Suitable Precautions Read online

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m glad we’re here.”

  “What?”

  He handed her a granola bar.

  In Ella’s guidebook to Italy there was a section on train travel. She had highlighted the prices, the connecting stations, the numbers to call for schedules and reservations, even though she couldn’t understand the recorded messages she got when she dialled. Under her pens the map of intersecting train lines turned into iridescent veins and arteries, criss-crossing the leg of Italy, their ink-blood pooling, it seemed, somewhere near Rome. All roads lead to Rome, the caption below the map said. The facing page had a health warning about deep vein thrombosis. There was no mention of chickens.

  Charlie kissed Ella on the lips as the train pulled into the station. The men got off the train, leaving behind the virile stink of their armpits, dog fur, a few feathers. The nun stayed where she was. “This is it,” Charlie said.

  Charlie inched his way past the nun who was faking sleep. Ella looked at him and imagined herself having his children, taking care of him when they were both old and he was sick and thin from cancer and her eyes were milky white with cataracts.

  “Ella,” he said. “Are you coming?”

  Ella put the highlighted guidebook into her bag, sure the nun was watching through the reptilian sliver of her right eye. Charlie helped Ella down the stairs and held her hand as they walked into the pearl pink sunlight that settled over the city. She held on tighter as they walked alone, together, into a stream of women on scooters, their hair unfurled; of men in pointy-toed shoes and dark sunglasses, saying, Pronto, pronto, into their cellular phones; of angels etched in the stone façades of banks and insurance companies.

  Ella bought a carved giraffe from a North African man selling his goods off a tattered blanket. His hands, covered in pink and grey scars that snaked up his arms, touched hers when he gave her the figurine. “You will have good luck,” he told her. She believed him on the grounds that a man with such scars would not joke about luck. Charlie hailed a taxi. The world now negotiable, it would never be flat again, no matter how many times Ella had dreamed of sailing to the edge of the earth and looking over.

  The dreams had changed since she bought the plane tickets. The night before the flight, Ella had seen herself in fields of poppies, her feet bare and covered in earth. She heard Charlie’s voice calling to her from a great distance. Look, Ella, look, he said. Isn’t it beautiful? Ella’s hair was long and tangled and touched the backs of her elbows, tickling her. But it wasn’t her hair, after all. It was an avalanche of butterflies. Yellow. Black. They blocked her view of whatever it was Charlie wanted her to see. They flew in her eyes, into her ears. She could barely make out Charlie’s words above the fervent fluttering of wings. In another dream she saw Charlie and a small girl playing in a park, the girl in a yellow rain slicker, feeding ducks. Charlie turned to look at Ella. With a shrug, he took the little girl’s hand and walked away.

  “Another bad dream, baby?” Charlie had said when Ella woke up breathing hard.

  “Sort of. No. I don’t know.”

  “Well go back to sleep, we’re leaving early for the airport.”

  “Did you pack the letters?” Ella asked.

  “Yeah, babe,” Charlie had said. “Everything’s fine.”

  Now, as Ella clutched the wooden giraffe in her hand and Rome washed over her through the window of the taxi, she knew Charlie was right. She was surer than ever that the world could be simple, could be beautiful. She and Charlie were going to return the letter. She was going to tell him everything. She was still working up the courage. She thought of them running up the crooked front walk when they got home, flinging open the door, laughing and kissing as she told Charlie the story again, tearing the rest of the lining off the old couch frame to show him the multicoloured paper that had given her nightmares. He might throw some of the bills in the air just to see them fall to earth, saying, Look, Ella, look. It’s beautiful. They were going to plant a maple in the backyard and make love underneath it. Emily for a girl. Aaron for a boy.

  “Okay, okay,” the taxi driver said as he pulled up to their cheap hotel. “Okay.”

  “Wait,” Ella said, turning to Charlie. “I think we should return the letters now.”

  “Now? Why don’t we get settled, have some lunch, or something. I’m tired, babe.” Charlie reached for the door handle.

  “No,” Ella said, grabbing his arm. “No, Charlie, please. We can’t. We have to do it now. We have to.” It was spring—why was it so hot? The windows. Had the taxi driver closed the windows?

