Away From Everywhere Read online

  Owen was stabilized and alone in his room. Through the dead silence he heard doctors asking for more suction, more blood. More light. The shouts and screams were getting louder and more urgent. And then a sustained beep tore through Owen’s room. It sank into him like a bullet in slow motion. He heard Alex swearing, then wailing, then being constrained and comforted. Something got knocked over; it sounded like pennies falling, like metal on metal, for five long seconds.

  Owen expected Alex moments later. He expected his brother to barrel into the room and grab him by his neck and snap it. To yell, to shout in a way that brought saliva out with the words. He braced himself for it, not to protect himself, just out of instinct. But Alex never set foot in his room.

  Owen sat alone in cold silence for days, contemplating life, suicide, love: the intricacies of each, the flipsides. He thought of his place in the world now, without family, without Hannah, without love, and without hope.

  A GHOST, ALIVE

  ONE GLANCE OUT HIS WINDOW and he saw it was one of those grey days, maybe rain, the kind of day he could use as an excuse to be lazy, to stay in bed and avoid the world. Mummified in white sheets and propped up against a mahogany headboard, he sat up in bed, sipping bitter black coffee from an oversized white mug, a novel splayed over his knees. He’d paused to stare out the window. Grey clouds clung to a grey sky, like balls of lint on an endless blanket. The same crow was zipping left to right and right to left, etching temporary black lines across the window.

  The book fell off his lap and lay front cover down on the beige carpet. He stared at it on the floor. He’d lost his page. He couldn’t concentrate enough to read anyway. Every ten minutes he was back in that car.

  Another sip of coffee.

  He’d placed the filter so carelessly in the carafe that he could feel the grit of coffee grounds against his teeth, and the steam rising from the mug coaxed tears from his eyes. The cold of the day had crept in through his window and crawled into bed with him, so he fetched a black downfilled comforter from the hall closet in a futile attempt to stay warm. Everything about his life felt futile now. Memories of Hannah were constantly batting off his skull like wasps trapped in a jar: buzzing, stinging, and clawing their way to the surface to play out over and over again.

  It was the morning of Hannah’s memorial service, and he’d awoken to a memory of them at Alex’s cabin: Hannah dropping a CD into a stereo as Owen lit a fire in the fireplace. She laughed when she caught him reading the instructions on the store-bought log.“I think you just light them, Einstein. I think the idea is you burn the log!”

  He smiled at her sarcasm, as he always did. She never considered herself funny but laughed at herself habitually, and the sound of her laughing always walked right through him like a ghost.

  She turned and flashed him a black and purple CD cover: The Lioness . “Owen, you’ll love this album!” She always spoke so clearly, neglecting no syllables in her words. She pronounced album as AL BUM, as it if were two separate words.

  She pressed play, wandered over to the light switch, and flicked it off. The room was lit only by the fire now, and the flickering flames had her shadow dancing along the wall. Reflected black onto the ceiling, the glass of wine in her hand looked like a ten-pound goblet. “Most people make music you hear , but SongsOhia playmusic you feel . Do you know what I mean?”

  He insisted she drink it, even though he couldn’t now, because wine evoked something in her; it awakened her to the world and made her hypersensitive to its emotional landscape. She felt everything when she drank red wine. She’d describe those sensations with enough passion and detail that he often made jot notes and incorporated her ramblings, and everything about her, into his writing:

  Have a character likeHannah who uses her hands as much as her eyes to see the world.

  Lying in bed she says, “Love is most epic between those who cannot share it.”

  Have a character whose smile lingers, just a few seconds, after she laughs.

  A guy notices cat scratches in the headboard of his mistress’ bed, from where the cat climbs up into the window. This bed is also his brother’s bed. It took noticing the cat scratches, a detail, never to sleep with her in that bed again.

  He knew this made her nervous, his tendency to spin his own life experiences into short fictitious stories, but she’d told him it was what she loved about his writing as well: the free glimpses into his otherwise secretive personality, guessing the real people he based his characters on, and wondering which passages were drawn from his own life and which he merely imagined into existence.

