Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  “Of course we ate. It’s Shabbos. We ate almost three hours ago. Which was two hours after you were supposed to be home.”

  “Are the boys okay?”

  “Are you kidding me? They barely registered that you weren’t at the table.”

  “Did they register that you were at the table?”

  “No. Why are you laughing?”

  “A missing person’s report?”

  “Are you coming home now, Jean?”

  “Yes. Immediately.”

  “How delightful. I’ll be upstairs working when and if you do. Goodbye, Wife.”

  “Goodbye, Husband,” I said, in my meekest voice. Forgiven through mockery.

  —

  When I got home, I found that Ian’s mother was still at the house. She’d waited for me. So I wouldn’t have to eat alone. “We girls have to stick together,” she said.

  Beatrice hadn’t liked me when Ian brought me home fifteen years ago, and she didn’t like me at the wedding, either. But as soon as I started popping out her grandkids, she turned sweet as pie, at least officially. We both understand she still doesn’t like me, but we each come with the package now, so why not be nice? I’ve asked Ian how it is his eyelids don’t close sideways, and he claims his father, who I never met, was only part-lizard. Beatrice’s tongue is pinned to the floor of her mouth owing to some childhood incident involving a pencil, so you only ever see the pristine pink tip of it. This is only one of the things I’m not crazy about. She was also born smelling of bronzer.

  I play a game where I am twice as polite as she is and see if I can make her burst into flame. “That’s so super of you, Bee, to wait,” I said. “At least there’s one civilized person under my roof.”

  “I’m heating a microwave in the leg for you,” she said. “We’ll have a little picnic.”

  I sat at the one place setting left at the table. It was a large white plate on a plastic placemat. When the microwave dinged, she removed a casserole with a steamed-up lid. My children, who had yet to say hello to me, were on the couch, engrossed in their phones. In Reid’s lap, Lefty was curled up in his usual place. The only sound coming from the room was purring. “Helloooo?” I called.

  Beatrice put a casserole on the table and removed the lid. Inside, resembling a crime photo, was a single chicken leg.

  “Is there any salad left?”

  “I’ll look. You eat, you’re hungry!” She rummaged in the fridge, her broad rear end blocking my view of the boys.

  I heard Nick say: “Do you know what rage means?”

  “Angry,” Reid answered. “A lot of angry.”

  “I got salad,” said Beatrice, backing out of the fridge and standing with a showy groan. “And I found something to nosh on with you. Gotta keep up my strength for these little gangsters.”

  I was still half listening to Nick.

  “Do you know what inducing means?”

  Reid’s shoulders bounced up and down. He didn’t know and he didn’t care.

  “It means make something happen,” Nick explained. “Angry Birds is a rage-inducing game.”

  Nick had lately been sprinkling his conversation with words that belonged to a more adult vocabulary, like inducing. I wanted to hear my children talk to each other more, but that was it for their conversation. They’d been drawn back into their several screens, and they sat together isolated, their phones in their hands with the television still on in front of them. I’m not certain either of them can function with fewer than two screens. Reid’s eyes were dead—fixed and dilated.

  “Why is that one so schvartze?” Beatrice asked me.

  “Sorry?”

  “Nicholas. You don’t think he’s darker than his brother?”

  “I’ve never thought to compare them.”

  She looked over her glasses at me. “Have you always been so fair?”

  “Yeah. My sister too.”

  “Your sister? Well, maybe it skips a generation. Or maybe,” she said, winking, “you got it on with the postman!”

  Her mouth churned with white meat. Her “nosh” was a whole chicken breast from the fridge. “How’s your chicken?” I asked her.

  “I don’t mind having cold. You eat.”

  Ian’s mother eats chicken like a Jewish Inuit. She eats the skin, then the meat, followed by the gristly, translucent grey knobs at the ends of the bones. These she breaks to suck out the marrow. I pray she doesn’t have a chicken breast when she comes for Friday dinner, because she eats the ribs and makes barbaric smacking and crunching sounds.

