It was almost five p.m. by the time Teddy's ferry pulled into Horseshoe Bay. His father Alan was waiting at the terminal with a woman Teddy had never seen before. He guessed she was about twenty-five. She had long, dark, wavy hair and Teddy could tell she was beautiful despite the huge pair of retro sunglasses she wore. His first thought was that his dad had dumped Cassie for a younger woman, but he quickly realized that this must be one of the models who regularly posed for his dad's paintings.
"Ted!" said Alan, giving Teddy a hug. "So good to see you! Hey, this is Gabrielle."
Gabrielle shook his hand firmly and smiled at him. The afternoon was bright and clear and Teddy caught a glimpse of himself reflected in her sunglasses. Her clothes were casual but stylish enough that Teddy felt a little inadequate in his old jeans and hoody.
"Gabby's been modelling for me lately in the studio," said Alan. "Is that all you have?" he asked, pointing his chin towards Teddy's backpack.
"Yup," said Teddy and they were soon heading briskly down Highway 1 in Alan's black Porsche Cayenne, "Gabby" in the back seat and Teddy up front, his backpack wedged between his feet.
"We just have to drop Gabby off at her place near 21st," said Alan, pulling abruptly into the left lane. The Porsche engine hummed as they breezed past a row of slower cars that had probably been on Teddy's ferry. "She's an artist too," he added.
If that was meant to spark a conversation between Teddy and Gabby it failed. Teddy did a quarter turn toward the back seat to sort of acknowledge her while she just sat quietly.
It was a little awkward but not as bad as the drive from Victoria to Nanaimo earlier in the day when Neea had shuttled Teddy to the ferry terminal an hour and a half up the island from their house. It was Darwin in the back seat for that trip, and the vehicle was Neea's smaller, older and less luxurious Honda which showed its lack of horsepower on a few of the steeper hills along the way. Darwin had stayed mostly quiet in the back and Teddy had either looked down at his phone or stared glumly at the road ahead while Neea optimistically but unsuccessfully tried to engage them both in conversation.
There was a much closer ferry to the mainland, running from Swartz Bay near Victoria, but that one would take Teddy to Tsawwassen on the other side instead of Horseshoe Bay, meaning a one-hour drive each way through Vancouver traffic for Alan instead of the quick ten-minute run to Horseshoe. For years Neea had, without complaint, driven this three-hour round trip every time Teddy went to see his father or came home again because, it went without saying, her time wasn't as valuable as Alan's.
Alan tried again. "Maybe you saw Gabby in one of my recent works," he said. "Did you see Beauty Ascendant on the website? Or Serenity in Solitude? They were both in the September newsletter. You still get those, right?"
Alan grew up in Victoria, the youngest son of two wealthy, art-loving doctors. From an early age he aspired to artistic greatness and his parents spared no expense in helping him on his way. The greatness he sought was not the West-Vancouver-mansion, Porsche-Cayenne, hot-artist's-model kind of greatness; it was the Picasso, Van Gogh, Da Vinci kind. He wanted people to know the name Alan Ames Aiken the way they knew the names Monet and Rembrandt. Somewhere along the way, though, that dream was replaced by a new one, a dream that Alan was now well on his way to fulfilling: the dream of wealth.
Sometime during the early 2000s, after twenty years in unrewarding pursuit of critical acclaim and the attention of serious art collectors, Alan realized three things: that he didn't like art critics and serious collectors, that he wanted to make a lot of money, and that the average person would be much more likely to pay for a painting that was nice, pretty and easy to understand than one that was ugly, challenging and weird. He evolved a style of painting as well as subject matterâmainly beautiful young womenâthat a lot of people wanted. He also found a business partner, Sheila, who helped him realize that the big money wasn't in the paintings themselves, but in limited edition prints. For the first time in his life Alan started to make real money for himself. As his old friends and associates in the fine art world turned their noses up at his new direction, he just laughed at their pretentiousness and their stubborn refusal to make art that people actually liked.
