Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  They were letting cops through from the north. They came down driving the wrong way and cars had to back up and drive on the sidewalks to let them pass. We stopped at the edge of the crowd. Ian looked over the heads in front of us. “I don’t know what this is,” he muttered.

  “What did your mother want?”

  “She said Nick was throwing up.”

  “Oh no! Is he okay?”

  “They had one of their all-nighters and ate gummy worms and Vachon cakes in front of her TV until four in the morning. She said they watched three movies in a row.”

  “Great. Maybe they had some bridge mix for breakfast.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “They’re going into an alleyway up there.”

  I stood on my tiptoes to see which alley he meant, and when I saw, my heart sank into my stomach. I’d stood in that alleyway, thinking about walking back into the mass of humanity and leaving Katerina’s story behind.

  The front of the crowd pushed back as the ambulance parted it, throwing red and white light and making urgent whooping noises. Cars honked on Baldwin and the voices around us called what happened, but nobody knew.

  Then someone shouted, “That’s her! That’s her over there,” and I turned to look behind me, but the coatbacks were running away in every direction, down the street and into the park, like they were fleeing.

  Ian pulled me onto the sidewalk. “Are they pointing at you?”

  “Are they? Hold on a second!” I got my phone out as if I had to answer a call. “Hello?” I said into dead air.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Sorry! It’s Nick! Hey, sweetheart! Daddy told me you weren’t feeling well.” I put a finger into my other ear and walked away from the thronging, and when I looked back, a policewoman was approaching Ian. The moment she put her hand out to shake his, I made a sprint for the alley that leads to municipal Green P parking lot number 071 and I ran behind it and climbed the fence into the residential parking area. The ambulance was already around the back of the food mall and I crept closer, keeping to shadow and breathing one two three four. The attendants jacked a gurney down from inside the ambulance and rolled it toward the crumbling patio where Katerina had served me my first pupusa.

  I took a few more steps, my dread thickening, until I came close enough to see that it was her. It was poor Katerina. She lay face down on the white paving stones in a pool of blood, her arms and legs twisted in different directions, her face turned toward me. One of her eyes was a red disc and the other stared out clouded. I must have made a sound, because one of the officers hurried over to me and asked if I knew the victim.

  They needed someone to identify her. The officer, name Sanchez, had to pull me toward the body. My nostrils felt like they were the size of quarters, and oxygen swamped my head and made me dizzy. The words Careful: she can still hear you came into my mind and “she” was Katerina, the woman, my friend, sprawled dead on the back patio of a makeshift food mall. I started to cry.

  Sanchez led me over to her. There was a purple hole in the side of her head, right through her tattoo. “Can you please cover her face!”

  A pair of blue gloves pulled a sheet over her and a red ring soaked through. “I know her first name,” I said. “It’s Katerina. She works here.”

  “How well did you know the victim?”

  “Victim!” I sputtered. “Oh my god, I can’t believe this. I met her in April.”

  “Were you her friend?”

  “Yes. We were friends.”

  “Did she have a husband or a boyfriend, you know?”

  “A guy named Miguel.” A man in a suit and tie was drawing a chalk line around Katerina’s body. I sobbed and Sanchez put his hand on my shoulder. “Why did this happen?”

  “Will you please wait here, for two minutes?” he asked. “I want to get a statement from you, Miss…?”

  “Fox,” I said. “Ingrid Fox.”

  SANCHEZ WENT OVER to talk to the suit and I slipped back to the streets through the parking lots and went into Bellevue Square. Crying endorphins made me feel calm again. I bought a four-dollar hat from Smart Wear, a floppy beige number that would come down over my eyes if I lowered my gaze. My jaw ached. I went and sat in my usual spot.

  Did Katerina kill herself? I’d thought that maybe she wasn’t well, but she wasn’t depressed, she was lively! She was looking for love, she was making friends…

  It could have been Miguel. I’d given his name, so no doubt Sanchez would find him and question him. I’d only seen them together once, and there had been a troubled connection between them, but I couldn’t see him killing her. But if it was him, they’d know it.

