Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  BLOOD SECRETS

  Nadine McInnis

  BLOOD SECRETS

  STORIES

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © Nadine McInnis, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McInnis, Nadine, 1957-

  Blood secrets / Nadine McInnis.

  Short Stories.

  ISBN 978-1-9274-2800-9

  I. Title.

  PS8575.I54B56 2012 C813’.54 C2012-901708-6

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  Cover Image by Eduardo Gomez

  Contents

  The Story of Time

  Heart of Blue, Glowing

  Blood Secrets

  Stone Deaf

  Snow Moths

  Where All the Ladders Start

  Bliss

  Bare Bones

  The Men Have Gone Hunting

  Persephone Without Maps

  Endowment

  Lucky

  Feigning Death

  The Story of Time

  ON THE NIGHT SHE MET HIM, one century was becoming another. Joyce was with her husband and daughter on Parliament Hill. Europe had celebrated all through the day, with flamenco dancers in Spain, an explosion of light behind the Eiffel Tower, parades and spectacles so energetic that they came downtown that night, expecting something spectacular to happen as the timeline moved closer.

  Joyce could tell by the edginess of the crowd, primed with liquor and shifting in the cold, that she was not the only one irritated by the sombre sound-and-light show called The Story of Time. Costumed dancers paraded around the peripheries carrying puppets that were supposed to be cogs in the machinery of a giant clock wheeling freely around them. Bleak modern art was projected onto the Peace Tower as speakers broadcast a collision of twentieth-century sounds: children screaming, air raid sirens and industrial rackets. She looked to see what effect this was having on her daughter. Ruth’s hands in their thick mittens were clamped on either side of her angular face, pulling her skin tight over her fine bones.

  “Can we go now? I hate this,” Ruth said. And then again, “I hate this.”

  “You’re not kidding. This is what gives art a bad name. All that angst and seriousness,” Colin said. “All that bullshit about the zeitgeist of the times.”

  “The great critic speaks,” Joyce said, annoyed.

  He ignored her testiness, stretched out his arms, ready to wrap them both in his tall embrace, but he held a silver flask open in one hand. Joyce could see him considering which one of them he would hug. It was a split-second decision. She felt a fleeting disappointment when he put his arm around their daughter while reaching to offer the flask to her. Joyce shook her head, shivering at the thought of the small metal O, wet with saliva, unbearably cold in her mouth.

  Red and gold spotlights swept over two mountain climbers from the armed forces as they scaled the tower at two minutes to midnight, ascending through an image of the earth taken from space, heading towards the white face of the clock.

  “Those poor buggers,” Colin said. “To have to be the star attraction in this noise-in-the-dark show. Only in Canada.”

  “You’re the one who wanted your citizenship so badly I had to marry you,” Joyce said.

  He laughed, not noticing her tone, and said, “You had a few other enticements. Sea to sea to sea. I know them all by now.”

  “That’s what you think.” She decided to let it go. “We need to find something worth coming downtown for tonight. After all, how often does the millennium change?”

  “Too bloody often, if this is all we have to look forward to.” This is the way he talked when he drinks, a little crude, which made Joyce turn her face away from him.

  The countdown was projected onto the Peace Tower as the crowd called out the numbers half-heartedly. They called down to seven, then the number on the Peace Tower jumped up to nine again, before skipping to four, which flashed upside down. The voices petered out to confused silence so that the number one hung in the air, and then, without any fanfare at all, the millennium changed. Fireworks started and ended even before the crowd had the chance to shift their attention to the northern sky. The concussion she usually felt in the centre of her chest was muffled by her winter coat.

  “Well, that was an experience,” Colin said, as the crowd turned with one mind away from the Parliament Buildings towards the few openings in the fence. “I think I’ll go home and drown my sorrows in whisky.”

  “You already have.” She glanced over to see if her daughter was listening to them.

  “Those terrible sounds, especially the crying children,—they made me think there really had been some sort of terrorist attack,” Ruth said. She seemed to be shrugging off her own discomfort now that the broadcast noises had stopped.

  SECURITY HAD BEEN TIGHT on the way in. All fifty thousand in the crowd were frisked with metal detectors, but the narrow gaps in the makeshift fence were not sufficient to let fifty thousand out.

  Now, no one stands at the exits, not a uniform in sight, yet the fences remain standing. A subtle drift can be felt. Joyce is almost lifted from her feet, an irresistible pressure separating her from Colin and Ruth who are swept away in a different direction. So this is how people are trampled to death, she thinks, as though stating a fact that has nothing to do with her. She is being pushed by a heavy soundless wave, isolating, yet singling her out for obliteration. She can’t breathe with the pressure exerted from all sides, like being under black water, trying to come up for air. The stars spin above her, cold salt falling through the dark, salt she can almost taste on her tongue. She feels her feet moving automatically without really bearing her full weight on the ground.

  Pressed insistently against someone else, she lowers her eyes to see a man looking away.

