Despite the rain, it’s quiet. Tim hears his exhalations, his lungs filling and emptying, the staccato of raindrops hitting the leaves above a kind of muted soundtrack. He hears it all, everything, his senses sharp and alert in a way he can’t remember them being in years, in decades, since, maybe, before he started methodically emptying his father’s liquor cabinet, since before he discovered the way the pungent honey mustiness of smoke could cloud over everything, since before he left home at sixteen, caught a bus to the city and never looked back.
This is it, Tim suddenly thinks. He leans recklessly, eagerly, into the hazy blackness. At first, there’s nothing to see, just the night, a charcoal veil obscuring everything. Until, gradually, something else comes into focus: a dark outline, darker dark against the angled plane of the lawn. Tim stares hard, so hard it hurts. The form moves, becomes the outline of a person. The house, a black centre, frames its—her—movement. This is it, Tim thinks. This is what he came for. He shivers violently. It’s freezing. Not like being cold up in a tree in the April rain. This is different, a liquid ice churning inside him. He’s not crazy. He’s not high. What he’s seeing, it’s—
Carly’s told him about astral projection, leaving the body, flying through the night sky on nocturnal adventures.
But this isn’t some projection. This is—
real.
Once, a long time ago, not so long ago, he was a boy. His parents screamed at each other. Something—a glass, a plate—shattering. Muffled shouts. The sound of a door slamming. Voices, his father’s brusque baritone, silence, a car starting, then a scream. A scream.
For weeks after, Tim would come home from sixth grade and stand in the empty foyer and call out, as he always did, as every kid did: Mom? I’m home! Mom?
Then school ended. Then the summer’s empty days spilled together like the endless glasses of Jack and Ginger his father drank, sitting in a kitchen chair he’d pulled into the backyard. Just sitting there and staring into space.
Tim remembers how quiet it was that summer. Neither of them did much more than grunt at each other. When the phone rang the sound cut through the house like a shriek.
The phone hardly ever rang.
That’s when Timmy started spending his days in the tree, absorbing every movement, every shift of light as the sun crossed the sky. His father stopped going to work. He just sat out there in the backyard. At first he did nothing, but then he started watering. Watering the lawn. Not the whole lawn, Timmy realized. His father’s interest was directed exclusively toward one particular bare area of earth hardly discernable in the patchy terrain of interlaced weeds and grass. Days and weeks went by. Long hot muggy July afternoons gave way to dry dusty August evenings that stretched on and out past forever. The brown patch turned a light shimmering green. Tim watched his father and his father watched that rectangle of twitching grass. Every day, every single freaking day, his dad watered the patch, fertilized it, got down on his knees and, scissors in hand, inspected it, gently evened out each individual blade.
Tim can still close his eyes and summon up the colour of that summer: a chartreuse sheen, a shimmering new growth madness.
Toward the end of that hazy muggy season—which Tim doesn’t so much remember as feel imprinted in his memory (because, he, too, began developing a taste for Jack Daniels and ginger ale, knocking back several short glasses of the stuff before heading down to the river and climbing up to his special place)—Tim came to a conclusion. Call it an epiphany, a realization, an ordering of facts. The grass was beginning to darken and blend with the rest of the lawn. And still his father attended to the coffin-shaped plot. His father, who had never tenderly cared for anything, obsessively groomed this particular patch of Kentucky Bluegrass as if his life depended on it.
His mother wasn’t coming back.
Tim hung onto his branch and threw up, sweet sour sticky boozy mess burning his throat. His father got up off his knees and scanned the horizon for the source of the sound.
At some point, Timmy turned twelve. He spent the next four years plotting and scheming and drinking and smoking and wondering: Was he, too, going to disappear?
Of course he was.
You were just a boy, Carly’s told him, pulling him into her chest and stroking his hair.
A burst of rain, drops slapping against leaves, cold thin wet spray reaching Tim where he holds on, staring out.
Carly again.
The house, that centrifugal emptiness.
He wasn’t. They took that from him. They stole it away before he even knew what was happening.
Fuck! Tim bellows, swaying in the tree.
