Today I Learned It Was You

by Edward Riche

  The boys received something, a man-to-man signal that Alessandra didn’t fully grasp, a message worse than Matt’s words themselves. They were suddenly afraid of Matt. The three boys commenced crab-walking to the edge of the slope. Reaching daylight they dropped, legs churning to run before they even hit the ground.

  “You scared them off.”

  “I wish I had the knees to chase them. Maybe.”

  They wandered until they reached a seldom-used path cut into a steep bank paralleling a gorge through which ran the Waterford River. They were shaded, scattered beams of sunlight cut through the leaves above to show off mist rising from the rapids they could hear, but not see, below.

  “Sure Davenant doesn’t think he’s a mountain goat?” asked Matt.

  “At night you might . . .”

  “Pitch right over the edge. Yes, easily.”

  They came to a bench, its etiolated wood turning moss green. Matt sat down and draped his arms the full length of it. Alessandra stood for a moment before him and then, without any sense of having chosen to do so, placed herself on the seat next to him, touching him.

  “Councillor Cappello . . . Alessandra?”

  “Yes?”

  “I . . . when I asked you to . . . We really do have to determine. It is something we have to look at.”

  “I know. It’s an urgent situation. Not an emergency but also . . . Matt, today I felt, today I —”

  His arm pulled her in and up. She craned her neck and dropped back her head to let his mouth meet hers. Her hand pressed to his heart as her lips parted. His left hand cradled her side, overtook the length of her ribs so she felt small. She brought her hand down and felt, right away, heat and muscle.

  A panting dog, dripping river, was eyeing them. They could hear its owner’s voice and another approaching, two men jabbering. Alessandra went to stand. For a second it seemed as if Matt would not let her go, was holding her down, but his hand fell away and she got to her feet in time to greet them.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Nineteen

  The man was in distress. He was standing on a patch of grass, off a concrete walk, on the margin of the supermarket parking lot. He was unsure where to go. He wasn’t carrying groceries so Audrey Manning first reasoned he had forgotten or lost his wallet. Then, walking past, she saw that his condition was not one of agitation but confusion. Audrey turned back to help.

  “Have you lost your wallet?”

  “I shaved and now . . .”

  “Yes?” Audrey encouraged, noticing his belt had missed two loops and his trousers were at risk of falling down.

  “Where were we?” he said.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  The man handed Audrey his wallet and said, “I’m not the person on that list.”

  He was a handsome older man, consumed by fear. He was unshaven. Audrey took the offered wallet and opened it. His driver’s licence said his name was Jules Bowan. He lived on Rennie’s Mill Road. The identifying photograph on the laminated card showed a confident figure, unafraid. Audrey wondered for a second if she knew the name, but then she saw so many in her work as the mayor’s secretary.

  “Maybe you should go home, Mr. Bowan. Do you have a way home?”

  Mr. Bowan shook his head.

  “Can I give you a drive home? Let me take you home.”

  Mr. Bowan relaxed once Audrey coaxed him into her car. It was as if she had driven him home this way hundreds of times before. He seemed to be taking in the sights.

  In less than ten minutes Audrey was pulling into the driveway of a lovely home, the address on Jules Bowan’s driver’s licence. The yard was wild with unkempt rose bushes and annuals in ad hoc beds. As soon as the car stopped Mr. Bowan said, “Thank you so much for the ride.”

  He opened his door, stepped from the vehicle, and made his way to the house as if everything were fine. Unconvinced, Audrey decided to follow. She was met by a neighbour, a woman in her sixties, in a man’s work shirt and thick knee pads. She wore cloth gardening gloves and was holding a trowel.

  “Did you . . . ?”

  “I found him at Sobeys on Merrymeeting Road. He seemed disoriented.”

  “He has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Yes, I gathered that was the . . .”

  “Poor creature. I know them. I keep a key.” The woman gestured at the house. “Let me . . .”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. Very kind of you to bring him home.”

