Elizabeth and After (28 page)

He walked from the car towards the line of maples. When Evelyn was still alive and they still believed in the future, he used to sketch out plans on graph paper. In the plans there was always a carefully drawn outdoor stone fireplace near the maples. That would be for summer barbecues with the grandchildren. Up on the ridge above the lake they’d have the view and the breeze off the water. And there he’d perch like an old fart telling them stories while the coals turned white.

One of the maples arched over a big slab of rock. That was where he liked to sit when he came to smoke a couple of illegal cigarettes and worry his way through whatever problem was currently tying his gut in a knot. But now, as he stepped
towards the rock, he saw others had been there first. There was a small circle of stones around the remains of a fire. Off to the side was a cardboard beer container sodden from the rain. The bottles it should have held were smashed to pieces at the edge of the rock.

At first he had no reaction at all. “It was like if I kept looking it would just go away,” he told Marilyn later. Then before he could move, anger began spreading through him. His heart tripped. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” he said aloud, as though they might be hiding in the bushes and waiting for him to drop dead.

He turned and starting walking back towards the car. He was standing beside it, unsure where to go or what to do when Luke Richardson’s black Cadillac pulled off the highway and onto the shoulder. It was the middle of the day and Luke had taken off his suit jacket. His tie was loosened and his pants were creased from driving in the heat.

“Terrible thing that happened to Carl last night,” Luke said.

“Police were over this morning.”

“And?”

“Nothing much. Thought I’d come over here and look around.”

“Surveying the property?” Luke asked.

Arnie’s throat was filled with bile and he felt his stomach was about to turn. Luke stepped closer, took his arm, peered into his face. “Something wrong?”

“Ah, those bastards, they left broken beer bottles on my rock.” As soon as he said these words he regretted them. What did his crazy selfish dream matter compared to Carl getting his head bashed in.

“What rock?”

Arnie was amazed to hear this. What rock? Didn’t Luke Richardson, the real-estate millionaire who owned a condominium in Florida, for God’s sake, know every square inch for fifty miles around? Hadn’t he offered to buy this place a dozen times? “Name your price,” he would say, as though challenging Arnie to recognize that in the modern world, the world of strip plazas and convenience stores, the world he had effortlessly turned to profit and an endless stream of new black Cadillacs, there was nothing that couldn’t be given a number.

“We could get some lunch,” Luke now said. “Why don’t you come to the hotel with me for a bite?”

Arnie looked up. There was a look of concern on Luke’s face that made him worried about himself. “I don’t know.”

“Come on. They have a new chef there. Someone they got from Ottawa for the tourists. He wears a little hat and comes out in his apron to ask how you liked the food.”

“Well—”

“We’ll go in my car. I have to drive back this way afterwards, anyway.”

And before he knew it Arnie was in the passenger seat of Luke Richardson’s air-conditioned Cadillac, looking at Luke’s big hands folded comfortably over the wheel. It was years since he had been in the passenger seat of a car, not since he tore the ligaments in his ankle stepping out of a rowboat and Evelyn had to drive him around for three weeks. Somehow Luke Richardson in his big hearselike Caddy seemed to have mastered time; sure, he was overweight and thinning and the backs of his hands were dotted with liver spots but as he steered through town, it was as though it was
his
town, as though he had welcomed the changes that had happened over time, had grown and prospered with them, swallowed them up like food for body and soul.

At lunch, watching Luke eat, Arnie found himself admiring how the big hands handled the knife and fork, the unself-conscious way he cleaned his plate, leaned back, patted his stomach like a favourite old dog assured of being coddled through the afternoon. When he told Luke about the bypass, Luke looked at him hard and long. Arnie felt that if he wanted he could have cried, complained, said he was afraid of dying. He didn’t want this but knowing he could made him feel he had somehow gone into debt to Luke. Even when Luke told him, after they’d talked about Carl, how he was taking blood-pressure pills and had had his gall bladder out last year, it didn’t make things even.

A
DAM H AD DRIVEN BEHIND THE AMBULANCE
to the hospital and two days later he went to visit Carl at home. The impossible had become the normal. Adam had telephoned Carl first and following instructions, he let himself in.

