Authors: Linden MacIntyre
Please, Daddy, let me go
.
Nothing happened. Something happened. The fatal contradictions fused somehow, somewhere, sometime distant years ago.
Sandy Gillis killed himself because of … what? What I said? What he saw? What happened in a war years before that moment?
And for the first time she seemed to understand that questions without the possibility of answers aren’t questions at all, just accusations, and that accusations without the evidence of memory are meaningless.
She considered buying coffee for the drive home, but as she approached the coffee shop she saw JC standing near the cash, talking to a girl. Effie recognized the angry teenager from the bookstore. JC was gripping the girl’s wrist, and from the expressions on their faces, the encounter was unpleasant. She backed off, but not before she saw the girl roughly yank her arm away. JC’s face was dark with anger, the girl’s face flushed as she wheeled and hurried off. Then Effie watched the slow transformation in JC’s expression, from anger to a helpless kind of grief she’d never seen before.
She went to him. “I saw.”
“Great.” He exhaled.
“That was … her?”
“My flesh and blood,” he said. “The peripatetic granddaughter.”
“Do you want to talk?” she asked.
“About what, exactly?”
“What happened?”
“She asked for money.” He shrugged. “I said sure, but maybe first we should talk about the missing chapter in her life, when she had
me running around Toronto like a lunatic. Upon which she told me to do the anatomically impossible.”
His expression was impassive. Then he spread his hands, signalling finality.
“You don’t owe her anything,” Effie said. “You went out of your way—”
“No, don’t,” he said sharply. “If I thought that …” He raised his arms defensively. “There are things you just have to do.”
“Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m in the mood for cooking.”
I
t was a three-hour drive to the Halifax airport, but it seemed to pass in minutes. She realized that she was actually pushing her body backward into the car seat as if to slow the journey down.
“I should have gone to see John’s baby,” she said. “I know they think it strange that I didn’t. I just couldn’t bear to.”
“Babies,” he said. “They make me nervous. Talk about impotence.”
“It isn’t that,” she said miserably. “It’s a measure of my character, or lack of it.”
JC laughed. “The baby is going to be around a lot longer than we are. There’ll be lots of time.”
“What if he’s Cassie’s half-brother?”
“What if he is?” JC said. “What difference would it make? They’re either that or they’re cousins. It’s just a matter of degree.”
“You never talk about your family,” she said. “You must have cousins.”
“Not that I know of.”
The countryside around them was green. The light was pale, the sky clear. “It’ll be a lovely day,” she said. “What will you do?”
“I’ll go straight home and get serious about the project,” he said.
“I just dread going back to the city. I used to look forward to it, but that business in July changed something.”
“There’s nothing in the city that you should have to worry about,” he said. “Trust me. The business in July was dealt with.”
“How do you know he won’t …?”
“People like that usually just need a good fright.”
“And you frightened him?”
“I think so.”
He left her with her bags at the curb. “I’ll not go in,” he said. “Public farewells aren’t my thing. Come here.”
They stood there as one, afraid to make eye contact, afraid to speak, until there was the sound of knuckles rapping on the fender of the car. A traffic officer stood there wagging a finger. “Time’s up,” he said. “Sooner or later, someone has to make a move. Might as well get it over with.”
“I’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” she said.
“I’ll be here.”
Briefly his lips brushed her cheek as he released her.
Cassie met her at the airport in Toronto. She had what seemed to be an endless store of questions, about JC, about Duncan, about the future. Then, on the expressway through downtown, she told her mother she and Ray were moving. He’d been invited to join a new medical practice in Sudbury. He longed to live closer to his family, and she could sympathize with that. “They’re my family now, too,” she said.
“I suppose.”
Cassie reached a hand across to her. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
With both hands now gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, Cassie said, “And we’re going to have a baby.”
Effie said nothing.
“Well?” said Cassie.
“I’m really happy for you.”
“You don’t sound happy.”
“I’m thinking of your father.”
“He’ll freak, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. He seems different. You haven’t told him?”
