A Thief in the House of Memory (5 page)

Vivien leaned towards him, smiling sadly. “You don't observe a lot these days, Declan Steeple.”

Dec didn't know what to say. Suddenly he felt as if all the vowels had been sucked right out of him.

Luckily, at that moment, Ezra breezed through the door. The mighty doctor himself, all in black, as usual, with hair like a deserted crow's nest and tiny round spectacles that gave his narrow face a distinctly crowish look. The lenses were no larger than dimes and the frames were made of real tortoise-shell.

“Where were you?”

“Ah,” said Ezra. “A good question but in need of some refinement. I assume my state of being is not in question and therefore what you really want to know is, what place have I most recently occupied and why for such an extended period.”

With that Ezra sat down. Vivien moved along to give him some room.

“That was totally heavy,” she said and returned to her journal writing with great vigour.

“So?” said Dec.

“Urgent meeting with Marlborough.” Marlborough was the head of guidance.

“What about?” asked Dec.

Ezra opened a bottle of water and glugged down halt of it. When he had finished, his eyes shone. “Dec, dear friends, one and all, an announcement. It's official. I'm out of here.”

Vivien looked up excitedly. “You're expelled?”

“Great,” said Martin. “I'll be tops in physics.”

“In your dreams,” said Melody.

“Is it because of that time you proved Mr. Merkley didn't exist?” asked Langston.

“Whoa!” said Ezra, holding up his hands. “I have not been expelled. I've simply been Plarred.”

Everyone turned to Arianna. She shook her head. “No such word,” she said.

Ezra smiled like a cat on a sunny windowsill. “You know, I'm not going to miss old L.C.I. but I am truly, truly going to miss you guys.”

“Hey. Help is out here,” said Dec. “What happened?”

“Right,” said Ezra. “The details.”

“Thank you,” said Dec.

“P.L.A.R. Prior Learning Assessment Recognition. It's where an institution takes into account the work you do beyond just your class credits. For instance, a summer job at the Chalk River Nuclear Power Station, making it to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and yes, proving that Mr. Merkley doesn't exist — that kind of thing.”

“And?” said Dec.

“There's this scholarship to McGill that Marlborough figured I could try for, if I wanted. Now. He went to bat for
me. Anyway, the long and short of it is, I don't have to do my senior year.”

“You're kidding.”

Ezra shook his head, “Montreal, here I come.”

Vivien sighed and rested her hand on her heart. “
Alors,”
she said.
“Montréal, c'est très beau.”

“That's not all,” said Ezra. “They've given me a job in the physics lab for the summer. I start July first.”

Everyone cheered. Everyone except Dec.

“You're leaving in three months?” It sounded like an accusation.

Ezra threw up his arms. “You can come and visit,” he said. “You can be Igor, my trusty assistant. And when we've finished a hard day in the lab, we'll paint the town red.”

Dec pounded the tabletop with his fist, just hard enough to collapse his edible monument. He looked up. Everyone was staring at him, Ezra the hardest of all.

“What?” Ezra asked. “I should have got your permission?

Dec frowned, shoved a half-empty juice bottle into his lunch bag so hard the paper split. “It's just the red part,” he said. “I mean, painting the town red. Where's that at? It's so trite.”

Ezra pointed a finger at Dec and nodded. “You are so right,” he said. “How about alizarin crimson?”

Dec managed a tight little smile. Red warning lights were flashing in his head.

Ezra was leaving him. Why did people keep doing that?

D
EC HAD BEEN
plarred: Passed, Left, Abandoned, Robbed. Ezra chased him down after school and apologized. He hadn't talked about the scholarship to anyone, didn't want to jinx his chances. He said he meant it about Dec coming up to visit and if alizarin crimson didn't work they could try scarlet, vermilion — whatever!

“I'm totally happy for you,” said Dec. “I'm just jealous, I guess.”

“I'll only be three hours away,” said Ezra.

“Three light years, you mean.”

