The Devil You Know: A Novel (28 page)

I
t’s sobering. You’re twenty-one and your dad is coming over to check for monsters under the bed. I spent fifteen minutes alternately telling myself to grow the fuck up and the other fifteen listening acutely for strange noises in the hall. I sat on my bed so I wouldn’t have to look out the kitchen windows at the fire escape. My father has my spare key so he can let himself in.

I heard him come in the downstairs door and the smack of his footsteps up the stairway and I got up and went and stood in the hall. There was the key in the lock and the door made a noise and I stopped cold.

The man from the fire escape. He pushed the door open and let it click behind him. He had his black wool cap on and dark jeans and a black hoodie under his jacket. I could see the pattern of the knit in his cap. The empty eyelet where the cord was missing from the hood of his sweater. He pushed the door open with his head
down and then looked up as he came in, one arm reaching out toward me. This was so real I had to catch my breath.

The door swung open and my father walked in. He had a Tupperware container filled with something red.

Put this in the freezer, he said. The spaghetti sauce. Remember I said?

I
t’s possible that my father never actually slept when I was a kid. I never once woke up earlier than he did on a Saturday morning. The first time I slept over at Lianne’s I was amazed. Her parents stayed in bed till noon on Sunday. We’d get up early and tiptoe through the living room right beside the sofa bed where they were sleeping. There was a rule where you couldn’t stand at the side of the bed, whispering any questions to them. We made toaster waffles with Kraft peanut butter and watched the
Super Friends
and
The Smurfs
on the sixteen-inch TV in her bedroom. Her little brothers got in bed with us. By the time Lianne’s mom and dad got up we’d already seen
The Little Rascals
.
The Three Stooges
was on. The boys liked
The Three Stooges
but if we were lucky there’d be an old Marx Brothers movie on instead. Lianne’s mother wore a man’s shirt to sleep in and at noon she’d suddenly be up, boiling coffee and frying bacon and corn fritters together in the pan and putting ketchup on the table, and Lianne’s father would be doing all this, too, and also somehow strumming a guitar in the corner and wearing a towel on his head.

At my house I’d get up at eight and wander downstairs and my father was already working away out in the garage, his shirt off and a cup of black coffee balanced on the Black & Decker collapsible workbench. Or he was busy in the kitchen, the stand mixer blending pancake batter. Or he was chopping onions for chili, or using a press to make fifty hamburger patties for the freezer, a thin sheet of plastic between each patty. A summer’s worth of hamburgers, all made by 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday in early May. Late into the night
he’d be sitting downstairs in a double-wide green Naugahyde armchair. Hockey Night in Canada. Old Westerns or
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
When I was a teenager, if I wanted to sneak out at night I had to wait until 2:00 a.m. to slide the patio door open. To be safe, I’d have to be back before six.

After Lianne died my father made room for me in the chair and for a year or so I stopped falling asleep in my own bed at night. I fell asleep under a pink blanket while Steve McQueen and his car zoomed around on the screen or Clint Eastwood shot people. I fell asleep while Mike Nykoluk yelled at Börje Salming from behind the boards.

E
verything I was going through still had to do with Lianne, my father told me. His opinion. We were sitting at my little café table next to the kitchen window and drinking midnight coffee. All the paints and the sand and the half-finished sink were still spread out on the floor.

Evolution-wise, my father said, what your brain is doing makes perfect sense. He stirred a spoonful of thick honey into his coffee. He said this is how his mother drank it when he was growing up in Vancouver.

The point is to perceive danger wherever it might exist, he said. He held his hands out the width of the table, then brought them together, slamming one fist into the other palm. But you’re stuck. See? You’re caught in a flight pattern. Hard on the nerves, sweetie. Hard on the heart.

He said I had too much going on. I looked out the window at the empty fire escape. I could still see the man standing there, lit up stark as lightning by the neighbor’s floodlights.

Why don’t I have a motion sensor? I said.

I told him about a girl I’d seen when I was out running in High Park, back in the fall.

I’d come running along the path, through a curve. When you’re
running on gravel, there’s this thing where the pebbles that your feet kick up shoot back and land behind you, and the sound of the gravel spray hitting the path behind you creates a weird echo. It sounds like an extra set of footsteps. You think there’s someone behind you, but you’re alone.

Way up ahead there was a kids’ soccer game going on and the colored shirts of the players stood out in the distance like orange and yellow petals in a field of grass. There was the sound of a motor running just ahead of me and a machine lying on the edge of the path and then a man in a crossing guard vest about eight feet down from that. The machine was a hedge trimmer. Not a crossing guard. A city worker, a landscaper, working the trail. He was standing right where the chain-link fence comes out of the brush and meets the path. He had large, perfectly round sunglasses and two days’ worth of stubble.