  Owen was still kneeling by the fire when she approached him. She moved so silently across the room, she touched him with such grace and necessity, that he could love her guilt-free. He laid his head back, resting it on her breasts, and could smell her messy brown hair as it spilled over his face: like fresh rain on cement. She kissed his forehead.

  Her voice, the calming sound of it, was how he knew he loved her. “I saw this coming, you know, me and you.”

  Owen was comfortable with the affair by now, the awkwardness had passed, but he was still rendered uncomfortable by that label: me and you, us . It too blatantly disrespected Alex, it felt too insensitive, so he never responded to her, and she ran her hand through his hair, knowing how much he liked her fingers as a comb.

  “I don’t know, it’s…it’s dangerous and illogical that we can meet an absolute stranger and somehow relate to them before any words are shared, you know?”

  She tugged at the collar of his black sweater, exposing the bright red t-shirt below it. He looked up at her and she nodded her head towards the couch.

  They curled up to watch the fire burn, to watch shadows crawl along the walls and take each other in. He fumbled around on the couch, entangling himself in Hannah. They fit so well, so easily together, that it was hard to feel guilty. Two pieces of a two-piece puzzle was how she always described it. When Owen fell asleep on the couch that night, she threw a blanket over him and went off to her bedroom because Owen refused to sleep in Alex’s bed.

  Owen spent the rest of the day writing in bed, trying to convert some of the scribbles in his notepad into publishable short stories. Writing was his only chance at distraction now, his only means of actively forgetting. It was seven in the evening by the time he stopped to consider supper, and Hannah’s memorial service, he’d heard, was at eight. He could have gone, but he had enough respect and compassion for his brother not to show his still-bruised and unwanted face. He stood by his window, holding the curtains back with his right hand, watching a herring gull search for something in the snow-covered grass along the fence beneath the streetlight. There was nothing there. He caught a glimpse of himself in the window and stared at the purple halo around his left eye, and the teeth prints still stamped into his lower lip.

  In a way he was content to miss the service. He wanted to forget Hannah’s face, the specifics: the wet glistening of her chocolate eyes, and the two lines that formed brackets around her mouth whenever she smiled. He wanted to forget what she looked like because maybe then that lingering image of her, so frail and lifeless in the back seat, covered in blood and guilt, might stop haunting him. He slept with the light on for days after the accident, because darkness only triggered it. He’d pull a sheet over his head to find a balance, a compromise between lightness and darkness. It was her face that stood out the most: the gash on her chin so deep bone was exposed, and the laceration above her left eye so wide that her eyebrow was disjointed. He didn’t even have to close his eyes to see it. Her face superimposed itself on his mundane surroundings: a wall, or the kitchen table while he ate. The white ceiling above his bed, or his medicine cabinet mirror as he shaved. Sometimes she was screaming, her throat rattling or erupting blood. Her teeth dripping red.

  Since the accident, he’d become a recluse. Leaving the house was too much of a hassle: the shower, shaving, trying to look presentable enough to be out in public, and he stayed in bed so much a
fter the accident that he never got used to walking with his crutches. Inside, he could hide away from the world; he could pretend it wasn’t out there. Any of it.

  With the exception of his aunt, Lillian, no family members were bold enough to visit him during his stay in the hospital, and on the night Owen was released from hospital,Lillian took him out for supper before taking him home. It was a swank restaurant. The bright white tablecloth draped all the way down to the shiny hardwood floor so that Owen couldn’t see his aunt’s legs. He kept butting her shins by accident with his cast.

  “It’s okay, sweetie.” She pulled her chair back a little more each time he knocked her shins; the first kick hurt so much she had to massage the pain out of her leg, her taut face contorted into a temporary knot.

  The waiter came to take their orders, and she told him that they were waiting for a third person to join them. Owen’s head shot up from the menu like a jack-in-the-box, and the anxiety felt as solid as stone.

  She laughed as if to apologize to the impatient waiter.“It’s my daughter. She’ll be late for her own funeral, that one.”

