by Lisa Moore
Lysol’s antibacterial, Libby Strong said.
That’s no way to talk about your mother, I said. Saying she’s hard to live with. Your mother is up there with four youngsters underfoot. She’s on her own. She works like a dog.
I like it here, Libby said. She put the platters in a bag.
Looks like you got a shiner, I said.
Dad’s living with somebody else now, she said. Had me over for Sunday dinner to meet her. Real nice lady.
It was meant to sting me, refer to my own situation. Jocelyn Strong’s husband did a three-week rotation on the White Rose but they’d shut her down. Their house in Low Point was a two-bedroom and when all the men on the White Rose were laid off the marriage went sour and he’d moved into St. John’s.
Listen, I said. I wrote my cellphone number on a scrap of paper. If you ever need to talk to somebody.
The door of the Dollarama swung open and a man came in and fought with one of the stacks of mesh-wire shopping baskets, trying to free the top one. But it was hitched to the others. The stack of baskets was up to his chest, and it swayed and shook as he struggled to free one. All the baskets lifted up and slumped and he was cursing. Then he got the basket free and kicked the stack and it fell over. He turned toward us and it was the man I had seen on Low Point beach. He didn’t recognize me. But he knew Libby.
You have a break coming up? he asked her. She flushed.
I’m not getting no breaks for a while, she said.
I have something for you, he said. Out in the truck.
Go out there, and I’ll come out, she said. I’ll come out in a minute? Just as soon as the other girl comes in from her break. She just went out, she has a smoke. She’s been gone long enough. She’ll come back now the once. There’s two of them gone on break, actually, smoke break? They’ll come back together? They’re gone this good while now.
Libby was scared of him, the way I had been scared at the beach. She was talking fast and soft, placating, the ends of her sentences rising in a question the way the kids in town talk, the girls Kevin hangs out with. She didn’t sound like Libby. The man walked over to the counter and wedged himself in front of the line. Everyone else in the line-up had fallen quiet. My sister flicked the lid on Lysol wipes and pulled the first tissue out and the waft of ammonia mingled with the stink of the man made my eyes water.
I’m not sitting out there in the cab by myself, he said. Fuck that.
I’ll get one of the girls to cover for me, Libby said. You go on, you’re going to get me in trouble.
This is bullshit, he said. He put the basket down on the counter in front of me. I’ll tell you what, he said. But he reached out a finger and touched the thin gold chain on her wrist. Libby had rested one hand on the counter in front of her. And the chain on her wrist was very thin and gold, and he moved his index finger over it, where it rested on the back of her hand. He stuck his finger under the chain, and turned it so the chain was very tight, twisted around the top of his finger, making it very red, and the rest of the chain bit into the skin of her wrist, and then it broke.
That was cheap, he said. That was no good.
It’s okay, Libby said. Look, the girls are back.
That was a cheap piece of jewellery, he said. That’s from Walmart, is it? Piece of fucking garbage. You see how easy that broke? I hardly fucking touched it.
I’m coming out now, Libby said. The man turned and left the store, got into a truck in the parking lot and started it. Let it idle. Revved the engine.
Libby looked at the scrap of paper with my number on it. She had been holding it in her other fist. She knew what I had been implying, when I gave it to her. That she wasn’t okay. She should go home. And she was afraid I would tell her mother about the bruise around her eye. But she let the paper with my number on it drop in the garbage bucket behind her.
I have a place, she said, in Cowan Heights.
I hope it’s not with him, I said. She turned to glance out at the parking lot, which was packed. Then she held out my bag of plastic platters and, taking the Lysol wipes back from my sister, dropped them in the bag too.
Thank you for shopping at Dollarama, she said. I have to go on my break.
When my sister and I got outside it was raining and the truck was gone.
* * *
One evening at the end of August, the man appeared at the foot of my bed. He was as solid and present as the bedpost. Though I was fully awake, or felt I was, my body was paralyzed. I could not move. He picked up the corner of the eiderdown from the foot of the bed and pulled it off my body. I was wearing my pyjamas with the panda bears, but my skin was covered in goose bumps. I was full of terror but my heart was beating very slowly, like a drum at a memorial service, a deep, hard muffled beat that may have been the ocean. Still, I could not move. The cellphone was on the bedside table and with tremendous effort I flung an arm out and slapped my hand around and got the cell, but there weren’t any bars.
* * *
The kids who robbed the store abandoned the stolen van they were driving and took off into the bog and got so far and gave up. It had been November and the bog was partially frozen and they’d run over a long flat white surface and the ice cracked and they were up to their waists. Of course there are sinkholes and you can disappear; a few cows have been lost that way, all the community out with a rope around the cow’s neck pulling with all their might and the eye rolled back, until they give up and shoot the terrified animal between the eyes before it sinks all the way under.
When the teenagers came out of the woods back onto the highway they were surrounded by five cop cars with the lights going. Both holding syringes in their raised fists, threatening to jab anyone who came near them. The cops drew out their tasers and the youngest cop, trigger happy, shot the girl. She was a long time before she could move. The boy dropped the syringe and was arrested peaceably. The army surplus bag of cigarette cartons, and whatever else was on the shelf he’d happened to clear out, had disappeared in the bog.
