The Devil You Know: A Novel (4 page)

I don’t know what I was thinking. I wanted my flowers to be there, too, I guess, and then a second later Cecilia’s mother was yanking me out of the hole by one arm. They thought I’d done it on purpose. This was the story that went home to my mother, that I’d thrown myself into the grave with Lianne. You can see that’s the way adults would tell it, too.

After they pulled me out, people left a respectful distance between me and them. When I noticed that, I walked a little slower. No one even tried to brush the dirt off me.

A
fter Lianne’s funeral my parents sold our house and we moved to a different, bigger house where my mother could feel like I was safe. Except what she didn’t count on is that bigger spaces make you feel more vulnerable, not less. The safest place you can be is inside a shoebox, a tiny space that’s just for you. If you can reach one hand out and touch a wall, and reach the other hand out and touch a different wall, then you know for certain no one else is in that small place with you and you are just fine.

The house on Inglewood had three stories for the three of us, three bathrooms, a laundry chute that used to be a dumbwaiter and fell in a straight path from my own bathroom on the third floor right down to the stone-floor basement. Two televisions. Sliding doors to the backyard, a big square of land with an engineered waterfall in one corner as a landscape feature. My parents still live in that house, but they pulled out the waterfall a few years ago. In the summer you could hear it trickling all day through the kitchen window. My mother said it made her crazy. It made her think she had to pee.

There’s a big front porch with a couple of chairs on it, and my mother sat outside most of that first summer rocking in her seat like a sentry. That was the year everybody’s mother changed. Every kid I knew suddenly had more rules to follow, an earlier bedtime. We didn’t play hide-and-seek after dinner because if you were hiding and it suddenly got dark, something bad could happen to you. Every kid was
under surveillance. My mother had never seemed to me like other parents, but now that difference multiplied: she’d go missing for a few hours at a time, without telling us where she was off to or even that she was leaving. I can’t say for sure what triggered this. She was different from the get-go, so maybe it was what happened to Lianne, or maybe it was just a mid-life thing. Those little escapes were consistent with her personality in general. She’s not always predictable. The day before Lianne disappeared, I’d run home to ask if we could help find a lost dog, but I found the front door locked. My mother was in the living room, arguing with someone I couldn’t see. She saw me out on the steps and sent me to my room. As a kid, you don’t really question things like that. Odd to imagine your parents as their own entities, moving through the world.

The alley from the next street over opens up right across the street from our house. One night I was sitting on the steps with my father, eating baked potatoes off plates on our knees. We’d been waiting for her to come home and make dinner but once it got dark I guess my father gave up and turned on the oven himself.

Your mother’s okay, he said. He’d scrubbed the potatoes over the sink, then wrapped them up in foil with butter and chives already inside them. I hadn’t asked where my mother was, and it made me happy that he’d supplied the answer. We didn’t need to have a discussion about it.

It was the end of August and maybe nine o’clock at night. My father’s hair was very blond and cut close to his head, short, the way you expect a dad to look, with just a tiny lick of a curl behind his ear. I was focused on the task of cutting into my potato without tipping the plate on my lap. I imagined the plate tipping and my potato rolling off and then bonking down the steps,
bonk bonk,
and down the path into the gutter. My father scooped some sour cream off his own potato and put it onto mine.

There was no streetlight over the entrance to the alleyway. It was the first night where you really needed a sweater, and I pulled the hood on my sweatshirt up over my ponytail. There was a scuffling
sound like a kid falling off a fence or someone kicking at stones. I looked up and my mother came walking out of the alley, alone. Her jean jacket was open like it wasn’t cold at all. She saw us and walked straight up the steps anyway.

No rapists in there? my father said, as though we bumped into my mother, casually like this, practically every day. He didn’t say: Why were you in the alley at night? Or, Where have you been? Or even, Have you had dinner?

None, my mother said. No rapists at all. She smiled sharply. The smile was there and then done. When she went inside, the screen door smacked closed behind her. My father chewed his potato.

T
hese days she’s more settled. She fits inside her own skin. There’s a theory that women in their thirties are naturally inclined to recklessness. A woman that age has more in common with a teenaged boy than anyone else: she’s reeling on hormone-drive. The sound of her biology isn’t a ticking clock, it’s a motor, revving up. I don’t know if this explains it, or if it’s a simple equation involving distance from a traumatic event. I can tell you my mother turns forty this year.

She’s a bookkeeper by trade and works freelance out of a tiny, gold-painted office on the second floor of the house. There’s a business card with her name, Annie Jones, also in gold. This is fixed to the door with painter’s tape, instead of a sign. Her window faces the back garden. One day she’s up there wearing a pantsuit and a pair of killer heels and the next day she’s all ripped jeans and a T-shirt. This has less to do with client meetings than it does with just putting whatever she wants on her body at any given time. She’s math-minded, in the same way that she would always prefer a yes-or-no answer to any question. The details of the situation take a backseat to definitiveness. I guess she started chasing down deadbeat patients for my father’s dental practice when I was a kid and took a shine to solving money problems. Her certification all came from
night school. I can’t imagine her working in an office or for any kind of boss.

Sunday mornings we’ll bike over to the St. Lawrence Flea together, down the long sweeping spin of the Mount Pleasant Extension. She dyes her hair so it’s brighter somehow and it comes flying out of her blue bike helmet, coppery in the sunlight. We jump off close to the lakeshore and lock up and get busy touching all the merchandise. Since I moved out she’s keen to buy me things, houseish things, or else sensible clothing such as cashmere turtlenecks or warm winter boots.

