Twenty-Six (22 page)

Z
iv’s first thought had been the same one he always had when some unidentified disturbance awoke him in the middle of the night: nuclear war. He’d waited in Bundy Burgess’s bathroom for the light to blink off. He knew that just before the heat blast vaporized you, radio communication and electrical service would black out. The shadows in the tiny space beneath the stairs danced and skidded about as the bulb that cast its light onto the walls rocked at the end of its wire. Water in the toilet made waves against the sides of the bowl. He put a hand to the bulb to stop its swinging and awaited the loss of electricity. He wondered whether he’d have time to feel any heat before he was turned into steam and smoke and ash.

The house had stopped moving, and a profound silence had set in. He stood looking at the worn pattern in the linoleum and felt the pressure of a headache pushing in at his temples. Whatever had awoken him had not disturbed anyone else. He stepped out of the little bathroom and looked at the walls. To his
groggy eyes, they looked fairly straight and sound. Subsidence, a fall of earth from the cave-in of an abandoned mine shaft, sometimes swallowed up a house. But it had not happened in the Red Row in his lifetime. Not yet, anyway. Several homes had given way in Westville, and there was an area near Bridge Avenue that had sunk by several metres when he was a kid.

He flipped on the kitchen light and filled a glass from the tap. He gulped the water, refilled the glass, and downed the contents again. Then he put on his boots and coat at the door and made for his parents’ house. The brisk air of early morning caught in his lungs and in his nostrils, and his head began to clear a little. The light in his parents’ kitchen burned white against the black row of spruce trees at the edge of the graveyard beyond. There were days when the old man might already be up this early, but not on a Saturday morning, not hungover. There were a few other lights on at this end of the Red Row, more than there should have been at this time. He became aware of his breathing and watched the ghost of his breath rise up into the dark air.

“What the hell else was it?” his father was bellowing. Ziv was in the porch taking off his coat and boots. Even through the closed door to the kitchen he smelled coffee brewing.

“It could have been anything,” his mother was saying. “It could have been anything.”

Ziv opened the door to the kitchen. “I was down at Burgess’s,” he said when he came in. He heard the fear in his own voice. “The house shook.”

“Your mother felt it,” his father said. He stood in the dead centre of the kitchen, his arms held out at an awkward, unfamiliar angle. “We came out to the kitchen here and saw it had knocked the juice pitcher right out of the fridge. Must have banged the
door open first. I don’t know how the hell it could have done that without waking me up.”

The floor in front of the fridge was wet, freshly mopped. The empty juice pitcher sat on the sink.

“Your father thinks it was the mine,” Dunya said. Her face was white.

“It wasn’t anything else,” Ennis said. He had a confused look on his face, as though only part of him understood what he was saying. He looked down at the back of his leg, where a purple bruise carried from his heel to his lower calf.

“Do you think it could have been anything else?” Dunya said, looking desperately to Ziv. Ziv sat at the table. His stomach felt lighter than air. It rose slowly into his chest and squeezed against his heart, which began to pound with the struggle to beat.

The coffeemaker gurgled and sputtered.

“Arvel …” Ziv said.

“There would have been an alarm,” Dunya said. She went to Ziv and grabbed his shoulders in both hands. She dug in her fingers until Ziv pulled away in pain.

A high-pitched whining, muffled by the closed-up house, entered the kitchen from outside. It was the big siren at the town hall.

Ennis looked up.

The ringing of the telephone woke Jackie up, and she instinctively reached for the clock radio. She’d pressed the snooze bar several times with no effect on the ringing before she realized that it was too early for the seven o’clock alarm. The ringing was coming
from the phone in the kitchen. She almost went over on an ankle on the way out of the bedroom.

She stood over the ringing phone an instant before picking it up. If it was Arvel, she would prefer not to answer. She did not want to take the chance that talking to him would change her mind, but a call this early in the morning could be something important.

“Hello,” she said when she finally picked up.

“Is Arvel at home?” It was a woman’s voice.

“No he’s not,” Jackie said, looking at her watch to make sure it really was before six in the morning. “Who’s calling?”

“Is he at work today?” the voice said.

Jackie hesitated, wondering who she was talking to. “I’m not … I’m not exactly sure, but I think he was twelve to eight last night. Who is this?”

The woman hung up.

The call bewildered her. Who calls before 6:00 a.m.? She sat at the kitchen table and put her head down into her hands. In a few hours Colleen would be here and they’d be off to Halifax. She hoped that an incident with Arvel was not going to interfere with that.

She was up now and thought she might as well make some coffee. She took the carafe from the Proctor-Silex, filled it with cold water from the tap, and poured the contents into the back of the machine. She took the coffee can from the freezer and set it on the counter beside the stove.

