Strangers Among Us Read online

  “Look,” said Cassandra. “A guest room. For when your kids come to visit.”

  “Huh,” he said skeptically.

  “Or your mother,” said Cassandra. Whom she’d never met.

  “Mmmm.”

  “And this third bedroom,” she went on, “we could turn it into a TV room. There’d be space enough for a desk, too, if we wanted.”

  They wandered back into the living room, arms around each other’s waists.

  “Well? Do you like it?”

  “Yeah,” said Alberg. “Sure. I do.”

  “I’m not going to change my name, you know.”

  He grinned at her. “I never thought you would.”

  She looked at him and laughed, and reached up to kiss him. “Look at that fireplace,” she said. “We could put candles on the mantel. Or photographs.” She brushed from her mind the image of a mantelpiece crowded with pictures of Alberg’s daughters, and his ex-wife.

  He said, “Uh-huh,” but he was looking at her, not at the fireplace. “I wish we’d brought a blanket or something. Or else I wish just one room in this damn house was carpeted.”

  Cassandra touched his face with her fingertips. “Are we going to be happy, Karl?”

  He rubbed his nose against hers. “Are we happy now?”

  Cassandra looked up at the skylight, at a patch of blue sky, dispassionate and serene.

  They locked up and got into Alberg’s Oldsmobile. He turned it around and headed back up the gravel road toward the highway. He kept looking into the rearview mirror, watching the house until they turned a corner and it disappeared.

  Alberg lacked ebullience today. He lacked the enthusiasm that was supposed to accompany house-buying, and getting married. He felt bad about this. He glanced over at Cassandra, who was looking through the passenger window, not having much to say. “Hey,” he said.

  She turned her head. “What?”

  “How about if we take a couple of days off and go over to Victoria?”

  The road lurched into another bend and propelled them toward the intersection with the highway, fifty feet away.

  Parked on the opposite side, facing north, was Jack Coutts’s pickup truck.

  “I think that’s not a bad idea,” said Cassandra.

  Alberg pulled up at the intersection. Jack looked at him steadily and Alberg looked back. His mouth was suddenly dry. His hands were tight on the steering wheel.

  “Next weekend? I could get Friday, too,” Cassandra was saying. “How about you?”

  Jack fired up the pickup and drove rapidly away.

  “Karl?” said Cassandra. “What do you think?”

  Alberg wrenched the wheel to the left and took off up the highway after the truck.

  “Karl!”

  His foot was on the floor. He felt the world whizzing past, saw only the brown pickup, getting smaller, and smaller…

  “Karl, what are you doing!”

  …and now gradually bigger, bigger, the sonofabitch he’d batter him into a goddamn pulp…

  Alberg slammed on the brakes, pulling the Oldsmobile to the side of the road.

  After a long moment, he looked at Cassandra. Her freckles were sprinkled upon her white face like cinnamon. He reached out to touch her cheek but she slapped his hand away.

  “What was that all about?” she whispered.

  “It was right in the middle of everything. Maura.” He clutched the steering wheel. “Jesus. Such a bad time.”

  They were standing in the dining room when Maura told him. He’d just come home from work. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off yet, so he was standing there in his uniform, his hat in his hand, when she said, “Karl, I want a divorce.”

  He put his hat down on the dining room table. “Where are the kids?”

  She was across from him, clutching the back of a chair. She was dark-haired and green-eyed, like their daughter Janey, and Alberg couldn’t imagine living without her.

  “Out.”

  “Maura. Don’t do this. Let’s talk about it.”

  “I’ve been trying to get you to talk to me for months.”

  His wife was lithe and graceful, utterly confident in her physical self. When he first saw her Alberg had thought she must be a dancer.

  “It’s too late now,” she said.

  “No,” said Alberg.

  “Don’t snap at me.”

  “I’m not snapping at you.” He shook his head. “Jesus. I can’t believe this.”

  “My shop is as important to me as your job is to you.”

