Darren Effect (2 page)

Then it began to bark. It rose — barking — front legs splayed as though it might pounce — barking, looking her straight in the eye. Heather wondered if it were rabid. She tried turning away from it, to snub it, to savour the view again. But the barking would wake everyone in the cabins, certainly everyone in the campers at the edge of the parking lot. She remembered hating that dog. Imagine, hating Inky — a creature perpetually cheerful, agreeable, loyal.

Now, as she crossed the hospital parking lot, she smiled, thinking how terrorized she had been. The smile felt good on her face, then sparked a terrible moment of clarity — she was no longer on that beach but outside this hospital, minute by minute increasing the distance between herself and a man whose dying seemed incomprehensible.

She had walked away from the dog and beach — not quite tiptoeing. When she looked back, she saw it hadn't moved, not even followed her with its eyes. But it was still barking and it was the barking she wanted to escape. She stepped off the sand and across the small lot where several cars had parked in no discernible pattern. She made her way to a minivan and moved behind it, blocking her view of the sea and the dog, and realized
the level of her distress. I'm such a coward, she thought, closing her eyes and leaning against the warm metal of the van, but just let that demented dog run off and persecute someone else. This was what she had been thinking when she opened her eyes and found him standing just feet away, watching her.

She assumed he was a tourist. Ontario, possibly the New England states. But when he spoke, she knew he was from St. John's.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Not, she would later tease him, Can I help you? Are you all right?

“Hiding from a horrible dog.” He was short and athletic looking. She noticed his hair was untidy and flying off, though there was no breeze at all. It might not have been combed in days.

He laughed. “You're not referring to Inky?”

She realized the barking had stopped just as the dog came trotting around the side of the van. It was covered in sand and panting.

“Where's your ball?” the man asked the dog in a calm, business-like voice. The dog stopped and looked at the man. It retracted its tongue and with some difficulty closed its mouth around it. Heather watched its head swing left, right, left. Then it did two complete turns and looked again at the man.

“Where's your ball?” he repeated, this time, it seemed, more intimately.

The dog sprinted back down to the water and Heather made a move to go. She could feel the sweat collecting beneath her breasts along the underwire.

“By the time he's finished rolling on top of that ball, he's forgotten it exists,” the man explained.

Heather tried to appreciate the remark. She had no interest in dogs.

“Camping?” he asked.

“No, no. We're here for a writers' retreat.”

“You're a writer, are you?”

She hesitated. She was warmed by his voice, his confidence and easy curiosity about her.

“Yes, we're staying in the cabins,” she said. “For the weekend.”

A week later when they met again at the lecture, she was forced to tell him she was not a writer. She was a social worker, tagging along after her younger sister, Mandy, who was the aspiring writer.

He moved towards the van and leaned against it, letting her know it was his. He was looking at her, thinking something about her, and although she would have liked to have known what, her instinct was to offer him nothing more, and to ask him nothing about himself.

She had said goodbye abruptly and walked away from the man with his van and dog and returned to her cabin. At first she thought nothing more of him. There was an afternoon poetry workshop out in the field, under the few trees and in the face of some welcome, unpredictable sea breezes. Before the readings could begin there was competition over the shadiest spots to sit, then argument about someone's suggestion they delay supper in order to avoid the hot kitchen, but eventually they all sat back, fanning themselves with their manuscripts.

Heather stared at each face without listening. It wasn't until she lay flat on the grass and looked up at the sky and tried to focus on the one misshapen cloud that she realized her distraction was formidable, uplifting and irresistible. She spent the remainder of the weekend returning every hour or so to the beach, but the man, dog and minivan had vanished. She nursed a small fantasy: reliving the meeting, rewriting the conversation. His expression. Her appearance. She emitted confidence, she spoke to the dog and even stroked its bony forehead and soft creased ears. She wasn't sweating and the man asked her what her plans were for the rest of the day.

It was a public lecture held on campus. Had she known anything about him, she would have known he was married and, surely, she would have avoided eye contact, pretended she could
either not remember him at all, or not remember where she'd met him. But she did not know anything about him and she went straight up to him. He stood by the table with the books and refreshments and he waited for her, watching her approach — only a few seconds, really — and when they started talking they could have been talking about anything under the sun. When he asked if she'd like to go for a drink after the lecture, she wasn't even relieved. She knew then who he was — not his name or what he did, but what he would come to mean to her — and she knew that he knew.

His name was Benny.

It was a fluke either of them had been there. Later, Benny would call it fate, though only half seriously. It was the last in a series of public lectures for the year — that night on outport architecture. Benny had felt obliged to attend. Heather was there to meet Mandy and Mandy's partner Bill, a university professor, but they didn't arrive. Heather suspected they had quarrelled, but she never asked.

Heather made it as far as her car and got in. Her keys were in her hands. It was a busy day at the hospital, but even on a slow day, parking here was impossible. In her rear-view mirror she watched with detachment as cars went up and down the lot, hunting for a space. Many, seeing her sitting there, stopped and waited. Make up your mind, they seemed to suggest. She felt her heels digging in. Detachment gave way to an unwillingness to behave. She might sit there until nightfall, if she wanted. She might still be there when the lot began to empty and the heat of the day began to lift and a dark Volvo pulled in beside her. Isabella Martin would disembark, distraught but refreshed, in slacks and a white cardigan. Benny's son Cooper would tumble out the other side.

What would Heather do? Would she get out of her car? Would she make an appeal, apologize, beg?

Heather imagined Benny's wife walking through her as
through a ghost — undetected, unseen — and on into the hospital to her husband. The Volvo would rock slightly, and in the back seat Inky would sit up. He would glance about with his ears perked until he found and recognized her, and their eyes would lock.

