by Shari Lapena
“Shit!” his mother said.
Harold was terrified.
His mother calmly surveyed the damage and then turned to him and said, “Don’t worry, most spirits are harmless.” As she swept up the broken china, she added, “I can’t say I’m surprised—the same thing happened to my Scottish aunts when they were about my age.”
Harold had never met the Scottish aunts, and after that he didn’t want to.
They’d lived in one of those tall, narrow, nineteenth-century Victorian houses in Cabbagetown. Harold could actually walk from where he now lived to Riverdale Park, cross over the pedestrian bridge that spanned the Don Valley Parkway, walk up the steep hill and through Riverdale Farm and come out at the park at the other end—the very same one he’d played in as a child. From there, it was just a couple of short blocks to the house he’d grown up in. He never made that walk, but he could if he wanted to.
Harold thought he could remember being a happy kid once, but after his father died, at the breakfast table over his bacon and eggs, things had changed. There wasn’t enough money, and his mother had been forced to take in boarders, and to cook and clean all day. That was bad enough, but after a couple of years of this, when he was about nine years old, his mother’s “gift” had arrived, announcing itself that fateful night. Not long after, she began to make a little extra money as a medium. She let it be known through word of mouth that she was willing to contact “the other side” in her own home, for those wishing to communicate with lost loved ones, and Harold’s life had changed forever.
His mother really could reach the dead. Harold had seen it with his own eyes. One evening, early in her new career, an older couple had come in—her clients usually seemed to be older, because, Harold assumed, they knew more dead people—and Harold, against his mother’s orders, and in spite of his own timidity, had snuck down to the landing and tried to hear what was going on behind the closed double doors of the front room. He heard his mother’s murmuring voice, and then she began to moan, and he had to see.
He crept down the staircase and put his eye to the keyhole. The room was dark except for the flickering light of a single candle burning on the mantelpiece. The tall, narrow windows were heavily curtained in dark velvet, shutting out the light from the street. In the centre of the room was a round mahogany table, with four high-backed chairs around it. Three of the chairs were occupied, and his mother was leaning slightly forward, reaching across the table and grasping one hand of the man and one hand of the woman on either side of her. The man and woman also held hands, so that the three of them created a circle.
His mother’s eyes were closed, and she was moaning as if in pain, while the other two stared at her. The woman looked eagerly expectant, fearfully hopeful; the man looked as if he were having second thoughts, especially as Harold’s mother’s moans became louder and her head began to roll around on her neck. The man leaned back in his chair as far as he could, as if to distance himself from the proceedings. Harold’s mother’s eyes began to flutter beneath her closed eyelids; it was a disturbing sight, and Harold almost turned and ran. But then his mother began to speak, and he found he couldn’t move. Because it wasn’t her own voice that came out of her mouth—it was the voice of a man in the prime of life, deep and confident, a trifle impatient, and it said, “What do you want, Ma?”
The woman gasped. “It’s him!”
“I’m here too, Richard, it’s your dad.”
“Hi, Dad,” Harold heard the voice say out of his mother’s mouth, and it was the strangest thing Harold had ever seen.
“We want to know if you’re okay,” the mother said.
“I’m all right I guess.”
“We miss you terribly,” said the mother, and she began to weep.
“Don’t cry, Mom. It never does any good.”
“But it was such a senseless accident! We’re so angry about it!”
“I don’t like it either, Ma, but what can I do?”
“We’re trying to do our best without you, son, but it’s hard,” the father said. There was an awkward silence, which the father tried, even more awkwardly, to fill. “You know Sandy’s running around with some new guy.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“We could talk to her,” the mother said, “tell her it’s not decent. You in your grave less than a year!”
“No, no—leave it be,” the man’s voice said irritably.
The father said, as if eager to change the subject, “Do you by any chance remember what you did with the socket wrench? I’ve looked everywhere—”
“I loaned it to Tony.”
