“What if he’s Cassie’s half-brother?”
“What if he is?” JC said. “What difference would it make? They’re either that or they’re cousins. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“You never talk about your family,” she said. “You must have cousins.”
“Not that I know of.”
The countryside around them was green. The light was pale, the sky clear. “It’ll be a lovely day,” she said. “What will you do?”
“I’ll go straight home and get serious about the project,” he said.
“I just dread going back to the city. I used to look forward to it, but that business in July changed something.”
“There’s nothing in the city that you should have to worry about,” he said. “Trust me. The business in July was dealt with.”
“How do you know he won’t …?”
“People like that usually just need a good fright.”
“And you frightened him?”
“I think so.”
He left her with her bags at the curb. “I’ll not go in,” he said. “Public farewells aren’t my thing. Come here.”
They stood there as one, afraid to make eye contact, afraid to speak, until there was the sound of knuckles rapping on the fender of the car. A traffic officer stood there wagging a finger. “Time’s up,” he said. “Sooner or later, someone has to make a move. Might as well get it over with.”
“I’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” she said.
“I’ll be here.”
Briefly his lips brushed her cheek as he released her.
Cassie met her at the airport in Toronto. She had what seemed to be an endless store of questions, about JC, about Duncan, about the future. Then, on the expressway through downtown, she told her mother she and Ray were moving. He’d been invited to join a new medical practice in Sudbury. He longed to live closer to his family, and she could sympathize with that. “They’re my family now, too,” she said.
“I suppose.”
Cassie reached a hand across to her. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
With both hands now gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, Cassie said, “And we’re going to have a baby.”
Effie said nothing.
“Well?” said Cassie.
“I’m really happy for you.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
“I’m thinking of your father.”
“He’ll freak, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. He seems different. You haven’t told him?”
“I was waiting to tell you. Maybe you can help me break the news.”
“When the time is right.”
“Yes. When the time is right.”
“Ray must be over the moon.”
“Yes. But … you know, his age.”
“Come on,” she said. “Ray isn’t old.”
“Ma! He’s sixty-three.”
“Sixty-three?”
“What did you think?”
“I guess I forgot.”
Cassie began manoeuvring the car to take an exit to the Annex, but Effie told her to drive on. “I’m not going there, to Huron,” she said. “I’m going to Walden. I’m going to live there for a while.”
“Perfect,” Cassie said. “Finally.”
“JC is staying in Cape Breton for the time being. There have been some changes over the summer.”
“What kind of changes?”
“I’ll tell you, but not right now. Just take me to Walden.”
It was September, but the city felt even more oppressive than when she’d left it in July. The sky was a moist grey blanket compressing the accumulated fumes from car exhaust and gases from the rotted produce piled nightly on the sidewalks for collection. Her daily walks through the little Chinatown on Broadview accentuated her feelings of exclusion; on the Danforth, there were women, faces hidden, speaking glottal Arabic where, years ago, she found the Greek romantic. She fought annoyance as she struggled through impassively aggressive little women wearing what appeared to be pyjamas, past the leaking piles of garbage exploding out of plastic bags and bloodstained cartons piled in front of shops that somehow now seemed sinister.
It was no better on St. George, near her office, where the throngs of ageless, timeless students seemed more than ever to be self-absorbed and hyperactive pampered children, products of delusional parental expectations.
During endless meetings with faculty and students, she would drift away on the gentle swell of recent memory, yawning compulsively. She was sleeping badly, partly because of the undiminished nighttime heat, partly thanks to a lingering fear that she was being stared at by a stranger.
Even before she left Cape Breton she had notified her landlord that she would have to break the lease for her apartment. He was sympathetic and, she suspected, not unhappy at the prospect of a rent increase. With Cassie’s help, she’d organized her possessions and arranged for storage.
“I wish you’d told us about the creep,” Cassie said. “You know it happens all the time. Men preying on women who live alone. Ray could have handled it.”
“It’s been taken care of,” she said. And changed the subject.
“Did you get a name?” her daughter asked.
“I had a name, but I’ve forgotten it,” she said.
But she hadn’t. The business card was on her desk. She’d consulted a street guide to locate the address, in a neighbourhood they called the Upper Beach. And one evening, after she had consumed several glasses of wine with her solitary meal, she drove there and sat out front. It was an unusually quiet street, hardly any traffic, no sign of children or family activities.
Maybe if she saw him once again, the bland reality of what he looked and sounded like would neutralize the menacing shapes and sounds that haunted her imagination. Maybe, with the restoration of an accurate impression, she could stop scanning the faces of strangers in the streets and coffee shops.
Eventually she saw a woman approaching from a streetcar stop. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, and there was a small boy hanging on to one hand. In her other hand she had a bag of groceries. She turned in to the walkway at the address on the business card.
