...And the Damage Done Read Free Page B

putting the key in my pocket.
    “I have to play hostess. Please excuse me.”
    She gives me her hand, now slick with cold sweat. I have upset her, or she has upset herself. This moment and its safety dissolve around us. “Thank you for coming,” she says.
    I leave the showing. I walk past the colors and the palettes I recognize from the flecks on Marie’s nails, from the smears on the overalls she wore while working, from the reeking drop-cloths that she piled in the corner of her kitchen. I take the back stairwell where the caterers loiter, feeling
them
come closer. At street level, I see
them
coming—a few cluster near rusted cars and vans parked in the Waterfront lot.
    They will position themselves throughout the neighbourhood. They will hunt me in bars and coffee shops, and coordinate themselves through their cell phones and voicemails and text messages. I do not fathom this breaking of their theatre of stealth, and though I know going to Marie’s home will savage my heart, I am thankful to have a place to go besides my home, which will be watched closely tonight.
    Nell waits in the hallway outside Marie’s apartment, tapping cigarette ash into a beer can. The sleeves of her blouse are rolled up, revealing smooth skin etched with as-yet-unbroken blue veins.
    She smiles as I walk up the hallway, as I smile politely and smother down my horror at what she will do.
    She drops her cigarette hissing into the can. She stands and again fixes me with her blue eyes. I hide what I see of her future, what I see of her choices and how they will write themselves deeply in her flesh. For the second time tonight, she says, “I’m glad you came.”
    There is no graceful reply to what she has said, so I say next to nothing: “Have you been here long?”
    “About an hour. I couldn’t stand being at the showing after a while. A lot of the so-called patrons were just vultures.”
    I smell
them
on her as she says “
vultures
.” They have been close to her, soiling the space of Marie’s art, her empathy, and her mourning.
    “Is there anything I can do? To help settle . . . things?”
    “No. Not now. I just want you to have what Marie wanted you to have. I need to see something
done
. I want to have some closure, tonight.”
    She opens the door and the residual smells of Marie—the lingering scent of the expensive lotion she always used out of vanity for her skin, and also the scent of the sandalwood conditioner she said always made her feel calm—choke me with memory.
    We enter. On the couch before us is an amorphous mass, the color and texture of which is immediate in the tactile memory of my hands.
    “I couldn’t figure out why she wanted you to have this ratty thing,” Nell says, picking up her grandmother’s fur coat. Trying a feeble joke, she says, “You’re not going to wear it, are you?”
    “No,” I say, and the word is more coughed than spoken. I can’t bear the thought of touching the coat, even as Nell holds it out to me. Nell, with her otherworldly grace, steps toward me and I nearly step back. She hands it to me and I feel I could tear it as if it were paper. The sensation, the remembered feeling of holding Marie’s hand under the silk lining, trembles in my blood.
    “We . . . had . . . with the coat . . .” Nell eyes never leave mine. I see in her the frailty behind her strength that will lead her to run broken glass along her wrist. I want to reach through the time separating us from that moment and snatch away the bottle before it can rip her.
    “You don’t have to tell me,” she says, and takes back the coat. She rests it on the chair that Marie and I had salvaged when the college kids down the street had moved and had dumped it on the curbside. Nell walks to the battered desk where Marie’s ancient and paint-smeared laptop sits. Nell picks up a stack of disks and hands them to me. Some bear multicoloured thumb and fingerprints in oil-based paint.
    “Marie didn’t want you to know