The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  If you live by the sea, you expect the weather, or else you move away.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Leo whispered. No apologies for weather.

  Borrowed Time

  IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN THE VOICES STARTED. Low at first, so that he couldn’t make out the words through the wall. But Frank knew what they meant – knew the angry tone and the way the words seemed to chase after one another.

  She was listening again.

  He had to resist the urge to get up out of bed, to bang on her locked door, to yell “I know what you’re doing in there” through the wood. He knew it wouldn’t help, knew that then the voices would lower to a mutter, maybe even less, but that they’d still be talking.

  And he knew she was sometimes confused in the night, and that she had a shotgun in there somewhere with her – loaded with number six birdshot – and she might decide that he was dangerous and simply fire right through the hollow-core bedroom door.

  It had been simple when he’d taken the job: live-in help for a little old lady whose hands were so bad she couldn’t twist open new jars, and whose senses had faded so much she couldn’t tell if the milk had spoiled until it was too late.

  It was supposed to be simple. He didn’t even have to be there all the time, just make sure there were groceries and that she got fed. The wages weren’t great, but the living expenses were all taken care of: for a first job, just out of college with an English degree, he thought it was pretty good. And he hadn’t given the big radio in her room a second thought.

  “A nice boy like you not married?” Mrs. Pearson said to Frank when her son Paul – the lawyer – had introduced him as the new employee. And Frank had smiled and answered no, not yet, he was only twenty-three.

  Mrs. Pearson snorted.

  “When I was twenty-three, I was married and pregnant for the second time. You’re just not putting your mind to it,” she said. And then, “Hope you’re better than the last one. She stole things.” When Mrs. Pearson stopped talking, she turned away quickly, blinking. She was short but big, round and creased, and her legs weren’t long enough: she practically toppled into her chair, throwing herself backwards at the cushions, and when she came to rest, her legs stuck out awkwardly as if they could not bend, and would not reach the floor anyway.

  Better than the last one.

  Paul hadn’t talked much about past employees, just said that it wasn’t an easy job to fill and that they’d gone through several people. Paul was in his sixties, hefty around the middle, and fully grey. He had the southern lawyer look down pat, Frank thought. The of fice was panelled in dark wood, surroundings that oozed quiet, expensive legal con fidence. From behind a broad, smooth airstrip of desk, Paul had said that his mother wasn’t easy to deal with – but Frank should-n’t be worried: “She’ll warm up to you quickly,” Paul said, winking. “She’s got a thing for men. Treats ’em more politely than women. Must be generational.”

  Frank didn’t know what to say about that, but he could certainly use the money and the roof over his head. Sure, everything in the house was old and dark, and some of the furniture looked pretty frail – and there was a constant smell halfway between mold and dirty dishes – but he couldn’t afford to be picky.

  “They always steal,” Mrs. Pearson said the next time she spoke. Frank wasn’t really sure that she was talking to him as much as just going over familiar ground. “They steal the nice things. Only the nice things, the expensive things. One moment they’re here, sitting on the shelf as pretty as can be. The next they’re gone. And money. You have to keep your eyes open, because they steal money, too. From an old lady, if you can believe that.”

  “Don’t worry,” Paul-the-lawyer said when Frank talked to him about it.

  “She always thinks someone is stealing. Thing is, she’s losing it a bit upstairs. She remembers stuff she used to have, can’t remember that she doesn’t still have it, says people stole it. We’ve had some bad apples, all right, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much if I were you.”

  Paul laughed.

  “I’d worry a lot more if she decided you might be a terrorist. Rush Limbaugh and the bunch have her all riled up, and you don’t know what she’d do. And another thing – she’s petri fied about home invasions. Haven’t been more than a handful, but if there’s a door between you and her, you might want to knock – and speak respectful.”

  “She’s not dangerous, is she?” Frank asked.

  “Well, she’s armed,” Paul said jovially. “But she hasn’t shot anyone yet.”