“Oh. He hasn’t mentioned it.”
“Well, for sure he’s got it. Ask him.”
“Okay. I will.”
“Do you ever see your grandma?” the woman asked.
“I gotta go. You take it easy.”
Harold saw his mother’s head shoot up. Her eyes opened and she quickly let go of the hands she’d been holding. Harold had seen enough; he bolted back upstairs to his bedroom.
He was simply too scared, after this, to ask questions. After that one time, he stayed steadfastly in his bedroom with the door closed, concentrating fiercely on the Hardy Boys or his comic books. The only thing he allowed himself to be curious about was whether his mother ever contacted her own dead husband—his father—but even about this he never asked.
At first, his mother had a client only every couple of months, so for much of the time Harold could pretend that he was a normal boy with a normal mother living a perfectly normal kind of life. It wasn’t as though his mother dressed like a gypsy or used a crystal ball; but Harold could remember, at a fairly tender age, things flying around the room. He could remember having to duck. And as word got around, the bereaved and the curious beat a path to his mother’s door. Harold found it more and more difficult to pretend that things were normal, that life in his house ran along the same lines as it did in everybody else’s. For instance, his mother seemed to find it amusing that objects in the house had been moved around while she wasn’t looking—she called this “playful”—but Harold didn’t like it. He liked to know that if he put something down in one spot, he’d find it there later. He wanted things to be predictable.
As time went on, it seemed to Harold that his mother was losing control over the spirits. Not all of her customers went away happy. Her boarders began to leave. Harold was a nervous wreck, and even his mother complained that she was getting tired of replacing her dishes.
Until finally, one day, she told Harold she was quitting—that the money she was getting from the séances wasn’t worth the loss of her regular income from the boarders. Harold could remember hugging his mother, weeping with relief. Things had been much better after that, and if occasionally some object in the house behaved in a peculiar manner, Harold went to play outside.
He’d never told anyone about his mother, not even Audrey. Harold pretended that this part of his life had never really happened. He could get away with it because by the time he was in university, his mother was dead.
Harold was gripping the sides of his La-Z-Boy chair, his spine so rigid that the chair wasn’t even taking most of his weight. He hadn’t thought about his mother, or this traumatic period of his childhood, in many years. And now, some part of his mind wanted to return to the subject of Tom’s death and then ping off in all sorts of wild and frankly disturbing directions—but Harold deliberately eased himself deeper into his chair, snapped the newspaper briskly, and determinedly blocked it all out.
Audrey, having finished cleaning up the kitchen, came into the living room, dropped onto the couch, and picked up a magazine. John and Dylan were in the basement watching TV.
It wasn’t long before the telephone rang. Neither Audrey nor Harold made a move to answer it, knowing already who it was for. There was a steady parade of girls calling Dylan all the time. Dylan came tearing up the stairs and picked up the phone in the kitchen. Harold didn’t even look up, but Audrey was suddenly o
n alert.
“Just a minute,” Dylan said. He put the phone down and ran up the stairs to his bedroom two at a time, said “just a minute,” at the other end, and then ran down the stairs to hang up the phone in the kitchen—he didn’t trust anybody else to do this—and then ran back up the stairs to take the call in his bedroom in private.
“Oh. I just remembered there’s something I want to watch upstairs,” Audrey said, putting down her magazine. Harold didn’t pay her any notice.
She stood up, rapidly considering the possibilities. There was an extension in her and Harold’s bedroom, but she couldn’t pick that up without Dylan hearing her come on the line. She might have better luck listening outside his bedroom door, which, she observed by the time she was halfway up the stairs, was closed. He would think everybody was still downstairs. He might get careless.
She made her way as quietly as possible up the stairs toward his bedroom, trying not to make the wooden stairs creak. She remembered how, when the boys were very little, she’d had to slither out of the nursery on her stomach after Dylan had fallen asleep—his floor could crack like rifle shots—so that she wouldn’t have to start the laborious, exhausting process of getting him to sleep all over again.
