The Lost Ones

by Sheena Kamal

  I see her as a cautionary lesson in indulgence.

  “You whore,” I say affectionately to her after each episode. Then she whines at me and puts her face in her water bowl as if she’s trying to drown herself.

  After Leo and Seb leave for the evening, I go to the basement and wake her up. Like me, she prefers to be out when the sun goes down.

  “We’ve got someone to find,” I tell her. Her tail lifts as though she is thinking about wagging it and then falls back onto the floor with a thud. She gets up and goes to the door. She hates to admit it, but she loves watching people almost as much as I do.

  7

  The refusal of the average Canadian to procreate enough to meet replacement levels of 2.1 children has necessitated a progressive immigration policy. We hover under 2, and this isn’t a good thing. We can’t sustain an economy on sub-2 levels. Who will contribute to our gross domestic product? Racists and advocates for closed borders can scream all they want, but unless they start making babies at a much higher rate, multiculturalism is the wave of the Canadian future. Their social safety nets depend on it.

  Which makes Canada a clash of cultures. However, being Canada, it is not so much a clash as it is a polite acknowledgment and a few snide remarks on the golf course. For the most part. As I sit outside the RB Mart in Surrey and watch the Indians go by, I am reminded of this. And by Indians, I mean Indians from India, or sometimes Fiji. The community here is largely South Asian, but patrons are a tapestry of ethnicities. Everyone needs gum and throat lozenges.

  Whisper and I sit on a park bench across the street from the RB Mart and watch the woman behind the counter. She is middle-aged and round-bellied with long dyed-black hair tucked beneath a loose scarf. I admire the efficiency with which she performs her tasks. Economy of movement, slender hands ringing up purchases swiftly, answering questions in a perfunctory manner, no more or less helpful than necessary. When there are no customers, she moves on to inventory.

  This is not a woman who appears to be worried about her husband’s safety.

  At exactly 7 p.m. a young man in his twenties takes over the shift and Bidi Baichwal goes home. I don’t follow her. I know where she lives with her now-missing husband, her elderly parents, and her adolescent children. Professional surveillance is a team effort but, once again, Stevie Warsame is nowhere to be found and a forensic accounting case just landed on Leo’s lap, so for the moment, I’m on my own. I take a chance that Bidi will go home because she just had a long day and I’m betting she’ll want to spend the evening with her children. I stay and watch the young man, Bidi’s cousin, just arrived from India this past year. From the file that Melissa dropped on my desk, I know his name is Amir. He’s a good employee, but has a sorrowful gaze that could give Whisper a run for her money. He continues the shift throughout the evening, but his English is not as sharp as Bidi’s and he takes twice as long to answer questions. People don’t seem to mind, though, because there’s something vulnerable about him, something that makes them either want to be patient or take advantage.

  As the time passes, everything around me grows still and quiet. It reminds me of the moment just before dawn, when silence hangs in the air and sleep becomes impossible. When my monsters come crawling out from under their rock and go marauding into the world, in search of sustenance. I don’t let myself think of Bonnie, though. I don’t even know the girl. From many years of suppressing her memory, I wouldn’t even know where to begin dredging her out again. What I see is my sister Lorelei’s face. What would I do if she’d gone missing? I know instinctively that if it had been Lorelei, I would not be sitting here, on a case.

  At 11 p.m., Amir closes up shop. I follow him to an apartment building that is six blocks away from the Baichwal home. Most of the windows are dark this time of night except for a few night owls. Two minutes after he enters the building, a shadow crosses a window on the third floor. The lights are on in that apartment. Someone has been waiting for him.

  I watch until the lights go out, while the knowledge that there is a missing girl out there with my eyes festers inside me.

