Away From Everywhere Page 6

  “Why are the colours so vibrant? Why are the houses attached? It’s like God spilled a bag of gumdrops all over this city and they all melted together!”

  It wasn’t a question so much as a statement.

  On their first day there,Owen took her to the old battered cannon shelters beneath the Fort Amherst lighthouse. The fog siren frightened her into his arms every time it blared. They could be together like that in public now, and it strengthened their love. More than they had expected it to. There was a loner minke whale. She tried ten times to photograph the whale, but came up short every time and ended up with ten pictures of water and nothing more.

  “Here, you try!” She handed him the camera and stood behind him to watch the screen as he lined up the photo. He caught the whale on the first try. Nothing glorious or worth framing, but enough to satisfy her. Enough to show the kids when she got home. She had one hand on his shoulder, the other tucked into his coat pocket on the opposite side. She nodded when he showed her. “Try one more.”

  But the whale never resurfaced.

  He turned to hand her the camera. Saw her sun-reddened cheeks, and the smile on her face looked so right, so impossibly perfect. One second of her time, every word she spoke, the feel of her skin on his, how the curve of her body fit into his. It was all too perfect, so perfect that he couldn’t hate himself for loving her. When he wrapped his arms around her that day, he sank into a better world: she was a porthole to something more. But as he looked at her standing there, her hands tucked into the pockets of her hip flannel skirt, her body arced into the direction of the wind – he knew he could never have her. Not like he wanted to. He could never make a wife and mother of her. Their love would have to be secondary to her marriage; it would have to be ephemeral, “wrong.” He wanted his own children, a wife, a life. Things she could never grant him.

  “Are you okay?”She slung her arms around him and rocked him sideways, dancing slowly to the sound of the waves and seagulls. She combed his thin hair back into place with her hand.

  “I don’t feel guilty anymore, Hannah. And I love you.”

  They said nothing for a while. They were in love but no one had used those three words yet. So he made light of the situation, but meant every word. “I love this water bottle, just because you’ve touched it and sipped from it. I love the air in our hotel room, because maybe you’ve breathed it in–”

  She laughed, broke free of the embrace, and gave him a soft, playful slap in the face.

  She asked about the tower, Cabot Tower, that sat atop Signal Hill, and she wondered why Alex ever left this place.

  “Can we get in there? It looks like a …castle , doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, we can go up after supper. Have you ever had saltwater taffy? Is that a Newfoundland thing? They sell it there.”

  They were hand in hand in the open, walking back to their rental car, no longer needing to hide their love. That day at Fort Amherst, they knew, was a day in a life that could’ve been, if they could just summon the courage to consummate their love, and shatter Alex Collins like glass.

  Owen thought of St. John’s for the rest of the day: the ever-changing mural ads on the cement walls of the LSPU hall, and the way the city had seemed so much more alive with Hannah there by his side. She was the tourist, but in showing her his hometown, he was appreciating it all more than ever. She brought out all the features of the place: the unique architecture of the buildings, the carved turrets of the courthouse onWater Street, and the coarse grain in the rock of its walls.

  Then he thought of his father, locked away in a mental ward at theWaterford Hospital across from Bowring Park – a park where they had picnicked and fed ducks twenty-five years ago, before his father got sick. He remembered his father handing him a loaf of bread and guiding him towards the ducks one day.

  “You’re everything beautiful this world can be, my son.”

  Owen was getting too old for those compliments, too old to be at a park with his father, and yet his hand still felt so big on Owen’s back that day, and so god-like. Now his father was just a body suspended between life and death, like a corpse perpetually waiting for CPR or a body bag, kept alive by a coin-sized lump in his brainstem that kept his heart beating and convinced his catatonic body to breathe.

  By the end of grade ten, Owen’s father had fully surrendered to schizophrenia. He went delusional, then catatonic: a raving lunatic and then a body in a rocking chair that wouldn’t have the instinct to flee a burning room; a man seeing people to a man with no use for eyes. It was an unbearable, life-altering year for Owen and Alex, every day of it, especially since the biggest turmoil in any of their friends’ families that year was that their mother wouldn’t extend their curfew.

