damp armpit curved around her cheek. She breathed his cottony T-shirt heat.
“We won’t write each other or anything, will we?”
“Give me your address. I may show up someday.” He kissed her bangs. “Just don’t off anybody without me.”
“Bang Bang Malcolm’s Silver Hammer —”
“— came down upon Peck’s head!”
They didn’t kiss again.
On June 7, 1985, Hank strapped their beds, dressers, and suitcases to the Ranger and drove Peck to their new house on Hartley Horse Way in Westwoods, a new development in north Brampton. She carried The Black Donnellys, the feathered clip, her mom’s library card, and the McCartney letters in her mom’s deerskin purse.
They arrived at Westwoods late Sunday morning under a yellow sky. Number 39 looked the same as the others, a twostorey semi-detached with a garage. It had two small windows upstairs and one medium down. It had no shutters or any other decorations. The bricks were rusty pink and the trim off-white. Steep concrete stairs led to the front door. Three evergreen shrubs squatted under the front window, and a spindly tree with pointy leaves graced the end of the driveway. No tree on Hartley Horse Way reached higher than the roof peaks, and there was little shade.
They entered through the garage, which smelled like potatoes. Hank had arranged the living room the same as in Kashag. Above the couch hung the gun rack adorned with photos of two does suspended by their hind hooves from winter branches. Saloon doors took her into the kitchen, set up like home. The red table and yellow chairs below the sunburst clock. Mrs. Salter’s lemon squares in a Tupperware container on the counter. Sue Smedley’s thoroughbred calendar on the fridge. Only Burt was missing. Dogs didn’t belong in subdivisions, claimed Hank, so the Salters had kept him. The dog was in his prime, and Hank intended to hunt him that year.
Hank banned her from her bedroom until he had it ready. She helped him move the furniture into the hall. Then he showed her the cable box. She punched buttons and ended up watching a woman in a long dress strolling through a park singing, “He walks with us, he talks with us.”
After an hour or so, Hank called her down the hall. “This is it, baby,” he said. “This is your new life.”
He stepped aside and nudged her. She didn’t dare turn back and show him that although she loved him and wanted to feel as happy as he did, this room with its white walls and its high square window made her think not of her future, but of her mom. Her new room, her Beatles poster pinned above her dresser like at home, was not her new life, but a reminder of what had irretrievably gone.
chapter 3
In February, I was making blueberry pancakes when cops visited our house again. Alex shovelled the driveway while I stood on the stoop in my slippers. An officer confirmed my name and wrote down my occupation as unemployed. He handed me a subpoena then drove off.
I dropped the sheet on the kitchen table. New butter sizzled straight to brown, the element too high. I tossed the frying pan into the sink and slammed another onto a cold burner. Stanton had lied. And the other one, Young — crafty blonde. Weekends were supposed to be sacred. They couldn’t make me testify. What happened had nothing to do with our lives now, I’d tell Alex, and trust him not to hold a grudge. Snow clods rattled the window. Untroubled, he’d stayed outside. I didn’t like to let him down.
He came in fifteen minutes later, his hair chaotic from his toque.
“Allo, luv,” he said. He was in a British mood.
“Sweetness.”
We ate on the living room couch.
“When that bobby pulled up, I buckled and surrendered you.”
“Snitch.”
“Fugitive.”
Since I’d quit my job at InfoText, I’d taken to letting the phone ring. Whenever the detectives or the Crown called, I deleted their messages. Come and get me. I liked the image of myself as a runaway — its reckless mystery, and its privacy — though I doubted I’d have the nerve. Ramona’s trial started next month.
“It’s a trial they’re asking me to testify at. No big deal.” Good. Minimize it.
“You say that like it’s a birthday party. How could this happen? You don’t know anybody. Is it your dad?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Then it is your dad. Seriously, why haven’t you told me?”
“You don’t like it when I talk murder.”
His eyes churned bark-grey. “You know a murderer?”
“Murderess. Accused. And not know. Knew.”
We read the subpoena together. The Queen commanded me to report to District Court on Wednesday, April 22.
My voice tinny, I told him that Ramona had befriended me in high school, when my dad and I moved south from Haliburton to Cloud Lake, a Brampton subdivision, that we hit it off in the summer but drifted apart once school started. “Ramona had a career and a house and a fiancé. I lived with my dad and went to high school,” I said. I left out my panic, how my tongue roped at saying “Ramona.”
“They must need you as a character witness,” he said. Trustful, assessing, he took me at my word. How could I forget? My part in the trial he would see as a part-time job, a duty that occupied but didn’t own me. He wouldn’t make the leaps, connect this to that, invent causes or blame.
“It’s for the Crown, not the defence. I talked to the cops last summer. I thought they wouldn’t need me for the trial, but they called last week.”
I settled my hands against his. We pushed our palms until our fingers bent and our knuckles cracked.
“Did you end on bad terms?”
“We ended. She got married and I left for university. Then I met you.”
Alex had said “I love you” first and quickly. We were in his dad’s BMW with the sunroof open. Drunk on whisky, I was making noises and rocking into him. He was the first man I’d had inside me. We were parked by the sea a thousand miles east on what we’d convinced his parents was a painting excursion. I was nineteen.
He didn’t repeat the words. Afterward, I lay under a blanket and shot back more whisky.
“What did you say?”
“When?”
“Then. There.”
“You heard me.”
“I heard something but I’m not sure.”
“You heard.”
“What I heard was something a person would want to say again.”
“Re-ally.”
“Maybe it’s
