“Well, you can’t blame them for being inaccurate,” Kathleen said.
Stevie put the paper down. “Merritt knows, you know. She told me yesterday.”
“About what, dear?”
“The baby, of course. My baby.”
“Oh!” Kathleen was momentarily dumbstruck. “Your father and I didn’t tell her.”
“I know. Sometimes I wonder why you didn’t tell Michael. The years Merritt was living here, you were in a lot of contact with him.”
“I promised you I wouldn’t.” Kathleen smiled. “And I didn’t.”
“And I appreciate it.”
“I guess Merritt had big ears?”
“And big eyes. She kept it to herself, though.”
“I’m very surprised.”
“Something about not wanting him to know he had an heir. She actually used the word ‘heir.’ Slipped out.”
Kathleen looked out the window toward the river and frowned. “Michael was thirty-three. He had decades left to live. Why would she be worried about heirs?”
Her eyes turned back to Stevie’s. An intelligence passed between them.
“But, Mom, who benefits by Michael’s death? It didn’t cross my mind until yesterday when she said ‘heir.’ Merritt benefits. Right?”
Kathleen frowned. “Not necessarily. We don’t know what’s in Michael’s will.” She reached for her coffee cup. “I presume he had one.”
“But Michael wouldn’t cut Merritt out, however strained their relationship was. He’s the one who pulled her out of New York. He arranged treatment. He got her to Hazelden. He gave her money after she’d spent everything. And he did it before when she went off the rails.”
“Why Tom Rossiter didn’t set up a proper trust for his children, I’ll never know,” Kathleen mused, sipping her coffee. “Imagine having all that money at eighteen.”
“And then having blown it all by age twenty-six.”
“She resents being beholden to him.”
“Well, she put herself in that position. Maybe if she had been more responsible—”
Kathleen shook her head. “It’s depression, you know that. It can’t be treated with reprimands—”
“I think she’s using again. She claims not. Or claims it’s under control.”
“I wondered if she was—”
“And who’s going to save her this time?”
That had put a stop to her mother’s end of the conversation. Uncharacteristically silent, Kathleen had risen, adjusted her earrings, and gone off to her office. Stevie, somewhat invigorated, began to look for something else to distract herself. Novels and videos had worked most of the summer. But waiting three days to bury someone you loved was grim, she thought, peeling open the film cartridge with a can opener and cutting off the first few inches of leader. It was limbo. It was hell.
After winding the film onto a stainless steel reel, Stevie reached in the dark for the plastic surface of the developing tank. She shivered slightly. The basement was chilly. She popped the reel into the tank and turned the lid tightly. Then, with her free hand, she groped for the string that hung from an overhead lamp and yanked at it. A burst of light seared her eyelids shut and she had a retinal vision of the darkroom, cramped and jumbled with its photographic accoutrements. It reminded her too well of the ghostly vision that had flashed in her brain Tuesday when she closed her eyes to shut out the sight of Michael lying in his own blood. Her heart beat a little faster.
She opened her eyes. Her heart slowed. She poured the developing fluid into the tank, shook it to release any air bubbles, and set the timer for eight minutes. Developing film was boring. All you could do was sit and wait and every so often gently agitate the tank to make sure the chemicals moved evenly over the surface of the film. As she waited, her mind drifted to Leo.
Odd that he hadn’t called her yesterday. She had expected he would. She had assumed he would. After what happened. The death. To see how she was. His kiss crept into her mind. Or at least to thank her for walking Alvy. Last evening, after an hour or two when all the phone calls seemed to be for her mother, her fingers had danced over the dial as she contemplated giving him a call. If she had called him, it would have been a first. He had always called her. He was the pursuer. He was the ardent one. She was getting over a failed marriage. She didn’t want anything heavy. She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.
She was a little miffed. She recognized the feeling. Leo’s attention was okay. Okay, it was better than okay. Better than no attention at all, at any rate. Hell, she deserved some attention. Surely what Merritt had told him hadn’t turned him off, the pig.
