“Are you done?”
Caleb shook his head. “You have to say it.”
His boy was stubborn like his mother. “Caleb, I want you to go to your room and not come out until Nana says you’re allowed.”
He didn’t budge. He bit his lower lip.
“For every moment you stand there, you’re going to lose something you like. Do you understand?”
Caleb nodded.
“Do you want to stop now?”
He shook his head.
“No video games.”
Caleb stared up at his dad. “Say it.”
“No TV.” Mike looked at Betty to confirm she’d heard.
Caleb sniffled. “Say it.”
“No apple pie.”
Caleb nodded. He was willing to pay that price. “You have to say it.”
The kid was tougher than Mike gave him credit. It was time to end it.
“Do you want me take away Snappy?”
He saw panic flicker in his eyes. But then his son’s chin tilted up and he breathed in like his mother. He gave Snappy a hug and laid him on the steps at his father’s feet. His entire body was quivering.
“Mike, the reservation…” Lori had her window down. “Get in the house, Caleb! Now!”
Mike looked down at his son. Just this once it would be so much easier. He said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Caleb exhaled. He wiped the snot and tears from his face with the back of his hand. “Now you’ll be safe.” Gently, he picked up Snappy and went indoors.
Mike looked back at the van. It was going to take more than an overpriced steak and crème brûlée to make Lori smile again.
24
Mike was sleeping open-mouthed. The tension was gone from his jaw and the creases on his forehead and around his eyes had softened. He looked younger. Lori hadn’t seen him so peaceful in years.
It had been a good night. A great night. After they had implemented the no-talk-about-kids-over-dinner rule and imbibed two glasses of a good pinot noir, they had forgotten who they were and became a couple out on a romantic date. They flirted with each other. The room was sultry and the jazz sensual. They indulged, refusing to think of the cost and the bills it might have paid. She slipped off her sandals and rested her feet on his shoes, legs slightly apart and dress hiked coyly. The night hummed electric like their honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, when they had stayed up dreaming the future until the neon sky lit the sea.
He had been funny tonight. His eyes shone in the candlelight. He was still so handsome. She had known the first moment she saw him. Those ice-blue eyes and movie star’s jawline. Tall, athletic. His confident, easy stride and quiet, respectful integrity. She would have slept with him that night. But instead, he walked her to the door, kissed her on the cheek, and asked if he could see her again. She had been so flustered, aching with the heat of want, she pleasured herself that night imagining him as she writhed on her futon. It would be another two weeks before they had sex. It was wild, unfettered, and as tender as she had hoped.
He’d been that boy again tonight. She had been surprised by their mutual hunger and the heat of his hands. Before they reached the bed, their clothes were off, discarded on the floor. They didn’t pull back the sheets or close the blinds. Their bodies found each other and tangled closer. They came at the same time. She couldn’t remember the last time they had stopped breathing together and the children hadn’t woken.
After, they curled into each other, recounting the night so they would remember: the steak best ever, the accompanying wild garlic, loganberries, capers, and mushroom bouillon unbelievable, the summer berry tiramisu intoxicating, the ricotta, coffee, and honey gelato orgasmic, the walk along the waterfront magical, and even the movie Mike had admitted life-affirming.
She asked him, What was your favourite part?
This, he answered.
Her eyes had teared. He must have thought that she was overwhelmed by her love, and not the guilt of the nights spent wondering who she would be if she left him. She did still love him. She nuzzled against his chest. His hand cupped her breast, and groaning, he nudged her closer.
If only the children would sleep through the night, this could be her heaven.
She would try harder. She would try harder…
25
Mike woke clenched in pain. His face contorted in a silent scream. He curled his knees to relieve his back. Lori was lying on his arm. He slipped the appendage free, cringing with every tug, and rolled onto his side. With clamped teeth, he tried to ride the fire and will his muscles to relax, but to no avail. He leveraged himself onto his arm and slid off the bed. White-hot pain seared. There were tears in his eyes. He crawled to the dresser and, using the handles, pulled himself to his knees. He could go no farther. He was trapped.
