Waiting for Time Read Free

decode her mother's mind, stopped trying to uncover her secrets, ceased to be intrigued by her silence. These days Lav lives happily in the present, she is indifferent to the past.
    Today she is going to her mother for straightforward data. A security check of Department of Fisheries employees is being made. All she needs is her father's name, his birth and death dates and the names of her grandparents.
    “I suppose I can have a look,” her mother had said when she telephoned this morning. Charlotte had seemed preoccupied, had said she is moving to California. Her mother can still surprise.
    Lav does not enjoy travel, feels apprehensive boarding trains, planes, even busses. Last spring, partly in memory of Saul, she had gone on a guided tour to Israel and Egypt, had become ill and cut the trip short. She has never considered living anywhere but Ottawa. “Why?” she asked her mother, “Why move? And why to California?”
    “I've always hated the cold—I might as well move south permanently,” Charlotte told her, so casually that she might have been talking about changing banks or the brand of tea she drinks. She suggested Lav come over at lunch time, before she begins packing.
    When Lav arrives her mother is already searching through the big desk that once belonged to Saul. “What you need is in here somewhere,” she says.
    Charlotte's apartment is on the tenth floor and has a view of the river. Lav has been here only twice. She is still surprised that her mother has chosen to live in such a place, grander, more stylish than anything she would have expected.
    Saul's desk seems to be the only thing Charlotte has rescued from the dark rooms behind the bookstore. Her apartment is furnished in black and white: heavy glass tables, white carpet, black steel dining room chairs and a black leather sofa set. Although Charlotte has lived here for almost four years, the place has the clean, uncluttered look of a hotel suite. The only colour in the apartment is a painting, one huge, blazing-red poppy hanging above the black sofa.
    “I only had one letter from your father—no papers. I suppose some might have come after I left,” her mother peers into the desk's pigeon-holes which seem to be empty.
    “Left where?” Lav asks. It is an absent-minded question, she is gazing about, trying to reconcile how the woman who has chosen this decor could have been content surrounded by Saul's old books, his clutter of discarded furniture. She is wondering if her mother will offer her lunch, she sniffs, nothing is cooking but then Charlotte always hated to cook, there might be tea and toast, sliced fruit perhaps.
    “Cape Random—you know that! I told you a dozen times I ran away from a place called Cape Random!” Lav turns and catches her mother regarding her with what seems to be dislike, dislike quickly concealed as Charlotte bends and, still talking, opens one of the desk drawers.
    “That's if a woman with a three-month-old baby can be said to run. I never got in touch with his people again. I don't even know when his birthday was. Make up a date—what difference? He was between nineteen and twenty-one the year you were born.”
    The phone rings. Lav gathers from the conversation that Charlotte is selling all this sharp-edged furniture. “Practically new, hardly used,” she is saying, “everything modern, top of the line at the Bay.”
    Lav stands in the middle of the room, her mother has not asked her to sit. I have never, never heard of Cape Random, she thinks. She culls through memory, through imagination, through a clutter of truths, half-truths and layers of lies—trying to sort one from the other. What had she been told? What imagined? What imagined being told? She reminds herself that she is a scientist, trained to observe, to test hypotheses, to identify truth—but in her own past there is no truth—nothing is labelled, nothing sure.
    Listening to her mother negotiate with the furniture buyer, Lav marvels, as she has