Knife Fight and Other Struggles (7 page)

It had a different effect on McGill. He didn’t know me, then. His mother had left him at home when she met me at the schoolhouse. He’d waited in the car when we danced at the shopping plaza, and she vanquished me again. She obviously didn’t tell him about me—about the things I could do, to the world . . . to the hearts and heads of men and women. How formidable I was.

He saw that cat, and he saw me, in the tub smeared with feces and vomit and blood, and there was no fear. All that came up was anger.

“Let that little girl go, you fuckin’ cocksucker,” he said, and made fists. The camera he’d brought fell to the floor. His eyes filled with tears. And like a stupid, tantruming child, he stepped up to the fight.

That was the first time we met, and the only time I came close to besting McGill. I don’t know how his mother taught him . . . what talent he might have simply inherited . . . But even new to the game, blinded by stupid rage. . . .

He was a chip off the block.

She was giddy when we got home. She set my stroller in the living room, in front of the TV, and I sat there alone for a time, watching some colourful cartoon show about dinosaurs and science, while she scoured the basement.

She returned with a stack of slim, hard-covered books. Four of them. She settled on the floor in front of the sofa. Opened one of them. The inside flaps were covered in scribbles, notes like a greeting card. She pored over those for a few minutes, then flipped through the pages. It was filled with photographs.

“This is a yearbook, baby,” she said, as she noticed me looking over her shoulder. She scudded nearer me, and flipped through it. “This is mummy when she was a lot younger,” she said, stopping at a page filled with faces. Hers grinned out at me. She flipped a few more pages, and there she was, among a crowd of other girls wearing shorts and tank-tops. “This was the girl’s track and field team. That’s mummy.” And finally, she flipped back, to another of those face-filled pages. There, stuck in the middle like a dried piece of chewing gum, was McGill’s grinning face.

“And this is the man who brought you back, baby.”

I grinned and waved my hands, and she laughed.

“He’s our hero,” she said, and when I giggled in what I was sure then to be my triumph, she said, “Yes he is. I wish he was here too.”

One more day—an awful, interminable day, filled with tears and silences after questions and accusations—and we were in the car.

She had been fiddling around on her computer, looking things up, putting it together in the morning, after he left, silent and stiff-backed. Oh, how it must have stung him, those words:
You didn’t do anything to help! McGill saved our baby, and the best you could do was sulk!

He hadn’t said anything to her, but he came to see me in the night, clutching the waistband of his pajama bottoms, damp-eyed and snuffling, declaring his love for me. “I hope you’ll remember that, no matter what happens,” he said, and touched my cheek.

She strapped me into the child seat behind her. It offered a terrible view, and that made me fussy. After all these years, I must admit that I was acutely curious as to where precisely McGill bedded down at night. In all of our transactions, the McGill family only ever came to me. Never had I had occasion or opportunity to play the visitor.

We sped along blacktop. She braked three times—the last time hard enough to leave skid-marks—before the surface under the wheels grew rougher, and gravel popped up against the underside. The brilliant blue sky above me disappeared behind a canopy of leaves, and soon after that, the car slowed and lurched to one side as she negotiated a narrow turn, onto an even rougher surface. And then we came to a stop and she climbed out.

“Wish me luck,” she said, and kissed my forehead before unbuckling me and lifting me out of the seat, and the car.

We were in a small clearing in the middle of the woods. In the middle of that, was a house that I could only guess belonged to McGill.

It was made of wood, its walls shingled in rough, dark cedar, and happily, it had but a single storey to it. The shadow of the trees all around kept grass from growing, but there had been some attempt at a little garden underneath the living room window. The nose of an old Lincoln poked out from underneath a carport. There was a metal shed behind that.

Although it was the middle of summer, the space here had a chill to it. I fussed, and she held me close, and she fussed too, in her way. She took a step toward the house, and another one—then stepped back. She looked back at the car, and shook her head, and said, “damn” in almost a sob. She might have gotten into it, too, if she’d been left to her devices.

But—lucky her—she was rescued.

