Forty Words for Sorrow

40

EDIE SOAMES KEPT HER EYES on the clock until it finally inched its way to lunchtime, then she told Quereshi she was breaking and went to the Pizza Patio at the other end of the mall. She always had lunch by herself; Eric never got lunch at the same time. The need to be with him was particularly bad right now. They’d been holding the boy for so long, Edie’s anticipation was in danger of turning into fear. Eric kept putting off the party, apparently enjoying stretching this one out. He loved having a prisoner; it gave him a renewed sense of purpose. But Edie was feeling restless and jumpy, as if her skin were on too tight.

At the next table her ex-friend Margo sat with her back to the entrance, giggling with two other Pharma-City employees. Edie never sat with Margo anymore; Margo was not a serious person. A year ago, before Eric came along, she had confided to her diary, Margo knows how to have fun—something I’ve never learned. I think I may be in love with her. She came round and set my hair last night, and we had such a good time. But then Eric had come along, and Margo and Eric disliked each other on sight. One day, before Margo realized how much Eric meant to Edie, she had commented carelessly that he looked like a ferret. Except for unavoidable exchanges at work, Edie hadn’t spoken to her since.

Edie ordered a Diet Coke and two slices of pizza. She was halfway through the second slice when she heard her name. Margo had shrieked it out, but Edie wasn’t being called, she was being discussed. “Oh, my God,” Margo was saying. “Such a sourpuss. I mean, that face could stop a truck. And she must wear like a quart of Obsession. That girl needs a makeover, big time.”

“Big time,” Sally Royce agreed. “A personality makeover.”

The voices went low for a moment and then there was a burst of laughter.

Edie pushed aside the rest of her pizza and left. Bitches should read the papers, get acquainted with the Windigo. They wouldn’t be laughing so hard if they knew what she was capable of. She could scare the shit out of them if she felt like it, have them begging for mercy like that stupid Indian brat. She might’ve done Billy LaBelle herself, if the little runt hadn’t died on them. Her courage had failed only once: she’d had to cover Todd Curry’s head with that seat cover before she could help Eric move the body.

But she was getting stronger all the time. Why, less than twenty-four hours ago she’d been driving a dead body out to Trout Lake. Eric was amazing. So cool, so calm. Killed him like he was nothing, not even a bird. And then we dumped him like a bag of garbage. Garbage—that’s exactly what he was—left him at the side of the road. But the really brilliant touch—totally Eric’s, of course—was leaving the van out at the Chinook Tavern. “Somebody’ll steal it before you can say Rumpelstiltskin,” he said. Totally correct, as usual.

The Algonquin Mall has a massive Food Town at one end, and at the other an equally gigantic Kmart. Between them the mall itself forms a wide, fluorescent L. It is meant to afford this northern city a Main Street without winter. Blizzards, ice storms, wind chill factors—who cares? A shopper can stroll from store to store, window shopping all afternoon if the mood strikes, without freezing to the marrow.

Edie thought it very tasteful the way they had set out squares of indoor trees and large plants with benches around them. You could sit on a bench and stare at a window full of running shoes at the Foot Locker, or on the other side you could look at Records on Wheels. Or she could sit on the bench near Troy Music Centre until Eric got off work.

Edie walked past the Tot Shoppe, where the window was crammed with tiny parkas as if an army of dwarf Eskimos were about to invade. Then in Northern Lighting they had a high-tech chandelier fashioned from copper tubing and aluminum cones. It looked like futuristic moose antlers.

She stepped into Troy Music, but Eric was in the back doing inventory. Just as well, really, because he’d told her not to visit him at work. Eric’s boss, Mr. Troy, was behind the counter, tuning a guitar for some geeky-looking kid. Edie flipped through the sheet music, reading the words to a Whitney Houston song and then a Celine Dion. Of course they were famous: look at those perfect teeth, perfect tits. Give either of ’em a case of eczema and then where would they be? Fame was a genetic lottery, just like love, and Edie had inherited neither from the unknown man who’d fathered her or from her mother, who had vanished from Algonquin Bay six years later.

