The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Well, fuck this. There wasn’t enough to distract her from heartbreak. Now the embarrassment of tears. Not a single comfort measure was available. She couldn’t find the CD he’d recorded when he was trying to learn blues and classical guitar, before his studies had stolen every other interest from him.

  The other song she’d loved. Spooky, she’d thought, and weird and sad. I’m going with you, babe, I’m going with you babe, I don’t care where you go. She made him sing it over and over, she begged him to write new verses. I’m going down south, I’m going down south, chilly wind don’t blow.

  I’d rather be dead, I’d rather be dead.

  She crawled over to the window and sat there, curled up on her mattress. It might as well be that nothing had changed from last winter. It might even be that none of it had happened. It had all been a hallucination. They were brains in vats. Jason had been a better philosopher than a scientist, because he didn’t believe in Occam’s razor, didn’t equate neatness with truth.

  Neither of them had done what they should have: made a romantic gesture, moved closer to each other, rended garments, nothing. She cried until it hurt to open her eyes. Tears were a poison, an acid to the eyes and flesh. What had changed from last winter? Not a thing had changed. Nobody was coming. The world had ended. The world had ended, and this was not a metaphor.

  She wiped her face with her palms. “Gus, please!” she rasped. She couldn’t hear him. “Gus!”

  If she went back there? To Montreal over a decade ago, to start over, to try again, to restart their doomed marriage? They’d make clear-headed vows this time. If I fuck up, you don’t let me leave. You tie me down. We won’t have children, and it doesn’t matter. All that matters is us, together. But what about that other Marie, who’d still be twenty-one and pudgy with beauty? Port couldn’t put this Marie back under that bronze umbrella. And what if it didn’t take you where you wanted, Dorothy-style? This was the worst of it: no matter how badly she wanted to go, she’d never leave. And knowing this changed nothing.

  She got up and went to the bathroom, where the plumbing had sat unused all that year. Mildew spotted the toilet bowl. Rust was browning each of the fixtures. Lines of brown and black and circles of fuzz were blotching the wall, the bathtub, the sink, all despite a lack of running water. Everywhere the natural world took its slow hold. She pinched her nose and went to the only mirror in the apartment, above that blackening sink. She wanted to see how bad the tears had set her face, wanted now to go back to the others seeming strong and fine. The appearance of strength was strength. But every mental path she travelled brought more tears: Mom—Claudine—Dad—Bonita—Mo and Rosa—baby bodies red-clumping the basin—Gus. “Gus!”

  Finally she heard the weight of him trotting up the stairs. As she opened the bathroom window, she looked again at her own face in the mirror. Just as it had always been, as though she were still that long-gone child, thinking me.

  Loneliness can kill you, she thought. But in the reflection, she saw that there was something on the wall behind her. A piece of paper taped there. Then Gus was at her side, his nose pressed cold against her hand.

  She peeled it off. A folded note on fine art paper. On it, scrawled in blue marker:

  Found you.

  Chapter

  13

  THE STRANGER

  Marie folded up the note—Found you—until it was a moist nugget in her hand and then stood in front of the shop for a very long time, paralyzed by not knowing where he’d be. The binoculars were around her neck now. Taking them had broken the spell. She peered into the buildings, with binoculars and without. She half expected to see that figure in the shadows, looking back. Found you. It had made her laugh. He was still his terse, plainspoken self, even if he was also behaving extremely strangely. She waited there on that corner, thinking that she would spot the speck of light that would betray his presence.

  She went back into the store and fumbled in the darkness for the pots of felt-tip markers and a sheet of heavy paper. Is it you? she wrote. I’m waiting for you. Find us south of Aberdeen between Locke and Dundurn.

  With leftover duct-tape, she posted it to the outside of the door. Because she did not know what else to do, she returned to the fire. Pulling the wagon, she was a shadow of the child she had once been, the one always cramming suitcase with stuffed toys and books and threatening to run away. Life had called her childhood bluff: she wasn’t going anywhere. Gus trotted next to her, and the darkness made the echoes of their movements sharp, so she moved faster.

