Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  Marc turned around then. His face was full of emotion. Exasperation. Defeat. “You have a party to host,” he said and his voice cracked.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. I fought my own tears. “And where are you going to be?”

  Marc seemed to straighten up, to pull his emotions back inside himself. “By Sunday afternoon? Thunder Bay.”

  I stared at him. “But you’re not starting that job for another two weeks.”

  “Am I not?” he asked and walked out of the room.

  I watched him pack. He was trying to scare me. He was packing to be ready to leave on May sixth, as planned. He was going to stay for the party. For me. Of course.

  But early Friday morning, he loaded up the truck. And I retreated to my office and looked out to the grey April sky and porous ice on the river. Unable to say, “Stay.”

  The construction site was deserted. Except for the yellow Suzuki Sidekick parked on the side of the road. It was facing toward the city, as before. I did a U-turn and pulled in behind it. I didn’t need to read the licence number in front of me to know it was Lucy’s.

  The shoulder was bordered by a scruffy row of bushes, and beyond the bushes was a cottage, and a man in the yard.

  I got out of the car, cut through the bushes and crossed the lawn. “Excuse me,” I said to the man. “I’m wondering if you know anything about that car parked over there.”

  He turned slowly, with the help of a cane. He was slightly built, with thick greying hair and a topographical map of a face.

  “It belongs to a friend of mine,” I said. “I’m wondering if you’ve seen her.”

  “No, I ’ave not seen her.” He spoke each word slowly, with a strong Québecois accent. “That car ’as been parked ’ere since Saturday afternoon. My wife and I, we ’ave just come back from town tonight—we live in Hull. This is our cottage. We are renovating. We were going to call the police. We thought it might be stolen and abandoned.”

  “Do you have a phone I could use?” I seemed to be speaking from a script, knowing both my lines and his.

  “Yes, in the house. Ma femme, she is there. Go ahead,” he added. He waved his cane.

  This was in the script too—that I should go ahead and let him make his way behind me. That I should feel I was being rude, but know that under the circumstances it was necessary.

  I stepped around the construction materials on the porch. The woman who answered the door spoke little English, but she understood the word “phone” and my agitation. She guided me through a half-finished hall to the living room.

  I sat in a chair and dialled Lucy’s number on an old black rotary-dial phone. My hand shook. Tim answered on the first ring.

  “It’s her car,” I said.

  “Should we call the police?” His voice was as shaky as mine. This was also part of the script—the line and the delivery.

  “Yes, but I don’t know if it should be Ottawa or Quebec.” I leaned my head in my hand, trying to think. “Quebec, I think, since it was found in Quebec.”

  I wanted to hang up and leave it to Tim. But he would have no idea how to call the Sûreté du Québec, or how to communicate, if necessary, in French. I could feel his helplessness. I couldn’t block it out. I couldn’t change the script.

  “I’ll call them,” I said.

  His relief came across so strongly the feeling of scripted roles faded. The melodrama of the evening stayed.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “How do I get up there? I’m no good with directions or finding my way at night.”

  I remembered Lucy telling me the same thing the previous summer, explaining an idiosyncrasy I couldn’t have cared less about at the time.

  She had been ecstatic to have finally gotten him out. The battle was over. But it had been an adjustment. Tim had been completely dependent. He had little idea how to live in the outside world. She’d had to drive him everywhere, show him how to do the simplest things, the grocery shopping, getting a library card. She’d bought him a mountain bike. Shown him the bike paths along the canal. Finally, he got his driver’s licence. That had made a huge difference. Except, I now remembered her telling me, he had a lousy sense of direction. He kept getting lost and calling her from phone booths to come and get him. “He doesn’t go by street signs,” she explained. “He goes by landmarks, which you can’t see at night, so he doesn’t drive at night.”

  It was one of those useless things you retain in your head that suddenly become relevant. How was I going to explain where I was? It was getting darker by the minute.

  “Do you know where Tulip Valley is?” I asked him.

