I had moved to an apartment on the second floor of a converted Victorian house, close to the downtown core, and after I hung up, I looked around my kitchen, at the counters stacked with boxes, some still packed, some open where I could see cutlery, plates and glasses wrapped in paper towel. It was hot, a humid August night, and the rooms were small and unfurnished, their walls dull from the overhead lamp that seemed to smear a layer of grime over everything. My two cats milled about, jumped on the window ledge to catch the warm breeze that moved into the room. I sat on the floor and looked at the space about me—boxes and dining room chairs along the wall, curtains pulled back—and felt the muggy air that the ceiling fan drilled down into the room. I fell asleep that night on the floor in the heat with the sound of the fan and the noise from the street outside the window. When I woke the next morning, stiff and late for work, I did not think about Landy and our conversation the evening before, nor did I know that I was never to speak with her again.
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I think of Landy’s last day, a few months after our conversation, how the sun rose, and the moments, one after the next, moved along the route of their solid predictability. She would have grown to hate that predictability, the even sure way each anguished moment followed upon the previous moment. She used pills, I never knew what type. I was at work and Paul, a colleague and friend, was in my office discussing a conference we were planning together. He was a precise man and carried a clipboard where he kept notes and information and he had a way of sitting, with one leg folded over the other, that made him look closed in and compact, like a cat. The phone rang and he said, “Go ahead, get it. I’ll come back.” Honey was on the line and without preamble said, “Landy killed herself last night.” I’m not sure what I said, I’m not sure how I was able to write down details of the internment, but when I got off the phone, there they were on the paper beneath my hand.
I remembered Landy telling me about a reoccurring nightmare, spider dreams she called them, when a wad of spiders would crawl over each other, a mass of jointed legs moving in slow motion. And sitting there in my workplace, a place where I was someone she would not have recognized, I remembered the dream, the way she’d say in her matter-of-fact way, “Well, I had another spider dream last night”. And I wondered then why this memory, from the myriad memories I had of her, arose at that moment.
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Three years before Landy’s death, my mother had moved to a two-bedroom apartment not far from where I worked, and the night after the suicide, when I pressed the intercom to tell her I was there, she made her usual mistake of immediately hitting the entry button.
“Did I do it again?” she said in the hallway when I reached her floor.
“Yes, Mom, but it’s okay.”
“No it isn’t. What if I let in a murderer?”
“I need to tell you something.” But I could see she was fidgety, not listening, and knew she thought that her continued confusion regarding the buttons was a sign of advancing mental decline.
“I always think it’s the right one and then I question myself and end up making the same mistake.”
“Mom, don’t worry about it.”
We were now in her apartment. She stopped, looked at me. “Is something wrong?”
“Landy killed herself last night.” The same sentence Honey had said to me, the same blunt fact.
“Oh.” She backed up to sit on a flowered chintz chair, a chair that matched her chesterfield and drapes. “Oh, my.”
“It’s awful. I can’t seem to get my mind around it.”
I could hear a loud mechanical rumble, like a garbage truck revving, but it was too late in the day for that.
“Amelia,” she said. “You listen to me. She’s at peace. This is what she wanted, what she wanted for years. You never understood that about her.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s true. She was always so disturbed, I remember, everything disturbed her.” She sat upright as if what she had to say demanded fortitude. “It worried me, the way you cared for her, the way you’d do whatever she wanted.” My mother’s cat, a black, sleek animal, jumped on the arm of the chair and she patted him for a moment. “I do feel sorry for her mother though. She was such a sweet woman, way too sweet for that husband of hers.” Then she turned to me as if putting the matter to rest and asked if I was staying for dinner. “I made a pot roast and there’s too much for one person.”
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That year, the year of Landy’s death, an infestation of black crows hit the city; thousands en masse would land in trees or on electrical wires, where they sat like music notes on a staff, their communal flight creating a sound like huge sheets flapping, their caw filling the air with a dark laughter. The day of Landy’s funeral, as we walked to her grandmother’s gravestone where her ashes would be buried, crows gathered on the high branches of the trees above us. “They give me the creeps,” Honey said. She was there with her husband and two children but her mother and father did not come. Her mother refused to believe Landy was dead. “Mom called her phone and heard the message on the answering machine and is convinced we’re playing a hoax on her.” I didn’t ask why her father was not there. At Willie’s funeral he’d appeared deflated and broken and when I tried to speak with him, he was unable to make eye contact. At the graveside were old friends, Jimmy and his wife, friends of Honey, people I had not seen in more than a decade. We formed a semi-circle, Honey beside me and when I joined her I asked the question I had been wondering about since I heard of Landy’s death: “Did she leave a suicide note?”
Honey did not look at me but put her arms around her youngest child, a six-year-old girl who wore a puffy jacket of such brilliant colours that it stood out among the mass of dark-clad mourners. “No, no, nothing. They found nothing.”