Raised by Gram, the old bitch, who never made her feel like anything other than ugly and stupid. For one brief fantastic moment she had imagined she was attractive: that was when Eric first started paying attention to her. She even had sexual fantasies about him for a time, but in this as in other things she absorbed Eric’s attitudes almost by osmosis. “Edie,” he told her, “you are made for something more important than sex. Both of us are. You and I are meant to push the limits of what human beings are capable of.”

Edie dashed across the frigid parking lot to the Tim Hortons, where she had two chocolate donuts and a large coffee. Algonquin Bay boasted seventeen donut shops. Edie knew this, because on a particularly aimless, empty day she had counted them, making a circuit around the entire city. The donuts really hit the spot, and by the time Edie headed back to the drugstore, she felt much calmer.

Margo came rushing in a few minutes later, out of breath, stashing her purse and coat under the counter between the two cash registers. Edie didn’t so much as glance at her.

Sometimes at work Edie could put herself into a kind of trance that made the time go faster. She would look up and it would be seven o’clock and she’d wonder where the afternoon had gone. But today the time dragged. She kept remembering what Margo had said, and that nauseating laughter; she hardly thought about the boy tied up in her basement, or about his wounded leg. But when Quereshi asked her to keep an eye on the pharmacy while he went to the can, Edie dumped fifty diazepam into a plastic bottle she kept in her pocket.

When Quereshi came back, she asked him, “What would you give someone if you wanted them to be awake but lie absolutely still—without moving?”

Mr. Quereshi’s smooth brown face wrinkled up like a walnut. “You mean to facilitate the performance of surgery and so on?”

“Right. So they wouldn’t move no matter what you did to them.”

“There are such drugs, it goes without saying, but we do not stock them. Why, Miss Soames—you are planning to operate on some poor soul?”

“I like to know things, that’s all. I may go to pharmacy school, one day—I’m putting money aside.”

“I myself matriculated in medicine, at Calcutta. But my diploma was not being recognized in this country, so I was forced to study pharmacy. Three credits they granted me. Seven years of studies reduced to three credits only—it is a shocking waste. I would have been making an excellent surgeon, but the world is not a fair place.”

“I feel like I could do something special one day, Mr. Quereshi.” Very special. The night before, she had written in her diary: Soon I’ll be ready to kill on my own. The runt in the basement would be no problem, but maybe I’ll let Eric do this one. I think I’d prefer to start with a female. I can even think of a candidate.

“You would be well advised to settle on a course of study, Miss Soames. There will not be so many opportunities coming your way. The world discriminates not just against brown people, but also against women such as yourself.”

Women such as yourself. Well, she knew what he meant by that, bloody Paki. Plain women such as yourself. Women with fucked-up faces. He didn’t have to say the words; it was in his superior tone. I wouldn’t let the bastard operate on a dog, Edie thought, let alone a human being. Quereshi handed her a bottle of pills, which Edie placed into a bag for the frail old woman across the counter. “Twenty-nine fifty.”

“Twenty-nine fifty! It was only twenty-five dollars last month.” The woman tottered a little, as if the price had infected her inner ear. “I can’t afford twenty-nine fifty. I’m on a pension. I won’t have enough for cat food.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t buy them.” Or maybe you should strangle the fucking cat, I don’t care.

“I need them. They’re for my heart. I can’t just leave them. I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“I don’t know. It’s up to you.”

“It isn’t up to me, that’s what I’m saying. How much did you say?”

“Twenty-nine fifty.”

“That’s a twenty-percent increase. More. How can a few pills suddenly go up twenty percent in the course of a month, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“I don’t know, lady. They went up.”

The woman came up with three tens that stank of talcum powder, and Edie handed back the change. “Thank you for saving at Pharma–City. Don’t you get hit by any cars, now.”

“What did you say?”

“I said be careful in the parking lot. There’s a lot of cars out there today.”

