Authors: Linden MacIntyre
“The elastic band is new,” she said. “It was loose in an envelope when I last saw it.”
“Well, that’s how I got it.”
“And he said nothing.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I have to sit,” she said. Her legs felt weak.
“I have a better suggestion,” he said, reaching for her hand.
She woke to the sound of her cellphone ringing in the kitchen, where she’d left it. She closed the bedroom door behind her. It was Stella, with a dinner invitation. “Duncan wants an evening with you both before he goes.”
“Before he goes?”
“Back to Toronto. He can explain it himself. Are you free tonight?”
“Of course,” said Effie.
The manuscript was on the kitchen table, near where she’d left the phone, and she was tempted to start reading it. But she resisted. JC’s story was all too simple. Why would someone who had risked so much to steal it simply hand it back without a word?
His jacket was hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. She slipped a hand into a pocket. There was a paper that turned out to be a folded boarding pass. Car keys. Then a slim plastic object that she recognized even without seeing it. She removed the little cutting tool and examined it. Extended, then retracted the small pointed blade, sniffed at it then returned it to the pocket. She sat perplexed.
After long minutes she stood and found her purse and, from it, she retrieved the business card and walked outside with her phone. She studied the name: Paul Campion. She entered the numbers and listened as a phone rang somewhere in Toronto. Her thumb was poised to disconnect the moment someone picked up on the other end. But it just rang and rang and rang. Eventually a mechanical voice intruded. The inbox for the party being called was full. Please try your call later, it instructed.
She returned to her place at the kitchen table and sat again, hand resting on the document that she knew recorded so much of her past. Still she couldn’t bring herself to read it.
When JC emerged into the kitchen, his face was that of an unsuspecting sleepy child. He rubbed an eye socket with a fist, face contorted.
“You distracted me last night,” he said. “I fell asleep with a contact in.”
“I didn’t know you wore contacts.”
“Just one.”
“That’s odd.”
“No. Owww. It stings.”
“I was sitting here wondering. About all the things I don’t know about you.”
He walked toward the chair where his jacket was hanging, fumbled through the pockets.
“I usually keep eye drops handy … there should be some in here somewhere.”
His hand was now in the side pocket, exploring.
“Oh,” he said. “You’ll be interested in this.” And he was holding up the utility knife. “Look what they returned to me before I left.”
“Who?”
“The police. Apparently they sent it to the lab, looking for clues …”
“I didn’t realize the guy had been stabbed,” Effie said.
“He wasn’t.”
“Oh? What happened to him?”
JC was examining the cutter, extending then retracting the blade.
“Fractured skull,” he said. “Apparently.”
“So why were they interested in that thing?”
“It was a trick,” he said. “If I was to act like I knew how he really died, they’d want to know how I knew something they hadn’t made public.”
“So how did you know?”
He was now searching her face, expression changed. “Ummm … I didn’t. Not then.” He paused. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said. She studied his face for guile, for all the tics and colouration that betray deception.
“Come here,” he said. With his arms tight around her, he said, “We have about a month. How about we try to solve as many mysteries as possible in that time?”
Unexpectedly she wept, but only briefly.
They were approaching Creignish, and Stella’s. “It’s almost August,” she said.
“It’s my fault you missed most of July,” he said. “I kept you stuck in Toronto. Wondering what I was up to.”
“I don’t think I missed much. Sextus says the weather sucked.”
“Weather isn’t what you come here for.”
“What, then? Scenery?”
The sun was hanging above the horizon ahead of them, St. George’s Bay a vast, dark, dimpled plain.
“Civility,” he said, after a long pause. “It’s for the civility.”
She laughed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“People need each other in small places. Necessity inspires civility. Trust me.”
“You’re being sentimental,” she said. “You’d better get over that if you’re going to stay here. One winter will knock that out of you.”
Duncan was loading a large suitcase into the back seat of Stella’s car when they arrived. “We want to make an early start,” he said. “Crack of dawn. There’s a flight at eight.”