That’s when he smells it. A stench of rot laced with sweat on skin. Fear courses through him. What is it? The smell is animal. Putrefied. But rich and fusty, feminine, sexual, a lingering secret scent suddenly released.
Perfume.
It smells like his mother’s perfume.
Then Tim feels the light brush of a soft finger tracing down his stubbled neck. Everything stops. The only sound: his beating heart.
He pulls away. What’s happening? Someone—? It’s no longer raining. The audio switched back on. The forest drips gently. Tim casts urgently into the deep night. He sees nothing. Shadow on shadow where the yard meets the cliff. Then—a light. Light? Tim squints, blinks. Quick blur going dark then bright. The patch of light remains. It gets, maybe, brighter. Now he can see her. In the middle of the night. In the middle of a rain storm. Tim hunches forward. He shifts his body farther out on the branch. He feels the wood swaying, unstable. There’s a sound now, too, faintly audible. What is it? Tim thrusts his head into empty dark space. A shape slowly emerges. Long hair. A woman. She’s moving methodically, her limbs, barely illuminated, swinging in and out of view—light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. And the sound, metal on dirt.
Digging, Tim thinks. Tim in the branches, wood bowing, his whole long body folded over, pressing in, holding on to the wet bark. Then he smells it again, a powerful miasma surrounding him, sticking to him, a cloying need, a syrupy thick rot, death discharged.
She’s digging.
PART TWO
JUNE
Friday, April 11
GREAT BIG STREET GOING NORTH. Hurontarion, artery to the highway. Other roads are capillaries winding through the flesh of the edge city. Cars penetrate like blood, coating subdivisions, new developments, bare fields promising communities named after absent trees and elusive glimpses of the river.
Hurontarion is three lanes each way, traffic bumping and grinding in a striptease of progress. 18-wheelers, minivans, SUVs, even the occasional car trolls the congested laneway seeking access to the Save-A-Centre grocery store, the Next Future Shop, the Bed, Bath and Yonder, huge stores leading up to the biggest attraction of them all: the Middle Mall.
June sees a gap in traffic. She speeds up. She’s alert to the ebb and flow, the way the cars surge and recede, the way life itself seems to stall, then shoot forward. She can feel it now. How everything can matter, how even a trip to the grocery store can be—real. She just needs to stop thinking so much. That’s the problem, that’s what it comes down to. She’s spending too much time alone in an empty house. It’s amazing how easy it is to get lost in your own head.
June signals her turn into the grocery store. She’s out of it now. She’s back. Last night—it was like a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. Whatever else it was, it really happened. She can still feel the rough grain of the heavy shovel against her palms. Her forearms ache, muscles pulsing. Maybe that’s all she needed. Something physical. Something actual.
When she worked at Phfizon all the employees got a fitness rebate of up to $300 a year. She joined a gym for the first time in her life and came to enjoy it. StairMaster and treadmill, she stepped along, going nowhere fast, feeling the sweat drip down her inner arms, involuntarily picturing the crisp files stacked up on her desk, each one marked Confidential in red, important letters. Sample size, she would think with each panted stride, co-morb
idity, clinical trial, generalizability, patient response, efficacy, pregnancy. But gradually, her head cleared of pharma jargon. Then, back at work, everything would flow: she would find herself clearly, even artfully, building the text for the brochure the reps needed to promote their new cholesterol-lowering drug to physicians. She and Norm were just starting to date. She was learning on the job, speaking up in meetings, joining her co-workers in company-sponsored picnics and bowling outings. Then, all of a sudden, it was gone. Despite a 1.3 billion-dollar annual profit, she was abruptly downsized, her position one of several thousand identified as more efficiently performed by outsourced contractors, overseas freelancers, she later learned, doing the writing she did for pennies per word.
June makes the turn into the grocery store parking lot and pulls into an empty spot. She stretches her arms above her head, feeling her sore muscles. She bears no ill will toward whoever ended up getting the work. They have to eat too. Only—it had been a grim time. She’d had no inkling, no warning. Her performance review had been stellar. She’d bought a bike and started to cycle to work, peddling silently through side streets misted with early morning frost, soon to be dispelled by the sun’s slow rise. Ancient history, June tells herself. She’ll get a bike here, she decides. She’ll join a gym. She’ll get back to figuring it out. Whatever it is.
