Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  The rest of the day was spent walking, often single file, on a narrow, winding trail. Fog settled and there wasn’t much to see other than the few sheep that appeared out of the mist from time to time with splashes of red or blue on their coats to identify their owners. Somewhere along the trail I joined up with Philip and we chatted, exchanging pleasantries about where we lived and what we did. He said he was a secondary school teacher, which didn’t surprise me. I told him I was a microbiologist in the water department of a mid-sized city in western Canada. He thought that was impressive, but I assured him it really wasn’t, since my job was now mostly administrative and I barely understood modern water treatment systems. I said I’d come to realize I was slouching my way to retirement. I told him also that my parents had emigrated from England, and he asked me if I’d ever been there, and I said no, there were no family ties. I wasn’t even sure where in England they’d come from. The north, I thought, although they’d worked in London during the war. Philip thought it was unusual that I expressed no interest in knowing more. I agreed. “But they’re both gone now,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  My hamstrings turned to jelly from hours of walking downhill, and I was never so glad as when I saw the van waiting for us at the pickup point. The men congratulated me on my stamina—they actually applauded as I climbed into the van—and they confessed that there had been an easier way down, which they would have taken had they not believed I could handle the shale slope. I was flattered and, now that I was safely in the van, elated. I was ceremoniously given the slip of paper with our route on it as a souvenir, and I folded it and put it in my pocket. I almost fell asleep on the winding drive to Mr. Burke’s inn. I didn’t wonder whether Ian would be there when we got back. In fact, I’d completely forgotten about Dublin and an early flight home.

  When we arrived, the driver dropped us in the parking lot and two of the younger men transferred their gear from the van to the trunks of their cars. I found myself walking with Philip across the lot to the inn, and it wasn’t until then that I noticed our rental car—mine and Ian’s—was not where it should have been. I stopped walking. Philip stopped beside me. I stood staring, as though a crack had opened in the parking lot and swallowed our car.

  “What is it?” Philip asked.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  I felt myself somewhere between tears and anger, but I managed to hold both at bay.

  “I think Ian is gone,” I said. “It’s my fault. I haven’t been honest with him. I’m not a good partner. In fact, I’m not even a very good person.”

  Philip looked at me as though he was thinking, and then he said, “I don’t know you well enough. I’m sorry.”

  Of course he was right. What had I expected him to say? Did I think he would be comforting because he was a Christian, or a man who liked a good confidence because he was gay? We walked on then, as though I had not spoken, and I tried to cover my embarrassment by babbling about how tired I was, and who would have thought walking downhill would be as tiring as walking up? We parted in the foyer of the inn and I returned to our room, where I found that Ian had indeed left.

  I could have thought, Why would he do that? But instead I sat by the open window wrapped in a blanket, shivering, thinking about how I deserved to be left behind. I was the same person I’d always been, the silly girl who ignored every bit of advice and every warning she’d been given by people who cared about her. I’d revealed my true history to Ian when it was too late for him to make his own choice about things as important as marriage and children. He’d been duped by a charlatan in a black dress on the night we’d met, when he was still a handsome twenty-six-year-old, recently jilted and far too good for my cold heart—or at least that’s the way I saw it at that moment.

  I went to bed without eating, my body tired and aching. I didn’t know whether it was self-pity that kept me awake or euphoria from the hill-walking adventure. The two vied for my attention, and I managed to snatch only a few minutes of sleep here and there.

  MY ENCOUNTER WITH the Englishmen was not quite over. At breakfast the next morning they greeted me as though I were an old friend and told me they were all going to church, an Irish Sunday mass. I hadn’t been to church since the last wedding I’d attended, but I agreed to go—not because I wanted to go to mass, but because I wanted to be with them. I noticed Philip looking at the spot in the parking lot where our car should have been, but he didn’t mention Ian. We walked to the church in a group and sat in a long pew and the locals stared at us, especially the children. Some of the climbers knelt and genuflected during the mass, and they all prayed and sang joyously. One of the younger men had a beautiful voice, and I wondered if he might even be a professional singer.

  We exchanged fellowship greetings at the end of the service with the large family in the pew in front of us. Afterward, we went back to the bed and breakfast and collected our bags, but still we didn’t go our separate ways, because when I told them I would be taking the train to Dublin to arrange an early flight home, they said they were going there too. They’d travelled in two rental cars, and they made room for me in one. They even drove me to the airport. No one asked about Ian or why I was travelling alone now, so I assumed Philip had told them what I’d said to him. My eyes filled with tears as we said our goodbyes. They hugged me one by one, and I didn’t hold back but fell into them, each one, like a person desperate for comfort. Philip told me I was special and I didn’t know what to say, but I felt, briefly, as though it might be true.

  Afterward, when they were gone and I was inside the Dublin airport, I remembered that the business of believing anyone could be special was what had made me, like my mother before me, suspicious of Christians, or at least the ones who insisted on telling you they were Christians. As though anything at all—goodness, intelligence, least of all faith—made you special. I was glad to have that straight again, even though I appreciated the kindness of the men and believed it had been genuine.

