The Calling (34 page)

'She's eighty-seven! You couldn't have just tied
her to a chair like a regular lunatic, could you?'

He remained behind the table. The lamplight
was pale and yet his white face shone in it like a
coin. He kept the knife in his hand, but pointed it
to the floor. 'What you said about pride was right.
But in the Bible, "pride" means blind arrogance; it
is not a dignified thing. But I
am
proud. I have a
right to be. My pride is just.' He tilted his head at
her. 'Is yours?'

He walked toward her, his broken face catching
the stray light as if its facets were the folds in a
crumpled piece of aluminium foil. 'Time is of the
essence,' he said. 'I'm going to give you this knife,
Hazel.' He stood in front of her, the knife held out
to her in the palm of his hand.

'I'm not going to kill myself for you,' she said,
trembling.

'Christ did.'

'You've been reading a different book than the
rest of us.'

'And the night before, he bled in the Garden of
Gethsemane.' He felt his face with his fingertips
and held his stained hand up for her to see. 'As it is
written.
He was heavily pressed
. He kneeled in the
Garden and his awareness of what he must bear
weighed on him.' He took another step toward her,
the knife laid across his two palms. 'His messenger
is lashed to you. You are anointed.'

'Neither of us is Christ, Peter. You're just a griefstruck—'
and she felt the point of the knife against
her bottom lip.

'Call me Peter again and I'll bind your lips with
steel. What is my name?' She said nothing. He
withdrew the blade. 'I've got something more
efficient than a knife. If you'd rather die like a coward.'

'Let us go,' she said, trembling. A thin rivulet of
blood ran down over her chin. 'Think of all
the people you've shown love to, and let us
go. You know how to vanish. You can do that.'

He flung his arm out behind him and the knife
flew to the door and stuck in it with a bang. She
jumped. He stepped back to a bag on the floor
behind one of the chairs and drew a gun out of it.
She stared at it. The knife had been a test, but she
knew the gun was for real. 'I'll take her somewhere
where your people can find her,' he said. 'I'll let her
say a prayer over your grave before I drive her out
of here. It'll be daylight when we go so she'll be
able to find her way back. To lay flowers if she
likes.'

'Please,' she said. 'Wake her up. Prove to me
she'll make it out of here alive.' He stared at her
flatly, the gun hanging from his fingertip. 'Simon,
please.'

'Ah, now I'm Simon. Now that you want something
from me.'

'Just let me say goodbye.'

'You want your mother to watch your death? Is
that the kind of child you want to be to her in your
last moments?' Without warning, he brought the
gun up, aimed at her head, and pulled the trigger.
She heard the empty click of the hammer and felt
the power go out of her legs. She collapsed to the
floor, her arm out, searching wildly for purchase.
The broken handcuffs clinked on the floor. 'Go
ahead and wake her then,' he said behind her.
'Leave her with that fine memory of you.' Hazel
found her mother's arm and gripped it, pressed
her face into that beloved flesh. The scent of her
mother entered her, fugitive beneath the scent of
rotting blood but still insistently alive, and it was
that same scent that was woven into her memory,
the whole record of her beingness: it was limned by
this, the source of her life. She wanted to go on. It
was a bright, clear thing now, this need to live.
After losing everything that she thought had
mattered to her, after loneliness and humiliation,
after pain and failure, she still wanted to live. She
dug her fingers into her mother's arm, but Emily
Micallef did not wake. Hazel rose and faced her
killer.

'All right,' she said. 'I agree to your terms.'

He was searching for something in one of his
pockets and brought out a single bullet, which he
loaded into the chamber of the gun. 'Terms? There
are no terms here. Your agreement doesn't mean
anything.'

'No. Just like it was never truly a condition of
what you offered your victims. You took advantage
of their desperation, like you'll take advantage of
mine.' She could hear the rattle in his chest.
Exhaustion, starvation, sickness: death was as close
to him as it was to her, like the shadow of a cloud
racing across a valley. 'You broke His first
commandment,' she said. 'Do you think He'll let
you come to Him with all of these stains on you?'

