Tell Anna She's Safe (24 page)

He laughed then, and his laugh—a warm, genuine laugh—dissipated my unease. “Touché.”

I changed the subject. “So did you stay in contact with Lucy after….” I trailed off.

“After she ditched me for another guy? No, I'm not that much of a masochist. I took a few months to get some emotional distance. But I liked the woman. As it happens I like most of my exes. I always try to stay friends. So after a healthy amount of time, I contacted her.”

“Before Tim got out.”

“Before Tim got out,” he confirmed. “We saw each other now and then. She asked me to have dinner with her a night or two before he was released.”

“Didn't you find that a bit … odd?”

Curtis barked out a laugh. “Well, at first I flattered myself that she'd come to her senses. She didn't announce until we were in the middle of dinner that Tim was about to be released. I realized she wanted to….” He paused, searching for the right word. He seemed to pick his words with care. “Gloat,” he said at last.

“Gloat? I can't believe that. It seems heartless.”

“It depends on what she was gloating about. It wasn't so much about Tim. I sensed she wanted to show me how well she'd got on without me since I'd left. She'd been living on her own for almost a year.”

“That's when I met her. When she was on her own. I admired her. She seemed so self-sufficient.”

Curtis was nodding. “I can see how she would have come across that way. But that was a first for Lucy. Her pattern was always to have a man waiting in the wings. She chased me and chased me. I've always been slow to commit. And then when I finally stopped running and said, ‘okay,' she dumped me for Tim.”

“But Tim wasn't free to move in.” But he was
there
, I added, to myself. Maybe in a way no one else ever had been. He couldn't be anywhere else. His being in prison, ironically, had ensured he was always there. It had probably been quite easy to offer her unconditional love from prison.

*

A FIGURE STOOD BESIDE THE
highway in the distance, at the end of the drive. He didn't move, didn't pace or fidget or look at his watch. But he watched the highway with an air of unease, as if he had no idea where he was or where he was going. He looked like he was hoping someone would come along and pick him up and take him home.

She pulled the Suzuki over onto the shoulder. Their eyes met through the windshield. The fear in his eyes met the fear in hers. But then she saw relief shear through his fear. Someone had come for him after all.

The first few drops of rain began to fall as they turned onto Highway 15. She stuck to the eighty-kilometre-per-hour limit, but even so sensed everything was going by too fast for her passenger.

There was, she thought, too much space around him.

She was overwhelmed by the anxiety filling the car. Her own, driving in the rain with a line of cars building behind her, bringing a newly released convict to live in her home. And his. She felt his almost more than her own: fear of the open space, the speed of the car, the unknown destination. Anxieties she knew all too well. The difference was: Tim would grow used to it all. He would become at home in the world again. But maybe, just maybe, as he overcame his terror of being out in the world, so would she.

Two and a half hours later, she pulled into the driveway and pulled the key out of the ignition. She closed her eyes and with one long exhalation tried to release all the tension of the drive. Then she turned and smiled at her passenger. “Welcome home, baby.”

But Tim wasn't looking at her. He was letting himself out of the car. He seemed mesmerized by his surroundings, the neighbourhood, the house, even though he'd seen it all before when he'd been allowed to visit on his
ETA
. He stepped onto the porch as if in a daze.

She reached into the back for his forgotten duffel bag. It was even lighter than she was expecting. What did it feel like to carry all your earthly goods in one small bag? For a moment—the moment between the car and the front door—it was her bag, her life. There was something incredibly freeing about the lightness of this bag. You could, she thought, go anywhere you wanted. No mortgage payments, no bills, no clients, no deadlines, no responsibilities, no “things” to worry about. For a split second she envied Tim his freedom. Until she remembered the invisible cord that still connected this bag, and its contents and its owner, to prison. He wasn't free—not yet. There was a parole officer to report to, mandatory counselling to take, a job to find, or for her to create for him, adjustments to make to living in the “real” world. And when he had adjusted, what then? Then he would be bound by other bonds—work, car payments, financial responsibilities. All the trappings of “normal” life. Who, really, was ever free?

She vowed, climbing the front steps to let Tim in the front door, that in the intervening time, in her house, in her care, she would give him a taste of real freedom.

*

“I COULD SEE SHE WAS
stronger for having been on her own,” said Curtis. “She seemed more sure of herself. I was impressed. And I told her so. I also gave her a hard time for not seeing the light about Brennan. But she seemed to have grown up a lot.” He sighed. “There were so many times when I felt like a parent with a four-year-old.”

“Yet you stayed with her.”

He shrugged. “I was waiting for her to grow up.” He paused, then added, in that deliberate way of his, as if he were delivering a line on stage: “No one has ever loved Lucy the way I loved her.”

His words hung in the air between us for a few silent minutes. I wanted to ask him if he believed in unconditional love. Instead I said, “It must have been a blow when she said Tim was getting out.”

“Don't misunderstand me. I didn't accept her invitation to dinner thinking she was coming back to me. I just hoped for her own sake that she wasn't continuing on with Brennan.”

“And after he got out. Did you continue to see her?” I thought about what Anna had said. That Tim had been jealous. If Lucy had continued having contact with Curtis, that would have been a hotbed of conflict.

“I ran into them on Bank Street the day after he was released.”

“The day
after?
My God.”

“Completely by accident. I was getting my morning coffee at the 7-11 on my way to work. When I lived with her, Lucy wasn't even awake at that hour.”

“Where do you work, anyway?”