  “It was no trouble.”

  “They are going to have to do something, if he is going to start wandering. Care of some sort.” The neighbour lay down her trowel on the stone wall lining the driveway and took off her gloves.

  “Yes,” said Audrey. “Home care.”

  “For a time, but . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “His wife is a young woman. Not young young but not . . . not a senior like Mr. Bowan,” said the neighbour.

  Twenty

  Matt took the quickest route back to City Hall, along Waterford Bridge Road. Glancing at the speedometer he caught himself doing sixty-five kilometres an hour in a fifty zone. Reduction of speed on this stretch of road was a cause he’d championed.

  “It’s not . . .” he said.

  “I love Jules. I love my husband,” she said.

  “I know. It’s the same with me, I . . . but that has nothing to do with it.”

  “I know. It’s nothing to do with it,” said Alessandra. “I wanted to and I did. I don’t feel I should regret, but . . .”

  “I know,” said Matt. But he felt an utter fool, felt more ashamed and embarrassed than he had in years. He was sorry for what he’d done, but sorry also for himself. He was a fool. He was a fool. He was a fool.

  Twenty-One

  Alessandra had not known this sort of shame since she was a child, a weight of dishonour, the sense of all the eyes in the town on you. She was overcome with more than a desire to kiss Matt; it was a demand. It was not her fault and yet she felt blame, felt the admonition of her dead mother. Her mother! And every second sitting next to Matt in his car a howling, a baying of disgrace in her head was amplified. It was a kiss, only a kiss. Was that so wrong? It was nothing to be ashamed of. She took out her phone to check for messages. It was the only way out of this moment.

  “Oh hello, Alessandra, it’s Kathleen. I’m in your house now. Fixed Jules a cup of tea. A woman brought him home from Sobeys. He was wandering. I’ll stay here until you can get home. No worries.”

  She couldn’t ask Matt to take her, not home, she would go to City Hall, get in her own car and go. Putting the phone back in her purse she saw the prescription for Reminyl, a new drug the doctor suggested for Jules, that she had neglected to fill.

  “I . . . I may not make the public meeting tonight,” she said.

  “Not because of . . .”

  “No, no, something else altogether.” They were turning into City Hall. Matt was going to park in the space reserved for the mayor, closest to the front doors, in plain view. “Can you let me out by the garage?”

  “Of course,” Matt said, stopping the car. “You all right?”

  “Yes, Matt, this is . . . it’s nothing to do with . . . we will have to talk.”

  “We will.”

  Twenty-Two

  “Are you hungry?” Patty called. She heard Matt close the front door behind him.

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “I waited. Come on, I’m starving.”

  She’d cooked a ham and mac and cheese. There was a small bowl of salad and about a half a bottle of red wine in the middle of the table. There was a glass of wine at Matt’s place setting.

  “This is delicious,” Matt told her. It was.

  “I had all these ends, nubs of different kinds of cheese, so there’s like Parmesan, and ol
d cheddar and that expensive French one. Saint-Nectaire?”

  “It’s great.”

  “Gourmet mac and cheese, hey?” she said.

  “How was your day?” asked Matt.

  “Good, good. Do you like this wine?”

  “I do.”

  “From up in Canada.” She picked up the bottle and examined the label. “How was the council meeting?”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything about the Deer Man?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I saw a Facebook thing today,” she said, thinking the ham did not taste the way ham used to, that there was a chemical tang to the meat that was never there when she was a girl, when it was ringed with white fat and rind and not, as now, uniformly pink and the shape of something extruded. She’d been thinking lately of trying to avoid all processed foods, to be more mindful of what they ate.

  “What sort of thing?” Matt asked.

  “A page supporting him.“

  “You support him, Pats?”

  “NO! I think it’s disgusting. It’s a sort of perversion. Can they not . . . help him?”

  “What can they do? They don’t even know where the mind resides.”

  “‘Mind’ or ‘spirit’?”

