When she came back downstairs, her mother didn’t ask. Instead, her mother asked for her doctor’s name and number, and how often she’d been to see him, and how many ultrasound appointments she’d been to so far. And then she called and made arrangements for all the appointments that Audrey had blown off or missed or hadn’t made yet.
And when her father came down from Canmore the day after they brought Shelly home from the hospital, he didn’t ask. He walked around the house poking at the cracked plaster and peering up into the corners of the ceiling at the water damage. He frowned at the hole in the basement door and sucked air in through his closed teeth when he looked at the furnace.
‘You should get your landlord to fix that,’ he said the first time he heard the refrigerator rattle to life. But he never asked her. Audrey saw her mother give him a look, and he shook his head, and never asked.
‘This place is a wreck, Audrey,’ said her father before he went back to Canmore.
Her mother stayed longer and eventually she went back to Canmore too, and Audrey spent her first night alone in the house with her daughter, carrying her around between feedings while she whimpered or wailed. Tried to sing her songs that she hadn’t learned the lyrics to. Did her best to feed her when she needed feeding, no matter how tired or sore or raw or confused she was. Terrified, alone in the dark. She sat on a chair gently coaxing burps out of her tiny daughter, tapping her back with a flat palm, and her heart raced and raced. She tapped and Shelly wouldn’t burp and instead she squirmed and screeched, and Audrey, heart racing, alone in the suddenly-way-too-big house, couldn’t imagine not being scared and exhausted ever again.
Her mother came back a few days later with more baby clothes, more diapers, more muslin blankets and wipes and little cloths for cleaning up the spit-up, for wiping milk off chins. She brought a little countertop sterilizer for bottles and a rented pump to help Audrey’s milk come in.
She brought a year’s worth of mail, which she left on the counter. Audrey waited until she was alone in the kitchen to go through it all. Pay stubs from Moose Leg, and then an employment termination letter. Bank statements. And then the letter from the insurance company. She read the letter from the insurance company that explained her new premiums following the accident involving her Honda Civic. She set this face down on the table and cried, as quietly as she could, alone in the kitchen.
They never asked, and after a few months had gone by, Audrey realized they never would. She’d never have to tell them the story. She’d never have to tell anyone the story, she realized. Her mother came for a few weeks at a time and gradually her trips back home to Canmore got longer and longer, and Audrey sat alone in the dark, burping her daughter, and she wasn’t scared anymore, just tired.
§
In the Frequently Asked Questions section of their website, West Majestic Developments outlined the various provincial regulations for walleye fishing in Two Reel Lake and explained that it was the responsibility of individual property owners to secure fishing licences. Audrey sat at her desk at lunch and looked at artist renderings and floor plans. Sixteen two-bedroom condominium units, and twelve one-bedroom units, as well as eight two-storey main-floor town homes. Quartz countertops, steam showers, wide-plank hardwood floors. The townhouses had real wood fireplaces.
There was a digital illustration: a huge red-brick building in a sun-washed, idyllic valley. In the foreground, a family of four sat in a boat, fishing. All of them blond and apple-cheeked. A red-brick building that was just part of a larger, sprawling complex – reflective glass in black steel frames, stainless-steel balconies, red cedar patios with colourful sun umbrellas. You could make out the small shapes of people in swimsuits sunning themselves on their cedar decks or drinking from martini glasses around gas barbecues.
She tried googling:
Crash Palace Closes
Alex Main Arrested
Two Reel Lake Drug Bust
… but didn’t find anything. The Calgary Herald and Red Deer Advocate stories hadn’t made it to their digital archives.
She went back to the West Majestic FAQ page. ‘Construction begins Spring 2010!’ it told her. She stared at the illustrated building. Tried to imagine the Crash Palace underneath all the new wood and glass and steel.
‘They should just knock it down,’ she muttered at the computer. ‘Knock it all down and start over. If they haven’t already.’
‘But they probably haven’t,’ she said to herself that night, standing over the sink doing dishes while Shelly played with her train blocks in front of the TV.
It’s probably just sitting there empty in whatever shape he left it in. She hadn’t been able to find more, so her imagination just had that original paragraph in the story about his death to go off. A few words and phrases: ‘fined,’ ‘unlicenced hotel and bar,’ ‘known to police,’ ‘ongoing problems.’
She imagined the building, alone and empty, in the cold. She wondered what state it was in. Had they known? Did they have time to pack everything up and clear out? Or were they surprised? Had the RCMP rolled in while the party was in full swing, music blasting, hundreds of kids dancing upstairs in the ballroom, Gurt Markstrom somewhere in the crowd whispering in people’s ears and making tallies on his little notepad?
‘Choo choo choo,’ sang Shelly in the living room, knocking blocks together.
You know who wasn’t surprised? The goddamn Skinny Cowboy. No one caught him at anything. No one ever had and no one ever would. Heck, Audrey didn’t even know his name. The goddamn Skinny Cowboy. He’d found her, but if she ever wanted to find him, she didn’t even have a name to go by.
