Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  “No,” I said, “I’d like to go tomorrow. But,” I looked directly at him. “Are you free to take me?”

  Quinn met my eyes. “I’m free.” Then he looked away.

  *

  THE DOORBELL WAS RINGING. SHE lay in bed, spaced out from the sleeping pill, too aching to move. Let Tim get it.

  Through the floorboards, she could hear voices. Male voices.

  Bill. Bill Torrence had arrived.

  She eased her body out of bed.

  A minute later Tim was calling down from the top of the stairs. “Lu. I need you up here.”

  She pulled on her housecoat. She climbed the stairs as fast as she could.

  A short balding man almost skinnier than she was sat in the cold living room. Papers lay on his briefcase on the coffee table. Legal-looking papers. Relief seeped into her aching bones.

  But the scene wasn’t right. It was Tim who was writing the cheques.

  The man got to his feet and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Vaughan Hendricks.”

  She looked from Mr. Hendricks to Tim. Tim didn’t pause in his writing. “Mr. Hendricks is renting me the apartment. He needs you to witness the lease.”

  From relief to disappointment back to relief in seconds. She eased herself into a chair in the chilly room.

  She watched Tim hand over the cheques to Mr. Hendricks. She didn’t ask him if there was money in his new account to cover them. Vaughan Hendricks was here. He was real. The apartment was real. And Bill Torrence was real too. The money was coming. And then there would be more than enough money. And then she would be free.

  Tim handed her the lease agreement and the pen. She signed him over to Mr. Hendricks. She signed him out of her life.

  *

  THERE WAS A PHONE MESSAGE waiting for me when I got home. Curtis. He’d been home for a few weeks now, he said. He’d come home to a subpoena. He assumed I had one too. He’d been trying to avoid contact, but…. “Hell, I missed you, McGinn.” I could almost see his slow smile as he said the words. “Come up for dinner tonight if you get this message in time.”

  I called ahead. I let Curtis feed me a Spanish omelette and pour me a glass of wine. We assumed our usual places at each end of the lime-green couch.

  “I don’t want to talk about the hearing,” I said. “I want to hear about Easter. Last Easter.”

  “Easter,” Curtis repeated, with a sigh. There was a silence while he brought Easter back. Then he spoke. “She called me the Thursday before Easter. She needed a break. I invited her to come up to the cottage. She said she’d bring the wine.”

  *

  THEY CLIMBED UP THE LADDER to the tree-house. From under the wide canopy of pine branches the lake, still frozen white, was just barely visible. Lucy sat in the bamboo bucket swing—her seat. She wore her navy pea coat against the chill of the April air and held her wine glass in gloved hands. Curtis sat on the wide railing.

  She watched his easy posture and his sexy body in his jean jacket with appreciative eyes.

  She didn’t tell Curtis that Tim didn’t know where she was—exactly. She’d left a note that she was driving up to the Gatineaus to go for a walk. That she would be back by six for dinner.

  “So did the money come yet?”

  “No. Can you believe it?”

  “Yes,” laughed Curtis.

  Lucy watched his beautiful smile and ignored his skeptical reply. She didn’t want to talk about her life. She asked questions instead. About how he was doing, about his work, his family. She could see he was taken aback. Impressed that she had made some progress out of her self-absorption.

  Lucy was impressed too: at the way he expressed himself, at his serenity, his confidence. Why had she given this up? She knew why. She hadn’t been able to appreciate him then. She had been too busy trying to meld him into her idea of who he should be. But the chemistry was still there—patently there. Who was to say that when Tim was out of her life…. They could take it slow this time. Maybe she could rent a cottage nearby….

  No. She pressed down hard on those thoughts. There was no going back.

  But couldn’t they go on?

  She didn’t know. She didn’t have to know.

  That was new.

  Curtis was giving her a queer look. “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  She started as if he had shouted. Met his eyes. And started again. They were filled with kindness and concern.

  He leaned forward. “I said, are you safe?”

