The Killing Circle (13 page)

I admit to stealing Angela’s story. Even so, it still wasn’t a novel. While I used her characters, premise, setting, mimicked her tone, even copied whole pages from her recorded readings, viewed strictly on the basis of a word count, the bulk of
The Sandman
could technically be described as mine.

There was much I needed to add to give it the necessary weight of a book. Whatever it took to roll out what I already had with a minimum of actual
creating
, so that the result had been thinned to cover a couple hundred pages. But what the book still needed was the very thing Angela’s story didn’t provide. An ending.

After long months of scratching ideas on to index cards and dropping most of them into the recycling box, I managed to wring out a few concluding turns of the screw of my own, though there’s little point in going into that here.

Let’s just say I decided to make it a ghost story.
I knew it was plagiarism. There wasn’t a moment I thought enough of
The Sandman
was invented that it could be truly considered my own. What relieved me of the crime was that I was only playing around. It was a distraction and nothing else. A kind of therapy during those hours when Sam was asleep, the TV spewed its usual rot, the sentences of my favourite books swam unreadably before my eyes.

Even when it was done, I still had no plans to present it as though I was its sole author. This was partly because I
wasn’t
. But there was another reason.

I always saw the writing of the book as a kind of communication, an exchange between Angela and myself. I have read dozens of interviews with real writers who say that, throughout the process, they have in mind an audience of one for their work, an ideal reader who fully understands their intentions. For me, that’s who Angela was. The extra set of eyes looking over my shoulder as the words crept down the screen. As I wrote our ghost story, Angela was the one phantom who was with me the whole time.

And then I started wondering if it might not be good. Our book. Angela’s and mine. Except Angela was dead now.

What would
someone else
think of what we’d made together?

But even this self-deceiving line of thought wasn’t my undoing. My real mistake was printing
it out, buying envelopes to slip it into, and telling myself
I’m just curious
as I dropped them in the mail addressed to the biggest literary agents in New York.

That
was a mistake.

I say now what all those in my position say in response to the most commonly asked question of the after-reading Q&A:
I had always wanted to be a writer
. But in my case, this answer is not precisely true. I had wanted to write, yes, but more primary than this, I had always wanted to be an
author
. Nothing counted unless you were published. I longed to be an embossed name on a spine, to belong to the knighthood of those selected to stand alongside their alphabetical neighbours on bookshop and library shelves. The great and nearly so, the famous and wrongly overlooked. The living and the dead.

But now, all I wanted was to be out of it.

What had seemed so important then now struck me as a contrivance, an invention whose purpose was to complicate that which was, if left alone, cruelly simple.
Life’s a bitch and then you die,
as the T-shirts used to say.

I would make do with keeping both hands on the wheel of fatherhood, with weekend barbecues and package beach holidays and rented Westerns and Hitchcock. I would no longer feel the need to
say something
, to stand isolated and furious outside the anesthetized mainstream. Instead I would be among them, my consumer brothers and sisters. The search called off.

There are times I’m walking with Sam, or reading to him, or scrambling an egg for him, and I will be seized mid-step, mid-page-turn, mid-scramble, with paralytic love. For his sake, I try to keep such moments under control. Even at his age he has a keen sensitivity to embarrassment, and me blubbering about what a perfect little fellow he is, how like his mother—well, it’s right off the chart. Not that it stops me. Not every time.

It is these pleasures that
The Sandman
’s publication has denied me. All the attention afforded the break-out first novelist—the church basement talks, forty-second syndicated morning radio interviews (“So, Pat,
loved
the book—but, let me ask you, who do you like in the Super Bowl?”), even a few bedroom invitations (politely declined) from book club hostesses and college campus Sylvia Plaths—was poisoned by the fact that I was alone, miles from my son.

“Where
are
you, Dad?” I remember Sam asking over the phone at one of the campaign’s low points.

“Kansas City.”

“Where’s that?”

“I’m not sure. Kansas, maybe?”

“
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“That’s right. Dorothy. Toto. Over the rainbow.”

There was a silence for a time after that.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Remember when Dorothy clicked her heels together three times?
Remember?
Remember what she said?”

That
The Sandman
wasn’t my own book didn’t help things. Just when a glowing review or snaking bookstore line-up or letter from a high school kid relating how much he thought I was
the shit
came close to making me forget, Angela’s recorded voice reading from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment would return to me, and any comfort the moment might have brought was instantly stolen away.

