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  AWAY FROM EVERYWHERE

  AWAY FROM

  EVERYWHERE

  A NOVEL | CHAD PELLEY

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Pelley, Chad, 1980-

  Away from Everywhere / Chad Pelley.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-265-7

  I. Title.

  PS8631. E4683A92 2009 C813'.6 C2009-902809-3

  © 2009 Chad Pelley

  Front cover photograph: Christian Kuddler / Source: PHOTOCASE Back cover photograph: “Muffinmaker” / Source: PHOTOCASE www.photocase.com

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence fromThe Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  BREAKWATER BOOKS LTD. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  Printed in Canada

  Reprinted 2010

  FOR PEGGY,

  FOR EVERYTHING THAT CANNOT

  BE PUT INTO WORDS.

  “All happy families are the same;

  all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.”

  – LEO TOLSTOY FROM ANNA KARENINA

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE A LINE CROSSED BECOMES A WALL

  BUT FIRE BURNS

  A GHOST, ALIVE

  THE BIGGEST LIE

  PART TWO TO THE WALL

  THE OTHER KID

  WELCOMING WANDERING EYES

  WAYS OUT

  OH TO BE SQUAT BETWEEN A WALL AND A LOVER

  A LOOK LIKE GOODBYE

  THE FELLING

  TURN AROUND, TURN EVERYTHING AROUND

  ONCE IS ALWAYS ENOUGH

  A PLASTIC SMILE

  ALONE BESIDE YOU

  IN NEW SKIN

  FATE AND MISFORTUNE

  HEAR ME, WITHOUT WORDS

  FROM NOTHING TO NOWHERE

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  ALEX

  IF FISTS CoULD SPEAK OR WORDS COULD HEAL

  IN PLACE OF A GOODBYE

  NO STEADIER FOOTING

  WAITING FOR DECEMBER, FOR SOMETHING THAT NEVER COMES

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  A MOTHER, NOT A LOVER

  WORDS LIKE SHRAPNEL

  UNDONE

  WITH ALL THE JEALOUSY OF A FLIGHTLESS BIRD

  I AM MY FATHER'S SON

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AFTER THOUGHTS

  AWAY FROM EVERYWHERE ORIGINS AND UNEXPECTED OUTCOME

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  PART ONE

  A LINE CROSSED BECOMES A WALL

  BUT FIRE BURNS

  IT WAS THE HARSH CONTRAST of her blood on everything around them that he remembered the most. The warmth of her blood on the cold of his flesh. The dark red handprint on the beige headrest of the back seat, smeared downwards from where she tried to lift herself up off the floor – but fell back down. There was a puddle of it on her belly, too much to soak into her white shirt. When he spun around in the driver’s seat to face her, he expected widened eyes and an adrenaline-flushed face, but she was just lying there, so ghostly still and quiet, so deaf to his shouting and unaffected by his panic. Only her eyes were moving, scanning their bodies and assessing the damage. How are we going to explain this? The affair, she meant, not the accident.

  Hydroplaning felt like a circus ride gone wrong, like having his sense of control gutted and guillotined. All sounds were muffled by the forward momentum, and the car felt weightless as it slid across the highway’s yellow lines. He turned the wheel, hand over hand. He pumped the brakes, but there was no stiffness there, no resistance, and the car dove into the forest, snapping limbs off trees. It felt more like the forest was coming at him, from all sides. Like a whir of brown and green was devouring the car, chewing on it. Branches shrieked and punched against the sides of the car: scouring paint, denting steel, busting glass.

  It all ended in one dull thud – his body thrust forward, then snapped back into place by a seatbelt. The sulfuric smell of deflated airbags filled the car, and smoke – palpable and salty – burned its way down into his lungs and had him panicked, choking, looking for flames. There were none, and the relentless rain would have doused any fire anyway.

