“Stop it. Tell me to come down. I will. Just say the word.”
“You can’t. I can’t tell you to do that. Anyway, this place isn’t for you. It’s hotter than fuck. Fuck is the lowest temperature here. And you have your life.”
“You don’t want to see me, do you? You want to be alone.”
“I’m seeing you right now. I don’t know how, I don’t understand all these new geegaws. I’m just glad I can talk to you.”
“So I only get my screen looking through your screen on a box of windows. You’re like my own personal Russian doll.”
“What will you get when you twist me open and look inside?”
“Us. As happy little girls.”
“Nah,” Paula says, and my screen moirés. “I’m the one in the middle, kid. The one you can’t open.”
When I get home, I’m still doing my breathing: one two three four. My vision is like someone has tweaked the focus and I see, or at least I notice, everything. It’s a bad high, like the tokes I had in high school that started with everyone else saying whoa and I am so stoned and ended with me puffing on a paper bag while Nelson Spivak rubbed my shoulders and asked me if I’d be more comfortable with my bra off.
I clean the TV room disaster zone, then the kitchen disaster zone. Focus on the immediate. Half-eaten granola bars are separated from their wrappers by floors, a detail that had escaped me before today’s sighting turned me into an adrenalin-soaked satellite dish.
Ian appears after I’ve finished doing the trash rounds. “Oh, you’re back.” He looks at the clock. “Seven hours later! Wow. Your phantom show her face?”
“No,” I lie. “And I don’t like the way you talked to me in front of those people.”
“I thought you knew all of them.”
I don’t give him the satisfaction of a response. “Where are the kids?”
“At my mother’s?”
“Oh, right. Are you going to have me locked up again?”
Ian sits at the kitchen table and lowers his head. “Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”
“I’m busy at the store. I have a lot on my hands. Just because you have all your time to yourself now doesn’t mean other people—”
One palm slaps the table, hard. “Just hold on! The bookstore?”
“Forget it. I told you I wanted a change from teaching.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“Them?”
“Your employers at the college. Where you teach essay structure and creative writing?”
“I go to work—”
“If you want me to trust you…Gary is faxing a prescription to the Shoppers on Dundas. We can talk about all of this when your head’s on a bit straighter.”
“Are you serious? He’s medicating me sight unseen? I don’t need to—”
“Yes, you do. And no going back to the market or the park. Will you promise me that? Jean?”
I want to dial this conversation up to ten, but if he’s sold on a version of me that’s wrong, what can I do? And he’s confused, which worries me. I quit the college when we left Port Dundas. I love him and I don’t want to lie to him, but I know a lie will salve his anxiety. To show him I’m for real, I take his hand and put it against my cheek. I kiss him. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I understand. I really do. I’ll stop. Don’t give up on me.”
“You’ll take the pills?”
“Yes, I’ll take them.” I start to cry. I’m actually really sad, but it’ll give him a reason to drop the subject, too. We’ll make love tonight and the gulf between us will narrow. I can always spit out the pills.
IAN’S MOTHER DROPS the kids after lunch Sunday. They have enjoyed their weekend at the Condo of No Rules. If you want to see what a hangover looks like on a ten-year-old, let him stay up until the middle of the night two nights in a row. Everyone got their freak on at Buby’s, but Mother, to keep her promise, has to shut it all down. Today, I’m putting on a Tony-worthy performance as sane mother and wife. Mutually satisfactory connubial lovemaking has righted the balance with Ian, and he’s in a much better mood this morning.
“We’re eating pot roast and potatoes and green beans like normal people tonight,” I warn them. “Stop scarfing all that garbage.” Ian takes control of a box of Honeycomb cereal from Nick, who’s been popping little wheels of crunchy sugarcorn into his mouth. Now Ian starts popping them into his mouth. Reid is hitched up on the counter, his favourite vantage point on the room, from which he presides over kitchen discussions. He is halfway through a single-serving box of Honey Smacks, a cereal he explains is fifty-six per cent sugar by volume. “You people are addicts,” I tell them.
