And she imagined that Ronnie wouldn’t wake up, that he wouldn’t wake up because then she would have to explain. And Liz wasn’t sure that she could.
She couldn’t remember exactly when it had started. It was like one day her hands just did what they were meant to do. At parties in the summer, Liz suddenly found it impossible to keep her hands off things. In one house it was a grey soapstone walrus, just a small sculpture with one of its short tusks splintered anyway, and she had wrapped it up in her jacket almost without thinking. Once, a yellow-handled paring knife, absolutely nothing special about it except that it had been on a cutting board, cutting lime slices to perch on the edge of margarita glasses at a Mexican-night party.
If she’d been asked why, Liz might have said that it was like trying to capture a piece of wherever they were, a way to save a part of some particularly good time. Like a totem—like some proof they belonged there, in a particular spot all their own, that they would someday be back, and that everything would be wonderful all over again.
The next time, a small art deco jewellery box, empty—she didn’t take things because they were valuable. They weren’t even things that she really wanted for any reason. And all of it went into the shoebox, so much now that it was hard to get the lid back on.
She wasn’t worried even about getting caught. Liz thought about it, and wondered sometimes if it was because she hoped she would get caught, hoped she would be forced to explain, the process of explaining making it all clear to her as well. As long as it wasn’t to Ronnie. She was afraid that she’d get the blank stare, that cold look he saved for anything he couldn’t bother understanding.
But, she thought, he was so good at the things that made sense to him. She could remember having sex with Ronnie on the floor in a bathroom at someone’s house, and when he’d turned to unlock the door, she’d snatched the hand soaps from the dish on the sink, mostly because they were shaped like little shells: a pale blue whorled snail, a yellow-brown flat scallop. She didn’t even like the smell of them, but that didn’t matter.
She had slid both of them into her pocket, and later, sharply aware of how they had taken on the warmth of her body, she had held them in her hands for a few moments before putting them into the box as well. The smell bothered her for months whenever she opened the box, but any annoyance went away as soon as she could see the smooth curves of them and could imagine them as they had been, lying in the dish next to a stranger’s sink.
That would be the thing to have, she thought: a small, light blue dish just to hold seashell-shaped soaps. What was wrong with wanting a bathroom where the sink didn’t have a rust stain tonguing its way down towards the drain—one where the faucets and sink were brand new and clean?
When Ronnie wasn’t around, she’d sometimes take the box out and line up every single thing on the edge of the bed. The box was packed tight, a worn washcloth folded over the top of the items before she closed the box lid up and slid it back into the bottom of the closet. She’d written Sewing Stuff on the top of the lid in big square letters with Magic Marker, thinking these words would be as likely as anything else to keep Ronnie from ever looking inside—although she couldn’t help but wonder what he would think if he ever did open the box and saw her collection of oddities.
There was a big brass button she’d found at Ronnie’s parents’ house the first time she’d ever been there, and a single paper bill from Trinidad and Tobago—she’d worked that out from under the Plexiglas bar top downtown, prying it a bit closer to the edge every time the bartender turned his back, Ronnie tied up and laughing with a bunch of his friends when it was supposed to have been only the two of them, out on a formal date. But there were guys there from Ronnie’s neighbourhood, and they came over like they owned Ronnie and owned the bar too, slapping each other on the back and seeing who could knock back his drinks the fastest. By the end of the night, the damp bill was folded up in her purse and no one was the wiser for it.
There was a blue felt baby mitten she’d taken from a woman at the grocery store. Well, not so much taken as picked up and kept when it had fallen. The baby was in a cart at the checkout, and the woman was unloading groceries and looking the other way. The baby had regarded Liz with an overly serious look, eyes studying and not blinking, its feet poked out at her, legs ending in knitted bags, and Liz was going to give the mitten back, was actually bending down to pick it up and hand it over, but then tucked it in her pocket instead.
On the walk home, Liz put the mitten under her nose and was amazed that it smelled so strongly of baby—like powder, and also something sour and spoiled. After a day in the box, though, it just smelled like the soap.
There was a spare key to the first apartment she and Ronnie had rented, and a battered toy car she had found in the garden before the landlord told them that the backyard was “technically” only for the downstairs tenants, because they had the deck up top, and Liz shouldn’t be down there “poking around.” They hadn’t lasted long there: hardwood and sun, the ad had said, but it didn’t say anything about the mice, or about the way the wind blew in all around the useless storm windows and ate up more heat than they could afford to keep paying for.
