The Empty Room (17 page)

Colleen felt better. She strode back into the offices of C&C Staffing. Kev was at his desk again and looked up from his crossword puzzle as she walked in. He blushed red as a radish. So, little Princess Di hadn’t been able to keep her perfectly lipsticked mouth shut. Exactly what you’d expect in a place like this.

“We didn’t know if you were coming back. Are you going to continue your testing?”

Colleen walked past Kev and snatched her coat from the back of the chair by the carrel at which she’d been working. She also picked up her test papers and stuffed them in her purse. She didn’t want anyone looking at them and sniggering at any questions she’d answered incorrectly. Kev watched her leave, but didn’t say a word. Not even
Will you be back?
Not even
Goodbye
.

Who cared? Out the door she went. Elevator down. Across the lobby and back onto the street.

And now what?

People flowed around her like schools of fish. Cars and buses zoomed past. Bicyclists, too, and a man on a silver scooter going faster than the cars. Where was everyone going in such a hurry? Colleen realized she had no destination. There was nowhere she
needed to go and no one who cared if she got there or not. Where was her life?

Over and over again, she saw that bottle of vodka crash to the floor. She had been caught. She had done what she never thought she would: she had huddled like a fugitive, drinking out of a hidden bottle in a bathroom stall. But was that true? No, it wasn’t true. She had drunk from a hidden bottle in a number of bathrooms—at work, in movie theatres, at her mother’s nursing home (quite often there, in fact), in people’s homes when the booze wasn’t flowing fast enough to suit her, in restaurants when she deemed it more economical to bring her own … She’d just never been caught before.

This was not who she was, though. She was not a woman covered in vodka in a bathroom stall. This was not the Colleen Kerrigan who loved James Agee and Gabrielle Roy and Graham Greene and Thomas Hardy and all those other wonderful writers. Not the Colleen Kerrigan who had her first poem published in the school yearbook and who even though she never had anything else published surely would, one day, she surely would. She was a bluestocking, a woman of the mind, who lived in her thoughts, and who read books on God and science and history and understood all of it. It didn’t matter she’d never graduated from university. Neither had Ray Bradbury nor Truman Capote. Everyone had always said how smart she was. Even Jake, who was about as cheap with a compliment as ever a man could be, said she had brains.

So how had she let that terrible moment happen? How? She drank too much—hadn’t she vowed just this morning not to drink
at all today—and in a hideously fluorescent-lit moment of clarity, she understood she was probably exactly what Princess Diane had said she was. A little cry escaped her lips and a man passing glanced at her. She put her fingers over her mouth. It was true, wasn’t it, and not the first time she’d thought it either. The problem was, she couldn’t possibly stop drinking today, and it had been that way for a long while, hadn’t it.

She felt lost, adrift. What a desultory sort of life she’d been leading, rambling, meandering, being knocked from one place to the next, led not by any map or plan, but merely in reaction to one damn thing after another. She was a little boat that had slipped its moorings and was floating off into a dangerous current leading to a turbulent open sea. She could not help thinking of safe harbours and whether or not she would ever find one.

The air stank of car exhaust and dust. The whole neighbourhood, which used to be so trendy, looked down on its luck. Plastic bags fluttered by the curbs. Garbage cans overflowed. The never-quite-solvent businesses that changed every year or so … a spa, a laser treatment centre, an answering service (who used those anymore?). The public school looked like a refugee from 1960s Russia. That was the problem with this city; it tried so hard, but never quite managed to live up to its potential.

Colleen wanted to get away from the C&C building in case Kev or Diane came out and saw her just standing there like a piece of battered driftwood. She walked toward Mount Pleasant, reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. Maybe someone had called
her. She flipped it open.
You have two missed calls
. Colleen’s heart did a little Texas two-step. She dialled in to her messages and listened.

“Ms. Kerrigan, this is Carol from Spring Lake Place. Can you give us a call when you get a minute? Everything’s fine, but your mother’s had a bit of a fall and we’ve sent her off to St. Mike’s just to be sure.”

