The Chrome Suite (27 page)

They join the flow of people moving down the centre aisle of the store, beneath the sparkling revolving snowflakes suspended from the ceiling. They walk among the sounds of paper rustling, the whirr of cash registers, and the murmur of many voices. Gold and silver garlands wound around pillars glitter harshly, and poinsettias appear like red clots on the wall in front of her. She sees the whole floor at once and yet every detail of it too. She misses nothing. She sees her mind as a camera clicking and storing information. They’re on the first floor, near the south exit, she notes, and near the car park. Sporting Goods is to the left, Toys to the right, where a baby howls in disappointment as its mother pries a package from its fingers. Paint and Wallpaper directly across from Toys.

They step out of the traffic moving down the centre aisle and stop to look at a display of skis. Amy notes three clerks, two at the sports counter and one speaking to a customer. She’s searching for security personnel. She and Shirley cross the aisle and stand in front of a counter of model airplane kits. Shirley takes one from the shelf while Amy scans the toy section for security personnel, and spots one, a middle-aged woman in Paint and Wallpaper. What she is doing, Amy sees, is pretending to tidy up shelves, while really watching two kids huddled together on the other side of the model airplanes. Amy knows where that security person will be for the next little while. Shirley sets the model kit back onto the shelf and they move into the main artery once again. Amy follows her as they pass by Optical and the row of green vinyl chairs where people wait to have their eyes tested.

They enter the jewellery department. Shirley stops at a carousel of gold chains and begins to rotate it slowly, as though deep in thought, and then appears crestfallen, as if she can’t find what she wants. There are only two clerks in Jewellery. One leans against the counter with her back to them, chatting, while the other tidies up around the cash register. That means two counters of jewellery
unattended, Amy realizes. Another display rotates slowly, Shirley searching for what she wants, but Amy knows that she already has several gold chains hidden inside her coat sleeve.

Just then a woman steps up beside Shirley. At her side is a little girl, mitts dangling from both sleeves on idiot strings. The girl twitches with impatience as her mother stops to browse. “Gosh, they cost the earth, don’t they?” the woman exclaims, and Amy detects a British accent. It’s not Security, but Shirley moves away, not taking any chances. Chicken, Amy thinks, and steps into her place.

“I’d like to have a look at the rings, please,” she says loudly, impatiently, as though she’s been standing and waiting for some time now for the clerks to be finished with their little visit. They both turn, surprised and then a bit annoyed. The woman with the child moves up beside Amy to look, too, as she examines the tray of rings the clerk has set down. She hovers at Amy’s shoulder as Amy slips onto her finger a pearl ring surrounded by a cluster of emerald chips. “It’s for my mother,” Amy says. “For Christmas.”

“Quite nice,” the woman comments as Amy holds up her hand to better admire the ring. The child at her side sighs deeply and begins yanking at her mother’s coat.

“Not bad. But she has a large hand. I don’t think this will suit her.” Without removing the pearl ring, she selects another, a plain band with a single clear stone. Too much like a wedding ring, she thinks, and puts it back into the velvet tray.

“I beg your pardon?” Shirley calls for attention from the other jewellery counter and draws the remaining clerk away. Amy picks out a third ring, a large moonstone surrounded by tiny red stones. She slips it onto her middle finger and spreads her fingers, on each one a ring, two that are her own. “I just don’t know,” she says. “What do you think?” she asks the woman.

“Your mother must have a November birthday, then,” she says. Their attention is arrested suddenly by the sound of a carousel
display crashing down against the glass counter. The clerk turns from the tray of rings, watching as Shirley, profusely apologetic, assists the other clerk in righting it. Too much make-up, Amy thinks suddenly. Exaggerated. Shirley has plastered on too much eyeshadow and mascara. But this works to Amy’s advantage, because the clerk handling the tray of rings becomes suspicious and her attention is diverted.

