Directly across the boulevard, Roach has stopped, his head whipping left and right as he scans for an opening in traffic. I don’t see the knife in his hands, but I’m sure he's got it.
Blinking the rain out of my eyes and pulling myself along the chain links, I look to see what's on the other side of the fence.
It's the subway line. Must be the stretch from Wilson to Downsview. Wilson Station can’t be more than a block away. I’m so close.
Screw the ankle! It can hurt later.
I start a staggering jog down the sidewalk. After half a block I hear wheels screeching on wet pavement behind me, then horns and shouting.
“Nut!” “Look where you’re going!” “Get out of the road!” voices are yelling back there.
No time to look. I hit Wilson Street, stumbling across the intersection on a yellow light. People back away from me. I’m bleeding and soaked to the bone. Nothing matters but making the next train.
I’m wheezing like an asthmatic when I get to the subway entrance. If I can just catch the train, I’m free. I’m gone. Game over.
I take the stairs at full speed, hanging on the railing, half hopping, half sliding down. Approaching the ticket booth, I consider jumping the turnstile, but I really don’t think I could clear it. So I spend precious seconds scrambling to flash my transit pass. By the wide-eyed stare of the woman in the booth, I can tell I must look insane—running and gasping, covered in blood.
I limp straight to the southbound platform, sliding along the wall to keep myself vertical. The pain in my ankle is dull compared to the agony of the burning gash in my arm, finally breaking through to my shocked brain. Don’t know how much blood I’ve lost, but it's still flowing. I watch it drop on the dirty green tiles. The slightest of breezes blows past, the stirring of a train in the tunnel. I walk over to the edge and see the white headlights in the dark.
“Come on,” I plead with it. “Come on.”
As I’m staring into the black of the tunnel, out of the corner of my eye I see someone step out onto the platform. My eyes shift slowly over to him.
Roach walks casually toward me, like he only wants to ask me the time. He knows there's nowhere left to run. Roach is winded, his acne-scarred face deep red. Hunched a little to his left, he keeps his arm at his side, protecting himself. I must have cracked a few ribs with the bar.
Letting him come closer, staring into those dark buggy eyes, I try to time it just right. Then I fake with my crippled left hand and throw a hook with my right. He sees it coming like I’m in slow motion, dodging it easily. I stagger with the momentum of the missed punch, and before I can balance again, Roach hits me with a body check.
I stumble and fall off the edge of the platform, hitting the tracks hard and knocking what little wind I had left out of me. My eyes refuse to focus. All I see is two blurry white eyes coming toward me. There's a rumbling sound that seems to come at me from all directions. The tracks vibrate under my back, and my last active brain cells tell me that those aren’t eyes I’m seeing, shining from the dark.
Get up! Now!
Pushing myself up on my elbows is a major effort, but I get from my elbows to my knees, and finally, shaking, to my feet. Reaching up to the platform, I set my palms flat on the tiles and get ready for one final exertion.
My unfocused eyes pick out a pair of shoes in front of my hands. Stunned and stupid, I follow them up to the shadow standing above.
The rumble of the train turns to thunder.
One of the shoes kicks me in the face; not hard, just enough to push me away. I lunge back to the platform, reaching to pull myself up. His foot shoots out again, but I catch it this time. He tries to shake me. But I know the only way out is through him. So I put my weight into it and give his foot a yank. It's enough. He gives way and falls past me onto the tracks.
The air splits open with a blast from the train's horn. Thirty feet away. No time to climb out even if I still had the strength.
I crouch and roll under the platform's slight overhang, trying to squeeze myself into the thin wedge of space there. I flatten myself into the stone.
The last thing I see is Roach staggering to a standing position, his glasses gone, holding his hands out blindly. He moves to try and escape to the northbound tracks. Then there's the scream of metal on metal as the train brakes. Sparks fly, and my scream joins the train's. I think I hear other voices screaming too, from above.
Impact. Blinding pain. The world goes black, and I’m falling a very long way, getting smaller and smaller, carrying our screams down with me.
Then nothing.
THIRTY-ONE
SUBWAY ASSAULT ENDS IN DEATH
Police are investigating the death of a man hit by a train at Wilson subway station. In what may have been a failed mugging, two males were seen fighting on the southbound platform when one man fell to the tracks as a train was approaching the station. Witnesses report that in the ensuing struggle, as the fallen man tried to climb back onto the platform, the other male also fell to the tracks and into the path of the oncoming train.
The train was unable to brake in time. One male died on the scene from massive injuries. The other is presently in critical condition at Baycrest Hospital. Names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.
THIRTY-TWO
The guy in the mirror could have escaped from the morgue. Pressing down on the sink, I lean in for a closer inspection. My right eye has no white in it; the brown iris is surrounded by red. It's what the doctors call a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Doesn’t look real, more like a special effect. They say it's a minor condition that will clear up in a week or two.
“Okay in there?”
That's Mom. This is my first solo trip to the toilet. She's been helping me with sitting and standing, steadying me and looking the other way when I tell her to. I was thinking the nurses could handle those duties, but she insisted. I’m back to being her baby again. I think she likes it that way.
