Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wished my father could have heard him, as well as Esme and all those other people who’d never believed Dooley Sullivan would come to anything good. But it was down to me. I said, “Okay, then. Apology accepted.”

  Then he said, “Your dad drove a hard bargain. But he was fair.”

  I didn’t leave. Dooley handed me a dry blanket, which I wrapped around myself, and we sipped our tea and topped it up when it cooled down. And he told me a story, a long one that took all night to tell. It began with him waiting for my rumoured return to Elliot (the source of the rumour was a participant in Mavis’s yoga class), and then he slipped into memories that rolled over one another like waves on a beach. He told me things that he had never told anyone, not even in the anonymity of AA meetings. When he got to the part about the red truck and the last time he’d seen its remains in the Texaco parking lot, I wanted to cry for him. When he got to the part about the deer turning into a man—the vision that still haunted him—I knew I had to tell him another version of that night, my version. And for the first time, I told my story—the wedding night, the green cap, my flight from Elliot, and the disasters that followed before I reinvented myself, before Ian.

  All night the rain was a soundtrack on the trailer roof, until the man turned back into a deer and both of our stories ended on the same mostly deserted street in Elliot.

  It was almost morning when I fell asleep in the chair. Dooley slept too, awkwardly, slumped into a corner of the banquette. Once, I was awakened when I thought I heard him talking. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he said, but then again, it might have been a dream.

  The power was still off when we woke up, but the rain had stopped. The sun was out and mist was rising eerily from the low spots across the street. Before I left, I asked Dooley about Tobias’s estate, whether he felt as though he’d been cheated. He said no. He’d taken the money my father had offered and run like a bandit, knowing it was more than he deserved. I was relieved to hear it.

  I went up the steps and into my house and sank into the brown couch, my foot aching again. I wished that I had solid proof of my version of the story so that Dooley could truly be relieved of guilt for the worst thing he’d done, or thought he’d done, in his messed-up younger life. He was sixty-eight years old. If he could live his old age without that burden, I thought, he would be a freer man than he’d ever been living on a beach in Mexico. He said that he’d once gone to the RCMP detachment with a plan to make a confession, but then he’d turned around and gone home again, losing his nerve, clinging to the smallest particle of doubt.

  The smell of dampness made me get up off the couch and look for its source, although I knew it was going to be the basement. When I opened the door and flicked on the light, I was greeted by the sight of water halfway up the staircase. Debris was everywhere. The bookcase floated on its back, empty of books, the guitar bumping up against it like flotsam. The fur coat resembled a moose with its head under water. The pole lamp poked its own bent head up in an elegant way, a bit like a swan. An old steamer trunk was lodged under the staircase, bulging with wet linens, and soggy cardboard boxes had spilled their contents into the water. It appeared that nothing stored in the basement had escaped.

  The house’s breaker box was on the wall beside me. I switched off all breakers and closed the basement door, not believing my good fortune—the need to sort judiciously through possessions now gone—although I did not yet realize the extent of the new problem I’d have to deal with.

  That evening, I sat on the porch and watched Dooley Sullivan do his bird dance in the water pooling in front of his trailer. Deeper water lay in the lots between us, and I imagined my house rocking the way it might if it were floating on the ocean. I thought about Joe Fletcher dying in the hospital, an opportunity flickering like a candle burning out, and I saw Dooley’s dance in a new way—not just because of the water, but because now I knew about his life since Elliot had lost track of him. Nineteen years he’d been sober. Three times in detox, but the last time it took. Now he went to meetings and took medicinal marijuana for the pains in his body, caused by injuries he’d inflicted on himself, he said, by driving drunk into a bridge. He didn’t blame anyone, he said, not his grandfather, not my parents or Esme for packing him off with a cheque and a bus ticket, not the teachers for missing his cries for help.

  When he finished his ritual, I went inside and opened the fridge a crack, trying to keep the cold air in, to see what I might have that could be turned into a meal not requiring electricity. I made myself a sandwich, and then I sat on the porch and watched the horses across the road as they grazed their way down the fenceline and out of sight. They belonged to Dooley. They were rescues from an animal cruelty seizure not too far away and had been fending for themselves in a bare pasture without food or water. Dooley knew a bit about caring for horses from his time in Mexico, so he took them because no one else would and they were destined for the slaughterhouse. He’d been rescued, he said, many times. Everything deserved to be rescued. The town had been happy to lease him the empty lots across the street.

  I wondered if Mary, the supposed mother of all rescue, was still on her hill. I scrambled through the barbed-wire fence and made for the shrine. When I got there, I found only the stone grotto and what looked like the remains of an old fire. Someone, it appeared, had burned up the holy mother.

  The mosquitoes found me, and then I heard the horses galloping toward me, and it was terrifying, but they stopped before they ran me over and left as quickly as they’d come when they saw I had nothing for them. I hobbled back through the wet grass and crawled through the fence again. I heard a car crossing the tracks and thought it might turn up Liberty Street, but it passed the turn and the sound receded. No one ever came up Liberty Street.

  I went into the house and went to bed, thinking I could hear the sound of water lapping. I lay there and contemplated what to do about Joe Fletcher.

