Every Little Thing Read online

  “Is that your mother? Sorry if I’m being—”

  “Yes. Shit. I didn’t mean to leave them there like that.” She walked over to the stack, grabbed them all, opened a dresser drawer, threw them in. Closed the door with a hip. “My father gets livid with me when he sees those photos. I—You might find this weird, but I took a photo of her every day, for what turned out to be the last sixty-two days of her life. Kind of morbid, maybe, but I was capturing what was escaping her, day by day. A photographic study of...death.”She shrugged her shoulder and had a shy, awkward grin like maybe he was judging her.

  She was side-on to him as they peered down at another stack of photos, their hips locked into each other. A breast at his elbow. She was too liberal with her body against his. It was just her nature, he knew that by now, but it flared desire in him. And there was a bed, right there behind them.

  “It’s why I live with my father, still, by the way, if you’re wondering. I moved back in with him to help him care for her. And to be with her. And I just...didn’t move back out. Yet. We both wanted to move into town here. And your lonely dad makes for a good enough roommate when you don’t know anyone in town.” She shrugged her shoulders, that’s that.

  “What’s weird about living with you father?”

  “When you’re pushing thirty? Nothing, I guess. Just making sure you know I’m not a weirdo. This stack of photos is less depressing,”she said, pointing to a pile of glossy pictures. The way the light was bouncing off them, he couldn’t see the image until he tilted his head. “They’re the ones for the photo frames. Photos of touristy landmarks that sell pretty well.”

  They were vibrant images, obviously colour-manipulated in Photoshop, but confidently composed. Interesting angles, subjects, and ways of framing things. “These are great. Really great. This one’s my favourite, though. The abandoned house, with the goat in the window.”

  She plucked two cans of paint from a bag in her closet. “Thanks. FYI: this is fancy paint. It says it only needs sixty minutes between coats. I think we can have it done by midnight. You don’t have to stay for all three coats, though, okay?”

  But he did. They watched a movie between coats. They shared popcorn; two hands, one bowl. Quick little fights, like Go ahead, no you go ahead, until they found a rhythm and stopped reaching for the popcorn at the same time. Cohen sat on one end of the couch, and Allie lay sprawled on the remaining two cushions. Sometimes her toes rested against his leg or she’d plunk a heel down on his knee and rock her foot back and forth, like there was nothing to it. Like she didn’t know what her body did to his. Or like maybe she did.

  Matt joined them for the second movie, after the second coat of paint, and said sad things like, Meryl is your mother’s favourite actress. Matt said is not was when talking about Kristen. Cohen knew Allie wouldn’t leave her father alone in that house until he could say was. There was something profoundly empathetic about Allie. He’d noticed it in her right away. How she could suffocate in sadness, so she took steps to eradicate it wherever she detected it. As much out of her own need for a copacetic equilibrium than out of compassion alone.

  MEN IN JAIL could be divided into men who took pride in what they’d gotten caught for, and men who were ashamed to admit to what they’d done. He’d expected more people claiming innocence. Or to have the kind of convoluted, fucked-up story he did, about how he got six months in jail—a slim sentence for a man pegged as being a conspirator to murder in the initial police reports. But it all made for a good story, and that, somehow, got him respect in there. You could write a movie about all that, and get rich! Won’t have been for nothing then! It was almost like they were jealous of all the twists and turns and characters involved in his story, versus their more commonplace ones: attempted burglary, drunk driving, aggravated assault after too many drinks in a shady bar.

  Cohen’s story ended with an accomplice being locked away in a place much darker than where they all were, and that was a nice detail in the eyes of inmates who loved a good So, what’d you do? story. As one inmate told another about Cohen’s story, and then another, each person exaggerated or changed a detail, until one version of the story had Cohen’s name, and Cohen’s part in the story, swapped with Lee’s.

