The Chrome Suite (30 page)

Then Cam built a fire and we dried ourselves beside its heat and sipped at beer for an hour while the sky swept its arm of stars over us and Gord roamed the gravel hills. I recognize that night now as having been one of those few moments in life when I didn’t want to be moving towards another place. But when Gord reappeared, and I heard the sound of a beer bottle shatter against rock, I knew that my state of contentment was bound to end soon.

Instead of returning to Carona, we drove on further west, towards a larger community where Gord directed Chuck through the
streets, making him stop behind a hardware store. Brenda, Chuck, and I waited as Cam and Gord disappeared into the shadows and returned moments later, jubilant with success, carrying a length of chain and a carpet knife. Then we drove to the outskirts of the town where there were several car dealership lots and, once again, without saying why, Gord instructed Chuck to pull over.

Chuck groaned and began to bang his head against the steering wheel, saying that his father would kill him if he ever found out, and Brenda made frightened noises behind her hand as we watched Gord darting through the car lot, hooking the curved knife into tires and slashing them open. Cam stood beneath a streetlight, hands plunged deep into his jeans pockets, on guard. I sat in the back seat waiting for Gord to be finished, watching impassively while in the final venting of his anger he swung the heavy chain and shattered a windshield. They ran back to the car and slid in beside me. Gord hugged himself and shivered and his laughter was tight and barky. Idiot, I thought. I could tell by the silence in the front seat, by the rigid fix of Chuck’s and Brenda’s heads, that they agreed. Cam moved away from me, pressing up against the door, staring into the night. I knew that something had ended.

When we got back to Carona I asked Chuck to let me out at the top of the street and I walked the remainder of the way home. There were no lights burning, which meant both Mel and Margaret were asleep. I didn’t want to risk waking her, and so I felt my way through the closet in the front hall and pulled free a blanket, and, without undressing, curled down under it on the couch in the living room and instantly fell asleep.

When I opened my eyes the following morning the sun streamed in through the front window and I saw Margaret sitting across the room in the easy chair. She played with the asparagus fern, which
trailed like dangling fingers, stroking the plant, sometimes twisting its fronds and letting them spring back. This chair and the couch I had slept on were from one of Timothy’s lines, and now the worse for wear. Silver threads had pulled loose from the fabric and were prickly against the arms and legs. On one side of the chair stood Timothy’s smoking-stand, which I could never look at without my stomach doing a strange turn. From time to time, Margaret collected bits of things when she went walking, pine cones or small pebbles, and she’d place them in the ashtray to remind herself that her lungs were now clean and taking in nature’s pure air. The way she sat there, fondling the plant, deep in thought, unsettled me and I wanted to make my escape upstairs. “What time is it, anyway?” I asked, startling her.

“Oh! You’re awake,” she said. She got up from the chair and walked towards me. I looked down at her bare feet, the long, narrow boniness of them, her large, square toenails. Ugly feet, I thought. I felt the warmth of her body as she sat down beside me and I inched away from it, slightly repelled by the uncommon nearness of her. She began rubbing the small of my back, small circular motions, which filled me with apprehension. I knew there was a hidden reason behind everything she did.

“Honey.”

I groaned inwardly. Spare me, I thought.

“Honey.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Shirley is dead.”

The words jolted me awake. I freed myself from the blanket and Margaret’s touch and sat up. She was silent for several long moments, eyes cast down, studying her hands lying open in her lap. Then our eyes met, hers searching deeply into mine, body alert, waiting for my reaction. “She was killed last night. In a car accident.”

I wanted to know all, immediately, the how, when, and where. But even while my skin crawled with shock and my mind did not yet
firmly hold the tragic news, I sensed the shadow of something other than sympathy pass across her face and I became wary.

“It happened about six miles from town. On the highway.” She reached and clasped my hand, which had grown icy. I couldn’t comprehend that Shirley was really gone. Then Margaret said, “With a man. She was with a man. He was killed too.”

I knew then why Shirley hadn’t shown up at Ken’s last night. “Dave.”

She nodded. “A David Warren. Only twenty-one years old.”

I wonder what happened to Mel’s bike? I thought, and at the same time I was appalled by my stupidity, callousness even, for having thought that. Shirley was dead, after all.

“Did you know him?”