  Because the flight to Toronto was full, I had to wait to find out if there would be a seat for me, but eventually I heard my name on the intercom—Frances Moon, please report to the Air Canada counter—and I was told that, yes, I could change my ticket, and I was given a boarding pass. I wondered if Ian would be on the same flight, but I didn’t see him anywhere and assumed he had flown home the previous day.

  As I got in the boarding lineup, I noticed an enormously obese man in front of me. I followed him onto the plane, and he made his way through business class and past the plus-size seats, which were all taken, to an ordinary aisle seat in row 23, where he sat after lifting the armrest between it and the next seat.

  Row 23. I glanced at my own boarding pass, and sure enough, row 23, right next to the man. I slipped out of the line of passengers, ducking my head beneath the overhead bins, and tried to decide what to do. I could see that there was only half a seat remaining next to him. I wasn’t a big person, but I would be in for an uncomfortable flight home if that was the only spot available to me. Could I ask a flight attendant to find me another? Could I do so without making a scene or humiliating the man? It seemed like some kind of ethical dilemma.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Ms. Moon?” a voice said. I turned around to a flight attendant, who asked to see my boarding pass. Then she quietly told me they were upgrading me to business class because there were no other free seats in economy. She was speaking almost in a whisper. No mention was made of the reason for the move. I followed her back through the line of people and their carry-on luggage, dodging the traffic by popping in and out of the rows until we arrived at the front of the plane, where I was directed to my own little pod. I wondered briefly whether I should have offered the upgrade to the obese man, who was bound to be uncomfortable even in two economy seats, but instead I accepted my own good fortune and settled in to take full advantage of it. I ordered a Scotch.

  “Or make that a double,”
I said. “Save you a trip.”

  I could see the flight attendant wondering if she’d made a mistake in rescuing me, but she brought me my drinks.

  Once we were in the air, I began to consider the rental property I owned in the small town of Elliot, left to me by my mother. It made sense for me to think of the house now, since it was the full repository of what remained of my family’s history. In other words, my former life was in its basement.

  The house had been built by my uncle Vince, although he never lived in it. When he died, it went to my parents. My mother claimed it as her backup plan, and she had in fact lived in it for a time after she sold our dairy farm. She probably should have moved instead to a place that appealed to her, although at that point in her life, I don’t know where that place would have been. After she died in the care home in Yellowhead, I moved her possessions to the basement of the house and stored them there, alongside the furniture and old clothing and boxes of knick-knacks and dishes from the farm—all the remnants of my childhood. I found long-term renters for the house, a responsible retired couple who didn’t mind doing caretaking duty for the remains of the Moon household, and they lived there for fifteen years, never missing a rent payment. They did all the necessary home repairs, except for a new roof, which I happily paid for. I’d not had to worry about a thing until one of them—I couldn’t remember which—developed a need for dialysis twice a week and they moved to Yellowhead. I would have sold the house then, but a real estate agent named Mavis had appeared on the scene with a young couple looking for a place to rent. Mavis had offered to manage the rental herself, and once again the arrangements became easy and had remained so for several years.

  Now, under the weight of my confession to Ian, I saw the house and its possessions as an unresolved burden. They would have to go. There were no renters at the moment, although a pair of first-year teachers had arranged to move in later in the summer. Maybe Mavis could convince them to buy the house instead. I could direct her to take whatever she could get for it—practically give it away, just to be rid of it. I could tell her to hire someone to haul everything in the basement to the dump—every box, every bag of clothing—something I should have done years ago.

  Immediately, I saw a problem. I knew Elliot well enough to know that anyone Mavis hired would be appalled at the idea of throwing good things in the dump, and I’d have some Tom, Dick, or Harry in the basement with his girlfriend or his mother or perhaps his whole family, salvaging my family’s things. And could I even trust Mavis, whom I had never actually met, to do as I asked? Maybe she herself would be rifling through my possessions. She’d already asked me if she could bring some of the furniture upstairs, since the young teachers had requested a furnished house—“We could do a vintage look,” she’d said; “there’s that cute fifties dinette”—and I had agreed.

  Our flight attendant was on her way up the aisle again, this time with boxed meals. Instead of a meal, I asked for another double Scotch, because I was now considering a return to Elliot to take care of the family archive myself. A man across the aisle was clearly assessing whether I was on my way to causing trouble. The attendant rummaged through her trolley and handed me two little bottles with a look that said they were the last. I tried to seem good-natured. I wondered whether the easiest solution to the house and its contents was to ask Mavis to start a fire in the kitchen and burn it down.

  After the meals were cleared away, I attempted to settle under a blanket. I slept fitfully, and then, what seemed like minutes later, the attendants were serving coffee and handing us Canadian newspapers as though they had just arrived, hot off the press. I tucked a paper in my carry-on bag for later and tried to dilute the Scotch in my system. When the plane was almost ready to land in Toronto I fell asleep in earnest, and then woke up again to an attendant trying to check my seat belt, and for a brief moment I thought she was my mother.

