Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  I kept my eyes closed, my breathing relaxed, my mind open. I asked Lucy herself.

  And her answer came. She took me back to her bedroom, doped up on painkillers on Easter Saturday night, keening long, drawn-out sobs of despair.

  *

  SHE HAD HEARD THESE SOUNDS before—these long, low cries of grief. She reached inside her memory, back to her childhood home, up to the third floor. The drugs made it vivid, immediate.

  She is six? Seven? She is playing in the attic room. It is a hospital room. Her dolly is in her own old crib. She has removed the sheet for the dust and put Dolly in. It has high bars to keep her from climbing out.

  Dolly is naked under the doll’s blanket. Burning up with fever. Soaking wet from the cold water she has poured over her to cool her down.

  She is wearing her mother’s white cardigan backwards. Over her face she has tied a tea towel, so that only her eyes show. It’s hard to breathe through the linen, but she keeps it on. She can’t be a nurse without the mask. Nurses don’t have faces.

  She tells Dolly she has to stay in the crib. That she is sick, sick, sick. “Your mother doesn’t want to see you. You are too sick. You can’t climb out. You can’t get up. You have to stay here. By yourself.”

  The words give her satisfaction. Dolly’s suffering gives her satisfaction.

  Dolly begins to cry. She is surprised. Dolly has never cried before, except when she makes the sounds for her. She is not making the sounds. They are not the same kinds of cries she would make. They are not the kind of cries she makes even when she’s not pretending. These are long, low, sobbing sounds. Scary sounds.

  They are coming from somewhere else in the room. Somewhere near the stairway.

  She goes over to the top of the narrow stairs, cocks her head. She pulls the towel off her face so she can hear better. The cries are coming from the bottom of the stairs.

  The stairs are narrow and dark. They are not supposed to be dark. Someone has closed the door at the bottom of the stairs. The cries are coming from behind the door.

  Her breathing gets faster. She is beginning to shake and sweat. She can’t go down the stairs in the dark.

  She runs back to Dolly’s bed.

  Dolly is still crying, but not as loudly as before. She wants to hit her.

  She can’t stay here. Dolly is sick. Dolly has to stay by herself.

  She goes back to the top of the stairs. She makes herself stand at the top and stare into the darkness of the stairway. If she stares long enough she’ll be able to see better, the way she does in her bed at night. She just has to make herself stay there long enough.

  The cries from down below continue—long, drawn-out cries. Like the dog down the street when it gets left outside at night. She feels the hairs rise on her arms and the back of her neck.

  Gradually the outline of the steps comes into view. If she takes one step at a time, just slowly, she won’t trip. There is nothing between her and the door at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing can get her. She hopes that’s true.

  The railing is her friend in the dark. She feels all its smooth bumps. She doesn’t let go all the way down the stairs.

  She is on the last step. Her heart has moved up into her throat. It’s pounding away. It’s loud in her ears. Blocking out the crying. Almost.

  Behind the door at the bottom of the stairs, there is the sound of another door slamming in the distance. The cries abruptly stop.

  She opened her eyes. Her head was heavy, foggy, from the drugs. Had she heard the front door? She strained her ears for the sound of footsteps.

  Nothing.

  Tim must have gone out. Thank God.

  Daylight had come. Easter Sunday. She ached all over.

  She rubbed her hands over her face. Winced as the motion of raising her arms hurt her sternum. She was spent, her face puffy.

  Her mother had cried this way too. Why? What had she lost?

  She eased herself out of bed and made her way gingerly up the stairs. She felt like an old woman. In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face. She expected to see despair in the face in the mirror. It wasn’t there. There was something else. Something she barely recognized. Was this, could this possibly be, the semblance of peace?

  How could she be at peace? Nothing had changed—everything was getting worse. Worse than anything she had ever imagined. Her bank account was draining away, dollar by dollar, even as she stood here. She was alone, cut off from friends, family. Her body had taken more abuse than should have been possible. But it was going to end. Soon. She was going to start over. In a new way.

  Her mother had never had that chance.

  Had she wanted it? She had done what was expected of her. She’d married a successful man. Produced children. Created a beautiful home. Looked after everyone’s needs except her own.

  No. That was where she had drawn the line. She’d taken care of her husband’s needs. Only his. And sometimes Anna’s. And even that had proven too much. She’d been meant to be a poet, not a wife and mother. She’d made do with writing in notebooks that she’d burned when she got too sick to write in them anymore. Just because her mother had always been hard at it didn’t mean she’d found it fulfilling. Like herself, writing for the government. Fulfillment was a joke. Where had she thought she’d got this need to write? Where had she thought she’d got her need for solitude and space?

  Her mother had claimed hers.

  And she, Lucy, had suffered as a result. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t meant to hurt her.

  And so then, what had her mother lost?

  Everything else.

  Lucy stared at herself in the mirror for a long time. She breathed in a deep, painful breath. With the exhalation came forgiveness. The beginnings.

  27.

  IT WAS ALMOST DUSK BY the time I got home. I had less than half an hour before the sun set. I changed into my jeans and a warmer jacket and took myself down to the point. The river was the pale blue water of evening, tinged with black moon-shaped shadows where the breeze still riffled it into gentle waves.

