by Lisa Moore
Francine, will you come in? he asked.
I’m just going to finish the pots and pans, she said. But instead she peeled off the gloves and reached behind the couch to bring out her mandolin. There had been two attempts with pills, one requiring his stomach pumped.
But they played together without speaking much to each other. Sometimes her mother and father would hold each other’s eyes and they would suddenly laugh, or nod in agreement or look stern and uncompromising. Her mother on the mandolin or the banjo and her father either on the guitar or the fiddle. The music would be chaotic and almost incoherent, but for long stretches there would be threads of melody they’d wind around each other.
They’d had the neighbours search the property, and her mother was calling for him. Nobody realized that Kelly was out there looking too. He was just fourteen. But it was Kelly that found him. He had shouted out. Bawled out for them to come. He’d called for his mother. One of the neighbours brought Kelly back to the house. He’d sat on the couch with a blanket around him. He’d spoken very fast about what he’d seen, and what he couldn’t see, because it was already dark. He’d said the flashlight was jiggling around in his hand. He couldn’t hold it still. He said half his father’s face was missing. Then he’d said he was hungry. He’d stood up to go to the kitchen and fainted.
* * *
Chelsea had done a careers placement test a couple of months before her father died. Twenty-five questions and you shaded a little square with a pencil next to the possible answers: very interested, interested, slightly interested, and not interested. They had a guidance counsellor, in from St. John’s, with an answer key.
Chelsea had hesitated about whether she would like to help a client achieve their financial goals. Who was the client? She was slightly interested. She was not interested in computer repair. The question about doing things with her hands seemed so broad she had ticked slightly interested. Did they mean woodworking? She used her hands all the time. Cooking? She ticked not interested. But this was not quite accurate. She had a revelation: she loved watching her brother burn his grilled cheese sandwiches. She loved the fast, sharp smell of smoking butter. It occurred to her there was nothing she was not interested in. But she knew she would render the test invalid if she ticked very interested for each question.
She’d waited on one of the orange moulded chairs outside the office. When it was Chelsea’s turn to go in she’d found the career counsellor fitting a paper with holes over the form with Chelsea’s answers. The woman held up her hand to stop Chelsea from speaking. She was toting up figures on a scrap of paper, moving her lips silently, or now and then whispering a number, or a number and a letter together, then consulting the booklet, which she held upright. She bit her lower lip, turned a page of the booklet and turned it back. Finally she looked at Chelsea and said: police studies.
I think I want to be a nurse, Chelsea said. But she had said it without any certainty. It was later, when her father died, and she understood much more about the complex nature of pain, how it could rove through the body, how acute it could be, even without external injury or visible cause, that she knew for sure.
In the career counsellor’s office, she had been guessing. Nursing interested her, but she didn’t know if she was very interested.
When her father died, and her mother’s rigid, uncompromising decision to keep going formed over her grief, Chelsea made up her mind. She thought pain was like matter, always a constant amount of it in the universe. But it was malleable; it could be shifted or coaxed out of the room for short periods. It could be exorcised or hurled out to roam somewhere else.
* * *
They’d caught the rapist trying to get on the ferry in Port aux Basques three months after he’d jumped onto the white van in the backyard of the blue house. Several squad cars closed in on the harbour. The man fought six officers and it took them almost half an hour to subdue him. Chelsea had overheard a conversation between a woman behind the counter at Tim Hortons and a couple of cops.
A half hour, you want to tell me he isn’t a vicious animal, the woman said.
People think, six officers against one man, the first cop said. But it isn’t like that. We’re careful to not use more force than necessary. That’s how we’re trained. I’d say those officers let him tire himself out. I’d say they only threw a jab when they had to.
They had him surrounded where he wasn’t going anywhere, the second cop said. Then, basically, they moved in on him, because the last thing you want, they throw this out because of police brutality.
He is a big bastard, the first cop said. They has it up on YouTube, where people came out with their phones, recorded it.
Once he was down, see, that was it, the cuffs on him then, the second cop said.
They’re saying fit to stand trial, the woman said. His lawyer is looking for ways to get him off, like he’s got mental issues or something, a lesser sentence.
They have DNA and they have the cellphones from his room, said a woman behind Chelsea in the line. They turned to look at her.
The woman said, I’m a lawyer. They’ll put him away for a long time. He’s going away forever.
The police went to Chelsea’s house on Merrymeeting and questioned everyone after the arrest. Chelsea told them about the stolen Hibachi. Everyone in her house mentioned all the syringes lying around. Chelsea identified the man she’d seen jumping from the upstairs window onto the white van as the same man who had been caught in Port aux Basques. They’d shown her photographs. She said it was him. It’s definitely him. She mentioned his rings. The leather choker around his neck with the small pointed studs.
She didn’t mention giving him the coffee in the Tupperware container.
She didn’t say she knew one of the women he’d raped.