June releases her seatbelt, which snags on her bulky sweatshirt. She’s in sweats and jeans; she didn’t even take a shower. She just wanted to get out of the house, breathe the air, fresh and cold after the storm, move, keep moving. Now she feels clunky. She could have at least gotten properly dressed. Norm bought her a cute workout jacket from lululemon for her birthday. That was three months ago. It still has the tags on it. I should have—Why? So she can look good for the Save-A-Centre cashier? This time of the day she won’t even get the pimpled high school version. One of those used-up ladies, bad dye job, sour-faced. Dump your change on the counter and make you pick up the coins one at a time so they don’t have to touch your pretty palm. Sighing aggrievedly, June swings herself out of the car.
June pushes her cart down aisle nine looking for those crackers Norman likes. She’s already rolled through snack foods. Not there. Why not there? They keep them somewhere else, in some other section—“organic” or “ethnic” or “party planning” or “gourmet.” She scans the shelves.
June? Juney?!!
June turns, sweatshirt heavy on her shoulders.
Christine?
Christine looks sharp, looks like a woman, like a grown up. Her hair in a glistening brown bob, cream silk blouse offsetting a black skirt and jacket number that reveals long legs, always, June recalls, the girl’s best asset.
What a surprise! June abruptly exclaims, forcing her face into an enthusiastic grimace.
I knoooow, Christine giggles. I haven’t seen you in ages! How are you?
I’m fine, I’m great. June smoothes at the crown of greasy honey brown ringlets escaping her fraying ponytail. How are you?
Wow! Christine says. Look at you!
No! June says. Look at you!
June grips the handles of her cart, overloaded with bulk toilet paper, cases of Coke Zero and Canada Dry, ten-pack Save-A-Centre brand nutty nougat chocolate bars.
Christine puts down her mostly empty basket—mango, tub of lite yogurt—and plants her high heels in the middle of the aisle.
You live around here?
I—sure, we—live not far from here.
Wississauga Heights, Christine says.
That’s right. June smiles, keeps smiling. And you? You don’t—
I live downtown. Little Italy?
Sure. Yeah. Of course. It’s great to see you, Christine. Christy.
I go by Chris now.
Chris. Sure. June laughs nervously.
So, Christine says, her pupils narrowing in the bright track lighting. What are you up to these days?
I’m well, in between things…right now, I guess. I…got married. June holds up her ring finger and grins apologetically.
And it’s hard, of course, says Christine. With kids and everything.
Oh, June says. We don’t have kids. She follows Christine’s gaze to the jug of chocolate milk sweating in her cart.
I’m working on Bay Street, Christine says quickly. At South and Copperman. You know I went into law, right?
Sure, I heard that. June’s bunched cheeks are starting to hurt. Christine gazes at her expectantly.
So, uh, June says, what are you doing here in the ’burbs?
I was just on my way back to the city. I had to meet a client. Normally they come to my office, of course, but he’s an elderly gentleman, and he’s not doing so well, physically. Cancer, Christine faux whispers. Anyway, she resumes in her normal clipped tone, he’s revising his will. So I met with him, and then driving by I thought, it’s now or never. Who has the time to shop these days? I’m so busy—
As if on cue, Christine’s cell bleats.
Ah, excuse me, I just have to—
Listen, June says, great to see you. She awkwardly negotiates her cart around Christine.
Yes, Christine says impatiently, I did receive the file. She waves at June, bye or wait a second. In her lacquered fingernails a business card that June snatches as she squeezes past, catching a whiff of Christine’s tastefully elegant perfume. She hurries to the end of the aisle and steers the cart left toward the meats. Christine’s probably a vegetarian.
June in her baby blue sweatshirt. She pushes her greasy hair off her face and picks out a roast.
