The Girl in the Wall (10 page)

Jim Coulthard didn't give up easily and each time he got in touch with her she lost a little more steam. He got nowhere with her and ended up setting himself up in competition. He called his business “Living with our Dead.” Mrs. Mortimer heard that his photographs were brash and brassy, his business phony, fancy, unreal. She visualized Las Vegas, pictures she'd seen in her dad's
Life
magazine of that pretend city in the desert.

There were those who thought she should have competed, but she didn't have it in her. She let it all go.

When the call came through, she hadn't taken a photograph in over five months. She felt a childlike excitement when she heard the address recited over the phone. It was on Wellington Crescent.

“I'll need a lift,” she said and recited her own address back to the caller.

“Please let it be one of the long low ones,” she said out loud after she had hung up. “Let it be a ranch house.”

She loaded her camera and waited for her ride.

It was a damp morning in November. The fog was so heavy it was like moving through a rain cloud. Mrs. Mortimer liked it this way. When she was younger and woke up to days like this she hurried to get outdoors, to be inside of it. But she never felt that the mist truly surrounded her. It always seemed to be a short distance away. If only she could watch herself from down the street, see her body looming out of the grey, then she would know it was real.

A Moores taxi came to get her. She climbed into the back seat because she knew that was where she was supposed to sit. It always felt odd to her, sitting in the back, purposefully unfriendly, but it did make not talking easier.

The driver made no attempt at conversation, so she settled back to enjoy the ride. She would be silent unless he asked her a particular question, which it turned out he didn't. In addition to not wanting to talk she didn't want to interfere with his driving skills; he didn't seem to have many and there wasn't much in the way of visibility beyond the windshield. He peered over the steering wheel, slowly making his way. He didn't look old enough or big enough to drive but she supposed he must be qualified.

Being inside a car in this weather wasn't nearly as interesting as being on foot.

Finally, in her excitement, she asked, “Do you know the house?”

She thought he looked over his shoulder at her as though it was a stupid question and she supposed it was.

“No,” he said. “I don't know the house.”

It was such a deep voice that Mrs. Mortimer wondered for a moment where it came from. Surely not from the sideways chubby face resting on top of the barely visible shoulder.

He slowed down and made a right turn off the crescent onto a circular driveway. It was late enough for the sun to be up somewhere behind the clouds but you'd never know it in the dimness. The house stood behind a solid wall of fog. Mrs. Mortimer squinted as they crept closer and saw that yes, it was what she had hoped for. Her heartbeat quickened when she saw the house stretching away into the mist in both directions.

She paid the driver, including a good tip. Surely the woman who phoned would reimburse her.

“Would you like me to wait for you?” said that same deep voice.

The idea of a driver waiting had never occurred to her before and she was both suspicious of it and grateful just in case he was being kind.

“No,” she said. “But thanks.”

He drove slowly away and she turned toward the house. As she moved closer she was disappointed to see there were no lights on. The air inside the windows looked no different from the air inside the house on Monck Avenue. It was the colour of nothing. With every step her feelings turned a little further aslant from where they had been when she first heard the address.

The porch light went on and she forgot all about the colour of the air. The figure of a woman was framed in the open doorway. It was her woman, the one of her daydreams. Her hair was in a pageboy, just so. It was all there: she was sleek of form, wearing high heels. Mrs. Mortimer was still too far away to see lipstick but she knew it was there. Only the oven mitts were missing. But that was okay; she could live without the oven mitts. She couldn't expect the woman to be baking peanut butter cookies under the circumstances, whatever they might be. It was the vaguest phone call she'd ever received. The address had kept her from asking her usual questions. The address was her dream.

Each step closer took her further into a quagmire of confusion. The porch light was a single dim bulb; there was no tasteful fixture to soften the entranceway. And the paint on the doorframe was peeling badly. One section of the frame had pulled away from the house altogether. Mrs. Mortimer worried that no one was caring for this home.

