by Joan Boswell
“You ready to go home, or do you want to sit some more?” he asked.
“I’d like to go home now.”
He came around, got me out, and led me gently, his hand on my arm. “The SUV is better for this weather.”
I climbed into the SUV. “I forgot my things,” I said. “Can I get my things out of my car before we go?”
“Certainly. I’ll get them for you.”
“The Shoppers bag on the front seat and my purse.”
He left, and through the frosted windows I watched him approach the huddle of police and ambulance drivers. They were moving the body now, lights flashing through the snow.
Of course, I’d been crazy to come out in this storm. Hal always called me crazy. Said he couldn’t live with a crazy woman any more... Crazy, crazy. My entire body was trembling. I closed my eyes and pressed my lips together to keep my teeth from clacking against each other.
“You didn’t tell us you went to Needles ’N Trims,” the young cop said to me accusingly when he climbed in the SUV. I stared at him, open-mouthed. He was smiling. Okay, it was a joke after all, and I saw what had happened. The bag from Needles ’N Trims had somehow fallen out of the Shoppers Drug Mart bag. He handed both to me.
I quickly put my Needles ’N Trims bag inside the one from Shoppers, rolled the top of it down and didn’t say anything. My scrapbooks were my private affair. My things. My time for myself.
“Do you do crafts?” he asked, pulling out on to the snowy road. “My mother does needlepoint,” he added.
I looked out the window. The ambulance was driving away, slowly, sadly. No need for hurry, no need for sirens now. The lights looked blue against the snow. The dead man was Ernest Rodhever, Ernie to his friends. Bank manager and member of the Rotary. Recently divorced from Rebecca Rodhever. He would probably have a big funeral full of words from kith and comrade. The victim was unknown to me.
“I have a picture in my kitchen she did.” He was saying. “It’s of a wagon train in snow. Like tonight. Only instead of a car it’s a wagon. Framed. You’ll have to direct me to your house.”
“Down this road a mile or so. At the light, turn left onto Brisbane. It’s the Westminster Apartments. I’m on the fifth floor.”
“The Westminster apartments?” He turned to look at me.
“Yes.”
A few minutes later he said, “Quite a commotion there a few months back.”
I shrugged. I knew what he was talking about. Everyone who lived anywhere near Westminster apartments knew that Bruce Searshot had fallen to his death off his fourth floor deck. Some said it was suicide. Others thought it was an accident. The findings by the police were inconclusive.
Outside, the sleet had changed to a kind of half-rain that sounded like hands patting the top of the vehicle. He asked me if I knew the man who’d fallen, and I nodded and said I knew him to see him, that was all.
When we stopped at a light, I asked him his name. He adjusted the mirror and said, “I thought I told you. I’m sorry if I didn’t. I meant to. It’s Robert. Call me Rob.”
“Isn’t that interesting. My son’s name is Rob. He’s a stock broker. Investments. Bay Street.”
“Perhaps I could call him for you.”
I looked down at my hands, the veins like thick worms crawling across my flesh. When had my hands gotten like this? When had I become this woman with hands like this? I used to be so young. There was a time I was even pretty. “No. Don’t call him.”
The air in the car was stifling. The young always make it too hot for us. They think we like it that way. I placed the back of one hand against the window, trying to extract coolness from the pane.
Ahead of us, the lights of a twenty-four-hour coffee shop on the corner from my apartment looked surreal through the snow, like a painting on a calendar.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“What?”
“We could stop for coffee. I think we both need to unwind a bit. Have a cup of something hot.”
“That would be nice.”
He parked in front of the coffee shop, and he came around to take my elbow as he helped me down from the SUV, as if I was an old woman. Well, maybe I was. Maybe to him I was. And then I thought how nice it would be to have a son who did this, a son who walked his mother into a coffee shop at eleven at night to get her a nice cup of something hot to drink.