There was also the worry I would be found out. Although I hadn’t heard from any of them since
The Sandman
was published, it was entirely conceivable that one of the Kensington Circle would come across it, recognize its source material, and go to the press. Perhaps worse, Evelyn or Len would come knocking on my door with my book in their hands, demanding hush money. Worse yet, it would be William. And I would pay no matter who it was. I’d done a wrongful thing. I’m not
denying it. But if there was ever a victimless crime, this was it. Now, in order to walk quietly away from my fraudulent, non-starter of a writing career as planned, four people had to keep a secret.

When I finally returned to Toronto, I went through the mail piled on my desk in the Crypt expecting at least one of the envelopes to contain a blackmail letter. But there was only the usual bills.

Life returned to normal, or whatever shape normal was going to take for Sam and me. We watched a lot of movies. Ate out at neighbourhood places, sitting side by side at the bar. For a while, it was like a holiday neither of us had asked for.

And the whole time I waited to walk into someone from the circle. Toronto is a big city, but not so big that you could forever avoid the very people you’d most like to never see again. Eventually, I’d be caught.

I started wearing ballcaps and sunglasses everywhere I went. Took side streets. Avoided eye contact. It was like being followed by the Sandman all over again. Every shadow on the city’s pavement a hole in the earth waiting to swallow me down. And what, I couldn’t help wondering, would be waiting for me at the bottom?

I raise my eyes from the page. Squint into the lights. Dust orbiting like atoms in the white beams. If there are people out there, I can’t see them. Perhaps they have learned that I’m not what I’ve claimed to be, and have left the hall in disgust. Perhaps they are still here, waiting for the police to click the cuffs around my wrists.

But they are only waiting for me. For the words every audience to Angela’s story requires to lift the spell that’s been cast on them.

“Thank you,” I say.

Yellow, flickering movement like the beating of hummingbird wings. Hundreds of hands clapping together.

Sam is there at the side of the stage, smiling at his dad with relief.

I pick him up and kiss him. “It’s over,” I whisper. And even though there’s people watching, he kisses me back.

“We should make our way to the signing table,” the publicist says, taking me by the elbow.

I put Sam down to be driven home in the waiting limo and let the publicist guide me through a side door. A brightly lit room with a table at the far end with nothing but a fountain pen, bottle of water and a single rose in a glass vase on its surface. A pair of young men behind a cash register. Copies of
The Sandman
piled around them in teetering stacks. A cover design I’ve looked at a thousand times and a name I’ve spelled my whole life, but it still looks unfamiliar, as though I’m confronting both for the first time.

The auditorium doors are already opening as I make my way around the velvet ropes that will organize the autograph seekers into the tidy rows that always make me think of cattle being led to slaughter. In this case, all that will await them at the end is me. My face frozen in a rictus of alarm, or whatever is left of the expression that started out a smile.

And here they come. Not a mob (they are
readers
, after all, the last floral-skirted and corduroyed, canvas bag-clutching defenders of civilization) but a little anxious nevertheless, elbowing to buy their hardcover, have me do my thing, and get out before the parking lot gets too snarled.

What would this labour feel like if the book were wholly mine? Pretty damn pleasant would be my guess. A meeting of increasingly rare birds,
writer and reader, acknowledging a mutual engagement in a kind of secret Resistance. There’s even little side servings of flirtation, encouragement. Instead, all I’m doing now is defacing private property. More vandal than artist.

I’m really going now. Head down, cutting off any conversation before it has a chance to get started. All I want is to go home. Catch Sam before Emmie puts him to bed. There might even be time for a story.

Another book slides over the table at me. I’ve got the cover open, pen poised.

“Whatever you do, just don’t give me the ’Best Wishes’ brush-off.”

A female voice. Cheeky and mocking and something else. Or perhaps missing something. The roundness words have when they are intended to cause no harm.

I look up. The book folds shut with a sigh.

Angela. Standing over me with a carnivorous smile on her face. Angela, but a different Angela. A professional suit, hair expensively clipped. Confident, brisk, sexy. Angela’s older sister. The one who didn’t die in a car crash with a dirty old novelist, and who could never see the big deal about wanting to write novels in the first place.

You’re dead
, I almost say.

“What, no ’How’s the writing coming?’” the living Angela says.

“How’s the writing coming?”

“Not as well as yours, by the looks of things.”

The publicist makes an almost imperceptible side-step closer to the table. The woman next in line behind Angela shuffles forward. Coughs more loudly than necessary. Taps the toe of a Birkenstock on the floor.

Angela remains smiling, but something changes in her pose. A stiffening at the corners of her mouth.

“Have you—?” she starts, and seems to lose her thought. She bends closer. “Have you
seen
any of them?”

