Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  Before I went to bed, I stepped out onto the porch to catch the night air, and there at my feet was a plate of cookies. Two kinds, chocolate chip and oatmeal, on an old-fashioned blue-and-white china dinner plate and protected from insects by a serious triple wrap of plastic. I picked up the plate and carried it inside.

  Whoever had wrapped the cookies had done it so thoroughly I needed a knife to get at them. Once I had the plastic off, I was torn between the anticipation of pleasure and the uneasy thought that something was wanted of me. No one could be that persistently welcoming, not without wanting payment in return. I studied the cookies for a long time before I bit into one, and then I closed my eyes and savoured. I couldn’t decide whether I liked the oatmeal or the chocolate chip better. I wondered why the cookies had come on a china plate when the muffins had been delivered in a disposable pie plate. It seemed like an escalation.

  The next morning, an aluminum pot was waiting on the porch. When I removed the lid, I found a good-sized serving of freshly made paella, the top sprinkled with peas and chopped egg. I looked around. All was quiet. No signs of traffic on the street, no dust in either direction, no sound of a vehicle in the distance. I looked toward the trailer. It was appearing more and more likely, I had to admit, that my neighbour was responsible. I considered throwing the paella out, just tossing it over the side of the porch in hopes that the cook was watching and got the message.

  What message, though? So far, I’d eaten everything that had been sent my way, so would that not be like the restaurant customer who sends back a meal after eating three-quarters of it? And who throws out a pot of homemade paella? Even with the lid back on the pot, I could smell the onions and garlic and seafood, and when I removed the lid to look at it once again, I couldn’t help myself. I got a big spoon from the kitchen, and even though it was still morning and toast would have been more appropriate, I sat down on the step and ate it right out of the pot, one spoonful after another, as though I hadn’t seen food in weeks. I could hardly believe it when the pot was empty. I went inside and washed it, then I realized I was still licking my lips and wishing there was more.

  I stood in the kitchen and contemplated the empty food containers. I felt an invisible cloak folding and unfolding around me, like slowly beating wings, and thought I must be going mad.

  I phoned Mavis and asked her whether I should be calling the police about the food deliveries, hoping that she would fess up to being the Welcome Wagon. She assumed I was joking. “Wouldn’t that be funny,” she said, “if you called 911 about a plate of cookies?”

  Yes, hilarious.

  The next morning, there was nothing. That afternoon, after spraying myself with repellent from a can that I found in the bathroom, I went for a walk up Liberty Street, avoiding even a glance at the trailer as I passed by. When I reached the end of the street, I turned away from town and walked down the grid road into the country, farther than I had intended to walk, seduced by the smell of cut hay. When vehicles passed on the road, I put my head down. When one driver slowed alongside me to make, I presumed, the inevitable offer of help, I waved him on. Best not to speak, I thought, and give the inhabitants of Elliot a story to pass around like a chain letter.

  When I got back to the house, I found an old Coca-Cola tray with the rusty image of Santa Claus waiting for me on the top step. An appetizer—three shrimp carefully arranged and swimming in butter and garlic. A bowl of gorgeous-looking pasta with what appeared to be a marinara sauce. A side salad with cherry tomatoes and cheese slices and fresh basil leaves. There was also a small plate containing a serving of cake with chocolate shavings on top. Tiramisu? Really? Each dish was carefully wrapped in plastic.

  I carried the tin tray inside and put it on the kitchen table, and then sat down and thought about what I should do. In spite of the aroma escaping the plastic, I decided to take a chance and return the meal to the trailer—it had to have come from there—but then I hesitated, and that moment of hesitation was just long enough for my willpower to reduce itself to nothing, and then I couldn’t stop. I was at the plastic with a knife, and I ate every bite.

