Adam's Peak Read online

  Rudy is at the kitchen table with the rest of the “children,” browsing an old issue of the Gazette while his aunt makes Christmas lunch and his father listens to the Jim Reeves Christmas album in the living room—right hand anchored to his drink, left hand lazily tapping the arm-rest of his chair, more in time with his own thoughts, it seems, than with the music. Bundled up in her multiple cardigans, chopping away, Aunty tells stories of the old days on the tea estate. Adam’s the only one paying any attention. He listens as a curious outsider would, tilting his head and widening his eyes, as if it were all fabulously exotic—as if peraheras and kavichchis and Peria Dorays were from a different planet. It’s vaguely embarrassing, Rudy thinks, the way his brother fawns over things that should be ordinary to him. But then Adam has never been home; he’s different from the rest of them.

  “So, Aunty,” he says, rocking back on two legs of his chair, hands clasped behind his head, “were there any problems between the Tamils and the Sinhalese back in those days?”

  In the living room Dad coughs. Aunty keeps on chopping.

  “Ah, not like they have now,” she says. “Things were more peaceful then.” She brushes loose strands of hair away from her face with the wrist of her chopping hand. “People got along better, isn’t it.”

  Adam frowns. “Well, they made it look like they did. But I can totally understand why they got fed up—the Sinhalese and the Tamils. I mean, I’d wanna start fighting too if I had second-rate status in my own country. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Ah, maybe,” Aunty says, without conviction.

  Dad coughs again. Rudy and Susie exchange a glance, then Susie retreats to the heavy manual she has brought with her from Toronto: An Introduction to American Sign Language. As far as Rudy is concerned, Sri Lanka’s problems aren’t real. Real is another frozen Christmas with crappy gifts and too much food. It’s Adam’s larger-than-life presence. It’s Susie and her husband finding out their tiny blue-eyed, black-haired kid is severely hearing impaired.

  Watching his sister move her hands like pieces of newly acquired anatomy, Rudy senses a familiar impotence—a powerful but hopeless desire to be helpful, to be significant in some way. He remembers an afternoon, ages ago, in Aunty Mary’s garden, when Susie leaned too far over the edge of the well and got stuck. For several long seconds, she teetered perilously atop the narrow stone wall, screaming, feet kicking in the air, before Rudy got to her and yanked her back down by the hem of her skirt. In his mind, he’d saved his sister’s life, and for a brief, triumphant time he was her hero and protector. But he doubts Susie even remembers the incident. And in any case, it’s no longer Rudy she calls for in her moments of crisis, but Adam.

  Adam’s interest in Sri Lankan politics seems to have fizzled. Whistling along with Jim Reeves, he slides his chair away from the table and slips into the living room, where he drops to the floor in front of Zoë, who’s playing with a pile of National Geographic magazines.

  “Whatcha got there?” he says, signing “Zoë,” along with something Rudy doesn’t recognize.

  Zoë looks up and slaps the magazine on the floor in front of her. Adam blows a wave of hair out of his eyes.

  “Cool picture,” he says. “That’s a woolly mammoth. It’s like an elephant, only it’s bigger and hairier. And those things coming out of its mouth are tusks.” He exaggerates the signs for “big” and “hairy” and fingerspells “tusks.” He starts to read from the magazine—“‘The woolly mammoth ranged over North America, Asia, and Europe during the Pleistocene. It was—’” then interrupts himself. “Hey, Zoë, can you imagine if they used one of these things instead of a regular elephant in the Kandy Perahera? Wouldn’t that be crazy?”

  Rudy hears his father clear his throat, and his own body tenses.

  “What are you expecting her to understand from all this?” Dad says, his voice deceptively mild. “Point to the picture and say ‘elephant.’”

  At the kitchen table Susie’s eyes again catch Rudy’s. Their father is the one member of the family who won’t sign.

  “I don’t want her to learn anything from this,” Adam says. “I just want her to know I’m interested in what she’s looking at.”

  Dad doesn’t answer. For a moment the only voice in the house is that of Jim Reeves, crooning the final verse of “Blue Christmas,” his velvet melody pocked with record crackles that have become part of the music itself. Then Zoë laughs as Adam swoops her up off the floor and steers her like an airplane, through the kitchen and down the hallway, past the trophy room and the dining room, across the entrance hall, and back into the living room, where he deposits her with a fading whistle next to the pile of toys beneath the Christmas tree.

