Critical Injuries (18 page)

James's mother looked stricken. “Oh no.” His father had his hands on her shoulders. He looked stricken, too. Well, wasn't everyone?

“What do these girls want?” he asked. “What is their purpose in this?” He must have forgotten his son's ruthlessness, the way, when James wanted something, he set out to get it.

Back home, time felt suspended, vacant. There was nothing to do, and everything. Alix drifted wanly and aimlessly around the house; Jamie was in the basement, arms folded, watching TV furiously. In the kitchen, Madeleine was making egg salad. “I thought we'd have sandwiches,” she said. She looked at Isla helplessly. “I don't know what to do. I don't know how to help.”

“Just being here. Thank you. Except, do you know how I made such a mistake? Could you tell what he was like?”

“Oh, honey, no. How could anyone tell? Don't beat yourself up. Whatever's wrong is in his heart, not yours. And you know, one thing I've learned very well is that you can never see all the way into anyone else's heart. If someone's determined enough to keep something hidden, there's no real way to know what's in there.” How did Madeleine learn that? From what experience was she speaking? Isla couldn't ask. She didn't think there was room in her head for more information, much less revelation.

“At least, I suppose,” Madeleine was continuing thoughtfully, “we can be grateful it wasn't boys. That would have been even more of a shock.”

They stared at each other. Isla saw her mother begin to struggle with her expression, and felt something unfamiliar bubbling up in herself. She heard herself snort. Then they were laughing, howling, tears ran from their eyes. “Oh my God, yes,” Isla gasped. “It could always be worse.” It was irresistible. They couldn't stop.

“Mum! Grandma!” Jamie sobered them instantly. He looked like thunder.

Madeleine caught her breath first. “Don't be cross,” she said, “we were just letting off steam. Everybody has to let off steam, you know.”

“I'm going out.” He turned. The front door slammed behind him.

“Shit,” Isla said.

Alix drifted into the kitchen. “Were you guys laughing?” She sounded as if she were willing to disbelieve her own ears if need be. “Where'd Jamie go?”

“He needed a walk,” Madeleine said. “Are you hungry? I've made egg salad for sandwiches. Your mother and I were just talking. We probably got a bit loud and carried away.”

Isla wasn't sure she could keep anything down, but the sandwiches were good: a childhood sort of taste, an ordinary, mother-made sort of lunch. Alix picked at hers. “Are you going to see Daddy? Because maybe he could say…you know.” That he'd done nothing, Isla supposed; Alix must mean he could say that. Or that the misunderstanding, misinterpretation, just plain evil, lay elsewhere. Or that, magic daddy, he could rewind events and restore them all to the relative bliss, the general beautifully, magnificently dull assumptions of twenty-four hours ago.

“Maybe,” Isla said, not committing herself to whether that meant he could maybe explain, or that she might go and see him and ask.

Poor Jamie, out there trying to run faster than the pictures, and faster than his mother's and grandmother's idiotic, necessary laughter. Isla understood the impulse. If she didn't have him and Alix, if she weren't responsible, she would jump in the car and drive off, foot to the floor, across the country, to some other continent, anywhere she'd arrive before the pictures could catch up with her. But she did have Jamie and Alix, she was responsible. All her options, just like the pictures in her head, were narrow. They were also governed by James and what he had done. Salt in the wounds indeed. She laughed again, this time sharply and to herself. Alix and Madeleine both looked startled.

What were James's options, as he currently saw them? Until recently they must have looked enormous, expansive, an all-he-could-greedily-eat buffet of delights. She found herself standing. “I'm going to court,” and like Jamie, was gone from the house.

It was urgent, suddenly, to get a good look at James. Scrutinize him for any connection at all between what she had thought and what she now knew. She wished there were a way to pin him down the way thoughtless collectors pinned down butterflies: in order to discern the elements of their beauty in that case, the elements of James's elusive, sly wickedness in his. A matter of camouflage. A matter of creatures creating shapes and colourings in order to escape being noticed. To be able to carry on their intentions unhindered — that now sounded like James, all right, although also somewhat insane.

The woman at the courthouse information desk was helpful in directing Isla to the right courtroom. It was a more straightforward system than she'd expected: one large, busy space dedicated to first-appearance remands, the woman explained. Would expressions like “first-appearance remands” come to roll as trippingly off Isla's tongue? She thought not.

