Cold Hands (12 page)

‘Shit.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think the phone line might be down.’

‘Down where?’

‘It means it’s broken. Maybe because of the storm.’

I picked up my cell – nothing, not a bar of signal now – and sighed. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure Mom’s fine.’ I reached for the bottle of Shiraz and noticed it was three-quarters empty. I drained it into my glass anyway. ‘Come on then. Let’s get some plates. How about we eat in front of the TV? Catch a movie?’ A rare treat, generally forbidden by Sammy.

‘Yaayyy,’ Walt said as, behind him, the snow came down through the dark night and pummelled noiselessly against the thick glass.

Were you bad a lot?

* * *

We didn’t talk about the actual crime for a long time, many months. It was the late winter of ’84, February or early March, the trees outside still bare, the sky stark and then black by five o’clock, and we were onto Shakespeare now. Mr Cardew was not yet Paul, that was still some way off, but we’d grown comfortable with each other. He had a way of opening up the parts of myself I had to shut off to survive in the institute. I see now that he was showing me that who I was at this time, in this place, did not have to define who I would become.

We were doing
Macbeth
, for O-level English, and we’d been reading the scene where Duncan’s wife and baby are killed. I was quiet. He put his book down, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘In your own time,William,’ he said quietly.

‘What?’

‘Whatever’s on your mind. In your own time.’

I looked at my shoes, the plastic prison shoes, and spoke softly through the fringe that hung down covering my face. ‘People hate us. Hate me.’

‘Who hates you?’

‘Everyone. For what we did.’

I peeked up through my fringe. He was chewing on the stem of his glasses, looking away from me. Silence in that sad, grey room. ‘Well,’ he said after a long time, ‘I often find people’s capacity to be surprised by the cruelty of children surprising. Look at the situation we just had there in Cambodia. Wee boys with machine guns leading the charge. People want to think you’re a monster, William, because that’s easy. An easy thing to think.’

‘Maybe I am. A monster.’

‘“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” It’s from another play.
King Lear
. Do you know what “wanton” means, in the sense Shakespeare uses it here?’

I shook my head, fighting tears.

‘Cruel. Unjust. Merciless.’

‘We didn’t mean it.’

He took my head and brought it to his chest as I wept. And I said it for the first time, the thing that had been building in me since I came here, since I got my mum’s letter.

‘What . . . what’s going to happen to me?’

Tobacco and aftershave, the itch of his suit on my cheek as he took my face in his hands and looked into my eyes.

‘Listen to me, William. Listen now.’ I took deep breaths and controlled the sobbing. ‘You did a terrible thing, you and your friends. But you can still grow up to be a good
man. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Do you understand?’

I just looked at him. He gripped my face tighter and said more urgently, ‘Do you understand me, William? This is important.’

I nodded.

‘Good boy,’ Mr Cardew said.

WE ATE OUR
meals – Walt leaving most of the slithery green spinach leaves, burying them under rice and cutlery – on trays on our laps in front of the big TV in the living room, the one that lived in an armoire, where the doors folded back to reveal the TV and stereo equipment. (Sammy had been the first person I’d known who thought it ‘tacky’ to have a giant TV as the focal point of a room.) Flipping aimlessly we’d found
Toy Story 3
about halfway through on one of the movie channels and stayed with it, even though we had it on DVD anyway. (There is always something more exciting about discovering a movie already playing rather than laboriously putting it on yourself.)

I say ‘we’ watched it but really I was somewhere else, doing calculations in my head:
Say she had a long lunch, finished about three, got on the road then, normally an hour’s drive, say two or even three hours with the weather, she’d be getting into Alarbus about now, she’d maybe try a payphone, but the fucking line’s down. Could she send an email from her BlackBerry if she had Wi-Fi?
I checked my email on my iPhone – nothing.

I tuned back into the movie, near the end now, the toys all in that huge garbage incinerator, sliding down a slushy
mountain of landfill towards the fires of hell, towards certain doom. Solemnly they accept their fate. Tenderly they begin to hold hands, preparing to meet death with dignity and love. Suddenly, inevitably, tears were springing to my eyes and I was pulling Walt towards me on the sofa, folding his little head onto my heaving chest. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy,’ Walt said automatically. ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I cry easily at most films but anything to do with childhood, with innocence . . .

