Inukshuk (30 page)

“WHAT DID YOU TAKE?” his father yelled, and this time Thomas was able to hear it, though still as if it were coming from far away. “WHAT ARE YOU ON, THOMAS? ARE YOU SICK?”

They lifted and hauled him to the bathroom, forcing him to walk, and tilted him over the toilet, their fingers in his mouth, prying, one
of them holding it open, the other gagging him until all the wonderful food—all the good pie and ice cream and jam and C-soaked deliciousness—came up in a syrupy mess. It flooded his nose and caused his eyes to burn and also brought the world of sound closer again.

“Let's clean him up,” his father said, and they were swabbing his face, his neck with a wet facecloth.

“What is wrong with you?” his father said. He had Thomas by the jaw and squeezed painfully, rattled his head from side to side. “What have you done to yourself, please! TELL US. And HOW MUCH?”

“Scu . . .” he tried to say. His tongue was too thick and swollen. Numbed. That was it. Wouldn't curl to the roof of his mouth for the
r
sound. He tried again. “Scurvy.”

Now his father seemed irate. Flapping his hands and yelling, yelling, though somehow (thankfully) Thomas was not able to attach most of his words back to their meanings. “ . . . old enough now to . . . this sailor crap . . . . Good God! Please tell us. . . .”

He shook his head. Swallowed a mouthful of spit and mucus. Moved his tongue unsurely. “I . . . 'm . . . not kidding.”

His father just glared and continued yelling, hopping from foot to foot.

“Devon,” Thomas said at last, only it sounded more like
Vevah
. He nodded. Tried again. “Call . . . Devon. He'll . . .”

The seal-hat woman touched his father's shoulder and leaned to whisper something in his ear. This was not someone he'd ever seen before or met. She reminded him of his mother a little, also of lemons—lemon meringue pie with the hat on. He could see why his father would like her, but who? Some kind of on-call Viking nurse? How had his father found her? What was she doing here? “You'll be all right,” she said loudly. “Can you understand me?” Together, they walked and carried him to his room again—the door opening too fast, too wide, crashing into the edge of his desk with a sound that made him laugh and want to say
whee
.

WHETHER THERE WAS ANY SENSE trusting Moira's assurances in parting that
all would be well
for Thomas, he decided to wait until first light to call Devon. Hear whatever it was he had to say and then decide whether or not to make the trek to the clinic in Okotoks or Houndstitch, possibly the ER. He wasn't actually sure where would be best. Since coming here, they'd had no medical emergencies, and it wasn't something for which he'd planned or laid in an advance course of action. That had always been Jane's turf—kids' health, knowing where to go, when. And though he'd turned first to Thomas's storyboard notebooks for clues and explanations, anything giving him a window into what had happened and why, the sense of wrongness and violation of T's privacy in perusing those words and drawings, the page upon page of ink-wrinkled squares warping the paper, and dialogue in his crazy all-caps print running from corner to corner, notes and asterisks in the bottom margins, barely a space between words, dizzyingly unreadable, was soon outdone by his realization that there were truly no secrets here anyway—no designs or hints that might let him into whatever had gone wrong. It was just the movie. Thomas's imaginary movie world as solidly real and all-encompassing for him as Franklin's own Sule Skerry, but bound in ice, not water. And more copiously inked. Where Franklin had looked to the ends of his lines, his handsome, stair-stepped, wordless blank spaces sidling down the right sides of pages, to contrast and pull through buried rhymes, enjambments, eye rhymes, subtly opposing thematic tensions, Thomas had poured down more and more ink and pencil lead. Covered the page. Regardless, there was nothing revelatory here; nothing of a personal nature.