  Lee Brown had been a close friend of Allie’s. An atypical friend: he was an elderly, American war vet turned sidewalk vendor. And Cohen couldn’t hear his name now without thinking about the trajectory of it all. He thought about what domino had struck what domino first, to set things in motion: how he wouldn’t have known Lee Brown, if he hadn’t fallen in love with Allie, and how he’d fallen in love with Allie, partly, vaguely, as a reaction to Ryan’s death, and how his brother never would have drowned if his mother hadn’t of insisted on a trip to the cabin, and how she wouldn’t have insisted on the trip to the cabin if his family hadn’t gotten plagued by a genetic heart disorder. And even that trickled back decades, to how his grandfather’s DNA took on ARVC, against its will, almost a hundred years ago. Because his father choose to marry a Candice Heffernan instead of a million other women. Screwy genes and all.

  But if he stacked those dominos back up and knocked them back down in the reverse order, it’s the same series of events that had led him to Allie. Minus Lee. And how Lee fit into Allie’s life was simple happenstance.

  Three mornings after the night Cohen had helped Allie paint her room, he met Lee for the first time. There was a knock on his bedroom window. His room was below ground, and his window was behind his headboard, so he had to look at the window upside down; his body awkwardly held in a backwards-crab posture. It was Allie, awake, showered, wearing a black skirt and a bright purple tank top. The sun barely up.

  He’d notice something new about her every time he saw her. The way she blinked slower than most. The way some words caught in her mouth; an over-lingering on the letter F. Fffine. Fffuck.

  She was knelt at the window, her legs pressed together, and she plunked a framed photo against the glass. “Look! For you, for helping me paint the other night!” She said, “It’s the one with the goat, in the abandoned house,” as if he couldn’t see for himself. “You said you liked that one, right?” She nodded her head, widened eyes. “Right?”

  “Yes, thanks.”He laughed as he looked at his alarm clock.

  “So...like...you knock on people’s windows before eight in the morning, hey?”

  “Well. Not everyone’s. I have to know the person.”

  “And what if that person valued sleeping in on Saturdays or sleeping naked?”

  “Well, yeah. Okay. I never thought of that. But you’re not naked, are you? And you’re under a comforter. And I don’t judge.” A wink, a shy smile. “I’ll put the goat picture down by your back door, where you smoke. I have some errands to run. Sort of. I’ll be back by one or two, if...if you want to do something this afternoon? It’s nice out. I don’t really know anyone else around here to call, but you’ll do, for now, until I meet some other people!”She laughed at herself so easily. It was a different kind of laugh, less graceful than when she laughed at someone else. She was like Ryan that way. And they both had dart-hole dimples in their cheeks when they smirked at their own wisecracks.

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

  “Nice! Okay. I’ll meet you out front. Two o’clock sharp?”

  He laughed at her in a way that said Yes, and she waved before spinning and walking away; her skirt tornado-ing around her legs. A flash of orange panties.

  “Allie!”

  She was back at the window. “Yeah?”

  “Where...where are you off to at eight in the morning? And do you want some company?”

  She smiled. “Sure.”

  “Give me twenty minutes to shower and that?”

  “Okay!”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. So where are we going?”

  “I have to drop my photos off somewhere. About an hour away. Hour and a bit. Out in Grayton, where me and Dad just moved from. Know
it?”

  “Of course,” he said, kicking off his bedsheets. “It’s nice out there.”

  “I thought you slept naked,” she said, nodding at his pajama pants.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Twenty minutes. I’ll be out front with the car running. And I’m driving. I don’t like being driven. I’m a...very paranoid driver. And I don’t know you well enough to be all backseat driver on you, yet.”

  Yet she’d said. And they both paused at the utterance of it. Yet. The implication.

  “And, Cohen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nice pajamas. Very manly.”

  She winked and walked away. Who winks?

  He looked down at his pajama pants like maybe real men don’t wear pajama pants.

  ALLIE REALLY WAS a paranoid driver. Did you see that! That son of a bitch just cut me off! She’d slap the wheel and swear even though a school bus could have fit in between her car and the man who’d passed her with ample berth. Her driving anxiety was something a long-term partner, a husband, might grow sick of, but he loved it. Found it endearing: her so harmless, but uttering such well-articulated threats.