“How much of this crap have you eaten?” Ian asks Nick.
“The contents settle.”
“I’m going shopping,” I say. “Stop eating that shit. Daddy?”
“Daddy’s on it,” Reid says.
“I want to hear from Daddy.”
“Daddy’s coming.” Ian accompanies me to the door, and in the kitchen Nick is saying, “He wouldn’t be bad as a baby. Why would you kill him, then?”
“‘Cuz he’s Hitler. I’d actually kill Hitler’s parents. I wouldn’t let them do it once.” Reid cocks his finger at Nick, a gesture his older brother detests, and pretends to fire a gun at him.
“Don’t blow the smoke away.”
Reid blows the smoke away.
“DICK,” his brother says.
From the door we holler in unison the parental HEY HEY HEY!
“Mom would kill Hitler because she knows how to get the job done,” Reid says, stating a pride in me I didn’t know he had.
“I don’t want this place to turn into a swear party while I’m gone, okay? Keep it civil.”
“You’d kill Hitler,” Reid repeats.
“Maybe I’d try to educate him.”
Ian steps between us. “I’m surprised you can walk straight today,” he says, leering and winking like Benny Hill.
“You having a seizure, sweetheart?”
“Just grocery store and home, right?”
“Yes. Unless I’m abducted by aliens.” He smiles with all his teeth. I wonder if it’ll be tennis or baseball while I’m out. “See you soon,” I say.
—
I’m in Bellevue Square by one. It’s riotous here on this Day-After-Sighting. There are people swinging soap bubbles around, and a clown on a high unicycle is going about painting the leaves on the trees. He carries a paintbox in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. The paint is confetti.
There’s still no Cullen. I’m beginning to wonder if I should tell someone he’s missing. What if he’s suffered the same fate as Graham Ronan and Katerina?
I want to say it’s as if nothing happened here, but nothing has happened here a lot. A murder’s not enough to make a ripple in the nothing. I’m disappointed that there’s no pong of suspicion in the air, or any hint of despondency. I wasn’t the only one who bought pupusas from Katerina. Others should be missing her.
Miriam isn’t at her station. I note this walking along Denison Square to Augusta. (It’s confusing that they named the street Denison Square, when in fact it’s a street, and Bellevue Square is more rectangular than square, and really, it’s a park.) I walk up to CHURROS CHURROS CHURROS and find it’s been taped off and boarded up. The little yellow flags with pictures of the golden deep-fried pastries are gone.
The brunch crowd is filling the sidewalks. Ninety per cent of them are on their phones. When these pocket computers starting getting common, old people like me catastrophized about how bad it was going to be, but we were wrong. It’s much worse. We’ve been looking at each other’s faces for a million years. But now you don’t see faces anymore. At night on the sidewalks of Toronto people walk around in the dark looking down into tiny lamplit rooms they hold in their hands.
The children in the wading pool rotate in and out of the water, into their mothers’ or their fathers’ hands. High-pitched laughter. It’s a sun-blasted panorama of cherubs
in frilly plastic pants, the heavily chlorinated water saturating their diapers, weighing them down. The parents take constant, quick inventories. Babies and the sound of water. Someone tosses a towel, a child vanishes into it.
I do my own habitual scan. I’ve already completed mental check-offs of the drunks, the painfully pierced, and there have been two iced coffees and a couple sharing a starfruit. Miriam is back in her spot. I go over and ask her, “If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?”
“Oh god,” she says, “do I look like a person who kills babies? I was a nurse, you know.”
“It’s Hitler.”
“You kill’m,” she says. “Spin him round by his feet and smack his head against the wall, if you got the stomach for it.” She considers, while I feel like an idiot for asking. “If I had to get rid of one person, it would be Walt Disney. What a piece of work that guy was. You ever seen Bedknobs and Broomsticks?”
“What? No.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Did you know Katerina?”
Miriam doesn’t answer.
“You knew her, right?”
