Every Little Thing Page 14

  If she asked his opinion, it would be the difference between lying to her and withholding the truth. A fine line, but one he’d never cross. It would make his actions twice as unforgivable.

  “…I’m parked there, car idling, sitting on the hood of my car. Wondering why I’m even there…” She was doing all the talking, but he’d need words, soon. “...all these months have gone by, yet I felt like his truck should’ve still been down there, for some reason. Like, the world couldn’t possibly have moved on from that moment...”

  He owed her a perfect sentence. But he was nowhere near it. He was feeling sloppy from the shots and the beer.

  “…are you even listening to me?”

  He felt caught, arrested, the cops at the door.

  “Cohen?”

  He nodded, Yes, go on. To buy time. He wanted a distraction, a glass to smash in the distance, a fight. He wanted a drunk kid causing a scene.

  “…I got off my car and sat on the guardrail and I just stared down at the sea for a while. There were cars passing by and staring at me. One woman stopped and asked me if I was all right, like I was going to jump or something. I need you to tell me that it’s okay I did that. That I stood there that day and wondered.”

  “It’s…sort of beautiful, in a way. It’s okay, yes, of course it is. It makes sense. It’s what graveyards are for.”

  He knew his response was disconnected and gauche, but she hadn’t really heard him over the music, and kept going. “Thing is. Like I said. You’d have to see the guardrail to know what I mean. I want to show you someday. So you can tell me I’m being crazy. That it doesn’t make sense.”

  He couldn’t say, Really? He couldn’t say, Matt fell asleep, Allie, so the car did whatever it wanted. He couldn’t lie to her the way the police report did. Shifty, eyes in his beer, the truth rattling around inside him. Trying to find the best way out. “A-Allie?”

  “What?What’s wrong with you?”

  Cowardice, hesitation, a lie: “I have to run to the washroom again.”

  Her heart sank, like, You fucking bastard. She was visibly hurt that that had been his response to her confession. It was in her voice and the subconscious shake of her head. “I’m coming too. Those shooter kids at the bar are staring and creeping me out. Wait outside the bathroom doors for me?”

  He nodded and they left their booth for the washrooms. He went into a stall, put the cover down, and sat with his legs shaking back and forth in wide, anxious swings. He stabbed an elbow into each knee and laid his chin on the knuckles of his hands.

  He couldn’t stand the idea of her, parked at that guardrail, questioning the physics of her father’s death. Him not there to hold her. This day was inevitable, but the timing was all wrong because he was drunk, and they weren’t home, and that meant a taxi to the airport and a plane ride with this news throbbing between them. She’d need some distance, some personal space, that the hotel room couldn’t provide.

  The harder he searched for the right words, the less sense it made he’d never told her the truth until now. Because Lee had reassured him there was no use, but what did Lee know? Your father’s idea. I was dragged into it. I was betrayed, to my face. He wanted to offer that as an excuse. For sticking with Matt’s plan A and the suicide he was duped into being a part of.

  There was a kid throwing up in the stall next to him. Allie was probably outside the bathroom door already, waiting for him, watching over her shoulder for those kids at the bar. She worried easily.

  He should have been putting those few sentences together— the truth, well-worded—but an anger at Matt kept rising to the surface. He’d want her to know Lee knew too. To share the resentment, spread it over two people. He felt callous for thinking that way. And it wouldn’t work to tell her Matt had threatened him, If you tell her, there’ll be a war between us, understand?

  He’d been in that stall way too long. He thought of Allie out there waiting for him. Looking over her shoulders at the guys at the bar. He got up off the toilet. Went out to meet her. They walked back to the booth without saying anything to each other, until sitting in the booth. She asked him again, “What’s wrong with you? Are you okay? You look pale, and you took forever in the washroom.”

  “Lineups. At the urinals.”

  “No there wasn’t! I could see in. Every time somebody walked out of the washroom, I peeked in, because I thought maybe you’d come out and I missed you. There were no lineups at the urinals. There was no one at the urinals. Why are you acting so weird? Do you want to leave? Did the shots make you sick?”

