(This story is a sequel to City Tracks which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/August 2001)
DEATH BY OMISSION Karen Skowron
Josef stared at his son in his creaky camp-cot bed, his neck wrapped hugely in an old wool sock that Josef had worn long ago in the woods.
Ben's gaze thumbed the half-drawn curtains of his bedroom, the spitballs adhering to the ceiling, the poster covered wall that led to the door, as if seeking escape, and finally he looked back at his father. "But what if I don't get better?" he croaked, repeating the question.
"But I told you, you will get well. It's just the mumps."
Ben's eyes filled with tears and this alarmed Josef. In all his ten years Ben had cried perhaps a dozen times and it was serious behavior when it happened. Josef wanted to sit on the bed for closeness, for comfort, for understanding, but it would have collapsed beneath him. Ben had found the old wood and canvas cot alongside the dumpster of the apartment building and it was one of his most loved possessions. Instead Josef squatted beside it. Once he could perch like this for hours, waiting, watching, but that had been long ago in the wilderness. This time his bones groaned.
"What is it, my son? Tell Papa." In the same way, in the old country, his father had soothed him.
The tears rivered down Ben's cheeks. "Jacko said I wouldn't be able...that mumps made a man...that I couldn't... Oh, Dad- "
Ben flung himself at his father, upsetting the cot, upsetting Josef, and ending up himself on the floor on top of his dad. Josef hugged his son in the tangle and managed to smooth the stiff mop of hair. Into Josef's shoulder Ben murmured, "I want my-, I want my-."
What Ben was asking for he could not give him so Josef gave him what he could. "Jacko is a dumbcluck and if he is going to cause such trouble with such misinformation he will not be allowed to visit with the rest of your friends." It had seemed a good idea to let the three or four boys come by for a very short visit. Ben had been cooped up in the apartment with the flu and then an eye infection and now the mumps. It had been a very long spring.
"What did he tell you - that you would not be able to make babies" - Josef chose the less serious side-effect, at least from a man's point of view, that he recalled was related to mumps, and at Ben's nod, went on," well, that does not apply now. That was in the old days when people weren't given shots, vaccinations. You have the mumps now but once they are over there will be no after effects. This is like an extra shot of immunity." He had no idea of the accuracy of his words. He needed an instant antidote to the grief. And he got it.
Ben started to giggle, the humor of the present situation taking precedent. Josef responded, untwisting them both, righting the cot, helping Ben back into bed. He had just gotten him all settled when Ben said, "I need to go to the bathroom."
"Of course, why not, exactly on cue as I finish tucking you so neatly back into bed. Go. Go." Josef pointed. And Ben went, chuckling.
"That's exactly what you used to do when I put on your snowsuit and mitts and hat and scarf and extra socks and boots," he called to his son who was moving down the hall with the unsteady gait of recuperation. Vancouver did not often produce a winter such as Josef had known in the north; he was recalling the one time that it had come close.
"Did I really have a snowsuit?" Ben's voice asked from the bathroom.
"You might have," Josef called back. "Maybe it was just two layers of track pants."
When Ben was back in bed he called out to Josef who was in the kitchen doing breakfast dishes, "Tell me about when I was born."
"You heard it all before a million times."
"Tell me again. Please, Papa."
He could still hear Ben's, "I want my, I want my."
"Let me get something to work on," Josef called back to him, "You can be a lazy layabout but your poor Papa has to work to pay the rent."
"You're rich, you got all that money in the bank,' his son called out.
It made Josef nervous to hear his son state this. It was true. He knew how to earn and he knew how to save, how to invest. But from an affluent childhood he had become a refugee with nothing and he never felt he had quite enough to relax.
He brought a kitchen chair into Ben's room along with a barley twist bridge lamp. Ben's only seating offering was a beanbag which Josef had tried once and from then on declined. Sitting on the chair he cradled the lamp on which he'd raised a fur with a light coat of water and began to patiently draw out the heart of the wood with diminishing grades of sandpaper. Grandma's Giveaways down the block already had a customer waiting on the lamp once Josef had restored its soul.
