Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  It feels odd not to be flanked by the other—no, not candidates. Not any more. Jason is on his way to Saskatoon, Jaya to Montreal. As for Philip—

  Toronto? Or Cape Breton Island? Where he was living, or where he was from?

  “Gotta hand it to the guy,” Jason said just an hour or so ago, once the three of them had found each other in the departure lounge. “He got the girl and the money.”

  “Jason, have some respect for once!” Alone among the candidates, Jaya had shed tears at the award ceremony the night before. Then, as the audience reacted to the news, she had stripped off her bracelets and pulled out her earrings—a traditional act of honouring the dead, Jill supposed.

  “What I can’t understand,” she went on now, “is what got into that girl. I mean, how could she just throw her career away like that?”

  “Maybe she knew old Phil was going to win, so she made him name her in his will before he got his leg over.”

  “Jason!” She punched his bicep, hard.

  Just then Jill’s flight was called. “You two should get married,” she said as she gathered up her coat and purse, enjoying the astonished look the young people gave first her, then each other.

  The plane has levelled off, achieving that illusion of stillness it will maintain for the next several hours. After take-off, flying is a bit of a bore, Jill must admit. A thing for which she should be grateful. After all, what would make it exciting? A sudden silence. Flickering lights. Then that plunge, which she has read can take several minutes. Several minutes of knowing the thing you spend your life trying not to know.

  Did Philip have an inkling? And where is he now? Not in the hold, surely. Jill tucks her feet up. Then she puts them flat on the floor again. Silly. The logistics involved—body, box, paperwork—would take more than one night.

  She slept well, and still feels remarkably rested and refreshed. Some burden seems to have been lifted from her. It solves a lot of problems, she remembers her father once saying about death. But what connection could there be between her light-heartedness this morning and what happened the night before?

  Olympia Featherstone had just been introduced, and was about to make one of her rare public appearances to announce the winner and present the cheque. As they all applauded, an OFAFF employee pulled the curtain aside for the old lady. There emerged, slowly, the tip of a cane. Then the polished toe of a custom-made orthopedic shoe. The audience kept applauding, waiting for a knee, a hand, the gleam of silvered hair. Instead, there was a pause. The shoe withdrew. Followed by the cane. The employee holding the curtain appeared to receive some direction from backstage. Then he too slipped out of sight behind the rippling velour.

  The applause petered out. A minute passed. Two. Finally another, older OFAFF employee emerged and went to the podium.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there has been … Mr. Philip Phelps is … that is, he would have been … the recipient of this year’s Olympia Featherstone Award For Fiction. However … unfortunately … Mr. Phelps met with … Mr. Phelps died. Suddenly. We are deeply saddened. Please—” The audience was beginning to murmur. The employee had to raise his voice. “Please … we ask you to proceed back out to the reception room. Coffee will be served.” At this point the younger employee re-emerged and whispered something to the older, who announced, “And dessert. Has also been assembled.”

  Over coffee and their second dessert of the evening, which everyone was suddenly quite hungry for, the story that no one must ever tell was leaked. Sometime between dinner and the award ceremony, Philip and his sparkler slipped upstairs to his room. From there, the front desk received an hysterical call. Staff found the young woman wrapped in a sheet, and Philip on his back on the bed, a look of profound surprise shaping his stiffening features.

  Joy. Is that what this is, Jill wonders, not for the first time. This feeling of lightness she woke up with? She has, of course, felt joy before. But it’s been so long that it seems a new thing. Actually, it’s more like an absence. Of an absence. Does that count as a presence? She is still aware that Eliot is gone. She just doesn’t care anymore. She doesn’t care about the award or the money either. Is perfectly happy to be going home with nothing.

  No. Not nothing. She opens her purse. Pulls out her wallet. Yes, she did keep that business card. “You can always order it through my website,” the potter, a tall Dutch woman, told her the other day when she was deciding for the ninth time not to treat herself to the raven plate. The potter was not much younger than Jill, and seemed to understand her hesitation. “I can ship to anywhere in the world.”

