There was no logic to my impulses. Or maybe there was: I’d had my life all planned out, and he had turned it upside down. He was forcing me to move through unknown territories without a map. And now I wanted to know more, explore, try things.
And I wanted to know what he was thinking.
The house was closer to the beach than I’d imagined. I was surprised to see it appear before us, the sea calm, the waves soft and murmuring, the stars high in the sky, the rhythms of the night hypnotic.
Trey stopped and stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and drew a nervous breath. He spoke softly. “My mother was Mi’kmaq, and my grandparents are, and their parents, and generations before.”
Something absurd entered my mind—but I wondered if it could be true.
“Trey, were you embarrassed about that? Is that why you never wanted to talk to me about your mother?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No. I’m proud of who I am. I never talked about her because there are things about me that you might not like. And if you don’t like them, you’ll pull away…”
I closed his lips with my hand, unable to believe he would really think something like that of me. Unable to imagine what I’d done or said to make him think I might behave that way.
“Me? You thought I’d judge you because of your family?” I brought my hand over to his cheek and stroked it. “Who you are and where you’re from don’t matter to me, Trey. All that matters is what you make of your life.”
He kissed me.
“You’re killing me,” he said. “I feel like I’m losing it. Like I’m going completely crazy.”
“In a good way?”
“See?” He laughed. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’re priceless. Incredible.”
I blushed. I wasn’t. Not even a little. Was he blind? Stupid? Who knew. At any rate, there was no way I was driving him as crazy as he was driving me!
He took my hand and dragged me to the shore, to a boulder that jutted out into the water. I could hardly see him, just his outline against the glow of a slender crescent moon. He sat down and motioned for me to sit on his lap. When I did, and when he wrapped his arms around me, I thought to myself that there could be no better place in the world.
He kissed my temple, and his face remained close to mine as he started talking.
“My parents met in the spring of 1990, at a folk music festival in Vancouver. They fell in love, and two weeks later, they were livingtogether. My mother got pregnant, they got married, and I was born. Things went well between them at first. My father got a job in a major architecture studio and quickly made a name for himself. With fame came money and hangers-on and a lifestyle and social position that he liked a little too much. There was just one problem. Suddenly he was ashamed of my mother. She wasn’tclassyenough to hobnob with the stuck-up women his friends were married to. They talked bad about her behind her back, and my father knew it. He wanted her to pretend to be someone else.”
“Poor thing. She must have felt terrible,” I whispered.
“She didn’t. She was strong, and she never renounced who she was.”
“So what happened?”
“They argued constantly. I remember them fighting at all hours, but I was too little to realize why. One day I came back from school and Mom was gone. I didn’t understand how she could abandon me, and I kept asking about her. I wanted to go find her. I needed to see her again. That was when my father started to talk aboutthose people… Of course he was talking aboutmypeople. He was nasty about it, and he never let me forget that a part of me waslike them. He kept repeating that my mother had chosenthemover me.”
I turned to look at him and saw the pain in his face with every word.
“How cruel of him.”
“He never let up, and I started thinking like him. But that turned me into someone insecure, ashamed of my mother, and I hid that part of my life. She stopped existing for me. She was like a ghost.”
“She never tried to see you again or make contact with you?”
“Yeah, she did, many times. I didn’t know that then. My father had taken out a restraining order against her, saying she’d threatened to kidnap me. It was a lie, obviously. She went to my school, showedup at my house, and eventually she got arrested. She spent time in jail because of it.”
A dark cloud of curses was forming on the tip of my tongue. What kind of man could do that to his own son?
“The years passed,” Trey continued, “and I still hadn’t seen her. But then I turned fourteen. There was a woman watching me in the park where I was hanging out with my friends. I started noticing her. I remember she was wearing beaded earrings. Then one day she came over and called me by my name. I recognized her then…”
“And what did you do?”
“I took off running. I saw her twice again, the next day and the day after that. She was waiting for me outside. So I hid.” He sighed and passed his hand across his forehead. “I mean, I hated her because of what my dad had ingrained in me. A few years later, Dad and I moved to Montreal, and I met your brother and sister. And you. It was a new start, and it forced me to forget everything that came before. When people asked about my mother, I always said she’d died when I was little.”