* * *
The whole town of Bay de Verde had been evacuated. Houses gone. Beverly O’Grady was staying with her sister in Low Point and she’d come in for a tin of Carnation.
They got everybody put up in the gym, she said. They’re waiting for the ammonia tanks to blow.
A reporter from VOCM had stopped for gas and was eyeing the apple flips. There had been a new batch of them that morning and they were almost gone.
Elaine Barrett came after Beverly and she said, The calls are coming now, they’re saying thirty-eight hours is all they can promise. Thirty-eight hours for everybody but you got to go to the two other plants.
That’s a start, I say.
Thirty-eight hours is no good to anybody, she says. You can’t get enough for stamps with thirty-eight hours. People are screwed unless they get overtime. People are saying the Thai workers should be sent back. If there’s not enough work for people here. They should go on home.
I snapped the plastic bag for her bread and milk.
I knows they’re sending money back to their families and that, she said. But people are put up in the gym down there. A lot of them homes got no insurance. Burnt to the ground. I’m lucky I got my sister up here. I’ll have one of them apple flips and give me five Scratch’N Wins. Then she bit at a hangnail so her finger bled a little stream of thin bright blood, which she licked away. She was wearing plaid pyjama bottoms and a jean jacket with a rose on the back in plastic jewels and silver studs.
* * *
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, it had seemed. The cod throwing themselves in the air and diving back down. The ocean weirdly calm but for the plinks of the fish leaping up and sending out concentric rings from the dimple where they dove back under the surface. I wondered if there had been some shifting of tectonic plates out there. Was there a tidal wave coming? But we would have heard about that. I wasn’t surprised to see a st
ranger at the beach, because of the fish. Because it was an unnatural occurrence and all kinds of people had stopped to look. He might have just been driving past, coming from the other side of the island. He might have just caught sight of it and pulled over.
I was trying the phone, the man said. But you got no reception here, do you?
You can’t get a signal in some places, I said.
Where are you from? he asked. You don’t belong here. He winced, a kind of slow spasm.
I grew up in St. John’s, I said.
You want a drink? the man asked. He lifted a bottle to show me.
No, thank you, I say.
Too good for a drink? I looked back over the cliffs and saw that the cars were all starting up and heading home. There would be something about the fish on the news. It was almost dark and the wind was picking up.
I’m just out for a stroll, I said.
I’m Lorraine Cake’s cousin, he said. Lorraine will vouch for me.
I don’t care who you are, I said.
You got a husband or anything? he said. Fine woman like you don’t want a drink?
I tried to walk away from him then. But he was following me, close enough he jostled into me when he slipped a bit on the beach rocks. He made a grab at my elbow. I was heading back up the dirt lane from the beach to the highway that leads to the store. At the top of the hill, near the church, I’d get a few bars of service.
Not going to answer me? he asked.
Yes, I am married, I said. The church was maybe five minutes away, lit with garish red floodlights the new minister had installed at Christmas last year. They lit up the building all through the summer and fall.
Percy’s truck drove past then and I waved him down. Nice-looking woman, the man said, as I got in the passenger side of the truck. Percy swept Coke cans and crumpled bar wrappers off the seat.
Heading up to the store? he said.
Yes, I said.
Who is that? Percy asked.
Some asshole, I said. The guy was in his own truck then and he tore out in front of Percy Strong and zoomed away, down the road toward the highway.
Bat out of hell, Percy said. He stopped at the store and he came in with me for smokes. He bought a few Scratch’N Wins and won twenty bucks and I opened the cash and handed it to him.
Have an apple flip on me, I said. I asked about the layoffs in the camps north of Fort Mac, where he had a year and a half to go before he got a pension.
The likes of which you’ve never seen, he said.
After he left, the grey monitor affixed to the ceiling showed me the empty aisles. The engines of the milk coolers buzzed hard. The store was empty. I felt clammy and chilled, a burst of intense fear. There was a dazzling floater hanging over the stand of chocolate bars across from the cash. I tried to get rid of it, focussing on the box of Turkish Delight bars at the end of the row. My armpits were sweating, my heart felt out of whack. Then the episode passed.
There was a rush around nine thirty, several cars at the pumps. Lorraine Cake came in and I asked about the man.
Said a cousin of yours, I told her. I described him and his truck.
Lorraine said she didn’t know anyone who fit the description I gave of the man at the beach. She was certain she didn’t know anybody like that. She questioned me on each detail. Then she asked me did I see the fish.
I never heard tell of anything like it, she said. They’re saying the scientists will be down here tomorrow.
Scrabbling over the beach rocks, trying to get back up on the highway where I would be more visible to the passing traffic, and where I could get away from the man, the enveloping stink of him, I had suddenly remembered a dream I’d had the night before. In the dream, on my left breast four new nipples had grown overnight. They were raised and stiffened, raspberry-coloured, incredibly tender. They were large nipples and threatened, it seemed to me, to spurt milk. They really hurt, the way nipples hurt when a milk duct gets blocked and the skin cracks but is constantly damp with seeping milk or blood. I was thrown back twenty-five years to when I’d given birth to Kevin. The gentian violet I’d used when I got thrush. The word thrush, something a barn animal would be afflicted with. The shock of it, because we were encouraged to continue breastfeeding, despite the pain, so sharp it brought instant tears, and the baby’s mouth also painted that indigo purple, an ugly stain so everybody knew what was going on.
