Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1 to 19 Read online

  ‘Rowena, this is a serious breach. Rowena – ’

  Grandma Giles is back in her chair, arms crossed, head down. I crouch in front of her, say ‘Grandma?’ and she pets my head.

  Rinkel yells, ‘Brenda, Brenda! Call Security.’

  Brenda appears, winding an overpermed curl around her finger. Otherwise, she doesn’t move.

  ‘This will be documented,’ says Rinkel.

  ‘Damn right it will.’ Brenda plants her feet apart like she’s aiming a rifle. Possibly she’s been practicing for this moment. Even Grandma stares. ‘Excuse me, folks, but we have a union, Rowena has rights.’

  ‘Oh, how noble,’ Rinkel tries to snarl, but he’s shrunk from Doberman to chihuahua.

  ‘Exactly,’ shoots Brenda. ‘No more scapegoats. No more secrets.’

  ‘Writing’s on the wall,’ I hear myself say.

  He actually lifts off the floor. Like someone stuck his butt in a socket.

  Brenda says, ‘I need to talk to Rowena, people,’ and Rinkel snaps open his BlackBerry. ‘Well, I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Good call,’ says Brenda and he’s gone, faster than a cockroach in my Biology lab.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her,’ Brenda tells me. As in, Get the hell out of here.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Gee, almost time for my bus. Okay, Grandma. Sorry.’ Avec red face as per usual.

  Fifteen

  Well, what a nice full day. In five hours, I’ve damaged two people I adore, discovered how irreparably damaged I am and helped someone make two origami cranes. You’d think I could go straight to the bus thinking, Good job. But, no.

  Maybe if I walk the long way round, I think, maybe if I walk past the wool shop, past the Times office, Rose and maybe even Jessie will see me, see how cold, lonely and potentially good I am. Hey, Dree, where are you going, they’ll yell. Because of course they want me to stay over. Of course they’ll order two xl fully loaded pizzas. I can hear both their voices so clearly in my head, I walk around twice to give their bodies a chance to catch up. If the smokers outside the bingo hall weren’t watching, I’d keep going.

  So when I turn round Jubilee Road onto Main and the bus is pulling away, should I be surprised? I run, yelling, ‘Stop! Stop!’ then falling as dramatically as possible when you’re outside a Saan store and two seniors with walkers are waiting for you to get out of the way so they can cross the street. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I missed my bus.’

  Even my options have rejected me. What else but walk to Grandma’s. The really long way. No one comes running. After the Happy Garden café and the Sally Ann, I face a whole lot of nothing with a cold wind at my back. Talk about familiar.

  Grandma’s apartment is dark and cold, and lights and heat don’t help. I bump Trinity the lamp on my way out of the living room, and let it smash into infinity. In the kitchen, I do a few crackers avec Cheez Whiz, accidentally drop a blob on the sacred recipe box which leaves a grease mark, so sad, then spoon out caramel sauce and think nothing but hospital. There’s gotta be something: hospital. He drew a whole wall: hospital. Sugar rush or epiphany, who can tell. I’ve got to see that wall. I take Grandma’s plaid coat, the crackers and cheese, and leave Joan a phone message. ‘Sorry for not letting you know, I won’t be back until really late. Sorry.’

  It’s dusk and the pine trees have gone nasty – branches swipe at my face, pine cones roll down the sidewalks like grenades. It’s a hood-up, head-down kind of thing all the way to the top of the hill. Dad, would it ever be excellent to hear you right now. Something like, Way to go, Dreebee. Really. That would totally be enough.

  ‘Got any crackers?’ A soft, dusty voice and mouldy smell.

  ‘Hey,’ I say to Tent Guy. He’s heading down the hill with multiple plastic bags stuffed with pine cones. I’m weirdly happy to see him despite the ongoing beard issue.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ I use the suitcase for a table and make him six cracker sandwiches. He puts one into each bag, says ‘Yabbadabbadoo,’ and gives me a pine cone.