  I stood for a long time at the edge of the water, feeling my face illuminated, even slightly warmed in the April air. And then I retrieved the lawn chair from its shelter in the bushes, opened it up, and sat down, facing the sinking sun. Absorbing all the things Lundy had told me today. Lundy and Kendra—and Lucy.

  Had she ignored her intuition, too?

  I thought back to the way she had talked about Tim before he’d been released. There had been nothing but excitement and enthusiasm emanating from her. It hadn’t felt like she’d been hiding any doubts, even from herself. But maybe things had been different while he was in prison.

  The sun was sinking lower. As it sank, the light became more intense. It would only last moments. The revelations had to come now, in that intensified light, or they would not come. I didn’t care that it was an irrational thought. Some truths, I was learning, were irrational.

  But the truth about Tim wasn’t irrational. Things had been different in prison. In prison, he could be whoever she wanted him to be. He had spent most of his adult life in one. There was nothing there to help him define himself. No occupation, no interests—beyond what prison offered—no relationship. He wasn’t free to grow the way normal people did. So he had become what Lucy wanted him to be. He could be a perfect mirror.

  He becomes whoever he thinks you want him to be. Marnie’s words.

  He had been a mirror for all of us. Whatever we had expected Tim to be, he had become. I had been upset and shaking the night I found Lucy’s car, and so had he. His reactions had mirrored mine. Who knew if it had even been conscious on his part.

  There had been no premeditated plan to con Lucy. It was a certainty. The police had it wrong. A woman begins to write him, she offers him a glimpse of her own life, and then
an invitation into her life—and into her heart. How could he, a man without a life, refuse that opportunity? He had taken on her life in the absence of his own, and Lucy had thought she’d met her soulmate. His capability for violence had come out even while she visited him in prison, but then, Lucy had a violent nature of her own. It had possibly, sadly, been the only genuine similarity between them.

  He definitely had capabilities. Maybe he had incapabilities too. An inability to love. In prison he had offered Lucy unconditional love. But probably only after she had presented the idea to him. I doubted Tim Brennan knew anything about unconditional love. I doubted Tim knew anything about love at all. Lack of love in his life was probably the root of all his crimes. Certainly there had been no one to love him in prison. Probably not even himself. But he had a need to be loved, like everyone else. And Lucy had come along, and he’d sucked her love into him, with his insatiable need. And when he’d got out, he’d gone further—tried to choke off her will. To take over her life. Because he had none of his own.

  I shivered. The sun had abruptly taken back its warmth. It was slipping behind the hills. Had I been heading down the same dark road? I thought about Quinn. This was not a man with no life or identity. Because he had these things, he had not, thank God, been simply a mirror for me. He’d tried to mirror me, that was obvious now. But the mirror had cracks, and if I had trusted my inner voice sooner, I would have seen them. He wasn’t as perfect a mirror because he wasn’t as “empty” as Tim.

  But something was missing from his life. Maybe a sense of being truly in control. For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at. Drugs would have been a means both of trying to regain control and ultimately of losing it. So—what? He had turned outward to the women in his life to assure himself he still had power? To cover up his own insecurities?

  Had everything been a lie between us? Maybe not. From what Lundy had said, it was true that when he’d first told me about his marital situation, his wife had left him. In light of the circumstances, he had probably not expected her to come back. He might even have been expecting to be divorced by the time the trial was over. But Quinn had likely not been thinking about the long term at all. He had, it seemed clear now, been trying to fill a void in his life then. He’d wanted to claim me, secure me, by telling me things he thought I would want to hear. And I had oh so willingly allowed myself to be secured. Because his controlling behaviour had come across as concern. Caring. And that was something I had been missing. Or thought I had.

  Maybe I wasn’t being entirely fair—to either of us. There was no denying the physical attraction. That went both ways. And he had clearly enjoyed playing the protective cop to the witness in distress. And the witness had enjoyed his protectiveness, even his possessiveness and authoritarian manner. I could forgive myself for that; I had been in distress.

  I wondered about the other Ellen in his life. His wife. How far had she sacrificed her own autonomy before she’d seen the truth? Had Quinn been violent with her? I hoped he hadn’t gone that far. If he had, I hoped she had been able to pick up the pieces and go on.

  As Lucy had been intending to do.

  As I was going to. Thanks to Lucy.

  I watched the twilight gather the hills to itself and then felt my way back up the familiar path to the house.

  The sun streaming in my bedroom window woke me minutes before the alarm. I dressed and carried my knapsack down to the point: a sole pallbearer. When I emerged through the narrow pathway opening onto the point, I caught a glimpse of red by the water. A familiar kevlar canoe was pulled up on shore, its paint gleaming in the early morning light. Marc sat beside it, his wrists leaning loosely on his knees, his face turned to the bare rock of the cliffs across the river. Beside him, Beau lay companionably. The sun behind them caught the honey gold of Marc’s hair, Beau’s fur, and the paddles lying beside them and seemed to be making an artistic statement about symmetry.

