Liberty Street (3 page)

Now, under the weight of my confession to Ian, I saw the house and its possessions as an unresolved burden. They would have to go. There were no renters at the moment, although a pair of first-year teachers had arranged to move in later in the summer. Maybe Mavis could convince them to buy the house instead. I could direct her to take whatever she could get for it—practically give it away, just to be rid of it. I could tell her to hire someone to haul everything in the basement to the dump—every box, every bag of clothing—something I should have done years ago.

Immediately, I saw a problem. I knew Elliot well enough to know that anyone Mavis hired would be appalled at the idea of throwing good things in the dump, and I'd have some Tom, Dick, or Harry in the basement with his girlfriend or his mother or perhaps his whole family, salvaging my family's things. And could I even trust Mavis, whom I had never actually met, to do as I asked? Maybe she herself would be rifling through my possessions. She'd already asked me if she could bring some of the furniture upstairs, since the young teachers had requested a furnished house—“We could do a vintage look,” she'd said; “there's that cute fifties dinette”—and I had agreed.

Our flight attendant was on her way up the aisle again, this time with boxed meals. Instead of a meal, I asked for another double Scotch, because I was now considering a return to Elliot to take care of the family archive myself. A man across the aisle was clearly assessing whether I was on my way to causing trouble. The attendant rummaged through her trolley and handed me two little bottles with a look that said they were the last. I tried to seem good-natured. I wondered whether the easiest solution to the house and its contents was to ask Mavis to start a fire in the kitchen and burn it down.

After the meals were cleared away, I attempted to settle under a blanket. I slept fitfully, and then, what seemed like minutes later, the attendants were serving coffee and handing us Canadian newspapers as though they had just arrived, hot off the press. I tucked a paper in my carry-on bag for later and tried to dilute the Scotch in my system. When the plane was almost ready to land in Toronto I fell asleep in earnest, and then woke up again to an attendant trying to check my seat belt, and for a brief moment I thought she was my mother.

Once we'd landed, I collected my carry-on and stumbled from the plane. I swayed on my feet while I went through customs, fell asleep while I was waiting for my connecting flight west, almost missing it, and finally ended up on a small and noisy turboprop, with an excruciating headache and a fear of what was waiting for me. The husband and baby finding their way to the surface of my consciousness meant something. Ian leaving me in Ireland meant something. The house in Elliot was plaguing me for a reason. They were all part of the same quagmire, and I had no idea how to keep myself from sinking.

The plane hummed like it might fall apart. I pulled the newspaper from my bag and read through the headlines. One on the second page caught my eye:
Saskatchewan Homeless Man Dies after Waiting Full Day in Hospital ER for Treatment.
I read the article. The incident had happened in my local hospital, in my home city. The man died of a catastrophic head injury that could have been treated had he not been ignored—
allegedly
ignored, as they are always careful to say—because he was known by the staff and was unpredictable, according to an unnamed hospital source. I wanted to weep because someone had died for being unpredictable. I folded the newspaper and stuck it in the seat-back pocket in front of me. By the time we began our descent it was midnight and I watched the city lights rise toward me from the surrounding blackness.

We landed. I retrieved my bag and caught a cab.

T
HE CENTREPIECE OF
our living room was a poppy-red couch with lime-green piping. Ian and I had chosen it together. In months of searching, it was the only one we'd looked at that we both loved. We'd sat on it side by side in the store, nodding our heads in agreement that this was the one. Now we sat at opposite ends, eating the fried-egg sandwiches I'd made and watching the evening news, my suitcase still by the door where I'd left it the night before. Ian had worked that day, Monday, even though he wasn't scheduled to return until later in the week.

The story of the homeless man was on every network. The family was threatening to sue. A hospital spokesperson was trying his best to prevent this by being apologetic without admitting liability, or really anything at all. He described the incident as unfortunate. The camera cut to a memorial
that was growing in the hospital parking lot: flowers, cards, messages, prayer flags, stuffed animals. The homeless man's sister spoke on behalf of the family. A reporter asked her if she was angry. She didn't answer his question.

“He didn't deserve to die,” she said.

After we'd eaten, Ian did the dishes, as usual. We both read for a while, or pretended to, and then went to bed. We slept in the same bed, an invisible line drawn up the middle, my confession in the room with us like a smothering fog. In the morning, Ian got ready for work again. As he went out the door, he told me he was flying to Vancouver the next day for meetings. He'd be home the day after.

All morning I sat on the couch and thought about Elliot, the place I'd grown up, a place that had not been my home for a long time. Then I thought about how little I really knew of the city I did call home, and where I'd lived most of my adult life. I knew the neighbourhood I lived in with Ian, which was not the kind of neighbourhood where people held block parties and community picnics. I had known the neighbourhood where I'd lived as a student, but I did not know it now. I knew the pathway I walked between home and work each day—unless it was too cold, in which case I took the bus, my small contribution to environmental responsibility. I knew the malls where I shopped and banked and went to a movie once in a while. But there were many areas of the city that I didn't know at all, neighbourhoods I had never visited, streets I had never been down.

I chose a part of the city that was unfamiliar to me, and I drove there and parked and walked along the street. It was as though I were in a different city. It was mid-afternoon and the street was busy with a stream of women with baby
strollers and preschool children, many of them Aboriginal, many of them new immigrants from African countries or the Philippines. I saw one woman wearing a niqab. Besides the mothers and children, there were a number of teenage boys wearing baggy jeans and walking, I thought, with that rolling gait of gang kids, although they didn't look especially dangerous and none of them paid any attention to me. In fact, I felt invisible.