  It was the week his father was finally and indefinitely committed that Owen started writing. His first short story was about a man in a coma; it was a contemplation on the distinction between being human and being mere flesh and bone. How being alive means being connected to others, invisibly, and nothing more. It won the junior division for fiction in the provincial Arts & Letters competition. He and his mother went to visitTheWaterford that same week, and he told his unresponsive father all about it. He left a copy of the story with his father that day, just in case he snapped out of it for five minutes. He waited until his mother had turned her back and headed towards the door, and then he laid it on his father’s lap so his mother wouldn’t see his pathetic attempt at sharing this joy with his father.

  Initially his father stayed at home, medicated and more or less house-bound. It was the strange utterances his father made, particularly in the shower every morning, that startled Owen the most. He’d string unassociated words together, almost singing them, and laughing to himself.“I amnot the alien who smoked the last Jeremy!”“Candy eater eighty, sixty-seven.” The doctors called these “word salads,” and said they were one of the defining symptoms of schizophrenia.Word salads : the title sounded so unprofessional, so unreal. More so than his father’s delusions and hallucinations.

  One morning, two weeks after his father was diagnosed, they were all eating breakfast together. His mother and Alex had finished up quickly so they could get in the shower before Owen. It was just the two of them at the table, quietly sipping too-sweet tea and crunching burnt toast. Neither of them was comfortable with the idea of schizophrenia just yet.

  Nothing triggered it – no loud noise, no sudden movements – but his father jumped up from his chair, slung an arm above his head, pursed his lips, and started into a word salad. Something about it frightened Owen out of the kitchen and into his parents’ bedroom. He dove down onto their waterbed, lifted slowly up and down by the wave, and felt nauseated by the guilt. He felt like he’d just betrayed and embarrassed his father. He held his body still, as if he could pause life, maybe rewind it. He came back to the kitchen with his social studies textbook, pretending he’d only bolted from the room to get the book.

  “I’ve got a final today.”He flashed the book. It fell out of his sweaty adolescent hand and crashed onto the floor, buckling the hardcover corner.

  His father nodded, knowingly.“I’m sorry about that,Owen. I dunno. I thought it might be funny…I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders and slumped his head. “My pills aren’t magic, okay?”

  Prior to his father’s illness,Owen had never viewed his parents as a couple. He saw them only as two parents, living together, whose sole function was to raise and support their children. It took watching them fall apart, layer after layer, to see them as a couple who had loved each other. A couple who had loved each other in a way that one couldn’t persist without the other.

  The wall between the laundry room and his parents’ bedroom was paper thin; he could’ve poked a finger through it. One night he heard them talking as he searched for his pajamas in a ball of clothes in the dryer.

  “It’s the pills, Claire. I’m into this, but I’m just …not … it’s a side effect, it’s not me…just keep going, here…just keep going
, like this.”

  “It’s okay, Roger.” A pause. She must’ve rolled over. “Just get some sleep, we can always try again, the next time you feel ready.”

  “I can stop taking the pills for a few days and–”

  “Roger, don’t you even think of it! I’m going to watch you swallow every pill now, like you’re a fucken baby, d’you hear me? Just go to sleep!”

  A slight whimpering then, like she was trying to hold it in, but couldn’t.

  It was the first time Owen had heard his mother yell at his father and it might have been the first time he’d heard her swear. So who was she now? She’d stopped folding towels and putting them in the hall closet; he was fishing his pajamas and tomorrow’s outfit out of the dryer.

