Then she felt the familiar bolt of anger, the pre-emption of the building sorrow, stood straighter, turned and walked steadily toward her kitchen. On the cupboard she saw the business card. How did that get there? It had been in her purse. It was wet now, splashed at some point in the afternoon or evening. She laughed. And for a fleeting moment, giddy recklessness dispelled the sense of isolation. What if? We only live once.
She pressed the buttons on the telephone, and it was only when it started ringing that she felt the panic. But it rang and rang and slowly she relaxed. And when no one answered, she felt enveloping relief.
My God, she thought. What on earth is coming over you? She poured the last of the wine down the sink. Sanity restored, she undressed quickly, donned pyjamas, splashed water on her face, applied a cleansing cream, rinsed it off and brushed her teeth.
When the phone rang in the morning, she was so sure it was him she simply murmured, “Hey, you,” when she picked it up.
There was silence. Then the unfamiliar voice. “Is this Faye?”
She paused, recalibrating. “Who’s calling, please?”
“It’s Paul,” he said. “I hope I’m not getting you at a bad time.”
Her head was throbbing, her mouth dry. Paul. Who is Paul? Then she remembered.
“I didn’t realize I’d given you this number,” she said.
“My phone rang last night. I was waiting for the machine to pick up … you know the way the phone is. The solicitations. I forgot the machine was turned off. So I did the star-sixty-nine thing … and this is what I got. Serendipity, I guess.”
“Right,” she said. “I did call … umm. I misplaced my cellphone and thought I might have left it at the coffee shop. I’d dialled your number before I realized you left before I did. I’m sorry.”
“No apology necessary,” he said. “I believe in serendipity.”
“Anyway, I found the phone, buried in my purse, just after I called your number—”
“Why don’t we meet up for another coffee … later today?”
“Maybe some other time. I’m actually getting ready to leave town.”
“Lucky you,” he said. “Back east, I suppose.”
Now she was fully alert. Just hang up, a small voice urged.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes. Look. I must go. I have a lot to do.”
“Of course. But maybe I’ll bug you again about that coffee. A drink, maybe.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“Right.” He laughed. “Actually, I prefer Effie.”
“Pardon me?”
“You also go by Effie, right?”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve done my homework,” he said. “I hope you’re impressed.”
She was sure she heard him laughing as she put the phone down.
In the darker moments, she could, and always would, return to the summer months of 1998 for comfort. All through May and June she and JC had discussed driving through the United States, through New York and Maine, to get to the east coast. Then they decided that the journey would be simpler through Canada, even when they factored in the chaos of traversing Montreal. He mentioned camping. She thought the notion was absurd. They were going to stay in all the best motels, she said, and she’d pay the tab. Growing up, she’d had enough bugs to last a lifetime. A deal, he said, but only if she’d let him cover the gas. The pleasure of anticipation was exquisite, almost to the point of dread. Somehow she knew that this was real. But weren’t they always real when they were only plans?
They were to leave on Saturday, July 4. He called the night before.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” he said.
And she knew. It was as if she’d known all along.
“You’re going to kill me.”
“What’s the crime?” she asked.
“Actually, a criminal,” he said. “They want me to go to see a criminal.”
“When?”
“Um. As soon as possible, I’m afraid.”
“You can’t get out of it?”
“I tried. They want me to approach this guy we’ve discovered who happens to be in a bit of a pickle down in Texas. He hates the media, has never given an interview. The boss thinks I can talk him into one.”
“Pickle?”
“He’s in a prison, on death row. They’re going to execute him soon.”
“Why you?”
“Who knows? My boss calls me the Reverend. Maybe that’s a clue.” He laughed. “She thinks I can talk him into it.”
“Maybe she’s right.”
“I hope she’s wrong, in which case it’ll be back to Plan A. You and me and the open road. Let’s hope. But I wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Maybe you could come with me. You ever been to Texas?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll call,” he said.
And she said, “Sure,” knowing that he would, but maybe not.
She’d been at the window, near the landing halfway up the stairs, since early morning. They’d told her to be ready to leave by nine. By ten she’d given up, resigned herself.
The car horn tooted at the gate. It was just past noon. She saw Sextus darting through the gate and up to the front door. She heard Duncan call her name. She sat on the stairs, fighting tears. Duncan started up the stairs.
“They’re here,” he said. “Finally.”
Her decision was spontaneous and irreversible. “I can’t go,” she said. It was, she knew, a refusal born of disappointment.
“What do you mean you can’t go? You’ve been talking about it all week.”
“I don’t feel well.”
“You were fine at breakfast.”
“I’m not now.”
“Come on,” he pleaded. “We’ve never been around the Cabot Trail. It’s overnight. We’ll get to eat in restaurants.”
“You go,” she said. “I’m staying here.”
“Goddamn.”
“Don’t swear.”
His face was dark with worry. “What will you do?”
“What will I do? I’m thirteen. I’ll think of something.”
“What will I tell Sextus and his father?”
“I’m sick,” she said. “Tell them that.”
“Where’s the old man?”
“I have no idea.”
