Away From Everywhere Read online

  Ten years old, before the world had terrorized them and broke their big, red hearts, back when they were who they were and not who they are. Time capsules from a time when they were their truest selves: unmoulded and omnipotent. There was a picture inside each capsule. A photo of each brother at ten years old, taken at the very desk Owen was sitting at. There was a Memorex cassette tape in each one too, but he stared, dumbfounded, at those two pictures. The innocent, mischievous looks on their faces, like nothing could go wrong, bedheaded in matching Spiderman pajamas. Like life was all laughter and games of tag and being able to hang upside-down on the monkey bars longer than your brother. He studied the smiles on their faces, the gloss in their eyes. He hadn’t realized how much the world had beaten out of him and his brother until he saw those two photographs.

  The cassette tapes were thirty-minute interviews their father had conducted with each of his sons. He sat in front of the stereo in the living room and he lay down on a large, brown, oval rug, stared at the white ceiling, and learned all about who he was . The tape was intended to capture who he wanted to be when he grew up, but as he listened to it, it had the opposite effect. It was a tape of who he wanted to be again. A kid who saw the beauty in a sunny day, who played dinkies with Alex, and that was enough. To find a simple joy in feeding a red squirrel with his father there, and his brother right beside him.

  “So,Owen, tell me. What do you want to be when you are my age?”

  “Um, what did Alex say?”

  (laughter)

  “He said he wanted to be rich, like your Uncle Ross.”

  “Oh. Well. I want to be a hero. Can I be a hero?”

  “That’s up to you, my son, and remember that. But tell me, what kind of hero do you want to be?”

  “You know, a hero, someone who saves the people other people hurt.”

  “That’s nice, so maybe a doctor or a police officer?”

  “No. I don’t want a job. When I grow up I am just going to get a cheque book like Mom’s. I won’t need a job then. I’ll just pay for everything with cheques.” then. I’ll just pay for everything with cheques.”

  (laughter)

  “I’ll let you think it’s that simple for now, kiddo.”

  By the time he finished listening to both the tapes, an hour had passed. The fries he’d put in the oven and forgot about burned black and set off the fire alarm, right in the middle of Alex’s interview. His father asked Alex why he loved his brother.

  “Because he is always there, we are always together, so if one of us gets hurt, like when I fell off my bike last night, he’ll help me. When I got lost at the museum during last week’s field trip,Owen was the one who found me, remember? That’s why it’s good to have a twin, you’re never alone when you get hurt or lost. You don’t have to wait for the bus alone, and he’s good at the parts of video games that I can’t figure out. Most people only see their best friends at school. Mine is always around, and always will be.”

  Owen made some toast, because the fries had burnt and all he had in the house were fries, bread, tea, and butter. He took it into his father’s office to open that second drawer. There was nothing in it except a wooden jewelry box about the size of a carton of eggs. He shook it. He slid the lid off and hauled out a note from Cassie, Clyde’s wife, the woman his father had taught to read and write. The note thanked him for much more than the English lessons and was signed, Love Cassie.

  Love.

  Beneath the note, there was a strip of joined, black and white photos, those strips of four photos from old photo booths in shopping malls. In the first photo, they were caught off guard and ill-prepared for the flash of the camera. His father was just about to sit – looking behind him with a hand on the seat – and Cassie was standing, still taking off her jacket. In the second photo they were laughing at themselves for missing that first photo opportunity – their faces side-on and their mouths wide with laughter. Her hand was on his father’s knee in a way that suggested she was familiar with his body, that she’d wandered its landscape in a darkened room enough to know his body with her eyes closed. In the third picture they smiled and faced the camera, their heads resting together. This one was their attempt at a nice photo of the two of them. She was wearing the same blue-and-white dress she had on in that photo on Clyde’s mantle. In the fourth photo they were kissing, their faces pressed together in a way that suggested they knew exactly how to kiss each other, that they’d been together enough to know exactly how the other one liked it.

