I sensed a lurking presence behind me, and when I turned to look, there was Mr. K. He stood so close I felt his warm breath on my neck. Had I told him I was coming? No, definitely not. The evening suddenly had some sort of a pall over it.
Dave sensed my unease and moved in between us, putting a protective arm around me, giving me a bear hug with his thick arms. Mr. K. looked embarrassed and wandered off, back in the direction from where he’d come.
Dave ushered me away and bought candy floss and caramel apples. We pulled cans of beer from my giant-sized hand-crocheted purse and wandered the grounds, sipping, cans plopped into wax paper cups to conceal them. We went off shopping for trinkets in the kiosks, and I bought a hand-knotted meditation mala bracelet. We wandered past Doo Doo the Clown and Water Bark, past the Demolition Derby, and then we went to The Barn and sat down and watched the live bull riding at the rodeo—’cowboys and cowgirls testing their skill and speed, going flat out to beat their rivals,’ the program said.
Hours passed, and it was getting late into the night. Dave and I searched and searched for Rome and Gina until they told us we had to go and closed the gates behind us. Then, somehow after leaving them there at the kiosk, Gina and Rome disappeared after shooting it out for the bears. When I’d last seen them, they’d sat down on the grass, off to the side, after Rome won the Panda Bear. Gina lit a cigarette, and Rome lit up a joint. They finally had it out.
Dave drove me home. He took the long way around the block to my house; he was enjoying the night air, the song playing on the radio.
“How could she just vanish like that?” I said, “Into thin air.”
Dave kept driving, drumming his fingers on the dash to the music.
“I mean, one minute they were just standing there in front of the kiosk, next minute, bam. Gone.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Dave said. “Maybe they went off to ball.”
“No. No, I don’t think it was that. In those last few minutes, I could feel the tension. I think they were having a big fight.”
“Oh?”
When I’d watched them after Rome and Gina got the bear and went and sat off to the side, I heard Gina say she thought Rome wasn’t paying enough attention to her, or something like that. Last week, she told him she wanted to get married, and he never said anything. When we first arrived at the fair, Rome talked to that same waitress, Pascale, the one from the Ponderosa, right before they disappeared. Gina is the jealous type, and I suddenly felt frightened, like anything was possible.
“I’m sure everything’s fine,” Dave said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”
“I don’t know. I just have this funny feeling, like something’s going to happen.”
“Gina is a big girl.” Dave grinned, baring his teeth. “I’m sure she knows how to look after herself.”
“I don’t mean that. It’s something worse than that.”
“What’s the point of speculation? Maybe they were just tired?” Dave said, sounding exasperated.
“Yeah. That could be. Maybe. It’s a possibility.” A flutter of nerves sprinkled through my chest. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking.
Dave drove around the block a few more times. Finally, he turned the music off. The night was black as we approached my house.
“But I just can’t seem to shake the feeling. Like an omen. Something’s going to happen,” I said again.
“What’s with the Spidey sense? A couple wandering off on their own isn’t such a big thing, is it?”
I had the feeling then that whatever had happened between them couldn’t just be laid to rest. That it was going to have to culminate into a cacophony of sorts in order for Gina to find a way to place it.
My hand clutched the door handle. I hesitated before I got out of the car. I looked up at the house, at our suite, and saw a light burning in the window.
I thought of asking Dave in, but I didn’t want to tell him what was going through my mind. I still wasn’t certain myself whether I was justifiably or needlessly worried. He kissed me, and in my vulnerability, I let him, his lips still tasting slightly of candy floss and candy apples, of the caramel popcorn we’d shared, mingled with the beer. The warm feeling lingered through me, and I didn’t want to go, but my mind was still reeling.
A moment later, I was standing alone on the sidewalk in the dark, watching Dave’s taillights disappear around the corner. I tentatively stepped forward into the darkness. Down the road, I heard dogs’ bark. The air was scented with a dew that hung heavy with the dust on the road and mingled with my own perspiration.
As I walked up the stairs, I was barely breathing. My heart thumped madly against the inside of my chest and rang against my ears in the darkened, silent stairwell. Then, at the first turning of the stair, I heard those dogs bark again, saw nothing but blackness below me.
I climbed one bare step at a time, as quietly as I could. The baby downstairs would be sleeping. Voices from their television set murmured as I passed by their door. As I arrived nearer to the top of the stairs, that light was still there, glowing under the crack in the front door. I stopped at the top of the stairs, held my ear to the door. I listened to the silence. I stepped inside, and everything was dark except for that light which I could see was coming from under the crack in the closed bathroom door. I saw the outline of the big clunky furniture in the living room. The kitchen was tidy and clean. I stared at the light under the bathroom door and called out Gina’s name. Everything was so quiet I heard a ringing in my ears. I waited, then called out her name again. When she still didn’t answer, I began to wonder whether she wasn’t actually there—whether what I had seen in my mind was only a figment of my sugared-up imagination. I rapped lightly on the bathroom door.
“Can I come in?” I thought I heard a stir then, behind the door, but I couldn’t be sure. It jangled my nerves. I began to wish I was somewhere else, thinking for the first time that I wanted to go back home, conscious then that we didn’t have a telephone. Then, through the open window in the living room, I heard those dogs growl, closer now. I knocked, louder this time, and when Gina did not reply, I opened the door as fast as possible before losing my nerve.
There she sat, precisely as in my vision, holding a razor blade in her right hand, the inside of her left arm plucked with red gashes like she’d raked it through the thorns on a rose bush. She was dripping with blood, splashing tiny red droplets onto the white and black checked tile floor. A towel was wrapped around her wet hair, fluffy white slippers on her feet. She clutched at her open terry robe. She wasn’t crying and otherwise did not stir. Instead, she leaned forward and shut off the water dripping from the tap.