She poured another liquid into the tank to arrest the film in its chemical transformation, shook it, waited forty-five seconds, poured the liquid out, then added yet another liquid to lock the images forevermore onto thin strips of emulsion. Finally, she was able to remove the reel of film from the tank and begin rinsing it in running water. Stevie looked at her watch. It would be some time before she could begin to make prints. The film had to dry first.
Shall I go or shall I stay?
The question of the morning returned as she climbed the stairs. In the kitchen, she pulled the phone book from a drawer and opened it to “H.” As she ran her finger down the length of Hugheses, she considered that, no, she was not making a choice, she was merely better exploring her options.
15
What the Busboy Saw
Jason Garrity wasn’t sure what he should do. He didn’t know if what he had seen was important. And he wondered what his parents would say if he did decide to go to the police. They didn’t seem to like cops much. He occasionally heard them refer to them as “pigs” and then snicker. They were always using such old-fashioned expressions. It was embarrassing. And what was worse, they tried to stop him watching cop shows like Hill Street Blues on TV. But then, when the house was robbed last year, they sure seemed glad to have the police around. “Yes, officer; no, officer,” his father had said, all polite and self-righteous. What a fucking hypocrite.
Jason looked at the newspaper again. He was going to be late for afternoon classes if he didn’t get a move on and he’d already had a couple of detentions for being late.
He hadn’t felt like going home for lunch. His mother wasn’t there anyway. She was too busy helping his father with the business. When he had been a little kid his mother had taken him every day to the bakery with her and he had played happily while the wonderful smell of bread and buns wafted over the little store. Now, of course, his parents’ little hippie bakery had turned into a big-deal specialty foods supply business and they were never around. The stuff his mother left him for lunch was always weird. It was supposed to be healthy, but he hated it. Which was why he went to the 7-Eleven instead and had a hoagie and a Slurpee. He would get home before his mother and have lots of time to throw out the lunch she had made him.
That’s if he didn’t go to the police. That would mean having to take the bus downtown after school. Or perhaps he could just phone? But then maybe they would think he was playing a prank. He kicked at a plastic cup that rolled by in the breeze and watched as it landed in a pile of garbage that had spilled from a refuse container. If he hadn’t decided to buy the newspaper, he wouldn’t have had to think about any of this. He never looked at newspapers. They were just for boring old farts like his parents. And he had certainly never bought a newspaper before. But no one else had joined him at the store for lunch. The guy who ran the store had gotten really shitty lately when more than a couple of kids hung out. Neighbours were complaining. Apparently. So everyone had decided to cool it for a while. When Jason brought the Slurpee to the counter, the guy had really scowled at him. But while he was fumbling in his pants pocket for money, Jason had glanced at a newspaper in the stand next to the counter. He couldn’t resist the word “murder” and the picture of the victim looked familiar.
“I think I’ll buy this, too,” he had said.
“Gee, I didn’t know you kids
could read.”
Jason had no snappy comeback, so he ignored the guy. He looked like Hitler anyway with the cropped moustache and the strands of lank hair plastered across his forehead. Only he was even skinnier than Hitler. And stooped. And really depressing.
He had taken the paper outside, planted himself on the window ledge and between bites read the story. He knew where he had seen the victim before, on the street outside the Wajan, the restaurant he had started working in a week earlier. He was the busboy. He didn’t mind the work, but it wasn’t that much fun either. He had wanted to get a job at McDonald’s or somewhere where there was a bunch of other kids he knew. Most of the people at the Wajan were some kind of Asian, or really old, or possibly gay. And no one in the kitchen seemed to speak English except the owner, who was too busy to have a conversation with a busboy.
His father had arranged the whole thing. His parents didn’t want him to have a job at first. Homework and grades were what they were concerned about, they said. But then, when he bugged and bugged them, they decided it was okay but only under certain conditions. Like he couldn’t work late. And it had to be close to home. The Wajan was opening a few blocks away and his father, who supplied the restaurant with different items, got the owner to hire his son just for the few hours over dinner each evening.