He preferred not to work while he talked: he preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But he felt the need to do something with his hands as a distraction if he was going to wander into "I want my-," territory.
"Well, now where will I start?"
"With how you went to the woods because of the war after you escaped across the ocean and became a hunter and lived all alone and then my mother came and she was a burglar and then you had me."
Josef made length of a pause to fish in his shirt pocket, take out his glasses, inspect the lenses, put them on the better to see his work, peered over them to better see his son.
"I have no need to tell you anything. You know it all."
"No, tell me. Please. When you tell it I can see it."
Josef drew in breath and let it out in a sigh. It troubled him to remember, but it also felt good. Irony of life.
"Your mother came to - "
"Hilary," Ben interrupted, rolling the three syllables around in his mouth.
"Yes, Hilary - "
"It's a nice name," Ben interrupted again, with his own sigh. "And she was very beautiful." Josef had described her many times. They had no photo. Ben had done a drawing with colored pencils a year or so ago and it hung on the wall at the foot of his bed.
"Yes, Hilary - very beautiful Hilary - came to the woods deciding she was no longer going to be a lawbreaker and -"
This time Ben stopped his father's words by coming up slightly from his pillow and staring. Josef responded by staring back and then shrugging.
"Well, she came to the woods - career on hold. And she came to my cabin and she thought it was funny and wonderful and awful how I lived."
"And you never got married," Ben put in. Lately he had been working out something about this: he seemed intrigued and proud rather than critical and Josef had overheard him tell a friend, "My parents weren't married either."
"No. But we loved each other very much." His hand was stroking the lamp gently.
"She thought I was food poisoning," Ben put in with a grin and a nod.
"Well, she did, at first. She didn't expect to ever get pregnant - no, not from having mumps, I don't know why - and so she was surprised and looked for other reasons when she started to feel different. She thought she might have the flu or possibly a growth."
"And it was a growth and it was me."
Josef remembered the curiosity and interest and yes, dismay, with which she had watched the changes in her body. He swallowed some emotion before he could speak again. At times he regretted telling Ben any of this. And each time he seemed to tell him more and more, to have a need to relive the past.
"We didn't think you would be born until the autumn -"
"And she never saw a doctor."
" - but in the summer, one night, you started to be born."
"And you helped her have me and cleaned me all up and I didn't even cry and she called me Ben."
Ben snuggled lower into his pillows, a smile on his face. He had taken part in a program at school called Boys And Babies and a film of an actual birth had much sparked his interest in his own arrival, particularly the personal, unique aspects of it. Josef suspected the filmed birth had been very different from Ben's. He would not at all want a recording of that event.
Hilary had actually not named him: she had called him Your Boy in the time until she left. Josef was not sure why he had told Ben that his mother had named him but having once done so he had to live with the lie.
"And you took me out and showed me to the sun."
Josef had walked through that experience many times in memory. He had wrapped the baby in a soft flannel shirt. "He's all yours now," Hilary had said in exhaustion and pain, turning toward the wall of the cabin. That had been their agreement.
He had carried his son outdoors into the early morning that seemed so incredibly normal after such a night. Nothing had equaled his feelings before or since. In spite of his more than fifty years at that time, his three years alone in the wilderness, he had never seen anything born. Hilary was as unprepared as he. They had planned to go into the nearest city, with a hospital, closer to the time they expected the baby to be born. Birthing might be natural but it was also scary and painful and messy and he felt that they had been lucky. He'd tied the cord with strips of leather and washed the newborn in rainwater warmed in the dishpan.
Holding that brand new human being, a part of him, gave Josef a glimpse of something he did not understand but which changed him. The baby skin was like moss after a rain, the eyes so dark and knowing, the tiny perfect mouth had opened in a tiny perfect yawn. Josef, who also seldom cried, had wept deeply holding his son. And then he realized he had wet the baby's hair, even then black and stiff, and he hoped it a fitting baptism. He shared a part of this now and Ben stared at him with those same dark eyes but Josef kept his sight on what his hands were doing. Ben's tears over the mumps had prompted him to admit that he, too, could cry.