Burberry! Who got rid of this?

The vendors see my mother coming and get sad eyes. I like to leave her to it. She has a lot of stamina for arguing. This time she handed me an entire ensemble folded in on itself inside a white plastic grocery bag.

Ten bucks, she said. It was early February, but one of those days that warms up so much you almost believe it’s going to be spring. Kids throw down their winter jackets and commit themselves to hopscotch.

I opened the bag: black turtleneck, classic belted trench coat.

No one will know I’m a reporter now! I said. Wait. Did you get me a deerstalker? I don’t know if I can solve mysteries without my deerstalker.

Har.

I slipped my arms into the trench and opened up just one side suggestively, then sidled closer to my mother:

Would you like to buy an O?

There’s a few antique dealers but in other respects it’s just your standard flea market.

Audio cassettes and vintage Snoopy piggy banks, embroidered tablecloths, plates with pictures on them. Who wouldn’t want a gravy boat with a picture of the
Bluenose
on it? Paper stalls with racks of old
Life
magazine covers wrapped up in their plastic sleeves: Marilyn and Jackie Kennedy and the moon landing. Stacks of romance
novels and Agatha Christies. Royal Wedding memorabilia. Vintage porn and true crime.

Here’s a stat for you. I held up a paperback and waved it at my mother: Women are voracious true crime readers. No word of a lie. Much more so than men.

She came over and took the book from me, then laid it back on the pile.

So, the men are doing all the serial killing, but the women are reading about it?

Not what you expect, is it? I said.

My mother had her fingers on the black spine of a copy of
Helter Skelter
. She flipped it up and flashed the cover at me.

I knew a guy once, she said. Who used to say he’d met him.

The True Story of the Manson Murders,
I read.
Number One True Crime Bestseller of All Time!
I reached out for the book. Friend of a friend?

Of a friend of a friend, my mother said. I imagine it was all lies. She went back to browsing.

Think we live vicariously? I said. Reading it, I mean.

Sometimes I just throw this shit out there because it feels good. Because, hey, look at us, out for a Sunday stroll and chatting it up about gruesome murders and whatnot. I dug into my purse for fifty cents and reached the coins over to the book vendor, a tall guy with a comb-over and baby-fine gray stubble. He clicked open his cash can and threw the money in. There was a hundred-dollar bill Scotch-taped to the inside of the lid and I asked him what for.

Counterfeit, he said. So I remember what they look like. He leaned across the table and straightened the little rows of books. He had long, elegant fingers.

Your serial killer name is The Librarian, I told him.

I slid
Helter Skelter
into my purse and we moved on to the next booth, old paintings and ponchos hanging from a wire.

M
y friend David Patton moved me into my bachelor. He borrowed his mom’s minivan and we packed it with all my stuff: books and papers and Goodwill buy-the-pound vintage. My mother had given me a plastic laundry basket filled with packaged food: spaghetti, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, applesauce. In the housewares department I owned three coffee mugs, a teapot that I thought was an antique but later turned out to be from Ikea, and a cast-iron fry pan. This paucity of assets must have seemed strong evidence that I didn’t need help moving, and my parents didn’t offer any. I think they were instead offering subconscious discouragement regarding my plan to live all by my lonesome. I could have moved all my worldly belongings in two cab rides—maybe even just one. But David had his mom’s Caravan. So.

The original plan had not been for me to live out in Parkdale on my own. My friend Melissa and I were meant to share an apartment up in the Annex. She had a line on a nice one at College and Borden. Her father owns a bunch of cosmetic surgery clinics, so she comes from money. Only then Melissa quit her summer job to go see a few Grateful Dead shows and never came back. Her dad found her in a parking lot outside of Nashville, painstakingly carving I Need A Miracle signs into some shim wood she’d found. This is a thing she was doing for money, and I guess it’s better than some of the alternatives. She had some kind of breakdown on the way home and ended up in the hospital on lithium. When I told David that, he said the same thing happened to his cousin Helen when she was twenty. Just the lithium part, unrelated to Jerry Garcia and his timeless music.

It’s really common, he said. Girls go crazy all the time.

As it turned out, I loved bachelor life. You walk into your own tiny space at the end of the day and everything you see here is yours. There’s no joint decision making and no explaining anything. On Saturday mornings I turned off the answering machine until 2:00 p.m., to feel independent of social connections. Sometimes it kills you. It’s excellent to force your own hand. Then you know for sure you don’t need anyone.

You think David’s my boyfriend, but he’s not. He’s been my friend since forever. He’s been my friend since we were kids. David Patton was just this kid I used to babysit. He’s still got the same mess of dirty blond hair over his eyes all the time—back then because he was a kid, and now because he’s trying to look hard-edged and a little broken. He wants his hair to make a girl think of Kurt Cobain, and maybe get the two of them, Kurt and David, confused for a moment. He’s also still got the same five freckles across the bridge of his nose, plus a few extra in the sun. These detract from the grunge persona and a girl (me) is careful not to mention them too much. The year David turned thirteen he grew about seven inches in two months and did nothing but eat sandwiches. So today he stands six-foot-two, which is a solid five inches taller than me, but I still have the power because once upon a time I was the boss and somewhere inside we both remember that.