Eve's Rib, page 19
Richard used work in this way, as a barrier against open wounds. Like the cone they put on dogs to keep them from licking and chewing an incision, work was Richard’s Elizabethan collar. It shielded him from the compulsion to pick at painful scabs.
That was the problem with Eve, Richard thought. She didn’t have enough work to distract her. There was her writing, but that wasn’t the same as having a nine-to-five job, where you couldn’t go back to bed in the middle of the day or have a breakdown at your desk without witnesses. He wondered whether it had been a good idea, Eve leaving her job in the tech sector. It had seemed like the right choice at the time. Better for Abbey. Better for Eve. That’s what they’d said, what he’d said. Now he questioned his motivations. Eve and he had worked for different companies, but as their software rep she’d made regular trips to his office. They’d never had a problem with working together in the past. But when Eve finally went back to work after Michael’s death, Richard found himself dodging her when she came for client visits. He didn’t blame Eve for what happened to their son, but it was difficult to see her face without remembering the disaster they both had in common. Work had been his only refuge from that constant reminder. He’d been secretly relieved when she’d quit not long after. It was hard when your love and grief were rolled up into one.
He realized that over the years he’d sought more opportunities to look away from his wife and the tragedy they shared. It was easier that way. He’d thought if he kept up a strong facade that it would comfort her, but it had only driven a wedge between them. And then it seemed too late to change his approach. He’d found his own way to cope. But he couldn’t tell her about it.
His face reddened as he remembered parking his car Friday night on the far side of town. He’d checked the street for anyone who might recognize him before he went slinking onto the sagging porch of the dilapidated Victorian by the train tracks. He and Eve had driven past the old house years before, during happier times. They’d laughed at the Psychic by Appointment sign, with a phone number burning in neon underneath. If she were really psychic, shouldn’t she know to call you? he’d joked. But Richard no longer laughed about such things.
Michael had been dead six months the first time Richard had worked up the nerve to climb the rickety steps past that neon sign to ring the bell. When the woman answered the door, he hadn’t known what to say. Much as Eve and he had joked, he’d hoped she might already sense his needs. But he’d discovered that wasn’t how it worked.
“What do ya want?” she’d asked, hand on one hip in the doorway. The smell of old nicotine and cat litter had wafted out from the dark hallway behind her.
Richard had stood frozen on the front porch, partly from the temperature. It had been February and minus twenty-five degrees Celsius with the windchill.
“My son died,” he’d said. And to his humiliation, tears had begun to flow. One or two crystallized on his eyelashes before he could blink them away.
“Come inside, before you catch your death,” the woman Richard would come to know as Collette had said. He’d stepped into the warmth of the house, and she’d closed the door behind him.
And so had begun a dependency that now shamed Richard more than his affair. More than his perceived failings as a father and as a husband. Because this addiction showcased how much of a sham his illusion of strength really was. He was a house of cards held together with silence and denial, until the stress became too much and he ultimately toppled and fell apart. When that happened, he could not talk to his wife about it, or to his co-workers, or even to a best friend if he’d had one anymore. When that happened, there was only one person in whom he could confide, and that was the little boy who’d fallen off the railing onto the hard, unforgiving floor.
The woman with the laughable neon sign was the only one who could help him with that. Because Collette wasn’t just a psychic. She was also a medium.
Twenty-Five
As Eve walked into the drop-in centre, the bell made a little jingling sound above the door. The handful of people who sat at the Arborite tables didn’t look up, too weighed down by circumstances to lift their heads. Only Heather standing behind the counter in a faded yellow apron acknowledged her.
“Hey, what are you doing here? I thought you only volunteered on Thursdays.”
“I think I might have left my sweater behind last time,” Eve said, approaching the counter. She darted a quick glance to the room where Mark conducted his counselling sessions. The door was closed. She needed to see him. She’d tried his regular office, the one housed in a rambling old mansion converted for professional use, earlier. They had no receptionist there, only a whiteboard in the shared waiting room with columns marked In and Out on it. A black magnetic disk, affixed next to his name, was in the column marked Out. He couldn’t still be at home so late in the morning, being a creature of habit with a firm work ethic. She’d decided to try the drop-in, hoping to catch him in between clients. If that didn’t work, she’d have to wait for him at his apartment. But that was a last resort. She was wary of confronting him on home turf.
Mark had crossed a line when he’d come so close to Abbey and the car. It didn’t matter if what she’d seen in his eyes was real or imagined. She didn’t want him anywhere near her daughter. She’d threaten him with professional misconduct if she had to, make public their affair no matter what the consequences. He could do whatever he wanted to her, but Abbey was off-limits.
As soon as Abbey left for school this morning, Eve put on her sneakers and walked the few blocks to downtown. She hadn’t tried divining Mark’s whereabouts. There wasn’t time for that. The best way to find him would be through the old-fashioned process of elimination.
“I didn’t see any sweater,” Heather said, wiping the counter with a dingy grey cloth. They washed the kitchen linens every night at the drop-in, but much like the clientele, everything came back looking tired.
