Away From Everywhere Read online

  By the time he got to the cemetery on Waterford Bridge Road, cars had him wet with the spray of slush. Cold wet slaps to the knees and hips, and twice to the face, a stinging left eye or a taste of salt. The sidewalks weren’t cleared and he had to walk along the margins of the road beside dirty mounds of grey snow. He could tell which drivers were innocently inconsiderate and which just didn’t care. It was in the brief flash of the brake lights, a sign the driver was taking in the damage in the rearview mirror, maybe cupping their mouth or screwing up their face in remorse.

  He found his mother’s headstone amongst the sea of others – unpolished black marble with worms of grey running through it – and realized he hadn’t been there in over a year. He wasn’t the type to find comfort in talking to a slab of marble, and leaving flowers next to her grave didn’t feel like connecting with her.

  Standing there above his mother, he didn’t know what to say, or do, or think, or why he’d even come there. He expected some vague feeling of relief or comfort, but got a flash of guilt and anger instead. An isolated memory from Jim Croaker’s trial filled his blank mind. He and Abbie had been lying on her couch, reading, when Alex burst into the house. He was just getting back from the trial. Owen wouldn’t go. He couldn’t go. He couldn’t be in the same room with the man, couldn’t not bring a knife or a rock of his own along to the courthouse. Couldn’t stand having the weapon confiscated before he could use it. Couldn’t stand having his image of the man refreshed. Or his guilt renewed. In his mind he was equally worthy of being on trial for his mother’s death, so he couldn’t sit beside his brother with that reality there between them.

  “He was bawling, Owen, crying his eyes out. Saying how sorry he was. He never meant to kill her. He kept saying he only meant to hurt her, as if that was okay in itself. Because she hurt his arm and took his Janine away . He sounded like a whiny, dumb kid. And his lawyer was playing up the sympathy card to go along with his theatrics. Going on about how he was an abused kid with a drunk for a father. What’s that supposed to change? He had a shitty father so our mother had to pay for it?”

  “So …how did it, like–”

  “His lawyer pushed for manslaughter, but the policemen who were there with you…that day…who seemed like they felt a little guilty, played up the willful disregard for life card. That’s how the lawyer nailed Jim with second degree murder. His willful disregard for life. Yet the motherfucker was allowed to kick on that door, day after day, uttering threats, with a willful disregard for life , until he managed to drag Mom out the door.”

  He looked at Owen, added, “Or whatever,” and looked down at his feet.

  “Until I dragged Mom out the door for him, you mean?”

  “Owen, no. The time for that is over now. Jim did this. Not you. I’m sorry for what I said that night. It was in the heat of the moment, you know?”

  Just like that, the memory was gone.

  It was cold, so cold his hands were numb even though he had them gloved and tucked deep into his pockets, yet he felt better there than anywhere else in the world that day. He felt away from everywhere. Invisible walls surrounded him. His breath hung like clouds in front of him with each exhale.

  He sat beside her gravestone, leaning on it, feeling the grain of the headstone tug against his jacket. He rested his head against it and stared at the branches of a birch tree swaying in the wind. Rhythmically. With each gust of wind the branches swayed in a way that filtered the light like a kaleidoscope. It made the ground beneath the tree look afire with dancing sunlight. Lines of blue and grey and yellow criss-crossing each other at random. Almost like TV static now. He reached for his notepad:

  What is it about light that has this tree in front of me ten feet tall and still reaching, still growing, still stretching towards the sun? I want to want something like that. To be that salmon swimming upstream, to be that determined. To be Ghandi, to care enough about something to starve myself. This indifference. I am not alive, I am not dead, I am something worse.

  Minutes later, there was something about that ephemeral dancing light, how a cloud could soon end it, could soon block out the sun. And there was something about the stark-but-calm cawing of the one black crow in the whole graveyard, hopping along in the flickering light beneath that tree. How the wind blew snow and covered its tracks with each exhale, like the crow had no past to turn and contemplate, or the past didn’t matter: a statement that there is forward movement only. There is nothing to be gained by dwelling on a past that is ultimately gone, buried, invisible and intangible. It made him reach for a pen. Everything looked equally symbolic of life and death, endings and beginnings. He wrote his first poem and rushed home to type it up. He was working on a collection called Home , trying to write short pieces set in every major landmark in St. John’s, knowing a gimmick like that can help a book get published, or at least act as a marketing strategy.

  He would’ve liked Abbie to be there when he got home. To share his first poem with her. Everything was starting to feel insignificant now that he had no one to share it with. He missed calling her into his office to read out a line or two, or to ask for her opinion on what to do next in a story he was working on. Should I cut this story off here, or add this last paragraph? He was only ever sure on a piece after she’d calmed all of his concerns and agreed with all his choices. He liked the way her hand clutched his doorframe as she listened, thought about her answers, and shared them. He liked her hands, the way the hair fell away from her face. He liked the impression of her chest beneath her sweater, the cling of it against her. He liked seeing her this way. It wasn’t a sexual desire, a mere attraction, it was simply a comfort, or an appreciation of something graceful, right there in front of him and tangible.

