by Kris Bertin
“Wish I had thought of it,” said one of the DuMonts.
These things all mattered to us because we’d saved up for our houses, gone into debt for them. Because we’d sought out a spot for ourselves, and looked at so many different places before settling on this one. One we’d chosen because it was perfect. So we cared.
We cared about the way the lake changed, season by season, year by year. We cared about its pH levels, fish and loon populations. We tended the shared beach together, collecting garbage and clearing it of debris and driftwood. We gathered together several times a year for block parties, barbecues, community meetings. We had a community charter which we had drafted and agreed upon. We groomed our lawns in accordance with each other, with the belief that there was a way things ought to be.
We had chosen this place for its beauty. We believed—very strongly—that this beauty was ours, and we deserved it. We had purchased it and expected to get the most of it.
This is why three of our households—the Grangers, the Fongs, and the Pietres—came together to watch the first work crew take down every last one of the tamaracks at the top of the road with chainsaws and tethers. Up closer to the noise, the Cambies, a young family of five, watched from their front lawn. A MacAllister from the bottom of the road had come to the top to watch and turn red. He stood, with his hands on his hips, at the edge of this new boundary and called out to the men in hats and vests. They were maybe the poorest and rudest amongst us.
“Who the fuck is this even for?” he shouted. “They don’t like trees?”
We each had a different picture of how things should be, and how they should look. But it was unanimous that this one component was essential to all of us, whether we were wealthy retirees or artists or “summerers,” or regular working people who just happened to live miles and miles from a real city. It was such a large portion of the beauty we believed was ours that we convinced ourselves it hurt to see it removed.
We wanted to hold someone responsible for it.
***
Then, after construction began, these things were forgotten.
It was even worse than everyone thought. The house that developed was strange looking. All the other homes here were either Victorian or pre-fab Victorian-imitation kits, and theirs was not. Theirs was narrow and tall, like a box of crackers. Modern, people were calling it, though it didn’t seem to be part of any kind of movement. A neighbour—Wanda Pietre—walked up there and asked the contractor about the design and he shrugged.
These were the plans we were given.
I didn’t have a problem with it, and neither did my husband. This was our first departure from the consensus. When it started coming together and neighbours on both sides of us complained about it, my husband, Gorman, said that it was about time someone built something new here. This comment went ignored, because he was well liked, and because they didn’t want to acknowledge that not everyone felt the way they did.
One day, one of the Grangers came over to talk about it. About how we could do something to stop it. She had a clipboard.
It was Connie Granger, the matriarch, whom my husband Gorman interrupted mid-sentence to tell her she really needed to mind her own business. That he didn’t care about any of this shit. I was proud that he stood up to her.
This, I know, was what was expected of us. We were the progressives of the neighbourhood. An interracial artist couple in their sixties with city money. We dressed well, we were educated, we were liberals. We drank wine and black coffee and wore paint-spattered clothing, and could often be seen toiling at some project which had no plain explanation because it was purely artistic.
What else would people like us think?
But we both changed our minds when the home sprouted a fake stone facade that faced the road, and then grew cheap mint-coloured vinyl siding everywhere else. When they put down a gravel driveway and woodchips instead of grass. When a six-foot chain-link fence went up around the house and left the rest of the property bare dirt that quickly sprouted weeds.
This was not a matter of aesthetic differences anymore. Whether it was ignorance or negligence was unclear, but Gorman told Connie Granger that he owed her an apology.
“I liked the idea of people having a unique vision,” he told her, “but that isn’t this.”
“It’s an eyesore,” Connie said, forgiving him, and looking proud of her own forgiveness.
***
The community came together in their disdain for the building, and so began a period of monitoring and information-sharing about the residents. They hadn’t moved in yet, but had showed up every now and then, usually late at night, and were gone before the morning. The Pietres saw them first, because they were always watching everyone.
“The man’s a big guy with a brush cut. Looks like a football player,” Wanda said. “And she’s tall and thin—too thin—with legs like sticks and hair down to her ass. They got a black Jeep.”
These were all the details we got, because that’s all you can really learn about someone by staring at them through binoculars from half a kilometre away.
We learned more from the Cambies, who were up at the top of the hill and were closest to the new neighbours. The strangers had come to them first, as the sun went down, to ask for light bulbs. They said they had packed up for a weekend at the mostly finished house and totally forgot to bring light bulbs. The Cambies, an older retired couple and the only childless couple on the street other than us, didn’t care about the new arrivals, or their house, and hadn’t given anyone this information. Instead, it was extracted by Teddy Pietre, who turned his dog walks into a kind of patrol. He told everyone the light bulb story as evidence of good news: they were going to be seasonal residents, which the vast majority of the lake dwellers were.
“They aren’t gonna be one of us,” he said. “Won’t have to see them all the time.”
