Believing Cedric (4 page)

She followed closely behind him, almost drunkenly, the heels of her shoes catching on the floor in ways they never had before. When she closed the door behind her, she led Cedric into a book room across the hall. There was a single chair in it that the teachers sometimes used to stand on, to reach the books on the higher shelves. She pointed at it, feeling like everything she was saying and doing was automated, empty. “I want you to sit there until I come back. Understand?” She watched him carefully as he stepped past her, and without even meaning to, she added another banal disciplinary remark: “And I want you to think about what you said to me.”

Cedric got comfortable on the seat; and once he had made sufficient bodily adjustments, he turned to her, smirking.

“And just what are you grinning at? Do you think this is funny? Is that it?” She hadn't meant to challenge him either. In fact, the only thing she wanted to do was leave him be, contain him in a place where he couldn't be heard, and walk away. But now, after having explicitly confronted him, those same eyes were fixed on her again, teasingly clever, knowing. His smirk grew into a half-hearted smile, as if, yes, there really was something that was funny, a private joke that belonged to him and him alone. Then he looked away, beginning to inventory the rest of the room with the same hungry attention that she'd noticed in him a few minutes prior.

She didn't dare say another word. Instead, she closed the door and made her way to the ladies' room, where she leaned against the tiled wall and watched her reflection gawk back at her in the mirror. What exactly did this all mean? Was she going crazy, finally losing her grip, like everyone thought she was? Because, being honest with herself, as it stood, the only thing she could be absolutely certain of was that the child who was holed up in the room a few doors away from her was not a child at all. She shook her head. No, she knew children, understood them. She could recognize when a child was simply reciting adult words, repeating things he'd heard his parents say, trying out snippets that he'd picked out from restaurant conversations and bus-stop arguments, but this was different. There was a cognizance with the language, a natural ease with it that could only come from profound maturity, from worldliness. And this, this was the only thing she could be sure of.

So what was she supposed to do now? There was no one to help her, no one to ask advice from. It wasn't as if she could just stroll up to the principal's office and let him know that there was a man in the skin of a boy locked in the book room downstairs. It would be a matter of minutes before she was injected with sedatives and wheeled away to some institution for the rest of her life. No. She had to deal with this alone. And quickly.

She noticed that her reflection didn't look healthy, her complexion pallid, sickly. She stepped forward to the sink and turned on the taps, splashing her face with lukewarm water. When she was finished, she put a hand on the cold porcelain of the basin and leaned closer to the mirror. Her other hand wormed between the third and fourth buttons of her blouse and found the skin above the empty space there, pressing down on it, her fingers cold as a stack of nickels.

The thought crossed her mind to just leave, to walk out the front doors and never return; let someone else clean up the mess. But she also knew that, if she did, she would be admitting to herself that she was insane, or at least incredibly unstable. Besides, if she just walked out now, wouldn't they try to take away some of her retirement fund? And if so, how many friends did she have on the school board who would stand up for her, speak in her defence? Few. Maybe none.

No, what she needed to do was to look at this problem with rational eyes, as something real, as something that actually happened to people. Then she could deal with it.

She considered how he'd addressed her, the way he'd held her gaze as if he were on the same ground, the same standing, and it came to her that the best thing to do was to confront him in that light, as an equal. She would have to walk into the book room and have a rational, grounded conversation with him, a conversation that was going to be every bit as squeamish and gawky as standing her ground with another adult; one of those cumbersome situations that everyone has been in at some point, a colleague who has overstepped his or her boundaries, a supervisor who has made a mistake. This was going to be about diplomacy, about reasoning, about seeing where the other person was coming from and, possibly, even admitting wrongs and apologizing. This is what it had come to. It was the only reasonable way out that she could think of.

She felt edgy as she walked out of the bathroom and down the hall, where she paused for a slow minute before putting a hand on the door of the book room. She opened it quickly and stepped forward, standing tall, holding her chin as high as her husband would have. However, she could tell instantly, just by looking down at him, that this wasn't the same person she had left in the room.

Cedric was standing in the middle of the floor, gawping up at her, his face long, eyes glossy, his shoulders seeming to hang from his neck. His hair was somewhat dishevelled, like he'd been holding his head for some time, squeezing tufts of it in his fists. “Mrs. O'Donnell?” His voice was pitched high, meek, submissive. “Um,” he looked around at a few of the shelves, “why am I in the book room? I don't . . . I . . .” he paused, as if wondering whether or not he should admit this next part, “I don't remember coming in here.” Then he broke off, looking at the floor, and within seconds had started to cry, quietly, shamefully, like he'd wet his pants.

She let him whimper for a while, watching him skeptically, churning over the absurd thought that this could possibly be a grown-up in a child's body just pretending to be a child. But she heard the pathetic ring of paranoia and delusion in this reasoning. No. Intuitively, she understood that this was just a boy in front of her, a boy who was confused and afraid.

Agnes crouched down and held on to his shoulders. “It's all right. Everything's going to be all right now. Okay?” But Cedric couldn't look her in the eyes as she reassured him. He was discomfited, embarrassed.

She flattened one of the raised clumps of his hair. “Come on,” she said, standing up. “Let's get you back into class.”

For the next hour, Mrs. O'Donnell's movements were stiff and awkward, her instructions to the students imprecise and confusing. She found herself constantly checking to see that Cedric was still in his seat, still watching the class with his usual appeasing eyes, still writing in his usual complacent way. And, to her relief, he always was.

The day passed without further incident. As did the next. And then the next. Until, eventually, Agnes began to have a hard time believing that anything strange had ever happened at all.

