Darren Effect (29 page)

“I suppose so. Yes.”

Heather was aware of both the woman knitting and Byron listening. She didn't care.

“But it's odd that I would be this woman,” her mother said.

“What do you mean?”

“It's odd that I ended up being alone all these years. A single woman.”

“Why?”

“Because when I was a girl all I wanted was to love, and be loved. I waited and waited for it, and then when I got it, it didn't last.” Her mother sighed and patted her handbag. “But I'm happy enough now.”

Heather didn't know what to say. She told her mother she was going outside for a moment to get some fresh air. As she walked slowly past admittance, a nurse looked up and asked if she was all right. Heather nodded.

She took a seat on a bench and breathed in the out-of-doors air, so fresh and oxygenated she began to believe she didn't require sleep after all. Bunches of clouds were forming high in the sky. The colour was impossible to name. Not grey, not white, not pink exactly. Lower in the sky, a bright streak of light intersected the nearby wooded hill, which seemed incompatible with the helicopter pad at its base, the plateau of parking lots and finally the hospital with its golden machines capable of passing a narrow beam of X-ray photons straight through human tissue to see broken bones, swallowed objects, congested baby lungs.

A figure was coming across the parking lot. A man with a bouncing, deliberate walk. She thought he looked rather handsome. She tried to rise.

“What are you doing out here, Heather?”

He stopped in front of her.

“You should have gone home hours ago.”

“I was waiting for you.”

A look crossed his face: uncertainty, hope, pleasure, then worry she'd seen it.

“Sure, Byron's a big boy.”

“I know that. But I also ran into my mother.”

“Here?” He sat beside her.

“Bladder infection.” Heather was finding it difficult to breathe without making a lot of noise. “She gets them. Chronic. She's fine.”

“Are you okay?”

“A few minutes ago,” Heather said, panting and arching her back. “My water broke.”

By the first week of August, most people could no longer remember when the hot weather had started. Everyone was complaining of a lack of sleep. Heather had been hearing it for days, since she returned to work, and knew it was, like Christmas, a formidable psychological stressor — humidity, heat and sleeplessness.

She was working two days a week. She had been anxious to return to her office, to her clients. She had forgotten how much she liked her job. How much she liked the anticipation of what the day might bring.

She purchased a fan at Canadian Tire to combat the heat and poked it in a corner of her office. It created a bizarre environment, just moving the heat around like that. She suspected it was only an illusion of cooler air.

She was surprised the Quigleys had made an appointment at all. She assumed they would have moved on, disgusted — particularly Derm — with her sudden, unexplained disappearance.

But when the Quigleys arrived — promptly — Derm was not with them. Donna and Tracey seemed confused with the three empty chairs Heather had stationed in a welcoming crescent.
Eventually they sat, side by side, looking vulnerable and nervous.

“We were wondering what happened to you,” Tracey said and Donna nodded.

For several minutes neither would look directly at her. Both were wearing tank tops and cut-offs, which struck Heather as far more sensible than her own cotton sweater set and skirt. She realized they were saying they'd missed her.

Then Donna sucked in some air and said, “We don't know where he's to.”

“Toronto.”

“We don't know that for sure, Tracey.”

“Derm is gone?” Heather asked.

The women nodded.

It seemed impossible. Although he had been overbearing and full of himself, he had made the trio what it was. Heather would never have predicted this.

Now even the illusion of coolness was beginning to fade. Both women had been carrying lit cigarettes when they entered the building, held covertly at their hips. Heather pictured them stepping off the bus — the car would have been Derm's — and without delay lighting up. The smoke joined the swirling heat of Heather's office and she imagined it settling into every nick and cranny of her clothing, every pore of her skin.

“Tracey here — well, I never — she's after looking for a job,” Donna told Heather.

For a moment Heather couldn't remember which of these women had been Derm's wife. But wasn't this symptomatic of what had always been the real dilemma?

Tracey produced a shy smile. “I'll need to, won't I, if I get a divorce?”

“Now she's talking about divorce.”

“That comes as a surprise to you, Donna?” Heather asked.

“I don't understand,” Donna said. “He hasn't even called us. He might be in trouble.”

Donna finished her cigarette, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out with the toe of her flip-flop. “Did we do something wrong?”

“Jesus, Donna,” Tracey said quietly. “Do you even know where you're to?”

Donna looked like she was near tears. She leaned down and retrieved the squashed butt, then held it in her hand and looked at Heather. There were no ashtrays in sight.

Heather stared at the flecks of tobacco on the hardwood floor and remembered her last rendezvous with Benny.

Could she really have been so heartless?

“Miss?”

“I'll take that, Donna,” Heather said gently. “Not to worry.” She opened a drawer and pulled out an ashtray.

Could she really have locked him out of the car in the rain and driven away?

“If she gets a job,” Donna said, “I don't know what I'll do. Sure, he did everything for us.”

“I tried some of them tricks you told me,” Tracey announced. She sat back. She was clearly pleased with herself.

“I'm happy to hear that. And you're staying on your meds?” Tracey nodded.

“Staying on your meds is essential.”

“I know.”

After the tragedy of the boys on the ice they did not see each other for a while. It had been in all the papers and on the news and Benny had felt exposed by the attention to the event, although there was never a photo or mention of him by name — only a reference to those bystanders who had been first on the scene and who made a courageous attempt to rescue the boys.

But after that Heather had trouble reaching Benny.

By the time they met again, it was late summer, a year ago. They had been out in the woods and returned to his car just as a light rain started. It blurred their view of the stand of poplars and patch of ocean visible from inside the car.

“Heather,” he had said. “It's not possible for us to continue seeing each other.”