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Neea and I have been in serious negotiations. We're going over her latest list, daily activities intended to ween me off meth. I flatly refused to do number four of twelve, which was "Meditate", but eventually caved on number eight, "Do something creative", figuring that was vague enough that I could just draw or write in my notebook and check it off the list. Then I pushed back on the third "Exercise" because no one should have to exercise three times in a day unless they're training for the damn Olympics. The rest of the list is mostly standard stuff about eating healthy meals, drinking enough water, and keeping my brain sharp by reading. She finally agreed to strike the third "Exercise" from the list.
With that done, we're walking on Boyd Street for today's first of two exercises. Coming up to Dallas Road, I can smell the ocean. I'm trying to be positive, which she put on the list in place of the meditation.
"Seek out things that will bring you satisfaction," she says.
That isn't a new addition to the list. As she's walking, she's reading from a new book she bought. It's all about addiction-recovery techniques and it already has at least a dozen torn paper bookmarks sticking out of its pages.
"Try to find things that will add real, substantial meaning to your life."
"Uh huh," I say.
I get the logic, and I see how it dovetails perfectly with Neea's views on food: real, nutritious food over empty calories and junk. The idea in the book is to replace the "junk" satisfaction that the drug gives you with a deeper, more reality-based satisfaction; something you can work into a healthy lifestyle. Sounds awesome in principle, but it also sounds like it was written by someone who has never taken meth. Writing a decent haiku or biting into a perfect, heritage-variety apple is never going to deliver quite the same rush, you know? Plus if we were people who could be soul-satisfied by poetry, organic produce or flower-arranging, we wouldn't be taking meth in the first place. We have bigger holes to fill than that. We're fucked up. That's kinda the whole point.
Anyway, as I say, I'm trying to be positive. Neea and Teddy's place is, like, four blocks from the ocean and for me, coming from the Interior, that's just amazing. I think Neea likes to come down here, but Teddy doesn't seem to care. It isn't the open ocean, it's a channel maybe thirty kilometres wide running between the bottom end of Vancouver Island, where Victoria is, and the northwestern part of Washington State. If you head out in the channel and turn right, though, you don't have to go far before it opens into the Pacific, and from there it's clear sailing all the way to Japan. Or maybe Siberia, I'm not too sure on the latitudinals.
That expansiveness never fails to astound me. I always find myself gazing out toward the west, to the blue horizon in the distance, thinking of the curvature of the Earth and all of the blue horizons you'd have to cross before you saw land again.
"You can't take control of your recovery until you take control of your life," she reads. "You have to be the captain of your own life-ship."
"Does it really say 'life-ship'?"
Neea laughs. "It does! We all have our life-ships!"
"I think some of us just have lifeboats," I say. "And some of those have holes in them."
"Then we'll just have to patch up the holes and make you ship-shape!" she says cheerfully.
"Yes, captain."
"No you're the captain!"
"Yes, captain."
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They dropped Gabrielle off at her house, or rather, the house with a room over the garage that she rented. Still, it looked pretty nice and Teddy wondered about her ambitions to be an artist and what her life was like. Her art, Alan had said, was mostly abstract "but incorporates representational forms in a kind of outsider style," whatever that meant.
Sometimes Teddy thought of his father as a serious but misunderstood artist and other times he thought he was just a guy who had figured out a way to make loads of money painting beautiful women like Gabby. Watching Gabrielle turn to smile and wave as she walked up her driveway, Teddy thought his dad had a damn good job either way. As long as Alan didn't mind being dissed by the critics and art snobs, he was living the good life.
Teddy wasn't completely convinced though. Deep down, Teddy thought, his father still had that longing to be regarded not just as a successful artist but as a great one. He still wanted to be Picasso. The money and the pretty women would never be quite enough.
"How's school?" Alan asked. "You liking Songhees?" They were headed up the lower slopes of Cypress Mountain toward the big house up on Andover Crescent.
