Every Little Thing Page 2

  He walked around to the front of the house and a man named Matt introduced himself. A bit too enthusiastically. They had something in their DNA, Matt and Allie, and Cohen pictured it as a charge, buzzing at their core, that kept them wired, and 110% alive. “It’s Cohen, right? You’re Gordon’s boy?”

  “Yes, yeah, how’d you know?—”

  The man grabbed his hand and shook it, hard, the way men of that generation do. It was his left hand and the vigorous shake burned the wound on his chest. A flash of fire along the edges of the cut.

  “We’re old friends. Your old man and me. He hasn’t mentioned us moving in? Kinda weird, since it was him who turned us onto the place. Or your mother did.”They were standing on the front lawn and it was in need of mowing. The grass was so tall it was awkward to stand in as they waited for Allie to reappear. And she did. She burst through the opened front door.

  “Told you he wouldn’t mind,” she said. “Roped him in.” She posed in a cowgirl stance and swung an invisible lasso.

  “I guess...why would Gordon mention it, right? But Allie here, she needed a place by the university. She’s doing her PhD. Chemistry of all things.” He patted Allie on the back and she flinched like she’s a bit too old for a proud father. Cohen pegged her as pushing thirty: the swagger, the confidence, the effect she had on him. They started walking towards the truck and Matt said, “Your father mentioned the place next door to his son.”Matt tossed a hitchhiker’s thumb at Cohen’s house.

  “And he just bought the thing,” Allie said. “We didn’t even come see it. He looked at pictures online, trusted an inspector. Fucking crazy.”

  Matt hauled open the back of the truck. “Just this one bed frame, kid, and you’re off the hook. We can manage the rest by ourselves.”And that was the point when Cohen was supposed to say,No, don’t be silly, and offer to help. Or better yet, explain about his arm, the surgery.

  They all grabbed the bedframe and lugged it to the front porch. But a third body was one too many. A third body was only in the way when rounding corners, doorways, climbing stairs. “You guys got this,” she said,nodding her head like they should be proud of themselves. She let go of the frame and it felt no heavier in Cohen’s hand. “I’m gonna grab a few of my boxes, speed this up.”

  She scurried off, leaving them to chat through the awkwardness of not knowing each other. They mounted the stairs and made a turn for one of the bedrooms. “Any reason you’re only using the one hand there, tough guy?”He laughed.

  “I’ve...just had surgery. It’s fine, I’m fine using just this hand, but—”

  “Jesus Christ! Lay it down!” Matt stopped walking as he made the demand, but Cohen wasn’t expecting the sudden stop, so he kept walking forward. He’d butted his incision into the bedframe, winced, and laid the oak frame down.

  “You had that heart surgery, like your father? The...the thing put into your chest?The shocker thing?” Matt looked panicked, repentant. He’d been tapping his own chest, over his heart, while he struggled to find the right word.

  “ICD, yeah. Like father like son—”

  “Why didn’t you say anything, Jesus!” He was definitely concerned but kind of laughing too.

  COHEN STEPPED BACK into his house that night, banished by Matt on account of his useless arm, and his phone was ringing, tinny and distant. It rang at least ten times before he’d found it in the cupholder of his treadmill. Ten times it rang, so he knew it was his father. A patient man. The only man Cohen knew who’d let a phone ring until someone answered it or until that blaring give up! signal cut in.

  “Cohen?”

  “Obviously. I live alone. You dialled my number. Were you expecting Oprah?”

  “Yes, very funny, ha hah.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Your mother. You know what she’s like. She’s still processing this ARVC thing. She says the doctors are downplaying it.”

  “We’re invincible. We’re robots now. These ICDs make us immune to heart attacks.”

  “Yes, but, she’s still working through, What if the doctors installed them wrong, and, What if the battery suddenly fails, and, what if these machines slip loose and puncture our hearts?”

  “What if a comet is coming?What if spontaneous combustion is real?”

  “Don’t bust my chops, kid. Save it for her.”

  “I will.”Cohen flicked his kettle on; eyes darting indecisively from a box of Earl Grey to a red tin of Rooibos.