  “Now, let’s see what we have to play with here,” he says. “Stuffed doll ... stuffed dog ... stuffed platypus ...” One by one, the toys fly over his shoulder. “Hey! Giant Lego! I believe this is from your Uncle Rudy. Hey, Uncle Rudy, wanna play Lego with me and Zoë?”

  Rudy shakes out his paper and turns to a new page. His brother’s invitation strikes him as a challenge.

  “Uh, no thanks. You two go ahead.”

  He detects the shadow of disappointment that crosses Adam’s face, and briefly he regrets his answer. But his regret muddles with irritation, and as Adam dumps the tub of Lego out on the floor, Rudy stares hard at the page before him, unable to make himself concentrate. He decides to go out.

  Beside him Susie closes her book and begins straightening the clutter on the table.

  “Mark and I are going to have a rest upstairs,” she says. “Adam, would you mind watching Zoë?”

  Outside, Rudy walks as far as the end of the driveway and leans back against the juniper tree stationed like a sentry at the corner of the lawn. The sky is low and grey; the air has that particular about-to-snow sharpness to it. He buries his hands in his pockets and inhales the cold. He doesn’t really plan to walk any farther.

  Stretching out to his left and right, Morgan Hill Road—chemin de la Côte Morgan, officially—is perfectly straight and, despite the name, flat. The snow on its front yards is still untrampled after the latest fall. Its houses, from the bricks of their living room levels to the aluminum siding strips of their bedroom levels, are ordered and straight. Most of them have their Christmas lights on, and these strings of lights, too, conform to the right-angle geometry of the street.

  Rudy looks back at his father’s sagging lights, the exception on the block. Complementing the red shutters and door, the bulbs are green and red, but the wires hang in loose arcs along the eaves and under the windows. “Like the lights at the Kandy Perahera,” Adam apparently said when he put them up. Dad said they looked sloppy and apologized for them when Rudy and the others came home. “Kandy Perahera!” he huffed, shaking his head. “The boy has never even seen a perahera. The neighbours must think we’re completely ignorant.”

  Rudy turns back to the street. “You should have been born in the old country, machan,” he muses to his absent brother.

  Rudy himself is tired of being Sri Lankan. Or, rather, of being only Sri Lankan—especially to women. His relationships follow a pattern as regular as the lines and angles of Morgan Hill Road. Currently it’s Renée, who took the initiative and asked him out. At first, she found him exotic (that word he has grown to despise) and therefore incapable of being boring. And he, in the interest of boosting his desirability, became in her presence someone not quite himself, peppering his descriptions of “home” with tropical flavours and smells, using Sinhala words whose meanings had escaped him, admiring the contrast in their skin tones when they made love. It worked, for a while. Then Renée asked about his name, and on discovering he was neither Sinhalese nor Tamil, but a hybrid with European ancestors, began to find entirely ordinary faults in him. Soon, he’s sure, they’ll break up, and once again he’ll vow not to take part in this embarrassing routine.

  As if to assert his Canadianness, he crouches and scoops up some snow with his bare hands. It doesn’t pack very well, bu
t he manages to form a lumpy little ball, which he fires across the street at the Frasers’ Oldsmobile. He crouches to scoop up more snow, but as he does so the Frasers’ front door opens and Mrs. Fraser and her daughter come out. For an instant, Rudy worries they’re going to bawl him out for hucking snowballs at their car, the way Mr. Fraser once did. But Mrs. Fraser and her daughter seem oblivious to his presence. Mr. Fraser himself—odd, sullen guy—is no longer around to care. Apparently his heart gave out on him in the summer.

  Rudy straightens up slowly and leans back into the juniper, grateful that his jacket isn’t far off the green of the bush. To step out into the street would probably call for a greeting—something he’d rather not bother with—so he stays where he is, waiting for the two women to get into the car and drive off. Curiously, though, they stay where they are, hovering by the front door, as if trying to decide where to go or what to do. Mrs. Fraser, in a fur-trimmed coat, is cradling something in one arm, gesturing toward the middle of the lawn with the other. Her daughter, Clare, looks frozen in a turtleneck and jeans. Her arms are folded across her middle and her head is bowed, long hair hiding her face.

