Blind Spot

by Laurence Miall

  I approached the Brookfields during the final throes of the awkward afternoon, when half the guests were gone, and so each remaining voice stood out in the growing quiet.

  “I’m glad we finally have a chance to talk to you,” said Jacob. He shook my hand. Then he tried to give me a consoling pat on the shoulder.

  “Good of you to come,” I said. Then I realized that this sounded insulting — as if there had ever been any question they would come.

  “A lot of people here,” said Stella as she hugged me. She whispered in my ear. “They were so loved.”

  “Do you need anything?” I said, eyeing their empty plastic glasses and Jacob’s empty plate.

  “No, no. We’re not staying much longer.”

  It was silent for a while. Someone was going to have to say something, and it wasn’t going to be them. They were gazing into the room.

  “It must be hard for you,” I said, wanting to steer the conversation to that night. “You were the last to see them.”

  Stella’s face was melting again. It was like dough decorated with paint. Jacob looked at me skeptically. Stella adhered to his side again. He gently caressed her hair as he mustered the authoritative air with which he usually spoke. There was no question of him falling apart. He was six feet tall, barrel-chested, with a broad face covered in wiry bristles.

  “It’s hard, naturally,” he replied.

  “I see.”

  I didn’t sound like I believed them. That must have been the impression I conveyed, because Jacob felt compelled to hurry on talking, as if justifying himself.

  “We never could have imagined something like this happening. For them to go like this. They were still young, really. Maybe that sounds odd to someone your age, but that is how we saw them. A fine couple in the prime of their lives. Leonard was jogging every second day. I had started going with him, but it was impossible to keep up. Plus with my asthma...” He gave a rueful smile, as if wanting to make light of his weakness. But I knew that he in no way considered himself weak. “And Mary — she was equally as energetic.” He paused. His face clouded a little. Stella was looking at me, her eyes still watery, but now with a distinct sharp gleam to them, as if my continued presence was an intrusion. They didn’t want me there. It was obvious.

  Jacob continued. “Mary’s business was really taking off. We were both so proud of her. This year, she even hired some boys to help her. But don’t think she let them do everything. She was in there, dirt up to her elbows, pushing the wheelbarrow, carrying sod. A woman in her fifties, doing landscaping work like that. Remarkable. Truly remarkable.”

  I nodded my head. I hadn’t really stopped to think of it before. Seeing my mother labouring all afternoon long in the garden had been a normal part of my youth.

  “We’ll miss them so much,” Stella said.

  I looked at them. They were staring back with a little touch of defiance. They were a very strange couple. The way Stella clung to him was like a seventeen-year-old with her first love. As for him, he gave her the attention she obviously needed, but did it automatically, as if she didn’t really matter to him.

  “Your father was organizing a conference,” Jacob announced, abruptly. “I thought you should know. It was going to be here in Edmonton. It was a major coup for him. I just got word today: they’re continuing with the conference. It has been moved to Poland. I don’t think anything would have delighted your father more than knowing his hard work is coming to fruition.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. I hadn’t said the words with any feeling. I was putting on a very poor performance.

  “Are you okay?” said Jacob.

  “Of course,” I retorted.

  “You just seem a bit faint. A bit pale.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Please let us know if we can do anything,” said Stella, attempting a smile that exposed her teeth.

  “It’s got to be devastating for Laura,” said Jacob. “She was so close to them — especially to your mother.”

  He did not take his eyes off me for a second. What composure it took to do that. It was breathtaking audacity, suggesting that my parents’ death wouldn’t trouble me in the same way it did Laura.

  “It’s very hard on her,” I said, “and on everybody.”

  “When will you be returning home?” said Jacob.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a return ticket.”

  “You’re probably busy out there with your new career.”

  “I wouldn’t call it new. It’s been over three years.”

  “How time flies,” he said. “Still, it was a smart move, in my opinion. Getting a more stable job in an industry you already know so well. It’s keeping you busy, yes?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “It’s a shame you can’t stay in Edmonton longer.”

  “I’m here a little longer yet.”

  “Yes, but it’s not like it’s a real holiday, coming back for this.”

  He looked around the room, and then he looked at his watch.

  “Are we going?” said Stella.

  “Yes, we’ll be going. I don’t want to drive home in the dark.”

  Another silence. It was impossible not to think of another drive that had happened in the dark only a few days previously. The thought permeated our little circle, almost palpably chilled us. We hadn’t dared to discuss that night.

  7

  I had approached the Brookfields with the expectation that they would tell me something. Didn’t they owe me a final memory of my own parents? Instead, I found myself accused of not mourning the death the way a child should — the way Laura mourned it. When the Brookfields left, I was irritated, and I couldn’t face the sparse crowd anymore. I escaped out to the front step for a smoke.

  How handy it was to still have the self-imposed outlaw status of the burning cigarette in hand — an excuse to abandon the family whenever necessary. I smiled bitterly, thinking how some things hadn’t changed since I first took up the habit with Joel. After a while, the next-door neighbour Larry came out and joined me. He too enjoys a good smoke, and is unrepentant about it.

