Trader

by Charles de Lint

  No matter what anybody said, she knew it was her fault, the guilt eating away at her as much as her grief. Neither allowed her much respite, but the worst was not knowing. Where was Zeffy? Tanya was no closer to understanding now than she’d been the evening the Indian had come into Kathryn’s to talk to Jilly. All this mumbo jumbo about spiritworlds and getting lost in them made no sense. But then what had happened with Johnny and this Max Trader made no sense either. Overnight, the rules of the world had changed and she didn’t have a handbook to see her through. All Tanya knew for certain was that the catalyst to Zeffy’s disappearance had come out of her own stupid need to have a boyfriend. Beyond that, everything was confusion.

  “I guess that’s it,” Geordie said as they locked up the storage space.

  Tanya lit up a cigarette and nodded. “Thanks for your help. I don’t know what I’d’ve done otherwise.”

  “Listen. About us...”

  “It’s not you, Geordie. Honestly. It’s me. I’m really shitty company and I can’t deal with the extra pressure of knowing I’m bringing somebody else down as well.”

  He looked as if he was going to say something, but then only nodded and went around to the driver’s side of the pickup. They’d been through it all a hundred times before. She hadn’t expected to see him today. She’d asked Jilly if she knew someone who could help her and the next thing she knew, Geordie was on her doorstep, the borrowed truck parked at the curb, and what was she going to do? Turn him away? She still liked him—liked him a lot—but she had to make some changes in her life and one of them was trying to make a go of it on her own. If someone was going to get hurt in her life, let it be herself. Except it didn’t work that way, did it? Geordie was hurt because she wouldn’t let him into her life now. But she had to make a start of it somewhere. She had to learn to like herself, to trust in herself, before she could be part of a couple again.

  So she was moving. She’d quit her job at Kathryn’s and started working for a temp agency. Office work, and she hated office work, but it paid better than waitressing and who was she fooling? She was never going to be a waitress-slash-anything. She didn’t have aspirations like everybody else she knew. Oh, she wanted to do more with her life, but she didn’t have it in her. Didn’t have the drive. Didn’t have the need to be painting, or writing, or playing music, or anything. But she wasn’t going to simply be the appendage in a relationship anymore either. She wasn’t going to define herself by who she was sleeping with or hanging out with. She had to be something more. And until she could figure out what that something was, she might as well try to make the day-to-day aspects of life easier to deal with. Might as well learn how to make it on her own for a change.

  “You want to go back to your new place?” Geordie asked when she slipped into the passenger seat beside him.

  “If it’s not out of your way.”

  “No problem.”

  Jilly had been trying to do her a favor. Tanya knew that. But why couldn’t she have played matchmaker some other time? Why did she have to send Geordie to help her?

  “It’s not like you don’t mean a lot to me,” she said as Geordie started up the truck.

  “I know. But you just want to be friends.”

  Tanya sighed. She butted out her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another.

  “I hate the way that sounds,” she said. “It’s like saying somebody’s got a great personality, but you know that just means they’re not all that good-looking.”

  “I understand,” Geordie told her. “Really, I do.”

  No, he didn’t, she thought. Nobody did. How could they? She didn’t understand what she wanted, what she was feeling, so how could anybody else? All she knew for sure was that she had to make a go of it on her own. For once she had to not lean on just whoever happened to be handy.

  She wanted to pay back the money she’d borrowed. She wanted to save some. Maybe by the time she had a couple of thousand dollars put away in a savings account, she’d have a better idea of what she wanted to do with her life. Maybe Zeffy would come back.

  No, she told herself. Don’t think about that. You’re just going to make yourself crazy.

  “How do you like your new job?” Geordie asked.

  “Well, you know me. If WordPerfect didn’t have a spellchecker program, they’d probably have fired me on my first day. But it’s okay. I got four days last week, three at a shipping company and one with an accounting firm.”

  “I couldn’t work in an office.”

  Tanya gave him a half-hearted smile. “I know the feeling. I think what I hate the most is all the packaging. You know, the right clothes, the right makeup, the right attitude.”

  “My point exactly. Some people just aren’t cut out for that kind of thing and I’m one of them.”

  Me, too, Tanya thought, but she didn’t seem to be cut out for anything else either, so she had to make do.

  “Monday I’m filling in at a talent agency,” she said. “Two weeks while the regular secretary gets to go to Hawaii.”

  “Hawaii’s not all it’s made out to be.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  Geordie shook his head. “No. But if it was that great, then everybody’d be living there, wouldn’t they?”

  “With that kind of logic—”

  “I’m joking,” Geordie said. “I’d love to go there someday.”

  Tanya lit another cigarette from the butt of the one she’d only half-finished. I remember jokes, she thought. They were part of the world before everything went horrible. She didn’t know how people could appreciate them now. She didn’t know how people could all just carry on as though nothing was different when in reality, everything was different and showed no signs of getting any better.

