Prized Possessions Read online

  The phone was working again by evening.

  But Emma didn’t call anybody. She waited. Occasionally she took note of her calmness.

  She put the wash in the dryer and, when it was ready, folded the clothes.

  She made macaroni and cheese for dinner, and then scraped it into the garbage.

  She left the porch light on. And every so often she picked up the telephone, to make sure it was still operating. It rained all day, but there was no wind.

  She spent Sunday night in bed, but she didn’t sleep.

  Monday morning Emma got up, drank some coffee, got dressed, and made the bed. At exactly nine o’clock she phoned Charlie’s office.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. O’Brea, please.”

  She thought for a moment that the phone had gone dead again. But was aware of sounds.

  “Hello? Hello? Did you hear me? It’s Mrs. O’Brea calling. I’d like to speak to my husband.”

  “Mrs. O’Brea,” said the receptionist, breathless. “I’m sorry. Your husband… ”

  Emma closed her eyes and pressed her hand against her chest, trying to stifle the beating of her heart.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Mr. O’Brea doesn’t work here anymore.”

  Emma opened her eyes. She lifted her right hand and turned it, watching the bracelet gleam, a silver handcuff around her wrist. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Friday was his last day,” the receptionist stammered. “He quit. I thought you knew.”

  12

  WHEN FRIDAY CAME, Eddie still hadn’t received an answer to his letter. And this made him totally fed up. Melanie was a girl with the manners of a pig.

  But he couldn’t afford to let himself get mad, even though he had every right to. He had to figure out what it meant that she hadn’t answered him. Did it mean she couldn’t be bothered with him? Because even though this would be mortifying, and would make him mad as hell, it would be good, since it would also probably mean she couldn’t be bothered to complain about him.

  On the other hand, ignoring his letter might mean she was plotting something. She was spiteful enough to be doing that, all right—getting her revenge. He was sure of it. And you certainly wouldn’t write a letter to a person you were plotting against.

  He would have dearly liked to consult with Sylvia, and he thought he ought to be able to do this too—after all, he had apologized, just like she’d told him to do. But then, he knew, he’d have to tell her about what happened in the alley. And warning bells clanged and danger sirens went off whenever he thought about that.

  So he ended up doing what he knew all along he’d do if things didn’t straighten themselves out, and that was to call up Gardiner.

  He’d gone to high school with Gardiner. They’d hung out together then, and they still did. Gardiner made Eddie nervous, but he was a comfort too, because he always knew what to do about stuff. Eddie sometimes didn’t like the particular solutions Gardiner came up with, but they were sure as hell better than no solutions at all.

  So he called him up, and Gardiner came over and right away he turned on the hockey game. Eddie got them cans of beer, and he put out some chips and a thing of dip he’d bought at the Safeway, and they sat there drinking and eating and watching the game. Eddie figured he’d wait until the first period was over before bringing up his problem; it was a play-off game, and the Canucks were in the play-offs, and Gardiner was very hot on the Canucks.

  At the first break, though, Vancouver was ahead by one goal, and Gardiner was too wrapped up in the game to think about anything else.

  “I gotta take a piss,” he said when the commercials came on, and that’s the only thing he said that wasn’t about hockey. Eddie knew he might as well resign himself to sitting through the whole damn game before he got to talk about his situation.

  Fortunately, the Canucks won. Gardiner could get in a hell of a rage if things didn’t go right for him—or for his hockey team, or his football team. Or, sometimes, his friends.

  As soon as he’d turned off the television, Eddie said, just blurting it out, “Gardiner, I got a problem.”

  Gardiner was sprawled out on the sofa, drinking his fourth beer. He was a tall, skinny guy with so much energy it didn’t matter how much he ate, he never put on a pound. It was like his motor was revving all the time, using up gas whether he was moving or just spinning his wheels. He had big teeth and very light-colored hair, so that when he didn’t shave there was no shadow on his face; it just looked dusty.

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “Kind of a woman-type problem.”