  On the back of those photos, his father had penned a message: Here’s to loving someone so much there is no such thing as time anymore. Just when we are together and when we are not.

  Owen was speechless. A little pissed off, and, surprisingly, a little touched at his father’s sincerity. At least Clyde wasn’t his brother. Maybe that’s all it was: justification of what he’d done with Hannah. Like father, like son. Breathing a little slower, he dropped the photos back into the box and closed it, thieved of even more of his sense of family. So that was your big project up here, was it, Dad? Another man’s wife?

  And then he remembered Clyde saying that Cassie died shortly before his father went mad. His father lost his mind shortly after Cassie died. So he had to wonder,Was her death a contributing factor to his father giving in to schizophrenia? Was it the death of his father’s beloved mistress, a woman Owen knew nothing about, that finally sent his father over the edge? His Port Blandford life was the life he ran off to, to escape his reality, to escape his life in the city. This was the place where he was happiest, where a whole town talked of him as an ethereal saint. When Cassie died, he lost all that. He had nothing but a wife who never understood him, two children who actively avoided spending time with him, and now he had nowhere to run off to. All he had was his profession, and then his newspaper failed. It was a glorified, simplified explanation, but it helped Owen understand things a little more. Or he let it explain things a little more.

  He gazed out the window. The view out the window from his father’s office was the rusted swing set and the grown-over sandbox he and Alex once loved. They used to dump sand in each other’s hair because they liked the sensation of picking the sand out of their scalps. Alex said it was like scratching fly bites.

  A MOTHER, NOT A LOVER

  December 4th, 2008,

  Fumbling Towards Farewell.

  Love might be beautiful, but it’s a vicious sort of beauty.Vicious in that it forces you to act. Possesses you. You can’t ignore it. Not for sure anyway. Not always, or for convenience or wedding vows or a clean conscience. Yet we try and entangle love with all the laws of morality, even though morality shatters like glass when love swings a fist. We’ve all done something we shouldn’t have in the relationship department, or we at least thought about it and deprived ourselves, and that is really no better.

  What is love anyway?What are we separated from, as human beings, that we are so desperate to find in someone else? I thought Owen was all my answers. Maybe in another life he could’ve been. Now I see that we are only complicating each other’s lives. I mean, maybe if I wasn’t married to your brother, Owen, maybe then we could’ve kept this feeling alive. Instead we’re hiding it, hiding a fire. A fire between us can only burn us. It can do nothing more. It can light up no brighter life. It can only destroy my family, my children, your brother.

  Juliet never listened to her mother, maybe she should have, but she didn’t. That’s the point of her and Romeo’s story, of mine and Owen’s: love is bigger than us, it decides for us, so why do we shit ourselves and apologize for what it does to us? How can we even pretend that who we want in 2008 will be who we want in 2018?Who wears what they wore a decade ago?Who doesn’t change over the course of a decade?We change.What we want changes. It’s only natural.

  But I am a mother and this is a selfish way to think. And I am sick to death of thinking anyway. I’ve thought it to death, and here’s why I am sorry I’ve had an affair: family is enough.A great family like
mine is far more beautiful than love itself, I think. Or at least I have chosen to believe, for the sake of my husband, my children, and my own consience. For the sake of alleviating the sensation that my organs are tied in knots growing tighter every day.

  Because lastWednesday was too much. The scene hasn’t left me, the wicked and savage dishonesty is ripping me apart. Alex called and left a message on the answering machine as his brother was bucking against me on our bed. It felt vile. I was a monster. I died, right there in our bed. My skin was throbbing, it’s the only way I can describe it. I cried. Alex called to say he was craving my potato-leek casserole for supper, that he’d love me for life if I could make it for him. I died, I sank right into the bed with guilt and remorse. I was afraid he’d somehow hear us there in the bed. Through the machine. Somehow. But Owen, he just kept on thrusting and moaning away. He didn’t even react. He just kept on panting, eyes closed, raising then slowly lowering his head, over and over.