I rocketed by, I said. I was really on pace and he looked at me with such an odd smile. And then I saw the girl.

Her back to me, close to the fence. A couple of fingers touching the chain-link fence for balance maybe. I only saw her for a second as I was running by. She was wearing pink jeans.

I said: Her back was to me and I could see her blond ponytail and I thought she might be doing up her jeans and that’s why she was turned around. She was saying something but I couldn’t hear what. I thought: She was peeing and this guy came along with his hedge trimmer.

My father’s face had gone still.

And then the next moment I thought, It’s a boy, she’s been caught rolling around in the woods with a boy. There might have been another person in there with her, I said, I don’t know for sure.

So what was it, my father said.

I don’t know. I didn’t actually see another kid up there in the brush with her. But I felt like there was someone else. The point is, I said. The point is I should have stopped. The guy had this shruggy smile, you know, but I couldn’t see his eyes because of the sunglasses.

You think something bad, he said.

I don’t really.

But kind of.

I was probably half a click away when I thought, I really should have stopped and checked in with her. I should have stopped and said, Hey, are you okay?

She probably got caught peeing, my father said.

But that’s how this shit happens, I said. And now whenever I read one of these stories, every time there’s some guy who says: Oh, I saw a little girl talking to an older man and it seemed a bit off, but then I kept walking. Why do you keep walking? It happens so fast. Your brain gives you the easiest answer.

Did you go back? my father said.

Nah. I shook my head. By that time, who knows? I didn’t even slow down.

I
had a therapist early on who explained things this way: there’s a spectrum. Take that fifth-grade class from 1982. The class list the police spent all night calling. On one end of the spectrum, there are kids who don’t even remember that night. There’s at least one kid who doesn’t remember what happened or how, and if they stumbled upon Lianne’s name in the paper tomorrow what they’d think is, Oh yeah . . . I forgot about that. Weird.

The other end of the spectrum is me.

Doesn’t that have more to do with how close we were? I said to my father. Rather than my extreme powers of empathy?

Look at what you do for a living, he said. Your job is the anxiety machine. You’re mainlining fear.

I have something to show you, I said. I went over to the desk and pulled my mother’s photo off the wall.

Look at this.

I smoothed the picture and pushed it at him across the little table. My father regarded it for a moment.

Quite a find, he said.

Do you remember her?

Your mother? I still see her around the house. My father gave me his quiet smile. Is that what you mean?

But do you remember
her.
Not like she is now.
Her.
I stabbed at the picture with my finger, just gently. This version, I said.

She was something else, he said. When I met her she was sick as a dog. He put his hands on the table and moved the picture back and forth between them. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but she’s kind of a jackass when she’s sick. Frankly it’s a miracle we ever got together.

He said this kindly. I was very fond of her from the get-go, he said. She wore this kerchief when she came to clean the house. I used to make sure I was cooking something when she came into the kitchen. Because, you know, then I’d have something to offer. He passed the picture back to me, across the table. Plus I’d make a mess in the kitchen so she’d have to stay around longer.

You know how I found this? I said. I was looking for Robert Cameron and this picture came up. Robert Cameron owned the house, I said. Not Robert Cameron. Arthur Sawchuk. But that’s his alias. It’s one of his names.

What are you doing?

What was she like? I said.

My father stared at me.

What are you doing, he said.

Humor me.

I got up and started moving around for the hell of it, stacking things on the counter and putting other things away in the cupboard over the stove.

She was lovely, my father said. She’d had a rough start. And then you were born and she was fine. When Lianne happened she had a hard time. Hard as you. Harder, maybe.

It was like she disappeared, too, I said.

She didn’t, he said. She was holding on.

It felt like she was gone for a long time, I said. I stopped cleaning and turned back to face him. I always wanted her and she never came. She was always in bed. Or else gone.

My father looked sideways out the window.

She used to go for those long walks, I said. Remember? She’d be gone for hours. Everyone else’s parents split up.

She couldn’t look at you, he said. She told me that. Too close to home. What if it had been you?

There’s something else, I said. There’s another name that comes up with this picture.

Evie, my dad said. These are common names. That’s your mother’s house. I didn’t know any of the people there. I knew your mother. She needed out.

Graham Patton. That’s David’s father, I said. Right? Graham Patton’s name is buried in this file, too.

My father went silent.

I looked it up, I said. I can’t figure out why his name is attached, but hers is and also Cameron’s.

These are common names, Evie.

Stop saying that.

He threw his hands up. It’s the truth! You’re making problems where there are no more problems!