  Marc turned at the sound of the rustling bushes and gave me a quizzical look. “Did you sleep well? You didn’t get eaten alive yesterday?”

  Beau got up to greet me, tail wagging. I leaned down to give him a hug. “Just little bites taken out of me. Nothing that won’t heal.” I set down my knapsack with its precious cargo and joined Marc on the rock. Beau settled back down on my other side. “How was the trip up?”

  Marc’s arm was around me. He pulled me in close. “I had to chop my way out of the bay, but it’s a beautiful morning for a paddle.” He looked at me. “I wish you had let me come.”

  “I know. But I didn’t want you to hear it there.”

  “Where will I hear it?”

  I nodded at the canoe. “That seems like a good place. Let’s go do this thing.” I patted the knapsack beside me.

  Marc stood up and reached a hand down to me. He didn’t let go. We faced each other. His expression was solemn but tender. “This is a big step for you, Ellen McGinn. Are you sure you want to get back into a canoe with me? I wasn’t very patient with you in the past.” His tone was rueful.

  I gave him a teasing smile. “I will, if you promise not to dump me.”

  Marc kept his face solemn, but warm humour glinted in his eyes. “Plus jamais, ma chère.”

  We headed downstream, passing the occasional drifting ice flow. Behind me I could feel Marc powering the canoe with strong, competent strokes.

  We paddled to where the river widened and the current slowed, and then we stopped. I turned around in my seat to face Marc and unzipped the knapsack, lifting out the metal urn. Neither of us spoke. Beau’s watchful eyes from the centre of the boat seemed to know. I took the lid off and let the memories of Belle come. Then I tipped the urn over the side of the boat.

  The ashes pouring out made a rustling grainy sound—like sand and bits of gravel. It wasn’t the sound I was expecting. I was expecting the whisper of dust.

  It seemed to take a long time to pour Belle’s ashes into the river. They clung to the surface only for a moment before disappearing below. I had thought they would get picked up into the breeze, or stay on the surface, not sink so decidedly.

  The water was clear. An unusual phenomenon in spring. I watched the ashes make their way down into the depths beyond the light. I kept peering over the side of the boat until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  Then I looked up to find Marc waiting to hear my story.

  AFTERWORD

  I had the dream the night after I spotted Louise Ellis’s car. It was parked on the shoulder of River Road in Chelsea, Quebec, not many kilometres from my house. I didn’t know for sure, then, that the car was Louise’s. I knew her from Canada Post. We had both been contracted to work on the annual Souvenir Collection, she as the writer, I as the editor. We had become friends.

  Two hours after I saw the car, I received a phone call from her partner, Brett Morgan: Louise was missing.

  I drove back to River Road, confirmed the plate number, and called Brett and the police. Eventually they both arrived at the site.

  That night, I didn’t sleep well. I was worried, not only about Louise, but also about Brett. He was an ex-convict, with a manslaughter conviction behind him—a man whose release from prison Louise had successfully advocated for just the year before. Tossing in bed, I went over all the things he’d said and done that evening. They didn’t add up.

  It was when I finally slept that the dream came. My old school friend Joanna was sitting on the bed. Her mouth was moving, her lips still closed, as if she were trying to find the right words to speak. As if she weren’t used to speaking at all. Or as if she were trying to translate into words a message that was coming to her in some other language or form I couldn’t begin to guess at. The language of the other side.

  When she finally spoke, it was three short sentences I have never forgotten:

  Look in the ’opler grove. Write it in a book. Tell Mary she’s safe.


  An image came to me of poplars or aspens. I had no idea who Mary was. And then I woke up.

  I had never had a dream like this before. It was more of a visitation. But why Joanna? I hadn’t seen her in years. But she had always struck me as someone with integrity. Someone you could trust. Now she was telling me to search, to reassure Mary (I remembered she was Louise’s sister.) And to write it in a book.

  I immediately got up and recorded in my journal everything from the evening before.

  I spent ten weeks searching for Louise, aided by information from a deep-trance psychic.

  All during my search, and in the months afterward, waiting for the trial and then giving my testimony, I thought about Joanna’s admonition in that dream. Write it in a book. I had written in my journal, but my journal is also a source of material for my creative endeavours. And if my own search would make a powerful story, it had been made possible by Louise’s even more profound experience. I had to tell both. In fact, I made a commitment to Louise to tell her story.

  After testifying, I obtained permission to attend the rest of the trial. I spoke with Louise’s other friends and colleagues. I visited the prisons she had visited. I read two of her journals that had been used as trial evidence. There was a stereotype she seemed to fit: a woman taken in by a convict and con artist, trying to “rescue” him. Louise had not been trying to rescue Brett. I knew she had been on a specific journey of her own. But I didn’t understand it. And I wanted to understand. I wanted to tell her story with empathy. To do that, I had to get into her head and her heart—into her soul.

  It wasn’t easy. We had been friends, but not close friends. And her growing negativity the previous fall had put me off. I had shut down the personal side of our working relationship. So I didn’t know what had been going on in her life the previous year. But through the research and the writing, through the continuing dreams and encouragement I felt were coming from Louise herself, understanding and empathy gradually came. I was ready for the telling.