Elizabeth and After (26 page)

In books, secret sinners always go crazy in the end. For almost thirty years—it was that long since his first night with Elizabeth—he’d held everything in check, divided himself into as many people as necessary, each locked away from the other. Now the mind-control muscles were gone. He’d worn them out or forgotten how to use them.

Nights he couldn’t sleep any more. He’d lie in bed until two or three in the morning, then get up and drive by the old Balfer place just to see how Carl was doing. Once or twice the lights were on and he’d wanted to stop and knock at his door.
Back in West Gull he’d snake guiltily into his own driveway, feeling like a Dr. Jekyll who’d been out playing Mr. Hyde. Finally, afraid of where this might be leading, he bought a do-it-yourself book, ordered in a load of building supplies, and began putting new gyprock on the walls of the upstairs bedroom that he’d slept in as a child but used as storage ever since he’d moved back to town.

It took him weeks to empty the room of its furniture, carefully remove the wooden mouldings and the window framing, put up the panels, tape, plaster, sand and paint. Although it had to be admitted he spent most of the time re-reading the instructions or admiring each tiny increment of his accomplishment. As he stood, paint-spattered in his childhood room, listening to the baseball game with paintbrush in hand, he convinced himself that once his bedroom was finished he’d remodel the entire house. The incredible prospect of becoming a virtuous handyman who actually increased the value of his residence rather than coaxing it from crisis to crisis became immensely comforting.

But one night when he was standing on the stepladder, his knees began to tremble, his tongue to flutter, and the pure current of the voices shot through him with such force that he fell down in the newspapers that were covering the floor and began to beg for mercy. But who was he begging? he’d asked himself afterwards, although when it came to mercy he was prepared to accept it from whoever or Whoever wanted to give.

In mid-August the junk he’d moved from the room was still piled, sheet-covered, in the hall and the ladder was still poised beneath the naked light bulb. To keep himself from driving around the township in the middle of the night, Adam now returned to an old remedy for sleeplessness—night walking. Maybe it was the low dollar or the exceptionally dry
weather, but even late at night this summer there were always a few tourists roving and the Main Street convenience store was often open. What Adam most enjoyed was staking out the Movie Barn. From where he stood, which was under an old tree fronting the dress shop, he had a view of Carl through the window and could see customers coming and going. It was strange to think of Carl being observed without knowing—in fact it was strange to be always thinking about Carl but Adam couldn’t stop. Carl’s return to West Gull, his life with Lizzie, even his job at the Movie Barn, obsessed Adam day and night. When Luke brought up Carl’s name, it was all Adam could do to keep his face straight and murmur in agreement. Sometimes he would imagine Carl sitting in his kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, or Carl driving around in his truck, and he had to ask himself why whether Carl threw his coffee in the sink or turned his truck at this or that corner could be so important, while what he himself was doing had become so dull he could hardly stand to be in the same room with himself.

Friday, to break the spell, he’d actually taken a step he’d fantasized about in his car: he’d walked into the Movie Barn and stood face to face with Carl, daring his voices to take him over and spill the secret. Then Ellie Dean had swept in, furious about Ned, she claimed, but that was just an excuse to start in about the accident as though it was something that had happened to
her
. “I could tell
you
something about the accident,” Adam had screamed. “What would you think if you knew this boy who killed his mother was my son, that when he killed his mother my own son was killing the only life I ever had? Was what she and I did so bad we had to be punished like that? Did you ever hear of the sins of the fathers being passed down to their children and then their grandchildren?
You’re standing there with your hands on your hips like a bad joke blaming Carl and he doesn’t even know that he’s cursed, or why he’s cursed, or that his whole life and his children’s lives and who knows how many generations will be lived out under the shadow of this curse he can never be told about. …” But as always the scream had been silent, just something that boiled through Adam’s bones until it drove him back into the street.

Sunday night he decided to return. It was well after midnight. The rain had started with a loud crack of thunder that split the sky like a celestial earthquake. Pellets of hail came pounding down, then a harsh downpour that overflowed the eavestroughs and covered his windows in thick sheets of rain that suddenly thinned, then disappeared, leaving him so agitated that he threw on his jaket and started searching for his mother’s umbrella, a heavy red monster forgotten in a cupboard for years.

