Authors: Linden MacIntyre
It was a cool September morning, the eighteenth, she would recall, sky blue, air freshened by a breeze from the northwest. She planned the route, up Broadview, past the jail and through the park, along the pedestrian ramp that crossed the Don Valley Parkway, up through the model farm, where children would already be scampering.
I’ll be a grandma soon
, she thought, and there was a ping of pleasure in the memory of Cassie’s news. There was a coffee shop on Parliament where, according to JC, the brew was unbeatable. She’d pause there, maybe eat a muffin.
At Bloor and Sherbourne, she could feel a blister starting, so she abandoned the walk for the subway, which she rode to St. George station. Emerging from the subway car, she was startled to remember that it was fewer than two years earlier, on that same platform, that he’d called her name.
The student needed help with sources for a thesis on the influence of myth in history. He had the British Isles in mind, with particular attention to Scotland. He was older than she had expected and unabashedly flirtatious, exuding a cockiness she knew would either serve him well or ruin him in the long run.
She had just checked her wristwatch, and it was ten fifteen when the phone on her desk rang. She excused herself. She didn’t recognize the voice at first.
“It’s John,” the caller said.
“John?”
“John Gillis. I’m sorry to be calling, but it’s kind of urgent. I tried calling your other numbers, but thank God I had this one too. Do you think you could come home? Right away?”
“Home?”
“Home. Cape Breton.”
“Oh, John,” she said. “What …?”
“It’s your friend Campbell,” he said. “JC. Something happened. You need to come home as soon as you can.”
“What happened?”
“I can’t talk now. The cops are in the yard. They want to talk to me again.”
“For God’s sake, what happened, John?”
“Some people tried to rob him. Call me when you know what time your flight arrives. I can meet you at the airport.”
S
he flew out that night, and she would remember how the communities below her looked like the glowing embers of campfires in the darkness.
The light is life
, she thought. She tried to imagine people on the ground, wrapped tightly in their lives, sealed in the particularities of now, mid-sentence, mid-argument, mid-laugh, mid-meal, -drink, -piss, mid-copulation. Everybody, everywhere, engaged, mid-something. And JC, somewhere, in mid-struggle to survive. She tried to pray.
John hadn’t told her very much.
“He’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look good. That’s all I know.”
She’d forgotten to ask which hospital. She prayed that it was the little hospital near home, that it wasn’t one of the larger regional facilities in Antigonish or Sydney. The greater the distance to the hospital, the greater the cause for alarm.
“He’s in Halifax,” John said as he took the airport exit to the city.
“He’s in the ICU at whatever they call the old Infirmary these days.”
“Halifax?”
“They had to airlift him.”
John reached across the car to hold her hand. For the first time, she noticed that his right arm was in a cast from his knuckles to his elbow.
“It’s the best place he could be,” John said. “He’ll get the best of care.”
“What happened, John?”
“I can only tell you what I know,” he said.
Friday night John went for a run. It was his best time, after the baby was down for the night, or at least part of it. He jogged out past her old place, as far as the main highway, then along the highway to the little airport near Port Hastings. On the way back, he felt a slight twinge in his knee.
“It’s an old problem,” he said. “Whenever I feel that starting, I back off. You can’t mess with the knee.”
Near her gate he slowed to a walk. There was a light on in the house, but that was not unusual. There was a light there every night. But that night there was also an unfamiliar car parked near the gate.
“I noticed it was parked kind of crooked, and it wasn’t there when I went by the first time.”
As he passed behind the car, there was a loud crash from inside the house. He stopped. At that moment the car door opened, and with the inside now illuminated, he could see a woman there, or a girl. He couldn’t tell, not right away. She slid out of the car and shut the door, and it was dark again.
There was a shout from inside, someone’s name. Obviously hers. She opened the gate and started running toward the house. Now there were sounds of a violent struggle inside, and he followed her.
As he reached the door, it opened suddenly and what was now
clearly a young girl, a teenager, brushed past him. She was carrying something. “It looked to me like one of those portable computers.”