Hurontarion narrows, framed by a series of gas stations and family restaurants—Appletree’s, Taco Terrace—promising early bird family discounts. June hesitates at the turnoff, her foot wavering between gas and brake. Maybe she should just go home. Lie down. Have a nap.
But you cancelled last week—
And for the first time in months, June’s not tired. She dug and it rained and she dug some more, filling her shovel with the heavy, wet, cold earth. But she felt weightless, the shovel floating in her arms; she could have dug forever, the depression slowly and inexorably turning into a bottomless pit, her anonymity in the dark night underscored by the unshakeable conviction that she was being observed—no, not observed: watched. Then came a slight shift in the texture of the air, an early onset reminder of a coming grey dawn. Suddenly everything hurt, as if she was being forced to lift a load well beyond her means. Gripping the shovel, she had stared into the hole she’d dug and saw it: her true burden—an astonishing discovery.
June accelerates. She’s sticking to the plan. Make the rounds at the home, then head to her home and prepare dinner. She’ll dine with Norm on salmon-stuffed pinwheels matched to a highly recommended unoaked South African chardonnay. The curtains will be kept closed. Nothing to see. Nothing to see out there.
And tomorrow, she’ll go to the garden centre. She’ll fill the dead space with a blooming jungle of—it doesn’t matter. Whatever grows. Whatever keeps Norm happy.
Fill it in. Cover it up. If it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen.
The short road to the home is easy to miss, more of an extended driveway than a road, really. It’s just off the main drag, but the low-slung building obscured by a thick row of hedges feels like somewhere else, somewhere far from anywhere. June arrives at the mostly empty parking lot adjoining the building and slows to a near idle. Weird pockets of emptiness are everywhere in Wississauga. They disturb her, these sudden moments of lapse, gaps in the sprawled city’s coverage. Finally she parks, carefully fitting the station wagon between painted white lines.
Temporarily permanent, Cartwright is home to eighty or so seniors. June’s assigned to the fourteen of them who live on the seventh floor. She brings cookies, offers tea, struggles with awkward minutes of conversation. She signed up in a fit of industriousness when she first moved to Wississauga. She told Norm she was considering going back to school, maybe social work, something to do with gerontology. Norm made appropriately encouraging
noises.
June moves through the unstaffed, unadorned lobby and into a spacious elevator built for walkers and wheelchairs. The elevator dings and she steps out into the hall. The smell is of something spilled on the floor then haphazardly wiped up with a dirty mop dunked in vinegar. The nurses’ station is empty. June hurries past and knocks on the first door to the left.
Anonymous senior opens up. He peers at her suspiciously. Hi! she says with enthusiasm. It’s terrible, but June can’t remember the old fellow’s name. It doesn’t matter. Room 714 grudgingly takes a cookie from June’s proffered plastic plate. Mostly, they accept June’s ministrations as part of their daily routine. Even so, they’re as eager for her to arrive as they are for her to leave—their eyes half hooded, their TVs blaring, their days passing like the incessant sound of cruising cars one block over. They’re lonely, but not so lonely as to forget that June is part of a fleet of able-bodied intruders whose peering eyes are ever fixing on further evidence that Grandpa has lost his mind, his hip, his sight, is no longer able to help himself, will never again work, drive a car, make love. Only one of June’s charges seems to actually be eager for her arrival, seems to be able to separate her from the conspiracies of a quasi-confinement marked by intermittent calls to bingo and bland institutional meals served up three times a day with a regularity designed expressly to mock the unpredictable bowels of the confined diners. June hurries through the other residents, saves Rose for last.
Rose it’s me! June finally gets to announce, opening the door without bothering to knock. Rose, unlike the other residents, doesn’t bother to lock her door. Rose says she has nothing to steal, and nothing anybody would want either. True enough, June thinks. A constant stream of cars passing, but nobody notices the seniors, even enough to bother to rob them.
Hi Rose. Sorry I’m a bit late…
Not to worry dear. You just come on in.
…traffic was terrible.
Gets worse every year dear. They say these days everyone’s got two cars. Two cars! Can you believe it? Rose’s voice, throaty and authoritative, makes June think of a chain-smoking high school girl’s softball coach.
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