The Empty Room (8 page)

There was surprisingly little to take. A small carved turtle one of the First Nations students had given her last Christmas, a framed photo of a winter landscape with late-afternoon light slanting through the trees that Colleen had clipped from a magazine because it looked so peaceful, a little leather notebook in which she had meant to write down her thoughts, two paperbacks, one of Celtic fairy tales, the other called New Paths Toward the Sacred, an old address book, a pretty fountain pen she’d bought herself and a glass paperweight in the shape of a star. On the bulletin board above her computer was an old Bloom County cartoon in which three little boys and a penguin
contemplated the vastness of the universe and their place in it. One boy held up his thumb and index finger, measuring a minuscule space, and said, “That’s the portion of the night sky at which they pointed the Hubble telescope for a week, the equivalent of a single grain of sand, and inside they found galaxies, thousands of galaxies with billions and trillions of stars and more beyond that.” “And so what,” one of the other boys asked, “is the centre of it all?” “Me,” said one boy, and “Me,” said the other.

Colleen left it where it was.

“Do you have everything?” asked Minot. She held out Colleen’s red coat.

“I have a mug in the kitchen. I want that.” She grabbed the coat and put it on, and was about to leave the office when Derek stepped in front of her. “Really?” she said.

Minot shrugged. “What does it look like? I’ll get it.”

The mug had a saying on it:
Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart
. “Never mind,” Colleen said.

She opened the bottom drawer of her desk to get her purse. The bottles of vodka were gone.

“It’s no bother,” said Minot. “Which one is it?”

Colleen picked up the shopping bag. “Get out of my way,” she said to Derek.

He moved aside and she walked down the hall, her purse on her shoulder and the depressingly light shopping bag dangling at the end of her arm. Derek walked behind her. People she knew—Ann
from the Registrar’s Office, Brian and Eric from Political Science—passed her, smiled tightly and looked first confused, and then—with telling swiftness—embarrassed.

Did everyone know? Colleen thought how pleasant it would be to stroke out right there and then. One could never summon an aneurysm when one needed it.

Harpreet, the handsome, turbaned Sikh from the Department of Statistics, looked up from the papers he carried and said, “What’s up, Colleen?”

“Not a great day,” she said, and kept walking.

He looked about to say something else and then, glancing at Derek, stood with his mouth slightly agape and let her pass, as though she were a criminal being perp-walked into court.

In the elevator three students, two girls and a boy, disregarded Colleen and Derek, focused as they were on texting, their thumbs flying furiously over the tiny keyboards, their ears plugged with headphones. What did it matter? Colleen was largely invisible to the students now anyway. She was a middle-aged secretary, totally ignorable. Or, more correctly, she used to be a middle-aged secretary.

They exited the elevator at the ground floor. At the steel and glass exit Derek said, “Let me get that for you,” and held a door open.

This small gesture of kindness created an unexpected prickling behind her eyelids and she was afraid to thank him for fear her voice would break.

She stepped out onto the open concrete plaza in front of the building. Students and professors hustled by, arms full of books and papers. Other sat on benches drinking coffee and chatting. The hot-dog cart from which Colleen had occasionally bought her lunch was already set up by the curb. The trees, encircled by metal benches, had lost their leaves and looked frail and brittle under the cloud-heavy sky.

“Do you want me to get you a cab?” Derek asked.

Did she want a cab? She supposed so, since even the idea of getting back on the subway caused a cramping panic in her chest so strong she was afraid she might scream. But where would she go? What did one do in a case like this? She saw herself standing on the Leaside Bridge, her red coat flapping in the wind. Not long ago, two University of Toronto students jumped to their deaths. It would be quick and final, and she’d still be part of the university community.

“I don’t,” she said, and kept walking.

Goodbye, job
.

The question now became, where should she go? What was the post-firing protocol? She didn’t want to be seen just standing on the sidewalk, hopeless, lost and, she suspected, alarmingly red of face. Everyone she looked at walked with purpose; they all had somewhere to go, something to do, lives to lead. Even that crazy person across the street, wearing shorts, a T-shirt with holes in it, flip-flops and what looked like a helmet made of tinfoil, even he strode along
with such speed—arms pumping, chin thrust forward—that he gave the impression of intent.

