Sweet Life (18 page)

And one night Gloria didn’t come home. They never did find out the exact details. Who called the ambulance while she hemorrhaged in a downtown alley? Only she could’ve explained, but she died before reaching the hospital. Darryl’s mom insisted it was Alma who arranged for the abortion. Who else but a slut could know about something that terrible? Home wrecker.
Murderer.

Darryl’s dad crashed, Alma’s term for major depression.

And Darryl’s mom? She took the blow and decided she still had someone to live for. She threw out her prescription drugs, enrolled in a course and ended up secretary in a lawyer’s office. She rarely spoke of Gloria, and when she did, it was with the halting care of someone holding broken glass on her tongue.

After the divorce, she kept the house.

Until Darryl moved out, the sense of what his family used to be hovered about the rooms like an invisible miasma. Occasionally he’d open the door to Gloria’s room, see it neater than it was when she was alive, nothing disturbed except for posters that had dropped from the walls and been arranged on the chenille bedspread by his mom. The inert blobs of Gloria’s lava lamp no longer searched for a way out.

~

Darryl watches a V of Canada geese overhead. They beat their wings in a hard rhythm as though the birds have been contracted not only to fly but to drag with them any remaining warmth. The geese don’t sound happy and Darryl doesn’t blame them; it’s a grim journey to another continent.

At the hardware store, customers complain about raking leaves and scraping frost, ask Gerhardt about snow shovels. There’s no missing how they dread winter.

Darryl once tried explaining snow to Anin. “Think of cold, white sand.” Darryl couldn’t describe how snow can be either dry or wet, how it will change everything, even the way air tastes. There was no way to explain the illusion of grace; the pure white transforming whatever lies dormant. Or dead.

I kill the
engine.

They thought they were being circumspect. It wasn’t until the HIV worsened that Darryl, unable to allow anyone but himself to nurse Anin, moved into his tent. Of course there was the rifle, and it would’ve stayed with Anin if Darryl hadn’t taken it with him. It was the rule to travel armed in case of a chance encounter with a dangerous animal.

He was waiting for the next shipment of AZTs. The drugs hadn’t helped, but he and Anin kept hoping. Word came that a drop had been made and the fellow who usually drove for the supplies hadn’t shown up that day. Darryl didn’t think much about it and, impatient as usual, headed out alone, taking the Jeep in midafternoon with plenty of time to be back before dark.

When he reached the makeshift runway, there was nothing and no one. Puzzled, but not alarmed, he waited a long while before giving up and heading back. On the way, two things happened: the Jeep broke down and night fell. It took some time to make the repairs in the beam of a flashlight, but when he was done, he made good time; he knew the route well.

After all those years, why wouldn’t he know it well? Years during which he and Anin saved the babies and inoculated the children, treated malaria and snakebite. For which of these crimes was Anin dragged from his bed and hacked to death?

Darryl should’ve been there. He would’ve lit the lamp, heard the cowards creep to the door, heard the hard panting of their liquored breath. He would’ve loaded the rifle and stood between them and the bed where Anin lay, already half-dead.

They should’ve been more discreet about their relationship, called the HI
V
anything but what it was. And that day Darryl should’ve been smarter, paid attention, driven faster. Should have. Would have. There’s no going back, and there’s no mercy for the guilty.

And Gloria. Why didn’t he tell his mom the rumours about his sister? Why didn’t he have the courage to defend Gloria against her own rage?

Now a sudden blast of wind flings grit against Darryl’s cheek and eye. He swipes at his face with his gloved hand, and when his eye waters, he realizes he’s forgotten to bring a handkerchief with him. The edge of his scarf will do.

The woman from across the street is out again, and this time she’s put on a jacket and done up the buttons. The sun glints from her glasses. She actually raises dust while she sweeps the front walk. The way she keeps looking at Darryl. Does she know something?

Does she have a message? Lady, wave your broom and shout! But one last look at him and she’s gone. No message. No meaning to anything.

