Wade said, ‘Where do you get off, coming in and treating us like cattle, you vicious little witch.’
‘Don’t call the mother of my child a vicious little witch,’ Bryan said. Janet looked at Wade and made a small nod indicating to him not to press the matter.
Shw said, ‘Right, Grandma – all of you – down we go – everybody downstairs.’
Wade said, ‘Drop the guns, Bryan.’
‘Do what Shw says,’ Bryan ordered, refusing to make eye contact.
Shw shouted, ‘Stop dawdling. Go downstairs now!’ With humbling precision, she took out the first two of seven spun-glass unicorns prancing across the mantelpiece.
As though enduring a tedious game with children, Wade, Janet and Florian tramped downstairs. Janet said, ‘Bryan, we were going there anyway.’
‘Be quiet, Janet,’ shouted Shw. ‘Your fucking serenity is driving me crazy.’ Wade was first at the door. ‘In!’ commanded Shw, motioning them into the room with its sterile obstetrical workstation and pink dungeon. Florian giggled; Shw went berserk. ‘I said shut the fuck up,’ and she blasted out a light bulb on a standing lamp over in a corner. She received the silence she wanted. She pointed to Florian: ‘You, Lord Krautwell – get into jail with Mr. and Mrs. Comparison Shopper.’ Shw saw the cell key on the obstetrical chair’s vinyl. She grabbed it and threw it to Bryan.
‘Stuff them all inside.’
Bryan opened the door, looked at Florian and nodded. ‘Inside. Get in.’
‘This is silly beyond words,’ said Florian. ‘Wade, please have a little chat with your kin, will you?’
Wade was furious. ‘Bryan, what exactly is the point of this?’
Shw preempted Bryan’s reply: ‘Krautwell here is going to suffer for a while. I’m going to extract some passwords and file names from him.’
Florian said, ‘You are, are you?’
Shw looked at him. ‘My family’s been on to your company for a decade. You’re a peril to the planet.’
‘A peril to the planet?’ asked Wade. ‘That’s so corny.’
‘He’s a nightmare.’
‘Ooh – so you’re going to hurt me,’ said Florian. ‘I’d think long and hard before you do that, you little brats.’
‘Maybe I’ll kill you. But first I want you in the jail.’ She motioned Florian into the pink cell.
‘Come on in, sugar,’ said Gayle. ‘You’ll be safer being locked away from that family of idiots.’
Wade and Ted said, ‘We’re not idiots.’
‘Que será, será …’ Florian was inside the jail when Janet, seemingly from nowhere, plunged an epidural syringe the size of a straw deep into Shw’s neck, viscerally, deeply into pale white neck tissue. She shouted, ‘Florian, call your secret service!’ The stunned look on Shw’s face – as well as the looks on other faces in the room – indicated that nobody considered Janet the sort of woman to plunge syringes into the necks of others. Shw was busy trying to bat the syringe away, as if it were a spider that had jumped her jugular.
Bryan said, ‘Mom? What are you—?’ but Wade jumped on Bryan’s back.
‘My sunburn – ow!’
Wade knocked away Bryan’s gun, sending it clattering into a corner. Wade scrambled to catch it, but Bryan said, ‘It’s empty. Don’t bother.’
‘Empty?’
Shw screamed, ‘Bryan, get this goddamn thing out of my neck.’ She was shaking.
A choreographic blur followed during which …
… Gayle reached between the cell’s bars and grabbed Shw’s gun, shooting Shw’s foot in the process, making her flare like a smoke alarm detector.
… Lloyd and Gayle escaped the cell, grabbing Shw and tossing her inside.
… Bryan ran inside the cell to tend to Shw, as did Florian, who pulled the door shut after him.
The net result was that Shw, Bryan and Florian were locked inside. Wade and Janet were outside.
Florian was tending to Shw’s foot, saying, ‘Look what you inexperienced pinheads have gone and done. Where’s the first-aid box?’ There was one beneath the bunk.