  “People are going to argue that it’s his right to be whoever he likes.”

  Patty thought Matt’s tone was condescending.

  “Which people?” she said.

  “Some people came to a committee meeting and then met me in the office. These . . . there’s . . . every sort of ‘pride’ organization,” Matt said. “There’s ‘mad pride’ now. I know there are going to be people coming out of the woodwork saying it’s a good thing that he’s a deer.”

  “Pride goeth before a fall.”

  “Nothing religious please, Pats.”

  “Becoming an animal, Matt?”

  “Hey, I’m not defending it,” he said.

  “But are you . . . ?”

  “He’s trespassing,” Matt said, “and if he stays out there until the fall he’ll die of exposure. It’s too foolish for words, really.”

  “I think it’s wrong. I think it’s . . .” Patty shook her head. She thought it was devilish but she wouldn’t say. “That’s not what’s in the Bible anyway, ‘Pride goeth before a fall.’ It doesn’t say that,” she said. “It’s from Proverbs. It actually goes ‘Pride goeth before destruction.’”

  “Right.”

  “‘. . . a haughty spirit before a fall.’” She watched Matt nod in a way she knew meant he didn’t want to hear anymore. He wouldn’t come out and say it but he was hostile to anything to do with her church. It wasn’t disinterest; it was antagonism. “Gonna have some more mac and cheese, honey?”

  “Pats . . . there is something we have to talk about. Something’s happened.” Matt lay down his fork and knife. Patty felt as though there was something in her throat.

  “What is it, Matthew?”

  “I got a call from the Prime Minister’s Office.”

  “The prime minister of Canada?”

  “Yes. I was invited to run in St. John’s South next election. They’ve done some polling and it looks like I stand a good chance. More than good probably.”

  Why did Matt seem so grave?

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” she said. “Matthew! The prime minister! A tremendous vote of confidence, if anything?”

  “Sure,” said Matt.

  “And?”

  “And I think I’m going to do it. It’s an interesting time in St. John’s but . . . bigger stage, change too. Get us out of town. With Katie and Jack away at school, what’s keeping us here?”

  “I think it’s a great idea, honey. I do.” She had to catch her breath. “Incredibly exciting, Matthew.”

  “Yes.”

  “They would put you right in Cabinet, being the only one from Newfoundland. You speak French. Wow. When are you going to —”

  “Nothing is public yet. I’ll get back to them soon and then . . . There’s a thing, though.”

  “A thing?’

  “We, you and I, are gonna have to watch more closely any . . . in public . . . stuff like social media too, Facebook. Keep it boring.”

  “Of course.”

  “Religious . . . don’t want to . . . The media will grab hold of anything.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Great, thanks.”

  “Did you know, Matt, that the prime minister is a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance?”

  “Not until the man from the Prime Minister’s Office told me, which makes my point.”

  “Yes, Matt, it does.”

  Twenty-Three

  Gary Mackenzie did not like Newfoundlanders.

  The Toronto Metro Police said they would relocate Gary anywhere in Canada. Newfoundland was booming, a touch exotic, and reputedly “friendly” at a time when Gary needed companionship. New friends in a newfound land, why not?

  But on arrival Gary found the people nosy, clannish, and inordinately pleased with themselves. They looked inward and uncritically loved all they observed; the views the fish the berries the mountains the music. A native daughter working in the Los Angeles porn industry had recently set a record for copulating with the most partners in a day and so was a local hero. The mayor of the capital city once played a few shifts in the NHL and they carried on like he was Bobby Orr.

  They were too talkative and overly familiar. Female shop clerks called him “dear” or “my love” and even “my lover.” A secretary back at the cop shop, Joanne, a married woman in her fifties, never failed to put her hand on his back when talking with him. But if you were not born to them you were never going to be of them. They weren’t countrymen; they were a sprawling family nine generations from their shipwreck.

