The lawyer came out to Oakalla prison to explain how lucky I was. That was not how I felt, still in shock and crying all the time, without any idea how many days had passed. It was a nightmare, I kept thinking. Some small detail wasn’t right and if I could only figure it out, it would cue me to wake up.
Things had changed overnight, the lawyer said. The only charge against me that was going to stand was the least of them. He didn’t tell me why and I didn’t ask. All I wanted to know was if Timo was okay. “Oh, he’s fine. But the guard’s not in such great shape, which doesn’t bode too well for some of your friends.”
My aunt posted bail, which was what she had been saving up for all those years, I supposed. By the time all the paperwork was done it was evening. I signed for my belongings—The Party and Other Stories, my empty cosmetics bag (its contents exiled to a separate plastic one), wallet, a clean pair of panties—all of it packed in anticipation of an overnight stay in Seattle. I wasn’t sure what relationship I had to these personal items any more. Only the book felt like mine, filled with my annotations: p. 36 galoshes, p. 141 slippers, p. 117 felt boots.
A police van drove me back to Vancouver and dropped me off at the Main Street courthouse where it had brought me for my bail hearing the day before. Dark by then, almost ten o’clock, the air, saturated with damp, held its odours close. Across the street a few ragged people had formed a privacy wall with shopping carts. I was supposed to go to my aunt’s, but felt ashamed after how I’d treated her. Yet with the Trutch house behind police tape and the lawyer’s stern warning not to fraternize, there was nowhere else to go.
I was still standing on the street working up the nerve to find a phone and call her, when a second van pulled up and Dieter got out. As soon as I recognized him, I started walking away fast, but he saw me too and caught up.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
I tried to pull out of his grip. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“No? Well, we’re getting the story straight. Because we’re in deep shit here. We are fucked.” He dragged me along. No one we passed looked at us twice. They thought we were drunk.
Dieter didn’t like the Irish pub we came to first. He bullied me farther along the block, then down a stairwell wallpapered with photocopied posters, into a pit where everyone was dressed like ghouls. Faces were stuck through with pins, as though their features might drop off. A leper bar. He shoved me through the crowd. “What do you want?” he shouted over the noise of the band.
“Nothing!”
“Wrong!”
“Vodka then,” I said.
Dieter shouted to the bartender, who was wearing a dog collar and black lipstick. When he let go of me to pay, I didn’t try to escape. I didn’t think I could. He stuck the glass in my hand and, on the first sip, my eyes watered and the room diffused even more, as though there were two disco balls. The band was shrieking, goading the people on the dance floor who were leaping around, smashing into each other, pogoing. “Were you in on it?”
“No!”
“I should believe you? You’re such a liar!”
“I’m not,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m not!”
“Right! I found out something about you! I found out you’re not even Russian! You told everyone you were Russian just to get into the group!”
“I never said I was!”
“Drink your milk, Kitty!”
I took another sip, choked.
“And Pete! Pete is such a hypocrite! But you all love him! He can do no wrong! He can make bombs and that’s just swell with all of you! You’ll still sleep with him. Drink that! I am so fucking tense here!”
I drank down the rest.
“Or T-t-t-timo! T-t-t-t-imo’s everybody’s darling! Or that stupid fucking kid! I hate you all! Know why?” Saliva sprayed my face and I thought that, quite possibly, he was the ugliest person in the room. “Because you hate me!” he said.
Something that might have been a waitress brought a tray of beer to a nearby table. Dieter went to speak to her. Again, I could have left, but I actually felt sorry for him then with his headband of an eyebrow and his goggly glasses and his rage. I didn’t care what happened to me anyway. My life was ruined. At any moment the bomb would fall and put me out of my misery. Good, I thought. Dieter came back, demanding money. I handed over my backpack and he dug through it, found my wallet full of dull American bills, took a few, then let the backpack drop. I picked it up and hugged it to my chest. My book was in it. That was all I cared about.
“And poor little Sonia! She’s probably a lesbo too!”
“She’s not!”
“Well, you’re one for sure!”
I started to cry.
“You’re all a bunch of man-hating dykes and I hate your guts!”
