Every Little Thing Read online

  EVERY

  LITTLE

  THING

  CHAD PELLEY

  EVERY

  LITTLE

  THING

  A NOVEL

  P. O. BOX 2188, ST. JOHN’S, NL, CANADA, A1C 6E6

  WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

  COPYRIGHT © 2013 Chad Pelley

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Pelley,Chad, 1980-

  Every little thing / Chad Pelley.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-405-7

  I. Title.

  PS8631. E4683E84 2013 C813'. 6 C2013-901004-1

  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 from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $24. 3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We acknowledge the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.

  Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

  For,

  Everyone who had a kind word about the last one.

  “Open your mouth and fill it with food or rage.

  The same leaf that turns to the light shies from the blaze.”

  –FROM “LULLABIES” BY GEORGE MURRAY

  “I want to believe our love’s a mystery,

  I want to believe our love’s a sin.

  I want you to kiss me,

  like a stranger,

  once again.”

  –FROM “KISS ME” BY TOM WAITS

  Contents

  SHAKING THE BED

  SCREAMING UNDER WATER

  EVERYTHING OLD AND NEW

  PULL

  FILLING SPACES

  A BROKEN WING

  RISE TO A FALL

  DRIVE-BY

  HIDDEN SHOULDERS

  ROUNDTABLE

  GAPS

  CENTRIPETAL

  SEEING AND NOT KNOWING

  A FACE IN THE MIRROR

  FALLING BACK

  LOUD, LOUDER

  MEANING WELL

  PULLED THREADS

  FOCUS

  VISITATION HOUR

  WEIGHTING

  A CLEAN FLAME

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SHAKING

  THE BED

  HE’D CLOSE HIS eyes and thoughts of Allie would pinball around in his head—thudding and dinging and keeping him awake. He’d recollect her, bit by bit: the dart-hole dimple in her cheek when she’d smirk at her own wit. The artichoke dip she’d make for book club, and how she’d shoo his hungry hands. You only get the leftovers, double-dipped and half-stale! A kiss, a sorry. That smell,more clover than cinnamon, of a bath product, or her DNA.

  He’d open his eyes and she’d be gone. Nothing but darkness, cement walls, iron bars. The floor in his cell was so cold, it felt like broken glass when he’d step on it barefoot. Most nights he was drawn to his window, if you could call it that: thick glass, no bigger than a textbook, so dense it blurred everything he could see into blunt-edged objects. He’d stare at the hypnotic sway of trembling aspen in the distance and think of the boy: the pacifying, perfectly spaced beeps of his hospital machinery. All those white hoses latched onto his body.

  It was lights out long before he was tired in that prison and that was half the problem. Being locked in a cage, alone with his thoughts, and miles away from the people who could answer his questions, like where Allie was now, and how the kid was doing.

  He’d lie there on his back, eyes closed, body restless, rocking an ankle back and forth; his toes scraping across bedsheets drier than paper. It was strange the way silence worked after lights out. New sounds would emerge from the quietness, one by one, in an ordered hierarchy. At first it was a guard’s footsteps and the tossing and turning of inmates in their beds. Within fifteen minutes he could hear the heavy breathers and what thirty years of smoking had done to their lungs: the cliché rattle, the constant need to be cleared of phlegm. With everyone asleep, he’d hear the waspy buzzing of distant bulbs. And then the whispering crawl of water through old pipes; the drips from faulty plumbing as constant as a ticking clock. In time, they’d all start snoring—a rhythmic orchestra of rattling lungs. People would grunt as they came to, gasping for air, and roll over; their part in the orchestra now gone, the song changed by one less instrument.

  The rusty springs in his prison cot—the screech and stab of them—would get him thinking about his and Allie’s first bed. It had a lamp built into the headboard and the bulb would burn until two or three in the morning. Her taste in books had left her tired every morning. Another marathon, this one’s so good! But they all were. They’d all keep her up. And every morning she’d climb over him, drunk with fatigue, blindly hammering a fist at the snooze button, and fall down over him like a third blanket; her heart beating like a bird trapped between them.

  The nights he could sleep in prison, he’d wake early to the purple glow of dawn. It would punch through his thick window and lay a perfect mauve rectangle on his bedsheets. Like a book he ought to pick up and read. There’d be a faint birdsong, but the glass in his window was so thick, the bird sounded ten feet under water. It might have been the same yellow warbler, every morning. He’d look for it, through his window, but the window was too narrow to see anything not directly in front of him.

  In the mornings in prison, the wake-up call’s blare was worse than an alarm clock. It was more urgent. More insistent, like a military warning. And that didn’t make sense: they had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. He’d snap the sheets off himself and sit up, disoriented as he came to. His vision dissected seven or eight times by the black cylindrical bars of his cell—the guard on the other side like a man in two halves. His body was getting stiffer than the bed he’d been sleeping in. His spine with no give to it now, an iron rod, rigid, running from his neck to his legs. And that toilet smell that clogged his nostrils every morning: like bright steel and mould. His toilet hissed incessantly, always filling with water, but there was never more than a puddle in it. He’d sit on the edge of his bed, staring at his feet, dizzy from another sleepless night. Or he’d lie back down and stare up at the ceiling’s cold, porous cement. There was one solidified drip in a corner, like a stone icicle.