A noise rose up outside the house, a high wailing sound. Jackie went to the back door and opened it, put her head out into the cold air. It was a siren, but it was too loud and persistent to be a siren from an emergency vehicle. It must have been the big siren
perched on the tower in the parking lot at the back of the town hall. They’d used it years ago, a single blast to sound the nine o’clock curfew for kids under sixteen, but she’d never heard it wailing like this, rising and falling, sending a cold shiver through the town.

First thing on Monday morning, the city hummed and throbbed. The clack and whir of the machines in the print shop across the alley came in through the open window. Meta slid aside the pane and stuck her head out the window into the cool Tokyo winter. When she came back inside, she left the window open a few centimetres and sparked the gas heater to life, positioning it so that it faced away from the vinyl tubing that connected it to the wall. She sat at the table, consciously holding off grief. She had to call home, but she wanted some time to herself first. She wasn’t awake yet, and knowing earlier was not going to save anybody’s life. She wished she could close her eyes and stop time: She’d sit in this crummy little apartment in Tokyo forever, never knowing, never having anything to know.

There was a thirteen-hour time difference between Tokyo and Nova Scotia. The news reports had said the explosion had taken place at five thirty in the morning, but that must have been on Sunday morning, Nova Scotia time. It would now be after five in the afternoon on Sunday in Nova Scotia.

With a cup of hot tea in her hand, she went into the hallway, taking care to close the door noiselessly behind her. She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor without meeting anyone. Once on the rooftop, she put her cup down on the ledge and stared out
over the buildings that cluttered the landscape. How early in the morning was it? She couldn’t remember. She always got up long before she had to go to work, so she wasn’t thinking about that yet. Even with a lined windbreaker she began to feel chilly. But it was not cold enough to see even a hint of steam on her breath. She looked down at the little side street that twisted up behind the building and saw that it was alive already. A paperboy, the basket of his bicycle now empty, limped along beside the bike, drinking something from a can. Old women were out, sweeping the spotless pavement in front of their little shops and apartments. The old man who lived in the storefront of a defunct small-engine repair shop stepped into the street wearing only his grey one-piece long johns.

She was sure that Ziv was dead. She had learned from her parents that Ziv had hired on at Eastyard and was working underground.

A strange new emotion began to affect Meta, and though she had never experienced the feeling before, she felt as though she had. The pit had exploded, the alarms had gone off. The alarm she’d heard had sounded halfway round the world. Now she was waiting for news of a loved one. She felt she was living in the wrong decade, the wrong century. She felt like her own grandmother, who had done this same waiting first for a father, then a brother, and then a husband.

There were two messages on the machine when she got back inside her apartment. The first must have been there, unnoticed, since last night. It was in garbled Japanese, half-spoken, half-sputtered. Meta guessed that in recent months a phone-sex line had opened with a number that must resemble hers. Men had been
calling, leaving messages that had turned Yuka red when Meta asked her to translate. Some even switched languages when they heard her speak English on the tape, repeating the single related word they knew: sex, sex, sex, sex.

The next message was from her parents, telling her there was some news.

She went to the teapot and poured herself half a cup, sat at the table and drank it slowly, then went back to the phone and, after several attempts, was able to get through.

Meta told her mother she’d heard about the explosion. Her mother exhaled heavily into the telephone, making a dull percussive sound.

“Everything is just … it’s so unclear,” her mother said. “I don’t know what you know there. The company doesn’t know exactly who all is down there, yet. They didn’t have a list of the shift.”

“They don’t know who’s underground in their own mine!”

“Only immediate family has seen the list of names at this point, the people they know for sure are underground. They’ve got it posted in the fire hall in Plymouth. They’re only letting family members see it.”

“Is it Ziv, Ma? For God’s sake, is it Ziv?”

“Someone at Tim Horton’s told your father that his neighbour’s boy was on the shift before and no one had been in touch with him since, so they let the neighbour see the list. And … well … the fellow your father spoke to … he thought the other fellow saw Arvel’s name there. I tried to call Arvel’s mother, but the phone’s been busy there all day. Likely off the hook.”

Meta looked about her tiny apartment and felt all connection with Japan dissolve.

“Oh my God,” Meta said. “Arvel. You’re sure it’s not Ziv?”

“Your father said Ziv doesn’t work at Eastyard any more. He hired on and then quit not long after.”

“Why didn’t you tell me,” Meta said quietly, more a statement than a question.

“The company is talking about rescue operations. The draegermen have started down the main shaft already, but it’s slow going. They’re measuring for gas. The ventilation system is knocked out. But honey …” Her mother’s voice became dark, disappeared briefly in the staticky vapour of thousands of kilometres. “The explosion,” she continued. “It shook the house, here. It cracked a pane of glass in one of the old windows upstairs. The roof over the main shaft where it comes to the surface … the blast blew it all to pieces, bent the steel frame and everything. The old-timers here … the ones who remember other blasts. They say … well … they’re not very hopeful.”