Alligator (31 page)

Frank’s door was ajar and she pushed it open and the hinges squeaked. There was a girl standing at the window looking out onto the street, her dark, curly hair hanging past her shoulder blades.

Beyond the girl, Carol could see out the window to the street, and the crowd from the haunted hike had gathered under the trees.

Are you Frank’s girlfriend? Carol asked.

I owe him some money, the girl said. Carol walked up to the window to look out at the crowd.

I stole some money from him and I want to pay it back, the girl said.

The trees across the street were white, as if there’d been a snowfall. The window screen was covered in moths. Carol saw, on the roofs of the cars below, and on the hoods, a blanket of white moths, the wings opening and closing. A transport truck roared up the hill and moths lifted all at once and it looked like a Christmas card.

The worms, the girl said. They’ve transformed. The deflated waterbed was still in the centre of the room, the bedclothes lay on the floor from when Frank had hauled them off the bed.

Frank is gone, Carol said.

FRANK

H
E WOKE IN
the hospital and his jaw was wired shut. Everything he ate had to be liquefied. He could eat Jell-O, applesauce, and eggnog. He became an expert on what liquids had the most protein. He had an
IV
and most of his nourishment was coming through a tube going into his hand.

The nurses had poured sterile saline over the fabric that had melted into his skin during the fire, mostly patches of the nylon windbreaker, and they removed the nylon with tweezers and he gripped the metal bar of his bed and broke a sweat while they tugged at each piece. They let him rest between strips of fabric, for a moment or two, and water ran from the blisters. They told him he was brave, and it was going well, and it wouldn’t take much longer and it would all be fine soon. They said when they were done he could have a nice rest. They said these things while they let him rest but when they were tearing the fabric from his skin with the tweezers they worked in silence. He couldn’t feel the fabric they took off his upper arms and torso because the burns were deeper and the nerves there had become insensitive. The nurses were in agreement that his chest was pretty bad; there would be substantial scarring on his chest.

But there were blisters all over his face and the nurses said not to burst them and they said they were pretty sure there wouldn’t be any scarring where there were blisters.

You were lucky, the nurses said. A doctor asked permission to show some interns Frank’s burns and when they came into the room one of the interns fainted.

Anything you could suck from a straw. Kevin had been keeping vigil. Kevin had gone to Ches’s and got an order of fish and chips with gravy and dressing and he put everything in a blender and brought it in a jar and Frank tried it. He tried it and it tasted just like fish and chips and he asked for more salt, but it was too much work getting it through the straw.

Kevin came four days out of ten and he sat there while Frank slept and he wiggled his eyebrows behind the nurses’ backs and made lewd gestures. He leaned forward one evening and stared into Frank’s face and said there was something funny he couldn’t put his finger on. Then he realized Frank didn’t have eyelashes any more.

One evening Frank woke and he could hear Kevin asking one of the nurses to a movie, just outside his bedroom door. When he came in and sat down, Kevin was blushing and Frank said, I’m sorry I asked you for that money. Kevin took a newspaper from under his coat and the story was still front-page news. Valentin ducking the camera, his hands in cuffs; he looked wary and unrepentant.

ISOBEL

MADELEINE IS DEAD.
Madeleine died and Isobel got a phone call from the production assistant. Isobel was asleep and could not believe someone was waking her.

She sat up on one elbow and listened and then she was wide awake and she put her glasses on and she kept saying it can’t be true and she saw she was holding her fist up to her mouth. She was staying in a bed and breakfast on Gower Street until the insurance from the fire was settled. She saw herself in the mirror on the wardrobe door and no matter how much she whispered it couldn’t be true she knew it was true because there was nothing dreamlike about the phone call or the square of sunlight on the hardwood floor or the weight of the cat on top of the blankets. She could smell toast burning.