  ‘Okay, we’re all set,’ I say and he heads down the hill saying goodnight over and over. I’ve morphed into rugged hiker woman and the rest of the climb is easy. Tent Guy’s like human Valium. Everything feels fine after he drops by. On the grounds, I’m all stealth through the trees to the back of the old hospital. The hospital’s grown, puffed itself out like a security guard kicking someone out of Edmonton Centre. There’s uber-rustling, crackling, general wilderness noise because the wind just doubled in velocity, but no, I am not going to start checking behind me. Of course it feels like someone’s watching. Look at these windows. Iron bars built right into the brick. Ghosts, hundreds of them, must be packed in there, flattened against the glass to stare at me.

  Find a way to get in, I think, or possibly hear, or think I hear because otherwise, WTF am I doing here. My nerve is about to take off like my options, so, obviously, keep moving. Checking a building for B&E possibilities doesn’t feel weird for long, more like a useful skill.

  Below the windows on the ground floor, the walls are stone, stones the size of microwaves. My hand runs along their bumpy cold skin in case one pops out to reveal a secret entrance. I could climb up, maybe, if I had the right shoes. But I have MaryJanes, part of the current I’m-ten-molest-me fashion thing, which Clarks, makers of excellent shoes, jumped into with over-stitched, thick-soled MJS, then went What were we thinking, and sold them très cheap. Who knew I’d have to scale a wall. Okay, I turn around. That sound is de finitely not nature. But there’s nothing. Trees.

  The second floor has a front balcony I could pole vault onto, haha, too visible. One side of the building faces trees so it’s hidden, except to anyone hiding in the trees, and there’s a fire escape zig-zagging all the way to the third floor. But it rattles way too enthusiastically, as in, Step right up, let me kill you. And how cliché to fall off a fire escape.

  Okay, third time at the back door, and, without explosives, hopeless. We’re talking big metal padlock on big metal door. Dad, you are going to have to help me. Because I’m ten minutes away from my own heart attack. The pigeons in their long warbling row are ready to dive bomb any second. I want to put on Grandma’s coat, but I can’t do anything except listen for my impending murder.

  Okay, what would Jessie do? Maybe crochet a long rope, throw it over the balcony railing and shimmy up. All très elegant and fast. Anyway, to hell with her. I tried. In general, I tried. I’m circling for the last time, and on the fire-escape side, I crouch under one last tree, the lowest boughs in my hair. Cheez Whiz seems necessary although possibly a gopher magnet, but get over it, we’ll probably have to eat them after the apocalypse. Paige will be out here with her little bow and arrow, all perfect hair and precision.

  After five cracker sandwiches, the panic is manageable, and I try thinking. Nothing. No epiphany, no idea. Okay, Dad, I’m going. I hear that long, defeated sigh of his. When he tried to go to university. When he and Joan talked about money late at night. Hey. What’s that black square behind the fire escape? Not sidewalk. Not shadow.

  A gust of wind slaps me. As in, Move it.

  De finitely a noise.

  De finitely wind.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Here we go.

  Excellent. The abyss.

  The black square is an opening to a stairway I can’t see the bottom of, as in a black hole. No railing. You’d have to be out of your effing mind to go down there.

  Fine.

  Hair completely tucked into hood. Sleeves stretched down over hands.

  Go.

  Go.

  Go.

  Eww. Something crunches under my foot, something I’ll probably never stop imagining, and I shuffle around to scare other wildlife. Down, down, down I boldly go, my back against the concrete wall until the third step when I consider the nematodes et cetera that grow in dark, wet concrete and might try to lay eggs on me.

  Something’s moving down there. I can’t actually hear it. But I feel i
ts bigness, its evil hugeness. I’m done, dead, oh god, just get it over with. I’m sorry, Joan. I’m sorry, Paige. You’ll never know how good a person I potentially am.

  Okay, one more step. My suitcase makes not the best shield. But plaid will be unexpected when the psycho flashes light on me, which he will, because who wants to kill someone you can’t even see? My legs shake, not more than the rest of me, but more problematically since they’re supposed to hold my feet steady.

  It’s true about final moments lasting a long time. I form a meaningful relationship with the stairs as I fall, feel loose gravel and slippery edges, feel my knee, my suitcase and my arm connect fully to the bug-ridden concrete. Then I go fetal and yell my best yell. No words, just a sound that says, ‘I’m more psycho than you are.’ Before I’m done, something pulls my jacket sleeve, and I lurch back up the stairs. I get to ground level on hands and knees and watch my heart bounce across the lawn.

