“Don’t you dare say that to me now.”
“I have a family.” He sounded tired, as though he’d been trying to explain something to a child for hours.
She closed her eyes. He was dropping her like a hot potato. She wondered if she had always known he would.
“I’ve been clear about that from the start, Heather.”
When she opened her eyes and saw the rain on the windshield, she was briefly unsure of their whereabouts. He was watching her.
“This can’t come as a surprise to you, sweetheart.”
He tried to take her hand but she pulled away.
“I’m going to be having a number of procedures over the next month or so,” he went on. “New procedures. A new line of attack.” His laughter was brief. “I wish I had the guts to tell those doctors to fuck off.”
What procedures exactly? The idea of them was dreadful, chilling. She realized his life was shrinking. There used to be a place for her in it, but his illness would soon be shutting people out. One by one, doors would close on everyone who had known him.
Not only that, there would be an order of priority that made her desperate.
He was waiting for her to say something. When she looked at him, she saw that he was scared. Well, he couldn’t have it both ways.
“Right.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?” He sounded incredulous.
She thought again about the procedures. Then about his wife beside him or in a nearby windowless waiting area. “What do you want me to say?”
He looked hurt, then angry. She hated it when he got angry with her and for a moment she wished she could stop herself.
“I’ll be thinking of you? Is that what you want me to say? Or, good luck?”
“Why are you shouting?”
They sat without speaking for several minutes. She was surprised by herself, by her emotional unpredictability. They had been lying together in a clearing just a short while ago, but now, as she considered leaning over to pick the debris from his back and hair, she found herself frozen by something akin to homesickness.
He began searching for his keys. He arched his hips as he checked his pockets. He slapped his coat and rifled through the CDs and gum wrappers and tissues in the compartment between them. “Dammit, there’s so much junk in here. Would you mind tidying up this stuff?”
She stared out the window.
“Have you got the keys, Heather?”
Although it had been overcast and misty all day, this was the first rain.
“Heather, are you sure you don’t have the keys? Didn’t I hand them to you before crossing the river?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t forgive him for getting sick or having a wife.
He stopped, then opened the door and stepped out. She could hear the rain first-hand now and feel the warm, close air as it surged into the car. Before slamming the door, he leaned in and said, “I just wanted a little sympathy from you.”
The path to destruction lay right in front of her. She couldn’t step away from it. She leaned over and hit the button that locked the car doors. Hearing the locks click, he swung around and looked at her with disbelief. He was standing in front of the car and getting wet. He lunged back to the door and tried to open it, yanking on it several times. If he spoke she didn’t hear it. For a moment she felt a bubble of laughter, as though they were only kids playing. A happy life would be returned to her, surely — it was just around the bend. Then he turned away from her, walking back out across the meadow. She didn’t know where he was going or what was going on anymore, either with herself or with him. Did he really think he stood a chance of finding the keys out there?
Everything between them seemed wrong. He wanted to talk about his illness now. She had wanted to talk about it in Spruce Cove.
She reached out and lifted her hat from the dash. The keys were tucked inside, where she’d put them. She knew and she didn’t know. She climbed into the driver’s seat and started the car and backed out and up the gravel road away from the coast. She drove slowly, not checking the mirror to see him standing at the edge of the meadow, getting rained on, abandoned, surprised. Like the act of driving was one long, careful interruption of self-awareness, an annihilation of thought and time.
At the top of the lane, she stopped the car. She imagined returning at high speed and running him down. She imagined finding a cliff and taking the car over it by herself. She imagined driving back to town and never looking back. When she reminded herself that it was his car, she imagined parking in front of his majestic home and handing Isabella Martin the keys.
When she returned, there was no sign of him. Suddenly she could not bear the thought of him out there alone, drenched, lost. She felt a wild panic and understood that you don’t let go of someone in a single moment.
She found him wandering along a part of the old road protected by trees and where the rain was not so heavy. He looked like an invalid, a vagabond, someone who had lost a good portion of his memory. He glanced up at her with an expression that said he was beyond caring.
“You had the keys?” he asked.
For a brief moment she thought he was being funny.
“You lied to me?”
She nodded.
This was it. Time was chugging on, and Heather wasn’t ready. Everything was moving away from this moment, into the awful future, and Heather wanted to grab onto it and dig her heels into the ground and pull it back. Stop!
“Benny — ”
“Let’s not talk anymore. It’s all a bit much, don’t you think?” So this was goodbye.
Heather left her desk and came around to sit in the third, empty chair, knowing that sometimes her best tool was sympathy. She offered the tissues, and Donna took a clump. Tracey shook her head; she didn’t need them. Not yet, Heather thought. She rested the box on her knees, inches from Tracey’s thigh but within easy reach of either woman. For some reason, perhaps due to her sudden closeness to the women and the heat they were emitting, her milk let down. She usually made it to noon, when she rushed home to nurse her daughter. She folded her arms over her front and pressed down on her breasts, which were now tight and aching. Tracey seemed to sense the distraction in Heather, though she couldn’t know its cause.
