The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Britannia is where the working poor of the neighbourhood go to borrow books and recreate their kids, to take guitar lessons, study aikido and judo, to catch a yoga class that doesn’t cost twenty bucks an hour. It’s where they teach teen moms what they call life skills, like cooking something more nutritious than ramen; they bring me in to demonstrate how to unstop a toilet and install a baby gate. Now and then the Center will even bus people out to Golden Ears Park to hike or canoe or ride horses.

  We came out behind the daycare into a green space known locally as Poverty Park. My house overlooks the park—I could see my front door—but instead of taking Paige home with me, I pointed at a bench under a double-flowering plum. The tree was thick with blooms, like it had been dipped in candy floss. Fifty feet over, near the tennis courts, three young guys with blond dreadlocks were beating on trashcan-sized drums.

  I must have frowned, because she asked, “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re curious about something.”

  “I suppose that happens all the time?”

  “It’s okay,” Paige said, settling herself under the canopy of blooms. “You can ask me anything.”

  “I was just thinking it had been four months since…They brought Deenie to trial pretty quick.”

  Ghost of a smile. “The prosecutor’s a force of nature. And Deenie’s representing himself. He didn’t know the tricks they use to slow things down.”

  Or he didn’t want to. “So, you want reno advice?”

  Paige said, “I’m renting my basement out as a recording studio. I thought soundproofing, bars on the windows…”

  “You have a house—I mean, you own it?”

  “Pamela had some insurance.”

  “You’re not planning to grow pot down there, are you?”

  “With soundproofing?”

  “Or a dungeon?”

  “I haven’t got time for vanilla sex, let alone kink.” The baby was watching the birds with bright-eyed intensity.

  I steered my gaze back to Paige. “You want to do the work yourself?”

  She flinched. “I need advice on the soundproofing. It’s too complex…. The books don’t say anything.”

  Don’t volunteer, I told myself. You can’t fix someone else’s life, and Lela’s opinions notwithstanding, I didn’t need this. A baby meant Paige was maybe no more than a year out of a relationship with some guy. “You want to DIY, even though you have money. You need to rent out your basement, but you’re a nurse, aren’t you? You have a kid, you’re the public face of a homicide trial, and now you want to get into futzing with soundproofing and—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Look, maybe I don’t talk like a Rhodes Scholar, but I know when I’m being lied to.”

  “Forget I said anything.” She scooped up her kid and stormed off, so mad she almost walked over two women who were hawking handmade jewellery over by the sidewalk.

  I watched her go, relieved. Then I took her abandoned library books inside so I could tell Lela to lay off the matchmaking.

  Know what she said? “Oh, so you did like her?”

  May

  The thing about going for broken women is it doesn’t make you feel good about yourself. So I kept busy: installed cabinets in a local rehab center, redid a couple bathrooms, volunteered to replace some vandalized tiles in Mosaic Creek Park. I let myself get talked into working a shift at the Italian Day festival, valet parking bicycles and chit-chatting with environmental activists as people from all the Drive’s overlapping communities ambled by.

  At one time, East Vancouver was the bad part of town, which seems laughable now house prices have shot up. Sleek, well-off mommies, new to the area, pay my bills: I renovate the kitchens in their circa-1920 houses while they slurp up frappuccinos at Starbucks and plan the next battle in their bitter fight for control of Poverty Park. The area is upscaling; they want to drive out the homeless, the veterans, the street vendors and heroin junkies who’ve occupied the park—peaceably, for the most part—for decades.

  None of which is to say I had mommies or motherhood on the brain. I put Paige and her troubles out of my mind, skipping the trial coverage, walking by fast when I saw her doe-eyed face in the newspaper boxes.

  But a month after we first met she was back at Britannia, even more harried, obviously looking for me. The kid was in her pouch, lolling like a sailor after three days ashore.

  I kept my eyes off him. “You got the soundproofing up? Barred your windows?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened?”

  She hesitated. “They vandalized them.”

