The Devil You Know: A Novel (13 page)

I
came in the downstairs entrance and up the skinny flight of steps to my own front door. I was dragging a white ceramic sink I’d found on the way home from my parents’. I saw the sink from the bus window, on the curb at the corner of Dufferin and Dragon Alley, and I jumped out and grabbed it, which meant maneuvering the rest of my way home with some ingenuity and a fierce stubbornness besides. Someone had put it out for garbage along with a few other renovation castoffs: a sky-blue toilet, an old brown cabinet with a chipped-off knob, a roll of once-creamy, greasy linoleum.

It was in good shape. A country sink, almost square. During my first year of j-school I’d had a strong, one-day crush on a nineteen-year-old fine arts student I met in the park behind the Art Gallery on Dundas Street. He’d also had a wide white sink. He was using it for a project he called Loss and Foundling, art in a found object, and painting a water scene inside the basin, lilies and fish and whatnot. He was quiet while he worked and I watched him. The whole process was deeply pleasurable. I had a bar of Toblerone in my bag,
along with a copy of Joan Didion’s
The White Album,
two pens, and my wallet. We ate the chocolate and made out for a while in the park and when he suggested I come home and let him cook dinner for me, I surprised myself and said no.

Since then I’ve turned this plan over and over in my mind about a found sink. The gentleness of his hands, doing that fine work, left me with a jealous longing. You can want to touch someone and not want them, but instead want to inhabit them.

The idea was to paint the thing and mount it on the wall, inside the front door, and use it as a convenient place to keep small objects. My keys, for instance. I mean, you’d have to keep the plug in, or lodge something in the bottom drain. So your things wouldn’t all roll down and fall out through the hole. The idea of a wall-mount sink that’s not attached to any plumbing appealed to me. A dry sink. I’d paint it to feel like sand.

I leaned it against the wall in the place I planned to put it later, if in fact I could figure out how to mount something as heavy as that without tearing a hole through the plaster. There was some ice jammed up inside the drain and I stuffed a tea towel under it to catch the melt. I waited for the toaster to finish with the last of an old baguette and dotted cold butter onto it in pieces, and went to work.

My home computer lives in the kitchen. I recognize this isn’t the best place to keep electronics. It’s like keeping a piano in your bathroom. There’s a fan over the stove but it doesn’t vent outside. It just blows the steam around. All the same, I try to keep my work and my private life separate, and seeing how the only other room in the apartment is my bedroom, there’s not much choice. My kitchen has a small café table against the window and a gas stove, and the computer sits on a desk in the corner near the door. It’s very light during the day and private at night. There’s a fridge, too, just where the door leads out to the fire escape.

In fairness, the computer itself is a hand-me-down from my father’s dental office, and I’ve never felt attached. Remnants of his secretary’s sandwiches—vintage lunch crumbs—stuck in the keyboard
and a half-sticky leftover smear on the CPU where someone once applied and removed a packing-tape label.

LexisNexis.

Nexis Search.

Evie Jones,
Toronto Free Press
, 1992.

Come on. Tell me that’s not the first thing you’d do.

Here you go, yo. Green type on a black screen, all my “with files from” over the previous year or so, every instance of my name in the news. Abra-abracadabra. I shook my head a little. Because, hey: Check That Out.

DECEMBER 30 1992:
Cash for Kids shoots, scores

DECEMBER 28 1992:
Legal woes loom in police shooting case

DECEMBER 27 1992:
Recession-weary Canucks take troubles down south

DECEMBER 21 1992:
City-wide mobile phones set to take over

DECEMBER 18 1992:
Court says alimony still needed, 19 years later

I scrolled down through a retrospective of my eight-month career. From Angie’s point of view, the dead-girls list was a huge promotion. Back in July I’d been working on
Community picnic goes on despite rainout, pD7.

Then this, from before my time:

MARCH 30 1992:
Fraudsters used phone, mail to lure victims

MARCH 29 1992:
Woman charged in senior fraud

Well, hello. Evie Jones, reporter? Meet Evie Jones, victim-lurer. I tried searching my name from the year before and found her again. This time I cruised through to the whole article.

FEBRUARY 15 1991:
Assault, gaming charges laid in Lovers’ Lookout scheme

Be my valentine? As many as four elderly males are thought to be among the victims of a con artist operating a Valentine’s Day investment scheme in Etobicoke’s Mimico district. Officers from 22 Division were called to the scene late yesterday afternoon after an altercation broke out in the parking lot of a strip mall. Charged is 44-year-old Evie Jones of Lake Shore Boulevard in Etobicoke. Jones had been operating as a psychic and fortune-teller. Initial reports say she may also have been running an illegal gambling room at the same address.

Evie Jones, perpetrator, was hard to resist. I wanted to know this woman. She turned up again in 1989, operating a common bawdy house out of a bungalow in an Italian neighborhood in the east end:

Neighbor Ottavia Primi said the revelation came as no shock. “We sure saw a lot of comings and goings over at that house, especially late at night. I’m not surprised at all.”

