My Temporary Life (33 page)

He doesn’t listen. His interruptions and objections keep coming. He doesn’t have control, and I know it’s killing him. He sounds like he thinks he really can fix it all, if he just comes to Woodbine. I don’t let him finish this time. I raise my voice. Heather sits up, listening. “Terry, you don’t understand, nothing’s really changed since we got here. It’s still about a little girl, except now it’s even more important. We have to go. We have to get Emily.” I know I have no choice. There’s no decision to be made. I’m just running, running on instinct.

Heather keeps staring at me, watching me. I hold the phone, and listen to the silence on the other end, imagining Terry looking over at Jo, probably raising his hands in the air in frustration. Then, she speaks, “Malcolm, it’s Jo. I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this. You sound very emotional right now, and from what you’ve described of this man, this policeman...” She says the word with disgust. I can tell she’s angry too. I feel as though I can almost hear her thoughts formulating, on the other end of the line. “We just want you to be safe. We just want to make sure you’re going to be okay, both of you.”

I love the sound of her voice. I love the steady tone of it. I imagine her eyes, pleading as she speaks to me, trying to reason with me in her own way. “Jo, I’m going for her. We’re going to get her.”

There’s a moment’s pause, before she speaks again, and I realize by the tone of her voice that she knows. She knows we have no choice. We have to get the little girl out. “You need to call Brennan, Malcolm. Tell him what’s going on there. When will you call us back? When will we hear from you?” She’d decided. In her own way, she’s reasoned it out, and decided that it’s best for us to keep going, to go and get Emily.

I’ll call him now, when I hang up, and I’ll contact you two tonight. I really will. Don’t worry. I need you both to know where we are, and what’s going on.” I mean it. I don’t want Terry here, but I need his support, and maybe even at some point, his refuge.

“
If we don’t hear from you, you stupid shit...You call me. Call me as soon as something happens.” Terry’s excited, still not convinced, but I know that Jo has somehow calmed him down, and for now he’s given in, accepting that I have it under control.

I hang up the phone and look over at Heather. She still looks scared, but there seems to be a little more light in her eyes. I take it as hope, and lean over and kiss her forehead.

Heather showers while I call the lawyer. When I tell his secretary that Terry Allister, has referred me, she says that Mr Brennan has been expecting my call, and I’m connected immediately. I ask him questions about birth records, and paternity rights, and I ask him to look up an old record of a child who was born ten years previously. He tells me that it isn’t really his area, but he’ll try and get me the answers. He gives me his mobile phone number, and tells me to call him back in a few hours. He says that he wants to help, and that he’ll help anyone who’s a friend of Terry’s.

As an afterthought, before hanging up, I ask him about the penalties for kidnapping, and child abduction. After a lengthy pause he asks me if I want to repeat the question. I decline. It doesn’t matter.

I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do, but I know that we have to move forward. I order food from the hotel kitchen, and we eat ravenously. Heather touches the marks on my face gently, while I try to navigate my soup spoon past my puffed-up lips. I try not to think about her bruises. It brings the anger too close. I focus on moving forward, not looking back.

I shower my sore, stiff body and try to feel fresher, try to feel awake while Heather dresses and packs some of the leftover food in our bag. The afternoon has turned to night, and the snow lazily starts to drift down again. I can almost feel the coldness as I look outside at the dark purple sky, and see the people walking in the streets, pulling their jackets tighter around themselves. “Doesn’t it ever stop snowing here?” I mean it. It’s unlike my mild Vancouver climate.

“
For three months, then it starts again.” She says it quickly, as though it’s a practiced answer, one that the locals probably tell strangers.

We look at each other and laugh. It’s the first time in days that I’ve felt like laughing.

She sits away from me, on the small chair in the room, while I dress, and get ready for our journey back down the highway. She starts to speak in a slow steady voice.

“
I didn’t know where to go at first. I thought about going back to the motel. Then I thought about coming back for you, but I really wasn’t thinking straight at all, so I just drove and drove. I know the roads. I know them from growing up here, but none of them looked familiar to me. Nothing made any sense.”

“
Emily didn’t ask any questions. She just sat there, and after a while she reached out her hand, and held mine.” Heather stops, and shakes her head. “It was almost as though she was trying to comfort me.”

“
We heard sirens, everywhere we went, everywhere. They wouldn’t stop. I knew it was us. I knew they were looking for us. We drove out to the hills, and then past them. I just didn’t know where to go. After a while, I just gave up. I pulled over to a construction site. They’re building homes, out past the hills. There’s big piles of dirt, and half finished buildings. We sat there, we talked. I thought we’d be hidden. I thought that no one would see us.”

I hold onto my jacket, and sit on the edge of the bed, listening to her, remembering that I would have been shivering in the old barn at about the same time.

“
She was comfortable with me, Malcolm. She didn’t ask where we were going. She just seemed happy to be with me.”

She stares forward, looking down, but not focusing. Her face is hard, the same hardness that I saw in the motel room, the night she came back from her father’s house, the night he slapped her.

I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to ask if Emily is going through the same things Heather went through as a little girl. Heather looks at me for a long time, before continuing. “She didn’t have to tell me, Malcolm. I knew, I just knew. She cried and cried. I wouldn’t make her tell me. I couldn’t. I held onto her, and told her that everything was going to be okay. I told her that I’d look after her.”