He kept on like this until the drinks came. I drank mine willingly this time. Dieter kept calling me “Kitty” in a derisive tone every time I sipped my “milk.” It was so weird. He couldn’t have known about Anna Karenina. Soon the things he was saying became inseparable from the ugly things the band was screaming. They merged into one song to thrash around to. Abruptly, half of it ended on a discordant strum and I heard someone say, “We’re going to take a break.” Dieter carried on. “I’m getting out of this mess! There’s no fucking way I’m taking the rap for Pete and a bunch of dykes! We’re going to get the story straight! Right?”
I said, “I’m going to throw up.”
Somehow I made it to the bathroom, where it was twice as bright as in the bar. All the scarecrows were lined up at the sinks pinning their faces back on. When I finished vomiting, they made room for me to splash myself with water. One of them asked, “Are you okay?”
Dieter was waiting outside so he must have escorted me there. I squinted around. We were in a short dark corridor at the end of which a sign glowed. Exit. Vykhod. I made my way toward it, dragging one shoulder along the wall, falling against the handle—air! Taking great draughts of it, I stumbled out. In the alley, people stood around in clusters. Someone was playing with a lighter, making the flame climb higher, while someone else sliced a hand through it.
Pozhar. Fire.
A bottle went flying. There seemed a very long delay before it smashed on the cobblestoned street.
“Where do you think you’re going, Kitty?”
I clutched my backpack to my chest. Book. Kniga. “Nowhere.”
“That’s right. You’re staying with me until we figure out what we’re going to say.”
“I told you. I don’t know what happened.”
“You’ve fucked me around before. Remember? Remember the recruitment centre? You were going to back me on that. Look what happened.”
Dieter’s next shove prompted a few white faces with bruised eyes to turn curiously in our direction. “Did you ever talk to Sonia? You didn’t, did you? Or maybe you did. Maybe you said nasty things about me.”
It wasn’t that I began to be afraid—I hadn’t stopped being afraid—but now I realized I was going to get hurt. He pushed me again, hard enough for my head to flop back and smack the bricks. A silver ball of pain released, rattling all through my skull, binging off my synapses. I sank down and began to conjugate. “Ya zabyvayu, ty zabyvayesh . . .” I forget. You forget.
“Get up!”
“On zabyvayet . . .” I opened my eyes. Some of the ghouls were closing in behind Dieter, drawn by the scent of violence. I curled tighter, teeth chattering. Dieter slapped the back of my head again. “My zabyvayem.” Again. “Vy zabyvayetye . . .” I was conjugating for my life.
“What do you think you’re doing?” someone asked me.
“Oni zabyvayut,” I answered.
“Fuck off, man!”
“You fuck off!”
“Leave her alone!”
I heard scuffling and grunts. Dieter: “Fuck you!” Steps running off.
Someone touched my arm. “Are you okay? Hey? Hello?”
I lifted my face. How had he spoken? His lips were pinned together. “Can I call you a cab?” He was dressed in pins too, a kind of silver armour of them. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Do you want to go home?”
His blue spikes formed a halo.
“Nyet,” I said.
Dawn oozed through a curtain of pins. I had no idea where I was, how I’d gotten there, but I knew my headache had something to do with it. There was a guitar case propped up in a corner, but barely any furniture. The bed itself was a Murphy bed that folded into a rectangular recess in the wall. One small room I was alone in with a tiny alcove kitchen. I assumed there would be a bathroom, and there was. That was where I found him, curled up asleep in the tub.
Snippets came back as I stood in the bathroom door. A different room he’d asked me to wait in. Bottles on a table. The reek of brimming ashtrays. I could have anything I wanted except a clean glass. When the noise started up again, it was like the end of the world. Even the walls had shuddered.
The next time the pins were sparkling. Now I saw that they looked pretty with the sunlight on them, fixed together in long chains. “Oh,” he said, peering down at me. “You’re awake.”
He looked different in daylight, less fierce by half, spikes crooked after a night spent in the tub. His nose hooked slightly, almost meeting the pin in his lip. There were pins in his ears too, but the most predominant feature was his skin, which looked purplish and sore to the touch. The pins, my headache, his acne. I winced.