“I’ll have a look in the Lost and Found just in case.” Eve moved behind the counter and bent down to remove a large cardboard box they kept in the cupboard underneath. Pretending to look for her fictitious sweater, she sorted through the discarded water bottles and old mittens left behind from the winter months, never letting the door to Mark’s office leave her peripheral vision.
“Well, since you’re here, do you mind covering for me while I go into the back for some ketchup?”
Eve nodded, still focused on the box and the door. They had a refrigerator behind the counter, but the majority of food and condiments were stored in a huge walk-in unit in the basement, accessed through the common room.
“I’ll only be a minute,” Heather said as she grabbed a set of keys from the pocket of her apron and disappeared around the corner to where there were couches, a collection of poorly tuned guitars, and a few aging desktop computers with Wi-Fi. Despite this cozy ambiance, the common room usually sat empty. The regulars at the drop-in preferred the stark Arborite tables and hard chairs in the eating area, more in keeping with the institutional feel to which they’d become accustomed.
Harold stepped up to the counter. He pointed at the carafes behind Eve with one of his long pointy fingernails. Today, they were painted with red nail polish instead of the usual black.
“Coffee,” he grunted, pushing a quarter toward her. Eve put the cardboard box of lost things back in the cupboard and poured him a coffee. She spooned three helpings of sugar into the cup, knowing if she put any less he’d complain. Harold took the mug and poured in a generous dollop of milk and then remained standing there. Eve kept her eyes trained on the door to the counselling room. She didn’t see Harold reach into his back pocket and pull out a tattered leather wallet until he had extracted the photograph from it and placed it in front of her.
“Look,” he said, bringing her attention back. Eve tore her gaze away from the closed door and looked down at the photo on the counter. It was dog-eared but still glossy. There was a white border around it, the kind film developers used before everything went digital. In the picture, a little boy was riding a toy horse that was suspended from springs on a metal frame. His hair was curly and slightly too long. She couldn’t discern the colour because it was in black and white.
“That’s me,” Harold said. “Can you believe it?” He picked the photo back up and caressed the image with his thumb, as if he could make out the contours of the little boy he used to be through his razor-sharp fingertips.
“You look very happy there,” Eve said. And then worried this was not the right thing to say. Harold was obviously not a very happy man, whatever he was as a child. She wondered if his mother took the picture, capturing the joy on his face as he rocked back and forth on the horse. She’d probably never envisioned a future for him that included shelters or twenty-five-cent coffees where he wasn’t even allowed to have a spoon.
“Well,” he said, still caressing the photo. “You never know how things are going to turn out, do you?”
The front door of the drop-in flew open and the little bell jingled violently. Harold quickly slipped the photograph back into his wallet, pocketing it before returning to his table. A dishevelled man ran past him to the counter, smelling of sweat and booze.
“Is the shrink in?” he asked her. His eyes were protruding and darted wildly back and forth, like a farm animal caught in a barn fire. Mark was not a shrink, but the people here thought of him in that way.
“He’s not in today,” Heather said, plunking a large canister of ketchup onto the counter. “Tomorrow,” she told him.
The man continued to stand there, searching the room with his wild eyes. Heather repeated what she’d said, but more slowly this time. Her message eventually sank in. Without any further outburst, he grabbed a day-old Danish donated by a local bakery and went to sit by himself at a table in the corner.
Heather leaned in close to Eve’s ear. “Mark was here,” she whispered. “But he left to go back to his saner clients. Honestly, I don’t know how that poor man does it. He’s a saint.”
“Yes,” Eve said quietly, thinking sanity was in the eye of the beholder.
“Did you find your sweater?” Heather asked, getting out a funnel to pour the mega canister of ketchup into more manageable dispensers.
“What?” Eve said. “Oh, no, I didn’t.”
“Things have a way of turning up,” Heather said, with her back toward Eve. She reached to the back of the cupboard, standing on the tippy toes of her orthopedic shoes. “Usually where you looked the first time.”
By the time Heather turned to ask her taller friend for help, Eve was already out the door, the bell jingling in lieu of a goodbye. The wild-eyed man muttered questions to himself in the corner as Harold caressed the photograph he’d taken back out of his wallet. Each tried to figure out where they’d lost the things they’d been looking for.
* * *
WALKING ALONG GORDON STREET, EVE wondered how she’d come to be this desperate woman, roaming the downtown core and looking for a man she didn’t want to see. But a mother’s protective streak was a powerful motivator. It could take a woman to all sorts of places she didn’t want to go.
She crossed at the intersection of Gordon and Yarmouth, cutting through the tiny triangular park that perched on its angled corner. An elderly woman with toothpick-thin legs sat with her dog on a bench next to an old fountain. It had been a watering stop for horses a hundred years ago, when it was built. The fountain sat dry and without purpose, much as the old woman who sat with her pet, watching resignedly as the cars passed by.
Once Eve reached the looming Italianate facade of the Wellness Centre, she stood and looked up. In a tiny window on the third floor, she saw movement. Mark’s office. His metallic disk on the waiting room whiteboard would be moved to the In column now.
