The Snow Falcon (8 page)

“It’s not just where you’ve been,” Wilson said. “It’s what you did. People around here know you, they read the papers. I couldn’t have somebody like you working here. Even if I thought it wouldn’t affect business, I couldn’t have you here. It just wouldn’t sit right with me.”

“What about all that stuff about treating people right? ‘We’re good people,’ didn’t you say? Shouldn’t people get another chance?”

“I think you ought to leave,” Wilson repeated, moving toward the phone. “I don’t want to have to call the police.”

Michael felt suddenly deflated; his anger faded to a dull buzz. He should have known better. Wilson held open the door for him, saying

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nothing. Michael met the old man’s eye and saw only distance and hostility there.

“Take my advice,” Wilson said as Michael left. “Go somewhere else. Where people don’t know you.”

There was no sympathy in his tone, no desire to offer wisdom for the sake of helping. He was just saying that the town didn’t want him around, and that if Michael had any sense, he would just move on. Michael didn’t reply. On his way past reception downstairs, he noted that the girl who’d smiled at him earlier was speaking on the phone. She looked up and met his eye, then looked quickly away. When he reached his car, he got behind the wheel and screwed his eyes against the pain throbbing in his temples, taking deep breaths, massaging his head with his knuckles until the pain faded to a dull ache.

IN THE AFTERNOON, Michael left the house and walked down to the river, needing time to think and clear his mind. He crossed the river by an old footbridge that creaked and swayed above the dark water. The air was filled with the muted roar of water where the banks narrowed between two black rocks that glistened wetly in the weak sunlight. Beyond them the river dropped and surged in white rapids for a hundred feet or so before it widened again to continue its course. On the far bank he climbed through the woods, which down here were mostly hemlock scattered through with aspen and poplar. When he came out beyond the trees, where the snow was thick on the ground and the air was still and quiet, he found a place among the rocks where he could sit for a while.

When Holly was born, he’d thought life was full of promise and had painted mental pictures of how his family would be. The one thing he wanted for her was that she should be happy, that her life would be free of the tensions he’d grown up with himself. He envisioned only an existence where nothing intruded to upset the balance.

He’d married Louise when he was twenty-six; she was three years younger. He was already doing well, and they’d bought an apartment that they moved into the week after their honeymoon in Tobago. He’d written his dad a letter a month later to give him the news, and he sometimes wondered now what pain that must have caused

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him to receive it after the event. Louise herself came from a happy family, with two brothers and parents who welcomed Michael as one of their own. He’d never talked about his own family except to say that he was an only child, that his mother had died when he was eighteen and he didn’t get on with his dad. He’d never tried to explain why, or revealed that his mother had taken an overdose. Louise had tried to persuade him to invite his dad to the wedding, a conversation that had developed into a serious argument.

“You don’t understand about him, okay! Just forget it,” he’d said, aware that his voice was rising uncontrollably but unable to stop it.

After that, she’d let it drop. A couple of weeks after he’d written, a wedding present had arrived from his dad, and a card. He’d put the present, unopened, in the spare room, but Louise had found it, and one day when he came home from work, a hand-blown glass vase was standing on the table.

“Call him. Just do that, please,” Louise had said. “What harm can it do?”

He’d refused, and she’d let it go. But it was there between them, a taboo subject he wouldn’t discuss, and it festered.

The first years of their marriage had been happy. Louise had honey-blond hair and serious gray eyes, but when she smiled, they melted. He’d loved her then as completely as any man could. Her body was slim and firm and she knew how to dress so that she turned men’s heads in the street. He’d been proud of her. He’d thought he was lucky to have her, and looking back now, he could see that that was the first sign something was slightly wrong. It was as if he’d already felt that nobody should expect things to go so well, that it couldn’t last. He had a beautiful wife, a career going places, and at the back of his mind there was a shadow lurking, a gloomy tendency to wonder when it would all go wrong.

His dad called once or twice from Little River, and they’d had stilted conversations. After a while the calls had stopped coming, but there’d been letters instead. Every time he’d read one, he’d felt the need to be alone for a while, and sometimes he’d read them over and over again. Perhaps he was searching between the lines for a message that wasn’t there. His dad wrote about the town and small things that were happening. He never mentioned Michael’s mother or asked him to come back and visit. Louise had periodically tried to persuade him that he should try to work out whatever had gone wrong be-

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tween them, or at least talk about it, but he could never bring himself to do that. If he and Louise ever argued, it was over this one thing, this part of his life he excluded her from.

When Holly was born, Louise had given up her job. About that time, Michael had been headhunted to a new agency where he was paid more money. It should have been a perfect time, but the shadow in his mind had grown longer and darkened his thoughts. From a vague feeling that he was undeserving of his existence, he became convinced that disaster was just around the corner, that all of his good fortune had been devised to lull him into a false sense of security. He looked for the warning signs. The birth of his daughter had made him wonder how it was possible to have so much love for a person. He’d look at her, so helpless and vulnerable, and the emotions he’d felt constricted his throat. He kept thinking that he was responsible for her life, that everything she experienced when she was young would shape her and stay with her for all of her days, and he’d promised he would make her life perfect the way his own had never been. He would lie awake at night, and when Louise would question him, he’d tell her that he was afraid for Holly, afraid that it would all come apart. She’d tried to comfort him, but he could see in her eyes that she was worried.

“But why should anything go wrong?” she’d said. “Everything’s fine.”

“It’s just the way I feel.”

He’d started calling home at odd hours, checking that everything was okay, sometimes turning up unexpectedly at the apartment. At first Louise had been touched by his concern, then one day it had got to her. Maybe Holly had given her a bad time because she was teething, and maybe the strain was just beginning to show. She’d flown at him when he’d come in the door early in the afternoon.

