Thalo Blue (36 page)

She never pushed such habits on him, only made room for them. Only found things to help. Sometimes she felt vulnerable and defeated by it all.
How can I possibly give him what he needs? He has so much potential. And all I do is bring home a couple of Search-a-Word books...
But, in the little ways, the
important
ways, she thought, she was doing the best she could.

And she was.

So she started taking him to church when he was seven and they went every Sunday for the next two years. But when the two of them sat in there, near the middle, he wouldn’t listen, like she thought he would. He heard. He just didn’t process. He sat in the pew with his little legs dangling and he stared upwards.

When they got inside the big wooden doors one Sunday morning a man in a long flowing gray robe crouched down to Sebastion and said,
Well, hello there young man, welcome to the House of The Lord.
He knew that God lived in heaven and heaven was in the sky. So when he got into church and sat still next to his mom like a good big boy, he looked up to see if he could find God.

But all he saw was the cracked spackle of the ceiling. It was a light color and the dark lines on it ran in long jagged stretches carving nearly perfect right angles before moving in another direction, then turning again. Mingled with that design there were two wooden-slat ceiling fans that went silently round and round at differing speeds relative to one another while the man in the gray robes talked and talked. One fan would do nearly two and a half revolutions by the time the other one turned once. And, eventually forgetting to look for God up there, forgetting, even, to listen to the man in the robe, he would race those two fans. To see when one would overtake the other.

Sadie and Oliver didn’t argue so much in those days. There was more silence between them than anything else. He would work in the study at the back of the house when he was not at the office downtown and she would make meals in the kitchen-dining split. But neither would say much. He didn’t treat her well. But Sebastion wouldn’t decide that much until later in his young life.

When there was arguing, the words they spat at each other caused cataclysms. The last time he heard them yelling was one night after church in late autumn. November maybe, maybe later. Sebastion lay on his bed and stared at his own ceiling wishing there was a fan up there to watch.

The house was dark. Nearly all the lights were off except one lamp in the living room. When he heard them, with their voices getting louder, he got up from his bed and crept down the hallway to the end where it branched in one of two directions: the kitchen-dining split or the living room. Beyond that were the guest bedroom and the second bathroom and then the door to the garage. He stood and watched them with his hand resting on the cool wall of the opening. His mother’s voice particularly made him feel something shiny, black and shapeless at the ends of his fingertips where he should have felt the semi-gloss coolness of the drywall paint. The yelling was loud; both of them, mom and dad each, were staring at each other, their stances at odds. She accused him of something and he told her to go then. She said that she was going to do just that. And she left. The front door banged. Neither one of them saw their only child standing at the mouth of the hallway, confused and forgotten.

<> <> <>

Sadie made room for every one of Sebastion’s desires, whether they were wants or just notions. That’s why she bought him a whole set of paints for his eighth birthday after he had told her he just didn’t have enough colors to make the pictures he wanted.

There
, she said,
Now you can mix them up any way you want. And you can make a million different shades.

But some time after she left, he stopped using them. They dried up, in more ways that one.

In his mind, connected to the banging of the front door, was the memory of that set of paints and also the droning sounds of Oliver’s
Yellow Brick Road
record coming up the stairs. Oliver played it over and over after Sadie left. For hours he would just get to the last note and put the needle right back on the inside track. He started drinking more then too.

By the time Sebastion was thirteen he had helped his father off with a dress shirt and into bed at two or three in the morning more times than he could remember.

On one of those nights, as Oliver’s dress shoes fell to the carpet of his bedroom floor with a softened double-thump, he said with stinking breath of beer and weed,
Red. They used to a call me Red at the firm. When I first started. Nobody calls me Red anymore.
Sebastion didn’t say anything at that. He
hated
it when people called
him
Red.

The drunken blabber carried on; the intoxicated always have much to say.
Boy, Sebastion-boy, d-did you know that one of the Group of Seven—the painters, you know who they are, don’t you?—he used to have a house here. Right here in Vaughan. M-hm. Just a few blocks away...but nobody can remember which one of the seven...

