Every Little Thing (13 page)

“Drinks? It's a Tuesday night.”

“I know. It just...happened.”

“But I need the car, to get to my eight o'clock meeting, remember—”

“I know, sorry. Just happened. I'll be home. In the morning. In time for you to get to work with the car. Promise. Sorry. Then I'll get a cab to work.”

“Are you all right? You're talking weird, and you sound like you're crying. Are you two watching sappy chick flicks again?”

“No, just whispering. Your dad's asleep. On the couch. Don't want to wake him.”

A soft, warm giggle from her tired body. She could alter his temperature with that laugh. “You two are so cute together. Goodnight. Love you. Set an alarm so I'm not late for work!”

He closed his cellphone and shook his head. No one there to see it shaking. He'd been with Allie more than five years, and that was the first time he'd felt awkward talking to her.

He turned his car around,went banging on Matt's door, and then he did get drunk. Too drunk. They were standing in the hallway, Cohen refusing to “join him out back,”but not leaving either. So it was a heated standoff in the hallway. He'd looked at Matt— his eyes so wet, the lights behind Matt looked like stars—and he said:
You're a fucking idiot
. And he meant it. He'd screamed it. He was clutching a wine bottle so tight his fist tingled and went numb.

He had to have loved that man, to have, in that moment, hated him so thoroughly. This man who'd given him Allie, and lessened the loss of Ryan, all those years ago. This man who'd enlightened him, all those nights he'd come over, for years, shaping Cohen in ways maybe his own father hadn't shaped him. That hate was sorrow: resentment at the thought of losing him. That hate was having to lie to Allie.

THE NEXT MORNING came. The alarm clock on the coffee table like a drill doing damage. A red digital display flashing
7:00, 7:00, 7:01
. The smell of coffee and the sound of it percolating. Lying on the couch, staring straight ahead, he saw Matt's scrawny bare legs go by. Matt fell into the loveseat across from him. His bony knees pointing at Cohen like accusations.

“Got time for a coffee before you go?”

“I'm not sure I have much to say, Matt, other than you're asking too much of me. And Allie needs the car, pronto. This isn't happening. Not the way you laid it out last night.” He sat up, threw the blanket off himself, and rubbed the side of his head that ached the most.

“Fair enough, but I think we owe each other some apologies, and my clock's ticking. I have cancer. Best say our sorries before it's too late?”And maybe only Matt Crosbie would make that joke at that moment, at a time like that, and maybe only Cohen Davies would get it, and take it as apology.

“That was just you drunk last night, working through it in your head, right? You're not serious about this plan of yours?”

Matt got up, walked away.

COHEN BROUGHT THE car back to Allie. He walked towards the front door with his head down, dragging legs heavier than barrels, afraid of how visibly Matt's news had altered the set of his face.

She was waiting in the porch to greet him. “I made you some breakfast,” she'd said, and she hooked an arm around his neck, kissed his lips. “I love you. I love how good you are to my poor old father.”

He kept his head down as she hugged him. He kept his eyes away from hers. His tongue felt clipped,numb, so he said nothing back to her. He held her close enough to feel her pulse bouncing off his cheek. She smelled like caramel in the mornings. A hair product, or a bath product, he was never quite sure, but that smell was always gone by noon.

He ran a hand up the back of her shirt to feel her skin and ran a finger down her rocky spine, letting the bumps of her spinal cord drum against his fingertips and course through him. It was how he calmed himself, that motion. He went to kiss her, but she got shy. “Lee's here!The kidney stones, remember?” she whispered, slapping his hand off her breast. “He's in the kitchen. Go get your breakfast!”

ALLIE WENT TO work, but Cohen called in sick from the phone in his bedroom. Turned out it wasn't the kind of day he could: nineteen five- to ten-year-olds had their lunchboxes packed, expecting a man to take them on a hike and talk about birds and bugs and wildflowers and how pitcher plants grew near bogs, but irises grew near fresh water. No one else at the Avian-Dome could do that the way he could. The kids' parents had already paid.

“Cohen. How bad is it? I mean, can you come in for the two-hour hike and go back home? Please? Never mind the rest of it today, Justin can take care of the COSEWIC presentation this afternoon. But, the kids, that's, I mean, some of them are already here for Christ's sake. Their little hiking boots on, all laced up. Suzie Gardener's kid bought new hiking shoes
just
for today. You know? She
just
showed them to me.”

