The rain was, if anything, heavier here than it had been in Toronto and she dashed to the front door of the house and let herself in. It was midday quiet and still; a kind of stillness that made her nervous, given what she’d found in her hotel room the day before. It would have been nice to have some company, but her mother and Martha had gone out in the morning and the house was as empty as it sounded.
She popped two pieces of whole-wheat bread into the toaster. To make up for the healthy amount of fibre, she took a half-eaten wheel of Camembert out of the fridge and left it on the counter to temper for a few minutes.
There was nothing of interest in the mail except for a forwarded property tax bill for her house in Pember Lake. Westmuir kept reassessing the house at higher and higher levels and this year had it at $325,000. A similar house less than a kilometre away had sold for $260,000 in January. She didn’t mind paying her taxes – after all, it was tax money that paid her salary – but it made her sick that the county was helping itself to thirty percent extra with its upbeat evaluations. Too bad there wasn’t a law that you could sell your house back to Westmuir for what they claimed it was worth.
The toaster dinged and she cut three big slabs of cheese onto each piece and sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t realized until now how tired she was. The buzziness of a week without Percocet had finally begun to die down – keeping busy had helped her ignore the jitters during the last few days – and she felt like the world around her was beginning to emit its real colours again. What a strange dream the last two months had been. Living in this house, half out of her mind in pain, depressed, hopeless at times. But now she was sitting at Glynnis Crombie’s – all right, Pedersen’s – kitchen table, in full uniform, thinking about the day ahead of her. She was escaping the immediate present, a state of mind that paid no heed to tomorrow, that hardly believed in it. She was shaking loose the bonds. It seemed to her now that days and weeks lay ahead of her, a topography of tasks and battles and puzzles and outcomes. She realized she felt calm and prepared for the first time since Christmas.
She worked her way through one melting, fragrant piece of toast and was picking up the second when she heard a sound from downstairs. She stilled her hand midway to her mouth and listened. There it was again. Something being pushed around on the floor. And now a voice. Good Christ. She put the toast back down on the plate, picked her chair up to move it silently back, and slipped her reloaded gun from its holster. No one would take it from her now, by god. At the door to the basement, she could hear more clearly now: faint bumps, gentle clattering, a murmur. A woman’s voice, she was fairly certain. She breathed shallowly by the door, her hand wrapping the knob silently, opening it into the dark stairwell. She stepped down, once, twice, stepped over the creaky third step, and then down again, but the fifth step emitted its low groan and she stopped on it, her heart pounding. The sounds from below abruptly stopped. Jesus, she thought. I should have gone around the back and come in through the door with the Glock out. There were footsteps approaching the bottom door. Fucking hell. She brought the gun up to chest height. A high-pitched hum filled her head. Below her, the door opened.
“We have to stop meeting like this.”
“Goddamnit,” Hazel said, lowering the gun and leaning against the wall. “What are you doing down here?”
“You sure you don’t want to shoot me first?” said Martha. She turned sideways to allow her mother to answer her own question. There were boxes opened and in various states of being filled around the room. “Nanna gave me a job.”
Hazel descended the rest of the stairwell into the bedroom. Three finished boxes were closed up and taped shut against the wall by the back door. “I guess you’re in the mood to stick me in a box, huh?”
“You put me out of my house, I put you out of yours.”
“Ah,” said Hazel. “Karma.”
She crossed the room. It looked bigger with boxes of her stuff ranged around it. She didn’t think she and her mother had brought much with them, but Martha was on six boxes and counting. Hazel sat on the bed. “Any chance we can start over?”
“At what point?” said Martha, her fist on her hip. “1971?”
“You really want to redo your whole childhood?”
“Maybe the parts where you somehow communicated to me that I was a screw-up and the world wanted to eat me alive?”
Hazel lowered her head and measured how much further lightheartedness was going to get her. She said, “Some things get lost in translation, Martha. I never thought you were a screw-up, but as for the world part, every mother thinks that. I never meant to make you feel that I was protecting you from yourself.”
Martha tossed a pair of shoes into a box and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “So that’s it? I just accept I’ve built my entire world-view on a miscommunication and move on?”
“It wasn’t a miscommunication if it’s what you heard. I should have done a better job of correcting the impression.” She finally looked at her daughter. “But these kinds of things are hard to set straight, Martha. They go off true so gradually that by the time you realize you’re wrong, the error starts to look like you. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Belief is all we have,” Hazel said. “What we believe doesn’t weigh as much as a gram, but it’s what we are. A wrong belief can ruin everything.”
“You make it sound like you can just switch it off.”
“I know you can’t. It takes time, but you have to start.” Her daughter sighed heavily. “Come sit with me.” There was a pause, but then Martha pushed herself off the wall and came to sit beside Hazel on the bed. “There’s still time, you know. We don’t have to carry on thinking the same old wrong things about each other.”
“What will we think about each other then?”
“Some new wrong things,” Hazel said, and they both smiled. “I’ve only ever wanted you to feel loved. Everything else, no matter how misbegotten, was for that. I can’t promise I’ll be able to stop trying to protect you, Martha, but if you’re able to convince yourself it’s coming out of love and not fear, maybe it won’t feel so toxic to you.”
Martha shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked slantways at her mother. “Where’s this new Zen aspect coming from?” She closed one eye. “Is it the Percocets?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, but I know about the pills. Nanna told me to keep an eye out for stashes when I packed up. She says you were developing a problem. Is that true?”
Who was protecting whom, Hazel wondered. “No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m off them now. It’s been six whole days.”
“Is it hard?”
She wanted to say no, she wanted to say it was none of her business. But if it was time to change the beliefs, she was going to have to do her part. “Yeah,” she said, at last. “It’s hard. It’s very hard. I still want them.”
“Why?”
She realized she was crying. “I like the way they make me feel, Martha. But I’m not me on them. It’s good that I stopped.”
“So this is really you?”
“I think so.”
Martha shifted a little closer and Hazel hesitantly lifted her arm off the bed and then settled it on the girl’s shoulders and they touched the sides of their heads together, like birds. “We’ll hardly recognize each other now,” Martha said.
Martha said she’d handle the rest of the packing on her own – it was good to have something to do, she said. Upstairs, the Camembert on the second slice of toast had begun to go waxy and Hazel tossed it into the garbage can. She imagined herself rummaging in her own fridge again, and she felt a frisson of excitement that might have had an undercurrent of fear in it as well. To be on her own again. To start over. What would it feel like?