Until I Find You

brain the tumor is. You should send me the MRI.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He noticed he was crying.

“If it’s in her visual cortex, she’ll go blind. If it’s in the speech cortex—well, you get the picture. If the cancer eats through a blood vessel, she will hemorrhage and die without ever knowing or feeling what has happened to her. Or, as her brain swells, she will simply slip away.”

“Will she be in a coma?” he asked.

“She could be, Jack. She could die peacefully in a coma—she could simply stop breathing. But along the way, she might think she was someone else. She might have hallucinations—she might smell strange, nonexistent smells. Truly anything is possible. She will go fairly quickly and painlessly, but she may not know who she is when she goes. The hard part for you, Jack, is that you may not know who she is, either.”

The hard part for Jack, as he would tell Maureen, was that he’d never known who his mother was. The description of her ultimate death seemed almost familiar.

“Do you mind if I call you Dr. Yap?” Jack asked Maureen, when they were saying good-bye.

“Not if you call me incessantly,” she said.

He wouldn’t, of course; Maureen knew that. When Jack sent her his mom’s MRI, he already had a pretty good idea of where the tumor was—the so-called space-occupying lesion. Alice knew, too. Dr. Yap’s interpretation of the MRI would merely confirm the prognosis. The tumor was in the limbic system—the emotional center of the brain.

“Well, isn’t that fucking great!” Leslie Oastler would say. “I suppose that Alice will think the whole thing is terribly funny, or she’ll be laughing one minute and crying the next—an emotional yo-yo, either telling grossly inappropriate jokes or drowning in some inexpressible sorrow!”

Of course, from Jack’s point of view, his mom had always been that way; that a malignant tumor now occupied the emotional center of her brain seemed unremarkable, even normal.

“If it’s gone this far, Jack,” Maureen Yap had forewarned him, “I’m sure that your mother has already come to terms with dying. Just imagine how much she’s thought about it. She even decided, somewhere along the line, not to tell you. That means to me that she’s thought about it a lot—enough to have the peace of mind to keep it to herself. It’s Mrs. Oastler who can’t come to terms with it. And you—you won’t have time to come to terms with it until she’s gone. It’ll happen that fast, Jack.”

“She’s only fifty-one!” he’d cried against her thirteen-year-old’s breasts, her child-size body.

“Cancer likes you when you’re young, Jack,” Maureen had told him. “Even cancer slows down when you’re old.”

There was no slowing down Alice’s cancer; it would run away with her in a hurry, befitting a disease that had a twenty-year head start. Later that same morning—after he’d said good-bye to Dr. Yap—Jack got himself down to Queen Street and once more entered the tattoo world of Daughter Alice, where he and his mother had a little talk. (A little dance would more accurately describe it.)

“Do you still take your tea with honey, dear?” his mom asked him, when he walked into the shop. “I just made a fresh pot.”

“No honey, Mom. We have to talk.”

“My, aren’t we serious this morning!” his mother said. “I suppose Leslie spilled the beans in her dramatic fashion. You’d think she was the one who’s dying—she’s so angry about it!”

Jack didn’t say anything; he just let her talk, knowing she might clam up at any moment. “Of course Leslie has a right to be angry,” Alice went on. “After all, I’m leaving her—and I promised her I never would. She let me go to all those tattoo conventions, where there’s a lot of fooling around. But I always came back.”

“I guess you’re leaving me, too,” Jack said. “When were you planning to tell me?”

“The only person I ever wanted to agonize over me was your father, Jack, and he simply refused. He didn’t want me—even knowing that, if he rejected me, I would never let him be with you.”

Perhaps it was being with Maureen Yap that made Jack wonder if he’d misheard what his mother had said, but he could tell by the way she suddenly gave his cup of tea her complete attention that she might have said a little more than she’d meant to say.

“He wanted to be with me?” Jack asked her.

“I’m the one who’s dying, dear. Don’t you think you should ask me about me?”

He watched her put a heaping teaspoon of honey in his tea; her hands, like Mrs. Oastler’s at the kitchen table, were shaking slightly as she stirred the spoon in the cup.

Jack knew that he’d not misheard her. She’d clearly said that William didn’t want her—even knowing that, if he rejected her, she would never let him be with Jack. When his mom handed him his cup of tea—looking, for all the world, as if she were still the wronged party—Jack imagined there would be no stopping him this time, no turning him away.

“If my dad wanted to be with me,” Jack persisted, “why did he flee from us? I mean everywhere we went. In city after city, why had he always left before we arrived?”

“The cancer is in my brain—I suppose you know,” his mother replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my memory is affected, dear.”

“Let’s start with Halifax,” Jack continued. “Did he leave Halifax before you got there? If he was still there when you arrived, he must have wanted to see me be born.”

“He was still there when I arrived,” Alice admitted, with her back turned to Jack. “I wouldn’t let him see you be born.”

“So he wasn’t exactly running away from you,” Jack said.

“Did Leslie tell you about my mood changes?” his mom asked. “They’re not always logical, or what you would expect.”

“I’m guessing it’s bullshit that I was a Cesarean birth,” Jack told her. “The scar from your C-section wasn’t why you wouldn’t let me see you naked. There was something else you didn’t want me to see. Isn’t that right?”

“Leslie showed you the photographs—that bitch!” Alice said. “You weren’t supposed to see them until after I was gone!”

“Why show me at all?” he asked.

“I was beautiful once!” his mother cried. (She meant her breasts, when she was younger—he’d meant her tattoo.)

“I’ve been thinking about it—I mean your tattoo,” Jack told her. “I’ll bet it’s a Tattoo Ole, from Copenhagen. You had it almost from the start.”

“Well, of course it’s a Tattoo Ole, Jack. Ole preferred only outlining, and I wasn’t about to shade myself.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t let the Ladies’ Man shade you,” he said.

“I wouldn’t let Lars touch me, Jack—not even shading. I wouldn’t have shown Ladies’ Man Madsen my breasts!”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Mom. Let’s talk about Toronto before we talk about Copenhagen. When we got to Toronto, had my dad already left?”

“He got a girl at St. Hilda’s in trouble, Jack—he had another girlfriend at the school, and for all I know an affair with one or more of the teachers, too!”

“Mom, I know about the girls.”

“He was with other women in Halifax!” she blurted out.

“Mom, you told me. I know he left you. But I never knew he wanted to see me.”

“I couldn’t stop him from seeing you, could I?” she asked. “When you were out in public, I couldn’t prevent him from getting a look at you. But if he wasn’t going to be with me, why should I have let him be with you?”

“So that I would have a father?”

“Who knows what sort of father he would have been, Jack? With a man like that, you can never be sure.”