  THE NEXT DAY, I phoned Mavis from a payphone in town and reported that my basement was full of water.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Well, I hear half the basements in Elliot are flooded, so it’s not surprising. Main Street is under water, or at least it was. Did you know that?”

  I told her yes, there were pumps going everywhere in town. She asked me if the water in my basement was receding. I said I’d closed the basement door and hadn’t checked since. There was silence on her end of the line, as though she couldn’t believe what she’d heard.

  “I have no electricity,” I said. “I’m pretty much camping. I don’t really know who to call.”

  Mavis said she would try to find someone to pump out the basement and check the electrical.

  Later, Dooley knocked on my door. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you might like to go to the hall with me tomorrow night. Apparently, someone is throwing together a benefit to raise money for flood victims, people with house damage and no insurance. There’s a good local band. They have a young girl who plays the fiddle, and she’s kind of famous around here. She almost won one of those TV talent shows. A lot of people got the Internet just so they could vote for her.” Then he said, “Just to be clear, it’s not a date or anything like that. I don’t complicate things by having relationships. Sobriety is my mistress. Just thought, two people, not much going on with either of us that I can see. Might as well go together. You think?”

  I found myself nodding and saying, “Okay. What do people wear to these things?”

  “Anything you want,” he said. “It’s Elliot.”

  I wore jeans and a T-shirt with a flower-shaped pattern of cheap crystals. I didn’t have proper shoes with me and likely couldn’t have worn them anyway because of my foot, so I wore flip-flops. When Dooley came to pick me up, he was wearing jeans and boots and a silver belt buckle. There was still a touch of swagger in Dooley Sullivan, I thought, which amused me quite a bit.

  The parking lot at the hall was under water and the puddles glistened. Cars and trucks w
ere parked all up and down the street. The hall itself had been spared any damage—the same hall where all those years ago I had hidden underneath a table and then danced with Dooley Sullivan when his foot was in a cast. I asked him if he remembered that night and he said no. I said, “You crawled under a banquet table where I was hiding and pulled me out to dance with you, much to the annoyance of the ladies who were following you around like you were a rock star.”

  “It’s been a long time since any ladies followed me around,” he said.

  There was a donation box at the door and we both dropped bills inside before we found chairs against the wall at the back of the room. Lots of people said, “Hola, Dooley,” to which he answered, “Hola yourself.” In a way, the lack of attention paid to me made it seem as though I had lived in Elliot all my life, because that’s the way it had been when I did live there.

  It was a long night. It was hot and humid in the hall, even with the doors open. I didn’t much like the band, and the girl with the fiddle—wearing a light cotton dress and red cowboy boots and looking too young to be on stage in a place where they served alcohol—wasn’t doing anything particularly impressive. Dooley kept telling me to wait, assuring me that a solo set was coming. By the time the girl finally stepped up to the mike and the other musicians put their instruments down, I was falling asleep in my chair and dying to go home. I watched her settle her fiddle on her shoulder, pluck the strings, tune, slide her bow back and forth a few times, and then launch into something I recognized. Everyone recognized the song—was it “Orange Blossom Special”?—and before I knew it, I was being pulled up to dance a circle around the hall with Dooley and everyone else, sore foot and all. Then someone was cutting in and I was dancing with a strange man, and then another, and then Dooley cut in again. Everyone in the hall was dancing, and when the girl stopped playing, the room erupted. Someone took the mike and told the story of how much fun the whole town had had voting for her, and she should have won—she was robbed, wasn’t she?—and everyone clapped and stomped again, until the girl began to play another tune and the hall thundered with the sound of dancing feet.

  When her set was done, the band took a break and the crowd spilled outside to cool off and smoke cigarettes, and the hall went more or less quiet. Dooley went out too and I sat on my chair against the wall, resting my foot on another chair and trying to think what proof I could offer Dooley to keep uncertainty from creeping back in. I was almost the only person left in the hall. A woman with a cane and wearing white oxford shoes walked by and said, “Hello, Frances. How are you tonight?”

  “Fine,” I said, “thanks. And you?”

  “Oh, I’m all right for an old lady. Shame about this rain, though. Once in a hundred years, they’re saying.”

  Then she walked toward the bathrooms, tap-tapping her cane on the linoleum floor. I had no idea who she was.

  I got up and stepped outside and found Dooley talking to someone, and I said I was ready to go home, but I could walk if he wanted to stay. He insisted on driving me, because of my foot.

  On the way, I said, “You mentioned that you’d worked for a while in the bush north of here, right?”

  He nodded and said that he had.

  “The night of my wedding, there was a man—the one who brought the cap. Saul Something-or-other. He was older than you by quite a few years. I remember that he worked in the bush and was married to an awful woman named Ginny. She sounded like a duck when she laughed.”

  Dooley thought for a minute. “There was a guy named Saul and he might have worked in the bush, but I knew him because he sold homemade liquor and didn’t care how old you were. I think his last name was Danko, or Demko. That was it, Demko. Why do you ask?”

  I was picturing the bottle of homemade booze that Ginny had carried into the house on my wedding night. I was picturing the initials SC.

