I’m here again at my sister’s house in East Vancouver. It’s Saturday, and you can only tell it’s afternoon by the clock. The haze is not as thick as it was yesterday, but it’s still there. Still obscuring the daylight and conjuring frightening images of smoker’s lung to the health nuts of the city, who will not quit hiking or cycling in these conditions but will complain incessantly while they do it. I hear there’s another forest fire on the Sunshine Coast and the winds are blowing the smoke over this way.
Vancouver isn’t on fire, but it sure as hell seems like it is.
I’ve waited until Lorelei’s car pulls out of the drive to approach the narrow gate leading to the backyard. Her husband, David, is sitting on the small deck, contemplating his shitty garden. There are a few herb plants mustering some strength, but they are no match for the mint growing like weeds, even in this postapocalyptic atmosphere. He looks like he’s trying to stay positive, but failing. I feel sorry for men like David, the decent, hardworking men of the world. Try as they might, the simplest things seem to overwhelm them. He can’t even succeed at coaxing something edible from the earth.
He’s drinking a light beer and doesn’t bother getting up when I round the corner. The last time we laid eyes on each other, he had thrown some money at me and asked me to stay away from Lorelei for a spell. He doesn’t seem surprised now that I have broken our agreement. Then he sees Whisper and a delighted smile crosses his face. Part of the reason I brought her with me is that dog people are so easy to manipulate. She understands her role well enough to trot over and say hello to his crotch with her nose. Bam. Nice to see you.
“Who’s a good girl?” He grins, reaching over to scratch behind her ears. “Who’s a very good girl?”
And then he looks at me. The grin disappears. I try not to be offended. Good girls are overrated anyway.
“The yellow box,” I say. There’s no reason to beat around the bush.
He considers this for a moment, then makes a decision. “Upstairs, in the guest room closet. Top shelf.”
I walk past him and into their house. My visits to my sister’s home are usually of the clandestine sort so, at first, I’m not sure how to proceed. Am I supposed to move differently now that I have permission?
Lorelei’s house is much like her personality. Spare, uncluttered, and a little nauseating in its blandness. There’s no room for surprises here. The box is exactly where he said it would be. When I come back outside with the yellow shoe box tucked under my arm, I find that things have progressed for Whisper. She is busy enjoying the touch of a man. She’s on her back now, and has offered her stomach for a thorough rubdown. The nympho.
“Thank you,” I say, when David looks up at me again.
He nods.
“Will you tell her I’ve been here?”
“Not unless she notices the box is missing. But she hasn’t opened it in years, so I wouldn’t worry.”
I nod, too, and both of us are doing a thing with our necks that is attempting to smooth over the rough patch we’ve hit. We now have an understanding between us. A secret. My sister’s husband and I have agreed that she is not to know that I’ve been here and that I’ve taken something from her. I won’t tell her because she no longer speaks to me. His silence on the subject is probably due to a misplaced guilt over our tense relationship. Even though it has nothing to do with him. But David is a good man and would not deny me what I have left of my father, all conveniently contained in a box that used to hold a pair of Lorelei’s nude pumps, size seven.
I close my legs a notch. The pressure builds slower than I like. Slower than I’ve become used to. And then it is over, several excruciating moments longer than it used to take. I’m not ashamed, which I suppose is in its own way progress, but then again I’m not much of anything, really.
I still feel like I’m being watched but the angle is all wrong.
As I remove my knees from their indentations beside the stranger’s head, I wonder—was it worth the trip over here? The answer doesn’t come to me, not when I put on my jeans or even when I untie his hands from the bedposts and make for the door. Like the cliché I have become, the money is in an envelope on the dresser.
It comes when I’m already halfway to the motel’s parking lot.
I will sit on your face, says the ad I placed online. And your hands will be tied. When it’s over, I’ll leave. NSA. No fuss. No games. My teeth are sharper than yours.
Then I name a reasonable rate that I’m prepared to pay.
All things considered, it’s an insulting ad. I have come to hate myself more than the lonely schmucks who answer it, but I haven’t taken it down yet. I come, then I go, and it had all worked out well at first.
My old Corolla takes a minute to get used to the idea that something is expected of it and while I wait I’m left with the unsettling answer. It’s not enough anymore. No matter how many strangers whose faces I try to erase with my thighs.
About an hour later, I park next to the restaurant at Burnaby Mountain and head to a spot about halfway up the lawn. The air is cleaner up here, plus the view of the beautiful Japanese wood carvings beneath me and the city of Vancouver to the west can’t be beat. I’m at this spot because my journalist friend Mike Starling loved coming to this place to think, or so it claims in his obituary last year, after he was found dead in his bathtub with his wrists slit. To me, Starling wasn’t the type to sit around on mountains and contemplate life but, admittedly, my memory isn’t the greatest. What I remember the most about him was his disdain for drinkers of multisyllabic coffee and what he looked like in death, in a tub full of bloody water.
My support group friends assure me that I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about because I’m not the one who killed him—but what the hell do they know, anyway? It’s not like their judgment is exactly sound. And what they don’t know (because I haven’t told them) is that I’m the reason he’s dead. He was killed because some dangerous people had come looking for me and he’d made the choice to protect me. He may have even sat here while he thought about it and decided that my life was worth fighting for, and he’d be looking into who painted the target on my back.
I sip at the coffee I brought with me—four syllables—and pour a little on the ground beside me for him. So he’ll know the woman he gave his life to save still has a sense of humor. Maybe he did like to come up here, and maybe there’s a little bit of him left behind in this place, too, because it seems to me Mike Starling could never walk away from a mystery.
Clearly, I can’t either.