Late Breaking

by K. D. Miller

  She knows she is supposed to tell him what’s bothering her. She’s read the relationship books. Instead of fingering her smooth little stone, she should pull it out of her pocket and show it to him. That’s how a marriage works. And she can tell he knows something’s up. She comes home to sparkling surfaces, fluffed sofa cushions and exquisitely cooked dinners. He follows her around with the look of a chastened child who wants to make things right again. So yes, she should tell him. Put him out of his misery. And she would, too, if she wasn’t enjoying his misery so much.

  It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when she loved the vinegary smell of his feet, the tickle of his pubic hair nudging her cheek and the salt of his cum at the back of her throat. She loved his mane of brown hair, too—yes, she married a Leo with a mane—and the cruel little sculpted goatee, darker brown, that ringed his mouth and bobbed when he talked.

  But most of all, she loved his voice—rolling and sonorous and big—everything an author’s voice should be. Leo had a way of pausing mid-sentence, mouth a little open, head cocked as if listening, as if waiting to be given the perfect phrase, the only possible word.

  In those days, Fiona used to dream of him publishing his novel and being her book club’s guest of honour. She imagined him standing tall in one of the group’s immaculate living rooms, pinching the crystal stem of a wine glass between his thick fingers, beaming and booming down on the other women’s upturned faces. Such a modest little dream. But cherished. Necessary, too. What else has kept her going for nine years? What else has pulled her out of bed all the mornings of all the weeks, then pushed her out the door onto the subway, then out onto the sidewalk for three blocks in the heat and the rain and the snow, then up the steps and through the door to her job at The Cred?

  It frightens her to think that the dream might never come true. Does every marriage reach this point, and either break in two or just carry on for the sake of carrying on? Most of the women in her book club are married. Maybe she could ask them. After all, criticizing your husband to the shrieking delight of the other wives is de rigueur at the meetings.

  But she’s not exactly friends with any of those women. They never have runs in their pantyhose. Their skirts never trail threads or their blouses come untucked. Most of them are professionals—two lawyers, a doctor, a psychotherapist, an architect. They talk loud, their voices sharp. When they all get going at once, then explode into laughter, Fiona thinks she might hate them.

  Of course, there is Miranda. The quiet one. Older than all the rest. Nice enough. Retired from that creepy job she had for ages. Fiona can see herself talking to her. But what would be the point? It would be like confiding in a nun. She would have to assume that whole areas of reality were off limits.

  Leo is licking his fingers. Sucking, actually. Sucking the butter off each finger in turn. Fiona watches him. Mentally caresses her stone.

  *

  Leo is at his desk, ostensibly thumbing through his much-annotated manuscript, but in fact listening for the sound of Fiona leaving the apartment for the day. There. Hall closet door opening. Closing. Front door open. Closed. Click of the deadbolt. Steps fading down the hall. Ping of the elevator.

  She’s gone. The sudden, all-over relief never fails to amaze him. It’s like the hit of a drug. Now the day is his alone, till six o’clock. He can spread out into the rest of the apartment. Relax in the big reclining chair in the master bedroom that used to be his study before he was uprooted and moved into this matchbox. Listen to music. Even go to the movies if he likes, provided he’s home in time to have the place immaculate and a good supper table-ready the minute Fiona comes back through the door.

  Years ago he would have felt free to mention seeing a movie, would even have discussed it while they ate together. “A writer,” he told Fiona early in their marriage, “is someone on whom nothing is lost.” Years ago, though, he could conveniently forget that he was not in fact voicing his own thoughts but quoting Henry James. And it was so easy to convince not just Fiona but himself, too, that any book he might read, any music he might hear, any movie or play he might take in, was grist for the mill.

  In those days, he actually believed that the same was true of restaurant meals. After all, fictional characters do eat, don’t they? So did he not have to educate himself as to the flavours, aromas, and textures of as great a variety of cuisines as possible? And were a well-stocked bar and wine rack not just as necessary, for precisely the same reason?

  Then there were the demands imposed upon him by The Writing Life, of which actual writing was only a part. It used to make such perfect sense to keep himself at the ready for public readings and interviews. That none such had so far been lined up was, he assured himself and Fiona, of no consequence. Fame, when it comes, comes like a thief in the night. So his hair products and skin toners had to be of the highest quality, and his goatee given the attention, twice a week, of a professional barber whose hot towels were like a sauna from the neck up.

  Jesus Christ. The money he spent. The bullshit he spent it on.

  Feeling as if he’s picking at a too-fresh scab, he opens his bottom desk drawer and pulls out the letter from Scribbler. A form letter. They actually sent him a form rejection letter. Not even a scrawled initial at the bottom. As if they had never published him. As if he hadn’t worked for them. Won first prize in their literary contest just—

  Eleven years ago.

  Did Fiona read the letter before leaving it on his desk? The flap was open. But maybe it was never properly sealed in the first place. And surely she wouldn’t read his mail. Except she’s changed of late. A lot. And he first noticed the change—he checks the date on the letter. Yes. Two weeks ago.

  “You’re taking a course in haiku?” he remembers her asking. “Aren’t they those itty bitty poems?”

