And how do you do that? Vincent thought. How do you take the whole place apart, every marked-up wooden spatula, the butter dish they’d always used even though it had been set too close to the stove element and one corner was melted and ruined? How do you go through and deconstruct it all without tearing down every single memory too?
Two-by-fours and plaster, Vincent thought all at once, and the thought stopped him cold. Remembering how these simple walls had spent so much time hemming him in. And how frightening it would be simply to surrender all that hard-earned freedom and fall right straight back into that grasp again.
Vincent picked up the phone and called Twig Chaulk, even though he wasn’t Twig anymore. Now he was just Terry, a smiling, much fuller face on real estate signs all over the city—and pretty much the only realtor’s mug you would see anywhere in the neighbourhood. If anything sold on McKay, Terry Chaulk usually sold it.
“Hey, Twig, it’s Vincent. Listen, let’s just go ahead and sell. And I want it listed ‘as is.’”
“What do you mean?” On the other end of the phone, Twig sounded as if he was taken aback. They had talked about pulling out the bathroom vanity and putting in something newer, sprucing the place up a bit, maybe making a couple of thousand dollars more on the sale.
“I mean just the way it is. Every bit of it. If you want to leave the stuff there, fine. If you want it all stripped, then hire Wheeler or someone to come in and haul it all out.”
Twig sounded incredulous. “Vincent—wait a minute, now. You’re pretty much just throwing money away, doing that.”
“I don’t care. Donate everything to charity. I’m not taking it all apart. I’m going out the door now, and I want the last memory I have of the place to be just the way it is.”
Twig fussed for a few minutes on the phone but realized quickly that he wasn’t going to change Vincent’s mind. “I’ll make a few calls,” he said.
“I’ll leave my keys in the mailbox,” Vincent said.
He felt the smooth oval face of the brooch through the fabric of his jeans with a fingertip as he walked through the kitchen, picking the house keys up off the counter with one long, even sweep of his arm. Knowing as he did it that even his habit of locking the door made him someone very different from the couple who had lived in this house for so long.
109
McKay Street
KEVIN RYAN AND
MARY PURCHASE
AUGUST 11, 2006
THE HOUSE was empty now except for the bedroom Mary had grown up in. Everything else was in cardboard boxes, or else was ready to be there, the whole house just one seriously full trunk load of the car away from having been emptied out completely.
Two towels in the bathroom, always the same pair. A face cloth draped on the edge of the sink. Two toothbrushes standing together in a hard white plastic cup.
In the kitchen, one last open box, flaps yawning, a box that they kept putting things into and then taking them out of again whenever they needed to make a meal. One step forwards, two steps back, Kevin thought hopefully, stirring scrambled eggs, watching the steam rise as the eggs went from flat and opaque to mounded and wet.
The rest of the rooms were empty. The runner was still on the stairs, but the front room was stripped right down to the hardwood floor, the fireplace with its round screen staring out across the room like an open mouth, the coiled-up cable from the television left behind like a sleeping snake. They had made love there once, late at night and urgent, Mary’s back flat against the wall as groups of passersby passed the front room, their conversations on the sidewalk louder than Kevin’s and Mary’s breathing. It seemed to Kevin that they had made love in every room, as if they were marking their terrain, as if Mary was intent on overwriting almost every memory of the place with something new and treasured.
There were no curtains left downstairs, so all the rooms were flat and ringing with echoes whenever either Kevin or Mary walked through them. The basement was so wide open and empty that even light bulbs seemed like an unnecessary luxury—and at the same time, to both of them, the house seemed filled to bursting.
No curtains upstairs either. The realtor had said the curtains that had been there were in such poor shape—raddled with claw marks from the cats—that it would be better if they weren’t there at all, if all that was left was bare windows and imagination. Only the ceiling lights were left there, harsh and staring in the empty rooms, and they only turned them on for absolute emergencies.
The realtor was a slight, blond, angry-looking woman with a strange way of holding her face, as if she were constantly smelling something that had just begun to go bad. Every time the woman left, Mary would worry again about whether the house smelled like cats, and whether the smell of the now-departed animals would keep it from selling. And then she’d realize that it didn’t matter.
Inside the room that Mary had slept in as a girl, she and Kevin often simply forgot there was anything like an outdoors. It was as if the house, the street and even the whole city had closed in tight around them outside the plaster so that there was really just that single room, and for wonderful, full periods of time there was nothing else they needed beyond those four walls. Neither of them had expected it could happen, and both of them, when they were apart, wondered cautiously if it was really something they could trust.
Outside, the For Sale sign shook against the front of the house in the slightest of winds, smacking the house with flat plastic slaps, the sign sometimes almost vibrating in its eagerness. Mary and Kevin took to leaving the windows open so that the summer air swept through the house on its own schedule, while they both moved silently in the near darkness—a darkness where they believed all things could be explained simply with touch.
Days went by and Mary kept turning down offers for the house, stalling the sale as if there was an unwritten, undiscussed agreement between them that everything, all of it, could only last in the strange, otherworldly hiatus of a house without contents, without curtains, with only one room that still held anything familiar.
