Every Little Thing (20 page)

He told the cabbie, “Here's fine,” at a stop sign at the start of the street, but there was no house for thirty paces in either direction. “Whatever,”the cabbie said. “Twenty-three fifty,”and he hit the farebox.

Number 58. There was a black truck parked two doors down from Nathan's house and a fire hydrant two doors up. He bounced back and forth between the truck and hydrant like a pinball. There was a white van in their driveway with
Tulley & Sons Locksmiths
written on it. He thought of Allie's sealed-shut black eye; apple-red in the centre. Her cut jaw. The cop's descriptions. More adrenaline soaked his brain and lengthened his gait every time he walked past that house. And it was this kind of macho bullshit that had gotten Allie into the mess in the first place. But he was drunk and pissed off and needed a place to put it and it was more than revenge that put him in that cab. He wanted those kids to feel the way Allie did about the attack. Gross, wrong. And she didn't need to go through the process of getting a new SIN card, hospital card, credit card. He pictured her standing there in line, in a sickly hospital or a stale-aired government building, staring at their outdated flooring, waiting in queue, wondering if they'd ask her how she'd lost her card.

The house was rundown: one shutter missing on the left side of a window, cracks in the pale yellow siding, and the lawn was knee-high weeds tangled up with litter: silver flashes of pop cans and a torn-open chip bag. There was a smell of mould as he walked up three cement steps to their front door. He didn't knock: he pounded the door with the underside of a clenched fist and still had no plan for when two or three drunk kids threw themselves at him. Through the living-room window, he saw them, all three of them, plus one, playing video games. And then the door opened.

They recognized each other immediately from the bar. The guy who'd opened the door went to slam it shut, but Cohen got an arm in. Just an arm, elbow deep, and the door was a vice. Each time they rocked the door against each other, it was another blast of pain: an intense pain that splashed from his arm, to his chest, in angry waves.

“
Nathan!
” and the kid sounded like a kid: twenty and terrified and almost ready to cry. He was shrieking for Nathan to come plough against the door with him because Cohen had gotten a leg in the door now too.

It was about
not
breaking his arm now, that was all. But the door was a snare around his arm and leg. Vicious rivers of blood were getting dammed up,where the door met his knee and elbow.

“
Nathan!
, it's
him
...from—”

Nathan charged the door like a bull, pinning Cohen's thigh and forearm tighter in the wooden frame. Cohen shrieked, pounding on the door, but he still heard the guy. “Shut the fuck up,Travis! You don't know this guy, okay? You don't know this guy, remember?”

Cohen's hand had gone entirely numb. It was being pricked by a hundred invisible needles and ballooning with trapped blood. Travis and Nathan had no plan beyond pressing hard against the door. They were panicked, and each time they shifted, he inched himself out a little more. “I just want her wallet back. Her purse! Throw it out the fucking window, I don't care!”

A third person slammed against the door, and the door was a guillotine at Cohen's arm. This guy was vicious. He grabbed Cohen's hand and squeezed so hard it felt like his knuckles were grinding each other into dust. The guy squeezed harder, and the bones of Cohen's fingers were being rearranged.

Cohen was slapping at the doorframe, yelling: begging them to let go. He saw one of their hands. Claw marks. Like a cat had taken a swipe at the guy. Except it hadn't been a cat, it'd been Allie, defenceless but trying. Those three cuts, puffy and pink, started on the back of the guy's hand, and then became two pink lines instead of three as they ran down his thumb.

“Throw her purse out the window!”

There was whispered discussion, a conference. “We don't know where her goddamn purse is now!”And he sounded like he meant it. Like they'd chucked it after looting it.

He managed to tear his leg out of the door and it had gone too numb to stand on. It rested on its tippy toes, useless. And now his arm was taking all the pain, all of it: three men, pushing one door, against one arm, and now there was acid fizzing under the surface of his skin.

His foot regained feeling, and he started kicking it against the door,
Fucking let me go!
but they weren't listening. They were drunk or stoned or both, and they were 100% panic. He turned his back to the door and pressed against it with everything in him: his toes crunching up in the ends of his sneakers, and his sneakers squeaking as they slid across the pavement steps.

