Darren Effect (3 page)

They took a booth by the windows. Mandy opened Heather's menu and then her own, as though there were some chance she
would not order the vegetarian omelette and Earl Grey, and Heather, nothing at all, and said, “Now let's see. What would you like, Heather? What do you feel like? Bill's treat.” Then she leaned over the table and whispered harshly, “Who is she, Bill?”

“Honestly, I don't really know.”

Heather was aware of Bill glancing at her. She liked Bill, but had never been entirely convinced he and her sister were right for each other. Bill was a good deal older than Mandy. They often bickered, Heather thought, because they didn't really know each other. Normally she helped them through this. Changed the subject, made a joke. Got them back on track. But she couldn't think of anything to say. She looked out the window and felt her eyes welling up.

“Yet we all avoid her?” Mandy demanded.

“Mandy, I don't know who she is.”

Heather sensed he was telling the truth. Outside it looked almost cold enough to snow.

“I wish you would order something, Heather.”

Heather glanced at her sister, whose face looked too tight and unhappy. Mandy wasn't going to let this go.

“Bill, if I discover — ”

“She's nobody. I promise you, love, I don't even know her name.”

“Well, it's your last warning.”

“What does that mean?”

Before Mandy, Bill had had relationships with women that were casual, upbeat, short-lived. After Mandy, he had, he claimed, embraced monogamy, and Heather believed him. The woman in the blue jacket could be anyone from his past: as much as a weekend girlfriend, as little as a woman he had once exchanged glances with at a party — but someone, unfortunately, whose name and face he no longer remembered.

Mandy turned to Heather and smiled, though her eyes were still glittering in a way that made Heather uneasy. “They were asking about you at the Writers' Cooperative last month. Someone
mentioned that epic poem you wrote about a horse named Joy. They miss you. You haven't been to a workshop in years. Why don't you come next week? It'll be good for you.”

“You mean I can work through my troubles by writing about them?”

“Or you could come along and keep me company.”

“Mandy, I attended a grand total of three writing workshops, the last one at Spruce Cove . . . ”

The time she met Benny.

“Bill really liked that poem, didn't you, Bill?”

Bill looked startled, as though he hadn't realized he was still part of the conversation. Heather thought it wasn't fair to put him on the spot like that. After all, he taught in the Anthropology Department, not Literature and Language. And her poem had been dreadful.

“I think the horse was named Happy,” Bill said. “Not Joy.”

Heather nodded. “It was meant for children. It was dreadful, wasn't it?”

“Well, I can barely remember it.”

“Say no more,” Heather said, laughing for the first time that day. “It's all over your face, Bill.” She realized they were staring at her, relieved by her sudden, though marginal, lightness. For a moment, she felt herself sharing in it.

“I'd like to write a story about desire,” Mandy said a second time.

“Could we have missed the turnoff?” Heather asked. “Desire?”

They were en route to the Writers' Cooperative meeting, and Heather was beginning to wonder if they were lost. It was night, and raining.

“Yes, but not just any desire. Desire for a time that no longer exists,” Mandy said. “A lost opportunity.”

Heather was watching the slick black road. She had to force herself to consider her sister's idea.

“You mean like an opportunity for a relationship? You just missed the turnoff, Mandy. Stop.”

“I can't believe you said that, because listen to this.” Mandy pulled over and stopped the car. Her look was inspired and familiar. The windshield wipers were on high. Zip, zip, zip. Heather had to stop looking at them. “This happened to me last week, and already I've been thinking, what a great story. Which way?”

“The turnoff's back there. Just go back — slowly — you can't miss it. I'm listening.”

“I was driving along Empire Avenue where they're widening the road, right?”

“Turn here, Mandy.”

“And I got stuck behind this poky guy in a truck. You know how I'm always barrelling around town.” Mandy removed her hands from the wheel and Heather looked on as she pumped her arms up and down as though speedwalking. “There was something so familiar about him. I could see a bit of his face in his rear-view mirror and the way he was looking around, curious about the road construction. Who cares about road construction, Heather? I could feel his interest like it was my own, and suddenly I realized, I know this guy. Maybe I even said it out loud. I will in the story.”