“What is it?” Benny had asked, just before she left the hospital room.

“Nothing,” she had said.

Heather sat with her hands on the steering wheel of the silent car and considered rolling down a window. The heat was extraordinary and the only thing in the physical world making an impression on her. She started the car. Hearing the engine come to life nudged her like an unseen hand and she burst into tears.

The Indian summer did not last. Heather's impression of October was of darkness and cold. Eventually she learned from a teary client they were having a record-breaking streak of bad weather: thirty-two consecutive days of precipitation. Heather had nodded. Really? She had not known.

Now it was November, coming up to a long weekend.

She pulled her chair up close to her desk — she preferred this when clients entered her office these days — but it was a tight squeeze with her coat cradled in her arms. At a time like this she required something to hold on to.

He had a right to be angry with her, if he wanted to be. That was the worst of it. She had been cold and unsympathetic. She couldn't stop thinking this, even after seeing him in the hospital and knowing it was the furthest thing from his mind.

She shivered. She seemed to be chilled all the time. And bonetired. She had turned the thermostat on bust the day before, just before going home, but now it was eight in the morning and the air in the building was parched and stifling.

Was she really so bad? So cold, cruel and heartless? Most people did and said things they regretted once in a while. Heather was sure of it. Her mother, for instance. Her sister Mandy. Even Benny, goddamnit.

She pushed herself away from her desk and went out into the hall where it was even warmer, past the empty reception cubicle and into the washroom where the poster of the bruised, dejectedlooking girl beneath the caption “Love Doesn't Have to Hurt” caused her, as always, to look quickly elsewhere.

She looked in the mirror.

Her face was red and blotchy. Her nose was swollen and her eyes looked foreign and dark. It was time to pull herself together. You couldn't change the past. She splashed cold water on her face, dried off, took a deep breath. She applied face cream, which helped. It gave her skin the springy feeling of regeneration and hope. And as she began to feel better, she began to resent the cause of her sadness. She was better off without him.

But she
was
without him.

She looked at herself in the mirror again and watched her eyes well up, her chin and then her mouth collapse.

“Stop it!” she whispered to the mirror, ashamed of herself, then splashed on more cold water, dried her face, and applied another coat of face cream. She had ten minutes before her first appointment. She'd be fine. She had a solid capacity for recovery, her mother had always said so. In ten minutes, no one would know she'd been crying. She checked her teeth. Looked around for a comb, gave up and ran her fingers through her hair. She felt a surge of energy.

She returned to her office, picked up the phone and called her mother, waking her.

“Did you discover anything?” Heather asked.

“You really want me poking around?”

“Yes! I asked you to. I want to know anything.
Where is he?

He's not at the hospital.”

“He's not?”

Heather paused and took a moment to consume her exasperation. “No. I already told you that. Because I called. At least he's not where he was. He may have been moved.”

“I could ask around. You know this town is small. A person would be a fool to have an affair in this town, Heather.”

“It's too late for that advice.”

“Don't yell me at me, honey.”

Heather was aware of her mother sitting up and reaching for her pack of cigarettes.

“
Mother!
Please.”

“Honey — ”

It was lit. The first inhalation.

“What?”

“I'm worried about you.”

“I'm
fine
. But I'm busy — ”

“You're busy? Right now? It's not even nine o'clock.”

“No. I'm just busy. I mean, I don't have much time. I just feel so
rushed.”

“I wonder if you should see someone. You seem in such a panic. It's awfully early in the morning to be in such a rush and panic. How many cups of coffee have you had?”

“None. Do this. Just do this.”

“On one condition.”

“Absolutely no conditions.”

“You stop — ”

“No.”

“ — driving by their house.”

Heather paused. “How did you know that?”

Exhalation. “It's a small town.”

Mandy was driving, which made everyone a little nervous. Bill sat in the front beside her, and Heather in the back, causing her to feel tolerated yet banished, like a child. When Mandy braked at the stop sign at the bottom of the street, Bill pitched forward in his seat like a rag doll, as though he had expected Mandy to sail through the intersection. Heather suspected he and Mandy had just had sex.

Bill straightened, then glanced into the back seat, and Heather gave him a weak smile. She felt remotely embarrassed. She knew she looked wrecked and that Bill would have been
told, at the very least, that it was the result of a disastrous love affair. Bringing her along on these outings had become a habit of theirs, but Heather knew it was Mandy's crusade, not Bill's.

Mandy parked directly in front of the Legacy Café and Heather watched Bill glance up to see two women in conversation just outside the entrance. When he turned quickly back to study the dashboard, Heather took a better look at the women. One was staring into the car at Bill, nodding, chatting with her companion, even laughing, but she had clearly fixed her eye on Bill. Heather longed to escape the next few minutes.

Mandy pulled her scarf in at her throat, then gathered up her purse and keys and gloves. Neither Heather nor Bill had moved.

“Hold on a minute, Mandy,” Bill said. Heather thought it was a mistake to have said anything. Better to just walk on in.

“How come?”

“That woman.”

“Oh, for the love of . . . ”

Mandy leaned across Bill to look up at the café. Other than these two women, there was no one else out on this raw November morning. Remembrance Day. They were all sleeping in, Heather thought, respecting the holiday.

“Which? The blond in the hat? Or the one in the blue jacket?”

“Blue jacket.”

“Let's go. She's too old to be a student.”

“I wouldn't say she's too old to be a student,” Bill said crossly. “Theoretically, nobody's ever too old to be a student.”

But Mandy was out of the car. She shut her own door with some force, then opened Heather's and said, “Come on, let's go. It's freezing.”

Heather obeyed and Mandy flew up the steps and into the café, not awarding either woman standing there a single glance. Heather and Bill followed. Heather had never seen the woman before.