  The expression in his eyes was suddenly irritating. Condescending.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “I’m safer with Tim than I ever would be with you.”

  She said it to be contrary. She knew he didn’t believe her. But in fact it was true. Tim had no power to hurt her. No power over her at all. Not anymore. Whereas Curtis … if she let him back in to her heart….

  In that moment she was overcome by compassion for the man sitting across from her on the wooden platform high in the tree. There was no space. No time. Just compassion and love. For Curtis. For his honesty and integrity. For how hard he’d tried—in his own way—when they’d been together. For how frustrating he must have found it dealing with her needy, demanding ways. She did love him. Not for who he could be for her. Just for who he was. She listened to him talk. She watched the way his eyes sparkled and the way his voice warmed to his topic, and she smiled, unseen, in the deepening twilight.

  It was the dusk masking his face that finally brought her around, panicking about the time. It was almost seven o’clock. It would take her the better part of an hour to get home. Shit.

  Down below the tree-house, in the darkness, Curtis held her close. Something old and familiar stirred between them, and he abruptly let her go. “We should not sleep together,” he said.

  “No.” Under the surface disappointment she felt a small surge of happiness. They were on the same wavelength. At last.

  Curtis walked her to her car. He closed the door firmly after she got behind the wheel.

  *

  “I CALLED A FEW DAYS later to see how she was doing,” said Curtis. “She would have been pretty late getting home, and I had a bad feeling about Tim.”

  The sternum injury.

  “She didn’t tell me Tim had physically hurt her, but he had.” His fingers, which had been pressing on a trigger point on my foot, pressed harder. Then he released my foot. And looked at me. “I didn’t find out until the police told me. But I can imagine exactly how it happened. I think when she got home he confronted her about where she’d been, and knowing Lucy, she probably told him outright and he lost it.”

  I closed my eyes against the image of Tim sending a powerful fist into her sternum. No wonder she had sounded so bad on the phone that day I had called her. She would have been in terrible pain. And then I remembered something from our next phone conversation. I looked at Curtis. “Lucy told me she might be in the Gatineaus the next weekend. That’s why I invited her to my ice-breaking-up party. Was she going back to your place?”

  Curtis shook his head. “We talked about her coming, but we never firmed anything up. I wasn’t expecting her. But I’ve heard since then that she apparently was on her way to my place.”

  “But she never arrived.”

  Curtis looked up, and there was unbearable pain in his eyes. “She never arrived.”

  The house was dark. I had forgotten to leave a light on in my rush to get to Curtis’s. At least it was only a few steps from the car to my door. And there was nowhere for anyone to be watching me from; I was so close to the main road. But the thoughts wouldn’t go away. Quinn spying on me. Tim hurting Lucy. Lucy lying in pain in bed. Calling the bank. Calling me. Calling how many other people, reaching out for help?

  I stuck the key in the door and flicked on the hall light. I was spooked tonigh
t, there was no question. I hadn’t told Curtis I was going to the site since I couldn’t tell him I was going with Quinn. That was definitely off the record. There was no one I could tell where I was going.

  I gave myself a shake. There was no reason to worry. My unease was from hearing more about Tim’s violence. Quinn had said Lucy had ended up in the hospital with the sternum injury. The hospital again. A place she dreaded. A place that had brought back memories of her mother.

  *

  THE EMERGENCY WAITING ROOM WAS becoming a familiar place. In the middle of the night it was relatively quiet. And then a pregnant woman was ushered in on a stretcher. Lucy heard the words “emergency caesarian.” At the words, the woman, already in distress, became visibly distraught. Lucy tried to block out the woman’s cries, her sudden yell as a contraction hit. The woman had become her mother, crying out at the child who would not come out on her own. She was relieved when the stretcher was wheeled away. Relieved and also sorry for the woman.

  Would hospitals forever be a place of horror for her? And … had her mother felt the same way?

