The broken places, p.32
The Broken Places, page 32
He let them stay the night. What choice did he have? The old woman, not exactly spry to begin with, can hardly walk since her fall in the dining room. She spent the night on the sofa, Stedman concludes as he regards her sleeping form now. The same morning sun that sparkles diamonds over the ocean, today glinting and playful beyond the sliding glass doors, falls harsh on the furrowed old woman, whose fish mouth emits a series of light, moist snores.
He is stuck with this woman. Likewise her caregiver, who slept on the leather sofa opposite by the looks of the untidy nest there: coats, sweaters, scarves, even the striped Hudson’s Bay blanket, a patriotic adornment that to his knowledge has not covered a human body until now. The early sun catches an object underneath the leather couch — a wine bottle, he sees as he pulls it out. Empty. He kneels, reaches in farther, finds a second, then a third, each drained dry. Damn it all! The third is the 2002 Château Lafite Rothschild he’s been saving for an occasion that matches the vintage. An occasion like getting bought out of his company, should that liberation day ever arrive.
Wonderful. The nurse, who may have also pocketed his twenty thousand dollars — he’s still not sure which of the hired people took his stash — has gotten drunk on his most expensive wine and is wandering around his house, her nutso patient forgotten and left to drool on his furniture. God, what if the old woman, immobile all night with no one to help her, did worse than drool? He ventures near and sniffs, but detects nothing save a stale smell of soda crackers. There’s one thing to be grateful for.
The gardener spent the night too, judging by the air mattress near the fireplace, where sits the telltale ball cap that every handyman wears. Why? To signal to each other that they’re of the same tribe? Where the hell is the gardener so early in the morning? Off checking his property? Making friends with his neighbours? Tending to his daughter?
Yesterday’s anger flares, then sputters. These are all things Stedman should be doing. He knows it, yet the most he’s been able to do so far is get out of bed. This morning, besides an aching face and a mind gone to soup, he woke with bashed-up hands and a deadweight of guilt.
Gay? Could things be any more screwed up? Bad enough that some blue-collar stranger takes over his house and maybe steals his money. Then Stedman has to go and hit the guy, and it turns out he’s gay. Now, to the list of head injuries, lost Merck account, untold corporate damage, and general uselessness in his own home, Stedman can add the humiliation of being a gay basher.
Standing over the air mattress, he scuffs at his unbandaged jaw. He hates having a day’s growth, but he can’t bring himself to shave.
Part of it is the pain — the right side of his head feels like it’s in a vice. Mainly he doesn’t want to look in a mirror.
He hit a gay man.
How was he supposed to know the gardener is gay? He doesn’t look gay; he doesn’t sound it. He drives a truck and wears frayed work clothes. He’s got a bad haircut and a ball cap, for God’s sake. But he is gay, and Stedman hit him. Stedman, who back in Hamilton beat up every snot-nosed kid who dared make fun of Tim. He only had to do it a few times before the word spread: Leave the little faggot alone or his big brother’s gonna whale on ya.
He scared himself yesterday, he will admit it. The paralysis, the self-pity, the loss of control. Then the shame. He’s an achiever, a winner, yet what little he has accomplished since the earthquake he has done badly. Disaster has not brought out the best in Tayne Stedman.
To top it all off, Sidney despises him. Yesterday, before the incident with the gardener, she made several attempts to coax her father out of his office. “What about Mom?” she asked plaintively. “We’ve got to find her. We’ve got to talk to her. And May. We need to find them both so we’ll know if —” Her voice broke at that point. He didn’t reply. “Dad, why are you here?” she asked the next time. “How come you won’t leave your office? You’re acting so weird. Like you’re hiding.” Then, after he hit Joe, the way she gaped at him — God, he never wants to see that again — like he’s a monster.
Since then he’s hardly seen Sidney. She appeared at his bedroom door once in the evening, hands on hips, looking pointedly off to the side. “They need food,” she said. “We have to feed them. And it looks like they’re staying the night. You have to come down and help.” Wearily he shook his head, said he needed to think. Still she refused to look at him, and her disdain sapped his last ounce of strength. “You’re my big girl,” he told her. “You know what to do.”