This is what trauma leaves behind, this inward suspension of prospect. What does he tell his mom? What does he tell Gerhardt?

Darryl stands, his legs more chilled than he’d realized. If he turns back the way he came, it’s four blocks to his mom’s house. In the opposite direction is the hardware store, and the next bus can have him there in ten minutes. Where Gerhardt waits.

Darryl’s mom has been careful not to ask too many questions. She is alert, though, looks for clues and tracks his nightmares.

Darryl’s dreams have a recurring theme. He’s overseas with either Anin or Gloria. They’re on holiday in Rome and Paris, Istanbul or Morocco. And in the dream he realizes that it’s time to catch the plane, but he can’t find their tickets, has forgotten what time the plane leaves and his suitcase isn’t packed. The hotel room is a mess and he rushes about in panicked helplessness. If Gloria doesn’t wake up, if Anin won’t get out of bed, if Darryl can’t find the tickets, he won’t get any of them home.

And where will he call home, now? He can’t stay with his mom forever, grateful though she is for his company. She lived alone when he was gone all those years, although she has had a few of what she calls “guy friends.” Darryl once asked why she didn’t remarry. She looked into her teacup for a moment before answering. “When Gloria went, something died in me, too, and it hasn’t come back. It wouldn’t be fair.”

That’s it, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be fair to unload the man Darryl has become onto anyone, even if that someone is as understanding as Gerhardt, who claims that what the two of them have in abundance is hope.

Darryl sees hope for what it is: an abject white flag, sputtering an unclear signal. Yet beneath the heaviness coffining his heart, something longs to burn.

Here comes another bus.

Again a sudden wind grabs his breath; yanks the end of his scarf free. For a single, startled moment, he’s alive.

Glass
Garden

A distant noise, like a dry strumming,
wakes Agatha soon after dawn, sends her downstairs wearing the shorts 0and halter top she slept in. She stands barefoot in the wet grass and listens, but all she hears are robins in the pines, the breeze rustling new poplar leaves and, from farther away, the piping of a meadowlark. No crows. Not yet.

Under the blue spruce, pine cones and needles lie evenly scattered as though deliberately spread. One good rain will move things around once again, settle the soil Roland dug during the night. Crossing the patio back to the house, Agatha steps on the upraised edge of a crack, the broken pavement digging into her heel. But what stops her, catches her breath, is the empty shotgun casing lying in plain view. She gingerly nudges it with her toe and rolls over, not a casing, but a curled leaf, gunmetal grey.

An hour later, she’s on the kitchen counter, working on her third coffee. She hears Roland and Karin chat while they come downstairs, pretending the bloom isn’t off the rose six months into their marriage.

Wasn’t thinking with his brain when he walked into that pottery shop on Corydon Street and fell for Karin. Of course she made him look, the way she dresses: butt crack showing in those tight pants, t-shirt too small. And why wouldn’t she go after a chartered accountant with his own business, member of the BMW Club? What did she, the fatherless bastard, have to lose? Claims her mother works as a social director at
some resort in Wisconsin. Hawaii has resorts; Florida has resorts;
who ever heard of resorts in Wisconsin? More than likely the mother cleans toilets in some cheap hotel.

Agatha did give Karin a chance, played the gracious hostess in her turquoise caftan and hoop earrings. No migraines, no problem wrapping her head around supper. She went to the trouble of making chateaubriand, set out her grandmother’s crystal and china and silver; used the best tablecloth. All for a braless tart, a snip of white trash, who didn’t know her dessert fork from her spoon.

Look at her now: clipping up her hair with a child’s barrette, trying to scrape Agatha off the counter, right out of the picture, with those freak eyes. Karin’s blue balls are covered with transparent film like egg white or saliva or semen. A cholesterol problem, she claims. Some days when the rage shakes loose, Agatha imagines those eyes staring upward, still as opaque glass.

“It’s embarrassing the way your mother dresses.”

“I’m not deaf.”

