Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  You keep remembering all that once it’s gone, as if it’s some kind of magic elixir you can draw strength from, strength you need through the times when you’re not getting any sleep, through sick kids and colic and the whirl of endless turmoil in extended families. Things rush along, and you end up living a kind of dismissive shorthand with each other—no one to blame, everyone to blame. Because there’s no time, and you forget to make time.

  Until the day I woke up and realized that even the light outside had changed some time ago, and I suddenly believed that all the books had been lying about love, that it wasn’t really endless and perfect and available after all. I also realized that I’d actually known this for a while, although I couldn’t pick out the exact day when I’d discovered it.

  It was like when autumn comes, when there’s still sunlight but it doesn’t have the same kind of warmth on your skin anymore.

  I knew everything had changed.

  When I asked her, it was something Beth knew too—except she told me she had other things to worry about, more important things, that she was overwhelmed by everything else in her world. She also basically told me, in just so many words, that I could deal with that loss on my own.

  For weeks afterwards, looking out the windows of my office, my mind was in neutral, doing nothing to help except spinning around endlessly over the same knot, and cutting into my billable hours to boot. I was marking time, shifted away from any kind of action by the realization of the thing I had lost.

  Oh, and did I mention how much Mary understands loss? Two kids of her own, two girls almost grown now, a single parent hop-skipping around the city enough that she understands real estate better than the firm that does our title searching, so that sometimes I let her handle the few realty transactions we do get, and I just initial them in the end. For her and the kids, she told me, moving was almost like painting: you have to do it right away when you realize that the serious marks are beginning to show through. She told me quietly that she’s spent a life walking into relationships full of hope, and every time, she’s either walked away or been walked away from. That it’s hurt every single time, but in the end has always wound up being the right thing to do.

  So she recognizes loss when she sees it, recognizes it like it’s a fine new colour rising up under your skin, a nascent bruise.

  And when it happened, it was just one moment, one single tipping moment, one switch tripped, one light touch. I can remember it absolutely exactly: her touch, electric and fine, like static chattering across my skin, drawn out over a full minute. After that, things simply fell into place.

  In Markland versus Markland, a British case, the husband and wife shared ownership of a chicken plant, except a trust held the two deciding shares. The wife had told the judge that the trust was a sham, that her husband had always been able to coerce the trustees into doing exactly what he wanted, and the judge spent thirty-seven pages of his decision detailing what a sham is in law, and how it has to work. I believe the judge was actually just trying to delay the inevitable, that he had to make a decision one way or the other—that he’d already made the decision—and that he wanted to be saved from blame by deliberately burying himself in unnecessary and extraneous detail.

  Reading the decision, I couldn’t help but think it would have been better for everyone involved if he’d simply gone ahead and said it, instead of endlessly trying to straddle both worlds. On page thirty-eight, already easily twenty pages too late for everyone else, he finally said there was no proof to the wife’s charges. But it still took another one hundred and twelve pages to finally finish the case.

  In Traves versus Traves, Ontario Superior Court, there were no good guys at all, and the judge obviously held everyone, lawyers included, in complete disdain. Her verdict was full of sharp, angular words, chastising the husband for deliberately hiding assets and underplaying his vast income, lecturing the wife for theatrically overplaying her misery, and smacking all the lawyers for resorting to legal tricks and sharp practice. I got the feeling that if it was her choice, she’d have given all the property and cash, every darned bit of it, to charity instead of letting any one of that shabby crew benefit from it. There was disdain dripping from every judicial word.

  But she analytically split the property up piece by piece anyway, the houses and cars and loans and registered retirement savings plans, and in her last paragraph she said that she had been as fair as possible in trying circumstances, where everyone had cheated in one way or another. Then the judge said she had absolutely no expectation that the case would end with her, that she expected everyone would appeal, and in the end their entire savings would be devoured by bitterness and legal fees.

  And good luck to them both.

  It read as if she put the last period on the page with a hammer.

  It was completely unprofessional, and it was the sweetest judicial verdict I have ever read.

  It was almost midnight, and the office was lit hard against the night. Shaken by the dark glass of the windows, I turned off as many lights as I could, leaving only the small circle of the desk light and the blue pool from the computer monitor.

  With the light almost gone, the office started to take a shape from its sounds: the distant whirr of a motor, probably the refrigerator in the small kitchenette, and the occasional flat ping of the fins on the radiator when the heat came on. Sometimes a disembodied and regular ticking, something cooling down or heating up.

  Outside, the snow had started battering down even harder, and the cars left trails that barely lasted, deep white-on-white indentations, the tires no longer cutting down to the black of pavement. The occasional passersby were crowned with white on their heads and shoulders, like small and moving mountaintops. Ranges coming into range, I thought, and the scrambled confusion of the words made me smile.

  Down over the dock, I could see the coils of snow caught high and twisting in the orange arc lights, bending and running but, like moths, unable to escape from the glare they’d caught themselves in. Able only to lie down on the ground and die, exhausted by all the futile effort they’d expended.