  She had never before questioned his need to self-educate. Over the years he has enrolled in writing courses at the local university, writing workshops taught in community centres and church basements throughout the city, writing mentorships conducted online.

  “Seventeen syllables,” he corrected her. She had paused in the middle of writing the cheque that would pay for the course. “A highly compressed form. Very difficult.”

  “But you’re writing a novel.”

  That had given Leo pause, too, when he was filling out the application. But he had reminded himself, as he reminded Fiona now, of what he had heard from one workshop teacher after another, namely that all writing was essentially writing, thus it followed that any writing of any kind at all—

  “Yeah. Okay. I get it.” Fiona had signed the cheque and handed it to him.

  And just last week, she had questioned the value of his Daily Writing Practice. “You wrote about your toenails? You spent half an hour writing about your toenails? Is it at least going to be part of your novel, what you wrote?”

  Why was she undermining his confidence this way? He invoked the compost-heap image that had always convinced her before. He explained, again, why keeping a jam jar on his desk filled with slips of paper on which he had scribbled single words or phrases—toenails, pebble in shoe, martini, bus transfer—then pulling one of those slips out of the jar every day and writing on the topic nonstop for a set number of minutes (he kept a kitchen timer beside the jar) could generate reams of material that might not be precisely pertinent to the project at hand, but could, in the fullness of time—

  “Okay. Right. Compost.”

  It had all come to a head on Monday. Fiona had called one of her household meetings. Leo dreaded these, but presented himself at the dining-room table to listen humbly, respectfully, as his wife elucidated the state of their finances. She was, after all, an expert in household debt, having for years nudged boxes of Kleenex across her desk at The Credit Counselling Centre toward clients who wept while she took scissors to their plastic.

  Leo did not weep when she circled a date on
the kitchen calendar six months hence. Nor did he protest when she stipulated that by that date, he would not only have finished the novel he had been working on for almost a decade but would have at least a glimmer of a publishing contract. Or an interested agent. Something. Otherwise, he would get a job.

  It could have been worse, he admitted to himself when it was over. Fiona could have demanded, finally, to be shown the manuscript which he keeps locked in his desk drawer and has never shared with her. (“Does an artist display a painting before the final brushstroke has been applied? Does a composer allow a piece to be played whose last note has yet to be—”) She could have measured the half-inch thickness of his opus between finger and thumb. Hefted its total of eighty-seven pages on her palm.

  Leo spends his days now in a state of fear. He is afraid of the hollowing in his stomach that tells him morning is over and it’s time for lunch. He is afraid of the shadows lengthening along his study floor, reminding him that the afternoon has ended and Fiona will soon be home. He is afraid of his desk calendar, whose squares he imagines marked off in black X’s advancing upon the day when he will have to start searching for a job.

  A job. At thirty-three. With a BA in philosophy and English.

  *

  I heard them coming, heard them calling our names. I didn’t move or call back to them, just let them get nearer and nearer. Because they were It. They were the seekers now. And for once, I was the one who got to hide. So if they found me, they found me. And if they didn’t, they didn’t. That was the rule.

  It was starting to get dark. With my auburn hair and yellow sweater, I blended in with the leaves. There was a freak snowstorm later that night. I’d have frozen to death if they hadn’t spotted me. Once I was home, I looked out my bedroom window, watching the snow coming down and down. Like a warm white blanket. Covering our footprints. Keeping our secret.

  They went on searching the woods for weeks. Police. Civilians. Dogs. Nothing. Not a thread of Maude’s clothing. Not a hair of her head.

  Miranda is sixty-five now, and has lived in the co-op for three years. On the day she turned sixty-two, when she was still in the house where she grew up, she came home from work to find the message light on the phone blinking. She stood still for a moment, taking her customary deep breaths. Smoothing down that slight ruffle of alarm brought on by anything unexpected—a brisk knock on the door in the evening, or an envelope whose hand-written return address she doesn’t recognize. She can’t remember a time when she did not react this way to any surprise, big or small. Of course, she can’t remember much before the age of eight, when a headline in the local paper dubbed her the found girl.

  Miranda has learned only a few lessons in her life, but she has learned them very thoroughly. First, she has learned that to be found is to be forgotten. To be still missing, on the other hand, is to be forever kept in mind. As little as five years ago, she came across an article about Maude. There was that same black-and-white photograph. Those same eyes that had looked out from every front page across the country. The lost girl. And as usual, her companion was mentioned. But for the first time, the companion’s name was not.

  The second lesson Miranda has taken to heart is that the best way to hide is in plain sight. If you wish people not to notice you, simply position yourself in their line of vision and do nothing worthy of note. She never missed a day of school, never distinguished herself as either gifted or slow. “Miranda Shankland?” any one of her teachers might have said of her. “Oh. Yes. I remember now. Nice girl. No trouble. Never a problem. Wish more of them could have been like her. But why do you ask?”

  Her classmates might also have needed a moment to call her to mind. A girl who was neither a leader nor an outcast. Neither clamoured for nor rejected by captains choosing teams. A nice girl who would lend you her eraser with a smile, but never link arms with you on the way home from school.

