Still Mine

by Amy Stuart

  “She was married.”

  “Clare,” Malcolm says.

  “I was trying to clean her up,” Derek says. “I had her on a program. Journaling. Exercise. I was trying. Methadone. I have no idea how Wilfred got his hands on so much of the stuff.”

  “Why did you hire Malcolm? Why didn’t you look for her yourself?”

  “I had no idea where to start. This is a small town. You can’t ask questions. I thought maybe an investigator could look into Jared, Charlie, follow up on things. Do what the police should have done in the first place.”

  “You needed to be the hero,” Clare says.

  “No. I needed to find her.”

  “She’s clean now at least,” Malcolm says, glaring at Clare.

  “She’s dehydrated, a bit undernourished, maybe. He kidnapped her, for chrissake. But she actually seems better.”

  “And you love her,” Clare says.

  “I’m not sure it matters if I do. She won’t speak to me. She’s asking for her mother.”

  “It suited you that everyone thought Jared killed her.”

  “Clare!” Malcolm says.

  “I thought it was Jared,” Derek says. “So did everyone else. Who the hell else would it be? Who would ever think her own father would lock her in a hole?”

  “Listen,” Malcolm says. “This could have ended really badly. Much worse than it has. By any measure this is a happy ending. Whatever comes next is up to you and Shayna. But Clare and I need to leave.”

  “She can’t leave. She has a gunshot wound.”

  “We need to go,” Malcolm says. “Now.”

  Clare motions to the IV. “What about this?”

  “Do you want your face all over the news?” Malcolm says. “Do you want to talk to the police?”

  “No,” Clare says, tightening her grip on the card.

  Malcolm comes to her side and motions to Derek to tug the needle out. Only a small bulge of blood appears. Derek jabs at the buttons on the IV machine until it powers down.

  “Can you get us out?” Malcolm asks.

  “I don’t know,” Derek says. “The two nurses are on shift change. You could probably just walk out the side door.”

  “Can you leave us alone?”

  “She’ll need pain medication. Dressings. Antibiotics.”

  “If you could get us some,” Malcolm says. “Enough to tide her over for a few weeks. Then give us five minutes to get out.”

  “People will be looking for you. The police are upstairs with Wilfred. They asked me to call them when Clare woke up. What do I say?”

  “You say nothing. You have no idea where we went.”

  Derek nods. It makes sense to Clare now why Malcolm didn’t tell her who’d hired them. Clare can’t be sure what she would have made of it, how it would have carried her differently. Once Derek has left the room, Malcolm dumps the contents of his bag onto the bed.

  “I bought you some clothes. Not much women’s wear selection at the hardware store. I did what I could.”

  “So you just leave? Just like that?”

  “We just leave.”

  “You feel no obligation?”

  “I met my obligations. We met them. We found her. He should be happy with the outcome.”

  Clare reaches for Malcolm’s arm. “Did you ever call him?”

  “Who?”

  “Jason.”

  “No.”

  “You just dropped contact?”

  “Not exactly. After I left the trailer yesterday, I sent him an e-mail saying I had no leads and would be dropping the case. I told him that you were likely dead.”

  Clare glances at the flowers on the side table. “Did he reply?”

  “No,” Malcolm says. “Why don’t you open the card?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t get the impression he’s particularly gullible.”

  “How do you make enough money to live?” Clare asks. “If Jason didn’t pay you?”

  “Clare. Not now. We need to go.”

  “I’m not allowed to ask you why you do this?”

  “You don’t need to know everything,” Malcolm says. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  “You know my story.”

  “I don’t know you, Clare.”

  “But you knew I had a history with this stuff. That I’d been a user. Can you finally just answer me? Jason told you. You knew, didn’t you?”

  “He alluded to it,” Malcolm says.

  “Oh, come on. He told you. You sent me into Blackmore knowing what it might do to me. You see that, right?”

  Malcolm edges to the door and looks both ways down the hall.

  “We only have a few minutes.”

  “You see that, right?” Clare says again. “Malcolm? You put my life on the line.”

  “It was a better option than turning you in.”