  I kept calling up more case law, tapping keys into the Ontario Superior Court and the British Columbia law library, sometimes taking a swing overseas through the European Union law archive for judgments that were at least written in a slightly different tone, different enough that I could almost hear the upper-class shape of the words. Reading family law reports from Australia and Scotland and New Zealand, soaking it all in, all the broken little pieces of glass that are right there, around the next corner.

  As hard as I tried, I didn’t find anything close to the simple answer I was looking for. Not anywhere.

  Silvio versus Silvio. March, for some reason, versus May, like two different seasons at war: he’s cold, she’s blooming. Layton versus goddamn Layton.

  Across the street in the hotel, a room suddenly burst to life, the curtains open, lights ablaze. There was a man and a woman, tight in each other’s arms, and I could see them coiling against each other, urgent. I wondered who they were, if their personal and joined struggle—looking almost violent from this distance—was Married versus Married, or Lover and Lover.

  Another time, eons ago, I might have actually joked that I could sit in my own office and drum up new business by the careful and regular examination of the rooms across the street. The couple in the hotel clearly didn’t care about curtains, either, shucking themselves out of each other’s clothes, and the irony was that I could watch without even getting aroused, keenly aware of what they were feeling and wondering if the weight of tragedy was just waiting to fall.

  Whether or not I’d get to see it coming before it struck.

  Whether I’d care.

  When I was barely paying attention anymore, one of them turned off the lights and the windows went dark.

  Ground down by the weight of a hundred cases or more, I knew that I would eventually have to stop reading, turn off the last of my office lights and lock the
door. That I’d throw myself out into the night and hope that the snow would blast away everything from my skin and leave me shriven. Sandblasted clean. Home to a quick shower, the kept appearance of freshly painted and unmarked walls—and no questions, because questions have become a well-known, well-trodden minefield.

  Magazines are always saying that there are a dozen signs your spouse is having an affair, and they’re all true. What the magazines don’t say is there’s a point where you don’t even want to know what the signs are, because it’s the kind of addition that you just don’t want to do. The sum is too definite.

  All of the hotel rooms were either dark or had their curtains pulled closed when I turned off the computer and headed for the stairs.

  I turned the key in the front door, felt the deadbolt snick into place, then pressed the familiar numbers on the keypad to make sure the security system was on. Out in the snow, I saw Billy Sharpe, crusted over with fallen snow like a statue. He’s a process server, a guy who works for the firm regularly. When he moved out of the shadows, snow tumbling off him, the movement startled me. He must have rung the after-hours bell and somehow I’d missed it.

  “Got nothing for you today, Billy,” I told him.

  “Well,” he said quietly, and he shifted his weight and moved his hand into his pocket so the snow tumbled down over one shoulder in a brief and abrupt avalanche. That’s why he’s so good at his job—no one ever expects anything. He pulled out papers. “Actually, Mike, I’ve got something for you.”

  He said it apologetically, his eyes down at my feet, but he handed me the papers anyway and then moved off into the falling snow and out of sight so quickly it was hard to believe he’d even been there.

  And I wondered what the rush was, wondered which lawyer in town was in such a hurry that they’d send Billy out in a snowstorm to wait up half the night for me.

  I opened the envelope, unfolded the brief, and watched as the snowflakes fell down like little stars on the expensive paper, melting instantly and bringing the paper up in little damp humps like welts wherever they landed.

  Looking at it over and over, I tried to make sense of the words while the rest of the world seemed to be grinding to a halt under the weight of the snow.

  Carter versus Carter.

  LITTLE WORLD

  “M ILLIE DOESN’T MIND if I come in, she never does. If she minded people coming in her house, she’d lock the door, wouldn’t she? But she doesn’t. She hasn’t locked the door in years. Everyone knows everyone out here, we’ve grown up together, for God’s sake. Right on top of each other, really.”

  Helen Goodyear was like a tour guide, explaining every single step.

  “And you a police officer, it’s not like you’re here to rob anything.”

  Helen was a small woman, stooped, with an ordered pile of white hair. All of the knuckles on both hands were fat and angry red with arthritis, her face creased and brown from the sun. She was wearing a summer dress, blue, but the hem had come unstitched and she hadn’t noticed, so that the skirt ended in an uneven fringe of ravelled cloth.

  Helen stopped on the porch, turning as if the motion provided some essential piece of punctuation to what she was going to say next. “I tell you, I know what I saw. But I don’t know if anyone else saw anything. You’ll have to ask for yourself.”

  Behind the house, there was a big shrub rose, the white buds tipped with pink, falling over itself with the weight of the flowers that had already bloomed, the tips of some of the branches rubbing against the side of the house. Thrown over everything, the sound of the ocean, the swells running up the bay and falling on the stones, hauling the loose rocks back into the water with a clatter.

