by Rachel Wyatt
She ran down the steps to the subway. The train rattled on, taking her towards her own small world. Compared to the outer world’s problems, hers were no more than a gnat-bite. Was there enough leftover chicken for dinner? Could she keep making the mortgage payments or would she at last have to face reality and find a small apartment? Maybe it was time to move out of Toronto. Could she stand that? Would her down coat last another winter?
And I do have friends, she almost said aloud to the two young women opposite. We go to movies, to cafés. My sister Janey spends every other Sunday with Dan. I’m lucky really.
The larger of the two women across the aisle, lovely face, big eyes on the verge of tears, was listening to music, earbuds in place. Her companion, slim, long blond wavy hair, stroked the other’s arm a few times and looked at her sadly. Were they on their way to some dreaded appointment? Or maybe returning home from the doctor’s with a bad diagnosis? Or was it a breakup? Shut up! Erin said to her brain. It had its own scattered ways of distracting her.
Rain dripping off her umbrella, she turned her key in the lock, opened the front door and could hear, instead of the tap of a hammer, voices. His parents were unlikely to drop around without making a plan at least a week ahead. Was she going to have to make dinner for friends? She almost backed out of the hall and ran down the street. Courage! She put the umbrella in the stand, hung her coat on its hook and opened the living room door. Dan was lying on the floor, his eyes closed, while a voice from the radio murmured in a language unknown to her and probably to him.
She went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Mom had been by and left a salad. There was plenty of chicken. She poured a glass of wine for herself and orange juice for Dan, and sighed for the days when they’d shared a bottle on a Friday evening. Don’t weep for ruined expectations: line in Thursday’s horoscope. But she had wept. Dan was to come back from Afghanistan and, after a vacation in Mexico, take up his job at Creative Construction, lead the community program against the pipeline and, in the rest of his spare time, renovate the third bedroom for a baby. Instead…well the “instead” could be seen blowing to and fro in their yard. And it was, in every way, for the birds.
Mel had told her she was a heroine. But heroines are noble, she’d replied. They do not look at the nursery that is now a workshop littered with sawdust and fragments and want to scream, consider arson or ignoble flight. Pictures of birds cut out from Wildlife magazine formed a frieze where there should have been a pattern of teddy bears and dolls. And where there might have been a crib, a camp bed, the smell of paint, instead of baby powder… She let that refrain die.
Dan came from the living room to greet her. “Thank you for coming back,” he said.
Her heart shook. It was the first time he’d said anything like that. He’d changed from his old blue tracksuit into decent grey pants and a white shirt. He put some crackers and cheese on a plate, found two cocktail napkins and set them on the table with a little flourish. When they were sitting down with their drinks, he asked if she’d had a good day. There was excitement in him. It was a Chaplin moment. She could hear the piano but couldn’t read the script.
“Is everything all right, love?” she asked.
“Stay,” he said. “Don’t go away.”
In a few moments, he returned carrying an object covered with an old T-shirt.
“This is the surprise.” He pulled off the cover like a magician revealing the dove in his hat and unveiled a large egg. He stroked it and held it out for her to take. She stood up, put both hands round it and stared at it. The twenty-fourth birdhouse was a smooth oval with an oval entrance for whatever birds chose to make it home.
“Thank you,” she said. ‘It’s lovely.”
“It took me a time to hollow it out. I’ve put a lot into it.”
Once this man had cared about refugees, about other soldiers returning home to bleak futures, about people who had to swallow their pride and go to food banks and to charitable places for free meals. Now all this was contained in a ten-inch wooden egg. Erin shivered as she continued to nurse it and imagined that all the disease and evil of the world was crammed inside.
“Oh,” he said, “there’s a rough bit. Hold on.”
She held on, fixed in place, heard him run up the stairs and quickly back again, and tamped down the hysterical laughter that was rising in her throat.
“Keep still,” he said.
The file slid off the smooth wood and into her palm.
She threw the precious egg to the ground and shouted, “Look what you’ve done, you stupid, stupid idiot, you and your freaking useless birdhouses! Get a towel. Do something!”
But he stayed still and watched the blood run from her hand onto the wooden fragments. She pushed him away and ran to the sink. When she’d run water over her hand and wrapped it in a drying cloth, she plugged the kettle in and sat down to cry. It was the end. It was too much. For eighteen months, she’d borne this calm desolation of his mind. Now she’d said the unsayable and broken his gift. The heroics were over. She had to get help. He’d have to go to some kind of home at least from Monday to Friday. I am not strong. I am not good. She wanted to shout for Mel to come and hold her. The cloth was reddening and the stain was leaking onto her pants. She rested her head on her right hand and saw Dan’s feet. He was beside her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but couldn’t look at him.
“I’ll drive you to the hospital in a minute,” he said. “Drink this sweet tea first. You might need stitches.”
She looked up because that was a man’s voice, and the man’s eyes were once again full of awful knowledge. At the hospital he went straight to the triage desk and said, “My wife is bleeding badly and there might be a chance of tetanus.”
