Suitable Precautions Read online

  Ella quietly shut the door behind the exterminator and locked it. She closed the blinds in the living room and sat in her new reading chair, her blood thudding in her cheeks and her fingers cold and raspy against the smoothness of the cream envelope. It didn’t mean anything. There was nothing to mean. It was just a letter, a mistake. Someone who didn’t know that Matilda had died. It was sad, that’s what it was. Sad and that was all. Why was she worried? What was there to worry about? This was her house and she had lived in it for months. She hadn’t done anything wrong. No one had blinked twice at the antique store when she paid cash for the bookshelf. She had been downright honest, telling the salesman he had undercharged her by sixty dollars when he rang up the bill. And who was to say the letter had anything to do with the money? Imagine an old woman with a body full of cancer hauling bags of money up those rickety attic stairs and prying up the floorboards with hammers and crowbars. It was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.

  Ella took a deep breath and looked at the envelope. The penmanship was strong and dynamic: thin, hard, written with urgency, Ella could tell. The return address on the back was carefully scripted. No smudges. Each letter clear and precise, but spiky, impatient for an answer. Whatever was inside was important. Beautiful, maybe. Sad, almost definitely. Nothing at all to do with Ella or the money. A coincidence of address, just like the hydro bills that still came to her house addressed to M. Giacoma.

  Ella took her pen out of her purse. “Recipient deceased,” she wrote on the envelope. She just hadn’t been clear enough the first time.

  Ella slipped the letter in the mailbox that afternoon, along with a large donation to the Toronto Humane Society. She returned her new boots and gave the money to Girl Guides selling cookies on the street corner, their cheeks pink and their teeth new and white.

  If the letter came again, she was going to ignore it, Ella decided. Throw it away and that was it. It had nothing to do with her or her new life.

  Ella had told her parents she had landed a job as a ghost-writer for nearly famous people who wanted to write their autobiographies but couldn’t. A lack of time, maybe, or talent, she said. Ella’s father tried to get her to talk about her work when they went out on Sunday afternoons.

  “Oh, look at this one,” he said, pointing to a glossy hardcover as he and Ella browsed through the Spring Sale section of his favourite bookstore. “I wonder if it’s any good.”

  “Dad, you know I can’t talk about my work. It’s part of my contract,” Ella said.

  “Oh, I know, I know. I just wonder.” He walked over to another table and held up a book. “What about this one?”

  Ella shrugged. “It’s too soon for any of mine to be out, Dad.”

  Her dad bought the book anyway and made her sign it: To Dad, Who knows all my secrets.

  Her mother shouted out names at random.

  “Tom Cruise,” she said.

  “No, Mom. I don’t get paid a Tom Cruise salary.”

  “Okay, Anne Murray.”

  “More like Anne Murray, but still no.”

  “Leonard Cohen.”

  “Mom, why would Leonard Cohen need me to write his book?”

  “I’m just saying, Ellie, that I wish you got the credit for what you do. Those people you write for are just nobodies pretending to be somebodies. I bet they couldn’t string two words together without you, but it’s their ugly mugs on all those covers.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ella said.

  It would have been true. Ella didn’t mind anonymity. While people thought she was writing anonymously, she was living anonymously, cycling through the city on her rusted ten-speed, buying flowers and weaving them into the baskets of other bikes chained outside the flower shop. She bought fruit at the Chinese market. Ripe mangoes, raspberries that stained her lips, her thumb, her forefinger. In the first flush of spring she watched children in yellow rain slickers feeding ducks at the pond with day-old bakery bread. In the autumn she sketched the trees in the park, drawing them thin and bare with the curves of old women. But life was not meant to be this easy and beautiful, she was sure, and so every day she did something that disgusted her. She touched the severed pigs’ heads at the meat market. She picked a cigarette butt off the ground and smoked it. That is worth some money, when you think about it, she said to herself. That is worth some money.

