The Robber Bride (43 page)

“Billy, don’t do that,” she says.

“Why not?” he says. “Why the hell not? I can do what I like. You’re too dumb to notice.” He lets go of her shoulder with one hand and slaps her across the face. “Wake up!” He slaps her again, harder.

“Billy, stop that!” she says, trying to be firm and gentle, trying not to cry.

“Nobody … tells … me … what to do.” He steps back from her, then brings his leg up, knee into her stomach. He’s too drunk to aim well, but it hurts her.

“You’ll kill it!” She’s screaming now. “You’ll kill our baby!”

Billy puts his head down on her shoulder and begins to cry, hoarse choking sobs that sound torn out of him. “I told you,” he said. “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Told me what?” she says, stroking his yellow hair.

“There’s no scars,” he says. “Nothing. There’s no scars at all.”

Charis doesn’t put it together, what he’s talking about. “Come on now,” she says. “We’re going up to bed.” They do, and she rocks him in her arms. Then they are both asleep.

In the morning Charis gets up to feed the chickens, as she always does. Billy is awake: he stays warm underneath the sleeping bag,
watching her dress. Before she goes downstairs she comes over to give him a kiss on the forehead. She wants him to say something, but he doesn’t.

First she lights the stove, then she fills the pail at the sink. She can hear Billy moving around upstairs; also Zenia, which is unusual. Maybe she’s packing, maybe she’ll leave. Charis certainly hopes so. Zenia can’t stay here any more, she’s causing too much disturbance in the air.

Charis goes outside and unlatches the gate to the chickens’ compound. She can’t hear them rustling around this morning, she can’t hear their sleepy cooing. Sleepyheads! She opens the chickens’ door, but none of them come out. Puzzled, she goes around to the door for humans and steps inside.

The chickens are all dead. Every single one of them, dead in their boxes, two of them on the floor. There is blood all over the place, on the straw, dripping down from the boxes. She picks up one of the dead hens from the floor: there’s a slit in its throat.

She stands there, shocked and dismayed, trying to hold herself together. Her head is cloudy, red fragments are swirling behind her eyes. Her beautiful chickens! It must have been a weasel. What else? But wouldn’t a weasel drink all the blood? Maybe it was a neighbour, not anyone right next to her but somebody else. Who hates them that much? The chickens; or her and Billy. She feels violated.

“Billy,” she calls. But he can’t hear her, he’s inside. She walks unsteadily towards the house; she thinks she’s going to faint. She reaches the kitchen, then calls again. He must have fallen asleep. Heavily she goes up the stairs.

Billy isn’t there. He isn’t anywhere in the room, and when she looks into Zenia’s room he isn’t there either. Why would she expect him to be?

Zenia is gone also. They are both gone. They aren’t in the house.

Charis runs, she runs gasping, down towards the ferry dock. She knows now. It’s finally happened: Billy has been kidnapped. When she reaches the dock the ferry is hooting, it’s pulling away, and there is Billy standing on it, with two strange men close to him. Two men in overcoats, just the way they would look. Beside him is Zenia. She must have told, she must have turned him in.

Billy doesn’t wave. He doesn’t want the two men to know Charis has anything to do with him. He’s trying to protect her.

She walks slowly back to the house, goes slowly into it. She searches it from top to bottom, looking for a note, but there is nothing. In the sink she finds the bread knife, with blood on the blade.

It was Zenia. Zenia murdered her chickens.

Maybe Billy wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe he’s run away. He’s run away with Zenia. That’s what he meant by no scars: there are no scars on Zenia. He knows because he’s looked. He has looked at Zenia’s body, all over it, with the light on. He knows everything there is to know about that body. He has been inside it.

Charis sits at the kitchen table, banging her head softly against it, trying to drive out thought. But she thinks anyway. If there are no scars there must be no cancer. Zenia doesn’t have cancer, just as Billy said. But if that’s true, what has Charis been doing for the past six months? Being a fool, that’s what. Being stupid. Being so deeply stupid it’s a wonder she has a brain at all.

Being betrayed. For how long, how many times? He tried to tell her. He tried to make Zenia go away, but then it was too late.