“I’m good,” I call through the door.
The light's too bright in here, making my stitches appear even more gruesome. They sewed me up with fifteen stitches, running from behind my ear down the back of my neck. Another twenty on my arm—they had to do both deep sutures and surface ones to close it up. There might be some nerve damage. Got to wait and see. My other arm is shot too, with a mid-forearm break and two screws in there to heal it straight.
What else? A minor concussion and some serious road rash where I got dragged along under the platform.
I look like crap. But you should see the other guy.
Roach, aka Scott Weber, was pulped, crushed, and left without any real features to identify him. Good thing he had his health insurance card in his wallet.
The cops came and went, and came and went. There was some confusion about the sequence of events. People had spotted me being chased into the station. If it was a botched mugging, why had Weber followed me like that, into a public place?
“Sorry, I can’t remember,” I told them. “He tried to rob me. He had a knife. But it's all really hazy.”
The concussion bailed me out, gave me an excuse to be vague and confused. There were enough people who saw Roach chasing me—and the security video showing him attacking me on the platform—to fill in most of the blanks. And he still had the knife on him that sliced my arm open.
It came out on the news that there had been a prior assault charge against Scott Weber. A prostitute had been beaten up, but the charge was dropped when the woman refused to testify. So even if the cops still had some questions, it was clear Weber wasn’t exactly a model citizen.
When I come out of the washroom, Mom's right outside the door.
“Did you manage?” she asks.
“Yes, Mum. I’m a big boy now.”
I try a smile that turns into a wince when it stretches my stitches.
Dad gets up from his seat by the window. He's not looking so hot himself, staying here during the day and working the graveyard every night
. If Mom's my nurse, Dad's my guard. Death almost got me, but he'll be here to scare it off next time.
“Go home, Dad,” I tell him. “You’ve got to be at work again in like six hours.”
I walk over to the bed, and they follow me on either side, ready to lift and carry me, burp me and change my diaper.
“Thanks, guys. I think I can make it.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“Do you want some ice water?” Mom asks. “Or some Jell-O?”
I shake my head slowly, wincing at even that small movement.
“Watch some TV,” Dad suggests.
“No. No. You guys should take a break. I’m not going anywhere. It'll be a couple more days before they let me go home.”
Dad lets loose with a monster yawn.
“Go,” I say to him. “Get some sleep.”
There's a knock at the door, and Wayne pokes his head in. “You’re not getting your sponge bath or anything indecent, are you?”
“I wish,” I say.
“Sir. Ma’am.” Wayne greets the folks.
“Wayne,” Dad grunts, not thrilled to see him.
“Well, maybe we will take a breather,” Mom says, sensing the sudden chill in the air.
Before they leave, Mom comes over and combs my hair with her fingers, studying my face. “I really don’t like the looks of that eye.”
“Like the doctor said, it'll be gone in a couple weeks— the redness, not the eye,” I tell her. “It's like a hickey.”
“Hmmm,” she says, trying on a weak smile. “I'll be back first thing in the morning.”
“Okay.”
“Night, kid,” Dad says.
When they’re gone, I have to deal with Wayne screwing around with the controls on my bed.
“Let me give it a spin,” he says, hopping on with his dirty shoes and ratty jean jacket. “So what's with the folks? I get the feeling they’ve got a voodoo doll of me at home and they’re going to rush back to the Jungle to hammer nails into it.”
“You’re the devil on my shoulder, man. Darth to my Luke.”
“Right. What a load. You’re the one who talked me into a felony.”
Wayne gets tired of the contorting bed and flicks on the TV. Him and Vinny have been coming by every day. We’re the only ones who know what really happened. And we’re going to keep it that way. Taking it to the grave.
“The cops been back?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I have a concussion. I can’t remember. I’m confused. Where am I? What's my name?”
Wayne nods. “Massive head injury. Good excuse.” He scratches his stubbly scalp. “I never should have left you alone there.”
After Wayne took off that day, he went and waited on the corner. But he was getting drenched, so he ran over to the coffee shop to get out of the rain. He didn’t see Roach coming home. Wayne said he was drying himself off with a wad of napkins when he looked out the window and saw me being chased. I was already two blocks away by then, and running hard. He tried to follow but lost sight of me. He was still searching when he heard the sirens converging on Wilson Station.
Wayne actually saw me being loaded into the back of the ambulance. He couldn’t call my parents or talk to the cops without giving everything away. I mean, we had just committed a felony. So he went to the hospital and found out I was still breathing. He came real close to running into my mother when she got there, but managed to slip away unseen.
“Hey, don’t let it eat you up,” I tell him. “All's well that ends… in death and disfigurement.”
I lean back on the bed beside Wayne. He stops flicking channels when he finds a rap video.
I reach over to my bedside table and take a sip of warm water, using a straw. “Remember when you were talking about going straight? No more scamming?”
“Doesn’t sound like me.”
“Seriously.”
Wayne sighs. “Yeah. I remember.”
