Darren Effect

by Libby Creelman

He showed her where everything was kept, though she already knew. She dunked a tea bag in his hot water for barely a second, just colouring it, then poured in an equal portion of milk. She began to enjoy his company and decided to have tea and toast as well. She brought the plates and cups to the table and he set them out. He buttered all the toast and while they ate, he told her about school, his baby sister, his friends, the game he had been playing. He grew more and more animated. It seemed he couldn’t get the words out fast enough and a few times she wasn’t sure what he’d said, he was speaking that fast. Bits of toast sprayed from his mouth. When he got on to ballroom dancing lessons and how silly they were, even his dad said he shouldn’t have to go, he jumped up onto his chair and started dancing wildly. “Let’s dance,” he shouted. “Let’s have a fine time!” He kicked his legs out to the side and hit the table. The dishes rattled and Isabella’s tea nearly capsized. She felt her face grow hot.

  “Hey. Sit down. Sit down right now, Benjamin!”

  It was like when she tried to call him in from playing. If he heard her he wasn’t showing it. She got up and went over and grabbed him, pulling him down, and then the two of them toppled onto the floor. She scratched her arm on something and released him. They stood up, staring at each other, both shocked. She was usually a calm babysitter.

  “I just wanted to show you how we dance,” he said.

  “I think you better go get washed up. I’ll do these dishes. Okay?”

  “Sure!”

  She watched him race out of the room, nearly hitting a number of things as he went. She’d never sat for a kid with so much energy. He was weird. She was bringing the plates and cups to the sink when she changed her mind and hurried upstairs after him.

  But she couldn’t find him. For nearly an hour she searched. She figured he was hiding from her, so at first she was annoyed, but not worried. She checked under every bed, in every closet, behind all the furniture and in all the rooms. She felt uncomfortable searching through his parents’ bedroom. The room smelled different from the rest of the house — nicer, cleaner. She began to imagine that when she found him she would smack him, though she knew she would never actually do such a thing. She called for him, not loudly, because she didn’t want to wake the baby. She began to beg him to come out and finally to offer him bribes. Cookies, candy, ice cream. She opened the back door, stepped out and shouted for him. It was dark now. She started to cry. She decided to call her mother, which she had been putting off. She was standing in the kitchen staring at the table where they’d had their snack. There was a sugar bowl on the table. It had small blue windmills on in. When she removed the lid, she saw there was hardly any sugar in it. She went over to the sink and lifted his tea and tasted it. It was revoltingly sweet.

  She heard shouting upstairs.

  When she entered the baby’s room, he was standing over the crib, gently cooing at his little sister, “You’re some bad baby. Sure we’re going to have to sell you.” He glanced up at Isabella. He looked dishevelled and flushed. With a sinking feeling she realized he might have been outside after all. Then he leaned into the crib and shouted, “I LOVE YOU, BABY GIRL! YOU’RE THE BEST BABY GIRL THERE EVER WAS!”

  Isabella rushed at him, just wanting to get her hands on him, but the baby was awake and bawling.

  “Get out of this room,” she hissed at him. She lifted the baby. She was exhausted and near tears again. Rocking the baby gave her comfort. She didn’t care where Benjamin had gone. She would stay in this room with the baby until the parents came home. A rhythmic creaking sound started up in a nearby room and she knew he wasn’t far.

  When Benjamin’s mother came into the bedroom, she looked at Isabella, who was still holding the baby. The baby had stopped crying but was hiccuping. Isabella could see she wasn’t going to be in any trouble. The mother looked disappointed, but not surprised. She left the room. Isabella heard her call down-stairs for her husband. Then she heard her say, “Haven’t I told you a million times not to jump on the beds? Benjamin!”

  The baby heard her mother’s voice and started to cry again. The mother came back in and took the baby from Isabella. “You go downstairs and Frank will pay you and see you get home safely. Thanks so much, Isabella. It was great to get out. I appreciate you coming over.”

