Garren adds that he knows which house it is.
I can’t think of a better idea but it still sounds risky. “Your girlfriend—she lives in the same neighborhood, though, right? What if she sees us or what if Henry has someone watching her street?”
Garren shakes his head. “He couldn’t have anyone watching the street. My mom doesn’t know about her. Neither does Henry. And Janette’s house is close to Lawrence Station—at the closer end of the street than the empty house I’m talking about. We could take the long way around, across Lawrence and up Duplex Avenue. Janette wouldn’t have any reason to be that far down her street. We’d just have to look out for her brother.”
I’m cold and scared. I’ve only been in danger for an hour and I’ve already forgotten what it’s like to feel safe. “Okay,” I tell Garren. “Let’s go.”
We head for Eglinton Station where we huddle in front of a pay phone (our third in half an hour) and I call directory assistance and then the Bellair Café. “Yes, hello,” I declare in what I hope is a mature (and somewhat annoyed) voice. “I’m hoping you can help me. My husband placed a dinner reservation with you for this coming weekend and has inconveniently forgotten the date and time of the reservation.”
The man on the other side of the phone laughs good-naturedly and asks what surname the reservation is under.
“Byrne for two,” I tell him. “B. Y. R. N. E.”
“Bingo,” the guy sings. “That would be seven o’clock tomorrow evening, Mrs. Byrne.”
“Ah, thank you. We’ll see you tomorrow then.”
Garren’s staring at me as I hang up the phone. “You were good,” he says.
“Not good enough to convince you two days ago.” Behind us a middle-aged couple is kissing passionately goodbye like they’ll never see each other again. I’ve never seen anyone older than thirty kiss in public that naked and unashamedly and for a moment the act distracts me.
When my attention shifts back to Garren, his gaze has dropped to my Doc Martens. “Two days ago everything was different,” he says.
We go down to the platform together and ride the subway one stop north to Lawrence because Garren says it’s farther than it looks on the map, especially on a day like today, and that anyway, it’d probably be harder to spot us on the subway than on the street.
Along the journey he admits that when I came to his door earlier this afternoon he told his mother I was just some girl who was chasing him but that he wasn’t interested in. “I didn’t want her to know you being there had anything to do with my dad,” he continues. “She hasn’t been the same since his accident and I thought the things you were saying were … I don’t know … some kind of fucked-up joke.”
I guess I might’ve thought that, too, if our situations were reversed. As it is, I’ve slipped into a frame of mind that won’t allow me to think beyond the next twenty-four hours. We’ll go to this place Garren knows and spend the night there. Tomorrow we’ll ambush Doctor Byrne and make him tell us what Henry wouldn’t.
The moment after that is a complete mystery. If I try to think beyond it panic will swallow me whole.
I get off the subway with Garren at Lawrence Station and then we walk the long way around to Cranbrooke Avenue. I was envisioning a neighborhood where the houses were much farther apart (and hopefully backing onto a park or otherwise unpopulated area) so that it would be possible to break in without anyone noticing. I was also imagining it would magically be dark out by the time we arrived. Neither of those things is true and the only thing that keeps me from turning back is lack of options.
“We could try the windows and see if one’s unlocked,” Garren says as we near the house. “But that could take a while and since they’re out of town they probably locked everything up tight. I figure the best thing to do is jump the fence and then kick the back door in.”
I’ve seen that done on television where the doors give way easily but it can’t be that simple in real life, can it?
The only saving grace is that the house—which looks similar to Henry’s—is detached. If we can get inside without being spotted no one should be able to hear us. There’s no one out on the street as we walk hurriedly towards the house and Garren points at the empty driveway and says, “Follow me fast. I’ll try to unlatch the back gate—unless there’s some kind of lock on it—so you won’t have to climb over.”
I’m right behind him as he whisks up the driveway and scales the high wooden gate, disappearing into the yard. I’m instantly more nervous at being left alone and exposed on the other side but then Garren’s swinging the gate open for me and we’re both in the yard, edging around the house and searching out a back door, which sits right where you’d expect it to, at the top of a compact porch.
“Do you know how to do this?” I ask under my breath.
“I’ve never tried.” Garren zips up the steps and examines the door while I anxiously scan the area. If anyone in the vicinity happens to be peering out their back window right now, we’re doomed.
A lone goose that should’ve flown south long ago honks accusingly as he flies overhead. The sound makes me jump in my skin and Garren’s ashen as he says, “Okay, I’m going to aim right below the doorknob and kick the shit out of it. That’s my plan.” He says that like he knows it’s not much.
I move away to give him room and Garren stands sideways, several feet from the door. His left leg’s firmly on the ground as he launches his right heel fiercely into the door. The noise of the assault rockets out into an otherwise noiseless neighborhood and suddenly I’m positive we’ll be caught, not in a sixth-sense way but because there surely must be a spooked neighbor within hearing distance.
The door shudders visibly under the force of his effort but doesn’t break. Garren’s already repeating the process like the door is his mortal enemy. The second time the door frame begins to splinter and on the third I hear it crack and part of the jamb splits off and shoots into the house. Garren staggers through the doorway. I race in after him, glancing at the door frame as I go and hoping the damage isn’t visible from the house directly behind us.
