Strangers Among Us Page 6

  “Oh, sure,” said Jack. He got out his wallet and extracted a piece of paper on which he’d written three names, with phone numbers. “I figured you would. Those are out-of-town numbers, I’m afraid. Kamloops.”

  “Are you moving here, Mr. Coutts?”

  “I don’t know yet, ma’am. I’m looking the place over, you might say. The climate’s better than up-country, so I’m giving it serious consideration.”

  The phone in the kitchen rang, and she excused herself to answer it.

  …it had happened on a rutted, sandy road, dry yellow grass and sagebrush spreading across the landscape on either side, purple mountains rising nearby. Jack had gotten him down and he was pounding the shit out of him. Sweat was pouring from his face onto Alberg’s. There was bright blood in Alberg’s blond hair, upon his ashen face, drenching his uniform jacket. It was the only time in his adult life that he’d hit somebody. And it hadn’t been enough. It wasn’t nearly enough…

  As Enid returned to the living room she saw that Jack Coutts’s hands were trembling. He brought them together, tightly. He was a big man, slightly stooped, with thick hair that was almost completely gray, even though he was a little bit younger than Enid. What could cause his hands to tremble?

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “If I had one of those answering machines I could have just let it ring.” She smiled at him. “And your family?” she said.

  He looked at her uncomprehendingly. “Excuse me?”

  “Your family. Will they be joining you here, if you decide to stay? Because as you saw last night, the suite really isn’t big enough for more than one.”

  “No,” said Jack, huskily. He cleared his throat. “No family.”

  She had resolved not to be caught by surprise this time. This time she would be ready for him. This time the house would be ready for him.

  She took an old paper grocery bag into the bathroom and dumped into it all the bottles and sponges and toothpaste tubes that cluttered the counter, and then she wiped the counter. Downstairs, she put all the newspapers into piles, and in the kitchen she washed all the dishes. Some of the food would not come off. It stayed on the plates in speckled patterns, like a bird’s egg. It stayed in the cups, shadows of tea and coffee stuffed down in there. It stayed in glasses, ghosts of Heather’s milk. Still, Betty thought, every plate and cup and glass and knife and fork and spoon has been in hot soapy water, and so it is clean. She washed the counters, too, and the table, and the front of the refrigerator.

  When she had finished all this work, she was exhausted. Her head was spinning; her mind was numb. She went up to her room to lie down, to rest and collect herself.

  Later, she got up and walked around the house. She could scarcely recognize it, it was so clean. And it had taken her only one day—just one day. It was disappointing when Heather came home, because at first she didn’t notice anything. So Betty took her around the house, showing her. “Look in here, look in the kitchen,” she said, and Heather followed her in there and when she saw it, she smiled.

  “It looks good,” she said.

  But the next morning Betty realized that she had not done the floors. She knew it didn’t matter that she had cleaned the bathroom and piled up newspapers and washed all the dishes. If she didn’t do the floors as well it would be the floors that he would see. She was angry with him then, for a minute, as she looked around the house and saw what she still had to do.

  With a broom she swept the floors and the rug. The dust blew up onto the furniture and into her nose and eyes. And the more she swept, the more dust and dirt there was. It came up in clouds and choked her. Finally she stopped and went outside to breathe the cold air.

  When she returned to the house the dust had settled back onto the carpet, onto the floors. It didn’t look as though she had cleaned the floors at all. He will see that the floors are still dirty, she thought. He will see that before he sees the clean bathroom, the clean kitchen, the neat piles of newspapers.

  And then she had an idea. She would make a large sign saying, WELCOME HOME, JACK! He would be so surprised and pleased by the sign that he wouldn’t notice the floors.

  She jumped up from the table and started looking for a piece of paper. She looked in the kitchen and in Heather’s room, but couldn’t find one that was big enough. So she went into Jack’s den, tiptoed in there where it was so neat and tidy and cool and clean. She tried to open his desk drawers—but they were locked.

