Away From Everywhere Page 4

  In any case, I know that’s why we have these short story CDs, because Alex doesn’t care for fiction, and I know that if I asked him something about one of these stories later on he’d remember nothing. He isn’t even listening. He just looks out the window at all the young beauties in their twenties.Their daring wardrobes that a thirty-four-year-old like myself cannot wear without rolling everyone’s eyes. Their innocent laughter and eager sexual appetites I cannot match. Their flashy accessories and technological appendages: iPods and cell phones and…God, I’d love to be that stunning, oblivious, wild twenty-one-year-old again. I think everyone dies at thirty; thirty to eighty is just one last long breath. I mean by thirty we’ve filled our future with far too many wishes to ever come true. Growing up we are naive and concoct a far too perfect future for ourselves, so it’s only natural that as adults we are a little let down. The world is not the place all those childhood fairytales promised us. All lovers are not like Barbie and Ken, and now I want to burn those fucking dolls for lying to me! (lol.)They painted far too beautiful a picture to ever live up to.

  Sometimes I hate myself for babbling and rambling like this.What a shame, I’d at least like a solid reason to hate myself.Not just a long, vague list. It only seems healthy that if you are going to hate yourself, you should know why. You should be able to justify it.

  Why do we hide from the truth when it shows its ugly face everywhere?Why close our eyes to it? For ourselves or for others? The truth is, and today I’ll finally admit it, I am bored with my life. I am afraid this is it. I am terrified. I am trapped in a life that took years to build. I built it so solidly, soconfidently, that it is like a cage around me now. The marriage vows and the mortgage payments and the family album filled with nostalgic photos. Melancholy is my new shadow. If it weren’t for Callie and Lucia, I don’t know. I’d probably burn it all down. I realized I was stuck in this monotonous life long before Alex bought these stupid audio CDs. About a year ago we stopped kissing. It feels weird to kiss now. That’s when you know it’s over. Couples go on fucking long after the love is dead, that’s primitive. But a good kiss is how we tell someone all the things we love about them that words could never convey. When we can no longer kiss our lover with passion, we are admitting – in a blaring silence – it is over.

  But knowing a relationship is over, and letting go and moving on, these are two very different things. Chalk and cheese, black and white, day and night, pleasure and pain. Birth and death.

  PART TWO

  TO THE WALL

  THE OTHER KID

  OUTSIDE HIS WINDOW, OWEN LISTENED in on two kids building a snowman. They were arguing about what to use for a nose – a rock or a carrot – and contemplating the gender, the name.

  “Bill!”

  “No! It’s a girl!”

  “No it’s not!”

  “Yes it is, stupid! ”

  One kid was calculated, practical, instructed the other how to best pack the snow. The other was more concerned with the name, what kind of hat they’d use, how long the snowman would last. Lillian’s dog ran along the fence, barking at the children.

  He crawled out of bed, just past eleven, wondering what his aunt truly thought of him: a man with no job, a man who sleeps with his brother’s wife, a grown man waking at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to go and nothing to do. A man stranded in his aunt’s house, a thousand kilometers from home. Whatever home meant. He was a burden, but Lillian would never say so. I’m enjoying the company, dear. It’s a pretty bighouse to be all alone in. And you need somewhere to rest up, someone to look after you til you get that cast off, right?

  It was too obviously a lie. He had nowhere to go, no money to get him there. Not acknowledging that, dancing around it, made him feel even more rueful.

  She had breakfast made for him, eggs and bacon between burnt toast, with a side of hash browns greened with fresh herbs, and she’d left the coffee pot on even though he’d told her she brews her coffee too strong for his liking. No thanks, Lilly, that stuff is going to punch holes in your kidneys…You know, Lilly, tar is cheaper than coffee beans… She’d laugh then, like maybe she did enjoy his company.

