The Hour of Bad Decisions (10 page)

Then he was in the car, driving on the highway. The engine warning light came on, orange, and then the red oil light, but Ray drove without moving his head, his face planed calm and staring, the radio talking loosely to someone else, turned too low to be heard. The engine started knocking hard as the car climbed the first long ridge of the highway, crossing the big iron bridge over the Gasperaux. The big bridge the highways department would sandblast clean and repaint every summer, and every year, the fat-knuckled boils of rust would reappear by spring.

At the top of the hill, the dials on the dashboard went wild, and the car stopped, lurching once onto the shoulder, and smoke started to curl out from under the hood. He sat there watching, futilely turning the key over and over again. Nothing. In the middle of the hood, the paint started to blister and peel back all by itself, leaving a widening, blackening circle, more smoke coming out from the edges of the hood all the time. He sat, listening to hisses and crackles as the radio stopped, and thin wisps of smoke rose from around his feet. Then he took the key out of the ignition, lifted his bowling ball off the seat, locked the doors, and started walking away down the long inclined plane of the Five-Mile Hill towards New Minas. Soon, there were sirens coming up from Wolfville, but he kept walking.

A firefighter standing next to the burning car saw Hennessey just before he disappeared from sight, just before his body sank below the hill and his head and neck were wobbly from the heat-shimmer off the pavement. And the firefighter pointed him out to the police – by then only the dome of Ray's head and his white shirt visible, the distance robbing him of arms – while the big pump on the fire engine was still thrumming and the water hitting the LeMans made the hot metal ping and snap. The fill-line to the gas tank had burned off, and a large puddle of gasoline was burning on the pavement.

The police car crept up behind Ray slowly, its right-side tires crackling on the gravel shoulder, but he still didn't turn around.

Not until a policeman touched him gently on the shoulder.

Then Ray swung the bowling ball desperately in its handled bag, and another, more cautious policeman edged in behind him and broke the bone at the point of Ray's elbow with a sharp rap of his night-stick, a motion as easy and gentle as a caress, the practiced, slow motion of a cook breaking the first egg on the edge of a pan.

And even after Ray dropped the bowling ball, it took four policemen to put him in the back of their car. Down in the ditch, the bees took turns marching into the garish funnels of the foxgloves, and the clover bobbed and nodded its silent approval.

“S
HE'S SCREAMING
.”

“She always screams.”

It was cotton-dark on the stairs, cotton-dark and gripping, the kind of dark that fills corners, fills the corners and rests there, waiting.

And the sound of the screaming seeped through the wall, muffled like wool, shadowed and thin, the edges planed, the tops and bottoms all lost. Without tympani or piccolo, but screaming nonetheless. Words indistinct, but tone definite.

Cold on the stairs, the draft falling off the big window halfway up, air falling down between the gaps in the stair treads, running away into cracks in the floor, meeting crumbs and dust and spiders, toppling into the crawl space beneath. And even after the scream stopped, he could hear it, echoing, thin and whispered, known, tattooed as much as remembered. It was the sort of sound, the kind of harmonic that sets
up its own place, that rings in a way that lets it hang in memory like a finger, held chin-high and in front of you, pointing outwards. The kind of sound that, once heard, is never forgotten. And the night pressed too close, the wind up outside and shaking. The night gloved and fingered and touching, the trees rattling branches like bare finger bones. Outside, a fine-footed cat walking tightrope, one careful foot in front of another, intent and distant, lone-walking, fursleeking, far away and into the garbage behind the fence. And then, after a moment, the screaming again, low, guttural and feral.

“I'm telling you, she's screaming,” Kevin Hennessey said. He was only new there, recently separated from his wife, living in a friend's narrow house like a transient in an alley, caught in between so tightly that he could reach out and touch the walls that hemmed him in. New enough that he could still feel the shape and style of his previous life around him like furniture, placed and unmoving, feet settled into the carpet, making dimples.

