Street Symphony (12 page)

Her mother worried about Dan being alone. But he wasn’t going to set fire to the house, he had simply become – well – simple. He spent mornings in his workshop, watched endless game shows in the afternoons and slept like a child in the spare room on a nest he’d made from blankets and pillows. Erin had become his mother, as her own mother pointed out. Setting aside morals and possible unintended consequences for her daughter’s sake, Mom also pointed out that unless she, Erin, had a sex life, she would become bitter and cruel.

Erin had pondered long on the
cruel
and knew she was not that – yet.
Bitterness
, though, was an occasional guest that hung around the house and left wet towels on the bathroom floor. Thoughts of if-only and why-me prolonged that visitor’s stay. But I am not cut out for adultery, she said. Who was? Would she take the shears one day, clip away all her defenses, and fall into temptation’s arms? As she so nearly had with Mel last week, in the elevator, for heaven’s sake! What fun that would have been for the people in the office, not to mention the guards who scanned the Argos-eyed CCTV screens. Long gone were the days when only an invisible god watched the world, and elevators and closets were likely out of his range.

Charlie Chaplin hadn’t appeared in her dreams of late and that was a good sign. His cockeyed walk and hat and stick and those sad eyes were too close to home to be funny. At times she felt that she was living in black and white to a background of portentous piano music with words written like signals across her days:
The Friday before Halloween, on her way home…

Erin walked away tired from meeting an author whose manuscript, “in its current form”, was not working and had managed to leave him feeling upbeat and convinced of possibility. Outside, the noise of traffic hit her in the face. The city she knew and loved was trailing its garments in the dust. Drab, overused, dirt and litter on the street, she wanted to sweep a huge vacuum cleaner over it and suck up all the muck. A man shouting about Jesus tried to put a leaflet into her hand. Across the road a group of women in headscarves were holding up placards:
Egypt! Free my father. They took a child’s teddy bear away from him in jail.

She ran down the steps to the subway. The train rattled on, taking her towards her own small world. Compared to the outer world’s problems, hers were no more than a gnat-bite. Was there enough leftover chicken for dinner? Could she keep making the mortgage payments or would she at last have to face reality and find a small apartment? Maybe it was time to move out of Toronto. Could she stand that? Would her down coat last another winter?

And I do have friends,
she almost said aloud to the two young women opposite.
We go to movies, to cafés. My sister Janey spends every other Sunday with Dan. I’m lucky really.

The larger of the two women across the aisle, lovely face, big eyes on the verge of tears, was listening to music, earbuds in place. Her companion, slim, long blond wavy hair, stroked the other’s arm a few times and looked at her sadly. Were they on their way to some dreaded appointment? Or maybe returning home from the doctor’s with a bad diagnosis? Or was it a breakup?
Shut up!
Erin said to her brain. It had its own scattered ways of distracting her.

Rain dripping off her umbrella, she turned her key in the lock, opened the front door and could hear, instead of the tap of a hammer, voices. His parents were unlikely to drop around without making a plan at least a week ahead. Was she going to have to make dinner for friends? She almost backed out of the hall and ran down the street. Courage! She put the umbrella in the stand, hung her coat on its hook and opened the living room door. Dan was lying on the floor, his eyes closed, while a voice from the radio murmured in a language unknown to her and probably to him.

She went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Mom had been by and left a salad. There was plenty of chicken. She poured a glass of wine for herself and orange juice for Dan, and sighed for the days when they’d shared a bottle on a Friday evening.
Don’t weep for ruined expectations:
line in Thursday’s horoscope. But she had wept. Dan was to come back from Afghanistan and, after a vacation in Mexico, take up his job at Creative Construction, lead the community program against the pipeline and, in the rest of his spare time, renovate the third bedroom for a baby. Instead…well the “instead” could be seen blowing to and fro in their yard. And it was, in every way, for the birds.

