The Blondes (37 page)

Throughout the meal Larissa chattered at me about old times and I grunted in agreement. I felt like I should cry, but didn’t, even though she was talking about when I had lived with my mom. I remembered how my mother used to say I was just a late bloomer. When she had said that, I got mad and walked out. Whenever I heard that phrase,
late bloomer
, I visualized bright orange mums in autumn, in pots outside a grocery store, their green leaves growing furry with dust stirred up from traffic. Something waiting to be bought and planted. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I dug my fingers into the bridge of my nose and the corners of my eyes to squash down the gathering pressure there.

When I came back, Larissa said, “I’ve got some errands I just remembered. We need to go right now.”

“Sure,” I said. I looked around for the server but she was in the back. I don’t know why I was looking anyway—it’s not like I had any money.

“It’s taken care of,” Larissa said. Our booth was so close to the door, she was already on her way out.

Around the corner and down the street, she worked a couple keys off her ring and gave them to me so I could let myself into her apartment if we didn’t arrive back at the same time. We parted ways and I headed for Karl’s office at
the school. Now that I had Larissa to draw on for help, I hoped to take transit and save my feet, but when I patted down my pockets, the change I’d begged the previous day was gone. I had switched coats, of course, at my old apartment, but I thought I’d been sure to move the money from one pocket to the other. Even though it was only a couple dollars, I hadn’t wanted to use it to ride the streetcar until I was certain I had a place to stay. Cursing my bad luck, I trudged to the university on foot. On my way, I passed a row of hoardings where photographs of loved ones and handmade posters had been stapled up. It was a wall of the missing. The paper layers roiled in the wind, revealing yet more smiling faces underneath—the word
missing
repeated a hundred times.

Karl’s door was like a tombstone. It was cold and blue and locked. At least, that’s how I think of it now. I knocked hopelessly before cruising around, seeking out anyone who could help me. The halls were open but deserted. It was finals, I remembered.

I rounded a corner and came across a prof I knew. She had two pens stuck into the back of her hair, which was coiled up on her head. All her greys were gone and it was a healthy-looking solid brown. It suited her. She was walking with her head down, reading a student paper.

“Ex—excuse me, Dr. Jacques,” I said as she approached. “I was in your symposium, Gender and Genre, two years ago.”

“Oh,” she said, “yes. You’re the one with the aesthetology thesis …”

I nodded.

“Hilda?” she guessed.

“Hazel.”

She had looked at my thesis early on, but had passed on being my adviser when I approached her, months before I began working with Karl. She’d said it was “intriguing” but didn’t fit closely enough with her own expertise. Also, she’d felt I was trying to “cover too much ground,” and that perhaps my ideas lacked focus. I liked her, and it had seemed she liked me—in class anyway. I was stung—devastated, in fact—when she suggested I approach Dr. Mann instead. I had hesitated at first, unsure if I could bend the thesis to Karl’s areas.

Now, Dr. Jacques casually tucked the hand holding the paper on her hip, and said it was good to see me. Where had I been keeping myself? New York, I told her, and she joked, “I’ll bet your thesis has a whole new direction after that!”

I muttered that I didn’t know, actually. That I was thinking of abandoning it. At this point, what could it matter?

“Academics will always matter. Eventually people will want the outbreak interpreted. We’ll look back on this time and we’ll want to know what it meant.” Then she excused herself for being so brazen and said I must have other things on my mind right now. “I remember when I was pregnant,” she groaned before I could answer. “I was so sick and my feet swelled two sizes. I was always making my partner run out to
the store to buy me ice cream and Epsom salt. But it’s all worth it in the end, you’ll see.”

I must have given her a doubtful look because she silently ticked her finger at me.

“I’m looking for Dr. Mann,” I confessed. Dr. Jacques didn’t blink. She asked if I’d tried his office but, before I could answer, said, “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him skulking about in a couple weeks. But we’re all squirrelled away, marking.”

I asked her if she thought he and Grace might be at their cottage. I used Grace’s first name, though I don’t know why. Maybe I thought it would make Dr. Jacques more likely to tell me if she knew, though it was pretty clear they weren’t close companions.

“Maybe.” She smiled, and her gaze shifted toward the paper in her hand, as if we were through our little confab.

Before she moved to pass me she stopped again, and said warmly, eyeing my belly, “I didn’t even say congratulations. This time of year makes animals of us. Congratulations, Heidi!”

“Hazel,” I said, nodding my head and drawing in a breath. No one had congratulated me on being pregnant before.

When I exited the building, I found a cold ledge outside it, where I sat trembling. If Dr. Jacques had taken me and my thesis on, you wouldn’t have happened. I wondered if I would still be snug in my old apartment, if I would have paid more attention to my mother when the plague broke out and warned her against whatever may have befallen her. I ran my hands up and down the quivering bump of you.

Larissa wasn’t home when I got back. There was a form Scotch-taped to her door. I remember I pulled it off without thinking and stepped inside. I opened it up and glanced at it before going in to sit down and take off my boots in an easier position. I placed the yellow piece of paper, three-folded, on the glass coffee table next to my city invoice.