She reached the top of the stairs and made the bold leap across the landing onto the safety of the bathroom tile, twirled, and pressed up against the bathroom doorframe, her eyes and ears trained on Dylan’s bedroom door like a commando closing in on a target. If he came out, she’d say she’d come up to disinfect the bathroom, where John had been throwing up that morning.
She was in position; her heart beat fast within her ribs. But she soon realized she couldn’t hear a damn thing—Dylan had to be talking very quietly, which in itself was suspicious.
Eventually she decided she might as well clean the bathroom, and that’s where Harold found her, a half-hour later, scrubbing the grout in the shower with an old toothbrush.
“What happened to your show?” he asked, but Audrey pretended not to hear him.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the following Monday morning, Audrey had nothing left to clean, so she decided it was time to go through everybody’s clothes and throw stuff away. She got started as soon as everyone left after breakfast. What she really wanted to do was make a great big bonfire in the backyard and burn all the junk in the house that Harold wouldn’t let her get rid of. Instead, she went through her clothes and considered whether she could get one more season out of that pilly sweater. She rifled through empty pockets before tossing worn-out pants and shirts with frayed cuffs in a heap on the bedroom floor and wondered anxiously about the meaning of things.
Someone else might have called it coincidence, but Audrey believed things happened for a reason. There had to be a reason she saw Tom one last time—significantly, on the very day of his death—and she had a pretty good idea what it was. She felt like she’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer.
After all, she’d gone to Home Depot a dozen times over the years, and never run into him before—they didn’t even live in the same neighbourhood. What had Tom been doing at her Home Depot anyway? Audrey had never felt possessive about Home Depot before. In fact, she hated going there—the feeling of incompetence she got, of being overwhelmed, the shelves impossibly high—so high that birds lived up there. It was so intimidating that she had to treat herself to a coffee and a donut every time.
That day, she’d gone to get some ideas for Harold’s present for his upcoming birthday—his forty-ninth birthday, and therefore special, although not as special, or celebratory, as his fiftieth would be. She was thinking of a new power tool, something to inspire him to start a new project, to propel him out of his mysterious lethargy. Something masculine and shiny that he could show the kids—she’d school them beforehand. She’d dragged out something called a reciprocating saw and was wondering what it was for and how Harold could be so good at this power tool stuff when he couldn’t even program the vcr, when she saw Tom, in profile, a little farther down the aisle, handling a power saw, checking it for its heft. She hadn’t seen him in fifteen years but she’d know him anywhere.
Her first impulse was to run. Her hair was a mess, she was sloppily dressed, and she’d put on weight—while he looked better than ever. Still tall, still trim, expensively dressed—especially for Home Depot—and tanned, like he’d been playing tennis in his beloved Caymans. He looked older—his jawline was softer, his hair more silver than not—but he was still handsome. No woman with any pride left at all wanted to meet a former lover, no matter how meaningless their relationship had been, under such conditions. But she hesitated a fraction too long. He glanced up and she was trapped.
He looked away, not recognizing her, and she realized that she was free to go—but how mortifying! Then he did a double take and stared.
“Audrey?” he asked.
She gave a wan smile. He set the power saw down on the floor. She clutched the reciprocating saw to her chest. He walked up to her, evidently happy to see her.
“How are you Audrey? How’s Harold?”
“Good. We’re good.” Audrey was nodding like an idiot. Her entire body squirmed with discomfort.
“Here, let me take that for you.” She reluctantly released the power tool to him. “And the kids?”
“Good, they’re good.” She was still nodding, like those stupid dogs in the back of people’s car windows. “How’s the family?” she managed to say, momentarily blanking on his wife’s name, remembering that the last she’d heard, he had two daughters, the eldest a year older than John. He might have more kids by now.