  Rudy hasn’t seen Clare Fraser in years. In his time away from Morgan Hill Road, he’s forgotten her, and only now, watching her like this, does he recall with an unexpected wave of nostalgia that she used to be a fixture in his life. He never spoke to her; they weren’t friends. But she was regularly there, the girl across the street, about his age, a presence he could count on.

  His mind begins to drift, until Clare and her mother walk out to the driveway. Rudy presses his body farther into the juniper. The Christmassy smell fills his nostrils. “Come on, you two,” he mutters. “I feel like an idiot here. Get in the car.” Cupping his hands around his mouth and nose, he prepares to slip around the bush and back to the house. But then the scene across the street changes.

  The two women march through the fresh snow to the pine tree in the middle of the lawn. Mrs. Fraser circles the tree, examining its branches, while Clare stares at the ground. Rudy squints at the thing cradled in Mrs. Fraser’s arm, craning his neck to get a better view. It’s a container of some kind, he guesses. Then, teetering into the shrub, he gets it: an urn.

  “Jesus,” he whispers.

  He steadies himself then squats down, making his body as small as possible.

  Mrs. Fraser says something. Clare’s head is still down, her arms folded. If she answers, Rudy doesn’t hear it. He imagines her heavy-hearted but restrained. He knows the feeling. She wants the whole thing to be over with, he imagines—and, for her sake, so does he. But Mrs. Fraser, fondling a branch of the pine tree with her free hand, seems to be in no hurry. Rudy shifts his weight. His knees are complaining, but to get up now is out of the question. Waiting, he notices that the Fraser house is the only one on the block without Christmas lights. Though reasonably well tended, the place wears a vacant stare of abandonment, as if, despite Mr. Fraser’s grumpy manner, the house can’t manage to look homey without him. Rudy knows little about the circumstances of his neighbour’s death. Living in Toronto, he received only a sketchy account. But it occurs to him that even if he’d been living here on Morgan Hill Road, he’d not have known much more. For though the Frasers have lived across the street for as long as he can remember, the distance between their house and his own has proven itself, for no straightforward reason, to be unbridgeable.

  Holding the brass urn in both hands now, Mrs. Fraser offers one side of it to her daughter, but Clare shakes her head. Her mother turns to face the pine tree then takes a step back. Rudy’s eyes are fixed on the urn. He’s never seen ashes before; he’s heard there’s more to them than one might expect. And indeed, when Mr. Fraser’s remains spill out into the branches of the pine, onto the snow, upward in great, whitish gusts, their quantity is surprising.

  That’s what we amount to, Rudy tells himself, though he doesn’t quite believe it.

  Mrs. Fraser wraps her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and together they stand, facing the tree. It would be fitting, Rudy thinks, for the snow to start now. He searches the sky and in the absence of any climactic flakes tries to honour the Frasers’ small, quiet ceremony with a memory of his mother’s burial. It’s an event that should have stuck, but all that comes to him of that muggy August afternoon is the car ride from the cemetery to the house: he and Susie in the back seat with a large 7-Up to share, baby Adam screeching on Aunty Mary’s lap.

  His knees are killing him. Seeing Clare retreat, head down, toward her house, he straightens up painfully, extracts himself from the juniper, and tramps back across his own yard. He’s halfway to the steps when the front door opens a crack.

  “Rudy! Lunch in ten minutes!” his aunt calls, loud enough to be heard several houses away.

  Rudy groans into his collar. He could carry on to the house without looking back—he’s almost there—but he stops and turns.

  Mrs. Fraser is looking in his direction, clutching the empty urn. He expects her to ignore him, or dismiss him with a friendly wave. But instead she starts walking toward the road, her free arm out for balance, as if she’s on a tightrope. Awkward and baffled, Rudy watches her for a few steps, then he backtracks across his yard.

  “Rudy? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  The Scottish accent is a surprise. He’d forgotten it, along with other quirky things about Mrs. Fraser that used to captivate him in a confusingly sexual way when he was a kid—the fiery hair, the makeup, the pretty clothes. Though he understood her relationship to Clare, it was always difficult to imagine Isobel Fraser as a mother.