  “Allie. Your father.”

  “What?What about him? Say something. Jesus Christ!”

  “A—”He clenched his jaw. Took a sip of beer. Looked away from her to the stage.

  “Cohen, what the fuck?”

  “A month before he died, he went to Lee’s house.” Cohen stopped, wanting to, but not needing to drag Lee into this. She was still as a statue, waiting for his words. “A few weeks before your father died, he called me to come over. When I got there. Something wasn’t okay.” He looked up at her and quickly looked away. She had a face like a beating heart. “When I got there, something was wrong. He wasn’t okay. He was drunk. He—He had cancer,Allie. Terminal, definitely terminal cancer. He told me all about it. His esophagus, his stomach, it was bad. He only had months. And didn’t want to die that way, in a hospital bed. He was talking suicide. So I...”

  Allie deflated slowly. Her arms tucked into her body, her stomach concaving, her tailbone sliding into the groove between the seat and the back of the booth. She clutched her big white purse with two hands and held it like a shield to the words. She motioned like she might get up and run away. But fell back into her chair.

  “...He didn’t want you to see him, go through it, like—like you had to with your mother. I told him that wasn’t okay. I—I did. I tried to stop him. And he fucking lied to me. He looked me in the eyes and promised, with his hands on my shoulders, that he’d tell you at the cabin that weekend or later that week. I had no idea, but he thought he knew what was best for you. He didn’t want you going through it with him, day after day, like you had with your mother. He wanted to spare you that, and himself too, I guess. He—He. He made me part of his plan.”

  “He made you?” She’d howled it so loud that the bartender’s head turned to their booth. “You sat there, in the car with me, by the guardrail, and you fucking knew? And you bit your tongue?”

  “I was shocked. Crushed. Hurt. I did not know he was going to do that.”

  “Then how do you know it wasn’t an accident!”

  “Because he told me. The night he told me he had cancer. He told me. How. He’d...do it.”

  Her face was swan white; her eyes pinched half shut. There was a thick tear in one eye that had to be blurring her vision. She slammed her eyes shut to block it all out, and one tear ran quickly and then stopped altogether on her cheek. She let out a moan that sounded out of context. She was supposed to cry, to yell, but the moan was un-gaugeable and unexpected. A whimper really. A slight trembling in her lips and then her hands.

  She put one hand straight out in front of her—an open palm at first, and then a closed fist—and slammed it down on the table. Unwritten sign language.

  She grabbed her purse and dashed off, he’d assumed, to the washroom to be alone. He swallowed the rest of his beer and walked across the bar. He leaned against a wall to perch somewhere he could see both the washroom door and their booth.

  He waited there, for twenty-one minutes, and she did not come back to the booth.

  She did not come out of the washroom.

  He waited another minute before walking into the female washroom, and he apologized to three shocked women applying makeup or drying their hands. “Emergency, sorry. I’m looking for someone.”

  He peered under all the stall doors, at shins and shoes, and not one combination was Allie’s.

  No black and red shoes.

  He ran back out and looke
d over to the booth they’d been in, and she wasn’t there. Three fat men in matching baseball jerseys were there instead. Boisterous. Laughing. Almost drowning out Josh’s music. Slapping their hands off the table so that their beer bottles wobbled. They’d pushed his and Allie’s pitcher of beer to the edge of the table.

  He combed the bar, quickly, thoroughly, and went outside. Looked up and down the sidewalk. He saw a woman on a park bench in the distance, and he wanted it to be Allie, even though this woman was taller and wore a white coat. She in no way resembled Allie, and yet he stared, squinted, to bend her shape.

  He called her.

  No answer.

  He called her back. Nothing. Her voicemail. “Hi, you have not reached Allie Crosbie. Better luck next time.”

  He was there when she’d recorded that message and laughed at herself. She was painting her toenails,on the corner of their bed, and called him into the room. She said, Listen to this, my new voice mail message!, and she threw him her phone, laughing at herself.

