Away From Everywhere (6 page)

Most of those school mornings were similar enough to blend into one memory. All that ever changed was the song on the radio or the homework they exchanged. That may have been why the sudden change in their father's personality, near the end of grade nine, was so marked and poignant. By the end of that school year, he spoke only to answer their questions in the mornings. He'd stopped hassling them to help shovel, and he cleared the ice from the car without making any jokes about how useless they were. If he did speak, and Owen was the first to notice it, his voice was flat. Something was missing, there was no tone, no inflection at the right places in his speech, just a flat line of simple one or two word sentences. His lack of emotion was evident in his now monotonous voice. He seemed more like a body dragging itself around than a man alive. Every morning he fell into the car seat and let out a long, exaggerated sigh. One morning he'd shaved only half his face and didn't notice until he got in the car. He went to work anyway. He stopped styling his hair, and then stopped ironing his shirts, and then stopped tucking them in.

Near mid-May of that year, he started spacing out at red lights. He habitually looked down on his hands whenever they were at a red light, as if fascinated by them. He watched them like a captivating play only he could see. He'd pull his skin tight to eradicate a wrinkle or gently comb the hair on his wrist, and he often laughed a little as he came out of what looked like a daydream. They never bothered to tell him to go, they'd wait for a car behind them to blow their horn.

Owen tried to ignore his father's change in personality, but one night before bed Alex mentioned it to their mother, who explained,“Your father may be losing his job, that's all. He might be a little glum like that for a while, but everything is going to be all right. He'll just have to give up the journalism bit and work in another field…”

They nodded when she finished the story, reiterating, “Everything will be okay, all right?” They were satisfied with having an explanation. Any explanation would've suited them just fine. “Now go to bed.”

Less than a week later, they were driving to school and Owen saw his father notice a payphone in front of the courthouse onWater Street. His father did a double-take, as if it were an old friend he'd spotted. The car jutted out of its lane, no indicator, and bumped into the curb before it stopped. Owen was confused, but liked that he'd have a valid excuse for being late. Alex though, he didn't want to miss a minute of math class. Mrs. Saunders always recapped the last day's class, stressing what was most relevant, what he'd need to know to secure the A he was after.

“Dad! What are you doing? We're
already
late!” Alex smacked at his new watch.

It was odd of their father not to have mentioned needing to use the phone, but not answering Alex was even stranger. Instead, he slammed his car door, needlessly hard, as if to shut Alex up. He cast an eerie look back at them as he marched towards the phone: it sliced at them like a knife. His eyes were glowing, bulging from their sockets, as if his eyeballs were swelling and the sockets could no longer contain them. He was on the payphone for ten minutes, flailing his arms and stamping his feet. He slammed the receiver down and picked it back up to yell some more, as if the target of his arrow-headed words could still be on the line.

“Alex!What the hell is this?”

“I don't know, just … just keep your head down, don't look at him, don't make him mad…okay?”He wiped a sweaty palm on his jeans.“Don't look at him and don't say anything… and don't make him mad. Pretend we didn't see anything. Okay?”

Owen forced a laugh. “Jesus, Alex, it's Dad!”

“Is it?”

At school they were given a late pass to bring back the next day, signed by one of their parents to confirm they were legitimately late. Owen had a habit of cutting classes, so the principal was skeptical. When they came home after school that day, they walked into their house, laughing about a substitute teacher's botched delivery of Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
, and slung their bookbags down in the porch, having actively forgotten about their father's fit of rage that morning. They were heading up to their room to play video games when they saw their mother sitting alone and strikingly silent in the living room. She was watching the carpet like it was a fire. The TV wasn't on, there was no music on, and she wasn't reading. She looked aged, and with her hands lying on her knees, she looked defenseless against the world.

“Mom? Are you …all right?”

“It's your father.”She got up off the brown couch immediately, clutching a white pillow between her hands like a sandwich. “I'm worried about him. His boss called today. He might have quit, we don't know.” She turned and laid the pillow back on the couch.“He just…he got up and walked out around eleven this morning,”she said, throwing her arms in the air.“He didn't say a word to anyone. Joyce called to ask if he was feeling ill. You know what he's like. Who knows what he was thinking, who
ever
knows what your father is thinking? He keeps everything all pent up, all to himself.”

She caught herself growing frantic and calmed herself because Alex started to look panicked when she panicked.

Alex showed her the late slips that needed to be signed. He hauled the crumpled pink slips out of his bookbag and smoothed them. “I don't know what the hell he was doing or who the hell he was talking to,” he told her as he sank into the couch, “but it was kind of creepy. He gave me this nasty look when I asked him what he was doing, and then he was going apeshit on the phone!”

“Watch your language, honey, and what phone, where?”

“The payphone, down by the courthouse onWater Street.”

They would have been fools not to have seen how the story alarmed her. She looked like someone just shot at in a war.

“Oh, you know Dad…he…he probably forgot to use the phone before he left this morning.” She forced a dismissive smile. “That's all.”

She laughed a nervous laugh, but her mind, behind those flickering eyes, was clearly racing for an explanation. “When your father comes home, don't say anything, don't act any different than you usually do, okay? Like I said, he's just stressed out about finding another job. His newspaper isn't doing so well, that's all.” She'd gone beyond trying to calm them now and was trying to calm herself, pressing wrinkles from her clothes and taking quick breaths.

When their father opened the front door that night, their mother was leaning in the porch entrance, waiting to greet him, presumably hoping for a logical answer, one that would alleviate all her worries, one that would make her feel stupid for ever worrying in the first place. But he said nothing. She pried. “So, how was your day?”

