Whirl Away (19 page)

I've been working out in the cold, the wine next to me, and when I knock the glass, I'm sure it's landed in soft snow,
but there it is, all in shards anyway, looking like some kind of special ice. The spilled red wine has left a small stain like piss from a tiny, critically ill dog. A small dog who's lifted his leg in disdain and then disappeared again, too light and fleeting to even leave footprints in the soft, drifted snow.

The door's not sticking now, but the little black smears of rubber left by our shoes have defeated every single cleanser until, in frustration, I got out a can of paint thinner from the basement, and that took the marks off—but it took the paint off too, so now I have to repaint. And it's hard to know how well the paint's going to go on in the cold, whether it will even stick, when nothing else in my life ever seems able to. I think my neighbours must be used to seeing me sitting on the front stairs crying by now.

On the phone again. It's after three, and he really should be home. I count each ring with my hopes falling, because it's a small place and he's usually on the phone by the third ring. It gets to four and I'm ready for the machine again when Michael suddenly answers.

He's drunk. Really, really drunk. But that's okay, because it's that nuzzly, needy drunkenness, that warm-blanket, sloppy-kissing, maudlin kind of ardour that topples into snoring before anything really gets going. Luckily, not the screaming “You've destroyed my family, you bitch” kind of drunk, although I'm always waiting, always afraid that might be what I get when he eventually picks up the phone. Put it this way: I hope for “wish you were here” and almost always expect “wish you were gone.”

I can hear how drunk he is right away, the way his voice has dropped a full note in the register, the way some of the words have softened at the ends, the consonants losing their shape or just their way. He's got a mild St. John's accent that creeps out when he's had too much to drink. His words are louder too, like the liquor has made him slightly deaf.

“You've had a night, then,” he says, the phone held crazily away from his mouth so that he sounds like he's talking on the wall phone in a warehouse.

“So you got all my messages,” I say.

“I was going to call, but I was having trouble with my shoes. They seem to have developed a peculiar kind of knots all their own.”

And then I hear it. That self-deprecating chuckle that's as much him as his smell is; as much him as where he puts his hands to move me around when we're making love, never speaking, as silent as if it was all as important as ritual.

I don't know why—I want to be angry with him for putting me through the evening, but all at once I feel the frustration vanish, like the dam's burst and it's all just run away right out of me.

“Sounds like you had a night too,” I say, suddenly relieved. Everything I needed to talk to him about, well, I don't need to hear about anymore. Security is like an anchor, and I can feel the bow of my ship turning up into the wind, everything safely in place again. “Get some sleep, love, and call me in the morning. When you can.”

I know that he's going to be hurting in the morning, that he'll replay all the messages—if he hasn't accidently erased
them all—and then will spend the day trying to make amends for my panic. And that will be all right too, because it will be sweet and painful and magical.

Beth's lawyers served him with divorce papers a week after she found out, right after someone called her with one of those helpful anonymous “I just think you should know” calls.

I can't ever let it slip that I know exactly who called her—that it was actually me—and I can't ever let it out, not even when I feel the words trying to bubble urgently up in my throat. Not even when Michael and I are drunk and naked and coiled up together on the bed, post-coital and confessional. I know those words are going to try to escape, no matter how diligently I try to keep them back, because part of me needs him to know how desperately I want him with me. I know that small act is always going to be something that's caught there between us. That's a hard way to start a relationship, with a dirty little secret wrapped up tight and hidden away, when you're supposed to be just getting used to sharing everything. But for me, it's a trade-off. Because I also know about what kind of bad behaviour you can defend and what kind you can't. What you can explain and what you can't. Because everything was down on paper, everything that we were going to do, all on that napkin and agreed to, even if it hadn't been set in motion. I just hadn't expected it to be so hard.

The front door is closed behind me, and I'm leaning my back against the cold metal that I'm absolutely sure will never
take paint cleanly again, looking at the pile of garbage on the driveway and thinking about every single thing in there that's made each of the last moves with me.

I hadn't expected that everything would feel like a stone dropped to the bottom of a very deep well.

I'll spend another day painting, and by the time we're done, the girls and I will have the house spotless and as downright cute as we can, ready to make prospective buyers think about exactly what they can do with every room.

I'll make spice cake on the morning before the open house, and I'll leave it to cool on the counter while we're out.

I hate spice cake.

That's a small—but necessary—secret.

D
AVE SIMPSON WAITED
. It wouldn't be long, he thought, and he tried to keep his breathing even and slow. That's what they would expect him to do, that's what they would tell him to do. “Just breathe slowly, sir,” they'd say, just like that, pumping up the blood pressure cuff and checking his pulse before they even asked his name.

They'd ask his name even if they already knew it. Dave knew the drill—he'd heard it plenty of times before. Different paramedics, but the questions always the same order, the pattern set, Dave was sure, to cut the risk of mistakes. They'd ask a few questions, listen to the answers to try to make sure he was breathing properly, ask him if he was in any pain, where the pain was, and then they'd start the formal workup, one of them putting the details down in their notebook in quick shorthand, the other one with their hands travelling around his body, feeling here, looking there, like they were following a familiar road map.

Dave could feel the rough concrete steps through his pants up against the back of his legs, and against the heels of
both of his hands where he'd set his pyramid of body and arms, fixed in place and upright, leaning slightly backwards so that he felt solid. He hadn't fallen. It was important to tell them that he hadn't fallen. They'd ask. Halfway down the hill on Prescott, there were five short steps in the sidewalk because the grade was too steep. He'd just sort of slid down slowly, not letting go of the railing until he was fully settled. He felt like he was some kind of giant advertising balloon, but with a leak, the air running out as he bent and eased down. It was an ordered collapse—no rush, because it was so familiar to him. The air getting short, the edges of everything starting towards dark, and then someone noticing and asking if he needed help. Making the call for him, sending the ambulance on its way from the bay at the Health Sciences Centre.