  Miranda seemed to understand from an early age that some things were simply not for her. Or she was not for them. She engaged in no adolescent rebellion, no fights with her parents. Nor did her parents encourage her to think in terms of marriage and family. Having once almost lost their daughter, they were just as happy to keep her at home. In high school, boys danced with her the way they would with their big sister and confided in her about other girls. Grown men started slightly when she entered a room, as if afraid she could read impure thoughts. At work, when a joke circulated about a spinster postmistress whose headstone read Returned Unopened, she obliged her colleagues by pretending not to overhear. And when her periods stopped in her forty-fifth year, she felt no regret.

  “The house will always be yours, Miranda,” her mother said to her at the reception after her father’s funeral. No doubt Mrs. Shankland thought of this as the last and greatest gift from a parent devoted to keeping her child safely in the nest. But Miranda did have a practical side. She had taken a job, after all. And she had known for years that the house was a drafty, leaky white elephant whose taxes and upkeep would bite ever more deeply into her salary and her mother’s widow’s pension.

  So the week after her mother finally died, she went to the library and used one of its computers to research housing co-ops in the city. An article in the paper had called them affordable housing for the disappearing middle class. She applied for units in three such, then, once the interviews were over, accepted a place on the waiting list of the one that was farthest from her present address.

  Three years later, she came home from work to see the message light on her phone blinking. Her name had risen to the top of the list, and a unit was available. Would she be interested in viewing it?

  “Places always look bigger once you get your furniture into them,” the building manager said apologetically, taking Miranda’s silence for disappointment. But she was not disappointed. Far from it. There was something almost thrilling about the emptiness of the rooms she was being shown, the bareness of the walls. She had lived all her life with her dead parents’ heavy mahogany furniture and ornately framed florals. Here, the light pouring through the undraped windows gave a shine to the pale hardwood floors that made her want to run and slide in her socks like a child. Though she had never been that kind of child.

  “I’ll take it.”

  The next day, she gave notice at the Melville Staines Funeral Home, where she had started as the youngest receptionist ever employed there and, over four decades, become the oldest. Felicity Staines, daughter of the late Melville who had hired Miranda all those years ago, accepted her resignation with a show of regret that Miranda assumed was masking relief. And if she was right, the feeling was mutual.

  With the death of old Mr. Staines, the place was no longer the sanctuary it had been for Miranda from the minute she stepped through its doors forty years ago for her job interview. Here, she had sensed, was a place where no one, whatever their authority, could burst through those doors and tromp in loud boots up to her desk and point a finger. And the guests, as she was taught to call them, could neither recognize nor remember nor bear witness through their sewn lips. Under Felicity Staines, however, the place was being thrown wide open to the world, the guests all but invited to get up and sing and dance.

  Felicity’s mother died when she was two, and her father never remarried. The girl had her father’s height and pallor, and somehow gave the impression that she had never really needed a mother, having calved off Melville Staines like an iceberg. When she was introduced to the staff of the Home at the age of six, she regarded Miranda gravely across the reception desk for a moment, then said, “Were you ever a little girl?”

  In middle school, Felicity started dropping in to the Home to do her homework. She claimed the place was quieter than the library. Besides, her father could give her a ride home at the end of the day.

  Miranda did not dislike the girl, who was no trouble. But something about her put her on edge. Though Felicity was not overly familiar, her presence made
Miranda want to take a step back, as if to preserve her personal space. The girl gave the impression of knowing the older woman more thoroughly than she possibly could or should.

  When Felicity finished high school and announced her plans to study thanatology, Miranda felt a niggle of dread. The dread became certainty when she apprenticed under her father, then settled into resignation when she took over the place after Melville Staines’ death.

  Miranda did what she could to salvage some of the funeral home’s dignity. She had supported and maintained that dignity for forty years with every detail of her deportment and person. The short, simple haircut. The muted colours of the skirted suits she wore all year round. The way she had let her own colours—auburn hair, blushing complexion—fade naturally with time. Above all, her manner of speaking—measured and hushed, as if she hovered perpetually on the threshold of sacred space.

  But she was up against the force of fashion. Felicity embraced the latest trends in the funeral industry—everything from the ceramic skull she kept on her desk (“Respect for grief need not be synonymous with denial of the realities of death”) to her espousal of biodegradable caskets for unembalmed corpses (“It’s time our profession embraced the environment it has been abusing.”) She dyed her hair midnight blue, dressed in gothic weeds, and laughed loud. She referred to the embalmer and his assistant as the boys in the basement and called Miranda by her first name. The day the staff-meeting agenda included a serious discussion of contracting with a tattoo artist to offer ash tatts, whose ink was mixed with a pinch of a loved one’s cremains, Miranda had trouble eating her lunch.

  It was time to go. She would have preferred to perform her duties as usual on her last day then slip out the door without ceremony. However, she tried to be a good sport about the coffin-shaped cake with RIP Miranda Shankland scripted in purple icing. And she actually allowed Felicity Staines to embrace her at the door. The younger woman’s eyes were damp when Miranda pulled away. And one last time, there was that strangely knowing look.