Every Little Thing Read online

  Cohen sat at the back of the boat staring behind him as Ryan relieved himself. His hand going numb from the vibration of the throttle.

  “Hurry up, man!We’re not headed for a wharf or anything are we?”

  “No. And slow down a little. Jesus, I’m gonna piss on myself here!”

  There was a flying V of ducks overhead and Cohen watched it shoot like an arrow through the sky. He felt the lever of the throttle torque his wrist up, like the propellers had snagged on vegetation or struck a rock. But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like the grinding halt, or the slight tug, that his hand had felt a hundred other times in running that propeller into stone or vegetation. He cut the motor. “Ryan?”

  Before he’d even turned around, his jaw went numb at the thought of the propellers biting into his brother. He let go of the throttle and refused to turn his head and be sure. Some force, some invisible set of hands, pushing against his head as he turned, slowly, to look at the front of the boat.

  And it was empty.

  Ryan wasn’t on the floor of the boat, but Cohen took a stubborn look behind a bench. He looked in the water behind him and Ryan wasn’t swimming towards him. He wasn’t swimming towards shore. Cohen hauled the outboard motor up and out of the water to check for signs the propellers had struck his brother.

  He cut the stereo and a curtain of silence fell all around him. A stillness. He heard no thrashing, no panicked screaming, no reckless laughter. He shouted his brother’s name into that silence. Filled it. Shouted like his screams would yank Ryan to the surface. Fish him out of the water.

  He didn’t think to close his mouth or take a breath of air as he dove into the pond. He was in the water and his chest stung— the wound from his surgery still not closed. He was screaming his brother’s name and it came out bubbly and muffled; the murky pond water gurgling in his throat whenever he yelled Ryan’s name. The taste of it thick in his mouth. Like cow manure and grainy dirt.

  He couldn’t see a thing. A million flecks of brown were suspended and bobbing calmly up and down in the water. A ballet of silt; such a stark contrast to his panic.

  He came to the surface for air. Gulped. And his lungs felt like torn bags. He submerged and swam for the bottom: the water getting more and more visually impenetrable as he descended; the spaces between suspended dirt closing and closing until it felt like he was swimming through mud. And darker still as the sun’s reach petered out. The silt felt like microscopic claws at his eyes. His legs kicking furiously and eventually his palms hit mud. Sank inches deep into that mud. His lungs begging for air, tightening, or threatening to burst. He felt around. His throat ready to pop; an urgency for Ryan overriding an urgency for air. Buoyancy yanking him towards the surface. He fought against that pull, the need for air, kicking his feet, scraping his hands off God knows what on the bottom of the pond—the mud cool enough to soothe whenever something tore his flesh. The incision on his chest had stopped stinging or adrenaline had him feeling invincible. Like he could punch a hole in the bottom of the pond to drain it and find his brother.

  He rushed to the surface for a refill of air. He was shovelling his arms through the water and the water felt like a gel. He dug deep and hard into that water, but his limbs weren’t moving as fast as it felt like they should’ve been. And he hated his lungs for needing more air. He was gulping pond water as he swam to the surface, like maybe he’d drown too, but the light was getting brighter and brighter and he made it. He yelled meaningless guttural panic as his head broke the surface; pond water gurgling out of his throat, rattling in his left ear drum, and stinging as it leaked from his nose. Deep breaths. He screamed Ryan’s name as he bobbed at the surface.

  The sound of no response was the sound of a hundred things that weren’t Ryan. Buzzing insects, cars whizzing by on the highway beyond the pond. The panic had two hands around his throat. His heart thudding and thumping. It felt like his ribs were caging an agitated bird. He swam along the surface, farther away from the boat, where he assumed Ryan had fallen in and gotten struck by the propellers.

  Deep breath. Conviction. But the fight against the water was getting harder as his muscles weakened. The rush to get down to the bottom. Faster than this.