  Gardiner guffawed and put on a leer, and Eddie waited patiently while he joked around and offered various crude kinds of help. Then Eddie shook his head. “It’s not that kind of a problem. This woman’s giving me some trouble.” And he told Gardiner all about it.

  “And you sent her a note? You stupid weasel. What a dumb thing to do. You ain’t gonna get no respect that way.”

  Eddie was pretty sure Sylvia would have approved of the note.

  “She didn’t answer it,” he confessed.

  “Of course she didn’t answer it,” said Gardiner. He squeezed up his eyes and looked at Eddie like he didn’t believe what he was seeing. “You thought she’d answer it?” He clutched himself around the middle and fell off the sofa, laughing.

  Eddie had had enough. He hadn’t waited around all evening watching a damn hockey game while he was so worried it felt like there were big insects in his stomach, eating away at him, just to get laughed at. He stomped out to the kitchen and started throwing beer cans into a brown paper bag.

  Pretty soon Gardiner came out there too and leaned against the edge of the doorway. “Okay, okay. So what do you want from me?”

  “I want your advice. I want you to tell me what to do.”

  Gardiner heaved a sigh and pulled out a chair. “I don’t get it. What’re you scared of? What do you think’s gonna happen to you, for shit’s sake?”

  Eddie turned around from the sink, which he’d been cleaning with baking soda. He’d given up buying Old Dutch and stuff like that because of the environment. Though he hadn’t been able to figure out exactly why Old Dutch wasn’t as good for the environment as baking soda was.

  “I think she might tell Harold,” he said. “She could get me in a lot of trouble.” He sat down across the table from Gardiner. “She could get me fired,” he said heavily, rubbing at his right eye, where a sty was growing in the lid. “I can’t have something else get on my work record, Gardiner. It’d be—I’d be, like, doomed. If that happens.”

  Gardiner looked at him thoughtfully. “Gimme another beer, willya?”

  Eddie got him a beer.

  “You oughta throw a scare into her,” said Gardiner. He nodded. “Yeah. Show her not to fuck with you.”

  “Yeah, well, I already did that, didn’t I?”

  “You gotta do it again. Like a one-two punch, you know?” said Gardiner, jabbing at the air. “Scare the piss right out of her.”

  “Well, but how?”

  Gardiner shot him a sly glance. “I’ll do it for you, if you want.”

  “No,” Eddie said quickly. “No, that’s okay.”

  “You can’t go through your life letting yourself get pussy-whipped, Ed.”

  “I’m not. I don’t,” Eddie protested. Then he started getting angry again. “You know I don’t, Gardiner. You damn know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. Sorry.” He gave Eddie a wink. “We’re buddies, right? So I gotta watch out for you. Gotta make sure you’re on the straight and narrow.” He was overcome by another fit of laughter, which made his face red and his eyes bright, and when it was over he stood up, quickly, like he did everything, and slapped Eddie on the shoulder. “Come on. Show me where she lives. We’ll work on a plan.”

  13

  ALBERG’S PHONE HAD awakened him at one-thirty in the morning.

  He thought it was work. But as he picked up the receiver, he thought it mi
ght not be work; it might be Diana, or Janey. Or even Maura. The most likely thing of all never even occurred to him.

  “Alberg,” he said.

  It wasn’t work. It was his mother.

  ***

  The skies over London, Ontario, were leaden when he arrived there late in the afternoon, and the white stuff drifting down the following morning wasn’t the petals of cherry blossoms.

  “It won’t stick,” said Alberg’s mother.

  “It’s supposed to be spring,” said Alberg.

  “How quickly we forget,” said his mother, with a wry glance at him. “It is spring, Martin. In Ontario, sometimes, in springtime, it snows.” She was the only person left in the world who called him by his first name.

  Alberg’s mother lived in a large yellow-brick house built in 1895, which still had its original woodwork. It was set at an angle on a corner lot where wide, tree-lined streets converged. Alberg had always loved it, even though he’d never lived there: his parents had bought it after he left home.

