Several months ago, when Seb, Leo Krushnik, and I were still working out of the Hastings Street office together, Leo dropped a passport application on my desk with the reasoning that international travel might improve my sex life. “You’re not dead below the waist, you know,” he told me. “And it’s hard to get laid in this city.” Then he threw a wistful glance at Seb.
That’s when I first noticed the distance between them.
Now I walk toward the office before dawn, much earlier than Leo would ever consider coming in. His new business partner, however, is antisocial and keeps odd hours. I use my old key to get in and wonder that Leo hasn’t bothered to change the lock. It’s been a while since I’ve been in here, but the change is startling. A serious decorating overhaul has taken place. Any reminder of Seb’s presence has been ruthlessly eliminated. His pastry certification is nowhere to be found on these walls, and it’s not at the house, either, which makes me wonder if Leo has done something drastic to the only remaining proof that Seb knows his way around butter and flour.
Despite the office’s location in the middle of the shabby Downtown Eastside of the city, the interior is now quite chic. The new decor announces quietly that reasonably priced investigations are done here, rather than screaming it. When Seb gave me a choice to go with him, I didn’t hesitate, but for the first time I’m feeling nostalgic. My old desk is still in the reception area, but is almost totally obscured by a large vase of flowers.
Stevie Warsame, Leo’s new partner, has moved his good backpack into Seb’s office and has set up some kind of complicated computer station in one corner of the room. In the other corner is a second desk, which throws me off balance. Even though this isn’t what I’m here for, I can’t help but search it. I find nothing but a few spare phone chargers, some surveillance equipment, and a chart that compares the nutritional value of various vegetables when juiced. Leo has replaced me with a vase and given a desk in Seb’s office to some kind of juice freak?
“Find what you’re looking for?” says a familiar voice from behind me.
Brazuca, my old AA sponsor, is leaning against the doorjamb, eyeing me warily. I haven’t seen him since last year, when he told me he forgave me for drugging him and abandoning him in a chalet in the mountains. After I found out that he had been lying to me about his day job, and I was too stupid to realize it.
Now here we are again, both of us still looking a little worse for wear, him slightly less so—possibly due to the introduction of fresh vegetables to his diet. There is more color in his cheeks and his eyes seem brighter. For some reason, I imagine us fucking but it is an unpleasant thought. Neither of us has any give or take. We are stretched too thin, and pressing our sharp bones against each other is the least sexy thing I can imagine. No comfort can be drawn out of us. At least not with each other. If he replied to my online ad, I would have to delete his message. Self-preservation is a funny thing.
“Making some life improvements?” I say, holding up the chart.
He smiles, ignoring the distance between us, as though it is a matter of mere physical space. But as the seconds pass and the distance now expands to an abyss, he sees there’s nothing between us but distrust and a single orgasm. “Something like that. What are you doing here? I thought you left to go work with Crow.”
“What are you doing here? Thought you worked for WIN Security.” The security firm that was hired to find my daughter, Bonnie, after she’d gone missing. Hired by a corrupt family they were in the pocket of. I’d been alerted to her disappearance by her adoptive parents, which set off a chain of events that led to my near-drowning.
“Needed a change after last year. You haven’t answered my question.” He steps into the room. My shoulder still hurts like hell from when I was shot last year, but with physical therapy I have been able to mask my limp, from an ankle injury that never quite healed. For the most part. But Brazuca hasn’t been that lucky with his own gimpy leg, a result of a gunshot wound back when he was a cop. Or maybe his injuries aren’t just physical. I blame his victim mentality.
“I’m looking for Stevie.”
“Warsame is on assignment,” Brazuca says, which explains Stevie’s silence. “Want me to get a message to him?”
I don’t need Brazuca for that. If I wanted to get a message to Stevie, I would do it myself. But what I have to say can’t be communicated via electronic means. They haven’t created keyboard characters that could encompass it. “I’m gonna be gone for a little while. I need someone to check up on Seb.”
He doesn’t ask where I’m going and I don’t offer any more information. “What’s wrong with him?” he says finally.
I tell him about the cancer and the failed treatments. “Leo doesn’t know,” I add, when I’m done. “I can pay you to do it if Stevie can’t.”
“Why does everyone think I need money all of a sudden?” he mutters, running a hand through his hair.
