After the murder, Amy would wake in the middle of the night and watch the shadows on the ceilings of her apartment crawl forward as the first strands of daylight stretched into her room. Later on the bus, where she found herself part of a herd of commuters being pushed from stop to stop, she imagined the dead sister, lying curled around the sounds of her last day, her friend’s laugh, the roar of traffic from nearby streets, the screen door slapping shut when she arrived home and her mother’s greeting. The moment when the brother stood outside her door, his hand on the knob, while she was coiled around her dreams, that moment before everything changed, when the tragedy was still a churning thought in his mind. This was where Amy’s thoughts stalled as she went through the routine of her day, making coffee in the office, speaking on the phone or typing. She’d glance out the window at the parking lot, where beyond a field lay in the slow process of hardening for the approaching winter.
z
After Amy married and moved to a small town miles away, she thought less and less of her childhood and had forgotten about those few months when her thoughts had been consumed by the death of a young girl. That was until one Saturday when her husband brought the newspaper into the kitchen where she was pouring a cup of tea and said, “Didn’t you tell me about this case?” There, on the cover page of a section entitled Observations appeared the same school photograph of the dead girl. The piece was part of a lengthy series about the devastation of mental illness. She took the paper and her tea into the living room and read the article, discovering details about the murder she’d not known, such as the fact that he’d heard voices and had killed his sister because he loved her and had wanted to protect her. When Amy was finished she put the paper down, looked out toward the street, at the large oak and maple trees that had started to turn colour, and it struck her that the murder had happened on just such a day. She thought about the morning after the sister’s death, when the light would have filled the room, just as light was filling her living room more than a decade later. Joseph would have been able to see his sister, her disheveled hair, the sad twist of her ankle exposing the soft pink palm of her foot, so clearly it was as if he were looking through still water. Through the night he would have watched the changing light reveal her body, entrapping her in a stillness before regret, before even sadness.
As Amy sat in her living room, her legs tucked under her, the tea now cold on the table beside her, she could hear her son upstairs start the shower. He and her husband had planned a weekend away, to attend a hockey tournament and so after dinner there were hours of noisy activity as they packed and prepared for the trip. After they left Amy sat at the dining room table, in the quiet left in their wake. It was unusual to not have the sound of her home interrupting her thoughts, to have the room lie utterly still around her. She looked toward the corner of the dining room, to a dark space beside the buffet, a spot where, at that time of night, light could not reach and she saw there a shifting of dark against dark, a coiled animal of deepening shadows.
z
Joseph’s mother turned fifty-five on a hot summer day. Her job at the time was in a bakery on a major thoroughfare close to the city limits. She worked with the owner, a man of eastern European descent, who had difficulty speaking English, and his wife, a plump woman who harboured a deep mistrust of everyone except her husband. Joseph’s mother had worked in this bakery for more than ten years, and while others before her had said they grew infuriated by the impersonal way they were treated there, it was exactly that quality she liked best about the job. Her employers did not know her past, no one in her life at the time did, except Joseph, who had been released from the hospital five years earlier and was living in a group home uptown. He had grown heavy and was barely recognizable as the thin, tortured boy from that summer of 1973.
On the evening of the mother’s birthday, she returned to her rented apartment not far from the bakery and watched television. Later she washed her face and brushed her teeth, but when she shut the light and got into bed she could not sleep. She knew that to turn fifty-five alone was a form of failure, but she was unaccustomed to wondering about life, to contemplating what its patterns and vagaries meant, and after many years of cultivating silence her mind had a sluggish quality so that it was only a pained quiet she experienced lying there, staring into the dark.
The next day at work Joseph called, wanting money, and she told him to go to her apartment after she finished work. She hung up the phone, wiped her flour-dusted hands on her apron, when the name Lisa, a name she had not thought of for years rang in her mind, like a clear bell. It took her breath away so that she turned from the wife of the owner who asked in a harsh tone, “Was that a personal call?”
When Joseph arrived that night she made him a dinner of macaroni and cheese and gave him forty dollars in an envelope. The television was on as they ate, but over the evening news, she said, “I turned fifty-five yesterday.”
“Oh yeah,” he said without looking away from the television.
“And today for the first time in a long time I thought about Lisa.”
The name had not been spoken between them for years. He was quiet, watching the television, but he knew she was watching him, waiting, so that he turned and said, “I still miss her”. How surprising, those four short words, how they were able to deflect her anger so that she saw in them the last, final link between her and her son.
When he was leaving he noticed that day’s newspaper and his mother’s mail on the table by the door. On the front page of the paper was an article of a teenage boy who had murdered his family in Toronto. He stared at the photo, the boy no older than seventeen, smiling awkwardly out from his school photograph. “I hate reading the paper,” he said. After he left she bolted the door, prepared for bed and that night slept soundly in the unforgiving dark of her small bedroom.