  “I know that, Maura,” he said wearily.

  “No you don’t know that, Karl. You do not understand that I do not want to give up my business, that I do not want to move, yet again, and this time to a place I’ve never been to, a place so goddamn small and isolated—”

  “Okay, okay. Can we discuss this? Please? There are alternatives. Let’s consider the alternatives. Let’s think about the kids, for god’s sake.”

  “The kids,” said Maura, “are no longer children.”

  “They’ll be devastated,” he said, desperate, and had more to say, much more.

  But then Betty Coutts had pounded on their door.

  The sun was getting low in the sky, casting that primrose winter light that Cassandra thought was insubstantial; transparent; it lacked richness and depth. She watched it trickle through the trees on the other side of the highway from a sky the same shade of pale blue that happened on the hottest of summer days. And this seemed odd, now that she thought about it.

  Alberg was still holding on to the steering wheel, staring straight out through the windshield.

  “What does he want from you?” she asked.

  He glanced at her. “He hasn’t decided yet.” He started the car, checked both ways for traffic, and made a U-turn.

  “Tell me what happened, Karl. Did you put him in jail, or something?”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with work,” he said sharply. “It’s strictly personal.”

  She couldn’t get him to say anything else.

  Chapter 10

  Monday, November 28

  ELIOT WAS TAKEN TO what they probably didn’t know was his favorite room in this place, and told to wait there. Like all the other rooms, there were bars on its windows. But someone had tried to make this fact less obtrusive by placing a couple of tall plants in front of the windows, making it harder to see the bars. Once this person had positioned these plants just so, however, she had apparently put them from her mind: maybe she’d thought they weren’t real, and therefore didn’t need watering. Eliot could see that the earth they lived in was dry, shrunken from the edges of the pots, gray and powdery, and on the floor were dozens of leaves that had fallen from the potted trees, creating gaping holes among the branches. Eliot noticed these things because his mother had worked part-time in a nursery, back home. She had a lot of plants. They were probably all dead by now, he thought. Except maybe the cactus.

  There was a big rectangular rug in the middle of the room, dark blue and light blue, with a yellow stripe around the edges. Eliot was looking at this rug and picking out shapes in the swirls of color. It was like looking at the sky, watching the clouds form themselves into shapes and then dissolve those shapes and form new ones. In the rug many shades of blue collided—conflicted— mixed and merged.

  Eliot had now been in this place for two and a half weeks. He had been examined and discussed and talked to by a whole lot of people, and there was going to be more of this before somebody finally decided what would happen to him. It seemed to be taking an awfully long time.

  A big round wooden table sat on the rug. It had a very thick top which had what looked like vines carved into the side of it, vines with leaves and grapes on them. The top of the table had pale circles all over it where careless people had put down glasses or mugs.

  Eliot was sitting in a chair near the fireplace, which had no grate and no screen and looked as though it hadn’t been used in years. It was an upholster
ed chair; the fabric was severely worn on the arms and the back. Eliot had dug his thumb into a small hole on the right arm and was moving it around in a circular fashion, making the hole bigger.

  He liked to sit, and even more to lie down. He didn’t get to lie down very much, though, because of his roommate. He could sometimes feel comfortable, sitting or lying down. He occasionally when lying down had the sensation that he was dematerializing, becoming another kind of substance, like steam, or cloud. He thought about that now, wondering if he’d ever be able to do it on purpose. Maybe sometime, he decided, but not today. As soon as he began to examine the possibility he became acutely conscious of his feet, quivering large and sullen in huge sneakers at the ends of his legs; and of his hands on the arms of the chair, one thumb nuzzling into the fabric like it wanted sex there, a good sucking. He pulled it out and dropped his hands into his lap. They looked grimy; dirt was smeared into all their little skin crevices—he was surprised that there were so many. One of his fingernails had grown out almost to the end of his finger. He decided not to bite it but there didn’t seem to be any good reason for this and so he bit it, snapped it off and nibbled at the rough edges, and the taste of his finger was as strong as a smell.