  ‘C’mon, you’re okay.’

  ‘Jessie?’

  ‘Who’d you think?’ Jessie unzips her pocket and pulls out Marcel 19. ‘I went to talk to Dad. He told me to come here.’

  ‘Mine did too.’ So what if I didn’t necessarily hear him.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d find the stairs.’

  I get up thinking Surely, no. ‘You were watching?’

  She shrugs.

  I suppress.

  ‘It’s effing freezing.’ Jessie glares as if I personally selected Bitterly Cold with Wind from some weatherboard.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘You’ve got something stuck – ’ She stands still while I pull a short twig or long insect out of her hair. ‘C’mon,’ she says. The stairpit of hell’s no biggie with her penlight, but talking seems like a bad idea. At the bottom, she hands me the light and pulls out a screwdriver. ‘No biggie,’ she says. ‘Hold still.’ The door’s cheapo aluminum with a lock even I could open, and she’s been opening it on an annual basis. One click and we’re in.

  She takes her light and marches forward. I walk into a metal table. Give me that effing light, I say in my head. In real life, it’s ‘Please. Please, I can’t see.’

  ‘What, you don’t have a light?’

  Something wet hits my nose. I whimper.

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She stays close until we’re in the hallway. The light bounces off bed frames, a long row of steel bed frames lined up end to end all the way down the hall. Some are rolled up, some flat, and they all look ready to start moving any second. At the end of the hall, the gaping mouth of some laundry machine.

  ‘Hey, that’s where my mom worked,’ I say, trying for perky.

  But Jessie’s halfway up the stairs. I’m in darkness thick as cheese, my hands gripping a bedrail like I’m dangling from the High Level Bridge.

  ‘Where are you?’ she yells.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say. She comes back, hooks her arm under mine and says, ‘Pretty freaky, hey?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘Let go of the damn bed.’ Right. On the second-floor landing, I’m panting, we stop, and she swirls her light up to a barred window. Rust marks run down the wall like bad mascara. ‘Did you hear that?’ I say.

  ‘Mice,’ she says and ignores my full-body shudder. ‘C’mon.’ The third-floor hallway is a long silence. Rows of doors, most of them closed, metal door handles flashing when Jessie’s light hits. She scans then holds steady on the third door from the end. ‘Can you make it?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Something swirls around me as I follow her. I wave my arms as Jessie plows through the dark haze, waving invisible things away as if she’s brushing snow off her coat. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I say. She nods, holding her scarf over her mouth. Getting warm, says the faint, probably imaginary, voice of Leonard. I try to breathe through my scarf, and smell my own sweat. Jessie’s going into the room when something moves behind me, de finitely real, possibly human. I’m still making some animal sound or other when Jessie puts her arms around me.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She put her arms around me. ‘Stop shaking.’ ‘I can shake and run at the same time.’ That’s when the smell hits. Gasoline.

  I try to pull us back to the stairs but she yanks me into the room, and we stumble against the wall like drunks. Jessie’s light hits the window first, goes back to the wide bar across the top, and I know Tim hung himself there. And Leonard saw him, kept seeing him for the rest of his life. I concentrate on not puking to steady myself. ‘He’s here,’ Jessie whispers. I hope she means Tim.

  Barely through the door, and it’s even harder to breathe, everything too close, the walls, the gasoline fumes, death. Panic so strong, I’m nothing but Get the hell out. ‘Jessie,’ I yell, beg, but she barely shifts when I pull. Her light strikes the wall and my arms go limp. A face, non-face, in finite holes for eyes, black paint dribbling from the mouth. And another. Faces floating out of the dark, undulating under the light. I lean into her, and she leans back. My chest goes electric shock, a jolt all the way up to my throat. Maybe the jolt is what turns us to the corner. Or maybe we knew he was there. Rinkel. Crouched in the corner like an evil garden gnome.

  ‘Get out,’ he says.

  Jessie kicks him in the stomach.

  In a split second, I almost join in, then grab her from the back, my arms pinning hers. She charges and I barely hold us back. But I do. She lets me hold on, her arms going slack. Pain hammers through my chest. She chokes or cries, I can’t tell.