  His hands were back at the muddy bottom, wrist deep in mud, elbow deep in places. He felt something solid and thick as an arm and his heart stopped. His whole body stopped, but the object was loose and weightless. Attached to nothing. It was a beer bottle. One of theirs maybe and that was cruel, the bottle having belonged to them. It was cruel that they’d just been together, above surface, drinking and laughing and this seemed impossible. Them separated and searching for each other below the surface. That his brother could die. That Ryan could die. Not exist. That the water could be so goddamn murky, so visually impenetrable, that Ryan could’ve been right there, within reach, without Cohen knowing.

  He kept going. Up and down. Long after it made sense. His body acting, his mind just needing to. Up and down. Mud at his hands, water tugging him to the surface, too soon, every time, and dunking him back under.

  The boat a little farther away each time he came up for air.

  Until it was a dot in the distance.

  The sun a little dimmer each time he emerged, the air a little cooler. And then he couldn’t even get to the bottom anymore. His limbs like solid blocks until he couldn’t feel them there at all. All torso.

  His eyes felt like all the dirt and water in the pond had seeped in behind them and were pushing at his eyeballs from behind, trying to thrust them from his skull. His vision blurry as he floated there at the surface. Up and down with the incessant rise and fall of the waves. His soggy shirt twisted, almost choking him, and so what. He stayed there for a while, his first break in over an hour, scanning the surface for his brother’s body, thinking, Things float. Thinking that maybe Ryan had made his way to dry land and found his way back to the cabin. Thinking maybe Ryan was looking for him. That Ryan was on someone’s wharf and peering out at the empty boat, perplexed. The boat now well out of Cohen’s blurry field of vision. He gave up. Exhausted and in shock. Confused. His body and his mind disconnected as he lay out on the water’s surface, crucified.

  The water was heaving him around like driftwood, slowly, over and over, clapping against his ears. His tongue pushing bits of dirt off the back of his teeth. He turned his head to his right hand. Went half deaf from the ear submerged under the water. The flesh along the entire underside of his thumb had been torn clean off and yet he felt no pain.

  A faint echo of his name registered. He looked back up to the sky and with his ear now out of the water, he recognized his father’s voice yelling over the sound of an outboard motor. His father was coming around the bend, from the direction of their cabin, in a bright yellow boat he must have borrowed from a neighbour. He got close and cut the motor.

  There was a shakiness in his father’s voice he’d never heard before. Like, if Cohen worded this wrong, his father would shatter right here in front of him. There was hesitation, but a desperate need to know in his father’s voice. “Cohen!”

  His father was right there in front of him and yet sounded so far away. When his father stood—the sun like a yellow globe resting on his left shoulder—he looked impossibly tall. He was close enough for Cohen to see his legs tremble, like his bones were giving out, turning into sand. And it was the first time he ever really noticed the colour of his father’s eyes—a black-flecked pale brown that connoted motion, waves—and he knew he’d forever equate the colour of his father’s eyes with the murky pond water he’d stared into for an hour, or two hours, or maybe it was three.

  “Cohen. Your brother,Cohen. Where—Where?”

  Cohen spoke so calmly he sounded insane and emotionally disconnected from the situation. “Ryan fell over. I can’t find him. He must have swam ashore. I can’t find him.”Waves still breaking against him, clapping at his ear, lifting him up and down.

  His father tore his shirt off, buttons popping off, and
Cohen stopped him. “It’s been more than an hour,Dad. He’s...not in this pond,” and something about that line, something about sharing this search with his father, brought Cohen back into his body. His chest went concave and his lungs emptied as he wailed.

  His father went whiter than a swan. “G-give me your hand, Cohen.”

  “No.”

  He had to pull Cohen from the water, his ribs—each one of them—rippling off the side of the boat, one after the other, as his father fished him out of the pond. He laid Cohen in the centre of the boat and he dove into the water. Because a man needs to try.

  EVENTUALLY THERE WERE other people out in boats, yelling, looking. Red and blue lights flashing in the distance. The water black as the night sky. Everything, somehow, a shade of black: even the trees. The stars shining like they always do, like this night was nothing different. Cohen was sitting on a wharf, alone, watching out over the pond. It wasn’t even his wharf. He could hear more than he could see, but Search and Rescue had the pond lit up like a night-time sport’s event was about to start. Yells, motors, and meaningless, wordless sounds. RCMP. Premature ambulances.