  8

  The Kerrisdale house is dark. Everett and Lynn must be sleeping. There is no moon out tonight and no streetlights in front of this yard so it is especially bleak. But even in the dark I can see that it’s a beautiful two-story home with a rock garden in the front and a dapper wooden welcome sign over the door. The sign is hand-made and I can tell that it’s amateur woodwork. I assume that Everett must be responsible for it. Everett and perhaps Bonnie. Did they make it together? From the outside, it is the only evidence that perhaps a child might live there. But this is the address that was scrawled on the back of the photo Everett handed to me outside the café.

  I’m so interested in the sign that I almost don’t notice the man sitting in a dark sedan and watching the house. By the time I do see him, it is already too late to turn back, so I adopt a casual, out-for-a-late-stroll pace. The man isn’t sleeping, so I know that he’s not a cop. Also, he’s eating an apple. I have never before seen a cop eat an apple and, though I suspect it must happen from time to time, I can’t imagine it in a surveillance situation. Everett said that the police logged Bonnie as a runaway. Unlikely, then, that they’d maintain a presence.

  I pass him with Whisper and, after an initial glance in which he has inventoried my features and strands of dark hair creeping out from beneath my hoodie, he dismisses me. I am clearly not a threat, nor whomever he is looking out for, so he returns his attention to the house.

  It doesn’t bother me that he has seen my face because he’ll never remember what I look like come morning. If pressed, he might say “maybe native, average height, skinny.” If he was going to be mean about it, he’d add: “flat chest, no sense of style, ugly dog.”

  I circle back around the block and find a place outside of his line of sight. I watch him watch the house for a while. I wonder if they have hired him to keep an eye out for Bonnie, in case she returns, but dismiss the thought almost immediately. They wouldn’t need someone to watch the house when they’re inside.

  The picture becomes more complicated. There is a third party involved.

  A light goes on in a bedroom over the garage. The window cracks open slightly and a cloud of smoke seeps through. A thin hand emerges and waves the smoke away from the window. Lynn is stress smoking in a room that’s not her own, somewhere she hopes Everett won’t see. From where I’m sitting on a lawn several houses down, I can’t be certain if the not-cop in the sedan has observed this, if he has written it down in his notebook to include in his report. A woman, whose guilty conscience won’t let her sleep, passes her night smoking in the bedroom of her missing child.

  9

  I get home before dawn and sleep until ten. Seb and Leo work from home on Fridays and sometimes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays as well. Tuesdays are their only steadfast office days. Though Seb will most likely leave me alone with the hours of recorded interviews he left for me to transcribe, I know that Leo will call at noon for an update on Harrison Baichwal.

  Seb’s book on where the hell Canada’s foreign aid goes and if it really does get there is a huge undertaking, one that he and I pick up on the side. He’s recently had to take on some freelance projects just to pay the bills but that is the bucket and he is the crab. There is little value for seasoned investigative journalists, not with the Internet enabling just about anyone with a Wi-Fi connection to investigate and also to call himself a reporter. So Seb is also working on The Crow, his syndicated news blog, which is carried by a couple of papers. The work keeps us both busy and me employed, so I have no complaints about the time commitment.

  I step over Whisper and go upstairs into the office. Our wing of the building is mostly empty. There is a small marketing services company next door that doesn’t seem to offer very many services, as their door is always closed.

  When I get to the office, I see that the red light on the office phone isn’t blinking (as usual), but the red li
ght on my mobile is. I forgot it at my desk last night and had not missed its presence at all. Only Seb and Leo call me, anyway, and they aren’t likely to do so much after office hours. I don’t recognize the number on the missed call log—but there is a message.

  The voice is one that I vaguely remember. Hundreds of cigarettes and countless cups of stale coffee have roughened it, but it’s still the journalist I used to know.