  He has a vague grimace on his face, is warding her off with his forearm pushed up until she can smell the cloth of his sleeve, dry cleaning fluid and good wool, his hand between their faces. Then he manages to lift it further as though there is something floating in the air above their heads, something elusive, like a feather, and he wants to pluck it out of the darkness. Her chest pushes hard against his chest. She’s glad for their winter coats and hopes he is stronger than he looks. He is about her height, his face strong and tense around the jaw, eyes slightly unfocused as though he is lost in thought. His breath, thickened by the cold, moves unpleasantly along her cheek with a faint fresh smell of mint. She is off balance with her attempts to lean away from him, she knows she will be lost without him to push against. Hip to hip, feet moving in a kind of desperate dance, weight about equal, they remain upright like two delicately balanced cards.

  “I’m not doing this on purpose,” Joyce says.

  “I know. I’m not doing it either.” He looks at her directly for the first time.

  “My arm,” he says. “I can’t hold it up any longer.” And his arm drifts down and rests lightly across her shoulder. She curls in closer, not being able to tell if it is her will or something else pushing her into this familiarity. A sudden lurch travels through the crowd and then her nose is in his neck, a cool silver smell. He isn’t
wearing a hat and she can smell the shampoo from his hair.

  Now, the gap in the fence is just ahead and there is a renewed pressure, an urgency pushing painfully towards that point of entry and exit. Her arm moves up to steady her and then it floats around his neck, and she feels his arm, surprisingly strong around the small of her back, holding her upright. Bodies press in all around, the smell of alcohol cloying just over their heads. It feels impossible to get a clean breath.

  “Almost there,” he tells her and for the first time, smiles more generously than she would have expected from his serious, private face. The temporary gatepost opening out to Wellington Street is circled with phosphorescent tape. She focuses, counting the distance to keep herself calm: three metres, then two, finally one, then a push, a collective groan from the crowd, the most dangerous moment. Pushed so hard, she can’t fill her lungs. Their bodies fly apart, but they are propelled in the same direction. He is still watching her as she takes a deep breath.

  “I usually don’t do that on the first date,” she tells him, but he doesn’t laugh. Now people are hurtling past, near misses, like dark stars. She tries to catch sight of Colin and Ruth, but they were separated such a long way back.

  “Did you lose someone?” he asks.

  “My husband and daughter.”

  He looks at his feet then as though this is a rebuke, and she notes that he is wearing black dress shoes.

  “Aren’t your feet cold?”

  “I hadn’t planned this. I just finished work.” He says this hurriedly, and she can see that he is a shy man.

  “Was The Story of Time worth risking your life for?”

  He laughs. A surprise. She has already written him off. “It was a bit bleak. Maybe there are troubled times ahead,” he says.

  “Maybe,” and she turns away.

  “I can help you,” he says. “If you want.”

  A wave of distaste washes through her. It occurs to her that he might pull a pamphlet from his pocket. The Watchtower, or some cranked-out basement mimeograph. She can see the bare arm plunging up and down in bad light. Pockets stuffed full, smeared promises of damnation and catastrophe, fire, ice, floods. He has the shoes for something like that. And the clean-cut hair of a fanatic.

  “I’ll help you find them.”

  “But you don’t know what they look like,” she says, relieved that this is all he means. “Besides, I’ll meet them at home.”

  They start to move for the first time since they are free of the gate. Her legs are a bit shaky. But she doesn’t have very far to go to reach the bus stop on Slater Street. She, Colin and Ruth had taken a bus downtown, with crowds of young people drinking and laughing, wearing long evening dresses under their winter jackets, no hats or mitts. But by the time she inches down through the crowd to where the buses are running, she can see that getting home will mean throwing herself back into that tangled mass of humanity. The crowd is now a little drunker, a little meaner, and more impatient than they were on the Hill.

  “I don’t think I can face that now,” she says. Her legs have stopped shaking, but feel heavy and jelled, as though her bones were filled with mercury. She has never been good with crowds.

  All around, people are sweeping them along, still blowing their noisemakers. A few revelers crack light sticks, releasing an eerie green glow that soon grows faint. Some are writing on the air with sparklers. Lovely, fiery hieroglyphs, tantalizing secrets fading into darkness. She is trying to read these messages lit in the air when a young man stumbles into her path. Then she is down too, and as she falls, her brow explodes, a crystal glassy sound, followed by a warm flood down the side of her face. A woman reaches to lift her, crying out, “Are you all right? You’re bleeding.”

  The woman is holding an empty champagne glass in one hand as though she has thrown the drink in Joyce’s face. There is a kind of hot sparkling pain, not cold like champagne. But there is very little discomfort after that initial flash. The woman drops the stem of a broken glass from her other hand and it shatters like an icicle on the hard street. Joyce waves her off, confused. Was the woman carrying one glass or two? Is she injured or not? Is it champagne or blood running down her face?

