Accusation

by Catherine Bush

  And the shot to the head: had that been impulse or planned, it was a thing men did, not heart but head, the choice to knock out consciousness first, the horror of fury and terror and shame colliding, a final detonation of annihilation and self-judgment.

  She’d pushed him to that point. Had she pushed him?

  The phone sat dumbly on her desk. She did not call David or want to call David and anyway he’d said he would be going to court: dropping his keys and wallet in the tray provided and sliding his briefcase along for the security guard to shove into the mouth of the X-ray machine and picking up his belongings on the far side.

  Sara laid her head on her folded arms. She’d spoken to Raymond Renaud and now there was no more of him. Nowhere at all in the world.

  Outside the sun shone and, in the parking lot, tucked between the sock factory and the newspaper’s production wing, sparrows chirruped on an overhead wire, and a car turned into the lot through the open gate, an old brown Chevy driven by no one she recognized. On the far side of Wellington Street, a crocodile of small children tottered along, linked by a rope with knotted handholds to which they clung, tippy on their feet, led by a jaunty young woman in a pea jacket, who was cajoling them into song, Row, row, row your boat. Another, older woman brought up the rear.

  Each loss was particular but pushed up against every other loss.

  A car horn howled. To Sara’s right, a taxi, green and orange, jerked to a stop, the driver’s voice, even within the sealed tomb of his vehicle, audibly yelling at her, and the faces of the children and the women swerved in her direction, as a young woman in a red coat approached along the far sidewalk, leading a black pug on a leash. The trees ahead of her were almost leafless, branches leading to tinier branches, filigreed, dendritic, beautiful in their spindliness. Merrily, merrily, merrily, the children sang. At her back, the taxi lurched into motion. Life is but a dream. That she could have been hit barely registered.

  Juliet Levin was the only person she wanted to talk to, although reaching out to Juliet felt risky. Once before, in a moment of crisis, she had turned to Juliet. Or Juliet had been there and held out sympathy. Juliet knew Raymond and knew enough of Sara’s past to understand why the possibility that he was not guilty made the horror of what he’d done so much worse. The horror of what she’d done.

  Inside a phone booth at the corner of Portland and Wellington, Sara scrambled through her wallet for change. Held a quarter poised, tried to compose herself. And if Juliet wasn’t there. She dropped her coin in the slot and was met by the repellent field of a busy signal, Juliet or Max online or talking to someone else.

  West and a block north, the wind tunnels of King and Bathurst pulled at her coat and entered the cloth and sucked at her body as she went on leaning toward Juliet Levin. The Friday before, she’d sent Juliet an email saying that she’d found Raymond teaching at an orphanage in Port-au-Prince and spoken to him and her brief interview was in that day’s paper. And had heard nothing from her.

  On the far side of Stanley Park, by the pedestrian crossing, the yellow rectangular sign above the crosswalk creaking in the wind, Sara pushed through the accordion door of another phone booth and felt its panels push back as the door closed itself behind her.

  Juliet’s hello sounded artificially bright: maybe this was her looking-for-work voice.

  Juliet, Sara said. I’ve got some news about Raymond Renaud.

  I saw your piece, Juliet said. Sorry, sorry, I meant to get in touch. How did he sound to you when you spoke to him? And how did you track him down anyway? In Haiti?

  Upset. Distressed. Listen, I found out —

  How upset?

  I don’t know. Julie, I got word at work, he killed himself.

  The short, sharp exhalation of Juliet’s breath — Oh — oh no — what happened, when? In a small playground, beyond the phone booth, red leaves flattened themselves against a children’s slide.

  He shot himself in the head. The day I spoke to him. Last Thursday. There was a wire report, giving his name. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard to find him. I spoke to him hours before he does this. I feel like I had a hand in his death. I can’t help it. Like in a way I killed him.

  Yes, Juliet said.

