Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  I expressed my condolences and told the woman that I knew Graham for a while, that he’d been a regular customer of mine. He gave me a list of things to keep an eye out for, I told her, books he wanted, and she asked me to send the list to her. I later did. It was handwritten and signed G.

  May 20, 2016

  Dear Ms. Ingrid Fox,

  Please forgive me in advance for what might seem an invasion of your privacy. I will only write to you this once.

  Katerina is convinced you are my double. Except for our hair—you wear yours short, I wear mine long—we are supposed to be identical. She’s told me that you’ve been unwell, and that you’re seeing doctors for a neurological condition. However, I wonder sometimes if Katerina is the one who might be unwell and if she should tell a doctor about you. I know she has friends who would accompany her to appointments if she wanted. She also claims you gave her a tattoo that I think she gave herself. I’m a little worried because I really care about her.

  I have kept a lookout for you for almost two months now, and if you are actually out there, I think the reason I haven’t seen you is that we look nothing alike. However, Katerina is my friend, and she believes you to be her friend as well, so if you are really out there, I know you won’t allow me to worry about her like this. I propose we simply meet and put any doubts to rest.

  I will wait from dawn until dusk in Bellevue Square next Friday, May 27. You are welcome to come at any time. Katerina is also welcome.

  Yours,

  Jean Mason

  BY MAY 27TH, approximately 7,500 people who had passed through the park were not Ingrid. This confirmed my two top hypotheses: that she didn’t exist at all and Katerina needed a shrink, or she did exist but she looked nothing like me. The third possibility, that I was crazy, I deemed distant but possible. Ian has his reasons to be concerned, but if I’ve gone mad, then it’s nothing like the last time, which was already twelve years ago. Of course I get low from time to time, most people do, and probably the majority of them would never call it depression, but that’s what it is. I imagine depression as a concavity in the spirit. Something gets scooped out. The first time, the concavity was Nick. After he was born, I got sick and I had a hard time bonding. Accept the baby, they said. I love the baby, I said. It’s hormones, they said. Take the medicine. I took the medicine, I did the yogic breathing, I loved the baby. It would be nice to spare the people you care about the most the experience of seeing you get sick in that way, but so many of us are only a few squares away from pure lunacy anyhow. That you so rarely get to the final square gives you and everyone around you the reassuring illusion of your solidity. For most of six months, I wouldn’t eat because I worried that if I got food poisoning, it would make my milk toxic. I denied that I was worried someone was poisoning my food. I drank organic whole milk and I ate applesauce I made myself, and almonds. It happens to a lot of women. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and I had the love and support I needed, which is all anyone ever needs. And time.

  The fourth and final hypothesis, that Ingrid actually existed and was my identical twin, I put at “basically” impossible, which still allowed for the slimmest chance of possibility because impossible has stringent, but not unmeetable, requirements. Impossible is choosy. For instance, merely unlikely things are bound to happen to you and the people you know almost all of the time. Still, if you think about it, you know a person whose guitar teacher’s best friend’s son survived being shot six times. Or we settle Mars. Or Donald Trump becomes president.

  I tried to rise above myself and see this all from a psychological point of view: maybe I was pre-grieving my sister’s death (eventual death, I argued: unilateral vestibular schwannomas are rarely fatal, even among those who are only eligible for radiation); or maybe some part of me knew Ian was in money trouble or there was another woman and this fantastical goose chase was how I was dealing with it. Or maybe I, myself, had a brain tumour. But what was this tumour doing beyond making me more credulous than usual?

  I knew I was close. Ian would have been horrified at the thoughts evolving in my mind as I sat in the square, waiting for Ingrid. I remained locked to my position, from dawn till dusk, with only three bottles of water and a bag of apples. Miriam brought me my carton of milk around three, but she didn’t linger. I hadn’t seen Cullen since he waved to me getting into that black Corolla.

