What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  He gets up one morning or afternoon to use the washroom and sees a white flat object that has been pushed under his door: a sheet of paper folded into a shape that isn’t quite a rectangle. When he unfolds it, it says: Dear Clif, I am yor frend. Love, Olivia. He understands the letter’s intent clearly: Another prisoner has reached out to him.

  He says to Cleo, You can let the kids come in.

  No, she says. They’ll jump all over you. They can’t be still for two minutes.

  The pain meds or his injury keep him suspended for what he later knows is two weeks and then he wakes up and it’s like hitting the ground, like he’s been born, an elk onto frozen tundra and expected to run, or like in that movie he saw this spring, Keanu Reeves being dumped wet and naked out of his pod.

  He thinks now of Sophie, lost and hungry, maybe hurt, wondering why he doesn’t come for her. He thinks of Loretta and his head is split — on one side his worry: How is she doing? And on the other side fear and rage growing like white shoots on a potato. He has to slam that door.

  He thinks that Cleo is probably saving his life but he doesn’t want it to be that. He doesn’t want to be in her debt again, to need her, to owe her anything more.

  In the end Cliff has to tell about Loretta, too. He lets himself sink into the shame. He just adds it to the tab. He tells Ben, who has come all the way out to Cleo’s, who is sitting by Cliff’s bed, in the semi-darkness, on the chair where Cleo leaves his puke bowl. He just tells Ben.

  Ben seems impressed, rather than disdainful. Holy fuck, Cliff! He says. As if Cliff has participated in some really stupid extreme sport, the kind guys boast about.

  Maybe he has, at that. He has a skull fracture, a concussion, three broken ribs, a chipped hipbone and ankle, a torn tendon in his knee. And a bitten tongue. The rest is just scrapes and bruises. The broken ribs, that’s the pain in his back, the injury that’s making it hard for him to breathe.

  He says to Ben: Don’t tell Cleo.

  What? She’s going to have to know.

  No, don’t tell her.

  She’s not going to let it go, bro.

  Just don’t tell her.

  Okay, man. Ben looks pleased, excited. He reaches over with his right hand and punches Cliff lightly on his arm.

  It’s a game, to Ben: Cliff can see that. Ben takes a sort of delight in it. He seems to see Cliff as some sort of star athlete, an explorer of the unknown and dangerous. It makes Cliff nervous. No good can come of this. No good can come of pretending you’re something you’re not.

  But it’s more than that. He cringes when Ben talks about it, uses words like bitch. He wants to say to Ben that women aren’t like that, that Loretta is an abnormality, and probably broken in some way by somebody else. He wants Ben to know that it’s usually women, in his experience and observation, who get thrown down stairs. It doesn’t seem good, the glee that Ben is expressing. As if he really wants to believe there are a lot of violent and crazy women. As if he’s only too happy to have evidence of their existence. It’s not good.

  At the same time, he lets it go. He’s not unhappy to have Ben’s admiration rather than his pity or disdain.

  Ben and two of his friends, Coop, the lean-jawed one, and Rav, the Indian guy, cook up a plan. They will pound on Loretta’s door. They will demand to come in. They’ll barge in. They’ll storm the apartment like firefighters. Like ninjas. Like a swat team. They’ll kick open the door. They’ll hold her down. They’ll threaten her with fake badges. They’ll retrieve his clothes, his boxes. The cat if they can find it. His armchair. They’ll throw something of hers down the stairs, in repayment for the TV. What does she have that’s expensive and breakable? Does she have a computer? They’ll throw her computer down the stairs.

  No, no, Cliff says. You can’t do that kind of thing. They’re all speaking in hushed voices in the downstairs room at Cleo’s. Cliff is not supposed to be agitated but they’re more concerned about Cleo hearing.

  Dude’s right, Rav says. It’s no good, guys. She’ll call the cops.

  So a second plan, which they like better than the first, which they call Black Ops.

  Nothing good will come of this, Cliff thinks.

  They’ll go in daytime, when Loretta’s at work. Let themselves in with Cliff’s key. They ask Cliff to make a floor plan of the flat. They put an X on the map for the spot where his things are, where the storage locker key hangs. They make a list of Cliff’s belongings. They write down a description of the cat. There’s only one cat, Cliff says. If there’s a cat, it’s my cat.