  She decided she didn’t want to know the story of the money. Good luck should make her thankful, not afraid. She had always been a lucky person, and fortune, so she heard, favoured the brave. In the thick heat of summer she had sewn a few hundreds into the lining of her good wool coat and felt courageous.

  The letter arrived six times that year, the same little envelopes, the same handwriting, but Ella was firm—they went in the garbage, unopened, and she got on with her day. Buying lemonade from the neighbourhood children, tipping them each a dollar as the sour juice made her squint. Raking the leaves for Mrs. Robertson, who had arthritis and poor eyesight. Never leaving anything less than a twenty in the collection plate. Ella made a point of shovelling the fine, dusty powder on the day of the first snowfall. She wanted to bake her mailman cookies to apologize for things from the winter before. She thought about buying him mittens as a Christmas present, maybe red and navy ones to match his Canada Post jacket. His hands had been so pale, and this year she was making an effort.

  “FIFTY-ONE CENTS IS NOT A LOT TO ASK,” Charlie said. “Find me anybody else who would take a stinking letter from here to Saskatoon for fifty-one cents, and I’ll be damned. You think you can go up to someone on the street and get them to take a letter down the block for that?” Ella said no, she didn’t think so. “You’re damn right,” Charlie said. “You can’t.”

  Dangerous dogs shouldn’t be left to terrorize the neighbourhood.

  He didn’t steal pension cheques, so stop calling the cops.

  People who didn’t shovel their snow should try doing his job and not breaking their legs. Ella of all people should know that.

  If he had had a bad day, he might go on for hours.

  Ella went to the kitchen to get Charlie a beer, thinking for the hundredth time that no matter what, those gloves had been worth the money. Even now it seemed like an extravagant idea, cashmere lining and Italian leather, but she had talked herself into it and made a plan, knowing that it was a good year for grand gestures.

  She had waited until a bad snowfall and then watched the mailman come up the walkway. When his boot hit the wobbly first step of her porch, Ella had crouched a little and jammed the small flat box through the mail slot. It was a tighter fit than she thought, and the shiny gold wrapping scraped most of the way off. She hung onto the corners of the box with pinched fingers.

  “What now?” The mailman’s voice came through the door.

  Ella shoved the gift forward a little and lost her grip. The box slipped onto the porch and the brass flap that covered the slot snapped shut on the wrapping. Ella yanked the paper back and balled it up in her hands.

  “Sorry,” she said through the door.

  She poked the flap up again with one finger and saw the mailman from the waist down. He turned the box over.

  “They’re mittens,” she said, panicked. “Gloves, I mean.”

  He tucked the box lid under his arm and tried one, stretching his fingers inside the soft leather.

  “Fits like a glove,” he said, reaching his hand closer to the mail slot. Ella didn’t laugh.

  The mailman kicked at the salt on the steps, which were scraped down to the bare concrete. Ella wasn’t sure what to do next.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “What about you,” he checked the letters in his bag, “Ella?”

  They spoke through the mail slot. Ella said they should meet at the pasta place on the corner when his route was done.

  “No, I’ll pick you up,” he said, sliding the mail to her, waiting for her to take it before he let go. Ella had felt stupid as the flap clanged shut and the mailman walked away. Her calves were cramping an
d she had forgotten to ask for his name.

  But it didn’t matter now, Ella thought happily, popping the cap off the beer. Charlie loved her just the way she was. She was his. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” she whispered to herself as she padded back to the living room and handed him the bottle.

  “A cold beer and a hot woman,” Charlie said. “This is heaven, right, babe?”

  Ella said that it was. She stretched her legs out along the couch and let him balance the bottle between her bare ankles. When it spilled, he licked it off her skin, careful with his tongue as his hands pushed up the leg of her jeans. He spilled more on her shin, licking as he went. The blond hairs on Ella’s thighs stood up from the cold and so she took the bottle and began pouring. Down his chest, over his waist. They licked, drunk on expectation, and Ella rushed to take off her panties before they were doused in beer, knowing the way the cheap fabric stained. She wrapped her legs around him tightly; it so often seemed that Charlie was just barely tethered to her, that when they made love he was in danger of gliding over her and disappearing.