“If we could change the past,” Heather said to Donna. “Most of us would.”
Heather had realized there were more ways than one to fall in love, to come to love a face. With Benny, it had happened in a moment: a face with an opening that she went straight through. Not a moment of resistance. She suspected this had been Tracey’s, and likely Donna’s, response to Derm. Perhaps this was love at first sight.
But there was another way. Meeting a face that grows on you. You have one or two glimpses. A sneak preview. A promise. At first standing in the woods with your feet numb and birds like chatterboxes overhead, you think: never. But then you begin wondering, until one day there is an opening and it takes your breath away.
*
Isabella was unable to sleep because of the heat. In the evenings, just at that point when she would have acquiesced to the idea of sleeplessness and lain in the dark and listened to sounds of Cooper, Inky, cars on the street, she got up and took a walk.
She was growing accustomed to her new neighbourhood, particularly at night. Suddenly it was an extraordinary world of crescents, cul-de-sacs and connecting footpaths cluttered with hockey nets, skateboard ramps, candy wrappers, knobs of sidewalk chalk, escaped hair clips. At the beginning she had been a newcomer, a single mother, a stranger, but during these warm nights both she and the world were transformed.
She felt alert. She felt she was climbing back into her life.
She circled the same route over and over — one crescent that linked to another crescent and up a cul-de-sac with a paved footpath connecting to the first crescent — as though she could not get enough of it. Midnight, and the laburnum still smelled like grape jelly, their drooping branches discharging papery blossoms that flutt
ered past her like popcorn. The clicking watering of lawns, now restricted to night-time hours under a new water conservation order, resulted in forgotten sprinklers saturating lawns until the water flooded sidewalks and ran down the sides of streets. Isabella watched a man cross his lawn beneath his weeping trees, moving his sprinkler in the tepid dark: a pale figure in white shorts and polo shirt, long returned from tennis but not yet in bed either. A lot of people were still awake.
She heard a flute being practised in an unlit upstairs room, the zany buzz of an electric guitar from a basement, a child squealing — or was it a teenaged girl? A pair of cats emerged from an open garage and approached her, mewing their complaint. One sprawled in the middle of the street, its tail swishing saucily. There was the padded crunch of a car door as it slammed shut, repeated three times.
She paused before an old bungalow set back from the street and looked through its open door down a hallway to a kitchen where a woman in a dress and apron was standing at the counter, sorting through a pile of papers.
Another woman, in another house, cried out, “Wow, honey,” and Isabella knew the woman really didn’t care at all.
Near her home she stopped before a storm drain. It was quiet here, as she had hoped. She took the Super Soaker canister she’d been carrying in one arm and unscrewed its top. She bent and emptied the contents through the grated opening. The smell of gasoline rose up, but it was done. She thought of it making its way to Rennie’s Mill River and mentally apologized to the ducks and fish that lived there.
She crossed her lawn and heard rustling in the hedge separating her yard from the neighbouring yard, then a single belllike chirp: a bird, also fitful. Inky was sprawled on the doorstep, too hot and arthritic to move when she tried to open the screen door. She gave up and went around to the back of the house.
He was still there on the doorstep the next morning when she tried to get out. It was a Saturday, but she found a number and telephoned, a part of her hoping no one would pick up. But someone did, the vet, in fact, a woman who told her it would cost an additional ninety dollars to dispose of the body.
She called for Cooper, but couldn’t find him.
She held open the car door and whistled to Inky. Twice he rose and ambled towards her and twice he thought better of it and turned back to the house. Isabella stood and watched, as though she had all the time in the world, thinking it was a peculiar thing to have a creature’s life in your hands like that.
When she got to the animal hospital she opened the back door of the car and Inky stumbled getting out. He had been panting and Isabella saw he’d covered the backseat with that clear syrupy saliva seemingly unique to dogs. She felt chilly and dispassionate watching him straighten and stand. Wanting him to suffer seemed to be a secret only just surfacing. He hobbled with her into the building, always wanting to do the right thing, but as soon as he was indoors he began to tremble violently.
The vet had short blond hair and wore a number of earrings. Together, they lifted Inky onto the metal table, but he immediately began to slide off, his legs rigid as tent poles. The vet got him to lie down and told Isabella to cradle his head. His terror began to subside. The vet explained how the injection would travel through his bloodstream until it reached his heart, stopping it. This would take only a minute and the dog would feel nothing. While the vet readied the needle, she asked Isabella if there were any questions.
“Does it matter that he’s not my dog?”
“Whose dog is he?”
“My husband’s.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“He’s dead.”
The vet nodded. She was impossible to read.
Isabella looked back down at Inky. Heather Welbourne had recognized this dog right away. How many other women knew him by name?
When Heather had first entered Isabella’s kitchen, Isabella felt the floor slip sideways. She had never felt such hostility towards anyone before.
The vet was back at the table with the needle. Already Inky’s head was heavy as a log in Isabella’s arms.
“Wait,” Isabella said.
The vet stepped back. Isabella could see that she took everything in stride.