And she was sick, as she would be many times thereafter. Sick of promises. Sick of the seductive hope that followed promises too lightly made. Sick of expectations, the shallow giddy joy that people cultivate in others to harvest their approval or their favours; sick of what, even then, she knew to be self-interested kindness. Sick, sick, sick, until she recognized the foolishness of joy derived from the conditional: might, could, would. Even the future tense was loaded with the likelihood of disappointment.
From the window on the landing she could see them talking by the car, looking toward the house, looking toward her window, knowing she was watching them. She saw Sextus shrug, say something to his father. Duncan looked back again, his face bereft, then opened the rear car door and disappeared inside. The car moved off, dust lingering. She wept.
Saturday, July 4, was sunless after an early morning drizzle. Two days, she calculated. It will take two days. Traffic on the parkway was grim, Willie Nelson blaring on the stereo. On the road again … Insisting that the world keep turning our way … She felt a sudden surge of love for Willie and then an unexpected dampness on her cheek. Or was it for Conor? Willie had been his favourite. Willie Nelson and Van Morrison—he thought the sun rose and set on them. Now Conor was a ghost. Little things like songs would bring him back in times of insecurity, a moment in her past when everything seemed stable.
“Don’t expect too much,” he’d warned her. “Love, friendship, loyalty aren’t real. They’re only qualities.”
“What’s real?” she asked.
“Our solitude,” he said. “The moment.”
/> She wiped her eyes, checked the rear-view, remembering Conor. Conor, the one who never let her down. Except by dying.
“Love and friendship are only temporary absences from solitude. Sunny days. You can’t keep sunshine in a jar. Remember.”
Right you are.
And then she was singing along with Willie.
In a service centre washroom mirror she spied on three young Muslim women, niqabs set aside as they shared their lipstick, passed around magenta eyeshadow, then retreated back into their costumes, walking out in single file like nuns.
Afterwards she wasn’t sure how long she stood there, water running, staring down the drain.
The old barn had been her secret place, a kind of cloak that she could pull around her for security. It was always warm there, and the musk of old hay and long-departed animals created a sensuous space that was as far away as she could ever hope to get from home, from school, from disappointment. There were always new discoveries, discarded artifacts from other times. Once there were kittens, suddenly present and just as quickly gone, but the softness and the innocence remained. Dry and dusty bottles without labels, pieces of machinery with wooden wheels, cobwebs laced among the spokes. And a maze of secret spaces, hiding places—impenetrable.
“Are you in there?”
The small internal voice would answer no.
“I know you’re in there somewhere.”
Inching through Montreal, she remembered stopping there in 1970 to see a friend, someone Sextus knew in university. Big Ed. He was tall and blond, handsome in a way. A college football player, Sextus told her. A tackle, whatever that was. A standout at Dalhousie, which wasn’t saying much, Sextus joked. She felt vaguely attracted to Big Ed. Attracted, she would later realize, to the idea of being someone new to someone new, unburdened by a history. Attracted to the future, in a way.
The traffic crawled along the tangled bypass, a maze of sudden ramps and exits, intimidating trucks and darting cars. JC had warned her about Highway 40. Keep to the centre lane. You can’t go wrong. Highway 40 was aggression in slow motion, her own aggression mitigated by the glow of recollection. Smoked meat. Pizza. Names flipped up in memory. Dunn’s. NDG. Snowdon. Ma Heller’s. The Hunter’s Horn. And with them came thin strands of ecstasy that led her through to the other side of pandemonium.
Near Rivière-du-Loup she stopped at a small motel just off the highway, near a service station. It was only seven o’clock. She could have carried on. People often used to stop there. It sounded musical, the way they used to say it. Riverduloo. A long day away from home. A day or two away from Elliott Lake or Sudbury, or Detroit, or Wawa. Or Toronto. Some other destination of necessity.
The motel room was flimsy. Thin covers on the bed, a chair that sagged and squeaked, a TV set bolted to the dresser. Settled in, she flicked the TV on, went to the washroom, brushed her teeth. Conditioning instructed her to eat, but she felt no hunger. She’d packed a bottle. Balvenie single malt, her brother’s choice, purchased days earlier for the special nightcap with JC at the end of what would have been their first day on the road. She thought it might relax her, then realized she didn’t want to be relaxed. Returning to the bedroom, she heard the sound of someone gasping. On the television screen a man and a woman, backsides to the camera, were performing lurid, feral sex. Massive penis in the cutaway, sliding, glistening. She stared in shock. The woman looked back toward the man behind her, hair draping half her face. She slowly licked her lips. Effie felt a sudden, involuntary tingle of arousal, quickly followed by disgust.
“They only want one thing, and they’re dangerous when they don’t get that one thing they’re always after.”
“Yes, Mrs. Gillis.”
“You can call me Mary.”
“Yes, Mrs. Gillis.”
“Your daddy always has a knife on him.”
“I don’t know.”
“Be careful.”
“Yes.”
