Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  It occurs to her after a while that there is a hammer somewhere in the apartment and that it would probably be therapeutic to just smash the laptop to smithereens. But the noise might travel down the hall and bring him home, and she doesn’t want that. As far as she is concerned, he can stay there until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  She closes the computer down and stares at the blank screen. She can’t get rid of “Come Again.” It is out there. She can’t stop total strangers from seeing it if that’s the kind of thing they’re looking for. She can’t stop friends, for that matter — people she had taken to be friends. And so shame is added to her sorrow, but that’s okay. For her, sorrow is so deep, the shame is no more than a hard pebble thrown into a vast emptiness.

  She closes the computer and puts it back right where she found it. She feels different. Lighter. How can that be? It may have something to do with hunger. But the ham sandwich she had been looking forward to no longer appeals to her. She is too edgy, too distracted. No, that’s not quite right. Her focus has shifted — that’s all. This place she has lived in all these months suddenly seems more sharply defined; there are sharper edges and contrasts. It’s the light, of course — so harsh. But it’s something else, something vibrating in her nerves, lifting her.

  She no longer feels sorry for herself.

  With the computer dealt with, she looks around the apartment to see what other surprises she might leave behind for the magic man, whenever it occurs to him to come home. She imagines buckets of pig’s blood suspended above the entranceway like in Carrie. She imagines hacking off the head of the painted pony and placing it in his bed, like in The Godfather.

  The painted pony.

  It stands there smiling at her. She grabs its metal muzzle and tries to lift it. Too heavy. She tries again, grunts with the effort — puts her whole heart into it. It doesn’t budge. Merlin is strong, but Caution’s anger is stronger. Breathing hard, her hands on her hips, she stares at the smiling muzzle. She can’t just stick a quarter in the slot and expect it to trot away. She walks around it, patting its blue flank. If she could shove something under the base, make a lever. . .

  She surveys the apartment. There is nothing long enough, but the idea won’t go away. Outside, she thinks, in the alley maybe. She seems to recall leftover building supplies out back. She goes out and looks around, kicking through the waist-high weeds growing through the cracked concrete of what was once a parking lot. There’s a rusted-out fence and metal wire looped through holes in angle irons, but the irons are stuck fast. She looks up, looks around. Down the block, she spies a Dumpster where someone is renovating. She makes her way there and soon finds an eight-foot-long piece of steel reinforcing rod. She lugs it back home, hoping Merlin hasn’t returned, then thinking that if he has, an eight-foot-long rod might come in handy. Her brain is on fire. She wants to laugh out loud but holds it in for fear that once she starts, she’ll never be able to stop. She is on the verge of hysteria. She imagines herself on a tightrope far above the city, holding the reinforcing rod to keep her balance.

  Walking up the alley, she is suddenly aware of the line of windows only a couple of feet above her head. Stepping back, she recognizes the curtains to Claudia’s place, and she has to stop herself from launching the half-inch steel rod like a spear through the plate glass. The party crasher to end all party crashers! The rod, with any luck, would pierce Merlin through the chest, pinning him to Claudia forever. Sagittarius the archer!

  No. Stay focused, she tells herself.

  It’s something else Spence taught her.

  In the end, the lever she constructs is a complicated affair. She shoves the thin-edged blade of a meat cleaver under the base of the pony, then shoves the reinforcing rod under the cleaver and uses a low stepping stool as a fulcrum. The steel is bendy and the cleaver keeps slipping, but she perseveres. She piles magazines and Merlin’s CDs beside the base of the pony, and as soon as she can lift it high enough, she pushes as many of them as she can underneath the corners of the base with her toe. She likes the sound of the CD cases cracking. This allows her to take a break and move the fulcrum closer. Slowly, slowly, she tilts the horse farther and farther over. Finally gravity takes over and the thing tips until its stupid blue head is resting against the wall. She clears away the assorted parts of her machine and, on her knees, lifts the board and removes the cookie tin.

  Eight thousand dollars.

  They’ve been going without food, and he’s got eight thousand dollars! She sits on her haunches, staring at the money in disbelief. What is he up to? she wonders. What does he have planned?

  She hears a noise out in the hallway. Of course. It will be now that he comes back. But she makes no effort to move. The cleaver is right there within reach, but she doesn’t go for it. It is easy to slip back into self-negation. He thinks he chose her on that cold March street corner, but she chose him — chose him as her executioner. And now her last appeal has been turned away and it’s time. Everything has led to this moment. She has been disobedient, she has screwed up, she has talked back, but nothing has been enough for him to actually kill her, though she is sure he is capable of it. She has failed in this regard. But this . . . this should do the trick.

  It’s perfect, really: him walking in, her sitting there with all his savings in her greedy little hands. There’s even a handy eight-foot-long steel rod for him to thrash her to death with. It has been such a long death sentence, and in the end she has had to work very hard to bring it about. If she were only braver, she could have saved them both the trouble and just offed herself. She has thought about it any number of times. But while she has prayed for deliverance, she has never been able to carry it out. This, she thinks, must be the most unconventional suicide ever.

  So she waits, but he does not arrive.