Mel had told her she was a heroine. But heroines are noble, she’d replied. They do not look at the nursery that is now a workshop littered with sawdust and fragments and want to scream, consider arson or ignoble flight. Pictures of birds cut out from
Wildlife
magazine formed a frieze where there should have been a pattern of teddy bears and dolls. And where there might have been a crib, a camp bed, the smell of paint, instead of baby powder… She let that refrain die.

Dan came from the living room to greet her. “Thank you for coming back,” he said.

Her heart shook. It was the first time he’d said anything like that. He’d changed from his old blue tracksuit into decent grey pants and a white shirt. He put some crackers and cheese on a plate, found two cocktail napkins and set them on the table with a lit
tle flourish. When they were sitting down with their drinks, he asked if she’d had a good day. There was excitement in him. It was a Chaplin moment. She could hear the piano but couldn’t read the script.

“Is everything all right, love?” she asked.

“Stay,” he said. “Don’t go away.”

In a few moments, he returned carrying an object covered with an old T-shirt.

“This is the surprise.” He pulled off the cover like a magician revealing the dove in his hat and unveiled a large egg. He stroked it and held it out for her to take. She stood up, put both hands round it and stared at it. The twenty-fourth birdhouse was a smooth oval with an oval entrance for whatever birds chose to make it home.

“Thank you,” she said. ‘It’s lovely.”

“It took me a time to hollow it out. I’ve put a lot into it.”

Once this man had cared about refugees, about other soldiers returning home to bleak futures, about people who had to swallow their pride and go to food banks and to charitable places for free meals. Now all this was contained in a ten-inch wooden egg. Erin shivered as she continued to nurse it and imagined that all the disease and evil of the world was crammed inside.

“Oh,” he said, “there’s a rough bit. Hold on.”

She held on, fixed in place, heard him run up the stairs and quickly back again, and tamped down the hysterical laughter that was rising in her throat.

“Keep still,” he said.

The file slid off the smooth wood and into her palm.

She threw the precious egg to the ground and shouted, “Look what you’ve done, you stupid, stupid idiot, you and your freaking useless birdhouses! Get a towel. Do something!”

But he stayed still and watched the blood run from her hand onto the wooden fragments. She pushed him away and ran to the sink. When she’d run water over her hand and wrapped it in a drying cloth, she plugged the kettle in and sat down to cry. It was the end. It was too much. For eighteen months, she’d borne this calm desolation of his mind. Now she’d said the unsayable and broken his gift. The heroics were over. She had to get help. He’d have to go to some kind of home at least from Monday to Friday.
I am not strong. I am not good.
She wanted to shout for Mel to come and hold her. The cloth was reddening and the stain was leaking onto her pants. She rested her head on her right hand and saw Dan’s feet. He was beside her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but couldn’t look at him.

“I’ll drive you to the hospital in a minute,” he said. “Drink this sweet tea first. You might need stitches.”

She looked up because that was a man’s voice, and the man’s eyes were once again full of awful knowledge. At the hospital he went straight to the triage desk and said, “My wife is bleeding badly and there might be a chance of tetanus.”

When they told him to take a number, he shook for a moment as if he were about to shout or collapse, but then he plucked the plastic square off its hook and came to sit beside her.

“Fourteen,” he said. “We might have to wait.”

~ • ~

All the birdhouses except the yellow one
and the tower in the birch tree were gone. He’d arranged the rest of them along the edge of the lawn with a sign that read FREE, and they’d quickly disappeared. Dan was back and Erin still watched him but surrendered to him those tasks she’d taken on ever since he’d set out for what they called the theatre of war.

“I developed muscles,” she told him. And he laughed and put his hands round her biceps.

He was wary. He was loving. He had put away childish things.

“Wonderful,” her mother said, her sister said, her friends said, her therapist said. His parents, who had backed away slightly from their damaged son, now came to claim him.
You’ll come to us at Christmas.

In fact, no, they wouldn’t, thank you. They were going at last to Mexico.

