“Come on, James. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The two girls rushed through the yard, past Jessica and the big tree and out through the back fence. Jessica could hear their footsteps in the alley, and the sound of them overturning a metal trash can onto the gravel. “Fucking white people,” Casey said. “Let them pick up their own garbage for once.”
Donna sat heavily on the wooden lounge chair, her knees splayed over the edges. Jessica wanted to run to her but felt strangely rooted to the ground. Her mother had never looked so helpless, so downtrodden, so crumpled. Jessica kneeled back down. She just couldn’t watch anymore.
Chris’ voice cut through the fog of memory. “These files are a big help in filling in the gaps.”
Jessica stared at the table in front of her. Something had happened to those girls that weekend they had run away. She was sure of it. When they had come back, they were filled with a rage she never saw again, not even when she was taking children away from abusive homes. Bill was neglectful and beat them once. But there was something else. There had to be.
Finally, she spoke. “What was Bill charged with?”
Chris twirled his pen between his fingers and looked down at his notes, as if he needed the time to think about what he should reveal and what he shouldn’t. Before he could speak, Jessica almost shouted, “Just tell me, for fuck’s sake.”
“One charge of assault related to Wayne Chow, and another related to Casey Cheng.”
“What happened to the charges?”
“If you really want to know, I’m sure you could find out. It’s all part of the public record and you seem pretty good at digging up old paperwork.” He drank from his coffee cup and then smiled. “Did you find anything about your mother in the files?”
She pulled at the sleeve of her sweater in frustration. He was changing the subject, something she used to do when the parents she was interviewing grew defensive or silent. There was no point in fighting his questions. He would tell what he wanted to and no more. She sighed. “No. The notes basically stop as soon as the girls were left at our house. I looked, but there was nothing there.”
“So you still have no insight into your mother’s role in their deaths?”
Jessica shook her head. “None. I wish I did.”
As soon as the two bodies were found, she had known that Donna had done something to those girls. She had spent the last four days careening from possibility to possibility, searching through notes that said almost nothing. But as she sat there, swallowing the urge to cry, she could think only of the small, bare foot she had seen in the freezer, dusted with ice. The longer it took for her to find out the truth, the more she began to believe that her mother—the singing, stewing, musky woman she knew—had killed two children. And this thought made her want to light her own head on fire, just so she wouldn’t have to think anymore.
Sighing, she rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “If she were here, I would shake her. It’s so unfair, leaving those bodies for us to find. What did she think was going to happen? That we wouldn’t notice? Or that we’d just leave them alone?” Snot began running down over her mouth and she sniffed, but it didn’t make any difference.
Chris handed her a handkerchief. “I’m the only man under ninety who carries one of these.”
Jessica blew her nose and stared down at the damp square of cloth. “I don’t suppose you want this back now.”
“Just take it home and throw it in the wash. You can give it back the next time I see you.”
“Next time? Will it be for official business or something else?” As soon as she said it, Jessica felt her body wilt. For a moment, she could see herself—eyes swollen, nose red with wiping, shoulders bent forward from the strain. She shouldn’t be flirting. Why was she flirting?
He smiled and picked up the files. “I’m sure I’ll run into you somewhere. Who knows? Maybe I’ll go for a sandwich and find out you got there first.”
Jessica laughed and pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. She felt hot, as if the floor were radiating upward and wrapping itself around her.
He held the door open for her and, as she walked closer to him, she extended her hand. He held her by the wrist, his fingers grazing the veins that pulsed under the thin skin. She took another step forward and he looked down at her, brown eyes narrowed. For a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. In the middle of this mess, a kiss would make a perfect kind of sense, as if it could be the unmoving centre of a wildly spinning universe. Jessica knew it would be messy, that kissing the man who was investigating suspicious deaths in her mother’s house would be a bubbling mass of sadness and complication and the kind of sex that was both freeing and confining. But she didn’t care. Not now. If he would just kiss her, maybe everything would fall into place.
In half a minute, she imagined that one kiss leading to long emails, to sentences that were heavy with longing and words that were about sex but weren’t, words like want and pull and tonight. She saw, in her head, her own feet walking quickly out of her apartment, carefully paced so Trevor wouldn’t hear her running like mad toward another man in a waiting car. Afterward, Chris would leave his smell on her, and she would press her nose up against her own shoulder every twenty minutes for a whole day and breathe in the remnants of his sweat, that scent that was him but also her because it was both of them, locked tight together in his bed or a bed in a hotel or anywhere. And if she left Trevor then, it would be her fault, but it would incontestable, a separation easily understood, easily defined by relationships and their ruination.
But then she heard a photocopier whirring to the left and the slide of a drawer being pushed back into its cabinet. Chris turned his head away and waved a hand toward the hall. “Your dad is waiting,” he said before walking quickly to the front room, not even looking behind to see if she was following.
