His home is almost exactly as I’d expected. The top floor in a towering glass high-rise. There is a majestic view of English Bay on one side, Coal Harbour on the other. Whispers of ocean and far mountains beyond. Everything is as I’d seen it at sea level, but from here it is dwarfed to perfect miniature. It is beautiful.
“Do Vancouver views get any better than this?” I ask.
“Not much,” he admits. “That’s how I ended up here.”
“It’s all about the view?”
“Sure. And the jetted tub. Check it out.” He leads me to three bathrooms, one after the other, each more exquisite than the last.
“Multiple bedrooms, as well.” he says with a leer. “You can take your pick.”
“I’ll want one close to where you are,” I quip back, a line he finds uproariously funny.
We have a lovely day, followed by a relaxed evening. He makes us dinner: some confection he calls his specialty that involves pasta and spinach. And cheese. He pours us glasses of twenty-year-old wine and we perch on stools at a counter in the kitchen that affords us a stunning view of the city. Sunset followed by nighttime cityscape. And all of it is breathtaking. All of it takes my breath away.
“So beautiful you could die.”
He looks at me sharply. “What is it with you and dying all the time?” he says, and I can’t read his voice.
“I … I don’t know. I’ve … I’ve lost people. I guess that’s what it is. It brings it closer. Makes it more real.”
“Your husband,” he says.
“Yes. Him … and others. Listen, I’m enjoying myself so much with you. I don’t really want to talk about this now, okay?”
“Sometime maybe?”
“Yes. Okay. Sometime. Maybe.”
We both know it is a lie.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN THE MORNING I wake up alone. I’m disoriented momentarily, but it all comes back to me quickly. I am in a glamorous cave a quarter mile above downtown Vancouver, Canada.
I am in a large and comfortable bed. The sheets are impossibly luxurious: thick and soft at the same time. White. And covered with a white duvet. It is like resting inside a cloud.
I don’t know right away what has woken me. When I realize, my stomach responds instantly. Coffee. Bacon. Onions. Other good things. I was not hungry, and then I am.
He has left his robe at the foot of the bed for me. Huge and white, a spa robe several sizes too large for me, and so I move towards the kitchen, now encased in yet another cloud.
“Good morning, beautiful.” His face lights in a smile when he sees me. My heart flips a little in my chest in response to that light. One can wait a lifetime for a glance like that. “My robe looks good on you.”
“Too big.”
“Made for you,” he says, pushing away from the stove quickly and enfolding me in his arms. “Made just for you.”
We end up back in bed before we get around to breakfast. After a while, he gets up to go to the office. He eats cold food on his way out the door, but before he leaves, he drops a kiss on my forehead and a key fob on the bed.
“Make yourself at home. And if you feel like it this evening, there’s a new restaurant I’ve been wanting to check out. You’re a good excuse.”
“Again, with the excuses. I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“Dork,” he accuses.
“And the key,” I say, ignoring his crack. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll rob you blind?”
“Not particularly. As far as I can see, you’re the most precious of the contents of this apartment.”
I just look at him, my heart in its own cloud. I don’t know what to say and a part of me feels dangerously close to tears.
Without him in the space to warm it, the apartment is even more massive. I drink the coffee he left for me and nibble on the cold eggs and bacon, then roam around the space dwarfed by his bathrobe, looking at his stuff.
He has a sort of media room, and I imagine some overpriced decorator determining it should have a sports theme. I wonder if the signed balls under glass or the framed signed jerseys were his own acquisitions or some decorator’s buy. It seems to me it matters. It speaks either of a personal passion or an urge to impress. I am curious which one it is.
Not that it will matter in the end—I remind myself of that. I have to keep reminding myself.
I turn on the television, then spend a quarter hour figuring out how to make the channels work, remembering a time when there was only on and off.
When I finally locate the channels, the first thing I see is his face. The other him. The one I’d briefly forgotten. William Atwater. It fills the sports-sized screen hanging on the wall above the baseballs trapped inside plexiglass. His face is so large and clear on the very good television. Too large and clear. High definition. I can see every pore.
He is beautiful, in his way. I think again how very normal he looks. How guy-next-door. Pale blue eyes, smooth skin marred only slightly by the acne he has yet to outgrow. There is a collar on his shirt and color in his cheeks and there appears to be nothing remarkable about him other than a sort of casual beauty. My stomach turns at the thought of it. How can this be? How can there be people who would do such things walking among us and there is nothing about them to set them apart? I feel as though there should be some visual marker, something off-kilter about his appearance. A scar on his forehead. A brand. Crossed eyes. Not quite a tail or horns, but something. But there is nothing like that. At all.
People would say that about me. The thought comes to me suddenly. There are those who would view me as a serial killer. When I sink into the plush sofa behind me, it feels out of my control, as though I have been pushed by the weight of the thought. I should have horns or a tail. There are those who would think I am of the same ilk. The same as him.
