Part 1
1
Agents search me at the Canadian border. Of course they do, those fascists.
What exactly is suspicious about a woman traveling alone by bus from Detroit and into Canada with no luggage, I ask you?
Well, put that way, maybe it’s fair, but an entire bus is held up while the border agents in their ill-fitting uniforms conduct a physical search of my person and ask me questions verging on the intimate. Intimacy and I aren’t well acquainted, so the questioning stalls for some time.
“How long were you in the United States?” the female agent asks again, starting from the beginning. She’s likely doing this for the benefit of her supervisor, who has decided to join the party. Though the woman is older, they both look like poster children for the SS, with their blond good looks and their belief in harassing citizens of the country they’re supposed to be guarding.
I tell them what they want to know, even though the information is stamped right there in my passport. My voice breaks from the cold. It’s freezing, even inside the checkpoint. Raindrops spatter the windows, and outside I can see the wind kicking up fallen leaves. Sending them dancing. The damp and the gray remind me of Vancouver, my city, but the biting cold tells me I’m far from home.
“And what was the purpose of your trip?” she asks.
I shake myself back to the present and try to focus. But it’s difficult. We’ve been through all this before. This is how they get you: a constant stream of repetition until you change your story out of sheer boredom.
But I’ve been questioned by fascists before, and I know their game.
“My father grew up in Detroit. I went to visit his childhood home,” I tell them. I don’t say that he was a child of the Sixties Scoop, a program where thousands of indigenous children from Canada were adopted out of their communities. I’m not sure if cultural genocide is covered in their cross-border orientation handbooks.
The agent doesn’t believe me. Her supervisor is too busy sending me a threatening glare to notice the subtle shift of my body, the tension around my mouth. My patience is at an end. They’re either going to do a more thorough physical search or not. The words strip and cavity come to mind. I have never liked being touched by strangers, and the idea of having my cavities inspected verges on the obscene.
Maybe this is why I try to explain myself, for once.
“My father died a long time ago,” I say. “Someone he used to know showed up on my radar recently, and I had some questions. I thought I’d go to Detroit to learn more about my dad’s life.” And his death. But that’s another story entirely. “I wasn’t planning to stay more than a couple days, but the trip took a little longer than I expected.”
I hear a door open and feel a blast of icy air on my nape. I look over my shoulder to see who’s behind me. Whether or not anyone new has come into the station. It’s an unconscious gesture, but a telling one.
One that they’ve noticed.
They exchange glances. “Looking for someone?” says the woman.
“No.” My attention moves from the man in the blue toque who’s just walked in, the man who was sitting near the middle of the bus we were both on, and snags on the agent’s latex gloves. I begin to imagine where those gloved hands might be going shortly. Which cavity they might start with first. I’m sweating now, despite the chill in the air.
The supervisor steps forward and speaks for the first time. His voice is deep and smooth, like the singer of a forgettable jazz band. He looks over my passport. “Nora Watts,” he says, drawing out the syllables. Is he trying to be sexy? If he is, it isn’t working. “Did you find what you needed in Detroit, Ms. Watts?”
“I found that my father is as dead as he’s ever been. Life moves on, and so should I.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” The supervisor notices for the first time how rough it is. How it sounds like it’s been scraped up from my diaphragm and shoved through my throat.
“Laryngitis.”
“You say you live in Vancouver but you’re going to Toronto. Why there instead of back home?” The supervisor takes over the questioning now, which is a plus. He seems more reasonable to me right about now, given the choice between him and the woman with the gloves. And I’m starting to enjoy the jazz voice.
“My daughter,” I say. “I’m going to see my daughter.”
The real question here is: Will my daughter want to see me?
They step aside to decide my fate. I try to look more like a fine and upstanding citizen, though my wardrobe and shabby appearance are telling a different story. That maybe I’m not so fine, definitely not upstanding, and it’s possible I don’t even have laryngitis.
I look like a woman on the run from her enemies.
A fair assessment, because that’s exactly what I am.
Part of me wants to tell them that my father’s bloodline goes back to this land before their ancestors even had the thought to come here, but the other part reminds me that my mother was an immigrant from the Middle East, and I may not want to pull that particular thread right now.
A baby in the waiting room begins to cry, putting everyone on edge. The baby’s brother, who looks to be about six, tries to get their mother’s attention, but she’s too busy searching through her bag for something to distract her crying child. Toque Man gives the maybe six-year-old a chummy smile.
As the infant continues to bawl, I stare at the gloves and the female agent’s long, thick fingers. Imagining where they might go if I’m not persuasive enough.
In the end, they let me back through to my country of birth with my cavities intact.
Back on the bus, some of my body heat returns. The bus heaves into motion, and I leave Detroit behind. Finally. With the greatest relief, I watch the scenery fly by outside the window.
Oh, Canada.
I relax, thinking I’m in the clear because the Ambassador Bridge is in the rearview mirror.
The relaxation doesn’t last for very long.
Toque Man is sitting directly behind the six-year-old’s mother, where he’s been ever since we first boarded the bus in America. She and the infant have the seat in front of him. The six-year-old is across the aisle. Whenever the boy turns to look at his mom, he sees Toque Man. With the bus only a quarter full, the man’s choice of seating is unthinkable. Nobody wants to travel in such close proximity to a young family. Nobody but this guy. At the border, I was too far away to hear what he was saying when his passport was checked, but I know whatever it was, he wasn’t being honest. His posture was relaxed, his smile a little too easy. Practiced.
It was the same way he’d smiled at the little boy.
I don’t like it at all.
I’m trying to keep my eyes open, to pay attention to the middle of the bus. We’re barely across the border when there’s a distraction I hadn’t anticipated.
The radio comes on.
It’s playing a song I recognize, one that I have sung. The song follows me into Windsor and then past it. I have left Detroit behind, but there’s that damn tune in my head—and now it’s on the radio, too. Sung by an unsigned soul artist and a former blues singer caught unawares on the airwaves, the song is a tribute to a relationship heading for the rocks. A call and response. It’s a good song, maybe even a great one, but it isn’t the kind of thing you hear on the radio anymore.