  The door that was supposed to be locked suddenly opened, and Eliot looked up, mechanically, to see a kid of about ten or eleven with black hair falling all over his forehead leaning into the room, hanging on to the doorknob with one hand and yarding up a pair of dingy gray sweatpants with the other.

  “Whatcha doin’?” said this kid, and although he must have been talking to Eliot, because there was nobody else in the room, he wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were wandering all over the place. Eliot figured there was something wrong with him. He was blind, maybe, or maybe just crazy. He didn’t bother to reply, and then he heard somebody yammering away in a scolding tone and the kid was whisked away. But the door remained open.

  Eliot continued to sit, waiting, and now he could hear sounds from the hallway. He hadn’t been aware until then of how much he’d been—not enjoying, because he didn’t enjoy anything anymore, but—appreciating, he’d been appreciating the silence; he’d been leaning into it; burrowing his head into its bony shoulder bone; muffling his life in its flesh. The only sounds he’d heard, while waiting here, apart from those he’d made himself, were so muted as to be ignorable. But now all kinds of noises were springing through the doorway at him. He heard so many feet on the bare floor of the hallway that there might as well have been an army out there.

  Except that they weren’t marching footsteps; there were a lot of different kinds. There were the overlapping, careless squeaks of sneakers, running. The brisk tapping of some woman in high heels. The plodding steps of a man who was probably wearing shoes with laces.

  Eliot let himself lean back in the chair. He looked up at the ceiling, which was pretty high because where he was now was part of an old building that had once been somebody’s house. They’d added pieces on to it, ineptly, so that it didn’t look right anymore but from the inside, when you were in one of the old parts of the building, sometimes you could make it feel like a regular house.

  Except for the bars on all the windows.

  The door slammed shut, and Eliot heard it get locked.

  Now he was feeling restless. He went over to one of the windows and looked out through the branches of the potted fig tree. There was a big sweep of lawn out there, and then a bunch of plants, and a fence, and beyond that a very busy street whose name he didn’t know.

  Some kids were huddled together at a bus stop on the corner, little kids, and one of them was wearing a jacket that Eliot—just for a second—thought he recognized. His heart jumped and he pushed the tree in its pot aside and grabbed hold of the bars and put his face close to them, to see between them. But then just as the kid turned around, enough for him to see her profile, God showed him Rosie in real life; running, in real life; screaming, in real life; running away from him, from Eliot, and screaming, while her blood flowed, red and abundant.

  He had watched her as she ran. He had seen the neighbors come. He had seen Rosie fall. And then Eliot had walked from the beach into the forest.

  This much he remembered.

  Eliot turned away from the window.

  He heard somebody unlock the door, and Staff Sergeant Alberg came in.

  Eliot made himself cross the room to a chair, a wobbly chair with no arms and a round back. He sat down and concentrated on his body, which was in distress. His teeth were rattling, his hands were cold, and at the top of his chest where his throat began he felt an intense ache. If it stayed there, and grew bigger, it would not be possible for him to breathe. Eliot wanted the ache to go away but he didn’t know if that meant that he wanted to live.

  He opened his mouth and forced some words out—it felt like he was literally selecting and ejecting them with his tongue; the words felt like marbles in his mouth, choking him. “Rosie,” he said. “Is Rosie dead?”

  Alberg didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said, “No,” sounding surprised.

  Eliot shut his eyes. The hugeness of his relief sapped him of all strength. He thought his heart might stop beating; he thought he had not even the strength for that.

  “I told you before, she’s not seriously hurt.”

  Eliot’s eyes opened, and focused on the floor.

  “Not physically, anyway.”

  Eliot stopped listening.

  Alberg was silent for a while, but then began talking again. Eliot didn’t hear his words, only his voice, which was gray, and reminded Eliot of the ocean. It was quite soft. But there were slivers of pain in it, and fragments of anger. Eliot listened indifferently to this voice, and the words that rippled within it were lost to him.

