Prized Possessions

by L. R. Wright

  On the lower level of the mall, near the entrance to Eaton’s, there was a shop that sold handbags and briefcases and luggage. As she walked through the door, the smell of leather was sudden and strong, and it created in Emma a flood of nostalgia so powerful she was made breathless. Somewhere in her head there must be a memory to explain this. What use were one’s senses, she thought resentfully, if they were so undisciplined as to create pain without providing an explanation? Quickly she blinked away tears, hoping they hadn’t dislodged any mascara, and looked around for a salesperson.

  She couldn’t see one at first, but she heard somebody humming. She’d never heard a hum with such a robust vibrato. It was issuing from a woman who was energetically cleaning a glass countertop in the corner of the store.

  “Excuse me,” said Emma, and the woman looked up and smiled.

  “I use vinegar and water,” she said, “in my own house, but it’s the smell, which doesn’t bother me, you understand, except in here it just doesn’t seem right, because of the leather, which it’s the smell of the leather that sells things in this store, and to have the place stinking of vinegar just doesn’t make sense.” She reached down to stow the bottle of Windex under the counter and threw the paper towel she’d been using into a wastebasket. “So. What can I do for you, dear?”

  Emma held up the photograph of Charlie. “Do you recognize this man?”

  She saw in the woman’s eyes that she did.

  “What’s your name?” said Emma.

  “Rita Hemming,” said the woman, who was about fifty years old and had short gray hair. She was Emma’s height but considerably heavier, and wore a gray skirt and a bright red short-sleeved sweater. Emma noted that her lipstick matched the sweater exactly, and that she used mascara and blusher but no eyeliner or eye shadow. “Who is he?”

  Emma averted her eyes and looked sadly at the floor. “He’s my husband.”

  Rita Hemming looked from the picture to Emma and back again. “Why are you looking for him?”

  Emma sighed. “I’m not looking for him. I know where he is. He’s in the hospital.” She curled her tongue around the delicious phrase and delicately eased it from her mouth: “Suffering from amnesia.”

  Rita looked at her in awe. “Really,” she breathed.

  “He was in a car wreck,” said Emma. “When he came to, in the hospital, he couldn’t remember a thing.”

  Rita shook her head in wonderment.

  “He had identification, of course,” Emma went on, “and so the police called me, and I rushed straight to his side.”

  “And he didn’t know you? His own wife?”

  Emma, surprised and gratified, realized that there were tears in her eyes. She reached into her purse for a tissue. “Physically, he’s fine. But it’s very hard on him psychologically.”

  “And on you too,” said Rita, exclaiming her indignation.

  “The doctors feel that if I can re-create the days before the accident for him,” Emma said, marveling at her ingenuity, “and fill in as many gaps as possible, it might help his memory to come back.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now that I do recognize him; I do indeed.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad,” said Emma in a tremulous whisper.

  And she heard a voice in her head, as clear as a bell, and it was saying: I’m going to get you. I’m going to get you, you bastard.

  23

  EDDIE STOOD INDECISIVELY on the corner of Fourth and Macdonald and let the stream of pedestrians break against him and flow around him. The weather had turned cold and blustery again, even though it would be May tomorrow, so he was wearing his beige jacket with the zipper in the front. There was a splotch of grease on the right-hand pocket, which held a retractable ballpoint pen and a small notebook, three inches by five inches, with a coil at the top and a picture of a cat on the cover: he’d bought them at the drugstore.

  He was oblivious to the irritated glances thrown by the people swirling against and around him.

  He had on brown cotton pants that had become baggy in the knees, and high-top running shoes. His shirt was dark blue, and under it he wore a gray T-shirt.

  He was full of anxiety, standing there. There were three things he had to do today, and for the moment he was helpless in the thrall of this: he had to go to work, and he had to go to the gym, and he had to go to that house.

  He didn’t have to be at work until two o’clock, and it was only nine in the morning now. So he had lots of time.