She and Madeleine had gone for a hamburger in Donovan’s Industrial Park because that’s where they ended up. Madeleine drove and she talked about the film and Isobel said nothing because she had decided she would tell Madeleine about Valentin and the fire he had planned for the following weekend. She felt certain Madeleine would intervene. Whatever it took to intervene, Madeleine had it. She would reroute the inevitable, take charge. Isobel sat in the passenger seat with her hand against the dash and her foot pressed into the floor as if she had a brake of her own and she listened while Madeleine talked budget.

Anyone who has to confess is better off closing her eyes. Isobel had planned to order a hamburger and while waiting for it to arrive she would grip her fork and knife and close her eyes and tell Madeleine everything. Some part of her believed the fire would never happen.

It was hard to get a word in with Madeleine. She was obsessed with the bloody horses and believed she was being haunted by an archbishop and she had never been able to shut up for five minutes in the whole time Isobel had known her. Isobel had decided to close her eyes and say about the fire.

Madeleine told the waitress she only had a forty-five minute lunch. She said about the burger: she wanted medium-rare, she didn’t want rare, she didn’t want well-done. Did the girl know what she meant by medium-rare, Madeleine wanted to know. Do they do that here? she’d asked.

Isobel had worn her silver bracelet. She fiddled with the fork. She opened her hamburger when it came and scraped off the mayonnaise.

You don’t meet men at weddings, Madeleine had said. Everybody at a wedding has a date. I’ll tell you the place.

Isobel put salt on the tomatoes. A wide man in a flannel shirt hefted a cheek from his chair to swivel all the way around. They were two beautiful women being too loud in Donovan’s Industrial Park.

Funerals, said Madeleine. Nobody brings a date to a funeral. The men come out in droves.

The emergency ward is good, Isobel said.

Funerals, Madeleine insisted. Her mouth was full of lettuce. She put the hamburger down.

What is so bloody hard about medium-rare, can you tell me?

The production has shut down, the production assistant says. The director will be waked at Caul’s Funeral Home and in lieu of flowers people are asked to send donations to Médicins Sans Frontières.

Madeleine had said, Look, I’m dying. She was waving her fork, making a point about the burger. The point was if she was dying, really dying, couldn’t the universe conspire to give her a proper hamburger. She had given up meat and now she was treating herself and look what they had served her.

She was dying and she said Isobel was free to bring a date to the funeral. She waved the waitress down and explained again about how, exactly, she wanted her burger. When it came back it was burnt.

Isobel wanted to tell her about the fire because Madeleine would deal with it. Isobel knew she couldn’t trust herself. Something was wrong with her. She was in the grip of a powerful man at a bad time in her life. She was being crushed. She would shut her eyes and grip the fork and knife and say
arson
. She would say about his hand on her throat, how tight, she would say about all her belongings going up in smoke. How off-kilter and afraid she had become. She would say about the pills she’d been taking.

I have to tell you something, Isobel had said.

I don’t have long, Madeleine said.

FRANK

I
T HAD RAINED
for most of December, icy rain and the afternoons were dark but there hadn’t been any snow. The rain lashed against the houses and the sidewalks were slippery and sometimes it turned to sleet. Frank had been cutting business cards at the photocopy shop for most of the afternoon and it was almost closing time. Lana had finished the floors. She turned off the buzzing lights and her yellow rubber gloves looked luminous in the gloom.

She stood for a moment leaning against the doorway, holding the mop handle with both hands and resting her chin on the tip.

He could smell the ammonia floor cleaner. It was a smell that reminded him of his mother. He could see his mother in a short-sleeved shirt, her elbows eczema-crackled.

Ammonia reminded him of cancer, the eradicating, indifferent swath it had cut in his life, and the July evening when he was five and Mrs. Hallett brought him back home, after his mother’s double mastectomy.

Your mother is getting out of the hospital, Frank, she’d said. And he was afraid to trust it.

Mrs. Hallett had taken him to Middle Cove Beach for caplin when he was five. He and Kevin scrabbling over the rocks, picking up the wiggling fish with their bare hands. Someone had a flashlight trained on the curling waves and he saw the caplin twisting on the breaking surf like a silver scarf. Mrs. Hallett had got down on one knee and had taken hold of his elbows and said that his mother would be home when they got back to town. She was bringing him directly to his mother’s apartment. You can show her all your fish, she’d said.