  It sounded like a joke – but that was before Frank heard the voices.

  Frank had a room on the second floor of the house. It was a split-level, the kind of house where all the practical mechanical pieces – the washer, the dryer, the big chest-freezer with its constant steady hum – were in the basement. The trees outside were too big and too rarely trimmed, so that the inside of the house was cool and dark even in summer. Most of the furniture looked out of place – a dark wooden curio cabinet with curved glass, for example, that looked like it belonged in a Victorian home, and a huge mahogany dining room table that was way too large for the dining room. All of it looked as if it belonged in a bigger, older house – and that’s where it had been, Mrs. Pearson explained.

  “Stairs, that’s the problem,” she said, slipping her feet into soft pink bedroom slippers that would be crammed to capacity when her feet had finished swelling up by the early afternoon. “I would have been happy to stay in the old house if it wasn’t for the stairs. One or two trips up and down, and I’d be done for the day. Anyway, Paul wanted to sell it, said it was cheaper and I’d be safer here, and he was willing to handle everything. He told me we got a very good price. He handles all the financial stuff, and without a word of complaint. He’s a lovely boy.”

  Frank couldn’t help think how much she reminded him of his own mother – perhaps it was the way she stuck her chin right up and out at him when she was making a point, as if the very intensity of her belief leant weight to her argument. Or perhaps it was the solid way her feet would thud down the hall towards the kitchen, purpose in every step.

  Footsteps weren’t the only thing he heard.

  The split-level that Paul had bought for his mother meant Frank shared a wall – a thin, modern, hollow gyprock wall – with Mrs. Pearson’s bedroom, and she was close to deaf in one ear, so he heard the voices on the very first night.

  It was after one when he woke up the first time.

  “America needs to know who she can trust,” one voice said, and addled by sleep, Frank felt he almost had to agree – America did need to know who she could trust.

  Then the same voice told him that public opinion polls showed Americans would be happier and sleep sounder knowing Muslims – and only Muslims – had gone through some sort of registration process. By then, Frank was fully awake – the voice sounded angry, American talk radio seeping through the wall the way it was starting to creep across the Canadian border.

  It wasn’t easy to hear clearly through the gyprock, but the harder he listened, the more words he could make out. “Liberal lawyers, “ the voice hissed quietly. “Snakes, all of them.” Frank got out of bed and pressed his ear to the wall, wondering all the while what Mrs. Pearson would make of it if she decided to burst in, and found him there, nearly naked, his face against her wall.

  And that was Frank’s introduction to American talk radio.

  Some nights, Mrs. Pearson would work her way through the entire radio dial, sampling fuzzy and distant stations that only occasionally made the trip, trying to find the show that best approximated her own views. Sometimes, it took several tries. Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy – Frank learned new names almost every night.

  And the pieces he heard were sometimes startling.

  “Every stinking, rotten left-winger in this country

  … is a greater threat to your freedom than al-Qaida….”

  “It’s idiots like you who cause this country to go u
p in flames….”

  “… moron, moron, moron…”

  Frank was reminded of tapes he had heard about once, from a company that claimed you could learn Spanish just by running their tapes all night long. Some sort of osmotic linguistics, he thought, where you soaked up a language the way roots soak up water.

  “I think it’s all going right into her head,” Paul confided to Frank one afternoon in the dining room of the house. “She was once a dyed-in-the wool Trudeau Liberal, if you can believe that, but not any more. Worse the last few years, after she started on the talk radio from the States – seems to get nastier every week, and it just drags her along with it. You know, like you are what you eat. Now she says even the conservatives are too easy on criminals, and wonders why we ever got rid of hanging. If a teenager steals a bag of her groceries, she might well finish him off herself. I’m just glad we have handgun laws.”

  Paul laughed. Frank wasn’t so sure that it was a laughing matter: after working there for just a few weeks, it already seemed to him that Mrs. Pearson was always agitated on the mornings after he heard the radio. It might just be the fact she hadn’t slept well, he reminded himself.

