Accusation (31 page)

Knapsack on her back, Sara stepped through the rubber-lipped back doors of a streetcar and found herself moments later in the Sha-li-mar before David or any other diners. A man in a white jacket popped his head through the swinging door of the brightly lit kitchen and nodded at her. She could have stopped at home first and dropped off her bag. Everything ought to feel ordinary yet didn’t. After ordering a Kingfisher beer, she pulled her knapsack onto her lap and the envelope from it and propped the photograph against the small vase in the middle of the table and stared at bearded, Afro-ed Raymond Renaud surrounded by children.

Asked point-blank who had sent the photo, she’d have said Raymond himself. It was possible to imagine him, even in extreme distress, cajoling a friend, an acquaintance, a relative, a blue-helmeted UN peacekeeper like those with whom she’d travelled through Port-au-Prince, or one of the clean-cut evangelical Christian Americans who were all over the place down there, to carry an envelope back to New York and drop it in the mail. As, in a different state of duress, he had convinced her to help him get to Montreal by embarking on a crazy, six-hour night drive. Had he known when he folded the photograph into the envelope and sealed it and wrote her address on the front what he was going to do next, his extremity seeping into the paper through his fingers. If she touched the envelope, she touched this. The letters of her name and address looked to be written at speed, pen lines trailing from letter to letter. She had never seen another sample of his handwriting. When they’d parted in Montreal, she had given him her business card, along with a hundred dollars in bills. Hadn’t she? Or had she passed him a business card in the circus tent, when she’d been standing with him and Juliet? She couldn’t remember. He’d sent the photograph to her because he wanted her to see something. There was a message here if only she knew how to read it. The new life that one way or another was about to be stripped from him. For her to feel guilty, feel haunted.

David walked past the restaurant window in his wool coat, hand held to his ear. Seated at a table halfway down the restaurant, facing the street, Sara caught sight of him: he was holding a cellphone to his ear and talking into it. She had never seen him with a cellphone; he’d never mentioned owning one. It was new and/or his life was full of secrets. By the time David entered the restaurant, he’d slipped the phone into his pocket. Or she had imagined it. Nothing about him looked different. He was coming toward her, beautiful and familiar, smiling and seemingly unencumbered, but something torqued in her longing for him, a new restlessness asserted itself. There was a deer in her and it was running. She rose to her feet and kissed the bright cold of his lips, touched her fingers to the reddened skin of his neck.

Were you just talking on a cellphone?

He looked surprised. Yes, he said. It’s new. Greta wanted me to get one.

He didn’t pull the phone out to show Sara but pried himself free of his coat and suit jacket and loosened his tie. A couple of people at the paper had recently got cellphones. That David had one wasn’t so extraordinary: he was a lawyer and could certainly afford one. When the waiter appeared, David ordered a beer for himself and began talking about a case at work, something to do with a minute infringement of a patent on floor tiles. It’s driving me crazy. You’ve no idea how many volumes have been written on it. I’m drowning in paperwork. Or the years it’s taking to sort this out. It’s like the floor-tile version of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in
Bleak House
.

Sara handed him the photo across the table. Do you recognize who this is?

She had an advantage. Two photographs of Raymond Renaud had appeared in the newspaper: these were probably the only images of him that David had seen. In the first, which had accompanied her interview, Raymond, clean-shaven, in his baseball cap, had been standing by the road, the circus sign with its painted upside-down figure of the boy atop the wooden pole in the background. In the second photo, which had run with his obituary, Raymond in profile, arms raised, appeared to be giving instructions to a pyramid of backbending circus girls.

David stared at the photograph respectfully.

It arrived for me at work today, Sara said. Sent in an airmail envelope from the US, no return address. And no note, nothing to say who sent it. It’s Raymond Renaud, she said, after another moment.

Oh.

I presume it’s taken in Port-au-Prince. At the orphanage where he was teaching. I called the orphanage director this afternoon to see if he knew anything about it but he said he didn’t. He thought maybe it was taken by a woman who worked there. But he couldn’t explain who sent it or why. I’ve been thinking maybe Renaud sent it, or gave it to someone else to send.