Effie knew by her easy movements that she lived there—the house key slipped without hesitation into the lock, the door swung open, the boy ushered in ahead.
Effie waited for five minutes. Darkness was gathering, and she could see a glow of light inside the house. She opened the car door.
The woman’s face was fixed in what seemed to be an expression of permanent caution, eyes full of questions, door not quite open.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Effie said brightly. “I had a friend who lived here. Paul Campion …”
“He isn’t here,” the woman said.
“He did live here, though?”
“He did, but he doesn’t anymore. How did you know him?”
“It was casual. We’d have coffee. I loaned him something. A book …”
“He isn’t here.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“Paul passed away,” the woman said. “I don’t know about any book.”
“He passed away,” Effie repeated. “When? What happened?”
“A month or so ago. I’m sorry to tell you he took his own life.”
“My God … I’m sorry,” Effie said.
“The Bloor viaduct,” she said. “That’s where he did it.”
“And you’re his …”
“I’m his sister.”
She drove back to Walden in a daze. She poured a drink but had to put it down to prevent spilling it. It was nearly ten o’clock, time for his nightly call.
The pronunciation was terrible, but the voice was warm and shy: “Ciamar a tha mo nighean ruadh bhoidheach a-nochd?”
“You didn’t tell me he was fucking dead,” she replied. She had not intended to use the F-word or to put such biting emphasis on “dead.” B
ut it was out, and everything was changed.
There was a long silence. Suddenly she wished she had simply answered his garbled question, had said, “Your pretty redhead isn’t great tonight. In fact, she’s feeling pretty rotten.”
“Who is fucking dead?”
“Campion,” she said. “The stalker.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit. You’re telling me you didn’t know?”
“If I knew something like that, I’d have told you.”
“Really?”
“Hey. Why don’t I call back in half an hour when you’ve had time to think this through.”
“What on earth did you do to him?”
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line, and it was, to her, more powerful than anything he might have said. “What happened to him?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m asking.”
“What if I told you it was a fractured skull?”
“Shit. Really? How did that happen?”
“He went off the viaduct.”
There was a laugh, more of a barking sound. “You think I tossed him over. Is that what I’m hearing?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“So it was a suicide.”
“That’s what they think.”
“They don’t usually report suicides, especially not off the viaduct. Where did you get this?”
She froze for just an instant, then felt an old, familiar grief congealing near her heart. Her voice was a hateful whimper and she knew it. “I don’t know. Somewhere, someone.” After another long silence, she said simply, “I’ve got to go now.”
What is it about me? she wondered. What draws the damaged and the doomed? Sandy Gillis in a doorway; Conor in his gym; this stranger, Campion, smiling at her in a coffee shop; men passing through her life, a constancy of needs, of mother-sister-daughter neediness. When does it end?
The phone rang. Suddenly, the drink she’d been reaching for was toppling. She grabbed it, licked the splash from her hand, then picked up the phone.
“You’re still there,” he said.
“Where did you think I’d be?”
“I don’t blame you for being shocked,” he said. “But I really didn’t know.”
“I shouldn’t have insinuated. It’s me who should be sorry. I just wish that you were here.”
“Me too,” he said. “I’m actually not making much progress. I might be just as well off there.”
“You decide,” she said.
“I’ve been going over it in my head. What I might have said to him.”
“What exactly did you say?”
“Well, I told him he was a freak and a pervert, and that if he didn’t hand over the document he’d swiped from you I was going to put his mug on television, to warn innocent people about him.”
“You didn’t!”
“I never thought he’d take it seriously. I was only trying to provoke him. I found him pathetic, and I didn’t like that. I’d have preferred belligerence.”
“And that was all.”
“I swear to God almighty.”
“Maybe it was the manuscript,” she said. “Reading my sordid story just made life not worth living anymore.”
“Who knows?” JC said.
“Christ,” she said. “Do you really think that’s a possibility?”
“Come on,” he said. “The guy was a nutcase. Anything’s possible.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m the problem.”
He was silent for a while. “I really do think I’m going to have to abandon this thing. At least move it back to Toronto. Life’s too short for us to be like this.”
“It’s your call,” she said.
“I’ll sleep on it. Tomorrow night? Same time?”
“Please. I promise to be in better cheer.”
“I love you,” he said. And she repeated the words, and later tried to remember if it was the first time she’d spoken them to him.
It was Thursday night. On Friday night he didn’t call.
She woke early on Saturday. She’d slept badly, waiting for the phone to ring. But somehow, in spite of the cascade of speculative reasons for his silence, she drifted off and mercifully slept through till nearly eight o’clock.
She had booked a meeting with a history major for ten o’clock. She got out of bed resolved to activate her dormant optimism. It must be in there somewhere, she told herself, like a long unused article of clothing that suddenly was back in style. In the shower she decided that she’d walk to the office. She needed the exercise.
