She was now in a state of merciful paralysis.
“I read somewhere that, if you know what you’re doing, you can really cripple someone with one of those things and they never see it coming. Cutting the right place in an arm or a leg or a neck. I guess that’s what JC did. Crippled the guy’s arm when they were grappling.”
As he struggled to his feet, John could hear the car speeding away. Afterwards, he wasn’t able to remember much—not year or make or model, not even colour. One of those nondescript mid-sized Asian cars that all seem to look the same.
JC stirred and sat up. He seemed dazed. John thought he was fine. But then he vomited, and there was a lot more blood on the floor, and he just kind of rolled over and curled up in it. John knew he couldn’t wait for an ambulance. He found JC’s car keys, and they were at the local hospital in less than half an hour. “I kept talking to him as I drove. We were flying on those back roads, me talking a blue streak, but he wasn’t answering. I was holding on to his hand with my bad hand, and I could feel it getting colder as we drove. But I wasn’t sure if the coldness was from him or me.”
Clearly at least one of the kicks to JC’s head had done serious harm.
“He hurt his head in January,” she said. “He was in the hospital, in Toronto.”
“You’d better tell them that,” said John. They had entered a vast parking lot in front of a hospital glittering with light. For the first time, she was gripped by a nearly suffocating fear.
The doctor was a young woman, still in her twenties, by Effie’s estimate. She had an authoritative confidence when she told them that they’d have to wait a bit. There was another assessment of the patient under way.
“Can’t you tell us anything?” Effie asked, struggling for poise.
“Are you his …?”
“Wife,” Effie said abruptly.
The doctor studied a clipboard. “We have him down as single,” she said.
“Well, you’re wrong,” said John. “I’m her ex-husband. I can vouch for it. And that man inside there is more husband to her than I ever was.”
The doctor looked from one to the other. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It isn’t important, anyway. You’re Dr. Gillis? I think your name is on here somewhere.”
“How bad is it?” Effie asked.
“We don’t have a clear prognosis yet, but the injuries are serious.”
Effie wondered about what she saw as aloofness in the doctor’s manner. Do they disengage when they know the case is hopeless?
“I’ll come back,” the doctor said, “when I have something to report. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a cafeteria on the second floor, if you want to wait there.”
“Can I see him, just for a second?” Effie asked, now barely in control. “I’d just like to see him.”
“Not right now,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back.”
“How long have you two known each other?” John asked her.
“I met him when I first moved to Toronto,” she said, suddenly aware of how easily she had strayed to the edge of the unspeakable narrative behind those simple words: “when I first moved to Toronto.” She searched his face, but there was no reaction there.
“That’s a long time ago,” John said.
“He was part of the crowd Sextus knew. Then he went away. Years went by. Decades. He resurfaced two years ago.”
“What a shame,” said John. “For this to happen.”
They were silent then, the sounds around them—muted conversations, the clatter of mugs and plates and cutlery, bland voices calling doctors over unseen speakers—accelerating a slide into a weary sense of helplessness.
John sighed, studying his coffee mug. “Funny they’d pick your place, and him a stranger there. When these things happen, it’s usually to someone everybody knows. Some old fellow living by himself. And sad to say, more often than not the culprit is a neighbour or a relative. But he has no connections there. So you have to wonder. Just the luck of the draw, I guess.”
She felt cold. “What did she look like, that girl sitting in the car?”
“I couldn’t say. Everything happened so fast. I might have got a look at her when I met her in the doorway, but there was so much going on inside …” He shrugged.
The doctor reappeared. “There you are,” she said. She smiled, and Effie read it as a sign of hope.
“You can see him, but only for a moment. You’ll find him very groggy, and he can’t speak.”
He was propped up in a high bed, a thin blanket covering his lower body. His mouth was distorted by a plastic hose that ran from a chugging ventilator. There were transparent lines taped to his arms and abdomen. His head was bandaged. On a stand beside the bed, an electronic line of light lurched erratically.
She felt wobbly, clamped to John’s good arm.
JC’s eyes unexpectedly flipped open, and she saw what looked like panic in his glance.
“Who did this?” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and turned away, limply raised an arm, moved a hand toward hers. She caught it briefly. His hand seemed small and dry, diminished, and at the touch of it, she felt time stop.
She was there for only seconds, but the images would last a lifetime. And then there was a sudden urgent sound from the monitor beside the bed. The young doctor quickly reappeared. “You’ll have to leave,” she said.
Effie could feel the pressure of John’s hand as he gently drew her back and away. She could already hear raised voices and hurried footsteps in the corridor. The doctor swiftly drew a curtain.
22
The city was an hour behind them before she felt the confidence to speak aloud. “There’s a curse on the place,” she said quietly.
“What place?” said John.
“My place. Home. Maybe the Long Stretch. Maybe the whole wretched island. We’re all cursed.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” John said. And the silence fell upon them once again.
