Things Withered (20 page)

People fled into stores, behind displays. Merchandise scattered dangerously around the edges of the centre court. Trudy stepped on something that squeaked. She couldn’t see where she was going for the press of bodies until she hit a glass wall. She dragged the two of them along it pressing against bodies that grunted and sobbed and shouted names—
Gloria! over here!
Someone screamed that he dropped his phone. Trudy hit something soft, synthetic. It fell into something solid and the two of them went with it. Her face pushed into the soft plush of a toy, smelling like plastic and gas. When she was able to move her head, she saw the painted face of a doll. Nearly life-size, the sort of toy weekend fathers buy their daughters, garish, bright—

Ariel.
The Little Mermaid.
A big one.

They were in the Disney store. Trudy and Timmy had landed in a pile of stuffed toys. The corner display. There was Woody, Pooh, Ariel.

Trudy laughed. Hysteria, panic, adrenalin all fought over the place in the toy pile.

Disney.

From somewhere beyond her scope of sight there were terrible sounds, clearer somehow than the cacophony of voices: guttural, growling, sometimes worse. She pawed away at the pink softies, the blues, the greens, the lurid reds of the toys they were buried under, they scattered over her head, and pressed into the window. She kept doing it until she could see through the glass.

What she saw: just past the blond fluff that was the top of Timmy’s head she saw a single papier-mâché palm tree, still standing. Someone ran past the window, hands raised over his or her head, their mouth open in a shriek, almost cartoon-like. The person hit a patch of something slippery

(blood don’t say it, don’t think it, blood)

and went down. The chasing-thing rose on hind legs and then dropped out of view.

A bear. Trudy thought it might have been a bear. She turned away.

This isn’t happening. This is the petty zoo. Saturday. Forty-eight hours of uncompromised quality time.
Timmy had not let go of her neck. Trudy was almost on top of him.

“Timmy, let go,” she grunted. Her voice was muffled by the toys. Under the screaming and weeping, Elton John sang over the store PA. “Hakuna Matata,” from
The Lion King
. They had it at home.

“Tims, we’re in a store now. We’re safe—look—it’s the Disney Store.”

Timmy wouldn’t take his head out of her neck. He had been silent. His hand clutched her wrist, digging her watchband into the soft flesh. She realized that she had lost a shoe, her bare foot resting on one of the plush toys. Her mind stumbled over thoughts fast, like: the wristband and the fluorescent lights and the bump and press of other bodies as they tumbled into the pile of soft toys and rolled off or jumped away.

Trudy tried to slow her breathing, tried to calm herself to calm him.

Hakuna Matata

She dug her hand out from under a huge stuffed Lightning McQueen, one shiny headlamp eye staring cheerily up at her, the other buried somewhere under her neck. She brought her hand up to her baby’s neck and stroked. Around them were the shouts and cries of chaos, the crash and clatter of things that fell and the grotesque wild call of animals.

“It’s going to be okay . . . we’re in a store. We’re in Disney,” she said. She laugh-sobbed, “Nothing bad can happen in Disney—”

A flash of orange and an ungodly sound and then

Tigger?

was upon them.

The beach had been deserted the four or five times she’d been down there. When she mentioned this to the lady at the store, she said, “Oh, you really have to go at night. It’s a night beach.”

A dirty patch on her breast was embroidered with
Sylvia
, but there was a look of the second hand to the smock. Her husband, a great hairy man who reminded Laura of an uncle she used to like, shot
Sylvia
a look, a quick one. Not too nice, maybe. The woman stared him down.

“What?” the lady finally said. He shook his head and disappeared into the back of the store, saying nothing.

Laura bought the city paper, a carton of milk for her coffee and a package of hot dogs. She added a candy bar while she watched the woman punch in her purchases on an old-fashioned, manual cash register. The store was utterly deserted, as it had been each time Laura had been there.

The woman gave her the total. While Laura dug in her purse for the money the woman leaned on the counter and said, “Yup, lots of people on that beach at night. Gets real lit up if there’s a moon,” she said. She watched Laura steadily as she spoke.

“Oh,” she said, because it seemed to need something.

“Are you enjoying our little town?”

Laura stared into her purse, not quite sure what to say to such a thing. She wasn’t enjoying anything these days, and the town, she decided, was a little creepy. It was empty all the time. It was the beginning of July, beach season, and the town was less than a mile from one of the country’s “The Ten Most Beautiful Beaches.” The main road ran along the rugged shoreline of the rest of the lake, with tiny little coves dotted here and there. In spite of this, the place was dead.

Laura’s cabin was about a city block from one of the little coves and she’d been down there a handful of times. It was always empty. One day she shared the beach for a full afternoon with a big black dog that ran in and out of the water, barking. He’d run about ten feet in—to where the water would just be touching the underside of his belly—bark madly for about thirty seconds, and then run back out, looping the cove for a few minutes, and then back in. No owner had shown up to take him away, no one had called for him. It had been surreal. Her only company.