The door was next to the kitchen counter. There was a case of empty beer bottles. And on the table a mug half-filled with black coffee sat beside a foolscap pad with a list of necessary groceries and hardware.

Adam wished he’d thought of bringing something, flowers or a treat from the bakery.

“Up here,” Carl called.

Adam mounted the stairs, guiltily aware of the rolls of dust in the corners, the house’s musty smell. Wearing Lizzie’s Ice River souvenir T-shirt, Carl was sitting on his bed, which was only a mattress on top of a braided carpet on the floor, his back propped up by pillows. At the hospital his skull had been swathed in bandages; now there was just a wide strip of
adhesive across the back. His face was patched with bruises and scrapes stained with yellow disinfectant.

“Thanks for coming. And thanks for finding me the other night.”

Adam, shocked by Carl’s face, just shook his head.

“You going to throw up? The bathroom’s down the hall.”

Beside the bed Carl had his cigarettes, along with an ashtray, two half-empty coffee cups, and a folded down paperback novel.

“Sorry,” Adam said. “How are the ribs? And your head, have you been dizzy?”

“I’m okay. Maybe I had it coming but I’m just a little pissed.”

“You could always change your mind. Tell the police who did it.”

“And go to court? Carl McKelvey’s word against Fred Verghoers’? I don’t think so, Adam. It’s my problem and I’ll fix it.”

Carl’s voice sounded strong and now that Adam was getting used to it, his face wasn’t so bad.

“The doctor told me you were very lucky. Said you must have a very hard skull.”

“Always have.”

“Don’t worry about your job or the rent. Whenever you’re ready to go back to work is fine with Luke.”

“I’ll be back this week. I’d rather be there, doing something, than just sitting around.”

Adam saw Carl had shaved off his moustache. There was a scar on his upper lip from the fight he’d had with Fred after Chrissy had kicked him out and Carl had come back to find Fred living there. Adam remembered that in the judge’s chambers that scar had been a bright red gash and then, looking at
Fred’s big hands, Adam had seen the fat ring that had made it.
It’s
my problem. I’ll fix it
. Not if I can stop you, Adam thought.

“Not an easy way to come home,” Adam now said.

Carl looked directly at him. He had hooded eyes. Maybe that was one of the things the girls liked about him, Adam thought. He remembered that, too, thinking bitterly how obscene it was that this drunken young id with hooded eyes and half the girls in the township crazy about him had strutted and danced on his skinny little legs, poured the booze back into his flat little belly, then drove his mother into the oak tree just down from the Fennerty place.

“Not easy. I was almost ready to give up but now I’m going to stay.”

Carl’s eyes stayed on Adam, and Adam couldn’t help thinking that Carl looked as though he himself had been slammed headfirst into a tree. Though he had survived. Maybe, after everything, fate had published its judgement on that night in the Richardson back bedroom: Elizabeth would be killed, Adam would grow old alone, Carl would be released after a ten-year sentence and a crack on the skull to create his own destiny.

When Chrissy got pregnant Carl had come to Adam’s office to tell him, like a child reporting what might be a disaster to a trusted uncle. He explained that their plan was to get married and move into the farmhouse where Carl was watching William McKelvey try to drink himself to death. The prospect of Carl and Chrissy reliving what Elizabeth had gone through was too much; Adam invited them out to dinner and told them that there was a provision in Elizabeth’s will which would allow Carl to receive his full inheritance when he got married, if that was before he turned twenty-five. The two of them, lost little waifs, Adam thought, sat bewildered
while Adam suggested there might be enough for a small house in Kingston. In fact, most of the money would have been Adam’s, but nothing could have suited him better than this chance to give Elizabeth’s eventual grandchild a passport out of West Gull.

Over the following weeks Adam had spent hours on the telephone and inspecting possible houses. In each of them he imagined Carl and Chrissy safely ensconced, taking turns learning useful skills while their child went to a series of private nursery schools, kindergartens, etc., which would culminate in a brilliant academic career. Instead Chrissy’s uncle died and she inherited the old farmhouse on the Second Line Road.

