A Killing Spring (15 page)

It didn’t take long for Alex to bring Reed Gallagher’s file up on his computer. I stood behind him as he hit the print key, and when the machine began printing, I leaned over and embraced him.

Alex put his hands over mine. “One of the first things they teach us at police college is to build defences against the appeal of attractive women.”

“You’re not on duty right now, are you?”

“No,” he said, “I’m not.” He stood up and kissed me. “And I’m glad I’m not.”

While Alex checked through a stack of papers on his desk, I looked through his
CDS:
Mozart, Beethoven chamber music, Ravel, Bartok.

“I like your music,” I said, “and I like your office. You seem to have figured out how to hang on to what matters and leave the rest behind.”

Alex scrawled his initials on the last of the papers in the pile, then he looked up at me. “You’re not often wrong, Jo, but you’re wrong about this. I don’t leave anything behind. And I don’t know what matters. All I know is that if I can keep the externals of my life uncomplicated, I can function.” He walked over to the coat hook and handed me my jacket. “Time to go,” he said. Then he reached behind me and flicked the wall switch.

The wind had come up, bringing with it one of those sudden shifts in the weather that, despite precedent, always
seem to come as a surprise. By the time we had walked from downtown to the Albert Street bridge, I was shivering.

“I’m always yelling at the kids about rushing the season,” I said. “But I wish I’d worn a heavier jacket. I’m freezing.”

Alex put his arm around me. “Better?”

“Much,” I said. We were almost across the bridge when a half-ton, travelling in the same direction as we were, slowed down. The window was unrolled, and a beefy man in a ball cap leaned out and shouted something at us.

I felt Alex’s arm stiffen.

“Is that somebody you know?” I asked. “I didn’t hear what he said.”

Alex didn’t answer me, but when the light changed and we started across the street, he tightened his grip on my shoulder. The half-ton had stopped for the light, and as we crossed in front of it, the driver yelled again. The words were ugly and racist, but Alex wasn’t his target. I was. “Hey, babe,” he shouted, “when you’re through fucking the chief, maybe you’d like to try it with a couple of white guys.”

My reaction was immediate and atavistic. I broke away from Alex’s hold and ran across to the sidewalk. In a heartbeat it was over. The light changed; the man in the truck cheered and yelled, “We’ll be back for you, baby,” and the truck drove off.

When Alex came to me, his eyes were filled with concern, but he didn’t touch me. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I laughed shakily. “Wow! As Mother Theresa would say, ‘what a scumbag.’ ”

Alex didn’t smile. I reached for his hand, but he drew away. “Alex, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It was just a reflex. Getting out of the line of fire is instinctive.”

“You wouldn’t have done it.”

He smiled sadly. “I couldn’t have done it.”

“Because you’re not a coward.”

“No,” he said gently, “because I’m not white. That closes off a lot of options. Now, come on. You’d better get back.”

He walked me to my door. “Come inside,” I said. “I’ve got a few minutes before I have to get Taylor. I don’t want to talk out here.”

He came in and I closed the door and went to him.

“Alex, I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I did that. I don’t care what some idiot in a truck yells at me.”

He took me in his arms and kissed me and, for a few moments, I thought I was home-free. Then he stepped away from me.

“That was just the first time,” he said. “After a while, you’ll care, Jo. Take my word for it. You’ll care.”

My grandmother’s maxim, “Morning is wiser than evening,” has helped me through many troubled nights, but that Saturday morning daybreak didn’t bring perspective. When the sun came up, I still didn’t understand why I had run from Alex on the bridge, and I still had no idea how I was going to make things right between us again.

As the dogs and I started on our morning run, I ached with remorse and regret. The cold wind of the night before had disappeared as suddenly as it had come; the air was mild and the sky was luminous. Once, on a morning like this, Rose and Sadie would have been straining at the leash, but we were all growing older, less anxious to seize the day. As we started across Albert Street, I noticed shards of broken beer bottles at the spot where the half-ton had stopped the night before. I pulled the dogs out of the way, kicked the glass into the gutter, and headed for the lake. “Life’s full of symbols,” I said, and Rose, our golden retriever, looked up at me worriedly.