“It’s very quiet,” Laura said, because to say otherwise would be impolite. And she wasn’t sure if it was the town, or her own circumstances. She wasn’t sure she would enjoy anything for a while. Not even St. Kitts.

(He’d taken her to St. Kitts one year, on a conference. She’d had to spend the whole time in the hotel, going out only when it was dark so that no one saw them.)

The man returned from the back. He loaded some things onto shelves behind the counter, eyeing his wife. She ignored him. To Laura he said, “You have to be careful swimming. There’s an undertow.”

This annoyed the woman and she snapped. “There’s no undertow. For chrissakes Bernie, don’t scare the girl from the water.” He looked chastened. He allowed himself one glance at Laura and then went back to stacking.

“We need bodies on the beach,” she said to Laura, more kindly. “Don’t listen to him. You go swimming. Try that West Beach. It’s a good beach. It’s a night beach.”

The woman put Laura’s few things in a plastic bag with the logo from a famous toy store on the side and handed it across to her. The store was shabby, with a fine and invisible layer of failure over everything. The meat counter was empty and used to store things still in boxes, with anonymous names stamped on the outside. Handwritten across the side of one box was
Mephist
and the rest was hidden behind its neighbour, on another she could clearly read (
362 Belisle Street No COD!
). The printing angled off until the final D was only about a half inch high. A file folder blew open and closed with the rotation of a small fan. The papers inside fluttered like the gills of a fish, as if it was breathing.

The place smelled funny. Like an old auntie’s bedroom.

“It’s better at night,” the woman added as Laura nodded her goodbye.

“Excuse me?”

“The West Beach. It’s better at night. Go tomorrow,” she turned her head, looking out the big, grimy window at the side of the store. “There’s a moon.”

It was just after ten
A.M.

The store was at the other end of town from where Laura was staying. It was nestled in a short strip of businesses, most of which were boarded up, as though waiting for clientele to decide on opening day. The hot dog stand was open and as Laura passed by, a tall man ducked his head in a nod and watched her walk. She waved and smiled a greeting. He didn’t wave back.

The main drag—such as it was—was barren. Farther down, heat waved up off the concrete in front of the mini-arcade, and distantly she could hear the ping and click of the games as they played themselves. A single car was parked outside the arcade, coated in dust from the gravel road into town.

The place should be packed. But it wasn’t, the whole thing was downright creepy, and completely deserted.

Laura hadn’t come to the beach for a party, regardless of what the woman at the store thought, she was not looking for a busy beach. The main beach was close enough to walk if you had nothing else to do with your day—and she didn’t—and had she wanted loud company, that would have been the place to go. It was unofficially, strictly regulated: the body beautiful, the young and tanned, occupied the middle section of the beach. The east side beach was for the campers and families and the guy at the beach stand that sold drinks and dogs (that was the name of it, in fact:
Drinks ’n’ Dogs
) said the water was warmer on that side from the kids peeing in it. The west side was where Laura had sat the day she’d gone. It was mostly old people who didn’t want to walk far from the boardwalk and didn’t mind sitting near the rocks.

She belonged in the middle group, but had her fill of sexual heat and innuendo. Maybe forever.

The week before her holidays Tom had walked past her desk and given her the signal, a casual tap on the cubicle wall as he passed. Ten minutes later she met him in the coffee room and as they poured coffee he leaned close to her ear—reaching for the sugar—and told her that he couldn’t see her anymore. It was because of his wife, he told her. She was suspicious.

“But you know, maybe we can meet up once in a while at the hotel. See ya, kiddo,” and then he did the worst thing, the very
worst
thing he could have done, ever. He slapped her on the back.
Good knowing ya. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Catch you on the flip side. Sayonara. Toodle-oo.

See ya, Kiddo.

For two years her life had been about secrets and sex and love. (On her part; bravely, boldly she had told him on a trip to Bemidji that he didn’t have to love her! She had enough love for them both! Darling!)

When she got back to her desk she looked up beach rentals on the net and called this one sight unseen. After all, she could cry anywhere.

It was the worst thing that he’d done, in a list of worst things that could go all the way back to the fact that he was cheating on a wife whom he had three small boys with, a woman whom he had also taken to St. Kitts, she found out later.

Kiddo.
Really?
Kiddo
?

It was the worst thing he’d done. But not the worst thing
she’d
done.

That would be the packet and photos.

The cottage was about seventy years old. There was electricity, but it was without plumbing. She hauled water from the city and it wasn’t as bad as she had thought it might be and was just preoccupied enough for the extra, unfamiliar chore, to be a distraction. There was an old back house at the end of the yard, abutting onto an overgrown, unlit pathway and that was the bad part.

