The Devil You Know: A Novel (2 page)

The heat from the car had worn off by this time. My bones were cold, and under my hat, my ears stung. There’d been a thaw a few days earlier but the snow was back in force now, falling heavily, and occasionally suddenly drifting in one direction or another with a gust of wind. Down your back or against your cheeks. It was cold enough that the snowflakes froze to my eyelashes and then melted there. I was in a hurry to get inside and crossed the bit of white lawn, diagonal, and snow got down inside my boots. Later, I couldn’t remember whether or not the landlord had cleared the path to my door. It didn’t occur to me to look for footprints.

I
got home cold and hungry and put a pot of water and rice on the stove before I’d even taken off my jacket. Bits of snow fell on the floor and I stepped on them in my socks and then peeled the wet socks off and put on two new pairs, one on top of the other. I went back out into the hall and shook out my hat and coat and hung them on an old hook behind the door. In the kitchen, my hand went in and out of the spinach bag and the rustle of the cheap plastic gave me a little jump each time.

I didn’t have any music on. The sound of the bag interrupted the other listening I was doing, a kind of keen attention through the quiet to whatever else is out there. Only nothing was there. This type of listening is common among women. You’re alone and there’s that baseline drone of electricity powering up your house, and your whole consciousness is taken up with witness to that noise, the hum of no humans. You catch your own hand moving out of the corner of your eye and it surprises you.

I had a tiny chunk of pecorino crotonese from Gasparro’s that I planned to grate into the spinach and rice. I’d been in to pick up olives and flirt with the dark-haired son, who was newly married but enjoyed a little call-and-answer over the meat counter. The father and the uncle either shook their heads or joined in, depending on the day. They were gray-haired but not really elderly. There was a sway-back wooden chopping block in the center of the shop. They were busy at the block, wrapping loins and strip steaks, and the son told me they had to do the offal separately and scrub the block down so there would not be contamination. Between us, under the glass, a pile of calves’ livers slouched and glistened.

I grated the cheese into a bowl. I was making myself hear things. Mice in the walls. The burble of water through the rads. Steam from the rice pushing up against the lid, the
click-click
of the pot as the lid rose and fell. Any floor creak sounds like something moving. It can’t really happen if you’ve imagined it enough.

There was a scrape outside and the chime of something heavy rang off the metal fire escape and my heart flipped up. A heavy icicle falling from the eaves. A hardy raccoon. I turned my body to the window.

There were two black stumps on the snowy landing.

The stove light shone off the glass and made it hard to see anything else. I could see my own reflection, my own fridge and stove. One of my hands was full of spinach and I held it out in front of me with the fist tight and the raw leaves sticking out between all my knuckles. The stumps were not stumps. They were black boots.

One of the guys from upstairs. Right? If you forgot your key, you’d climb up the escape and try to get in some other way. I counted in my head, waiting for him to move on, a friendly knock, something. The boots just stayed there.

My breathing stopped and I squinted, but the window shone back only a pale and cloudy version of my own kitchen, like a wet painting folded in half. On one side of the glass, real white table, white wall, desk in a corner, two chairs. On the other, the mirage:
table, wall, desk, chairs, and under the stove light, girl, spinach-fisted, staring. For a moment I didn’t recognize myself. I took two long steps forward.

Aggressive. Get off my escape. I could see the boots on the landing where a thin periphery from the streetlamp was casting some light. They ended at my kitchen table. Above that, my own long hair brushing my shoulders, the V of my sweater, my collarbone standing out white. In another yard, a cat or a raccoon screamed and the neighbor’s motion sensor kicked on. The outside lit up all at once.

Replacing me, a man. Taller than me. Black hoodie, black jeans, stocking cap pulled down close over his ears. Eyes shadowed or else deep set, and his hands hanging there, huge and gloved, black against the snow balanced on the rail behind him. The raccoon scrambling across the top rail of the yard fence.

The light held for the count of five. Long enough for me to see him there, two feet from the window. For him to see me looking. Then it turned off, leaving just the white walls again, the hazy girl in the glass. There was a silhouette where I knew he must be standing, a few feet away at most, dancing spots where my eyes were trying to adjust to the sudden swell of brightness and then the dark again. The window between us. The silhouette becoming an outline, part of my eye’s reckoning.

If he was still there.

I reached up and turned off the stove light. The spinach leaves fell all over the range, into the elements.

Nobody. My own reflection disappeared, but now the man was also gone. I went over and shut the kitchen door and shoved a chair up under the doorknob. Out in the night, I could see the shape of the thin bars on the outside of the windows, and beyond that only the snow-covered landing, the steps, the black railing. I was in the dark now.

What if he was somehow inside the house with me. Could he be inside? Or out there, watching me do this? I walked over to the window and knocked on it with a fist to warn him off and then pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

Outside, fat snowflakes were still drifting down against the fence. A little piece of moon came out from behind a cloud.

No one. No trace.

You’re making this up, I said. Ridiculous.

I said it loud enough that someone would have heard me, if he was there, around the corner, just out of sight.

I know how to work myself up. Panic, and then it’s nothing, and the relief of it is so good. There’s no one there. There is no better feeling than suddenly realizing you’re not going to die.

Outside was clean and gorgeous. I could see everyone’s sloppy backyards, white and muffled. The raccoon was gone.

I looked down and saw the tracks: boot prints, all up and down the landing, the heavy marks in the snow where he’d stood and stared.

O
n May 23, 1982, the week after she turned eleven, my friend Lianne Gagnon took the subway to St. George Station to practice running the two hundred at Varsity track and never came home. Sometimes I think I was supposed to meet her there. Sometimes what I think is we had a plan to meet—I used to run relay with her, never fast enough to be last leg, but they’d put me in second or third—only that day I didn’t go, and Lianne stood around on the corner, waiting for me, until whatever happened next came along and happened.

