All I Ask

by Eva Crocker

  * * *

  For the night’s second show, I went upstairs and handed out programs. When the lights went down I sat in an empty seat near the exit. A video advertising Saucy Soldiers dance classes was projected on a screen at the back of the stage. It was a montage of women in skimpy outfits doing complicated routines under stage lights, spliced together with footage of women stretching and laughing in the dance studio. I heard banging on the steel door to the theatre. I thought of my light-catcher bouncing against the window when the cops came. It was my job to open the door. I popped out of my seat. Two big guys were waiting in the bright hallway.

  “Is it started?” one of them asked.

  “Sort of,” I whispered. “Can I see your tickets?”

  “I already showed it to the girl downstairs,” the same guy answered, lowering his voice. He reeked of cologne.

  Behind me the video shut off.

  “It has your seat on it, I’m supposed to show you to your seat.” I pushed the button on the back of the flashlight I’d brought up with me and a beam of weak light hit his shoe. The other guy reached in his pocket and passed me his ticket. He was seated right next to me.

  “I don’t know what I did with it, I’m next to him,” the first guy said.

  I showed the latecomers to their seats and sat down beside them. The music started up; the show was billed as a Beyoncé tribute and the first song was “Formation.” A line of mostly white women marched on stage.

  The guy beside me cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “THAT’S MY GIRL!” I jumped in my seat, his elbow was on the armrest and I brushed against it. I pulled my arms in tight, he didn’t seem to notice. Stills of Beyoncé and short clips from her music videos played on the screen behind the dancers. The girls turned their backs to the audience and started twerking. The man beside me made a loudspeaker with his hands again and yelled, “YEAH BABY, YEAH KELLY, YEAH THAT’S MY GIRL.” His friend contributed a half-hearted “Wooo, yeah.”

  I tried not to look at them. I tried to stare straight ahead. “Formation” ended and a slower, sexier song came on. A different group of women slinked on stage; the guy beside me relaxed into his seat. These women were wearing sparkly leotards. They split into pairs and rubbed against each other. Some of the girls I recognized from the bar earlier. There was a tall, skinny girl with a thick townie accent who’d asked me to fill her water bottle. She was centre stage, stroking her partner’s thigh. Suddenly she flopped into a dramatic backbend and her partner dragged a hand down the middle of her chest. The muscles in my vagina clenched. I felt a jolt of shame. I was turned on. I looked at the man beside me without turning my head. His phone was lit up in his lap, he was scrolling with a finger.

  The song changed and he flipped the phone over on his leg, like he was worried he might be caught. A fast number. Two-piece outfits. Kelly was back on stage. The latecomer leaned forward and roared, “THAT’S MY BABY!”

  When the whole ensemble came out to bow at the end and a spray of plastic-wrapped bouquets rained down from the audience, I scuttled downstairs with the box of leftover programs.

  “They’re on the way,” I warned Dana. She plugged the aux cord into her phone and played some radio hit.

  “What’d you think?”

  “It’s a lot,” I said.

  “In a good or bad way?”

  “Do you have Coors Light?” The latecomer saved me.

  * * *

  When I got home that night the upstairs hallway was filled with the smell of burning dust because I’d cranked the heat before I left. I climbed into my bed in the hallway with all my clothes on. The view from the hall windows was different from this angle. Normally the windows were filled with the parking lot and the dumpster and the fluttering VHS tape, but from down on the floor I could see a stretch of uninterrupted sky. There were stars that night. A stream of milky light intensified in the corner of the window closest to the door and I thought the moon must be just out of view.

  I noticed a pinprick of red light swooping over the roof of my neighbour’s house. The light swung to the left, then reappeared in the window on the opposite side of the room. It travelled up, towards the roof of the church, and rounded the corner into the empty lot behind it. I thought of the woman outside Venice Pizza who’d pointed the drone out to me. That was where the light was coming from now, from Venice Pizza.

  Ten

  For three mornings in a row I went to the pay phone around the corner and called the police station. Each time I brought the letter with me so I could read the number off the bottom as I dialled. On the third morning Constable Bradley had come back to work.

  The same cop was on the reception desk when I got to the station. He nodded, letting me know he recognized me.

  “Going to need some government-issued photo ID,” he told me. “And you don’t have a phone on you?”

  “No.”

  “Right, I have to ask.”

  When I passed my ID through the slot he opened a drawer in his desk and tossed it in. I saw a few cell phones in the drawer — their owners’ IDs were strapped to the fronts with varying sizes of elastic bands. The cop got up and left the room; a door a little further down the hall opened and he stepped out and walked into the lobby. It seemed unfair that he could leave the office and enter the Wild West of the lobby whenever he wanted. I liked having a thick sheet of cloudy plastic between us.

  “Put this on and follow me.” He passed me a laminated visitor’s pass on a piece of thin white string with a messy knot at the top. I hung it around my neck and we walked down a longer hallway lined with beige doors. We passed a group of cops in uniform gathered around a water cooler, drinking from paper cones. One of them was a woman; she was shorter than the others and had frizzy hair pinned in a bun at the back of her neck. We were about the same age. The water cooler cops nodded hello to us, one raised a paper cone and the front desk cop nodded back.

