Where She Has Gone (7 page)

“So I saw that woman you drove off with yesterday,” he said. “Pretty classy.”

It took me an instant to realize he was talking about Rita.

“That’s my sister.”

“Victor, my boy, you’ve been holding out on me.”

I felt the anger rise in me.

“She’s out of your league.”

He covered his hurt with a smile.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, his voice dripping false magnanimity.

The incident soured what little good feeling remained in me from my day with Rita. In my memory of it, the day had the dreamy ambiguity of something utterly hermetic and private, that had happened outside of time and space; it seemed a violation that there had been this witness to it. I felt like a criminal at the instant of a first crucial misstep; from this, all the rest would unravel.

It was afternoon before I’d gathered the courage to call Rita’s.

“Gone to the library,” Elena said. “At least that’s what she said.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She said the same thing yesterday.”

“We decided to take a drive.”

“So I hear.”

I felt a throb of paranoia.

“Just tell her I called,” I said.

By evening she hadn’t called back. I went out and in a few minutes found myself at the head of her street, then just across the way from her house. Through the front window I could see Elena seated at her desk silhouetted by the glow of her desk lamp; as I watched, Rita came to her doorway and stood leaning against the door frame in conversation. From where I stood I could just make out the movements of her face as she spoke. It was like reading directly through to a
subtext: she was talking, smiling, responding, and yet beneath was this complex, subtle shifting of emotion as if I were seeing through to some darkness in her, some side of her where forces I knew nothing of contended.

I went home and phoned her.

“I tried to call,” she said. There was still a note of timid intimacy in her voice. “I guess you were out.”

“I went for a walk.”

Now that I had her on the line I had no idea what to say to her.

“I thought maybe we ought to talk,” I said.

I asked her to come by the following evening. But already we were getting too far away from whatever it was that had happened at the Falls, whatever the feeling had been between us then. It was the sort of feeling, it seemed now, that could only have been right for those few minutes it lasted, that had to have come out of nothing and then had to return there.

From the moment she arrived at my apartment, the two of us awkwardly sidestepping and shifting at the door as she took off her coat, everything seemed wrong. She had dressed as she might have for a first date, in nylons and a cream-coloured skirt and a silky white blouse. We both seemed aware at once how inappropriate this was.

“I shouldn’t stay long,” she said. “End of term and all that.”

I went into the kitchen to make coffee. I caught a glimpse from there of Rita sitting stiffly in the living-room armchair like someone awaiting a reprimand.

“There’s wine, if you want,” I said stupidly.

“Sure. I mean, if that’s what you’re having.”

I was stuck then not knowing whether to bring coffee or wine and ended up bringing out both, in an awkward flurry of glasses and cups that then sat incongruous and untouched on the coffee table.

“How are things with Elena?” I said.

“They’re all right.” The way her eyes avoided me reminded me of my visits to her at the Amhersts’ when she was a child. “I was probably just overreacting before. I mean, she’s always been really supportive and everything.”

There was a knock at the fire-escape door. Rita’s eye went to it with what looked like a mix of panic and relief.

“I guess you should get that,” she said.

It was Sid.

“Hey, Vic.” He was dressed in an elegant black overcoat I’d never seen him in before. “Just wondering if you wanted to grab a drink.”

But his gaze went immediately to Rita. It was as if he had been watching for her from upstairs, ready to pounce.

“So this must be your sister,” he said, flashing me a mock-innocent grin.

Before I could find a way to deflect him he was inside introducing himself.

“Wine. Very romantic. Mind if I stay for some?”

He had directed the question not at me but at Rita.

“I guess not,” Rita said, looking toward me uncertainly. “I’ll get you a glass.”

“It’s all right, I’ll find one.”

He put on a gallantry around Rita I’d never witnessed in him, pouring wine for her, asking her questions about herself. Rita seemed baffled by him at first, warily putting him off;
but then slowly he managed to draw her in. He had a way of disarming people with the impression he gave that he needn’t quite be taken seriously, that he was someone you simply observed; and then suddenly he was the one in control.

