by Dani Couture
The blinds drawn and the doors shut and locked, The Shop was bathed in complete darkness, a hermetic seal that would not be cracked until early morning by the key holder. The store was silent except for the creaks and rattles of an old building that was perpetually shifting, expanding, and contracting with the seasons. Its wear was beginning to show—cracked windows, loose floorboards, crumbling brick.
Outside, the temperature had plummeted. Ghostly roads coated in salt dust. Hoar frost crept along the windows, a slow takeover that only stopped when the sun rose, and even then, only a bit. What happened next would later seem like the building was trying to take back the night, bring a touch of August to the middle of winter.
A corner of one of the curtains in housewares touched the exposed element of the space heater and burst into flames. Fire, slick like water, travelled up the curtains and walls. Soon, a stratus cloud of fire spread across the ceiling. Just as quickly, the flames moved back downward, inward. They licked the hems of old skirts with outdated hemlines, blouses with faint perspiration stains in the armpits, ancient receipts in ownerless pockets.
The smoke alarm remained mute, its batteries having been removed months ago after the toaster oven kept setting it off.
“Need some good-goddamned quiet around here once in a while,” Josie had said as she tossed the batteries into the junk drawer.
From a distance, the fire in The Shop’s windows looked comforting and familiar. A cottage with fresh logs thrown in the fireplace. It was only when part of the roof caved in that someone noticed. A drunk reluctantly used his second to last quarter to call it in. The next morning, during a retelling of the story, he’d learn he could have made the call for free. The waste ate at his heart for days, everything seeming a single quarter out of reach.
When the firefighters arrived, they stood still for a moment, mesmerized by the sheer height of the flames. There was nothing to save. The brigade trained its hoses on the pulsating heart of the blaze for hours until it was only embers beneath a ruckus of awkward stacking and black smoke rising into pale morning.
Gaetan sniffed the air. The cigarette smoke in the bar was tinged with something heavier. Wood smoke mixed with the smell of burnt wires, plastic. The bar was quiet, almost empty. He put down what he was reading and stepped outside into the bitter February cold. Toward the north, he saw it—a subtle orange glow in the distance. He hoped it was an empty building and not a house. He crossed himself and went back inside.
Sitting on a stool behind the bar, he picked up the note he’d been reading. It was one of Ferd’s. After reading it several more times, he put it back in the cigar box with the others. There were dozens, all stiff with water damage, brittle. He wished he could get his hands on the rest, the ones his wife was working so hard to keep from him, but there was never an opportunity, or he forgot when there was.
Before discovering that Algoma had been keeping something from him, Gaetan thought her incapable of secrets, mistaking her for having no inner life. Yet, once he knew, he never let on that he did, wanting to see how far she would take her secret and what would finally make her show him the notes she’d collected. He approached her like the animals he hunted—watching from a safe distance, learning what he needed to know for future use when the time was right.
But the time, it seemed, was never right. He realized he’d missed the moment his wife had changed, when she’d doubled back. He’d followed one person and found himself face-to-face with someone he no longer recognized.
In the distance, sirens wailed. The smell of fire was thick in the air, giving rise in Gaetan the most basic instinct: flight.
______________
7:15 a.m. -13°C. Wind N, light.
A spire of black smoke rising from the horizon.
The morning after The Shop burned down, no one called Algoma to tell her that her sorting services were not needed that day. As she drove toward work, the morning still winter dark, the acrid scent of smoke bit at her nostrils even before she could see what had happened. Gut seized with worry, she drove faster, blowing through stop signs until she could go no further. The roads surrounding The Shop were blocked off by yellow metal barricades the police had erected. Algoma abandoned her car in the middle of the road and walked toward The Shop. She approached the scene almost reluctantly, as if her actions could change what had happened.
The turn-of-the-century building—three storeys of stately red brick and concrete mouldings—was now unrecognizable. It was almost impossible to believe that only yesterday the building had held warmth and a loose degree of order. The far right third of the building, the section where The Shop had been, had collapsed entirely. The rest of the building, including Café Drummond, was still standing, but the windows were charred mouths of soot flanked by long, jagged teeth of ice. Algoma swore she could smell burnt coffee beans. The roof was missing, presumably incinerated, so that the morning sky was visible through the windows on the third floor.
“Almost pretty,” she said, in a daze.
The building and most of the debris and surrounding sidewalk were covered in a layer of ice topped by the fresh water the firefighters poured onto the remaining hot spots. The water slid cleanly over the already formed ice, hardening at the edges. A crystalline lava.
Algoma watched a firefighter—indistinguishable from the others dressed in orange-and-yellow gear—spray a steady stream of water into a heap of blackened lumber that was still smoking. Tired, he knelt down on the hose to keep it in place, the thick brass nozzle propped up on a brick, the spray arcing over the mess.
Her lunch, the leftovers she had planned to eat again today, was now irreversibly overcooked and buried under rubble. She couldn’t believe that at a time like this, she was thinking about her Tupperware. Algoma wiped off the cold mist of water that coated her face. A second fire hose was spraying water down from a crane high above the scene.