She does know. Sidney is smart and willful, her mother’s daughter, and it’s apparent that she got everyone settled last night. But every girl needs her daddy. Sidney has to know how much he loves her. He’s got to make her see that.
It’s true, what Charlotte says — he’s been neglecting the home front. Workaholic, she spits at him when he begs off some anniversary or school meeting. She’s probably right. Years ago, he figured that once GlobalTech went from big to enormous he could ease up, take the odd weekend off, go for drives with the family, which would have expanded by then — he and Charlotte were trying for a baby. Wrong on all counts. Eventually they gave up on more kids, and soon thereafter sex, and as the company grew so did people’s expectations, including his wife’s. You can control the market in eastern Europe, she told him, and she was right. Ease out of the US, she warned right before the 2008 collapse. India and China: follow the growth is her admonition now. Every year he works more and more, later and later, resigned to the fact that bigger is never big enough. Only lately has he grasped that the only way to unburden himself from the golem he has created is to pass it to someone else.
Damn it all, how did yesterday affect stock prices? Checking the market is one more thing he needs to do, besides getting hold of Marcus and May and Charlotte —
She’s not coming back.
— and reassuring his little girl that they will be fine. Sidney may not want to look at him let alone listen to him, but she needs to know that she is safe and that he’ll do anything to keep her that way, even slugging that asshole of a gardener.
The morning sun that slants through the glass doors brings him purpose. He will surmount this catastrophe the same way he conquers his business challenges, day after day, year after year. He will devise a strategy; he will retake his castle. Be a man, Charlotte hisses whenever he needs whipping into action, whenever he slips a toe into the deep, feathered comfort of passivity. It is her voice he hears now, rousing him.
She’s not coming back.
It doesn’t matter. He is his own man, beholden to no one. He does his best when he goes it alone.
As if to challenge his solo status, there comes a sound so out of place in this upside-down world that for a moment he fails to recognize it: the doorbell, followed soon by a barrage of pounding.
He arrives in the foyer right behind Sidney, who narrows her eyes at him before standing aside. He swings open the heavy fir door, perfectly intact after all that has happened, to find two helmeted men on his porch. Soldiers — or rather reservists, he deduces from their unlined faces and tidy camouflage.
“Everyone all right in there, sir?” The speaker, the shorter and stockier of the two, can’t be more than sixteen. His voice quavers as if still seeking its adult pitch.
“Thank you, yes. All fine.” Stedman starts to close the door. “Wait! Dad!”
“Sir?” The stocky youth wedges a boot in the door, then a leg. He peers around the doorframe at Sidney. “Ma’am? Is there a problem?”
Ma’am. Stedman guffaws. Who do these clowns think they are?
The silent soldier, the tall one, folds his arms and eyes Stedman up and down. Sidney pushes into the doorway. “We don’t know where my mom is. Or May, she’s our maid. Can you, like, make a call?”
The soldier touches a rectangle holstered at his hip. “All we’ve got are sat phones. Emergency use only.”
Stedman rests a hand on Sidney’s head. For once she’s not wearing the metal bowl. “Honey, run upstairs. I’ll look after this.”
The second soldier, the tall one, clears his throat. “Sir, we have several injured parties from an evacuated highrise down the way. We need to keep them somewhere safe until we can ship them to a treatment centre. Their building is not stable. Requesting permission to billet them here, sir.”
“Dammit, man, you can’t be serious. I’ve got a house full of strangers already, one of them injured.”
“Two injured,” says Sidney.
Does she mean the gardener? He’s got, what, a couple of bruises? Or does she mean him, her father? He touches his bandaged jaw, then shakes his head emphatically even though it hurts his skull. “There’s no room here, no room at all.”
“Dad!” Sidney looks horrified. “We’ve got tons of room.”
“Absolutely not,” he tells the soldiers. “We’ve got more here than we can handle. Now I ask you respectfully to leave my property before —”
“Daddy, come on.” Sidney tugs at his arm. “You can take them next door.”