  Owen was sinking deeper and deeper by the day; something was swallowing him whole. One day he took the kettle off a red hot burner and felt like he could press the palm of his hand on the burner and it wouldn’t hurt. Everything had lost significance. It concerned him enough to go to his doctor.

  “I’m not depressed, but I don’t care if I live another day. I am not psychotic like my father, but I don’t feel in touch with reality. I feel like, if someone attacked me on the street, I’d just lie there and take the beating, submissively, and not even feel the pain. I feel like my actions don’t have consequences, like I could walk in front of a bus and survive it. Like I could witness a murder and not feel emotionally connected to the scene.”

  Given his father’s history, the doctor looked into Owen’s complaints. Weeks later, after a barrage of interviews and a seemingly childish questionnaire, he was told he had depersonalization disorder, and that there was little that could be done for him, for now.

  “Medications are in the works,” the doctor told him, “but like any disease or disorder, pharmaceutical companies tend to focus their research on conditions that millions suffer from, like cancer and diabetes, so they can get rich off the medications they invent.”He shook his head, genuinely disgusted. “When it comes to something as obscure and unpopular as DPD, well, there’s no money in that.”

  The doctor laid his clipboard down and took a seat to deliver some of the worst news to Owen. “I’ve got a pamphlet to give you on DPD, and a few websites you might want to check out too.”

  He handed Owen the white and green pamphlet: a poorly drawn cartoon of a depressed-looking teenager staring at the light at the end of a tunnel. He’d wait until he left the doctor’s office to throw it in the garbage. It would be rude to do so in front of him.

  “But there are a few things I want to give you, a sort of heads-up on in person.” He cleared his throat and brushed his bulbous nose with an index finger. “People suffering from DPD are prone to relationship issues, Owen, because intimacy can feel foreign when the disorder peaks. And drug dependency and alcoholism are common, because drugs and alcohol can make a DPD sufferer feel ‘more alive,’ as you say, when they are feeling detached from themselves. So I need you to be honest with yourself if you find
yourself drinking, or worse, and come to me, okay? There are a lot of good programs I can turn you on to.”

  Owen smiled through the whole summary. Alcoholism and bachelorship hadn’t concerned him, schizophrenia had. Owen was simply relieved he wasn’t succumbing to the schizophrenia that consumed his father. Alex had mentioned– his concern for himself and Owen in his voice – that most research indicates schizophrenia is hereditary. Owen didn’t need to hear it. Didn’t need to know that. There were no steps to take to prevent it. There was no way to screen yourself for it, like a simple blood test. It just reached out its hand and grabbed you when you were at your weakest.

  In those weeks before his diagnosis with depersonalization disorder, a rabid fear of schizophrenia sometimes kept him up at night. It made his mind wander as he lay in bed; that noise outside the window, maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe he was crazy for wondering what the noise was, for picturing scenarios in his head. Was it a tree branch? A person? Any man’s mind can wander like that at night, he knew that, but he also knew that a schizophrenic’s mind can wander so far it gets lost. That fear of schizophrenia was the last thing his father had left behind for his sons.

  He got home that day and started to read the pamphlet. At its worst, on the bad days, DPD sufferers can feel detached from themselves. Most sufferers describe the feeling of detachment as not feeling emotionally reactive to what is happening to them, or not feeling present in their body, as if they are watching their life as a movie, and yet they can carry out all their daily work and social responsibilities just fine… By the end of the first paragraph, he’d crumpled it up and thrown it away.

  …typically caused by childhood traumas, witnessing something traumatic, or… The words, the causes, it all made him feel weak, pathetic, and he didn’t want to know what it all meant, or how long it would last, or why Alex never had all these problems.

  IN NEW SKIN

  August 22nd, 2008,

  In the garden, desperately in need of fresh air.

  The danger of being human is our ability to justify our actions.

  It’s been happening for a while now. We started exchanging looks a long time ago, biting into each other’s souls with hungry eyes. Not even lewd glances, just a desperate but denied gaze. Wanting the new beginning. The escape, from the world before now.

  On some nights, those eyes feel more like invisible hands, a soft embrace. A physical manifestation of hope, of how it could be, sort of massaging me into a weak state, a lapse of judgment, so that I might lay my body beside his.

  And then we moved on from there, having to satisfy the body’s need for contact, for touch, the one sense we cannot, literally cannot, live without.

  Or deny.

  We started finding reasons to brush past each other, to toucheach other. Even if I’ve seen it a dozen times before, I’ll say “nice shirt,” and rub his shoulders a little, pretending to examine the material, but more truthfully rubbing his shoulders in a way to let him know that I am good with my hands. I deflate when he touches me. I slip out of my skin. He seems to tense up. I like to think of it as him being struck stiff, erect and aroused. But sometimes he’ll almost haul away, like he can’t take it.

  Today was too much.

  Owen was particularly “alive” today, as he says, and he was tangling himself up in the monkey bars with the girls, and dizzying himself by spinning them around and around on the merry-go-round, charged on by their laughter. So I couldn’t just sit there on the bench reading like I usually do. Watching them all laughing like that, I wanted in on the fun. They all headed over to a red plastic tunnel connecting a set of monkey bars to the slide. “C’mon, Mommy, come get in the tunnel with me and Callie and Uncle Owen, pleeeease!”