The formalities were over. JC, in a moment of clarity, had legally designated Effie as his next of kin when he was admitted to the hospital. They advised her that it would be up to her to notify the other members of his family. She said she would, even though she knew of only two and she had no idea what, if anything, she’d ever say to them. The doctor told her there would have to be an autopsy because of the circumstances, and she agreed.
“Ever since your father,” Effie said. “Since that day. The day Kennedy was assassinated. Everything seems to lead back to that day. And what happened that day colours my memory of everything before it.”
John was nodding. “You aren’t the only one felt that way,” he said, eyes fixed on the road ahead of them.
“Nothing’s been normal since then.”
We become bystanders, she thought. In all the large, life-altering moments, we are on the margins. The outcome of the crisis happening behind the curtain in that sterile room would redefine her as she had once been redefined by an unseen act of violence in the forest and, before that, a single unknown outrage in a war of inconceivable ferocity. There was nothing she could say or do, not then, not now. JC’s word came back to her. “Impotence.”
After what had seemed to be an hour, the doctor said the words Effie had prepared herself to hear: “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
“You never get over it,” John now said. “You cope the best you can. You try to manage with what you have. But you never get over it.”
She reached across the car and touched his broken hand. “How long will you have to leave the cast on?”
“Months,” he said. “No big deal. It’ll get me out of doing housework.”
The young doctor had telephoned a downtown hotel. There was one awkward moment as she cupped the telephone receiver and asked, “One room or two?”
“Two,” John said quickly.
Outside her door, he hesitated, then wrapped his arms around her and held her firmly, as if to save their bodies from the sudden explosion of her grief. I
t lasted for perhaps a minute, and then he relaxed, released her and stepped back. “Life’s awful flimsy,” he said.
She nodded and turned toward the door. He was still standing there when she closed it gently.
After the first call from Toronto, she decided to turn off her cellphone and put it away for good—forever, if such a blessing could be arranged. The voice had been impersonal. “I’m calling from the newsroom. The wires are reporting what happened. I got your number from Molly Blue. She didn’t think you’d mind …”
She’d mumbled something briefly. Maybe, “We really don’t know anything. I’m sorry.” Which was very, very true.
Just before the causeway, she said, “You can take me to a motel in town. I know one with a car rental agency. I’ll need a car while I’m here.”
“I figured you’d be staying at the house. And there’s JC’s car.”
“No, John, please. I couldn’t …”
“My house. You’ll be staying with me. Janice is expecting us.”
It was late afternoon when they turned up the country road known as the Long Stretch, where their common life began, evolved and ended. She wished that she’d insisted on staying somewhere else, even at the apartment Sextus rented in town.
“I haven’t heard from Sextus,” she said.
“You will,” John said. “He called first thing Saturday. We decided it should be me contacting you. Since I was there when it happened, in a way. But I think he’s pretty shook up about it. Himself and JC go back a way, I understand.”
“Way, way back,” she said.
“He said he wants to get himself together before he sees you. Says he wouldn’t be much help to you the way he is now. Okay?”
She nodded.
The old house had the tidy, well-maintained appearance of a year-round dwelling. The grass was cut, firewood neatly stacked on the little deck that ran along the front. There was a car—a second-hand Toyota JC had purchased when he’d first arrived. This visible reminder of his recent presence was almost more than she could bear. She remembered how he’d used the word “civility,” and she suppressed a bitter laugh.
A yellow plastic ribbon fluttered in the gateway. “The Mounties put that there,” John said. “People were coming out all morning, just to look. This kind of thing is still pretty rare around here.”
She turned her face away.
Janice was holding the baby in her arms, pacing, when they entered the kitchen. Little Jack was squawking loudly, his mother shushing. John set his backpack on the floor and took the baby from her. “Hey,” he said. “Come and meet the visitor. This here’s Effie.” He turned the child to show his face. “What do you think? A Gillis or what?”
“He’s got the Gillis lungs,” his mother said.
Effie turned toward her. “Janice, we haven’t met,” she said. They shook hands.
“I wish the circumstances were happier,” Janice said.
Effie nodded.
John had walked away with the child, chatting to him with an intimacy that seemed to register, for the crying had stopped.
“You must be hungry,” Janice said, and Effie demurred. “Maybe a drink?”
Effie declined that too.
She sat on the bedside in the unfamiliar room. This had been her home, thirty years before. It was a place in the memory without features, just a sensation of time passing. Two years, perhaps. Could it have been just two years? It had been not quite two years since her first encounter with JC Campbell on the St. George subway platform. She curled her body on the bed, hands clasped between her knees, trying to remember details of the two years she had lived in this place, but they were lost in the overwhelming immediacy of the time just gone, the two years that would define tomorrow and the unimaginable march of time beyond tomorrow.
