I walk down the concrete steps to the basement door. The handle won’t turn a millimetre in either direction, but the door feels loose. I nudge it toward its hinges and a crack opens on the latch side. On TV, detectives and criminals jimmy doors with credit cards, and I get out my driver’s licence and slip its knife-edge into the crack and work it down until it meets resistance. I push the card in further and angle it to get purchase. If the bolt’s curved, I can depress it by pushing the card in hard against the door. If it’s a deadbolt, I’m SOL. But it’s going in. The card scrapes metal and I press the door against its hinges. Then the card vanishes as if it’s been snatched away, and it takes me a moment to register that the door has swung open. My face stares up at me from the floor. I’m going into her house. I’m breaking the law.
I close the door behind me and stand inside the house of Ingrid Fox.
So who is she? She’s a woman with a washer and dryer set in her basement. Take note of that, washer and dryer set in basement. She also has a small unfinished bathroom, a furnace, some raw-wood shelving with paint cans and tools scattered on it. She illuminates it all with a forty-watt on a pullchain. It’s not enough to light the corners of the room. I see stacked suitcases, a headless dress form, an unplugged generator, a couple of stashed radiators. I have none of these things in my house, although of course I have luggage, black luggage like Ingrid’s by the look of it, but I don’t keep mine in the basement. There’s nothing here of interest, or at least anything that might tell me what she’s capable of, or who she thinks she is.
A door at the top of the stairs opens into the kitchen. I allow my fingers to drift over the slightly oily surface of the butcher’s block. In the sink, there’s a coffee cup with an inch of cold coffee in it and the buzz of fear begins to sound again. A faint pink lipstick smear on the rim.
I come out of my body. I see myself in the kitchen from the corner of the room, looking down into the sink at the coffee cup. I leave myself there and go into the hallway, where through reverse-telescopic vision, I see the front door six miles away. I’m unsteady on my feet, vertiginal. The living room curves into place as I turn my head. Its shelves line one wall, floor to ceiling, full of books. The sight of this multiplex of spines makes my eyes strobe uncontrollably. I have to get back to my body. I hold the wall and close my eyes. Through a squint, I navigate to a wooden chair. My back teeth send bolts of electricity directly into my eyes, and there are venetian blinds on the back of my neck, opening and closing, scraping me with their cold edges.
My kitchen self joins me and we breathe and count and count and breathe.
When I can lift my head, I look around at the living room. At the front of the house, through a pair of open French doors, is a small office. Its window gives out on the church wall across the road, as well as the tree and the bench beneath it.
Around me, the house sighs and hums like a living thing.
After a few minutes, I can breathe normally again, although I’m cold all over. I walk along the shelves with my arms behind my back, one hand clenched tightly in the other. The books aren’t alphabetized and mystery shares shelfspace with poetry. Of course I’ve seen a lot of her books in my store. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, U.S. hardback edition. Secret World of Og. Ditto. Hard book to find in original hardback. I still have one in my glass case of unmoveable first editions.
I run my fingertips over the spines. A vein in the top of my hand is throbbing.
Raymond Carver’s Cathedral; Collected Poems by Adrienne Rich. So she has taste, Ingrid Doppelganger. I have seen almost all of these editions, either on my own shelves at home or in the bookstore. Why should I be surprised if we have the same taste when we already share so much?
One shelf is stocked with art and photography, and I don’t have to scan it too long to determine that Ingrid’s modest art book collection contains all of, and only, the art books I am currently stocking. A bead of moisture rolls down inside my hand and collects on the end of my pinkie. I look at the other books again, muttering under my breath. Her first edition of Time’s Arrow is signed by the author. I call Terrence at the store, my voice as low as possible. “Do we still have that first edition of Time’s Arrow signed by Amis?”
“Who is this? Mrs. Mason?”
I have to repeat the question.
“You want me to look?”
“Simple instructions, Terrence.”
