Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  Up close, it was hard to make out anything, and it wasn’t until he heard the details on the news that it was clear there had been three people in the car—and that all of them were dead. The car was so totally destroyed that John had a hard time deciding just what it was he was looking at—but that confusion would shrink with each telling of the story, the details settling themselves more solidly every time through.

  Minutes after the fire trucks roared down the road and stopped, John saw a firefighter step away from the side of the car, walk across the road, bend at the waist and carefully throw up in the ditch.

  John found himself edging in far closer than he ever had before, and he felt almost offended when one of the firefighters rudely pushed him back out of the way. “If you’d just step back a bit, sir,” the firefighter said, but John found the “sir” hard and sharp, as if the firefighter was also making some kind of judgment he didn’t appreciate.

  There was occasional steam coming from the front of the car, and the two front wheels had disappeared under the dump truck. There were long, slow discussions among the firefighters about the best way to move the heavy truck. They had managed to lift enough of the roof on one side of the car to peer carefully inside the flattened wreck. No one was rushing anymore.

  John was still caught up in the sheer drama of the scene when a newspaper reporter saw him and came over, asking questions about the crash. It was strange how much John enjoyed that, he thought later. But he had enjoyed it, enjoyed it tremendously, all the while keeping his face as respectful as he could, telling the reporter about the seriousness of the crash, about all three of the crashes, leading the reporter up across the lawn to show him the healing scar in the grass and the sharp stumps, now starting to turn grey, of the clipped-off maples, agreeing when the reporter asked if his photographer could take John’s picture for the story he was doing.

  The next day, they had put his picture with the story on the bottom of the front page, and John thought he looked properly solemn and not the least bit smug at all. Turning to the obituaries and holding the paper up in front of him, John wondered if he should go to the funerals. He imagined standing there in church, formally dressed, impassive yet serious, while family members nudged each other and looked over at the man they’d seen in the paper. The unfortunate guy with three fatal crashes right in his yard. The guy who had tried to help. Somehow, John had managed to convince himself that standing there was included in helping. In the end, he thought better of going to the funerals. It would take far too much time out of the day, he thought.

  The latest crash was, without a doubt, the best story yet. John could tell the first time he told it. He could tell by the way his listeners’ faces fell, everyone standing in a small circle holding their drinks while the last barbecue of the year heated and smoked behind them, steaks forgotten. It was late in the year, the evenings already sharp and suddenly cold, the sky grey with impending sleet. There was always someone, John thought, who just couldn’t let go, who had to keep the summer going. So there were steaks and burgers, sweaters and jackets pulled around tight, and blue smoke blowing sideways away from the barbecue while John held a beer and talked gravely about the latest accident.

  “So he cut the wheel back—and that was the right thing to do, cut the wheel back, and get out of the skid—but he went too far with it, and there was this dump truck,” John said, listening to himself as he talked.

  Tone it down, he told himself, pull back—not so preachy.

  “Not survivable,” saying it like a judge delivering a verdict. “I could tell that right away. You didn’t even have to run—nothing anyone could have done anyway.

  “Crushed them right there where they were sitting, even the kid in the back seat. Hard to even tell what parts belonged to which body.”

  John hadn’t even seen the bodies—the police had come and taped off the scene after the firefighter had pushed him back, closing the road and holding up tarpaulins when the firefighters started cutting the car into pieces—but nobody knew that.

  John thought about throwing in a resigned shrug, then thought better of it. He caught a glimpse of Mary’s eyes, and they looked sharp and beady and black like a crow’s.

  Afterwards, when they’d left for home in the car, she started talking, her voice low, her face fixed and straight ahead so that she was talking to him without ever looking at him. “You enjoy it too much,” she said. “All these horrible things that happened to other people.” Her hands were working in her lap as if desperately trying to find something to do, he thought, or as if she was afraid he might hit her.

  “Don’t be foolish,” he said sharply. “I don’t enjoy anything about it.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Really, how could I enjoy it? Do you think I like it, having to go down there again and again? The kind of things I’ve seen, Mary—you have no idea.” John could feel the roundness of the words filling him up and spilling out, their order rhythmic and patterned and familiar, knowing when to carefully let his voice fall and crumble a bit at the end of the sentence.

  She hadn’t come out of the house, he thought, not even once, so she had no right to lecture him at all.

  Mary watched his face out of the corner of her eye, recognizing the practised ease of his expressions flowing from one into another, an actor reprising his role.

  “How could I like it?” John went on. “Do you think I like dragging some dead guy out of his truck to do CPR on him on the lawn? Having to go out in my own yard and find some teenager out there like a rag-doll roadkill or something? How could I like that, Mary?”

  He loved that last little bit of alliteration—rag-doll roadkill—liked it so much that he’d used it every single time since the first time the tough-sounding words had accidentally tumbled out when he’d been searching for the right description.

  He was only pausing for effect, for breath, but she cut him off. “You’ve never done CPR on anyone,” Mary said quietly. “And you don’t have to do this with me.” She paused, but before he could say anything else, her thin, small voice said, “John—I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  The words were fine and distinct and set down formally in place like dishes on a dining room table, forks and knives in order, napkins square. Planned.

