Away From Everywhere Read online

  “… I’m not saying it’s due time, Claire. I’m just saying you should let yourself be open to the idea of a new relationship is all. If something happens organically, go with it.”

  She laughed, and Owen smiled for her. That she could laugh now.

  “It’s not that I loved Roger too much to remarry, Nancy, my dear. I just can’t entertain the idea of being with another man and losing it all again. And the truth is, I don’t have anything left to offer a man. Roger took it all with him wherever it is he went.”

  “Oh c’mon, Claire. I mean–”

  “What? It takes years to build a solid and meaningful relationship, and that long haul of firsts and fights and accepting each other’s flaws …it’s …it’s just too exhausting. I just can’t see myself going through all the motions and getting myself that far into a relationship again. Besides, there’s nothing a man could offer me that I have any need for anyway, as an over-the-hill woman and mother of two, with an ill mother–”

  “Oh poor you, Claire Collins. Boo-hoo! You’re still a gorgeous woman and a wonderful person despite it all, so quit talking like you’re dead. Why don’t we start there? I mean look at me , Claire, I’d kill to have your face and your skin and your hair …and that body. I’d have me a man in no time!”

  They laughed like they were old friends then, not just two single mothers trying to get back out into the world.

  “I don’t know, Nancy. We’re out of the game.” A schoolgirl chuckle. “I haven’t been on a date since the sixties …the sixties .”

  “Shhh!” They laughed like cackling hyenas. “I don’t let myself go there, girl. Truth is I wouldn’t know what to do with a man if I had one in my bed tonight anyway, I suppose–”

  “Ah! I’d be a nervous wreck. I’d make a fool of myself, I would. I mean, when you’re in a relationship for too long you get used to some safe but sterile routine with a man, you know? I mean, sure, it’s mechanical and to the point, and the passion is gone, but at least you know what to do with each other.”

  “Hah!”Nancy cracked her mug down on the table so hard it echoed over her laughter. “You too, hey?”

  Owen ran to his window to shut it. He wound the handle until he heard the wood creak against the frame and threaten to crack. He locked it, like that would make the glass more sound-proof. He hit play on his CD player to drown out their chattering, the specifics. He preferred to think of his mother as a mother, not a woman. Not a friend of Nancy. Not a woman who talked about that kind of stuff over tea.

  But he didn’t get to the window in time to spare himself the worst of it. He saw his mother winding her wedding ring around and around her finger, and heard one last sentence. “Besides,Nancy, I’m still a married woman.”

  She held up her hand with a brutal mix of bleakness, hope, futility, and unconditional love.

  His mother missed her husband. He and Alex weren’t enough. They’d go to sleep and she’d be in her room alone, with only infomercials and books as company. They’d go out to movies and parties, and some nights Owen pictured her home alone on the couch, watching a movie, laughing, turning to share the moment, but no one was there.

  She started to bury herself in distractions. Monday night was movie night with the kids, Tuesday night was grocery night, even if they didn’t need groceries. She joined a book club and a cooking class. She eventually found salvation in volunteering all her spare time away. Having no spare time meant she never had to evaluate her life, or compare now to then.

  There was a battered women’s shelter three blocks from their home that needed a woman who could spare them twenty hours a week.“It’s a perfect match, it’s fate!”She told Nancy all about it and explained her role there to Owen like she’d just won the lottery.

  Helping out at the shelter initially distracted her, but over time she developed a genuine sense of purpose in being there. She started to feel alive again, and relevant. She befriended and almost mothered her assistant, Abbie Darenberg, and despite the two decades between their ages, they brought each back to life through their insightful, almost therapeutic discussions. She’d sit at the kitchen table, elbows on knees, with the phone in her hand, twirling the cord and laughing at Abbie for an hour or more each time she called. Owen would sit on the couch in the next room, pretending to be watching television, but not so secretly eavesdropping, smiling every time he heard his mother’s from-the-gut laugh.

