Twenty-Six (20 page)

She had plucked out all the hairs of her eyebrows, one by one, and she sent the metal ends of the tweezers probing along the bare skin where the brows had been, searching for the first signs of a new hair coming through. She’d bought two new eyebrow pencils, in two shades of brown, and she applied them now, one over each eye. The light brown she applied in an arc of arousal or intrigue over the left eye. The darker brown she pressed into a stern straight line over her right. With a hand mirror, she studied the effect of each in its profile.

She had a new Revlon lipstick in a shade of dark red called Black Cherry. Her bottom lip was half-covered when a flash at the bedroom window distracted her. She pulled back the sheer and looked to the street. The little yellow-green station wagon that was parked at the end of the driveway was familiar to her: Alice’s Pizza delivery.

She went back to the table and continued applying the lipstick.

In the garage, Alec rooted in a wooden box in the corner opposite the door to the house, moving aside end-cut sticks of wood,
lidless pickling jars, and greasy rags until he found a blue coil of vinyl-sheathed clothesline wire. He set up the stepladder so he could easily reach the crossbeams of the rafter trusses, and climbed up. He wrapped the end of the wire three times around the two-by-six crossbeam, and twisted the short end into a tight knot around the part of the wire that hung down. He got down from the ladder, reached up the wire on his tiptoes as high as he could, and twisted a loop of wire back onto itself. He put a slip knot at the end of the loop, and inserting his wrist into the noose, jerked it downward to make sure the wire tightened around his flesh. He opened the top drawer of his father’s toolbox and took out a pair of wire snips. He cut the extra wire from where it dangled on the slip knot and replaced the wire cutters in the drawer.

In Ken’s room, there was a
TV
that took up half of the top of the dresser, but he kept it shut off until the two hours he’d set aside for homework were over. It was the Christmas holiday, and there was no homework to be done, but he’d disciplined himself all of first term to set this time aside, and he wanted to keep himself used to the pattern. He’d taken his history and biology texts home and decided to read ahead in them.

Scheduling Saturday night as a homework night was a compromise. He’d prefer to do it on Friday, so that it would not hang over his head for the whole weekend. But Friday was the night that people went to movies or had parties in their basements or went cruising through the countryside with the first of their friends to have a license. Doing homework on Saturday meant that he could go out and do something with his friends on Friday and not have homework looming when he got out of bed on Sunday.

He was more conscious of doing homework this year, his Grade 10 year, as a way of distancing himself from his brother. Ken had been in the same grade as Alec last year, so he was used to the idea that his idiot brother, who was supposed to be two years ahead of him, was in the same grade. But this year they’d got put in the same homeroom, so Ken had to face the embarrassment every day, the constant association with a fool. Every time Alec shot off his big mouth to a teacher, Ken had to endure the uncontrollable impulse of the teacher to look at
him
for an explanation of his brother’s behaviour. Every time Alec skipped class, which happened almost every day, Ken had to endure a pause before his own name was called, as the teacher waited in vain for him to explain his brother’s absence.

Doing well was his only defence, his only way of separating himself, of making sure that there was no mistaking him for his brother. And sacrificing a couple of Saturday nights over the Christmas break was a small price to pay to keep his self-respect.

He was reading a shaded insert from the history text in the section on the fall of Rome when he heard a noise from the basement. His brother was down in the furnace room, setting his hockey gear out to dry. He heard the buzz of the oil burner coming to life, then the sound of the furnace room door swinging shut with a bang. He went back to the insert, about Flavius Maximus, “The Delayer,” and how he put off potential invaders by paying them not to attack the city.

There was a James Bond movie on
TV
tonight. The theme music seeped up through the floor as his brother settled in downstairs. Ken turned to look at the dark screen of the set on his dresser, then went back again to Flavius Maximus.

In the garage, Alec gripped the wire above the noose and yanked it hard, testing the knot that held it to the cross-beam. He moved the ladder directly beneath the wire and climbed up to the fourth rung. He noticed a drop of red paint stuck to the stamped aluminum of the top rung and scratched at it with his thumbnail. There was nothing painted red in the house, and he wondered momentarily where that paint had come from.

When the noose was snug around his neck he lowered his gaze to the concrete floor of the garage. After undoing the noose, he stepped off the ladder and stood back from where the wire hung. He looked up at the knot on the rafter, down at the concrete floor. Now directly below the wire, he reached over his head to where the noose hung. At the top of the ladder again, he twisted the whole apparatus twice more around the two-by-six, so that it swung a foot higher than it had before.

He stood on the fifth rung of the ladder, wrapped the noose about his neck. He grabbed hold of the rafter over his head and let his weight off of the ladder, so he swung by his hands from the two-by-six. He hooked his toes under a rung of the ladder and kicked the ladder so far away that it clattered into the wall before striking the floor. He chinned himself, making his eyes level with the two-by-six. His arms were tired from the game he’d played earlier, and the taxed muscles set his arms trembling. The end of the wire, where it was twisted around the rafter, dug into his cheek. He let go.

Ron Morrison sat at his kitchen table, a bottle of Captain Morgan rum, cap screwed off and nowhere in sight, planted on the table before him. Beside it, a large bottle of Pepsi. In a tall glass near his elbow was a mixture from the two bottles. The twelve-inch
TV
on the counter was tuned to
Hockey Night in Canada
. They were announcing their lineup of interviews and commentaries for the second-period intermission.

Ron looked down at his hands where they were curled around his drink. They were already the hands of a much older man. The hairs that protruded from the backs of the fingers were thick and coarse and black. The fingernails were yellow and thick, like the skin over a rancid pudding.

