Critical Injuries (5 page)

After a while there were smells from the kitchen. They had supper, and then Roddy went off to bed, in his new room at the top of the house, with the blue nightlight casting a faint, reflecting light upwards. He lay on his new bed, furious until the moment, he guessed, he fell asleep.

The next day he made his first, best, real friends: Buster, who woke him up bouncing onto his bed, and Mike, who turned up at the door with his mother.

Other than that, well, this is a small town and people know things. So they knew why he and his dad moved in with his grandmother. When he started school, it was different from his other one. Like, people looked at him weird, like they were waiting for him to do something strange. One bold kid, who was in fourth grade, marched up the first day at recess and poked a finger into his chest and said, “Your mother's nuts. Bet you're nuts, too.” A bunch of littler kids started chanting, “Nuts, nuts, your mother is nuts,” and running in a circle around Roddy, reaching out as they ran, touching him and dodging away, screaming as if he was dangerous and they were real brave.

He had a choice of things to do. What he did was grab the grade four kid who was standing around watching what he'd started, and take a hard, fast shot at him. He aimed at the nose and didn't miss. Blood, gushers of it, made the circle stop dancing. A howl made everyone silent.

Roddy got sent home for two days. On his very first day, he got sent home. “Don't take any crap,” was his father's advice, which was Roddy's idea, too. His grandmother only looked worried. After that he learned to walk with a sort of roll to his hips, his legs widened, eyes narrowed. It seemed to work. Nobody messed with him much. There was Mike, too, and that helped, the two of them a team, pretty much.

He and Mike have spent a lot of time together, roaming around, exploring in town and also out here in the country. Sometimes they've got tired and dropped their bikes in a ditch and wandered into a field, and crashed for a while, lying side by side with their hands behind their heads, chewing over some event or idea and looking up into the sky.

A lot of good times. Roddy has often come out here on his own, too. Mike isn't so interested in some of the things that fascinate Roddy. Like watching the purpose and intention of bees, or the progress of a snail traversing the length of his arm, or an ant tugging another insect larger than itself back to its community, for the whole community to devour — this sort of thing he could spend a lot of time on. Because up close, none of these creatures were disgusting or weird. They were amazing. Antennas and hairy legs waved, dark faceted eyes kept watch for danger and prey. One might have a blood-red body, another an iridescent green shimmer. The best were the ones that over time and through stages became some completely other thing. Something that crawled or slithered wound up with wings. Tails fell away. Skins changed their colours. Dead things were ruffled, disturbed, distressed by last moments.

At home he used razor blades to slice pictures of tiny shelled and segmented and many-legged and antennaed creatures from library books, carefully, carefully, so that absences were not apparent. Also, sometimes, from books he and Mike shoplifted. He loves his room at the top of the house, where the ceilings slant and if he sits straight up in bed he bumps his head. He took those radiant photographs from the books and hung them low on the walls. Some of them unfold in strips showing the shifts of the most special creatures from earthbound to aerial life.

His dad called them ugly. Mike said, “Gross,” but that's because in the photographs they're blown up so big. His grandmother said it was nice Roddy had such an interest, and maybe he'd be a biologist or some other kind of scientist someday.

He liked the small grey desk for doing homework that his grandmother said was his grandfather's when he was young, and the adjustable light that leaned over it. Once he wasn't so angry, he liked that his grandmother told him, “This is all yours, Roddy. You can do whatever you like with it,” so a couple of years ago when he painted the walls black, she didn't say anything. He thought the pictures would look more dramatic, and anyway he liked the idea of it feeling like night in there all the time. His grandmother didn't say anything either when he saw the room looked awful, and totally depressing, and started trying to paint over it yellow, with mixed and muddled results.

His poor grandmother. She wasn't planning on having her son and his son move in with her and never move out again, and looking after them like nobody ever grew up and went away. His dad never says much, even to her. He and Roddy still have some kind of language, though. Passing by, he pats Roddy's shoulder, skids his hand across the top of Roddy's head. Or, “All right!” he yells if they're watching hockey and there's a smart pass, or a goal, and he and Roddy grin at each other. Roddy figures that inside, they're shaking hands then, giving high-fives, pounding each other on the back.

Words don't matter so much anyway. His grandmother says it's what people do that counts. His dad works and watches hockey, and his grandmother bakes and tells Roddy to eat up so he won't be so skinny, and neither of them can be totally trusted. And his mum buggers off. Really, absolutely buggers off.