  She washed his uniform in the sink, the washing machine broken again and the beer stains setting. First his shirt, then his pants, which she hung over the shower curtain rod to dry. She cleaned everything. Washed her hair, the beer bottle. Once, after seeing a police show, she made Charlie scrub down the entire couch: if a crime were committed in the house and the police checked for bodily fluids, she knew she would feel unbearable shame, even if she were lying dead in the next room, her throat slit by a drug addict trying to steal her stereo.

  “You’re crazy,” Charlie said to her, “but I love you.”

  Ella kept washing her hair.

  She bundled him up for work on winter mornings, taking care to tighten his scarf, reminding him to bring his gloves. He never left the house without an extra pair of socks in his bag, in case of rain. “Happy feet make happy people,” Ella said. In the summer Ella froze bottles of water halfway, alternating drops of juice from fresh lemons and limes into each distinct layer of ice. This was her definition of love.

  It had stopped amazing Ella that she loved Charlie, really loved him, and yet lied to him the way she did. She read him poems when he couldn’t sleep, and he brought her bouquets of dandelions from abandoned hydro fields. Sometimes they fought over the dirty dishes in the sink, and sometimes Ella was lonely and cried quietly, hoping Charlie wouldn’t wake up and ask her what was wrong. They were in love in a very strange and troubled world, Ella knew, and the fact that they were happy was enough for her to know that the lie was worth it, that the work she did to keep it up was love itself. If one of the letters showed up in Charlie’s mailbag, Ella said nothing about it and threw it in the garbage. She stopped bugging Charlie to go to church on Sundays. She had found faith.

  Ella knew there was a paradoxical relationship between truth and lie: the more outrageous the lie, the more people believed it to be true; the more outrageous the truth, the more people believed it to be a lie. Either way, you believed. If you were lucky, Ella thought, the difference between the two eventually disappeared, and you kept standing in your bra in front of the bathroom sink, washing beer out of a uniform.

  “I’m a ghostwriter,” she had said over spaghetti on their first date. “Freelance.”

  It had been easy to lie, easier still to keep it up when Charlie moved in during Ella’s second spring in the house. Charlie’s salary was enough, and when it wasn’t Ella made up the difference, pretending to ghostwrite. Ella imagined life as a rich woman, and she knew what it was like being a poor one, and now she was comfortable. That was the best so far. She and Charlie ate fish and chips on Fridays and thought about the names of their children, the ones they would have when they had saved a little money and maybe planted a tree in the backyard.

  “How about Emily for a girl and Aaron for a boy?” Ella asked.

  “When we have the money, babe,” Charlie said. “But I like Emily.”

  Everything had a price. Ella discovered this to be true after Charlie told her he couldn’t imagine his life without her, that he wanted to marry her. Ella started having dreams.

  They were different dreams, but somehow always the same. In the first one, the house was burning down. The blue paint was glowing an electrified orange, melting in radioactive globs onto the lawn. The white trim cracked. The old wood split apart in violent explosions. Charlie was there, inside the house, and Ella was screaming, Charlie, Charlie, get out! But Charlie just stood there behind the broken screen door, shaking his head at Ella, his skin melting, mixing with the blue paint. In another, Ella and Charlie were on a sailboat. Ella with her hair around her shoulders, basking in the sun and watching Charlie turn the ship’s wheel. A storm followed them. It pushed them closer and closer to the horizon. The force of the wind whipped Ella’s hair across her face, drawing blood. Look, Ella, look, isn’t it beautiful? Charlie asked her. He smiled in a way that made his skin taut over his skull. Ella could see all the way down to the bone.

  “Baby, another bad dream?” Charlie asked when Ella woke up sweating in bed.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “Can’t remember,” she lied.

  “It’s just a dream, baby,” he said. “Go back to sleep. I’ve got to get up soon.”

