Vancouver Noir

by Sam Wiebe

  He slips an arm around my waist. “When Emmaline goes to bed, I want to creatively satisfy you.”

  “Emmaline?” I say.

  “Shit. I mean Hannah.”

  * * *

  We have the Horseshoe Bay playground to ourselves. Just us and the crows.

  Emmaline is fussing. She doesn’t want to ride the wet swings, won’t eat the cut veggies Sage packed.

  Hannah taps our diaper bag and asks for an applesauce pouch. Before I realize what’s happening, she marches it over to Emmaline.

  “No, Hannah!” I shout as Emmaline slurps the whole pouch down.

  “It’s okay.” Sage grabs the empty package and scans the ingredient list. “Hannah was being sweet. It’s just, if Em gets a taste for processed food . . . and it’s sweetened with apple juice, which is basically sugar . . .”

  Jenna rummages through her snack bag. “I guess she won’t want homemade hummus after fruit juice.”

  “Oh relax, you guys,” Misty says with a laugh. “Look how happy Emmaline is now.”

  “Because of sugar. She’ll crash soon.” Sage shakes her head. “I’m not mad. It’s just . . .”

  * * *

  A week or so later, Hannah and I have a chill day, so I pack a picnic and we walk to Whytecliff Park. She falls asleep in her stroller, which means I should go home and vacuum the drapes. But I’m feeling rebellious. Let Jake earn our rent for a change.

  Sage’s Tesla is in the parking lot. I glance in the window and it slams me all at once.

  Sage and Jake. Necking like teenagers. I slink away before they see me.

  I push Hannah toward home, the hour’s walk made twice as long when she wakes up and demands release. She splashes along beside me, holds my hand and half-sings songs from music class. I pay enough attention to keep her safe from cars and headed generally forward, but the rest of my mind is stuck in the back of that Tesla.

  I could leave Jake, get a job bartending, and try to find a crummy apartment with whatever money’s left after childcare. Or I could make the best of this fucked-up situation, put in my two hours of housework for a free ride in what most people in the world would call paradise.

  By the time I reach the boathouse, I’ve decided to say nothing. Hannah’s thriving with her new friends. Jake reads with her now, even took her to the park the other morning. Before I met Sage, I was trapped inside my own Cinderella story. She waved her wand and everything is better. So what if she wants to share my prince?

  And there’s another perk. I text Tommy: Tandem paragliding?

  * * *

  I drag Hannah to the ladies’ room handicap stall. The ferry’s rocking, but I manage to apply colored hairspray until her dark mop is blonder than Emmaline’s. I spray mine gray to look like I’m her grandmother. A quick change of clothes and we’re no longer the people in the Amber Alert.

  I try to load her into the stroller but she clings to me, screams when I try to set her down.

  We’ll ditch the stroller. In case the bus driver remembers.

  I clutch Hannah’s hand and lead her to the gangplank.

  * * *

  The rain breaks, and Sage invites us for playgroup on her boat. Except when I arrive at the yacht club with Hannah, only Sage and Emmaline are waiting.

  “Jenna and Misty couldn’t make it. But we’ll have a fun foursome with our daughters.”

  She skippers like a pro. Of course she has the perfect outfit, wide blue-and-white stripes and an adorable captain’s hat.

  She cuts the engine in a calm bay, puts the girls down for a nap below deck. She returns with a bottle of white and a thumbs-up.

  After we’ve shared half the bottle, I say, “Jake’s cheating on me.”

  “No!” Her eyes grow huge. “He seems so into you, and you give him all the freedom in the world. Why would he cheat?”

  “It’s fine.” I’m sure my laugh sounds contrived. “Frees me up to play with Tommy.”

  “Oh my.” Sage’s eyebrows lift. “Have I created a monster?”

  “I don’t know. Did you create this?”

  “I dragged you up from a life that was clearly no fun.” Her smile gives way, showing a crack of a sneer underneath.

  I refill our glasses, draining the bottle. “Why did you invite me out alone?”

  “Because it’s time,” Sage says, no pretense left. “Time to give Jake up. He’s mine. We’ve both known for a while.”

