Every Happy Family (10 page)

“Right,” they echo.

Beau catches Dugan's eye and quickly looks away, rowing as if this stupid machine could actually take him somewhere. Namely back home. Imagines Pema's room, sunk into her beanbag chair, surrounded by the pictures of their childhood she's plastered over her –

“Wright, with a W.”

“C...C...Coach?”

“Outside.”

“Outside?”

“Outside.”

Dugan disappears through the door that leads behind the gym. Beau gets up, his muscled legs hollow and weak.

“It's when you look up,” whispers Killer, his eyes straight ahead as he slides forward and back on his rowing machine. “That's when.”

Beau nods and forces his feet towards the back door. None of the other guys dare look at him, dare acknowledge this initiation they've each gone through or will go through. But they're with him every step of the way, Beau tells himself. They're his team. He's one of them. He presses down the bar on the door and steps out into the grey light of the afternoon.

“Shut the door, Wright.”

Beau does as he's told. The gym backs onto a dense grove of evergreens, out of sight of other students, teachers, staff. Dead pine needles litter the narrow strip of dirt and gravel that runs the length of the building.

“Come over here.”

Fixing his gaze on the man's immense running shoes, Beau goes and stands in front of the coach.

“To go to this school and play with these guys is a privilege and an honour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you know that the methods I use, as your coach, are to help you become a better team player?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” What would Mom say if she knew?

“Good. So I need to know if you, as one of our most talented guys, if I do say so, want to be on this team.”

“Yes. Thank you, sir.” His fear momentarily billows with pride.

“So you will keep what happens today between us.”

“I will, sir.” As he makes himself a promise that rugby will be the most important thing in his life, the strength returns to his legs. What's a little pain anyway? He raises his gaze to where Dugan's knees hide beneath his sweatpants. “I just want you to know, sir, that I...I...I...I...,” Beau says, then hitches up his lip like Alexei's, “I want to toss the dog water to muh...muh...muh.” He looks up.

The punch to his cheek is harder than he expected and he reels backwards, lights flashing in his head, but doesn't fall. Before he can feel the pain, he stumbles back up to the coach, looks him in his eye and says, “sister,” before a second punch, in the nose this time, extinguishes light and consciousness.

He doesn't remember hitting the ground, but when he opens his eyes, a rusty taste tickles his throat and he's looking at the saddest-coloured sky he's ever seen. But what he notices more, lying here in the dirt, is the incredible relief he feels. As if he finally landed, planted his feet on the ground, after a long, anxious time hovering just above. The next thing he notices is that he isn't thinking of Pema but of Satomi and how different her next portrait of him is going to be and that he might have to change his fucking name. As he gently touches his off-centred nose, which is already twice its normal size, his laugh comes out as an ugly gurgle.

Brothers

Quinn is at his desk listening to Fats Waller and staring at a picture of a Renaissance stone bridge brilliantly arcing the Tiber. He has a project due: Create a structure or structures that connect a city with its landscape. He scrolls down, reading about the social history of this Roman river, slips a mickey of rum from the bottom drawer of his desk and takes a long swig. Pictures a metal arch from riverbank to riverbank with something practical yet magical...huge dome-shaped building suspended from its centre and dangling mere feet above the rushing river. It would need walkways, but how...

The phone shatters his concentration. Irritated, he lets it ring before he remembers Pema's at school, Mom's at work and Dad's napping. With a grumble, he turns down the National's
Boxer
.

“Hello?”

“Quinn?”

“What do you want, Beau.”

Early arena, gladiator style, perfectly symmetrical, made from cement and limestone blocks, is how Quinn thinks of Beau. It rubs him wrong that his jock brother is at a private boarding school with a stellar academic reputation. Quinn did his research.

“Nobody's around,” says Quinn. “Well, Dad is but he's sleeping, down with the flu or something. Call back later.”

“When's later?”

“I heard you dove face first into a goalpost and that you're pretty ugly now?”

Beau laughs his menacing laugh. “Make up your mind.”

Good one, thinks Quinn. “That you've defaced your face,” he says, guessing Beau won't know what deface means.

“I still make your face look sorry.”

“Pfft. How's school?”

“Imagine jail. Oh, you don't have to imagine. Beat up any more girls lately?”