Then this, further down in the same article:

Police were alerted to the high-traffic address after a Neighborhood Watch program was instituted in the area. Spokesperson Pino Arrabia said the Watch was put in place as a safeguard in light of recent sex attacks in nearby Scarborough. “It’s a dangerous place for girls now,” Arrabia said. The local community association has installed additional lighting and is applying to City Hall for permission to mount video
surveillance cameras near bus stops. The so-called Scarborough Rapist is suspected in more than a dozen vicious attacks over the last 20 months, many of them lasting half an hour or longer. One week ago a 22-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital after being attacked inside her apartment building. The victim stated she noticed a man outside her window the previous night. It’s unclear if the same man is the attacker in this case. No charges have been laid.

Poof. Evie Jones, con artist, disappeared. The Scarborough rapes were on my current to-do list. I sat up a little straighter. You could say they’d been on and off my radar since I was about sixteen. That was the year bus drivers started dropping women off in front of their own houses, off-route, because the attacker used to wait for girls at bus stops in the east end, late at night.

When you hear that, you get a picture, right? It’s dark and there’s the sigh of the doors closing and the bus drives away. We’re out in Scarborough so the roads are really empty. Guy jumps out and attacks the girl while she’s walking home, or drags her behind a bush or something.

Only that’s not how it was. This guy followed the girls all the way home. He tracked them like scurrying animals. He liked to rape a girl right in her own backyard, under her bedroom window, or her little brother’s bedroom window. You think about how scared you can make yourself at night on a dark, lonely street. Those girls stepped down off the bus and walked home listening for every little sound behind them. There’s a way of listening in the dark that’s so intense for girls. You can feel the insides of your ears. He waited until the moment they thought they were home, safe. That takes a special kind of interest.

I knew he used a knife. The attacks were singular in their duration. No rush. He held one girl for more than two hours. As a teenaged
girl, reading that shit has a marked effect on your sanity. The first time my parents left me alone in the house overnight, I came up with a foolproof, go-to solution.

I’m just sleeping with a butcher knife under my pillow the whole time, I told David.

He said that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

Anyone who breaks into your house is going to be stronger than you, he said. The guy will take the knife away and use it against you in about two seconds. All you did was give him a weapon he didn’t have before.

Thanks, Detective, I said. Now how will I sleep?

B
etween the Scarborough Rapist and the AIDS scare, we’d all grown up on edge. In this way you can say the ’80s were kind of the opposite of the ’60s in flavor: the problem was that we still all had to keep up. Every girl I knew had a repertoire of raucous, horrifying rape jokes. One way to own it, I guess. We made strange choices. Sex was scary. We wanted to own that, too. I’d lost my virginity that same year I was sixteen, during a New England road trip with my family. My parents were sitting out on a patio drinking beers with a few couples we’d met at the beach and I was down by the creek with the one single guy of the group, a thirty-one-year-old pro Frisbee player from Quebec with dark hair and green eyes who looked like he knew how to use a condom. I was sure I’d never see him again and I asked him to confirm that. He asked me the last thing I’d read and I told the truth,
Gourmet
magazine.

His name was Jean-Marie. He’d spent a year working in Lake Tahoe and he told me how anytime he had to deal with an Anglophone government they assumed he was a woman, but that it was a very common man’s name where he was from. I said I thought it was a good name for a man.

So I won’t work outside Quebec anymore, he said.

But you could rob banks, I said.

What?

You could defraud the system. Because they’d be looking for a woman, see? I said he had two identities in one and how handy that could be.

But only outside Quebec, he said, as though this negated the argument.

He’d made a water pipe by punching a hole in the bottom of a beer can and we smoked a little hash that way, and then he broke up the rest into crumbs. He held his cupped hand to my mouth and I licked the hash crumbs. We sat and watched the creek and your body feels very good with a little hash in it. Your muscles all buzz and relax. It’s like a massage from the inside.

Jean-Marie asked how old I was and I lied and said eighteen and he said, Let’s pretend you are, but he was laughing a little, and then he hooked his thumbs into my bikini top. He pulled the bandeau part down so that it sat just under my breasts and they were propped there on a little balcony that was my swimsuit and he sat back and looked at me and told me he was very lucky to have met me. I wanted to kiss him or push forward and on with it. The hash slowed us down. I got up on my knees and fed my breast into his mouth with one hand around the back of his head and he played along and everything sped up. The sound of the water in the creek was faster. I wanted to make all the first moves so he wouldn’t guess it was my first time. The pain shocked me. I realized suddenly that I had a foot on his shoulder and the foot was trying to push him away and I had to work to override that.

So I didn’t have to worry about it, the one-special-guy-who-took-your-virginity thing. I didn’t want anyone to have that on me. It was something I wanted to get rid of, both the fear and the label. This made me not unlike a lot of other girls I knew. Melissa lost her virginity to a guy she met at Sandbanks Provincial Park when she was camping with three other girlfriends. It’s this thing to be disposed of but then later you can’t change the story. The story sticks.

I wish now that I’d had one nice soccer player boyfriend for a year in the eleventh grade and done it with him after months of making out in the front seat of his mother’s Toyota Corolla. David had a girlfriend named Emmeline when I was busy at university. Emmeline had long brown hair and she was studying piano and they had absolutely nothing in common but when they did it for the first time it was on Emmeline’s parents’ bed while the parents were out shopping at IKEA with her four-year-old sister. Her family came home and she and David pretended like they’d been watching TV the whole time and the sister had a face full of cheap IKEA ice cream and they had those frozen meatballs for dinner, with lingonberry sauce. Then David went home and called me and told me all about it.