  A big piece of anger settled in Betty’s chest. He locked them to keep Heather out of his things, but why can’t he leave a key with me, she thought, in case of emergencies? She pulled and yanked at the drawers but they would not open.

  Then a thought came into her head, bright and shining. In Heather’s room she found a big fat felt pen, and she ran into Jack’s den and stood up on his sofa and in big black letters, everyone perfect, she wrote on the wall: WELCOME HOME, JACK! And then she got the chair from behind the desk and moved it closer to that wall, the one behind his desk, and she wrote the same thing on that wall, blackly on the white wall: WELCOME HOME, JACK! Carefully. Carefully.

  She stood in the doorway and looked at the two signs. He might not like it, she told herself. He might not like it that I have written on his walls. I know that. I am not a child.

  She wanted to see his face when he looked at them. She could almost see the first expression that would pop out on his face like a big pimple when he saw them. He would be astonished, bewildered…and something else, something she couldn’t quite make out in her mind, no matter how much she peered, no matter how hard she strained to see.

  She had never been so impatient for him to come home.

  Chapter 8

  Wednesday, November 23

  “ITHINK HE’S EXPERIENCED A tragedy,” said Enid. They were sitting in lawn chairs on Bernie’s covered front porch, Bernie not yet having gotten around to putting away the accoutrements of summer, and they were discussing Enid’s lodger. Enid sat back with a sigh, holding a glass of iced tea. “It’s extremely interesting, isn’t it? Getting bits and pieces of other people’s lives. It’s one of the—”

  “That’s all well and good,” said Bernie severely, “as long as you don’t start making up the in-between parts.” She wore a hairnet over her bright brown curls and was dressed for work in a white uniform and white shoes.

  “What on earth are you saying?”

  “You know exactly what I’m saying. You’ve got too much imagination for your own good, Enid. Especially now you don’t work anymore.”

  Enid, who had been a teacher, had retired early, when her husband died.

  “What did you think of the funeral?” Bernie asked. “You being the local expert on this type of thing.”

  “Well goodness,” said Enid. “Under the circumstances it was fine. I guess they did the best they could.”

  It had been a disappointing occasion, finally, although she wouldn’t say this to Bernie. The funerals she attended were usually far more social in nature. People gathered around and told stories after the service, celebrating the life of the deceased. There were refreshments, there was laughter.

  Of course most of these departed had died at an advanced age, and could be considered to have lived complete lives. Enid hadn’t expected that the Gardeners’ funeral would be a social event. She had expected to feel the shock and bewilderment and horror that was almost palpable among the gathering. But something else had been present, too, something Enid couldn’t put her finger on. She had felt it as people huddling, with backs bent, averting their eyes, concealing the dead rather than acknowledging their unnaturally terminated lives.

  “How’s the little girl?” she asked.

  “I’ve heard nothing,” said Bernie. “So I guess that means at least she’s still alive.”

  “And what will happen to her brother?”

  “He’ll go to jail,” said Bernie grimly. “But not for long enough.”

  “How well did you know him?”

&nbs
p; “Not as well as I thought. I got to know his ma. I knew Verna.” Bernie drank the rest of her tea and stood up. “Gotta go. You gonna walk along with me?”

  They put the glasses in the sink and Bernie picked up her big black handbag from the kitchen counter. On the windowsill, three African violet leaves were rooting in small jars of water. Bernie rattled the knob of the kitchen door to make sure it was locked, and they left the house through the front door.

  They set off for Bernie’s two o’clock housecleaning job, which was at the O’Rourkes’ house, about a mile away. Bernie trudged along the side of the road and Enid glided next to her, imagining herself on rollerblades. She’d been a creditable ice skater in her time, but that was ages ago. She did those flexibility exercises almost every day, though, so who knows, she thought: maybe there was a night school class in rollerblading; they taught just about everything else there. Enid, strolling next to Bernie, pictured herself parachuting, or windsurfing, or pitching from a clifftop with one of those big kites strapped to her back.