  He’d stopped trying to convince himself that Allie would come and apologize, explain herself, because too many weeks had passed since the night he went looking for answers and got taken by the police. Three months. Twelve weeks ago. He’d lay there calculating the math of time passed. Two thousand hours, it didn’t sound long enough. It didn’t add up to all the distance between them now. Twelve weeks. Ninety-four days.

  One night—one misunderstanding and a sloppy trial—and now he wakes to the sound of metal bars unclamping, sliding open, so he can follow a herd of hard men to the cafeteria. Choke down dry toast. Concentrated orange juice. Burnt scrambled eggs that smelled off.

  He could never recollect that night as a whole; it was a smashed vase he saw in pieces only. He doesn’t remember what sentence, exactly, got her crying, but her eyes were so wet with tears they must have been kaleidoscoping her vision. He can picture her strangling a crumpled tissue in her shaky hands. It was his last image of her. Crush
ed. Remorseful. Love and anxiety, guilt and compassion—she could never handle two emotions at once without getting the lines crossed and going off like a bomb. He couldn’t put a colour to the walls of the room they were in. What time of night it was. But she was wearing the watch he’d given her. She’d always worn the thing so loosely that it swirled around her wrist in circles whenever she’d move her arm too fast. Like when she pointed to the door that night. You need to leave, Cohen, he’s upstairs, he’ll hear you!

  He asked her questions, but he doesn’t remember her answers.

  The officers had reduced everything to guilty or not guilty. They weren’t concerned with the context of the three-way argument they’d walked into, just, simply, which of the three had crossed a line and broken a law. There were cracks and pops of walkie-talkies going off like gunfire, making far too big a deal of things. All that guilt caught in Allie’s throat, stretching it, until her voice was a wheezy, punctured balloon. Every time she nodded her head to the police that night, it was another dull blow, until Cohen’s whole body felt like a thumb struck by a hammer. Theymade Allie clip the but off of every yes but, until she panicked at how simple they’d made it all sound. Yes or no, ma’am: Did Cohen Davies enter your home without your consent?

  They dragged him down over her staircase, gripping his arms so tightly he could barely turn and face her. The male officer’s grip was firm and contemptuous: his fingers pinched deep between Cohen’s bi- and triceps. The female officer’s grip had been less judgmental. Four thin fingers and a dry thumb, like a butterfly at his elbow.

  There were no sirens going off as they walked him to the car, but the lights were flashing and it seemed so needless, such an exaggeration. The red and white lights poked him in the eyes as they tucked his head into the car. He sat in his seat, watching the lights bang off the trees in the yard: brown bark to red bark, to white bark, to brown. He looked up to Allie’s window and she was staring down at him. Her eyes in his, I’m so fucking sorry. And that’s what kept him up at night. That she really was sorry and had so much to be sorry about.

  Every night, he’d lie in that prison bed, restless, running a finger around the puck-sized metal implant above his heart. His idle hand was drawn to the rough feel where the metal pushed, from the inside out, against his flesh. Raising it, just a little. It felt like a big bottlecap sewn under his skin. He’d gotten used to having that chunk of metal in his chest, mentally, but his body never did. It throbbed, wanting Cohen’s hands to pluck it out like a splinter.

  The first time Allie took his shirt off, it was dark and she never saw the thumb-sized scar below his collarbone. Surgical, but with a vicious edge. They were both on their knees, in the centre of her bed; his hands tucking her hair behind her ear, to kiss her neck. The soft mattress was bending under their weight, so they were leaning into each other; her hard nipples soft scrapes against his chest. She slid a hand up his thigh, past his hips, over his ribs, and when she felt it there, she went still as a statue. Took a deep breath with a cutting noise.

  “Cohen! You’ve got a...it’s a lump or something!” Her eyes so wide he could see their whiteness in the dark.

  He laughed, “I...was born with a broken heart.”

  She shrugged both shoulders, “So, it’s a pacemaker or something?”

  “Something like that.”

  She reached out to touch it, hesitantly, like it was a button she shouldn’t press. “Can I?” she nodded to her fingers, an inch or two from his chest.

  He nodded back.

  She rubbed her middle finger over it, like she was applying a cream, to feel the outline of it under his skin. She brushed another finger, her forefinger, along the glossy scar, once, and looked him in the eye. “Tell me about your broken heart.”

  “There was this girl I loved, and she left me for a man with money.”

  She shoved him, hard, her palms clapping off his shoulders, and she bounced back like she just shoved a wall. They tumbled onto opposite sides of the bed, laughing. “I’m serious!”

  “You know those paddles doctors shock peoples’ hearts with in the hospital?”He waited for her to nod. “I have one in my chest.”

  “Fuck off! ” She covered her mouth like the words were a sneeze. “Really?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. His eyes looking where his hands wanted to be. She was sitting there, crossed-legged in bright orange underwear, topless. Gorgeous.

  “I dunno, I’ll be out shovelling, or something like that, and it can feel like my heart is a bird trapped in a space too small to flap its wings. But it’s trying anyway. That’s what this implant thing is for. To shock my heart out of a, I dunno, a bad rhythm.”

