Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  “We don’t mean to be. We’re just shy.”

  “No, you’re just boring. But you are very good and nice. Hey, I bet you don’t think I can do Bogie.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to me to wonder.”

  She tightened her jaw. “I come to Casablanca for some water,” she said.

  It wasn’t bad.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2014, I chose a location for Bookshop out on the revamped part of Dundas Street around the top of Trinity Bellwoods Park. I saw coffee shops springing up and decided to cast my lot. Now we have artisanal cheese shops, a pet store, and some good restaurants. And Ossington Avenue. Ten years ago the only nightlife on Ossington was drive-by shootings. Now you can get Italian shoes and chocolate for wine tastings.

  We’re only in Toronto by a lucky stroke. If not for Ian having had some good fortune playing marijuana stocks on the TSE (husband: “Skill!”), I’d still be working at the college in Port Dundas; he’d still be in the Ontario Police Services. We’d all be back in that quiet, safe little town. But as my ex-cop likes to say, “I smelled the coffee on the wall.” The country was going to legalize pot. He’d busted some growers in Westmuir so many times he’d become friends with them, and some were liquidating in the lead-up to legalization to buy stocks instead of plants. Ian didn’t warn me that he was retiring and putting all of our savings into stocks with names like Gemini Pharma and GreenCo. Luckily for him and us, it was a good bet, although I was furious not to be consulted.

  Every place you live has its own rhythms, and it can take a while to get used to it or fit in. After two years, I was still decoding Toronto, and I certainly knew what Katerina was talking about—the friendly coldness of Torontonians—but many things about the city were becoming clearer. Torontonians wanted to get on with it, but they were generally courteous. If someone let you into a car lane, for instance, you were expected to wave with casual gratitude, like you expected it, but thank you anyway. Toronto’s panhandlers say thank you when you give money, and also when you say “Sorry.” In fact “Sorry, thank you,” may be the most common exchange between citizens. Toronto’s reputation when I lived outside it was that it was a steely, arrogant place without a heart, but now I see it likes outsiders and it draws on a deep spring of weirdness. Maybe that’s the source Katerina came from.

  I dwelled for a while on these two encounters in my shop and then, to satisfy my curiosity (or to have my gullibility further tapped), one day mid-month I closed the store early and went down to the market. Apart from our move, nothing as interesting as Katerina and her Ingrid had happened to me in a long time. I planned to keep the whole thing to myself, because Ian is a worrier and this was only a lark. Who wouldn’t want to know what was going on? And a part of me was thinking: what if this turns out to be a good story?

  May was on its way, thank god. We were getting inoculations of sun. Winter here arrives, stays, persists, goes away a little, then comes back and people start leaping off the bridges. That’s approximately March, when jumping is at its apogee, but even then, winter isn’t over. What it likes to do is go away for a week in April and then return for three days and finish grandpa off.

  Katerina hadn’t said where she worked, but Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market was crowded with Mexican, Chilean, Middle Eastern, and Portuguese businesses. I looked for her in all of them. The last time I’d been in the market—years ago—its identity as a countercultural space had already been scrubbed clean. It was a hodgepodge now, but something was happening: it was young like it had once been, the coffee was excellent, and I saw a couple of restaurants I’d risk eating in. The smell of weed hung in the air, advertising the dozen or so medical marijuana dispensaries that had appeared since the Liberals were elected.

  No matter your approach, once you crossed College Street or Spadina Avenue or Dundas, you were somewhere else when you entered Kensington Market. It’s like if I cross the Canadian border in my car, I know I’m in the United States. Even before the signs for Cracker Barrel come up, I’m feeling hustled. Kensington Market’s energy was hustle too, plus bustle, a lot of movement right in front of your eyes, and a shudder or rattle behind it. Countercultural, but bloody and raw. The organic butcher beside a row of dry-goods shops offered, in one window, white-and-red animal skulls with bulbous dead eyes, and in the other, closely trimmed racks of lamb and venison filets, displayed overlapping each other like roofing tiles. Then some stranger rustles past with blood on his cheeks.