  It was only a few minutes’ drive from the warehouse where she’d rented the storage space to her new apartment, but it seemed to take forever. She knew Geordie meant well. She knew he was sweet and kind and all the things she liked in a man, but any kind of intimacy, even something so simple as sharing the cab of a pickup truck for a short drive such as this, made her uncomfortable these days.

  When they reached the end of her street and Geordie had to stop because the light was against them, she unfastened her seat belt.

  “I can just get off here,” she said.

  Geordie glanced down her street and she knew what he was seeing. Run-down tenements, litter collecting against the curbs, beat-up vehicles parked along the street, including one near the corner that was up on cinder blocks, its wheels missing. A handful of tough-looking boys were gathered in front of the corner store, pushing each around and joking. On the step of the building next to them, an unsmiling man in chinos and a white sleeveless undershirt was smoking a cigarette and staring blankly across the street. There was nothing to see there, only a couple of boarded-up storefronts.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “It looks kind of rough.”

  Tanya nodded. “I guess. But it’s my neighborhood now, so I’m going to have to get used to it.”

  Before he could protest further, she had the door open and stepped down onto the pavement.

  “Thanks for the ride, Geordie,” she said. “And for all the help moving everything.”

  “No problem. Listen, if you decide you want to—”

  “I’ll keep in touch,” she told him, and closed the door.

  She started walking briskly down the block, not looking back, half expecting him to follow anyway, part of her wanting him to follow, but when the light changed she heard him put the truck in gear and continue on up Lee Street. She slowed down, but not much. She was nervous walking up the street by herself, even now, in the middle of the day. At night it seemed like a war zone and most of the time she flagged down a cab at the bus stop on Lee and had it drive her the two blocks down to her apartment.

  Nothing’s going to happen in broad daylight, she told herself, but when she walked past the pawnshop and a thin, dark-haired man rose up from the weeds in the lot beyond it, sh
e wasn’t so sure anymore. He had a haunted look in his eye that she recognized from her own junkie days—the jones was fed, but it didn’t seem to be enough.

  “Crack?” he said. “Smack?”

  She wasn’t sure if he was selling or looking to score. All she could think was—and it wasn’t the first time since Zeffy had disappeared this came to mind—how a couple hits would be the way to take the pain away, to forget everything, just for a while. But then she remembered all those hours hidden away in bathrooms, jabbing away at her welted arms, stashing needles in Tampax boxes, suffering mild convulsions because she’d done a little too much, eyes rolling, staggering into the shower to stay alive...

  And she didn’t want to forget. Not Zeffy. Not why she was making this break from her old life. Drugs weren’t going to solve anything.

  “No, thanks,” she told him.

  “’Scool.”

  But she was tempted. Even looking at him, so wasted he could barely stand upright, shuffling back to his nest in the weeds and trash, dirty clothes and dirty skin, back prematurely stooped, arms below the sleeves of his T-shirt covered with small scabs...she was still tempted and that probably scared her more than the idea of what she’d have to suffer going through cold turkey again. If she didn’t OD and kill herself first.

  But it didn’t have to be like that, a part of her reasoned. This time she’d know how much she could handle before the jones threatened to take over her life again. She could give herself small snatches of oblivion—just enough to let her deal with the emptiness that was swallowing her from the inside, to give herself some breathing space from the crying jags and the loneliness that filled up the long hours that stretched between coming home from work and going back in the next morning.

  Yeah, right, she thought. Like that wasn’t every junkie’s rationale before they let the monkey climb up on their shoulders and ride them back down into wasteland. She knew that this time, it’d be a one-way trip.

  “No, thanks,” she repeated.

  The junkie wasn’t listening, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t talking to him anyway. She gave him a last look, trying to impress the pathetic image of him on her mind so that she could call it up again when she needed a reminder, then hurried on down the block to her apartment.

  7 LISA

  Lisa answered the doorbell with the same nervous apprehension she felt whenever the phone rang or there was a knock on the door. Her heart would lift and she’d think, finally, it’s Nia, but at the same time she dreaded the intrusion, believing that, after all this time, it could only be bad news. She could no more stop herself from feeling this way than she could stop herself from picking up the phone, or rushing to the door. This time it was a postal delivery man and the usual mix of relief and disappointment washed through her.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” the man said. “But your neighbor downstairs isn’t in. Would you mind signing for his package?”

  “No.”

  The man smiled. “Thanks. If you’ll sign here.”

  “I meant, no, I won’t sign for it.”

  “But—”

  “He can rot in hell for all I care,” Lisa said.

  The police had established that Max Trader had disappeared around the same time that Nia had, while “Bones” hadn’t pulled his own vanishing act until the police started to look for him. Lisa wasn’t sure what the connection between her neighbor, her daughter and the strange fortune-teller she’d met in the park had been, but she did know that the two men had something to do with Nia’s disappearance. They’d had to. Why else would Bones have plied her with whatever drug it had been in that cigarette, making her think that she’d seen Nia disappear into some vague spirit land? Why else would a man such as Trader, three times Nia’s age, ingratiate himself to her daughter?

