Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  Tell Anna She’s Safe

  A NOVEL

  BRENDA MISSEN

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  Copyright © 2011 Brenda Missen

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council

  for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  We are also grateful for the support received

  from an Anonymous Fund at The Calgary Foundation.

  Excerpts from #s 3, 16, 19, 62 from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, A New English Version, with foreword and notes, by Stephen Mitchell. Translation copyright © 1988 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. UK and BC Rights: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 25 Eccelston Place, London SW1W 9NF, United Kingdom.

  Cover/interior design: Luciana Ricciutelli

  eBook development by WildElement.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Missen, Brenda, 1961-

  Tell Anna she’s safe / Brenda Missen.

  (Inanna poetry and fiction series)

  ISBN 978-1-926708-20-1

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8626.I825T45 2011---C813’.6---C2011-900730-4

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna@yorku.ca Website: www.yorku.ca/inanna

  This book is for Louise

  and her indomitable spirit.

  Throw away holiness and wisdom,

  and people will be a hundred times happier.

  Throw away morality and justice,

  and people will do the right thing.

  Throw away industry and profit,

  and there won’t be any thieves.

  If these three aren’t enough,

  just stay at the centre of the circle

  and let all things take their course.

  —Tao Te Ching

  PART I: SEARCHING

  [The Master] helps people lose everything they know

  —Tao Te Ching

  1.

  I WOULD NEVER HAVE GIVEN the yellow Sidekick a second glance if it hadn’t been parked in the middle of a construction zone. Or if a temporary traffic light hadn’t stopped me close by.

  I was on River Road, on my way home from my twice-weekly visit to the chiropractor. I didn’t mind the half hour drive to Wakefield at the end of the workday. The bottleneck on the interprovincial bridge had always thinned out by the time I made it up the long slope of highway, past our place in Chelsea, Marc’s and mine, and deeper into the Gatineau Hills. And I knew I would have this old rough road to myself afterward.

  Except, today, I was stopped at a traffic light in the middle of nowhere. I would have taken the main highway if I’d known about the construction. But I wasn’t sorry. The delay gave me a chance to drink in the view. The road, aptly named, ran like a second river beside the Gatineau. Straight out of the opposite shore rose high, ancient, enduring fortresses of Shield. The craggy grey rock was most visible at this time of year: the snows were sloughed off; the spring greens hadn’t yet replaced them.

  But today I barely glanced at the hills. My eyes were drawn to the open water. It was a welcome sight. Our bay was still locked in ice. The river up here was narrower, with a stronger current, though it was still unnaturally wide. The entire lower Gatineau had been dammed and flooded in the 1920s. I always wondered about the lands and cottage remains submerged in its depths.

  The construction zone was located right at the point where the road curved up and away from the river. The reason for that was clear now that I was stopped. Here was where the railway tracks crossed the road and ran parallel to the river the rest of the way down to the city. The steep drop separating the rise of the road from the tracks and the river below was being reinforced with cages of rock. The work was blocking the northbound lane.

  The light turned green, and I took my turn in the single lane. That was when I noticed the Sidekick. It was parked on the narrow shoulder, facing south. There was barely room to squeeze by. I wondered at the construction worker who had parked it there. But it didn’t look like a construction worker’s car.

  That was my first thought.

  It looked more like a woman’s car.

  That was my second thought.

  It looked, in fact, like Lucy’s car. I made a mental note to ask her if her Sidekick had a white geometrical design painted on the side. Maybe she had come up here to go for a walk on the tracks. Many people did. The trains no longer ran.

  And that was my only thought about Lucy Stockman the rest of my drive home.

  I had other preoccupations. I had two dogs who had been cooped up all day. I had sciatic pain that the chiropractor assured me was going to be gone in time for spring cycling and running. And I had an absent boyfriend working on a construction project fourteen-hundred kilometres away, who said he wasn’t coming back to me at the end of the summer.

  Marc’s absence was the reason the dogs were cooped up. For most of the year, he was on a job site nearby and could check on them. I hated leaving them tied up or in the house, but Beau was a wanderer and Belle tended to follow.

  I came to the junction at Highway 105, where the Tulip Valley Restaurant sat, and turned south on the highway to our turn-off at Chemin Cameron. I hoped the dogs’ bladders were holding out.

  Like many Chelsea roads, Cameron sloped down to the river from the old highway and branched off into several dead-ends. Our house was at the end of one of those dead-ends, the only house on the road. Marc had built it from hand-hewn logs salvaged from a pioneer homestead. It was tucked into the side of the hill, above the tracks, high enough for a clear view of the river.

  I limped my way up the stairs. It was a long climb, leading to a wraparound deck and the front door. Two golden retrievers sat looking out through the glass. At the sight of me, they stood up in unison, bumping into each other in a mutual tail-wagging wriggle. Once the door was open, they ran circles around me, then raced down the stairs to relieve themselves.

