The Thirteen (14 page)

“Of course,” she said.

Before she left, Marla took a piece of leftover cake and a bit of earth from her backyard and put them together in a jar. She shook up the jar and then put it in a bottom cupboard. She did this hastily though, because she needed to go get Amy.

Outside, Tim was still bouncing the basketball over and over against the garage. She poured a sports drink into a go-bottle and took it to him. His face was flushed and sweat had gathered along his hairline. He was concentrating. He didn’t say a word to her. She made him drink it.

Her boy was not right. Something was not right with him. He had drunk it—that was something. But it was unravelling. Everything.

In the car she focused on Amy and hoped it was a cold or the flu. Hoped that the girl had vomited or something, in the throes of some normal childhood virus. But she didn’t think so.

She thought maybe it was her turn.

In the space of a half-hour her mixed feelings about Paula had sorted themselves out. They needed her. Marla’s children were now at stake.

And they needed Rowan especially. She allowed herself to think
the girl the girl
who would save them all, and afterwards Paula would come around to their way of thinking. She would have to. They had all made sacrifices.

And Marla had never had a choice. Friday couldn’t come fast enough.

TWELVE

A
LONG DRIVE LAY AHEAD OF
I
ZZY
, and at the end of it, a horrible task. On the floor of the passenger side of the car was her leather apron, rolled and tied tightly. On the tight curves of the highway, if she listened carefully, she would hear the clinking of the heavy business inside. She did not listen. In her life, it didn’t pay.

Of all the women in Haven Woods, Izzy alone would have understood Paula’s life in the city. The slum where Paula and her daughter lived was a world away from Haven Woods, but it was not very far from where Izzy had started out. Her neighbourhood had been Borwin Street. An ugly name.

Borwin Street was no place to be raising two kids. The street-lights were burned out routinely. Most of their block was populated with people like them, poor people just trying to do their best, raise their kids without killing them. All night long you could hear wandering drunks, shouted obscenities, howling fights, police sirens.

That was after Roger’s car wreck. He’d lost his job—however lame it had been in the first place, it had kept them housed and fed—and then they couldn’t pay the rent on their decent apartment. They’d had to move to the bad neighbourhood. Roger healed slowly. Isadora—she’d been Isadora then, not Izzy—had worked for a time at a restaurant a few blocks from their place, then lost that job after the boss made a pass at her and she turned him down. She cried. For minimum wage.

For a while she had another waitressing job, but it was two bus rides and a good long walk from home. She was spending all her time on buses, leaving before the kids were up, getting home just before they went to bed, exhausted and smelling like beer and french fries. Roger couldn’t manage two preschoolers, either.

Missing everything. The children growing up.

Marla was whatever she was: an unhappy child, alternately quiet or overbold, a couple of years younger than David. But David! He was her pride. Tall even at five, talented, handsome. The kind of child who would succeed. He’d been—they’d both been—her reason for listening to the old woman.

Even when Izzy was little, her grandmother had been crazy, at least according to her mother. Someone to stay away from. She’d occupied the back bedroom in whatever house her parents were living in. Izzy’s mother had brought her from Haven Woods to live with them after the old woman went mad. At least that was how her mother explained it. There had been an incident—a feud with a neighbour, dead animals on his doorstep, some kind of final blow-up—that ended with Izzy’s mom physically removing her grandmother from her own house and sticking her in a mental hospital. When she was released, they brought her home to their place and locked her in the back bedroom, watching her all the time.

Grandma’s crazy don’t talk to her don’t go in there stay away

Izzy had a vague memory of her mother and father moving her grandmother’s things into the tiny room, and a more vivid memory of them in the backyard, burning what was left from her house in a big oil drum, the smoke black, the flames brilliant colours.

Of course Izzy knew all about it now. She knew who the old woman had been, knew what she’d been.

Izzy’s parents had been poor their whole life. Sometimes during those very bad days, Izzy would look at her parents and feel horrified that she was looking at her own future—Roger unemployed, her working a shit job, the two kids growing up with no opportunities.

When Izzy was very little, her grandmother would eat with the family, but her mother was ever watchful, watching the old woman for … something, and chastising her when she saw it. But Izzy had been a smart child, and she picked up on the things that were said. When they came to visit, her aunts would talk. Izzy was supposed to be sleeping, would feign sleep, on the sofa while the woman chattered like crows in the kitchen. She heard things.

