Workplace Injuries
After I’d organized the container drawer, a mess of orphaned tops and bottoms, I recommended that Tammy toss all the plastic and replace it with glass. I researched where to buy it and sent her the link. She loved the initiative. That was the problem with their old housekeeper, she’d said. “She did the bare minimum, and even then, it was half-hearted.” I laughed because that’s what my mother had said about me. My modus operandi, as she’d called it, my whole view of the world, my dad jabbed, was a cross between half-assed and half-hearted.
Every week, I cleaned out something that wasn’t on the original checklist. I reorganized the linen closet, the basement shelves full of Christmas decorations and old paint cans, the kids’ closets full of broken hangers and candy wrappers. Until I found the note pinned to the fridge, asking me to remove all the food from the freezer and please prepare meals with anything that appeared “ready to die” and then another note the following week, “Can you check the ceiling fans in the kids’ rooms?” Who did she think she was?
They’d been paying me generously and I liked impressing them, but when she started listing things, the extra favours that once garnered surprise and gratitude, and the occasional twenty-dollar bill, had become part of the job.
I was watching YouTube videos sitting on their daughter Chelsey’s unmade bed when the idea came to me.
Unscrew the mounting bracket behind the bookshelves in Chelsey’s bedroom. Move books from the bottom to the top shelf.
Fifteen minutes before Tammy returns from Yoga, pull down shelf and crawl beneath the rubble of snow globes and books.
Scream for help when the front door opens.
Limp down the stairs and rest on the sofa for an hour until Joe gets home from work.
Refuse to visit the doctor, refuse to call the cleaning service, refuse to initiate any sort of paper trail because Tammy and Joe may not find another housekeeper willing to work in such an unsafe environment. The bookshelf hadn’t been installed properly. Call the contractor. No. Don’t call anyone, I’m fine, totally fine. I’ll be fine. Just let me rest.
It worked. I couldn’t believe it.
I texted Tammy during my first shift after the accident.
- I hope it’s okay that I didn’t finish the laundry.
I hate laundry.
- Don’t even worry about it.
- Would you mind if I work a half day next Tuesday?
- Of course.
- You won’t need to pay me, if that’s an issue.
- Not at all. We’ll pay you. Take all the time you need.
- I’m sure I’ll be right as rain by summer.
- Summer? Do you think it will be that long?
- Massage therapist said I tore my rotator cuff.
- Torn? Oh no. Poor Marina.
- I’ll be okay. I appreciate the support.
I haven’t folded a pair of Joe’s boxers in two years. Haven’t cleaned out a drawer. Now I work the half-hearted bare minimum and still get paid $40 more than they’d originally agreed for a six-hour day.
On Wednesdays, I clean Chuck and Bob’s condo. They pay me $200 for four hours of cleaning. Last year, a finishing nail mysteriously appeared out of the freshly installed hardwood floors. I sat in the emergency for eight hours to get a tetanus shot because I’d forgotten to consider the real implications of putting a nail through my foot.
On Fridays, I work for Nancy and Geoffrey, and I have no plans for a workplace injury. They never expect anything from me. I walk around their house every week for five hours with a dust cloth and a half-filled bucket of tepid soapy water, and they pay me $150.
I’d been trying to fill my Thursdays for a few months, but none of the clients worked out. When my boss Tatyana recommended Hugh, I worried that another divorced man who works from home, whose kids visited on the weekends, meant that I’d have to wash his dishes and pick up dirty clothes from the floor. I do not like touching dirty underwear. I’d rather sweep them into a bin. Cleaning up before I get down to cleaning up takes up a lot of time. I told Tatyana that I’d do a three-clean test-run.
Turns out Hugh is not your average divorced dad. Hugh spends an hour on the stationary bicycle in the morning and when he finishes eating his lunch, he cleans his own dishes. Hugh dresses in a suit and tie every day. Hugh has a place for everything. Every shelf is built-in, the hardwood floors pristine, the cleaning supplies environmentally friendly, which means I could drink them and still not be able to claim exposure to toxins. It means he’d know if anything had been moved or modified, if anything went missing. It was the easiest job ever, but without an opportunity to make it even easier, it started to feel like hard work.
