Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  The first thing I did after she left was let the plants die. Her plants, all of them. She watered them, she talked to them. When the police were here the first time, I could tell they were bothered by that, by the fact that not only were all the plants dead, but that they were still dotted around the shelves, on the fireplace mantel, on window ledges. The cops kept looking at the flowerpots with the dead stalks waterfalling down over the edges, the puddles of curled up leaves all around them on the floor like everything had happened fast, like it was a reaction to some kind of shock. I didn’t bother to explain, but if they had asked me, I would have had an answer ready.

  They were her plants, I would have told them, and she was the only one that knew what the schedule was. She was the one who cared for them, and, quite simply, they were her responsibility.

  So if she wanted to just up and leave, well, that was her decision, too. And decisions always have repercussions. She could come back and water them any time she liked; she was welcome to that.

  That’s what I would have said. I thought it would have been a good answer, but they never asked, so I kept it to myself. They never got off the same page, those first police officers, just kept to the same bunch of questions that I’d get to know real well over the next few months: Had I heard anything about where she was? Did I know anyone else who had heard anything? And my favourite: “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, sir?”

  Do they teach that one in police school? And did it work on a single person ever?

  “Oh yes, I’ve just been waiting to spill it all out for you . . .”

  One of them was always taking notes, like they were going to go away and compare what I said that day with whatever it was I had said last time. Is there anything I’d like to tell you? No. Nothing at all.

  I kept thinking about it after they left. They were the first two guys — I could probably dig up their names somewhere, I’m pretty sure they gave me their cards. Later, those other two, Hill and Scoville, they certainly did.

  Mary? People should have seen it coming. That’s what I felt like saying.

  People should probably have asked her about it ahead of time, about whether anything was wrong or whether she was making plans to take off. Whether there was anything they could do to help.

  Maybe they did.

  Looking back, there were signs that she was getting ready to fly the coop.

  You hear about men who keep their women on a short leash — don’t let them have their own bank cards, hold on to their driver’s licences, their passports. Make them explain every single place they go, who they see, what they’re up to. Men who are jealous, all the time.

  Thing is, it’s just going to happen anyway, that’s what I’d tell them. So start hardening yourself off, get ready for it. Decide what you’re going to do.

  Things change. All kinds of things. It doesn’t make any difference how hard you try to hang on to the things that brought you together. Even dams only hold the water back for so long.

  The year before she left, Mary was doing more and more things on her own. Casting out little runners like she was her own kind of wild strawberry plant, each skipping step taking root somewhere new, somewhere a little farther away. Busy all the time with different groups, things I couldn’t figure out how she’d even found out about, let alone gotten involved in.

  You hear people saying all the time that there’s a point — some definable instant in time — when they suddenly knew there were problems in their marriage. Like B.C. and A.D. or something, a single fine and clearly drawn line in time.

  I think things just grow slowly, and the reality is that there’s a point where you suddenly look back at all of it, see how the points should have lined up, and you just say, “of course.”

  It’s exactly like B.C. and A.D., but you see it retrospectively, only when the writing’s already firmly on the wall.

  By then, there’s so much of everything that’s already happened that it’s built up over itself again and again like layers on a pearl, so much and so thick that you can’t really come close to scraping it all apart again. Nacre, that’s the exact word for it, the word it would be if resentment grew the way a pearl did, in hard, heavy layers, all laid over and glued down and stacked on top of one another. And all the stronger for it.

  By then, it’s over anyway.

  It’s becoming the fossil record, angry volcanic ash falling down around you everywhere and the stupid-ass dinosaurs already well on their way to dying out completely.

  Mary had her garden club and darts night on Fridays, and even though she didn’t go to church, she had a church group thing that met on Wednesdays and did something with the poor or the underprivileged in some South American country. She told me about it at first, but I’ve got to say it sure didn’t stick in my head. A couple of other things that met late in the afternoons and sometimes went on long enough into the evenings that I’d find myself eating alone, picking away at whatever leftovers were in the fridge.

  And friends — a whole bunch of friends that suddenly I didn’t know, hadn’t even met, and that were all people who didn’t ever come to our house, people she’d talk about but that were just about as real in my head as a collection of cut-out paper dolls named Barb and Andrea and Linda.

  Just names with no faces, and in my head, it was like they were all a group of similar and interchangeable silhouettes. Mary would come home and be talking away about it, and I couldn’t even really keep any of them straight.

  I should have been paying more attention, I’ll admit that.

  I really should have been interested and involved, but I guess I was too lazy. I’d feign a bit of interest and let the whole flood of it just wash over me like a big wall of water — who’d said what and who was pregnant and who was moving away and wasn’t that a shame? I’d try and stick in a few bits of “uh-huh” and “really?” and “why would they do that?” but to be honest, I cared less about the answers than about whether I managed to tuck my own words into the right place in the flow so that they didn’t sound completely out of place. Just another night discussing cut-out people who lived in a cut-out world I didn’t either know or care about and never would.

  But I should have.

  Because eventually, Mary caught on, and she just stopped talking about it.

  Then she started checking off the remaining nights.

