Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘My lawyer said that he had actually talked with Theo who was “devastated” about what had happened to his daughter, and wanted to speak with me . . . but also didn’t want to ring me directly. “That’s courageous of him,” I remember telling my lawyer, then adding: “Inform him that I never, ever, want to hear from him again.”

  ‘Theo must have taken him at his word – because I didn’t hear from him. But ten days later, I was in a restaurant off Harvard Square having a meal. It was around eight – and this diner had become the place where I ate every meal, as I couldn’t bear to do anything in my apartment except drink myself to sleep with the aid of Zopiclone and red wine. The waiters there were so used to me by now – and the fact that I always ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee – that the food always showed up around five minutes after I sat down.

  ‘But on the night in question, as the sandwich arrived, I looked up and saw Theo and Adrienne coming in. They didn’t notice me at first, because I was in a booth in the back. Before I even could consider what I was doing, I threw some money down on the table, and grabbed my coat and the fork next to my plate. I walked straight towards Theo and Adrienne. They were waiting to be seated. Adrienne saw me first and actually said: “Jane! Oh, my God, we’re so—”

  ‘Before she could finish the sentence I took the fork and plunged it right into the side of her neck. She screamed, there was blood everywhere, I kept right on walking out the door, then dashed across the street to a taxi stand and was in a cab before anyone could stop me.

  ‘I was home ten minutes later. I threw clothes in a bag. I grabbed the necessary documentation, including my two passports and some cash and traveler’s checks. I tossed everything into my car. I started driving.

  ‘Ten days later I drove into a snowbank in Montana. And . . .’

  I fell silent again.

  ‘End of story,’ I said. ‘Except the woman I stabbed didn’t die and didn’t press charges. And when I messed up my suicide . . . well, maybe living was the punishment I would have to endure for killing my daughter . . .’

  Finally Vern spoke.

  ‘You didn’t kill your daughter.’

  ‘Did you not listen to a word I just said?’

  ‘You didn’t kill your daughter.’

  ‘All the advice I got, all the steps I could have taken to avoid disaster, what did I do . . . ?’

  ‘You didn’t kill her. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Because I still blame myself for losing my daughter. Even though . . .’

  Silence. He put his hand on top of mine. I pulled it away.

  ‘What are you doing here with me?’ I said. ‘I mean, do you really like damaged goods? Is that your kinky thing? Or do you actually think there’s some sort of weird romantic future between us?’

  As soon as this was out of my mouth I loathed myself for it. And I turned to him and instantly said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so stupid, so . . .’

  I buried my head in his shoulder, but couldn’t cry. He put an arm around me, but I could tell he was nervous about doing it, fearful about how I might react.

  ‘You know,’ he said quietly, ‘even if I wanted “that”, it could never be. The prostate cancer ended that part of my life . . . not that it had existed since my wife left me.’

  ‘So what do you want from this?’ I asked.

  He disengaged himself from me. His eyes were red, rheumy. He pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his coat and wiped his face. Then he gripped the steering wheel and stared straight out at all that blowing snow.

  ‘I want a whiskey,’ he finally said.

  Eight

  WE WENT TO a bar in a strip mall. Like all strip malls, this one was grim. The fact that several inches of fresh snow had dappled it didn’t lessen its ugliness. The bar was also ugly: a real beer-and-hockey joint which stank of urinated lager and male sweat. At least they weren’t playing heavy metal music – though there was one of those massive televisions near the bar that was broadcasting a Calgary Flames game. On screen two guys from opposing teams had thrown off their helmets and were now doing their best to rip each other’s ears off. All the patrons at the bar seemed to be enjoying the show – and were yelling encouragement to the pit-bull in the Flames uniform.

  ‘Hey there, Vern,’ the bartender said as we came in. The bartender was named Tommy. He looked like a biker and wore a T-shirt that exposed overripe biceps and a tattoo of the Canadian Maple Leaf intertwined with a crucifix.