Janice was speaking softly at the bedroom door. Effie had somehow unpacked, undressed and slept, and now she was confused. The word “police” brought clarity. An officer had called and would like to meet with her in an hour at her house. They were hoping she might be able to help them ascertain what, if anything, was missing.
“I asked if it could wait, but they said it was important to the investigation. They let me clean up the place yesterday, after they took their pictures and went over everything for fingerprints. It was a mess, but it’s okay now. I could go with you. Or John could.”
“It’s okay,” Effie said. “I have to face it sooner or later.”
The officer seemed young, his manner awkward. He explained much of what she already knew. John was their only source of information, other than the speculative recreation they had sketched out on a large yellow notepad. He explained a theory, referring to a floor plan of the kitchen/living area, the two small bedrooms, once hers and Duncan’s, one of which was now an office. There were dotted lines, showing the presumed entrance and subsequent movements of the attackers.
“We figure they didn’t get beyond the kitchen right away, or at least not far,” the policeman said. “There was a wallet, with money and credit cards here.” He was pointing to the bedroom in the sketch. “We figure if anything was missing, it came from here.” Now he was indicating the office.
“There should have been a laptop,” she said. “Before I went away, he had it here.”
She walked slowly toward the office doorway. The table that had served as a desk was littered with scraps of paper, notepads and pens. There were books.
“The witness, from up the road, said he saw a young female carrying something,” the policeman said.
“I believe that would have been the laptop.”
And suddenly the scene was clear to her.
“He would have fought them for the laptop,” she said. “He wouldn’t have allowed them to take that without a struggle. Money wouldn’t have mattered, or if they tried to take his car. But the laptop …”
“Do you know what was so important about the computer?”
“Yes,” she said. “He was writing something.”
“Do you know what he was writing? It’ll be important if we find it. Unless, of course, they deleted everything.”
“Yes,” she said. “He was writing about something that happened to someone he knew.”
“I see. Like a book?”
“Like a book.”
The policeman walked past her to the desk, and when he turned, he was holding the manuscript that Sextus had written.
“Would this be the hard copy?”
“No,” she said. “That’s something else. Something different.”
“Do you know the make of the laptop?”
“No,” she said. “I never really paid attention. It didn’t seem important.”
“I’m sorry to be dragging you through all this,” the policeman said. “But every little bit of information helps.”
“You have no idea who did this?” she said.
“No,” he said. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen much around here, though there have been a few recent cases. Some old folks don’t trust banks and don’t lock doors. It’s usually about drugs.”
“What are the chances you’ll find out?”
“Oh, chances are better than good,” he said. “It’s still pretty shocking when this happens here. Even the perpetrators are kind of disturbed by it. They have to talk about it; word gets around.”
The policeman returned the manuscript to the desk. “I guess that’ll be all for now,” he said. “Do you need a lift home?”
“This is home,” she said.
“Yes, I suppose. Sorry about that. I meant, to where you’re staying.”
“I can walk,” she said. “I need fresh air. May I take that with me?”
She gestured toward the manuscript.
“I suppose so,” he said. “It belongs to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s mine.”
He picked it up again, examined it briefly. “Why Men Lie,” he said. “Sounds interesting.” He handed it to her.
“There was a plastic b
ag,” she said. “A No Frills bag.”
“No frills,” he said, and smiled, and looked around him, taking in the bare wooden walls, the modest furnishings. “You could do a lot with this place.”
“That’s the bag over there,” she said.
Duncan arrived Monday evening. On the telephone he’d inquired about a funeral. She gave the phone to John and left the room. John told her later that Duncan felt he had to be here. Now he held her briefly, and it felt odd, the comforting of this familiar stranger. She realized that he was wearing his priest’s collar and black suit. “The collar,” she said.
“I had to go standby,” he said. “I thought I’d use all my assets.”
She forced herself to listen as John again recounted what he knew, the scene inside the house, the fleeing girl.
“It wasn’t anyone you recognized?” Duncan asked.
“I never really got a good look at her face,” John replied. “The light was behind her. I was distracted by what was going on inside.”
“So what’s next?” Duncan asked.
“They told us it might be days before they release the body,” John said.
“I can stick around,” said Duncan.
After John and Janice had gone to bed, they sat in silence in the living room. “Do you remember how we’d come over here on Christmas Day and they’d always have a tree decorated? Over there, in that corner. We weren’t much for Christmas trees at our place.”
He laughed. “John always got things from Santa. We did too, but his stuff was always better. I remember once he got a train set. I had a cap gun and was pretty thrilled until I saw that thing.”
“There was always something here for us too. Under their tree. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he said. “And it always felt queer. Like they felt sorry for us.”
“They meant well.”
“We should be home,” he said.
“I don’t think the police want us staying there yet,” she said.
“They told you that?”
“No.”
“He was happy here,” she said eventually. “He liked the quiet.”
Why Men Lie Page 28
