Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  “What?” John answered.

  “You’ve got to tell me how the two of you ended up married,” Anne said. “You have to tell me how the heck that could happen.”

  “It just did.”

  “That’s not an answer. That’s an excuse.”

  “Maybe it was her idea,” John said, and Anne could see he had already brought one hand up to the small curls on the side of his head. “Maybe we were together a lot, dating in high school, and it seemed like a good idea, like it was the natural thing to do.”

  “Like, ‘Oh well, here we are, might as well get married’?” Anne asked, incredulous. “No one gets married because it’s just the easiest thing to do.”

  “Whatever you like,” John said. “You asked.”

  The higher they climbed towards the house, the more the lights of the rest of Bay Bulls nestled down into a bowl beneath them. It looked as if all of the houses would fit into two cupped hands, like tight bunches of bundled Christmas lights.

  “What was it like, with her?” Anne asked. “It couldn’t have all been bad. There must have been a time when everything was clicking. A time when you were happy.”

  John shrugged—not like he didn’t know how to answer, but like he knew exactly what to say but was refusing to say it. “S’ppose,” he said, sounding resigned. “Jeez. Sometimes you sound just like her.”

  Anne felt her breath stop, the muscles in her chest rigid and fixed like they might never move again. Like she’d been hit again.

  John had let go of her hand and was still walking, the distance growing between them. Anne forced herself to walk again, forced herself to start breathing, trying to find a place to hold on to in a suddenly tilting world. The sky was alive with stars then, so Anne looked up at the wide, broad sweep of the Milky Way, deliberately trying to wonder if every one of the stars already had its name. Then she’d caught up, and John took her hand again as if nothing had happened, and the sky rushed back away from her and settled into its proper place.

  John reached out and opened the gate at the end of the walkway, and the hinges squeaked just like they always did. Later, Anne would remember that it was the last time before the accident that she could recall actually looking—really looking—at his hands.

  Ten days later, after the accident, she was packing up the last scattered pieces of his things, and almost absentmindedly turned on his cellphone. The police had returned the phone to her, along with his tool belt and the mitre saw and the rest of the tools and bags of clothes from the back of the pickup. Almost immediately, the phone rang. The ringing startled her, but she answered it anyway.

  “John there?” a hollow man’s voice said.

  “Ah, no,” Anne said, flustered.

  “Well, where the hell is he?” the man asked. “He was supposed to be out here a week ago.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Brooks. Brooks, Alberta.” The man on the other end of the phone sounded exasperated. “Look, I got him the damned job—sure, I know he’s way overqualified for framing work—but I got him the damned job and now he’s making me look bad for recommending him in the first place. He was supposed to start four days ago. When the hell’s he going to get here, anyway?”

  The cellphone dropped out of her hand while she was looking across at Bev’s house on the other side of the bay. It was dark, and she was startled to see her own face reflected back in the window glass.

  And for a moment, lying face up on the hardwood floor, the phone kept squeaking and whistling, like a small bird desperate for home.

  ECHO

  K EVIN ROWE was on the front deck, hemmed in behind the fence pickets, looking down on the narrow street.

  He was five years old, and he had serious, obvious eyes with small, square eyeglasses. Behind the glasses, emotions played across his face quickly, like a travelling storm. His eyebrows rose at the faintest hint of confusion, furrowing his forehead, and fell again quickly, leaving behind a blank, smooth slate that seemed never to have borne a mark. He had short hair, all of it cut the same length so that it stood up like bristles on a brush.

  Kevin was just tall enough that his eyes were above the level of the deck railing, sharp blue eyes that didn’t seem to blink often enough. He stared, unabashed, at passing cars, at walking people.

  And he talked in short, tight bursts of words.

  “Don’t you care what I think?” he said over the edge of the railing, the movement of his lips barely visible but his mouth enunciating every word. “Don’t you even care what I think?”

  The railing topped the brown fence that ran all the way around the deck, and all the way around the front of the small bungalow.

  It was a white house, vinyl siding, single storey with light blue trim, occasional brushstrokes of blue lipping onto the white like bent feathers. All the windows of the small dark bedrooms at the front of the house were open, doing their best to shed the heat. It was uncomfortably hot for St. John’s, the air thick and heavy and motionless. All-over damp, like the inside of Kevin’s father’s work gloves, when he had taken them off for a rest and Kevin had slid one of his own hands inside.

  Kevin’s parents were in the kitchen at the back, his father sitting down at the table with his work shirt off, his undershirt going yellow, his mother doing dishes in the steel sink. Kevin didn’t like the sound of the dishes, the way the plates and cutlery rattled and scraped against the metal.

  Before he went out, he had brought his bowl over to the sink the way he was supposed to, a scant handful of cereal Os swimming like life rings in the leftover milk. The handle of the spoon slid back and forth along the edge of the bowl with every step.

  Then his mother told Kevin to go out on the deck. His father was looking down at his feet as if he was surprised they were still in the same place.

