Cosmo (18 page)

But those odd instances of real conversation keep June coming back, hoping for that feeling of privilege and elation, the happy noise her fingers make on the keyboard that means the computer is really being used and enjoyed. She can simply sit and type, careful to never minimize their dialogue box between responses to avoid accidentally closing it. She won't, under any circumstances whatsoever, leave the room – even if her bladder fills in protest or the phone rings, someone calling without thinking that after a long, purposeless day at work she
might
not want to speak with anyone at all. She's done enough talking in the last five months, enough 2 a.m. phone calls with wracking sobs and avowals, to never again waste another minute. She can't leave the room. If she stops typing for the brief length of time required to pee or to tell her sister she'll call her back, he might get distracted, or he'll exit the conversation with only a brief
love ya mom, gotta go
, and she'll be unable to tell him once again to be careful or that she loves him, or, worse still (things could always be worse, worse), he might simply leave, and she'll be forced to message
Hello? You there? Where are you?
until she can't wait any longer, has to log off.

She stares at a LiveJournal entry, a nightscape photograph of Chris standing amid boys wearing bowling shirts (definitely ironic, she thinks) and khaki pants. Another boy rests his jaw on Chris's shoulder, a thin arm draped across his shoulders. Chris's dyed-black hair falls over his eyes and beer sloshes from a bottle, frothing over his black-painted nails.
This
is the person typing out the affected journal entries, the new voice he's taken up to introduce himself to the public: so different from what June knows is his
real
voice, which now and then comes ringing through the words on
ICQ
. This makes June most happy – and in full awareness of how it sounds, how wretched and pathetic she is to be feeling this way – that a chat window, a stupid
uh-oh
sound bite, and her son's broken grammar can lift her up from the solidness of the room, its square corners, its darkness. It makes her feel that life is indeed long and still holds an element of excitement, that they'll have many more years together, aging gracefully into better and more loving communication, that this separation and ongoing dispute is only a short, temporary adjustment. This makes her forget her office, the insipid interns waiting on her decisions, the work that is increasingly monotonous and cruel and completely uninteresting. It makes her forget her hands, wrinkled and pale and fat. It makes her think of a time when Marcus was younger, when he loved her, when his small habits were cute and sweet and not yet robotic and false (
my Minnie
, he used to say). June craves those moments of real conversation with such an intensity that if she could – if a legitimate exchange was guaranteed at least once a night – she would spend every evening like this, waiting in the dark, playing e-solitaire over and over, drinking decaf and surfing the web.

At 12:01, she finds herself growing restless. The animal – louder now, as if crawling toward the garage – makes a sound that June imagines to be a satanic effort to swallow its own tongue. She stands and makes sure the window is closed – it is. She sits back down, frowning through the screams. She realizes that a concession must be made – that she can't sit before the monitor all night, let alone another hour. She waits another sixty seconds, watching his name, imagining Chris in danger somewhere, stumbling through the city. Then she drags the cursor across the screen, signs out from the Messenger window and shuts down the computer. The screen drains of colour, as if cooling down, losing its heated definition. Then it slips to black. June has to feel her way toward the door.

She brushes her teeth in the yellow light of the bathroom, washes the makeup from her face, rubs a swath of white skin cream beneath her eyes. She undresses drowsily and slips into her flannel nightgown (the air having turned cold, spiced with the crisp smell of dried leaf, autumn rot). In the days and weeks leading up to the divorce, Marcus might have still been watching television in the basement, or maybe working with his papers spread across the dining room mahogany. She would know if he were in bed, reading. She'd know by the way he'd cough and clear his throat in his slow, shaky rattle. If he were in bed before her she would climb in beside him and roll to face the closet and the door. He might ask a few prodding questions, and she'd answer impatiently – unless, of course, she'd made contact with Chris and was able to tell him some detail about their son that would make him really listen. Tonight, with Marcus downtown in a twenty-floor condominium tower, she lifts the sheets and rests her head on the pillow, too tired to read, to think. She turns off the lamp on the night table on her side of the bed. She closes her eyes, imagining the pattern of Marcus's breath, the turn of a page.