“We don't have no one's purse, man! Will you piss off if we crack the door and let you go? The goddamn neighbours— My sister's baby. You need to fuck off.”

“I'm
trying
to get my arm out of the door! Fuck! I'm
trying
to!”

Panicked slaps at their door, and then he saw one of their faces through the slit of the open doorframe. The guy's head was pressed up against the wall; he saw his left eye, blinking madly, and half of his mouth, but mainly that one blinking eye. And it was Nathan.

Without thinking,Cohen reached into his pocket, hauled out his keys, and jammed a long car key into his face. It hit a tooth, made a sick scrapping sound along his gums, and Cohen cringed as the door swung open. They all stood there, watching Nathan on his back, on the carpet, wailing, with his right hand covering his bloody mouth. His limbs flailing around like an overturned beetle. Cohen was stunned still, holding his arm, looking at Nathan. He felt everything but satisfied with himself.

The door shut and a deadbolt clicked. He heard them all yelling
Holy fuck! Holy fuck!
One of them poked a head out a window. “We don't have her purse. We panicked. We threw it in the harbour, off the MacKay bridge.”

He walked back up to the stop sign, where the cab had dropped him off, to call another cab. While he waited, he watched a vicious, snarling dog. It was tied to a thick tree trunk. It was a hyena of a dog. Marbled and angry. Every time it lunged in Cohen's direction, its body snapped itself midair as the leash restrained it, temporarily muting its barking as the collar tightened on its throat. The dog didn't even know what it wanted.

GAPS

THEIR FLIGHT BACK home was only half filled. There were vacant seats and Allie
thought it best
to sit in one. Three seats behind Cohen. Every now and then he'd hear her turn the page of her magazine, the sharp
snap
of a page turning. Or she'd clear her throat or sniff, and the plane was somehow quiet enough to hear all that. He watched clouds pass the window, whiting out the blue. The flight attendant came by and asked if he wanted a drink, and he'd instinctively turned to Allie, who wasn't there, to let her order first.

“No thanks. I'm fine.”Except, he wanted a drink, and caught her in time. “Actually,” an apologetic laugh, “I'll have a glass of anything red.”

“I'm very sorry, but we're fresh out of red. And that's a first! White?”

At the luggage corral, Allie suggested he sit in front of the cab. The hefty cabbie had an impossibly thick moustache. He shifted uncomfortably as he drove, biting a fingernail to fill the quietness with action. Even a rough-looking man like him—with rolled cigarettes and a bottle of Brut in his cupholder—could sense something wasn't right between Cohen and Allie. He'd turned the radio up a little too, like the uncomfortable non-conversation between the couple in the backseat was worth drowning out with a bad pop song.

When he got in bed that night, he lay right at the edge, with an arm dangling over the mattress, to emphasize the distance he could offer: eighty percent of the bed could be hers. Lying there, he heard her brushing her teeth: the scrubbing, the water running, then clinks of her toothbrush falling into a ceramic holder. She walked passed their bedroom door with an extra pillow and blanket tucked under her arms. The blanket trailing behind her like a tail.

Minutes later he got up, peered over the staircase railing, and shouted, “You can have the bed. I'll take the couch.”

“I'm shorter than you. The couch isn't very long. Just...go to bed, okay?”

“Can we talk about this? About us?”

“I have to work in the morning. It's going on one. Tomorrow night, okay?”

“Keith won't care if you show up late for work tomorrow.”

“Can't we just go to sleep?”She wiggled into the couch, trying to find a comfortable posture.

At three in the morning, he felt her sliding under the covers. He felt the sheets lift, and then he felt a warm breeze across the mattress. The comforter grazed his chin as she settled in.

“Should I go down on the couch?”

“No.”

Silence. Minutes worth of it.

“Listen. We. We were having issues before. All of this. And I'm not overwhelmed and I'm not confused. It's. Just. We've been expecting the past, to keep us stitched together. Hold us in place. Memories.”She brought her hands together, interlocking her fingers. “I need some space. Just to...see how that'll feel. I might stay with Lee. Maybe. Just...for a while.”