Hey, Skinny Cowboy, she couldn’t phone him up to say. Leave me alone ’cause I don’t owe you anything, but first tell me about the night the RCMP came and tell me how it all went down and what’s even up there still and what kind of shape is the place going to be in when the bulldozers finally show up in spring 2010?
She stacked the dishes on the counter, propped on a tea towel to dry. Dried her hands and poured herself a glass of water.
‘Mom mom come see,’ hollered Shelly from the living room.
She drank a glass of water, looking up at the jar on top of the refrigerator.
He’d found her but she wouldn’t even know where to look for him.
‘Mooooooommmmmeeeeee come seeeeeeeeeeeee,’ whined Shelly.
‘Coming, baby,’ she said. She drank her water and put the glass into the sink. She went to the living room and Shelly showed her the train course she’d made. Audrey sat on the floor with her daughter and listened while Shelly pushed the train along the plastic track, singing a little made-up song that was mainly snatches of ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ with train sounds instead of words. She sat on the floor watching and sometimes she looked up, over her singing daughter, into the kitchen.
§
At work she placed the cut-out photograph of the Skinny Cowboy from the newspaper down on the copier. Closed the lid and hunted through the menu, then found the option to Enlarge 200%. The result was grainy and pixellated, but you could get the general idea looking at it.
She’d printed out the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? in a large font across the top of another page. She carefully positioned the two sheets together on the copier and ran off a page combining them. Now the image quality was even worse.
Anyone who knows him would recognize him from a worse photo than this, she thought.
At her desk she turned the page ninety degrees and carefully wrote an email address across the bottom, over and over, in a series of vertical tabs: [email protected]. She made twenty copies. Then she sat with a pair of scissors and cut around each of the email tabs, to make tearaway flaps.
When Shelly was in bed, Audrey went out into the night, down the block to the wall around the hole. She was careful not to cover any of Marnie’s posters. Marnie would pull down anything that had been put overtop of one of her own. She’d pull them down and crumple them up and leave th
e crumpled paper there on the sidewalk. Audrey stapled her posters to the wall in a strip a few feet to either side of Marnie’s block of nightclub and theatre bills. Stapled them up and then spent a minute pulling off a few of the tearaway address tabs from every fourth poster.
Make it seem like there’s some action, she thought. Get the ball rolling.
The hole behind the plywood wall hummed. There was a pump down at the bottom. They’d dug below the water table, Audrey figured. Water was pumped into a firehose that wound up the four storeys through a concrete stairwell that protruded upward like a stalagmite, then out into the alley on the other side of the block. Even after they’d stopped working, after they’d packed up all their tools and taken down the crane and left the hole, the water kept pumping. The pump ran around the clock, all year long, the electric hum and gurgle of water pumping out of the hole and into the drain in the alley.
§
Audrey didn’t own a computer. Her cellphone was an old flip-top with a black-and-white screen, not one of the new smart phones with a web browser that the men in suits riding the elevator at work stared into between floors. If she needed to send an email or fill out an online form, she did it at work, on her lunch break.
She sat at her desk eating reheated rice out of a Tupperware container and opened her email. There was a reply. Her heart jumped in her chest. A reply from a garbled address made up of random letters and numbers at a domain she didn’t recognize. She opened the email and there was a URL, which she clicked without thinking.
Dozens of browser windows immediately opened, all of them pornography. The volume on her computer was up and groaning slapping panting grunting poured out of the speakers.
‘Cole, what the hell are you doing?’ asked Harold, standing behind her.
‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ she said, doing her best to close the windows. She clicked the little ‘close browser’ buttons as quickly as she could and more windows opened – harshly lit naked men and women fucking on couches, in showers, on kitchen tables. She tried to close the windows and her hands shook.
Harold reached across and turned off the power of her computer. ‘Jesus, Cole, be a little smarter. Don’t click email links. Don’t make me get some internet safety consultant in here.’
‘Sorry, Harold. Sorry.’
When he was gone, she went to the bathroom and sat in the stall, her heart racing, and she wanted to cry, but goddammit if she was going to cry at work.
§
She dressed Shelly up for daycare on a Thursday morning. Mittens, jacket, toque, boots.
‘Mum, I wanna stay. No daycare.’
‘Come on, kiddo. Let’s go see all your friends. Let’s go see all your teachers.’
Shelly sat down heavily on the floor and pulled off her mitts. ‘Mum, I don’t wanna!’
‘Shelly, come on.’
The little girl stretched out on the floor crying. Audrey stood above her waiting.
She stood above her crying daughter and then she stepped over her and walked into the kitchen. Audrey reached up above the fridge and pulled down the mason jar. Dropped the key into her hand and slid it into her pocket. She put the jar back on the fridge top.
She phoned Harold.
‘I can’t make it, Harold,’ she told him. ‘It’s a stomach thing. You don’t want me around.’
She listened to him for a while and when he was done she said, ‘Sure thing, Harold. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She went back to her crying daughter.
‘Come on, kiddo,’ she said. She reached down and pulled Shelly up by the armpits. Shelly flopped back down on the floor. She picked her up again and held her this time, kneeling down so her face was level with her daughter’s. Found a tissue in her pocket and wiped Shelly’s face and nose.
