Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  Because things would be where they always were. Every piece of the house was still in exactly the same place she had left it. Dishes in the cupboard, pictures on the wall. Same bookcase, same blankets, same wall. Waking up was just falling right back into the same old order — except, at the same time, it wasn’t.

  Because everything had changed. Subtly, but absolutely undeniably.

  Julie had briefly held both sides of his face with her hands when she told him she was leaving, and all he could think about was the feel of those hands.

  “This is the part where you do something, Dean,” she said. “This is the part where you at least say something. Anything. You just fucking speak.”

  But he didn’t. He could feel every single thing about her hands, the warmth, the familiar touch, where each finger rested. But he couldn’t find a single thing to say, couldn’t find a way to push the words out.

  She’d taken her hands away — cool air on his face — and she was gone.

  Dean was full of words, packed tight, but he said nothing.

  It wasn’t that Julie had caught him with another woman, or that he’d caught her with someone else. It was slower than that, each step more deliberate and somehow harder to avoid — it wasn’t a simple big mistake. Part of it had been the way he liked police work, spent more and more time at it. The way she’d ask him to change one thing about his routine — if he could come home earlier for once, if he could take a break so they could share lunch — and how nothing could ever change, not without Dean being out of sorts and almost confused.

  It was also the fact they’d bought a place out of town, miles from everywhere, and Julie needed more than just trees outside and one tired cop to talk to in the evening. It was that she had quit her job to work at home, and while the work she was doing was great, it was lonely, too.

  Dean thought that, in retrospect, he should have been able to see every one of those things, see how they would pile up and weigh them both down — years analyzing evidence and statistics, building charts — but still he hadn’t seen any of it coming, and also couldn’t find one single spot where either of them might have taken even one step differently.

  Compelled to what was, looking back, an obvious end.

  So Dean would drag himself out of bed and get dressed to head downtown to work. And at least that still made sense for a little while, until the quiet of the office felt like it was hemming him in completely.

  Then he’d sign out a car, any car, leave Scoville right there at his desk, and drive around the city, sometimes unable to even figure out afterwards exactly where he had been.

  Drinking coffee, tucked away along the back edge of a high school parking lot.

  On a side road out near the dump.

  Sometimes not back to the headquarters building until it was fully dark and Scoville was long gone. Never wanting to drive home to that empty house. Knowing full well that it was only a matter of time until someone higher up noticed and everything else came unstitched, too.

  There were times when Dean felt completely outside his own skin — as if the things happening around him had no connection to him at all.

  And not sleeping. It was like he didn’t know how to sleep any more, listening to the house creak and settle in the cool of the night, sure that she was about to call and willing himself not to answer it. Wondering if he would be able to resist. Then up in the morning, exhausted. For the first time thinking that maybe being an ex-cop wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

  Chapter 12

  2 hair dye — Golden Blond

  soap

  bus pass

  diapers

  A small white note, short, half open like it was a wrinkled little butterfly trying to skip over the lip and escape from one of the produce displays, pushing its papery wings out into the warmer air so it could fly away.

  I didn’t see where the note came from. I didn’t see her.

  I wished I had. As soon as I read it, I wanted to go through the store and track her down, spot that hair, and go straight up to her, if only just to tell her it would be all right. And maybe it wouldn’t be all right at all. But I really wanted to tell her that it would be.

  Because — this is stupid, but it’s true — that’s the kind of note that makes you want to be behind her with your arms out, ready to catch, makes you say, “I’ve got you,” right up close into her ear, a note that’s almost a cry out loud right there in front of the iceberg and the romaine and the leeks, the kind of cry someone makes just when they realize they can’t help falling.

  I’m surprised I found it at all, because I always try to move fast in produce — the produce guys are out there in the rows almost full-time. There’s broccoli to stack and throw crushed ice onto, and three colours of bell peppers to pull out of those strange heavily waxed cardboard boxes. Apples and pears to arrange in ranks like fruit platoons. Lots of rituals to take care of, and those produce guys guard their turf carefully, like you don’t really have any right to be hanging around there, because the produce is for them and the customers only, and “isn’t someone calling for a cleanup in aisle eight? Just move along.”

  Only the meat section is worse — they’re the closest thing there is to a grocery cult. Meat is the place where they look straight into your eyes and know you can’t ever be counted on to clean anything right, even if cleaning is your full-time job. Because you can never, ever hope to clean well enough to measure up to the standards they set.

  The meat guys, they take care of their own stuff. Their own racks, their own knives, their own small acreage of tiled walls and floors that you sometimes catch them washing within an inch of their lives. Lots of soap, disinfectant, and some kind of sanitary religion that involves extremely hot water, big boots, heavy rubber hoses, and the kind of water pressure that makes you want to bend a loop of the hose into your shoulder like you were a firefighter or something. They’re the only ones who wear white, and also the only ones allowed to wear stuff with stains on it, too, like each stain was some kind of badge or something.

