The Calling (16 page)

Hazel laughed without smiling and lifted her
glass to him. 'To fog.'

'Uhh, okay. Fog, Hazel. To fog.' They clinked
and drank and Andrew's gaze fell on the swizzle
stick lying at the base of the ketchup bottle. 'What
fog are we drinking to?'

'The one that's coming in about an hour, dear.'

This caused the light to go out of his eyes. 'I
don't want to be part of some kind of masochistic
ritual, Hazel. I've seen enough of that for this lifetime.
If that's why you wanted to see me, I don't
think I'm okay with it.'

She wiggled her drink at him. 'It won't be
from this,' she said. 'In an hour, when I go home,
I have to take three pills to counteract the pain
I've been in all day. They turn out my lights.'

'Doesn't sound like something you feel neutral
about,' he said. He stirred his drink. 'I didn't know
it was that bad.'

'If it gets any worse, they're going to cut me. I'll
be in bed for ten weeks. Or more.'

'Your mother'll love that.'

'Maybe.' The ice melting into the liquor looked
like smoke. She suddenly remembered some homework
Emilia had brought home in grade eight or
nine that purported to show hidden messages in an
advertisement for Canadian Club. Someone had
carefully outlined the word SEX about fifty times in
the ice cubes. This was the difference between
policework and other fields that called for interpretive
powers: in her line of work, what you saw
had to actually be there.

'I didn't mean to be flip,' said Andrew. 'About
your problems.'

'Nothing's happened. They're not real problems
yet.'

'But the pain is real.'

'It is.'

He held his hands steepled over his glass. 'What
was it you wanted to talk about, Hazel?'

'I just wanted to see you. See how you were.'

'Uh-huh. Are we eating tonight?'

'You're willing to spend an entire meal with me?'

'I put in thirty-six years. Dinner is nothing.'

She waved down a waiter and took a menu, then
passed it to him. 'Order me whatever's good.' He
asked for two New York strips, medium rare.
'Mother'll kill you,' she said.

'She got you eating alfalfa?'

She hung her tongue out of her mouth. 'My
God, I'd kill for a bowl of alfalfa. It's just little
pebbles and dehydrated water for me, Andy. I gotta
get me a husband.'

He smiled, recognizing her. She saw it in his face
and a swell of raw fear went through her that felt
like someone had jumped out at her. The base of
her tongue was throbbing with it. She lived most
of her days and nights now unaware of the kind of
need that once animated her; the need for touch,
for comfort. Her mind was home now, not her
body.

'Andrew ...'

'Oh-oh.'

'We're out of practice. It used to be you could
read my mind. But you can't now.'

'Certain skillsets fade, Haze.'

'You wanted to know why we were here, and I
told you, but then we went past it.'

He lowered his drink from in front of his mouth
to his throat. 'I don't remember that part of the
conversation.'

'And it even happened when you were here.'

'Give me a hint.'

'It was the part that should have triggered images
in your mind of my eighty-seven-year-old mother
carrying me to the bathroom.'

The drink went the rest of the way down to the
table. He made a little sound in the back of his
throat. 'Right,' he said. 'I did miss that part.'

'But now I hear the sound of a coin rolling down
a ramp.'

His mouth, which had fallen open into a soft O,
slowly closed. 'God, Hazel. How can you even ask
me this?'

'We don't have the money for live-in help,
Andrew.'

'And what about Marty?'

'Are you serious?'

He breathed out heavily. 'Christ.'

'I have another test coming up in two weeks.
After that, they'll schedule me for surgery if I'm a
candidate.'

'I wish you'd told me it was this bad.'

'Andrew, it's this bad.'

'And what do I tell Glynnis when she says you're
a manipulative witch who'd submit to surgery if
she thought it would get me back under your roof?'

'Tell her you'll see her in ten weeks.'

He laughed, but his eyes were not smiling.

On the way home, the pain was so intense that she
drove with her fist balled up under her right
buttock. There was a point there a chiropractor
had shown her that was supposed to relieve some of
the pain in her leg, but if anything, it only gave
respite because it meant she wasn't sitting all the
way down on the seat. She was a shade away from
drunk now, probably over the limit, but still alert
enough to drive. The surging pain in her back and
leg counteracted some of the effects of the liquor.

They'd left the topic alone when the steaks
came, but Hazel still had the impression that it had
been left open. Before any final decisions were
made on either side, she knew she was going to be
sitting down alone with Glynnis, and she also
knew what the suggested compromise was going to
be. This appealed to her about exactly as much as
having to manage on her own, but managing on
her own after surgery was going to be impossible as
opposed to unbearable, and unbearable was
subjective. She already knew that if Glynnis agreed
to her husband nursing his ex-wife, there was no
way it was happening under the ex-wife's roof.