Silence, and then he returns. “Yeah. Should I set it aside?”
“That’s great,” I whisper and hang up.
I creep past the reading chair into the little office behind the French doors. There’s a desk and a couple more bookshelves. I put my phone away and enter the room with a feeling of deathly reverence. This is Ingrid’s office.
I recognize my handwriting on a pad of paper. That’s my handwriting. Jesus.
A professional portrait of Ingrid and her husband stands in the recessed windowsill. I pick it up and bring it close to my eyes. That is, truly, my mouth. The expression is mine as well. It’s my take-the-picture smile. It’s everywhere in our photo albums.
The glass captures the reflection of another picture, a young girl, hanging on the wall behind me. “You’re home early,” it says, and I involuntarily pee. “Mummy?”
“You’re up?” I ask.
“Duh,” she replies. She cranes her neck to see my face. “Are you going back?”
“To what?”
“Work!”
Her mother can’t keep looking away! Is the girl sick? Maybe she’s home-schooled. We look at each other. Her expression doesn’t change. At a glance I can see the fever in her eyes.
She says, “Can you make me a gorilla?” and bounds away.
I follow her like I’m being called to my execution. She sits at the kitchen table. “Sweet—heart? I didn’t hear you.”
“A gorilla?”
“Right. Just one?” I see a picture on the fridge of Ingrid and this child. I scan the fridge for name-clues and there’s a diploma for circle-drumming presented to Dana Fox. A feeling of terrible grief washes over me.
“Just one.”
“Anything else? Dana? On the side?”
“Just the gorilla. Mother.” Her legs are long enough to reach the floor when she sits forward on the seat, but when she pushes back they dangle like clappers in a bell.
“Why don’t we make it together, then. It’ll be fun.”
She sighs and slides off her chair. Why does she have to do everything? “Fine. I’ll get the bread. You get the cheese.”
Gorilla cheese sandwich. I hunt beside the stove for a frying pan. The cheese singles are in the fridge door. The child and I move around each other and I steal glimpses. Her hair is stringy and a little damp—fever hair. Like her mother’s hair looked in her red coat. Dana’s blue eyes have a gloss of red in the whites. I pour her a glass of water. “Drink that,” I say. “You’ll feel better. When’s the last time you had any medicine?”
“You gave me grape Motrin before you left? Why are you using that cheese!”
Two slices of American droop off the side of my hand. “Sorry. Maybe I’m getting a touch of what you have.”
“What do I have?”
“It’s nothing serious! It’s nothing! A touch of flu.” There’s only one other cheese I can find in the fridge and it’s a hunk of real cheddar. I slice thin squares of it onto a cutting board under Dana’s careful gaze. She coughs into her shoulder.
I fumble about pretending to look for stuff and Dana butters the bread. She’s beautiful, with tiny feet and toes. I’d always wanted to have a daughter. She’s so delicate in her illness, but I can feel her will pulling at me like a river current. How is it she doesn’t know I’m not the one she thinks I am? That I might be her mother’s Llorona?
“Mummy—?” Her hand slides into mine. Cold, soft. My stomach cringes. She puts the sandwich into the pan and it hisses like it’s recoiling in pain. “I heard you and Daddy crying.”
“Oh. I thought…we th
ought you were asleep.”
“You have a bo-bo in your head. You said you’re sick.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” I take her into my arms, I can’t stop myself. “Sometimes adults have problems,” I say. “And they cry. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t you cry?”
She pushes away from me. “Flip it.”
“What?”
“My gorilla.”
If Ingrid has my looks and my books, then why doesn’t she have two sons? Why doesn’t her husband look like Ian? Is she at Bookshop right now, greeting my customers? Terrence would have said something. Unless he’s in on it. Unless everyone is in on it.
The girl takes the sandwich out of the pan with her bare fingers.
“Careful,” I say. “Do you think…you’ll be all right on your own this afternoon?”
