Every Little Thing (42 page)

One night he'd gone to sleep there, and instead of waking to a muffin or cupcake, he'd woken up to a note beside him, pinned under Allie's engagement ring, like a paperweight holding it down.

Cohen,
It's not like I ever saw this day coming. Me walking into a hospital room, afraid to wake you. Afraid you'd yell at me and be right to yell. The boy I never told you about: I still believe it was Keith's. And I wasn't ready for a baby with Keith. And I couldn't deal with what it meant to not want a baby with Keith. To want a child, but not with the man I was with.

And if it was your son, that was wrong too. Because he should have been ours, not yours, not mine. We were going to have a little boy, and he was going to spill juice on our couch cushions and demand pets that pissed on our rugs and shat all over our yard, and he'd need our advice, and his fingernails clipped, and we were going to raise him. Together. The both of us. Vacations and parent-teacher interviews. Together. That's how it was supposed to be. Not this. Not all this confusion and court-intervention. Not you, here, at this boy's bedside anyway, because he might have been yours.

This is not an apology for all I've put you through. This situation is beyond forgiveness. But not understanding, I hope. And I need you to understand one thing: the day I revoked my parental rights to a little boy, I never imagined you in a hospital room and me afraid to wake you.

What I did was inexcusable. What I went along with in that courtroom even more so. But it took sitting in court six months ago, and turning on you, to realize how upside down my life's become. I stared at my engagement ring the whole time I was on that stand, twisting it around and around my finger, until my finger was sore.

Sorry I'm saying sorry in a note, like a high-school girl—but I don't deserve the face time. Nor should you be put in a position of having to decide if you should grant me a dignified conversation. You're here with this boy. For this boy. Not for me. Not right now. But I do want to talk. This can't be like Dad again, where we don't address it, and drift apart. I want to talk with you, and you have my number, but you haven't called. Just know that I want you to. And please do, when your head is clear and you think I deserve a minute.

I bought you a muffin. It's all they had left down there in the cafeteria.

My deepest sincerities, Cohen.

- Allie. Allie Crosbie. Remember her?

HE READ HER note two or three times that morning, inspecting it, the way a cat bats at a mouse to try and understand it. Or to understand its own reaction to it.

His mother showed up around noon. A bag of bagels. Some orange juice. “You have your interview at the university today, don't you?”

He threw Allie's note in the garbage. “Yeah,” he said, looking in the garbage like the note didn't belong there. “At three thirty.”

“It's twelve now. You should go on home, have a shower to clear your head. Think about some answers, to some questions they might ask you.”

But he didn't go straight home. He stopped in to visit Lee on his way home, like he did every time he left the hospital. Lee was a statue now, unresponsive, but Cohen liked that. He felt bad about liking it, but Lee had become the perfect confessional booth. He could be viscerally honest with an old friend, but free of judgment. He could say,
I still love her
. He could say,
I fucking hate her, Lee
, and Lee wouldn't even look up.

That day, he found himself telling Lee about how he didn't want to teach university biology. And maybe he'd skip the interview. Move far away. A fresh start. A clean pair of eyes. In

Iceland. Montreal. Somewhere in Italy where he didn't know a goddamn thing, not even the language. Touching down in Italy and being forced to learn how to talk again, meet new people, find a career in something other than birds. There'd be a house there, and he'd have to get familiar with it: where the cutlery tray was, the AC dial, what the postal code was, the phone number. He'd have to find the delis, cafés, bookstores, and pick favourites. He liked not even knowing what the currency was.

“Euros?” he asked Lee. And Lee said nothing in return.

A CLEAN
FLAME

JULY 18TH. RYAN'S birthday. There was a bench not five paces away from Ryan's grave, and Cohen had been sitting there, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. The coffee was cold now, but it tasted fine, or at least acidic enough to keep him from slipping into another daydream. He watched his parents standing at Ryan's headstone, doing whatever silent ceremony it was they did every year, in the last ten minutes of their visit: face-to-face, foreheads pressed together, and all four of their hands bound and balled up into a dangling pendulum. Eyes closed.

Cohen sat alone on the bench and thought back to the hospital. To Zack. To the month he'd spent by the kid's bedside, falling asleep to the pulls and hums of his machinery. The nurse there. Cassie. The muffins she'd bake for them, at home, and bring in
just for him
. He thought of the day Cassie came in with carrot cake muffins. A long sliver of carrot had gotten stuck between her two front teeth. She couldn't get it out and had to do her rounds anyway. The two of them laughing about it. She'd tried a piece of paper, as floss, torn from a magazine; licked the taste of print from her teeth and tried again. Cohen had gone to a vending machine and bought her a pack of gum, but nothing worked. “Could you¸”she wrestled a handful of coins from a pocket¸ “run across the street and grab me a toothpick or something?” She had a hand on his shoulder. That bone-softening look of hers in her eye. “There's a pharmacy there.”

Cassie had been the one to get Cohen to read the test results. On a park bench, outside the hospital, under her umbrella. It wasn't raining, but she liked the shade when they'd go out for some fresh air together. He took the test result from his wallet, rolled it up between his fingers like a paper cigarette. He held it straight up, like a candle, between his thumb and forefinger.
Maybe I should just burn it?
She took it from him and read it, and Cohen tried to read her face. She'd looked let down. “It's between me now and this garbage can,” and she laid it in with the trash, results facing up. “So you better decide, in the next few minutes, if you really want to know. Or the answer dies with me.” She walked inside. Left him there. Worried a wind would blow. Worried everyone passing by, eating hot dogs and drinking lattes, was headed for that bin. He peered into the garbage, and the answer was resting on a dozen Tim Horton's cups. It had said,
Negative DNA Match for Cohen Davies and Zack Janes
. That was it. Short and official, no room for denial.