The waiter reappeared with David’s beer and only then did they leaf through their menus and fix on some food, the brocaded walls and dimmed lights doing their best to offer an illusion of exotic comfort, the two of them as yet the only diners.

David peered at the photograph again. It’s a pretty good disguise.

You see disguise? It was funny: Sara had registered that possibility without really admitting it to herself.

Yes, David said. Why, what do you see?

There are other reasons for people to change their appearance. As a sign of some transformation or new beginning.

Had he grown his hair into an Afro to accentuate his blackness? she wondered. He had chosen to return to the place where his mother’s people came from.

When David passed back the photograph, his expression was difficult to read. Even if he sent it. Just say. To make you feel somehow like he’s come back from the dead, or more responsible than you already do, don’t — don’t let yourself get too wrapped up in this. Okay? Get too obsessed. You were doing your job. Whoever sent it is trying to mess with you a little, and you’re going to need to let it, let him go.

There was a loose thread in the raffia placemat in front of her. Sara returned the photograph to the cave of its envelope, the photograph of the smiling dead man. How relaxed David’s posture was, a faint flush from the cold still visible in his cheeks, and the reddening of his neck, which sometimes happened, he’d told her, in response to the emotional complications of spending time with her. He’d admitted this but not voiced it as something that bothered him.

A pressure was building against her chest, like the weight of a palm. Sara said, There’s a piece of all this I haven’t told you. Something that makes it all particularly hard. I was once falsely accused of something, something so much smaller than this but. And then she unravelled the story of Colleen Bertucci and the wallet, watching David’s face take in her words. As she spoke, the palm on her chest released itself.

You didn’t plea? It went to trial? He listened with focused calm: lover and lawyer.

Yes.

How exactly did you get off?

There wasn’t enough evidence to convict me.

David nodded. For so long she’d put off telling him this secret because she hadn’t wanted to face his inevitable judgment. The risk of his doubt. Anyone to whom she told the story had at least fleetingly to wonder, imagine her as a thief, even if they immediately discarded this thought. Which David did so swiftly that Sara felt no inkling of it, only his belief, and trust.

What was it that Raymond Renaud had said in the car that July night, something about how when people believe a thing to be true it is very hard to convince them it isn’t. It is very difficult to prove something in the negative: I did
not
do it. Had he spoken with the vehemence of someone who’d already had an experience of trying to counter another’s claim, of not being believed?

Can you understand why it feels wrong to completely let go of the possibility of his innocence? Maybe he isn’t guilty of what he’s been accused of. Maybe he did something, and they have good reason to be upset with him and lash out. But maybe, by linking him directly to a pedophile, I’ve helped scapegoat an innocent man. I spent those hours in the car with him. I had no sense of him then as a raging sociopath. Or when I spoke to him. Full of himself, wanting things his way, self-absorbed but not —

It wasn’t just her innocence that she wanted David to see or feel but something else that she wasn’t sure she could articulate properly. Something about the complicated ways in which innocence could be lost. How, having been accused, you turned a false accusation upon yourself. Maybe you
had
done something in order to be accused, even if you couldn’t decipher what. The blame wasn’t random. There was something about you. The legacy of imagining yourself as others, as your accusers, saw you became internalized. The shame of it. Some countered shame with anger. She had been angry. There was shame in having to defend yourself. And fear. What had happened once could happen again. Mistrust became global. The places you inhabited felt unforgivably tainted, as you grasped at the belief that you could outrun or cover up what had happened.

She had begun to trust again, to trust David, although trust only went so far with him because if she opened herself too much, he’d back off.

Don’t go down that path, he said. It’s dangerous.

What path, how dangerous?

I don’t know any more than what I’ve read and what you’ve told me, but from here, he looks guilty. He runs, he goes to ground, changes his appearance, clearly doesn’t want to be found — and he denies the allegations only when you press him to.