I sensed her careful scrutiny and became frightened, wondering when the hole would open up for me to fall through. “I know who he is. But I don’t know him very well.” The truth.

“Well, that’s strange,” Margaret said, “because he called here for you last night. Not too long after you left the house. He was very polite, gave his name,” she said, “and explained why he was calling. He said you and he had a date.”

I withdrew my icy hand from her hot, dry palm. I wanted to flee because I suspected where the conversation was heading. Then I heard Mel’s footsteps on the stairs. He entered the room wearing his plaid bathrobe, exuding the sour smell of someone who has slept too long. He passed by without even glancing in our direction and went on into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.

I got up from the couch, left the room to escape to my bedroom, and Margaret was behind me. “They said on the news this morning that two people were killed,” she said. “And when I heard that man’s name, I was almost certain the other name would be yours.”

She followed me up the stairs and so I headed for the bathroom instead with the intention of running the water taps and flushing the
toilet for as many times as necessary to drown out the sound of her voice on the other side of the door. When I reached it, I turned, and we faced one another. She stepped back and clasped her hands across her stomach. Her cheeks burned with a ruddy, dark flush, and her eyes beamed with unconcealed joy. “Amy! Don’t you see? It could have been you in that car! Not Shirley. It was the Lord’s hand –”

I wouldn’t let her finish. I swung my arm and my clenched fist connected with the side of her face. Her head snapped back and her eyes grew wide with shock. In the seconds of silence that followed, we stood and stared at each other. She pressed her palm against the spot where I had struck her. “You hit me,” she said quietly.

I waited for something to happen. For the walls of the house to topple inward or the roof to fly off. For a giant hand to reach down, pick me up, and throw me away.

“Your mother. You hit your mother.”

“Yes.”

She turned then and went down the stairs.

I found Cam and Gord waiting for me in the back booth at Ken’s. I slid in beside them. We did not speak for several moments, the three of us in shock and avoiding one another’s eyes because we didn’t know yet what we wanted our faces to say. I wondered if they were remembering being inside Shirley’s body and, if so, did it cause them to grieve more deeply. Ken hovered behind the counter, glancing our way off and on, and then he came over to the booth with mugs and the coffee pot. “Very sad,” he said quietly. “You stay. You be sad.” I accepted the coffee but I couldn’t be sad. I didn’t feel anything.

“Dave was a pig, a maniac,” I said once Ken had left, breaking the silence and not wanting to ask myself why Shirley, who had been warned about Dave, would agree to get into his car.

“We know all about Dave,” Cam said. Then he went on to tell me that, unlike Shirley, Dave didn’t die instantly. Cam had learned this from an
RCMP
officer who had come into the cafe earlier. Dave had pulled a U-turn on the highway and the car was hit broadside on the passenger door by an oncoming vehicle, crushing Shirley’s chest and rupturing her heart. Dave was still alive when the ambulance arrived, screaming his lungs out and banging his feet up and down against the pavement until he, too, died. Good, I thought. It was a waste of time, and dishonest as well, for me to attempt to dredge up sad feelings over Dave. I was glad he was dead.

“It’s not fair,” I said to no one as the three of us walked down to the police compound where Dave’s car had been towed.

Crushed chest, she remembers, ruptured heart. Perhaps Shirley’s heart had already been ruptured years before
.

Whenever she remembers the friend from her youth, she sees Shirley with her stepsister, Cheryl, and is amazed by what she didn’t see before, the tenderness of Shirley’s hands on the child’s body. She sees Shirley leaning over the bathtub, cascading red hair, a satiny curtain, and the baby girl’s chubby fists grabbing handfuls of it. She hears a mushy, soft, cooing voice saying, “You little monkey.” Only several years later she herself would be as blind as Shirley was to the rivulets of yellow or greenish mucus trailing from a tiny nose and experience and understand what passed between Shirley’s hands and the child’s body
.

When she remembers Shirley she sees, too, her scuffed black flats and the flaky skin at the backs of her ankles, and then she turns her chair to the centre window in her workroom and gazes into the bright new leaves of an elm tree in early summer, or into bare branches beautifully encased in glassy ice taking on the sunlight and appearing as though lit from within, dripping beads of light onto the dirty patches of snow on the walk below
.

