Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling

by Caroline Adderson

  Shauna shrieks.

  “Sorry!”

  “I’m sleeping in my own bed!”

  She grabs Todd’s shirt off the floor by mistake—a good thing because she meets a satyr on the stairs. She’s at the bottom, a hand on the banister, about to climb, when his form unmerges from the darkness. She can’t see his face; her eyes haven’t adjusted. He’s a shadow cinching up his robe. Gasping, she tugs down the T-shirt hem to cover her pertinent parts.

  “Going up?” Darcy asks.

  He fills the stairwell as she passes. She teeters, grabs his arm and for a moment has no idea where she is. It’s as though they’re suspended together in an amoral void.

  “What are you doing up?”

  “What are you?”

  Poised on the middle stairs, neither answers. He lets her by but, like smoke, follows closely. On the landing, he rubs against her. “Shauna. Let me tell you, I’m no Petit Chef.” She can feel it for herself, hard against her back, seven and five-eighths inches, plus.

  What stopped her? she will wonder later. How did she summon the self-control? She says good night and closes her door. Just as easily she could have crossed the Stygian hall.

  Abby saved her. Rather, Shauna worrying what Abby would think. Abby is God’s proxy. With her around there is an account. If Shauna succumbed that night, she would have known every man in the house in the Biblical sense—except the post-docs.

  At breakfast the next morning Todd keeps his sulky gaze on her while he mashes a banana in his bowl. Shauna refuses to meet his eye. She has nothing to feel guilty about. To the contrary.

  At last he speaks. “I can’t find my wallet. Do you know where it is?”

  Shauna says, “I think we should be allowed to kiss other people.” She decided this as she tossed in the flames the night before.

  His look as he rises from the table, his staggering retreat—the losing duellist. The phone starts to ring as the front door slams, so she can’t go after him.

  “Did you give my phone number to someone?”

  In the background, the wails of Shauna’s infant niece.

  “Rosie?”

  “Did you?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “A guy phoned here and said so. I never buy anything over the phone. He started arguing with me, so I hung up. He called again. He called seven times. He said he was a friend of yours.”

  Darcy appears in the doorway and Shauna knows he heard what she said to Todd. She’s stunned to see the whole door frame filled, the top of his head grazing the arch, shoulders pressing either side. Is it possible that he’s grown?

  “Rosie, I’m late for work. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.”

  Darcy takes the phone and drops it in its cradle. He backs her against the counter. She doesn’t even try to resist. She’s the one responsible for this beast. “Shauna,” he says, singeing her with his breath. “This is a limited-time offer.”

  The kiss cracks her head against the cupboard. A metallic tang fills her mouth in advance of his tongue. Member Tested and Recommended. A durable edge. She’s gagging by the time he lets her go.

  There’s Abby, transfixed in the doorway. “Hey babe,” Darcy says, wiping his mouth with the hairy back of his hand.

  “Oh, Abby,” says Shauna. “It’s not what you think.”

  Abby about-faces.

  Making the best of an embarrassing moment, Shauna leaves for Stong’s. She works all morning, sweaty with apprehension, putting the things other people buy into bags. Her mouth feels like banana mash. Then she remembers her granny who lives alone and defenceless in a little house in East Van. She makes the panicked call on her lunch break.

  “Gran, it’s me.”

  “Who? Rosie?”

  “Shauna.”

  “Shauna! What a surprise!”

  “How are you, Gran?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Oh, good. I’m just phoning to check—”

  “Shauna, darling, I really can’t talk just this minute. There’s a young man here showing me the most marvellous knives.”

  The power of The Devil is not as great as it appears to be, Abby remembers as she scrubs out the tub. If He had full power to rage as He pleased, no one would be left alive. There is still more good in the world than bad. Only a very small part is actually subjected to the power of The Devil. He is compelled, after all, to leave the fish in the sea, the birds in the air and men in their cities.

  She rinses the blue wash of Comet off the tub’s sides, stoppers the drain.