  Lillian was outside with the dog, urging it to relieve itself so they could go back inside. He peered out the window and saw her topping up her bird feeders. He felt like another bird to her, but something big and ugly, like a vulture, which only she would take in and care for. He put the food on a plate and hurried back to his room to read more of Hannah’s diary. As he read, he chewed and sipped and wiped crumbs from its pages. He tried, with a butter knife and then the tip of a pen, to dig up some bits of toast from the crease between its pages. There were lines he read twice. Pages he dog-eared to go back and read later.

  He laid her journal down on the edge of his night table and tuned back into the neighbour’s kids talking about the snowman. They were fighting now. One wanted to topple it, and the other threatened her not to. They reminded him of himself and Alex at that age. Such opposites, and yet so close. To any set of outside eyes they were nothing alike: Alex was the school president,Owen was the class clown, and they were right. But this was to their advantage: it meant that what one didn’t know, the other did. It also forced them to dig so deep into each other for common ground that the roots of their bond were that much deeper.

  He thought of school days with his brother. How they’d sit in the back seat of their father’s rusted red station wagon and listen to him scraping ice away from the windows. The sound was so loud it was as if the noise was coming out of their heads, not into them, and they had to raise their voices to talk to each other. Each day, as their father’s face appeared from behind the ice, a little distorted by the wet windshield, he’d shake a fist and make some corny joke about how they’d never offer to help him clean off the car. Not even if a hurricane was stormin’ up behind us!

  Instead, they sat in the back seat exchanging homework. At the time, the biggest advantage of being fraternal twins was that they were both in the same grade and had all the same homework. Anything non-subjective, like math or geology, they split down the middle and exchanged their answers in the back seat of that car. It halved their workload and freed up more time for them to play video games together. What one of them couldn’t get past in one of those games, the other could. They never fought over the controller, they shared it as fit. Owen could still see those nights now, their dark bedroom lit only by the surreal glare of the TV screen, the walls alive with all the colours and motions of a kaleidoscope. Alex always sat up on the edge of the bed in blue pajamas, kicking both legs straight up in the air and holding them there each time the game got intense. And Owen could still see the inside of that car they sat in every morning: the navy blue upholstery, dulled and rendered bumpy by age, and the cigarette burn in the passenger seat. Yellowed cotton poked up from it like an upside-down icicle. His father always jammed it back down with his forefinger, and got mad when their mother plucked it out and threw it away. It’ll be empty in no time if you keep at that! He could still smell the ninety-nine-cent pine tree air freshener his father put there when they were in grade six. It was still in the car when they were in junior high, hanging from the rearview mirror and blowing parallel to it whenever someone rolled down a window.

  Most of those school mornings were similar enough to blend into one memory. All that ever changed was the song on the radio or the homework they exchanged. That may have been why the sudden change in their father’s personality, near the end of grade nine, was so marked and poignant. By the end of that school year, he spoke only to answer their questions in the mornings. He’d stopped hassling them to help shovel, and he cleared the ice from the car without making any jokes about how useless they were. If he did speak, and Owen was the first to notice it, his voice was flat. Something was missing, there was no tone, no inflection at the right places in his speech, just a flat line of simple one or two word sentences. His lack of emotion was evident in his now monotonous voice. H
e seemed more like a body dragging itself around than a man alive. Every morning he fell into the car seat and let out a long, exaggerated sigh. One morning he’d shaved only half his face and didn’t notice until he got in the car. He went to work anyway. He stopped styling his hair, and then stopped ironing his shirts, and then stopped tucking them in.

  Near mid-May of that year, he started spacing out at red lights. He habitually looked down on his hands whenever they were at a red light, as if fascinated by them. He watched them like a captivating play only he could see. He’d pull his skin tight to eradicate a wrinkle or gently comb the hair on his wrist, and he often laughed a little as he came out of what looked like a daydream. They never bothered to tell him to go, they’d wait for a car behind them to blow their horn.

