Away From Everywhere (26 page)

You grow up and be like Dad then, and I'll grow and be like Ross. You can be a poor boring dimwit driving a crappy car, and I'll
be the one to come and visit you in my Porsche. Let's make a bet right here today. Twenty bucks says I'll be happier at thirty living like Ross and you'll be as boring as Dad.

He sat up in the seat on the plane feeling like he owed his brother twenty bucks. Owen might be the only person who knew it, but Alex was never happy. He always wanted more: a bigger house, a better car, and at times, a prettier wife. A more professional wife. A wife that didn't need “warming up” before sex, because he didn't have the time and energy for it anymore. He wanted a son but had two daughters, and as much as he loved them, they weren't cognitively years ahead of the other children in their class like he imagined
his
children would be. He was a surgeon, but the hospital he was working in wasn't cutting edge enough for him, wasn't ranked as one of the top ten in the world.

He picked up his drink, the ice cubes had melted. He emptied the glass in one quick gulp, and wiped the corner of his mouth with the sleeve of an Armani suit. Used it like a napkin. He set the glass back in the cup holder and decided that when Owen was released, whatever was left of him should come stay with him and Hannah for a while. For however long it took to get back on his feet. He was looking forward to it. And it would do Hannah some good to have someone in their spare room so she could start seeing it as a spare bedroom and not what it was intended to be. And maybe having Owen around would liven her up a little. Get her out of that funk. That years-long funk she'd been in.

IF FISTS CoULD SPEAK OR WORDS COULD HEAL

OWEN WOKE TO THE SOUND of a viciously hissing kettle and his Aunt Lillian's motherly voice talking someone down on the telephone. The kettle stopped whistling and he could hear Lillian's graceful hand searching the inside of a tin can for one of her chamomile teabags. That kettle squealed every morning as if it felt the pain of being burned. It was the noise that woke him every morning since she took him five and a half weeks ago.

“One thing at a time or we'll get nowhere at all!”

Lillian was talking to Alex,Owen could tell. Alex had been calling more and more frequently for help with the girls. Any fatherly instinct he once had was thieved from him by grief and despair. It didn't help that he had never been much of a father in the first place. He wasn't a bad father; he just wasn't an inherently good father. He was an absent father too preoccupied with work and his image to discover the simple joys that lay in spending time with his daughters. In hearing them laugh, in pushing their tiny excited bodies on a swing at the park, or in hearing their unlearned thoughts on God and life and insects. Hannah had listened to her girls explain why
they
thought spiders had eight legs and found their theories and reasoning fascinating. Owen would help the girls collect spiders in mason jars, and search the Internet for what kind of food to give a daddy-long-legs spider. Alex, however, just assumed that his girls hated spiders because they were girls, or because there is nothing inherently interesting about spiders.

In the weeks after Hannah's death, Lillian would come back home complaining about how messy Alex's house was.
Filthy, not fit for them kids to be in. The garbage didn't even get out, there were fruit flies. All the dishes were dirty and strewn around empty bags of take-out and pizza boxes.

Christmas that year was brutal, exactly three weeks after Hannah died. It was staged, faked, lived through with fleeting smiles and bursts of happiness snuffed out by the reality of their new family life flashing at random. Lillian wrapped the girls' gifts that year, not their mother. Lillian did whatever she could when Alex called, and she was spending most nights at Alex's house now, because Alex had forbidden her to bring the kids back to her house because Owen was there. She taught Alex how to use his washer and dryer and felt it was chauvinist of her nephew that he had left so much for Hannah to deal with. He couldn't even prepare an edible meal for his daughters. He poured their baths too hot and never pestered them to finish their meals. He figured extra dessert was fine since it meant a full stomach. Over a period of about three weeks Lillian had pretty well straightened him and the girls out. They were all clear on what the girls were used to eating for lunch and what channels their favourite shows came on. She thought he was going to be fine until the phone rang that morning.

“Alex, rambling on like this isn't changing anything. I'll be over in ten minutes. You're due at that meeting with your boss at nine. I'll be there at quarter to nine to watch the girls. While I'm there I'll find a nice daycare for them to go to after school, and when you get home, I'll go into their school and ask the teachers about making up lost time.”

She was trying to calm Alex. Owen looked across the room at the telephone sitting on his bedside table and wanted desperately to pick up the receiver and listen in, but to be caught would be too awkward. He worried about Callie and Lucia. They knew he was staying with Lillian and knew that she was on speed dial, number 2.

Days later, while Lillian was shopping for bird feed, they called him. They were crying too hard to get their words out, their throats too constricted. It was Callie on the phone, with Lucia shouting queries at her and into the receiver.

“How come only Daddy loves us now?”

“Callie, no…it's…that's not true, okay?”The words simply weren't there to explain the mess to them. Their vocabulary didn't include adultery and betrayal, and he didn't want it to. Not yet.

The words didn't need to be there anyway, Owen did, to wipe the tears from their freckled faces, but he couldn't be. The circumstances of their mother's death meant they had to lose their uncle as well, but there was no way to express that. Every word those girls uttered into the phone felt like shears slicing into his heart; the longer the sentence the deeper the cut.

“Ask him if he still loves us, Callie. Tell him Lucia said we got hamsters for Christmas but Daddy keeps forgetting to buy us a wheel. Ask him if he can get us the wheel. Tell him, Callie …what did he say?”

He was as surprised as they were when he started crying. He didn't know what to do with the tears as they wet his face, he wasn't expecting it to affect his speech like that.
C-Callie, t-tell your s-sister…
All he could do was reassure them that he loved them, but that didn't matter to two little girls who needed physical contact with him, the warm comforting blanket of a hug and kiss on the forehead.