Jessica wondered if she was still drunk, or insane with grief, or both. As she waited for her father to put on his jacket, she thought of Trevor again. Poor Trevor, always trying to help and never quite succeeding. With her, with anyone. She felt sorry for him, and guilty. If she could, she would lie with him right now in their bed and rest her forehead against his. Surely that way he would know that she cared, understood even. He was like a mouse in her hands, quivering and cold. If she went back, she would try to be more careful. She could try.
Gerry stood outside in the sunshine, shading his eyes with his hand. “Where to, Jess?”
“Someplace with meat. And beer.” She took her father’s arm and led him to her car, her mother’s skirt swirling around her ankles.
—
They drove down Marine Drive and stopped at an old barbecue restaurant hidden behind a trellis and a small parking lot. Gerry pointed to a table in the back that was pushed up against the faux-wooden siding. When the server arrived, her father muttered, “Whatever you’ve got on tap that tastes like another.” Jessica rolled her eyes and ordered a wheat beer with lemon.
“Do you remember this place?” Gerry leaned forward. “I used to take you here when your mother was out. It was our little secret.”
“Didn’t she cook something and leave it for us in the fridge?”
“I used to bring the dish with us, and throw out the food in the Dumpster in the parking lot.” Gerry laughed and then shook his head. “I didn’t feel guilty about it either. I just wanted a burger.”
Jessica smiled. “And a milkshake.”
Outside, it had started to rain, a light misting rain that clung to grass or hair or pants, only soaking in thirty minutes later, after you had forgotten that you were even caught without an umbrella in the first place. Jessica touched the curls piled on the top of her head. On days like this, her head was haloed in frizz.
“It wasn’t enough,” Gerry said suddenly, breaking the low buzz from the restaurant around them.
“What?”
&nbs
p; “I didn’t take you here enough. I should have spent more time with you.”
Jessica touched his hand with her fingers. “You were busy. It was work that had to be done.”
Gerry shifted in his chair and grimaced. “Sure, sure. I saved a bog and got some tree-huggers out of prison. When God is looking at my list of sins and virtues, I’m sure those will be enough to justify the deaths of two teenaged girls.”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
“Obviously, your mother needed help. I couldn’t see that because I was too busy thinking I could save the entire world from destruction. I could have been there for her—stayed home more, helped out with the kids. Even just taken you out more often. Anything. But I didn’t. And look what happened.” He shifted his eyes from Jessica’s face to the ceiling, blinking at the fans, immobile and dusty.
Jessica looked at her father, quiet and still, his face lined and sharp, as if the last few months had slowly been shaving away skin and fat until all that was left was his essential sadness. During Donna’s illness, he had held her while she shivered, cleaned her armpits with a warm cloth, trimmed her toenails as she slept. And now, his thoughts circled in on themselves until all he could understand was that he hadn’t done enough. He had made those dead bodies his fault. Jessica wished she could tell him that he was wrong, that the outcome would have been the same no matter how often he got home in time for dinner, but she knew this wasn’t true. If he had been home more and listened to his wife, maybe Casey and Jamie would still be alive. Maybe they would have walked out of the house, whole and intact, carrying their bags and scowling at their social worker.
She gripped her father’s hand tighter across the table. “You did what you could. None of us knew any better, Dad.”
Gerry looked at Jessica’s face and exhaled. “That’s sweet of you.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I know.” He picked up his pint glass and took a long sip. “I just wish your mother was sitting here so I could tell her I was sorry.”
“And you know what she’d say. She’d tell you to stop apologizing and help her rake the flower beds.”
Gerry laughed. “Even when I first met her, she didn’t take any shit.” He paused and looked out the window. “She was so beautiful then, with all that curly hair and that big smile. We started out thinking we could change the world. She told me once that she used to nurse injured birds and squirrels and things. One time, it was a stray cat. She kept them in the attic, where her mother couldn’t find out.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, I think most of her patients died. She probably didn’t want to tell you that.” Gerry winced at his words and, with a slight shake in his hands, picked up a menu. “Burger or pulled pork? Or both?”
Jessica watched him read, his eyes just barely rimmed in red. She almost stood up and put her arms around his neck, but then changed her mind. “Both, of course. With a side of sausage.” They laughed and clinked their glasses together, feeling, for the first time in months, that laughter wasn’t cruel and wrong.
—
That night, Jessica roasted a chicken in her parents’ kitchen, then washed her clothes. She drank a glass of wine on the back deck after her father went to sleep, huddled in Donna’s green parka against the wind that whistled down the side of the mountain. She could hear movements in the bush—crunches and snaps—and imagined raccoons and moles feeling their way through the dense vegetation, some of it dead. She had always loved this house, which sat squat and brown like a mushroom in the moss. Even though downtown Vancouver was only a twenty-minute drive away, the city seemed like just a good story you told to your family at dinnertime.
It was easy to say My childhood was normal. It was the sort of thing people say when they want to deflect attention, or when it was the most polite way to explain that you grew up with privilege, that your past wasn’t dotted with evictions and coupons and beatings from a father who could never keep a job. It was what Jessica always said, even though she knew this statement couldn’t possibly be true for anyone.