  And only when she feels her foot going to sleep does she decide to get up. It hurts. She has to lean on the tilted pony and shake the pins and needles out of her leg. “Owww!” she cries out loud, and then laughs. There she was, expecting to be bludgeoned to death, and here she is now, moaning about a few shooting pains.

  She limps around the apartment with the money in her hands. This is called tempting Providence. This is called clinging on to that death wish Merlin accused her of. Clinging on to it like a life raft. How weird is that?

  At some point she is surprised to see that the sun is setting. It’s after five. Where did the time go? She stops and looks around. In the falling light, she sees nothing that she cares a thing about. The cold of winter was supposed to kill her, but Merlin took her in from the cold. Merlin was supposed to kill her, but he has failed her, too. She has wondered on and off about the existence of God, and right now she is utterly convinced that He exists and has a really, really bad sense of humor. She also realizes that it is time to go, but she risks Providence one last time and sits at the messy table to write Merlin a note. She finds a scrap of paper and a pencil but cannot summon up anything to say. Then she spies her Little Mermaid backpack and goes to it. She digs out Anna for inspiration and flips through the pages. There was a scene with Anna and her husband. He’s trying to warn her that people are noticing the way she acts around her lover, Count Vronsky. Yes, here it is. She writes as neatly as she can.

  “It may be that I’m making a mistake, but believe me that I’m saying what I am just as much for my own sake as for yours. I am your husband, and I love you.”

  For an instant her head had drooped, and the mocking glint in her eye had died away, but the word “love” aroused her again. She thought: Love? As though he were capable of love! If he hadn’t heard that there is such a thing he would never even have used the word. He doesn’t even know what it is!

  She doesn’t bother to sign it. She doesn’t bother to explain. She’s not even 100 percent sure Merlin can read. It doesn’t matter. She finds the DVD called “Come Again” and hacks her initials into it with a kitchen knife. This shall be her signature. She has erased Merlin’s computer and st
olen all his money. If he ever loved her — even for one second — he would surely hate her now.

  In a matter of minutes, after all this time waffling, she is ready to go. She has her electric-blue jacket on, the zipper done right up to her chin. In her Little Mermaid backpack is Anna, the money, a change of underwear, a box of Oreos, and a bag of weed. She can use the weed for bartering, if it comes to that. She was going to leave her keys on the table, but she takes them just in case she wants to come back sometime and really destroy the place. Maybe light it on fire when he’s sleeping off a high.

  She pauses as she looks at the key ring. She’s got her own key to the Nissan. Sometimes he’d sent her cross-town on deliveries. The Nissan. Now, there’s a thought! But then she remembers what the car sounds like starting up. The muffler’s going. Not only that, but it sometimes doesn’t start. Not right away. She looks out the window. It’s parked way too near to Claudia’s window. Caution feels this shifting in her — this new kind of exhilaration. She wants out. The car might stall — it often does. She is better to leave this place the way she entered it, on her own two feet.

  So she heads out, not even pausing at the door to number four. She heads down to Queen Street in the gathering dark. She walks west, checking over her shoulder for a streetcar, not wanting to wait at the stop — wanting only to put as much distance as she can between her and whatever it was she imagined had been worthwhile about Merlin.

  You are on an eastbound streetcar, Blink, clanging along, filled with people going home. You hang from a strap, standing room only, in the dying light. You are so busy staring at the BlackBerry in your hand that you don’t see a girl in a blue jacket look up as the car rattles by, heading the other way. It’s her. A coincidence? Not at all: it would only be a coincidence if either of you ever found out that it happened — passing that close to each other. But you will meet. It’s just not time yet.

  Backtrack this bright October Wednesday. It’s noon; you are in the park. You look around and what . . . ? Is it just your imagination, or is everyone on Philosopher’s Walk looking up from their sandwiches and books, crossword puzzles and cell phones — looking at you like the blind woman was?

  You are in trouble. You know that much, but you don’t know how much. And yet you feel good. It’s as if you always knew something like this would happen to you one day. A test that you could pass because you had to. You’d stumble on to something, and instead of running away from it, you’d pick it up and run with it, follow it to the end.

  You head down into the bowels of the subway and head north. You don’t know much north of Bloor — never really been there. Well, there’s a time for everything.

  And it’s like that all afternoon. You ride around the city in no direction and every direction, while you try to think your way through whatever it is you are doing. Ditch it, Blink. Ditch the phone. The video game is over. You lost. QVD: forty-eight million points; Blink Conboy: zero.

  What is wrong with you?

  You have to laugh at that. A man across the aisle looks up from his newspaper and wonders what it is you’re laughing at, what it is you’re on.

  “What is wrong with you, boy? Huh?”

  He isn’t waiting for an answer, but you almost want to say, Thanks for asking, because usually he hits first and then asks those questions for which there are no answers.

  “And stop blinking at me!”

  Your mother is crying at the kitchen table, either for what you did or for what he’s going to do. You want to ask her if she ever imagined when she was your age that she’d spend so much of her adult life sobbing. It started with Daddy leaving. Then the pace picked up when Stepdaddy came along.

  Stepdaddy’s car keys sit on the table. He just found them in your jacket pocket when he couldn’t find them in his own.

