Twenty-Six (21 page)

As soon as Ennis flipped back the hatch on the top of the Dumpster, he knew he was too late. The box had been stuffed full when he’d tossed his scrapbooks in here. He could tell that it had been emptied already. Nonetheless, he put a foot up on the big iron hook where the garbage truck took purchase, hoisted himself up to the container’s lip, balanced a moment, took a quick look before himself, then jumped down inside. He knew the box was not here, but he felt desperate now to find it, as though he had no choice but to look. He dug his hands down into the corrugated paper and began turning the trash back onto itself. A foul odour that could only have come from rotting food rose into his nostrils. As he worked away, he grew warm in the confined space, unzipped his winter coat and tossed it up out of the bin toward his car. On the backswing from the throw, his shirt sleeve caught on a bolt and he heard the ripping sound of a seam letting go.

Just before waking up, Dunya had dreamed a vivid and powerful dream. The images in the dream were unclear and nonsensical, but when she thought about them in the morning, she thought of the dream sensation as moving forward and backward at the same time. She stood on an unpaved street of her childhood, outside her family’s house at the north end of the Red Row. She felt or maybe saw her future, somewhere over the western horizon, luminous as the sun and almost hidden. There were flowers and the fragrances of flowers. There was the smell of tomato plants pungent on her fingers after she had pinched off suckers and
unwanted runners and cascades of hard green fruit with no time left in summer to develop. She was a little girl, not even school-age. She turned to look at her house and felt it throbbing with life. Her father was there, her mother, mysterious relatives from the old country. Her future family was there, too: never-spoken-of Ennis, her children, unborn and as yet unthought-of. She entered the house through the back door, and all the people she loved and ever would love were glowing spirits, floating, almost unformed but identifiable in the air. She raised a hand to touch them and they spiralled together in a great human/spirit knot. The knot formed itself into a globe of light, bright as a hot white star, and when she put out a hand to touch it, the globe became flesh, coalesced into a pulsing, blood-filled fist of bone and muscle and living energy. She held the ball in her two upturned palms and looked at it, half-entranced, half-repulsed by its carnality. She brought it to her lips and bit into it, felt the juice of blood run down her chin. There were deafening screams, coming from a place unknown to her, reverberating through her chest. Bones crunched and snapped, some of her teeth gave way and cracked, she swallowed them with the flesh she was eating until it was all inside of her. She walked out the front door of her house, pregnant with the burden of her life, the past and future gurgling inside her like a plugged drain. She leaned down into the turned earth in the front garden and vomited onto the soil. When she stood straight, what she had thrown up had become the countless thick stalks of giant sunflowers, reaching up to touch the low overcast sky. She dug her fingers into the fibrous stem of the closest one and began to climb.

She awoke, raw and disturbed, convinced that the dream had revealed something terrible to her, something she could not quite understand. When she got down to the kitchen, Ziv was already there, waiting for the coffee to drip through.

“Are you all right?” he said. He must have been able to see how disturbed she was. “You don’t look well.”

“Yes,” she said unsteadily, and sat at the kitchen table across from him. She rubbed her cheeks with her open hands in an attempt to wake herself up. “I had a really disturbing dream,” she said.

The phone rang. It seemed Ziv had picked up the phone, listened a moment, then put the phone back down without having spoken himself, although she realized he must have said something, however brief. Some of the brewed coffee had drooled down onto the hot plate beneath the pot, and the bitter smell of it frying penetrated the room.

Ziv looked at her, his face gone an expressionless blank. “Alec’s dead. He hung himself.” He appeared to melt down into the chair nearest the phone. Dunya never did find out who’d called. Someone who lived near Alec, probably. There would have been police, an ambulance.

She stood in stunned silence a moment, then went over beside her son and put a hand on his shoulder.

“He told me he was going to kill himself. Just the other night. He told me!” Ziv’s hands began to tremble. Dunya felt herself weakening and pulled over a chair to sit on while she remained by her son’s side. They couldn’t have been there for more than a few moments when Arvel came in through the back door. The short burst of cold air he’d let in chilled the kitchen slightly.
Without a coat or hat on, he’d come down the hill from the apartment he was renting on Bridge Avenue. His leather boots had been pulled on hastily and were loose and untied.

“Is it true, what I just heard?” he said. He had a scared look on his face that Dunya had not seen since he was a child.

Ziv nodded. “He’s dead,” he said. He looked up at his brother. “I believe it. He told me the other night at the party we were at. He said he was going to kill himself. Jesus, I didn’t do anything about it.”

“How were you supposed to know?” Arvel said. “All the crazy talk that guy was prone to. How was anyone supposed to sort out what was real and what was bullshit?”

“Don’t speak ill of him, Arvel,” Dunya said. “That poor boy. What must have he been going through?”

The back door banged again and Dunya heard Ennis mumbling in the porch. She set the three steaming coffee cups on the table and went out to the porch to tell Ennis the news about Alec.

