Darren Effect (11 page)

“Please. You don't need to go on.”

“Then how about names? Have you given any thought to names yet?”

“What if a person has more than one hardship?”

“Those people are unlucky.”

Heather followed her mother to the door, then after she left, lingered there, taking in the view of the outside. She had hardly left the house in three months. Few people knew she was pregnant, a state of affairs that would be obvious to anyone now. She could hear birds, children, traffic, even the sound of her neighbour cutting wood. Was it Saturday or Sunday? He always cut and stacked new wood on the weekends this time of year and left it in his backyard through the summer to dry.

She began roaming through her house, tidying up, but for days still did not go outside.

One afternoon she was in the kitchen heating a can of soup. When it began to boil, she lifted the pot from the burner and remembered that once she had been happy. It must have something to do with the soup, she thought, reminding her of being over at Dad's when it was his week to have them and Mandy wasn't putting anything into her mouth except tomato soup. She had a sudden clear memory of who she was then, in her teens, a girl defined by frequent stabbing moments of happiness. Even the passage of time, the change of seasons, the very weather — wind, rain, snow, sun — had been sublime. They had protected her. She had been addicted to those moments.

Early the next morning, Heather rose and went to the window and looked out at her car, a red Echo. She speculated half a tank. She dug out heavy boots, an oversized coat, her new field guides and Mandy's binoculars. She looked around. As
soon as she was home again she'd take a shower and do the laundry. She'd go grocery shopping and thoroughly clean the house. She felt grand. It was the first time she had put something other than slippers on her feet in weeks, but she barely winced getting into the boots.

Outside she discovered it was a soft spring day. She squeezed her stomach in behind the steering wheel and was surprised by the cramped quarters. Her back immediately began to ache and she was breathless, but undaunted.

As she parked beside the dumpster behind the Canadian Wildlife Service building, Heather realized she felt almost hot under the spring sun. She dropped the visor and checked herself in the mirror. The woman who met her gaze looked alert, perhaps agitated, though frankly, the best word to describe that face, Heather concluded, popping the visor back up just as Darren exited the back of the building, would be deranged.

She watched Darren twice go back inside to collect something. He was wearing a T-shirt and loose jogging pants, an adaptation, Heather guessed, to the warmer weather. He fussed with the windshield wipers, though there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and checked the air pressure in the tires. His movements were uncharacteristically sluggish. As she started her car and pulled out behind him, Heather decided there were two questions she needed answered.

Was he married?

Did she
want
him to be married?

The storm petrel was in a box in the basement, which was the safest place for it, though they owned neither dog nor cat and a bird would be safe anywhere in their house. But it was so small, so much smaller than you might expect. Not even the size of a blue jay, barely that of a robin. And it was the second in a week. The first was found in the Virginia Park area by a woman. It was sitting on her doorstep and she almost stepped on it leaving for work. She screamed, thinking it was something else, a rat perhaps. The second one — the one in the basement — had made landfall at the Kidsville Daycare in Mount Pearl. The children found it beneath the slide and had been passing it around all morning. People didn't know what to do with them. It took a few seconds to realize they were looking at a bird at all. On rainy nights hundreds could be found stranded inland, having mistaken wet roads and parking lots for the black surface of the sea.

Darren knew not only what they were but that you needed to keep them sequestered until it was good and dark.

The Leach's storm petrel was the first bird Darren identified. He was twelve, on his way home from school, when he saw a queer-looking bird in an empty lot. It walked clumsily among the weeds and, in Darren's hands, gave off a sharp fishy stink.
He brought it home and in the evening his mother sent him to the library with his older sister, Jeanette, who flipped through magazines while he read about
Oceanodroma leucorhoa
. An abundant species of seabird, but one few people ever saw. It spent its entire life over the ocean, hundreds of miles from any shore, visiting land only to breed, and only at night.

He had hurried home, knowing exactly what to do, but while they were gone the dog had crept into his bedroom and swallowed the bird whole.

