Every Little Thing Read online

  “A daughter maybe?”

  At Lee’s trial, Cohen had sat in the back of the courtroom. He’d watch Lee’s head jerking around, with those owlish movements, like he was trying to figure out where he was. Or why Allie wasn’t there. He’d called her name out one day, out of nowhere, cutting off the judge’s answer to a lawyer’s question. Everybody jumped. Spooked.

  The judge made her ruling, and a caretaker, or a legal escort of some kind, called his name to come with him. Lee never responded. The escort had said Lee? and the word had no meaning for him anymore. His own name. Something even a dog responds to.

  COHEN’S TRIAL CAME seven weeks after Lee’s. Allie in the hot seat. A judge staring down on her. Shame kept her eyes glued to her bony little hands, fidgeting on her lap; the crown of her head pointing at the courthouse pews.

  No, he didn’t knock. Yes, I asked him to leave. Yes, it was this man who fought with my fiancé.

  She shot looks at Cohen, I’m so fucking sorry, but he couldn’t take her torment on top of his own. It was too much weight. And the sound of his mother, sniffling behind him, watching Allie squirm. The sight of his father on the edge of his seat; a hand on his mother’s shoulder like a strong wind was coming.

  Cohen was sunken in his chair, arms crossed, looking angry, and his lawyer nudged him. Pay attention. He’d lectured Cohen on the importance of looking repentant and wrong, not aloof. This judge, she’s judging your character. Impressions matter.

  Keith took the stand, and his mother growled after all his statements. Cohen’s lawyer tried shutting it down, with objections and frustrated posturing, but Keith’s lawyer found a way to let Keith share things unrelated to Cohen’s trial. So everyone heard that he’d threatened Zack’s father...with a knife. That he’d jabbed a kid in the face with a key. “I guess I got off easy,” he’d said, like a victim.

  Cohen’s father had to take his mother out of the courtroom. He’d walked back in, alone. Glaring at Keith in the stand.

  She was blonde, the judge, and had a look on her face like it was going to be a long day of trials no different than this one. Black bags under her eyes, and she’d been yawning. She’d been fair during the trial, professional, but detached, unmoved, unengaged. She struck the gavel down that day, and the base she’d struck with the gavel recoiled; it spun like a spintop. He watched it twirl as she’d said, Six months in prison. It felt like he was in a car, flying down a hill, and the brakes were gone, and there was nothing down there but traffic and trees and kids on crosswalks, and there was nowhere to swerve his car, and he was going to hit it all, hard, and he couldn’t stop.

  They’d expected him to just get up and carry on, walk out of there like everything hadn’t just changed. He looked over to his father, and his father was glaring at Allie so she’d hurt. He had his glasses off, in one hand, biting one of the arms between his teeth. Staring at her.

  Cohen’s lawyer was shocked, promising things, but Cohen was still in that car, barrelling towards something. Until a man in a uniform insisted Cohen get up. Clear the area. So they could all move on. Start another trial.

  The man let Cohen hug his father goodbye and walked Cohen to a holding cell in the courthouse basement. Throughout the day, more people were added to the cell. They weren’t hard men, not all of them. They were nervous, kind. Pacing, sighing. One man had sat on a bench, with a hand clenched around a jail bar, like he was riding a subway. His foot bouncing up and down; laid on a nerve. He’d sat like that, staring, barely blinking, for hours.

  At the end of the day, a van took Cohen and a fat black man named Curt to jail.

  IT WAS A highly ordered process. Cohen and Curt were shipped and extensively catalogued. The man from the courtroom, in the brown uniform, drove through a series of computerized gates at the prison. He’d wink and nod and make small talk with people he knew, but he still had to go through formalities with them. He had a way of whistling between tasks and drumming his forefingers against the steering wheel in time to his whistling. A black cap over a full head of hair. A decent guy.

  He popped the back of his van open, for Cohen and Curt to climb out, and handed them off to two new officers in black uniforms. More signatures and they were walked inside. Curt had a chinstrap beard and clipped hair. He was very tall, very fat, but had stumpy, bowed legs, and they couldn’t take his weight. His crooked legs bent backwards at the kneecap and made him walk in a way that had his pants swooshing.

