Cities of Refuge (17 page)

The letter was not coming together. They were never easy, or newsy. Rosemary was not a writer of newsy letters. She wanted things to matter, to have meaning and force. And Sammy, who had no meaning in her life, who had not been granted peace or physical beauty, who had none of the certitude that Rosemary had found in God’s dictate, expected as much from her. And so she wrote slowly, composing a structure of words, a consoling architecture built line by line, each one struck once, hard and clean. Sammy always played the tough case, dismissive of her sister’s God, and Rosemary had learned not to mention Him anymore. And so it was important that she write prayerfully.

But tonight she was self-conscious. Sometimes her own need for Sammy, her doubt that her sister would ever be free of her dread, made her write with too much intention. She insisted on the reality of saving wonders. She wrote of using pain for wisdom, and the selfless goodness of others for hope; of gaining purchase on her days, and gathering strength to climb out of what Father André called “the morass of pointless anxiety” – but her own language was flat. There was nothing real in it, and certainly nothing of God. You couldn’t sit around and wait for inspiration any more than the world could. You had to summon it. Some nights, though, it turned out you hadn’t prepared yourself, and the words weren’t granted. Those were the nights for the Guinness and Bach.

There wasn’t anything in the letter about fire and risk or any of the battle metaphors she herself lived by. Rosemary was a soldier.
She knew the enemy. She wanted to tell Sammy about sly King David, a killer and poet. The great faiths were founded upon blood sacrifice, but she certainly couldn’t tell her sister that.

She tried to say something about prayer and doubt. In one of his sermons last winter – there had been ten or eleven people that night, most who’d come in from the cold, some of them drunk, but a better than average turnout – Father André had pointed out that the word “precarious” comes from the same root as “prayer.” She’d made a note at the time to save this connection for Sammy. Now she wrote, “Anyone who’s really awake (many aren’t) lives in doubt. But if they’re asked the right way of the right power, prayers are often answered. I know this is true. Please imagine what it means to me to know this.”

The conditions were not best for prayer lately. Her A key was sticking. She got her repairs and supplies from an old man who barely had space left for himself in an apartment crammed with wheels and hammers, platens and screws, lettered keys. The place smelled of fresh inky ribbons and grease. His name was Mr. Stubbs. She couldn’t see him in there without carrying around the picture of the place for the whole day, this man trying to make repairs in the world he’d made of his mind. When she’d invited him to come to the church, he’d said nothing. He only ever talked about typewriters.

And lately the television made its assaults from the basement all evening. Rodrigo watched with his finger on the mute button, trying to anticipate every shout and siren, but it was hopeless. It seemed that whenever Rosemary passed by the screen with a basket of laundry there was brain matter on a wall or a bullet hole in a dead woman’s naked chest. She assumed these were the American shows that were messing up
the jury pools down there. Rodrigo just called them “murder shows.” He’d seen his first one at sixteen. It might not have seemed to him like make-believe.

Tonight he was in the living room, standing at the front window, looking for Luis like a boy for an older brother. He could simply stare for twenty or thirty minutes at a time, with no book or phone in hand. “The patience of peasants,” as an idiot former colleague had called it. A patience often mistaken for blankness. But it was hardly empty. Not in Rodrigo’s case. She’d seen this sort of near-violent calm before. Rosemary had been there the day of his Review Board hearing, on one of the tips she got from lawyers sympathetic with her goals. Rodrigo had looked on neutrally as the evidence was presented until, through a translator, his lawyer explained that the details of the drug soldiers’ activities, which Rodrigo had acknowledged were accurate, had been put forward not in defence of his claim, but rather against it. The horrors that had sent him running north in the first place now revisited him in the accusation that he was an actor in these atrocities, and he began to fall apart. His face didn’t change, it abandoned him. He had had to be wrestled from the hearing room.

“I’m having a drink,” she announced. “Would you like one?”

“No, thank you.” He turned and looked at her briefly with his thin, hollowed gaze, then turned back and said suddenly, “There is someone watching us.”

He moved away from the window. She walked into the room and stood still.