He shelved the notebooks as he'd found them and lifted instead the black leather zip pouch of all the boys' old D&D dice—weighty, cryptic things, not meant to be understood by adults. How many? Thirty sets or more—he couldn't count—all manner of shapes, sizes, and colors—red, black, purple, four-sided, six-sided, twelve-sided, and so on—some probably quite expensive, all bearing numbers or mysterious symbols. What had been the spell these dice held over the boys anyway? he wondered—the hours spent together
in Thomas's room, nights and weekends, rolling, talking, plotting on graph paper—what was the secret? How did you even read the things?
It's like storytelling, Dad. Kind of build-your-own adventures, with some generic ready-made stuff, and cumulative character points and just shit tons of rules....
Was what had happened to Thomas all part of some more advanced, stranger necromancy Devon had put him up to—some graduated
dungeon master for life
pact or scheme between them? Probably so.
Ask Devon
, Thomas had said.

As light crept over the kitchen windowsill, he called. Leaned elbows on the sink edge and looked outside, waiting as the ring tones pulsed and fluttered in his ear. The snow had stopped, but it looked to be a bleak, windswept day ahead, gray and cold.

On the fourth ring, Devon answered, clearly awakened from sleep. “Dad.”

“Wake you?”

Devon puffed an exhale, possibly a yawn. “Little bit, yeah. Late night. It's OK though. I was going to”—here he yawned openly—“sleep till like nine at the latest. Got an exam at eleven. What's going on there?”

“What's going on here.” He stood back. Gripped the edge of the sink. Watched the sky in the east brighten a shade redder and more orange. “Gee, I don't exactly know, Devon. That's kind of why I was calling. I was hoping maybe you could tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“This morning, I woke up to find your brother passed out on the floor of his bedroom. We can start there.”

“What in hell would I have to do with anything like that? I'm, like, five hundred kilometers away, or did you forget?”

“Yes, well, it's my question, too,
what you could possibly have to do with it
. But the one thing, after my
. . .
A friend of mine who was here and I, we managed to get Thomas upright and in the bathroom and evacuated of whatever nonsense he swallowed, so he was mostly awake and talking, and Thomas said . . . at least what I
think
he said was,
ask Devon
.”

“Ask me what?”

“Well he seems to think he has scurvy, the best I can make of it, and that you had something do with it.”

“Man, oh, man, Dad. I had
nothing
to do with that. Holy fuck.” It sounded like something had struck the phone; then Devon's voice returned closer, crisper, and certainly more awake-sounding. “That little pussy. I can't tell you how many times I've been on the brink of blowing his cover or just dropping some good, obvious hints so you could be on the lookout, but . . . man. It's pretty hard to tell from here how serious anything might be, hey? Maybe it's all a bluff; maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a partial bluff. But he's my brother, you know, and he's having a pretty tough go of it lately, so if he comes around with some so-called
top secret experiment
he's doing and needing a little advice about it, what am I supposed to do? I'm not going to rat him out or tell him
no
. But you gotta believe me, too, every
single
time we talk, I tell him to eat some goddamn lemons. Every time. Lemons are
cool
.”

Franklin released his hold of the sink edge. Slumped forward, forehead in his palm. “So . . . it's not something you put him up to?”

“
Put him up to
? Are you on glue?”

“OK, OK. It's easy enough for me to misread things, too, you know. If you can believe.”

Silence. Breathing on the other end of the line. “How bad, then? . . . What's he got?”

“Like I said, he was passed out on the floor and pretty well delirious. We figured drugs.”

“Shit. Let me see. I e-mailed him that check list. Hang on a second.”

“Some weird-looking sore on his neck, too. Like a bite or something.”

“That's for sure indicated. Here, hang on. . . .” There was a sound of notebook pages turning. “Severe exhaustion and general disorientation, despondence—yes. Corkscrew hairs . . .”

“Corkscrew what?”

“Don't ask. OK, here it is. . . .”