  Once inside, the officers explained that they each had to be searched. In what was called a dirty cell. They explained everything they were about to do, right before they’d do it—like where they were going to put their hands and fingers and why they’d be doing that, and Cohen was naked in front of two strangers and it was all still impossible, what was happening. They’d finished searching Cohen first, and he had to wait in a hall while they finished checking Curt. And then Curt came out of the dirty cell with the same look on his face he’d been wearing since two o’clock that afternoon. Eyes wide and mouth agape, like he couldn’t believe something was about to happen to him.

  They’d proven they were not smuggling anything in, and then they had to prove, to a man at a computer, that they were who they said they were. ID wasn’t enough, and they’d taken his wallet anyway, before the strip search. And they documented it all with tags, the way a curator at a museum would, treating it all like specimens. Right down to the coins Cohen had in his pockets. Cohen finally heard Curt’s voice for the first time that day. It’s my daughter, he said, can I hang on to this picture? He held the photo with such grace that Cohen was rooting for him. But they took the photo and sealed it in an envelope. Like a time capsule. His daughter, she’d look a little different, she’d change a little, she’d get a little smarter before he’d get out of this place. Curt had been caught selling pot to high-school kids, and it had been the fourth time.

  The man sealed Cohen’s belongings in an envelope and there was an option to mail it all home. His watch and his wallet, some coins. But he liked the idea of it being in the same building as him. He associated his wallet, and all those cards in it, with his identity, and he wanted that near him.

  More forms:Next of Kin? Dietary restrictions? He was filling out the forms, looked up to Curt, and realized they hadn’t spoken a word to each other all day. Curt nodded, and Cohen nodded back and finished up his form.

  It all ended with a mandatory health check from a male nurse with bad breath. Open your mouth and say aww, and Cohen had to breathe it in. They’d waited forty-five minutes for that nurse. And it was another forty-five minutes Curt and Cohen hadn’t said a word to each other. That look still on Curt’s face. Cohen wondered, if he saw Curt in a week, in the cafeteria or the shower, if the look would be gone by then.

  His jailroom was more of a box than a cage, but it was all his: no bunk bed or cellmate. And that was good. Things started off better than he’d envisioned. He spent his first day pacing back and forth in his cell. It only took six steps to get across the room. And then he’d turn and do it again. Pacing out the room had a way of making it feel bigger, more familiar. The front of his cell was all metal bars, floor to ceiling, like in the movies, but the other three walls were cold, porous cement. They trapped noise. Sounds ricocheted around in there: the guard’s footsteps like racket balls bouncing off his walls.

  At first, the worst wasn’t where he was, but how he got there. Allie’s betrayal, or Keith’s devious bullshit had festered in him. A maggot, agitated, disgusting, and clawing its way to the surface, so he could think about it again: every little thing that had landed him in jail. The way he met Allie, because his kid brother drowned. The way his kid brother drowned because his family happened to own a cabin on a pond. Or because his mother was the type who needed a weekend getaway to wrap her head around things.

  Allie: if she’d never taken that job with Keith; if she never had the qualifications for that job; if she’d never befriended the likeable old war vet who’d sold her photos at a vendor�
�s table in her town; or even if she’d answered her phone the night he called to ask her boy or girl. He wouldn’t be in jail.

  Zack: if Jamie had been a better father; if Zack hadn’t reminded him of Ryan; if Jamie had put Zack in a different daycare; if another couple, elsewhere, had of adopted Zack first. The kid wouldn’t have cost him so much.

  Lee: if Lee had moved anywhere but Grayton in the years after the war; if he’d died in the war; if he’d come back a mechanic or doctor or grocery store bagger then Allie would have never met him.

  Every day, every hour, really, it was a new name and a new suite of scenarios that could’ve gone differently, so he could’ve been a hundred places other than prison. Still at the Avian-Dome, taking kids on hikes. Maybe in love with Jenny Lane this time. Or teaching biology somewhere in Europe, had he gone along with those friends from university—Tommy and Cane—who’d done just that.