When they told him to take a number, he shook for a moment as if he were about to shout or collapse, but then he plucked the plastic square off its hook and came to sit beside her.
“Fourteen,” he said. “We might have to wait.”
~ • ~
All the birdhouses except the yellow one and the tower in the birch tree were gone. He’d arranged the rest of them along the edge of the lawn with a sign that read FREE, and they’d quickly disappeared. Dan was back and Erin still watched him but surrendered to him those tasks she’d taken on ever since he’d set out for what they called the theatre of war.
“I developed muscles,” she told him. And he laughed and put his hands round her biceps.
He was wary. He was loving. He had put away childish things.
“Wonderful,” her mother said, her sister said, her friends said, her therapist said. His parents, who had backed away slightly from their damaged son, now came to claim him. You’ll come to us at Christmas.
In fact, no, they wouldn’t, thank you. They were going at last to Mexico.
The lines had deepened on Dan’s forehead as awareness of the world returned along with memories of battles, explosions, death. He slept beside her but sometimes cried out in the night. Exactly as we told you, the three wise doctors said, pleased that they could close the file for now. You see, a shock, something broken, a crash, his work smashed. Any of those would be the trigger. But Erin knew it was the blood.
Falling Woman
What had led her to sit in the wrong chair? Not that there was a wrong chair, but now and then Maura felt guilty for having a choice when some people had no chairs at all. Every morning, she sat in the red upholstered armchair in the corner drinking her coffee and reading the paper till it was time to go out to the next fruitless job interview. The couch against the wall was for evenings only, or ill health or, until recently, sex. For some reason, or rather no reason – later she put it down to intuition – at 8:31 a.m. on Thursday the twenty-third of May, she decided to sit in the brown leather recliner by the window, the window that looked out onto the street. And that was how she happened to see the tragedy. Harold had told her several times that she saw too much for her own good, as if there was virtue in ambling th
rough life without looking to either side. He himself had lately become a fine imitator of the three wise monkeys.
So in one glimpse, one frame if it had been a movie, at 8:31 a.m., Maura saw: half the beige four-storey building opposite, the cedar tree that blocked out the other half, the back end of a pickup parked in front of the beige building, a red sedan going by towards town, a man falling from the roof of the beige building, a person running to the far side of the roof of the beige building.
She dashed outside and went to the fallen man, who, it turned out, was a girl, and said, “Are you hurt?” realizing at once that there’d be no response. In minutes, there were neighbours on the sidewalk, a passerby yelling into his cellphone, a person, possibly a doctor, kneeling beside the body. Maura ran home to get a blanket but by the time she found a decent one, one fit to be seen by all and sundry, an ambulance was drawing up. Paramedics leapt out to take control. A police car, lights flashing, arrived. An officer cleared a space round the fallen person and asked the onlookers, unless they had seen anything, to disperse.
“I saw her fall,” she told the cop, and almost found herself adding With my little eye. She also said, “There was someone else up there.”
The cop came into the house with her and looked through the window to confirm her story. Another cop came back later and asked her to tell him exactly what she’d seen. She was, she told him, still in shock and no longer sure of anything. He warned her that they’d need to speak to her again and left, leaving her with a vague sense of guilt. She made herself a cup of sweet tea and cried for the dead woman. Lying there, crumpled, wearing a long blue sweater and jeans, the victim, as the cop called her, had looked like a discarded doll. Her shoes, soft black pull-ons, had dropped off in the fall; one was resting on the rhododendron bush by the door and the other lay on the grass in front of the building.
Maura tried to call her sister but got the zombie voice telling her to leave a message. She tried Kylie, but Kylie had a job now and wouldn’t be home till eight. Harold had asked her not to call the office, but she did and no one responded at his number. She was greatly tempted to Facebook what had happened to all her invisible friends but held back. Guess what! This morning I saw a young woman fall from a roof. The dead couldn’t care about invasion of privacy but that didn’t make it right. At least she hadn’t rushed out with her cellphone to take a selfie with the corpse. She opened a file on her laptop to key in the facts, but there were no facts other than that a young woman had fallen from a roof. Her life, her family, her mental state were unknowns, as was the matter of whether she’d jumped or been pushed or simply tripped.
At lunchtime, Maura still felt shaken. She’d checked her emails and responded to none of them, not even the invitation to potluck at the Gladwyns. Why couldn’t they just make dinner for heaven’s sake, instead of ending up with too many salads and a sickening array of desserts? She’d done nothing, the bed wasn’t made, there was shopping to do and oh God, she’d missed the interview at Everstone, Brice. She called. She told them there’d been an accident and the police were talking to witnesses. Unable to call sooner, sorry. “Tomorrow,” the voice said. Disbelief in the tone but giving her another chance. Same time tomorrow.
“Thank you,” Maura replied, too gratefully maybe. On the other hand, in the world of job seeking, there were times when crawling was the only way. The handbook called it due deference, but Maura liked to know people before she deferred. There was something slithery about kowtowing to the unworthy.
