The Hand That Feeds You

5

Steven picked me up in his car outside the shelter. He had offered to take me to the airport. He thought I was insane for visiting my dogs. “How can you look at them knowing what they did?”

I tried out the analogy of the mother with the murderous son, but Steven said, “These are dogs, not children.”

The analogy worked for me. “You’ve known Cloud since she was eight weeks old.”

“I’m talking about the other one.”

I didn’t plan to spend the night in Montreal. My plan was to find contact information for Bennett’s parents and leave.

Steven made me promise to return to his apartment when I got back. “I went to your place yesterday to check on the cleaning service. It’s spotless, but there’s nowhere to sleep. They took the bed away.”

“What else did they take away?”

“It looks pretty empty. But they did what they needed to do. Are you sure you want to go back there?”

This kind of concern from my brother had precedent. A lifetime of precedent. He had deflected our father’s madness when it was directed at me. Our father was not a violent man except when his mania broke and he plunged into depression. In his blackest moods, he was capable of brandishing a knife at our mother. He saw me as a smaller version of her, and just as insubordinate. One summer night when I was ten and Steven was eighteen, our father came into the kitchen and saw the empty fruit bowl.

“Who ate my peaches?” he yelled. We heard him from the finished basement, where Steven and I were watching TV. We heard him turn on our mother. “Did you let them eat my peaches?”

We heard our mother say, “They were for everyone.”

Steven started up the stairs to the kitchen and I followed him.

“I ate the fucking peaches,” Steven said, when, in fact, I had eaten them.

He took the beating for me. Two months later, our father threw him out of the house, and Steven hitchhiked to New York City. He hired on with a construction crew in Hoboken and took night classes in criminology at John Jay. By the time I got to New York, Steven had left for Afghanistan to work as a lawyer for the State Department. He traveled to outlying villages, encouraging chieftains to follow one of the pillars of Islam — to support the poor and establish a public defense system. He found the work immensely meaningful, but the living conditions wore him down. He and his coworkers lived in a hotel-turned-bunker, which was blown up by the Taliban a few months after Steven left. When he got back to New York, he went to work with Avaaz, an NGO whose name meant “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern, and Asian languages. He felt aligned with their humanitarian mission and programs, from human trafficking to animal rights.

• • •

I landed at Dorval just before rush hour, got a cab, and gave the driver Bennett’s address in the Quartier Latin, on rue Saint-Urbain, Montreal’s equivalent to Bedford Avenue, the hipster epicenter, a half mile from where I lived. Although the houses in the Quartier Latin were the same as row houses found in Williamsburg, the French had painted them pale blue and adorned them with the wrought-iron balconies you find in New Orleans; in Williamsburg, the houses were ornamented with shrines to the Virgin and high-kitsch tributes to Italy.

We started down a commercial street. It was early fall and already freezing, but people were still sitting at outdoor cafés.

Another couple of blocks and the driver slowed down to read the street numbers. There was no forty-two. “Are you sure you have the right address?”

“Is this Saint-Urbain Street? Is there a north or south?”

“It should be right here.”

I paid the driver and got out. I wondered if I had reversed the number and walked back two blocks, but twenty-four was a Laundromat. Bennett had told me about this little restaurant below his apartment where the owner made him the best omelet he’d ever tasted, Deux something. I walked up and down the block but saw no restaurant at all. I typed Bennett’s address into my phone’s GPS and waited for directions, but the window showed there was no such address. “Oh, come on,” I said aloud. I went into a shop and asked if there was a restaurant nearby called Deux something.

“This is Montreal. Everything is Deux something,” said the clerk.

I retraced my steps as though the numbers would magically change and my mounting sense of unease would vanish. Had I ever written him at this address? No, we’d only e-mailed and Skyped. I tried to remember anything else he told me about his neighborhood or his friends, but all I could remember were the musicians he represented. He was a music agent for Canadian indie bands. Maybe one of them was playing in town. I bought a newspaper from a kiosk and a bag of Smarties. I found an outdoor café around the corner and took a seat despite the cold. I took a few deep breaths and opened the paper to the Arts section. There were no band names I recognized.

I noticed the café was filling up and people were ordering dinner. My plane home wasn’t leaving until midnight. The streetlights went on. The waiter came over again and this time I ordered something — poutine and a small Diet Coke.

“Is Diet Pepsi okay?”

He brought over a petite bottle. Unlike in America, the small was actually small, and I felt cheated.

I felt I should know what to do next. I’d spent the last two years memorizing procedures and methodologies, examining crime scenes, interpreting incident reports, investigating missing persons, all manner of victims. Yet I could think of no model to follow here. I had a funny thought: Could I file a missing person’s report on a dead man? Why had Bennett given me a false address? What had he been hiding? A wife? A family? Was he in trouble with the police? So this is why he always came to me. So the B&Bs with their prying hosts and too-sweet breakfasts were about secrecy, not romance. What else had he lied to me about?

Whom was I mourning?