The Blondes (12 page)

Media reports claimed the Fury had something to do with melanin and also with the double-X chromosomes associated
with being female—as if that lonely Y that left men vulnerable to male-specific diseases, such as hemophilia, was in this case a shield. Genetic scientists began searching for an allele that might be attached to the Y chromosome, protecting males while females were left vulnerable. Or maybe they were searching for an allele that would attach only to the second X—I wasn’t sure. After all, it had been a long time since I had heard the word
allele
. I had taken one “bonehead” biology class to meet my undergrad degree’s requirements, and even then I was lucky I got a B. The most interesting fact I learned that year was that a true calico cat—a tricoloured one, with orange, black, and white—can only be female because the colour trait attaches to the X chromosome. A female cat has a base colour of white and then two colour alleles (black and orange) that can attach, one each, to her two X chromosomes—black on the first X, orange on the second X. A male cat can be only the base colour (white) and one other shade (either orange
or
black, but not both), because he has only one X to take the allele.

All this ran through my mind, but then I shook my head: it was ludicrous to think of cats at such a time. The room felt hot and stuffy, so I went to the window and heaved it open. The courtyard below was still and empty, giving no indication of a city in crisis. That seemed so wrong to me. I felt there ought to have been an uproar I couldn’t have missed, even with my headphones on, even walking around in a self-centred fog. In a window across the way and up a level, a man’s white-shirted back was pressed to the pane, as if he
were standing and watching something across the room, or perhaps watching some
one
, having a conversation. I noticed that there were black smudges across my line of sight, so I pulled off my glasses and blinked at them. Mascara was speckled on the lenses, and this seemed so ordinary it unsettled me. That everything should be the same; that such little things should still matter. I pulled up my shirt and used a corner to rub the lenses before replacing the glasses on my face. I don’t remember if I cried. I don’t think I did. I probably should have.

The thing about disease is that it’s based on connection. What connected those six X’s, those six women in New York, to the ones who were now statistics in Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, Ottawa, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London? I asked myself that question as if it mattered. The truth was, I couldn’t do a thing about the answer, much less about what was to come next.

THIS MORNING, EVEN BEFORE I DRANK
the instant coffee that is making you kick, I wandered up the road to have a look at the neighbours’ place. It was about 9 a.m., which I thought was a reasonable time to go knocking. But their car was gone. There were fresh tire grooves in the snow, backing out of the drive. And there was blood in the snowbank along the road—maybe some animal. Maybe that dog Grace and I saw a few weeks back, the one she calls Alf. Maybe not. The mailbox that the postal woman knocked down with her vehicle was still lying there, toppled in the ditch. I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to speculate.

I walked up the yard until I could see the living room windows. They’re plastered over with newspapers now, and they definitely weren’t before. I went up on the porch and stood
there and read the news stories, taped overtop of one another, some half-hidden. A few reported the usual small-town fare about failing local business, but the headlines were enough to give me some idea of the state of the world. For example: the British R&B sensation Shelbee Brown, who died of the SHV while I was in the Women’s Entry and Evaluation Centre, had a final album released posthumously. A review, reprinted from a larger paper, proclaimed, “Shelbee Brown’s soul is still haunted, and it comes through in her croonings and stylings as if reaching us from the other side. Although she could not possibly know what fate awaited, these songs are testament to the times that took her life. This voice comes from somewhere beyond.”

The album sold a million copies in the week of its release—and knowing that reassures me. Things continue normally. People are buying and consuming, turning up the dial while driving in their cars, surfing the Internet and inputting their credit card numbers to own a little piece of culture. If I were anywhere but here, I would likely be caught up in all of that too.

I started to read a local news piece about current cases of the virus—and then I got spooked. It was so quiet. So I ran all the way back here, and you woke up inside me, and I ate a whole can of peaches and a freezer-burnt toaster waffle, and drank that Nescafé, black, to steady myself.

The good news? “The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit has no new cases of the SHV virus to report today. Last Wednesday, two cases of the virus were confirmed in the Barrie
area, however.” That from the most recent paper in the window—February 23, just a few days ago. Although I had to ask myself: What about that delivery woman? Is she an uncounted case? Or next week’s case? What about the blood down there along the road? And why have the neighbours left in such a hurry?

Still,
no new cases
—even if it doesn’t hold true—is a good sign. I’ve decided to read it that way.

I suppose if I could find someone to beg gas money from I could head back to Larissa’s place in Toronto—but Larissa has problems of her own, and how can I expect her to take care of me? Especially after I took off on her like I did. I could try to sell Larissa’s car rather than let it sit right where I cruised it into the driveway on fumes. But almost no one drives past this place, so even if I were to clear the snow off and write on the back window with a bar of soap, how fast would it sell? Still, I could try. I
will
try if Grace doesn’t come back soon. With a couple thousand dollars I could get myself back to civilization and put myself up somewhere—at least until you come.

Unlike Grace, I didn’t drive all this way up north to get away from the virus. I came here for Karl. I was only five months pregnant back then. I drove down several wrong roads where the houses were black smears, hunkered down behind fence posts and evergreens, hiding under snow. Driving with one eye exhausted me—the lens in my glasses was gone, and if I’d been pulled over by the cops I’d have been sunk. I had no licence or ID on me. I was wearing a half pair of specs and
driving a car that belonged to someone else. All the way here, I travelled in the right-hand lane so as not to go too fast, also to align myself with the white stripe that outlined the road. The left side of the road was a grey whirl. I couldn’t say who or what passed me. I was in Wasaga Beach, nosing up and down laneways, going slowly and craning my head to see, trying to retrace by memory the path I’d taken with Karl, using pine trees as landmarks. A hamburger stand. Horses wearing blankets, standing in the snow. An Esso station. A bait shop. The car got stuck on a bend where I’d slowed down, uncertain, and as I spun the tires I thought that might be it for me—all she wrote. The needle in the gas gauge had sunk below Empty at least ten miles ago. I gunned it to eighty. Then I turned the wheel just enough and the tires jostled into new ruts, and I was free. I jolted forward, braking before I hit a snowbank, and the cabin was right there: tucked in among the trees, a light shimmering beyond the branches.

