Chapter Twenty-Four
Polly arrived back to discover…
Polly arrived back to find her home cold and dark. Jean wasn’t there. There was no note left on the kitchen table. The drive in on the bus had given her much food for thought. The route took her past so many familiar places and things. She recognized the homes of friends and even caught glimpses of people she knew.
Now, the old house felt empty, creaking with age in the freakishly warm January weather. Jean was a grown man. She was somewhat disappointed not to find him there, flushed with what she had originally perceived to be her decision, one that she felt pretty good about, right up until this moment.
Again she was plagued by second thoughts. It would have been so much better to just blurt it out and get on with it, a decision announced being harder to back down from than one merely imagined. If only she could whole-heartedly commit to the thing. But even if Jean wasn’t going to be here much of the time, her life could not go on as before, and she knew she had to go somewhere, anywhere, really. It probably didn’t matter much to Jean either. It was her concern, her problem. She was the only one that could solve it. What in the hell was she going to do?
It all seemed to be so simple as she rode along on the bus, feeling that this was the first little baby step on the way to a new and more exciting life. She wondered if, in the final analysis, she would have the courage for it. She prayed that she might find it. Polly knew she couldn’t burden Jean with some old lady in the back bedroom, paying minimal room and board, and always prying into his business. She couldn’t help but to adopt Jean in some ways, like a surrogate son. Her life had been so empty since old Mrs. Roberts passed on. While she could put more time into a gaggle of nephews and nieces, they lived so far away and the fussy attentions of a spinsterish aunty were not truly essential.
After only a few days with Jean in the house, she had begun to worry about him.
Jean never talked about Afghanistan, or his experiences in jail, but she knew things must have been very hard on him. Poor Jean was such a cheerful and open character.
She couldn't help but adopt him.
Polly worried that he was bottling it all up and that wasn’t good. He didn’t seem to brood.
Once you got to know Jean, you could accept that an injustice had been done, and once done, it could not be retracted. Miss Andrews had never experienced anything like it. You saw stuff like that on CNN, all these people on death row being exonerated by the Innocence Project or whatever it was called. Polly had a hard time accepting that there was nothing anyone could do for Jean. It was too late. The damage was complete.
Jean told her that he planned to keep his nose clean, and ask for a pardon in seven years. It was enough to bring tears to your eyes. Truth was, he wasn’t very likely to get it, was he? They would never forgive him—not without recovering the money.
“Maybe someday I get to go to Florida too, eh, Miss Andrews?”
Miss Andrews had taken to praying for Jean. He really did deserve a better turn of luck.
As for herself, she had a date with Nathan, and after that, she could literally pack up and be gone in three days—maybe less, if there was any burning sense of urgency. Just the thought of it made her heart beat faster. She felt a rising sense of dread at the inevitable. Those who said if you can’t change it, don’t worry about it, were full of horse-puckey in Polly’s opinion.
Her friend May said all kinds of things.
Once you get out on the road, you’ll feel better almost instantly. It’s the part where you still don’t know…you don’t know what comes next, that’s the hard part.
May had been through three husbands and had lived in ten different cities. She ought to know if anyone did.
***
“We like to challenge ourselves from time to time.” Thus expounded Scott Boisvert-Schiller, with his ermine-bedecked wife Jasmine seated beside him in the much sought-after corner banquette in Shirley’s doughnut shop.
Jasmine simpered affectionately at her husband, basking in the reflected glow of his self-esteem. The pair got a little over halfway up Mount Everest.
Nothing but a road map and a handful of credit cards.
“Even though we only made it to Camp Himalaya, at sixteen thousand feet—in metres that’s about five thousand, I’m still glad we went. Eh, honey?” Scott made it a point to consult with his wife on big things and little things, her glossy waves of brazen blonde hair bobbing in acknowledgement.
Scott, with his shaven head and open collar revealing a veritable tortoise-shell of tattoos, nodded in reflection.
“We wanted to find ourselves, right honey?”
The crowd of mid-morning patrons was for the most part listening in rapt attention, with twelve or fourteen people in the audience today. Scott’s triple eyebrow rings on the left side, and the nine ear-rings on the right side, glittered and glistered as only gold can in the wan angling beams of the evening sun. The pale rays came in the southwest window and refracted back up from the tops of the tables, spilling a blurry, dark, reverse-camera image of shadows on the ceiling.
“So, how did you get to Tibet?” Someone at the next table was asking.
Ed Jones, the butcher.
“Yes, that was quite the ordeal too. God.” Shaking her head, she composed herself, and her thoughts came jumbling up from the surface of her mind. “We drove to Toronto, and parked the van—that was costly, eh, dear?”
“Jeez.” He nodded vigorously.
“Then we had to fly to London.” She engaged the nearer members of the group with expressive eyes.
Several couples sat at immediately adjacent tables, pretty much all of them regulars at the popular watering-hole. There weren’t too many places to go. There were only four or five real coffee-shops and doughnut houses in Scudmore. Five gas stations, a half-dozen regular family-type restaurants, three fast-food national franchises, the usual sort of thing in a town of this size. Scudmore had exactly three grocery stores, one of them very small.
“We were stuck there for three hours, and then we flew to Nepal.” She went on as Scott nibbled at a walnut-stick, and glanced around the room. “The hotels in the major cities are pretty much as good as any anywhere. But God. The further you go up into the hills…well.”
The couple had rented a jeep and loaded all their gear aboard. With their hired guide and problem-fixer, they just started driving.
“With nothing but a road map and a handful of credit cards.” Her hubby, ready to take over again.