On the local radio, the tragedy was slotted in between the prosecution of an elderly man for drunk driving and a rise in the theft of small electronic devices. It did mention that the fallen girl was from a town called Subotica and that the police were trying to contact her family. Maura found Subotica on the map very close to Hungary. The evening TV news was packed with explosions, sad lines of refugees, soldiers in combat, civilians in combat and the sinking of a giant cruise ship. That night in bed, she hugged Harold and said she would never get over it, the horror of that body lying there. He stroked her shoulders and told her to go to sleep, but in her sleep she saw a body falling and sometimes it was hers.
On Friday morning, the Herald headlined the story: Woman dies in freak accident. A breeze, a loose tile had perhaps caused the victim to slip.
“She was pushed, I tell you,” Maura insisted. “There was someone up there.”
But Harold, in his usual way, scoffed. “You imagined it. You always extrapolate.”
“Harold,” she said, “what have I seen in you? Why have I just made breakfast for you?”
“That is one question too many. Possibly an existential question. I can’t answer it at this time of day.” He went out chewing on the last piece of toast.
She imagined him falling from a taller building, ten storeys, or even twelve. Taking her mug of coffee to the brown leather chair, she sat down to stare at the picture framed in the window, trying to recall exactly what she’d been looking at yesterday in the moments that preceded the terrifying fall. Robins had been hopping around the white lilac as they were now. The mailman going up the path at 2023 had stopped when the woman fell and then walked back towards 2013, perhaps to see if he could help. Then, because the mail can’t be delayed, he’d continued on his route. Now he was skirting yellow crime tape, glancing down as if there might be another body.
Maura looked up. There was a figure standing on the edge of the roof! She ran out of the house to yell up to it, “Life is good. Don’t jump.”
“Police,” the man called back. “Please move beyond the tape.”
Feeling like a scavenger, a vulture, a paparazza, Maura returned to her house and sat on the front porch. Was there, she wondered as she looked across the road, a difference in the way a person landed according to whether she jumped, fell or was pushed? A difference in which bones broke or how the limbs were splayed? And was the woman dead before she hit the ground?
The man now walking up the path towards her wasn’t a stranger. She’d seen him occasionally on the street leaving the building opposite in the mornings about eleven o’clock. Clearly not an early starter. Some kind of soft office job for sure. Yet he looked like a fighter, rolled from side to side a little when he walked, arms slightly akimbo, hand maybe ready to reach for a gun.
“I heard what you said to that cop yesterday,” he said. “You saw someone on the roof?”
Maura was about to invite him inside but instead she stayed where she was and said, “Did I? I might have, yes. It was a terrifying moment. I’ve never seen anyone fall like that. I don’t suppose many people have. I was in shock. I’m still shaken. I could have made a mistake.”
“I look across from my window on the fourth floor and I see you, where you sit in the same chair every morning.”
“But I don’t,” she began to say and then held back. Because that was a clue. He was lying. Unless he had a magic periscope and could see across the living room to the red chair, there was no way he could see her in her usual place.
He didn’t move. Maybe he expected coffee.
“Has your husband left already?”
Without replying, Maura went into the house and closed the door. A moment later she saw the man walk down the path, cross the road and go back inside the beige building. Curious! She wanted to consider the meaning of his visit. Sinister, that’s what it was. No question. Was he the person who ran across the roof yesterday? The murderer?
She tried to shake the thought from her mind. It was time to get out of her robe and change. Time to imagine that today she would be told she was exactly the right person for the job on offer. She wanted to greet Harold that evening with the smile of a successful woman. Her interview outfit, navy skirt and jacket, white shirt, was “brightened”, as fashion writers said, by a red scarf. She focused on professional matters and put on her shoes with hope.
As she opened the door, she was startled to see a woman on the step, a woman dressed like herself, but without the red scarf. “I ha
ven’t time,” she said. “Whatever it is, I have to go.”
“I’m from the Herald. I just want to ask you a few questions about yesterday.”
“I’m in a hurry. I have an interview.”
“TV? Radio?”
“A job.”
“Well, look, can we talk?”
“I have a bus to catch.”
“I’ll drive you.”
~ • ~
If anyone had asked his occupation that morning, Harold would have replied that he was a tightrope walker. He trod a thin wire that stretched between his work, his home and his future. It was unwise to look down or to either side. He had only to keep going forward, eyes front, placing one careful foot in front of the other like Blondin when he walked above Niagara Falls, and he would reach the other side not only intact but possibly flourishing. To say that he himself was taut was an understatement. A wrong move on an inauspicious day, a slack rope, and it would be over.
In his sleep he heard the words “making ends meet” and thought of the two ends of the rope coming together: a circular, never-ending, dangerous ring of wire, and himself a miserable hamster on a horizontal treadmill. When he told Maura that he was going to the office, he didn’t say that the office was a small room in the back of the AllWin Casino where his job was to keep quiet, to count money, to lie and to lie low. He did his best to ignore the foreign girls who slipped into his office occasionally to ask what the English words were for leave, card, money. Maura, his still unemployed wife, thought he went to the insurance company each day where he’d earned an honest salary for seven years. Until the crunch came. Until the roof fell in. Until he’d set his foot upon the wire.