  What especially irked her was that because Trader had arranged for direct payments from his bank to cover his rent and utilities, the apartment and store on the ground floor remained waiting for him, as though he could step right back into his life whenever he’d finished with Nia. The landlord collected his mail for him.

  “Look, Mrs. Fisher,” he’d told her. “In this country, a man’s innocent until proven guilty. Mr. Trader has seen that his bills are paid and until he stops, or he’s convicted of a crime, I have no intention of evicting him.”

  “But he kidnapped my daughter.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “What? You think they eloped and ran away together?”

  “I’m very sorry about what’s happened with Nia,” the landlord had said, obviously uncomfortable with the way the conversation was going. “But you don’t know that Mr. Trader had anything to do with her disappearance. It’s far more likely that she simply ran away at the same time Mr. Trader left on his trip.”

  Which was what the police said as well, though at least they were willing to look further into it.

  “Nia wouldn’t run away,” Lisa told her landlord.

  Except hadn’t her ex told her that, in fact, that was exactly what Nia had done? And hadn’t Trader still been in his apartment after Nia had disappeared?

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you, ma'am.”

  Lisa blinked, memories brought up short when she realized that the delivery man was still standing in front of her.

  “You have a nice day now,” he said.

  She didn't bother replying. Closing the door, she leaned against the inside wooden panels and fought to regain her composure.

  “Who was that?” Julie called from the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” Lisa said. “Just somebody else trying to deliver a package to the monster who used to live downstairs.”

  She pushed away from the door and returned to help Julie prepare dinner, hoping she looked more composed than she was feeling. Julie was sitting at the kitchen table, chopping vegetables for a salad. She looked up as Lisa came in, the worry plain in her features.

  “I know, I know,” Lisa said. “Just because he’s a creep, it doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Nia’s disappearance. But I still feel he’s involved and I’ll be damned if I’ll do him any favors.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Julie said, her voice mild.

  “But you were thinking it. I could tell the minute I walked in here.” Julie shook her head. “I’m just worried about you. You’re taking this all so—”

  “Badly? You try having your daughter kidnapped and see how you feel.” Julie made no reply. Lisa knew she should let it go, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from going on. She never could these days.

  “And I know what you’re going to say next: There’s no proof that Nia was kidnapped. In fact, everything points to her having run away, but I know my daughter and running away isn’t her style.”

  Julie laid the knife she was using down on the cutting board.

  “You’ve got to stop blaming yourself,” she said.

  “Then who should I blame?”

  “I don’t think blame’s the issue unless you make it that way. Everything you feel is understandable—from reproaching yourself to the worry and hurt you’re feeling. But none of it’s going to bring Nia back and you’re only turning yourself into a nervous wreck. The simple fact of the matter is she did run away—we know that because of your ex’s phone call.”

  Lisa shook her head. “You don’t know him. Dan would say anything if he knew it’d get me going.”

  “How would he even know that Nia was missing in the first place?”

  Lisa shrugged.

  “What we’re waiting for,” Julie went on, her voice patient, “isn’t to hear from kidnappers, but for Nia to either change her mind and come back home, or at least call.”

  “I can’t just wait,” Lisa said. “It’s driving me crazy. I know this is all my fault. If I hadn’t...”

  Her voice trailed off at the pained expression that now touched Julie’s features. She had never meant to tell Julie what the stranger in the hall had told her, how Nia had le
ft because she’d seen her mother necking with another woman. It had just come out on a bad night, blurted out in a confused jumble in between bouts of tears. As soon as she’d told Julie, she’d regretted it and been determined not to bring it up again. But it did come up. Not once or twice, but a half-dozen times.

  “I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t getting into all of that again.” But Julie only sighed. She stood up, still moving slowly. The knife wound had healed, but she was far from being fully recovered. Lisa moved aside as Julie walked by her to go into the hall, then trailed along behind her lover.

  “Where...where are you going?” she asked.

  Julie put on her coat. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  “Julie, please...”

  “Please what? You’re blaming our relationship for Nia’s running away— that is, when you aren’t constructing elaborate conspiracy theories. I’m really and truly sorry for how you’re feeling—it makes me realize what I put my own parents through when I ran away—but this guilt you’ve got over our relationship isn’t something I can live with any longer. It’s just not healthy.”

  “I didn’t mean it. I won’t bring it up again.”

  Julie shook her head. “No, but you’ll still be thinking it. And, god help us, somewhere inside you, I think you agree with it as well.”

  “It’s just...I feel so crazy...”

  “I know. And that’s why I think this is better for both of us. With me out of the way, you won’t have to constantly be reminded of how your unnatural desires drove your daughter away.”

  “I’ve never said that.”

  “No, you just think it. I’m sorry, Lisa, but I can’t stay in a relationship like this.”

  “But...”

  “I wish you the best, truly I do. I hope Nia comes back or calls you soon. And I hope you figure out just what you want and don’t drive it out of your life when you finally get it.”