I shrug. It might have something to do with his wardrobe, which is several years outdated and, frankly, not tight-fitting enough for the modern man, but I don’t mention it. The male ego is a fragile thing.
“How often?” he asks.
“Every few days. The dog walker I hired will do a daily check.”
He frowns. “You’re not taking Whisper with you? You know what, never mind. I don’t need to know.”
I walk past him, careful to avoid any accidental brushing of our bodies. The last time we touched I had straddled him and poured liquor down his throat, knowing full well that he’s an alcoholic. I’ve never asked for forgiveness for this. Nor will I ever. I had been able to discern lies before the events of last year, with everyone other than Brazuca. His lies had hurt the most, because I hadn’t seen them coming. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to. I won’t make that mistake again.
“Krushnik isn’t going to like this,” he says, as I reach the door.
“You can tell him if you want.”
But we both know he won’t. It’s not our secret to share. Leo will find out eventually and we’ll have to face him when it’s time. For now we agree to keep silent. Another illicit understanding, another man. I seem to be stacking them up these days.
It occurs to me to ask him something, because he is nothing if not observant. “Did you see anyone watching the building when you came in? Who maybe didn’t look quite right.”
“This is the Downtown Eastside. No one looks right here,” he says, looking at me like you would a crazy person. Of which, in the city of Vancouver, the DTES is their muster point. It’s mine, too. The destitute, the addicted, the people with demons—we flock here because it is often the only place that will have us.
I nod. So much for his powers of observation.
On my way to the car, I see a group of people huddled around a prone body on the street. I can’t help but scan their faces to see if the veteran is among them. He’s not, so I turn to the spectacle unfolding. A man is crouching over a woman, speaking to her in a soft voice. She’s unresponsive. He takes an intramuscular needle from a kit at his side and draws up a dose of liquid from a marked vial. Then he plunges it into her thigh. There’s a gasp from the crowd. Clearly from someone who’s not from around here because this is an everyday occurrence in these parts. I don’t wait to see if the woman on the ground wakes up from the naloxone shot. There are enough concerned citizens around and, besides, I’ve got enough problems of my own.
When I return to the house, Seb is in his office with his head pressed against the desk and Whisper at his feet, staring at me with accusing eyes. For a moment my heart stops beating, but then he wheezes in a shaky breath. I am not a large woman, but lifting him requires little effort. He is like a pile of bones in my arms, held together by fragile connective tissues and weak muscles. I lay him gently on the couch and take up my post in the armchair.
Leo has absconded with mostly everything but the books. If he’d known how much Seb needed them he would have taken them, too. But he didn’t, so they are still here and when Seb is well enough we reference them as we talk through his memoir. He speaks and writes while I listen and make my own notes, or I write when he doesn’t have the strength. We only work in this room and we check all our extra baggage at the door. Everyone needs to have a sacred place, and this one belongs to the three of us. Watched over by the tattered books that have meant something to him over the course of his life.
I am no academic, but Seb’s books have been a revelation to me. Nothing moves me like the poetry of Césaire, the political writer from the French colonies who spoke of people’s unwillingness to challenge their worldview. How easy it was to cast ideas away, as if swatting a fly.
Last week, before the smoke from the northern fires drifted down, I took Whisper to the rocks overlooking the ocean. We had some time to kill while Seb was at the hospital. We stayed there for a long time, long enough to see the circle of life played out in front of us. Just above the waterline, at the edge of my field of vision, two birds of prey circled a certain place in the water. Every now and then one of them made a dive. They called to each other, and the more time that passed, the tighter their circles got. I could only sense what they saw. That the creature in the water, a stray duck perhaps, was getting tired. Its reflexes were slowing. The inevitable was waiting to strike.
It reminded me that disaster swoops down and grabs hold when a creature is at its weakest.
Alone, with two hungry mouths to feed and the knowledge that a woman’s love is a powerful thing, but not as powerful as the void it leaves behind when she’s gone. Up until that veteran, whose name I didn’t even think to get, showed up I had thought my father just couldn’t handle the stress.
But now I think of Césaire, and a suspicion lodges in my mind. The idea, he’d said, an annoying fly. Buzzing in my ear. Telling me there’s more to my father’s death than I’d allowed myself to consider. Upending my worldview.