Then his parents really got into the idea of his having an after-school job. They billed it as a “cultural experience” where he would learn to “interface” with “new Canadians.” They also approved of Oriental food. It was so “low-fat, high-fibre.” Jason also knew that they were just as glad to have someplace to stick him after school because sometimes they didn’t get home from work until seven or eight o’clock. He didn’t really care. He just wanted the job to save up for a CD player. If he couldn’t work at McDonald’s, the Wajan was okay. Probably McDonald’s didn’t hire fifteen-year-olds.
He had slipped out the back entrance of the Wajan for only a couple of minutes. There had been practically no business out front and the kitchen had been so steamy and so noisy—the cook was shrieking about something and the rest of the staff had joined in—that Jason figured they’d never miss him. He had sat on the stoop facing the back lane and the high hedge that ran down its length and taken out his cigarettes. He wondered if his parents knew he was smoking. Whenever one of those stupid “Break Free” ads with those sucked-out looking kids and that hosey-looking singer came up on TV his mother would make a point of saying what good ads they were and how teenagers shouldn’t smoke. Blah, blah, blah. As if he didn’t know they smoked dope when they thought he was all tucked up asleep in his little bed. The hypocrites. No wonder they were concerned about the police.
He remembered the back lane had been quiet except for the dull whir of the restaurant’s exhaust fan. The sun had started to set and long shadows had grown from the buildings and engulfed the hedge. None of the stores’ back security lights had switched on. The lane had sunk further into darkness as he sat and dragged on the cigarette, but it was a warm, unthreatening darkness, like his bedroom when he turned out the light. He had never been afraid of the dark as a little kid. He was proud of that. He had always been independent. Sometimes he had to be. Which was why he thought maybe he should go to the police. Even if it meant his mother finding out that he hadn’t eaten the lunch she had made.
On the other hand, maybe it was nothing. He tore the piece about the murder out of the newspaper, folded it into his pocket and stuffed the rest of the paper into the refuse bin. He would have a chance to think more about it during Language Arts class. After all, it was only boring Shakespeare.
It was sort of cool, he thought as he left the parking lot, that a murder had been going on, like, about a hundred metres from where he worked. It might even have been happening right while he was having a smoke. Maybe what he saw, or sort of saw, was the getaway car. It could have been.
The car must have been pressed right up against the hedge on the other side. He remembered that he had just butted his cigarette out when he heard the sound of a car starting. He looked across and saw two red lights shining through the gnarled leafless lower branches, one on either side of a white light that shone over a licence plate like a little movie marquee. On the plate were numbers and letters you couldn’t easily forget. At least he couldn’t forget them.
16
Antonioni
Stevie anchored one foot against the faucet and slid lower in the tub until her face floated just above the water line. She ceased all movement. Water lapping against the side of the tub ebbed. Silence enveloped the room.
Clear your mind of all thought, she thought, closing her eyes. She had taken up yoga for a time as a way of relaxing after long weeks at Yabu Pushelberg and busy Saturdays shopping and entertaining. She joined a dozen other Beaches wives Sunday afternoons at a studio above a retro candy store on Queen Street East. Then, relaxed—supposedly—they would go home and fix simple, elegant dinners for their perfect children and loving—or, in her case, philandering—hubbies.
Clear your mind, she thought again, more earnestly this time. This is what the yoga instructor had counselled.
OM.
Om-mane-pahdme-om.
She sighed. The bathwater stirred.
Why hasn’t Leo called?
OMMMMMMM.
It’s so unlike him.
OMMMMMMMmmmm, he was a good kisser. Her hand wandered across her thigh. The water stirred again.
No, I won’t do that.
Well, maybe later.
OMMMMMMM.
Michael was a good kisser, too. David was not a good kisser. Not really. He might as well have been kissing himself. Perhaps he had been the whole time.
Michael.