“A couple. Here and there.”

Angela ponders this response as though I’d answered in the form of a riddle. The woman behind her takes a full step forward. Her reddening face now just inches from sitting atop Angela’s shoulder.

“Perhaps you’d like to speak to Mr Rush
after
the signing?” the publicist says, as pleasantly as an obvious warning could be stated.

“I think—” Angela starts again. I wonder if she is steeling herself to launch some kind of attack. Slap me across the face. Serve a court summons. But it’s not that. With her next words she reveals that she isn’t angry. She’s frightened.

“I think something’s…
happening
.”

The publicist tries to squeeze between Angela and the table. “May I
help
you?” she asks, reaching toward Angela’s arm. But Angela rears back, as though to be touched by another would burn her skin.

“Sorry. Oh. I’m
sorry
,” she murmurs, nudging the book another inch closer to me. “I suppose I should have this signed.”

Now the entire line is getting antsy. The woman behind Angela has come around to stand next to her, an act of rebellion that threatens to create a second line. Fearing the chaos that would result, the publicist pulls back the cover for me, holds the book open to the title page.

“Here we are,” she says.

I sign. Just my signature at first. Then, seeing this as too hopelessly impersonal, I scribble a dedication above my name.

To the Living,
Patrick Rush

“Hope you enjoy it,” I say, handing the book back to Angela. She takes it, but remains staring at me.

“I’m sure I will,” she says. “I’m particularly intrigued by the title.”

The Birkenstock woman has heard enough. Drops her copy on to the table from three feet in the air. A single crack on impact that draws gasps from the line.

At the same time, Angela grips the front of the table with her free hand. Whispers something so low I rise out of my chair to hear her.

“I need to
talk
to you,” she says. Opens the palm of her hand so that I have to reach into it and take the card she’s offered me.

Then all at once she pushes aside the publicist who attempts to usher her toward the exit, makes her way unsteadily around the corner and is gone.

“I liked it,” the Birkenstock woman says when my hands steady enough to open her copy. “Didn’t totally buy the ending, though.”

SUMMER, 2007

You wouldn’t say climate is Toronto’s strong point. Not if you appreciate seasons as they are normally understood as quarters of transition. Instead, the city endures long months of swampy, equatorial heat, and longer months of ear-aching cold, each separated by three pleasant days in a row, one called spring, the other fall.

This morning, for instance, the clock radio woke me with news of the fourth extreme heat alert so far this year, and it is only the first week of June. “Emergency Cool Down Centres” have been established in public buildings, where wanderers can collapse on to chilled marble floors until nightfall. The general citizenry has been advised not to go outside, not to allow the sun to touch its skin, not to move, not to breathe. These are empty warnings, of course, as people still have to work and, worse,
get
to work. After I’ve dropped Sam off at the
daycare, I make my way back along Queen, lines of sweat trickling down my chest, glaring at the passengers on the stalled streetcar, all of them struck in poses of silent suffering.

From here I turn up toward College, past the semi-detached Victorians, each with their own knee-high fencing protecting front lawns so small you could mow them with a pair of tweezers. I stick to the shady reach of trees as best I can. But the heat isn’t the only thing that slows my steps: I’m on my way to meet Angela.

The card she’d slipped into my hand at the Harbourfront book signing was blank aside from a scribbled cellphone number, and beneath it, a plaintive
Call Me
. I didn’t want to. That is, I was aware that pursuing any further contact with a woman I had actionably wronged and who, if published reports were to be believed, was no longer among the living, could lead to nothing good.

Even now, my legs rubbery from the heat, zigzagging up the sidewalk like some midday boozer, I’m not sure why I called. It must have been the same impulse that had me press the Record button the first time I heard her read. The reason I kept going back to the circle’s meetings when it was clear they were of no use. The ancient curse of the curious, the Nosey Parkers, the natural-born readers.

I needed to know.

We decided to meet at Kalendar, a café where we can sit outside. Now, selecting the one remaining
table (only half covered by the awning’s shade), I wish we’d opted for a cellar somewhere instead. I’m here first, so I take the darker chair. Later, when the sun slides to a new angle that allows it to fire lasers through the side of my head, and the chair across the table from mine is comfortably shielded, I will realize the error of my positioning. But for the time being, I order an intentionally funfree soda water, believing I am still in control of the events barrelling my way.

At first, when a young woman arrives and, spotting me, comes over with a shy smile below her State Trooper shades, I assume it’s a fan. Over the last few months, it has become not entirely uncommon for strangers to approach and offer a word about
The Sandman
. Some will stick around for more than this—the lonely, the tipsy, the crazy. And I’m trying to decide which this one is when she joins me at my table. I’m about to tell her I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for someone, when something in her face changes, a trembling strain at the tops of her cheeks, and I see that it’s not a stranger at all.