  Larry had recently retired and didn’t want to talk much about himself. We discussed my parents. He had last seen my father about two weeks ago. The two of them had been in their respective yards at the time — Larry for a smoke, my father to rake the leaves. They had chatted for a bit. My father had divulged that he’d raced in the Edmonton marathon, and that his time was published in the Edmonton Journal. He had finished ninety-eighth out of five hundred and something, but seventh in his age group.

  “If I had tried running like that, I would have dropped dead in a minute,” Larry said.

  He didn’t mention my mother. It was, perhaps, deliberate. I don’t remember my mother being a real fan of Larry, and it was possible he felt the same way about her. She would complain about Larry spending entire afternoons using power tools in the shed at the end of his yard. The noise ruined the best days of our short summer, she used to say.

  While we were watching our plumes of smoke curl lazily in the air, Larry asked what would happen to the old house now. This had been discussed already between Howard, Laura and me. The property tax in this neighbourhood was too much and the house was too old. We’d be selling it.

  “You’ll get a fortune,” he said.

  I had not thought about that, and the prospect of thousands of dollars coming my way suddenly unnerved me. Without pausing long, Larry went on to say that the house should get a makeover before being sold. He pointed out that it needed new paint. The window frames, soffits, and fascia were looking worn. Also, somebody should check all the storm windows. He’d noticed a few where the mosquito screens had come loose.

  “I could do all of that,” I said.

  “If you had a week to spare,” he said. “How long are you staying?”

  I decided there and then that I did have a week to spare. It was an instinctive response. I had only been looking for an excuse t
o delay my return to Vancouver.

  “I’ll have plenty of time,” I said, nonchalantly.

  “You’ll need good luck with the weather, too. It’ll be too cold for the painting soon.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But it’s going to hold up, from what I saw on TV. It’s an Indian summer.”

  This was true. Since my arrival, the temperature had climbed, and it was now like a mild summer day. Larry offered to loan me his extension ladder. He said I should come get it after I was done with the memorial.

  Before heading back inside, I wandered around the back of the house. A surprise awaited me there. Or maybe it wasn’t a surprise; maybe this was something I’d just forgotten from an earlier visit.

  The awning which I’d used to break into the house with Joel was gone. I could faintly detect a different shade of stucco, marking the patch-up job where the structure had been removed from the wall. I don’t know why my parents did it. Sure, I guess the awning had the feel of an afterthought, and never really matched the rest of the house. Maybe it had been falling apart. Or maybe, years after my break-in and now living alone, my parents had a scare about home security, remembered the ease with which I had stolen inside, and had it removed. Whatever the reason, the house didn’t look right without it.

  As I was going in, the last guests were coming out. I had to stop and perform the whole routine of hugging and hand-shaking again. When they were finally gone, only Howard, Laura and I remained. The kids were playing with a visiting cat in the backyard. The three of us didn’t want to talk; the sense of abandonment was heavy now. The house was too big for us. We busied ourselves with cleaning up. When I announced that I had decided to stay longer to paint the house and fix the storm windows, they were surprised.

  “You have time for that?” Howard asked.

  I nodded.

  “You don’t have to,” said Laura. “If it really needs doing, we’ll hire someone.”

  “It really needs doing,” I said.

  “There’s so much needs doing,” she continued. “There’s so much junk in here. There’s a lot of cleaning to do. There’s a lot to throw out.”

  “I want to do as much as I can to help.”

  “Sure, but aren’t you due home? Don’t you have to get back to work?”

  “I’ll take the time off work.”

  The degree of her surprise was starting to bother me. Did she think my own family was worth so little to me that I was just going to fly in and fly out mere days later and leave all of the hard work to them?

  Just then, the children charged in through the back door, preceded by a clattering of claws on the floor as a cat skittered ahead of them. Emma was laughing hysterically. I remember Laura shouting out something, then Emma lunging for the cat. She disappeared from my view. She must have trapped the cat because Laura left my side at the kitchen sink and an argument ensued.

  “Let the cat go outside.”

  “I caught him,” I heard Emma reply ecstatically.

  “But he belongs outside.”

  “He’s mine.”

  “Emma, no.”

  There was a shrill tone to Laura’s voice. Then there was a scuffle, the squawking of an alarmed cat, and suddenly I saw a ball of fur whiz by, back to the freedom of outdoors. Emma tried to make a grab for the cat and lunged forward, but Laura stopped her, and ended up accidentally ripping her daughter’s dress.

  “That’s your fault,” said Laura.

  “That’s your fault,” Emma retorted, and started to cry.

  Howard emerged from the basement where he had gone to put away the extra chairs we’d pulled out for the memorial.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mom ripped my dress,” Emma complained.

  Laura related the whole story, but there was still that edge to her voice, as if she was struggling to hold herself back from something — from anger or tears — I don’t know what. She had been unusually irritable around the children all day.

  “I’m sure we can fix the dress,” Howard said.

  “No we can’t,” said Emma.