  “There was the option to let me go,” Clare says. “Let me keep running. But you didn’t.”

  “I was giving you another way out.”

  “You said before that I remind you of someone.”

  “Listen. I’m leaving in two minutes with or without you.”

  “At the trailer. You said that.”

  Malcolm heaves a deep sigh, then pulls the curtain closed around the bed.

  “You do,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean by gone? Is she dead?”

  “No. I don’t think so. She’s gone. Vanished.”

  “What happened? Were you married to her?”

  “Yes,” Malcolm says.

  There is a sour taste in Clare’s mouth. Malcolm Boon, married. A wife disappeared. Gone. A story he refuses to tell.

  “Do you know who sent the flowers?” Clare asks.

  “Read the card,” Malcolm says, losing patience.

  “I don’t want to read it. I’m not reading it. Was it him?”

  “Listen,” Malcolm says. “I’m going to find Derek and get your supplies. Can you get dressed on your own?”

  “I think so. Malcolm?”

  “Clare. We have to go.”

  “Where? Where will we go?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  They watch each other in silence, Clare exhausted and parched and propped up in this bed, Malcolm at the foot of it, ever composed. Clare thinks of Jared’s estimation of her, a cold one, how it fits Malcolm too, the sparseness of him, how he does not temper his words to account for her injured state. In all his coolness Malcolm is the only person with any sense of Clare’s true history, the only one to have glimpsed the indignity of her life before this one. Still, Clare cannot decode him, what his ulterior motives might be, whether he means to protect or discard her. But he is right. She cannot stay here, and Malcolm Boon is her only way out.

  “Okay,” Clare says finally. “Let’s go.”

  When he leaves the room Clare presses herself up, then swings her legs over the edge of the bed and stands. She will have to change quickly, ignore the shudders of pain that come with even small movements, whatever drugs she’d been given wearing off. It takes two tugs for the string of her hospital gown to come loose. Before she can grab hold of it, the gown drops to the floor. Clare wears only underwear, the chill set upon her instantly. She fumbles with the clothes on the bed, sitting to pull on the pants, tucking her head into the shirt. Malcolm even brought her a pair of shoes, a sort of tennis slipper one size too big.

  The nausea from the pain passes. Clare feels steadier. She stuffs the unopened card into her back pocket. Then she throws the flowers in the garbage. If they are lucky, Derek will run interference for them at the nurses’ station. They will make it out of here undetected, out to Malcolm’s car and back down the road, away from Blackmore. No one will see them going, everything Clare had left behind in the trailer anyway, even the name O’Dey to be cast off. All these people left behind to sort out the aftermath, puzzled by Clare’s disappearance, le
ft to question whether she existed at all. If they are lucky, it will be like they were never here, the short life of Clare O’Dey abandoned in the egress of an old mine.

  The stucco on the motel room ceiling is peeled in places. Clare lies on her back, the bandages on her shoulder tinged with blood. According to the glow of the alarm clock, it is nine. Despite the bedside lamp this motel room is dim, the bathroom in shadow at one end, another double bed empty beside her, the heavy curtains pulled shut. How many hours have passed since she and Malcolm drove away from Blackmore? Clare can barely envision the exodus, the flight of hospital stairs to the car, then the click-clack of the windshield wipers, how Malcolm sped around the turns though the road was slick with rain. There was the cold of the mountains out the window, their snow-dusted tops peering in and out of the clouds.

  The day now reveals itself to Clare in hazy scenes. She cannot pinpoint exactly when the mountains gave way to rolling hills and bright sun, to earth brown and scorched, and then to a lush and flat green that must have signaled the nearing of the ocean. She has no memory of securing a room or navigating from Malcolm’s car to this bed. There is the vague image of Malcolm standing over her with a glass of water and a pill, setting some food on the bedside table, then sitting in the chair, watching the muted TV while she swayed in and out of sleep. Now Clare can see that the food is still untouched in its takeout container, that she did not imagine him setting it there, this her only sure clue it wasn’t all a dream.

