The Hour of Bad Decisions (11 page)

It was something about the corner of the woman's mouth, that's what he would remember later, just something about the corner of her mouth, a small ironic fold that appeared when she smiled, that made the two of them come together in the cigarette smoke and the downtown dark. Eventually, that half-smile would be the only thing he would even be able to conjure up of her, the only piece he could gather from memory's scattered threads. But Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Bird he would never forget.

A twitch of the curtains, an instant of Mrs. Bird's profile, the black bead of one sharp, alert eye, and he was taken for a moment with the image of crows fighting in mid-air, the way one will fold its wings and fall, as if broken, to escape while the other – knowing – will almost immediately follow suit, jinking vertically. Cut and parry, an ease of movement when another's move is understood implicitly. The unexpected, yet always expected.

Then he was inside Heather's house. Inside, to that unfolding of hope, to that small perfect wonder of falling, helpless, and never fearing the fall.

The inside of her leg, right and yet wrong. Familiar, and yet strangely unfamiliar, patterned with
fine thin hairs that he could not see, that his fingers barely felt. Tracing the delicate “y” of a vein along the back of her arm, from elbow to wrist, a line the like of which he had never touched before, fine and magic and halting strange. The feel of her breath, battering urgent against his neck, her fingers grasping in the hair on the back of his head. The complexity of it, the roundness, the fullness, thick like the fat humid air of a steam-room, so that it was an effort just to breathe.

Detail streaming in, filling up, overflowing to the point that he began to slide away, saw the room greying, so that suddenly he needed to feel less, yet wanted to feel everything.

And was it from next door, chilling like the thin thread of a cold draft seeping in under a door? Or was it there in the room then, where everything lived in immediate, sharply lit snapshots -the futon flat and revealed, its beige cover folded back by their movements together, the sheets and blankets heaved into fabric's round, damp topography. The long orange rectangle of the streetlight cast out across the floor. A leg, lit from ankle to knee, the shadowed curve of a smile, that small, distinct pool at her throat that might fill with a puddle of water, if only a bath were deep enough.

And that brought more images, unbidden and unwelcome. Another bed, a narrow, too-steep staircase, picture frames that stared back at him. The road, framed in the front windows of the house that he had left.

What's that noise, he thought; that hollow noise in my head.

She's screaming again, he thought.

Keening distantly, but directly, too, like Mrs. Bird could look through walls.

He knew then what he hadn't. Suddenly, he knew how the gate swings silent, frictionless, on its hinge pins after someone leaves, how night's heavy breaths sometimes shake the house, how the snow sometimes falls abruptly, so that it just appears in the morning without ever being seen in the air. Knew the sinking feeling of being caught tight in the twisting spin, with Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis carefully calculating how short a time it would take for him to slide completely out of sight.

Mrs. Bird, screaming like she always screams, screaming for the lost.

Screaming a scream that Mr. Bird would never, ever hear. But Kevin did, and he could both feel his own hand on the gate, leaving, and imagine watching that same gate swing shut behind him, its latch clicking with a near-silent but final tap.

Beside him, sleep-heavy and warm, the woman shifted and turned on her side, languorous and long and welcoming – and there.

Lost, and found, and hopelessly lost again, Kevin clamped both hands over his mouth, trying to keep the sound from flying out.

J
OHN
H
ENNESSEY STARTED THE MAP WITH A
ditch, with one small spot that would, for anyone else, have been absolutely unremarkable.

It was just a ditch, dug out every five or six years by a department of transportation backhoe. It held a small pool of standing water after it rained, fireweed in summer, and a long stretch of meadow ran away behind it, fragrant with timothy grass and low tangles of wild strawberry.

It wasn't that the ditch was special, and she wasn't the first accident victim he had ever seen – just the first to leave a permanent mark. He saw her every time he passed.

Standing, arms outstretched, one hand open and the fingers of the other folded inwards. She was ankle deep in ditch water, with the blood running down to her shoulders.