  Jill decides she will order the plate. It will be fun to imagine it travelling the breadth of the country, arriving at her door miraculously intact. She looks out her tiny window, happy as a child to see that they are flying above the clouds.

  WITNESS

  As soon as Harriet’s in, the second she hears the screen door bang shut behind her, she feels an arm come round her neck.

  “Ranald?” She can hardly gasp the name. The arm tightens. Something with a point pushes into the small of her back. Breath—smelling of Juicy Fruit gum—blows hot across her cheek.

  She turns her head to the right and the pressure on her throat eases. It can’t be Ranald. He doesn’t chew gum. And not even Ranald would play a trick like this. “What do you want?” she says. Her voice surprises her—low and calm-sounding.

  No answer. Just a sharp intake of breath. The arm at her neck is trembling, and she detects a tremor in the hard point digging in just below her back ribs. Is he just a kid? One of the town boys, maybe, who stand in a sullen pack outside the 7-Eleven?

  “Tell you what.” She tries to sound companionable, to take the tone she used to with Ranald when she had to coax him out of one of his sulks, give him some means of retreat with honour. “You can just let go of me. I won’t turn around. I won’t look at you. I’ll never know who you are. You can get out of here, really fast, and it will be all right. You won’t be in any trouble.”

  Whoever he is, he probably came up here on a dare, and can’t—

  She’s on the floor. On her hands and knees. A second shove, from a foot to her buttock, pushes her flat. She breathes in the dusty smell of the rag rug.

  “Where is it?” He sounds like he’s trying to make his voice deeper and rougher than it is. The foot gouges her buttock. “Where?”

  “You mean—my money?” Another gouge. “My purse is in the bedroom. On the dresser. I don’t have much—”

  He grabs her bathing-suit straps. Pulls her up onto her knees. She scrambles to get her feet under her. Then his arm is at her throat again. The pointy thing in her back.

  “Go get it! Move!” His voice cracks on the last word.

  They do a clumsy dance out of the living-dining room, around the corner, past the bathroom. She thinks of something and stops. He shoves her. “Wait.” He shoves her again. “No! Wait. Please. There is a mirror on the dresser. I promised I wouldn’t look at you. So put your hand over my eyes. Or turn us around and back us into the bedroom. That way you’ll know I haven’t seen you.”

  They stand still. She can feel him panting, can smell the Juicy Fruit on his breath. All at once he swings her to the side, shoves her onto the bathroom floor. She slides on the tile, slams her head against the toilet. Sees stars. Hears him going into the bedroom. A clatter. A thump. Then he’s pounding past her, back through the cottage, out the door and gone.

  Slowly, she sits up. Touches her head where it hit the toilet. No blood, but a goose egg rising. Her knees are red from where they skidded on the rug and the tile. Her elbow hurts. And she’s starting to stiffen up all over.

  But she’s okay. And utterly amazed at herself. The way she remembered that trick of turning her head so she could breathe. When was the Safety for Seniors talk? Last winter. And she almost didn’t go. Figured it would just be common sense, nothing new. But she did go, and sh
e did learn something. “If someone comes up behind you and puts their arm across your windpipe,” the young police officer told them, “turn your head into the crook of his elbow. That will give you some breathing space.” What would have happened if she hadn’t heard that bit of advice? She could be unconscious. Brain-damaged. Dead, even. She feels her head again. She should put some ice on that lump. She imagines it sticking straight up like a lump in a cartoon, pointy and bald, pain-stars orbiting round, and starts to giggle.

  Is she in shock? Is that why she felt no fear, tried to negotiate with her attacker and even thought to warn him about the mirror? Whenever she has imagined one of Ranald’s threatened scenarios coming true, she has seen herself terrified—witless and begging. Maybe the fear will come later. Right now, she feels proud of herself. Deserving of a treat. Ice cream? A gin and tonic before lunch?