She slipped into a row near the back. Other people were also coming and going. She could see where the lawyers sat, and the bench where prisoners from the jail were rotated through as their cases were heard. Other people accused of crimes arrived, with or without lawyers, from the outside world, through the same door Isla had used. There weren't as many spectators as she would have thought, no great crowds of distraught families, for instance. The room itself was unceremonial, functional. No especially glossy, expensive woods here, no scales-of-justice carvings, only a large, spare, grey-painted room with benches and tables. She discerned a sort of assembly-line system: a name called, a man, usually a man, identified, charges read, arguments made for or against bail, occasional huddlings between lawyers and judge, frequent agreements without the need of huddlings, bored, accustomed voices following familiar scripts. To Isla it was amazing and foreign: all this life, all these plots for robberies, drug deals, quiet evenings at home gone awry, off the rails. What violent spectacle, what vicious drama! And all done so quietly!

And oh look, there was James; one of the few prisoners wearing a suit, although of course it was yesterday's suit. All things considered, he didn't look too bad. She understood she'd been hoping for black eyes, cut lip, some vicarious vengeance like that. She also would have preferred him to look more slumped and shifty-eyed but there he was, sitting straight, tall and, nearly, proud. Well no, surely not proud. He was just, with the aid of a tailored suit, still camouflaging himself. What nerve, though. And what energy even to try pulling that off.

Stephen Godwin turned out to be a sleek and silvery fellow who hustled in for the few seconds it took to remand James, without bail. The lawyers made some hurried, mumbled agreement, and that was it. The world of crime was humming, Isla assumed, and James would be among its smaller, if creepier, potatoes.

She, however, was no further ahead. Shocked she might be, despise him she might, but she nevertheless needed now, like hunger, like breath, to see him and hear what he had to say. Again, the system worked in surprisingly straightforward ways. She was directed to the relevant jail, some kilometres from the courthouse. Who knew these things? Off she drove.

At the jail there were formalities to do with identification and handing over possessions and stepping through an apparatus similar to an airport metal detector. There was no patting-down search, and the visitors' room was an actual room, not one of those grilled, glass-boothed things from the movies, but another plain space, this one with straight chairs and a guard.

James, appearing through a doorway, said, “Isla! Thank God.” In other circumstances those words could have been nearly touching. And he should have stopped there. “I hope you brought a change of clothes, and my shaving stuff. I can't believe I'm not out on bail yet, but as long as I have a few things from home, I guess I can stick it out for a couple more days.”

Such resilience, such bounce-back capabilities.

He really was extraordinary.

He was a good-looking man, although looser of chin and more sternly lined than he used to be, but she thought he was not a nice-looking man. Had he ever been? Was there some moment of transformation she'd missed?

“Look,” he said, in a more subdued tone, nodding towards the guard, “I can't talk properly here. But I'm sorry. Truly, I never wanted to upset you, and anyway, this is all stupid. Not true, any of it, a complete over-reaction. And nothing to do with you, nothing to do with my feelings for you, honestly.” Honestly! As if she'd be too stupid to notice that even denying, he was confessing. Or as if she could have any idea what might have previously been his feelings for her, or what they were now. Except that he wouldn't want her to think badly of him. He didn't, in general, like to be ill-thought-of, but must have some particular pride when it came to her.

Something, among so many other things, he might have considered beforehand.

“It was just something small and separate. But I swear, nothing to account for all this, believe me. I'm sorry there wasn't time to talk about it last night. Warn you better. I'll tell you everything when I get home, okay? It's not all what it sounds like, okay?”

She was staring; shook her head finally, not to say no, but to clear it. “You're an amazing man, James. Really quite impressive in your way.” He started to speak, then decided, perhaps gauging her expression, against it. “Now, while you're being amazing, do you have any advice about how I can help your son and daughter understand that their father's a child molester?”

He looked horrified. “For God's sake, Isla, I'm not a child molester. Jesus! How could you say that?”

“I guess because I heard the charges. So far. I gather there may be more. How would you put it?” She was curious. They might just have had a long-term translation problem.

“Not children,” he insisted. He seemed to imagine he had some right to insist. “How could you think such a thing? We
have
kids. You know better than that.”

“So,” she said mildly, “you'd understand if some middle-aged guy hired Alix in, oh, three years or so, and then jumped her? That'd be fine with you, quite understandable and not child-molesting?” Her voice hardened. “Since you ask, she and Jamie are kind of upset and confused. A little off-kilter. So I have to get back to them.” She looked at her watch. It was the silver-banded one he gave her, engraved with her initials, for Christmas a couple of years back. She saw that she was beginning the inventory of things she would need to throw out. Too bad. She liked that watch.

