Interference (22 page)

It's a matter of will power. A matter of mind over matter, actually. What's the matter? Maria will try to pull herself across to the back door. She will try to open the door and let Dog in. Maybe she can roll herself. She can do it.

Or she can call loudly for Tom or Becky.

“Tom.”

“Becky?”

“Tom.”

“Toooommmmmmmm.”

Nothing. The house is too spread out. The kitchen isn't below anything but the upstairs office. Tom is a deep sleeper and Becky is at the front of the house. They are both too far away to hear. And even though Becky and Tom always tell her she is loud, they don't really mean it. Maria's voice is faint and delicate.

Scratch.

Maria uses her legs to slide herself across the floor. Her bathrobe is so thick, it makes all movement difficult. She propels herself with her legs. She tries to roll. Moving her arms is not an option. When she moves her arms her back breaks. Even moving her legs makes her feel like she's about to die. So she keeps her arms down straight at her sides and moves her legs back and forth as much as she can. The hardwood parts are okay, she gets across them rather rapidly, faster than she thought she would, it's when she hits the carpet again near the door that the problems arise. She gets stuck on the carpet and finds it difficult to slide anywhere. Her purple robe, thick and piled, is like Velcro on the carpet.

The pain is surreal. It's intense but then moves through her and disappears. And then intense again, a sharp, shooting, angry pain. Her hips take the pain, her neck, her feet — even her feet, her toes, her ankles — feel the pain as it vibrates through her. Sometimes it feels as if she is paralyzed in one area, but then that area frees itself of the feeling and the stabbing feeling comes back three-fold. Maria begins to cry. She is, after all, still young. Why should she have this pain? Why is her body doing this to her?

Maria wonders if Dog will stay there. She wonders if he'll be there in the morning, but she doesn't want to take that chance. Does she? Becky is already so mad at her. She rests a bit, thinking about it. She clears her mind. Stops her tears. Sniffs.

Scratch. And then a thump, like a knock. Just one.

Can dogs knock on doors? Perhaps she just imagined it. Another scratch. Yes, it was a scratch, not a knock.

Dayton said one more thing before she left. Dayton said, as she balanced Carrie on her slender hip, as she looked down at Maria on the floor, her long blond hair framing her face, she said, “I keep thinking I see him in the neighbourhood. I keep thinking that he's been creeping around the house, looking in our windows, waiting. That's crazy, right? I mean, it's been eight months.”

“Waiting for what?” Maria said. “What would he be waiting for? Why wouldn't he just knock on your door? Come get Carrie?”

“Waiting for the right moment, of course. To steal my baby. He said he was going to get Carrie. I don't expect him to do it legally.” Dayton flicked her hair over her shoulder and left. She called out, “I'll lock the front door on my way out,” and Maria heard her walk across the front porch and disappear.

All Maria could think about, after Dayton left, was: if she's so worried that her ex-husband is stalking her, why does she leave her baby with a pre-teen babysitter and go out to play hockey? Huh? Does that make sense to you? Maria asked herself.

Maria thought, that long, cold, sore afternoon by herself on the floor, that maybe some women got what they deserved. Not in any self-righteous way, of course, she wasn't trying to be self-congratulatory because she has such a great life, and she certainly didn't want Dayton or Carrie to come to harm but some mothers just don't know how to have a good relationship or how to raise their kids. It's a matter of give and take. It's a matter of communication. And, really, if you thought about it, any woman who won't let the father see the child, well, she should be punished in some way. Shouldn't she?

The scratching continues. Poor Dog, Maria thinks. Out there in the cold and wet and dark. Poor, poor, anxious old Dog. And here she is, drugged out on pain killers, thinking that Dog is knocking on the door. Crazy crazy.

Maria pushes herself across the rest of the carpet, towards the back door, towards Dog and his pitiful scratching. All day she's been lying on the floor. All day she's been cold and sore and now she is almost there, almost to the dog at the back door in the dark. Her back is burning from the carpet. Becky will be so happy when she wakes up and sees Dog lying beside her mother on the TV room floor, keeping her mother warm. Maria will make sure they look good together, she will make sure it looks as if she went to the ends of the earth to get Dog and that Dog is grateful and loves Maria and can't lie anywhere but beside her, nuzzled in, nestled in, breathing deeply and contentedly.

When she finally, miraculously, gets to the door the scratching stops. Maria listens and then she props herself up as high as she can get, groaning wildly as the pain shoots into her back and hips and arms, a stiffening, cracking, breaking pain, and she manages to click open the lock. She collapses back before she can turn the knob on the door.