When Roddy was fourteen, in the summer between public and high school, they finally told him. “You're old enough,” his dad said. Maybe his grandmother insisted. Roddy still bugged her sometimes, still had the idea he could go find his mother because when he thought about her, or pulled out those two old photographs, he knew she had to be wondering what had happened to him and was even probably looking for him and feeling bad. At night, when all the lights were out and he could lie in bed looking into the top branches of the tree on his grandmother's front lawn, he sometimes pictured his mother roaming dark streets, looking in windows, buttonholing strangers, in search of her son. He could even make himself sob briefly, picturing that.

Also there was something he'd wanted to tell her, to maybe save her, although he could no longer totally remember what it was, any more than he could truthfully remember what she looked like, beyond those two happy snapshots. Still, even if she'd changed as much as he had, and he guessed his dad too, he'd know her if he saw her. Would she know him? If it was a movie she would.

Anyway, none of that happened. Instead, after supper one night his dad said, “You're old enough,” and he and Roddy's grandmother stared at him for a few seconds as if they were deciding if that was true.

In the city there was a particular bridge. There were lots of bridges, over rivers and railways, but this one arced high over an expressway instead of over anything soft, like water. It was where people went when they were very sure they wanted to die.

Roddy's mother was very sure.

More than a year before they told him, she had been very sure.

“I'm sorry, son,” his dad said. “Oh, Roddy dear,” his grandmother said.

“It was,” his father continued, although Roddy wasn't hearing so clearly now, had whole other words and pictures going on in his head, “nobody's fault. They couldn't find quite the right drugs, or she wouldn't always keep taking them, and I guess she just got to feeling too bad to go on. It's something in the body, to do with the chemicals in it, it seems.”

“Things were just out of whack,” his grandmother added.

Roddy was thinking again of that mysterious
they
, who got to decide things about other people and try things on them and then, finally, fail. If he ever met them, he hoped he'd be quicker and luckier than his mother. “How come,” he asked, “you never said?”

His dad looked down at his hands, his fingers spread out flat on the dining room table. “It didn't seem necessary, right at the time. We wanted you to get through public school without being upset, but now, like I say, you're old enough. Going into high school, it's time to know these sorts of things.”

“I know it's very sad, Roddy,” his grandmother said. “Your mother was a fine, bright woman, and she was so happy with you, oh, you have no idea. When you were born, she kept holding up your wee hands and making people admire your fingers. She thought you were perfect. And so you were. And she was a very good mother. Well, you remember how much she cared for you. This other thing, though, she just couldn't beat it. She tried so hard for your sake and your father's, and she hated it when she felt bad. I remember her saying that when it was coming on, it was like somebody pulling a big black cloth over her head that she couldn't get off. What I mean is, she would have given anything to keep on being able to look after you, and she did the very best she could. Do you understand?”

No.

“Yes,” he said. Then, “Did she have a funeral?”

His dad looked uncomfortable. “Yes, there was one.”

“Did you go?”

“Yes.”

“Did you?” turning to his grandmother.

“Yes. There weren't many people who still knew her well enough to pay their respects but yes, your dad and I went together.”

“Where was I?”

“It was a school day.”

It had been some ordinary day, then. And behind his back, without giving away anything, his dad and grandmother had sneaked off to his mother's funeral. That was almost more shocking than anything else, that they could do that, hide it, carry it off so he never even guessed they'd been someplace important. Roddy stood. “Okay,” he said.

He went to his room and lay on his bed, on his back, very still. He was something other than angry that night, but he couldn't put words to it.

He put pictures, though. He saw her figure, small and distant and wearing a coat, walking slowly, slowly, in the darkness. He saw a high bridge, deserted at night. Way below, on the expressway, which wouldn't be deserted at any hour, day or night, headlights followed each other one after the next. The rough sounds of speeding motors and tires rose upwards.

He saw her lean against the ironwork of the side of the bridge, listening to the rough sounds, watching the headlights sweep by beneath. She would think — what?

That all those headlights meant people with places they needed and wanted to go, with or towards people they needed and wanted to see, maybe that's what she'd think. While she was up there in the dark on the bridge all alone.

