The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (34 page)

Blue's got his hand on his pocket and he's walking toward the Salvation Army. “It's your lucky day,” the guy at the door says, recognizing him. “Your man's just hobbled in here for dinner.”

There is a train of men standing in line, gripping trays in grubby hands. Blue squints and sees him—a bearded man in a grey hat stooped over a tray.

“Think I could have a word with him?”

“You can try. He's not much of talker, though.”

Blue walks up the side of the line and moves in behind the bearded man. “Hey, buddy,” another man behind him says. “Wait your fuckin' turn.”

“Yeah, get to the back of the line,” another one shouts.

“I'm just delivering a message,” Blue shouts back.

The bearded man turns his head around to see what the commotion is about. He stares right into Blue's eyes and Blue stares back. He pulls a knife out of his pocket, and in one swift gesture, he stabs the man deep in the stomach.

“Holy fuck!” the man behind him yells. “He just fuckin' knifed the guy!” The crowd moves backwards and the bearded man falls over without making a sound.

Blue is surrounded by hostel workers who wrench his arms behind his head and throw him to the floor. His head and legs are pinned to linoleum with steel-toed boots. Blue's head is flooded with images of
red blooms—poppies in some foreign field of dying men. He lies there in that field and feels the wind move through the swishing sea of opiates. He doesn't know whose country he's in, or whether he's still alive, but he knows he's won the war. He smiles and breathes in linoleum.

When the telephone rings in the middle of the night you invariably wake up with your heart racing and flip through the catalogue of potential disasters in your head. The only possible hope is that it's someone calling from a different time zone. When the telephone rings in the middle of this night, Emma knows it means that Blue is in trouble. He's using his one phone call to reach her.

“Blue?” Emma says sleepily into the phone.

Amy opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes out. “He stabbed your father,” she finally stammers. “He's in custody.”

Professor Savage insists on picking Nina and Emma up from the bus station. It's very kind of him but his eyesight really does concern Emma. He doesn't seem to be registering the line in the middle of the road, but she's too much of a mess to mention it. They sit three astride in the front seat of the cab, and when Emma starts to cry, Professor Savage gently puts his arm around her and pulls her up against him. “Ah, pet,” he says gently. “Why don't you tell Grandpa Mel what's going on.”

The affection in his voice just about kills her and she breaks into heaving sobs. Her new grandpa has one hand on the steering wheel and one arm around her and his truck is not an automatic. “Grab the gear stick, will you, Nina, dear?” he says casually.

“Ah, sure,” she agrees, a little startled, and reaches for the gear stick.

“I'll tell you when,” he says to her. “Now, then. You tell me what's going on,” he says, squeezing Emma's shoulder.

It all comes out in a blurry torrent punctuated by the occasional
sigh. He lets her blurt on uninterrupted about her father, Andrew, her brother—all the men in her life. “Why is it that they end up disappearing or trying to kill someone? Is it men or is it me? I seem to be the common denominator in all these disasters,” she splutters.

“Ah, pet, it's neither,” he says, trying to comfort her. “You're brother's clearly an angry young man. Unfortunately he's gone and gotten himself into a whole lot of trouble. That's not your fault, dear. He's old enough to figure out a way of handling these things without ending up in jail. Hopefully he'll learn.”

“But it's too late now,” she says.

“It's beyond your control, Emma. It always has been,” says Nina.

“Your girl's right there,” says the wise grandfather. He starts to tell her a story about his own son—a son he's never mentioned before. He stares at the road ahead and begins talking.

“When my son Kevin was a young boy, we used to catch him throwing stones at the cats next door,” Professor Savage says, telling them something he hasn't told anyone in years. “I should have known then that we had trouble on our hands. When he was about eleven he bludgeoned a dog to death with a two-by-four. Now here's a boy who had been nothing but loved and protected by his mother and me, showing a real propensity for evil at a young age. Of course, I questioned everything we had ever said to him—I wondered what we could have done to make him become so malicious and sadistic. The thing is, Emma, I doubt there was anything we could have done differently. It's that old question about evil—nature or nurture.”