There was a shell, two earrings Liz had grabbed in a flash from a bar counter, and the lid from a sugar bowl that was shaped like a cow. Somewhere in a house in Conception Bay South where a woman had tried to pick Ronnie up, smiling all night and pushing her chest out at him, there was the rest of the sugar bowl, the black and white chest and legs and the startlingly pink udder, but Liz had the top of the smiling cow, and when she put it on the bed, it was like the animal was swimming deep in the bedclothes, the comforter almost up to its neck. There was a glass wine stopper, a lavender sachet from another bathroom, and a wedding ring that someone had been silly enough to take off and leave on her dresser for the evening. Liz had seen it when she and Ronnie were putting their coats on the bed, and every time she picked it up, Liz thought to herself that if she had a wedding ring, it would never leave her finger, not even if she was going into surgery. Sometimes she’d stop for a second when the ring came out of the box and think about its owner tearing the room apart in the search for it, desperate. Serves you right, Liz thought every time. Serves you damn right. And that was one thing she never felt bad about taking, not even for an instant.
Ronnie was coming back to the car. She rolled down the window and he tipped a small avalanche of coins into her cupped hands. Why does it have to be coins when the guy’s got so much money? She didn’t say it, though, the coins warm in her hands in the damp cold of the car. Why not bills and keep-the-change? And just why does he get so much money in the first place? Why does he deserve it?
The fact is, Liz thought, he doesn’t deserve it, and one hand closed over some of the coins. She slid that hand into her pocket. Then Ronnie was back in the car, dropping onto the seat heavy beside her. And Liz watched the man at 35 McKay as he closed the door, staring right at him, trying to catch his eye to let him know that he didn’t deserve it at all, that it wasn’t right.
She thought he saw her at the last moment, caught her eye and snapped the last few inches of space between the door and frame shut fast. Because he knows, she thought, he knows it somewhere inside that big doughy body, and he feels guilty about it, too. She felt the stack of coins through the denim of her jeans, the tips of her fingers tracing the edges: eight loonies all touching each other, overlapping in her pocket, as warm now as her own skin.
They were only at the pizza shop for a few minutes before Ronnie was storming back to the car. He was out in front of her before she could even stand up from the booth, and from behind, she could see that his hands were already clenched into fists. Past the four small red tables with the cracked tops, past the front window with its incongruous see-through cityscape stencilled on the glass.
Outside, even though they had really only just gotten in the door, their feet made brand new slashes in the deep fresh snow, and Liz noticed that the street lights we
re surrounded by globes of light reflecting off the falling snowflakes. The heavily falling snow was eating up all the sound, so that everything moved through a breath-holding hush, each movement seeming that much more sharp and deliberate.
“We’re going back to see that fucker,” Ronnie said as she caught up with him and got into her side of the car. Liz couldn’t help but notice that, just like every other time, just like every single time all night long, the car was already cold, so cold after the heat of the pizzeria, where the big oven hunched against the wall, so squat and square and hot that it seemed as if it should be glowing.
“Why?” she asked, settling against the already-cold seat.
“Bastard shorted us,” Ronnie said. “Thinks he can get away with it, too.”
Liz almost told him then—but she didn’t. The words were right there, she could feel them, tripping to get out and explain. It was, she thought, almost as if the words got stuck, as though they got held up on the fact that if she told him, she’d have to tell him all the rest too. She’d have to tell him about all the other things, and in the process she would have to try to figure out how to tell him why, when she wasn’t completely sure herself. To tell him it wasn’t about soap and mittens and rings at all, that it was about them, about what it was that they deserved together, and also about what they would never have, no matter how hard they tried. That it was a box packed full of proofs, and that all it really proved was failure—and it was, all at once, as clear to her as that. Clear and sharp and all at once there, and Liz knew that there was no way to say it and have it make any sense at all.
So she didn’t say anything, and the car swung wide on every corner, and Liz was afraid they’d hit someone else coming the other way because Ronnie was driving so fast and dangerously. And there was a little part of her that hoped they would crash, that hoped in one great smack everything would be taken out of their hands.
It was as if, once set in motion, everything had no choice but to end up at its logical end. It was as if she had no voice, and also as if she could not lift her arms, as if the door handle was right there in front of her but she was incapable of understanding even something as simple as how a door handle worked. Everything unfolding in a simple, direct, unstoppable order.
The car slithered sideways onto McKay Street, slid in close and struck the curb under the snow at 35—and it seemed to Liz that Ronnie was out of the car and at the front door before the car was even at a full stop, and she couldn’t decide if everything was moving incredibly fast or if she was in some kind of suspended slow motion.
And Ronnie started punching the man at 35 McKay, and it was angry and fast and definite, and the man’s pudgy hands danced up in front of his face as if he were trying to ward off a cloud of particularly persistent flies. Ronnie’s fists went right through the pudgy hands, and then the man was lying on his side in the snow.
She saw Ronnie pick up the shovel and raise it in the air, but still her hands stayed in her lap. She looked through the circle she’d wiped clear on the side window and watched the shovel rise and fall, and then rise and fall again. And the only thing she could think, as strange as it seemed, was, “I’ve lost control of my face.”
Liz couldn’t even feel her face, couldn’t imagine what it looked like, except that blood was surging all around her body, and for the first time since fall she felt warm inside the car, like the heater had burst into life unexpectedly. Then Ronnie was back inside the car and they were speeding away—and caught in Liz’s throat was something that felt like a bubble of laughter, a bubble she had to swallow hard to hold in. It felt like laughter, urgent—but she knew it wasn’t.