  The tree trunk that finally stopped the car punched a V into the hood, and the sudden stillness, the lack of motion, was jarring. It felt like it was raining rocks, that the car was being dented, that the metal frame wouldn’t last much longer. Any sounds in the blackness of that forest were washed out by the drumming of bullet-sized raindrops on the bonnet of the car; they even snuffed out his throat-cutting cries for help. It felt like he was screaming under water: futile and exhausting. Hannah made no sound at all. She had been lying down across the back seat before the accident, and the impact threw her to the floor. He turned the rearview mirror down, slowly, afraid of what he’d see. She lay there on her back, in a pile of dirty leaves and busted glass, staring at Owen through vacant eyes. He couldn’t tell if she was vomiting blood or coughing it up. He didn’t know which would be worse. Which to hope for.

  “Hannah! Can you breathe? Can you even hear me!”

  He reached down behind the seat and shook her, like he could jumpstart her with a vigorous shake of her limp arm. The pool of blood on her stomach felt hot on the back of his hand, and with walls of trees and rain blocking out any light, it looked as thick and black as oil. As they waited for help, he could see life coming and going in her eyes: her soul hesitant but ready to leave. Her charcoal pupils the boundary. She was a beautiful thirty-four-year-old, with messy brown hair, who looked more like a child now than a mother of two.

  With each howl of December wind, a cold gush of rainwater barreled in through a broken window like a slap across Hannah’s face. That’s how she saw it, a slap across her face, punishment for what she’d been doing. He saw that in her eyes, they said it all and more. They were billboards to her emotions, flashing guilt, regret maybe. They said that she was scared to die and aware they’d be found out, and that neither fate felt worth the fight for her next breath. She gasped, her punctured lungs struggling for air, and he knew it was her two children she was thinking of. Not him, not Alex. There was a steady stream of tears, but no sounds.

  He gave up on his cell phone: the battery had cracked into three triangular pieces. He turned again to Hannah. She wasn’t even blinking now. She never even closed her eyes as the wind threw water onto her face, pressing her hair into her forehead and making her blood glisten a brighter red. Her eyes jerked back and forth between his face and the blood on her hands, her long slender fingers outstretched. She seemed more confused than frightened.

  “Hannah!” Only panic in his utterance. Like the word could’ve been any word.“Hannah, I don’t have a phone. We… we …need to find your phone …Hannah! ”

  Nothing. No response. Just more coughing, more blood. Some gurgling now, and then his own stomach felt weak. She looked like someone punched stupid, beaten into a daze.

  He struggled to get out of the car and dash down to the highway, but the door was butted up against a rock. It looked like a shark fin: grey, wet, and bumpy. He tried to climb out the window, but his left leg wouldn’t take his weight, and he fell back into his seat. The adrenaline had numbed the pain. Every time h
e tried to put weight on that leg, it felt more like intense heat and pressure than pain, and he shrieked in a way that hollowed him out. He looked down and saw a snapped bone pressing against his skin, just shy of poking through. An inch below his kneecap, his tibia had snapped from his fibula, and the bones were stabbing him from the inside out like a prong.

  “Hannah…I need your phone!”He looked at her face and saw two deep lacerations on her chin: claw marks, like a bear had taken a swing at her. He saw one more slash above her left eye, so deep her eyebrow was disconnected. He knew the cuts would form scars, and the guilt threw tears into his words. “Hannah. Where is your–”

  She turned her head, slowly, towards her purse, pointing with her eyes. He reclined his chair, slung an arm over the passenger seat, and hauled himself half onto the back seat. He looked down on her and her eyes were twitching, like she was seconds from a seizure. His tears mixed with rain and snot and dripped down onto her. He wiped hair from her face, tucking it behind her ears, and kissed her forehead.

  He dialed 9-1-1, and with the help of the calm, gentle voice on the other end, they scrambled to work out where the car had gone off the road.

  “I’ll turn on the high beams. And the hazard lights. I’ll blare the stereo. You’ll find us …right?

