Every Little Thing Page 5

She walked towards him. Threw her sandals on the right side of him and lay down on the left. Only two or three feet between them: a formal yet casual distance. They both had their head back against the roof. Eyes full of stars. At the very base of his vision, he saw Allie’s bare toes—painted pink—poking up to the sky like fleshy flowers.

  He didn’t move his head; he pushed his eyes as far left as they’d go, without making him dizzy. Her shirt was waterlogged. It clung to her, defining her breasts: a second outjutting where her nipples poked at her shirt. The cold, the rain.

  There was a divot, where her black tank top, wet, had sunk into her belly button. There was skin exposed between her tank top and her skirt, and there was nothing in the world like her.

  He took his eyes back up off her. She rolled over, facing him, and closed her eyes. “That was really cute, what your brother said, I mean. About the stars. And that you’ve always remembered it.”

  They lay there on that shingled roof, two or three feet apart, and that distance was too much.

  ALLIE SAT WITH him at the funeral service.

  He was sitting in the very back of the church with four rows of empty pews between him and the nearest person. A smell of cedar or incense. A dead wasp at his feet. His father occasionally peered back at him, over his shoulder, with a look on his face somewhere between being perplexed and embarrassed. What are you doing back there?

  He heard the chunky church door creak open—a splash of light on his right shoe—and he looked over his shoulder to see Matt and Allie poking their heads in; mild looks of guilt on their faces for being a little late. Allie’s eyes were two flies buzzing around until they found Cohen. She sat with him; her hand tapping his knee, twice, as a silent greeting. And then she let it rest there. Matt kept on walking, up the aisle.

  Sitting in the back of the church made the priest’s words sound distant, and that made them more surreal. He’d never been around that much of his family without Ryan being there too.

  At the graveyard, Allie had put her hand on his back the very second his breathing changed. Just barely, her fingers, tracing the outline of his shoulder blade. He had a dry, tight throat, indicative of impending tears. But when the priest started talking about God’s plan for young men like Ryan, it all turned to anger. He wanted to break the man’s jaw to shut him up about it. Ryan had fucking died, at eighteen, and the priest was putting a positive spin on it, and he saw his grandmother nod her head, like yes there’s a God, and yes, he saw it fit to hold Ryan’s head under water while Ryan choked and gasped and panicked and died. And he pictured himself in Ryan’s body, under water: his lungs exploding or his brain shorting out or his heart popping like a balloon, exactly like a balloon.

  Allie leaned in, whispered into his ear. “Some people need to believe that. In something more, in divine reasons for things. In gods that have plans.”Her voice soft and warm enough on his ear to calm him.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, there were plans for supper at his parents’ place, and he wanted Allie to come. He wanted to put something between him and his parents. A distraction. Something to fill the empty space of Ryan’s seat or something to fill the silence, and Allie could have been that thing. But he never asked her to come. They ate lasagna, and there was too much quietness between the forced conversation: clicks of forks off teeth, knives against dishes. Gulps of wine or water. A comment about the weather, maybe. Three sets of eyes like empty glasses.

  He’d let himself in. He’d come over a little earlier than they were expecting him, maybe, and he’d let himself in. His father was sitting on the couch—hands behind his head, elbows pointed left and right—staring at a TV that wasn’t on. “Supper’s in the oven,” he said. “Be another hour though. Beer in the fridge if you want one.”

  Cohen pulled a sweater off, laid it on the couch, and headed for the washroom. It was like he’d caught his father off guard and his father needed a minute, so Cohen pretended he had to go to the washroom, to give him that minute. He walked passed Ryan’s bedroom, and the door had been open, and he felt like it should’ve been closed. He stuck his head in, looked around. Why or what for, he didn’t know. That feeling of sand in his throat.

  It was a strange thing to have thought, but he thought it immediately upon seeing his brother’s guitar: those strings would never be changed again; they’d sit there until they frayed into razors. There was a fish tank, and he wondered how the things weren’t dead yet, who’d been feeding them. How hard it must be for his mother or father to step into that room and keep something of Ryan’s alive. And how long would they leave those sheets on his bed. Those clothes in the closet. And how long until this room was a spare bedroom, not Ryan’s, or converted into a computer room or an exercise room or somewhere for his mother to sit and knit socks and sweaters. Long after the day they did convert it, an item of Ryan’s—a guitar pick or a note in his flippant handwriting—would fall out of nowhere, maybe the top shelf of a closet.