No one knew exactly

how far to run

Starting, stopping

like deer spooked

with that curiosity that

has them lingering dangerously

between the line of knowing

and knowing it's too late

We'd watched him light the fuse

and drop it into the pail

with an unceremonious plop

breaking the meniscus

then scattered, wavering

gathering, tightened

How soundlessly

the pillar of water

geysered into the sky

and held there, weightless

towering colossal

Until the spout fanned

and began to drop away

falling into an explosive rain

that smacked at the pavement

with swollen globs

soaking some of the other boys' shirts

Cotton clinging to their backs

as slick-tight as bravery

Mine

was dry

Being on the road, traversing the country again on the way back home, put Melissa in an odd mood. Particularly here, in the landscape of her father's upbringing, which she had never before spent time in. She was leaning against a car, waiting for her roadtrip companion to come out of the gas station, when she noticed the train standing still on a set of tracks across the highway and decided to cross the asphalt to take a better look. She walked up to the car that was most heavily graffitied, an enormous rusted barrel with the fadings of the words “Government of Canada” on its side, in two languages, streaked with corrosion, mechanical grease, and bird droppings. It made her think about how far this one car had travelled, how many times it had made its way across the country. Then she thought about that greater context, picturing the nation's trains whistling over desolate tracks, then of its planes, like stubby pieces of chalk pressed sideways and pulling across the length of blueboard skies, and the night roads that stitched the cities together through a patchwork of cricket rumours and bat-fluttering expanses; binding us, dividing us.

But these thoughts were soon interspersed by wonderings about school and debt, where she was going in life and why, about travel and where she would find the money to do it, thoughts about her chances of becoming just another woman living a mostly painless fifty-two-week-a-year emptiness, interrupted, at best, twice, by all-inclusive resort packages. Thoughts that the chances were pretty good.

It's interesting how countries, considered Melissa, have a way of having their way with us. Though, she countered, so does the world really, our biology, our nature, time, the cosmos. They all have their way with us. In the end, those inspirational posters and movies and New Age propaganda professing how one individual can make an enormous difference are wrong. In the end, there is room for our smallness, our insignificance. Infinite room.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and Peter Kushnir was in his backyard striving for numbness, taking generous swigs from what was now his third glass of whisky. But it wasn't working. Instead, with each coating of warmth that drained down his gullet, he felt his despair mount. Within hours, he was sure of it, a nuclear holocaust would sweep the globe as bare as a slate, and he couldn't do anything—
no one
could do anything—to stop it.

He was, however, doing a pretty good job of getting himself drunk. He had never had much tolerance for alcohol, only really partaking at Christmas and New Year's get-togethers, retirement parties, and when he was handed a cup with an ounce of sour champagne at the railway yards, to be raised into the sooty air at the welcoming of another newborn. Other than that, he avoided it, convinced that drink was one of those things that made people turn on you, made seedy colleagues into friends and friends into enemies. Today, of course, none of that really mattered anymore.

Peter emptied his glass and poured a fourth, the spout of the bottle wobbling above the edge of his tumbler. As the liquid neared the rim, he heard the distant sound of voices and laughter, which belonged to a group of boys who gradually came into view. The boys were walking along the crest of the coulee that his yard opened onto, and he recognized them as kids who lived in the neighbourhood on the other side of the draw.

As they came closer, three of them broke into a jog and steered themselves down a long hill, their feet slapping at the dirt to keep up with their bodies. The last boy looked to be limping a bit, like he'd just twisted an ankle in a gopher hole or foolishly jumped from a branch that was too high, and so continued walking toward Peter's house, where the trail that dipped down and crossed the draw wasn't as steep or long. He recognized him as the Johnson kid, who lived close by and whose father worked down at the flour mill. Hearing the others call up to him, he learned that his given name was Cedric.

He watched the boy as he limped along, oblivious to what was happening in the world, oblivious to the very volatility of his own existence. There he was, concerned about his sore ankle, about catching up with his friends, or maybe just about finding something sufficiently rotund to topple down the hill. Lost in play, on the eve of the Third World War. Much in the way, come to think of it, that Peter had been (for a short period at least) during the First World War. That was, until he had learned better. Which happened on the day that he and his brother, Michael, had gotten into some serious trouble, and for the strangest reason imaginable.

It had been right in the middle of the Great War, when, he recalls, the weight of the daily news visibly slumped onto the shoulders of everyone in town. He was only eight but old enough to recall the unnerving quiet, the way people walked through the stores and sat in restaurants as if they were secret places, their conversations hushed and serious. The day it occured, Peter had been walking back from school with his brother, nearing the point on the road where the two rows of houses on either side stopped and gave way to a farmer's field—the field that their father rented, on the corner of which was a modest house that their family called home. Peter and his brother had found an old bicycle tire to push along the pavement and had gotten lost in play, constantly adding new and varied obstacles to manoeuvre the tire through, upping the ante. And because the game was being invented on the spot, they needed to shout out the rules to each other while they wheeled it along. The two brothers were speaking Ukrainian, as they often did when playing alone, and a woman stood watching them from her front yard as they weaved back and forth through the street, her expression as unmoved as a garden ornament's.

At some point, Peter became aware of a man yelling from far away, in a voice that was shrill and foreign, but thought nothing of it. Meanwhile, Michael challenged him to bounce the tire over a rock in the middle of the road but to keep the tire rolling in a straight line. It didn't, and they swerved to chase it in a long, sweeping circle, giggling.

The extraneous voice grew louder, more insistent. “You must come home! You must come!”

Then Peter dared his brother to roll it right along the gutter without letting it fall inside, and Michael told him that he doubted it was even possible, for anyone, even a grown-up.