  “Someone needs to tie his hands to his feet and roll him down a mountain!”

  “What?”He laughed. “They need to do what to him?”

  “You heard me. A mountain!”

  She drove as if driving a fighter jet, and all the other cars were missiles. Even in the city, she imagined a moose might just jump out of anywhere. And kids, she’d told him,were death-wish fearless. She reduced her speed by 50% if she even thought she saw one.

  “The problem is, kids think they’re invincible. But a quick game of Car Versus Kneecap would prove otherwise, am I right?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, you’re right all right.”He paused. “Have you...been in a bad accident or something?”

  “No, why?”She had the wheel gripped so hard her knuckles were popping through her skin.

  “Just wondering.”

  “So what, I’m a melodramatic driver. We all have our flaws. There are worse things, Cohen, like halitosis and...I dunno. Gambling addictions!”

  “Okkkaaay…”He put up his hands like, Don’t shoot!

  “And I hate this stretch of the drive. It’s the worst. I mean, why have an undivided highway? That’s just asking for trouble. Some dipshit in the other lane nods off or speeds and hydroplanes, and ka-bam, it’s all over for me!” She shook her head at the injustice of it. “You’ve got to wonder about a world that builds undivided highways.”

  “Absolutely. You do. I mean, what kind of world!”

  “Are you mocking me! I’m serious, think about it. Chunks of metal, flying past each other, going more than a hundred clicks an hour!”

  He was still smirking. “What?” she said. “What?”

  “You should’ve seen your eyes when that squirrel ran across the road. It was like your brain slingshot your eyes from your skull.”

  She slapped his knee, Shut up!, and he was shocked she’d taken a hand out of the 10 and 2 position.

  They’d made it to Grayton, and the town was in a state of evolution, and Allie hated it. Densely packed subdivisions were being built; the kind where you could see into a neighbour’s window through your own, and they made the more traditional saltbox houses look cheap, not practical or quaint. The old, abandoned, unbountiful farmland now housed a Walmart, and an old merchant’s house was, as of that summer, a two-theatre cinema. “One that doesn’t even play good movies,” she’d added as they drove past it.

  Her eyes followed a ballet of litter blowing in the wind. “It’s the litter—the McDonald’s burger wrappers and Tim Hortons’cups—that bothers me the most. I mean,” she pointed to a sidewalk, “it’s everywhere.”

  She was scanning the street for fearless children and other potential driving hazards as she spoke. She’d swerve from potholes like they were land mines and look at him with her cheeks puffed out like they’d just dodged an explosion. Allie had definitely gotten her license on the first try.

  Downtown Grayton was one main street, called Main Street, with a strip of restaurants and retail stores on one side and a stony beach on the other. When she pulled up at the curb of Main Street, she told him to wait in the car. That she’d only be a second. So he did. He could see the wharf, stretching out from the beach like a strip of brown carpet, and he could hear boats knocking off of it like wooden wind chimes. She was pumping some change into a parking meter when Cohen noticed an older man sat at a collapsible vendor’s table on the sidewalk. The old man had been eyeing Allie from the moment she’d stepped out of the car. He wore thin black dress pants and a white V-neck shirt: his chest hair visible and grey. White really. Cotton-white. Fluffy like a cloud. He’d been carving wood, with a tool-like knife, into what looked like a lighthouse; his hands almost too shaky to get the job done. He laid down the block of wood, but kept his fist tight around the knife, and he stepped toward Allie.

  Something was off about him. He was skinny, and yet his skin sagged from bones: there was a lizard-like flap hanging down from his chin and droops of flesh flapping off his elbows. Both jiggled when he moved, like a rooster’s throat wattle. His body looked frail, finished, but his bright blue eyes and animated facial expressions were full of life. When he started walking towards Allie with that knife still in his hands, Cohen got out of the car, defensively. He felt like a fool when he saw Allie walking towards him; her arms thrown wide open for a hug. She held him close, it was a been-too-long kind of hug. She was rubbing his back and calling him Lee.

