Mother Love

by L. R. Wright

  After a while he stepped out of the brush to glance up the road: the woman plodded on, oblivious. With a grimace, he pushed back into the blackberries.

  Scratches soon appeared on the backs of his hands, his neck, and one side of his face. Chunks and fragments of blackberry vines clung to his clothing. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

  Once more he pulled free and looked—the woman had stopped walking. She was leaning against the trunk of a maple tree about forty feet away.

  Swiftly he propelled himself backward into the blackberries and stood completely still.

  Several minutes passed. A car drove by, heading toward Sechelt. The midafternoon sun coaxed fragrance from the blackberries. A breeze muttered in the vine leaves, and birds chortled high in the maple tree.

  Eventually the man turned, slowly, and squinted through the foliage. The woman was still leaning against the trunk of the tree, doing nothing. Then he saw her straighten and step out from behind the tree to stand at the edge of the road, looking northward, not moving.

  ***

  Belinda was walking home from her father’s house, back to Sechelt, when suddenly a woman appeared on the road from behind a huge old maple tree and pulled off a scarf that had been tied over her hair. Belinda stopped. The woman was about fifty yards away.

  Belinda’s body went into shock. She felt disoriented. Terrified.

  She took a step backward. Her mother didn’t move. Just stood there, staring at her—and Belinda saw brokenness in her face, and pain, and she saw that her mother, too, was terrified.

  It was her mother all right. But Belinda had remembered her as being more commanding. This woman was small and thin to the point of frailness. And her mother had had black hair, but this woman’s hair was almost completely silver.

  The woman remained motionless.

  Belinda turned around and hurried back up the road, back toward her father’s house. She took fifteen long strides and then whirled around. Her mother still hadn’t moved.

  “Go away!” Belinda shouted. She felt enormous. She thought about Michelangelo’s David and his hands, disproportionately large, capable of miracles. What would she do with her size, her strength?

  Her mother was speaking.

  “I can’t hear you. Go away!”

  Her mother spoke more loudly. Belinda heard “love,” and “reason.”

  She turned around again and ran back up the road, pelted up the road, wishing she could fly. She sprinted around a corner and stopped, leaning forward to catch her breath, her hands on her thighs. Tears began dripping from her eyes, and fury clogged her throat.

  Belinda got some tissues from the small zippered bag that was belted around her waist and dried her eyes and blew her nose. Then she marched determinedly back toward Sechelt. If her mother wanted a damn confrontation, well, Belinda would damn well give her one.

  The edges of the road were dusty. Belinda noted this and was aware of the sun warming her back and the smell of ripe blackberries that tempted her from the roadside. But she disregarded dust, and sun, and blackberries. She had thousands of questions for her mother, and the fact that Maria had shown herself, Belinda was belatedly realizing, meant that she was prepared to answer them. Belinda was in a turmoil of rage and eagerness, and she began to run again, racing around the corner, and saw the road ahead, empty. She stopped. She heard birds calling, and a child shouted, somewhere far away. Belinda walked to the maple tree and looked behind it, but nobody stood there waiting for her.

  Belinda leaned against the tree and looked up, through its many-layered branching, to the winks of sun and sky at the top. After a long time she began walking home.

  The man in the blackberry bushes didn’t breathe as she approached, slowly, her eyes on the ground. He thought she hesitated when she passed the place where he was hidden. He thought her body half turned toward him. He thought he would have to do it now, here on this public road. A cyclist whizzed by, heading up the hill. The girl glanced across at the cyclist and continued walking, out of the man’s sight.

  He stayed where he was.

  The shit was well and truly in the fan.

  But he was serene and confident, and looking forward to doing what had to be done.

  He waited, enmeshed, scratched and sore, for several minutes. Then he shoved roughly through the vines, brushing leaves and thorns and crushed berries from his clothing, and returned to his car.