“So I suppose you’re a brain like your brother here.”

“I dunno. Something like that.”

“I’m going back to school in the fall, eh. I’ve just got a few courses left for my degree. What I really want to get into though is film.”

He had never mentioned to me having been to university. But when he quizzed Rita on her courses he seemed to know the terminology well enough. It turned out – or so he said – that he’d actually done one of the courses that Rita was currently enrolled in.

“I’ve still got all the old exams and things, if you want to come up and have a look at them. It’ll just take a minute to dig them out.”

Rita’s eye went to me again.

“I guess that’s all right,” she said. But we both seemed merely at the whim of Sid’s momentum now. “I mean, if Vic doesn’t mind.”

“No, no. That’s fine.”

She was gone for more than half an hour. I heard the creak of their footsteps on the hardwood above, then the low reverberation of Sid’s stereo. When she came back down it was clear from her distracted air that she was stoned.

“I guess I better get going,” she said.

“Did you get those exams?”

“Uh, no, he couldn’t find them.” A pause. “He asked me out.”

“Oh.” It only occurred to me now, from the dead note in
her voice, that she was probably thinking I’d planned all this, that I’d set her up. That that was my way of dealing with things. “What did you say?”

“I said yes.” She wouldn’t look at me. “I thought it’d be fun.”

We’d remained standing at the fire-escape door. She had gone up without her coat and now she removed it from the rack near the door and stood staring at it in her arms.

“So when are you seeing him?”

“Thursday, I guess. He’s off work then.”

“Just before your party.”

“Yeah.”

The stupidest, the easiest thing seemed to be to let things stand as they were.

“So I guess I’ll see you at the party then,” I said.

“Sure.”

I stood watching from the living-room window as she walked along College through the pools of light the streetlamps cast. At Spadina she paused, looked around and behind as if searching for something; and then instead of continuing westward and home, she turned south on Spadina and dropped out of view. It struck me that I had no idea where she was going. There seemed something vaguely encouraging in that, reassuring, as if she were a character in a book who had suddenly veered off the page, stepped into some secret life where there were other ways of working things, other possibilities. Without quite knowing what I intended, I grabbed my coat and hurried out after her – I could run into her, on neutral ground there on a night-time city street, and something would be different. But by the time I’d got to the corner she was nowhere in sight.

I ran into Sid the following morning at the convenience store in our building. He was buying groceries – bread, tins of soup, canned salmon – though he could have got the same things for half the price at the market five minutes away.

“So you’re seeing Rita,” I said.

But he wasn’t playing the matter at all as I’d expected.

“It’s no big deal,” he said, almost peevish. “I’m just going to show her around a bit, that’s all.”

He seemed almost surprised now at his own good fortune, as if he thought of himself after all, despite his talk, his hopes, as simply what he appeared to be, a two-bit drifter trying to make his way. I thought of how his apartment had looked the few times I’d been up to it, how it had reeked of transience: dirty dishes piled up, dirty clothes strewn about, the furnishings mainly milk crates and planks and the windows tacked over with yellowing newsprint that let in a weird, sallow light.

“Anyway it’s none of my business,” I said.

I had papers due for my courses at Centennial but couldn’t put my hand to any work. Everything seemed askew, as if a story had been proceeding in some normal way and then an error, a shift, had sent it off into strangeness. Even the weather, which almost overnight had turned spring-like and warm, seemed a kind of senseless reversion, the melting snow, the patches of greenish lawn re-emerging here and there littered with the debris that had collected over the winter. In the lot of the service station which my apartment looked onto across Huron, a great mound of snow that had been built up by progressive ploughings during the winter was slowly melting down through its layers as if time were moving backwards; in a matter of days only bits of gravel and grime would remain like the insoluble residue of all the past weeks and months.

I called my Aunt Teresa to let her know I wasn’t returning home for Easter.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, as if she’d had to fight to dredge my image up from her memory. It seemed like years since we had spoken, like we’d never been part of a family.

