Circle of Stones (7 page)

“Never seen him.” I know the officers are watching me so I try not to do anything weird. I whistle at Stan to come over to me so I can pet him, but he just stares at me. I want to ask the officers for more details, but I figure they're not going to tell me more. All I can come up with to say is: “Our dog is really old.” David and Smith ignore me.

“Where do you think Miklos is?” David asks.

“I think he's looking for Jennifer.”

“You don't think he committed suicide,” Smith says.

“No way.”

David nods at Smith and they both stand. Smith hands me a business card. David watches as I put it in my pocket.

“Call if you remember anything else,” Smith says, heading toward the door. As I stand to follow them, the back of the chair comes off in my hand. I drop it onto the yellow-spotted linoleum with a clatter. David glances back. Smith is already out on the porch.

I don't look in at my dad as I head down the stairs. I know he's been listening from the living room the whole time, as if the exchange were a TV drama. In my room I open my grandparents' ratty old antique wardrobe and feel through shirts and jeans from high school that I'll never wear again. At the very back my fingers seize on cardboard. I pull out a large canister containing the dozen canvases Nik left behind in Vancouver. I didn't trust them with Ilana or Kendall. When I took them I thought one day it would be important to own a Miklos. I open the canister and unfurl the canvases on my bed. As I flip through each one, I start feeling angrier and angrier. They're brilliant. No one else was doing anything remotely like this while we were at Emily Carr. The paintings are better than what our instructors were doing, even. But with Nik missing, I'm no longer sure his paintings will ever be worth anything. He left a stunning mural on the wall of his room, but the landlord has probably already painted over it for new tenants. There's no way Ilana and Kendall could afford the rent on their own. These might be the only serious Miklos works that still exist. And it's impossible to know if he'll ever paint more. He should paint more though. Fuck. The world needs his work in it. It never needed or cared about my useless attempts. I used to be so jealous of him, his natural talent, his drive. And that made me mean. I put the paintings back in their hiding spot.

I stay up most of the night re-reading and marking up
The English Patient
. It keeps me from having to think about anything else. I fall asleep thinking of the desert, explosives, Caravaggio's missing thumbs. I wake up in the grey light of early morning thinking about Nik. About what I did.

I wait until both my parents leave for work, then throw on a pair of black jeans and head upstairs. My folks didn't bother to ask about the police visit. They're good at ignoring things. It's as though pretending I never went to Vancouver makes our current arrangement stronger. They want me to stay close, but I'm not sure why. They seem to need me the same way they need Stan: something to feed and occasionally pat on the head. I grab a random mug from the mismatched selection in the cupboard. Stan struggles to get up off the linoleum and stumbles over to me, sniffs my bare feet, licks my toe. I grab the plastic container of kibble from the cupboard and fill his bowl. We do this every morning, but he stills snuffles at it before beginning to eat, as though he's hoping for something else.

After my shower I wrap myself in a faded blue towel and slink back downstairs. I grab my laptop and sit on the bed to check my messages. There are a dozen new ones from Ilana, and I delete them all. They'll all be same thing: a bunch of garbage about what's going on in Vancouver, questions about why I left and demands for the month's rent they say I owe for not giving notice. I'm about to delete another one from an address I don't recognize, because I think it's spam, when the subject header catches my eye.

From: [email protected]

Subject: Remembering Nik

To: My family and friends

Dear friends,

As many of you are aware, my son Nik has been missing since May. The RCMP is leaving his case open, but his father and I are certain our beloved Nikky is gone. As you can understand, this has been extremely difficult for our family. We believe it's time to say goodbye. Please join us in remembering the wonderful stories Nik told through his art and the kindness he brought to all of our lives. We've created a personal page in his name at OnlineMemorial.com. For those of you on the island, please visit the beautiful memorial circle created for him at Rotary Beach Park by a close friend of his grandmother's.

Love Annette Miklos (Nikky's mom)

I click the link for the memorial and I'm stunned by how many people have written messages. Students from Emily Carr who never talked to us. Friends of Ilana and Kendall's that Nik barely knew. Even a few people I know for sure he never actually met. Everyone is turning it into a personal drama. Messages like, “I can't believe I'll never see him again. I miss him so much!” and “I'm devastated by this news. Life won't be the same without Nik” are so obviously more about the writer than they are about Nik. Several postings have his name spelled wrong, with the bereft missing Nick or Nico. Others brag of events that never happened. Nik never hung out with Monty Black (a loser from Emily Carr no one talked to) or took film studies with Claire Smolken (Nik hadn't yet taken any of his electives). I knew the goth, industrial, punk, and art school scenes we hung around in were full of fakers, but I didn't think they'd generate so much sham sentiment about the one person I know who is totally legit.

