Things Go Flying (17 page)

Tom had made her feel like anything could happen, at a time in her life when she could no longer imagine anything happening to her. Tom
made
things happen. He charged through life making things happen. She was so accustomed to seeing him this way that when he actually made a pass at her, she saw it as just another example of Tom making things happen. At least, this was how she looked at it after three drinks with him in the middle of the afternoon at the rooftop bar of the Park Plaza Hotel.

He'd asked her to meet him there, one of his favourite spots.

“You've got to get Harold to take more risks,” he said. “He won't listen to me—I've tried.”

Audrey knew that Tom was making a great deal of money on the markets—at least that's what he told her—and that he was successful, smart, and could be trusted.

“You and Harold should invest,” he said, persuasively. He took another sip of his drink and said, looking at her, “You could be rich.”

And the way he said this, and the way he looked at her when he said it, made her believe that not only could she be rich, but also that if she were rich, she herself would be fascinating. The world would be her oyster. She could do anything, go anywhere.

He smiled, finished his drink, and added, “Like me.”

For a girl who'd grown up on the outskirts of a small Ontario town, the oldest child of small-minded parents, it was the ultimate fantasy. She'd finished her drink too, and there was something so heady about being alone with Tom, being the sole focus for all that charisma, all that confidence and unrestrained optimism, that it quite undid her. And three drinks in the middle of the afternoon were too many, but hindsight was always 20/20.

“Come,” he said, dispatching the bill and taking her arm when she stumbled slightly.

He took her to the Four Seasons Hotel next door. She'd never been in a hotel so grand, never been with such a man of the world. It was electric; it was like living in a movie for an afternoon. The sex wasn't even the most exciting part.

He spirited her away to a suite and ordered strawberries and champagne from room service. He fed her strawberries and slowly undressed her on the king-sized bed, describing for her the light in Tuscany in the late afternoon, the saltiness of ripe olives on the tongue, the view from the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. She was down to her bra and panties, and she wasn't even questioning what she was doing, what with the champagne and Tom's equally intoxicating accounts of twisted corridors and romantic bridges in Venice. Her brassiere came off while he was whispering to her about the treasures in the Musée d'Orsay; her panties were lost in a description of the Château de Chenonceau, how its arches span the River Cher, how it looked at sunrise, with the mist rising off the water.

“You could have all that too, Audrey,” he said to her afterward, leaning on one elbow, caressing her cheek. “Talk to Harold.”

She'd gone home feeling guilty but energized, thinking not about a life with Tom, but of the possibility of a grander, more exciting life with Harold.

This had happened in the late 1980s, and Tom had been trying to talk them into buying Microsoft for their own good. They hadn't— perhaps partly because Audrey wasn't so sure Tom could be trusted after he'd taken her to the Four Seasons Hotel, but mostly because Harold couldn't be nudged out of his habitual caution—but Tom had invested heavily, and had no doubt laughed all the way to his bank in the Cayman Islands. Audrey had almost fainted when she'd seen recently, in a short clip on the TV news, that Microsoft stock had increased in value over 7,000 per cent since the late eighties.

They could have been rich.

But there was something Audrey found far more demoralizing than having lost out on potential wealth, and that was the possibility of Harold losing his mind.

As a teenager, growing up near that small town, Audrey had worked summers and weekends in the local old-age home, bringing trolleys of weak tea and packaged biscuits around the wards to the elderly and infirm who'd been sent there by families too overwhelmed to care for them.

She'd hated it. It was only the fact that it paid relatively well and she was saving for university—she was desperate to go away to university—that made her stick with it. It wasn't the smell, or the brown polyester uniform and the ugly shoes she had to wear—it was that the nurses seemed pitiless, inured to the suffering of those in their care, especially to the ones—and there seemed to be lots of them—with dementia. The nurses spoke to them and scolded them as if they were naughty children, while Audrey watched in silent, cowed disbelief. When the nurses weren't there, Audrey spoke to the inmates, who sat around all day in wheelchairs, as if they still had all their faculties—whether they did or not. She poured their tea, wiped up their drool, buttoned their sweaters.

If Harold
was
losing his mind, Audrey told herself, he wasn't going anywhere.

But she wondered whether—if she'd worked there for years and years—she would have been like the nurses. The thought terrified her.

Audrey finished her coffee and forced herself to get up and go downstairs and sit at the computer. She pulled up the website of the company she'd decided to use for the paternity test and reviewed the details one more time.

The test was quite simple; all she needed was some strands of hair from Dylan and some from Harold—four to seven strands from each, with the roots attached. She couldn't do the mouth swab, obviously, without them knowing about it. She didn't think she'd have any trouble procuring the hairs. Good thing she didn't need any from Tom. The test was accurate to 99.99 per cent, which was good enough for her.

Audrey got pulled into the computer and was surprised when she read that an estimated one in ten children is not fathered by the man who thinks he is their father. She'd had no idea! She read with raised eyebrows about women whose various children, on DNA testing, showed a number of different fathers. Modern science had now made all this possible.

She ordered the home testing kit by phone, opting for discreet shipping. She used her own credit card. She balked a little at the cost—but thanks to the financial mess they were in, Harold would probably never even notice that she'd spent the money.

