The lagoon emptied into mangrove creeks, the creeks emptied into a channel, the channel into a bay. And the bay? Well, who knew where that emptied? Sea or sky? Or somewhere in between?
"We live in a wet net, we are caught in it as surely as the catfish and prawns." This was how the boy's father had put it, speaking in their Delta dialect, finding patterns in everything as was his habit.A sky heavy with the promise of rain.
From the grassy hillock above the lagoon, the boy watched the men moving through the mud-green waters below. The other children were lined up single file on the path behind him. "They aren't ready for us," said the boy, addressing the others as their designated leader. "We go'an wait up here, by the cannon."
CHAPTER 9
Laura was outside in the cold. Officer Brisebois was trying to make eye contact, speaking quietly as the air around them turned to steam with every syllable.
"Will you be okay?"
She looked up at the apartment towers rising like bookmarks above the trees.
Will I be okay?
Will
we
be okay? That was the question.
Laura had offered to stay, but her mother had said no. Her brother had offered to take their mom back to his place in the suburbs, so that she wouldn't have to be alone, but she'd said no to that, too.
"I want to stay here tonight," their mother had said, her voice so faint it sounded more like a wish than a whisper.
I want to stay here tonight, in case he calls.
They'd left her at the kitchen table, waiting for a husband who would never come home no matter how long she waited.
"I'll be fine," Laura told Brisebois. "We'll be fine."
"It's hard," he said. "Losing someone you're close to."
She turned, met his gaze. "You know what's harder? Losing someone you used to be close to. Someone you haven't been close to for a long time."
All those things that die with us, all those things that are left unsaid.
"He was a good dad."
The officer nodded. "I'm sure he was. I lost both my parents in the space of a few years. It's tough. Can I give you a ride somewhere?"
"It's just up the hill, I can walk." She pointed toward the two apartment towers. "Second building on the left. Third light in the top corner. That's me."
"There's someone waiting." It was more a question than a statement.
"Just the lamp." Then, with a half-laugh that died even as she tried to force it, "Not even a cat."
"If you need a cat, you can have mine," he said—too quickly.
"Honestly, I don't mind. He's horrible. We're more adversaries than master and pet. You want a cat, I can drop him off tonight."
She tried again to laugh. "Thanks, but no thanks. Odds are, he wouldn't survive."
Brisebois looked at her.
Why would she say something like that?
"Well," he said. "If you reconsider, you've got my card. And if anything surfaces, anything at all. Your father. Anything. Give me a call."
I won't.
"I will."
She started up the hill, then turned. "The last time I saw my father," she said, "he seemed—distracted."
Brisebois came closer. "Distracted?"
"Sad."
"Sad? Or distracted?"
"Both."
She said goodbye and walked back up the hill, lungs filling with cold fistfuls of air. Snow: sifting down, filling the cones of light that the street lamps cast, a snow so fine it felt like sand underfoot.
Laura lived in a shopping mall. This was how she described it, jokingly. Not jokingly. Her apartment elevators fed tenants directly into the Northill Plaza. Yes, there should have been two h's in the name, and yes, it spelled "north ill." Laura had to resist the urge to write in the missing consonant with a Sharpie every time she passed the mall directory. A mall with an apartment building attached, or an apartment building with a mall attached. It was the architectural equivalent of a zebra: black on white, or white on black?
Residential on commercial, or the opposite?
Having the shopping centre directly below her should have been wonderful. The mall had everything she needed: a Safeway at one end, Sears at the other, a World Health gym, a Coles bookstore, a Laura Secord chocolate "shoppe" (Laura's namesake, according to her dad), a Magicuts hair salon, a food court, a pharmacy. Her building had a pool for swimming laps, and the professional centre included not only a medical clinic but an automobile insurance and registrar's office, should she ever need to register a vehicle, which she didn't. She'd auctioned off her parking spot online to cover her monthly membership fee at World Health, where she walked on treadmills and rode stationary bicycles every second day with a metronome's predictability.
Laura worked online—her daily commute was four paces from kitchenette to office alcove—so when the weather turned foul, as it so often did, she didn't need to go out. At all. It was easy enough to let the days slip by even when the weather was fair. At one point last spring, she'd realized she hadn't been outside for three weeks, and on her e-tax return under
OCCUPATION,
she had entered "Hermit."
A faceless accountant somewhere had emailed it back, not amused.
Nine floors, two towers, no balcony. She entered her apartment and tossed her keys in the fishbowl, the fish itself having long since vacated the premises. Laura wasn't good at keeping things alive. Her ferns all but coughed and wheezed, and when she'd chosen the fish
(a delicate little Beta) she'd felt like the Finger of Death selecting its next victim. She had once flirted with the idea of getting a cat, but it hardly seemed humane, keeping something enclosed so far up.
Just as well. With her record, the cat would've developed some sort of feline leukemia on the trip home from the pet store and been dead by the time she got out of the elevator.
Laura rested her forehead against her living room window, breathed a soft fog onto the glass and then watched it slowly disappear. The Rocky Mountains were trapped inside the building across from her, dark peaks set against the night sky.
"You see, I'm falling too."
Her father on skates, falling. Again and again.
She'd chosen this apartment precisely because it lacked a balcony, to avoid the unsettling temptation that vertigo offered.
When she was first looking for a place, she'd considered a spacious two-bedroom in a building high above the river. But as she looked over the edge of the balcony, she'd wondered how long she could go before climbing over and stepping off. How long she could have lasted before asking herself, "What would it matter?" And how much time would pass before anyone noticed she was missing?
Any friends or colleagues she might claim were scattered across the country like spare change; they would have just assumed she was offline. But even as Laura asked herself that question, she'd known the answer:
Dad. He would notice I was gone.