  When I was carrying the dishes to the sink I dropped the dessert plate, which broke perfectly in two with a sharp crack as it hit the tabletop, and this crack seemed to tell me it was time to put an end to the anonymous deliveries. They had to have come from my neighbour. I washed the dishes and stacked them all—everything that had arrived over the past few days, including the broken halves of the dessert plate—on the Coca-Cola tray. There was still a half jar of marmalade in the fridge, so I emptied it into the garbage can, washed the jar, and put that on the tray too. Then I carried it all through the grass to my neighbour’s.

  Once I was there, the trailer a few feet in front of me, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. The trailer had a screen porch decorated with the patio lights I had seen glowing in the darkness. On the screen door was a ceramic tile sign with bright blue letters spelling El Nido. Spanish, I thought. Tourist kitsch from Mexico. I could see a picnic table inside with a checkerboard on it. I would have to enter the porch and squeeze by the picnic table to knock on the main trailer door. I didn’t want to. My arms were getting tired and I considered leaving the tray on the ground where I stood. Then I realized that the truck was not there, which meant that my neighbour wasn’t there either.

  I opened the screen door and entered the porch, setting the tray down on the picnic table. There wasn’t much of note in the porch. A few plant pots with fresh basil in them (there had been basil in the salad). A huge tomato plant already loaded with cherry tomatoes. Without thinking, I picked one and popped it in my mouth, then was horrified with myself for doing such a thing. I left the tray in the porch and cut across the vacant lots again. When I got home, I realized I hadn’t left a note saying thank you. I thought of quickly writing one and returning to tuck it among the dishes on the tray, but it was too late; I heard the truck coming up the road. I hurried to the bathroom window, thinking that I could get a look at the neighbour, perhaps see his reaction to the tray. But the truck blocked my view, and I saw only the driver’s head with a hat on it as he left the cab and slipped inside.

  What, I wondered, could this man possibly want?

  There was no need for supper that evening. At seven o’clock, I made myself a fresh pot of coffee, and I was just about to carry a cup outside when I heard a buzzing sound coming from somewhere inside the house. I went looking for the source, coffee cup in hand, and found a wasp trapped in the dusty bathroom window, banging itself against the glass in its attempts to get out. I was wondering whether I could open the window and release the screen without getting stung when I saw my neighbour step into full view, carrying a portable disc player. He was tall and thin with a long grey ponytail, and he was wearing nothing but multicoloured long-legged shorts. I watched as he parked himself in what might be called his front yard and faced the sun that was now in the western sky. He balanced with one leg in the air and positioned his arms like wings, frozen open. Then he began to move, slowly at first, with jerks and flaps followed by seconds of stillness, building eventually to a convulsive and continuous full-body workout. He looked like a spastic old crane, I thought, his string-bean body twitching itself into a concoction of movements, the purpose of which was hard to imagine. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  Half an hour later, he stopped abruptly, as though a timer had gone off in his head, or perhaps the music had ended. He saluted the sun in the west with a polite bow, his back still turned to my bathroom window, and after his salutation, he touched his toes a few times, then hiked up his shorts, picked up his disc player, and went back inside the trailer.

  My coffee was cold and the wasp was still buzzing in the window. I poured the coffee in the sink, grabbed a home-decorating magazine from a basket left by Mavis, and slipped my cup over the wasp. I let the curtain fall closed again, and I carried the wasp, held in the cup by the magazine, to the door and released it.

  The air outside felt still
and peaceful in spite of the mosquitoes. Instead of pouring myself another cup of coffee, I got a beer from the fridge and settled on the porch in my new canvas lawn chair, and watched the horses across the road as they stood along the fence slapping their tails obsessively. As the sun began to turn red in the west, I noticed my neighbour emerge again from the trailer, now wearing baggy, faded jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals. He was carrying something in his hand—a plastic bottle, it looked like—and he crossed the road without noticing me, climbed through the fence, and proceeded to wipe down the horses with what I assumed was some kind of insect repellent. When he was done, he happened to glance my way and I saw his arm rising in what was likely to become a friendly wave, so I quickly looked away and stood to withdraw into the house. As I did so, one of the chair’s aluminum legs slipped into a hollow spot between the spruce boards on the porch, and the chair tipped to one side and I had to grab the porch rail to stop myself from going sideways with it. I saw myself the way he saw me: with an empty beer bottle in hand, stumbling out of my chair and onto my feet. I quickly righted the chair and went into the house without looking to see what he’d made of my performance. I felt twinges of guilt at my rudeness—returning the dishes without a thank you, the way I’d ignored his neighbourly wave—but at the same time I was glad to put to bed any chance that we would become friendly.

