The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  So, she found herself with George in a rented bungalow, in a little town of just over four thousand people, on the banks of the Salmon River in the middle of Nova Scotia where she knew no one. She tried to do want he wanted, tried to reconcile her own disgust and just get on with it—until she simply couldn’t anymore. Until the night he brought home Dave, his friend, such a close friend, George said, that they’d share everything.

  She walked out into the night, stayed in a cheap motel on the highway, took some cash out of the bank the next day and found herself an apartment on the top floor of a Victorian house near the railway track that had a little cast-iron fireplace she fell in love with, even if the place was drafty and not terribly clean. She got a job as a waitress in a diner, but planned no further than the next paycheque. George came round a time or two and tried to persuade her to come back to him. He even called her parents, and in response they sent her a letter saying they weren’t surprised it didn’t work out, and they hoped she’d sort herself out and get a decent job. They included fifty dollars in the letter but didn’t suggest she come home. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had. No matter how tough things were, at least she was on her own. She felt safe in her little apartment, not happy, maybe, but safe. After a few weeks, George stopped coming round. She heard later he’d found a new girl and moved to the Annapolis Valley.

  She tried to make friends with Janet and Amy, the other waitresses in the diner, but it didn’t take long to discover she was considered an outcast in that puritanical little town. “Why’d you leave George?” Amy asked. “He didn’t beat you; he didn’t cheat on you.” They asked her to attend their church, but Pentecostalism wasn’t for her. Janet wondered aloud if that was the way girls behaved in immoral cities like Toronto. No wonder, she said, Colleen’s parents wanted nothing to do with her.

  When she made friends with a couple of Mi’kmaq boys and a few of the black kids who came into the diner, her fate was sealed, apparently. Damned for all eternity.

  Then Amy, feeling even more Christian than usual, invited her for Christmas dinner with her family.

  SNOW GLEAMED WITH SILVER

  The doorbell buzzed on Christmas morning, right around eleven o’clock. Colleen had slept in—she slept a lot then—and she was still in her bathrobe. She went down the steep stairs to the main door and opened it to find Amy, in a black coat with a fur-trimmed collar, standing on the enclosed porch. She carried a plastic bag.

  “Merry Christmas,” said Colleen.

  “Merry Christmas,” said Amy.

  Amy was tall, with broad shoulders and white-blond hair that she always wore up in a bun. Her hair was so pale she looked bald if you looked at her straight on. She wore pink lipstick, and earrings in the shape of gift-wrapped packages with gold bows. It must be a festive thing, thought Colleen. She’d never seen Amy or Janet wear any kind of makeup. Their religion frowned on it as vanity.

  “Do I have the time wrong? I thought you said around four.”

  “I did. Can I come in?”

  “Sure, sorry. I can change really quick.”

  Colleen climbed the stairs and Amy followed. In the apartment Colleen asked if she could take Amy’s coat, maybe get her a cup of coffee while she waited.

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” said Amy.

  “It’s no trouble. It’s just instant, though.”

  “Look, Colleen, I’m really sorry about this.”

  “It’s okay. My fault, right? Got the time wrong. No worries.”

  Colleen smiled and shrugged. “My fault.”

  “It’s not that,” said Amy.

  She wasn’t meeting Colleen’s eyes. Why was that?

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  “It’s my mother. It’s just that I guess I spoke too soon, and my mother has this thing about Christmas, it’s a whole traditional rigmarole, and it’s all about family, you know.”

  “Okay. Family.”

  “She’s kind of strict about it. I’m really sorry, but my mother’s decided Christmas this year should just be for family. I feel really awful.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I brought you this.” Amy held out the plastic bag. “It’s a roast chicken, and some mince pies.”

  Colleen didn’t want to take it. Taking it would mean admitting how pathetic she really was. Not only uninvited but unable to feed herself.

  “That’s nice of you.” She took the bag. If she’d had anything in the house except Tang, cream of wheat and sardines, she would have told her to stuff her chicken, pun intended.

  “It’s not much.” Amy shifted from foot to foot and twisted her woollen gloves as though trying to wring out water. Her face was flushed and she bit her lower lip.