Where were her coworkers? Where was Josie? The street was surprisingly empty of onlookers. The only non-emergency services people on site were a handful of children who should have been in school. Algoma looked at them and shivered. She’d never liked children’s attraction to devastation. They looked almost excited by the wreckage. Their wide, curious faces made her think of her son. Ferd. She had to see him.
“He has an appointment. I need to take him now,” Algoma said, tapping her nails impatiently on the school secretary’s desk.
The secretary, a woman of indeterminate age with orange-peel skin and darkly drawn eyebrows, shuffled nervously through the papers in her desk. “It’s got to be—” she said.
“Forget it, I’ll look myself.” Algoma took off down the hallway in search of Ferd’s classroom.
The secretary clipped along awkwardly after her in her too-tight skirt. “Mrs. Beaudoin, you need to sign in. I need a record for my files.”
Algoma quickly found Ferd’s classroom and opened the door with more force than needed, the doorknob denting the wall.
Ferd’s teacher stopped in the middle of writing a math equation on the chalkboard. “Can I help you?”
The students in the classroom stared at Algoma who gripped the door frame with hard, bloodless fingers. Her hair was a fury around her small, tight face, and her denim skirt and wool jacket were still wet from the mist from the fire hoses. It was as if she had risen from the river to claim her sole remaining son. Or at least that would be the story that was passed from child to child until it had reached every parent in town by dinnertime.
“Ferd?” Algoma looked blindly around the classroom for her son. “Come here. Ferd, where are you? Stand up.”
Her eyes settled on the empty desk in the back row.
Ms. Prevost looked at the desk. “He’s not here,” she said, slowly putting the piece of chalk down onto the ledge. “He left this morning.”
“Yes, yes, he left this morning for school,” Algoma said. �
��Where is he? In the washroom? Where is it? Show me. I’ll go get him myself.”
“Ferdinand came in this morning with a note that said he had a doctor’s appointment. It was signed by you.” Ms. Prevost pulled a piece of paper from her desk and handed it to Algoma who did not make an attempt to take it.
“He left an hour ago.”
Algoma’s face softened like a dam compromised, its mortar rotting, giving way. Her shoulders slumped and she left the teacher and secretary to calm the disrupted class, which was already spreading rumours about what had happened to Ferd.
At home, Algoma nervously thumbed the buttons on her stove, trying to reset the clock. For the past year, every clock in the house had displayed different times. The digital numbers of the alarm clock in the bedroom read 4:23 p.m. The black and white twelve-hour clock in the living room said noon or midnight, she couldn’t be sure which. Her watch, dead for weeks on her wrist, had stopped at 3:01, yet she still wore it for the familiar weight on her wrist. The only clock she trusted was the ornamental sundial in the back yard, however approximate its timing was, but it was buried under snow.
She felt her life being taken from her, flash frozen and slowly melting away as the months dragged on. She could no longer remember the small differences between her twins. Which one wouldn’t eat cheddar cheese, only marble. Who only liked to sleep with flannel sheets. Who had had chicken pox first, only days before the other. Which one had a mole behind his right ear. She only saw blank skin and Leo’s birthmark. Her mind had amalgamated their identical bodies into one boy; blurry vision that had spontaneously cleared one cold winter evening last year.
Algoma wondered who or what she would lose next. Maybe she had already lost more things, small things that she hadn’t noticed yet. How long would she be able to keep what she had left. She patted down her clothing for missing coins, pins, anything. Inventory, she thought. I should take inventory. But she didn’t know where to begin or where the starting line was. Her breath was short and shallow.
She hadn’t looked in on her husband that morning. It was late afternoon now. The bedroom door closed. Where was he now? The bar. It was the one thing she was sure of.
But where was Ferd?
Algoma considered calling Gaetan, but stopped short. What did it matter if he learned now, or a few hours from now, that their second income had literally gone up in smoke and that their son—their sole remaining child—was missing.
She promised herself that Ferd would turn up soon. The odds were in her favour. Who loses two sons? But then she thought of the muddied and bloodied faces of the mothers she saw on the evening news, women from war-torn countries who had lost everything. Their livelihoods, husbands, homes, children: gone. They had probably expected to keep something, but their eyes held nothing, and their arms, no one.
In the days after Leo’s drowning, Algoma had not been able to turn on the television even though she would have welcomed the distraction. Images of her own tear-streaked face on the fourteen-inch screen were too much for her to bear. The sound of her own sobbing broadcast through thousands of television sets, an aural house of mirrors.
Media from southern Quebec and even Ontario had shown up in Le Pin. They loved the angle: twins. Reporters appeared on the playground at the school and tried to interview Ferd, who remained mute in front of the camera. He looked confused, they thought, at the suggestion that his brother was dead.