With the moonstone ring still on, its stone now twisted to the palm side of her finger, Amy removes the pearl ring and wedges it carefully back into the velvet display case. “It’s okay, thanks a lot,” she says to the distracted clerk. The bulge of the stone is cool against her skin. A seventy-five-dollar ring. A gift for Margaret for Christmas, if she can think of a way to explain how she came to afford it. The clerk smiles in answer, still preoccupied by the fuss at the counter where Shirley and the other clerk gather up the spilled cards of earrings and pins. Amy wants to grin and hold the ring up for Shirley to see. Check this out, eh? Got you beat this time. But her exhilaration vanishes with a sudden chill of fear. She’s being watched, she senses it. She looks down and into the face of the young girl at the woman’s side. The girl stares at the moonstone’s silver band. Amy’s stomach lurches. Even while she knows it’s not possible, it is the face of Jill she’s looking into. The child’s mother crosses the aisle, calling for the child to follow, and the girl walks backwards, mitts dangling like another pair of hands at her side. She grins up at Amy, her expression knowing, and at the same time her dark eyes are filled with scorn. Then she turns away and, with a little skip, catches up to her mother. Amy watches brown braids shift against the child’s red coat until the girl and her mother are swallowed up in the jittery kaleidoscope of Christmas.

“Have you decided if you want the moonstone?” The clerk’s voice intrudes bluntly.

Amy swears under her breath. She twists it from her finger and drops it onto the counter. “I don’t want it. It’s overpriced garbage.”

The clerk’s mouth drops open. “Well, I am sorry,” she snaps. “I don’t price it. I just sell it.”

Amy hears Shirley call her name, looks up, and sees that she’s on the escalator, going to the second floor. Behind her, and staring straight at the back of her head, is Security, a man wearing glasses and brown cords. Come on, Shirley beckons, and then looks puzzled as Amy turns away and walks towards the north exit of the store.

It had begun to snow while they were in the store, light dry crystals, but now as Amy walks along Portage Avenue, heading downtown to the bus depot where she’ll wait for Shirley, the snow grows heavier, like huge wet pieces of tissue, and melts in her hair, making it stringy and limp. Her white bucks grow sodden from the stinging cold and her toes stiff, as though welded together. The sky turns mauve and begins to brighten the closer she gets to downtown, the avenue becoming festive then with the coloured lights of Christmas entwined in wreaths of spruce boughs mounted along the centre boulevard. When she reaches the Hudson’s Bay store, she stops for a moment. Recorded carol music floats out across a manger scene above the main entrance. The window display is a living room on Christmas morning. A tall blond man is standing in a plaid bathrobe off to one side, one hand in his pocket, the other casually holding a pipe. Two mannequin children crouch at the Christmas tree looking at the gifts. Their beautiful, well-groomed mother smiles and watches from where she sits in a Queen Anne chair, an unopened gift on her lap. Wet snowflakes tumble down from the top of the department store, down through the music, children’s voices singing “White Christmas.”

The warm and happy family Christmas display fades and in its place Amy sees her reflection in the plate glass, hands plunged into
jacket pockets, thin shoulders hunched up to her ears. Reflected above her head in the window is the sign on a building directly across the street:
ROYAL BANK
. She walks to the intersection and waits for the light to change. Tinny-sounding, she thinks of the carol music pushing through the traffic sounds.

When Amy returns moments later and enters the Hudson’s Bay store, her pocket heavy with five dollars’ worth of quarters, she thinks, What do I want for Christmas? Anticipating Timothy’s question. Her fingers begin to thaw and tingle in the warm air as she feeds quarters into the pay phone. I want to get on a bus. Visit you for Christmas. She frames what she will say. Her breathing becomes fast, suddenly, with the quickening of her heartbeat. She listens as the first ring cuts through the crackling of static. I want to live with you. He has been waiting for her to make the first move. Perhaps he’s been hurt or puzzled over why she stopped writing and calling, thinking that she doesn’t care or is too happily occupied in her own life. On the third ring he answers and her mouth freezes. She thinks her heart will stop.

“Hello?” He asks once again when she doesn’t speak. “Margaret? Margaret, is that you?” He pauses and Amy hears what might be a heavy sigh. “You know you really should give it up, Margaret. This must be costing you a fortune,” Timothy says, his voice suddenly hard. He hangs up.

