Away From Everywhere Page 18

  I saw forty-three years’ worth of memories seep out of my mother in that one minute she lay there between life and death. As they fled from her, I imagine them all as being pleasant, except for those last few years with Dad losing his mind and all. None of us truly recovered fromthat, we just carried on. There is a big difference.

  As I think back on her now, I can’t help but wonder if it was all those pleasant memories she had that made her a better person than me, because I believe we are a product of our experiences, not our genes. I believe that we head into each new day as the construct of all memories preceding that day. I think this is why my brother and I are so different, we have kept or discarded different memories. I think maybe it is my brother’s ability to erase the same wretched memories I have that makes him a more stable person than me. We are all born equal, they say, and at birth we are all blank slates, no memories, no identities, no ambitions or desires. But that all changes the second we take our first breaths. That all changes with everything we see, taste, touch, smell and hear until the day we die.

  My mother, the day my grandfather died, told me that my grandfather wasn’t really dead. I never really understood her at the time, but she promised that someday I would. What she meant was that he had an impact on far too many people’s lives to simply stop existing the day he died. He would live on in memory, in how he influenced who my mother and I were. What she said was:all that remains of us is in our children. We live on in our children.

  What does that say about me? Am I really my parents? The best of them? The worst of them? A random mix? In any case I feel a terrible let-down. It’s that notion, that statement of hers, that makes me feel depressed and felonious, not simply that I am a mess or a failure. Because if it is true that all that remains of my mother is in me, in who and what I am, I have disgraced the most beautiful woman I have ever known. I have also disgraced my distinguished and benevolent father and hisfamily name. I am nothing, and that speaks so poorly to their character. Thank God, or whatever made us, for Alex.

  When I get out of this clinic, maybe I can work towards a better life. It’s a sad realization: there is no more for me outside of these walls than there is within them.I have wasted my life, at least a decade of it, and it might be too late for me. Our whole lives Alex and I have knocked how each other lives, what the other wanted out of life. We were both capable of greatness in whatever fields we chose. I guess the difference is he chose, I got distracted. By alcohol, and the whole quixotic writing thing. Or was it the lousy childhood, something so obviously simple and Freudian? Our past was like a tumour inside of us, but mine was a cancer and his was benign.

  I have no trouble accepting the blame for where I’ve gone wrong. I’ve taken the blame for plenty of shit growing up, even when it wasn’t even my fault, and I have never resented or regretted doing so. Take the incident with Greg Evans’ mother. She was there for us during all that shit with Dad going away. So when her ex-boyfriend started making her life difficult, we thought we were helping. The idea was to leave a note threatening him to back off, and to light his compost bin on fire. The fire got out of hand though. We’d used too much fire-starter fluid, and Alex took off, leaving me with the decision to let the guy’s house burn down or get caught. I suppose there was no point in both of us getting in trouble, and as always it was understood that I was the one who should take the fall for something like this.

  The stalker guy opened his patio door as I was hosing out the fire with his sprinkler. He had called the cops the second he saw me. I thought I got away with it all, since I took off over his fence before the cops showed up. I jumped his fence like a hurdle and never looked back. I guess herecognized me as a friend of Greg’s. I imagine the note helped, and he knew what school we all went to. The next day the cops questioned me, and well, convinced me not to lie, I guess. Given my age and motive, I got off with some community service. I was cleaning up litter and planting flowers as punishment while Alex sat at home playing our new video games. This meant he was always a level or two ahead of me and ruined any surprises, so I stopped playing those stupid games even though they were the simplest and easiest source of joy in my life at the time.They sort of distracted us from the silence in the house since Dad was sent away. I remember hating Alex for that, and wondering if the hate was ill-placed.

  A stewardess came by with a drink tray as Alex read the last line, as if he’d mentally summoned her, empathetic telepathy. He asked for a double scotch on the rocks, tilted his chair back, and was thankful there was no one sitting beside him. He twirled the glass in his hands, listened to the ice cubes clink off the glass, and let that piece sink in. Did Owen harbour any subconscious unspoken resentment of him? If so, was it warranted?

