Away From Everywhere Page 19

  Owen was on his hands and knees now, like a dog. He’d fallen face-first into hard, crusty, ice-glazed snow. It was sharp: a bed of needles pressing into his cheeks and eyes. He rolled over onto his side and looked up to see his brother standing over him. He pressed his shoe down on Owen’s face as if it were a giant fetid insect he wanted squat, forcing his face into hard, crusty ice. The wet footprint on his cheek was cold and soothed the sting. He could taste the snow in his mouth now, and it was a mild distraction from the pain. Alex stamped his chest and Owen felt as if his ribs had cracked, all of them. He panicked and gasped for air and got none, and his lungs felt filled with fire. And then a pop, a ringing ear, the lobe split from the pressure of the kick.

  Owen tried his hardest to whisper,“Not now, Alex, c’mon. Not here, not in front of Callie and Lucia. Not in front of Callie and Lucia.”

  The girls were frantic, screeching so loudly their throats sounded raw and bloody.

  “Not in front of the girls? You think you own them now too? Hey?Talking like you’re their fucken father…at my wife’s grave.”

  Callie broke free of Lillian’s grip. Lillian just wept, and threw her arms up in the air, and looked on and then away from the scene, again and again.

  “It should’ve been you that died in that car, you piece of shit drunk, because at least no one would miss you. But no, it’s like Mom all over again. Here you are and there Hannah is.”He pointed at her headstone, only now noticing Owen’s blood there.

  Alex looked betrayed that the girls were pleading for their father to stop beating on Owen. They grabbed at their father as he swatted their hands away like flies.

  “Alex, it’s not the right time for this.”

  “Here, why don’t you take them too?”

  He grabbed Callie by the arm, hard enough to hurt her, and shoved her down on top of Owen. It was too much. Owen finally stood up and comforted Callie, told her it was okay, that Daddy was sorry and didn’t mean to upset her. Owen looked up and saw Alex staring at his daughter now. Unsure, with a slight trembling of atonement about him. Alex saw only his daughter now, what he’d just done to her. He turned and saw Lillian appalled,Lucia afraid of him. Both of his daughters feared him now. He swung his head around the scene like a man deeply sorry and deeply ashamed, totally silent now, and yet there was that look of relief and vindication that strangely meant he was only human.

  When two policemen approached them, Owen waved them off and assured them all was well. He had an arm around Callie and used her like a crutch. He pressed the fingers of his other hand into the cut near his temple to assess the damage. He ran the backs of his fingers over the bump on his head.

  The police drove Owen home from the graveyard, and at the first red light they broke a ten-minute silence. The one who spoke was a stereotypical, fat-but-fit mustached cop. He spoke to Owen by meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror. “I would encourage you to press charges, sir. Frankly, any man who would get violent in front of his children like that…well…I have to question not only his parenting, but if he is abusive himself…”

  Owen only laughed, sardonically. Shook his head. Saw the officers look at him, then each other, perplexed. Why bother telling them that they had it all wrong, that they had shown up too soon and that he deserved much worse a beating. Instead he simply laid his head against the window and followed telephone wires with his eyes, up and down and up and down between poles. An occasional bird on a wire. Clouds ready to rain.

  As the police car pulled into Lillian’s driveway he sighed with relief. Her house was covered in ivy and surrounded by trees, which made it appear hidden from the world. It gave the sense that he could crawl into that house and disappear from the world, or at least be protected from it. He wanted a house like this for himself now, in a much smaller town back in Newfoundland, or maybe Alaska, that mystical place his father talked about so much. Maybe Italy, the one place on the globe he’d ever cared to visit. But the balance in his bank account was no more impressive than a teenager’s, and his reality reflected that. He had no alternative to staying with his benevolent aunt and being stranded in his brother’s town, unwanted.

  He got out and tried to shut the car door, but it wouldn’t close because the buckle of the seat belt was hanging out. He didn’t bother to deal with it and kept walking towards the house. He wanted to be hidden away in his room when Lillian got home.

  The officer in the driver’s seat hopped out to fix the seat belt. Owen threw his arm up to wave them off. He checked his pockets for his keys and they weren’t there. He’d have to sit out back and wait for Lillian.

  That same night Lillian woke Owen around midnight. She was careful to find a part of his body not bruised or cut, and squeezed him gently from his sleep. He rolled over and saw Lillian’s tired face illuminated by the orange glow from the digital display on a small black portable telephone. She slowly extended her hand to Owen and almost cringed as he reached out for the telephone, like it was a blade he was about to squeeze in his hand. She left him alone with the phone, but stood close enough to his bedroom door to listen in on the conversation.

  It was Alex, Owen knew it. He recognized something in the silence. He couldn’t decide on the tone of his hello and breathed deeply into the receiver, waiting for the courage, for all the right words to come to him.

  “Owen?”

  “Alex?”

  “Owen, it’s Alex. I’m sorry about today.”

  The sound of his brother’s voice evoked a smile: his emotional and physiological responses confusing each other.