“I was waiting to tell you. Maybe you can help me break the news.”
“When the time is right.”
“Yes. When the time is right.”
“Ray must be over the moon.”
“Yes. But … you know, his age.”
“Come on,” she said. “Ray isn’t old.”
“Ma! He’s sixty-three.”
“Sixty-three?”
“What did you think?”
“I guess I forgot.”
Cassie began manoeuvring the car to take an exit to the Annex, but Effie told her to drive on. “I’m not going there, to Huron,” she said. “I’m going to Walden. I’m going to live there for a while.”
“Perfect,” Cassie said. “Finally.”
“JC is staying in Cape Breton for the time being. There have been some changes over the summer.”
“What kind of changes?”
“I’ll tell you, but not right now. Just take me to Walden.”
It was September, but the city felt even more oppressive than when she’d left it in July. The sky was a moist grey blanket compressing the accumulated fumes from car exhaust and gases from the rotted produce piled nightly on the sidewalks for collection. Her daily walks through the little Chinatown on Broadview accentuated her feelings of exclusion; on the Danforth, there were women, faces hidden, speaking glottal Arabic where, years ago, she found the Greek romantic. She fought annoyance as she struggled through impassively aggressive little women wearing what appeared to be pyjamas, past the leaking piles of garbage exploding out of plastic bags and bloodstained cartons piled in front of shops that somehow now seemed sinister.
It was no better on St. George, near her office, where the throngs of ageless, timeless students seemed more than ever to be self-absorbed and hyperactive pampered children, products of delusional parental expectations.
During endless meetings with faculty and students, she would drift away on the gentle swell of recent memory, yawning compulsively. She was sleeping badly, partly because of the undiminished nighttime heat, partly thanks to a lingering fear that she was being stared at by a stranger.
Even before she left Cape Breton she had notified her landlord that she would have to break the lease for her apartment. He was sympathetic and, she suspected, not unhappy at the prospect of a rent increase. With Cassie’s help, she’d organized her possessions and arranged for storage.
“I wish you’d told us about the creep,” Cassie said. “You know it happens all the time. Men preying on women who live alone. Ray could have handled it.”
“It’s been taken care of,” she said. And changed the subject.
“Did you get a name?” her daughter asked.
“I had a name, but I’ve forgotten it,” she said.
But she hadn’t. The business card was on her desk. She’d consulted a street guide to locate the address, in a neighbourhood they called the Upper Beach. And one evening, after she had consumed several glasses of wine with her solitary meal, she drove there and sat out front. It was an unusually quiet street, hardly any traffic, no sign of children or family activities.
Maybe if she saw him once again, the bland reality of what he looked and sounded like would neutralize the menacing shapes and sounds that haunted her imagination. Maybe, with the restoration of an accurate impression, she could stop scanning the faces of strangers in the streets and coffee shops.
Eventually she saw a woman approaching from a streetcar stop. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, and there was a small boy hanging on to one hand. In her other hand she had a bag of groceries. She turned in to the walkway at the address on the business card.
Effie knew by her easy movements that she lived there—the house key slipped without hesitation into the lock, the door swung open, the boy ushered in ahead.
Effie waited for five minutes. Darkness was gathering, and she could see a glow of light inside the house. She opened the car door.
The woman’s face was fixed in what seemed to be an expression of permanent caution, eyes full of questions, door not quite open.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Effie said brightly. “I had a friend who lived here. Paul Campion …”
“He isn’t here,” the woman said.
“He did live here, though?”
“He did, but he doesn’t anymore. How did you know him?”
“It was casual. We’d have coffee. I loaned him something. A book …”
“He isn’t here.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“Paul passed away,” the woman said. “I don’t know about any book.”
“He passed away,” Effie repeated. “When? What happened?”
“A month or so ago. I’m sorry to tell you he took his own life.”
“My God … I’m sorry,” Effie said.
“The Bloor viaduct,” she said. “That’s where he did it.”