“By the time we were driving through the middle of our third raging river, bridge washed out, white foam literally coming up on the windows, and gushing in around the bottoms of the doors, Jasmine was really starting to wonder.”
“But the rooms. God. I mean, I could take so much if only I had a bath, and a clean bed to sleep in. A warm bed, I mean. Our tent up at Base Two was better than some of the rooms, with wet, sweating, mold-encrusted plywood walls, worse than some of the cabins at camp when we were kids. For God’s sakes, at least those had some paint on them.”
“Where are you guys going next year?” Mildred Johansen was asking, eyebrows raised, quite familiar with these two characters.
She suppressed a sly grin, which might be misunderstood—or worse, understood.
“I hear Borneo’s nice.” If nothing else, it might have been a little warmer.
***
Some anonymous section of Manitoba, which describes all of Manitoba.
The gold Caravan rolled down the Trans-Canada Highway, with some anonymous section of Manitoba tarmac rolling by under its wheels, with fog and small patches of brush visible in the background.
“Fuck.”
Caitlynn was sick, probably motion sickness, which Steve had also suffered as a child.
Now the fuckin’ dog had diarrhea.
“Fuck.” Steve looked for a convenient place to pull off the road for a few minutes, the sickly smell making him retch and gag.
In his haste, he must have bought the wrong dog kibble. Or maybe the dog had motion sickness too.
A good place appeared up ahead, a place where the shoulder was paved due to the road going over a small creek or watercourse. The thing could hardly be called a bridge, but at least the van could get all the way off the road. He dry-heaved a little, hoping against hope not to vomit all over the steering column and dashboard. He tried not to breathe.
Putting the vehicle in park, he lifted up the armrests and slithered over into the passenger seat, and began poking through all the bags of garbage from a number of roadside fast-food outlets. The dog had crapped right in between the two front seats.
“Ugh.”
His questing finger found and pushed the button to lower the right-side passenger window, and then he began mopping up the dog’s sticky, gooey shit with a handful of spare paper towels. He had to concentrate on something else, the goal, and try not to puke all over the place. The last thing he needed to do right now is blow chunks all over his beautiful vehicle. He put the wad in a bag, and kept gobbing the stuff up. Fuckin’ dog.
He shouldn’t have let it out of the box, but it was taking its long confinement in the car-carrier even harder than Caitlynn did the car seat.
The sound of its constant whimpering was upsetting both Steve and Caitlynn, and he had to admit when he let it out of the box, she cooed and clapped her hands in joy. That part was all right. The squirming beagle pup sniffed and sneezed around his trouser legs and looked up at him with frightened, nervous eyes, and barked a little.
“Don’t be shitting in the car. You’re pissing me off.”
“Bark.
Bark. Bark.” The only name they could come up with had been Mister Doggie.
Mister Doggie has the shits.
Steve stuffed in the last wad and chucked a bag full of garbage out over the guardrail into the snow-covered ditch below. He rolled up the window as Caitlynn was waking up and becoming restive. Steve laid an old magazine over the spot he had attempted to scrape, but the smell lingered heavily.
“Daddy. Daddy?”
Steve’s heart soared. Time to get going again, but first he had to give her something to drink. According to the last sign, the next service centre would be about thirty-seven kilometres up the road, and that would be about right. By then Caitlynn would be ready to go.
Steve gave her some juice from a pasteboard carton, warm enough because he kept it beside the heater outlet, but not hot by any means, and not freezing cold either. No sooner had she taken a couple of hits off of her sippy-cup than she barfed all over the front of herself. Luckily the coat itself was open, but it was all over her knitted sweater. What next, he thought, what next?
“Ah, shit.” Steve softly cursed under his breath.
He scuttled around in the front of the van, and then went into the back seats in search of more paper towels, but he only came up with a measly pair of thin brown towels from a well-known burger chain. It wasn’t going to do the job, thought Steve, once again struck by the urge to vomit as the rancid miasma of stomach-juices and half-digested breakfast sandwich caught him right in the back of the throat where the nostrils joined up. This wasn’t in the plan.
“That’s it.”
There was no choice but to head for a service centre. Steve was avoiding cameras all along his route. He was trying to keep a low profile. When he went into a gas station, or a bank lobby to use the terminal after hours, or to take Caitlynn to the bathroom in some coffee shop, he was aware that there was always at least one camera in the room, or those for outside surveillance when he used a drive-through window. He tried to limit those exposures, by using older service stations with the bathrooms tucked away around the side of the building, rather than the larger centres where you accessed it from a lobby that also led to a restaurant. Mom and Pop places.
Steve had put Caitlynn’s car seat right in the middle of the van, in the middle of the seat. He had selected the most heavily-mirrored option for the vehicle windows. He hadn’t washed it in weeks, it was smudged as only a cross-country trip in winter can accomplish.
The odds of the greasily-smeared license numbers being readable on a video recording from thirty metres away were slim. It was one thing for Steve himself to appear in a store surveillance tape. With his thick beard fully in place, and the uncharacteristic suit and tie, he figured no one would recognize him from a dim and grainy video, not in a million years, but to appear on camera with Caitlynn in tow was another thing altogether.
As Steve Isaacs pulled out onto the Trans-Canada, he decided to find a real town, and to find a real clothing store, a discount store, and pick up some clothes for Caitlynn. The biggest worry he had about that, was if she should say the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The trouble with coaching her was that it would draw Caitlynn’s attention to the fact that something was wrong. He had to take some risks, although he could just go to a restroom somewhere and rinse the sweater. But they needed a walk, really.
END
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