She told him how in Moscow, her father, the third secretary then the second secretary at the embassy, would come into the kitchen where she was eating porridge or a boiled egg and balance a spoon by its bowl on the end of his nose or pull a ten-kopek piece out of her ears. Of going out for pastries and hot chocolate on Saturdays in Berlin with Anna, the woman who looked after her. Of her amazement, upon returning to Ottawa, at ten, to discover how many different kinds of toilet paper there were in North America. Wandering the long supermarket aisle with her mother, she’d stared agog at the pictures of kittens and babies and snowflakes on the plastic packaging, the various patterns of dots and swirls imprinted on the bright white rolls themselves.
Neither she nor he had siblings, although Raymond said there were always cousins around in Montreal, and other children had lived with them that year in Agboville and he’d liked having them around, the almost-siblings.
He said, In those days when I was with my mother, and she talked to me and confided in me sometimes like a husband, what I wanted most of all was to be seen.
Then he spoke again about the boy, Yitbarek. He will come up to me in the hall or at the house and go, Teach it, or Teach it me, he was just always so eager to learn new things, always, a move or routine, whatever it is.
She felt that there was something he needed her to understand about the boy, that he was handing her this vision urgently.
A tractor trailer roared past, behemothic in the dark, and a yawn quivered through him, escaping from his mouth.
You can sleep for a while if you want, Sara said. It’s okay. If I get too tired, I’ll wake you and make you talk to me.
Maybe I will a little bit.
They were approaching Belleville, and she was glad of his calm, although it didn’t mean his distress had vanished. He hiked back the seat so that he was near to horizontal, the top half of his body disappearing from sight, his hands wrapped around him, shadowy in the dark when she glanced over, and she listened to his breath slow and grow hoarse, and thought how strange it was to see him like this, strange to have a man in her car at all, since David was seldom in it, and she was used to driving alone, and here was this man, Raymond Renaud, founder of a children’s circus in Africa, laid out now beside her in the vulnerability of sleep, and it was impossible not to entertain the thought that in this state she could do what she liked with him, take him anywhere.
She slowed in the exit lane that led to the service centre just beyond Odessa. If he didn’t wake, she would leave him sleeping while she went inside to buy a coffee, needing that fuel to keep herself alert, but as the car decelerated, he stretched and yawned, then pulled the seat upright, and, yawning again, breath curdled, voice nasal with sleep, asked where they were. Sara told him they were near Kingston, and he could stay in the car if he wanted, she could get him something, but he said no, he’d come inside.
It was glorious to climb out into the cool night air in which crickets were singing, to stretch her arms, squeeze her toes in her blue sandals, tottery on the heels, creases furrowing her linen trousers and shirt, her party clothes. Beyond the grassy ditch separating parking lot from highway, the slipstream of trucks pushed waves of thundering air toward them. On the far side of the car, Raymond Renaud stretched too; then, as they made their way toward the glow of the circular service centre, beneath the hum of the mile-high lot lights, he said, In this country they eat a special food called doughnuts very late at night. No one knows the true reason they are called this.
Tell me what they’re like, Sara said, both of them giddy and bumping shoulders as they passed the truck lot, where the great trucks, like elephants, flanked one another, some rumbling, engines idle, running their air-conditioning or refrigeration units. Giddiness didn’t take away from the underlying horror of the paralyzed boy; it was bound to this, to the fact that the boy’s plight was now shared knowledge between them. Then her perception shifted and all she wanted was to get this errand, this crazy thing she was doing, over with as quickly as possible.