  It was warm for November, but there were puddles from the recent rains, and the brush by the roadside was still wet with the fog that had crept in during the night and taken until mid-morning to recede.

  “It does feel odd,” Enid mused, “having somebody staying in my house.”

  “Huh,” said Bernie. “Especially a man.”

  “I hear noises down there and at first I’m alarmed, then I remember it’s him. And I ought to feel relieved. But I don’t know if I do.”

  “Well but he’s only just moved in. You’re not used to him yet,” said Bernie, squinting up at a crow that sat on a telephone pole, squawking. “I often wonder why I’ve never been shat upon by a bird. It’s gonna happen someday. Bound to.”

  “Should I invite him up for dinner, do you think?”

  Bernie stopped in her tracks. “What? Your lodger?”

  “I thought it might be the polite thing to do.” Enid glanced at her friend. “For goodness’ sake, Bernie, don’t look at me like that. I’ve never been a landlady before. I don’t know the drill.”

  “What you’ve got here, Enid, is a strictly business arrangement, and don’t you forget it.” Bernie started walking again, almost at a trot now. “I don’t like it. I don’t like nothin’ about this. I thought you were gonna have a young teacher in there, or a nurse or something—some young female person, anyway.”

  “So did I,” said Enid, striding along in order to keep up. “But it doesn’t matter, surely.”

  “I don’t know if it matters or not,” Bernie muttered. “I’m not one to mince my words, Enid, and you have always been a terrible flirt.”

  “Bernie! You can’t seriously think that a woman of my age—”

  “Enid, stuff it. I’ve known you for twenty years, and you’ve been a flirt for every one of them. You’re gonna flirt with the embalmer, you.” She jabbed Enid in the shoulder. “You just better draw the line, though, at flirting with your lodger.”

  “He’s too young for me,” Enid protested, and then winced, knowing what Bernie was going to say next.

  She didn’t say it, though. She just stopped again and with those raisin-black eyes looked straight at Enid, her lips pursed tightly together, the wrinkles in her face exclaiming her disapproval.

  That night Cassandra had a library board meeting. Alberg fixed himself a corned beef sandwich with lots of mustard and got half of it down before his appetite vanished. He put the other half on a plate, covered the plate with plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge. Then he opened a beer and sat on the sofa, watching the TV news and tossing a foil ball for the younger of his two cats while her mother, not in the mood for play, lay in his wingback chair watching them through slitted eyes.

  Later, stretched out with a cushion under his head, the lamp in the corner turned on low, he tried to conduct a detached and logical examination of the past. But all he was able to do was buzz it, like a dive-bomber. He swooped down, grabbed a glimpse, and soared high, like an eagle with a piece of prey in its talons. He looked at this piece of memory for a minute, dropped it, and plunged down for another one. He wouldn’t let himself collect them, retain them, fit them together so they made a whole picture. Maybe there wasn’t a whole picture.

  What the hell was Jack Coutts doing here? What was going on in his head?

  …dust in his mouth, blood in his mouth, on the uniform— head wounds, they bleed like crazy. He hadn’t been expecting it—who the hell would? Especially at that late date: three months had passed since the inquest.

  The guy was just suddenly flying through the air toward him. His whole body hit Alberg’s and the two of them crashed to the ground, and Jack had commenced to beat the crap out of him. And then Jack had collapsed. Alberg remembered the dead weight of him, crumpled across his chest, and the sound of his weeping, and the wetness of his tears, as they mingled with Alberg’s blood.

  Alberg had shoved him aside and gotten to his knees, then to his feet. He pulled Coutts up and leaned him against his car. Jack’s eyes were closed; he was still crying. Alberg patched himself up with the first aid kit in the patrol car while the wind blew hot across the already sunburnt grass, tumbling sagebrush alongside the sandy track down which Jack had followed him, honking his horn, waving him to a stop.