When she pulled into her driveway, she was in a
black funk. She tried to think of a single part of her
life that was in complete working order, a part she
had control of, where she was actually exercising
that control in a measured, intelligent way. Ahead
of her: pills, bed, morning. Days scattered across a
landscape of weeks and months.

'How's the one that got away?' said her mother,
looking up from the television.

'Four decades of marriage is not "getting away",
Mum.'

'The
escapee
, then.'

'He was fine.'

Emily Micallef twisted away from the television
to see her daughter better. Hazel recalled herself
turning in the chair at the Laughing Crow,
nervously looking around for her ex. 'I'm having a
moral dilemma right now,' her mother said. 'You
need to take your medicine and go to bed. Your
day needs to be over right now.'

Hazel stepped into the living room. 'What
happened?'

'See, this is what I'm struggling with right now.'

'Mother.' Hazel followed her mother's sightline
to the portable handset on the sideboard.

'You have a message.'

'
Thank
you.' She picked up the phone and
dialled into the voicemail. 'I'm the chief of police,
Mother, not the president of the glee club.'

'How come I'm the one who doesn't get your cell
number?' said the voice of Howard Spere. 'It's nine
o'clock. In case you've ever been worried about
how safe your personal details are on Bidnow.com,
you may shop with confidence. They wouldn't give
out your shoe size without a notarized release from
your podiatrist.' She pushed the 3 button to fast
forward. Howard said, 'Practically had to send
them a blood sample before they'd—' and she
pushed the button again until, at last, he informed
her that the website's management had given in.
The shipping address Delia Chandler had intended
to use for the duvet cover she was bidding on the
day she was murdered definitely was not Maitland
Avenue in Port Dundas, Ontario. It was for a postoffice
box in Port Hardy, the last town before the
Pacific, high up in the northern wilds of Vancouver
Island.

Saturday 20 November, 3 a.m.

He continued driving through the night after resting
at the roadside. His hunger pangs had turned
into cramps, and every couple of hours, in the
static dark through the countryside of central New
Brunswick, he'd pull over and squat in the brush to
push out a hot stream of shit into the dirt. It stank
of bile. His body was starting to eat itself.

He drove the highway crouched over the steering
wheel, his stomach tortioning inside his gut.
He could smell his breath bouncing off the inside
of the windshield: a combination of wet dog and
tooth rot. An undertone of acid. He was very sick,
he knew this now. He knew it could become an
obstacle.

The headlights pushed along the road surface,
the cracks in the old asphalt rolling toward him, an
ever-changing, wild line moving like an endless
branch under the car. He fought his exhaustion
and reached inside his mind to find his brother,
and he spoke to him.
Be with me now, my brother.
Sit with me and look at this night with me, this beautiful,
empty night
. He saw his brother lying racked in
his bed. The flower of his beloved body, sudden in
death's preawakening, ready to seed.
We are drawing
the spore of your soul from one ocean to another,
like a lace cinching us together.

He pulled his head up suddenly and saw the road
again, forced the car hard back onto the flattop, his
breath as thin as the buzzing of a fly. He saw the
pale, blinking light of the gas station that marked
the halfway point of this road that slid through the
dark between the two main highways. There lay
the promise of a few empty calories, perhaps a toilet
with a light, but he blew past it, pushing his foot
down on the accelerator. He would be in Pictou by
mid-morning as he'd promised. He'd emailed
Tamara Laurence from a library in Quesnel to say
he would arrive on 20 November at one o'clock in
the afternoon, and he had been late only once in
his travels, and early just once. He tried to keep his
appointments to the minute. He had even waited
in his car on the streets of Port Dundas for half an
hour the afternoon he'd arrived to take Delia in
order to be at her door precisely at three. He could
not ask for the trust it entailed to join him in this
profound chain if his first gesture was to break his
word.

His stomach folded over on itself and he had to
stop again. He stumbled out of the car and
hurriedly pulled his black pants down around his
ankles and shat into the gravel, heard the
explosion of pebbles underneath him. He cleaned
himself, and in the rising steam he smelled meat
and he carried the soiled tissue around to the front
of the car and held it up in front of his headlights.
It was drenched with blood.

He drove through the rest of the dark in a stew of
dreams and agony, but when he saw the ocean at
eleven o'clock in the morning, his stomach settled
like a storm lifting and he was able to sit up
straighter behind the wheel. There was the compulsion
to take any one of the little dirt roads that
led north to the shoreline now, but by the map he
saw that he would arrive at Pictou with only
minutes to spare and he kept his eyes forward. Back
in Amherst, a tang of salt had suddenly manifested
in the air, an Atlantic salt, though, lighter and
more acrid than the smell of the ocean from back
home. Still, it woke him, thrilled him to the root.
From a well he knew he could draw on when he
had to, strength returned to his muscles. The sunlight
processing through the windshield went into
him like sugar.