  “Of course we can,” Laura snapped.

  I had long ago stopped washing dishes and was listening. My hands in the water were dimpled. The scene was for some reason unexpectedly tense.

  Howard, as if losing patience with the both of them, said wearily, “I’ve got to go outside and cover the hot tub. I noticed the leaves are falling in.”

  In his absence, the argument between mother and daughter sputtered on for a brief final exchange. Finally Laura said, “I’ll fix your dress tonight. Your grandmother could fix anything, and there’s no reason why I can’t.”

  There was a sewing machine upstairs in the room that I used to call my bedroom, which had long ago become Mom’s room. Laura asked me to help her fetch it and take it to the car. It was an old Singer, and very heavy. She wanted to fetch it that very second. I had to dry my hands and leave the dishes behind. I climbed the stairs behind Laura.

  On the threshold to Mom’s room, we stopped. The door was closed. It was the only room in the house with the door firmly shut like that. It had for so long been a private space that to enter now seemed wrong.

  I was just about to put my hand to the door when we heard a scream from downstairs. It was a child. It was Emma.

  “What is it?” Laura called out.

  She left my side. She thundered down to the bottom floor, but I stayed put. I heard Laura’s voice and Emma’s plaintive tone, but I wasn’t paying attention anymore, and I didn’t know what was said. It was Laura’s concern. It didn’t appear to be an emergency.

  I entered the room. You could smell my mother’s perfume, and another smell, a fresh smell like of laundry. There were fabrics here; she had been working on new curtains. The sewing table was cluttered, and for a moment, I couldn’t even see the old Singer. It was partially buried by her last project, her unfinished project. I looked around. The room had clearly come to serve also as an office. There was a new desk and on top, tax forms and receipts and a laptop computer.

  I didn’t want to linger long. I still had the sense of violating someone’s privacy. I uncovered the Singer, tried lifting it, found that it wouldn’t be too heavy to take on my own, and hauled the whole thing into my arms. As I did so, something that had been stuck to its base fell to the floor. It was a rectangular piece of paper.

  I set the Singer down again. I picked up the piece of paper and turned it over. It was a photograph of Jacob Brookfield. He was sitting on a bed, shirtless, wearing only jeans. His arms were folded behind his head, as if stretching, but it was obviously an ironic pose, because he was showing off his muscles. Aside from a thickening at the stomach, he looked surprisingly youthful and robust. He was obviously at ease with the person holding the camera.

  The look in his eyes said, I’m about to fuck you.

  8

  If you looked at the photo carefully, you could tell that it was shot in my parents’ bedroom. On the wall behind the bed were two pictures that my parents had taken in the Rockies: one of Table Mountain, the other, Sulphur Mountain. The quilt on the bed was the recognizable dark scarlet colour, like spilt wine. The headboard was cherry wood. My father had crafted it many years ago when he still had time for woodworking.

  I folded the photo in half and tucked it into my back pocket. Then I lugged the massive Singer sewing machine downstairs.

  There wasn’t a lot of time to brood over the photo. My first instinct was to pretend that nothing had happened. Circumstances perfectly suited this because no one was paying any attention to me. They were paying attention instead to the cause of Emma’s bloodcurdling scream. It was a mouse that the cat had dragged into the house and then released. The little creature was cowering in the alcove of the hallway where Mom kept her washing machine and dryer. It had squeezed between both machines and retreated all the way to the wall. Emma insisted it was a rat. That is why she had screamed. But it wasn’t a rat, of course.

  “There are no rats in A
lberta,” said Howard.

  He looked exasperated. How on earth could we get the mouse out of there?

  “We could poke it out with a stick,” I said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” said Laura. “I don’t want you to squash him.”

  “So he gets squashed,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t like to get squashed,” she retorted.

  “Yeah, but I’ve got the smarts not to get stuck between a washing machine and a dryer.”

  “Where’s the cat?” Howard asked.

  Chloe called out that the cat had skittered off outside again — clearly had lost interest.

  “Just poke him out with a stick,” I said.

  “Well, sure,” said Howard. “But somebody has to be at the end to trap him or else he’ll just escape again.”

  I looked around and saw a dustpan.

  “Let’s use this.”

  The procedure was very awkward given that the space was so cramped. Howard was crouched over on the floor with the dustpan, awaiting the mouse. I had to angle myself over him and use the end of a broom to poke out the tiny rodent. While we sweated and panted over this delicate work, Laura implored us to be careful. We were exceptionally careful. The mouse was safely delivered into the dustpan, its little sides quivering. Then Howard made a fast break for the outdoors and threw it into the garden.

  “Good job,” I said.

  He smiled. I think we both felt quite triumphant.

  “Now let’s get out of here,” said Howard, “before anything else happens.”

  At Howard and Laura’s that night, I lay on my makeshift bed in the living room and stared at the photo. It had been taken in the last five years or so. Jacob did not look much different from how he had a few hours ago. He was the same weight; the face was the same. There was a kind of insolence in his expression as he looked at the camera that I found particularly repellent.