  Hannah was unconscious by the time the emergency response team found the car. She was lying there peacefully, as if asleep in her own bed. When Owen first heard the paramedics coming, their voices sounded so distant and calm. Then he saw frantic zips of flashlights along the ground like helicopter spotlights, and noise rushed at him as fast and loud as warfare: the shouting of urgent instructions, the suck of mud at their feet. Even the snapping of twigs beneath their boots was deafening. Their urgency was more startling than their presence was calming.

  The paramedics pried their bodies from the car and loaded them onto long yellow spine boards. As they turned to head back to the ambulance, Owen heard them sigh and curse the rugged terrain between the car and their ambulance down on the highway. They’d almost screamed it in his ear, yelling through the walls of rain,We’re gonna need a third set of hands on each board! Watch your backs! They treated him and Hannah like cargo, lifting them over rocks, passing them around trees, ignoring Owen’s questions. Just relax, sir. Just take it easy until we get back to the ambulance and take a look at you both. We have no answers for anyone just yet.

  It was slippery and dank. Tree branches and shrubs got in the way, scraping against the bright yellow spine boards. Rocks rolled under the paramedics’ feet, threatening to snap their ankles. Lying there on the spine board, his eyes shut tight to avoid the rain beating down on his face, Owen had an eerie feeling that he should have died in the crash. Or maybe that he wished he had. He was thinking about those few moments before he hydroplaned. The wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain, and a thick glaze of water, rippled by the wind, coated the windshield and hazed his vision. The glare of oncoming headlights trickled down his windshield like stars caught in a waterfall. He was watching Hannah, so peaceful in her sleep, when the car lifted from the highway and spun into the ditch. His eyes, not on the road, had been wandering across the curves of her body in the rearview mirror: the lines of her ribcage beneath her tight shirt.

  As the paramedics loaded the stretchers into the ambulance, Hannah’s left arm fell over the side of the spine board, limp because she was unconscious, and swung back and forth like a pendulum.

  Owen grabbed a man’s forearm, panicked.“We are heading to the hospital in Sheet Harbour, right? It’s the closest, right?”

  He wanted to be taken to a hospital anywhere but Dartmouth, maybe check in under bogus names. Say they never had their hospital cards or any other kind of ID on them. That they were just out for a drive.

  “Dartmouth General, sir. Sheet Harbour is, at present, not equipped for this …for … surgery . Just take it easy now, and lie back down.” He was fiddling with an IV bag and didn’t even look at Owen.

  He didn’t want to seem desperate, and didn’t want to have to explain why. “Isn’t Halifax closer than Dartmouth?”

  The paramedic shook his head.

  “Then can we make it the other one in Dartmouth instead. I have–”

  He looked at Owen like he was delirious. “Just lie back, sir. My job is to take you to Dartmouth General Hospital, and it is in your best interest to let me do my job. Especially for your partner’s sake.”He nodded towards her.

  Owen looked at Hannah: his brother’s wife, his sister-in-law. Now that title sounded so incestuous and wrong. His lover, the woman his brother had failed, the woman he loved: that was how he preferred to think of her.

  He pictured his brother’s face, how bereaved and betrayed it would look when he saw his wife and brother come into his hospital, strapped to stretchers from the same accident. He knew Alex was working all weekend, but in that moment all he had was hope. Even if he’d never seen the difference between hope and naïveté.

  He looked again at Hannah and the two paramedics who were working on her. All their attention, the quick movements and taut faces, made it clear how helplessly injured she was.

  “Sir, lift your head.”They placed a mask over his mouth. “Deep breaths now.”

  There would be no point in lying. Owen knew that Alex was smart enough to connect the dots and draw the picture. Owen was not at a screenwriting conference and Hannah was not shoe-shopping in Montreal. Her car would be found not twenty minutes from Alex’s cabin, on a stretch of road that led to nowhere but his cabin.

  “Deep breaths, sir.”

