Unravelling

by Josephine Boxwell

  White Smock snaps right back at her. “Eat your dinner, Vivian.”

  Vivian stands defiantly but the white smock is distracted by four old ladies who never speak. One of them reaches for the teapot and pours the pale brown water all over her meat as though it were gravy.

  White Smock spins around and seizes the teapot. “Mia, I told you not to give this table tea!”

  Apologizing, a young girl rushes over and Vivian is forgotten in the fuss. That is what she will become if she stays here, barking mad and ignored. She needs to break free but she can’t simply run off into the winter. There must be another way and she will find it, but she must sit down for a moment first. She’s suddenly leaden with fatigue.

  “You’re not Frank.”

  “No, I’m Frank’s son, Dean.”

  Frank doesn’t have a son. She would know if Frank had a son. Wouldn’t she? She’s well aware how Frank can slip into other skins, other stories. She’s always been able to use that to her advantage. Frank fakes it so well it’s as though he believes his own lies.

  “I brought you some more chocolates,” the young man says, passing her a box.

  “When have you ever given me chocolates?”

  “I brought you some last week.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  She clumsily unwraps the foil from one and crams it in her mouth.

  “Was Curtis Reid guilty of anything?”

  The chocolate sticks in her throat. “Why do you care about Curtis Reid?”

  “It’s been a challenge to get to the bottom of something that happened over 25 years ago. It would be a lot easier with your help.”

  She pushes the chocolates back in his direction. She doesn’t like them anymore. They look the same as the ones she likes but taste different.

  “This is what I’ve got so far. Feel free to let me know if I’m on the right track.”

  She stares at him incredulously. Idiot.

  “Mary Jones spoke up against your proposed mill development in the ’70s. She suspected the military had contaminated the land they occupied during the war but you managed to get your project pushed through anyway. Then, in the ’90s, somebody blew the mill up. Now, assuming Mary was right, we have a motive. The contamination was starting to affect people’s health and somebody noticed. What was it, Vivian? Skyrocketing cancer rates?”

  The man who is not Frank snaps his fingers in front of her face. “Vivian? Are you listening?” She wants to break them almost as much as he wants to break her.

  “I tried contacting the doctor who was working in Stapleton in the ’90s, but he passed away a few years back. What’s interesting, though, is that he left town just a couple of months before the explosion. Somehow landed himself a very cushy gig at a private clinic in Vancouver. Did you help him get that job?”

  That isn’t the point, Frank. Removing the doctor isn’t enough. Others will begin to ask, and eventually they’ll start digging into all the irregularities around the mill development. Fingers pointing at her and the other councillors. They can’t have that. Something more permanent has to be done.

  “Frank ...”

  “I’m not Frank.”

  “Talk to Frank.”

  “Frank’s dead.”

  Vivian shakes her head. She saw him yesterday, wearing a pale green t-shirt with a hole in it just below his armpit. He wants the council to buy a large slab of his jade. He’s calling himself an artist now. She grins. The sun feels so warm on her cheeks, seeping into her wrinkles. She lets her eyes close.

  “You can help me solve this puzzle. You can help all those families get to the truth of what happened.”

  She glares at him. “I don’t do puzzles.”

  “Do you remember what you did?”

  Father likes puzzles. He likes games because he always wins. Little black and white figures on little black and white squares. Some are more important than others, aren’t they? Bishops are worth protecting, but not the peasants. They aren’t called peasants though, are they? The little ones with cone-shaped bodies and perfectly round heads. What are they called? They don’t have any power. That’s the point. They can’t do anything useful except stand in the line of fire.

  Vivian waves her hands around a bit, speaking without sound because she can’t put the words together to ask Frank what those pieces are called and she can’t remember at this point what they were discussing. Something to do with her father.

  “Just answer me, Vivian. Yes or no. Was the mill deliberately destroyed to hide the fact that people were getting sick?”

  She stares at him. She recognizes him. “You’re Frank’s son.”

