Critical Injuries (22 page)

That time they talked about children, his far more than hers. Teenaged daughter and son, tough ages, that's pretty much all she had to say right then about Jamie and Alix. Lyle was happy talking about William and Robert, a few years older than her two, and already in university. Imagine that, she thought, fairly bitterly.

Certainly they didn't talk about marriage, their marriages. Just his, “Widowed,” her, “Divorced,” his “Sandy,” her “James,” his “cancer,” her silent shrug.

They went to a couple of movies, had drinks afterwards, discussed plots and characters. She saw no reason to invite him to her home, that rented duplex. In fact it was rather pleasing to keep him to herself: a private sort of treat, as unaffected and untouched by her real life as her real life was unaffected and untouched by him. He said, “You don't talk about yourself much, do you?” but he didn't seem to require an answer, or a reason. It was restful to be in the company of a man who made an observation, not, apparently, a judgement.

They toasted his legal triumphs. When he won a case in which he had defended a drug company and its officers who'd been charged with deliberately permitting, encouraging, gaining from the massive overseas distribution of medications long past their expiry dates, she was slightly taken aback. She herself was obviously capable of misleading, with catchy lines and one-minute plots, but still — she wanted to think of Lyle as someone to admire, and to be glad to know. “What sort of case wouldn't you take?” she asked. “Who would you refuse to defend?” presuming an existence of lines, just inquiring where they might lie.

“Hitler,” he sidestepped, grinning at her. “You?”

“Stalin. Pol Pot.”

“Well then,” and he'd lifted his glass, “at least we know we have standards.” And made it into a joke, perhaps just as well.

He said, after a few weeks of these easy dinners, movies, drinks, conversations, “You know, I'd like you to see my place. I think you'd enjoy it. Why don't you come out for a weekend, just hang around eating and drinking and staring at nice stuff that isn't made of cement?”

Well, why not? She thought he was attractive and clever and good, easy company. She also thought that if it wouldn't get too much in the way of life itself, she wouldn't at all mind seeing his thighs, touching his ribs. Things build up. Trust and even affection don't always have much to do with desire. “If you think we'd come back still friends,” she said, “I'd like that.”

Somewhat cryptic, she supposed. How was he expected to know what she meant? He laughed and said, “Why wouldn't we?”

Alix and, at least theoretically, Jamie went to spend the weekend with Madeleine. Isla went off with Lyle to fall in love, at the turn at the top of the lane, with his home. He put her bag in the guest bedroom, which she thought was unusual, even possibly strange, but he said, “We can just take it easy, okay?”

He led her outside, back to the porch and its deep chairs, him with a beer and in bare feet (high arch, long toes, she noticed) up on the railing, her with white wine, bare feet (flattish, stubby-toed) beside his. “Over there,” he was pointing, “there's a creek. Pretty aggressive this time of year, but not even close on its best days to being a river. Out there's the shed, the old barn was falling down so I saved as much of the wood as I could and put up something a lot smaller. The main part of the land is twenty acres, just from the road in, and this around here. The other fifty, back up behind that little hill, I rent out to a neighbour. I'm no farmer, but I didn't want it going to waste. Bad enough, I figure, people like me buy up these places, without letting them go to waste.”

“Why is it bad? What do you mean, people like you?” There were daffodils blooming around the base of the porch, tulips in bud, tiny blue flowers running wild in the grass. This man beside her maybe planted those bulbs and blooms, crouched down, fingers digging into the earth, hoping for future beauty, planning for it.

“Guys who wouldn't know a real day's work if it rose up and bit their ass. Guys like me, from the neighbours' point of view. I figure it's a reasonable enough attitude. It takes a while to get comfortable here, though, or at least get other people comfortable enough they don't resent you too much. But a latecomer never really belongs. Which is okay. I never intended to. Wouldn't know how, and I don't have the time. Still, people like it, I think, that I've shown some respect for the place, made it better, shaped it up. So it's obviously not just a hobby, it's my home. I'm not romantic about it, either, it's not some stupid goat-farming, back-to-the-land dream, people around here have been through that and it really pisses them off. And I'm not a weekend gent, verandah cocktail parties, that sort of crap. There's a few of those around, too. This is where I live, and it's something I've hammered out for myself.” He suddenly grinned. “Every. Fucking. Nail.”

There was a breeze. The air smelled odd to her, and sounded odd, too. “Not everyone likes it out here,” he said. “Being in the middle of nowhere isn't to everyone's taste. Too quiet, some say, too out of it.” Who were these
everyones
and these
somes
? Not a question she could ask.

“Quiet,” she said instead, “in this racket?” Rampageous birds, mainly, ducks and crows but also smaller bold black ones Lyle said were grackles, bright jays and cardinals, a few robins, red-winged blackbirds, whole clouds of other, duller, brown flocks sweeping and clattering and soaring over them and away. He identified a raw sweet chorus, which unlike the birds would continue far into the night, as frogs. “Jesus,” she said, “how many frogs?”

“Thousands,” he smiled. “Millions, maybe.”

It's possible that without him, all this could have felt creepy; but without him, she'd have had no reason to be there herself. She was accustomed to cars, trucks, ambulances, taxis, screaming brakes and sirens, all those urban bells and whistles, the great human racket, most of it, if occasionally dangerous, at least somewhat predictable. Hordes of birds, “millions” of frogs — in their masses, she couldn't see much reason they mightn't gang up on human intruders, dive, swoop, hop, and crawl through the air and the grass, onto porches, under doors, through window screens, tormenting and pursuing and driving them out.

“No,” he said seriously. “That's more what humans would do. Animals, and I include birds and frogs, are more generous.”

His mistrust of humans reassured her. She thought she might be able to lean, just a little, on his wariness; although it was too early to tell.