“Michael, what are you doing here? Why are you doing this? You keep sneaking around as if you expect to find something!”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“We’re fine. Michael, we’re fine.” She’d spoken slowly, trying to maintain control. “You have to stop doing this. You’re smothering me,” she’d said in a softening voice.

He had stopped—for a few days, anyway—but then started again, and it got to the point where she persuaded him that his insecurities

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stemmed from his own upbringing and that he ought to see a therapist or else get in touch with his dad.

“I could maybe understand if you’d at least tell me something about your parents. What is it that made you this way?”

By then, though, it was way too late. The mention of the subject was like opening a sore every time they spoke, and they argued. At the time, he’d been surprised by her insight, but when he thought about it later, he saw how obvious it must have been. As time went on, she talked more about his seeing somebody. His moods had started to affect her, too, she claimed. There were days when they hardly spoke, and he began to suspect her of having an affair.

When Holly was about a year old, Michael got a call one day from the RCMP in Little River. His dad’s car had been traveling on the wrong side of the road when he came around a bend outside of town, and he’d hit a logging truck head on. The impact had flattened his Dodge, killing him instantly. The cop that called Michael said that his father wouldn’t have known anything about it. Maybe a moment’s awareness and then oblivion. Michael was numbed by the news, and then the knowledge filtered through that they would never be reconciled, that all the things he’d kept locked up now had nowhere to go.

Louise had all but begged him to go to the funeral. She’d said they would all go, that he could show her and Holly where he’d grown up. The break would do them good. He’d refused, and refused even to discuss it. He didn’t tell her about the way he’d cried silently, grieving for a father he’d never really known, about how he remembered that he hadn’t even cried at his mother’s funeral. He kept it all locked inside, and though he wasn’t aware of it at the time, his reason began to slip away.

Things got worse after that. His work started sliding, and people at the agency were starting to ask questions. He’d overhear Louise on the phone, and when he’d try to discern what she was saying, she’d hang up, avoiding him if he questioned her about who she’d been talking to. He spent hours at night in Holly’s room, just sitting quietly in the dark watching her sleep. He remembered thinking it was all falling away from him, that he was letting Holly down, unable to live up to the responsibility he felt for her happiness. Louise came in one night and found him holding Holly, pleading with her not to grow up hating him as she cried in distress.

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It went on for months. Near the end, he knew Louise was planning to leave him and was convinced she had found somebody else. He bought a gun, unsure of what he was going to do with it, and he kept it for weeks in his desk at work. When he followed her one day, she met a man he didn’t recognize, and he watched them have coffee in a cafe, talking earnestly across the table with their heads close together. Before they left, the man took her hand and a look Michael recognized passed between them. It was the way Louise had once looked at him. At the door he watched them kiss and part regretfully. He followed the man and found out his name and where he lived.

A week later, Louise told him she wanted a divorce. She explained at length how the last year had made her life a misery. Even then there was something in her tone he hadn’t picked up on until later. She’d pleaded again with him to see somebody, and maybe if he’d agreed, they might still have had a chance. Instead, he’d got up from the table in silence and left the apartment. He’d driven to the office, let himself in, and taken the gun from his desk. Then he’d driven to the address of the man Louise had been seeing, and when he opened the door, Michael had shot him twice.

There had never been a time since then that he could recall anything of what he’d been feeling. And yet every action from the moment he’d risen from the table was etched in his mind and he could recall it with ease; not a second had dulled in his memory. It was like a film in which he was an actor. He didn’t even view the figure he watched go through his paces as being himself in any real sense.

He’d driven home and told Louise what he’d done, and he remembered most clearly of all her frightened look and the way she pleaded with him while she held Holly close. Holly had cried, not understanding what was happening. It came to him eventually that Louise had thought he intended to shoot them both and turn the gun on himself; this was something he’d thought about often since, unsure exactly what had been in his mind. The police arrived, and he held them at bay while he tried to work out what was happening and what he was going to do. The enormity of it all had hit like a crushing blow that he felt he would never recover from.

The last time he saw his wife and child, they were being led away while he was handcuffed. Louise had looked back for one brief moment, and in that instant he touched bottom, knowing he would never see her again.

Coming back to the present, Michael rose stiffly, aware he’d been lost in thought for hours. He’d been sitting hunched against the cold while it seeped into his bones from the rock. He stretched and thought back to the meeting with Wilson. Maybe the old man had been right not to hire him. Maybe people had a right to be wary of somebody who’d done the things he had. Heller had asked him once, not long before he left St. Helen’s, if he thought he was cured.

“I thought you were the doctor,” Michael had said.

“You don’t exhibit any psychotic signs, but then you haven’t for a long time. I want to know what you think, up here.” Heller had tapped his head with his finger.

In truth, Michael didn’t know. He recalled the dog that had strayed over to his house a few days earlier, poking its nose through the kitchen door, and the expression of the woman in the house through the woods when he’d taken it back. She’d been afraid of him, which had both angered and saddened him. Maybe she was right to feel that way. Who was to say that what happened once might not happen again?

He looked to the sky, which was just starting to change its hue as the afternoon became late, and he felt insignificant beneath it, as if he might be the only person in the world, and the air was empty and still around him, like an emptiness of his own inside. As if to prove him wrong, a movement across the snow caught his attention.

Down the slope from where Michael stood, a man with a rifle over his shoulder walked into view, and as Michael watched, he wondered what the man was hunting.

ELLIS DIDN’T NECESSARILY BELIEVE IN SUCH things, but he’d almost swear that falcon knew what he was about and was making a fool of him. It wasn’t just the money anymore that drove him out here every day, though that was still a big part of it. Now there were other things at play, like he had something to prove to one or two goddamn people, and maybe to himself as well.