There were a few other patrons in there. Two men were at the counter talking about the storm, and a young couple sat together in the far booth and held hands across the table. There was a time, years ago when that could have been Hal and me.
He ordered coffee, and I asked for just a cup of hot water, please. I don’t often drink coffee, and certainly nothing with caffeine this late at night. I’d had a couple of sips of coffee in the police car earlier and would probably pay for it later.
Rob was pleasant and talkative. I mostly listened while he told me about his wife and baby at home, about the new house they were building across the river, about how his wife wanted to do the bedroom in a kind of yellow and how he wanted blue. I told him how lucky he was to find love. After a few minutes he said, “Tell me about your divorce. It must’ve been very painful for you.”
I looked down at my cup. They’d given me a tea cup instead of a mug. That was nice of them. “It was very hard.”
He looked so serious, so intent, the way he touched my arm, like no son had ever touched my arm, so I told him my sad, sad story.
Later in my apartment, I couldn’t sleep. You’d think if I’d just killed someone, that’s what would have kept me awake, but no, it wasn’t that. It was all that talking about Hal. He shouldn’t have left me. It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. I fell into tears again. Hal. Hal.
I cried as I dumped out my new scrapbooking supplies onto the kitchen table. I had two days worth of newspapers to go through. I cried as I plugged in the kettle. I wept as I went through my papers and added pictures and addresses. I sobbed when I pasted them in, adding coloured string and ribbons.
At around six in the morning, I fell into a restless sleep. In my dream, I was running my car over Hal and his bimbo, the way I’d run over Ernie. Only in my dream I kept running over them, back and forth, back and forth. Then I dreamed that Hal was falling, turning over and over as he fell to his death from the deck. Instead of Bruce Searshot falling the way he did, it was Hal, and it was me who had pushed him.
The ringing telephone jarred me awake.
“Mrs. Wilkens?” I sat up on the couch where I’d slept.
“Yes?” All over me were paste and markers and newspaper cuttings and scraps and scrapbooks. I had left the cap off the red marker, and through the course of my turning and tossing, it had written an elongated Z on the couch cushion. There was also some red on my forearm and a bit on my face.
“Mrs. Wilkens, this is Rob.”
I cleared my throat. “Hello.”
“I was wondering how you are.”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?” He sounded so caring, so son-like. “It was quite an ordeal you went through last night.”
“Thank you for calling, Rob.”
A few minutes later, I got up and went to the bathroom. I really wanted a bath, a nice bubble one, with candles even, but a sponge bath would have to do. I’ve been bathing this way for six months now, filling the sink with water, leaning my head into it to wash my hair and then sponging off the rest of me.
Behind the closed shower curtain was the heap of bloody clothes, encrusted and dried to a dark brown by now. I couldn’t go in there. I couldn’t even move them to a safer place.
Before I washed my hair, I carefully removed the red from my cheek with dabs of cold cream and cotton balls. I’d have to be more careful. I’d have to pay more attention.
In the kitchen, I boiled more water, poured myself some Kashi, and got out my scrapbooks. The little matter of the red Z on the couch worried me. I hoped the couch wasn’t ruined. If I couldn
’t fix it, it would be yet another thing in my apartment that would be off-limits to me; like my bathtub, my computer case and my 21.7 cubic foot freezer that I kept in my second bedroom. The whole second bedroom would soon be off-limits to me.
I drank hot water from my tea cup and wandered through the day’s newspapers, which had come through the mail slot. I get four each day, two in the morning, one in the early afternoon and one at night. I managed to find six more pictures of Hal. These I cut out.
You may wonder that I can find so many pictures of my ex-husband. Well, Hal’s a real estate broker, so his picture’s in the papers, plus on lots of lawn signs, like he’s running for office. When he’d first left me, I’d taken to driving from house to house late at night, parking behind bushes, venturing out and defacing his picture with a black magic marker. I drew mustaches and beards and put round circles around his face with lines through. I thought I was quite clever. No one would suspect me. How could they? A respectable woman-of-a-certain-age writing four letter words on For Sale signs? Think about it.
