Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  In front of her, the gate finally slid open on rattling wheels. She walked through the front doors and found herself at the end of a line-up of people who looked all too familiar with this procedure. No one else seemed to be nervous. They seemed bored.

  It didn’t help. Nor did knowing what was to come. She steeled herself, terrified that when asked to surrender her purse she was going to refuse. Which wasn’t going to get her anywhere, least of all in to see Tim.

  She wasn’t prepared for the smile the guard offered along with his orders and outstretched hand. She handed over her purse as she might her child to a kindly caregiver. He would look after it; she would get it back.

  The metal detector was simply a doorframe she had to walk through. Like at the airport. It did not reach out to hurt her. She didn’t set off any alarms. She didn’t have to endure the wand in the guard’s hand being brushed over her body. She could swallow again.

  The guard—the same or another, she could barely tell—led her through door after door. They came to a large room, where the guard pointed to an empty table. She could see his lips moving, but there was such a loud noise in her ears—a noise quite apart from the noise in the room—that she couldn’t hear the words. She sat down. She was short of breath; her heart was beating too fast, too lightly. She was exhausted. But she was here.

  She stared around her at the green-walled room. She might have been sitting in a public cafeteria. Snack and pop machines lining one wall. Couples and families sitting at the tables, eating cellophane-packaged sandwiches and chips and drinking canned pop. Children running around; parents yelling after them. They might have been ordinary families or couples, except for the institution green worn by the male at each table. As if a crew of janitors had sat down for a break. Except janitors didn’t have numbers sewn on their shirts. Here were the inmates. Inmates. Take off the prefix and they became what they were in this room: mates.

  It was also true that in ordinary cafeterias people didn’t usually sit on each others’ laps, or neck in the corner. The guards, watching from their observation room, seemed to be ignoring this behaviour. How far could a couple go before they were stopped? Was discreet fucking tolerated? Who was to say what was happening in that corner. Would she and Tim be necking there one day? The idea filled her with a perverse excitement.

  No one had warned her about the smoke. Her shortness of breath became a physical reaction to the air. Her headache intensified.

  Every time the door opened and a guard-escorted inmate walked in, she started. Was it Tim? Did she even remember what he looked like? Would he recognize her?

  It was out of her hands. The gate had opened. She was inside the beast now. Clarity was no longer required. Clarity, in fact, was no longer possible. Terror held her in her chair. The terror of the first day (and many days) of school, the terror of hospitals, the terror of churches. Spaces that swallowed her. Spaces that deprived her of her ability to see.

  Each inmate who entered was a blur.

  Stand clear. Sit blurred.

  She sat blurred until a man stood before her and brought her to her feet.

  As she stood, dazed and exhausted, the screen door swung open. She had to step out of the way.

  There was a man in the doorway. He looked puzzled. “Why are you just standing out there?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Hello?” said Curtis. “Earth to Lucy. Come in. Come in,” he repeated, stepping aside and opening the door wider. “Did they lobotomize you while you were in jail?”

  She stepped in through the door. She handed over her purse. If body searches had been legal, he would have found it was her heart, not her frontal lobe, that was gone. She was amazed at how detached she felt from him. And not amazed at all.

  They sat down at the kitchen table. Curtis poured her a glass of wine. She was too tired to appreciate the gesture. She was too tired to drink it.

  She was overcome by the wearying sensation of having driven not just hundreds, but seemingly thousands, of kilometres. What was she doing here? Who was this man? He sat before her, shoulders slightly slumped, avoiding her eyes. Where were the presence and confidence he had exuded in the courtroom? Where was the familiarity she had felt in meeting him there and in their letters and phone conversations? She was sitting before a prison inmate who, when he had lived in her world, had committed countless acts of fraud—and one act of manslaughter. What was she doing?

  She was starting to feel dizzy. The smoke seemed to have filled not just her lungs but her entire insides. It was choking her. She was going to faint. She just needed to signal to one of the guards. She could get up and walk out without saying a word. They could pretend she had never come. She could go back to her safe, familiar world and he could stay here, in his.