Just breathe, she tells herself. Breathe. She closes her eyes. But the pain wells up and coats her brain. There is nothing but pain. It's unbearable. Maria sees spots. Red spots, white spots. And then a cold breeze rushes in and covers her already chilled body, a cold breeze shoots across her and she feels as if she has been dipped in the freezer. Maria cries out.

Can Dog open doors?

But then there is there someone standing there at the open back door, just over her, looking down at her broken body.

“Dog?” Maria says, and then, just before she passes out from the pain, she hears, “Mom?” coming from behind her, from the kitchen.

And then she hears Becky say, “Who are you?”

Maria had said to Dayton, before Dayton started to tell her about the ex-husband, “I couldn't play hockey anyway, even if Trish had asked me, even if I had wanted to. I really didn't want to. Hockey isn't my thing. And Trish would have asked me if she thought I could have. But, seriously, can you imagine me playing hockey? Not with this back.” Maria had laughed and motioned towards her back with a nod of her chin. “You'd have to slide me off the ice, wouldn't you? I mean, I'd fall and my back would give out and then where would the team be?”

And, instead of saying something like, “Oh, we could really use you on the team,” or “I'm sure Trish would love to have an extra player and we'll call you next year,” or “We just didn't think of you and we're so sorry,” or something like that, Dayton had merely looked at Maria with a curious expression on her face. She had looked at her long and hard, judging her almost, and then she had said, “I guess you're right.” There was pity in her eyes and Maria cannot abide by pity. She. Can. Not. Be. Pitied.

That small sentence. That look in Dayton's eyes. That's what did it. That's what made Maria forget about Dog all day long. That's what made Maria lie on her kitchen floor for so many hours, thinking about her life and her loneliness and the fact that she never seems to get invited to anything, the fact that everyone seems to be jealous of her when they don't even really know her, when they don't know at all how she feels or who she is or what she is going through all the time. All. The. Time. Those small words from this new neighbour seemed to break apart the fact that Maria has known Trish for twelve years. They seemed to dissolve what Maria thought of as a friendship. Or at least a neighbourship.

Neighbours, she thought. Neighbours.

16

The way the whole situation sped out of control, the way it rapidly devolved, wasn't something Dayton's ex-husband, John had planned on. Not that John had planned much in the first place. But once it ran out of control there was nothing he could do to stop it. He also didn't intend for there to be others involved: a small man in a brown suit, a man with a vicious scar straight down his face and a tattoo of a cross on the back of his neck, a women's hockey team, random neighbours, babysitters, a frightened girl, a missing dog. What started out as a rain-soaked, cold, dark night, turned into . . . What, precisely? Yes, John intended a few things — to steal his child back and to scare his wife. But not in that order. He intended to frighten her the way she had frightened him. One day she was living with him and his child, the next day she was gone. His daughter. Gone. Of course his intention was to terrify her, in the same way she had terrified him. But he didn't mean for the rest of it to happen.

John was blindsided by the two men first. And then the dog. The girl and the man. The darkness, the confusion, the commotion and sudden lights, the footsteps all around. As if the sky was illuminated by searchlights directed at him. The whole world watching.

On the plane on the way over, John exchanges a glance with the woman two rows up from him. She is reaching to put her briefcase in the overhead bin and her shirt rides up, exposing a small butterfly tattoo high up on her hip. John stares. The woman glances over at him and smiles. She smooths her shirt down and sits back in her chair. Later, John buys her a drink. Sends it up the aisle with a stewardess.

There are a lot of things John gets away with because of the dimple on his chin, because of his polished, whitened teeth, because his suit fits so well and his hair is greying at the temples. Just the right amount. Those Touch of Gray commercials — he should be the model. He gets away with more than most. At least more than most of his friends and colleagues. It's the confidence, the swagger, the poise. That's what John has been told it is by friends after they've had too much to drink, by women who hit on him. And he thinks they must be right. Because he does get away with a lot more than most people. One woman told him he looks a little like George Clooney and, she said helpfully, that should explain everything.

This is why, when Dayton took off with Carrie, John was thrown for a loop. It's not that he can't do without Dayton: their marriage was reaching a natural end — she was unhappy and boring, he was bored — or even Carrie, although, truth be told, he did miss her more than he thought he would. John has always known he has no interest in babies. He told Dayton that before they had Carrie. It's not that he can't do better without them, it's that they left him. No one has ever left John before. He doesn't mean to seem self-centred and egotistical, but it shocked him that they left. And the way they did it was violent — Dayton didn't move down the block, she disappeared. With her passport, with Carrie's passport, with all John's savings.

