Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  The air over the water was a degree or two cooler than on land. But it was still spring air: gentle, promising.

  My paddle cut through the water. I heard Marc’s voice giving me calm instruction: Dig, pull, pry, sweep. Breathe. Dig, pull, pry. Dig. Breathe.

  The strokes came back to me. Not very expertly, but sufficiently enough that the canoe responded. Marc had taught me well. In spite of myself.

  I headed the canoe south, towards the Chelsea Dam. I stayed as close to shore as I could, keeping my eye out for stray logs, and especially for deadheads. They collected in the shallower waters near shore. I needed to check shorelines. I also needed them for safety.

  Right at the place where the river widened into a big bay above the dam sat a tiny island, out in the middle. I paused in my paddling, brought the boat to a standstill. Took my time working up my nerve. The water was mirror calm. I would be fine.

  I turned the boat and headed, slowly, out toward the island. I paddled a slow circle around it. I peered carefully over the side of the boat, as if I might actually be able to see into the murky depths.

  Then I headed south for the big Hydro-Québec-owned island in the bay. It was the perfect size for a private cottage retreat. It was ringed with good sunning rocks, but also signs that prevented sunbathers: Privée. Défense de passer. I had never set foot on it. But I was about to become familiar with its shoreline.

  On the northeast side was an inlet that over the years had collected a substantial population of deadheads. Another deadhead might be inclined to join them, should it have resurfaced somewhere upstream, not too far away.

  I was prepared for how it would look: “a bloated hand that was the hand of a freak.” A face that was “a swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on it.” Blonde in Raymond Chandler’s case, dark in mine.

  I knew from my Internet research that Chandler’s description wasn’t entirely accurate. The head of a floating body would most likely be hanging down. But I had deliberately sought out Chandler’s description for its emotional impact. I wanted to carry this image, make myself see it, so that when I came across the real thing I would not freak out. That, at least, was the theory.

  I returned home an hour and a quarter later, bringing back with me only the images I had started out with and a mixture of disappointment and relief.

  I hefted the canoe back up on shore and left it there, upside down next to our dock, the paddle and life-jacket stowed underneath. There was a satisfying ache in my biceps. That would be gone soon. My new morning exercise would take care of that. I could do this. I could paddle. I could search. I would not go out unless the water was completely calm. I would not scare myself more than necessary.

  The river in the early mornings of late May was murky. Murky and still. The weather held. We were having a record dry spring. It was a two-edged sword. The good weather meant I could be out paddling every day, not worrying yet about blackflies. But for Lucy to surface, a heavy rain was needed to stir up the currents.

  I was getting used to the canoe. My strokes were getting less awkward, more efficient. My arms were getting strong. I cut minutes off my time, down around the Hydro-Québec island and back.

  I kept watch for stray logs. The tugs had cleared most of them by now, but one occasionally floated downstream, dislodged from some winter holding place. When I saw a floating shape on the water, I approached with pounding heart. I approached expecting to see the grotesquery that was now Lucy and to be haunted for the rest of my life.

  It was near the Hydro-Québec island one morning that I found the hand. It was a hand cut off at the wrist, floating like something out of a David Lynch movie. It was a pale white hand, lying languidly on the surface of the water.

  Heart-twisting horror. A cautious approach. And then recognition. It was not a human hand. It was a rubber glove—a dirty, flesh-coloured rubber glove, given substance by the water.

  Relief. Even a chuckle at the cosmic joke.

  And then a thought. A practical one. Maybe the man in the teal-green van had used gloves to handle Lucy’s body and, stupidly, thrown them in the river after her.

  I tried to land the glove on the blade of my paddle. Every time I got the paddle underneath and tried to lift it, the glove slid off, disappeared momentarily, resurfaced. It was an elusive hand.

  This could go on forever. I drew the boat in close and reached over the side to pluck the glove between my thumb and forefinger. It became a lifeless mound of rubber in the bottom of the canoe.

  A sudden gusting wind came up just before I reached my bay. It whipped up the waves. I paddled harder. To get around the point into the bay I was going to have to turn the boat so the waves came broadside. Oh God, please don’t let me tip! But there was Marc’s calm voice, telling me what to do. I knelt down, off the seat, and, staying low, slid forward to the middle thwart. I crouched down low, the water right there beside me now. I watched in alarm as the waves came rolling against the side of the canoe, but the boat was imperturbable. I soaked my arm digging the paddle in deep. A few minutes later I was in calm waters.

  I sat on the shore for a good ten minutes, absorbing the solid ground into my being. Only one molded piece of fibreglass had separated me from the river. Yet putting my weight low in the boat, at surface level, even just below, had made me safer. So that I wasn’t an object on the water, but somehow part of it, rolling with it, not resisting. My pulse returned to normal.

  I left the glove in the boat and went up to the house for a plastic bag. And then what to do? Offer it to the police on the slim chance it had incriminating fingerprints on it? Or accept it as a macabre message from Lucy: I am down below.

  I wished I could leave it at that. Why did I have to keep embarrassing myself? Why couldn’t I stop myself from making that phone call?

