Darren Effect

by Libby Creelman

  It was at an end-of-summer outdoor party, she couldn’t remember where. She had been restless all that summer. There had been a band and lots of people. Had it been a park, or someone’s yard?

  She and Benny had been seeing each other for nearly a year, but not on a regular basis. Weeks would go by and she wouldn’t hear from him. She wondered what he did on the weekends when she didn’t see him. Was he dating other girls? Those his own age? She had heard he was spending some time with that girl Marjorie.

  They had made plans to meet at the party. No specific time. He was like that: vague, casual, which left Isabella feeling hijacked. She didn’t know if underneath his flirting and foolishness, he was actually humble and shy, incapable of recognizing something — or someone — that could be his, or whether he was insecure and cruel, a person who lined up admirers to count them. She often felt anger towards him stirring inside her.

  She and her two friends bought a litre of milk and flask of Kahlua and mixed sombreros in the car before going into the party, which they had heard would be alcohol-free. Isabella’s friends talked about how hard it was to get their heads around going back to work. September was only a week away. Isabella added little to the conversation. She knew they were pretending to bemoan the end of summer for her sake. In truth, they were looking forward to teaching again.

  It didn’t really matter to her, though, because she was daydreaming about Benny.

  Isabella drank most of the sombreros. Normally, she did not drink. She knew enough about herself to know that there was a part of her that was different from other people — ruthless, confrontational, eccentric — and that drinking released that part of her. When it was time to get out of the car, her friends had to pull her onto the sidewalk, where she stood swaying. But they were all giggling. They linked their arms through hers and ran up across a lawn. The sun had set, though there was still light, and a breeze had come up. The air did not feel like summer anymore.

  It was not a dry party after all. There was a cash bar with beer and wine. The band was inside a tent, where people were dancing, but from the bar the music was muted and hard to identify. Her friends told her to slow down. Have a Coke instead, they suggested. Isabella didn’t like the insinuation. She wandered off, searching the crowd for Benny. Her longing for him intensified. It seemed hours had passed by the time she made her way back to her friends.

  “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Do you see Benny?” She stepped on someone’s toe.

  “Wow, is she ever loaded. Should we take her home?”

  “There he is. Isabella. Look. He’s just coming now.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there!” Laughter.

  She turned and there he was. In her memory he was standing with a sweet guilty smile in a clearing devoid of other bodies.

  He looked as though he was half expecting her to step up and embrace him, and for a moment she thought she would do just that. Instead, she felt anger lift inside her. She slapped him across the face, then fell backwards, hard on her rear end. Her last memory was of herself sitting on the grass like a rag doll, her legs stuck out before her in an unladylike manner. Gasping sounds buzzed about while hands came down to get her. She never asked whose hands.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” her friend said to her over the phone the next day. “He’s so nice.”

  “What did he do after?” Isabella asked in a small voice.

  “He spun on his heels and marched off.” Her friend sounded satisfied, as though: what did she expect?

  Isabella’s self-loathing went on for weeks, though it was worse that first day, when she was so hungover she couldn’t move from bed, yet had to keep her head elevated or else it would swell to the size of a pumpkin and burst open.

  Benny never called. He lived with his parents, so she was afraid to call him.

  He could have left the province, or gotten engaged.

  She missed him, and eventually she went to his house. She was let in by a teenaged girl — the crying baby, Isabella assumed — who disappeared in search of him. Isabella stood in the foyer, between the two sets of doors, and waited.

  Later she would look back at the young woman she had been and see a hollow, lonely person. She would shudder, relieved by the miracle of her life changing course as it had.

  She waited ten, fifteen minutes. She assumed Benny was refusing to see her, yet she couldn’t budge. She hated herself. She was certain she was shaking from head to toe, but when she glanced down at her hands, they were hanging motionless at her sides.

  She was still there when his father came home, bemused to find a silent young woman in his foyer.

  “Everything all right here?” he asked her.

  She nodded, but wished now she’d left the house. This was beginning to involve too many people.

  She heard calling from inside the house, unmistakable confusion. The sister sounded apologetic and defensive.

  When Benny appeared he looked surprised, but guarded. Her impression was that there was no hope at all for them.

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  He seemed to be thinking about how to answer that.

  “About time.”

  It was not what she expected him to say. It gave her hope.

  “Have you been waiting for my apology?” she whispered, incredulous.

  He crossed his arms over his chest, grinning at her reaction. “My sense was that I deserved one.”

  He was kidding with her now. She adored him.

  “I was so drunk, it’s no excuse, but I didn’t know what I was doing, Benny. I’m so sorry.”

  “You were in the bag, all right, missus. You. Were. In. The. Bag.”

  Isabella and Cooper were watching television: Just Shoot Me, King of the Hill, Grounded for Life. It was midnight when Isabella finished the bottle of wine. A movie was coming on. Isabella sniffed. “Who made that smell, I wonder?”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  “Wasn’t me. Are you drinking plenty of water?”

  “Maybe it was Dad.”

  Isabella stared at the television. The movie was beginning with a murder.

  “Maybe it was,” she said.