  She was absorbed in this new thought—it felt important—and didn’t hear her name called. Tim elbowed her in the arm. “That’s us.” He got up to go with her.

  But the nurse wouldn’t let him into the examining room.

  In the car on the way home, he demanded to know what the doctor had asked her. “What did you tell him?”

  She let out a long jagged sigh that hurt her chest. “I didn’t tell him anything.” She turned her head to the window and looked out into the street-lit night. “Just take me to the drugstore so we can get the prescription filled.”

  Back home, Tim headed for the sitting room. She heard the TV come on. Sounds of gunfire and screeching tires.

  She eased her aching body down the stairs. Crawled into bed.

  The pain ebbed with the painkillers. Where were the painkillers for the emotional pain?

  She began to cry. Not her usual tantrum tears. Not hiccoughing can’t-catch-your-breath tears, but long, slow, despairing sobs. So deep, so drawn out, they were almost a relief. She had heard these sounds before. Had her mother’s pain been similar? The cancer, in the end, would have been much more painful. What really had she known of her mother’s pain? What had she tried to know?

  Her father had been the one to call. Followed by Anna to stress that her father hadn’t exaggerated the seriousness of their mother’s condition. She was in hospital. It wasn’t likely she would come out.

  At the word “hospital,” she balked. There should now be an opportunity for poetic justice. Her mother was the one in hospital now, wanting her. She should be able to refuse to go.

  But she couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t.

  She was so focused on getting herself to Toronto—huge, noisy, unbreathable Toronto—and into the beast, the hospital itself, that she was unprepared for what she found there. There was a ghost lying in the bed. A ghost who was not her mother.

  She choked back the tears. No amount of preparation would have readied her for this sallow, gaunt figure with the laboured breathing, barely taking up any space in the bed. Her mother’s features were still there in the ghost face—the high cheekbones, even more prominent now, the naturally pursed lips. This was what her life had come to, at fifty-nine. The alcohol, her own dissatisfaction and unhappiness, had slowly eaten away at her insides.

  She looked across the bed to Anna, whose eyes were also brimming. And then, without warning, she was filled with anger—anger she hadn’t summoned. She wasn’t sure what she’d come here to do or say—what was there to do or say?—but it wasn’t to rage. She couldn’t rage at a ghost. It would blow her mother to kingdom come. And it was meant for her father, anyway, who wasn’t there this evening. Thank God.

  But her hands, which should have taken her mother’s, were clenched, and she couldn’t unclench them. To unclench them would have been to unleash the demon.

  She could feel Anna looking at her in hurt and bewilderment, wondering why she wasn’t reaching out to their mother.

  At that moment, her mother’s eyes opened. For an instant—an instant only—they lit up. Was it because she’d thought she’d seen Anna? Her lips parted, as if to speak.

  She couldn’t bear to hear whatever the ghost mouth was going to say. Words that might haunt her forever: What are you doing here?

  She bolted to the lounge.

  Anna came after her. She didn’t open her eyes, but sensed her sister sitting down beside her. She kept her concentration on her breathing, not on the presence beside her. But she couldn’t block it out. It was a warm and gentle presence, completely devoid of reproach or disappointment. She scrunched her eyes tighter. How dare Anna be so forgiving when she was being so impossible?

  She couldn’t will her sister away by keeping her eyes closed. There was a soft sigh, and then a hand touched hers—a feather touch. At the touch, her eyes fluttered open, and she turned to face Anna. But the seat beside her was empty.

  23.

  WEARING BLUE JEANS AND A white T-shirt, Quinn arrived on the stroke of nine. In the sunlight his eyes were bluer than I had seen them before. Cobalt blue.

  It was a Saturday in mid-April masquerading as a warm day in June. I was, I realized, dressed too warmly.

  In his car I talked too much, too fast, to make up for the blueness of his eyes and my paranoid thoughts of the night before.

