Vanishing and Other Stories (7 page)

“I walked over from my place.” She whispered. Aware, too, of Edith sleeping down the hall. “I've been thinking about the story you told.”

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. “You should go home. I'll take you home.”

“My parents talk a lot about right and wrong. But I don't believe in that.”

And I thought of all of it—my wife, my daughter, the sky's frosts and floods. I looked at her, and she touched my arm. Her hand was cold from the air outside, and I said, “Me neither.”

She nodded like she already knew that, and pulled out her ponytail. Her hair hung damp and knotted down her back. Then she unlaced her muddy boots and placed them beside the bed. She unbuttoned her shirt, folded it. Paused, as if thinking it through, then unzipped her dirt-hemmed jeans and slid them from her legs. She stretched herself out and lay beside me. Touched, carefully, the hair on my chest.

She was nervous too. I heard it in her breathing.

 

 

MOST NIGHTS
, she came into my room, then peeled off her T-shirt and jeans. I sat up and watched her do this, squinting through the dark. Then she'd climb into bed, put her arm around me, and say, Shh. Go back to sleep.

Not that night. That night, they thought I was warm in my bed, deaf and dumb. They didn't think the rain woke me. But I heard it. I heard her walk through the house and then I heard her open the wrong door—his, not mine. A mistake, a funny mistake. I expected her to burst into my room, gasping and laughing holy-shit-guess-what-I-just-did.

That night, my bed felt as big and cold as the sky. And if there was one thing I knew, it was that this wouldn't get easier. It would ache for years. That's what I've learned. That's what my father taught me.

 

 

AFTER, WE DIDN
'
T KNOW
how to talk to each other. She lay on her back and breathed, air scraping along her throat. I picked up
some of her hair, felt its weight, but she wouldn't look at me. The moon shone through the window, and I could see her pale lashes and the pale hair between her legs. She looked skinny. She looked seventeen.

I took a breath, as pained as hers. “Rae—”

“Don't say anything.” She stared at the ceiling. She must have been used to these kinds of things being quick and rough—at a party, in the back of a truck. She'd probably never done that before. Been in a bed, beside a man.

She sat up and turned her back to me—embarrassed, now, to be naked. “I should go.” She tied up her hair.

“You don't have to.” I knew she'd never be in this house again. “You can stay awhile.”

She put on her shirt and buttoned it. Then zipped her jeans, buckled her belt. I wanted to touch her arm, take her hand. But she pulled on her socks, laced her boots.

She walked down the stairs and I heard the front door open, then click shut behind her. The same door that flew off its hinges during the storm. The one I replaced with a tarp the next afternoon, the afternoon my wife left. The tarp didn't do much to keep out the cold. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the wind catch and snap it all day. As I waited for the school bus to pull onto the highway's shoulder. As I wondered what I would tell my daughter, when she came home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN HIS WIFE DIED
, Tom started going to the casino. The first time, it was by accident. He'd driven for hours, past the stylish downtown condos that resembled his own, the Costco and the Home Depot—where he would never shop—the suburban houses and then the patches of rainforest that had yet to be developed. He didn't know where he was going. He only knew that he didn't want to sit in a bar or restaurant—that would make too pathetic a spectacle. He drove out of town, along the highway, and into the small city where his wife had been raised. She'd escaped this place as soon as she could, and he could see why. It had a casino, a mall, and a bus station. He pulled into the casino's lot, went in to use the urinal, and ended up at the blackjack table for three hours. This is how he lived his life now: everything was accidental. Everything was inevitable.

These days, he goes every night. He knows the roads well, and can make it in less than an hour. He could go to the casino in
town, but he likes being far from home, far from colleagues and well-meaning friends. And he likes the drive: the rain-darkened highway, the sudden light from passing cars.

He leaves work at six and arrives at the casino at seven—seven-thirty if he remembers to stop for dinner. He parks in the north side of the lot, and it's never difficult to find a space. It has been nearly a month, and he goes to the same cage at the beginning of each night. But the cashier—a young man with eyes the colour of kelp—never treats him like a familiar. Tom appreciates this disdain for small talk. The staff deal with people the way they deal with money: with immunity, without judgment. Tom buys a hundred dollars' worth of chips and, as he walks to the tables, enjoys the feel and weight of them in his hand. He stays an hour, two at the most. This is a habit, not a compulsion. Other than a few poker nights he participated in as a student, he's never been a gambler, and he has no special talent for it. He simply wants company in his solitude.