A day after the accident, Algoma turned off the television, unplugged it, and faced it toward the wall where its single, glassy eye could not stare at her anymore. Yet, from morning until night she scoured the newspapers for articles about the incident, hoping to find new details, something she’d missed, or had not been told. If she could find a discrepancy, there was hope. Body not recovered became her mantra.
“He’s gone,” Gaetan said, slumped on the couch, knees up to his chin. “You have to understand that. He’s gone.”
“There’s no body,” Algoma said.
“Ferd saw him go through the ice.”
“It was dark and he was far away. He’s young. He couldn’t have known what he was seeing.”
“Leo’s gone.”
“There’s no body. There was no body.”
For weeks, she received phone calls from strangers who said they’d seen Leo playing on the north side of town, or playing with other children at the hill, or even skating on the edge of the river. Each phone call sparked hope in Algoma, but in each instance, she would later discover that it had only been Ferd going about as the living do. After that, the phone was unplugged, too.
In the beginning, Algoma’s sisters had come over every day. The house was filled with the voices of women and the smell of sautéed onions, great pots of soup bubbling on the elements. They’d tried to fill the empty space with food and company; however, Algoma shrank from their efforts and would not eat their offerings. Her body grew thin and frail until she did little more than sit in the living room and stare out the window. Her sisters’ visits were eventually replaced with concerned phone calls and messages, which she mostly ignored, and then nothing at all.
Gaetan began to request extra shifts at the Club and stayed later than he was scheduled. In the early hours, he sometimes found himself on the other side of the bar, his hands cupped around a glass of golden liquid as the cleaner passed through with a wet mop the colour of an overcast sky. Ferd found his way to the dinner tables of other families who felt it was their duty to care for him during the Beaudoins’ time of need. The mothers conferred with one another about his visits.
“He seemed quiet.”
“Wouldn’t you be? His mother losing her mind?”
“You would, too. He’ll… they’ll all be fine.”
“I’m just saying keep him away from the river.”
“Keep her away from the river.”
“Don’t even—”
“Rudy said he saw him at the river, just talking to the ice like it was nothing. Nothing at all.”
“The poor mother.”
The women began to pack extra treats in their children’s lunch bags.
Ferd emerged from the woods to find morning recess in full swing. From a safe distance, he watched a pack of students rampage across the paved yard, wholly engrossed in a game of their own making. Two teachers, bundled in sober winter coats and thick knit scarves, patrolled the grounds.
To Ferd, humans were no different from animals. Here, two adult females watched over the juveniles in an organized attempt to keep them safe. The children were careless and curious, unable to understand the potential for disaster that existed beyond the perimeter of the schoolyard or even within it.
Using language he remembered from one of his nature guides, Ferd narrated the scene. “The two adult females do everything they can to ensure the children make it to adulthood, but not all will. At least several will succumb to illness or accident within the first ten years of their lives; however, as a result of the reduced numbers, the remaining children will receive more food and attention, thus increasing their chance of survival and reproduction.”
Abruptly, the wind changed, and along with it several students lifted their heads, sniffed the air. Ferd lifted his. Smoke. The teachers followed suit and stared into the wind. Without thinking, Ferd walked off school property and toward the smell. The longer he walked, the stronger it became. Impatient, he ran the rest of the way until finally, breathlessly, he reached the source of the smoke. His heart was beating fast and furiously. He was already thinking about who he’d tell first and how he would tell it. It was like finding a pot of gold until he realized it was his mother’s store. He froze and noticed the cold for the first time that day.
A dozen people were clustered behind the sagging yellow caution tape, as if waiting for a second fire to start, or for someone to emerge from the ashes. A single manifestation of everythin
g lost. Those who had lost something, like Josie, stayed away. There was nothing to salvage or to gain from staring at the remains. She was probably already out collecting what she thought she’d need next.
Ferd weaved through the small crowd until he reached the front. He tugged on the coat sleeve of an elderly woman with a Dowager’s hump who stood there holding a dog leash, her ratty mutt seated beside her feet.
“Where’s my mom?” He asked, his lips trembling.
The woman shook her head slowly, her paper-thin eyelids fluttering.
He spotted a police officer and ran to him. “Have you seen my mom?” He was shouting now. “My mom.”
The police officer, a short man with tired but understanding eyes, rubbed the back of his neck. “Listen, I’m sure she’s fine. Why don’t you calm down a minute?”
“But she works there,” Ferd said. He pointed at the collapsed building. “She worked today.”
“And no one was hurt,” the officer said. “No one was there when it happened. Why aren’t you at school?”
“My mom.”
The officer pushed his hat up high on his wide forehead and sighed. “Let’s take you home.” He guided Ferd to his cruiser. “I’m sure we can fix this. Where do you live?”
Through the living-room window, Algoma watched the police cruiser pull up in front of her house. She stood up from her chair and watched as the driver took his time to perfect his parking job. The cruiser moved back and forth several times before coming to a complete and perfect stop inches away from the curb. Algoma chewed her nails viciously. There was no place she could hide—no ditch deep enough, no culvert long enough to hold all she held close to her from the coming winds.