Maybe she missed her son. He imagined that, too, although also considered that maybe her son was the farthest thing from her mind; that maybe she'd forgotten her son. Her heart, anyway, was heavy as lead. Maybe it was so heavy she could hardly climb up the iron bridge fretwork. Maybe it was so heavy she thought it would smash easily when she hit bottom. Maybe to her that sounded best.

He saw her falling, like a dummy, like a mannequin, like a person who does stunts for a living. But he couldn't imagine her heart. He wondered what her last thought would have been, flying downwards. Maybe, “Oh no.” Maybe, “Finally.”

Now, lying on his back in the tall grain, staring up into the starred, darkening sky, and into the remote, watchful faces of two German shepherds who show no signs now of malevolence, listening to pounding boots coming closer through disturbed, rustling grass and words being called out between male voices in cautious tones, Roddy thinks, “Oh no.”

He has done everything he could. Even if nothing worked and this moment arrived anyway, he did everything he could think of. “All a person can do is their best,” his grandmother likes to say, although she would not have meant anything like this.

So in that way he also thinks, “Finally.”

It's a funny thing, though. Roddy supposes this moment of lying here watched by two dogs and a thousand stars, and with probably a million insects and other small things unseen and unfelt underneath, is real. He guesses it's a very particular, suspended moment between one thing and another entirely different thing. The funny, surprising thing, though, is that suddenly it feels good now, being suspended between one thing and another like this. Kind of weightless and free, like being in space.

He's not cold any more, either.

It's amazing, how totally contented he is with this moment. Perfectly satisfied. This is so new, and so fine, he wouldn't mind at all if it just went on and on, forever. He sighs, he smiles upwards, he would say he is nearly, right this second, happy.

All the Time in the World

As Lyle starts so reluctantly recounting the missing event, Isla finally sees it unfolding. Although not in his words, or his way. “Hop in,” Lyle says, and in she hops. He does a little number on her thighs: “tickling the ivory,” he calls this. It still, after several years of doing so, delights her to climb into his old dented green pick-up, so large and high, sturdy and workmanlike. The ruts and potholes of the laneway are easier on the truck's tough suspension than on their cars, although inside it, humans tend to bounce around. Isla feels like quite a tiny person in the truck, with its wide seats and distant floor, as if she's a kid briefly reliving childhood; although not her own childhood.

The laneway ends at a busy county highway, and sometimes it takes a while to pull onto it. It's always a wonder that there's this rush of life so close to the house and yet also so distant. People come to visit, and even if it's not their first time they're likely to remark at some point, with flattering astonishment, “You'd never know this was here! It feels like a whole different world.”

So it does. But still an easy drive to town, and then a long, slow expressway drive into the city, and work, and a different kind of whole different world.

They turn left at the foot of the lane for the eight-minute trip into the town whose outskirts, which have been creeping in their direction, include a couple of car dealerships and strip plazas followed by a few streets' worth of frame or stucco or aluminum-sided bungalows, some sliding into decrepitude, others tidy and trim. The core of the town, home and business, is brick, old and original and apparently permanent, in structure if not content. Stores fall vacant, change hands, houses also now and again, and there appears to be a diminishing interest in, or money for, upkeep and maintenance, for keeping things thriving-looking and bright. But Lyle and Isla do their part and shop in town just as much as they possibly can: for basic groceries, for the tools and nails and fertilizers that keep Lyle occupied. They are good citizens, not the kind of newcomers who take it upon themselves to complain about change. “We're just commuters,” Lyle tells visitors. “It's easy for us.”

They do what they can to encourage local businesses, so in their journey for ice cream there's no need to discuss where they're going, which is of course to Goldie's Dairy Bar.

Goldie's was a real dairy bar at some point in its history, and apparently there was even a Goldie attached to it a few decades ago. Now it carries cigarettes, newspapers, stamps, some staple household products and foods. It would be almost a mere variety store, if the original long transparent-topped ice-cream freezer didn't still run along the front, glass-lidded, bulky and squat. The dairy is long gone, but the high school kids who staff Goldie's on evenings and weekends still scoop single, double, and triple-dip cones from the deep vats of flavours, of which there are, according to the blackboard sign out on the sidewalk, thirty-four. Nice old-fashioned touches, the sign and the freezer, although the staff themselves are often enough pierced, dyed, and tattooed.