  He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left.

  Heading for the washroom, he walked passed his parents’ room, and the door was ajar. His mother had been lying on her side, her body kinked into a Z; her shoulder blades bucking like clipped wings flapping. She had a light blue pillow, but there was a wet, navy, perfect circle, the size of a CD, where her eye met the pillow.

  He went downstairs, asked his father if one of them shouldn’t be in there with her.

  “She’s upset.”He pointed to the kitchen table, visible from the living room, and there was a smashed plate on the ground in four perfectly equal quarters. “She’d set a place for Ryan. About ten minutes before you walked in. Just…give her a minute.”

  Cohen cleaned up the broken dish. He grabbed two beers from the fridge and brought one to his father. “Are you sure one of us shouldn’t go in there?”

  “Cohen, I can’t—I can’t deal with this myself ” he said, sitting up and taking the beer. “So what am I supposed to say to her? There, there? I’m not getting snappy with you. I just...”He shrugged his shoulders and took a swig of beer. “This is taking a toll.” His father’s eyes looked loose, soft; the flesh around them saggy. “She’s not making this any easier on me, placing blame. Throwing it around. And having to worry about her on top of it. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it? But it’s all my fault, she says, that I let you go out in that rickety old boat in the first place. Or that I owned that boat and taught you two to drive it. Or that I didn’t go after you sooner.”He clenched a jaw. A big swig of beer, and he’d hit the bottle off a tooth.

  “It’s what people do, Dad, that’s all. They go over everything that went wrong until they’re buried under the weight of all the things that could have prevented what went wrong.”

  “It’s not something you think through out loud. It’s indecent.”

  So Cohen stepped into her room. He sat on the corner of her bed, and it sank more than he’d expected. His toes pressed into the carpet, to keep him from sliding onto the floor. She stood up immediately, looked down at him. She was in a bathrobe, unshowered, a wreck of a woman: the hair on one side of her head grease-flattened into her scalp, and the hair on the other side frizzy and jumping away from her. She stood up, looked down at him. Her face went sour and she slapped him. It caught him on the ear and his ear was ringing. And instead of reacting, he closed his eyes and listened to the buzzing.

  “People wear life jackets,Cohen. They wear life jackets so they don’t drown!”

  When he opened his eyes, she was leaning into her dresser, balancing on her knuckles. She was staring at herself in the mirror, perplexed, like some part of her was missing or something new added on.

  She wasn’t crying, but there were black icicles of mascara hanging down from her eyes. Too much of her breasts falling out of her robe, and she was too unaware of that. She took her hands off the dresser, tightened the terrycloth belt. “I mean, did he hit his head?Why did he just sink? It doesn’t make any sense.”She sat on the edge of the bed, beside him, and apologized for slapp
ing him. She had laid a hand on his shoulder when she apologized, like maybe she really was sorry. “It’s just, not lining up? I don’t think he could have hit his head hard enough to knock himself out? I don’t understand this!”The thought of the motor’s propeller biting into his brother still made Cohen’s stomach weak. He’d felt that motor strike something that day, and he’d never know what.

  His father pushed the door open, “What’s going on in here! Jesus Christ, Anne! Stop grilling your son—” and she ran from the room, pushing passed his father, saying she had to check on supper. But there was a thud, and Cohen walked out into the hall. His mother was on the ground, clutching her foot; a toenail cracked from a badly stubbed toe. She was looking at the heater, like the heater had done it on purpose.

