The Blondes (40 page)

I hadn’t understood he liked me that much. There was the time in his car—well, Grace’s car, actually—when he cried, but I had believed it was more over her than me. That he felt guilty for what he was doing to her. We’d been driving around
talking about my going to New York. He hadn’t seemed to care. He’d said decisively—and I remember this so distinctly—“You’re young. It will be good for you. You should go.”

I remember so vividly his hands, his knuckles on the wheel, the glint of the little hairs on them. The way he palmed the wheel when he turned it. I remember him complaining about Grace, but she was a different Grace then, one I didn’t know, and I don’t recall what he was on about. It was like the phone conversation with the teaching assistant when I had first entered his office so long ago—it didn’t seem very important, and now, of course, it does. I wish I could remember. But I do recall him saying, “You don’t know what it is to get old, Hazel.”

He pulled the Mini over to the curb on a side street. There was no one around and the sun was going down, glinting off the glass of buildings. He said we weren’t far from his condo, and I thought he might take me there. I thought we were driving around with that idea—of going there. Then he asked me to park with him, and to touch myself for him. It was summer dusk, but we were visible on a city street. This wasn’t the kind of parking Larissa had told me about as a teenager, where you could find a pull-off from the highway or some rural route, or head down near some old railroad track or beside the Detroit River. This was Toronto, a city of eight million, at nine-thirty at night.

“But you’re going away,” he pleaded.

At the time, it seemed like a teacher’s power play. Now, it seems so desperate. In the end, I made him climax. It was fast
and awkward, and my wrist cramped, and I felt sick, and some people came out of a building nearby when it was almost done, but I didn’t stop because the Mini’s windows were tinted and I could tell Karl was near the end and I just wanted it to be over.

Afterward, Karl opened his eyes and stared out the windshield, and said, “That’s my wife.”

I didn’t see her. I saw the top of her head behind a door that opened and then closed. We were parked outside the door to their building, but I hadn’t known it. I’d known one of the buildings nearby was where he lived, and I’d made the logical assumption that we were several blocks away. I saw a spike of hair, then she was gone. That was when he started to cry. His shirt was folded up and there was ejaculate pooled on his belly and a stain hardening onto his pants.

I still don’t know why he parked there. Had he wanted us to go in and have Grace catch us, but he couldn’t work up the nerve for it? Had he wanted her to walk by and see? Had he wanted to orchestrate the three of us together? Or had he simply misjudged? Perhaps he’d meant for us to go in but lost his nerve. Perhaps he hadn’t thought Grace was anywhere in the vicinity.

Karl and I had one more time together after that. We met at a boutique hotel. It wasn’t glamorous, like you might think. The room was nice enough, but it was daytime and we were sober. I don’t know about sober sex. It’s not really something I’ve conquered. It seemed strange to be there, walking around the big clean bed, looking out the windows
at the dirty city. The sex itself felt anonymous, dutiful, hurried, mechanical, and sunlit. I remember I was flattered he had spent the money on the room. I think it happened only because neither of us wanted me to go to New York on that other note.

I remember he asked if I would miss him, and I asked, did he want me to? To which he said faintly, “Of course.”

“He lost it a bit when he thought you’d been caught in the outbreak …” Grace’s lips pulled down and her voice trailed off. “When he never heard back, he tried to call Wanda to find out about you, but then, she was gone too. He—he felt responsible. Thought he’d played a part in your going away and whatever you came into contact with. He became quite manic, as if he wasn’t up and down enough already. It was grief, but not a normal grief …” As Grace talked, she stared over my shoulder at the dead television screen. “More compulsive than normal. Obsessive.

“He went to
them
,” Grace said. “He died in a hotel room, surrounded by the blondes. I knew he was doing it, but I couldn’t make him stop. He told me only once, but he did it more than once. Whole gangs of them. He started selling things he’d collected over the years—rare books, prints of films—fucking collector’s items. He had so much. He would package it up in his office at school so I wouldn’t see him doing it. I didn’t know. I realized what he’d done later, when I went to his office and there was nothing much left. He wrapped
his stuff in kraft paper and plastic and he Purolator’ed it, and with the money he bought the blondes.”