“But Blue was never cruel when he was young. It wasn't like that.”

“That makes it an even greater tragedy,” Professor Mel sighs. “But
it also means there might be reason for hope. That there's a motive other than cruelty. Kevin just went from bad to worse.”

“Where is he now?” Nina asks.

“He's dead,” Professor Savage says matter-of-factly, not offering any more explanation.

Blue's being charged with attempted murder and Amy's the only one he will talk to. The police, on the other hand, want to talk to all of them. Emma's in shock—the only word she can use to describe the feeling that all the vegetation on earth has just withered and died overnight. There's nothing growing any more, just vast tracks of flat earth from here to the horizon. Maybe this is the end of the world. Maybe every single family on the planet has undergone some simultaneous catastrophe and this has nothing to do with domestic order at all, but has some much bigger cosmic underpinning. In moments of crisis you selfishly wish it were so, and then, remembering yourself human, immediately wish it back.

The officer interviews her at length about Blue. She in turn probes him for details but he can tell her nothing about the man Blue attacked except that Blue maintains it was his father. If the man is their father, Blue might actually have some legal recourse. He can claim it was aggravated assault, a defensive measure against years of systemic abuse. The officer asks her a lot of questions about her father's disappearance, and yes, it seems to all add up, but still, the likelihood that Blue actually found Oliver seems next to impossible to her.

The first step toward clarifying this involves Emma on a plane going west, at the end of which there will be an escorted visit to a hospital. She offers to swim there instead. She thinks it might be safer. It would definitely be slower. Instead, she drugs herself with Ativan and cheap white wine and dreams she and Blue are floating on a dark lake. Lying on pieces of driftwood so thin they can feel the waves lapping against their backs. It's a haunted lake with a spiralling eddy, and it's pulling her and Blue in different directions and sending them down tributaries that spill down opposite sides of a hill. Emma floats downriver and spills out into the sea. She doesn't drown, but she doesn't know if her brother has survived.

Amy meets Emma at the Vancouver airport, a police officer not far behind. They collide into an embrace and Amy shakes with tears. This is an escorted visit. Amy and Emma hold hands in the back seat of a police cruiser and pull up outside the Vancouver General. Here, Emma is asked to look through a small square of glass at a sullen and silent stranger and tell the officer that this man is definitely not her father.

Would it be better to lie? she wonders. To push her way through the door and say, “Hi, Dad. So how are you doing?” and then explain away the fact that he doesn't recognize her or recall having any children with some reference to progressive dementia or Alzheimer's. Because she chooses not to lie, it's now her word against Blue's. She is guilty of implicating her brother in an attempted murder it will be nearly impossible to defend.

The only other person who could verify that this man isn't Oliver would be Elaine, and nobody wants her involved. “Not a good idea,” Emma tells the officer. “She hasn't seen him in about fifteen years and she's practically blind as a bat,” she lies. “Besides, he owes her about a
million dollars in child support. She'd probably say the guy was my father just so she could nail somebody,” she says. “She's not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” she adds, realizing she should just quit while she's ahead. She knows that they'll have to speak to Elaine.

Amy and Emma go to the Y. It's the only place Amy thinks she might be able to relax. In the steam room, Emma wishes she could turn up the heat so high that she would become liquid. She's nervous about seeing Blue. She keeps holding on to some earlier memory of him in the belief that his essence remains. She had thought he simply needed the right loving hands to peel away the ugly veils and reveal his spirit, but she's no longer sure if she believes in the idea of some essential core, some aspect of self which remains relatively stable and true. If enough worms eat their way through an apple, they will get to its core: they will gnaw away its pithy centre and the whole structure will ultimately collapse, decompose, and become dirt. He might look the same, but then again, you can bite into an apple and find it full of maggots. You can kiss a princess and she turns into a frog. You can fall in love with an illusion that crumbles before you in some unexpected moment—through a simple gesture, a smell, or a misplaced word. You learn that earth is actually heaven, which means that your only options after death are purgatory or hell. A sweeping tour of all the major religions leaves you disillusioned, and suddenly you cease to be a believer in anything at all.