Staring at the mountain in the night, barely lit by the flood lamps on the ski hill, she remembered that her childhood, the public one, was ever-shifting, as if one more news story about a child gone missing or a predator on the loose or a mass cult wedding could twist the continuum of time or reorder the universe so that every house on the walk to school in the morning seemed ever so slightly different. A volcano erupted, and the sidewalk looked cracked and bumpy. A nuclear power plant exploded and Jessica knew that the flakes of skin on her legs were dying, peeling off one by one as the radioactivity seeped into her body. But nothing weighed down the air like the men who abducted, raped and killed children.
It was Clifford Olsen. It was Ted Bundy. It was the Paper Bag Rapist. Later, it was Paul Bernardo. If Jessica saw a windowless van parked on the street, she ran past it, head down, afraid even to blink because, in the half-second her eyes were closed, a man with a fake beard or a real beard could grab her by the waist and throw her through the rear doors, into a space padded with mattresses and old quilts. Even if she screamed, no one would hear her over the van’s engine starting up. He could stuff a sock in her mouth. He could drug her. He could threaten to kill her parents if she said one word. So she ran, eyes aching with the dry air that pushed at her face.
If she thought hard enough, she knew that these things—sex, violence, death, fear—would be forever entangled in her head. Jessica knew the very first time she looked at a boy and wanted him to make her come. She was scared, but she wanted him. She knew she might die if he beat her or didn’t wear a condom, but she couldn’t stop staring at his face. Even now, while drinking twelve-dollar wine in a folding deck chair behind her parents’ house, she could remember everything about that boy’s face. The wide smile. Eyes just a touch too close together. The dimples, always a surprise. And how she wanted to watch that face as he watched her.
It never happened. That time, the fear won.
She knew, also, that the fear kept her with Trevor. He bought books for her and wrote messages on the inside covers. Brought her croissants whenever she had her period. He would cry when she died, those deep, coughing sobs, the ones that tear through a chest and hurtle through walls. There might be no one else who would love her this much. If they broke up, the next man she slept with could kill her, could wait until she was naked and lying on his couch, half-drunk, and strangle her with an electrical cord. Or simply beat her with his fists, the weight of his body hitting her head until the sounds she made were wet and involuntary, until even those stopped too. All of that could happen.
Because it wasn’t just girls she didn’t know who had gone missing and died. It was two girls whom she had lived with and tried to like. It was Jamie and Casey, who had breathed fear but pushed through life anyway, who had run away for one weekend and returned, brittle and angry and violent. Jessica knew that something terrible had happened during those two days. If she had to guess, she would say that men had hurt them then, as they had before and as she had always feared for herself. The difference was that she was still alive and they were not.
Jessica had always been scared—of disappointing her mother, of another job, of living without Trevor. But now, drunk but alone in the night wearing a parka that Donna had used only when she shovelled snow, she understood that fear was a doubling down on hurt. The men might hurt her anyway, or they might not, but fearing them wouldn’t prevent that. It only made her tentative and sad and stuck. Being afraid of death made no difference. She was going to die anyway. She licked a dripping line of red wine on the curve of her glass.
Once inside, she saw a car parked in the front driveway, a big American sedan. She walked closer to the window. In the light of the street lamp, a man emerged from the driver’s side. Chris Gallo. She put a hand to the messy bun on the top of her head and looked down at the pink long johns she had pulled
out of her mother’s dresser just after dinner. At least the hooded sweatshirt was hers. She wondered how much of the makeup she had applied earlier that morning was still on her face.
She opened the door and he didn’t smile. There was a wrinkle in his forehead that pushed his eyebrows downward, that made him look like an over-sugared child who had just been told it was bedtime. Without saying anything, Jessica reached out and touched the wrinkle with her finger, pressing to smooth it out. When he smiled, she let her arm drop to her side again.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to see if you were all right.” He whispered, as if afraid that Gerry would come rushing out.
“I’m over it. A few glasses of wine can cure anything.” She paused and looked at his eyes, set far apart and warm even when he was trying to act detached. “You didn’t really come all this way, at ten o’clock at night, just to see if I was all right.”
Chris let out a breath and his shoulders fell, just a quarter of an inch, but it changed everything. He was no longer the police detective who asked questions and expected them answered; he was a man who was unsure of what was going to happen next, who had a different kind of question he wanted to ask, and who didn’t know which words he was going to use or what the answer was going to be.
“Do you want come for a drive?”
Jessica looked at the looming bulk of the car behind him. She had a decision to make. One that was hard not because the choices were equally appealing, but because one choice was so glaringly wrong and scary that it made her stomach flip. Yet it was precisely that choice that pulled at every muscle in her body, that made her want to dance out the door—light and happy—even though she knew with every cell in her brain that the final outcome would almost certainly have nothing to do with happiness, but rather guilt or disappointment or disgust.
She had never met a man who had said so little to her that was sweet or kind or romantic, but who nevertheless owned her fraction by fraction every time his eyes settled on hers. So as the drumbeat in her head pounded out wrong, wrong, wrong, the blood speeding through her veins pulsed a homologous but opposite rhythm: this is what I want, this is what I want.
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