She looked again at the woman. The hair was black, too sleek. The print dress hung on pointy bones and made a mockery of Mrs. Mortimer's imaginings. There were no curves, there was no comfy roundness. It was like a mean joke — the way this person looked.

The whole package was wrong. The woman was smoking a filterless cigarette and she blew the smoke sideways out of the corner of her mouth. When Mrs. Mortimer came nearer she could see that the dark hair was greasy, filthy.

On someone else the high-heeled shoes would have been beautiful. They had open toes and were made from a soft velvety material, but they revealed stockingless talons that looked as though they were fighting for air. And the feet reeked: there was no mistaking the odour that wafted up and spoiled the air in the clean misty morning. Mrs. Mortimer had noticed it often enough on her visits to deathbeds. She frequently wondered why people didn't pay more attention to the feet of their loved ones. She would bathe George's feet this very afternoon and every afternoon till he died unless he told her not to. And if she ever had another loved one in her unlikely future, she would tend to his feet too, and keep them clean.

There were sores on the woman's face. She was wearing lipstick all right, bright red and caked on her lips, like it was added to every morning without taking the old layer off. Deep cracks ran in all directions away from her mouth and the lipstick travelled those cracks, perhaps searching for somewhere else to be, in one instance settling in a scab to the left of the woman's mouth.

“Mrs. Mortimer, is it?”

The oily chin wagged and quivered. The voice was ruined from the filterless cigarettes.

“Yes.”

She had to swallow and say it again, as no sound came out the first time.

“Yes.”

“I'm Mrs. Buckingham. Please come in.”

“Thank you.”

To Mrs. Mortimer's relief, no hand was offered.

There was something familiar…

The gash.

When the lips were pulled back they revealed small, yellow teeth.

“You're wearing lavender,” said the gash. “I wish you weren't.”

Sometimes Mrs. Mortimer felt as though there were perhaps only five hundred or so people in the whole world and she kept seeing them over and over again in different situations, playing different roles.

“My Regina is dead,” said the gash. “My daughter.”

“Sorry.”

“Yes, well. Come along in spite of yourself and we'll have a look.”

The air in the house was as cold as outdoors. There were no furnace sounds. At a first glance there seemed to be very little furniture, nowhere to sit while tying up your shoes. There was no deep carpet to sink your toes into and nothing on the walls but pale shapes where paintings used to hang.

Mrs. Mortimer followed the woman down a long hallway to the right of the large foyer. It was a hallway of closed doors. Mrs. Buckingham opened the last one on the left.

Through the open door Mrs. Mortimer saw a window looking out on to a yard that must have led to the river, but in the mist the river was invisible. The interior pane was pushed up and in the frame of the storm window there were three open holes the size of silver dollars. They let in the cold but they didn't let anything out.

The next thing she saw was a sea-green wall. It reminded her for a second of her good night dream, the one with the aquarium and the chance of mermaids. But then she saw it wasn't a wall at all — just a screen in front of more peeling paint and torn and faded wallpaper. On either side of the bed were plastic palm trees. It was a unconvincing attempt at an exotic ocean locale.

Finally, Mrs. Mortimer's eyes sought the bed. Against her will, it seemed. There was a sheet covering the daughter in her entirety. It was the first time that she felt afraid when approaching death, unwilling to see what lay before her. She was familiar with the smell of dying; it was often present in the rooms she visited. But this wasn't like that: this was simply the smell of excrement and she objected to having to experience it. The three small holes in the storm window didn't stand a chance.

She hung back; she wanted to run.

The woman grasped her elbow with rough fingers, urging her forward. She pulled back the sheet.

“This is my Regina,” said the gash.

At first she didn't let herself look. But then her eyes got away on her and lit on the bed. They saw the bruises on the arms and on the nose of all places. They saw the tongue: she'd know that tongue anywhere.

“Hello, Mrs. Mortimer.”

The familiar voice came from behind her.

