by John Niven
‘Daddy?’ Walt was sitting up.
‘Mmmm?’
‘What’s that noise?’
I listened. ‘What?’
‘Listen.’
I thumbed the ‘MUTE’ button on the remote (on the screen, just as I did this, Lotso Huggin Bear was being picked up by the garbage man: the last image, the last moment, of normality for me) and sat forward. I could hear it now: a deep regular thumping, somewhere outside, somewhere above the house, getting louder as we both stood up and moved towards the huge picture window, looking up into the black sky and pelting snow. The noise was very loud now, even through the double glazing. It must have been deafening outside. Then, suddenly, a white cone of light burst down through the night and started circling the field in front of our house. ‘What is it, Daddy?’ Walt asked, scared, clutching my hand now. I could see other lights up there in the sky, red and blue, flashing and blinking around where the white spot began.
‘It’s a helicopter.’ My mouth was dry.
As I said this it revealed itself; coming belly down out of the darkness, the black number ‘157’ painted on its white underside, the windows and floor vibrating, rattling, as it came down into the field just a hundred yards or so from the house, wobbling as it set down on long runners. ‘Wow!’ Walt said, his terror turning to excitement.
My emotions were already running in the exact opposite direction to Walt’s. Because now I could read the gold lettering on the door of the machine, the door that was already opening, two figures jumping down and ducking under the chopping rotors, running towards the house.
I could read the words ‘Saskatchewan Police Department’.
And then I was running, sprinting up the half-flight of stairs and into the kitchen, fumbling with the lock that opened the sliding doors out onto the decking, my hands shaking, trying to block out Walt’s jabbering stream of enquiries behind me. The phones are all out and the roads are closed. But – to have flown here in this weather? Oh Jesus. I was picturing pile-ups, emergency rooms, as I watched the two figures, the policemen, wading through the knee-deep snow towards us, pulling the brims of their hats down, trying to keep them from blowing off in the backdraught from the blades. With a heavy snap I finally unsnicked the lock and slid the door open, a freezing blast of air hitting me in the face. Walt tried to follow me out onto the deck in his T-shirt. ‘Walt! Stay in here!’
‘But –’
‘Fucking STAY, Walt!’ For a second I thought he was going to cry. I placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Sorry, son, it’s too cold out there. Just wait here a minute. OK?’ He turned sulkily back into the kitchen as I stepped out onto the deck, sliding the door shut behind me as I watched the policemen coming up the steps towards me, everything getting quieter as the helicopter powered down, the rotors making a slower shucking sound. I could see the pilot in the cockpit, snapping up switches and pulling toggles. Oh Jesus Christ, oh Jesus Christ, please let everything be OK, please be OK. Everything slowed down, like they say it does, and I felt like I was treading through deep ocean as I moved towards the lead figure, a man, older than me, in his fifties, with a silvery moustache, his face wet with snow as he removed his glove and extended a cold hand for me to shake and I knew he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I just said, ‘Yes?’
‘I’m Sergeant Danko, Regina PD. This is Officer Hudson.’ I noticed, with faint surprise, that Hudson was a woman.
‘It’s my wife, Sammy. Isn’t it? Something’s happened.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Oh Christ, oh Jesus, she should have stayed at the apartment, please be OK, please be OK, please . . .
‘Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’ Danko asked.
I looked through the glass and saw Walt standing alone in the kitchen, his head bowed a little, watching us shyly through his fringe.
18
DANKO SAT DOWN across the low coffee table from me in the living room, our dinner plates still lying on it. Walt stayed in the kitchen with Hudson. He had taken his hat off, revealing thick silver hair, some of it plastered to his head with sweat. He was explaining about the phone lines being down, twisting his hat in his hands as he spoke, turning it like a steering wheel.
‘Please, Sergeant, is she badly hurt?’
‘I’m afraid we think she’s dead.’
A tidal rush of nausea, a vertiginous whooshing, like I had suddenly woken up to find myself teetering on the brink of a chasm, tiny pebbles skittering from under my toes, falling into nothingness. I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands, trying to take deep breaths as my mind scrambled around, trying to latch onto something. I got there after a few seconds.