"It's pretty cool so far," said Teddy, as they sped past a house extravagantly decked out for Halloween, still weeks away.
Alan was taller than Teddy by an inch, and was wearing his usual jeans, plaid shirt and tweed jacket. Besides the silver hair at his temples and the creases at the corners of his eyes, Alan still looked like a young man, despite being a couple of years into his fifties. Alan was thirteen years older than Neea and, though it never seemed to bother either of them, Teddy thought that was weird. Now with Cassie, Alan had found someone a little closer to his own age. She was only ten years younger.
"How's your mother doing?" Alan asked. "Is she dating anyone?"
"No. She's doing OK, but no," said Teddy.
These catch-up conversations with his dad were always a little challenging. Teddy was sensitive to the odd balance his father maintained between guilty party and innocent victim. Yes, Alan was the one who left Teddy and his mother and there was some residual guilt around that, but at the same time, Alan was quick to let Neea and Teddy know that they could make more of an effort to keep him in the loop on what was happening in his son's life. Teddy understood that, but then he'd get caught up in his day-to-day and realize it had been three weeks since he last talked to his dad.
It was the same with Neea and her parents in Finland. With cheap long distance, the Internet, apps and whatever, the fact that they lived halfway around the world shouldn't really have mattered. She could have talked to them every day if she'd wanted to, but weeks went by between calls.
"I guess she's pretty busy with this homeless girl she's looking after, eh?" said Alan.
"Yup," said Teddy.
"What's that like? I mean, that could be a bit weird for you, right?"
"Yup," said Teddy. "Really weird."
"Hmm," said Alan. "She really should have talked to me about it before exposing you to that kind of thing. Sometimes she just thinks of herself."
"Well she's really helping this girl. It's not like she's being selfish, Dad," said Teddy. "Totally the opposite, and who knows what would happen to Darwin if Mom didn't do this?"
The two of them went quiet for a while before Alan changed the subject to talk about a recent trip to the vet for Alan and Cassie's little dog, Rufolo. Soon they were pulling into the driveway of their house on the slopes of Cypress Mountain, Alan slotting the Cayenne into the space next to Cassie's red Volkswagen Golf and hitting the push-button parking brake. Rufolo was yapping excitedly as Alan opened the front door. Teddy bent down to give the little dog a scruff behind the ear and Rufolo, tail wagging and claws clattering on the hardwood floor, gave Teddy some enthusiastic licks in return.
"Teddy!" Cassie came into the living room, arms wide, and Teddy gave her a hug.
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"Dad?"
"Darwin! Is that really you?"
"Yeah, sorry it's been so long. I've been meaning to call you."
"Where are you? Yvonne says you haven't been home much lately. You've been staying with friends? We've been worried!"
"I know Dad. I'm sorry."
"We really need to get that phone of yours sorted out, lovey. We have to be able to reach you! What if something were to happen? If I send an extra few hundred on the next cheque will you get a new one? What kind do you think you'll need?"
Geoffrey is talking a mile a minute, which suits me fine cuz I really don't know how I'm going to tell him what I have to tell him.
I had a phone. My parents paid the bills so I could stay in touch with them. I used to call them at least once a week, usually getting away from Kodi and the others so they wouldn't make all kinds of stupid noises and freak out my folks. One time though, Kodi was with me. We were sitting down by the harbour. He promised to keep quiet, and he actually did, but when I was done talking to my dad, he just grabbed the phone from my hand and threw it into the ocean. I watched it fly in a high arc toward Victoria Harbour, saw it glint in the evening sun as it flew, before disappearing in a sad, barely visible splash. Kodi was laughing like an idiot and I was so stunned I just stared open-mouthed out at the water. Then I smacked him in the head, or tried to, but he grabbed my wrists and wouldn't let me hit him, laughing and telling me how he'd just done me a huge favour. I told my parents it broke.
