Strangers Among Us

by LR Wright

  So he’d parked across the street, she thought, distracted. So maybe he’d sat down on the bench. So what?

  “That’s the thing, see,” said the sergeant. “She won’t say, one way or the other. But whenever she calls me up, it’s because she wants to come over and collect more of her things,” he said bitterly. “For her apartment. I mean, this’s been going on for a long time now. I’m getting sick of it, Cassandra.” He sat back, rubbing his close-cut scalp. “Keeping the place up. Eating alone. Living alone. Sick of it.”

  “Has she ever talked about divorce?” Cassandra asked him.

  It was a small town, after all. A very small town. It was virtually impossible to avoid anybody in a town as small as this one.

  Sid flinched, and shook his head.

  “The problem is,” said Cassandra, “that if you try to make her choose, if you give her some kind of ultimatum—”

  No—she’d already discussed Karl with Sid once. And she knew Karl wouldn’t appreciate that if he were to find out.

  “Yeah.” He was nodding, grim-faced. “I know. She might choose wrong. But I’ve been thinking.” He shifted in the chair. “See, a lot of it was the Job. So what if I quit? Take early retirement?” He peered at her, frowning. “What do you think?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  She’d keep an eye open, make a note of how often she saw that truck, and where. And if she wanted to talk about it with anybody, she’d talk about it with Karl.

  Sid was shaking his head. “She wouldn’t believe me if I just said I was gonna do it. I’d have to do it, get the paperwork in, get it approved. And then tell her. It would have to be a done deal.”

  “That’s a pretty tough decision, Sid,” said Cassandra gently. “Don’t do anything hasty, okay?”

  He looked at her, anguished. “What a mess, eh?”

  Cassandra wondered what kind of a new life Elsie was living. Maybe it was a relief just to be alone, after all those years looking after Sid and their five daughters.

  He picked up his cap. “I better be going.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Sid.”

  “Well, yeah, you did, though,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s the first time I said it out loud, what I’ve been thinking. So that was good.” He tried to smile at her, as she opened the door for him. “I just gotta make the decision.”

  Later, Cassandra met her friend Phyllis Dempter for lunch at Earl’s. They had ordered sandwiches, and were drinking coffee while they waited for their food to come.

  “Now,” said Phyllis briskly. “Bring me up to date.”

  But Cassandra, studying her friend’s face, said, “Why are you so skittery today?”

  “I don’t even know what ‘skittery’ means,” said Phyllis. But she wouldn’t meet Cassandra’s eyes, and she kept adjusting and readjusting the gold wristwatch she wore.

  “It’s the way you acted when you quit smoking,” said Cassandra. “Nervous. Jumpy.” She was facing the door, and the windows, so she saw the truck pull up in front of the café. “My god. There he is again. Look at that guy,” she said to Phyllis.

  Phyllis craned her neck. “What guy? Where?”

  “He’s outside. Just got out of that brown truck. See? My god. He’s coming in here.” At least she’d get a good look at him, she thought, aware of her accelerated heartbeat.

  He came through the door and walked straight to a table in the back of the café, a tall, middle-aged man with a stoop, fleshy, his hair mostly gray, wearing jeans and a red plaid jacket.

  “What about him?” said Phyllis.

  “I don’t know,” said Cassandra uneasily. “I keep seeing his damn truck. On the street. Here at Earl’s. Out where we were house-hunting. And this morning he was sitting on that bench across from the library.”

  “Well who is he?”

  “I have no idea. Karl won’t tell me.”

  “Karl? This guy knows Karl?”

  Cassandra watched as he gave Naomi his order. “Yes. But I don’t know from where, or when.”

  He was sitting quietly, waiting for his meal. “It’s strictly personal,” Karl had said.

  Naomi arrived with their sandwiches, and Cassandra looked back at her friend. “Now listen, Phyllis,” she said, attempting to marshal her powers of concentration. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously what?” said Phyllis.

  “Seriously—is there something wrong? You are jumpy. And you’ve lost weight. Are you okay?”

