Suitable Precautions (2 page)

Ella had paid for a house inspection and her house had passed with flying colours, but what did they look for if
not giant holes in the attic? She had no idea where she was going to get the money for repairs, not to mention the exterminator.

There was more than just mulched newspaper and insulation in the nest: there were oddly beautiful bits of paper, purple, blue, green, red, ripped up and kaleidoscoping through the design. Ella had heard stories of animals moulding all kinds of things into their nests—parking tickets, strips of bloody gauze, scraps of love letters—but it wasn't the strange colours that made her plunge her bare hands into the mixture, ignoring thoughts of rabies and lice as she picked out shreds of paper and pieced together the feral jigsaw puzzle. It wasn't the frustration of discovering yet another problem with the house beside the railway tracks she didn't have the money to deal with. It was the pale green face of a young Queen Elizabeth from a worn twenty-dollar bill.

There were six hundred and seventy-four pieced-together dollars when Ella had finished picking the nest apart. She kneeled on the floorboards and looked at the waste of the chewed bills, the sting of it like a nail gnawed to the quick. The tears were in her eyes before she realized that the six hundred and seventy-four dollars weren't important: the insulation and the newspapers were from the attic. Her attic. Empty and hers. Ella wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater and looked out into the blank white void of the hole in the wall, then down at the warped floorboards. Several of them were loose and she started ripping them up by hand.

 

SHE DIDN'T KNOW EXACTLY how much money there was. The animals had done a number on the waterproof bags, tearing open their plastic bellies and letting the bills fall
between the joists like discarded paper bones. Each bag held about ten thousand dollars and she had found fifty-four bags so far. She was trying to be sensible about it—a twenty for bread and eggs, butter and milk, a fifty for dinner and a night out at the movies, maybe—but the whole thing didn't make sense. Ella woke up in the middle of the night and moved portions of the money around, hiding six bags in the flowerpots in the locked wooden shed, then hauling four of them into the kitchen, suspending them down the old laundry chute and painting over the door with the spare can of paint she found in the basement. She opened a safety deposit box to store six more bags, and the bank woman who smelled of hairspray asked her if she would like a private room to deposit her valuables. “Yes,” Ella had said, sweating through her blouse, “some privacy would be nice,” as though she were talking about a hospital room for risky elective surgery.

A dozen bags between the springs of her old couch, and eight more in the cubbyhole under the stairs. Ella had spent the better part of a night in the garden, hacking at the frozen ground with her new shovel, boiling pots of water to soften the earth, and now there were ten bags buried in the best garbage bags she could buy, housed in waterproof camera cases, ten more under the grape vines in plastic containers Ella bought from Canadian Tire after having been assured by both the teenage salesman and the department manager they were completely waterproof. She made a map of the backyard and mailed it to her grandmother, asking her not to open the sealed envelope. She left two bags in the attic, mostly because she wasn't sure where else to put them. Ella knew she was being strange about it, but she couldn't help thinking and rethinking her hiding places. She bought seven fire extinguishers, one for every room in the house.

She quit her secretary job at the insurance brokerage. “I have a family emergency,” she told her boss. She spent her time trying to find out the story of the money, dogged by guilt and fear, wondering if Matilda Giacoma had hidden a fortune from her greedy children, or been involved in some Italian crime syndicate. Ella spent weeks scouring old newspapers and looking through public records at city hall only to find out that Matilda Giacoma had lived in the house for nearly forty years and had no family to speak of. A sister in Europe, one of the checkers-playing women at the community centre thought, but no, definitely no children. Matilda had died after a long battle with cancer, according to her obituary, and Ella's neighbours were going to miss her at the street party this year—she made such tasty lemon tarts.

Not sure what else to do, Ella started going to church again. She lit a candle for the eternal soul of Matilda Giacoma and said prayers of apology. Several times she considered going to confession. It wasn't a sin to be lucky, she told herself. She wasn't a graveyard ghoul—the money came to her. Ella spent a lot of time counting, wondering if she was blessed or cursed.

