419

  Sergeant Brisebois accepted another cup of tea from Mrs.

  Curtis, who said, "It must be very difficult for you, dealing with this sort of thing every day. I'm so sorry."

  Laura's mom, apologizing to a police officer for her husband's death.—Is the wife a suspect?—The wife is always a suspect.

  The twins were trying to squirm their way out of the dining room. Warren had returned from the kitchen with a bag of Cheez Puffs, was fuming, as Warren was wont to do. And Laura? Laura was replaying it over and over in her mind: the last thing her father would ever say to her. "You, I love."

  Brisebois had asked whether Laura's father was on medication, had been told no, not even Advil. He was now going over apparent incongruities in the route Laura's father had followed earlier that night. "Mrs. Curtis—may I call you Helen?—in situations like this, we like to compile a record of the last twenty-four hours." He had a map of the city open on the coffee table. "Your husband worked in the east rail yards, here, on Blackfoot Trail. Is that correct?"

  Her mother nodded.

  "But the accident occurred at Ogden Road. As near as I can tell, he was going the wrong way. Do you suppose he forgot something, had turned around, was heading home?"

  "Maybe. I don't know."

  Warren cut in. "Don't you think she's had enough for one night?"

  "Of course," said Sergeant Brisebois. He finished the last of his tea, stood up and was buttoning his jacket when he asked, almost in passing, "Helen, you don't suppose there was any reason your husband might have felt his life was in danger, do you?"

  Warren snorted. "Dad? Don't be ridiculous."

  Their mother looked at the officer, tilted her head at the question. "Why would you ask such a thing?"

  "No reason. It's just—The speed he was travelling, it seemed excessive. The medical examiner will perform an autopsy; it's standard in a case like this. They'll check blood levels for alcohol, look for lesions in the heart or evidence of a brain seizure. Perhaps your husband simply fell asleep. You said he was having trouble in the nights before this happened. Insomnia?"

  Their mother nodded. "I'd often hear him up in the middle of the night, microwaving milk to help him sleep." She looked over at Henry's chair, then drifted again into that in-between world."Maybe that's all this is," said Brisebois as he pulled on his cap.

  "A case of driver fatigue. It's just that—there's a phenomenon we call scrub marks. These occur inside a tire track. When a vehicle is going at high speed and is then turned, forcibly, against its own forward momentum—even if the brakes aren't applied, there's this internal tension that occurs. You can see it: the vehicle is going one way, but the tires are being pulled another. We found very distinct scrub marks in the treads where your husband's car left the road.

  Now, if someone falls asleep, then suddenly wakes up and cranks the wheel, that will create scrub marks. But if that had been the case, your husband would have been trying to steer his vehicle back

  onto the road; the scrub marks would pull him toward the bridge.

  But your husband's treads pull in the opposite direction. Away from the bridge, toward the embankment."

  Brisebois had released these details like depth charges and was watching their reactions carefully. The mother looked baffled. The son was eating Cheez Puffs from a bag and scowling. The daughter hadn't flinched, barely seemed to be breathing.

  "So Dad was disoriented," said Warren irritably. He licked his fingers, now stained with orange. "He steered the wrong way.

  What's your point?"

  "We found a second set of tire tracks. This second set is back, higher on the road, halfway up. Those tracks stop long before the bridge."

  Warren leaned in. "You think someone ran him off the road?"

  "It's possible."

  "I should have known! There's no way Dad would have been driving that fast! He was always a legal-speed-limi t sort of guy. And the injuries he had, those were..." Warren's voice trailed off.

  Laura turned to her brother. "You saw Dad? You saw the—"

  "Someone had to. And it sure as shit wasn't going to be Mom."

  He glared at his sister. "What the hell took you so long, anyway? I had to come all the way in from Springbank. You're just up the hill; you can walk down, for Christ's sake."

  She'd been working late and had switched her phone to voicemail because her father had taken to calling her in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep. She'd had a deadline to meet and hadn't been picking up, and he never left a message. Just a series of clicks. It was only while she was brushing her teeth and had pushed

  PLAY that she heard, not her father's voice, but her mother's. "Laura, pick up... please."

  Laura's father: laid out under the sickly green of fluorescent light."You went?" she said. "You saw Dad?"

  Warren didn't answer, wouldn't look at her, was keeping his eyes locked on the police officer instead, was refusing to blink, was denying sadness a foothold, was opting instead, and as always, for anger.And in that moment, the years fell away—fell like feathers in a pillow fight and there he was, her older brother. Her big brother.

  Warren Curtis, staring down the mean girls, forcing them to apologize to his little sister. Warren, sneaking into a slasher flick with Laura in tow, squeezing her arm, whispering at crucial moments,

  "Look away, look away now!"