  Odd how she thought at first it was Ranald, that he had driven up a day early without Patrick, hidden inside the cottage while she was down on the dock and waited for her to come up the ramp. Just so he could grab her from behind and teach her a lesson. I don’t like you up there by yourself. When did he start standing too close, literally talking down to her, forcing her to peer up at him like a child? And when did he stop calling her Mom? He doesn’t call her anything now. Just you. Thank God he and Patrick aren’t coming till tomorrow. She’ll have time to put some ice on her head. Come up with a story. Anything will be better than the truth—that she left the back door unlocked while she was down on the dock and one of the yokels, as he calls them, got in. So did she fall down the back porch steps? Yes. That’s plausible. My injuries are consistent with a fall down the back porch steps, she thinks, and giggles again.

  Her purse. Damn. How will she explain having no purse, no keys, no money? She gets up, limps into the bedroom and there, like an answer, is her purse lying open on the floor. Hanging onto the dresser with one hand, she bends carefully and picks it up. Credit and debit cards. House keys. Only the cash is gone. So yes, her attacker must have been just a kid.

  She should be on the phone right now, to alert the authorities. She almost giggles again. Alert the authorities sounds so pretentious. What could she tell them? That she was mugged by somebody with Juicy Fruit breath? Even if they managed to catch the kid, it wouldn’t make any difference. Boys will always gather outside the 7-Eleven with nothing to do except build up resentment against cottagers like her. Besides. Ranald might get wind of it if she makes a report. She can imagine him badgering an OPP officer, refusing to listen when they try to explain that if his mother did not see the kid’s face—

  The car. Oh no.

  She runs—stumbles—out of the bedroom around to the back door and looks out. There it is. Of course it’s still there. She’d have heard him driving away. She’d like to go out and touch it, but tells herself not to be silly. On her way back through the cottage, she does allow herself to check that her car keys are on the mantle where she always puts them when she comes in. Yes. There they are, on their ring with the big plastic daisy.

  So there’s nothing to be done. She’ll just have her lunch. And she’ll have ice cream after, not gin and tonic before. Because she’s going to have to drive into town to replace her cash. And tomorrow she’ll tell Ranald and Patrick that she fell down the steps. Falling down the steps is less blameworthy than leaving the back door unlocked. Nothing for Ranald to lecture her about. Make her feel childish and stupid about. Yes. That’s what she’ll do.

  Harriet is a painter. Right now she’s in the middle of painting the lake as seen through the living room window. She has set her easel back far enough that it’s going to be as much about the window frame, curtain, and sill as the water.

  Ever since she turned seventy, she has been thinking about doing a self-portrait. She never used to see the point of them, though she liked Rembrandt’s renditions of himself through the years. And while she stared into the mirror as much as any girl, her own young face never struck her as remarkable. Good-enough cheekbones. Nose a little long, or maybe it was the short upper lip making it look that way. Wide-spaced hazel eyes—her best feature, she supposed, since it most resembled what she saw in magazines.

  She’s not sure what Halvor saw in her. Likely the top of my head, she used to joke to company, when the talk turned to how they met. He was a tall young Dane whose family had immigrated when he was ten. Her first week at U of T, when he came up to her at a mixer, smiled down from his height and asked her to dance, his accent thrilled her. Her own roots were Scots-English and her family had been in Canada for three generations, so Halvor was exotic. Her very own Viking. She liked his long hands and feet, his bony red face, his pale eyes like chips of blue ice. Above all, she liked his yellow hair that always shocked her when she saw it, as if it wasn’t quite real. All the men in her family were dark, like her. Her mother was fair, but nothing like Halvor. “Going to stir up the gene pool with that one,” her father, a high-school science teacher, said when she told her parents she was engaged.

  Her own hair is white now. If she finds an errant black strand, she pulls it out. She never coloured it, just let it go when it started to turn grey in her thirties, intrigued by the streaks coming in. Changes in her face and body intrigued her, too, over the years. She could never understand other women’s dismay over their sags and bulges and lines.

