Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  When I first began to sleep on my back, I imagined that in the dark, forms joined together and came alive. This never happened, owing, I believed, to my mantra, which was: “That would be impossible. I HOPE.” Hope was the operational part of the mantra. I thought hoping was supplication.

  It was only when I was older that I envisioned the unseen intruder as a vampire, something that had control of my self. I saw what he looked like: an etching of a face with a square beard and slippery lips. I was a silly girl, and I knew other of my silly friends had their own crazy-thoughts.

  I left these fantasies in adolescence and forgot about them, although I didn’t change the way I slept. Boyfriends complained that I looked like a Victorian corpse. I knew Ian was the One when he lay on his side, tucked his head into the space made by my shoulder and my neck, and laid his hairy forearm over my belly.

  The vampire lost its power over me. In high school the new intellectual scare was a product of my adolescent narcissism. I began to wonder how I could know anything outside of myself was actually real. (I would not have entertained the idea at that age that my “self” wasn’t real.) There was no way to prove that everything I saw and experienced wasn’t being performed for my benefit alone or that the things and people I “knew” blinked out of existence the moment I turned my back. The extension of this was that my entire life was a dream, that I was perhaps a character in a book or in someone else’s dream, which was extremely frightening. I almost fainted in the cinema at the end of the first Men in Black movie, when it turned out that the cat was wearing an entire galaxy around its neck.

  The materiel needed to disprove this particular hypothesis—my Blinkout World—I never found. The world would appear to me exactly as it always had, except that when I left a room, or turned a corner, there’d be a void where I’d been. It replenished itself as quickly as I could run and look for it, and it was seamless. That was what my brain had been invented to do: run a program in which I constructed reality by witnessing it.

  I was able to disprove this hypothesis by replacing it with a final one. If I believed, in my less overwrought moments, that I was not special or different from anyone else, then the universe being a show for me alone would make me special. So I lowered the odds from 0.005 per cent to 0.0001 per cent. But that only means I still believe in Blinkout. On days like this, I can’t ignore that about myself. I am willing to believe.

  Ingrid’s crossing Dundas at Spadina. On the south side, she waits for the light. I miss it and have to spy from a distance. She continues east, pulling her buggy behind her, disappearing into the crowd. I’ve lost her again.

  I still have groceries to buy!

  I NEED MORE personal space than the average person, but I didn’t know this until I had children. Once your second child is born, there’s always another body on top of you. Sometimes it’s your husband, but otherwise it’s the constant pawing and sticky grappling of offspring. “Having you inside me was much easier than having you on top of me,” I said to Nicholas once. “It only lasted nine months.”

  Reid, who’s currently regaling me from the countertop with something he’s heard, is smaller and lankier than his brother and until he was six he could lie on his side and fit between my breasts with his feet paddling at my knees. He has somehow always been heavier than Nick, as if he’s more densely packed. Reid’s personality takes up space. Ian says our ten-year-old has an untrammelled ego, but from his point of view—Reid’s, that is—he’s generously sharing everything he has to offer. He overflows with bad magic tricks and interesting facts—most of which he’s gleaned from the internet and some of which are factual facts—and there’s nothing he likes more than telling you the whole story of a movie, from start to finish, including the credits if they were cool. This was what he’d started on when I walked through the door. I was thinking about Ingrid’s empty buggy and her apparent sadness, but then I heard Reid say, “Her dad falls out a window,” and I started listening.

  “Whose dad fell out a window?”

  “Eli’s, Mom.”

  I unpack the avocados, the fish, and the premade salad. “This is in a movie, right? Did you already say that?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “So this isn’t someone we know.”

  “It’s a movie, Mom.”

  “Stop saying Mom!” He’s already opened the nacho chips. “Did you have lunch? Where’s your father?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “He’s out. I had some sour keys.” He gives me one of his face-wide smiles. His teeth fill his whole countenance, white and bedraggled. He hops up onto one of the barstools on the other side of the counter. I see the sugardust on the fine blond hairs of his upper lip.