The minister arrived and as he spoke about God and Landy’s place with him, words she would have despised, I looked to the sky and remembered when we were teenagers we’d often used this cemetery as a shortcut to a nearby neighbourhood. Its hills were marked with rows of tombstones, and on summer days, were shaded by huge trees that hovered gigantic over the graves.
I remembered then how things we did or stories we told each other could bring on attacks of laughter so violent we couldn’t catch our breath, when everything would seem hilarious and absurd. Standing there in the new chill that promised winter, a story came back to me from the year we were sixteen.
There was a tall, skinny boy in the grade ahead of us, whom Landy had nicknamed Vulch, a shortened version of Vulture, because of his stooped stance. His hair was long, hung in his face, and he seemed to radiate the same kind of contempt for his surroundings as Landy. During the year we were in grade ten, she developed a crush on him, “God, he’s so cute,” she’d say when she saw him on the path before us during our walk to school.
The story I remembered took place on a day when I’d walked home alone and as it was almost spring, I was wearing shoes rather than boots; they were high heels which made it difficult to walk, and almost impossible to walk quickly. At some point in my journey I turned and saw Vulch behind me, his strides long and commanding. I felt imprisoned by my shoes, as if by concrete, they anchored my feet to the ground. And then by what seemed at the time as the cruelest of possibilities and because I was desperately trying to outwalk him—but was in fact hobbling along the street with an awkward and graceless gait—the heels of my shoes, pretty stilettos which cost me a week’s salary, became stuck in the grid of a sewer cover, stopping my hurried progress abruptly. I had a choice: step out of my shoes and try to pull them from the grate as he walked by or stand still and smile. I did the latter, and when he passed he smiled too and asked if I was okay. I said, “Yes, just fine.”
Later that afternoon as Landy and I walked in the cemetery, it was this event I was recalling. “Oh my God,” she said. “Are you kidding? You were standing with your shoes stuck in a sewer? Just st
anding there like an idiot?”
“I know, I know. But what could I do, get on my knees and try to pull them out of the grate? That would look even worse.”
Once her astonishment abated, after she garnered every absurd detail, she began to laugh. “Oh yeah, that’s real funny,” I said. But then I too started to laugh, which made Landy clutch her stomach and laugh harder, and we laughed so hard and for so long that we had to bend over to stop the pain in our side and catch our breath, leaning against the tombstones, the muscles in our faces paining from all our laughter.
The Murder on Prince Albert Street
He was his mother’s first child, born on a cold day in October 1957, when she was twenty. Outside the hospital window the sky was marble hard and blue as the Wedgwood vase her mother had kept on their buffet, a gift, highly praised, from a distant aunt, the same vase that her sister had taken after the sudden death of their mother a year before. She saw this sky change over the day, from pale blue, through stages of royal and navy, to settle, by the time of her child’s birth, into a dimensionless black.
The baby’s father, a boy of twenty-two, visited her at the hospital the next day. He lived with his parents and had not seen her for months, since she had told him she was pregnant. Her movements were still heavy and her body seemed mysteriously bloated beneath the pink nightgown. The baby was gawky, with short crooked legs that moved aimlessly under the blanket, like a bug caught on its back. “Here, hold him,” she offered, stretching the baby toward his father. He held the child awkwardly, looking down at the sore red face.
“What’s his name?”
“Joseph, it’s a strong name, don’t you think?” The father shrugged and handed the baby back to her.
He did not know what he felt, but he knew it wasn’t love. There was nothing that made him want to see her or the baby again, and so in his customary way, he reasoned that this girl and her squirming child, with their sleepy faces, were in no way connected to him. It made leaving easier when the next week he packed his bags and took a bus to Edmonton, $300 from his parents in his wallet, and plans to begin a job in an oil field advertised in the Ottawa paper.
The mother moved to an apartment on Somerset Street close to shops and restaurants that catered to a variety of immigrant populations and lived on financial aid through a welfare program for mothers with no other means of support. It was a small apartment, with yellow walls in the kitchen, an old round-cornered refrigerator with a metal handle that took a knack to open, and a stove with burnt on grime around the elements. She didn’t miss the boy who was the father even though he was the only lover she’d ever known, even though before Joseph’s birth she had fantasized that he would ask to live with her and they would settle into the patterns she imagined made up a family. When she’d sit before the television in the evenings, her baby in his crib in her cramped bedroom, she thought about this boy, the one summer they knew each other, the night at the drive-in when she became pregnant. She concluded it was for the best he was not there, that she could not have felt her contentment had he stayed.
