The 'Geisters (3 page)

Good, but obviously not perfect.

“It’s gone. It’s escaped.”

“Look up, dear.”

“Of course.” She looked up, into the rafters of this room—where just a few years ago, during the big blackout, when she was sure the thing had gotten out again, running amok in the dark corridors of her residence, flinging knives, she’d found it hanging like a great chrysalis, grinning down at her, long hair dangling like the tentacles of a man-o-war.

Not this time, though.

“Not this time,” said Ann.

“Keep at peace,” said Eva. “All right dear, let me tune in.”

Ann couldn’t help imagining Eva in the Wal-Mart, moving her hands so they hovered inches apart from one another, eyelids fluttering . . . the little rituals that she invoked, to tune in to Ann, and her safe place, and the prisoner that she kept there.

Imagining Eva in Wal-Mart, or indeed anywhere but in the circular tower room, was of course exactly the wrong thing to do. The safe place
was
an unreliable construct . . . a lie, really, although best not to think of it in those terms. Hurrying would knock it over, and so would distraction. Start thinking of some other place, particularly a real place (like the Wal-Mart) and that place intrudes.

“Stupid,” she hissed, as the door to the stall farthest from the door slammed shut and her eyes opened. “Sorry,” she said to the closed stall door. The woman who’d presumably gone inside didn’t answer, and suddenly Ann felt nothing but foolish—imagining how she must have appeared to the woman now sequestered in the stall, a moment earlier quietly passing the sinks, and wondering: what a strange young woman, leaning over the sink with her eyes shut tight.
Some of us can’t hold our liquor
. That’s what she
would think.

“Ann?” said Eva, and Ann said, again: “Sorry.” She shut her eyes, and reassembled the tower room, re-inhabited it. “Got distracted.”

“All right,” said Eva, “now hush. I’m sending you energy.”

Indeed, as Eva said this, the tower room flooded with light—appearing through the mortar between the stones, and the narrow slit-like windows that gave a tantalizing view of the realm. Ann thought she’d have a look at that realm—cement some details in her mind—the bucolic roll of hills, a silver river that wended between them . . . that mysterious, snow-capped mountain range in the distance—and take in the energy that Eva insisted she was sending her.

Was she really? Sending energy? From Wal-Mart?

Questions such as those, Ann had long ago learned to suppress. And she did so now. After all, they did nothing to help her take control, to give her the strength she would need to wrestle
the Insect.

A clank, as the door to the stall rattled. And a voice—echoing off the tile of the washroom.
“Are you all right out there?”

“Fine,” said Ann, keeping her eyes shut this time, “thank you. I just need a moment.”

“Don’t we all.”

The hollow rumble of toilet paper unwinding now.

“You know what you really need?”

Still unwinding.

“I’m fine,” said Ann, while on the phone, from Wal-Mart, Eva said: “Shh.”

“That fine-looking young man out there. He’s a crackerjack!”

The door to the stall rattled fiercely. It slammed open, and closed again, and somehow Ann was turned around, the cell phone on the floor. Watching as the door to the stall slowly rebounded open. Showing nothing but an empty stall, with a long line of toilet paper, draped over the toilet bowl in a mandala form.

From the floor, Eva’s voice buzzed. Like a bug, Ann thought crazily (
like an insect
) and she watched, transfixed, as the silver button on the side of the tank depressed, and the toilet began to flush.

“
I am satisfied
,” said the Insect, as it settled back into its chair in the shadowy part of the tower room, crossing its hands on its lap, slender fingers twitching and intertwining. “
I approve
.”

“Thank you,” said Ann when she’d collected her phone from the floor.

“Did that do the trick dear?” asked Eva, from Wal-Mart.

“That seemed to do it,” said Ann.

“You sure now?”

“Sure,” she said—not sure at all.

Eva sighed. “I’m glad, dear. Be at peace. Now you call, if—”

“I will.”

From one tower to another, Ann LeSage made her way back. She could find no evidence of mayhem en route. The glasses hanging over the bar gleamed in the afternoon sun, which shone through windows clean and clear. The traders gesticulated at their tables, hands unblemished, while their cutlery stayed safe in front of them. The waiter was cheerful and intact behind the bar, tapping lunch orders on a computer screen. And Michael sat back in his chair, ankles crossed, hands palm-down on the table, while the saltshaker sat unmoving between them. His face was strangely, beatifically calm.