After a few cleans, I called my boss.
- Tat, I can’t work for this guy. Can I get another family in Rosedale?
- You’re all I’ve got. Nobody wants to work for him.
- Why? This place is the easiest job I’ve ever had.
- I don’t know, but nobody lasts more than three months before they leave, as in they quit the company. Isa moved back to Chile for fuck sakes.
- He doesn’t need a cleaner. The guy cleans the house before I get here. This morning the hardwood floors were still wet.
- Are you calling me from his house?
- He’s on a call. He can’t hear me.
- You shouldn’t be using your phone on a job.
- Sure, Tat.
- I mean it. Tammy and Joe sent in a complaint last week. Said you stopped cleaning their daughter’s bedroom.
- They did what?
I told Joe a couple of months ago that it was triggering to go into Chelsey’s room and clean the same shelf they’d re-secured to the wall. Now, they’re complaining about me?
“Good morning. Sorry.” I tuck the phone into my back pocket after ending the call with Tatyana.
“That’s okay. I’m not one of those employers who cares about that. You can talk on the phone all day, if you want.” Hugh sips his smoothie, rubbing the back of his neck and stretching his shoulder muscles.
“I’m almost done here.” I roll the last pair of socks and toss it into the laundry basket. “Do you want me to put this away?”
“No that’s fine. I was wondering if you could do two days next week?”
“Two days?”
“I’d like the refrigerator cleaned out, and the stove. Is that too much?”
Here we go. I knew this was too good to be true. It’s been two months. I guess this is where it starts. All the cleaners probably quit when his nit-pickiness jumped into high gear. He doesn’t know I’m wily. I’ll find a way of getting out of things like cleaning the stove. I hate cleaning the stove more than I hate folding his fifty-dollar-boxers.
“Sure. No problem,” I say, “My hourly goes up a bit for jobs like that, but don’t tell Tatyana. She’ll take a cut and it’s not like she’s doing the work.”
“I completely understand.”
“If you want me to clean the basement, let me know.”
The basement might be where I’ll find my workplace injury.
“I hire a special cleaner for that.” Weird. He appears nervous and embarrassed about the basement.
“I can always add it to my regular day. Tatyana doesn’t need to know.”
“Thanks for the offer.” He tugs at the tie and unbuttons the top of his shirt. He’s got the body of a marathon runner, lean and a bit gaunt. Not my type, as if he’d ever consider a woman like me. I’m a solid size 14 but occasionally squeeze myself into a size 12 and this guy wears small boxer briefs under a 38 Tall suit.
“I noticed the kids’ rooms haven’t been slept in.”
He stares at me for a few minutes because of course it’s none of my business but I’d rather not wash and change clean sheets on two twin beds pushed against the walls.
“Their mother moved to Montreal,” he says, “They’ll come live with me in the summer.”
If there’s going to be two teenagers here all summer, I will not be doing their laundry. I’ve got a few months to figure out how to get out of this.
“Tatyana mentioned your family lives in, Florida, is it?” I don’t usually care about family history, but it’s always weird to think about an American moving here, to a bungalow in Etobicoke.
“Cleveland, actually.”
“Cool. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
“Never been.” He untucks his shirt and removes his belt. For a second I think he’s going to undress in front of me.
“Parents still alive?”
“Both still working.” His abdomen is a topographical map of manly perfection.
My parents still live in our seven-bedroom house in Rothesay, New Brunswick. When I stopped going to school, they threatened to board me at Netherwood for high school, I forged another one of my mother’s cheques and moved to Toronto with ten grand. I called them from Montreal. They said that I’d never see a penny from the trust until I paid them back.
“What about you, Marina? Parents? siblings?”
“Why do you ask?” What the hell business is it of his what my brothers are doing right now. Would it help him to know they blocked me on Instagram?
“I just like to know what ties people to the world, you know,” Hugh says.