  He pulls his right hand from his pocket and waves. “Hi, Mrs. Fraser. It’s been a few years at least.”The Mrs. Fraser sounds ridiculous; she can’t be more than forty-five. But she doesn’t correct him.

  At the edge of the road he stops, while she, on her side, does the same. A sensible position, Rudy thinks. With Morgan Hill Road between them, it’s easier to avoid the urn, not to mention the fact that in almost twenty years of living across the street from each other, he and his neighbour have almost never spoken.

  “Is your family together for Christmas?” she says.

  He’s forgotten about Christmas. “Oh. Yeah. My sister and her family are here, and my aunt’s out for her visit.”

  He wonders if she has any idea where his aunt is visiting from—if she even knows where the place is. Renée didn’t, though she tried to hide it. But Mrs. Fraser, he sees, is smiling and nodding in a way that seems entirely genuine.

  “Oh, that’s lovely. I must say, I always envied your aunt every time she went back home. I’ve dreamed of going to that part of the world ever since I was a girl.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, aye. I think it would be marvellous. The lovely beaches, the temples ...”

  Touristy stuff, he thinks, but still. It seems to him suddenly preposterous that Mrs. Fraser has never been inside his house, never had a cup of tea with his aunt. He takes a small step forward.

  “You should go sometime.”

  “I should, shouldn’t I. Well, maybe when things here are a bit more settled.” She shifts the urn in her arms.

  Grateful for the opening, Rudy clears his throat. “I was really sorry to hear about your husband. Is everything all ... I mean, is there anything ...”

  She shakes her head. “Thank you, pet. It was a terrible shock, but we’re managing quite well. It just takes time, doesn’t it.”

  Pet, he repeats to himself, nodding. She’s speaking to him as if for all these years the Vantwests and the Frasers have been regular neigh-bours. He glances back at his own house. Through the living room window he can make out his brother, tossing Zoë up in the air. Adam’s build is slender, but he’s a swimmer, lean and strong.

  “I shouldn’t keep you,” Mrs. Fraser says. “I heard Mary calling you in.”

  “Yeah. I should probably go.”

  “Well, it was lovely chatting with you, Rudy.”

  “You too.”

/>   “You’re still living in Toronto?”

  “For a while anyway. I’ve got a teaching job in North York.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful! Well, best of luck with it.”

  “Thanks.”

  He wonders if he should wish her a Merry Christmas, but a final glance at the urn dismisses the idea. He waves again then turns and retraces his steps through the snow and up the concrete stairs to the front door. With his hand on the latch he looks back to see Mrs. Fraser disappear behind her own door. His eyes travel to the upstairs windows of the Fraser house, and there, in the middle window, he catches Clare Fraser’s pale, pretty face, turning away from him then vanishing altogether. Odd duck, he thinks. And yet he watches a few seconds longer to see if she’ll return. He wants her to—wants her to come back and just be there. But she doesn’t. One last time he meets the vacant stare of the house across the street, then he goes inside.

  Christmas lunch is almost ready. The counter is crowded with Aunty’s special dishes, and the air is heavy with the competing smells of curry spices and turkey. While Aunty and Susie fuss over last-minute details, Dad and Mark drink arrack and talk hockey. Down on the floor, Zoë struggles with the lid of an empty Tupperware container. Adam is rummaging through a drawer; Jim Reeves is still singing. Rudy hovers in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, staring out the front window. In all the noise and confusion of his own house, it seems suddenly impossible that across the street Mrs. Fraser has just disposed of her husband’s ashes. But she did. He was there. He could even say that, in a way, he was part of it.

  “Found them!” Adam suddenly calls out. “Christmas oven mitts! I told you they were in here, Aunty.”

  “Very good, son. Now take the turkey out before it dries up.”

  Adam pulls on the mitts—ridiculous, ruffled things with reindeer on them—opens the oven door with a flourish, and slides out the rack on which the turkey pan sits. The bird is greeted with noisy enthusiasm. Adam lifts the pan and stands with it while Aunty Mary clears a patch of counter space and the others shuffle aside. Then, from the archway, Rudy sees Zoë race toward the oven on hands and knees. He guesses what she’s going to do, but he’s a kitchen’s length away from her. His father is closest.