I didn’t press. And I’ve thought about why he didn’t speak before that. Or make a statement. He didn’t want more negative attention to the circus. To risk doing more damage to it.

Listen, he goes right back to working with children in another place. When found, he kills himself. I’m not saying he is guilty, Sara, and granted, that kind of allegation is enough to destroy a person’s life, and potentially enough to make someone want to kill himself. Yes. But. There are patterns of behaviour. I don’t want you to get too knotted up in all this —

Was there something patronizing about David’s words? Even dismissive? There was a strange taste in her mouth. Something was missing, some emotional connection, there was something here that David couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Because it felt too dangerous. Or she couldn’t get him to see it. They had never argued. They had shared a beautiful fluency. They had been through so much together. But their mutual habits of self-protection, which had once seemed like a good thing, a way of being that bound them, were for her no longer enough.

I can’t do this anymore. She’d had no idea she was going to say this until she did.

Do what?

Do this. Be with you like this.

David looked startled. It isn’t possible otherwise, he said. You know that.

In the maelstrom of all that she didn’t know, here was something she did. She felt stuck, trapped in a cage. If he wanted her — he wanted her only like this. He would not leave his wife. He had no desire to change things.

Greta knows you still see me, doesn’t she?

There are some things —

Do you love me?

Sara, please.

You don’t love me or you won’t tell me if you do. You must know I love you. Do you know what it’s like to love someone who can’t or won’t love you back?

Both his face and his body contracted, turning inward and away. She’d raised her voice. He would hate that she was making a scene. The door to the kitchen squeaked somewhere beyond her back. Someone had said to her once that all desire begins in the desire to be witnessed. Did it?

David, do you really think we can go on and on like this? Coat pulled on, she tossed a couple of bills onto the table, which David pushed back at her.

Sara. Stop it.

In pain, she spoke the only words she could think to say to him, It’s an impossible thing.

She came to a halt by the lake. By then a light, cold rain was falling. She had walked west in the dark to the park gates, the pair of old lamps glowing atop their pedestals, and, once through the gate, followed the path that led alongside the duck pond and traversed the lawns beyond, passed no one, and came out again, crossing first the Queensway, then beneath the expressway, then Lakeshore Boulevard, where the arched entranceway of the old bathing pavilion glowed white on her left and a thin strip of beach waited ahead through a drooping line of leafless willow trees. The water’s edge, a line of white froth, curled at her feet. The water smelled fecund and dank. Ducks and geese were small blobs, darker against the tunnel grey of sky and water. Two swans upended themselves and waved about like drowning hands. There was no sign that David had tried to follow her. She did not think he would follow her. To leap from his car and run through the dark across the strip of beach and shout that he loved her, he would leave his wife for her. His mother had left him and part of him would always be leaving, but he would not leave his wife. No, he would speak to the waiter and pay for their food. Once in his car, would he weep? Maybe he would weep and allow himself to feel the loss, some loss of her. Maybe they would speak again, but she’d done something irrevocable and what had been between them was over.

Once, in their very early days, David had driven them west, past her neighbourhoood, to one of the old motels still clinging to the stretch of Lakeshore Boulevard that was becoming a thicket of condominium towers, the wink of their lights visible around the curve of the bay, and in a bleak motel room, lights on, she and David had pulled off their clothes and thrown themselves into sex that had felt combustible and thrilling, their bodies open even if so much else was held back, and at the time that had been enough and now it wasn’t. He had not abandoned her or betrayed her exactly. Yet there was failure here. And loss. And grief. And in its wake, the shock of seeing things newly. This openness. And a need to keep moving, to move through something.

When it came to Raymond Renaud, she could not yet see more clearly. Was David right and she wasn’t seeing something because she was too busy projecting herself onto Raymond? And therefore excusing him? Was sympathy thinking only the best of someone or imagining everything possible about them? Maybe more clarity would prove elusive, but she did not know that yet.