  “By ‘they’ you mean…”

  “The band.”

  “And by ‘them’?”

  “The soundproofing pads.”

  She was clinging to the lie. I thought of calling her on it, again, but I’d had a month to feel guilty. Chivalry won out. “You ready to show me?”

  A long sigh. “Should I make an appointment?”

  “No, I’m between jobs. Lead on.”

  Paige’s house was a few blocks south of mine. It was what we call a Vancouver Special—an ugly box clad in yellow aluminium siding and fake brick, square in shape, designed to max out the floor space ratio on its lot. Multifamily residences: idea being to shoehorn in a couple with three kids, both sets of in-laws, and maybe jam an unmarried sister in the basement. There’d been a toxic bloom of them in the eighties; nowadays, developers are knocking them down to build pretty, faux-heritage townhomes.

  The place didn’t look Paige’s speed at all.

  “Big basement,” she said, by way of explanation. I got a bit of a jolt; perceptive women are sexy. We shared a weird, edgy grin.

  Past the front door was a rabbit hutch and a couple bags—one packed with scrubs, another a suitcase I’d seen in trial photos. She dropped the diaper bag beside them.

  The rabbits shifted nervously.

  “You hate animals too?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The baby. You make a point of ignoring him.”

  “I keep fish.” I didn’t mention the cat; this was no time to sound like a nurturer.

  “Downstairs.” She indicated a door. “You can leave your shoes on.”

  I ducked under the overhang, heading into what had once been the in-law suite. Its interior walls were sledge-hammered away, the carpet torn up. All that remained was a vacant space with bare concrete floors.

  “Why aren’t you on maternity leave?” I asked, thinking of the bag of work stuff—scrubs, shoes, protein bars.

  “I take the occasional fill-in shift to remind myself I have more on the brain than the next loaded diaper.” She closed the door behind us.

  Ever been somewhere where no sound gets in, none at all? Not the traffic outside, not the hum of the fridge, nothing but your own breath and heartbeat? It can be suffocating, almost claustrophobic; your ears ring and your brain insists there’s something wrong.

  You can muffle a garage studio on the cheap by padding the walls with second-hand mattresses, but Paige had gone high-end. Her panels looked like they had come from a mental hospital—they were surfaced in a white quilted fabric and had been fitted with care, floor to ceiling, even covering the windows. They snugged up against the ceiling panels perfectly.

  The air stank of bleach.

  A baby cam and one big light were mounted in a corner of the ceiling, cords snaking between the soundproof boards.

  “I figured they’d behave if I kept an eye on them,” she said, following my gaze to the camera.

  ‘They’ again, the fictional rock band. “This is good craftsmanship.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Impressed.” The nurses I know have decent mechanical skills, but this wouldn’t have been an easy job.

  “The damage is here—” The fabric of the wall was torn at knee height in two places, the foam scattered in bits.

  Foam and…I stirred the scraps, recognizing a tuft of
animal fur.

  She didn’t meet my eyes. “I’ll have to install something over the padding, won’t I?”

  “You could frame and drywall….”

  “Drywall might be too fragile.”

  “Clad the walls in sheet metal?”

  “Sounds ugly.” She was close to weeping. “It has to be nice. It can’t…just be a big cage.”

  My heart raced, loud in the silence. “Bamboo panels.”

  “What?”

  “Bamboo wall panels. Natural-looking, eco-friendly, and very hard. We frame over your soundproofing, clad the whole thing in bamboo panels. Even if one or two of them do get roughed up, we just replace. No harm, no foul, okay?”

  We. Damn, I said “we.”

  “Seriously?” She pretended to scan the room, mastering her emotions.

  “It’ll be easy, Paige.”

  That’s when the drunken sailor baby opened his little mug and belched a river of chewed industrial foam, blood-laced baby formula, and a sticky hunk of bunny leather onto my steel-toed work boots.

  I looked from the mess to Paige’s chalky face.

  “Maybe we can find the bamboo in sort of a crimson lacquer,” I added.