  Owen cut his brother’s apology off abruptly. “Alex, listen, I deserved it … I deserved worse. You don’t get to feel bad here, and–”

  “Don’t talk! I don’t want to hear your goddamn voice, okay? Not right now anyway. This is my turn to talk, you might never get yours, and really, you don’t deserve it. You do deserve an apology though, and I am truly sorry. That was not how I wanted to end things between us. I was possessed and overrun by something bigger than me. Nobody deserves to get beaten like that, and that’s not what I wanted to do to you, okay? I don’t hate you. I love you. That’s what makes a mess of all this, and my actions today are not how I wanted to end things between us.” Alex paused briefly, like he didn’t want to ramble on like this and talk in circles.

  “I don’t want to physically hurt you. I don’t want revenge. I just want to move on without you in my life anymore. I forgive you because I know you never meant to hurt me. It was out of your hands, for both you and Hannah, whatever developed between you. The same way my emotions were out of my hands today.”He paused, like he sounded too forgiving now, but he let it slide, if only to be done with the conversation as soon as possible.

  “So this is it, Owen. Goodbye. And I am sorry about today. I gave Lillian a cheque for you. Twenty grand. It’s enough to get you back to Newfoundland and out of mine and the girls’ lives. Maybe you should go to Dad’s old cabin for a while. Maybe you can look Abbie’s number up. Whatever. Just, for me, and you owe me this: leave. Forget about me and Callie and Lucia and Hannah. I took more out on you today than you deserved. It was about more than Hannah, it was years’ worth of pent up–”

  “I know, Alex–”

  “Shut up,Owen! I can’t take hearing your voice right now. I asked you not to talk, didn’t I? Fuck. Can you just shut up and listen only?”

  He tried to curb the anger. Thirty seconds passed before Alex spoke again. He filled that silence with a clicking noise he made from plunging his tongue down into the floor of his mouth. It wasn’t so much a nervous twitch as it was something he did to calm himself when overwhelmed by emotions.

  “I also don’t want you feeling like we are square now that I beat you. It wasn’t an equivalent to redemption.”

  Another half minute of silence passed before Alex spoke again. He took one last sigh.“You never did this to hurt me, so I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to forgive you and forget you, like I have with Mom and Dad. I also thou
ght you might like to know that the girls are okay. Well … better. Getting there. When we all got home I came up with a tentative explanation for why I hurt you, and we are all okay now.”

  More silence, like he was contemplating the next spiel.

  “Maybe it’d be nice if you sent them a Christmas card next Christmas, or something small like that. Let some time pass. But please, because you owe it to me, take the money and just go. It’s not out of my pocket. It’s from …her life insurance. I hope the writing game works out for you, Owen. You deserve it. Maybe I’ll even buy your book. But I don’t owe you another word.”

  Alex slammed the receiver down. The sound of it, the scratches and the click, coursed through Owen’s body like a jolt of electricity. He was taking in a breath as his brother said his last words, and ten seconds passed between his brother hanging up and Owen exhaling.

  He laid down the phone on his bedside table and saw the cheque there. Twenty grand. Lillian must have laid it there when she brought in the phone. He’d feel criminal if he took the money, and yet he owed it to Alex to leave town. He’d take that money and spend some time in his father’s old cabin near Terra Nova National Park, back in Newfoundland.

  He started packing on the spot, and all his belongings fit in one large grey duffle bag that had belonged to his father. There was a time his father put him in that very bag and Alex in another and swung them around in circles like a carnival ride. He’d give them guns and tell them they were fighter pilots and make all the grunts and noises of gunfire, or he’d tell them they were caught in the middle of a tornado and sound out the gush of vicious circular winds. Owen thought of that as he packed the bag full, and it was hard to imagine that life now. And it was hard to imagine that a bag could be kept so long and witness such a change in the family it was servicing. And it was hard to imagine that he could once fit in a duffle bag. He found himself pressing the bruises on his ribs, accepting the pain to quiet his mind. He picked at the scab on his ear where Alex’s foot had split his flesh.

  In that moment, everything seemed inconceivable and hazy. Was his childhood, before the death of his family, really as magnificent as he remembered, or had hindsight glorified his earliest memories?

  The act of packing that duffle bag was almost rejuvenating. There was a false sense of hope for something good in something new, because at least nothing worse could happen to him now. He put his laptop and Hannah’s diary on top of the bag and decided he’d rather take a ferry back to Newfoundland than a plane. He wanted to feel the cold chill of the ocean. He wanted the trip to take a while, so that he could feel the distance he was putting between him and his brother. Between his past and his present.

  IN PLACE OF A GOODBYE

  November 13th, 2008,

  From my bed, sinking again.

  Two years ago today, you were born dead. I never did give you a name because it only would’ve made it all that much harder on me. See, if I named you I’d know who I miss, who I never got to know. But every November 13th you are all I think about, my only son, and for what it’s worth I think a part of you stayed with me. It’s as if your soul, since you died in my body, stayed within me. I still feel some connection with you, and I want to think that connection is more profound than a mere reluctance to let you go. So you may haunt me all you want.

