Bursting Bubbles (19 page)

“Oh yes, indeedy, something happened. That’s why I’m so glad to see you!” She heaves the garbage bags over him and into the dumpster. It’s possible that she played basketball in high school. “It’s Sod’s law, isn’t it? It never rains but the ceiling comes down!”

Of course it did. It’s probably been waiting for this exact moment.
Should I collapse today? Tomorrow? Next week?
it asked itself.
No, no, not yet
, it answered.
Asher will be dropping by at ten at night in the middle of a monsoon to leave a note for Mrs Dunbar on Thursday. Wait till then
.

She looks behind him. “Where’s your car?” He could ask her the same question, except he knows she probably parked out front. Divine guidance again. “You couldn’t have walked here.”

“No. No.” He gestures vaguely to the left. “I parked a little way away.”

“Well, come on inside out of the wet,” she orders. And then, impulsively, gives him a hug that stops his breathing for a full second. “Carlin will be so glad for your help.”

As he follows her in, Asher wonders whether, if Mrs Dunbar told him to kill his firstborn son, he’d do it. He figures he probably would. So maybe it isn’t the Devil she works for.

“Everything was copasetic. I was just settling down with my book and my chamomile tea,” Carlin tells him, “when suddenly I hear this almighty crash like the sky fell.”

But it wasn’t the sky, of course, it was the plasterboard drop ceiling over the old photocopier. Water must have been collecting there from a leak in the roof for months, and it finally gave way.

“It was like Niagara for a while there. That’s why I called Mrs D.”

Who immediately jumped into her overalls and rushed over.

“Lucky choir practice was cancelled because of the storm,” says Mrs Dunbar with a God-thinks-of-everything smile.

Carlin moved the photocopier and put a garbage pail and several buckets under the drips.

“Temporary measures,” says Carlin. “But now you’re here to give me a hand, I want to clear the whole area. Maybe see if there are more receptacles in the cellar. And get up on the roof to see how it looks from up there. I’m worried more of the ceiling could come down.”

Mrs Dunbar, getting ready to leave, shakes her head firmly enough to send the child’s barrette she habitually wears flying past Asher’s eye. “You can’t possibly climb up there in this weather.” She turns to Asher. “His back’s acting up again. He could kill himself.”

Asher knows where this is heading.

“So you want me to climb up and have a look.” Obviously Asher can’t kill himself; he’s an angel of the Lord.

“No, no way.” Carlin shakes his head. “I won’t hear of it. It’s too dangerous if you’re not used to heights.”

Asher should keep quiet. Asher should say that he can barely climb the stairs to his room without suffering vertigo. That just standing on a chair makes him dizzy. Anything except the truth.

“But I am used to them,” says Asher. “I’m a rock climber. I’ve been doing it for years.”

Mrs Dunbar beams. “You see? That’s why he’s here!”

Of course it is. Why else would he suddenly show up at this hour on a night like this?

After Mrs Dunbar shambles off, they clear the area as best they can, find more receptacles and put them in place. Then they tackle the roof itself. Carlin holds the ladder while Asher goes up it.

“You OK?” shouts Carlin.

Asher doesn’t hear him. It’s just as well he’s an experienced climber. Mrs Dunbar’s connections in Heaven are doing nothing to improve the weather. The rain is coming down by the bucket. The ladder was a donation, like everything else at the centre, and is a foot and a half short of actually meeting the edge of the roof. The rungs are slippery and the gusts of wind are trying to blow him back to the ground. If this is how he dies, his father will never forgive him.

Asher hauls himself over the parapet and steps down with a splash. He takes the flashlight Carlin gave him from his pocket and turns it on. It doesn’t work. Well, why would it? Nothing else at the centre does. Except Mrs Dunbar, Carlin and a handful of volunteers.

“What’s wrong?” Carlin yells into the wind. “What’s going on?”

Neither the wind nor Asher answers.

Asher, of course, is not a young man to leave much to chance; there’s a Maglite on his keychain. He turns it on. How the roof looks from up here is like a marsh, only without the grasses, rushes, cattails and nesting birds. The good news is that the corner where the leak is looks relatively dry. Which would be because most of the water is now inside. The drainpipe must be blocked, so Asher wades across the roof until he finds it. He has no stick or gloves; there’s no choice but to shove his bare hand into the opening and hope he doesn’t catch anything before he gets to his antibacterial wash at home. His face knotted with disgust, he manages to dislodge a nest of leaves, plastic and silt.