He followed the curving road through the shore
towns, their houses stacked up on the hillsides like
loose teeth. Finally, he saw the signs for Pictou and
went through the town to the other side, just where
the forest began again. He passed a golf course and
went right, bearing down toward the harbour. A
huge plume of white smoke hung over the trees
from the paper plant across the water, puffing out
its scrubbed toxins over the inlet. Sulphur and salt
in the air. He saw Tamara's house as she'd described
it in her message to him and he pulled over.

A hard surface, a sensation of rope. Gullivered. His
eyes would not open. There was an irregular surface
beneath him. Wood or straw. He pushed his eyelids
together to moisten them and then forced them
open and he was looking up at a stucco ceiling
inlaid with rough planks. The air was cold on his
face. Someone had tucked a heavy blanket around
his body and the weight of it was somehow immobilizing
him. His mouth was crusted, and he
lifted his hand to wipe his lips and heard the dull
clack of a tangle of tubing that, to his great
surprise, he had pulled up with his arm. He was
attached to something; he turned his head slightly
upward and saw a metal stand behind him. Two
bags, one with a clear liquid, the other containing
blood. A transfusion. Someone was saving his life,
a great transgression: the blood of strangers. He
managed to lift his shoulders and he craned his
neck forward to see it was not the blankets that
were holding him in place, but cloth straps over his
shins and his pelvis. They were ratcheted tight by
means of belt clasps cinched against the surface of
the bed.

This was not a hospital, however. A house. He
was in a basement. The lights were dimmed, but
through a doorway halfway down the wall on his
right, he saw a quiet yellow glow. He called out and
something blocked the light momentarily and the
door opened. A woman stood in it with a burning
cigarette in one hand and his gun in the other. The
room was warm, but she was wearing a sweater and
a thick burgundy shawl lay over her shoulders. She
was as thin as a crack in a wall. 'You're a dangerous
man, aren't you, Simon?' she said.

'Where am I?'

'You drive up right on time. I watch you from the
window, you go to the back of your car, open
the hatch, and drop like someone's cut the legs out
from under you. Half-dead behind your own car.
You were hunched over a leather kitbag full of neat
things.' She held the gun up. 'This for one.
Although I found the hatchet and the hammer
interesting backup. I guess hatchets don't jam.'

She came farther into the room and sat at the
foot of the bed. She moved with great difficulty and
when she sat, her knees and hips crackled. 'You're
Tamara,' he said.

'You'd better call me Dr Laurence for now. I
could get into a lot of trouble for doing what I'm
doing. But I'm already in a lot of trouble, so what
the hell. Death removes your hospital privileges
anyway, doesn't it?'

'Why am I restrained?'

She tugged on one of the straps. It barely moved.
'Who knows what you might do to me if you
weren't restrained, Simon.'

'You're frightened of
me
?'

'I wasn't until I found your medicine bag. Then
I started to wonder what I'd signed up for.'

He struggled against the ties until he was almost
sitting up. He felt a tugging under the covers in his
groin. 'You shouldn't be smoking, Tamara.'

She laughed in disbelief. 'I know. It's bad for me.
Look, I want to know what you were planning to
do once you got here.'

'I was going to kill you. You know that. That's
why you invited me here.'

She shifted on the bed to face him. Her eyes
were set back in her head and the smoke drove
them farther away from him, as if she were wearing
a veil. He was finding the farther east he went, the
closer his supplicants were to the edge. He was
arriving in the nick of time. 'I signed up for mercy.
Or at least I thought I did. What is all that shit in
your bag?'

'Medicine.'

'Since when did the healing arts include hand-to-hand
combat?' She coughed heavily.

'Release me, Tamara.'

'I thought that was
your
job.'

'Tamara.'

'You're not wearing any pants,' she said. 'You've
got a tube up your prick. A catheter. Didn't want
you wetting my rattan.'

He lay back down to take the strain out of his
lower back, looked at the tubes in his arm again.
The one in his hand delivered the clear liquid. The
blood was flowing into a port on the inside of his
arm. 'I gather you're having second thoughts,' he
said.

He heard her get up and leave the room, then reenter.
She put his medicine bag down on the floor
beside him and opened it. 'Take me through this,'
she said, removing a couple of glass vials from
within. 'Foxglove?'

'I've done nothing to deserve being held
prisoner.'

'This is like, herbal digitalis, right?'

'It's for my heart.'