“They’re all doing extremely well. Susan’s in first year at U of T. Can you believe it? She wants to be a doctor, like the old man.” He smiled proudly.
“That’s wonderful,” Audrey said. She’d stopped bobbing her head up and down and was studying Tom for telltale signs of Dylan. She didn’t see any. She’d never seen any resemblance between Dylan and Harold though either.
Dylan took after his mother, bless his secretive heart.
Now she was tossing out one of Harold’s heavy, down-at-heel shoes; she was on her hands and knees digging in the closet like a dog after a two-days-dead woodchuck. The shoe hit the phone on the bedside table and knocked the handset off, but she was oblivious. Of course she hadn’t told Harold about running into Tom at Home Depot—how could she without giving away that she’d been there to look for his birthday present? Besides, who wanted to bring all that up again?
She should be relieved. Dead men tell no tales.
• • •
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Harold said tightly into his telephone at the office.
“I’m not releasing the car until you pay me seventeen hundred dollars.”
“Why the hell not?” Harold demanded.
“Look, you wanted an estimate—”
“An estimate, that’s all I said, I didn’t tell you to start working on it,” Harold protested, his voice rising.
“Well, I had to take the car apart to make the estimate. It’s all over the floor of the shop. You want the car, you’re gonna have to pay for my time. And storage.”
“You wouldn’t be that son of a bitch Roy, would you?” Harold shouted, forgetting himself.
“Nah, I’m Jimmy, the owner. Roy drives the truck. Like I said, you want your car, you’re gonna have to pay me first.” Harold heard him slam down the phone.
Harold sat in his chair at his desk, his breathing all disordered, while the dial tone buzzed in his hand. He remembered uneasily that he’d asked for the estimate before the insurance company had told him they wanted their own approved people to do it. He had no idea whether taking a car apart to do an estimate was normal. Shit. Shit. Shit. He couldn’t afford to pay seventeen hundred dollars out of his own pocket, and surely the insurance wouldn’t cover two estimates.
Harold slammed down the phone and considered what he should do. He was pondering the wisdom of calling the insurance company— but who e
ver viewed his insurer as a benign entity?—when the phone rang again. He picked it up, a little aggressively.
“Hello, is this Harold Walker?”
“Yes,” said Harold.
“It’s Patricia, from Credit International—”
“I’m very busy right now, so if you don’t mind—”
“You owe us a great deal of money, Mr. Walker.”
Harold was absolutely certain he didn’t owe anybody anything, but nevertheless, his mouth went dry and he was dead silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “I think you’ve made a mistake.”
“Oh I don’t think so,” the woman on the other end countered. “You owe money on an Infiniti G-35 Sports Coupe.”
“I most certainly do not.”
“Right.”
Harold smiled grimly, which he appreciated that unfortunately she couldn’t see, and said as if delivering a coup de grace, “I have a nine-year-old Camry that’s in pieces all over some idiot mechanic’s shop floor—I certainly do not have a sports car.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then the woman said, sounding bored but threatening at the same time, “Mr. Walker, we’re one of the most successful legitimate debt collections firms in the country. You might as well just give up now.”
Harold slammed the phone down, feeling the need to duck. It had to be a mistake. It was some other Harold Walker, not him, who had this bad debt. He already knew that there were other Harold Walkers in Toronto, because they’d turned up when the searches were done to buy their house.
Like he had time for this.
He resisted the urge to crawl underneath his solid desk and pull the phone down with him. He thought about calling Audrey but didn’t want to upset her. Instead, he decided to begin with a call to his bank manager.
• • •
WHEN SHE’D FINISHED going through everybody’s clothes, Audrey started on the furnace room—piling up stuff she wanted to get rid of against the wall. She’d changed into her old house-painting clothes, and she was filthy, so when the doorbell rang, she decided not to answer it. But the doorbell would not stop ringing, no matter how still and quiet she stood at the bottom of the basement stairs, listening.