  “Nora—I’m sorry, I know you said never to use your name. Fuck. Mary, then. I had a hell of time finding you, lady, so I hope you’re okay. Had to go through Crow, too, which I know you’re gonna hate but it’s an emergency. There’s something I gotta tell you, but not over the phone. We need to meet. Tomorrow morning. Same place we spoke last time. Do you remember? Please, be—”

  The message ends. Either he was cut off by the system or his battery died. Even though he was halted midsentence, I’m sure the last part was a warning. I play the message several times and then slump down in one of the stiff-backed chairs in the waiting room, left over from the previous occupants of the suite.

  All of a sudden I’m scared of what’s happening here. First Everett Walsh and now the journalist. It seems that my past has come looking for me. That its violent fingers have clawed up from the damp soil in the woods where I buried it and it has now returned to pull me back in.

  And, just as suddenly, I need a drink.

  10

  Sometimes when I wake up, I dig out an old hand mirror and stare at my reflection in it. My face always comes as a shock to me. Like a vampire, I avoid looking at myself in mirrors. Unlike a vampire, I expect a reflection, albeit one that is in serious need of an uplift.

  All I see now is a dusky wraith descending into middle age but with none of the milestones that usually go along with it. I cringe at the woman staring back at me in the dim morning light that filters reluctantly into the room. There’s not much that stands out, not much to show the passing of time, but I note that every year my buttocks descend just a fraction of a centimeter more. The general public is not aware of this decline. I’ve been told this is the process of “getting old” and there are injections that I can pay for that will provide some lift, but I have never valued money enough to keep it in any significant amount—rather, never made enough of it to keep it any significant amount. Also, my old bad habits of spending it on booze make it impossible to keep that kind of temptation around.

  Seb and Leo think that I have no sex appeal, that it is a game for the young. I won’t distract their clients or leave them for other men. They think other men don’t pay attention. I can’t argue with this logic, because they’re mostly right. Also, this natural disguise of mine works well in surveillance situations so there is a professional bonus. There’s nothing more invisible than the middle-aged woman, and there’s no denying that middle age is creeping up in time with the descent of my ass, a sort of inverse gravitational relationship.

  After I woke up in the hospital, I used to wear thick panties day and night as an extra protective layer, but a brief stint in a survivor’s support group showed me that I must not punish myself and that I’m not to blame. So, in an act of rebellion, I have mostly discarded the use of underwear altogether. But now . . . now I think I need them. I fish around for a pair with the elastic still intact and I call my bosses to tell them I may have a lead on Harrison Baichwal, but I’ll give them an update tomorrow. There is the transcribing of interviews to be done, but I can do that later.

  Technology is a remarkable thing. It allows for so much work to be accomplished sitting in one’s sweats at the kitchen table, which is what Seb and Leo are probably doing now.

  “Sounds good, Nora,” Seb says over the speakerphone. I hear Leo cursing the coffee machine in the background. “Everything else okay?”

  “That depends on what you mean by okay.”

  “I just mean, do you feel all right?”

  “Yes,” I say, if only because all right is relative. Compared to some people, I am all right. Compared to others, I am an ex-alcoholic survivor, sober off and on for thirteen years, celibate for just as long, who owns no property, has no friends, and spends her nights wandering the city with no one to love except a dog that is perpetually in heat. Compared to those people, I am one country song away from leaping off a bridge.

  Whisper is waiting for me by the door. She can smell my fear and is wondering if she, too, should be scared. If she would be better off taking her chances elsewhere. We never lie to each other, she and I, and we both know that she’s in it for the food.

  I spend the rest of the day surfing the net on the office Wi-Fi. I get three bars here in the basement instead of the normal five I get upstairs, but two bars less is a sacrifice I’m willing to make for free Internet. My mobile rings steadily for an hour. The journalist is desperate to reach me, but I’ve had enough of this shit.

  I put on Nina Simone and her melody drowns out all ambient noise. The good thing about Nina Simone is that you can never think about anything else while you’re listening to her. She commands all attention. You can pull the covers over your head and sink into that voice for days on end. After her, I put on Muddy Waters and then Percy and a little Tom Waits for flavor. I’ve had some personal experience with the blues, but for the past few years I’ve found it more useful to listen to others sing it than wallow in it myself. It allows me to be employable, which I am, but just barely. Lucky for me, Seb and Leo are excellent employers and don’t ask many questions.