“I guess we’ve never seen each other in the light of day,” Angela says, studying me. It makes me wish I’d brought sunglasses of my own.

“You’re right. We haven’t.”

“You look different.”

“That’s just heat stroke.”

She looks at my soda water. “Are we having real drinks?”

“We are now.”

Once a shot of vodka has been added to my drink and a glass of white wine placed next to Angela’s hand, we talk a little about how she’s spent the last few years. Following a period of clerical odd-jobbing, she decided she needed something more permanent. She went back to community college and came out with a certificate in legal administration, which landed her a position as an assistant at one of the Bay Street firms. It was this job she was stealing an extra hour away from, having told her boss she had a dental emergency.

“That’s why I can afford to have a couple of these,” she says, raising the glass of wine to her lips. “Laughing gas.”

The waiter arrives to take our order. Angela asks for some kind of salad and I have what she’s having (my nerves won’t let me eat, only drink, so it doesn’t much matter what prop is put in front of me). When he leaves, Angela looks at me. That same measuring gaze I caught her at a couple times in the circle. I don’t get up and walk home, or turn my face away, or run to the men’s room to hold my wrists under the cold water tap (all things I’d like to do). She knows too much already. My crime, of course. But other things as well. What had she whispered to me when she appeared out of nowhere, risen from the dead?

Something’s happening
.

Yet for a time the sun, the rare treat of dining outside in the middle of the day, the first edge-numbing
blur of alcohol leaves us chatting like a pair on a blind date, one that has so far gone better than expected. In fact, Angela seems almost pleased to be here. It’s as though she is a prison escapee who’d never guessed she’d have gotten as far as she has.

Our salads appear. Aggressively healthy-looking nests of radicchio, beets and chickpeas. Normally the sort of thing I’d lay a napkin over to not have to look at, let alone eat. But the illusion of immunity has given me a sudden appetite. I swing my fork down, and it’s on its way mouthward as Angela speaks the words I thought we’d decided to leave alone.

“I read your book.”

The fork drops. A chickpea makes a run for it.

“Well, yes. Of course you would have. And I suppose you saw that I…borrowed certain elements.”

“You stole my story.”

“That’s debatable, to a point. I mean, the construction—”

“Patrick.”

“—required a good deal of enhancement, not to mention the invention required in—”

“You
stole my story
.”

Those sunglasses. They keep me from seeing how serious this is. Whether I am to now endure merely hissed accusations, or whatever wine is left in her glass thrown in my face, or worse. A knife impaling my hand to the table. The naming of lawyers.

“You’re right. I stole your story.”

I say this. I’m forced to. But I’m not forced to say what I say next. It comes with the unstoppable breakdown, the full impact of facing up to the person you’ve done injury to, sitting three feet away.

“I just wanted to write a book. But I didn’t
have
a book. And then I heard you read at Conrad’s and it wouldn’t leave me alone. Your journal, novella, whatever—it became an obsession. It had been a while since my wife died—oh
Christ
, here we go—and I needed something. I needed
help
. So I started writing. Then, when I found out about your car accident, I thought…I thought it was more
ours
than just
yours
. But I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. So now…
now
? Now I’m just sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

By now a few heads have turned our way. Watching me blowing my nose on the napkin I steal from under the next table’s cutlery.

“You know something?” she says finally. “I rather enjoyed it.”

“
Enjoyed
it?”

“What it said. About you. It made you so much more
interesting
than before.”

“What I wrote.”

“What you
did
.”

My puzzled look nudges Angela further.

“In the circle, you were the only one without a story to tell. Most people at least
think
they have stories. But you assumed all along that there wasn’t a character-worthy bone in your body.
And then what do you do? You steal mine. Tack on an ending. Publish it. Then regret all of it! That’s almost
tragic
.”

She takes the first bite of her salad. When the waiter comes to check on us (a look of phony concern for me, the messed-up guy with the already sunburning forehead) Angela orders another round for both of us. There is no talk of retribution, settlements, public humiliation. She just eats her salad and drinks her wine, as though she has said all she needs to say about the matter.

When she’s finished her meal she sits back and takes me in anew. My presence seems to remind her of something.

“I guess it’s your turn to get an explanation,” she says.

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“I don’t
have
to. But you probably deserve to know how it is that I’m not dead.”