  There was no sight of Katerina on Baldwin Avenue, either. It had been about a week since she’d appeared in my store, and I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered what she looked like. I’ve had this problem before. When I first meet someone, my mind must be busy noting other details, because I don’t always register what they look like. Sometimes I even forget the faces of people I know. There have been times when I haven’t been able to bring my own sister’s face to mind. Not even if I look at one of the few pictures I have of her. I’ll look away from her image and close my eyes, but she won’t be there.

  Katerina was not on the lower part of Augusta Avenue. I looped back and forth over the street, going into a fish and chips shop, a vegetarian wok spot, the coffee corner, and looking at the people behind the counters, sometimes searching their faces as if a person I spent ten minutes with not very long ago could change that much. On Augusta I crossed with throngs of every station back and forth and back over the street.

  I found her at last, working a flattop in a Latin American food court. The only sign over the entrance said CHURROS CHURROS CHURROS. Seven or eight food stalls went back inside the narrow space. In the front window, an elderly man squirted batter into a decapitated three-gallon jerry can of boiling oil. Brand name Cajun Injector.

  “How are you!” Katerina came around her counter to hug me. I stiffened in her embrace. “Are you okay? I worried about you, you know.”

  “About me?”

  “Of course! Come in the back, I make a coffee.” She ushered me toward the rear of the food mall more quickly than necessary, I thought. I smelled coconut and coriander as we went past the stalls. “Miguel won’t be happy to see you after what you did.”

  “What I did?”

  “Yeah! Did you go to the doctor?”

  She walked into my back.

  “Katerina,” I said, “I’m Jean. Who do you think I am?”

  “Jean!” she said. “So stupid of me. You are the other one!” She admired me. “Incredible.”

  “I’m the other one now?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe.”

  “I don’t know what I’m not believing in. What did Ingrid do? Why did she have to see a doctor?”

  Katerina showed me to the patio. “We talk out here. Are you hungry? I have to look busy a couple minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry. Just hurry.”

  “Go sit.”

  I hesitated, or resisted, but then I obeyed. At the back of the building, a red rusted VW Bug stood on blocks, and behind it, in a garage partially closed off by tarps, I heard voices and smelled weed again.

  In one of the chairs, my legs sprawled out in front of me, I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Now I felt stupid. I was almost certain that Katerina wasn’t a threat, but between her and Mr. Ronan—who had not returned to the shop—I probably should have started to get a little suspicious. Something was definitely wrong, but what? When I opened my eyes, the clouds had amphibious underbellies and were ringed in a menacing shade of grey. I leaned forward and looked into the food mall, but it was too bright to see in.

  I got up and left the patio. This was foolish. I walked partway back to Augusta Avenue along the alley and stopped. I stood with my back against the wall. I imagined I could feel the graffiti skirling out in twisted bands behind my shirt like tentacles of smoke.

  “You want to eat in the alley?” Katerina said. She stood at the edge of the patio with a styrofoam plate of food in her hands. I returned to the table. I didn’t know it yet, but by returning to the patio inst
ead of walking away, I had sealed Katerina’s fate.

  She put the plate down in front of me with an orange Jarritos. There was an albino hamburger on the plate that smelled the way my grandmother’s kitchen sometimes smelled: of comfort. “This is called the pupusa,” she told me. “You eat it with your hands. Like a sandwich. Go on,” she said, “eat it.” I tried to figure out how to pick it up. “And because you weren’t listening the first time, I will tell you again about the Llorona and the Sayona.”

  “It’s not necessary,” I told her, but the moment I’d taken a bite of her pupusa, I didn’t care anymore. Its scent was how it tasted. The shell contained a mixture of avocado, white cheese, corn, and a greeny-brown salsa that tasted like roasted tomatoes and garlic. The shell was made of white corn flour; the hot and crispy-hard surface perfectly burnt in a few places, and it was warm and bready on the inside. Katerina grinned at my pleasure, and I concluded that, at the very worst, she was only a nuisance.