  Eventually Jack’s sobbing had ceased. He watched dull-eyed as Alberg staunched the bleeding in his scalp and slapped a bandage on the wound. He said nothing.

  Alberg decided to pretend the whole thing had never happened. He left Jack standing by his car and went to the motel he was then calling home, to change and get cleaned up, and that was the end of it.

  He hadn’t blamed the guy.

  He still didn’t.

  But that was then. What was happening now? Had this final tragedy pushed him off the edge? Was Jack becoming deranged? Like his wife?

  Alberg got up and turned off the lights in the living room and sat down again on the edge of the sofa, letting the darkness engulf him. The senior cat, purring, rubbed against his pants legs, turned around several times, then lay down across his stockinged feet.

  Chapter 9

  Saturday, November 26

  ALBERG AND CASSANDRA SPENT the afternoon looking at a house.

  “Take your time,” the real estate agent had said, handing them the key. He was a shy young man called Neil, a slender, ruddy-cheeked kid whose credulous smile made Cassandra want to hug him. “I think it’s gonna suit you real well,” he’d said. “But you gotta be careful about such a big decision. Sure.”

  The sun was shining again, glittering from the ocean, throbbing in the red bark of the arbutus trees that clung to a cliff face down the beach, setting aglow the bright green ferns growing thick and tall among the trees behind the house.

  In front, a small, ailing lawn led halfheartedly down to a rocky beach. On the left a spit of land extended beyond the lot on which the house was built, offering shelter, creating a small cove. To the right there was another patch of weedy lawn, and then a rocky ledge that separated this lot from the next one, which was a rough piece of terrain backed up against a cliff, unlikely to be developed easily or soon.

  “Look,” said Cassandra, pointing into the backyard. “Wildflowers.”

  Alberg looked. “Weeds.”

  “They’re only weeds if they’re growing where you don’t want them to grow,” she told him. They had gone to seed, turned brown, been beaten by the autumn rains.

  “Right. They’re weeds,” he said stubbornly.

  Behind this patch of earth was a forest that stretched up the hill to the highway.

  A gravel road wound down from the highway and turned here to run parallel to it, giving access to the several houses that had been built along the coastline to the south, squeezed between the forest and the sea.

  Inside, the living room, which faced the ocean, had one wall made almost entirely of glass, and French doors led out to the front lawn.

  “There ought to be a deck out there,” said Cassa
ndra. “Or a patio.” The sound of the sea would put her to sleep at night, if she lived in this house.

  “That’s easily accomplished,” said Alberg.

  “I can’t believe I’m getting married.” She was suddenly filled with wonder, thinking about it. “I’m fifty years old for god’s sake.”

  “I’m older,” said Alberg. “Somewhat older. Not much.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not your first wedding. It’s my first damn wedding. At fifty. Some people would say it’s a dumb thing to be doing, Karl.”

  He put an arm around her. “People like who?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  Cassandra had once dreamed of learning Italian, and living a year in Venice; of learning German, and spending a year in Munich, or in Bonn.

  “Those people don’t know diddly squat,” said Karl. “Come on.”

  He’d probably sooner be looking at houseboats, she thought, as he led her into the master bedroom.

  “There should be glass doors in here, too,” she said, seeking her truant enthusiasm. “Instead of just that piddly little window.” She could plant lots of flowers, and they could lie in bed on weekend mornings, drinking coffee and reading the papers and gazing out at the garden.

  “Glass doors are easy, too,” said Alberg.

  She would never have children, now. But that didn’t bother her. Not much, anyway.

  The kitchen faced east. “There’s probably deer in the woods. We can watch them eating the wildflowers,” she said, “while we’re doing the dishes.”

  “The best thing about this kitchen,” said Alberg, “is the built-in dishwasher.”

  The house was empty, and their footsteps echoed on hardwood floors as they walked slowly from room to room. Each time they stopped to look around they heard the sea.

  There were two huge closets in the master bedroom. “Thank Christ,” muttered Alberg. “We could get rid of the damn wardrobes.”