  From the next room comes the clang of old plumbing. Maybe Malcolm is there, taking a shower, washing his face, brushing his teeth. Clare tries to listen for more noises, but her head hurts. The corner of her forehead where the butt of Wilfred’s gun landed is sore even to the lightest touch. When her eyes close she sees the barrel of Wilfred’s shotgun, that perfect circle of black, the halo of trees above it.

  Salty tears burn down the swollen skin of her cheek. There was no lucidity as she lay on the wet ground under Wilfred, his gun aimed down at her, no awe or incredulity that death might be what came next. The only death Clare ever witnessed firsthand was her mother’s, a peaceful enough departure, a tube in her arm to feed her a drug that might have spared her any sense of what was unfolding. It must have been like sleep, thoughts weaving in and out like dreams, so that her mother might have figured her own death to be imaginary. Clare remembers marveling at death then, how it might take its time, plucking life away over weeks or years, a slow decay, or how it might choose instead to barge in, a truck on the highway or a blast at a mine, a cooked needle in the wrong vein, a shotgun aimed just so.

  A bottle of the small pills is on the bedside table next to the food and a glass of water. Clare’s legs and toes feels numb. Whatever momentum has driven her these last months seems to have left her. All she wants is to stay in this bed under the yellow light of this lamp. The taste of it is in her again. She will have to work hard to ration the pills, to keep herself to a regimen, to avoid that slip back to a place where this dullness is the welcomed norm.

  “Malcolm?”

  Clare sits up.

  “Malcolm?”

  It takes some maneuvering to get out from under the blankets and fend off the dizzy spell that follows. Clare stands and flicks the switch next to the door, washing the room in a harsh light. The light fixture hums, its bowl speckled with the black dots of dead insects. Clare can’t be sure what she is looking for until she sees it, the card that came with the flowers on the dresser next to the television, a yellow envelope and the cell phone Malcolm gave her on top of it. Clare limps over and opens the yellow envelope. Inside is a wad of fifty-dollar bills held together by an elastic. The Post-it note tucked in with the bills offers only two words. Your share.

  Your share. The wonder of it, Clare thinks, this life as a paying job.

  Next, Clare picks up the card. She knows. She knew the moment she saw the bouquet in the hospital. Some instinct must have been honed these past months, because a pulsing pressure fills the space between her ears. She nudges the card open. A folded paper falls to the carpet. Clare struggles to pick it up. She unfolds it. The greeting is set apart from the rest of the text so that it catches the eye at first glance. Typed.

  My Clare.

  Clare must sit back on the edge of the bed to stop herself from vomiting. She turns the paper over in her hands. It is blank but for the printed words. My Clare. In the early days of their courtship she’d taken this call as a gesture of dreamy intimacy, but in time she grew to hate it. I do not belong to you.

  Clare crumples the paper in her fist, then stands and goes to the window, yanking the curtains fully open. The sight of Malcolm’s parked car fills Clare with resolve. The motel sign is lit. SEASIDE INN AND LIGHTHOUSE. On the far side of the parking lot is a drop-off beyond which Clare assumes is the ocean. A wash of pink sky. She can taste the salt in the air. On the desk next to the phone Clare finds a pack of matches embossed with the motel name. She slides the chain lock and steps outside into the dusky light.

  It is the noise of the ocean that surprises Clare the most. The roaring hum of it. The light in the room next to hers is on. Malcolm. Malcolm is here. Clare walks across the parking lot to the guardrail. Below, the water froths up then curls back over itself, a steep drop down to a rocky shore. The sun has just dipped behind the horizon. Clare holds her sore arm to her chest and climbs over the guardrail, balancing with her legs pressed back against it. There is the sensation that the wind is rocking her. She pinches the card between her teeth while she works to strike a match. The corner of the paper lights up and the heat curls up the page. Clare watches it, working to steady her breaths, about to toss it, unread, into the sea.

  No.

  Just as the flame is about to take hold, Clare blows and pats at the paper until it’s extinguished. She sits on the guardrail and runs her finger along the charred edge of the page.

