Chapter Three #2
“It’s okay.” Sarah swallows. She has no history with the word itself. All of her racist experiences in Toronto have been micro-aggressions, like Officer Isaac commenting on her name. Digs so subtle she can never be sure if she imagined them or not. Story of her life.
But the overtness of this hate stuns her.
In Sweetside, the wolves don’t bother with sheep’s clothing, and she’s not sure which is worse.
She’s read the news stories of increasing racist attacks, yes, but they always seem to happen outside her comfortable boundaries.
Outside the city, outside the province, outside the country.
An itch spreads between her shoulder blades, reminding her she’s wearing a target she can’t take off, can’t hide with makeup or clothing.
Being female and Asian, she has to wear masks of a different kind.
A friendly, innocent smile. Clothes that don’t draw too much attention.
A casual speech pattern, dropping the Gs from her verbs and softening her Ts, to show she’s not one of them.
She’s from Toronno, not Toronto, and she was headin’ to Timmins to visit her bro. She’s harmless. Not worth the trouble.
It’s like living with Ben all over again.
“No, it’s not okay.” Caleb stalks over to the truck and opens the passenger door for her.
Sarah’s reflexes kick in, and she feels the need to smooth his temper’s jagged edges. “It is, really. No one’s ever called me that before. It just makes me laugh. Like, seriously, what decade are we living in?”
“The current one, unfortunately. Here.” Caleb thrusts her hoodie and mask into her hands, thankfully too rankled to scrutinize them. She hooks the elastic over her ears, and her shoulders loosen as soon as her face is covered.
It only takes a few minutes for the truck to roll up the drive to the house.
Sarah searches the windows for the figure she’d seen earlier.
No one lurks behind the panes. The only silhouette is that of the woods behind the house.
Graham had raved about seeing stars up north, but tonight, the sky is overcast. All she can see is dark against dark, the tree-shaped shadows swaying as one, breathing in an irregular rhythm.
Caleb pulls the truck into what looks like a converted carriage house.
Inside, it’s a normal suburban garage, which Sarah finds reassuring.
Power tools hang on a pegboard over a workbench, and a spool of heavy-duty plastic sheeting leans against a chest freezer.
Industrial-sized bottles of bleach and boxes of latex gloves are stacked on a shelf.
It’s no less than what everyone has these days in a pandemic.
She follows Caleb out of the garage, clutching her damp hoodie.
Caleb carries her backpack. The house seems bigger now she’s standing below its gables, monstrous by Toronto standards, and unnecessarily large for two—now three—people.
The woods behind it reach up to the sky.
These are the trees from the motel paintings, dark and sinister, moving constantly in the wind.
“Welcome to Sweetside Manor,” Caleb announces, his voice droll. He climbs the porch’s front steps and holds the door open. “I didn’t name the place, by the way. Some ancestor with a taste for grandeur and colonization.”
What would that ancestor think of her? She steps warily over the threshold, instinctively afraid of awakening old ghosts. This house must have many.
“No need to be quiet,” Caleb says. “Elijah’s a night owl. He’s probably in his studio or out for a walk.”
“At this time of night?”
“It’s pretty safe around here.”
She raises her eyebrows. He adds, sheepishly, “Well, for us.”
Sarah scrapes the borrowed boots on the doormat and pries them off. Standing in the foyer, she’s not sure what she’d expected. Ornate Victorian furniture and tarnished chandeliers, to match the house’s exterior.
Sweetside Manor is a time capsule, but of about fifty years ago.
The space is lined with orange and brown floral wallpaper.
Cross-stitched flowers in embroidery hoops follow the rise of a varnished wooden staircase, and a braided rag rug sits below the last step.
The air smells like cedar and something oily, like turpentine. Like Elijah’s coat.
To Sarah, she might as well have stepped into Victorian times.
She’s not used to anything older than a generation.
She and Graham grew up just north of Toronto, the house freshly built when her parents bought it in the 1990s.
Everything that couldn’t fit in a suitcase had been left behind in Hong Kong, and even there, the family home was filled with modern flat-pack furniture.
And the house where she and Ben rented an apartment is newly renovated, any history exorcised by track lighting and stainless steel appliances.
The whitewashed walls were a blank canvas for Ben’s moods.
She tries to put her smile into her eyes as she takes in the house. She’s fled to the past, instead of the future she’d imagined every time she withdrew just a little more cash from the grocery store ATM to fund her escape.
“I’m afraid it’s not classy by Toronto standards,” Caleb says, helping her out of the parka and hanging it up in the hall closet. “We were planning to renovate and put the house on Airbnb, but then the pandemic hit.”
