The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  And later, when he unpacked, Kevin found he had brought not one single pair of socks, and, paradoxically, every pair of underwear he owned.

  “Screaming. That’s what she does,” Heather Doane said. Heather, who owned the house, who had lived there for years, who knew the unevenness of the walls like a knuckle tracing the plaster, feeling each dip and rise, the longitude and latitude of walls. Heather, who knew it already, who knew things before he did: she recognized all his symptoms, knew the line and the dip and the sudden sinking plunge. And every now and then, in the dark, still, painful evenings, she would tell him it was alright, that he was doing all right, as if leaving home had all the formal stages, the halting forwards-backwards steps, of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Sometimes when he shuddered with sobs, the few times he did cry in front of her, she would place two or three supporting fingers gently on the outside of his elbow. Knowing that the simple connection of touch was essential: knowing too that anything more than the slightest touch was a dangerous invitation at a dangerous time.

  For Kevin, the house was all still deliciously foreign. He would wake at night in that strange fog of unease, the momentary bump and slip of not knowing, of trying to make sense of foreign surroundings lit with unfamiliar light – the oblong of the streetlight-lit window somehow always wrong, in the wrong place. The room, soft and unthreatening, yet turned on edge, sideways-shifted.

  The cat, black and white and short-haired, heard the screaming and didn’t flinch, hardly paused, step-stepping carefully, more intent on each paw-lifting, paw-settling step than on the fugitive noises of neighbours.

  Kevin, on the stairs, stopping. “Is she in trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Why, then?’

  “Because he left.”

  It was explanation set as punctuation – just the naked why. But Heather was sometimes like that: an explanation was unnecessary, as long as the outcome was clear. Eventually he learned more: that the neigh-bour was Mrs. Bird, that she had two cats, that Mr. Bird had left for work one evening like he always had, a night watchman prowling the periphery of an oldage home, alone with his thoughts and the buttonless night. Nothing to suggest he wouldn’t be back in the morning, like always, sitting in his kitchen in his sleeveless undershirt, drinking one more cup of milky sweet tea. Heather said his face hung on his skull as if it had come unpressed, that it drooped away from the muscles beneath, and that every day he was there, waiting for the clock to count down to bed.

  Except, one day, he wasn’t. As easy and as unlikely as that. From the door of Heather’s laundry room, looking across to the Birds’ kitchen, Kevin could imagine a cup of tea, steaming, waiting. It was five years ago, Heather told him eventually, and still Mrs. Bird was keening, still waiting for the front gate to open at his quiet touch.

  And still Kevin was learning the shape of the house he was living in, the pattern of the place. Learning when the hot water would fail two full inches before the bath was full. Already he knew that the rooms weren’t square, although sometimes the variation was only slight: looking at the ceiling of the living room, it was possible to see that the back of the room was narrower than the front by a few inches. In other rooms, the unevenness was more pronounced, all the result of a house built to fit a space between its neighbours, on an oblong and long-used lot.

  At night, when Heather was out, Kevin would wander the house, picking things up, setting them down, wondering about the history behind glass bottles, the heavy, green, once-stoppered Superior Lemonade bottle on a window ledge in the bathroom, the flat, flask-like bottle whose only features were the words “S.A. chevalier’s life for the hair.” Candlesticks were silent about their provenance, but rested inside cupboards with a particular pride of place. Wineglasses, all different styles, were organized in rows without any particular discernible order. Shelves of paperback books, speaking of half-remembered university English courses, whispering of not having been moved in years. Photographs of smiling couples he did not know, a wedding picture of Heather’s, turned face down now that her husband was gone, where, smooth-cheeked and literally radiant, she looked like no Heather he had ever met.