The soldiers turn to the voice behind them, unmistakeably smug. Half hidden behind the soldiers, standing a step below them, the gay gardener shoots Stedman a laser-like glare. “Vincent has plenty of room and wants to help.”
What the hell? The hired man is everywhere.
Joe steps onto the porch and the stocky soldier gasps. “Sir! Are you all right?”
Stedman freezes. Joe’s face is like something from a horror film, makeup and prosthetics courtesy of the special effects studios over by GlobalTech headquarters. His bottom lip is split open, a reddish-black gash, his cheeks are purpled, one eye is swollen shut. What the hell happened? Did the guy fall? There’s no way Stedman did all that. No way.
“Sir?” The stocky soldier awaits Joe’s answer.
“Looks worse than it is,” Joe says. “Here, I’ll take you next door, introduce you to Vincent. He can help you with whoever’s injured.”
The soldiers glance again at Stedman and Sidney.
“Ma’am?” The tall soldier steps toward them and raises his voice. “Ma’am, do you need help? Are you going to faint?” He shoulders past Sidney and crosses into the house. Stedman turns in time to glimpse the nurse’s back as she disappears from the foyer, running.
Everyone here is crazy, Stedman thinks as the soldiers turn back down the steps, led by Joe, who limps slightly.
“Excellent,” Stedman mutters. “Faking a limp. Not enough to take my money, he’s going to come back and sue me.” He drops his hand onto Sidney’s shoulder. At least he took charge this time. It feels good. “Come on, Sweetpea. Let’s go inside.”
She looks at him, his daughter. Her hair hangs in sheets of gold, her eyes are big and dusky, and her expression is one he has only ever seen on the face of his wife: contempt, pure and withering.
* * *
They’re in Shuswap country, approaching Salmon Arm. Endless lake, rolling farmland, forested hills, towering mountains. “Bloody beautiful,” Bryan keeps saying. “A guy could stay awhile in a place like this.”
Charlotte sees none of it. She is on the floor in front of the passenger seat, which she has slid back to create more space, the adjustment mechanism unoiled and resistant. She’s not doing what a red-blooded woman riding with an unattached Aussie hunk should be doing on her knees in a moving vehicle. That happened earlier, before they checked out of the motel in Hope. They’d gathered their few belongings and were about to shut the door on the dismal beige room when Bryan grabbed her hand and rubbed it against his denimed bulge. “Gonna be a long drive, Lottie,” he said. “Not sure I can make it unless you help me out.” They neglected to close the curtains of their ground-level unit, whether out of haste or inclination she wasn’t sure. Anyone walking by could have seen Bryan open-legged on the bed, his shaggy blond head thrown back, her brunette one bobbing up and down. The risk of it was electrifying.
“Damn.” One arm shoved under the seat, Charlotte brushes against dirt, crumbs, wrappers, and God! something moist. “What the fuck?” She withdraws her hand and sniffs, unable to resist. Fermented apple juice — less revolting than she expected. Bryan smiles and the dent appears in his right cheek, a rugged divot she has traced with her finger and licked clean of sweat.
“It’s like a compost heap down here,” she says.
“Yeah, I’m hoping for mushrooms eventually. Living off the land, you know.” He glances at her again as she shakes dry her apple-sticky fingers. “Make that living off the hand.”
It’s a lame remark, one of many he’s come up with. Her Australian’s face is chiselled and his pants are full of life, but his attempts at humour fall flat every time. However. She’s not with him for his sparkling repartee.
“Any luck?”
“No. I can’t find it anywhere.” She sits back in the seat and goes through the Birkin bag again, this time removing every object and making a pile on her lap. She put it in her purse yesterday, she knows she did, and she never took it out again. It’s got to be here.
“Come on, Lottie, who cares? It’s over, right? You’re rid of the guy.”
She stares at the tube of lipstick in her hand. Rid of the guy. Bryan is right: Lottie wouldn’t care. She is divorced and on her own. Why fret about a wedding ring that has lost all meaning?