  Cliff feels very tired. They are boys. They are just boys.

  They could have set it up on the phone but they drive all the way out to Cleo’s and huddle around Cliff and cook it up and make him very tired.

  Cleo comes downstairs and tells them to leave. They pat Cliff’s shoulders. They’re all very excited. Coop’s lean cheekbones are red; Ben and Rav are giggling. Cleo frowns at them. They leave.

  When they come back, they’re less giddy. They have got Cliff’s stuff from the storage locker, but not his clothes, his jeans and button-downs, his work uniforms. Those are gone. Threw them out, the bitch! Coop says, and Cliff winces. They have retrieved the armchair. Cleo looks at it like it needs fumigating. She says they can put it in the garage.

  No sign of the cat. No cat dishes or litter bin, even, Ben says. I thought to check.

  Oh, Sophie.

  He’s not allowed to get up and look for her. If he doesn’t let his brain rest it will take years to get better. He might have permanent damage.

  Cleo drives him to his checkup with the neurologist, who tells him: You have an earlier skull fracture. See? He points to the x-ray pinned to his light board. There’s a white line sort of on the front and top, to the right and above his eyebrow. You did that as a child, the neurologist says. We can see that it healed while your skull was still growing. There was likely some bleeding, some bruising.

  Cleo has come in with him, against his wishes. He feels her grow cold and withdrawn, beside him. Neither of them say anything until they are in Cleo’s car. Then she says: You fell a lot. You and Che roughhoused a lot. I don’t remember a specific time. Then she bursts into tears, cries hard for about two minutes, wipes her face and starts the car up.

  The neurologist has told him: You need to rest more. No exertion, no thinking! If you don’t you could be permanently incapacitated. You could have headaches, seizures. You might not be permitted to operate a motor vehicle again.

  He has to stay in bed in Cleo’s dark basement room. He’s allowed to read a little, watch TV a little. That’s it. He sleeps a lot. When he sleeps, he dreams of Sophie, and in his dreams she’s sentient, and talks to him with a human voice. She reminds him of the girl in his building, the girl with the tattoo. But she’s a cat.

  He knows where Sophie is. It comes to him one morning as he is waking up. He knows where she is. He needs Cleo to drive him into the city. She says No: it’s been only three weeks. He says he’ll wear dark wrap-around sunglasses. Sit quietly in the car all the way there. He’ll go in and look. Ten minutes, that’s all. Ten minutes.

  Cleo likes cats. He knows that she’ll give in. She does.

  HE HAS TO WAIT for someone to buzz him in and then he’s going up the stairs, trying not to rush and raise the blood pressure in his brain. The familiar stained and scuffed floors and walls fill him with nostalgia. To the second floor. Along the corridor. He knocks and knocks at her door. Nothing. He had thought she never went out, but maybe she has moved out. It has been a few months, now, since he himself moved in with Loretta. He hadn’t thought of that.

  But there’s still somewhere else, something he didn’t mention to Cleo. She’ll give him heck but he’s in here now. To the back stairs, now: the basement. There’s no light bulb, as usual, and he feels his way in, groping, counting steps, worrying about bumping his head against something. Why hadn’t he thought of a flashlight? Then the wall, where he was expecting it. Turn to the right, now, and ke
ep going. Which door? His outstretched hands touch things he has to identify: grating, roll of something smooth — linoleum maybe?

  At one point his feet hit something immoveable, and he thinks his path is completely blocked, but patting with his hands, he finds tacked boxes of asphalt shingles, the top boxes opened. Only knee high, this barricade, though heavy, and too deep to step over; he has to crawl. The mechanical parts of the building shriek and groan, suddenly. A swath of cobwebs across his face, himself swabbing involuntarily to wipe them clear.

  Something he brushes against comes clanking down all around him, clanging and echoing. Metal of some sort. Another turn, a fork in the corridor. Where is he now? A locked door. No. But there was a locked door, he remembers. Door to the electrical room: not the one he wants. The other door will be just a few feet further.

  And here it is, the cool metal knob turning in his hand, the door resisting fractionally on its spring.