  * * *

  —

  Up at the firepit Mo was tapping his hands on his djembe. Rosa had brought out some of the strings in her collection and was piecing together a song on one of the ukuleles, this one made of a reddish wood. She sang “Over the Rainbow” as Mo’s drumbeats fell into her rhythm. There were only a few songs she knew. Mo moved into a rhyme, a beat about living at the end of the road.

  “Why is every song about leaving or returning?” Bonita said to Donnie, who sat beside her. Cups of instant hot chocolate were steaming in their hands. It was time for comfort food, even in the humidity. Iced tea was not an option. Above and behind them, in the trees cresting the escarpment, the sunset was glowing orange.

  “Clearly every song is not about leaving or returning.” Donnie coughed into the thick fur of his forearm.

  “I think most of them are. All the songs I can think of, anyway.”

  Now Rosa was singing “La Vie en Rose,” but her French was rusty, and she’d forgotten most of the lyrics. Mo laughed, she laughed, they kissed.

  “They’re rubbing it in our faces,” Donnie said.

  Marie glanced up then, wondering if Donnie could see through to her envy and her new, terrible hope.

  “Not on purpose,” said Bonita. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  Marie scanned the lawns. Steve and Regina were at the back of their house under a mouldering wooden overhang, deep in conversation—his wide eyes, the back of her small head. Everyone else was sitting around the fire. Without Philip, record-keeping had become haphazard, but Bonita had taken a head count, like a chaperone on a field trip.

  “It’s good for young people to fall in love,” Bonita said.

  Donnie harrumphed.

  “Even though love doesn’t last, and people just hurt each other,” Marie said, to which Donnie let out a little woot.

  “Friendship and music, then. Music is good for us,” Bonita said.

  “Except that we’re all in tears,” Andrea said. She wore her hair always tied under a kerchief now, was toughening up and thinning out.

  “It’s not always a bad thing to weep,” Bonita said. Many of the heads she had just counted were bent into hands, distressed, shoulders shaking.

  “All the songs are about leaving!” Andrea said.

  Rosa started to sing “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.”

  Bonita walked over. “Something upbeat,” she said, hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  Rosa began “Over the Rainbow” again, and Bonita shook her head.

  “Something we can dance to,” Bonita said, tossing her hips to the left and then to the right. Her awkward shimmy made Lilah laugh. She pulled her friend out of her seat, and they danced, while Mo beat his hands on the drumskin.

  “How about this,” Mo said, and he sang about eloping with the love of his life to a Detroit hotel.

  Bonita lifted her arms in a kind of shrug as she danced. But several of them were moving now, she and Lilah and Andrea. Steve and Regina were standing on their porch, arms crossed over their chests.

  “Maybe it would help if I learned some more songs,” Rosa said. “How about this one?”

  Marie felt agitated. The sinking sun was behind her and Bonita’s dancing was taking on a frantic quality. Her audience included six crying adults. She smiled more largely. She shimmied. She hooted.

  “Let me try.” Andrea sang a song none of them knew. It was about leaving and returning, about staying and bein
g always in the place you were. The word home rang out to them.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, Bonita, breathless, sat down and put her thin, strong arm around Marie. Marie’s body was sensitive, her skin keyed up as though feverish, and this touch made goose bumps spread. She held her right hand tightly over the note; she cupped Gus’s throat with her left. Bits of fur released and stuck to her palm.

  The firelight on their faces was hard as a strong sun.

  “Tomorrow,” Bonita said, “you should take us hunting.”

  “I’m not sure—” Marie hesitated. She wouldn’t tell Bonita about Jason. She wanted not to be dissuaded. Wanted not to be told the thing that niggled at her: that she had conjured these clues from her own insane hope. “I’m not sure it matters.”