Quinn shakes his head. Can hear Beau now, in the locker room, telling the story of his drunk brother, wearing it like one of his scars. “I was inebriated, that means drunk. I tripped and fell on her. End of narrative, that means story.” A familiar emptiness hollows his chest, as though all integrity has been drained out of him. He hasn't dated since Lauren. Hasn't even gone out except to a movie or two with his friend Graham.

“She was kind of a bossy bitch anyway,” says Beau.

“You're getting meaner
and
stupider?”

“No, but I'm getting stronger. I could crush you with one hand.”

“I'm sure you can.” Quinn hangs up, tired of sort-of joking. He can easily picture his younger brother beating the shit out of him, can sense he would find it really satisfying for reasons even he doesn't know. He cranks the volume on his music. Picks up a pencil, taps the eraser against his nose then takes another hit of rum. He opens his sketchbook and copies the picture of the Tiber, placing the stone bridge in the background. In the foreground he draws a metal arch the same height as the bridge, and from its center, a giant birdcage-like structure hovering over the river. Ballroom sized...diaphanous walls. The prof is all about natural light. And energy efficiency, he recalls, drawing solar panels all along the top of the arch. The circular floor is made of...plexiglass! The rushing water below taking your breath away. Giving people vertigo, fainting spells. Antique fainting couches around the perimeter of the room. Weddings. The symphony.

The diaphanous walls a pale blue to enhance the water effect. He pencils in walkways to connect the structure to either shore.

The apex of the dome will be one giant skylight. Sky above, water below, like standing in a vertical tunnel. Quinn smiles, rewards his brilliance with another drink.

The walkways also see-through, every step – he thinks with a mean satisfaction – will feel like falling, will be death defying. “Walking on Water” he could call it. Maybe the Vatican will fund it.

Below the window of Jill's shared office, students hustle to classes, faces tucked into collars against the blowing rain. Except for taking an unpaid year off for the birth of each of the boys, she's been at university since she was eighteen. She dials the number of her mother's care facility and it takes four rings before someone picks up.

“Cedargrove.”

“The Alzheimer's wing, please.”

Jill pictures the phone as it rings in her mother's wing, on the desk inside a glass-walled office.

“Cedargrove.”

A rock station plays in the background and she knows it's the same music that's pumped throughout the wing, competing with the TV in the living room. Jill suggested they could play music from an era the patients might well remember and enjoy, but nothing came of it.

“I'd like to speak with a resident. Nancy Thomas.” She considered installing a phone in Nancy's room but Nancy is rarely in her room except to sleep, and patients wander in and out of each other's rooms. She could end up talking to anybody.

“Nancy. And who is this calling?” The woman sounds impatient.

“I'm hoping to speak to my mother.”

“Is it an emergency?”

Every minute's an emergency, thinks Jill. “I do need to speak to my mother. Nancy Thomas.” Unable to come over this weekend, Jill just needs to hear Nancy's voice. Know she's all right.

“Hold on.”

There's yelling in the background and Jill winces, pictures the heavy metal entrance and exit door. Every visit, there's one old woman with a walker watching that door as if for her parents, or God, waiting for someone, anyone to punch in the sequence of four numbers that adds up to liberation. On Jill's last visit, the old woman who blocked Jill's way out, edged closer and closer whispering “take me with you” before a nurse scolded her in a heavy Spanish accent and forcibly turned her around and steered her into the TV room. The defeated woman was visibly scared. Jill sat in the car and cried for twenty minutes before she was able to drive home.

Jill makes the trip over once a month and spends the day with Nancy, takes her for a walk or drive, out to lunch and sometimes dinner. Occasionally Les comes too.

“Some people just drop them off and leave them,” a staff member, Filipino, who Jill has come to know, told her during one visit. “They think the person doesn't know who they are, so what difference can it make?”

“But you think it makes a difference?” Jill asked.

“Oh, yes. On the days that family visits, patients sleep better. Eat better.”

“I work full time,” Jill needed to tell her, “and live in Victoria but have her on two wait-lists for facilities over there.”

“Hmm... Moving can be terribly disorienting. She's not unhappy here.”

Not unhappy.

In her absence Jill pays Odile to go visit twice a week to play cards, go for walks or ice cream and do any shopping Nancy may need, like hunting down shirts without buttons. Unbuttoning her blouse in front of the male nurses has become a habit.

“Do I answer this phone?” she hears Nancy ask.

“It's for you. It's your daughter.”

Jill sees her mother standing in the office, on the wrong side of the glass, uncomfortable, no one offering her a chair.

