Last Night In Twisted River

“Well, I don’t know,” Dominic said. “I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week-she might have been a stripper, for all I know. She had a stripper’s name.”

“Like what?” Danny had asked his dad.

“‘Lady Sky,’” the cook had said. “Sounds like a stripper to me.”

“I think her real name is Amy,” Danny said; he tried to remain calm.

“You know her?”

“I know only one Lady Sky.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel-I just assumed she was a wacko.”

“What did she say, Pop-do you remember?”

Naturally, the cook couldn’t remember all the details-just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She’d written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she’d said she was no longer flying, as if she’d once been able to fly.

“Did she want me to write her back?” Danny asked his dad. “Do you remember where her letter was from?”

“Well, I’m sure there was a return address-they all want you to write them back!” the cook cried.

“It’s okay, Pop-I’m not blaming you,” Danny said. “Maybe she’ll write again.” (He didn’t really think so, and his heart was aching.)

“I had no idea you wanted to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel,” the cook said.

Something must have happened to Amy; Danny wondered what it could have been. You don’t jump naked out of airplanes for no reason, the writer thought.

“I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel.” With that, the cook paused. “She said she had lost a child, too,” Dominic told his son. “I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them.”

“Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad,” Danny said.

After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Danny received a few more letters from his fans who’d lost children, but he’d been unable to answer a single one of those letters. There were no words to say to those people. Danny knew, since he was one of them. He would wonder how Amy had managed it; in his new life, without Joe, Danny didn’t think it would be all that hard to jump naked out of an airplane.

IN DANNY ANGEL’S WRITING ROOM, on the third floor of the house on Cluny Drive, there was a skylight in addition to the window with the view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store. This had once been Joe’s bedroom, and it occupied the entire third floor and had its own bathroom, with a shower but not a tub. The shower was adequate for a college kid like Joe, but the cook had questioned the extravagant size of the bedroom-not to mention the premier view. Wasn’t this wasted on a young man attending school in the States? (Joe would never get to spend much time in Toronto.)

But Danny had argued that he wanted Joe to have the best bedroom, because maybe then his son would be more inclined to come to Canada. The room’s isolation on the third floor also made it the most private bedroom in the house, and-for safety’s sake-no third-floor bedroom should be without a fire escape, so Danny had built one. The room, therefore, had a private entrance. When Joe died, and Danny converted the boy’s bedroom into a writing room, the novelist left his son’s things as they were; only the bed had been removed.

Joe’s clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers-even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He’d kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Danny had long been in the habit of finding his son’s double-knotted shoes and untying the laces for him. It was a few months, or more, after Joe died before Danny had untied the last of Joe’s shoelaces.

What with Joe’s wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual shrine to the dead boy. In the cook’s mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic’s would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there-apparently, that was what Danny wanted.

When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy’s kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them-or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook’s bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel’s bedroom-hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.

That guest room and its bathroom had recently been spruced up-in readiness for Ketchum’s expected arrival, the woodsman’s now-annual Christmas visit-and because the bedroom door was open, both Danny and his dad couldn’t help but notice that the cleaning woman had prominently placed a vase of fresh flowers atop the guest room’s dresser. The bouquet was reflected in the dresser’s mirror, making it appear, from the second-floor hall, as two vases of flowers. (Not that Ketchum would have noticed or acknowledged a dozen vases of flowers in his room, the writer thought.)

Danny guessed that the cleaning woman probably had a crush on Ketchum, though the cook claimed that Lupita must have pitied the logger for how old he was. The flowers were in anticipation of how near death Ketchum was, Dominic absurdly said-“the way people put flowers on a grave.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Danny told his dad.

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied-not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Danny Angel’s other writer friends, both from Europe and the United States, often came to visit. Armando and Mary DeSimone were visitors to the city at least twice a year, and they always stayed with Danny and his dad.

Many of Danny’s foreign publishers had slept in that guest room, which reflected the author’s international reputation; the majority of the books in the room were translations of Danny Angel’s novels. Hanging in that guest bedroom, too, was a framed poster of the French edition of Baby in the Road-Bebe dans la rue. (In the connecting bathroom, there was an oversize poster of the German translation of that same novel-Baby auf der Strasse.) Yet, in the mind of the Mexican cleaning woman, only Ketchum merited flowers.

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny’s third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he’d come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called “the Mexican marvel.” They’d had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who’d lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She’d told the cook that she was worried about how Danny was doing, but to Danny she would only say: “Your boy is in Heaven-higher up than the third floor, Senor Angel.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Lupita,” Danny had replied.

“?Enfermo?” Lupita was always inquiring-not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny never failed to answer her. “Yo solo soy un escritor.” (“I am merely a writer”-as if that explained how miserable he must have looked to her.)

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn’t speak of it to Danny, but she’d told the cook. There were no details, and there was scant mention of the child’s father, a Canadian. If Lupita had ever had a husband, she’d also lost him. Danny didn’t think there were many Mexicans in Toronto, but probably more would be coming soon.

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Danny and his dad guessed that she was somewhere between their ages, in her sixties, and while she wasn’t a big woman, she was heavy-