Siddhu felt his anticipation dissipate. He was on a hot air balloon that began drifting back to the ground soon after its ascent.
“I guess my story has nowhere to go,” he wrote to Uma. “I’m coming home.”
But all he wanted to do was keep walking around the mall. He had no reason to hurry. And the world had opened its door to him once more.
21.
In the third week of January, as Megan Tso and Jeffrey Oishi were finishing a shift with the Sanitation League, she saw her face on a telephone pole in Strathcona; an image from a vacation she’d taken three years earlier in Berlin, standing against a spray-painted section of its Wall, was placed on a poster under the words, “MISSING SINCE SEPTEMBER 24TH.” It listed her full name, age, height, and weight, and a description of the butterfly tattooed on her ankle. An email address and a cellphone number were given at the bottom of the poster.
Was that why she had gotten those funny looks in the last few days? Were people inspecting her? She tore the poster from the telephone pole and climbed into Oishi’s Audi. As the judge drove, she noticed another poster a block up on Princess Avenue. “Stop the car,” she said. The car caught black ice and slid along the street before coming to a halt.
“What is it?” Oishi asked.
“The hell I escaped.”
They had spent the morning and afternoon taking seniors to get vaccinated. This was his third day riding along with her and he’d held up well. The judge was on leave from work, and his hands shook periodically, but he insisted that this was better than sitting in his hotel room with a bottle of rye and his daughter’s stuffed Arctic seal, scrolling through his iPhone photo album. He was helping people who had gone through this. It made him feel less alone.
Within an hour, both Grossman and Rieux texted her images of the poster in separate neighbourhoods. Each of them told her to call the police. She knew they could do nothing. She had grown accustomed to Markus’s unyielding insistence on her life.
As a criminal judge, Oishi was aware of the extent that the law protected Markus more than it did her. He suggested that she get a black-market taser.
“Did you dump him because he was possessive?” he asked.
“He dumped me,” Tso said. “He hated how messy I was. But then I moved on with my life. He no longer had me to blame for his own failures. So he insisted on harassing me.”
“What’s his end goal?”
“I don’t think it’s to get back together with me. His end goal is just to make me miserable.”
Oishi looked out the passenger window and pointed to one more poster. Tso told him to continue driving. “I wish my wife and I hated each other less. We have so many other things in common,” he said.
The other night, he’d tried to kiss her in the restaurant lounge. He wasn’t her type, but she let him kiss her long enough to entertain but reject the idea of doing more. She missed physical contact. Her body felt like a callous, and she wanted to be touched to regain sensitivity to the world. She imagined herself with Oishi and how it would be afterward, and she could only picture the kind of mutual regret that made former lovers hide behind trees to avoid each other. He knew that, too. When she told him it wouldn’t be a good idea, his apology followed a hot sigh of relief.
They met Grossman at her apartment. Outside, on the sidewalk, she’d placed a sandwich board. In chalk she had written: “Izzy’s Storytelling Night: Come Laugh & Cry at the Plague.” Grossman had cooked a roast with Yorkshire pudding before the performance at her club, and the smell of the meat rendered Tso wobbly with hunger. And Grossman was making real gravy.
Afterward, they helped her get ready for the event. Grossman had reimagined the ground-floor studio as a performance space that she named “Izzy’s” after her father. She had commissioned a neon-style LED sign with the name and an illustration of her father’s face—younger, eyes a-twinkle in a way that Tso never saw firsthand—that hung outside the front door. Inside was a small stage. A vintage bar had been installed.
It took Tso a moment to notice the bare walls. “What did you do with all of Janet’s paintings?” she asked Grossman. “Did you return them to her?”
“Sort of,” Grossman said. “Janet believed that I was in wrongful possession of her creative work. She was right. But those paintings all featured my image. At no time did she ask me whether I wanted to be in her paintings. So I returned them to her with my likeness cut out with an X-Acto knife. I’d always felt invisible in our relationship and even when Janet painted me, she painted me the way she wanted other people to see me. The holes I made in her work make it more honest.” She filled Tso and Oishi’s respective wine glasses before filling her own. “What do you think? Does that sound psycho?”
Tso removed the torn poster from the back pocket of her jeans and held it up. “You’ll have to up your game.”
Grossman nodded at the poster. “Why don’t we get Khan to take care of that nuisance?” she asked.
Oishi looked puzzled. Tso quickly explained the situation with Grossman’s tenant and his role as a fixer and procurer. They had called on him recently to acquire additional vaccine, and it came through the next day.
“What could Khan do?” Tso replied. “Send him off on the garbage barge? He’d only end up back here.”
Grossman stared up at the ceiling. “He could do other things.” When Tso didn’t respond to the insinuation, she added: “I bet Khan could find someone burly and unscrupulous to take care of your ex.”
“I already caught your hint.”
They took their places as the event’s start time approached. Oishi stood at the door, taking the cover charge. Fifty folding chairs had been rented for the event, which had only been advertised on social media and in a few local culture blogs. In the first ten minutes after the doors opened only two people had come. Grossman and her friends waited nervously as show time approached. Just before eight o’clock, people came in a cluster, and a line formed outside as Oishi fumbled with change. Grossman poured her guests plastic glasses of red and white wine and offered premixed highballs from cups. A few of the attendees recognized Tso, who worried they had seen her ex’s poster, but they had met her at the after party that followed her book event in October. They thought she’d made it out of the city. Tso’s memory of her first days here felt like keepsakes from another era and world. But only three months had passed since she’d first come to this big house.
The start time needed to be pushed back. Every chair was occupied and they scrambled to find more. People had come out of curiosity. They saw friends they hadn’t spoken to since autumn. The room, initially draughty, was warm with body heat and the air electrified with the smell of booze. Grossman was starting to grow out of her tinted grey hair, and its black roots were showing. She had changed out of her apron and old jeans into a black tuxedo shirt and jacket over hot pants and fishnets. It was the first time Tso had seen her friend looking so femme. She resembled the photos Tso had seen of Grossman’s mother, the dancer. And then she understood her friend’s look to be a salute to both her parents.
As Grossman took the stage, Tso remembered how jittery she’d behaved at the book event and then her pudding-smooth delivery on the tour bus. Her preamble before introducing the first speaker in her roster of storytellers—friends, social-media acquaintances, volunteers for the Sanitation League—was delivered in a confident but off-the-cuff manner.