“When that bobby pulled up, I buckled and surrendered you.”
“Snitch.”
“Fugitive.”
Since I’d quit my job at InfoText, I’d taken to letting the phone ring. Whenever the detectives or the Crown called, I deleted their messages. Come and get me. I liked the image of myself as a runaway — its reckless mystery, and its privacy — though I doubted I’d have the nerve. Ramona’s trial started next month.
“It’s a trial they’re asking me to testify at. No big deal.” Good. Minimize it.
“You say that like it’s a birthday party. How could this happen? You don’t know anybody. Is it your dad?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Then it is your dad. Seriously, why haven’t you told me?”
“You don’t like it when I talk murder.”
His eyes churned bark-grey. “You know a murderer?”
“Murderess. Accused. And not know. Knew.”
We read the subpoena together. The Queen commanded me to report to District Court on Wednesday, April 22.
My voice tinny, I told him that Ramona had befriended me in high school, when my dad and I moved south from Haliburton to Cloud Lake, a Brampton subdivision, that we hit it off in the summer but drifted apart once school started. “Ramona had a career and a house and a fiancé. I lived with my dad and went to high school,” I said. I left out my panic, how my tongue roped at saying “Ramona.”
“They must need you as a character witness,” he said. Trustful, assessing, he took me at my word. How could I forget? My part in the trial he would see as a part-time job, a duty that occupied but didn’t own me. He wouldn’t make the leaps, connect this to that, invent causes or blame.
“It’s for the Crown, not the defence. I talked to the cops last summer. I thought they wouldn’t need me for the trial, but they called last week.”
I settled my hands against his. We pushed our palms until our fingers bent and our knuckles cracked.
“Did you end on bad terms?”
“We ended. She got married and I left for university. Then I met you.”
Alex had said “I love you” first and quickly. We were in his dad’s BMW with the sunroof open. Drunk on whisky, I was making noises and rocking into him. He was the first man I’d had inside me. We were parked by the sea a thousand miles east on what we’d convinced his parents was a painting excursion. I was nineteen.
He didn’t repeat the words. Afterward, I lay under a blanket and shot back more whisky.
“What did you say?”
“When?”
“Then. There.”
“You heard me.”
“I heard something but I’m not sure.”
“You heard.”
“What I heard was something a person would want to say again.”
“Re-ally.”
“Maybe it’s not what I thought.”
“Maybe it is and I don’t want to say.”
“It’s okay to say.”
“I know.”
The air was pearling up as we stuck our feet into desert boots then stepped onto wet sand littered with shell fragments and spread with sticky seaweed.
“We should move higher. The tide.”
We drove to grass and pitched a pup tent between the car and the ocean. I crawled into the sleeping bag as the nylon filtered pinkish orange light. Alex tied the flaps, zipped the screen. He got in beside me, and I pulled off my jeans now that I had his warm legs. I wouldn’t let him see me upright without clothes. Later, I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed at other people’s houses. We tangled together, legs and arms, heart against heart, and he said it again, once, before I slipped into drunken slumber, and I heard it and remembered, and from then on he felt okay saying it and we could talk about it.
I didn’t remember beginning to love him. He built love around me, and I sat inside. I had known him the same as I’d known anyone else. Then something shifted. He named it, and I lingered long enough so all that mattered was staying there. In bed, beside him, I’d catalogue our body parts. His slimmer hips and ankles, our same-sized hands. The few inches he had on me, though neither of us was tall. At the thought of him leaving, my longing throbbed.
Back in Guelph, Alex moved into my room. Soon we had our own apartment overlooking the Speed River. We sealed our love in a ceremony with candles and body painting and acid. We spoke vows and played Hendrix’s “… And the Gods Made Love” as everything reduced to vibrating particles.
We found the rings at the farmers’ market, two entwined snakes, heads meeting. The rings made us husband and wife. I’d used Shore as my last name ever since.
“It’s not about marriage,” he said as we walked along Macdonell Street to the Albion Hotel for fries and a pitcher of draught.
“You don’t believe in it?”
“It’s a convention. What we have is no less valid because we didn’t say the prescribed words and get the paperwork. It’s what we make it. Nobody can take our bond away.”
I’d believed Alex’s words and thought he did, too.
Talking about our crazy first time beside the ocean diverted us from my subpoena, and we moved into the bedroom. Afterward, Alex headed back out to salt the walk. Valentine’s Day, Alex brought a rose. “Bet Ramona never gave you one of these,” he said.
“If she had, it wouldn’t have come in this plastic test tube.”
A few mornings later, Alex pinched his moussed hair into points. He rinsed his hands in my bubble bath and said, “You were lovers, right?”
“You could be talking about anybody.”
He soaped me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know I was your first. But don’t you wish you’d been one of her sex slaves? You could have learned her techniques and tried them out on me.”
“That’s right. You know how much I like that stuff.”
“Maybe you’d like it more.”
“I doubt that.”
He sat on the side of the tub. “Why didn’t you tell me, Pauline? It hurts me that you didn’t.”
“It’s a sob story. And there’s not much to tell.”
I didn’t want to talk about Ramona again before the trial, especially not to him. My testimony would have the odd cast of a public truth he could react to along with everyone else. If I told him now, the story would enter our relationship. It would live in this house with us. It already lived in my office. I could breathe in there, alone with it, but I couldn’t take it out of the room, let alone share it. I liked how Alex saw me and feared any change that might take him away. Holding onto him was worth any flak he gave me.
“We should tell each other everything. Like lovers do.”
“Why, so we can hurt each other?”
“So we can know each other and stay open.”
“What we call the truth comes back on us.”
“Where is that coming from? What does it even mean? We don’t do that.” He dipped a face cloth in the water then wrung it over me. I took it and spread it out on my chest.
“We