  “The initials,” I said. “On the cap. SC. That cap definitely didn’t belong to Saul Demko.”

  “Oh,” Dooley said. “No, I suppose not.”

  He sounded hopeful.

  NO HANDYMAN SHOWED up at my door. I assumed they were all too busy for me and my basement. Many homes in Elliot had suffered the same fate as mine—almost four inches of rain overnight, a freak storm. I tried to buy a pump at the Co-op, but they were all sold out. When I explained my predicament to Dooley, he managed to borrow a pump, and he pumped the water out a basement window and then checked the electricity and said he thought I could turn the breakers to the upstairs back on. He suggested I buy a dehumidifier, and I got the last one in town. There was no point in even attempting to salvage the ruin in the basement, which I saw as a liberating gift. Dooley helped me out once again by offering to haul everything to the dump for me in his truck. I wouldn’t let him do the work of carrying the Moons’ waterlogged belongings up the stairs, and as a result it took me days to get everything out and piled in a moulding heap in front of the house. Together, we carried up the few pieces of furniture that were heavy or awkward, and then we loaded up the truck.

  The only keepsake I salvaged was my mother’s mahogany tea caddy from England. It had floated to the surface of the floodwaters and washed up on the dry land of a stair tread. After Dooley left for the dump, I sat on the couch with the tea box and lifted the lid. There were still tea bags inside, although when I touched one the paper fell apart and loose tea spilled out into the bottom of the box like dust. The thought did not escape me that it had once survived a bombing in London and had now survived the disaster of a hopelessly flooded basement. It was the one thing I would take with me when I left, I decided. How could I leave it behind after what it had been through?

  I held it in my hand and thought it was a lovely thing.

  No Song Like a Country Song

  I SCRUBBED DOWN the basement walls and floor with bleach.

  I bought a new smartphone and a data plan at a wireless outlet in town, and then booked a plumber to come and tell me if I needed a new furnace.

  I went to visit Joe Fletcher.

  “Is he in pain?” I asked, and nurses said no. They came in periodically to make sure he was comfortable. They were amazed that he was still alive. I waited, hoping he would open his eyes, perhaps speak, but he didn’t. I thought of Esme Bigalow and how her eyes had popped open long enough for her to say the words “We are all such mysteries to one another.” Perhaps Joe Fletcher would do something similar: “I want to come clean.”

  While I was there, a priest came to visit. I told him I didn’t think Joe Fletcher was Catholic and the priest said it didn’t matter, he visited everyone. He stopped to see Mr. Weins in the next bed, but Mr. Weins wouldn’t say a word to him and pulled the covers right up to his chin. When I asked the nurse afterward why Mr. Weins didn’t say, “Help me, help me,” to the priest, she said he spoke only to women, and seemed to be afraid of men. Did he really believe he needed help? I asked. She said no, it was just something he liked to say, a way of communicating. He was waiting for a room in a nursing home, one with a dementia ward. His wife was being difficult and kept rejecting placements because they were too far away, she said, and she would not be able to visit him. The nurse said the wife couldn’t visit him anyway because she was almost bedridden herself with arthritis. She kept threatening to take him home.

  I followed the priest out to the parking lot after his visit with Joe. “Has he said anything to you?” I asked him. “You know, confessed any big sins on his deathbed?”

  “No,” the priest said. “Although you know I wouldn’t tell you if he did. Surely you know that.”

  “I wonder if he could be pretending,” I said.

  “To die?” the priest asked, incredulous.

  “No,” I said, “that’s not what I meant.” But I didn’t explain further and left it at that.

  I went back again the next day and sat by Joe’s bed with my new phone, searching for information about comas and deathbed confessions. I tried to find out if it was possible that he could hear people talking to
him. I tried to find cases of people snapping awake from comas to say final words to their families, confess sins, make up for lost time in final hours. I found a story about a woman in Ontario who had gone public on behalf of her father, claiming that just before he died he’d admitted to killing the man who’d been having an affair with his wife, the woman’s mother. I wondered if he really had confessed, or if she was confessing for him, having known that he was guilty all along. I tried to remember the name of Silas Chance’s sister so I could find out if she was still alive. I didn’t know enough about social media to use its resources, so I googled, entering words indicative of what I remembered—Silas’s name, the year, Elliot, hit and run. Nothing useful came up. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this. I didn’t know what I would tell Silas’s sister even if I could find her. Which version of his death was the correct one, if either? I knew which version I wanted to believe, but how could I be certain?

  An explanation of how Facebook worked came from a young nurse-in-training doing a practicum, to whom I happened to say, “I’m trying to find someone. Does Facebook do that?” She returned when she got a break and set me up, saying, “My grandma’s on Facebook. She doesn’t really get it, but anyway.” She took a picture of me with my phone, and this became the profile picture for an account under the name Frances Moon. In the course of learning how to find friends—“Go ahead,” the student nurse said, “enter the name of someone you used to know”—I discovered that Ian was on Facebook. That came as a surprise.

  “Look at that,” she said. “You found someone already. Now send him a friend request.”