“What’s the plan, then?” Effie asked.
“Stella’s driving me to the airport. What did you think?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what to think anymore. So much for your theory about female clarity at middle age.”
He slammed the trunk lid and stood, hands on his hips.
“So what does it all mean?” Effie asked her brother. “In plain English.”
“In plain English I’m being relieved of my priestly duties, except in dire circumstances. If someone is near death I can hear confession and offer absolution. Otherwise, I go back to doing what I was doing at the shelter. Cook, dishwasher, janitor, bouncer and buddy to the down and out.”
“And Stella?”
“She thinks some time apart might be useful for perspective.”
Effie laughed. “You’ve always been apart, except for the past couple of weeks. What perspective?”
“I need time to think.”
“But,” Effie said, “with this laicization, you’re now both free to—”
“I haven’t got it yet,” said Duncan. “And even when I do, what you’re talking about requires a dispensation from the top, from the big fella in Rome. That’s if we’re even interested in all that.”
“Surely just a formality,” JC said.
“Forgive me,” Duncan said. “I’m old-fashioned.”
Over dinner JC asked, “Could you come back, live here?” And he looked from Duncan to Stella.
“Would I want to?” Duncan replied. “I’ve spent most of my life here already, for all there is to show for it.”
JC shrugged. “We mostly never really know what there is to show, which is probably a good thing, on balance.”
“So,” Duncan said. “I hear you’re giving up the TV business.”
“Going to stick around here for a while. Reconnect with my roots.”
“A fella can’t eat those kinds of roots,” Duncan said.
“That won’t be a problem,” JC said. “The TV racket has been good to me.”
By mid-August they had found compatible routines. She slept late, he rose early. She would feel the bed move, briefly stare toward a window. Dawn was coming later now that summer had begun to wane. She would close her eyes and listen as he moved silently toward the bedroom door. He had the gift of stealth, she noted, the ability to float just above the floor, to pass through doors without a sound. How long, she wondered, would this strangeness last? And she remembered others in her life, men who kept small sectors of their inner selves reserved, the places out of which surprises came.
Daddy? What’s that in your hand?
She shuddered, drew the blankets tight. And as she slid back into sleep, she could hear the soft thud of the keyboard in her office.
Unlike when she worked, he seemed to carry most of his raw resources in his head. There were two books. She had opened one,
Among the Lowest of the Dead
. She had read the first line on the first page of text: “On Florida’s death row, in the bloom time of spring, grimy windows beyond the cell bars glow with the beauty of freedom …” She quickly closed it. The second book was very slim—
Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot. He had underlined “What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.” There was a reporter’s notebook and the small square computer disc that he carried in his pocket any time they left the house. Since he’d explained it, the word “impotence” had lost its dreadful meaning.
“Sam told me once that if you start from the end and work back, everything makes a lot more sense. And a lot of what mattered doesn’t anymore,” he’d said.
“But we can’t know the end,” she said.
“That’s true. That’s why Sam was such a gift, a chance to observe someone at the end. With Sam, everything worked back to a bad
head injury when he was a kid. Nothing about his life was predictable after that. But things made sense in retrospect. Maybe everybody has one, a point from which everything starts to get a little bit out of control, but you can only know it in the distant future. I’ve figured mine out, for the time being.”
“Not the head injury on New Year’s?” she’d replied.
“No,” he scoffed. “That was nothing. It was way before that. Back in my second year of university. When the word came. Four words actually: ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ ”
One August morning, as the sun rose high and slowly dried the silent land, she walked outside. The world felt stationary, emptied out and motionless except for flimsy contrails in the sky. She studied them, watched them break apart and fuse with cloud, and the reality of people up there, chatting, reading, dozing, was unimaginable. She resumed her study of the land around her, trees without boundaries, the old road that went nowhere in particular. Then JC was there beside her. He was holding the manuscript.
“What about this?” he asked. “What do you propose to do with it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I find it distracting,” he said.