  He calls. It seems there’s a listening, or that something has stopped moving. Might be rats. Mice, anyway. He can smell mice, old clothes or furniture, bicycle oil. Then he thinks: light switch, feels inside, pats the wall down. There.

  A room of wire cages, lockers. This is the room. He calls again, and realizes: small odds. Such small odds. Something folds up, makes itself small, inside his chest.

  And then there she is, blinking in the light. She’s thin and covered with dust, but it’s her. She walks up to him, mewing a little. She head-butts his shin. He picks her up. She purrs.

  Cleo and the kids, grinning, when he carries Sophie back to the car.

  The Knuckleheads

  ON THE FIRST FERRY Ben buys gift-shop souvenirs: a plush toy otter, supine, with a felt clam between its paws, a wind-up plastic hermit crab with a bright orange plastic anemone riding it. Do you think he’ll like these? he asks. Is the stuffed toy safe for the baby? Mandalay understands he is nervous, wants to arrive bearing gifts.

  He is distressed that he has nothing for Crystal. You’re the gift, Mandalay says. She’s being facetious, but really: What can he offer that won’t be too ludicrously ordinary for the occasion?

  But she understands: The gifts are an act of penance, for something.

  On the ferry he plays with the wind-up toy. He’ll break it, she thinks, but she doesn’t say anything. Sunlight shafts through the big slanted windows, sudden warmth. She closes her eyes: She is tired with the sort of tiredness that must be like battle fatigue. Too many losses, recently. Too many lost battles. She is empty.

  She had wanted them all to travel up to Butterfly Lake together: Cleo and Cliff and Ben and herself. But Ben had wanted to go a few days before Cleo: Cleo had wanted to bring the children and Trent, and Trent couldn’t leave till the weekend, and Cliff had appointments. She had cried, sitting on the floor of her jewel-box apartment with her telephone. She doesn’t drive. She must be a passenger, be carried along by other people’s plans.

  The second ferry, to Powell River, then the winding drive along the fjord, to Guisachan Falls. I can’t believe I’ve never been up here before, Ben keeps saying. He is enthusiastic about it all: the long drives, the two ferry rides, the small city with its potholes and derelict houses, its smokestacks, its new mall glittering like a squat alien colony on the outskirts, the steep and winding highway leading up to Butterfly Lake, the ascent through the overarching cedar and then dark upright spruce taxing the engine of his little car. He changes gears and the car seems to hesitate and then move into the next grade with a sort of resigned determination. It’s, like, wilderness, he keeps saying.

  Mandalay feels the old heaviness descend on her: the darkness of the forest, the assault of maple and salal and salmonberry on the roadside, the effort of climbing the thirty kilometres from sea level weighing on her as if she were doing the engine’s work herself. She has last been on this highway eight years ago, riding pillion on Horst’s Harley. Horst, her fiancé. He’d wanted to meet her mother; one of his eccentric, old-world quirks. And he’d had romantic notions about the wilderness. They’d had rain all the way from Powell River, had arrived stiff with cold, soaked through under their leathers. Horst had loved it. She’d developed a stubborn bronchial infection.

  And before that, another gap of about eight years since she’d hitched a ride with Danny Jones out of Powell River, followed him to Vancouver.

  A perpetual passenger. Maybe she needs to get her driver’s licence. Though at least, on this trip, she’s riding in a newish car with a working heater and windshield wipers.

  Ben asks, Why is it so far? What’s up there, in the mountains? Why is the community there?

  She has to say that she’s not sure, exactly. There’s a hydroelectric dam, she says. And a mill.

  So the lake wasn’t always there?

  She doesn’t know. It feels to her that Butterfly Lake has always existed, and yet it can’t have been there for more than a hundred years. Her sense of its history is muddled, fragmented. The community she remembers from her childhood is one of back-to-the-land types, growing their organic beets and cabbages, holding solstice parties. Macramé and hummus and homemade granola, she thinks.

  Maybe there was, like, a rich farming valley before the dam, Ben suggests.

  Maybe. But she has never heard that — never heard of people’s land flooded, any of the community displaced.

  It must have been so cool to grow up out here, Ben says. In the natural landscape. In the wilderness. It must have been so free and healthy.