“What does that mean?” I ask. He steps into the laundry room and exits wearing running shorts and a t-shirt. It’s the middle of March, probably 5 degrees outside.
“Family is everything, right? Without family, even if they’re friends who are like family, what do we have to keep us here?”
“You mean, alive? Like family is what keeps us from leaping off a bridge.”
“I guess so. Existentially, we’re here to matter to other people, to make other people feel like they matter.” His earnest smile as he slowly says, matter.
I am not in the mood for a conversation about why I don’t matter to anyone. I’ve already missed my streetcar. “I thought I was here to clean your house.” I smile right back.
He reaches inside his shorts to adjust himself before he pulls his ankle up to his butt to stretch his quads. “I just mean, why are we here?” He reaches for the smoothie on the kitchen counter.
“On the planet?” I pucker my lips while he drinks the liquified grass.
“Human beings? Why are we here? You should know, I’m an atheist,” he says, “Sorry if you believe in God.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
I don’t believe in anything, I want to say, but this guy clearly believes in something, and I don’t want to hear what it is.
“God is a waste of time, and real unhappiness exists with or without him.” He swallows the last of the grass.
“I don’t know. Tat believes in God, goes to church and everything, and I’ve never known anyone happier than her.”
“I bet that’s not true.” He swings his leg down, shaking his foot around before pulling up the other ankle.
“I’m not close with my family.” I don’t know why I say it, but it’s like he’s a priest or something. The words fall out of me.
“I didn’t think so. You’ve only got an Instagram account, where you have six followers and
you’re following nobody. You might be the only 26-year-old without social media.”
How does he know all this? “I just watch YouTube and TikTok.”
“I couldn’t find, Marina, DelRay is it? Not on TikTok.” he says.
My TikTok links back to my real name. Why is this guy looking me up?
“I’m on there,” I say.
“What’s your name?”
“Pardon?”
“On TikTok. What’s your handle?” He tosses out the words like he doesn’t care about the answer.
“I don’t really want the people I work with to see, my personal life.” I carry the laundry basket to his bedroom, and he follows me.
“I can put that away.” He stretches his neck by pulling his face into his armpit.
“I’ve gotta go. See you next week.”
“Can you come on Monday?” he asks.
Does he know that’s my day off? That I never work Mondays?
“Can I let you know?”
“I’d rather know now. Otherwise, I have to hire somebody else.”
Somebody else? Is this why people quit because he tells them they have to work two days or be replaced? Because he starts stalking them on social media like some kind of psycho?
“Sure. See you Monday.”
“Great.” He leaves before me, and I watch him out the living room window as he jogs across the street.
I immediately go through his drawers looking for something to steal. If I can’t figure out a plausible workplace injury, I’m going to leave here today with something. The remote control to the television! Brilliant. He’ll come home after his run and want to turn on the news or sports or whatever he watches, and he won’t be able to. I go out to the living room and open the skinny drawers in the wall-to-wall cabinet searching for the clicker. I get down on my hands and knees and reach under the sectional, waving back and forth like a windshield wiper. Finally, I check behind the wall-mounted screen and there it is, attached to the back of the television with Velcro. Of course, he’d have it in a spot where he’d never lose it.
Instead of that, I take the Miyabi chef’s knife. It fits diagonally in my fanny pack.
Before I have my shoes tied, the front door opens.
“You still here?”
“Ya, sorry. I forgot to vacuum the carpets in the kids’ rooms.” A believable excuse given I’m sweating from searching for the remote and those rooms never get dirty.
He knows I’m lying. It’s the same face my dad had any time I came home drunk or high.
“Can I show you something?” He removes his t-shirt and opens the door to the basement.
“I honestly have to run. I’ve got a date with a friend.”
“I know that’s not true. Corinna.”
“Corinna?” I swallow my birth name like it’s an entire supermarket dinner roll. Maybe he didn’t say it.