  Owen hadn’t heard laughter in days, it sounded so hollow and contrived.

  “You’ll have to give us a few more minutes.” She flashed another apologetic smile to the waiter.

  She peeled back the sleeve of her black top to check her dainty watch. Lillian was a beautiful woman, the kind of fifty-nine-year-old who could wear that tattoo on her forearm with grace. It was a red Taoist symbol that meant nothing to anyone but her. She was a retired architect who looked, ate, and acted more like a typical art teacher, and the sound of her voice hinted remarkably at her kind disposition. She looked at you when she spoke, and punctuated her sentiments with emphatic facial expressions: soft smiles and stitched-together eyebrows.

  He asked her, hoping that she would say no, hoping that he’d heard her wrong, “You’ve invited Gail? ”

  “She’s still your cousin,Owen. That hasn’t changed. She’s in town for …the service. You two haven’t seen each other in a year or more. It’s been far too long.”

  He propped a menu up to mask his anger. “I don’t think that matters now, Lilly.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  He shook his head but spoke calmly, to make his point seem more valid. “I’m not being ridiculous. And she knows I am here, right?”He slapped his menu down on the table.“Lilly, you told her I am here, right?”

  Lillian kept on smearing goat cheese spread over her bun. She looked away from him as she chewed. He didn’t force an answer. He was too timid. Instead, he sat there chewing his bun more forcefully than necessary. He knew Gail well, as well as a brother knows a sister. He knew that Gail never kept her opinions to herself, and she saw the world in black and white, in right and wrong. Owen wanted to leave. He wanted to be home, alone. When Lillian had asked him to go out for supper he said yes, but meant no.

  Owen had his own motivations for this meal though, and with Gail on her way, he didn’t have much time left to press Lillian for answers about how his brother and nieces were taking the loss. He wanted to know what their faces were filled with, their words: rage, melancholy, betrayal? But he didn’t know how to word it, or when to ask it. Chewing the bun felt that much more laborious. Concentrating on his wording, and distracted by the weight of those words on the tip of his tongue, he never saw Gail approach the table.

  “Are you fucken kidding me,Mom?”Her arms sprang from her body for emphasis. Twenty heads turned to face Owen’s table and a sudden and pronounced silence enveloped the room. “I almost convinced Alex to take the kids and come join us. What if–”

  “Sit down and lower your voice, Gail.” Lillian nudged a chair out with her knee. “These people didn’t come here to watch you put on a show. And spare me the theatrics. He is still your cousin.”

  Gail rose from the chair the second she sat down, as if it were spring-loaded. “I’d sit, Mom , if that piece of shit weren’t here.”She pointed at Owen with a quick nod of her head. Arms folded now. She looked at him as if there had never been any love between them, and as her eyes wandered up and down his body, her face puckered up like she smelled sulfur, like she had a mouthful of it, thick and gritty on her tongue.

  “He might still be your nephew, but I don’t consider him family anymore.” Her head shook back and forth in short, quick gestures of incomprehension. “In fact , he seems to be destroying our family every chance he gets–”

  “You can leave now, Gail.”

  “My pleasure. Quite frankly, I have better things to do. I think while you dine this piece of shit, I’ll go look in on his brother and the kids. I mean …Goddamnit!”

  Owen couldn’t look either of them in the eye. “Look, I’ll go. I’m sorry I came anyway.” He slid his chair out from the table, but never stood up. “And you’re right, Gail. No one is denying–”

  “Shut up. You don’t get to act all repentant or noble or whatever you’re doing. You’re a heartless bastard and you know it! If you care about your brother at all, if you have any dignity left, you’ll get out of this city and go drink yourself to death, because that’s all you are good for.” She bit her lip, hard, and shook her head even faster. “And you know it, right?”

  She waited for his subtle nod. And then until he nodded more hardily.

  It hurt all the more because, growing up,Gail had been like a sister to Alex and Owen. They had traditions, games they’d play together in the backyard. The way she shrieked joy as they chased her around the yard with the hose, worried they’d knock out her contacts with the spray. It was only a bittersweet memory now, of what was. Of who they had been.