  “AAAAGH!” Nick shouted. “This shithead game is glitched!”

  “Nick!”

  “Well, it is!”

  “It doesn’t require such colourful language.”

  “Ech,” said Beatrice. “Shithead isn’t so bad. Do you remember when he was two and he’d ride around on that plastic tricycle and go fuck fuck fuck every time he bumped the stair?”

  “Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa!” Reid shrieked.

  “SHUT THE EFF UP, LIMPDICK!” Nick shouted.

  The chaos ignited something in my duodenum. My stomach lurched and I felt the back of my throat being pulled downwards. Then something came out of me. No one could see it, but it was in the room with all of us. I felt it go through Nick and Reid and I heard Beatrice chewing bones and swallowing them.

  She tapped the edge of my plate with a sternum. “Stop dreaming, dear. It has the most bacteria when you eat it at room temperature.”

  I tried go back to my food, but the panic was rising. It wasn’t panic, though—it was density and intensity, it was volume and pressure and brightness, like somebody had tightened the room tone. My ears tuned tinnitus and my eyes focused to five hundred dots per inch. Now I saw, impressed into the tip of Beatrice’s index finger, the outline of her nail before she cut it. I saw the light in the kitchen behind her head grow a nimbus. A thought appeared in my mind and the thought was “I’m inside of what I’m inside of,” but I don’t have thoughts like that. Then the sound of Beatrice chomping the wishbone—a moist splintering—made me jump up and my chair hit the wall behind me.

  “HO-lee!” she shouted.

  I ran upstairs to the hall bathroom and locked the door behind me.

  Ian stomped down from his office. “Oh my god, Jean! What is going on!” He tried the handle. “Hell-o? Are you okay?”

  “The chair tipped over.”

  “What happened to you today?”

  “I just—I lost all track of the time.” I ran cold water over a facecloth, loud enough so I had cause not to hear what he was saying. “Did everyone have a nice supper?” I called.

  “Reid ate buns and dipped french fries into sauce. Nick ate half a chicken.”

  “There were French fries?”

  “You sound strange. Can you unlock the door? Can I talk to you?” He rattled the handle. When I didn’t reply, he went away for a minute, but returned with something that clunked against the door. It sounded like a chair. I stepped backwards into the tub. “Jean?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just had a little tumble downstairs. Everything’s fine.”

  “All right, but where have you been all day? Before inventory, or whatever it was you were doing.”

  “I went and sat in a park for a couple of hours, and I had a call.”

  “With who?”

  “Whom.”

  “Don’t do that.” He tried the handle again. “Can you open the door?”

  “I’m taking a shower,” I said, turning the water on. “I’ll be out in a sec.” He just sat there. I could sense his weight behind the door. “Are you going to listen to me shower?”

  “Turn the water off, okay? Enough.”

  I did. I didn’t need this to escalate.

  “You promised to talk to me if you ever had another…attack. So talk to me.”

  Fuck, I thought, I did. But did I mean this? Did I mean anything out of the ordinary, or did I mean only, and specifically, if I suffered postpartum depression again? “Noth
ing like that is going on,” I said. “There’s nothing to tell you about. It was a beautiful day, I went to a park, I had an ice cream, and I lost track of the time. And then I had to go back to the bookstore because Terrence, and there was inventory…”

  “The bookstore? Because you what? You’re lying. You’re lying to me, Jean, why?”

  The anguish in his voice hurt to hear. I unlocked the door. He came in. I saw him look for anything I might have been planning to harm myself with.

  “See? I’m fine.”

  “So why lock yourself in the bathroom?”

  “I wanted to be alone for a couple of minutes.”

  “I heard you come up the stairs like there was something chasing you—”

  “I know what you’re thinking. But that was then and this is now. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “I can’t ever stop worrying. I saw what happened to you. You didn’t see it. You didn’t even know you were sick when you were sick.”

  “I know,” I repeated. “Okay. What happened tonight wasn’t exactly as I told you. But if I tell you, I just want you to listen. Okay?”