  * * *

  “It’s not what you think,” she said, twenty minutes later in the backyard. The baby was on a blanket under a tree, and she’d pulled out two beers. “Pamela didn’t bite him.”

  “No?” She couldn’t afford to have me—or anybody—thinking otherwise. If Deenie could prove Pamela had ever been a danger to others, he’d walk on the murder charge.

  “She’s his mother. Was.” She rolled the beer bottle between her hands. “Lycanthropy’s been in my family since the Civil War. You can transmit it through the placenta.”

  “You were in the womb together. Same placenta.”

  “I’m not a werewolf,” she said. “Best guess is sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn’t. Twins were a first for my family.”

  “Papers don’t say he’s her baby.”

  “We drove out to the middle of the province, switched IDs. At the hospital in Trail, nobody knew us.”

  “Twins, right. Didn’t anyone notice that you—”

  “I wore a padded belly to work for a few months.”

  “You and Pamela must have been close.”

  “I wasn’t so sure until she was gone. It was my job to take care of her, to cover, to cover up—”

  “The good kid.”

  She wiped her eyes.

  “Me too. Eldest, right? Perfect attendance, good grades, come home and watch the little kids….”

  Again with that scalpel-sharp look of comprehension: “Your family’s not around anymore?”

  “They’re alive. They’re pretty sure I’m going to hell.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t about to get into that. “So, you pulled a switcheroo with his birth certificate. But why?”

  “To protect him. Deenie was already hunting Pammy.”

  “And her boyfriend—he’s the father?”

  “He doesn’t know. She left when she realized she was pregnant.”

  The boyfriend had just testified. Deenie broke his fingers and pulled out one of his front teeth to get him to give up Pamela’s location. Poor guy damn near had a mental breakdown on the stand; since he was representing himself, Deenie got to cross-examine the man he’d tortured. He’d had a lot of fun with it.

  “Deenie caught up with Pammy a couple weeks after the birth. She was weak, postpartum. Slow.”

  “But you’d fixed things so the kid’s yours on paper.”

  “It wasn’t that risky. We’d pass a DNA test…identical twins, remember?”

  “Except Chase’d test positive for werewolf?”

  “Yeah.”

  The baby was waving at the tree, entranced by the moving shadows. Not that I was watching.

  “The first three months were okay; I kept him in his playpen.”

  “And now?”

  “See that pile of playpen scraps over by the trash bin?”

  “So you cage him in the basement every month until…” How long would he be a puppy? Sixteen years?

  “Until he’s five. There’s a pack, in Surrey; they’ll take him in during the moon, teach him to hunt, to avoid people. It’s how Pammy was socialized. But he has to go to them good-tempered. He has to enjoy his…wild nights, they call them. If his temperament sours…”

  “Then the pack won’t take him?”

  “They’ll do worse than not take him.” She was tearing up again. “And all this depends on their being around when he’s five, which depends on Richard Deenie being convicted so he and his thug sidekick and all their sick monster-hunting pals know it’s serious, it’s illegal, that it’s not open season up here.”

  I put my hand on hers. “Okay. So. Dog-proofing the basement.”

  How hard could it be? He weighed, what, fifteen pounds?

  JUNE

  Four weeks ran by in a blur.

  By the time the full moon rolled around, we had the walls of her basement panelled. The rabbit hutch had spent a couple weeks downstairs, killing the bleach fumes with a dog-friendly aroma of barn. We’d left construction sawdust on the floor.

  That evening, Paige took all but two of the bunnies upstairs. She threw toys, rawhide chew sticks, and pepperoni down on the concrete floor, along with an old moccasin. She dropped in a few two-dollar ivy plants from the garden store, without their plastic starter pots. So there’d be dirt?

  Fifteen minutes before moonrise, she gave Chase a bottle, burped him, stripped off his footie pyjamas and diaper and lay him, nude, on the concrete basement floor.

  “No blanket?”

  “He’d eat it.” We stared at him, pale and small on the floor. He was playing with his toes. If he was cold, it didn’t show.