“Good morning! Do you understand anything I’m saying to you? No?” He sighed in his Sex Pistols T-shirt. “Coffee?”
I sat up. It was the same word in Russian. “Kofye.”
“Bingo!” He disappeared into the alcove, returned with a mug. “Do you take milk or sugar? Forget it. Wait.” A milk carton jiggled at me. I nodded, still perplexed. Something had happened last night. Ya zabyvayu.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said.
But I couldn’t drink the coffee. It curdled whatever was in my stomach. He sat on the bed and looked at me again. Wasn’t there a bird with that same crest? Horned Grebe? Punkatoo? I was staring at his pins, but he seemed only to be thinking of what to say next. “Joe,” he finally came up with, pointing to his chest.
I pointed to the same place, at Johnny Rotten on his T-shirt, extending a can of ejaculating beer. “Joe.”
“Oh, crap,” he said. “Listen. I’ve got to go. You stay. Stay.” He patted the bed. “There’s food by some miracle. Thank you, Mother.” He went to the alcove to show me the fridge. Mimed eating. “Eat. Eat. Help yourself. Okay? I’ll be back around—” Five fingers held up.
“Da,” I said. It seemed funny now.
“Yeah. Da.” His boots were by the door, black and shin high and requiring a seated position to put on. He wove the laces through the eyelets, snugged all the Xs, then stomped over to the table where a stack of boot sole–thick books waited to be loaded into an army satchel. He relieved the chair of the leather jacket. There must have been five pounds of studs hammered into it and his shoulders sank when he put it on. Thus burdened, he left the apartment, calling over his shoulder, “Stay!”
I went to the window and, drawing aside the pins, watched him clomp up the street. The view was of a commercial building with a sign over what looked like a garage door. Shipping and Receiving. Nothing indicated what moved in and out. I let go of the pins and looked around the room. The bookshelf was filled with science texts. The one I opened had his name written under the crossed-out previous owner’s.
Joey Normal.
I cleaned his bathtub and finally took a bath. I cleaned the rest of the bathroom and the kitchen. It was the least I could do. In the fridge were a number of plastic containers with the contents written on a piece of masking tape. Chicken Soup. Meatballs. I ate a cold meatball and, though delicious, my stomach was still touchy. I considered going for a walk, but worried I’d get locked out, so for the rest of the day I slept and read. Twice the phone rang, prompting an agony of questions. Why hadn’t I gone to my aunt’s? I was supposed to notify the police of a change of address. Should I call them and tell them where I was? Where was I?
The phone, the questions, all unanswered.
Near five, I zipped the book up in my backpack and closed the Murphy bed.
Boring (5). Bore (1). Boredom (1). Bored (6). Dull (2). Banal (1). Idleness (1). Monotony (1). Tiresome (1). Sad (10).
A group of people came down the hall when the building had been so quiet all day. “So you picked up a stray?” a woman said.
I locked myself in the bathroom.
“She might not even be here still,” Joe said as everyone thudded in. “Crap. She cleaned up.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone. Or—”
“Knock.”
“No. She’ll come out when she’s ready.”
“She doesn’t understand anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Where’s she from?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about her. This guy was beating her up in the alley.”
“She’s a prostitute?”
“Maybe.”
“They bring girls from other countries and make them sex slaves.” She started chanting, “Joey has a sex slave, a sex slave!” Then they lapsed into silence. I heard grunting, a thunk, a sigh. Three more times. They were removing their boots. Also, though they made noise enough for four, it was just the two of them. I opened the door a crack.
The back of her head was shaved, leaving just a tuft of bang in front, dyed Barbie pink. She was bent over, massaging her feet and, when she straightened, she looked right at me, smiling under the kilt pin stuck through her septum like a bone. Her nose was a near match in pinkness to her hair. “Hi! Joe?”
Joe popped out from around the corner, all acne vulgaris and smiles. “You’re still here! Great! Come out! Come out! It’s okay!” He pointed to himself again, this time being careful not to reference the shirt. “I’m Joe. That’s Molly. Molly.”
“Hiya,” Molly said.
When I finally sidled out, Joe repeated his introduction, adding, “Who are you?”