  “Yes,” he says, sighing.

  “All this ...”—she waves her hands again—”won’t bring him back.”

  He is speechless. Good. He’s exhausting. She wants him to go away. The room is occupied by nodding grey heads. There is no one here who can help her. It’s time she went home. Todd will be wondering where she is. “Can you take me home?” she asks. He doesn’t seem to hear her. Her words have become lodged in her head and they won’t come out.

  “Frank must have been involved in lining pockets or whatever you were doing back in the ’70s to make the mill project happen. That’s why he helped you destroy it. And there must have been others. Who else was in on it? Other councillors? Your husband?”

  She is staring at the chess board and Father is waiting for her to make a move. Mother’s suggestion during one of his visits. Father teaches her the rules but he won’t let her win. If she doesn’t make a move, she realizes, he can’t win. She will take her turn, though. Losing is better than not being in the game. She eyes the smallest pieces with their perfectly round heads and squat bodies. Peasants lack ambition. They aren’t the ones who make the world turn, who make decisions that change lives. But they’re always willing to string up their leaders and watch them swing.

  “Do you remember Audrey Reid?” he asks.

  A peasant. Can be bought, but like others of her kind, her effectiveness is limited.

  “Audrey Reid, Curtis’s mother,” he repeats. “Mary thought her perspective could be significant, so I tracked her down.”

  A greedy woman. She took the money but didn’t honour their deal.

  “She was involved in all this, wasn’t she? Did she know what she was doing?”

  “They always know,” Vivian says, mumbling. Frank lets out a little smile.

  “Audrey wouldn’t talk to me, but I had a long chat with her ex-husband. Jim told me that after the explosion a man came to their farm and gave Audrey a pile of cash to go visit her grandkids. The man said the money was for some information. Audrey’s job was to find out what Elena Reid knew about the mill explosion. He said it was for the family’s own protection. Jim told her not to take the money, but she did. You wanted to know how much of a risk this kid really was and you thought she might confide in a family member.”

  Vivian closes her eyes and turns away, shaking her head. Audrey Reid. Useless woman. Vivian’s concern wasn’t merely about what Elena knew. She was a girl with a very active imagination and nobody paid much attention to her natural attempts to extricate her dad from blame. Vivian wanted to know exactly how she had gained insights that were, for the most part, very close to the truth, and how many more people might now be in possession of pertinent information, whether they realized it or not.

  The young man’s hand touches her face, gently turning her head towards his. She opens her eyes and looks at him.

  “The more I learn about you, the more I think this is all an act. It’s your way of avoiding responsibility for what you’ve done.”

  “Who are you?” she asks. “You’re not Frank.”

  The young man sits up slightly and pulls his chair in even closer, as if he and Vivian are the best of friends. A nurse walks by and smiles at them. Vivian is too confused by it all to call out and demand to be rescued from this stranger.

  “Jim said Audrey felt so bad about what she�
�d done that she went to the police maybe a dozen times with Elena’s theories. But you’re a smart woman. You probably realized Audrey would never be a real threat. The cops only saw a bag lady stinking of booze.”

  Bad apples. It was very convenient that Curtis came from a long line of them. He was the perfect scapegoat.

  “Was it Frank, the man who bribed Audrey?”

  She nods slightly at the man who she thinks is Frank but isn’t but could be. He knows, anyway, he knows. He grins, a big fierce grin, and it makes her instantly furious.

  “Leave me alone!” she screams. Two nurses come rushing over and escort her out of the common living area. She hears them apologize to him. They don’t see him for what he is. No more visitors, she mutters. No more.

  The sky is dark. Someone closes the curtains. Vivian touches the books lined neatly against one wall and then slowly settles into a chair. She lifts her knitting out of her bag and examines it under the orange lamplight.

  Mary shuffles in, pushing her walker over the wood-like vinyl. She grabs Vivian’s knitting. “How is this going to keep refugees warm?” she asks, peering through the holes.