  His father’s death had been expected—and yet Alberg was discovering that he hadn’t expected it at all. He’d prowled the house last night, looking into every room, as if hoping to find his father there. (He’d noticed while making his exploration that his parents had had a water bed installed in their bedroom. He pondered it for quite a while and finally decided they had bought it for its salubrious qualities.)

  Alberg was an only child, and he felt responsible for this event, his father’s funeral. But he kept disbelieving it, the whole damn situation: his father dead; having to dispose of him somehow; the need to protect his mother from the armies of friends and relations who kept marching up the walk to pay their respects. He was so clumsy and ungracious, carrying out this last duty, that his mother no longer allowed him to answer the door, or the phone, either.

  “I wish you’d come back and live with me when this is over,” he said to her. “You’d like Sechelt.”

  “I’m sure I would. I’m sure it’s beautiful. But I don’t want to live anywhere but here.”

  He was immensely relieved to hear this. What on earth would he have done with her, his elderly mother, if she’d said yes, I’ll come and live with you?

  “I’m prepared for this, you know, Martin. He’d been sick for a long time. We talked about it, about what was going to happen when he died.”

  Alberg, sitting next to his mother on the window seat, shuffled his feet uneasily.

  “I know what he wants to happen now, the funeral and the burial and all. And we talked about what’s best for me now too.”

  “It’s such a big place, though,” said Alberg, looking around the spacious living room, squinting up at the ceiling.

  “Somebody else cleans it. Somebody else does the garden.” She put a hand over his. He looked down at it, gnarled and liver-spotted, misshapen by arthritis. “It’s what I want, Martin. I want to stay right where I am.”

  The window looked out onto a veranda, which encircled the house. In the summer a porch swing stood out there. His parents had liked to sit in it, side by side, gently swinging, watching the corner where two streets crossed, watching cars purr slowly along, watching people strolling, watching the squirrels, and the birds, and the evening light that slanted golden through the trees. Would she sit there alone this summer? Would she trade in the two-seater for a single? Or would the veranda be empty in the summer evenings to come?

  “Maybe you could visit me for a while in the summer. I’d like that a lot,” said Alberg. And this he meant.

  She squeezed his hand and patted it. “Maybe.”

  ***

  Maura and his daughters arrived the following morning, and Alberg picked them up at the Toronto airport in his rented car. He hadn’t seen Maura since her remarriage the previous summer. He gave Janey and Diana a big hug each and offered Maura a friendly kiss on the cheek. “You’ve put on some weight,” he said to her. “It suits you.”

  Maura apparently didn’t think so.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked him, while they waited for the bags.

  “She’s good. She’s actually really good.”

  ***

  There was a small anteroom with three pews, one behind the other, and that was where the family was supposed to sit. Alberg stationed himself at the end of the first pew. He could see his father’s casket through the archway that led into the chapel. His mother was next to him, then Maura, then Diana and, at the far end of the pew, Janey.

  His father had been one of seven children, but he had outlived all his brothers and sisters. There were some cousins left; they sat behind Alberg, along with his mother’s younger sister, June, and her two sons.

  The chapel was packed with people. Alberg had been taken aback at the size of the crowd. He had forgotten, temporarily, his father’s long history in this place. And Alberg’s own, much shorter one had come to seem almost irrelevant in the rapid sweep of his life toward Sechelt and middle age.

  Squeezed into the hard wooden pew, he felt resentful and disoriented. He folded his arms and let his head sink into his neck, willing his mind elsewhere, trying not to hear the organ music, the words of the minister, the occasional sniffles of grief coming from behind him.

  His mother sat straight and still, wearing a black coat and a small black hat with a little veil. Somewhat to Alberg’s surprise, she’d had her hair done the day before; it was white and curly. Her gloved hands rested quietly in her lap.