“His laptop?” Effie said.
“That’s what it looked like.”
Inside there was blood, spattered on the refrigerator and smeared on the linoleum. JC was on the floor, and there were two men kicking him. They were young men. JC was curled in a fetal ball, hands covering his head.
“I headed for the closest guy, but he spotted me and turned. I noticed that his left arm was kind of limp, dangling like. So I got him with a hard right. It was a good one, and he went staggering backwards, but my fist caught his forehead mostly … so this happened.” He held up his injured hand. “The knuckle broke and the wrist got sprained.”
At that point the second attacker had grabbed John, but clumsily, shoving him so that he stumbled on JC’s body and fell across it.
“That was when I realized it wasn’t JC’s blood. He wasn’t cut. The blood was from the other guy, the one with the bad arm. When I scrambled up, I found one of those little utility knives. That must have been what JC used.”
She was now in a state of merciful paralysis.
“I read somewhere that, if you know what you’re doing, you can really cripple someone with one of those things and they never see it coming. Cutting the right place in an arm or a leg or a neck. I guess that’s what JC did. Crippled the guy’s arm when they were grappling.”
As he struggled to his feet, John could hear the car speeding away. Afterwards, he wasn’t able to remember much—not year or make or model, not even colour. One of those nondescript mid-sized Asian cars that all seem to look the same.
JC stirred and sat up. He seemed dazed. John thought he was fine. But then he vomited, and there was a lot more blood on the floor, and he just kind of rolled over and curled up in it. John knew he couldn’t wait for an ambulance. He found JC’s car keys, and they were at the local hospital in less than half an hour. “I kept talking to him as I drove. We were flying on those back roads, me talking a blue streak, but he wasn’t answering. I was holding on to his hand with my bad hand, and I could feel it getting colder as we drove. But I wasn’t sure if the coldness was from him or me.”
Clearly at least one of the kicks to JC’s head had done serious harm.
“He hurt his head in January,” she said. “He was in the hospital, in Toronto.”
“You’d better tell them that,” said John. They had entered a vast parking lot in front of a hospital glittering with light. For the first time, she was gripped by a nearly suffocating fear.
The doctor was a young woman, still in her twenties, by Effie’s estimate. She had an authoritative confidence when she told them that they’d have to wait a bit. There was another assessment of the patient under way.
“Can’t you tell us anything?” Effie asked, struggling for poise.
“Are you his …?”
“Wife,” Effie said abruptly.
The doctor studied a clipboard. “We have him down as single,” she said.
“Well, you’re wrong,” said John. “I’m her ex-husband. I can vouch for it. And that man inside there is more husband to her than I ever was.”
The doctor looked from one to the other. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It isn’t important, anyway. You’re Dr. Gillis? I think your name is on here somewhere.”
“How bad is it?” Effie asked.
“We don’t have a clear prognosis yet, but the injuries are serious.”
Effie wondered about what she saw as aloofness in the doctor’s manner.
Do they disengage when they know the case is hopeless?
“I’ll come back,” the doctor said, “when I have something to report. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a cafeteria on the second floor, if you want to wait there.”
“Can I see him, just for a second?” Effie asked, now barely in control. “I’d just like to see him.”
“Not right now,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back.”
“How long have you two known each other?” John asked her.
“I met him when I first moved to Toronto,” she said, suddenly aware of how easily she had strayed to the edge of the unspeakable narrative behind those simple words: “when I first moved to Toronto.” She searched his face, but there was no reaction there.
“That’s a long time ago,” John said.
“He was part of the crowd Sextus knew. Then he went away. Years went by. Decades. He resurfaced two years ago.”
“What a shame,” said John. “For this to happen.”
They were silent then, the sounds around them—muted conversations, the clatter of mugs and plates and cutlery, bland voices calling doctors over unseen speakers—accelerating a slide into a weary sense of helplessness.