  He had even raised it with her, as delicately as he thought he could.

  “You listen to some pretty opinionated folks on the radio, Mrs. Pearson,” he had said one morning, passing her a cup of coffee. She was cooking them both scrambled eggs – two days in, she had told him he didn’t really cook very well, and it would be better for both of them if she just went ahead and did it herself.

  “You can hear my radio?” Mrs. Pearson seemed surprised. “I can barely hear it myself. Nothing to worry about there – that’s just talk.”

  “But pretty extreme talk, Mrs. Pearson. When you’re talking about taking away someone’s civil rights because they belong to a minority group…”

  “Well, they should have thought about those civil rights when they were crashing airplanes into those buildings and all.” Mrs. Pearson set her jaw in a firm, straight line. “Fact is, we all have to be more careful, more willing to take things into our own hands. We used to be safe in our own country – we used to be safe in our own houses. Not now.”

  Frank recounted the conversation to Mrs. Pearson’s son the next time Paul had come over, but he hadn’t seemed that concerned.

  “I don’t think you have to worry too much, Frank. Taking things into her own hands? Heck, those hands can’t even open a jam jar by themselves,” Paul had said.

  “They can fire a shotgun,” Frank answered.

  Frank had found the gun while he was vacuuming Mrs. Pearson’s room – well, actually the nozzle of the vacuum had found it, when he was cleaning blindly under Mrs. Pearson’s bed. He had looked, dropped the vacuum, and had headed for the phone to call Paul to ask what he should do about it. But Paul’s secretary said he was meeting a client, and before Frank heard back, the gun had disappeared.

  Frank wasn’t about to dig around looking for it.

  “That shotgun has to be fifty years old,” Paul said. He was standing in front of the china cabinet – Frank noticed he was handling one of a set of small jade sculptures.

  “And she’s only ever fired it once, years ago – heard burglars in the kitchen of the old house, took out a patch of screen door the size of your head and shredded a bunch of branches on the lilac. Left a bruise on her shoulder the size of a dishpan. I don’t think she’ll be doing that again in a hurry.” Paul closed the cupboard, and slipped his closed hand into his jacket pocket.

  “Besides, if she pulls the trigger, the old thing’s more likely to explode than shoot anything.”

  Thinking about the conversation later, Frank realized that while Paul was talking to him, something else was happening right there in front of his eyes. It was as if two different movies were playing at the same time – there was what Paul’s voice was saying, and what his hands were doing. And once Paul had left and the house was quiet, Frank thought he understood.

  But he would have to check to be sure.

  Frank walked through the kitchen to the dining room, stopped in front of the curio cabinet and turned the little brass key. The two glass doors opened easily, and Frank began looking through the figurines, moving the ones in front out of the way so that he could be sure.

  “Hands out of that cupboard, buddy-boy,” Mrs. Pearson said. She was close up behind him, close enough that he could hear the click of her teeth when her mouth closed at the end of the sentence.

  Frank froze.

  “Mrs. Pearson, there used to be three jade figures here – but they’re gone,” Frank said, taking his hands away from the shelves slowly.

  “Maybe they’re in your pockets,” Mrs. Pearson said. “Do you think we should check?”

  Frank turned around slowly, his hands open in front of him. Mrs. Pearson was holding the wicked-looking shotgun, small gauge and bolt-action, but still big enough to seriously damage whatever she was shooting at. “Head-sized”: Paul’s words about the hole in the screen door swam through Frank’s head unbidden.

  “You can check if you like,” Frank said carefully, looking hard at Mrs. Pearson’s face. “But I think you should really be checking Paul’s pockets.”

  He paused.

  “And I think you know that, too.”

  Mrs. Pearson seemed to shrink right in front of him, and the end of the shotgun’s barrel shook. Then she lowered the gun, so that it was pointing at his knees instead of his chest.