Grace said that he’d confessed to having five at once. She said she asked him not to do it again, “but …” and her voice faded. She told me he was an addict, and then she picked up her drink again. I remember the cabin had become dark, and Grace flicked on the light above her.

“He got a bad posse,” Grace said. She laughed, but it was a hiccup of a laugh and set the amber liquid in her glass shivering. “One or two of them must have fucking had the disease. He had to have known it would happen, but he wanted them so bad—”

What did it mean, she asked me, to desire so much? She said that before she got married, she’d had a checklist for the man she wanted. Looks were on the list, but there were other qualities of Karl’s she’d ranked higher. Like intelligence, financial stability, job security, talent, a sense of style, a sense of humour. She asked me why I’d chosen him and not some cute young thing my own age, but she didn’t give me space to answer. She wasn’t sure she’d ever known what desire was.

She ran her hand back over her head. “I never should have been so afraid. I never should have shaved it,” she said, and she set her glass down. “At least then, I might have been enough for him. Or I’d have gone out with him, or maybe before him.”

I hadn’t thought I had any tears left for your father, for Karl, but here they are again. I’ve got this image in my mind of him in that photograph, the one I took. It now seems so long
ago and lost, the one where he’s looking up into the light above the bookshelf. I remember him in his office, saying, “I suppose I’m going to put these over here for a while and then I’ll forget to move them again. They’ll fall on my head one day.” His carelessness wasn’t how he felt about
things
so much as …

I told Grace she shouldn’t blame herself. It kind of blipped out of me. I struggled under the weight of you.

My words, feeble as they were, seemed to relieve her. “Karl’s mother,” she said, and then she couldn’t say anything more for a minute. “I had to tell her how it happened. I had to tell an old lady how her son died.”

Grace picked up the glass and downed what was left in it, which wasn’t much. She said his parents, who were elderly, flew in from Lethbridge for the small service. His older sister had refused to come. The parents stayed about five minutes, then got up and left, abandoning her to deal with the room. There was a casket, she said, but truthfully she didn’t know what was inside it, and didn’t want to know. Officials had told her it would have to be closed, and she was fine with that.

She’d wanted a prescription but didn’t dare go see a doctor at the height of the pandemic. She’d holed up in their condo for a few days—I noticed she talked about her and Karl’s space as if he were still there—she’d holed up there until a woman one floor up got the virus and threw herself off the balcony. Grace said she hadn’t seen the woman fall, but she’d heard it. When Grace looked out the balcony door, she felt like she was looking at herself down there on the pavement. “The awning was torn and flapping where she’d hit and rolled,
and then in the courtyard … It could have been anyone, and I thought,
I’m next
. That was when I figured I’d better haul ass someplace—any fucking place,” she said. She set down her empty highball glass with a click on the long wooden arm of the chair. She said she’d been at the cabin for four days when I came hollering.

So I’d made it back to Toronto only to miss Karl by a week. I sat with that information, not moving, even though you were.

“I think I’m in shock,” Grace said, touching a hand to her eyelashes. “Is it possible to be in shock for two months? What the hell is shock anyway?”

Then she got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back, I saw she’d retouched her makeup. Because she was a little drunk, she put it on crooked, and even without my glasses, her eyes seemed to float outside their shapes.

“Please don’t name the baby after him,” she said, looking down at the wedge of you.

“It’s not a boy. She’s a girl,” I told her. “Or supposed to be.” I was surprised I hadn’t told her that before. I hadn’t realized I’d been keeping the knowledge to myself.

“She’ll be at risk, then. Like the rest of us,” Grace said, and laughed wryly. Then she was thoughtful. “That first night—when you came here, you said someone close to you died. Who was it?”