When Ann recalled that July day—months later, outside Ian Rickhardt’s Niagara vineyard, while she cradled an unreleased Gewürztraminer on the south-facing veranda and looked down upon the rows of grapevines, with just a moment to herself before their other guests arrived . . . this moment, not any prior or subsequent, was the moment that defined it. She, folding her skirt beneath her as she resumed her seat; Michael, looking steadily at her, unblinking, as he lifted one hand, and lowered it on top of the saltshaker like a cage of fingers.

“Gotcha,” Michael said as he lifted the shaker off the table and studied it with real glee.

Was it terror she felt looking at him then?

Was it love?

Love, she guessed.

Yes. Love.

To say that Ian Rickhardt played a large role in the planning of their wedding was like saying the sun was a bit of a player in the solar system. The old man
threw
the wedding—planned it and drew up the guest list and staged it, taking things over and riding them all like a bride’s nightmare mother.

When Michael had told her about him, Ann thought Rickhardt might have been a father figure, standing in for the angry Afrikaner Voors. Michael had met Rickhardt in South Africa, over a rather complicated real estate deal. Rickhardt, who’d made his fortune in deals like this, saw something in Michael—clearly—and over the course of the years took an interest in the young South African. “He encouraged me to be my own man . . . eventually, to come here, and make my own life.”

Ann nodded to herself.
Like a father, like a father should be
.

When she eventually met Ian, for dinner one August Sunday at Michael’s condo, she scratched that idea too. He was more of
an uncle.

He was near to sixty, but in fine shape for it. Had all his hair, which had gone white long ago and hung in neat bangs an inch above his eyebrows. He was lean without being gaunt, with a thin brush-cut of beard over a regular jawline. His eyes were pale blue and his skin a healthy pink.

Ian came to dinner in a pair of faded old Levis, and a motorcycle jacket over a black T-shirt. A wedding band, of plain gold, bound a thick-knuckled finger. His socks had holes in them, and he displayed them like hunting scars.

“The house at the winery is ancient,” he said. “Century house and then some. Very romantic, oh yes. Floors are the original oak, and they’re fucking stunning. But they spit up nails like land mines. The socks put up with a lot.”

Michael laughed at his joke and so did Ann—not because it was funny, but because it cut the tension that ran just beneath the surface of this casual little dinner party.

Because of course, it was barely a party, and anything but casual. Ann figured it out even as it began.

She was being interviewed.

So they sat down to a meal of lamb and collard that Ann and Michael had prepared together, with a bottle of Rickhardt’s cab franc, and as the sunlight climbed the bricks of Michael’s east wall, Ian genially put Ann through her paces.

“You are an orphan?” he asked as he poured wine into their glasses.

Deep breath: “My parents died when I was fourteen.”

“Car accident, I understand.”

“Yes. I was very lucky. But my mother and father didn’t survive.”

Rickhardt made a sympathetic noise as he sat back down. He gave her a look that said,
Go on. . . .

“My brother—”

“—Philip.”

“—it was Christmas.”

“Michael was telling me. You two were very close, I understand?”

“I don’t think of him in the past tense. Philip survived.”

Ian nodded. “But not whole.” He took a sip of his wine. “That’s very hard, Ann. I’m sorry. And you’ve really been on your own since then.”

She sipped at her own wine. It
was
really very good.

“No one’s really on their own,” she said.

“That’s not always true,” he said. “But it’s lucky you haven’t been. And now you’ve met Michael, and that’s fine. You two are getting married.”

Needless to say, when Rickhardt arrived, he’d demanded to see the ring Michael had bought her and Ann obliged: a two carat emerald-cut diamond, set in a smooth band of platinum. Yes, they were getting married.

“I think marriage is good,” he went on. “Good for Michael, good for you. I wish my wife could be here. She’d like you.”

Michael nodded.

“What’s her name?”

“Susan,” he said.

“Sorry she couldn’t come,” said Ann. “I’d love to meet her.”

Rickhardt made a small smile and sipped his wine. “You’re young,” he said. “How young?”

Another sip of wine, all around.