“Maybe she’s retarded.”
“Kitty,” I said.
“Ah!” and just then one of his spikes gave way completely, reminding me of a dog with one ear in a flop, though in this case four blue ears stayed cocked. “Kitty’s a nice name.” To Molly: “Could be anything, right? Spanish. French. She understood ‘coffee’ this morning. I wish I could remember some French.”
Molly: “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?”
“I see you cleaned up. Cleaned.” He mimed scrubbing. “Thank you. Thank you. Are you staying for dinner?” Forking motions. “Eat with us? Me and Molly? Yum.” Tummy rubbing. “I’m just going to fix Molly up here first because she’s done a really stupid thing to herself. Here. I’ll take down the bed so you can sit. Here. Sit.”
He patted the place.
“So where’re you from, Kitty?” Molly asked me, so casually I nearly answered except she burst into phlegmy laughter before I could. Joe, who had gone to the bathroom to wash his hands, came back with a bottle and some sterile pads. “She has nice eyes,” Molly told him.
“Do you want a drink first?”
“Of that?” It was rubbing alcohol. “I can take the pain,” Molly said. “I love pain.”
He pulled his chair up close to hers, doused one of the cotton pads. When he dabbed at her nose, she jerked her head back with a yowl. “Fuck off! Loser!”
“Hold still,” he said. “I’m going to take it out.”
“No!”
“I have to.”
I couldn’t look. Molly screeched. “Look at the pus,” said Joe.
She ran to the bathroom. More howls. “I look awful! Jesus Christ!” She stomped back without the kilt pin, which Joe was cleaning with alcohol. “Now put it through my cheek like this.”
Joe: “Meningococcus? That mean anything to you?”
“I want to cry. How can I go out like this?” and she retrieved her boots and began the trial of putting them back on.
“You’re welcome,” Joe said.
“Fuck off.” She stamped one heel down.
“Aren’t you eating with us?”
“I’m going home to cry. Give me back my pin.”
Joe tossed it. “Pick up some Polysporin.”
He sniffed in all the containers and decided on soup, heating it in a battered aluminum pot. He seemed very relaxed for a person with a giant pin through his lip, the kind of person who probably talked to himself and was grateful to have a mute overnight guest as an excuse. “I’m in med school. First year.” He looked at me. “This is where I would pause to ask what you do. Honest I would.”
I gave him my most dazed, uncomprehending look.
“Actually, I probably wouldn’t. I’m pretty shy. I don’t talk much around girls. Molly doesn’t count. She’s barely a girl. She’s a thing.”
He brought the bowls to the table and invited me to sit. His smile, the way his acne barely registered after a few minutes, reminded me of Dr. Samoylenko, who after a few days began to strike others as exceptionally kind, amiable, handsome even. Even with the pin. But how was he going to feed himself? He simply ate around it. “Eat,” he extolled before pausing to consider his utensil. “This is a spoon, Kitty. A spoon. Say it. Spoon.”
“Spoon,” I said.
“Good! And this is a bowl.” He clinked it. “Bowl. Say ‘bowl.’”
“Bowl.”
He looked pleased with himself. “Soup.”
“Soup.” Sweet and salty, swimming with fat noodles and pieces of shredded meat, it was the first thing I’d eaten all day. I immediately felt about that soup the way I felt about a good book, that I would probably have liked Chekhov too, if I’d ever had the chance to meet him.
“So. Med school. I almost didn’t get in. I’m trying harder now. My dad’s a judge. Big shoes to fill, right? Last year I decided I didn’t want to. I wanted to be a musician, see?” Joe flipped back the errant spike again. “Then my old man had a heart attack. I realized I was sabotaging my whole future. Hence summer school. I can be a musician on the side. Do you remember me singing? That was me and The Fuck Ups last night.” He pointed to the guitar in the corner. “I’ll play something for you after.”
I directed my alarm into my soup.
“Guitar. Say it.”
“Guitar.”
“What’s guitar in your language? Me, guitar. You? What?”
“Balalaika.” If there was another word, I didn’t know it.
“Balalaika? That’s Russian. That’s that little Russian ukulele. Are you Russian? You? Russian? USSR?”