  I laughed when I told Sergeant Lundy what I had found.

  “Is it a surgical glove?” He sounded interested.

  “No, it’s a rubber glove. The kind you use to wash dishes.”

  “There wouldn’t be any prints left on it,” he said. “But I’ll come up and get it anyway.” He didn’t miss a beat. “I can use it for doing the dishes. My wife will have a fit. I’ve never done the dishes in twenty-two years.”

  I laughed. “Come on up. I’d like to help you give your wife a fit.” I liked the fact that he had a sense of humour. A wife. A life beyond “Major Crime.”

  “Did anything—were you able to send anyone to look in that garage?” I was embarrassed to ask.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I haven’t seen Sergeant Roach since yesterday.”

  So much for police assistance. Not that I blamed them. Not really. I was on my own. The search was mine, my undertaking. And, it came as a kind of surprise, that was okay.

  Being yourself is not a licence. It’s a responsibility.

  *

  ALL THE GROGGINESS FROM THE bad motel sleep vanished when she came up the drive, past the Pittsburgh Institution sign. She couldn’t believe her eyes: Tim was there waiting. In civilian clothes. Outside. There was no gate, no line-up, no security check. There was only a low chain-link fence around a large picnic area. They were free to walk around outside, to eat the lunch she’d brought in a cooler, to snuggle together against the November wind at the picnic table, to pretend they were in a park on the “outside.” A little taste of freedom.

  Tim was looking well and happy. He’d been transferred from the slaughterhouse; he was getting to drive the tractor. He was starting to work out again. He was happy she’d come to see him. He pulled her onto his lap. She could feel his hardness while they talked and ate the cheese and fruit she’d brought. She loved that neither of them acknowledged it. That it was just there—an unspoken message of desire answered by her own secret response. Why had she pu
t off coming? This was what she needed—to be reconnected to his physical being. No wonder they’d both been so screwy the last few months. They needed physical contact. It was a shot in the arm. Ballast. She was drugged on the heat of him amid the frigid air.

  “I met a guy the other day. Bill Torrence. Rich.”

  “What’s he in for?”

  “Fraud,” said Tim. He popped one half of a muscat grape in his mouth, removed the seeds of the other half, and popped it into her mouth. “He defrauded some guy out of a few million. He’ll probably be out on parole in six months.”

  Tim himself had just been denied day parole. Again. “I don’t want to talk about parole,” she grumbled. She didn’t want to talk period. She just wanted to be held. To immerse herself in Tim’s physical presence.

  “But he can probably help me. After I get out. He says he can set me up in his cattle transporting business.”

  “Cattle transporting? You’d need a truck.”

  “Yeah, he says he can give me info on how to lease one through his brother-in-law—he’s a money man.”

  “Legitimate money?”

  Tim looked hurt. “Yeah, legitimate. You know I’m going legit after I get out.”

  “I didn’t mean you. I meant Mr. Money Man.” She was running her hands under Tim’s shirt. Revelling in the warmth of his skin. She wished she could have all of her skin next to his.

  “Well, anyways, it’s just an idea we’re rolling around.”

  “We?”

  “Bill and me.”

  “How old a guy is he?”

  Tim shrugged. “Late fifties? Real classy guy. Just wants to get back to his golf and country club. Who else is going to hire me?”

  Lucy sighed. “I know. Those bloody application forms. ‘Previous place of employment: Pittsburgh Institution.’ Maybe we could just put ‘Pittsburgh’ and they’d think you were a paint mixer.”

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it. I still think our best bet is to set you up in your own handyman business.” She was sliding her hand down below his belly. Down into his underwear. His jeans were so lovely and loose. She didn’t even have to undo the zipper.

  “I’d need equipment, tools.”

  “Oh, you’ve got the tool.” She grasped his warm cock in her hand, smiled when she felt it respond.

  Tim kissed her hard. “I’ll show you my tool.”

  Lucy sighed. “I wish you could.”

  “I can,” he said. His voice was lost somewhere in her hair. His hands found their way under her jacket. Her nipples hardened under his fingertip squeeze. “Meet me in the bathroom.”

  “The bathroom!” She pulled back, stared at him.

  “Everyone does it. We won’t get in trouble. People even do it in the corner of the visiting room. Staff are pretty human here; they turn a blind eye. But the bathroom’s more private.”

  She was horrified. “I can’t do it in a bathroom, it’s sordid. It’s—”

  “Sh-shh,” he whispered, his hands in her hair. “It’s me and you. Nowhere is sordid when it’s me and you. I love you.” His voice held a softness she hadn’t heard in months.

  Her eyes filled up with tears. The horror abated. She buried her face in his jacket. Her cheeks were hot—from shame, from desire. Mostly desire.

  In the echoey, tiled bathroom, Tim turned her around at the sink so they could see themselves in the mirror. She reached down and guided him inside her from behind. He was already hard. Ready. She was ready too. She couldn’t take him in deep enough. He gripped her pelvis and pulled her off the floor, pulling her hard against him. She felt light and loved in his strong arms. They fit.