Even with her ear buried in the pillow, June can still make out the ragged gasps of the animal. She decides it must be a raccoon – it has that squealing pitch, that almost-human scream, grating sporadically against the wave-like roar of her heartbeat, the tempting weight of sleep. She closes her eyes and tries to relax every muscle, until her body feels as thick and heavy as the nightgown around her. But her thoughts turn, vividly, to a memory, 1985, maybe '86 or '87: the way she used to put Chris to bed in similar flannel pyjamas, only patterned with He-Man or Star Wars characters, his specific companions in sleep. And just when her door was shut and the night seemed to close in for good, he'd rush back into their room, jumping crazily on their bed in wild, smiling transgression. She imagines him jumping, throwing his stuffed animals. He'd owned a stuffed raccoon, too. Or no – was it a fox? A bear? Something small and grey and furry, his arms around it constantly, there as protector and friend at night. Suddenly it was very important to know what it was, to tell the difference.

The raccoon manages to scream, wetly, every few seconds. The noise is too irregular, she thinks, too full of surprise, variation in pitch, to sleep through; and she was never a deep sleeper. But the noise also seems too ridiculously cruel to bear, so bottomless and wretched – some strange caricature of suffering. There again, the wailing. How long will she have to wait and listen? Marcus would have no trouble snoring through this, she thinks resentfully, but she sees herself writhing, at the end of her wits, until the hours begin to slide away in gradual terror and morning takes on a malevolent light.

At 12:25 she sits up and turns on the lamp. She slips into a pair of slippers and walks out of her bedroom, descending the curving flight of hardwood stairs. She reaches the quiet gleam of her stainless-steel kitchen and gazes over the indistinct furniture of her living room, caught in white curtains of moonlight. She can hear the animal's cries coming from somewhere near her hedges – the place where she grew tall, healthy tulips during last year's summer (a summer literally in another century, she thinks, the twentieth century, the last). She drifts to the cupboard, finds her flashlight and tests it in the murk of the foyer: on off, on off, casting mean shadows upon the door.

What the hell are you doing?
The question comes breathless and sharp.
Are you going outside?
She imagines standing on the porch, the surrounding horror-movie glow of porch lights, the sharp white stones of the driveway beneath her slippered feet, the flashlight before her to ward off whatever it is – something dangerous, rabid, a skunk?
Then what, June? Are you going to call somebody, some animal rescue centre, to come stitch it up?
Not likely – with those noises, and for this long, it's obviously too far gone to save. Or she can speed up its suffering, end its misery. By bashing in its skull with a shovel, a rock? June knows that there is no chance she'd be able to. She can bury it, she thinks, when it's all over. At least she can give it that, but it's only the glimmer of consolation. What June really feels is relief: relief in her inability to make such a decision, confront something so elemental, and the guilty relief that she can stay inside and try to sleep.

She shivers, feeling tired, precarious. She can hear the mountains of dry leaves swirling in the wind, roaring up the drive with the sound of rakes scraping concrete. She imagines the animal, the blood on the soil. And she feels sure, all at once, that Chris's stuffed animal wasn't a raccoon. That it was probably a wolf – nothing so defenceless, so pathetically vulnerable as the dying mammal outside. Something savage and noble to protect Chris from monsters and nightmares, but only if he went back to sleep, if he stopped jumping on their bed. It wasn't bad behaviour or willfulness or rebellion – he did it only to postpone the moment of separation, the lonely privacy of dreams. It's been lodged in memory for over fifteen years, but it isn't something she's ever brought up. One memory that she knows is private, classified, something
just for her
– liable to be banished if ever shared with Marcus or even brought to words.

