The Devil You Know: A Novel (8 page)

The
Free Press
building is down near the bottom of Yonge Street, which means a fifteen-minute ride on the King car for me to get to work on a good day. The sidewalks had frozen over again so quickly that between my house and the streetcar stop I could skate along on my boot soles, and I did. On the way in, we stopped at University and a pregnant woman ran for the car and slid. She fell flat out on her belly and I watched from my seat as a couple of nice-looking old
men helped her up. She got on the streetcar and sat across from me with both hands clutching her stomach and a look of quiet terror.

O
kay—so is
this
February weather now?

I’d called David from my desk.

It’s not better, he said. It’s not because it keeps changing. Do you get it? The ground needs to freeze and stay frozen.

Or thaw and stay thawed, I said. That’s my vote. Are you still tree-climbing this summer?

A few years earlier he’d spent a summer in Junior Rangers planting trees. With the encroaching pressure from his mother around A Sensible Business Degree: Why David Should Get One, he’d been looking at escaping the city for another forestry gig come spring.

I can pick up a firefighting contract, he said. Wildfires. They fly you in via helicopter.

Where?

Northern Quebec. Or else Labrador.

I was quiet for a minute.

I’d still live in camp, he said. But the money’s way better. Wanna come plant trees? Take a break from the Don Jail Daily?

I didn’t answer that, either.

Hey, I said. I found the hat. Thanks.

What hat?

My hat.
I left my hat and mittens at the park before I tried to grocery-kill you. Remember? You left the hat at my doorstep? But no mittens. Or else someone took them.

Not me, David said. I mean, I didn’t leave you anything.

I could hear him turn on the kitchen tap on his end of the line. The rush of water hitting the bottom of the steel sink and the change in pressure when he switched the faucet to spray.

That’s weird then, I said.

Nah, anyone will do that. Put the hat at the closest doorstep.
Like when you’re out walking and someone’s hung a baby shoe they found up on the fence, or on a fire hydrant or something. He was banging around the kitchen, dropping cutlery into a drawer with more cutlery already inside. Maybe you lost it right in front of the house, he said. Lucky.

Are you making breakfast still? I said. It’s like one o’clock. I’ve been at work for five hours.

Think about the summer, David said. Working vacation. Write an exposé.

What if I’m urgently needed at the Don Jail?

I figure I’m irresistible in uniform, David said. But don’t worry. I’ll fight you off.

I
came home balancing a tray of leftover muffins and white-bread sandwiches from a meeting I hadn’t even gone to. The muffins had been left in the little kitchen on my floor at work. They had a clear plastic dome for a lid that clicked soundly into place. I thought that in itself was worth the price of admission on claiming the leftovers.

When I was a Girl Guide as a kid, we had this trick of weighing down our camping hats with those little plastic tags that seal up bags of bread from the grocery store. Not twist ties. We all saved those bread tags and clipped them up along the edge of our hats, fifty or sixty of them at a time, so that the wind couldn’t blow the hats away. Today if I see a bread tag lying in the street, it’s everything I can do not to lean down and pick it up and bring it home. There’s a part of my brain that just kicks in. They’re very useful. So I have a long and resolute history when it comes to collecting garbage. When I’m old, little children will see me coming and say, Here comes Crazy Bread Tag Lady.

I came into the kitchen and set my new muffin dome down on the table and switched on the light. Something red caught my eye, just outside the window on the fire escape. The color stood out against the ice. My red-striped mittens. They were laid out
carefully, like an X. I cracked the lock on the emergency door and stepped outside. The temperature had fallen steadily all day. It was cool and slippery. The water from a long row of melting icicles had frozen slick on the landing. I held on to the rail and slid out to where the mittens were and brought them inside. They were dry and clean.

I
think it’s sweet, David said. He leaned his forehead against my kitchen window. You have a secret admirer.

It’s creepy, I said.

It’s just one of the guys upstairs. Where were they, he said. Just there?

Don’t you think it’s weird? I came over to the window but didn’t lean as closely in. Looking at the fire escape made me want to keep my distance. Whoever found my mittens must have been watching us fool around in the park, I said. Then he watched to see what house I went into.

He didn’t catch much action then, David said. Aside from my near-death. He pressed his hands against the glass and pushed backward. Maybe someone likes you, Evie. I mean, who wouldn’t, right?

He had a way of holding his head down but looking up at me that sometimes made me want to jump up and down a little bit and sometimes just made me want to punch him.

That’s the last thing I want to hear right now, I said.

I went over to the kitchen counter and opened up the cabinet. There were a few things sitting in the dish rack in the sink and I started stacking them up, pulling the plates and cups out of the rack and setting them in the cupboard. I turned back to David.

Then this guy waits a whole day to climb up onto my fire escape and leave them there in the creepiest way possible? Why not put them in the mailbox? Or leave them in the doorway with the hat? Or—now get this—how about ring the doorbell?

David turned around and put a hand on my shoulder.

Look, he said. It’s definitely one of the guys upstairs. Why don’t you ask them?

