by L. R. Wright
Eddie was hidden behind sunglasses and a straw hat with a wide brim. He planned to remove his disguise at the last minute, because he didn’t want to disguise himself from the girl, only from anybody else who happened to be hanging around. But there wasn’t anybody else hanging around.
Melanie walked quickly through her neighborhood, where the waxy white magnolias were in bloom, and the dogwood trees too, and lilacs, and rhododendrons, and azaleas.
Eddie, sitting upright behind the wheel, his hands on his thighs, cleared his throat nervously. Occasionally a vehicle passed him, and twice during the hour and a half he’d been waiting a bus had trundled by. But no pedestrians.
At a cross street, Melanie looked north to catch a glimpse of English Bay and, beyond it, the North Shore mountains. The sea was very blue today. She took one more look—maybe she’d take her studying to the beach this afternoon—and turned south, toward Fourth Avenue.
Eddie turned the key in the ignition, glanced into his rearview mirror, and pulled the Camaro out into the street. He drove west, very slowly, barely moving, whispering to himself, fast and urgently. He had to time things just right. He’d worked it out in his head over and over again. It would be a maneuver like when the army was showing off and part of the show was the motorcyclists doing those crossover things, one line of bikes crossing through the middle of another line of bikes. It would need that kind of split-second timing. And Eddie knew he had it.
Two blocks ahead, he saw her emerge from one of the cross streets. She looked casually left and right and started across the avenue.
The Camaro shot forward, gathering speed. He’d whisk past her real close, give her a little nudge, a little bounce off the fender…
She saw the car coming and hesitated, unable to decide which way to run.
Everything was happening very fast—but Eddie’s thinking was keeping up with it. As she loomed bigger and bigger in his windshield, he knew she wouldn’t just stand there forever, she’d break to one side or the other—he had to guess right, here, or he was going to screw everything up—and although she was almost dead center in the road, she was a little bit closer to the right-hand sidewalk than the left-hand one, and Eddie guessed she’d run to the right: he aimed a little bit to the left, just as she made her move.
The car struck her.
Eddie kept on going.
Melanie’s body was flung into the air.
The street was quiet again, in the early spring morning. The breeze lifted a few strands of Melanie’s hair and rustled the pages of a textbook that had spilled from her carryall. Some of her blood trickled out from under her head and moved hesitantly across the avenue, but it stopped before it reached the drifts of pink petals in the gutter.
15
“IT SOUNDS LIKE he’s had some kinda breakdown,” Bernie offered.
“Yes, that’s what’s in my mind too,” said Emma. A breakdown. It sounded reassuringly ordinary. Some piece of the mental machinery had gone temporarily awry. They’d laugh about it later, when the appropriate repairs had been made.
“That’s probably what it is,” said Bernie, nodding. She was sitting very straight in a kitchen chair, with a mug of coffee steaming on the table in front of her. She came on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for half a day, to do the heavy work.
Emma combed her hair back from her face with her fingers. “Whatever it is that’s happened, Bernie, he needs me. He surely does.”
Bernie’s face, crisscrossed with hundreds of tiny lines, was full of worry. It was a comforting sight. Every time Emma thought of Bernie, the phrase “nut-brown maiden” flickered through her mind; even though Bernie, at fifty-eight, was far from being a maiden.
“Bernie, another thing’s occurred to me. Maybe…what if he’s got amnesia?” This was a terrifying concept. Surely he would then be truly lost to her.
Bernie drank some coffee while she thought this over. Emma watched her intently. She was tough and sturdy, Bernie was; incapable of being horrified.
“He’ll have identification on him, though,” said Bernie, with satisfaction. “So it won’t matter if he loses his memory; he’ll still be able to figure out who he is.”
Emma nodded. “That’s true.” And once he’d found his way back to her, she would reclaim him, as she had once before, with love and unswerving devotion. Even if he never remembered the past they’d shared, together they’d make a new future for themselves. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know.”
Bernie stood up and went to the fridge. Emma didn’t protest. She’d let Bernie fix her some breakfast. She’d even try to eat it, because it was important to keep up her strength.
“What should I do, Bernie? What would you do, in my position?” She played with the rings on her fingers, the gold wedding band and the jade ring she wore on her right hand. She’d picked them out herself. The silver bracelet too. All she had to do was ask for something, and it was hers.
Bernie put two strips of bacon on a double layer of paper towels and popped them into the microwave oven. “He’s a missing person, your man is.”
“Well, Bernie, I don’t know if you could call him missing, exactly.”
Bernie fixed Emma with her beady black gaze. “He ain’t at his home. He’s quit his work. He ain’t phoned you. He’s been gone more than forty-eight hours. That’s missing.”
Emma bent her head. Missing person. The poignancy of the phrase struck at her heart.
“I got a man I do for,” said Bernie, dropping whole wheat bread into the toaster. “He’s a policeman. He’s the head man over there. He’s the fella to see.”