“That poor dog was only jealous,” his mother said.

By ten o'clock the storm petrel was restless, its internal clock tuned to the arrival of night. From the kitchen they could hear it fluttering against the cardboard box, and Jeanette wondered aloud if it were not time for him to release the creature.

Darren put the box in the truck and drove it out to Cape Spear. When he opened the box he could see that the tips of the tail and wing feathers were severely frayed. It had been a trying day in the playground and a longer one in the box. The steep forehead gave the storm petrel a wise, pedantic look, despite its tiny size, while its slender black legs ended in webbed pads that looked impossibly soft. He imagined thousands of them running over the surface of the ocean at night, pushing against water as unyielding as concrete.

With the bird tucked inside his open jacket, Darren carried it down the boardwalk to the eastern-most point of North America and tossed it into the air. As long as it stayed airborne and resisted pitching on the water, it might survive, though it had lost weight and there was the sorry condition of its flight feathers. It was dark, and Darren lost sight of the bird almost immediately as, flying more like a butterfly than a bird, it vanished over the sea.

*

They had seen Mrs. Pynn infrequently, usually when the weather was mild. She would drift across the cul-de-sac at the end of Goodridge Place in her slippers and housecoat with the fallen hem. She had been chatty, and Darren avoided her, though Jeanette stood listening to the old woman, nodding and sometimes interrupting her with a benign question.

Mrs. Pynn disappeared in November. It was on Remembrance Day — fittingly — when Darren found her in the obituaries and discovered her first name had been Veronica. She would be sadly missed by her brother-in-law, Norman, and her nieces, Mary and Patty. Flowers were being gratefully declined.

“Well, well,” he said, staring at his sister, who was reading the paper and may not have heard him. “Stayed in her own home till the bitter end. She always seemed a bit lonely, though, didn't she?”

He turned to look out the window at Mrs. Pynn's empty house. Above it, a water-laden blanket of cloud hung so low it seemed the peaked roofs circling the cul-de-sac were holding it aloft. It had been a spectacularly bad autumn. Thirty-two consecutive days of freezing rain, drizzle, fog or combination thereof, with only a hundred and fourteen minutes of sunshine clocked for the entire period.

Within a week Veronica Pynn's house went on the market, but it didn't sell until the end of the month. Darren guessed the house had seen few improvements during Veronica's life. Certainly the shabby exterior of the house gave one that impression.

It was a dim afternoon in early December when the new neighbours arrived, appearing first as a slew of skateboarders: boys of all ages, it seemed, the oldest rangy and bad postured, with bleached hair and broken expressions implying an extreme sport mishap was just around the corner. It was not clear how many of the youngsters actually belonged there. The arrival at
suppertime of a parent — in this case, mother — did not shed much light on this, since they all ignored her.

The moment he saw her, Darren blurted out, “Not Isabella Martin.” He almost groaned.

He had found Jeanette peering out the window of their front door. She had switched off the hall light, just in case anyone glanced over. It was at times like this that Darren felt a stab of concern for his sister.

“Who is Isabella Martin?” Jeanette asked, her face to the glass. “Have I met her, Darren?”

“Avalon Nature Club.”

“So I haven't.”

They watched the Household Movers truck pulling into the driveway and riding up across their yard as it made the turn.

“A little late in the day for moving, isn't it?” Jeanette said.

Two men in blue work suits jumped down from the cab of the truck and began to approach the house, slowly, as though still gearing up for the exercise ahead.

“Who is she, Darren?”

“Just give me a minute to think.”

“Pardon?”

The moving men and Isabella Martin stood in the driveway talking. The outside light was on, allowing Darren and Jeanette a good look at their faces. Although he didn't know her well, Darren could recall her sudden, high-pitched cries of astonishment and slightly formal wardrobe. She said something to the men, who laughed. They were slapping their hands together because of the cold.