“Am I cut bad?” she asked. “Am I cut bad?”

He could see bone winking white through her scalp, and the washed-sky blue of her eyes. The rest of her face was scarlet with blood, and lit bright by the headlights of his truck.

Next to her, a dark-blue car wedged nose-down in the ditch. The bank rose up behind her, high with browning summer thistle. The car had hit it straight on. There was a silver-white dimple outwards through the windshield, where her head had hit the glass.

The summer night was quiet, the air heavy, rain coming, and not one person along the road had come to their door at the sound. All the houses stood dark, their backs turned.

Her scalp was pulled back and split just at the hair-line, and the blood pulsed in rapid, shallow waves. He told her to stand still, to stay where she was, leaning against the open car door, that there would be more help in a minute. Her sweater had been blue. There were others in the ditch, someone he couldn't see, moaning, and the driver sitting on the shoulder of the road, crying.

Sirens then, still far away, the sound tumbling down the night valley toward Broad Cove. The valley was spruce on both sides, heavy green running up to flat meadow.

He had known he would be the first firefighter there, the accident right around the corner from his house. He had fumbled with his fire coat and the latex gloves.

But there wasn't much he could do, except watch the blood pour over his hands like tide running in
across flat sand, as he tried to staunch it while she watched, unblinking. Until the ambulance came, and it was suddenly like a dream.

Back at the station, he saw that he had dried blood on the cuffs of his sweatshirt, and he looked at the rusty stains blankly, as if wondering where they could have come from.

The car had hit a patch of loose gravel, just as the driver had started to turn. There were four kids, all teenagers, and one had fractured his skull, just above the ear. But it was the girl that he remembered.

Everything was a second either way, he thought. It was all like that – it was just as simple as being caught in the middle of an intersection when someone had a stroke and hit you broadside. One small step away, always.

The engines on the fire trucks ticked as they cooled.

The other firefighters filled the trauma kit with new rubber gloves, brought blankets from the storeroom for the rescue truck. They looked past him, watching the ceiling fans, then inspected their hands. In the kitchen, someone dropped a coffee cup in the steel sink and swore. Hennessey tried to keep his mouth shut at the fire hall; more and more, the others had a way of looking around him when he talked. And he, around them.

They had been solicitous when Jodean left, had talked to him more, standing close and saying they should go downtown, that he should get out and meet people. But the closer they tried to get, the more he
felt pushed away. Every attempt, every strained word, only serving to underline the differences.

They didn't understand about Jodean, he thought; sometimes he didn't understand himself. Maybe distance between people, between lovers, grows in inches, inexorably, until one morning you open your eyes and suddenly see those unexpected miles, stretching out backwards forever, and you realize you don't have the energy, could never have the energy, to undo those inching, methodical steps that lead you away from each other.

Six years she had lived with him, before walking in the door one day and undoing it all with the finality of cloth tearing. He'd been out for much of the night, a March night when it seemed that cars were intent on doing crumpled, broken-backed gymnastics into ditches. The firefighters had already levered a middle-aged woman out of the upside-down wreckage of a Ford Fiesta, had cut the door off a dirt-smeared van, and Hennessey had held a drunken man's head while Gord Tucker tied him to a backboard, blood from a cut over the man's eye running over Hennessey's gloved fingers and down into the man's collar.

Hennessey had come home with his defences down, with his clothes dirty and his thoughts disordered and wandering – images flashing through his head like light bulbs turning on and off randomly: blood on the glove of one hand; the way the starred and cracked windshield caught the lights from the trucks; the green-glowing, reflective stripes that were all you could see of the other firefighters at the edge
of the headlights. So it was an unfair fight, if you could call it a fight at all.

Because he didn't fight: at least, he didn't fight outside their rules of engagement. He thought about that later, about the things he should have said, about what he might have said, and really, he had thought about it then as well, the words full and round on his tongue, yet stuck there, unable to fall. And he found it strange how the rules that define a relationship could form almost imperceptibly, could frame and define the space within as precisely and rigidly as walls define the inside of a house. He could feel the argument – quiet, words barely spoken, pauses long and unbroken – growing dangerous, tilting wildly, yet he had been unable, utterly unable, to find a way to stop it.

