Elizabeth and After (27 page)

“You’re supposed to be taking fluids. How about some tea?”

“You have time?”

“They gave me a few hours. I was sent to visit you in hospital so I can tell them you’re still alive. Your father really cares about you, you know.”

“Thanks.”

“Look.” Moira was suddenly so sure of herself she took off her sunglasses. “I’m just a college kid who got busted by her own father. But I can tell you for certain that you have no idea about anything. If it makes you feel any better.”

“Yeah. I guess it does. Okay, I’ll have some tea. Please. And after, if you really do have time, I’m supposed to see Lizzie today but I don’t think I can drive. If you could pick her up for me. She knows you so it won’t be too weird. And I’ll explain what happened on the phone so she doesn’t freak out when she gets here.”

“No problem,” Moira said. “I’ll make the tea first.” She went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. It was odd the way you got into things with people. Like the time she had gone to visit her friend Lucy in New York and they dropped into a Spanish bar that Lucy said was cool. It was a tiny little tavern down in a basement with a black-moustached red-nosed waiter who sweated wine and brandy, turned the music loud enough that Moira could hear the paper speaker cones trying to tear themselves free, and she and Lucy had ended up dancing around the bar stools with two men in top hats and capes, one with a silver-tipped cane. “I’m sure that’s Truman Capote,” Lucy had whispered into Moira’s ear, and the next day Moira had gone out for lunch in another dim bar with this man who might be Truman Capote, of course she was too cool to ask,
and the man who might have been Truman Capote leaned forward and told her wicked gossip about everyone else in the restaurant and by three o’clock in the afternoon she’d had so much brandy her bones were like hollow varnished antlers nailed to the middle of outer space. On the way to the bathroom she had to catch the wall to keep from falling. Didn’t dare look in the mirror. Fell out of her chair when she was trying to fall back in. Found herself lying on her back on the cigarette-pebbled floor of a dark hallway and looking up at a ceiling that was the colour of a dark tobacco sea when the man with the silver-tipped cane who might have been Truman Capote reached down and undid her top button.

When she’d got herself back in her chair he leaned forward and asked if she and her girlfriend would like to come to his hotel room and let him tie them to the bedposts. “I don’t think so,” Moira had said. Afterwards Lucy had told her she wasn’t any fun and she should have pretended to go along, so they could have at least found out who he really was. “A pervert,” Moira said.

“Spoilsport,” Lucy objected. “That was just his way of coming on. What was he supposed to say? ‘Honey, without you my life will end’?”

A
RNIE OPENED THE DOOR
. T
HE RAIN
had stopped but the roofs and trees were still dripping, his front walk and the road spotted with puddles. All day people would be talking about how the rain had finally come, hard and strong. They would complain it hadn’t lasted long enough to soak through the caked ground, or that it had soaked through too much, drowning the roots of their tomatoes and that special bush they’d bought at the Kingston nursery. At least he’d never sold crop insurance. You had to be the government to afford that.

“Kerry Bates,” the policeman said, showing his badge. He was hatless but in uniform, his cheeks and forehead burned pink, his light brown hair cut close and neatly parted at the side. A bit overweight, was Arnie’s first thought; better watch those fatty foods. “I was told you were at the Movie Barn last night. May I?”

Arnie motioned him in. “Was there some kind of fire?” Years ago, before his wife, Evelyn, had died, he’d covered the insurance for the supermarket but then it had gone to a big
Kingston broker who offered a better discount. Which is fine if you’re trying to get new business but if your customers live next door to each other, they all have to be treated the same.

“Not a fire. An attempted robbery. The fellow who works there was assaulted as he left the store.”

They had been standing in the hall but now Arnie started towards the kitchen. “Carl McKelvey. Was he hurt?”

“Saw him at the hospital just an hour ago. He seems okay. They say he has some kind of concussion.”

“Concussion…” Arnie sat down at the table. There was that hockey player he’d been reading about in the paper.
Coma
was the word they started using after he wouldn’t come round.

“He’s in no danger. Concussion and broken ribs. He said you were one of the last customers.”

“Who did it?”

“That’s why I’m here. Seems they came at him from behind.”

Talking to the policeman, Arnie thought how strange it was that on a Sunday evening the place would be so empty. The Movie Barn not only had a door opening outside, but also one into the supermarket—that was for fire regulations—making it possible for a gang, if there was one, to have been hiding in there at the time.