The school bus rumbled down County Road 10. A hackysack flew past Dec's head. An elbow jostled him, grabbing for it. He pulled himself in tight to the window, leaned his head against the glass. He turned up the volume on his MP3: Crispy Ambulance. More Ezra music. Where did he find this stuff? And where would the music come from when he was gone?

The bus slowed down to let off another happy customer.
As it lumbered back onto the road, an impatient motorist pulled out to pass in a rust-bucket with bumper stickers galore: “My other car is a Porsche.” “I may be slow but I'm ahead of you.” “So long, sucker!”

Right. Ezra was leaving Dec in the dust. His future was happening now. And Dec was stuck here, in the middle of nowhere. Worse, he seemed to be slipping into the past.

He went straight up to the big house. Did not pass Go, did not collect Little Sister. The incident with his mother. It was a memory, that was all. He didn't need Herr Doktor Ezra to tell him that.

But it was so real. How to explain the scent of her, her heart beating against his back as she held him close? How to explain the way it filled him with a longing he couldn't understand?

He stood in his stocking feet in the cool of the front hall. There was no sound — no human sound. He shook his head. This was foolish. He had been hallucinating. He was having some kind of a breakdown.

The grandfather clock tocked; the house listened. His eyes wandered down to the floor. If Denny Runyon had been erased from his memory, there was still an impression of him on the Oriental rug. Dec could see it if no one else could. He remembered how it had been rucked behind the corpse's feet as though he had tried to run and the carpet had tripped him up, an accomplice to his murder.

Of course it wasn't murder. Just an accident. That's what
the cops said, anyway. There had been the smashed remains of a little aluminium stepladder that Runyon must have found in the kitchen. The police had reconstructed the crime: the thief on the ladder standing on his tiptoes, reaching up for the bronze prize, slipping, instinctively grabbing the valence along the top of the bookcase, pulling the whole thing down on himself. The end.

But why?

There had been a sack of loot: silver and jewellery and china. What did he want with a clunky bronze statue? Did he really think it was from ancient Greece?

Plato looked down philosophically from his perch atop the killer bookcase. Mr. Play-Doh, as Sunny called him. His nose was missing but it always had been. The fall had not seriously damaged the philosopher. If it did fall. Sunny had seemed so sure that the statue had still been on the side table. And Dec wasn't sure it had been put back. He wasn't sure of much, these days.

The bookcase had been restored perfectly, indistinguishable from its three stately cousins, each featuring its own bronze bust: Virgil, Descartes and Shakespeare. There was a smell of fresh paint. You'd never know someone had died here.

Dec took a deep, shaky breath. He looked around, listened. Was that music he heard a long way off? He closed his eyes.

Yes. A guitar.

She was in the room with
Lindy
on the door. Her private room. She sat on a loveseat, her legs crossed, her head bent
down close to the guitar, her hair hiding her face. She was singing a sad song. Dec stood in the doorway, silent as a secret, and listened. Smoke curled up in a thin wisp. She stopped playing and picked up a cigarette from the ashtray beside her on the loveseat. It was one of the fat cigarettes she rolled herself. He heard her slurping in the smoky air. It almost sounded as if she was sobbing. Then she played again, her voice like a soft wind.

The water is wide; I cannot cross o'er;
Neither have I the wings to fly
.
Build me a boat that will carry two
,
And both shall row, my love and I
.

He wasn't sure why she stopped. Maybe he had moved without knowing it. Maybe she could hear him humming the song inside his head. She had sung it to him often enough as a lullaby. But he was six now; she didn't often sing him to sleep any more.

He was glad she turned. He wanted her to know he was there. She pulled back the jumble of hair from her face, tipped her head and smiled at him.

“What happened?” he asked solemnly.

“Nothing happened, honey.”

“Really?” He so wanted to believe the noises he'd heard coming from the master bedroom had been nothing. “Nothing” usually wasn't so loud.

“Believe me,” she said.

“You were yelling at Daddy”.

She nodded, slowly, her eyelids half closed. “I had my reasons,” she said.

He wanted to go to her but he could still hear her shouting in his mind, and it frightened him. She seemed to guess his thoughts.

