Losing It (11 page)

Alcohol helped.

But Lenore was always nervous and flighty. This illness was unfathomable, better not thought of too deeply. The abyss that might be awaiting any of us. Still, Bob wasn’t worried about Lenore. Whatever the present crisis – and they came up at least three times a week with Lenore these days – it would pass. But he felt deeply the need to talk to Julia, to reconnect with someone from home. He was deracinated here in this soulless hotel room eighteen floors above an outrageous city. This was the problem, he decided. He was too far from Julia, from the department, the things he knew and loved. Sienna Chu was
poisoning his thoughts. Bewitching him. It wasn’t his fault. He was a terrible slumper. Julia kept him straight but she wasn’t there. She was ages and miles away.

And the phone didn’t ring.

7

J
ulia was running now, clutching Matthew, dodging pedestrians, lowering her shoulder to force her way through the idiot wind that blasted free on every street corner she passed. She had to get to Pullman’s before closing. It was a traditional store, didn’t stay open past 5:00 on a Friday night. A neighbourhood store, with a tiny parking lot so full Julia had had to drive the van around the back streets, vainly searching for parking, drifting farther and farther away. That’s why she was running now, to get there in time. It felt good, somehow, to punish herself with intense physical effort for having left her mother in such shoddy care. They’d lost her within a day. How was that possible?

There wasn’t enough air, because of the wind, probably. Her lungs felt ripped raw, but she had to keep going. She was cramping now, but she didn’t want to stop. She missed the young woman on Rollerblades. She missed the old lady, but not the man in the blue suit. Thumped straight into him from behind, then collapsed because that’s as far as her legs would take her. As she fell she twisted herself around trying to save Matthew, place him as softly as she could on the ground. But
the pavement scraped her wrist and knee. The man in the suit, blindsided in the middle of the sidewalk, cried,
“Jesus fuck!”
and folded like a tent, but in slow motion, all in a heap. Julia tried to get up but her body wouldn’t obey her. There wasn’t enough air.

More slow motion.

“Fucking moron!”
the man in the suit said. He was on his feet now. Didn’t seem to see Julia at all but was bearing down on … Donny! Donny Clatch, who was there all of a sudden, unaccountably holding Matthew.

“I’m so sorry,” Donny said.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
the man in the suit said. Fists doubled. Looming over little Donny and Matthew. Julia started to move but everything was so slow.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Donny said.

“What do you think this is, fucking Roller Derby?”
He was going to punch Donny. He was going to punch Matthew! Julia lost sight of them as she was fighting her way to her feet, and then the man in the suit was on the sidewalk clutching his knee. Donny remained standing, still holding Matthew.

“Matthew!” Julia sobbed and Donny held out the baby for her. Matthew was calm as a Buddha in his arms but burst into tears as soon as Julia took him back. So they wept, clutched together.

The man on the ground said,
“Jesus Christ!”

“I thought you were going to hit the baby,” Donny said. “I’m very sorry.”

“
You’ve broken my fucking knee
!” the man said.

“No. I just kicked it out from behind you. It’ll be okay.”

Matthew was crying and screaming. Julia had to take him away. She could hardly keep hold of him. Everything was
scrambled. There wasn’t time to think it through. She had to get to Pullman’s.

“Are you all right, Julia?” Donny asked. “Hey, don’t go.”

“Why are you following me?” she blurted.

“I’m not. I wasn’t!” he stammered. “But I saw you running. It looked like, I don’t know, someone had stolen your purse.”

Her shoulder bag hung off her elbow, big as a baby. But it didn’t matter. What was the point of trying to make sense in an idiot wind? “Quiet, Matthew,” she said, stroking him.

“It looked like you needed help.”

“It’s my mother,” she said, and started crying again. How could she explain it? “I’ve lost my mother!” she said.

Of course, she wasn’t going to be there. All that time, wasted! Now it was nearly 5:00. Julia and Donny – he was calm as a rock, she felt better having him there – walked up to Pullman’s. Swirling pockets of wind buffeted them first from one side then the other. Julia had to turn to keep Matthew away from the dust. Donny just kept walking.

A thin girl with a sardonic smile was tending the door. “Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all. “We’re closing.”

“Listen, this is an emergency!” Donny said. “Julia’s mother is missing. Did you see her here today? What does she look like, Julia?”

Julia told Donny and Donny told the girl. “We’re looking for an older woman, hunched significantly, with white hair, pretty frail, suffering from dementia. Did you see anyone like that this afternoon in your store?”

“You just described half the clientele,” the sardonic girl said. She couldn’t help smiling at her own joke. She looked at Julia,
then smartened up. “Maybe someone inside saw her. I’ll get Mr. Peters.”

Mr. Peters was thin and nearly bald, a careful, dapper man whose flesh had sunk with age. His skin had an undertone of grey and the form of his bones showed in relief like some fossil emerging on an eroding cliff.

“Mrs. Carmichael!” he said, as soon as he heard the name. “Lenore, yes, she was a regular customer for many, many years.”

He hadn’t seen her, though he was very sorry to hear about her declining health. His hands trembled as he spoke.