  Kevin’s father drove from St. John’s to Boston and back, big rigs with chrome wheels, and every time he came home, Kevin would come into the living room and be startled to find his father in front of the television or hear his father in the bedroom, snoring, like he’d never really left. For Kevin, it was like going into the kitchen and finding there was an extra fridge where there hadn’t been one before. It was a magic trick, as if his father could just simply appear, again and again and again. By the time the surprise of it wore off, Kevin’s father would be ready to head back out on the road, hauling fish to Boston and furniture back again.

  Kevin’s mother held the door open as he went out onto the deck, telling him not to get into trouble. “Stay on the deck and stay off the road,” she said, and as she did, a car whooshed by next to the deck, like an example she’d whipped up just for him.

  “Stay off the road,” she said again, and she put all the emphasis on “off.”

  Kevin heard the door latch behind her, the click sharp and final.

  Kevin’s father hadn’t said anything when Kevin was in the kitchen, but a few moments later Kevin heard the deep rumble of his voice from the kitchen, not so much words as a deep straight line, all one note. And over the top of it, his mother’s thin voice, growing higher and then falling away like a ball bouncing up and down, up and down. It was like they were singing together, each one already sure where the other was going and just exactly where they would eventually end up.

  It was hot in the sun, Kevin thought, and the water in the inflatable swimming pool on the deck was murky, catching struggling daddy-long-legs and wandering, curious, paper-winged moths that lay flat on the surface, at the mercy of potential rescuers. It was too late for several toys, completely submerged and fuzzed with small air bubbles.

  Kevin fished the toys out—a green rubber frog that sprayed water out through a small hole in its mouth, a plastic power shovel, the hard yellow wand from a bottle of bubble liquid—making sure he kept the dripping water away from his T-shirt and shorts, and then threw them back in again, watching them sink back down to the blue vinyl bottom of the pool.

  After he threw them back in, they lay still on the bottom
. Above them, the ripples on the surface made them appear to wriggle for a few moments before the water fell still. The bottom of the pool had lines where the weight of the water had pulled the plastic down into the cracks between the boards.

  “There you go again,” Kevin said to the surface of the water. “There you go again. How many times do I have to listen to this stuff?”

  He turned, and out on the road he saw a man with a dog on a leash. The dog was brown and white, a heavy, low-slung beagle with big, sad, bloodshot eyes and dragging ears. Kevin thought that the dog and the man looked a lot alike, and he watched them through the slatted pickets as they made their way along the road.

  He pressed himself down onto the surface of the deck, trying to make himself inconspicuous, creeping on his stomach so that he stayed even with the dog’s slow, plodding walk. The street ran in tight to the front of the deck, so Kevin could look through the railing and see the mottled colour of the side of the man’s face, dappled with small, shiny beads of sweat.

  The man looked angry, Kevin thought, even though there was nothing to be angry about.

  Suddenly, there were seeds from dandelions parachuting in on the wind under their silver-white canopies, regiments of soldiers, landing all around him, and Kevin was the only one left to protect the base, the only survivor.

  “Bang!” he said, pointing a loaded index finger at the air.

  The dog looked around at the sound and stopped walking, but the man kept going, pulling the leash hard. The dog appeared startled when the collar suddenly dug into its neck.

  “Save it for someone who cares,” Kevin said to the dog. “Save it for someone who cares.”

  The dog didn’t look back.

  Across the street, Mrs. Batten came around the corner of her house from the backyard and started to rake the grass. Rake, rake, stop. Rake, rake, stop.

  During one of the stops, she looked across, spotted Kevin and waved. But Kevin wasn’t sure whose army she was with, whether she knew the password or not, so he kept very still and looked up under the edge of the railing, watching for airplanes. Everyone has to watch for the planes. It was like that in every movie.

  Sometimes, airplanes draw lines with clouds, Kevin thought, like arrows that show you right where they are. And sometimes, they make a noise that makes you think they’re actually somewhere else, not where they are.

  Then he saw there was a spider in the corner of the deck, a brown, fat spider with a white pattern on its backside. The spider was finishing a small and perfect web under the top edge of the deck railing, the tips of its front legs plucking at the sticky lines, placing the threads.

  Kevin pointed at the spider and shook his finger. “You don’t want to fix things, do you? You don’t even really want to try.”

  The spider continued picking at the sticky webbing, working its way around the outside circle of the web, Kevin’s words passing right through it.

  He sat down on the deck and watched the spider, pushing his glasses back up his nose every time they slid down. It was getting hotter on the deck, and he was starting to sweat.

  Mrs. Batten finished raking and walked back behind her house, and Kevin purposefully watched her out of the corner of his eye.

  Still, neither of his parents came to Kevin’s front door. He thought they should, that someone should check to see what he was doing. The door was closed tight, like it was sealed into place. There were grown-up voices in the distance behind it, rumbling like a thunderstorm far away.

  By then, the sun was high, and Kevin thought he would like a sandwich and some juice.

  He would like a tuna fish sandwich on white bread, cut into triangles so that he could eat in from the points towards the crusts, and then leave the crusts behind on his plate. It would be even better if the bread was soft and fresh, so that he could flatten it into bread pills with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. And all the tuna, every scrap in the whole sandwich, would be light and pinkish and salty, with no fishy-tasting dark bits that pop up sometimes and wreck a whole sandwich.

