Darren Effect Read Free

last in a series of public lectures for the year — that night on outport architecture. Benny had felt obliged to attend. Heather was there to meet Mandy and Mandy’s partner Bill, a university professor, but they didn’t arrive. Heather suspected they had quarrelled, but she never asked.
    Heather made it as far as her car and got in. Her keys were in her hands. It was a busy day at the hospital, but even on a slow day, parking here was impossible. In her rear-view mirror she watched with detachment as cars went up and down the lot, hunting for a space. Many, seeing her sitting there, stopped and waited. Make up your mind, they seemed to suggest. She felt her heels digging in. Detachment gave way to an unwillingness to behave. She might sit there until nightfall, if she wanted. She might still be there when the lot began to empty and the heat of the day began to lift and a dark Volvo pulled in beside her. Isabella Martin would disembark, distraught but refreshed, in slacks and a white cardigan. Benny’s son Cooper would tumble out the other side.
    What would Heather do? Would she get out of her car? Would she make an appeal, apologize, beg?
    Heather imagined Benny’s wife walking through her asthrough a ghost — undetected, unseen — and on into the hospital to her husband. The Volvo would rock slightly, and in the back seat Inky would sit up. He would glance about with his ears perked until he found and recognized her, and their eyes would lock.
    â€œWhat is it?” Benny had asked, just before she left the hospital room.
    â€œNothing,” she had said.
    Heather sat with her hands on the steering wheel of the silent car and considered rolling down a window. The heat was extraordinary and the only thing in the physical world making an impression on her. She started the car. Hearing the engine come to life nudged her like an unseen hand and she burst into tears.

Chapter Two
    The Indian summer did not last. Heather’s impression of October was of darkness and cold. Eventually she learned from a teary client they were having a record-breaking streak of bad weather: thirty-two consecutive days of precipitation. Heather had nodded. Really? She had not known.
    Now it was November, coming up to a long weekend.
    She pulled her chair up close to her desk — she preferred this when clients entered her office these days — but it was a tight squeeze with her coat cradled in her arms. At a time like this she required something to hold on to.
    He had a right to be angry with her, if he wanted to be. That was the worst of it. She had been cold and unsympathetic. She couldn’t stop thinking this, even after seeing him in the hospital and knowing it was the furthest thing from his mind.
    She shivered. She seemed to be chilled all the time. And bonetired. She had turned the thermostat on bust the day before, just before going home, but now it was eight in the morning and the air in the building was parched and stifling.
    Was she really so bad? So cold, cruel and heartless? Most people did and said things they regretted once in a while. Heather was sure of it. Her mother, for instance. Her sister Mandy. Even Benny, goddamnit.
    She pushed herself away from her desk and went out into the hall where it was even warmer, past the empty reception cubicle and into the washroom where the poster of the bruised, dejectedlooking girl beneath the caption “Love Doesn’t Have to Hurt” caused her, as always, to look quickly elsewhere.
    She looked in the mirror.
    Her face was red and blotchy. Her nose was swollen and her eyes looked foreign and dark. It was time to pull herself together. You couldn’t change the past. She splashed cold water on her face, dried off, took a deep breath. She applied face cream, which helped. It gave her skin the springy feeling of regeneration and hope. And as she began to feel better, she began to resent the cause of her sadness. She was better off without