When she steps outside the air seems colder, and once again she feels the bite of dampness. She stamps her feet, waiting for the green light. She’s stunned by the revelation that Margaret calls Timothy. That her mother stands in the hall at the telephone listening to his voice and not speaking.

She waits on a bench in the bus depot, watching the clock and the patrons in the Salisbury Coffee Shop as they come and go. Pain shoots through her toes as they begin to warm up. The skinny ticket agent behind the Grey Goose wicket has been glancing at her off
and on and she knows she looks bad, like a runaway, a drowned and decrepit rat. She smiles at him from time to time to try to convince him otherwise. For half an hour a young man in a U.S. Air Force uniform recounts the story of his life and what it’s like to live in the city of New York. When his bus leaves, an old man takes his place on the bench beside her. He sets several bulging bags onto the floor at his feet and begins telling Amy how lucky she is to be living in this time and country. His tongue is thick and slow with an accent. He’s fifteen minutes into his speech when Shirley, flushed with excitement, enters through the arrivals and departures gate. They go up to the washroom so she can show Amy the sweater, cosmetics, and jewellery she has stolen. “So, what’s with you?” she stops to ask. Amy shrugs and says nothing. Shoplifting has become boring, that’s all. Not her scene any more.

Margaret Barber looks at the clock and wonders why Amy isn’t home from school yet and whether she has gone downtown again. Whether she will even show up for supper. She dusts flour across the kitchen-table top and begins rolling flat a chunk of cookie dough. She works from the inside out, applying an even pressure to the rolling pin so that the dough doesn’t crinkle or crack. When she’s satisfied with the result, an almost perfectly shaped circle, she begins to hum to the music playing on the radio as she dips a Christmas tree cookie-cutter into flour and presses it into the circle of dough. “For unto us a child is born,” the choir sings on the radio. It’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but still it’s quite beautiful, Margaret thinks. “And the government shall be upon His shoulder,” the choir sings. It doesn’t matter to Margaret that she’s not going to eat the cookies. Or that, because Mel and Amy are going to parties, she will pass Christmas Eve taking communion at the Alliance Gospel Church, and then the remainder of the evening alone, and
that the following day, while Mel and Amy sleep off their party hangovers, she will walk down to her parents’ for a pinched, silent Christmas meal. The cookies are for others. For the Christmas boxes she and the other women at the Alliance Gospel Church will pack and deliver to the less fortunate. Secretly, when it’s dark outside, she’ll set the boxes down on the back steps or just inside a porch door; the recipient need never know the hand of the giver. “ ‘For unto us a child is born, unto us, a son is given. … And his name shall be called. …’ “ Margaret sings along with the choir. “ ‘Councillor! … The Everlasting Father! Prince of Peace!’ “ She sings loudly, feeling joyous, trembling with the beauty of the music and with the vision she has of the Prince of Peace standing white-robed and barefoot on a rim of clouds, eyes filled with the terrible white fire of his love, and at his side is Jill. Then suddenly she thinks of Amy and the picture falls apart, her joy vanishing. There’s a reason why she has just thought of Amy. She wipes her hands on her apron and goes out into the hallway and calls Mrs. Hardy.

“Edith? I’m worried about Amy. I’m not certain why, I just am.” She listens to Mrs. Hardy’s response with a slight bit of annoyance and she has an unloving thought. It is easy to say to trust in the Lord with all your heart and not to worry when you haven’t had a child of your own to worry over, when you have your man at your side. “Do you think we could take a minute and pray for Amy?” she asks.

The woman agrees and begins to pray, and Margaret closes her eyes and presses her forehead against the wall beside the telephone. “Oh yes, Jesus,” Margaret sighs. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she breathes while the woman prays, believing, trusting with every single cell of her body that there is still time and God will yet save Amy.

nd then, when I was seventeen, I made a date with a rapist. His name was Dave. He was a six-feet-six, size-fifteen-boots man endowed, I discovered, with an enormous mouth and a rather small prick.