Cities of Refuge (21 page)

“And she never turned up?”

“We went to the police, they did their thing. Nothing. She’s still on the books.”

“I’m sorry she disappeared. But the police probably don’t have forensics for heavenly whirlwinds. Religions and their free-pass categories. In Islam, suicide bombers think they’re skipping thousands of years in the grave and going straight to their reward.”

“You have to understand that I believe in Elijah’s translation, just as I believe in the resurrection.”

Like that, she was a stranger again.

“Not literally, you don’t. Something like the resurrection only makes sense as metaphor. That’s its value. Why it’s powerful, historically.”

“It’s powerful because it’s the truth. Let us not mock God with metaphor.”

“Is that from one of Father André’s sermons?”

“It’s from a poem.”

“And here I thought poetry was metaphor.”

“Not this poem. I’ll send it to you.”

He sat there, dumbfounded that such an intelligence had been carried off by fairy tales. There was a great darkness in her past through which she’d lost her way. He wondered what had happened to her, but more so he wondered at her certainties. In the years ahead for him, his last couple of decades, he would need such certainty, if only he could arrive there. As delusions went, it was the right one for a man his age. Later life was best endured with family and friends – he was not well stocked – a good drug plan, and a hopeful delusion. He saw himself walking out into a summer storm to be taken up by the winds.

On the drive back to his car she told more stories about her missing Guatemalan girl with the musical name, a name made for prayer, and he tried to understand how biblical characters could be as real to her as this person who’d existed for her in flesh and blood. He asked her to spell it out for him as plainly as she could. She said she believed in the resurrection, she believed in the translation of Elijah, and she
could as easily believe
in the translation of Mariela Cendes.

Maybe this Mariela was an invention, a ploy of some sort, he thought. But then no, that wasn’t it.

She pulled up by his car. They got out and he stood and watched her wave goodbye and walk away and disappear into the church.

B
y now she had to remind herself that
R
wasn’t real. He was there in her world but he wasn’t real. He had being but he didn’t exist. They were made for each other as surely as they were missing from one another. It was partly the absence that drew her, and that made his life personal for her. They could never reach one another, never inhabit the same plane outside of her imagination, though they felt loss in similar ways, and if she could write it well enough, they’d feel it in the same way. She would grant him the full apprehension of his loss.

She wanted to tell someone about him, tell Marian here on their late-morning walk, the ritual they’d formed to talk about things. The walk had become shorter every few days. They wouldn’t make the end of the block this morning. There were small moments of shock that she came to expect, though expecting them didn’t console her. What consoled her was the thought of
R
.

The front yards began to widen as the street grew older in this direction, the houses Victorian, brick. Every morning, in one way or another, Kim asked her mother how she was doing. Usually Marian dismissed the question lightly, but today she said that she was trying to hit a moving target, to get used to a condition that kept changing. The only way to mark it, and her adjustments, was against the constants in her life, Kim and Donald. There might come a time, she said, when she’d ask Kim to give her a read on herself. “It matters that you tell me the truth,” she
said. “I trust your eye. It consoles me to know there’s a good witness to my exit.”

“I’ll try. But one truth is that I don’t think I’m much of a witness.”

And so Marian asked her what she felt now, at this distance, when she thought of the attack.

She felt she’d been upside down.

“What do you mean?”

“I was working a night shift, which was half-normal to me by then, but upside down to everyone else. Everything was backwards.”

“Sounds like it’s still close if you allow it to be.”

There was something else, something new. She had tried to remember the sound of her footsteps that night, and the indistinct measure of another’s step beneath them, but she simply couldn’t hear it. Then yesterday, writing a fresh scene with R, she thought of him walking again, this time from a work site to a subway station, and she realized he wasn’t alone, that someone was with him, and she heard the steps, syncopated and a little uneven, and then she suddenly closed her laptop and dropped her head and hugged herself.

“I think he had a leg injury.”

“Before you kicked him?”

“I can hear his last few steps before he tackles me, and they don’t fall quite evenly. And then when I kick his leg, his left ankle, he cries out like I’ve broken it, but there’s no chance, and so maybe it was hurt already.”

“All right. And his skin tone. His eyelashes you said.”

“Yes. And his hands. He works with them.”

“And you told the detective about the leg injury?”

“I called her this morning. But it doesn’t matter. I got her to admit that the trail’s cold. There never was a trail.” Marian reached for her hand and squeezed it lightly. “It’s okay, Mom. I already knew they wouldn’t find him.”

They never would. Not unless he did this again and her description matched another, and then the pieces started to lead places. The pieces always led her to the same place. To get there, she is upside down. She carries a tray of coffees, a bag of treats. She stops at a bookstore window, she passes by a makeshift church. He’s there behind her but she can’t see him. She thinks to turn north but stays west instead. She sees the chain hanging loose on the clasp. She hears the uneven footsteps, feels the shoulder in her back. The coffee scalds her leg but she doesn’t know it yet.

“So I’m dealing with it, as they say. Though I guess I’m distracting myself a little from … the state of things with you.”

“Is that why you’re in your room tapping all day?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I love having you around but I don’t want you underfoot. I think we’re both holding up just fine. It’s your father who’s crumbling. Last week Donald found him in the garage, going through boxes. Drunk.”

“What boxes?”

“Presumably his boxes. He stores his life in there.”

She’d felt something like this coming.

“I can’t picture the scene.”

“Harold lurching around. Donald standing there with a phone and a can of wasp killer. Each calling the other an intruder.”

They stopped and looked around at the day, then started again. As a child this had been the limit of her world. Now it was the limit of her mother’s.

“Why are you only telling me this now?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think I was going to tell you at all.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like your father in his pathetic mode. I must be reminding him of his mortality.”