They were both silent for a time.
"Then she - went away ..." Ben said. He thought his mother had died. He seemed to be wanting more details this time.
Josef got to his feet, the lamp stand silky under his arm.
"Sleep now, my son. I've got to go out and do some errands but Miz Shouldoon said she'd come by and be here in case you needed anything."
"I don't want Miz Shouldhavedone again, Dad. She fusses. I'll be fine on my own."
"If you are sure. But I'll put the phone by your bed so you can phone her."
He found the resident manager in the lobby watching as a lock was replaced on one of the mail boxes. "I should have known that man would use force instead of common sense. Look how he pulled the door off his butter container in the frig instead of sliding it out. I should have thought to tell him," Miz Shouldoon told both him and Alf who was acting custodian now that Mr. Bellecourt the former janitor and, surprisingly, the owner, had been killed several months before.
"Still no word on what is happening to the building," she said to Josef in a quiet aside as she walked him to the door after he had told her Ben was fine on his own. "It's all tied up in the courts or something to do with inheritance and his kids." She knew he was interested but too courteous to inquire. He had been a good tenant, he and his son, across the five or six years she had been managing the building.
Josef walked along a street lined now with spring flowering trees. Their leafy autumn splendor had been one reason, likely a major one, that he had chosen the apartment when he and the baby had come to the city a decade ago.
He finished his errands quickly and was walking back to the apartment when he stopped and entered a small park. He put his two bags on the ground and sat on one of the benches, leaning back, closing his eyes and turning his face to the sun.
Ben's ongoing bouts of sickness had affected him as well and he felt drained.
Someone passed in front of him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then sat beside him. He felt an irritation at the intrusion and kept his eyes firmly shut. Then some instinct shot through his body. It was a scent, a feeling. He could taste her on the air.
He prepared his intellect to prove him wrong as he finally opened his eyes and turned his head. His inner knowing was validated.
"Hilary," said Josef.
He had spoken of her this morning. Her son had asked for her, about her. Now she was here. Such coincidences astonish but seldom overwhelm: it is as if we know they are about to happen.
"Where is he? What has happened to him? " She did not turn toward him.
"I have him. I have cared for him as I promised."
"I know that." Now she did turn to face him. "But I 've not seen him for more than a month. What has happened?"
"He's been ill. But he's fine now. Have you been around all along? Have you been watching us?"
She slumped on the bench and took a couple of deep breaths. "I only now realize how upset I 've been now that I 'm so relieved. I thought something had happened to him."
He waited on the answer to what he had asked. He had learned patience in the woods.
She turned her face to him. "I have been living in this city for the past nine years. Have you also?"
He nodded, responding to the astonishment behind her distress.
"I didn't know," she said. I only saw you both at New Year's, across the street. I followed you and yes, I have been watching you ever since."
"You still have the boy page," he said to delay asking what he really wanted to know.
"The what?" She saw he was looking at her hair. "Oh, page boy. No, usually I wear it differently. When I thought the boy - well, whatever, - I cut it this way again."
She also did a leap of avoidance of worry about her son with a memory, "I remember how you went into the town and found those huge scissors because the little ones I had were not very efficient. And you cut my hair and they were so sharp and you cut too much across the bangs."
"You cried and cried."
"Yes."
"Why?"
They both knew what he was asking.
"I went back to the cabin but you had gone."
"When did you go?"
"September. I still had milk. I was going to -"
"But you came no further." It was a statement with a hope of a question.
"I was told you had gone back to your own country. I thought you had gotten in touch with your father and gone back to him. She didn't even know what country that was. Nor did I. Josef, how did I live with you for more than a year and not know that?"
"Who told you I had gone back to my old home."
"The girl in the store where you sold your furs. The daughter, I think of the owner."
"Susie?"
"I don't know."
"But I told her, I told her, if you ever came back, I told her where I was going and then I sent her my address when I found a place for Ben and me."
Her face opened into a wide smile. "Ben? His name is Ben?"
"So you never knew. You would have tried to find us?"
She faced forward again, frowning, thinking, and did not answer.