Shit
. Colleen was about to call them back, but then thought she should listen to the second message. Maybe it had all worked out without her. She could not handle her mother today. Of course she fell, again. She fell all the time, because she refused to use the walker that everyone, except Deirdre, agreed she needed. She kept saying she just wanted to fall down and be dead. Eventually, Colleen assumed, she’d get her wish, but not without causing a great deal of trouble beforehand.

Ah, that was a terrible thing to think, and she knew it. But it was the truth. For Colleen, her mother’s death was something she both feared and desired. For forty-nine years she had lived under her mother’s cloud, and the possibility that she might one day be free of it was incontestably attractive. On the other hand, when Colleen thought of her mother she was filled with regret, for even though Deirdre was the cause of so much wanton destruction, so much slash-and-burn, Colleen understood her life had been a miserable one, and when it was finally over she knew she’d grieve for all the things that might have been and never were.

She listened to the second message.

“Hey,” a deep male voice said. He said. Jake. “It’s me.” Of course
he never gave his name, always assuming she’d know. Cocky bastard. “Give me a call. I want to talk to you.”

She should call the nursing home back. But they said everything was all right. There was nothing she could do. And besides, this was the worst of days and she couldn’t cope with one more goddamn thing. She was disappointed. Lori hadn’t called, nor had anyone from the university. What did she expect? Well, she had hoped maybe one of the profs would call to see if she was okay, to see if there was anything they could do. They would have heard by now.

She didn’t want to call Jake from the street because she knew talking to him, the person who maybe knew her better than anyone else in the world, and from whom it was impossible to hide, could lead to tears. She hurried back down Mount Pleasant and by the time she reached Davisville she was nearly sober again. In fact, she had the post-drink droops, all energy gone, mood plummeting to her heels. She might need a nap. She was also hungry. Her stomach growled as she stepped into the empty lobby and she realized she hadn’t eaten since that breakfast sandwich on the way to what-used-to-be-her-job. The elevator was as deserted as the lobby. She imagined a post-apocalyptic city with all the people gone, just her and the plastic bags tumbling down the forsaken streets. It was almost comforting. What would it be like to never have to worry about what other people thought of you?

As she opened the door to her apartment she was struck by how still it was. A miasma of loneliness thickened the air. She snorted
at her own sentimentality—either what she smelled was a miasma of loneliness or the milk was off. She dropped her purse, took her coat off, hung it in the hall closet and went into the kitchen. Whatever she had smelled when she came in was gone now. Perhaps it had been a ghost, or perhaps she was becoming more like her mother than she wanted to admit. Her mother’s condo, the one she’d moved into after Peter Kerrigan succumbed to lung cancer seventeen years ago, had this smell in it—pungent and cloying—an old-lady smell it had taken Colleen weeks of cleaning to eradicate before she put the place up for sale last spring. Deirdre never seemed to notice it. Maybe this was how it started: you walked in one day and there it was, an odour so sharp it peeled the wallpaper, and then, as quickly as you started smelling it, you stopped smelling it. It just became the smell of your own house, which no one really smelled, did they? She vowed to watch the faces of those who crossed her threshold for signs of sniffing, and if they appeared she’d drown the whole place in bleach and burn sage for a month.

There was nothing in the fridge she wanted: yogourt, stale bread, two apples, a jar of olives, celery. The white wine bottles stood in a tidy at-attention row in the fridge door. How clean and cool they looked. She had to call Jake back, and she couldn’t do that without a glass of wine in her hand.

She chose a packet of cheddar cheese slices, and the stale bread. She toasted the bread and made herself a sandwich. Then she poured herself a glass of Chablis. The taste on her lips was as refreshing as a dip in a mountain lake. The perfect accompaniment,
she thought, to a cheese sandwich. There she was, the little French fairy, all decked out in verbena leaves, released from her bottle, flitting around the room.

Colleen brought the sandwich and the glass (not the bottle, just the glass) to the couch. The apartment was too quiet. She turned on the television and listened to a big old bald Southern boy with a cheesy moustache telling a crying woman this wasn’t his first rodeo and something about a pancake having two sides no matter how flat it was.