  I was about to head down after them when a familiar sound, like soft wind chimes, brought me over to the deck railing.

  The spring winds had finally done their work. They had whipped up the water at the edge of the frozen bay. The waves had been working at the ice all day, breaking it into tiny pieces. They tinkled in the undulating water, working closer and closer to shore. I smiled wryly. Just the day before, I had hosted our annual ice-breaking-up party (on my own) to herald the arrival of spring. It had been a day too early.

  Marc would have liked to have seen this. Every morning in April he waited for the day he could put one of his boats in the water. They sat, a good half-dozen in all, on a multi-tiered rack below me, a fleet of white-water, flat-water, and racing canoes in various designs and colours. The canoes mocked me from below: you misled him.

  That was the bomb Marc had dropped on me the previous week.

  A bomb set off by a fight about Lucy.

  Looking out over the river, listening to the icy chimes,
I choked on a laugh. Marc’s stand on Lucy seemed eminently understandable now that he wasn’t here to impress it on me.

  I had been living with Marc for two years when I met Lucy. I was working, then as now, for a small company called Roots Research that did contract work, mostly for the museums. The National Gallery was also a client, and that year I was putting together a research package for a retrospective on Emily Carr.

  Lucy was the contractor who had been hired to write the panels and the guide for the retrospective. Our first meeting was at the glass-cathedral Gallery with our client on a cold, damp November day.

  Her grin and the grip of her hand immediately set her apart from the other writers I had worked with. Where the others seemed to channel their personalities into their writing, Lucy’s seemed to explode out of her tiny, wiry frame. She emanated intensity, sexuality, and an enviable self-possession. There was no other word for it: Lucy Stockman was alive.

  Standing beside her, I felt big and gawky. My freckles and strawberry blonde hair were no match for her smooth tanned skin and long, glossy dark hair. I wondered what she did to keep so trim and fit. It was hard to judge her age. It turned out she had more than a decade on me—she was in her early forties.

  She talked very fast, as if being paid by the word. “I hear you live up in the Gatineaus. Are you right on the water? Lucky you. I’ve always wanted to live in the country. One day I’ll get up there. It’s in the five-year plan.” She grinned, as if at a private joke. There was a faint aroma about her—not quite perfume, not quite musk. Distinctive. But I couldn’t place it.

  While the client went over the details of the project, Lucy produced from a thermos, and drank, mug after mug of steaming black coffee. With each mug, her sentences and ideas spilled out faster. They were good ones.

  At the end of the meeting, she gripped my hand again. “I look forward to working with you, Ellen McGinn. Maybe you’ll invite me up to your place. I think I could commune with Emily Carr up there.”

  “We aim to provide the complete experience at Roots Research,” I joked back.

  Lucy beamed at me. “I’m sure we could commune with Emily Carr over a glass of wine at my place, too. I’m in Ottawa South. Drop in any time.”

  “I’ll even hand deliver the research package.”

  “Deal,” she said.

  She turned to our client and alternated her cheeks for his kiss. I was struck again by her self-confidence.

  Preparing me for the meeting, our Gallery client had mentioned a half-Hungarian background, a hyper-intensity, and a quick temper. He hadn’t mentioned the intelligent gleam in her eye. Or her quick wit and generosity. He hadn’t mentioned her passion for justice. Or her fear of being far from home. Or her propensity for panic attacks when she found herself in big spaces or anonymous institutions. He hadn’t mentioned that she was on a conscious spiritual journey, hell-bent, she once put it, on healing the traumas of her past. But over the next year I got to know all these things about Lucy Stockman—all these things and more.

  More than I bargained for.

  The dogs shot ahead of me into the house and straight into the kitchen to wolf down the food they’d left untouched all day. I limped upstairs to change. The tidiness of the house unsettled me. I complained about the clutter of Marc’s paddling gear, but without it the house seemed big and empty. As it did every summer when he was off on a construction project.

  I promised myself again I would start looking for my own place. But I had until the end of August. Marc wouldn’t be back before then. If we had to break up, it was good timing. That was what I told myself. There was really no shock to the system: I was used to his summer absences. He chose his construction jobs for their proximity to the rivers he wanted to run. Not their proximity to me. By the time he came back, I would be ready. Maybe I was ready.

  The ringing of the phone brought me out of my thoughts and into my office.

  I glanced at the familiar Ottawa exchange on the call display, picked up the receiver and spoke with a smile in my voice. “I’ve just been thinking about you.”

  There was a pause, and then a male voice. “It’s not who you think it is. It’s Tim Brennan.”

