The Girl in the Wall

by Alison Preston

  His missing Gus was less complicated than his longing for Denise, but his body told him that it ran nearly as deep. It had a hard ache to it and very little in the way of regret. Maybe just that he hadn’t been with him as he took his last breaths, but he couldn’t be blamed for that. A man needed to sleep. He still talked to Gus sometimes to get his thoughts in order and imagine what his friend would have said in response. The loss of his daily presence, with his insights and gentle advice, left a giant chasm in Frank’s life. He doubted he would ever have another such friend.

  “Good morning, Daddy.”

  Sadie kissed him on the cheek on her way to the kitchen.

  He loved that she sometimes still called him Daddy even though she was fourteen years old. He was going to have to pull himself together, get his irritability and sadness under control for her sake and for the sake of Garth — Emma too, on the far side of the world. It was his good self that they counted on, not this new man that shouted at the river and wanted to squeeze the neck of young Tad next door.

  That was another thing about Tad. He had the oddest-looking neck Frank had ever seen on a man. It was like the neck of a beautiful woman. Maybe he was a woman! Frank decided he would look keenly for an Adam’s apple next time he encountered him. He found that he felt more kindly towards Tad hollering into a phone when he thought of him as a woman dressed up as a man.

  Frank believed he was having an epiphany — one that would help him deal with the ogre he was becoming. He made a hasty promise to himself that when someone was driving him berserk, he would picture that person as a frightened member of the sex opposite to what he was, trying to make his way in a hostile world where he was living a lonely lie. Usually it was men that made him crazy but sometimes it was women: women drivers, for instance.

  He followed Sadie into the kitchen.

  “Is your brother stirring?” he asked.

  Sadie was at the sink. She turned on the water and didn’t answer.

  “Sadie?”

  “Uh, I think he might have gone out really early,” she said.

  The blood vanished from Frank’s head.

  “On a Saturday? There’s no such thing as Garth going out early on his day off,” he said as he raced up the stairs.

  Frank remembered last night. He had fallen asleep before he heard the familiar clumsiness of his boy coming up the stairs.

  Sure enough, the unmade bed was empty. It was the emptiest bed Frank had ever seen. He rummaged in the covers as though there were a chance his son had made himself small in the night and was there someplace inside the teenage-boy sheets.

  He ran down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  “Sadie, do you know anything about this?” he asked.

  She was sitting at the table staring straight ahead.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Dad. Jeez.”

  “I should never have allowed myself to go to sleep before I heard him come in,” Frank said, and put his hand on Sadie’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey, I’m just upset with myself. And Garth, of course.”

  His knees began to shake and he sat down. His throat was parched and his chest felt heavy, achy even. Maybe he was having a heart attack.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” he said again.

  “You look kind of grey,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  The phone rang and they both lunged for it where it sat on the kitchen counter. Sadie got there first but she handed it to her dad.

  “Hello?” said Frank.

  It was Garth. He was calling from his friend Ian’s house where he had spent the night. Ian lived a one-minute walk away.

  “Come home right now,” said Frank.

  He listened for a moment.

  “Come home right now,” he said again and hung up.

  Garth was in the kitchen in a little over one minute.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up by phoning.”

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Frank said.

  “I’m eighteen,” said Garth. “I’m going to be living away from home in the fall.”

  “You hope,” said Frank.

  “Da-ad!”

  “I think you better go to your room now before this gets any worse. We’ll talk later.”

  Garth trudged upstairs and Sadie busied herself with flour and eggs and other ingredients.

  The heavy feeling in Frank’s chest had grown and sunk to include his stomach. It felt as though he had eaten a woollen blanket. He hated fighting with Garth. He was a good boy, an excellent boy, who had worked hard at both his schoolwork and baseball to earn a scholarship to the University of North Dakota in the fall. When Frank recalled the things he himself had been doing at Garth’s age, he cringed. He’d been having sex off and on for three years by then and was smoking, of course, drinking, staying out all night with no consequences at home. He was even dabbling in dope at eighteen. The only reason he hadn’t started in on that sooner was that it wasn’t around yet, not in his circles, anyway. As soon as it was, he’d leapt right in.

  Things were different then; the world was different then. But that wasn’t an argument he could give his son. He had tried it before. It wasn’t a good argument.

  Frank feared for the life of his children every time they left his sight. Again, he wished he could speak to Gus. He would set him straight on this, tell him to ease up. Still, it was wrong of Garth not to have called last night, even if he was eighteen. It was 2006, not 1968. Much as it wasn’t a good argument, it held water as far as Frank was concerned. If no one had answered the phone, Garth could have left a message for Frank to find first thing in the morning or as he roamed through the house at night as he often did.

  He tried picturing his son as a girl dressed up as a boy to try out his new idea. It didn’t work. If Garth had been a girl and stayed out all night Frank would have stopped breathing and died. So much for the effectiveness of his epiphany.

  In spite of his anxious thoughts and the heavy feeling in his torso he hoped that Sadie was making a cake.