“Mom? You there?”

“Hello?”

“Mom, it's me, Jill. Jillian. How are you?”

“Jill. I'm busy in the office.”

“Have you and Odile been out for a drive today?”

“I went for a drive. All around the town.”

“Good. Did you have an ice cream?”

“It's very busy here.”

There's so much she wishes she could tell her mom. Her paper's been accepted for publication and, though she didn't make the short list for the tenure position, she should get a salary increase. And about Beau's broken nose and fractured cheekbone, how he's wearing a protective mask and hasn't missed a game. Quinn's straight As. Pema having her first boyfriend, going on dates and all. Les undergoing a series of tests for what they first thought was a hernia and now aren't sure about.

“I won't keep you. Just to say I can't make it this weekend but will come next weekend.”

There's a scuffle and bang as if the phone's been dropped. Then it goes dead.

Jill waits for a minute, then there's a dial tone and she hangs up. The chronic guilt she used to feel is now closer to grief. And anger at her self-involved brother, Kenneth, for making her take this on alone. She's about to call back to say a proper goodbye when her two o'clock appointment knocks on her door.

Five Months Later

LES

Eyes hunting in the dark, Les makes his way down the driveway, trips on a pile of pruned branches and rights himself with a clumsy skip.

Filmy pools of light illuminate their cul-de-sac and, like some invisible night janitor, a lumbering wind has swept dirt and pine needles neatly up against the curb. A cool moistness in the night air feels like pure oxygen, and Les breathes it in along with positive images of healthy cells.

What first sold him on this neighbourhood were the trees, so many you can barely see the houses. Garry oaks, juniper, red cedars, all of which appear curiously alive in the dark and make him wonder if trees could be somehow nocturnal. Or maybe they're just insomniacs like him.

Last night, at three in the morning, he made a batch of phyllo pastry, the night before, french loaves. Tonight he had to get outside and walk. The oncologist warned that the hormone therapy could cause insomnia but failed to mention this nervy, phantom feeling in his lower legs that makes him have to move them. Either that or ram a paring knife into his calves. When Les described the sensation to Jill, she said she'd had the very same when pregnant, her smile strained. “I don't
think
I'm pregnant,” he joked to cover their mutual pain.

A chip bag cartwheels past and he grabs it, crumples it into his jacket pocket.

They bought the house the same year they brought Pema and a recipe for momos home from Nepal. Bought it outright with the money from his parents' estate. He's not a great provider but he did provide a roof over their heads. He's proud of that anyway. God, that was a stressful year, moving house, Pema having night terrors, Beau acting out, Jill getting more teaching work all the while fretting she wasn't there for her daughter. He ended up the stay-at-home parent – cooked, kept the house somewhat in order, played one game after another with the kids. Something he wouldn't trade for all the truffle oil in the world. God, you blink and they're all grown up.

He'd woken tonight to Jill's breath warming his shoulder. When he removed a tail of hair from her eyes, she'd made a sleepy sound of annoyance and turned to her other side. She's frustrated, angry even. Not about the lack of sex, he hopes, but with the fact he's only forty-eight. Hell, he'd be angry too if the estrogen pills weren't turning his blood a passive pink. Instead, he's on the verge of weeping half the time. Like at Sunday's game when Beau made that unbelievable tumbling kick down the sidelines then dove on the ball in the try zone. His pug-faced, teeth-gnashing coach had leapt on the field and hugged Beau as though he were his own son while Les had to duck behind the stands to hide the tears raining down his face. Beau would have been embarrassed beyond belief.

It's after three and the neighbourhood is quiet except for a feeling like static electricity in the air, a vibration that dogs might hear. Is he imagining it or is it the pull of the moon, or maybe the invisible cross-hatch of wireless networks? He's read that where networks cross over, the recognized safe level of waves in the air is no longer safe, especially for kids. When he logs on to his computer, three other wireless networks pop up. Maybe they should change back to plug-ins.

He passes Jim and Liza's house. They have two kids, eleven-year-old Hailey who's musically precocious, if not a genius, and her younger brother Darwin, who has Down's syndrome. He loves that they named the kid Darwin, and how every time he says hi to the kid, Darwin gives him this look of superior disdain. Darwin loves Pema, who has babysat him since he was two. “Pretty Pema,” he calls her and loves to touch her hair.