Now Dad's talking about setting things up so he can transfer money into my account instead of sending cheques through the mail to Yvonne. This makes perfect sense but it isn't what we need to talk about right now.
"Um, Dad... things are actually kind of bad here. I should have told you sooner..."
"What is it, Darwin?"
My dad knows from the sound of my voice that it's something serious. Now I have to follow through and tell him, but I can't find the words. Ugh, all this truth-telling lately is just not my style. Keep going, I tell myself. The words will come.
"It's getting a lot better now but it was pretty bad. I was... actually kind of living on the street for quite a while, not with Yvonne..."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"I was living on the street, Dad, and... that's not even the worst part, I was also taking a pretty bad drug... Um, crystal meth..."
Geoffrey's already crying. I can hear him trying to hide it.
"But it's better now," I go on, trying to sound cheerful. "Honestly. I'm getting help from this really nice woman. She's helping me get off the drug and letting me stay at her place."
"What? Who? How do you know it's safe? Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you come home?" He's not hiding the crying anymore. "We could have helped you!"
"I know Dad, I know. I messed up and I'm really sorry. I know I could have come home, but there are problems with that too. You know what I'm talking about."
He didn't say anything for a second or two, then very quietly, "Yes..."
After a while he said, "We're coming there. We're coming to get you."
"No!" I said. "Really. It's OK. I need to keep going with Neea if I'm going to get better. I'll come and visit once I'm all better, I promise."
"Well... I need to at least come to Victoria. To see where you're living. To meet this... what was her name?"
"Neea, and believe me, she's super nice and she's taking good care of me."
"OK, but why is she doing this? What does she want, Darwin? Are you sure you know what you're getting into?"
"Well it can't be worse than what I was into before," I say with a chuckle, but Dad doesn't find it funny.
"No, really," I go on. "Neea's great. You'd like her."
"Oh God, Darwin. How did all of this happen? Drugs?"
"I don't know Dad, but it did. One thing led to another."
"Tomorrow. We're coming there. I want to meet this Neea and check things out. Getting off a drug like that isn't easy, you know. You need professional help, not just the kindness of this stranger, no matter how nice she might be."
"I really don't think you need to come here, Dad."
"You know I have to come and see you. Please, Darwin. Give me an address and a phone number. We can stay in a hotel, but I need to come and see you. Please, lovey."
Lovey. Gets me every time.
"OK. But I really don't want to go back to Kamloops. I have to do this, Dad. I have to stay here, at least for a while."
"We'll see. If we all decide it's for the best then... yes, maybe. But we'll have to see."
I'm very familiar with Geoffrey's concept of fairness: everyone gets a vote and whichever way mom votes, that's what we do. So yeah, we'll see...
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Sunday was shaping up to be exactly the kind of day that made Teddy hate coming to visit his dad. It was grey and rainy outside, Alan was working in his studio and Cassie was busy getting the house ready for the evening dinner, so there wasn't much for Teddy to do. He offered to help Cassie, but she insisted that she and the part-time cleaning lady, Lena, had it all under control. He stared out the window. The view, looking to the south, was the reason people built houses up on the slopes of Cypress Mountain. You could see ships anchored down in English Bay, the Lion's Gate Bridge crossing from North Vancouver and disappearing into the dark woods of Stanley Park and, beyond the park, the glass and steel forest of downtown Vancouver. On a clearer day, he would be able to see the sprawl of the city eventually give way to farmland to the south, and down beyond the U.S. border in the fading distance, the towering, ghostly outline of Mount Baker to the east and the San Juan Islands to the west. Yeah, he thought, his dad really was on top of the world.
Eventually, even the view got boring so Teddy headed downstairs to see what his father was up to. Alan was usually okay with Teddy coming in while he was working, but if the studio door was closed that generally meant that he didn't want to be disturbed, either because he had a model with him or because he was just working really hard and wanted to concentrate.
