by Sheena Kamal
Whisper growls, standing over Nora’s body, and bares her own teeth in response. The cat is larger than she is, Brazuca can see that even from below it, but Whisper doesn’t back down. Her growl turns into a loud bark and froth flies from her mouth. The cat prowls closer to the edge. Just as it crouches, preparing to pounce, Brazuca breaks his inertia. He steps forward and screams at the top of his lungs, waving his arms above his head.
The big cat hesitates. Its lips folds back over its sharp teeth and, with a great, bounding leap, it returns to the forest.
Brazuca stands frozen, his eyes trained on the trees, for a long moment. Then he turns to Nora. Whisper backs up a few steps and drops down so that her belly is on the rocks but her muzzle hangs off Nora’s shoulder.
“A cougar,” he mutters as he presses his fingers to Nora’s neck, feeling for a pulse. “A goddamn cougar . . .”
Then he fishes for his phone in his pocket and dials. “I need emergency services.”
11
I emerge from a deep sleep in a dimly lit hospital room to an image of myself as a teenage girl. Same dark eyes, but shaped differently. Heavy dark hair cut short. Skin that is somewhere between gold and bronze, even though there’s nothing vaguely metallic about it. My features are different from what I recall, but who can accurately remember herself as a child? It feels like an image that has been stretched to distortion and then snapped back into place, but doesn’t quite sit right. The expression on my face is cautious, and that feels true, but there is something curious and hopeful as well, which doesn’t. I close my eyes and wish the picture would go away, but it sneaks its way beneath my eyelids.
“Mom,” says the image.
“You don’t have a mother,” I tell this reflection of my younger self. “She abandoned you. She hates you. You’re better off without her.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Nobody loves you, not even your sister, but who cares? She’s kind of a bitch.” The vision of an SUV comes to mind but I have no idea why.
“You’re wrong,” the irritating younger me insists. “I have two.”
“Only one sister.”
“Two mothers. And they both love me. They both looked for me.”
I laugh, though my throat is so dry the laugh turns into a mirthless, hacking cough. Everything in my body hurts, everything. Even my eyeballs are sore, like they’ve seen too much and ache with the pain of it. The thing is, I don’t remember what it is they could have seen that makes them hurt so much.
“Nobody loves you,” I remind the little me when the coughing subsides. “Nobody loves you . . . nobody . . .”
“Mom,” says the voice, as I shrink from it, try to block it from my head. What is she saying? I’m not her mother, she is me. I am her. My mouth can’t seem to form a response, so thick on my tongue. “Please don’t go . . .” pleads the little me. God, what I drag I was at that age. Please don’t go. Please love me. Ugh. I’ve already told her that nobody does, so what more does she want from me?
“Don’t leave me, Mom . . .”
I retreat so far away from myself at these words. This younger me thinks she has a mother; in fact, she’s so delusional she thinks she has two. How ridiculous. How absurd. How wrong. Little Nora Watts has nothing but her voice, but all that will bring her is trouble.
“Come on, sweetie,” says another voice, this one male. It’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place it. “She needs her rest now. Maybe you can see her later.”
I’m probably never going to see this child-me again because my nightmares are very specific, but I don’t say it. I want to tell her to leave and never come back as she puts her muzzle to my limp hand that hangs off the side of the narrow hospital bed. Her nose is cold and wet to the touch. I fall asleep feeling her tongue lick my fingers.
What a strange dream.
12
I open my eyes and wonder what time it is. Dim gray light filters through the single basement window, but that means nothing. It could be morning or evening, or anything in between. But my phone tells me it’s just after four in the afternoon. I’ve slept most of the day away and would have slept for much longer if not for the hair prickling at the back of my neck.
I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Whisper is drugged up on pain relievers from tearing a ligament so she hasn’t noticed yet. Plus, she’s exhausted from eating at her leg brace. Ignoring the pain in my wounded shoulder, I grab the steel pipe from by the door and stand to the side of it. I open the door just a crack, enough for me to glimpse an auburn-haired woman descend the staircase. It takes me a moment to recognize Lynn. Her hair is darker now than the first time I saw her. More subdued, though she on the whole looks better. She’s put on some weight and it suits her.
She sneezes from the accumulated dust and pauses when she sees me staring at her from the doorway. “Hi,” she says after a moment of us standing there, sizing each other up.
“Yeah?” I put the steel pipe down. If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life, it’s drop-by visits.
“Your friend the investigator, Leo I think his name is, he said I might find you here, um, in the basement. I came to thank you for . . . for looking for Bonnie. We don’t really know what happened, no one seems to, but you found out where she was being kept and when she was in the hospital, before we even knew she’d been found, the hospital said she had a visit from a woman who wanted to take her away. We think it was Jia Zhang. And then . . . she never came back. We think that’s because of you. You saved her life.” This all comes out rapidly, like she’s been planning it for a while and now that the moment is upon her, she just wants to get it over with.
“Where’s Everett?”
She seems at a loss for words. “Oh, he moved out. It’s . . . it’s for the best, really.”
