You Could Believe in Nothing

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  Curtis had slipped out of touch again, taking the past with him. His baby had to be due soon. Every day his mother tried the phone number he left, but there was never an answer. She emailed and received no reply. Only Derek had heard from him. An email without a message, not even a subject line. Just an attached photo.

  In it, Derek’s mother wore the same toothy smile he recognized from her wedding picture. Maybe the same skirt and jacket as well. But in this picture she stood with a square block of a man not much taller than herself. She had one hand through his elbow, and reached across with the other to link her fingers. John Ogilvie was more substantial than Derek had imagined, and better dressed. His dark suit fit without a wrinkle, and the tie was perfectly aligned, running straight down the centre. He was looking down at Curtis, a hand on the boy’s shoulder, perhaps trying to make him stand still for the camera. So the photo captured only the wispy light hair at his crown, the tip of a nose, and a dark, jovial eye. John Ogilvie remained obscure. Curtis’s tie was precisely knotted and draped, like his father’s. His smile was huge, and one hand was blurred by motion. He looked about to do something mischievous.

  On the first day of summer, Sarah called with Nicole’s flight number. Take as much time as you need, she said, but get the girl home to her parents in time for supper. “I’ll be over with Justin after work. I suppose you haven’t seen Justin since his christening,” she said. “We’re in this together now. Don’t fuck it up.”

  As Derek drove to the airport, he saw Sarah’s face smiling down from on high, a benevolent god with a hard, vengeful heart.

  The luggage was backed up, so he and Nicole sat for a long time in the observation lounge, watching jets lift in the air and skid back to earth. Her face fell when he told her he had given notice on the apartment.

  “When are we out?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “I want to make love there. Are you able?”

  “As long as we’re careful.” On Dr. Mac’s advice, Derek had begun a regimen to bolster his groin and abdominals.

  “We can do other stuff,” she said. “And I’ll help with your physio.”

  They drove to her parents’ house. Mrs. Stanley opened the door, placed her hands together as if in prayer, and raised them to her lips. Her eyes softened as if she might cry. It was a gesture she would repeat numerous times in the days to come. Mr. Stanley stood half behind her shoulder. After kissing his daughter, he gripped Derek’s hand, leaned in, and said, “I’m going to make a pot of coffee.”

  In the kitchen, Mr. Stanley took mugs from the cupboard and a bag of ground coffee from the freezer. There’s no sense to it, he told Derek, but the wife insists on it, says the coffee stays fresher this way. Derek sat at the kitchen table and tried to evaluate the first ninety minutes of the reunion. Nicole’s skin had changed, though he wasn’t sure how, and tiny red pimples dotted her hairline. He hadn’t experienced a strong sexual urge upon seeing her, but he could work his way up to that.

  “You talked it all out,” said Mr. Stanley. He lifted the lid of the coffee maker and removed a damp paper filter, filled with old grounds.

  “We had a good talk,” said Derek.

  There was a trash can next to him, a metal canister with a foot pedal. But Mr. Stanley dropped the used filter in the sink. He took the coffee pot and swished it out with water. The tap ran hard, and water drops sprayed up his sleeve. He filled the pot and laid it on the counter.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s always a leap of faith. God knows.”

  He turned from the sink, frowning at the floor while the drainpipe trickled and gurgled behind his legs. He was trim and smart, with a full head of silver hair, and shirts and slacks always pressed. Derek had never heard him crack a joke.

  “I can’t say I have any advice for you, and you probably don’t want any. She’s a lovely girl, to be sure. But I’ve never understood her. The stuff she gets on with, I’ll be goddamned if I can figure it out.”

  With that, Derek was ushered into the family, and invited to share Nicole’s bed in the basement while they were between apartments. The Stanleys didn’t always get along, and didn’t stifle their disagreements. During dinner they exchanged volleys of strife and agitation the way other families might exchange well-worn anecdotes. There was a thick, burly quality to the household, and Derek sensed the weight of it, though not as a burden. More like a boxer’s punching bag, hanging from its hook, swaying darkly from side to side before him.

  Two days later, Derek was at Twin Rinks for the final game of the season. The warm weather turned humid that night, so they arrived in shorts and sandals and skated like old men, stoned and lazy. The rink had the feel of a fresh breeze, but the dressing room was jungle damp, and when it was over they sat sweating until the beer was gone.

  “Jo-Jo’s?” said Leo Murphy, and Derek agreed to a couple of beers down at the café. Brian didn’t come, and they all relaxed a little more without him.