He had always expected that he would stay: leaving home had seemed like a long, virtually impossible hill, something that maybe could be climbed, but only if you could ever find the energy. It was always there, always something just on the edge of the possible as the desperation built, until one day he found himself wildly throwing shirts and underwear into a duffel bag.

By then, neither he nor his wife were sleeping more than three hours a night, the rest of the darkness
torn apart with tears and quiet, bitter fights. Exhaustion took as much of a toll as anything else: days were a hopeless tangle of confusion and the blank stare left over from sleeplessness. Leaving became necessity; the rest of his world had been out of his control, taken over by the Coriolis effect, spinning quick and clockwise, straight down the drain. Sometimes, that's exactly what Kevin blamed it all on: Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, the nineteenth-century scientist whose examination of Newton's laws of motion of bodies explained both cyclones and the spinning whirlpool disappearance of bathwater. Pull the plug, watch it all go, watch a fine and curling twister rise up from the drain, the whirlpool column in the water silver-sided in the light – fragile, and yet cruelly constant. Often, that was as close to a reason as he could find: that he had taken a wrong step, and physics had inevitably intervened. It was that, or accept a personal blame he didn't really understand, or – more to the point – wasn't willing to put his finger on.

And later, when he unpacked, Kevin found he had brought not one single pair of socks, and, paradoxically, every pair of underwear he owned.

“Screaming. That's what she does,” Heather Doane said. Heather, who owned the house, who had lived there for years, who knew the unevenness of the walls like a knuckle tracing the plaster, feeling each dip and rise, the longitude and latitude of walls. Heather, who knew it already, who knew things before he did: she recognized all his symptoms, knew the line and the
dip and the sudden sinking plunge. And every now and then, in the dark, still, painful evenings, she would tell him it was alright, that he was doing all right, as if leaving home had all the formal stages, the halting forwards-backwards steps, of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sometimes when he shuddered with sobs, the few times he did cry in front of her, she would place two or three supporting fingers gently on the outside of his elbow. Knowing that the simple connection of touch was essential: knowing too that anything more than the slightest touch was a dangerous invitation at a dangerous time.

For Kevin, the house was all still deliciously foreign. He would wake at night in that strange fog of unease, the momentary bump and slip of not knowing, of trying to make sense of foreign surroundings lit with unfamiliar light – the oblong of the streetlight-lit window somehow always wrong, in the wrong place. The room, soft and unthreatening, yet turned on edge, sideways-shifted.

The cat, black and white and short-haired, heard the screaming and didn't flinch, hardly paused, step-stepping carefully, more intent on each paw-lifting, paw-settling step than on the fugitive noises of neighbours.

Kevin, on the stairs, stopping. “Is she in trouble?”

“No.”

“Why, then?'

“Because he left.”

It was explanation set as punctuation – just the naked why. But Heather was sometimes like that: an
explanation was unnecessary, as long as the outcome was clear. Eventually he learned more: that the neigh-bour was Mrs. Bird, that she had two cats, that Mr. Bird had left for work one evening like he always had, a night watchman prowling the periphery of an oldage home, alone with his thoughts and the buttonless night. Nothing to suggest he wouldn't be back in the morning, like always, sitting in his kitchen in his sleeveless undershirt, drinking one more cup of milky sweet tea. Heather said his face hung on his skull as if it had come unpressed, that it drooped away from the muscles beneath, and that every day he was there, waiting for the clock to count down to bed.

Except, one day, he wasn't. As easy and as unlikely as that. From the door of Heather's laundry room, looking across to the Birds' kitchen, Kevin could imagine a cup of tea, steaming, waiting. It was five years ago, Heather told him eventually, and still Mrs. Bird was keening, still waiting for the front gate to open at his quiet touch.

And still Kevin was learning the shape of the house he was living in, the pattern of the place. Learning when the hot water would fail two full inches before the bath was full. Already he knew that the rooms weren't square, although sometimes the variation was only slight: looking at the ceiling of the living room, it was possible to see that the back of the room was narrower than the front by a few inches. In other rooms, the unevenness was more pronounced, all the result of a house built to fit a space between its neighbours, on an oblong and long-used lot.