I saw an old-style Safeway sign up ahead, and as I got closer I heard hip-hop music coming from an outdoor sound system, and I saw that there was a massive garage sale going on in the parking lot. I recalled a time when my mother and I had come to the city, and we'd been robbed and carjacked and forced to drive to a Safeway store. I wondered whether this was the store, but I had no idea. Even at the time we hadn't known where we were and had been unable to tell the police anything of use. A few years later, when I was refusing to go to university for the good education my mother so badly wanted for me, she asked me if I was afraid to go. I knew what she was getting at. I lied and said no. I didn't want to admit to being afraid of anything. “You were the one who was a complete coward,” I'd said. “Like a mouse in the corner.” It was mean and I knew it. As though my own mother was the cause of the damage done, instead of a blonde-haired woman in cowboy boots and her silent partner.

As I joined the festivities in the Safeway parking lot, I saw a vendor selling hot dogs from a cart for a dollar, so I stopped and bought one. I stood eating my hot dog, listening to the music, and watching people wander from stall to stall looking through the used clothing and furniture. Then I went into the store and felt immediately as though I didn't belong
among the strangers loading their carts with diapers and groceries and kitty litter, so I left. On my way out, I heard one woman call to another, “Sister, it's good to see you. I heard you've been sick.” I wondered how you could not know that about your sister, and then I realized they weren't really sisters, and I was envious of a neighbourhood where you could run into someone who might call you sister.

I got back in my car, but my one foray into an unknown part of the city didn't seem to be enough. I drove south on the expressway until I came to the new Walmart, then I parked in the lot and walked around in a brand-new subdivision, one with monster houses with double or even triple garages and bare dirt waiting for landscaping. Sometimes I had to walk on the newly paved road because there was not yet a sidewalk. House after house I saw, with people obviously living in them but no signs of life on the streets. I came across one child, a boy who was simply inert in front of a house, sitting on his bicycle in a Spider-Man suit, going nowhere. I had no idea how to speak to children, but I gave it a try anyway.

“Hello there,” I said, but he looked away from me and at his house, as though checking to see if his mother—or a babysitter, perhaps—was watching. An orange cat wandered down the dirt driveway toward the boy.

“Is this your cat?” I asked. “He looks like his name should be Marmalade.”

No answer. His parents had wisely taught him not to speak to people he didn't know.

The cat meowed at me and brushed up against my legs. The front door of the house opened and a woman poked her head out.

“So long, then, Spider-Man,” I said and walked on. The boy followed me for a ways on his bicycle, and I heard the woman calling for him to come back.

I made my way to the Walmart where I'd left my car, and I went inside and bought a houseplant, which I placed in the kitchen window when I got home. I listened to the phone messages and learned that Ian was not coming home for dinner. I didn't bother cooking anything. I didn't feel hungry.

At dusk, I got in my car once more and drove up the block where I'd lived with a Greek family when I first came to university, and then several blocks over to the street where I had lived with a boy named Rudy. The house was gone, torn down and replaced. The owners had tried to make the new one fit into the neighbourhood, but it stood out with its faux brick facing and its ostentatious columns on either side of the front door. The house across the street, where an evolving stream of art students had lived, was still there, but it was rundown and I supposed that in no time, the whole block would be developed with infill houses. Student housing in these neighbourhoods was no longer needed. The university now had many residence buildings on campus.

As the city settled into darkness, I found myself on a street near the hospital where the homeless man had died. I pulled into the parking lot by the emergency entrance and there it was, the makeshift memorial, up against a fence. A bored-looking security guard stood nearby with his hands in his pockets. A few candles in glass containers had been placed in front of a framed picture of the dead man. Perhaps the security guard was there to prevent a fire. There seemed to be no other reason for his presence, since there were no mourners or spectators that I could see.

As I stopped my car to look, he came to my window and motioned for me to lower it.

“Have a look and move along,” he said. “This is still the emergency entrance.”

“It's touching,” I said to him. “The memorial.”

“They're tearing it down tomorrow. Have a look and move along.”

And so I did. I drove slowly by the fence and saw the dead man's face flickering in the candlelight. He had a pleasant face, at least in that photo.

I left the parking lot and joined a line of traffic that took me through downtown and to an area known as the warehouse district, where the clubs were. I had never been in one, and I had no desire to go in now because I could hear the pounding techno dance music even as I passed by in the car.

I came upon a junkyard, well lit to prevent theft, although I wasn't sure who would want to break into a junkyard. I could see the outline of rusty piles of scrap metal through the chain-link fence. Another pile of nothing but bathtubs. Two German shepherd dogs on patrol sniffed the periphery of the fence, bored by the lack of action. What was the real business of a junkyard with dogs? I wondered. A front for drugs, one of my colleagues at work would always say whenever a questionable licence application came to the attention of city hall. I did a U-turn so I was on the same side of the street as the dogs, and I pulled up to the curb and rolled down my window. The dogs stopped and looked at me, alert now, and went back to sniffing their way along the fenceline only when I put the car in gear and moved off down the street.

As I turned back toward the city centre, I checked the time. It was almost midnight. I'd had nothing to eat since the
hot dog in the Safeway parking lot, and I was now hungry. I wondered if Ian would be home yet. I could see the lights of city hall up ahead, and I drove there and parked the car in front of the building, and I imagined a cocktail party taking place beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main floor, the genteel tinkle of champagne flutes, myself in a black dress, snow blowing into impossible drifts in the courtyard.

My office was on the tenth floor. I looked up and saw the lights on in the office below mine, as though someone was working late, which would not be unusual.
I
often worked late, one spreadsheet or another on the computer screen in front of me. I could leave the car right now if I chose, use my access fob to open the front door and enter the elevator, step onto the tenth floor, and turn the light on in my office and go to work. On the other hand, I could just quit. It seemed like such a good idea, I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before. I started the car and drove to a Tim Hortons and picked up a sandwich and a coffee, and then I went home.