Clouded Vision

by Linwood Barclay

  She looked away, but Pam was transfixed. A man’s legs were splayed across the hood of a yellow cab that had crashed into a streetlight. His upper body had gone through the windshield and was draped over the dashboard. A mangled bicycle was trapped under the car’s front wheels. There was no one behind the wheel. Maybe the driver had already been taken to the hospital. People with FDNY and NYPD on their backs were inspecting the car, telling the crowd to move back.

  Someone said, “Fucking bike messengers. Amazing it doesn’t happen more often.”

  Edna took Pam by the elbow. “I can’t look at this.”

  By the time they found their way to Canal and Broadway, they hadn’t exactly put that horrible image out of their heads, but they’d been repeating a “These things happen” mantra that would allow them to still make the most they could out of this weekend.

  Pam used her camera phone to get a shot of Edna standing under the Broadway street sign, and then Edna got a shot of Pam doing the same. A man walking past offered to take pictures of the two of them together, but Edna said no thank you, telling Pam later it was probably just a ploy to steal their phones. “I wasn’t born yesterday,” Edna said.

  As they moved east on Canal the two of them felt as though they’d wandered into a foreign country. Weren’t these what the markets in Hong Kong or Morocco or Thailand looked like? Stores jammed together, merchandise spilling out onto the street?

  “Not exactly Sears,” Pam said.

  “So many Chinese people,” Edna said.

  “I think that’s ’cause it’s Chinatown,” Pam said.

  A homeless man wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey asked for change. Another tried to hand them a flyer but Pam held up her hand defensively. Throngs of teenage girls giggled and gawked, some able to carry on conversations while music chattered from the buds stuffed into their ears.

  The store windows were jammed with necklaces, watches, sunglasses. A WE BUY GOLD sign was positioned out front of one. A long, vertical sign hanging off a fire escape read “Tattoo—Body Piercing—Henna Temporary Supplies—Wholesale Body Jewelry—Books Magazines Art Objects 2nd floor.” There were signs pushing “Leather” and “Pashmina” and countless banners in Chinese characters. And even a Burger King.

  The two women went into what they thought was one store, but it turned out to be dozens. Like a mini-mall, or a flea market, with each business ensconced in its own glass-walled cubicle. They all offered a specialty. Stalls for jewelry, DVDs, watches, purses.

  “Look at this,” Edna said. “A Rolex.”

  “It’s not real,” Pam said. “But it looks fabulous. Think anyone in Butler knows the difference?”

  “Think anyone in Butler even knows what a Rolex is?” Edna laughed. “Oh, check out the bags!”

  Fendi, Coach, Kate Spade, Louis Vuitton, Prada. “I can’t believe these prices,” Pam said. “What would you normally pay for a bag like this?”

  “Way, way more,” Edna said.

  The Chinese man running the stall asked if they wanted help. Pam, trying to act as though she knew the territory, which was not easy when you had a New York guidebook sticking halfway out of your purse, asked, “Where do you have the real deals?”

  “What?” he said.

  “These are nice,” she said. “But where do you keep the prime stuff?”

  Edna shook her head nervously. “No, these are fine. We can pick from these.”

  But Pam persisted. “A friend told me, I’m not sure if it was your place specifically, but there might be some other bags, but not on display here.”

  The man shook his head. “Try her,” he said, pointing deeper into the rabbit warren of shops.

  Pam went to the next kiosk and, after giving the bags a cursory look, asked the elderly Chinese woman, dressed in a brilliant red silk jacket, where they were hiding the good stuff.

  “Huh?” the woman said.

  “The best bags,” Pam said. “The best knockoffs.”

  The woman gave Pam and Edna a long look, thinking that if these two were undercover cops, they were the best she’d ever seen. Finally, she said, “You go out the back door, go left, look for door with number eight on it. Go down there. Andy’ll help you.”

  Pam glanced excitedly at Edna. “Thank you!” she said, and grabbed hold of Edna’s arm, tugging her to a door at the end of the narrow mall.

  “I don’t like this,” Edna said.

  “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

  But even Pam was caught up short when they went through the door and found themselves in an alley. Dumpsters, trash strewn everywhere, abandoned appliances. The door closed behind them and when Edna grabbed it she found it locked.

  “Great,” she said. “Like that accident didn’t freak me out enough.”

  “She said go left, so let’s go left,” Pam said.

  They didn’t have to walk far before they found the metal door with an “8” painted on it. “Do we knock or just go in?” Pam asked.

  “This is your brilliant idea, not mine,” Edna said.

  Pam rapped lightly, and when no one came after ten seconds, she pulled on the handle. The door was unlocked. They were met with a short set of steps leading down a dark stairwell. But there was a glimmer of light at the bottom.

  “Hello? Andy?” Pam called out.

  There was no answer.

  “Let’s go,” Edna said. “I saw some purses at the other place that were perfect.”

  “We’re already here,” Pam said. “Might as well check it out.” She went down the stairs, feeling the temperature drop with each step. She peered into a room at the bottom, then turned and looked back up at Edna with a huge grin on her face. “This is so the place.”