  Then he is beside her, gently pressing a folded scarf to her forehead. She leans hard against his hand to stop the bleeding and feels sudden sharp pain.

  “Don’t press. There could be glass,” he says and steps several feet away, bent down. She’s dizzy without his support. He walks back, slowly removes her hand and then presses softly packed snow against the cut.

  “Lucky for you, my store is just down here,” he says, leading her by the arm. Everything is a bit skewed, as she has one eye closed. Soon the snow is melting down her face like tears. Pink bloody tears. She’s off balance, but he keeps her moving more or less in a straight line. The crowd parts to let them through.

  “And you just happen to be a doctor,” she says, once she sees the store with her one open eye. A large modern drugstore lit up with a neon elongated blue cross. When he doesn’t answer, she adds, “That cross is just like something from the Crusades.”

  “Neon was one of the great inventions of the twentieth century,” he says. They are speaking in riddles and she doesn’t know if she is meant to laugh.

  “Along with management theory applied to genocide, light pollution and frogs with four legs.” Then she does laugh. She doesn’t know where this list has come from. Some unknown part of her is thinking fast.

  He’s silent again. They can’t seem to find any reliable rhythm to their conversation.

  She realizes that she’s recently been in this store. Just a few blocks from here, at the Museum of Nature, she’s been doing life studies of birds for a children’s book she is illustrating. On a break, she has bought lipstick here, a fiery red she carries in her purse.

  He searching for keys from inside his coat, zipped away in a pocket that she has never seen any other man use.

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m a pharmacist. I have bandages, ointment, anesthetic.”

  “Imagine that.” Pain makes her sarcastic. She can’t tell if she really means to insult him or if it’s just a way of drawing him out. He takes his time before answering.

  “If you’d rather not,” he says, turning to look at her, waiting for her to set the tone for what remains of their encounter. She sees that he is willing to make her wait as long as it takes for her to make up her mind.

  “Thank you. I would rather not leave a trail of blood behind me.”

  He turns then, opens the door and steps inside the dim large room. He punches codes and flips one switch. A light comes on far back in the store where the drugs are stored on shelves in large plastic jars. But it is dark. He notices her discomfort.

  “And I’d rather not let the world know that we’re here.”

  But she doesn’t find this reassuring. She looks down at her flat practical boots, now leaving a puddle on the grey gleam of his floor. He tries again.

  “It seems every hour of the night, people remember things they forgot.”

  And she laughs. “He has the cure for Alzheimer’s as well!”

  He grins. She starts to plot to win the next smile, so generous and unexpected they seem.

  “Can you make your way back in the dark?”

  “This is everyone’s fantasy,” she tells him, and can immediately feel her face grow hot, but he is walking ahead of her and doesn’t notice.

  In the gentlest possible way he removes splinters of glass with tweezers he’s wiped with rubbing alcohol, cleans the cut with wet gauze. He is left-handed and his wedding ring close to her face comes in and out of focus. The bleeding has stopped.

  “I can try every perfume, open every box of chocolates and eat just one,” she adds.

  He dabs slippery ointment with his finger, a sharp and almost sweaty smell, surprisingly warm after the cool cloth. There are long spaces of silence between them.

  “They don’t break in here for the chocolate. You have innocent fantasi
es,” he says, letting all the meanings hang in the charged air between them.

  He leans forward suddenly and kisses her. There is a strange familiarity in the gentle exploration of his tongue. During the kiss she has the sense that she has been here before, and will be here again.

  She also has the sense that she is here, with this still-nameless man, and elsewhere at the same time. She is here with him and yet she is already in her future, at the Museum of Nature, utterly unable to concentrate on the indigo buntings frozen in a facsimile of flight in the diorama of a still northern forest. It will be that kind of a courtship, if courtship is even a word that can describe what they have embarked upon. The first time they meet in daylight, they will walk to the museum. They won’t be interested in the static wings of the birds with their innocent voices piped through speakers above their heads. Verisimilitude if they keep their eyes closed: the wind and calls of a gannet colony high on a cliff, the gentle surroundings of an early morning in a boreal forest. All gone when they open their eyes.

  THE KISS SEEMS TO SET something free in him, and his formality vanishes. He grows animated, moving quickly while talking, a compact man with the precise grace of a dancer. He gives her a tour of the more personal side of his pharmacy: tells her about each of the antique medicine bottles he has collected and placed on locked glass shelves near the cash. He turns on a light set behind the bottles in such a way that the cobalt blue or amber or deep brown of the glass glows wet and luminous as though each bottle hasn’t yet hardened after being fired and shaped. Then he leads her to a back room, opens the door, and she wonders what he might unleash. The light is intense as she steps through the door.

  “Welcome to my pharmaceutical garden, or my physic garden, as they used to be called,” he says. Under the grow lights are shelves of herbs and flowering plants, the damp floor is concrete, but there is a sitting area with a plush red couch, a carefully made-up single bed and a bathroom off to the side.