“Isla,” he said in a pleading sort of tone. Beseeching her for mercy, empathy, something soft like that? Apparently he could make his voice do anything he thought might be useful. Or else her name was the last familiar thing he had to hold onto. That could be sad.

“I have to go. There's just a couple of things I need to tell you. One is, if you get bail, which won't be from me, you're not coming home. Another is, I'm not your valet, so if you need underwear and after-shave, you'll have to find some other way of getting them. And third,” she leaned forward, looked hard at him, last hopeless chance for seeing into whatever that dark space was behind his eyes, “what the hell did you think you were doing? What possessed you? What made you dream you had a right to risk your children this way, never mind me? And which part of your brain told you it was all right to throw yourself at young girls? What the hell did you think you were doing? Who did you think you were?”

She ran out of breath.

His eyes narrowed. He too leaned forward, astonishing man, looked ready to leap. The guard made a small reminding sound. They were staring hard at each other. Nothing was familiar. Some long history was erased.

“You should be careful,” he said slowly, flatly, the cold sound of true anger, “about asking questions you don't really want answers to.” It was by no means the first time she'd heard him say this, something like this; but it was going to be the very last time.

Standing, turning, leaving, she paused in the doorway, turned briefly back. She smiled brilliantly. She waited just long enough to see his hopes start to rise, his eyes to begin lighting up with relief, and for affection, real or manufactured, to begin softening the edges of his mouth.

Smiling brilliantly, then, got her safely, thank God, all the way home.

Like a Secret

The questions, which seem both hard and mainly pointless, at least have given Roddy something to do here at night. Form after form, page after page, they help him tune out the racket, the shouting and swearing back and forth that goes on, the kind of flying threats for tomorrow that float and dive-bomb along the corridor from one mad guy to another.

Worse: occasional whimperings, or loud sorrows.

He can't imagine anyone's so interested in him, his desires, inclinations, and gifts, that much will come of all this. Probably everything's just fed into a computer, which spits out some bare and simple plan of action that, however many questions there are, doesn't truly take him into account. Well, because how could it? Like at school, the questions are mainly multiple choice. Like at school, they're trickier than they look; and when they seem most innocent, he is most suspicious that that's when they're possibly trickiest, so that he has to circle and circle around them, like a dog tramping a patch of floor to lie down on.

Most of the answers aren't right no matter how careful he is, because the questions don't take shadings into account. Like, “Would you rather a) play hockey, b) swim, c) watch TV?” The way he would answer that is, he'd rather watch hockey on TV, like he used to do some nights with his dad, the two of them mostly silent except if there was a good goal or a bad fight, but connected, too. Another one comes closer: “When you watch TV, do you like programs about a) sports, b) nature, c) drama?” Still, much is left out. He feels squeezed into choices he wouldn't otherwise make.

The intelligence tests have lots of questions about patterns and shapes: which word does not belong in this series of words, how would this shape look if it was turned inside-out and sideways? Trains and airplanes hurtle towards one another at varying speeds: when will the moment of collision occur? He's good at patterns of words. He can transform shapes in his head and see how they would be, inside-out and sideways. Speeding objects are harder to calculate. The only sure thing is, they will collide. Which would be the point, if these things mattered at all.

At least the intelligence tests, if devious or confusing or just plain hard, must have plain answers, too. Questions on some of the other tests, the ones about what sort of person he is, he'd like to either skip or have room to explain. “When you are angry, are you more likely to a) yell, b) hit something, c) hit somebody?” There's no place for “none of the above,” no space for saying that mostly he goes off to his room, or out, alone or with Mike, either downtown or into the country, depending. Getting his head clear, working the anger off, dulling the edges. But hitting something, that would be pointless, and feel kind of made up; and he's hardly ever hit a person out of anger. More out of something like treading water: holding a place for himself, not getting pushed over, or around, or drowned.

Some people do yell when they get mad. Mike, for one, he's seen Mike dance around with his arms waving, raging up at the sky, even about nothing much, like a flattened bike tire, some small thing gone wrong. Roddy's vocal cords don't work that way, nor do his arms feel capable of grand gestures. Yelling is caring too much. It's too naked.