  Vivian shrugs. “I told Carol ...”

  Mary tuts and lowers herself into the chair beside her. The stitches come apart easily as Mary unravels the rows. “What a mess,” she mutters. “Most of this needs to be redone.”

  “I tried,” Vivian says weakly.

  “Quiet!” an old man grunts from across the table. “This is the reading room.” Vivian looks around. Mary has gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  1 9 9 5

  THE WINTER CAME and went, dumping more snow than usual. But apart from the constant pain of Dad’s absence, things seemed to go back to normal. Then the rain came, Mr. Peterson died, and everything changed.

  The rain pounded the ground, but the old man at the Inn said the snowmelt brought the water up. The door to the bar was open a crack, so Elena peeked inside. The old man was the only one there. Mamma must’ve been on a break. Elena decided he was the very oldest of Frank’s regulars, ninety at least. His name was Vince. He was nice and he liked to talk. He passed her a half empty packet of dry roasted peanuts and he spoke so slowly that she had to weigh up her impatience against the chance he might eventually say something interesting.

  “In the winter ... the snow builds up on the moun’ns, but if it gets too hot in the spring ... well it melts ... real quick ... and the rivers ... can’t handle ... all that snowmelt comin’ at ’em ... so ... they ... overflow.”

  “Will my house get flooded?”

  “Could do,” he said. “No way ... to know for sure ... what the river’ll do.”

  Elena didn’t want to leave Stapleton but the threat of being separated from her home seemed to be lurking just around the corner. The pressure was building like hot air before a summer storm and everybody felt it. If Kathryn’s family couldn’t survive here anymore, how would her own family ever find a way to stay, especially without Dad? He would be home soon though, she reminded herself. He would never leave them here. She would tell him proudly that she always knew he’d come back.

  Vince’s glass was empty, striped with lines of white foam. He loaded his pipe and gently tamped down the tobacco before adding more. He singed the tobacco at the top of the pipe with his lighter until it seeped smoke. He lit it again and cradled the bowl in his palm, sucking on the end of it. She liked the smell, sweeter than cigarettes. The air in the bar was mostly old smoke.

  “My brother smokes.”

  The old man’s lips pressed against the pipe a couple of times and little clouds escaped from his mouth. “He’d probably ’preciate it if ... you ... kept that to yourself.”

  Elena paused. “Can you blow smoke rings?”

  He opened his jaw and moved his lips into a circle. He brought his lips closer together and apart and together again, until a few wavering smoke rings rose. He was one of the coal miners, she reckoned, who came here long ago. She could imagine him, a young man in those museum pictures, going deep underground in a rickety shaft with a headlamp and a pickaxe, coming back with his face covered in the stuff he was being paid to dig up. His rough cough was the coal dust trapped inside him, rattling around forever.

  “Why do you come here all the time?”

  “Got no one ... to talk to ... at home.”

  Elena shuffled halfway off her chair and craned her neck so she could see if anyone was coming down the hallway. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “Your mom’s rules?”

  She nodded, keeping an eye on the doorway. Vince grunted. Elena looked into his filmy eyes and wondered why he didn’t have any friends.

  Dad always said Mamma didn’t appreciate what they had. “Aren’t you glad I bought this view, Elena?” he’d ask her when they were all outside on a hot day. “People pay millions for a view like this.”

  Elena would nod. “I love our house,” she’d tell him, and she meant it. Mamma would roll her eyes.

  If Dad was in a really good mood he’d say: “The only thing that could make this place better is a few flowers. Wouldn’t hurt to plant a few flowers, would it, Giulia?” Mamma would tell him to plant his own damn flowers and he’d laugh loudly. Mamma couldn’t help smiling.

  Elena passed the gas station on her way home from the Inn. There were sandbags stacked up outside. She watched people pull in and load them into their trucks as she wheeled around the gas pumps on her bicycle. Dad said their house would never flood. The river never got that high, he said. She hoped he was right.