Inside the women’s washroom, Sara threw cold water over her face and patted her skin dry with paper towels before making her way along the curved corridor that led to one of two restaurants. As she turned the corner toward the right-hand restaurant, she looked about for Raymond and saw him not at the service counter, where she expected him to be, but out among the tables, beneath the shimmering fluorescent lights, stripped of his yellow jacket, in a black T-shirt, in front of two seated boys. He was juggling. Juggling. With what? She couldn’t see. Then she could. Small, multicoloured balls. Where had he got them? Had he brought them from the car, stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, and she had failed to notice? She was stunned at the sight of him and —
Head tilted up to follow the arcs of the balls, how fluid he seemed, how assured, how calm, despite the balancing twitches of his hips and the shuffle steps of his sandalled feet. Once again, he was revealed to her in an entirely new way. She didn’t dare move closer, didn’t want to disturb him but to watch as others were watching, the boys’ mother, or the woman at the same table who was presumably their mother, though darker-haired and more bony-featured than the boys. Bleary-eyed travellers at other tables were roused to alertness. The two women behind the counter where the doughnuts were had drawn close to its edge and whispered as they stared, and a man in a trucker’s cap stalled in astonishment inside the side door. The coloured balls flew up from Raymond’s hands and tumbled down, six balls. Sara had no names for the patterns he was making, the volleys, a spray of balls, his hands held up and open at the end of each muscled arm, releasing each ball with a flick, easy at the wrist. He spun around without missing a ball. She’d had no idea he was so good. The boys gaped at him in wonder. All that grief and turmoil had to be in him somewhere, transmuted, displaced, given this form, performative yet generous, as if he wanted to find and give others pleasure.
He called out to the women behind the counter for a doughnut, weaving between the tables toward them, keeping the balls in the air, teasing the women, I will pay, do not worry, nothing with icing or glaze. Catching three balls while keeping three in the air, he stopped by the rack of utensils, plastic and metal ones, and grabbed, what, metal knives, three of them. The younger woman, in her brimmed visor and hairnet, looked at her co-worker, nervous, then tossed him a doughnut overhand, an old-fashioned, and he dropped a ball but caught the doughnut with a grin, adding it to his volley, catching the knives by the handles, grabbing the doughnut in his mouth when it fell and taking a bite before sending it airborne again.
Someone started to clap, the air alive with excitement and disbelief at this tall man juggling in the wee hours at a service centre on the 401, and the jaggedness of something so unexpected. Raymond finished the doughnut and caught the balls and knives, picking up the dropped ball from the floor, but he was not through yet, and, throughout all this, how calm he remained. He set down the knives, pulled out a chair, and, standing on its seat so that he towered over them all, launched the balls again while tipping the chair forward, not falling but stepping backward onto the back of the chair, rotating the chair beneath his feet, growing taller as he moved, feeling his way backward to balance now on the chair’s legs, keeping himself upright, under the shimmering lights, not looking down as the pressure of his moving weight turned the chair beneath him while his hands kept the balls spinning through the air. Joy shone on his face, through a sheen of sweat. At last he caught all the balls in both hands and leaped free of the chair. When everyone clapped, he gave that shy, dimpled smile that Sara remembered from Copenhagen and dipped his dark head. Had she really seen what she’d just seen? As soon as he stopped and righted the chair, it seemed improbable that any of this had happened, or that it had happened like this, despite the surprised murmurings of everyone around her.
He was conversing with the boys, leaning over them as Sara approached, explaining to them about Cirkus Mirak, the children’s circus in Ethiopia, did they know where that was, it was in Africa. He p
ulled a folded flyer out of the pocket of his jacket and gave it to them and told them some day they should come for a visit. When Sara came close, Raymond turned to her with a friendly smile, and the boys and their mother also turned and must assume, if she was the companion of this man, that all this was familiar to her. That she knew his secrets. Raymond introduced her to the boys, Ben and Matt, and their mother, Moira, who were on their way from Sarnia to Moncton, days and nights of travel to take up a new life there, and suddenly she was commiserating with the mother, and joking with them all, saying, no, she had none of his talents, could only appreciate his, this complicity, and wishing them a safe trip onwards, while Raymond offered to buy the boys more doughnuts. Their mother said, no, really, they’d had enough, she needed them to sleep. A near-intoxicated glow poured from Raymond, despite his underlying note of distress. Some sadness and bewilderment came from the boys too. He was gentle as he shook both the boys’ hands.