  Alberg decided he ought to be remembering things about his father. He began ransacking his mind for memories and came up with bizarre, disquieting images: his father’s face invisible behind a cloud of smoke from his pipe; his father stretching his arms into the branches of a tree, reaching for a bird’s nest; his father’s tall, lean frame disappearing into a hole in a frozen river; his father watching a porno flick, his face impassive… These were not memories. Then what the hell were they? Alberg tried to push his dead parent out of his mind. There was a zinging sound in his head; he wondered if he was getting the flu or working up to a heart attack. He wanted to hold somebody’s hand.

  Suddenly there was organ music again. People began standing up. Everybody in his pew was standing up now, so finally he stood up too.

  “Follow me, Martin,” said his mother.

  Speechless, he did so.

  He heard Diana whisper to Maura, “Do we have to go, Mom?”

  “Yes,” said Maura curtly, and they formed a line behind him.

  Where the hell are we going? thought Alberg, trailing after his mother. This is how they got people into the gas chambers, he thought.

  She was, he knew, leading him to the casket.

  He trudged along behind her, out of the anteroom, through the archway, and onto the stage where the casket was displayed. At least it felt like a stage to Alberg; he was going onstage in somebody’s goddamn play, but nobody had told him what to do when he got there. He waited while his mother said whatever she had to say to her husband, and then she moved on and he found himself staring down at his father, who was of course pale and waxen and not his father at all. He had nothing whatsoever to say to this apparition, so he moved on, too, and retraced his steps back to the anteroom, where he waited for the rest of his family to file past and have a look.

  After this we have food, he thought, visualizing the dining room table in his mother’s house, covered with a white linen cloth. There were a lot of people looking after that aspect of things; he didn’t have to think about that.

  His family was now reassembled in the anteroom.

  “What’s next?” said Alberg to his mother.

  “We go out to the graveyard,” she said, and turned to the door that led outside.

  “Right,” said Alberg, moving to follow her.

  But all strength had left his limbs. He stumbled, clutched at the doorframe, and saw his daughters, his ex-wife, through a blur of tears. They were looking at him in shock. Diana shrank back, and Maura put a protective arm around her shoulders. />
  Then Janey rushed to him and took his arm. He would never forget the strength and confidence in her voice. “It’s okay, Daddy. You’re okay.”

  ***

  The next morning he drove them back to the airport and saw them off on the plane to Calgary.

  He decided to spend a couple of hours in Toronto before returning to London, and he called his mother to tell her that.

  The phone rang four times, and he was about to hang up when the answering machine clicked on.

  “You have reached the home of Eileen and William Alberg,” said his father’s voice. “Please leave a message, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.”

  Alberg listened to the silence that followed the beep. He was for a moment prepared to believe in anything.

  14

  IT WAS VERY EARLY Tuesday morning. The day was already bright.

  There was almost no traffic on Fourth Avenue.

  The sky was absolutely clear, free of the yellow-brown haze that too often hovered over Vancouver.

  Petals fluttered down from the double pink blossoms of the ornamental cherry trees that bordered this section of the avenue. They had collected thickly in the gutter, drifts of pink petals concealing whatever dirt and litter might be huddling there. They had scattered themselves along the sidewalk in front of the gourmet coffee store, and the shop that sold nothing but buttons, and the children’s clothing boutique.

  There was a thin layer of them, too, on the roof of the bronze Camaro parked in front of the bookstore.

  It was just past six o’clock. None of the shops was open.

  Several blocks away, Melanie Franklin emerged from her house, wearing a light jacket, black slacks, and a white shirt, with an enormous carryall slung over her shoulder. She closed the door softly behind her and hurried down the steps, along the cracked sidewalk, and through a gate in the six-foot-high laurel hedge.

  On Fourth Avenue, Eddie Addison, sitting in his Camaro, looked again at his watch. He had decided against the plan Gardiner had come up with Friday night, which was to spray-paint obscenities on the front of the house Melanie lived in. Gardiner hadn’t liked having his plan rejected. He’d become suddenly bored and gone home. And Eddie had thought very hard and finally, three days later, he’d come up with a plan of his own.