  “Of course it matters. Marietta, of course it does.” Bonita pulled her into a tight embrace, and Marie closed her eyes, rested her forehead in the warm crook of Bonita’s neck. “Our survival matters.”

  “I can’t leave,” Marie said. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Even when I’m standing right next to a port, and it’s tempting me or whatever, I can’t leave.”

  Bonita rocked her gently. “Listen.” Andrea was singing an unfamiliar love song, full of sweetness and aching. “If you were there,” she sang. “If you were there.”

  “Did you know she could sing like that?” Bonita said.

  Marie shook her head and closed her eyes, let the song be a lullaby. Let a person be lulled, she thought. Her right fist relaxed, and Bonita plucked the note out of her hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “I found it in one of the apartments.” A lie was easy and too quick to come.

  Bonita opened the page, but it was tearing along its many creases, and the blue ink had blurred.

  Mo had his hands on Rosa. At the small of her back, on her knee, pushing her hair back. They got up together, and then Andrea helped Donnie down, and now Marie’s longing was worse, now Marie’s skin was raw. Marie stood up, and then Gus did. Bonita wordlessly refolded the note and handed it back to her.

  “Who wrote that?” she said.

  Marie pushed it into her pocket. “I told you I found it in one of the apartments.”

  “But you think you know who wrote it.”

  “That wouldn’t be impossible, would it?”

  Bonita nodded, and Marie saw that her strong response had confirmed for Bonita that she was deluded.

  “Well it wouldn’t be,” she said.

  “Nothing’s impossible,” Bonita said. “But we’ll want to get up early. Why don’t you go to sleep?”

  * * *

  —

  Lying on Bonita’s couch, she thought she’d be too excited to sleep, but almost instantly she was unconscious under the piled afghans, hand draped over the edge, fingers lightly in Gus’s fur as though her arm were dangling from a boat into calm water.

  In dreams, Jason’s eyes were on her the way they once had been, full of knowing. In dreams, she knew she was dreaming. “I’m having a lucid dream,” she told him. She went to toggle light switches, and they all behaved. Lights on, lights off, lights on.

  She toggled and then woke; she was the light going on. But darkness and silence filled the room. She was lovesick from the dream, lips tingling and swollen. Jason’s eyes on her mouth, hands on her waist, on her breasts. Gus was no longer beside her but was standing poised at the window, growling.

  “Gus,” she hissed, worried that he would wake Bonita upstairs.

  He growled. Let out one sharp yap.

  Checking for the gun beside her on the coffee table, she walked toward him. Her eyes adjusted, and now she could see the difference in the darkness just where Gus stood. A body, a human body, someone standing at the window. Broad-shouldered, like a man. Gus barked twice. The figure put its hands in the air.

  Marie held the gun carefully, ready to aim. Fear sloshed her gut.

  “Hello?” she said.

  His voice was faint through the glass. “Gus,” he was saying. “Buddy, it’s okay.”

  She did not recognize his voice. Not Jason. Not tall enough either. It was some asshole she didn’t know trying to charm her pup. She pointed the gun at his chest and walked closer. Held her arms out straight and aimed, as she had with the deer.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” His voice came watery through the window.

  “How do you know my dog’s name?”

  “I’m here to help. I’m— I don’t mean any— Please. I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  On Brandon’s fourth day in the city, something seemed to be happening. Something seemed to have happened. He had been eavesdropping on these women, Rosa and Marie. The dog, Gus, appeared to be meant for protection, but in fact he was harmless. Yesterday Brandon had parked the car up the street and watched the women climb up the side of a building in shorts. He wanted to be close enough to hear what they were saying, but he stayed down on the street.

  Once, he approached Gus, who only sniffed him and accepted the peace offering of an open can of processed meat. He’d left the three little chicks in his mom’s living room after checking and double checking that the port was zipped shut and already he missed them when he was this far away, missed them even more than he did Zahra or Suzanne, who, from the vantage of his current predicament, seemed abstractions. His mother, too, was a ghost, a wisp of smoke. He understood that Gus was not about protection, just as his chickens would never be food.