  He brought the glass to his nose and sniffed. An odd habit of his was to smell any food or drinks before consuming them. The smell of alcohol unexpectedly turned him off. To drink it suddenly felt like siding with the devil that had done his brother in. It was alcohol that had made a bloody mess of him. He set the glass back down in the oversized cup holder and stared at the clouds.

  Alex realized the most significant differences between him and Owen had always revolved around their feelings about their father, before and after the schizophrenia. Growing up,Owen never complained about their father’s shitty station wagon the way Alex did, and made do with their allowance, even if it wasn’t as much as their friends got from their parents. Alex was always sure to let his family know they were poor, relative to most of his friends. Their mother’s never-changing retort: Well you must have some rich friends, sweetie, because you’ve got your own bedroom and want for nothing!

  He thought of their Uncle Ross, his father’s only brother. He remembered that Ross always flew in to see their father, at Christmas and over summer vacation, but his father never traveled to visit Ross. He later pieced it together that Ross had ten times the money his father had, and that was why he was the one to absorb the travel cost of seeing the other. Ross had a home in St. John’s, and another in the Caribbean somewhere. On one trip home, he offered to buy their father a new car to replace that shitty old thing you’re driving . The old, dated car Alex hated so much. Alex couldn’t believe his uncle’s generosity, but their father refused, muttered something about character, and it does the trick, point A to point B.

  Alex never spoke to his father for weeks, and one morning he took his father’s toothbrush and smeared the bristles along the inside of their toilet bowl. The whole situation surrounding the car made Alex think that Ross was superior to his father, and that money was a testament to a man’s character and inherent worth. From that point on he was convinced that a man defines himself not through education or spiritual enlightenment, but through what he owns and earns. You couldn’t look at a man like his father and see philanthropy and depth of character, but you could look at a man like Ross and see his money. He assumed that his father rejected Ross’ offer because he was jealous of Ross. Alex admired Ross, his money, the smell of his cologne, the hem and fit and price tags on all his suits, and that second home down on some island he could never remember the name of. He admired Ross, but Owen admired their father. Alex thought this madeOwen ignorant and beneath him.

  You grow up and be like Dad then, and I’ll grow and be like Ross. You can be a poor boring dimwit driving a crappy car, and I’llbe the one to come and visit you in my Porsche. Let’s make a bet right here today. Twenty bucks says I’ll be happier at thirty living like Ross and you’ll be as boring as Dad.

  He sat up in the seat on the plane feeling like he owed his brother twenty bucks. Owen might be the only person who knew it, but Alex was never happy. He always wanted more: a bigger house, a better car, and at times, a prettier wife. A more professional wife. A wife that didn’t need “warming up” before sex, because he didn’t have the time and energy for it anymore. He wanted a son but had two daughters, and as much as he loved them, they weren’t cognitively years ahead of the other children in their class like he imagine
d his children would be. He was a surgeon, but the hospital he was working in wasn’t cutting edge enough for him, wasn’t ranked as one of the top ten in the world.

  He picked up his drink, the ice cubes had melted. He emptied the glass in one quick gulp, and wiped the corner of his mouth with the sleeve of an Armani suit. Used it like a napkin. He set the glass back in the cup holder and decided that when Owen was released, whatever was left of him should come stay with him and Hannah for a while. For however long it took to get back on his feet. He was looking forward to it. And it would do Hannah some good to have someone in their spare room so she could start seeing it as a spare bedroom and not what it was intended to be. And maybe having Owen around would liven her up a little. Get her out of that funk. That years-long funk she’d been in.