I’d also managed to find a picture or two of Maura. That’s his mistress. It’s always a little more difficult to get pictures of her, and sometimes I have to resort to taking them myself. Sometimes I follow her, keeping well behind as she does some ordinary task like grocery shopping, and there I am at the ready with my digital camera. Then I put them on my computer and print them off.
I stacked my scrapbooks on the coffee table. I put Hal’s scrapbook on top of Maura’s, then I got out my murder weapons one.
I collect murder weapons. Well, I don’t really collect the actual weapons, I don’t want you to think that, but what I collect are pictures of murder weapons used in actual cases. I follow trials—I sometimes even go to them—and when the murder weapon is mentioned, I look through all my books and magazines for pictures. I’ve been pretty lucky in finding just about everything I’ve needed. I’ve got pictures of guns, knives, pillows (These are easy to find—just go to any Sears ad in any newspaper and you’re bound to find pillows!). I’ve found fireplace pokers and cast iron frying pans in ads for Canadian Tire, but my all time favorite has to be a curling trophy. Yes, someone actually killed someone with a curling trophy! It took me a while to find it, but I lucked out when a rink in our town won some sort of bonspiel, and there was this picture of the skip holding up a trophy right there on the first page of the sports section!
Sun glinted through my window. I got up and closed the blinds. The snow was deep, but at least it had stopped. Down below, Clyde Frodiff was shovelling, and across the way, old Mrs. Gibb was sweeping off her deck. That woman, always sweeping snow, never shovelling, always sweeping. I hope when I’m that old I don’t get like that. I looked down to the place where Bruce Searshot had fallen off his deck and onto the ground. Being one floor above him, I knew exactly where that place was. If I squinted, I could almost see him lying there still.
The intercom buzzed. I pressed “talk”, thinking it might be the mailman or the courier guy.
“Mrs. Wilkins? It’s me, Rob.”
I buzzed him up, and while he was on the elevator, I scrambled to shove my scrapbooks under the couch. Then I closed the doors to my bedroom and the bathroom attached to it. Then I turned on the television as if I’d been watching it all along. Old women watch television, and in his estimation, I probably fit that bill.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked him cheerfully when he came to the door. “I have the kettle on.”
“I would, thank you.”
I knew he was just being polite. Police officers don’t usually drink tea. I know this, but on the other hand, I don’t keep coffee around. Hal used to drink coffee, but when he left he took with him all the remaining canisters of Tim Hortons along with the Mr. Coffee.
“Are you here with news about my car?” I asked.
“Not yet. I’ll keep you posted on that.” He stepped into my kitchen, stood there looking around. “I just have a couple more questions for you.” While he talked, I looked at the apartment from his eyes and saw the trashcan heaped with paper cuttings, my newspapers stacked in a corner of the living room floor, the scissors, my bottles of glue, my marking pens, bits of cloth, ribbons and colored string. I also saw the dishes in the sink, a loaf of bread on the counter, the cereal box, the butter where I’d left it, the dirty knives on the sideboard. Back when it was Hal and me, I never would’ve stood for this. I used to have a girl who came in and cleaned for me once a week. I don’t have her any more. Sometimes I regret not having her any more.
The kettle whistled, and I unplugged it and got down the tea bags. I’m very fond of Earl Grey.
“It’s about your ex-husband, Hal Wilkins,” he said.
I turned suddenly, almost pouring boiling water on my hand. “Hal?”
“You told me he left you. I got the impression from you that it was fairly recently, and that’s why you weren’t yourself last night.” His cheeks were flushing purple. “But my information says it’s been five years. He’s remarried, and they have a child.”