What the fuck was this? Nothing had ever forced him to his knees. His body had never betrayed him before.
“Lori…”
He heard her rustle in bed. It was still too dark to see.
“Lori.”
She woke like a mother, fully awake and alert for danger. “What’s wrong?”
“My back, I need you to get me something.” He tried pulling himself up again, and the pain drove him down.
The nightlight switched on, revealing him naked on his knees, hanging on to the dresser, his back arched as if he were being flogged. He wanted the light off. He wanted her to go back to sleep. He wanted her to not look at him. She jumped out of bed.
“Baby, what’s the matter?” She had never see him like this before.
“I need you to get something for me. In my pants, there’s some pills.” The effort of speaking sawed at his spine.
She rushed to the door. He hung on. The hardwood floor crushing his knees.
“I don’t see it. Which pocket?” Her voice lacked the practised calm she used with the children.
“Right lower.”
She returned with the pill bottle. “How long have you been taking this? This is codeine.”
“I know what it is!” It came out louder and angrier than he had intended. “The doc prescribed it. Just give me a pill.”
She padded to the ensuite and he could hear water running.
“I don’t need water!”
She returned with a glass of water and handed him one pill. He swallowed it without water.
She said, “When were you going to tell me?”
“Give me another one.”
“It says one pill.”
“It says as needed. Give it to me!”
She threw the bottle at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled to a stop just out of reach. She walked away.
“Is this what you were on tonight?” She said it like the answer mattered. She was behind him and he couldn’t see her.
“What the fuck does that mean?” He growled the words. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to be left alone until he was himself again. He leaned tentatively forward, his fingers nudging the bottle.
“What did the doctor say?”
“It’s a pulled muscle.” If he rocked his weight gently onto his heels, the pain loosened. “In a couple of days it’ll be fine.” Another inch and he had the bottle. He ground the pain into his back teeth, refusing to show her. It did say one pill only. But he needed more. Now. He swallowed a second pill and tried to breathe.
“I knew something was wrong when you were tossing Caleb in the air.”
“Nothing was wrong! I was playing with my son! This is nothing!” He forced himself to stand. He couldn’t hold back the whimper that escaped his lips. He tried to straighten to his full height and stitched over heavily to the right. He leaned on the dresser. “Just give me a few moments and I’ll be fine.”
“Where does it hurt?”
Before he could stop her, she had her hand on the small of his back. The shock ripped through him. “Don’t touch me!”
“I’m trying to help.”
“Just let the meds kick in.”
“Those ar
en’t meds. It’s an opiate. It converts to morphine.”
“What are you, a doctor now? Did you learn that from your afternoon shows?” Too far, too far. This had nothing to do with her. “I’m sorry, Lori, you have to let me get through this. Please, go back to bed. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
“You’ll be stoned in a few minutes.” It was the righteous tone in her voice that pissed him off.
“You wrestle a crazy bastard to the ground with a ten-pound belt slung around your waist and sit in a shit car seat twelve hours a day! That’s my job! I don’t get to call my mom for a break. So if I need a goddamn pill, from a doctor, I’m going to take it!” The pain, the fucking pain was throbbing behind his eyes now. He wanted her to shut up and go away.
“I knew it wasn’t you tonight,” she said.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You weren’t the prick you usually are.”
Now, she chose to attack him? Now? He could hear sirens in the distance. They never stopped. Four in the morning and somewhere shit was going down.
Her cheeks had flushed. “It’s always your job! There’s no time, day or night, when you’re not bleeding cop!”
All he had wanted was for her to get him a pill and go back to bed. He hadn’t asked for anything else. He never asked for anything. “If it wasn’t me you were screwing tonight, then who were you with? Because you sure seemed to be enjoying yourself, baby!” Sirens were wailing nearby. It was odd to hear them on this street.