  Isabella nodded and said goodnight. She swore she would never babysit for that family again and she never did.

  While Benny napped, Isabella slipped into Cooper’s rubber boots and put on an old sweater and drove over to Shoppers Drug Mart. It was Halloween and colder than she had expected, but she didn’t bother buttoning the sweater, just wrapped it around herself so it overlapped at her breasts. She was waiting at the checkout, hugging herself, when she realized she wasn’t wearing a bra. A man joined the line behind her. Her peripheral vision told her he was tall and overweight. Her bags of Halloween candy rang in at $12.38. Suddenly she was ashamed of herself. She hadn’t been to the hairdresser in months and her nails were uneven and unpainted. She wasn’t wearing a single molecule of makeup.

  “Evening, Isabella,” the man said, and she turned, aware of herself shrinking along her spine, knowing by the voice it was Rex Chafe, cosmetic surgeon extraordinaire.

  “How’re you getting on?” he asked.

  Everyone was asking her this.

  “Great,” she said.

  Rex was staring at her. No one believed her. They looked at her and thought, you can’t be great. Your husband is dying, everyone knows he’s been seeing another woman, your son is wild as the woollies and your dog is filling your glamorous house with feces. You can’t be great, I don’t believe it.

  Rex placed a large bottle of green Scope on the counter and turned to study her.

  “What have you got done to yourself, Isabella?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it your hair?”

  “Oh dear, I forgot the bread. Excuse me.”

  She scurried out with her candy, thinking, my god, I didn’t even say goodbye, and crossed over to the bakery, though she didn’t need bread, and joined the long snaking line, just in case Rex checked up on her. She was feeling that ping ping of insanity again.

  She focused on the conversation of the couple in front of her. They were discussing their new home. It was then and there that Isabella decided to call a real estate agent, which Benny had been suggesting for a while.

  She began searching for the new house in early November, just before Benny went into the hospital for the last time. It was a discouraging business, but she had done some investigations at the bank and with their lawyer and had come to terms with her limitations. But it wasn’t only that: she knew she couldn’t live another day in their house once Benny left it. She would be a different person. She was shrinking, her life swirling around her like the Bermuda Triangle or some kind of alien-produced humongous whirlpool that Cooper would know about, and she was at its epicentre. She and Cooper could let the rest of the world spin while they stood — quiet, oblivious, blind.

  She never told Benny. On Saturday she went to the Bagel Café and thumbed through the real estate section. She contacted an agent and only gave him her cell number. The agent was discreet and never asked her anything he didn’t need to know. She said two bedrooms with a backyard. She wanted to avoid the downtown. He assured her they’d find something suitable.

  Already she was changing. She felt it.

  She would return home, flushed, to her laundry, Inky’s deposits, Benny’s needs, a disappeared Cooper. Was this how it had felt to be Benny? Deceitful, untrue, fraudulent? She had never kept anything from him before. It seemed massive, crippling, destructive, and then she pinched herself: he was dying. What could be more destructive than that?

  She didn’t want him to die. Whatever he had done, whomever he loved, Isabella did not want him to die.

  She found a house a few days after he went into palliative care. It was cold and the rain that fell was like ice. She had heard they were experiencing some kind of record: t
hirty-two consecutive days of bad weather. The agent seemed apologetic. He was wearing a red poppy in his lapel for Remembrance Day. But no house was going to be attractive right now, Isabella told herself, and she took the small bungalow. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac: Goodridge Place. It smelled of old woman. The next day she accepted the counter-offer on her cellphone, standing outside the hospital, shivering.

  She immediately started to pack. She spent half her time at the hospital. The remaining time she spent packing, throwing out things, occasionally sleeping. She would stand up from taping a box and Cooper would be beside her, tugging at her sleeve.

  “What’s going on, Mom? What are you doing?”

  “Everything is going to be fine.”

  “You’re acting strange, Mom,” Cooper whined.

  Later she found him under his bed, covered in dust bunnies.

