Away From Everywhere Read online

  A month later, Owen came home from school and found his mother asleep on his bed. She was on her side. His baby blue pillow had a few navy drips on it: his mother’s tears. The sight of her tears didn’t help to share the burden of a mutual loss. It accentuated that loss. The tears never brought them closer together. They simply stated they weren’t a family anymore. Just three people coping. Readjusting. Coming out of it as different people.

  His math exercise book was wedged between her hip and the mattress and pointing up diagonally off the bed – the one he’d written in the night before instead of doing his trigonometry homework. She must have been reading it, before the tears and the nap.

  When Dad was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I promised us both that I wouldn’t treat him any differently. When he was committed to a hospital, Ipromised myself I wouldn’t see him any less. But now that he is catatonic, I don’t have any part of him left to hold on to. His body is still there, physically, in that cold dark room, but he is long gone. He is a beating heart in a net of nerves and nothing more. Wherever he went, he took some vital part of me with him. The part of me that could have favourite TV shows and movies, and give a shit about music. The part of me that could smile at a day like today: the last of the snow is gone and it is jeans and T-shirt weather and everyone is finding reasons to be outside. Not us. It doesn’t help that Mom is a zombie now too. Just a different kind. And Alex is pretending like nothing happened. And my friends just change the topic.

  When Alex and I were eight, Dad took us camping.When we registered and paid for our lot in Terra Nova National Park, we were given pamphlets on bear safety.I read that campers were not to leave food out in the open, and should cover any trash in order to avoid luring bears.Desperately excited to see a bear, I left a trail of crumbs leading to our trailer, I uncovered the garbage, I did everything the pamphlet said not to do. I never ate half of my hotdog at lunch, or half of my burger at supper, so that I could lay the remains out for the bear that never came.I waited for Dad and Alex to fall asleep and sat outside the trailer for over an hour, just waiting. Nothing. And I fell asleep disappointed.

  I only now realize why I could have done something so careless when I was a kid. It was because I felt like Dad could have protected me from anything. Not simply that a father can protect his children, but more specifically that Roger Collins could save Owen Collins from anything. The day Dad tackled me and threatened Alex was the day I lost that feeling of childhood naiveté. I don’t think anyone should be able to attribute that loss to one distinct memory.

  OH TO BE SQUAT BETWEEN A WALL AND A LOVER

  July 30th, 2008,

  Back from the grocery store.

  I just walked to the bakery for some focaccia bread. The kids love it, and I’m an addict. I’ve joked with Gene, the European baker, that he ought to put an addiction notice on all his baked goods. He’s such an endearing man, always covered head to toe in flour and bliss, always chatting with his customers in his broken English. Bellowing at them as if they were across the room. “TODAY, HAH-NAH, I HAVE JUST MADE DE CHOGOLATE-STRAWBERRY DANISH FOR YOU!”He actually does that clichéd Italian gesture of kissing his fingers and flicking them away from his mouth when he boasts about something culinary: “MOAW!” He is reason enough to shop there. He knows the girls, Callie’s sweet tooth. He gives me little treats free of charge to bring her. She makes him little crafts that he tacks up on the wall in the back room: drawings of bakers with giant chef hats, or chocolate chip cookies made out of brown foam and black pipe cleaners.

  There were couples everywhere as I walked back home. Couples, and me alone. Happy couples, possessed by each other’s presence.Basking in each other. New lovers, true couples, they take that enthrallment for granted. To be in love like that is to cease to exist, to be freed from yourself, to be found in each other. Not everyone can say they would let go of everything for one person.Not without hesitation, not without lying. It is a confidence and a thrill for the new lovers only, or those few rare couples whose bond even time admires and shies away from.

  There was a couple walking their excited German shepherd on a taut red leash. It kept spinning around, getting tangled up in its leash, and jumping up and down, its nails clicking off the sidewalk. It kept turning around and hoisting itself up on two legs and patting at their chests with its front paws in a “Hey! Look at me!” kind of way. They were standing so close together that the dog’s left paw was on the guy’s chest and the right on the girl’s. There was no space between them. They even walked in step. They were used to the dog jumping all over them. Jumping all over them in a way that meant they must walk that dog every night, together. Together. Together, and me there alone.

  And there were two couples sitting together on a bus stop bench, laughing hysterically, oblivious to the world.

  There was a young man who had his girlfriend squat between him and the brick wall of the grocery store, in a vulgar public display of affection. He looked like the kind of kid the prissy-looking girl’s mother wouldn’t approve of. Her with her ready-for-Broadway makeup job and a jacket too pristine to be grinding up against brick like that, and him with his bought-faded-and-torn jeans and styled-to-bedhead hair.There was something genuinely James Dean about him, though. He was kissing her neck and scooping her into him with both hands on her ass to hide, or maybe apply somepressure to, any bulge growing there between them. She was embarrassed but pretending to like it, all the while making sure no one was watching. I mean, what if a teacher saw, or her aunt came out the door with a cart full of groceries?

