13

The video arrives with no identifying details. But the dark, unadorned space can only be a motel room.

Carter opens it while brushing his teeth. Isabelle and Sam are safely below, bickering over breakfast.

Shadowy limbs move. A flick of hair. It’s a woman dancing. The window behind her is a square of sunlight, and she’s silhouetted against the glare. She pivots, showing a round cheek and an arm topped by a T-shirt sleeve. There’s no music. The woman laughs and hugs herself, the arms rise, bringing a dark shirt overhead. It falls behind her and the light catches the white of a bra and armpit. The dancing resumes. Her arms twist behind and the bra drops while she turns away. A small, shadowy breast, side-on. A hand reaches and pulls her back to face the camera.

The picture freezes in a blur of flesh as Carter drools a gob of toothpaste, slurps it back, and gags on it.

“Everything okay up there?”

“Yeah.” His eyes water. He hacks painfully into the sink and gargles. The email from Will included no message, just the attachment and video in the subject line. Carter watches again with his headset plugged in. It starts with male laughter and indecipherable voices, except when Colin calls, “For the boys, for the boys!” in a sing-song voice. The sunlight in the window is reflected off the grill of a parked vehicle—the blue one that took them through the last couple of years.

He’s expecting the hand this time. It emerges from the screen’s edge, touches her shoulder. There’s laughter as it slides briefly for a stroke of the breast, and takes her arm.

On third viewing he focuses on the moment of laughter as the girl exposes herself. It’s almost lost behind Colin’s loud, approving “Yeahhhhhh!” The laughter belongs to Carter. As does the hand.

She dances again, and he watches the quick movement of the hand, the fingers turning to quickly cup the breast as the girl turns. The grip on her arm is firm, with the thumb wrapped around her bicep.

//////

“Aunt Kat had an eye. A brilliant eye,” says Shelley. “The family let her down, leaving her all alone in that big old house, way out on the Durham County Line. Poor Kat.”

Isabelle and Shelley tumbled through the door a few minutes ago, carried on the winter wind, toting heavy bags from the market and liquor store. Isabelle announced that Sam was staying with his grandmother in Hamilton, then the two women set to work on a window-fogging, stove-spattering Spaghetti Bolognese, “like we used to make.” Bacon spits in the skillet and onion skins blow across the floor. “Spag Bol!” the women cry. “Spag Bol!”

Aunt Kat lived in her kitchen and her sewing room, Shelley explains as she smashes garlic cloves with the side of a knife and stirs them around the bottom of the pot. In an old house she inherited from her parents. She spoke in a hushed voice, produced enormous meals for the extended family, and was rarely seen to take up a plate. Eating at Kat’s house left Shelley stricken, as if the loneliness had been poured into her cooking and shared around the table.

“But what an eye. She could see clothes on a person. She did a bit of knitting and sewing over the years, but nothing much. A brilliant, wasted eye.”

“I can’t believe you never told me about her before,” says Isabelle, her cuffs red with tomato juice.

“I had no appreciation. I thought she was just a silly old woman.”

Shelley opens a bottle of white and fills champagne flutes. Carter takes his glass and sits on a stool against the wall, keeping his distance.

“You could have learned so much from her,” says Isabelle, nearly shouting. She’s been possessed by a nervous gaiety since Shelley clomped into the house, kicking off purple sneakers and greeting them both with mock kisses. (Mwa! Mwa! Pressing her face to one cheek, then the other.)

“She never had the chance,” says Shelley. “The chance to just hide away and make clothes and use her imagination and make mistakes.”

“To make dueling bandage skirts with her best friend.”

“Exactly.”

Carter has heard about the dueling skirts. In Shelley’s occasional visits, he has heard all the favourite tales from the idyllic fashion school days. How Isabelle and Shelley spent hundreds of hours with their pencils and scissors, labouring over sheets of tissue paper and rolls of cheap fabric. Every day they dug into their mountain dragged home from Goodwill, raiding it for buttons and ruffles and strips of leather or tulle or denim. The whole apartment stank of sweat and polyester and mothballs, of old closets and basements. The mountain produced treasures, like the gold buttons for Isabelle’s high-waist capris, the green serge for Shelley’s asymmetrical skirt, and the endless supply of Lycra for their naughty line of dominatrix yoga wear. They found occasional coins and crumpled bills—including a memorable cache of eighty dollars—an old baby picture, which they framed, a pair of unwashed black underwear from the Gap (ladies petite), also framed, and a knob of driftwood kept as a talisman. There were church bulletins, keys, tickets and tokens, fossilized wads of chewing gum and used tissue, court summons, mouldering food scraps, and mouse shit.

“Will your mother be alright with Sam?” Carter asks. The woman has lately complained of nerves, and how children make her anxious.

