Part 5 (1/2)
Abby Weiss stood up with a foot-long rose-bush branch in one hand and a pair of hedge trimmers in the other. She looked as if she had been slapped with a glove. Her straw hat was crooked and her 1993 Folk Fest T-s.h.i.+rt had ridden up, revealing her fifty-eight-year-old abs. ”Did you just say you love me?”
”I did.”
”But you never...”
”I just did.”
”Well, frick.” Abby's eyes glistened and she dropped the hedge trimmers and the rose-bush branch and baby-walked to Madison. They hugged on the warm front lawn, with the laughter and provocations and tinking gla.s.ses of nearby restaurant patios audible about them. ”That made my day, sweetheart. It really did.”
Madison squirrelled out of her mother's grasp. ”Get back to your roses.”
”Gladly.” Abby wiped her tears with the Folk Fest s.h.i.+rt. ”Gladly.”
Her mother returned to the rose bushes and Madison hunched over the annuals bed again, digging deep into the soil with a decommissioned screwdriver. It was her job to battle the seemingly endless white roots of dandelions. She reached to the bottom of a particularly nasty one and heard a large vehicle apply its brakes. On her knees, she saw one white van and then another in front of 10 Garneau. Without a word, both Madison and Abby dropped their tools and hurried to the sidewalk.
A small team of men and women in matching blue uniforms resembling hospital scrubs emerged from the vans with a variety of indoor and outdoor implements of improvement: buckets, sponges, mops, bleaches, rakes and shovels, garbage bags and touch-up paints in appropriate colours.
Abby approached two deeply tanned men who stayed outside while the rest of the team went in the front door. Stunned and feeling oddly violated, the way she had felt on Monday night when Jonas slipped her VISA card into the door jamb, Madison hung back on the sidewalk.
”Lovely to see you,” said Abby.
The two men looked at one another.
”What are you people doing here?”
Now that Madison had grown used to the idea that Jeanne and Katie were in Mexico or Calgary, that Benjamin Perlitz had died in a pool of his own blood in the master bedroom upstairs, she was beginning to accept 10 Garneau as it was. Madison realized, on the sidewalk, as a cloud of tiny bugs formed over her head, that she had been taking a sort of secret pleasure in the tragedy; the sort of pleasure she once took in muscle injuries after cross-country ski races.
The whole city had been implicated in the death of Benjamin Perlitz, just as it had been implicated in the murdered policemen, the thirteen-year-old girl found dead on the golf course, the Somali cab driver stabbed and stuffed into his own trunk, the pregnant wife beaten to death and abandoned in a ditch. The whole country and culture had been implicated. Yet this particular horror wasn't just local. It was next door. Jeanne Perlitz was her gardening friend. Once, when she had locked herself out of the house, Jeanne had come into Madison's bas.e.m.e.nt suite and they'd watched a cooking show together. Madison had babysat Katie several times, while Jeanne and Benjamin went to the theatre, the opera, the ski hill in Whitemud Creek.
This was Madison's special horror. It bestowed certain rights upon her. The right to feel victimized, to sulk dramatically, to surf the Internet for something more substantial than crib prices. How could these people in stiff blue cotton uniforms bleach, rake, mop, and shovel it away?
15.
the block party.
Soon, the sidewalk in front of 10 Garneau was congested with the curious. s.h.i.+rley Wong and Abby Weiss insisted on filling a cooler with German beer and Costco pop. David Weiss suggested pizza and Raymond Terletsky agreed it was a brilliant idea, as long as pepperoni and mushrooms were involved.
It took several minutes for Jonas Pond to appear, his short brown hair twirled by the pillow. He stood next to Madison and yanked her ponytail. ”Toot toot. So is there an exorcism going down or what?”
”It's four in the afternoon. Did you just wake up?”
”Don't judge me, woman.”
”Did you just wake up?”
”I had a rehearsal last night, absolutely gruelling, for a two-hander aboutyou guessed itcoming out of the closet. What we really have to do is ban stupid people from getting theatre degrees. In fact, let's set up checkpoints at all roads leading into Old Strathcona and downtown. That way...”
”They're in the house.”
”Who are?”
”Cleaners.”
”What house? This house?”
”You know what, Jonas, maybe you should grab another fourteen or fifteen hours of shut-eye.”
”Are those men Bolivian? The ones picking up the garbage?”
”I have no idea, but they only speak Spanish. Abby tried to get some info from them, but all they can do in English is apologize.”
”Well, at least they're adapting to Canadian culture.” Jonas shook his arms, rolled his shoulders, and initiated a mouth-stretching exercise: ”Pah-Teek-Hah. Pah-Teek-Hah. Joowish. Joowish. Kansas City Rollers. Boooomtown.” Then he started up the gra.s.s to speak to the workers.
”What's he doing?” said David Weiss, who sat in a lawn-chair with Garith on his lap. He had just returned from playing eighteen holes at the Mayfair with a party donor. ”Does he know those guys?”
”He's practising his Spanish.”
”That seems inappropriate.”
Madison shrugged.
”Sit down, have a beer. It really strips some of the macabre out of this.”
”I don't want a beer, Dad.”
”Hey, you love beer. Come on. Tell your old man a story.”
Madison watched the women moving rhythmically behind the upstairs window. It took two of them to mop the wood floors. On the night it happened, she hadn't been able to see Benjamin up there with the gun. It was too dark, and the tactical unit kept everyone back. Residents of the Garneau Block weren't allowed to be in their houses, so they huddled behind roadblocks with the media and local bystanders, drinking Sugarbowl coffee and trying to hear what Benjamin was screaming out the window.
The last Fringe play of the festival had been earlier that evening, and afterward she and Jonas had sat in the Casa Radio Active tent drinking with a table full of actors. Since she had been nursing a cranberry juice, the compet.i.tion for speaking time and attention between the drunken performers had been almost too much to take, so she daydreamed about her baby. Names she might give him or her, and whether or not she could afford one of those running strollers with the big mountain-bike tires.
When Jonas lost the ability to deliver a coherent sentence that Sunday night, she helped him up and they started home. Four blocks away, with the flas.h.i.+ng lights visible behind the Garneau Theatre, it was obvious something had gone wrong. Madison's first worry was that her parents were dead. A break-in, a fire, a violent left-wing reprisal against David Weiss.
They reached the roadblocks as fast as Madison could drag the stumbling, mumbling Jonas, and the policewoman guided them to a safe place to wait out the ordeal. Madison was pleased to see her parents and Jonas was pleased to see a soft patch of gra.s.s. Luckily, one of the ambulances had several extra woollen blankets. Madison covered him up.
So what did they know? They knew that Benjamin, who Jeanne had kicked out, was back in the house. They knew he was drunk and raving and that he had a gun. What was he thinking? Well, no answers there.
Now, more than two weeks later, Jonas concluded his exploratory interview with the Latin American men working in the front yard by shaking their hands and kissing their cheeks. He reported back to Madison with a cringe.
”What did they say? Who hired them?”
”Their accent is strong, their vocabulary is quite advanced, and they talk really fast. I'm only in level two Spanish.”
”But you spoke to them. In Spanish.”