  Edna followed her into a dense, cluttered, low-ceilinged room that was jammed with handbags. They were on tabletops, hanging from hooks on the walls, hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Maybe because it was cold, it reminded Edna of a meat locker, but instead of sides of beef dangling from above, it was leather goods.

  “I must be dead,” Pam said. “We’re in Purse Heaven.”

  Tubular fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed above their heads as they began picking through bags on the display tables.

  “If this is a fake Fendi, I’ll eat Phil’s hat,” Edna said, inspecting one bag. “The leather feels so real. I mean, it is real leather, right? It’s just the labels that are fake? I’d love to know how much this one is.”

  Pam noticed a curtained door at one end of the room. “Maybe that Andy guy is in there.” She started walking toward it.

  Edna said, “Wait. We should get out of here. Look at us. We’re in some basement, off an alley, in New York City, and no one has any idea whatsoever where we are.”

  Pam rolled her eyes. “God, you’re so Pennsylvania.” She reached the doorway and called out, “Mr. Andy? The Chinese lady said you could help us?” As soon as she’d said “Chinese lady,” she felt like an idiot. That really narrowed it down.

  Edna had gone back to examining the lining of the fake Fendi.

  Pam reached out and pulled aside the curtain.

  Edna heard a funny sound, a kind of pfft, and by the time she’d looked over, her friend was on the floor. Not moving.

  “Pam?” She dropped the purse. “Pam, are you okay?”

  As she approached she noticed that Pam, who was on her back, had a red dot on the middle of her forehead and something was running out of it. Like Pam had sprung a leak.

  “Oh my God, Pam?”

  The curtain opened and a tall, thin man, with dark hair and a scar over his eye, stepped out. He had a gun, and it was pointed straight at her head.

  In her last remaining second, Edna spotted, just inside the room beyond the curtain, an elderly Chinese man, seated at a desk, his forehead resting on it, a rivulet of blood draining from his temple.

  The last thing Edna heard was a woman—not Pam, because Pam was done talking—saying, “We have to get out of here.”

  The last thing Edna thought w
as, Home. I want to go home.

  ONE

  If I’d known this was our last morning, I’d have rolled over in bed and held her. But of course, if it had been possible to know something like that—if I could have somehow seen into the future—I wouldn’t have let go. And then things would have been different.

  I’d been staring at the ceiling for a while when I finally threw back the covers and planted my feet on the hardwood floor.

  “How’d you sleep?” Sheila asked as I rubbed my eyes. She reached out and touched my back.

  “Not so good. You?”

  “Off and on.”

  “I sensed you were awake, but I didn’t want to bug you, on the off chance you were sleeping,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. The sun’s first rays of the day filtered through the drapes and played across my wife’s face as she lay in bed, looking at me. This wasn’t a time of day when people looked their best, but there was something about Sheila. She was always beautiful. Even when she looked worried, which was how she looked now.

  I turned back around, looked down at my bare feet. “I couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time, then I think I finally nodded off around two, but then I looked at the clock and it was five. Been awake since then.”

  “Glen, it’s going to be okay,” Sheila said. She moved her hand across my back, soothing me.

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad you think so.”

  “Things’ll pick up. Everything goes in cycles. Recessions don’t last forever.”

  I sighed. “This one sure seems to. After these jobs I’m doing now, we got nothin’ lined up. Some nibbles, did a couple of estimates last week—one for a kitchen, one to finish off a basement—but they haven’t called back.”

  I stood up, turned and said, “What’s your excuse for staring at the ceiling all night?”

  “Worried about you. And … I’ve got things on my mind, too.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “I mean, just the usual. This course I’m taking, Kelly, your work.”

  “What’s wrong with Kelly?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with her. I’m a mother. She’s eight. I worry. It’s what I do. When I’ve done the course, I can help you more. That’ll make a difference.”

  “When you made the decision to take it, we had the business to justify it. Now, I don’t know if I’ll even have any work for you to do,” I said. “I just hope I have enough to keep Sally busy.”

  Sheila’d started her business accounting course mid-August, and two months in was enjoying it more than she’d expected. The plan was for Sheila to do the day-to-day accounts for Garber Contracting, the company that was once my father’s, and which I now ran. She could even do it from home, which would allow Sally Diehl, our “office girl,” to focus more on general office management, returning phone calls, hounding suppliers, fielding customer inquiries. There usually wasn’t time for Sally to do the accounting, which meant I was bringing it home at night, sitting at my desk until midnight. But with work drying up, I didn’t know how this was all going to shake down.

  “And now, with the fire—”

  “Enough,” Sheila said.

  “Sheila, one of my goddamn houses burned down. Please don’t tell me everything’s going to be fine.”

  She sat up in bed and crossed her arms across her breasts. “I’m not going to let you get all negative on me. This is what you do.”

  “I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “And I’m going to tell you how it will be,” she said. “We will be okay. Because this is what we do. You and I. We get through things. We find a way.” She looked away for a moment, like there was something she wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to say it. Finally, she said, “I have ideas.”