They sat in silence, digesting information, shuffling years into a different perspective.
"I want to see him," she said finally, quietly but very definitely.
"He thinks you are dead."
She bolted upright. "Dead? You told him I died?" Her face had gone white.
"No, I never actually said so but he assumed you died after he was born and I let him think it."
"You have killed me, Josef. As surely as if you raised a gun and shot me. He has grown up thinking I am dead." Her anguish smothered her and she fought to surface in anger. "How could you?"
"You never got in touch. You may as well have been dead. It was easier and kinder to let him think this. I did not know you went back." His anger was tempered by regret.
She slumped again. He stared at her. At last she turned and looked at him again.
"You will have to resurrect me. We will explain."
"And what then? What then, Hilary? You have left him once."
"Yes." She was silent, her gaze going past him and his stomach clenched. If she had been angry or apologetic he would have seen it as a sign that she would not leave again. And he was dealing with a sudden glimmer that her presence again in his life would cause complications and he was content with simplicity. He was afraid to ask for reassurance. Afraid she would not give it. Afraid that she would.
She looked at him sideways under the shelf of her hair. "I will not hurt him. I will - explain. There are things to be explained." She paused and moue'd her lips as she did when considering. "Are you with someone?"
"With my son."
She gave him a look he could not decipher. He did not ask if she were on her own, if she had resumed her career, and she did not answer his unspoken questions.
Afraid she might, he stood up suddenly. "He has the mumps."
"Don't forget your bags."
"Maybe I should go and prepare him first."
"I cannot wait any longer."
"He thinks you named him Ben."
"Oh. Well, I might have."
They were walking now, out of the park, along the street toward the apartment building.
"You called him Your Boy. Over the years I have thought of him, at times, as that. Thought, I wonder what Hilary would think of Your Boy now."
"Yes, I realize now I have continued to think of him as Your Boy." She laughed, richly, and he knew the joyous sound was not just over his name."
Miz Shouldoon nodded to him as he went through the lobby with Hilary. He did not stop to introduce her. Miz Shouldoon raised her eyebrows. "Ben must be fine, he has not phoned me," she called out as he and Hilary got on the elevator.
" She is surprised because I bring home strange women every day but usually they are blondes," he teased Hilary when they were on the elevator but her return smile was distracted. He wondered at her thoughts, her feelings.
"Dad, I threw up again," Ben sang out when he heard Josef enter the apartment. " I barely made it to the toilet. It must have been that squash you made me eat last night for supper."
"We have company, Ben," he called to warn him and stop any more embarrassing disclosures.
"Bet it's Nose," he started to say, naming a man who scouted objects for Josef to refinish but then he saw Hilary behind his father.
Across his face flashed curiosity and then awareness, then a brief astonishment replaced by an almost goofy expression as he recognized the hairdo Josef had described to him and he mouthed the words, "Boy page." Josef could hear Hilary behind him murmur, "Page boy."
Then there was confusion and when emotion finally caught up with realization Ben grabbed at anger to protect himself from possible hurt and hugging his knees to his chest he turned his face to the wall.
Josef was about to say something - he was not sure what - when Hilary squeezed past him and perched on the kitchen chair at the end of the cot. She could wait up a storm. She had come to the woods with patience: it was not one of the things she had learned in the wilderness.
Now she gave Josef a reassuring look. She had seen the drawing at the end of the bed. He couldn't think what to do or say so he went on to the kitchen with the groceries but paused in the hallway as he heard his son say, his voice muffled from his face being still pressed into his knees, "I got the damn mumps and we got your damn lock pick, and I thought you were dead." Josef grimaced at the language: what kind of upbringing would Hilary think he had given their son.
"Oh." Hilary sounded startled. Then she laughed. "Well, it must be a real nuisance having the mumps. And a lock pick is not the usual keepsake of a son from his mother. And I am sorry you thought I was dead - this was a misunderstanding. I knew you were very much alive. I've thought about you every single day."
Silence. Then the creaking of the camp cot. Ben must have turned to face his mother. Still silence. Josef continued on to the kitchen. Likely a staring contest. Likely bonding.