She tells me she heard about Conrad dying with a girl in a car accident, a girl believed to be her. Angela had been seeing him a bit at the time (“He was doing a close reading of my work”) and left her purse in his car—which is how the authorities established their identification of the remains. The police didn’t look into it much further than this, and had little reason to. The female body had been especially savaged in the crash, so there was no apparent inconsistency between it and the photos on Angela’s ID. The accident was circumstantially odd, but there was no evidence of foul play. The
presumed victim, Angela Whitmore, was known to have moved around a lot over the preceding years, job to job, coast to coast and back again, so that the authorities weren’t surprised they couldn’t discover her current address, as she likely didn’t have one. Her relationship with Conrad White wasn’t looked into either. The old man had a history of enjoying the company of much younger women. It was likely that Conrad and Angela had set out on some cross-country journey together, a sordid,
Lolita
-like odyssey, and hadn’t made it through the first night on the winding highway through the Ontario bush.

After she has related all this to me, Angela’s posture changes. Shields her face from the street, hiding behind her hair. The playful ease with which she’d introduced and then promptly dismissed the topic of my story-theft has been replaced with a stiffened back.

“So if it wasn’t you, who was in the car with him?”

Angela’s hands grip the table edges so tight her knuckles are pale buttons.

“Nobody’s certain,” she says. “But I’m pretty sure it was Evelyn.”

“
Evelyn?
”

“They were hanging out together a lot around the time of the circle. And she was coming around to his apartment even after the meetings stopped.”

“Were you
following
her?”

“If anything it was
her
following
me
.” Angela lifts her wine glass but her shaking hand returns it to the table before taking a sip. “I was there too sometimes. For a while I liked the attention. Then it just got weird. I stopped going. But before I did, Evelyn would come by. I didn’t stick around long whenever she showed up. It didn’t feel like she was too happy to see me.”

“Did you get a sense of why she was seeing him?”

“Not really. It felt like a secret, whatever it was. Like they were working on something together.”

“And that’s why you think it was her body in the car.”

“I looked into it a bit more. After the initial report in the local paper—”

“The clipping you sent to me.”

Angela cocks her head. “I didn’t send you anything.”

“Someone did. In the mail. Unsigned.”

“That’s how I first found out about it too.”

I can’t help wanting to know more on this point—if she didn’t send the clipping, then who did?—but diverting her any further might shut her down completely. Already she’s looking at her watch, wondering how much longer she has.

“Okay, so you followed up,” I say.

“Because I thought it was Evelyn, but wasn’t sure. And then, in one of the reports, it mentioned that the only distinguishing feature on the female victim’s body was a tattoo. A raven tattoo.”

“On the back of her wrist. I remember.”

“I know I should have come forward. Evelyn probably has family who are still looking for her. They must think she’s disappeared.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“At first, I think I saw it as a chance to just, I don’t know,
lose
myself. Be erased. Start over. You know what I mean?”

“It’s not too late. You could tell the police now. Straighten it all out.”

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s not like you did anything wrong.”

“That’s not why.”

“I don’t understand. Someone dies—an acquaintance of yours dies with your name on her toe tag, and you’re letting the people who care about her live with the lie that she might still be out there? That Evelyn might be
alive
? I’m not taking any moral high ground here—you know I can’t. But what you’re doing is hurting others who’ve got nothing to do with you.”

Angela takes off her sunglasses. Pupils darting from one peripheral to the other. Her voice had almost managed to disguise her panic. Now it’s her eyes that give her away.

“After the accident, I took on different names,” she says. “Changed where I lived, how I looked, my job. It was like I’d disappeared. And I
needed
to disappear.”

“Why?”

“Because I was being
hunted
.”

The waiter, who has been watching us from the opposite side of the patio for the past few minutes, drifts over to ask if he can bring us coffee or dessert.

“Just the cheque,” Angela says, abruptly pulling open her purse.

“Please. This is on me,” I say, waving her off, and the enormous understatement of the gesture, under the circumstances, brings a contrite laugh from my throat. But Angela is too agitated to join me in it.

“Listen, Patrick. I don’t think I can see you again. So I better say what I came to say.”

She blinks her eyes against the sun that is now cast equally on both of us. For a second I wonder if she has forgotten, now that she’s come to it, what the point she wanted to deliver actually was. But this isn’t what causes her to pause. She is only searching for the simplest way to put it.

“Be careful.”

“Of what?”

“He was only watching before. But now…now it’s
different
.”

The waiter delivers the bill. Stands there long enough that I have to dig a credit card out of my wallet and drop it on the tray before he reluctantly moves away. In the meantime, Angela has gotten to her feet.