Juliet Was a Surprise Read online

  When he returned, Eden was there in halter top and bikini bottoms, humming to herself as she bustled from cupboard to drawer, hunting something. Her breasts were truly quite fine.

  “You came back,” she said wryly, not having even glanced at him. She did a little grin now and looked him full in the face. “We’re not so scary.”

  The sunlight coming in behind her worked like a halo, the gorgeous rainbow traces perhaps due to some imperfections in the glass. It was so overdone he could have laughed, were he not on guard.

  “Coffee,” he said, lifting his plastic bag to the counter. “And milk. And cherries. I found some at—”

  “Coffee! Oh! Oh! Oh!” She ripped the can from the bag and rolled it against her forehead as one does a cold can of beer. She panted with full tongue. She really was quite the comic. She checked to see that it was fair trade.

  “It’s in there,” he told her, pointing to the lower cupboard with the coffeemaker after she began slamming through them one by one. He told her, yes, he’d like a cup himself, and he preferred it strong.

  WHEN THEY WERE BOTH down at the dock, he went through their stuff. Both had mid-sized packs holding enough to take on a short vacation, but also an amount that could conceivably be all they owned. In hers, a well-thumbed Tom Robbins. A little hash pipe. Or crack pipe? No, he knew what a hash pipe looked like and it was a hash pipe. Why had his mind gone to “crack pipe”? Did something in him want it to be a crack pipe? Also, a little book of phone numbers. Would you take that on a week’s trip? Maybe. And toilet paper. Why take that to a furnished house? Well, it might be a hitch-hiking woman’s reasonable gear.

  Now his knuckle bumped something cold. A pistol. So here it was. He threw his head back and let himself breathe deeply, extravagantly. Then he hefted it. It felt somewhat light. He moved to the window with a view of the yard. He could find no safety switch. He depressed a little button and out slid a magazine, shockingly full. He counted seven. Looking more closely, he saw instead of bullets the rather more impotent folded-up ends of what had to be blanks. A starter’s pistol. For robberies? For two savvy travellers to scare away bad people? Whatever the reason, it was a compact portrait of characters at home in the bad life. Here they were in his.

  He went through Adam’s small bag and it held only clothes, half of which were hers. So Adam was chivalrous. But why—a chill teased him—was there no ID? No wallets, money, cards. No one travelled without ID. Were they seasoned travellers taken to hiding it under mattresses? But why hide it in a rental cottage in Pinanten Lake? Why hide it from him?

  The timing perfect, here came Adam striding across the patio. Checking that he left things the same, he made it to the upstairs bathroom before Adam’s steps sounded in the kitchen. He locked the door, started the shower. He’d get in under the spray and think. But he’d be vulnerable, he could picture the door breaking open, he’d slip in the wet tub in an attack. So he sat on the toilet, pants on, and watched the door. He heard what sounded like the fridge slamming, then Adam’s feet back outside on the deck. He stood and breathed and tried to gather reason to him. Clearly they weren’t who they said they were. Clearly they had plans for him. What these plans were he had no idea. He was still open to the possibility that their intentions were good—were benevolent, in fact. They could be messengers, guides to what on this trip he was trying to relocate, they might be nothing less than a wonderful opportunity. Yet you could be tricked in precisely this way, by anticipating the best. God knows it had happened before. So he must assume the worst but be ready for anything. Stay alert, but open.

  He did take his shower, feeling silly. It would be nothing so crude as smashing down a door and … and what? Stabbing him à la Psycho? He dried off, softly whistling, and dressed in his bathing suit and T-shirt. Flip-flops and UBC ball cap. He wondered if they knew he used to be a professor. He wondered if they’d done research on him.

  He strode down the lawn, arms swinging, flip-flops flapping, midday sun instantly at work on his neck. Walking the damp path through the cattails to the dock, he heard their murmurs before he burst into view. Kneeling on her towel and topless, Eden squeaked and covered up with an arm. Adam, sitting on the overturned red canoe, snickered.