“What are you doing?” I tried to sound calm, measured, but inside, my mind was screaming. I felt shock tingle through my scalp, a panic that rooted me still.
Gina said nothing. Her expression was blank. She still did not cry. Instead, she shook her head as if she was trying to make herself feel something. Or maybe not feel anything at all.
“I’m going to get help,” I yelled. My mind spun, not knowing what else to do, fearful and confused.
“No,” she cried, coming to life suddenly then.
“But I have to. Look at your fucking arm,” I screamed.
She insisted she was fine, she didn’t need anyone, but I ran back down the stairs.
I ran two blocks to Dave’s mother’s house and banged on the front door until Ruby woke up and called the police. By the time Ruby drove me back, the police were already there. I asked her to wait in the car.
I walked back up the stairs with two officers behind me. When I opened the door, Rundle meowed at my feet. The light in the bathroom was out, and the scent of cat urine and unclean kitty litter hit me in the face. I was ashamed of what the police would think, how they might judge the way we lived. I switched on the hall light. The cat had crapped in the middle of the hallway, and I was embarrassed by the look of squalor, trivial I knew, in the face of life and death. Gina was nowhere in sight.
I lead the officers to the bathroom door. One of them had a pad out and was writing everything down as he saw it. I switched on the bathroom light. Gina was gone. There was no blood on the floor, and the bathtub sparkled clean with the scent of the industrial cleaner. I felt afraid of what might have happened to her, mixed with a sudden surge of anger at the predicament she’d left me in; the police likely to think I was the crazy one.
“She must have left,” I said. I tugged at the short strings on the end of my mala bracelet, twisted at them nervously. “She was here. She was covered in blood.”
The two officers exchanged glances. One raised an eyebrow.
“What were you drinking earlier this evening?” the other one asked. And when I told him I had only one beer, he wanted to know if I’d taken any drugs that night. I told him I had not. I rolled the sandalwood beads on my bracelet back and forth between my fingers, counting out a silent prayer.
While I slept over at Ruby’s house that night, Dave and his mother looked for Gina everywhere—the hospital, all the ditches within a few miles of our apartment, the pubs, the Ponderosa. Even at her former foster parents’ house. Eventually, they found her at her mother’s. Of course.
In the morning, I felt a sense of relief that Gina was found safe. But I was still shaky and traumatized from all that had happened. I felt an urge to flee, but I didn’t know where I’d go next, what I’d do.
I walked back over to our apartment and ran into the owners from downstairs.
“How’s her fucking arm?” the woman said, looking tired and quite annoyed. “Next time, try and keep it down, will you? You woke the baby, and we were up half the night.” I walked past, in a stupor, shaky, nauseated.
I found out later that the police hadn’t looked for Gina anywhere or even filed a report. So, when Ruby called to let them know we’d found her, they had no record of it.
“They didn’t believe you,” Ruby said. “Good thing nothing happened to her, or I’d be down there raising bloody Cain.”
It turned out that Gina hadn’t made any deep incisions, just tons of tiny cuts that created a lot of blood but weren’t life-threatening. Instead, she’d cleaned herself up, bandaged her arm, and washed the bathroom floor and tub.
I sat down on the couch and began thinking about all the rejection in her life and that no one loved her as much as she loved them. How alone and unwanted she must feel. But still, I never would have thought she’d have been capable of this.
When I thought about it more, though, reflecting on some of Gina’s behavior, I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. How is it that sometimes we don’t see what’s right in front of us; maybe all of our relationships are like that? Only illusions of how we think people are, how we see them or choose to see them.
When Gina got in, she watched silently as I packed my bags. Finally, I’d decided I was going home. It was all getting to be too much, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was frightened of Gina, and I was frightened of Mr. K., and the summer I’d looked so forward to was utterly ruined.
What was I so afraid of? Becoming like Gina, and if I failed, what would happen if I lost control. First, I’d have no one. Then I’d fall apart and have to rely on strangers, need someone to take care of me.
Dave sat in his car in front of the house, engine off, cigarette in hand, elbow leaning out the open window, radio blasting into the street. He’d offered to drive me to West Hill outside of Toronto, where my parents had got back together and just bought a house.
Since Dave had kissed me in the car that night after we’d been to the fair, something had shifted between us. And now, everything felt different, like it had opened a window, letting me into a secret place I’d never been before. Should I really leave Dave now, I kept asking myself. Abandon Gina?
I finished packing by about half-past two, just after I had eaten. Luckily, I was alone. Dave had taken my suitcase out to the car and left me to look around, make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I took one last look in the bathroom, gleaming now, the polished tiles spotless, and walked down the stairs to the front steps. The young woman who lived downstairs had a bag of groceries in her arms and was balancing it on the handle of the baby’s stroller. She said goodbye to me. Lost in thought—feeling guilty about whether Gina would be okay after I left—I barely answered her, and she must have thought me rude. I stood in the doorway, sipping the last dregs of my coffee.
Gina was sitting on the front step in a sleeveless blouse, leaning on her knees, even though the fall air was a little cool. She sucked in a long drag of her Export A, holding it precariously between her fingers, halfway to her knuckle, to avoid touching or rubbing wet red nail polish. She sucked in, then exhaled, leaving a pinky red ring of lipstick on the filter, the colour of a rose when it bleeds. She was wearing black sandals with silver studs and had small folded tufts of toilet paper between each toe nail, painted to match her lipstick.
I turned my head away and gritted my teeth. I was exhausted, worn down, with a lack of sleep.
“Well, what are you looking for me to say?” Gina asked.
“I expect,” I hissed, “you to be honest.”