  Jimmy? Could Jimmy kill?

  There were voices behind me. “That’s her! She’s right there!” It was Ian. He came toward me with a female constable. “Where did you go? Whose hat is that?”

  “I’ve been here the whole time.”

  He thanked the cop and she returned to the street. “Come on, Jean. Someone was shot. They’re taping off the whole street.” He offered his hand, but I didn’t take it.

  “She’s coming,” I said.

  “Who’s coming?”

  “Ingrid.”

  His face collapsed.

  “I’m close,” I said. “To figuring this out. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “Look, I can’t feel what you’re feeling or see what you’re seeing. I know it’s real for you. And frankly, you can do whatever you want. Sit in the park, own a bookstore, drop out and dial in, whatever. But it’s a crime scene back there and it might not be safe in the park today, so come on.”

  He tried to take my arm, but I shouted, “GET OFF OF ME!” and pulled away.

  “Look at yourself!” he snarled. “Look at the people around you—and not just the imaginary ones, the actual ones. There’s a dead woman back there!”

  “I know!”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked what happened and someone told me.”

  We’d collected some attention from both the adults and the children in the playground. A guy adjusted his iPhone angle so he could film both his kid on the slide and us. “Hey,” he called, “everything all right over there?”

  “Everything is fine,” Ian said, looking into my eyes. “Correct?”

  “I’m getting this all on tape, mister.”

  Ian said, “I’m calling Dr. Pass.”

  “You can call him, I don’t care.”

  “So let’s go now.”

  “NO!”

  He tried to stare me down, but I wouldn’t break eye contact with him. What did he know about any of this? What could he understand?

  “Go away,” I said.

  Ian stepped into the playground and snatched the man’s iPhone. “I’m a cop,” he said. “I’m erasing this video.” The man protested, but Ian just did it and handed him back his phone. “They should rip this all up and replace it with something less shitty,” he said, and walked straight out of the park.

  SIRENS ECHOED SOMEWHERE DISTANT, like the news of Katerina’s death was travelling on soundwaves. The man with the iPhone grumbled to his spouse. I was aware of eyes on me, like spotlights, like cameras. Did the eyes know something? Had Katerina been murdered? Who would want her dead? Ingrid, maybe. Maybe Ingrid thought Katerina had said too much, had given something away. Had exposed her.

  And if Ingrid killed Katerina, was Graham’s death a suicide? What if she was killing anyone who’d seen her?

  No sooner had this thought entered my mind when something happened in the trees. They captured the sound of the sirens and transformed it into a tone like a violin section tuning itself to A. It went ahhh or awe. I raised my eyes and centred the tone in my mind.

  And my god I was there, I was right there. I realized I hadn’t looked at any of those thousands of people who hadn’t been Ingrid. If I’d let my eyes fall off their faces, I would have seen her, though. Her shoes tossed into the grass, a napkin blowing by with her mouthprint on it. Her
voice, identical to mine, mistaken for an echo. The sum of her being was a closed set of everything I’d missed. But if she wanted me, she would have to appear. And now I knew she would.

  I lifted my eyes to the southwest corner of Bellevue Square. And I was right, because there she is.

  MY DOPPELGANGER CROSSES the street and enters the park at its southwest corner. It’s her, in a knee-length blue buttonfront dress. She walks directly toward me, crossing the park on a diagonal. I don’t own that dress. I shrink from her, but she’s not looking at me. She seems lost in her thoughts, her sleepwalker’s eyes staring straight ahead.

  The sun changes its angle in the sky to pick her out, and Ingrid glides forward in its follow spot. It’s golden hour, which in the park is around eight in the evening now. An early-summer light of promise and memories of childhood. It comes aslant from the west and pushes the shadows of the trees across the grass. Fencelight.