I scroll down the page, skipping over a bunch of names I don't recognize. When I get to the overlong posting by Ilana it's so emotionally manipulative and ridiculous I punch a hole in the unfinished drywall behind my desk. “I've never loved and respected a friend as much as I loved you,” she writes, as though communicating directly with him. “You'll never know how much you mean to me and how much I wanted to help you, you were always so sad and I wanted to make you smile and now you're a tragedy to make me sad but I will totally never forget you.” If I were to do a close read on that run-on sentence I could write a twelve-page paper about why Ilana was motivated to make it seem like she cared. I wonder what she and Kendall have been telling the RCMP about me.

After that I can't bring myself to read whatever dreck Kendall wrote. I keep scrolling. The latest, and shortest message on the page catches my eye:

“I can't believe he's dead.”

It's signed “J. in Ottawa.”

“Jennifer.” I say out loud.

I click the “add a new memorial message” link and write:

“He's not.” Then in the form field where it says “enter name” I type “Another Asshole.”

I turn my laptop off and crawl back into bed. I wrap my arms around a pillow and pull the covers over my head.

I'm on my way back to school. I stare at a pop can rolling back and forth along the subway car's floor until a construction guy in dirty jeans crushes it under his boot. I hear the can crack over the electronica streaming through my earbuds, but no one on the crowded car reacts. I hate that about Toronto. In Vancouver, people wait around for things to happen so they have something to complain about. Nik's clock radio was tuned to a news station broadcasting an unending spate of protest and B.C. government scandal stories. I used to sneak into his room, lie on his futon, and listen to it when he went to class, analyzing the nuances of every perceived injustice. If I were any good at art, I would have found a way to recreate that continuous spew. But what comes so easily to Nik is impossible for me. If you read any of his garbled, spelling-challenged emails you'd know he thinks in images, not words — another reason why the idea of him committing suicide is so stupid. He would have painted it first.

Another student is already waiting outside Professor Moreland's office. I'm stalling, so I sit down to wait my turn. I lean against the wall and close my eyes. I think of Vancouver and crave moisture, the smell of sea salt. And drugs.

Moreland's door clicks. I'm sitting by myself. I've fallen asleep. Totally lame.

“Oh, it's you again.” Moreland peers down at me. “Back already.” I stand up head-rush fast and follow her into the office. This time the electric kettle is idle.

“You can't have finished the book overnight.” Moreland sits down and sips something from her mug and I think I smell liquor. “Questions?”

I grab my book out of my bag and lean toward her, flipping through it to show her the underlining I've done throughout. I wrote a lot on the last page. Then I toss it onto the still-towering piles of papers on her desk and sit down.

Moreland looks at me with interest. I feel like I'm being read. Closely. “Learn anything?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Think so.”

“If you were to write your paper now, how would you do it differently?” Moreland leans forward to listen. She's expecting something from me now. Maybe she sees I'm not a total idiot.

“I would write about the patient instead of the nurse,” I say. “And I would talk about how the book is really about guilt, even though it's set up like a love story.”

Now I can't look at her. And she remembered my name. I stare at my book. The cover looks ratty. Mangled in my hands like everything else. I think about the night Nik left the apartment. How Ilana tried to set him up with an obvious lie. It seemed like a game. And then I got the spins and my heart raced like I'd taken something hard. All I'd had was some pot. And a glass of water. I saw Nik holding a glass of water. I didn't stop him from drinking it. I should have. Wish I would have. Ilana had dosed it with something or other. After that I got really sick. I puked so hard I heard Ilana whisper “I'm sorry.” Next thing I knew I was lying on the couch in the living room being shaken awake by a big bald man. He asked me where Jennifer was. He asked me where Nik was. I don't know why I told him.

Nik always used to walk the Vancouver bridges when he was feeling anxious. Before Ilana and Kendall moved in I used to always go with him. Granville Street was his favourite.

“What does the patient tell us about guilt?” Moreland is sitting very straight in her chair.

“He never should have left Katharine on her own. You shouldn't leave anyone who is hurting by themselves. And if you don't stand up for someone when you know you should — if you make the situation worse by what you don't do, and by some of the things you are doing, then you're basically a criminal.”