“You left me all morning,” she says. “I think I’ll survive until one of you gets home.”
“One of…?”
“You or Dad? Holy wow, you’re goinked worse than me today.”
I have to get out of here.
“Are you going back to work right now?”
“I’m sorry.”
She directs a steady stream of ketchup onto her plate. I reach over and touch her hair as she wanders past me, heading into the TV room with her sandwich and a glass of milk.
“You called me Dana, like, twice,” she says. “Maybe you should go back to your feelings doctor and talk about your feelings some more.” She searches my eyes for knowledge I don’t have. “Hello, Mom? I’m Jean? Dana’s the dead one.”
I HAVE TO WALK, and walk, and I have to stay in motion as long as possible, and not go in the direction of Bookshop or Bellevue Square, although I feel like eating a huge hunk of meat, raw red hamburger if I have to. But I walk away. I walk down into the old garrison part of the city where the streets meet at right angles. The buildings on either side of me in the old core crowd the street and make a person lose their sense of direction.
Little Jean, sick, sweet Jean lost a sister and Ingrid lost a child. Was that why Ingrid was crying? Is the bo-bo in her head grief? I don’t share this with her. I have no grief. I’m happy. Right now, in this part of my life, except for a few bumps such as seeing things, I’d call life peachy. Ingrid has grief.
The faces of buildings repeat and repeat until I lose track of which direction I’m facing or what time it is. I feel safer among others. I feel compassion for them, certain of their sufferings and courage. But maybe they are bad people. Is this why Ingrid’s grief is happening to me? Am I a bad person?
WHEN I GET HOME, it’s in time to make like mother and wife again. Both children are stupefied in front of the TV, not necessarily looking at it, but abiding with it, their attention downward as usual, peering into the only real windows they look through anymore, their fingertips moving over the glass.
I collect the empty plastic bags that contained whatever they bought at Bulk Barn on the way home from school. Sugar crystals. They say hello in unison.
I look in the fridge and try to imagine the dish that can emerge from its puzzle of ingredients. My mouth is dry. I drink iced tea straight from the bottle. I could make grilled cheese sandwiches again, these guys could live off of grilled cheese, and it’s easy, and no one will complain if it’s American cheese.
As I assemble the ingredients, I have the sensation that I’m underwater, complete with the inability to breathe. The air has thickened. The presence that pinned me to my bedroom ceiling is back. It’s everywhere now, a current or a wave. I go out into the living room and it’s there too, going through the room like a braid woven through the space, filling in the nothing. It’s not Ingrid at all. It’s deeper than Ingrid. It’s an invisible fortification holding everything in.
When Ian gets home, he wants more than grilled cheese. He encourages the kids to go downstairs and play a board game. This is like asking them to wear top hats, but their father has a convincing way.
I know there’s no hiding from him anymore, my husband and sometimes confidant, the father of our two children, our genes stirred together in them. Today is he my friend?
He tells me that he had a conversation with a Detective Sanchez, who told him that a woman named Ingrid Fox identified the body behind the food mall.
“So do you believe me now?”
“Sanchez described her to me. It was you. He had you down to the part in your hair. You disappeared from me for ten minutes and that’s where you went.”
“Don’t you think if I had a doppelganger that she’d part her hair in the same place? That’s how identical things look: the same.”
“Why did you tell Sanchez you were Ingrid Fox?”
My silence is uninterpretable.
“Are you still going to the park?”
“Yes,” I tell him, because he’s relentless. “And I’ve gone to Ingrid’s house, too. Okay?”
He changes seats at the kitchen table to be beside me. He puts his arm around my shoulder. “Jean? Please talk to me.” He shakes me, gently. “Were you in a relationship with that woman?”
“Oh my god.” I push his paw off my shoulder.
“Was there a fight?”
“We were friends. Only friends. How can you even ask me that?”
“Which part?” he asks, his eyes tearing up. “If you’re cheating on me, or if you killed that woman?”