  Owen tried to ignore his father’s change in personality, but one night before bed Alex mentioned it to their mother, who explained,“Your father may be losing his job, that’s all. He might be a little glum like that for a while, but everything is going to be all right. He’ll just have to give up the journalism bit and work in another field…”

  They nodded when she finished the story, reiterating, “Everything will be okay, all right?” They were satisfied with having an explanation. Any explanation would’ve suited them just fine. “Now go to bed.”

  Less than a week later, they were driving to school and Owen saw his father notice a payphone in front of the courthouse onWater Street. His father did a double-take, as if it were an old friend he’d spotted. The car jutted out of its lane, no indicator, and bumped into the curb before it stopped. Owen was confused, but liked that he’d have a valid excuse for being late. Alex though, he didn’t want to miss a minute of math class. Mrs. Saunders always recapped the last day’s class, stressing what was most relevant, what he’d need to know to secure the A he was after.

  “Dad! What are you doing? We’re already late!” Alex smacked at his new watch.

  It was odd of their father not to have mentioned needing to use the phone, but not answering Alex was even stranger. Instead, he slammed his car door, needlessly hard, as if to shut Alex up. He cast an eerie look back at them as he marched towards the phone: it sliced at them like a knife. His eyes were glowing, bulging from their sockets, as if his eyeballs were swelling and the sockets could no longer contain them. He was on the payphone for ten minutes, flailing his arms and stamping his feet. He slammed the receiver down and picked it back up to yell some more, as if the target of his arrow-headed words could still be on the line.

  “Alex!What the hell is this?”

  “I don’t know, just … just keep your head down, don’t look at him, don’t make him mad…okay?”He wiped a sweaty palm on his jeans.“Don’t look at him and don’t say anything… and don’t make him mad. Pretend we didn’t see anything. Okay?”

  Owen forced a laugh. “Jesus, Alex, it’s Dad!”

  “Is it?”

  At school they were given a late pass to bring back the next day, signed by one of their parents to confirm they were legitimately late. Owen had a habit of cutting classes, so the principal was skeptical. When they came home after school that day, they walked into their house, laughing about a substitute teacher’s botched delivery of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men , and slung their bookbags down in the porch, having actively forgotten about their father’s fit of rage that morning. They were heading up to their room to play video games when they saw their mother sitting alone and strikingly silent in the living room. She was watching the carpet like it was a fire. The TV wasn’t on, there was no music on, and she wasn’t reading. She looked aged, and with her hands lying on her knees, she looked defenseless against the world.

  “Mom? Are you …all right?”

  “It’s your father.”She got up off the brown couch immediately, clutching a white pillow between her hands like a sandwich. “I’m worried about him. His boss called today. He might have quit, we don’t know.” She turned and laid the pillow back on the couch.“He just…he got up and walked out around eleven this morning,”she said, throwing her arms in the air.“He didn’t say a word to anyone. Joyce called to ask if he was feeling ill. You know what he’s like. Who knows what he was thinking, who ever knows what your father is thinking? He keeps everything all pent up, all to himself.”

  She caught herself growing frantic and calmed herself because Alex started to look panicked when she panicked.

  Alex showed her the late slips that needed to be signed. He hauled the crumpled pink slips out of his bookbag and smoothed them. “I don’t know what the hell he was doing or who the hell he was talking to,” he told her as he sank into the couch, “but it was kind of creepy. He gave me this nasty look when I asked him what he was doing, and then he was going apeshit on the phone!”

  “Watch your language, honey, and what phone, where?”

  “The payphone, down by the courthouse onWater Street.”

  They would have been fools not to have seen how the story alarmed her. She looked like someone just shot at in a war.

  “Oh, you know Dad…he…he probably forgot to use the phone before he left this morning.” She forced a dismissive smile. “That’s all.”

  She laughed a nervous laugh, but her mind, behind those flickering eyes, was clearly racing for an explanation. “When your father comes home, don’t say anything, don’t act any different than you usually do, okay? Like I said, he’s just stressed out about finding another job. His newspaper isn’t doing so well, that’s all.” She’d gone beyond trying to calm them now and was trying to calm herself, pressing wrinkles from her clothes and taking quick breaths.