They would not be wrong, those people. I think about that now, too. I have killed serially: one after the other. I have taken lives. I don’t know how many now. I don’t count or keep a record or anything like that. It is more people than would fit on a bus, I know that. And none of them breathe. Not now.
I wonder if I have not considered it that way before because of the money. There is no emotion for me with killing. And certainly no pleasure. It is a job. And if the thought of taking a life for money might distress me, the fact that someone else would surely do it if I do not adds some comfort. These are not random, violent acts. And I am a professional. I put thought into what I do, and the deaths are always humane. Many times, the people I’ve been paid to hit transition from alive to dead with no awareness on their part. I’ve watched their faces at times, so I know.
I look again at the face on the screen.
No emotion, until now.
I think again of my lover, my host.
No emotion until now.
I close my eyes tightly. Push back the flood of feeling that threatens. I’ve held it off this long. So long. It has been years now. I know I can do it again.
I turn my attention back to the screen. The clipped Canadian accent is describing William Atwater’s heinous acts. The announcer is mixing gun control into the conversation baldly, something that would let me know I’m not in the U.S. now, even if her accent had not. And the fact that she is passionless about it. Matter-of-fact. There are statistics that all add up to what she states as fact: gun deaths and the detail that people kill people with guns. She points out calmly that, in the United States, more people die by gun than dogs die in the street in other countries. Equating street dogs with human citizens seems like a stretch to me; still the point is driven home. And she has statistics, though the numbers are so horrendous one tunes them out. They are like random, unrelated numbers. They seem to make no sense.
“But these were not gun deaths,” says another talking head. He is white. Apparently tall. Something paternal or maybe patronizing in his tone and delivery. His is the voice of reason. You can tell he feels that is the case; that he believes in his oh-so-reasonable voice and all t
hat it intones.
“That’s not the point, John,” the original speaker says calmly. She is confident of her position. It is apparent in the arc of her back, the tilt of her head. “The point is violence. And a culture so steeped in it, senseless acts like this one are possible.”
They go on in this vein, but now we are seeing images on the screen, as well; hearing the voices only. They are mostly images I have seen before. The thread of Atwater’s victims, one by one. They make a tapestry of stilled voices. A small playground that will never be.
Now we see select parents, mostly so choked with emotion they are all but immobilized. Their faces are all different, as are their places in life, but I recognize them. It’s like I’m looking in a mirror. They are me. Or, at least, they are the me that was. And I am them. She of the commuting. Of coffee in the morning. Of the Pebble Tec pool. She of the two dishwashers and the hopeful life that made sense.
The abductions and murders happened over time. The interviews we see now reflect that, and we are seeing these parents at different stages in their grief. The parents of the child lost most recently are so staggered by their anguish that they can barely walk—they are almost unable to stand erect. Wiped out. And there are deep shadows in their eyes and under them. I can’t stop looking at their eyes.
But the killings have been going on for several years. The parents of earlier victims have moved on somewhat. They are able to stand. Because that is what we do, we humans. We stand. We move forward. We move on. Sometimes the movement nearly kills us for a while, but eventually, we move on. Make new lives. Lives without holes.
I think again of my dead garden, filled now with the green of hardy weeds. I close my eyes, put fingertips to my temples, blink back unexpected tears from a source I don’t recognize. And then I take a deep breath. Open my eyes. Move on.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SO DEEPLY IMMERSED am I in these thoughts that when my phone rings it causes a physical reaction in me. I jump, startled.
“What are you doing?” His voice is firm and warm. It sounds just as it does in my ear. I suddenly want him there. Very badly. To feel the firm, real length of him. To feel his strength. His warmth. And, yes, his desire and his humanity.
“I’m watching television, if you can believe it.” I am surprised at how even my voice sounds. How normal. Like watching his TV is the most natural thing in the world.
“Good! You figured it out. Bright girl. I often have trouble with it myself.”
“Why are you calling? Did you want to check to see what I’ve stolen so far?”
His laugh is deep and real. It is balm. I feel I could listen to it all day.
“Not at all. But if you do steal something, can you please take the sculpture by the ottoman in the living room?”
“The one shaped like the bottom of a horse?”
“Yes, that’s it. I understand from my decorator that I paid a lot for it, but I really don’t care for it much.”
“What about the sports paraphernalia in the media room?”
“What about it?”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure.” He sounds mystified. “I like it fine.”
“But did your decorator buy it,” I persist. “Or you?”
“Oh, that junk?” He sounds a little embarrassed. I like him for it. “I picked it up myself. Here and there, you know? I’m a bit of a sports nut. And I go to a lot of games.”
We chat a bit more. To me, we sound like normal people and that wrenches at my heart. I had not thought I’d sound or feel like that—normal people—ever again.
And yet, of course, we aren’t like normal people at all. The reality of that washes over me again like a dishwasher rinse cycle. It is inevitable. And required.
“You ever think about running away to a desert island?” The thought comes to me from nowhere.
“Let’s do it. I’ll peel grapes for you and fan you with coconut leaves.”
“What sort of desert island has grapes?” I ask.
And so on. Because it is right there and because we can.