  Rinkel’s doubled over, his feet clunking against something.

  ‘Get out,’ he croaks.

  I take Jessie’s light and shine it straight at him, see his flash-light on the floor beside a gas can. Mostly, I see his face against the nightmare faces and make myself keep looking.

  He covers his eyes with his hands, says, again, ‘Get out.’

  ‘No,’ I say, or Leonard says, or I say on behalf of Leonard. Who knows. ‘You first.’

  ‘You’re committing a crime – ’

  ‘Murdering bastard.’ Jessie lunges for him and he’s gone, into the hallway, then gone. Jessie’s back in the room, running her hands over the wall. But father-daughter time’s done, I think, not mean but practical. If she’s half as dizzy as I am from the funes, we’re in trouble.

  She’s got Rinkel’s light, I’ve got hers and we’re almost in the basement when we hear the whoosh of something catching fire. Jessie jumps but keeps going, both of us running to the door, up the creepy stairs, the cold air greeting us like applause. ‘He’s got to come out the same door,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe no. Smoke inhalation,’ she says. But we stay huddled under the tree, watching.

  Sixteen

  It takes six days for my headache to go away and I’ll probably never be able to blanket stitch as fast as I could pre-asbestos. Seriously. But brain damage was helpful the morning after the fire because that’s when it all came down – the Plan, the special account, the credit card, Toronto. Low verbal ability was an asset.

  I’m hoping there’s a total lifetime amount of remorse everyone must have, which would make me advanced in one area of life. Driving to Timbley with Joan for the Talking Circle, actually a Talking Rectangle, takes care of a decade’s worth of sorries. The signal light’s broken again, so Joan rolls down her window to hand-signal, and the window gets stuck. We drive for two hours in silence and icy wind.

  In the basement of a generic square building, Jessie and Rose are already at the table. I keep my eyes on the industrial carpet. A middle-aged guy sits at each end of the table, Man 1 mountainously still, Man 2 twitchy. A frizzy woman in teal sits beside Rose and Jessie, and a woman cop with incredibly precise bangs sits on the other. Joan points to the chair beside her.

  We have the power says a poster of workers in hardhats and I go all mitochondrial because that’s the perfect title for our bio presentation. I can draw a cute little mitochondrion doing a power salute.

  This is amusing,
Dree?, says Man 1, and I look up to serious disapproval all around. Let the executions begin.

  I say an unfortunate What? which requires more, so I launch right into being really really sorry, especially for hurting Joan when things were really hard for her but also for putting Jessie at risk in the hospital especially once we knew Dr. Rinkel was there. Man 1 nods and turns to Jessie. ‘The key here,’ he says, is complete clarity.’ He reads something official about breaking and entering and generally makes us sound evil. Jessie apologizes too, but he won’t leave her alone, keeps bringing up ‘the key thing,’ then teal woman goes at her about responsibility and boundaries, then Rose comes down like thunder.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It was my idea.’ Everyone ignores me. While Jessie cries in big choking sobs, I run my fingers over small gouges in the table.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking,’ booms Rose. ‘You think your father wanted this?’

  When the torture finally stops, something shudders in my chest. The big wall clock spasms another minute. Papers are moved, pens clicked, coffee sipped, legs recrossed. Please let it be over. How much sorrier can we be, for god’s sake. And, hello people, what about Rinkel?

  Man 1 puts his papers into a file folder and takes others out. Joan’s voice is so soft the haircut cop paraphrases everything, sometimes twice, as in, ‘I feel so betrayed,’ ‘You feel betrayed, Joan?’ ‘Betrayed,’ ‘Hmm, betrayed.’ They talk about me like I’m not there, teal woman telling the guys that what concerns her is the series of deceptions over a long period of time, haircut cop says she counts five chargeables, Man 2 says they’re possibly dealing with pathology here given the family history. That gets an Excuse me? from Joan and a lot more volume. ‘When will the hospital be taking responsibility for Dr. Rinkel, who is not even here?’ she says. He is not the issue, say both guys in different ways, and Joan’s hands fly up. ‘Excuse me? That worm has been the issue for fifteen years.’ The room pretty much crackles as everyone tries to read everyone else, eye contact criss-crossing the table. Ha. There’s something they don’t want us to know.