  He just couldn’t figure out whether to work out first or do the house first. They were both extremely important things. Was one more important than the other one? That was what he was trying to decide.

  Eddie recalled that both the house and the gym were south and west of where he stood, so he began walking. He didn’t think to look before he stepped off the curb, and he collided with a woman crossing the sidewalk in front of him. Flustered, he tried to apologize, but she was rushing to catch the light. He blundered on, into the intersection. A car swerved to miss him, and the driver hit the horn and let it blare and blare while Eddie, scrambling back onto the sidewalk, felt his face get beet red with embarrassment. The WALK light came on, and he made his way across the street. He stopped to dig his cigarettes and lighter out of his inside jacket pocket. His hands shook as he lit up. That kind of thing was always happening to him. It made him so damn mad.

  After a while he’d calmed down some, so he tossed the cigarette butt away and started walking again, west on Fourth Avenue.

  It was a gray, miserable day. He didn’t feel much like working out; but he had to keep his strength up. Eddie was very strong. He didn’t look like the other guys who used the gym, though, which sometimes made him depressed, because although strength was what he went there for, what he worked so hard there for, it would have been good if he’d looked strong too. He couldn’t figure out why his pecs were flabby, and his gut was soft, and his waist had a roll of fat around it. Someday pretty soon now he was going to complain about this to the guy who ran the gym.

  He trudged on, hunched against the cold. He missed his car a lot. He looked forward to the day when it would be safe to drive it again. He daydreamed about that: he’d go out to Abbotsford on the Greyhound bus, and he’d walk up Delair Road to Rollie’s place, and head out to his barn, and open the door—and there it’d be, the Camaro, all ready and waiting for him, shiny and purring, just like he’d left it. He’d had the broken light fixed, so it was perfect again. Pristine. (This was a word Eddie had recently looked up in the dictionary. “Extremely pure.” He thought it was the perfect word for the Camaro.)

  While it was away, though, he didn’t mind using the city buses to get places. And often he got rides with Gardiner. And sometimes he walked. Walking wasn’t so bad. Except on a day like this, that felt more like winter than goddamn spring. I should have worn my gloves, he thought—but then he remembered that he had a reason for not wearing them: you can’t write when you’re wearing gloves. Eddie fumbled quickly at his pocket to make sure the pad and the pen were there…and that decided him, feeling the pen there, and the little notepad; that made up his mind.

  He felt a huge wave of relief. He hated not being able to make up his mind about something. There was nothing, nothing, he hated so much. And no matter how often he reminded himself that his mind would make itself up when it was ready, because after all it always had, Eddie was afraid that this time it wouldn’t, and he’d be dangling there helpless hour after hour, not being able to do anything, not one single thing, because he couldn’t make up his goddamn mind which thing to do next.

  He strode confidently down Fourth Avenue and passed the gym without giving it a glance, and eventually he turned right and then left.

  Eddie was now on a narrow, tree-lined street of two- and three-story houses. He was in the general neighborhood that Sylvia lived in, except she lived on a street that wasn’t nearly as nice as this one. Whistling under his breath, Eddie eventually stopped across the street from a house t
hat was partially obscured by a tall hedge.

  He hunkered down against the trunk of a tree and pulled out his notebook and his pen. He noted the time and entered it at the top of the first page. He hesitated, because he’d never done this kind of thing before and wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then he wrote: “No sign of life.”

  Though of course there was life inside the house. That was the problem. One of the problems.

  ***

  “Roommate?” It had come out of Gardiner’s face like a yelp. “She had a roommate?” He’d slapped his knee and near to killed himself laughing.