Maybe I should just get both of us wrapped up and try and make it over to Irene’s and see if her phone’s still working. What if she has to spend the night in the car? She’d be OK as long as she could keep the heater running. When did she last fill up the tank? Last night, that’s right. On the way to her parents’ party, so –

‘Daddy?’ Walt was sitting up.

‘Mmmm?’

‘What’s that noise?’

I listened. ‘What?’

‘Listen.’

I thumbed the ‘MUTE’ button on the remote (on the screen, just as I did this, Lotso Huggin Bear was being picked up by the garbage man: the last image, the last moment, of normality for me) and sat forward. I could hear it now: a deep regular thumping, somewhere outside, somewhere above the house, getting louder as we both stood up and moved towards the huge picture window, looking up into the black sky and pelting snow. The noise was very loud now, even through the double glazing. It must have been deafening outside. Then, suddenly, a white cone of light burst down through the night and started circling the
field in front of our house. ‘What is it, Daddy?’ Walt asked, scared, clutching my hand now. I could see other lights up there in the sky, red and blue, flashing and blinking around where the white spot began.

‘It’s a helicopter.’ My mouth was dry.

As I said this it revealed itself; coming belly down out of the darkness, the black number ‘157’ painted on its white underside, the windows and floor vibrating, rattling, as it came down into the field just a hundred yards or so from the house, wobbling as it set down on long runners. ‘Wow!’ Walt said, his terror turning to excitement.

My emotions were already running in the exact opposite direction to Walt’s. Because now I could read the gold lettering on the door of the machine, the door that was already opening, two figures jumping down and ducking under the chopping rotors, running towards the house.

I could read the words ‘Saskatchewan Police Department’.

And then I was running, sprinting up the half-flight of stairs and into the kitchen, fumbling with the lock that opened the sliding doors out onto the decking, my hands shaking, trying to block out Walt’s jabbering stream of enquiries behind me.
The phones are all out and the roads are closed. But – to have flown here in this weather? Oh Jesus.
I was picturing pile-ups, emergency rooms, as I watched the two figures, the policemen, wading through the knee-deep snow towards us, pulling the brims of their hats down, trying to keep them from blowing off in the backdraught from the blades. With a heavy snap I finally unsnicked the lock and slid the door open, a freezing blast of air hitting me in the face. Walt tried to follow me out onto the deck in his T-shirt. ‘Walt! Stay in here!’

‘But –’

‘Fucking STAY, Walt!’ For a second I thought he was going to cry. I placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Sorry, son, it’s too cold out there. Just wait here a minute. OK?’ He turned sulkily back into the kitchen as I stepped out onto the deck, sliding the door shut behind me as I watched the policemen coming up the steps towards me, everything getting quieter as the helicopter powered down, the rotors making a slower shucking sound. I could see the pilot in the cockpit, snapping up switches and pulling toggles.
Oh Jesus Christ, oh Jesus Christ, please let everything be OK, please be OK
. Everything slowed down, like they say it does, and I felt like I was treading through deep ocean as I moved towards the lead figure, a man, older than me, in his fifties, with a silvery moustache, his face wet with snow as he removed his glove and extended a cold hand for me to shake and I knew he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I just said, ‘Yes?’

‘I’m Sergeant Danko, Regina PD. This is Officer Hudson.’ I noticed, with faint surprise, that Hudson was a woman.

‘It’s my wife, Sammy. Isn’t it? Something’s happened.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Oh Christ, oh Jesus, she should have stayed at the apartment, please be OK, please be OK, please . . .

‘Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’ Danko asked.

I looked through the glass and saw Walt standing alone in the kitchen, his head bowed a little, watching us shyly through his fringe.

DANKO SAT DOWN
across the low coffee table from me in the living room, our dinner plates still lying on it. Walt stayed in the kitchen with Hudson. He had taken his hat off, revealing thick silver hair, some of it plastered to his head with sweat. He was explaining about the phone lines being down, twisting his hat in his hands as he spoke, turning it like a steering wheel.

‘Please, Sergeant, is she badly hurt?’