  And somehow, it was as if he might be able to find Heather’s whole life in there, locked up in code, if only some sort of Rosetta stone would make itself obvious in among the tablecloth runners, or deep in the pine cupboard where the casserole dishes hid. But there was no simple solution there – even though there were telling pieces, like the careful imprint of her lips in lipstick on a glass waiting to be washed, the overall pattern eluded him. Sometimes, he could feel it in the air in front of him, as fine as the smell of lemon peel. As fine as the thin, high trill of Mrs. Bird, once again her own private ambulance, driving through the narrow highways of her halls, rising, fading, rising again.

  One day, through her window, as he was heading out Heather’s gate, he saw her, saw Mrs. Bird, saw that she was, in fact, the thin, stick-like woman he had expected, the very way he might have drawn her in his imagination, except for the fact it seemed there was no way a woman that small could generate a sound that full. She just wasn’t big enough to be a bell that could ring with such a depth of tone. He saw her peering through the window, not standing in the centre of the glass, but off to one side, peering from the corner as if she were an adjunct to her own living room. Her mouth was firmly closed, a thin, disapproving line, but still he could hear the sound, could hear it as clearly as if the tone were still hanging there in the air, existing all on its own.

  And for a moment, he knew exquisitely and absolutely, not just the smell of the zest of lemons, but everything, even the sight of the nubbled yellow peel on the side turned away from him: he felt he could know her entire universe from the space around her, as if her life was captured in the china figurines along the mantel, the seven wooden balustrades he could see behind her, climbing up, as if her hopes and fears and desires were crystallized in that three-foot-by-two-foot glass rectangle, in what it held, and what it did not. How it had never changed, how she raged through it, her voice battering with the unanswered question of why, why this had not been enough.

  When she looked away, quickly, it was as if he had looked too carefully, as if she was shamed by what he might have seen or by what he knew. As if she had misplaced something, as if she was embarrassed that she couldn’t put her finger on just exactly where it had gone.

  He met her outside, later, moving down the icy lane, walking carefully in small, pointed, fur-topped black boots, her face down, her words indistinct and muffled in the wool of her coat. He took it for “good morning.” The words had come tumbling out, a low rush, and he had picked up only the tone of them, the way they were thrown out in one single exhalation, as if discarded into the air.

  She was past him then, her shoulders hunched and impossibly narrow, as if she might turn sideways and vanish completely. Kevin was sure that she kept talking after she passed, that the words had continued spilling out, falling over themselves and scattering like salt under her feet, becoming their own sort of murmured security as she fled.

  One night, the snow came, filtering fine through the trees at first, not touching the branches, sifting flakes caught only by the light. Thin snow threading down in lines, and then there was more, filling the spaces between. In the laneway, the flakes fell in careful, tipped sequence into angled drifts, leaning against the fence on one side of the lane, so that when Kevin stumbled home through the shin-high, powdery snow, his footprints did not so much fill in as create their own forgiving, erasing avalanches.

  And there was a woman with him, holding his hand loosely, trailing like kite string back behind him, her own footsteps toppling in like afterthoughts behind her. Just someone he had met while Heather was working the hospital night shift, Heather working another Friday night call-in as the emergency room filled with the bruised, the shattered, the drunk.

  It was something about the corner of the woman’s mouth, that’s what he would remember later, just someth
ing about the corner of her mouth, a small ironic fold that appeared when she smiled, that made the two of them come together in the cigarette smoke and the downtown dark. Eventually, that half-smile would be the only thing he would even be able to conjure up of her, the only piece he could gather from memory’s scattered threads. But Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Bird he would never forget.

  A twitch of the curtains, an instant of Mrs. Bird’s profile, the black bead of one sharp, alert eye, and he was taken for a moment with the image of crows fighting in mid-air, the way one will fold its wings and fall, as if broken, to escape while the other – knowing – will almost immediately follow suit, jinking vertically. Cut and parry, an ease of movement when another’s move is understood implicitly. The unexpected, yet always expected.

  Then he was inside Heather’s house. Inside, to that unfolding of hope, to that small perfect wonder of falling, helpless, and never fearing the fall.