“He went and married someone young enough to be his daughter!” I sloshed water onto my counter, that’s how much my hands shook. “What kind of a man goes and marries someone half his age? How do you think that makes me feel? And a child!” I managed to still my fingers enough to get two tea bags in the pot and pour water over them. I set the works on the table with the cozy on top.
“You also said you had a son named Rob. I looked that up, too. You have no children, Mrs. Wilkens. You and Hal Wilkins had no children.”
“He has a child with that Maura!” I spat out the words. I was shaking now, like last night. “I was mixed up last night. I’ve been through a lot. I may have said strange things. I don’t even know what I said!”
I turned away from him to the sink, pulled off a paper towel from the roll and dabbed at my eyes.
He was holding a bottle of glue, turning it over and over in his hands, looking around, not saying anything. It was making me nervous. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, poured himself a cup of tea and started drinking it, still not saying anything. I asked what colour he and his wife had decided on for their bedroom. Anything to change the subject. He told me yellow. That’s a good choice, I said, but he kept looking at me. Finally he asked that if I didn’t mind, could he check in on me periodically? His own mother was gone, and he felt a kind of responsibility toward me. Still trembling, still shaking, I said that was fine. Before he left, he asked to use the bathroom. I said okay and led him to the half-bath off the hallway.
He hugged me before he left. Hugged me! Then he said he was sorry. He knew I’d been through an ordeal, he should have been more understanding about Hal.
When the afternoon paper came, I boiled the kettle again and began skimming through the divorce section. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, there is no such thing as a divorce section like there is a births or obituaries. But really there is, if you know where to look, and I do. It’s the auction section; the legals, those little notices absolving a man—it’s always a man—of any encumbrances and debts owing against him. I found a few. Also, I looked for trials and murder weapons to add to my collections.
I found more pictures of Hal. I used my scissors and cut his nose and placed it on one ear, and put his two ears where his eyes should be, and cut out his mouth and placed it upside down. I laughed at that, and you would too, if you’d seen what I’d done to him! I wondered how it would be if I did that for real.
Rob called me the next day, and the next day. And the next. I got my car back at the end of the week, and still he called. Usually he ended up talking about his baby, who was changing every day, he said. He promised to bring me pictures the next time he came over. He always asked how I was doing. No one had ever done that, not even during those early days when Hal left. On Tuesday he called to tell me that his little girl had a new tooth, her first. She was standing too, well, not on her own, but walking along furniture, that kind of standing. I said how
nice.
On Saturday, a full two weeks after it happened, Rob called again. “Just tying up some loose ends, Mrs. Wilkins, just trying to get a handle on things.” He cleared his throat. “A man in your church, a Thomas Gillian, died of food poisoning a year ago at a church supper? Do you remember that, Mrs. Wilkins?”
“Well, of course, I remember that! I quit going there after that! Something like that happens in a church, you just lose your trust in people.”
“Hmm,” was all he said.
A day later, he called and asked about Marta, my cleaning lady.
“I had to let her go.”
“Her family reported her missing six months ago.”
I said, “The day she disappeared, she confided in me that she planned to run away to Vancouver. I told the police as much at the time.”
But I have to say that his questions were making me nervous. Why was he asking all these questions, especially when he was so nice to me? Most people aren’t, you know. Your husband leaves you, they automatically think something’s wrong with you!
When Rob didn’t call for four days, I looked up his name in the phone book. I didn’t find it. Well, lots of police officers have unlisted numbers. You can’t be too careful these days, especially when you have a wife and baby daughter to think about. So, I called in at the police station and was told by some secretary, probably, that Rob was out on a call.
“Poor thing. He works so hard, and especially with his wife and baby at home. I just wanted to invite him for supper.”
There was silence, then, “Wife and baby?”
“He promised to show me pictures next time.”
More laughter. “You sure you’re talking about Rob? Our Rob? That guy’s as single as they come. In fact he’s more single than they come. He’s the party animal to beat party animals. Wife and baby!” And then she laughed some more.