  Well, Eddie didn’t need that. He already knew he was in trouble. “So you see what I mean,” he’d said doggedly, ignoring Gardiner’s high-pitched cackle. “She must have talked to her about me. And now she’ll tell. The cops. Or Harold. Somebody. She’ll tell. I know she will, because you can’t shut up a woman, they all talk, yak-yak-yak, can’t keep their dumb mouths shut for a minute, none of them.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” said Gardiner, wiping his eyes with his hand and then wiping his hand on his jeans. He leaned against the fender of his beat-up Olds, which was parked outside the liquor store at the corner of Broadway and Cypress. Eddie hated the way Gardiner treated that Olds. It caused him real pain to see a good car go unappreciated, uncared for. Gardiner was grinning at him. “At least,” he said, “you don’t need to worry about her telling the cops. That’s hearsay, and it don’t count for a rat’s ass.”

  Eddie felt a great deal better. He was sometimes skeptical about things Gardiner told him, but not when they were things having to do with the law, and crime. Gardiner was something of an expert when it came to law and crime. And although most of the time Eddie disapproved of this—Gardiner’s life was haphazard and uncertain, and he’d already been sent twice to the slammer—it did come in handy now and then to know somebody in the crime field, even if he was kind of a low-ranking criminal.

  His relief didn’t last long, though.

  “It’s the fucking notes you gotta worry about,” Gardiner said, unlocking the trunk and pushing up the lid. “Especially the second one. Jesus,” he said, shaking his head, “you can be some stupid, Ed.” He threw his cigarette onto the street and leaned into the trunk, where several cases of empty beer cans sprawled on top of a box of tools, an old piece of orange tarpaulin, a big-eyed teddy bear with one ear missing, and—Eddie could hardly believe this—a shotgun, a Winchester Defender, for God’s sake, with a pistol grip—clumsily wrapped in a sheet that had come unwound.

  “What’re you doing with that thing?” he said, momentarily distracted.

  “A guy owed me,” said Gardiner vaguely. “Come on, gimme a hand here, willya?” he said, hauling out the beer cans and dropping them on the pavement next to the car: he was going to cash them in at the liquor store.

  Eddie reached into the trunk and plucked out two cases of cans.

  “You know what you gotta do, don’t you?” said Gardiner.

  “No. What?” Eddie heard the whine in his voice and was disgusted with himself.

  Gardiner looked up at him, exasperated. “Get the fucking things back,” he’d said.

  ***

  So that was why Eddie had parked himself, shivering, on his hams in front of that damn house. He was studying the place and brooding about how to get inside it. He already knew that he’d forgotten something important: he hadn’t thought to bring anything to eat. And when he was concentrating, or worrying, or fretting about something, he absolutely needed to eat. It was a stomach condition he had—too much acid, or not enough, or some damn thing. He stared at the gap in the laurel hedge and wished he had a milkshake or a bag of chocolate chip cookies.

  Time passed, and his rear end got cold, and his stomach started acting up, like he’d known it would. He wondered how long he ought to stay. This kind of work—surveillance—it was a strain on a person. And after a certain amount of time he’d be bound to attract somebody’s attention, which would be bad. He thought about it for a while and decided he’d do two hours at a stretch.

  No, an hour and a half.

  He’d been sitting there for thirty-five minutes when he got a glimpse of the front door of the place opening. Somebody ran down the steps and came out through the hedge: a girl with red hair. Eddie wrote her description in his notebook, as she bustled off down the street.

  Eddie was extremely pleased with himself.

  He checked his watch. Another half hour to go.

  But after a while it occurred to him that the place was empty now. He sat up straighter. His stomach started to churn. He could pretend he was a repairman, maybe. Bang on the door, and when nobody answered—what?

  Break the window. He could get in that way.

  Or maybe she’d left the back door unlocked.

  He put the notepad and the pen in his pocket and stood up. His butt ached from sitting on the cold ground. He wiped the palms of his hands on his cotton pants and got ready to cross the street—and all of a sudden a second girl came out the door.

  Eddie watched, half hidden behind the tree, as she emerged from the gap in the hedge and headed for a gray Plymouth Reliant parked in front of the house. This one had dark hair that was short on one side and long on the other, like somebody had made a big mistake. Eddie scrunched his head down into his shoulders and wrote her license plate number in his notebook. Two roommates she’d had.