  He looked again at Hannah, at the paramedics who had done all they could for her. It was only a matter of time now. He looked up at the white ceiling, jostled back and forth by the bucking of the ambulance against the rough pavement.

  The paramedic adjusted a knob. “Deep long breaths now, sir.”

  The periphery of his vision blurred, engulfed by whiteness. He thought of the time he and Alex had run off on their parents at a zoo, each daring the other to stick a hand in the bear cage. They agreed to do it at the same time: the first one to take out his hand was the loser. He couldn’t remember who won.

  Everything went white.

  When Owen regained consciousness in the hallway of the hospital, he was wearing a rigid neck brace. He couldn’t look to his left or right: just straight up, at the square, dotted ceiling tiles framed by beige metal. He couldn’t see if Alex was nearby and had caught on to him yet. He didn’t know where Hannah was, or if she was still alive.

  Everything seemed blurred. His eyes were overwhelmed, or the lights were too harsh. All he could see were glowing strips of yellow: long fluorescent light bulbs passing him by, one by one, as medics carted him down the hallway. Eleven, then they turned a corner. Seven more fluorescent strips, another turn. The sickly smell of hospital tingled in his nostrils, making the hair in his nose feel thick and wiry, and he could feel dried blood caked against his skin when he shifted his body. All of his adrenaline was long gone now: the broken bones were throbbing, the deepest lacerations felt filled with salt, flames, glass. When three more long fluorescent bulbs passed him by, he was lifted from the stretcher onto a bed, and the fluorescent bulbs were replaced by two large domed lights. They looked like headlights, like a car headed straight for him. Then his brother’s long, unmistakable face was peering down at him. Alex’s eyes were either questioning or denying what he saw.

  Owen?

  Everything in the room was gone now, except for that look of astonishment in his brother’s eyes. It was wild and haunting: a frightened fox wanting to pounce or run. As both brothers struggled for words, a nurse appeared and pried Alex out of Owen’s field of vision. She had his arm clutched in her hand, her pink nails digging into his freckled and sparsely haired skin.

  “Dr. Collins!The woman in the next room, same crash, she needs your immediate attention! I don’t know how she’s still breathing!”The urgency in her voice wasn’t enough, she had to shout, to yell the spec
ifics. “It’s bilateral hemopneumothorax. We’re sure of it, she’s suffocating, and I am guessing cardiac tamponade, and those are just the chest traumas …”

  Alex blatantly ignored the nurse because it was his brother right there in front of him. But the nurse insisted, she tugged at his arm, sank her nails a little deeper. Creases now, where her nails met flesh. As he was promising Owen he would be right back,Owen grabbed him by the arm so urgently it made a slapping noise. He had to warn his brother, to at least lessen the shock. “Just, wait …one second.”

  Alex and the nurse turned to him. Their attention, their eyes all over him like that, it made it harder for him to speak, to confess.

  “Alex.” He waited for the courage to finish the sentence. The pause only made it harder to utter the next few words. There was only the vicious truth. “It’s …Hannah …in there.” He tilted his head, slowly, towards the next room. Hesitant to be so curt. So definite and honest. He fell back into his bed breathless, his heart thudding off ribs.

  Alex tore his arm free from Owen’s grip. His one hand clapped from the sudden absence of Alex’s arm. “Hannah is in Montreal , Owen!” His voice quivered in denial, as if all of a sudden so much made sense. As if he understood that curious way Owen stood next to his wife now: like a man fighting against every inch of himself not to reach out and touch her. Not to let eyes linger too long after words during a conversation.

  “Alex …me and Hannah, we …we were at your cabin … all week.”

  He looked at his hands, no longer able to look his brother in the face. Alex refused to believe Owen, so he had to trust his eyes. Owen watched him walk into the next room, dragging feet like blocks of cement, moving only because he had to. He pressed the palms of his hands to those green doors with all the hesitation of a man about to commit suicide, then thrust the doors quickly open.