  Mamma was working all day Saturday, so she put Rob in charge. He told Elena they were going to the park. It was better than sitting at home. He abandoned her as soon as they got there, with strict instructions. She wasn’t to leave the park or come and talk to him under any circumstances. Elena watched him from a distance. He was with a girl.

  Red hair, freckles, bracelets and rings piercing her ears. She looked very different from Ashley, Rob’s ex-girlfriend. Mamma didn’t know about the new girl. She used to know everything about everything, even the things they tried to hide from her.

  Elena didn’t recognize this girl. She wasn’t from Stapleton, unless she’d been living under a rock. She could’ve come from one of the neighbouring towns, but how would she have met Rob? He wasn’t old enough to drive. Maybe she could, or maybe she was home-schooled and grew up on one of the ranches and lived in the semi-wild. Maybe she rode horses and knew how to shoot guns. Lots of people in Stapleton knew how to shoot guns. Dad tried to take Rob out hunting a few times, but he never showed much interest. Elena wasn’t asked but she didn’t mind. You had to be quiet if you went hunting. Elena didn’t like being quiet.

  She walked around the edge of the park while Rob and the mystery girl hung out.

  “Hey. Elena.”

  The low, rumbling voice came from behind her. She spun around and stepped back in surprise. It was Audrey. She had come back.

  “Did ya miss me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve been lookin’ all over for you. No one was at the house. I figured you might be here. How’s your mom holdin’ up?”

  Elena looked down at her sandals. It was only barely warm enough to wear sandals, but all of her other shoes were too small. When Dad was still around, Mamma would’ve noticed by now.

  “She’s fine,” Elena said.

  Audrey didn’t seem to hear. One hand was clutching her handbag and the other was shaking. She spoke too quickly and she kept looking around like someone might be watching them.

  “Listen, Elena, who’d ya tell your little theories to? About your Dad’s disappearance and the cover-up?”

  Elena didn’t like Audrey’s tone, or the word “little”. She was definitely nervous about something and it was starting to make Elena nervous, too.

  “You need proof before you start saying things to people or you get yourself in trouble.”

  Elena looked down at her sandals in response.

  “
Who’dya tell?” Audrey asked.

  “I said a few things to Mary.”

  “Mary. Who’s Mary?”

  “She runs the museum.”

  Audrey considered it. “She doesn’t seem like the talking type. Who else d’ya tell?”

  “No one. Why?”

  “Who else, dammit!”

  Audrey was right. She had told someone else, but she didn’t want to admit it now that Audrey was angry.

  “The councillor. I talked to her ...”

  “Vivian?”

  Elena nodded. “She came up to me when I was leaving school.”

  Elena remembered the powerful smell of her perfume and the silk scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Elena didn’t know her but knew she was an important person in Stapleton. It was strange that the councillor was waiting for her outside the school gates but she seemed nice enough. She just wanted to help. Not many people wanted to help.

  “What did you tell her?” Audrey asked.

  “She was worried about Dad and she wanted to know if I knew anything. So I told her what I thought happened.”

  “I should’ve told her something more believable,” Audrey muttered. “I didn’t think she’d do her own dirty work.”

  “What do you mean?” Elena asked, confused.

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “She said it was safe to talk to her,” Elena said, “because it’s her job to look after the whole community, including me and Dad. She just wants to make sure we find him.”

  Audrey scrunched her eyes as though she had a terrible headache but when she opened them again her whole face had changed. There was a brightness in her eyes and she put on the smile-scowl that had frightened Elena when they first met.

  “We don’t need to worry about her anymore. I got some amazing news.” Audrey leaned in and whispered in her ear: “We found him. We found your dad.”

  Elena stepped back and looked at her. “Really?”

  Audrey nodded. “He’s in the forest ... laying low.”

  Elena couldn’t quite let herself believe it. “So you actually saw him?”