  A body doesn’t just disappear. And it wasn’t that big a pond. And the fact they hadn’t found his body yet, meant there was a sick pulse of hope, a one percent chance Ryan was still alive. Cohen had to cling to that or lose himself right there on some stranger’s wharf.

  That one percent chance felt more like a five percent chance because this was Ryan they were looking for, so it could’ve been another one of his sick pranks.

  But it had been too long.

  That one percent chance felt more like a twenty percent chance, because it had to.

  THE POLICE, OR Search and Rescue, or whoever those men were: they wouldn’t let the family look at his body. Just his father. Two men held his mother back. Three men held Cohen back, yet he managed to push through them. He’d knocked one man to the ground and that man had grabbed another two and they all went down like bowling pins. But a moment of hesitation slowed Cohen’s pace—a moment of not wanting to see Ryan and be sure—and they restrained him in that moment of hesitation.

  There were flashlights etching shaky yellow zigzags all along the ground. There were mad dashes of red and blue lights hitting his father’s body in different places. They unzipped a black bag and his father threw up all over it. Threw up all over Ryan’s body. He fell to the ground, into a sitting position, bawling wordless desperate moans, backing away from Ryan’s body like it was a train coming at him.

  “Sir.”

  “No! Just—”And he was crying and Cohen had never seen him cry. Every bit of air in his lungs, gone, like they wouldn’t fill again.

  They went to help his father up off the ground, but his father shot up and grabbed the bag, unzipped it, looked again, and when he absentmindedly leaned into the stretcher, or collapsed, or fainted, or something, it tipped the stretcher over. A thud of Ryan’s body on the wet ground. From a distance he heard his mother yelp in shock and saw her try to run to her son’s body, in the bag, knocked off the stretcher. But the men held her back, righted Ryan’s body, and put him back on the stretcher.

  Crackles of radio and walkie-talkie static popped in the distance. The sound of his mother’s eyes, exploding, and dripping down her face. All of it had felt too much like it was Cohen’s fault, and he felt stabbed full of holes of pain. All of this meant: no more Ryan. Inconceivable. Ryan didn’t feel gone. Because eighteen years can’t just be undone like that. Or because there were parts of his life his brother had filled and they didn’t feel empty yet.

  His father came to his mother, but Cohen walked away and they didn’t follow him, or they didn’t notice. There was a crowd, maybe twenty people, in a small space, boxed in by trees, darkness, so it was easy to slip away. Because he couldn’t stand the pond colour of his father’s eyes; couldn’t be near his parents without guilt bullying him.

  He walked back to his cabin the long way. Took detours. Kicked sticks and cried once, briefly. He’d sat down and forced himself to cry, like that might help it sink in. It didn’t.

  He got up and walked back to the cabin, afraid his parents would be there and he’d have to say something to them. And he didn’t know why he was afraid of that. His mother was in a rocking chair when he walked into the cabin. Back and forth and back and forth. Creaky hardwood. Crumpled tissues, like swans with their necks wrung. Cohen sat on the couch. There was a silence between them that no words could have penetrated. It would’ve been like shooting arrows at a cement wall.

  THEY WERE SUPPOSED to go back home Sunday night. But it didn’t feel right. Or it didn’t make sense. Or they just couldn’t.

  Six a.m. Monday morning, Cohen was sitting on their sun-bleached wharf. Legs crossed. Palms flat back against the splintery wood. The light drizzle was refreshing and it had fish jumping as they mistook stray raindrops for winged insects on the water. He sat staring out at the pond. Watching ripples. The indifference of the water to the life within it. Fish leapt out at flies and birds tried to snag fish and everything just carried on, like his brother didn’t die here two days ago. Their boat was knocking against the wharf, tied on with a frayed yellow rope. The bag of garbage Ryan had put the battery packaging in was snapping like a flag in the wind, stuck under the weight of the stereo.