“You know,” Carl said, “Lizzie aside—and all the bullshit—it’s great to be back. This place … I don’t think I could live anywhere else without feeling I’d left the best part of myself behind. I know, I sound like a bad song. Millions of people leave home.”

“Not everyone,” Adam said. “I ended up coming back.” The bedroom’s one chair was piled with clothes and Adam was still standing in the doorway. The important thing was to remain composed and remember who he was—Adam Goldsmith, West Gull businessman, face like a slab of rock. “I was working in Kingston but then my mother died and Luke Richardson offered me a job. I thought it was just for a while. Until I got my balance. Then I was going to sell the house and go back to university.”

“Balance,” Carl said. In the changed angle of the light the colours of his face took on depth and Adam could see the bruises flowering through the pale flesh. “What stopped you?”

Adam got a sudden image of himself sitting on a hunk of firewood in his basement, listening to Elizabeth tell her story.
It had always been so easy to make Elizabeth his explanation. “I guess it turned out I’m the staying kind.”

Carl laughed, that short laugh that could sound so much like his mother’s, and Adam wondered how much more of Elizabeth was hiding in Carl. Carl was silent a moment but Adam could see his jaw working, as though he was struggling to say something or keep something back. Adam had broken into a sweat, a grainy and uncomfortable slick covering his chest and back. Maybe it was because Carl was on the bed and having to look up towards Adam in the doorway but suddenly Carl looked like a child and Adam realized that for a long time, a time so long it might have begun Carl’s whole life ago, he’d been afraid of Carl and hated him for it. “You remember the accident?” Carl asked. “That time—” He stopped.

Adam waited. Then: “Of course I remember.”

“I just wish it hadn’t happened. It and everything that went with it.”

“Me too,” Adam finally said. After a minute or two of standing in the doorway, all the time so silent inside himself, he turned and made his way down the stairs.

Moira knew Carl needed her. Although she was no psychologist-in-training, at least the R&R had taught her something about taking care of sick people. She came back a second time and that afternoon convinced Carl to let her help him take a bath. It would get rid of the hospital smell so he could officially start getting better—also, as she later wrote to Lucy, after what had happened she wanted to see his body again. She had thought of him as infinitely strong and powerful, but seated precariously in the water, his bruised ribs purple and yellow while his bandaged head wavered above like Humpty Dumpty trying not to fall, Carl looked so pitiful that, ashamed at having
exposed him in such a cruel way, she knelt down beside him. He was still in the bath when someone started pounding on the door.

It was a woman who’d come bearing a huge casserole full of vegetable macaroni—you would have thought he was dying or something—and announced herself as “Nancy Brookner, one of Carl’s very best customers. And who are you? They send you from the hospital?”

“Moira,” Moira said. “I’m from the retirement home.”

“I guess you nurses get around,” Nancy Brookner said. She proceeded to put the kettle on the stove herself and before it had finished boiling she told Moira that a few weeks ago Carl had gone to a dance and driven away with his ex, Chrissy, while half the township watched.

“Just so you know,” Nancy said. “I don’t think Carl and Fred are the best of friends.”

After Lizzie fell asleep, Carl started to tell Moira about how Adam used speak in tongues. But that was another local legend Moira had already heard at the R&R—from Kate Rawlins, who had called it uttering. Her mother, according to Kate, had actually witnessed the child Adam “down on the floor like a baby goat bleating and mewling and no one knew if he was possessed or just epileptic, but Flora was so proud that everyone pretended to believe God was talking right out of his little mouth. Though why God’s mouth would choose to work for Luke Richardson all these years is a question.”

“They say he made a fool of himself,” Carl said, “rolling around on the floor. No one ever thought too much of him for that.”

Poor Adam, Moira thought. So meticulous. So clean. So proper. He must have been ashamed to find himself down
among the feet of the West Gull matriarchy. Ashamed to grow up with everyone knowing. She squeezed Carl’s hand. She liked the way their arms ran together. No one else’s arm had even tried to fit against hers this way. “We rolled around the floor,” she said. “Made some pretty weird noises, too. There’s probably a lot of others out there doing more or less the same.”