“With jasmine woman?”
“What—oh. Yes, jasmine.” She smiles sadly. “That’s what it was. Her name is actually Adele and she’s his boss. Can you imagine? My husband, the slut, screwing his boss on her desk as soon as everyone’s gone home for the night.”
I shake my head. I cannot imagine this, but I try. Everett Walsh, bent over a desk, between the legs of an elderly floral-scented woman. We stand there for a few moments, Lynn trying to erase a pernicious mental image, and me unable to stop myself from creating one.
She does not seem to know what to do with her hands and, after smoothing her hair and clothes, she sticks them into her pockets. “Can I come in?” she says finally.
I hesitate. No one but me and Whisper have been in here while we’ve taken up residence, but Lynn clearly is on a mission. I open the door wider and she follows me inside and to the couch from Leo’s old apartment that I was supposed to put up for sale four years ago. She looks at the exposed piping along the ceilings. “It’s very industrial. That’s back in style now, you know.”
I nod and wait for her to continue. There is nothing stylish about this basement. Even I know that.
“The man I was seeing, he was also a coworker. Isn’t that cliché? Both workaholics. We only had time to have affairs with people at work, really.”
“That’s where you were the day Bonnie went missing. With him.”
“How did you know?”
“Because you were lying.”
She stares at me. “You’re a surprising woman. Maybe another time, in different circumstances . . .”
I laugh. We would never be friends in any other circumstances.
She smiles. “Okay, maybe you’re right. Neither of us seems particularly friendly. And what you know of my family . . . We seem pretty messed up to you—no, don’t deny it,” she says, even though I had no intention of doing so. “Everett and I were never perfect, but there’s one thing you have to know. We love Bonnie. Our marriage died a long time ago and she’s what kept us together.”
Lynn does not cry and I am glad for it. I never know what to do with weeping women. In a survivors’ group once I had become one of those weepin
g, wretched things and walked out. I never went back after my “share.” Lynn pulls a stack of photographs from her purse. “I want you to have these. You don’t have to look at them now. Just . . . whenever you’re ready. You can throw them out if you want.”
She places the photographs on the couch between us. I say nothing; there is nothing to say, really. Whisper, awake now, comes trotting over for a perfunctory sniff of Lynn’s crotch. Satisfied with what she has considered her duty, she lies at my feet and puts her head down. For all intents and purposes, she seems to be fast asleep again but I know she’s listening.
Lynn looks tenderly at Whisper for a moment, lost in her own thoughts. A question pops into my mind, a question that I’ve never allowed myself to think about, far less put into words.
“Can I . . .” My throat closes up. I feel invisible fingers squeezing it shut, pressing against my neck, trying to keep the words in. But maybe it’s time. “Can I meet her?”
Lynn stills and looks away. “She doesn’t . . . She saw you in the hospital. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“You said some things . . . Look, this is hard because I know what you went through to find her, but it really shook her to see you. After all that. It’s been too much for her. I think she needs some space from all this. From . . . from you.”
“No, you don’t,” I say, just at the point when the silence between us becomes unbearable.
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t know what I went through.” How could she? I don’t even know. Can’t remember. Being drugged and losing a few quarts of blood will do that to you.
She sighs. “Fair enough. What I’m trying to say is that Bonnie had this image of you in her mind for a long time and seeing you . . . You became real and she couldn’t take it. She needs some time. Can you understand that?”
I don’t know what else to say, so I just nod.
Lynn clears her throat. Opens her mouth to speak, and then closes it again. I wait. “She did want to know who her real mother is before this all happened,” she says, finally. “Maybe one day she’ll want that again.”
“She knows who her mother is.”
Lynn meets my eyes and holds them. Then she stands and goes to the door. There she hesitates. “Look, I’ve got a job offer in Toronto and I’m going to take it. Bonnie wants a fresh start, so she’s coming with me. Everett is pretty broken up about it, but he knows we need a change. Bonnie and I . . . we’re leaving. But I think she’ll be in touch, Nora. I really do. She knows that both me and Everett are okay with her seeing you now, so there’ll be no more sneaking away,” she says, before disappearing into the hallway.
I turn away from the stack of photographs and wait for the footsteps to go away, for the upstairs door to slam shut. When it does, I scratch behind Whisper’s ears. “Come on, you faker. Let’s go for a walk.”
The streets are particularly filthy today and it feels good to breathe in the odors of human refuse once again. Yet another condominium complex is going up nearby and the construction will drive people mad for the foreseeable future. Whisper and I head toward the ocean, hobbling along together, until we come to our usual railing overlooking the Pacific. The sea is even more mysterious now than it had been before I got Everett’s call that fateful morning, but I’m okay with that, because it’s on my side. I lean over the railing, but no longer imagine a dark current.
A whimper builds in the back of Whisper’s throat. I look over to see Brazuca sitting on a bench several feet away. “So you’re alive,” he says, looking me up and down. I’m not offended by the assessment. It’s more a catalog of injuries than anything else. I turn back to the railing. Somehow I knew he’d show up, sooner or later. I feel confident that Whisper will be keeping a close eye on him now that she’s realized he’s here.
