Every Little Thing Read online

  VISITATION

  HOUR

  COHEN WAS A little late coming into the visitation room to see his father, and when he walked into the visitation room, it had been the first time he saw Truck in there with a visitor. It was his brother or something. Maybe a friend. Hulk Hogan-ish, but with brown hair. They were sitting two tables over from Cohen and his father, being loud and crass in a way that made Cohen’s father sheepish.

  His father covered his mouth, spoke through his hands. “An arm wrestle, really?” But they watched, entertained. “Five bucks on Blue Shirt,” his father joked, yet he didn’t laugh from the gut. The way he normally would, at his own jokes. So Cohen dropped the good news he’d been holding back for almost an hour. “Clarence, he sent me a link. Claymore University is looking for first-year biology instructors. Per-course, but it’s something to try for.”He’d served half his sentence now, and there was reason to think he’d not serve it all. “I’ve submitted an application, and Clarence knows a guy who knows a guy, or whatever. Hopefully they don’t trace the IP address of my email back to a prison.”He laughed but his father didn’t. “The job would start the spring semester.”

  “That’s good, son, that’s good to hear. You’d like that, yeah?

  Teaching?”

  “Teaching ecology courses to people who give a shit? Yes.

  Teaching first-year to kids who have to take it? No. But it’ll pay the bills and beats a lot of jobs.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, for sure.”His father was so obviously distracted and had been the full hour. It was like there was a TV screen behind Cohen, thieving his attention: a ballgame and his favourite team about to win. “And your sentence. Terrific news you’ll be out—”

  “Dad, what’s up? You’re a little...I don’t know.”

  “Your mother. She’s. She, you know. She thinks it’s enough that you’re in here. I don’t know. Never mind.” An awkward posture, an awkward shrugging of his shoulders. Truth had a way of wanting to bust out of his father. “She doesn’t want you getting worked up about anything else until you’re out of here, you know? And she’s probably right, you know?”

  The shrilling visitation-is-over bell rang.

  His father got up to leave, and Cohen said it like, Sit Down! “What do you mean, Dad? I can see it on your face. Something’s up.”

  “Nothing, just, keep looking for a job. That’s priority one.” His father stood up. “I hope you get the teaching position. That’s your first priority. Focus on that, on getting a job, for now. That’s the best use of your time, now. Your thoughts.”

  “What is wrong with you, babbling like that?”

  His father put his hat on, “See you...I’ll come by the weekend.”He scurried off like the timid man he was. Secrets had a way of bouncing around in his body, and Cohen knew the signs, the junky posturing.

  COHEN WAS ALLOWED three one-hour visits a week, and to prevent wasting one of those precious hours, he had the right to ask who it was and refuse the visit. But Cohen had yet to use all three in one week. So he’d get buzzed and he’d go. Expecting his father. The first few times he was told he had a visitor, he rounded the corner, and every time it wasn’t Allie, he’d hit a wall that wasn’t there: his father could read the disappointment on his face. The way Keith must’ve read the shock on Cohen’s face the day he made a surprise visit. He’d been expecting his father, but he’d been expecting him at three o’clock. Cohen was reading in his cell, heard footsteps, heard humming, heard Davies, your visitor is here. He thought nothing of it, dog-eared a page in his novel, and laid it on his windowsill. Looked at the guard, Lemme out, then.

  When Cohen saw Keith sitting at that table, he’d stopped walking so abruptly his sneaker squeaked off the floor. Two inmates behind him had bumped into him and pushed their way past him. Looks of disdain on their face because jail was no place to be bumping into people. Cohen wanted to turn and walk back to his cell, or he wanted to flip the table on Keith. Pin him under it and yell. But he was drawn to the look of anger on Keith’s face. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Don’t act shocked to see me, you son of a bitch.”

  “Shocked?”

  “Allie’s gone missing, and you know it. You’re crazy mother’s probably behind it, harbouring her?”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Piss off, Cohen. I just want to know she’s okay. I want to know where she’s been sleeping, and if she’s coming back to work or what?”