Yeah, dad
, Sebastion said, somewhat snide as he pulled a blanket across him.
Everybody knows those paintings were important. But nobody ever knows why. Then everyone starts to forget the reason for their value—just that they
were
significant. The names of the artists are the first thing to go.

But his response was empty. He noticed that Oliver’s eyes were closed. He had already passed out.

Oliver only ever smacked his son once. In the era of Sebastion’s early teen years, they yelled at each other all the time when they were in the same room; the shouting matches were a constant for a few years. But hand to flesh only happened the one time. It was a strike that echoed for years, though. Maybe because it was just once. If it had happened all the time, maybe neither one of them would have placed as much significance on it.

But they did. Both of them did.

<> <> <>

For me? He did it for
me
?
That made no sense.

The two men drew apart from one another for a long time—perhaps as fathers and sons do when the younger gets to that stage in his life. Sebastion was always out during the latter half of high school—always with Vivian and Captain Jack, though Jack wouldn’t find himself with that nick name for a few years yet. And then for the first half of university he was out with Jackson alone tearing up the town—sowing his oats, as some might say. The latter half of his time at York was with Caeli, velvety green-eyed Caeli.

In the strangest possible sense fourth grade astrocytoma brought Oliver and his son to a spot neither thought they would ever see after Sadie let the front door bang shut behind her. Sebastion spent that summer feeding the man, bathing him, making sure to fix his tie for work every morning with Oliver there to watch. Despite the fact that he wasn’t sure Oliver even knew who he was—or could necessarily hear or understand him—he read from the business section to him every evening around supper time. In a sick turn of logic, one could say they had never spent so much time together.

But, true. He couldn’t have kept paying Merridew for Sebastion’s sake. There was no sense in that. Sebastion couldn’t remember the last time Oliver had done
anything
for him. But Oliver had stopped writing the checks so he had either come to his senses or had confronted the bastard. He had done
something
, because the last check was dated nine years earlier.

Why had Sebastion even cared then? It was over while he was still ranting in Viv’s back bedroom with a brush in his hand, convinced he knew everything. Water under the bridge. Shouldn’t it have been treated as so? He never went hungry, never lacked for anything he ever needed or wanted. His childhood, in monetary terms, was all that anyone could hope to afford for their progeny.

But yet he stood out there on the edge of a limb, took Fish’s carefully acquired photo properties, snagged secretly from his father’s stash of perhaps other noteworthy photographic collections, and he tried to get some manner of revenge.

Payback? Did he seek reimbursement? Some kind of explicit dollar-to-dollar equivalent? He didn’t think so. He knew he had been pulled downwards into that world of pennies and decimals, but he also knew that he still didn’t place much credence in it. By virtue of being his father’s son and by virtue of living in the kind of world he did, he knew that money was important, but he also knew that it had its respectful limitations. He did not go after John Merridew for money.

He felt spent. His brain was used up and squandered. He felt like he could not even think about the reasons. He wanted to scream about them, wanted to scream at
Oliver
, but had nothing left in him. So he sat there, on the edge of the bed, next to his father who still had that puke-bile running out of his mouth, who still smelled of his own urine. His fists had tightened again around that stained collar. The anger was still present and he felt suddenly like he had an outlet for it. For a moment his father was back in that room; he couldn’t hide behind that stiff, tight skin on his head, or those pinkish scars that still bled sometimes and needed to be swabbed with disinfectant. He looked into the man’s eyes and saw someone he could be mad at. Merridew wasn’t here. But Oliver was. Oliver who made her go. Oliver, the man who drove Sadie out that front door with a bang to never return.

Weak, feeling like the energy had seeped out of his pores and run down to his bare feet, Sebastion looked into his father’s eyes. His heart was pulsing in his chest like a clock with misaligned innards might; it always did that when he was overtired.
Did it for me...That’s shit, Dad, and you know that.

Still present—remarkably present—Oliver blinked.
I know now more than ever. Seb. Boy. I know. But I didn’t then. Not like I do now. But I do. I do now.