As for the dead chickens and the bread knife, it’s a message.
Slit your wrists
. She hears a voice, a voice from a long time ago, more than one voice.
You are so stupid. You can’t win this fight
. Not in this life. She’s had almost enough of this life anyway; maybe it’s time for the next one. Zenia has taken away the part of herself she needs in order to live. She is dumb, she is a failure, she is an idiot. The bad
things that have happened to her are a punishment, they are to teach her a lesson. The lesson is that she might as well give up.

That is Karen speaking. Karen is back, Karen has control of their body. Karen is angry with her, Karen is desolate, Karen is sick with disgust, Karen wants them to die. She wants to kill their body. Already she has the bread knife in her hand, moving it towards their shared arm. But if she does that, their baby will die too, and Charis refuses to let that happen. She calls all of her strength, all of her inner healing light, her grandmother’s fierce blue light, into her hands; she wrestles Karen silently for possession of the knife. When she gets it, she pushes Karen away from her as hard as she can, back down into the shadows. Then she throws the knife out the door.

She waits for Billy to come back. She knows he won’t, but she waits anyway. She sits at the kitchen table, willing her body not to move, not moving. She waits all afternoon. Then she goes to bed.

By the next day she’s no longer so spaced out. Instead she’s frantic. The worst thing is not knowing. Maybe she’s misjudged Billy, maybe he hasn’t run away with Zenia. Maybe he’s in prison, having his throat cut in the showers. Maybe he’s dead.

She calls all the numbers scribbled on the wall beside their phone. She asks, she leaves messages. None of his friends has heard anything, or will admit to it. Who else could know where he is, where he might have gone? Him, or Zenia, or both of them together. Who else knows Zenia?

She can think of only one person: West. West was living with Zenia before she turned up on Charis’s doorstep with a black eye. Charis views that black eye from a different angle, now. It could have had a valid reason for existing.

West teaches at the university, Zenia told her that. He teaches music or something. She wonders if he calls himself West, or
Stewart. She will ask for both. It doesn’t take her long to track down his home number.

She dials, and a woman answers. Charis explains that she’s looking for Zenia.

“Looking for Zenia?” says the woman. “Now why in hell would anyone want to do that?”

“Who is this?” says Charis.

“Antonia Fremont,” says Tony.

“Tony,” says Charis. Someone she knows, more or less. She doesn’t stop to wonder what Tony is doing answering West’s phone. She takes a breath. “Remember when you tried to help me, on the front lawn of McClung Hall? And I didn’t need it?”

“Yes,” says Tony guardedly.

“Well, this time I do.”

“Help with Zenia?” says Tony.

“Sort of,” says Charis.

Tony says she’ll come.

T
ony takes the ferry to the Island. She sits at Charis’s kitchen table and drinks a cup of mint tea and listens to the whole story, nodding from time to time, with her mouth slightly open. She asks a few questions, but she doubts nothing. When Charis tells her how stupid she has been, Tony says that Charis has not been particularly stupid; no more stupid than Tony was herself. “Zenia is very good at what she does,” is how she puts it.

“But I was so sorry for her!” says Charis: Tears roll down her face; she can’t seem to stop them. Tony hands her a crumpled Kleenex.

“So was I,” she says. “She’s an expert at that.”

She explains that West couldn’t have punched Zenia in the eye, not only because West would never punch anyone in the eye but because at that time West wasn’t living with Zenia. He hadn’t been living with Zenia for over a year and a half. He had been living with Tony.

“Though I suppose he might have done it just walking along the street,” she says. “It would be a definite temptation. I don’t know
what I’d do if I ran into Zenia again. Soak her with gasoline maybe. Set fire to her.”

As for Billy, Tony is of the opinion that Charis shouldn’t waste time looking for him; first, because she’ll never find him; second, because what if she did? If he’s been kidnapped by the Mounties she won’t be able to rescue him, he’s probably in some cement cubicle in Virginia by now, and if he wants to get in touch with her he will. They do allow letters. If he hasn’t been kidnapped, but has been bagged by Zenia instead, he won’t want to see Charis anyway. He’ll be feeling too guilty.

Tony knows, Tony’s been through it: it’s as if Billy has been put under a spell. But Zenia won’t be content with Billy for long. He’s too small a catch, and – Charis will excuse Tony for saying so – he was too easy. Tony has thought a lot about Zenia and has decided that Zenia likes challenges. She likes breaking and entering, she likes taking things that aren’t hers. Billy, like West, was just target practice. She probably has a row of men’s dicks nailed to her wall, like stuffed animal heads.