“Twenty-six,” she said.

He nodded. “Michael’s ten years older. Practically an old man. That doesn’t bother you?”

Michael met her eye and smiled a little, shook his head, and Ann said: “Horrifies me, actually,” and Rickhardt laughed.

“She’s not in it for the money,” said Michael, and stage-whispered: “Don’t worry.
She’s loaded.
”

They didn’t really talk about money after that, although Rickhardt did ask her about her job at Krenk & Partners. He knew more than a little about them; Alex Krenk himself had joined forces with him in the 1990s, on an office development in Vancouver that had gotten some attention. Rickhardt had hired Krenk on various projects off and on since. They’d been asked to bid on designs for the restaurant and retail structures at his vineyard but had fallen short.

He told this story with clear expectation that Ann might jump in, but it was difficult. She was junior enough at the firm that she had no real knowledge about the Vancouver development; she’d helped out on some of the design for the vineyard, though, and she mentioned that. Rickhardt managed to say something nice about the bid, but facts were facts: the bid had fallen short. Ann attributed his words to a belated attempt at basic good manners.

There had been no mistaking when he’d finished his interview with Ann. He asked her a question about the type of care Philip was getting, but he clearly wasn’t interested. Halfway through her answer, he was refilling his glass.

She was in the middle of a sentence when he looked up, right past her, and asked Michael, “Hey, do you remember Villier?”

Michael frowned, snapped his fingers, and said, “John Villier? From Montreal? Of course! What’s he up to?” And so they launched into a long, context-free reminiscence about a trip the three of them had taken somewhere, some time ago, involving a seaplane and a great deal of liquor.

After Rickhardt left, they fought.

“He’s a jerk,” Ann said. They were standing on the narrow balcony where it overlooked the reclaimed industrial lands of the city’s east end. Across the street, patrons from a café built from an old auto body shop sat under glowing orange lanterns and wide umbrellas outside the open garage door, getting happily buzzed before another work week.

“That’s not fair,” said Michael, his voice taking a plaintive edge. “Ian’s just of a different generation.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “What’s your excuse?”

They’d both had some wine by then, and Ann’s tone was sharper than she’d intended. Two glasses ago, she might have stopped herself from pressing the matter.

“You left me out to dry,” she said. “Ian Rickhardt treated me like a piece of property, a new car you brought home. He came over to check it out. Check me out.”

Michael tucked his chin down, put both hands on the balcony rail, and pretended to study the seventh-day revellers in the café. “That’s not what was happening,” he said.

“Wasn’t it?”

“I told you he could be a little off-putting.”

“Yes. You did. And it was off-putting. So off-putting you abandoned me.”

Michael stepped back from the railing and held his hands in the air, a gesture of retreat. He stepped back through the doors and retreated further, to the kitchen. Ann looked away from him, down at the café. As she watched, one string of lanterns flickered, and went dark.

Good
, she thought, and was immediately ashamed.

Now, at the vineyard, staring out at the stand of fiery golden maple trees, watching the van make its way up the drive, and wondering if there might be some more of that delicious Gewürzt inside, Ann winced at the memory. She swilled down the last dregs of the wine from her glass, and drew a deep breath of the smell of this place—woodsmoke and loam—and turned to go back inside Rickhardt’s winery. This was the place that Krenk & Partners didn’t design, and from the look of it, wouldn’t have if they’d been asked: all glass and oak around the tasting bar, faux-Bavarian beams demarking a first-storey ceiling below a dark loft above, railing hung with even-more-faux grapevine. Home Depot had won that bid, no question.

Rickhardt is a jerk. Also no question.

Ann swung around the tasting bar and pulled the half-empty bottle of Gewürzt out of the cooler. She poured herself half a glass.

He was a jerk. But so was she. She realized it when later that August Sunday, she’d come inside and started drying the dishes Michael was washing, and Michael had told her: “He wants to pay for the wedding. That’s why he wanted to meet you. He thinks of me as a son. I’m sorry you didn’t hit it off.”

Ann took a sip, and then another. She started to take a third, but stopped herself as the wine touched her lip and set the glass down on the bar. The place would fill up in just a few hours with the guests at her Ian-Rickhardt-Productions wedding. From the sound of things, it was already starting.