  It wasn’t logical, my shock at hearing Tim Brennan’s voice phoning from Lucy Stockman’s house. Lucy and I had kept our conversations focused on work these last five months. The only thing I remembered her volunteering during that time was that Tim had moved out at Christmas. She needed her space, she’d said. He needed to learn to be more independent. I hadn’t pressed for details. The shutting down of our budding friendship a few months ago had been my choice. It had also been my choice, only a week ago, to open it up again. But there hadn’t been any opportunity yet for catching up. So there was no reason her common-law partner couldn’t have moved back in without my knowing. No reason at all.

  Lucy did not immediately tell me about the man in her life. We had started with the things we knew we had in common. Obvious things, like our love for what she called “the country” and our interest in staying fit and healthy. She wasn’t a runner or a long-distance cyclist, but she had a touring bike she rode along the canal and to the stores. And she kept herself in shape with yoga and dance. “I’ve been dancing ever since I can remember,” she told me in one phone conversation. “When I was a kid I danced so much I wore out the kilim carpet in our living room.” Her tone turned wry, almost bitter. “My father wasn’t too happy about that.”

  From there she managed to segue the conversation to astrology, meditation, psychic phenomena, reiki, dream analysis, Zen Buddhism—all the other things that interested her. I had no experience of such things. My world was the physical, tangible terrain I could take a hike or ride a bike in. I couldn’t prove or disprove the validity of those other kinds of things, so I didn’t spend much time thinking about them. But Lucy brought a thoughtful intelligence to it all—and a passion—that drew me in, in spite of myself. She made it all sound so normal. She talked about meditation and her spiritual journey in the same matter-of-fact way she expounded on a subject she was working on for Correctional Services or the Justice Department, or the kind of soil her garden needed. There was no separation: a vision was as real to her as a vegetable. I listened in amazement—and a secret curiosity.

  Her independence, I think, drew me to her the most. She was self-employed; she owned her house. She seemed very much in control of her life, not having to answer to a boss, or to a partner who wanted her to do things she didn’t want to (or simply couldn’t) do. It occurred to me that maybe the metaphysical things she was into played a key role in that. That maybe I should keep listening.

  One topic we avoided: relationships. Surprising for two women. But I had my own reasons, and I thought I knew Lucy’s. I might have been envying her independence, but when I’d told her I was living with someone, she’d sounded wistful. I assumed she didn’t want to hear about someone else’s happy relationship when she was on her own. And if she assumed Marc and I were happy, I wasn’t ready to set her straight.

  It wasn’t until my second visit to her house, after many long phone conversations, that she told me about Tim. It took a half-consumed bottle of red wine between us on the table and a warm May breeze filtering in through the kitchen window.

  She had been to my house just the weekend before for that spring’s ice-breaking-up party. She had met my keen, competent canoe-head boyfriend. She had raved about our log house and its location near the water. I had invited her to come up and use the dock any time. It felt as if we were moving to new ground, from personal chats in the midst of work phone calls to social invitations and visits.

  She waited until I was into my second glass of wine. Her own she topped up with water. She trained her eyes on me. “There’s someone I want to tell you about. His name is Tim. Tim Brennan.” She paused. “I’ve known him a couple of years.”

  I felt a sudden unea
se. I was used to Lucy’s intensity but there was something different here.

  Lucy paused again, then continued in a rush. “He was a witness at the Supreme Court hearings for Colin Fajber, two years ago. D’you know the case?”

  I nodded. I did. A little. It had received national media attention.

  “I went to the hearings,” said Lucy. “I saw Colin Fajber on TV. There was no way he was capable of raping and stabbing a girl. And I saw his mother. The way she stood by him. I had to go. To show my support. That’s where I met Tim. He testified against another convict.”

  Another convict besides whom? Colin Fajber?

  Fajber had been convicted of murder two decades before, when he’d been just sixteen. The victim had been a young nurse. She’d been stabbed and slashed more than two dozen times. And brutally raped. It had been an unusual case to reach the Supreme Court. It was Fajber’s mother who had got it there. She had even pleaded with the Prime Minister. That much I knew.

  “I don’t know how familiar you are with the case,” Lucy was saying, “but Fajber’s defence was that a guy named Archie Crowe actually committed the murder. By that time Crowe was doing time for something else, and he bragged to some other inmates that he’d got away with it by pinning it on Fajber. That’s what Tim was testifying about. I ran down the hall after him when they were taking him away. I had to thank him for speaking up for Colin. He risked his life doing that. There’s no worse crime in prison than being a rat.”

  In prison? Tim was the other convict. What had he been in for? Was he still inside? I didn’t want to ask.

  “I wrote to him. Then we started phoning, and then we arranged visiting privileges for me. I never meant it to go beyond friendship. I never dreamed we’d have enough in common for it to become a relationship. But,” she smiled,“it did.”

  She leaned forward then and looked at me intently. “Tim is serving ten years for manslaughter.”