As they walk back to Jolie's apartment, Amy squeezes her arm and says, “You don't have to feel nervous about seeing Blue.”

“But he must be so angry.”

“Actually, Emma,” Amy hesitates, “he doesn't want to see you right now.”

“Blue doesn't want to see me?” she asks, stunned. What happened to us? she wonders. All of us. It's like the four of them in the family were only ever joined by a suicide pact. Strangers perched on top of the same building, agreeing to jump all at once. Instead, one jumps before the signal, one loses his nerve, one slips or sees God, and the other one survives. Is it just her imagination that they were related once? Other families, for all the differences between them, still seem to be governed by some mysterious magnetic force which pulls them to eat, drink, bitch, and be merry and miserable together at least once a year.

Maybe Emma's family was just bits of fluff stuck together on the head of the same dying dandelion which became permanently scattered when somebody, or something bigger than all of them, sneezed. They've taken root in other people's gardens. They've planted seeds in other countries and grown up looking like unrelated species. If she is a dandelion, Blue is a thistle, Oliver deadly nightshade, and Elaine a petrified herb from the Pleistocene era fossilized in stone. In some taxonomist's wet dream they are related—according to the same kind of meaningless logic that calculates six degrees of separation between Brad Pitt and Lady Di.

The RCMP does interview Elaine. They have to—they have to interview virtually everyone who ever knew Oliver. This doesn't prove to be such a monumental task because Oliver only ever knew about half a dozen people, not including all the people who wish they'd never met him and pretend they never did.

Elaine denies just about everything as a regular matter of course. She'd like to be able to deny she has a son at this point in time, but that she cannot do because two officers are sitting across from her taking notes. They're asking whether Llewellyn has any history of violence, about his relationship with his father, about his school record, emotional stability, friends. After an hour of questioning she breaks down, uttering broken fragments instead of sentences. Her son is not a sociopath, but she can't say he was easy, or like other boys.

“And the way he coughed—Jesus,” she cries. “Just like his father. In the morning, always clearing his throat. Sent shivers down my spine,” she shudders. “Can you imagine?” Her nightmare of an ex-husband reincarnated in the body of her son. Now haunted for the rest of her life.

She uses words like “stubborn” and “uncontrollable” and she admits that she did feel threatened by him on occasions. “But that was when he was younger,” she defends. “He seemed to have calmed down, matured so much since meeting Amy.” She offers the officers a drink and they say, “No thanks. But go ahead, Mrs. Taylor,” and flip to the next page of their notepads.

Everything Emma and Elaine have said only seems to drive another stake into Blue's potential pardon.

Emma knows Blue will blame her. She is, after all, the one who stands up in court and says, “No, he's not.”

“Can you just repeat that for me, miss? You say the man you saw in the hospital that day is not your father?”

“That is correct. That man is not my father.”

“You are quite sure.”

“I am positive.”

“Did he bear any resemblance to your father at all?”

“No, he didn't.”

Emma can't look at Blue; she hears him shouting “traitor” in his head.

But Blue doesn't feel betrayed at all. He is calm. He knows that man wasn't his father, but that doesn't matter, that's not the point. Whoever he was, Blue doesn't feel he's losing his mind any more. Whoever he was, his father is dead. He did it for both of them, she'll probably never understand that, but even if she doesn't, her life has at least been spared.

“And we have evidence to suggest in support of this, Your Honour,” continues the prosecutor, “that Mr. Taylor, in fact, died earlier this year.”

Emma looks over at Amy. Her face collapses. It's too easy, Emma thinks, shaking her head. It would be easier for all of them if it were true. It's quite possible, but far too simple and not altogether fair. Does
this mean that Blue's been running paranoid across the country in search of a dead man? How could he get away so easily? How could he drop off the planet and leave them wondering?