The Taken Read online

  He was holding his hand up, warding her off comically, as if she’d overwhelmed him. “You really need a chocolate sardine, Hazel!” He held the box to her, and now she gratefully took one and unwrapped it. It was excellent, toothsome chocolate. He watched her eat it. After a moment, he said, “Do you ever think about the dinosaurs?”

  “The dinosaurs?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he leaned forward, that position that made it look like he might sail over the desk. “I mean, they were so successful. They had flying dinosaurs and dinosaurs that could eat the little leaves at the tops of ancient redwoods and dinosaurs the size of your pinkie. I just think about them sometimes, wonder who they were. Because they were everywhere and they, like, ruled the earth. But success has its costs, right? Too many dinosaur mouths, not enough trees or meat. Now, if only they’d had some smart dinosaur to tell them they had to change their ways before they screwed up all the good stuff, maybe this would still be a dinosaur planet instead of a people planet. But they didn’t have that smart dinosaur so instead the universe sent a meteorite to blow all their scaly behinds to kingdom come so the planet could start over.” Hazel chewed more slowly. He was smiling at her. “Dinosaur days are over. All the dinosaurs are gone. But we’re not going to wait for a meteor to sort us out, are we? Hell, no. We’re going to sort ourselves out. And – this is the thing, this is the hard thing even – though we want it to be about people, it isn’t. It’s about money. It’s always about money. You know that and I know that. So first we show the dinosaurs in charge that we can handle the money side of things. We take the meteor hit, you know? And after that, we make it work.”

  She felt about as heavy as a brontosaurus. “Jesus,” she said. “You had me for a minute back there. I thought everything might be okay.”

  “It’s all good,” he said.

  “You’ll still be paid your salary, is what you mean.”

  His eyes sparkled, as if he’d just fallen in love. “We need people like you, Hazel, people with a strong connection to the way we do things, so there’s continuity, you know?” He put both his palms down on his desk. His body language said they’d just solved all the world’s problems. “Change goes badly when systems fail to negotiate the transitions sensitively. We’re not going to make that mistake here. No meteorites, you know what I mean? It’s going to be more like a fine sandpaper, moving slowly over the rough patches.” He was practically beaming. “I have to say, I’m so glad we had a chance to meet, Hazel. I want you to know my door is open to you, any time, for any reason.”

  She stood. “When’s it going to happen? Can you tell me that?”

  “When’s what going to happen?”

  “Amalgamation. Redeployments. Clawbacks.” She gripped the back of the seat she’d been sitting in, where she presumed she’d looked like a complete fool. “When are you going to start fucking us?”

  “That’s salty,” he said. He stood up behind his desk, and his ergonomic little chair rolled back silently. “The needs and views of all our partners in policing will be solicited before anything happens.”

  She went to the door and turned around. “I wonder how soon after policing standards go to hell up here you’ll be telling your bosses in Toronto that we’re not ‘managing our resources’ well. Because the blame for a fucked-up system always lands on the ones who have to live in it, not the ones who invent it.”

  “Don’t fall for that kind of thinking,” said Willan. “You invent your own reality, Detective Inspector Micallef. And if you want it to be one in which your higher-ups are trying to suffocate you, you will wither away.”

  “God, you sound like someone I know. She doesn’t live in the real world, either.”

  “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said.

  16

  They’d put together a nice evening for her, something to mark her birthday and the beginning of a new chapter in her life, but none of it went the way they were planning. When Emily heard the door to the downstairs apartment slam shut, she knew Hazel wasn’t going to be the most receptive guest at the evening’s celebrations, and she put her hand on her granddaughter’s wrist and prevented her from opening the door to the basement. “Judging from the sound of your mother’s boots on the parquet, Martha, I’d give her a couple more minutes.”

  “I can handle my own mother.”

  “Just handle her in a few minutes. She’s going to be feeling a little under the weather tonight.”

  Martha released the doorknob and stood back a couple of feet, as if expecting the door to dissolve and admit her on its own terms. She and her grandmother listened to the sounds emanating from below, a combination of heavy footfalls and hoarse mutterings that seemed liberally sprinkled with language one didn’t usually use in front of a child, even a thirty-three-year-old one.

  “Son of a fucking bitch,” they heard, and then the sound of a drawer being thrown.

  “She does sound a little under the weather,” said Martha, grinning nervously at Emily. “Was she sick when she left for work this morning?”

  “Something like that,” said Emily.

  “MOTHER!!” came Hazel’s voice from below, volcanic.

  “You want to go down there?”

  “Maybe I’ll wait another few minutes,” said Martha.

  “Hand me that bottle.”

  Martha passed her a full two-sixer of J &B.

  The basement apartment was littered with thrown things: two full drawers, towels, shoes, sections from various newspapers. She was puffing in a corner of the room like a bull. The door to the upstairs had opened, and she heard her mother descending. “Are you armed?” said Emily from behind the basement door.

  “You better not be coming down here without something for my back.”

  Her mother opened the door six inches and held out the bottle of J &B. “This is the best I can do.”