I shook my head.
“Something like it then? Czech? What do you call this?” He lifted the spoon.
“Lozhka.”
Tocking his spikes. The loose one went back and forth, metronomic. “Lozhka. Lozhka.”
After soup, he took the guitar out. There were acronyms stencilled all over the case—D.O.A., R.I.P., a plain A with a circle round it. Another one, I thought, as he bent over the instrument, untuning it. He launched straight into a violent strumming and, immediately, a banging sounded overhead. Joe rolled his eyes and stopped playing. “That’s my neighbour. He’s all right. We have different taste in music is all. That was the start of ‘Fucked Up Ronnie.’ Remember? We covered it last night. You don’t remember. You were wasted. I can’t drink and play. My fingers don’t work. Hey, I’m going to write you a song.”
He spent a moment plucking out a rudimentary tune, then barked out:
I found Kitty in the alley
I found Kitty in the alley
Someone was being mean
Someone was being mean
Fuck that! I don’t like it!
Be nice why don’t you!
He fell back on the Murphy bed, a hand on his shirt, sapped by this burst of creativity. “God. These songs just pour out of me. I don’t know how. I don’t even try.” He propped himself up to look at me. “You can see what my dilemma was. With med school, I mean.” Then he laughed. “You make the funniest faces, Kitty.”
He had to study. “Hit the books?” The guitar put to bed in its case, he went for one of the tomes in his satchel, dropped it on the table. “Book,” he said. “Hit.”
I slapped my hand down on the cover.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re getting it.”
Joe was up till two humming “Fucked Up Ronnie.” I wondered how he could read and hum at the same time. Obviously he didn’t know he was doing it since he was reading in the kitchen so I could sleep. I liked him. Because I liked him, I was going to have to leave before he found out I was a fake. I tossed on the Murphy bed, sleepless and bored and fretting. If only I could have read. And Chekhov was so close, right under the bed!
Eventually, he retired to the bathroom. I heard him washing, the stallion-like voiding of his bladder. The flush. I waited, then got up and tore a page out of his notebook. Ya Jane, nye Kitty. Ya Kanadka. Ya govoryu po-angliski. Bolshoye spasibo. Ty kharoshoiye.
There was no way he would recognize a word of Cyrillic.
“Know what day it is today, Kitty? It’s Cadaver Day! I have to say I’m not really looking forward to it. When I come home tonight? If I look a little pale? That will be the reason. Are you staying? Here? Stay?”
I shrugged.
“Really?” He slumped a little though his spikes stayed pert. He’d showered and regelled them, had been firing up the hair dryer off and on for half an hour. Now he was talking at me while he finished dressing. It constituted a project, putting on those jeans. The outside seams had been slit, then pinned, pins being, I realized, something of an obsession for him. When he finally got the front of his pants attached to the back, he went to get his boots.
“What’s this?” He reached inside. “Ah! A clue!”
I blushed. I’d pictured him stomping around on my note all day, not noticing it until later, after I was gone. He unfolded it. “That sure looks like Russian. You’re sure you’re not Russian? Bulgarian? I’m going to ask around. So will you be here when I get back or not?”
I nodded yes.
“Uh-oh. I know for a fact that this”—he nodded—“is no in Bulgaria and this”—he shook his head—“is yes. So. You might be here or you might not.” He paused in the doorway, looking back. “If you’re not, I think I might get a cat.”
I was. I was still there when he got back that evening. Because he had to cut up the dead body. What a horrible thing to have to do. He’d been there for me so how could I just walk out? I regretted the note and worried all day that he’d somehow find someone to translate it.
Alas, I underlined in my book, the actions and thoughts of human beings are not nearly as important as their sorrows!
He knocked—as though I had some right to the place now too!—and looked so happy when he came in. So happy to see me. Yet there was something different about him too. He wasn’t making eye contact.
“Do you think that guy’s still looking for you? Is he your boyfriend?”
Ugh, I thought. It was easier just to clamp my tongue between my teeth so I’d remember not to answer.
“I mean, can we go out? Out?” He pointed to the window.