The doorbell rings. He doesn’t break eye contact.
“Expecting anyone?” The second ring is more insistent and he rises from his chair. “Wait here,” he tells me.
I get up and turn on the little countertop television and watch with my arms crossed over my chest, shifting from foot to foot. Through my socks, the floor tiles are cold. Katerina and I were only friends. She was in love with Ingrid. Or Jimmy. Or Miguel. And she was already dead when I got there. But why do I feel Ian knows something I don’t?
I want to stay here, in front of the TV, and watch this man
in the traditional garb of his country play a woodwind instrument for his po-faced king. I want to be here with my plans for dinner, and night falling, and getting into bed. What’s so difficult about that?
He returns alone. “Some woman wants to talk to you. Don’t be long, we’re not done here.” The ringing in my head starts before I leave the room. I reel into the front hall knowing it’s her. She’s going to be standing on the other side of the screen door under the glow of the porch light. And she is! It’s her. Ingrid Fox stands at my front door. But how did she find me? Well, of course! She’s already been in my bathroom mirror.
The light spills over her, shadowing her eyes, but it casts her smile in phosphorescent pink and white. She clasps her palms to the base of her throat, as if she’s having trouble breathing, and I open the door for her.
“I knew you were back,” she says. “I’m ready now.”
I HEAR THE SOUND of gas in a tube. It hisses a hollow note. Ian’s voice says: “Her eyes are open.”
His voice comes closer, but it distorts in what I think must be an operating room because the light is immense and tear-inducing. I hear him through this medium of light, which is like being under the surf with the sun just inches away from the surface of the water, except I don’t know how far away the surface is.
If this is death, it’s confusing, but it doesn’t hurt and it isn’t frightening or sad. Then something changes and the light recedes like a drug wearing off and then I remember—for I am still myself, I can feel that I am here—that at death, the brain releases natural opiates, to calm you, to give you a final dream and then after that there’s nothing. It’s a trick, after all, a merciful trick, but a dirty one just the same because the last thing that ever happens to you is untrue. I don’t want to stop being myself—
(Jean falls into a sleep so profound that only I can tell you she loses sense of what she is and shades into no-mind and not-time. She’s starry potential and dead signal. She “sees” her mother’s face. She “sees” “light” beyond a “door.”)
Luminescent lines speed down cometlike behind my lids. They’ve hooked me in this black ocean and I feel them reeling me in.
“She’s crying,” Ian says.
NOW I AM AWAKE.
I’M IN A PRIVATE ROOM at what used to be the Clarke Institute but then someone started calling it the Jurassic Clarke and now it’s just CAMH. Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Spoken like a person’s name: Cam Aitch. This is Jimmy’s sometimes home. The trees are in full summer leaf. I look out over an ocean of green. I’m high up, looking toward the campus of the University of Toronto. I see its treetops in the distance.
The TVs they have here lean down from the corners of the rooms, so you have to crane your neck if you want to see anything. It looks like the little boy running toward the camera with his arms spread is actually up there, in the corner of the room, about to leap from the ceiling into my arms.
I guess I’ve been here for a couple of weeks. That’s what they tell me. I have to get my strength back before they send me home, and for now, I’m not even allowed off the floor.
I’m still having seizures. They want me to stay in bed, where it’s safe if it happens, but lying in bed starts to make you feel crazy. I’ve walked around the ward. Nothing to see. I don’t need to make any friends, because I’m not going to be here much longer. I’m not like these people.
After I collapsed in my front hallway, they couldn’t wake me up. Ian says I wasn’t in a coma, because I responded to pain. But I was asleep and I wouldn’t wake up. It’s frightening to think of being unconscious for as long as I was—five whole days. I don’t remember a thing from my sleep, not a flicker of a dream, but since I’ve been awake I’ve begun to wonder if those long nights were so dark because my dreams had already escaped into the world.
Bellevue Square Page 11