* * *
During the procedure at the hospital, when the nurses were scraping DNA from Raylene’s fingernails, Chelsea had begun the speech about being a support person from the centre, there for anything Raylene might need, but she faltered. Raylene didn’t seem to be hearing anything. She didn’t seem to be present.
Chelsea was sure Raylene hadn’t recognized her. Raylene could barely see. One eye swollen shut. The other eye had a detached retina, the doctor had said.
Chelsea had been the one to get the new clothes for Raylene, from the supply closet, when they’d taken the clothes she arrived with for evidence. The new clothes were still in the Walmart shopping bags. The hospital had three pairs of black, fleece-lined sweatpants, underwear, socks and sneakers (three different sizes), T-shirts and sweatshirts. She stood with the clothes in her arms while the doctor dressed a cigarette burn on the inside of Raylene’s arm.
Chelsea didn’t tell the police that she had been on call the morning Raylene was raped, or that she had helped Raylene, who could barely stand, pull up the new sweatpants over her sharp hipbones. How she had helped her dress like one would help a baby. How she gingerly lowered the sweatshirt over her body so that she wouldn’t knock the bandages or touch any bruises. She didn’t say she knew about Raylene’s brother, Cody, or the fire in Fort Mac, or how Raylene had attempted, for nine days, to go clean, or how the other women Chelsea had seen around the blue house had shunned Raylene, ganged up on her in a casual, off-handed way, something about Raylene working the same corner as them, taking their business, how she had better fuck off if she knew what was good for her, or how they had attempted to bash out Raylene’s brains on a whim, just for fun.
She didn’t say about the pictures of the children in Raylene’s wallet, and how Raylene had said their names and that one of them, you couldn’t get him to eat nothing that wasn’t white, like, he’d only eat bread and macaroni. The other one would eat whatever was put in front of him. How the foster mom was after giving the little one a bit of fruit in his high chair, but he wouldn’t have nothing to do with it.
Chelsea didn’t mention to the cops the almost
inaudible lisp Raylene had because four of her top front teeth had rotted away to brown stumps the ends of which were visible in her gums. They had rotted away or been punched out.
Or how Raylene had said she’d bought both of her children cardboard books, which you can wipe down with a J-Cloth if they get food on them, and the foster mom said they couldn’t get enough of being read to, and that they were really smart. They loved The Cat in the Hat and Are You My Mother?
Chelsea mentioned, instead, the blue earplugs, the ringing the guy had in his ears. She said about him holding up a sign for the city, when they were repairing a road. His complaint about a bad back. Chelsea knew that significance could cling to odd facts, but she had no way of knowing which facts were significant. She’d said about the sun that morning, when they had spoken at the fence, how it cast a long shadow over their yards, from the houses, but the shadows had not stretched far enough to touch either of them where they stood just a couple of feet apart, with only the fence between them. His silver rings catching the sun. She believed the shadow creeping toward them over the grass might be significant. But she didn’t mention that.
After her interview with the police, Chelsea had gone to view an apartment that was close to the university. That apartment was too expensive, even with a roommate sleeping in the living room.
Then she caught a bus, and two more buses until she found herself at the cul-de-sac in which the coast guard owned the house she’d thought about renting almost a year ago. She took out a credit card and approached the front door. She edged her credit card between the doorframe of the house and the front door, and jiggled it noisily back and forth until the lock popped.
The faux-sheepskin boots sat on a rubber mat by the door. She snatched them up and squashed them into her knapsack, and locked the door again, before closing it, and headed back to the bus stop.
5.
David told her he would stay on the phone.
I’m going to stand right here, under this light, you’ll be able to see me from the skywalk, and I’ll be on the phone. But I could just walk you over, he said.
I don’t want you to walk me, she said. All you need to do —
I’m going to be on my phone, and you can see me standing here, he said.
He had that stupid bike, which was his only means of getting around and now it was too cold for the bike. His hands would get very cold on the handlebars and he’d have to stop and try to rub the feeling back into them.
He was doing Young Drivers of Canada, which meant he had to be at the driving school at eight thirty in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, and stay until four, even though he worked at the restaurant until two a.m. sometimes, cleaning up.
David hadn’t passed the permit test. He had failed the permit test because instead of studying the booklet, he’d got the answers from his friend Chad, but the answers were a year old. They had changed up the answers. Chad had dicked him around with the answers.
His mother had driven him all the way to Mount Pearl for the test and he would have to wait until she had a free hour in her workday and he didn’t have a class, until their schedules aligned, so they could get back out to Mount Pearl again to rewrite it.
Until then he had the bike. It was for stunts and he’d used it at the skate parks around town, every day, a couple of summers ago. He’d gone to the park at Mundy Pond, and the one in Portugal Cove.
The thrill of swooping down in that bowl and flying up into the sky. Being suspended.
For an entire summer all he cared about was that moment of hanging weightless before the bike dropped and he dropped with it. After that summer, he lost interest.