By the time he got outside the noise of the rain on his umbrella was only an intermittent tapping, even though his feet got soaked in the puddles. His plan was the only one left to him: like a retired general with a phantom army planning a war that would never happen, he would map out this final campaign in front of the empty store in order to better imagine exactly what he would say to Carl if ever he summoned the courage to say anything at all.

The lights were off, Main Street washed clean and silent. As his shoes crunched into the gravel of the parking lot, Adam felt a wave of confidence that everything would work out—the same feeling he’d had after asking Maureen if he could escort her home. He remembered he had come down the stairs from the dark bedroom where he had been with Elizabeth and Maureen had been standing beneath the chandelier waiting
for him, her eyes turning to him as he nervously checked and straightened his clothes in the contrasting brightness. With the taste of Elizabeth still in his mouth he inquired if she was ready to leave. In return Maureen had offered her usual anxious smile, tinged with what might have been meant as encouragement. Outside, she hooked her hand into his arm and as soon as they were out of sight of the house, Adam, still dizzy with Elizabeth, dropped to one knee in the snow, closed his eyes to avoid seeing her face, and proposed. “I’ll think about it,” Maureen had replied. And he’d been so confused he’d left her there, halfway home, retreating to his own house and into his pyjamas, Elizabeth still caked to his skin, and drunk himself to sleep.

As always, the Movie Barn’s windows had posters of the latest video releases. Avoiding the puddles Adam stepped closer to read them, and that was when he became aware of someone breathing—a tiny shallow breath that was hardly a breath at all—and his first thought was that the whispery sound must be running water. Then he caught the glow of a cigarette in the dark and came closer. A rain-drenched Carl was sitting in the gravel propped against the steps with his eyes raised to the sky and, as he told Adam later, “smoking my last cigarette.”

As Adam realized Carl was hurt his throat filled with a thick choking pain. He knelt beside him and following Carl’s mumbled instructions, checked his ribs, his head, his neck. He took Carl’s keys and opened the store, called an ambulance, then Luke. “Now I’m going to help you up,” he said to Carl. “I’m not going to let them find you like this.” He bent over the boy, hooked his arms under Carl’s while Carl looped an arm around his neck. For a moment Adam strained and it seemed that he would drop him. But then his back straightened and he walked Carl up the steps into the store, eased
him into the chair beside the counter. Fifteen minutes later the Movie Barn was swarming.

Early the next morning, by the time Moira came into the main kitchen, McKelvey was sitting at the table, doing one of his ever-present crossword puzzles and laughing about something with Kate Rawlins, the cook.

“Look at him turn red,” Kate said to Moira. “I was just reminding him he had the wife everyone else wanted to dance with.”

“Never would,” McKelvey said. “Except for old Adam. Old Adam was what she called him, like some kind of whisky. Guess that’s what he is, some kind of whisky that stayed in the bottle.”

“Adam Goldsmith?” Moira asked. “The man from the dealership?”

“Also the chairman of our very own board of directors,” Kate said. “That’s why he’s always dropping by. He’s always been old Adam, though I never thought of the whisky angle. I think they said old Adam because he would never actually do anything with Maureen Knight, the doctor’s daughter. That was the one he was engaged to—she was the French teacher at the elementary and everyone always joked she was waiting for old Adam to get off the mark. My father used to say they were engaged so long they should have had an anniversary. There was a rumour once that they had run off and got married. It was an Easter holiday when I was still at the elementary, and after the holiday everyone was making jokes about it but it turned out they weren’t even living in the same house. I heard she left town a few years ago.”

They started talking about something else but Moira was thrown into thinking of Carl and the time he’d taken her to the
cemetery. Ever since, watching Carl with his father, with Lizzie, she had been sure she could see his mother’s absence in every gesture, every shadow. But she’d never before considered who that mother might have been, the family they must have made. And Adam Goldsmith dancing! That must have been something. She was trying to imagine exactly how Adam would dance when he came through the door.