She started at the sight of her husband. For a sliver of an instant she thought she was looking at a stranger. Ennis was bent over, wrestling with the laces of a boot. His clothes were covered with dark stains, his hair was spotted with what looked like fragments of dirty paper and Styrofoam. From the doorway, with her back to the kitchen, she smelled a terrible sour odour from him, like a sink full of dirty dishes that had been left to moulder for a week.

He glanced up when both boots were off his feet, but his eyes did not exactly meet hers. His expression was desperate. He looked right through her.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “Aren’t you.” She did not know what else to say. She’d never seen him drunk in the morning and she’d certainly never seen drink do anything like this to him. When he
took off his coat she saw that his shirt was in tatters, stained much worse than the coat had been.

His eyes focused on her. “Drunk!” He was outraged. “Nobody ever saw Ennis Burrows drunk at eight thirty in the morning. You must be drunk to suggest it.”

Dunya remembered her sons in the kitchen and lowered her voice. “Ennis,” she said. “Something terrible has happened.”

“Something terrible
has
happened,” he repeated her words and moved to push past her into the kitchen.

She set herself solidly in the doorway in front of him. “No, listen, Ennis. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“I already know,” he said.

He placed a hand on her shoulder and moved her easily out of his way.

Dunya followed him into the kitchen to shield her sons from their father in their time of grief, but stopped when she realized the kitchen was empty.

She called after them. She ran through the house to the bottom of the stairs and called again, then noticed that the front door had been opened and not closed the whole way. She opened it and the cold bite of early winter entered. In what was left of yesterday’s snow on the front steps, she saw footprints where her two sons left the house in order to avoid their father.

She closed the door and turned back into the house. There was a crack of light beneath the bathroom door. She walked down the hall and tried the handle. Locked. She felt a light-headedness strangely akin to elation.

She curled her hands into fists and began pounding at the door. She banged some more. “Those boys have troubles today and look what you did. You made a bad situation worse. As always,
Ennis, as always. Don’t you ever think of anyone other than yourself?” She continued to pound on the door. “Your own sons can’t bear to be around you.” She listened for any sort of response from inside the bathroom. She waited a long time, finally sitting down on the floor of the empty hallway.

Z
iv and Meta entered the church together, hand in hand. They made their way to the closest empty seats available, genuflected, then knelt for a moment of prayer. The smell in the air was of expiring candles and the stale incense that clung to the walls and furniture.

Mr. Morrison was so drunk that two of his friends had to carry him into the church, one under each arm, walking slowly enough that Alec’s father had time to alternately place his left and right foot beneath himself to simulate walking. He had made a brief appearance at the funeral home the night before, in a similar condition. Instead of having him wait and go to the front of the church with the procession, where he’d only make a bigger spectacle, his friends helped him to the reserved pew at the front of the church and set him up between them, where he could not fall over.

The priest had asked friends and family members to do the scripture readings but everyone refused. No one thought they would be able to hold up.

Alec’s mother stood motionless in a black knee-length dress, her face overpowered by two thick, stern lines of eyebrow pencil. At the corner of her mouth, her lipstick was smeared halfway to her chinline, giving her face a deformed aspect. Beside her, a handsome middle-aged man had an arm draped consolingly around her shoulders. He was the next-door neighbour, a
CPA
whose wife had left him for an old boyfriend not quite a year before.

Alec’s brother Ken stood at the far end of the waiting procession. He was turned at an odd angle, as though he did not belong to any of these proceedings and was about to walk out at any moment.

The church was decorated with greenery and seasonal banners in preparation for Christmas. At the foot of the altar was a nativity scene with a manger empty and waiting for the arrival of the infant Saviour.

The whole town seemed to have come. There was standing room only downstairs and every seat was full in both balconies. All the teachers from the high school were in attendance.

Ziv held tightly to Meta’s hand. As the organ music started up, he looked back toward the main entrance where the men from the funeral home were putting the casket on a trolley, ready to wheel it forward. The priest was at the back of the church, stoking the censer. A seven- or eight-year-old boy held a big brass crucifix overhead and was positioning himself to move forward at the front of the procession. Two rows back, Arvel stood by himself, squeezed into the suit he’d worn at his high school prom, shoulder to shoulder with people Ziv knew were strangers to his brother. Ziv scanned the room in disbelief, looking at all the people, their forms crowding and darkening the church.

“They all hated Alec,” he said to Meta. “The adults, the kids. They all despised him. They dumped on him every chance they got. What are they doing here, crowding around him now that he’s dead? When he was alive, they were tripping over themselves to stay away from him.”

Meta put her free hand on his forearm. “They feel badly,” she said. “They know now that he needed help. They knew it all along, but they didn’t do anything.”

Ziv looked at the faces, the downcast eyes, the stooped shoulders, the stricken expressions. He became aware of how many people were weeping. Their muffled sobs echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. Meta was right. Everyone was here because they wished they’d done something to help Alec.

When Father Boudreau reached the head of the church, he circled the casket, waving the censer, filling the air with acrid smoke. When the censer had been placed next to the boat of incense, the priest stretched out his arms in an attitude of prayer.