  PULL

  IN PRISON, THE toast was always burnt, and he hated that. It was like a sponge, sucking his mouth dry. The grit would get on the backs of his teeth, scour gums, agitate his throat. There was juice, to wash it down with, but never enough. The glasses were tiny and the juice was the fake, tangy kind. So he’d save it all for the end: he’d eat the toast, the papery scrambled eggs, then chug all the juice as a palette cleanser. The only drawback to his routine was it meant leaving his glass full, long after everyone else had finished theirs, and that made his juice prey for the scavenger hands of thirsty, impatient inmates. Maybe once a week, someone would walk past him and snake his cup. It was important to let them take it. Most violence happened in the cafeteria. It was equally important to crack a defensive joke: to call the guy an asshole and laugh. Or say, Tastes like shit anyway.

  A lot of the tables were on wheels, and it irritated everyone. Someone would sit down, jerk the table, and it could be enough to set the wrong man off. A gangly redheaded man accidentally jostled a table one day, and knocked over Truck’s orange juice. Truck speared his thumb into the guy’s eye. A quick, senseless jab. The man yelped, fell backwards out of his seat, and cracked his head off the concrete floor, hard. Hard enough for his teeth to bang together. Nip his tongue. And that one incident had plagued the man as everyone’s target for weeks. Surprise kidney punches in the shower, for kicks. A leg out in the cafeteria to trip him, for a gag. Some people were bored in there and never meant any harm by that sort of thing. Other people needed a target for their pent-up anger.

  If someone had a dietary restriction, they’d be called a fag for it. Given a hard time by the rougher crowd. To be lactose intolerant, a celiac, a diabetic—anything that got you served a red tray instead of the standard blue one—singled you out. And prison was a place to be transparent. You did not sit alone in the cafeteria, you did not eat from a red tray with a special order, and you sat with your head down next to a man with a blue tray.

  If it weren’t for the colour-coded trays, Cohen would have lied, faked a gluten allergy, to avoid the toast, and get the yogurt or the gluten-free English muffins instead. Because they were thicker, the gluten-free English muffins took longer to toast, so they wouldn’t burn. The one time he’d seen them on a man’s plate, they were a perfect golden blonde.

  He’d thought of Allie the day he craved that gluten-free English muffin. Allie had once bought a new toaster because of a poor gradation between settings on the one they owned: if she’d use setting 3, it would leave her bread hardly even toasted, and setting 4 made it too toasted. He’d come down for breakfast one morning, caught her unplugging it. Explained why the toaster had to go to the goodwill, that very day. Come to Walmart with me, she’d said. And he did. He bought an electric razor for himself that’s still in his medicine cabinet at home—an ornate, two-hundred-dollar teak cabinet that Allie had seen, fallen in love with, and bought while shopping at a Christmas craft fair one year. It had deep shelves, requiring it be sunk into the wall. It took Cohen a whole Saturday to hang. She laid in the bathtub—not in the bath, naked, but in the empty tub, fully clothed—reading him short stories from a battered old Journey Prize Anthology. He had to borrow a jigsaw from Matt and pretend he knew what he was doing. Getting it into the wall wasn’t too hard, but securing it was a matter of botched improvisation. Trial and error, with a lot of errors. Allie had read most of the book.

  The walk back to his cell from the cafeteria only took a minute or so. It was two lefts and then a right turn, in a hallway that trapped sounds and sent them bouncing off the walls. After the second left, someone’s cell was plastered with surprisingly beautiful photographs. A woman, back on, stood under a street-lamp, like she didn’t know which way to walk. A moonbeam, spread like butter across a violent, black ocean. They were all night time shots. Striking. And looked the way longing feels. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t expect a man with that kind of artistic taste to be in a prison cell. He expected only photos of ugly wives and violent children. Or he expected pages torn from a porn magazine, taped askew to the cement walls. But porn was eradicated as quickly as drugs in that place. Anything the part-time doctor thought might excite or render violent an inmate was part of the frequent cell sweeps. And they’d always come at the exact moment Cohen was enjoying a nice nap or a moment alone at his window.

  Allie had been a photographer when Cohen met her. Not long after his brother died, Cohen was out back, smoking. Daydreaming. He felt heat at his fingertips and looked down at his cigarette. Two or three puffs left. And then he heard glass shatter; heard Allie’s voice next door, Shit! and he walked up the stairwell, peered around the side of his house, and saw her looking down at a pile of busted picture frames on the sidewalk. She was holding a grey plastic bag—the bottom torn open, blowing in the wind. She looked up, saw him, and made her sad face: lips turned out and down.