  Ping ping. Now we’re both crazy, she thought.

  Cooper rose early. He was counting on his mother to sleep late, which she usually did if they’d watched a movie the night before. In their new house, the kitchen was not far from her bedroom, making it essential he not slam the cupboard doors or toss dishes into the sink or drop a spoon on the floor. The more orderly he kept the kitchen, the faster he could clean it up when he heard her begin to stir. These days she did a lot of talking to herself, so he would be amply warned. It was whispering mostly, primarily in the bathroom, though occasionally in the car with him sitting right there next to her.

  It’s just a way to get through the day.

  Why did I agree to that?

  Think of murderers.

  Nothing alarming, but the idea of her talking to herself around other grown-ups was humiliating. Like around the bird man next door.

  He measured the water and flour and mixed them together in a large pot. The directions said to stir thoroughly before heating, and he was very attentive to this. Lumps would spoil everything. He turned up the heat and, once the mixture had come to a boil, waited three minutes, then removed the pot from the stove and dumped in the black cherry Kool-Aid and stirred some more. It was a little thick, which pleased him, and the colour was dark and realistic. He tasted it, then let some run down his chin and wished he still had his camcorder. That had been some awesome piece of machinery. But, thanks to Dad, it was wrecked.

  Dad. Where did Dad go to exactly anyway? Since his departure, Cooper had been considering the ramifications of thought. Is a person dead once they stop thinking? On the other hand, perhaps they are just not born yet. Cooper believed he not only remembered his first thought, he remembered being born. Everything was black as night and he was moving t
owards something — something round with some swampy mottled light to it. It was only now, after being born and going to school, that Cooper figured it must have been Earth. But back then, he wasn’t really himself, Cooper, because he didn’t have a body. He was travelling away from the black everything to something he had forgotten he knew really well. He never knew anything so well as this thing he had forgotten he knew. Now that he was born, Cooper wasn’t exactly sure what it was he had forgotten. Memories were like that, like dreams, they were always one step ahead of you. But Cooper thought it might just have been Life. He had forgotten Life and was going back to it after being away.

  His first thought had been, Oh, I remember this.

  Cooper would like to know what his father’s last thought had been. He wondered if it was the same as Cooper’s first thought. Oh, I remember this. Perhaps not. And what if a person dies suddenly without warning? What about the elimination of thought when you are right in the middle of having a thought? It made the thought seem pretty pointless. Say you eat a poisonous plant, get a whiff of poison gas or burst into flames. You might have been thinking it was time to buy a new fishing rod for your kid, or how lucky are we, another fine day — a comment adults were always making. You might have been in the process of looking forward to something, perhaps your favourite food because you could smell it cooking — spaghetti and meatballs. You’re feeling warm and happy and then suddenly you’re dead.

  Of course, his father had been in la-la land by then. It was unlikely he was thinking about fishing. Or the weather. Or eating. And he probably was not thinking, Oh, I remember this.

  A door opened and closed and Cooper froze. Luckily, there followed the sound of the bath running. Cooper removed the pitcher of juice from the refrigerator and emptied it into the sink. He poured in his own mixture, still steamy and sweetsmelling, and tiptoed downstairs with it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Darren had come home early from work and was in the living room reading the paper. Occasionally he glanced up to see Cooper roaming around outside, possibly looking for another stump, though Darren had already told him one would be enough. It was great to see the boy walking. He was wearing several T-shirts but no jacket or coat. Although it was spring, it was still cool. The wind had come around from the northeast and was cutting. It was important to dress warmly this time of year with the weather so unpredictable, especially if you were out in the woods. Especially if you were pregnant. Darren had been trying to guess how far along Heather was. He didn’t want to ask. He had also been wondering who the father was. He watched Cooper disappear behind his truck, which worried him slightly.

  He heard a noise from the bathroom. Jeanette. She had returned home from doing errands earlier and immediately disappeared. All was quiet again. Evidently she had not opened the shower curtain.

  There had been three herons initially. The crew saw them flying low above the twenty-five-metre high whitecaps, heading for the tanker. Darren imagined it must have been quite a sight, five hundred miles northeast of the Azores and there they were: three long-winged creatures with folded necks and trailing legs, their bodies rickety as they battled eighty-knot winds to reach the tanker. From the bridge, the crew watched the birds make a sloppy, unimpressive landing on deck, briefly looking more like blue-grey tumbleweeds than birds. They were placed in a storage room, but one died almost immediately and was cast overboard.

  The tanker was another week reaching Conception Bay due to headwinds and some nasty weather. A second heron died within a day of Newfoundland, but by then, superstition had set in and none of the crew would approach the storage room. Darren had taken custody of both the dead heron and the lone survivor, who was now in the bathtub, an hour and a half ago. The dead bird was in the freezer between the ice cream and fish patties. Jeanette wasn’t going to like that either.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, her face was shiny and scrubbed and she was in her pre-bedtime layers.

  “Retiring early?” he asked.

  She sat down across from him and took some of the newspaper. He wasn’t going to be surprised if she didn’t speak to him. Not after the other evening when he’d brought up the idea of moving out.