It was like the deadened body, all wrinkled and leathery, pink and scarred and worn, was channeling someone else. As though, for that brief statement of understanding—the only time since Sebastion had stood on the creaking last stair—Oliver was back inside that dead thing where he used to live.

Sebastion looked at him, saw him as the stiff, dead root out of which everything bad and hateful grew. Something had caused her to leave and the pale man, all taught skin and scars, there in that bed was it: the reason. The resentment had been with him since the beginning, but now there was a label for it.
Daniela.

Goddammit, Dad,
Sebastion said, the tears coming back, his face flushed and burning.
How could you do what you did...?
His voice came out weak but there was a biting contempt in it. His fists were still holding his father’s shirt collar and they had tightened again.

—
Don’t you disrespect me.
Oliver’s eyes were set on his son’s. His look was still his. He was still there for a moment.

—
How could you, Dad?
—

—
I know you stole those pictures
—

—
how could you
—

—
I know you took ‘em. The ones of your mother
—

Sebastion’s fists loosened.
What?

Oliver’s eyes weren’t glassy again, but he was despondent.
The pictures
, he said again.
I know you took ‘em. The ones of your mother. Go get your mother—You have ‘em. And I want to tell her you have ‘em.
He was yelling now,
GO GET YOUR MOTHER! I WANT TO TELL HER WHAT YOU TOOK!

And Sebastion became irate with that.
What did you say?

Go get your mother.

You don’t say anything about her! You don’t GET to. You have NO RIGHT!
Sebastion yelled.

—
Go get your mother
—

Shut UP! You son of a bitch. SHUT UP!
Sebastion was screaming now. In his head, he saw the meaty flesh of his dad’s brain, a hunk of steak, scoured by that marble-white of fat. His voice was discordant, it reverberated up the stairs, and another whiff of urine tarnished his nostrils. He had pushed his face in close—their noses were nearly touching and the glare in Oliver’s eyes was still shining, as though spots of oil from a dropper had fallen to their surfaces.

—
Go get your mother. Go get your mother
—

Sebastion exploded up from the edge of the bed. He pushed his fingers backwards through his hair and screamed.
SHUT UP!
He spun around and stormed towards the stairs, covering his ears, crossing the pane of light that spilled from the kitchen.

Oliver was yelling now too, louder and louder,
GOGETYOURMOTHER! GOGETYOURMOTHER! GOGETYOURMOTHER!

Rubbing his hands in his tearing eyes, Sebastion whirled back around, back to his father’s bed again. He came at him. And he pressed his hands across his father’s mouth, silencing him.

Sebastion didn’t know he was screaming. His voice was parched and cracking and his eyes squinted shut. He pressed down on the man’s mouth and nose and his arms shook with force. His elbows threatened to buckle. Between the screams, there were mangled, stifled grunts from him. Hair, what was left of it surrounding the pink and white tonsure where jagged seams ran, vibrated behind and above the face where his hands pressed. Spittle burst in small spots onto that face and onto a set of eyes, still his father’s, staring up at him. In silence. There was no flailing. No sighing, moaning or wailing.

There was no struggle.

Only staring.

Moments passed.

In a stinking stain of his own piss, Oliver Redfield was dead.

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The Thief stood inside the hospital room door, with his fingers pressing gingerly on the stainless steel knob behind him. He was balancing tenderly on his left foot while the right—the one with the brace—had only a little of his body weight on it. The door stood open a crack and its knob had a small stain of greasy condensation where his thumb had rested less than a second before. He was staring wide-eyed at a fully-made bed of pale green sheets, a similar green privacy curtain pulled open and another bed beyond that, with sheets somewhat disheveled. It was nearer to the window. Beyond the glass of that window it was dark and he saw a piece of himself in reflection. A touch of warm color came from overhead where a fixture glowed with yellow light. It had an orange tint and made a close-to-inaudible hum. If the Thief had been at death’s door, like so many other times, he would have heard that hum much louder. On those nights pain was more real. Sound came with a greater intensity. Everything was
more
.