Close-up of repellent penis; vagina like a passive, bestial eye, uglier than sin. The thing they’re always after. She spied a knob on the wall near the television set, crossed the room and studied it. “A” and “B.” Next to “A,” Scotch-taped in clumsy letters, the word “adulte.” Adult. Adultery. Was there a common root? Adultery, exclusively for grown-ups. She shivered, remembering another motel just down the road from here. Labatt’s 50, hot chicken sandwiches and a side order of adultery. She turned the knob to “B,” and Molly Blue, JC’s television colleague, surfaced on the screen, telling her of some atrocity in some unlucky place. She turned back to “A.” Now the woman was on top, breasts like squash suspended. Effie quashed the television picture, rummaged in the small bag she’d packed and found sweatpants, T-shirt and a book.
She couldn’t read, gave up and turned out the bedside light.
Sandy Gillis said, “You tell me if anyone comes near you. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You come straight to me.”
In the dark, she tried to picture Toronto as she remembered it when she arrived in 1970. Cop cars were, for some peculiar reason, yellow—taxis for Cape Bretoners, the boys would joke. Bouncing jingles on the radio. “C.h.U.m. 10.50 ta.RON.ta.” Ancient brick and granite buildings with new black towers reflecting cloudy skies. Thrilling smoky bars. Food aromas jostling the senses, competing for her hunger. Fat ducks shinier than patent leather on display in steamy Chinese diners on teeming Dundas West. The Greek place where the kitchen seemed to be an extension of the dining room, where she simply pointed at submerged selections in oily liquids. Just as well that she could point: she didn’t have a clue what she was ordering. Nor did Sextus.
She asked herself how she would avoid encountering Sextus at home. Tomorrow or the next day. And the day after that. JC would have been her shield, her triumph. She felt a spurt of irritation. You can’t depend on anyone.
She slept in semi-conscious episodes, part dream, part memory.
“Effie, what are you doing, hiding in there?”
She stared back at him. He squatted down in front of her.
“You didn’t go with the others …”
“I didn’t feel well.”
His hand was on her brow. “You’re warm.”
She turned her head away.
“I have to go to town,” he said. “You’ll be all right?”
She heard the truck pull up outside.
He stood, turned and walked away.
She watched him go, watched him walk toward Sandy’s truck, climb in and slam the door.
Exhaled slowly.
From Rivière-du-Loup to the New Brunswick border, the road was basically unchanged from 1970, so the memories came flooding back intact, fully shaped sequential scenes from the movie of her life, strung together on the frame of retrospect. They were in his father’s car because his father was dead. At first, Jack had died slowly, with the cancer in his lungs, but then death had become impatient. Jack’s great, kind heart just stopped. Did Sextus use the sorrow they all shared to take advantage of her? She was suspicious at the time, but her suspicion vanished in a flame of guilt. It was just too cynical—even Sextus would not manipulate such a situation, cloak the raw seduction in the cloth of grief. His dad was dead and she was in his bed. Guilt reduced to doggerel.
She remembered the cheap, intoxicating drama of it all. Was it really all his fault? Did he really have to try so hard, to lie so hard? Was she really such a challenge, her virtue such an obstacle? Or was it simple exploitation of the willing? She imagined a small green Volkswagen on a long hill, labouring westward, the direction of the future, and the eastward road to yesterday blurred briefly.
And now the trees pressed closer on the potholed two-lane highway. Maybe that’s why thoughts of home were looming like the spruce and pine and juniper, full of menace. Eastern Ontario and most of Quebec had been wide open, free of small constraints, bound only by an oceanic lake, a river long and broad as history, eternal towns of stone huddling around their spiky churches, in
different to time and passing strangers. She remembered the intoxicating freedom she’d felt years before, driving westward, in her sinful liberation from those dark and gloomy trees. Fhuair mi’n t’aite so’n agaidh naduir. The despairing words of the long-dead bard from Nova Scotia flooded her with gloom. “My place, at war with nature,” was how he saw it. The suffocating truth.
The silhouette was at her bedroom door again. She followed the glow of the cigarette, the ember moving, a tiny point of light from the unseen hand to where she knew his face would be. The truck had returned in darkness, but she knew.
From behind him, in the kitchen, the disembodied alcoholic growl. “Hey, Angus, come away from there.”
Silence, ember moving upward, flaring again.
“I said, get away from her door.”
Chair legs scraped on the floor. The silhouette turned, revealed the familiar profile and was gone.
“Hey, Angus, what’s your fuckin’ problem, anyway?”
Sunday at noon she called home from a pay phone in a coffee shop in Fredericton, New Brunswick. There was one message.
“Hey … guess where I am. Davy Crockett country, but only for a day or two. Be well. Drive safe. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
She was suddenly hungry, ordered a burger and a coffee, bought a paper from the day before. Fires in Florida. Clinton and Lewinsky—did they or didn’t they? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The Oval Office. Clinton should be fired, they were saying. Who cares? Tampa Bay was scheduled to play the Jays on Sunday at the SkyDome. And now it was Sunday. Staring out the window of the coffee shop, she was trying to remember why he went to Texas.
Why Men Lie Page 12