“This must be it. The first house past the Irving.”

“Plus the shape of his head. I recognized that. He's as mild as May, but he looks like a bulldog. Nothing like Bill.”

“So who was he?”

“Darren Foley. Biologist. Don't you remember I used to live with him?”

“No.”

“He was into birds.”

“Birds?”

“Yeah. But Heather, it was uncanny. I've been feeling lonely, and I know you're thinking I have Bill.”

“No, no, I wasn't thinking that. ”

“When I saw Darren it was so weird. What I remembered of him seemed as intimate as though we
had
been intimate. He'd been interested in me, but I had just met Gary.”

“I think you can park here. I don't remember Gary.”

“Darren and I were strictly domestically intimate. Shared the groceries, the bills, the bathroom. So I find myself tailgating this guy and it's him. I can predict the movement of his head, even though I haven't seen him in years. Even his thoughts.”

“Sounds like you have the start to another great story,” Heather said, opening her car door.

“It's not enough,” Mandy said, not moving.

Heather's right leg was already out and getting rained on. She rested her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I was thinking about calling him, asking him out for a drink. In the service of my craft.”

“I see. This is your story about desire?”

“Or maybe just follow him around town, on the q.t.”

“What?” Heather slowly drew her leg back into the vehicle. “Like stalk him?”

“It would be an adventure. I'm fed up with Bill. I think he's got something for that woman.”

“What woman?”

“The one we saw last weekend, at the Legacy Café.”

“I wouldn't assume there was anything to that, Mandy.”

The idea was bizarre, even alarming, and Heather knew she should seriously caution her sister against it. But then, most of the writers in the Cooperative wrote about themselves, and Mandy was only suggesting taking the process one step further. Heather couldn't write about herself. Not surprisingly, she'd only written the one poem, for children, about a horse.

Now that they were here, getting out of the car and attending the workshop was the last thing in the world Heather wanted to do.
Do you feel hopeless, unreasonably sad, ever find yourself thinking there's no reason to go on living?
This was the litany she gave clients. Like a blood test, an X-ray. A lot depended on their answer. Of course, they had to be telling the truth. They had to be honest with themselves.

The workshop had already started. There were a few shushes
and severe looks. She and Mandy slumped down on the floor, their backs to the wall, hidden by the dining room table already set with refreshments. Mandy reached up and slipped two asparagus sandwiches out from under their plastic wrap. She handed one to Heather.

If Heather wrote a story fuelled by the desire for a time that no longer existed, she would need to give her central character a name, and she would never be able to decide on one that fit, other than Benny, which, of course, had been his name.

Someone was reading a poem about an island. Someone else likened it to Walt Whitman.

Or she could begin: A woman and a man meet. She is a clinical social worker, single. He is an architect, married, with one son. Six years later, he becomes sick.

She was in his home only once. It was in that time between winter and spring. He told her over the phone no more than the plain fact: he'd been diagnosed with cancer. She cancelled the rest of her appointments for the day and drove immediately to his house.

He was there alone. His son was in school and his wife — a substitute teacher — had been called in that morning. It was afternoon, but there was still the smell of toast and coffee and something sweet — syrup? — in the kitchen, where they stood a while awkwardly. She could see that everyone had rushed away to their day: a bowl half-filled with milk and soggy cereal, dirty mugs and spoons, a plate with crumbs, the tub of margarine and jar of jam, all still on the kitchen table by the window overlooking the park. And beside the sink: a stack of gunkcovered plates and pots and pans from supper the night before. An opened bottle of white wine stood on the counter, someone's plan to return it to the refrigerator unrealized.

As Heather followed Benny upstairs, she felt a vague desire begin to surface. She paced herself as she ascended the staircase, passing the family photographs hung on the wall: babies with
wizened faces, fresh from their births at the hospital; adults in crooked birthday hats; a delighted woman in her wedding dress, holding a champagne glass; a toddler with his hair in his eyes, hanging from the neck of a young Inky; the still-coiled body of a man golfing, his chin up as he scans the sky for the outcome of his shot.