“I thought the man I had married had finally come home!”
Oh Christ, she was going to cry. He wanted to put on his clothes. He didn’t want to be standing with his ass hanging out like he was about to be strip-searched. Couldn’t she see the pain he was in? Crap, now the baby was crying and that would be his fault, too.
He wanted to say he was sorry, this didn’t involve her, that he couldn’t think through the vise grip crushing him, if she just stopped talking and let it ease, everything would be good soon. Instead he was shouting. “I’ve never left! I’ve been here for you every day! Everything I do is for you and them. Every bit of shit I walk through, every horror show, I do it so they don’t have to ever see it! You expect me to come home and sit at the table and talk about grocery lists and crayons and chores and bills and fucking bills…” He knew he should stop, but the electric pain was frying him inside, jump-starting his tongue and short-circuiting his heart. He would have kept going if the doorbell hadn’t rung.
Instinctively, his trigger hand reached for the revolver case forgetting that it was unloaded. It was after four in the morning. Nobody came to the door at this time of night.
Lori wiped her eyes and eased open the bedroom door. Red and blue, red and blue ricocheted through the windows.
From under the bathroom door, hard white light spilled.
26
Daddy said, daddy said, daddy said if the bad guys come lock the bathroom door.
Caleb’s bare feet were cold on the tile floor. He was standing on his too-long jammy bottoms that got wet when the shouting woke him up. The pee was hot but now it was cold. The bad guys were in Mommy and Daddy’s room.
The portabelly phone was heavy and he was holding it with both hands. His ear didn’t reach the listeny piece when his mouth was on the talky piece, so he kept his mouth pressed to the talky. Someone was saying his name from inside the phone, far away. He slid the phone down to his ear.
A man’s voice said, “Caleb, are you still there?” Caleb nodded. “The police are there and are looking for the bad guys. Can you hear me? Can you say yes?”
“Yes.”
“Caleb, where are your mommy and daddy?”
Mommy and Daddy were gone eating ice cream in the big people’s restaurant. He had kissed them three times. He had said IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou. He had done everything right. He had been good for Nana, ate apple pie, let baby play with his toys, said See ya later, alligator, and Nana said After a while, crocodile, and kissed him three times, and he kissed one-two-three and touched the birthday present cars chasing robbers on the roofs, one-two-three, and pulled the covers up around his neck so the monsters couldn’t suck his blood, and checked no fingers or toes were over the edge—
“Caleb?”
“They gone,” he said.
The door handle turned and Caleb took a step back. The bad guy that sounded like Daddy was saying his name. Knock knock, let me in, said the wolf to the piggy pig pig.
The voice in the phone said, “Are you still in the bathroom, Caleb?”
“Say the magic words,” Caleb whispered.
“Can you say that again? I couldn’t hear you.”
“He’s at the door.”
“Caleb, I’m talking to the policeman now and he says it’s safe to open the door. Your mommy and daddy are there.”
Those weren’t the right words.
The knob rattled. Shadows flickered under the door. Mommy was saying his name, but that wouldn’t work. Only the policeman could make the door open. Daddy said.
“Caleb, the police officer is going to knock on the door. His name is Constable Harvey. Then you’ll know it’s safe.”
“Three times.”
“What did you say, Caleb?”
“Him knock three times.”
Caleb stepped behind Snappy. The crocodile’s green chenille head was touching the ceiling and his tail overfilling the bathtub. Snappy’s button eyes were blacker and shinier. His white felt teeth had hardened to razor bone. Caleb laid the phone on the toilet seat and pulled up his soppy pyjama bottoms.
Knock. Knock. Knock, said the door.
Caleb took hold of Snappy’s soft paw.
If it’s not them, you bite their heads off, he said. And Snappy licked his lips.