  It was a game his mind played with or without him, and it kept him up at night. That and the other inmates snoring. Or the insects buzzing around the light down the hall. Or the ache of hunger in his belly for a thousand things they didn’t feed him in there. So he’d go to his window and stare. Let the cold from the floor rise up through his feet and lull him.

  GETTING NAKED AND getting showered with all those other men had only been weird the first couple of times. And there were things a biologist couldn’t help but observe and mentally catalogue: the linked traits. How bald men tend to be hairy. Short men hung. Fat men would scrub longer, as if they felt dirtier.

  There was an effeminate man who shaved his whole body every day, like he was going on a date. No one gave him a hard time for it because his brother was Truck Drake, and Truck Drake wanted a reason to punch a hole in someone’s face. Anyone’s. Truck was the guy who’d lay one hand flat against a wall, wrap the other around his cock, and be loud about it. Not caring who was looking or where anything went. The guards kept their backs turned, stood at the door. It meant they’d never see anything happening until it was too late.

  Truck had been two stalls down one morning, and he’d thrown three quick punches at the guy next to him, for no reason. It was a fat, bald, moustached guy, and it was terrifying to stand so close to it—so close Cohen should’ve been the one to break it up. The violence itself wasn’t the terrifying part: Truck’s pleasure in it was. And the way the poor man squealed as Truck attacked him. Cowering. He lay on the ground, curled in a ball, yelling, Guard, guard, guard! And everyone laughed, and it was the first blast of violence Cohen had seen. It was over before it started, but frightening for its senselessness and spontaneity. The way violence happened, like rain, wherever it wanted, meant Cohen wouldn’t always see it coming. The poor man had been on Cohen’s toes, yelling guard! and Cohen knew, looking down on the guy, that it would’ve arbitrarily been him had Cohen chosen the wrong stall that day.

  The dull thudding of those punches had stayed with Cohen a week. He’d showered as close to the entrance as he could. To not feel trapped in there.

  HIS FATHER HAD come to visit him, the first visitation hour he could. There was a rule that Cohen had to be there a week before his first visitation hour. He was still being catalogued and kept clear of certain areas: the visitation rooms, the cafeteria, the yard, the group sessions.

  “Your mother,”he’d said, “has written a letter to abolish this one week rule, and I’ve been stuck with the task of reading every new draft.”He smiled, rolled his eyes. He grabbed Cohen’s hand quickly and let go just as quickly, looking around as if someone might judge Cohen for the show of affection. “How ya’ holding up?”There was a loud bang, like a book being slammed on a table, and his father jumped. Since sitting down, his father’s eyes hadn’t stopped scanning the room like everyone was out to get him.

  “Your mother couldn’t come. She just couldn’t do it. She’s afraid she’ll break down and that’ll make you seem...weak.”

  “It’s a low security prison,” he swept his arm around the room to men holding wives’ hands, drawing kittens with their daughters, “I’m not in Alcatraz.”

  “We’re talking about your mother,Cohen.”

  “Fine, but tell her to lay off the emails. I get thirty minutes a day on the web, if that. I’d need three hours to get through her circular, thousand-word essays on hanging in there.”He laughed so that his father would. He looked painfully ill at ease. “And you guys should not have sold the boat!”

  “Cohen,” he waved his hand to dismiss Cohen’s worry. “It’s been sitting in the garage forever now. I haven’t had a membership at the marina in two years. We never take it out anymore. Boating was a...brief infatuation.”

  “I’ve got enough in RRSPs and a tax-free savings account to get through six months of bills and mortgage payments.”

  His father’s face said, And then what? “Just...remember this, when we’re old and need a favour of our own.”He sat back in his chair, looking happy to have helped.

  Another bang and his father jumped again. Higher this time. “You know, it’s still surreal. You being here. It’s like I’m strapped in a car going two hundred.”He looked to a man with bruises on his face, and his eyes stuck there. Cohen followed his father’s gaze and saw that he’d been staring at the man who’d been beaten in the shower that week. “You know that guy or something?”

  “No. Just. His daughter. He’s very patient with her.”

  “Drunk driver,” Cohen filled him in. “I saw the man get his face punched in a few days ago.”Theman’s daughter pointed at the bruises, How come,Daddy?