  “Oops. Sorry,” he said. He’d stopped with one foot on the dock.

  “No worries. You scared me.” Eden appeared to trade a look with Adam. “You ever been to France, sailor?”

  It took him a moment to realize she was serious. He told her he had.

  “No big deal then.” She dropped her arm. Adam smiled at him benignly.

  Wondering what this might mean on the deeper level, he knew at the same time that the protocol was to be casual, cosmopolitan. Crudely turning away was as uncool as staring. You didn’t not look at them if they fell into your field of vision. He stood centre-dock with them in the periphery and he successfully kept them there. He could see only that they were very white.

  “Fishing?” he asked Adam. “Or is it too hot?” He saw Adam trade looks with Eden again. “They don’t seem to be feeding, though.” He scanned the water, putting a hand to his ball cap brim as a silly extra shield to the sun. But he almost knew what he was talking about. Where today there were none, last night the many concentric circles out there on the surface had to have been fish sucking down bugs.

  “Let’s do it,” said Adam, slapping the fibreglass of the canoe. He offered to go up and get the worms from the fridge and the rods and tackle box from the shed.

  “Have you seen any paddles?” he called to Adam’s trotting back, and Eden informed him they were under the canoe.

  “Let’s flip it,” she said. “You flip and I’ll catch,” she added, positioning herself to face him but three feet away, across the red hull, no aversion of his eyes possible. He did as best he could to keep his eyes on hers; he wasn’t going to lose this particular trial, whatever it was. As he flipped and she caught, her smile was knowing.

  “If you can look down,” she said, “you’ll also see two life jackets.”

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled as well, though it felt wooden.

  “Could you please try to get him to wear one? He can hardly swim.”

  “All right.”

  “He’ll deny it but he’s a dog-paddler. He can barely get across a pool. A width.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You should put some of this on. You look hot.” Eden flipped him a pink tube. “And could you put some on my back?”

  He caught the tube. He watched her eyes as he undid the cap and squirted a dollop into his palm. Rubbing a dab onto his cheeks, he said, “No. I won’t.” He was pleased with himself, not only his restraint but his ability to see the buildup and interrupt the momentum at what was very likely an important juncture.

  “Oh.” She did a fine job of looking taken aback and slightly hurt. “All right.”

  They slid the canoe in, he not looking at her. He stowed the paddles. After donning one life jacket he threw the other in front, thus laying claim to the back, where a canoe was steered.

  Adam came smiling through the cattails, carrying the fishing gear and a bag that held, he said, an apple for each of them. Eden made a plaintive joke about no beer, then declared that she also wanted to come on their little fishing trip. Adam asked if she was sure. He made his own little joke about pirate ships and females and bad luck.

  “There’s three seats.” She pointed to the canoe. “It’s ordained. And it’s not like you’re going to catch anything anyway.”

  “I was sort of hoping we would,” Adam said. He looked genuinely hopeful, boyish.

  As he watched Adam and Eden play their parts, he considered her use of the word “ordained,” and the bag of apples, which was so biblical as to be funny. He wondered if the apples were planned, or spontaneous slapstick on Adam’s part. And now the supposed change of plan, of Eden coming along. It occurred to him that no one, not a soul, except the McGregors—but who could say they weren’t a part of this?— knew where he was. He
hadn’t told his wife, an omission that had felt vital at the time. As for his work, he was over two years into his extended leave, and most ties there had stretched and broken.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Can you wait one minute? I have to go up and …”

  Adam said of course, he had to get the rods ready anyway. Eden asked if he wouldn’t mind bringing down a thermos of water or, she said in singsong, “something stronger.” Stepping through the cattails he heard her ask Adam to put some lotion on her back.

  He dug the number from the depths of his wallet. An odd European number with more than one area code, he’d dialled it perhaps three times in the half-dozen years since Casey had gone there. Theirs was a profound and troubling relationship, one where not calling always felt as richly significant as calling. He suspected Casey felt the same. They’d never been able to talk about meaningful things; their conversations resembled a small red canoe moving superficially across the lake of what mattered. Casey had been adopted. He was one of the first proofs he had received that nothing happens by accident. Seeming chaos was always choreography, but more complex, and more tightly woven. Your role was yours to find, and the barriers to finding it were towering—career, medication, psychiatry, the visible world, logic itself. But the truth was luminous. It was as exciting as magic.