John sighed, studying his coffee mug. “Funny they’d pick your place, and him a stranger there. When these things happen, it’s usually to someone everybody knows. Some old fellow living by himself. And sad to say, more often than not the culprit is a
neighbour or a relative. But he has no connections there. So you have to wonder. Just the luck of the draw, I guess.”
She felt cold. “What did she look like, that girl sitting in the car?”
“I couldn’t say. Everything happened so fast. I might have got a look at her when I met her in the doorway, but there was so much going on inside …” He shrugged.
The doctor reappeared. “There you are,” she said. She smiled, and Effie read it as a sign of hope.
“You can see him, but only for a moment. You’ll find him very groggy, and he can’t speak.”
He was propped up in a high bed, a thin blanket covering his lower body. His mouth was distorted by a plastic hose that ran from a chugging ventilator. There were transparent lines taped to his arms and abdomen. His head was bandaged. On a stand beside the bed, an electronic line of light lurched erratically.
She felt wobbly, clamped to John’s good arm.
JC’s eyes unexpectedly flipped open, and she saw what looked like panic in his glance.
“Who did this?” she whispered.
He closed his eyes and turned away, limply raised an arm, moved a hand toward hers. She caught it briefly. His hand seemed small and dry, diminished, and at the touch of it, she felt time stop.
She was there for only seconds, but the images would last a lifetime. And then there was a sudden urgent sound from the monitor beside the bed. The young doctor quickly reappeared. “You’ll have to leave,” she said.
Effie could feel the pressure of John’s hand as he gently drew her back and away. She could already hear raised voices and hurried footsteps in the corridor. The doctor swiftly drew a curtain.
T
he city was an hour behind them before she felt the confidence to speak aloud. “There’s a curse on the place,” she said quietly.
“What place?” said John.
“My place. Home. Maybe the Long Stretch. Maybe the whole wretched island. We’re all cursed.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” John said. And the silence fell upon them once again.
The formalities were over. JC, in a moment of clarity, had legally designated Effie as his next of kin when he was admitted to the hospital. They advised her that it would be up to her to notify the other members of his family. She said she would, even though she knew of only two and she had no idea what, if anything, she’d ever say to them. The doctor told her there would have to be an autopsy because of the circumstances, and she agreed.
“Ever since your father,” Effie said. “Since that day. The day Kennedy was assassinated. Everything seems to lead back to that day. And what happened that day colours my memory of everything before it.”
John was nodding. “You aren’t the only one felt that way,” he said, eyes fixed on the road ahead of them.
“Nothing’s been normal since then.”
We become bystanders
, she thought.
In all the large, life-altering moments, we are on the margins
. The outcome of the crisis happening behind the curtain in that sterile room would redefine her as she had once been redefined by an unseen act of violence in the forest and, before that, a single unknown outrage in a war of inconceivable ferocity. There was nothing she could say or do, not then, not now. JC’s word came back to her. “Impotence.”
After what had seemed to be an hour, the doctor said the words Effie had prepared herself to hear: “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
“You never get over it,” John now said. “You cope the best you can. You try to manage with what you have. But you never get over it.”
She reached across the car and touched his broken hand. “How long will you have to leave the cast on?”
“Months,” he said. “No big deal. It’ll get me out of doing housework.”
The young doctor had telephoned a downtown hotel. There was one awkward moment as she cupped the telephone receiver and asked, “One room or two?”
“Two,” John said quickly.
Outside her door, he hesitated, then wrapped his arms around her and held her firmly, as if to save their bodies from the sudden explosion of her grief. It lasted for perhaps a minute, and then he relaxed, released her and stepped back. “Life’s awful flimsy,” he said.
She nodded and turned toward the door. He was still standing there when she closed it gently.
After the first call from Toronto, she decided to turn off her cellphone and put it away for good—forever, if such a blessing could be arranged. The voice had been impersonal. “I’m calling from the newsroom. The wires are reporting what happened. I got your number from Molly Blue. She didn’t think you’d mind …”
She’d mumbled something briefly. Maybe, “We really don’t know anything. I’m sorry.” Which was very, very true.