  “I might give it up,” said Heneghan, as he and Derek were backed into the jukebox by a crowd of rugby players. The harbour blew around them, hot and salty through the open back door. “My therapist says playing sports is good only if it’s a stress release. He says hockey makes me angry, builds stress. So I might give it up. Nels might give it up too.”

  “Yeah,” said Pittman, his head appearing behind Heneghan’s shoulder. “It’s not relaxing at all. Feels more like...What was it the therapist said, Steve?”

  “A provocation.”

  “Yeah. More like a provocation.”

  Derek ordered a beer. Nels and Steve switched from Coke to ginger ale. The two of them had made a pact to stay off the booze all summer. Easier if you have a partner, said Steve.

  “Won’t be anything easy about it,” said Pittman, staring into his glass of pop. “How long can you drink this shit?”

  “You said you wanted to do this, Nels. Said you wanted to clear your head.”

  “I know, I know. Look out when Labour Day comes, that’s all I can say.”

  Jo-Jo’s was blocked, generating a familiar rhythm that pulled them along for a while, longer than expected. The television was showing old hockey highlights from the 1980s, Gretzky’s Oilers against Calgary. There were lots of fights, and one of them went on for a long time. Two unshaven men swinging wildly, refusing to go down, until finally they drooped, stumbled, fell into a clinch, and signalled the linesman.

  Heneghan offered Derek a drive home. As the car climbed Church Hill, Derek saw a figure outside the main entrance of the Anglican Cathedral. An exposed head, with red hair clipped to the scalp, and a puffy bomber jacket on two skinny legs, toes pointed inward.

  “Slow down,” said Derek. “Pull over here.”

  The woman turned towards the headlights. She had the hard, bloodless face of a china doll. Heneghan shifted into park. Derek flinched as the engine settled to a low hum. He glanced around the empty street. The woman took two tentative steps, almost challenging them to look away. Heneghan attempted a dirty chuckle. She continued down the sidewalk, head tossing with each jerking step of her high boots.

  Heneghan killed the headlights, fumbling at the switch. That left the white face in profile from the street light. Their breathing stopped for a moment as the woman came to a halt before them. She was closest to Derek, on the passenger side, and looked him in the eye without a smile, or any gesture that might have been flirtatious. She shrugged at him, then placed both hands on the hood of the car and leaned across the windshield.

  Heneghan shifted into drive. The woman stood straight and backed away, clutching the small bag at her shoulder. She was past them in an instant, walking on down the hill. Derek watched in the mirror. She didn’t look back.

  They drove silent, gasping like schoolboys on a lark, trying to maintain a show of nonchalance. Derek felt guilty. They had humiliated her. But she didn’t look like the kind of woman who woul
d want his guilt. She’d know that it was contempt disguised as pity and wouldn’t care shit for Derek’s opinion.

  Through the windshield, he saw two moist handprints on the hood, watched them until they evaporated.

  Heneghan finally spoke. “Is that where it happened?”

  “No. My dad did his business on road trips. I don’t know where, exactly.”

  They stopped at the curb in front of the apartment as a mouse or shrew darted into the street, sprinting a zig-zag path to the opposite curb.

  “You ever pay for it, Steve?”

  “That’s the last thing I need, the state my life is in.” Heneghan shook his head. “How many guys been there before you? I can’t get past that.” He made a noise of disgust. “How about you? Did you think of rolling down the window just now?”

  “No,” said Derek. “Just wanted to get a look.”

  “I imagine we could have scraped together enough to haggle for something.” Heneghan closed a fist and made a half-hearted pumping motion. “A hand job. I’m sure she would have been wicked.”

  Derek wondered at his father’s need to lose himself in that secret, corroding world. An image flashed in his head. His favourite bit on the Internet, the Asian girl with the slithering voice and beautiful hands. Maybe it wasn’t about betrayal, or poison in the well. Or music. Maybe it was just dumb lust.

  Nicole had told him that families stay sane by living on a narrow band of memory. She opened her thumb and forefinger, making a space of three or four inches. Everything you need fits on a single strip, she said. Between what you forget and what you’d like to forget. “You know enough about your father,” she had told him.

  He could find out more. But the knowledge would be useless to him. He’d never know it all, so the story would never be over. On Church Street, in Heneghan’s car, Derek had reached the limits of his imagination.

  Nicole’s silhouette appeared, turning from Barnes Road and heading towards them. Her loping tomboy walk made her dark hair lift from her shoulders with every step. A woman put through life’s wringer was supposed to cut her hair or replace her clothes or something. But Nicole had the same hair, same sloppy men’s blazer flapping in the breeze as she approached Heneghan’s car. She had been wearing that blazer the night they met.

