Interference Page 22

  But that doesn’t matter right now. The butterfly woman is standing because the seat-belt sign is off, and she’s coming his way. She thanks him for the drink and proceeds to the back of the plane to use the washroom. When John follows her, she smiles at him. But once they’re in the line up for the bathroom she turns away from him and stares straight ahead. He tries to make conversation but her attitude is stiff and unyielding, her arms crossed in front of her chest. John gives up. That’s another thing that has changed — he gives up so easily these days. After she uses the bathroom, he enters and the smell of her perfume is all around him. A floral scent, mixed with the urine smell in the air, that together make him think of funerals. John gags a little and then sneezes. Right now he thinks it’s the scent that makes him sneeze, but later he’ll realize he’s getting a cold.

  Settling back into his seat, John thinks that maybe there are alternatives to his situation. Maybe Dayton will have changed her mind, maybe she did this to test him, maybe he can talk to her and she’ll agree to come home with their daughter. Even though, when he finally started contacting her, her emails were nothing but nasty and tight — like her — maybe she has realized that life is not easy alone, that she needs him to cope. She needs him to support her. But John shakes his head. He knows this isn’t true. And he doesn’t really want it to be true. The woman is a bitch. She has always been one. Never trying to fit in in California, never trying to assimilate. All his colleagues’ wives did. Assimilate. Why couldn’t Dayton? Was she too good for them? For the clubs they joined? For the Mommy-and-Me classes? For the cosmetic surgery?

  “It’s not like it’s a matter of life or death,” the woman ahead of him is saying to her seat-mate.

  “Well, death, if you think about it,” the seat-mate says.

  “No, but really.”

  “Really, honestly. Honestly.” John looks at the man who is speaking. Bald head, his shirt collar skewed and stained, his hands moving quickly over the empty tray in front of him as he eats and talks. The woman is no better. Her shirt collar is stained too, making John wonder what detergent these people use. Her earrings dangle below her chin; her hair is so short he can see her scalp. There is dandruff on her shoulder. Black rimmed glasses with rusty screws.

  “I just wouldn’t do it if I were you,” the woman whispers. “Not now.”

  “But, Rita, it’s a matter of —”

  “It’s not. It’s really not. Harold. It’s not.”

  John puts on his headphones and pokes at the movie monitor in front of him. Every time he pokes it, the seat ahead of him moves. The woman finally looks back at him. Glares through her black-rimmed glasses. John smiles, shrugs. What can he do? The screen isn’t sensitive enough. It’s not his problem.

  He arrives. The rain splashes. Cabs slosh water over people waiting on the sidewalk. He has to get from here to there, from the airport to where Dayton lives. Without him. In a house. The detective said a nice house, on a nice street, with a huge tree out front.

  “Who the fuck cares about a tree?” John said.

  “But it’s huge. Like . . . huge.” The detective uses his hands, spread out in front of him, to signify this.

  “That big?” John mocks. “That’s really big.”

  But when he is standing in front of that tree later, when he looks up into its eerie, naked branches, when he tries to imagine putting his arms around the trunk and then realizes that it would take five men to wrap around it, he knows the detective was right — it is a big tree.

  To get from the airport to Dayton’s house John has to take a cab downtown and then a bus. An hour and a half–long bus ride, through the night, John sleeping off and on, his head banging the window, and then he’s there. Still with no real definite plan. Nothing. Even his tiny ideas have faded. All he is, all he has, is his emotion. And that emotion is mad right now. It’s revenge. His tiredness doesn’t help matters. It has been a long, long day. Why the hell would Dayton chose to move to this small city? So far away from the real world. What is it about Parkville and how did she even know about it? John figures she moved here because it’s the end of the world. A dinky, stupid little place.

  Walking through the deserted downtown of this dirty, ugly city — no palm trees, no sparkling lights or patios full of beautiful people — he thinks maybe Dayton has been punished enough. He laughs at himself, because stealing a man’s child, well, you can never be punished enough for that. If it had been the other way around, if he had taken Carrie and moved to Canada, he’d be in jail right now. It’s always a different story for men. Of course taking Carrie back is not at all the same. He’s bringing her home, not stealing her away.

  Walking softly towards Dayton’s neighbourhood, John starts to think about things — for example, he realizes he never called anyone. He never reported his child missing. So he isn’t sure what would have happened to Dayton — he’s pretty sure it would have been something, but nothing as impressive as what would have happened to him. If roles were reversed. Which they wouldn’t ever be because he’s not so stupid as to do what she did. John shakes his head out. He’s so tired he’s thinking himself in circles. But men always get the short end of the stick on this kind of thing, don’t they? Steal the kid away from its mother and you go to jail immediately. The mother steals the kid and gets a slap on the wrist. It’s really not fair. In fact, the reason he got fired was probably because they needed more women in the company. It probably had nothing to do with him but everything to do with his gender.

  His hair is soaked.

  His coat is soaked.

  His feet are soaked.

