Losing It (41 page)

His mind working furiously, he raced down to the parking lot, but the van was gone – towed. Of course it was. He ran back to the department, burst in on Helen, demanded the extra key to his office, which he hadn’t collected before in the shock and confusion of first seeing what Sienna had wrought. Barbara Law was standing by Helen’s desk, the two were deep in conversation when Bob arrived. They looked up, startled, guilty. “It wasn’t me,” he sputtered when he saw their looks. “I need my key,” he said. “Immediately!”

Helen was flustered, took too long trying to find it. Barbara didn’t seem to know where to aim her eyes. It didn’t matter. It would all be cleared up. Bob grabbed the key from Helen when she finally produced it and as he was turning away she proffered a note – a phone message. “
Please call your wife,”
it said rather baldly, and there was a phone number underneath that he didn’t recognize. It must be Brenda’s, he thought. Julia has probably gone back there. And probably she has heard. She has heard, but there’s no proof. He sprinted to his office, fought the door open, burst in upon his clothes rumpled on the floor. He didn’t care who was looking from the hallway. There were no female things in sight. It could all be explained. He grabbed his wallet and keys from his trousers pocket, didn’t change into his own suit, there wasn’t time, but bundled the clothes under his arm. He rushed down to the parking lot again, and into his car.

Home, home. It was only a five-minute trip. He hit all the lights, changed lanes at exactly the right moment to avoid someone plugging traffic by turning left, sped through a section of construction without slowing. He swerved to avoid a young man who was crossing four lanes of congested traffic on foot like an unshaven immortal, his jaw slack, his lips turned up in a dopey half-grin, and he saw himself, his old self, whistling on the edge of disaster.

No one was at the house. Both the insurance man’s car and the fire-department official’s vehicle were gone. The yellow hazard tape fluttered in the chilly wind. Bob parked on the street and walked to the porch, called out but got no reply. “Thank you. Thank you,” he said softly, and let himself in. It was so much darker than just that morning. It was afternoon now, the sun had moved around to the other side of the house. He entered the hallway carefully, had to wait for his eyes to adjust.

In the kitchen the floorboards protested under his weight and he imagined himself falling through, getting skewered on some blackened rafter. The basement stairs looked shaky too, possibly a bad bet. So he turned around. He had a safer route, the same one he’d taken at the height of the blaze.

He walked out the front door again and was headed towards the backyard when he caught sight of his neighbour, Ray Little, standing on the edge of the hazard tape, looking at him.

“How’s it going, Bob?” Ray asked. He was a fortyish man, soft-spoken.

“Okay,” Bob said. He wanted badly to just head for the back window, to complete his mission. But now that Ray had seen him he had to walk over and chat. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the clothes, Ray,” he said.

“Yeah, sure. Hope they’re not strangling you.” Ray attempted a laugh. “Hell of a blaze.”

“We were lucky,” Bob said. “Lucky we all made it out.”

And they talked about it for several minutes, Ray asking about the support beams and the wiring, and whether the insurance company was being decent about it all, and he mentioned that his parents’ place in Bells Corners had burned down four years before. “That house had been in the family for four generations. It had to be gutted. All the old furniture was ruined. We had letters that were over a hundred years old,
pictures. It doesn’t matter how much money you get in settlement, you can’t replace those memories.”

“That’s so true,” Bob said, and he felt it in his bones. And how good it felt too, to stand and have a normal neighbourly conversation.

“My mother and father never recovered, really. I mean, they were safe, but the shock of it, the stress. Their health started to go almost immediately.”

“That’s awful. Just terrible,” Bob said.

“But you know those insurance guys, they’re just trying to rip you off most of the time. The one who handled my parents’ file, you won’t believe this, he insisted -”

Bob cut in. “You know, I have … I have a thing I have to do,” he said vaguely. “In the back. But I’ll catch you later.”

“Do you need any help?” Ray asked. Patiently, in a friendly way, in no hurry to move.

“No. No, I have to do it myself. But thank you, you’ve been a wonderful help, we really appreciate it.” Bob shook his hand and it felt true, it felt warm and connecting in an unfamiliar, grounded way. He turned and waved and walked off and Ray stood watching him, smiling, just beyond the tape.

Bob headed to the back of the house, then when he was safely out of sight darted to the basement window. It was cracked; part of a pane had fallen out – probably broken in his mad scramble to escape the night before. He bent down gingerly and pushed the window open, cautiously reached his right leg in while trying to avoid the bits of broken glass. The workbench had toppled over, he knew that. He knew he was going to have to ease himself in, balance the window open while gently lowering himself without the benefit of being able to step on anything on the way down. He was set in his mind to do that. He knew he shouldn’t take much time, but he couldn’t hurry, either, and
while he was thinking that he shouldn’t hurry his support foot slipped on some mud and he fell about three inches onto the windowsill. It wasn’t far, but his legs were split and the point of contact included his testicles, which his full body weight slammed. The pain was immediate and shocking: he gasped once, wildly, for air, and managed a low, terrible moan, and clutched awkwardly even as he was falling, his body helpless as a bag of wood, and struck his head almost soundlessly on the concrete floor lost in the darkness below.

35

“I
wish you wouldn’t keep missing me!” his mother said, and she turned her head just as Donny got the spoon to her lips.

“I’m not missing you,” Donny said.

“You are. You’re preoccupied!” she said. She raised her eyebrows and flapped her gums. “I wish men would talk about things.”

Donny wiped her chin with a napkin.

“Your father was a great man for the silent treatment!” she announced. Then she said, “This is terrible, by the way. You might as well shoot me now if this is the sort of rubbish you’re going to feed me.”