  Cohen lowered his voice, “The man seemed like he needed some company that day at lunch. I caught his story. He’d ploughed into two university kids at a crosswalk and only got a year in here. His second DUI. The fact he can even share the story, you know? If I was him, I’d just—I’d make up another story.”

  His father nodded. “So. How are you doing? How are you getting along, all things considered? Are you getting roughed up, like that guy, or did he have it coming, or what?”

  “It’s not good. But it’s really not that bad either, for me, anyway. Honestly. I spent the first three days curled up in a ball in my bed, livid, infuriated.”He looked up at his father, confessed, “I could have let Lee kill him, you know? One morning, I...actually thought about that.”

  “Jesus, Cohen!”

  “I know. But I was furious—”

  “Not so you could be with Allie? Not that way.”

  “No. Just, pure anger. This is low, even for him. Me in jail.

  It’s absurd.”He waited a second,worried it would sound pathetic. “She hasn’t even come by. Sent a letter.”

  “What d’you expect from her? She’s engaged. And then all of this?”He swooped a hand across the room. “She can hardly pop by and say hello after that shit she pulled? I mean, her apology, that’s not going to change a goddamn thing now, is it?”He shook his head, angry. “Or at least, I hope it wouldn’t. I can’t believe you’re thinking on her, to be honest.”

  Cohen put his hands up, smiled, Okay, settle down.

  “So listen, anything I can do for you?”

  “What, on the outside?”He laughed.

  “I dunno. In general? C’mon?”

  “Take back half the money Mom transferred me from selling your boat.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Cohen had been leaning back in his chair; had it back on two legs. He brought it forward, back onto the ground. Laid two elbows on the table. “The kid. The one I got fired because of.” He watched his father’s eyes pinch tight. “Can you get me an update. About his heart?”

  An alarm sounded off: three long blares like transport truck horns. Visitation hour was over.

  “Cohen, I’msorry but. Between Allie and the boy from work. You’ve got to cut your losses, don’t you think?” His father picked his hat up off the table. Put it on. “You’ve tried enough, with those two, and we can agree it didn’t end well.”

  “There’s a journal, in your breas
t pocket, right?”

  His father tapped it. “Yeah.”He smirked.

  “Take it out.”

  His father leaned forward, laid his elbows on the table. “All due respect. To the boy and his troubles. But we’ve got our own, don’t you think? You’ve poked your nose in far enough.”

  “Zack Janes.”He nodded to his father’s breast pocket. “Janes. Zack Janes. Dr. Jennings would know the boy, from the ARVC clinics. Just want an update. That’s it. He’d been waiting on a goddamn heart,Dad. A transplant. I think about him sometimes. If you tell me’s alright, I’ll stop asking about him.”

  His father rolled his eyes. Fetched his pen. Bit the cap off, leaving it clamped between teeth. “James?”

  “Janes. N. Janes. ”

  A guard approached them both. “Sir. It’s time to leave.”

  His father stood, gave the guard a look, Yes, I’m leaving, and Cohen said, “Check on Zack. Remember.”

  BUT HIS FATHER never did check in onZack. Looking into it, his father would say. Or two weeks later, I can’t just…roam around the hospital wings, calling out his name. And finally, I can’t ask our doctor about some kid I don’t know. There’s probably rules against it.

  Cohen was at his cell window, his breath fogging it up. It was too dark to see anything, between eleven at night and one in the morning. He tried picturing Zack in Florida. The kid had always been ecstatic when he spoke of his grandmother. Zack would show Cohen the things she’d mail him—books about owls and all the right kinds of toys—and Zack would act all, What’s mine is yours in sharing the goods with Cohen. You can borrow this book anytime, I’ll share!

  Cohen had been sitting at the desk in the daycare room one day. The kids drawing puffins and razorbills. He had his head down, reading a paper about bioremediation for a project he’d been assigned, and Zack’s fist banged down on the surface of the desk. He took it away and a blue Tyrannosaurs figurine wobbled to a stop. I’ve got two, so you can have that one! Keep it in your pocket. We’ll have fights all the time!