“Maybe,” said Emma, pushing crumbs around on the tabletop. Where had they come from, anyway, those crumbs? “Maybe he’s in the crawl space.” She looked up at Bernie. “I read a book once, about somebody who took up residence in a crawl space, and the people in the house didn’t know he was there for ages.”
“You got a basement here.” She plucked the bacon from the microwave and blotted it with more paper towels.
“Maybe he’s in the basement, then.”
Bernie poured a large glass of orange juice from a pitcher in the fridge. “Go have a look, if you think it’s likely.”
Emma shook her head.
Bernie buttered toast and made a sandwich with the bacon. She sliced it in half, put it on a plate, and set Emma’s breakfast in front of her. “Eat.”
To make her happy, Emma picked up the glass of juice. The first sip ignited hunger so intense it was intolerable. She drained the glass in a series of ravenous gulps, her mouth full of the voluptuous taste of oranges warmed by a summer sun. Her concentration on this sensation was absolute; when she set down the glass she was out of breath, almost dizzy. She licked her lips and turned to the sandwich and devoured it, chomping warm toast and crunchy bacon, pausing only once, to drink a glass of milk that Bernie set down before her.
When she was finished, she sat back and pushed the plate away from her. Butter was smeared on her mouth like lipstick. Bernie was nodding approvingly. Emma sat there trying to decide how she felt and whether there were any thoughts in her head.
“You live alone, don’t you, Bernie?”
“I do.”
“What’s it like?”
“I like it.” Bernie put Emma’s dishes in the sink and turned on the water.
“Do you get lonely?”
Bernie considered this, while squirting detergent onto the dishes. “Nope.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
Emma pushed herself up slowly from the table. “I’m going to town.”
Bernie looked at her quickly. “To do what?”
“I’m going to Charlie’s office.”
“You should be going to see Mr. Alberg, my policeman, that’s what you should be doing.”
“I will, Bernie. I’ll do it later.” She tore off a square of paper toweling and wiped her mouth. “But first I have
to see if he took my picture with him.”
“And what’ll it mean if he did, or if he didn’t?”
Emma put her arms around Bernie and rested her cheek against Bernie’s artificially auburn hair. “I don’t know.”
16
“NO NO NO NO NO NO,” said Eddie, over and over. He sped along the street and she vanished behind him, into his past—except that she didn’t.
She hadn’t looked like anything made of flesh; she’d bounced up into the air like a big doll, her arms flailing, and the bag thing she was carrying went one way and she went another, toppled down like a tree hit by an ax or a deer felled by a rifle shot, except not powerfully and prettily, like a tree falls, or a deer.
The Camaro had flung her into the air. He hadn’t expected that, hadn’t meant that. The Camaro had actually hit her, struck her with a force that he’d felt behind the wheel. He hadn’t expected that. Now he was afraid she might be hurt, and he hadn’t intended to hurt her, only scare her.
Yet he was…not exactly proud of himself, but satisfied with what he’d done. Because he’d done it on his own, solved his problem himself; he hadn’t needed Gardiner to do it for him. He felt excited, and stern, and full of righteousness.
And nobody had seen him, either. Except the girl, of course. She’d seen his car, all right…
Eddie pulled the Camaro over to the curb, because something was bothering him. She’d seen his car, yeah…
But she didn’t know it was his car. How was she supposed to know what kind of a car he drove?
He conjured up her face, turned toward the sound of the Camaro racing toward her, and saw it get bigger and bigger, and saw confusion on it, and then fear—but no recognition.
He banged the steering wheel and shouted. “She didn’t know it was me!” He banged it again. And then he remembered his disguise, the sunglasses and the big hat. “Shit!” he said, and tore them off.
He threw the Camaro into gear and hooked a U-turn, heading back the way he’d come. He had to get to her before she limped off to call the damn cops. He had to let her know who it was who’d hit her, because unless she knew who, she wouldn’t know why, and what was the point of that?
He saw her from more than a block away. She was still lying on the pavement. She wasn’t moving. He stopped in the middle of the street and stared intently through the windshield. Once he thought he saw her begin to stir, and relief stood on tiptoe, waiting to take over, but it was only some pages of a book, ruffling in the wind.
Eddie turned right and drove slowly around the block. He felt dazed; bewildered. She must have been hurt worse than he’d thought. But why was she just lying there? If she didn’t drag herself up off the street soon, some lunatic was going to come along and run right over her, squash her flat.
Now he was approaching from the east, like he had only a few minutes earlier, and he glanced to the north, as if expecting to see her emerge from the cross street. Let’s take this again, he heard someone say, and let’s get it right this time. But that was only in his imagination. In real life she was still lying in the street. He saw the bag with books in it. He saw one of her shoes—a black shoe; a loafer; it had come right off her foot.
He pulled over to the curb a block away and watched her. Soon a car came along, from the west, and almost at the same moment somebody came out of the apartment building across the street. The car braked hard and the driver jumped out and ran over to her, and so did the guy coming out of the apartment. The two of them leaned over her. The driver put his hand on her neck. Then they both straightened up, and the guy from the apartment went back there, walking slowly, his hands jerking at the sides of his body like they wanted to be holding on to something. The driver took off his jacket then and put it over the top part of her body, covering up her head.