  Owen Collins is missing something human. It was so unnerving. He isn’t insensitive to how this could crush Alex.It’s not that, it’s that he’s missing something human. It’s hard to explain. He’s indifferent to his very existence, to everythingand anything that could happen to him. You could shoot the guy and prod the wound and he’d just sit there, unflinching.I know he cares for Alex, but today when Alex left that message, he didn’t even react. Indifferent, not cold. It’s like the world is a movie he’s watched so many times it bores him now.I remember maybe the third or fourth time we made love. I just burst into tears. I pushed him off of me then hauled him into me for a bear hug and wept wildly on his shoulders. He comforted me, but I don’t think he got it. The guilt. I mean he got it. Three weeks later I was kissing him again, guiding him onto the couch, and he mustered up a “Are you sure, are you sure?” He got the guilt, but I don’t know if he felt it.

  It was beautiful what we’ve shared. It was love. But it has to end soon. We are kidding ourselves to think it can evolve. It’s not so much guilt that I feel now, it’s a crushing sadness and a feeling of futility in being with Owen this way. We will never have a house and children of our own. We will never see the kind of kid we could create, a precious little girl with curly locks and freckles, or a devilish little brown-eyed boy, and we will never have a house with walls to paint and railings to accidentally ding up. We will never be able to have a proper relationship where we can project ourselves into the future, so what’s the point in what we are doing? If there is no place for something in the future, and time is always dragging us into the future, what is the purpose of what Owen and I are doing? Besides, I don’t have the strength to leave Alex or the desire to destroy my family. You can’t raise your daughters with your brother-in-law while their father is still alive.That goes without saying. Not that I haven’t thought about it.Pictured it. Pictured us spooning before bed every night, him rocking me to sleep, rubbing my palms with his thumb like he does.

  Just after Alex left that message, I turned into a mad ball of tears and snots. I lost it. I pushed Owen off of me and gatheredmy clothes up off the floor. By accident, I’d pushed him into the lamp on Alex’s night table, and it smashed off the wall behind him. I thought I got all the glass, but I never thought to check the sheets. Alex crawled into bed that night and a slender knife-like shard, the same colour as the sheets, sank deep into his back, right behind his heart. How’s that for guilt?We are villains. We both agreed we’ve gotten too casual. No more sex in that bed, no more assuming Callie and Lucia won’t pick up on our closeness. They are far from naïve, and years beyond their ages.

  Last week, last Thursday night, Alex surprised me with tickets to a Hayden concert. He knows I love him, knows he is my default music and accepts the crush. And Hayden was great, and funny in between the songs, and played the trumpet part of one his songs with his mouth, because he was playing alone, and it was cute and funny and perfect. How do you not love a guy who wrote a song about his cat? After the show, Alex took me out for supper. It was nice. We laughed a lot, he even pulled my chair out for me to boot. He is a gentleman, if only because people are watching. He hates most restaurants because the seating is too crowded and most people can hear his conversations, and that makes him feel like he should be saying something special. He’s always so worried everyone is judging his appearance, because he is either over- or under-dressed.And he worries that he’ll mispronounce something on the menu and seem uncouth. It’s so vain of him, but if you know him, like I do, it’s kind of cute. It’s kind of sad, because you know why he is the way he is. My point is that it was a nice night, and I know they don’t happen enough, but I also know we’ll have many more nice nights, and maybe moments are enough? Maybe I can let moments be enough. For the sake of my children.

  Owen gives me every minute, makes me feel like a beautiful, interesting, and worthwhile woman. Unique. Like I am meand no one else is. He makes me feel like a giddy little teenager.Sometimes I don’t even know what to do with my arms and legs, he excites me that much. He points out the things about me I never think of or notice, like how I hold a mug, and they all make me feel so distinct and noticeable. But we both know that will fade. I’d rather cut it off now, before it does fade. Because all of this guilt and shame won’t have been worth it if it does fade. All this risk and anxiety. All this jeopardizing my children’s childhoods. I have one duty as a mother: keep my children safe and happy.