“And you’re his …”
“I’m his sister.”
She drove back to Walden in a daze. She poured a drink but had to put it down to prevent spilling it. It was nearly ten o’clock, time for his nightly call.
The pronunciation was terrible, but the voice was warm and shy: “
Ciamar a tha mo nighean ruadh bhoidheach a-nochd?
”
“You didn’t tell me he was fucking dead,” she replied. She had not intended to use the F-word or to put such biting emphasis on “dead.” But it was out, and everything was changed.
There was a long silence. Suddenly she wished she had simply answered his garbled question, had said, “Your pretty redhead isn’t great tonight. In fact, she’s feeling pretty rotten.”
“Who is fucking dead?”
“Campion,” she said. “The stalker.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit. You’re telling me you didn’t know?”
“If I knew something like that, I’d have told you.”
“Really?”
“Hey. Why don’t I call back in half an hour when you’ve had time to think this through.”
“What on earth did you do to him?”
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line, and it was, to her, more powerful than anything he might have said. “What happened to him?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m asking.”
“What if I told you it was a fractured skull?”
“Shit. Really? How did that happen?”
“He went off the viaduct.”
There was a laugh, more of a barking sound. “You think I tossed him over. Is that what I’m hearing?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that.”
“So it was a suicide.”
“That’s what they think.”
“They don’t usually report suicides, especially not off the viaduct. Where did you get this?”
She froze for just an instant, then felt an old, familiar grief congealing near her heart. Her voice was a hateful whimper and she knew it. “I don’t know. Somewhere, someone.” After another long silence, she said simply, “I’ve got to go now.”
What is it about me?
she wondered.
What draws the damaged and the doomed?
Sandy Gillis in a doorway; Conor in his gym; this stranger, Campion, smiling at her in a coffee shop; men passing through her life, a constancy of needs, of mother-sister-daughter neediness.
When does it end?
The phone rang. Suddenly, the drink she’d been reaching for was toppling. She grabbed it, licked the splash from her hand, then picked up the phone.
“You’re still there,” he said.
“Where did you think I’d be?”
“I don’t blame you for being shocked,” he said. “But I really didn’t know.”
“I shouldn’t have insinuated. It’s me who should be sorry. I just wish that you were here.”
“Me too,” he said. “I’m actually not making much progress. I might be just as well off there.”
“You decide,” she said.
“I’ve been going over it in my head. What I might have said to him.”
“What exactly did you say?”
“Well, I told him he was a freak and a pervert, and that if he didn’t hand over the document he’d swiped from you I was going to put his mug on television, to warn innocent people about him.”
“You didn’t!”
“I never thought he’d take it seriously. I was only trying to provoke him. I found him pathetic, and I didn’t like that. I’d have preferred belligerence.”
“And that was all.”
“I swear to God almighty.”
“Maybe it was the manuscript,” she said. “Reading my sordid story just made life not worth living anymore.”
“Who knows?” JC said.
“Christ,” she said. “Do you really think that’s a possibility?”
“Come on,” he said. “The guy was a nutcase. Anything’s possible.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m the problem.”
He was silent for a while. “I really do think I’m going to have to abandon this thing. At least move it back to Toronto. Life’s too short for us to be like this.”
“It’s your call,” she said.
“I’ll sleep on it. Tomorrow night? Same time?”
“Please. I promise to be in better cheer.”
“I love you,” he said. And she repeated the words, and later tried to remember if it was the first time she’d spoken them to him.
It was Thursday night. On Friday night he didn’t call.
She woke early on Saturday. She’d slept badly, waiting for the phone to ring. But somehow, in spite of the cascade of speculative reasons for his silence, she drifted off and mercifully slept through till nearly eight o’clock.
She had booked a meeting with a history major for ten o’clock. She got out of bed resolved to activate her dormant optimism. It must be in there somewhere, she told herself, like a long unused article of clothing that suddenly was back in style. In the shower she decided that she’d walk to the office. She needed the exercise.