On the Bus
After Amy finished high school she moved from the home she shared with her mother and brother to a small apartment a short bus ride away. That same month she began work for a government department on the outskirts of Ottawa’s east end, and in autumn, as the hours of daylight shortened, it would be dark when she caught the bus in the morning and dark again when she came home in the evening. The fields surrounding the road, bare except for the occasional factory and electrical pylons stretching evenly into the distance, would lie dormant in the day’s first or last touch of murky light.
For three years Amy followed this same route, often with the same people, as the bus, on its way to the outlying industrial plants and warehouses, wound its way along boulevards lined by high-rise apartments, strip malls and low-rise medical buildings. When she was older and had lived away from the city for many years, she thought of this time in her life with fondness. She remembered how the bus rides parenthesized her workday and allowed moments of contemplation the rest of the day did not, and she felt protective toward the young woman she was then, captive on the bus beneath a hardening sky and captive to that moment in her youth with its uncertainty, naivety, and promise.
During those years Amy developed a fear that nothing would ever change, that her life would stay forever the closed world of the office, her apartment, the bus and streets she’d view on the way to work, but she was mistaken. One afternoon, at the same instant that the sun poured in the large window of the filing room where she worked, a pipe broke in her apartment. When she returned home that night she was forced to move seven floors up to an empty unit. Seeing the items the superintendent had brought from her apartment—food on the kitchen counter and clothes and toiletries in the bathroom—Amy experienced the surreal sense of finding the familiar in a strange place, as if she’d entered a dream and was captive to a moment when anything could happen.
Her mattress lay on the living room floor against the wall, dragged there by the same man who had brought the food and then shortly after her television. For most of the evening she sat on the mattress and read, disturbed onl
y by the noise from the street below or people coming or going in the hallway. Later in the evening after she prepared to sleep, she turned on the television to watch the news, sitting crossed-legged with her back against the wall. The announcer reminded her of Mona, a woman in her office, who could often be found speaking and laughing with Mr. Raymond, Amy’s boss, a man of such earnest attitude and speech as to be a figure of ridicule in the office. His face was sharp featured. “Like a fox,” Amy said, to which Cathy, her coworker replied, “or rodent.” When he was beyond earshot they mocked his shiny hair and pointed face. “From here,” Cathy leaned across the table where they were sorting the morning mail, “he looks like his head is made of patent leather.”
“Well, that’s perfect, because his face looks like a foot,” Amy said.
“What are you two laughing about?” Mona asked as she entered their office.
“Life,” Amy said and continued sorting the mail.
z
In the new apartment Amy fell asleep watching the tiny lights from the houses twinkle below and extinguish in a random sequence, until the darkness became a black slate pressed against the balcony door and window. She dreamt Mr. Raymond arrived, dressed in a camel hair coat and pinstripe suit, an outfit she’d seen him wear in the office. He began to undress, fumbling with the buttons of his vest and shirt, undoing and stepping out of his trousers and underwear. After he removed his socks and was naked, he stood straight and looked at her. There was an offering, a vulnerability in his stance, and when he came onto the mattress Amy discovered Mona lying beside her. Her eyes were closed, and although during the day she never wore makeup, her mouth now was red with lipstick and she was saying his first name over and over, as she put her arms around his neck and drew him to her. Slowly he moved his hand over Amy’s arm and smiled while Mona whispered. Amy jerked awake remembering in that instant that she’d overheard Mona and Mr. Raymond speaking French and although she had not heard the whole conversation she did hear the words ce soir, as Mona was leaving the office. Surprise and interest spread over her like a flush.
z
“Mona moaning,” Cathy said during their break the following morning. She was a tall blonde woman in her early thirties who usually spent the break complaining about her husband or the woman who babysat her three-year-old son. She ripped the packet of sugar, put it in her cup and stirred the tea with a plastic stick. “God what an image, the two of them, like two cold fish slapping against each other.”
“Yeah,” in light of the ill-tempered interest Cathy showed, Amy wished she had not said anything. “Stupid really, just a dream.”
z
The next evening when Amy was once again sitting on the mattress watching television, she heard a knock at the door. Inside the circle of the peephole, pressed close to her eye, were two men she had seen in the elevator. She called through the door. “Yes?”
“Hi, there. We were wondering if you have a newspaper we could borrow.”
Remembering this moment, many years later, Amy felt a spontaneous sympathy for the girl she had been then, standing at the door, barefoot, stretching to see into the hall, for these were the first words the man who would become her husband spoke to her. She had a choice here; she knew that she could say that she did not have a newspaper or she could open the door and give the men the paper she had bought by the bus stop on her way home.
When she opened to them and they saw the sparse room, the taller man, the man who would be her brother-in-law said, “Guess you just moved in, eh?” and Amy explained how she usually lived on the main floor. And so this is how Amy’s life with Philip began, with him stopping to get the paper every night, even after she moved back to the first floor. In stages these meetings grew into weekends spent together when they were introduced to each other’s relatives and friends, weeknights cooking dinner, watching television and the new sensation of sleeping with someone every night. Amy continued her trips to and from the office, seeing the same commuters, the same men congregating in the cafeteria in their dark suits, like crows gathering in fields. And she saw Mona with them, dressed in a tailored suit, sitting quietly, listening to the men, the plain, flat shoes she wore because she was tall, the shy, compliant way she sat on the edge of her seat, sipping coffee.