  “Jesus, Ella. What’s wrong with you?” Charlie took out his wallet to pay the fare. “We’re here. Let’s check in, drop off our bags, at least.”

  But Ella reached into his backpack and clawed for the stack of letters. She peeled one off and shoved it in front of the cab driver. “Here,” she said, jabbing at the return address. “Here, we want to go here, right now.”

  The cab driver looked at her, then at Charlie who shook his head. The cabbie lit a cigarette. “Right now,” Ella said again, clapping her hands, and the driver finally turned the key in the ignition. Ella, ashamed but pleased that the car was moving again, sat back against the seat and felt the sweat press into her thin sweater.

  “It’s lucky we decided to take a vacation,” Charlie said. “You’re about ready to crack.”

  The cab drove for only a few minutes through the weaving traffic of the city before stopping in front of a small cobblestone laneway off a street of gelato stores and panini bars. There was a derelict church on the corner. Ella saw that the old apartment doors lining the alleyway were made of thick, weathered wood, the door handles the heads of rusted lions, the door knockers the faces of angels. “Here?” she asked. The cabbie flicked his cigarette out the window in response.

  “Will you wait?” Charlie asked the driver. “Keep the meter running on us. We’re only going to be a minute. One minute. Okay, Ella? Can we be quick about this?”

  “But Charlie.”

  “Ella, come on. Meter’s running.” He grabbed his backpack off the seat, fishing for the stack of now crumpled letters, one of them already in Ella’s sweaty hand.

  The cab driver unfolded a newspaper and lit another cigarette as Charlie walked quickly down the laneway, Ella trotting to catch up. Charlie checked the address and then stopped in front of a large wooden door, painted green, on the left-hand side. There was no doorbell, no knocker, and so Charlie, before Ella could stop him, pounded loudly with the heel of his hand.

  “Charlie!”

  “What?”

  It was too late. An elderly woman opened the door, shuffling back a few steps in her sturdy black shoes, laced tightly, before jamming a small doorstop in with her foot. Ella looked at her old nylons, pilled and with a small run at the ankle, which disappeared under the billowing waves of her faded black housedress. Her hair, mostly grey, was still streaked black in places and tied back in a bun. She smelled vaguely of lilacs. She reminded Ella of her own grandmother. Maybe everything was going to be fine.

  “Sì?”

  “Hello,” Ella said, forcing her lips off her teeth in a nervous attempt at friendliness. “Hello, do you speak English?”

  The woman looked from Ella to Charlie and back to Ella. She shook her head and clasped her hands together.

  “We’re from Canada,” Charlie said, “Toronto.”

  “Yes, Toronto,” Ella said again quickly. “We live in Toronto and these letters,” she took the stack from Charlie and held them out to the woman, “these letters come to us there.”

  The woman took the packet, undoing the ribbon. She looked at Ella again, then Charlie, then back at the letters. She shook them in her hand, asking a question.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t speak Italian,” Charlie said. “No parlo Italiano,” he tried.

  The woman asked the question again, then again, louder each time, until she was shouting at Charlie, then Ella, throwing the le
tters onto the street where they landed with a smack, scattering like a bunch of small white pigeons. The woman shuffled forward, one finely manicured finger, the knuckle swollen, pointing at Ella, so close that Ella was terrified she might actually touch her, that the force of that one finger might stop the wild beating of her heart, killing her instantly.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ella said as Charlie put an arm in front of her.

  “Hey, lady. Back off, okay? We’re just returning your mail. I’m a mailman.”

  The woman turned to Charlie, stomping her foot and then pointing to the letters, to herself, her apartment. She tugged at the material of her dress and pointed again to the letter, to the washing on the line overhead.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ella said.

  “C’mon, babe. Let’s go.” Charlie wrapped an arm around Ella’s shoulder. They walked back to the cab, Ella half turned around, tripping over Charlie’s heels as the woman stood in the middle of the street, her words a flood of incomprehensible curses streaming along the cobblestones.

  “Whatever, lady,” Charlie called without turning around, shaking one hand dismissively.

  “Charlie, don’t. Please don’t.” Ella started crying.