I pulled the mittens onto my hands and looked down at them. They’d been lost on a wet day. I opened my mouth to tell David what I thought, that they looked so clean when I found them, laid out like a gift. Like someone had washed them for me. I splayed the thumbs in and out. My hands looked like Pac-Man’s hungry mouth.

I don’t want to encourage anybody, I said.

Y
our standard workday as low-man at a daily newspaper is engineered to start early and end late. This inspires loyalty. It’s like Stockholm syndrome. Get ready to be there for fourteen hours, even if you’re only scheduled for half a shift. Even if at first glance it looks like the world’s easiest day, and actually you’re just dropping by to pick up your paycheck before you go to your friend’s cottage for the weekend. There are too many variables. Who can say what will happen next?

I controlled this aspect by showing up later than I should. I got up the next day and put on my weird, clean mittens and then took them off again and shoved them into my bag. In case sometime later the cold made me really desperate. Most days, Angie was too busy with her own stuff to come looking for me until around ten, so it was safe enough if I rolled in by that time; anyway, part of the reporter beat is to know the city. She’d told me that herself: Walk everywhere, learn the neighborhoods, pay attention. Get to know the local zoo—hookers, junkies, everybody. Hookers and junkies, especially.

It was a nice enough day and I zigzagged to work, walking up along Dundas and then through Kensington Market. I bought a sugary cappuccino in a Styrofoam cup from the corner shop, figuring I could drink it out in the bracing freshness of February and wander back down Spadina. It was cold but not impossible. I wondered
if it would be worse to sit out on a park bench or on the frozen sidewalk. When I was a kid my mother was convinced that sitting on a cold sidewalk would give you a kidney infection. I was the only child standing up through the whole Santa Claus parade. Everyone else sat on the curb.

The sidewalk in Kensington is filthy in any season. On Baldwin Street a few stragglers emptied out of a second-floor booze can, a dark-haired woman in jeans and army boots wearing a full-length fur coat and dragging her boyfriend along behind her. The boyfriend was heavy-eyed. He had a cadet’s cap on his head and a professional coat of pink lipstick across his mouth. Short, light blond hair stuck out straight from under the hat and at the back of his neck. He had a Russian look that suited him and the woman grabbed his cap and refused to give it back until he kissed her. It was 9:00 a.m. A good time had by all.

I’d been inside the same after-hours club a few times in the past year. Once to report on a shooting and a couple of other times as a patron. There’s an inherent drinking culture that the
Free Press
has in common with all other news sources on the planet. That’s another loyalty and/or hostage thing and it’s easy to get caught up, especially when you’re all on deadline and it’s been a long week. Or even just a long day. It’s after midnight and you’re jacked on cheap coffee and hours of closely examining the worst that humanity has to offer. The impulse is to break out of the bunker. With your compatriots, of course. By now they’re the only ones who could possibly understand you anyway. Which is fine and good if you’re a 180-pound guy who can hold his liquor, but some of us lady journalists need to take it easy. It’s possible to forget that part. All of this tightens the knot. Less like a job and more like the best, most secret club you could belong to. You think you’re a grown-up but life turns out to be high school with money.

There’s another way into journalism, which is to take a better reporting job at a smaller paper. David and I have talked about this, and that’s why he thinks it’s a good idea to dangle Labrador in front
of my nose. Where I’m “with files from” in Toronto, I could jump to writing editorials and features in an outport town.

Except features on what? I said. Bears versus campers? Moose collisions?

I’ll have you know that moose are a really serious problem, David said. He cited several instances of moose-related drama from his tree-planting experience. And don’t even get me started on bears. A good bear attack? That’s worth at least three street corner drug busts. Take a look at the inside of a bear’s jaws. Have you ever seen a bear chase something down? Those fuckers are fast.

Part of his vehemence had to do with saving me from myself, working this job that pushed trauma up under my nose every day. Saving my heart, he called it. The other part had to do with the fact that David knew me well enough to wonder where the work might take me. Geographically, I mean. So that part was really about saving his own heart, and we didn’t talk about it.

We’ve spent a lot of energy being friends. I’ve baked cupcakes on David’s birthday every year since he turned fifteen. I’m lousy at it but there’s a secret. You put marshmallow fluff in the frosting. The frosting is basically fluff, with chocolate or cherry syrup added in for color and whatnot. That’s the whole key right there: not the kind of ingredient you’d ever expect, but it makes all the difference in the world.

I make the cupcakes because David’s mother melts down every year on his birthday. I don’t know if this is a thing she also did when he was small and his father was still in the picture, or if it has something to do with the fission of his nuclear family. One time we walked in after school and found his mother wearing the same aerobics outfit she’d put on first thing in the morning, maniacally doing jumping jacks and sobbing in front of the television in the basement. She’d spent an entire day doing exercise videos, one after another after another. I was in the tenth grade, David was in eighth, and Graham Patton had been gone for six months. That’s why I relate her craziness to the family breakdown, although it’s possible
I’d just grown old enough to pay attention. Who knows how many other days she’d driven herself into the ground?