  “Brian says it’s a big mistake, the two of you getting back together,” said Heneghan. “But Brian doesn’t know shit.”

  He rolled down the window and introduced himself. “I see Derek is a very fortunate lad.”

  “He puts up with a lot.”

  Derek joined Nicole on the front step as Heneghan drove away. She leaned her head against the newel post. He offered to get a drink.

  “I’ve had enough,” she said. “Sit.”

  The night made every sound deafening. A distant siren, the creak of the clothesline from Strickland’s backyard, an unseen tin can tumbling on pavement. Nicole worked a fingernail into the peeling paint at her feet.

  “Do you think your parents are alright with me? With me and you?”

  “I think they’re fine with it,” said Derek.

  “You might as well marry her,” his mother had said when he told her Nicole was coming home. But his parents had more immediate torments, Lou with no job and all that money to pay back. At Cynthia’s insistence, they had agreed to sell the house on Connor Place, move in with Cindy and Joey, and share the cost of converting the garage to an in-law apartment. Joey didn’t appreciate the plan, and used the occasion to revive a simmering dispute with his wife. Cynthia didn’t want any more children; Joey said she had promised him kids when they decided to marry.

  “I did make a promise to him,” Cindy told Derek when she dropped by to size up Nicole. “But I was a mess back then. Didn’t know what would happen with Rob or who I wanted to be with. I wasn’t myself.”

  She didn’t look troubled by it all. In fact, she looked terrific, her voice light and eyes glimmering. “Maybe she’s having an affair,” said Nicole, as Cynthia drove away. Derek shook his head. It took more than a simple affair to make his sister that happy.

  The night’s shirt-sticking humidity would soon turn to rain. Derek searched for signs of life in the houses around them. Surely Strickland was up and on the prowl, or Mrs. Ennis. But it appeared he and Nicole were alone.

  “Heneghan says he’s quitting hockey,” said Derek. “His therapist says it gets him all riled up. It’s not good for him.”

  “He looks like a man with troubles,” said Nicole.

  “I wonder if it might be a good idea.” Derek was warming to the idea of leaving things behind.

  “No,” said Nicole. “Your troubles aren’t like his.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You can tell at a glance.”

  The clinic in Ottawa was holding her job for six months, so she had to give them a decision by the new year. Derek pictured himself pointing the Escort towards the sun, a golden coin sinking behind western clouds. He imagined waking in a strange house on an unknown street, looking out the window, ignorant of everything around him.

  Nicole wiped her brow and examined the film of sweat on her fingertips. A spark in her, or a spark between them, was snuffed out. They could get on with life without longing for the novelty of romance. They knew the difference.

  Derek prided himself on this insight. He had been casting about for signs of progress. Signs that he had matured, developed, wised up.

  Nicole turned towards him and dropped a leg across his lap, dark skin showing through the frayed knee of her jeans. “How long did we live here?”

  “I was here about five years before you.”

  “Doesn’t it seem like we were so young then?”

  “What are you talking about? It was only a year ago.”

  Derek was impatient to rid himself of tired habits and ideas, so conscious of the effort that he sometimes found his body pushing forward at the thought of it. He was doing it now, sitting on the step and leaning into his knees, away from the apartment.

  “There aren’t many places that last, that you want to keep with you,” said Nicole. “But this is one of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were happy here. Don’t you know how rare that is?”

  “We weren’t always happy. Anyone can see that.”

  “Shush.” She closed her eyes and took a drowsy breath. “It’s our memory, Derek. It can be anything we want.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Carmelita McGrath, Kenneth J. Harvey, Jennifer Lokash, and Danine Farquharson for their close reading and invaluable advice.

  A host of friends and colleagues offered counsel and encouragement, including Edward Riche, Anne Hart, Ramona Dearing, Michael Crummey, Scott Farquharson, and Mike Murray.

  The generous editorial guidance of Patrick Murphy and Kate Kennedy made the final drafts a pleasure to work on.

  Thanks to the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, and the Literary Arts Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, whose support made this book possible.

  The excerpt from Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear, copyright © 2003 by Jacqueline Winspear, is reprinted by permission of Soho Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

  “Harbour Le Cou” is a folk song of the “Newfoundland ballad/flirting sailor” genre, generally attributed to Jack Dodd of Torbay.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jamie Fitzpatrick is a host and producer at CBC Radio in St. John’s and columnist for the About.com network. You Could Believe in Nothing is his first novel and a winner of the Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers in Newfoundland and Labrador

 

 

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