“You know, you’re lucky the police have no fucking clue how to deal with the mess you made back there. I talked to some people and . . . you might be in the clear on this, Nora.”
That, Seb’s intervention, and the drugs in my system when they finally pumped my stomach are what prevented me from being immediately arrested when I woke in the hospital. I’m told I killed a man and that my blood was found at his house. That I’d been shot. That I was found washed up on the rocks of a beach with no idea how I got there. They said that Jia Zhang washed up a couple of miles away with a fishhook sticking out of her neck, but she was dead, drowned. My blood was all over Ray Zhang’s house, but he and his grandson were missing. Have been since before I washed up on the coast. That there was a bloodstain in their basement that matched a runaway from Vancouver. Bonnie.
All of these things people have informed me, questioned me about, shouted and argued over. But the truth remains: I don’t remember. It occurs to me now that maybe Brazuca had something to do with it, too, but after what I put him through, I’d be shocked that he’d lift another finger for me.
“How did you get in the water, Nora?” Brazuca asks now. “How?”
How did I get from the house to a distant beach? I have no idea. I shrug. “I don’t remember.”
“What happened to Jia Zhang’s man? Dao.”
I shake my head. “You’d know more about that than I would.”
“I looked for him. Nothing. No one has seen him since that night. Or Ray Zhang. Or his grandson. I take it you don’t remember anything about that, either.”
“No.” But it’s not a comforting thought. That he might still be out there somewhere. “I don’t know where he is.”
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It helps that my toxicology reports back me up. “I was only trying to help, you know,” he says softly, after a minute of silence. “I just wanted you to know that. I worked for WIN, yes, but I had no idea about the Zhang connection when you brought that plate number for me to check. I wanted to figure it all out just as much as you, but it wasn’t one of those things I could just up and ask them.”
I don’t respond. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but you can’t change the past and I can’t for the life of me forgive the only man whose lies I can’t recognize.
We stay there like that for a while, each refusing to budge. Finally I hear the rustle of his coat as he rises from the bench. “I should let you know I’m back on the program, Nora. What you did to me up in the mountains . . . you know, rape victims often reenact their assaults but with them in control. I get why you tied me to the bed and drugged me. It was a way for you to feel in control of a situation that you didn’t like, that upset and hurt you. Doesn’t justify it, but I understand.”
“Survivor,” I say as he turns to go.
“What?”
“You said ‘victim.’”
Once a cop, always a cop. That’s how they think and if I’ve learned one thing from those groups I used to go to, it’s that phrasing is important.
He pauses for a moment. “A survivor. Yeah, silly me. You’re right.” He laughs quietly to himself for a good minute. “I think ‘survivor’ is the best word to describe you, actually. Take care of yourself, Nora. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I misled you.”
I listen to his steps as he walks away, his limp more pronounced than ever, and slump against the railing. I think about what he’s just revealed to me. He is back on the program. My body eases a little with the knowledge that I haven’t turned him back into a raging alcoholic. Aches a little less. Whisper feels the tension in me release and relaxes, too.
I lied to Brazuca. I do remember something about that night.
There is a channel way down deep beneath the surface of the ocean that carries sound incredible distances. It allows the various navies of the world to communicate with each other underwater, over vast stretches. But it was discovered by whales. Like a radio station that exists just for them, they only have to dive deep enough to get at it. Being that a whale’s skull is like an acoustic antenna, transmitting and amplifying sound, they can hear things we can’t even dream of. There is a faint memory of me singing for my life
on the deck of a boat and a silky fin rising up from the depths of the ocean, slipping up and out of the water in a graceful arc, giving me a distraction and saving my life. I remember singing, although that’s absurd in and of itself. But maybe I did. Maybe I sang and my song traveled down to that sound channel and brought forth my savior. All these years I spent looking over the seawall, wishing for the dark current to show me a little love . . . and all I had to do was sing for it.
I stand at the railing for a long time after Brazuca has left.
There is a peculiar quality to the mist when it is about to clear and let the sun shine through it, like the atoms are heating up and getting ready to dissipate. I want a drink, like I always do, but I press the point of a little switchblade into the crook between my index finger and my thumb and allow the sharp stab of pain to quell the urge. It’s a place where the scars aren’t too noticeable and the cut can’t do much damage on its own. I’ll stop when I can manage it better; I always have. But for now, I do what I need to.
Whisper nuzzles my knee and licks the soreness away from my hand. She stares out at the horizon. I follow her gaze to where a ray of sunshine breaks through the clouds, brightening the evening ever so slightly.
About the Author
SHEENA KAMAL holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry—academic knowledge and experience that inspired this debut novel. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.
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Copyright
The term “red market” used in part IV, chapter 1 and part V, chapter 9 was coined by Scott Carney in his book THE RED MARKET, published in 2011 by William Morrow & Co.