  Helen stood in front of a two-storey house that had once been white, with rough-sided clapboard now showing through in patches. The peaked roof with its black shingles dipped along in the middle of the roofline in a gentle, hipped curve. Millie’s house was prominent among the handful of houses in the bottom of the valley between the river and the road, the highest of the six in elevation, but the lawn was ragged and uncut, high with browning timothy grass, a spruce tree heavy in the front yard and the ground beneath it carpeted with cast-off needles and scattered wet spruce cones.

  Millie’s house was like all of them, turned so that it was facing away from the wind off the water. Each at its own subtle angle, backing or shouldering into the wind, not squared off like new houses on a suburban side street. The houses all standing as if they were performers in a play, caught fixed in time at one particular point in their blocking, each part of a lengthy and familiar conversation, lines practised and delivered over and over again. That was easiest to see from above: as the road curled in from Placentia, the houses suddenly appeared, laid out and clearly visible, so that finding them was like a discovery made while landing a small plane on a narrow asphalt runway.

  “Millie’s in here all the time, she’s the best here for making bread, so I try to time coming over when there’s bread baking, you can’t beat that.” Helen was talking so that her words were thrown back over her shoulder as she walked down the narrow hall.

  She walked into the empty kitchen, put her hand on the cold enamelled stove that hunkered down next to the back wall, and then walked to the window, peering out through the small square panes of glass. The paint was peeling on the mullions between the panes, white once but freckled now with small black blemishes of mildew.

  “She’s not here, and I don’t see her in the garden either, but she can’t have gone far. Used to be it was like she was attached to her kitchen with string, she was that easy to find. For the last few months, though, she’s never been here when I needed her. Maybe she’s found a man.” Helen laughed behind her hand at her own joke, her eyes flitting back and forth, looking for someone else to join in. “Found a man? She’s the same age as me, officer.”

  Helen in front of the window, checking her reflection in the glass, tucking away loose strands of hair behind one ear. An old mirror, with the silver backing coming away in the corners.

  “You can see all of the houses from here, we’re always right on top of each other, everyone minding each other’s business. You get used to it.” She pointed outside, her index finger bent. Her hand was shaking slightly. “That’s Wakeham’s over there, he’s a nasty old man, spits all the time, and a mouth on him like a sewer. Never anything good to say about anyone. And then, next to that, the two Hodges, Davey in the yellow house and Mike and his wife in the red one. My house you know, and the Slips are in that pale green one. They used to have two cars, in that narrow little driveway—can you imagine? And whoever was going out first took whatever car was closest to the road. Keys on a hook in the kitchen right inside the door, I could have taken one for a spin if I wanted to, and I don’t even drive.” She laughed, paused. “Not that I would, officer.

  “Never see a car down there now. Must have taken them a little to get used to that. You can talk to all of them, if they’re around. I don’t know what they’ll be able to tell you that I can’t.”

  The house quiet, hot-air still, the rooms almost soaking up sound. There was only the faint ticking of the house shifting in the heat, individual boards giving a slight creak or an occasional snap as they settled, eased. No steady tread of someone walking upstairs—no sounds from outside. No shouts—no dogs barking.

  The curtains hanging limp in the windows, exhausted.

  “It’s never really been a town. It seems too small to be a place that could have its own name. But it’s been St. Peter’s for so many years now, so I guess the highway signs are going to say that no matter how small it gets.”

  Helen opened the front door, revealing a rectangle of outdoors, the warmth of the summer morning flowing in through the gap like smoke.

  The valley was cut up into rough squares with rail fences, the river fast and tea brown but low. The Slips’ house with one broken window obvious on the second floor, a slight attempt at a repair with quarter-inch plywood. Down below, a lila
c in the front yard, all of its blooms gone away, the branches heavy with green seed pods, the flutes of the blooms bleached and brown and scattered on the ground like intricately formed wet confetti. The small harbour a creation of time and the river’s erosion. The belly of the valley full of dark soil and gravels pulled down from the higher ground over thousands of years.

  Out over Placentia Bay, big clouds were scudding left to right, heavy enough to be thunderheads, waiting for just the right time to roll in like an army advancing and soak the land. Helen closed Millie’s front door behind herself, looking around almost immediately, as if expecting Millie to change her mind and make an appearance after all.

  “I’d take you down to see the Slips, because they’re just as close to the water, almost next to the wharf, and their fishing shed is right next to the road there as well. But I don’t think they’re home. I don’t see them much at all anymore, and without the cars, it’s hard to know when they’re there.” Her voice suddenly quiet. “I’m not sure if they’d even come to the door. I think I may have done something to make them angry with me. It’s not so very hard to do. If there’s one thing they’ve always been good at, it’s holding a grudge.”

  In the fresh air, the smell of the spruce trees on both sides of the river was stronger, as if the heat was pulling perfume out of the blue-green needles. The lupines were already dropping their flowers and setting seeds, the flowers that remained running up the side of the hill opposite like purple flames of a slow-travelling brush fire. There was one dry gravel road running straight down between the houses towards the bay and, springing from it like branches, narrow green paths that gave the impression of a community of sheep or other livestock, rather than people.