Hey Nostradamus! (27 page)

Part of the terror of being told something you know will shock you is that it takes you back to the time in your life when everything really was shocking; for me that was maybe age thirteen, when I was essentially friendless, and being told by my mother that I'd one day blossom. I remember wanting peers; I remember wanting people in my life who could help me make all the fun mistakes. Crime? Maybe that's why I'm a stenographer. I hesitated and then said yes, I'd like a cigarette.

“You don't smoke, do you?”

“This is the second time this week I've had something resembling this conversation. Yes, I want a cigarette. I suppose, yes, I do smoke now.”

She gave me one and lit it with her lighter and then lit her own. She said, “Mom's been telling you some pretty wild stuff, huh?”

“She has.” I took a drag and I got dizzy, but I didn't mind. I wanted this experience to have a biological component to intensify it.

“It's not what you think it is.”

“I started guessing as much last night.”

“You think I slept with your boyfriend, don't you?”

I put the cigarette down on the concrete. “I did.”

“When did you stop thinking that?”

“A minute ago. When you got out of your car and looked at me across the alley over there. You have a clear conscience.”

“I'm sorry I have to tell you what I'm going to tell you. I can shut up if you like.”

“No. Don't. I deserve whatever you're going to say.”

Two crows landed on the pavement across the street and began cawing wildly at each other. There were needles and condoms on the alley's paving; late at night, this was the sex trade part of town. Jessica put her hand on my forearm. “No one deserves this. Heather, here's the deal: your boyfriend came to my mother about a year ago. He brought this sheet of paper with him. He gave my mom five hundred bucks and told her that if he ever went missing, then she should contact you and tell you these things as if he'd spoken to you from the dead-or from wherever it is he's gone to. He wanted you to be happy.”

I sucked in air as if punched. It's the only way to describe it. “And so my mom did that with you-she saw the story in the
North Shore News
that he had gone missing-”

“Jason. His name was Jason.”

“Sorry. That
Jason
had gone missing. She called me at work yesterday and told me what she was up to, and I drove to her place and really lashed into her.”

I'd seen the fight. I trusted this woman.

“My mom told me how she wasn't answering your calls. She has call display and can count every time you phoned. She's sneaky. She knew exactly what she was doing. She was milking you. And she was going to milk you dry. She has you pegged for another ten grand.”

I stared at the ground. Jessica said, “Smoke your cigarette.”

So we sat there and smoked. Her coworkers filed in, and she waved to them, and there was nothing really out of the ordinary about two women smoking together outside a workplace on a cold clear Canadian October day in the year 2002.

“What did Jason ever get into that'd make him think he might disappear some day?”

“I don't know.”

 

 

Five years ago, before I met Jason, I had a depression or whatever you want to call it, and one morning I felt so dead I called Larry and pleaded bubonic plague. He had seen the clouds accumulating inside me and told me to phone the doctor; bless him, I did. At first they tried out some of the more fashionable antidepressants on me. They either nau-
seated me or made me buzzy and I had to say no to maybe six of them. There was one, the sixth one-I forget the name-which did this odd thing to me. I took it in the morning, and around lunch I had this impulse to kill myself. I don't mean to shock here; what I'm saying is that people talk about killing themselves all the time, and some people give it a go, and I'd always known that, but this pill, it opened up a door inside me: for the first time ever I actually understood how it
felt
to want to kill myself.

The drug wore off quickly, and the next prescription did the trick. After about three months I was my usual self again, and stopped taking anything.

The point here is that there are certain human behavioral traits that can be talked about, but unless you've experienced the impulse behind them, they remain theoretical. Most of the time, this is for the best. After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

In a similar vein, I think there is the impulse to be violent. When Jason and I fought, I'd be so angry that my eyeballs scrunched up and I saw black-and-white geometric patterns inside my head, but never, ever, would I consider hitting him, and Jason was the same way. We spoke about this once during a lunch down by the ocean-about anger and violence-and he said that no matter how angry he ever became with me, violence wasn't an option for him; it didn't even occur to him. He confided that there were
other
situations where violence was an option for him-obviously
the Delbrook Massacre, but who knows what else? I suppose I'll go to the grave wondering what they were-but with me? No.

Why am I saying this? Because Jason simply didn't have the suicide impulse, nor do I think he was a violent guy. So I don't worry that he jumped from a bridge or got killed in some fight.