“I know you have no friends. I know you go home every day and watch pirated television shows on your laptop. I know your other clients, Tammy and Joe, have been trying to figure out a way to fire you and that Nancy and Geoff feel sorry for you. What did Geoff say? He said watching you walk around their house like an idiot toddler is their way of paying it forward. Charity. They have another cleaner who comes on Saturdays to clean what you didn’t clean. Charles and Robert are afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me?” I turn the fanny pack around and rest my hand on the zipper.
“Yes. Robert thinks you might be a bit.” Hugh circles the side of his head with his index finger.
“They think I’m crazy?”
“You don’t leave a good impression on people.” Hugh removes his shorts. As he turns toward the bedroom, I lunge for the front door.
I’m fiddling with the lock when he comes up behind me.
“I can’t open the door.”
“It’s locked from the inside,” he says, “Come with me.” He grips my hands and drags me to the top of the basement stairs.
I open my fanny pack, but I know there’s no way I can get a good swing from this angle, and I know psychopaths, if you hurt them, they just get mad, and all this, whatever he has planned for me, will be worse.
“I’m just like you,” I say. Like if he knows that I’m a bad person, a schemer, a fucking liar, as my mother once called me, maybe Hugh will let me go. What pleasure will he get from murdering me? I have nobody who’ll care I’m dead.
Hugh doesn’t hear me.
“It’s not about how you live or how you die, but how you will be remembered.”
Is he suggesting that my life will only have meaning now as a murder victim?
“Ho-leee, shit.” An entire wall in the basement is covered in photos of me, drone shots of me walking on my street, paparazzi style photos of me drinking coffee on the bench across from the park. I’d started watching the nannies with the kids, keeping them on their toes with a few photos here and there. There are screenshots of the stupid TikTok videos I made cleaning everything with baking soda and vinegar. I thought I could make some money, pay back my parents, go home for Christmas.
“How does this make you feel?” Hugh asks.
“Like you’re a psycho who’s going to kill me, but for some weird reason wants me to see how big a loser I am first.”
“That’s not what’s happening here.” He places me in a rolling office chair and pushes me to a big screen. He lifts a remote control, and it comes to life. I see my birth certificate, a picture of my mom crying with a bloody-freshly-birthed version of me on her chest, a photo of my dad crying, staring down at a swaddled baby. Me. The images that come across the screen are all of me at various stages of my life.
“Do you see this girl?” An image of me at thirteen. Mr. Paterson, the vice-principal thought it was a good idea to create a board of shame and any student who acted out – or who accidentally tripped the most popular girl in school throwing her into the open door of a school bus causing her to lose two of the front teeth that her parents had paid thousands to straighten – had their photo taken in front of a height indicator he’d painted on the wall in his office. That mugshot had been pinned to the corkboard in the front foyer of the school for two years.
“She looks cool,” I say. I doubt my sarcasm is going to get me anywhere today. I laugh because maybe Mr. Paterson was right. One of these days, young lady, that smart mouth of yours is going land you in a heap of trouble.
“What’s so funny, CoCo?” Hugh says it like he knows the truth, like he knows what’ll happen when I hear it.
“Don’t call me that.”
“I just need your attention.”
“I’m Marina. Not CoCo.”
Hugh sits in another rolling office chair and pulls himself close to me. My hands are shaking because this is it, this is my only chance. I feel it. I push my chair back and reach inside the fanny pack.
He doesn’t see it coming because he’s now focused on a yellow file folder. More photos, more proof of the half-assed, half-hearted life I lived before coming to Toronto. Do I tell Hugh I’m a worthless piece of shit who won’t be missed by anybody? Does that matter? He’ll probably send Tatyana a text message from my phone saying that I quit and he’ll have added another body to his count.
He grips his neck. The blood comes out like the fountain at the park, and I can’t believe I actually got him in the good spot. The jugular.
“Holy shit.” I run up the stairs. He’s gargling words and stumbling after me.
I lock the basement door. At the sink, I clean the knife. I spray it with bleach cleaner.
“I have to take this with me, what am I doing?” I should call the cops. I know I should call the cops. But I’m freaking out. I put the knife back in my fanny pack. At least it’s clean. They won’t find evidence of it. I remove the Swiffer mop from the front hall closet and spray and wipe the floors around the basement door.