Moments later I flicked my finger to open the letter again.
Sorry we missed you
, it said. It was from Social Services. It had her name hand-printed in blue pen at the top, her maiden name: Larissa Engle.
As per our last visit, a reminder that you are to complete the following
 … There was a checklist of tasks, some typed, some printed under the category “Other”: looking for work; seeing her therapist; filling out forms for Gardin-Lake, the condo company Larissa had claimed would re-house her; keeping her appointment at someplace called the Grief Institute. The times and dates for the appointments had been scratched in hurriedly by some social worker, probably in the hallway.
We will call again in ___ days’ time
. A “2” had been penned into the blank space.

I folded the note back up. I pressed my fingers into my eyes. I went out into the hall and retaped it to the door. Then, as I was coming back inside, I moved too quickly and my bump hit something and I grabbed the object before it could tumble over. It was the artisanal wig. The Styrofoam head wobbled over my sock feet, rolling on the laminate wood floor. I was arranging the wig back on the head when a tag slipped
out and hung overtop of the nose.
Malibar Costumes
, it said, and the price. Maybe Larissa had frittered away the last of her money on it, or maybe she had stolen it—but it certainly wasn’t a gift from an artist. She wasn’t even working with artists any longer.

I went into Larissa’s bedroom and lay down on her bed.

Jaichand didn’t seem to me the type of man who would leave his wife when she was struggling. Something had happened, I reasoned—something he couldn’t abide, something he couldn’t solve. How bad had things become? Had he left the continent with their child? Or were one or both of them dead? I saw the social worker’s handwriting again:
Your appointment at the Grief Institute
. In the picture frame beside the bed, Devang was just an infant, maybe two or three months old. Dark, wet trails of hair bled across his scalp. His eyes were only half open and his mouth pulled down to one side, like he had deep worry for the world.

I thought back to the morning. Larissa had snagged that three dollars from my pocket and used it to pay for our Tim Hortons coffees, I realized. How had she paid for breakfast? Then it came to me: she simply hadn’t. She’d orchestrated an elegant dine and dash. I remembered asking her about her cellphone, whether she’d got my message the previous day. She said she’d left it at work. But according to the yellow form, she was supposed to
look
for work. Meaning, she didn’t have a workplace. I got up suddenly and walked through her apartment pulling open drawers. The cellphone was in the utensil tray in the kitchen among the forks. When I turned it
on, no message icon came up. She’d received my voicemail and then shoved it away in there.

The blue glass clock above her sink had hung in her condo. I watched the hands move. It hit me that she wasn’t supposed to drive. I was making her break rules. My being there was making her pretend to be someone who had everything under control when she was supposed to be trying to get it together. That’s why she had been reluctant to come get me, even though I’d been just twenty blocks across the city.

I went to the living room window and looked down into the parking lot. All the cars looked the same, silver glints in the sun, the icy pavement beneath them like aluminum foil. I found my glasses in the bathroom, carried them back to the window, and peered through the one good lens. My breath sailed through me with relief: Larissa’s car was there.

I found the keys on the coffee table inside a metal dish with some paperclips and a lighter. It was sitting next to the invoice for my mother’s funeral. If Larissa suspected what the envelope contained, I reasoned, it meant she was still talking to her father down in Windsor. It meant someone would take care of her. I grabbed my things and pushed them into my bag. I left her a note saying that I had to go. Then I locked up her apartment and loaded myself and my things into her Honda, and in a short two blocks, I was on the expressway.

Karl, Karl, Karl
, the wheels seemed to mutter over the slick asphalt. The cottage was a small brown square with a sloped roof and a cherry-red door, tucked around a bend partially
obscured by a hill and maple and pine. At the time, that was all I could remember. How many cottages did that describe? In my mind I could hear Moira saying that Karl should take some responsibility, and suddenly I knew what that meant: food, shelter, clothing, health care,
money
.

It was the same kind of crisp, sunny day as when I had first made the trip with Karl, and I was cresting the city, passing into Barrie, before I thought to look at Larissa’s gas tank. When I glanced up again, a transport truck printed with an image of a short-haired, blonde, smiling woman went by. She was wearing heavy black rubber gloves and holding up a vacuum nozzle. The company logo was scrawled below her in red letters.

Why was she blonde? Why was she smiling? I sped up and passed her.

I zoomed along, barely able to see the road ahead because of my one lens, desperate with hope. There was just enough gas, I thought, to get me there—if I could remember where
there
was.

And, as you know, I did find it—but what else did I discover? I found I could steal a car and leave my best friend all alone. I found Grace and a kind of silence I still can’t understand.

AFTER WE LOST THE TV SIGNAL
, Grace would sit in the chair, sipping away on her glasses of wine, and staring at the wood stove or out the window at the snow. Laying her head back against the chair, her thin white scarf wrapped around it, she sometimes looked like a cancer victim to me, especially as breath sang in and out of her lungs. She’d stopped bronzing by then, as if she’d realized I hadn’t brought the threat of the virus in on me. At least she trusted me a little.

Then one evening, out of the blue, she perked up in her chair and said, “He claimed he didn’t bring you here, but I know he did. I know you did it all over our furniture.” Her lips had turned black around the edges with wine and lipstick. “He said it was always at your place, but I know it wasn’t. He said you were loud in bed and you couldn’t get enough. He really bragged about it.”