  “So,” she said. “My mother has told me I was visited by a Llorona myself. When I was a baby. An old woman was coming to the house one night to ask for a cigarette. My mother gave her one. The old woman comes back two more times, and she doesn’t want to be rude, my mother, so she brings her into our house. She makes her tea and the old woman tells she has a daughter my mother’s age and my mother feels warm toward her. After that, she comes and visit from time to time, always after I go to sleep, and my mother was smoking with her and making her hot tea and sometimes a tortilla with a egg inside it.

  “One night, the old woman wants to use the anexo. To make her water. My mother show her out back. She tells me that the old woman went away for too long and she felt something was going on. So she goes to my room, and my door is open. She goes in and she sees a woman who look exactly like her! Standing beside my crib! And I am inside the crib, standing, reaching to her, who I think is my mother. My real mother, she shouts and stamps her feet and the spirit goes out through the curtains! Straight out the wall. My mother picks me out of my crib and holds me the rest of the night.”

  “How do you know she was your real mother?” I asked, trying to make her smile. “Maybe it was a bait-and-switch-and-bait.”

  “She was never visit by the old lady again. Later, her mother, my grandmother, tells her who it was. The Llorona! Sometimes she comes to visit crying with a baby in her arms, sometime to see if a baby is in the house. If she come in three times, then she will try to take!”

  I chewed calmly. “This is delicious, by the way.”

  “Now you see what we are dealing with, you and Ingrid.”

  “I thought you concluded neither of us were Guatemalan spirits.”

  “There are more than two spirits,” she said. “I have not ruled out for Ingrid that she is La Siguanaba.”

  “Speaking of Ingrid, why did she go to the doctor? Did she try to walk through a wall or something?”

  “You are joking.”

  “A little.”

  “I can make you believe,” she said, and her tone of voice made me want to jump up and run. She leaned over the table and tucked her hair behind her left ear, revealing three blue dots tattooed on her temple. A triangle of pinpricks still red and raw around the edges. “Look at this. She give these to me.” The dots gleamed like spider eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “A trick with a sewing needle!” Katerina laughed and fell back into her chair. “I invite her over one night! We have some drinks. She’s a good talker. She was drunk. She tells me…” She lapsed into silence and a trickle of blood came out of her hairline. “She said she was sick. Here.” She tapped her head, right on the tattoo, and noticed the blood on her fingertip.

  “I think you scraped it with your nail.” I passed her a napkin. “Why did you let her do that to you?” I asked. “What does it mean?”

  “We get drunk and she give me a tattoo. Big whoop.”

  “Jabbed you in the temple three times for the hell of it.”

  “It means therefore, she says.” She looked at the blood on the napkin.

  “Therefore.”

  “She says it is my own personal therefore. I think she fell in love with me.”

  “Wow. Do you usually drink so much?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that night?”

  “Of course. What do you think? I do anything for company here. I think maybe Toronto is a fuckless city. It was nice that she come over. But you have to be careful, if you ever meet her, don’t believe everything she say.”

  “Like what?”

  “She thinks she has a doppelganger!” She laughed and I suddenly felt really scared. My heart hiccupped behind my ribs.

  “This was great, Katerina. How much do I owe you?”

  “You should go to the park,” she said. “That is where she will come. One day again soon.”

  I struggled for a moment over whether I really wanted to know. “Which park?”

  “Her again?” said a man in the doorway. He wore a white apron stained with chocolate sauce.

  “No. Another one! See?”

  “Hello,” he said to me. “You pay on the way out.”

  “It’s on me,” Katerina said.

  He switched to Spanish and harangued her. It was obvious they were, or had once been, lovers. But he was also the boss.

  “I’m allowed to do nice things for people,” she said in English. “Miguel was a mathematician in Chile,” Katerina explained to me. “But here he is only Churros Churros Churros.”

  For that, he came out and grabbed her by the arm. I was on my feet before I knew it. “Let her go! Let go of her right now! We don’t grab people!”