  It’s an almost universal attitude for them, even if the meat comes in pre-cut now and they’re just slapping it onto the Styrofoam trays and shrink-wrapping it. Seriously, that’s something a monkey could be trained to do. But they call themselves butchers, even if that only means they know what a pork chop looks like without a label on the shrink-wrap plastic to tell them.

  Don’t believe me? Just look at that stupid spinning metal bucket-cart they always bring the meat in when they’re shelving it — nothing like it anywhere else in the store, and the darned thing’s probably specially designed, and most likely costs a mint. All to haul pre-packaged meat. To shelves. It could be a fucking wheelbarrow.

  But back to that note.

  Heartbreaking.

  It was just a crumpled little piece of white paper, and you had to imagine that it was pulled out of a deep pocket where it had been stuffed, eight spare words in all, and you could draw the scene up in front of you as solidly as if it had been etched on stone. Down in the bottom of a winter-coat pocket, probably with a damp ball of Kleenex and a half-used tube of ChapStick.

  Yes, I would have liked to have been able to find her.

  And, yes, it had to be a her — men don’t ever have that kind of list, never anything close to that desperate, even if their wives are bringing in a list like that on every single trip.

  I picture her with a kid stuck there on one hip and a foldable stroller out in front with a smaller baby stuffed down in it — no cart, because the list’s so short. Or maybe she’s with one of those staggering, newly walking toddlers, falsely independent and casting out in front of her, one of those toddlers with the bulky square-diapered butts stuck out behind them and that dazed aura like they’re always about to fall down and still can’t quite believe it could actually happen.

  And when they do fall, they’ve got a face on
them like they’ve suddenly lost every single scrap of faith they ever had in the whole entire world.

  Mom walking behind them in that exhaustion haze that means she absolutely needs a list, even though she really only needs five things — so few she could count them on the fingers of a single hand.

  Tired enough that she doesn’t even know, isn’t really sure, that she even has hands any more.

  I’ve seen them leave kids in those seats in the carts and walk completely away into other aisles, the abandoned youngster shrieking until their mom realizes they’ve been left behind. Other kids being pushed around the store while they’re half-leaning out of the carts with the plastic-clip safety belts not even done up, and you can imagine them going just that little bit too far, the physics already pointing their heads right straight for the floor. Moms with a half-drawn, half-resigned expression that suggests that a fall might not be entirely a bad thing.

  Women with their coats half opened or buttoned wrong, maybe a button missed or just plain missing. In a rush to get everything done and to get to the bus stop out front before the Number 2 hauls away without them. If they don’t make it, it’s another critical fifteen minutes before the next bus pulls up. And that fifteen minutes might be the difference between a calm child and neutron-bomb, ballistically tired, screaming two-year-old.

  Every time it happens, I think maybe I could be a help — if nothing more than to try and give her a little smile when the whole thing’s starting to come unhitched.

  Things come unhitched. You see that if you can see past how annoyed it makes you that someone else’s kid is having a meltdown.

  I held that note in my hand, right up against the handle of my cart, and I couldn’t stop thinking that I could do something if I could find her.

  Golden Blond, with at least one kid in tow behind her or out in front.

  Mary said she wanted kids, and I guess I did, too. Said it, I mean — I said I wanted kids, because that was one of those questions that just popped up once when we were on an early date, and it had all the immediate gravity of an absolute deal-breaker.

  “Do you want kids?”

  “Do you want to get married?”

  Those definite questions, those imperatives that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, make you founder and wonder, even when they come out innocent and sudden-like: “Do you like strawberries?” or “Have you ever had a cat?”

  I don’t think I stopped to even consider what it was I was saying when I first said it — the whole thing seemed so incredibly foreign. Of course I wanted kids — globally, I meant. Not like next Thursday or something.

  But once you’ve said it — at least, once you’ve said it to Mary — well, the discussion is over. You don’t get a chance to go back.

  Sometimes, I think I said I did because she wanted them so much.

  Or else because it’s the kind of thing that you’re supposed to say when you’re a couple.

  Children are the kind of thing that you are supposed to want, and she did. She wanted them like they had always been a necessary part of that list, that important list that she kept close and that I was never allowed to see. I think she had the number of kids she wanted and the sex and the names and everything else all picked out and stashed away. Thinking back, I’m absolutely sure she did, that she had them all drawn up already, sketched out right through high school and college and all the way to them having her grandkids, and all I had to do was my part.

  I’ve wondered since if it would have made a difference if we had actually had them — if they would have acted like some kind of carbon shield for the impending explosion, if they would have been capable of knocking down those scattering, tumour-causing gamma rays of temper before they managed to do the real deep genetic damage you can never recover from.

  It’s hard to imagine, that those invisible rays zing right through you, doing nothing until that random moment when they knock some strut or guy-wire off a critical bit of DNA in just one cell — and they’re not even there any more, because they’re still winging off through the universe without ever being seen or heard or even felt. Uncaring. You should get to feel them, really you should, like some pinprick or shiver or splinter or something — at least you should get to feel the ones that end up changing everything, that end up mattering.