Outside the building the air felt warm, like a new season, like summer, though it was only May, an evening in May with birds twittering around the warehouses and the sound of distant traffic in the air. Now I saw the apartment from the outside, old and brick, survivor, along with a few slouching wooden houses, of industrial rezoning. He’d left his studded jacket behind and today’s T-shirt was full of holes, the ripped-off sleeves revealing his acned shoulders. He’d obviously forgotten about my note. Other things had happened to him that day, things more important than my confession. Clomp, clomp, clomp went his boots on the sidewalk. The few people we passed gave us a wide berth. They gave it to Joe in his blue crown of thorns.
“How was your day?” he asked. “Pause for you to answer. Question reciprocated. Thanks, Kitty. It was pretty disturbing, needless to say.”
He grabbed my hand and ran me across a busy street when there was a break in traffic. On the other side we intersected with another pedestrian, all of us performing the awkward ballet of getting out of each other’s way. Joe let rip a chorus, “We’re The Fuck Ups! We’re The Fuck Ups!” A cement truck rumbled by like a sound effect.
Under the concrete span of Cambie Bridge, boots dangling over False Creek, he patted the spot beside him. When I sat, he took my hand, squeezed it, let go. Held up his. “Hand.”
“Hand,” I said.
Here was where he told me about the cadaver. How he’d kept thinking about his old man. “Everybody was making jokes. From nerves, you know. It wasn’t very respectful. Here’s this guy. Gave his body to science and science is making cracks about his dick. Not that I wasn’t.” He inserted a finger in a hole in his shirt and scratched his stomach. “There’s quite a difference between being dead and alive. Beyond the obvious, I mean. This guy was clearly not just sleeping. He was dead. But the weird thing is, every day a thousand billion cells in your body die, Kitty. That’s a fact of life.”
We walked around for a while, then went for Chinese. The waiter slammed a teapot and two stacked cups on the lazy Susan. Joe, unnesting one cup from the other, asked for beer. He filled the teacups, rotated the lazy Susan in my direction. When I went to take my cup, he steered it out of reach. Every time I tried to grab it, the cup spun away from me. Our laughter brought the waiter hurrying back with the beer. He’d put us in the corner, near the kitchen, away from the other diners. Joe seemed unoffended. The food came faster. He was finally looking at me again.
“You probably won’t understand what I’m going to say, Kitty. You came along at just the right time. If you saw me last year when I dropped out of med school, you wouldn’t have known me. Of course you wouldn’t have known me. You didn’t know me. But you know what I mean.” He laughed. I laughed. Then he chopsticked a cube of crimson-sauced pork into his mouth, sombre again.
“A lot of guys would say this is an ideal situation. A girl who can’t talk back.”
When I bristled, he said, “You must be really intelligent. You always seem to know what I mean.”
Joe unlocked the apartment door. As soon as we stepped inside, he lunged for me and pressed the pin into my lips. It almost went up my nose and I shrank back. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have asked. Do you want to? Kiss?”
I wasn’t sure. The mechanics seemed daunting. Yet he’d been so kind! I leaned toward him, offering the corner of my mouth, but the various positions we tried were so awkward and I worried the pin would come undone. I told myself that was silly. It was a safety pin.
“Fuck it.” Joe bolted for the bathroom.
I’d hurt his feelings. I stood there trying to work up the nerve to knock, to finally speak, but he emerged a moment later without the pin, rendering me genuinely mute. Still in his boots, he took my face in his hands and placed his liberated mouth on mine. He tasted of garlic and tin. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed, which was strange for me. A strange new sensation. When we finally pulled away, I touched my own mouth and saw his blood on my fingers.
Joe sat down to take his boots off. I knelt and helped unlace them, pulled and pulled and when the boot finally released, fell back into giddiness. I had to struggle harder with the other one. Joe lifted me into his lap and we kissed for a long time, finally getting the choreography right. When we came up for air, he pointed to the bed. Blue exclamation marks all around his head, but on his face, a tender question.
He had to undo all those pins first. While he was occupied with them, I got in the bed and undressed under the covers. He turned out the light, got in too, and lay beside me in the dark.
“Did you read my note?” I asked.