Secrets. Pieces of impossible secrets. For most of her life, until things got so very, very terrible, she hadn’t believed them. The talk of women raised in a different world, who saw spirits and omens in tea leaves. Who used nearly unintelligible words
—damon, hexe, ubel
. They didn’t live in the real world, where evil was a glassy-eyed girl with a knife in her pocket looking for money, where evil was a fat man on the corner getting the girl stoned in return for nasty work.

Ubel
indeed.

Then came the Chapman murders.

It had been summer, one of those hot, hot, sticky days that make things like murder and violence seem possible, the kind of heat that tastes like copper, like blood. It was big news and it got around fast; even in those days before Twitter and Facebook, everyone seemed to know.

Izzy first heard about it on her break. One of the women showing up for a later shift told everyone. “A man went crazy and killed his family,” she said, clearly excited to be breaking the news. “Just outside the city. In Haven Woods.”

Where her grandmother had lived. Izzy had been there before her grandmother went nuts and had to be pulled out of her house screaming, with the neighbours watching, the old man next door yelling,
“Jedza, Jedza!”
She wondered where exactly in Haven Woods it had happened.

For days it was all over the radio and the papers. It wasn’t just the murder—in their neighbourhood people were killed fairly regularly—it was a
bad
murder. A man named Martin Chapman, thirty-seven years old, had gone crazy. He stabbed his wife twenty-three times and drowned his eight-year-old son in the bathtub; then he shot himself in the head. Those were the official details. But rumours spread, and in time they became accepted as fact.

He’d killed the boy first, people said, and laid his dead, wet, naked body on the dining room table. He’d placed the dead boy’s head on a pillow, his arms spread, his legs open. And then he had plunged a large kitchen knife into his chest.

When his wife came home, he killed her in the dining room. Then he cut her throat and hung her body from a ceiling beam, over the boy. In her blood he wrote on the wall

HE LIVES HERE

No details were given about who “He” was, but people guessed. In the days following the murder, neighbours, friends of the family, families of the children the boy went to school with were interviewed. Or they wrote letters to the editor. Or they just talked and talked and talked.

The day before the killings, Chapman had told people there was something in his house. That the house wasn’t just a house but a place where lines intersected. The Chapmans had lived there less than a year. It had been a steal of a deal, it was said, having been empty for a very long time.

It was an awful murder.

When Izzy got off work the day she heard about the murders, Sears came and took away her washing machine. The repo guy had had his own details to add.

“Yeah, he stabbed his old lady fifty times or something and drowned the kid, shot himself in the face. You know what I heard? I heard she was banging some guy in the bedroom and he drowned the kid to mess her up,” the Sears guy had told her as he dolly-wheeled her washing machine into the front yard where the neighbours could see.

“Sorry about hauling your washer away like this. It’s the shits being hard up.”

“It’s all right.”

A month later, two streets over from where Izzy and Roger and their children lived, a woman was strangled to death by her drug-addicted son and left to be eaten by her two Rottweilers. That was awful too. It made page six.

Izzy’s exit came up and she pulled onto a road bordered on both sides by chain-link fence. Behind the chain-link was a maze of filthy, blackened concrete, an abandoned warehouse that had been stripped of every usable piece of material until all that was left was the pillars and the fence. Every ten feet or so a metal sign was bolted to the fence.
KEEP OUT. OVERHEAD DANGER. PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE REMOVED
.

If you watched for awhile you could see people slinking around in there. Mostly they hid.

She drove past it, past another warehouse, then another. The deeper she got into the city, the bolder the people became, standing out on the street drinking from paper bags, smoking little pipes, vomiting on the sidewalk. As she drove slowly by, a man repeatedly smacked a sad, hunched woman, who stumbled with each blow but never fell. Everyone looked up as her car went by, but few stared. Nobody cared. Not anymore.

She watched the streets carefully for what she was looking for. When she spotted what she needed, she pulled in and parked at the end of an alley behind a set of large blue Dumpsters. Her car was not invisible, but it was not particularly noticeable either. It would not be stolen, that was certain. It would likely be taken for the car of someone best not messed with

(how true—they had no idea)

like a drug dealer, a gang leader. Still, there was always the possibility of graffiti, baseball bats, rocks,
anger
. It was best to hide the car, so she did.

She worried less about herself.

Mountains of dark green garbage bags were piled around the Dumpsters. She picked her way around them and over the other detritus of the alley—the rats, the shit, the used condoms, the dropped needles—to the street. Partway down the block the vomiting man had collapsed to the pavement, his head hunched down between his legs. He seemed to be asleep. It looked like sleep.