“Leave him alone and he’ll come home, wagging his tail behind him,” says Tony. “If he still has a tail, after Zenia gets through with him.”

Charis is astonished at the ease with which Tony expresses hostility. It can’t be good for her. But it brings an undeniable comfort.

“What if he doesn’t?” says Charis. “What if he doesn’t come back?” She is still sniffling. Tony rummages under the sink and finds her a paper towel.

Tony shrugs. “Then he doesn’t. There are other things to do.”

“But why did she murder my chickens?” says Charis. No matter how she considers this, she just can’t get her head around it. The chickens were lovely, they were innocent, they had nothing to do with stealing Billy.

“Because she’s Zenia,” says Tony. “Don’t fret about motives. Attila the Hun didn’t have motives. He just had appetites. She killed them. It speaks for itself.”

“Maybe it was because her mother was stoned to death by Roumanians, for being a gypsy,” says Charis.

“What?” says Tony. “No, she wasn’t! She was a White Russian in exile! She died in Paris, of tuberculosis!”

Then Tony begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs.

“What?” says Charis, puzzled. “What is it?”

Tony makes Charis a cup of tea, and tells her to take a rest. She has to look after her health now, says Tony, because she is a mother. She wraps Charis up in a blanket and Charis lies on the living-room sofa. She feels drowsy and cared for, as if things are out of her hands.

Tony goes outside with some plastic garbage bags – Charis knows plastic is bad, but she’s found no alternative – and collects up the dead chickens. She sweeps out the chicken house. She fills a pail of water and does the best she can with the blood.

“There’s a hose,” says Charis sleepily.

“I think I got most of it,” says Tony. “What was this bread knife doing in the garden?”

Charis explains about trying to slit her wrists, and Tony doesn’t scold her. She simply says that bread knives are not a viable solution, and washes it off and puts it back in the knife rack.

After Charis has had her rest, Tony sits her down at the table again. She has a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen. “Now, think of everything you need,” she says. “Everything practical.”

Charis thinks. She needs some white paint, for the nursery; she needs insulation for the house, because after the summer there will be a winter. She needs some loose dresses. But she can’t afford any of
these things. With Billy and Zenia eating up the groceries, she hasn’t been able to save. Maybe she will have to go on welfare.

“Money,” she says slowly. She hates to say it. She doesn’t want Tony to think she’s begging.

“Good. Now, let’s think of all the ways you can get some.”

With the help of her friend Roz, whom Charis remembers dimly from McClung Hall, Tony finds Charis a lawyer, and the lawyer goes after Uncle Vern. He’s alive, though Aunt Viola is not. He’s still living in the house with the wall-to-wall and the rec room. Charis doesn’t have to go and see him – the lawyer does that for her, and reports to Tony. Charis doesn’t have to tell the whole story about Uncle Vern because everything the lawyer needs is there in the wills, her mother’s and her grandmother’s. What has happened is perfectly clear: Uncle Vern has taken the money he got from selling the farm, Charis’s money, and put it into his own business. He claims he tried to find Charis after her twenty-first birthday, but he couldn’t. Maybe this is true.

Charis doesn’t get as much money as she should have – she doesn’t get interest, and Uncle Vern has spent some of the capital, but she gets more than she’s ever had before. She also gets a creepy note from Uncle Vern, saying he’d love to see her again because she was always like a daughter to him. He must be going senile. She burns the note in the stove.

“I wonder if my life would’ve been better if I’d had a real father,” she says to Tony.

“I had one,” says Tony. “It was a mixed blessing.”

Roz invests some of Charis’s money for her. It won’t bring in very much, but it will help. Charis spends part of what’s left buying the house – the landlord wants it off his hands, he thinks the city will tear it down any day now, so he’s happy to take a low price. After she’s bought the house she fixes it up, not totally but enough.

Roz comes over to the Island, because she loves renovating houses, or so she says. She is even larger than Charis remembers her; her voice is louder, and she has a bright lemon-coloured aura that Charis can see without even looking hard.

“Oh, this is terrific,” says Roz, “it’s just like a doll’s house! But sweetie – you need a different table!” The next day, a different table arrives. It’s round and oak, just what Charis wants. Charis decides that – despite all appearances – Roz is a sensitive person.