He was still working on the interior, he said: repairing floors and doors, sanding them down to the original oak, gradually finding colours, one room at a time being papered and painted. “When I see things, I know them,” he said. “So I wait till I see something right.” Nothing he said sounded random to her, or insignificant.

“Also, I like my comforts. It meant updating all the wiring and plumbing, but I'm not into inconvenience or hardship. I keep an office here, too, so I'm wired to the world. I couldn't do it, otherwise.” He liked wood, it seemed, glowing true oak panels in that office, for instance, and nothing cheap, or cheaply done. Also she'd seen nothing fluttery in any part of the house as they'd passed through, no flowery wallpaper patterns, not much in the way of pastels. The kitchen and its cupboards were downright stark, contrasting black and white against hard maple floors, the living room painted a deep burgundy with high ivory ceiling, the bold yellow sofa and matching wing chairs reeking of ease. She could see why a tall, narrow-built man without much spare flesh might go looking for excess comfort, furniture he could sink into without bone hitting structure.

Perhaps for a similar reason her own plusher body, not unlike his furniture, would appeal to him, who could say?

“It was pretty neglected when I bought it,” he said. “An old couple left it to their kids, they couldn't agree what to do with it, so it sat empty a while. Property goes wild fast, grows up out of control, and inside, things start to collapse. Mice, squirrels, things like that you kind of take for granted. Other things, well, I opened the door of the second bathroom when I was still just thinking of buying, and there were huge bells of fungus growing out of the walls. Giant pinkish ones, not even little mushroomy things.” He shook his head. “I'm prepared to see beauty in a lot of unexpected places, but that wasn't one of them. I almost threw up. Did close the door fast, tried to put it out of my mind for a while. It was the most disgusting thing I had to do, fixing that bathroom. Knocked a few grand off the price, though.”

“How long have you owned it?”

“Three years now. After everything.”

After his wife, Sandra, died, of course. “Tough times,” he said. “She was home, mostly. It was hard, but also in a lot of ways good.”

Either he was a man lacking words to describe large experience, or he had faith Isla was sufficiently wise to fill in the gaps. She could not be sure which it was, but hoped for the latter. Certainly he'd been through events foreign to her — she might have wished James dead, but that was just bitterness, and anyway, he didn't die. She thought it might be possible to seriously admire Lyle, a man who emerged from horror with hard-won, hard-thought-through grace. If that turned out to be what he was.

“The dining room's last on my list, and a few more touches in the bedrooms and bathrooms. Then it'll probably be time to start over again. Do one thing, something else immediately starts falling apart.” Well, yes. “I used to figure if I could get things how I wanted them, they'd stay that way, that was the deal. Also that I'd go on wanting more or less the same things. Not true, either one. I should have known better, but we have to find things out for ourselves, don't we?”

Evidently. She'd nodded. “Funny,” she offered, because in some way this followed, “how sorrow always seems more powerful than joy. Joy just kind of jogs along, but grief, that really throws a person off the track, onto a new one.”

He thought for a moment. “It's how it looks, all right. I'm not sure, though. Maybe what comes from joy just doesn't leap out, there's nothing sore-thumb about it. But grief's nothing but pain. It makes the lessons learned more noticeable, for sure, but I don't want to think they're bigger than what we get from a good run of pleasure.” Looked at that way — well, she saw she could stand to rethink a few things. It was nice, what he said, a nice way of seeing.

“But on the other hand, such a rage I fell into when Sandy got ill, I can't tell you.” No, and did Isla especially want to hear? “I wasn't much help to her for a while, when she could have used something better from me, but that anger, it took me over, like I'd gone blind. Just staggering, nothing-else-mattered blind. I actually put my fist through a wall. And it felt good. Everything I'd planned and assumed, you see: good family, good career, a good life ahead as far as I could see, and then. The end of everything.” Isla found herself nodding. She couldn't have put it better herself.

“The worst thing — for me, I mean, not for Sandy — was growing apart for a little while. She was on a journey I wasn't going on, but it still disrupted every part of my life, small to large. I probably blamed her for that. I don't know if she knew or not. I imagine some people come closer in a situation like that, but we fell apart for a time. As if we could find less and less in common to talk about, that could be spoken out loud. I knew I was failing her badly, which made me even angrier, but I couldn't seem to find a way to do better. Be better.

“Then, it sounds strange, but we got past all that when what was going to happen finally became obvious and inevitable. I guess we were both exhausted from trying to be brave or whatever, and we both just gave up, broke down. It was,” he said, looking away, far from Isla, seeing pictures she couldn't and didn't particularly want to imagine, “a strange time. Strangely good, in its way.”

“And then?” Stupid; she'd just wanted him to haul himself out of history, away from old pain.

“Then she died,” he said flatly. Back indeed. “We all knew it would happen, but even so, when it did, the boys needed a whole lot of help and that got me through the worst. In a funny way Sandy did, too. She died with as much grace as she could muster, and it would have been shabby to let her down. But you don't want to hear all this.”

Not really; but also yes, of course. This was the early stage of their acquaintance, when much information had to be exchanged swiftly, facts of various levels and sorts flying back and forth, establishing a scale of compatibility, possibility. Her turn would come and what would she say, exactly how would she recount her own history? As flatly and sufficiently as Lyle, or in some more incoherent or jumbled or dramatic fashion? And if style reflected content, did it mean Lyle was a flat and sufficient man?

“Of course,” she said, and touched his hand.

The trouble, one trouble, with middle age was that while there were prospects for the future, there was also a good deal of past. An awful lot to catch up with, imagine, try to picture and fail to picture. The entire scent and sensation of someone's life, perfectly familiar to him and maybe even to a very few others, had to be strange, foreign, irretrievable territory to anyone recently met.