Twenty-Eight

Wednesday morning

February 6, 2019

NIA FELLOWS SAT ON one of the reliable but weary-looking armchairs in The Bunker. A solicitous social worker had just brought her a cup of steaming tea and now sat across from her looking very concerned. Nia was exhausted beyond whatever exhausted was. She kept feeling Christian’s frozen body in her arms. How he felt like he might break into a hundred pieces. How that beautiful man she loved so much was completely absent from that horror by the church. She couldn’t remember how long she sat there with him, but she finally realized she had to go and get help. She ran to Alexis Nihon mall and begged for someone to call 911. But no one would. They took one look at filthy and terrified Nia and practically ran the other way. Finally, one man stopped and offered her his phone. After that, everything seemed to happen so fast and so slowly, like one of those surreal movies where you’re not sure what’s real or what’s a dream.

Therese, the social worker leaned closer. “Nia? What did the police say? Will there be an investigation?”

Nia answered in a flat monotone, as though any expression in her voice was too exhausting. “They took me to the station. Asked me a lot of questions.” Nia stopped to take a breath. “They made me feel like I did it.” Nia looked down at her feet. “And I did. I knew he wasn’t in good shape that day. But I really wanted to get to the housing office, and Christian would slow me down. I should never have left him alone. Never!” On this last word, Nia’s voice finally broke. Therese took the teacup from Nia’s red, chapped hands and tried to hold her, but Nia felt repulsed by that much contact and tucked herself tighter in the chair. A few of the kids had gathered on the periphery and were listening intently to Nia’s story.

“One of the cops was actually very kind—now that Christian is dead.” Nia’s voice had returned to that deadly monotone.

“Did they say they suspect foul play? Did someone hurt him?”

“I don’t know. Their questions were weird. They kept asking me if anyone would want to harm Christian.” Nia finally made eye contact. “Who would want to hurt him?”

Therese, stroked Nia’s hands very gently. “No one. Christian was very special.”

“That man—the Good Samaritan? He…told me—that night—that some guy was hanging out with Christian and took him to that…place by the church. I’d like to know who that guy was.”

“Did you tell that to the police?”

“Yes, I did. But. I have no…description. It was weird, though. I stopped outside the metro station—at Atwater. I asked some people there if they’d seen Christian and Hamlet. Gave them my last smokes. And. One of them…seemed like, familiar to me. Like I knew him from someplace else. Where he was somebody else. More his voice than anything. I just feel like I knew that voice.” Nia looked off into the distance. “And, like, what was the Good Samaritan doing there—”

“Isaac, you mean?”

“Yeah. There’s something wrong with him. I just feel like, like he was almost following me. Like he knew.”

Therese took the empty cup from Nia’s clasped hands and placed it on the floor.

“Isaac is…I think Isaac is pretty harmless. But I can see how his…devotion might strike you as a bit creepy.”

“They just took Christian away like…that. Like he was nothing. Like he was a bag of garbage. I didn’t even get to see him again—and I have to. I have to let his family know, don’t I? His family doesn’t know. But he ran away from them—he hated them. But he loved them, too, I know it. Oh my God, someone has to tell his mother.”

“I would think the police have notified his family, Nia. You know they will probably ask you back to ask a few more questions.” Therese pulled a card from her pocket. “This guy…Detective Pouliot came by here and left me his card.”

“The police aren’t gonna do anything.” She hesitated and then added, “I don’t want to talk to the cops again. I have so many tickets I haven’t paid—they’ll arrest me again. I know they will. I owe like a thousand dollars!”

Therese tried to comfort her. “Nia? I can talk to the police for you.” She hesitated before asking the next question. “Would you like to call someone? Is there any…family or…someone that you’d like to call?”

Nia thought of her family. There were only the three of them. Her mom, Janey, who Nia remembers teaching her to read by the time she was three. Nia’s first book was Hazel’s Amazing Mother, about a mother who defends her daughter against bullies. Nia loved the book because she had an even more amazing mother—who knew how to keep beehives, raise chickens, and do a perfect swan dive into the little pond behind their house. Nia worshipped her. Her father, Gavin, had built their little house on a few acres of weedy land outside of Lennoxville, a busy university town two hours southeast of Montreal. He did odd jobs around the town, but mostly worked at home. An avid birdwatcher, Gavin could entice the chickadees and jays and even crows to come to him and eat out of his hand. He taught Nia how to save a bird when it hit a window and knocked itself out. He would hold it in his two hands, and jiggle it around, all the while asking, “What’s your name, little bird? Come on, tell me your phone number. Wake up!” Nia couldn’t remember a single bird who didn’t come back to life in her father’s hands and fly off frantically back into the trees when he released them. It wasn’t until Nia was eleven years old that she found out what her parents actually did for a living.

“I have no family to call.”

Her mother was in a halfway house in St. Jerome, after serving three years in a detention center in Laval. Nia hadn’t seen her in almost four years. Her father was arrested after a high-speed chase with three Sûreté du Québec cars, which lasted, amazingly, for seventy-three kilometers down the Eastern Townships highway. They got him with several kilos of heroin in the trunk of his old Volvo. That night, Nia waited with her mother in their beautiful little house for her father to call. He never did. Two days later, Nia’s mother was arrested. That was when she discovered that her gentle, funny, and eccentric parents were almost single-handedly responsible for the epidemic of heroin amongst the local college crowd.

“I have to find Hamlet. Do you think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know, Nia. I think it’s possible he’s still alive. I’m just not sure what more you can do to find him.”

After Christian’s death, Nia had had an explosion of energy fueled by adrenaline and shock. She had called the Montreal SPCA so many times they started blocking her calls. She had also called every shelter she could Google, but not one of them had Hamlet. She had roamed every block in the area where they found Christian, but no Hamlet. She asked everyone she knew on the street if they’d seen him or heard anything about him. She insisted the people at several shelters and missions put Hamlet on their websites and Facebook pages. Then she had literally collapsed at The Bunker. She was haunted by what might have happened to him. Was he run over by a car? Was he in a ditch somewhere, dumped by someone who couldn’t care less? Did someone take him to hurt him? Torture him? These images played over and over in her head until Nia felt like she would implode with worry and grief. But that morning, as the bright light of another sunny winter day dappled the floor of the lounge at The Bunker, she closed her eyes. As Therese covered her in a fleecy kids’ blanket covered in smiley faces that someone had donated, Nia Fellows finally fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.