  Hazel strode to the door and snatched the bottle out of her mother’s hand. She was beginning to feel the heebie-jeebies: it had been almost twenty-four hours since her last pill. Waves of nausea accompanied the anxiety. There was a tumbler in the bathroom meant for drinking water out of; she filled it to the rim. When she came out, Emily was standing in the middle of the room, looking around at the mess, her arms behind her back. “You want a straw?”

  “You had no right.”

  “I had no right.”

  “I had surgery seventeen days ago. I have pain and I have a prescription for pain killers. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Her mother was dressed nicely, in a grey wool dress with a thin, shiny black belt around her waist. Elegant. She hadn’t put her shoes on and she was tilting back and forth on her heels in her black hose. “First off,” she said, “keep your voice down. There are people upstairs planning a nice evening for you and they don’t need to hear you swearing like a fusilier.”

  “Fuck ’em,” said Hazel. “Where are my pills?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  Emily pushed past her in the bathroom doorway, grabbing Hazel’s arm on the way in. Whiskey sloshed onto the cold tiles. She tugged her toward the toilet bowl. “There they are,” Emily said, lifting the lid. “They’re down there somewhere. If you can’t find one, maybe you should just lap the water. You might as well, with the mess you’re making of yourself.”

  Hazel saw something on the floor behind the toilet, and shook herself loose of her mother’s grip and leaned forward to close the toilet lid. She sat down on it, straddling the toilet tank, and put the glass of whiskey down on the floor as she felt around behind. She was sure she’d seen an escapee, a pill that had bounced off the toilet rim and rolled onto the floor. Her finger grazed it, pushing it farther along the floor, but then she had it. She closed her hand around it and stood. Her mother was shaking her head ruefully.

  “Look at you,” she said. “Look how small you are now.”

  “Get out.”

  “Give me the pill.�
��

  “You’re not supposed to go cold turkey. Did you know that?” “Your daughter’s here,” Emily said. “You want her to see you like this? I can call her down right now.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Emily turned her head toward the door. “Martha!” There was nothing for a second, but then they heard footsteps coming down.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Hazel, hanging her head. “It’s my birthday. This is what you do to me on my birthday?”

  “For you,” said Emily. “Not to you. Now give me that pill.”

  “Can I come in?” Martha was standing just inside the apartment. “Mum?”

  Emily took a step toward Hazel, a careful step, like she was approaching a mad dog, and she put her hand out. “You’re an addict, Hazel. Now give me that pill.”

  She turned her fist over into her mother’s hand and opened it. The pill fell out silently into Emily’s palm. Emily looked at it and then, to Hazel’s surprise, her mother popped it into her mouth. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s a Tylenol,” said Emily. “After all this nonsense, I need one. Now go say hello to your daughter.”

  But Martha had crept slowly into the room and she was already standing in the doorway. “Mum?”

  “Sweetie,” said Hazel, going to take her child in her arms. She tried to ignore the nausea roiling inside her. “What a wonderful surprise.”

  She did her best to behave. Glynnis had made duck breast with a tart raspberry sauce that made Hazel’s stomach flip when she smelled it, but once she started eating, her gut settled down. It was, frankly, one of the most delicious things she’d ever eaten. And Andrew made a serious toast, one without a single euphemism in it, wishing her a year of renewal and happiness, a year of closeness with those she loved, and success in her work, and the entire time, Glynnis had sat beside her new husband with her glass raised, beaming at Hazel. Was she happy because she knew with Hazel back to work she’d be out of her house soon, the devil in her basement? Or was she – this strange, strange woman – genuinely happy to see Hazel up and about, despite the fact that only six days ago, she’d caught her husband feeding her spare ribs in the bath? Nothing had ever come of that, Emily had been right, no angry words, no delayed consequences. It really had been, in Glynnis’s eyes, an instance of her husband “caring for another human being.” It wasn’t right. It should have blown up in all their faces. Is that what Hazel had wanted? Maybe. But in that, she had failed as well.

  Martha sent her mother shy looks of love and sadness from the other side of the table. They hadn’t seen each other since February, when Hazel had felt well enough to go down to Toronto for an afternoon and they’d had coffee. Their meetings didn’t always end well. The undercurrent of Hazel’s worries about the girl infected a lot of what she said, and Martha heard her mother’s criticisms of her life in everything. Hazel could not offer to pay for Martha’s lattes anymore when they met because such a gesture – no matter how natural it might have been for a mother to buy her daughter a cup of coffee – Martha saw as a judgment on her joblessness, her failure to choose a path and stay on it, her eternal singleness, her at-least-once-yearly need to be bailed out of some mess. All of this in a three-dollar cup of coffee. When Martha had been in her late twenties, Hazel and Andrew had talked about it all as a phase – she was young; she would find her way; this generation started everything later; she’d be sorted out by the time she was thirty. Then, after the breakup, Hazel excused her daughter’s rootlessness as a reaction to what was happening to her parents. But now she was thirty-three, and there was no sign of her waking up. What was going to happen? Would she find someone to share her life with, who would shoulder part of the burden that loving this girl entailed? What if she or Andrew died? What if Martha became dependent on her sister? Would she ever be able to stop worrying about this child?