Eve took the back entrance, marching up what would have been the servant’s stairs when the building had been a gracious home. Now it was subdivided into hushed carpeted offices used by massage therapists and other healing professionals who sought to knead the thornier knots out of their clients. Eve had come here to see Mark on the referral of a social worker at the hospital. She’d carried the address around in her purse for two months after Michael’s death before gathering up the courage to mount these stairs. It took her that long to admit she had a problem. If crippling grief could be described as a problem and not a natural state of being for a woman who’d lost her only son.
When she reached the third floor, she saw the door stood ajar to Mark’s office at the end of the hall. She walked past a room with a treatment table fitted in stark white linen. Flickering candles on recessed shelves surrounded it like a shrine. Eve took a heady inhalation of essential oils as she continued down the hallway.
“Hello, Eve,” Mark said. He looked up from the small writing desk that faced the open doorway, not appearing surprised she was there. Behind him was a futon sofa, spread with a brightly coloured Mexican blanket — a funky alternative to the classic psychiatrist’s couch. Two comfy armchairs faced each other by the window. Between them was a table holding a box of tissues and a pitcher of water with plastic tumblers. Eve had sat in the far chair dozens of times in her counselling sessions with Mark, sometimes making use of the tissues, more often the water. One to mop up her tears, the other to replenish the fluid she’d lost from them.
“Come in,” Mark said. She considered her position in the safety of the doorway for a few seconds before taking one step inside. He’d have to find a way past her if he tried to close the door.
“I want you to stay the fuck away from my daughter,” Eve hissed, mustering the courage of her outrage. “I saw you at the school yesterday.” Eve flashed back to the memory of Mark’s eyes as he stood on the sidewalk by the car, the dead black pits of them trained on Abbey like prey. She quickly blinked the image away. He was just a man after all. She mustn’t project.
Mark leaned his chin in one hand, studying her, not used to her strong resolve or her swearing. She wasn’t the depressed and sorrowful wreck she’d been that first time she’d entered his office. She knew now that the bastard had used that vulnerability to draw her into his arms and his bed, and she loathed him for it.
“I was at the school as part of the trauma team, Eve,” Mark said, after he was finished studying her. “It’s my job.”
“Was it your job to follow Abbey to my car?” Eve demanded.
“I just wanted to see if you were okay,” he said. “Are you okay, Eve?” He got up from his desk and Eve visibly stiffened. She cast her gaze around the room for something she could club him with if he got out of hand, but all she saw were soft, innocuous pillows.
“Hmm,” he said, regarding her carefully. He was close, but not close enough to make her step back into the doorway. “You seem a little fixated on your daughter lately, Eve. It’s concerning.”
“The only thing you need to be concerned about is leaving my daughter alone.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I can do that, Eve.” He smiled, exposing his perfect teeth. “Your daughter, I think, warrants a fair bit of concern.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” She tried to maintain the tone of her earlier outrage, but her words were just that little bit hesitant. She’d been angry and frightened when she first came here, but now she was just frightened.
“I took a look at Abbey’s school record. She’s got a bit of a temper, doesn’t she? Of course, we’ve talked about her anger issues before, you and me. There were those unfortunate incidents with the mice. I lied to you when I said you had nothing to worry about there. I think you have a lot to worry about.” Mark walked over to the table and poured himself some water before taking a drink.
“And then this terrible business with Selena Patel occurred.” He shook his head. “What a tragedy. Selena’s a good friend of Abbey’s, isn’t she? Rivals as well, it appears.” He put the empty tumbler back on the table. “I asked around the school about them. You know, just as part of my job. The two girls were even up for the same scholarship, I believe. The principal told me about it. Although it looks like Abbey will get the award now, what with Selena’s accident. Lucky girl.”
Eve was trembling now. Every word he said seemed to cut her, and he could sense the blood in the water. She felt him circle around her before he closed the door and went in for the kill.
“You understand that as a therapist I’m legally required to report any situation where I feel a person may be a threat, a risk to themselves or others.” He pulled back her hair from one side of her neck while standing behind her, brushing his lips gently behind her ear. Eve started to cry.
“Don’t, Mark,” she pleaded, and she meant more than the unwanted kiss. If he reported his suspicions about Abbey, it could lead to a deeper investigation into her daughter and possibly into Michael’s death. Eve might not know for sure whether Abbey had put the glass in Selena’s drink, but she couldn’t take the chance that she had.
When Mark pushed her roughly down on the futon sofa, Eve tried to feel nothing, except for the scratchy Mexican blanket that grated against her skin. The ache from her rib came in waves, as Mark pushed himself inside her again and again. No magic left to save her, she bit her tongue and let the blood fill her mouth like a salty salve. Deals with the devil were not only made within the chalked lines of a pentagram. Sometimes they were made on your back, with a man who held the power of your family’s destruction in his hands.
After it was over, Eve went to her mother’s house. She knocked first, then walked in through the unlocked door. Her mother sat in the chair she wouldn’t leave, watching the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale. Eve said nothing, only sat on the floor at her slippered feet and put her head in her mother’s lap. The tears fell onto her polyester pants and left beaded trails there.
Eve’s mother patted her head with one veined hand, the only part of her body that betrayed her age besides her bad hip.