  “Little Allie Crosbie! Don’t tell me you braved that big ol’ highway just to visit me?”

  After a few good-natured insults back and forth, the man fell into his seat as if standing too long had weakened every bone in his body. He wore black combat boots, scuffed white in places. His cheap black dress pants were tucked into his boots.

  “Cohen, this is Lee.”

  Lee. Casual, yet formal enough an introduction to rule out grandfather.

  “Nice to meet you, Lee.”

  A handshake, and Lee cracked a joke about her driving. “So, how many near-accidents did she have on the way out?”

  “I counted zero, but she got up to a dozen before we hit the highway.”

  Lee flung his head back and hacked out a laugh. Allie changed the topic. “Lee and I have an arrangement. He sells my photos at his table on Saturdays and Sundays, and we split the profits at the end of the month.”

  Lee was nodding along. He nodded a lot. He was staring at Cohen, and his eyelids were a crusty and sore-ish shade of red: he had vulture eyes and they were picking Cohen apart. She had a hand on Lee’s shoulder, the other hand arranging photos on Lee’s table, taking so many at a time from a box at her feet.

  Cohen, taken off guard by the way Lee was visually dissecting him, turned to Allie for an escape route, “Do you want me to grab the rest of the photos out of the trunk?” Allie shot him a look, widened eyes, and shook her head, once, quickly, while Lee wasn’t looking. Cohen took the cue to play stupid.

  “No, this is all the photos. And listen,Lee, you don’t mind if this Cohen fellah joins us for lunch, do you? Because I can leave him in the car while you and me eat if you want?”He loved how Allie could be around people. Her humour and compassion never separate from each other.

  “We’ll make that call at lunch,” Lee told her. “He’s not too chatty or anything, is he?”He looked at Cohen, nodding again, “I swear I literally stuffed a sock in her last boyfriend’s mouth once, to shut him up. A dirty sock too, right off my foot.” He laughed and tapped at his right boot. A sprinkle of dust fell to the ground. His shoelaces untied. “Kidding, of course. But her last boyfriend was so boring I had to call an ambulance one time; I told them to come quickly because I was being bored to death.” He paused, waiting for them to laugh at him. He was that type. “Jesus! I mean, who dominates lunchtime conversation with the details of some chemistry thesis he’s writing?” He waved
a hand through the air and Allie laughed, almost embarrassed for having exposed him to her ex. “You don’t talk science, do you, Colin?”

  He didn’t know if that was a joke or if he was being asked, and he didn’t know if he should correct him about the name. Cohen, not Colin. “No. Not as a rule. Or at length. And I’d use layman’s terms and not be boring about it—”

  Lee looked at Allie with faked shock, “Did he just call me a lay person!”

  “No, I meant if—”

  “He’s joking,Cohen.”

  Laughing, “Tell him to work on his sense of humour and he can join us for lunch. Now go on, get, you’re blocking off my table!”

  “Okay, we’ll get, but make sure you sell at least one of my photos, so I can buy some lunch, hey?”

  “Ah, go on, your boyfriend is buying lunch for us. Isn’t that right, Colin?”

  “Cohen.”

  “Wha?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Just kidding, kid. Lunch is on me. Any days you two come out and visit my lonely ass.”He nodded a lot as he said it. Always nodding as if someone was constantly asking him yes or no and he hated to disagree.

  “So what is it you do, Colin? You’re not a boring-job-for-the-good- paycheque kind of guy, are you?”

  “He’s a birder, like you! He works at a bird…museum. You’re like, best friends, and you don’t even know it yet! Cohen wrote a masters’ thesis about seabird conservation.”Allie turned to Cohen then. “And Lee here has protested against the gillnets set out for fish. Because they kill deep-diving seabirds.” She turned back to Cohen, in case he didn’t understand. “The birds dive deep for fish,” she enmeshed her hands together, “and then get caught up in the nets and drown. They never come back up for another breath of air.”