“You need to understand something,” she said. “When the big old wolf sinks his teeth in the lamb, it's the lamb that does all the bleating.”

Bleeding? Was she hurt?

“You got to watch out for the quiet ones,” she said, not looking at him any more.

He didn't like this talk. He rocked on his heels, his hand on the doorknob, not sure if he was coming or going.

With an effort she opened her eyes wide. She smiled. She rested her head on the gleaming curve of the guitar. “Come here, Skipper,” she said, her voice tender and husky. She held out her arms and enfolded him in an embrace. She held him tightly, the guitar pressing against his rib cage. It hurt, but he didn't mind. Over her shoulder he could see her cigarette sitting in the ashtray he had made for her. He had dug clay out of the riverbank and then painted it blue with black musical notes. It sat on her school yearbook, a yearbook that was open to a page of photographs of people dancing.

Happy people. People having the time of their lives.

B
ERNARD STEEPLE
was hunched over his workbench painting a miniature soldier. A hundred more were strewn around him, plastic, white and lifeless. Dec waited for his father to notice him standing in the doorway. He looked up at last. Contact. Recognition.

“Hi, Son.”

Dec nodded a greeting and shrugged off his backpack. His father's attention returned to the tiny soldier in the tiny vice.

“Just touching up this squaddie here,” he said. “Took a while to get the colour right. K.D.”

Dec walked closer. “You're painting him to look like Kraft Dinner?”

Bernard smiled. “Khaki drill,” he said. The glasses magnified his brown eyes, made him look a little crazy.

Dec leaned on the work table and imagined a wave of Kraft Dinner soldiers arriving on the shores of Normandy. He watched his father. He was giving the squaddie a face with the smallest paintbrush Dec had ever seen.

“Do you ever wonder what happened to Mom?” he said.

Bernard stopped painting for about as long as it would take to dot an eye. “What makes you ask?”

Dec shrugged. “I don't know. It's been almost six years. It just seems weird she never got in touch.”

Bernard gently removed the soldier from the vice. “Is it all that surprising? Your mother never really cared about anyone but herself.”

She cared about me, thought Dec. He reached for an unpainted soldier.

“Your fingers, Declan!”

Dec snapped back his hand.

“Sorry,” said Bernard. “It's just that the oil on your skin will resist the paint.” He was wearing see-through gloves like a doctor. Like this was surgery.

Self-consciously, Dec rubbed his fingers on his pant leg. It was only then that he noticed the wall. It startled him, as if it had snuck up behind him. It divided the workshop roughly in half. It was chipboard painted grey, the same dull grey that speckled his father's work clothes and that he had noticed on his father's skin from time to time lately.

“What's this all about?”

Bernard looked up and took off his glasses. “Take a gander.”

There was an opening in the wall, a long, narrow slit about thirty centimetres high and at chest height. Dec peered through it at a miniature beach right at eye level. It sloped
down from grassy knolls to the sea, the sea stretched to the far wall of the shop. There were miniature machine-gun pillboxes and mortar emplacements in the knolls, sandbagged and camouflaged with netting. The same netting hung across the front of the window. Gently, Dec moved it aside. The far wall of the shop had been painted to resemble an early-morning sky. Dawn was breaking on this empty diorama.

Bernard joined him, wiping his hands on a rag that smelled of turpentine. He leaned down to look, raked his eyes critically over the scene.

“Juno Beach,” he said. “The way the
Wehrmacht
saw it from their bunkers.”

Dec stared in wonder. There were no soldiers yet. The beach was an obstacle course of tiny geometric barriers painted to look like steel and concrete. There were rolls of barbed wire and black poles sticking up everywhere.

“Rommel's Wall,” said his father. “The black things are called Teller mines.”

“Out of sight,” said Dec. He had seen battlefields in this room before: Greek and Roman battlefields, Waterloo and the Plains of Abraham, but never anything much bigger than a ping-pong table. This beach was close to six metres wide and four metres deep.

“Had to include a fair bit of ocean,” said Bernard enthusiastically. “That's where a lot of the action takes place. Landing crafts, you know. LCTs and LCIs, half-tracks and ducks.”