  Evidence was mounting that nothing beyond someone else’s overactive imagination was at work here. I watched the sun sink in the western sky. Unless they were being as fashionably late as possible, neither Katerina nor Ingrid was showing. I even waited until it was dark. In the dark, nothing happened.

  IAN JOKED ABOUT my being good enough to join them for Friday dinner, but I was hardly late. It was only seven. Beatrice was making up a mess of biximol, which is a fry-up of beef cubes, red and green peppers, and mushrooms, with a dash of Worcestershire, that she claims to have learned from Ian’s first nanny, a Swedish au pair. It’s served normally with scrambled eggs, but tonight she’d made it to go in vol-au-vents. Both boys looked at the semi-burnt towers of puff pastry running over with glistening biximol and pulled their upper lips back in disgust. She brought one for Ian, and then one for herself, and sat down.

  “Um, Ma?” Ian said. “Is there one for Jean?”

  “Oh god!” My mother-in-law jumped up to grab me a plate and the children said in unison: “She can have mine!”

  “So sorry, Jean!” Beatrice put a plate down in front of me. The pastry was cracked and dribbling its contents.

  “It’s okay, Beatrice,” I said under my breath. “I only live here.”

  Ian tilted his head at me.

  “I’m just joking,” I added.

  “Maybe I forget to serve you because your chair has been empty so many Shabbats. You don’t like to eat dinner with your family?”

  “No! I eat dinner with—”

  “When Ian was a boy, Shabbos was obligatory!”

  “You’re only here one night a week, Bee. Don’t make it sound like you keep the place running.”

  “Jean,” Ian warned.

  “It was a night for family,” Beatrice continued, as if I hadn’t said anything, “not for work.”

  “Did everyone get a plate to eat from for Shabbos or only the blood relations?”

  Ian’s fork hit his plate with a clank. “For chrissake.” The boys stopped eating.

  “Let her go,” Beatrice said as I got up from the table. “It’s better you don’t fight in front of the children.”

  —

  He was still good and angry when he came into the bedroom an hour later. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “It’s like I’m not even in the room, like I’m invisible to her. She doesn’t talk over me, she talks through me!”

  “Keep your voice down. If she didn’t notice you, how would she know how often you’ve missed Shabbat dinner?”

  “I’m sure she prefers it that way. Then it’s the perfect family. No crazy mummy, the kids get fed—”

  “Jean, come on. You’re the mother of her grandchildren. She loves you.”

  “She wouldn’t mind if I got hit by lightning.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening with you right now,” he said. “Nick says you haven’t been home after school for three weeks, and when you are here, it’s like you’re being broadcast from another planet. You tell me nothing’s wrong, but given what I’m seeing, that answer is starting to be part of the problem.”

  “So I’m the problem, eh? Have you had your mother’s head checked for bugs? Did she heat anything up in the leg today?”

  “Why are you acting like this? I don’t believe your story from two Shabbats ago anymore. What’s happening on Fridays that you can’t make it home for dinner? Is there someone else?”

  “Oh! No, god no.” I had to tell him something now. “Look, I wasn’t sure what it was at first, so I didn’t want to talk to you about it because I figured you’d worry.”

  “It.”
>
  “It…I ran into this woman in April,” I said, watching his face. “Never met her before. New to Canada. Anyway, she works in Kensington Market. She introduced herself to me and we became friends.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “She told me she saw a woman in the market who was my exact twin. Said she even had my voice. Just listen before you say anything. She was going to introduce me to her. To Ingrid—”

  “Ingrid,” he grunted.

  “But she never did and I didn’t—and I don’t—believe her. But it was weird. I wanted to know more.”

  “What could you have wanted to know? She’s a scam artist. How much did you lose?”

  “Don’t be like that. Don’t be so cynical. She didn’t ask me for a thing. She told me Ingrid had been in and out of hospital with seizures and she didn’t want to meet me until she felt better. Finally, I asked her right out, would she give Ingrid a letter from me. In the letter, I asked her to meet me in Kensington Market today. And I waited in the park all day for her, but she didn’t come. And I knew she wouldn’t. Because my friend is sick. I’ve had problems before, so I guess I recognized it and I wanted to help. Because we’re friends.”

