Losing It (38 page)

He wandered, distracted, up to the English department. The halls now were crowded with young people, with fresh energy, hopes and dreams, wearing sloppy pants and baseball hats turned backwards, with knapsacks and pimples and loud, brazen voices, with too much life. He felt like a heavy black rock in the current that he only now realized was sweeping past him.

And now everyone seemed to know it as well. Voices stilled, conversations took silly little hops, eyes turned. To see what? An engulfed weight. He felt their gazes, it was remarkable, all these students who weren’t his own. At least he didn’t think they were his. And they were stopping to watch him; the whole flow changed when he went by.

Whispers and subtle laughter and stares, outright, almost rude, the closer he got to the department. His heart began to jiggle nervously, remembering the night before. He almost felt as if he were still caught in the leather dress, that he was that conspicuous. It’s possible, he thought, that Barbara Law
had
seen something, had told someone … possible, but not likely. Not likely that
everyone
would know.

Perhaps it’s these borrowed clothes, he thought. But the gardening boots, the trousers so tight, sleeves too long, were hardly more outlandish than what some of the students were wearing. Still, he was a professor, the standards were different.

“Fire,” he said lamely, but people turned away.

He hurried into the departmental office and sought the refuge of Helen’s friendly face. She had a wonderful sense of humour, would laugh with him about his outfit. And there she was, absorbed in something on her computer screen, didn’t look up immediately when he walked in.

“Helen,” he said, happy to say her name, to ground himself in something familiar and secure. She looked up then, but her
smile didn’t follow. She appeared startled, almost frightened, as if she knew him to be a ghost. It couldn’t have just been his altered appearance. It occurred to him that there must have been a mistake – maybe the local news had reported him dead in the fire, that was what was behind all the whispers and stares.

He waited for her to recover, to say something about the fire or his clothing, or perhaps even about his continued existence, to cry out in joy and relief. But she didn’t, and she wasn’t her usual graceful self. She turned her eyes down quickly, her face looked strained, as if there were a sudden bad taste in her mouth.

“What? What is it?” he asked. “You heard about the fire? My home has been destroyed, it was a disaster, we could have all been killed.”

Even when he said those words her reaction was muted.

“Are you … are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes! Fine! We’re all fine!” he announced, too loudly, over-compensating. “I can’t stay long – insurance, everything to work out. Could you cancel my classes for this afternoon? And I’m afraid I’ve locked myself out of my office. I think you have an extra key, don’t you? Or am I going to have to track down the -”

Gerry Calcavecchia poked his head in the office at that moment and then did a cartoon double-take. Bob thought he was fooling, waited for the punch line. But Gerry couldn’t deliver it. Instead he dropped the papers he was carrying, then didn’t bend down to pick them up.

“What is it?”
Bob implored.

“Bob, I guess you haven’t heard,” Helen said then, her voice so thin, the moment tight as a wire against his throat.

33

“I
suppose you get used to it,” Julia said, not feeling used to it at all, but opaque and otherworldly. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the insurance man’s light-blue sedan – Bruce McCutcheon – who did seem used to it, tramping through burnt-out houses, picking over the ruined remains of flooded rooms, soggy carpets, cracked paintings, smoke-blackened drapes, melted toys, computer carcasses, splintered doors, of collapsed cupboards and blistered furniture and potted plants blasted across the floor by jets of water. Julia had two things in her hand: a water-stained photo album and Matthew’s cloth snake, Willy, damp and slightly singed, though with a still fully functioning rattle.

“At least there were no deaths,” Bruce McCutcheon said, and he wiped his big hand back through his thinning hair. “It’s when they bring the bodies out you can’t get used to it.” His fingers were long and bony and looked terrifically strong. Julia could imagine him in another era tightening the wire on a fence or pulling a horse to the barn in a snowstorm – chin down, face out of the wind, those fingers in the harness strong
as sprung steel. Now he was guiding a ballpoint pen along the lines and boxes of a carbon-sheeted form. There were other papers spread out on the top of his briefcase, a pamphlet in blue and white on her lap:
When Disaster Strikes! Your Guide to the Insurance Process
.

“What’s the worst you’ve seen?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know the worst thing,” Bruce said. He looked up from his form. He wore a wedding ring and his left pinkie was badly scarred, bent a little the wrong way.

“I do,” she said. “I really would like to hear.” And so he told her about his first case, a family he’d sold a policy to just weeks before the fire. “It was a winter night, thirty below, and the house went up in seconds – either a leak from the gas stove or else a burner had been left on and a spark had set it off. The mother was at bingo, it was her first night out in months, and the father was drunk in the living room. The place blew up. The father was thrown back against the wall, the couch rolled on top of him. He was out of it anyway, he’d been drinking very hard. Three little girls upstairs in bed. They tried to get to the window but it was frozen shut.” He had a little voice, odd in such a large man, and when he talked his mouth barely moved, his eyes stayed down at the form. “It was frozen,” he said, “and then they were roasted, and when the mother came home the walls had all but collapsed. She ran in right past the police and the firemen. They had to go in after her and drag her shrieking from the building. I was trying to comfort her and all she wanted to do was die with her family. Besides that, they’d made a mistake in their coverage. The husband had sworn he was a teetotaller – he got a break in the premiums for that – but there were bottles littered all over the living room, and the autopsy showed blood-alcohol of .38 or something.”

“So there was no coverage?” Julia asked.

“Technically it should have been nothing. We had absolute proof. But I got the brass to spring for a reduced pay-out. She never thanked me. She killed herself later on anyway. You asked.”