“Fucking genius,” Colleen said to the screen.

She turned the television off and when she did the silence rushed back in to fill up all the available space. The room looked the same—the blue sofa, the black coffee table, the television, the battered leather chair under a reading lamp by the window, the shelves of books (most bought from remainder tables), the small table and four chairs in the dining area no one ever sat in—but the objects looked slightly askew, as though someone had come in while she was out and moved everything an inch to the left. This sinister silence, whatever it was, invaded her home with intent. They don’t call it “spirits” for nothing. She finished her sandwich, refilled her glass and called Jake.

“Yeah, hey,” he answered, because of course her number came up on his phone and that was how he spoke to her, casual, almost bored. She understood this was because he didn’t want her to know his true feelings. The old game.

“I’m having a bad one, a really bad one,” she said. She hadn’t
meant to start like that. She hadn’t meant to sound so needy. Why did just the sound of his voice turn her into Imperilled Pauline? Not that what she said wasn’t true.

“Yeah, I thought you might be.”

Why would he think that? Last night? The phone calls? She didn’t want to ask. She’d learned the best way to handle what she called her “grey-outs” was to pretend nothing at all had happened, but to listen for clues. “Really? What are you now, psychic?”

“You were pretty upset last night.”

The blunt statement gut-punched her. It was important not to let on that memories of the night before were little more than vapour.

“Things are piling up, you know.”

“You had me worried.”

“Nice to know you still care.”

“Don’t be cute, Colleen. You said some pretty wild stuff last night. Look, I know you’d had a few, and that’s no big deal, but maybe, I don’t know, maybe you should find someone to talk to.”

“I’m talking to you.” What the hell had she said? Snippets of talk hovered at the edges of her memory.
Can’t take much more … might as well
… yes, she’d been crying last night. She’d been pacing, phone in hand, crying. Had she said that?
I miss you … empty life … pointless life
. Jesus. “I was upset last night, that’s all. But today … Jake, I don’t know if I can take much more.” Why had she said that,
again
?

He sighed. She would bet he was pinching the bridge of his nose, bowing his head. His special expressions of impatience.

“Sorry, am I a burden? Maybe this call was a mistake. I’m returning your call, you know. I just thought … you were going to be there for me, a friend. My mistake.”

“Babe, take it easy. I am your friend.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Okay, what’s up?”

She pictured him at his desk, tie loosened, chair tilted back, Bluetooth in his ear. Maybe he was pulling on his lower lip the way he did. Amber eyes scanning the room. His eyes were never still.

“I’m out of work.”

“You get fired?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Well, did you?”

“No, I didn’t get fired. I had to quit.” Her chin was trembling and now she really was going to cry. She gulped down the white wine. Empty glass. The pretty French fairy disappeared like a burst soap bubble. “They were accusing me of all sorts of things I didn’t do.”

“Like what? Anything interesting?”

She knew that tone. Jake was a great smirker. It was part of his armour against the world, and she knew that, but it didn’t stop her, from time to time, from wanting to rip it off his face. Their relationship had always been like this, and worse. He’d slapped her a couple of times. She once threw a chair at him.

“Sylvia’s been taking work off my desk and then I get accused of losing it or not doing it. I told them. She even had a bunch of stuff right there in her hand, papers Harry had left for me to make
copies for his class, but she took them and when he came looking for them, of course I didn’t know anything about it and David was there and Sylvia’s grinning away and presto she produces the copies and I look like an idiot. I don’t know why that little bitch had it in for me. I never did anything to her. When she first came to the department I took her out for lunch and tried to get to know her, but she thinks … oh, I don’t know what she thinks.”

Tears ran down Colleen’s face. She had taken Sylvia out to lunch, taken her to a little restaurant down on John Street. Colleen had ordered a carafe of wine but when she went to pour some for Sylvia, the stuck-up bitch put her hand over her glass and said, “Do you always drink at lunch?” Really? What kind of manners did that show? Colleen had only drunk a single glass and left the rest sitting on the table, which was a stupid waste, and they’d never had lunch again. Sylvia had asked her a couple of times, but Colleen didn’t trust her.