  “We can share him.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She shoves a vial into my hand. I frown and turn it over. There’s no label, nothing to indicate what the ounce or so of liquid is.

  “I learned everything about him after I read Rebecca’s Room. It was clear on every page that he wrote it for me.”

  I push my wine away. “Most readers say that with fan mail.”

  “I wanted his daughter to play with mine. I wanted him to see what a good mother I am so I could replace you.”

  Replace me?

  “I read about you being swinging singles back in the day, a regular Toronto Scott and Zelda. I knew that was my easiest way in.”

  I tap the vial. “What’s in this?”

  “You love Hannah so much, you should give her the life I’m offering. She can have the room next to Emmaline’s. She can go to any school, any summer camp, any international exchange. She’ll have the very best chance to be strong enough to take on this sad and crazy world.”

  “Are you telling me to kill myself?”

  “Might be easier than watching your daughter grow up without you.”

  “Why would she grow up without me?”

  “Read Jake’s love story for the full answer.”

  “He never lets anyone read before his editor.”

  Sage cocks an eyebrow. “He let me.”

  “That’s not . . .” I don’t finish the sentence because it’s impossible to accept that Jake let Sage read before me. “Jake can do what he likes, but Hannah stays with me.”

  “We’ll let the courts decide, shall we? When Jake moves in with me, he’ll have a fixed address. They’ll award him initial custody. You’ll have to fight to get her back, and I’ll make sure that never happens.”

  “The court won’t just give you my daughter.”

  “Courts can be bought like anything else. Plus, I have footage of you stoned and drunk and fucking Tommy.”

  “Jake d-doesn’t know what Hannah eats for breakfast,” I stammer. “He wouldn’t want full custody.”

  “He wants me to be happy.” Sage sighs, a contented cat with nothing left to wish for. “I’ve always wanted two daughters, but Emmaline’s birth was atrocious and I can’t have more. I told Jake he should spend more time with Hannah. Take her to the park, read books with her. I got a great photo of them together on the tire swing.”

  Of course. It was too good to be true, Jake wanting to be a better parent spontaneously.

  “He agreed to let me tell you. He’s a coward that way. Can’t stand conflict.”

  It’s true. Jake couldn’t even fire his first agent. He sent me to their coffee meeting to do it for him.

  “He’s packing now,” says Sage. “He’ll be moved into my house by the time we’re back to shore.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “He’ll keep our New York and Hong Kong apartments. He barely has any business in Vancouver anymore. Honestly, I think he’s relieved.” She stands up to go get us another bottle of wine.

  I study the yacht’s control panel. A steering wheel, a gear shift—forward, neutral, reverse. I might give it a few knocks while docking, but I could get the girls safely back to shore.

  I picture Hannah growing up in that house. Jake, loving but distant. Sage, disturbed beyond belief.

  When Sage turns away, I grab the wine bottle and crash it into the back of her head. She yelps and crumples to the floor. I lift her tiny body over the edge. The water is a thousand feet deep, according to the dashboard GPS. She’ll drown before she comes to.


  I’m nearly back at Eagle Harbour when a police boat pulls up beside me. Over the megaphone, they instruct me to cut my engine and allow them to board.

  The female officer finds Sage’s phone mounted to the dash. “Didn’t know you were being broadcast?”

  In my stomach, I know what’s happened. She wanted to die. Jake might have fucked her senseless, he might have taken her advice to spend more time with Hannah, but he rejected her invitation to a brand-new life. I had what she wanted, what she truly thought was hers, and she needed to take me down with her.

  “Our children—they’re sleeping below deck.” I realize with a thud that Sage put them down. If anything happened to Hannah—

  I exhale with relief when the officers carry up a groggy Hannah, followed by an equally alive Emmaline.

  “Mama?” Hannah reaches for a hug but my hands are cuffed behind me.

  * * *

  Police are waiting in Nanaimo, scrutinizing foot passengers as we enter the terminal.

  A tap on my arm. “Could you and the girl step aside?”