  It feels negligent and cold to mourn you only on your birthday/the day you died, but it’s all I can muster, emotionally.I know there is a league of women out there who would agree with me that the hardest part of a stillbirth is having to go through with the labour in a silent, somber room. There is no crying baby, no relief followed by joy, no roomful of pink or blue balloons. There is just the saddest and most futile moment of your life.

  One percent of pregnancies end this way, I was told.One-fucking-percent, just enough to matter. One in a hundred women never see this coming. One in a hundred pregnant women will walk through life with the ghost of their child stuck within them, never knowing what they look like, laugh like, and live for.

  My useless prude of a doctor says it might help to talk or write about it so I will. I will say that the second worst part of a stillbirth is the absolute lack of warning signs. There was the shopping for cute clothes, the sporadic kicks from within, the flipping through that baby name book I bought on a whim in a line-up at some grocery store, and then there was nothing.For days. I figured if something went wrong it would be obvious, like a sharp pain or a lot of bleeding. Instead I felt nothing and I didn’t consider feeling nothing something to worry about. I guess I knew something might be wrong, but I waited, I lied to myself, I made up scenarios, like maybe you were just sleeping. Does a seven-month-old fetus even sleep?

  Owen was here with me today, thank God for that. He doesn’t know about you. He doesn’t know that this stillbirth was somehow, indirectly, the last blow for our sex life. Alex wanted to surprise Owen with the news of our son-to-be. He saw being able to hide a pregnancy as a perk of them living in different provinces.

  So Owen didn’t know, but thankfully he acted perfectly today, as perfectly as I needed him to, as if he did know. He didn’t want sex, he didn’t talk too much. We lay on opposite ends of the couch and he tangled his legs into mine in a way that shared the pain, and in a way that the girls wouldn’t read too much into.

  We watched stupid reality TV shows and Oprah. She talked about the top ten healthiest foods and how to age gracefully. I would have preferred tips on how to start again. He made uslunch and fixed my tea just right. He had to run out to the post office at four and called on the way home to see if I’d rather him pick up a pizza than cook. I couldn’t even eat today, let alone cook. Why is it harder this year?

  I am glad no one called to acknowledge it today. I wasn’t in the mood to act strong. And I am glad that Alex either forgot or chose not to say anything about it at breakfast this morning.

  I find myself more engrossed by kids’ shows these last two years, and more able to relate to children, and I wonder if there IS some ghost of you within me, and that is why. I sound crazy, I know, but I had to finally say that out loud, or write it out anyway. And I am sorry. I am sorry if there was something I did wrong, or if I could have prevented this somehow, like going to the doctor more often than I did or sooner after I felt you stop moving. For what it is worth, I made them check again and again for any sign of life in you. I made them wheel me into a different room so we could use a different machine in case there was something wrong with the first one. I even asked two different nurses to operate those machines in case one of them was overlooking something. And then I made Alex try out both machines. By the time I gave up everyone thought I was insane, and I could tell by their faces and the way the held their bodies that they wanted to yell at me for my frustrating persistence, but they were too polite to scold a grieving mother.

  I remember, painfully, how on the second attempt to hear you in there, I heard a thumping noise and shrieked. I thought it was your heart beating, but it was my own. The nurse was right, it wasn’t the typical swooshing noise I’d heard before.The swooshing noise of an ultrasound for a healthy baby. That sound wasn’t there at all, there was only the sound of my own broken heart thumping away. Do-dah, Do-dah, Do-dah, KKSSHHhhh…

  Placental malfunction. I don’t know. All those stupid medical terms I heard that day go way over my head. You’d have to ask your father what the real problem was termed. My placenta failed us, so it was technically my fault. It separated from me and you weren’t getting enough blood, which meant nutrients and oxygen. How did my womb support two eight-pound girls, and not you? I carried you for seven months. I imagined you into existence. Then I had to explain to your sisters that they would never get to meet you. They never really understood and don’t seem to remember. Maybe I am a little jealous.

  I love Callie and Lucia, but you were going to be my little boy.I had a few names ready and I was going to choose the one that came to me the moment our eyes met. I was going to give you the name I saw myself cal
ling you for the rest of your life.The name I would write on all your birthday cards and Christmas gifts, or what I’d yell when I scolded you for getting into trouble at school.

  During the seven months we shared my body I developed an idea of who you might be. A month before you died we moved into a new house so you could have your own bedroom, the one Owen has been sleeping in. I think that maybe you’d have liked animals, nature, been an environmentalist and guilted us into composting and recycling everything possible. I think you’d have the presence and dignity not seen in men these days. I think your words, because of their sincerity and your nobility, could convince anyone you were right, even if you were wrong. You’d have all the strengths of your father and uncle combined, and without their wretched weaknesses and childhood scars. I think that you would have had only serious long-term relationships and treated those girls like they dreamt of being treated. You would rebound from heartbreak with a lesson learned, not a wound carried along into the next relationship, like your father or his brother. Hair kept short so it wouldn’t tease your forehead or your ears, corduroys wouldfeel more comfortable than denim. I picture you telling me all about your important job and using words I don’t understand, but I’d nod my head to keep you talking to me, just because I love the sound of your voice.