“Feel free to read it,” she said.
“I only read for what I need to know,” he said. “There’s nothing here I need.”
“We could burn it. He said he doesn’t want it back. We could have a ceremonial purging of the past.”
“Let me know what you decide,” he said. And he went back inside.
August melted down. He worked most mornings while she slept. Late breakfasts flowed into the afternoons. Long dinners occupied
their evenings. They rarely went to town. At some point she finally acknowledged an awareness she’d been resisting.
Stability
, she told herself.
I feel stable in this new arrangement
.
On a morning late in August she found him sitting at the kitchen table, examining a knife. It was a large knife, and he seemed mesmerized and didn’t see her in the doorway. Then he looked up.
“What’s the matter?”
She found her voice. “What are you doing with that?”
“It’s an antique. I found it in Texas, in a junk shop. It’s a Bowie knife. Dates back to God knows when. I once heard that Bowie’s people originated in Nova Scotia somewhere. Acadians.”
“Get it out of my sight,” she said.
He slipped the knife into a sheath, placed it in a briefcase. “Come here.” He stood, and when she didn’t respond, he walked toward her. “Let’s go sit outside,” he said. “I have coffee on. I’ll bring us some.”
“I’m not going to pretend I don’t know what that was about,” he said.
She sipped her coffee, avoiding his eyes.
“I didn’t realize you were up,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
When she knew that she could trust her vocal cords, she said, “I hate fucking knives.”
“I know.”
“What do you know?” She was staring off into the distance at nothing in particular.
“I read a few pages of that tome,” he said, after some thought. “With what you told me, it’s fairly clear.”
“Oh?”
“About your dad and his obsession with a knife and …”
“And what?”
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“But I don’t know what’s not to talk about.”
“Okay.” And the silence closed in again.
Finally, she asked, “What did Sextus write?”
“What do you remember?”
“I remember that my father had a knife like that, and I remember him just sitting there with that knife, looking at me strangely. Sometimes, at night, standing in my bedroom doorway. And once …”
He waited.
“And once he was sitting there with the knife and Sandy Gillis walked in. And Sandy Gillis attacked him. That’s all I remember. Except that Sandy Gillis came to me later, asking. And I said that he was wrong.”
“Wrong about?”
“Wrong about what he thought he saw.”
“And it was after that …”
“Yes.”
“And was he wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was more than the knife, wasn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter. My father didn’t do anything.”
“Have you ever discussed this with Duncan?”
“Of course not.”
“Did he know?”
“I think so. He hit my father once.”
JC laughed briefly. “Seems like your dad got hit a lot.”
“What did you read?”
“Just a few pages. Sandy walks in, sees … something. Goes after your father. Your father later tries to get even, tells him a story about them raping someone during the war, and then killing her with a knife. It seems that Sandy had no memory of it because of a head injury, from when the girl shot him. And it was after that …”
“Does it say what Sandy thought he saw?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to elaborate.”
He nodded. “Do you remember when it started?”
“I remember being alone. Duncan went away somewhere, with the Gillises, I think, Sextus and his parents. I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“But this Sandy intervened at some point.”
She nodded.
“I could have prevented it, what Sandy did afterwards,” she said. “He was a kind man, down deep. Maybe if I had just thanked him for caring about me. But I blanked it out. And then, when I told him that he was mistaken when he thought he saw …”
She stood up. “I want to go inside. I feel cold.”
He stood and took her hand. “It’s ancient history,” he said. “There isn’t anything we can do to change it. It’s now a part of who we are, and who we are is okay with me.”
She examined his face briefly, then squeezed his hand and smiled. “We should go to town,” she said. “I don’t want to leave you here with empty cupboards.”
Effie hated shopping, always had a list, even for the groceries. And so she finished quickly. JC’s last known destination was a clothing store—to enhance his country wardrobe, was how he put it. She
loaded her bags into the car, then wandered back toward the mall. Her body buzzed with nervous energy. Her mind flitted through compressions of time.