  The vial digs against my hip.

  A few others are pulled aside. Moms mutter, annoyed for the delay. Kids are fussing. Hannah’s enjoying the action, pointing out every dog, every baby, every boat.

  They’re checking ID. We could slip under the rope, but I wouldn’t get far carrying Hannah. And without her, what’s the point?

  I slide two fingers into my pocket, roll the vial between them.

  “You’ll be okay.” I stroke Hannah’s hair, try to match her grin as she pokes my nose. “Your father will rise to the occasion, or close enough.”

  One cop won’t take his eyes from me, speaks low into his radio.

  I unscrew the cap, draw the vial to my nose. Bitter almond.

  “Your grandparents will pay for an excellent education.”

  Three other cops circle, staring at Hannah and me.

  It would be so easy to swallow, to erase twenty-five years of sporadic prison visits, erase the decades after release when she might meet me for the odd coffee but mostly make excuses for why she doesn’t need me in her life. Or in her children’s.

  I brush hair out of her eyes. She’ll need a cut soon. “You just have to stay confident, stay kind, make good friends, true friends who adore you for who you are.”

  I tip the vial back. She’ll have to navigate her teen years without me.

  But what if our prison visits go well, and I say even one thing that helps?

  I’m about to dump the liquid on the floor when Hannah taps the vial, knocking the contents down my throat.

  The circle tightens. An officer has handcuffs out.

  I slump to the ground, clutching Hannah to protect her from the fall as I fade from consciousness. I whisper in her ear, “It’s okay, munchkin. You’ll be strong. You’ll be loving. You’ll be . . .”

  PART II

  Rags & Bones

  The Midden

  by Carleigh Baker

  South Cambie

  Well, this is unexpected, but I guess no one ever expects dead bodies. Not in places that aren’t morgues, or battlefields, or graveyards. I certainly didn’t think there’d be one here, in the abandoned, boarded-up house next to my own home, on the corner of Cambie and King Ed. But here we are.

  There are certainly some expectations when trespassing in a vacated home. It’ll be quiet of course—a deep, engulfing quiet that only comes when the electricity is turned off for good, and the space has been empty long enough for the crackle of human existence to float off into the atmosphere. Energy never dies so it must go somewhere else. Maybe it goes to other neighborhoods, but what’s left sinks to the earth like a deflated balloon. These leftovers—dust, moss, mold—are the biology of the dying home. Distasteful things that might make us feel better about the living, breathing biology of our own homes. South Cambie is a dead neighborhood slowly being ingested by condos, but I’ll get to that later.

  This body smells like someone threw steak in the compost. It’s not overwhelming because the body isn’t that old. It’s dressed in a V-neck undershirt and a cardigan, pants cut awkwardly above the ankle, no socks. Skate shoes. Some people don’t like this look—kind of normcore—but I do. Simple and youthful. There are no visible wounds, but rats have eaten its eyes. I assume it was rats, anyway. Maybe eyes are a rat delicacy, or maybe just a habitual first target, like when we get a chocolate Easter bunny and go straight for the ears.

  Here’s another unexpected thing, I knew this body when it housed a person. His name was Daniel, but he went by

  Diezl. I may have been the last one to see Diezl alive—around this time yesterday—and that brings a prickly feeling of responsibility to the situation. And so, standing here in this mausoleum, I try to remember what color Diezl’s eyes were. And, obviously, wonder how the hell he ended up here.

  It doesn’t look like he was dragged—this would have left a trail of displaced junk, since the house is full of it: empty beer bottles, needles, piles of pink insulation. He must have died inside, but why would he come here? His territory is way down past 49th, in the neighborhood that’s still mostly alive—for now. But Diezl’s body appears to have just materialized here, the rotting sneakers and McDonald’s bags around it untouched. He always had his skateboard and his bag of spray cans with him, but there’s no sign of them. My flashlight flicks across his hands, curled into a rigor mortis grip. Diezl has huge hands, always stained with paint.

  Through a busted window, I can see the dark outline of my own house. Ben will still be asleep.