  Gary sent an email to his Toronto task force case officer last week reporting that the move to Newfoundland was a failure and that he wished to go elsewhere. Gary did not mention that he was worried that someone in St. John’s, an animal rights activist, might have recognized him.

  He’d expected, despite never having been promised, to be living in the downtown of St. John’s, in some candy-coloured Victorian house like those he’d seen on television commercials. That variety of housing was in short supply and, once converted from rooming-house tenements, costly. The condos in the city centre were no different than any in North America, squat and poorly built, so Gary ended up in a subdivision called Southlands, which could have been a suburban tract in Etobicoke but for the wind and the wet.

  More concerning, he reported, was that any pretense of discretion regarding the circumstances of his relocation seemed to have been abandoned before his arrival. Every cop in the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary knew his story, or a part of it. The fellow cop sitting next to him in the front seat of the cruiser, Constable Kevin Maher, was now plumbing Gary for details.

  “So your fake name was a dead feller’s?” Kev was from some rural quarter of the island, one of its innumerable bays, and retained his accent. The ways of speaking here were too many and various to sort out and all equally cranky to Gary’s ear.

  “Died in infancy, parents moved to England soon after.”

  “And ’e a Gary too. That was good fortune, make it easier for you to pretend.”

  “They look for that. When they are making the legend they look for someone with the same first name.”

  Kev considered this. “Like you would.”

  Having come up from two full years undercover, underground, living as a subversive, Gary expected assignments reflecting his skills, serious investigative work, but the locals kept the big cases for themselves. There was a double homicide in Shaheen’s Trailer Park yesterday — a pond of blood and viscera, according to reports, teeth all over the place — that should have been his, but
Chief Cahill, to whom Gary complained about not getting the assignment, said Gary needed to better learn the lay of the land before taking on such a high-profile matter. The press would be “all over you,” the chief said. Gary was promised a pending high-stakes fraud case, but he was never going to meet women that way. It was the big murders and rapes, the violence that enthralled the gals, that made you as interesting as the latest serial killer on the tube. No, instead of chasing down a two-time murderer, Gary was sitting, in a fine new suit, in a cruiser rank with man stink, in a city park on the lookout for some nutcase who had allegedly taken up residence in the bushes. Rather than asking the questions, Gary was answering them, and his interrogator was a hick who looked sixteen years old.

  “And the crowd you were investigating dey were . . . like, ‘terrorists’?”

  “No, they were anti-globalization activists. Some of them were anarchists,” said Gary.

  “Dey were going to make away with the world leaders?”

  “They were going to disrupt the G20. How, we didn’t know. I’m not comfortable talking about it. I’m not supposed to.”

  “Reads ya. I don’t think we got any anarchists here in Newfoundland. Dere’s dem that don’t believe in the law, your regular robber, right.” Kev considered the question more deeply. “And I allows dere’s dem don’t even know dere is a ‘system.’”

  They sat for a while in silence, listening to static and chatter on the radio. Hold up at the Marie’s Minimart on Topsail Road, a teenage girl missing from Shea Heights, domestic disturbance in Quidi Vidi.

  “Buddy thinks ’e’s a deer,” said Kev.

  “Yeah,” said Gary.

  “You believes dat?”

  “Sure,” said Gary, adding, “there’s no ‘normal,’ Kev.”

  “No?”

  “No, ‘normal’ is the stupidest idea ever. There’s no such thing.”

  “I don’t know, b’y.”

  “Year ago, in Toronto, in Rosedale, which is a well-to-do ’hood,” said Gary, “I answered a call, a 10-97. A guy was dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs with his dick in his hand. Turns out he’s like one of the best oboe players in the world, tours all over the place. Hong Kong one night, Berlin the next. Classical music, right. Thing about it was, he could only get sexually aroused when he was falling down stairs. He’d broken almost every bone in his body over the years. This night, which he must have seen coming, it was a bone in his neck. He couldn’t have chosen that. It was who he was. Maybe this guy is a deer.”