  “Ella, it’s okay. It’s not worth it. I see lots of weirdos on my route. That lady’s nothing.” He opened Ella’s car door and slid in beside her. “Back to the hotel, please.”

  “Charlie.”

  “Seriously, El, don’t let her get to you. Who knows what her problem is. Don’t let it spoil our vacation, okay? It was a really good idea, the letter thing.” He kept his arm around her until she stopped shaking, but Ella still wished they had never come to this street, never come to Rome. Charlie was wrong, she knew that now. It was a bad idea, all of it. How could she have been so stupid, so selfish? She should have left the money in the attic, moved out of the house, even. She couldn’t tell him the story now, she thought. It was just too risky. This was crazy. She was crazy. She was. Why did Charlie love her? She didn’t deserve it. It was all her fault and she was never going to be able to make it up to him.

  Their hotel room was small with a low and crooked ceiling. The exposed wood beams made Charlie think of a church. They made Ella claustrophobic.

  “I’ll go get some fruit,” he said adjusting the straps of his backpack as Ella sat gingerly on the bed.

  “What? No, don’t go.”

  “Oh, come on. You just need a rest. You’re too sensitive about stuff like this. Relax and try to forget about that crazy woman. When I come back we’ll have a shower and go for a nice dinner or something, okay?”

  “Please don’t go,” Ella said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Babe,” Charlie sat down beside her, “you don’t have anything to be sorry about. I’ll be back before you know it. You’re just overtired. Take a nap. Look up something fun in your guidebook for tomorrow.”

  “Charlie, please.”

  “Just relax.” Charlie said, the keys jingling in his hand as he kissed her on the forehead. “Dream of me.”

  She didn’t. She lay on the bed and dreamed of nothing but blackness and silence, and when she woke up she wasn’t sure that she had been dreaming at all. Maybe she had just been staring into the blackness of the windowless room, listening to the sounds of the waiters in the street restaurants serve dinner, clear the plates, close the doors and stack the patio chairs; the women walking away in their stilettos; the sirens of the police cars, the ambulance. They had all died away and now it was quiet, and Ella, sleeping or not, stared into the blackness and silence, waiting for Charlie to come back. She thought he might bound into the room with a bag of oranges and a story of misadventure, hilarious and unbelievable. Something about him getting locked in the walk-in freezer of a fancy restaurant, or maybe of him volunteering for a street performer’s act and then finding himself stuck in the very box into which he was supposed to disappear. Would you believe it? he’d ask. Not a word, Ella would say back, the orange juice on her tongue tart, the flesh of the fruit between her teeth.

  Ella turned on a light and checked the time. It had been hours since the woman had shouted at them. Cursed them.

  Ella reached into her bag for the guidebook. She started looking up the telephone numbers of the local hospitals and police stations, whispering a short prayer before she dialled. She called, asking for anyone who spoke English.

  HE MIGHT LIVE, if he’s lucky, the doctor said. But the knife had pierced a lung, his stomach; it had cut through his liver and intestines, the most significant problem by far. There was a serious infection now and he had lost a lot of blood before he had been found. Ella should be prepared.

  “For what?” Ella asked stupidly.

  “He lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said again. “And now he has a fever.”

  “Oh,” Ella said. “Oh.”

  Charlie was sleeping. He was in pain, they told her. This was better.

  Charlie woke up crying at one point. He grabbed Ella’s hand.

  “Babe, I’m so sorry, they took it all, they took it all. It happened and, and it, I—”

  “I know, Charlie, I already know.” Ella said. There had been the strange heat of the afternoon, Charlie walking down an empty street. Then three men, maybe four, if the old man in the flower shop was right, catching Charlie in a surprise embrace. Long-lost friends, maybe, meeting by chance on a street corner a long way from home. Charlie, holding his hands to his side as the boundaries between blood and air dissolved between his fingers, the splashes of red on the street an inevitable map to the doorway he was found in—a boy coming home from school, the first day with his own key, new, the bright metal tied around his neck with an old leather shoelace. The police had told her. They were very thorough.