Later, but before the police came, Liz took the loonies from 35 McKay Street out of her pocket and put them on the foot of the bed, and then went to the closet to get the box.
32
McKay Street
VINCENT O’REILLY
JULY 14, 2006
VINCE got the shovel out of the shed and, holding on to the handle, tried to shake the same set of thoughts he had every time he touched anything in the house: the thought that the last time there was someone holding the shovel handle, it had been his father, and he was still alive.
Sometimes, that thought alone was almost paralyzing. He’d open the drawer in the kitchen and find himself just standing there, staring at the spoons, trying to figure out which one he could pick without covering up some important message from his past, every single one of them overlaid with fading fingerprints, prints that could never be re-created or replaced.
It seemed wrong to move anything. It seemed impossible even to stay in the house with the weight of all that hanging over him. The clothes in the closets, the things that should be packed up and sold or given away: he couldn’t get away from the fact that every single thing in the house had its own particular weight and importance, far beyond the actual heft and shape of the physical space it inhabited.
He felt like he had been made curator by default in an obscure museum that never attracted any visitors, but where he was the only one who knew the history of each of the exhibits. It was a feeling that came at him from all directions.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the natural thing was to just take over the house and move right in, a custodian for someone else’s vanished life, and in the next moment he’d be wondering how anyone could handle inheriting the family house and all the memories that crowded around inside it, that stuffed it so damned full. Then he wanted to pack the whole house up and be rid of it, to be out from under the burden of responsibility for protecting someone else’s entire world—and, in a strange way, part of his world too.
He went out the door of the workshop with the shovel in one hand, the jewellery box in the other, safe at least in that particular project, and headed around towards the path to the backyard. He waved to Mrs. Purchase as he went. She was standing on the sidewalk across the street, staring at him as if either trying to figure out what he was doing or else just trying to establish who he was. Some things didn’t change: Mrs. Purchase, always eager to mind everyone else’s business, he thought. Mrs. Purchase, who was, he imagined, keeping her own collection of what-has-been and what-is-already-done.
The sun had burned the last traces of the morning fog out of the air, but the grass was still wet underfoot. Vincent could feel the dampness soaking in through the canvas sides of his sneakers as he walked next to the house, and when he looked behind, he saw his footprints as dark flattened spots, the rest of the wet grass still standing and pearled with the heavy dew.
He buried the box because he couldn’t figure what else to do with it. The backyard was heavy, dark soil, a patch of ground his parents had cared for over the years, building it up and fertilizing it and spreading pesticides like water until everything was treated into its place, grass where grass should be and flowers in their even, bordered beds—and it seemed as good a place as any to put a thing that could only ever be his mother’s, a thing that he couldn’t look at without immediately thinking of her.
Vincent dug and hit solid rock almost immediately, and then moved over and dug another hole, until finally he had a narrow trench a little more than two feet down, the soil layered in thin, different-coloured stripes like the undisturbed layers of some archaeological dig. Then he dropped the shovel and picked the box up from where he had left it on the grass.
In front of him, a smooth bank of grey bedrock cleaved up from underground, growing out into a ledge and then a narrow cliff. His parents had placed a small trellis there, and he knew what shade of soft pink the roses would be when they eventually came out, and how, three summers out of four, the damp would rot the tips of the flowers, a brown stain stalling the buds before they had a chance to open. The way peonies swelled and then surrendered, giving in to mildew just as it seemed they were about to flower.
When he opened the jewellery box one last time, the music sounded tinkly and far more tinny than it had inside the house. Vincent stirred through the jewellery with his ind
ex finger for a moment and lifted the opal brooch, remembering his mother’s words about bad luck and his father’s brief crestfallen look—a look that had been erased by a stony stare. His mother had then been forced to jolly Keith O’Reilly along by pretending she was more grateful than she really was. Faith would love it, he thought, and it would be as if, by moving it across the country, he had changed the whole sense of it, and it could start fresh in the way it had been intended.
Underneath the brooch as he picked it up, the brief blue flash of the cover of a slender notebook, and for a moment he thought about hooking the book up through the pile of tangled jewellery to see what was written inside. Something important enough to be tucked in with his mother’s treasures. Instead, he closed the box sharply. The music stopped in mid-verse. Then Vincent simply dropped it straight down into the hole, nudging it squarely into place with the blade of the shovel, and began to fill the hole in again.
When he put the shovel back in the workshop, he looked around at the rows of boxes and the tools hanging from hooks and leaning against the wall, and then he turned off the light decisively, turned it off as if he knew for certain then that he would never be coming back, that there was only the quick hard work of emptying the place and nothing more. It would be a job for a thick skin—what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away—and he knew that each decision would have to be made in a way that brooked no question, that would be right simply because it was a decision made.
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