  “No, I never been up there before. Is it near Kingsmere? I’ve been to Kingsmere.”

  “No, that won’t help.” Kingsmere was at the other end of Gatineau Park, closer to the city.

  I couldn’t deal with him right now. I had to get the police here. “I’ll call the police, and call you back when they get here.”

  I sat opposite the couple in their living room—the Rivests. I sipped water from a glass. Each tick of the clock pushed the sun farther behind the hills. Each sound of a passing car brought me to the window.

  Every time I sat down I smiled an apology to the Rivests. They had better things to do than wait in their living room with a strange woman for the police to come and investigate the disappearance of another strange woman. It wasn’t their fault she’d parked her car in front of their house. They hadn’t asked to be in this drama. Neither had I.

  Sitting intensified the pain in my leg. I stood up. “I’m just going to go outside.” I gestured out the window. Mr. Rivest nodded. From behind me, I heard him speaking in French to his wife.

  The temperature had dropped with the sun. I pulled my jacket tight around me and walked with crossed arms over to Lucy’s car. Walking relaxed the sciatic nerve a little.

  I cupped my face against the passenger window. I was expecting the car to be empty.

  It wasn’t. A pair of sunglasses lay on the dashboard. There was a dark bag on the passenger-side floor, and another, bigger bag in the back. Would she have gone for a walk without her sunglasses? Would she have left her purse in full view on the floor? Both seemed unlikely.

  I avoided touching the door handles, but I could see the locks were pushed down.

  I looked up and down the road. No cars. No police.

  Back in the house, the Rivests were still sitting in the living room. As if frozen there until their part in the next scene began.

  I dialled Lucy’s number again on the old rotary phone. “The police still haven’t got here,” I told Tim. “I looked in the car. Her purse is there and her sunglasses. The car’s locked. Do you have a spare set of keys?”

  “Yes, there should be one here.”

  “Could you bring them? I’m going to try to give you instructions to get you up here. The police are taking so long.”

  “Okay,” he said. He sounded as if he were bracing himself.

  I braced myself too. Lucy had said he didn’t go by street names. I tried to think of obvious landmarks. “Do you know the bridge from Ottawa that takes you onto the big highway that cuts right through Hull?”

  “Is that the one from King Ed-ward?” He said the name hesitantly, as though pronouncing a word in an unfamiliar language.

  Relief. It was like trying to ask someone a question in their language and having the response come back, haltingly, in your own. “Stay in the left lane,” I continued. “There will be a sign pointing to Hull.”

  “Is that the sign that says Hull left, Sussex right?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.” More relief. It was so much easier than I had expected. He would be here soon.

  I had met Tim only twice. The first time had been just a few weeks after his release, almost a year before. The same day Lucy had explained his id
iosyncrasies with directions. I had ridden my bike down from Chelsea for an early supper. I was nervous about meeting him, though Lucy hadn’t mentioned whether he would be joining us. And she hadn’t made it a foursome. Which was just as well, given Marc’s reaction when I’d told him where I was going. He didn’t want me socializing with Lucy at all, now that Tim was out of prison. But he hadn’t been home when I’d left for Lucy’s. He was conducting a paddling workshop on the Ottawa River.

  Wheeling my bike around behind the house, I spotted Lucy working in the garden at the bottom of the yard. She came over to greet me. She was wearing an oversized shirt thrown over a white tank top and black cotton leggings. I was shocked at how tightly her skin was stretched across her collarbones. I saw fragility and aging, toughness and sensuality.

  She tugged off her gardening gloves and invited me inside. There were steps from the backyard to a small porch, presumably leading to the kitchen, but she took me in through a sliding door on the same level as the yard.

  Walking through this door was like a small revelation. Technically it was the basement. In reality it was the rest of her living space—her bedroom. Now hers and Tim’s.

  It was a large room with partial walls separating off other rooms. Her office. A laundry room. Even though it was above ground at the back, my impression was one of darkness, of partial walls leading into dark corners.