  “What are you doing, Sadie?”

  “Making a carrot cake. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s okay. It’s great. Be sure to take a piece up to Garth when it’s done.”

  “I will, Dad.” She smiled.

  Frank got himself together, phoned Jane, and headed off to the house on Lloyd. It seemed a good idea to keep in touch with the situation.

  When he got there, a young constable he hadn’t met before was removing the yellow tape surrounding the yard and a forensic photographer was packing up her cameras. After doing so, she stood and stared at the house for a long time. Frank stood back and stared too. He didn’t want to be in her way. There were other people out on their sidewalks, watching the house, but it was obvious by now there was nothing much to see. And they would have learned that their questions would mostly go unanswered.

  Jane had said she’d meet him there. She was walking towards him now and he felt his interior woolly blanket begin to evaporate ever so slightly. He liked the way she walked, a bit like the tomboy she said she had been as a kid. Frank hadn’t known her then, though she, too, had lived in the neighbourhood for the whole of her life. Her parents moved to their home on Pinedale in 1967, one year before she was born. Both sets of Frank’s grandparents had settled in the area in the 1920’s. His parents had never left and neither had Frank. He didn’t suppose anyone would describe him as an adventuresome man.

  He went to meet Jane.

  “When can we pick up our tools?” she asked.

  Frank spoke to the constable who told him to phone downtown when the weekend was over.

  Jane started to protest and Frank put his hand on her arm.

  She shrugged him off.

  “I hate that they’ve got our tools,” she said. “What if they wreck something?”

  “There’s nothing we can do and it has nothing to do with this officer.”

  Frank felt pleased th
at someone was more upset about something than he was. It made a change.

  “If we had our tools we could have gone back to work today,” said Jane.

  “We’ve never worked weekends,” Frank said. “Why start now?”

  “To make up for losing yesterday.”

  “You’re starting to sound like Featherstone.”

  The photographer and constable finally drove away in their separate vehicles.

  “Let’s see how much of our work they’ve done for us,” Frank said.

  Sure enough, the upper level had been stripped pretty well bare and all the materials removed. There was no evidence of any interior walls at all except for a few support beams — nothing left but the memory of a tiny woman sealed behind drywall and the little ghosts of their missing tools.

  They were exiting the house just as Norm Featherstone drove up in his brand new unattractive Cadillac.

  “Great,” Frank muttered.

  “Where are you two going?” he asked.

  “Good morning, Norm,” said Frank.

  “Are you getting back to work today?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know we don’t work weekends.”

  “But so much time has been wasted already.”

  Frank looked at Jane and smiled.

  “Half a day, Norm,” he said. “Plus, they finished gutting the upstairs, which is all we would have ended up doing yesterday anyway.”

  “Anyhow, they took our…” Jane began.

  Frank nudged her perhaps a little too hard and she stopped talking. He didn’t want to give Featherstone anything, let alone a good reason for their stopping work.

  Norm looked around him.

  “Where are the new materials?”

  Jane looked at Frank.

  He realized in the emptiness of the yard that he hadn’t placed an order yet with McDiarmid Lumber. If they had wanted to work today, if they’d had their tools, they would have had no materials, no lumber, no anything to work with. He wondered if it had occurred to Jane. Maybe he should hand over all the thinking aspects of the job to her. He could become the grunt man, follow her orders and work only with his aching back and stiff hands.

  “I called and told them to hold off till Monday,” he said. “They couldn’t have dropped anything off past the yellow tape with the police milling around.”

  Now that was quick thinking, thought Frank. If I had placed the order I would have had to do exactly what I just lied about doing. I’ve had a brief moment of quick thought.

  He was certain his brain was shrinking and changing. The parts that he’d used as a detective — the keen, intuitive, deductive parts — were no longer being exercised to their full capacity. He needed to whip them back into shape. He pictured an amorphous blob inside of his head flopping about, interfering in ways that were ever-growing and ever-changing.

  The blob — it was mauve — also affected what he thought of as the other part of his brain, the part that was turning him into a man who raged and blamed and behaved badly in front of his kids and friends like Jane.

  Norm Featherstone jingled the change in his pocket. He was wearing the same horrid brown suit he had worn the day before. The jingling sound made Frank want to turn Norm upside down, empty his pockets onto the ground and light the contents on fire, melt down the coins and pour them into Norm’s ears.

  “So, young Josh Werbanski works for the city,” he said.

  “Why all the interest in Josh all of a sudden?” asked Norm.

  “Just curious, is all, about who we’re fixing up the house for.”

  “He’s majoring in city planning,” said Featherstone, “and his grades are so good the city hired him on for the summer.”

  “How nice for everyone,” said Frank.

  Jane and Norm both looked at him and Frank knew he had begun something unpleasant that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from pursuing.

  “Are you being sarcastic?” Norm asked.

  “Yes, I am,” said Frank.

  “Why?”