Les picks up his pace, counts his blessings for having had healthy children. He'd take being sick any day over one of his kids being sick. Hell, fifty was considered a long life a hundred years ago. Still is, in some parts of the world. You get old, you get sick, you die. Everybody does it. Every second of the day. Doesn't mean you're special.

Annie had found out that their father, a man named Frank Chapman, owner of Chapman Realty, had died a mere two years before they found Faye. Frank and Faye. Chapman sounds English, or is it Scottish? Would have liked to have seen a picture. There's an animal satisfaction to knowing what you're made of. Who you're made of. He suddenly wants to know what Frank died of, how old he was. Maybe he'll send Faye a note and ask. He's left that sort of thing up to Annie, but Faye would have his home address then, in case she wanted it.

There are no stars out tonight, only a bruise-coloured sky with a patchy highway of cloud crossing its middle. As he turns down Parkside, a couple of street lights are burned out and it's hard to tell what creature is crossing the road ahead of him. His eyes adjust in time to make out a raccoon's humpbacked lope. He once read how the invention of street lamps changed people's biorhythms so they stopped going to sleep with the sun and, as a result of the increased “daylight” hours, crime increased a hundred percent. The article declared progress an illusion, that a step forward in one direction was inevitably a step back in the other. Like when Les asked his oncologist, why him?

“Petrochemicals and their by-products are a root cause of carcinogenic cell mutation. Of course, reproductive organs are the first to go.” The man used that gloating factual tone scientists are good at, then patted the vinyl-covered examining table. “Ubiquitous now. We're stuck with finding a cure.”

It was a survival-of-the-fittest answer Les couldn't argue with. But later it made him angry to think that no one was doing anything about these man-made cancers and that his sons might also be vulnerable, with their lives compromised some day.

A pushy wind at his back makes him pick up his pace before a tweak in his groin reduces him to one anxious thought: it's back. A minute later the pain's gone. God, he's fretting like an old woman. Man up. Where's the guy who prefers his sex standing up? He laughs weakly. And he thought having his wife be the breadwinner was emasculating. These little pills take the prize.

Around the next corner someone is crouching in the street and Les slows his step, considers turning around. It
is
the middle of the night. Why the hell is he crouching?

“Hey,” says Les, twenty feet away.

“Hi there.” The man unfolds to standing. To Les's relief, he's short and pudgy. “Letting my cats out for a whizz.”

Les sees the cats then, Siamese, one large, one small, curl out from the man and come toward him. “Same litter?” he asks.

“Brothers. Rescued them from the reserve,” the guy says proudly. Les can't tell in the half-light if the guy's Native or not.

It's Les's turn to squat, let the cats sniff his hand, but they veer back to their saviour.

“Bubbles and Monkey,” says the man, and he makes a kissing sound. “Bubbles is the runt.”

“Bubbles and Monkey.” Good name for a dessert, thinks Les as he stands. Something with pink meringue and chocolate and some kind of fruit or nuts. “See ya.”

“‘Night,” says the man, and Les likes that he wasn't asked what
he
was doing out this late.

At the end of the block he turns into Orchard Meadows, the new subdivision, named after the dozens of apple trees the developers toppled. The wind sounds lost as it races down this street with nothing to rustle, no blossoms to scatter like confetti. One balmy summer night years back, returning from the grand opening of a restaurant where he once worked – the manager couldn't taste the difference between real butter and margarine, shallots and yellow onion – and having indulged in the free champagne, he and Jill snuck into this former orchard under cover of darkness and had the best sex he can remember. Dr. Linguist was a drunken harlot. Normally quiet when lovemaking, she let loose these sounds, growly and breathy and round, like a lioness letting her hunger be known. Makes him horny just thinking about it. They found petals, later, pasted on their backsides.

He walks up the street, past the sprawling but close-set homes, their postage-stamp back yards. When did mowing and gardening a patch of earth become undesirable? The street ends in a cul-de-sac and as he circles back he hears a screech owl. Peers up at rooftops hoping to see one when a second-storey light comes on in a house ahead to his left. Not an owl but a child with a nightmare? He's back to that year with Pema and her night terrors. Emitting heart-shattering screams despite being sound asleep, she woke the whole house and made him worry they'd made a terrible mistake. That no amount of riches, education, nutrition and love could fill the emotional chasm left by one's missing mother. He used to sit by her bed, hold her stricken little hand and talk to her over the screams. Tell her about all the things she had to look forward to in her new life. Tell her that he also had two mothers, and that because raising a child is the best job ever, they have to share it or it wouldn't be fair.