‘You think?’ I said.
A mistake. This is all a mistake.
‘Well.’ Danko swallowed and I saw now how nervous he was. This scared me more than anything so far, because this was an old cop. A seasoned guy who I sensed had surely done this kind of thing more times than he would have liked, who had sat in many living rooms and kitchens delivering life-ending news like this.
‘We haven’t been able to positively identify the body yet. A credit card belonging to your wife was found with the victim but there’s, and this won’t be easy for you to hear, sir, there’s considerable, ah, damage to . . .’
All these words, ripping me to pieces. ‘Victim?’ I manage to whisper.
‘I’m afraid so, yes. It appears your wife was murdered.’
Now I felt tears and racking sobs trying to fight their way up, hearing myself saying ‘Oh Sammy, oh no’, as my eyes landed on a Lucite-framed photograph on the coffee table; the three of us in Hawaii a couple of Christmases ago, on the beach, Sammy drying Walt with a big beige towel. Uselessly I remembered that afternoon; a long wait for appetisers in a restaurant. An argument about parking. Walt’s life as he knew it – over.
‘Mr Miller, I’m afraid we . . .’ Danko was saying.
I knew what he was going to ask me next.
‘We need . . .’
‘You need me to identify the body,’ I said, through clenched teeth, through my fingers.
He nodded, sadly.
‘I . . . I can’t. I can’t put Walt through that.’
‘Officer Hudson can stay here with your son. She’s a trained psychologist and very good with children. We should be there and back in less than an hour. Unless you have someone nearby he’d be more comfortable with?’
‘I, have, there . . . there’s a neighbour.’
He nodded again. ‘Mr Miller, in the circumstances, it might be better just to tell your son that your wife’s been involved in an accident and that you’ll be back soon.’
I rang Irene from the hall. She answered on the second ring. The helicopter. ‘Sammy’s had an accident,’ I told her, practising a version of the lie I was about to tell Walt. ‘I need to go into Regina with the police. To the hospital. I don’t want to take Walt. I’m so sorry, Irene, but do you think you could . . . ?’
‘Oh God. Oh dear Lord. Of course, Donnie. Do you, is, is she OK?’
‘I think it . . . it’s quite bad, Irene.’
For a second I almost believe this version of events. I briefly picture myself walking into a hospital room, seeing Sammy with tubes coming out of her. Bruised and cut but alive. Kissing her tenderly on the forehead, her smiling weakly, woozy on painkillers, as she tells me about the tailgating on the icy highway.
‘Oh no, oh God,’ Irene said. ‘I . . . I’ll be right over.’
In the end Walt bought the accident version of events much more easily than I had imagined. He looked worried, but, maybe, more jealous that I was getting to go on the helicopter. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour,’ I told him, zipping up my parka and looking for my gloves as there was a gentle knock at the glass door. Danko opened it and Irene came in nervously, nodding hellos. ‘Thanks for coming, Irene.’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I brought a few things, just in case you’re longer than you expected.’ She set down her bag, a big
old Gladstone, Mary Poppins-type thing. ‘Are you sure it’s OK to fly in this weather, Officer?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Danko said. ‘We can get up and around it.’
‘OK then,’ I said, leaning down and hugging Walt again, feeling sobs trying to fight their way up into my chest. I took a sharp breath in through my nose. ‘See you both soon.’
The helicopter went straight up. Ascending almost vertically for thirty, forty feet – with me waving back at Irene and Walt who were standing at the brightly lit kitchen windows – before the pilot dipped the nose and we powered into the wind, veering away from the house, rising in a gradual turn, snow whirling all around us.
Danko and I were in the back, cramped in front of a gun rack: a pair of pump-action shotguns, an assault rifle. As we got higher up, as it got quieter, he leaned in and started to tell me the facts.
Sammy had left the office around eleven thirty for an unscheduled meeting. She may have taken a call on her cellphone that initiated this meeting. Her cellphone had still not been found. Her colleagues assumed she’d headed straight home after lunch somewhere downtown, to beat the storm. Her body was discovered by two city workers on a vacant lot on the eastern outskirts of Regina at six fifteen that evening, her purse and ID nearby.