  John stopped talking then and held the steering wheel tightly with both hands, telling himself that if anyone knew how important it was to stay focused when you were driving, it had to be him. After they’d driven a bit farther, he tried to reach across for her hand, but he couldn’t find it in the dark of the front seat. When his fingers grazed her wrist, Mary snatched her arm away.

  Home, and the freezing rain that had been threatening finally arrived. The sleet was travelling through the lights outside the house in ragged sheets, and the last scraps of fall were being torn down from the trees and thrown around the yard by the wind. Sitting in the living room in the dark, John could hear the change in the tone of the raindrops, could hear the glassy flexing of the iced power lines moving in the wind. No salt trucks yet—they always get out slowly on a Saturday night, he thought. Bound to be slippery out there, and the turn is always sharper than it seems.

  He quietly moved the muscles in his arms and legs, flexing and relaxing them, imagining each group of muscles getting ready to run. Mary washing her face in the bathroom, turning off the light, closing the bedroom door with what John thought had to be an accusing click.

  He heard the wet tires of every passing car, imagining that he heard them spin and grip, and spin and grip again. And every time, as every car came closer, he drew in one long and quiet breath and held it, the way a sigh might sound in reverse. Waiting. Ready for when he’d be called upon.

  After every car passed, he’d breathe again.

  OPEN ARMS

  “A T THE SOUND of the beep, leave a message.”

  So I do.

  It’s in shorthand, I realize afterwards, because by now he should be more than able to read between all the
lines. By now he should be able to read me too.

  “I don’t need any of my high school transcripts anymore, right? Or my grade six report card? I mean, there’s no reason I would—who would want to see them? We took three truckloads of stuff to the dump. The painting’s going to be fine, but there’s rain coming now.” The hiss of the recorder. “It’s Mary. Okay, you know that. Gimme a call.”

  After I hang up, I realize how disjointed the message must sound, how I’ve been talking while at the same time turning slowly around in my living room, my eyes and my words catching on things as I pass over them. I almost pick up the phone again and call back, but I stop myself. I want to call back and say, “I love you and I miss you, and you still want to be with me, right?” It’s awful to sound so desperate, so eager, so needy, but I need the reassurance more than ever.

  I need to hear him laugh, that almost dismissive two-step chuckle. It’s a laugh that feels like your hair’s being ruffled condescendingly, like someone wrapping their arms around a child or bending carefully down so they can talk face to face.

  I need him to pick up the phone so I know he’s really there. I’m sure he’s caught the note in my voice that says I need him, even if there isn’t anything obvious about it in the words I’ve said.

  I can imagine the answering machine coming on in his new place, springing to robotic life. I can see that small apartment in the shorthand he’s given me—the yellow paint and wooden floors and no pictures on the walls, so that the whole place sits in my mind like an image from a real estate website.

  Oh yes, that’s right: the apartment he hasn’t said I should come over and see yet.

  He’s told me the people downstairs cook big dinners most weekends, whole turkeys sometimes, or roast beef with potatoes, so that the whole place smells like someone’s mother’s house. The other tenants all seem to have big, deep-bellied voices, though he’s not sure whether it’s really them or whether it’s just the acoustics of their kitchen and hall. I can’t picture the bathroom or the kitchen that’s also his laundry room, even though his neighbours stumble constantly through my thoughts like big-footed trolls.

  I imagine my own warbled words coming out through his answering machine and battering around the room like restless little birds, distressed and panicked and bouncing from room to room, looking only for his ears so they can settle.

  Every now and then, I worry about him naked on a bed in a room I haven’t yet seen, another woman in there, panting and eager and under him, and I force that image out of my head as quickly as I can, telling myself that my doubts are all about me and my damaged sense of trust, clearly much more about me than him. But this move, this step, is all much harder than I thought it would be.

  I don’t know what I thought. I don’t know why I thought it. I guess I thought we would come together like some sort of relentless force, that our lives would just melt together—not easily, not seamlessly, but as if they were always intended to and were just now getting around to it.

  When I call again, he’s still not home, and I try to keep my voice level. “I didn’t expect it to be like this, okay? I mean, I’m out here taking my whole life through the door in cardboard boxes. I guess I thought I’d be past worrying, that it wouldn’t just seem so final. But I’m out of my depth here.”

  I listen to the phone after I finish, but I hear only the empty line and then the click when the machine hangs up. I pretend that it’s exactly the same click in his living room as it is in mine, that the end of the call is as unifying as it is dividing.

  I’ve never liked this house. Never. It was a stopgap for me and for the girls, a stepping stone, a way station that was supposed to be on the way to him.