  We climbed a set of stairs and we were in the bright kitchen. Then Lucy revealed another room I hadn’t noticed on my previous visits: a sitting room off the kitchen. It was a tiny cozy space, with a window overlooking the yard. Just big enough to hold a love seat, a bookshelf and a TV in a corner cabinet.

  Ensconced on the small couch with a glass of wine, I relaxed. There was no sign of Tim. There was no sign of his presence, either, though he’d been living there for a few weeks already. He would have had few belongings. Still, there was nothing to indicate someone else was living in the house.

  “How’s the new tenant working out?” I asked. I was referring to the woman renting the top floor. The previous tenant had apparently been a disaster.

  “Which one?” Lucy grinned.

  I made an apologetic gesture. I should, of course, have been asking about Tim. But Lucy didn’t seem concerned.

  “So far, so good,” she said. “Her name is Lakshmi. Goddess of prosperity. How can I go wrong?”

  She went on to talk about her other new “tenant.” They’d started a handyman business—Brockman Repairs—a combination of their last names. Tim was out at the moment, she said, seeing a woman about a painting job. He was good at carpentry too. “Maybe Marc could hire him.”

  I made excuses. I didn’t do them very well, and she wasn’t fooled.

  “Well, just ask him. He must need an extra worker sometimes.”

  I lied and said I would.

  We were in the kitchen eating a delicious homemade vegetable stew when we heard sounds from down below. There was a steady thud on the stairs. The door opened and the man from the photos on the refrigerator stepped into the room.

  Lucy introduced us, and Tim shook my hand. He looked almost solemn, as if he understood how I might be feeling. I was touched by his sensitivity.

  He turned to Lucy, and his face transformed into smiles. He’d got the painting contract.

  Lucy beamed back at him.

  The Sûreté had only just arrived when a green pick-up pulled into the driveway. The man I hadn’t seen in over half a year got out of the truck. He looked different from what I remembered. Not the attractive confident man from the photos who had been working out. Not the solemn sensitive man shaking my hand in Lucy’s kitchen. Just an ordinary guy in a loose-fitting windbreaker, jeans, and a baseball cap. No one I would have partnered Lucy with.

  Tim looked me in the eye. “I was okay until I got to River Road. Then I stopped at that restaurant there, to make sure this was the right road.”

  I felt mildly irritated. He had to be pretty dense to stop there. It was the one place I had given him an obvious landmark—the restaurant itself.

  I explained the situation to the two Sûreté officers. At least I assumed I did. My dealings with the Sûreté stayed in my mind afterward as a series of blocked scenes. A tableau followed by a plunge into darkness before the next is illuminated.

  In the first tableau, Tim and one of the Sûreté officers and I were rushing to the car. The spare key was in Tim’s hand. Tim was unlocking the driver-side door, opening it, reaching over to unlock the passenger door for the officer.

  I stood behind Tim. I watched him reach up to the dome light on the ceiling. I watched him lean in and put his hands on the steering wheel. I watched him insert the key in the ignition and heard him say, “Maybe this is how you turn on the interior light.”

  You don’t need the key in the ignition to turn on an interior light.

  In the second tableau, the Sûreté officer was reaching across the inside of the car, handing Lucy’s handbag to Tim and me. Our hands were inside it. Two books were suddenly in my hand. The titles didn’t register. Lucy’s wallet was open in Tim’s hand. Licence, money, credit cards: everything was there. I didn’t want everything to be there. I wanted signs of theft. Ordinary theft.

  Tim pulled out a white plastic bag. Her lunch, he said, feeling it. We didn’t look inside.

  Why are we touching everything? We shouldn’t be touching anything.

  In the third tableau, Tim was reaching into the back seat, pointing out Lucy’s overnight bag. He lifted up the bag. “See,” he said, “it’s heavy. I carried it to the car for her because it was so heavy. She packed her pyjamas, a bottle of wine, hot water bottle.”