Inside, I press some of the larger bits of jagged wood back into the frame so I can close the door behind us. With the lock destroyed, the door begins to swing open again. Garren’s the first one to spot the door stopper on top of the shoe rack next to us. He snaps up the stopper and wedges the door shut.
I’m shaking and I can hear Garren breathing. We stand motionless in the back room (which has been decorated as a children’s playroom with shelves full of toys, a dark green carpet and forest wallpaper) for a full minute, waiting to hear some sign that we were spotted. When nothing happens I suggest we go upstairs and watch the street from one of the bedrooms. If we hear a siren or see a police car it will probably be too late to make a getaway but it’s not as though we can sit back and relax.
The first room we come to upstairs is a children’s bedroom with two single beds. Someone’s painted a Smurfs mural on one of the walls and there’s a Wonder Woman alarm clock on the dresser next to a stout pink night-light. Children’s books line the top two shelves of a red plastic bookcase. The bottom shelves are filled with things I’ve seen advertised on after-school television—My Little Pony figures, a giant Barbie head to style, plush Care Bear toys and two identical Strawberry Shortcake dolls.
Garren and I dart over to opposite sides of the window and cautiously pull back the minimal amount of curtain that will allow us each a view outside. Every so often a car jogs along the roadway and after several minutes we see a woman dawdle by with a little girl in her arms, the two of them bundled up against the cold. Garren releases his hold on the curtain and moves to the nearest bed, lowering himself onto the purple bedspread.
“Is your foot bothering you?” I ask from the window.
Garren curves his fingers around the edge of the bed. “Not really.”
That’s not the same as no and I say, “Maybe you should ice it. I mean, if no one comes for us.”
&
nbsp; “It’ll be fine.” Garren folds his hands around the back of his head and lies back. “I’m just having a hard time processing all this. It’s unbelievable. Those guys with guns coming for us and Henry being in on whatever the hell’s going on. It must go back to our fathers and something top secret they knew but I don’t get how it can stretch back to our grandparents too.” He rubs his eyes. “I don’t understand any of it. With the scope of this you’d think our mothers would have to know something but mine seems clueless. I don’t just mean today. I feel like I’d know if she’d been hiding something this big.”
I don’t have any more facts than Garren does but the uneasy feelings I had before this served as a warning and our current situation doesn’t come as quite as much of a shock to me as it does to him. I think about describing my dreams about the blond boy for him but I don’t want to risk upsetting Garren by telling him about the boy snarling like a wild animal and wanting to hurt me.
Instead I talk about Doctor Byrne and the flu my family had after flying home. It turns out that Garren and I both traveled through Australia to reach Canada. My family never left the airport in Sydney but Garren’s father lived in Melbourne for two years in his youth and Garren’s mom wanted to sprinkle some of his ashes there. He says they were fine while they were in Australia but that the flu hit after they’d been back in Canada for only a couple of days.
Neither of us has an inkling of how the flu ties in to everything else but it must. All the similarities between our lives must add up to the same thing. We go over it and over it, talking in circles as I, at first, continue to glance out the window and then gradually drift towards the other bed. Darkness has begun to fall and it’s chilly in the house (the owners must have turned the heat down before they left) but still warm compared to outside.
I lie down in my coat and shut my eyes, intending to open them again in a minute because it’s important to stay alert. When I do force my lashes open the room’s dark and I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep for. The tension must’ve drained me more than I’d realized.
I get up and feel for the light switch, realizing just in time that I shouldn’t flick it on because I’m not supposed to be here. The house needs to appear vacant. I stumble over to Garren in the blackness and reach for his leg. “Garren, I’m going downstairs to look for flashlights or candles.”
He turns over in his sleep and I try again, saying his name until he stirs more wakefully. “What time is it?” he asks.
I tell him I don’t know and repeat what I said about looking for sources of light that won’t announce our presence in the house.
“Good point,” Garren says, sitting up on the bed. “Something to eat would be a bonus.”
Food, yes, I’m starving.
We shuffle downstairs in the dark. I feel like a ghost haunting a stranger’s house, only a ghost wouldn’t need to hold the banister and wouldn’t feel hungry. On the ground floor, I head directly for the kitchen, which is solidly in the middle of the house, between the play room and combination living/dining room, and swing the fridge open so that we’ll have something to see by.
“I’ll make sure all the curtains down here are shut,” Garren says before wandering off into the adjacent rooms.
I shove one of the chairs from around the kitchen table against the fridge door to keep it open. The refrigerator is depressingly empty except for a selection of condiments—ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, relish, Cheez Whiz—and a jar of applesauce and half a carton of orange juice. Inside the freezer there’s a package of waffles, a carton of Neapolitan ice cream and a box of frozen hamburgers. I check inside the box to see how many hamburgers are left and am relieved to find five remaining.
Garren returns while I’m rifling through the cupboards and says, “I turned up the thermostat. It should start to warm up in here soon.”
I can’t believe we’re camping out in someone else’s house. Bizarrely, on some level that feels weirder to me than having Henry turn against us and being chased by men with guns. We’re an intrusion here; we’ve invaded other people’s lives.