  All of this, John says later to explain his mood to the cops. He says all of this to explain how it could have happened, to let everyone know that, really, John’s not such a bad person. Deep down. He was merely tired, frustrated, wet. His wife stole his child. Remember that, he wants to shout to everyone. Remember that she did it first.

  John sees a well-lit building up ahead and decides to go inside to get dry. Somehow he finds himself inside an arena, the only thing open that he passes on his walk towards Dayton. A coffee. A hot dog. He could use the washroom. It’s lit up inside, warm and inviting. John buys his food, his drink, uses the washroom and then stands by the window looking in to the arena. There, on the ice, are women. Mature women. Playing hockey. John smiles. Things have changed since he was a kid.

  John decides to take a load off and go in to watch.

  He doesn’t see her right away. Right away he focuses on another woman, one who is head and shoulders better than anyone else on the team. But then someone shouts “Dayton,” and John knows, feels it, knows for certain that there is his wife. He can’t explain it, considering she’d never shown any interest in hockey, but he doesn’t even have to see her blond hair coming out from the back of her helmet, her tiny body in that huge amount of gear, before he knows it’s definitely her. Besides, how many other Daytons could there be in this town?

  John instinctively looks around for his daughter. Of course she’s not there.

  He sits up in his seat and watches her, watches the game.

  When she finally notices him he knows it immediately. Her face pales. Her body stiffens. She stares, mouth open. After the game John walks slowly out of the arena, opening the door for a sweaty woman as she struggles through, carrying her hockey bag and stick. Back to where he was headed. His plan has now changed. She saw him so taking Carrie won’t be as good revenge. There won’t be that twenty minutes of terror for Dayton. Instead, John will wait for Dayton at her house. And then he will take Carrie. Straight from her arms.

  The tree is there. Gigantic and old and powerful. A nice house set back from the street, the front yard all tree. The lights are on downstairs. No car in the driveway. John moves silently around the house, scoping out the backyard, the windows (curtains on all of them), the tree. And then he starts walking around the street, checking out the neig
hbours’ houses, peering from the sidewalk into some of the lit-up windows. He walks to the house next door and sneaks a look into the back through the wire gate of their fence. Their curtains are open and John can see a man sitting in a reclining chair in front of the TV. John startles. Stops dead in his tracks. Until he realizes the man is fast asleep, leaned back, his feet up. The TV plays a hockey game and John watches for a bit before he moves on, down the street, towards the corner. He can see the glimpse of a pool through a spotty hedge in one person’s backyard. The rain falling on the winter covering. He glances at a swing set behind another house. From where he stands it looks rusted and half broken. Dayton’s yard, in contrast to her neighbours’ yards, is empty. No toys, no barbeque, no chairs. Nothing. Although winter has just ended. Or maybe she never goes outside?

  Across the street and up. John is walking back and forth, wearing down the sidewalk. Back towards Dayton’s house, but on the other side of the street. Waiting for her. Some of these houses have fences and a dog barks fiercely at one house when John passes. He can see its shadow in the front window. He’s walking slowly, ducking into the shadows whenever a car passes, when he hears them coming up the street. Later John realizes how stupid he is. Who cares if anyone sees him now? Dayton has seen him. His plan has changed. In fact, the more people who see him, the better his chance of getting Carrie back. But he hears people coming and so, not thinking clearly, tired from the long flight and the time change, from the day that seemed to stretch out forever, John ducks up the side of a house across from Dayton’s and crouches in the bushes. He waits within inches of the fence, feeling trapped by his predicament, by the huge house beside him, by the rain that is still falling.

  “Oh, I’m out of breath,” he can hear a man say.

  Two men on the street. They pause in front of the house John is hiding behind.

  “You said that before.”

  John peeks around the bush and sees the two figures. One standing stiffly, looking up into the high reaches of the house where John is hiding, the other, a short man in a brown suit, scurrying around him.

  “You might want to leave me alone,” the taller man says. John can’t see his face, but his voice is deep and angry. “I’m not feeling very generous right now.”

  “Oh my,” the other man chirps. He claps his hands. John pulls his head back. It would look bad, if he comes out from behind the bush now. If he stands and heads down the driveway, waves hello, and keeps going. They might know he doesn’t live here. John waits.

  “You might want to keep your distance.”

  The other man says, “Oh my. It hurts.”

  “Shhhhh.” And then John hears footsteps recede.

  John only hears one set of footsteps walk away. The smaller man is still out front, making snuffling noises. Drunks. John leans back against the brick wall of the house. His coat scratches the bottom of a window pane, and the noise feels loud. He feels exposed.

  From inside of the house he hears someone shout, “Mom” or “bomb” or “Tom,” and this startles him.