  Chapter 8

  ALBERG AND CASSANDRA had been home for three hours and in bed for two when the phone rang, at one o’clock Monday morning: Alberg was being called to a crime scene.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Cassandra when he’d hung up. “It’s a homicide. I have to go.”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s your job, for God’s sake.” She threw back the covers and got up. “I have to go with you, though.” Furious with herself, and humiliated, she dressed quickly. She would wait in the car until Earl’s Café opened at six.

  ***

  “She got pushed a little bit, by the door, when I opened it,” the woman kept telling them, not looking down the hallway.

  “I know, ma’am. It’s all right,” said Sid Sokolowski. “You just go back inside there and get yourself a cup of coffee.”

  The woman turned to Alberg. “I heard a scream, you know? At first I thought, It can’t be a scream. But then I heard it again, you know? And so I knocked at the door, and—” She made a faltering, pushing gesture. Hilda Makepeace was small and bony, wrapped in a dark green bathrobe. “And—there she was. Couldn’t believe my eyes at first. It’s not a thing you expect to see. I’ve lived here eighteen years, never seen a thing like that, never expected to, either. So then I called you guys.”

  “I know, ma’am,” said Sokolowski patiently. “You told us. I wrote it down.” He held up his notebook.

  “Would you like some coffee?” said Hilda Makepeace, who was a widow. Every few seconds she rubbed industriously at her thinning gray hair, which was standing up in startled wisps all over her scalp. “I could make you some. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “No, thank you—” said Sokolowski, but Alberg interrupted.

  “That would be very kind of you,” he said.

  Mrs. Makepeace, looking relieved, retreated behind her door.

  “I want a minute, before we let the troops in,” Alberg said to the sergeant, and before Sokolowski could reply he was down the hall and inside the victim’s apartment.

  Walking from my car, I am innocent, I am in the fullness of my innocence. Everything I have ever done wrong is in these remaining moments expunged from the record. My innocence blossoms within me, as I stride toward my crime.

  Alberg saw that a circle of glass had been cut from the balcony door, to accommodate a reaching hand: the door was unlocked. He stood in the middle of the living room, his back to the balcony.

  My feet are firm on the floor. There is no weakness in my knees. My heart is calming, as I stand in the silence. I am wearing gloves. My clothes are black. In my hand there is a hammer.

  Alberg saw a photo album on a bookcase shelf. A lamp lay on the floor, its shade detached and crushed, the brass base dented. A trail of blood led from the body across the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom.

  I will do it neatly, silently; with respect. I will slide her into another world in her sleep. She has dozed off here—she will awaken somewhere else. I know exactly where to strike her.

  Hands in his pockets, Alberg stood in the bedroom doorway, looking in. A large doll sprawled on the floor at the end of the bed. The bedclothes were crumpled. The victim had scrambled out of them: she had not had time to throw them aside.

  There was blood here; she had received the first blow here.

  As I go down the hall I am in a delirium of poetry, never before so alert, so talented. Into the bedroom. Up to the bedside. I lift my weapon—but a splotch of white in the corner seizes my eye and my heart lurches, my knees lock, she moves in her sleep, and the hammer blow glances irre
solutely off her temple. And instead of dying, she awakens.

  She ran for the door, thought Alberg. And he chased her. She ran for the door, bleeding—but before that, she hit him: the doll’s head was smashed. Alberg could see blood on it. And he’d bet that it wasn’t the victim’s blood: she had been struck with something much harder than a doll.

  She falls in the hallway, slipping on her blood, and I hit her again. Her hands claw at the floor, and my head is spinning, cracking with pain. It is a poem of horror. She gets up again and runs again. In the light from outside she looks demented—I have an instant of fear.

  Alberg went back down the hall, careful to avoid stepping in blood. He looked down at the body, which was that of a woman in her mid-fifties, of average height, thin, with shoulder-length gray hair, who had been bludgeoned to death. It was a messy way to kill someone. He noticed pink polish on her fingernails.