He told the policeman, to whom he was sympathetic because of his own profession, that he was an insurance adjuster and had therefore driven all around the township and been in and out of a lot of homes, including where Carl grew up. Had known him since he was born, along with his parents. He’d been the one to assess the accident—terrible thing—another of those late-night tragedies. If you were in his business, to tell the truth, you’d be afraid to give your son the keys to your car until he was fifty years old and had sworn off drinking.
Elizabeth McKelvey was another story. He had been on the library committee with her for two years. She spoke like a man, which was probably normal for a teacher, and there was something wild about her that made you think one night she was just going to give out a big loud whoop, let down her hair and start dancing on the table. Though she never did.

On the kitchen table, between him and Kerry Bates, who was asking the questions and writing down his answers in a lined spiral notepad, there was a Bible. Not that he was born again, the way some people claimed to be, just that the Bible had turned out to be his favourite book so he had copies here and there in the house. That way they’d be easy to pick up wherever he was sitting instead of him having to search one out from wherever he’d left it. He would often open it at random, the way he used to with whatever magazines were lying around. “I’ve never seen someone like you for always having to be reading,” Evelyn had once said. But even she would have been surprised to find him with all these Bibles.

In his opinion, but he didn’t bother explaining this to Kerry Bates because he suspected that just catching sight of the Bible was enough to make him devalue anything he said, you didn’t have to be born again. He’d been born once and that was enough. But lately things were just seeping into him. It was like walking up a big wide set of steps in the sunlight. He knew he was climbing, he was going somewhere, but he wasn’t sure what he’d find at the top of the steps. Maybe a fancy paradisal cathedral or maybe, after all that effort, he would reach the top only to fall off the other side.

His fall might be triggered by something as ordinary as a pill, a needle in the arm. The pill would come first thing in the morning, just to calm him down. “A happy pill,” his daughter called it. Arnie had insisted they name her Marilyn,
as close as possible to Evelyn’s name, and in the end Evelyn hadn’t minded. After the happy pill would come the needle to put him out. Then the mask over his face and all the fancy equipment. A triple bypass was what they had planned for him. If he could watch himself go out in a moment of glory, hooked up to all those contraptions, he might have been more tempted. But to be put to sleep like a dog: a happy pill, a needle in the arm, one last breath and suddenly they’ve blown out your brain, a dead candle when the party’s over.

That night at the Movie Barn, the first thing Arnie had noticed was that one of the fluorescent lights was flickering. Carl was sitting on a stool behind the counter and watching the monitor. Sharon, the girl who’d worked there before Carl, had been nice but with Carl it was different. He smiled and was polite but it was a guarded kind of thing. When you took your movie to the desk and Sharon was there, she sometimes kept looking at her own video while she talked to you, chatting away as though you were her best friend. Carl always switched his off as if he didn’t want you to know what he was watching because that might give you a way into him. And then there was that tattoo on his left forearm, a butterfly whose red wings fluttered every time his muscles moved.

But last night Carl hadn’t been watching anything. He’d been looking at the restaurant franchise ads.

“I thought he must be planning to buy into one,” Arnie said, “but no, he claimed he can’t cook. Like most men, I suppose. Though since Evelyn died you’d be surprised. The other night I made myself spaghetti with vegetables. Used to eat steak every night.” The policeman had his pen politely suspended above the page.

Because of the light it had taken him longer than usual to select his movie. Hard to concentrate. A couple of times he
had found himself shaking his head, as though the faulty electrics were in his eyes. So he just told himself to choose something, anything. Then Carl had offered him a cup of coffee and he’d kept Carl company until almost eleven. After he paid for his movies, Carl said, “Hope you enjoy them,” in that way he always did, a grain of something in his voice as though in fact you might get home, put a cassette in the TV, and suddenly find your grandchildren watching a naked sex party. But of course he didn’t say that to the policeman. Just told him that outside he’d looked up at the sky because there’d been rumblings of thunder all evening but it was a nice night and aside from a couple of cottagers who’d also been in the store, he hadn’t seen anyone.

“Then I came back home and I was cleaning up the kitchen when I saw, under a newspaper right on this table, an overdue video from last week.
Sleepless in Seattle
. It reminded me of my daughter, I don’t know why, she’s never even been to the States. I didn’t want to owe another day’s fine so I drove back to the store and when I went inside Carl was talking to Fred Verghoers.”

“You remember the time?” the policeman asked. He printed Fred’s name on the pad.

