The Hidden Keys. Andre Alexis
Daniel’s father, had been like a father to Tancred as well. Daniel and Tancred, both born of African mothers, looked like siblings. The Mallays’ son, Olivier – pale as winter – was almost as close to him as Daniel. The three boys had been inseparable from kindergarten until the end of high school, and they were close still.
Tancred had long forgiven his mother for any supposed damage his childhood had done to him. But it seemed that she hadn’t entirely forgiven herself, that she blamed herself for his way of life. Before she died, Clémentine had made him promise to read the Bible in her memory. Tancred had agreed, because it would not have been possible to refuse her anything as she lay dying. And although he was not much of a reader, reading mostly to please others, it was an easy promise to keep. His mother had asked Daniel and Olivier, who’d been on death watch with him, to help her son change his life. A more difficult proposition. Daniel had said he would, when Tancred was ready to change. But Ollie said that he would not.
– I wouldn’t know how to do that, he said.
Ollie being Ollie, he could not have answered otherwise.
But Clémentine had asked in earnest. She’d wanted to believe, before dying, that her son would find the right path. And Tancred had been hurt, not because his mother wished him to live a better life but, rather, because she knew he was living a life in the shadows. That she knew this, moreover, had been his fault. He had decided, at nineteen, to be honest with her, whatever the consequences. So, when she’d asked him where he got his money, he had defiantly admitted that he stole things for a living. At her death, he cringed at the brashness of it. She’d loathed thievery. He had put her in the position of having to choose, day after day, between her conscience and her son. That she had steadfastly chosen her son was no credit to him, and he knew it.
After his mother’s death, it was as if Parkdale had turned away from him, all the familiar places seeming drab and pointless. This was not the worst of his bereavement, but it was unexpected. The worst was the feeling of irreality, like living in a state just before waking. Parkdale had been home to him since he’d moved there at eighteen, his first home as an adult. It was unbearable to feel as if he were suddenly estranged from the world.
For a while, nothing mattered to him. He went on as he had, stealing what was wanted by those who paid him to steal. But something was working its way out. He had become strange to himself as well and he began to question his way of life and his motives. Ironically, this was also the time when he most needed his skill – the planning, the cold carrying out, the algebra of thieving. It seemed to be the only thing to distract him from grief.
For three years following his mother’s death, Tancred did not see Willow at all. The idea that they were destined to be close faded to grey, along with any number of assumptions and ideas that had preceded the death of his mother.
And then Willow walked back into his life.
It was a Sunday and it had rained. Tancred was wet and cold as he sat in one of the half-booths at the Skyline: orange leatherette seats on both sides of a white laminate tabletop. Sunday was now the day he spent alone. He would wake at seven, eat eggs and brown toast at the diner, return home, read from the King James Bible, make plans for the week to come, clear his mind and go to sleep early.
By now, he’d spent Sundays this way for years, and even some who knew him assumed there was a religious tinge to his discipline. But there was not. What there was was devotion to his mother. For the hour or so it took for him to read twenty pages, Tancred felt her presence. Or at least he thought of her. His reading of the Bible did not lead him to God or prayer or worship. It did not lead him to a new life. Though it was no doubt less than what his mother had hoped for, he simply grew more and more familiar with what was, for him, a mostly tiresome but sometimes entertaining repository of catalogues, tales and poetry.
He had ordered his eggs and toast, when Willow came in off the street. She saw him and, speaking to the waiter, asked that her coffee be brought to Tancred’s table. She was neither spaced out nor flagrantly high. She was thinner than she had been, however, and she wore more makeup. She greeted him, took off her raincoat and sat down.
– I’ve been looking for you, said Willow. Freud Luxemberg told me you come here on Sundays. And Nigger told me you’re a thief. Is that true?
– Why do you want to know? asked Tancred.
– You think I’m a foolish old woman, said Willow. And I am. I know it. But I’m more than that, Tancred. If you’ll listen to me, I have a proposition. You don’t have to say anything. I’ll do the talking. But first, I want you to know how I ended up here.
– Where? asked Tancred. The Skyline?
– No, no, said Willow. Here. In this life.
She began to rummage in a purse that was black, cumbersome and capacious, with a clip that looked like two brass moths meeting, their entangled antennae keeping the purse closed.
– My name is Willow Azarian, she said. My family is well-known.
– You told me all this, said Tancred, when we met.
– Yes, she said, and you may have got the impression that I worship money and status. But I don’t. I just wanted you to know who I am.
She took a bank statement from her purse and said
– This is from my expense account.
She pushed the statement to his side of the table. Tancred looked at it. Yes, it belonged to ‘Willow Azarian.’ Willow reached across and put her finger beside a number at the bottom of the page. For a moment, looking down, Tancred assumed he was mistaken about the figure he saw there:
$15,011,957.07
– It’s only my mad money, said Willow. I have much more.
– Why are you showing me this? asked Tancred.
– I want your help, she answered.
Her eyes were blue, not big or round, but set off by her thick eyebrows. Her face was pleasantly oval, her lips thin but expressive. Her ancestry would have been difficult to guess. Her clothes, on the other hand, suggested ideas of elegance whose time had long passed. She was wearing a black dress with padded shoulders, the dress’s collar cascading from one shoulder like three dark ripples and coming to a point on the other.
Willow was out of place in Parkdale. It would have been difficult to say where she’d have fit in. But she was not weak.
– What can I do for you? he asked.
2 Willow’s Inheritance
By her own account, Willow had had a wonderful childhood. It had been everything she might have wished for. Her parents had been loving. Her siblings had helped to take care of her, changing her diapers and feeding her when her mother was tired. They had all doted on her.
For her first eight years, she felt loved and precious. The world itself was marvellous. The Azarians lived in Toronto for most of the year but in winter they moved to Key West where Nicole, their mother, had lived as a child. Willow had had, she believed, the best of north and south: the dry quiet of Rosedale (wealthy, its big houses politely distant from the street) and the sea-shush of Old Town (thirty degrees Celsius in the morning, houses modest and close); the soft rain along streets with tall trees and torrential storms so vivid she was certain their house in the Keys would shake apart.
Though she would not have changed a moment of her early childhood, it was not without its shadows, shadows that lengthened until they blotted out her adolescence. The worst of them was her mother’s illness: Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The eight-year-old Willow watched as the mother she loved was slowly taken from her, slowly becoming a woman Willow did not know. It took a year for Nicole Azarian to die.
This being the first and most frightening death in Willow’s life, it would be fair to say that she never recovered from it. For one thing, her mother’s death was the beginning of an anxiety about her father. For years she