  He led me into a windowless conference room. There was a large table surrounded by wheelie chairs and a dry-erase board on the wall with a rolled-up screen above it; a projector was mounted on a brace that hung from the ceiling.

  A man in a suit stood up from the head of the table. He was tall, he had to be more than six feet. He was pale with dark circles under his eyes. He had thick black hair that was receding on either side of his forehead.

  “Constable Bradley.” He held his huge hand out to me and I shook it.

  “You’re all good in here?” the front desk cop asked.

  There were papers spread out on the table and I saw my computer and phone inside a sealed plastic bag with my name on it. Seeing the sticker of a cartoon cat slurping up a spaghetti noodle that I’d stuck on my phone case made me queasy.

  “Do you want some water?” Constable Bradley asked me.

  “No, thank you.”

  “We’re all good, then.”

  The front desk cop left and I was alone with Constable Bradley.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “So first I have to let you know the investigation is ongoing, so I won’t be able to answer a lot of questions.”

  I sat on the side of the table closest to the door and left one seat between us. Even though his frame was huge, Constable Bradley looked slim; his suit was loose on him. He moved some papers around, saying, “I was just reviewing your file this morning. We’re just as disappointed as you are that the warrant wasn’t executed more quickly.”

  “More quickly?”

  “It’s a small unit, so we can’t get to things as quickly as we’d like. It’s just a few guys with this specialized skill set. Obviously we have to prioritize cases with a live victim. If someone is in danger, we prioritize that. Sometimes things take longer than is ideal — in a case like this, it means the suspects may have moved on.”

  “So I’m not a suspect? They were looking for someone else?”

  “At this point th
e investigation is still ongoing. I will say we’re not feeling hopeful.”

  “The people who lived there before us? They were women, young women. Well, like my age.”

  “Looks like there was a boyfriend. Did you meet a boyfriend?”

  “You don’t know who was living there?”

  “These things take time, it’s frustrating for everyone. What’s really frustrating is it’s looking like we lost the suspect this time around.”

  “Can I have my things back?”

  Constable Bradley slid the plastic package with my phone and computer across the table to me. I took it in my lap.

  “You can take them out of that. I’ve got a form here for you to sign, just have a look to make sure nothing’s been damaged.”

  I flipped the package over. The air in the room was dry, the inside of my mouth was sticky. I wished I’d said yes to the glass of water. “They seem fine, I’ll sign it.”

  “Usually people power them up.”

  I ripped the plastic open with my nails. I opened the computer on the table and pressed the power button; a celebratory blast of music rang out. The wallpaper was a photo of me and Viv holding Snot and Courtney when I first brought them home to Patrick Street. We’re sunburned and smiling, I have a bleached chunk in the front of my dark bangs and Viv’s red hair is cut into a messy mullet. I closed my computer.

  Then I held down the button on top of my phone until the screen illuminated — a photo of Snot and Courtney curled together on the armchair in Viv’s old bedroom at Patrick Street. After a moment, red notifications appeared on the screen signalling new texts, emails, Instagram DMs. I pressed the button on top of my phone again and turned it off.

  “It seems fine.” I lay the phone face down on top of my closed computer. I hated being alone with him. I knew it was unlikely anything would happen to me, because I was white, because I didn’t look especially poor or vulnerable. But I was alone in a windowless room with a strange man who had probably seen naked photos of me, who could order me to do whatever he wanted.

  “So you’ll delete all my information now — the stuff from my hard drive?” I asked.

  “So what we’ve done,” Constable Bradley looked me right in the eyes and spoke slowly, “is acquire the entire physical content of your drives, including unused disk space and deleted data. We used algorithms to verify the authenticity of the data. We created a forensic image that is an exact duplicate of the original source data. We’ve had trained officers search that data and we found nothing incriminating. That said, this case is still under investigation.”

  The whole time he was talking I was picturing the front desk cop appearing with a jug of cold water and two clean glasses on a tray. Or maybe just some of those paper cones from the water dispenser in the hall.

  “It wasn’t you?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Who looked through my hard drive?”

  “Not me — trained officers. Good people who have been doing this work for a long time.”

  I tried to pull myself back into the room, to focus.

  “What makes them good?”

  “Pardon?” Constable Bradley asked.

  “Nothing. So I’m not a suspect? This is all done now, my name isn’t linked to any of this?”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t say because the investigation is not yet closed; there’s a few more avenues to explore,” Constable Bradley told me.

  I felt very, very thirsty. How had he known I would need a glass of water? Something about the room, about the situation.

  “Can I sign the form? I actually have to work this evening.”

  Constable Bradley pushed the form across the table along with a pen, the kind where you have to twist the top to make the nib emerge. It felt like my throat was swelling shut. I didn’t read the form. I printed my name in all caps on one line and signed the line below it.

  Constable Bradley led me back to the lobby, saying, “Remember, return your visitor’s pass and pick up your ID before you go.”