“Kerry Bates,” Arnie said. “Now I remember you. From the Hornets. Used to play goal. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“It’s the mask,” Bates said. “You were telling me, Fred and Carl were talking.”

“Shaking hands,” Arnie said. “Fred was giving him the welcome back to town—probably trying to round up his vote.”

“Well,” Bates said, “he’s got mine. Not that I minded Vernon Boyce but with everything that’s changed here, someone like Fred might have something to contribute. Anyway, I’ll go over and talk to him. Thanks for your time.”

Arnie stood at his living-room bay window, watching Kerry Bates as he got into his cruiser and slowly drove away. Bates’s father—Lawrence was his name—he was in a Kingston old-age home. Winnifred had been his wife, Winny Bates, the one with diabetes. She’d even been in Evelyn’s bridge group for a while. He had done their house and car insurance; once they’d had to replace the chimney for their wood stove to satisfy new company regulations. He didn’t do Kerry’s but that was no reason to forget he existed.

Reflecting on his memory, or lack of it, Arnie got so gloomy he decided to cheer himself up by driving to the property to see if the rain had done anything. When he’d bought it, the place was so far out of town the value looked like it could never climb—which was how he and Evelyn had been able to afford it after all the money they’d sunk into the house. Now West Gull was creeping closer and the nearby road had become a small highway. But the entrance was still unmarked and he slowed down carefully before easing off the road onto a dirt track that led through a small meadow to a parking place, just the right distance from the house he’d never built. After he switched off the motor he sat for a moment looking at his hands on the steering wheel. He was breathing hard, as though he had just stopped running. Or maybe it was only that lately he was always listening to himself breathe, checking his pulse. “You’re alive,” he reassured himself. In fact these days he felt more alive than ever. Some outer skin that used to keep everything at a comfortable distance had peeled off; time had slowed down and was rubbing his face in it—
it
, everything from the way clothes itched against his skin to the colour of the air which, suddenly, he could see so clearly he had started to wonder how anyone could ever look at anything else.

He took a package of cigarettes from the glove compartment and stepped outside. It was about fifty more paces to the line of maples that edged the ridge overlooking the lake. A few of the leaves were starting to turn but the green was still dense and massive against the blue sky. In the winter you could see through the bare branches and down to Long Gull Lake. More than a few years ago he had spent twenty thousand dollars buying the field and all the hope its purchase implied: a retirement home at the edge of town with a view of the lake on one side and on the other of the town nestled in the small valley.

In those days West Gull had been what the real-estate brochures called picturesque: stone buildings more than a century old, a few tree-lined streets that ended at the lake, two churches, a tavern made of big pine logs from the time when a white pine only seventy feet high wasn’t yet worth cutting.

Once he had imagined the dirt track where he was now parked would in his lifetime be transformed into the start of a circular drive leading to a white frame house. That was before a certain series of events. Events that had led—or perhaps they had been only a coincidence—to Evelyn’s death. So instead of having a fine retirement home he still had a field with a view.

Meanwhile West Gull, the picturesque farming village bent around Long Gull Lake’s curve, had stretched into a tourist centre, a little kernel of past surrounded by a shell of convenience stores, strip plazas, used-car lots and the expanded lumber yard. Now Arnie’s field was only a few minutes’ walk from a strip mall with a small supermarket, an all-night doughnut shop and a dry-cleaning outlet. Arnie looked down at his hand again, the package of cigarettes; he took one out and lit it. The matches were from Chez Piggy’s, one of those trendy whole-grain health-food restaurants Marilyn always
chose for their lunches.
Chez Piggy
. It looked like a barn. And despite the whole-grain menu the men at the bar looked ready to fall on their faces. Of course he hadn’t smoked during lunch. A man going into hospital for a triple bypass doesn’t smoke in front of his daughter, especially if she works at the hospital. Nor did she know he’d been sneaking cigarettes for eleven years, ever since they first tried to talk him into the operation. No way he would have had that operation then. In those old picturesque days, he had imagined the hospital as a medieval torture chamber and the doctors as dim-witted incompetents who opened people up just to find out what they had inside. But you had to hand it to them now. Miracles were routine. Also back then, with Evelyn just a year dead, he didn’t know if he wanted to survive. But the children had still been his responsibility, not like now when the balance was shifted and he found himself pretending his life for their benefit, offering them the lies they seemed to require just the way they must have pretended to him and he had pretended to his own parents.