27
Just after midnight, Kate had been woken by the shrill pips of her pager and mistook the sound for her alarm. She had fallen asleep on the couch next to a plate of cold pizza on the floor and the television hawking lonely, full-busted girls. It took thirty-one minutes to deploy, having lost several minutes locating her keys and boots while Zeus waited patiently at the door. En route to the ground search, she confirmed with the hospital that she could switch shifts. Go, they said. Go find them.
The area of probability was a densely wooded park not far from the city. For the past two hours, they’d been searching the ravine’s dense bush. Ranging twenty feet ahead, Zeus’s lit red collar bobbed and his reflective vest weaved. His light disappeared and reappeared, warning of a dip ahead. It was good to be in the woods.
It had been a shit day at work. Swamped with the elderly. In ER they didn’t really care about the old dying. It was accepted they’d had their time and should be grateful, but today she couldn’t push it away. She had avoided looking into the eyes of family members hovering nearby, as doctors called for tests delaying the diagnosis of old age and scripts to either send them home or up to the eighth floor. Twice she pulled up charts to hurry along the process to get them in or out. They were running out of time to wait. The afternoon was worse, when a howling unstable was brought in. The ER hated unstables, even more than the elderly. Really, they hated their own helplessness.
They couldn’t hear their poor stories, couldn’t help them, couldn’t do anything. Of course they felt for them, but they had to put up walls or they’d suck you dry. Poor, poor man, they said and got on with their day. Kate hadn’t said a word. She had picked at the scab on her palm, kept her head in her paperwork, and made sure he wasn’t her patient. After he was transferred, she gorged on brownies, chocolate, and iced lattes with the others and refrained from their barbed jokes. They weren’t wrong. The ER wasn’t the place. There just wasn’t any other place.
Treading carefully, she trained her flashlight on the uneven ground below and her headlamp on the terrain ahead. The soil was thin, and roots humped from a tangle of decaying deadfall. Stands of old-growth hemlock had given way to the choke of spruce and weedy hardwood. Her flashlight flicke
red over the green curl of leaves, yellow mushrooms, and the blush of red berries. She pushed aside a branch, then let it lash back. Behind her, Heather grunted.
Over the walkie-talkie, Riley’s calm, strong voice punctuated the night. As incident commander, he had deployed her to the south sector and assigned his wife as team lead. It was her first mission. Riley at least had the decency to pull her aside to apologize. Nobody else was available. Would it be a problem?
“Can she do the job or not?”
“Yes.” He adjusted his voice from lover to commander. “She can.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Her boots kicked through a carpet of rust needles. The understory was tinder dry. The fire hazard sign at the entrance was red-lined extremely high. Trees gave way to a rock slab mottled with lichen. Clomping heavily behind her, Heather was already out of breath. Above them, night’s blackness opened to stars and a deepening blue sky.
Kate stopped and retrieved the bottle of talcum powder from her pant pouch pocket. She gave it a quick squeeze and the fine dust fell unperturbed. She lowered it to ground level and squeezed again. It settled over the rocks. The gully was a dead pool. Scents could be drawing down over the ridge.
Mosquitoes churned in her ears. She swiped her face and bug spray fumed her eyes. “What’s our heading now?” They had been looping erratically, backtracking, and sawing forward through bush at times too dense to penetrate. Twice they had crossed open paths that would have led a lost person out.
Riley’s prized military compass glowed green in the reflection of Heather’s safety glasses and her red headlamp illuminated the map pencilled with plotting points. She was outfitted in new, expensive brand-name gear and boots. Even her reflective orange vest was crisp. Kate glanced at the crescent moon and drew an imaginary line south, found the Big Dipper, followed the pointer stars to Polaris, the cardinal point, and sited their direction. They had swung west again.
Heather breathed heavily. “South-southwest. Bearing 225 degrees?”
“Are you asking me?” She hated sentences that ended in a question mark. Either she knew or she didn’t. Guessing wasn’t an option.
The Waiting Hours Page 17