So he went into work. Had to. Had to smile and pretend and educate. He was even a little jealous. They'd all seen a blue jay, and that blue jay would be all they thought about for the rest of the day. Excitement at something so small and trivial. One kid claimed he saw a parrot. Entirely impossible for Atlantic Canada. Just as well he'd said he'd seen a gorilla, riding an elephant. Normally Cohen would have explained that, explained that parrots only lived in warmer, tropical places. Some days, if the kids were bright enough or interested enough, he'd even explain
why
. But he left it alone. He let the kid believe in something impossible while the kid, being a kid, still could.

WHEN HE GOT back home, noon-ish, Lee was asleep on the couch. Snoring. Snoring like there was something wrong with his lungs. The history channel blaring about Vietnam,“
...the gruesome, decades-long aftermath of Agent Orange
.”

The hospital had dismissed Lee, but Allie wanted to keep him overnight. Just in case. Ever-precautious. Ever-caring. Tender. Ever-loving. All traits that one too many emotional blows could beat right out of a person, and he was getting worried about that. About how Matt's sudden death might change her, the woman he loved and didn't want changed in any way. It seemed selfish, like his thoughts should be with Matt, not Allie, not how his death might destroy something about the way she laughed or put her clothes on in the morning.

He went upstairs, into his bedroom, sat on his bed, and called Matt.

“Look. We were both drinking last night. We said some crazy things. You can't
possibly
be serious. About. Suicide—”

Matt hung up.

Cohen called him back.

“I'm serious,Matt. I'm not sure if this is right or wrong...what we're doing behind her back. She can handle the truth—”

“Some things don't get to be right or wrong.”

“She can handle the truth. Are you listening to me? She's a goddamn rock, stronger than both of us combined—”

“I'm not going to lay in a fucking hospital bed, rotting into a corpse, while Allie snaps those morbid photos of me like she did with her mother. That was…
sick
. See. You think she's strong, and she is, but I'm her
father
, don't you
get
that? There is no...
being strong enough
for that.”

“No, there's not, but every day, everywhere on earth, hundreds of people watch loved ones die of cancer. I don't mean to be insensitive. I mean to be frank.”

“I'm not talking about hundreds of people. I'm talking about Allie, and what's best for my daughter. Fuck. For me too. This is not how I'm going to die, and that's not up to you.”

“But your plan is—it's sick, man. You can't expect me not to tell her, the second she comes home today. I'm giving you a choice. You tell her, soon,or I do.”

Matt hung up again. Cohen called him a
fuckin kid
and threw the phone to the foot of his bed. Laid down. Put an arm over his eyes to block out the sun that was punching through the window.

The phone rang again, and he thought about not answering it. “You weren't there when her mother died. That's the part you need to understand. Allie spent days, in her bed, un-showered, not eating. She cried until she threw up. Her last boyfriend left her when she became a woeful chore, did you know that? She stayed in her pajamas all day. She lost her job. Her grad work suffered. She came around, but not all the way around. I mean, fuck, she sat outside the funeral home, on a park bench in the rain, crying so hard it was all anyone could hear.”

“I get it, Matt!”

“She sat in her car during her own mother's funeral, Cohen. Did she ever tell you that? That she left me sitting next to an empty plastic chair?”

“Yeah, because her mother died. Not because her mother had cancer. How do you think finding you hanging from a fuckin noose is gonna be any easier on her!”

“I told you. It'll look like an accident. Me driving off the cliff, some rainy night. I've scoped out the section of the road. I can get in behind a guardrail. I've told you this. Sudden. Boom. Gone. No extended, belaboured heartbreak.”

Minutes passed without either of them talking.

“I'm very sorry I've dragged you into this,Cohen. I was weak. It was a weak moment. But it's too late now. This is between me and my daughter, and my dying wish is that you keep your mouth shut. Because this is none of your business anymore, and I'll not forgive you, and I'll do it anyway, and your telling Allie won't have changed a thing except causing her more torment. I'm talking like a villain here, a real asshole, but I'll be that villain for my daughter. That's my point. That I'm doing this for her, and it's between me and her, and I'm sorry I filled you in, drunk, last night.”