  I’ve been able to make out the resonant thud of Nick’s heels, so I know son number one is home, but there’s no reply from the husband. Nicholas walks as if his centre of gravity is two feet behind him, landing on his heels and rocking forward. I used to wonder if he did it for comic effect.

  “Dad’s out getting the Lamborghini waxed,” Reid says.

  “You wish.”

  “He went to Staples,” says Nick, entering the kitchen.

  “Did your brother eat?”

  “I made him beef Wellington.”

  “Okay, let’s make dinner now. Who’s mashing the avocados? They’re perfect.”

  Nick, who is usually immune to requests for help, will do this because it involves using a sharp knife, something he only started doing when he turned twelve. So now Reid has to watch him, for two years, cut stuff. Nick gets to work on the guacamole. I let the little guy melt butter in the frying pan and pat the fish dry.

  “What’s that?” Reid asks, his voice dripping with horror.

  “Pickerel.”

  “Ew. It smells like dead donkey.”

  “It’s fresh from an Ontario lake, dork. You can make little fish tacos if you get the tortillas out of the freezer. We have salsa, too.”

  He moves the butter around in the pan on the end of a fork. It begins to melt.

  “Okay. So Eli’s dad falls out a window.”

  “He lets her suck his blood and then he falls out a window,” he stage-whispers, to make his exclusion of his brother audible to his brother.

  “Go on…”

  “I can hear you, moron,” Nick says.

  “Reid, go on with your story. Nick: mash the avocado now.”

  “Okay, so she chops off the bullies’ heads when Oskar is in the pool. They tried to drown him because he was a pussy.”

  “Whoa, what?”

  “Because he was—”

  “No no, you don’t say pussy. Keep moving the butter around.”

  “You say pussy.”

  “For Lefty, Reid. Not for a person. Ever.”

  “Ever?”

  Nick says, “Well, not until you’re older and you know the other person really really well.”

  “What kind of movie was this?”

  “A kids’ movie.”

  “Called?”

  “Don’t Let Her In. It’s about this angry vampire girl who makes a friend, but she doesn’t have a…a Lefty.”

  Nick’s laugh is like a plate shattering.

  I take Reid’s chin in my hand and bring his eyes around. The fork clinks into the frying pan. “Hey. Did it occur to you that maybe this wasn’t an appropriate movie for a ten-year-old?”

  “They were talking Spanish or something.”

  “So you have no idea what the movie was actually about.”

  “Of course he doesn’t.”

  “Nick.”

  “Do you want me to turn this down?”

  I don’t know what he means until I see the butter is burning. “Goddammit.” I snap the gas off.

  “I can read subtitles, you know,” Reid says, bringing the attention back to himself. He’d juggle in a house fire if he thought someone would watch. “So I knew what they were saying. Instead of a foo foo she had a scar. The b
oy sees her boobies though.”

  “Fabulous.”

  “I’ve seen boobies, Mummy.”

  “Whose?”

  “You know. Yours! Other ones too. I saw a monkey with breasts on the internet and they were a lot bigger than the ones in the movie.” Nick is biting his lip, keeping his comments to himself, but Reid plows on: “Mummy, are all nipples the same size?”

  “Did your dad know you were watching a vampire movie with breasts in it?”

  “It was a foreign movie,” Reid protests. “Geez. Foreign movies got breasts in them, I’m sorry! You want me to watch X-Men over and over and never learn about life?”

  Nick howls “BWAAA-HAAAAH-HAAAAH!” and I know Reid’s going to lose it.

  “Let go of that,” I say to Nick, taking the hand with the knife in it, “and get out of here for five minutes.”

  “Guess what? He pauses the nude scenes.”

  Reid shrieks: “ASSHOOOOLE!”

  “Get. Out.”

  He goes, but not without first taking a swipe at the back of Reid’s head. He doesn’t connect, but he makes his little brother flinch, which is all he wanted.

  “Nick is nifgit.”

  “I don’t want to know what that is.”

  “It’s a dangler hanging outta your—”

  “Enough. Go wash your hands.” He goes to the sink and washes his hands with the dish soap. “For your information, all nipples are not the same size.”