For a couple of months after they left John tried not to care. He told himself he was better off without them, that eventually he could find her if he tried and file for divorce and move on with his life. Marry again. Hell, even have another kid. In the fall he was busy with work. Christmas came and went and that bothered him a bit. His daughter's first Christmas and he hadn't bothered to send her anything. Slowly John was feeling lonely and missing her. But then things started to go insane at work. Strange things began happening to him, because of him; once or twice he overslept for a meeting, once or twice he forgot to return a client's phone call, once or twice he drank too much at lunch and made a fool of himself. Then there was that party at Tsar's, the one with the cocaine in the bathroom, the one with the escorts and champagne. The one he couldn't afford but picked up the bill for anyway.

So things were slipping and John thought about what the connections were, if there were any, between Dayton stealing Carrie and his slow decline. And there were connections; he could see a lot of them. The fact that the house was always messy and when he hired a cleaning service they didn't show up half the time. Or when they did, they did a half-assed job. The fact that when he came home at night there were always dishes in the sink — his, of course, but still. There never used to be dishes in the sink. And the fact that Carrie's bears and baby toys were still taking over the living room and John couldn't be bothered to move them, instead tripping on them, bruising the soles of his feet on them. Fucking toys. Toys he didn't need. When he brought women home they would glance at the toys and he could feel them pull away. No woman likes to imagine George Clooney with a baby.

So here he is in an airplane, high above the world, following the trail of some slimy detective who charged too much for his services but quickly, easily found Dayton and Carrie. It wasn't that hard. They used passports to fly into Ontario and then the detective followed holes and gaps and sightings and such. Traced the credit cards. He did his job. Whatever that was. And here is a woman with a butterfly tattoo just up ahead and John's got a drink in his hand so things aren't all bad.

John wonders if — had he not been fired — he would be here at all. But then he pushes that thought out of his head — of course he should get his daughter back. And get back at his wife. How dare she steal from him? John wants to do to Dayton what she did to him. He wants to steal Carrie into the night, take her back home to California, leave no trace of her for Dayton so that there is that intense moment of panic when you think your child and wife have been stolen out from under you. Because, even though John quickly realized that Dayton had left on her own cognition, she didn't even leave him a note. Because, even though John figured it out within about twenty minutes, for those twenty minutes his heart beat so quickly he thought he might die. He had no idea where they had gone.

At this point, on the plane, John has a bit of an idea as to how he's going to go about it. Getting his daughter back. An idea. Not a plan, but a tiny bit of an idea. But he hasn't yet thought about what he's going to do with her when he gets her back to California. He hasn't yet realized that he'll have to take care of her in some way or another. There is nothing in his plan past getting Carrie back. Once they get back he has no idea what to do. Especially without a job. And his credit cards are maxed. John hasn't thought it through enough to worry about what Dayton will do when she finds out her baby daughter is missing. It hasn't even occurred to him that Dayton might not take only twenty minutes to come to the conclusion he came to, that Dayton might actually think Carrie has been kidnapped. And he hasn't thought through the kind of trouble he'll be in — because, in fact, he is intending to kidnap his daughter. Sure, he's going to take her away from her original kidnapper, but John doesn't let the idea enter his brain that maybe, to the outside world, he'll be just as guilty as Dayton.

But that doesn't matter right now. The butterfly woman is standing because the seat-belt sign is off, and she's coming his way. She thanks him for the drink and proceeds to the back of the plane to use the washroom. When John follows her, she smiles at him. But once they're in the line up for the bathroom she turns away from him and stares straight ahead. He tries to make conversation but her attitude is stiff and unyielding, her arms crossed in front of her chest. John gives up. That's another thing that has changed — he gives up so easily these days. After she uses the bathroom, he enters and the smell of her perfume is all around him. A floral scent, mixed with the urine smell in the air, that together make him think of funerals. John gags a little and then sneezes. Right now he thinks it's the scent that makes him sneeze, but later he'll realize he's getting a cold.

Settling back into his seat, John thinks that maybe there are alternatives to his situation. Maybe Dayton will have changed her mind, maybe she did this to test him, maybe he can talk to her and she'll agree to come home with their daughter. Even though, when he finally started contacting her, her emails were nothing but nasty and tight — like her — maybe she has realized that life is not easy alone, that she needs him to cope. She needs him to support her. But John shakes his head. He knows this isn't true. And he doesn't really want it to be true. The woman is a bitch. She has always been one. Never trying to fit in in California, never trying to assimilate. All his colleagues' wives did. Assimilate. Why couldn't Dayton? Was she too good for them? For the clubs they joined? For the Mommy-and-Me classes? For the cosmetic surgery?