  The inside of her leg, right and yet wrong. Familiar, and yet strangely unfamiliar, patterned with fine thin hairs that he could not see, that his fingers barely felt. Tracing the delicate “y” of a vein along the back of her arm, from elbow to wrist, a line the like of which he had never touched before, fine and magic and halting strange. The feel of her breath, battering urgent against his neck, her fingers grasping in the hair on the back of his head. The complexity of it, the roundness, the fullness, thick like the fat humid air of a steam-room, so that it was an effort just to breathe.

  Detail streaming in, filling up, overflowing to the point that he began to slide away, saw the room greying, so that suddenly he needed to feel less, yet wanted to feel everything.

  And was it from next door, chilling like the thin thread of a cold draft seeping in under a door? Or was it there in the room then, where everything lived in immediate, sharply lit snapshots -the futon flat and revealed, its beige cover folded back by their movements together, the sheets and blankets heaved into fabric’s round, damp topography. The long orange rectangle of the streetlight cast out across the floor. A leg, lit from ankle to knee, the shadowed curve of a smile, that small, distinct pool at her throat that might fill with a puddle of water, if only a bath were deep enough.

  And that brought more images, unbidden and unwelcome. Another bed, a narrow, too-steep staircase, picture frames that stared back at him. The road, framed in the front windows of the house that he had left.

  What’s that noise, he thought; that hollow noise in my head.

  She’s screaming again, he thought.

  Keening distantly, but directly, too, like Mrs. Bird could look through walls.

  He knew then what he hadn’t. Suddenly, he knew how the gate swings silent, frictionless, on its hinge pins after someone leaves, how night’s heavy breaths sometimes shake the house, how the snow sometimes falls abruptly, so that it just appears in the morning without ever being seen in the air. Knew the sinking feeling of being caught tight in the twisting spin, with Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis carefully calculating how short a time it would take for him to slide completely out of sight.

  Mrs. Bird, screaming like she always screams, screaming for the lost.

  Screaming a scream that Mr. Bird would never, ever hear. But Kevin did, and he could both feel his own hand on the gate, leaving, and imagine watching that same gate swing shut behind him, its latch clicking with a near-silent but final tap.

  Beside him, sleep-heavy and warm, the woman shifted and turned on her side, languorous and long and welcoming – and there.

  Lost, and found, and hopelessly lost again, Kevin clamped both hands over his mouth, trying to keep the sound from flying out.

  Mapping

  JOHN HENNESSEY STARTED THE MAP WITH A ditch, with one small spot that would, for anyone else, have been absolutely unremarkable.

  It was just a ditch, dug out every five or six years by a department of transportation backhoe. It held a small pool of standing water after it rained, fireweed in summer, and a long stretch of meadow ran away behind it, fragrant with timothy grass and low tangles of wild strawberry.

  It wasn’t that the ditch was special, and she wasn’t the first accident victim he had ever seen – just the first to leave a permanent mark. He saw her every time he passed.

  Standing, arms outstretched, one hand open and the fingers of the other folded inwards. She was ankle deep in ditch water, with the blood running down to her shoulders.

  “Am I cut bad?” she asked. “Am I cut bad?”

  He could see bone winking white through her scalp, and the washed-sky blue of her eyes. The rest of her face was scarlet with blood, and lit bright by the headlights of his truck.

  Next to her, a dark-blue car wedged nose-down in the ditch. The bank rose up behind her, high with browning summer thistle. The car had hit it straight on. There was a silver-white dimple outwards through the windshield, where her head had hit the glass.

  The summer night was quiet, the air heavy, rain coming, and not one person along the road had come to their door at the sound. All the houses stood dark, their backs turned.

  Her scalp was pulled back and split just at the hair-line, and the blood pulsed in rapid, shallow waves. He told her to stand still, to stay where she was, leaning against the open car door, that there would be more help in a minute. Her sweater had been blue. There were others in the ditch, someone he couldn’t see, moaning, and the driver sitting on the shoulder of the road, crying.