At night she used a flashlight. There was a powerful yard light over the back door and she kept it on all night long. But when she had to use the outhouse, rather than make the trip easier, it simply deepened the shadows in the yard. The flashlight was used to dispel those. While she wished she hadn’t been quite so impulsive, it was not that bad. Laura read during the day, a lot of light stuff, suitable for the beach, the sort of thing that occupied only enough of her mind to keep her from crying all day. It was a lot of John Grisham and Sue Kellerman. She would read a paragraph or two and then stare into space until she was crying hopelessly; then she would blow her nose, dry her eyes and go back to the book. That cycle took about a half an hour, and so were her days filled.

She’d taken a lot of walks.

The road in front of the cottage ran alongside the shoreline that was the fat cousin of the
Ten-Best
beach. The shore was at the bottom of a steep drop-off, carefully secured by an eyesore, a clumsy metal guardrail, but there was a nice view from the road. And you could always hear the water. Wild waves smashed against enormous rocks the colour of slate when they were wet and even during low tide when the water lapped instead of pummelled, it sounded violent and discouraging like tight knots of teenagers at the 7-Eleven. The sound was always there, low and growling or as loud as highway sounds, but always there, under everything else.

Laura would walk the full length of the road, a good long walk that took the better part of an hour, and if she was hot and sweaty, or not quite ready to go back and face the routine tears of Mr. Grisham and the incredible lightness of reading, then she would slip down the steep incline and wander along the rocks up to the far end, where the rocks ended briefly and there was a small patch of blond sand. The west beach.

It was always empty.

She would wear her bathing suit and carry a towel, but never went in past her knees. She’d sit an hour or so on the coarse sand, staring out as far as the water went—and you couldn’t see where the water ended on the other side; it was all grey water and blue sky, forever.

It was as if she
thought
she went in. Like trying to remember if something happened on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the final outcome not really important.

Then she would head back and try to do something.

In the mornings she went for supplies, if she needed something, or if she wanted something. A candy bar, a newspaper. The store sold no magazines, the woman said it wasn’t worth the effort to bring them in, because folks brought them from the city. But both papers were there every day and the first two days Laura was at the beach, she bought both papers and did the crossword puzzles in both, and the Jumble.

The days were long, and sometimes, if she had to, she went for two-three-four walks. The second night in the little cottage she decided around ten
P.M.
to take a walk through the town.

It had been disturbing.

The town itself was completely motionless. The night had been breezeless, the moon reflecting off the water in little white lashes, like the flick of a cat’s tail, there, then gone. The water lapped against the rocks in little gasping breaths. But for the length of her walk, she saw no people outside, no lawn chairs parked to face the lake, no cars on the road.

Sound carried, however, and she could hear people laughing and the low jumbled hum of voices or radios, maybe coming from the campground, maybe from across the lake, where at night you could see a single light burning, no bigger than a star in the sky. (She liked to think it was a lighthouse, but knew it wasn’t; she asked the woman at the store the next morning and she told her it was the yard light from a John Deere dealership.)

Laura hadn’t walked long that night. Instead she’d gone back to her little cottage, glad to see its light through the front curtains, circa 1949. She poured herself a glass of wine and let it warm her to sleep.

The day had been a restless one. She’d walked down to the beach again, and it was deserted, although as she was leaving a tired-looking woman with a small boy showed up, him scrambling down the sandy hill with a towel around his neck, her pulling up the rear with less enthusiasm. They’d shared a wan smile each before the woman suddenly shouted, “
Johnny!
Take your
damn
sandals off!” startling Laura so badly, she actually jumped.

She’d gone home and finished the Grisham, starting on a Laurel K. Hamilton, but put it down when the words started swimming in front of her eyes. She ate one of the hot dogs she’d bought at the store, raw, and then out of guilt made herself a small salad with the limp works she’d brought from the city. She dressed it up with the last glass of wine in the bottle and it seemed like she might be feeling (starting to feel) a little bit better. At some point through dinner she realized she hadn’t thought about Tom—

or that horrible other thing

—all day. She convinced herself that she really was feeling better.

After the wine, she fell asleep on the sofa. She slept for hours. In self-defence.

Laura woke hours later, fighting some demon she could no longer remember. The room was dark and she realized she’d slept through the sunset and that it had to be close to ten, for the room to be so dark. Beside her on the coffee table were the remains of supper, a few pieces of lazy lettuce drowning in Italian dressing, fork-knife-napkin a crumpled package and her empty glass. It was disorienting. Her first thought was panicked—she’d slept too long! She would never be able to get through the night! She could
not deal
with another sleepless night!

The curtains were drawn against the sun, an attempt to keep the cottage cool, in vain. She was sweaty and hot, unsure of the time. Laura pulled herself to sitting and peered through the tiny crack in the curtains, seeing only the night.

Tomorrow his wife will get the package
, was what she thought once fully awake. The thought made her stomach tighten and her face hot. If she’d been an excitable girl, she would have felt her heart pounding like in a bad novel. She thought about that scene in
Psycho
, when Janet Leigh looks at the money in the envelope.