  As he snuck out of the laundry room that night, he thought of the time his father was committed. Alex, who had taken to spying on his father, caught him outside and looking in a neighbour’s window one night at 2 a.m., and ran to get his mother out of bed. Alex woke Owen and they watched the scene from their bedroom window like a movie. Their mother ran outside in her blue-and-white nightgown, looking frantic and disheveled, and for the first time: old. She wept madly, wiping tears away with the flattened palms of her hands as she raced towards him. Owen read it as a mix of fear and sadness. Like she knew in that moment what she had been ignoring about her husband those last few weeks. They watched her run up behind their father, who was going through the neighbour’s garbage cans, and haul him back into the house. She dragged him inside; she managed to overpower him as he fought back, livid that she was sabotaging his secret lead. He claimed the neighbour was the kingpin of a nationwide sex slave trade. That he’d been working on the story for weeks now, and his employer was expecting a final draft.

  Their neighbour at the time was a seventy-eight-year-old widow named Elsie. She was so innocent, so bored with life, that she made pies and cookies for Owen and Alex on a regular basis. Dropping them over, and coming back for the Tupperware, was an excuse for social interaction.

  His mother burst back into the porch, dragging their father by the shoulder like a misbehaving kid. The door bounced off the wall and hit their father as they came back into the house. The black nylon of his jacket was balled up in her hand. Owen listened in on his parents from the hallway and heard his mother shove their father down onto the couch. She was standing above him, arms folded, waiting for an explanation. They were yelling, then calm, and then yelling. Owen and Alex hid in the bathroom when they heard their parents coming down the hall towards their father’s office.

  That very night his father shifted from hiding his theories to trying to justify them. He “admitted” that the pizza fliers being delivered to their mailbox were coded, that his supposed employer was leaving them there. He showed her the “codes,” a drawer full of pizza fliers with certain letters underlined to spell out a hidden message. Among the lines of the flyer in his hand, EAT AT SAL’S TONIGHT. EAT SMART. TRY OUR REAL SICILIAN CURED HAM. The underlined letters spelled Elsie’sTrash. What frightened them the most was the four letters underlined in the next sentence: TAKE IN A LITTLE SICILY TONIGHT! He assured them he wasn’t there to kill her.

  “I’m just the journalist, Claire, don’t worry. Anything that serious would be left to other agencies, not the journalist division. I really don’t understand what the kill code means, but it is not an instruction for me, and we are not in any real danger unless you blow this out of proportion and–”

  “Roger, please! Think about it. Where are the paycheques from this company?Where is the goddamn magazine ?What is it called and where can I buy–”

  “It’s not that kind of magazine,Claire. It doesn’t need a title, because–”

  “Roger! C’mon. You’re smarter than this.” Screeching now, her words ripping out of her throat. “How can you be selling a magazine with no goddamn name?”

  He sat there so calm, so unaffected by her emotions. “It’s not that kind of magazine. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll find mixed in with trashy celebrity magazines in a grocery store checkout. And it’s only being distributed underground to an elite audience, for now.”

  His father spent three months in a psychiatric ward on medication, getting therapy from a young and gifted specialist in schizophrenia. Dr. Erickson managed to convince him that the magazine was all a delusion. At first, Owen’s father thought the doctor was just trying to censor and sabotage his magazine by locking away all of its contributors, but the doctor was crafty enough to convince him otherwise. The drugs helped, once they settled on the right pill, CPZ, and a dosage that didn’t make him twitch or slur his speech too badly. The doctor recognized that Roger was an intelligent man and used a lot of logic in his therapy. One day he took him to Elsie’s garbage cans and let him go through them. He took him inside Elsie’s house to meet Elsie and let him root around until he was satisfied it was just some old lady’s house. He showed him that everyone on the street was receiving those fliers and took him to meet the men who published the fliers. With a lot of therapy, and CPZ,Dr. Erickson brought Owen’s father back to reality.

  In November, his mother signed all the necessary papers to get him out. He convinced her he could control his disorder with the CPZ and cognitive therapy. He could convince anyone of anything. And formonths, right through Christmas, he was fine.