  “What makes you think I give a shit where she’d be?”

  Keith stopped talking and squinted his eyes at Cohen, like Cohen was out of focus. He tilted his head, curious, like maybe Cohen wasn’t lying. “It’s been...weeks. Maybe three, I don’t know. Too long.”

  Cohen sat back in his chair. “You’re not exaggerating?” and his concern for Allie sidetracked his anger.

  “Un-clench your fists, tough guy. I think your temper’s gotten you in enough shit this year?” Cohen looked down at his hands, and Keith said, “If you really don’t know where she is, I’ll just go.”

  “So, what, she hasn’t called you, didn’t leave a note?”

  Keith slapped the table, pointed. People looked over at them, briefly, but got back to their own conversations just as fast. “Don’t play dumb. She was here. She’s a registered visitor for you! I saw her name when I signed in on your file as a visitor!”

  “I’m not gonna argue about this,Keith. I’m gonna get up and go if this is all we’re going to do!”

  “You fucked her up. About the kid. How she lied.” Cohen stared, waiting for more words. “The last thing she said to me was she needed to come here and tell you it was a boy she gave away, not a girl. And I haven’t seen her since.”

  “A boy? It was a boy?” And his skin was crawling with invisible insects. He got up to leave again, and Keith muttered, “And what do you mean, it was a boy that me and Allie had? Your goddamn mother’s been—”

  “What do you mean, that me and Allie had?Why’d you tell me about her child that night, man, if it was yours.”

  He raised his shoulders in a slow shrug and made a dumb face that Cohen wanted to punch. “Logically, it was mine. If you’re smart enough to do the math. But you, you’re not even smart enough to lie, you piece of shit. Your mother’s been by my house a dozen times. She barges in whenever she wants, tearing into Allie for whatever details she needs. She acts like I’m not there, in my own goddamn house. The two of them. And now Allie’s run off.”

  Cohen put two hands on the table and stared at them.

  “Your mother’s acting like a vigilante cop—”

  “Just, back up!The whole story, when did this start?”

  “This is bullshit! I’m not going to sit here and guess if you’re pulling my leg or if your mother’s batshit crazy or what?” Keith stayed sitting in his chair, but started pulling his jacket on. “If you don’t know what she’s up to, you should! Because someone needs to reel her in. She’s out there fucking up peoples’ lives. Ping Ponging around from my house to Zack’s house to the police to Adoption Services—”

  “What do you mean, Adoption Services?”

  Keith sat back in his chair like a man with an upper hand. “She wants them to administer a paternity test. Before Zack’s sent back into foster care.”

  “Foster care? ”

  “Fuck. You’re way out of the loop, aren’t you? I can see it in your eyes now.”Keith sat up in his chair, grinning, about to get up and leave. The table they were sitting in was constructed the way a picnic table is built. It meant Keith’s legs were trapped under the table, and Cohen wanted to thrust the table up and pin Keith to the floor. He wanted to drive the edge of the table into Keith’s ribs, and he wanted to hear the fucker wheeze, cry, apologize. Keith stood up, looked left to right like he couldn’t remember the way he’d come in.

  Cohen went back to his cell and sat on the edge of his bed, rocking his legs back and forth; his cheeks puffed out from an everlasting sigh. The four walls o
f his cell meant there were no outlets for the kinds of questions that could wreck a man. He didn’t have ten minutes to himself before the burly counsellor from corrections staff was at his cell door to fetch him, for another seminar, as required by his Offender Plan. The man had an impossible thick moustache and, always, a coffee in one hand, a file and pen in the other. And he smelled like waking up in a wet tent.

  “My father’s coming in an hour and a half.”

  “Well, this’ll only take an hour,”and the man had said it like Cohen didn’t have a choice anyway. It had been another VHS tape. There was dust in the grooves of the cassette; Cohen could see it as the man slid it into the VCR. It was a two-hour video, about respecting peoples’boundaries, narrated by women with bad perms and men in acid-washed jeans. The counsellor at his desk, in the rehabilitation centre, clipped his nails through the movie. The sound of it was worse than fingernails across a chalkboard or a fork missing food on a plate.