  The only time she did not like how she looked—hated it, in fact—was when she was pregnant with Ranald. She wasn’t one of those women who glow, who decide they’re goddesses or some fool thing. The whole nine months, the nights upon nights she sat up in bed with heartburn, pounding her chest and drinking milk, which she disliked, she felt as if something was being done to her. And her labour was simply appalling. She couldn’t believe it. She alternately screamed at Halvor to go away, then screamed for him to come back. Then, when they set Ranald bloody and squirming onto her stomach, the first thing she saw was his hair. Gucky black strands like an old man’s comb-over. Maybe if his hair had been yellow, if she had looked and seen a tiny version of Halvor—

  “I didn’t know one end of the baby from the other,” she was finally able to joke to friends, once Ranald was in school and she had some time again. “Halvor had to show me how to feed him, how to change him, everything.” She was an only child, but Halvor was the oldest of five. And he loved being a father—would rush home from work to be in time to give Ranald his bath. “These big hands,” she would say, “and so gentle.”

  Until Ranald was born, Harriet had no idea how much she was counting on her and Halvor’s life together continuing the way it always had. When Halvor went off in the morning to the civil engineering firm that had recruited him right out of university, she would tidy and scrub. She loved their little apartment in the middle of downtown, would never let a hair remain in a sink or a snarl of dust gather behind a door. Once the housework was done, she would read until it was time to fix the Danish open-faced sandwiches Halvor had taught her to make. They would go to bed after lunch, and she would almost have to push him out the door or else he’d be late back to work. Then in the afternoon she would paint in the sun room, where there was just space for her easel and a cabinet full of brushes and tubes of oils. Most often, she painted the view from their apartment—roofs and treetops and backyards, all through a criss-cross of electrical wires. She had always loved the wrong sides and the backs of things. Her favourite portrait of Halvor was one she did of him from the back. His eyebrow showed, and one sharp cheekbone, the line of his jaw, his neck and part of a naked shoulder. But the focus was that hair, glorious and yellow, still young and bright, right up until the day he died.

  She never painted Ranald, though she did do a few sketches of him sleeping when he was little. He would not sit for her, refused to even try, and she was secretly relieved. The idea of being alone with her son for hours in the taut silence that stretches between sitter and portrait artist filled her with a kind of dread.

  For
years after Ranald was born and they had moved from the apartment to a bungalow just north of the city, she could not paint at all. It wasn’t simply lack of time. Everything around her was too spacious and blank—the lawns, the roads, the shopping malls. She felt as if she were getting lost in all that space—thinning out, stretching, becoming as transparent as the sky. Gradually, as Ranald grew and left her alone for longer periods of time, she managed to gather herself back to herself. She found that she could paint her suburban world from inside the house, framed by a window. It was good practice for painting the lake up at the cottage, which at first overwhelmed her with its immensity.

  Twice this summer she has started a self-portrait. She has rigged up a mirror beside her easel, blocked in some colour, then scraped the canvas. She worries about committing something hokey like Norman Rockwell’s portrait of himself painting himself. But she can’t give up on the idea. She has looked through photographs Halvor took of her, thinking she might work from one of them. He’s been dead for eleven years, so the oldest she appears in any of them is fifty-nine. There’s one of her coming up the ramp, head down, watching her feet. She supposes she could age the figure, thicken the body and whiten the hair.

  Lately she’s begun to wonder if what she really wants is not to paint herself but to be painted. To be seen. We will witness to each other’s lives. She and Halvor had that written into their marriage vows.

  Lunch. That’s why she was heading up the ramp from the dock in the first place. And some food will raise her blood-sugar level. And that might—what? Wake her up? Make her shake? Cry? Maybe she is in shock. If it wasn’t for her stiffness and bruises, she could believe she dreamed what had just happened.

  In the kitchen, she cuts a generous slice of the cold meat loaf she brought with her from the condominium. She checks that the mustard is out on the lazy susan on the dining table, chops up a tomato, puts the chunks in a bowl then adds some sugar snap peas for green. There’s a half baguette in the bread box. She puts it on the board with the bread knife and butter bell, chooses an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter, thinks about the three arrowroot cookies sitting in a little dish in the fridge, then remembers ice cream. Her reward for being brave. If that’s what this calmness is.