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When Joseph was five, he and his mother moved to a crowded neighbourhood in the east end of the city, on the second floor of an apartment building, part of a series of stuccoed buildings with green wooden railings and verandas. Their floors were linoleum and the rooms dark and small. When he started school, his mother began work as a waitress in a busy diner where she met the man whom she would marry, and with whom she would have another child, all within a year. He was quiet and thoughtful and liked to read in the living room at night and because he was fond of Joseph, he adopted him, so that from that time on, Joseph had his last name. Lisa, the daughter, a pretty blonde baby, was born when Joseph was in grade one. He used to sit with her in the kitchen before school and when she’d throw her food on the floor he’d laugh and throw it back until his mother would become angry and snap, “Joseph, stop that, you’re just encouraging her”. His mother stopped working to stay home with the baby and his stepfather found a job driving a truck that took him away from the family for weeks at a time. Then when the baby was two and Joseph eight, his stepfather had an accident on a winter day on the Trans-Canada Highway and was killed. Because he was hauling dangerous chemicals, the highway was closed for a day and a story about the closure appeared in the Calgary newspaper on January 19, 1965. His mother kept a copy in the top drawer of her dresser where Joseph found it when he searched her room, as he often did in the years that followed, looking for money or valuables. After the death of her husband the mother was forced to move her family to subsidized housing on the outskirts of the city—long streets of duplexes and townhouses, divided by laneways, back pathways, where the sky was cut by electrical wires and the air was full of the sound of children and angry adults. This was where the murder happened, eight years later.
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Two years after Amy moved away from the neighbourhood where she grew up, a sixteen-year-old boy murdered his twelve-year-old sister in a house two blocks from where Amy had lived. Perhaps because the brother had schizophrenia, the same illness Amy’s own brother had been diagnosed with years earlier, or because she could see the scene of the murder, the dim hallway and small bedroom, Amy became obsessed with the story during the autumn of the year she was twenty-one. She first read about it in the newspaper, where a photograph showed a stretcher taking the body out the back door, the brick walls and wooden windowsills, originally painted white were now yellow and cracked, a bag of pegs sagged beside the clothesline and below was a cement veranda with black metal railings. She knew that beyond what was shown in the photograph was a back yard with rusty bikes and toys, discarded implements, such as hoses, tools, and a lawn worn to earth from the constant running between yards by the neighbourhood children. These were the kind of children you could catch, line up, and photograph, and through the grime of their faces something earnest and alive would shine, so that the photo would be praised as showing the blind optimism of being young. This was the kind of child Amy had been years before when she lived there, running from yard to yard, chasing friends, playing games, panting in the cold autumn air. And this was the sort of child the murdered sister had been. The newspaper showed her school photograph, her unruly hair springing from barrettes and her smile still the innocent smile of a child. She was part of the constant noise that raged through the neighbourhood, like a loose wind, running in packs of children, playing hide-and-seek or chase.
After the murder, the brother stayed in the room beside his dead sister until the next morning when their mother found them. She called the police, and when they arrived, she stood in the doorway as they crowded around her son, asking questions he did not answer. He was found unfit to stand trial and was taken to a psychiatric hospital in another city.
Amy was living alone when the murder happened, working in a government office, and seeing the man she would later marry. Her mother had moved to an apartment with her brother and when Amy told her about the murder she said she wasn’t surprised. “There were some loonies there,” she said, as if they were cartoon characters. Amy’s mother had always been able to disregard incidents she found unpleasant or mysterious, but Amy could not stop thinking about the murder. In her imagining, it was always the deepest part of night, when rows of evenly spaced townhouses and duplexes were caught in a soft darkness that moved like mist among the buildings, thinning under the street lights and thickening in laneways. Sleep invaded every shape. In the October dark, bare branches scratched the sky and the cars along the road, garbage bins on the roadway, the fences enclosing yards, everything still, as if frozen in contemplation.
Time was the real enemy. If it had refused to move forward in that plodding, measured way it had always moved forward, the sister would not have been found. The tumble of rushed images that jammed the room would not have happened—starting with the mother, her shock, then grief and later still, something smaller, poisonous, lodged at her core, the ne
st of pain and anger that bloomed at times into a profound bewilderment and was to stay with her all the years that followed.
Then the police crowded the room, questioning the boy and taking him away; they took photographs, lingered about smoking, looking out the window, “awful,” they said to each other and meant it. The ambulance attendants who took her body from the room came next, each thinking of their own fragmented lives of adulterous intrigues and rebellious children. And a few days later, sent from the city’s social services, two women scrubbed the bloodstains from the floor and removed the mattress and pillow.
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King George, Queen Mary and Prince Albert Streets stretched in three long parallel rows that spanned the area from Rideau River in the west to St. Laurent Blvd in the east. The streets were made up of duplexes or row houses and were built as affordable housing in the early 1950s. They were red brick buildings with roofs of assorted colours, which over the years dulled to the same nondescript shade of rust. The houses all had the same layout: from the veranda, there was a vestibule, which in Amy’s home was always cluttered with shoes, boots and coats, an L-shaped living room, dining room and beyond a kitchen. At the top of the stairs, off the hallway, were a washroom and three bedrooms. Every house started out with the same possibilities. Amy lived there from the time she was two until she quit school and moved away at eighteen. She knew the winter nights when snow glowed in soft mounds illuminated by the street lamp, summer afternoons when the heat pressed upon the streets and stilled time and spring days when the soiled banks of snow collapsed into grime.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 12