  ‘Nice place,’ I said, following Vern into a booth and sliding in opposite him.

  ‘That it is not,’ Vern said. ‘But it’s local – and I can stagger home from here.’

  Now this statement begged a question: ‘Does having two drinks make you stagger . . . or do you come in here to break your two-drink rule?’ Over the next three hours I got an answer to that question, as Vern proceeded to drink me into an advanced stupor. After telling me in the car that he wanted a whiskey he drove me here in silence, saying absolutely nothing about all that I had told him. He plugged a CD into his sound system: a piano trio by Schumann; brooding, expressive, wintery music. We negotiated our way through the snow and back towards the city. I was grateful that he said nothing after everything I had said. There is a notion propagated in modern life that ‘talking it out’ will somehow make everything better. It’s a lie. All talking does is articulate the agony. You have to get it out because you have to get it out. But it’s not like vomiting up a toxic meal. You don’t suddenly feel purged, scoured, cleansed and ready to start anew. All you feel is: I’ve said it . . . and nothing has changed.

  So I was pleased to avoid extended soul searching with Vern. Maybe Vern himself had once been told by someone that his daughter’s schizophrenia wasn’t his fault and he too had decided otherwise. Or maybe my story had so appalled him that he just wanted to get drunk.

  Whatever the reason, Vern started drinking seriously. Two shots disappeared within ten minutes of us sitting down. This seemed to steady him a bit. Then it was a double every thirty minutes. I matched him, drink for drink. It was an interesting experience, getting truly sloshed. Though I had often drunk myself to sleep in the recent past, this was different. From the hints dropped by Tommy the bartender – ‘So it’s going to be that sort of afternoon, Vern . . . How ’bout handing over your car keys for safekeeping?’ – it was clear that this was not the first time my work colleague had gone on a binge here. I even posed that question to him – around the time round five showed up.

  ‘So if you’re into AA and all that, how do you explain an afternoon like this?’

  ‘It’s simple, really: every other month, when I sense the need to get drunk, I come in here and I get drunk. Tommy knows when I’m having one of those days and what to do when I get to the point where I don’t know what to do. There was a time when I was blotto every day. Now I get smashed under controlled circumstances.’

  Over the three hours we were in the bar, Vern did most of the talking. The rye loosened him up considerably and he ranged over a wide variety of subjects, from interpretations of Mahler on record, to the lingering despair he felt about most things to do with the Central Public Library, to a brief mention of a woman he’d fallen in love with while he was at the Royal College of Music.

  ‘Her name was Veronique. She was a cellist from Lyon. Brilliant and, to my eyes, very beautiful in a rather severe way. I once accompanied her in the Second Cello Sonata of Mendelssohn. And I sensed – from the hints she was dropping – that she was more than interested in me. God knows, I was smitten with her. But . . . I was just never good at that sort of thing.’

  ‘By which you mean: seduction?’

  ‘By which I mean: being normal.’

  ‘Who’s normal?’

  ‘Oh, there are people who seem to get through life with a limited amount of difficulty; who know how to make their luck, to capitalize on their talents, to allow things to happen for them.
’

  ‘But the majority of people don’t cut through life like it’s very soft, malleable butter. It’s always a brawl . . .’

  ‘Especially against the one great force that none of us can counteract: death.’

  ‘Does it scare you, death?’

  ‘It’s going to arrive, that’s for sure. And I guess the one and only thing that perplexes me is the idea that I will be no more, that my entire story will vanish with me. No “me”. How can that be?’

  ‘“No me”,’ I said, repeating the phrase. ‘A year ago that struck me as a very viable alternative.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now . . . I have to live with myself, and all that that means.’

  That was the only mention during the afternoon of all that had been articulated earlier that day. More drinks arrived. We kept talking. I felt the rye take hold of me – but I liked its alcoholic balm. I needed to get drunk for the same reason I needed to talk about ‘that day’: it had to be done. It was a necessity.