  So this week was it for us, or at least the beginning of the end.I relished and exploited every moment of it, and now I intend to end this affair in a beautiful, courteous way. I will tell him it is over and he needs to move out. For the sake of my beautiful, innocent family. And he will have to understand.Our relationship is a dead end for him, a bomb in waiting for my family, and emotional suicide for me.

  I am a mother first, not a lover. I am at least a better mother than I am a lover, and Callie and Lucia are more important to me than Owen is. Period. And my own life for that matter.I would deny myself food, air, and water for my daughters – I would readily die for them – and so I will deny myself Owen.For them.

  WORDS LIKE SHRAPNEL

  HE FINISHED READING HANNAH'S LAST journal entry. The writing in the last paragraph was shaky – she’d written it in the car. The rest of the pages were empty. There was no more left to read. No more left to say. And he’d started drinking again.

  He was half-drunk as he read it. He laid it down, finished the bottle, and walked over to a window. Put his forehead to it, felt the cold there, the winter against his window, the condensation, wet and slippery. A slight squeak. There was a pine grosbeak in a tree, not a rare bird but a notable one, with its grey body speckled red in a way that looked like blood splatter. It was clinging to a branch, trying to hide from the wind. The branch floating up and down, swaying left to right. He could’ve sworn the bird was staring him down.

  He sat back down, brought steepled hands to his face, stared at her journal, then flung it across the room like a Frisbee. Sparks shot out of the fireplace and logs cracked from the blow and rolled over each other. The smoke from its pages burned a darker black than the smoke from the wood. Toxic smoke. The paper was gone in seconds, and then the cover slowly seared, twisted, curled in on itself, and turned to ash. The diary was gone, and yet burning it never changed a thing. Those pages, her words: they were an inextricable part of his life now, another tragedy to live with, and why bother? What for? Who’d notice if he was gone? He could’ve crawled into the fireplace and burned with those pages and felt no pain at all.

  He’d walked back up to the North Atlantic gas station, the only place in town that sold wine. The selection was shit and he sighed about it. He brought three bottles up to the counter, dropped them down, and they clanged off each other loudly. One fell over. The cashier was scared. She took a step back, but he saw a look of sadness that overwhelmed her fright, so she looked confused to him. She tried to diffuse the situation. “Heyya, Owen. Heard ya bought Clyde’s truck after? Had a grand ol’ chat wit
h him? He’s chatty. He’s like a woman that way, but fun as they comes, re–”

  “How much is the wine?” He hated himself for the irritibility, she was a sweet woman, but he just couldn’t pretend. “Sorry, just …in a rush.”

  “Company coming, dear?”

  He shook his head and she looked down at the three bottles.

  He came back the next night for more. It was the kind of town where the amount of booze he’d bought couldn’t go unnoticed, so he hated being Roger’s boy , knowing that meant someone was going to intervene. Clyde had the obvious in with Owen: the sale of the truck and the conversation over brownies.

  Owen was washing a week’s worth of dishes when Clyde knocked on his door. “Hey,Owen, I found the driver’s manual for your truck in my shed just now! Thought you might want it.”He held it out to Owen. It was yellowed and buckled and spotted with brown residues.

  Clyde squinted a little, his crow’s feet tightening, as if he barely recognized Owen’s face behind the patchy beard he’d grown. Owen looked down, took himself in. He looked disheveled, if not unhygienic: black-and-white pajama pants, dotted red in various places by what was obviously wine, and a plain black golf shirt that needed an iron. Hair like an old wig he’d found balled up in a closet somewhere and pulled on his head. Frizzy and bedheaded. He watched Clyde stumble, improvising a plan to get some one-on-one time with Roger’s kid.