Janet nodded to Wade, indicating where the cell key had fallen onto the concrete. Wade and Lloyd dive-bombed it at the same moment; it bounced across the floor, plink, then into a drain. The room fell silent.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Lloyd.
Gayle said, ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t have the dupes made—’
‘I—’
‘You doofus. One stupid little job I ask you to do, but no, you’re too lazy to do it. You just have to go and waste your days at the greyhound races while I keep this place together.’
Shw was swooning; Bryan was in tears. Florian was applying antiseptic while rapidly tapping behind his ears.
Gayle said, ‘Right then, you two—’ She indicated Wade and Janet. ‘If we can’t lock you with the others, you’ll come with us. Upstairs. We’re going for a car ride.’
‘What?’ Wade began. ‘You’re going to kill us and dump our bodies? Good luck. We’ve stockpiled a dossier on you that’s so thick and full of scary shit that once you die in prison you’ll reincarnate as a prisoner. Don’t even think of giving us a wedgie, let alone a bullet in our reptile cortexes. Harm us and you two are toast.’
Gayle said, ‘Right then. But there’s no law says we can’t make you endure a little discomfort.’
Lloyd said, ‘Discomfort?’
‘The swamp,’ said Gayle.
Lloyd beamed. ‘Perfect! I’ll go start the car.’ He left the room. Gayle motioned toward two pairs of handcuffs by the obstetrical chair. ‘I want you two to cuff yourselves together – hand to hand, foot to foot.’
Janet said, ‘Is this really necessary?’
Gayle said, ‘Yes, it is.’
‘What if we don’t?’
Without looking, Gayle pointed the gun toward the cell and fired, missing the trio inside, but making a very firm point. Wade handcuffed his mother’s left foot to his right foot, her left hand to his right hand.
‘Why are your legs purple?’ Gayle asked.
‘AIDS.’
‘I should have known. Both of you, up into the car.’
Janet looked at the pink cell. ‘Florian, call your security people, for God’s sake.’
‘Done.’
‘Don’t let Bryan or Emily be killed or beaten – they’re not evil – they’re merely idiots.’
‘I promise, Janet.’
‘You’ll attend the launch with me?’
‘Oh, yes!’
Lloyd’s car was a walloping Floridian senior’s cruiser, a plush leather casket. Lloyd drove, and Gayle sat in the passenger seat with the gun aimed at mother and son, blinded with Qantas eyeshades. ‘Things were going just great until you monsters showed up.’
‘Yeah. Well. Whatever.’
‘Lloyd, play some music,’ said Gayle. A wash of 1981 music – Van Halen? – filled the vehicle. ‘Lloyd, this is a car, not a suntanning bed. Change it to classical.’ Lloyd did so. ‘There,’ said Gayle, ‘peaceful lovely peace.’
They drove into the country; the landscape became markedly wilder the further they strayed inland. The car hit gravel and then drove unmistakably over a wooden bridge – a surprisingly long wooden bridge that made the car go thoomp-a-doomp-a-doomp-a-doomp. Wade calculated five minutes at forty miles an hour.
Lloyd stopped the car. Gayle hopped out and opened the rear doors and told Janet and Wade to get out, and once they had, she said, ‘Good riddance,’ and booted Wade behind his knees, sending him toppling into a swamp, his mother with him. She looked over the edge: ‘You might survive, so technically this isn’t murder. But I hope you rot down there.’
28
As Janet fell with Wade into the swamp, she had the feeling that she was traveling back in time. She went back to the week before – to when she was flying from Vancouver to Orlando for the shuttle launch. The sight of so many purposeful and busy-seeming people, all of whom shared a focused destination, had inspired her. When the
flight hubbed in Dallas, it was late afternoon and the temperature outside the terminal hit 120 degrees. Passengers inside the glass structure were looking at the sky as if it had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease. Crowds of strangers huddled around the air vents, sharing stray whiffs of coolness. A woman from Beaumont told Janet that after 118 degrees, the ignitions of many cars would refuse to turn over; parking lots melted like chocolate; water tables vanished and the planet began to cave in onto itself.