“A man, in the park. I thought there was a man in the shadow and then when I looked again I saw him moving to the tree.”

She went forward to the window.

“To the right of the bench. Behind the tree, to the right.”

She saw nothing. Either the man had concealed himself or he was gone. Or he’d been imagined. There was a point at which sensible paranoia crossed into illness – she looked for it constantly in herself and her boarders – and this may have been an early warning, she supposed. Whomever Rodrigo had been before he came to Canada, it was Canada that had forced him to imagine himself as a killer. He didn’t have to imagine that he was a hunted one.

He retreated to the basement.

There was a movement beyond the tree. A man walking away? The tree obscured him almost perfectly. He was meaningless, this stranger, or else something was wrong and there was nothing she could do about it. And then, suddenly, there he was, just a man lost in thought, waiting patiently for his terrier to piss.

She sipped her stout and contemplated her slight dread of Luis’s arrival. He always made a show of arriving. A sustained “hellooo” and a broad smile, a prepared comment on the beauty of her home or the food she’d dropped off. His forced manner saddened her each time. She could hear any number of horror stories and witness killing judgments and actual family-splitting removals, she could feel whole lost lives, but it was the way a new Canadian came through a door that got to her. Just once she’d like him to arrive as a solemn presence, or as whomever he was in the lonely dark.

He knocked his four knocks – tat-tat, tat-tat – and she opened the door. He was wearing a dark red windbreaker over jeans, and cheap canvas runners, as if he’d just been sailing. His looks were often out of place. He’d once appeared in cheap cowboy boots and a western shirt. And tonight he had a prop. He handed her a batch of mondongo, corn soup with tripe. He held out a plastic bowl and she took it.

“Thank Teresa for me.”

“You should hide it from Rodrigo.” There was the smile.

He stood in the entranceway. If she invited him to come in or sit down, he’d make his excuse – he and Rodrigo were expected somewhere, they were already late – and so she didn’t invite him, but turned and walked into the kitchen and put the bowl in the fridge. Then she called down to Rodrigo.

He came up and she told him the man had been no one, walking his dog.

“He thought he saw a man in the park,” Rosemary explained to Luis. “He did see one. But it was okay.”

Luis hadn’t moved. As if his shoes were muddy.

“Maybe the man out there, he’s in love with you, Rosemary. He comes with his dog to sing at your window.”

He put his hand on his heart and looked up at the ceiling with a face in sweet pain and sang “Oh, my love, Rosemaryyy” and then laughed at himself. Or at her. She wasn’t sure.

Rodrigo appeared and went straight to the door. He and Luis never greeted one another. It lent to the impression they were up to something on these nights. Hiding things from her. On the nights they dressed like this, presumably they weren’t heading for work but trying to find Rodrigo a woman. There was a dance club the Colombians favoured. She didn’t want to know the details.

“Should we leave in the back?” Rodrigo asked. It was only a courtesy to her, to show he was cautious.

“No. It’s fine”

“The man hides in the park until we leave,” said Luis. “Then he comes to your door with a dog and flowers. He steals them from the park maybe.”

“Okay, enough,” she said. “You two keep out of trouble. If you get arrested, Rodrigo, no one can help you.”

He was busy tying his shoes.

“Did you hear Rosemary?” Luis asked.

“Yes.” He stood. “Yes. No troubles.”

She had explained the rules when he moved in. He must always have his false
ID
. He could never be in trouble. He could never be standing nearby it. He could not defend a friend. He could never drive a car. He must always have cash for a subway or taxi. If he was sick or injured, he was to go to this hospital and not that one. He must always know his false name and his story and her address and number. No friends or lovers could ever know his real story, not even Luis, though he likely already did. If he was in trouble, he was to go to the church, not to anyone’s home.

Luis left first. Rodrigo paused as he was about to leave, and then turned and approached her. To her astonishment, he embraced her. She hugged him uncertainly, on delay, her head laid against his chest. They had never touched, not once, and now he held her like a grown son. He said nothing and didn’t meet her eyes, then left. She went to the window and watched the men walk away.