As we ran along the shoreline, I worked hard at thinking about nothing, but nature abhors a vacuum, and out of
nowhere my mind was filled with images of my first-year Greek class: chalk dust lambent in the late-afternoon sun, muted sounds of traffic on Bloor Street, and a professor’s voice, infinitely sad, “Antitheses are always instructive. Take, for example, the pairing of ‘symbol,’ literally, ‘to put together,’ and ‘diabol,’ the root of our word ‘diabolic,’ ‘to throw apart.’ Symbol suggests the highest uses of our language and thought; diabol their uttermost degeneration.”

The amazing thing was that the diabolical hadn’t happened sooner. Alex and I had been going out together since late November; we lived in a city in which racism was a fact of life, and yet this was the first time that a stranger had felt compelled to hurl words at us. November to mid-March. We had, I suddenly realized, been saved by a northern winter. Most of our time together had been spent indoors: at my place, talking, watching movies or playing games with the kids; later, when we became lovers, at his apartment listening to music, making love. When we did go out, for a run with the dogs or to cross-country ski or toboggan with the kids, we were bundled in the layers of Canadian winter clothing that mask distinctions of race, gender, and faith.

Julie and Reed’s wedding had been our first real event as a couple, and it had been, in my mind at least, a disaster. For reasons that I would never understand, Julie had decided to make Alex her trophy. She introduced him all around, stumbling over his name, dimpling in mock-confusion and laughter. “Well, it’s one of those wonderful native names, but you’ll just have to say it yourself, Alex.” She’d paraded him through the wedding reception, telling everyone that he was on the police force, cooing over how commendable it was that he was giving his people a role model, someone to look up to. I had been livid, but Alex had been sanguine. “She has to start somewhere, Jo. Maybe knowing me can make the new Mrs. Gallagher more open to the possibilities in the future.”

But it hadn’t happened that way. In public, Julie may have fawned over an aboriginal police inspector, but in private, when she had needed the services of a cop, she had made it painfully obvious that her personal officer of the law had to be white.

With her smiles and her oh-so-subtle double standards, Julie was the poster girl for polite bigotry, but as comforting as it was to demonize her or dismiss the cretin who had yelled at me the night before as a bottom feeder, they weren’t the problem, and I knew it. I had lived in Regina all of my adult life and, to paraphrase Pogo, I had seen the enemy and he was us. I knew the language, and I knew the code: a whisper about the problems in the city’s “North Central” area meant native crime; “the people,” said knowingly, meant native people. I’d never used the code; in fact, I had prided myself on doing all the right things. Years ago, when an aboriginal couple had wanted to buy a house in our area, a petition had been circulated to keep them out, and I’d gone door to door urging my neighbours not to sign; when racist jokes were told, I walked out of the room; when my kids came home from school talking about “wagonburners” and “skins,” I sat them down and talked to them about how words can wound. But until the night before, I had been drawing from a shallow well of liberal decency. In my entire life, I had never once been on the receiving end of prejudice, and the experience had been as annihilating as a fist in the face from a stranger. Alex was forty-one years old. That morning, for the first time, I found myself trying to imagine how it felt to withstand forty-one years of such blows.

When I got back to the house, it was 6:25. I dialled Alex’s number. There was no answer, and I didn’t leave a message. There was nothing to do but take refuge in my Saturday ritual. I plugged in the coffee, showered, dressed, made pancake batter, brought in the morning paper, and tried to
concentrate on the politics of the day. At 7:30, I tried Alex’s number again. He picked up the phone on the first ring.

“I was just about to call you,” he said.

“Synchronicity,” I said. “That has to be a good sign, doesn’t it?”

He didn’t answer, so I hurtled on. “Alex, I’m sorry about last night. I’m more than sorry, I’m ashamed. I don’t know what made me run like that.”

I could hear fatigue in his voice. “You didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what I was trying to tell you last night. There’s no reason to blame yourself. You were in a lousy spot, and you reacted.”

“But I reacted badly.”

“The point is, you wouldn’t have been in that spot if you hadn’t been with me.”

“Alex, I wanted to be on the spot with you. I still do. Come over. Please. Let’s talk about this.”

“I don’t think so. When we’re together, it’s just too easy to lose sight of the facts.”

“What facts?”

“The ones we’ve been ignoring. Jo, that guy in the truck last night was not an aberration. That’s the way it is.”