  “Yes! Please!”

  “I did have…a little attack,” I began, making it up as fast as I could. “When I was out getting a coffee, my heart just started going bump bump bump, and I got scared. I had to walk it off. Like Dr. Pass told me, you know? I walked and I…I don’t know how long I walked, Ian. But my mind cleared—”

  “You said you had a call. From who?”

  “I talked to my mum, I talked to a friend…so I could ground myself. It was good to hear their voices.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because I thought you would do this. Get worried or get angry. I took care of it,” I said. “I’m sorry I gave you a scare.”

  He went into himself for a minute, weighing. He took my chin in his palm and kissed me. “Okay. I’m sorry that happened. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “Carry on,” I said. “I’ll release your mother back to the wild and put the kids to bed.”

  “Okay. Next time call me, though. I won’t judge you. I want to help.”

  “Sorry. Thank you.”

  He started up the stairs.

  “By the way, have you noticed your mum’s been getting mixed up lately?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She put a microwave in the leg for my dinner. That’s how she said it.”

  He continued to his office shaking his head slowly, Ianese for if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, over a stewed chicken and avocado pupusa, Katerina told me she’d seen Ingrid the previous evening. She’d come in for churros, then popped back to say hello. She was feeling better, but the results from the doctor were worrisome. She was having seizures, and they’d started her on a drug.

  Having recovered from the previous night’s vapours, I had a new perspective on Katerina. It was good that Ian had questioned me so directly, because afterwards, I felt myself click back into place. Of course I wasn’t getting sick. I knew what that felt like, and this wasn’t that. But it only made me want to know so much more. And I wanted to show Katerina the picture.

  “Has she said she wants to meet me?” I asked her. “Why don’t you just give her my number?”

  “She says she can’t be reached. Better to wait until she’s feeling better.”

  “She’ll see you, why won’t she see me?”

  “She’s not ready, Jean. She says she’s not herself. And I think she is scared.”

  “She must think you’re full of it.”

  “Do you know what she says? Oh no, not again!”

  I showed her my forearms, bumpy with gooseflesh. “You’re actually freaking me out. Look.”

  “Her husband is very handsome. Maybe you can have him after she’s gone?”

  “I have a husband. And what do you mean, after she’s gone?”

  “You call her doppelganger, I call her Llorona, someone else calls her Ra, but she always bring death. I’m not sure, but I think it’s hers. Her own death.”

  “What does her husband look like?”

  “I don’t know. I never meet him.”

  “And how sick is she?”

  “She says it has happened one time, and after, she got better. But I’m not sure. I care about her a lot, but I don’t trust her.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “No.” She squared herself to me, to look me in the eye. “Let me ask you something. Do you like Jimmy?”

  “Jimmy? He’s crazy, but I guess he’s okay. Not for a date, though.”

  “Oh we already have gone,” she said. We sat at a table at the back of the food mall, hidden among other customers. I had a sightline to the front, and if Miguel came in she was going to dart into the walk-in freezer, then come out with something.

  “You’ve already gone on a date with Jimmy?”

  “You have only been here one month. Jimmy is here for years. He’s not always like that, he cleans up. Then he’s only the same trouble as the rest.”

  “What did you do?”

  “There was a French chicken place. It comes to the table whole, and inside with olives and prunes, and they bring us a nice bread, you know, a baguette. We ate the whole thing with our hands.”

  “Sounds like it went well.”

  “My chichis smelled like chicken fat for three days!” She laughed a deep, lungy laugh and her eyes teared up. I passed her my water, but she waved it off.

  “Why are you asking me about Jimmy?”

  “I asked if you like him,” she said, blotting her eyes.

  “Oh. No. Yes, but not like that. And anyway…I’m married!” Katerina crushed the napkin to her mouth to stifle more laughter. “Okay, ha ha. Yuk it up.” I finished the last bite of my pupusa and let her collect herself. “Can I show you something?”

  “Of course!” she said. She cleared her throat.