Afterwards, he’d stood on the sidewalk on Water Street and a window opened on the third floor and there was his mother in her flannel nightdress, elbows on the sill, leaning out, waiting for him. He’d opened the Dominion bag for her to look, caplin glinting under the street light.

There was a funny phone call, Lana said. Water was still gurgling through the pipes somewhere on the fifth floor. But the building was empty. Why, when you turn off the lights in an old building like this, does everything alter? He could hear the wind outside. Everything was about his mother tonight; it had something to do with the weather. The giant cola-tinted window of the photocopy shop overlooked the harbour. It was covered in beads of rain. She was so proud when he brought home a good mark. She’d take both his cheeks in her hands and look into his eyes.

Look at me, she’d say, holding his cheeks. It means the world to me when you do well in school, she’d say. Once he’d brought a math test home with a gold star and she’d moved her thumb over it and when she looked up she was exultant.

The wind made the raindrops on the windowpane shiver and then drove them sideways cross the glass. He brought the paper cutter down over the last stack of card.

Some girl looking for you, Lana said. Frank lifted the blade.

Lana pulled the bucket behind her so the wheels rattled over the tiles. He listened to her moving around in the other room, emptying the bucket, flushing the toilet.

Lana was washing the coffee mugs and called to him over the running water.

You know I’m taking Monday, she said. Then she jumped because he was standing behind her. He had a way of creeping up.

I don’t want to talk to anyone who’s phoning me, he said. Lana looked at him for a long moment, then picked up a rag and started on the counters.

A call comes for you, I mention it, she said.

He knew it was Colleen. He wanted his money back. Lana was some sort of Gypsy. Her husband was a fisherman during the crab season and worked at Stoker’s Auto in the winter. Lana had talked once about roasting goat on a spit over an open fire. You could see the snow coming through the mountain pass, she’d said. They’d eaten eggs and bacon fried on the engine of a car when she was growing up.

We moved in caravans, she’d said. I saw all of Europe as a child. It made Frank wish he had known Lana back then. If he and his mother could have travelled in caravans and eaten goat.

It got dark, Lana said, while we chewed the bones and afterwards the violins came out.

ISOBEL

G
IVE THE LINES
the time they need to materialize. This is essential. Actors forget this and it’s the only thing they’re required to remember, let the lines materialize.

There was a girl of twenty standing in the middle of the classroom, her hair drawn back in a ponytail, wearing sweats, holding a script.

Get up and take a book off a bookshelf if you must, Isobel said. Be deliberate and vague at the same time.

She told them she had once played Napoleon. Even Napoleon had to look uncertain. She’d worn one of those hats.

Here was her advice: Watch a person get on the bus or peel the paper lining away from a muffin. See how lost and present they are. Emulate this. That is acting: the alchemy of absence and presence. Embody the character, agree there is no character; there’s only a series of linked gestures, fudged acts, reprieves. She was teaching an evening course at the university. They had a growing drama department and she was finding she could pick up at least one course a semester. She was thinking about dinner theatre. There was a growing market with the cruise ships. It was something she could do easily.

What people don’t understand about regret is that it incubates; this was her strong hand. She knew regret and it was a hue in her palette the younger actresses didn’t have. They could not muster that tone. Regret could cast shadows in a performance: to have fucked up grandly, that could make you an actress of note, especially if you hadn’t got caught. There was talk of a big shoot the following summer. She’d received an e-mail. There was talk of a Hollywood actor, someone halfway big, and they wanted local colour.

First, you think the lines out, and then you say them. Say the lines as if everything has already been settled.

He had called once, after the fire. He said he was going to cover for her. She hadn’t spoken because she was sick about the boy. She hadn’t known — no part of her had guessed — he was capable of it. His capacity for hatred was stunning, shattering.

You’ll get the money, he’d said. He waited for her to answer. He had left the boy to burn alive. Isobel had slept with him, he had touched her.