She spun around to see Jim Coulthard standing by the door with a smirk pasted to his face.

“You,” she said. “What are you…? What am I doing here?”

The two people she feared most in the world spoke at once.

“You're here to take pictures,” said Jim.

“You're here to say goodbye,” said the gash, the same one that had screamed at her the day of the bad thing at the Women's Pavilion.

They looked at each other then and began bickering. They sounded like the grackles that squawked outside Mrs. Mortimer's bedroom window early some mornings. But they made less sense than the grackles.

She focused her eyes on the wooden frame of the window and the three holes that led to the mist. If she could make herself small for a second or two, she could slip through one of those holes and get away faster than if she went back through the front door. Get to George. She worried for a second that her camera wouldn't be able to fit through the hole with her. Outside she could inhale all the clean oxygen in the world. She could go back to before all of it: before George's sickness, before the bad thing and Jim Coulthard, before the tongue in the bed, mostly before George's sickness. But no, there was too much to climb over. She would never get back far enough for anything at all to be okay again.

She turned back to the bed.

“You killed her, too,” she said.

That silenced them.

Mrs. Mortimer replaced the sheet. Two looks at the dead girl were way too many.

“Why?” she asked.

“She got too big for me,” the gash said.

“Ssh!” said Jim. It was a very loud sound.

“I couldn't hide her anymore. Especially with all the trouble she was getting into.”

She looked at Jim then, accused him with her look.

Suddenly Mrs. Mortimer knew where the smothered baby had come from.

“Why did you have to hide her?” she asked.

Mrs. Buckingham sank into the only chair in the room. It was a lawn chair. She put her face in her hands and began to sob.

“Why…why, I was ashamed. I couldn't do anything right, could I? Not even have a proper baby.”

Her skinny shoulders shook and when she looked up her mouth was a lopsided smear.

“We had to keep her a secret. Don't you see?”

“No. Not really,” said Mrs. Mortimer.

“I couldn't take it anymore.” The blubbing continued. “What was I supposed to do? It all got away on me after my husband died. He ruined my daddy's business, saddled me with Regina, and then he up and died on me. I can't be blamed.”

Mrs. Mortimer didn't like hearing the word “daddy” from a grown woman of Mrs. Buckingham's age. And she still didn't know why she was there. They'd had vastly different answers to that question and she was unclear as to who was the boss of the situation.

“Mrs. Buckingham is very particular,” Jim broke in suddenly. “And you're a better picture taker than me, Mrs. Mortimer. We want to create a family scene of some kind.”

“You're not here to take pictures,” said the gash, getting her sobs under control.

“But I've set up,” Jim said, meaning the palm trees and backdrop, Mrs. Mortimer supposed.

“Shut up, you fool,” said the gash. She held her forearm to her forehead and gaped at the ceiling.

“Let's phone someone,” Mrs. Mortimer said, but she said it with no heart.

Mrs. Buckingham stood up. She nudged Jim hard as though to get him moving.

“It's not me you want,” Mrs. Mortimer said as she backed out of the room. “It can't possibly be me that you want for any of your reasons.”

“I can't let you live,” spat the gash. “Not after what you've seen. You should never have come snooping around.”

Jim reached out to stop Mrs. Mortimer and she pushed him away from her with all her strength. Mrs. Buckingham shoved him back at her like he was a puppet made from socks.

As she stumbled down the hall she heard the hissing of the gash.

“Don't let her go,” it said. “It's on you if she makes that phone call, Jim. You idiot!”

The front door had been left ajar.

Why hadn't she taken the taxi driver up on his offer to wait? Clinging tightly to her camera, she ran, staying close to the houses to stay out of sight. There were no fences. She ran without looking back, grateful for the mist. There were some hedges and she fought her way through them and over them. She would not allow him to catch her.

Of all the streets, of all the houses…

She ran till she came to Academy Road, where she crossed the Maryland Bridge to the Misericordia Hospital and a familiar bus stop.