  By keeping up a steady, but not rapid-fire pace of imbibing, neither of us pitched into incoherency until around five that afternoon . . . at which point Tommy phoned for two separate taxis (was he ensuring that we didn’t wake up next to each other?) and helped each of us out of the bar and into the waiting vehicles. But around two hours before this, I made a momentary observation which – as it turned out – was to direct the course of events in my life for the next few months. Like so many events that manage to alter things for us, this one came about merely because I looked a certain way at a certain moment – glancing up at the television behind the bar just when . . .

  ‘About time they nabbed that lying sonofabitch.’

  That was Tommy the bartender staring up at the television. On the screen, George MacIntyre – the father of the missing thirteen-year-old girl, Ivy – was being led out of his very simple frame house. He was a man in his early forties – overweight, balding, with a wispy beard. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and pajama bottoms – the cops evidently deciding to arrest him while he was still in bed. But though I took in all the grubby details of his appearance – and the fact that he so seemed to fit the identikit portrait of a child molester – it was his eyes that really grabbed my attention. They were red from crying. But what I saw in them wasn’t fear or guilt or denial; rather, it was anguish. The same anguish I caught in my own eyes on those occasions after Emily’s death when I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror. The eyes of someone who had also lost a child and now knew a sorrow beyond dreams. And at that precise moment, I knew: that man did not kill his daughter.

  MacIntyre was now being perp-walked to a waiting cop car while dozens of reporters and paparazzi shouted questions and clicked camera shutters.

  ‘As George MacIntyre was led away,’ the CBC reporter said, ‘he was heard shouting: “I would never hurt my daughter. Never.” Since his daughter’s disappearance he has made several dramatic public appeals for her safe return. MacIntyre, forty-two years old, is known to the police. His wife, Brenda, is very active in the local Assemblies of God church, and according to her pastor, Rev. Larry Coursen . . .’

  The report cut to Larry Coursen. He was blond, square-jawed, with very good teeth, dressed in a light brown leather jacket and a dog collar, and oozing sanctimonious concern.

  ‘This is an immensely sad day for Brenda MacIntyre, for all members of our Assembly of God congregation and, yes, for George MacIntyre too. What has happened is so tragic. We are praying very hard for Ivy’s safe return – just as we are also praying that the light of our Lord Jesus Christ shines down upon her and also upon George MacIntyre.’

  I pulled my glass towards me and threw back the dregs of rye.

  ‘Praise the Lord,’ I whispered under my breath. Vern heard me and favored me with a small smile.

  Now onscreen was an RCMP officer named Floyd McKay. He explained that George MacIntyre had been transferred to Calgary for further investigation.

  ‘Know what I heard this morning from one of the cops that drink here?’ Tommy the bartender said to someone perched on a stool and drinking a Labatt’s by the neck. ‘That they found a “bloodied undergarment” under a pile of wood in MacIntyre’s workshop, and that’s what led to his arrest this morning.’

  ‘If I was the cops I’d castrate him,’ the other guy said.

  That’s when I heard myself say: ‘He didn’t do it.’

  Tommy the bartender glared at me.

  ‘Did I hear you correctly?’

  I met his gaze.

  ‘You did,’ I said. ‘He didn’t do it.’

  ‘And how the hell do you know that?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Even though they found his daughter’s bloodstained panties hidden in his workshop?’

  ‘That’s hearsay. And I’m telling you, sir – the man is innocent.’

  ‘And I’m telling you, ma’am, he’s guilty as hell. And Vern . . . I don’t know who your friend is, but I think all that Crown Royal you’ve both been drinking has clouded her judgment.’

  ‘Think what you like,’ I whispered under my breath. Vern held up his hand to me and gave me the sort of imploring look that let it be known I should now shut the hell up.

  ‘I’m sorry if I offended you, sir,’ I shouted to the bartender.

  ‘Hey, just be grateful that Vern’s a regular here. Otherwise you’d’ve been out on the street by now.’