Leaning over the side of the roof, Asher gives Carlin the thumbs-up and starts back down the ladder.

It may be that Asher is better at going up than coming down, or that he’s so cold and wet it makes him careless, or that the ladder being a little short throws him off balance – or it may simply be that the soles of his shoes are slick from the muck on the roof. What can be said with certainty is that he’s lucky he loses his footing when he’s in the middle of his descent and not at the beginning. Carlin breaks his fall.

Carlin gets up, wetter but miraculously uninjured. Asher can’t stand without help.

“It’s my ankle,” he says. “I must’ve twisted it.”

Carlin blames himself. “I never should’ve let you go up there. I knew it was dangerous.”

But it isn’t Carlin’s fault; it’s Mrs Dunbar’s. For working one of her spells and making Asher volunteer.
Oh, I’m an experienced climber, let me go up your broken ladder in gale-force winds. No sweat
.

Carlin helps Asher limp inside. He makes him take off his soaked clothes and gives him a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans to put on. Asher isn’t happy about wearing someone else’s clothes, but it can’t be worse than putting his hand into toxic debris, and they do seem freshly laundered even if they haven’t been ironed.

“I don’t think it’s broken.” Carlin frowns at the foot, already so swollen it looks like a club. “But you can’t drive home with that. You’d better call your folks to come and get you.”

“Folk,” says Asher. “It’s just me and my dad, but he’s not home.” Albert Grossman is in Europe this week, doing something important. For no reason, or no reason that he can later remember, Asher adds, “My mom’s dead. She died when I was little.”

Carlin looks more thoughtful than he did examining Asher’s ankle. “So what are you saying? That even if I take you home, there’s nobody there to look after you?”

There is, at least technically. Mrs Swedger, the housekeeper, is there. But nearly midnight is well outside of Mrs Swedger’s work hours. She wouldn’t be happy to be woken now and asked to drive to Queen’s Park, and Asher wouldn’t be happy to ask her. He doesn’t want her involved. She’ll want to know what happened, and then she’ll tell his father, and then he’ll have to explain about the community centre and what he was doing on the roof. The closest Albert Grossman has ever come to a roof is the terrace of someone’s penthouse. His father will be disappointed in him. Asher can’t even face the idea of that.

“No, it’s just me right now. But if you can give me a ride I’ll be OK. I can take care of myself.”

“Like hell you can,” says Carlin. “You can’t walk.”

“I can walk.” He hopes he can. If he tries hard enough. That’s what counts in life. Focus. Purpose. Determination. Trying.

“Really?” Carlin gives him a nod. “OK. Let’s see you walk.”

He can’t walk, but he is able not to howl in pain.

“That settles that. I’m calling Mrs D, to tell her what happened, and then I’m going down to the gas station to get some ice for that foot, and then I’m getting my air mattress out of the car. You can have the sofa.”

“No, really—” begins Asher.

“Yes, really,” finishes Carlin.

After Carlin comes back with the ice and sees to Asher’s foot, he makes them both a herbal tea. Asher has gone on record as believing that only old ladies and people who think the world is run by aliens drink herbal tea, but he takes his cup without comment. After all, he’s already wearing used socks. And used clothes. And about to sleep on a used couch.

They sit in the waiting area at the front, Asher on the bed that’s been made up on the sofa and Carlin on a plastic chair. There’s a desk lamp on the table beside the couch. Also on the table are Carlin’s reading glasses and a framed photograph of a younger Carlin with a smiling woman and little boy. Just like home.

“I don’t want you to think I’ve moved in here or anything,” says Carlin, seeing Asher look at his things. “But Mrs D, she lets me sleep here when the weather’s bad or I’m in too much pain to manage in the car. And so I can keep an eye on the place.”

“You sleep in your car?” The Grossmans’ gardener lives in a trailer, but Asher has never known anyone who lives in an automobile. Not even a large one.

“Lost my job. Lost my house. My wife took our son and went back home to her folks. Nothing else she could do, really.” Carlin smiles. Things can always be worse. “At least I still have the car.”

Since they’ve already exhausted the topics of rain, leaks and flat roofs, Asher asks about Carlin’s job. “So I guess you lost it because of your back,” he ventures.