  Then he was seizing.

  Paige threw out an arm; I guess I’d taken an involuntary step into the room. She backed me out, closed the door, cutting off the sound of him strangling. Then she led me upstairs. “We can watch on the monitor.”

  Ye gods. The strength it must have taken; I didn’t even like the kid and I didn’t want to walk away. She turned on the monitor. He’ll be a slavering, hideous monster. Scary and unlovable, I thought. I took a good look.

  It was worse than I thought. He was all wobbling puppy butt and baby fluff. He had big eyes, long flirty lashes. He batted them at a chew toy, looking like some kid’s cartoon dawg—bink-bink.

  A quiet “Aroo!” trickled through the baby monitor.

  “Awww,” I said. Believe me, a dead cynic couldn’t have kept from saying “Awww.”

  I was entranced until he caught the first rabbit.

  Even baby-clumsy, he was fast. He shook the rabbit into a puddle, sending fur flying, then rolled in the pudding. He chewed one of the plastic toys to chips. The shoe went in stages; he’d run around with it for a while, settle in for a chaw, run some more.

  And my God, the peeing. Every nook, every corner. All my lovely bamboo panelling.

  “Boy dogs,” Paige said, by way of apology, or explanation.

  “This was why the bleach, last month.”

  “To kill the smell, yep.”

  Okay, stop staring. I got up as he began dragging the first of the ivy plants around the room, spraying potting soil. His tail was wagging. It had only been an hour.

  “He’s laying waste to the place.”

  “As long as he’s happy.” She quirked a brow. “Speaking of which…”

  “Mmm?” I was already considering how to entertain the little bugger next time. He needed grass, more plants…

  Paige kissed me.

  It was awkward—disastrous. My head was elsewhere; she caught me by surprise. She was nervous, too, so the move came out a bit of a lunge. Our lips met for a second; then our teeth clacked, pinching my tongue. I pulled back, reflexively, tasting blood. And whatever she saw in my face…she turned bright red.

  It might be for the best. I squ
elched the urge to apologize. “I should leave.”

  “Hey—it’s okay. I wouldn’t want to date me either.”

  “You’re plenty dateable, Paige—”

  “Don’t, Jude.”

  “What do you want me to say? You’re dead gorgeous. You’re funny, smart. But your sister’s newly dead, you got this murder trial…”

  “I’m hot, but I’m a basket case? You don’t want to take advantage? I didn’t take you for old-school butch, Jude.”

  “How could you not be a basket case?” I stared out the window. “You’re in mourning and there’s a rabid frigging monster in your basement.”

  A faint “Aroo” trickled from the speaker.

  “So? You think you’re such a catch?”

  “I didn’t say that.” A flare of light in a truck, across the street, caught my eye.

  “You’re freakishly tall, for one thing. And that librarian gave me your entire romantic history. You dare call me damaged goods when—”

  “Someone’s watching the house,” I interrupted.

  She cat-stepped across the living room, pissed, and looked sideways through the curtains.

  “Reporter?” I whispered.

  “Deenie’s sidekick,” she gritted. “Valmont Robb.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll bundle up something kid-shaped and walk you to the door.”

  “To the…”

  “You were leaving anyway, weren’t you?”

  “But—”

  A furious glint in her eye. “I may look like a mess to you, but believe me, I can handle myself.”

  Ten minutes later I was out in the cold on the porch. Paige had a fake baby bundled in her arms, a fake smile plastered on her face. See, folks? Nothing going on here.

  “Good night,” she said.

  I gave the fake kid a pat. “I never set out to be a parent, Paige.”

  “Funnily enough, neither did I.” She pivoted, closing the door in my face.

  Well. I’d needed to back her off, right? Nicely done.

  I walked home in the dark, past Robb’s truck with its Kansas plates, pretending I hadn’t seen him, my lip throbbing, my mind full of a strange mix of regret, sexual fantasy, revenge, and puppy eyes.