“It's not like it's a matter of life or death,” the woman ahead of him is saying to her seat-mate.

“Well, death, if you think about it,” the seat-mate says.

“No, but really.”

“Really, honestly. Honestly.” John looks at the man who is speaking. Bald head, his shirt collar skewed and stained, his hands moving quickly over the empty tray in front of him as he eats and talks. The woman is no better. Her shirt collar is stained too, making John wonder what detergent these people use. Her earrings dangle below her chin; her hair is so short he can see her scalp. There is dandruff on her shoulder. Black rimmed glasses with rusty screws.

“I just wouldn't do it if I were you,” the woman whispers. “Not now.”

“But, Rita, it's a matter of —”

“It's not. It's really not. Harold. It's not.”

John puts on his headphones and pokes at the movie monitor in front of him. Every time he pokes it, the seat ahead of him moves. The woman finally looks back at him. Glares through her black-rimmed glasses. John smiles, shrugs. What can he do? The screen isn't sensitive enough. It's not his problem.

He arrives. The rain splashes. Cabs slosh water over people waiting on the sidewalk. He has to get from here to there, from the airport to where Dayton lives. Without him. In a house. The detective said a nice house, on a nice street, with a huge tree out front.

“Who the fuck cares about a tree?” John said.

“But it's huge. Like . . .
huge
.” The detective uses his hands, spread out in front of him, to signify this.

“That big?” John mocks. “That's really big.”

But when he is standing in front of that tree later, when he looks up into its eerie, naked branches, when he tries to imagine putting his arms around the trunk and then realizes that it would take five men to wrap around it, he knows the detective was right — it is a big tree.

To get from the airport to Dayton's house John has to take a cab downtown and then a bus. An hour and a half–long bus ride, through the night, John sleeping off and on, his head banging the window, and then he's there. Still with no real definite plan. Nothing. Even his tiny ideas have faded. All he is, all he has, is his emotion. And that emotion is mad right now. It's revenge. His tiredness doesn't help matters. It has been a long, long day. Why the hell would Dayton chose to move to this small city? So far away from the real world. What is it about Parkville and how did she even know about it? John figures she moved here because it's the end of the world. A dinky, stupid little place.

Walking through the deserted downtown of this dirty, ugly city — no palm trees, no sparkling lights or patios full of beautiful people — he thinks maybe Dayton has been punished enough. He laughs at himself, because stealing a man's child, well, you can never be punished enough for that. If it had been the other way around, if he had taken Carrie and moved to Canada, he'd be in jail right now. It's always a different story for men. Of course taking Carrie back is not at all the same. He's bringing her home, not stealing her away.

Walking softly towards Dayton's neighbourhood, John starts to think about things — for example, he realizes he never called anyone. He never reported his child missing. So he isn't sure what would have happened to Dayton — he's pretty sure it would have been something, but nothing as impressive as what would have happened to him. If roles were reversed. Which they wouldn't ever be because he's not so stupid as to do what she did. John shakes his head out. He's so tired he's thinking himself in circles. But men always get the short end of the stick on this kind of thing, don't they? Steal the kid away from its mother and you go to jail immediately. The mother steals the kid and gets a slap on the wrist. It's really not fair. In fact, the reason he got fired was probably because they needed more women in the company. It probably had nothing to do with him but everything to do with his gender.

His hair is soaked.

His coat is soaked.

His feet are soaked.

All of this, John says later to explain his mood to the cops. He says all of this to explain how it could have happened, to let everyone know that, really, John's not such a bad person. Deep down. He was merely tired, frustrated, wet. His wife stole his child. Remember that, he wants to shout to everyone. Remember that she did it first.

John sees a well-lit building up ahead and decides to go inside to get dry. Somehow he finds himself inside an arena, the only thing open that he passes on his walk towards Dayton. A coffee. A hot dog. He could use the washroom. It's lit up inside, warm and inviting. John buys his food, his drink, uses the washroom and then stands by the window looking in to the arena. There, on the ice, are women. Mature women. Playing hockey. John smiles. Things have changed since he was a kid.

John decides to take a load off and go in to watch.

He doesn't see her right away. Right away he focuses on another woman, one who is head and shoulders better than anyone else on the team. But then someone shouts “Dayton,” and John knows, feels it, knows for certain that there is his wife. He can't explain it, considering she'd never shown any interest in hockey, but he doesn't even have to see her blond hair coming out from the back of her helmet, her tiny body in that huge amount of gear, before he knows it's definitely her. Besides, how many other Daytons could there be in this town?