Nicolai's Daughters (3 page)

Alexia frowned. Had he known this all along? “But we've buried him here already,” she said. 

“He wants you to deliver a package to your sister.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your sister, Theodora. You.” He stared at her for a moment, then looked away, shaking his head. “I'm sorry, Alexia. I thought he'd told you.”

She stood up abruptly, almost knocking into him. “Excuse me?”

His eyes pleaded. “He didn't want to die with this secret hanging between the two of you.”

She couldn't look at him. “I thought he was delirious.”

Stuart put his arm around her.

She pulled away.

“It can't be true.”

“All I know is that he wants you to deliver what's in this box to your half-sister. I mean Theodora.” He walked around to the other side of his desk and sat down heavily in his chair.

She stared at him in the same way she'd stared at her father when he used some Greek expression she didn't understand.

“This was hard for him.”

“Was it? I think he liked secrets.” She crossed her arms against her chest. “He liked to play, and he never minded leaving his messes for others to clean up.”

“Alexia, you're not being fair.”

“He never told me anything important until it was too late.” She felt tears welling up. No way was she going to cry. No damn way. She swallowed hard, blinked and focused on what Stuart had placed on his desk.

She couldn't help the gasp that escaped from her chest. They'd cleared out her mother's things years ago, and yet, here were her ribbons holding the lid of this shoebox in place. Her mother had tied up her hair with these ribbons while she vacuumed the house or weeded the garden. Why had her father used them to tie this box? He could be so clueless sometimes. They were likely hanging around when he needed them so he used them. Never once thinking that maybe she'd like to have them.

Alexia reached out to touch the ribbons, could almost hear her mother's voice again. “We'll clean up, then go to the park.”

Sara was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Alexia sat on the closed toilet lid beside the counter, her legs tucked underneath her. “I can help,” she said, handing Sara a blue ribbon. She watched her mother loop it around her long, thick hair.

Something cool stroked Alexia's forearm. She looked down at Stuart's hand, at the trail of liver spots.

“You are sisters. This box may make a difference to her. It might help you too.”

She turned and walked out of his office, her heels ringing on the hardwood floors. No. No. No. Stuart's pleas dropped behind her. I took care of him my whole life, she fumed as she punched the elevator buttons. I can't remember a time when I didn't. He never trusted me enough to tell me what was going on. Anytime I asked, everything was always great. It wasn't great. He was sick. He had a child with another woman.

Liar.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Stuart showed up at her apartment door, his tie loosened, his jacket slung over his arm. He left his briefcase and a large plastic bag at the front door and followed her into the living room. Alexia ignored the bag. He was still trying to pawn off that box, she thought.

He sat heavily on the couch. She sat stiffly on the loveseat, her hands tucked under her legs.

“I've known you your whole life, Alexia,” he said. “I know how hard this is.”

“I don't want to have anything to do with that box, Stuart.”

She turned her back to him to face Coal Harbour and the flickering lights on the north shore. Why couldn't Stuart have protected her from all this? After all, he'd been a second father to her. And if he couldn't do that, why hadn't he advised her father to tell her about this long ago? This is what lawyers do. At the very least, he should have advised his client to take his stupid secret to the grave.

“Alexia, you're the executor of his estate. Think about your professional responsibilities.”

“And what if I don't want to?”

“He trusted you.”

She shrugged.

Minutes passed and she didn't move. Finally, she heard the door click closed behind him. Go, she thought. Dad did when things got tough. You might as well too.

Her windows vibrated at the bang of the Stanley Park cannon just as they did every night at nine o'clock. She went to the bathroom and saw the large plastic bag by the front door, saw the shape of the shoebox inside. Forget it, she said out loud. I'm not getting involved. This is not my problem.