  Sirens then, still far away, the sound tumbling down the night valley toward Broad Cove. The valley was spruce on both sides, heavy green running up to flat meadow.

  He had known he would be the first firefighter there, the accident right around the corner from his house. He had fumbled with his fire coat and the latex gloves.

  But there wasn’t much he could do, except watch the blood pour over his hands like tide running in across flat sand, as he tried to staunch it while she watched, unblinking. Until the ambulance came, and it was suddenly like a dream.

  Back at the station, he saw that he had dried blood on the cuffs of his sweatshirt, and he looked at the rusty stains blankly, as if wondering where they could have come from.

  The car had hit a patch of loose gravel, just as the driver had started to turn. There were four kids, all teenagers, and one had fractured his skull, just above the ear. But it was the girl that he remembered.

  Everything was a second either way, he thought. It was all like that – it was just as simple as being caught in the middle of an intersection when someone had a stroke and hit you broadside. One small step away, always.

  The engines on the fire trucks ticked as they cooled.

  The other firefighters filled the trauma kit with new rubber gloves, brought blankets from the storeroom for the rescue truck. They looked past him, watching the ceiling fans, then inspected their hands. In the kitchen, someone dropped a coffee cup in the steel sink and swore. Hennessey tried to keep his mouth shut at the fire hall; more and more, the others had a way of looking around him when he talked. And he, around them.

  They had been solicitous when Jodean left, had talked to him more, standing close and saying they should go downtown, that he should get out and meet people. But the closer they tried to get, the more he felt pushed away. Every attempt, every strained word, only serving to underline the differences.

  They didn’t understand about Jodean, he thought; sometimes he didn’t understand himself. Maybe distance between people, between lovers, grows in inches, inexorably, until one morning you open your eyes and suddenly see those unexpected miles, stretching out backwards forever, and you realize you don’t have the energy, could never have the energy, to undo those inching, methodical steps that lead you away from each other.

  Six years she had lived with him, before walking in the door one day and undoing it all with the finality of cloth tearing. He’d been out for much of the night, a March night when it seemed that cars were intent on doing crumpled, broken-backed gymnastics into ditches. The firefighters had already levered a middle-
aged woman out of the upside-down wreckage of a Ford Fiesta, had cut the door off a dirt-smeared van, and Hennessey had held a drunken man’s head while Gord Tucker tied him to a backboard, blood from a cut over the man’s eye running over Hennessey’s gloved fingers and down into the man’s collar.

  Hennessey had come home with his defences down, with his clothes dirty and his thoughts disordered and wandering – images flashing through his head like light bulbs turning on and off randomly: blood on the glove of one hand; the way the starred and cracked windshield caught the lights from the trucks; the green-glowing, reflective stripes that were all you could see of the other firefighters at the edge of the headlights. So it was an unfair fight, if you could call it a fight at all.

  Because he didn’t fight: at least, he didn’t fight outside their rules of engagement. He thought about that later, about the things he should have said, about what he might have said, and really, he had thought about it then as well, the words full and round on his tongue, yet stuck there, unable to fall. And he found it strange how the rules that define a relationship could form almost imperceptibly, could frame and define the space within as precisely and rigidly as walls define the inside of a house. He could feel the argument – quiet, words barely spoken, pauses long and unbroken – growing dangerous, tilting wildly, yet he had been unable, utterly unable, to find a way to stop it.

  Any of it.

  Then the accident on the hill became the first single sharp point on a map in his head; that was the way he thought of it. It was simple geographic punctuation, hard and fixed and distinct; time and space spun around it like the heavens around the North Star. At first, it was that one spot on the hilltop road, a spot he would avoid driving by when he could. But then, others appeared. More and more, every week, effortlessly, the map spread and grew like lichen on granite, a web of dots with fine lines between them. Bit by bit, it began to intrude, uncomfortable, like an eyelash caught in his eye that he couldn’t seem to find. Driving through the fire district started to feel like a half-remembered dance, filled with steps that only partially made sense to him.