  One afternoon, a little more than two weeks after Raymond Renaud’s suicide, as Sara returned from the newsroom cafeteria, the blue glint of an airmail envelope in the inbox on her desk caught her eye. The envelope hadn’t been there earlier. She picked it up. The American stamp seemed odd because most Americans didn’t put letters to Canada in airmail envelopes. There was no return address on front or back, only her name and address written in scrawled block letters, the contents, as she ran the envelope between her fingers, thin but stiff. Seated at her desk, she contemplated waiting to open it. Then, with her index finger, she ripped open the envelope’s seal and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, blank on both sides. Unfolded it to find a photograph.

  Of a man surrounded by children, a man with the beginnings of an Afro, bearded, in shorts and a striped cotton T-shirt, who knelt, one knee to the ground, arms wide to embrace the darker children around him. Five boys, three girls. He was smiling, as the children were. It took her a long second, mind reconfiguring what she saw, before, through hair and beard, she recognized him. A cinder-block wall filled the background, leaves fronding to one side. The children’s clothes had the incongruous theatricality of secondhand, repurposed clothing sent from the north: one girl clad in a puffy blue party dress, a boy in a multicoloured knitted sweater, another in a down vest. The sheen of sweat on the children’s upturned faces suggested heat. The turquoise paint on the wall, a quality of light read as tropical. Port-au-Prince, the wall of an orphanage: Sara was guessing, since nothing was written on the photograph or the sheet of paper, and there was nothing else in the envelope. She pried it open to check. Who had sent the photograph? Raymond Renaud and more children: their happiness, his happiness reached out like a hand from a river to pull her under the current again.

  The first night had been the worst. In the wake of Juliet’s Yes, not comfort or sympathy but chasm, she’d kept walking west, west, and farther west rather than south toward the lake and the lake path as she might otherwise have done, since the lake path went right past the parking lot where the Cirque had raised its tent and where she’d met Raymond Renaud in July. West and north. For hours. Then south. Her sense of responsibility, her horror so tiny when set against his. Her grief. She tried to yank him back, to argue with him. Don’t do it. Part of the horror was not knowing if he’d killed himself because he was guilty of what he’d been accused of, felt guilty of something, or because he wasn’t guilty, the nature of his panic and shame and point of no return unknown. His voice raged at her: You are not trying to help me.

  Years back, she’d been walking along a road near dusk outside the Polish town of Tarnow and come upon a Roma encampment. After the first stint in Lebanon and the Middle East, she’d made up her mind to go north, figuring that her ability to speak a bit of Russian and her glancing childhood familiarity with this part of the world might be useful; she had her contacts as a stringer; there was the first anniversary of Chernobyl, the persecution of the Roma, the Pope’s trip home to Poland to write about. She’d rented a flat in Warsaw, returned to terrible toilet paper and began living off potatoes.

  Outside Tarnow, through the lime-green leaves of late spring, she’d glimpsed battered cars, trailers, and two small dark men walking in the air between two trees. She looked again: two tightrope walkers on a wire. As she watched, silent and entranced, unseen she thought, one man turned a somersault on the wire and fell, oh the jolt of it, no, for he caught the wire in his hands and spun himself around and around the wire until able to pull himself upright. A woman’s voice cried out. From another tree, a giant pine, a woman in a red leotard was hanging upside down from a rope as the rope rotated in tiny circles. At the sound of the woman’s voice the men turned, and the woman called again, without moving from her upturned pose, an
d the men lowered themselves from the wire by their hands, jumped to the ground, hurried toward her, then began to twist the rope from which she hung in bigger and bigger spirals, until it became clear the woman’s leotard was pinned, its cloth enfolded against the rope: she was stuck and they were endeavouring to free her. One of the men caught sight of Sara. Her gaze must have touched him, for he shouted, as if she’d glimpsed a secret, or her gaze was a violation, or by watching them she had somehow caused his fall and the woman’s entrapment, and both men shook their fists and shouted in Romani, and one of the men began to run toward her as she took off.

  The house was dark and quiet when she entered. If she had not found him and exposed him. Was it her linking of him to Mark Templeton that had proved his breaking point? Or that her words, her repeating of the allegations, would remain not just in print but online and searchable and inescapable? Or that he could not live with who and what he was? In the kitchen she poured herself a glass of whisky and climbed the stairs, whisky in hand, her body seizing up as she crossed the threshold of the bedroom. And what about Yitbarek — who would pay his rent now?