'No one who has died is truly dead.'

'One of my officers found your brother in the
cabin you shared, his body surrounded by dust,
stinking and full of maggots, abandoned with no
one to bury him. The one who brought you out of
the hell you once lived in. And that was how you
showed your love?'

'It doesn't matter how I show my love, only how
He shows his. And now, how you show yours.'

'Just know this: I don't give myself freely.'

'You said it yourself. You deserve to die.'

'I do,' she said. 'But it doesn't mean I want to. I
agree to your terms because I don't have a choice.'

His jaw tightened and then he made himself
release it, and he smiled at her. 'You should be careful.
You don't want me to believe you're false. It
may incline me to be false as well. And you do
want your mother to live, don't you?'

'I do,' she said. 'But if I'm to die here today, I
won't do it as a liar. She wouldn't want me to tell a
lie just to save her. The truth is, in my heart I don't
want to die. I can't pretend that, even to save my
mother.' She took a careful step toward him. 'If I
give myself to you and you bring your brother back
from where he's gone, what is he going to say to
you? What will he think of your great work when
it's cost the lives of so many people? Would he have
saved himself at any cost?'

'Every second you talk, Hazel, your mother
moves closer to death. Tell me you want her to
live.'

'Put a bullet in me.' He lifted the gun and she
looked down the dark eye of it. 'But first show me
how you want my mouth.'

'You needn't worry about that.'

'I want to, though. If you're going to make me a
liar, I want to tell the lie myself.'

He watched her, motionless. She thought that if
she could keep him here, that the last of his
strength would ebb from him and he would vanish
like smoke before her. For weeks she had feared
him, hated him, but standing before him now, feeling
the force of his broken heart, she felt for him
for the first time. To get back what is gone no
matter the cost. Who could not understand that?
Anyone who has lost hope is in that wilderness, she
thought. And there is only prayer in the wilderness.

'I can tell the whole lie,' she said, 'I memorized
it.'

'Make your peace, Hazel.'

'
Libera eos de vinculis
—'

'Don't you—'

'We've both lost the one who loved us most,' she
said.

'Your mother still lives.'

'My husband left me. Your brother is gone.
Simon is gone.'

'He stands before you.'

'No, his broken-hearted baby brother stands
before me. Simon is gone forever. So you tell me:
who is going to save Peter now?'

She saw his eyes flicker backward and there was
a shudder in his body. And then there was nothing.
There was stillness and quiet and all the desolate,
broken dead were in their graves. She saw him
know it. '
Mortis
,' she said.

He opened his mouth as if to sing and put the
gun in it.

Saturday 1 January

New Year's Eve had seen its share of disturbances,
misdemeanours, drunken behaviour. Sam Roth had
driven his brand new Skylark clear across Howard
Tyler's field at two in the morning and through the
side of a barn. The car was a writeoff, but Tyler
declined to press charges: the barn needed rebuilding
anyway and Roth had saved him the trouble of
demolishing it.

There were nine fights, a bottle thrown through
a window in Kehoe Glen, and an ambulance dispatched
to Clifton right after midnight to assess a
black eye caused by a champagne cork.

It had begun to warm up since Christmas and on
New Year's Day, the temperature would reach six
degrees by noon. The
Westmuir Record
would
report the following week that it was the highest
temperature ever for a January first. In the morning,
the usual garbage blew across the streets and it
rained. A quieter Sunday than many she'd recently
passed.