On the way back to the car, Raymond carried a box of doughnuts along with his coffee, the juggling balls weighing down the pockets of his jacket. Sara was about to ask him where they’d come from but stopped herself: to ask meant the stubborn return to the practical, the stripping away of mystery.
In the car, he reached one arm behind his seat for a plastic bag that he seemed to know was on the floor, tossed the sand-filled juggling balls into it, knotted the plastic, and dropped the bag behind him.
You’re incredibly good, Sara said, setting down her own coffee. You must practise a lot.
Not much, he said. I don’t have time. Have a doughnut?
Pass me a cruller, please.
You are sure you don’t need me to drive?
I’m fine for now. She loved driving, loved the control of it.
Something had shifted between them, a loosening coloured by her amazement at what he’d done, could do, those hands, those arms, that body now slurping from a cup of coffee at her side as she pulled back onto the highway, glazed cruller on a napkin in her lap. A loosening familiar from other journeys with fellow journalists in stranger places, on planes, in vans, in bars, in the aftermath of something harrowing or exalting, something extreme or risky, the intimacy possible in the intensified chamber of hallucinatory exhaustion and enforced closeness that you know will end.
Wiping icing sugar from his lips with the back of his hand, Raymond said, This is a thing I like to do. Juggle in unexpected places. Sometimes I carry a set of juggling balls and sometimes I use whatever I can find. When I was in Sri Lanka —
When were you in Sri Lanka?
Ninety —
I was there in ninety-one, covering the civil war.
We just missed each other.
Were you teaching? What was it like being there when you were, I imagine, quite tense.
I was on a break. A friend worked there. In an orphanage. So I went for some weeks. I went north and east, into Tamil territory, because I’d heard the beaches near Trincomalee were beautiful. There were a lot of soldiers. And armed rebels. I’d get off a bus and juggle. Or I’d go to the market and pick up fruit, breadfruit, mangosteens. Sometimes I juggled in front of the soldiers. Or the rebels. Once I juggled with street cones. It is about showing people an unexpected thing. Creating an anomalous situation. Which I also tried to do in Addis Ababa. And this, tonight. It’s about changing things even briefly, because people are distracted. I like watching children be enthralled by something like this, when they are not sure what to think or why you, the outsider, are doing this thing. The expected interaction is overturned. If I give out money until I have nothing, it will not change a thing.
How did the soldiers or the rebels react to your juggling?
He gave another grin. They didn’t kill me.
She told him that she had spent most of her time there travelling with soldiers, remembered driving past long stands of palm trees with the tops of their heads blown off. He, too, said he remembered palm trees with the tops of their heads blown off. A transport trailer, lit by the gemlike reflectors along its bulk, seemed to elongate as she passed it. Were you teaching before you went over there?
In Canada. In the north. Then I decided to take some time to travel.
And, after, did you have a plan to go to Africa, or go back there?
I applied for jobs in international schools. It was chance. I got the one in Addis. And you, he said, brushing crumbs or sugar from his knees, did you set off to be a reporter in faraway places?
I didn’t really set out to do anything. I was trying to escape some things that happened in Montreal. I was in a relationship that ended. We were supposed to get married. And then a woman accused me of stealing her wallet and using her credit card. Which I didn’t do. But I was charged and it went to trial, and that was a very long process. And the man I was with, I trusted him to support me, I wanted him to be a character witness in court, I didn’t have a proper alibi, he was the closest thing I had, but he wouldn’t do it.
She was startled to hear herself saying this because it was not the version of events that she usually told, and she had never spoken of these matters in exactly this way. There was still pain in mentioning the particular form of Graham’s betrayal. She had never told anyone at work about the trial; Juliet Levin was really the only person among her Toronto acquaintances who knew of it. David didn’t.