When had I last seen her? At the party. As she walked away from me, back towards the fireplace and the advertising conversation. Hitching the strap of her gown up.
I let my head drop down, started to cry. Danko looked the other way.
If I had known that would be the last time I would get to talk to her I would have kissed her on the mouth. I would have told her how much I loved her and thanked her for giving us Walt and being such a good mother to him. I’d have told her about all the things I remembered from our years together, all the things we had never spoken of that were burned into my mind forever. Tiny stupid moments.
Sammy giggling and saying ‘Oh, right . . .’ as I clumsily leaned across the bar-room table to kiss her for the first time.
Sammy laughing when she discovered how scared of spiders I was.
Sammy on the hotel bed, looking up at me, across my stomach, her chin slick as she said, ‘Boy, I’ve had my protein today.’
Sammy crying so hard the first time we argued.
Sammy’s guilty expression when I caught her by surprise in a fast-food place downtown, about to bite into a burger.
Sammy lying back after she’d given birth to Walt, woozy from blood loss, pale as a geisha, yet smiling as she watched me holding him.
I remember it all, Sammy. Everything.
19
IT WAS ABOUT a week after Banny tried to make the Professor eat the bit of paper that it happened, in Miss Gilchrist’s English class.
It was the last period of the day and everyone was tired and listless in the hot, late-spring classroom. Miss Gilchrist had colourful, kind of funny philosophical posters on her walls: a cartoon child on a stool, fist on chin, thinking, with a bubble above his head saying, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.’ Four cows in different fields, separated by barbed-wire fencing, each cow poking its head through the fence to eat the other cow’s grass.
We were doing the poem ‘In the Snack Bar’ by Edwin Morgan. I don’t know why she suddenly rounded on Banny that day. Maybe she’d had enough of his staring out the window, blatantly not listening, defacing his jotter, or the desk, never paying attention. Maybe it was the near-ceaseless babbling and sniggering with Tommy sitting next to him. Whatever the reason, she interrupted Jackie Shaw’s endless monotone reading of the poem (‘hiss-of-the-coffee-machine-voices-and-laughter-smell-of-a-cigar-hamburgers-wet-coats-steaming’) and said, ‘Derek Bannerman?’
Banny looked up, breaking off from whatever he was saying to Tommy. ‘Whit?’
‘Excuse me?’
A sigh. ‘Whit, Miss?’
‘Why do you think the poet chooses these particular images here?’
A blank stare. Vacant hatred. ‘Ah don’t know, Miss.’
‘Well, I’m asking you to think about it, Derek.’
A long silence. Miss Gilchrist perched on the edge of the desk, her arms folded, poetry book dangling from one hand, as all thirty-odd faces in the class turned towards Banny. Just by asking this question she had broken one of the unspoken rules that surrounded a pupil like Banny, a rule that said, roughly, ‘Leave me alone and I will allow you to teach the rest of the class. Fuck with me at your peril.’ She had breached etiquette and had to expect a reaction. Banny fidgeted for a second, fingering his tattered, defaced copy of Seven Modern Poets, waiting for her to sigh and say, ‘Anyone else?’ Waiting for hands to go shooting up and things to move on. But she didn’t, she stared him down, Banny getting agitated under the fluorescent strip lighting. Finally he shrugged and said, ’Cause he’s a fucking bentshot, Miss?’
The class exploded; a fifty–fifty blend of laughter and gasps. Miss Gilchrist let it subside and said, ‘Yes. I do sometimes wonder why you think nearly everyone we study in here is gay, Derek.’
There was a further ripple of laughter, at a teacher using the word ‘gay’, and then, right there in the front row of desks, far away from us at the back, a lone hand went up.
The Professor.
‘Yes, Craig?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Please, Miss, it’s called “denial”. Derek thinks everyone is gay because he’s secretly worried he might be gay himself.’