The aptitude tests are weird, too. “Would you rather work with a) numbers, b) words, c) hands?” — that's an easy one. But what about “When you think of a dangerous animal, is it more likely to be a) a dog, b) a leopard, c) a skunk?” What could that have to do with anything? Unless that Stan Snell, the counsellor or therapist or whatever he is, can steer him towards being a circus-trainer or a zoo-keeper, what difference does it make what he thinks a dangerous animal is?

The woman works with words, he guesses, if she's in advertising. She's probably rich, and for a job like that she also probably has to be smart. It'd be unbelievably hard to be smart and have to lie absolutely still, not feeling anything. Maybe he and the woman are both in the same kind of trouble that way, their heads going around and not being able to actually do anything about any of it. He imagines the hospital bed is about the size of the cot in his cell. Even if Roddy lies very still, there's still the hardness of the mattress beneath him, the rough blanket above, his heart beating, little digestive rumbles down below in his belly. Where his heels rest and how his eyelids quiver when he concentrates — she can't feel any of that? And if she itches, she can't move to scratch? Oh, but then, she probably can't itch, either.

For being so fucking stupid in the particular way that caused all this, Roddy, with his cot, his grey walls, his lidless crapper, is in totally the right place. He has to belong in this world of the dimwitted, the dense, the furiously hard-done-by. Not bad, necessarily — he himself is not bad, and he can't be the only one — but sort of mutated, sort of twisted, sort of bleached-out somehow. There are guys here that are like dried-up snakes flattened out by a truck. A few are even freakish like, oh, albino squirrels.

The sounds, the unrelenting din of voices rising and falling and boots clumping and cutlery clattering and pool balls dropping into pockets and TVs blaring and even just pages turning, are one thing. The smells are another. The place stinks of disinfectant and containment: the mad fragrance of frustration, which brings them all to rage of one sort or another. In the middle of the night guys cry out, awake or asleep there's round-the-clock grief. Roddy supposes he could do that too, if he chose, if he wanted, if he didn't mind other people knowing what goes on in his head.

If he imagined they cared.

He knows more now about how things work. Stan Snell and Ed Conrad have both explained that after he's sentenced, a couple of weeks from now probably, he'll be moved on from detention centre to reformatory. That should be a good word,
reformatory
, promising hope and life-changing, happy improvement, but obviously it is not.

There's no question about pleading guilty, which he'll be doing today. Because he is guilty; and because of course that first night, he confessed, just blabbed away to the cops about the whole thing, right down to what he and his dad and his grandmother had for supper. Everything except Mike. No wonder Ed Conrad sighs a lot. Roddy would, if he could, look for the mercy of understanding, an official, judging comprehension of one small, shattering, mistaken event. “You can hope, I suppose,” Ed Conrad says, “but I sure wouldn't count on it.”

Roddy was under the impression justice moves very slowly, but the lawyer has explained otherwise. “Pleading guilty speeds things. It's going to trial that takes forever.” What Ed Conrad has done for Roddy is make a deal, a trade. He's proud of himself for pulling this off. “You plead guilty to the armed robbery, the attempted murder gets dropped. It's a good deal, you know, sawing off the attempted murder. I told them if they held on to it we'd be going to trial because you wouldn't plead guilty, and there's a good chance you'd skate on it. But if they dropped it, you'd plead to the armed robbery and the whole thing's off the books. Everybody saves money and time, you get points for not dragging the thing through the system, which means not dragging some witnesses through the system, either, like that woman, and you're better off all the way round, and so's everyone else.” He grinned. “Except me. For me it'd be better to rack up big bills on your dad's tab, trying to defend you somehow.”

Nice.

He's probably right, though, he spends enough time defending guys who've done what they're accused of doing, so all he can do is get them through the best he knows how. Maybe it's not his fault his heart isn't much in it, as long as he does what he's supposed to. Probably this is pretty good, good enough. Roddy's glad he won't have to testify and doesn't have to see anybody else testify, either. Not so much the paralyzed woman, and anyway how could she, but other people, like his dad, maybe, because of it being his gun. And like Mike. Either way, it'd be hard to hear whatever Mike had to say.

This way Ed Conrad said the charge'll get read out, the cops will have something to say, just the facts, basically, “no big deal.” One thing he said might happen is if the woman or people in her family want to make some kind of statements before Roddy's sentenced. “You should be thinking about something to say to the court, too, make it clear what a good fellow you are, and a very sorry one.”