  So this. This. This is how it happens: John tries to stand up without being seen (because, he tells the cops, he’s trapped by the drunk man out front. But when the cops say, “Why were you hiding in the first place?” John has no answer), and so he stretches his body up slowly and peers over the bush and then he sneezes. Suddenly a dog comes tearing towards him and slams into him and John screams a little (because the dog startles him), and his scream is a bit high-pitched (he does, after all, have a cold), and then there is a little man with a brown suit standing right in front of him and John screams again. That is how it happens. He, John, did not go in through the back gate and open the back door, the man in the brown suit did. He, John, did not take the girl, the man in the brown suit did. He’s sure of it. And yes, the girl went with the man easily and yes, the man smiled at John as he passed him and yes, John was immobilized by the dog, who didn’t need to bite him or, if the dog did need to bite John, the dog could have let go of his leg, let go of the death grip — John was sure he could feel the dog’s teeth on his ankle bone, holding on. John says this later as an excuse for why he didn’t go after the little man in the brown suit leading the girl away. After all, John’s wife stole Carrie from him. His small daughter — no, he’s not sure exactly how old she is now, but she’s still a baby. Just a baby. After all, John was not thinking right about everything — he hadn’t been thinking right about everything since Dayton took the kid. Plus he was jet-lagged. And tired. And wet. And in pain. Remember: he was in pain. The small man opened the door. Not him. He never even went in the backyard. And, besides, why was it even open? Shouldn’t people lock their doors at night? What kind of a town is this?

  John would like to know that. He knows he looks suspicious and, no, he has no idea which direction they went down the street. It wasn’t until the man with the huge scar on his face showed up that he finally realized the little girl had been taken from the house. It seemed so natural. She just walked past him with the man, holding his hand. There didn’t seem to be a struggle. In fact, he tells the cops, he was so busy trying to kick the dog off him that he didn’t see much or think much at all. But he knows what the people who live here feel like, after all, his wife stole his baby from him. When a kid is missing, that’s the worst thing . . .

  It went like this: first he ducks beside a bush at the side of the house to avoid the two drunk men, then he sneezes, then the dog whams into him and takes hold and he screams, then a small man in a brown suit walks calmly by (not helping him with the dog) and opens the back gate as if he lives there. Then the girl comes out with him and then they leave. All the time John is stuck to the dog. Of course the noises start then, shouts from Dayton and her friend as they come home from hockey and see him hobbling down the driveway bleeding. And then you come, John tells the cops. And they discover the girl is missing. That’s the story.

  “Why were you hiding in the first place?” the cops ask again.

  John learned quickly that nothing in this neighbourhood is normal. A women’s hockey league, for god’s sake, that should have tipped him off. And then that little man hanging out with that scar-faced man. Loitering. Drunks. Kidnapping all around. John thinks later that Dayton’s neighbourhood is shit. It is certainly not a good street for his daughter to grow up on, and he’s pretty sure that if things had gone better that night he could have used this information to sway the judge to his side if there ever was a custody battle.

  The funny thing (something John muses on in the future) is that the two men, the screaming neighbours, the cops, even the dog, the hours of questions in the rain and then the police station, the missing girl, that wasn’t even the worst part. That wasn’t so bad. It was what happened after all of that. All that after-stuff that landed on him, with the police, the court, the judge, all that crap that took his baby away from him. Permanently. Forever. Dayton won, didn’t she? That was worse than anything.

  While the man comes past John with the girl, the dog has hold of John’s ankle — first his pants, then quickly and viciously, the ankle itself. The skin, the bone. The dog gnaws and bends and cracks. John is hitting at the dog with his fists, smacking and punching it. And later it’s not the terror of the dog attack but it’s the image of the scar-faced man as he came down the street towards where he was hobbling towards Dayton and her friend, where they were standing out front shouting. That man’s face haunts John. In the night, in the rain, in the dark, with the light from the street shining down, the man looked as if he were wearing a mask. As if he had stepped from the stills of a horror movie. His mouth was open but was warped by the crack down the middle. The shadows distorted everything.

  John can feel the warmth from the blood on his ankle (he is sure his ankle is broken). He lunges out from the bush and into the driveway.

  Dayton is there, getting out of her car, shaking slightly, pale in the streetlight. Her friend (Trish, he later fi
nds out) starts shouting, already calling 911. Then the man, his face split in half, barrels down the street towards them. Everyone soaking wet. Shouting. The cops come. A girl is missing.

  A girl is missing.

  That girl. He saw her go.

  The bottle of pills John has to take later for the pain in his ankle has a label: “Take With Food.” What John finds interesting, in his drugged haze, is that the picture signifying “Take With Food” is toast. Toast and crackers. Little square crackers, drawn in white over a black background. Four small dots on each one of them. And a slice of bread, that distinctive shape of it. Toast and crackers. Take With Food. This fascinates John, which is good, because otherwise he’d be in agony. He wonders why the label doesn’t have a glass of milk on it — usually recommended to soothe the stomach if pills are strong. The little crackers make him smile. They are cute with their little dots, the kind of crackers he got on his tray in the police station when they offered him some soup after all those hours of questioning him. Soda crackers, he thinks they are called, and he doesn’t know why they are called that and he ponders it for hours.