  The next night, David came over. He’d called her at home late in the morning, said he’d seen the obit in the paper and tried her at work. How are you?

  I couldn’t stand the thought of the newsroom so I’ve been working from home.

  I’ll be over as soon as I can this evening. Any estrangement she’d been feeling was immediately overcome by these words.

  As soon as Sara opened the door to him, David took her in his arms and there was so much strength and warmth in him, his embrace felt like a home. She leaned into him. In the kitchen, she laid her head against his shoulder as he pressed his hands to her back.

  Did you sleep?

  Not much.

  You must not take this on. It’s nothing you did.

  It’s easy for you to say that.

  Did he contract a little at her tone, as if she wasn’t going to be as straightforward to console as he’d hoped.

  Breaking from him, Sara unhooked the string that held up the window blind and lowered the cloth on the darkness outside and the lights of other people’s homes, and said, I keep wondering if others might have died because of things I’ve written. People have run risks to speak to me, I know that. The ex-general in Islamabad. This Kurdish woman, Khadija Berwani, who wanted to speak out even though her husband had been taken away and was probably being tortured. And even some of the fixers, our translators in Iraq. I’ve never heard that anyone died but that doesn’t mean they haven’t. I’ve spoken to people who were going to die. Not because of anything I did. From their injuries. People living with the threat of death. That’s different. Not a suicide. I don’t know of another suicide.

  David, in shirt sleeves and stockinged feet, said, It’s not necessarily because of anything you’ve done.

  He must have seen the day’s newspaper out on the porch, Sara realized, and chosen not to bring it in; she hadn’t gone out all day, not even to retrieve the paper, had felt no urge to see the obituary that Anne Rauschenberg or someone else had written or be confronted with whatever photograph of Raymond Renaud accompanied it. She wondered how far word of his suicide had spread by now: to Australia, to Addis Ababa, to the circus children.

  Okay, but at least admit I was in the vicinity. He did it hours after I spoke to him.

  Unshowered, knees pulled to her chest, feet resting on the vinyl of her kitchen chair, Sara watched David set on the counter a can of gourmet soup that he’d brought, since she’d said soup was all she could think of eating, and pour them each a shot of single malt.

  Granted, David said. Have you tried to get in touch with the alleged victims since you heard about his death?

  Tomorrow I’ll try. I didn’t want to be the one to tell them. And I couldn’t seem to do much of anything today.

  He nodded and his ordinariness, every ordinary gesture, felt so sad. The assumptions of ordinariness. The scent of the whisky, honey and peat, in the glass that David handed her smelled sad and assaultive. If things had gone another way, she might have been mothering their child by now. A toddler, here in this room, right now, across the table in a high chair. This felt unimaginable, and shocking in part because unimaginable, and this made her even sadder, and David in his true desires nearly as unknowable as Raymond Renaud was. A wreckage of sadness.

  The table in front of her was a mess of week-old newspapers. Her father often looked at the Canadian papers at the embassy in Moscow: had he by chance read her Ethiopian dispatches? He was used to seeing her name in the paper, even if not reporting from Ethiopia. He might have read them and not have made the connection between the day’s obituary, if he’d seen that, and the man she’d written about the week before. She’d had no word from her parents for weeks, for months, and felt too exhausted at the moment to think of phoning them to let them know what had happened. Why let them know? It was an old and ambiguous urge: to seek comfort without any conviction that the longed-for comfort will be found. Maybe she shouldn’t feel so fundamentally shaken. And yet: a man’s life. Nor had she heard anything further from Juliet Levin.

  The Thursday night, two nights after she’d got word of Renaud’s suicide, and she’d had to wait until late because of the time difference, Sara placed a call to the office of Sem Le, the Sydney legal agent. She hoped Sem Le and his clients had heard the news by now. It was a week since Raymond Renaud’s death; surely they’d have heard somehow.

