The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  “I talked to Kate Speir,” she said, finally.

  He didn’t do a Morris. No startled response. He didn’t lean back or widen those ice-blue eyes. If anything, he seemed to settle there across plates and glass and flatware. He put both his hands on the table, loose fists. He didn’t look at her directly, but gazed attractively towards the front window, his eyes glinting with the sunny action there. He was entertaining responses, Catherine thought. Calculating how much she knew, as something more serious flitted there under the surface, the shadow of a trout in cold river water.

  “So?” Kalmar started. “How did you get along?”

  “Don’t do it, Kali,” Catherine said. And she felt a genuine sadness just then. “Please. Just don’t.”

  He looked at her. Those blue eyes bruised around the lids now too. Tired blue. “What then, Catherine?” he said. “Maybe you go first.”

  “You’re not eating,” she observed.

  He picked up a gherkin and held it to his teeth.

  “Kimchi ramen,” she said.

  He didn’t bite. He put the gherkin down. He looked away again, this time with a wistful smile. Instant noodles and Clif bars brought to the women in his plans. He had a sure fondness for helping, for fetching, for ingratiating himself. Let me help. An Icelandic mystic in search of his package. What were the chances that all that familiar food in Speir’s kitchen had come direct from the DIY canteen? Why wouldn’t it have? Kalmar was a man who’d stolen more important things than that. Catherine had made it possible by being more open with him than anyone else. Perhaps Kate had too. Perhaps they’d both exposed themselves. And how skilfully Kalmar had worked the angles as they were presented to him, instructing both of them on the topic of invasive species. Kate and Cate. Both of them listening in their different ways, from their perfectly reciprocal positions on either side.

  Catherine thought she could picture the scene exactly. Yaletown over fancy plates. Pork with miso and Hiroshimana greens. Clicking chopsticks and conversation all around. Light fixtures like planets, like a galaxy in which the diners were suspended. The sake would be poured. And Kalmar would have been there in his suit, with his lean frame, his brooding slouch, attentive eyes. Catherine herself had so nearly gone under. Speir, for her part, would have looked at Kalmar and licked her lips. He was so eager to help. So keen to please. But there was apparently a line even Kate Speir wouldn’t cross. And she’d reached it in her own living room, facing, finally, the survivor who was meant to survive.

  Kalmar sipped his water, then put it down. “Just business,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Catherine said. “But where did your business go?”

  Kalmar again looked away, the lowering light making shadows across his features.

  “The leak,” she said. “That was Mako bait, was it?”

  No answer.

  “Did you do other bad things, Kalmar? Did you show them confidential meeting minutes and financial statements? Did you break the law?”

  His jaw tightened and his hands tensed again on the table.

  “You got to know her. Why do think she’d pull out?” Catherine asked.

  Kalmar freezing, his expression hardening further. Then he swivelled his gaze to look at Catherine squarely. He still had the juice, Catherine thought. She could feel the movement of something in her own chest. She could feel the full impact of being engaged by this man.

  “She pulled out because of you,” Kalmar said, eyes still intensely locked on her own. Was that real emotion brimming there?

  Catherine waited.

  “She told me about meeting you,” Kalmar said. “Wouldn’t say where or what about.”

  Catherine listening only.

  “What did you talk about?” Kalmar was now asking. “What the hell did you say?”

  Catherine in silence, now seeing quite clearly how it must have happened after their Kensington Place exchange. Kate Speir telling Kalmar the news. She was pulling out. He’d reached a hand to touch her. Listen, listen. And Speir had slapped him hard. Right there on that left cheek. Catherine could see it as if in a vision. Speir was small, but very strong. Fair skin, red hair, a green-eyed fighter. And Kalmar had shrunk back from her.

  Kalmar with something like fear in his eyes now. Kalmar afraid of his own future and turning away to conceal the shame of it. Kalmar turning away.

  There was nothing more that needed to be said. He’d get the letter. He’d accept the settlement. He wanted now just to be gone. And he left without even another glance in her direction. Kalmar up and heading for the door, slipping and slouching towards the street. She’d never see him again. She was sure of that. She’d never see Kate Speir either, but then Speir, by her nature, did not wish to be seen.

  —

  So it wouldn’t be Maui where Catherine decided to go for her much-needed break forty-eight hours later. Not Vietnam. Not Puerto Rico or Spain. They had a big party at the Warehouse the next day. Hapok hired a mariachi band, because he said no more goddamn Christmas covers and because today they stood with Mexico. They had a mountain of tacos and many bottles of Dos Equis Amber. There were high-fives. And there were hugs. There was hardly any talk of the beta release, which would need to be accomplished soon. Time now for beer and food and a long, deep breath. One carol, Hapok conceded, ordered up and sung with Yohai using the new house karaoke system, a nod to where Catherine was going: “Christmas in Killarney.”

  Directly home and to bed. Directly to the airport in the morning with a single carry-on bag and a lumpy envelope in her purse, traveling with the crowds on Christmas Eve. There was “Last Christmas” trickling down from a thousand invisible speakers, silver wreaths on the pillars and an arrangement of penguins on a fake iceberg just outside of international departures. Everyone at YVR security offered a greeting. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Eid Milad Saeid.