  Once we’d landed, I collected my carry-on and stumbled from the plane. I swayed on my feet while I went through customs, fell asleep while I was waiting for my connecting flight west, almost missing it, and finally ended up on a small and noisy turboprop, with an excruciating headache and a fear of what was waiting for me. The husband and baby finding their way to the surface of my consciousness meant something. Ian leaving me in Ireland meant something. The house in Elliot was plaguing me for a reason. They were all part of the same quagmire, and I had no idea how to keep myself from sinking.

  The plane hummed like it might fall apart. I pulled the newspaper from my bag and read through the headlines. One on the second page caught my eye: Saskatchewan Homeless Man Dies after Waiting Full Day in Hospital ER for Treatment. I read the article. The incident had happened in my local hospital, in my home city. The man died of a catastrophic head injury that could have been treated had he not been ignored—allegedly ignored, as they are always careful to say—because he was known by the staff and was unpredictable, according to an unnamed hospital source. I wanted to weep because someone had died for being unpredictable. I folded the newspaper and stuck it in the seat-back pocket in front of me. By the time we began our descent it was midnight and I watched the city lights rise toward me from the surrounding blackness.

  We landed. I retrieved my bag and caught a cab.

  THE CENTREPIECE OF our living room was a poppy-red couch with lime-green piping. Ian and I had chosen it together. In months of searching, it was the only one we’d looked at that we both loved. We’d sat on it side by side in the store, nodding our heads in agreement that this was the one. Now we sat at opposite ends, eating the fried-egg sandwiches I’d made and watching the evening news, my suitcase still by the door where I’d left it the night before. Ian had worked that day, Monday, even though he wasn’t scheduled to return until later in the week.

  The story of the homeless man was on every network. The family was threatening to sue. A hospital spokesperson was trying his best to prevent this by being apologetic without admitting liability, or really anything at all. He described the incident as unfortunate. The camera cut to a memorial that was growing in the hospital parking lot: flowers, cards, messages, prayer flags, stuffed animals. The homeless man’s sister spoke on behalf of the family. A reporter asked her if she was angry. She didn’t answer his question.

  “He didn’t deserve to die,” she said.

  After we’d eaten, Ian did the dishes, as usual. We both read for a while, or pretended to, and then went to bed. We slept in the same bed, an invisible line drawn up the middle, my confession in the room with us like a smothering fog. In the morning, Ian got ready for work again. As he went out the door, he told me he was flying to Vancouver the next day for meetings. He’d be home the day after.

  All morning I sat on the couch and thought about Elliot, the place I’d grown up, a place that had not been my home for a long time. Then I thought about how little I really knew of the city I did call home, and where I’d lived most of my adult life. I knew the neighbourhood I lived in with Ian, which was not the kind of neighbourhood where people held block parties and community picnics. I had known the neighbourhood where I’d lived as a student, but I did not know it now. I knew the pathway I walked between home and work each day—unless it was too cold, in which case I took the bus, my small contribution to environmental responsibility. I knew the malls where I shopped and banked and went to a movie once in a while. But there were many areas of the city that I didn’t know at all, neighbourhoods I had never visited, streets I had never been down.

  I chose a part of the city that was unfamiliar to me, and I drove there and parked and walked along the street. It was as though I were in a different city. It was mid-afternoon and the street was busy with a stream of women with baby strollers and preschool children, many of them Aboriginal, many of them new immigrants from African countries or the Philippines. I saw one woman wearing a niqab. Besides the mothers and children, there were a number of teenage boys wearing baggy jeans and walking, I thought, with that rolling gait of gang kids, althoug
h they didn’t look especially dangerous and none of them paid any attention to me. In fact, I felt invisible.

  I saw an old-style Safeway sign up ahead, and as I got closer I heard hip-hop music coming from an outdoor sound system, and I saw that there was a massive garage sale going on in the parking lot. I recalled a time when my mother and I had come to the city, and we’d been robbed and carjacked and forced to drive to a Safeway store. I wondered whether this was the store, but I had no idea. Even at the time we hadn’t known where we were and had been unable to tell the police anything of use. A few years later, when I was refusing to go to university for the good education my mother so badly wanted for me, she asked me if I was afraid to go. I knew what she was getting at. I lied and said no. I didn’t want to admit to being afraid of anything. “You were the one who was a complete coward,” I’d said. “Like a mouse in the corner.” It was mean and I knew it. As though my own mother was the cause of the damage done, instead of a blonde-haired woman in cowboy boots and her silent partner.

  As I joined the festivities in the Safeway parking lot, I saw a vendor selling hot dogs from a cart for a dollar, so I stopped and bought one. I stood eating my hot dog, listening to the music, and watching people wander from stall to stall looking through the used clothing and furniture. Then I went into the store and felt immediately as though I didn’t belong among the strangers loading their carts with diapers and groceries and kitty litter, so I left. On my way out, I heard one woman call to another, “Sister, it’s good to see you. I heard you’ve been sick.” I wondered how you could not know that about your sister, and then I realized they weren’t really sisters, and I was envious of a neighbourhood where you could run into someone who might call you sister.