  Yet He is capable of causing great disturbances. He brings kingdoms into conflict with each other and throws provinces and households into confusion. She who submissively serves The Devil abets this end and will suffer much for it, especially, most especially, in her conscience. Shauna clearly doesn’t know this.

  As for Abby, she’s changing sides.

  Todd isn’t in his room when Shauna gets home from work. He hasn’t come back from UBC yet. Probably Shauna is panicking for no reason. Why be alarmed? She kissed Darcy. So what? But when she lifts the phone receiver, the dial tone chills her to the bone.

  She goes upstairs and knocks on Darcy’s door, opens it and sees the big bed stripped to the mattress and not a single cardboard box. She goes back downstairs to the living room where the TV used to be. He’s gone! Hallelujah, she thinks.

  In the kitchen the knife block stands on the counter, one slot empty.

  Shauna tries the bathroom door and, finding it locked, quails. She remembers Abby this morning. It wasn’t the first time Shauna has seen her pain. Is Abby in the bathroom with the Petit Chef? Shauna closes her eyes. She sees through the door to what she imagines all this has led to and, even in her horror, marvels at how considerate Abby is to keep it all contained in the tub. If Shauna had done this to herself, she’d have made an unholy mess, purely for effect. Shauna would do it naked. In her mind’s eye Shauna sees Abby lying in the tub in her pyjamas, her face, drained of colour, the same white as the frills around her neck. All her colour is in the water.

  The Dunbar house is old. There are still skeleton keys in some of the locks. Shauna opens Abby’s door to get the key from inside and use it to unlock the bathroom. The cutting board and knife block sit on Abby’s cluttered desk. The empty box is on the bed. Abby is filling it with books.

  “Ah!” says Shauna. “What are you doing?”

  “Packing. I’m going home.”

  “Because of Darcy?”

  Abby lifts her face. What a look. Shauna will feel judged for the rest of her life.

  “Who’s in the bathroom?” she asks.

  Of course Todd never expected his relationship with Shauna to last. Six months ago he answered her tap at his door, thinking it was Abby. Tearful, Shauna asked if they could talk. Todd let her in and closed the door, hoping Abby hadn’t heard the knock.

  Danny broke up with her. “He says I’m bourgeois,” Shauna told Todd.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I’ve got blood on my hands according to Danny.”

  To Todd her hands were small nude animals, defenceless and pink. Impulsively, he lifted one and kissed it. Shauna wanted to make Danny jealous, that was why she started sleeping with him.

  Todd removes the cloth he’s pressing hard against his forearm. The letters immediately write themselves in red—S-H-A-U—and dribble down the side of the basin. He feels woozy, but takes up the knife again, braces his arm on the sink, grateful he can do the N in three quick cuts and won’t have to hack out another curve in his flesh.

  Todd will heal, but he’ll never wear short sleeves again.

  The next day a police officer will come. Abby will call when she discovers that her bank account has been cleaned out and she can’t get back to Saskatchewan.

  “Let me get this straight. You wrote him cheques?” the officer will say.

  “For the knives,” Abby will confess. “And to cover the rent. He said he’d pay me back.”
r />   “And your arm, mate?” The officer points to Todd’s bandaged forearm. “He have anything to do with that?”

  “No,” Shauna will cry, moved to love again by Todd’s sacrifice. Todd and Shauna won’t find out till the next day that they’re penniless. “That was my fault. It’s all my fault.”

  Todd will always consider himself blameless. He even volunteers to identify the villain once they’ve rounded him up.

  But after every knife is drawn from the block and the blades and handles are dusted for fingerprints, the officer will turn to them and say, “Sorry, kids. These knives are clean.”

  Mr. Justice

  Unasleep and breathing hard, massive in my old twin bed, he hefts himself in the dark, onto his side, captive whale rolling in a tank. Pushes off the mattress, heaves legs over the side: a seated position achieved at last. He plants his feet but can’t actually feel the carpet—he’s numbed, numbed by diabetes. He gropes the headboard, preparing to stand. He must be filled with dread. Once up, he sways there listening then, hearing nothing, lurches cursing for the door.

  There’s a night light in the hall, the bathroom door ajar at the end. He hesitates before stepping out.