On the
TV
screen, hockey players skated and swerved and shot. The excited announcers described it all. But Ron was too drunk now to follow it. He knew which teams were playing. Now and then the score would register with him. But the mad panning and switching of cameras on the hulking players in their uniforms was blending into mere swirls and flourishes of colour.

He heard a clatter, and in a moment he realized it had come from the garage. He stood up, both hands on the tabletop to steady himself. He put one foot in the direction of the doorway that led down the few steps to the garage, but he forgot why he’d stood up. He paused a moment, swaying unsteadily with only one hand on the table to hold himself upright, then sat back down.

S
unday morning Ennis rose just after five thirty. Since the incident with Ziv over the scrapbooks, he had been furious with himself for having thrown away months of work. The memory of his failure to understand and communicate with his son humiliated him and made him angry at himself, his failure. He wanted to be long gone from the house before anyone else was up.

It was just after six when he walked into the Tim Horton’s in Albion Mines for a cup of coffee and to catch up on the latest gossip. The place was unusually empty, even for so early in the morning. In the far corner, deep in the smoking section, sat Ivor Thompson and the rest of the early-morning crowd, half a dozen men and one woman, most of them middle-aged, all of them puffing on cigarettes as though their lives depended on it. They were huddled close together in a single booth, so intent on whatever they were discussing that they hadn’t even noticed Ennis coming in.

Ennis ordered his coffee with milk and headed in their direction. As he approached the booth, Ivor Thompson looked up and caught Ennis’s eye. Immediately Thompson shook his head at Ennis and frowned.

“What carcass are you people chewing on over here,” Ennis said. “I could hear your teeth grinding as soon as I came through the door.”

“Bad news,” Ivor said. Everyone else at the table looked up now, their faces all marked by the simultaneous sadness and self-importance of people who’ve been first to discover tragedy.

“Jesus, you’s all look some grim,” Ennis said.

The only woman at the table, Mary Cameron from up in the prefabs in the Heights, said, “Ronnie Morrison’s son.”

Ennis knew Alec was dead before she said another word. It was the darkness in her voice as she said the father’s name.

“The older boy. He’s gone, I guess,” Mary continued. “I guess he hung himself is what they’re saying.”

“You guess! Jesus! Who’s saying?”

“I been here since three,” Ivor Thompson said. He took a deep drag of his Export A and tapped the ash into one of the empty coffee cups on the table. “I been trying to quit smoking if you can believe it. I been three days without a smoke and three blessed days without sleep. Round two thirty this morning I give up tossing and turning, keeping the wife awake, she was cursing at me there. Anyway, must have been before three I came in here.

“Cochrane White was sitting with a newspaper and a large double-double right over there.” He pointed at the booth by the door. “Come about twenty-five after three or so, a call comes across his police radio. He had the damn thing up so loud I heard it plain as day. ‘Go to such and such address in Valley Woods,’ it
said. Some teenager’s voice. Isn’t it White’s own boy that works dispatch on the weekends? Anyway, plain as day it says, ‘We got a call from Amanda Morrison says her son Alec hung himself.’ ”

Ennis went straight to the garbage can, and without realizing what he was doing, he threw his coffee, china cup and all, right into the trash.

“Ennis!” Mary Cameron called after him, almost laughing with the shock of what Ennis had done. “What the hell are you doing?”

Ennis did not reply, but walked as though in a trance to his car. He drove directly to the Morrison house in Valley Woods. The Albion Mines police cruiser was parked on the street in front of the house. Every light in the house was on and the door to the garage was criss-crossed with yellow police tape.

Ennis sat in shock for a long time on the street in front of the Morrison house. Without pulling to the side, he put the car in park and shut off the engine. In a moment an ambulance pulled in behind him and he had to start up the car and make way for it. He pulled ahead and to the side of the street as the ambulance, without siren or flashing lights, pulled quietly into the Morrison driveway. The garage door lifted up, releasing a breath of steam into the cold and breaking through the police tape. Inside the door stood Cochrane White, a stout man dressed in a blue uniform. On the floor of the garage behind him was a sheet-covered body. The only other person visible appeared to be Amanda Morrison, who stood slumped in the doorway that led from the garage into the house.

Ennis put the car in gear and drove out of Valley Woods and back into town. There were a few more people in Tim Horton’s when he drove by. The people he’d spoken with were still huddled in the corner of the smoking section. He pulled into the driveway
of his own yard and looked at the building. No one was up yet. It was still well before seven in the morning. Both of his sons, one in this house, the other in an apartment just up the hill, would still be asleep. And their friend was on his way to the morgue by now.

Ennis felt himself begin to panic. His limbs jumped involuntarily into action as he slipped the car into reverse and pulled out onto the road. He headed straight for the Highland Square Mall, to the service road at the back. The big garbage Dumpster behind Woolco was where he’d thrown the box of scrapbooks the day Ziv had come home from university. A little more than a week ago, he’d driven off in a huff with the box in the trunk of the car. He’d had no clear plan of action. He had not been able to see that his son was tired. He was angry at Ziv for not understanding that he was only trying to reach out to him. He’d pulled away from the house without a plan, but as soon as he found himself within sight of the mall he drove with a purpose directly to the nearest bin. He’d hoisted to his shoulder the box that contained hours of painstaking work, and heaved it onto the bulging pile of boxboard and Styrofoam already there. In the time since, he had not once thought about the scrapbooks, what he’d done with them or where they might be. But now all his anger and hurt seemed pointless, something he had done to himself.

He found himself pulling in behind Woolco, parking perpendicular to the Dumpster. The light of morning was just starting to colour the cloud cover above, but big square security lights illuminated the whole service area behind the mall, a long row of nondescript fire doors, each with its own trash receptacle. Some of yesterday’s snow still clung to the ground, most of it up close to the building where the sun did not reach during the day.