  “What ideas?”

  “Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches.”

  I stood there, my arms open, waiting.

  “You’re so busy, so wrapped up in your own problems—and I’m not saying that they aren’t big problems—that you haven’t even noticed.”

  “Noticed what?” I asked.

  She shook her head and smiled. “I got Kelly new outfits for school.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nice ones.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’ve made some money.”

  I thought I already knew that. Sheila had her part-time job at Hardware Depot—about twenty hours a week—working the checkout. They’d recently installed these new self-checkout stations people couldn’t figure out, so there was still work there for Sheila until they did. And since the early summer, Sheila had been helping our next-door neighbor—Joan Mueller—with her own books for a business she was running from her home. Joan’s husband, Ely, had been killed on that oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland when it blew up about a year back. She’d been getting jerked around by the oil company on her settlement, and in the meantime had started running a daycare operation. Every morning four or five preschoolers got dropped off at her door. And on school days when Sheila was working, Kelly went to Joan’s until one of us got home. Sheila had helped Joan organize a bookkeeping system to keep track of what everyone owed and had paid. Joan loved kids, but could barely finger count.

  “I know you’ve been making some money,” I said. “Joan, and the store. Everything helps.”

  “Those two jobs together don’t keep us in Hamburger Helper. I’m talking about better money than that.”

  My eyebrows went up. Then I got worried. “Tell me you’re not taking money from Fiona.” Her mother. “You know how I feel about that.”

  She looked insulted. “Jesus, Glen, you know I would never—”

  “I’m just saying. I’d rather you were a drug dealer than taking money from your mother.”

  She blinked, threw back the covers abruptly, got out of bed, and stalked into the bathroom. The door closed firmly behind her.

  “Aw, come on,” I said.

  By the time we reached the kitchen, I didn’t think she was angry with me anymore. I’d apologized twice, and tried to coax from Sheila details of what her idea was to bring more money into the house.

  “We can talk about it tonight,” she said.

  We hadn’t washed the dishes from the night before. There were a couple of coffee cups, my scotch glass, and Sheila’s wine goblet, with a dark red residue at the bottom, sitting in the sink. I lifted the goblet onto the counter, worried the stem might break if other things got tossed into the sink alongside it.

  The wineglass made me think of Sheila’s friends.

  “You seeing Ann for lunch or anything?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought you had something set up.”

  “Maybe later this week. Belinda and Ann and me might get together, although every time we do that I have to get a cab home and my head hurts for a week. Anyway, I think Ann’s got some physical or something today, an insurance thing.”

  “She okay?”

  “She’s fine.” A pause. “More or less.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I think there’s some kind of tension there, between her and Darren. And between Belinda and George, for that matter.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Who knows,” she said.

  “So then, what are you doing today? You don’t have a shift today, right? If I can slip away, you want to get lunch? I was thinking something fancy, like that guy who sells hot dogs by the park.”

  “I’ve got my course tonight,” she said. “Some errands to run, and I might visit Mom.” She shot me a look. “Not to ask her for money.”

  “Okay.” I decided to ask nothing further. She’d tell me when she was ready.

  Kelly walked into the room at the tail end of the conversation. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “You want cereal, cereal, or cereal?” Sheila asked.

  Kelly appeared to ponder her choices. “I’ll take cereal,” she said, and sat a
t the table.

  At our house, breakfast wasn’t a sit-down family meal like dinner. Actually, dinner often wasn’t, either, especially when I got held up at a construction site, or Sheila was at work, or heading off to her class. But we at least tried to make that a family event. Breakfast was a lost cause, however. I had my toast and coffee standing, usually flattening the morning Register on the countertop and scanning the headlines as I turned the pages. Sheila was spooning in fruit and yogurt at the same time as Kelly shoveled in her Cheerios, trying to get them into herself before any of them had a chance to get soggy.

  Between spoonfuls she asked, “Why would anyone go to school at night when they’re grown up and don’t have to go?”

  “When I finish this course,” Sheila told her, “I’ll be able to help your father more, and that helps the family, and that helps you.”

  “How does that help me?” she wanted to know.

  I stepped in. “Because if my company is run well, it makes more money, and that helps you.”

  “So you can buy me more stuff?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Kelly took a gulp of orange juice. “I’d never go to school at night. Or summer. You’d have to kill me to get me to go to summer school.”

  “If you get really good marks, that won’t happen,” I said, a hint of warning in my voice. We’d already had a call from her teacher that she wasn’t completing all her homework.

  Kelly had nothing to say to that and concentrated on her cereal. On the way out the door, she gave her mother a hug, but all I got was a wave. Sheila caught me noticing the perceived slight and said, “It’s because you’re a meanie.”

  I called the house from work mid-morning.

  “Hey,” Sheila said.

  “You’re home. I didn’t know whether I’d catch you or not.”

  “Still here. What’s up?”

  “Sally’s dad.”

  “What?”

  “She was calling home from the office and when he didn’t answer she took off. I just called to see how he was and he’s gone.”

  “He’s dead?”