  He noticed a figurine on the fireplace mantel, a china woman wearing a long dress with a huge skirt, the kind they wore hoops underneath, and she was carrying an umbrella. Her hair was in big curls, pinned on top of her head. Eliot thought she was very beautiful. He stood up and went to the mantel and looked at the figurine more closely. There was a chip missing from the umbrella, and another from one of the folds in her skirt.

  He heard Alberg’s voice change. It blackened, and got deeper and anger glittered in it, like mica. Eliot rested his forehead against the mantel. His hands hung large, empty, useless; he didn’t want to make them into fists.

  He felt Alberg’s hand on his shoulder, Alberg’s arm around him. Eliot became very still. He tried to make himself evaporate but of course this didn’t work. Alberg wasn’t talking anymore but he was so close to Eliot that Eliot could hear him breathing. In his imagination he heard blood trickling through Alberg’s veins and arteries. He lifted his head and eased away from the fireplace, from Alberg’s sheltering arm, and returned to the window.

  “I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”

  Eliot heard the words this time, very clear, but with a surrounding echo, as if the two of them were standing on a basketball court.

  The little kids were gone from the bus stop. Now only an old woman sat there, a scarf around her head and a shopping bag at her feet. She was smoking a cigarette, jiggling it in her fingers impatiently between puffs, craning her neck to look up the street to see if the bus was coming.

  Eliot shook his head.

  “I’m not gonna give up on you, Eliot.”

  Eliot lifted his gaze from the old woman to a big tree on the opposite corner of the street. There were a lot of yellow leaves still clinging to its branches.

  He heard the door open, and close.

  It was mid-afternoon when Alberg got back to Sechelt. He parked in front of the detachment and sat there in his car, going over in his mind those conversations at the Gardeners’ kitchen table.

  “I can do something about it, if you’ll let me,” he’d say to Verna, but she’d just shake her head and get up from the table and find something to do—dishes to dry and put away, a countertop to clean.

  “What about Rosie?�
� he’d say doggedly.

  “Rosie is fine,” Verna would say quickly. “He doesn’t have a problem with Rosie.”

  “And you? Does he ever have a problem with you?”

  “Never,” she’d said, firmly, looking him in the eye. And Alberg believed this.

  “Where’d you get that?” he would say to Eliot, who was wearing his white apron, clearing tables at Earl’s.

  “That what?” said Eliot, sullen.

  “That bruise on your face.”

  “Fell down. Rollerblading,” said Eliot.

  And what if this had been true? Alberg thought.

  He got out of the car and went inside, straight to his office, where he took off his jacket and hung it over the chair behind his desk. Preoccupied with thoughts of Eliot, he glanced out the window, remembering the boy looking out that other window, the one with bars.

  And then he saw the brown truck parked on the side street, and Jack behind the wheel. “Sonofabitch,” said Alberg under his breath.

  He sat down at his desk and looked blankly at the paperwork piled up there. He was feeling claustrophobic. He stood up and took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself.

  “Staff.”

  Sid Sokolowski was in the doorway, wearily rubbing his close-shaven head with a huge hand.

  “I’ve gotta talk to you.”

  “Okay,” said Alberg briskly, staring at his in basket. He sat down again and emptied it on top of the desk. “But not now. I have to do this now.” He started sorting through the piles. Concentrating. Prioritizing.

  “When?” said Sid plaintively.

  “Tomorrow? Wednesday? Thursday? I’m at your disposal.”

  “Whenever,” said Sokolowski, stepping back into the hall. Alberg worked furiously all afternoon, writing memos, completing forms, returning phone calls. He thought about nothing but the paperwork in front of him.

  When he finally went home, Jack’s truck didn’t follow him.

  That evening Cassandra wanted to talk about Christmas. “It’s less than a month away, Karl.”