  Nothing.

  Emboldened, he takes a second cautious step, then a third, and like this he goes, one hand on the wall. If he proceeds slowly there is no sound except the hardwood responding to his weight, but his balance isn’t great, especially in the dark. He stumbles.

  Click.

  Swings around, furious. No one! How many nights has this been going on? How many times tonight? I see it all as on a darkened stage, my father’s progress to the toilet. The sound pursues him. Click, click, click, click. He locks the bathroom door, lifts the seat. I don’t look. He’s my father, but we’re not close to say the least.

  A dribble. A dribble for his aggravation.

  When he opens the door my mother is standing there in her nightgown. “What the hell do you want?” he roars.

  “What did you and Lachlan fight about?” She told me she thought that this was why he couldn’t sleep, because I’d come over to the house and argued with him.

  “None of your business.”

  “You’ve been up all night, Gerald.”

  “That’s none of your business either.”

  Downstairs my brother Richie calls out, afraid. “Ma! Ma!”

  “Now look what you’ve started,” he tells her.

  The click follows him back to my childhood room. My mother doesn’t hear it. Or if she does, she doesn’t say anything. He decides on the latter, that he isn’t crazy, that we’re trying to make him that way.

  He still can’t sleep. His throat is dry. There’s a bad smell in the room. He feels feverish, tormented. Why a click? What is the significance of click? An impatient finger tapping the judicial bench? Has he made a wrong decision? Is this supposed to be his conscience?

  The strange thing is he only hears it at night. In the morning it’s his habit, a vestige from his ranching boyhood, to dress to the waist and go shirtless to the bathroom to shave and wash. I see him sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear catching in his left hand a huge roll of midriff flesh to puncture with the needle. He pulls an ankle up onto the opposite knee and stuffs an argyle sock with his enormous bloated foot. He can hardly get the sock on. The shoe is just as bad and now, muttering over the slow passing of another hellish night, he limps to the door having failed yet again to notice what the problem actually is.

  At seven-thirty he descends the stairs in his blue-black suit to find my mentally retarded brother holding his lips closed with his fingers. Richie is big, like Father, six foot two plus hair. He gives the impression that if he sat on his chair with his feet flat on the floor, his knees would lift the table. The rule at breakfast is Father has the first word. He maintains an imperious silence, his patriarchal right, even as my mother comes in with his plate of eggs, HP Sauce and the triangles of white toast in the rack the way he likes them, cold. “I hope you eventually got some sleep, Gerald,” she tells him, flouting his decree. I imagine her adding with a long-suffering sniff, “We certainly didn’t,” and lifting the tea towel to her throbbing temple.

  Richie releases his lips. “Can I tell him about Pontius Pilate now?”

  “I know all about it,” Father snaps.

  Since Father has made an utterance, Richie is free to speak. He’s memorized it word for word and likes to put on the different voices, a growl for Pontius Pilate, a falsetto for Jesus. “‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ ‘That’s what you say.’ ‘Your own people have brought you before me. What have you done?’ ‘My Kingdom is not of this world!’”

  Father makes flatulent sounds with the HP bottle, pretending not to hear.

  After breakfast, he puts on his overcoat and leaves with his briefcase in hand. He backs the Mercedes out of the garage and through the lane, still seething over Richie and the video my mother gave him. Probably he’s likening himself to Christ, all the sacrifices he’s made for his family, unappreciated, even mocked. The house next door was bought several years ago by an offshore family, Taiwanese I think, who live in it for two weeks of the year. A Shaughnessy mansion, it’s their summer cottage and to give it that summery look they’ve painted the Tudor accents bright turquoise and mustard yellow. My father redoubles his curses at the sight of it.

  The very next block gives him reason to rage. In Vancouver a demolition is always preceded by particular fencing around the trees, a two-by-four frame with orange plastic netting stapled to it. The bulldozer levels anything not surrounded by this eye-catching corral. The house in question, an old mansion similar to my parents’, is being sacrificed to make room for a new mansion of potentially incongruous style and dubious taste. My father objects obstreperously to this trend. After 1997, when Hong Kong reverted to the Chinese, he hoped it would stop. The first deeds on Shaughnessy properties included a clause to prohibit resale to Orientals. He actually told me this.