  Laura tried to catch her brothers eye. She wanted to mouth

  "thank you" to him the way his wife had whispered "hello" to her, but he wouldn't look, couldn't look. If he did, he would start to cry, she thought. And he can't let that happen. He can't. Because once it starts, it never ends.

  "So that's what this is?" Warren asked the officer. "Some asshole joy riders figuring it would be fun to chase an old man down a hill?

  You better find those fuckers before I do."

  "Language," their mother admonished, drifting back into the conversation.

  Warren ignored her. "For Christ's sake, officer. I've watched

  C.S.I. Can't you run the tires through some sort of database, find these assholes?"

  "Tire treads aren't like fingerprints," said Brisebois. "They change, constantly. You're dealing with rubber, which is a soft compound. A week later, even a day, and the tread marks will have been altered. A tire picks up a rock, loses a bit of rubber, forms a new crack, and the marks change. That said, yes, we can match marks that are consistent with a certain tire. But it's not like there's a central registry for tire treads. We can't find a vehicle based solely on its tires."

  Laura turned to the picture window, saw the living room reflected back on itself. Her brother and her mother. The officer and herself. Her father, no longer there.

  Language. Conceals as much as it reveals.

  "You, I love." Why would he say that?

  CHAPTER 8

  Mist on green waters. Children, waiting. Once the men had finished, the little ones would be called. They would scramble down with their buckets to collect the smaller fish that had been missed. That call would come soon; the men were moving quickly through tidal waters, backs bent, pulling hard on the nets.

  The lagoon emptied into mangrove creeks, the creeks emptied into a channel, the channel into a bay. And the bay? Well, who knew where that emptied? Sea or sky? Or somewhere in between?

  "We live in a wet net, we are caught in it as surely as the catfish and prawns." This was how the boy's father had put it, speaking in their Delta dialect, finding patterns in everything as was his habit.A sky heavy with the promise of rain.

  From the grassy hillock above the lagoon, the boy watched the men moving through the mud-green waters below. The other children were lined up single file on the path behind him. "They aren't ready for us," said the boy, addressing the others as their designated leader. "We go'an wait up here, by the cannon."

  CHAPTER 9

  Laura was outside in the cold. Officer Brisebois was trying to make eye contact, speaking quietly as the air around them turned to steam with e
very syllable.

  "Will you be okay?"

  She looked up at the apartment towers rising like bookmarks above the trees. Will I be okay? Will we be okay? That was the question.

  Laura had offered to stay, but her mother had said no. Her brother had offered to take their mom back to his place in the suburbs, so that she wouldn't have to be alone, but she'd said no to that, too.

  "I want to stay here tonight," their mother had said, her voice so faint it sounded more like a wish than a whisper. I want to stay here tonight, in case he calls.

  They'd left her at the kitchen table, waiting for a husband who would never come home no matter how long she waited.

  "I'll be fine," Laura told Brisebois. "We'll be fine."

  "It's hard," he said. "Losing someone you're close to."

  She turned, met his gaze. "You know what's harder? Losing someone you used to be close to. Someone you haven't been close to for a long time." All those things that die with us, all those things that are left unsaid. "He was a good dad."

  The officer nodded. "I'm sure he was. I lost both my parents in the space of a few years. It's tough. Can I give you a ride somewhere?"

  "It's just up the hill, I can walk." She pointed toward the two apartment towers. "Second building on the left. Third light in the top corner. That's me."

  "There's someone waiting." It was more a question than a statement.

  "Just the lamp." Then, with a half-laugh that died even as she tried to force it, "Not even a cat."

  "If you need a cat, you can have mine," he said—too quickly.

  "Honestly, I don't mind. He's horrible. We're more adversaries than master and pet. You want a cat, I can drop him off tonight."

  She tried again to laugh. "Thanks, but no thanks. Odds are, he wouldn't survive."

  Brisebois looked at her. Why would she say something like that?

  "Well," he said. "If you reconsider, you've got my card. And if anything surfaces, anything at all. Your father. Anything. Give me a call."

  I won't. "I will."

  She started up the hill, then turned. "The last time I saw my father," she said, "he seemed—distracted."

  Brisebois came closer. "Distracted?"

  "Sad."

  "Sad? Or distracted?"

  "Both."

  She said goodbye and walked back up the hill, lungs filling with cold fistfuls of air. Snow: sifting down, filling the cones of light that the street lamps cast, a snow so fine it felt like sand underfoot.

  Laura lived in a shopping mall. This was how she described it, jokingly. Not jokingly. Her apartment elevators fed tenants directly into the Northill Plaza. Yes, there should have been two h's in the name, and yes, it spelled "north ill." Laura had to resist the urge to write in the missing consonant with a Sharpie every time she passed the mall directory. A mall with an apartment building attached, or an apartment building with a mall attached. It was the architectural equivalent of a zebra: black on white, or white on black?

  Residential on commercial, or the opposite?