I should add, that when Jason and I fought, the characters went away. To have dragged our characters into a fight simply wasn't a possibility, any more than suicide or hitting each other. Our characters were immune to the badness in the world, a trait that made them slightly holy. As we didn't have children, they became our children. I worried about them the same way I worry about Barb's kids. I'll be having my day, walking around the dog run down at Ambleside, say, and then suddenly,
pow!
my stomach turns to a pile of bricks, and I nearly collapse with anticipatory grief as I realize the boys could burn themselves or be kidnapped or be in a car accident. Or I'll be near tears when I think of Froggles alone by himself in an apartment with nobody to phone, no food in the fridge, maybe drinking some leftover Canadian Club, wondering why we even bother going on with our lives. Or I worry about Bonnie the Lamb, recently shorn, lost from the flock, cold and sick with loneliness on the wrong side of a raging river. I probably don't have to say much more on this subject.

And then there is me, sad little me, living in a dream, staring out the window, never again to find love. With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and Christmas
dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four-and then, well, then I'll be applying my makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really
for
anyone. I'm alive, but so what.

 

 

After my cigarette with Jessica I drove back to Lynn Valley, up to Allison's house. I know her real name is Cecilia, but she remains Allison to me.

Her Cutlass was in the carport. The newspapers were still on the front doormat, so I picked them up and rang the bell. Through the badly built 1960s contractor door, I heard shuffling up the stairs from where I knew the kitchen was. There were three glass slits in the door, and I looked through them and saw Allison, who stopped on the third step up, looked at me, and froze. It took her maybe half a minute to thaw out, and she came to the door and opened it, a tiny brass security chain across the gap.

“Heather. It's awfully early.”

“I know it is.” She'd have to be a moron not to see a certain level of madness in my eye, but I could tell she misread this as desperation for a message from Jason.

“I suppose I could let you in.”

“Please do.”

She unclasped the chain and said to come upstairs to the kitchen for coffee. “You look terrible,” she said, “like you didn't sleep last night.”

“I didn't.”

The kitchen was generic North Van-lemon-lime freckled
linoleum floor with four decades of wear patterns showing, SPCA fridge magnets, vitamins on the windowsill, and through that window, the primordial evergreen maw that continues from Lynn Valley until the end of the world. She said, “I know it must be troubling to wait for messages to come in from loved ones.”

I said, “I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.”

She looked at me and at my small insurrection. “Heather, I do the best I can.” She handed me a coffee, and I sat and stared at her. She had to be an incredible dolt not to see trouble lurking. “Last night was psychically very active, and I think I received something you might be interested in.”

I smiled.

“Again, it's something that makes no sense to me, but these words do seem to mean something important to you.”

“How much will they cost me?”

“Heather! No need to be so crass.”

“I'm out of money. Yesterday was it.”

Allison didn't like this. “Oh, really?”

“I don't know what to do.”

“I'm a businesswoman, Heather. I can't just do these things for free.”

“I can see not.”

I sipped the coffee, too hot and too weak. I placed the mug on the tabletop and looked at my hands. Allison watched me. I began tugging away at a diamond ring on my left ring finger, a diamond the size of a ladybug. Sometimes with Jason, subjects were best left undiscussed. I'd always assumed the ring had fallen off the back of a truck, but then
Barb told me she'd actually gone with Jason to Zales to help select it. “I have this ring.”

Allison came over and, with the deadened eyes of a Soviet flea marketeer, appraised it in a blink. “I suppose so.”

The ring came free. I handed it to her, and as she reached for it, I grabbed her, yanked her forward and with my right arm put her in a headlock. I said, “Look, you scheming cow. Your daughter filled me in on your little prank here, and if you want to live past lunchtime, you take me to wherever you keep the sheet of paper Jason gave you, and you hand it over. Got it?”

“Let go of me.”

I turned her around and dug a knee into her back. I've never struck another human being before, but I had size on my side. “Don't screw with me. I've got a brown belt in Tae Bo. I studied down in Oregon. So where is it?”

“I can't…
breathe
.”

I loosened my grip. “You bring tears to my eyes. Come on. Where is it?”

“Downstairs.”

“So that's where we'll go.”

I felt like I'd been given a prescription drug that opened a fifty-pound pair of oak double doors, doors I'd somehow overlooked before. To be even clearer, I felt like a man. It was surprisingly easy taking full control of Allison's body, but I don't think I'd have killed her. Whatever door this new door was, it wasn't the murder door.

The stairs were tricky but doable. We entered a room that must once have been Glenn's office but had, over the years, been converted to a transient storage area for bankers' boxes full of old books and papers. A sun-bleached litho of mallard
ducks in flight had been removed from over the desk and leaned against the floor below, leaving a ghostly rectangle on the wall. Straddling this ghost was a brass-framed piece of fuzzily photographed flowers embossed with some sort of poetic nonsense in that casual fake-handwriting font people use on invitations to their second and third marriages. Allison's feminizing touch. The room had an aura of bankruptcy and defeat.

“Where is it?”