Fiction
He followed the official down several hallways until they paused outside a door. The young man knocked and entered. The older civil servant behind the desk rose and shook Peter's hand, gesturing for him" to take a seat and brusquely waving the younger man away. Peter noticed the little Canadian flag pin in his left lapel.
The man spoke aggressively. "Mr. Forrest, my name is Macdonald and my job is to make sure Canadians in China have as little trouble with the authorities as possible."
"Am I in trouble?" Peter couldn't help it. His voice stuck and rasped in his throat. Annie looked up at his face.
"No, no. It's more a matter of confirming a report made by a third party about an incident at the orphanage you visited a few days ago in Fujian province. Could you tell us in your own words what happened there?"
So Peter spoke about Chen, the drive to the orphanage, the army-occupied building next door to the orphanage, how nice the orphanage looked, the fire there and their subsequent exit, how the soldiers had come to put out the fire and how he had then been driven back to the airport.
"And those things were all that you saw, all that struck you?" Macdonald looked sharply at Peter as he spoke.
Peter wished he knew whether the man wanted full disclosure for some reason of security or would just as rather he, Peter, kept quiet about seeing the surgeons come up from the orphanage basement. It was Annie who decided him. The most important thing now was to get her back to Canada.
"That's it. For an orphanage, I thought it was situated in a great spot, lots of plants and forest in the background. The children looked happy. The staff were nice people." He looked blandly at Macdonald.
The man held his gaze for a moment then made a note. "Thank you for your time,"' he said, rising and shaking hands again. "Enjoy your trip and safe voyage home."
I only spotted the photo because Gail stopped to talk to her son’s hockey coach. He was a moose of a guy, like one of our regulars in cells who required three men to restrain. Or, as the joke goes, one woman.
While they discussed Mighty Mite registration, I busied myself in a dark corner of the garage. A shoebox full of pictures was going for three dollars—cheap gold plastic frames with calendar prints of kittens, flowers, babies, plus the one that caught my eye. It was an old sepia photo of twin girls, about four or five, dressed for a formal pose in long ruffled dresses with big bows in their ringlets and black lace-up boots. It looked exactly like one my grandmother had given me of her and her sister. Hardly possible coming from a home here in rural Saskatchewan, but I couldn’t resist the urge to compare them.
“I just want the one picture,” I said to the large woman sitting at the cash table. “Here’s three dollars for it.”
“Three dollars for the whole box.”
“I don’t want the whole box.” I thought I was doing her a favour by allowing the box to sell twice, but her expression told me I knew nothing about garage sales.
Seeing us, Gail pulled away from the hockey coach and came to my rescue. “She’s flying, Joyce. She doesn’t need any more baggage. This is my friend Bella from Vancouver—Constable Dryvynsydes. She and Monty trained together.”
I winced that Gail had to work in the “Constable,” but kept a friendly smile on my face. Joyce nodded without returning the smile. When she accepted my three dollars, I felt I had cleared customs with an undeclared pair of shoes on my feet.
“Whose stuff is this?” Gail asked.
“Multi-family, looks like Cindy Mingus,” said Joyce, distracted by a woman behind us who seemed eager to transfer a Crock-Pot and an armful of jigsaw puzzles to the table.
Gail and I moved out of the garage and down the driveway as fast as we could, leaving the carton of gilt-edged pictures behind. Before we reached the safety of Gail’s minivan, Joyce bellowed, “Don’t forget the bake sale!”
Gail let out an exaggerated sigh. “You didn’t have to buy anything. I just wanted to give you a sample of local colour. What we do for recreation here in the boonies.”
I studied the picture again. “I wanted this. It looks like one Sara gave me—you must have seen it. The only evidence she had of a twin sister. I’ll dig mine out when I get home, if I can ever find it.” I stared at the bows on the girls’ heads—one straight and neat, the other floppy. Sara said her floppy bow was the only way she could tell herself from her sister. “But there’s no way they could be the same. Sara’s was taken in Nanaimo.”