What he knew with certainty: his mother would want him to stand there in the freezing cold at one in the morning to see this girl through the skywalk. And she was almost at the entrance.
What was he supposed to say to this girl? She had an army surplus knapsack with pins all over it. He could see that jiggling around on her back as she passed under the streetlight and he could hear the pins rattling through the phone and then into darkness and then under another streetlight. Sometimes she was lit up by passing traffic; haloed in light, and then she was in a stretch of darkness again. She was walking really fast.
He told her on the phone that he had the bike up on Kijiji and believed he could get five hundred bucks for it, which was what it had cost him. Money he’d made washing dishes. He explained to her the kickback on tips in the restaurant where he worked. Basically the system was pretty loose and it was all according to how generous the waiters felt on any given night. He’d also bought a snowboard, he’d told her, but some douche had crossed in front of him going down a hill, and the front of the board was chipped and now it was no good.
He had bought an expensive watch, he told her, when she was at the foot of the skywalk.
She had stopped a few feet away from the entrance. She was just standing there, very still.
The watch was the most expensive thing he’d ever owned, he told her. His mother said he was a fool for getting it, but he didn’t tell the girl that. He paused, but she didn’t say anything and she didn’t move.
He was waiting for her to move. She had been walking pretty fast and he could hear her catching her breath.
He wasn’t going to speak until she had made up her mind to go through the skywalk. He wanted to say that he was coming, and they’d go through together. He would walk her through, but he knew that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to go through the skywalk on her own.
I had that watch for two weeks, he said. He couldn’t stop himself from talking.
Then I lost it at a field party.
He told about the party, how they had revealed the secret location on Facebook just a day before the party. How they had fundraised for beer kegs, how they’d bought second-hand couches at Value Village and had them all around the field, and how they had tarps set up to lay people under if they passed out. They’d even bought pillows at Walmart. They’d carried anyone who was unconscious into the shelter they’d made with the tarps, and put them in the recovery position.
He said toward the end of the evening some of the couches were piled up on top of each other and the pile was set on fire and it was really beautiful with the sparks flying up really high. And about five hundred people.
A few fist fights had broken out, but nothing serious, he said. Chad, his friend Chad, was so drunk he got lost in the woods and his parents organized a search party, but he, David, never found out about Chad until the next day. Chad had been walking around in the woods for three hours and he’d dropped his phone and his parents had people driving up and down Torbay Road looking for him.
David’s mother had been furious with him for leaving Chad, but he didn’t tell the girl that. He did not tell her that he had made out with a girl on one of the couches. He’d taken off his watch because he’d been making out with the girl, a girl he’d known in a peripheral way since grade twelve, but had only recently become involved with, because one of her friends told one of his friends, one of Chad’s friends, actually, that she was interested in him, and it got back to him and he saw her, maybe for the first time, and she was seriously hot, but her hair kept getting caught in the retracting links of his gold watch and she’d said, Take it off, and he’d dropped it into the grass next to the couch. He didn’t regret losing the watch. Losing the watch so casually was part of the power of owning something that expensive, not caring about it.
He said the cops came and shut down the party but by then everybody’d had a fantastic time. By that time they were cold anyway, and they’d pretty much drunk everything there was to drink, and smoked everything there was to smoke.
And they were all running, maybe five hundred people from every high school in the city, just running off the field and into the trees.
Then he stopped talking. She entered the skywalk. He was completely quiet. He couldn’t see
her but he could hear her climbing the stairs.
I’m at the fucking landing now, she said. And the fucking light they have is fluttering. I’m just going to stay here.
You’re staying on the landing? he asked. But she didn’t answer.
What about you? he asked.
What? she said.
Ever been to any good parties?
No, she said. I don’t like parties all that much.
Are you still just standing there? he asked. But she didn’t answer. For a moment he thought she’d hung up.
Then she said, I can’t really move right now. He waited for her to speak again.
What about, he said. Have you ever travelled anywhere? Like did you go on a trip, ever? But she didn’t answer, so he told her that after the party, the party where he lost his watch, there had been an article in the paper and the mayor of Torbay was going to have to pay a fortune to get the field cleaned up. This is what the article said. The field belonged to a private owner, a farmer or something, and the mayor didn’t think the owner should have to pay for the vandalism. There was a picture that took up half the page of the Telegram, with the mayor in the foreground, looking really pissed, and the burnt-out couches behind him, still smoking.
The mayor was saying the town was going to have to pay out upwards of five thousand dollars in labour to get the field cleaned up, David said. Then he saw a shadow in a window on the other side of the skywalk.
Okay, he said. Listen. Someone is coming through.
What do you mean, she said.
Someone is walking through the skywalk, coming from the other side. That’s what they’re for, skywalks, for people to walk through, and you should start walking up the second set of stairs and through the skywalk where I can see you through the windows, to the other side. Are you walking?