  She didn’t have to beg. The four of us ended up in the tiny tunnel. It was hardly big enough for four kids, let alone two kids and two adults. It was claustrophobic, we were almost stuck in there, but the girls loved it. They pretended we were all trapped, and made Owen and me pretend as well.They shimmied and squirmed until me and Owen were lewdly squat together. Sandwiched in a way that went my leg – Owen’s leg – my leg – Owen’s leg. He was in cloth shorts, and I was in a thin, loose summer dress; we could barely feel the clothes between us. They had me pressed down on him so hard that my breasts were pancaked on his throat, and we were more or less hugging each other, my palms flat against the bottom of the plastic tunnel. My lips closer to his lips than they’ve ever been, and some primal magnetism drawing them closer and closer until I felt his warm breath jacket my lips. I got close enough that our noses touched. And untouched, andtouched again. We both pretended not to notice. I could feel him, IT, against my inner thighs, and we pretended not to notice. As Callie and Lucia jostled around, swinging their arms, telling their animated stories about how we were trapped in a submarine, they rocked and squirmed to simulate a sinking ship. Their movements had me rubbing it with my thigh, and I caught myself adding a more sensual motion to how they had me rocking against him. And that’s when I yelled at my daughters to stop what they were doing and get out of the tunnel. Even Owen jolted at the tone of my voice, though he looked relieved. Relieved and something akin to embarrassed.

  That was the first time I’ve ever unjustifiably yelled at my daughters. We all crawled out of the tunnel and Callie’s lips were trembling. She was hurt, but too frightened and taken off guard to know it yet. Lucia stood behind Owen, pouty and baffled. Owen pretended to comfort her so he wouldn’t have to look up at me.

  “You were hurting Mommy’s neck and elbows was all. I’m very sorry I yelled, I was hurting and I panicked. Mommy is sorry, okay?”

  Maybe it was the first time I lied to them as well? My neck was just fine, slung down over Owen like that. I liked my hair on his face. I liked it too much. If today wasn’t a line crossed, I don’t know what will be. If my daughters weren’t there I would have kissed him. Kissed him in a way that said I loved him, and kissed him in a way that would have led to sex.

  And now we’re almost avoiding each other, as if that was sex we’d just had. And despite the clothes that lay between us, it was just as thrilling as sex. The erotic gnaw of not touching each other. The way he was breathing, how his inhales would lift my body. I rose and fell against him, slowly, soothingly.

  Now I just feel dirty. Alex will be home soon. The three of us will sit around a table, small talk and pork souvlaki. At no point tonight will I feel as alive as I did in that tunnel today.And at no point tonight will I rid this guilt. It’s in my pores now, too deep to scrub out or ignore. I fear I wear it like a dress everyone can see.

  It’s all changing the way I look at my children too, my daughters. Less confidently, like I am denying them a secure parental unit and lying to them somehow. Denying them something different from, but equal to, safety: the only definite motherly duty. And I am, or some part of me is, the sole cause of what I am doing wrong to them. A part of me that has nothing to do with being a mother, but everything to do with being a woman, yet I can’t separate the two without literally tearing myself in half.

  Falling in love is so easy, so natural, so romantic. Falling out of love is so painful, so hard, so sharp that it cuts into you with every breath. I feel trapped in my life before now. Fenced in by it. Caged in. Denying myself something the world is offering, quite readily, and won’t stop until I take it.

  FATE AND MISFORTUNE

  SINCE THE DAY HE SCRIBBLED that poem at his mother’s grave, Owen took to sitting and writing at her headstone for the rest of the winter. When spring came, the snow began to melt and made a wet, muddy mess of the place he once sat. So he bought a collapsible camping chair and brought it along with him. He knew it was an odd or even morbid setting to write in, but sitting under the shelter of the city’s tallest birch tree was serene, and the isolation made him productive. The fresh air was stimulating and the sunlight that filtered through the evergreens was calming. It all kept him focussed. The only sound was the distant hum of traffic, the soothing h
iss from the taps and hoses the cemetery left running for people who wanted to fill planters and flower pots on gravestones. There was also an occasional fluttering of finches and dark-eyed juncos in the trees above him. The birds got used to his presence within a few minutes of his arrival every day. If he didn’t finish a granola bar, he’d fling it to the birds. He tore the crust off his sandwiches for them.

  It was quiet in the cemetery. It was loud in his apartment and he hated it there. Everywhere else he could go felt like hassling reminders of feeling lost in life. On rainy days, he’d sneak into the university library, but the busy footsteps of all those students around him made him feel like he should be heading off to a class himself. And he’d grown sick of working around the visiting hours at theWaterford, only to sit and stare at that shell of a man who used to contain his father.

  At his mother’s grave though, the world felt a little farther away and life hassled him less. If someone did come around, they didn’t bother him, because people keep to themselves in a cemetery; the most they’d burden him with was a hardy nod of the head. Nothing existed except the story he was writing.