“Oh,
this
morning you’re not deaf. It’s the third day in a row you’ve worn that yellow outfit.”

“Dog wants out.” Roland’s tight voice. At the best of times he’s a reasonably calm man, but these are not the best of times. For the last few days, he’s looked like a man who’s been dropped into the wrong house and all because of the animal Karin brought home. She lets the thing run all over, scratching the hardwood and messing the yard.
Digging.

It was digging clear through to China the day Agatha was woken by the smoke alarm. Down the stairs she ran to find her kitchen filled with smoke. She managed to toss the frying pan into the sink, kept her house from burning, the house her great-grandfather built from fieldstones, timbers hauled all the way from Ontario. And where was Karin, who was supposed to be making supper? When Agatha looked through
the window, there was Karin under the spruce with her mon
grel, its tail the only thing visible from the hole it dug.

And afterward, Agatha forced to endure Karin’s insinuations. “I can see someone like the president of the United States being insured for a million dollars, but an ordinary guy? I guess the RCMP looked into who bought the policy. It must’ve been really hard on you to lose your husband like that. I mean, they never did find him, did they?”

Now Karin opens the patio doors, first the screen, and then the glass. She follows the mutt outside and off it goes with its nose down, looking for a place to drop its rear.

“Know what a witch’s pet is called?”

Roland starts the grinder.

“This one should be called dead.”

He doesn’t hear that, either. When coffee gurgles into the pot, he helps Agatha from the counter. “You can’t sit there. You look like you didn’t sleep.”

“I was up early and caught my heel on the edge of morning. How’s that for poetry?”

“I hope I didn’t wake you last night.” Roland lowers his voice. “I couldn’t sleep, myself, and was up for a bit. Don’t say anything to Karin; I don’t want her to worry.”

Agatha doesn’t have the heart to tell him she watched from upstairs, her view partially blocked by the curved branches of an elm, while he worked in the wide beam of the flashlight he’d set on the ground. He first used the pointed shovel, then the pickaxe. Agatha kept an eye out for a light under Roland’s bedroom door in case Karin got up. It wasn’t until she saw him lift the bundle from the hole and drop it into the wheelbarrow that Agatha dared go back to bed.

Bet he’s sorry now he didn’t listen when she suggested they take down the spruce and build a gazebo, a round building with cushioned seats. He said they didn’t need more strangers coming around with a Bobcat.

Because, of course, the police had done a lot of digging, until the property looked like a demolition site. First they sent out dogs and a helicopter; then emptied the outbuildings, practically tore apart the garage.

Polite at first, later the police pressed Agatha hard in questioning how a healthy, sober man could disappear on his own property.

She wanted to tell them what her mother said one of the few times when she stayed downstairs, in a good mood and holding Agatha against her on the sofa.

“Now, sweetheart. Life is a big mystery. A long road with houses on both sides, houses you’ve never seen before. When you start walking down the road, all the front doors swing open and you wonder, ‘Now which house should I go into?’ Because you don’t know what you’ll find inside.”

There was no point telling the police how Erik had stepped through the wrong door.

“How’s the coffee coming?” Karin’s in the patio doorway. Her voice has a round shape, like a merry-go-wheel, and has sounded this way ever since her mutt poked its nose where it doesn’t belong.

Roland takes Agatha’s empty mug. “Get the blinds open,” he tells her. “And then have a shower.”

The house can’t be seen from the road and the nearest neighbour lives half a kilometre away, but after Erik walked off four years ago, Agatha couldn’t shake the sense of being
watched. She ordered custom blinds for all the windows, upstairs
and down. There were some who reported seeing strange lights bopping around the sky the night he disappeared, but those weren’t aliens: they were spirits of the dead searching for the way to the other side. Erik’s wasn’t one of them. His spirit is caught here; every so often, she glimpses a smudge lingering in a corner of a room, but it’s gone before she can turn her head. Or a shivering silhouette she sees for an instant before it backs off into darker shadows. Ironic how he won’t leave. When she needed him home, he preferred working overseas.