“I know that’s the way it is. I just wasn’t prepared. Next time, I’ll be ready.”

“Nobody’s ever ready for it. You’re talking to an expert witness now. It doesn’t matter how many times that kind of crap happens, it’s always an ambush. And defending yourself against it changes you.”

“Alex, you’re one of the best people I know.”

For a moment, he was silent. Then he said, “And you’re one of the best people I know, but, Joanne, you don’t know what you’re getting into here. And you don’t know what you’re getting your kids into. Angus and Taylor are great
kids, Jo – so confident, so sure that all the doors are open for them and that when they walk into a room people can’t wait to welcome them. I don’t think you want that to change.”

As soon as he mentioned my children, I felt a coldness in the pit of my stomach. “It wouldn’t have to change,” I said, but even to my ears, my voice lacked conviction.

“Maybe we should step back for a while,” Alex said. “Take a look at where we’re headed.”

I should have told him that the last thing I wanted to do was step back. I should have said that the direction in which we were headed was far less important to me than the fact that we were headed there together. But those were the words of a brave woman and, once again, I came up short. “Maybe that would be best,” I said. And that was it. We told each other to take care, and we said goodbye.

I replaced the receiver slowly. My eyes were stinging. From the moment Alex had called to tell me about Reed’s death, it seemed as if everything I’d done had been wrong: I’d failed a student who’d turned to me for help. I’d pushed my best friend so hard that I lost her. I’d been fired from a job that I liked. I’d made a scene in a restaurant. Worst of all, I’d betrayed a man I cared about deeply, and now I’d lost him. When I reached for a tissue to mop my eyes, I knocked over my coffee cup, and then, because I figured I’d earned it, I swore.

“I thought there was a major penalty for using that word.” Angus was standing in the kitchen doorway. His face was swollen with sleep, and he was wearing the black silk shorts his sister, Mieka, had sent him for Valentine’s Day. He yawned. “What’s up?”

My first impulse was to protect him. Then, remembering how much he liked Alex, I decided it would be best to tell him the truth. I poured us each a glass of juice, then my son
and I sat down at the kitchen table and I told him about the incident on the bridge, and that Alex and I weren’t going to be seeing each other for a while.

He was furious. “That’s totally stupid,” he said.

“I think so too,” I said, “but Alex is worried about us – not just me, but you and Taylor. Angus, has my relationship with Alex ever caused any problems for you?”

“No. Alex is a cool guy. Hey, he taught me how to drive, didn’t he? And he lets me drive his Audi.” He patted my hand. “C’mon, Mum. Lighten up. And tell Alex to lighten up. If other people are having a problem because you two are going out together, it’s their problem.”

“And Leah feels the same way you do?”

“She really likes Alex. They’re both kind of independent.”

“And no one’s ever said anything?”

He shrugged. “Some of the guys sort of wondered, but you know me, Mum. I’ve never cared what people say.”

It was true. Of my four children, Angus was the one who cared least about the opinion of others. “Inner-directed” was the term my college sociology book used to describe people like my youngest son. Ian had valued the trait more than I did. For me, Angus’s indifference to praise or punishment meant he’d been a difficult kid to raise, but Ian saw it differently. “It means,” he’d said, “that when Angus is older, he won’t be blown off course by every wind.” Ian had been right. Angus wasn’t easily blown off course. But he didn’t take after me in that, and I knew it.

I picked up our juice glasses and took them to the sink. Angus followed me over, and gave me an awkward one-armed hug. “Mum, don’t worry about other people. Do what you want to do.” He leaned forward and peered into the bowl of pancake batter on the counter beside the griddle. “Now, is this all for you? Or can I score some?”

In a few minutes, Taylor and Benny joined us for breakfast, and the conversation drifted to Samantha’s birthday party. By the time I had scraped the plates and rinsed them for the dishwasher, Taylor’s story was still crawling inexorably towards its climax. It was a tale with tragic possibilities. The flashlight had been a hit, but Samantha kept shining it in everybody’s eyes, and she refused to relinquish it when her mother asked her to. Finally, Samantha’s mother said there’d be no cake until Samantha started behaving, and Samantha said she didn’t care. Events at the party had reached a
High Noon
standoff when our phone rang.