Why wouldn’t he help? asked the man in the car with her, and his attention was keen and felt like velvet. If he had been sleeping before, he was now alert. Why had she told him this? Because he had opened himself to her about the boy. Because she’d watched him juggle, seen beauty in him as well as distress. Because by then a cord of intimacy stretched between them.
He didn’t want to be made public in this way. He’d been my professor. He taught, he teaches modern American history. We met in a class of his. It sounds so sordid now to say it. I think he was genuinely in love with me. He asked me to marry him. And I was madly in love with him. But in the end he turned pragmatic. He was coming up for tenure and he didn’t want this thing that was happening to me to jeopardize it. I became a liability.
Why did the woman who accused you think you did it?
How dark it was outside: there were no cars in sight, no headlights coming toward her, no taillights receding up ahead, only the extending pools of her own car’s headlights. They were in the middle of a dark path, dark woods spinning past to either side. Sara felt utterly awake. And calm.
We were in the change room at the downtown Y at the same time, the only two women there. I had been in the pool, then we were both in the showers, but I came out before her and was dressed and about to leave when she called out her wallet was missing. I helped her look for it and asked at the front desk to see if it had been turned in. She could have lost it anywhere, but she seemed convinced she’d had it when she came into the Y and taken her membership card out of it. Anyway, I left and didn’t think any more about it until I got a call from the police. She’d filed a report saying the wallet had to have been stolen from the change room and I must have taken it while she was in the shower when she’d left her locker closed but not locked. But then it became more surreal, nightmarish. There were all these store clerks who identified me as the person using her credit card later that same afternoon. They all signed statements saying I was the one they’d seen with the card, and it didn’t matter that the signature on the credit slips didn’t match the one I gave when the police asked me to sign her name. They said I was trying to cover my tracks. My lawyer found out later, after I was charged, that the clerks were shown this page of mug shots in which I was the only white and blonde woman.
Can that happen? The thing with the mug shots? She was aware of his curiosity, which was not judgment.
It did happen.
What about at the trial?
I was let off due to lack of evidence.
The words of her lawyer, Paul Kastner, the second lawyer, came surging back, from the hallway of the court when they’d stepped out at the end of the tri
al, his voice raised in vexation: Sara, the court is there to get you off, not declare you innocent.
Only a couple of years older than she was, garrulous, fingernails bitten to the quick, a terrible taste in ties, he’d been assigned to her through legal aid, after the first lawyer, Charles Martel, a distant acquaintance of her parents, suave in his charcoal suit, had advised her to plead guilty: it was a first offence, it didn’t matter what she’d done, it was expediency, she’d get off with counselling or a fine and avoid the risks of the courtroom and extended legal costs. Or her parents would avoid the costs. You want me to do what? she’d shouted before bolting from his office.
People, Raymond Renaud said, shifting in the dark, think they remember things that aren’t true. And when they believe something is true, it is hard to make them believe it isn’t.
Yes, Sara said. Touched. Intimacy, she thought, was a way of being seen by someone else, touched, a form of bearing witness. She felt a sudden, deep connection to him. That’s it exactly.
I’m sorry, Raymond said after a moment. I have to ask. What did the person with the credit card take from the shops?
I’ll probably never forget. A pair of lambskin gloves from the Bay, a bottle of Chanel perfume from the perfume counter, twenty cassette tapes from Archambault. A leather coat from a Danier outlet. The horrible thing is they’re not so far from things I might have bought except I’d never, ever buy albums by Sting or Madonna.
The wind through the air vents felt cold. The blue numbers of the digital clock on the dashboard read 4:06 a.m. Sara’s fingers shifted to find a comfortable place on the steering wheel, her eyelids itchy as if grit pressed against them. It struck her that she had not told him about Juliet Levin’s part in all of this, but the opening into which she’d spoken already felt closed, and besides, it had all happened so long ago. The release she felt in telling him, freedom in the wake of it, confirmed that all of that was long ago, and had been passed through, and was now behind her.
Accusation Page 6
