by L. R. Wright
After a while he was pretty hot, so he went inside and got himself a can of pop, and drank half of it in the kitchen, staring out the window above the sink. He took the rest back out to the garage, and resumed work on the siding. And as he worked, his mind wandered again to Bobby Ransome.
When Warren was twelve and Annabelle was fifteen they’d lived next door to Bobby. Warren’s granddad had an old ’59 Chevy he wanted to get rid of and Warren, who’d loved cars even then, bought the car from his granddad for a hundred bucks, which he earned doing a paper route and collecting bottles and beer cans.
Warren’s folks owned an acre out near Halfmoon Bay, and there was a shed on the property that Warren’s dad let him use as a garage. So Warren bought the Chevy—which was a gut-ugly Biscayne with huge fins, but Warren loved it because it was his first car. And the clutch was slipping, so he bought used parts from Joe Fourquin the auto wrecker guy and set to work to fix it. Which meant he had to first remove the drive shaft and take out the transmission. And Bobby Ransome started wandering over from next door to see what was going on.
Bobby didn’t know a whole lot about cars. Except he knew how to drive, of course. Which Warren did, too, even though he was only twelve. So Bobby watched him working on the Chevy, and he asked him stuff, and at first this made Warren nervous but then he decided he liked it. This big kid squatting on his heels, arms resting on his thighs, hands linked, seriously watching, asking Warren serious questions. It felt good.
But when Warren got the Chevy put back together again, it wouldn’t work. He was some embarrassed. Had to take the damn thing apart all over again. Drive shaft. Transmission. The whole works.
And then finally he figured it out. He’d put the clutch fork in backwards.
Warren, smiling at the wall of his garage, recalled a summer evening. He’d been working on the Chevy all day. And this time, he got it right.
Warren remembered that he gave a great whoop and banged his palm down on the steering wheel, and honked the horn excitedly, which brought Annabelle running outside and Bobby running over from next door. Both of them jumped into the front seat with him and Warren proudly drove the Chevy out of the shed and across the yard behind the house, and they were all three laughing fit to bust a gut and Warren figured he’d never been so happy, before or since.
“Yoo-hoo,” Wanda called from the back porch. “I’m home.”
He put away his tools and went indoors.
“I’ll set the table if you like,” he said as he washed his hands.
“It’s far too early, Warren, honestly,” said Wanda, pouring diet ginger ale into a tall glass. “I need to put my feet up.” She added ice to her drink, then took it into the living room, and Warren followed.
He sat on the sofa and listened to Wanda chatter away about the bank, its employees and customers, and he attempted some aimless conversation of his own but his heart wasn’t in it.
Finally, “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said Wanda cheerfully. “A dangerous sign.”
“Wanda, I really would like us to have a baby.”
She rolled her eyes and groaned. “We’ve been through this, Warren. I told you. When I’m thirty.”
“But that’s three more years.”
“It’s not three more years. It’s two years and three months.”
“Still—,” said Warren.
“I want two more years to enjoy life, thank you very much, before I tie myself down with kids. I told you when we got married, Warren,” she reproved him, “that I wasn’t keen on having kids right away. I don’t think it’s very fair of you to keep bringing it up all the time.” She picked up her glass and drank some ginger ale.
“Wanda, the thing is—”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” said Wanda. She was curled up in a big easy chair. She banged the arm of the chair with a small fist. “No more, Warren. Please.”
“But I read something,” said Warren earnestly, leaning forward on the sofa. “Just listen. Okay?”
She heaved a great sigh, which Warren took as permission to continue.
“See, I read that the best time to have your first baby is when you’re eighteen, something like that.”
“Well I messed up that opportunity good and proper, didn’t I,” she said.
“Yeah, but anytime from eighteen to about—” He stopped, floundering. “Oh, thirty or so,” he went on, “early thirties, somewhere in there, that’s good. And then once the body’s done it once, why it knows how, in a manner of speaking.” Wanda, he noticed, was looking at him incredulously. “And then you could wait a couple of years before having another one, and you could go on having them right through your thirties, and every time gets easier.”