“She would come Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, and often Fridays as well,” Mr. Peters said. “I would put aside some things for her which I knew she’d be interested in. She liked the Dutch biscuits, if I remember, and certainly any silk scarves that came in. And I could usually interest her in towels.”

“If you see her,” Donny said, handing over his handyman card, “please give me a ring.” He seemed confident, in charge, like a detective on the scene.

“I remember she used to bring you in when you were small!” Peters said to Julia. “Not as small as this young man, perhaps!” he said, meaning Matthew, who was hiding between Julia’s legs. “But a little lady.”

“Yes,” said Julia. It felt better somehow just to be in Pullman’s, even without her mother. The lunch counter was still there, the sides of the stools gleaming with chrome, and she could smell toasted cheese and bacon. Ladies’ socks were on sale three pairs for $7.99, and the support-garments section had, if anything, grown over the years, now took up three aisles.

“And Mr. Carmichael!” Peters said, animated now with the memory. “He was a man’s man. He
hated
it in here. I remember him lost in lingerie, wandering around helpless!”

“Anyway, if you see her,” Donny said.

“I said, ‘Can I help you? It’s Mr. Carmichael, isn’t it?’, and he said,
‘Where does a man get a drink around here?’
There was one time -”

“Thank you,” Donny said, trying to turn them away.

“– but perhaps that was someone else,” Peters said.

They walked outside again. It was already starting to get dark. Julia scanned the area. The tiny parking lot was empty now because the store was closed. The other stores up and down the street, in this older part of town, were glum in this light. An old woman on a street corner was begging for change, her clothes tattered, hair matted. One leg had a grotesquely purple, oozing wound. She held out a sorry Blue Jays cap and kept her eyes on the ground.

“That’s not her?” Donny asked.

No. No. Julia had a sudden vision of her mother wandering on the Queensway, eight lanes of angry traffic screaming by, weaving to avoid her, honking their horns while she panicked. Doomed in another second and a half.

“So you checked all around Fallowfields,” Donny said. He was wearing just a light shirt. Why wasn’t he cold? “Their staff are out looking. The police are out looking. You’ve scanned the obvious places …” Ticking all this off in his head methodically. Like it was some … kitchen job! “So, she might be found
already
. It might just be a case of going back home -”

“She’s not,” Julia said, with conviction. “This is my mother. Nothing is straightforward with my mother.”

There was one other place to try. Tellman’s Groceries was several blocks away. It had changed enormously over the years, was no longer a crowded little butcher-and-greens shop with a crate of vegetables in the front. It was now a sprawling, shiny
vault of food that covered acres, having swallowed two restaurants, a bank, a gift shop, a photo store, and a pharmacy. Her mother had hated going there in recent years, often complained that she no longer knew where to buy her Dodds biscuits, her Valentine’s sandwich bread and Mr. Doodle’s cheese. The biscuits could be in aisle three one week and aisle eight the next. They were constantly changing the plastic wrap and the Boston cream pie. You just couldn’t count on anything. None of the old staff were there any more. Mrs. Stephens, whose son became the president of whatever it was and whose husband died in the garbage compactor at work, gone long ago. Now it was all teenage girls who couldn’t even give proper change without a computer telling them what to do. And they packed the bags all wrong, with eggs on the bottom every time, and mixed meat and vegetables together without a thought.

Her mother’s voice drilled into Julia’s head even before they entered the store. For how long had she blamed everything that went wrong on changes at Tellman’s? For ages, it seemed. Before they knew what was happening. When she was just eccentric, a bit confused.

Now Julia felt exactly the same way. It was an overpowering store, the lights jacked up to megawatt brightness, twenty-one check-out cashier’s booths stretching into the distance. A few desultory shoppers pushed huge gleaming carts, the food-shopping equivalent of minivans. Aisle upon aisle of products, relentlessly packaged, hyped in colour. The fruits and vegetables looked drugged up, on steroids, too vivid and robust to be believed.

Everyone looked lost. Bent-over old ladies wandered aimlessly, their eyes glazed, limbs trembling. They weren’t her mother. Julia knew she wouldn’t be here but she had to look, for her own conscience. It was all her fault. If only she’d moved
her mother earlier so she would have adjusted better, instead of waiting till she couldn’t cope with any change at all.

She remembered her mother pulling her along by the wrist as they walked down the narrow, cramped aisles of the old Tellman’s, where the shopping carts were too tiny even for little girls to ride in. She professed to hate shopping, brooked no child-caused delays in getting it over with. And yet there was also this sense of her being queen in her own domain. Behind the meat counter, the butcher’s white apron was forever smudged with blood and grime, but no one cared. How he brightened when he saw them. Her mother was pretty then, trim, always well dressed, she wore scarves often and would fix her make-up in the car mirror, oblivious to the swarming traffic. “
Mrs. Carmichael
,” the butcher would say. “You’ve brought your beautiful daughter, but I can’t wait for her to grow up. Are you still married?” His drooping hound-dog expression and her business-like attitude, secretly pleased.