“Nah,” says Carlin. “I lost it because of my big mouth.”

Carlin worked for one of the largest construction companies in the country for over twenty years. He was project manager on a major infrastructure project for the government, and he raised some health and safety issues – first with his immediate superior and then with his immediate superior’s superior and then with head office. He was ignored. Then there was a related accident that could have been prevented if they’d listened to him, in which several workers were injured and two lost their lives. The company denied any responsibility. The company doesn’t allow a union, so when the survivors and the families of the men who died brought a suit against the company, Carlin gave them copies of the letters he’d written about the health and safety breaches and agreed to be a witness.

Carlin gives a little wave “And goodbye was all they wrote.”

“I know a little about corporate law,” says Asher, “and I’m pretty sure they can’t do that.”

“Oh, I think they did it.” Carlin makes a such-is-life gesture. “Anyway, they didn’t say that was why. They made up some stuff and fired me for that.”

Even if everything Carlin says is true, Asher knows that if a person wants a job a person will find a job. As his father often says, it’s only the lazy and feckless who can’t get work. “But what about other companies? I mean, with your experience and everything—”

“They have a list, man. Troublemakers’ list. Nobody wants a troublemaker. Not even little, local places.” Carlin shakes his head. “If it wasn’t for Mrs D I’d’ve given up a while ago. She makes me feel like things can happen. I do odd jobs for her and for her friends, and I get by. Pretty soon I’ll be able to get somewhere to live.” He gives Asher the this-isn’t-as-bad-as-it-could-be smile again. “You know, somewhere without wheels and with a bathroom.”

It may be the rain beating against the windows, or the circle of light that makes it seem that they’re alone in the world, but Asher finds himself thinking out loud. “She’s kind of unique, isn’t she, Mrs Dunbar?”

“She sure is,” laughs Carlin. “She’s one of a kind.”

“Why do you think she’s…” – one of the most stubborn people Asher has ever known; one of the most oblivious; a woman with a complete disregard for reality; a woman who forces things to be the way she wants them to be – “like she is?”

Carlin’s mouth shrugs. “I guess it’s because she believes.”

“You mean in God?”

“I guess so.” This time it’s Carlin’s shoulders that shrug. “She is married to a minister, so it figures, doesn’t it? But what I meant was people. Mrs D believes most people are good and want to do the best they can if they have half a chance. It’s hard to disappoint somebody like that. You know? It’d be like shooting your dog when it’s staring up at you with its tail wagging.”

Asher has been taught that sentiment has no place in business. He falls asleep with the rogue thought:
Would my father shoot the dog?

It
is not, of course, Georgiana’s lover who is lost. Georgiana has yet to find a lover, never mind lose him. It is Mrs Kilgour’s lover. Anderson. The daring, dashing war photographer (as Georgiana imagines him). The man who (as Georgiana also imagines him), shattered by the cruelties and horrors of battle, retreated to the woods of Oregon to listen to the timeless flow of the river and stare up at the stars. Only to become a victim of those cruelties and horrors himself. Killed in the prime of his life. Lost in time and lost to his one true love. And, it seems, lost to Georgiana as well. Mrs Kilgour, like a secretive government, is refusing to release any more information.

As they walked back to St Joan’s after the revelations by the river, Georgiana asked her what she was doing in Vietnam. “You weren’t in the army, were you?”

“Yes,” answered Mrs Kilgour. “I was a brigadier general. It would amaze you how many deaths I was responsible for.”

So that good mood’s over
, thought Georgiana. Aloud, she said, “I would’ve figured you more for a sniper.”

“Takes one to know one,” Mrs Kilgour shot back.

But Georgiana wasn’t about to give up. She might not have the drive of Asher or the determination of Marigold, but she has a belief in romantic love that makes Juliet and Romeo seem cynical. For Georgiana, meeting someone with a real, racing-heart love story – the sort of story that could fuel a thousand damp-eyed dreams – is like a devout monk meeting Jesus. Georgiana has no doubt that her parents love each other, but in an eat-from-the-same-fork way. You couldn’t describe their relationship as a death-defying passion of blazing hearts and mated souls. It’s more the comfortable matching of similar backgrounds and a mutual fondness for a game of golf. The Shillers are a light shower on a summer day in the backyard; Mrs Kilgour and Anderson are a tempest in the middle of an endless sea.