“Oh yes, they’ll be fine.” Isabelle holds the bottle of olive oil overhead, tipping and twirling it to send a spiraling stream into the stockpot.

But Shelley isn’t finished with Aunt Kat. It all came to a sad end. They left her alone out on Durham County Line all those long dark winters, until finally she went mad and they put her in the home and sold the house.

“Shameful for the whole family, all of us, to let it happen like that. I was so wrapped up in my own life. If I could have it back, I’d go live with her.”

“Aww,” says Isabelle, and reaches for a brief, one-armed hug, cheek to cheek. Glasses are refilled.

There was a very bad scene a few weeks before Ronnie died. As Isabelle tells it, Shelley went to see him without telling her. Isabelle found out and drove into Toronto, where there was an ugly confrontation. Carter isn’t clear on why she found the possible relationship so abhorrent. Couldn’t Ronnie use a woman? A reconciliation at the funeral, with a heartfelt hug, could have been the perfect, final grace note between them. But Shelley insists on the tether. They still have fashion school, after all. They were closer than lovers back in those innocent days, sharing a double bed in their basement apartment. Occasionally they would even “make out like teenagers,” according to Isabelle. “Just a comfort thing,” she called it. “Just kissing. We were both so lonely.” But surely, with the two of them in the same bed every night… “Your mind goes there because you’re a guy,” Isabelle insisted. “It was just kissing.”

Carter has never been good at drinking. It puts him to sleep. But today the buzz from the wine is fortifying. It burns a little, as if glowing inside him.

Shelley turns to him and says, “What about you?”

“What?”

“Your younger days, what were they like? You were in a band. There must have been some wild times.”

“It was great, but its time was brief.” This is his stock answer.

“But what was it like?” Shelley lowers her voice to a purr of comic seduction. “Didn’t the girls throw themselves at you?”

“Not at Herb,” says Isabelle. “He was married.”

“That’s a shame,” says Shelley. “Did people come to see you?”

“It was a big soap opera, and a big break-up at the end.” He’s being unfair. It doesn’t account for the way music, or the idea of music, pulled like an undertow. But he can’t give a name or purpose to this force. It’s why he’s had trouble arguing his case with Leah.

“But what was it like when it was wonderful? What did you love best about it?”

“My Telecaster.”

“What’s a Telecaster?”

“A guitar that can make you believe anything.”

“Really? I bet that came in handy. This was the nineties, right? Would I know any of your songs?”

“I doubt it.”

“Can I hear some now?”

“Not now. But we’ve got plans to get them back out there.”

“Are your songs embarrassing, like someone reading your high-school poetry? Horrible feelings and heartbreak?”

“No.” The comparison is not entirely off the mark. But he chafes against the touch of glee in Shelley’s voice. “Maybe a bit young and foolish. But it shouldn’t be dismissed because of that.” He shrugs. “It’s old.”

“Carter left all that behind long ago,” says Isabelle, dumping ground sausage into the pot. “We both let a lot of things go when we got married.”

They switch to red for dinner. Carter breaks the cork and has to push the rest of it in to pour. They drink and spit flecks of cork. Soon he is finding out things he never knew. His wife hates her hair, and has never found a style that can minimize the expanse of her forehead and the impossibly thick bridge of her nose. Also, even her most carefully selected shoes look absurd, big planks at the end of each leg.

The women push away empty plates and continue gnawing on chunks of baguette.

Shelley says the lemon-drop A-line jacket was the best thing Isabelle ever made, and she never, never ever should have shown it to Callahan.

“I remember how she held it,” says Isabelle. “Like I just handed her a lump of dog shit.”

“Like it was a personal insult or something.”

“I can’t believe my tuition helped pay the salary of that…that cunt.”

“That cunt,” says Shelley, and they let the label fill the air between them. Carter sits back, giving them room to relish it. He’s never liked this dining room. It’s more of a dining nook, too small for he and Isabelle. They loom over each other’s food and get entangled trying to help Sam. With Shelley taking Sam’s chair, it feels like the three of them are huddled in a secret bunker, knees touching.

They talk about boys.

“It was all out of anger,” says Isabelle. “Like, not hate, exactly.”

“No.”

“If you thought about it, you’d never, you know?”

Carter knows he has gained access to a raw, rich female moment. But what he wants is to see the video on a bigger screen. The laptop sits on the cabinet behind him.

Shelley spies a bottle of grappa at the back of the bar shelf. It’s been there forever. She opens it and pours shots for the three of them.

