—an excerpt—
Ambrose sees True sitting there, in the dust of the parking lot. The Alibi Room. He sits with his back against a concrete planter filled with cracked, grey dirt. Drooping over the planter’s side are the long, splayed fronds of a fern, a lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina, Ambrose notes. Who would confine a fern like this to a dry parking lot, heat rising from the cracked asphalt? A plant meant to thrive in a cool, damp place. There, this fern could grow five feet, a flourish of green fronds, not this pallid, brittle sadness. In Finland they called it hiirenporras, mouse’s stair. A name his niece, Day, True’s mother, had always loved.
It was August, then, late in the afternoon, late in the nineties. All of southwestern Ontario was on tornado watch. The sky yellow, the trees dark. So humid the moment Ambrose stepped outside, his glasses clouded. And there True was, maybe nine or ten years old. Ambrose had lost his hold on time somewhere in the weeks after Day left. Strange weeks and then months, at first, unpinned from their normal routines. No longer waiting for Day to come home. To wake up, so he could make her breakfast. Tea and sunny side eggs. She only ever ate the yolks. That’s alright, Ambrose would tell her. I’ll finish what you don’t want. The whippy whites, the hardened crusts. She’d help him clean the hardened yellow gloss from plates, although washing dishes, like all chores, meandered into games for her. Splashing water, blowing soap bubbles. But that was alright, too, Ambrose knew. Day’s joy could be the helium that filled balloons, permitted them to rise, and he could be the string that tethered them to earth.
Day’s mother was Ambrose’s twin sister, and when she left town, leaving Day behind, bequeathed her to Ambrose. Not that Ambrose minded; he knew without this baby, he might be prone to drift. But she anchored him, first through a newborn’s exhaustive routines, then love. Then one morning, Day was gone, too. When people ask Ambrose, where did she go, he doesn’t know why it matters. Gone is gone.