  COHEN’S FATHER WAS smiling at him as Cohen sat at the table that afternoon. Smiling. So Cohen’s words came like cold water. “You fucked up, Dad, as a parent, as anything...I mean...do you have any idea what an absolute mental...like...” He clenched his teeth, shook his head. Looked around the room and back at his father’s shocked face. “Keith’s been here. And I can’t make sense of what he was talking about!”

  His father, deflating like a balloon, “Your mother, she—”

  “I don’t even want to hear an excuse for her. She’s crossed a line this time, even for her. I just want the facts. Where’s Allie? What does Mom have to do with it?Why is she talking to Zack’s father, and the—”

  “Your mother,”he stuck his hands up to stop Cohen’s words, “just wanted you to worry about getting through your sentence. She wanted you to focus on finding a job, while she tended to—”

  “A job.”He shook his head.

  “You asked me to look in on this boy, didn’t you?”

  “There’s a huge difference, don’t you think? Between finding out if he’s dead or alive and busting in on his life and doing whatever the fuck Keith just blurted out in bits and pieces!”

  His father nodded, caught. “We’ll start with the boy, then?”

  “Just...start somewhere. We’ve got fifty minutes. And Allie. Is she really missing?”

  “I honestly don’t know anything about Allie. To be blunt, I don’t care. That’s your mother, dealing with her. I’ve stayed out of what your mother’s been up to until she started needing my help. We fought long and hard about how much she’s stuck her nose in. I mean, the both of you: look where sticking your nose into the kid’s business landed you!”

  “The boy. You said you’d start with the boy. So start!”

  “I know you’re mad,Cohen, but—”

  “I am. I’m mad. And I’m sorry if I’m being horrible, but I’m exactly that, mad.”

  “I don’t know what you know of the boy’s adoptive situation. In a nutshell, the boy’s father got stuck with the kid after his partner took off...” He paused and his face held still while he searched for a word. “I can never think of the boy’s father’s name?”

  “Jamie.”

  “Jamie spent two years thinking of what to do about Zack. He got offered a dream job, his words, dream job, in Alaska. But there’s no major hospital anywhere near the resort he’ll be cooking in.”

  Cohen motioned his hand like he was trying to fast-forward his father. “Okay, so what? Jamie stuck Zack back in foster care and left for Alaska?”

  “I’m getting there. Let me get there. The boy’s name comes up and you get your back up!”They both sat back in their chairs. “ARVC is pretty much endemic to families in Atlantic Canada or something. There’s specialists here. Zack’s living in a topnotch pediatric cardiac care unit, and he’s getting their absolute attention. Jamie couldn’t take him away from the care he can get here and couldn’t get in Alaska or Florida, and those places don’t have free healthcare.”

  “So, he’s still waiting on a heart transplant then?”

  “Yes, and...” his father snapped his fingers, “What’s his name again?”

  “Jamie!” Cohen leaned forward in his chair.

  “Jamie had been looking into putting Zack back into foster care long before the job opportunity in Alaska. And with the heart condition, well, that’s that. Jamie’s gone. The boy’s here.”

  “All right, but I still don’t understand the trouble with the boy’s heart. He has what we have: a rhythm defect. It’s not making any sense.”

  “His heart’s failing,Cohen. His tissues are filling with fluid. He’s swelling up. He’s lethargic and confused. It’s a hard thing to look at, I’ll tell you that.”

  “So you’ve seen him then?”

  “I’m getting to that. Yes.”

  “What you’re describing is congestive heart failure. Like old people get. Not ARVC.”He shook his head,“Has he officially been diagnosed with ARVC, with the DNA test?”

  “Dr. Jennings explained it to me in analogies. Whatever’s wrong with our heart gene, that causes ARVC, he’s got that same thing wrong with his gene too, but he’s also got other issues, with his heart gene, and all those issues are interacting negatively. Like gas on a fire.”