  “Anyway, she’s insisting on a family trip to the cabin this weekend. To take it all in, whatever that might mean. She hasn’t been sleeping at all since we were diagnosed. She’s been tossing and turning and keeping me awake too. She throws her legs around under the sheets like heavy logs. There’s bruises on my shins, swear to God, Cohen. Big ones. She worries, you know. I mean, when you got the chicken pox, you were only one. She thought that was it, her first born, gone before he’d learn to walk. So, just, I know you’re busy with the PhD and all that, but come to the cabin this weekend, hey? All four of us?Won’t be so bad.”

  “You wanna pick me up?”

  “Will do, and thanks for playing along. In fairness, this all happened very fast,me getting diagnosed, then you. She just wants a weekend together.”

  “I’ll go, I said.”Cohen took a mug out of the cupboard and almost dropped it when he heard a knock on his door. It sounded gentle enough to question whether he’d actually heard someone at his door. He walked towards it.

  “So, how’s the PhD coming along? Still playing with dead birds all day long?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds lively.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Get it? Dead birds, and I’m saying it sounds lively.”

  “Yeah. The joke’s funnier every time you say it.”

  He got in view of the door and saw that it was Allie knocking. “Dad, I have to go. Someone’s ah...someone’s at the door I wasn’t expecting.”He clicked the phone off, halfway through his father’s See you Fri—.

  “Hey,” she said, stepping into his porch like she’d been there before and had her own place on the coat rack. He had to stop himself from widening his eyes like, Why are you coming into my house?

  “Sorry, I didn’t cut off your conversation did I?” She pointed to the phone.

  “No. It...ah...it was. No.” He laid the phone down on a window ledge.

  She raised an eyebrow at his fumbled sentence. “Geez, man. What are you, CIA? Top secret phone calls?” She poked him in the chest, twice, a playful accusation. She pushed past him. “Sorry, I sort of invited myself in didn’t I?”Palms up, like,Whatever. “I feel like, since our fathers are friends,we know each other by proxy or something. And I’mhere for your toaster.”She smiled. “Any chance you were serious about lending me this stainless steel beauty?”

  “Sure.”A smile tore his face in two.

  “And so you know, I know it’s weird I still live with my father. It’s a long story.”

  Cohen nodded his head, still wondering why she’d just walked into his house. “I’mnot judging anyone. I didn’t even think it was weird. He seems like an ideal roommate.”He was about to laugh, pry, but she said, “It’s just, he’s a real sad and lonely bastard right now.”Her voice wobbled and her eyes twitched defensively, like her body was begging him not to pry.

  “Come in, I’ll grab you the toaster.” But a quick look around and he wished he’d just fetched it for her and left her in the porch. The hardwood needed to be swept. Mopped even. And there was a pair of socks curled up like napping snakes on the living-room floor.

  He walked her to the kitchen and she took in his house like she was being rushed through a museum tour. And as they walked back to the porch, his eyes followed her like puppies every step of the way. He liked the backs of her legs. Even the way her skirt dangled. She had the toaster cradled in her left arm like a baby— little crumbs falling out the bottom of it with every step she took— and she apologized for each one of them.

  �
��Get me a broom. Really. I’ll sweep them up.”

  ONE O’CLOCK THAT night, the lights were on in Allie’s room. He was pulling his bedroom curtains closed and she didn’t have blinds up yet. She was splayed across her bedsheets in pajamas that were two sizes too big. Purple, matching. She was crying her eyes dry, belly in and out like she was skipping breaths, and it was weird to see the desperate pain of crying, stripped of its sound. She grabbed a framed photo off her nightstand. Threw it across her room.

  As he pulled his curtain to, afraid she’d see him there, he saw Matt walk into her room. He sat on the bed with her, said something Cohen couldn’t make out. She curled into him, to put her head on his shoulder. And then Matt cried too. Harder.

  SCREAMING

  UNDER WATER

  HIS PRISON CELL window was so thick that the nights it rained he could barely hear it falling against the glass. There was just a hint of something happening outside, just a hint of the world out there, carrying on without him. The sound drew him to the window. It was glass, like any glass, but the water had a way of clinging to it and blurring his view of the duck pond in the distance. It was a pacifying view.