  It was a small, ten-table restaurant, booked to capacity. A waiter approached them to silence the scene, but Gail was out the door before he got to their table. Lillian apologized to the waiter and ordered for them both.

  “I’m so sorry for that, sir. We’ll both start with the featured blue-cheese beef medallions and theWaldorf salad.”

  “Yes.” The waiter fumbled awkwardly, embarrassed by the scene. “Well.” He took out his notepad. “Can I get you anything else to drink?”

  “Two glasses of the house shiraz.”

  Owen shot her a quick look, surprised by the order.

  “Sorry, one glass of shiraz, and some more water for my nephew. Thank you.”

  The waiter walked away, and Owen felt every set of eyes in the room peeling themselves off of him, one by one, though they all shot back quick glances throughout their meals.

  “Lillian, I love you, dearly. You’ve been a surrogate mother to Alex and me, but if this is about me being a charity case, if you are here because you feel bad or obligated to Mom…spare me. Spare yourself from scenes like that one.” He nodded in the direction of the door, as if Gail had left a trail of fire behind her. “I am fine on my own. I always have been, right? And I don’t want you to be here with me for the wrong reasons.”

  “Change the topic. You know me better than that.”She tore another bun in half, and the irritated tone in her voice verified her honesty. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be here, and we both know it. And you’re going to have to get used to being treated like this for a while, but don’t worry. With time, things will get …I don’t know, easier.” She bit into the bun.

  “It’s not like I accidently broke a vase in the guy’s house, Lilly. I shattered his fucken life. And the kids’.” He stopped talking as his voice constricted. His throat filled with sand. He shut his eyes tight, tight enough to numb them.

  Lillian acknowledged she might have just lied to him with a quick rise and fall of her face. He was that itchy, old, worn-out sweater that everyone was finally throwing away. The one they weren’t sure why they’d ever kept around anyway.

  Lillian could get away with an allegiance to both sides because she was a paradox in every way. She grew herbs and only ate vegetables from her own greenhouse, yet she smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. She stocked seven bird feeders with differe
nt feeds and photographed the array of birds that gathered in her backyard, but had no interest in their proper names. She was that ethereal person who walked around town with all the unofficial privileges a cop has: using the staff washroom in the public library or poking her nose where it didn’t belong, and no one would question it. So, the night Owen was released from the hospital, Alex never resented her when she knocked on his door and matter-of-factly stated she was there for Owen’s things, that she was on her way to the hospital to pick him up and take him back to her place. He swung the door open, let her in, helped her gather Owen’s things and bag them in Sobeys bags. She stayed for coffee, drew horses with the girls, offered to help Alex in any way she could, and left no less loved and respected. Callie and Lucia were clinging to her right arm and begging her to stay as she pulled the door shut.

  When Lillian got home from Hannah’s service, Owen didn’t have to pry for the summary. She came in, brushed snow from her jacket, put on some coffee, called out to him, assured him that she was alone, and sat him down at her small, round, mahogany table. She burst right into one of her philosophical rants, but all he wanted was the details of the service: Who wept and who stood stoic? Had the circumstances of her death polluted the atmosphere? Trimmed down the attendance? His head was full of uncouth questions he couldn’t bring himself to ask. They’d have to sit there like burning embers.

  She tore into an obviously prepared speech, stringing sentences together without pause. “I am not going to try and justify what you did, because infidelity is cruel and savage,” she said, speaking as matter-of-factly as she always did.“But I know, like you now know, that in an affair people are too quick to blame people , because our feelings are out of our hands, and anyone with a grain of sense knows that much.” She plucked her earrings out and slapped them down on the table as she finished the sentence.“Your father and I sat around this table having the same conversation one night,Owen.”She tapped two fingers on the table, her thick pink nails dinging like metal on wood. “He said love is beautiful in the same way a lion is. Half the beauty is in the sheer power of the thing. The control it has over you. And the chance it might tear you apart.”