  I’ve been breaking into the abandoned places in South Cambie for a while now. A person needs to know the story of the land they live on, even if it’s not pretty. Especially if it’s not pretty. Some houses have been sitting empty since the push to redevelop the neighborhood started last year, while others are freshly vacated. Companies like Millennium and Bosa have bought up nearly everything, but not the place where Ben and I live, not yet. Ben’s buddy owns it—he told us he’s holding out for eight million, and if you think that’s crazy, you don’t know Vancouver. The last offer he got was four million, so for now we get to stay. He says that if the cops find us squatting, he’ll deny knowing us. Ben hates that, but he puts up with it.

  Most of the glass is long gone from the windowpane, but I still take my time crawling out. A couple of rats look up at my dangling feet, unafraid. There’s been an influx of rats recently. A lot of them get hit by cars, their little mashed bodies rotting in the street. Yesterday, I opened a cupboard door and found a smallish one nibbling on Ben’s cookies. It’s not a great place to live, I’ll admit. But it’s practically free, and that feels like giving the finger to capitalism.

  I’ll also admit that when we moved here six months ago, the dying houses totally freaked me out. This one is in terrible shape: crumbled carport, roof caving, thick moss on the siding. Ample signs of the neighborhood taggers brighten things up a bit, but they worried me too at first. I thought they were gangs—Diezl had a good laugh about that. Fukit seems to be a pretty prolific artistic presence in this neighborhood; his tags are all over. There may be a turf war going on, though, since **Kitten** has been making a move, painting right over Fukit’s old tags. Or maybe Fukit just got tired and fucked off. It wouldn’t surprise me. Everyone in the city seems to have forgotten South Cambie exists. Weeks go by without anyone collecting our garbage or recycling. Most of the garbage in this backyard is ours, we just toss it when the bins fill up. This is supposed to be my last break-in, since it was the house I was the most intimidated by when we first moved to the neighborhood. Some kind of milestone, but I’m not sure for what any more. Diezl was disappointed that I wanted to do it alone.

  * * *

  Around the time things started to get a little rough with Ben, I started going for long walks in the neighborhood. The first time, I was getting out of the shower and he was pissed because I’d used all the hot water. This isn’t hard to do, since the water heater has been leaki
ng like crazy for ages. I told him if we just showered together it wouldn’t be a problem, and for some reason he flew off the handle and started yelling, pushed me and I slipped on the wet floor and banged my face on the towel rack. I chipped a tooth and split my lip. Pretty dramatic, I guess, but Ben swore that hadn’t been his intention—like, to actually injure me—and of course he was right. He’s not a violent guy. Still, the last thing I wanted to do was crawl into bed next to him. I slipped out while he was screwing the towel rack back into the wall, looking miserable. He really did seem to feel guilty about it.

  The place next door—creepy in the day and downright terrifying at night—looks right into our backyard, since someone ripped the plywood off the windows. Awful whether I pictured a human standing in the shadows watching, or the vacant stare of the house itself. I went out the front. We’re on the southwest corner, surrounded by huge laurel hedges that hide the house completely. But we exist. There’s an overgrown staircase that’s easy to miss, almost like bushwhacking out of a magical secret garden, except totally not. I bushwhacked out of a giant, moldering house that was somebody’s affordable palace in the seventies, but it’s a dump now, because why would anyone take care of something with numbered days? Spongy walls, split hardwood floors, and high ceilings that cave in a little and dump plaster muck on the floor when it rains.

  It was one in the morning, and there wasn’t much open in Cambie Village. The presence of the Canada Line station across the street makes the neighborhood a fairly unsafe place to be at night, even though it’s sandwiched between Shaughnessy to the west and Queen Elizabeth Park to the east. I decided to walk south, toward 49th. That’s where I met Diezl.

  He passed me on his skateboard, then stopped. “You should be careful, there’s some guy in the neighborhood grabbing women at night.”

  “Grabbing them?” I looked at his hands and quickly back up at his face, hoping that hadn’t made it seem like I was implicating him. Those humongous hands on such a small guy.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah, sorry to be creepy but . . .”