

Mrs. Oastler sat down at the neat table, her hands trembling a little as she drank her coffee. Jack poured himself a cup and sat down beside her.

“I had a bet with your mom, Jack. I said you were gonna get gang-banged by that bunch of boarders. Alice thought you were gonna go home with that overenthusiastic woman with the big dog. Nobody bet on the crip.”

“Where did Mom go, Leslie?”

“Another MRI,” Mrs. Oastler said. “Imaging, they call it.”

“Imaging for what?”

“Come on, Jack. Have you talked to her lately? I don’t get the impression that you’ve talked at all.”

“I’ve tried,” he told her. “She won’t say anything to me.”

“You haven’t asked her the right questions, Jack.”

There was a white envelope on the kitchen table; it stood perfectly straight, propped between the salt and pepper shakers, as innocent-seeming as an invitation to a wedding. If it were something Alice had left for Jack, it would have had his name in big letters on it—it would have had her drawing of a monstrous heart, bursting with motherly love for him, or some other over-the-top illustration of undying affection. But the envelope was unmarked and unsealed.

“Has my mom been sick, Leslie?”

“Envelope? What envelope? I don’t see an envelope,” Mrs. Oastler said, looking right at it.

“What’s in the envelope?” he asked.

“Nothing you’re supposed to see, Jack. Surely nothing I would ever show you.”

Jack opened the envelope, which of course was what Leslie wanted him to do, and placed the four photographs face-up on the clean kitchen table—as if they were playing cards in a game of solitaire with formidably different rules.

The photos were slightly varying views of a young woman’s torso, from her pretty navel to her shoulders. She was naked; her breasts, which were fully formed, didn’t droop. Her breasts and the smoothness of her skin were what indicated her youthfulness to Jack, but he was drawn above all to her tattoo. It was a good one, of what his mom would have called the old school. It was a traditional maritime heart—torn vertically in two, all in tattoo- blue. The tattoo was all outline, no shading. The heart was tattooed on the upper, outer quadrant of the left breast, where it touched both the breast and the heart side of the rib cage. It was exactly where, in Alice’s opinion, a tattoo of a damaged heart could best be hidden—and binding this broken heart together, like a bandage, were the words Until I find you. The words were in cursive on a scroll.

The tattoo was good enough to be his mother’s work, but Jack knew Daughter Alice’s handwriting by heart; the writing wasn’t hers. More traditional—instead of the Until I find you—was the actual name of the lover who’d left you or deceived you, or otherwise broken your heart.

Jack could easily imagine he was looking at a Tattoo Ole or a Doc Forest or a Tattoo Peter—or possibly Sailor Jerry’s work, from Halifax, long ago. The photos looked old enough. But Jack should have been thinking about the young woman, not her tattoo.

“You’re looking at the wrong breast, Jack,” Leslie Oastler said. “I don’t know why Alice bothered to keep that tattoo a secret from you all these years. The tattoo isn’t what’s gonna kill her.”

That was when Jack realized he was looking at pictures of his mother’s breasts—in which case, the photographs must have been taken about twenty years ago. Contrary to her unique reputation as a tattoo artist, not to mention what she’d told him, his mom had been tattooed—probably when William broke her heart, or shortly thereafter; certainly when Jack had still been a child, or even before he’d been born.

Alice’s insistence on hiding her tattoo from Jack was something he’d mistaken for modesty, which had never made the greatest sense alongside the opposite impression he had of her. It wasn’t modesty—not wanting Jack to take a bath with her, never allowing him to see her naked. (And this had nothing to do with the alleged scar from her C-section.) It was the tattoo that Alice hadn’t wanted Jack to see—and not only because she was tattooed, which contradicted her claim to originality among tattoo artists. Mainly it was the tattoo itself that she’d needed to conceal. Because the you in Until I find you must have been his missing father—it was William she’d kept a secret, from the start! And to mark herself for life because of him belied the indifference she pretended to—abandoning her search for William and refusing to talk to Jack about him.

The two-inch scar on the upper, outer quadrant of Alice’s right, untattooed breast was a thin, surgical line with no visible stitch-marks.

“She had the lumpectomy when she was thirty-one,” Mrs. Oastler informed Jack. “You were twelve—in grade seven, if I remember correctly.”

“I was at Redding,” he remembered out loud. “It was when Mom said she was going to come see me, but