But the hospital wasn't the last place he'd seen the boy. The wake was. The funeral. A little casket, the small crowd there to watch it lowered into the ground. The grass was soggy and puddled, and there'd been a wet
suck
at his feet as he got up to walk away. The priest read from the bible, about God's good plan for children like Zack, and Cohen walked away from the words, back to his car, and slammed his door shut, hard, because his lungs couldn't take it, and his eyes, and if it couldn't be someone's fault, he could at least hate what the priest was reducing Zack's sad life to.

Shortly after Zack died, Cohen went out and bought an alarm clock that didn't sound like the hospital machines that had failed the boy. That long sustained beep. There was a crosswalk by the university, and it blared to let blind people know they could cross, but it blared a long, sustained beep, far too similar to the machine that pronounced Zack dead.

He didn't like the way the hospital staff threw a blanket over Zack and walked away like their job was done. And he hated the packs of students, and their clipboards, and questions about what had gone wrong with Zack. He was still there, in his bed, under a sheet, and the residents and interns were full of intrigue, scratching lessons into their notebooks about what had gone wrong. Cohen had to wait in the hallway, wait out their rotation, and he'd catch stray words,
I've never seen an RVAD before, pretty cool.

That nurse, Cassie. She'd waited with him in the hallway. She bought him a water. Gave him her phone number.
Keep in touch?
She walked him out into the daylight, hugged him, rubbing his shoulders, as the sun burned in his eyes.

ANOTHER SIP OF that acidic coffee to fend off the memory. He looked up and his parents were still in their ritual, staring at Ryan's headstone, feigning telepathic communication with their dead son. It worked for them but never for Cohen. If he couldn't see something, if he couldn't touch it, it wasn't there.

They were alone in the graveyard that day. Anything louder than the faint drone of a passing car caught Cohen's attention: an empty chip bag, blowing around, slapping off headstones. A scratchy and irritating noise.

He heard footsteps, but he didn't turn around. The footsteps stopped. He saw his parents looking behind him, before he turned himself and saw Allie standing there. She had a bouquet of yellow flowers in her hands. Her nose in them like a bee. Cohen's mother and father excused themselves immediately. His mother looked at Allie smiling; his father wouldn't look at her.

“We'll wait in the car,” his mother said, and his father was already in it.

Allie had a look on her face,
Smile, please.
A bit lip, glassy eyes, the tips of her shoes together like the top of a triangle, and she was staring down at it. Vulnerable, standing her ground. The wind lifting her hair every few gusts; billowing her skirt. Her eyes fighting off a finger of sunlight.

Cohen faced forward again, leaving her standing there behind him.

“I—I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry.” She brought the flowers to Ryan's grave, laid them there, took a minute with the headstone. Cohen watched her, the way he always could watch her: like fire, satisfied to stare. When she looked up at Cohen, he had no words, no urge to say anything, and she said nothing. She started pacing back to her car, and as she passed him, her head was down, but her eyes were in his. He stuck his hand out. A palm against her belly. Allie Catherine Crosbie: he used to call her
Allie Cat
, for short. And for the way she'd come crawling into his life that night on the rooftop. Like a stray. Never quite his and always around.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THANKS FIRST AND foremost to this hip new reincarnation of Breakwater Books. Quite frankly, their President, Rebecca Rose, is the patron saint of my writing career. A book, and therefore a writer, cannot exist without a publisher, and four years ago, Rebecca took a chance on me with my debut,
Away from Everywhere
, when few others would. I owe all the literary thrills I've had to her—there have been movies deals, awards, time spent on bestseller tables, my book's been taught in university courses, and I've shared the stage with writers I cut my teeth on. I owe every fond memory and sense of accomplishment to Rebecca Rose for giving me a shot, my books a home, and my style a chance. Also, Breakwater's Managing Editor, James Langer, and their Marketing Coordinator, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, are both talented, award-winning writers I admire, and to me, it only makes sense the people I deal with at a publishing house are writers themselves. They
get it.
Where they had every right to tell me I was bonkers,and to shut up, and to hurry up, they did quite the opposite. What a fine bunch of people to publish with. And to Rhonda Molloy, thanks for another book design as flashy as your shoe collection.

To my editor, Mark Anthony Jarman, thanks for not only bettering the book, but for bettering me as a writer as well. By eradicating two tics I had as an author, I'm now twice the writer I used to be. Jessica Grant and Trish Osuch—two terrific, careful readers—lent me their patience and grace as first-draft readers. Subsequent drafts were much richer because of their two cents. Countless gracious friends and writers read passages from this book to answer questions I had. High fives to you. The kind that make your hand sting. And certainly to Kim Pelley, AshleyMacDonald, and SamuelThomasMartin, for reading the first 50 pages, in 2010, and saying,
Yeah, keepwriting this book
. And to KatieGuy-Knee for reading a bad draft at a crucial time. And to Mom, God love her, for always wanting to be part of the process and reading every draft, of this, and every little thing I write.

The authors who endorsed this novel—Lisa Moore, Russell Wangersky, and Billie Livingston. I write and write and write, in hopes of catching up to your talents. Your time and kind words meant as much to me as anything that will come of this novel.
(Everybody: go read their books!)
Thanks as well to Chris Bucci for his efforts with this novel, and for tolerating a client who can write novel-length emails about his novel.

And to you readers who bought this book: I really appreciate that my novel is in your hands. I'm figuring out this writing thing as I go, and your support and feedback along the way has meant more than I can articulate in an acknowledgements section.

Thanks to theNewfoundland&Labrador Arts Council for a grant that let me take a few months off to complete a tricky portion of this book.