“You liked it yesterday,” Donny said. It was mashed cauliflower soup with mushrooms and carrots and a light touch of garlic and a secret vitamin E tablet crushed up and hidden.

“It’s baby’s mash. I would
kill
for a steak and a glass of wine.”

“It would kill you,” Donny said, holding the spoon patiently in front of her, waiting for the right opportunity. “Besides, you need teeth to eat steak.”

“You could just put it in the blender!” she said. “It’s what you do with everything else anyway!”

“There
is
a steak in here,” he said. “Can’t you taste it?”

Her mouth fell open and he shoved the spoon in, wondered for a moment if the mush would come sputtering back in his face. But she swallowed it down grimly.

“If you took away the hockey scores,” she said, “he could go for days without talking. Men are extraordinarily shallow.”

She accepted another spoonful, then another and another. Then she had a small sip of water.

“Where do you go at night?” she asked finally.

“I have to go do a dishwasher pretty soon,” he said, another spoonful ready. She looked at it with slightly crossed eyes.

“This is Pablum,” she muttered. “I thought I was through with that when I turned
one.”

“You have to boost your immune system,” he said, and she made a noise with her lips,
Bppbbptt!

“I asked you something,” she said. “And you just changed the subject. I hate to think what you get up to when you go out.”

He stopped talking. They were both looking at the spoon, balanced now in mid-air. She finally took it in her mouth. He wiped her cheek again, handed her the glass of water.

“It’s become quite cold,” she said.

“I don’t do anything at night,” he said. “I walk around, that’s all.”

“Because some men,” she said, “some very lonely men -”

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. I
hope
not! There are men who will pay for-”

“I know, Ma.”

“Thank God your father was never like that.”

“Yes.”

“He could out-silence Gibraltar, but he was never that way.”

“I just go walking. I think a lot and I walk.”

“So you are
pining,”
she said, corkscrewing the word. “I have to tell you, in all honesty, there is nothing more pathetic to a woman than a man who is pining and mooning and a hopeless Milquetoast.”

“I know.”

“You will
never
get anywhere with a woman by -”

“I
know!”

“Then why do you
do
it?” she said in exasperation. “You know and you know and yet there you are walking about in the middle of the night.”

“I’m just trying to make sense of things,” he said quietly. “I know it’s not smart and not attractive and it’s clumsy and stupid, but it’s what I know to do. I’m not a complete idiot. Are you going to finish this or not?”

“I’ve had quite enough,” she said, and pushed the tray away. “I met your father at a dance,” she said. “It was a cold, wild night and he was terrifying the way he looked at me. Don’t young people go to dances any more? I was just so frightened. But I stared right back at him. I was shaking like a leaf when he walked over. I thought I was going to overturn the table, my hands were so wobbly. And he was a wreck. He told me later on. He was more afraid of that particular moment than any time he spent on scaffolding twenty storeys above the ground. But he went through it. He blurted out the words and took my hand and he mangled my feet till past midnight, I thought we were both going to burst. It wasn’t like dancing today. We were hot as the sun in mid-August. You either stand up to it or you melt away.”

“I know,” he said. “I know,” and nearly dropped the tray in his hurry to get out.
The course of one’s lifetime is like a great, winding river, and the individuals who are maladapted, who fight every turn, try to flow uphill, who overreach or fail to stretch at critical times will end up wasted in some inappropriate, rocky field or stagnating in some dark place, crowded with silt and cans of beer. Donny was thinking about one of Waylun Zhi’s most recent lectures. He was on his belly on Mr. Hopkins’s filthy kitchen floor checking the water hook-up under the new dishwasher and thinking about Julia, too, about how terribly much he wanted her and so the passion was unbalanced, it would never come to fruition. He would always be forcing or running away. It would never again be like that night when he had simply walked into her bedroom and there she was, half-asleep, naked, waiting, and she wanted him to touch her and he did, because it was a mistake, she didn’t realize what was happening. It was just a matter of timing and it would never happen again, because Donny Clatch doesn’t get Julia Carmichael. He doesn’t get her when she’s Julia Carmichael and he doesn’t get her when she’s Julia Sterling. He doesn’t get her because he never knows the right time to act.

He got up on his knees and pressed the button on the electronics panel to start the machine, then he went down on his belly again to check for drips. He was almost finished. He wanted so much to be on his way, to hurry to the lumber store and buy the plywood then head over to Julia’s house to work on the windows as she had asked. He really wanted her to be there, just her, without insurance men or husbands, just Julia. She’d asked
him
to work on her house during this difficult time. She’d stepped up and kissed him on the cheek and she’d looked so vulnerable, like she’d wanted him to embrace her.

He rarely was in real life, but when he was standing for long periods, when he was careful about his breathing and how he
held his arms, when he could feel the energy circulation in his body, gentle and deep, the way Waylun Zhi described it – when all those things were happening he did have a slight sense of being somewhat nimble. Perhaps. An inkling. Of balancing. Of having a vague idea of when might be the right time, of what might be the right thing.

That powerful, effortless sense of flow.

There was no leak. The motor ran fine. The dishwasher was in place and level, he hadn’t scratched the walls or the floor, he’d followed the building code and hooked the machine through the drain at the sink, even though it had meant outfitting new pipes over what the last idiot had done, which was to drain separately using pipes too narrow for the job. He screwed the bottom panel in tight and offered to take the wood and cardboard crate away. Mr. Hopkins, a retired auditor suffering from some kind of health problem that made him wear a scarf around his neck, even indoors, thought over the matter with painful deliberation.

“It doesn’t matter,” Donny said amiably. “Most people don’t like to keep the crate. I can take it away for you, or if you like I can put it in your basement.”