This story was also an indictment of the Cambies for their indifference.
“They didn’t even get the new people’s names,” Teddy said. “Can you believe that? They gave them a six-pack of bulbs but didn’t even ask them who they are or what they do. They don’t care what happens around here.”
The next time he told this story, the heat had died down for the Cambies and was back on the strangers. He had an update:
“They didn’t even repay the bulbs they borrowed! How rude is that? It’s like they don’t care about the rest of us!”
“They don’t,” my husband said, false gravity in his voice.
***
Even when we tried to pretend we didn’t care about these sorts of things, we were lying. We cared. Gorman liked to be playful and aloof with the Pietres whenever he could, because they could never pick up on it, but we were doing the same things they were. We talked about the house every now and then, laughed about it.
The new house also made me feel like they did, but I had my own feelings about it. I thought it was something sadder. That it looked like a dream gone sour. Its design and early construction had some intentionality to it—someone’s idea of sophistication—but then something had changed. Bad taste alone didn’t account for what it had become. They ran out of money, and the operation had been scaled down. Landscaping jobs cancelled, contractors switched, materials downgraded.
I kept these thoughts to myself, maybe because it was different from what the rest of us were saying, and maybe because I thought it might just become another criticism of the people we hadn’t even met. I didn’t want them to be rude, inconsiderate, and poor. This was also a thought I was careful not to verbalize, for fear of being laughed at by my husband, who laughed at everything, and laughed at what he called my city-girl morals more than anything else.
Then, in the spring, they were here. Not with just a few summer things, but with a moving truck and three small children, all of them and their things looking like they weren’t going to fit into their new hom
e, a place that seemed less like a house and more like a watchtower or a military fortification.
“I got it,” my husband said, once he got a look at them. “It’s a mobile home, set down on one end.”
He closed an eye and pinched the shape of it in the distance, then rotated his hand horizontally, putting it back down on the orange-brown woodchips.
“Like a tornado picked them up from the trailer park and dropped them off here,” I said.
He laughed, and I did too.
And though it was improbable, and even though I am certain she did not see it, part of me still wonders if she might have. If we had been spotted with our red wine in Mason jars, pointing and laughing.
If we had been marked, as a result.
***
The husband’s name was Dan Belanger and he was a doctor, though he wasn’t like any doctor I’d ever seen. He was heavyset and boyish, shy with almost no confidence to speak of. When I shook his hand, he looked at my thumb instead of my eyes.
We met them formally in May when the Grangers held their community get-together—what they called the Long Lake Community Picnic—but when I saw him before then, he seemed oafish or something. His Quebec accent contributed to this, but he also had enormous hands and a thick neck, a protruding brow. He looked like he should be demolishing walls, not diagnosing people. Even his demeanour was totally wrong.
But, if we were honest with ourselves, and if I’m honest, it wasn’t him we were interested in.
It was her.
If she wasn’t six feet tall, the shoes and boots she wore put her there by a couple inches. She had long hair, and a lot of it too. It went down almost to her waist and was thick and heavy-looking. I had the idea she was proud of it because she made it a consideration of her every movement. Whether to tilt her head and hang it over her shoulder, or straight down her back, or sort of fluff it up like a starlet. Her name was Christy.
She was in a bikini with a sarong and sunglasses when we shook hands. She was dragging along the three kids and a beach bag and a cooler, and I liked to think, for a while, that she was only dismissive of me because she was annoyed at her husband, who was walking with his hands in his pockets and not helping her with anything. Later, I wondered if it was because she didn’t yet know she had a use for me.
She made a show of bending over at the waist to put her things down at the beach, then stood up to arrange her bikini over her breasts, which looked as hard and unmoving as wax fruit. She was covered in tattoos, thick, black tribal ones that looked washed out by the sun and almost green against her tanned skin. She had a gap between her teeth, a mole on her cheek. Gorman was careful to point out that she had been revolting to him, but this meant he was worried I might think otherwise. It meant that there was something to be looked at. And I have to say, there was something.
She was pretty, or was once, and had a body like a dancer. Big, strong legs, a muscular stomach, visible ribs. She carried herself not with grace, but with a kind of special confidence, like none of this—us, the neighbourhood, even her husband and children—mattered to her. A detachment like I’d never seen before, like we were mayflies to be strode through. Gorman said it was off-putting, that it was like she didn’t care enough. I agreed, but in truth, I felt like she really was special in some way, that maybe she just needed someone to bring it out in her.
When her sunglasses came off, it was to put lotion on her children: fat, pale twin girls, and an olive-skinned one who was tall and skinny and toothy. It was an act that she carried out with disdain, as if it were below her. This was my first real look at her, and it was in an unfocused moment where her pretenses were absent.