She slipped out of the alley, walking with determination and authority. It was the only way to walk in a neighbourhood like this.

The old woman, her grandmother, had been excited by the murders too. She sat at the kitchen table in her daughter’s house, clipping articles. The pile of them grew. Usually she rarely went out, and then only in the company of her daughter, but every morning in the days after the murders, she asked permission to go out and buy all the papers. As long as she asked calmly, her daughter said it was okay.

She concentrated.

Izzy’s mother would babysit Marla and David when Roger had a doctor’s appointment or physiotherapy and Izzy had to work. She’d haul herself into her parents’ house, exhausted after her shift, and the kids would be lying on their bellies on the bare floor watching television. The old woman would be at the table or in her room with the door open.

Izzy’s mother’s vigilance had grown laxer, and sometimes the old woman would talk to Isadora or make the
spitz
at her—put her fat fingers in her mouth, get them wet with saliva and flick it in Izzy’s direction.

protect you from getting vain

Sometimes she’d whisper a comment about the other women in their family—the aunts, Izzy’s mother.

a stupid woman gets what she asks for

She would eye Izzy up and down.

a smart woman—a smart woman gets more

She thought Izzy was a smart woman. And she wasn’t wrong.

A half-block up the sidewalk, in the dull light of a broken streetlamp, the filthy man was still bent over, retching. Izzy crossed the street, her shoes hardly making a sound on the asphalt, and stepped around a puddle of something vile, perhaps from the puking fellow, the smell of it lost in a plethora of odours from the neighbourhood.

Across the road was a short brownstone with wide concrete steps. There another man sat, his shoulders hunched, hair thin and dirty, eyes sunken with need. He gaped at her with an ingratiating half-smile. Beside him was a dog that looked about the same.

She stopped in front of the steps. The man looked her over.

“Nice dog,” she said.

It was so easy. Which was why she’d chosen this neighbourhood. She knew the neighbourhood. If she got up on the step and stood behind that disgusting, egg-sucking little wreck of a man and raised herself on her tippy-toes, she would be able to see the kids’ first school.

She led the dog away on a brand-new leash, purchased yesterday for just this purpose.

The man who had been vomiting now stood at the entrance to the alley where Izzy had parked the car, watching her with yellowed eyes. He was wearing a ball cap, the bill filthy from a million fingers, coated in god-knows-what, rubbing the brim when … What? When a lady went by? When his brain itched from thinking something up?

There was a week’s worth of growth on his face and something clung to his chin, something he’d tossed up probably. He was disgusting. Izzy smiled at him.

“Is that your dog?” he said, and grinned. His teeth were yellow too, and he was missing one, a dark hole visible when he talked. “That’s not your dog. I know whose dog that is. It ain’t your dog. You got money though?”

Still smiling, Izzy leaned closer to the man. The stink of puke wafted off him, but she’d smelled worse in her time. She pointed to a place between his wet, weaselly eyes. “What’s that on your head?” she asked softly, deliberately, slowly, so that the words came out as if separated by beats.

The man blinked and stepped back, unused as he was to discussion. “What?”

“Right there. Between your eyes. Here—” She stepped close enough to touch, pressing her index finger hard against the man’s waxy flesh.

He blinked twice more and stepped away from her, nearly stumbling. His hands flew up to his face and he swiped at the place she’d touched. “Wha—wha—?”

He knocked his ball cap off. It hit the filthy sidewalk and rolled so that the underside of the bill could be seen. Brown stains that Izzy recognized as blood formed oval smears.

He jumped around, swiping his hands at his face, making little surprised, alarmed noises. “Yi-yi-yi! Oh, git it,
git it—
”

Izzy smiled again. “Good luck with that,” she said. And she led the dog on its pretty red leash away from the man, who was now bouncing and jumping around like a lizard on a hotplate.

“Ain’t your dog, ain’t your dog!” the man shouted after her, banging his head on the bricks of the building, screaming like an unhappy, unwell child.

Izzy closed the trunk lid gently and got into the car with a heaviness in her chest, in her legs, in her heart maybe. She started the car, the sound of it barely discernible, the engine so quiet and perfectly made. It was a miracle, that car. Maybe
miracle
was the wrong word. The wrong god. At every turn on her way out of the city, she could hear the lurch and thud from inside the trunk.