  And yet, here she was, her thin white skin shimmering in front of the candles (although not the special candles), and that wan, loving smile on her face. How could she not want to save her, this gorgeous, lost child? Hazel reached across the tabletop and took one of Martha’s hands in hers. “This is the best birthday present I’ve gotten so far.” She was, perhaps, now a little drunk on wine and whiskey, but Martha still smiled broadly at her and accepted the compliment. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Happy birthday, Mum.”

  “Another toast,” said Andrew, standing. They all raised their glasses again. “To family,” he said, and again, Glynnis was beaming that bright, terrifying gaze of pure joy at her. But she drank and the clocks struck ten and she was drunk.

  They shooed her out of the kitchen with a cup of camomile tea, and Martha beckoned her into the sitting room, near the door. “Your birthday’s not over yet,” she said. They went down the hallway together and Hazel saw the glass table in the front room was mounded with a small pile of gifts. They sat down together on the couch. “Mine first,” said Martha, passing Hazel a limp, wrapped package. She hefted it in her hands; it was a blouse or a blanket or something like that. “It’s a hat,” said Hazel.

  “So close.”

  She unwrapped it. It was a handmade case for a throw pillow, a needlepoint that was a painstaking copy of a photograph from Martha’s childhood, of herself at the age of three on her mother’s shoulders. It amazed Hazel and she held it in her lap, staring at it. “My god, Martha. This is beautiful, just beautiful.” She leaned across the couch and held her tightly. “You made this?”

  “You didn’t know I could needlepoint, did you?” Her face was bright with joy. “Well, I just learned. And it’s not easy. I pulled that apart three times before I got it done.”

  “It must have taken you months.”

  “I calculated it took about two hundred hours,” said Martha. “I figure if I wanted to sell that thing and make minimum wage I’d have to charge, like, twenty-three hundred for it.”

  Hazel laughed, but she was already cancelling the things she wanted to say that she knew would be translated in Martha’s head into something dark. It was hard to think straight, with the J &B in her and the wine, and the withdrawal symptoms, which had begun to make her sweat, like she was running a fever. But she had to be careful. Any comments on how much free time her daughter had, the fact that the gift had been made, not bought, anything around the idea that maybe this newfound talent was a “calling,” reference to the fact that Hazel would have to buy the pillow to put in the case herself, anything, to be sure, that wasn’t unalloyed gratitude. “Amazing,” she said. “You’re amazing.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. You surprise me.”

  “In a good way?”

  There it was, thought Hazel, she’d already gone through the bad door without realizing it. But she was drunk enough to shimmy back over the threshold. “If you hadn’t shown up here tonight, sweetie, this day would have had no saving graces. You’re a miracle.”

  Martha hesitated, and then she allowed the compliment with a warm smile. “And you’re drunk.”

  “Let’s open the rest of these impersonal, pointless gifts, shall we?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Martha lined them up, the smaller gifts in front, the larger ones behind. Hazel was touched to see her mother’s handwriting on one of the envelopes as well as Andrew’s. There were five more gifts in total. She reached for one of them, but then pulled her hand back, feeling a chill run up her spine. “Maybe we should wait for the others?”

  “Sure,” said her daughter. They sat silently for a minute, Hazel staring at the wrapped boxes. “What was all the shouting about earlier?” said Martha quietly.

  “Huh?” said Hazel.

  “I heard some shouting.”

  “Oh… it was just a rough day.”

  “It’s hard being in this situation, huh? Living here. With Dad and Glynnis.”

  “It’s temporary, honey.” She recognized the handwriting on all of the cards, she thought.

  “Is that what you were upset about?”
r />   “It’s okay,” said Hazel.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  She turned sharply to Martha. “Sorry, sweetie. Honestly, you don’t have to worry. Today had nothing to do with you.”

  “Why do you think I’d be concerned only if it had something to do with me?”

  “I don’t…” She got up from the couch, with difficulty, and wiped her hands on her slacks. “Are all these gifts from you and Nanna and the, um, Pedersens?”

  “Mum, why don’t you want to talk to me?”

  Hazel looked down at her daughter. It was getting hard to think straight. It felt like her brain was bumping around inside her head. Pay attention, she told herself. “I do. You know… recovering from surgery has been hard. Going back to work has been hard. And it was a rough sixty-second birthday. But it’s better now.”

  “Nanna is worried about you.”

  “I know, but I promise you,” Hazel said, looking Martha in the eye, “that everything is okay and that everything is going to be okay.”

  “Good,” said Martha.

  Emily emerged from the kitchen and started down the hall. “You ready for us?”

  “Actually… Mum, if you wouldn’t mind, could you pass me the phone?”

  Emily gave her a look and then retreated to the kitchen and came back with the portable. “You want to invite someone else over?”

  “Sort of,” she said, and she dialled the number of the station house. Wilton answered. “Spencer? Who’s on shift tonight?” She listened. “Will you ask MacDonald to put down what he’s doing and come over here, please?”