  “I—There’s no such thing as a heart gene, Dad. It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Well then I guess that’s why he spoke to me in analogies? We’re not all fluent in genetic-speak, are we?” His father put his hands up, settle down. “I didn’t say I understood it. That’s the best I can get my head around it. Something is exasperating the ARVC problem. There’s virtually nothing on the internet about what’s happening with Zack because cases like his have only been treated a dozen times in Canada.”

  “Who said that, Jennings, or the internet?”

  “Jennings.”

  “So his heart is officially failing?”

  “The heart is a muscle, Jennings said, and bits of the boy’s heart are turning to fat, and fat can’t pump like muscle can. Most days someone from the government comes by and sits with him, but your mother and I. We’ve been looking in too. They’re watching his urine output. I don’t know why, but I know it’s a bad thing that it’s getting lower and lower. Your mother sits with him a lot. Staring at the bag. Waiting for yellow.”

  “So, you’re both looking in on the kid, yet you’ve been lying to me about not having any updates on the boy—”

  “I got your mother involved in helping me gather news on the kid. I guess I should’ve seen this all coming, once she started poking her nose in. But, just to finish up on how Zack is doing, there’s an upside to how bad off he is. It’s bumped him up in queue on the transplant list.”

  Cohen blinked long and hard. His father said, “Do you know what an RVAD is?”And Cohen nodded yes.

  “The RVAD is doing the pumping work his right ventricle can’t do anymore. He’s come around some since they hooked him up to it. The swelling is down, and he’s breathing better. It’s made the newspapers,Zack’s plight. Heart transplants in children aren’t common,and kids on VACs are even rarer.”And he stopped there. Looked at his watch. Looked at Cohen. Looked at his watch again.

  “Now listen. I’m going to leave you with that. That’s enough for right now. Then I’m going to tell you the rest, with updates, on my next visit.”

  “Finish the story,Dad.”

  His father looked at his watch again. Tapped it this time.” I can’t blurt this next bit out in ten minutes, I’m sorry. And there’s really nothing to say until your mother...gets through a few more tasks.”

  “Call me then, tonight?”

  His father looked at him. “Like I said, there’s nothing more to say until your mother clews up a few things.

  “Dad?”

  His father put his hat on. Twirled a scarf around his neck. Left.

  THE PRISON LIBRARY had a horrible selection of books. Or it had been curated by someone with bad taste. Or they took whatever they could get in
donations. There were nothing but trashy paperbacks with no substance or variation on noble lawyer turned hero. There was a whole wall of non-fiction, but he’d never read non-fiction because nothing seemed interesting enough to read three hundred pages about. So he stuck with the crime novels. There wasn’t much else to do in there, other than read, but since his father’s abrupt departure earlier that week, since his father’s dangling more to come, Cohen had become too distracted to lose himself in the novels. His attention span would get punctured by isolated sentences from his father’s visit. There’s really nothing to say until your mother...gets through a few more tasks.

  He went to the hack squat in the yard. Put on more weights than usual. Up and down, up and down. He closed his eyes, kept going. Felt the throb of a kick in the shin, Get up. It was Truck. For months, Cohen had skillfully managed to avoid a confrontation with the Truck—how to look at the man, how to not look at the man,where not to sit. But here it was. Cohen had let avoiding Truck slip his mind, and now Truck was kicking him in the shin, Get up.

  Cohen stopped the up and down motion. Opened his eyes. He was taking his hands off the bar, and he knew what he did next mattered. If he cowered,Truck would hit him out of instinct, and if he challenged Truck,Truck would do the same. There was a middle ground, and Cohen had to find it—yield, give him the machine, but a solid look too, and not a word. But Cohen stood up, and Truck said, “Thanks, man,” and slid in around him, onto the hack squat machine. And that was it.

  Cohen walked off, afraid to turn around and see Truck there, swinging at him. He pictured a dumbbell into his mouth, the pain of cracked teeth and exposed nerve endings; the sight of his teeth bobbing in a pool of his own blood, and the guards not seeing it happen before another blow. He was afraid to turn around and see it coming, and he was afraid if he didn’t turn around, he’d not see it coming.