  “You know it and I know it,” Mrs. Pearson said slowly. Frank was surprised by how different her voice was, and by how her face had changed – as if, for weeks, he had been talking to a constructed and sometimes deliberately confused character, and now suddenly, he was faced with the real person.

  “But no one else is going to know,” she said, “and eventually, when enough stuff goes, I’ll have to blame it on you, and you’ll be gone, too. You’re living on borrowed time, Frankie, borrowed time.”

  Frank looked at Mrs. Pearson, at the way her mouth set in a thin line so that she had almost no lips at all. The corners of her eyes pulled downwards, and Frank could read in her face how deep the disappointment actually reached.

  “Paul can’t have a clue that I know,” Mrs. Pearson said, resting the butt of the shotgun on the floor and pulling a chair out from the dining room table. She sat down – Frank closed the doors on the cabinet, but stayed standing where he was.

  “I liked those jades,” Mrs. Pearson said. “My husband brought them back to me when the boys were small and he had to travel so much. The insurance said they were worth $10,000 when we had the appraisals done, but that never really meant much to me.”

  She put the gun across the table and looked up at him.

  “He’s got big dreams and only a small law practice, and he’s already been caught once dipping into the trust funds. Explained it away as some kind of misunderstanding, but the law society watches him pretty close. Every now and then, he’s got to put a little something back. And there aren’t many places for him to get it – he certainly can’t ask me. Not and still live with himself.”

  “What are you saying – that he steals from you and you’ve both agreed to blame it on the help?”

  “You’re not listening, Frank. We haven’t agreed on anything. He steals from me, and I blame it on the help so I don’t have to blame it on him.” She shook her head, eyes downcast, but then she turned and looked straight at Frank, her eyes as hard as beads.

  “It’s small things – valuable, yes, but he could just put me in a nursing home and have it all, and there’s nothing could do about it.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, there’s what you choose to know, and what’s really true.

  “You don’t have children, Frank. If you did, you might understand. You make them and raise them, and everything they do is something you did right or wrong. They get in a fight in school, and maybe you were too strict or maybe you weren’t strict enough,” she said. “You’re always doing something wrong, and you ne
ver know which one’s actually going to leave a permanent mark.”

  She shook her head.

  “He’s old enough to be closing in on retirement, and he still needs to look good in my eyes. That’s one good reason to get married, Frank. One good reason. So that you’ve at least got the chance to be close enough to someone to think you can be completely honest with them.

  “Children are hopes and lies. Hopes for them, and a bunch of time spent lying to yourself.”

  And after that, they didn’t talk about the theft again. One Mrs. Pearson – the straight, direct woman – vanished, and the other one reappeared: the polite, sometimes-confused woman with the right-wing chip on her shoulder. Frank began to wonder if Paul wasn’t partially right, if the old woman wasn’t losing something upstairs, after all.

  At first, the memory hung unspoken in the air between them every day. But with each day, it was like it had drifted a little further out to sea.

  And at night, the voices were getting louder and louder.

  Frank thought Mrs. Pearson was probably having trouble sleeping, but so was he. The voices sometimes wove themselves into his dreams, and he found that increasingly disturbing.

  One night, he dreamt he was at the scene of a terrorist bombing. It had the surreal feel that news coverage of explosions sometimes has: a building ripped cleanly in half by a bomb, so that you could look inside and see individual desks still set up on the edge of a precipice, with coffee cups and papers spread out as if the occupants had just gone to the bathroom. As if, at any moment, they would come right back and sit down again, getting on with their interrupted day. Frank was digging in the rubble, covered head to toe in dust, trying to find people he couldn’t see, but could hear, calling for help. And then he looked at his hands and saw that his skin was brown, and he realized the other rescuers were looking at him. And then they started chasing him. And then, they had knives and guns in their hands.

  He woke up drenched in sweat. Next door, he could hear someone bellowing from the radio.