The Killing Circle

I launch forward. Blinking my eyes clear to catch another sight of it down the rows. But what was it? Neither identifiably man nor woman, no notable clothing, no hat, no visible hair. No face. A scarecrow hopped off its post.

Now when I shout I’m no longer addressing Sam but whatever it is that’s out here with me.

'Bring him back! Bring him back!'

There’s no threat in it. No promise of vengeance. It’s little more than a father’s winded gasps shaped into words.

All at once I break through into the farmhouse’s yard. The grass grown high around a rusted swing set. Paint chipping on the shutters. Smashed-out windows.

I go around the back of the place. No car parked anywhere. No sign that anyone has come or gone since whatever bad news ushered out the people who lived here last.

I stop for a second to think of what to do next. That’s when my legs give out. I fall to my knees as though moved by a sudden need to pray. Over the pounding of my heart I listen for retreating footfall. Not even the movie voices can reach me. The only sound the electric buzz of crickets.

And the only thing to see is the Mustang’s screen. An ocean of cornstalks away, but still clearly visible. A silent performance of terror so much more fluid and believable than my own.

It’s as I watch that it comes to me. A truth I could never prove to anyone, but no less certain for that.

I know who has done this. Who has taken my son. I know its name.

I kneel in the high grass of the abandoned farmyard, staring at its face. Forty feet high and towering over the harvest fields, lips moving in silence, directly addressing the night like a god. A monstrous enlargement made of light on a whitewashed screen.

The part all actors say is the best to play. The villain.

PART ONE

The Kensington Circle

1

VALENTINE’S DAY, 2003

'Love cards!'

This is Sam, my four-year-old son. Running into my room to jump on the bed and rain crayoned Valentines over my face.

'It’s Love Day,” I confirm. Lift his T-shirt to deliver fart kisses to his belly.

'Who’s your Valentine, Daddy?'

'I suppose that would have to be Mommy.'

'But she’s not here.'

'That doesn’t matter. You can choose anyone you like.'

'Really?'

'Absolutely.'

Sam thinks on this. His fingers folding and unfolding a card. The sparkles stirred around in the still wet glue.

'So is Emmie your Valentine?” I ask him. Emmie being our regular nanny. 'Maybe someone at daycare?'

And then he surprises me. He often does.

'No,” he says, offering me his paper heart. 'It’s you.'

Days like these, the unavoidable calendar celebrations—Christmas, New Year’s, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day —are worse than others. They remind me how lonely I am. And how, over time, this loneliness has burrowed deeper, down into tissue and bone. A disease lurking in remission.

But lately, something has changed. An emerging emptiness. The full, vacant weight of loss. I thought that I’d been grieving over the past three and a half years. But maybe I’m only just now coming out of the shock. Maybe the real grief has yet to arrive.

Sam is everything.

This one rule still helps. But in the months immediately following Tamara’s death, it was more than just a focus. It allowed me to survive. No oneway wants, no me. Not permitting myself to dream had got me halfway to not feeling—easier conditions to manage than feeling and dreaming too much.

But maybe this has been a mistake. Maybe I was wrong to believe you could get along without something of your own. Eventually, if living requires being nothing, then you’re not even living any more.

Tamara’s last days is something I’m not going to get into. I will confess to all manner of poor behaviour and bad judgment and broken laws. And I am prepared to explore the nature of memory (as the cover bumpf on those precious, gazingout-to-sea sort of novels puts it) even when it causes the brightest flashes of regret. But I’m not going to tell you what it was like to watch my wife’s pain. To watch her die.

I will say this, however: losing her opened my eyes. To the thousands of hours spent gnawing on soured ambitions, petty office grievances, the seemingly outrageous everyday injustices. To all the wasted opportunities to not think, but do. Chances to change. To see that I could change.

I had just turned thirty-one when Tamara died. Not even half a life. But when she left, a cruel light was cast on how complete this life could have been. How complete it was, had I only seen it that way.

We bought the house on Euclid just off Queen as newlyweds, before the arrival of the yoga outfitters, the hundred-dollar-haircut salons, the erotic boutiques. Then, the only yoga being practiced was by the drunks folded up in store doorways, and the only erotica was a half-hour with one of the ladies pacing in heels at the corner. I could barely manage the downpayment then, and can’t afford to sell now. Not if I want to live anywhere near downtown.

Which I do. If for no other reason than I like to walk to work. Despite the comforts offered by all the new money washing in, Queen Street West still offers plenty of drama for the pedestrian. Punks cheering on a pair of snarling mastiffs outside the Big Bop. A chorus of self-talkers off their meds. The guy who follows me for a block every morning, asking me to buy him a prosciutto sandwich (he’s very specific about this) and inexplicably calling me Steve-o. Not to mention the ambulances hauling off whoever missed the last bed in the shelter the night before.

It is a time in the city’s history when everyone is pointing out the ways that Toronto is changing. More construction, more new arrivals, more ways to make it and spend it. And more to fear. The stories of random violence, home invasions, drivebys, motiveless attacks. But it’s not just that. It’s not the threat that has always come from the them of our imaginations, but from potentially anyone, even ourselves.