by Sam Wiebe
“Yeah. Can’t do that.”
“Go over to the kitchen.”
I waited for him to swing at me. The punch didn’t come. Instead a kick swept out and clipped the side of my knee, too fast to deflect. I was off balance, rocked by the pain. I swung anyway. He batted my fist away, seized my shoulder and propelled me backward into the kitchen, back until my spine hit the countertop.
“Stick your hand in the drain,” he said.
I didn’t. His grip on my shoulder tightened. I tried to shrug him off but his forearm came up into my throat and he bent me back over the sink so the back of my head pressed against the drape over the window and shook it down.
“Stick your hand into the sink.”
I did.
“Fingers into the drain. All the way. Until your hand’s stuck.”
I complied.
There was a switch over the drain. He flipped it. Nothing happened. He flipped it back down.
“Stay there,” he said. “Don’t move and don’t take your hand out.”
He turned and left the kitchen. I heard his feet on the stairs. I tugged my hand. I could have probably pulled it out but I didn’t. I wondered why I didn’t.
Time passed and then the lights went on. I heard thumps on the steps and he came back. Now I spun my wrist to try and free my hand.
“The fuse box,” he said. “That’s where I was.”
I was sweating. Suddenly my hand was free.
“Put it back in there,” he said. “All the way. That’s it.”
He walked up close and reached over for the switch. He kept his face close to mine. He had brown eyes like anyone else’s.
“I’m supposed to hear you say you won’t pursue this,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Chelsea Loam. I won’t look for her anymore.”
His hand reached for the switch and I flinched. My other hand groped at the countertop blindly but there was nothing.
The man flipped the switch. The garbage disposal roared to life. My hand—
Nothing.
The man dropped a small gear and some rusted screws into the other basin and turned off the disposal.
“That’s your warning,” he said. “Put the key back where you found it.”
He walked out of the room. I unstuck my hand. I took some breaths. Then I left, placing the key back as I went.
—
Fear is the least-understood phenomenon. A study of fear would be interesting to read, if you were the kind of person who read studies. What makes it so unappetizing is the nagging sensation that it is the proper state of things. That anyone without fear in their hearts has simply been enveloped in a comforting fantasy.
I drove to the office, going slow and making a nuisance of myself to the rush hour commuters humping over the Alex Fraser. I tried to think of the last time I’d been bullied so successfully. It felt as if someone had erased part of me, as if I’d really lost my hand.
Ken Everett must have known what I was walking into. Rhodes might have forced him to set it up. Or kept him in the dark, it was hard to say. Much as I wanted to confine and segregate my fear, there was no sense to be made, no way to process it.
Outside the office on the eighth floor I heard the strains of an argument through the door. I unlocked it and went inside, went to my office and locked myself in. I sat down and opened the filing cabinet and took a pull off the Botanist. I listened to Jeff and Marie bicker in his office, their voices as clear as if the doors had been open.
“—why you have to be so damn morose—”
“Me morose? Let me know the proper reaction for you saying you’d leave me.”
“It was a joke, Jeff. It was—”
“Wasn’t a joke. I heard—”
“You always—”
“I heard the tone and you were not—”
“Well it’s not like it’s gonna happen—”
“Not the point—”
“He’s a movie star for crying out—”
“Not the point, Marie.”
“Well what is. The point. Jeff.”
“We’ve been talking marriage.”
“Yes?”
“Which is a pretty big commitment for me.”
“Oh, and it isn’t for me?”
“And I’d like to not waste all this time—”
“Who said—”
“—only to find out you’d rather be with somebody else.”
“Jeff, it’s a thing people say—”
“Those are called words.”
“—a funny way to say someone’s cute.”
“Funny to who?”
“I’m not allowed to say I find other men attractive?”
“Not the same—”
“It’s exactly the same—”
“Oh, it is, of course, I’m just stupid.”