Garren adds that there are drapes in each room and that the ones in the living room might even have a thick enough lining to block out the light from the TV if we wanted to turn it on but that he’s not sure.
“I guess we should leave it off then,” I say as he begins to explore the contents of the cupboards with me. We find a jar of peanut butter, instant coffee, olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, a box of crackers, two cans of tuna, two jars of Ragu sauce, one can of sliced mushrooms, one can of peas, an unopened box of Count Chocula cereal, a large can of Beefaroni, four Cup O’ Noodles packages, three cans of Campbell’s soup, three lunch-size fruit cups, a package of dried spaghetti and multiple sachets of Kool-Aid.
We could stay here for a week without going hungry. Not that we’ll have to, I tell myself. Tomorrow everything could change again. Tomorrow Doctor Byrne could supply us with all the answers we need to free ourselves from this.
As we continue searching the kitchen, Garren discovers an emergency fund of thirty dollars stuffed into the smallest of three red canisters and I locate a working flashlight behind a box of garbage bags. Garren says he bets there’s another in the garage but since there’s no entrance to it from the house we can’t check. In the dining room we find matches and a box of long taper candles. I stick two of them in pewter candleholders (which were in the same drawer as the candles) and light a candle for each of us so we can explore the rest of the house.
“There has to be more money somewhere,” Garren says.
If we weren’t in so much trouble I’d feel bad about taking from these people. There’s a formal family portrait of them hanging in the living room and their grinning faces make them look like understanding folks—father, mother, and two daughters who both appear to be about seven years old but who must be fraternal twins because one’s a blond and the other a brunette.
Garren looks at the picture too and I assume he’s feeling guilty, but then he says, “Your binder with the photo of your family in it—did you leave it at Henry’s?”
That’s the first time I’ve heard Garren refer to our supposed grandfather as Henry the way I’ve been since this afternoon. “Do you really think he’s our grandfather?” I ask. I’d forgotten about the photo until Garren brought it up. The last time I had it was when we sat on Henry’s couch.
The article’s gone. The photo’s gone. I don’t know which parts of my life are real. There’s nothing concrete for me to hold on to.
“I don’t know.” Garren looks tired in the candlelight. “Maybe he’s the impostor—not your sister.”
“Or maybe they both are. But anyway, the photo and binder must be back at his house.” I try to make a joke out of it. “He can spend the night trying to crack the code of my biology notes and figure out where we’ve gone.”
Garren smiles but it doesn’t make him look any happier. We go back upstairs and, after making sure the drapes are shut, root around in the master bedroom, which feels like the worst invasion of privacy yet because I uncover copies of the Kama Sutra, The Joy of Sex and More Joy of Sex beneath several issues of National Geographic in one of the bedside tables.
In the walk-in closet Garren finds a forgotten ten-dollar bill in the back pocket of a pair of the father’s jeans and I come across a glittery silver clutch purse that has a tube of lipstick in it along with a crumpled five-dollar bill and a compact of blue eye shadow.
That brings us to a total of eighty-five dollars plus whatever cash we each happened to have on us earlier and Garren and I empty our pockets to count it up properly. Between us we began the afternoon with thirty-six dollars and fifty-seven cents, which means we now have just over a hundred and twenty dollars. It sounds like a fair amount but Garren says, “We need to spend as little as possible. Who knows how long this might have to last us?”
I don’t want to think about that. Doctor Byrne has to be the answer. “Let’s go eat,” I suggest. “We c
an try the burgers.”
We fry them up along with the mushrooms while listening to top-forty radio on low. Neither of us has much to say as we eat by candlelight but a few minutes into the meal we hear a thud from the second floor. We race upstairs with the flashlight to discover that some of the clothes we’d disturbed in the master bedroom closet had caused a previously unseen briefcase to fall to the floor.
The leather briefcase is lying open on the carpet and I bend to start picking up the papers that have spilled out (Garren shining the flashlight on the mess), automatically skimming through the typed pages, as though any information I run into now will inevitably be about us. It’s not. The only things in the file are a lengthy marketing statement for the company the father or mother probably works for and a bunch of corporate invoices.
I feel Garren’s eyes on me as I shove the papers anxiously back into the briefcase. “I don’t know why I had to look at them,” I mumble. “You don’t even know these people so they can’t have anything to do with us.”
Garren aims the flashlight away from me. “You don’t trust anything anymore,” he says simply. “Of course you’d look.”
He’s wrong, though—there’s still something left I trust and that’s him.
TWELVE
Later we listen to the news station in case there’s anything about us on it and devour mountains of ice cream. We spend most of Friday night planning out how we’ll approach Doctor Byrne outside the restaurant tomorrow. It’s not far from Garren’s neighborhood so he knows precisely where it is and what’s around it. We decide that we’ll have to make the doctor think we have a weapon; otherwise it will be too easy for him to pull away from us. We need to seem like a threat. If his wife isn’t involved her presence might work in our favor because he won’t want her to get hurt. We’ll need to stay on the move while we talk to him too. A moving target is much harder to locate.
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