Stevie sighed again. Only this time the sigh broke into a feeble sob. What kind of idiot have I been? Waiting for Michael to return from Europe, waiting to see if some spark might be rekindled, waiting in a fashion as hopeless as that of silly old Scarlett O’Hara pining after the insipid Ashley Wilkes.
Or maybe she had been more like Barbra Streisand’s K-K-K-Katie in The Way We Were, hopelessly attracted to the blond boy, Hubble, that Robert Redford had played. At least Barbra had married him. Hubble, that is. For a time.
But now Michael was dead, and with his death had vanished such vain hopes. She felt miserably as though she were about to cry, top up the tub with her own salty tears. But she didn’t. The further truth hit her: she had been a complete idiot. Her expectations had been utterly unfounded, her feelings for Michael had been of the purest nostalgia, born of an unhappy marriage and unsettling separation, nourished in a hot and indolent summer, rekindled by a chance encounter in a bookstore. Despite the cooling waters of the bath, she suddenly felt herself burn with a kind of humiliation.
OMMMMMM.
OMMMMMMdammit.
What on earth had she expected anyway? To pick up where they left off? And where had they left off?
Waving goodbye at the station.
Summer vacation.
Is taking you away.
Bye baby bye bye.
Well, waving goodbye at the airport anyway. And not summer vacation, but a summer placement with a design firm in Baltimore, where she would live with her aunt and uncle before travelling to Rhode Island in the fall. A few weeks earlier that spring, at a Camerata Vocale concert in the Pool of the Black Star, she had sensed it all falling away, the impossibility of it, she in Providence, he in Philadelphia, new lives, new friends, a veering off. He had been absorbed in the music; she, bored by Gregorian Chant, had let her eyes wander over the Legislative Building’s neoclassical interior, regretting that she had already forgotten half the correct architectural nomenclature despite getting an “A” in History of Architecture I. She felt his hand slip from hers.
A little later, in Baltimore, pregnant, when she made her fateful choice and postponed RISD for a year, she wrote him, breaking it off. His reply discharged enough wounded male pride to let her harden her heart, but between the lines she rea
d a kind of relief. He made a brief, feeble attempt at maintaining a connection, but she made no reply, other than to send a letter of condolence when his parents were killed some months later. She didn’t dare fly back to Winnipeg for the funeral. She was too large with his child.
Will I see you in September?
Or lose you to…
Michael had behaved toward her in the spring only as a friend. Really. She had to admit it to herself. Even in his upstairs studio, where they had been alone together, when she had put out a vibe, there had been no reciprocity. Pictures of the blonde woman who had been at his barbecue were prominently tacked on a cork board. Caitlin Clark, he replied, when she asked who she was. Just a friend, he added, smiling. Just some promo shots.
Really?
Is she what he had wanted to talk about when he phoned her last Monday? Phoned her, mind you, three weeks after getting back from Europe. Could there have been a bigger clue to his indifference to her? Three weeks! And why wouldn’t he have been indifferent? She was the one who broke it off all those years ago.
OMMMMMM.
Or was it this business Sharon Bean mentioned? Letting her go as his cleaner. Was he selling? Moving?
Well, at least she was now pretty much assured he hadn’t been in Maryland digging into adoption records. Phoning her aunt while Merritt had cooled her heels—or did some lines—at Leo’s house had allayed her mind on that score.
OMMMMMM.
And, speaking of Leo, why hadn’t he called?
OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Oh, to hell with it.
The bathwater was turning tepid. Stevie opened her eyes and, squinting against the light, looked over to the clock on the vanity. The film would have dried by now and time remained to make a few prints before…before what? The day stretched out ahead.
Maybe she should call Leo.
She rose in the tub, drew the shower curtains around, and turned on the shower. Moments later, she was out of the tub, dried off, and shrouded in an old snuggly terry-towel bathrobe. It was warm and just the thing for a chilly basement. Her hair she could leave. It would dry by itself. As a teenager, she had hated her naturally wavy hair. Now she was thankful for it.
Death in Cold Type Page 14