  There was an elderly man helping his feeble wife out of their station wagon, the kind with wood panel siding. He held her by the hips as she climbed the curb at the entrance of the grocery store. He didn’t mind. Her feebleness wasn’t a burden.It was sweet. They moved at their own pace, like the rest of the world wasn’t there. I followed them around for a bit in the grocery store, just to see what they bought.

  I suppose these couples have always been there on my many walks to the bakery, but it is only lately that I am noticing them. To be envious, you have to realize you are missing something in your own life.

  I am only now admitting to myself that what keeps Alex and me together is what was, not what is. The foundation of our relationship is dated, crumbling, in need of renovation that wouldn’t be worth the effort. I married in my twenties. It might work for some couples, but I think the problem with me and Alex is that I was not done growing as a person before we got all cohabitated/married/permanently involved. Alex is the same man he was when we met, but I have changed quite a lot. So much so that Alex almost feels like a stranger now.He is not what the new me would want in a husband. He is not what I would choose to surround myself with now. It’s not that I am wiser, just different. I’ve become who I am in my thirties, but cannot escape who I was in my twenties. I forged myself into that life the day I got married. The days Callie and Lucia were born. I could compromise, accept the better aspects of my relationship, seek them out and shun the others, but I resent doing so for an absent husband. Alex is a great man, a decent father, a dignified doctor, but not the husband I thoughthe would be eight years ago when I said “I do.”When you are made to feel transparent, you start to feel that way. Then your mind wanders to the remedy, to being loved and celebrated.

  I used to like being alone for the walk to Gene’s bakery. Taking in the city sounds and all the people. I’m the type to pet a stranger’s dog and get silly with children. To make an adventure out of the walk. Lately though, everything seems like a reminder, an omen, a blatant revelation that my marriage is dead. And I can’t help but fear the death is contagious. That it will consume me and I will spend the rest of my life just pretending to be alive. Fantasizing.

  At least I’ve got Owen. He comes with me just about everywhere now. I think I’m really distracting him from the writing thing. He says he needs an hour to get absorbed in his work, and then three or four more to be productive, but I’m knocking on his door ev
ery half hour with an interruption.I knock on the door with tea and a sandwich, or to invite him along on the walk to the bakery, or to see if he wants to come along to pick the girls up from school and take them to the beach. He’ll take the laptop and join us, but he never types a word. He says it’s a good thing to have nothing to write about, whatever that means. The other day he got sand in his keyboard, it was Lucia’s fault. I saw him messing with the keyboard: the sand screwed it all up. He didn’t say anything, not even to me. He just closed it in an “I’ll deal with this later”kind of way. Three days later Future Shop called to say Owen Collins’ laptop is serviced and ready for pick-up.

  Tonight, when Alex called to say he wouldn’t be home until after midnight, “something came up,” I asked Owen to watch the kids so that I could take a walk. The weather was perfect, and everything was quiet enough for me to hear the clap of my sandals off the sidewalk. I love the sound of that. And I love the colour of the sky this time of night. When it’s purple andthe clouds look black, not white. It’s so peaceful; it is the longest and most soothing hour of the day. It makes the book you are reading that much more serene, it makes a walk to the bakery relaxing and not just exercise. It was Owen who pointed that out to me. It’s appreciating the little things that makes Owen and Alex different men.

  I married Alex for all the right reasons: he is a good man, a handsome man, a financially secure man. What I loved Alex for at first was that he saw more in me than other men. I’ve always had a façade that attracted men, but lacked whatever it takes to keep them around. They all expected some magic from me that I never had. So they got what they wanted from me in one hot and sticky night, and then realized I had no more to offer them than any other girl. Everyone but Alex.That is why I married him. He saw in me the wife and mother I could be.

  But Owen, he sees it too. More than his brother ever did, and more importantly, now! He needs and appreciates my mothering him, my opinion on things, and he calls me his “agent” now, because whenever he lets me pick out what story to submit to a contest or journal, those are the ones that win. He notices the silliest things about me, like how supposedly oval my wrist bone is.

  Lately it feels like everyone but Owen is a stranger, including me, just because he brings something to every day that the days we’re apart lack. And I’m stronger now that he is here. I’m lost in you, Owen, with no need to be found. I am afraid of what that means. I am afraid of how good it feels. Some might call that love, you know.

  I want an affair,

  I want an affair,

  with you.

  Not even an affair. Not the sex anyway.

  I just want to feel your body against mine. Your warmth, your shape. Your arms around my body.

  I want an instant where there is no space between us.

  What is that called?

  A LOOK LIKE GOODBYE

  A LITTLE MORE THAN A year after Owen’s father went catatonic, his mother stopped going to visit because it “made no more sense than talking to a statue.” She told Owen that their father wouldn’t want him staying attached as if he were alive, and encouraged him to let go and move on. Owen knew it wasn’t cold of her. He knew that visiting felt like going to her husband’s funeral, week after week, because he felt the same way. He overheard her talking to their neighbour one night, from the patio just beneath his bedroom window.