  Mondays, she went to watch movies with a group of friends — they rotated from house to house, but for some reason, they never came to ours.

  Tuesdays, she started volunteering at St. Clare’s. Then it was other nights at St. Clare’s, too.

  It’s a big hospital, one of two in the city and the only one that’s actually in a downtown neighbourhood. The other one’s newer, out on the edge of town so that it could have plenty of parking. St. Clare’s, though, is like any other downtown hospital — go visit someone there and you’re almost guaranteed to get a parking ticket, even if you’re able to find a parking meter open. I swear the meter guys circle around like blackflies, ears on them like bats so that they can hear the moment when the little red flag clicks up and your time has expired. I never had much time for the place — my father was dead before he even got through the doors, and my mother died on the seventh floor after three solid weeks of blaming me for taking her from her house and periodically announcing that neither of my brothers would have “been so awful to me.”

  There were plenty of red flags for me to see, too, clicking up one after another. Makes me laugh a little now. Maybe if I’d gone to the right Fredericton convention or something, maybe if I had the right kind of notepaper tucked away in a briefcase, I would have had some idea what it looks like when a dam is ready to burst.

  St. Clare’s looms; it’s a big slab-sided place, heavy vinyl-covered floors, and the paint in the hallways beige and so thick it looks like it was put on with a mop. Doesn’t matter how heavy
it was put on, though; the walls, especially down in Emergency, were scarred from being hit by equipment, by gurneys and monitors and hospital beds. By the janitors’ carts, too: I felt I should be able to recognize that kind of mark, being part of the fraternity and all.

  I don’t remember which police visit it was when I finally told the cops they should be talking to an emergency room doctor named Patterson.

  Youngish guy, married, ran a family general practice in the daytime, a handful of emergency room shifts every month. Just enough to keep his hand in. Smug little mouth on him, always half a smile on it.

  And Mary? I think after a while, she was volunteering on just about every shift he came in for.

  Chapter 31

  April 5

  RNC release year-end statistics

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (rnc) issued its annual report on criminal activity in its area Friday, saying that there has been a 2 percent increase in violent crime, particularly aggravated assault, over the past year.

  Rates of other crimes in the region have primarily stayed the same. There has been a 2 percent increase in drug-related offences.

  “I know you’re not going to be fond of this idea,” Dean said, “but let’s start pulling in some open files on peeping Toms. Stalking complaints, that kind of thing. New ones, old ones, even nine or ten years ago. Unresolved ones, not the ones where someone’s looked out their back window and seen an oversexed teenaged boy fingering the bras on their clothesline.”

  “How come?” Scoville didn’t look convinced.

  “Because of geography. And because maybe what you were saying about arsonists could be taken a little more broadly — remember? About moving up the scale, bit by bit. Maybe that would work for other cases where people are driven to do things.”

  “Why do I think this has to do with Walt?”

  “Because maybe it does. But we don’t know that yet. So we’ll do a little math, starting in his neighbourhood and working out from there. And we’ll see what we get.”

  “There might be hundreds of them. Could be a real needle-in-a-haystack thing.”

  “Well, we won’t know until we do it.”

  Dean pinned a city map to the wall, white paper with a bright red dot at a McKay Street address, a blue one on a downtown grocery store. Then he sat down in his chair, leaning back, his fingers tented. He remembered, fleetingly, that he’d had a series of voicemails from Julie. Whatever it is, he thought, it can wait. He looked at the dots again, imagined they were bull’s eyes, circles radiating out around them.

  Chapter 32

  Bacon

  White bread

  Hash Brown’s

  Cherry Blossoms

  Diet Pepsi

  Simple enough. Another list on a piece of recycled junk mail, this one a small square brochure from a psychic healer: “I can help you in health, happiness, love, marriage, and business. I specialize in home blessings, removing bad luck, and evil spirits, jadoo, obeah, black magic, bad carma, and bad energies. Life has enough disappointments. All is private & confidential. Also available for house parties. I will reunite the separated and heal the sick.”

  Some nights, I feel like I could use both of those last two, and wonder which of the psychic’s “ancient roots, herbs, talismans, spiritual baths, and God-given powers” would be doing the healing and the reuniting.

  Eleven at night is the time when the emergency room really gets interesting. People are starting to get drunk, and in a downtown hospital, the walk-ins — and the carry-ins — are beginning to fill the place up. Doctors’ offices have been closed for hours by then, and the earaches, sprains, and flus that those doctors usually catch are in trying to cadge painkillers or antibiotics. On top of that, the real crazies are making themselves at home — you can see all of that in a hurry.

  St. Clare’s has a small emergency room — the bigger one’s at the city’s main hospital, so St. Clare’s catches the handful of downtown patients who can’t make their way to the larger one. It’s a slice of the city: a core sample, drilled down deep and taking in a bit of every strata as it goes. You can see just about every kind of person there is to see in downtown St. John’s, and see them all in a room small enough for a close look.

  I’d told Mary I was working a night shift — told her twice, because it hadn’t seemed to sink in the first time — and then I walked up to St. Clare’s and told the nurse on the front desk that I had a crushing headache I just couldn’t shake.