I look at the floor. I remember hearing Nik leave the apartment. I knew he was in for a bad trip. Nik liked to walk bridges because he'd stare out at the water and think of ideas for paintings. I knew where Nik was going and I told the lummox of a man who had his hands wrapped around my throat. When the man let go Ilana leaned over and hugged him hard. He said, “Hey babe,” and kissed her on the mouth in front of me. That's when I realized how little I knew about her. That I was caught in the middle of something. All I could do was sit frozen on the couch. I watched the man leave to find Nik. I didn't try to stop him.

I sit in Moreland's office and remember the man's fingers around my neck. I remember the look in Ilana's eyes when the man kissed her. And, for the first time, I remember what the man did next. He grabbed the wallet I'd left on the coffee table. I thought he was looking for cash. But now I realize he was looking at my Ontario driver's licence. That he knew my name and my Ontario address was — is — a threat. If he knew, then Ilana knew. She told the RCMP where to find me. What else did she say? I am such an idiot.

I wonder how Nik's boots ended up in the water. Whether it really was Nik I saw on Main Street. I could have said Nik went for a walk. I could have told that man anything. I thought I knew how to lie.

Moreland is looking straight through me. I'm transparent. Anyone can see I'm guilty.

Sondra: 9:28 a.m. I'm here again, doing everything myself. Where are you?

A
nother
morning's work interrupted. I stopped answering my sister's calls. Now she sends me text messages that she propels with all the sensitivity of bricks through my window. At first I texted back poetry to irk her. My favourite was Wordsworth:

Anne: My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky So was it when my life began

Anne: So is it now I am a man. So be it when I shall grow old Or let me die!

It was so effective she replied by voicemail. I wish I'd saved it. I enjoyed her repeated use of the word “avoidance.” I could have played for my students: “Class, this poem is a free-verse amalgam of patient parroted psychotherapy terminology. Is the contemporary dialectic always a reiteration of major canonical themes? How does the prescriptive, and somewhat brutal, realism of this form of spoken word differ from the language of the Romantics? Or Modernists? Or major Canadian authors? Discuss.”

Of course I would have had to stop the tape before the part where she said poetry is flippant, and my use of it destructive.

When we were teenagers Sondra wore her bangs flipped up in an overarching hairsprayed wave that evoked Ionic columns and made her look three inches taller. The trio of safety pins she stuck into her T-shirts for the two weeks she decided she was “punk” amused me, the older sister. I think she moved on to water polo after that. Or she liked a boy on the rowing team who wore polo shirts. Ever since she graduated from girlfriend to wife, my sister has been straight and neat as pins: flat-ironed hair, manicured nails, and navy-blue cardigans. She has an enormous gourmet Mixmaster, mausoleum marble countertops, an impressive home theatre. Her bathroom is ingeniously wired with radiant floor heat. Her house has warm tiles but no heart. It's devoid of books, the one incendiary device I wish for her children.

I dutifully send my niece and nephew age-inappropriate literature every Christmas. I am a responsible aunt.

I delete Sondra's morning messages and keep working. I must make use of every useful fragment of time before I'm inundated with students. Office-hour visits at this time of year are always grade complaints from overinflated egos. So many excuses. I would write the litany into a long-winded dirge, except too many of them are about sick cats. Or technological failures. Don't students fall into insane, reckless love anymore? Or does the continuous click, type, and mouse roll keep them too distracted to obsess? In lecture theatres I gaze out at the backsides of laptops operated by students with blank screen faces.

These are the precious, productive weeks between blasting air conditioning and dry, nosebleed heat at the university. Being among books in my office pleases me. I am protected by the towers of paper on my desk. I must soon open my door and shock another student with the bracing realities of academia. But first let me read this line by Wallace Stevens again. And let me again throw away the lights, the definitions, and say of what I see in the dark, “that it is this, or that it is that, but do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know —”

BEEP
dissolves my poetic otherworld.

Sondra: 10:51 a.m. The doctor wants to switch her blood pressure medication but both options can cause kidney damage!

Sondra: 10:53 a.m. He says we've exhausted other alternatives.

Sondra: 10:57 a.m. Why do I have to decide?

Let's silence this phone. Let's extinguish the computer screen. L.E.D. me down a winding path to somewhere else. I yank the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet open. Behind the cardboard boxes of herbal tea is a bottle of bourbon for celebrating academic triumphs. My bottle is still half full. Today it's also blood-pressure medication.