  They were meant to be together. There was no greater proof than this—this intimacy achieved in this most cold and sterile of locations.

  Oh joy to her body and soul, being with Tim.

  13.

  I STOPPED CARRYING MARC’S FISHING knife with me everywhere I went. There was no humming of motorboats out on the black river. No more cars (that I saw) arrived in the middle of the night. Some nights I even forgot to lock the door.

  My neighbours put their dock in, and, kindly, ours too. But the motor-boat remained up on shore. I still couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  The weather stayed dry. June arrived in a rare heat wave. Forests burned.

  I stopped dreaming. I stopped having visions. But I didn’t stop paddling.

  The rain came one night a week into June. It beat down on the metal roof and woke me up. I welcomed the disruption to my sleep. The rain was putting out fires and stirring up currents. In the morning the world would be soaked and the water calm. But only on the surface. Under the surface, colder and warmer waters were already exchanging places. New currents were flowing. The currents were stirring things up, dislodging things. Sending things to the surface. The resurrection of the deadheads.

  The drumming of the rain lulled me back to sleep.

  I woke to the sound of birds singing and water dripping from the roof overhang onto the deck.

  I was dressed in an instant.

  The sun paused for a moment to sit on top of the hills across the river. Belle and Beau barked after me from the dock.

  I had gotten the trip to the Hydro-Québec island down to half an hour. I made my usual circle counter-clockwise around the island, ending at the enclave of deadheads on the northeast side. I found an opening among the logs and manoeuvred the boat in. I entered with trepidation. If I saw Lucy, I could not bolt.

  The water here was shallow. She could very well have washed up here. She would be protected in this pen of logs, kept safe for those who were looking for her. Maybe only her foot or hand would come up, the way only one end of the logs surfaced. She had spent so much time with them down below, maybe she had become one of them. Maybe she was here and I just didn’t recognize her.

  I arrived down at the river one morning at the end of the second week of June to find the neighbours’ motorboat tied to their dock. I looked at the boat with a grim satisfaction.

  That evening I worked up my nerve. I had received permission to borrow the boat. Now I just had to make the call. I got ready to leave a message. It was a Friday evening; he probably wouldn’t even be home. I would tell him I had some further information on Lucy’s whereabouts, that I wanted to ask if he would do one more search with me. I would be friendly, but formal. I would not say, “Why haven’t you called me in the last three weeks?”

  He didn’t say hello when he picked up the phone. He said, “When are you going to get your own life?”

  I was so taken aback all my rehearsed lines vanished. “What d’you mean?”

  “My call display says Marc Desjardins is calling me. You’re living in his house. You’re calling on his phone. You’re looking after his dogs—”

  “They’re our dogs.”

  “Oh?” His tone was knowing.

  I was silent. Pissed off. Why had I phoned?

  “Sorry Ellen. Call it sour grapes. Male territoriality.”

  That term again. But I couldn’t stop myself from repeating, “What d’you mean?” I was starting to sound like a broken record.

  That made him laugh. “An attractive woman calls me up, and I have to see her ex-boyfriend’s name on my call display. As if you’re still his.”

  “I’m not his.” I was indignant. “I’m not anybody’s.” This conversation was going nowhere I had predicted.

  “Well, that must be lonely,” said Quinn. “What are you doing tomorrow evening?”

  I took a breath. “That’s actually why I called. I wanted to ask you a favour.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I wondered if you’d come for a motorboat ride with me tomorrow evening.”

  “A motorboat ride with Ms. I’m Afraid of the Water? What gives?”
r />   I ignored his put-down; I was keen to launch into the tale of my experience at the computer, my search on the river.

  “You’ve actually been out on the water?” said Quinn when I was done. “This is a big step for you.”

  “Yes, Marc would be proud of me—if he knew.”

  “You haven’t been talking to him?” There seemed to be relief in his voice.

  “No, not lately.”

  “Why don’t you come and have dinner at my place and we’ll talk about it.” He said it without a trace of self-consciousness. As if the last several weeks of silence had never happened. How did men do that? And how had he managed to sidestep my request?

  “Okay. But couldn’t you come here? Then we’d be—” closer to the boat, I was going to say, but Quinn interrupted me. And misinterpreted my reluctance.

  “I promise I won’t molest you again.”

  It seemed safest not to respond to that comment. “What time?” I asked, resigned. And, in spite of myself, excited.

  I woke up Saturday morning with the familiar current coursing through my veins. The one that had just let up. You know you want to go.

  Relax, I told myself. Go with the flow. Let the future take care of itself. God, I was starting to sound like Lucy. What was it she had always been at me about? Learning to live in the present moment. Accepting what is. I suddenly remembered a book she had given me for my birthday the previous summer. What was it called? The Tao Te Ching. One day I would pull it out and read it. I had a feeling it was all in there. And that maybe Lucy had read it like a Bible. That it had gotten her through the two years of frustration waiting for Tim to get out.

  I was in the bathroom applying rare make-up when the phone rang. I raced to the office. I stopped my hand on the receiver when I saw the area code. It had been much longer than a few weeks since we’d spoken. On the fourth ring, I picked up the receiver.