“I don’t keep track of people’s names.” She crosses her arms over her big chest and sticks her chin out. “Someone’s staring at you. Over across there.”
I turn around. No one is looking at me.
“The guy in the blue clothes,” she says.
She means a man in hospital scrubs way over on the other side of the park. “The nurse eating his lunch?”
“He’s been watching you since before.”
“Before when?”
“Before today.”
“He’s not looking at me.” I wave at him. He immediately throws his lunch into a garbage can and walks away.
“See?” says Miriam.
“He’s full.”
“He’s not. You interacted with him. He knows you know.”
“He knows I know what?”
“Feh,” she says. “I’m not matchmaking for you. You’re on your own.”
“Wait a second.” I take her elbow as she begins walking away and she looks down at my hand. “Did you know Katerina?”
“I know,” she says. “Of course I know. Everyone knows.”
“Nobody seems to care. What does it take to wake people up around here?”
“Where I come from, there’s a saying: ‘Once you’re awake, you can’t wake up again.’”
—
I go back to my place on the wall and collect my thoughts. If I saw her here once, she should pass again. After Katerina was shot, I could feel her coming. I have a feel for her now.
When Jimmy learned I paid for sightings, he claimed to have seen her, but now I wonder: what if he actually did? What if Cullen saw her, too? Where’s Cullen? Where’s Jimmy? If he turns up dead, I’ll know for sure Ingrid’s bumping them all off. But why? To isolate me? To strip me of my protection? For what? How can she kill me if she doesn’t even notice me? Maybe she has to kill all the witnesses because she doesn’t want anyone to know there’s two of us. Once those other eyes are gone, she can kill me and do whatever she wants afterwards. Maybe she wants to have my life, but whatever thing Ingrid is, surely she could have chosen a more glamorous, a more interesting, victim. However, if she really wants to be me, I don’t know how I’m going to stop her. And maybe I don’t even want to. I could use a break. If she wants to be the person who swabs my toilets, she’s welcome to them. If she wants go shoe shopping for kids who need the newest kicks as soon as they appear on the market, she can put the kicks on her credit card. She can be the one who discovers under the couch (still sitting on its plate, separated into asparagus-coloured halves) the petrified egg sandwich—the whole sandwich—made months earlier and believed eaten, garnished with three withered carrots tarnished black with mould. She can be the one who elbows the snoring husband at three in the morning, and for that matter, the one who deals with the dawn tumescence.
I wonder if Ian would notice.
The itinerant stand-up comic, Giorgio, is here today. I’ve paid him for sightings, but so far, Ingrid is letting him live. I wave him over. “You seen her lately?”
“Naw,” he says. He smells like Sterno and brandy. “No customers either.”
“You might want to get into the wading pool tonight, after hours. Wash up.”
“It’s the material. People don’t shock the way they used to. Used to be all you had to do to kill a crowd of nine-year-olds was say, ‘A poop came out of my bum.’ Now they see things on their phones worse than I can say.”
“So change your material.”
“You should hear how they talk. ‘Fuck,’ ‘motherfucker.’”
“If you see Ingrid, don’t look at her. Walk the other way.” I give him a two-dollar coin and he returns to the background, like he’s part of an endless line of characters provided by a talent agency.
People are not usually this interesting in real life. They’re deeper and more boring and more satisfying than this random collection of passers-through and the dozen or so that get stuck here. I haven’t seen a dull person in Bellevue Square this whole time. I just look and there’s an entire person, with her own clothes, his own hairstyle, her creaky laughter, his filthy dark blue shirt. The way people hold their mouths when they’re looking at food—that’s always interesting to me, to witness the animal looking out. And the blasted-open irises of the couples on the grass, young people discovering something most of us can’t be fooled by anymore. Is it only in this place, in this now, that I notice these particulars?
Maybe it’s time to go home, to stop all this nonsense, suggest we move back to Port Dundas and resume our old lives. I need to have a serious discussion with myself. Do you want to go down the long slide? Do you think you can be a rational person? Rational is rules and structure. Everything in it can be made to work with any other part, even if only in opposition, but outside of its math, there’s nothing. There’s the rest of It. That is where Ingrid has come from.