That room, with its old posters of forgotten teen stars and the thin, light blue bedspread with a rainbow sewn onto it, was more like a time capsule than anything else. It was all as foreign to Kevin as if he had taken some drug that let him age while staying caught in some out-ofthe-way spot in the past. A single bed that Mary knew well from when she was a girl growing up. White-painted louvred doors in front of the closet, and an impossibly small dressing table—also white—with an oval mirror.
Sometimes they talked, but they didn’t talk in any depth, and they didn’t fool around with framing up and building a future outside the walls they were already comfortably and immediately inside. If they had, they might have had to point out that they were grown-ups and past all that eagerness, that they weren’t the right age to be building castles or charting voyages. So they talked bare practicalities instead, like when they had to get to work and when the girls were likely to be home, and whether either of the girls would even notice, during one of the few times that their lives and Kevin’s would normally intersect, that he wasn’t there.
Mostly they didn’t have to talk, because the feel of their skin touching was always sharp, the single note of a tuning-fork vibration. Once, he stood behind her as she fried eggs, both standing naked in the small kitchen, and he felt the room full of the sun and the warm shape of her, and it was like the shape he could draw in the air with his hands thereafter held everything important.
The real estate agent—for the first time anyone on the street could remember, not Twig Chaulk—was growing more and more frustrated, her mouth turned more sharply down every time Mary saw her, the offers still climbing but no one ever offering enough.
Kevin would look out for Mary’s car, parked by the curb, from the second-floor window at the front of his house. Then he’d make his way down the street close up against the fronts of the houses that pressed tight to the sidewalk, as if he could make himself invisible, or at least insignifica
nt, but succeeding only at appearing guilty. He would look around, trying to seem careless but with his head darting back and forth too quickly, and he saw only the flat, uncaring fronts of the houses, imagining that was all there was to McKay Street, and that all over the street, no one knew.
But all over the street, they knew. They knew and they talked.
Sometimes, after Mary was asleep, Kevin would walk around in his skin, the slap of his bare feet echoing through the empty house, the tips of his fingers trailing loose along the walls like a cat’s whiskers, sensing more than they actually felt directly, wondering about the tingle of them together, the shivering wonder, and knowing also that he would be caught dead the moment Cathy came home from her latest Ottawa trip. She’d come home and just see the colour of his skin, his whole body overlaid with the tan of what they’d done, all of it there like some fine and obvious tattoo. He wouldn’t be able to lie, he knew. Not to her. She’d rip right through any lies like thin paper, well attuned and used to every single hint and scent a liar might give off.
He knew he wouldn’t even bother to try.
And then Kevin realized, hairs standing up all over his body as a fugitive summer breeze curled through the windows and down the stairs, that he just didn’t care. He stood there at the foot of the stairs in the falling cool air, feeling the sudden recognition running through his blood headily, like the knowledge was a new and unfamiliar drug. It was sharp and bright inside him when he went back to bed. Mary was still sleeping, and she pushed her naked back up against his chest without fully waking.
Later, they lay together while the house ticked and settled in the summer warmth, a long quiet morning stretching out as if it wouldn’t end.
Then Mary, her voice muffled because her face was next to the skin of his arm, her breath warm on his skin: “This can’t last,” she said, her voice flat, an arm thrown across his chest. Saying the words as if she thought that simply by speaking them, they could agree to set an end point that neither of them actually wanted. “It can’t last this way.”
Kevin was quiet for a moment, his eyes searching for any sign of the ceiling in the half gloom above them, the sunlight bright and playing through the leaves so that it cast shadows against the far wall. Kevin, suddenly feeling the dangerous tremble of the possible, the toppling towards decision.
“So what can?” he said.
117
McKay Street
HELEN COLLINS
OCTOBER 3, 2006
HELEN COLLINS stood in front of the mirror and wondered what kind of makeup would say Loving Mother Who Tried Everything, or if she should even try.
Ron’s court date had been set for months, and she had planned on being there for almost as long. She hadn’t been to the prison, to visit either Ronnie or Tony. She’d been as far as the big heavy walls and the front entrance with the metal doors and the Plexiglas panels, but she hadn’t been able to get through the doors. The outside of the squat building was painted a dull grey, and the uniforms of the guards were grey too, except the guards had black piping running down the sides of their uniform trousers.
Every time she got near the building, she started imagining that if she went in, they would have to search her for contraband. Then they would have their hands on her body, as if they were accusing her of something, accusing her of being involved. The warning was on the website, and on the sign out front as well:“Visitors should be prepared for physical search.” It made her think of the snap of latex gloves around guards’ wrists, and it wouldn’t have mattered if the hands involved were male or female.
As soon as she got close to the building, it made her shiver. She didn’t want any of them touching her, any of it sticking to her at all. So she had waited for the court date instead, thinking about it over and over again, and when she did, she imagined sweeping into the room while the news media and the courtroom spectators all stopped to stare at her, as if her entrance alone could bring the whole procedure to a halt.