Wanda now had a grim expression on her face.
Warren went on: “But if you wait until your body starts to—to—to, stiffen, see, stiffen up, before you have your first one, why then you’re gonna have trouble, and then probably you wouldn’t want to have another one, so you’d end up with only one kid.”
Wanda gazed at him stonily.
“And that’s what worries me,” said Warren.
Wanda didn’t say anything.
“Having only one kid isn’t good,” said Warren lamely. “A kid should have company, growing up.”
“I’ve got the perfect solution,” said Wanda.
“What?” said Warren cautiously.
“No kids at all. Ever.” She stood up.
“But you’d’ve had them with Bobby, wouldn’t you?” Warren said quickly, bitterly.
Wanda became very still; she looked like a statue, standing there, facing the hallway.
Warren heard the words repeat themselves over and over again in the stillness, like they were echoing in the air between him and Wanda. Maybe he shouldn’t have said them. But no; they had to be said, he figured.
Wanda turned to face him.
“And don’t try to deny it,” Warren said. “Because we both know better.”
Wanda snapped her mouth closed. She swept past him and he heard her march down the hall into the bedroom, and the door slammed.
Warren imagined rows and rows of his unborn children, retreating from him, reproachful and sorrowing.
Chapter 3
ANNABELLE HADN’T BEEN expecting him. Not exactly.
When he came she was very glad there was nobody else at home.
He knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door, because the inside door was open; the day was already hot, although it was still young. Annabelle moved through the kitchen into the hall and saw him, blurry through the screen, sunlight behind him, and she smiled in spite of herself. But she put a frown on, while she unlatched the door. She pushed it open just a bit, and pretended surprise and exasperation. “For heaven’s sake,” she said. “Bobby Ransome. Whatever are you doing at my door?”
He smiled at her, of course, but she ignored that and told him calmly and politely to go away.
“Give me a cup of coffee at least,” he protested. “And get me caught up on stuff. I hear you’re married, for instance.”
“Yes I’m married,” said Annabelle primly, “and I have several children, too.”
“Several?” said Bobby. “What’s that, ‘several’? Whaddya mean, ‘several’? How many’ve you got?”
“Three.”
“Three’s not ‘several,’ ” said Bobby, and he stretched out his arm and pressed his hand against the side of the house, leaning there. “Three’s three.”
“All right then, three,” said Annabelle. “Now I’m very busy, Bobby, and you have to leave right away.” He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and he was tanned very brown. She wondered where he’d been since he got out of jail. She thought he must have had an outdoor job of some kind, to have gotten so brown.
Finally he shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and she watched him amble across the yard toward the road, where a small blue car was parked. She was still watching when he reached it, and somehow he knew this bec
ause just before he got there, while still sauntering away from her, he lifted his arm and gave a wave; and then quickly turned to look at her over his shoulder. He shook his head, laughing, to see Annabelle still standing there.
She was flustered by her encounter with Bobby Ransome, and went into her garden to calm herself.
It was a very private place, virtually surrounded by trees and brush, about thirty feet behind the house. It was small, about twenty feet long by fifteen feet wide, including the small lawn she had built there, with strips of grass purchased from the garden shop. At the east side of the garden, where it shouldered into the hillside, was a stand of alder trees. On the other three sides there was brush, which Annabelle kept cut back, and down, so that it gave privacy to her garden without keeping out the sunlight.
She looped the handle of her pail over her left hand, took a pair of pruning shears in her right, and began a slow inspection. Carefully she removed several dead blooms from one of her rosebushes, cutting them off at the first five-leaflet leaf that faced away from the center of the plant. The flowers were oyster-colored. They fascinated Annabelle, who had never seen roses that color before. She also had a bright yellow rose, a dark red one, two pink ones, and one that was the color of an apricot.