After a few months, Ella started to feel comfortable with the money. She bought herself a new pair of boots without feeling like she was going to throw up, and from there she felt strong enough to buy a silver necklace and a matching bracelet, then a mahogany bookshelf from an antique market and two reading chairs, one for the sunny front bedroom and the other for the living room, to go with the new bookcase. She repaired the hole in the roof and hired a pest removal service to deal with the animals in the attic. Raccoons, it turned out. The lanky man arrived wearing thick,
industrial gloves, carrying a trap that looked hardly large enough for a well-fed house cat. She paid cash upfront and then tipped the man forty dollars when he came back with a whimpering raccoon, its fur poking wildly out of the cage bars. “Can you take good care of him?” Ella asked.

“Don't worry, lady. They always get taken care of,” he said, putting the cash in his shirt pocket and bashing the cage against the door frame, his shoes leaving a filthy dance pattern on Ella's linoleum hallway as he stepped around yesterday's mail. It was a pile of mostly junk flyers, even though she had repeatedly told the mailman not to deliver them. “Your junk, your problem, lady,” he said, and no amount of nasty looks from Ella or complaints to his supervisor had made a difference.

“Sorry about that,” Ella said as she picked up the stack, her hands recognizing the heavyweight paper a moment before she read the name, the words stopping the air in her lungs: M. Giacoma. Postmarked in Rome.

Ella quietly shut the door behind the exterminator and locked it. She closed the blinds in the living room and sat in her new reading chair, her blood thudding in her cheeks and her fingers cold and raspy against the smoothness of the cream envelope. It didn't mean anything. There was nothing to mean. It was just a letter, a mistake. Someone who didn't know that Matilda had died. It was sad, that's what it was. Sad and that was all. Why was she worried? What was there to worry about? This was her house and she had lived in it for months. She hadn't done anything wrong. No one had blinked twice at the antique store when she paid cash for the bookshelf. She had been downright honest, telling the salesman he had undercharged her by sixty dollars when he rang up the bill. And who was to say the letter had anything to do
with the money? Imagine an old woman with a body full of cancer hauling bags of money up those rickety attic stairs and prying up the floorboards with hammers and crowbars. It was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.

Ella took a deep breath and looked at the envelope. The penmanship was strong and dynamic: thin, hard, written with urgency, Ella could tell. The return address on the back was carefully scripted. No smudges. Each letter clear and precise, but spiky, impatient for an answer. Whatever was inside was important. Beautiful, maybe. Sad, almost definitely. Nothing at all to do with Ella or the money. A coincidence of address, just like the hydro bills that still came to her house addressed to M. Giacoma.

Ella took her pen out of her purse. “Recipient deceased,” she wrote on the envelope. She just hadn't been clear enough the first time.

Ella slipped the letter in the mailbox that afternoon, along with a large donation to the Toronto Humane Society. She returned her new boots and gave the money to Girl Guides selling cookies on the street corner, their cheeks pink and their teeth new and white.

If the letter came again, she was going to ignore it, Ella decided. Throw it away and that was it. It had nothing to do with her or her new life.

Ella had told her parents she had landed a job as a ghost-writer for nearly famous people who wanted to write their autobiographies but couldn't. A lack of time, maybe, or talent, she said. Ella's father tried to get her to talk about her work when they went out on Sunday afternoons.

“Oh, look at this one,” he said, pointing to a glossy hardcover as he and Ella browsed through the Spring Sale section of his favourite bookstore. “I wonder if it's any good.”

“Dad, you know I can't talk about my work. It's part of my contract,” Ella said.

“Oh, I know, I know. I just wonder.” He walked over to another table and held up a book. “What about this one?”

Ella shrugged. “It's too soon for any of mine to be out, Dad.”

Her dad bought the book anyway and made her sign it: To Dad, Who knows all my secrets.

Her mother shouted out names at random.

“Tom Cruise,” she said.

“No, Mom. I don't get paid a Tom Cruise salary.”

“Okay, Anne Murray.”