  I was a teenager when I last lived here, she says. I just wanted to get out.

  He can understand that, Ben says. But then he’s exclaiming at the steep drop now from the guardrails down to the river, the tightness of the turn, the narrow bridge open to only one lane of traffic at a time. Man, extreme! he says. This is wild!

  She never comes here, but only sees Crystal at Cleo’s house, maybe once a year.

  Then the dam, and a few more kilometres to Butterfly Lake. Then they’re at the house, and Crystal is running at the car, her off-kilter run, arms and legs moving out of sync. She’s dressed up: She has on an oddly girlish dress with a full skirt and puffed sleeves and a floral print. Her lipstick’s a strange harsh colour, a bright geranium, and she’s wearing pink cowboy boots. Her greying hair hangs down her back in a long braid; it reaches almost to her waist.

  And Ben gets out of the car and walks toward her, with his expensive shirt and jeans and his artful light beard, his shining, clean, well-cared-for teeth and hair, and he takes a breath, squares his shoulders, murmurs Mom?

  Crystal’s self-conscious screech, then: Omigod he looks just like his Dadda. They embrace, Ben almost towering over Crystal, Crystal hugging him awkwardly, her words coming out in strange artificial-sounding squawks. She can never just be natural. Crystal is never at home in her own skin. Mandalay tries, but Crystal’s awkwardness flays her nerves.

  Crystal’s husband Darrell comes out of the house then, comes up to Crystal and Ben. He gets bushier of beard and bigger around every time she sees him, a demented mountain man, something out of a horror movie involving axes and canoes. She waits for Ben to turn and look at Darrell and startle, and he does. You don’t really want to see a man who looks like Darrell coming suddenly into a clearing in the woods.

  Ben, says Darrell. Good to see you. He puts out his hand.

  My baby boy! Crystal says, and again it sounds false, like bad acting. Why should it? She’s sure that Crystal is having some pretty strong maternal or parental response to Ben. Why can’t she just let it emerge naturally? It’s like she’s rehearsed a false response to cover her natural expression. Mandalay winces.

  Ben, though, does not seem to be put off by it. He embraces Crystal. He shakes Darrell’s hand. He pats the two dogs who have bounded up from somewhere, barking and slavering. His body relaxes. He smiles. He is all grace.

  Only she is stiff and unhappy, as if she has been trussed up and delivered to the wrong house.

  CLIFF SAYS from the front passenger se
at: I don’t recognize any of this.

  Cleo doesn’t, either. The turnoff should be along here, should appear soon, but she doesn’t recognize landmarks. The slopes above the highway have been debrided of their thick forest, and there is raw earth, some red roots and bark, a swag of glinting houses. No landmarks. The highway has changed, too — it’s been widened, straightened, and the new detour around the town, which they’ve just taken, has removed recognizable marks — billboards, streets — and replaced them with overpasses. She has not expected this. She does not know where they are. How long has it been? Ten years, maybe. She has been back only once, about ten years ago.

  Do I turn or not? Trent demands, not slowing the SUV. She is supposed to be navigating, but what she’s seeing outside doesn’t translate into what she remembers. She thinks: I should have been driving. I could do it by feel, the feel of the road, if I were driving.

  Quick, Trent says, his voice rising. Turn or not? But he hasn’t slowed.

  Almost too late, she sees the sign. Turn, turn! she yelps, from the back seat.

  Trent yanks the wheel around and Sam’s car seat slides toward her on the back seat, scraping her wrist. Olivia, on her other side, squeals and protests. Hey! Daddy! Cliff grabs the door handle.

  Next time, give me more warning, Trent snarls. How far now? Quick!

  You could slow down, she points out.

  Trent slows to an exaggerated crawl. Cliff stares out the window, whether looking for the house or removing himself from the conversation, she can’t tell.

  But then, a few metres past the corner, things snap into their proper place. The moss-covered trees overarching the road, the thick undergrowth of salal and sword ferns, the dim wet gloom. There’s the driveway, at last, the hand-lettered sign nailed to the bole of the enormous spruce. Cleo spots the 70s A-frame, identifies it, though it’s been painted blue and disguised by additions, by the mountain rising behind the house — the only part of the landscape that isn’t altered.