The hospital had sent Emily Micallef home on
the Thursday morning, after almost a month in
hospital, in time to mark the new year in the comfort
of her own home. Hazel had transformed the
living room into a bedroom: her mother could walk
again, but the stairs winded her, and her doctor's
advice was to preserve her energy as much as
possible. The same went for Hazel. She'd driven
out of the park with Peter Mallick's body in
the trunk of his car and her mother reclined in the
front seat, and the whole time she had been forced
to hover over the driver's seat with her elbow
braced against the door to keep from fainting from
the pain. She'd not felt the disc in her back finally
rupture when Mallick had dragged her out of the
car – adrenalin had kept her attention away from
it. As soon as she had her mother in the car,
though, it announced itself, and Hazel had to make
the drive in agony. It was more than an hour before
she saw a sign for a hospital and when she turned
into the curving emergency driveway, she leaned
on the horn and blacked out. When she woke,
they'd operated on her back and her mother had
been airlifted to Mayfair, where she remained in a
coma until the week before Christmas. In two
separate hospitals they were hooked up to identical
machines, their vital signs translated into
electronic code, as if they'd both finally been
plugged into the same ethereal grid that Peter
Mallick had hunted his victims in. Hazel, not
capable of much more than hobbling on a walker at
first, spent her entire recuperation in her mother's
Mayfair hospital room. She read her the yearly
Christmas story from the
Record
when she woke up
– the last part of it appeared on the day before
Christmas Eve. Hazel could recall her father reading
the conclusion of the Christmas tale to her and
her brother, Alan, over the holiday turkey. Those
hopeful stories. On 30 December, her mother came
home.

Emily Micallef would not talk about her ordeal.
When she looked at Hazel, her eyes began to shine,
and Hazel understood that the unspoken thoughts
were too much to put to words, at least for now.
They both hobbled back and forth through the
house more or less avoiding each other, although
there was no rancour between them. It was as if
they had both been made aware of a grave new
truth and its presence was enough to keep their
minds occupied. The night of New Year's Eve,
Hazel made them breakfast for supper: eggs, hashbrown
potatoes, bacon and toast. Comfort food,
which they ate in silence.

Earlier that afternoon, Wingate had appeared at
the door, his cap in his hand. She noted the
absence of the traditional New Year's bottle, and
for a moment she felt that he was being critical of
her, but she knew in her heart that Wingate was
kind. No bottle was a way of saying it might very
well be a new year indeed. What he did have was
coffee and a bag of pastries (one vice at a time),
and the two of them sat in the front room. To his
surprise, Hazel declined a cruller. Since coming
home, she hadn't had any craving for sweets.

'How's your back?'

'I'm going to need another operation. There's no
disc there now. They'll probably do a fusion when
this heals up.'

He grimaced. 'And your mother?'

She peeled back the lid of her coffee cup and
stuck the flap down. 'Dr Sumner says she made it
by the skin of her teeth, but she's still weak. The
only reason he let her come home is because she
used to get his father off his parking tickets when
she was mayor.'

'Your people are made of stern stuff.'

'I had no idea what I was made of until four
weeks ago, James.' She drank, staring down into
the steam that rose up to obscure her face. 'First, I
was scared I was going to die, and then I knew I was
going to die. And that was a completely new
thought, you know? A feeling I'd never had before.
Imagine getting to sixty-one and having a feeling
for the first time in your life.'

He was shaking his head slowly from side to side.
'I can't. It must have been awful.'

'But now, nothing feels like bad news. You could
tell me I had six months to live and my thought
would be,
How am I going to fill six whole months?
'

He was smiling at her and he reached across the
back of the couch and gripped her shoulder. 'Well,
there's no bad news this week. I heard yesterday
that Terry Batten is going to drop the charges.'

'Yeah, I heard that too.'

'I guess she doesn't want to be the one to add
insult to injury.'

'That's Ian Mason's job.'

'We'll see,' he said. 'I doubt he wants his last
official act to be canning the person who brought
down Peter Mallick.'

'Peter Mallick brought himself down. I just
survived it.'

Wingate pressed his lips together. He'd been
around enough now to know when it was time to
stop reassuring her. He tried to imagine what the
lay of the land would be when he marked a year in
Port Dundas, and he had to admit, he could not
picture it.

'Did you speak to Sevigny?' she asked.

'Yeah,' he said. 'They gave him four months'
suspension, no pay.'

'Christ.'

'He'll be okay. We took up a little collection and
sent it to him.'

'Put me down for five hundred,' she said. 'Tell
me something.' He held his coffee halfway to his
mouth. 'Did you like him?'