  A seat in the lounge, a ticket to Dublin, and one last call to make.

  “May I speak to Phil?” she said, when a stranger answered at his number.

  “Oh, he’s shovelling,” the woman said, and laughed. “On Christmas Eve!”

  “Oh,” Catherine said. “All right. I’m Catherine.”

  “Catherine,” the woman said. “I know you, yes.”

  “Have we met?”

  “No, no. This is my first time in Canada. I’m Camila, a friend of Phil’s. Let me get him.”

  No don’t, Catherine said. I mean, not right this second. Christmas Eve and all. Let him do the shovelling. Did they really have snow?

  Camila laughed again. Not snow. Manure. For the plants in the greenhouse. Did she know about Phil’s plants? Well yes, he was out there now shovelling manure with Daniel.

  “Daniel is my son,” Camila said. “He has come with me.” Visiting from Spain, Camila said. Her father had known Phil’s father from long ago. Let me get him, Camila said again. They were just down at the bottom of the orchard. No trouble to get him.

  “No, no,” Catherine said. “Tell Phil I’m boarding a flight.”

  Okay. Okay. She would tell Phil that.

  “Tell him Merry Christmas,” Catherine said. “And to you too, Camila.”

  “Yes,” Camila said. “Merry Christmas, Catherine. Merry Christmas and the happiest new year.”

  Catherine in a departure lounge. And then in motion. Dublin direct. But no big rush. Christmas Day in the city. White lights in strands over Grafton Street. Fireworks on a barge in the Grand Canal. She had a pint with some Australians in Kehoe’s and a long walk by herself down City Quay, thick snowflakes falling and melting on the cobbles. She woke in the green light of Boxing Day. Rented a car. Headed west, then south. A night in Abbeyleix. A long, slow drive east through Carlow to the coast. To Arklow and north. Everything was closed but she found the lockbox for the Airbnb she’d rented from Vancouver. A cottage near the beach in Ballinacarrig, where she woke on the second anniversary of something important that had once happened quite near to there. Brittas Bay. A
ir France Flight 801. She could walk to the sand, to the very spot where she had come ashore. And after coffee, she did that. There on the beach, that morning, she walked and found her place, then stood and stared up at the sky. She stared up at the perch from which she had fallen. Soft sea swells from the Irish Sea. Very high cirrus clouds, the most delicate white lace against a dusty blue. The beach grass on the rolling dunes sifted in a cold wind. The sun was blazing but it did not do much to warm her. And looking up she saw that it was also circled in a wide halo that winked and refracted light, suggesting that the sun was itself not the largest orb in the sky, but the burning white centre of a shimmering, larger sphere.

  Ice crystals in the ionosphere, Catherine knew, suggesting rain to come. But for the moment, not merely meteorology, auspicious also.

  Catherine was on one knee, her small offering in hand. Here the pebbles were strewn across the sand in a way that suggested constellations. She kneeled in a galaxy of stones, the beach seeming to mirror in its patterns the heavens above. She kneeled at this point of meeting, where she herself had met the earth after her own terrifying fall.

  She had brought things. Crucial things that could be carried no farther. A broken watch. A flight safety card. An envelope of photographs. She had sealed these in a Ziploc bag that she laid in a hole she’d dug with her hands in the sand. She released these back into the wilds from which they had been plucked and assigned such significance. Now they could return to insignificance, or be adopted into new matrices of meaning by someone else if they were discovered. Let them charge a new imagination. They were gone from hers.

  One final item.

  Tear-stained. Wrinkled. She unfolded it now as she had so many times before, its creases darkened with the oils of her hands, the image smudged, but the yellow highlighter plain. That seat plan. Those lucky seats. The sacred six.

  But she did not read the coordinates again, or recite the seat numbers aloud. That liturgy had been said a final time, addressed to the gods who had authored her presence there, the sole survivor. Gods who were so near and yet ungraspable. She folded the paper up again, lengthwise, to fashion a taper. And then she set it on fire with matches she’d picked up at a gas station in Bray, watching the flare of flame, the tendril of smoke in the salty air.

  The flame burned down. She felt the heat rising. And just as it threatened to scorch her fingertips, she dropped it, watching the ashes and embers scatter in the Irish sand.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks Martha Kanya Forstner and everyone at Doubleday Canada and Penguin Random House Canada. Thank you Dean Cooke and everyone at the Cooke Agency. I consider it a great fortune to work with such warm and intelligent friends.

  Catherine Bach quotes on several occasions from the book ReWork, written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier of 37SIGNALS. Thanks to them for an inspiring work and its influence on that character.

  I would like to acknowledge the invaluable gifts of love, friendship and wisdom that I received from those people I lost in 2016, the year this book came together. I will never forget you, but will remain grateful and in your debt.

  Finally, thanks to my family, who have stood by me and supported me through difficult times. Where danger threatens, that which saves from it also grows.