When she got to Courtroom Number One in the Newfoundland Supreme Court, she realized that the place was designed to dwarf ordinary people, to dwarf even her. In the huge courtroom, the actors were always going to be smaller than the set. Long, dark, heavy wood benches like church pews, and at the front, a great upwards-rushing wooden frieze with the judge’s chair at the centre of it like a throne, and Helen had hardly gotten settled when a judge came into the room in black robes and wearing a red sash, and he had the exact effect she had wanted for herself: everyone stopped what they were doing and turned towards him, and behind her the chatter of the other people in the court faltered and fell away. The whole room was redolent of wet wool and the autumn beginnings of cold weather and the close, wet touch of steam heat, pipes hissing gently in the sudden quiet.
The reporters were at the front of the court, huddled together on a side bench close enough to hear the proceedings, and not one of them was paying her even the slightest attention.
And then Ronnie: two white-shirted sheriff ’s officers brought him in a side door, and they stood for a moment in the open doorway, taking off his handcuffs and leg shackles before they brought him into the court, so that he walked in looking like a free man. Like everyone was supposed to wipe that first image out of their minds, him standing there in cuffs and leg chains, like that was supposed to be possible, Helen thought.
He was wearing his high school graduation suit—Helen had expected that, because Ronnie’s lawyer had come looking for a suit a few days earlier, any suit at all—but she hadn’t foreseen how much it would look like yesterday’s clothing on him. Too short at the cuffs and ankles now, the fabric shiny and looking overused, or at least over-ironed. A new white shirt with a collar that was far too large for his neck, but even the extra room didn’t stop him from pulling at the collar with his index finger to make it sit more comfortably.
“We don’t see the trial running more than a few days,” the lawyer had said to her when he came to pick up the suit bag.
Standing by Helen’s front door, three short grey concrete steps away from the street, he told her that he expected Ronnie would plead guilty now, that even if they tried to get Keith O’Reilly’s police statement thrown out because he couldn’t be cross-examined, the police had more than enough circumstantial evidence to convict Ronnie. And then, he told her, there was Liz. Liz’s testimony would seal it all—but, the lawyer said, Ron had told him to leave Liz absolutely alone.
“There’s really enough to convict just in the blood-spatter evidence,” the lawyer said, not noticing the way Helen pulled away from the door as he said it. “But I might have been able to go after that girl, at least throw some doubts on her credibility with the right jury.”
She couldn’t shake the incongruity of it: the lawyer standing with the wrinkled plastic suit bag over his shoulder, one finger through the metal-and-plastic clothes hanger, while behind him, everything was going on exactly as it was supposed to. Cars were drifting around the corner, their turn signals staying on just long enough as their drivers swung the wheels back onto the straightaway, two arbitrary ticks after the turn and then stopping. Leaves were falling and then rushing along the curb on the wind. Helen could imagine Mrs. Purchase standing out there, staring after the mailman as if she couldn’t believe he hadn’t stopped to leave something in her mailbox. Mrs. Purchase, her mind coming apart for all these years, Helen thought, so much so that her husband had eventually packed up and left on the highway bus for Montreal with a girl in tow who used to wait tables downtown. A girl he’d been spending money on for years and years, so obvious about it that just about everyone knew. Everyone but Mrs. Purchase. Helen had heard that they’d shifted Mrs. Purchase off to a hospital or a home or something, somewhere where she couldn’t be minding everyone else’s business. That her house was going up for sale soon.
And on the front steps, the lawyer was staring at Helen, his eyes hard and direct on her face, as if he had asked her a pointed question she hadn’t gotten around to answering ye
t. And for the life of her she couldn’t remember the last thing he had said, so she left him there, stepping backwards, closing the door in his face so that he stood out front, bewildered by all of them, before turning and walking back to his car.
I won’t ever stop remembering Ronnie in that suit, she thought, the courtroom all around her. She wouldn’t stop remembering the way it failed to make him look formal and serious and suited to the place. Instead, it made him look outside the proceedings, as if he had been thrown into them completely by accident and was only now waking up in someone else’s clothes to find out exactly where he really was.
If the idea was to make him fit the surroundings, she thought, then it’s gone wrong. All wrong, and she was far too late to ever come close to fixing it. Because it would be over before she found the nerve to stand up and yell at them that they had to stop, that this wasn’t Ronnie in front of them at all, that they should be looking at the pictures she had from when he was five years old.
“Look!” she wanted to yell. “Just look at the pictures from Bellevue Beach, when he looked like any other boy with a bucket in the sand.” The baseball picture where his pants were too big, where he was trying so hard to look like a professional ballplayer, the bat in his hands held up over his shoulder. She was almost ready to burst with it, wanting to tell them how little of Ronnie they were seeing in the prisoner’s box, that they were getting ready to make a decision based on one little part of him, one instant of time that wasn’t really Ronnie at all. That they were looking at one single frame of a much longer film, and that they hadn’t even heard about her father yet, and how he poisoned everyone he came in contact with. That they couldn’t possibly understand why it wasn’t Ronnie’s fault—they knew only one small inch of him, yet they were ready to judge him based on that.
And in front of her, the court was busy unfolding like any piece of judicial choreography ever does, everyone dancing forwards along a straight line that they seemed to understand and expect. Only she and Ronnie were strangers to it.
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