  I can’t see the rest of the park, but that’s because I’ve slunk down behind the playground wall and only my forehead and the upper halves of my eyes are showing. The kids on the swings behind me are safe from her. She’s not after small game. I hold my breath as she walks by. She leaves the park and starts up Augusta under a sky of paintstroke clouds.

  I jump up and follow her at a distance of about two hundred metres. We share a purposeful, forward-leaning walk, but her hands are in her pockets, and I’d trip over my feet if my hands weren’t free for ballast. Her dress is printed with small white flowers. I guess I’d look good in it. Maybe I should look for one like it. Her thin sandal laces wind up her calf in a helix. I’m not a lacy-calf person. I prefer jeans and T-shirts and the kinds of shoes you can wear in the street as well as in the woods. We have the same bodies, but we use them differently. Yet she is my twin, there is no doubt in my mind now.

  Her hair is shorter than mine, like lying Graham said. It’s thin hair. All the women in my family have thin hair. It’s a curse, but in certain weather—heat!—it’s a catastrophe. It’s hot today, and Ingrid has had to tame some of her frizz with clips. I wear mine long for this very reason: long hair weighs more and stays put.

  She turns right onto Baldwin. I hadn’t noticed that she was pulling a wire shopping buggy. Maybe she’s just stolen one. Maybe if she’s a doppelganger she can materialize or dematerialize physical objects at will. I catch myself beginning to laugh, but I might start crying instead, so I suppress it.

  She’s going past everything, oblivious, not interested in what’s on offer, what’s happening around her. Going straight to Spadina with her empty wire shopping buggy. I remember Katerina said Ingrid lived near Chinatown. She turns right again. I have to run to get to that corner, and this time she’s turning again, left, back out toward Spadina. Maybe she’s trying to shake me. If those who know her secret die, then what happens if she turns around and looks at me? If she’s the harbinger of my death, then she’s done for, too. How can you have a shadow if there’s nothing to cast it? She goes into Moonbeam. I don’t get coffee here because it smells like patchouli inside.

  Shhhhhhhhhhh goes the hiss of the foaming wand; I can hear it. I can see her in the line. I can see her face. She is inside that coffee shop with my face.

  Moonbeam’s door rushes away, shrinking into the distance. The hiss gets louder. Ingrid stands alone, framed in the doorway, and the doorway is throbbing like a pumping heart. She’s tiny at the end of my seeing. I’m paralyzed, but she won’t look at me. She knows I’m here, but she won’t look at me. Do I have the upper hand? Is she afraid of me?

  “Hey!” I call over to her, but there’s no reaction. “HEY! INGRID FOX!”

  I can hear my voice, but she can’t. She didn’t so much as flinch when I shouted her name.

  I CAN’T GO HOME YET; I’m too full, my mind is overflowing. I pass Bookshop and look through the window to see what Terrence is doing. It appears the store is empty and Terrence is reading at the cash desk, his eyes lowered, completely still, like he’s been powered off. I keep going, but I can’t get beyond Ossington—a powerful force weighs me down so much I can’t even cross the street. Instead, I turn south, where the Ossington strip turns into a kilometre-long buffet. It’s dinner on the Kalahari here. The top of the food chain is lined up on the sidewalk for tequila and pho and they look like they’d rip your jugular out for a slice of pizza. I’d keep walking, but Paula’s ringing through on Skype. “Hold on,” I type. “I have to find somewhere to sit down. I’ll call you back.”

  I find a booth at the back of a donut shop and order a coffee so they don’t kick me out. I dial Paula’s number. “Listen,” I say, nodding to the dead-eyed geek who drops my mug. “Something awful’s happened. Do you remember me telling you about that lady in the market? Katerina? She was killed!”

  “Whoa. By who?”

  “Someone shot her!”

  “Oh my god,” she murmurs and falls silent. “That’s just awful. Any idea what happened?”

  “None. It’s possible…” I have to block my face with my coffee mug to keep my emotions to myself.

  “Sweetie?”

  “I think Ingrid might have killed her. There were people pointing at me when I was at the crime scene—”

  “You saw it happen?”