For want of a better idea, Colleen began walking up St. George toward Harbord and the Robarts Library. As she crossed the intersection, a gust of cold wind caught her and she realized her coat was unbuttoned. She stopped in front of the library building, put the bag down and did up her coat.
Bag lady
. Is that what she was? Is that where she was going to end up? She picked up the bag and walked faster.

All around her people went about their business and chatted with each other, jostled and joked, and not a single one knew her world had just imploded. She looked at her watch. 10:00. How was that possible? Had everything really just happened in a mere half-hour? The unfairness of it, the injustice, rushed up from her stomach and filled her mouth with an acid burn. She was going to vomit. She stopped. Leaned against a utility pole and dropped her head. She breathed through her mouth. The sidewalk dipped and swayed under her feet.

“Are you okay?”

Colleen looked into the eyes of a woman about her age, wearing what appeared to be construction-worker clothes: plaid lumber jacket, stained down vest, droopy jeans and Timberland boots. The woman’s hair was cut like a man’s and her face was heavily lined.

“I don’t think so.”

The woman put her hand under Colleen’s elbow. “You gonna puke? Pass out? You need an ambulance?”

“No, no.” Colleen pulled herself up and took a deep breath. “Just a bit of the flu, I think. Bit of a shock. I’ve had a shock.” She was babbling. The woman might just call 9-1-1 if she kept this up. “I think I need a taxi. I should go home.”

“You sure? Yeah, you look a bit the worse for wear, you know?” The woman grinned. “Been there myself a morning or two.”

“I’m fine.” Colleen pulled her elbow away.

“Right,” the woman said. She stepped to the curb and whistled loudly through her teeth. “Got one.” A cab slowed in front of them. The woman turned back to Colleen. “There you go. Ginger ale and pickle juice is my advice. My Polish grandfather told me about the pickle juice. Works a charm.”

If she couldn’t find any battery acid, Colleen vowed to try it. She got into the cab. “Thank you,” she said, for she believed the rituals of courtesy functioned as a privacy screen at times like this.

The woman saluted and moved off.

The cab smelled of pine air freshener, coffee and wet wool. “Where to?” the driver asked.

She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to talk to someone who would tell her everything was going to be all right and that the university was full of assholes. But everyone she knew was working. She gave the driver her address on Davisville. It didn’t occur to her until they reached Bloor that she might not have enough money in her purse to pay for this. How much would it be? Twenty dollars? Twenty-five? She scrambled in her purse and found her wallet. It contained sixty dollars. The question was, did she want to spend all
that on taxi fare, today of all days? The answer was, why the hell not?

“Driver,” she said. “Change of plans. Drop me at Yonge and Eglinton.”

“Whatever you say.”

Colleen looked at the photo identification tag on the back of the driver’s seat. The name was
Abdullah Elbaz
. She doubted he would approve of the stop she intended to make. She wondered if what Minot had said was true. Were her pores really secreting alcohol? Could everyone smell it on her?

She couldn’t tell if this odd, distanced feeling she had now was due to shock, from which she acknowledged she must be suffering, or some remnant of the hangover. She watched the world slip by outside the taxi window almost as though it were moving and the taxi were standing still, as though the scenery—the Varsity Blues Stadium, the fractured architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum, the little Church of the Redeemer nestled against all that glass and steel, the ragtag shops, the train bridge, the apartment buildings—all of it was on some enormous conveyor belt, making the city and all it contained—every person and shrub, every building and trash can—an experience to be had but not something to which one became attached. A little bubble world. She moved along behind glass and metal and no one knew her or why she was in the cab in the middle of the morning, heading to a liquor store. This was not the way she had thought she’d spend the day. This wasn’t the way she had thought she’d spend her life.

MAGIC FAIRY POTION

T
he first time Colleen got drunk, she was fourteen. Danny Gibson’s parents had gone away for the weekend and under such circumstances a party was practically mandatory.

