He lived an hour or so outside of Toronto. He wrote that he would be coming to Halifax. The drive from Toronto to Halifax is two days. I had done it many times with my mother to visit my aunts. A small red cooler always sat at my feet on the floor of my mother’s red VW Golf, full of snacks and Pepsi, my tiny legs hovered above. I’d crack one open, salivating at that click/ah/hiss. Gulping and digging into a bag of ketchup chips, I would stare out the window and count the passing cows. I especially loved the Guernseys. I could spot them by their tan color, their reddish-brown blotches. I would make my poor mother listen to the Lion King soundtrack on loop. How many times she was forced to listen to “Hakuna Matata” I don’t know. Me waving my greasy, ketchup chip–stained hands in the air, belting it out. We would spend the night near the Quebec and New Brunswick border. I loved listening to her speak French.
Staring at the glowing computer, I read his words ad nauseam, hoping they would change. My body solid, skin tight, bricks on the chest. I began to perspire, dampness on the neck. Despite sweating, I shook, cold but burning, ears ringing. My first panic attack, in retrospect. I did my best to dodge, intuiting that a clear no would not suffice, that something had changed. Ultimately, I managed to get him not to come and began the process of extracting myself. Responding less, disappearing for long periods. I could breathe, it seemed like that episode of Degrassi had ended.
Not long after I moved to Toronto, he resurfaced, having known my plan to move there in the fall. The emails amped up. He would attach pictures of me with my eyes closed, and photoshop himself with massive angel wings above me, glaring down. They must have been stills he took on his television, they were not images I could remember.
I’m going to cum on you in the clouds of heaven, he wrote.
He’d send me links to missing children websites.
By then I was sixteen years old.
And worst of all, Creed lyrics.
Above all the others we’ll fly
This brings tears to my eyes
My sacrifice
He made it increasingly clear that he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone get in his way.
Wiebke was the first person I told about him, the emails had reached a sizzling point. The oil leaping from the pan.
“You should really eat, you need to eat,” Wiebke said, with a look of concern I appreciated.
That can’t go inside of you. That minacious voice again.
“I know, Wiebke, I’m not sure I can.”
That can’t go inside of you. Insisting.
My stomach felt like a dirty old cloth getting wrung out over the sink, hands choking it, bit by bit.
I tried to eat a bite of the pizza. No matter how much I chomped and gnawed, swallowing was out of the question.
That can’t go inside of you. Again, that sardonic inflection.
The flavor had altered, my taste buds spoiled. Leaning over, elbow on table, hand on forehead, I drank some water.
It isn’t as if I had no food thoughts before. They had started to pop up when puberty launched. I was filling out, growing breasts, all my discomfort heightened as boys and girls disentangled. Watching myself on-screen had not been a problem for me really, but as my body morphed, that changed. The more visible I became, the more I waned.
My pizza still untouched, we headed home. I couldn’t shake the events that had happened earlier that day.
* * *
“Ellen!” Wiebke yelled.
I was sitting in my room doing homework. I loved that room, it was small, just enough space for a bed and a little dresser. The room had been painted close to canary yellow, my Cat Power and my Peaches posters tacked up. It had one big old window. At night, I would awake to eyes glowing, peering in, the raccoons examining me. There was a whole family in the attic at some point. Over a hundred thousand raccoons live in Toronto, it’s been called the Raccoon Capital of the World. The population began to skyrocket when Toronto introduced the “green bin,” a municipal compost program, in 2002. Feasts upon feasts.
“Yeah?” I took a right out of my room and entered her office. The original hardwood floors creaked under the feet, the house already eighty years old at that point. She swiveled in her chair to look at me, pale, an email open on the monitor.
Hi, I’m a good friend of Ellen’s and I’d really love to surprise her in Toronto. I haven’t seen her yet since she moved …
A friend then called, telling me she got the same email and thought it suspect. Another pal forwarded his email. He was homing in.
He had virtually all of my contacts. I’d been working since I was ten, having filmed in places as close as Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and as far as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Berlin, and Lisbon. I could easily imagine a friend in Halifax thinking it was a pal of mine in Ontario. I raced to email everyone I knew, attaching an image of him. He had sent it not long before. A selfie as they are now known, his face filled the screen. Eyes disturbed, he leered at me. Wiebke called the police.
