I said, trying to keep my own anger in check. “I’m simply offering her a way to get off the street. She likes to sing. She’s good, and don’t you think it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do?”
So the argument raged back and forth, first on my porch, then in the front hall. Through the whole thing, Olivia just looked on blankly, never asking us to stop shouting, or more importantly, stop discussing her as if she wasn’t even there.
Finally, I got a word in edgewise, one that Maggie didn’t try to talk over. “What is the big deal about singing in public?”
The venom in Maggie’s voice was nearly overpowering. “Don’t play games with me! You know goddamn well what Olivia can do with her voice. You just want to use her so she can bring in plenty more customers and save your lazy-ass jobs. Her ability is not going to go unnoticed for long.”
I hit her with my best shot. “And why is that so important?”
“Maggie, please,” Olivia finally said.
Her friend turned with blazing eyes. “I have a stake in this too, you know. I took as big a risk as you.”
Olivia blanched and looked down at her feet like a scolded child.
“What are you talking about?” I interjected.
But the angry woman had made a decision and turned, her hand on the front door knob. “Do what you want, okay? But when the shit hits the fan, just make sure none of it gets on me!”
With that, she stomped across the porch, down the steps, and hurried off towards Broadview.
I gently closed the front door and turned. Olivia was still standing there, face blank, head lowered. Tears flowed down her cheeks.
Putting my arm around her, I asked, “Hey, are you all right?”
“No, I’m not!” came the answer as she shook off my arm.
Walking into the living room, she sat on my brand new IKEA chair with her head turned away.
I left her alone while I brewed a pot of coffee, hoping that the smell might bring her around. When I brought her a mug, she’d turned the chair around to face the wall and was rocking and humming softly.
She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence, and while I went around the house doing various odds and ends, I continually checked on her. The hours ticked by with no change, and I was getting concerned when she appeared in the kitchen doorway as I was reading the paper.
“Can I have some water?”
“Sure,” I said springing to my feet.
Olivia took the glass without a word and went back to the living room. I waited a moment, then followed.
The sun had disappeared behind heavy clouds rolling in from the west, leaving the room in near darkness. She was back in the chair still facing the wall, but she wasn’t rocking or humming. I sat on the sofa and waited.
“I guess I need a place to stay,” she said softly a few minutes later.
“Why was your friend so angry?”
“Because she’s right. I’m being foolish.”
“What’s the ‘big risk’ Maggie was talking about?”
Olivia turned, but I could barely see her face in the dim light. “I can’t answer that, and you must never ask me again.”
From her tone, I knew she meant it. So I didn’t ask. I seldom asked her anything after that.
I realized now that I should have.
***
Word was now getting around town that Olivia wasn’t singing with us any more, but even so, we had a pretty good house at the Sal that evening, enthusiastic and relatively quiet. Dom had invited a sax playing friend from Montreal to sit in, and Simon had been very impressive on tenor, soprano and flute. We all stayed a bit later than normal, listening to old war stories about the ‘60s jazz scene as witnessed by Harry the owner and Franco the bartender.
Ronald usually cut out as soon as the gig was over, but he stayed around, primarily to crow about his new computer – as if any of the rest of us cared.
He lived alone, and while he would shack up with the occasional woman, the two passions in his life were the piano and computers. Ronald could make both sing. The few times I’d asked him for help looking up stuff online, I was amazed at how much he knew and how his fingers flew as fast over the computer’s keyboard as they did on the piano’s. I believed that he could find anything that existed in cyberspace with just the stroke of a few keys.
That night he went on and on about his computer’s great processing strength, its storage capacity, how he’d “ramped up his access speed” or some such garbage. Everybody else’s eyes glazed over. Didn’t he notice nobody cared about any of that except him?
Pain-in-the-ass Ronald was the farthest thing from my mind as I drove home along the deserted streets not much before three a.m.
I share a mutual driveway with my lawyer neighbour, and damned if there wasn’t a car parked between the houses. He probably had another sweet young thing over for the night. It would have been within my rights to pound on his door and make the car’s owner come down and move it, but I decided to just park behind and make her wait in the morning when she wanted to leave. That’s why I entered my house via the front door rather than the back as I usually do.
There aren’t any street lights directly in front of my house, so the shrubs, a group of scraggly rhododendrons and other evergreens I’d let get the better of me, blocked off almost all light on the porch.
Tired from the strain of the past three days, fuelled by two scotches I shouldn’t have had, I fumbled with the lock and dropped my keys. Bending to pick them up, I noticed the outline of someone sitting on one of the rattan chairs I hadn’t bothered to put away for the winter.
“Hello?” I said. “Who’s there?”
When I got no answer, I walked the eight or so feet to where the chairs were. Maybe it was Olivia, and she’d fallen asleep waiting for me to return.
Why had I picked this night to come home so late?
I touched the person’s shoulder gently and got no response.
“Are you all right?”
Able to see a little better because my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could tell the person had their head back, resting it against the house. When I shook the shoulder a little harder, the person slipped sideways and slowly toppled out of the chair.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to back away and bend way over to keep from passing out. I didn’t have to be very smart to know that something was horribly wrong.
It would have been a simple matter to go into the house and turn on the porch light, but I didn’t think of that in my distracted state. Instead I went to the car, and with shaking hands, fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment. I already had it on when I came back up my steps.