  In her mind, she was already summoning the guard, mentally raising her arm as if he were a waiter.

  Tim cleared his throat. “Your drive here,” he began.

  Her horror magnified. In her mind she was tugging furiously on the guard’s sleeve, to get her out of there before Tim spoke. She was terrified he was going to say something mundane about the drive, the weather. That he wouldn’t be who she thought he was. That she’d made a massive mistake. Her head began to spin. Nausea overwhelmed her. She was going to throw up.

  “Your drive here,” repeated Tim, “means a lot to me.”

  The words entered her head like a peacekeeping troop and made it stop spinning. The nausea vanished. Her vision cleared. It was Tim. Thank God he was still not looking at her, had not seen her face; it was shyness, not social backwardness. It was respect. It was nothing she’d ever experienced before.

  “I’m kind of overwhelmed by you sitting here in front of me.” Tim gave a small, embarrassed laugh and then he met her eyes.

  The guard she had summoned in her mind stood waiting. She handed him all her doubts, all her skepticism, all her fears—shitloads of fear. And then she sent him away.

  “If I seem a bit stupid, and like I got nothing to say, it’s … well….”

  There was a long pause.

  “Do you mind,” he said at last, “if I just sit here and look at you for awhile?”

  He was looking at her. She was supposed to be talking, spilling out the experience. She didn’t want to share this. She didn’t want it exposed to his cynical paintbrush, his layering of ridicule and mockery. Thinly disguised jealousy.

  She met Curtis’s eyes. And for the first time she saw the pain in them.

  Pain. It was so clearly there. It felt like someone was squeezing her heart.Without thinking, she reached out her hand across the table. “I feel that all you want to do is cry and cry.” She was speaking words she had never uttered to a man before—had never even thought. “I wish I could take you in my arms and just let you cry.”

  The eyes that met hers were startled, and did fill, then, with tears. “No one’s ever said that to me before.” He added, in a voice of wonder, “How do you see that?”

  She had no answer. She didn’t know. Except that maybe the clarity demanded of her at the gate had also been a warning: be sure you’re ready for what you’re going to see behind this gate.

  She had, somehow, become ready. She had never seen anyone else’s pain like this. She had—she could be honest about it now—always been so focused on her own. Had always wanted someone to look in her eyes.

  But now she was looking across the table at this boyish, vulnerable man and she was suddenly standing clear. She had arrived here at Warkworth to meet herself.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Curtis Frye.” He stuck out his hand.

  She started.

  Curtis sighed. “I see you left your tongue behind too. What did they do? Cut it out so you couldn’t report on the pampered conditions you found?”

  She ignored his bait. She couldn’t look at him. She fix
ed her eyes out the window on her vegetable garden at the back of the yard. It was looking neglected. It needed weeding, watering. Now that she had seen the pain in Tim’s eyes, pain was everywhere, like the weeds. What was that line about the scales falling from your eyes? How was she going to bear this—this seeing what was? How was she going to contribute to the pain she saw in Curtis now, too, and watch it grow and take over?

  She wasn’t, not yet; it would be unbearable. Besides, she told herself, Curtis would never believe her anyway. It was too soon to speak. Too soon even to know these kinds of things. You couldn’t fall in love with someone after one meeting. She wasn’t even sure she had. She wasn’t sure what it was she felt, but it wasn’t the usual infatuation of falling in love.

  So she shrugged, and the shrug let loose a lie. “The visit was okay. He’s a lonely man in prison. He needs a friend, and I can be that friend. That’s all there is to say.”

  She made herself look at Curtis then, and she made herself believe what she had just said, so he would believe her too. It was half true anyway. She steeled herself for a sneering remark. Cynical she could deal with.

  “And just how often do the pity visits take place?” Curtis was delivering, on cue.

  This time she rose to the bait. “As often as I feel like it,” she shot back, and felt better.