Joe started to laugh. “Well, I couldn’t, could I? But I found someone who could. Not that easy. I had to hike all the way across campus where they have a department for that. Say something else.”
“Bolshoye spasibo.”
“In English.”
“My dog actually eats nuts.”
He laughed and laughed.
“I might be a lesbian.” I said it. Would saying it make me one?
Joe said, “Maybe we shouldn’t then.”
Strangely though, I seemed to want to.
I woke thinking of Sonia the morning of the action, so radiant as she floated down the steps. I’d thought saintliness had made her shimmer when really it was bliss. She’d actually done it. She’d shown Pascal how wonderful it was to be alive. That entire night with Joe, Reagan’s infamous briefcase stayed tucked under his bed. Nancy had taken the phone off the hook. And far away, across the vast Russian steppe, in the Kremlin, Chernenko put Shostakovich on low and popped a sleeping pill.
I got up and took a shower. I was sore from keeping the world safe all night.
When I came out of the bathroom, Joe was on the phone. He hung up and said, “I’m going to take you to see my parents. You’re going to need a better lawyer.” Then he practised kissing me again.
I felt twice as nervous when I saw the house. I couldn’t imagine that anyone who lived in Shaughnessy would want his son to have anything to do with me. Joe tried the door, then used the knocker. Loud, judgemental raps. His father probably knew all about me already.
He answered in slippers—leather, backless—and I liked him even before the landslide of relief happened on his face. Pulling Joe close, he said, “I know someone who’s going to be very happy when she sees you.”
“Dad, this is Jane,” Joe said.
The judge held out his hand. “Joe Sr. Pleased to meet you, Jane. Come in. Come in. Rachel’s all in a tizzy baking something.” By the time he finished shaking my hand, my arm was numb to the shoulder.
We went through a vestibule the size of Joe’s entire apartment, through a living room, then into a large rec room with windows all around it. There was a pool table, a bar at one end, and, at the other, more sittable furniture than in the living room. His father bellowed, “Rachel!”
“What?” from far away.
“They’re here!”
“What!”
“Joey’s here with his friend!”
“Oh!”
Joe went over to the pool table and started emptying the pockets while I sat on the chesterfield with my hands nervously clasped, his father smiling at me from his armchair, just sitting there, legs crossed and smiling, like someone waiting for the punch line. A minute later Joe’s mother appeared in the doorway, aproned and in slacks. She was tiny, her hair in a tailored bob. She glanced at me, then at Joe racking the balls, and her mouth opened and her hand struck her chest with an audible thump. Joe’s father began to laugh, then cough.
“Excuse me,” he said to me.
“Hello,” Joe’s mother said to Joe. Joe came over with the cue and hugged her, then pointed it in my direction. “This is Jane, who I told you about.”
“Jane!” She brisked over with her hand held out and squeezed both of mine. “Rachel Norman. So nice to meet you, Jane. So very, very nice.”
I was finding all this strange. Their behaviour seemed over the top until it occurred to me that maybe I was the first girl Joe had brought home.
“I’m just putting the tea together,” Rachel said. “Come and help me, Jane.”
Joe was bent over the pool table now, eyeing up the shot, not caring that Rachel was leading me away by the hand. The room was full of light from all the windows. His hair looked crazy and I didn’t want to go, but I left him there with his smiling father, the dying judge, swinging his slipper on the end of his foot.
Rachel brought me back through the living room and down the stairs we’d passed on the way in, through a dining room with china-crammed cupboards, into a surprisingly small kitchen that smelled of cinnamon. The timer was sounding and Rachel hurried to remove a loaf pan from the oven. She dropped it on a rack as though she didn’t give a damn about it any more, pulled off the oven mitts, tossed them too, then turned to face me.
“Jane?” She drew in a breath while I stood there, feeling awkward and too tall.
“I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in. But let me say this, Jane—” and she took a step toward me. “I will never forget, never, that you were the one who got him to take that pin out.”
As soon as she touched me, both hands on my shoulders, a word came to me in my own language. Firmament. The way it sounded, so fixed and safe, I knew everything was going to be all right. Everything would work out.
Or so she thought.