  Other times, I’ve wondered if it would have been fair to bring kids into that, to have them caught there between Mary’s hammer and my anvil.

  Mostly, though, when I look at it square on, I think that maybe we should have tried. Or tried harder. Or I should have tried harder. As if, because we didn’t, we ended up missing something, as if there was something worth looking for that we didn’t try hard enough to find.

  I didn’t find Golden Blond in the end, not that time, not in the store or outside — outside, where I even held her note there under my nose like I was a bloodhound or something, like there was some way to catch a scent from it and track her tired footsteps across a hundred yards of rough-grained concrete sidewalk.

  But all the note smelled like was damp, the way damp paper smells when you’ve been clenching it too tightly in your hand; the way you hold on to something you depend on. At least until it fails you completely.

  Chapter 13

  Dec. 17 — Daniel won a trip to a Mexican resort, on raffle tickets he kind of had to buy because his boss was selling them. And the trip’s going to be such a relief. It will be nice to be away from here for a while. I can’t put my finger on why I’m so creeped out — I keep catching myself looking around, like I’m in a movie, not noticing that someone’s following me or something. I spin around and there’s next to no one, maybe someone walking in the same direction on the other side of the street. And the curtains? I used to pull them closed, sure, but now I feel like I have to make certain every scrap of glass is covered. Even if I can’t see anyone, it’s like there’s someone back out of sight, watching me. I haven’t seen anyone, not for sure — although there was one night when I was convinced I could see someone out near the back fence from my bedroom window, convinced enough to call Daniel. He came over and he said there was no sign of anyone there — and sometimes I feel like maybe it’s something that I’m putting together out of nothing. One thing’s for sure: I don’t like this at all, and Daniel’s still making fun of me, asking me if I saw the paparazzi lining up outside the windows for a candid shot of my tits. He thinks it’s a joke. I don’t. Got in a big fight because the cat food was put back in the wrong cupboard — I must have done it because Daniel says he didn’t touch it, but I opened the cupboard where the ironing board was and Bo’s food was in it, and I don’t know why, but it just sent a chill through me. And then I had it all worked out that Daniel had moved it, until he said he didn’t.

  Chapter 14

  Carrots (Organic? Baby)

  Cantalopes

  Apples (Macintosh)

  Cucumbers

  Cabbage

  Rice Crackers

  Granola Bars

  Onions

  Cheese

  Organic Yogurt + Plain

  Cereal From Organic Isle

  Eggs

  Hummous

  Bread

  The note itself wasn’t that important. All of it in pencil letters on the back of a piece of junk mail from her member of Parliament — the envelope not even opened. I held it up to the light, used scissors to clip off the very end of the envelope, a thread of paper so fine that it curved into a curl as I cut it. Like a fingernail, the kind of sliver of something that they’d slip into an evidence bag on a television crime show. Inside the envelope, an NDP pamphlet on “Putting your pension first.” On the outside, her name and street address. And I knew exactly where the street was.

  I spend a lot of time walking around the city. I always have, even though St. John’s isn’t really a city that’s made for walking. I don’t mean because of th
e hills either — I can handle the hills, I’m used to them, hardly even notice them most of the time. If you’re not going up a hill, you’re going down one. No, it’s the winter, and the drivers, that make the walking hard. If you’re out on the street in the winter, you’re mostly on your own, a single little hunched soldier moving pretty much unnoticed and low through a sleeping enemy encampment. The cars whizz by and hardly even check their speeds, so you’re a momentary headlight silhouette and nothing more — there for a flicker and then gone. I’ve been walking for years, and no one I know has ever mentioned seeing me.

  As soon as there’s snow, the streets are all narrowed down — hemmed in by the snowbanks, the sidewalks completely covered — and the weather freezes and thaws so regularly that there’s often slush and puddles just waiting for a car to fling them all over you, if you’re not slipping on ice as you try to get out of the way. You have to be ready for it, have to be on your guard. For the slush. For the cars themselves. For the occasional car mirror that plucks at your sleeve when someone cuts by too close. I think that’s a good way to live — to be on your guard. To always be ready.

  You hear that all the time now, especially about things like credit card numbers and the Internet and everything. Personal information, everything out there spinning around and eventually falling into the wrong hands. Like there’s a blizzard of information, drifts of it just waiting for people who are up to no good to come out and shovel through. But it doesn’t matter how many times you hear it: it’s really nothing new. People have always gone around shedding private information like they shed dead skin cells — constantly, and without even noticing. A piece here, a piece there — if you’re dedicated about it, about collecting things, it really doesn’t take very long to start putting the puzzle of a person’s private life together.

  Turn on the radio now and there’s bound to be someone earnest on, talking about the way someone can use the things you type into your computer.