“Did you ask him what he was looking for?”

Marian laughed. “God, no.” She was smiling but her tone meant she wouldn’t say more.

They had made it to the corner but could they make it back? There was no place to sit but a little wooden retaining wall, about eighteen inches high, fronting a neighbour’s garden. Kim had marked it on their first trip, when they’d started this routine. Some day soon they would need it, but again today they passed it by, as if floating a little on the thought of how well they were addressing things, so much better than the men, with the simple down-and-back, the same to-and-fro of their slow lines every morning.

“You could ask him.” So Marian would say more. Kim had to remind herself that her mother, too, had reason to act out of character. “He’s never been able to correct himself. He just crashes and then walks from the wreckage and goes off to another pursuit.”

It was the sort of thing Marian would say of Harold, but her tone had none of the usual bitterness. However slowly they were moving, the way seemed to be parting for them as it never had. The air was full of admission.

“Do you still love him?”

“You don’t need to ask that, Kim. The man has so much more worth than he knows. Little tragedies knock him over. He won’t survive the big ones on his own.”

“Have you told him that?”

“I can’t help him. He wouldn’t recognize the help, or if he did he wouldn’t allow it.” They stopped walking. They stood side by side, glancing at one another. “And focusing on him would be good for you too. You’ve always been a helper. Here you are helping me.”

“I’ve been my own project these last months.”

“Of course you have. But you might do a lot for yourself by lending him a little spine. You’re the only one who could get that close to him.”

“You make it sound like an assassination.”

Marian laughed. “Well, every love has its own best expression.”

That evening after the office was closed, Kim parked her mother’s car across from
GROUND
and stared up at the second-floor window until she was sure that Marlene had gone home. She let herself in with the key she’d never returned and made her way upstairs and through a second door.

It had come to her that this was it, the point of origin. Harold was convinced she’d met her attacker through
GROUND
. She couldn’t bring herself to concede as much, but this office was a locus. How had she come to be attacked in one of the safest big cities in the world? She’d brought it upon herself by working here, as an open host, constantly aware of her privilege, and she had felt guilty. She would not have thought that the guilt determined her actions, certainly not her life choices. But just maybe, one night, the work she did in this place had made her take a risk. Maybe it had taken her down a dark, quiet street when she’d thought to head towards a busy one. There was no other
explanation. Either the guilt of privilege had sent her into trouble or nothing had. She chose to think it was guilt.

The phone rang through to the answering machine and there was a voice from one of the many territories of broken English. Someone named Irina was calling on behalf of her brother, whom she didn’t name. She invited Marlene to a citizenship party where she promised to serve vodka.

The key to the three standing files was kept in a locked desk drawer. The key to the drawer was under the green plastic pot on the corner of the desk holding the cactus one of the clients had given Marlene as a gift. The cactus was dead but the spines endured as part of Marlene’s idea of a security system, as if anything more elaborate would be in bad faith. Besides, the dead-bolted office and building doors kept out junkies and thieves, and whoever else might have wanted to peek in the files tended to respect locks and follow rules where they were discernible. Marlene was supposed to be the only person with access. Though it had made things awkward at times, the standing files had been off-limits to Kim and the other volunteers, a fact for which Marlene had apologized. “If anyone has to get in trouble over what’s in there, it’ll be me.” Kim had assumed Marlene was worried about violating confidentiality, or maintaining for the volunteers some plausible degree of deniability, or maybe the trouble in the records ran deeper. If Kim’s attacker was in the files, she’d find him on her own, and keep
GROUND
out of it if she could.

The file drawers were unlabelled. The key to the first stack opened all four drawers. The top one contained old copies of the long-ago-aborted newsletter and a few letters addressed to Marlene and tucked back into their envelopes. The client files, arranged by case number, began in the second drawer. The
numbers corresponded to computer files that contained the clients’ names, but Kim didn’t know the password – Marlene changed it monthly – and she didn’t need the name anyway, didn’t want it really. What she wanted was a suspect whose story she’d recognize.

She went through files from the months before the attack, looking for anything that seemed familiar, that triggered a face, maybe a tense moment with someone they’d turned down. Every file contained a fact sheet with the claimant’s name, blacked out once the electronic file was created, age, country of origin, family information, port of entry, entry date. There was a box to check for “evidence of torture.” There were copies of the documents submitted in the claim, copies of the board’s decision. Most files listed local addresses and phone or contact numbers. Some had Polaroid headshots that lawyers had clipped to the referral letters.

For a moment she saw herself in mid break-and-enter. Far from enacting this scene, the old Kim wouldn’t even have imagined it.

After forty minutes, her attention and hope fading, she came across a translated narrative she barely remembered, from late winter, five months before the attack. Even as she read the header she recalled Marlene telling her the story of a young Colombian man. She said if you spent five minutes with him you could tell he had a sweet nature, and that he couldn’t be blamed for whatever violent world he’d been carried into as a boy. And yet he’d been rejected by the Immigration Review Board.

Name removed. Age 22. Colombia. No family in Canada. Pearson, Oct. 18, 2008. No photo. No home address. The contact was to be through his lawyer.

Kim had once met the referring lawyer, Belinda Paul, another smart engagé. She had wild black hair and tended to narrow her eyes as she spoke. Marlene thought that Belinda didn’t approve of their work but now and then she’d send clients to
GROUND
who’d suffered especially unjust decisions. “If Belinda sent them, they’ll break your heart,” she once said.

Kim photocopied the file of the heartbreaker, then returned it, put the office back together, and walked out to the car.

If the file led somewhere, if it furthered investigations, then bringing it into the house, her bedroom, had implications that she decided to accept. She sat in her desk chair with one arm folded across her chest, her hand clamped under the opposite elbow, and started to read.