  Okay. So now the place was empty. Eddie started across the street, putting himself in the frame of mind of somebody who was a repairman, trying to decide if he was going to be an electrical-type repairman, or a jack-of-all-trades, or what.

  He was halfway to the opposite sidewalk when the front door opened again, and another damn girl came out. Eddie’s heart lurched and began to pound. He swerved to the right, walked to the corner and around it, and went into the first café he saw.

  He sat down and ordered a milkshake, and hid his shaking hands under the table while he waited for it.

  Next time he’d take along a toolbox, he decided. This would make him look like a repairman and would also provide him with break-in tools.

  But before he barged in there, he had to find out just how the hell many girls lived there, anyway.

  24

  LATER THAT SAME DAY, Alberg went through the gate in the picket fence that marched past the front of Emma O’Brea’s house. It was a very ordinary-looking house—a lot more ordinary than the Sokolowskis’ next door, which was painted a deep sunny yellow. The house that Emma lived in was white. It looked tranquil, almost sleepy; the windows were covered with fiberglass curtains that revealed nothing of the inside—like Charlie’s eyes, thought Alberg, remembering. There was a small lawn, bisected by a sidewalk that led straight to the porch and then broke off to either side in the shape of a Y. Some bushes grew close to the house, and Alberg, climbing the four steps to the front door, saw narrow basement windows half hidden behind them.

  He knocked on the door, and through its small window he saw Bernie emerge into the hall and hurry to open the door. She was holding an oily dusting cloth, wearing her white dress that buttoned up the front and her white nurse’s shoes with the hole cut out of the left one. Her brassy auburn hair was covered with a hairnet, as usual. Alberg smiled at the sight of her and wondered what his mother would make of Bernie Peters.

  “Hi, Bernie,” he said, when she opened the door.

  “I’ll go get her,” said Bernie, stepping back and gesturing Alberg inside. A package of cigarettes and a disposable lighter were tucked into the pocket of her dress. She smoked the same brand that Alberg’s father had smoked. Alberg watched her walking away from him, sturdy and brisk, her legs slightly bowed. He wondered how much cigarettes had had to do with his father’s death. People blamed everything on smoking now. Smoking, or eating the wrong kind of fat.

  He waited in the hall, looking around. Doorways on the left and right led into the living room and the dining room. The hall appeared to divide the lower flo
or in two; he could see another door at the end, which must open onto the backyard. He figured that the kitchen would be behind the dining room, and a large bedroom across the hall from it.

  Soon Bernie reappeared, with Emma in tow.

  “I’ve got some time off,” said Alberg, “and Sid Sokolowski suggested I volunteer to look for your husband. Unofficially,” he added quickly.

  “You take him up on it,” said Bernie to Emma, poking her in the shoulder. “I’ll get coffee,” she said, and hurried away.

  Emma stood in the middle of the hallway, looking at him, her eyes searching; Alberg felt them moving over his face like the searching fingertips of a blind person. He felt his skin begin to itch.

  “That would be very good of you,” said Emma finally. “Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you.”

  “I can’t promise anything. I mean, I might get nowhere at all.” She nodded solemnly, her eyes continuing to explore him. Then he felt the mask settle down upon his face; and he relaxed and smiled at her through his mask, safe now. “Let’s sit down somewhere, okay?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry,” said Emma, and led him into the living room. “I’ve been looking for him on my own. It’ll be such a relief to have somebody helping me. But I’ve made progress,” she said eagerly. “A little bit, anyway. Just a minute.” She hurried away, and returned almost immediately. “You’ll need this,” she said, handing Alberg a snapshot of her husband. “I found somebody who recognized him,” she said, and told Alberg about the woman in the leather store. Then she hesitated, embarrassment on her face. “For some reason I thought he might be living there. In Park Royal. Up in the rafters, or in the washrooms, or somewhere. I don’t know what put such an idea in my head, but there it was. Until I found out that he’d bought a set of luggage.”