  He walked along the outside of the bar. It was attached to other pubs and shops and restaurants, so he walked the whole block. He walked up and down every little alley between the buildings, dialling her phone number over and over. Each time she didn’t answer was a separate panic.

  He tried calling their hotel room,and she didn’t answer there either. She wouldn’t do that to him. Disappear like that. She would at least answer his call and then hang up on him.

  She liked the Public Gardens, at the end of Spring Garden Road. So he went there, poking his head into every pub along the way that looked like a place Allie might have been drawn into for a drink and a dark corner. She was in none of them, and she was not in the Public Gardens. He had not randomly seen her, on a staircase outside of a hotel or shopping plaza or walking aimlessly along a sidewalk.

  He went back to their hotel room,and she was not there. And had not been there. There were no signs of her: her purse wasn’t on the bed,no half-drunk glass of water on a dresser. Her suitcase had not been hastily packed and taken out of the room.

  Hours had passed. Too many hours. He peered through his hotel window—forehead flat against the cold glass—eyeing Halifax like a hawk; waiting for the red dot of Allie’s jacket.

  He knew she wasn’t okay. She wouldn’t do this to him. She was rightfully in need of space, but she would’ve called to say she was okay, after storming off like that. Hours ago. It was who she was to do so. Naturally paranoid, always checking in, empathetic. And she would have reacted by now, said her piece, expressed herself. She couldn’t keep emotions to herself. She’d need to express the words in real time; articulate the frustration while it was still fresh enough to word well.

  Prying himself from the window pane, it had occurred to him that she was probably two floors up with Keith. Keith, not Leslie. Leslie had flown back home that morning.

  Allie had used Cohen’s cellphone earlier that week to call Keith. She’d left hers back at the hotel room. So she asked to use Cohen’s phone at lunch one day, to tell Keith she might be ten minutes late for a meeting. A meeting she hadn’t seen the need of attending, but Keith had wanted her there. Yeah, to stare at,Cohen said. Probably, she confessed.

  He grabbed his phone and searched through sent calls until he found the only number he didn’t recognize. He assumed it was Keith’s and dialled it.

  Keith answered. He sounded groggy and a little pissed off, “H-hello?”

  He didn’t want Keith to have been the place she ran to that night, and yet he desperately wanted him to say yes. “Keith, it’s Cohen. Davies. Is Allie…there?With you?”

  “Um, no.”

  But there was a long pause before Keith had said no. Like maybe he was lying. Maybe she was there, waving her arms like a traffic director saying, No no no!

  “Are you sure?”

  “What the fuck,man? It’s…three a. m. What’s going on? I’ve got shit to do in the morning, man.”

  “She’s…missing. We fought. She ran off. It’s been five hours, and she’s not answering her phone. I don’t know—”

  “Have you called the hospitals?

  A long pause. Keith said the word hospital and a storm of visuals silenced Cohen. He shut his eyes. “I. No. I can’t do it, man.

  I—”

  “What room are you again?”

  “Three-o-two.”

  “Look, I-I’ll be right down, and we’ll start calling some hospitals and police stations.”

  “No, look, listen. You have my number in your phone now. Let me know if you find something out.”

  “It only makes sense we stay—”

  Cohen hung up the phone. Irrational. He took off to the nearest hospital.

  No one here by that name, sir.

  And the police hadn’t heard the name either.

  A young cop, younger than Cohen, only said, “We can’t do much until it’s been a little while longer, bud. But I’ll take your name and call you if, God forbid, anything comes up about...,” he squinted at Cohen’s desperate scribbling on the back of a business card, “Nellie Crosbie.”

  “Allie.” He took the card back. Fixed his writing. “Allie Crosbie. Something’s wrong. We’re not even from here!”

  It was five a.m. The city was still asleep and so quiet he could hear himself breathing. There was a lack of bustling city activity around him, to drown out his panic, and that amplified his anxiety. He’d dial her number every couple of minutes, and it would ring until he hung up. He was sitting on the bench he and Allie had picnicked on earlier that week. Slices of smoked gouda and a tub of pecans and prosciutto. Red wine in coffee cups. That memory like a ghost there beside him.

