The Devil You Know: A Novel (33 page)

Last question.

Let’s go home. You’re making me feel ancient.

Which one is Sawchuk? I pushed the picture at her again.

She shook her head. He’s not in here, she said.

Oh.

She turned her glass upside down again and it smacked off the tabletop.

I really wish we’d moved to Orillia, she said. All that fresh air.

M
y mother taught me how to ice-skate when I was four, at the little ice rink in the center courtyard at Hazelton Lanes. In the summer you can have coffee and pastry at the tables there, when you need a break from shopping for designer shoes and jewels. In the winter, they close all the glass doors and the courtyard becomes a tiny, perfect ice rink, with a tree growing up out of the middle of it. My mother held out her hands and skated backward, away from me. Slowly.

I’m not moving! she said. I promise. Skate to me!

Then she’d glide another foot or two away.

I wonder if she really thought she was fooling me, or if it just seemed like the right thing to say. Metaphorically, she was not leaving me behind. She was imbuing me with a new and valuable pleasure. This is my mother in a nutshell: when faced with the possibility of preschooler tears, employ metaphor.

She also taught me to ride a bike in one shot, on the grass behind Maurice Cody school yard. On the grass so that if I fell (more likely to happen if you’re riding over a bumpy field, for the record) it would hurt less. She gave the bike seat a solid push from behind and then jogged just out of reach, screaming, You’re sitting half-assed! You’re sitting half-assed!

Compare and contrast at will.

If you leave Hazelton Lanes on the Yorkville side, you can walk down a little cobblestone pathway that runs between Remy’s bar at one end and Hemingway’s at the other. These are both stockbroker bars, guys-in-their-thirties-wearing-suits bars. The kind of place a guy like Paul Bernardo might have hung out, when you think of it. Remy’s sometimes had a dance floor and a bad DJ, too, with a video screen. Music videos were still exciting. People wanted to show off this new technology.

Keep going and you end up right on Bloor Street, where all the richest stores are. William Ashley if you’re getting married, Creed’s for fur, Holt Renfrew for everything else. I spent half of high school skipping off so I could spend my afternoons riding up the Holt’s escalator and trying on Christian Lacroix bustiers. Inside, it’s a comforting place. Bright white and swank. There’s a nice old doorman who knows my name. His own name is Leonard, like the poet. You can go into Holt’s and Leonard always has a nice smile for you and he’s wearing a carnation in his buttonhole, but it’s always a different color. You waste a few hours manhandling all the clothes and it’s like you’re growing up rich in New York City. Then you come out and go down into the grotty subway and buy one of those big Treats cookies and there’s a guy with one leg sitting on the ground playing violin and he’s not even very good and those things all feel okay again.

I
walked into Holt’s the next afternoon holding a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate in one hand. The other hand stayed in my pocket to keep warm. Hot chocolate doesn’t seem like what you want for a hangover but you’d be surprised. It tastes like a warm bed and someone’s hand on your forehead, checking to see if you have a fever. After the pool hall, I’d spent the night at my parents’ instead of going home.

I was keen to do anything frivolous and normal. Allow foreign
ladies to spray me with perfume. You can’t bring Leonard a coffee or a cup of tea or anything because both his hands have to be free, contractually: ready in their thin leather gloves to open the door and close the door and hail cabs as required. So we smile and whatnot, but no congenial exchange of goods.

I was playing around in the second-floor dressing room mirror, wearing a green skirt with no price tag on it when the fire alarm started up. At first it was just
ding ding ding,
and no big deal because probably someone’s fooling around. But it kept going. I figured if it got serious, someone would knock on the door of my little room. Then it changed.

Attention please, attention. Please leave the building immediately. The fire department is on its way. Please leave the building by the nearest exit.

The fire bell rang three or four more times and then the evacuation message repeated. I left the skirt on the ground and started hopping to put on my regular pants. By the time I’d slung my bag on my shoulder, there was no one left on the entire floor. The escalator was stopped. The announcement played over and over again.

In elementary school, they showed us a movie about two girls who get locked in a fur coat warehouse overnight. At first the girls really like it, they’re trying on all the coats and wrapping themselves up and posing. But the stillness and the racks of coats, hanging there like animals, get progressively creepier until the girls have to escape. I don’t think there was any talking in that movie, or if there was, it was in French. This is what an empty department store makes you think of.

I stood there between two display shelves of ultra-high heels, listening to the bell and the moment of silence whenever the message paused. A black-and-white Versace poster stretched across the wall over my head: an angry brunette holding her stiletto like a dagger, stabbing at a prone, laughing blond. Then I kicked my shoes off and slid my feet into a pair of alligator Vivienne Westwoods.

I was about four inches taller in the heels. Like a giant. For a moment I really thought I’d walk out of there in these stolen shoes, stopped escalator and all. There was no one around. I glanced up to where I thought the security camera’s eye might be, hidden among the pot lights. Someone was watching.

The alarm bell rang and rang. I kicked the shoes off and jammed my feet halfway into my own Converse and ran down the toothy metal steps of the escalator like that, stepping on the backs of the sneakers.