“Brianna asked was I happy with you, if everything was going all right—”
“You said I’d do till you left me.”
“I said you’d do till Tom Hardy asked me to run away with him. Don’t you see?”
“I guess I really don’t.”
And so on and so on and so forth. I drank gin and listened to them squawk, and I dreamt of ways to hurt someone whose name I didn’t even know.
12
I DID NOTHING THAT WEEKEND. Laundry, swept the patio, reaffixed a towel rack that had ripped through the drywall. I ordered in sushi and drank tea and worked my way into the back recesses of my liquor cabinet.
And on Monday I still hadn’t reached a decision. I drove to the Kirby house to let them make that choice for me, to tell me how much I should value my neck.
Gail Kirby was out. A mother-daughter team of Vietnamese maids were working through the house. I asked them when Mrs. Kirby would be back.
“Don’t know,” the mother said apologetically. “I’ll get her daughter, please you wait.”
So I waited in the living room and moved a couch so the younger cleaner could vacuum behind it. She wore earbud headphones that snaked down into the pocket of her uniform. She didn’t make eye contact, but nodded her thanks as I slid the couch back.
Eventually Caitlin came down the stairs. She wore a sleeveless button-up shirt and capri pants, and carried a wine glass with two half-melted ice cubes tumbling around inside it. I followed her into the kitchen.
“I’m having sangria,” she said.
“No thanks.”
She poured herself one, catching a couple of fresh cubes as they tumbled from the ice machine built into the fridge.
She leaned against the large island in the centre of the room, tasting her drink with no apparent enjoyment. I stopped in the entryway, still on the hall carpet rather than the blue mosaic tile of the kitchen.
“I’ll simply say this,” Caitlin said. “We both know what my mother has allotted for this silly errand. If you’re here for more money I can tell you I have conditional power of attorney, and it’s my preference to wait and consult with Gail before I authorize any further expenditure.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s having a round of aggressive radiation therapy, if you must know.”
“Sorry to hear that. The cleaners said she was out.”
“Oh, yes.” Caitlin waved her hand in dismissal in the direction of the cleaners. “They don’t speak much in the way of English. It seemed easier to tell them Mrs. Kirby was out than to explain a medical procedure.”
“The daughter is pre-med at UBC,” I said.
“How on earth do you know that?”
“Because I’m a really, really good detective.”
If her nose had crinkled any more it would have been cellophane.
“She has a UBC lanyard around her neck,” I added by way of explanation. “Medical textbooks on the back seat of their station wagon. Her name’s Deanna Tranh, if you want to talk to her sometime.”
“I’ll do that,” Caitlin said. She ran her tongue over the edge of h
er bottom lip. “So is this about money?”
“It’s about seeing if I should continue.”
I told her only that I’d linked Chelsea back to a well-connected biker who was reluctant to talk.
“It’s more than enough for me,” Caitlin said. “However, I can tell you that my mother would only redouble her efforts. But then she’s always been very single-purposed.”
“Listen to you,” I said. “You’re a couple years older than me and you sound like Jane Eyre.”
“Books and film raised me. My parents certainly weren’t around.”
“You wouldn’t spend a dime looking for Chelsea, it was your decision, would you?”
She bit her lip and looked for one moment as if she would have liked to throw something at me. Then she smiled. The kind of smile that has no smile in it.
“You must think I’m some haughty stuck-up lesbian,” she said.
“I hadn’t given much thought to your sexual preference.”
“Come upstairs,” she ordered.
I followed her up, temporarily disrupting Deanna and her mother’s efforts to steam-clean the stairs.
Upstairs we passed through Gail Kirby’s bedroom, tidy and antiseptic, a medical bed with fold-down rails occupying the centre. A plastic gripping rail reached floor to ceiling. Through the next door we entered a sort of office and craft room, with a computer desk and photo printer, a table covered with patterns, various half-finished sewing projects, and on the floor, three dusty boxes and two green garbage bags.