Maybe it was a trick of the light or the air. Maybe if I concentrate.
THERE SHE IS AGAIN! I open my eyes and she’s walking up Augusta with her buggy. Coming from the south. Does she see me now? I dismount the wall backwards and creep to the cover of a large willow. Inside its circle of darkness, I’m sure she won’t notice me. Its branches hang down like a geisha’s beads. She’s back!
She’s in her pillar of light. I’m not sure how she does it. Gliding up the road toward the Mexican restaurants, gilded with sunlight. She wears grey pants and a black shirt. With lowered head, she looks lost in thought. Her hair is unwashed. Where is she spending the night? Does she live anywhere? I look down and my feet are a blur of tapping.
Her squeaky wheels roll past and then I’m staring at her back as she turns down Baldwin Street. Does she ever put anything in that thing? I check for traffic and run across. When I get to the corner, she’s gone. Baldwin is paved with rose light spreading east to Spadina. A balm? A blessing? She’s gone.
When I was seven, I lost my mother in the Dominion in the then-new strip mall at Bayview and Sheppard. I’d been talking to her while she shopped in the canned goods aisle, and I found something colourful to turn over in my hands. When I looked up, she was gone. I went to the end of the aisle, afraid to leave it, and swung my head left and right. She was gone. She must have thought I was behind her. If I searched to the left but she’d gone to the right, the problem would only get worse. But if I stayed where I was, surely more distance would open between us. I chose a direction, I don’t recall which; I found myself frantically navigating the aisles up and down, walking quickly at first and then running, and the aisles were full of mothers none of whom were mine. We were living in our first house on Dunview. I looked all over for her; we’d been separated for only a few moments, a minute at the very most, but I was electrified. I started shrieking, “MUMMY! MUUUUMMY!”
Someone’s hand clamps down on my shoulder and it’s one of the men trimming the vegetables on
Baldwin Street. He wears a white apron stained with dirt and smears of green and red. “Go from here,” he says to me.
A couple sitting in the window of a bakery are staring. My hands are in mid-gesture. Maybe my mouth has been moving, too.
I continue along Baldwin.
Of course my mother found me, and when I later reconsidered that endless minute in Dominion, I concluded that I should have stayed where I was. She would have known to find me, and she did. I went back to the memory of this day throughout my preadolescence and my teenagehood and I think of it still. It was the first moment in which the wrong choice would have been disastrous. It was the first time I knew what terror felt like. A minute of it was a huge dose.
I tell my kids to stay where they are. Someone will find you, or the police will come, or the part of the plane you’re in will spring free of the wreckage. I’ll find them as soon as I notice they’re missing, they know that.
I get to Kensington Avenue. The coffee smell meets the fish smell, the weed smell, and the pee smell. I think I see her right away. A flash of slacks. But it’s not her. And she is not among the lanky, loose-panted rastas smoking hand-rolleds, either.
Then I see her again, this time I’m sure of it, crossing the road in front of a produce store on St. Andrew, the one whose casabas are always overripe. This territory is strictly vegan. Just walking past the Peacefood Lovecafé, I can feel my stool bulking.
I don’t know whether to cross the road and speed up, or stop and be satisfied that at least—at last!—I have seen her again. Two sightings! A stupendous thing.
Ingrid glances up the street behind her and I turn my back. Wait a minute. I look again: she’s going south. She’ll be easier to track from the other side of the street. I cross quickly, afraid she’ll look back again.
At Dundas she turns left, and I hurry forward, following the top of her head.
I think the signal memory of losing my mother in the grocery store eventually gave rise to some of the unwanted thoughts I suffered as a teenager. Certain things were impossible to disprove. I believed there was a spirit intruder that could control my thoughts and make me sound like myself to myself. I had to fall asleep on my back with the covers pulled up to my chin. I chose this position so it would be possible to see my entire room by opening only one eye.
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