  Colleen wondered what it must be like to have to stand there, in your good coat and holiday earrings, and tell someone they weren’t welcome at your table on Christmas. She imagined the fight Amy might have had with her mother. In fact, it was the sort of thing Colleen’s mother would do, and never see the irony in it.

  Colleen put her hand over Amy’s and said, “You don’t have to feel bad, Amy. It’s not up to you, is it? I’m a stranger, after all, and I really appreciate you bringing the food. Sardines for dinner don’t sound really festive, you know?”

  “I bought them yesterday,” Amy said. “I waited, though, you know, in case Mum changed her mind.” She looked up at Colleen, her eyes bright. “She should have.”

  “I’m okay,” said Colleen. “You have a great Christmas.”

  Amy left. Colleen closed the door behind her and stood staring at it. Oddly, she didn’t feel like crying. She was even a bit relieved. It would have been worse, being in a house where she was merely tolerated, where she felt she was intruding. She carried the bag to the kitchen. The chicken was in an oven-ready bag. The six mince pies were precooked. She ate one. It was sweet and flaky. She ate another.

  Colleen had a sudden urge to call home, but she didn’t have a telephone—couldn’t afford one—and the idea of slogging out into the snow to find a pay phone was more than she could face. She went back to bed and stayed there for as long as she could, dozing, dreaming about nothing at all, and then got up and went to the kitchen where she nibbled at the chicken. She wandered past the bathroom into the living room and surveyed the room: the cot with a couple of pillows on it that served as a sort of couch in the far corner, the worn-through carpet, the little table with a few of her things on top—a picture of Pixie the dog, a candle in a blue and white holder, a notebook in which she scribbled poetry, a little sweetgrass basket—the rickety desk with the equally rickety chair, and this chair, a comfortable old stuffed thing full of burn marks from the previous owner. Most of the furniture, except for this chair and the carpet, which had come with the apartment, she’d salvaged from things people left out by the side of the road for garbage pickup.

  She picked up a cheap paperback, some crime thing about a serial killer in Philadelphia, which she’d bought at the drugstore, and tried to read it, but her mind wandered. She heard Amy’s voice repeating over and over, I’m really sorry, but my mother’s decided Christmas this year should just be for family. She put the book down and strummed her guitar, sang every song she knew—Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce, Bob Dylan—and at some point she started to cry.

  She cried hard, and stuffed the end of her sleeves in her mouth so the old couple downstairs, who had made it perfectly clear they didn’t approve of her, didn’t hear her sobbing. The tears were hot with anger and resentment and a terrible feeling of injustice. She cried so hard she was afraid she’d drown in self-pity.

  But she didn’t. Instead, something else happened. Round about four o’clock, when the sun was setting and the snow on the streets turned blue, she moved her chair from beside the unlit little fireplace, and sat at the bay window watching the Christmas world go by. Kids with new sleds heading back from the slope by the agricultural college up the road; cars full of families on their way, no doubt, to Grandma’s house for the a
nnual turkey; a couple hand in hand, wearing matching green-and-red toques. Then, as though everyone who had somewhere to go had arrived at their destination and not a creature was stirring, the world seemed to settle, to take a deep breath and sigh it out again. The wind stilled, the snow gleamed with silver in the lengthening light, and the first star appeared in a cloudless sky. For a moment it felt as though she were outside her body, watching a girl in a white bathrobe sitting on a spring-sprung old chair by a frosted window. Then suddenly she was back inside her skin, but in that moment peace had washed over her. She felt as though she needed no one and nothing. It didn’t matter that her parents had declined her request for a ticket home for the holidays when she’d called them collect from the pay phone in the diner two weeks earlier (“You’ve made your own mess, young lady, you’ll have to clean it up”), or that Amy’s mother had judged her unfit to sit at their Christmas table, or that somewhere George was telling everyone what a bitch she was and clearing out the bank account. It just didn’t matter. She felt … well, companioned was the only word she could think of. She felt known by something greater than herself, some entity who knew her, all of her, and still loved her, not in spite of what they knew, but because of it. She felt clean, and utterly calm.

