Suitable Precautions (14 page)

David drove. Rick in the front seat, his forehead pressed against the window, unrolled a little to let in flakes of sobering snow. Julie and Tricia were in the backseat, Tricia still snuffling, but laughing here and there at Julie's little jokes. David had watched in the rear-view mirror as Tricia touched at her mascara with a tissue.

“Dad?” Diana said. “I am hungry, actually.”

She pointed to a sign at the side of the road: Tasty and Delicious Diner, 1 km. A picture of a hamburger, fries. A milkshake. David checked the map again. He wasn't any closer.

THE HAMBURGERS were flat and steaming, served by a woman with large breasts that sagged inside her waitress blouse. Regina, her nametag read. “Enjoy your meal,” she said when she plopped the plates down on the Formica table, making the pickle slices bounce. “I hope it's tasty and delicious.”

Diana sat opposite him in the booth, cross-legged. She wrapped her long hair into curls around her index finger. Her eyes were puffy. She poked at the burger with her fork,
sipped her chocolate milkshake. She tested a french fry and looked right at him. High beams.

“Why didn't Mom let me go with her? I'm not a little kid anymore.”

“Well, she thinks you're old enough to handle a weekend with me,” David said, not sure if he was joking.

Diana shrugged. “Everybody else was busy. Mom called like twenty people.”

“Twenty?”

“But it wasn't like she thought it was a bad idea, or anything,” Diana said quickly. “In the end, I mean.” She paused.

“Listen,” David said, leaning into the table, “I'm sure your mom has her reasons for why she didn't want you to go. She probably just didn't want you to have to see all that funeral stuff. It can be kind of scary.” He ate his fries.

“I heard Mom say on the phone that Grandpa was a class-A shithead.”

Regina came over and poured more coffee into David's cup, spilling some on the table, wiping it up with a dirty rag she took out of her apron pocket. David took out the map to Whiteshell to have something to look at.

“So, was he?” Diana, relentless.

“What?”

“A shithead.”

“Diana, language.” More fries in his mouth. “But yeah, sometimes. Not always, though. I don't know. It's complicated.”

The last time David had pulled into the driveway of the cigarette-stained bungalow, he had heard the tinny sound of a shoot-em-up blasting out of the television and seen the stacks of stale dishes festering on the counters. There was a
vase of tulips on the kitchen table, Grace's favourite, just starting to wilt.

“Hello, sir,” David had said. “Julie sent me to pick up a few things for her mother. That she needs. The hospital made me a list.”

“You still working at the goddamn grocery store?” The voice soggy like wet cardboard.

“Actually, I write for a magazine now. It's called
The Adventurist
and it's for men who—”

“Fucking great,” Frank said, his eyes on the television. “Now get outta my house.”

“I've got the list right here,” David said, offering the crumpled paper and wishing he had just gone to a drugstore instead of dealing with the old prick again, regardless of what Julie said about Grace needing her own things, that patients always did better with a few things from home.

“What part of get the fuck outta here didn't you understand?”

Frank stood, his knees cracking under the weight. His flesh flowed down his body, settling somewhere in his lower gut. His face was loose and jowly, ready to stretch into tissue-thin skin. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt, stained jogging pants that sagged. Shoes with bursting seams like split sausages. His thick hair was perfectly combed.

“The nurses said she needs a nightgown, a toothbrush.”

“Get outta my house.”

Frank shuffled past David into the kitchen, his fat hands inching him along the greasy wall, the stink of liquor and sweat drifting back.

“You can just tell me where to look and I'll get them myself.”

“If you don't leave, I'll make you,” Frank said, his lungs whistling.

“Oh Jesus, Frank,” David said. “This is ridiculous. Just give me her fucking toothbrush and I'll tell her you send your love, okay?”

Frank took the vase of tulips to the sink, filling it to the brim with cloudy water.

“Gracie is dying,” Frank said, his eyes the pale blue of soft ice. “Don't you tell me about love.”

David had given up and bought Grace a flannel nightgown from The Bay. Slippers. A new toothbrush, a hairbrush, and a gossip magazine. But by the time he got to the hospital, her room had been cleaned, the bed made. Julie sat on a plastic chair in the corner of the waiting room, feeding Diana and crying, her left breast leaking through her shirt.

“I'm so sorry, Julie.” He let the bag of useless items drop onto the seat beside her.

“It's not his fault, Dave,” she had said, wiping the tears off her lips. “I know you think it is, but it's not.”

She told him that once, for her birthday, Frank had given her a beautiful doll wrapped in pink tissue paper and a white box.

“It had real glass eyes. Bright robin's egg blue.” She shook her head. “The memory alone.”

Julie had put Diana over her shoulder to burp her, and the sound of her hand on their baby's back had seemed shockingly hollow to David.

“Mom's just so unfair,” Diana whined, her high-pitched voice carrying through the diner and making Regina raise her eyebrows.

“Finish your fries,” David said, laying bills on the table. “We're leaving.”

DAVID SAW THE HOUSE just as his eyes started to swerve blankly across the dirt road, the sun coming up.