  I need a drink so bad that my stomach is in knots. I’m shocked at how my body can remember how good it feels to be buzzed. How it’s always the one escape that I long for when everything else that I touch turns to shit.

  11

  I wait until evening settles in and then I dial the number I’m not supposed to call anymore. He picks up after the fifth ring, the fear that I’ve relapsed overwhelming the urge to shut me out.

  “I need to see you,” I say. “One hour, the bridge.”

  “Nora?” His voice is thick with sleep. I stop to wonder why that would be at this time of day while he fumbles around for his thoughts. Probably napping at his desk with a cold cup of coffee at his elbow. “Goddamn it,” he says when he finally finds them.

  “It’s important.”

  He sighs heavily in response but I know he’ll be there.

  I take the long route around with Whisper at my heels. I let her off leash because we’re just using backstreets and no one will be around this time of the night to take offense.

  They say a sponsor should be a shoulder to cry on, someone to share your burden with, to talk you down off that ledge. There were many nights my ex-sponsor and I shared a comfortable silence where we sat on the hood of his car parked in a lot near the Lions Gate Bridge, drank coffee, and watched the city go to sleep. I didn’t talk about my problems and he didn’t talk about his. We sat and drank until one of us had to pee and then we went our separate ways. Night is the worst time to be alone with your demons, as anyone with demons will tell you. The shadows deepen in your imagination, turn menacing as the sun drops out of sight. It’s when you are most desperate and will make the little compromises with yourself to get that one taste, that one drink, and then what’s another . . . and yet another couple of beers after that. He understood that intuitively.

  One night he moved to pat my shoulder and I grabbed his wrist and slammed the heel of my hand into his nose. Blood spurted everywhere. That didn’t bother him much at the time. He just reached for my hands, twisted them behind my back, and cuffed me before I realized what was happening. The cold metal slid over my wrists and I learned something then about keeping secrets. That some people are better at it than I am.

  After that night he decided that we weren’t the right fit. That he couldn’t help me in the way that I needed. Whatever that meant.

  My ex-sponsor is already waiting at our usual lot by the time I arrive. He unfolds his long body from the ludicrous MINI Cooper that he insists on driving. It’s his singular p
rize from what I can only assume was a disastrous marriage to someone who enjoys confined spaces.

  “I told you to find a new sponsor,” is the first thing out of his mouth when he sees me. I haven’t seen him since last year when he tried to put a hand on my shoulder, but the change in him is startling. His nose is still slightly crooked. I am unable to take my eyes from it. His hair is flying in every direction and his eyes are red-rimmed. I wonder if he has been hitting the sauce again. If his failure to nurture me back to health and well-being has driven him back to the bottle.

  “I did. She asks a lot of questions. I think she might be a spy.”

  He sighs again, as if I’m the hugest pain in the ass he’s ever encountered. The other cops called him Bazooka because of his name, even though there’s nothing loud or forceful about him. They could have at least given it some effort. Then the World Cup went to Brazil and a soccer ball was named. Suddenly, Brazuca became “the Brazilian” even though he is actually Portuguese mixed with British and has lived in Canada for most of his life.

  I search his features for a flash of the exotic but besides his dark eyes and a barely distinguishable tan, his demeanor is decidedly British. Reserved, self-deprecating. He’s tall and lanky but walks with a limp that becomes more pronounced when it rains, which is seven months out of the year. At first I thought the limp was a ploy to get women to be nice to him but I asked him once if it still hurt and he didn’t lie. Later on, after some snooping, I learned he took a bullet on the job. He is a detective, he explained to me the night he cuffed me, not a uniform man on the front lines, so I know there is a story there that he is not telling.