Any of it.

Then the accident on the hill became the first single sharp point on a map in his head; that was the way he thought of it. It was simple geographic punctuation, hard and fixed and distinct; time and space spun around it like the heavens around the North Star. At first, it was that one spot on the hilltop road, a spot he would avoid driving by when he could. But then, others appeared. More and more, every week, effortlessly, the map spread and grew like lichen on granite, a web of dots with fine lines between them. Bit by bit, it began to intrude, uncomfortable, like an eyelash caught in his eye that he couldn't seem to find. Driving through the fire district started to feel like a half-remembered dance, filled with steps that only partially made sense to him.

Sometimes, when he passed a place where a car had left the road on ice, even in summer his vision would fill in from the edges with the white dazzle of fresh snow, until the road was reduced to twin wavering wheel marks that ended with a memory of torn brush and battered metal.

There was the place where the orange van had pitched end-over-end, racing without headlights in the dark, throwing mechanic's tools around inside like hard metal rain before they sprayed out the burst doors and scattered, all silver and red on the pavement under the flashing emergency lights.

And the spot where a car rolled off the road in slushy snow, stopping upside-down in a flooded ditch, and they had all gotten soaked feeling around under the cloudy water for the missing driver, trying to find her by touch in the murky grey-brown silt. They'd searched for fifteen minutes before a neigh-bour told them the woman was inside her house, trying to warm herself in the bath. They put a neck brace on her while she sat naked in the bathtub, shivering, and Hennessey couldn't help but feel like they were intruding, the three firefighters in their bulky yellow coats, dripping wet themselves and speaking in soft, clipped sentences devoid of verbs.

“Scissors.”

“Tape.”

“Blanket.”

Or the house where a woman named Beth had fallen first asleep, and then unconscious, and quietly bled to death hours after dental surgery, a nurse five
feet away and knitting, the television remote control in her lap. And they had yelled at the unconscious woman and pinched her arm while her jaw yawned loose, trying for any sign of life, and the noise rattled around all out of place in a country kitchen with dark wood cupboards and a dirty bread knife on the drain-board, its blade streaked with butter.

The paramedics had tried desperately to find a vein, any vein, but her eyes had rolled away into her head for good while they worked and scattered medical scraps – torn gloves, syringe packages, the useless iv tubing – around her on the floor and the television chattered happily. And it was unnerving how much the mess bothered him – how much it bothered him while she lay dead, flat on the floor, arms spread when the paramedics stopped.

Skin as white as eggshells, he would think when he had to drive past her house, skin as white as eggshells, and her back – when they rolled her sideways to put her on the stretcher – was already starting to blossom purple, what little blood she had left pooling under her alabaster skin. Trying to revive her, he had felt the warmth of her bare skin through the gloves, and the familiarity was unsettling.

New points on the map would come on him unbidden, like a cold breath of wind off the water, when he hardly expected it.

Driving past the foundation of an abandoned house, he remembered the fire that had burned there late at night, spattering his helmet with black specks of flaming roof tar. They searched the basement for
drunken teenagers until a refrigerator – and then the chimney – crashed through the kitchen floor and joined them in the basement, where they were scrabbling, nearly trapped, among flaming mattresses, boxsprings and stacked, broken furniture.

Or the drunk-driving accident that had wrapped a car tight around a librarian, and they had cut and pried for over an hour while she alternately screamed and cried, and it was all he could do not to put down the tools, press his gloved hand over her mouth and hiss, “Shut up!”

It rang in his head: “Shut up! Shut up!” And he could feel his hands on his ears, the unfamiliarity of the latex pressed against his own skin, the strange touch halfway between antiseptic and intimate. And he could remember looking at Jodean, seeing her as the woman in the car, full of horror at his thoughts.