  Within a few months, she was offered a full-time salaried position and took it. Owen was infinitely thankful to someone, or something , somewhere, for how her job had rejuvenated her. He noticed her shopping again, letting a few bright colours slip into her wardrobe. She’d stopped watching TV and started reading again. She started cooking nice meals, buying thick hardcovered cookbooks by the armload. Some nights, she and Abbie went out to the movies.

  When Owen and Alex got their licenses near the end of grade twelve, they begged and pleaded to be able to drop her off at work, so they could be one of the few kids who took a car to school. She agreed, largely because of the frequency of vandalism in her parking lot – the car was safer parked at the school – but also because she liked to grant her sons’ wishes whenever she could, as a sort of compensation for what had happened to their father. Every night, when she called them for a ride home, they’d flip a coin or argue about who had to go to pick her up. But the coin tosses and arguments died off after Owen met Abbie.

  Owen was waiting impatiently in the car, flipping through a CD leaflet, when he looked up and saw his mother waving a hand to him, signaling him to come in. He parked the car and she buzzed him into the building. It was a moderately secure building, since the boyfriends, husbands, or fathers of the abused women often showed up, demanding to speak to their “loved” ones. The door was a deep burgundy with chips of paint dangling from it, exposing the silver beneath. It was also spotted with dents left by the feral men it had successfully kept out.

  “Come in for a second, sweetie. I’m sorry, but we just got a new lady about five minutes ago, and I’ve got some paperwork to fill out. Wait in my office, have a cup of tea, and I think there’s a few donuts left in the Tim Hortons box on my assistant’s desk.”

  The second he walked into his mother’s office and saw Abbie, he decided that if she were going to be around whenever his mother needed a ride home, he would be the one to pick her up. He started showing up early, hoping for the chance to see her.

  Abbie was older than him, but not old enough to write the desire off as a fantasy. Her auburn hair blew like grass in the wind when she opened the window that day, and she never once tried to constrain it. She let the wind and sun do as they wished to her body. She bucked fashion and it worked for her. Her clothes, the way they clung to her, the way the wind tugged them against her,Owen could tell that what lay beneath was worth pursuing. She was warm: a close talker without invading personal space, the kind of girl you can befriend in one sitting and have forever as a friend. Three tattooed swallows flew up the soft vanilla skin of her right forearm. Green and red birds, the first tattoo he knew a person would never regret. They meant something to her, defined her, spoke for her. She had that esoteric, unconventional beauty that made monsters of supermodels.

  She turned from the window to greet him. “Hi!” She said it so jovially, like someone everyone’s always falling in love with, so he didn’t have to feel pathetic. “Your mother always talks about you guys. Are you Owen the intellectual or Alex the genius?”

  Her voice shattered him. That one look at Abbie, through his adolescent, hormone-soaked eyes, had him sitting by the phone every day and waiting for his mother to call, hoping Abbie would be working that day. It had him filling tissues at night, and filling the shower drains in the mornings.

  When he confessed his crush to Alex, stating that they didn’t need to flip that coin anymore,Alex mocked him.“You’re pathetic, and she’s like five years older than you. That doesn’t matter later in life, but we’re still in high school. The last thing you ne
ed–”

  “Ah, whatever. High school is over in a few weeks. And you haven’t seen the girl, man, I’m stunned stupid when I’m around her. It’s not the kind of feeling I can ignore. I was sitting in Mom’s chair the other day, leafing through a Hemingway novel she’d just finished and offered me a loan of. She was standing up, sort of beside me but behind me, with one hand resting on the back of my chair, sort of around me. I could just feel her there, you know what I mean? Like, if I was blind I’d still know how beautiful she was, you know? It was all I could do not to lay my head onto her belly and pray she wouldn’t mind … and … I dunno, that she’d comb my hair with her hand. And ask me to marry her.”

  He shot his speechless brother a look that said, Yeah, I know, right? And laughed at himself. “I think I’ll head over there now, pretend I was over to a friend’s house and driving past, and didn’t see the point of going home and coming back again.”