  He drives past the chestnuts on Connaught Drive shivering in their winter nakedness. When he reaches the corner, he hits the indicator. Click, click, click, click. On his right, Shaughnessy United Church. Surely it strikes him then that Pilate too was a judge.

  He turns onto Thirty-third and, sweating profusely now, passes the stained glass nave. One shoe feels much tighter, as if his foot has grown inside it since he put it on. Light-headed, filled with that same nocturnal apprehension, he doesn’t want to use the indicator again, but it’s rush hour and the line of cars behind needs to know if he plans to turn or go straight. Someone honks. His hand lifts, seemingly in slow motion.

  Click,

  click,

  click.

  When I get home that afternoon Erica meets me at the door in her We’re Happy Because We Eat Lard T-shirt and a pair of men’s silk pyjama bottoms she got at Value Village. “Those might be my father’s cast-off pyjamas,” I tell her. Then, “Are you sick?” She should be at work.

  Her apple cheeks corroborate her “No.” There’s the wineglass she’s holding, too. “Lachlan. Your mother phoned.” She practically sings it: “There’s bad news!”

  “It’s not Richie, is it?” I know it’s not. She wouldn’t be acting like this.

  She casts down guilty eyes. “I’ll get dressed. We’re supposed to meet them at the hospital.”

  “Hospital? When did she call?”

  “This morning.”

  I go to the kitchen to retrieve my mother’s message. The wine bottle is open on the counter. As well as the message Erica saved, there are six new ones, all from my mother. My father has had a car accident. He’s had a stroke. He’s had a stroke and a car accident. He needs to see me. I listen to each convoluting instalment staring out the window at the condominium across the alley entirely swathed in bright blue plastic. Three years ago our own building wore this same costume. Entire Vancouver neighbourhoods have. Ours is a city dreamed by Christo.

  In the bedroom, Erica stands in her skin, uncommitted to th
e clothes lying on the bed. She looks at me. How to interpret her woozy expression? A mid-afternoon wine high or something more pleasantly animal? We haven’t had sex in over a year. Long before that it ceased to be an expression of love or pleasure. It was work, complete with supervisors. I was half expecting to be unionized. If I want to communicate my affection now, I rub her feet. It makes her purr.

  My father is lying in a hospital bed waiting for me. I wonder what he wants but Erica helps me out of my Canada Post issue and head-butts me onto the bed. My father can wait, I decide.

  Afterward, we scramble to dress and run out to the car. As soon as we’re on the road, Erica starts to cry. “I’m sorry,” she says, going through all the pockets of her Gore-Tex for a tissue. “He’s your father.”

  I have to tell her. I don’t want her to find out when we get there. “He’s all right. He’s not going to die.”

  “She said he had a stroke,” she argues. “She said he crashed the car.”

  “Into a hedge. Apparently he’s fine.”

  “Oh.” She leans back and closes her eyes. I don’t know which she feels more acutely, disappointment or embarrassment.

  “It’s so tiring,” she says a few blocks later.

  “Really? I feel invigorated.” Sex—it’s as good as a long walk. I’d forgotten.

  “Hating him. How do people live like this?”

  When we are almost at the hospital, she asks me to stop somewhere so she can buy some licorice.

  My mother and Richie are in the waiting room when we arrive. As soon as Richie sees Erica he runs to her bellowing sobs. My mother lights into me. “I’ve been calling all day!” I keep one jealous eye on Erica sunk in Richie’s King Kong embrace. What is there to prevent him from one day crushing her with his wild love?

  After a decade toiling at various arty things, Erica became a special needs teacher. She did her practicum in the day program Richie attends. Proudly he would show me his Pisa-like ceramic pencil holders, his wind chimes made of cutlery and driftwood. Erica, he explained, had assisted in their creation. Sometimes, to give my mother a break, I pick Richie up from the surreal playroom where he spends his days. I met his muse on one of these occasions and have been the third party in this triangle ever since.