  “Okay, Sid,” he called out to the sergeant, who was waiting impatiently in the hall. “They can take the body.”

  He called in the evidence team and pointed to the photo album. “I want to have a look at that as soon as you’re finished with it. I’ll be next door.” And he went down the hall to get some of Hilda Makepeace’s coffee.

  She scrabbles at the door, trying to get it open. I lift the hammer and bring it crashing down. The side of her head crumples, and she falls to the floor—so fast does she drop, so obediently, it is as if she had been waiting all her life for this special blow.

  One down.

  One to go.

  1987

  Chapter 9

  VANCOUVER, B.C.

  Maria rushed Belinda and Richard through breakfast on that Saturday morning in March, responding to them absently, her mind already outside in the garden. Gardening and driving her car; these were the only activities she could count on being permitted to do alone. Being alone was important, from time to time.

  As soon as Richard put aside his napkin and began to rise from his chair, Maria said, “Look after the dishes before you leave, will you, Belinda?” And ignoring Belinda’s halfhearted protest, she hurried outside.

  It was a gray morning, still and silver. She crossed to the tool shed for a rake and began raking the lawn, accumulating piles of leaves and pieces of cedar branches, debris that had been blown into the yard from the trees surrounding the house. Maria raked vigorously, restoring order, finding within herself a small pocket of serenity and striving to make it bigger.

  She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with a T-shirt underneath, and she had on a denim jacket, too, but after half an hour or so she took this off and tossed it onto the picnic table. She scooped up the piles of debris and stuffed them into black plastic bags until the lawn was bare again.

  Maria couldn’t tell whether it was raining or not. Perhaps the silkenness upon her face was moisture from yesterday’s showers still clinging to the air. She ignored Richard when he appeared at the door, watching her, seeming to hover there, indistinct but palpable, behind the screen. She continued to rake, scraping at the patches of bare earth that sprawled here and there in the grass, and imagined she could feel the lawn tingle, like a vigorously scratched scalp.

  When her husband eventually retreated from the door, Maria, on her way back to the toolshed, stopped for a moment to bow her head and take stock. Her pocket of serenity was ashudder, like a rain puddle swept by a passing breeze.

  She replaced the rake and began cleaning up the gardens, wrenching yellowed sweet pea vines from netting that was nailed to the fence on the west side of the yard, uprooting them, stuffing them into another plastic bag, a job she should have taken care of in the fall. She ought to have a compost heap. Maybe she would, this year. She pulled the dead leaves away from the lilies, whose new leaves were already several inches high. It was the beginning of Maria’s favorite time of year, when spring hung bright in the nearby forest, an infusion of green. Her face was moist and glowing. Yes, this year she would have a compost pile. And maybe a raised bed or two, for vegetables.

  Eventually she sat back on her haunches, her hands cold, earth beneath her fingernails. She could no longer pretend that it wasn’t raining. Her face was no longer moist, or even damp, but definitely wet with rain. She stroked rain from her warm cheeks, stroked rain from her hair, and saw phantoms, black swirlings of unknown origin.

  Maria held fast to thoughts of spring, pictured the clematis that would soon bloom on the trellis by the front door, white flowers on one side, purple on the other. But something out there was holding its breath. She was aware of nausea, of pinpricks of dread. Maria pushed herself to her feet and stumbled indoors, rain-wet and shivering.

  ***

  That night in bed she and Richard sat reading. They were close together—only maybe a foot of mattress separated them—but it was as though Richard was in another room. She was to blame for this mood. She had chosen to spend her day alone, and Richard had in retaliation created distance between them, fashioned it from nothing, a heavy, reproachful distance. She imagined him sitting in the dark somewhere, spinning distance on a cerebral loom.

  Maria would have liked to stretch her arms across that distance, to embrace him, hold him close. She wanted to kiss his closed eyes, stroke open his mouth, explore the terrain of his plump but sturdy body with fingertips and tongue. It was love that prompted these yearnings, not lust; but lust would have been the result.