  “Cooper?”

  “I don’t want Daddy to die.”

  “You’re going to be fine, darling. Come here. Come out.”

  “I don’t want to come out. You’re acting strange.”

  She separated Benny’s belongings from the rest of the contents of their home and put them in garbage bags to be picked up by the Salvation Army. After a while she realized she was keeping an eye out for something. What would it be? A snapshot, lock of hair, letter, receipt, article of clothing or jewellery? What kind of keepsake would Benny cling to? And more challenging, where would he hide it? She searched his pockets, desk and bureau drawers, tool box, glove compartment — she realized she would need to sell his car. How did one go about that?

  There was nothing. The only evidence of betrayal had come via their own son, stored on DVDs. And Benny had destroyed those.

  Then she found it: a white envelope with snapshots. The address on the outside was in Benny’s handwriting but incomplete: Bridget Neal, 55 Baltimore Crescent, Toronto, ON. It was an address he had known almost by heart — except for the postal code — scrawled across an envelope he had once meant to send. Isabella had never heard of Bridget Neal. Was that an alias? The photos were old and stuck together. Perhaps they had been forgotten. Perhaps this was a woman Benny had known before their marriage. Isabella began to separate them, still expecting to find evidence of that other woman, the one she had known about.

  Isabella still sometimes found it difficult to say her name, even inside her head.

  But this other woman was a stranger to Isabella, and the photos were taken after their marriage because in many of them the woman — Bridget? — was wearing a scarf Isabella recognized. She had given it to Benny for his birthday.

  Well, Cooper had given it to him. He had been only four, still round and sturdy with that low centre of gravity that seemed to give him a certain ruthlessness and power. She had taken him to the mall that afternoon and they’d selected the present. The scarf — grey and tan — had been delectably soft and irresistible to Cooper. The two of them had spent a long time wrapping it just so in those hours before Benny came home from work and Isabella still hadn’t made the icing for his cake or marinated the lamb chops. She was standing in the kitchen chopping scallions, overheated from the day’s busyness and the knowledge she was behind schedule, when Benny came into the house and Cooper, also flushed and revved, went flying towards his father, and Isabella heard him cry out, “We already wrapped your scarf, Daddy! We already wrapped your scarf.”

  Isabella had put the knife down and gone out to the hall and stared at her son in disbelief. Both her son and husband looked full of happiness. Cooper was on his toes, jumping.

  “You don’t tell Daddy what you wrapped. It’s a surprise,” Isabella blurted out. She hadn’t meant to sound severe or speak to him as though he were an adult. She had just been so flabbergasted. She had thought that Cooper understood.

  And then he did. Isabella saw it dawning on him: the purpose of shopping without Benny, then wrapping the scarf — hiding it — with the paper. A birthday present. Cooper got it, then burst into tears. Benny swooped him up and a lengthy session followed involving hugs and kisses and Benny’s declaration that he’d not heard what Cooper had said anyway.

  Isabella always felt awful thinking about that day.

  Had this Bridget heard the story? Isabella bet she had. Benny liked the story. He liked the way his son’s face had been transformed by a sense of responsibility.

  It’s summer in the photos and Benny and Bridget are outdoors. It looks like Newfoundland: only a few deciduous trees, a low sky, cobble beach. A few cabins appear in the distance, but they are blurred in the photo, and there are no cars or identifiable landmarks. That they are having an affair is not debatable. There is a certain look on a woman’s face in a photo that tells you she is in love, and that she in love with the man with the camera.

  But who was she? Long dark hair, dark eyes. Isabella flipped over one of the photos and found the date, printed at the photo shop: June 25, six and a half years ago.

  In the last photo the woman won’t look at the camera — that is, at Benny. Instead, she is staring off into the distance, maybe the sea. She is talking. She is sitting on a ridge of turf with her hands in her lap and she is delighted with the moment.

  Isabella thought the black smudge at the edge of the photo was probably Inky’s tail.