  IF FISTS CoULD SPEAK OR WORDS COULD HEAL

  OWEN WOKE TO THE SOUND of a viciously hissing kettle and his Aunt Lillian’s motherly voice talking someone down on the telephone. The kettle stopped whistling and he could hear Lillian’s graceful hand searching the inside of a tin can for one of her chamomile teabags. That kettle squealed every morning as if it felt the pain of being burned. It was the noise that woke him every morning since she took him five and a half weeks ago.

  “One thing at a time or we’ll get nowhere at all!”

  Lillian was talking to Alex,Owen could tell. Alex had been calling more and more frequently for help with the girls. Any fatherly instinct he once had was thieved from him by grief and despair. It didn’t help that he had never been much of a father in the first place. He wasn’t a bad father; he just wasn’t an inherently good father. He was an absent father too preoccupied with work and his image to discover the simple joys that lay in spending time with his daughters. In hearing them laugh, in pushing their tiny excited bodies on a swing at the park, or in hearing their unlearned thoughts on God and life and insects. Hannah had listened to her girls explain why they thought spiders had eight legs and found their theories and reasoning fascinating. Owen would help the girls collect spiders in mason jars, and search the Internet for what kind of food to give a daddy-long-legs spider. Alex, however, just assumed that his girls hated spiders because they were girls, or because there is nothing inherently interesting about spiders.

  In the weeks after Hannah’s death, Lillian would come back home complaining about how messy Alex’s house was. Filthy, not fit for them kids to be in. The garbage didn’t even get out, there were fruit flies. All the dishes were dirty and strewn around empty bags of take-out and pizza boxes.

  Christmas that year was brutal, exactly three weeks after Hannah died. It was staged, faked, lived through with fleeting smiles and bursts of happiness snuffed out by the reality of their new family life flashing at random. Lillian wrapped the girls’ gifts that year, not their mother. Lillian did whatever she could when Alex called, and she was spending most nights at Alex’s house now, because Alex had forbidden her to bring the kids back to her house because Owen was there. She taught Alex how to use his washer and dryer and felt it was chauvinist of her nephew that he had left so much for Hannah to deal with. He couldn’t even prepare an edible meal for his daughters. He poured their baths too hot and never pestered them to finish their meals. He figured extra dessert was fine since it meant a full stomach. Over a period of about three weeks Lillian had pretty well straightened him and the girls out. They were all clear on what the girls were used to eating for lunch and what channels their favourite shows came on. She thought he was going to be fine until the phone rang that morning.

  “Alex, rambling on like this isn’t changing anything. I’ll be over in ten minutes. You’re due at that meeting with your boss at nine. I’ll be there at quarter to nine to watch the girls. While I’m there I’ll find a nice daycare for them to go to after school, and when you get home, I’ll go into their school and ask the teachers about making up lost time.”

  She was trying to calm Alex. Owen looked across the room at the telephone sitting on his bedside table and wanted desperately to pick up the receiver and listen in, but to be caught would be too awkward. He worried about Callie and Lucia. They knew he was staying with Lillian and knew that she was on speed dial, number 2.

  Days later, while Lillian was shopping for bird feed, they called him. They were crying too hard to get their words out, their throats too constricted. It was Callie on the phone, with Lucia shouting queries at her and into the receiver.

  “How come only Daddy loves us now?”

  “Callie, no…it’s…that’s not true, okay?”The words simply weren’t there to explain the mess to them. Their vocabulary didn’t include adultery and betrayal, and he didn’t want it to. Not yet.

  The words didn’t need to be there anyway, Owen did, to wipe the tears from their freckled faces, but he couldn’t be. The circumstances of their mother’s death meant they had to lose their uncle as well, but there was no way to express that. Every word those girls uttered into the phone felt like shears slicing into his heart; the longer the sentence the deeper the cut.

  “Ask him if he still loves us, Callie. Tell him Lucia said we got hamsters for Christmas but Daddy keeps forgetting to buy us a wheel. Ask him if he can get us the wheel. Tell him, Callie …what did he say?”