  “Lost weight, whoopee!” Phyllis hooked her shoulder-length hair around her ears. She took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “This is very awkward, Cassandra, with your nuptials rapidly approaching—”

  “What makes you think they’re rapidly approaching? We haven’t even set a date yet.”

  Naomi had set a hamburger and fries down in front of the man in the back of the café.

  “You haven’t set a date?” Phyllis was saying, incredulous.

  “Valentine’s Day,” said Cassandra. “That’s when he wants to do it. Can you believe it? Valentine’s Day. I told him, no way. You haven’t touched your sandwich. Eat.”

  “I had no idea Karl was so romantic,” said Phyllis. “If you nixed February 14, I hope you offered an alternative.”

  “Not yet. I’m dithering between getting it over with in January, and waiting for spring. I’d like my wedding not to be rained on.”

  The man had finished the hamburger and was working on the fries, picking them up with his fingers, one at a time. He didn’t look dangerous, thought Cassandra. Did he?

  “To be reasonably certain of sunny skies,” Phyllis was saying, “you’d have to put it off until August.”

  “What do you think I should do?” Cassandra looked down at her plate and was dismayed to see only crumbs there.

  “Have it on St. Valentine’s Day.” She looked over at Cassandra, unsmiling. “Maybe he’ll bring you luck.”

  “Phyllis. What’s wrong?”

  Phyllis sat back, her hands in her lap. “We’re getting a divorce.”

  “Oh no.” Cassandra put down her coffee cup.

  “It’s been coming for a long time. First he fooled around. You knew that. Then I did.” She winced a little. “I don’t think you knew that. Anyway. The point is. We don’t even like each other anymore.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We were happy for quite a while. That’s more than a lot of people get.”

  “What will you do? Stay here? Move? Oh, I hope you don’t move.”

  Phyllis looked down at her uneaten sandwich. “I don’t know, Cass. I have to figure out my financial situation first. If it’s good enough, maybe I will go away. At least for a while.”

  Cassandra had a succession of visions, then: Phyllis riding serenely in a gondola; Phyllis taking a chairlift in the Alps; Phyllis strolling through Hyde Park; Phyllis leaning on the railing of a cruise ship, watching the sun set.

  “Oh, Phyllis.” Maybe she should envy her.

  But she didn’t.

  Cassandra glanced over at the stranger’s table. He was gone. She looked quickly out the window, just in time to see his truck pull smoothly away from the curb.

  Somebody—Eliot couldn’t remember who—maybe it was Staff Sergeant Alberg, maybe the social worker—he didn’t think it could have been the lawyer—anyway, somebody had tried to talk to him about his anger. Eliot could understand this, up to a point.

  Until he realized that they thought it still existed, his anger. That they’d wanted to examine it as a living, continuing thing. Which was of course pointless. He’d thought it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that his anger, strewn upon the beach with his family’s blood, spewed out on the sand with their blood—which had flown through the misty silver morning in tiny unred droplets, soaring in a great swath through the air; which had not turned red until all the drops had tumbled together and fallen upon the earth—that with the gushings of their blood, Eliot’s anger, with t
heir blood, had been washed clean away by the cleansing sea.

  This was the only good thing about what had happened and was maybe the reason for it, too. There was no longer any danger, any reason to be afraid, because his anger was dead.

  Eliot got up from the stairs and made his way down the hall and around the corner to the office. “I want to go outside,” he said to the woman behind the counter, who was typing at a computer terminal. She looked at him through glasses with a thin gold frame around them. She was about his mom’s age, only fatter. She wasn’t as good-looking as his mom, but her clothes were nicer.

  He sat on the damp ground under the canopy of a big old maple tree, leaned against the trunk and pulled up his knees. He could hear traffic, faintly, and some birds, but otherwise it was quiet. He rested his chin on his knees and wrapped his arms around his legs. He thought about his room, about his acoustic guitar, and the ghetto-blaster, and his rollerblades. And the clothes in all the closets. He didn’t know what was happening to all their stuff, and to the house.