“More like Anne Murray, but still no.”

“Leonard Cohen.”

“Mom, why would Leonard Cohen need me to write his book?”

“I'm just saying, Ellie, that I wish you got the credit for what you do. Those people you write for are just nobodies pretending to be somebodies. I bet they couldn't string two words together without you, but it's their ugly mugs on all those covers.”

“I don't mind,” Ella said.

It would have been true. Ella didn't mind anonymity. While people thought she was writing anonymously, she was living anonymously, cycling through the city on her rusted ten-speed, buying flowers and weaving them into the baskets of other bikes chained outside the flower shop. She bought fruit at the Chinese market. Ripe mangoes, raspberries that stained her lips, her thumb, her forefinger. In the first flush of spring she watched children in yellow rain slickers feeding ducks at the pond with day-old bakery bread. In the autumn she sketched the trees in the park, drawing them thin and
bare with the curves of old women. But life was not meant to be this easy and beautiful, she was sure, and so every day she did something that disgusted her. She touched the severed pigs' heads at the meat market. She picked a cigarette butt off the ground and smoked it. That is worth some money, when you think about it, she said to herself. That is worth some money.

She decided she didn't want to know the story of the money. Good luck should make her thankful, not afraid. She had always been a lucky person, and fortune, so she heard, favoured the brave. In the thick heat of summer she had sewn a few hundreds into the lining of her good wool coat and felt courageous.

The letter arrived six times that year, the same little envelopes, the same handwriting, but Ella was firm—they went in the garbage, unopened, and she got on with her day. Buying lemonade from the neighbourhood children, tipping them each a dollar as the sour juice made her squint. Raking the leaves for Mrs. Robertson, who had arthritis and poor eyesight. Never leaving anything less than a twenty in the collection plate. Ella made a point of shovelling the fine, dusty powder on the day of the first snowfall. She wanted to bake her mailman cookies to apologize for things from the winter before. She thought about buying him mittens as a Christmas present, maybe red and navy ones to match his Canada Post jacket. His hands had been so pale, and this year she was making an effort.

 

“FIFTY-ONE CENTS IS NOT A LOT TO ASK,” Charlie said. “Find me anybody else who would take a stinking letter from here to Saskatoon for fifty-one cents, and I'll be damned. You think you can go up to someone on the street
and get them to take a letter down the block for that?” Ella said no, she didn't think so. “You're damn right,” Charlie said. “You can't.”

Dangerous dogs shouldn't be left to terrorize the neighbourhood.

He didn't steal pension cheques, so stop calling the cops.

People who didn't shovel their snow should try doing his job and not breaking their legs. Ella of all people should know that.

If he had had a bad day, he might go on for hours.

Ella went to the kitchen to get Charlie a beer, thinking for the hundredth time that no matter what, those gloves had been worth the money. Even now it seemed like an extravagant idea, cashmere lining and Italian leather, but she had talked herself into it and made a plan, knowing that it was a good year for grand gestures.

She had waited until a bad snowfall and then watched the mailman come up the walkway. When his boot hit the wobbly first step of her porch, Ella had crouched a little and jammed the small flat box through the mail slot. It was a tighter fit than she thought, and the shiny gold wrapping scraped most of the way off. She hung onto the corners of the box with pinched fingers.

“What now?” The mailman's voice came through the door.

Ella shoved the gift forward a little and lost her grip. The box slipped onto the porch and the brass flap that covered the slot snapped shut on the wrapping. Ella yanked the paper back and balled it up in her hands.

“Sorry,” she said through the door.

She poked the flap up again with one finger and saw the mailman from the waist down. He turned the box over.

“They're mittens,” she said, panicked. “Gloves, I mean.”

He tucked the box lid under his arm and tried one, stretching his fingers inside the soft leather.

“Fits like a glove,” he said, reaching his hand closer to the mail slot. Ella didn't laugh.

The mailman kicked at the salt on the steps, which were scraped down to the bare concrete. Ella wasn't sure what to do next.