“Mrs. Reesor?”

McGill stood at the door. He was wearing an old bathrobe. A cigarette dangled between thumb and forefinger, and he flicked ash away onto the steps. His hair stood up on one side—no doubt where he’d slept.

She turned to him, holding me close. “Hey, you,” she said.

“How—” he frowned. “How did you find me here?”

“Online,” she said. “I looked up your address online.”

“It’s not under my name.”

“It’s not. But it is under your mother’s.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“Look,” she said finally. “I’m sorry for coming here like this. I . . . I hoped it would be okay, but maybe it’s not.”

“It’s okay.” He dropped the cigarette to the steps, and put it out with the heel of one bare foot. “Is Simon all right?”

She nodded. “He’s fine.” And she held me up, jiggling me like a carnival prize. I giggled appropriately. “See?”

“He looks good.” McGill set his head forward and squinted at her. “Really good. So you’re here . . . why?”

She giggled, inappropriately. She let her bangs fall over her eyes. She smiled at him through them. “I remember now,” she said softly.

McGill’s mouth hung open stupidly for a second. “Mrs. Reesor?”

“Shelly,” she said, and with that, found her courage. She strode across the stony yard, and up the steps, and holding me in one arm, wrapped an arm around his neck, and drew him into a kiss.

It wouldn’t be as simple as that soon enough. But for the moment, it was.

McGill’s house stank of old smoke and urine. The living room was a shadowy place. Dishes from a recent meal spread across a coffee table. Random-seeming pieces of clothing, yellowing paperbacks and empty bottles and cans clotted its shadowed corners. A large box of adult diapers sat near the doorway to the kitchen. She noticed none of it, of course—love sees, or smells, only what it wishes—but McGill was still ashamed.

“I . . . apologize for the state of things,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You probably can’t afford a housekeeper. You don’t charge enough for what you do.”

“It’s not right.”

“You saved my baby. It’s right to charge fairly for that.”

Of course, that was not what McGill meant. He meant that this wasn’t right, that there was no natural way that she would arrive at his door, and kiss him so. . . .

How was it for him these past days? I can only guess. When he watched her sashay past his locker those years ago, didn’t he dream of this day? When he could grow into and harness the talents of his mother, and use them to rescue that pale princess—to possess her, even as he drove the demons from her? Then, might he not have slipped his finger into the moist caverns of her mind, and communed with her as does my kind? And in so doing, truly possess her?

Shameful thoughts, for men of McGill’s avocation. Shameful, but once entertained, so difficult to dismiss.

“Don’t worry,” she said, standing near him now. Her heart was pounding—I could feel it as she held me to her breast. “I’m not going to try and give you more
money
. Come on with me.”

And she led us all, down a hallway, past a shut door—where the stink of piss seemed strongest—and through an open door.

McGill whispered an apology for the state of his bedroom. She told him she didn’t care—that she remembered now . . . that she wished she could undo the years and that she should apologize for not being able to.

There was an ache, she said, a hollowness in her that she had dismissed as ennui, until she saw him again. McGill might have said: that is how it feels, when a demon tweaks a heart, and turns it to another direction. He might have made fists, and turned to me, and said, “Let that woman go, you fuckin’ cocksucker.”

But our McGill . . . in spite of his vow, in spite of his avocation . . . in spite of his other responsibilities . . . he said nothing.

She took the pillows stacked at one end of his sagging bed, and made a small nest for me on the floor beside the bed.

Then she whispered an apology to me, and set me in it. “Mummy’s right here,” she said, and turned away.

And McGill . . . precious McGill . . . 
your
McGill, he took her in his arms, and ran his hands over the soft skin of her waist, the curve of her buttock. For that moment, he forgot everything . . . transformed forever, by his awful dream made flesh.

And so, I crawled.

It was a strain—the infant wasn’t really ready for crawling. But such as we know nothing so well as the bending of sinew, the diversion of will. And off I went—out the door, back to the hallway, past the lavatory, and to your door. It opened for me without protest: any wards McGill had ever bothered to place on it had long ago faded.