  “No. I got there right afterwards. I had to identify her.”

  “Poor you!”

  I sat sideways and cried into my shoulder, cradling the phone in the crook of my neck. “She was dead on the ground in a pool of her own blood.”

  “Why would Ingrid kill her? You said they were friends.”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve seen her…”

  “You’ve seen Ingrid?”

  “Yes. I followed her through the market. Paula, do you remember when I was a kid I used to tell you about the vampire that spoke to me? In my head?”

  “Hold on! Did she look like you?”

  “Dead ringer.”

  “Now I’m worried.”

  “I’m scared! What if this is something like my vampire problem?”

  “The vampire was adolescent existentialism. You were twelve.”

  “I am the vampire,” I whispered. “I sound exactly like you inside your own head. But these are not your thoughts. I’m serious. I used to scare the shit out of myself.”

  “Oh stop it now—”

  “He’d make me hold my breath for long periods. To prevent a disaster from happening.”

  “He never told you to hold it longer than you actually could,” Paula says. “Anyway, Descartes got to this centuries before you were born, dear. Your brain has enough juice in it to pull all kinds of tricks. And did the vampire really talk like that?”

  “Yes!” We’ve had this discussion a dozen times. “He had a better vocabulary than I did! And I bet you misread Descartes.”

  “René told you what he meant, did he?”

  “He meant that because I think, I think I am.”

  “He left out a cogito.”

  “I exist to myself,” I say. “Not in the cosmos, like matter, but in myself only, the only place I can prove I am.”

  “You really miss your students, don’t you? You love to lecture.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Get on Skype! I want to see how crazy you look.”

  “I’m in a coffee shop!”

  My phone goes boop-bee-booooo gwip gwup beep-boo.

  I answer and put the phone down on the table and her face stares up at me. “I saw her. Right after Katerina was shot, I saw Ingrid in the park. And Graham is dead, too.”

  “Who’s—”

  “Gavin—you know? That guy. I was told it was a suicide, but what if it wasn’t?”

  “You really think your doppelganger is knocking people off?”

  “She could have seen me today if she’d only looked. Katerina said she told Ingrid about me. I gave her a letter—”

  “A letter?”

  “To give to Ingrid. To come and meet me in Bellevue Square. But she didn’t come. Not until both witne
sses were dead…”

  “If she’s out walking around in public, I don’t think she cares who sees her.”

  “What if everyone who talks to her goes crazy and kills themselves?”

  “Slow down…” With effort she lowers her telescopic mount and her face comes close and pixelates. “You’re not having those kinds of thoughts now, are you?”

  “No!”

  “You’ve got kids and a good life. A husband who loves you—”

  “I’m not thinking of killing myself, Paula! But what should I do?”

  “Jesus!” she said, laughing. “Steer clear! Head for cover!”

  “Why are your eyes so puffy?”

  She reaches toward the screen and points it down to her feet, which are clad in knitted slippers. Bits of coloured yarn have exploded from them. “How are my boys?” she asks from off-screen.

  “Nick had a nightmare and had to play his six-phase meditation to get back to sleep. He found it on YouTube. A woman’s voice, like Sulu. He played it under his pillow lying against me, shuddering. He gets nightmares.”

  “What was phase one?”

  “‘Relax your scalp. Feel warmth flooding your head. Then relax your eyes and your face. Let the warmth travel down your neck into your chest.’”

  “Mmm.”

  “He never makes it to the end of phase two. His breathing changes and Sulu says, ‘Imagine a light coming from you and connecting you to everything you love.’”

  “What’s phase three?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. I turned it off when he fell asleep.” I’ve forgotten I’m sitting in a coffee shop. The coffee is cold. A skin of cream has tightened on its surface. “Why have you been crying, Paula?”

  “I’m not crying, Sis, I’m dying.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Look at me. Would you want to live like this? Stuck in a box with windows on the haze, order dinner in every night? I’m never getting out of here. I’m already dead.”