Algoma (18 page)

Hunched over and focused on his brother, Ferd did not notice Adrien Plamondon come up beside him.

“Hey, Ferdinand,” Adrien said.

Ferd looked up long enough to see Adrien’s fist bear down on his face. He reeled off the side of the steps, his arms covering his face, and landed hard on the asphalt. Adrien walked over to Ferd and grabbed the photo from his hand.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Give it back,” Ferd said. His left eyebrow was split, a thin rivulet of blood ran down the side of his face. He touched his cheek and looked at his bloodied fingers.

Adrien asked Ferd what the picture was of. “Your mom pregnant or something? I thought your dad was gone.”

Ferd struggled to stand up. “I said give it back to me.”

“Oh shit, did you knock up someone with your little pecker? Gross.”

The other kids stopped what they were doing and stood around the two boys in a circle. No one said a word. There was no question about who would win the fight, if it continued, which most hoped it would. Adrien never lost and he was a full foot taller than Ferd.

Adrien, fists raised, threatened to hit Ferd again if he didn’t tell him whose ultrasound photo it was.

“It’s Leo,” Ferd said, taking a step back out of striking range.

Adrien took a step forward. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Can you say that again?”

“It’s my brother. It’s Leo. The photo is of Leo.”

Adrien cocked his head. He was confused. “Like before he was born?”

“Like now,” Ferd said.

The teacher who was supposed to be supervising the students during recess stepped out just in time to catch Adrien straddling Ferd and timing his punches with each word. “Say… it’s… not… your… brother.”

The teacher mentally reprimanded herself for having taken the time to arrange a doctor’s appointment when she should have been outside. She could be suspended for this kind of thing. She yelled at Adrien to get off Ferd. “What do you think you’re doing?” Her voice was shrill.

Adrien turned around. He was flushed, his cheeks burning bright red. “Tell him it’s not his brother in the picture. Tell him he’s a liar.”

The teacher walked over to the crumpled photo on the ground and pulled it open. She turned to Ferd who could barely stand up straight and touched his bruised face. “What is this?”

Ten minutes after the final bell rang, Ferd stood on his toes in front of the mirror in the boys’ washroom. It hurt to stand, his ribs ached from where Adrien had punched him. He hoped they weren’t broken. The split over his eye was crusted over and the skin around it swollen and bruised. He touched his face and winced. He thought about Ms. Prevost’s face, the sadness in her eyes, when he’d told her the photo was of Leo. She looked disappointed in him. Worst of all, she didn’t give him back his photo. He watched as she tucked it into the top drawer of her desk.

Ferd pulled a make-up compact out from his backpack and tried to camouflage the damage to his face, so his mother wouldn’t notice. After the fight, the girl who sat to his right in class had passed over her compact with a sympathetic smile. “Keep it,” she’d said. “It’s just my mom’s.”

Using the sponge from the compact, Ferd applied a thick layer of foundation to the area around his eye. The cover-up was several shades too light for his skin and filled the ridges of his cut like spackle, making it even more noticeable than before. He examined his work and figured it was better than nothing. There was nothing he could do about the swelling. He’d have to make something up.

Make-up packed away, Ferd opened the washroom door a crack and looked down the hallway. His teacher was closing the classroom door. Ferd had never seen her with her glasses off. She looked naked and vulnerable. He felt embarrassed for having seen her this way and looked down at the floor. He could hear her digging through her purse for her keys. After she left, he waited an extra ten minutes before leaving the washroom, in case she returned for something. When he was sure there was no one else in the hallway, he ran to his classroom.

Once inside, he shut the door behind him and tossed his bag on the floor. He pushed Ms. Prevost’s chair to the side and opened the drawer.

The ultrasound photo was sitting on top of other confiscated items—rubber balls, a small pen knife, matchbooks and about ten packs of gum. He grabbed the photo and tucked it back into his pocket. He slid the drawer shut and hoped his teacher would forget she’d ever taken it. He had no idea what he’d say if she brought it up.