The new nipples in the dream made my breast porcine, and in the swollen follicles around each nipple, stiff, silver hairs were sprouting.
I filled with a shame so intense my main preoccupation in the dream was to hide the extra nipples, until terror made me show them to my husband. When I took off my T-shirt the nipples were gone. The skin was inflamed and there was a mark and swelling where each new nipple had been, like a mosquito bite.
At midnight I shut the store and walked back down the road to the cabin. The ocean was calm then. No sign of the fish. In the kitchen I made myself some tea and I thought I saw a movement in the garden, in the bushes. Jocelyn’s light came on at once, and there I was in the glass with my cup pressed to my chest with both hands.
* * *
That night in the cabin, I woke because of the smell. It was like the smell of capelin when they use it as fertilizer, mixed with the dirt on a hot day. The man was at the foot of my bed. I could not move at all. I was paralyzed. Everything felt heavy, even my eyelids. Two floaters hung above the man’s left shoulder for a moment, then they were moving slowly across the wall toward the window. After straining very hard, I managed to fling my arm over my body to the bedside table and I had the cellphone in my fist. But my fingers were like pieces of wood, tingling with pins and needles. I could barely hold the phone. I was afraid it would slip out of my hand. He got on his hands and knees at the foot of the bed and straddled me until he had worked his knees into my armpit and held my wrists down and then dug both his knees into my chest. I couldn’t breathe. And then he put his hands around my throat. He was wearing latex gloves. He was wearing the gloves I had near the salt beef bucket at the store.
He lowered his mouth onto mine and began to suck what little breath I had from me. When he pulled away from the kiss his face was gone. There was just a featureless, black clot of darkness surrounded by a burning aureole of light from the bare bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling behind him. With one hand he was working at his belt.
I felt the phone in my hand change shape, transmogrify. The man shimmied forward on his knees, thrust his hips out, waggling his penis near my face so it hit my cheek; then the whole room filled with a sweet stink it took me a moment to recognize: vanilla. He must have bathed in it.
I knew rather than felt that the cellphone had turned into a syringe, and with more effort than I have ever exerted in my life, as though I were lifting a hundred pounds, I forced my arm off the bed and drove the needle into his side. I felt it sink deep and hard; I felt the long needle crack as it drove against a bone. I gasped raggedly, drawing deep breaths, soaked now in sweat, sitting up on the bed. He was gone. My phone lit up. It was a text from Kevin. He asked me to buy a frozen pizza on the way home. I saw it was a text from more than a year ago.
It was then I heard the screen door at the back of the cabin wheeze open, the door off the kitchen, and a key in the lock of the back door and then the back door swinging open and the stamp of two feet on the rug. Someone was getting the dirt off his shoes. The clatter of an animal in the hall; it sniffled and trotted to my room. The dog. It was my husband’s dog. He found me, dug his snout into my lap, pawed me, moaned. Then he turned and barked, twice. Sharp high-pitched barks at the wall. I hauled him out of the room by the collar.
My husband switched on the kitchen light and his reflection in the black window appeared to be suspended above the garden; the branches of a maple tree in the field beyond shot through his back. He turned to face me and there were f
loaters on his face, two coins of shimmering light over his eyes; I blinked and blinked until they faded.
I thought we could talk, he said.
Please, I said. Really?
What do you want from me? Tell me what you want, he said.
Okay, I said. But you will do what I say.
I saw his shoulders slump with relief.
You’re willing to talk? he asked.
I said: I’m going to decide.
The Fjord of Eternity
The two of them, back in the Toronto office on Spadina, were rocking the contestable death claims, had doubled the clientele over the last two years, were smoking the competition. People hopping off the side of cruise ships, never heard tell of again. Costing insurance companies big time.
Collisions, Trisha was fond of saying, will always be bread and butter. Scrapes and fender-benders. Trisha had started there. But you get bored, and if you have her mobility and her lack of emotional whatever — the way she can hop a cruise ship with two seconds’ notice — you start to look elsewhere. Meanwhile, the young guys in the office were all getting hitched and the new wives were like: Sorry, honey, your cruising days are done.
Not that a fender-bender didn’t bring in bucks. You get somebody’s paint on your fender, you could be talking upwards of seven, eight grand. And enough of those? Karen Kapoor, also in the Spadina office, had uncovered a ring that produced considerable coin for the Russian mafia in Montreal. Busted them because a red Honda Civic in a parking lot allegedly brushed against the passenger door of a blue Toyota Prius.
Monetize the kind of dent you can easily pop with a toilet plunger and, next thing you know, you’re floating your own paramilitary outfit. Ultimately, though? Vehicle collision? Boring as fuck.
But a good contestable death — that was Trisha or it was Jimmy. The two of them had the Caribbean cruises covered like butter on toast.