  She was only a young thing, wearing a flowered top and green pants, both scrubs, but she still managed to give me a going-over with a weary stare, an experienced inspection to see if I was shabby enough or shaky enough to be trying to wheedle a prescription for painkillers from a harried doctor. Then she nodded me over to the waiting room.

  “Just have a seat in there and a doctor will be with you.”

  She left “eventually” off the end of the sentence, but you could hear the shape of it in her words, and I could imagine her writing down on the chart that I wasn’t any kind of rush case. Or else she was sliding my nice new file to the very back of the bunch of similar files that were all corralled in a metal rack on the corner of her desk. I didn’t mind the attitude — didn’t mind any of it. I wasn’t in a rush to be seen anyway.

  The waiting room was ringed with hard blue plastic chairs shaped like buckets, the kind of seats that start to make your back sweat five minutes after you’re in them. I sat in the uncomfortable, identical row that ran all along the wall under the opaque windows, because given the chance, I’ll always sit with my back to the wall. I don’t like people behind me.

  I looked around, took the place in: a few low tables, a handful of battered magazines probably coated with a dozen different kinds of bacteria, enough room for about twenty-five people waiting. The room only a quarter full that early in the night, some people rigid in their seats and as upright as if they were at church, others tilted over to one side like they’d permanently lost their balance. Two public telephones in the very centre of the room on a post and one woman crying. Slowly.

  The chairs in the centre of the room, the ones away from the walls, were different, less institutional. They were like a collection of odds and ends that nobody had a use for in other parts of the building — soft seats, vinyl, some black, some brown, some with chromed legs: pretty much a sampler, just like the patients.

  Every now and then, a nurse would come out with a file folder, read the name on top out loud, and take another patient into the back. Early on, an ambulance rumbled up to the doors, lights flashing, and the paramedics rushed a guy on a stretcher right straight past the waiting room to one of the examining rooms. After that, no one had their name called for a long time.

  The thing about the emergency room is that everyone’s already focused inwards: they’ve got enough going on that they’re not really worried about you. No one except me was looking around.

  They hurt, or they’re afraid, or something bad is happening to someone they’re with. Sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s small, but one thing’s for sure: it’s always big for the person it’s happening to. And because they’re caught up in something big, you don’t get caught watching them much — and when you do, you can always bend your face into something a little like concern.

  When I first sat down, I was one of only eight other people there — one of them a woman who kept going to the payphone, plugging in coins like it was an old-fashioned slot machine, and then shouting “I’m just smoking too goddamn much, so I came in here. They’ve got to help me stop” into the phone at whoever was listening, before angrily hanging up. She had hard, staring eyes sunk right back into a narrow, drawn face, and she kept stomping back to the nurses’ station, demanding more change for the phone. The nurses were abrupt with her, which made me think she was a regular.

  There was a young couple, sitting toge
ther, and he had his arm thrown up over her shoulders, and every now and then her face would crumple slightly and she would emit — that’s really the right word for it — she’d emit a soft, deep little moan, her mouth not even seeming to move, so at first it was hard to be certain exactly where the sound was coming from.

  Two older men were sitting only a couple of seats apart in a back corner, both small and leathery-looking, as if they had been distilled, shrunken down into their essential selves. Neither of them spoke, but I thought of them as Smoky and Liver: one had the nicotine-stained fingers and wizened face of a heavy smoker, and he kept going out through the doors and coming back five or ten minutes later, trailing the smell of harsh, half-burnt, roll-your-own tobacco.

  Liver’s fingers were yellow, too, but they weren’t the only thing — he was all-over-yellow, every bit of exposed skin an unhealthy mustard like he’d been dipped in some kind of permanent stain, and any time he looked at you, what should have been the whites of his eyes were downright disturbing. Not just the yellowish colour of them, although that was unnerving enough. It was the way his eyes managed to convey something close to abject resignation — like waiting didn’t matter, like bad weather didn’t matter, like the pain didn’t matter, like nothing would ever matter again.

  Last, a mother and an impossibly small baby, the baby red in the face like an angry little radish, a baby who screeched and wailed and then fell sound asleep like it had exhausted itself. I wasn’t sure which of the two was there to see the doctor, or if maybe it was both.

  They took Liver first, and he stood up slowly and shuffled toward the examining room when they called him, his body actually tilted and moving through the room at an angle, as though his compass was permanently askew.

  Then it was the moaner and her boyfriend. I still hadn’t caught even a glimpse of the good doctor, although I’d heard a nurse mention his name.

  Then another ambulance wheeled up, followed by a walk-in with a bleeding gash on his arm that looked a good six inches long, and two quarrelling drunks with some complaint that led to blows, the arrival of hospital security, and finally a pair of no-nonsense police officers who just bundled the pair up and took them away. I sat against the wall and watched it all, keeping an eye open for the white coat I wanted to see, the elusive Dr. Patterson, working one of only a few night shifts that Mary wasn’t also volunteering. And how did I know that? Well, Mary’s loud on the phone, and I’m used to walking quietly enough that I can come right up behind you and you wouldn’t even notice.