Eddie felt like he was five hundred years old.
He pulled out and moved off up the street, and at Alma Street he turned, and a few blocks later he turned again, and he drove east on Broadway, weeping.
17
“I’VE COME TO SEE my husband’s office,” said Emma.
The young woman behind the desk was leafing briskly through the contents of a file folder she was holding on her lap. She looked up inquiringly. When she recognized Emma she jerked to her feet, and the folder emptied itself upon the floor.
“Hello,” said Emma pleasantly.
“Hello, Mrs. O’Brea.” The receptionist, clearly flustered, began picking up papers.
Emma moved toward the hall.
“Uh, Mrs. O’Brea,” said the receptionist quickly. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t think… Could you wait till Mr. Carlson’s back from lunch?” She was wearing stiletto heels and a skirt that barely covered her thighs, and she looked deservedly ungraceful, scrabbling around on the carpeted floor among the fallen papers.
“No,” said Emma. “I’m afraid I can’t.” She went down the hall to Charlie’s office.
His window offered a view of Park Royal.
Her photograph was gone from the top of his desk.
Emma closed the door behind her and leaned on it for a moment. Except for the photograph, everything was as it had been the last time she was here, which had to have been more than a year ago, she thought, calculating; before their fifth anniversary.
There were two large Emily Carr prints on the walls, one above a long, low bookcase, the other near a grouping of two easy chairs, a standing lamp, and a coffee table. The bookcase was still full of books. Emma went near and studied the titles, but all of them had to do with insurance and insurance law. The top of his desk was bare, but then it almost always was—except for Emma’s photograph—when he wasn’t actually working at it.
She sat in the swivel chair and looked down at the desktop. There were eraser crumbs on it, inexplicable, like the crumbs on the kitchen table.
Emma opened drawers, slowly, one after another. Each was empty. She sat back in the chair and rested her hands on the arms.
There was a light knock on the door, and Peter Carlson came in. Emma noticed that he left the door open.
“Emma. You should have told us you were coming.”
“Why?”
“Well, because,” he stammered, “because we could have had lunch or something.”
Emma had always thought of him as a kindly man. She had never met his wife. Maybe he didn’t have a wife. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a brightly patterned tie. He must have a wife, thought Emma. Men don’t buy ties like that for themselves.
“Where’s Charlie, Peter?”
He looked stricken. “You haven’t heard from him?”
Emma shook her head. “Where is he?”
Peter’s eyes flickered around the room as he took a step backward, toward the hallway. Then he forced himself to look at Emma straight on. He lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know.”
She stood up and looked out the window, seeing the exact same things that Charlie had seen every day of his working life, these last four years. “I don’t understand this.”
“I’m sure you’ll hear from him, Emma.”
“But why? What’s he gone and done?” She turned. “Tell me what happened.”
“He said he wanted to leave the firm. He said he wanted to do something else; I don’t think he’d decided what. That’s all I know.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“A month ago.”
“A month ago,” she said wonderingly. “And Friday was his last day here?”
“That’s right.”
Emma began shaking her head. “Well, something awful has happened. That’s for sure. I can’t make head or tail out of this situation.”
“Do you want some coffee, Emma?”
She picked up her purse from the floor beside the chair. “I don’t have time for coffee. I’ve got to find Charlie.”
***
She drove to Park Royal and left her car in a covered lot across from Eaton’s. She had some lunch in a
restaurant—an execrable hamburger—and watched other people eat: a small, middle-aged Oriental woman wearing a black dress and a salmon-colored scarf; a young woman with a lot of hair, in a red suit, picking at a shrimp salad while reading People; a couple talking animatedly to each other—the woman was blond and the man was gray-haired and reminded Emma of the English actor Terence Stamp.
She pushed her half-eaten hamburger away, imagining Charlie doing the same thing, four years before, and never returning to eat in this place again. He’d probably told the waitress it was an awful hamburger. But nicely. Charlie was always very courteous to people. That was one thing she did know about him.
Emma wandered through the mall, which had a lot of skylights and greenery, including some trees that were at least twenty feet tall.
On the upper level she came upon a large chessboard painted on the floor. People were moving three-foot-high men around on it. Nearby, on a ledge near one of the waterfalls, three normal-size games were under way. Charlie was a fine chess player. Emma wondered if he’d ever played here, while eating his lunch. There was a hot dog stand nearby, and a place that sold frozen yogurt.
In the drugstore she pretended she was Charlie, inspecting the shelves of shaving products and men’s cologne.
In the bookstore she browsed through the biography section.
In Eaton’s she looked at men’s clothing.
Finally she sat down on a bench. It was late afternoon now, and the mall was filled with high school students. After a while a woman eating an ice cream cone approached and asked Emma if she could sit next to her.
“I gotta get off my dogs for a minute,” she said, plopping down. “Whoof. No break’s long enough, you know?”
Emma said she knew. “Where do you work?”