  “Looking at Roger now is like …staring at a mirror that reflects who I was , and can never be again, you know? And it’s been almost two years, but I don’t know myself without that man. I know that sounds pathetic, I know it’s time I–”

  “No, it doesn’t. Okay? There is no proper reaction to something like this.”

  Owen peered out the window and saw Nancy’s hand on his mother’s knee. They were sitting in patio chairs. His mother was slumped down in her chair with one leg tucked under her and the other sprawling out over the patio. A mug of tea rested on her belly, cupped by both hands.

  “He’s been away for well over a year now, and sick for longer than that, but … I dunno … I still roll over in bed at night and expect to see him there. I mean, we shared a bed for twenty-one years. It’s a crushing instinct I have, a cruel habit. Some nights I’ll wake up and pat the mattress beside me. Some nights I have this recurring dream where my bed is infinitely big. I dream that I wake up and walk for days and never find the end of it, and then I start looking for Roger, calling out his name until my throat and voice are chaffed into muteness. I’m walking and walking and the only thing I can see in any direction is mattress, with the edges blurred by clouds.”

  Owen watched her pause then and look up at Nancy, circling the top of her mug with a knuckle. “I just haven’t slept the same since. You get used to that other body there in bed with you, you know? And it always feels so cold in my room now, even with the heat on bust or when it’s twenty-odd degrees out.”

  She set her mug down on the table and ran a finger along the bags under her eyes. To keep the tears in, he figured. He felt her sadness, her bleak confession, like a cheapshot in the throat.

  “I know all about it, Claire. I felt the same thing when I left Dan. The only time I missed him was when I crawled into an empty bed those first few weeks–”

  “Exactly!Weeks.Weeks ,Nancy. It’s been the better part of two years for me. I am stuck in time, and I know the kids can see that, and I know that’s not good for their recovery. And lately I feel like every time we visit him we’re leaving a piece of ourselves behind in that wardroom. I can’t do that to them anymore, and I don’t have the strength left to do it to myself.”

  So Owen lied. He said he had made the basketball team and either had a practice or a game on Mondays,Wednesdays, and Fridays, but he’d be home by supper. A friend’s mother would drop him off. Alex knew it was a lie, and his mother overlooked the fact that Owen was anything but an athlete. He was capable, but uninterested. Owen spent those six hours every week sitting with his father, reading, writing, and telling him about everything he was missing out on at home. Even though his father was entirely unresponsive, Owen let himself believe there was a non-verbal communication at play between them. He let himself feel the words that weren’t there. He imagined their conversations.

  He always left a copy of Saturday’s Globe and Mail with his father before he left, and a final draft of any of his own writing, just in case. It was his father’s descent into madness that sparked Owen’s flare for writing. His stories served as a place to dump all of his emotional baggage, and then writing turned into his sole passion and talent. He longed for his father’s guidance and opinion on his writing. He wanted desperately to return to that room and find one of his short stories covered in his father’s eccentric and illegible hand-writing. To see a mess of red ink on his pages: Xs, check marks, jot notes, tips and suggestions, brutally honest constructive criticism. A smiley face, right up on the top left-hand corner, where a teacher would leave a grade. He pictured his father reading it; he saw the pages buckling under the grip of his large and chapped hand, the other hand using a red pen to prop his chin up like he used to do in his office while reviewing his own work. Sometimes, accidentally, it was the pen tip, not the pen cap that he’d prop his chin on, so it was common to see his father with red or blue streaks of ink on his chin. It drove his mother mad, always scouring her husband’s face with rubbing alcohol. He’d just laugh as she tutted. A hearty laugh, like a man who appreciated his wife’s taking the time to groom him. Sometimes he’d haul her into him for a kiss, or the kind of intimate hug that made Owen uncomfortable.

  Owen always drew the curtains wide open as soon as he walked into the room. As wide as they would go, and then he stretched them some more. They were dusty and floral patterned, and he tied them up with the drawstring in a way that annoyed the staff. He did this because sunlight seemed to put some life back in his father’s eyes, and he thought that maybe the sudden blast of light might wake him up. Some day. To Owen, it had to mean something that whenever he started rocking
the rocking chair, his father would keep the motion going by himself. But never a word, never a look or a nod, just the occasional snickering outside the door from nurses or graduate students.

  The secret trips to see his father cut into his lunchmoney on those three days a week, because he needed bus fare. After the hour-long visits with his unresponsive father, he would go sit at the bus stop bench next to Bowring Park. The park was always overflowing with father-and-son pairs. There was always a plethora of fathers feeding ducks with their kids, or pushing them on a swing, or warning them not to do a thousand different things. But it was never jealousy he felt, nor sadness. It was something much more profound, unfair, and inarticulate.

  Owen’s neighbour,Nancy, had made his mother’s recuperation a pet project of hers, and he loved her for it. Maybe she was a benevolent woman, or maybe she was a lonely woman, as sad and broken as his mother, looking for a friend in a neighbour. It didn’t matter. She was the only person Owen heard his mother talk to about his father. Most of their conversations happened beneath Owen’s window over tea, so he’d turn off his TV or turn down the music every time they’d get together to talk.