A Knock on the Door

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR, written & edited by Caitlin Hicks

This is the story of a knock on the door. A January morning. A child who vanishes into thin air, many years ago. It is a true story.

Told to me by Lise Langlois, who just died –  between December 27th and yesterday. Lise inspired me to listen to and to take down, to organize, to edit and tell this story. A generous woman, a shining light. I am so sorry she is not with us!

I had begun gathering stories from ‘old timers’ for a show I later called The Life We Lived. As we were producing a lot of theatre in those days, we knew many musicians. And we really liked this crackerjack musician named Len, who got around quite handily on crutches, had wispy red hair and a robust personality. He could sing and play guitar and was often part of a rotating ‘band’ of musicians who played at The Roberts Creek Hall in the Nineties. He had been in a car accident and told us he was paralyzed ‘from the tits down’. It was the day his life changed irrevocably, as his car tottered over a cliff for and he was trapped, suspended in pain between life and oblivion. Miraculously, the car balanced there until hours later, he was rescued. Instead of living in a wheelchair, Len got around on crutches.

Len said his tale of woe might be interesting, but he knew of this really amazing story with unexpected and weird elements, and it belonged to his partner, Lise. He wouldn’t say anything about it, I could only get it directly from her. We met, and I worked with her to hear her story, edit it, get the continuity, make it understandable and presentable so that it could be told out loud. Lise was distant enough from the story – in years – to have worked her way through it. She was excited to hear it told.

As part of an early show called STORIES FOR A WINTER SOLSTICE, I performed A Knock on the Door at The Gumboot Café in a Christmas show. Lise is French Canadian, and so I exaggerated her ‘accent’ to put the character of Eva into that persona. It allowed me freedom to express what was required to tell the story as well as I could.

I was thrilled to be the medium for expressing this story. Lise had invited her other daughter, who was born after Rachel went missing; she invited Jackie and Steven (mentioned early in the story) almost as witnesses; they were the two people who had seen Lise’s small daughter the night before she disappeared. It seemed to me that the story had come full circle.

But there was more.

I had been in the audience at The Sunshine Coast Arts Centre when Susan Crean read the prologue to her book, In the Name of the Fathers. Here, Crean described the scene of a woman stealing her child from a pram in a park in Toronto, a scene she had personally witnessed. The author began her discussion of her book with this incident to show the irony of a mother being accused of stealing her own child. The woman who kidnapped her own daughter was Lise; the child, Rachel in this story.

Lise had heard of Susan Crean, and her book, but neither of them had met. Someone put me in touch with Susan and I arranged for them to ride up to Pender Harbor together prior to the performance of Lise’s story at a show I was performing at The Sundowner Inn that night. After the performance, we posed for a photograph together. I still have the photograph my refrigerator.

In the photo: Maggie Guzzi, me, Lise Langlois, Susan Crean.

Here is the story. Remembering Lise Langlois.

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