It was a cool September morning, the eighteenth, she would recall, sky blue, air freshened by a breeze from the northwest. She planned the route, up Broadview, past the jail and through the park, along the pedestrian ramp that crossed the Don Valley Parkway, up through the model farm, where children would already be scampering. I’ll be a grandma soon, she thought, and there was a ping of pleasure in the memory of Cassie’s news. There was a coffee shop on Parliament where, according to JC, the brew was unbeatable. She’d pause there, maybe eat a muffin.
At Bloor and Sherbourne, she could feel a blister starting, so she abandoned the walk for the subway, which she rode to St. George station. Emerging from the subway car, she was startled to remember that it was fewer than two years earlier, on that same platform, that he’d called her name.
The student needed help with sources for a thesis on the influence of myth in history. He had the British Isles in mind, with particular attention to Scotland. He was older than she had expected and unabashedly flirtatious, exuding a cockiness she knew would either serve him well or ruin him in the long run.
She had just checked her wristwatch, and it was ten fifteen when the phone on her desk rang. She excused herself. She didn’t recognize the voice at first.
“It’s John,” the caller said.
“John?”
“John Gillis. I’m sorry to be calling, but it’s kind of urgent. I tried calling your other numbers, but thank God I had this one too. Do you think you could come home? Right away?”
“Home?”
“Home. Cape Breton.”
“Oh, John,” she said. “What …?”
“It’s your friend Campbell,” he said. “JC. Something happened. You need to come home as soon as you can.”
“What happened?”
“I can’t talk now. The cops are in the yard. They want to talk to me again.”
“For God’s sake, what happened, John?”
“Some people tried to rob him. Call me when you know what time your flight arrives. I can meet you at the airport.”
21
She flew out that night, and she would remember how the communities below her looked like the glowing embers of campfires in the darkness. The light is life, she thought. She tried to imagine people on the ground, wrapped tightly in their lives, sealed in the particularities of now, mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-laugh, mid-meal, -drink, -piss, mid-copulation. Everybody, everywhere, engaged, mid-something. And JC, somewhere, in mid-struggle to survive. She tried to pray.
John hadn’t told her very much.
“He’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good. That’s all I know.”
She’d forgotten to ask which hospital. She prayed that it was the little hospital near home, that it wasn’t one of the larger regional facilities in Antigonish or Sydney. The greater the distance to the hospital, the greater the cause for alarm.
“He’s in Halifax,” John said as he took the airport exit to the city.
“He’s in the ICU at whatever they call the old Infirmary these days.”
“Halifax?”
“They had to airlift him.”
John reached across the car to hold her hand. For the first time, she noticed that his right arm was in a cast from his knuckles to his elbow.
“It’s the best place he could be,” John said. “He’ll get the best of care.”
“What happened
, John?”
“I can only tell you what I know,” he said.
Friday night John went for a run. It was his best time, after the baby was down for the night, or at least part of it. He jogged out past her old place, as far as the main highway, then along the highway to the little airport near Port Hastings. On the way back, he felt a slight twinge in his knee.
“It’s an old problem,” he said. “Whenever I feel that starting, I back off. You can’t mess with the knee.”
Near her gate he slowed to a walk. There was a light on in the house, but that was not unusual. There was a light there every night. But that night there was also an unfamiliar car parked near the gate.
“I noticed it was parked kind of crooked, and it wasn’t there when I went by the first time.”
As he passed behind the car, there was a loud crash from inside the house. He stopped. At that moment the car door opened, and with the inside now illuminated, he could see a woman there, or a girl. He couldn’t tell, not right away. She slid out of the car and shut the door, and it was dark again.
There was a shout from inside, someone’s name. Obviously hers. She opened the gate and started running toward the house. Now there were sounds of a violent struggle inside, and he followed her.
As he reached the door, it opened suddenly and what was now clearly a young girl, a teenager, brushed past him. She was carrying something. “It looked to me like one of those portable computers.”
“His laptop?” Effie said.
“That’s what it looked like.”
Inside there was blood, spattered on the refrigerator and smeared on the linoleum. JC was on the floor, and there were two men kicking him. They were young men. JC was curled in a fetal ball, hands covering his head.
“I headed for the closest guy, but he spotted me and turned. I noticed that his left arm was kind of limp, dangling like. So I got him with a hard right. It was a good one, and he went staggering backwards, but my fist caught his forehead mostly … so this happened.” He held up his injured hand. “The knuckle broke and the wrist got sprained.”
At that point the second attacker had grabbed John, but clumsily, shoving him so that he stumbled on JC’s body and fell across it.
“That was when I realized it wasn’t JC’s blood. He wasn’t cut. The blood was from the other guy, the one with the bad arm. When I scrambled up, I found one of those little utility knives. That must have been what JC used.”
Why Men Lie Page 27