She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sundress, and her feet were bare. Her back was sweating, and under her arms. Annabelle lifted her face and closed her eyes and stood quietly, feeling the heat of the sun, listening to the bees nosing at her flower beds and the birds murmuring in the alder trees. Her feet seemed to be gripping the earth like roots. She let her body sway slightly; the smell of roses and crisp dry grass was thick and sweet. She heard leaves rustle and opened her eyes, slowly, and with a sleepy smile turned to greet her child, whichever one it might be who was coming through the brush.
But it wasn’t a child.
The smile stayed on her face, forgotten, as she looked at him. He was holding branches apart with both hands. He stepped toward her and let go of them and they sprang together again, closing the gap. Now they were together, she and Bobby, in her garden.
Annabelle didn’t think to say anything to him. He was looking at her intently, and he seemed much nearer to her than he actually was. She wondered why they weren’t speaking, either of them. She wondered what he’d heard about her, since he got back. She felt the smile tremble on her face and thought it was going to disappear, but instead it changed.
Oh, well, thought Annabelle, only vaguely aware of having made a decision.
She looked up into his green eyes, and there grew inside her joy and mischief and exhilaration. She allowed her smile to bloom. She saw that Bobby was holding his breath, but Annabelle breathed deep and slow, giving him her blazing smile.
“I didn’t say goodbye,” he said, after a long time. He stepped close to her. “Annabelle—”
“Shhhh,” said Annabelle, laying her index finger across his lips.
“Mama!” cried Camellia, crashing through the bushes. She stopped in confusion to see a strange man in the garden with her mother.
Annabelle stepped away from Bobby Ransome, toward Camellia.
Bobby looked at the child, and then at Annabelle. She imagined that she could hear his heartbeat, fast and hard. Finally he nodded, and backed through the brush, and was gone.
Chapter 4
CASSANDRA MITCHELL LEANED back in the swing, letting her long dark hair hang down behind it. “Maybe she is crazy,” she mused. “She could be crazy. She talks to herself, after all.” She closed her eyes, and the day was still so bright that light filtered through her eyelids, creating a field of pink.
“Me, too,” said Alberg. “I talk to myself, too.”
Alberg’s daughter Diana, who had a summer job with the local newspaper, was working that evening. So Alberg and Cassandra had gone to Earl’s Café for hamburgers. Now they were sitting on a garden swing in Cassandra’s backyard, drinking lemonade and talking about Hetty Willis.
“Probably you’re both just eccentric,” said Cassandra tolerantly.
Hetty Willis pedaled about the town on an elderly bicycle, a brown-paper shopping bag riding in the wire carrier. She wore a black shawl all the time, whatever the weather; it was draped around her shoulders and tied in a knot in front. She was never seen wearing a jacket or a coat; she never carried an umbrella.
“She lives in that big house all by herself,” Cassandra went on. “Except for her cats.”
And she did talk to herself—often, and unintelligibly. Sometimes she came into the library, to peer at the spines of books, and her incoherent mutterings could empty the place in minutes.
Cassandra lifted her head. “So, tell me. Why’re you asking about her?”
“I have to talk to her,” said Alberg.
“What about?” said Cassandra. She didn’t really expect him to tell her. “See, look at that, now,” she said in disgust, pointing at him.
“What? What?” said Alberg.
“Your face gets all closed off. It smooths itself out and closes itself off. That makes me so mad, I cannot tell you how angry that makes me.” She pushed herself off the swing. Sometimes she thought she didn’t know him any better now than the day they’d first met, in the Harrisons’ restaurant for lunch, after he’d replied to her “Companions” ad in the Vancouver Sun.
Alberg, smiling, stood up and put his arms around her. “I like the way you smell,” he said. “I like the way you look, too.”
“I’m overweight,” said Cassandra into his shirt. “I’m getting old.”
“You don’t know nothin’ about old,” said Alberg with a sigh, “until you’re staring fifty in the face.”
She gazed at him, thoroughly exasperated. Was it a good thing, she wondered, or a bad thing, that he’d forgotten she was only three years younger than he.