  “It’s a two-minute drive, Owen, and Mom isn’t off for another forty minutes. It’ll be a little obvious, don’t you think? I mean …”

  His brother was still talking as Owen pulled the front door closed.

  Every day Owen had an excuse to be early, in order to linger in her presence. One day she handed him a bottle of water, and when her fingers slid across his hand he felt something he hadn’t felt since he lost his father.

  The time he spent away from Abbie was agony, there was far too much of it. So he had to ask his mother over supper one night.“ I like it there too,Mom, it’s a great place, doing a great thing for the community, and I think you might need a few male employees there, for when those abusive men come by, screaming at the door, like last week. Abbie told me about Jim Croaker kicking another dent in the door. I’d like to volunteer there too.”

  She was stirring a pot of pasta, not even looking at him.

  “Sorry, sweetie, but it’s against policy to have men working there. Besides, no offense, but you’d do little to scare off the violent men we get beating on that door. Jim Croaker isn’t even scared of the police,Owen.”

  She laughed as her son’s true intentions came to her. As she laid a plate of garlic bread on the table she shot him a knowing smile. “She’s a charmer,Owen, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”

  His brother and mother laughing at him like that. The awkwardness of love exposed. He could only smile and play stupid, and maybe stop showing up so early for a few days.

  One day, well into his pursuit of her, he joined Abbie outside as she finished a cigarette on her break. They were talking music. She offered him one of her earphones and introduced him to Nirvana. He reached out for the earphone, but she stuck it in his ear herself. The way her fingers ran down his earlobe convinced him that she felt something for him too. He felt the elation of knowing his courting her these last five weeks was working. As for the band, Nirvana, there was something fresh there, something new and so totally their age. And if she liked them, he’d go out and buy the album that night, just to be that much closer to knowing her.

  July third, to Owen and Alex, became a day as significant as their birthdays, as significant as Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. They had just graduated high school. It was a balmy summer’s night – shirts clung to sweaty bodies and they had three fans going in the living room. They were watching TV, eating a chicken and rice casserole they’d eaten far too much of since their mother was always so busy now . When she called for someone to come pick her up that night, she was particularly cheery.

  “Hellll-o , lovely! Momma’s ready when you are.”

  As always, because of Abbie, Owen went to pick her up. He dropped his fork, the plate still half full, and pulled on his shoes as he chewed his last mouthful of rice.

  He headed for the shelter, desperately hoping to see Abbie waiting outside with his mother. He daydreamed of her confessing her love, or at least asking him to a movie. Sure. He’d say it nonchalantly. He practiced a warm-but-not-desperate tone. He pictured himself calling her, contemplating the opening lines, the options: Hello or hi , or hey Abbie? Hey Ab? Maybe hiya . You can come at some girls with a hiya , he figured. Girls like Abbie anyway.

  But as he approached the building, neither of them was outside. They were both inside the door, trying to tug it shut as a man tried to force his way in. His arm, from the elbow up, was trapped between the door and the door frame, and he squealed in pain as they rocked the door against him.

  Owen parked the car and met his mother’s frightened eyes: the blue cast out of them by the black of her dilated pupils. She shook her head and yelled, bashing a palm off the glass of the window. “Owen! Stay! Stay in that car,Owen! Owen, you stay in that CAR! ”

  Adrenaline made the man look more manageable, less dangerous.

  “Owen, don’t! Stay in the car, lock the door! The police’ll be here any minute! Owen, the police are on the way! Janine’s on the phone with them.”

  Only in hindsight was it obvious that Jim Croaker – drunk and reeking of stale whiskey – could never have pried open that door.

  There was something disgusting and inhuman about the shape of his face: the features so small and indistinct and rat-like. And the way he ground his teeth. His faded jeans were stained with blobs of motor oil, some fresh and some set, and his black track jacket reeked of sugary, cheap whiskey. His jacket was only half zipped, and a gold chain disappeared into a thick mat of chest hair lining the edges of his white tank top. Owen recognized him as Jim Croaker from Abbie’s description: “A badly groomed mustache and hair so greasy you want to vomit.” Jim had been desperate to get inside the shelter for over a month now, to apologize to his fiancée with his fists and insincere words. The last call to the police station had only kept him away for a week.