“I … I'm just really busy with work now, like Daddy always was before. But maybe sometime soon we can go for some ice creams at that store you like so much, okay? We'll see. Be good girls for Daddy now, won't you? Promise me? And your Aunt Lilly too. Okay, girls?”

“But all the bugs we collected together are dead now. Even the pretty black-and-orange butterfly. Even the caterpillar you promised would turn into a butterfly if I took good care of it.”

“It's winter now,Callie. There's no bugs to hunt, right? Ask Aunt Lillian for the hamster wheel okay? And…”he hesitated before lying, “maybe next summer we'll go butterfly hunting. At the cabin.”

He hung up wondering if she would grow up and consider him the man who killed his mother. They man who made a promise and never spoke to her again. The man who built a treehouse in her backyard, or the man who destroyed her family.

Minutes after Owen got off the phone with his nieces, he found himself walking to Hannah's grave, thinking he could temporarily escape it all by hiding out there. Her white marble headstone a brighter white than the dirty snow. It was still totally unweathered by the elements, except for smears from a few rotten, soggy leaves clinging to the base of it, some frozen into the inch of snow climbing up the stone. It was quiet enough that he could hear the wind, and bits of litter – empty chip bags and coffee cups – slapping off headstones.

He was sitting at Hannah's grave by noon and was still there at three o'clock when Alex arrived with the kids after school. It was as if the graveyard was designed in a way to provide for such privacy: Alex could not have seen Owen sitting at his wife's grave until he ascended a hill and was within ten feet of him, and Owen never heard them approaching on account of the traffic, and the fact he just wasn't paying attention to the world around him. Then he heard Lillian clear her throat, intentionally. And he heard his nieces, giddy and excited, their tones indicating they never really understood their situation.
Uncle Owen?

Owen stood, paralyzed, barely even breathing, speechless. The girls were trying to run towards him, but Alex had them clutched at the wrist by his gloved hands. They were an arm's length away from his body, tugging against their father and trying to get free, but Alex's hands were like chains clamped around their wrists. The heel of his black shoes dug into the snow so they couldn't jerk him forward. Lillian took Lucia up in her arms then, and Alex did the same with Callie, all the while glaring at Owen.

Owen knew what was coming. It was clear in Alex's eyes what his intentions were, and Owen knew he'd have to stand there and take it. That it would hurt. That it would hurt even more because it was a man he loved who would be inflicting the pain. A man he loved had good reason to close his fist and bust open his jaw, drive skin into bone, draw blood. And he'd have to watch the whole thing, hopeless and repentant.

Owen watched Alex dump Callie on Lillian, and watched Lillian start to panic, but he still couldn't move. He wouldn't move. He just stood there, waiting.

Five sprinting paces and Alex was right there in his face. Owen dropped to his knees to take it, and halfway down he felt a foot pressed against the back of his head, and saw Hannah's gravestone coming forcifully towards him. He heard Lillian and the girls screaming now, fear thick in their pitch, and felt the thud of her headstone against him like a gunshot. Felt his neck almost snap as his head met the stone at a sharp angle, and his brother's boot kept it there, sliding his forehead across the stone. He hit the ground then, looked up and saw a drop of blood in the indented C of
Here Lies Hannah Collins
. There was blood collecting in the hair of his left eyebrow. It was warm. He looked to Lillian, knowing he couldn't fight back, and saw that her first instinct was not to haul Alex back, not to choose sides, but to shield the girls from as much of this image of their father as she could. She was trying to spin them around, turn their backs on it all, cover their eyes. They fought against her, trying to shake themselves loose.

Owen was on his hands and knees now, like a dog. He'd fallen face-first into hard, crusty, ice-glazed snow. It was sharp: a bed of needles pressing into his cheeks and eyes. He rolled over onto his side and looked up to see his brother standing over him. He pressed his shoe down on Owen's face as if it were a giant fetid insect he wanted squat, forcing his face into hard, crusty ice. The wet footprint on his cheek was cold and soothed the sting. He could taste the snow in his mouth now, and it was a mild distraction from the pain. Alex stamped his chest and Owen felt as if his ribs had cracked, all of them. He panicked and gasped for air and got none, and his lungs felt filled with fire. And then a pop, a ringing ear, the lobe split from the pressure of the kick.

Owen tried his hardest to whisper,“Not now, Alex, c'mon. Not here, not in front of Callie and Lucia. Not in front of Callie and Lucia.”

The girls were frantic, screeching so loudly their throats sounded raw and bloody.

“Not in front of the girls? You think you own them now too? Hey?Talking like
you're
their fucken father…at
my
wife's grave.”

Callie broke free of Lillian's grip. Lillian just wept, and threw her arms up in the air, and looked on and then away from the scene, again and again.

“It should've been you that died in that car, you piece of shit drunk, because at least no one would miss you. But no, it's like Mom all over again. Here
you
are and there
Hannah
is.”He pointed at her headstone, only now noticing Owen's blood there.

Alex looked betrayed that the girls were pleading for their father to stop beating on Owen. They grabbed at their father as he swatted their hands away like flies.

“Alex, it's not the right time for this.”

“Here, why don't you take them too?”

He grabbed Callie by the arm, hard enough to hurt her, and shoved her down on top of Owen. It was too much. Owen finally stood up and comforted Callie, told her it was okay, that Daddy was sorry and didn't mean to upset her. Owen looked up and saw Alex staring at his daughter now. Unsure, with a slight trembling of atonement about him. Alex saw only his daughter now, what he'd just done to her. He turned and saw Lillian appalled,Lucia afraid of him. Both of his daughters feared him now. He swung his head around the scene like a man deeply sorry and deeply ashamed, totally silent now, and yet there was that look of relief and vindication that strangely meant he was only human.