Today the studio door was wide open and there was music playing so Teddy went in. Amid the clutter of canvases and easels, paints, palettes and brushes, Teddy immediately saw that there was a model there after all. It was Gabby. She stood glowing in diffuse illumination from Alan's battery of studio lights and reflectors, and she was topless.
Well, nearly. There was a gauzy length of fabric draped artfully over her shoulder and across her body, somewhat concealing her naked breasts. When she looked at Teddy he turned away so fast he nearly pulled a muscle.
"Oh, sorry! I didn't know..." he said.
"Oh hey, Ted," said Alan. "Yeah, I talked Gabby into sitting for me for a couple of hours before she joins us for dinner. It's OK... It's OK, isn't it Gabby?"
"It's fine, really," said Gabby.
Teddy ventured another quick glance, nodded a thank you then looked away again. Besides the sheer fabric, she wore only a tiny pair of pale yellow workout shorts.
Looking anywhere but at the nearly-nude Gabby, Teddy moved awkwardly toward where his dad was working on the canvas. Clipped to the top and sides of the big canvas were photos of Gabby, close-ups of her face, her hair, full-body shots, and body detail shots. And yeah, she wasn't wearing very much in most of them.
The smell of linseed oil and thinners filled the room. Teddy had always liked the smell and enjoyed coming down to the studio to watch his father work. Despite what he chose to do with it, Alan definitely had talent. To see him manipulate layers of colour on a canvas was to watch a master at work. Teddy liked to look over his dad's shoulder and watch as he transformed simple paint into light on tree leaves, the pink-grey crags in a granite cliff, the glint in some mysterious woman's eye or a perfectly placed lock of hair. It was the closest thing to magic that he'd ever seen.
The current painting was only about half finished, but already there was an amazing likeness of Gabby. She was standing on an imagined seashore, hair blown, her back to the grey seascape, her expression neither sad nor happy but intriguingly halfway between the two. Like Mona Lisa, Teddy thought. His dad wasn't quite da Vinci but Gabby was way prettier than old Mona as far as Teddy was concerned. Her wavy long hair was so dark brown it was almost black and her skin was smooth and beautiful and a perfect contrast to her dark hair. Her full lips were always smiling or about to smile in a way that made him want to smile back when she looked at him. Because of the big sunglasses she wore the day before, Teddy hadn't seen her eyes until a moment ago, but they were dark and beautiful. What a woman. If she was twenty-five, as he guessed, that would make her seven years older than him. That's not so much, is it? Yeah, right. When Gabby was starting high school Teddy would have still been playing with toy dinosaurs.
So why was the woman in his father's painting standing on a rocky shore in crappy weather, wearing only a flimsy piece of silk? Teddy figured there probably wasn't a good reason, just cuz it looked dramatic, but he thought he'd ask anyway.
"Is there a story here, Dad?"
"Hm? Oh, the woman? Well, there's a story evolving," said Alan, as he selected a different brush from the neat array laid out on a table beside him. "Gabby came up with more of it than I did."
"She lives alone in a stone cottage by the sea," Gabby said. "The wind blows constantly and it has driven her mad."
Gabby laughed but continued. "She thinks she hears voices in the wind. One voice in particular. It's the voice of the only man she's ever loved. She stands on the shore to try and lure him out of the depths to be with her!"
"Wow. I guess that explains what she's wearing?" Teddy said, still not daring to look directly at Gabby.
"Yes!" she said.
"And this man, he's what, a merman?"
"No," she said, trying to sound darkly mysterious. "He's a ghost!"
"You! Stop moving, would ya?" Alan instructed Gabby.
"OK, boss," she said.
Teddy finally ventured another look in her direction and saw that Gabby was looking right back at him and smiling.
"And quit smiling!" shouted Alan.
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If you liked this chapter I hope you'll kindly consider giving it a vote. Votes really help to increase a story's reach and my little tale could use a boost. Thank you for reading!
â D.B.