As Devon read aloud, Franklin's attention faded in and out. It
was too much to absorb. He watched his hands on the sink edge, furred wrists, hairless curve of knuckles, indentation on the left ring finger almost gone. Saw the ghosted reflection of his face in the sink window looking up, outline smudged and blurry.
Why?
he thought.
How could little T elect to do this to himself?
“‘Humans, other primates, bats, guinea pigs, and some fish are among the only animals known to lack the enzymes for synthesizing their own vitamin C–converting glucose to ascorbic acid.... Therefore, they can only obtain vitamin C through their diet.'” Again his attention faded and he was remembering Thomas, facedown on the floor. His terror, watching the boy's breaths come and go shallowly, thinking at first that the blue around his lips and mouth might be from poor circulation—something he'd read recently, some bulletin about a rash of teen deaths resulting from prescription painkillers and methadone and this being one of the last, fatal signs—before noticing the pen uncapped on the floor. The blue on the page beside and half underneath him. He'd rolled him to be sure, tapping lightly on the cheeks. Noted the dried blood caked around his nostrils and on his upper lip. What was it Thomas had said the day before yesterday—
that was something else, Dad . . . not related . . . having nosebleeds lately
. . . ?

Devon continued: “‘Functionally most relevant for collagen synthesis . . . pathologic manifestations of C deficiency noted in collagen-containing tissues . . . skin, cartilage, dentine . . . so, bleeding gums, blackened overgrown gums. Hemorrhagic sores. Body aches.'” Enough. He turned from his window reflection, crossing arms over his chest. Pictured Moira, on her way down the front steps. Her curt backward wave as she slipped behind the wheel of her Escalade, then rubbing hands together as her engine warmed, blowing him kisses.
You should count yourself lucky
.

“There's more,” Devon concluded. “But that's the basic idea. Man, I got this information specifically for the little ratface, to scare sense into him. You should see some of these pictures, Dad.”

“Actually, I don't think I have to.”

“Right
. . .
”

“Listen, though.” What was he going to say? Words of wisdom and consolation? Who was he fooling. Here he'd failed or been duped and aced out entirely by almost every person he knew or loved. He jingled change in his pocket. “I owe you an apology. . . .”

“You most definitely do
not
.
I
should've said something. I figured if he was still going on about it to where it sounded at all serious, I'd get Mom's opinion—you know, ask her involvement when I visited next month. She's usually the one who can get Thomas's number best. I figured I'd start there.”

“You figured right, I'd say. But it was never your job, raising Thomas.”

Devon said nothing immediately, but Franklin knew him well enough to picture the slow head shake and the look of concentration creasing and uncreasing his eyebrows as his thoughts shifted from speculative to combative to faintly amused. “True, true, Dad. But you can't exactly do it alone. Speaking of which . . . you mentioned a, uh,
friend
there. I think that was the word you used. At some ungodly early hour of the morning?”

“I did.”

“Any more to share on the subject?”

“No.”

“Permission to ask a question?”

“One.”

“Do we expect to see more of her?”

“That's two questions. But the answer is no, probably not. And yes, it is a
she
.”

“Not ambiguous at all, Dad.”

“Well, the situation
isn't
ambiguous or complicated, actually. She's married, as am I, more or less.”

“A one-night stand?”

“I wouldn't say that, either. Rather the opposite.”

“OK. I admit. I'm stumped.”

From here, the conversation wound back to Thomas, and Devon's recommended course of action for the present—massive amounts of citrus, C supplements, gooseberry, pomegranate, fresh meat and
vegetables; close, constant monitoring; if things looked worse in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, get to the hospital. Within a week or two, he should be back to normal. “But keep him away from the notebooks, Dad. The whole thing started because he wanted to make his art more
real
or something—experience it for himself firsthand ? I don't know. If it were up to me, I'd burn the things. Little bro'll probably start eating lead filings next.”

“Burn what?”

“The story notebook things, whatever he calls them.”

“Never.”

“Your call.”

“Anyway, I should check in with him and quit stealing your precious beauty rest. . . .”

He laughed. “Remember how you used to always call me that—Sleep Stealer? It's payback, at last.”

“What?”

“You said if I were ever to have a Native Indian name, that'd be it—Sleep Stealer—because of how I used to get you guys up all hours of the night, sneaking around.”