“At that time I was a mechanic in a garage.” He grinned. “Now I'm working part-time in a second-hand bookstore.”

“Quite the renaissance man,” I smiled back. “It must have been a shock to run into them.” But what I was really wondering was how it had been for Lucy.

“Well, at least I now knew what Brennan looked like.” He said it in a quiet but significant voice.

I gave him a sharp look. “Were you worried? I mean for your own safety?”

“The man had been in prison for murder.”

Manslaughter, I corrected in my head. But I knew Curtis would tell me there was no difference. There were definitely some similarities between him and Marc. Maybe that was why I liked him.

“I wouldn't say I was worried,” Curtis was saying. “Just more aware.”

“But you still kept in contact with Lucy.”

He shrugged. “What can I say? I liked the woman. We were friends. But it wasn't like we saw each other all the time. It was mostly phone calls, and not all that often.”

“Did she … did she say anything about Tim and her? How things were going?”

Curtis wiped a hand over his eyes as if remembering was an effort. “Yes and no. I remember the first thing she complained about was his grammar.”

I gave a wry smile, remembering Tim's letters. “But he wrote to her. She would have known he was no English major.”

“I think she made excuses for him while he was in prison. You know, being surrounded by all those other bohunks—that was her term, by the way—he wouldn't be able to help himself. But when he was living in her house, and she was introducing him to her friends and had to listen to him every day
…
.”

I was nodding. “It would be a whole other story.”

“That and his redneck attitudes. She found herself with a country-music loving, gay-hating, sports-loving bohunk. There was no point in saying ‘I told you so.'”

I was suddenly taken back to my second visit to Lucy's after Tim had got out. The time I had cycled down. Early September. I had been elated that Marc and I seemed to have come to a place of acceptance about our differences. Lucy had tried to tell me we were on a journey to acceptance of “the other.” I had laughed at her. I was just trying to get along with my guy. But when Tim had joined us at dinner, she'd said, “Ellen and Marc are going through
exactly
what we are.” I remembered I'd had no idea what she was referring to; she had let me do all the talking that day. Had it been about their different interests? Their contradictory attitudes? It would make sense. But in prison he'd claimed to be a jazz lover and to be interested in all the metaphysical things she was. Had he lied?

“Where are you?” asked Curtis.

I started, and laughed. “Being haunted by a ghost.”

“As are we all,” he said wryly. “Are you hungry? I've got the fixings for a Greek salad.”

I
was
hungry. I had lost track of time. It must be going on eight. The sun was lighting up the pine tree in a golden green glow.

The salad was good. It fortified us for another several hours of talking, this time in the cottage. It had been the family cottage, Curtis explained, but he'd moved in permanently after he and Lucy had broken up. The furniture was cottage furniture. Outdated but comfortable. We sat end to end on the lime-green couch.

It was after eleven when I finally took my leave. We had been talking for almost seven hours. My head was full. I needed to go home and unload it.

“You're still tense,” Curtis said when we stood at my car saying good-bye. “I thought you said you were on holiday.”

I made a gesture with my hand that reminded me of Marc. A gesture that said: Are you surprised?

Before I could stop him, Curtis had turned me around and was massaging my shoulders. “This isn't a come-on. You look like you're carrying around a plank in your shoulders. Maybe you should see a massage therapist.”

The only massages I'd ever had before had been a method of foreplay. But I believed him that this wasn't a pass. We had spent an enjoyable evening together, but our common point of interest was Lucy, not each other. And his hands meant business. They weren't caressing, they were digging, finding all my trigger points.

“Ouch!”

“You have to relax and go into the pain,” said Curtis.

“I cannot pretend to enjoy pain.”

“Okay.” I could feel him grinning behind me. “Really enjoy it then. You've got so many knots. It would be my pleasure to get at them.”

“To torture me you mean.” I scrunched up my neck when he pressed on one particularly painful spot.

“Okay, call me your torturer if you must. It's for your own good.”

“Would that make me a vic—
ouch!”
This time I pulled away, half grimacing, half laughing. Rubbing my shoulder. “Okay, okay, I need a massage. You've convinced me. But not from you. Is there a professional you recommend? Trish Cousins maybe?”

“Kendra MacKenzie,” said Curtis, without hesitation. “She's right in the market—didn't you say you work in the market? I'll give you her phone number. I've had a lot of massages in my life and she's the best.”

The phone was flashing when I got home. A Private Caller had phoned at four, just after I had left for Curtis's. “Hello, Ellen,” said my private caller's voice. “I'm sorry you're not there. I'll call you in the morning. At ten.”

Don't call me
. He didn't say it, but it was implicit in his tone. So was the order:
Make sure you're there
.

I couldn't believe he had called the moment I'd left to see Curtis. He seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to men and me. But maybe he was going to come and see me at last. We could finally talk. I had a thousand questions. And only half of them were about Lucy.

I slipped out the back door in my bare feet and felt my way in the dark to one of the Muskoka chairs on the lawn. Wispy clouds obscured the full impact of the starry night sky. I filtered Curtis's stories through what I already knew—or thought I knew—about Lucy. Back in the house I continued with my notes late into the night.

*

SHE WOKE, WOOZY AND HEADACHEY
, from a fitful sleep. Tim's snoring had kept her awake, not to mention their sexual hunger for each other after all these months. She felt raw inside but satiated. It hadn't exactly been romantic, tender love-making. But the urgency, she had to admit, had been on both sides. And at least they'd been in a bed, not in the corner or the bathroom of the prison visiting room. There would be plenty of time for tender romance. A life time.