  And he was excited on the walk up to the house. The sun cooking his neck. The fabric of his shirt teasing his skin. The smell of the grass as it respired, sending his nose the choreography of water and chlorophyll. The bronze doorknob—he could feel tarnish though it wasn’t raised, and though soundless he heard the inner springs and gears of the mechanism as he turned it. Clarity was getting more consistent, and closer.

  As he’d hoped, Casey’s voicemail came on. He found his son’s voice unsettling; he’d never been comfortable with its higher register. Casey asked, in both English and French, that callers leave the date, time and purpose of their call. He sounded the crisp bureaucrat.

  The voice caught him and he hesitated too long. He had to hurry through his message.

  “Casey, it’s your father. It’s Dad. I’ll be quick. I’m going … I’m going fishing, trout fishing. I might be in some kind of trouble, I don’t know. So if you don’t hear from me again by tomorrow, I’m at Pinanten Lake, B.C., renting a house from the McGregors. Mom doesn’t know any of this. Okay.” He wondered what more he might say, until a beep sounded.

  He found a thermos, held his finger under the tap as the water got cold and ran over his message in his mind, wondering what his son might make of it. He hadn’t wanted to sound disturbing—or even worse, crazy—but he could think of no better way of telling the truth, so to speak. He’d only been accurate. Still, if Casey decided he was already in trouble, how long would it take for an address to be found and authorities contacted?

  It occurred to him that it might have not only sounded like a cry for help but been a cry for help. Did some hidden, frightened shadow-self want police to show up tomorrow and … what?

  Well, if the police did come, he could always just show them that everything was fine. He could introduce them to his young friends. At that point he could check everyone’s eyes, the police too, see if they pretended not to know each other, hopefully discover how far-reaching the scenario was this time.

  He found himself gripping the door frame and staring into the hall closet, blinking, as if searching for something he needed for fishing. He truly needed sleep. The coffee hadn’t helped, hadn’t been good for him. He was deadly tired, yet on the opposite side of calm. He cocked his head to a crow yelling from the ridge of trees that separated the McGregors’ yard from the neighbours’, but he didn’t know what it meant. He was getting frustrated with being unable to tell even a warning from a welcome. Generally you just knew, but when they sounded or looked identical, your only chance was to open up and see under the surface of things. Which had been the whole point in coming here.

  Recalling from another time a trick for staying aware, he rummaged through kitchen drawers and cupboards. Peppercorns were good, but he found none, and in the end he settled on wooden matchsticks. He dumped a couple dozen from the box and snapped them in half. With duct tape he painstakingly taped all the jagged bits to his bare ankles and feet, tops and bottoms, binding them tightly.

  Two perched crows watched him try to take normal steps as he navigated the lawn. The flip side to the matchsticks and duct tape was that he’d had to don shoes and socks to hide things. They were brown leather shoes and white socks and didn’t go with his bathing suit or, he guessed, with paddling a canoe. He didn’t mind being ugly but feared his outfit might give away that he was on to them and would not be distracted, no matter what lure or drama they used.

  Halfway down the lawn he had an idea. He turned painfully and doubled back. In the fridge he found some mustard, the brownish European kind, and applied an earnest layer to his nose. He checked himself in the hall mirror and with a finger fashioned a pointed little flip of mustard at the nose tip. He would tell them it was a new and superior sunscreen from Germany. If they saw past this shield and asked about his wearing dress shoes in a canoe, he would tell them that the last time he’d been fishing his son hooked him in the foot, right between the toes. Anyone who’d suffered that would never fish again without shoes, he’d say.