  FLAILING, WINDMILL STYLE

  Colleen sat on the couch and gazed out the window. She tried to hold onto that peaceful feeling. It hadn’t lasted when she was a girl in Nova Scotia and it wasn’t lasting now. Such things don’t. Then, as now, she was alone: The Uninvited. Even though it didn’t last, she had never forgotten the sensation of being exactly and perfectly all right, of not needing a single thing or a single person. It was the same sort of connectedness she’d felt the first time she got drunk, at Danny Gibson’s house—at least before she’d gone too far and blacked out and all the rest. It was like being given a glimpse into a secret garden, and then being shut out. Ever since, she had wanted so badly to get back there.

  She hadn’t drunk alcohol, or not much of it, when she lived in Nova Scotia. She couldn’t afford it. But she’d come back to Toronto after a year. She got the job at the university, had her own place and a decent paycheque, and she was young. Everybody drank and went to the clubs and danced and danced. Besides, she discovered when she did start drinking again that she could drink with the best of them, drink with the boys, drink like a sailor. It was a useful skill. She soon discovered the golden warmth of the fairies-in-a-bottle. That’s what she called them, those spirits who could live in just about any bottle, clever things—wine (the French fairy) or whisky (the Irish fairy) or vodka (the Russian fairy dressed in white furs) or gin (although the gin fairy was Cockney and a bit aggressive), scotch (the thistle-fairy) and certainly Grand Marnier (the fairy with pretty orange wings).

  They were always there, the fairies, whenever she needed them. Whenever the day called for a celebration (and what day didn’t?), whenever she needed a pick-me-up, whenever the world turned nasty and cold and cruel, as it did so often—more often for her than for other people for some odd reason. Oh, the nobility of her soul, the depth of her suffering, she would think with a snort of derision at her own self-aggrandizement. The fairies waited for her, whisking her away to a far better world. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild.

  It’s like she always said: they don’t call it “spirits” for nothing.

  And there was the vodka fairy now, all dolled up in her ermine and pearls, so soothing, so infinitely kind. She whispered in Colleen’s ear, telling her everything would be just fine, it would all work out as it was intended to, the world misjudged her, but the fairy understood, understood, understood. Sip, sip, sip.

  The only difference between the fairies-in-a-bottle and whatever visited her that long-ago Christmas day was that the fairies exacted a price for their presence, didn’t they. But wasn’t that only fair, since they gave so much of themselves? And if they loosened her up, as they were doing now, urging her to reach out to her fellow human beings, to draw comfort from her friends, wasn’t that only right and good?

  The sense of peace began to fray at the edges. Doubt slipped in and nibbled with sharp little mice teeth. Colleen’s hand gripped the almost-empty glass. The skin on the back of her hand was crepey and the sinews stood out in ridges. She used to have beautiful hands, long-fingered, thin and graceful. Look at them now. Look at her now. This was not the life she had planned.

  She should call Lori. Lori, her oldest friend and confidante, would come over and make her feel better, would help her see her way out of this mess. Colleen took her phone out of her purse and dialled Lori’s work number.

  “O’Toole’s, can I help you?” said Lori.

  “Lori, it’s me.”

  “Hey, you, what’s up? Wait, can you hang on?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Lori said something to someone. It sounded as though she had her hand over the phone.

  Colleen looked at her watch: 11:45. This was probably a bad time to call, with the lunch crowd starting. But this was urgent. A life crisis.

  “Hey, sorry, party of eight, no reservation, naturally. Hang on. They want what? Fine, put tables fourteen and fifteen together, then. Okay? Sorry, Colleen. What’s up? You coming down for lunch?”

  “No, I quit my job this morning.” She had meant to say she lost her job.

  “You did what? What the hell happened?”

  It wasn’t too late. She could tell Lori. Then again, she couldn’t tell her why they’d let her quit. She couldn’t. “I’d just had enough of their bullshit, frankly.”

  “Really? Hey, wait, sorry. Yes, can I help you? Do you have a reservation? Parker. Yes, right here. Ruth, can you see the Parkers to table six? Thanks. Okay, I’m back, now tell me again, why did you quit?”