  KEITH CALLED. “WE’RE at the QEII Hospital.” And Cohen’s cab driver wouldn’t drive fast enough.

  When he finally got Cohen to the hospital, Cohen handed the man too many bills, rushed to the sliding doors, frustrated at how slow they were to open. Keith was waiting in the lobby, and then he was shaking his head, trying to hold Cohen back.

  “Wait, man. Wait!—”

  “For what, Keith?Where is she?What happened?”

  A family in the foyer was staring.

  “She’s been hurt. Mugged from what I can tell. But something’s not lining up. I’ll take you to her. Just calm down. She’s saying something about kids in a bar you two were at tonight?”

  Cohen took off down the hall, with Keith trailing behind him. “You’re going the wrong way! Calm down.”A tug at his elbow.

  Keith took him down the right corridor, “Right here,”he said, “but I don’t think you can go in yet. The police are—”

  He burst in through the door. Her left eye was swollen shut. It was black; apple-red where the lids were fastened together. She shot up in her bed and shrieked that they take Cohen out of there. And they did. They grabbed him and walked him backwards out of the room. Her reaction was disorienting, shocking, and he never fought against them. He was too tired for that, too scared, hurt. Two police officers and a male nurse engulfed him like a net, and gently, respectably, dragged him out of the room and onto a bench across the hall.

  “I need to know what happened. You don’t understand. I’m her partner. She’s just...shocked. We had a fight, and then...this happened. What is this?” he pointed to her room, perplexed.

  The two officers looked at each other, unsure which should do the talking. “Sir, you need to understand she was not distressed until you came into the room. She was relatively calm. I understand you two had had a quarrel, before she ran off. I understand the grave nature of your quarrel. I understand you’re shocked at seeing Allie here. But you need to understand that Officer Rose is not done taking a statement from Allie, and it’s important that her statement is not interrupted. She’s trying to help us catch her offenders. You don’t want to impede that, do you? By distressing her?

  He waited for Cohen’s response, like Cohen was a dumb kid and the man needed to know he was being clear. Cohen nodded yes.

  “
She’s banged up, yes, but not in a critical way. There’s no concerning medical issues to worry yourself with.”

  “Where?”

  “Sir?”

  “Did this,” he pointed to Allie’s room, “happen?”

  “She was headed back her hotel room. Three intoxicated males confronted her. She feels they were the three males you had a confrontation with, in the bar, earlier tonight—”

  “Confrontation?”He was still drunk and the word had come out as con-fron-ta-ta-tion. “Those guys. They sent her drinks. I implied they should cast their attention elsewhere. That was all!”

  “Confrontation was her word,buddy, notmine. Should I keep going?”

  Cohen nodded.

  “There was some name-calling and what she believes to have been allusions to you making a show of their gesture, in sending her drinks. They were handsy, rough, and ultimately, wanted her purse and belongings and to rattle her up some. But this story is for Allie to share,Owen.”

  “Cohen.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Never mind.”Cohen got up to peer in her window again.

  “C’mon, now. Let’s, just, sit back down. You also need to consider your actions. Assisting a suicide is a possibly indictable offence in Canada. It’s at least grounds for a civil lawsuit. You need to tread lightly.”

  “Her eye. What, they punched her? Her jaw, the cut there?”

  The cop was being coldly informative, and Cohen wondered if the man had been trained to be sensitive or to be painfully clear when talking to people. “They became physically abusive when she tried to retain her purse. There was a ring leader, goading the others along. When one of them tried to convince them to leave Allie alone, the ring leader also become physically abusive with him. They wore masks, but she’s been very intelligent here, very helpful. She’s told us one of them had raised moles on his neck. Another one of them stuttered. These are good details. These will help. Mainly, she tailed them to their van. Not a bright bunch. It had a company name on it.”