  She had lived through the day as a series of returns: exactly a week ago, I called him; around ten-thirty he hung up; he left the school; at twelve-ten I arrived home; at twelve-forty I started listening to and transcribing our interview; at three-fifty I handed in my copy. Maybe he had shot himself by then, his body lying in that room. Or sometime after that he — She had stashed the cassette tape of her interview in the top drawer of her desk at home. So close at hand. The alarming temptation to listen to it again was cancelled out by her inability to bear the thought of doing so.

  G’day, g’day, carolled Sem Le’s bright-voiced receptionist. When Sara gave her name, the young woman put the call through immediately.

  I’ve been meaning to ring you, Sem Le said, barrelling forward without pause. You found him. And then he kills himself. How did you manage to find him, by the way?

  Luck. Tenacity. I remembered something about his family.

  You found them in Haiti?

  I spoke to someone in Montreal.

  I read your articles. They were reprinted here. I assume you know that. So what happened — did he give any sign he would do this?

  No. He was upset. At being found. And at my questions. Linking him to what happened at the orphanage. I don’t know what more to say than that.

  In Ethiopia, did you find out anything? He visited the orphanage. I presume you visited the circus. Did any of the children you met say anything about what he’d done to them?

  No. I wrote what they told me. About your clients being unhappy and wanting more money. That the new circus director discredits the allegations.

  Frustration rang from him, and she knew why: dead, Raymond Renaud was of no use, or was nearly useless to him in making an argument that his clients should be granted asylum. He could not argue that Raymond posed a threat if they were returned to Ethiopia. Alive and hidden he’d been not much of a threat but dead he was no threat at all, unless Sem Le could prove that he was part of a larger ring of pedophiles threatening vulnerable young people in Ethiopia, or Sem Le might argue that in speaking out about their abuse, the runaways had made themselves too vulnerable to return. In Sem Le’s eyes, she’d had a hand in Renaud’s death and in weakening his clients’ case, and whether he’d admit to it or not, she presumed that he was furious about it.

  Mr. Le, are your clients aware of Renaud’s death?

  I’ve told them.

  And?

  They’re shocked. They wanted justice, but they did not want him dead. It is a very unfortunate turn of ev
ents.

  And they haven’t changed their story in any way.

  Changed it? They have not. Why would they do that?

  Mr. Le, I know I’ve asked this before, but I would dearly love to speak to one, to any of them. Even briefly.

  Why?

  To hear their account of what happened to them.

  Are you planning to write more about all this?

  Maybe. I don’t know yet. In part that depends if —

  They do not wish to tell their story to the press.

  And if I don’t write about it? How can I know until I speak to them? If I don’t write, can I speak to them?

  It was impossible to keep the pleading out of her voice, whisky carrying it forward, out of the dark room and across the world to a Sydney morning where a man whose body she imagined tilted back in his chair seemed intent on rebuffing her.

  I do not see how it’s in their best interest to speak to you.

  The next morning, Friday, Sara tried calling Addis Ababa from work, wanting to hear how people there were taking the news. Elsa Larsen first because she also hoped to ask Elsa for help finding out what would happen to Yitbarek Abera and his aunt now that Raymond Renaud was no longer paying their rent. She couldn’t reach Elsa. Elsa might be able to reach phoneless Alazar. In an email, she told Elsa that she’d be happy to pay Alazar for his aid in contacting Yitbarek. Nor could she get through to Tamrat Asfaw, whom she tried a little hopelessly at the circus number, then by email. She had little hope that Tamrat would want to speak to her. Raymond’s colleague, or colleague and friend. Ed Levoix was very cool, all bureaucrat, unwilling to allude in any way to his small but influential part in Renaud’s fate by having introduced her to Gerard Loftus. Nor was he going to offer sympathy or acknowledge her feelings of responsibility, presumably because this would mean touching on his own. He said he’d heard the news from the Larsens. Word was going around. Everyone here is just so terribly, terribly saddened by the whole chain of events, and yet, I suppose, there’s closure, if the worst sort of closure for some.