The Devil You Know: A Novel (18 page)

I
showed up at David’s at seven in the morning with a copy of the morning paper.

Man, twenty-eight, arrested in schoolgirl slayings, I said.

You look like shit.

Do I look like a nap and two cups of coffee? I said. Because those are things I want.

He made me drink four glasses of water and eat an egg right in front of him. I lay down on his couch till noon with a scratchy plaid blanket on my feet and sat up again feeling no better.

You get a real byline and everything, David said. He was sitting on the carpet with a mug of coffee, the newspaper spread out all around him.

Suspect grew up in Scarborough, I said.

It’s huge. All those years they never caught him.

I know.

They could have got him years ago, David said. They had him in for questioning and everything.

I’m not going in today, I said. Mike’s going back. But I’m not.

For a moment neither of us said anything.

I leaned down and dug into my shoulder bag. There’s something you need to see. Look at this. I smoothed out the picture I’d printed off the archive at work, my teen runaway mother in front of the
house on Brunswick Avenue. I found this like five minutes before Bernardo got arrested, I said. I’ve been carrying it around.

What am I looking for?

My mother. I pointed. This is the picture of that house, remember? That news item I showed you, the drug raid house with Cameron’s alias attached to it, Arthur Sawchuk. It’s
her
house, it’s the house where she lived. Arthur Sawchuk’s house.

David shrugged. So?

So the guy just happened to have the same name? I fingered the picture. It’s a weird thing, David.

Unless the guy was using some big long foreign name that no one else has, total coincidence. And even then. He looked down at the photo again. I don’t know that I would have recognized her, he said. This is pretty lo-fi. He slid the printout along the table and leaned back to look at me. You had a heavy night, Evie. Isn’t this supposed to be your day off?

It’s freaking me out, I said. I folded the picture in half, image side in.

What you need is fresh air, David said. He handed me a pint glass of lemon water. I think we should go skating.

David’s the one guy in the whole country who didn’t grow up playing hockey. His mother took him skiing. She put him on a bus every Saturday morning at six and sent him up to Blue Mountain and he spent the day on the mogul runs. As a result I find him to be a bit of a skating pansy, if you know what I mean. I say that more positively than you think. He’s got hockey skates but doesn’t have hockey speed. Overall it makes him a better companion, although whenever we’ve gone skiing I don’t see him for the entire day.

We walked down from Davisville Station with our skates hanging by their laces, over our shoulders so the heavy blades kept bumping against my rib cage. I didn’t have skate guards and I held my elbow out so that the blades wouldn’t slap against my arm and damage my coat or leave it streaked with rust. I hadn’t had them
sharpened yet, either. The weight on my shoulder zipped up my neck into my brain. I had a stinging hangover and I kept moving the skates from one side to the other until David finally pulled them out of my hand and carried them himself.

The skating rink is a longish walk from the subway. Behind the library, halfway between David’s mother’s place and the house where I grew up on Bessborough Drive. On the way past my old street there was an Open House sign tethered to the light post on the corner, so that it wouldn’t blow out into the street or fall over and get swamped with snow.

You wanna go?

David meant to the house, whatever House was Open. It’s a thing we sometimes do, starting a couple of years back. It’s a way to get inside new places. Sometimes you go for a walk in the evening and find yourself gazing into living rooms that have their lights on. Just in a cursory way. Not creepy. I have my favorites in every neighborhood. The ones with great giant paintings, or antique mantels. You see those houses where there’s zero art on the walls and you know it’s either students or old people who live there.

What if it’s my actual house? I said. I squinted down the street as we went by. David had never been there. We’d moved from Bessborough to Inglewood Drive the year before his mother hired me as a babysitter, before I’d ever met him.

W
e sat down in the penalty box to lace up and went around and around in circles for a while. The ice was fresh and smooth on the hockey side, and knobbly on the leisure rink. Leisure rink or pleasure rink? I never remember. I used the lumps in the ice to scrape the rust off my blades. I had a Walkman in my pocket with a tape of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and I put my earphones on and David went over and shot some pucks with a couple of guys who were about his age and also about a hundred times better than
him. I’m shocked no one ever uses “Rhapsody in Blue” at the Olympics. It’s perfect. Slow-fast-slow-dramatic.

So? I called out to David from across the boards that separated his side of the rink from mine. I pointed down the block with my mittened hand. I meant the open house, although I was generally ready to get the skates off my feet, too.

What if it’s the house I grew up in? I said again. What if this is an open house at my own house?

I’m telling, David said. I’m telling the agent you don’t have any money. Also? I’m totally going to hang out in your bedroom. Your mom will never find out.

I waved my fingers at him in a spooky way. Old houses are ghost houses, I said.

He held a hand out to ward me off.

You’re a lousy ghost, he said. I can never see through you at all.