  And if she recovered from what he’d done to her—what would happen to Rosie? Would Eliot ever see her again? Would she ever let him see her again?

  They had told him about the Arrangements (the word had been capitalized when they said it: “Arrangements”) for his parents, about the Arrangements for their funeral. They had told him about his uncle and aunt coming to take the bodies back to Nova Scotia. He liked to think of his mom and dad lying in graves in an apple orchard back there, but he knew this was unrealistic.

  For the first time he wondered if it would have happened anyway, even if they’d stayed home.

  It was kind of funny that his parents, who’d really wanted to come here, all the way across the fucking country, that they’d ended up being taken back home, while Eliot, who hadn’t wanted to come at all, whose malignant anger he was almost certain had been born the day the decision had been made to ignore what he wanted, because he was only a kid, it was pretty funny, by which he really meant ironic, that he was now stuck here, probably for the rest of his life. Or at least the part of it that counted.

  He didn’t know what they were going to do with him. Where they’d put him. Or for how long. Part of it depended on whether they decided he was crazy. Eliot knew that he wasn’t crazy.

  The seat of his jeans was getting damp now, and he was pretty cold. But he was reluctant to go inside. It was nice out here. He couldn’t see the chain-link fence, only the trees that grew on both sides of it, and their yellow or reddish leaves. He could look at the trees and pretend he was home, or at least back in Sechelt, because he was sitting with his back to the detention center. That’s what it was, even though he tried to think of it as a house, a big old house with lots of history.

  Like youth hostels he’d read about.

  He was going to do that someday, hitchhike across North America, back to Nova Scotia. Then maybe get himself over to Europe and hitchhike there, staying in youth hostels, meeting kids from all different countries. Seeing stuff. Learning stuff.

  Eliot rested his forehead on his knees and scrabbled with his fingers at the sparse grass that grew beneath the trees. He couldn’t imagine the man he’d be when they finally let him go, sometime in the next century.

  Chapter 14

  Wednesday, November 30

  CASSANDRA FOUND HER MOTHER in her room, sitting in her easy chair, looking out the window at the rain.

  “Hi,” she said from the hall, through the half-open door.

  “Hi yourself,” said Helen Mitchell. “Come in. This is a surprise.”

  Cassandra sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought you’d like to know that we’ve chosen a date.”

  “Finally,” said her mother. “When?”

  “February 14.”

  Helen Mitchell smiled. “And whose idea was that?”

  “His.”

  Helen laughed, and Cassandra grinned at her.

  “Have you brought the notebook?” said Helen, suddenly businesslike.

  Cassandra, with a sigh, hauled it out of her shoulder bag.

  Eliot had on his denim jacket, his second pair of jeans and his second top, a black sweatshirt with BLACKTOP scrawled in white letters across the front and the word REEBOK printed, smaller, inside a red rectangle. He had waited until the last minute before going in for breakfast, in order to avoid Alvin, who always ate at the earliest possible moment. Every morning Alvin was hanging around in the hall, waiting, when the cafeteria door opened. He probably woke up in the middle of the night hungry, thought Eliot. Maybe the kid had a tapeworm, a big fat immensely long tapeworm curled up inside his stomach or wherever such things lived, and whenever Alvin ate anything, the worm got it, and then snoozed for a while, and then woke up and started poking at the inside of his belly, biting him, maybe, making him starving hungry so he’d eat again. Or maybe Eliot’s first idea had been the right one, and Alvin was trying to get fat so that nobody would pay attention to him.

  Eliot sat alone at a breakfast table, looking at a huge bowl of porridge that sat there in front of him, wondering how the hell he’d managed to get himself a bowl of porridge, which was gloop that he hated. Nobody was sitting with him because Eliot wasn’t looking to make friends in this fucking place and nobody was looking to make friends with him either. The other kids were sitting around talking and laughing. Jesus. And hollering at the women who were serving the food. And sometimes somebody threw something, a bun or a piece of fruit. Eliot was disgusted. So he stood up and got out of there.