Ed Conrad gets a rusty-metal tone sometimes in his voice. Is it just Roddy, or does he not like any of his clients very much?

“Write something down,” he said. “At least make a start,” and Roddy has tried. Except he may be good at spotting what word doesn't belong in a series of words, but he's stuck when it comes to whole thoughts about something important. He's written, “I'm sorry,” but then — what else is there to say? That he'd change everything if he could? That he never meant it to happen? Words don't change anything, they don't fix, they're nowhere near big enough for real life.

Maybe that's why there's so much yelling here, and those other worse, suffering sounds: because words don't do the trick. Given time, Roddy, too, may lose more and more of them, be reduced, finally, to pointing or grunting.

This morning when the wake-up buzzer goes off in the corridor, Roddy's routine is instantly different. A guard comes for him, so Roddy doesn't join the usual lineup for the cafeteria. He and three other guys get taken right to the showers, and when they're finished there, instead of putting the brown jumpsuits back on, they're handed real clothes. His grandmother, or his dad, must have dropped off his stuff. His only pair of dress pants, dark grey, which he's never worn since his grandmother picked them up last year, a bargain, “because there'll be occasions in your life now, you know.”

So there are.

Also there's a white shirt he hasn't seen before. New. Specially bought? And who wears white shirts?

People accused of big crimes, he supposes.

And in fact he thinks he doesn't look too bad. His body's better suited to dress pants and white shirts than to flailing around inside brown jumpsuits.

One of the other guys has nothing to put on except the jumpsuit. That's pathetic; to have nobody who even cares enough to bring clothes. “Fuck you,” the guy says, “what're you looking at?”

“Settle down,” warns a guard.

They're loaded into a van, going back to the courthouse. It's like a drug, smelling for a few seconds the hot, free air, inhaling deep, like a flashback of a week ago, two weeks ago, a whole seventeen years when this sort of air was normal, breathable, taken for granted. Also, just for the moment between the front door and the van, heat bearing down on the top of his head. A country kind of day. A swimming pool and toke and beer and ice cream kind of day.

Not ice cream.

He and the other guys and the guards get to the courtroom by elevator from the parking garage in the basement, no moment outside at this end of the journey. They file in through a side door, and get lined up side by side on a bench. Birds on a wire. Roddy's grandmother and dad are sitting together in the second row in the part where the audience, or whatever it's called in a courtroom, watches from. There's a lot of strangers sitting out there. They could be here for one of the other guys, or just out of curiosity, to watch any case at all, suck up other people's bad luck. Like his; he, for one, feels pretty doomed.

Or Jesus, some of them might be related to the woman. He doesn't know if he'd recognize the husband if he saw him again. In the doorway of Goldie's, he was just a figure, not a person whose features, in the middle of Roddy's own catastrophe, get remembered. Also she's got those two kids Ed Conrad mentioned, older than him. So maybe one or two or three or twenty of the people out there are from her family. He had that stray picture of one of them standing up in the courtroom, pulling out a gun, popping him one. This still doesn't seem impossible, although also, it does. He doesn't want to die. Just breathing is something. Does the woman feel that way, too? Not likely. She probably thinks just breathing isn't much at all.

Is anybody keeping a close eye on these people?

His dad and grandmother look at him and his grandmother smiles and nods, but then their eyes bounce away. They came up with these clothes, they're paying the lawyer, but maybe they haven't forgiven him. Or his dad hasn't forgiven him, and his grandmother has settled on one certain loyalty.

People make big mistakes to be loyal. It can get them into all kinds of trouble. Look at him: when it came down to the day, he got cold feet about Goldie's, but he didn't back out. He thought that'd be letting Mike down.

That's not totally true. He didn't back out because he didn't want Mike to think less of him; which is not quite the same thing as loyalty.

Once again, Mike isn't here. Roddy looks away, down towards his knees, his lap, his thin unbound wrists. A real no-hoper, one sad, bad case, that's how he figures it looks.

This time there's a real judge, black robe, the full deal. When he comes in, and everybody's stood up and then sat down again, his eyes take a run around the room, taking in Roddy and the others but not pausing especially. Maybe for him it's just another day at work. Like Roddy's dad getting up every day, maybe this is only a job he does because he has responsibilities, he has other people he has to look after. He doesn't look all that interested in the people in this room, anyway, although it's hard to read either kindness or cruelty into a fat sort of face and a little bit of grey hair. The black robe is mainly the point anyway. It looks totally serious.