  His whole life, he’d been prone to getting hungry around midnight, but jail didn’t accommodate that. There were four meals a day and no food allowed in cells. Because food was just one more thing that inmates could barter or fight over. Curling into a ball, in bed, did little to stave off his panging for food. It was a desperate ache, deep in his belly, and his body wanted it answered. The hunger made the sheets chafe and the pillows flatter and the bed smaller.

  Somewhere down the hall, the prison left a few lights on after midnight. The light itself didn’t keep him awake, but it attracted insects. The sound of houseflies and moths and mosquitoes, or whatever it was zizzing around the glowing bulbs out there, kept him awake. The buzzing was incessant. Desperate and annoying. So he’d kick his sheets off. Go to the window. Stare.

  The cold blue pond reminded him of the last time his family had gone to their cabin. In a way, that weekend was the moment he could trace it all back to—he could think of that Saturday morning as exactly when and where his life had gotten twisted and turned.

  It had been a long drive to his parents’ cabin, for his mother’s taking it all in weekend. Three hours of never-changing scenery on the highway: an endless wall of spruce trees blurring past them. Cohen took breaks between chapters of his novel to watch the trees whir by: brushstrokes of green on the bottoms of clouds. The sun flickered through the tree tops like panic, disappearing, reappearing. Easy on the eyes and then blinding when the tree-line shortened.

  They were twenty minutes from the cabin when he asked his father, “I’ve got a new neighbour. Someone Crosbie. Matt or Mark or something. How do you know the man?”

  “He said he’d bought the place!” He turned to Cohen’s mother, “We’ll have to pop in on him, see how he’s doing?” She nodded.

  His father’s eyes found Cohen’s in the rear-view mirror. “How’d you make the connection?”

  “His daughter. She’s like—”He couldn’t put her into words, she was like a vacation; you just had to be there. “She came over for...a toaster. Said you mentioned the house next door to her father—”

  “A toaster?” he laughed. “Sounds about right. They’re a wild lot, the Crosbies. All jacked up on life, you know? They’ve got no boundaries, no one’s a stranger. Not in a hippie sort of way, just, I dunno.”He shrugged his shoulders. “Me and Matt,we worked at the university bookstore, when we were first years. We wound up roommates for a semester and everything. We’ve always kept in touch, drinks at Christmas and that sort of thing. Which is probably why he ended up a client of your mother’s.” He took a sip of coffee from his travel mug, laid it back in a cupholder. “His wife passed away in January. Cancer.”

  Cohen’s brother sneezed and it scared Cohen enough he jumped.

  “Bad. It was bad. She’d been battling it for quite some time. Long enough that his daughter moved back home to help him care for her. You know, to help her die. Comfortably. Horrible stuff.”

  His father clicked his indicator to turn into a passing lane. He checked his blind spot three or four times and it looked like he was shaking his head for no good reason. “Your mother and I were at the funeral and a few months later we went out to Grayton to have supper with the guy. Just to see how he was holding up. He mentioned his daughter was moving here, into town, to do her PhD. Your mother wasn’t having that.”

  She closed her eyes slowly, shook her head. “Can you imagine being left alone in the house your wife died in? It’s just, not right. You move. You do.”

  “He’s semi-retired, working from home.” Another sip of coffee. “Your mother planted the seed of the house next door to yours, so his daughter could be three minutes from the university, in a neighbourhood we could vouch for. I guess they’re after moving in together by the sounds of it? She’s got a science degree of some kind.”

  “Chemistry,”Cohen said, like he was proud of her.

  His father shrugged his shoulder, cracked a few knuckles. “Poor girl was a mess at her mother’s wake, that’s all I know. I mean, she sat outside in the rain like something from a heartbreaking movie. She couldn’t even look at the casket. I think she went home early. Twenty minutes in. I think it’s a nice thing they’re here together. Still living together I mean. For both his and Allison’s sakes.”

  “Allie.”

  “What?”

  “You called her Allison. Her name’s Allie. She seems big on the distinction.”

  A wink in the rear-view, “In love already, are you?”

  His brother said something about having chemistry with the chemistry graduate. A lame joke for the sake of it, but their father busted his gut over it, and Ryan rolled his eyes.