Goldie's is now owned by a widow named Doreen, about Isla's age but otherwise not like Isla at all. She bought the place after losing her job in the window factory just outside town in the other direction from Isla and Lyle's, using some of the proceeds of her husband Jack's life insurance after he died of a heart attack leaning over a pool table — or, some said, reaching for a waitress's rear end — in a bar down the block. “I was adrift,” Doreen likes to tell people. “I didn't know what to do. Then I thought, ‘Ice cream,' and it seemed like the answer.” It certainly was for Doreen, who has been transformed from the relative anonymity of factory work into an actual town character, brusque, entertaining, lively-tongued, a woman growing larger and larger, not in size but in presence, with each ice-cream season.

Isla finds this progression appealing, because wouldn't it be grand to grow vivid and large in the minds of others, not to mention one's own mind! Isla might manage grandiosity in a pinch, but thinks she's short of the swollen benevolence that's required, the assumptions of good-heartedness underlying Doreen's reputation.

For all Isla knows, she is herself a town character. Most likely, though, she's just a character drifting through town, an even later latecomer than Lyle, and attached in people's minds mainly to him. When she began living with Lyle, so that people began to take her existence somewhat seriously, and they asked what she did, and she said she worked in an ad agency, attentions wandered and lapsed. It could have been worse, she could have admitted to being part owner and vice-president of an ad agency, facts they probably know by now, but even working at one was so irrelevant, so distant from any normal concerns, that eyes glazed, heads nodded, conversations moved on.

Isla thinks, and not in any patronizing way, that this is exactly the correct attitude. She did not necessarily think that in the early days, but she does now.

It's been interesting, and no doubt salutary, to be an important person in one world — at least important in the sense of having power over a number of people and responsibility for a number of risky, big-price-tag ideas — and to be, here, not exactly a nonentity, but someone on whom nothing in particular rests. No one here, except perhaps Lyle, relies on her. She is generally liked, she thinks, at least certainly doesn't seem to be disliked, but she could vanish to no particular notice.

She considers it this way: if her funeral were held in the city where she works and where most of her life has been led, it would get a pretty good turnout, on grounds of etiquette or respect from some people, affection, she can hope, from most, a creepy curiosity, perhaps, from a few who still connect her with James. Here in town the turnout on any of those grounds would be meagre, and on that last one, non-existent. Here it would mainly be based on people's respect for life, and moreover death, in general, not for attachments they know nothing, thank heavens, about, and not really for Isla herself.

She rather envies Doreen, whose funeral would be huge and heartfelt. Lyle, when she mentions this, says, “My God, you have a morbid turn of mind sometimes. Funerals!”

It's hard sometimes to explain images, symbols, to a man, a lawyer, with a literal turn of mind. Then again, she depends on his literalness, his straightforwardness. “It's only,” she tells him, “that funerals are so useful for making assessments. The last summing up.”

“But have you noticed that the people who do the summing-up at funerals generally talk mostly about themselves? Like the dead person's just been an incidental entry in their own lives?” True. But again it's the funeral-as-metaphor she's talking about, not real funerals.

Anyway, the discussion takes them happily to town. Do other people run out of things to say? Well, yes. She and James did. Or they had done so much, and gathered up so much to say, that they went far beyond speech. But she can't imagine she and Lyle can ever get to the end of chatting about this and that in the thirty-odd years they have, with luck, remaining to them. The reason for ice cream, and maybe how her mind comes to wander off in the direction of summations and funerals: this outing a celebration of renewed prospects for thirty-odd years. All those words, all those ideas, all those details!

“You run in,” he says. “I'll keep the truck running. Then if we're quick we can go sit on the riverbank and eat before they melt.”

“What kind of cone? And do you want single, double, or triple?”

That sort of detail.

“Triple, of course, I think I deserve a big one. Double-chocolate chip? Then if I still have some room, maybe we can come back for something fruitier. For dessert, as it were.”

As it were. As it is, dressed in her blue linen suit, she will be juggling two cones, one triple, one double, in the truck for the two-minute ride to a riverbank bench. Easy. Suits can be cleaned; husbands, good ones anyway, can't be replaced.

As it is, she walks in on a robbery.

As instantly as she sees this, it is instantly too late. Just through the door, waving back towards Lyle, turning then towards the checkout counter, the freezer, and the young man with the gun is already turning her way, already startled, already recognizable.

