Why Men Lie (16 page)

“They’re here,” he said. “Finally.”

Her decision was spontaneous and irreversible. “I can’t go,” she said. It was, she knew, a refusal born of disappointment
.

“What do you mean you can’t go? You’ve been talking about it all week.”

“I don’t feel well.”

“You were fine at breakfast.”

“I’m not now.”

“Come on,” he pleaded. “We’ve never been around the Cabot Trail. It’s overnight. We’ll get to eat in restaurants.”

“You go,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

“Goddamn.”

“Don’t swear.”

His face was dark with worry. “What will you do?”

“What will I do? I’m thirteen. I’ll think of something.”

“What will I tell Sextus and his father?”

“I’m sick,” she said. “Tell them that.”

“Where’s the old man?”

“I have no idea.”

And she was sick, as she would be many times thereafter. Sick of promises. Sick of the seductive hope that followed promises too lightly made. Sick of expectations, the shallow giddy joy that people cultivate in others to harvest their approval or their favours; sick of what, even then, she knew to be self-interested kindness. Sick, sick, sick, until she recognized the foolishness of joy derived from the conditional: might, could, would. Even the future tense was loaded with the likelihood of disappointment.

From the window on the landing she could see them talking by the car, looking toward the house, looking toward her window, knowing she was watching them. She saw Sextus shrug, say something to his father. Duncan looked back again, his face bereft, then opened the rear car door and disappeared inside. The car moved off, dust lingering. She wept
.

Saturday, July 4, was sunless after an early morning drizzle.
Two days
, she calculated.
It will take two days
. Traffic on the parkway was
grim, Willie Nelson blaring on the stereo.
On the road again … Insisting that the world keep turning our way …
She felt a sudden surge of love for Willie and then an unexpected dampness on her cheek. Or was it for Conor? Willie had been his favourite. Willie Nelson and Van Morrison—he thought the sun rose and set on them. Now Conor was a ghost. Little things like songs would bring him back in times of insecurity, a moment in her past when everything seemed stable.

“Don’t expect too much,” he’d warned her. “Love, friendship, loyalty aren’t real. They’re only qualities.”

“What’s real?” she asked
.

“Our solitude,” he said. “The moment.”

She wiped her eyes, checked the rear-view, remembering Conor. Conor, the one who never let her down. Except by dying.

“Love and friendship are only temporary absences from solitude. Sunny days. You can’t keep sunshine in a jar. Remember.”

Right you are.

And then she was singing along with Willie.

In a service centre washroom mirror she spied on three young Muslim women, niqabs set aside as they shared their lipstick, passed around magenta eyeshadow, then retreated back into their costumes, walking out in single file like nuns.

Afterwards she wasn’t sure how long she stood there, water running, staring down the drain.

The old barn had been her secret place, a kind of cloak that she could pull around her for security. It was always warm there, and the musk of old hay and long-departed animals created a sensuous space that was as far away as she could ever hope to get from home, from school, from disappointment.
There were always new discoveries, discarded artifacts from other times. Once there were kittens, suddenly present and just as quickly gone, but the softness and the innocence remained. Dry and dusty bottles without labels, pieces of machinery with wooden wheels, cobwebs laced among the spokes. And a maze of secret spaces, hiding places—impenetrable
.

“Are you in there?”

The small internal voice would answer no
.

“I know you’re in there somewhere.”

Inching through Montreal, she remembered stopping there in 1970 to see a friend, someone Sextus knew in university. Big Ed. He was tall and blond, handsome in a way. A college football player, Sextus told her. A tackle, whatever that was. A standout at Dalhousie, which wasn’t saying much, Sextus joked. She felt vaguely attracted to Big Ed. Attracted, she would later realize, to the idea of being someone new to someone new, unburdened by a history. Attracted to the future, in a way.

The traffic crawled along the tangled bypass, a maze of sudden ramps and exits, intimidating trucks and darting cars. JC had warned her about Highway 40. Keep to the centre lane. You can’t go wrong. Highway 40 was aggression in slow motion, her own aggression mitigated by the glow of recollection. Smoked meat. Pizza. Names flipped up in memory. Dunn’s. NDG. Snowdon. Ma Heller’s. The Hunter’s Horn. And with them came thin strands of ecstasy that led her through to the other side of pandemonium.

Near Rivière-du-Loup she stopped at a small motel just off the highway, near a service station. It was only seven o’clock. She could have carried on. People often used to stop there. It sounded musical, the way they used to say it. Riverduloo. A long day away
from home. A day or two away from Elliott Lake or Sudbury, or Detroit, or Wawa. Or Toronto. Some other destination of necessity.

The motel room was flimsy. Thin covers on the bed, a chair that sagged and squeaked, a TV set bolted to the dresser. Settled in, she flicked the TV on, went to the washroom, brushed her teeth. Conditioning instructed her to eat, but she felt no hunger. She’d packed a bottle. Balvenie single malt, her brother’s choice, purchased days earlier for the special nightcap with JC at the end of what would have been their first day on the road. She thought it might relax her, then realized she didn’t want to be relaxed. Returning to the bedroom, she heard the sound of someone gasping. On the television screen a man and a woman, backsides to the camera, were performing lurid, feral sex. Massive penis in the cutaway, sliding, glistening. She stared in shock. The woman looked back toward the man behind her, hair draping half her face. She slowly licked her lips. Effie felt a sudden, involuntary tingle of arousal, quickly followed by disgust.

“They only want one thing, and they’re dangerous when they don’t get that one thing they’re always after.”

“Yes, Mrs. Gillis.”

“You can call me Mary.”

“Yes, Mrs. Gillis.”

“Your daddy always has a knife on him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Be careful.”

“Yes.”

Close-up of repellent penis; vagina like a passive, bestial eye, uglier than sin.
The thing they’re always after
. She spied a knob on the wall near the television set, crossed the room and studied it. “A” and “B.” Next to “A,” Scotch-taped in clumsy letters, the word
“adulte.”
Adult. Adultery. Was there a common root? Adultery, exclusively for grown-ups. She shivered, remembering another motel just down the road from here. Labatt’s 50, hot chicken sandwiches and a side order of adultery. She turned the knob to “B,” and Molly Blue, JC’s television colleague, surfaced on the screen, telling her of some atrocity in some unlucky place. She turned back to “A.” Now the woman was on top, breasts like squash suspended. Effie quashed the television picture, rummaged in the small bag she’d packed and found sweatpants, T-shirt and a book.

She couldn’t read, gave up and turned out the bedside light.

Sandy Gillis said, “You tell me if anyone comes near you. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You come straight to me.”

In the dark, she tried to picture Toronto as she remembered it when she arrived in 1970. Cop cars were, for some peculiar reason, yellow—taxis for Cape Bretoners, the boys would joke. Bouncing jingles on the radio. “C.h.U.m. 10.50 ta.RON.ta.” Ancient brick and granite buildings with new black towers reflecting cloudy skies. Thrilling smoky bars. Food aromas jostling the senses, competing for her hunger. Fat ducks shinier than patent leather on display in steamy Chinese diners on teeming Dundas West. The Greek place where the kitchen seemed to be an extension of the
dining room, where she simply pointed at submerged selections in oily liquids. Just as well that she could point: she didn’t have a clue what she was ordering. Nor did Sextus.