• • •

D
YLAN WAS RESOURCEFUL
, and soon found someone willing to look the other way. The Adam Fox Agency didn't have a glamorous office like Dylan had imagined, but at least this guy could get him auditions, no questions asked. What, exactly, they'd do about signing a contract when the time came, the agent didn't say, other than that they would cross that bridge when they got to it.

Adam Fox had even sent Dylan to a photographer he knew to have some photos done—a photographer who was willing to work on credit. All Dylan had had to pay up front was a hundred bucks.

Dylan was sure that once he got his big break his parents would come around, and then he could ditch the Adam Fox Agency, sign with the big leagues, and never look back. In the meantime, it was all about perfecting his craft.

In his bedroom, Dylan had switched his desk and his dresser around, so that when he sat on the side of his bed he could see himself in the dresser mirror. Today, for his first exercise, he was doing his dad, sitting in his La-Z-Boy. He leaned back against the wall and stretched his legs out on the bed in front of him, bending his knees and propping a pillow underneath his lower legs to simulate the La-Z-Boy's reclining action. Once he was in position with his props, Dylan tried to imagine himself as a depressed, middle-aged man. His shoulders sagged, a bleak look came into his eyes—they even felt a little puffy and hooded if he creased his brow just right. He could actually feel his spine curving, his muscle mass shrinking; he felt himself go flabby. After a few minutes, he glanced at himself in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and thought that he'd nailed his dad pretty well.

Next he stood in front of the mirror and tried to replicate his dad in that interesting moment just before he went down at the funeral. Dylan adjusted his posture, lowered his gaze to about where the head of the corpse would be in the coffin, and then tried to arrange his face to mimic his dad's just before he fainted. This was more difficult and took more concentration; he kept checking himself in the mirror. Once he got the face right, he started to croak and added the jerky body movements. He practised this, trying to get the sound and volume just right.

His mom came rushing up the stairs and stopped abruptly at his open bedroom door.

“What's wrong?” she asked, alarmed.

Dylan turned around to look at her. “Nothing,” he said innocently.

• • •

T
HESE DAYS, JOHN
was feeling like a million bucks. He didn't understand how it had happened but everything had changed, and he wasn't going to look too deeply at why. All his life things had happened to him that he hadn't fully understood—he was used to it.

All he knew was that his dad had let him drive the car home from Future Shop and had told him he might as well not be grounded anymore. John still wasn't clear on whether he was allowed to drive the car again in general, or whether that was a one-time thing.

He cut classes and met Nicole. He was so happy and excited to see her, he almost blurted out that he wasn't grounded anymore, but stopped himself just in time. Their reunion was hot and sweet—a rush of deep, wet kisses, peeling clothes, skin smells, feverish caresses— and a minimum of conversation. For John, it was bliss.

Afterward, he stared at her darkly, possessively. Answered her laconically in single words, sometimes indulging her with a phrase, or even an entire sentence.

He couldn't believe how much she seemed to like him.

CHAPTER TEN

T
here was concern about Harold at the office. Stan, his supervisor, was concerned enough that he had been conducting an informal, secret poll of the rest of the staff, one by one:
Have you noticed anything strange about Harold lately?

Stan was not actuated by anything bad; in fact, he liked Harold and was only trying to help. He was fully cognizant of the excellent disability leave benefits available—which Harold had paid into for close to twenty years—and only wanted to get Harold, a generally good employee, his due.

However, Stan did have an unemployed brother-in-law, recently laid off from another department, who could do Harold's job with his eyes shut, until something more permanent for him opened up. Stan also had a wife who thought he ought to be able to pull jobs out of a hat. All of which made him more inclined to believe that Harold was not quite right in the head and could benefit from an extended leave.

It was a win-win situation.

Besides, the evidence was there—he himself had caught Harold having conversations with thin air. He'd noticed Harold's slipping work habits, his forgetting about meetings, and his odd obsession with that spider.

The results of the secret poll, from Stan's point of view, could have been more satisfactory. There was an even split. Half the staff had noticed nothing about Harold at all and the other half had seen a change. Most of these had either heard Harold talking about his spider or had required some help, in the form of leading questions, to come to the realization that they had seen a change, but since this was for the good of all—including the department—there was no harm in that. Naturally, Stan had been careful to ensure that no employee knew that any other employee had been asked the same question—and each had been counselled to say nothing about it. Stan had kept the running totals in his head.

Of course, as supervisor, Stan had been carefully documenting, in writing, all instances of Harold's odd behaviour, as any competent manager was required to do.

He went to Harold with what he felt was a gift—a carefully worded, in fact, almost disguised invitation to apply for disability leave, with full pay, with a hint that such an application would be looked upon favourably. There was a delicacy to such things; one had to be so careful.

It was the end of the day. Stan entered Harold's office as Harold was packing up to leave, and closed the door behind him. “Harold, if I might have a word?”

Harold sat back down abruptly in his chair.

“I've been a little concerned about you lately, Harold,” Stan said, and waited for Harold to say something. It would be so much better if everything spilled automatically from him: a confession about depression for example, a revelation about serious problems at home, a problem with alcohol perhaps (not uncommon)—followed by an admission (possibly tearful) of the need for some time off. It would be better if Stan wasn't the one to suggest it. So he waited.

“I'm fine,” Harold said, beginning to perspire visibly.

“I'm not so sure, Harold.”

Harold started to fidget with the pen on his desk, tapping it rapidly against the blotter. He'd heard about Stan's brother-in-law in the other department.