Okay, maybe Colleen was only there because Tricia and Crystal—the two popular girls, one dark and curvy, the other blond and willowy—were going and they let Colleen tag along, but still, she was there. Daniel was sixteen, tall and athletic, and had once been accidently pierced through the calf by an arrow his next-door neighbour shot, which gave him an air of manly, warrior-like glamour.

She remembered so clearly the moment the drinking started. One minute they were all in the yellow kitchen, everyone giggling with pot-induced hilarity, as Danny displayed his talent for making the kitchen “work.” He turned on the blender, the toaster, the radio; he made the oven’s timer ring, and through some secret knowledge given to him by his father, who worked for the phone company, he dialled a special number and a moment later the phone rang, although no one was on the other end. The kitchen looked possessed by the ghost of Betty Crocker. Seemore, so named because he had so many holes in his jeans and you could always “see more” of him than anyone else, had apparently dropped acid
and sat cross-legged on the kitchen table while examining a cut-glass ashtray with transcendent concentration.

Even though she wasn’t the only fourteen-year-old at the party, Colleen felt a little bit like the annoying, merely tolerated younger sister. The week before, when she admitted to the willowy Crystal that she liked Danny, Crystal had smirked, stretched out her impossibly long legs and said, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up; he likes the model type, not some kid with her nose always stuck in the middle of a dusty old book.” Until that moment, Colleen hadn’t given much thought, one way or the other, to whether she was “the model type,” nor to the idea that reading was in any way unattractive. Now, watching Crystal drape her thin arm so casually across Frank Boyden’s shoulder (Frank being the most sought-after boy in school, with his long black hair and blue eyes), it seemed she peered through a kind of glass separation, a sort of bell jar, like the one Sylvia Plath, whom Colleen had recently discovered, talked about. She felt dangerously close to weepy.

“You want some?” asked Brad Rogers, known to his friends as the Barbarian. He had brought a selection of bottles to the kitchen from the Gibsons’ liquor cabinet. Brown ones and green ones and clear ones. He poured himself half a glass of brown liquid. “Whisky,” he said. “Makes everything better.” He took a drink and shivered, smacked his lips and said, “Aaaaahhhh.”

“Give me one,” said Crystal, stepping in front of Colleen. “Vodka. Danny,” she called over her shoulder, “you have any orange juice?”

The kitchen was returning to its normal, inanimate state as Danny
switched the various appliances off. “Yeah, sure, but don’t drink all that. My parents will have a fit.”

He picked up the phone and set it down again, silencing it in mid-ring. Strains of “Honky Tonk Women” came from the living room. Crystal slid to Brad’s side and took her glass.

“Aren’t you having any?” she asked Colleen, and then grinned with her perfect rosy lips and her perfect straight white teeth. “You’re just a kid really, aren’t you?”

For the first time, Colleen wasn’t entirely sure Crystal was really her friend, or even that Crystal liked her. She suspected she might be the sort of sidekick the pretty girls only kept around to make themselves look better by comparison.

Colleen picked up a glass and poured herself some whisky, and then, just for good measure, she poured a little from the green bottle, which she recognized as crème de menthe, into the glass as well. She was quite sure the minty taste would make the whisky go down easier.

“Bottoms up,” she said, which is what her father said.

“Really?” Crystal shrugged, and turned to get her orange juice.

The liquor burned going down and for a moment Colleen was afraid it was going to come right back up, but it didn’t. She coughed a little, but no more. It tasted like minty fire and ice; sweet, but also smoky and earthy. The possibility that it held hidden properties and purposes flashed through her mind. It seared her tongue and the inside of her cheeks. The liquids were not completely blended and a little bright green lingered on the side of the glass like a
magic fairy potion. She drank more, and that’s when it happened. She heard, or rather felt, a tiny, but clearly audible click, and when she looked around her at the people she thought she knew, she understood all the things she hadn’t understood before, including that she was perfect and pretty and just as smart as anyone else. The kitchen took on a warm, sunny glow, and everyone looked so friendly.

“I don’t know if I’d mix like that,” said Brad, with something in his voice that Colleen understood to be awe.