  Two more ryes later, the cabs arrived. I muttered a goodbye to Vern as I flopped across the back seat of my taxi. The driver asked me if I was going to be sick, and I assured him that I would keep the contents of my stomach within me until we got to my apartment, and he assured me he would deposit me in the minus-nineteen night air if I failed to make good on my promise.

  I don’t remember much after that, except tossing twenty dollars at the driver as I got out and somehow making my way upstairs. I unlocked my front door and fell face first on my bed. When I woke it was eleven the next morning. I felt as if my head had been cleaved by a very sharp instrument. I looked at the time and groaned. I was never late for work – and now I knew that, even if I wanted to make it in, I was too hungover. So I picked up my cellphone and called Mrs Woods and apologized profusely for only informing her now that I was out sick, but explained that I’d picked up some stomach bug and was up for most of the night.

  ‘Something’s obviously going around,’ Mrs Woods said, ‘because Vern Byrne also phoned in sick with the same complaint.’

  Great hungover minds think alike.

  I lolled in bed for another hour, thinking, thinking. As I replayed the insanity of that drinking session, it was clear to me that Vern had decided he was not the only person who needed to get drunk yesterday.

  But the thoughts of this drinking contest – and its toxic aftermath – were soon overshadowed by a larger consideration: George MacIntyre. The way his eyes seemed to become haunted when faced with the specter of all those popping camera lights and shouted questions. The sense of resignation that seemed to dapple his face – as if this new fresh hell was nothing compared to that of his daughter’s disappearance. A guilty man would have signaled his culpability by doing that Raskolnikov thing of self-incrimination. Something in his countenance would have given the game away. But MacIntyre simply looked crushed by all that had befallen him. He was a man who had lost hope, and who had now entered the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare: being accused of killing his own daughter while simultaneously knowing that he was completely innocent . . .

  And yet, from the little I’d heard in passing about the case, MacIntyre had a history of violent behavior. If it was true that he had beaten his wife and was considered dangerous by his son . . . of course, he’d be immediately regarded as the prime suspect in the case, though none of this could be publicized prior to his trial.

  Then there was the fact that a bloody piece of underwear belonging to his daughter was allegedly (according to Tommy the bartender) found in his workshop. Why would he
store that item of incredibly incriminating clothing there? Surely if he was the man behind her disappearance he would do everything in his power to hide evidence? Even if he was determined to have his guilt proclaimed by being ‘found out’, he wouldn’t resort to something as lame as a pair of underwear in an obvious location. Self-denunciation – especially when something like infanticide is involved – would involve something leading directly to the body; a true sign of guilt, and one which would be quickly substantiated.

  But the cops – needing to break the case as fast as possible – would jump on the bloody panties as proof that MacIntyre was guilty as hell (that is, if that bar-room rumor about this piece of evidence was even true). But until lab reports came back stating that the blood matched that of Ivy’s . . .

  Listen to you. Nancy goddamn Drew, with her Dostoevsky references and her hungover need to defend a much-touted sociopath. Talk about displacement activity . . .

  But try as I did to put the case to one side, it continued to nag at me all day. Having finally hauled myself out of bed and into a penitential cold shower, followed by a further two-hour act of physical contrition at the gym, I found myself inextricably drawn to my local newspaper shop, where I bought the Globe and Mail, the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal to get that day’s journalistic take on George MacIntyre’s arrest. I took my newspapers around the corner to Caffé Beano and started reading. The Herald had a full page on ‘The Ivy MacIntyre Case’ and noted that this was the third time in six years that an adolescent girl had gone missing from the Townsend area. In all of the previous cases, no traces of the vanished child had ever been found.

  The Herald also noted that George MacIntyre was ‘known to the police’ – that phrase again. It mentioned that he had a previous job driving long-haul trucks, but said little more because – as I was learning – the Canadian press wasn’t like the American press when it came to reporting somebody under investigation for murder. No past misdeeds could be reported. No incriminating comments from neighbors or colleagues at work. The law stopped them from reporting, prior to a trial, anything but the basic facts of the case.