  8.

  MY BAG WAS WAITING FOR me when I arrived at the Ottawa airport late Sunday evening. It had been taken into custody by Sergeant Quinn, who was standing beside it.

  My heart beat faster.

  But Sergeant Quinn didn’t look like he was here to arrest anyone. He wore the same black leather jacket he had worn the night I’d met him. But the jeans below it made me think he must be off-duty. He looked as though he were here to meet a friend or relative.

  That got my heart beating even faster. I was afraid he was going to hug me or kiss my cheek.

  He did neither. He came forward and stopped at the correct distance for police sergeants and civilians. “I knew you couldn’t be too many flights behind your luggage.”

  Then he smiled and held out his hand. Its warmth shocked me as much as a kiss might have. “Hello Ellen,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  “Hello Sergeant Quinn—”

  “Steve. Or just call me Quinn, like my friends do.”

  “How did you know I was coming in tonight?”

  “I’m disappointed you have to ask that question of Ottawa’s finest. Although I did think you’d be on the previous flight”—he picked up my bag—“with your luggage.”

  “I missed the connector in Toronto. Sorry you had to wait.” Why on earth was I apologizing? Why did I feel I had to account for anything to this man? Unless…. I hesitated. “Did they send you to meet me?”

  “I assume you mean Al and Roach, as opposed to”—he sent me an amused glance—“the folks at the Royal Ottawa.”

  I gave him a grim smile at the mention of Ottawa’s psychiatric hospital and made no reply.

  “No, Ellen,” he added. “No one sent me.”

  “So you’re not here to arrest me.” My attempt at a wry tone failed.

  “Arrest you. What the devil are you talking about?”

  “For, you know, leaving the city so suddenly. For dropping all sorts of bizarre clues as if I knew where Lucy was. For not coming back yesterday when I said I was going to.”

  I had, in fact, allowed Marc to keep me in bed all day. I had let him think he was being persuasive, but I’d already decided during the night to call a truce. Like soldiers at Christmas. Marc himself had left the bed only to bring food and beer and, once, to call the airline to book my flight. I had woken up in the morning realizing in horror that Saturday night had passed and I had never thought about Lucy once.

  And now here I was, meeting my captor. Who had dropped my bag and positioned himself directly in front of me. He placed his hands on my shoulders. He stopped just short of shaking me. “You are not a suspect. Do you hear? You are the furthest thing from a suspect. I came to see you safely home. I thought you might not like to arrive at your dark house on your own.”

  “Since when did you become a mind reader?” My voice was shaky.

  “Let’s just say I have a cop’s instincts—not to mention resourcefulness. And for better or worse, they go into overtime where you’re concerned.”

  He reached down for my bag, did an abrupt about-face and strode ahead of me through the revolving door. I was glad he didn’t see the blush that spread across my face. I had a feeling there might be one on his own.

  I followed him out to the parking lot. The late April night air had a hint of warmth to it and more than a hint of unreality. And, contrary to his stated intention, Sergeant Quinn was not helping.

  His car was sleek and dark. An Integra. Five-speed. It would be a fast car. But he didn’t start it up right away. He leaned a forearm on the top of the steering wheel and turned to me. “Why didn’t you call me when you got scared? I meant it you know. That you could call me any time.” His smile was wry. “I don’t give my home number out to just anyone. It’s unlisted for a reason.”

  I found myself apologizing again. He made me feel as though I’d betrayed his trust. It made no sense at all. I wanted to ask him whether anything had happened on the weekend. But the question was paralyzed in my throat.

  He started the engine. It purred in a way quite unlike my old Escort. Yes, it was going to be a fast car. But we cruised out of the lot in first gear. And then he suddenly braked and put the car in neutral. He leaned over. My stomach somersaulted.

  He reached across me and drew the seatbelt out of its holder. Snapped it into place. “I might have had to fine you,” he smiled and put the car in gear again.