  Kevin thought he’d like a glass of apple juice, poured fast so that the bubbles stayed in place in a ring along the inside of the glass.

  But there was no sandwich, and no apple juice.

  Kevin watched the spider, and wondered if it would catch a fly and eat it. The web didn’t look strong enough to hold anything, even if a fly accidently flew into the trap. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Kevin said sharply. “You’ll go along with anything, as long as we’re doing it your way.”

  Then there was the sharp sound of glass breaking inside the house, and from the front windows, loud voices that got louder every time the wind from the back of the house puffed the curtains out against the window screens. Now and then, Kevin could hear snatches of words, sometimes his mother, her voice low and hard and biting off the end of every word, his father’s a steady grumble that sometimes erupted into single clear words like “job” and “paid.” Once, a sound like someone smacking their hand flat down on the smooth surface of the countertop. Then, crying that sounded far away to Kevin, like he was hearing it through a cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels. The sounds kept rolling from the house, like waves slapping in on the shore.

  Kevin remembered the dog on the leash and wished he had a dog. It wouldn’t have to be a big dog, he thought, just a friendly little dog with black eyes and a wet nose, the kind of dog that would drink water from the swimming pool and then look out through the fence with him. They could explore the back of the house and the bottom of the sharp cliff, and all the time the dog would be busy with its nose, head down and curious. Kevin thought he would let the dog sleep in his room, up on the foot of his bed if it wanted, and if there was ever a fire or burglars, the dog would wake up and lift its head and growl deep in his throat as a warning. After the first time the dog warned them about something dangerous, his parents would let the dog sleep anywhere it wanted.

  After a while, Kevin found the last part of the deck where there was still a long blue triangle of shade, and he fell asleep on the boards watching a line of ants march around the corner of the house and down the siding to the ground. Just before he slept, Kevin was thinking about what kind of name his dog would have.

  When he woke up, the sun had toppled over the cliff behind the house and the whole deck was in shadow. It was colder, and there was a white and blue police car parked on the road, the lights on its roof flashing and throwing the shadows of the fence palings across him and all around the front of the house.

  A policeman got out of the car and closed the door. Then he walked up to the deck, reaching over the top of the gate so he could open the latch from the inside.

  He nodded at Kevin and put one finger in front of his lips, but he didn’t say anything. Kevin nodded back, and he thought the policeman smiled, but he wasn’t sure. The policeman’s face was pulled tight.

  Kevin sat up, resting his back against the fence, and watched as the policeman reached a hand out for the doorknob and turned it without even knocking. The policeman’s other hand was on top of the gun in his holster. Kevin could see the black butt end of the gun, its plastic handle patterned and rough. That’s so you can get a good grip on it, he thought. So you can hold on tight when you shoot.

  The policeman held on to his gun, although he didn’t take it out of the holster, and with his other hand he pushed the door open and went in, the door angling closed behind him.

  Kevin stood up, looked across the street and saw Mrs. Batten looking out through the front window of her house, but she only stayed there for a second. All along the street, Kevin saw people in their doorways, as if they were listening to some distant sound, like a mysterious silent dog whistle. He saw the way the neighbours were all tilting their heads, all turning a little bit the same way. He saw the Barretts and even Mrs. Connaught, who sometimes brought warm cookies over to his house on a big colourful plate with a rooster on it.

  Kevin thought he would like a cookie now.


  Another police car arrived, and then another, a second policeman, then a third. The second policeman went into the house. The third one took Kevin’s hand in his and pulled him in tight alongside the house.

  “We’ll just wait right here,” the policeman said. He had short blond hair, and he sounded almost scared.

  “Nothin’ else on my dance card,” Kevin said, his voice low and gruff. “Maybe you should just sit down and shut up for once.”

  The policeman looked at him and then towards the noises coming out of the house, but he didn’t let go of Kevin’s hand.

  Soon, Kevin heard the rise and fall of a siren, getting closer and closer. By the time the ambulance swung wide around the narrow corner, all its lights flashing and taking up more than its own lane, there were people in almost every door along Fahey Street, and Mrs. Batten was standing on her lawn with both hands up in front of her mouth.

  Kevin watched very carefully, without speaking or blinking. Watched as his father performed his disappearing act all over again, this time with his arms tight behind his back as if he was hiding something. The first policeman was holding on to his shoulder, as if he was trying to help him keep his balance. There were more policemen now, and there was a van. Inside the house, someone was taking photographs. Kevin could see the white flash from the camera bouncing off the walls.

  He was thinking about tuna fish again. Then he thought that the ambulance attendants should be bringing the long white stretcher out and his mother should be reaching out from under the sheet and holding his hand for a moment before they took her through the gate to the ambulance.

  “Be a good boy.” That’s what she would say, he decided. “Be a good boy and do what they tell you.” Kevin was sure he would start to cry.

  But his mother didn’t come out, and the ambulance lights kept flashing, the back doors open so he could see inside.

  Behind the police cars, a blue car with a serious-looking woman behind the steering wheel pulled up next to the fence. Kevin watched the car sitting at the curb.