  “Do they only get as big as the baby’s mouth?”

  “I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked that question. You should have a chat with Mr. Google about it. But if you ask me, I think it’s a random thing, how big a person’s nipples are.”

  “Ladies’ nipples,” he corrects. “Men all have the same size nipples. Their nipples are nickel-sized nipples.

  “Stop saying nipples!” I say, but I’m laughing because I’m a soft touch. “I can’t believe you were down here, unsupervised and unfed, looking at vampire breasts.”

  “You’re a bad mother,” he says, deadpan. “Are you at least going to cook dinner? And wouldn’t frozen waffles be faster?”

  Later, after I have both kids fed (fish tacos), Ian makes an appearance.

  “Reid watched a Swedish vampire movie,” I inform him. “Did you know that?”

  “No. But so what?” His lips glance off my cheek, but he waits with his lips hanging in the air until I kiss him. “He has to learn about Swedish vampires sooner or later.”

  “Where were you?” His hair is cap-shaped. “Did you go somewhere in your uniform?”

  He offers me an irritated look and puts two bags down on the stairs. They don’t say Staples on them. “I found some sheets on sale.”

  I look in one of the bags and indeed, there are two zipped-up plastic packages of queen-size fitted sheets and covers in deep purple and bright yellow. Wamsutta, half off. “Sweetheart,” I say. He hasn’t done anything this thoughtful for some time.

  He shucks his raincoat and shoes simultaneously, and then slides into the slipstream of domestic chaos. There’s a cluelessness to boys and men that must be very pleasant, an ignorance of the peripheral that women are aware of every waking hour. Maybe not all women have a sense of hints and shadows, but I gather there is some biological, evolutionary role for it. “Men defend, women protect” is one of Ian’s memes, a motto rather than an idea. But he may be right. The one who defends already knows his enemy. The protector knows the enemy can take any form it wants. Pedophile, peanut, gunshot in the food court.

  Only Nick can detect that I’m off. Beneath his shell, he’s a feeling boy. I go into his room at ten to turn out his lights.

  “You okay, Mum?”

  “Of course I’m okay.”

  “Your face is white and shiny.”

  “I had a Filet-o-Fish for lunch.”

  “You ate fish twice today?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “On purpose?”

  “It’s lights-out now, so let’s finish with the questions. Scooch.”

  He wriggles toward the foot of the bed and I pull his covers up.

  “Can I ask you one more thing?”

  “What?”

  “Do you have cancer?”

  The question shocks us both. “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

  “’Cause you look sick.”

  I kiss his forehead. “You’re a good boy.” I worry about what goes on in their heads when they’re alone. “Everything is fine. We’re all together. We’re safe as houses.”

  “Some houses fall down,” he says.

  I NEED TO UNPLUG, to shut out the voices. It takes three episodes of Antiques Roadshow to settle me down. Some of the world’s stock exchanges are open by the time I go upstairs, as evidenced by the fact that Ian’s in his third floor lair, clacking on keys. Sunday nights, he doesn’t like to miss the Monday opens in Asia and India; apparently they set the tone for the week to come. Sometimes I think we should just have an old-fashioned ticker spitting out tape in the living room. I climb the stairs and sit down behind him with one of his policing association magazines. This one is called Canadian Police Chief Magazine. Very niche. “Why do you still subscribe to this?”

  “Because I’m the chief of police?” He’s watching stock prices speed by under a silenced hockey game. “And I don’t subscribe, sweetheart. They send it to me for free.”

  “Ha,” I say. He never used to be facetious, but that was back when he was employed by the OPS rather than just getting their magazines. “What’s eating you?” I ask him.

  He looks beyond me. He says: “Hey, what are you doing out of bed?”

  Reid is standing at the top of the stairs. “Are you guys doing sex?”

  I scoop him up. “Back to bed, cakiepie. It’s almost midnight.”

  “Who won the game?” he asks. Ian tells him the Kings “blanked” the Sharks, and with sleep in his voice, Reid asks, “Have they taken a strangehold on the series?”