“Mmmmm!” says Isabelle, and Shelley pours another round. They talk about TV. Shelley’s guy is making a documentary about women who visit men in prison, men they’ve never met, and fall in love with them. Isabelle says she saw a documentary about Kurt Cobain, and it was so full of shit. The poor, tortured artist, too sensitive for the world. She takes her wine to the couch. Why can’t an artist be like anyone else? Why can’t he go home after a good day’s work, put dinner on the table and put the kids to bed? She settles into the couch, tucking her legs. Makes a pistol with her fingers, puts it in her mouth, and throws her head back. “If that’s your idea of a hero,” she says. She leaves her head back, resting on the cushions, and closes her eyes.

Carter excuses himself and heads upstairs, sitting on the bed, squirming with anticipation. Watches three times, turning his phone sideways and back, concentrating on the moment before the picture freezes. His hand touches her shoulder and slides down to the breast. The girl flinches and starts to turn her back. Carter takes her bicep and says, “Over here.” Or that’s probably what he’s saying, just as he’s cut off.

Will is dangerous. He has to warn Jordan that Will is dangerous. He hasn’t heard from Jordan for a few weeks. Smart just to lay low, he wrote in January. Keep it quiet until, you know.

Will is dangerous, he writes, and sends it.

//////

Morning is unseasonably warm, stirring odours of sticky alcohol and acidic tomato, with an underlying gym-locker rot. Carter sweats, his head in a vice. The young laughing man in the motel room is stronger than him. Stronger and younger, with a head full of ideas and a guitar. The lead singer is waiting back in his room and the girl in front of the camera is topless.

Shelley has receded since last night. Her face is small, and sharpened by its frame of greying hair. The hair tapers to fine points that curl around each ear. Her skin, which radiated liquid orange in the candlelight, looks dry.

“Are you going to give me your music?” she asks, breaking the silence over coffee. “Maybe we’ll use it? We’re always looking for music for our films.”

“Talk to Jordan Toytman,” says Carter. “I’ll get you his email.”

“They’re in a bit of a holding pattern,” says Isabelle. He can see her wavering over whether to mention Leah and her resistance, her decline. “Legal things to work out.”

He’s been waiting for the right time to mention that he’s mentally set aside late summer and fall to devote himself to the reissue. Possibly to rehearsal and shows, assuming Leah is gone by then. Jordan sent him several names of potential singers. Carter Googles them. Young women on the indie scene, daring and feminist and “sex positive.” One of them is a thin, painted blonde who used to be a stripper.

“Anyway, Carter’s an archaeologist now? He’s going to travel this summer, go digging in the dirt.”

“Anywhere sexy?” asks Shelley.

“I’m going to Gander in June.”

“Where?”

“In Newfoundland,” Isabelle explains. “Carter grew up there. It has a big airport and it’s full of plane wrecks.”

“Not full of them,” says Carter.

“This is Herb’s new life. He and his new professor friend, they’re going to go dig up old plane wrecks.”

“But that’s awful,” says Shelley. “A plane crash is horrible. It ought to be left in peace.”

“They go back to the war, most of them. It’s long ago now.”

“But I don’t know about digging things up,” says Shelley. She peels chunks of wax from the base of a collapsed candle. “Supposing you find bodies, or bones of people?”

“There’s no bones,” says Carter. He has no idea if this is true.

“It’s history now,” says Isabelle.

“My mom lost her father in the war. She never got over it. She wouldn’t want anyone digging him up.”

“We’re not digging up graves.”

“It’s the local people who are in charge, right?” says Isabelle.

“Yes. Memorial University. Terry and his students. I’m just lending a hand.”

Shelley asks about Gander, and Carter tells her about the mural they made in high school. A big blue sky filled with airplanes of every vintage. An outsized Gander Airport below, its runways spanning the breadth of the wall, and Crossroads of the World scripted in gold across the top. The only one in the class who could really paint, he tells them, was Barb Felthem, a sulky, green-eyed girl who had famously touched Wally Forbes’s crotch in exchange for two cigarettes, leaving her hand there while a hooting crowd counted three steamboats.

They erupt in hysterical, hungover laughter, with Isabelle wiping her eyes.

The woozy surge of energy burns out as Carter drives Shelley to the bus station.

“Are you and Bella okay?” she says, as he pulls into the curb.

There are little bursts in Carter’s head, like small balloons going pop. “Absolutely,” he says.

“It was just something you said. Kind of strange.”

“Last night?”

“We were talking about music and film, and you said there was a French movie you saw once with everyone in it singing. Around when Ronnie died. You said you and Bella can’t get away from that movie. Do you remember?”

“No,” says Carter. He gets out of the car and retrieves her bag from the back. “It must have been drunk babbling. We’re fine.”

“I mentioned it to Bella this morning. I mean, not what you said. Just the movie, and she had no memory of it at all. She said she never heard of it.”