He craves a certain kind of crowd, the kind that cares nothing for him, and he feels at ease with the people in the casino. They are not the kind of people he's used to: he doubts that they know what a polypeptide is, or care about cellular receptivity. Most are quiet, habitual gamblers. Many are older and less fortunate than he is. Men at poker tables who wear sunglasses and stare at screens. Elderly women who wear cards around their necks and plug these into the slot machines, like patients taking oxygen from a tube. These people don't seem to hear the dinging and beeping of the slots, or mind the dry air. Tom likes the way their worn faces look under the blue-tinged light. They remind him of a school of basslets, shy but aware of each other.

His favourite card dealer works the blackjack table. She is from China, or maybe Japan or the Philippines—someplace Tom rarely gives any thought to. She looks to be a few years older than he is; he guesses late forties. She rims her eyes with blue makeup and has a perm in her hair that's growing out. She's professional but not friendly, and she runs her table with a serious efficiency. It's a fast, rhythmical game, and she speaks only in service of it. When she says certain numbers—eleven, thirteen, and seventeen in particular—he can hear a slight accent in her voice.

He knows little about gambling, but enough to know that it's a waste of time and money to play at her table. She uses four decks, accepts only high bets, and a quick calculation tells him that he loses approximately seventy percent of the time. He knows he should stick to poker—he has a good instinct for the game, and lately his expression has hardened into a permanent poker face. But he likes her. He especially likes her hands. They're not a young woman's hands: the skin is creased, and veins reach down her wrists like dark ropes. And it's not that these hands are capable of anything remarkable; she is not, for example, a surgeon or a concert pianist. But her hands are slim and bare—she doesn't wear jewellery—and he likes to watch them pull cards from the shoe and drop them on the table. It's pleasant even to watch them sweep his chips away from him. Her hands, he decides, are golden damselfish—understated, graceful. But he would never tell her that. She probably wouldn't know what a damselfish was, and if she did, she might not like the comparison. And he doesn't want to ruin his routine by offending her. She works every night, from Tuesday to Saturday. She is a relief and a pleasure he can count on.

 

 

KELLY HAD BEEN SICK
for four years, and for much of that time they believed she would recover. She was thirty-six when she died. Tom was thirty-eight.

In the months after, Tom dismantled the bed they'd set up in the living room so she could look out the window. The condo was on the fifteenth floor, and she'd had a view of the sky, the distant ocean, the gulls that occasionally rose that high. Now, he rarely takes in the view. He moved the couch and coffee table back into their normal positions, cleared away her magazines, and gave her clothes to charity. He keeps up with work, goes to the gym, and cleans the condo himself. He continues to put money away for retirement and to pay his credit card bills on time. And he remains fastidious about the aquarium.

Each day, he sprinkles food onto the surface of the water, and watches the fish nudge each other as they open and close their mouths over the pellets. He also cleans the inside of the glass and replaces the evaporated water. Once a week, on Sundays, he removes the waste. He tests the calcium, magnesium, alkalinity, iodine, phosphate, salinity, and nitrate levels. Once a month he changes the filter's pouch, and once every four months he checks the components of the skimmer, lights, air pump, heater, and hydrometer. This allows him to maintain emerald and sea corals, a hermit crab, a blue damselfish, a jawfish, two mated gobies, a flamefish, a convict tang, a blue
Linckia
sea star, and seventy-five pounds of live rock. He keeps the temperature at seventy-seven degrees and maintains the pH at 7.8. He records any changes in the water's parameters in a log, which Kelly used to call Tom's
Bible. As a joke, she'd hide it around the house—sometimes under the bed, once inside the fridge.

“You have to find it.” She kissed his neck. “That's the game.”

“I hate games, Kelly. You know that.”

Memories this clear are rare. Kelly's presence in his mind is shadowy: she drifts in and out, but never in any form that he can smell or touch. That part of his mind has gone dark, and is lit only in patches, like the highway at night. It's as though Kelly disappeared in a puff of smoke or stepped behind a curtain. She must have passed easily into some sort of afterlife, which is what she would have wanted. He'd expected grief to be engulfing. He'd hoped that she wouldn't vanish so quickly. He'd hoped that she would haunt him.