  Two hundred and seven days. That was her reprieve. Clare thinks of Jason plucking at the keyboard of their old computer, searching for a florist, e-mailing this note to be tucked into the card. The gravel in his voice, how he might have uttered the text aloud as he typed, never one to give her the last word.

  My Clare.

  So many things can change in a day. That e-mail telling me he couldn’t find you. That you’re probably dead. The world works in such strange ways. Timing, you know?

  I sent him to find you. I’ve been awaiting his word.

  I’ve been looking for signs. Every day I search online for news. So many missing women. And then there you were! You’re turned away but I’d know your face anywhere. That smile of yours always broke my heart.

  I took the picture to your brother. She’s not dead. See? Like I told you? That’s what I said to him. She’s in the mountains and she’s in trouble. Again with the drugs. I don’t know what I expected him to do. He just stared at the picture and handed it back to me. And Grace. Poor Grace has been the worst. Telling the cops to come after me and question me. Calling the precinct. Telling them I’m a violent criminal. I found Grace in her backyard this morning. She was pushing her little guy on a baby swing. She said the picture might not be you. Then she got a sad look on her face. Some people give up more easily than others.

  I told them everything, Clare. About the pills and all the drinks you had that night. How hard you fell off the wagon. About the baby. How you wouldn’t let me drive you to the hospital. About the night you disappeared. It made me cry to finally tell it.

  It was hard to see Grace’s little boy, to think of our son, how he’d probably be sitting up by now too.

  You know I was never good at letters. Or flowers. My Clare. You aren’t dead. I knew it.

  I don’t know why everyone here is so willing to forget about you. It’s like that’s what you wanted. To be forgotten. Like you knew no one would come after you, like you knew they’d be glad to see you go. But not me. I can’t forget you, my Clare. You’re still mine.

  I hope he gives you this, that he doesn’t wan
t to keep you for himself. I hope he believes me. Because I need you to know how hard I’ve been searching. I need you to know that I will come find you. I will. I’m right behind you. I promise.

  J

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I HAVE BEEN humbled by the support and generosity shown by so many over the time it took me to write this novel. Above all, I owe a lifetime of gratitude to my parents, Dick and Marilyn Flynn, for their love and encouragement, for their sacrifice and hard work, and for the help and logistical backup they’ve offered in so many forms over the years. Also to my sisters, Katie Flynn and Bridget Flynn, and my sister-in-law, Beth Boyden, for their cheerleading from start to finish, and to my in-laws Mark McQuillan, Chris Van Dyke, Jamie Boyden, Tim Stuart, and Anne Wright, as well as my nieces and nephews and my extended family, with much love and thanks.

  To the talented team at Simon & Schuster Canada for all they’ve done to put this book into readers’ hands. A big, huge thank-you to Nita Pronovost, my skillful and tireless editor, for her warmth and her willingness to toil with me page by page, as well as to Kevin Hanson, Sarah St. Pierre, Brendan May, Amy Prentice, and the amazing editorial, sales, and publicity teams.

  To my wonderful agent Chris Bucci, for reading several drafts and for championing this book to so many, and for his patience and good humor in the face of my writerly angst. Thank you also to Martha Webb, Anne McDermid, and Monica Pacheco for their support.

  My profound gratitude to Martha Sharpe, for her advocacy and her friendship, for recognizing something worthy in this book and for pushing me so hard to make it better.

  To my UBC Creative Writing instructors and fellow students for the community they provide, to Andrew Gray for leading the pack, and most especially to Lisa Moore, my kind and diligent thesis advisor. To the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for providing financial assistance and for their ongoing work in promoting and supporting artists in our city and province. To the editors at FreeFall magazine, for publishing my short story “Damn Animals,” which inspired an early chapter in this novel. To those who indulged my constant search for quiet by providing me with space to write, including Mitch Kowalski and Yvonne Lai at the Toronto Writers’ Centre, the staff at Artscape Gibraltar Point, the Gladstone and Robarts libraries, the McQuillan family at Rowntree Beach, and my parents for converting their bunkie in Dwight, Ontario, into an ad hoc writer’s studio.