  Her feelings of being crushed and heartbroken left her. She was disgusted and humiliated. There was no telling if this was before or even during his relationship with Heather Welbourne — whose name she could now easily face — but either possibility left her cold. She didn’t want to know.

  Although perhaps Heather Welbourne should know.

  She recalled a way of Benny’s when they made love, when he seemed unable to endure another moment of foreplay. He would look stricken and his movements would become sluggish but deliberate. He would glance at her out of the corner of his eye, as though he could not bear to be distracted from his singlemindedness of purpose. The look on his face was the embodiment of passion: pure, but impersonal. It occurred to her now that in those last moments he had stopped recognizing her.

  The envelope with the photos was inside a larger envelope containing old receipts and warranties. If Benny had wanted Isabella to discover the photos he could not have chosen a better location. On the other hand, they were probably placed there so long ago they’d been forgotten. Certainly it was meant to be a temporary deposit. They were to have been sent. Isabella considered mailing them to the Toronto address. But mailing them to Heather Welbourne seemed a better option. She tucked them inside her purse and went off to the hospital.

  When Isabella was twenty-eight, two friends invited her to a party at the River Valley Tennis Club. It was supposed to be a dance, but no one actually danced, unless they had too much to drink and then they just made fools of themselves. Isabella knew the crowd and said it would be boring.

  “Won’t they just be talking about tennis?”

  Her friends laughed. “You need to get out more,” one of them said.

  “What odds what they talk about?” the other friend said. “It’s better than doing nothing.”

  Isabella had known these friends from university. The three had graduated with teaching degrees and, except for Isabella, now held permanent positions. Isabella was substitute teaching. She had surprised everyone by her growing lack of interest in her career, and herself by discovering that she hated teaching. Some evenings she unplugged the phone so a vice-principal calling the next morning looking for a substitute couldn’t reach her. She felt guilty and bored.

  They arrived at ten thirty. There was hardly anyone around, though the music was so loud it prevented conversation anyway. They went back outside where there was the scattered crowd. The smell of weed wafted over once or twice. The dance was clearly not a success and Isabella wished she had not allowed herself to become associated with it.

  One of her friends spotted someone she knew and they wandered over to another group. There was the awkward converging of two unfamiliar groups of people and half-hea
rted introductions. After a while someone suggested they go downtown to hear some live music.

  “Will there be cover?” a girl asked.

  “Marjorie, you tightwad, I’ll pay your cover if it’s an issue,” a young man said.

  Isabella felt too mature for all this and decided to go home. But she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by announcing she was leaving and she didn’t want to just wander off. She would wait until she was alone with one of her friends.

  Everyone was strolling towards a couple of cars and Isabella allowed herself to go along. She got in the back seat between Marjorie and the loud guy who had boasted he’d pay her cover. One of Isabella’s friends was in the front seat and the other friend was in another car. Isabella thought again that she should just go home.

  The guy beside her was talking. She turned to look at him. He had a round, dumb-looking face, though, to be fair, she couldn’t really see much in the car.

  “Hi,” he said, grinning at her. His whole face was involved in the grin. He seemed delighted to see her, though she’d never met him before in her life. She thought maybe he was drunk or high and mistaking her for someone else.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How are you?” he asked eagerly.

  She turned to look at him again, to see what his expression was now. It was the same. He looked young and short. His grin wasn’t really all that unpleasant.

  “Do we know each other?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. What’s your name?”

  “Izzie Parsons.”

  “I’m Benny Martin.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah.”

  They were downtown now. The driver was looking for a parking space and Isabella’s friend was telling him to just park anywhere, it wouldn’t kill them to walk.

  Finally, Isabella asked, “Where did you grow up?” “Bonway Place.”

  They had not grown up in the same part of town and had rarely crossed paths. There had also been the age difference. After a while Isabella had forgotten about him and about the guilt she felt for despising him. The incident between them seemed like something she’d read or seen on television.