  “Because he was rude and he raised his voice to my daughter who was working at the swimming pool in the flood bowl till yesterday morning.”

  “Well, she must have done something to deserve it,” said Norm.

  Frank pictured Sadie and her tears and her goodness and her cake that would now be sitting fragrantly on the kitchen counter.

  “Your son-in-law is a prick,” said Frank. “The only things my daughter deserves are excellent things, precious, holy things, that you and your twisted son know nothing about.”

  “He’s not twisted. And he’s certainly not my son.” The colour was rising in Norm’s face. His bluster and self-importance seemed to be seeping slowly out of him. He looked anxiously at the gutted house.

  Jane said, “Let’s go, Frank.”

  “Look, whatever happened, I’m sure we can get to the bottom of it,” Norm said. “We could get both sides of the story. I’ll speak to Josh. Why don’t I bring him over to your house later to see your daughter and the four of us will fix it?”

  “I’m not interested in his side of the story, Norm. And if I see him anywhere near my house I’ll come after him with an axe. That axe right there.”

  Frank gestured to an old wooden-handled hatchet resting against the maple tree and realized it was his. Shoddy police work.

  Norm started walking toward his car.

  “We’ll talk later when you’ve had a chance to simmer down,” he said.

  Frank struggled to catch his breath and he sat down where he stood on the sidewalk leading to the house.

  “What the fuck, Frank?” said Jane and sat down beside him.

  “Jane?”

  “Yes?”

  “Jane, I’m falling to pieces.”

  32

  Sometimes Frank’s worries got so far away on him that they took place years, even decades into the future. Later that same Saturday, as he worked on an empty flower bed with the edging tool his kids had given him for his birthday, he found himself fretting about Sadie’s impending divorce. He wanted to pound into the ground the faceless head of the man she had married. Tears came to his eyes and he had to wipe them away with his sleeve as his daughter approached.

  “I’m going over to Shayla’s house, Daddy,” Sadie said. “We’re going to practise on our unicycles.”

  Both girls had talked their parents into getting them unicycles a couple of Christmases ago and they’d finally gotten around to trying them out.

  “Okay, honey. Just be sure to stick to the sidewalks. Promise me you won’t go on the road.”

  She didn’t answer at first and it made Frank think that she was planning a wild ride down Portage Avenue, weaving in and out of the cars, practising for the Sunday night cruise.

  “Sadie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Promise me you’ll stay on the sidewalks.”

  “Of course, Dad. What do you think? We don’t have death wishes.”

  “Be home by 9:30, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll probably be home before that, actually. I’m kind of tired.”

  Off she went, walking her unicycle across the scruffy grass of the backyard. At least now Frank could worry about the very real possibility of minor physical injuries rather than future divorces. She was so good. What did he or Denise ever do to make her so damn good?

  Why was Sadie tired? Frank tried to remember if he had ever been tired at the age of fourteen. It seemed so unlikely, but he couldn’t think why. He must have been tired from time to time and who knows? maybe he even announced it to his parents. They were both long dead, so he’d never be able to ask them.

  A line from a Jackson Browne song floated into his yard from a passing car driving too fast down the lane. Something about running into the sun, but running behind. Sadness pierced his heart again and he felt a sudden brief panic at the despair he glimpsed when he realized that the line he had heard hundreds of times before had never made him sad till now.
What if the bleakness came to stay? It lasted just a second, but it took in the whole world, both space-wise and time-wise.

  Jane walked into the yard from around the side of the house.

  “Whatcha doin’?” she said.

  “Edging,” said Frank. “Trying out my new tool.”

  “These flower beds could use a flower or two.”

  “Yes. They used to have flowers, but I’ve kind of let it go.”

  “How are you, Frank? Are you feeling any better?”

  “Much better, thanks.”

  “Liar,” said Jane.

  “Let’s do something productive,” she went on. “Let’s go and talk to Mrs. Beresford. We can make a list first of questions we want to ask her.”

  Frank leaned his edger against the side of the garage.

  “Good idea.”

  He made tea in individual cups and decided as he was doing it that he would buy a teapot next time he saw a nice one somewhere.

  They sat on the porch and he brought out his small notebook and a couple of sharp pencils.

  He felt a hint of pleasure, as though someone might have told him something good in the last few minutes.

  “I like sharp pencils,” he said.

  They removed their tea bags and added milk and sugar to their cups.

  “Mmm,” said Frank. “I don’t know why I don’t drink tea more often.”

  Jane didn’t say anything and Frank realized he didn’t even know if she liked tea. She took a sip.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do we want to ask her?”

  Frank licked the end of the pencil for no good reason and wrote a one with a period after it.

  “What does she remember about the Coulthards?” he said. “What did the father do? What did the son do? Is there anything more she can tell us about their departure?”

  He was writing as he talked.

  “’Kay. You better make some subdivisions in these questions,” Jane said. “That’s way more than one right there.”

  “We’ll revise and neaten it up when we’ve finished coming up with everything we want to ask.”