  Having the shopping centre directly below her should have been wonderful. The mall had everything she needed: a Safeway at one end, Sears at the other, a World Health gym, a Coles bookstore, a Laura Secord chocolate "shoppe" (Laura's namesake, according to her dad), a Magicuts hair salon, a food court, a pharmacy. Her building had a pool for swimming laps, and the professional centre included not only a medical clinic but an automobile insurance and registrar's office, should she ever need to register a vehicle, which she didn't. She'd auctioned off her parking spot online to cover her monthly membership fee at World Health, where she walked on treadmills and rode stationary bicycles every second day with a metronome's predictability.

  Laura worked online—her daily commute was four paces from kitchenette to office alcove—so when the weather turned foul, as it so often did, she didn't need to go out. At all. It was easy enough to let the days slip by even when the weather was fair. At one point last spring, she'd realized she hadn't been outside for three weeks, and on her e-tax return under OCCUPATION, she had entered "Hermit."

  A faceless accountant somewhere had emailed it back, not amused.

  Nine floors, two towers, no balcony. She entered her apartment and tossed her keys in the fishbowl, the fish itself having long since vacated the premises. Laura wasn't good at keeping things alive. Her ferns all but coughed and wheezed, and when she'd chosen the fish

  (a delicate little Beta) she'd felt like the Finger of Death selecting its next victim. She had once flirted with the idea of getting a cat, but it hardly seemed humane, keeping something enclosed so far up.

  Just as well. With her record, the cat would've developed some sort of feline leukemia on the trip home from the pet store and been dead by the time she got out of the elevator.

  Laura rested her forehead against her living room window, breathed a soft fog onto the glass and then watched it slowly disappear. The Rocky Mountains were trapped inside the building across from her, dark peaks set against the night sky. "You see, I'm falling too." Her father on skates, falling. Again and again.

  She'd chosen this apartment precisely because it lacked a balcony, to avoid the unsettling temptation that vertigo offered.

  When she was first looking for a place, she'd considered a spacious two-bedroom in a building high above the river. But as she looked over the edge of the balcony, she'd wondered how long she could go before climbing over and stepping off. How long she could have lasted before asking herself, "What would it matter?" And how much time would pass before anyone noticed she was missing?

  Any friends or colleagues she might claim were scattered across the country like spare change; they would have just assumed she was offline. But even as Laura asked herself that question, she'd known the answer: Dad. He would notice I was gone. He would be the first to sound the alarm. If her body had been swept down the river, he would organize the search party. Warren would find her, but her dad would be the one that led the way.

  What if she didn't fall, though? What if she simply floated... away? Laura's windows were aligned not with the mountains but toward downtown; they looked onto that sandstone-and-steel city below with its Etch-a-Sketch skyline, a city that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself. A cold city, exhaling steam. A city of CEOs and venture capital, of oil company offices hidden behind curtains of glass.

  She could chart the price of a barrel of oil from her bedroom window by the turning of construction cranes along the skyline.

  When the price fell below some magical point, the cranes would slow down. And then stop. When the price rose again, the cranes would start up, spinning anew. Faster and faster.

  The Heart of the New West. That's what they called the city.

  And from up here, it did indeed beat like a heart, like one of those stop-motion films of traffic pulsing on aortal avenues.

  In the neighbourhood below, in a side street among other side streets, on the second floor of a two-storey apartment building, Matthew Brisebois was arriving home for the day. He brushed the snow from his boots, hung cap on peg, jacket on hanger, unclipped his tie, and turned on the television (pre-muted) for company. He stopped. Looked out at the room in front of him. What did he see? Walls, unadorned. A kitchen table that was also a dining room table that was also a desk that was also a mail sorting centre, with a laptop open, a pile of paperwork and a box of Just Right breakfast cereal beside it. Framed photographs, lined up neatly on the mantel.

  A fireplace that had never been turned on and the boxes from last summer still stacked in the corner.

  As an investigator, how would he read this scene? Single male, mid-forties, divorced from the looks of it, and concerned about his fibre intake. If you sniffed the air, you might catch the scent of cologne and Windex. What you wouldn't smell was anything catlike.

  He wasn't exactly sure why he'd lied to Laura about the cat.

  Maybe an attempt to gain her trust—he knew there was more to this accident than an old man on a
sheet of ice—but that was explanation after the fact. Had she accepted his offer, he would have swung by the animal shelter, picked up a cat, used that as a way in. But she hadn't asked, and he hadn't gone.

  He looked out at the twin apartment buildings on the ridge above. Second building on the left. Third light in the top corner. That's me. He would contact the insurance company tomorrow, inquire who the beneficiary was in the case of one Henry Curtis, recently deceased. And they would tell him; they always did. Any chance to avoid a payout.

  He stood a long while watching that corner light. Watched until it finally blinked off.