  She had told them about the backpack. How there was money inside it. Plane tickets. Passports. She said nothing about the letters. The police had apologized to her for the mugging, the younger of the two officers, the one with the better English, taking her hand as though it were a baby bird while he explained that Rome was a safe city most of the time. “It has its share of pickpockets,” he said, “but a mugging like this is very unusual.” He told her they were doing their best to find whoever did this. Could Ella remember anything else, anything that might be useful in the investigation? She sobbed into his shoulder as he held her, one hand softly patting her back.

  The nurse prepared a needle as Charlie began to wake up.

  “We can’t go home, babe.” Charlie cried like a boy, delirious with the recklessness of pain.

  “We don’t have to go,” Ella said, stroking his hair as he fell asleep again. “We don’t have to go back. We won’t go. Okay, Charlie? I love you. I’ll stay right here with you.”

  Ella stayed even though the nurses told her to go back to the hotel.

  “I’m not tired,” she insisted, afraid of what she might see if she closed her eyes. She ran her hand up and down Charlie’s arm as he slept the thick sleep of those who might never wake up.

  His fever spiked in the morning. The nurses put a tube down Charlie’s throat and taped it to his lips. The doctor who had told Ella to be prepared asked for her signature on some papers.

  “We’re trying,” he said.

  Ella signed her name. “Can I keep the pen?” she asked. She waited until the doctor left before she kissed Charlie’s ear. Then she went to the nurses’ station for a piece of paper and an envelope.

  Dear Charlie, she started.

  She told him how much she loved the way he curled up behind her in the night, the swell of his belly rising and falling into the small of her back. She told him that she really did like his cooking. She didn’t know why she said she didn’t. She told him that her favourite colour was blue, and that’s why she hadn’t repainted the house. Your breath, she wrote, smells like garlic when you sleep, and I don’t mind. She told him she was sorry. She told him about the money. The dreams.

  I love you, she signed it.

  Ella wrote the address of the
little blue house on the front of the envelope in slow and thick handwriting. She took the guidebook out of her bag and looked up the nearest post office.

  She understood now why it was that you had to write down what you were going to abandon, what was leaving you. Why you might have to write it over and over again and send it all the way across the ocean. Ella turned the letter over in her hands and tried to imagine the feeling of dropping it into a mailbox. She should be prepared. She would let it go quickly, she decided. The envelope with no return address would barely touch her fingertips, leaving her hand like some pale and lovely ghost.

  TheDEAD DAD GAME

  I LIKED THE WAY Nate told the story. He was happy to reel it off, starting with the part where Genevieve, his first mother, collapsed on the kitchen floor with a blood clot in her lung. “It only took a second or two for her to die,” he said, slowly lowering his hand in a side-to-side motion as though his mother had been a piece of windblown paper. “She probably didn’t even feel it.” Nate was a baby when it happened, and he had almost cried himself to death by the time the landlord unlocked the apartment door. His father—our father—lived with my mother by then. The day Genevieve died, my mother was busy giving birth. “But don’t feel bad, Elaine,” Nate said to me. “You almost died, too. You were early.”

  It seemed obvious to us that Genevieve’s death was a lot better than our father’s. It was definitely faster and there were no hospitals or operations, and Genevieve didn’t have to lose her hair or spend a lot of time throwing up into stainless steel bowls. My mother agreed with us on principle, she said, catching our eyes in the rear-view mirror, but either way it wasn’t appropriate to make a sport out of it. “Death isn’t a contest, you know. Everyone gets the same prize.” She lifted one hand from the steering wheel to make the point as we drove through the cemetery gates. Genevieve and our father were in different sections, but my mother said it was still very convenient for visiting, even if the traffic in this part of the city was hell.

  We remembered our father a little, Nate more than me because he was older. Our mother encouraged us to ask all the questions we wanted, which helped us make up a few more memories. No topic was off-limits when it came to our dead parents. My mother didn’t want us to grow up feeling guilty or resentful about things we didn’t understand. “Fear is the source of all disease,” she said as she made our kale breakfast shakes. She wasn’t sure what our father had been afraid of, and we knew the theory didn’t apply as well to Genevieve, but Nate and I bought into it anyway. We had a lot of questions.