“Don't you dare say that to me now.”

“I have a family.” He sounded tired, as though he'd been trying to explain something to a child for hours.

She closed her eyes. He was dropping her like a hot potato. She wondered if she had always known he would.

“I've been clear about that from the start, Heather.”

When she opened her eyes and saw the rain on the windshield, she was briefly unsure of their whereabouts. He was watching her.

“This can't come as a surprise to you, sweetheart.”

He tried to take her hand but she pulled away.

“I'm going to be having a number of procedures over the next month or so,” he went on. “New procedures. A new line of attack.” His laughter was brief. “I wish I had the guts to tell those doctors to fuck off.”

What procedures exactly? The idea of them was dreadful, chilling. She realized his life was shrinking. There used to be a place for her in it, but his illness would soon be shutting people out. One by one, doors would close on everyone who had known him.

Not only that, there would be an order of priority that made her desperate.

He was waiting for her to say something. When she looked at him, she saw that he was scared. Well, he couldn't have it both ways.

“Right.”

“Is that all you're going to say?” He sounded incredulous.

She thought again about the procedures. Then about his wife beside him or in a nearby windowless waiting area. “What do you want me to say?”

He looked hurt, then angry. She hated it when he got angry with her and for a moment she wished she could stop herself.

“
I'll be thinking of you?
Is that what you want me to say? Or,
good luck?
”

“Why are you shouting?”

They sat without speaking for several minutes. She was surprised by herself, by her emotional unpredictability. They had been lying together in a clearing just a short while ago, but now, as she considered leaning over to pick the debris from his back and hair, she found herself frozen by something akin to homesickness.

He began searching for his keys. He arched his hips as he checked his pockets. He slapped his coat and rifled through the CDs and gum wrappers and tissues in the compartment between them. “Dammit, there's so much junk in here. Would you mind tidying up this stuff?”

She stared out the window.

“Have you got the keys, Heather?”

Although it had been overcast and misty all day, this was the first rain.

“Heather, are you sure you don't have the keys? Didn't I hand them to you before crossing the river?”

She shook her head. She couldn't forgive him for getting sick
or
having a wife.

He stopped, then opened the door and stepped out. She could hear the rain first-hand now and feel the warm, close air as it surged into the car. Before slamming the door, he leaned in and said, “I just wanted a little sympathy from you.”

The path to destruction lay right in front of her. She couldn't step away from it. She leaned over and hit the button that locked the car doors. Hearing the locks click, he swung around and looked at her with disbelief. He was standing in front of the car and getting wet. He lunged back to the door and tried to open it, yanking on it several times. If he spoke she didn't hear it. For a moment she felt a bubble of laughter, as though they were only kids playing. A happy life would be returned to her, surely — it was just around the bend. Then he turned away from her, walking back out across the meadow. She didn't know where he was going or what was going on anymore, either with herself or
with him. Did he really think he stood a chance of finding the keys out there?

Everything between them seemed wrong. He wanted to talk about his illness now. She had wanted to talk about it in Spruce Cove.

She reached out and lifted her hat from the dash. The keys were tucked inside, where she'd put them. She knew and she didn't know. She climbed into the driver's seat and started the car and backed out and up the gravel road away from the coast. She drove slowly, not checking the mirror to see him standing at the edge of the meadow, getting rained on, abandoned, surprised. Like the act of driving was one long, careful interruption of self-awareness, an annihilation of thought and time.

At the top of the lane, she stopped the car. She imagined returning at high speed and running him down. She imagined finding a cliff and taking the car over it by herself. She imagined driving back to town and never looking back. When she reminded herself that it was his car, she imagined parking in front of his majestic home and handing Isabella Martin the keys.

When she returned, there was no sign of him. Suddenly she could not bear the thought of him out there alone, drenched, lost. She felt a wild panic and understood that you don't let go of someone in a single moment.

She found him wandering along a part of the old road protected by trees and where the rain was not so heavy. He looked like an invalid, a vagabond, someone who had lost a good portion of his memory. He glanced up at her with an expression that said he was beyond caring.

“You had the keys?” he asked.

For a brief moment she thought he was being funny.

“You lied to me?”

She nodded.

This was it. Time was chugging on, and Heather wasn't ready. Everything was moving away from this moment, into
the awful future, and Heather wanted to grab onto it and dig her heels into the ground and pull it back. Stop!

“Benny — ”

“Let's not talk anymore. It's all a bit much, don't you think?” So this was goodbye.

Heather left her desk and came around to sit in the third, empty chair, knowing that sometimes her best tool was sympathy. She offered the tissues, and Donna took a clump. Tracey shook her head; she didn't need them. Not yet, Heather thought. She rested the box on her knees, inches from Tracey's thigh but within easy reach of either woman. For some reason, perhaps due to her sudden closeness to the women and the heat they were emitting, her milk let down. She usually made it to noon, when she rushed home to nurse her daughter. She folded her arms over her front and pressed down on her breasts, which were now tight and aching. Tracey seemed to sense the distraction in Heather, though she couldn't know its cause.

“If we could change the past,” Heather said to Donna. “Most of us would.”

Heather had realized there were more ways than one to fall in love, to come to love a face. With Benny, it had happened in a moment: a face with an opening that she went straight through. Not a moment of resistance. She suspected this had been Tracey's, and likely Donna's, response to Derm. Perhaps this was love at first sight.

But there was another way. Meeting a face that grows on you. You have one or two glimpses. A sneak preview. A promise. At first standing in the woods with your feet numb and birds like chatterboxes overhead, you think: never. But then you begin wondering, until one day there is an opening and it takes your breath away.

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