It is difficult to convey the effect this statement had on the room. A few people laughed – just at the continued repetition of the word ‘gay’ – but most of us just stared open-mouthed at the Professor before slowly turning to Banny to see what his reaction was going to be, the enormity of the situation slowly dawning: the Professor just called Big Banny a bentshot in front of the whole fucking class.
Banny was slowly going very, very red. He was getting a roaster, a red neck. A fucking beamer. I felt my own face warming, flushing.
At the party, at his dad’s house, the glimpse into the murk of the bedroom. Straightening, buckling up. Banny’s stare, fierce. Defiant. Tommy starting to say something that day, starting to say, ‘Mind that time?’ then tailing off, running off towards those empty ginger bottles. ‘Ah’ve fingered her . . . ah’ve rode her . . . she’s a bike . . . ye don’t look at the mantelpiece when yer poking the fire, wee man . . .’ In the cold tent, the crackle of the dying fire, the pressure on my groin, his breath hot on my neck, the smell of vodka and lager. Pushing against me, hard, urgent. ‘C’mon . . .’
Tommy was the first to speak. He laughed mirthlessly and said, ‘You’re dead, Docherty.’
‘OK, that’s enough,’ Miss Gilchrist cut in. ‘Now, let’s get back to the poem. Jackie, where were you?’
The lesson went on, but no one was listening. Everyone was stealing glances at Banny who, incredibly, had still said nothing. He was staring at the back of the Professor’s head, a fury glittering in his eyes beyond anything I had ever seen before.
He battered the Professor over by the trees after final bell. Docherty just went foetal and took it all as Banny flailed and pummelled into him with feet and fists, a tasselled weejun connecting with his mouth, busting his lip open, a fist smacking again and again off Docherty’s red, swelling ear, and then a couple of teachers were running over and pulling Banny off. Docherty’s parents came into school and saw the headmaster and went mental and Banny got suspended for a week and that was it, over.
But it wasn’t. The battering wasn’t enough for Banny. Not nearly enough. A poofy wee tool like Craig Docherty? You’d batter someone like that for looking at you the wrong way. What did you do to make restitution for calling you a bender in front of the whole class? No, a kicking wasn’t going to cover it. Not even close. We all knew that.
20
I WAS SITTING on an orange plastic chair in an office, an anteroom of some kind off the main morgue, down in the basement.
We came down from the rooftop helipad in a freight elevator and then through
a series of gently downward-sloping corridors. Hospitals, with their forests of signage – ‘Paediatrics’, ‘Oncology’, ‘X-Ray’ – and their endless bustle. It occurred to me as we came down in the ancient, clanking, brass-gated elevator that the last time I was in Regina General had been nearly nine years ago. When Walt was born. (‘Hostibal,’ Walt used to say when he was tiny. Like ‘bullets’ were always ‘buttels’ to him.)
The pathologist, a Dr Manuel, was sitting next to me, Danko opposite, both of them waiting patiently for an answer to the question Manuel had just asked me. He was balding, bespectacled and tired-looking, not just tired in the sense that he looked like he could use a good night’s sleep, he looked tired of all of it, of what we can do to each other. As I guessed you might when your job involved looking at the worst things nature, accidents and man can serve up on a daily basis. I turned the terrible question over in my mind for a long time while I stared at a set of silver kidney-shaped bowls on a table next to Danko, the bowls arranged concentrically, in decreasing sizes, like a cross section of a metallic Russian doll (the useless thought: How many human organs have been placed in those bowls? Will Sam’s . . .) until finally I answered in a quiet voice.
‘She has a . . . a little strawberry birthmark on her, just at the line of the pubic hair.’
Manuel nodded and sat quietly, staring at the floor, and then asked, ‘Is there anything else?’
I thought for a moment before turning to look at him. ‘Won’t that do?’ I said.
Manuel held my gaze sadly. The enormity of what he was saying hit me and a fresh wave of horror broke upon me.
‘Oh God.’ I said. ‘Oh Jesus.’
‘Mr Miller,’ Manual said gently, ‘I don’t want you to have to view any more of the remains than is strictly necessary. It’s your choice of course, but I really think it would be much better for you to remember your wife as you last saw her.’
Yes, just like you told Walt about Herby.