  “You fucken whores! ” He tugged at the door, and both of their bodies rocked with it. “I’m going to kill both of you sluts! Do you hear me! I am going to stamp your skulls into dust, right fucken here on this pavement!” His pasty white saliva sprayed on the window before their faces.

  Owen figured he could easily take Jim down from behind, since he was pinned in the doorframe and obviously drunk. He wrapped an arm around his neck so tightly that Jim gagged and crashed his head back into Owen’s face, smearing his greasy hair across Owen’s cheeks and mouth. It tasted like rancid fish. Owen jabbed his hip into Jim’s and swung around, taking them both to the ground. All two hundred pounds of Jim fell on Owen’s chest, squatting the air out of his lungs. Within seconds, Jim was on top of him, his knees and elbows boring into Owen like screws as they struggled against each other’s bodies.

  It was already too late when Owen realized Abbie and his mother had had Jim much more secured than he did now, and that look in their eyes as he approached the door, a look of paralyzing and throat-clenching fear, registered as an omen that he’d made a mistake in tackling this man all by himself. Their lack of confidence in him was contagious.

  Owen was not yet twenty. Jim was forty, drunk, and coursing with adrenaline. He belted Owen with three solid punches to the face, not the kind of falsely depicted punches Owen had seen in movies, where two grown men can slug away on each other. They were three unobstructed, powerful shots that had him scared for his life. Each one felt like a car slamming into his face. His head bounced off the ground with each punch, and the recoil hurt as much as the blow. His left eye swelled, clouding his vision and making him feel even more helpless. His nose had made a distinct popping noise before he felt liquid warmth spilling over his mouth and down his neck. Jim fired one more, before wrapping his bony, sweaty hands around Owen’s throat.

  “Still feel like being a fucken hero! Huh? I’m fucken talking to you, kid! How about I crack your neck? How about I choke you until your brain pops out your ears?”

  Owen’s arms were pinned down, and he was already winded before Jim had started choking him. His face was getting hot, and his ears were ringing, and then he heard the door open and saw his mother and Abbie dive at Jim. They took an arm each and tried to free Owen fr
om his grip. He groaned and rolled off Owen and onto Abbie. He grabbed her wrists, pinned her arms down, and stared down at her, laughing maniacally. A string of drool fell onto her face.

  “Now what, you little bitch ? Huh? Now what?”

  His mother looked down at him, sobbing, and Owen imagined himself physically deformed by those four blows. They both got up to go help Abbie just as Jim sank his head into her chest and bit viciously into her left breast. She shrieked and squirmed beneath his weight. They kicked at him and pulled at every limb, but it was futile. Owen threw himself down on Jim and tried to pry them apart, but couldn’t without hurting Abbie even more. She screamed all her pain, unintentionally, into his ear as he fought against Jim. The neighbours kept their distance but were shouting at Jim like he was a rabid dog, reassuring them all that the police were on the way.

  Jim crawled off Abbie when he saw the police car storming down the road. She rocked back and forth, crying, hurt badly, violated. She didn’t even look up. She just rocked back and forth, her arms in a V across her chest.

  As the police approached,Owen saw the look on Jim’s face change in slow motion: furrowed eyebrows slowly unclenching and rising, an open mouth. He looked more panicked and flighty now than he did vicious, spinning around in one quick circle like he was being surrounded by a firing squad. When they were within ten feet of him, he grabbed Owen’s mother and held her down in a headlock.

  “Back off! Now! I’ll snap her neck. I swear it! Back, the, fuck, up, now! Go get me Janine out of that goddamn building and let us go, or I’ll fucken snap this bitch’s neck.” He was nervous now and watching his back. “She fucken deserves it, after nearly breakin’my arm like that!” His eyes darted around like a wild animal’s. Like a cornered fox.