When I asked about his crimes, she sighed.
“God, it’s hard to admit to myself that I was so stupid.”
“You were young,” I said. “Besides, it wasn’t what you signed on for.”
“No, it wasn’t. But it’s still hard to accept.”
I asked for details of his drug dealing: the rifles and speed, the laboratory.
“Well, he had some guns, but I never saw them. He kept everything from me. And he didn’t have a laboratory. Maybe that’s what he called it, but it was more like a kitchen. He cooked some stuff on a hot plate. It was definitely a kitchen, nothing fancy at all.”
Her pregnancies were among the happiest times of her life. He’d stopped doing crime, and she loved how her body thrived. Other women she knew complained, but she found it easy, feeling alive and calm, and she believed he’d turn his life around.
“He was extremely intelligent. It was amazing sometimes to hear his ideas. And as soon as he got into business, he was successful. Within five or six years, he had several seafood stores in and around Vancouver. He had a knack for business, and as far as I knew, everything was legal. I kept his books for him, and I saw what he was buying and selling. If there was anything else going on, he did a good job of hiding it.
“I suppose,” she said—“I suppose when I left him I’d finally accepted that he’d never change. He’d never be satisfied. But he was so charismatic and convincing. Most of our friends criticized me for leaving. Nobody could imagine that he was doing anything wrong. That’s why I stayed with him so long. All those years I thought he’d become a better, kinder person, because that’s how he seemed. But it was as if he had to destroy everything, as if some part of him had to make his life as bad as it could possibly be so that he could have something to fight. And even then he managed to look good to others. I don’t know how he did it.”
“I want to find his family,” I told her. “Did you ever meet them?”
“No. I talked on the phone with his sister once, but we barely understood each other since I hardly spoke French and she had almost no English.”
“Why did he stop talking to his family?”
“He told me French families were invasive, that they’d be visiting all the time. That was the reason he gave.” She hesitated. “After we met, we drove cross-country. We went through Quebec, right past where he grew up, along the Saint Lawrence River. He kept saying how backward it was. We stopped and ate at one of the fry stands they had along the road.
“He called his parents from about fifty miles away. He told them he was in Vancouver. That night we drove through the town where his family lived and didn’t stop.”
✴
MY FATHER DIED in a house empty but for a single chair. The property was heavily wooded, on the outskirts of Vancouver, and a blanket of pine needles covered his car, which was soon repossessed. I never saw any of this. I gathered details from a friend of his and the police.
That spring, a public accountant in British Columbia called to explain that my father had owed tens of thousands in back taxes and the government would confiscate and auction what they could, which wasn’t much—two wristwatches. A month later I received the rest, a small box of photographs with Air Mail, Par Avion stickers on it, the customs slip stating No Value. Inside were pictures held by blue rubber bands: photographs of our family and of himself. These were all he had while he sat in the single chair in his house, telling me his stories.
My favorites were those of him, the flash of superiority in his eyes, his bold stance before the camera. One showed him young, leaning on the tailgate of an old pickup, heel cocked against the hitch, his lean brown body taut as he laughed. Another had him holding a baby. His arms bulged and the baby cried. Behind him, a German shepherd gazed out the window, its dark nose invisible against the black glass. And then, years later, he posed before a decorated Christmas tree, his beard shaved to a mustache, his face lined. He wore a gray sports jacket and a white shirt. His jaw was lifted with Old World pride, a look that said to the photographer, This is the shot you want.
That year and the next, silence hummed within me. I burned my old writing, all except the notes from our conversations. I wanted stillness, lightness—as if by losing everything, I could, if only briefly, feel complete. I wrote and studied, trying to compose him in a novel. In my need to write, I recognized his longing to speak—the urgency of his telling, to make us understand each other and bring us to a place of forgiveness. I wanted to know what in him had been capable of leading his life, just as he’d been trying to make sense of the life he’d lived, and the simpler one he’d wanted but been incapable of. The more I wrote, the more I became clear—my words, my way of telling a story—and the further he receded. He eluded me—the landscape of his youth, the people who’d helped create him.
Gradually, after two and a half years, the silence subsided. I began to read in French often and dreamed in it as I had years before. Memories returned, forgotten emotions in the sounds, the language and culture I’d taken for granted. I’d say foulard and within the word was a flash of cold and the bliss of a parent who knelt to tie my scarf and fit it into my jacket. It didn’t seem like him, but as I read, the sound of words remembered for me: my grammar book with