There were steps in the hallway. Ferd froze for a moment before crouching behind the desk and looked around the corner at the door. Through the frosted window pane, he watched someone, maybe another teacher, walk by. It looked like a man. He crawled across the floor toward the door and sat down beside it, hunched over. A deep ache still lived in his ribs from Adrien’s blows. He barely breathed as he listened to the steps pace back and forth until they finally disappeared outside. With the sound of the door closing, Ferd let out his breath. It was time to go home.

Even from the end of the street, Ferd could see that there were no lights on at home. His mother was still at work, and knowing that she’d only be an hour or two late, she hadn’t arranged for a babysitter. She’d been working longer hours lately, earning whatever she could to pay the bills. Ferd knew this because she told him. She’d had no one else to talk to, so she was starting to tell her secrets to her son. The only thing she did not speak about were the offerings that were occasionally being left outside the house.

Word had spread that Gaetan had left, and that meant that strange things were happening in the minds of a handful of single men who thought Algoma was a romantic possibility, pregnant or not. In the past month, Ferd had returned home from school to find a variety of gifts left on the porch.

Yesterday, there’d been a small red-and-white plastic cooler with a frozen moose roast inside. When he’d shown it to his mother, she’d simply taken the roast and put it in the fridge to thaw. “Put the cooler back on the porch,” she’d said, not meeting his eyes. She wasn’t about to waste good meat.

______________

11:56 p.m. 4°C. Wind W, steady.
Carpeting on stairs puckering like sagging skin.

Algoma pulled the envelope out of the mailbox and ripped it open. This time, there was forty-five dollars and another birthday card. She tossed the card into the trash and pocketed the bills. It wasn’t her birthday, and wouldn’t be for months. The card was just a way to disguise the cash Gaetan was sending. Last week, there had been two envelopes totaling seventy dollars, and the week before, thirty dollars.

When the first envelope had arrived, she’d sat and wept, clutching the money in her hand like a love note. Even though her bank account was suffering, she did not spend that first thirty dollars. Instead, she kept it tucked away in her jewellery box along with her valuables.

Algoma shuffled downstairs in the slippers, nearly tripping over them on the last step.

“Shit,” she cursed, tossing her slippers off into the corner.

She walked into the back room and opened the freezer. It creaked like an old door and was nearly empty. There were only a few packages left, meat that Gaetan had butchered with saw and cleaver. She pulled out a pack of venison steaks. They would last her the week. The money in her pocket would not.

As she was shutting the freezer door, she noticed the shoebox, its frost covered edges. She put the package of steaks on the floor and picked it up. It was lighter than she expected. The box had been for a pair of Leo’s running shoes, white-soled ones he’d needed for gym class. She set the box on the workshop table and opened it.

The bird looked like it was sleeping, its feathers crisp and bright, its beak an ice pick. How long had it been there? Hollow-boned sleeping beauty. Algoma closed the lid and carried the box upstairs, forgetting the steaks on the floor, which would create a bloodstain in the carpet she’d never be able to fully remove.

The next night, once the bird had thawed, Algoma plucked its feathers and cleaned it as she’d observed Gaetan do so many times, although never with a killdeer. Never with something so small. She tossed her knife onto the counter and turned on the stove. She sat patiently at the kitchen table with a glass of wine as the oven heated up.

Dirty plate abandoned in the sink, Algoma sat down in Gaetan’s chair, firmly holding the armrests as she lowered herself down. The chair creaked under her new weight. Was it still his chair now that he was gone? How long until ownership reverted? In her worst moments, she thought it made it easier to simply pretend he was dead, the result of an illness or accident. A car accident. Something destined and uncontrollable. Something she could bury with good conscience that would allow her to miss the good things, allow her to move on. She propped her swollen feet up on the coffee table, shut her eyes, and fell asleep.

In her dream she sat cross-legged at the bottom of an outdoor swimming pool. Schools of small children swam around her, their cool, silver fins fluttering against her as they passed and disappeared into darkened corners. She drew deep breaths of water into her lungs, felt the cool liquid flow through her body, the sharp sting of chlorine in her throat. A dropped shoe slowly sank to the bottom, a slow motion bounce. The sodium lights above the pool went out and she was simultaneously overcome with pain in the palms of her water-puckered hands. She looked at her hands and Leo emerged from the right, Gaetan from the left. Both were dressed in swim trunks, flip flops, and had rosaries around their necks. And from their open mouths, long strands of seaweed swirled toward the surface.