“Say hello to everyone,” I said.

“Well. We can’t force you to come home if you don’t want to.”

Thursday I skipped my classes and spent the whole day searching for a birthday gift for Rita. I was in and out of gift shops, jewellers, antique stores; every item seemed wrong, seemed infected with our strangeness, open to misinterpretation. The shopkeepers offered up their suggestions, laid trinkets out on their counters; all wrong. It was a kind of obsession, finding the proper thing, what would hit the right note, would say, this is where we stand, just here. Then,
impulsively, I bought a watch, too elegant, too expensive, already chiding myself as the saleslady wrapped it for me, already knowing it was excessive, that that was the message of it. I couldn’t possibly give it to her; at home, I simply stuffed it away still in its plastic bag at the top of my closet.

It was getting toward evening; I didn’t want to be in if Rita came by the building to meet up with Sid. I got in the car and drove. The streets were clogged with rush-hour traffic; at one point, going down toward the lakeshore thinking to stop in a little park there, I missed a lane change and was forced out onto the expressway. At the end of the on ramp I had a moment of panic as the ramp narrowed and nearly pulled into the path of an oncoming truck. Its lights flashed, its horn sounded, and then somehow I ended up squeezed onto the shoulder, fighting the slide of the wheels against the gravel until I was able to bring the car to a stop.

Another car had already pulled up behind me. A bearded man in a parka got out and came to my window.

My heart was still pounding.

“Is everything all right?” he said.

“I think so.”

“You came pretty close to that truck.”

He eyed my car uneasily, its luxurious bulk. Perhaps he was afraid that I’d stolen it, that I was on the run. I saw myself for an instant as he might, through a veil of fear and good intentions: I could be anyone, capable of anything.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

More than my near accident, the look in the man’s eyes left me unnerved. It was as if I had suddenly lost any internal
sense of what I was: for that instant I was only what he reflected me back as, an unknown quantity, a threat.

I took the first exit and headed north. I had got it into my head to visit my friend Michael, though I hadn’t seen him since the fall. It took half an hour of driving, past older stretches of city and then up through the slow deterioration into discount furniture shops and strip malls, to get out to his suburb. From a distance the little island of tidy bungalows his subdivision formed cast up a halo of collective light like some protective dome that enclosed it.

Michael came to the door looking dishevelled and tired as if he’d just risen from a sleep.

“I was on my way home from Centennial,” I lied.

The television was on the living room, but the rest of the house was dark. There were no toys in the hall, no baby sounds in the background.

“Come on in. It’s good to see you.”

He offered me a beer. I followed him into the kitchen expecting it, for some reason, to be in shambles. But everything was in purest, pristine order, as if in waiting.

“Suzie left me,” Michael said, before I asked. “A couple of months ago.”

“Oh.”

There was an awkward silence. We sat nursing our beers at the kitchen table like two interlopers, out of place there.

“What happened exactly?” I said.

“You know how it is. You don’t notice the signs at the time, and then it’s too late. She was pretty young when we got married and all that. I guess she felt she’d never had much of a life. It’s just hard with the kid and everything.”

He set about to make us some supper, setting out foodstuffs and pots with an instinctive carefulness and frugality as if not to disturb the kitchen’s ordered calm. I thought of the three of us having supper there the fall before, drunk on homemade wine.

“I’m thinking of moving back to the city,” he said. “There’s no point keeping a house like this. My father jacked the rent up just after Suzie left, that’s how he thinks about these things.”

He talked a bit about the things he would do, his new freedom, but it was clear that Suzie’s departure had broken him. The baby would be about a year old now – he said the silence was the hardest thing, coming home every day and instinctively waiting to hear a child’s sounds that didn’t come.

“They’re back with her mother now, she looks after the kid when Suzie’s at work. But it’s not as if her mother and I ever got along. I get it coming and going, from her family and mine. You just become this pariah or something.”