  She reached up and touched it again. The backs of her fingers this time. Gently. He’d never seen that look on her face before. But she read his body language. That he didn’t want her that far away. Or that look in her eye. Like he was a movie and things were going wrong.

  HE’DMET ALLIEin hismid-twenties, just after his heart surgery. There were still stitches in his chest. The muscles they cut through in the operation were the same ones that his left arm needed to move. So it felt like someone had swung an axe at him and his left arm was dangling by a thread. There were painkillers and times he’d lift that arm too high in putting on a shirt and he’d wince from the hot stab of pain. He was all right hand for a while. He’d right-hand a cigarette into his mouth, and use his right hand to light it.

  The night they met, he’d stepped outside his house for a cigarette. He’d do his smoking in a deep, dark, cement stairwell out back. The house next door had been empty for months with the same mannish, unlucky real estate agent showing it almost daily. Her jacket was two sizes too big and it flapped like a flag in the wind; he’d hear her out there, wooing potential buyers, sounding like a plastic bag caught in a storm. The place had been vacant so long that seeing the lights on had snagged the corner of his eye. He had a cigarette poked between his lips and the lighter in his hand ready to go. He looked up and Allie was leaning into the patio railing, facing him, hidden behind a puff of smoke. Their eyes banged into each other, locked, and seconds passed without either of them speaking.

  “So,” she said. “Safe to assume you’re my new neighbour? If not...if you’re about to burgle that house, I’ll keep my mouth shut for the toaster.” Her sly laugh was a soft blade in his gut. “I’m just moving in here,” she said, nodding her head back at the house, as if it wasn’t obvious which house, “and I forgot to buy myself a new toaster tonight. I remembered everything but the toaster. I’d much rather a cooked bagel to a raw one in the morning. I mean, butter won’t even melt into a cold bagel, you know? Like, real fresh butter.”She flashed a sad face.

  He scuffed a foot, a nervous tic. “Sorry, but I’m just the neighbour, not a burglar. Although I do have a toaster. And your pending breakfast tragedy has me willing to lend it to you. Really. It’s a good one, it’s got a bagel setting and everything. High-end Black and Decker.” He snuffed his cigarette out. “Stainless steel. Digital display. You couldn’t get a loan of a better toaster.”

  She honked out a laugh and its unrestrained volume took him off guard. “I’m the kind of girl who’d take you up on that, you should know.” She looked at her cigarette, her first cigarette smoked on that patio, and she didn’t know what to do with the butt.

  Cohen scooped up his mug-as-ashtray and walked up the stairs. He stood beneath her, holding it up like a bouquet of flowers. “Just...try and shoot for the mug and not my head.”

  “Well, it would be funny, wouldn’t it?” she laughed, “the first time we meet, you make this chivalric ashtray gesture and I set your hair on fire—”

  An oversized U-haul truck pulled up in front of her house, loud as an old bus, and cleaved their conversation. Her boyfriend, he imagined. A fuller head of hair. More charm and wittier.

  “Well, there’s my stuff.” She tossed the butt and it landed in the centre of his mug. There was a soft sist of it being extinguished in the co
llected rainwater. She pumped a fist, said, “Guess who should join the basketball team?” and he liked that. “Nice to meet you...”

  “Cohen.”

  “Cohen who...Leonard?”

  “Davies.”He laughed. “You?”

  Her hand was on the sliding patio door now. “Allie Crosbie. And that’s Allie as in Allie. It’s not short for Allison. And you can’t call me Al, either.” She laughed; he raised an eyebrow. “Like, the song, you know? Paul Simon?” She started strumming an imaginary guitar, trumpeting the tune with her mouth. “You Can Call Me Al?” But he didn’t know the song.

  She shook her head and disappeared into her house, leaving him all alone with that dumb smile on his face and the filthymug-ashtray in his hand.

  But she came back out before he’d finished his cigarette. He heard her patio door slide open. In the quiet of the night, the sound of that door wasn’t far off a subway car stopping on rusty rails.

  “Hey,Cohen Leonard?”

  He turned around. “Davies. I’m Cohen Davies.”He pointed to himself.

  She raised an eyebrow, shook her head, almost embarrassed for him. “I’m fooling around, you know, hah hah. I’m mocking your name. It’s a weird name.”

  He had a sense of humour and it was exactly why he was drawn to her, immediately, but there was something about her, like when you shake an Etch-a-Sketch and it all goes blank. She had a look on her face—a smirk—like she knew she had that effect on him.

  “My father,”she said. “He’s out front. I think you know him? Any chance you could give us a hand with a bedframe? Just the bedframe, I promise, not everything. It’s just that it’s oak: an awkward, heavy lift. It needs three people.”

  He wanted to say, Sorry, I’m not supposed to lift anything right now. He wanted to say, I can barely get my own shirt on, and explain about the surgery. And he wanted to know why she’d said, I think you know him. But she’d slipped back inside before his tongue came unknotted. He figured he could manage one quick lift, using his right arm, the good arm. If only to spend another minute with her.