Rumours began shortly after the flood when a co-worker saw Mr. Raymond and Mona holding hands in his office and someone else caught them on a Friday night on Bank Street walking arm-in-arm. “You may have been right,” Cathy said as she and Amy worked at the long sorting table in the outer office.
“Leave them be, Cathy.”
“That’s right. You’re in love now, so the world should be in love.” She turned back to the job of sorting invoices.
Amy too went back to concentrating on the task before her. The night before when she woke she’d curled into the warmth of Philip’s body and this is the memory that surfaced at that moment as she watched Cathy’s hands shifting through the envelopes and paper in front of them. Amy was planning a move from the city to the small town where Philip had grown up, and their evenings were often full of people she had just met, people who would become her family, friends or neighbours.
Within a year of marrying, she became pregnant and gave up her job in the city. What she remembered best from the winter her son was born was rocking him to sleep while watching the snow fall into her yard. She had never known such peace, it settled in her slowly, falling like the snow, making her sleepy, warm and full. When her son was one year old and could be minded, Amy began work in a bookstore on the main street of the town. She enjoyed the work, the chatter between the women she worked with, and the way the sun lay in bands, stretching into the store from the front window in dusty rays during long afternoons, winter or summer. There was a calmness and natural rhythm to the work, an acceptance she never felt in her job at the office. She came to love the way the street changed throughout the day, when evenings drifted into the side lanes, or sun broke through the lace of leaves and fell into pieces of pure light. Many evenings she walked home from the bookstore, as the sky above her shimmered blue, and the houses crowded the streets with their dark, matronly bulk. The people she’d meet walking along the sidewalk, she greeted by name. Reaching the veranda of her home, she looked at the sky, dark then, like a scarf of deep indigo silk over the houses, held in place by the diamond pins of stars.
z
The winter Thomas turned eighteen, during his last year of high school, Philip told Amy he had fallen in love with someone in his office. It was a starkly cold day, and as he spoke she heard the wind rattling the dining room window. Her attention kept returning to the sound, even though she knew what he was saying was crucial, or perhaps she focused on the banging because what he was saying was too painful and, after the years of mounting indifference between them, too real. After Philip left, days went by when she’d forget to eat, when she lay on the sofa and be lost in the noise from the street: children, cars, dogs, common sounds that now excluded her. At times she slept soundly without dreams, but always the thought of Philip’s leaving awaited at the rim of sleep, jarring her with its cruel insistence; she’d curl around it, as if it would burst from her, a snarl of pain, a tragic birth.
z
Living in the city three years later and once again working for a government department, Amy was waiting for a bus when she saw someone who looked familiar. The woman had a gaunt appearance, tall and thin and after a moment of watching her stand stiffly looking out to the street, Amy said, “Is that you, Mona?” And Mona turned with a smile.
“Yes,” she said, her expression puzzled.
“It’s me, Amy, remember we worked together.” They were standing out of the wind in a doorway of a department store on Rideau Street. Within a few minutes of speaking Amy discovered Mona had left the office they shared a few years after Amy herself left and that she never married.
“That was a long time ago. My God, I haven’t t
hought about that place in ages. Who did you work with again?”
“Mr. Raymond was my boss,” Amy said and thought she saw a hardening of Mona’s expression. A thin layer of grey had settled over Mona’s face, giving her an aged, tired look.
“And you Amy? Any children?” Amy was telling her about her son when Mona’s bus arrived and they quickened their conversation to hasty goodbyes. Shortly after, when Amy’s bus appeared, she boarded and sat by the window. It was growing cold, a sad evening in October. As the bus moved toward the bridge, the neon of the city was replaced by streetlights and beyond, the darkness pooled around the apartment buildings and homes of Sandy Hill, streets where Amy’s own mother had grown up.
She thought back to a time on another bus, when she was in her early twenties, coming home from her first job. She passed factories and fields, dark against the golden light of a setting sun. And from the vantage of more than twenty years she remembered the girl she’d been, sitting by the bus window, wondering what her life would hold in the years to come, as telephone poles, fences, and the whole wide landscape of bare fields pasted beneath a mottled sky slipped by her into the past.
Worst Snowstorm
of the Year
My husband Philip found the stalled car when he was plowing a deserted stretch of road close to our village. It appeared through the blizzard like a mirage, covered in snow, a lumbering animal fast asleep. He’d told me, in the past, about finding people or dogs in distress while he was plowing, but this was the first time he’d come upon an accident. It looked like the car had simply veered off the road—there was no indication it had hit anything, no dead animal, or broken post, not even tracks, just a motionless car, snow covered, in the ditch. When he climbed down and cleared the windshield with his arm, Philip could hear his plow’s engine idling like the uneven purr of a powerful animal.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 13