  She couldn’t do it, though. Couldn’t reach for him because he would retreat, couldn’t beguile him sexually because he would reject her. Richard seldom allowed himself to be seduced.

  Maria, her eyes on the book she was pretending to read, compelled herself to be artificially calm, knowing that if she imagined something long enough and hard enough, it could sometimes become real.

  They were neither of them uncomplicated. Both were sometimes difficult. Each could be stubborn, uncompromising, intractable. But Maria thought these things were perhaps more true of Richard than of her.

  She heard him turn a page and realized that she hadn’t turned one for far too long.

  She leaned her head back against the bunched-up pillows and closed her eyes. “Sometimes,” she said aloud, “I have little hope for us, Richard.”

  She let her book drop to her lap. Outside, an unequivocal rain was falling, a harsh rain that occasional moments of windblown acceleration turned into rough, martial music. Richard said nothing as Maria listened to the rain. Then she heard him switch off his lamp and felt him suddenly close to her, and his mouth was on hers. She opened her eyes just as he turned off her own lamp.

  He pulled her down onto the bed and continued to kiss her, his hands on the sides of her face, now sliding down her body to lift her nightgown. She felt his hands on her breasts, his thumbs teasing her nipples, and now his lips were there, his tongue on her breasts. He was pulling down her pants, and she helped, kicking them off. She touched him, lightly, wishing she had a feather. When he entered her she reached behind to stroke his balls. He began talking to her now, and she answered him: “Yes, please,” she whispered, “oh yes, please...”

  Maria came first this time, and later she felt like a firmament as he thrust into her again and again; she was space and time and the earth itself.

  Chapter 10

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Hamilton Gleitman fired up his printer and rolled his office chair from the computer to the desk. He took a file folder from his IN basket, opened it, and examined the form it contained. He smoothed it with the palm of his hand. Picked up a pen. Checked the box next to the word Writing.

  Hamilton Gleitman was a streak of silver, a stealthy streak of silver, gray-haired and lightning fast, compact, dressed almost always in easygoing denim, usually wearing hiking boots. Several chains hung from the waistband of his jeans, one from almost every loop, and each chain held something—keys, a calculator, a bottle opener, a Swiss Army knife. He jingled, faintly, as he walked.

  He was a freelance magazine writer who also wrote poetry. It was the latter that
he considered his life’s work.

  Hamilton had begun to write in jail, mostly because he was so bored there, he was afraid he’d go crazy. It turned out, though, that he had a knack for it, so he’d kept on writing when he got out.

  “Year of Writing:” Hamilton wrote, “1939.”

  He had found that articulating his life made it clearer. It was as though writing and thinking were simultaneous; he didn’t know which came first. He had come to see his life as a stylus, writing itself—a cursive life, an interlocking series of black curves and swirls, some broad, some narrow. His task was to sketch for the world his own interior monologues, which at one and the same time made sense for him of what he saw, and created poetry.

  He filled in his address, which was an apartment building on Bellevue Avenue in West Vancouver. Next to “Employment:” he printed, “Writer. Self-employed.” He mulled over the next question on the form, trying to settle on a figure.

  The printer stopped. He gathered up the pages of his piece on collectors of hockey memorabilia and stuffed them into a manila envelope, which he tossed onto the table in the hall. Then he stood for several minutes in the living room, looking out the huge window, which faced southwest. He had a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view that swept from Burrard Inlet on his left to Stanley Park and the Lions Gate Bridge and across English Bay to Point Grey.

  In his dedication to his art he felt linked with the poets of all the ages. But the subjects about which people wrote poetry varied, of course, according to the person doing the writing. All poets were not the same. They had specialties, which developed naturally out of their personal preoccupations. Some poets wrote about the natural world, for example. Or love, in its many variations. The fear of dying, perhaps. Madness. Hamilton’s preoccupation, poetically speaking, was shame.