  We turned onto Elgin after all.

  “You are taking me to the station.”

  Quinn raised a hand off the steering wheel and gave an exasperated laugh. “My God, woman. When are you going to learn to trust me? I’m taking you out for a drink.” He glanced sideways at me. “Something tells me you could use one.”

  It was disconcerting, the potent mix I felt inside. Apprehensive. Unnerved. Excited. Like a school girl.

  The bar was small and minimalist. And, except for the bartender, empty. We sat on tall chairs with our knees all but touching under a tiny high round table.

  The drinks arrived. A single-malt Scotch for Quinn, a white wine for me. Assumed, wrongly, by Quinn that that was what I would want. Why hadn’t he asked? Why hadn’t I spoken up?

  Quinn raised his glass. “Cheers.” He took a long swallow, set the glass down, looked at me and grinned. There was nothing remarkable about his features, but the grin lit up his face. “Any plans for summer holidays this year?”

  I gave him a look. He was obviously trying for light conversation. He didn’t realize the minefield he was stepping into. “Shall I write an essay? Ellen’s mythical hiking holiday with Marc Desjardins.”

  “Marc. That would be who I talked to at noon.”

  I stared at him. “You called.” Understanding clicked in. “So that’s how you knew when to meet my plane.”

  Had he come to the airport yesterday too? Or had he called my house? Got no answer. Put two and two together. I was surprised he hadn’t called us last night. And then I remembered the phone ringing. And how Marc had ignored it.

  “He mentioned you’d decided to stay another day,” Quinn was saying. “Had all your flight information. Sounded like a nice guy. Careful. Obviously cares for you. Your boyfriend?” His voice was casual.

  “Ex. Recent. I assumed you knew. You seem to know everything else about me.” What did he mean by careful? He’d said it in an approving way.

  Quinn was shaking his head. There was a look of amused curiosity on his face. And something else. Something I couldn’t identify.

  “Marc’s w
orking in Thunder Bay this summer. The job coincided with our break-up.”

  “It was obviously amicable.”

  I took a sip of wine. Chose my words carefully. “Let’s just say the situation overrode our circumstances.”

  Quinn cocked an eyebrow. “And was there a happy reconciliation?” His tone was mocking.

  I could think of no sharp reply. Could I only dish it out?

  A potent silence lay between us.

  Quinn tipped back his glass for a last swallow. He looked around to catch the bartender’s eyes and held up two fingers. Turned back to me. “Sorry,” he said. “That was out of line. Do you do a lot of hiking?” The mocking tone was gone. This sounded like genuine interest.

  I shrugged. “Well, since I met Marc. So for the past few years. It was a compromise activity. He would have much preferred me to go down rivers with him.” Why was I telling him this?

  “Kayaking?”

  “Canoeing. White-water. But I’m af … I prefer dry land. Give me a bike or a pair of running shoes and I’m happy.”

  “You’re a very active woman.” His tone managed to be both admiring and condescending. I was both flattered and irritated.

  “I used to be active when I was younger, before I became a cop and stopped having a life. Hiking, biking, backpacking. I did it all. Gotta get back to it.”

  The way he was looking at me made me squirm. As if he was making a suggestion. That was ridiculous. There was nothing between Sergeant Quinn and me except Lucy.

  But, I couldn’t deny it, the air between us was charged, and had been since he’d met my plane. Maybe since our search through the apartment building. Maybe it was natural, given the circumstances. Everything was supercharged. It touched me that he’d been concerned enough to come to the airport (now that it was clear it hadn’t been to arrest me). And it took on greater significance since he wasn’t even on duty. Maybe I could understand Lucy’s attraction for Tim while she was still with Curtis. An absent partner was worse than no partner. And Marc, for all his tenderness this weekend, was absent. I’d had to go to him, I vehemently reminded myself. Lucy had had to go to Tim, too, but that hadn’t been his choice. In fact, she’d said he was overdue for release. Why had it taken so long?