  He hid in the alleyway behind a Dumpster—one and then two rats scrambled over the tips of his shoes. Rosa came down first and mounted her bicycle, followed by Marie, legs long in her cut-offs. Marie stood watching her pedal away. Only Gus turned to look at Brandon, tail down.

  He ducked into a small gallery, where the door had been jimmied open and left unlocked. He could see her only through a sliver of window. There, he sat back against a brick wall beneath a canvas painted with green and gold squares, and pulled two smushed Twinkies out of his bag.

  Marie stood just outside the gallery taking pictures, then she walked back to her store. In an e-mail from long ago, his mother had mentioned taking art classes down here, and he wondered if they’d crossed paths. Marie’s hair was half tied up with a length of red fabric, and he could imagine her in this crowd: big earrings, black dress, wine in hand. Sharp opinions and sultry laughter. She was looking at the storefront, and he was looking at her, the sculptural length of her, her dancer’s grace as she disappeared inside.

  After about ten minutes, Gus came trotting out from behind a fence along the back of the store and directly toward him. The dog nudged the door open and stared at him, tail wagging.

  “You want some of these?” He opened the packet of stale bone-shaped treats. “Good boy. Is Marie okay in there?” It felt like a trespass to say her name.

  They both heard her crying out for Gus, and Brandon patted him. “You’d better go back, buddy.” Gus choked back five treats and jogged back around the fence and into the store.

  Brandon wandered around the gallery. Among the title cards and paintings were quotes from newspaper articles about the artist. “Camille Allen Alder (b. 1975) for many years worked as a graphic artist in Chicago, before moving here with her husband and newborn twins in 2010. Since then, she has been actively pushing for better arts funding and visibility in the city. She describes her paintings as the city’s dream of the country.”

  He had long ached with nostalgia for these late summer dusks. If he’d stayed in the place he’d grown up with his mom, he might have been a starving artist. He might have fallen in love with Marie instead of with Sarah, the college sweetheart who loved to break up and give ultimatums. He and Marie would have had freckled babies and a porch with an escarpment view.

  Just as it was getting dark, a shadow fell across the sidewalk in front of the gallery. It was a blond man, balding a little, in a ratty blazer. By the time Brandon ducked his head out the door, the man was gone
.

  Finally she re-emerged. Before leaving, she tore through some hunks of duct tape with her teeth and pasted up a note.

  * * *

  —

  Marie unlatched and then pulled open the glass door, leaving between them only a thin screen. He waited for her to say something, but she only stood there with a gun pointed at him, lips pressed together, eyes unblinking.

  “I saw. I, uh—” Brandon pulled the note out of his back pocket. “I got your message. I thought you wanted me to come here.”

  Her face crumpled. She looked at the note without moving the gun.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. You can put the gun down.” He held the paper taut between his hands like a shield. She looked at the note for a minute without lowering her arms. Finally she turned her head away and put the gun into the waistband of her shorts, unconscious of how sexy this was, how it momentarily revealed her taut abdomen with its belly button stuck out like a berry.

  “I’m sorry, Marie.”

  “How do you know my name?” She slid the screen door open and thrust out her palm. “The note. Please.”

  “You’re an artist.” Brandon had imagined how this would go—what he would say—but now he saw that it was too strange for her.

  “And so are you,” she said.

  “Well, not really.”

  An angry sneer curled the corner of her mouth. “And I guess the binoculars aren’t yours, then?”

  He could hear the hope, the disappointment in her voice. “Actually, no,” he said. “They aren’t mine.”

  “Who are you?”

  She was nothing like Zahra; she was easily read. Her face betrayed her anger, her disappointment, her subsequent relief. Seeing these things play across her features felt unbearably intimate, and Brandon wanted to wrap her up in cloth, cover her and keep her safe.