  Later, when it was fully dark outside, I put on my nylon hiking shoes, the ones I’d bought for the trip to Ireland, and went for another walk. As I passed the trailer I saw that the patio lights were on in the screen porch, but no sounds came from the trailer’s direction, no music or television. As I walked, I realized the horses were following me along the fenceline. Although I was not much of an animal lover, I walked over to the fence to look at them. When I reached out my hand to run it up the face of one of the horses—a black-and-white-spotted one (a pinto, I believed it was called)—it spun away and ran, and the others followed, their hooves thudding on the dry ground. I continued along to the end of the road and then went back the other way, and I walked back and forth in the darkness until the insect repellent wore off and the mosquitoes sent me into the house where I sat on the couch and wondered what Ian was doing, and whether he missed me or was just glad to be rid of me. I wondered whether anyone from work had called my home phone, because no one had called my cell number. Then I wondered whether anyone at all was curious about what had become of me.

  Self-pity, it was called. I went to bed. When I got up the next morning, I discovered that my phone had been disabled. Someone had finally noticed I was gone.

  Luck

  IT CAME IN the form of a rusty nail. Luck, that is. I was in my bare feet, spraying the dust off the outside of the windows of Uncle Vince’s house with the garden hose, when I stepped on a spike (was it big enough to be called a spike?) that was sticking straight up out of an old scrap of lumber hidden in the overgrown quack grass. It took me a minute to come up with a hypothesis, put the pieces of information together: the board I was standing on, the incredible searing pain in my foot (a wasp?), the fact that my foot now appeared to be attached to the board. Not a wasp, then. A nail.

  At that moment, just the moment when I was realizing what had happened, my trailer-dwelling neighbour chanced to look out his east window—the tiny window above what he calls his couch (just one of the many details of his existence that I have since learned), which is really the dining banquette with the removable tabletop put away—and he saw me standing oddly, looking down as though there was something peculiar on the ground in front of me, or at least this is how he described it. In my hand was a yellow garden hose from which water was flowing liberally into the grass around me. I was wearing shorts and a yellow tank top, roughly the same colour as the hose. From where he was looking, I might have been much younger than he knew me to be—a teenager, perhaps, sent out to water the lawn and then getting lost in a daydream about what she really wanted to be doing with her summer day. He was seeing me from a distance, the sun shining on my blonde hair. He remembered my hair, he told me later. It should have been red, but then no hair colour was natural these days except his.

  Dyed hair aside, why, he wondered, was I standing there in a daze with the water running around me? He saw me take a step, or try to. It looked as though I couldn’t walk. Had I had a stroke? he wondered. Or was it possible that I was mocking him and his dancing—he’d seen me watching—the exaggerated way I was trying to lift my foot with my arms out for balance. Then I was motionless again, staring down at my feet, the hose running like a waterfall, until I lifted one foot high enough above the grass that he could see that something came along with it, as though I were wearing snowshoes. Then he realized that the snowshoe was an old board, and it was stuck to my bare foot, and the reason had to be a nail, still embedded. He figured it out much the same way I did, only a few seconds behind me. He watched as I tried to shake the board loose, but it didn’t come and the act was obviously a painful one. It looked as though I was shouting. He imagined a vocal conga line of ow, ow, ow, ow—it was actually quite a bit more colourful than that—as I kept the weight on the good foot, then tried to hold my balance while deciding what to do and how to free my other foot from where it was impaled.