“Is that you Benny?”

Benny was standing at the top of the stairs, watching her. He said, “Those were all taken before I knew you.”

It sounded like an apology. She looked up at him, wanting to hear more, but he had turned away.

And then the smoky black and whites: three young men in graduation costume; a string of women in long skirts on a rocky beach, hands over their eyes as though the sun might carry them off; a young woman with silky movie-star beauty, posed naked to her shoulders, the rest of her body artfully dissolved; some-one's grandmother in an apron, standing by the Christmas tree, smoking, caught in the act of shaking her head, Don't take my picture, I'm not prepared.

At the top of the stairs Heather can't face Benny. It isn't just his bad news. It's that all this time she has failed to recognize what it is she should have desired: to inhabit the body of the woman who lives in this house. She wants to stand in the centre of this woman's family — the centre of this universe — and be entitled to all her history and expectations.

She wants that family album — both tastefully and ostentatiously displayed along the stairway — to be her own and of her own making. She wants Inky, struggling to rise from the carpet at the foot of the master bed to nuzzle her in the crotch, to have been hers. She wants to have known him as a puppy, rubbed his nose in his accidents, retrieved him from the pound. She wants to have been part of every decision that was ever made about him. And about the cat, curled over a pile of magazines in the window seat, and the iguana, rabbit and gerbils she will never see.

And about his son, Cooper, whom they can hear coming in the house.

Without a word to each other, Heather and Benny return downstairs. In the kitchen, the boy shakes her hand. He has dark hair and a blanket of nutty brown freckles across the bridge of his nose. She sees that the act of employing everything his parents have taught him about manners does not come easily to him. He turns back to the counter and places a cold pancake between two pieces of toast. He is an unusual boy. She had never known this.

She looks at Benny and realizes he loves his son dearly. The boy is eleven, but already it is obvious he will not be tall. A miniature Benny.

Benny jokes, “We suspect he doesn't eat his lunch at school,” and the boy is embarrassed.

“So I gave you those papers?” Benny asks her.

Heather stares at him. His question confuses her, but he sees that and says, “The Spruce Cove project? It's important we have the designs completed by the end of the weekend.”

He's telling her he wants to get away for the weekend with her as soon as possible. There is a twinkle in his eye. Looking forward to this seems to be enough to sustain him, but Heather knows it won't be enough for her.

Benny turns back to the boy. “She's going now. What do you say?”

The boy hesitates, blinking. “Nice to meet you, Miss,” he mumbles.

As Benny escorts her to the front door, Heather glances into the living room. There is a pile of stuffed toys in the centre of the room. She would have thought the boy too old to be playing with these, but then, what does she know about children?

“What the hell is he doing?” Mandy whispered.

Heather was thinking that if a client came to her, talking about gallivanting through the woods in order to spy on a man in order for that client's sister to write a story about desire, she would have to ask, Do you really think this is wise?

“And I'm freezing.”

“You're freezing, Mandy, because you're dressed for the catwalk, not the outdoors.”

Mandy grinned. “I know.” She was wearing a bulky faux fur coat, but it clearly did nothing against the cold. Snow had come early this year — though the experts were saying it would not last — and both had worn inappropriate footwear: Heather, waterproof calfskin boots that were apparently not waterproof and Mandy, oxfords whose fleece trim was already soiled.

“Did you bring your cellphone?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

They had followed Darren Foley by car from the Canadian Wildlife Service parking lot nearly a hundred kilometres up the Southern Shore, and then, as their elation wore off, on foot over an old woods road through a forest of freakish trees crusty with ice and draped in some kind of fungus or parasite, giving them both a feeling of having miscalculated in some profound way. Darren had brought snowshoes, causing Mandy to remember him as “that little smartie,” but ATVs had already been out and packed down the snow, making their hike easy, if not leisurely. Despite her cold feet, Heather realized with surprise she was enjoying the excursion. She took a big deep breath, closed her eyes and breathed out with a happy hum.