  But, every time he’d stare off into a distance or think he heard something in the middle of the night, like anyone does, Owen was afraid his father was seeing that imaginary employer again. Or worse. Once Owen knew his father’s mind could wander, there was no telling how far. Alex told Owen, maybe every night, different stories he read about schizophrenics killing their neighbours, cats, dogs, mothers, fathers, significant others …kids. Each story exaggerated, but absolutely eerie and unnerving. His father’s illness, and the stories Alex told him, changed the environment the brothers grew up in. It fractured it. The world was no longer as small and simple as it had always seemed. It was bigger now, unpredictable, too complicated and unstable for them to retain that blind joy all their friends had. Owen felt distant from his parents and – because of differing opinions on their father – wary of of his brother.

  By April of that year, their mother had to hide any fliers that came to their house, and write NO JUNK MAIL on their mailbox. She had to get out of bed every night and snoop through her husband’s office to see what he was up to in there all day long. She found pages and pages of absolute gibberish, filed neatly away in labeled folders and drawers. Every morning, the word salads were getting worse and worse, and one night she overheard him talking to his “old employer” in the basement. As he picked up on his family’s wariness, he grew suspicious of them, and talked about how their eyes seemed “redder than they used to be.” He talked about how his wife’s face seemed to be changing.“You’re always frowning at me, your eyebrows are always furrowed.”The food always tasted funny. He was given new meds, new doses, Owen’s exhausted mother reading up on them all.

  When he was at his best, he would cry and beg her not to sign the papers. All the guilt and indecision was killing her, it never got better, just worse. She knew once she recommitted him, he wouldn’t be coming back; she’d be essentially sending him off to die. All the while, Owen knew that if his mother didn’t have two children to worry about, she’d never even think of sending him back. Every night he heard them fight and cry, he thought of her burden, acknowledged it, and felt something akin to guilt over it. She considered sending them to stay with their father’s parents while they all waited for the new medication to take effect. He overheard this in a phone call one night, from the laundry room. He needed a towel, and there were none. He dried off with a pair of pajama bottoms that night. He ran the water cold, for the shock of it, to avoid crying, to avoid feeling.

  The bad days were punctuated by good weeks, but one night their father came too close to hurting them. They were all sitting in front of the TV watching The Wonder Years when a U-haul truck pulled up in front of their
house. Its lights blazed in through the windows, and the rattle from the truck, surreally loud, drowned out the television. He shot up from his chair, drew the curtains closed and yelled at his family.“Get down in the basement! Now! We’ve got to stick together!” He was screaming so loud veins threatened to burst out of his neck and forehead. “They can’t tear us apart, not now, no matter what!”

  Before they could collectively assess what to do, their father was yelling at the empty space beside Owen, pointing a knife at a man who was not there.

  “Stay away from my kid, Ted. You said it wouldn’t come to– Owen! Don’t move like that! I’m done with the work, Ted. Hurting my family won’t change that! Owen , My God! Stop moving!”

  While their mother phoned the police, Alex tackled their father from behind, and he went mad then, suspicious and livid about his own son turning on him. He threatened Alex for crossing him. It took all three of them to pin him down and wait for the police.

  He was recommitted that very night. When it was all over, what got to them more than anything was the realization that maybe the man had never seen a point in anything but his work. It was true in the end, that when he was writing those imaginary stories to no one, he wouldn’t even sit to eat with them. He was too busy . His delusions about being a revolutionary journalist, his going mad because he wasn’t, made them feel not enough. Second to some non-existent magazine.

  After realizing he’d threatened his sons that night, he ceased talking, permanently. Within weeks of being recommitted to the Waterford Hospital, he fell into a catatonic state. He sat in a rickety wooden chair, perpetually rocking back and forth and mumbling to himself in a small, dark room. They would go visit him from time to time, but it felt futile. He had no idea they were there. He didn’t even look up. Not even when Owen “accidentally” stepped on his foot to try and get some reaction from him, some proof of life. The hospital treated him with a controversial drug, Clozapine, used on “treatment-resistant” patients. It spiked his white blood cell count to dangerous levels. It gave him seizures and never changed a thing. He was gone. A mannequin, not a man. If Owen bent his father’s finger or raised his arm, it stayed that way. Waxy flexibility , the doctor called it. Like his father was some kind of human doll; a wax figure. Inert.