  He was as surprised as they were when he started crying. He didn’t know what to do with the tears as they wet his face, he wasn’t expecting it to affect his speech like that. C-Callie, t-tell your s-sister… All he could do was reassure them that he loved them, but that didn’t matter to two little girls who needed physical contact with him, the warm comforting blanket of a hug and kiss on the forehead.

  “I … I’m just really busy with work now, like Daddy always was before. But maybe sometime soon we can go for some ice creams at that store you like so much, okay? We’ll see. Be good girls for Daddy now, won’t you? Promise me? And your Aunt Lilly too. Okay, girls?”

  “But all the bugs we collected together are dead now. Even the pretty black-and-orange butterfly. Even the caterpillar you promised would turn into a butterfly if I took good care of it.”

  “It’s winter now,Callie. There’s no bugs to hunt, right? Ask Aunt Lillian for the hamster wheel okay? And…”he hesitated before lying, “maybe next summer we’ll go butterfly hunting. At the cabin.”

  He hung up wondering if she would grow up and consider him the man who killed his mother. They man who made a promise and never spoke to her again. The man who built a treehouse in her backyard, or the man who destroyed her family.

  Minutes after Owen got off the phone with his nieces, he found himself walking to Hannah’s grave, thinking he could temporarily escape it all by hiding out there. Her white marble headstone a brighter white than the dirty snow. It was still totally unweathered by the elements, except for smears from a few rotten, soggy leaves clinging to the base of it, some frozen into the inch of snow climbing up the stone. It was quiet enough that he could hear the wind, and bits of litter – empty chip bags and coffee cups – slapping off headstones.

  He was sitting at Hannah’s grave by noon and was still there at three o’clock when Alex arrived with the kids after school. It was as if the graveyard was designed in a way to provide for such privacy: Alex could not have seen Owen sitting at his wife’s grave until he ascended a hill and was within ten feet of him, and Owen never heard them approaching on account of the traffic, and the fact he just wasn’t paying attention to the world around him. Then he heard Lillian clear her throat, intentionally. And he heard his nieces, giddy and excited, their tones indicating they never really understood their situation. Uncle Owen?

  Owen stood, paralyzed, barely even breathing, speechless. The girls were trying to run towards him, but Alex had them clutched at the wrist by his gloved hands. They were an arm’s length away from his body, tugging against their father and trying to get free, but Alex’s hands were like chains clamped around their wrists. The heel of his black shoes dug into the snow so they couldn’t jerk him forward. Lillian took Lucia up in her
arms then, and Alex did the same with Callie, all the while glaring at Owen.

  Owen knew what was coming. It was clear in Alex’s eyes what his intentions were, and Owen knew he’d have to stand there and take it. That it would hurt. That it would hurt even more because it was a man he loved who would be inflicting the pain. A man he loved had good reason to close his fist and bust open his jaw, drive skin into bone, draw blood. And he’d have to watch the whole thing, hopeless and repentant.

  Owen watched Alex dump Callie on Lillian, and watched Lillian start to panic, but he still couldn’t move. He wouldn’t move. He just stood there, waiting.

  Five sprinting paces and Alex was right there in his face. Owen dropped to his knees to take it, and halfway down he felt a foot pressed against the back of his head, and saw Hannah’s gravestone coming forcifully towards him. He heard Lillian and the girls screaming now, fear thick in their pitch, and felt the thud of her headstone against him like a gunshot. Felt his neck almost snap as his head met the stone at a sharp angle, and his brother’s boot kept it there, sliding his forehead across the stone. He hit the ground then, looked up and saw a drop of blood in the indented C of Here Lies Hannah Collins . There was blood collecting in the hair of his left eyebrow. It was warm. He looked to Lillian, knowing he couldn’t fight back, and saw that her first instinct was not to haul Alex back, not to choose sides, but to shield the girls from as much of this image of their father as she could. She was trying to spin them around, turn their backs on it all, cover their eyes. They fought against her, trying to shake themselves loose.