  He wanted to go back to his room and lie down on his bed, maybe look out the window, but Dick was there. Dick had said he wasn’t getting up yet, wasn’t hungry for breakfast.

  “Get the fuck out,” he’d said to Eliot. He was buried in blankets with only the top part of his head sticking out, his dark eyes and the scar that crept down from his hairline like a worm of glistening blood.

  So Eliot stood in the upstairs hall wishing he’d picked something else for breakfast. The glooped porridge had reminded him of mornings in his family’s kitchen. The linoleum was always cold under his bare feet. Eliot, slouched at the table, would see himself in his mind as a large black-haired troll who had a humped back with lots of hair growing on it. The hump in his back was like a hiccup on the way to becoming a mountain, and grass grew on it, black and bristly grass, black bristly grass in which lived small black quick-burrowing insects that hid in the hair and tunneled into his skin but they were so small that he barely felt their gouging.

  Every time Eliot looked into a mirror he was surprised to see only himself in there, the Eliot that other people saw.

  He stood now in the hall outside Room Seven, looking out the window again, shivering with restlessness. It was like he’d been anesthetized all this time. Now there were prickled scratchings at his arms and sides. But it wasn’t his body that was waking up—it was someplace in his mind. It was like his thinking apparatus had suddenly been pitched into a ton of nettles. He was trying to use it again, that was the problem. He’d been going around like a goddamn zombie and now his brain was trying to wake up.

  Eliot felt an urgent need to phone somebody, and his mom came to mind. “Oh, Jesus.” Eliot slumped against the window, pressed his cheek against the bars, trying to look through the space between them, trying to get close enough to see through that space and have no bars there.

  She was—he knew, he knew this—she was accessible to him, somewhere, somehow. Someplace along a straight line from here to someplace else he would find her. It was only a question of walking long enough. It’d be like in a story, thought Eliot. He would strike out equipped only with an ax and a shovel. Plus other necessary stuff in a backpack: a bottle of water and a bag of crusty buns and maybe an apple or two. And he’d wear his denim jacket and take along some gloves and some earmuffs too because the weather would change. Whatever direction he picked, eventually he’d come to some real winter. And when he needed more food he’d stop and get a job or steal something and then he�
��d move on. And someday he would find her, walking on the road in front of him, maybe, or waiting tables in a café in some little town or big city, or maybe teaching school like she’d done before she’d had kids, before she’d had Eliot.

  He pressed his forehead against the bars and closed his eyes, and was aware of the width of his shoulders and the length of his legs. They were strong legs, and would take him miles and miles.

  Eliot turned and walked down the hall. He fumbled at the door of Room Seven. He didn’t have to answer Dick. He didn’t need to say a thing, he’d just gather his stuff together. He pushed the door open. He would ignore him. Who the hell did Dick think he was anyway?

  Eliot’s face turned white and his mouth sagged open. He looked and he looked. He could not move. The seasons changed and years went by and still he could not move.

  He backed out of the room and closed the door.

  In the main office he stood at the counter listening to phones ringing and the muted clattering of computer keyboards.

  He felt somebody standing next to him and looked down and there was Alvin, one eye hidden behind his hair. Eliot saw that his face was still swollen.

  “Hiya,” said Alvin.

  Eliot looked up, and saw the woman with the wire-rimmed glasses gazing at him, and wondered how he could ever have seen any similarity between this person and his mother.

  “Yes?”

  “Dick,” said Eliot loudly, thickly. “The other guy in my room. He’s dead.”

  He wondered if there was a procedure for this. If it was written down someplace, what they were supposed to do.

  But now he saw with a dreadful shock, just like he’d stuck his finger in an electrical outlet, that this woman thought he’d done something to Dick. His face flushed. He opened his mouth to speak again, then changed his mind. His eyes got slitty— Jesus—he’d thought that was never going to happen again—and he looked cautiously around for his anger and there it was, there it fucking was, oh, Jesus…