I finally stop running at the park. On the bench, catching my breath, which I think is probably still in that basement because it takes so long, I worry I might pass out and one of the nannies will find me here, the knife in my pack. I need to throw it in the creek. He was going to kill me.
I open my phone, press 9-1-1, and look at the clean knife on my lap. I breathe in and out through my nose. I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I might scream. I drop my phone and pick it up. I need to call Tatyana. I can’t get my fingers on the right icons.
Finally.
“Tat. What the actual fuck?”
“Marina. What’s wrong? Is it Hugh?”
“Oh. My Gawd.”
Why did I call Tatyana? I can’t tell her I just killed a client. I can’t be the one to tell her that there might be more bodies buried in his bungalow basement.
“What’s going on?”
“Who else worked for Hugh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who worked and then quit?”
“Shannell, Halina, and Isa. Why?”
I have their numbers. I hang up and call Shannell. The number has been disconnected. I call Halina. It rings. I’m about to hang up when someone answers. They don’t say hello. Does Hugh have Halina’s phone? Is he still alive in that basement? I hang up.
In my apartment, I pack up my clothes. I wrap my Beatrix Potter cup and a musical Peter Rabbit. There are shelves of these figurines at home in New Brunswick. These were the only two pieces I packed ten years ago. I want to go home.
My phone rings. It’s Halina’s phone number, but I know it’s not her. I ignore it.
At Union Station, I have my backpack, the fanny pack with the knife still inside, and my mother’s rolling suitcase. My phone pings. Why do I still have my phone?
A text message:
- You trying to call me?
- Who is this?
- You called me 2 hours ago.
- Halina?
- Yes!!!!
- You’re alive?
- WTF are you talking about?
- Where r u? Have you heard from Shannell? Isa?
- We don’t talk, but I think Shannell moved to the States and Isa’s in Chile with her sister.
- You know that for sure?
- Pretty sure.
Damn.
- How’d you like working for Hugh?
How does she know that? I attach a thumbs up to her comment. Is this Hugh? Is he still alive?
- Get you to the basement yet?
- No. Why?
- I won’t spoil the surprise. If you’re still there after three months, he’s going to change your life.
- How?
- From what I heard, he paid for Isa to fly to Chile. Gave her enough money to open a bookstore.
The train pulls into the station. I call her phone.
“What do you mean he paid for Isa to fly home?”
“He’s a philanthropist. Like a billionaire,” she says.
“Why does he live in a bungalow in Long Branch?”
“He sold some tech business, Shannell said he became a certified life coach, a spiritual guru or something. He researched the hell out of me. Knew my middle name and the name of my elementary school teachers. Freaked me out a bit.”
“For sure. That would freak me out, too. Psycho killer stuff.”
“Right. Anyway. He told me I should be a lawyer, and guess what? I hired a tutor to write my LCATS and I passed. I’m applying to law schools. And the kicker? He’s going to pay for it. I don’t even have to pay him back.”
“He’s going to pay for it?”
“Ya.”
“He didn’t give you the money yet?”
I cling to the hope that he’s still a psycho killer.
“No. I didn’t want the money up front like Isa. He gave me a choice. Get paid monthly, and have my tuition covered, or take a hundred grand.”
“Shit.”
“Shit what?”
“Halina, I have to go. My train’s here.”
Instead of getting on the train to Montreal, I walk downstairs and head over to the Lakeshore West platform.
A woman wearing a chef’s jacket stands on Hugh’s lawn screaming into the phone, “He’s dead.”
The front door is open, and the woman walks along the sidewalk like if she moves farther away from the house, Hugh won’t be dead. She’ll be looking for her knife. I leave my stuff behind a tree and walk up to the front door and straight through like I’m supposed to be there. I disappear downstairs and just as I get to the bottom step, I hear someone say, “Corinna?” The chef knows about me?
I step over Hugh’s body and lift the file folder. I just need to find out what he had planned. What future had he chosen for me? The chef grips my shoulder.
Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? What did he see that might be worth anything?
– end –