I don’t hang around the old ’hood a whole lot. Once a year or so, in the fall when the trees are pretty, or if David’s mother forces us over for dinner. The year before we’d gone to play tennis using the courts at my old junior high. We walked up Millwood and through the catwalk and found the courts empty.

It was July, and the middle of the day. No one else was dumb enough to be out in the sun. We’d rallied for a while and then played a couple of slow games, stopping every twenty minutes or so to bend low and drink water from the kid-size fountain just outside the chain-link fence. Before we left I’d gone inside the school to pee. There was an unlocked door just off the asphalt courtyard. The playground, I guess, for whatever kind of playing takes place when you’re twelve or thirteen. David waited outside. I opened the door into what I suddenly recognized as the seventh-grade hallway. There was a long line of orange lockers, full-length. Halfway down the hall they’d had to replace one and the new locker was green.

Memory works on random cues. A sound, or some visual blip, something you’d never be able to identify in advance. There’s a girls’ bathroom in that hall. The toilets were clean because it was summer.
I sat down and looked up through the gap between the cubicle door and its frame. A space the size of my index and middle fingers together, a peepshow view of the bathroom mirror, the sinks, and the empty paper towel dispenser.

There’s the blip. Sitting there peeing and staring through the one-inch gap at a strip of mirror over the sink. My heart suddenly pounding. S
omeone could see me
.

Not a stranger. Not some follower-in-the-dark. Other girls. The twelve-year-old girls who would have been there in 1983, in the bathroom, checking their lip gloss and spraying their hair and cutting one another down with gossip in front of the mirror, the year I was twelve and Lianne was dead and I went to that school. And how easy it was, from that point of view, to watch them back.

I
thought of this as we walked down the circular drive, down and away from the Leaside Library rink. Try going back to the park where you used to play every afternoon when you were a kid, or your babysitter’s front yard, or the steps up to your nursery school. Now take a look at the way the streets all branch out and the trees hang down and the kind of light in the sky. The familiarity will make you seasick. It’s not about nostalgia. Nostalgia is a place you
want
to go back to. I’m talking about the opposite of that. A view that casts you out of your own, grown-up body and back into a place where someone leads you around by the hand and chooses what you eat and when you sleep.

We walked up Bessborough Drive a few blocks. I could see the For Sale sign sticking out of a snowy lawn up ahead and for a moment blanked on which house was mine and which ones weren’t. It’s an old neighborhood. A lot of the houses look the same. The windows were a different color, I thought, or at least the trim around them was different.

When we got close, David grabbed on to my hand. It was a light and casual gesture, like we did this all the time.

It’s not my actual house, I said. It looks like it, but it’s two doors down. My house was number forty-one; this is forty-five.

The real estate agent was perched up high on a bar stool near the entrance, with a wool shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The door was halfway open and it must have been cold sitting there, trying to run an open house in February. There were two names on the sign out front, but only one agent inside. She was a fiftyish false brunette. Her card said Antonina Argos.

Is this your first house? Antonina said. She rolled her R’s only slightly. Not quite enough to make her foreign. She hopped off the stool and I saw that she stood about four-foot-eleven.

Yes, I said, prying off the heel of one wet sneaker with my other foot. It definitely looks that way.

The steps up to the front door, the entranceway, the landing and staircase to the second floor: everything was identical to the house I’d grown up in. The whole street had been built on the same plan.

There was a pile of shoes at the door and David hunched down to unlace his boots. We weren’t the only lovely young couple out touring neighborhood open houses. When he stood up, Antonina folded back her shawl and her blouse parted in a deep and scandalous manner. She’d missed a few buttons for professional reasons.

Antonina waited for David to be done with his boots and then handed him the information sheet, gesturing to the highlights of the place like she was a tour guide at the Louvre. Her grammar was off-and-on. You’d call it practiced foreign charm: Three bedroom up, living, dining, eat-in kitchen. One-and-half bath. Hardwood throughout.

I slipped the sheet out of his hand. Antonina looked at David.

Now, honey. David gave my shoulder a condescending rub. Why don’t you go on ahead and look around upstairs?

He turned to Antonina:

I’d like to take a look at the electrical panel.

We had our routine down pat.

Y
ou hear about tragedy tearing families apart rather than bonding them together. A baby gets cancer and the parents just can’t manage all that grief and their own relationship, too.

This is understandable, because it must take everything in you to keep walking around, wearing clothes, starting the car with a key, and pretending to be the person-who-has-your-name. What’s left for the other partner? It turns out the other partner is also full of grief and actually wants more from you, not less. Like everything else, mourning is only about power. You watch the baby struggle through and then die and nothing in you can change any of it. Suddenly you’re the infant, power-wise. It’s bad enough you can’t protect your own kid. You’re also handed a neat reminder that it could have been you, and that it was unstoppable. In the face of freakish disease or freakish murder, all of us are just babbling. We’re on our backs.