She doesn’t have to tell me anymore. I know the rest. I heard most of it from the radio in the police station. They found her. She tells me that they surrounded her with police cars, and took Emily from her arms by force. Somebody must have spotted them parked there, and called the police. The officers were rough with her. They called her a lunatic, threatened her. They talked about what prison does to someone who steals children, other people’s children.

One car took Emily away, and Heather was kept in another with two officers. They were heading for the police station when a message came through on the radio, to re-direct them to Thornside. The instructions were to take her to Thornside hospital, instead of the station.

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I didn’t understand. I was frantic, just wanted to get Emily back. I kicked at the doors and punched the windows so much that they restrained me, put me in handcuffs.”

“
The cops left me at the hospital. They took me to that room you found me in, and handcuffed me to the bed. After a while a nurse or orderly came, and injected me with something. I tried to struggle, tried to resist, but it didn’t work. I had no strength left to fight with. I know that I slept because when I woke up he was there, standing over me, waiting for me to wake up. I was terrified. I felt like it was before. I felt like a child living in his house again.”

I can feel the anger start to rise in me again, as she continues to speak.

“
He didn’t talk, he just hit me. He just kept hitting me. His eyes were crazy, just like I remembered, and he was too angry to talk. I could tell.”

I remember him hitting first, and then speaking. I remember what he did to me at the police station.

“
He wanted to know about you. About whether you knew, and if we’d planned on taking her together. I told him I’d lied to you and you didn’t know anything. He didn’t seem to believe me, but after a while he stopped asking me, hitting me. He sat down in the chair and it was crazy. It was almost like he started to smile, this strange mad, smile.”

I’m holding onto the edge of the bed tightly now, trying to stay focused and not let my anger take over. I can see the snow through the window, from the corner of my eyes. It’s falling heavily again. Everything is turning white outside.

“
He looked at me and called me a slut, told me that I’d messed up, should never have come back. Then, he sat and didn’t say anything. It was like he was just thinking. After a while, he came over and stroked my forehead. It made me sick to feel his hand on me. He told me that it was going to be okay, that everything would be okay.”

She looks up at me, focusing on my face. There are no tears, just anger, and all of a sudden, I know that I really did rescue her from the hospital. I don’t know how he would have done it, but he never would have let her leave there. He never would have let her come for Emily. He knew she’d never give up.

I think about how lucky we’ve been, how our timing has been so close. We were just a few steps ahead of him all this time. He let me leave the police station, and then must have gone to the hospital to see Heather, before coming to the motel to get me. He couldn’t afford to have me out there, knowing his story, knowing what he’d done. He could deal with Heather anytime. He had her tucked away in the hospital, drugged. My mind races thinking of all the possibilities when the silence is broken by the loud ringing of the bedside phone.

The man at the front desk wants to see me, wants me to come to the desk to clear something up. The number on my credit card has been written down wrong. It’s just a silly mistake. If it isn’t too much trouble, can I just come and see him for a moment. It won’t take long; he keeps apologizing.

We have to check out anyways. I leave her in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, ready to go. I’m three steps down the hall when the realization hits me. I think about the man’s voice. I think about the indifference he’d shown when I checked in. I’d been just another customer. But, it’s different now. There’s panic in his voice, and I remember. I remember that nobody had written down my credit card number. It had been put through their machine. There’s no room for error there.

I turn quickly in one swift motion, and throw open our hotel room door. Motioning for her to be silent, I roughly grab her with one hand, and our small bag in the other. Looking down the hall, I see nothing, hear nothing. I pull her in the other direction, towards the sign that says, ‘Emergency Exit’.

My feet don’t feel like they’re touching the floor, as we almost glide in mid air, towards the exit. I push open the heavy fire door, and we’re pressed back by the cold air rushing in. There are some parked cars out back, and a man in a hotel uniform, leaning against a wall, smoking. He turns away when he sees us, uninterested. I pull Heather to the corner of the building, leaving her there. I squeeze her body one last time, and can feel her shivering from the cold, as I make my way around the corner, looking for the truck.

I can’t see a police car or Postman’s truck. There are other vehicles in the parking lot, people scraping windshields, moving the snow from their hoods. I slide into Michael’s old truck, and quickly turn the engine over. I let the windshield wipers remove as much of the snow as they can, and drive back to where Heather waits.

The man, still smoking, stands shaking his head at us now, while Heather jumps in beside me. He makes a motion with his arms, as though he’s telling us to clear the snow away from the windshield, but I can’t. I don’t have time. I can barely see out of the front window. I spin the truck around, back to the front entrance, and some of the loose snow falls off the hood and roof, giving us some visibility.

There’s only one way out. We have to pass the entrance to the hotel. I can see the front desk through the big hotel windows. For a moment, I think that I may have been wrong. I think that perhaps the desk clerk really did need to see us. Maybe I’ve over reacted. But then I see it. He did have spare keys. His large, winter-ready vehicle is parked at an angle, right at the front door. The vehicle I took the keys from is sitting there. We don’t slow down. I don’t want to see Postman inside the front lobby. I drive as quickly as I think I can without drawing attention to ourselves. The truck’s rear tires gently slide sideways, and I right them immediately, as we pull out of the parking lot, and back onto the main road. I wonder what he’d planned to do. Had he intended to grab Heather while I went to the desk, or was he going to try and get both of us at the same time? Even without a police car, he still has a gun and a badge. That would have been enough to get us into his car. I take some solace in the fact that there are no other cars around his, and that he’s driving his own car. He’s alone.