“I guess I kind of wrecked that for you.” I take the straw from my water and use it to scratch an itch under my cast, careful to avoid the stitches. “What do you say we make a deal,” I say, “and stay legal from now on?”
Wayne reaches in the side pockets of his jacket.
“Tell you what,” he says. “Let's sign that deal in pudding.”
He pulls out two sealed cups of chocolate pudding. “I lifted these from somebody's lunch tray.”
“Oh, man.” I shake my head, groaning.
“The deal is…,” Wayne tells me, peeling back the lid and dipping his finger in. “When the pudding's done”—he pauses to lick his finger clean—”so are our lives of crime.”
He hands me the other pudding. He's quit too many times for me to really buy it. Like he says—whether he's working a lock, doing some lifting, or taking a commission—”The fingers never forget.” But right now those fingers are smeared with chocolate, and I really want to believe him.
So I say, “Deal.”
I don’t know what it is that pulls me out of a dead sleep. It's not a sound, or a change in the light. The blinds are still drawn, and the hospital room is pleasantly dim. I sniff the air.
A smell. That's what it is. A smell so familiar …
“So you’re still breathing, eh?” she says.
I glance over to the source of the voice. Kim's sitting in a chair she's pulled up beside my bed.
I’m real groggy. My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton balls. I give her a lazy smile, breathing in her vanilla scent. “You smell like ice cream.”
“You always say that,” she tells me, her voice with a touch of sadness.
“Makes me hungry.”
She's quiet for a while, studying the wreckage of my face. I’m still smiling, in a dopey kind of way. It's a real effort to keep my eyes open. I’m so impossibly happy to see her. My phantom girlfriend, sitting there in the flesh.
Kim shakes her head. “You look like roadkill.”
“Yeah. But you should see the other guy.”
“They said it was a mugging. That you fought back.”
“Didn’t want to lose my library card.” I laugh softly at my own joke.
She sighs. “I’d whack you on the side of the head if you didn’t already have a concussion.”
“I’d settle for a spanking.” I try to waggle my eyebrows, but it hurts too much. “You mad at me or something?”
“Yes. No.” Kim reaches up and ruffles her short blond hair, giving me a growl of frustration. “You were always so busy trying to rescue me from my life. Remind me now, who's the one who needs protection?”
I’m finding it hard to focus on her words. She sounds mad, but it's a good mad. She doesn’t hate me or anything. She's just worried. Everybody's always worried about me.
“Miss you,” I say.
“I know.”
I almost doze off then, but use all my strength to keep my eyes on her. In the dimness, Kim's a long blond shadow stretched out on the chair.
We’re quiet for a little while. Then she gets up. I raise my head.
“Don’t go,” I say.
“Sleep,” she tells me.
“But—”
“Go to sleep.”
I want to fight it, but my head suddenly feels a hundred pounds heavier, sinking down into a pillow soft as melting ice cream.
The lights go out in my brain and I give up, letting sleep pull me under.
Way later, I wake up with the faint memory of someone being in the room with me. I can’t remember who, until I pick up the scent she left behind.
My vanilla phantom.
THIRTY-THREE
The stitches came out after two weeks. The cast stays on for six to eight.
After fourteen days of rest under Mom's surveillance, I get a little twitchy and decide to go back to work. I’m actually shocked I still have a job. I thought Jacob would have ratted me out when I took off for lunch that day and never came back. Maybe he never even noti
ced.
When he sees me with my cast, walking in the door of the lost and found, he says: “A lot of good you'll be now. One arm and a limp.”
Love you too, you old fart.
Back in the stacks, my lawn chair is still here. Same chair, same dust, same fossilized Post-its swept under the shelves. Nothing changes down in the morgue.
The cops stopped bugging me weeks ago. I was worried at first they might go searching Roach's place and find my blood in the basement, my fingerprints on that steel bar. Talking to the cops, I found out more from them than they got from me. My story didn’t change—I couldn’t remember. But they let slip about Weber living with his grandmother, and how she was being very uncooperative.
I guess they had no real reason to press it, no reason to get a search warrant or anything. The investigation was closed. Case cleared.
And nobody will ever know. Except me, Wayne, and Vinny.
On the weekend we had a big barbecue out in back of the Jungle. Guess what I used to start up the fire. I doused the pages from the diary with lighter fluid and stood there with Vin and Wayne, watching them burn.
I’ve been thinking about the grandmother, that deaf old lady who caged her grandson. What would she do when she discovered what he had been up to in the basement?
I can only see her through his eyes, his words. So I think she’d just take what she found as proof that her grandson was what she’d always suspected. She’d mop up the blood and throw away his things. “Very uncooperative” they called her. From what I read she sounds half nuts herself. It doesn’t really matter now, anyway. All Roach's plans died with him.
I settle into my chair and ease my foot up to rest on a shelf.
Kim called yesterday. It could have been a pity call, checking up on the poor broken-down ex. But she did call. That's got to mean something, right?
She's playing in the Toronto summer league, so I’m going to catch one of her games this week. And see what happens.
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