She sees Shirley walking towards her in the street, her fierce macho stance, ponytail and arms swinging, head and breasts held high, betrayed by weak
ankles that turn her feet inward. A van pulls up alongside Shirley, she imagines, and the man inside it winds down the window. “Hey you!” he calls. “You wanna fuck?” Without condescending to glance his way Shirley gives him the finger and says, “No, but I’ve got a dog at home who will.” As Shirley strolls nonchalantly out of this scene, she walks on the insides of her shoes, making her seem child-like, vulnerable, but grimly determined not to be
.

As I looked at the wreckage of Dave’s car I wondered at what moment of our evening Shirley had seen the oncoming headlights and what her final thoughts were in that split second when she realized that the accident was inevitable. The passenger side of the car had been crumpled so badly that its door was now in the centre of the car. I walked around the destroyed vehicle and noticed that the trunk lid was twisted and gaped open at one corner. I squatted to look inside. Mel’s bicycle wasn’t there. I would never learn what became of it. Perhaps it wound up at the trailer camp beside the agricultural grounds and when the men from the Hydro crew were slightly drunk they rode it crookedly and wildly. They rode that bike until its wheels fell off and then they threw it away into the ditch. Perhaps.

Cam stood back from the car, a silvery wedge of hair hanging across his tanned forehead. He squinted against the morning sun and his blue eyes grew watery-looking. Gord appeared to be puzzled as he walked around the car, as though he was only just realizing that the accident hadn’t been staged for our benefit after all but was real. He kicked at the hanging bumper, dropped to his knees to peer beneath the car, and got to his feet, his puzzlement replaced with relief. He declared that the undercarriage had snapped in two places. “Ford products,” he scoffed, blaming the car for the death of its occupants. “Never would have happened if this was a Studebaker.” Then he stuck his head inside the broken side window and leapt back saying, “Jesus!”

I went over. I saw the blood, too, on the nylon green-plaid seat cover, a dark, sticky-looking puddle crawling with flies. Crushed chest, ruptured heart, I thought, and saw in my mind the patch of mottled dirt behind Shirley’s knobby ankle bones. The flies were feeding on a part of Shirley. I thought, Go forth and multiply, flies, then forced myself to study the mess on the seat and saw the flecks of yellow tissue, pieces of fat or lungs. That’s life, I told myself. Just so you know.

After that, everything seemed pointless. There didn’t seem to be anything worth while to do, so I didn’t go back with Cam and Gord to Ken’s where several other teenagers, having heard the news, had gathered like the flies on the car seat. Those who ordinarily would not have given Shirley the time of day if she’d stooped to ask, wanted their fill now of the gruesome details, and would retell the story among themselves and grow fat with smugness.

So I went instead to the Carona Family Park and sat on the rim of a tractor-tire sand pit and watched an ant struggle to carry the wing of a moth many times its size. I listened for the sounds of children’s voices. I listened for our voices, Mel’s, Jill’s, and Timothy’s, too, shouting encouragement as he thumped his catcher’s mitt, saying, Put her there, Mel! I tried to imagine Margaret spreading a plastic cloth across the splintered surface of a picnic table and laying blankets down on the seats to protect us from the rough wood. I wanted to picture her setting down lime-green and purple melamine plates, a quart sealer of lemonade, waxed paper crackling as she unwrapped egg salad sandwiches. “Me, me, me!” Jill cries, small hands demanding a turn at the catcher’s mitt and Timothy’s attention. I sat still for a long time and my imagination failed me. This is a dream, after all, I told myself, and you will wake up and find yourself looking out through the bars of a crib. Or else you will find yourself lying on the ground in the cemetery.

Because of Margaret’s habit of drawing all the blinds first thing in the morning to keep down the heat of summer, the house was cool and dark, and, as I stepped inside, I sensed her absence in the settled quietness and was relieved. I went up to her bedroom. The room had remained unchanged throughout the years. Her Blue Book lay open in the centre of the bed, as always, and I was curious. “Amy struck me.” Or, “Today I have been slapped in the face by my own child.” Or had she written, “Oh, most High and Holy Father, who has spared my child Amy this day, has for reasons I don’t yet understand desired to take Amy’s friend instead. Oh, Lord of all, comfort the girl’s mother at this time …”? But Margaret had written nothing.