  He wasn’t sure what he should do. Should he try to help? He thought I had made it clear that I didn’t want anything to do with him, but still, he couldn’t just leave me stranded there. There was no one else. If anyone was going to help me, it would have to be him. He grabbed his straw hat from where it hung by the door and set out, through his summer porch, then through the weeds in the two lots that separated our properties, to help me out of my predicament.

  “Hola,” he said as he approached me.

  In the time it had taken him to get there, I had managed to free my foot from the board and I was now trying to stand on one leg and hose the wound. Even though the act of doing that without falling over took concentration, the word hola registered. This seemed to have become the greeting of choice in Elliot, no doubt because half the town now went to Mexico or Cuba on all-inclusive vacations to escape winter. But why would they swap their usual hello for a Spanish greeting? You didn’t hear people in the city saying hola to each other. It was a conceit, irritating.

  “Holy is right,” I said. “Holy crap, that hurts.”

  He was studying me, I could feel it. I might have studied him back had my foot not been burning as though it were skewered on a fireplace poker.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  “Just stand there while I do this.” I reached out and put my hand on his arm so I could balance while I hosed the bottom of my foot. “In case I fall over and land somewhere life-threatening on that goddamned monstrous nail. You would not believe how this hurts. I thought I’d stepped on a wasp nest.”

  The hose was splashing water and we were both getting wet. My neighbour looked at the board in the grass, nail side up. It was a four-inch construction nail. Rusty.

  “When did you last have a tetanus shot?” he asked.

  I accidentally sprayed his legs with the hose. Rusty nail . . . tetanus. Of course, why didn’t I think of that?

  “Well, not for about a hundred years,” I said. I stopped hosing my foot and turned the nozzle off. The water slowed to a drizzle. “I guess I know what I’m doing, then,” I said, dropping the hose in the grass. “I suppose I can get a tetanus shot at the hospital.”

  “I would think so. Maybe I should drive you?”

  The fire in my foot was such that I wasn’t really thinking about the man whose arm I was holding—my neighbour, the one who had sent me the excess of food gifts.

  “It’s okay. I can drive myself,” I said. Then I added, “Sorry, I’ve sprayed water all over your jeans.”

  “No problem. It’ll evaporate in the heat. Look. Already happening.”

  He shook his pant leg at me.

  He helped me around the house and up the steps so I could retrieve my purse and car keys. He waited in the kitchen as I
limped into the house’s interior, and when I hobbled back into the kitchen with my purse, I saw that he was reading the note I’d affixed to the fridge door with the flower magnet.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?” he asked. “I don’t mind. I wasn’t planning to go into the office today.” He paused. “A joke. The office.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, me neither. Thanks, but I can drive myself.” I stuck out my hand. “My name is Frances Moon.” I immediately wished that I’d thought to say Bonder, Ian’s name, keeping my identity from coffee row, if that’s where my neighbour liked to spend his time.

  He looked confused. I wasn’t sure why, but of course he’d assumed there’d be no need for introductions.

  “Thanks for coming to my rescue,” I said.

  He took my hand and shook it and said, because it appeared to be necessary, “Dooley Sullivan. Nice to meet you.”

  It was my turn to be confused. Dooley Sullivan? Dooley Sullivan was dead, long dead, a victim of drug-related violence or some form of addiction, maybe more than one. Explanations tried to form themselves in my head—two Dooley Sullivans, a son who looked older than he was—until something had to be said, and what came out was “You can’t be Dooley Sullivan.”

  “Frances Mary Moon,” he said.

  Then he understood that I really had not known. “Sorry to be such a shock,” he said.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said.

  “I get that a lot. Or at least I used to. Not so much anymore.” Then he said, “Seriously, who but me would claim to be Dooley Sullivan?” and the tension was broken and I wanted to laugh, almost did, but then my foot reminded me that I had other pressing business, and I said, “I’d better go.”