They'd received a second letter from Pema's birth mother after he convinced Jill to send pictures – ones not just of Pema but of the whole family – and to be straight about wanting to wait until Pema was older before letting her come to visit. The woman was very understanding in her response, though Les has been thinking it's time now. Two years have passed and Pema is sixteen, not the most mature sixteen, but still.

He passes the house with the light on when another screeching cry is followed by banging, like someone pounding on a door. Then a man's voice yelling. The lit window rasps open and a woman appears, leans forward and peers down at the ground as if judging how far it would be to jump.

“Are you okay?” Les calls.

She looks out in surprise, quickly steps back and closes the window. More yelling, pounding. Adrenalin strides Les up the woman's driveway. He takes the three steps to her door in one, and knocks with a firm fist before punching the doorbell.

The yelling stops. Les knocks again, a little less firmly, and scrambles for what to say and how to react if the man is hostile, or armed. Scans for a weapon of this own. Flower pot? A hall light comes on and he's drenched in porch light, exposed and feeling way less certain. The door opens and it's the woman in the window, a pale blonde, slight, wearing a dazzling lemon silk kimono and holding a sleepy baby who blinks at the brightness. Les strains his neck to make sure no one's behind them. There's no sign anybody's been hurt. He can't help wondering, as he often does with strangers, if she's eaten in one of the restaurants he's cooked for. If he's cooked for her and maybe, by proxy, the baby.

“May I help you?” Her expression is unreadable, its frank lack of curiosity whisking him back to his mother Faye and that horrible restaurant meeting in New York.

“Hey, my name's Les. I live over on Thurston and was out walking. Everything all right?” He can't help smiling at how the baby smushes his cheek against his mother's shoulder, grips her kimono in a fat fist. He wants nothing more than to protect these two strangers. “I was just wondering –”

“No thank you,” she says, as if he were selling magazine subscriptions. She drops her gaze and for a still second seems to hold her breath as though about to confide in him but then slowly shuts the door. The porch light vanishes and he stands there, more in the dark than ever, feeling helpless and then blindly furious. He kicks the banister, possibly fracturing a toe, gets control of himself and leaves.

Was the baby a red herring? He looks back at the house, the light still on upstairs. He'll make a point of walking this way if he's up in the night again. “I've got my eye on you, buddy.”

At the end of the street he stops and rakes a hand through his hair wondering which way to go? May not be able to sustain an erection, he thinks, but at least he's kept his hair. “Girly thought,” he mutters and turns right along the main road.

He cuts down a path between houses that leads back into his subdivision. Penned in by chain-link fence, he passes indecently close to windows on either side, treads through the sound of snoring. Halfway down the path he gets a distinct whiff of skunk. He's never seen or heard of skunks around here and guesses someone's got a few pot plants filling out their garden. Cannabis, he read somewhere, releases a perfume at certain times of day that allows police literally to sniff out crops. He walks backwards to recatch the scent, but the wind whips up and it's lost. His oncologist told him that if he wanted a prescription to buy medicinal marijuana for “insomnia, anxiety, discomfort” he only need ask. He thought the man eyed him sideways for a reaction.

He hasn't gotten stoned for at least two decades but used to make delicious mint hash brownies. He'd told the doctor, “No thanks,” thinking Annie could probably hook him up if he went that route. He really needs to teach her how to keep her own books, fill out a tax form. Wishes he could know for sure that Jill will be there for her. He emerges from the path into a cul-de-sac and there's an insane yapping coming from the house ahead. He sees the shadow of a bearded face trying to eat a hole through the picture window.

“Hush before you wake someone.” He jogs out of view and the small exertion ignites a chaos of sensations. More volcanic surge than hot flash, some hidden arson begins radiating outward and upward and, as he pictures his hair bursting into flame, his head erupts in sweat. Ducking under the large oak on the corner – the climbing tree as his kids used to call it – he removes his jacket to wait it out. Sweat streams down his face to sting his eyes and soak yet another shirt. These pills better be working, cause he doesn't know if he can take -

“I've dialed 91, just need another 1.”

“Jesus!” Stumbling to look up into the dark branches, he swoons slightly before locating the pale gleam of a rubber sole. Wipes the sweat from his eyes. “What are you doing up there?”

“I'm going to do it.” It's a female voice, a scared one.

“Stop that. I live down the street. I'm just out for a walk.”