The small, squat cabin was built of thick timber that was greyed with weather. Stray red and yellow leaves skittered down the steep roof, crackling like old, dry bones. David was going to get a picture when the sun was higher and the leaves were spinning. When The Meteorite Hunter was backlit and holding a blood-red stone from outer space. The kind of picture Rick liked. He would say, Yeah, Dave, now that looks authentic.

Diana stretched in the front seat. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Just go in the bushes.”

“What, the Lord of the Meteorites doesn't have a bathroom?”

“Just pee in the bushes.”

“This trip sucks.”

“Pretend it's an adventure.”

Diana slammed the car door and tramped off into the brush, hiking up her jeans with defiant fists. David leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, thinking to himself what Julie was going to say about all of this, how she might not say anything at all, just turn away and hunch her shoulders, curving her spine into a question mark.

It had all been so stupid. Julie knew he wasn't working on a last-minute story for the winter issue. She had phoned the office—four messages when he went in the next morning—before getting him on his cell, her voice as thin as a splinter.

“Deedee's crying and the car isn't starting,” she had said, “but I need to go for a drive to calm her down. When are
you going to be home? Don't we have a computer at home? Why did we buy that fucking computer anyway?”

But David wasn't listening. He was looking at Tricia on the bed as she pulled the sheets over her breasts and brushed the bangs out of her eyes. He considered the possibility then that it had all been a weird coincidence, a trick of physics that made their respective trajectories collide, bodies tangling in the same space and the same time. It didn't mean anything. It was just the kind of accidental intimacy that comes at the end of a tense conversation, or after a long wait. Tricia said the problem was they were bored with their lives but resigned to them. They should just give up. “But I can't,” David said. “That's what kills me.” Once for fun they took pills that Tricia stole from the hospital and David had had an allergic reaction, his tongue swelling, his breathing panicked.

“You're the one in a million, David. Lucky you,” Tricia had said then, jamming the needle of epinephrine into his thigh as she drove him to the emergency room.

“David?” Julie's voice from the phone, Tricia reaching for her robe.

“Julie,” David said, “I love you, you know.”

Tricia rolled her eyes and cinched the belt.

“Dave,” Julie, surprised. “That's worse.”

“I'll fix the Rabbit, first thing tomorrow,” he said, but Julie had already hung up the phone. Tricia looked at him like she was trying to keep back a laugh.

“No offense, David,” she had said, “but who drives a Rabbit?”

This trip to Whiteshell was going to wreck the car, if it hadn't already. David envisioned himself at the side of the road, working uselessly under the smoking hood, telling
Diana to stop thumbing for rides. Julie was going to be mad if he didn't have her back for school on Monday, even if he tried to convince her that this meteorite guy was educational or spiritual, or even just plain crazy and interesting. David sat up in his seat and turned the key in the ignition, to be safe. The engine revved and Diana came running back, her hair long and tangled, weeds catching her feet.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, leaning over to open her door, “did you think I was leaving without you?”

Diana slammed the door behind her and locked it. She looked at David with drowning eyes, wild and dark.

“What's wrong, Dee? Are you sick?” That hamburger. Shit. Julie was going to kill him.

“I was just going to see if I could use the bathroom,” Diana said, starting to cry, “I opened the door, and, that, that man . . .”

David's heart cramped in his chest. She had only been gone a minute.

“Diana, what happened?”

Fuck, that's what parents said when their children were molested or kidnapped. A minute was more than enough.

“Diana!”

But she was sobbing so hard now she couldn't speak, her fists balled into her eyes as her small body shook, curled up in the front seat of the car, the mud on her shoes grinding itself into the torn upholstery of the seat.

David ran towards the cabin. How could he have let her go by herself? They were out in the middle of nowhere, and this guy was some kind of crazy hermit who probably hadn't seen anything female in years, probably had fucking booby traps on the door and hunting knives lining the walls. Was Diana hurt? Christ! He hadn't even checked. God.

David sprinted, bursting through the door of the cabin ready to kill the sonofabitch.

But he was already dead. The Meteorite Hunter was sitting in a chair, his face on the oily wood table, his bloated black cheek touching the rough edge of a blood-coloured rock. David might have thought he was sleeping if not for the strange and broken angle of his neck, the way his arms dangled ridiculously, his blue skin dotted with industrious ants that pooled in the rotting practice cuts on his arms, his stomach. The knife handle that stuck out of his bare chest like an accidental bone. The dried blood and the flies. The stink, like cabbage left in the sun.

“Don't come in here, Diana!” David shouted over his shoulder, knowing that it didn't matter anymore. She was sobbing in the car while David, gagging now, rushed into the stale emergency of the rank cabin, shouting brave-sounding, stupid things like Don't come in here, Diana. Shit.

David saw a pad of paper under the blood-red stone. Careful not to touch the man, David moved the rock, heavy for its size, and picked up the smudged notebook. FOUND, it said at the top. In the left-hand column was a list of numbers, latitude and longitude. Then a weather report, followed by a catalogue of stones. A record of a lifetime spent searching. David looked at Diana in the car, how small she was against the landscape of dying trees. He wondered how he was supposed to know what to find. Where to look.