  When their father opened the front door that night, their mother was leaning in the porch entrance, waiting to greet him, presumably hoping for a logical answer, one that would alleviate all her worries, one that would make her feel stupid for ever worrying in the first place. But he said nothing. She pried. “So, how was your day?”

  Kicking his shoes off in the porch. “Fine enough.” He almost tripped over Alex’s bookbag as he entered the hallway, brushing past her on his way to the bathroom. His shoulder butted into her breast hard enough to hurt, but she wouldn’t acknowledge the pain, wouldn’t rub it out. That would mean something was wrong.

  Owen sat on the couch watching his mother’s mind roam, having witnessed the flash of pain on her face and his father’s seemingly lobotomized body stumble up the hall. She saw him watching her and tried to hide the concern on her face. She smiled and headed for the kitchen, claiming that she’d left the pasta sauce on for too long. From where he sat on the couch, he could see a bottle of pasta sauce on the kitchen table, the lid still unopened. It was next to an onion, still sealed in its peel, and a tub of mushrooms still sealed in plastic wrap. It was the first time Owen knew his mother was straightfaced lying to him.

  Twenty minutes later, at supper, his father complained that the food tasted funny, as if there was something in it . He chewed it with his mouth open, loudly, making a wet sucking noise, and looked around the table for a response. A single strand of shredded parmesan cheese clung to the bristles on his unshaven cheeks, dangling there, like a silkworm from a tree. He asked with an utter urgency,“Is it just me, or is there a funny taste on this spaghetti?”

  He was obviously more paranoid than disgusted. He walked over to the cupboards and examined the box of pasta. “Was this sealed when you opened it?”

  Perplexed and alarmed, she nodded a slow nod.

  He opened the fridge door, grabbed the tub of parmesan cheese, and sniffed it in an exaggerated manner, hauling it away from his face to clear his nostrils between whiffs. He checked the expiry date on the pasta sauce.

  “I can trust you, Claire, but I don’t know if we can trust everyone you’ve got traipsing through this house. Not anymore. I don’t even trust the phones in here anymore. I’ve been working on a story for another paper, see. High magnitude. A different paper. But keep that between us, okay?”

  They all nodded, shocked, concealing their
fear. Owen knew that if he spoke, his father would hear a quiver in his voice. A quiver he felt safer hiding. Alex shot his mother a look: See!

  “It might just be a funny taste in my mouth from earlier today. The coffee I drank. I think one of the youngsters at work might be poisoning my coffee when I’m not looking. I’ve tried to catch him. I can’t tell you how though. He might be listening. It’ll ruin my plan. But I am setting him up. Don’t worry. I think he’s jealous that I built up my career the old-fashioned way, but he fast-tracked it with some lame college degree…so he doesn’t have the respect and reputation that I’ve earned. He wants to steal my stories. He can’t come up with his own. None as good as mine anyway.”

  He never noticed his family’s collective fright, but talked right at their shocked faces. “I think he wants my job, and I think he’ll do anything to get it. All of them. They all would. I had to leave work today. It wasn’t safe. I don’t know who to trust anymore. But it’ll be okay, soon. It’ll all be okay once I figure out my plan to catch him. I’ll get the police involved when the time is right. Too early and I’ll spoil it. He’s just about to fall for my trap.”

  He walked out of the kitchen as he finished the sentence. He stormed up to his room, put on his pajamas, and went to bed at 6:30, as if that were perfectly normal.

  The kitchen felt like the inside of an oven, and the silence rang in their ears. They were afraid to breathe, to move or speak, because doing so would unpause life, and they would have to face their new reality. Their new life as a family. Worse still, they would have to deal with it. His decline into schizophrenia had been so slow they could ignore it at first, until that one week when it all came faster than a car crash.