  “It’s complicated. Any chance you can come over after your shift?”

  “Today?”

  Of course today, what kind of a question is that? “This afternoon, this evening, whenever you get off.”

  “Oh, Colleen, I can’t today, honey. I’m working until three and then I’ve got to drive Ian to work—did I tell you he slammed his car into the neighbour’s mailbox? Why do we let teenagers drive?—and I promised Madeleine I’d take her shopping for a new coat and I’ve got to get to the grocery store …”

  “Tonight, then, come over once Lewis gets home.”

  “He’s working late tonight. I can’t believe you quit your job. Not an easy time to find a new one, not these days, and well, I don’t know, but this is, what, your third job in five years?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I transferred within the university. Was that a crack?”

  “Listen, I’m really sorry, but this place is about to go crazy. Why don’t I call you later?”

  “Fine, whatever.”

  “Come on, Colleen, don’t be like that.”

  “I’m not like anything. You’re the one who apparently doesn’t have time. God knows I’ll be here.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Sweetie, listen, I’ll call you later. But in the meantime, don’t drink too much, okay?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, you’re drinking, right?”

  “Of course I’m not drinking. It’s not even noon, for God’s sake.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you, but I thought I could hear it in your voice. If I’m wrong, never mind.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Good. Okay, well, like I said, it’s crazy here right now. I’ll call you later, and I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Wonderful. Splendid.”

  Colleen flipped the phone closed and began to cry scalding tears. Lori was her best friend, had been since they’d met back in their early twenties at a dance class. They told each other everything, even things Lori didn’t tell her husband, Lewis. They knew each other’s secret wounds, like the torch Lori still carried for Kent Wilde, the lacrosse-playing high-school heartbreaker to whom she had lost her virginity. Before Lori got married se
venteen years ago to Lewis, she and Colleen had made the club scene together, and even dated a couple of guys from the same band back in the day. When the junkie drummer Lori had been seeing for six months told her he loved her, Lori’d almost had a breakdown, since no one (other than Colleen) had ever told her they loved her—not even her uptight Swiss parents. The drummer—a guy named Mike who reminded Colleen of Animal on The Muppet Show—had apparently mumbled those three magic words into Lori’s neck one night, just before he ran to the bathroom backstage, puked and promptly passed out. Lori had come undone, appearing at Colleen’s door in a state of near hysteria.

  “This is how I first hear those words? This is all there is? He won’t even remember them tomorrow,” Lori had sobbed, hanging onto Colleen like a drowning woman. “I feel like the biggest thing in my life has just turned into trash, into shit, and I’ll never get it back.”

  And maybe Colleen hadn’t really seen what the big deal was, but that didn’t matter. She poured Lori a tumbler full of scotch and listened to her rant and rave all night. She hadn’t said she had to work the next day, hadn’t said she had more important things to do. That was the way it was between them. They were there for each other when no one else was. How many nights had she listened to Lori complain about her job, or her lack of creative fulfillment? How she was too old to be a singer now and never got the right break. How she should have stayed in Paris when she had the chance and become the great artist she was meant to be. Lori had her music and Colleen had her writing, and even if they never became rich and famous, at least they had each other as a cheering section. Or at least that was how it had been before she married Lewis and had the kids.

  Colleen went into the kitchen, opened the new bottle of vodka and poured herself a little more. Not too much. Just enough to calm her down so she could figure out what to do next. She took a sip. She should put the white wine in the fridge, just in case someone came over later. The clock on the oven said it was nearly noon. She should also probably eat something. She opened the refrigerator. Half a loaf of bread. Some olives. Yogourt. Some cheese slices. What was that green thing in the back of the crisper? A lemon, wholly covered in a green-grey velvet mould. Using the tips of her fingers she carried it to the trash bin, which, when she flipped up the lid, produced some nostril-searing fumes and a small cloud of fruit flies. Colleen coughed, plucked the bag from the bin and tied it shut, hoping most of the flies were trapped within. She was going to have to clean this place, really clean it. She’d let things slide, she would admit that, but this was the start of an entirely new life, wasn’t it, and she should start it by giving the whole place a good going-over.