“It’s nice,” she lies. “Look, I’m really sorry about the windows. I can help clean up—”
“I’ll take care of it in the morning. I’m the one who’s sorry. I should’ve brought you to the house right away. They don’t like anyone who’s different around here. Even me and Elijah, they treat us like we’re outsiders.”
He shrugs off his jacket and he is, of course, wearing more plaid beneath it. He seems unaware he’s the poster boy for country living, a square-jawed, broad-shouldered mountain man who’d be at home in front of a fire with a couple of hunting dogs.
“I find that hard to believe,” Sarah says.
“Mom came from money—the town’s named for her family—so they never let us fit in. And after she died, Dad sold off the land she’d owned to a developer who turned it into luxury cottages. They bring in tourist revenue, but everyone’s mad we opened the door to more city folks. Shit.”
He glances down. There’s a smear of blood on the scratched hardwood. “You must’ve stepped on glass.”
Sarah lifts her left foot, revealing a blotch under the toe of her sock. Unbelievable. She broke his motel windows, and now she’s bleeding all over this man’s home. Karma, perhaps, for what she did to Ben. “I’m sorry about the—”
“For fuck’s sake, stop apologizing.”
She shuts up, the familiar alarm bell chiming in the back of her head. With his mask on, she can’t tell how angry he is. Best to keep smiling and appear harmless and helpless, even though her heart jackrabbits in her chest.
“I’ll take a look at your foot upstairs,” he says.
Caleb trudges up the stairs with her backpack, and the house springs to life, floorboards groaning under his feet. “Is it only you and your brother here?” Sarah asks, her own footsteps pale echoes of his bold ones as she follows him upstairs.
“Yep. Dad and Grandma and Grandpa Sweet lived here too, until they passed away. Now it’s just me and Elijah. This way. You can have the main bedroom. It’s got an ensuite bathroom, so you don’t have to go into the rest of the house.”
Caleb opens a door at the end of the darkened landing.
At first, Sarah thinks she’s staring at another painting, but then he flicks on the light, and she realizes it’s a window looking out on the woods.
A king-sized bed sprawls beneath it, next to a well-worn plaid recliner in shades of mustard and taupe.
A framed photograph of a man and woman stands on a built-in desk that must have once been a vanity for the lady of the house.
From the couple’s curling brown hair, Sarah guesses they’re Caleb’s parents.
The woman is elegant and bird-like in a long wool coat, the fine features of her face weighed down by an unseen sadness.
Sarah wonders if she’d been diagnosed with cancer already.
The man beside her is all sideburns and shearling and tinted glasses, his large hand weighing down her shoulder.
He grins at the camera, proud of his spoils. Sarah shivers. He reminds her of Ben.
Caleb strides forward, driving her further into the room, and motions toward the bed. “Sit. I’ll get the first aid kit.”
He disappears into the bathroom. Sarah drapes the damp hoodie over her backpack and sinks onto the mattress, anticipation and apprehension scouring her insides.
Caleb emerges with a tube of antiseptic ointment and some gauze. “I can—” she starts, but he waves her off. She peels the sock off her foot, afraid he’ll do it himself if she doesn’t.
He sits on the recliner and grabs her ankle. She gasps at the sudden heat of his skin. He glances up, brows drawing together. His eyes are as blue as a summer sky, the sky she’d pictured when she’d imagined driving up Highway 11 to her freedom. “Sorry, did I hurt you?”
Sarah shakes her head, unable to speak. He peers at the sole of her foot.
A tendril of hair springs over his forehead, and she fights the urge to wind the curl around her fingers.
She focuses on her foot instead. Blood smudges the gap beside her big toe.
She hadn’t felt the cut or noticed the bleeding until it was too late.
Story of her life, again.
“I don’t see any broken glass, and it’s a small cut. You won’t need stitches.” He gently dabs some of the ointment on the cut. Sarah hisses at the sting, and the unexpected intimacy of the gesture. “It’s all right,” he says soothingly.
He wraps clean gauze around her foot and finally releases her. She remembers how to breathe again, taking air through her mouth in shuddering gulps while Caleb returns the supplies to the bathroom. It’s been a long time since anyone touched her in kindness, without expecting anything in return.
“Get some sleep. You’re safe now,” Caleb says. Sarah wants to believe him, but the masculine smell of his deodorant and the crinkle at the corners of his too-blue eyes tell her otherwise. “I’ll come by in the morning with breakfast.”
“Thank you.”
He doesn’t turn to leave, his throat constricting below his masked chin like he wants to say something else. They lock gazes for a second too long, until a creak downstairs breaks the silence. Caleb’s eyes flit toward the sound, and deep lines appear in his forehead.
“I’d lock your door,” he says quietly, and then he’s gone.