  “That’s exactly what they’ve done,” Ian says.

  Reid wraps his legs around my waist and we go down the stairs. He’s all boy, gangly and scentless, while Nick has little filaments turning black in his armpits and his shoes smell like death. I put Reid into his bed.

  “I had a bad dream,” he says. “I dreamt I got lost in the woods and you didn’t look for me.”

  I tuck him in, using brusque movements under his ribs to make him squirm. “I’ll always come looking for you. And there’s nowhere I wouldn’t find you.”

  I wait in the hallway silently for a couple of minutes and listen for him to turn over and arrange his blankets, which can take up to two minutes until he gets it right. Nick fell asleep the second I left his room, this one has nightmares. The hallway between his bedroom and ours is hung with family photos. The lights are out, and the wall looks hung with darkened screens.

  Reid sighs. I creep back upstairs. On one of Ian’s monitors I see the welcome screen of the Ontario Police Services website.

  “What were we talking about before?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember. You don’t either.” His phone rings. I peer over his shoulder: Unknown Number.

  “Who’s calling you from an unknown number at this hour?”

  “Hold on a second. Hello. Hello? I’m fine, thank you.” He listens. “What’s the name of your company again? Uh-huh. Okay, I’ll take it! No, that’s fine, I’ll just take it. How much is it? You take credit cards, right? I can send a money order, too, in Canadian funds, euros, pounds. A week for rubles. I can bring you my money in a taxi if it’s urgent. Pardon? No, I trust you, why wouldn’t I trust you? You have my personal phone number. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. What will your boss say if he finds out you’re turning down a sale? You don’t trust me? Well that’s something. By the way, I have all of this on tape.” He looks at the screen. “He hung up!”

  “That guy’s getting paid four dollars an hour.”

  “Fuck’m. I save the numbers and they run them in batches for me dow
n at the station. Speaking of which, sit down for a minute, okay? I need to tell you something. One of the officers at the scene in Kensington Market canvassed that food court your friend works in. He asked about the victim’s friends and relations. A few people gave a description that matches you.”

  “How the hell would you know that?”

  “Cops share with each other. It’s routine. They want to talk to you.” His eyelid twitches. He’s hiding something, seeing how I’ll react. “When you’re feeling a little more yourself, they want to ask you a couple of questions. It was your friend, wasn’t it?”

  “What’s the victim’s name?”

  “They’re not releasing her name until they find her next-of-kin. Probably that’s all they want to ask you about. Maybe you can help them with that. I called Shoppers, by the way, to check if your prescription was ready and they said it was. So do you want go get it, or should I?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  He laughs. “No you won’t.”

  I retreat to the bedroom. Tonight has felt like a step in the wrong direction.

  WHILE WASHING MY FACE in front of the mirror, something happens I can’t credit. I lean down to rinse the suds off, and when I rise, I’m in the mirror, but I’m certain I’m not in the room. I see what I think is my reflection, but it’s actually someone standing in another bathroom, an identical bathroom behind this one. I look down, afraid there’ll be nothing below my head, but my body is still there. I lift my eyes back to the mirror and my double also looks up. I reach for the light switch and snap it off. In the dark, there’s profound silence even from other parts of the house. I feel for the mirror. I find its featureless cold surface and hold my fingertips to it and wait for my eyes to adjust to the junk light seeping in from under the door.

  Crazy is normal. I’ve been crazy before and I’ll be crazy again. It’s everyone’s biggest secret: those times they wondered if they’d lost it and those times they knew they had. Memories of choking on tears, alone in a dorm room three time zones from your parents. Driving way too fast after losing a job. Cheated on. And you must be crazy if you can’t love the baby. But then, one day, you love the baby. There are so many books with crazy main characters, too. Don Quixote is not the only one. Ahab has borderline personality disorder; Gregor Samsa, persecution mania. The Cat in the Hat is clearly batshit. And of all the characters in the Bible who supposedly hear directly from God, Noah gets the craziest task. Unless, of course, God never spoke to Noah and Noah had reasons other than divine inspiration for building the ark, like schizophrenia or OCD.