The lines had deepened on Dan’s forehead as awareness of the world returned along with memories of battles, explosions, death. He slept beside her but sometimes cried out in the night. Exactly as we told you, the three wise doctors said, pleased that they could close the file for now. You see, a shock, something broken, a crash, his work smashed. Any of those would be the trigger. But Erin knew it was the blood.

Falling Woman

What had led her to sit in the wrong chair?
Not that there
was
a wrong chair, but now and then Maura felt guilty for having a choice when some people had no chairs at all. Every morning, she sat in the red upholstered armchair in the corner drinking her coffee and reading the paper till it was time to go out to the next fruitless job interview. The couch against the wall was for evenings only, or ill health or, until recently, sex. For some reason, or rather no reason – later she put it down to intuition – at 8:31 a.m. on Thursday the twenty-third of May, she decided to sit in the brown leather recliner by the window, the window that looked out onto the street. And that was how she happened to see the tragedy. Harold had told her several times that she saw too much for her own good, as if there was virtue in ambling through life without looking to either side. He himself had lately become a fine imitator of the three wise monkeys.

So in one glimpse, one frame if it had been a movie, at 8:31 a.m., Maura saw: half the beige four-storey building opposite, the cedar tree that blocked out the other half, the back end of a pickup parked in front of the beige building, a red sedan going by towards town, a man falling from the roof of the beige building, a person running to the far side of the roof of the beige building.

She dashed outside and went to the fallen man, who, it turned out, was a girl, and said, “Are you hurt?” realizing at once that there’d be no response. In minutes, there were neighbours on the sidewalk, a passerby yelling into his cellphone, a person, possibly a doctor, kneeling beside the body. Maura ran home to get a blanket but by the time she found a decent one, one fit to be seen by all and sundry, an ambulance was drawing up. Paramedics leapt out to take control. A police car, lights flashing, arrived. An officer cleared a space round the fallen person and asked the onlookers, unless they had seen anything, to disperse.

“I saw her fall,” she told the cop, and almost found herself adding
With my little eye.
She also said, “There was someone else up there.”

The cop came into the house with her and looked through the window to confirm her story. Another cop came back later and asked her to tell him exactly what she’d seen. She was, she told him, still in shock and no longer sure of anything. He warned her that they’d need to speak to her again and left, leaving her with a vague sense of guilt. She made herself a cup of sweet tea and cried for the dead woman. Lying there, crumpled, wearing a long blue sweater and jeans, the victim, as the cop called her, had looked like a discarded doll. Her shoes, soft black pull-ons, had dropped off in the fall; one was resting on the rhododendron bush by the door and the other lay on the grass in front of the building.

Maura tried to call her sister but got the zombie voice telling her to leave a message. She tried Kylie, but Kylie had a job now and wouldn’t be home till eight. Harold had asked her not to call the office, but she did and no one responded at his number. She was greatly tempted to Facebook what had happened to all her invisible friends but held back.
Guess what! This morning I saw a young woman fall from a roof.
The dead couldn’t care about invasion of privacy but that didn’t make it right. At least she hadn’t rushed out with her cellphone to take a selfie with the corpse. She opened a file on her laptop to key in the facts, but there were no facts other than that a young woman had fallen from a roof. Her life, her family, her mental state were unknowns, as was the matter of whether she’d jumped or been pushed or simply tripped.

At lunchtime, Maura still felt shaken. She’d checked her emails and responded to none of them, not even the invitation to potluck at the Gladwyns. Why couldn’t they just make dinner for heaven’s sake, instead of ending up with too many salads and a sickening array of desserts? She’d done nothing, the bed wasn’t made, there was shopping to do and oh God, she’d missed the interview at Everstone, Brice. She called. She told them there’d been an accident and the police were talking to witnesses. Unable to call sooner, sorry. “Tomorrow,” the voice said. Disbelief in the tone but giving her another chance. Same time tomorrow.