She ignored it that night and every night for a week, then two. Each time she kicked it on her way out the door she was reminded of what her father expected. Sometimes she knelt and touched the ribbons and thought about her mother. Finally, she loosened a ribbon from the box, wrapped it around her own long hair and looked at herself in the mirror. She expected to see her mother. Instead, her father's eyes stared back at her.

As a child Alexia had been envious of her friends who had summer vacations with cousins, aunts and uncles. She had vacations with her father or was sent to summer camps. She'd wondered what it would be like to have a big family and asked her father why they didn't visit his. He never gave her an answer that made any sense. More lies.

Alexia had met her aunt Christina only once, when she came to visit in Vancouver a few years before Sara died. She found a picture in her father's desk when she finally got around to clearing it out. A phone number was scratched on the back. As she dialled, she thought, it's the right thing to do: tell a woman her brother is dead.

“You need family now,” Christina said. “What is for you in Vancouver?”

If only Christina had brought up the subject of Theodora, Alexia would have sent her the shoebox. Then she could get on with her life. It sat, an undone responsibility, a task she couldn't check off. I don't want to know this half-sister, she thought, or play nice like Dad always told me to do. He'd brag about my honour roll marks, the fact that I was the captain of my undefeated high school basketball team, puffing up my small successes until I didn't know if they were real. When I performed, he loved me. Like some trained seal, I got used to that stupid smirk I could get out of him whenever he liked what I was doing.

After that first call, Christina phoned Alexia every Sunday. At the end of each conversation she said the same thing: “Come home to us, your family.”

“Your mother, poor girl, is gone too early, your father too. No husband. You are young. You need to relax, take a break from everything.”

“I don't take breaks.”

“Time to start, no?”

She ignored her aunt. Work and more of it was the only thing that could keep her mind off what her father had asked her to do. Keep her mind off him. She walked to work and avoided the place on Cordova Street where her father used to meet his sea-wall-strolling buddies every morning for a walk and breakfast. She didn't let herself think about how he'd wave as she went by. She stayed at the office until close to nine. Sometimes when she got home earlier, she'd even forget to anticipate his eight o'clock phone calls, his nightly check-in to see how her day had been. Eventually, she unplugged the phone as soon as she came in the door. She stopped expecting his Saturday morning drop-ins too, warm
galaktoboureko
or some other pastry in a box in one hand, two small bottles of apricot juice from the Greek deli in the other. Instead, she'd go for a run, poke her head in a few shops, pick up a paper, sit on a park bench and read for half an hour, her drying sweat making her cold.

The stack of files lay on the kitchen table. She'd planned to review them, make notes and get ready for the following week's negotiations. Instead, she was sitting on the living room floor and watching one floatplane after another taxi into and out of Coal Harbour. Preoccupied with the sea bus on its treadmill run to the north shore, she blamed the claustrophobic sky for her apathy. Raindrops splattered against her window. She told herself she'd sit for another few minutes and then get on with work.

Damn that shoebox. Why can't I get someone else to take it off my hands? She'd moved it into the front closet because she was sick of tripping over it. What had her father given Theodora? Money? Some old family papers she wasn't allowed to see? Why her and not me? Her stomach ached.

She sat in front of the window until the sky changed from murky to black. She couldn't figure out how to make herself move. The lights from a plane in the harbour disappeared into the sky. Her muscles throbbed. She saw her father's downcast eyes, spotted the quiver in his jaw. He was disappointed in her.

“Don't live like me. You have family,” he'd said when he told her about the other daughter.

“What about me?” she said out loud to the blackness beyond the window.

She fell asleep on the floor. When she woke, it was the middle of the night. She felt him standing in front of her, shaking his head. “Why are you sleeping on the floor? Don't you have a bed?”

“I'm not little anymore,” she hurled back. “I can do anything I want.” The anger in her voice surprised her.

She stumbled to her bedroom. The mirror set lay on her dresser. She'd brought it home after he died. She held the mirror up and heard him say it clearly: “Do this for me.”