  “Greedy beggar,” he says. He slaps you then. “Little joyride, was it?”

  Slap.

  “Impressing your friends?” He holds the slap like maybe he wants to hear an answer this time, as if he’s wondering if you’ve got any friends. But you aren’t telling him where you went, not for anything. Not for nothing.

  Slap.

  The day wears on and wears out. Finally you arrive back at Bloor and Yonge, near where this whole thing started. You get this idea that you might hike a few blocks west, over to the Plaza Regent — see firsthand all the commotion — the cops coming and going. But whatever anybody thinks, you aren’t that stupid.

  You catch a train east. It’s clogged with homeward-bounders, hanging on to the rails and what’s left of the day. You just stand there, not holding on to anything, held up by all these people with their groceries, briefcases, backpacks, and handbags. Holding on to their end-of-the-day weariness. They’re all about ready to drop, but there’s no room. You’re all holding each other up.

  You get out at Broadview. You walk south down past Riverdale Park, with the Don Valley on your right, cars bumper to bumper on the parkway in the failing light, heading north to somewhere you’ve never been. They’re not getting there any too fast. And there is the dark river, the Don, going the other way, down to Lake Ontario, but not moving much faster than the cars. It’s like the Don’s going home, too, but south, like you.

  You stare at the BlackBerry while you walk. You think about that river flowing south to the lake, and you think about the lake and the beach where you used to go when you were at Nanny and Granda’s. There was a time you almost drowned. Funny you should remember that now. You weren’t even swimming, just walking out, deeper and deeper. Kind of like today.

  Oh, Blink, my fine feathered friend, you have walked too far out into the lake, and any minute there’s going to be just water under your feet. You’re as sunk as those Indians who figured that where they stood was theirs to stand upon. Except, for this: at least they think they have some rights. You know you have none. Didn’t you hear that enough back home?

  You have no right to talk that way, no right to come in this late, no right to joyride in your stepdaddy’s Pontiac.

  A Grand Prix or, as you like to call it, a Grand Prick, just like your stepdaddy.

  Anyway, the only law on your side right about now is the law of survival.

  You pass through Chinatown, the sidewalks piled high with crates of vegetables, people picking through them leisurely with no fear that someone might snap them up and drag their sorry asses off to jail. You cut across to De Grassi, then down to Queen. You look over your shoulder every couple of minutes. You step into the nearest shadow when a cop car passes by. You don’t wait at the streetcar stop; you keep walking until a streetcar comes along, and then you hop aboard, eastbound, homeward — what used to be home.

  There is a half-baked plan buzzing around in your head, and the only part of it you really understand right now is to keep moving.

  You figure out how to put the phone on vibrate, and you check it with every vibration. Then just as your streetcar is nearing Coxwell, Alyson calls again. You pull the cord to stop the car and hope she waits long enough for the driver to let you off. You jump down onto the street and keep walking.

  You push the green button and talk, not even waiting for her to start.

  “I’m not one of the people your father left the hotel with,” you say breathlessly, without introduction, your voice higher than you want it to be. You’ve been practicing this through two transfers now.

  “Left the hotel with?”

  “There was something weird about it.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Why haven’t you gone to the cops?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Another pause.

  “I believe you,” she says at last. “I mean, I believe you didn’t have anything to do with it. Do you want to tell me what you think you saw?”

  “It’s not what I think I saw — it’s what I saw. There were, like, three people with him.”

  “‘Like’ three people?”

  “Three people.”

  “Yo
u saw them?”

  “I just said that.”

  “Sorry.”

  You can feel the Captain up and about, pacing around his cabin down there in the hold of you.

  “No, it’s me who should be sorry,” you say. “I’m just jumpy, okay? This is so fucked. Oh, sorry again.”

  “So he was gagged and bound?”

  “No way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what I said.”

  “But they were in masks, right?”

  “Masks? Nobody was in masks.”

  “Nobody was wearing a mask?”

  “What masks?”

  “No masks,” she says. “And my father wasn’t gagged and bound.”

  It isn’t a question, so you don’t reply.

  There is a pause. “You stole his PDA?”

  You have to think what she means. The BlackBerry. “Took it. Borrowed it.”

  “Whatever. But that’s no big deal, right? Nobody cares about the stupid thing. So if you won’t go to the cops, then that’s fine, I guess. Really. But tell me exactly what you saw. Please?”

  She isn’t crying now. Good. You didn’t want her to be hurting at her father being kidnapped. Tell her that, Blink. But you already did. And it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. She’s in control.

  “Hello? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” you say, looking around, wanting to know where “here” is.

  “What’s your name?” she says, trying to sound gentle, like she’s asking a child who is lost at the shopping center.

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “No, don’t hang —”

  But you do. You really need to concentrate. You’re almost there.

  Your mother always said you lived just past the Raceway. Greenwood Raceway was what she was talking about, except they tore it down the year before you were born. Your daddy worked there as a horse trainer. They closed the place, then tore it down, and there’s just a fancy off-track betting place now, a movie theater, shopping plaza, and expensive condos. You used to wonder if maybe your mother didn’t know they tore down the track. She doesn’t get out much.