I felt my heart jump in my chest. What would I find inside? I didn’t know it was going to be just Grace and me. Grace and me for two and a half months, and then she’d go too—disappear, seemingly without preparation, without taking anything with her. Disappear the way women seem to, the way everyone seems to now. Blip, and we’re gone.

Grace shovelled out the driveway before she drove off in Karl’s Mini. I don’t know how I missed hearing the scrape of the shovel, but I get so tired these days because of you, Hazel Junior. So tired that sometimes I sleep as if someone has poured concrete on top of me.

Shush, don’t kick. Don’t push your little claws into me. Shush, shush. You think you want to know, but you don’t, little one. You don’t want to hear what I’ve seen. Still, I’m going to tell you—if only to keep sane while I figure out what to do.

After I found out about the Blonde Fury, I thought I’d better colour my hair again. I bought the dye at the same drugstore where I’d bought the pregnancy test, only this time its shelves were half vacant. There was an inventory girl with dark blueberry hair who stood in front of the selection with a clipboard. She had loaded all of the Blondissima and Super Blonde into a shopping cart, presumably to be trucked away into some back warehouse, out of customer eyesight. I reached out a finger and ran it along the remaining choices, as if touching the boxes would help me. When you get to know me, you’ll find out I have to touch everything to convince myself it’s real. I touch everything. Except people. Your father, an exception.

Brown Sugar, Toffee, Pecan, Cedar, Acorn, Walnut. In the cardboard panel on the boxes that showed the results, and on the dingy hair loops attached to the shelves below, they all looked the same shade.

“I went for the darkest,” the employee said. “Don’t take chances.”

A Japanese girl in jeans and pumps ran down the aisle, squealing, followed by a friend. The first girl, who had her whole head bleached white-blonde with the exception of
her naturally black bangs, grabbed the last box of Ebony. In contrast, her friend had one or two stripes of blonde floating in her dark hair. She stood scanning the shelves as though another brand in the same shade might present itself to her.

The employee informed us that in addition to the mid-browns I’d been browsing, there was still Ash Brown. Chocolate and Black Brown, on the other hand, were all out. “We’ll have more in at the end of the week. Sorry,” she said. “Distributor can’t keep up.”

The two girls beside me seemed to be debating whether they would share the box of Ebony. Meanwhile, I went with the Ash Brown. Is an ash tree darker than a cedar or a walnut tree? Hair-colour names had ill-prepared us for questions of scientific classification. I noticed the two Asian girls kept their distance from me. There were still boxes of Pomegranate and a lone box of Auburn on the shelves—I guess because they were closer to brown—but the lighter Henna Red and Ginger, and other red shades more closely resembling my own natural colour, had been cleared away in the inventory girl’s cart.

The woman at the till was portly and had long hair pulled back in a barrette on top of her head and hanging down her back, part straw-coloured and part silver. She confided that she thought the panic was a lot of nonsense, that no one knew what caused the sickness and she wasn’t buying the hair-colour story. She’d had her natural shade her whole life. People were always telling you what to eat, what not to eat, what to avoid, what might be dangerous. “Like cancer,” she said. “They don’t know. But it’s your $10.99,” she added. It seemed to take
an unfathomably long time for her to ring me through. My stomach groaned and a few paces behind me, the two young Japanese women giggled and nudged each other. My eye lingered on the magazines beside the till. “Singer Shaves Head Again,” one of the covers proclaimed. And, “This Time It’s for My Kids, She Says.”

Outside, the streets were abnormally quiet, especially for a Saturday. People were going about their business, but with reservation. Drivers sounded their horns less. I saw several blonde women in jogging suits and also an ice-blonde hipster. I gave them a wide berth. Two of them glared at me, and the third didn’t notice. A small group of people had gathered outside a corner eatery that sold stone-oven pizza. They were staring up at LCD screens positioned inside the glass facing out. Normally the screens showed ads of happy people jamming their mouths full of hot, gooey pizza, but for once the screens had been tuned to a news station. A cold, quivery feeling burst through me: the owners had conceded something more important than sales was happening. Together, these strangers—these strangers and me—read the closed captioning at the bottom of the screen.

Woman in quarantine shows signs of “Gold Fever.”

“They put it in quotes,” a tall man in a business suit said to another man in a suit. I couldn’t tell if they were together or just bound by the fact that they both wore ties. “Because it hasn’t been named officially. Names of diseases have to be registered. All these names are just ones the media made up.”

“That true?” the other guy asked.

Authorities are now able to track the progression of symptoms, which are indeed similar to rabies. The public is advised to be wary
—and here the prompter went into a list of symptoms—
of women with raised voices, acting violently
 …

Lumbering, limping, exhibiting imbalance
 …

Flailing or throwing any object
 …

Grimacing, displaying a downturned expression
 …

“We’re not allowed to have downturned expressions?” the girl beside me muttered. “I mean,” she said a bit louder but still to me, “what if we’re just worried? In a bad mood? PMS?”