Julia had asked and now she felt rotten. This wasn’t anything she wanted to think about. It was awful, too raggedly close to what she imagined could be her own life. She looked at her watch.

“Do you want to call him?” Bruce asked, his hand on the car phone.

“No,” Julia said quickly. “I wouldn’t be able to get him in his office. He’s probably on his way back now anyway. He said he’d be just a few minutes. I’m so sorry for this.” Bob had been gone over an hour. He was the one who knew all about the computers and the piano and the value of most of the furniture: old, beautiful pieces which had come from his family. He’d be heartbroken to view them, but she needed him to see the process through. They were going to have to account for every belonging in their possession, to give it a name and description and replacement value. “You didn’t videotape everything?” Bruce had asked with resigned skepticism. “Everybody does it now,” he’d said. Well, if everybody did it why did he look that way, as if everybody
ought
to do it but nobody whose house actually caught fire had
ever
done it? There was a box of soggy papers in the back of the car, salvaged from the study, Julia and Bob’s files of receipts reaching back a few years at least. Pure luck they hadn’t gone up in flames. She was going to have to go through them systematically, account in detail for their material lives, and she didn’t want to do it alone.

Bruce looked at his own watch, but patiently, with no sense of irritation or hurry, then wrote a few more things on the form on his lap. It was warm in the car in the sunshine. Besides the
salvaged box of receipts there was a baby seat in the back and a single child’s hockey glove; the side pockets of the passenger door were stuffed with disposable diapers, and the floor under Julia’s feet was littered with cassettes – a smattering of Spanish-language tapes mixed with blues, folk, reggae, and Cajun music.

“I guess we can wait a little longer,” Bruce said.

Julia heard a vehicle approach and turned to see a familiar, beat-up red truck. Donny Clatch was driving. He didn’t seem to see Julia in the car at first but peered at the house, the yellow hazard tape, the empty-soul appearance of the broken windows. He parked the truck at the side of the road opposite Bruce’s car and Julia excused herself, got out to talk to him.

He stood at the edge of the tape and stared wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open a little. “Is everyone all right?” he asked, and Julia told him the whole story. Throughout he shook his head, turned away in amazement, said over and over, “Is that right?”

“We were lucky,” she said for what seemed like the millionth time. “We all got out. Nobody was hurt.”

“So where are you staying?” he asked, and she told him the insurance would pay for a hotel, not the Chateau Laurier where they’d stayed last night, but something more downscale.

“They have a list. We have to choose. And we have to get started on renovations,” she said. He asked her when and she said as soon as possible, asked him if he would be available.

“You’ll want a whole team working on this project,” he said. “I’d have to get some guys together.”

“The insurance company wants us to get three bids,” she said. “But I’d love it if you could do it. I just, I want someone I can trust.” And then for the first time she really noticed how he looked at her – like he was ice cream dripping down the side of a cone and one more moment in this heat he was going to
fall over, go
splat
on the sidewalk at her feet. “We need the three bids,” she repeated, a bit flustered, he seemed so moved and embarrassed, almost unable to speak. “Anyway, as soon as you can I need you to board up the remaining broken windows. The fire department did the main ones last night, but I noticed damaged panes in some that they didn’t do. The raccoons are going to move in soon with the cold weather and I’m afraid of looting and kids getting hurt playing inside.”

“Sure. Absolutely,” he said, and took out his notebook. “I have to feed my Mom some lunch, then I’m installing a dishwasher, but I could get to this after.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much,” she said and stepped in quickly and kissed his cheek. She couldn’t think why she did it except to see him nearly burst with pleasure, to feel what a wonderful thing that is, even in the midst of disaster.

“God. I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.

Julia used Bruce’s phone after all. She got machines at Bob’s office, at the departmental office, and even in the faculty lounge, left curt messages for him in all three places. Donny had to leave then and Bruce and Julia shared Bruce’s meat-loaf sandwich on brown with mayonnaise and tomato. Then Bruce asked her if she wanted him to drive her to the university to try to find Bob, but she said no. “I’ve got to check on Matthew anyway.” She thanked him as politely as she could, given how bitter she felt inside to have been abandoned like this. Bob really wasn’t a brave man, she knew it in her core. He was squeamish and fussy and he hated unpleasant things. That’s why he was so bad about helping with Matthew. And why he drank so much. She could picture him now in some dark corner, in the middle of an intense academic conversation, hiding from his family responsibilities, dulling himself with Scotch.

Something else nagged at her – another possibility she really
didn’t want to think about. What if Bob had early-onset Alzheimer’s? It was rare, yet it happened, and Bob was fifty-four, certainly old enough. She knew that the early stages could be very difficult to detect but involved subtle changes in behaviour, memory lapses, problems with words and simple tasks, confusion. Stress could bring it on, and she had a secret fear that he was stumbling around right now, lost, the way that her mother had before anyone realized anything was wrong – driving aimlessly in the van, perhaps, or trying to remember what had happened to his car. That part was especially bothersome. She didn’t for a minute believe his story about lending his Porsche to Clarence Boyd to help him move. He seemed to have simply made it up in order to fill a void, either caused by a drunken blackout or something else.

Or something else.

So many things could go wrong. It was shattering to think how fragile anyone might be. She hoped it was just the drinking
– just the drinking
– but she struggled with the thought that the problem might be much worse.

She told Bruce she would work on the forms at Brenda’s house, gave him her number there, said that she wanted to walk, needed time to think and breathe. He understood. They made a tentative time to meet again later to do more damage assessment.

“I’ll call first,” she said.