We agree: I’ll meet him at the restaurant at six and then we’ll come “home” together. The way that feels conflicts me so deeply I can’t look at it. Not straight on. I have to look away.
Maybe in part to divert myself from the inevitable, I spend the rest of the morning snooping.
That’s too gentle. What I do is more like a methodical search of the premises. Looking at me doing it, you’d think I was a cop. Naked beneath a man’s bathrobe, so clearly out of uniform. But never mind.
As I search, I don’t know what I am looking for, but I need to do something to dispel the restless energy. Plus, I have questions. And I feel some of the answers might be hidden here.
So I toss the place. Not truly toss, but I search deeply and carefully without leaving a discernible trace. I don’t know what I am looking for. And when I find it—deep in a bathroom cabinet—I almost don’t know what to do with what I learn. But I know this: there is nothing in my discovery that I want to know.
What I find is a stash of drugs. Prescription medications. And the stash is so deep and deadly-looking, I know it is something to see.
Zytiga. Rasburicase. CAPOX. Lenalidomide. Dexamethasone. Elotuzumab. Neupogen. And more still. The names are meaningless to me. Names from a spaceship. From a science fiction convention. From a gaggle of botanists. I have no idea what I’m looking at. And the dates aren’t all current, but all of the prescriptions have been filled within the last twelve months. And they are all in his name.
I use my phone to photograph the bottles, then replace them as I found them before heading to find my laptop to hunker down and do a bit of googling. It doesn’t take long for me to figure out that all of them are drugs used in the treatment of cancer and, coordinating the dates and the drugs, it doesn’t take a PhD. to guess that the prognosis is not good.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I DON’T REMEMBER the rest of the day. There was waking up in his arms. And there was my discovery. Then there was his potential explanation. And there was nothing I could put between that would have the balance of the day make sense for me.
I leave to meet him a good forty minutes before I need to, but by then I am ready to get outside and into the air. I’d begun to think about birds. And gilded cages. And the way the air feels when it flows through your wings.
The restaurant proves to be the kind Vancouver does very well. Elegance so understated it looks casual, until you glance at the prices and see a different story. And everything seems like traditional comfort foods, but with some exotic twist. And so hamburgers, but instead of bacon, the menu says you can add a “Soupçon of lardon” at an additional price. And the coleslaw isn’t just chopped and dressed cabbage, but “a creamy ginger slaw with jicama and locally grown organic heritage carrots.” It all seems a bit much.
“Isn’t this place fun?” he says when he joins me.
I smile. He appears happy to be pleasing me, so I leave it be. What’s a lardon or a slash of jicama between new friends?
I find myself watching him closely, a new layer now to how we interact. Are his hands stable or was that the ghost of a tremor? Does he look at all wan? How do his clothes fit his frame? But as I only know this version of him, I have nothing to compare. No before to hold against the after in front of me. And, as it has these last few days, the after looks just fine to me. More than fine.
I can’t focus enough on the menu to decide what I want and I ask him to order for me. He lifts an eyebrow in my direction, but doesn’t say anything, ordering vegetables that have been variously roasted and then put together with strong flavors—beets with harrisa, maybe. Cauliflower with chimichurri, and so on—and a chicken that has apparently been flame-broiled under a brick, which seems a horrid finish for a perfectly nice organic chicken, plus I can’t imagine the possible advantage of the business with the brick, but I hold my tongue as I sip the cocktail he orders for us in advance of the meal.
; “You’re quiet tonight,” he says before very long.
“Am I?”
“Yes. Even a little pensive. Is everything okay?”
“Not really,” I say. “There’s something I want to talk to you about, but I don’t know where to begin.”
“Sounds ominous.” Another sip. But he doesn’t look afraid. Not much scares him, that’s what I’ve noticed. Not much knocks his natural balance away. It’s one of the things that attracts me. He is solid. Whole, that’s how he seems. Not many people are.
“It is ominous,” I say. “I think so, anyway.”
“You want to talk about it now or leave it until after dinner?”
“Are you sick?”
“So we’re opting for now.”
“I think it is possible you are unwell.”
The levity falls off him then and he looks at me, suddenly exposed. I feel a moment of regret. Did I really have to do it now? I suddenly long for the façade of lightness that existed yesterday.
“Sorry?” And it seems to me he says the word in such a Canadian way.
“Yes,” I say, ignoring the question.
He dips his eyes to his lap. Then raises them to a point just above and to the left of my face. I can see him searching for a reply, for something to say.
“How did you know?” he asks at length. He looks honestly concerned, like there might be some tell.
“I couldn’t. I didn’t. I found your stash.”
He thinks about what I mean for a minute, but I quickly see a light dawn. “It wasn’t out.”
“I dug.”
“Ah.” He drops his eyes again. I can’t imagine what he is thinking.
“How bad is it?” I ask when neither of us has said anything for a while. The remnants of cocktails are whisked away. Wine brought and approved and poured. We are sipping that, and largely ignoring the appetizers that arrive at the same time.
Endings Page 7