I was relieved when a woman arrived at the door. The officer walked in the house, head rotating, eyes searching every corner, a glance up the stairs. She said hardly anything initially. I imagined her in cop school being taught how to enter a place. The body language, stiff and solid and intentional. The tone flat. The face expressionless. Barely any eye contact at first. She combed the surroundings, assessing the danger. We showed her the emails, the photos, the links, and the lyrics. All of it. She was alarmed. I found myself looking out the window, imagining him suddenly across the street. A quick cut, the jump scare.
They phoned my father to explain the situation. It was a relief to have him know, for my parents to know. I was exhausted from the ceaseless state of disquietude. I took the phone, pressing it to my ear, my heart rate finally beginning to slow. “I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass,” was the very first thing he said to me.
He was furious. Livid at what I had done, befriending an older man online when I was a kid. I went numb after that, his angry voice fading away, but I will never forget those words. I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass. All the emails from my stalker paling in comparison.
When the police later went to the stalker’s house, he simply asked, “Does this mean I get to see Ellen in court?” Their presence didn’t faze him, if anything it titillated him more.
Between that comment, the emails, and his collection of photographs and other material pertaining to me, I was able to get a restraining order.
Every day I’d wait on Ossington Avenue just north of Queen West to catch the 63A to go to school, about a thirty-minute ride. I went to Vaughan Road Academy, where they had a program called Interact. It was one of the main reasons I moved to Toronto.
If you are involved in dance, theatre, music, or athletics, we offer you our unique integrated program with timetables that are built around your auditions, rehearsals, performances, and competitions … This is the only program in Ontario that offers you this type of flexibility. Our focus is to provide you an education that works with your outside interests.
Flashes of him taunted me. Coming up from behind with a knife, stabbing my back. Stepping onto the bus, charging at me, blade penetrating my chest. Waiting when I got off the bus, that last short walk to school, a bullet to the head.
I had to bring his picture to school, handing copies out to my teachers, who presented the photo to the rest of the class in a morbid show-and-tell. I was filming the television show ReGenesis at the time, with Mark, who had first told me about Interact. We’d met a year before and become inseparable. When leaving set for the day, the driver would take an obscure route, making sure no one followed. Still, it would be easy to find out where the studio was located. Again, pictures were shown at work. I couldn’t stop visualizing him ending my life.
Shortly after, I was walking east down Queen Street West toward Yonge Street where I would catch Line 1 at Queen station, across from the Eaton Centre, Toronto’s largest mall. I’d take the nine-stop journey north up to Mark’s house, exiting at Eglinton station.
I was on the north side of the street, across from what was the MuchMusic building. For my non-Canadian readers, MuchMusic launched in 1984 and was essentially the Canadian MTV. I felt a hand on my right shoulder, it stroked down to my elbow.
“You look familiar.” I turned and saw his face.
He stood in front of me, casual, a hint of a smile. I pictured a knife entering me, shimmering in the sun each time he pulled it out to stab again, a sacrifice. He had made it clear on multiple occasions that no one was going to get in the way of us, our connection, our love. Not my father, not the police.
“Come with me and let’s talk.”
I noticed a little white dog at his feet. This seemed unusual, he lived almost an hour from the city.
I could not move. I could not speak. You’re going to die now, I thought. This is it.
“Come on, just come with me, we can go talk,” he said, trying to persuade me with a gentle tone.
An intoxicating smell of refined sugar wafted out of Cafe Crepe’s take-out window, a sweet buckwheat treat. The iconic café with its giant red neon sign was locked in my peripheral vision. Never had I felt that frozen, Encino Man waiting to be found. My chest unlocked. Rise and fall. My lungs returned to their function.
“You can’t be here.” All I managed to get out, a record skipping. “You can’t be here, you can’t be here, you can’t be here.”
People swiped by, flashes behind him, one of the busiest stretches of Toronto. I tried to pull out my focus, dolly back. I raised my voice.
“You can’t be here, you can’t be standing there!”
Nobody looked.