Silence again. Withheld tears had a way of making her eyes look twice as big. She rolled over, away from him, and the sheets started moving as her shoulders bucked up and down.

“C'mere,” she said. “Just. Put your arm over me. Spoon me.” And he did. “Just rock me, back and forth, like this. Yes. Like that.”And she cried harder when he kissed the back of her head.

He woke up the next morning, and sun had filled the room. Allie was sat against the headboard, his arm laid in her lap like a book, and she was smoothing her fingers over the car-shaped bruise on his arm, as if it was a story in Braille.

“What happened?”They both looked at her fingers, skating over his bruise.

“I was trying to keep a door from closing.”

IT WASN'T JUST the bed that got bigger. The house felt bigger too. Like there were extra steps in the staircase now, and there'd be echoes if he yelled. The hall closet looked needlessly spacious with all of her shoes gone, and seeing only one toothbrush in the toothbrush holder made him feel like he was traveling.

Half bags of spinach were going bad before he'd eat it all. He was tearing banana bunches in half at the grocery store, understanding now why
some people
did that.

Lee had a spare room, and he was lonely and kind enough to agree when Allie asked for it. But his guilty conscience had him calling Cohen more than he normally did.
I'm rooting for you guys, you know that, right?

Lee's house was closer to her work, and there was less traffic heading to her office from Grayton than from their place in town. She also wouldn't have to pass that guardrail twice a day. He wondered if that had factored into her decision. All she'd said was,
It makes sense for me to stay at Lee's, for now, until I clear my head.
He gave her that space without pressure or an argument because him wanting her to stay wasn't the same as her wanting to stay.

First she packed a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush. Then he'd come home from work and her bathrobe would be gone from the hook on the back of their bedroom door. Or one of their DVD players would be replaced by a note,
Sorry, but you always watch movies on the couch anyway. We never used this one, right?
There was a thief erasing her presence—every day he'd come home from work and she'd be a little more gone.

By mid-August, the hall closet was gutted: her jackets and winter boots moved to Lee's house months before any signs of winter. By September there was never any mail for her anymore. He missed browsing the magazines she'd subscribed to. The cooking ones, mainly. One day, late August, he'd come home to their bookshelf looking lonely and hastily gutted. Books toppling into each other; some of the shelves needing book-ends now. She'd stripped her photos off the walls, and nothing had made their home feel as half-vacant as seeing those nails, still in the wall, and her photos, their decor, gone. Eventually the memories were eroding too: he couldn't gauge her height now, if she'd come up to
here
or
here
against his body.

His mother came by one day. She'd bought a Tassimo coffee maker, but didn't like it as much as “normal coffee.” She wanted Cohen to have it instead of throwing it away. It was a Saturday, so she asked him where Allie was, and he didn't know what to say. She hung her jacket up in the porch, noticed the lack of jackets and the emptied shoe rack.

“She's been...living at Lee's, for a while now.”

She looked at him like he was crazy. “You—You didn't tell us?”

He shrugged his shoulders, put a hand in his pocket. “I thought she was coming back.”

“She's not?”

“We haven't talked in a while now.”

“It was mutual, or she left you, or...”her words trailed off as her eyes took in his emptied home.

“It was mutual in that...I don't want her here if she doesn't want to be here.”

DECEMBER. THICK SNOWFLAKES blowing through the air like angry white wasps. Some clung to his kitchen window as he threw scallops into a bed of fettuccine. He hadn't seen Allie in months.

His phone rang and it was Lee. “Kid, it's none of my business, but there's things going on here, with Allie, you need to know about. That you deserve to know about. Things she's sworn me to secrecy about. Let's just say, you need to
see
her. You need to take a
look
at her. And I'll say no more. Except the fact that she just left here looking radiant. She got picked up by a fucker who shook my hand too eagerly. He said all that bullshit, you know?
So nice to meet you. Heard such good things.
He's a prick, Cohen. Men can spot a prick when they see one. I don't like the guy. Not for her. And I don't need a good reason why.”