He would be the first to sound the alarm. If her body had been swept down the river, he would organize the search party. Warren would find her, but her dad would be the one that led the way.
What if she didn't fall, though? What if she simply floated... away? Laura's windows were aligned not with the mountains but toward downtown; they looked onto that sandstone-and-steel city below with its Etch-a-Sketch skyline, a city that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself. A cold city, exhaling steam. A city of CEOs and venture capital, of oil company offices hidden behind curtains of glass.
She could chart the price of a barrel of oil from her bedroom window by the turning of construction cranes along the skyline.
When the price fell below some magical point, the cranes would slow down. And then stop. When the price rose again, the cranes would start up, spinning anew. Faster and faster.
The Heart of the New West. That's what they called the city.
And from up here, it did indeed beat like a heart, like one of those stop-motion films of traffic pulsing on aortal avenues.
In the neighbourhood below, in a side street among other side streets, on the second floor of a two-storey apartment building, Matthew Brisebois was arriving home for the day. He brushed the snow from his boots, hung cap on peg, jacket on hanger, unclipped his tie, and turned on the television (pre-muted) for company. He stopped. Looked out at the room in front of him. What did he see? Walls, unadorned. A kitchen table that was also a dining room table that was also a desk that was also a mail sorting centre, with a laptop open, a pile of paperwork and a box of Just Right breakfast cereal beside it. Framed photographs, lined up neatly on the mantel.
A fireplace that had never been turned on and the boxes from last summer still stacked in the corner.
As an investigator, how would he read this scene? Single male, mid-forties, divorced from the looks of it, and concerned about his fibre intake. If you sniffed the air, you might catch the scent of cologne and Windex. What you wouldn't smell was anything catlike.
He wasn't exactly sure why he'd lied to Laura about the cat.
Maybe an attempt to gain her trust—he knew there was more to this accident than an old man on a sheet of ice—but that was explanation after the fact. Had she accepted his offer, he would have swung by the animal shelter, picked up a cat, used that as a way in. But she hadn't asked, and he hadn't gone.
He looked out at the twin apartment buildings on the ridge above.
Second building on the left. Third light in the top corner. That's me.
He would contact the insurance company tomorrow, inquire who the beneficiary was in the case of one Henry Curtis, recently deceased. And they would tell him; they always did. Any chance to avoid a payout.
He stood a long while watching that corner light. Watched until it finally blinked off.
Do you know who we are?we are Mafia. We will FIND you andwe will kill you
CHAPTER 10
Wet forests crowded the roadside. Broad leaves, heavy with rain, slapped against rooftops as the vehicles jockeyed for position. The tanker truck was bucking under its own weight, straining against its own momentum; the driver and his mechanic could feel its cargo of fuel pushing them forward as they drove across washboard surfaces and crumbling asphalt, windows down, grinning wide.
Joseph was gripping the wheel as though it were a life preserver and he was at sea. He had to yell to be heard over the noise of the engine. "Dreams Abound!" he shouted. "We are on our way!"
What could stop them? Nothing.
Nothing except—He geared down. "Roadblock ahead."
"Police?"
"Army."
CHAPTER 11
You, I love.
This is what Laura remembered: chuckwagons reeling around a corner, men in rippling silk shirts yelling hard, Stetsons flying, outriders in full gallop, hooves flinging up clods of dirt, the tinny cries of the announcer lost in the melee.
And then—one of the animals stumbled and the wagons took flight, wheels in the air, men tumbling upward, horses piling on top of each other. Laura's father, covering her eyes.
Had she seen that accident? Or dreamed it?
Memories of the midway. A Tilt-A-Whirl world of spinning lights and helium balloons escaping into the night sky. Laura, wearing a cowboy hat with a plastic whistle attached, and her father in full Western gear, meaning, in this case, a too-tight vest, a too-big hat, new cowboy boots, and no whistle. Wandering the midway was like wandering through a slow-motion pinball machine. Chimes rang and ricocheted. Ferris wheels turned and Gravitrons spun.
Ring-a-bell tests of strength and guess-your-weight booths. Frozen bananas and deep-fried cheesecake. Light bulb lanes and tumbling milk cans.
"Throw a ball, win a prize! It's just that easy."
With Warren off with his friends and a mother who didn't like crowds, it fell to Laura's father to entertain her.
But she was too small for the big rides and he was too big for the little rides, so the evening consisted mainly of her dad waving to her as she passed by on the Lady Bug Bugaloo or the Inch-Worm Express
(a roller coaster that consisted of a single circle with a single bump).
While waiting in line for mini-doughnuts—moist and warm and dusted with cinnamon, the highlight of any Stampede midway visit—Laura had walked ahead, down the line, while her dad held their spot. She'd peered seriously at the menu-board options, decided after great deliberation to get the Big Bag, and was hurrying back when she kicked something underfoot. A twenty-dollar bill.
She ran, breathless, back to her dad. "Look what I found!"
Her elation didn't last, though. "Sweetie," he said. "It's not ours to keep."
So they went down the mini-doughnut line, asking everyone in turn if they'd dropped a twenty-dollar bill. One by one, everyone said no, till they got to a gaggle of smirking teenage boys. "Yeah," one of them said. "That's mine."
As she walked away, she heard them laughing.
"That wasn't theirs," she'd said, face in full pout.
"Probably not," said her dad. "But it definitely wasn't ours."
And somewhere in the gap between
probably
and
definitely
, her father had lost her, and the rest of the evening was ruined. As she walked, hand-in-begrudging-hand with her father through the fairway, with its toss-a-coin stands and dartboard prizes, she silently tallied the items she might have purchased with that lost twenty:
—a snow globe with a Mountie inside
—a bandana bedazzled with a rhinestone greeting of
"Howdy, pardner!"