  We headed northwest on River Road, past the site where I’d found Lucy’s car, a full year ago. In Wakefield we took the road linking the village with Highway 105. Not far up the 105, we turned again at the junction with the highway to Masham. Just before the village we turned right. We drove north for a few more kilometres and turned left onto a dirt road. Irwin. I memorized all the turns. So I could come back on my own, I told myself.

  Quinn drove slowly down Irwin. A funereal pace. He was looking for a road on the left. A break in the trees. An even narrower dirt road. He turned the car down the road. We manoeuvred our way around potholes and rocks. We came to a roundabout, encircling an enormous white pine. It reminded me of Curtis’s tree-house pine. I wished I had told him where I was going today. I could have trusted him. And I could trust Quinn. I put my paranoid thoughts out of my mind.

  Quinn braked. “I’m trying to remember. I was only here once. We brought Bryn back up here a week after Tim led her to the body. To do a video statement. To retrace their route that day. I just saw the video again a few weeks ago. It’s pretty powerful. We filmed from the back of a pick-up. You can see that the whole area is just bush and forest. They go down all these roads. They drive and drive. This was only the second time they’d gone searching, and they never get out of the car once. Bryn has no idea where she is. Then they come here, and—that’s right….” He was talking more to himself than to me, remembering. “They went down this road.” He pointed to an even smaller track beyond the circle. He nosed the car down the track.

  We drove a short distance, until we reached a fence. Quinn stopped the car, turned off the ignition, yanked up on the hand brake.

  He turned to me. “This was the first place they got out to search that day. After driving around for two or three hours. And wouldn’t you know, within twenty minutes they’ve found Lucy’s remains.”

  “It’s pretty compelling evidence, isn’t it?” I asked. “His leading her right here.”

  “Damn right it is. Stupid son of a bitch.”

  We got out of the car. Quinn pointed to a pile of wood in a small meadow in the distance. “He led Bryn that way first. Told her Lucy was likely under a pile of brush or wood. Now how would he know that? She said they didn’t even search under the wood pile. You can see an incline just beyond it—leads up into some woods. They got that far, then he suddenly wants to turn around. She follows him back. They do a cursory search on the way back—they look unde
r the wood pile. Then he brings her back this way, and they go through here, into the woods along the fence.” He turned and gestured the other way. Then he looked at me. “Shall we?”

  I nodded.

  He led the way through the dense bush. He held branches for me. He pointed out barbed wire half buried in the brush under my feet. “Careful.”

  I concentrated on my footing. Not on my thoughts. Not on Tim leading Bryn in this same way, holding the branches for her, pointing out the barbed wire.

  The dense brush gave way to a grove of pines. The forest floor was soft with pine needles. Sunlight barely filtered through the trees. I wasn’t sure how Quinn knew where to go. We seemed to be going in circles.

  “Sorry,” said Quinn, pausing to look around. “It all looks the same.”

  Then I saw it: a red ribbon tied around a thick pine trunk. A memorial. I touched Quinn’s arm and pointed.

  “Right—there it is.” He looked around again. “Tim and Bryn were about here when she spotted something over there.” He pointed toward the pine tree. “A dark mound, she said, something that looked out of place. She pointed it out, and Tim said, ‘That’s Lucy.’”

  “He said that? How could he tell from this distance?”

  “It’s great, eh? That’s what she asked him. He pointed out a running shoe—it was even farther away—said, ‘That’s Lucy’s running shoe.’”

  I stared at him. “He saw that from here? No way. He’s going to hang himself for sure, isn’t he?”

  “We’re going to get the bastard.”

  Again that hardness in his voice. I walked away from him, toward the tree.

  The ribbon was police tape. It was wrapped several times around the thick trunk. X marks the spot.

  At the base of the tree was a pile of brush and pine needles. Nearby was a darker patch of earth, where the pine needles had been cleared away. It was dark still, months after forensic experts had sifted painstakingly through the soil and branches in search of evidence.

  I crouched down. I put my hand palm down on the dark earth.