‘Come on,’ she said, holding Shelly’s face tightly against her shoulder, ‘let’s go to daycare.’
Later she pulled Joe’s van into a gas station in Inglewood just off Blackfoot Trail. Filled the van’s tank and paid with her own credit card. She watched the dollar counter climb and climb on the pump. Winced inside thinking about the number. She imagined all of the next month’s bills spread out on the table in front of her, with eighty extra dollars on the credit card balance.
‘We’ll make it work,’ she said to herself, topping up the gas and twisting the fuel cap back into place with a click. ‘We’ll make eighty bucks work.’
She sat in the idling van, staring at the traffic up ahead on Blackfoot Trail. She put a hand in the pocket of her jeans. Pulled out the single key with the blackened tab of masking tape.
That’s Blackfoot Trail right there and then you take the second exit to get Deerfoot northbound. And then Deerfoot Trail takes you right out of the city. Turns into Highway 2 going north. It’ll be busy with midweek traffic but not so bad and just stick to the right-hand slow lane and let everyone pass you. Joe’s van will be fine. Full tank of gas. Stick to the slow lane and then turn off at Red Deer. Turn off and head west, past Nordegg, and find that Two Reel Lake road. You’ll remember the turnoff when you see it.
You’ll be up there in three hours. You can get out and have a look. And then you can come straight back. You’ll be back to pick Shelly up from daycare just like always. It will just be like you’d spent the day at work. No one will ever know you were gone.
‘I just want to see it one last time before they tear it down,’ she said to herself, sitting in the van. ‘If I can see it, then I’ll stop thinking about it. See it one last time and then they’ll knock it down and I’ll never have to think about it again.’
Her cellphone rang.
She pulled out her little flip-top cellphone and looked at the tiny display screen. The 12th Avenue United Church number. Sometimes Joe Wahl would call her when she had the van if he remembered something extra he needed: pads of paper from the office supply store, or maybe he’d put the wrong quantity of coffee on the list. ‘Hey, Audrey, see if you can pick up some fresh fruit,’ he might ask.
When he called though, he called from his office, which was a different number. This was the number the Misses from the daycare used.
It rang a few times and she stared at the screen. It vibrated in her hand while it rang. She sat in the idling van, listening to the phone ring and vibrate in her hand.
Then she answered it.
‘Miss Cole, Miss Cole. So glad we caught you. It’s Shelly, Miss Cole. She is pretty sick again. Throwing up, diarrhea. Like the other day, Miss Cole. Needs to go home. Needs to go home and get better.’
Audrey said, ‘Of course, I’ll come get her. I’ll come get her right now.’
She sat in the idling van for a while, staring out the window, not really looking at anything. After a while she drove out of the parking lot. Headed downtown, toward 12th Avenue, where her daughter was.
§
On Friday, when Shelly was feeling better, Audrey took her to Mirko’s. The street in front of the grocery store was full of big SUVs parked in the no-parking zone with their hazard lights blinking, people inside lined up for their black kalmata olives and Macedonian sheep feta in brine. Glen sat in his chair with his papers. People came out of Mirko’s with their grocery bags and Glen looked expectantly at them, holding up the stack so they could read the masthead.
‘Glarpy,’ asked Shelly, ‘how magic work?’
Glen took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. ‘That, little miss, is a very serious question for a very little girl. You must be a very serious little girl, yes?’
‘How, Glarpy?’
‘Shelly, you don’t ask how the magic works,’ said Audrey. ‘That’s part of the magic.’
‘Well, my serious little girl, the truth is there are different kinds of magic, and they work different ways.’ He held up his long yellow fingers and counted on them as he spoke. ‘There is the deceptive magic that comes from fairy land like a cold wind and fools people into thinking that things are other than they are, and a clever magician can harness this magic
and confuse the senses of people. There is the hungry magic that makes people and things disappear. And there is the cruel magic that transforms people into things other than they used to be.’
‘And you do all three?’ asked Audrey.
‘Your humble practitioner makes small trinkets appear and disappear for the pleasure of his audience.’
He reached out quickly and snatched the knit toque off Shelly’s head. Turned the floppy white-and-pink hat over in his hands. There was a kitten face knitted in brown wool on the front, and little wool ears pointed out from the sides. He turned it inside out and held it toward Shelly. A delicate, intricately folded origami rose sat on the wool, made of green and red paper.
‘Thank you, Glarpy.’
‘Go show Mirko,’ said Audrey.
When Shelly was inside, Audrey gave him five dollars.
‘Is magic that transforms people into other things always cruel?’ she asked.
He took the money and put it in his jacket, then looked at her with an eyebrow cocked. Rooted inside the pocket and gave her a tiny slip of paper – a little photocopied flap that said haveyouseentheskinnycowboy @rocketmail.com. He winked at her and touched the side of his nose.
She took the paper, looking at him cautiously.
‘Well?’ she asked eventually.
‘Miss Cole, although I scrutinized the photograph carefully, I can’t say that I recognize the individual depicted.’
‘Not someone you’ve seen around the neighbourhood?’
He shook his head.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you see the individual depicted, let me know.’
The Crash Palace Page 21