Algoma woke up cold.

The room smelled like Gaetan. She sat up and was blurry with sleep and hope until she remembered what she’d done: sprayed one of his shirts with his cologne and stuffed it under the chair cushion. That way it always smelled like he’d just left. Like he was out picking up some forgotten ingredient and would be right back.

______________

6:23 p.m. 0°C. Wind SE, light.
Neighbour’s garbage bag opened by raccoons.
Shredded diapers and potato peels everywhere.

Bay ran up the stairs to her door and tripped. The toe of one of her black leather peep-toe pumps caught on the extended lip of the top step. She heard a loud crack when she fell but couldn’t tell if it was the porch or her knee. As she stood up, she saw her dry cleaning and the Chinese takeout she’d been holding were now hopelessly mixed together.

“Fuck.”

Her knee bled profusely under the ragged web of torn nylons. A run like a railroad track went all the way up her thigh, beneath the hem of her pewter-coloured silk skirt. She palmed away the mix of dirt and blood. There was no one on the street except for the feral cat that had adopted the neighbourhood as its home. Bay felt her stomach lurch when she thought about the litter of hares she’d found under her porch the year before, the explosion of fur and blood that had replaced them.

Bay reached into the mailbox and pulled out a stack of bills and magazines. Her knee throbbed. Most of the mail, and all the magazines, belonged to her upstairs neighbour. She tucked the latest issue of a tabloid magazine under her arm. She’d return it later. When she put the mail back into the box, she noticed something she’d missed on first look.

Another postcard.

She kicked aside her now stained laundry and spilled takeout. She’d deal with it later.

The apartment was airless, dust motes suspended in the lamplight. Bay opened up a window, but only an inch. Living alone on the ground floor, she had nightmares about intruders, even in a town as small as Le Pin. You never knew. The dream was always the same: she returned home after work to discover that someone had broken into her home, destroyed it and stolen her favourite things, right down to the expensive chef’s knife she had bought for herself in Montreal last Christmas. Everything she valued, gone. But everything was always there when she woke up. If anything, she had more than she needed.

Bay fell back into her couch, tossed her keys onto the coffee table and picked up the postcard. They were arriving more frequently now. A new one every other day. She knew the weather in Toronto better than she did in her own town these days. There was never a salutation or a sign off, but Bay knew the postcards were from Gaetan. His perfect handwriting, as efficient and unromantic as a teacher’s. She read the card once and put it down.

Distracted by the pinch of elastic at her waist, Bay wandered into the kitchen and peeled off her destroyed nylons. She threw them onto the heap of take-out containers in the trash. The floor was covered in a fine grit that stuck to the bottoms of her bare feet; it desperately needed to be swept and washed, but she was hardly ever home. She accepted every extra shift the hotel offered her. Anytime someone wanted a night off or called in sick, they called Bay. Within the hour, she would arrive at the hotel, push through the heavy oak doors and take her place behind the front desk.

The hotel, La Belle Fille—no longer a shiny young girl—was a grand old dame who showed her wear at every turn, one who was expensively dressed from another era with little replaced or repaired along the way. The Persian carpets in the lobby were threadbare in places. The wooden banisters, while polished daily, sagged and some of the dowels were missing. The front desk bell rattled more than it rang. It had once been the hope of the hotel’s founder that La Belle Fille would be the flagship hotel of a chain that would take over North America, but he never stepped outside county limits. The hotel’s clientele was mostly lumber executives visiting the mill or tourists on fishing, hunting, or snowmobile vacations.

For hours on end, Bay would stand behind the counter, the corners of her mouth pulled into a tight work smile. She thumb-polished her Hostess tag when no one was looking. During her breaks, she often unlocked one of the unoccupied suites and laid down on top of the made bed with her heels still on. She tried not to think of the past guests, the bodies that had slept and sloughed in the beds. Instead, she focused on the crisp and clean sheets, the drawn blackout curtains, the television that was always set to channel three. The detail and order were soothing, something she never achieved in her own life. When her coworkers asked her where she spent her breaks, she brushed them off.