Isla's mouth falls open; perhaps she is preparing to say his name, which is Roddy. He is a nearly shaven-headed, fair-almost-red-haired youth, a resident of one of those stuccoed, less-than-trim houses a few blocks away. He can be seen sometimes on street corners, wandering on weekends with rough friends, apparently aimless, punching each other's shoulders, speaking loudly. Ordinary high school kids, really. By Isla's standards, if they are disaffected, they are disaffected in ordinary ways. So she has assumed until this moment when Roddy's startled eyes meet her own shocked eyes, and the terrible thing happens.

She turns, although there's no point. His finger jerks on the trigger, although there's no point in that, either.

She thinks how instantly and thoroughly events become unreal. That this is like a movie, not like her own real life. She wonders what people did when something unreal happened before there were such things as movies; how they identified unreality then.

How did they regard the frame-by-frame unfolding of a sequence of movements, smooth but infinitesimal shifts of bodies through space and time, before they could possibly recognize and identify such a technique as slow motion?

She has all the time in the world for these questions as her torso continues to twist, her right foot turns on a dime, her hips dodge slightly left, as her body recognizes reality, snaps to action, behaves in automatic defence of itself, making its own instant decision to flee; even as Roddy's chin jerks up, his eyes widen — and what long lashes he has in the midst of otherwise unenchanting features — his spine straightens, his shoulders pull back, his knees give slightly so that he achieves the faintest hint of a crouch and his weight shifts to the balls of his feet, his arms extend up, and out, the sudden, rigid steadiness of shock making him detailed and large, someone new, huge, foreign, with barely a relationship to a soft-boned, soft-charactered adolescent, but someone instantly and surprisingly formed.

Either of their bodies, Roddy's or Isla's, could topple, or trip, or stumble with their respective alterations in balance, weight, attention, direction. But neither does. Roddy does not smack forward onto his face as he moves onto the balls of his feet; Isla does not crumple leftwards, but continues her swing towards the door. She can see sunlight and concrete through the glass. She cannot see Lyle, or the truck, because they're parked to the left of the entrance. She knows innocence lies just outside the door, out in the light, out where there is no young frightened man with a gun and she is not a panicking woman whose timing is off. A few seconds, a few minutes' difference and this would not be happening. How does it work, that such a thing can happen because at some point earlier in the day she moved too quickly, or too slowly, and got here just too early, or too late? Roddy may be wondering similarly. Where is the clerk? What can Roddy want?

It probably no longer matters what Roddy wanted, which would have to have been money, any more than it matters what Isla wanted, which was two ice-cream cones to eat down by the river with Lyle. Now Roddy's and Isla's original intentions are lost. They have new moments to endure. She sees quite clearly that this is as true for Roddy as for herself, and imagines this capacity to know about a number of people at once is another effect of the movies.

She is very angry, very bitter. Not with Roddy so much as with Lyle. She has come to rely on him. He has made himself virtually indispensable. But when she truly needs him, in the instant she is in genuine, terrible trouble, he's nowhere to be found. He's sitting in a truck listening to music, or the news, or maybe waiting in silent anticipation of ice cream, at any rate something irrelevant and stupid, instead of being here, where she needs him to be, doing what she needs him to do, which is to save her. How could he, how dare he, pick her up, hold her up, and then let her fall this way, so hard and far?

It's a little late to remember Jamie and Alix, and when she does it's with no particular impression in mind, neither anger nor, perhaps surprisingly, any dazzle of maternal love. In this moment they are simply irrelevant. She expects nothing of them. Not as she has, mistakenly it appears, come to assume salvation from Lyle.

He didn't even give her time to change her clothes. So now she's spinning towards escape hampered by shoes that have heels, and a blue linen suit that hugs tight to her dodging hips.

Roddy's finger is tightening. She is turning, but she can see him as clearly as if she had eyes in the back of her head. “Don't imagine you can get away with something just because you think I'm not looking,” her mother used to warn. “I have eyes in the back of my head.”

Perhaps this is inherited.

What has Roddy inherited? A willingness to risk? The sort of physical tension that, in the right circumstances, causes a finger to grow tight on a trigger? A pure, blind, dumb tendency towards anarchy, moral, emotional, physical?

She doesn't know the boy. She has nothing to say to him. It seems there's plenty of time for a great many thoughts, but not a moment for speech.

What if she cried out, “Don't!” or “Please!” or “No!”