The flaps of one box had been separated. Nestled within were ribbons and trophies, a childhood’s worth of art projects, now just so much construction paper, stale macaroni and glitter.
“Were these Chelsea’s?” I asked. But the era was wrong. The trophies were gaudy and plastic, too ornate for the early eighties when Chelsea came of age. This was late-nineties childhood ephemera.
“These,” Caitlin said, “were Kevin’s.”
I pulled out a framed portrait of a boy around seven, with dark hair and olive-coloured skin. He wore a Winnie-the-Pooh sweater. His mouth was open as if caught in a moment of wild ecstatic joy, as if some force had touched him in the pure pleasure centre of his brain.
“He was Chelsea’s?” I asked. There wasn’t a great likeness between Chelsea and Kevin. Maybe about the eyes, which both seemed brighter than their dark colour would allow.
“She gave birth to him,” Caitlin said.
“Where is he?”
“With Father, in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He was born with a heroin addiction, as well as developmental issues,” Caitlin said. “No one thought he’d survive. Chelsea’s careful parenting ensured that Kevin was diabetic by the time he was walking. She wanted to get rid of him, put him up for adoption. My mom said she’d take him. Which meant that I would take him.”
“Did Chelsea see him often?” I asked. But Caitlin wasn’t listening.
“I had no choice in the matter. I was only a child myself. I never wanted to be a mother, least of all a mother to someone who needed so much more than I could give. The doctor swore that with his accumulation of ailments, it was only a matter of making Kevin’s time comfortable. But he lived into his teens. He passed a year ago.”
“Did Chelsea spend time with Kevin? Get to know him?”
“She’d phone. Sometimes I’d let her talk to him. Other times I’d hang up on her.”
“Who was the father?”
“If Chelsea didn’t know, how would I?”
“How did she feel about that?”
“Honestly, Mr. Wakeland, I don’t care in the slightest. Sometimes she was remorseful and ashamed, other times she was only acting penitent. After the fifth time she vowed on Kevin’s soul to clean up and take responsibility, I told her I didn’t want her to see him.”
“And your mother knew about that?”
“Yes, though she was busy tending to her holdings. It’s only since her retirement and diagnosis that Gail has become concerned with doing the decent thing, and not just what seems decent in the eyes of her neighbours.”
“Parenting is difficult,” I said.
“I’m thirty-nine now, probably past the opportunity to have kids of my own. My biological clock and all of that. Only now am I realizing what I don’t have. I wasted the better part of my life caring for my sister’s child, so that cunt—you see, Mr. Wakeland, I do know how to speak your language—could waste her life getting high and break my mother’s heart. Please go.”
She was staring out the window, over the neighbouring roofs and through the netting of power lines. Maybe toward the Coast Mountains, looming blue against a blue sky. I thought there might be tears but she was clear-eyed, standing there among the keepsakes of a life she no longer cared for, looking out at something else.
—
“Do you think she’s special?” Jeff asked.
We were sitting on a bench in Coal Harbour, a few blocks from Denman where Jeff’s condo was. I’d suggested we take the morning off and walk the Seawall. That eight-kilometre circuit finished, I’d collapsed on the nearest bench and lit a cigarette.
I’d been hoping to sound him out on the Loam case, hoping he’d either say something that made sense, or something that pissed me off enough to do the opposite. Instead I’d been treated to a two-hour soliloquy on the premarital relationships of Jefferson Chen.
The heat was pleasant. It was a good day away from the office.
“Do I think who’s special?” I said.
“Marie. Who else were we talking about?”
“I wasn’t really listening,” I said.
He shook his head. Everyone who passed us was beautiful—trim fit spandex blondes, sculpted shirtless men in drawstring shorts, dark-skinned women, lithe under their summer dresses.
I took a long drag off my cigarette. “Why do you smoke in this day and age?” Jeff said.
“Makes me look cool,” I said.