  I lined up behind two middle-aged men in baseball caps and Carhartt jackets.

  “No, no,” one of the men said into the hole; his buddy shook his head in agreement.

  “Small game,” his buddy said.

  “Small game,” the first man repeated into the hole.

  I didn’t have a sleeve for my computer so I worked it back into the torn plastic bag. There was a label with my name and processed written on it. Eventually the front desk cop went to the filing cabinet and found some forms for the men to sign. They took turns leaning on the narrow counter to write with a pen attached to the desk by a flimsy chain. When it was my turn at the window, the cop slid my ID across the counter with a smile, like he was a bartender who remembered my favourite drink.

  * * *

  I waited until I was outside to check the messages and emails on my phone. I walked across the parking lot and down the street before I illuminated the screen. The battery was 100 percent charged, I guess the cops had plugged it in.

  There was a long string of texts from Viv — she’d kept messaging and then saying, Shit, forgot you don’t have a phone. Were the cops reading all those messages as they rolled in? Were they recorded somewhere? There was a Facebook message from Kris. She’d sent it two days ago. We should hang out again sometime.

  I tried phoning Holly but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was at work, probably she wasn’t taking my calls. I sent her a message: Call me when you can, I talked to the cops. Have new info.

  I thought about what to say to Kris. She must have thought I’d ignored her. Hey! Finally got a new phone. I would love to hang out.

  Then I checked my emails. There was an email from the casting director of the joint production. My guts fluttered, a twinge deep down like the warning signs of diarrhea. A reply this late had to be a rejection unless there was some complication, like maybe the person they’d wanted had backed out. Until I opened the email, there was still a chance. A very small chance.

  I was standing at the top of Long’s Hill in the glow of Long’s Hill Convenience. There was a pay phone inside the store, nestled between the counter and a rack of snack-sized bags of chips. The man who worked there always announced how many days there were until Christmas when you got up to the counter, even in the middle of July. They sold individual tea bags and cigarettes. It felt like a good place to open the email, a safe haven.

  I pressed on the casting director’s name. It was a very short email that began, Hi Stacey, thank you so much for coming down . . . Disappointment mixed with embarrassment spread through me and pushed itself out of my pores: I felt like I needed a shower. I went into the store and walked to the cooler in the back. I got a cold can of Pepsi and a bag of Doritos. At the counter the old man told me there were thirteen days until Christmas.

  “How many until the Regatta though, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “You stay warm now,” he told me as he handed over my change.

  I cracked the can open as soon as I got outside. I don’t drink pop very often, and I could feel the sugar seeping into my blood, turning it syrupy, making it rush through me like an antidote to the disappointment. I stood next to the cement garbage bin by the bus stop on the top of the hill and chugged my Pepsi. A mom and her school-aged daughter watched from inside the plastic walls of the bus shelter. I crumpled the can and dropped it onto the snow-covered garbage that already filled the bin.

  I called Viv. It was such a relief to be able to call Viv.

  “You have a phone!” Viv said.

  “I didn’t get the part.” I held the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could peel the chip bag open. “Will you come over and smoke a joint with me?”

  “Come to my place, I’m making soup.”

  “They said I could be an extra.”

  “Assholes,” Viv said. “Are you going to
do it?”

  “Yeah, I need money.”

  I turned around and started walking back the way I’d come, towards Viv’s new house.

  * * *

  On the day we’d arranged, I stood in the living room window waiting for Kris to pick me up. The coughing woman was out having a smoke. The neighbour kids were racing around the parking lot on their bikes. A young woman with green hair sat at the picnic table watching them, maybe also waiting for a ride.

  I heard the music playing in Kris’s car when she pulled up outside the house. The girl squeezed her brakes hard and her brother skidded to a stop beside her. They stood with the bike frames between their legs, hard pebbles of snow landing on their curly hair. They were waiting for the car to leave or park so they could get back to careening around. I waved to the kids as I got in the car, they each lifted a gloved hand in response.

  Kris was playing Lucinda Williams through the radio, an album my parents loved. The dashboard heater was twisted to the thickest part of the red stripe.

  “Still up for Bell Island?” she asked.

  “Yup.” I watched the kids kick off in the rear-view, the brother losing ground almost immediately.

  “My parents had this on a tape when I was a kid, we used to listen to it in the car. This was side A and Sheryl Crow was on the other side,” I told Kris.

  “Which Sheryl Crow?”

  “The one that goes ‘sun coming up over something something something.’”

  “‘All I Wanna Do.’” Kris picked her phone up from beside the gear shift, shuffling through the songs as she drove down Military Road. We stopped at the lights by the restaurant. There were seasonal decals on the window, snowflakes and Christmas bulbs. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Viv. The new server was wiping a table in the front window. She had a spray bottle of electric-blue cleaning fluid in one hand and a microfibre cloth in the other. I remembered the prickly feel of those cloths. My hands had always been dry from fishing mugs out of a sink filled with diluted bleach and the cloths chafed them. Kris turned on the Sheryl Crow song.