  “How are you going to help your friend?”

  “By letting her know I’m here for her.”

  He was shaking his head, but I knew he was processing it. “But are you sure you don’t believe her? A little bit?”

  “I don’t. I tested it today, and this Ingrid didn’t show.”

  “Show me the letter,” he said. I shrugged and pulled it up on my phone. He read it quickly, his eyes vibrating left and right. He passed the phone back to me. “You wrote that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much time have you been spending there? In the market?”

  “An hour here and there. Looking around to see if maybe there was someone who looked a little like me. I wanted to judge for myself. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Here and there? What’s here and there? How long has this been going on?”

  “About a month.”

  He was becoming agitated again. “What’s ‘about a month’? Three weeks? Six?”

  “About that.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Maybe five weeks.”

  “So…that means two months, right?”

  “I’d like you to stop this.”

  “I’ll stop. But you’re going to take me there. Tomorrow. And show me what you’re talking about.”

  PEE, DOG TURDS, and decomposing mice are only some of the fragrances of Bellevue Square in springtime. I’d long ago stopped noticing these undertones to the market’s stinky chiaroscuro, but it can be a challenge for first-timers, and when we walked into the park, Ian pulled his head back, as if he could save his nose from going in. “That’s…fucking foul,” he said.

  Miriam greeted us as we entered.

  “Friend of yours?” Ian asked.

  “A local,” I said.

  “That makes you…?”

  “I told you, I got to know a few people over the weeks—”

  “Months.”

  “—that I’ve been coming here.” I told him Miriam was a Turkish lady who’d worked her corner since 1995. I told him how she was the market wet nurse. Ritt wasn’t around from what I could see, and now Cullen had been missing for the better part of a month. The last few things Cullen had talked about before he vanished had unsettled me. He claimed to have invented a drug that allowed him to upload his thoughts into a computer.

  Ian and I sat on the top of the playground wall.

  “This your post?”

  “Yes.”

  “Other people have seen this Ingrid, and they’re sure.”

  “Yes,” I lied, Graham Ronan being dead, and the local lunatics unreliable.

  “But no one’s actually seen you two together. In the same space.”

  “If they did, they didn’t tell me. What they did tell me was that she looks more than passingly like me. Apparently my hair is longer.”

  He digested this. Someone called my name from some distance, and we both looked across the wading pool. It was Ritt, coming toward us with a photo wallet clutched in each hand. Oh boy. “Hey Ritt,” I said, hailing him before Ian could wonder if this man with the strange-shaped head was a threat or not.

  “Hello, Jean, and hello,” he said to Ian, and Ian sort of nodded. Ritt gave me one of the albums and handed Ian the other. “You can look at gears while Jean checks out carved keystones.”

  “What is this?” Ian asked me, but Ritt answered.

  “These are snapshots I take with my DKS-09 and save to a deep memory card and at Shoppers Drug Mart there are more than drugs and I develop my pictures there.”

  “Thanks for that,” Ian said.

  Ritt reached into the inner pocket of his parka vest and removed a small sheaf of loose photos. “I did what you asked,” he said to me. “I got some more shots.”

  There were eight different pictures, all of me sitting in the square, wearing eight different outfits, and eating in three of them. Over the eight pictures, the trees in the background grew leaves. “Oh, these are great,” I told him, sweating.

  Ian stuck his hand out. “Let me see those.” He shuffled through them. “Are you her personal paparazzi?”

  “She asked me to take pictures of that lady and I did.”

  “You know these are pictures of her,” he said, talking to him like he was an idiot.

  “I don’t know who she is, I’m only doing what Jean asked me to do.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to take the photos back. “Ritt and I started talking about portrait photography one day—”

  “Jean and I have never discussed portrait photography but I gave her napkins and that’s how she saw the lady in one of my pictures. Jean?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about whether you should pay me for all eight pictures or only for the ones you want to keep and I decided that you should keep all of them but that I would give you a discount and you could pay me four dollars each which is a total of thirty-two dollars.”