  “There’s a guy in Bellevue Square named Ritt. He’s there a lot, and he talked to me yesterday. He showed me a photo album, and in one of the pictures…” I looked in my bag and found the slot I’d stored the picture in. I hadn’t looked at it again—I was too frightened to. “Here,” I said. “Tell me what you think.”

  She studied it for a moment. “They’re beautiful. He took this?”

  “Look closer.”

  She had to bring it to her face. Finally, she asked, “Do you know those people?”

  “Do you? Do you recognize any of them?” The picture wasn’t that blurry. “That’s me!” I said. “Look!” I took it from her and held it beside my head for comparison. Her eyes went back and forth.

  “Oh, wow,” she said, “right! I guess…your head is a bit turned away, but now I see.”

  “Those are my earrings. I’ll wear them here next time. And that bracelet, that’s mine. Ian had it made for me on our tenth anniversary. Four colours of gold wound together, a strand for each one of us. That’s my bracelet.”

  “Okay, so it’s you.”

  “Yes, except I don’t remember this evening. I don’t recognize anyone else in the picture. This man”—a warm-looking dad type with a soft belly and a grey-chinned beard—“is completely in focus, and I am one hundred per cent certain I’ve never seen him in my life.”

  She nodded along to my Sherlocking. “So it is Ingrid. Somehow your friend takes a picture of Ingrid. It’s for sure she lives near here.”

  “I thought so too, but Ingrid has short hair.”

  “Maybe this is a old picture?”

  “How long has she been here, though? Why haven’t I seen her yet? I’ve come here a lot. You see her, but I don’t.”

  “I see her at least five times before I meet you in your bookshop.”

  One way or the other I wanted to erase all hint of doubt for myself. The picture was troubling, because either this woman truly existed or I had forgotten an entire evening and all the people in it. “I’d like you to do something for me, Katerina. I want yo
u to give Ingrid a letter from me.”

  “You wrote her a letter?”

  “Yes, and I want you to deliver it. Wherever she is, home, here, the hospital. Take it to her in the hospital if you want. I’ll give you five hundred bucks, too.” I put the envelope on the table.

  “I don’t want money.”

  “I spent a long time writing it, Katerina. It’s important. I want to be sure she gets it.”

  She snatched it up. “I do this for free! Such a good idea!” She put the envelope into her pants pocket. “Miguel will come back soon. Stay as long as you like. I have to peel corn.”

  I TROLLED THROUGH KENSINGTON MARKET after my pupusa. If Ingrid had been there the previous night, she might have had cause to come back in the daytime, say to pick up a repaired item, or I might get lucky running into her as she returned to fetch a pair of sunglasses she left at the pupuseria. I went into some of the shops on Augusta and Baldwin, again. And again, no one greeted me as a woman named Ingrid, although I asked a couple of people if we’d met before. (We hadn’t.) I made sure to check into the other Latin American and Mexican and Argentinian places. If she liked pupusas, Ingrid probably liked arepas and enchiladas and tamales, but not today, apparently. Katerina remained the only person who had seen her more than once. I’d wanted to speak to Mr. Ronan again, and I called a few more times, but there was never an answer. It seemed wrong to leave him another message, but the third time I got his voicemail, I told him I’d located a first-edition Römertopf clay pot cookbook from 1969 and did he want me to set it aside? He didn’t return my call.

  I don’t keep my customers’ addresses, but I used Canada411 to look for other Ronans, and there were few enough that on the first phone call, I found myself speaking to an older woman who knew exactly which Mr. G. Ronan I was talking about. She told me they’d discovered Graham (for that was his name) hanging in his apartment at the beginning of April. I’d braced myself for bad news, but not death, not suicide. I couldn’t hear anything else she told me at first because I was in that moment when he’d grabbed my hair at the bookstore. I saw his face, clear as day. His round Grahamish face and his hairy Geraldish ears. I had a pang of anger. I’d guessed his name, but he hadn’t admitted it. He’d lied and broken a promise and I’d tried to be his friend.