'Or someone else's. This stuff can stop you like a
clock.' She tossed it back into the bag with a clink
and took out a vial of powder. 'What's this?'

He strained over his shoulder to look at it. 'It's a
fungus.'

'Shrooms, huh? What's it do?'

'It sedates.'

'How much of this to kill a person?'

'Not a lot. Look ...'

'No,
you
look, you fucking sicko.' She stood up
with his kit and tossed it into the corner of the
room. He heard something inside the bag shatter. 'I
thought you were some kind of shaman. But
obviously you're a right fucking lunatic and I don't
know how many people have fallen for your—'

'TAMARA.' His voice filled the room and
covered her up. She fell silent. 'If you'd like to
stand there speculating on the evil I represent,
then go right ahead. But given that I can't pose
much of a threat in the position I'm in, perhaps
you'd be willing to let me address your issues.'

'
Address my issues?
I'm a bag of cancer, Simon. A
tumour with a face on it. What's to address?'

'You can't go about killing people even if you
have their permission,' he said. 'It's a crime. And
given that I'm committing crimes, I think it best to
at least hide my purpose. I deliver a painless death
in the name of something quite profound, Tamara,
and then, if I think it advisable, I cover it up
another way. I leave no trail but the one I am laying
down and the one that you've asked to follow.'

She laughed now. 'Do you give this speech to all
your victims?'

'None of them seem to require it. But you, in
witnessing my weakness now believe me to be
capable of a great insult. You invited me here,
Tamara. To be a part of something. What is it to
you that my methods seem strange? Either you
want to join us, or you don't. Whichever, you'll still
die. I only offer an alternative.'

'An alternative to death.'

'An alternative meaning.'

She was silent a moment. He remained on his
back, looking upward. He had the desire to pull the
tubes out of his arm, but he wanted to bring her
back. He had no one else in this area to call on: it
was Tamara followed by Carl Smotes in Trinity Bay
and then he was done. She said, 'So just let me get
this straight. You've been showing up at people's
homes, gently euthanizing them, and then, let's
see, committing unspeakable desecrations to their
dead bodies. Is that right?'

'Sometimes,' he said. 'I would be breaking my
word to all of you if I got caught. Would that not
be worse?'

She thought about it. He was aware that she was
shuttling from anger and disbelief back toward
where he had met her. She was almost with him
again. 'So what were you going to do to me?'

He raised himself back on his elbows so he could
look at her. She was sitting in a chair on the other
side of the room, her shawl pulled tight across her
chest now. 'I would have made you some tea.
Something to settle you. Then I would have
examined you to ensure your physical body was
complete—'

'Complete.'

'Yes. As I said in my messages to you, only those
who are whole in body can be a part of this. Whole
as God made you.'

'I've had about fifteen pounds of tumour
removed from my body.'

'I'm more concerned with surgeries of vanity,
Tamara. Stomach tucks, breast enlargements. I
want a body as God intended it to be. I make room
for some things: tonsils ... tumours.'

'What about a new heart valve?'

His own heart sank. 'Have you had a valve
replaced, Tamara?'

'No. I'm just asking.'

'It would probably be too much. Is there something
you want me to know?'

She shifted in the chair. It seemed to creak as
much as her body did. 'After the tea, then what?'

'I'd make a tincture of some kind. It's always
different. An opiate in your case, to help you deal
with your pain, followed by something to stop your
heart.'

'And then what.'

He stared at her, willing her to tell him she
didn't need to know, but she calmly returned his
gaze. 'In your case, Tamara, I was going to remove
your arms and legs.'

She blinked at him a couple of times and then
broke into a broad, if nervous, grin. 'Really? How
were you going to do that?'

'I have a flensing knife in the car. I don't keep it
in my kit. The blade's too long.' He watched her
face. She wanted it all. 'Before rigor mortis sets in,
I'd take your limbs in my hands and pull hard to
loosen the joints. It's easier to cut through the
ligaments and cartilage if the joints are pulled apart
manually. Then I'd slice through your arms just
below your shoulder sockets and your legs
just below your pelvis.'

She swallowed. 'And what are you going to do
with my arms and legs?'

'I'm going to put them in the oven, Tamara. It's
going to look like a madman was here. Just like you
said.'

She pushed herself up to standing with difficulty
and approached the bed. 'But you're telling me
you're not a madman.'

'I'm no madder than you. I'm suffering the pains
of death, but they have not made me mad.' She stood
at the side of the bed, her hand playing over one of
the cloth straps. She slipped a forefinger under the
steel latch that locked the clasp beside his shin and
flipped it. He felt the belt loosen and she tugged on
the cloth to pull it through the clasp. Then she
loosened and removed the one on his pelvis. 'I'd like
to be taken off your medicines,' he said.