I’ve had a few therapists, and my parents, tell me this isn’t true, but it’s a hard notion to shake. No one knows if she got to the track at all: maybe someone talked her into getting off the train early, or maybe she never even made it onto the platform. Kids didn’t carry phones back then. These were the days before Paul Bernardo or the Scarborough Rapist. The next winter a little girl called Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan would go missing from an Annex park. They found her a few weeks later stuffed in a fridge. People still remember that time as the moment the city changed. Up till then, Toronto was pretty safe. We used to ride bikes through Mount Pleasant Cemetery, all the way up to Yonge Street, and come home in the dark. They made you carry a quarter in case you needed to call home.

When I see it in my mind, Lianne is standing around near the track entrance at the corner of Bloor and Devonshire, waiting for
someone (me), and that’s when the guy notices her. He probably told her he had some running tips. He probably said he was a track coach and could help her with her time. That’s how the cops painted it for us, later on. In the couple of days right after Lianne disappeared, my friend Cecilia Chan and I used to sit at the piano in her mother’s classroom after school and tell each other how it happened, how it was raining and Bloor Street was empty, and a long black car drove up and pulled Lianne inside. Then Cecilia played “Jesus Loves Me” on the piano. That’s the only song they taught her at Chinese Sunday School.

The other thing I picture, sometimes, is my bedroom closet in my parents’ old house on Bessborough Drive. The year before, I’d grown a plate of penicillin in the back of the closet, hidden so my mother wouldn’t know what I was up to and come and throw it away. Penicillin is just bread mold: Alexander Fleming was a slob who left old sandwiches lying around in his desk, and then one day—
poof!
—some mold got into his petri dish when he was away on vacation and killed a bunch of bacteria. (He made another startling wonder-drug discovery when his nose accidentally dripped into a different petri dish. You never hear about the stuff Fleming discovered on purpose.) I was growing the penicillin for a science fair, but once the bread got moldy I couldn’t prove it had antibiotic properties because I didn’t have ready access to bacteria. The closet was good and dark, though: easy to hide stuff in.

When I say I picture my closet, that’s also because of the cops. When Lianne didn’t come home for dinner, her dad drove down to Varsity to get her, but no one was there and the gate was locked. I guess he drove around for a few hours before they thought of calling the police. Everyone figured she was lost. I went to bed not knowing a thing, but later my parents told me her school picture was on the eleven o’clock news.

Right away, I had a terrible feeling, my mother said. Right here: she pushed a fist into the soft part of her stomach. We were getting
ready for lunch when she told me this, so she stood there with her fist in her stomach for ten or twenty seconds, and then went back to setting the table.

The police called our house at two in the morning. My parents didn’t want to wake me up, but the cop on the other end of the line wouldn’t hang up until he’d asked me some questions. They had a class list and they were going through it alphabetically. I wasn’t special: they were calling everyone. Lianne was my best friend and I wanted to be the first one they called. If anyone knew where Lianne was, it would be me, right? How could they not know that I should be first?

What they wanted to know was if Lianne was hiding in my closet. Did I know she was going downtown to practice for the track meet? Did I say I would meet her, and then forget?

This seemed possible, even though I wouldn’t be eleven until November and I wasn’t allowed to take the subway alone. I also wasn’t allowed to take gymnastics, or throw myself out of trees the way Lianne did, hoping to break a bone so that she could have a cast and get everyone to sign it, like Sarah Harper did in the fifth grade. I know that the day before she disappeared, we wanted to help find a lost dog in the park and we’d both run home to ask. I wasn’t allowed to do that, either.

The cop knew everything about me. He knew I ran relay with Lianne, and hurdles. He knew which corner store we stopped at on the way home from school when it was sunny out and we wanted to buy frozen cherry Lolas. It was like he’d been watching me and Lianne for months.

Questions the police asked me in the middle of the night:

Did I say I’d go to Varsity and run track with her, and then leave her there alone?

Or did she come home with me? Maybe we wanted to have a sleepover and didn’t tell anyone. Were we afraid our parents would say no?

Was Lianne in my house right now?

I was standing in my parents’ bedroom in the dark, with the curly phone cord wrapped around my wrist. No one put a light on. There were the red numbers shining out of my father’s digital alarm clock next to the phone and a couple of skinny stripes of moonlight where the vertical blinds didn’t match up. I imagined Lianne sitting in my closet, safe in the back shadows like the plate of bread mold, with her knees drawn up high against her chest and her red sneakers still on.

No, I told the cop.

You didn’t see her today?

No.

You didn’t play with her?

No.

Did you see her at the park?

I don’t think so.

Did you go to the park today? Did you see her in your backyard?

No. I don’t. I don’t know.

If she’s at your house, you’re not in trouble. We’re trying to find Lianne, we need to know where she is.

I didn’t see her.

The way I can picture Lianne sitting in the closet, or standing around on the corner at the track entrance, those things are called confabulations. False memories, probably induced by a combination of guilt and suggestion. If you want to answer a question badly enough, your brain will supply the solution.

It’s a strange thing to have to think about every spring.

Outside it’s bright and cheerful and there’ll be fat yellow dandelions in all the yards across the street, turning into white wishing puffs. I like to buy three or four bunches of cut hyacinths at a time from the Portuguese lady on the corner and rollerblade down the block with my hands full of them. Purple and pink and white: the whole room smells sweet and clean and I’m windburned from rushing around on wheels all afternoon. I mean, I have fun. I’m a
fun girl, I’m good at it. Still, there’s this piece of you, every May, that kind of wants to slit its wrists a little.