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They sat in Whalen’s lush parlor, and she couldn’t keep herself from ru
After that she and Whalen met secretly, mostly in his family’s second car, parked in one of his father’s disused industrial yards down near the elevators. They’d toss around in the car’s mahogany-trimmed interior and scooped-out leather seats, then share American cigarettes afterwards, watching the lights of the moored lakeboats sizzle through the dark. How much of the thrill was sparked by that first betrayal of her brother and how much was her true affection for Whalen, she could not say today, but sitting in his car on those nights, it was as though the long-rusted gears of her own life had finally begun to turn.
Then at di
Her brother may have viewed Thunder Bay as a trap to escape after their mother’s death, but Diane had no such ambitions. Whalen would be taking over one of his father’s businesses, and though they’d yet to meet publicly, she believed there was a future for them, especially once Charlie was off at university. How strange it was, she’d often thought since, that she’d be the one to make it out of this place in the end, the one to accomplish things and see the world—only to fall back again, into a place even more dangerous and hopeless than the one they’d known.
Now with her mouth dry and rubbery from what must have been an hour of talking, Diane removed the goggles and clicked off the recorder, ending her Session early. But in the dance of light lingering in her eyes she found the phantom of Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow—Theodore’s favorite painting—a work she and Arthur once saw on a trip to New York: hunters returning to a village with their kill, one measly fox strung up, the rough men either pleased with their catch or gravely disappointed. Either proudly providing for their people or preparing to hunt them, one couldn’t be sure.
She went downstairs, made tea, and sat in the chair with a good vantage of the front sidewalk. Will’s class ended at 3:25. His walk usually took nine minutes. And it was already 3:46, which could mean anything, really, and she tried to pry her eyes from the clock as her mind was already spi
Since she’d been scouring the paper for news of that orphan who’d gone missing, Thunder Bay had assumed an even more sinister timbre. Trucks slowing out front for children to pass now seemed menacing, carnivorous, and the woods behind their house, with its dismal, soldierly birches, seemed ever more ready to conscript her son and order him out into the trees. Of course, children went missing all the time in Toronto—yet somehow these tragedies blended into the noise of the city. Here it was close, intimate, like a terrible chime struck in your bedroom.
She walked again to the sink, poured out her tea, rinsed the cup, set it in the dish rack, after this realizing that she’d actually wanted it, so she flipped on the kettle again—for a moment terrified it would shock her—and stood with her hands on the counter, listening to it heat up like a jet fighter approaching from far off.
With a fresh cup steeping, she walked back to the window—3:51—her eyes scouring the street, the neighborhood’s most attentive husbands already pulling into driveways to help out with di
7
A month passed, and the fall days chilled at their edges, warm only for a moment at noon. Each morning his mother would press the back of her lotioned hand to his cheek. “You seem peakish,” she’d say. “Why not stay home today—your immune system needs time to adapt.” Then she’d hurry off to Venice to fetch the thermometer. Yet despite her best efforts—she ordered once-illicit choke-prone foods like hot dogs and enticing films and art supplies, and even offered to get cable, including the movie cha
School itself was numbing, but not unpleasurably so. The building housed and sustained a great oceanic boredom, a boredom so vast it could be tasted. During the most tedious moments, he daydreamed of the freedoms he’d surrendered: languid afternoons of masterpiece painting in New York, his mother dropping a bowl of slow-cooked chicken stew beside his easel; later napping on the sun-warmed carpet in Cairo, the light pouring lava through his eyelids as she picked “The House of the Rising Sun” at the table in Paris. Still, he loved how school was something all children were subject to, a plague to endure together. There was freedom in this unity. It rescued him from the worry of what to do next that had constantly tortured him at home.