He had waved her away afterwards, a young woman in a knee-length brown skirt and a square businesslike jacket, her face clearly caught halfway between concern about him and the need to already be somewhere else. She'd half knelt there next to him, one sharp nyloned knee out through the slit in her skirt, a hand on his shoulder briefly as if that short contact was the only first aid she knew how to give, as though mere comfort could be cure. He told her he'd be all right, that he'd be all right to just wait for the ambulance, saying that she could go on, that there “must be other things you've got to be doing.” Said it short, in bursts, two or three words at a time, the pauses measured as he tried to catch his breath. People like to help, but they like to be let off the hook too, Dave knew. To know that they've done their duty
but can be released from it before anything nasty or messy happens, anything that it might be hard to forget later.

Dave watched the woman walk away, caught her turning once to look at him at the corner of Prescott and Bond, looking back like she was afraid she might see him toppled over on his side. I'd wave if I had enough energy to lift my hand, Dave thought, but he didn't.

He felt the cool air against the damp of his skin. Dave listened to his breath rushing in and out, trying to make each breath come evenly, trying to stay calm, trying to will his throat to open. They'd say that too—“Stay calm, sir, just stay calm”—as if the panic were something you could simply wish away, as if being out of control were as easily dealt with as deciding to be back in control again. But it wasn't that easy.

There was sun in the maples on the other side of the street. Dave squinted over at them and decided he liked the way the light worked through the leaves, the way some were a brighter green—but just for a second—carved up by the light and the shadows of other leaves playing across them, so that the shapes weren't so much maple leaves as they were an assembly of countless and untrackable shards of different leaves, moving across one another in haphazard order. Like there was a message in there, even if the message was that the order everybody is always looking for is just a lie, Dave thought.

He could hear the siren now, distant and a little fractured, like the ambulance was going past occasional square buildings that blocked the rising and falling sound. He tried to imagine the paramedics in the front seats, the way they must
ride along totally used to the sound of the siren, so that it didn't have any urgency at all, the one in the passenger seat with a cup of coffee, his body pressed hard up against the door so that the motion of the ambulance didn't even slop the coffee over the edges of the cup.

A lot depends on the dispatchers, Dave realized. A lot depends on how they interpret what they're hearing over the phone, the sound of his voice on the other end of the line, and it's not right that their decision should be so subjective—that they could decide what kind of urgency an ambulance would have. Dave knew they could make the ambulance just sing—that they could go on the radio and say a few words and anyone who was riding with a coffee would be rolling down the window and throwing it outside, coffee and cup and lid and all, and they'd have their gloves on long before they stopped, even if the driver had to hold the steering wheel with his knees while he struggled to push the awkward fingers into place. And Dave suspected it was better now when he didn't make the call himself, if someone else took out their cellphone and pressed the three quick buttons, explaining in fast sentences just what it was they had come across.

He looked around, noticing—as he had before—how bright the colours were, how every single thing seemed more distinct and intense. Some part of him checking things off, sure that this was his last opportunity to gather it all in. Across the street, there was a cat in a front window, watching him.

What do cats see through windows? Dave considered it. Do they think they're looking at a real world, or is it just like
television to them—motion and flat colour and little more? Dave watched the cat stare at him and then look away, uninterested. A man walked by on the sidewalk, fast, talking deliberately on his cellphone, making it clear he had no time to be disturbed. He brushed by where Dave was sitting and didn't look back. Dave was leaning over towards the railing by then, watching the little stars gathering and whirling at the edges of his vision. Little flaring sparkles that you couldn't grasp if you tried to look straight at them. Like a moving frame around his field of vision, and now it was as though he was looking at the street through a long tunnel.

Dave could feel his throat closing over even more; he could feel it as simply as that. He thought this must be like what people feel if they're allergic to bees or peanuts and got that haphazard nut or sting. That clear consciousness, that distinct awareness of your body's betrayal, that few minutes' knowledge that you're the victim of a knee-jerk physical reaction gone all wrong.

Dave watched the ambulance round the corner at the bottom of Prescott Street, and when it did, he felt the weight in his chest lighten a bit, as though his body had realized there wasn't much waiting left, as though it didn't have to steel itself, as if it didn't have to keep rationing air. He watched the staggered flash of the white and red and yellow lights, and he wondered when they'd added the yellow ones; he knew he'd seen them before, he couldn't remember when he'd seen them first. Newer ambulances now, more equipment—but you still sometimes got one of the old ones. Dave always looked around the inside of those older ones like he
was recognizing an old friend, full of shiny surfaces and rattling, banging pieces of equipment.

They'd gotten new jackets too, the paramedics, sometime in the past two years. New jackets with a lot more yellow in them, reflective patterns on the back that made the paramedics stand out garishly like cut-outs of themselves, especially at night. Dave wondered if they minded being that obvious, or whether it was like any other uniform—the sort of thing you didn't mind, because it was a sign of what you did and where you fit.

Dave could remember when there was a place where he fit. Not with a single formal uniform as much as with an understanding of what it was he was supposed to wear. White or light blue shirts with a collar, a necktie—the more staid, the better—and pants with a sharp crease. At least, with a sharp crease first thing in the morning. All of it saying that the world was under control—in fact, everything was under control, restrained, fastened, buttoned down.

He'd been with the city, in the planning department, deep into the world of easements and green space. Then there was a new mayor with a background in business and a public mantra that the only thing you could really control was the size of your expenses. Then, everyone was talking about “the economy contracting,” and there began to be empty desks, although at first it was just the part-timers and the co-op students.