  He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and he smiled at the man with ball cap and sunglasses and ochre nose with its elfishly curled tip. Of course, if they were on his side—he still held out hope that they were—they’d understand these precautions. They could all laugh together after they revealed themselves. But he mustn’t be deluded by this hope. That was what usually got him in trouble.

  HE STROKED STRONGLY and alertly from the rear while Adam dipped a seemingly calmer paddle up front. In the middle, Eden kneeled in a regal posture, having joked about being an Egyptian queen. Her arms hung straight down from her shoulders.

  He’d forgotten to bring water or beer but they’d forgiven him and Adam had sprinted up for three beers after Eden comically batted her lashes. Her top was back on. When Adam returned with three cans (and where had they come from?) he tried to commandeer the rear seat, saying he’d been a camp counsellor and could scull a canoe into a dock sideways, and quipped that men with yellow noses couldn’t be trusted to steer. Neither of them mentioned his feet. But there was no way he was going to let both Adam and Eden sit behind him, let alone steer. He refused and told them that he was also expert, and once they’d cast off and paddled a small distance, he saw what it took to steer. Though he jolted them a few times he thought he did a fairly convincing job, but after the failed negotiations there on the dock, Adam and Eden pretended to be angry and neither spoke to him.

  The water, the naked fact of floating on it and moving through it, was thrilling. Anyone’s small shift of balance was instantly felt by the other two, a communication so intimate it wasn’t unlike sharing one long body. When they approached the middle of the lake, he didn’t like it when a fish jumped right beside them. It was a ridiculously large trout and such a blatant lure to “come fishing” that it felt heavily portentous and dark, especially as it happened in the deepest, most isolated part of the lake. Adam pretended to be excited by it. The plan had been to paddle to the span of reeds on the other side, because that was where most boats appeared to gather, but after the trout jumped, Adam wanted to fish right there and then. Eden had the rods lying to either side of her, and Adam asked her to pass him one.

  But he ignored Adam and kept paddling, even when they questioned him. When he ignored them long enough, they stopped talking. So he was succeeding. They were learning who exactly they had taken on. He began to feel immensely proud, even to the point of taking deep, ecstatic breaths, which he noticed in time and recalled from the past and stopped. But not soon enough.

  “Know what?” Eden said softly. “I think I’d like to go back.”

  He was careful not to change his paddle stroke. Adam didn’t speak.

  “I�
��m maybe feeling a little seasick, you know?” she added.

  “Want us to turn around?” asked Adam, gently.

  “I dunno. What do you think, honey?” She did a good job sounding vulnerable.

  “Captain?” said Adam, rather too loud. “What say we head back. We can do this thing another time, maybe.”

  “No,” he said. “I really want to go in … there.” He lifted his paddle to point in the direction they were headed, a dark gap in the bank of reeds. He’d been watching it for some time. Yesterday he’d seen two canoes emerge from it. It was a stream or inlet.

  “That’s the channel I heard about,” said Adam. He cupped a hand over his eyes, gazing like a sailor. “It goes to a second lake. Little Pinanten.”

  He wasn’t sure if he liked that Adam knew about it, but he kept paddling. It wasn’t far. He could see that the channel was no more than eight or ten feet wide. Now Eden was acting angry with Adam, who in turn acted excited about their new adventure, marvelling at how narrow the channel was, and how tropical looking, and then blurting, “African Queen!” Which might have been a mistake on his part, joining her earlier comment about Egypt and revealing the choreography in too broad a hint.

  And only now, watching Eden kneeling no more than two feet in front of him, did he consider what he’d been taking in all along. Her hands resting on her thighs, her spine straight— this posture would be called “pert,” except for the strategic, languid rolling of her shoulders in rhythm to their paddling. It was adept and perfect in its subtlety. Of course she knew he watched her. Her communication couldn’t be more direct. Her bare skin, luscious tan. From her bum crack, peaking above her bikini bottoms, a tattooed blue hand waved at him. He could smell her, a confusing mix of scents. Appropriately, comically, a tackle box full of lures lay not an inch from her bum. They would know, probably to the month and day, how long he’d been without sex.