The Best Thing for You (17 page)

“Baby,” I say. He takes his hand back, but nicely.

We catch up to Liam at the top of the hill, across the street from our destination. It’s a raw moment – awkward, intimate – with a few sparse raindrops pegging us on the head and shoulders like something personal. Silver Video, from this vantage point, is a fish tank. Through the glass wall I see a lone customer bopping one video off his thigh while he reads the back of another. Then he sets both cases down and limps over to the Used / For Sale rack. Outside, the parking lot is empty, shiny black, the parking spaces delineated by yellow lines worn pale and grainy as fingerprints.

We cross the street. I walk over to a garbage can by the bushes where it happened, pretending to empty the crud from my
pockets – a couple of tissues, peel from a roll of breath mints – half expecting a change in temperature or a whirring like insects, but it’s cool and damp and unremarkable, a blank page again. Ty and Liam hang back, waiting for me by the doors. Liam has one foot up on the concrete barrier meant to stop cars from rolling through the plate glass windows. Ty, leaning his bum against the window, with his hood up and his hands still in his pockets, is shaking his head at something his father is saying, shaking his head and then smiling, grudgingly, as Liam punctuates his monologue with a duck-like waddle, one hand on his belly. Now they’re both laughing, smirking a bit, glancing to check where I am. Out of earshot, is where; they’re safe from me.

In a perfect world, I would look down at this moment and see a winking twist – my son’s MedicAlert bracelet, say – half-buried at my feet. Instead there’s a new-looking, extra-large drink cup from a local convenience store, complete with lid and straw, abandoned on the lip of the asphalt. I kick it into the bushes and turn back to rejoin my men, but there is only Ty, standing by the doors.

“Dad’s inside,” Ty calls, and we both roll our eyes and smile a little because he couldn’t wait.

“Poor Dad,” I say, and I’m conscious, as I cross the last few metres separating us, of my walk, of my hand on my belly. “He can’t help himself.”

We don’t go in yet. We watch Liam through the windows for a while, Liam the scholar, frowning and tapping his fingers against his lips while the overhead
TVS
blare their silent promotional dreck. We watch him pick up one video, put it down. We watch him drift to the
DVDS
. Working hard.

“Are you okay?” I ask Ty.

He says, “I’m good.”

We look at each other for a second, have to look away.

“Is this too weird?” I ask. “Being here?”

A car pulls into the parking lot, a navy Mini, a new one. My verdict on these cars is I would like them more if everyone else liked them less. Ty and I step apart to let the driver and his passenger, a tall, thin man with an expression of long-suffering good humour and a woman whose hair is a voguish rat’s nest of streaks and straws, into the store. “You’ve seen everything!” the woman is saying.

“No,” Ty says.

“You understand why,” I say.

He says he does.

“We believe you,” I tell him. “We’re trying really hard.”

“I know.”

Through the window I watch Liam glance over his shoulder, checking out the woman with the hair. He sees me and waves his arm in a big corralling gesture, mouthing, Come in.

“What’s he got?” Ty says, because Liam’s also holding up a
DVD
.

“Something violent,” I say. “I mean, my god, I hope.”

Ty pushes off from the window.

“Boom, bang,” I say. “Pow. Pow.”

I watch him go inside, join his dad. We pretend Liam needs supervision, Ty and I. Through the window I see Liam show him the case and they study it together, just like old times, like Ty is a visiting expert whose opinion he has gravely solicited. He plays us both, our son, and we let him get away with it. There’s nothing you can’t forget, in the end. I step up onto the curb, reach for the heavy door. Inside, the familiar three-pronged turnstile and the bee buzz of the lights complete the world as Ty comes toward me with the movie in his hand, hoping this is the one we will agree on, the one that will take us home.

THE GOLDBERG METRONOME

T
he metronome had been hidden in the bathroom, under the counter, taped to the pipes beneath the sink like a bomb taped to the chassis of a car. Fanciful, Anika reprimanded herself, though she did not reach to touch or remove it right away. She knelt on the tile floor and held the cupboard door open with one rubber-gloved hand, studying the package so plumply swaddled in brown paper and packing tape, so firmly affixed to the crook of the black
PVC
pipe. Once, in the old house, Thom had pulled off some of the wood panelling to get at a mouse nest and had pulled out a pair of child’s pants filthy with mould and ricelike black scat, the same as they had been finding in their pots and pans and even in the burners on the stove. For a vibrant moment they had stared at each other, down in the gloom of the unfinished basement, wondering what could possibly come next – a small body or bodies, police, newspapers, television cameras on the front lawn, inevitably a move, away from the horror of it – but had quickly realized the pants, and blanket, and other, assorted children’s clothes stuffed behind the panelling were simply old rags used in place of insulation. Which only went to show, Anika thought, staring at the package under the sink and simultaneously recalling the tiny trousers, perhaps
some child’s very first pair, you never knew what some people would leave behind.

Thom, she called.