  I bought it for a reasonable enough price. Small, in a nice enough neighbourhood, but nothing magic. Nothing magic at all. Under other circumstances, if I had been planning to stay in it for longer, I wouldn’t have even considered buying it. It wouldn’t have even been on my list as a possibility. It would have been discarded after a look from the pavement outside, or at best, after the door opened and I got the combination of smell and light—just the overall sense of the place. But I was running from the latest mistake. Retrenching again. Putting up walls, and setting my defences against the next relationship that could go wrong. So I grabbed the first safe place I could get my hands on, the first one that was in reach.

  It’s a capable house. It’s a house that is all the words you’d never want written in a performance evaluation at work, the kind of words no one expects to have applied to themselves. Workmanlike. Satisfactory. On time. On budget. This house has all of the pieces to do the job, and absolutely nothing more.

  It’s green clapboard, with a sharp, short peak to the roof, small rooms and low ceilings. It only has a postage stamp of a yard, just enough for me to work my way around with a push mower in ten minutes and be finished.

  I can imagine what people would say if they were potential buyers, driving down the street and seeing it sitting there, another nondescript one of a row of suitable, no-frills homes. The same dismissive kinds of words his wife’s friends would find to apply to me: “Blond, bottle blond probably, just what you might have expected. And cheap. Low rent.”

  I get it. Bad neighbourhood. Crooked teeth. Leaking shingles.

  Whatever.

  The way I like to think about it, her friends would be the people who only come to snoop around at the open house. They’re never going to buy anyway—they’re here to trash the place with words, to finger the fabric of the curtains and make fun of the people in the photos on the mantel and the knick-knacks on the side tables.

  Michael and I once ate a big brunch in a diner near my house. It’s the kind of place where there’s still Formica on the tabletops, the edges finished with an aluminum band screwed into place, red Naugahyde benches you slide into sideways when you sit down. Good-tasting food that’s bad for you. We wrote down our financial plans on paper napkins: how much we would be making, what kind of house we could afford, what kind of nest egg I could get out of the house when I sold it. How it would bring our joint mortgage payment down, because we’d have a house and mortgage together by then. Figuring out that it was all possible—how it was almost easy. On paper, anyway.

  It all came down to graphite numbers on paper napkins, numbers that were all smudged when I pulled the napkin out of my purse weeks later and realized budgets couldn’t change anything, as long as they were in my purse instead of his hands.

  Outside the restaurant that morning, the snow was piling in against the window like it was trying to force its way inside, its leading edge discovering the warm glass then crumpling all at once and sliding wetly down.

  Scrambled eggs and ham fried flat, one lone sausage that came to the table on the plate with all the other food but still managed to look ostracized and lonely. Hash browns that were already cold, the whole meal resolute about not living up to its promise. The waitress who had taken our orders stood with her back towards us, forestalling any chance at complaint. She was flirting with the cook most of the time we were there, coming back to the table only to quickly slosh more coffee into our cups.

  I wound up doing most of the talking that day and all of the writing down, the math all careful and accurate. I remember making a mistake and trying to erase it, the eraser biting down through the paper all the way to blood-red Formica, like opening a wound.

  My house has got to sell, and it’s got to sell for a high price. I need all of the down payment back, and more on top if I can get it.

  I keep telling the girls that it has to sell high, forcing them into the bathroom to cut out and replace the caulking around the tub, to clean floor tiles for prospective buyers they’ve never even met, so it’s like they were asked to get down on their knees and pray there to Mammon or the Almighty Dollar. I can’t really explain to them in a way they’d understand why it’s so damned important, can’t tell them about the law of last best chances, about having to land someone before the bait’s
all gone. They wouldn’t understand it. Maybe, more to the point, they’d misunderstand it, thinking I was suggesting I had to settle for Michael, and then they’d be forced to spring to my defence, telling me there was no need to settle for anything. Or anyone.

  Look, pragmatism may not cancel out faith, but it does make absolutely sure there’s not one single thing left to chance. Maybe you don’t make luck, but you sure can give it every possible chance to happen. To me, the equation’s pretty simple: if I sell this house for enough money, I’ve got something extra to offer. Sure, it’s the only nest egg that I’ve built up myself, something I should get to depend on, but it can’t hurt to have it there in the bank, to even things up if Michael ever starts trying to balance things out—if Michael ever starts doing the math, adding up who brought what to the equation, who made what sacrifice, who paid the most, who brought the most. If he ever does, then with the house money I hope we’ll be closer to square. Math happens, and it usually happens when there’s already a fight going on, and by then it’s always too late to redraw the lines.

  Besides, the sale of the house, written on the essential napkin, is my part of the deal. That means it’s kind of cast in stone in the alchemy of our relationship. Sometimes you have to keep those things because there’s just so little else.

  I want to take the girls and shake them until they understand—and at the same time, I don’t want them to ever have to understand this at all, because I want all of it to pass right over them without ever touching them. They deserve a future that’s simple and clean, not this. I want to save them from it completely, so that neither of them ever has to understand the despair that comes with falling down and getting up, only to be knocked back down again by love’s bitter backhand. The jarring, despairing clatter of always winding up back at the starting point, hands empty, arms slack at my sides, elbows loose, face bare and looking upwards.