He touched the side of her neck with his tongue and moved his lips to her ear. “I love you,” he said to her ear; he didn’t even know for sure that he’d said it out loud. But then she turned her head and drew back to look at him, and there was such solemnity on her face that he knew he must have actually said the words. And he was dismayed. And this must have shown in his eyes, because she shook her head and laughed at him.
The blue house stood on the east side of the road, high on the hill that dropped down to Davis Bay. He pulled off the highway onto a chunk of concrete that was cracked and crumbling, with weeds growing from every seam and fissure, weeds now brown and dead, killed prematurely by the brutal summer.
Alberg cut the motor and rolled up the windows. He got out of the car and locked it, then looked up. The house stood at the top of a very long flight of cement steps. He couldn’t imagine an old woman lugging bags of groceries up those steps. There had to be a back entrance.
From this angle the house looked like the house in Psycho. Except that it was bright blue. And painted not so long ago, either. It was a particularly noxious shade of blue, he thought, to use on a house.
The steps went up, and up, and up. There was a railing beside them. Alberg put a hand on it and gave it a quick shake and watched as the resulting wobble scurried upward; the whole damn railing all the way up the hillside shuddered. He squinted upward at the blue house, a bright blue shriek against the fading evening light, and started climbing.
He labored up the crumbling steps thinking about his upcoming birthday—it made his heart grow cold to acknowledge that he would be fifty in less than three weeks. But my God my wind’s better since I quit smoking, he thought, beginning to pant.
Halfway up the stairs there was a landing, a concrete pad about three feet square upon which sat a deck chair. Alberg stopped and looked at it approvingly. It was the old-fashioned kind made of wood and canvas, like a hammock with a frame, faded and torn but still usable. For some reason it made him think of his mother’s piano, an upright with a stool that you twirled around to make it higher or lower.
He looked up at the bright blue house. He saw no lights, no sign of life at all—except
for two cats peering at him from the veranda, beneath a window framed in lace curtains. He grasped the railing and propelled himself up the last six feet of steps and stood in front of the veranda, breathing heavily, eyeing a big sofa that he figured used to be maroon. Three more cats lay upon it. The sofa had been torn almost to shreds.
Alberg walked up the steps onto the veranda and looked for a doorbell. There was no bell and no knocker, either. But there was a little brass crank, which he turned, and he heard it squawk inside the house. Almost immediately the door opened, and an old woman looked out from behind it.
“Mrs. Willis?”
“MizMiz,” she said, unblinking.
Alberg thought for a moment. “I beg your pardon?”
“MizMiz. NoMissus.”
“I’m sorry,” said Alberg. “Ms. Willis.”
She wasn’t much over five feet tall. She seemed a collection of sticks and knobs, with very little hair; it was long and gray, what there was of it, and he could see her scalp through it.
“My name is Alberg. I’m with the RCM Police. Can I talk to you?”
“Ohohoh,” said Hetty Willis. She stared at him for a few more seconds. Then she pulled the door open wider, and scurried inside.
Alberg stepped through into the house. He realized that he had been aware for several minutes of an unpleasant odor, which now surged out of the house and smacked him in the face. It was the smell of cat urine. He tried to breathe through his mouth.
Hetty Willis had hurried on stick legs through the vestibule and was now crossing a large entrance hall from which a wide stairway led to the second story. There were three doors, all closed. She scuttled toward the door on the left, and as she neared it she started to make high-pitched crooning noises around quick repetitions of the word “Hurry.” Her hand reached for the glass doorknob; a roar of animal clamor rose from behind the closed door, surely too big and too loud to be coming from a few domesticated cats—Christ, thought Alberg, images of rough-coated cheetahs and cold-eyed lions springing to his mind. The old woman turned the handle and pushed open the door, releasing a tide of normal-sized cats that streamed across the threshold and into the hall. It undulated speedily across the worn hardwood floor toward Alberg.