  Ian shoved the photos back at him. “She doesn’t want these crappy pictures.”

  “I only have a twenty,” I said, handing him the money. “I’ll give you the rest later.”

  “Okay, Jean. Thanks, and thanks,” he said to Ian, “for enjoying my images of bicycle gears and other types of gears as well.”

  Ian, defeated, plopped the photo wallet back into Ritt’s hand. Ritt headed off, to spend his earnings. Ian swung his head toward me. “Speechless,” he said.

  “He’s harmless.”

  “How much has he taken off you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But I’m sure I’ve spent five hundred bucks here in handouts. What does it matter to you? It’s my money. I earned it in the bookstore.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. In your bookstore.” His phone rang. He showed me the screen: a beaming Beatrice. He’d asked her to take the kids. “Hi, Ma. What’s up? I’m busy.”

  “Everything okay?” I asked him, but he got up to take the call in private and stood with an elbow balanced on a wrist, listening.

  Ian’s voice arrived at my ear as a murmur punctuated with stertorous uh-huhs. At the bottom of the park, I saw Jimmy coming up Denison. He was doing what he called the long circuit, a walk that took you down Augusta to Queen, Queen to Denison Avenue, then north until you arrived back at the Kiever. I got up and walked over to him. His matted beard had potato chip crumbs in it. “Ripples?” I asked him.

  He swatted at his chin, and sparrows instantly gathered around his feet. “That your boyfriend up there?” he asked me. “I saw you sitting beside him.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. Are you on day pass?”

  “Yeah. Except it’s from yesterday.”

  “They’ll take away your privileges, you know.”

  “Fuggit,” he said. “Privilege to hang around crazy people? No, I’m better like this. I’m more m
e.”

  Ian put away his phone and came over. “You guys know each other, too?”

  “This guy’s wearing a wedding ring,” Jimmy said. “So if he’s not your boyfriend he’s cheating on his wife.”

  “Jimmy, this is my husband of fifteen years, Ian Mason. Ian, this is Jimmy. Jimmy hangs out in the park sometimes.”

  “Like her,” Jimmy said, offering his hand. “Are you cheating on your wife?”

  “This is my wife. We’re looking for a woman who looks exactly like her. You ever seen her?”

  “Your wife?” Jimmy slid me a swirly look. “Very tricky opening,” he said.

  “He wants to know if you’ve seen Ingrid.”

  “Oh. Yeah. A coupla times, but I’m never totally sure it’s her because sometimes it’s Jean. I mean most of the time it’s Jean, or all of the time, but if I think back, in my own mind there were a coupla times I saw Jean before I met her, so that must have been Ingrid. It’s just hard for me to sort out who told me what.”

  “Who told you what?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sorry,” Ian said, over-patiently, “what did Ingrid tell you?”

  “You’ll have to ask her yourself,” Jimmy replied, nodding to me. “She probably knows. I don’t have time for this, though. I have to find Colleen.”

  “Who’s Colleen?”

  “Who else would she be?” Jimmy replied, and walked away.

  “Hey—”

  “Leave him,” I said. “He’s a mental patient.” We watched him stalk over the new grass, his arms wide and his hands in fists at the end of his scrawny arms. When he reached the other side of the park, he went “BEH-HEHHHEH!!” like an enraged goat, and crossed to the Kiever side, mad as hell.

  I tugged on Ian’s sleeve. “Let’s go get pupusas.”

  “You want to go in the same direction he’s going?”

  “We’re going this way,” I said. I led him up the path to Augusta.

  “So this is how you’ve been spending your time? With these kinds of people?”

  We got to the street, but the way north was blocked by a crush of people. It was springtime in the market on a Saturday morning. At the T-shaped intersection of Baldwin and Augusta, bodies jostled for space with cars and bicycles. As we got nearer, the back of the crowd ruptured and people surged toward us.