  Without looking up, she asked, “Who’s that in the bathtub?”

  “A heron, but it’s not a great blue. I think it’s a European species. A grey heron.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “It’s unusual. It was on the ship a week and those clowns never even tried to feed it. I might have to take it down to Byron in the morning.”

  “You haven’t been doing much shopping lately,” she observed.

  It was none of her business, but he didn’t want to argue with her.

  “And the dinner invitations have dropped off,” she added.

  He’d forgotten to tell her about the barbeque.

  “I did think her cooking was too rich.”

  “I was only being neighbourly, Jeanette. You made too much of it. She’s lonely, her and the boy. I was just trying to help.”

  “A lonely soul. I agree with you there.” She snapped the newspaper. “If the doctors go on strike they’re not getting any sympathy from me.”

  “Were there many goldfish left?”

  She glanced up. “Where? In the bathtub?”

  Darren slowly drew back the shower curtain, and sure enough, all the goldfish were gone. He had purchased a dozen in at the mall on his way home from the tanker. Half he’d dumped into the tub. The other six were in a clear plastic bag under the sink.

  Visiting the tanker had consumed his entire afternoon, though he hadn’t been surprised when the crew insisted he come aboard to collect the birds himself. He was ferried out via longliner to the ship, which was enormous and freshly painted bright pink. A group of crewmen followed him as he was taken to the rope locker, a spacious room lined with gleaming yellow lockers where Darren guessed the ropes were stored, since there was not a single one in sight. A handwritten note posted on the door warned, “Live Birds Inside.” Although the crew had grown fearful of the herons, someone must have been coming in to clean up because the floor was spotless. It was unusual, Darren was made to understand, that they had kept these birds. The normal practice was to toss them overboard.

  The live heron was standing on one leg, beside the dead one. The crew hung back as Darren seized the heron and put it in a box, then slipped its dead companion into a garbage bag. Back on deck, while the crew debated who would carry what down the ladder to the longliner, Darren marvelled at the size of the ship. Its deck was the length of a football field and its total height at least six stories. Birds lost over the Atlantic often sought refuge on these vessels. Darren imagined the birds’ attraction, not only to the ship’s almighty size and excessive pinkness, but to its sheer presence over the unyielding seascape, as though it had been invoked not through chance, but necessity.

  Now the heron was standing in the bathtub beside the stump he and Cooper had dug out of Darren’s garden shed. Its neck and head were sunk to the level of its grey wings, which were folded in such a way that they resembled a cloak draped over the bird’s back and shoulders, lending it an elegant Count Dracula air despite the lavender-coloured tub. Minutes passed, during which neither the heron nor Darren moved, and then the heron lifted its head high on its serpentine neck and with its right leg made a few leisurely attempts to scale the side of the bathtub. Darren backed away and the bird defecated. The feces was projected the length of the tub and Darren saw that among the otherwise dazzling yellow matter there were some black bits — indicative of bleeding in the guts.

  He knelt beside the tub and dumped in the remaining half dozen goldfish, but knew he would be bringing the heron to Byron the next day.

  When he returned to the living room, Jeanette was gone.

  The heron survived the night, but had rejected the second course of goldfish, which were either floating belly up or moving sluggishly through the dirty water. While Darren scooped them up with a drinking gla
ss and flushed them down the toilet, the heron stood oblivious, its black and white crest rising and falling like a toy whose batteries are running low.

  For nearly two decades, Byron Murphy had run the Southern Shore Animal Rescue Park. Southern Shore Concentration Camp was more like it, Darren thought to himself. Sure, half the animals brought to it perished. Nonetheless, he called ahead and left a message with Byron that he was bringing down an unusual heron.

  He took the Goulds bypass without giving it a second thought and eventually passed the very spot where Heather had been pulled over for speeding. He wondered what she was doing today. He thought about seeing her at the barbeque on the weekend, then worried she might not show up. A few miles on, he turned in at Byron’s and was concerned when he saw the parking area vacant. Byron lived alone in a bungalow that Darren had the misfortune to visit only once; the medley of odours resulting from fried meat, sour clothing and sick birds had been alarming. Darren didn’t like to think about the things he and Byron had in common, especially the fact they were both bachelors.

  The birds were kept in a long shed beside the house. But here too the lot was empty. The Southern Shore Animal Rescue Park, as its name suggested, served as both hospital and nature park. It was through the latter role that Byron made his meagre income. The place was looking more rundown than Darren recalled, though it had never been particularly shipshape, and then the door to the Rehabilitation Centre, as Byron called the shed, opened and Byron stepped out and waved. As usual, he was wearing shorts.

  Darren had first met Byron after spending a summer as field assistant for a renowned seabird biologist, which meant Darren spent three months sitting in a dark cabin on an offshore island blowing eggs for that biologist’s illegal personal collection. He came back to university disillusioned and in bad spirits. Byron had worn his intelligence openly and, Darren thought, arrogantly. Competition between the two had been spontaneous. It took all the years of graduate school for this to wear off, though Darren remained childishly vigilant of Byron’s excessive knowledge.