The tall glass doors at the front of the store were all shut. Leonard was still standing there in his coat and gloves and when he saw me he pointed with both arms toward the back of the store. From somewhere under the alarm there was a low crowd sound, feet and voices, from people who seemed far away.

Is this for real? I yelled to Leonard. He shrugged. The big epaulets on his coat flounced.

Bomb threat, he yelled back. But I don’t know. Go, go! Get going!

Outside, a few cars and vans stood around in a clump. Two fire trucks blocked Bloor Street, and the men in their heavy jackets and hip waders came pouring off. Police sirens mixed with a car alarm. A red hatchback was pulled up on the sidewalk outside the plate glass window. The driver’s door left open, like whoever parked that car was in a hurry to get gone.

I turned down between the stalls in makeup alley, stepping quickly to try to catch the tail end of the line, other people somewhere up ahead. I could hear them but not see them, heading farther downstairs and through into the underground pathway.

Then another set of footsteps, too. Over to my right.

I looked back and Leonard was still standing where I’d seen him last, halfway between the escalator and the doors.

I’d thought I was the only one left. There hadn’t been anyone else upstairs.

Someone was pacing me. Just to the other side of the row of cosmetic
counters, the blockade of Shiseido and Elizabeth Arden and Clinique. There was a shimmery chime of breaking glass and then the heavy wash of perfume through the air; my own arm brushing against the tester perfume bottles, sending them flying off the shelves. I pushed myself along faster.

The PA announcement and the bells and the whoosh of my own pulse hammered through my ears. My vision narrowed to a white tunnel: the glossy floor and pale countertops. The perfume smell covered everything.

What if someone else had been watching those screens? Watched me pull clothes off the racks. Pose in the mirror. Someone following me now.

My knees buckled a little and I caught myself, skittering out into the open and sliding toward the doorway.

I caught up to the edge of the crowd and lost the sound of him. The annex opened up and I looked over my shoulder one last time, the border of makeup alley. No other person came out from between the stalls.

I was the last one.

The crush of escaping shoppers moved like a hot wave. I shoved my body through. There was that stink in the air, a subway stink, like animals in a tunnel, all sweating. We went down a wide set of six or seven steps and a woman fell and no one helped her up. She pushed against the wall and swung back out, grabbing onto my wrist for a second. I shook her off and hurtled my way down the stairs. As we came down into the underground mall the walkway widened out and people started to run.

I walked through, taking long strides, my bag hanging off one shoulder. The last thing you want to do is seem panicky, easy to pick off. Or, worse: fall. We were far from any possible car-bomb danger now, but people were still flooding out of the smaller stores and down the hall, on toward the entrance to the subway.

A few others slowed down the way I had and fell into walking
just ahead of me. A spontaneous emergency response station was setting up: workers wearing those orange vests. A man with a megaphone. Water for anyone who needed it.

If you’re lost, find a policeman. That’s what they tell small children. Corollary: If you think someone’s following you, make sure to never be alone, even in a crowd. Draw attention to yourself.

I stopped where the paramedics were standing.

Hey! I said. Hey, is that water?

What you want to do is talk loud, seem eccentric, swing your bag around and accidentally hit a few people. Something that calls you out. Something that people will turn toward, someone that people want to look at. Be memorable.

I sipped my water from a white Dixie cup with a pointy bottom.

Standing there against the wall, facing out, I could see everything. No one else had stopped. No one was behind me. A group of firefighters cordoned off the entranceway I’d just come out of. They were tall guys moving fast and dressed in the same hip-wader uniforms, but one of them laughed and I thought, Threat over.

It was like I’d taken off a set of earmuffs. I’d come in from a snowstorm into a warm house full of people. A loose crowd is a safe thing. You’re surrounded by witnesses.

I rounded the corner and started up the steps to street level. I was walking bent over, trying to use my finger like a shoehorn and jam my heels into my sneakers and someone yelled out,
Evie.

Evie.
A man’s voice.

My toe caught on the top step and I pitched forward onto my hands, my right knee slamming down hard.

I thought it was you—

I was still on the ground, rubbing my sore knee. I looked up. Black cords, black boots, brown beard. Some gray in it.

I couldn’t catch you, he said.

Later on, I thought what an odd way this was to begin.

He didn’t offer an arm to help me up. Both his hands stayed low in his pockets. Graham Patton, David’s father.

Speak of the devil.

W
hat are you doing on the ground like that, Evie?

His attempt at reestablishing the comfort zone. My body shrunk back against the steps for a moment. It really was Patton. I brushed off my hands and struggled to push up off the floor, trying to keep my knees together. Not easy. As I got onto my feet, he finally took his hand from his pocket and stretched it out to help.

Big panic over nothing, he said.

They thought there was a bomb, I said.

Yeah, Toronto is not New York, he said. Not yet. He was wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, and a shirt with no tie. A moss-green sweater with a crew neck. He put his hands back in his pockets. You hear about that?

He told me there’d been a bomb a few hours earlier under the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Still smoking, he said. Still getting people out.

I said I’d left work at noon, but I was picturing the newsroom as I said it, the wire coming in and everyone crowded around the television, watching for angles.