When her Guinness was gone, Rosemary returned to her letter and found herself writing with new fluency. She told Sammy that despair only proved a depth of heart and a willingness to be open to loss, and that sorrow and loss were not to be feared but accepted, “and then we should put them up on our bedroom shelves like those hippos you used to collect – remember Mr. Boy? – and look at them now and then. But Sammy, you need to celebrate all your feelings, and when you do, you’ll find so much to be happy about, there’ll be victories, new ones and
old ones rediscovered. You can’t celebrate triumphs without also accepting loss, or put away your losses without the courage to shout out at your triumphs. And when you least expect it, between the wins and losses, in the calm, you’ll see that everything, all of it, is truly amazing.”

She didn’t want to end there but suddenly she remembered herself, the one who’d received the embrace. She so seldom had reason to think of her physical self. There was little joy to be taken in it, not anymore. Her response hadn’t been warm and pure, but complicated and willed. And yet a young man had put his arms around her and either she dismissed the moment and tried to forget it or she took her own advice.

She tried to feel what had been exchanged, but she was not allowed, and so was left with the wish, unsentimental, that she could have felt more. She wished Sammy could feel differently, and she could feel more.

She pictured her sister’s troubles lined up on the shelf. Beside them, on the wall, the long-ago school photo of their dead little brother. The sisters lived a thousand miles apart but slept in the same room each night.

When the letter was finished she sealed it and affixed the stamp, and gathered it with the others and left the house. The mailbox was four blocks away. Along the residential streets, people were out walking, or talking and laughing porch to porch. The streetlights spilling on the cars, and teens heading downtown inside the kind of summer night that inspires music and myths and life-altering mistakes.

She opened the box and dropped them away and the door closed with a hollow, metal-muffle sound and, for a moment, she didn’t know where she was.

When she got home there was a phone message from a policewoman. She had a few questions and could they meet. Jesus, said Rosemary. She said it again, the name of the Lord, and again, the curse and prayer of it together that received and held her.

D
onald and Marian were in bed. Kim wrote them a note and left the house. She took her mother’s car, not really sure what she was doing, where she was going, and she drove the tree-lined avenues of her girlhood. She tried to remember who she’d been at fourteen. A girl with three talking parents, living in a pocket of white. She’d loved being in her body, she remembered, a dancer with sore ankles who floated when she walked, a gymnast with bloody chalked palms who could still bend herself expressively and visualize a tumbling run and feel the rhythm of moves and transitions. She missed that. To imagine a thing and then enact it and make it actual and true. It was hard now to know what was true, what to imagine, or how to enact anything. Now she tumbled against her will, out of control. Even a ride through quiet streets shocked her to the bones.

It was her first night out alone since the attack. Undisturbed darkness in her lap. She turned on the radio news and turned it off before three words had formed and she was heading downtown.

Harold had come by in the afternoon and they’d driven to the Beach neighbourhood and strolled on the boardwalk. The scene was busy and dull with occupation. Volleyball, Frisbees, children and dogs at the water line. There were sailboats pressed into the dead blue sky. Harold said the police used to bring people to
Cherry Beach at night to beat them up. He said he wished he had more confidence in cops. “Your cop, do you still think she’s any good?” Kim said she liked Cosintino but had no illusions about the investigation. He said, “It’s nothing but illusions, Kim,” and then, as if regretting the comment, bought her an ice cream cone. Throughout the afternoon, for seconds at a time, he fell silent and a pandemonium played in his eyes. On the way home he was distracted and almost hit a cyclist and then pedestrians getting off a streetcar. He didn’t argue when Kim insisted she drive and she took him to his condo and walked home.

Alone now she passed the former dessert place where a girl had been shot dead in a robbery years ago, when this city could be defined by such returns, a time not long past when you could almost remember every unlikely death, murders and subway accidents, the places where famous lawyers and lost kids were last seen, or the buildings and floors and maybe balconies from which toddlers or party guests had fallen, because the place wasn’t then yet so violent that the bad news didn’t register, that thinking of local sudden deaths was like staring at the rain.