  “That’s...too bad,” he said.

  “My favourite frame broke too! What a fucker,” she said, looking at the bag, still in her hand, and laughing. She put the broken, empty bag in her purse. “Any chance you’ve got an old broom and dustpan?”

  He nodded, went to fetch it.

  When he came back out, she was knelt down and separating good frames from broken frames, jiggling the good ones to shake off any bits of glass, and stacking them beside her. She was wearing a blue dress. White polka dots. A soft black cardigan. There were places on her body his hands begged to hold.

  He got to sweeping the glass, and she snatched the broom from him, turning her body into his as she did so, so that he couldn’t fight her on it. “I said do you have a broom, not can you deal with this glass for me.”She laughed, both to thank him and set him straight.

  He smiled back and hauled a bag out of his back pocket. He held it open, “Do you want to hold the bag yourself too?”

  “No. No you can hold the bag, thanks.” She smiled at him without looking at him. He noticed that. What it means to smile at someone who isn’t looking at you. He tied the bag off and looked into her trunk. “Jesus, who needs, like, forty picture frames?”

  “Me. I do. Clearly.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I sell photography, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Long story.” She had five bags of picture frames in each hand, struggling a little with the weight.

  “I can...ah. How about we take five bags each?”

  “How about it,”she said, face lit up as she extended a load of bags. Opening the passenger door, she exclaimed, “This one’s for me,” and stuck a huge, child-sized photo frame under her arm as she kicked the car door shut.

  She stuck her belly out and said, “Lock that car door for me? My keys are in the left pocket of my cardigan. And then you can open the front door for us too.” She slung her head, in the direction of the house, as she said front door, as if he needed to know which house was hers.

  Sliding his hand into her cardigan pocket felt intimate, it implied some bond between them or a familiarity. He wondered if he was reading too much into it, with the back of his hand against her belly, fishing the keys out, enjoying the effect of her body on his.

  He looked at her keys, titling them in his palm, noting w
hat she’d written on them. “Did you write H for house and C for car on your keys?”

  “Yes. So what. I like to be clear on things.”

  “You only have two keys. One is clearly a car key.”

  She kicked him in the shin, lightly, playfully, for mocking her. “Well, someday I’ll have a third, won’t I? And then we’ll see who is stumbling for the right key when a mugger is a few feet away from catching her, as she runs to the front door, won’t we?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, go open my door!”And he did.

  He followed her up the stairs to her room. Laid her frames on the end of her bed. Thought of the night he’d seen her, wailing, from his bedroom window.

  Everything was pushed to the centre of the room. Her bed was in the very middle, surrounded by dressers and nightstands and lamps and then a fence of boxes around all that.

  “Nice layout with the room. I like it. I mean why put your dresser or headboard against a wall, right?”

  She kicked him in the shin again. This was her thing, her reaction to sarcasm, and he liked learning these things about her, one by one. “It’s all in the middle of the room so I can paint, Dipshit. And if you’re a real man, this is the part where you tell a damsel you’ll help her paint her room tonight.”

  If she was trying to help him, trying to distract him from Ryan’s death, it didn’t matter anymore. He wanted to help her paint that room. He wanted to see paint dripped across her hands, splattering in her face, making her laugh, as she stepped back and second guessed the colour.

  “Sure. I’m a top-notch painter. What colour?”

  “White.”

  “Really?Who paints a room—”

  “Well, Computer Paper according to the paint chip. And head’s up: the white walls might mean three coats? I thought I’d have you committed before I mentioned that, because I am clever.”

  She winked at him. Who winks?

  He turned his head, saw a stack of 8x10 black-and-white photos on her desk. The one on top was a photo of a bedridden woman. She had the kind of face that implied breathing was hard, and smiling was a long-lost luxury. There were bottles of pills all over the nightstand beside her, looking lost in a maze of crumpled tissues. She was in a loosely fitting gown that hinted at sudden weight loss.