He lowered the cup to his lap. 'What do you
mean?'

'I mean did you like him? He's back on the job in
four months, but I can't imagine he's going to be
the most popular guy in his detachment. We could
use another body here.'

'Sure,' Wingate said quickly. 'He'd be a good
addition. He's disciplined.'

'He's crazy, James.'

'That too.'

'He'd fit in,' she said, and he laughed.

She pushed herself off the couch with some difficulty
and went into the kitchen, where she
poured the rest of her coffee into the sink. Her
stomach couldn't take much excitement right now:
even a cup of coffee was a challenge. She braced
herself against the sink to let the pain from standing
discharge itself down her leg. She was aware of
Wingate in the doorway to the kitchen, watching
her.

'Here's the question that keeps going through my
mind, James.'

'What?'

'Zemba or Tonga?'

'Sorry?' he said, smiling.

'The cougar, James, what was its name?'

The smile widened into a huge grin. 'Dave,' he
said.

Sleep was difficult. She was afraid to turn off her
light and berated herself for being foolish, but still,
she could not bring herself to be alone in the dark.
On New Year's Eve, long after her mother had
fallen asleep in the makeshift bedroom downstairs,
Hazel had sat alone in her bedroom with the lights
burning and listened to the faint sounds of
celebration reverberating from down the street,
from over the treetops. At midnight, there was a
tiny roar from everywhere. A communion, she
thought ruefully.

On New Year's Day they watched the Rose Bowl
Parade first thing in the morning and then the
football game. They ate no meals, just snacked out
of bowls all day: chips, garlic bread, popcorn. By
five o'clock, when night fell, Hazel felt as if she'd
eaten the contents of a vending machine. Her
mother announced that she wanted to spend the
first night of the new year in her own bed, and
between the two of them, they got her up the stairs.
Her mother was in bed by seven. 'Happy New Year,
Hazel,' she said, her thin hands along the top of the
sheet.

'Many more,' Hazel had replied.

Later that night, she lay in her own bed with her
eyes open, staring at the yellowy lamplight blooming
across the ceiling. She saw, again and again, the
back of Peter Mallick's head opening in that
terrible room, his wasted body falling away from
her, and she felt anew the strange sensation that
her life was going to continue. But all of those
people, in their faith, who had given themselves to
him: what had they died for? If you are the only
person left to hold a belief and you're right, then
you're a prophet. If you're wrong, you're a fool. But
who had died in that cabin in the trees? The
prophet or the fool? And who had survived? Her
limbs buzzed. An hour later, she was still awake.
She walked down the hall and pushed her mother's
door open. The radio played quietly beside the bed.
Emily opened her eyes. 'Hazel?'

'Can you move over?'

'What?'

'I want to get in.'

Emily Micallef stared at her daughter standing at
the side of the bed, then slid aside with some
difficulty, and Hazel pulled the sheet back. 'I'm
okay, Hazel.'

'I know you're okay. But I don't feel like letting
you out of my sight right now.'

She saw her mother smiling faintly in the near
dark. 'You mean you don't want to be alone.'

'Sure,' she said. 'That too.'

'I won't be able to stay awake with you, Hazel.
I'm too tired.'

'That's okay.'

'You can turn the radio off if you want.'

'No, I like it.' An orchestra was playing softly,
something from another time. She couldn't
identify the music – she had perhaps never
developed her listening abilities very well – but it
was peaceful and she could picture the roomful of
people who had made this music, all of them working
together to produce something that sounded
like a single voice.

'Mum.'

'I know, Hazel.'

They lay there listening to the music. 'We're not
a little town any more, are we?'

'No,' replied her mother. 'Those days are gone
forever.'

When she opened her eyes again, she wondered if
she had fallen asleep. She listened to the house.
Under the quiet music, her mother's breathing,
slow and deep. The old wood beams crying in the
walls. This was their home. Outside, the bare
branches tapped hollow in the dark ravine and
beyond the trees it was the middle of the night in
the town where she'd been born.

THE END