  “She owes me four hundred dollars.”

  “I’ll give you the money,” I said. “Let her go.”

  Katerina came and stood beside me. She rubbed her upper arm. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t owe him anything. Ingrid owes him.”

  Miguel said: “She dented the flattop with a cast-iron pan!”

  “Ingrid?” I asked. “You’ve seen her, too?”

  “Who? This one!” he said, pointing at Katerina. “Miss Hot-and-Cold!”

  “And he makes fun of my English!” she said, and started to cry. “Shithead. I break up with him because he is so mean. And a sucio cerdo, a pig, a dirty pig!”

  “You go,” he said to me.

  Katerina tapped her tattooed temple. “Don’t worry. I don’t belong to him. I am with you and Ingrid, miracle women, and you protect me.”

  “I’m a witness,” I warned him, sliding past. “Don’t touch her again!” To Katerina, I said: “I’ll come back soon. I wrote my phone number on the napkin.”

  THE PARK KATERINA meant is called Bellevue Square. I saw what she was talking about right away: you could see anyone or anything in that park. I sat on one of its benches after leaving the food mall and watched people coming and going for two whole hours. I had to remind myself to keep looking for my twin, but the passing parade was so gripping that from time to time I forgot my stakeout. The park was a clearing house for humanity. I saw no sign of my lookalike.

  The following week I went back, and the week after, too, a couple more times. I walked through the square, or sat for an hour, sometimes two. For cover, I had one of those puzzle magazines full of sudokus and crosswords, and I occupied myself with filling them in when I wasn’t doing my regular sweep of the park. I figured out which restaurants would let me use the washroom, which store sold the cheapest water. As my main lookout point, I settled on the low wall that half encircles the playground on the north side of the square. It gave me a vantage to the south as well as both sides of the park, and I could easily scan the path that cut it in half diagonally, southwest to northeast.

  I found reasons throughout the second half of April to drift toward the park, or pass the park, or sit in the park. There were times when I was at home or in the store when I felt a need to go there. And other times, I sat on the low wall overcome with a feeling of wrong, as if I were fo
rgetting something important, or being watched myself. It wasn’t anxiety. It was something that was present everywhere all at once: a climate. Something I was in.

  At the very beginning of May, I started buying my groceries in the market, too. That gave me extra days to have a reason to go. The temperature shot up into the twenties, and the park swelled with people and animals and garbage. I began to count the number of people who weren’t Ingrid, and I kept track of them on my phone, giving every person an identifying name so I wouldn’t count them twice, like Earlobe Mole and Triple Sweater Man and Bendy, who was a woman whose head sat askew on her neck and who walked serpentine.

  The puzzle book did its task so well that in those early weeks, no one so much as acknowledged my existence. Then, almost exactly a month after Mr. Ronan had first warned me of Ingrid’s existence, a woman walked clear across the park toward me like she recognized me, and I thought, Ah, this woman knows Ingrid. She wore two pieces of clothing: a tight white halter top with white spaghetti straps cutting into her burnt shoulders and a pair of white Lycra shorts. White sunglasses, a layer of lipstick red as a car crash. Also, I had to presume, no underwear: the front of her shorts looked like someone had painted over a tarantula. She kept coming, even though I’d put my head down to write feverishly in the margin of my magazine. I saw her light blue toenails and silver sandal straps come to a stop inches from my feet. She said, “Do you have what time is it?”

  I told her it was almost four o’clock and she sat down on the wall beside me, as if giving her the time had been an invitation. She took a bottle of beer out of her purse, twisted off the cap, and began drinking. It was twenty-six degrees and the cold green glass was sweating. I noticed a child on the wall of the sandbox looking at the bottle. Spandex had hiccups and burps, which made her sound like she was beat-boxing. She must have come from one of the rooming houses down Denison Avenue. Got a beer out of her minifridge and came to sit in the park. She drained her beer and put the empty into her purse. It clinked. If you can get two in, that’s what you want. Two was always enough to renew the drunk for my father. Her second beer was sweatier than the first.