“This dog is basically a hundred years old,” the vet pointed out.
Inky had relaxed and seemed to be sleeping. His bones prodded his hide from within, his grey-black fur was greasy and unclean, his muscles were astonishingly atrophied. He smelled wretched. Ashamed, Isabella realized she was going to cry. She was going to cry and needed to get home quickly. Home. She thought of Cooper, balancing a spoon on his nose instead of eating his cereal and asking her last week, “What month did Dad die?”
She had been halfway across the kitchen. She stopped and noticed red stains on the floor. His tone was serious, but matter-of-fact. He had grown several inches over the summer and she sensed his voice was about to change any day.
“It was in December,” she said. “You went to see him in the hospital just before. Do you remember?”
“No, I never. You told me I had to, but I hid under my bed.” He laughed, pleased with himself. “You tried to bribe me.”
Was he right about that?
“Christmas is in December, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did we still have Christmas?”
“Yes, but it was — strange.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“I don’t really either.”
“Did we already live here?”
“Yes.”
“I kind of remember. But Dad wasn’t here, was he?”
“In this house? No.”
“So Dad doesn’t know about this house.”
“No.”
Benny had loved Cooper. Though they had never discussed it, Isabella knew he never had any intention, before or after becoming sick, of leaving them.
But he had left them, in a sense. And he did leave them, in the end.
She hadn’t told Cooper she was taking Inky to the vet. That wasn’t fair. He deserved the opportunity to say goodbye.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Isabella said.
The vet nodded.
They roused Inky and got him off the table and carried him to the car. The vet withheld her opinion, which Isabella appreciated. Isabella thought perhaps that man Byron might know how to prolong Inky’s life more comfortably. He seemed clever that way.
But once Isabella got into the car, she realized she was breathing rapidly and her hands were shaking. She sensed she had narrowly escaped something dreadful, like a car accident or electrocution. Behind her, Inky groaned once, perhaps urging her to get the car started and them home again, out of this heat.
She did not entirely know the man Benny had been. Apparently, he had been a philanderer, but in a monogamous way. One mistress at a time. Isabella realized this came as no great surprise to her. When he met Heather Welbourne, he gave up Bridget Neal. Gave her up so completely he forgot to mail her photos of their last tryst — even forgot he had them. He had been as loyal to Heather as Heather imagined him to have been. No more, but no less.
Isabella opened her purse and removed the photos of Bridget Neal and tore them up.
The warm weather started early on the morning of July 18. Darren woke up to it. He couldn’t get over how people complained. He wanted to shake them and say, it won’t last, you’ll wake up one morning and it will be winter again and you’ll be cursing and complaining about that.
The bird flew onto the deck of a cargo ship forty-five nautical miles east of St. John’s. The crew put it in a box and tossed in a slice of bread. Darren got the call at nine thirty in the morning but was too busy to get down to the harbour until late afternoon. From the crew’s description he guessed American bittern. He took the box from the crew, put it in the back of the truck and headed over to Long Pond. He knew the bird was still alive because he heard it moving around inside the box.
Approaching the pond, he noticed several boys coming up the street towards him a
nd he slowed the truck. They were carrying skateboards. One of the boys was dark-haired and Darren thought it might be Cooper, but the sun, already lower on the horizon at this time of year, was bright and blinding. Darren watched the boy lower the rear wheels of his skateboard to the pavement, then begin running beside it, leaning forward as he held the nose of the board with one hand. Then he stepped onto the board with one foot, using the other to push himself along, gaining greater and greater speed. Just where there was a dip in the road, he bent his knees and both boy and board rose several feet into the air.
Darren was not quite sure how it happened — what it was that had given the boy the power to leave the ground. During those few seconds of being airborne, the skateboard remained attached to the soles of the boy’s huge sneakers as though glued. Then both skateboard and boy had landed and were moving in Darren’s direction.
Darren could not remember when he had last seen Cooper. He visited Goodridge Place only once or twice a week now, to check on Jeanette. If this was Cooper, he had grown considerably over the summer. He looked too old for a wading pool and certainly would no longer be easy to lift. Darren recalled the boy’s lightness, dripping wet with fake blood. He had picked him up and carried him out of the kitchen without thinking.
He waved at the boys as they passed him, but the gesture was neither acknowledged nor returned.
He pulled up to Long Pond and parked. He glanced at his rear-view mirror, imagining, as he still frequently did, a red Echo pulling in behind him.
He paused, the window down, drinking in the warm end-of-day air. Along a strip of grass beside him a pair of adult crows strutted, jabbing at the ground for grubs. Another two were perched side by side on the arm of a streetlight. One held a wine cork in its bill and the other was trying to steal it. Young crows were everywhere now. They were black like their parents, but Darren could distinguish them by their nasally call and the fact adults had better things to do than squabble over wine corks.
The moment he got out of the truck, the crows on the streetlight flew off, cawing maniacally, to a nearby stand of fir. The adults on the grass lifted and cocked their heads, getting a better look at Darren, then went back to foraging.
Darren Effect Page 23