Losing It (34 page)

He had no chance, he knew it, and yet he wasn’t done yet, all wasn’t lost. Quite possibly Barbara Law hadn’t recognized him. No one was standing by the doors outside. He didn’t know where he was running, but his body knew to take him to the
little-used west entrance, to the dark side of the parking lot. And he was lucky. No one was there. He didn’t even realize until he arrived that he was searching for his car. But then it made sense, and he found it, his beautiful little black Porsche. He grabbed for the nearest door, the passenger side, but it was locked … as he knew it must be, obsessive as he was protecting his Porsche. He felt the earth closing in around him. There was one last, faint hope, the driver’s-side door. It seemed pointless even to try it. Yet, unbelievably, it was unlocked! In his eagerness to get to class, to that class in particular, he’d left his Porsche unsecured. His stupidities were cancelling each other out! He flashed inside, slammed the door shut, very nearly began weeping on the steering wheel in gratitude.

But there was no time to lose. He pulled on his seatbelt, and then his fingers felt down for the key in the ignition. He looked and then he froze in terror and dread, felt his stomach heave in protest as the thought trickled through. Of course there was no key in the ignition. The key was in his trouser pocket, locked in his office along with the rest of his clothes and his office key and pretty well his entire life.

Bob howled in a paroxysm of rage, disbelief, frustration. It didn’t matter. The parking lot was deserted. There were only a few other cars sitting lonely and cold, barely lit by dull lights shivering this fall night on rickety wooden poles. He was alone in the universe, he could howl as long and as loud as he liked, it wouldn’t matter. When his throat was sore he began a low, throbbing moan. Some time later he realized he was banging his head against the steering wheel. Not violently, but almost ritualistically, in time with his moaning. He could feel the steering-wheel ridges indenting his forehead. And slowly, slowly, he began to reassess his situation.

I am not dead yet, he thought. Hopeless and ludicrous as it
might look, I am not yet finished. His house was only two miles from the university. One if he cut through parkland. He’d want to do that anyway, avoid streets as much as possible. But how could he walk that far without any shoes? Wait a minute, he did have a pair of rubber boots in the trunk – the locked trunk, but which he could unlatch from the inside. Not dead yet! He got out stealthily, found and put on his boots with a growing sense of relief and confidence. He was lucky. Not only were the boots in the trunk but also an old blanket that he could drape over himself to stay warm and hidden. It was all going to work out.

As Sienna had said, he would remember this day as long as he lived.

He headed for the shadows immediately. Two students were smoking in front of the engineering building. He could see them now, their blurry outlines a hundred yards away. But he was calm, focused. They couldn’t see him. He stayed in the shadows, skirted the parking lot away from the engineering building, crept from shadow to bush, crouched in hiding at building corners and beside stairs until he felt the way was clear. It was nerve-wracking but exhilarating, too, to fight his way back from the brink of certain personal and professional ruin, to hang on with the tips of his fingers, even to gain ground. He had a fixed idea now. He needed to make his way back to his house. He would break into the basement through the loose window at the back. He could slide onto the workbench and then down and find his good German scissors and free himself of these ridiculous clothes. Then he would steal into the laundry room, where he knew he had a pair of pants hanging up and possibly even a shirt. If there was a God, then a shirt would be there too. Even a dirty one, it wouldn’t matter.

Through the shadows, along darkened paths, his head down but ears keen. Wrapped in the blanket, a huddled, darkened
figure. He squatted behind a tree and held his breath while a campus patrolman – a sleepy-eyed old man with a flashlight – walked past humming something badly out of tune. Bob slipped down by the water and crossed under a major street by stepping carefully, fitfully over the slippery stones along the shore of the bridge rather than exposing himself to the glare of traffic. Now he was into the neighbourhoods. He stayed on a bicycle path – wonderfully deserted at this time of night, this time of year – passed by an angry barking chained dog outraged at the huddled figure in the night. When he saw a dim light approaching in the distance he quickly stepped off the path and crouched in a thicket, watched as a young helmeted woman blithely pedalled by. He waited there, still, roiling with fear and concentration for what seemed like hours until he was brave enough to venture on.

Closer to home. Even with the blanket his arms should have been cold, but he was feverish. He cut through backyards now, climbed fences, hiked up the dress and pulled his legs over, scurried along hedges like an urban raccoon. He was lucky, he felt it now from the inside. The dogs that barked were either inside or tied up. No one came out to investigate. When he had to cross a well-lit street and hurry up the sidewalk for half a block, no one saw him, no one was around.

It was eerie how deserted his own neighbourhood felt. Surely not everyone is huddled inside, he thought. It’s not the dead of winter yet. As he went along he could hear people in the distance. They were out somewhere, at an event perhaps. A street party? It was possible, he supposed. He had a sense of something happening but didn’t know what it might be, and when he got closer to his own house, where there would be a greater likelihood of being recognized, he decided to approach
from the back along the parallel street, cut through the adjoining lot and then through the big cedar hedge.

It was odd to navigate the private property of others, and yet he felt as though he’d slipped so many boundaries already that this was natural somehow. Of course he could steal up someone’s driveway, plunge into their garden, crawl and crouch and pull his way along, past fences, more boundaries, from shadow into greater darkness and then shadow again.

Into such bright light. He was so focused on the next step, where to put his foot, his hand, he almost stumbled onto his own property without realizing what was happening. It was bright and warm. And crowded. Here is the event, he thought, peering through the cedar hedge, and he cursed his luck again under his breath.
The event is at my house!

But then he saw it wasn’t an event; it was a fire. His house was burning! Fire trucks crammed the street and driveway, crowds massed, flames licked lazily out of the kitchen window. He saw Julia and Matthew and Lenore almost immediately: they were in the front row of the people watching, he could see them through the carport. Safe. They were safe.