She quits rummaging and gazes out the truck’s pitted windshield. They’ve arrived in Salmon Arm, which despite the quaint name looks like a generic highway town: gas stations, fast food chains, strip malls, mattress shops. There’s supposed to be beauty in small towns, but all she ever sees is this part, the grimy commercial spine.
No husband, what would that be like? Charlotte has contemplated it after a bad fight or when Tayne goes ghost and hardly comes home, but her thoughts always run toward separation or divorce. Being rid of him — somehow that’s different. It’s like erasing him and all evidence of him, an entire folder deleted from her system.
“I give up.” She starts to refill her handbag. “I can’t find it.”
“Want me to help? You know, fresh eyes. Someone else looks, sometimes they see things you can’t. Want me to pull over?”
Fucking hell — the money.
“A lady never lets a man look in her purse.” Charlotte believes no such thing, but she has neither the time nor the desire to concoct a plausible explanation for why the zippered compartment of her bag holds twenty thousand dollars in cash, actually a little less after her purchases in Kamloops. The truth will sound ridiculous: I took it from my husband to buy an orange Birkin bag. Because the money’s mine in the first place. No, the truth will sound like a lie. She’s not supposed to have a husband.
She reaches over and gives Bryan’s thigh a squeeze. “Sweet of you to offer.”
Being rid of Tayne. She could go anywhere. She could start over, like the man she read about in the Chicago airport. Say adios to BC, where she lives only because of Tayne, and head for a proper city like Montreal, a grande dame that throws shade on the pimply adolescent that is Vancouver. She could have her own schedule, her own choices. Maybe — her own convictions. No household to run, no office either, no parties to organize, no scavenger hunts for cheese, which she and Bryan have been nibbling but can’t seem to make a dent in. No need to supervise May — no need for May at all. No booking painters and window cleaners and moss removers and gardeners, people to put up the Christmas lights and people to take them down again. No making doctor’s and dentist’s and eye and hair appointments for her husband and her daughter, no twisting her days to get them there on the right date at the right time. No monitoring Sidney’s state and mood and smell: Is she sober or high? Truthful or lying? Sullen or ready to detonate? No having to manage the girl, set expectations, and enforce consequences, because — and here the penny drops — there is no girl.
That, of course, is the distinction. That’s why being rid of Tayne is so different from leaving him. Leave him and he’s still there, and so is Sidney. Charlotte is still a wife, just a divorced wife. She is still a mother, because you can never divorce your child. But erase Tayne and he never existed. And neither did Sidney.
Bryan’s window is down a few inches. The breeze stirs her hair and takes the edge off the funky smell emanating from the bag on the floor. The goddamn cheese — will she never be free of it? Irritation at all things goat, and all that the cheese stands for, makes her squirm. “How about some music?” Bryan fiddles with the scratched-up console and the CD kicks in, simple plodding drumbeat, twangy guitar. The Black Keys, a band Charlotte recognizes from Sidney’s playlists.
She balls up her hands, nails biting into her palms.
Sidney is her flesh and blood, and Charlotte is a monster. That’s the only word for a mother who wants to erase her own child. It’s one thing to crave a break now and again. What parent doesn’t? It’s another entirely to wish away your only offspring. Mothers abandon their kids every day, but they are drug-addled mothers, abusive mothers, crazy, suicidal, schizo mothers. Charlotte is none of those. She is healthy, successful, organized. She excels at every challenge, whether she enjoys it or not. There’s no question Sidney tries her patience, mocks her, hurts her — even, a few times, physically — and now humiliates her on social media. But for Charlotte to actually desert her daughter means entertaining a ghastly admission — that she is the worst, most unnatural kind of woman: a mother who doesn’t want to be one. It means accepting that she has turned into her own mother, who once told her, It was never my job to love you, only to make you independent.
A different song begins, mellow and moody, a Coldplay tune from ages ago. Salmon Arm is behind them now, and the Trans-Canada unrolls, smooth, wide, and slow. Cars, motorbikes, even transport trucks whiz by in the passing lane. Bryan’s battered Dodge Ram putters along. She’s an old gal, he said when they hopped into it this morning; she doesn’t like to be pushed.