I didn’t know it then, but looking back, I understood that I had glimpsed the real her. Her face was slack, her eyes dead, a look of complete exhaustion on her, like a person who had suffered a terrible and recent loss. I didn’t see this on her again, not really. But she caught me staring and firmed her face back into a mask. The one I would see for another three years. It was the mask that I came to know.
The mask laughed at other people when she didn’t know what to say. Like when we talked to the Liebowitzes—the only other couple remotely like us, a former radio producer and sound engineer who had met and married while at the CBC—about politics or film or art. When we talked about what was happening to the lake’s pH level, or some unfamiliar topic, she would raise her head and chuckle. We’d look at her and she’d do it some more.
The mask wanted to be admired, and noticed. That first day, on the beach, when a song came on the radio that she liked, she was quick to tell everyone about it, to get up, turn it up, and dance on the beach with her dark-haired daughter, even though the rest of us, sitting on lawn chairs and beach towels and blankets, didn’t move, didn’t react or comment on it. I think she wanted us to regard her as her husband did, with reverence and fear, the way you might stare at a timber wolf at a zoo. When he did glance at her, it was when she was not looking his way, so he could not be trapped by her gaze. Other times he seemed pained when she drew too close.
The mask didn’t want to be asked questions. When we asked her about where she had come from, we got very short answers. She told us she was from somewhere in Quebec that we’d never heard of, though I heard nothing of an accent from her. She was a stay-at-home mom. When I asked what she did for fun, she shrugged and smiled like she didn’t have an answer, but one of her twins, shining with sand stuck to her sunscreen, spoke up:
“Makeup!” she said.
“Makeup,” the mask agreed.
The reason I recognized all of this as a performance is because I believed I had once been the same way. Before I had made anything of myself, when I had no career, no work to be proud of, no confidence, I used to think I deserved attention without having done anything worthy of it. But I had wrestled through and out of this same trap by being alone, and being honest with myself. By facing the fact that all my look at me bullshit, all of my sleeping around, all of my drinking and cycling through boyfriends was all about trying to get someone to like me because I liked nothing about myself. I thought it was a story applicable to everyone.
So I made a mistake.
I hadn’t had a project in a long time. I didn’t announce it, or even really think about it, but a small, internal decision was made. Something inside me decided I would be the one to take her on. That the way they were looking at her wasn’t the way I would. That I was different.
Much later, at the end of it, I understood it wasn’t that she hadn’t yet made something of herself. It was the opposite. Something I had never seen in someone so young. That she had done something already, that she had used up all of herself, all at once, and it was over. The thing that the other families were repulsed by was the same thing that had always repulsed them—from any other source—and which was coming off of Christy and her husband like stream from a sweating body:
Failure.
***
Months later, the first indictment came.
Wanda Pietre, struggling through chemo and now outfitted with a maroon wig, said that Christy had gone through one of the Granger’s daughter’s purses. That someone had seen her doing it.
“Are you sure that’s what you heard?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I heard it from one of Bill’s sons. He told us he saw it with his own eyes. When we were all up from the beach and on our deck, they saw her rifling through the oldest girl—what’s her name, Lisa?—Lisa’s purse.”
I was on our back patio, and she was leaning over the fence when she told us. I remember feeling then, as I had many times before, that it was unacceptable she felt entitled to come over and gossip to us. I was sick of her, generally, but also had already decided I was with Christy, so to speak.
This was also during a period of unrest, when Gorman’s lung disease was particularly bad. He was upstairs in the bedroom coughing most of the day, so I
was doubly mad. Without him there, I couldn’t count on one of his biting remarks stacked thick with multiple meanings, so I said something noncommittal like Is that what happened now, and picked up a magazine instead. These were the limitations imposed by my manners.
By then, I had tried to contact Christy more than once. The neighbours—all of them—would have known this. So Wanda’s story might not have been just gossip. It might’ve been a warning:
Don’t let her too close.
Or:
You don’t know what she’s capable of.
But I had put in too much time trying to make her like me by then. I wasn’t prepared to write off those efforts or count them as wasted. When Nancy Granger told me about the purse incident, I was still holding out hope that I might get through to Christy.
I had tried to visit more than once, but the chain-link fence was always locked. The last time I tried, I’d shown up with a basket of apples we’d picked, and was convinced that I would be let in with them. But even after I called her name the heavy curtains didn’t move, and I saw no movement from inside the house. I left them beside the gate, where they stayed until recycling day when they went out with the organics.
***
Then she drove into our house.
She came down the road from the hill, into the ditch in our front yard, over a bed of perennials, and went into the southeast corner of the house.
I was inside at the time, making dinner, and was wholly unprepared for it. The sound was incredibly loud, but the sensation was stranger. If the house had a mouth and bit down and shattered all of its teeth on some unbreakable stone—and I was inside the mouth too—that’s what it might feel like. A deafening crunch followed by a terrible reverberation through the joists and rafters.