“Right, sweatpants and a Screaming Trees T-shirt and a cigarette, that’s the cover of Esquire right there.”
We sat. “I don’t know what you should do,” I said at length.
“Yeah, we’ll figure things out. How’s your love life?”
“No movement on that front,” I said. “Remember that Audrey Hepburn calendar I had hanging in my old office?”
“Yeah, we ditched it. Why?”
“It was a gift from my last office assistant. Sometimes when I was in the office for days on end I’d masturbate to that calendar.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Jeff said.
“It’s not the point of the story. Just a salacious detail.”
“Well, I don’t need those details.”
“My point,” I said, “I used to imagine having a relationship with someone like that. She always seemed so happy, so alive.”
“Vivacious.”
“Good word, yeah, exactly. And I used to wonder how long it would take, her being in a relationship with me, to suck every ounce of enjoyment out of her. Leave her a bitter old husk, wandering around a mall somewhere.”
Jeff nodded very seriously. Three women eating gelato walked past the bench. A ways along the path, a cyclist in a lemon bodysuit wove his bike through the foot traffic. A heron exploded out of the water, coursing through the air toward Stanley Park.
“Hanson Brothers are playing the Rickshaw tonight,” Jeff said. “Any interest in coming with?”
“With you and Marie? You probably need some alone-together time.” Jeff took his punk rock seriously, dancing with abandon. I’d spend three hours stranded, holding his jacket and beer.
He didn’t argue the point. I tossed away my cigarette.
“I don’t know how to proceed,” I said. “My instinct, someone tells me to do something, is to do the opposite, just to fuck them up. But you can’t fight bikers. Their money, their connections. And if Chelsea Loam is dead, and it was Rhodes that’s responsible, how in hell does
it benefit anyone knowing that, if there’s no chance he’ll see the inside of a prison?”
“I thought you wanted to talk about yourself,” Jeff said.
“Why?”
“Well, you don’t seem happy.”
“I don’t like to be bullied,” I said.
“You going back to the office?”
Instead I drove home. Showered and changed, frothed some milk and made a half-assed London Fog. Put on Kellylee Evans’s album of Nina Simone covers and sat listening with the sliding glass door open to accept as much of a breeze as the July afternoon could muster.
After a while I got out my MacBook and went to work.
If going after Rhodes was too dangerous, there were other angles to work. The list I’d given Shay contained several of them. Add the identity of Kevin’s father and the circumstances of the party Rhodes and Chelsea had attended. I started with the most basic and most metaphysical question: Who was she and where did she come from?
Vital Statistics had sent Gail Kirby a copy of Chelsea Loam’s birth certificate. I also had her adoption papers. Born to Anne Loam and an unnamed father, Chelsea Anne Loam was brought into the world at Vancouver General Hospital, delivered healthy if a little underweight. Our mothers had shared the same maternity ward. Chelsea’s adoption history was well documented—stints in Oakvale Girls’ House, a year out with a Mr. and Mrs. Forrester, back to Oakvale and then to a smaller facility called the River Run Academy, and then at age thirteen adopted by Lew and Gail Kirby.
I thought back to when I’d asked Gail why she’d adopted an adolescent. She’d said, “It sounds like masochism, doesn’t it? Willingly taking in a thirteen-year-old?”
“Most adopters want younger kids,” I’d said.
“I did it for Caitlin’s sake,” Gail had explained. “I couldn’t have more of my own. She was having a rough time of things. I thought it would help for her to have a sister. So we talked it out as a family at the dinner table. I convinced Lew. Caitlin loved the idea.”
I wondered how quickly that had changed. A sister in the abstract is different than one you have to compete against.
The internet is vast but not all-knowing. I couldn’t find much on Anne Loam. Like her daughter, whatever she’d done with her life hadn’t been well documented. After a while I went to the private detective’s best friend, the Yellow Pages. There weren’t many Loams, six in total. I dialed all of them.