“Look like you’ve been up all night,” McKelvey said.

Adam was pale and unshaven, his eyes rimmed with red. While he told McKelvey what had happened to Carl, McKelvey just sat there, not looking up, pushing his pencil into the newspaper until the lead snapped.

“Fucking idiot,” McKelvey finally said.

Kate handed Adam a cup of coffee.

“He didn’t start it,” Adam said. “Someone hit him from behind.”

“Anyone hits him any other way they’re dead.”

“It’s nothing to be proud of,” Adam said.

“Boys,” Kate said. She leaned into McKelvey. She wasn’t as tall as him but she was wider, and as she squeezed McKelvey’s shoulders his face loosened a little.

“I’m not going down there to see him,” McKelvey said. “Unless he asks me I’m not going. Anyway, my car’s in the lake.”

Even Adam laughed. Moira waited for Kate or Adam to volunteer to drive McKelvey but neither of them spoke.

“I could take you down there,” Moira said.

“He that sick?”

“Be out tomorrow,” Adam said.

McKelvey looked questioningly at Moira. “Maybe you’ll be driving by. You could take him something for me. Chocolates or flowers or something.”

By the time she got to the hospital he’d already been released. Later Carl would tell her Ray Johnson had driven him home. She wouldn’t have gone at all except that she had found out the real reason McKelvey didn’t want to go: one that Carl hardly ever visited, he said there was one time he’d got drunk that he shouldn’t have. Moira had realized he blamed himself for his wife’s death, blamed himself for having made Carl the instrument of the tragedy. Too bad she couldn’t give them therapy. Too bad she wasn’t really a psychologist-in-training as her job application claimed. Too bad she was just the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a rich lawyer who’d found a few plastic baggies in her dresser drawer and threatened to report her if she didn’t get away from her friends and do something useful for a year, like going to Africa or working at that old folks’ home in the town where they spent their summers.

When she got to Carl’s place she brought in the chocolates she’d bought at the hospital gift shop before discovering he wasn’t there. To make things easier, she kept her sunglasses on and held the chocolates in front of her like a shield as she knocked on the kitchen door. He called out to come in; she found him on the sofa, sitting with his bandaged head resting on a towel to protect the upholstery. He hadn’t shaved. One cheek was bruised and rising to a shiner and he seemed to be holding the ribs Adam had said were cracked. In front of the sofa on the coffee table was a hospital pamphlet about concussions along with a couple of bottles of pills. She set down the chocolates. “From your dad,” she said, thankful for her sunglasses. “He sent me to deliver them.” She immediately thought she should have at least asked how he was feeling.

“And so here you are,” Carl said. “Angel of death or angel of mercy?”

“No angel at all.” She crossed the room and sat down in the same chair as the last time. “You want me to get you some coffee or something? Some water for your pills?” She reached to take off her sunglasses, then kept them on.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did that time,” Carl said. “Not that way. I didn’t mean to be nasty. But as you can see, I’m not my own man.”

Moira looked down at her purse and took out her cigarettes, held out the pack.

“Quit,” Carl said. “Decided to get clubbed to death instead.”

“How was it?”

“You’re supposed to feel sorry for me.”

“I tried that.”

“And how was it?”

Carl was leaning back on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table. He looked pitiful or arrogant, depending on your slant. And, thought Moira, he was either someone she could like very much or someone she could easily learn to hate. “You tell me,” Moira said. “How was it for you?”

She could see Carl’s lips opening and she had the feeling that what he said would cut deep and she would be sorry she had left herself open.

“It was perfect. It was great. It was so good I was going to ask you to a drive-in with me and Lizzie. I was afraid you’d say no.”

She wondered how her face seemed to Carl: two green discs, a nose, a mouth. She wasn’t sure if she was liking him or hating him, if he was playing with her or trying to apologize. And if he was apologizing, was he saying they should just be pals or was he saying he wanted to pick up with her again? And if that’s what he wanted, what did she want?

“How was it for you?” Carl asked.