I open my office door, let in the first excuse. Why must I listen to tepid retail clerk remonstrations from English majors? Shall I compare clothing racks to a summer's day? My students are all undead. A grade-sucking vampire. A zombie seeking a course refund. Then I open my office door to the complaint from the day before. Yesterday he was a wheedling, over-entitled kid: the intellectual equivalent of a car alarm, yet somehow sneaky. An imbecilic version of Ondaatje's Caravaggio. But something has penetrated past his shiny shell of overlong bangs. He no longer emanates the new school clothes smell. There's a face behind the screen. I want to pull this newly world-weary young man into my office and get him to tell me everything. Instead, he shows me his Ondaatje book, all marked up like I said to do. He's read it. He has something to say! There's bourbon in my mug, and a real, living reader in my office. I watch him as he talks, analyzing him like a novel. His shoulders sag under the enormous weight of his story.

What is his name? I need to remember — James? Scott? No — A-something. When I first started teaching I knew every student. But now all the faces and names blur past too quickly. There are too many students, and too few with stories of any gravity. Ali? Andrew? Sounds like Arrrr. He's telling me about the English patient's subterfuge in a hushed near-whisper. For one awful moment I think he's going to start to sob. The horrible thing men do that sounds like choking.

Aaron. What did you do?

I want to ask him directly. But I am a professor. I probe with questions about the book, expecting him to stay crouched beneath the subtext. I do not expect him to detonate my office with the testimonial equivalent of an improvised explosive device.

“You shouldn't leave anyone by themselves,” Aaron says. “If you don't stand up for someone … if you make the situation worse …” He is glowering at the floor. He is calling me on inaction, he is saying the word
criminal
. Is he a criminal? Is Caravaggio? Is Ondaatje? Am I? The sparks of his fury, shame, and regret are incendiary. The paper tower is on fire. Hardcovers burst into flame. I hold on to my tenure with both hands until it burns. Then I think of my mother and am overwhelmed with guilt.

Aaron. What have you done?

He stops talking. The smoke subsides, the floor stops trembling. We sit in silence until my phone vibrates off the window ledge and clatters to the floor. We both turn and look out the window.

Sondra: 12:32 p.m. I don't know what to do.

Freeways terrify me.

The monstrous green signs for the 401 appear. There's no room for mistakes. You can't edit while driving, and I like to revise. I am boxed in by a moving truck, a taxi, and a van. I accelerate as vehicles merge and scatter across five lanes. Across the meridian are four more lanes travelling in the same direction. A long stretch of metallic roofs reflect sunlight. Traffic is all glare and no glitter. All pollution and propulsion.

My Wordsworth heart leaps up when I behold a massive rainbow-painted refrigerator truck passing me on the right. Up ahead a green sports car swerves between lanes without signalling.

Driver of the blue car to my left: are you sweating and swearing under your breath like me? Is your gastrointestinal system bubbling with road rage, fear, rejection, agony, defeat, and anxiety?

My phone beeps. A text message I can't check. I am ten o'clock and two o'clock and eyes ahead, not blinking.

“To everything there is a season,” I recite. “A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” And a time to drive? No. Sweat crawls down my temple, an insect-like arch. This trip is necessary but horrible. I blame Aaron.

I wanted to be the professor-priestess, granting Aaron communion and absolution after his confession. But I dropped my role. There was guilt. There were angry text messages from my sister. And now I am taking unscheduled time off to drive to Ottawa.

Guilt was there all along, of course. Aaron let it out. He's my version of Poe's raven. At home I tried Sleepytime tea and aromatherapy bubble bath. But my mother's face appeared on the pillow next to me as I slept, and stared at me in my dreams. I woke up to see her upstaging everything, from shadow to spotlight, bit part to starring role.

This morning I jabbed contact lenses into stinging eyes, made a Thermos of extra-strong coffee, and cancelled the day's appointments. I got into my car, revved the engine, shifted into reverse. But I couldn't bring myself to text my sister.

I see skid marks, the black rubber remnants of a blown tire, and cringe. Once when I was an undergraduate I saw a psychotherapist — briefly — for stress and anxiety. It's not like I
needed
therapy. Not like my sister. When exams ended, so did the panic attacks. The only thing I really remember about therapy is that when you're feeling anxious, you're supposed to list your anxieties. Like this:

• Driving, traffic, high-speed collisions, multi-car pile-ups.
  
• My mother's rapid decline.
  
• Running into my sister in Ottawa.
  
• Having to talk to my sister.
  

Bugs splatter the windshield, sacrificing sentence-fragment lives. Everything is progressing to an end. The apex of guilt is the exact moment you realize your time — for excuses and forgiveness — has run out.