Frustrated with their landlord’s apathy – about the mice, the insulation, the water that pooled in the basement every time it rained, the black, indelible paste of mould around the tiles in the bathroom where the caulking should have been – they decided to move anyway. They had thought the East Vancouver house a find, at first, with its eleven-foot ceilings, abraded hardwood, and lushly overgrown garden. Later, jaded, they pursued the search fitfully, defensively.
Character
, they had learned the hard way, meant rot;
cozy
meant stifling low ceilings,
fenced yard
meant more dog shit than dirt. They bought newspapers each weekend for the classified ads and spent precious Saturday hours poring studiously, instead, over the crossword. Sunday morning outings to neighbourhoods they felt they could afford degenerated into Sunday afternoon walks through neighbourhoods where they really wanted to live: Dunbar, Point Grey, the West end. They drank innumerable small, strong, expensive coffees in casually smart cafés, pretending they lived just around the corner, trying to postpone the inevitable return home. They both freelanced – he as a graphic artist, she as a photographer, neither entirely by choice – and their finances, while often good, were always precarious. Even coffee was a luxury over which they lingered, budget-conscious, for hours. One would read the paper while the other stared out the window. A moment would come, the lighting of the lamps that would knock the street outside into deep blue darkness, or the arrival of some other, better-dressed couple their own age, regulars greeted more warmly by the barista than they themselves had been, and they would rise and pull on their coats, leaving behind half-finished papers and empty cups, and find their way back to the car, an ugly and reliable 1980 Civic.

On one such occasion, driving back through the tree-lined streets of apartments between Denman Street and Stanley Park, she had ordered him to stop. A small white For Rent sign stood staked to the lawn of a modest low-rise. It was the twenty-ninth of the month, October, just before the newest vacancies would be advertised in the paper. They called immediately from a pay phone and got an appointment for the next day.

What is it? Thom said. He had been unpacking boxes in the second bedroom, what they called the study, which would also do for a baby’s room in another year or two, though they had gingerly avoided putting this into words.

She pointed to the package under the sink.

Drugs? he said.

He, too, hesitated for a moment, and she knew they shared the same thought: that finding this apartment had, after all, been too good to be true, and that this object, whatever it was, was surely the reason the previous tenant had left. It encapsulated whatever would be the next trouble in their lives. Trouble, Anika thought, was not too strong a word, though they argued rarely and always with an honest, distressed perplexity that each could not see the other’s point of view. No, it was not arguments so much as distance, a polite remoteness that had led to more and more meals taken in front of the television, and a gradual lessening of regret over the hours they spent apart. The first bloom was off, that was all, Anika told herself. They were steady mates now, no longer clinging and foolish fond. But the sense of unease, of a wrong turn taken, persisted. People split up this way, quietly, without fuss; people drifted off into their own orbits and never snapped back. It was almost a scent, like bitter orange, the knowledge that they did not absolutely need to be together. She came to wonder if the disappointment of the East Vancouver house was not the cause but the effect of the widening space
between them, the high drafty rooms and wet cracked floors the embodiment of the creeping absence she sensed. She wondered how long they would last.

Hold on, Thom said.

She held the package firmly with both hands while he reached awkwardly around her shoulder, trying to get at the tape. She felt his breath on her ear, felt, too, the warmth of a muttered oath.

I have nails, she said.

They traded positions, he holding the package with one big hand while she picked at the tape with her fingernails.

It’s light, he said, when she had freed one end and he had the weight of it in his hand.

They tore the package free, leaving a wind of tape and a flare of beige paper stuck to the pipe. Thom tore the rest of the paper away, less cautiously than Anika would have, letting it fall to the floor in drifts. Under the paper was a layer of cotton batting, and inside that was a black wooden box, roughly coffin-shaped, with a simple geometric pattern inlaid on the diagonal up each side, its symmetry marred by a small brass knob halfway down the right side.

It’s a metronome, Anika said. She took it from his hands and removed the cover, revealing a metal face with the numbers all but worn away, and a delicate brass needle and pendulum. She set it on the counter next to the sink and gave the needle a push, but it fell with a heavy finality to one side and stopped there.

Wind it, Thom suggested, but the brass knob was stuck, and she hesitated to apply much pressure and risk snapping it off.

Broken, she said. Well, it looks old.

They took it into the living room to look at it in better light. Thom stroked the high sheen on the lid with his fingertips while Anika pushed the needle back and forth a few times, hoping to
elicit a tick. The sun came out from behind a cloud, sending a sudden dust-teeming shaft through the window and across their hands, and at the same time each said, It’s blue.

What they had taken for black was in fact a deep indigo.

We should give it to Phyllis, I suppose, Anika said.

It was Phyllis who had answered their call about the apartment. Phyllis was, first, a voice: old but not frail, deliberately slow, with mannered good manners. Boston, smart. Phyllis in person (when they showed up the next day to view the apartment, overdressed, their references in an anxious manila envelope) was charmingly matter-of-fact, in a sweater with the sleeves pushed up and a pair of faded blue jeans. She described the building with disparaging affection, confessed to having managed it for thirty years and lived in it for forty, confessed to being seventy herself, all the while tossing out bits of information about laundry and parking and utilities as though they really were prospective tenants and not the objects of some particularly cruel practical joke.

We won’t get it, Anika whispered to Thom when the elevator reached the fifth floor and Phyllis marched off ahead of them down the hall, shaking out a ring of keys.

I know, Thom whispered back. It’s too good.

Listen to the dulcet tones of our doorbells, Phyllis said, pressing a button beside the door that yielded a failing rasp, ending with a distinct clank when she released it. The three of them laughed. Thom and Anika were by now painfully excited.

You know, Phyllis said. It’s old-fashioned, like I told you. Not modern enough for the other couples who came through. David, she called, rapping on the door. When no one replied she opened the door with a key.

Cupboard here, she said. The management company will see to whatever painting needs doing, of course, before you move in. Bathroom behind you, there. Master bedroom. Please, please.
(She gestured for them to precede her.) Look around. The blinds are necessary, as you can see there’s a lot of sun. Cupboard. This is the smaller bedroom. Immaculate tenant, as you can see. The pine floors are original, yes. Please. Kitchen. Not large, obviously, but
so
clean. David is a lovely man. He’s in the diplomatic service, just been posted to Trinidad, I think, or thereabouts.