I startled. I hadn’t thought I’d told Grace anything about myself, but she did have an uncanny way of reading between the lines. “My—my mother.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Mary.” There was a knot in my throat. I didn’t know who it was for—Karl, my mother, Grace, me … you.

“Mary Hayes. It’s a good name, solid. Name her that,” Grace said.

That night I dreamt of hazmat suits carrying bags and bags down the hallways and out of the Women’s Entry and Evaluation centre. They were also carrying the bulky black vinyl sacks down the narrow green stairs of the Dunn Inn in New York. I woke up in a sweat, sleeping at an odd angle around the lump of you, and I knew it was some other corridor, some other hotel, and it was Karl in my dreams inside those bags.

I sat up and the cottage was very still. I was alone, as if Grace too had been carried out by my dream.

LAST NIGHT I WOKE AT
4
A.M
. It may have been you who woke me, or a sudden cramp, or the tingling I get sometimes in my extremities—a kind of falling asleep in my limbs that prickles and aches. Or maybe it was just the buildup of sadness, as if sadness were something solid enough to shake me from a dream.

I could hear rain pattering on the roof, and I thought:
My mother is dead
. I thought it again, as if trying the words out on my tongue, although I didn’t say them aloud:
My mother is dead
. Of course I had thought of it often, but because I learned of Karl’s death and my mom’s in the same day, his eclipsed hers—after all, I’ve had Grace beside me reminding me that his was real. My mom’s passing still feels impossible. As I lay on my side in the dark, I saw my mom’s face in my mind,
from a long way away—through the windows of her shop, surrounded by the white fluorescent light from the overheads. I turned my face into Grace’s pillows and sobbed, and when I stopped, it seemed as though the rushing wet sound continued. I realized again that it was raining, and I listened to the tiny arrows of it and imagined them pelting the snow and the sharp divots they must be making there.

I remembered that my mom’s boyfriend Richard has a sister—Kristi—in Winnipeg. And it occurred to me he may have gone there. That
National Geographic
map left the Plains looking like one of the safest places to be. I resolved to look her up the very minute I am able, to see if Richard is there, if either he or his sister can tell me more about what happened to my mom at the Head Start. Kristi’s married name floated into my brain, Kostelanetz, and as soon as it did sleep returned to me.

My biggest regret is that I didn’t have a chance to tell my mom she would be a grandmother. But then, I didn’t know. I also regret how I treated Larissa, that I left her in that terrible state of mind, in the same way that I have been left all alone here by Grace. The difference being that Larissa is my best friend, and to Grace I am just … well, who am I?

Then this morning, I looked out the window and discovered this: glimpses of green, just at the edges of the yard. Even without my glasses, I’ve seen so much. From this window in the past week I’ve seen five hawks—blurred but I can tell by their glide—three jack rabbits, two raccoons, and just this morning one small red fox. I didn’t speak when it
showed up—didn’t want to risk scaring it. It was too far away at first for me to be sure of what it was, but when it came beyond the trees it moved like a streak of fire across the snow. It crept close to the cabin, flexing its legs and padding through the last patches of ice, every step like a pact. This creature—something between canine and feline—slunk low to the ground, snouting scents, its pointed red-black ears twitching. It was crouched out there in the snow near the porch on those flexed, always-ready-to-run paws. I watched its mouth open, its black nose, muzzle, and tongue tunnel-ling under the lattice, hunting a bird’s nest, thieving a stone-coloured breakfast. It came out with the egg tucked between its teeth, unbroken.

The fox moved swiftly, in spite of the fact that it thought itself alone, shaking the snow loose with its bushy tail, sending buds wobbling on that bush, though they’re barely there, green as the first day of March, which is today. The light was hollow and white and there was no wind. Then the fox was gone—just like that, prize still clutched tenderly in its mouth—darting across the yard and disappearing between the trees.