It was part of the long, rich record of June's secret life. Just as waiting, as she has done tonight – and as she has done for many, many nights – has become a long thread in the tapestry of her memory. She remembers living in a cramped ninth-floor apartment during her third year of university in Vancouver. She shared the two-bedroom with another girl: someone who spread herself across the city, in clubs from school and on dates with boys. June studied while she partied; she felt there was always something to shore up, something to save. And on many nights, June would sit alone on their balcony watching the night rain lance the city into steam and puddle, blurring the lights from downtown into vivid smears of blue and yellow, while she smoked and thought and waited, and an enormous, indescribable ache churned inside her, equal parts lonely and exquisitely sweet. Her roommate would return home in a great convulsion of dropped bags and cigarettes and conversation, cackling over what disasters or triumphs occurred among the night birds, and the exquisite core would diminish and harden and fuse to what June knew was her real life: the secret, most precious part of her, and forever private.

The best nights of my life have been spent alone, waiting
, she thinks.
And keeping the pleasure and hurt of the waiting, the loneliness, to myself
. She thinks of Chris's storming of the bedroom, the jumping and throwing. Secret things.

‘I'm going to give you a gift, Chris,' she mutters, and climbs the curving stairs, shuffles into the office and again boots up the computer. She waits through the screen's deliberate awakening, impatient to see the cursor move at her command. Once it's on, she opens her internet browser and heads to her email account. And she begins to compose a message: typing out the memory she has of Chris leaping on the bed and throwing the stuffed animals, taking her time to make sure it's just the facts, without embellishment, without undue sentiment. It takes her about ten minutes of thinking, typing, allowing the animal's death throes to fade to background noise while she works. When she is almost finished, she takes a moment to give herself some distance from the email, drifting almost automatically to the
ICQ
window, to the e-solitaire screen, to LiveJournal.com.

While Chris's name is still offline on
ICQ
, he has made another entry in his journal. The date and time (12:47 a.m.) and line breaks and general change in shape to his page slap June to attention.
So he's home
, she thinks.
Safe
. Relief drops her shoulders, makes her sigh in exhaustion. At least he's home, out of the cold. Inching closer to the screen, June rubs her neck and reads:

 

i wager i have made one of the biggest mistakes of the year. Thirsty Boy Thursdays, The Lookout (of course; need i say more?). all i can say is that things were said to, or attempted with, corm. even typing his name now makes me feel sick and stupid. it was just the rush of the music and the encouraging words and the drink (of course). and now back home early and the rest of them still there. the colour of the lights. gin!

fuck you, gin!

i figure i'm past the point of cliché, past the point of pity. it was easier to say what needed to be said back in august, accepting who i am, than i could ever imagine. but maybe it was too easy, too accepting, too PREDICTABLE. much love to the Scooby Gang, for sure, but where's the challenge?

if there was someone to talk to who knew this and could be a life coach or something. ridiculous. but there's no one since mr. a. moved to b.c. and i lost contact with r.

i feel like I'm lacking prayer or devotion or something.

being young is like that, we remind ourselves; sliding down to the future. there will never be another dawn I don't hate, another dawn i don't worship. learning and forgiving. every moment a rush. these days like flowers exploding! blooming explosions, the bloom and speed and sun coming up. heat! like in kerouac with the ‘yes' chant on the road. morning's gonna be ugly, like a horror show, but I see it red and white and yellow and holy and rising up over the shitty hospital at the end of nelson street and I DON'T CARE who knows …

true, it's horribly cliché … being young …

 

goodnight xo

 

June sits quietly for a moment. She scrolls down the page, somewhat disgusted: a wretch or a knot inside her, twisting. The cries of the animal return to their full-frontal tenor, demanding attention. She closes the LiveJournal page, signs out of
ICQ
and saves her unedited email to Chris in the Drafts folder of her Hotmail account.
Not tonight
, she thinks.
I'll leave this here
. It was easier to save it, to leave it alone.