  He thought about taking an axe to the boat, in a juvenile fit of rage, to vent his anger and loss, but mainly to hear the violent sound of destruction; to drown out all the quietness around him. He felt like he should be crying and pissed off and putting a fist through something, because that was reaction. To bust his knuckles off something, to cry, to watch the blood spill, to yell. But he just sat there, at a loss for how to cope, and it never felt like reaction.

  He blamed his mother, for making them all go up there that weekend. Because this wouldn’t have happened. She’d blame him: the drinking, no life jackets. The decision to go out fishing that morning. And they’d both be right.

  EVERYTHING

  OLD AND NEW

  NO ONE SPOKE the whole ride home. The stereo wasn’t on and no one was reading. There was only the sound of rolling tires, and after so long,Cohen could hear friction at work: the rubber tires pulling at the road to thrust the car forward. And at the Irving station: the clugging sound of gas filling the tank. There was never silence, just the kinds of background noise he’d normally not notice—like the sound of his father’s breathing or the wind whistling through the window—and it all emphasized the absence of Ryan. Cohen couldn’t turn his head to the empty seat beside him; turning and not seeing Ryan was like seeing a ghost. So he stared out his window the whole way home: his eyes riding along the tops of trees, squinting into the sun.

  When Cohen’s father pulled onto his street to drop him off, he saw Allie and her father unloading a pile of stuff from a pickup truck parked parallel to the curb. They were laying stuff on the sidewalk: a floor lamp, a coffee table, some boxed appliances with yellow Walmart tape across them. A toaster. They’d stopped and stood still when Cohen and his father opened their car doors and stepped out in unison.

  They knew and Cohen knew they knew. They had the wet gloss of sympathy in their squinted eyes. They were too eager to make eye contact. It was in Allie’s upside-down smile—her lips puffed out from her face. Matt shook his head back and forth, slowly, Unbelievable. It was a city with less than a hundred thousand people in it, so Ryan’s death had been all over the local news: it was front page in the papers and it got a ten-minute spot on the five o’clock prime time. Local boy, drowned. Family getaway gone wrong. They sensationalized it and oversentimentalized it. Will never attend university. Will never marry. By all accounts, a big-hearted kid, the class clown even teachers cheered on. But they didn’t. They’d suspended him once, earlier that year, for the pranks. And one newspaper had gotten his name wrong, called him Bryan Davies.

  Matt and Allie were carrying a coffee table, Matt on one end, Allie on the other, and they didn’t lay it down when Matt op
ened his mouth to speak.

  “We’ve heard, Gord, and we’re devastated.”

  Cohen’s mother opened her door,muttering that she wanted her purse out of the trunk. “I have a full casserole in the oven and there’s only the two of us.” Matt nodded at Allie, and took a look at his watch. “Really. It’ll be ready in ten minutes. You guys—”

  His mother had been rooting through the trunk for her purse and then she dropped a bag onto the driveway; the whack of it hitting the pavement had cut Matt off. She’d made a quick, frightened sound, like she’d been stung by a wasp, and they all looked at the bag, Ryan’s bag, on the black pavement. A black bookbag, white straps. A Canadian flag sewn onto the strap and Cohen could remember the day his mother had sewn it on— before Ryan’s grade nine trip to Greece. She’d stuck her finger and said fuck and Cohen had rarely heard her swear at that point.

  Cohen stepped towards the bag, scooped it up off the driveway, and slung it over his shoulder. “I...I packed up his stuff. So you wouldn’t have to.”

  She looked away from the bag, ignored Cohen. “That’s very nice of you, to offer us some supper, Matt, but we’ve already eaten.”A lie, and Cohen was starving, his stomach dancing at the thought of supper. She turned to his father, “Can you f-find my purse,Gordon?”She sat back in the car with her lower lip bit between teeth.

  Matt, again to his father, “Gordon, let’s cut to the chase. This is devastating...with Ryan. And we’re here for you. I’ll drop over that bite to eat at six, okay? I know where you live, if you haven’t moved.” Matt turned to Cohen, his eyes waiting for eye contact, “And Allie’ll bring a plate over to you, okay, bud?”