Traffic begins to thin somewhere past Belleville. I'll spend the rest of the drive to Ottawa passing cavalcades of trucks, watching bright autumn trees scream by. I try to keep my eyes on the road as I shove my hand into the glove compartment. I grab a CD, struggle to open the case. My book-on-disc version of Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano
reverberates. I sigh like an eruption.

Four hours later I pull up to ARC The.Hotel, where I like to stay in Ottawa despite the absurd punctuation liberties marketers have taken with its name. It's downtown on Slater Street. Close to everything enjoyable and nowhere near my sister's house in Kanata. I hand the valet the keys to my Toyota. It's a relief to feel my feet on solid sidewalk. I shoulder my laptop bag while my carry-on-sized suitcase is whisked into the foyer ahead of me. Check-in is a credit card flash and signature for an expressionless youth in a navy suit. I take the shiny, mirrored elevator up to my floor and fumble with my key card in the dimly lit hallway. The door clicks open to reveal a room so compact the bed seems enormous. A single green apple rests on a heaping pile of fat white pillows.

Mom can wait a few more minutes, I think. It's only mid­afternoon and visiting hours run until early evening. Besides, Sondra might still be there. I set my bags down, kick my shoes off, and sit on the spongy bed, my laptop balanced on my knees. I fiddle and click until I figure out the hotel's Wi-Fi. I think about how my mother goes to sleep early. I type the URL for the National Arts Centre website and am surprised to see the evening's performance by a Montreal modern dance company is not yet sold out. Filling in the ticket purchase form feels like a daring form of procrastination. The apple topples from the pillow and rolls down the surface of the white comforter. I grab it, recline on the pillows, take a few bites, and fall asleep.

I wake up confused to strange lights twinkling through the window. I stand and look for clues. The lights are from a cluster of criminally austere concrete office towers. Double buses roar past. Ottawa at night. It's too late to go see Mom now. I turn away from the uninspiring view and lift my suitcase onto the dark wood dresser.

Mother can wait until tomorrow. I pull out the dark brown wool suit I'd packed for our visit. She doesn't know I'm here anyway. Still, I avoid making eye contact with myself in the mirror.

The NAC is only a few blocks from the hotel. I walk, my wool pants draping comfortably, even in the city's continuous wind. A man in a wrinkled white shirt and tie, obviously worn all day at the office, holds the door open for me. I mill around the lobby among the small crowd of conservatively dressed middle-aged bureaucrats and unkempt students. Ottawa is a two-university town. Being back makes me feel plain and less expressive. Tired. I imagine who I'd be had I stayed. An NAC subscriber. A professor at Carleton, the more liberal of the two campuses. I would have malingered over publishable papers and research grant applications. I left because I needed to be bigger than my hometown. I was ambitious. My father understood. My mother kept asking when I was going to get married and have children, like perfect Sondra, as though that would cure me of my career.

The lights dim and I hurry to find my seat. I'm a dozen rows back from stage left. I squeeze past an elderly couple and sit down next to a large bald man in dark jeans and Converse high-tops. Laces undone. The man's arms occupy both armrests. He belongs in a tattoo parlour. His sizeable legs splay to either side and push right up against the seats in front of us. He breathes heavily, tosses his program on the floor, and taps his foot without a discernible rhythm. I lean toward the seniors on my right. They're reading their programs.

“Make sure you try to understand what it's about this time,” the elderly woman says. She gives her partner an elbow nudge. “I don't want another interrogation on the drive home.”

“Bah,” the man says. He shakes his grey-haired head. “That last one was strange, but I think this one will be nicer. We saw them last year, remember?”

I glance at my program. The names of the performers are like class attendance: Terrance Cho, Alexandre Chouinard, Jennifer Alleyn. I immediately forget them.

The house lights go down and the deep, slow notes of a stand-up bass and piano rumble from the orchestra pit. There's a tension-building pause that feels interminable in the dark. Then the curtains glide open to reveal an empty stage lit in deep twilight blue. A thin man in black pants, white T-shirt, and bare feet walks slowly onto the stage, moving back and forth in large, wistful movements. Soon, like a shadow, the other male dancer begins dancing behind him. The large man seated beside me edges forward when the female dancer appears. I think I hear him sigh. He smells pungent and dank like a basement. The aged couple to my right is small and silent, obliterated by the dark except for the blue-tinged reflections that bounce off their glasses. When I glance in their direction I catch the slightest fragrant whiff of maple syrup.