‘I’m afraid we think she’s dead.’

A tidal rush of nausea, a vertiginous
whooshing
, like I had suddenly woken up to find myself teetering on the brink of a chasm, tiny pebbles skittering from under my toes, falling into nothingness. I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands, trying to take deep breaths as my mind scrambled around, trying to latch onto something. I got there after a few seconds.

‘You think?’ I said.

A mistake. This is all a mistake.

‘Well.’ Danko swallowed and I saw now how nervous he was. This scared me more than anything so far, because this was an old cop. A seasoned guy who I sensed had surely
done this kind of thing more times than he would have liked, who had sat in many living rooms and kitchens delivering life-ending news like this.

‘We haven’t been able to positively identify the body yet. A credit card belonging to your wife was found with the victim but there’s, and this won’t be easy for you to hear, sir, there’s considerable, ah, damage to . . .’

All these words, ripping me to pieces. ‘Victim?’ I manage to whisper.

‘I’m afraid so, yes. It appears your wife was murdered.’

Now I felt tears and racking sobs trying to fight their way up, hearing myself saying ‘Oh Sammy, oh no’, as my eyes landed on a Lucite-framed photograph on the coffee table; the three of us in Hawaii a couple of Christmases ago, on the beach, Sammy drying Walt with a big beige towel. Uselessly I remembered that afternoon; a long wait for appetisers in a restaurant. An argument about parking. Walt’s life as he knew it – over.

‘Mr Miller, I’m afraid we . . .’ Danko was saying.

I knew what he was going to ask me next.

‘We need . . .’

‘You need me to identify the body,’ I said, through clenched teeth, through my fingers.

He nodded, sadly.

‘I . . . I can’t. I can’t put Walt through that.’

‘Officer Hudson can stay here with your son. She’s a trained psychologist and very good with children. We should be there and back in less than an hour. Unless you have someone nearby he’d be more comfortable with?’

‘I, have, there . . . there’s a neighbour.’

He nodded again. ‘Mr Miller, in the circumstances, it
might be better just to tell your son that your wife’s been involved in an accident and that you’ll be back soon.’

I rang Irene from the hall. She answered on the second ring. The helicopter. ‘Sammy’s had an accident,’ I told her, practising a version of the lie I was about to tell Walt. ‘I need to go into Regina with the police. To the hospital. I don’t want to take Walt. I’m so sorry, Irene, but do you think you could . . . ?’

‘Oh God. Oh dear Lord. Of course, Donnie. Do you, is, is she OK?’

‘I think it . . . it’s quite bad, Irene.’

For a second I almost believe this version of events. I briefly picture myself walking into a hospital room, seeing Sammy with tubes coming out of her. Bruised and cut but alive. Kissing her tenderly on the forehead, her smiling weakly, woozy on painkillers, as she tells me about the tailgating on the icy highway.

‘Oh no, oh God,’ Irene said. ‘I . . . I’ll be right over.’

In the end Walt bought the accident version of events much more easily than I had imagined. He looked worried, but, maybe, more jealous that I was getting to go on the helicopter. ‘I’ll be back in about an hour,’ I told him, zipping up my parka and looking for my gloves as there was a gentle knock at the glass door. Danko opened it and Irene came in nervously, nodding hellos. ‘Thanks for coming, Irene.’

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I brought a few things, just in case you’re longer than you expected.’ She set down her bag, a big old Gladstone, Mary Poppins-type thing. ‘Are you sure it’s OK to fly in this weather, Officer?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Danko said. ‘We can get up and around it.’

‘OK then,’ I said, leaning down and hugging Walt again,
feeling sobs trying to fight their way up into my chest. I took a sharp breath in through my nose. ‘See you both soon.’

The helicopter went straight up. Ascending almost vertically for thirty, forty feet – with me waving back at Irene and Walt who were standing at the brightly lit kitchen windows – before the pilot dipped the nose and we powered into the wind, veering away from the house, rising in a gradual turn, snow whirling all around us.

Danko and I were in the back, cramped in front of a gun rack: a pair of pump-action shotguns, an assault rifle. As we got higher up, as it got quieter, he leaned in and started to tell me the facts.