Cohen sank his toes deep in carpet. Speechless. He slid his feet back and forth over the carpet until the friction burned. “Did it...help. That you told me? Did it help, serve some purpose, for you?”

“Yes. It did. It was a lot to keep to myself, and I don't have a lot of people in my life. And I love you, kid, I do.”

Cohen spent another speechless minute curling his toes in and out of the carpet. “
Cancer
. I mean…c'mon. How cliché.”

A joke, but neither of them laughed.

THAT NIGHT IN bed, he watched the elastic flick of the clock's arm jutting from one second to the next and the long pull of the minute hand from 57 to 58 to 59 to midnight. Allie was asleep, her head nuzzled in between his shoulder blades, her arm tossed over his torso and tucked under his ribcage like a seatbelt.

When she'd wake throughout the night, she'd trace little circles on his collarbone before drifting off again. He'd feel little puffs of air on his back because she breathed through her nose when asleep, but through her mouth in those moments between sleep. When she wasn't there, if she was away for work, or if he spent the night at Lee's or Matt's, he found it hard to fall asleep without the weight of her on him.

He slipped out from under her that night, and turned to look at her before stumbling down the hall to the bathroom. More asleep than awake, he'd forgotten Lee was in the house, and he jumped at the sound of rustling cutlery in the kitchen. He found Lee at the table with a cup of tea in his fist, steam puffing out, and two pieces of toast with blueberry jam.

“Shit!” He ducked as he whispered it. “I didn't wake you, did I?”

Cohen shook his head and grabbed a mug for himself. He put it back and grabbed another one, a bigger one. He had an odd habit of looking inside a mug for collected dust and then rinsing the mug out, whether it was dusty or not. He checked the kettle, and it had enough water left in it to pour himself a cup of Earl Grey. He popped two slices of bread in the toaster.

“I can't sleep some nights,” Lee told Cohen. “Most nights, really.”

Cohen took his tea to the table and fell into his chair. He rested his forearms flat against the table and encircled the base of his mug with his thumbs and forefingers. He stared at the mug for a minute and said nothing.

“You...all right, kid?”

He looked up at Lee, and with no lead-in, asked him, “The men you've seen…go. Back in the Philippines. In the war. Like, in the prisoner camps. Before they died,were they...thinking clearly, near the end, once they...
knew
?”

Lee was jarred by the question and scrunched up his face. “I'm not sure what you're asking me, kid.”

Shifty eyes. Both of them. And Cohen felt rude, or bold, for asking Lee to go back to the war, mentally, and think about it.

“I'm asking you if you think a man facing death can think clearly or if his judgement is clouded?”

A sip of tea each and Lee said, “He told you, didn't he? Matt, I mean. The cancer.”

“You...know about Matt?”

Lee's head slung down like Cohen's question mark had cracked his neck. He shook his head and he bit his lip. Hard. “I fucking told him to leave you out of this shit. I told that son of a bitch that if he dragged you into this mess, I'd kill him myself.”His head, lowered now, was still shaking.

Cohen's toast popped up and he left it in the toaster. He sat there, staring at Lee.

“...he showed up at my door a month ago. His eyes burning red and too much alcohol on his breath to've been driving, if you ask me. He…”

Cohen stopped listening. He tuned out when Lee said Matt had shown up at his door a
month
ago. He wondered what it was that had festered in Matt for a month—
a month
—that made Matt feel the need to tell Cohen about his plan as well. It could have been uncertainty, like he needed someone to talk him out of it after, Lee gave the plan a thumb's up. Or maybe fear and loneliness had him rambling. His guess was that Lee had not given Matt the reaction Matt had wanted, so Matt told Cohen too. And now Cohen started wondering if he had reacted the way Matt needed. If not, Matt had told him for no reason.

The mug was thin and hot against the palm of his hand. He squeezed it harder. To feel the burn. He thought about getting up to get the toast; if he even wanted the toast. Since the night Matt had told Cohen about the cancer and his sick plan, Cohen was constantly aware of all the trivial things people mentally process in the run of a day: what kind of jam to use, what pair of underwear to put on, whether or not to run the yellow light. It made him aware of how much of his days were littered with trivial thoughts that really didn't matter.