  The dreams became worse if she had used the money. On the day she spent two fifty-dollar bills on a new blue dress, she dreamed of hurtling towards the earth in a ripped-apart airplane. She kept trying to reach for Charlie’s hand, but couldn’t find it. The plane slammed into the water, and Ella felt herself drowning. She woke up coughing.

  Unconscious guilt, she told herself. These dreams don’t mean anything. But she knew otherwise. She let the droplets of sweat evaporate off her body and listened until Charlie’s breath came slow and even out of his mouth, smelling just slightly of garlic. She got up and walked naked out into the garden to eat a handful of earth.

  She started saving the envelopes that arrived from Rome, tying them with a red ribbon and climbing the ladder to the attic. She sat cross-legged on the dusty floorboards for hours at a time, thinking. Something needed to be done.

  She wore her blue dress to their anniversary dinner. Charlie gave her a pair of beautiful green earrings, the colour of Ella’s eyes, he said, and a card. On the front was a watercolour picture of two people holding hands and walking along a beach at sunset. Love is the air, the ocean, the land, it said. When she opened the card, there was part of an e. e. cummings poem that she liked written in Charlie’s spidery handwriting:love is the voice under all silences,

  the hope which has no opposite in fear;

  the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:

  the truth more first than sun, more last than star.

  Happy Anniversary, it said after that.

  He signed it, For Ella, my sun, my star, my ocean. Love, Charlie.

  She gave him the stack of letters in a cloth-covered box.

  “What’s this?” Charlie said, undoing the ribbon and flipping through the letters.

  “You don’t recognize them?” Ella asked. “You deliver them every once in a while.”

  “I don’t know, babe,” Charlie said. “If I looked at everybody’s mail all the time, I’d go nuts. I don’t even read my own mail. Most of the time I don’t care what I put in the box as long as there isn’t a cat clawing at my leg or some little old lady telling me I forgot her Sears catalogue.”

  There was disappointment in Ella’s fingers as she rearranged her silverware on the clean white tablecloth.

  “No, babe. Don’t be like that. I’m sorry.” He put his hand on hers. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to give paper for the first anniversary,” Ella said. “That’s if you’re married, I guess, but I thought it was a nice idea. I figured, what with you being the greatest mailman in the world and all, that we should return these. Paper, right?”

  Charlie was silent.

 
“I thought it could be a love letter, or something,” Ella said a little desperately. “Sent again and again from across the ocean. Imagine sending that and never getting a reply, never knowing what happened to your letter.”

  She wanted to tell him that returning such a letter would be an act of mercy. An act of penance. That she was planning to donate her dress to the Salvation Army. She wanted to tell him everything.

  “But babe,” Charlie said as he twirled an envelope in his fingers, “it’s from Italy.”

  Ella reached into her purse and pulled out two plane tickets. Roma, they said.

  “Ella! You’re crazy. I knew from the beginning you were crazy. You were the one on the route that was craziest.” He thumped the tickets on the table. “Do you know how many washing machines these could buy?”

  Ella shrugged. “It’s only paper, Charlie,” she said. “Happy anniversary.”

  They got drunk and laughed all night long, but the next day Ella went to church and prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of travellers and harvests, of seekers of lost and stolen articles. The patron saint of mail. The protector against shipwrecks.

  I SHOULD TELL YOU, Ella almost said when Charlie took the letters out of his backpack again, but the noise of the train stopped her. She and Charlie had talked little since the rusty squeals of the engine had combined with the drunken songs of the cigarette-smoking men, three or sometimes four of whom hung out of the stuck-open windows, yelling obscene Italian to the nonnas with thick ankles who dotted the dried-out paths alongside the tracks. Ella had even stopped holding Charlie’s hand, the clattering of their wrist bones against their shared plastic armrest not worth the effort. In the corner of the car, there was a chicken in a cage. A dog smelling of junkyard roamed the aisle. A nun lost herself in prayer as the ticket collector tapped people on the shoulder who pretended not to hear him.

  “Strange pilgrims,” Charlie shouted into Ella’s ear.