Kicking his shoes off in the porch. “Fine enough.” He almost tripped over Alex's bookbag as he entered the hallway, brushing past her on his way to the bathroom. His shoulder butted into her breast hard enough to hurt, but she wouldn't acknowledge the pain, wouldn't rub it out. That would mean something was wrong.

Owen sat on the couch watching his mother's mind roam, having witnessed the flash of pain on her face and his father's seemingly lobotomized body stumble up the hall. She saw him watching her and tried to hide the concern on her face. She smiled and headed for the kitchen, claiming that she'd left the pasta sauce on for too long. From where he sat on the couch, he could see a bottle of pasta sauce on the kitchen table, the lid still unopened. It was next to an onion, still sealed in its peel, and a tub of mushrooms still sealed in plastic wrap. It was the first time Owen knew his mother was straightfaced lying to him.

Twenty minutes later, at supper, his father complained that the food tasted funny, as if there was
something in it
. He chewed it with his mouth open, loudly, making a wet sucking noise, and looked around the table for a response. A single strand of shredded parmesan cheese clung to the bristles on his unshaven cheeks, dangling there, like a silkworm from a tree. He asked with an utter urgency,“Is it just me, or is there a funny taste on this spaghetti?”

He was obviously more paranoid than disgusted. He walked over to the cupboards and examined the box of pasta. “Was this sealed when you opened it?”

Perplexed and alarmed, she nodded a slow nod.

He opened the fridge door, grabbed the tub of parmesan cheese, and sniffed it in an exaggerated manner, hauling it away from his face to clear his nostrils between whiffs. He checked the expiry date on the pasta sauce.

“I can trust you, Claire, but I don't know if we can trust everyone you've got traipsing through this house. Not anymore. I don't even trust the phones in here anymore. I've been working on a story for another paper, see. High magnitude. A different paper. But keep that between us, okay?”

They all nodded, shocked, concealing their fear. Owen knew that if he spoke, his father would hear a quiver in his voice. A quiver he felt safer hiding. Alex shot his mother a look:
See!

“It might just be a funny taste in my mouth from earlier today. The coffee I drank. I think one of the youngsters at work might be poisoning my coffee when I'm not looking. I've tried to catch him. I can't tell you how though. He might be listening. It'll ruin my plan. But I am setting him up. Don't worry. I think he's jealous that I built up my career the old-fashioned way, but he fast-tracked it with some lame college degree…so he doesn't have the respect and reputation that I've earned. He wants to steal my stories. He can't come up with his own. None as good as mine anyway.”

He never noticed his family's collective fright, but talked right at their shocked faces. “I think he wants my job, and I think he'll do anything to get it. All of them. They all would. I had to leave work today. It wasn't safe. I don't know who to trust anymore. But it'll be okay, soon. It'll all be okay once I figure out my plan to catch him. I'll get the police involved when the time is right. Too early and I'll spoil it. He's just about to fall for my trap.”

He walked out of the kitchen as he finished the sentence. He stormed up to his room, put on his pajamas, and went to bed at 6:30, as if that were perfectly normal.

The kitchen felt like the inside of an oven, and the silence rang in their ears. They were afraid to breathe, to move or speak, because doing so would unpause life, and they would have to face their new reality. Their new life as a family. Worse still, they would have to deal with it. His decline into schizophrenia had been so slow they could ignore it at first, until that one week when it all came faster than a car crash.

In high school the rumours were true: Owen and Alex had a “crazy father.”

Owen resented his brother's shame about their father. He saw through how Alex dove into the books and was crowned valedictorian. How Alex stayed hip and dressed head to toe in logo-visible clothes. It was all to compensate, to prove himself, to seem distinguished, flawless, and above all: normal.

By grade twelve, the jokes about how two brothers could be so different got old fast.
They must have different fathers. One of them must be the postman's son. One must have been dropped on his head.
Each a masked query as to why Owen wasn't more like Alex. Especially since they were twins. Alex was always quick to point out that they were fraternal twins, not identical, so it was
obvious
why they weren't more alike, why would they be? According to his biology textbook, page 501, fraternal twins were no more genetically alike than a normal set of brothers. But the jokes came anyway, and Owen watched as his infuriated brother recited genetic fact to family and friends of the family. The insinuation that he and Owen should be alike just because they were twins trivialized all the conscious effort he put into distinguishing himself from the likes of his brother.

When Alex came home one afternoon, gloating about how he'd been declared valedictorian for their graduating class, Owen saw Alex's elation deflate when their mother advised Alex, in a jovial and good-natured manner, that he
better get crackin' on that speech.

Right away he turned to his brother. “This speech is how this school – the teachers and the students – will remember me!”

By grade twelve, it was obvious that Owen had inherited their father's way with words. But writing was the
only
thing Alex thought his brother could do better than him, so he wasn't jealous of it.

“C'mon, man, you gotta write it for me. It's gotta be perfect, man. This is a big deal.”

Laughing, Owen cut him off. “It's high school, Alex. It's probably the most irrelevant thing you'll ever do in your life. Besides, a rock could graduate
high school
with honours.”

“Owen! Stop that right now. You should be proud of your brother and–”

“Oh shut up, Owen! We'll see who's where in ten years, okay? I'd say I'll be a lawyer, and you'll be a goddamn bum or criminal who'll need my help, shitface. I bet you'll at least need my money–”