She pushed the images away. She stared into the mirror at the creases in her face. Her French braid hung loose; frizzy wisps stuck out in all directions. She licked her fingers and stroked her hair to make it lie flat, but the wayward bits refused to weave back into place. She pulled out the elastic and threw it on the dresser.

He wasn't going to let her be until she got rid of that box. She slammed her hand against the dresser so hard her arm went numb. It ached as she typed and revised drafts of her request to the firm. She would send it by email. Once she'd clicked ‘Send' she crawled into bed. For the first time in months, she slept until the sun was high in the sky and clawed at her eyelids, untroubled by any dreams.

“We need you here, Alexia. You're one of our finest.” Dan stood beside his desk and held onto the piece of paper he'd ripped out of the printer. His tie was cinched tight, his jacket buttoned. The consummate professional, she thought.

“I need to sort some things out.” Alexia stood just inside the door to his office. She held his gaze.

Dan, her firm's senior partner, sat down behind his desk, and motioned for her to take a seat. He fingered the edges of her note. “I can't lose you.”

“Look, Dan, I know this isn't done, especially by junior partners. But I need to get away for a while. A week, two at the most.”

“Is this the best time for you to be taking off?”

Why did he want to be difficult? I've never taken so much as a vacation day, she thought. This is important. Doesn't he get that? And besides, she only wanted enough time to deliver the package to Christina, and convince her to pass it on. He could do without her for that long. The place wasn't going to fall apart.

He picked up the email. She watched him read it again. When he finally spoke, Dan offered more money, flexible hours, and when that didn't work, he said he'd miss her. She sat on her hands, teetered on the hurt one and dug her fingernails into the underside of her thighs. She repeated, “I have to do this,” as much to convince herself as to convince him.

“You've got more guts than brains,” he said. “I like that.” He tugged a short swath of his hair through his fingers; a nervous habit of his she'd gotten used to over the five years they'd worked together. Funny how he could be so formal and businesslike and have this one thing that made him seem so vulnerable.

In the end, he approved her leave on the condition she be available by phone or email.

“I'll be back before you notice.”

“I hope so.” He grinned, then his mouth returned to its single line. He faced his computer. “Keep in touch. Right?” he said over his shoulder.

The pilot's voice mumbled that they were landing in Athens in twenty minutes and suggested people sitting on the right-hand side of the plane enjoy the view of Vouliagmeni. Alexia looked down on the small boats scattered across the turquoise water and the dots of people on the colourless sand. A perfect postcard scene except for the film of brownish-grey smog. The current temperature: 35 degrees Celsius. She rubbed her hands against the seat and tried not to think about the people she was about to meet.

In the arrival lounge, swarms of passengers elbowed and jostled forward beyond the gate controlled by one short, taciturn security guard. An older couple stopped in front of Alexia. A family of six or seven ducked under the gate and surrounded the couple, preventing her from moving. Shouts, tears, smiles, laughter and words she didn't understand. Alexia tried to get around one side of the group, then the other, but couldn't find a way so she stood and waited, staring up at a ceiling fan.

The guard finally ordered the family to move along. Alexia moved past him and walked into the crowd, into the sea of placards inked with names, a few in English, most in Greek.

Her name, too —
ALEXIA
— in bold, box letters. The woman who held the sign and a shrub-size clutch of white chrysanthemums was a slightly younger, shorter version of her father. Alexia recognized his high cheekbones and hazel eyes. She stopped, let the wave hit her.

“
Paidi mou
,” Christina said. “It is me, your
thia
Christina. You are your father's daughter.” She hugged Alexia, her grip pinning Alexia's arms against her sides. The smell of garlic veiled Christina's hair and her dark, too-loose-fitting suit. When she finally let go, Christina reached up towards Alexia's face and pulled her chin towards her. Her aunt's eyes were as clear as her father's had once been.

“I am so happy,” Christina said, and before she could finish she sniffled, her face contorted as if holding her emotions in check.