At night, when Heather was out, Kevin would wander the house, picking things up, setting them down, wondering about the history behind glass bottles, the heavy, green, once-stoppered Superior Lemonade bottle on a window ledge in the bathroom, the flat, flask-like bottle whose only features were the words “S.A. chevalier's life for the hair.” Candlesticks were silent about their provenance, but rested inside cupboards with a particular pride of place. Wineglasses, all different styles, were organized in rows without any particular discernible order. Shelves of paperback books, speaking of half-remembered university English courses, whispering of not having been moved in years. Photographs of smiling couples he did not know, a wedding picture of Heather's, turned face down now that her husband was gone, where, smooth-cheeked and literally radiant, she looked like no Heather he had ever met.

And somehow, it was as if he might be able to find Heather's whole life in there, locked up in code, if only some sort of Rosetta stone would make itself obvious in among the tablecloth runners, or deep in the pine cupboard where the casserole dishes hid. But there was no simple solution there – even though there were telling pieces, like the careful imprint of her lips in lipstick on a glass waiting to be washed, the overall pattern eluded him. Sometimes, he could feel it in the air in front of him, as fine as the smell of lemon peel. As fine as the thin, high trill of Mrs. Bird, once again her own private ambulance, driving
through the narrow highways of her halls, rising, fading, rising again.

One day, through her window, as he was heading out Heather's gate, he saw her, saw Mrs. Bird, saw that she was, in fact, the thin, stick-like woman he had expected, the very way he might have drawn her in his imagination, except for the fact it seemed there was no way a woman that small could generate a sound that full. She just wasn't big enough to be a bell that could ring with such a depth of tone. He saw her peering through the window, not standing in the centre of the glass, but off to one side, peering from the corner as if she were an adjunct to her own living room. Her mouth was firmly closed, a thin, disapproving line, but still he could hear the sound, could hear it as clearly as if the tone were still hanging there in the air, existing all on its own.

And for a moment, he knew exquisitely and absolutely, not just the smell of the zest of lemons, but everything, even the sight of the nubbled yellow peel on the side turned away from him: he felt he could know her entire universe from the space around her, as if her life was captured in the china figurines along the mantel, the seven wooden balustrades he could see behind her, climbing up, as if her hopes and fears and desires were crystallized in that three-foot-by-two-foot glass rectangle, in what it held, and what it did not. How it had never changed, how she raged through it, her voice battering with the unanswered question of why, why this had not been enough.

When she looked away, quickly, it was as if he had looked too carefully, as if she was shamed by what he might have seen or by what he knew. As if she had misplaced something, as if she was embarrassed that she couldn't put her finger on just exactly where it had gone.

He met her outside, later, moving down the icy lane, walking carefully in small, pointed, fur-topped black boots, her face down, her words indistinct and muffled in the wool of her coat. He took it for “good morning.” The words had come tumbling out, a low rush, and he had picked up only the tone of them, the way they were thrown out in one single exhalation, as if discarded into the air.

She was past him then, her shoulders hunched and impossibly narrow, as if she might turn sideways and vanish completely. Kevin was sure that she kept talking after she passed, that the words had continued spilling out, falling over themselves and scattering like salt under her feet, becoming their own sort of murmured security as she fled.

One night, the snow came, filtering fine through the trees at first, not touching the branches, sifting flakes caught only by the light. Thin snow threading down in lines, and then there was more, filling the spaces between. In the laneway, the flakes fell in careful, tipped sequence into angled drifts, leaning against the fence on one side of the lane, so that when Kevin stumbled home through the shin-high, powdery snow, his footprints did not so much fill in as create their own forgiving, erasing avalanches.

And there was a woman with him, holding his hand loosely, trailing like kite string back behind him, her own footsteps toppling in like afterthoughts behind her. Just someone he had met while Heather was working the hospital night shift, Heather working another Friday night call-in as the emergency room filled with the bruised, the shattered, the drunk.