  Why are you lifting her bag? How come you know what’s in it?

  We were sitting in the back seat of the cruiser. The officer in the driver’s seat was asking questions. What did Lucy look like? How old was she? What was she wearing when she left the house Saturday morning? He was checking things off on a clipboard, as if he were doing a consumer survey.

  Beside me, Tim was describing what Lucy was wearing. “She had on a navy blue coat. I don’t know what you call it—it comes down to the knees.” He looked at me, as if I might know.

  I did. I could see it in my mind’s eye, from our very first meeting at the National Gallery. “A pea coat,” I said. I spelled the word for the francophone officer.

  “A pea coat,” repeated Tim, nodding, “with a thin red stripe down the sleeves. And dark blue or black leggings.” I was impressed by his powers of observation.

  “What kind of shoe was she wearing?” the officer asked in accented English.

  “I know she was taking three pairs of shoes,” Tim said. He counted them off on his fingers: “Her runners, her loafers, and her slippers.”

  “’Er loafer were in ’er overnight bag,” said the second officer. At some point he had got into the car and now sat in the passenger seat. “And ’er slipper were on the front seat floor on the passenger side.”

  “Then she must have been wearing her runners,” said Tim. “Nikes, I think. Yes, she was wearing her Nikes.”

  “How would you describe ’er mental state?”

  Tim and I looked at each other. “Nervous,” he said. “High strung.”

  I was surprised to hear him admitting this about his loved one.

  “Was she on any medication?” the officer asked.

  I expected Tim to say no. Instead he said, “She had a prescription for Valium. She would get eight from her doctor and they’d last her a couple of months.”

  “Would you describe her as suicidal?”

  “No. Definitely not.” Tim was adamant. I thought about the Lucy I knew. I’m hell-bent on healing the traumas of my past. Those were not the words of someone who is suicidal. I echoed Tim’s answer.

  The light from a set of headlights s
uddenly swung through the inside of the car from the rear. A vehicle passed us. Red tail lights intensified. A tow truck. I watched it back up into place in front of Lucy’s car. The second officer got out of the cruiser.

  I wanted to jump out of the car after him and stop them. You can’t take the car away. It’s our only link to Lucy. It has to stay here until she’s found. I didn’t speak these irrational thoughts.

  The officers and Tim and I were standing beside the cruiser. The interview was over. There was nothing more they could do tonight.

  “They will send ’elicopter, dog, in the morning,” said the first officer. “We will now search the track before we go.”

  “We should go and thank the Rivests,” I told Tim.

  We walked up the drive to the house.

  Tim was holding a tissue offered by Mrs. Rivest.

  “I know she knew how to swim,” he said, through tears. “But the water is so cold.”

  He wiped his eyes. Mrs. Rivest offered him another tissue.

  “She was—is—just a tiny person; I’ve got a hundred pounds on her. I know how easily she can be hurt—when we play-wrestle on the living room floor.”

  I didn’t want him to have play-wrestled with Lucy on the living room floor. I didn’t want him to be speaking about her in the past tense.

  We were back outside. The police were gone. Their search had been too short. Tim agreed that we should do a search ourselves. He fished a flashlight out from his truck.

  Lucy was at the end of the beam of Tim’s flashlight. Everywhere. She was lying on the tracks just ahead of us, disguised as one of the dark railway ties. She was lying in the black ponds between the tracks and the rock face, among the rocks and stumps. She was lying in the river, her hair waving gracefully in the water beside a dock….

  I nearly stumbled on the steps down to the rickety dock beside the floating hair.

  Tim was right behind me.

  He shone his light into the water. Under the prolonged beam, what I had thought was Lucy’s hair revealed itself to be the fraying end of a rope floating on the surface. I breathed again. And then realized where I was, close to water on a rotting dock. I stood stock still, terrified the dock was going to give way under my weight. Terrified I would fall in the water. Had Lucy fallen through from here?