  They pulled into the driveway just after nine. Unpacked and unenthused, they were all in bed by 10:30, after a few games of poker. They had no idea, as their heads hit the pillows, that they were about to become the kind of family you see on the five o’clock news, looking stunned to be there, getting ravaged by senseless questions like What really happened that day? and How did it make you feel? and Do you think you’ll ever get over it? A spotlight shinning deep into their eyes, hoping to scour out tears for some exclusive, heartbreaking footage.

  THAT SATURDAY MORNING, he and his brother woke to the snapping scent and sizzle of bacon and scrambling eggs. Ryan in the top bunk, Cohen beneath him. Ryan was eight years younger than Cohen and he’d joked once that Nothing says accidental child like having a brother eight years older than you. But they clicked. Got along. By the time Cohen was twenty-five, the mental distance between them was minimal. They’d show up at the same concerts or they’d show up to family dinners wearing almost-matching outfits. They were twins born eight years apart.

  They woke that morning and laid there until Ryan said, “Yes, it’s pretty up here and that bacon smells great, but what are we supposed to do up here for the next thirty-six hours while Mom wraps her head around the fact that you and Dad have broken hearts?”

  Cohen launched himself upright, his feet bouncing off the cold hardwood, “How about a dozen beer this afternoon? We’ll take the boat out, pretend we’re fishing. Or, we could fish. Let’s fish?”

  “There’s no bait, no beer.”

  “There’s a store, not ten minutes down the road.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said there’s a store, not ten minutes down the road.”

  So they bought beer, at the store down the road, and worms for their fishhooks and batteries for the stereo. In the car, Ryan took the lid off the Styrofoam container the worms were in and sniffed it.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Smells great, man. It does.”

  Ryan brought the container to Cohen’s face, “Sniff,” and Cohen took his eyes off the road one second too long. Almost rear-ended someone. Ryan didn’t even react. He put the lid on the container and changed the song
on the stereo.

  The walk down to the wharf from their cabin was steep and the path was crowded by lush spruce; their branches were cool against Cohen’s flesh. It smelled like they were walking through an air freshener as they used their arms like machetes to clear a path to their private wharf. The shittiest one on the pond, according to Ryan, but it was enough to tie a boat to or bask on. A splintery thing, if you weren’t wearing shoes. It was a big pond or a little lake—no one in the family knew the difference between the two and they made fun of Cohen, a biologist, for not knowing.

  Cohen stepped into the boat to attach the outboard motor because the slot at the back of the boat had always been too skinny to really take the thing and there was a trick to it that only Cohen and his father knew. Ryan arranged batteries in the stereo ten different ways, swearing as each configuration denied him audio. When the stereo kicked in, shockingly loud,Ryan jumped back like the music had punched him in the guts. The song was up so loud that Cohen could see, but not hear, Ryan laughing at himself.

  The water was always choppy on that pond—bucks you like a bronco—and the pond itself was shaped like a horseshoe, studded with cabins. It took them five minutes to pull out around the bend and get drinking, out of sight of their cabin, because Ryan was still a year shy of nineteen.

  He’d gotten drunker than Cohen had anticipated. His words were mashing together in his mouth and coming out without commas, periods; parts of one word entwined the next. “Dawn worry about, man!”and threw his hand up in the air, “I’m good. But what about the empties. So’s you don’t get busted fer intoxicatin’ a minor?”

  “Just, dunk them under water, so they fill and sink.”

  “What! Litter them, and you a biologist!” he laughed.

  “It’s not bad, really, the bottom dwellers will use them as shelter.”

  “The bottom dwellers,” he laughed. “You make it sound like thur’s zombies down there or something.” Ryan let out a fit of reckless laughter to alleviate Cohen’s concern and looked around, through drunk-enthused eyes, at moss-entwined trees and then the splash of a trout. When he stood again, to take in the view, Ryan was wobbly, pale. Knees like pivots. “Turn around and keep the boat going. A man’s gotta piss if a man’s gotta piss!” He reached to turn the volume up on their stereo, but he knocked it off the bench and waved a hand like, Fuck it.