Quereshi was going to say something, she could feel it. He was sidling over to her, warming up for a sermon. Not that it was any of his business; he was just there to count pills. Store policy was none of his business.

“Miss Soames, tell me something.”

Here we go. Edie started straightening the cash in her drawer, putting all the bills face up.

“Miss Soames, I just want to ask you something. I just want to ask you if you are having a hobby, or some other line of endeavour you are pursuing. Music, perhaps. Philately or some such.”

“Yeah, I have a hobby.” Killing people, she was tempted to say, just to see the expression on his silly brown face. “Special things I like to do.”

“I am glad, Miss Soames. Because you will never be a success in dealing with the public. You are lacking the required sympathy.”

“Who cares? Sympathy is for weaklings.”

“For weaklings? You have been reading some terrible philosopher, I take it. That poor lady has no money. It hurts her when prices go up. Can you not spare a kind word for her?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What does it hurt you to say ‘Yes, it’s a shame,’ or some such. You are not losing anything by it.”

They were interrupted by a dark-haired lady who bought six boxes of henna. It was the beginning of the late rush. Someone else purchased damn near a year’s supply of Mylanta Gas. One day they stock up on Kaopectate, next day it’s Ex-Lax, Edie thought; we get ’em coming and going. A young woman bought three different cold remedies, and shampoo and nail polish and conditioner. A curly-haired woman bought stuff to straighten her hair, and a girl with perfectly straight hair that Edie envied bought stuff to make hair curl. Edie herself had tried every remedy under the sun—as a Pharma-City employee, she got a ten-percent discount—but none of the ointments, creams and steroids made the slightest difference to the dead glare of her skin. “Hey, Edie,” she remembered one of her high school contemporaries shouting at her. “You been sticking your head in the oven again? Next time don’t use a microwave!” She carried the memory like an old bullet lodged in her rib cage.

A boy bought a dozen Sheiks from her. Condoms were kept behind the counter, and the boys never bought them from Margo; they felt safer with an ugly woman. Margo was working away at her cash register, happy as a lark. Margo was such a birdbrain that she actually enjoyed the stupid job. Since Edie had stopped speaking to her, Margo was at a loss during slow times; she would pull out her People magazine and flip through the same old tired stories, month after month, cracking her gum.

Edie was slipping on her parka when a man in a dark blue blazer said, “Miss Soames, would you come with me, please?”

He was with the security company. He would catch shoplifters and yell at them in front of the whole store to humiliate them. Struk, his name was. Edie followed him into the little office upstairs, where a fat female security guard sat in front of a surveillance monitor. Struk pointed at her purse. “Miss Soames, would you open that, please?”

“Why? I haven’t taken anything.”

“Pharma-City reserves the right to spot-check its employees. You signed a release when you were hired.”

Edie opened her purse. Struk carefully fingered his way through her Kleenex, her address book, her chewing gum. He even went through her wallet. Did he suppose she was hiding condoms in it?

“Would you turn out your pockets, please?”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Otherwise I’ll have Franny here pat you down. Let’s get it over with.”

Two minutes later she was back outside the office, straightening her purse. Margo was joking with Struk as he led her into the office. They left the door open, and Edie heard Struk go through the drill once more.

“Help yourself,” Margo said. “Nothing in there but makeup and chewing gum.”

“Uh-huh.” There was a pause. “And I bet you’re gonna tell me you have a prescription for these.”

“Are those pills? I didn’t put those in there. They’re not mine, I swear. I don’t know how they got in there.”

“Don’t lie to me. This is grounds for dismissal. There must be fifty diazepam here. How did they get into your purse?”

“I don’t know! I swear I don’t! I didn’t take them, you have to believe me! Someone must’ve put them in my purse!”

“And why would anyone do a thing like that?”

Margo had broken down in tears by then, and Edie didn’t hang around to hear the rest. She hurried downstairs and out into the shopping mall. Suddenly she was in such a good mood that she went straight into Kmart and bought herself a new pair of shoes.