And what he did next he did without thinking. The backyard was deserted; everyone was in the front or at the sides of the house – the firefighters, the neighbours, and police. So Bob recognized his opportunity. He raced across the yard and found the basement window. It was loose, he knew it was loose; Julia had been on him to fix it since the spring. He opened it and climbed inside, reached his leg down to the workbench in the darkness. It was terribly smoky. He knew even as he entered he was probably going to die. Somehow he thought it didn’t matter. He had to get in. He coughed and sputtered and felt the workbench tipping over. All the tools went clattering
on the floor. It didn’t matter. There was a general uproar anyway: the upstairs was on fire, he could hear the timbers crackling, the whoosh of the wind, could feel the terrible heat. If only I’d stayed in the car, he thought. I would still be alive.

Bob fell on the cement floor, reached out with his hand to brace himself, and miraculously felt the familiar German scissors in his fingers. He shut his eyes against the smoke and began to cut blindly, trusting that his fingers would know what to do. The scissors were terribly sharp and expensive, a gift from his father-in-law years ago. They cut through the leather easily, slid right up his front, and for a terrifying second Bob felt the tips get hung up in the black satin panties, felt the hot steel beside his testicles. But the female clothes fell away from him amid the clamour and destruction and turmoil all around. He took off his boots and freed himself of his stockings, of everything, then found the blanket and boots again and climbed towards where he knew the window must be. “Help! Help!” he cried now, as loudly as he could, blindly reaching. The heat was suddenly unbearable. He’d been so focused on his task before he hadn’t even noticed, but now he truly felt as if he had flung himself into hell. He screamed, but he could barely hear himself. There was a terrible crash up above and he felt the house shudder. The window wasn’t there. Please God, he prayed, pawing, coughing, unable to open his eyes. Please. Please God.

And then he found the window. He scrambled up the wall without the help of the workbench, without air or aid. He pulled himself out of the basement and through the loose window, back into the world.

He didn’t have the blanket any more. He didn’t have anything except the gardening boots. He staggered, gasping, past stunned firefighters and gaping neighbours.

“Bob! Bob!” Julia cried when she saw him, and opened her arms, of course she did. “Oh! Your hair!” she said, and there was a God. It was clear, there was a forgiving and merciful God.

“It’s been singed off,” Bob gasped as he fell into her arms.

29

C
old, cold, and evening had come on so blind. Sienna stalled in front of the dormitory doors, watched them spin and stop, spin and stop, which was odd, because she knew they weren’t spinning doors, they were the in-and-out type. But these had been changed and she was wary.

She squinted, willed the doors to stop spinning. The left one never did, but the right co-operated finally, began to look like itself again. Then someone brushed past her and pulled the right door open and Sienna bolted through behind her and it was fine. The lobby was itself: there were sofas still arranged around a lonely TV, and at the desk Marian the Librarian was studying a clipboard as if something was written there. Her name wasn’t really Marian and this wasn’t a library, but she had thick glasses and her long, tied-back brown-grey hair hung dead as an old rope. She gazed up just as Sienna looked away. She had a crush on Sienna. It was awful and it was entertaining, in a minor sort of way, and Sienna usually tried to hold Marian’s gaze for one penetrating moment every day. But not now.

She paused on the stairs, felt as if she were folding when in fact she remained upright. It was the wrong place to stop;
Marian would be behind her in just a small lag, asking what was wrong. So Sienna forced herself to keep going. The stairs had a greenish glow that Sienna wasn’t used to at this stage. She tried to ignore it. This was the worst re-entry she could remember.

Third floor, down the hall, step by step. Her own door was locked. She was clumsy with the key, but oddly the camera kept pace with this reality: if she looked through it, it held the door sane. That’s how to get back to Sterling, she thought, but vaguely, as if remembered through layers of packing foam.

And the shoes weren’t there. If only they’d been in the bag by the door, but the bag was gone and so was Ricky. Then the floor tilted like the slow, warning start of a carnival ride, and Sienna staggered two steps before regaining her balance. She wondered if that was the shoe bag by Ricky’s computer, but by then she was lurching towards her bed.

I’ll get up in a minute, she thought, and clutched the pillow round her ears, drew her knees to her chest, turned to the wall.
In a minute, in a minute
, it became a tiny song in her head.

Now the bed was heaving too, a different part of the ride, late to be activated. Sienna made herself as small as possible, tried to wait things out.

At some point Ricky came in. It was all wrong. She said,
“So?”
and stood over the bed as if she had the divine right of immediate explanation.

Her eyes still closed, Sienna felt as if she could see Ricky anyway. “I can’t talk now,” she said thickly.

“You fucked him,” Ricky said. Her hands were on her hips, her face was in shadows; she was breathing like an animal a moment before rage – all this was clear in Sienna’s mind.

“If that’s what you think,” she heard herself say, “if you can’t get your mind past that.”

“Oh,
shit!”
Ricky said, and Sienna couldn’t help her. It was too crawling-along-gravel, but she felt so weak, couldn’t think of how else to go. “You fucked him,” Ricky said again, a growl that broke at the end, became pitiful. “I knew you were going to do it. I knew it.” Sienna could feel her kneeling by the bed, her hands were clenching the sheets.

“If that’s what you think,” Sienna heard herself repeat.

“You said you wouldn’t but you did. He’s different to you, I
knew
he was,” Ricky moaned.

“Screw you.”

The phone rang.

Sounds were muffled, it was all slow now, useless. Sienna knew she had to get up and put it right, that there would be a way. When she was herself again. Some plausible combination of sounds would march out so that Ricky would understand, so that she herself would understand. Just what had happened back there? To have come so close … and then feel it all turn to shit.