Jeanette cleared her throat and Darren glanced down at her. Her lips were slightly open, an unconscious habit of hers that indicated she was concentrating, or praying, though it was a while since he had accompanied her to mass.

“I don't know her that well,” he said placatingly. “I'm sure she's nice.”

Jeanette walked away. A period of silence between them
would now follow, so Darren lingered, observing the men as they began unloading the truck, then Isabella as she coaxed an elderly black dog out of her car, across the yard, up the steps and into the house. The dog fell across the doorstep and Isabella stood staring at it a moment before leaning down to gently shove it inside.

The unloading continued until well after Darren and Jeanette had gone to bed. Cars began to arrive, presumably parents collecting youngsters, around midnight. There was the sound of honking, cars idling, doors slamming. A light rain made the tires kiss the pavement grittily as they finally pulled away and went off down the street. At one point Jeanette knocked on his bedroom door, but he ignored it. He could hear the door to Isabella Martin's house open and close every few minutes, followed by shouts. Darren was hoping she
was
nice, because he was going to have to have a word with her.

He found the cigarette butts scattered across his front yard in the morning. Jeanette would hit the roof. He began to collect them, not knowing where to put them, when Isabella burst from her house, heading for her car. She glanced at him but didn't stop, pretending she hadn't seem him. Darren was relieved.

Then she changed her mind and walked towards him.

“Not a bad morning,” she called to him when she got to the edge of her yard. It sounded as though it was the first time she'd used her voice that morning. “Off to work?”

He nodded.

“I'm Isabella Martin. I think we've met.”

He stepped her way, the cigarette butts cradled in his hand.

“You're Darren Foley, aren't you? I don't know if you remember me.”

“Avalon Nature Club?”

Her eyes brightened. “You brought in the assortment of bird eggs and stuffed penguins.”

“Puffins. We don't get penguins in this hemisphere.”

“Gorgeous creatures.”

Yes. Her annoying habit of referring to plants
and
animals as gorgeous creatures.

“Before you go,” he said, and she immediately crossed into his yard with an eagerness that worried him. “I just wanted to have a word with you about the commotion last night.”

She was looking at his house. If Jeanette was spying from a window, he hoped she had enough sense to step back. He was trying to remember something he'd heard about Isabella Martin. There was still no sign of an adult male presence. A recent divorce perhaps.

He opened his hand to show her the cigarette butts. “My sister Jeanette would be distressed to see these.”

He was conscious of the length of time it took her to focus on him again. She gave the cigarette butts an unsatisfactory glance.

“She's your sister?”

He nodded. “I'm not married.”

Why had he offered that? It was the worst possible thing to say.

“My son has a lot of friends, but I never laid eyes on half those boys,” she said. “I did think they were a hard bunch. I assumed they were from the neighbourhood.”

Was that a clever insult? “They kept my sister up quite late,” he said.

She produced an inscrutable smile. “These cul-de-sacs are ideal for skateboarding,” she said. “But I'll talk to my son. He's only just turned twelve. He certainly doesn't smoke. He's a good boy. I don't even keep matches in the house.”

She was looking back at her own house, as though making a quick comparison. The bungalow behind her was nearly identical to his own, yet her green siding was discoloured and faded, something brown had leached from the bottom corners of her windows, and other than a wind-battered dogberry, there was not a single ornamental in her yard. Lined up beside the front door were boxes that had not made it into the house the night before, dark and misshapen now from the rain and drizzle.
And she herself did not look too well put together either. The slacks she wore were in need of ironing and her raincoat looked as though she had taken it from the bottom of a box. Clearly, her hair had been shampooed within the past hour, but he knew enough about these things to know that she had not been concentrating during the drying process.

“I guess you're off to work as well?” he asked, thinking to wrap things up.

“Yes.” She sighed loudly, staring at the ground. “I'm a substitute teacher. Vice-principal called last night. A teacher broke his arm. I suppose I should be more sympathetic.”