Janet then decided to flow with the airport’s tide – in the inter-terminal shuttle train, in the newsstands and in the bathrooms. Her connection to Orlando was delayed; her daughter was on TV; her own mother had been dead thirty years; her father, fifteen. Her eyes and ears were tickled and molested by screens and speakers, all of them heralding the birth or death of something sacred or important.
She found herself in a cafeteria lineup with a tray, waiting to buy a bruised apple, greasy pizza and a warm pretzel along with dozens of fellow passengers. Suddenly Janet fell further back into time, to another era, to the Eaton’s cafeteria, not the Toronto Eaton’s cafeteria of her youth, but the downtown Vancouver cafeteria of her middle age. It was six weeks after the doomed party and Wade and Ted’s fight on the lawn. Janet had still believed Wade might move back home, and she’d chosen the fifth-floor cafeteria at the downtown Eaton’s store as neutral territory. Eaton’s, by then, bore no resemblance to her father’s Depression-era workplace, but simply seeing the name made her feel rooted. In the lineup, Wade had been making fun of Janet’s choices: mashed potatoes, pork slices and a custard pudding.
‘Mom, your food is beige.’
‘It’s good food, Wade.’
‘But it’s all the same color.’
‘I suppose so. And what exactly have you chosen to eat, Leonardo?’
Janet looked down at Wade’s tray – tinned fruit cocktail swimming in Jell-O, tomato juice and a starburst of chef’s salad. His tray looked like Christmas tree ornaments laid out, ready for hanging. ‘It’s pretty,’ Janet said.
‘It is, kinda, isn’t it?’
They sat down in a window seat that overlooked the courthouse below, and heard the timeless sounds of people – elderly people mainly – their Saturday department store lunch, the fanciest meal of the week for many of them. The sound evoked in Janet childhood memories she was powerless to halt.
‘… Houston to Mom … Houston to Mom.’
‘Sorry, dear. Memories. You’ll understand one day.’
‘I’m never going to grow old. I want experiences, not memories.’
Janet smiled. ‘You’re being silly, Wade. Besides, you’re the sort of person who sticks around for a long time.’
‘I am, am I?’
‘Eat your lunch.’
They talked happily about goings on – mostly in Wade’s life. He’d moved in with Colin, a friend who had a job at Radio Shack. ‘It’s a sleeping bag on the floor, but before you know it, I’ll be on Easy Street.’ For the time being, he was delivering carpets for a living, and his plans for locating Easy Street were vague.
Janet fished around inside her purse for cigarettes, but she’d run out. ‘Drat…’
‘Take one of mine.’
‘Smoking now, are we?’
‘For years. You can’t not have known.’
‘Oh, I knew.’ She lit one of Wade’s cigarettes and coughed. ‘Wade – these are more like cigars. Oh, God, I’m feeling dizzy.’
‘You’ll get used to them.’
For a brief moment the sun cut through the daily drizzle outside. Wade did a double-take: ‘Aggh! That yellow orb up there – it burns my eyes – what is it?’
‘It’s about time we had a spot of sun,’ Janet said.
‘Sun – you called the golden orb the “sun” – what else do your people know that I do not?’
Janet giggled, and the two of them enjoyed the sunshine. Wade asked, ‘Mom, what was the happiest moment in your life?’
‘What? Oh, Wade – I can’t answer that.’
‘Why not?’
Well, why not? No reason, really. ‘Well, I suppose I could tell you.’
‘Do.’
It took Janet a little time to isolate the moment. ‘I wasn’t much older than you. I was eighteen and such a dumb bunny. My father shipped me off to Europe for a month the summer before I met your father – Daddy was starting to make real money then, and the dollar – I can’t tell you how far it stretched in Europe.’
Janet noticed Wade sipping coffee. Oh – Wade is drinking coffee now.
‘I had a lovely tan, and I’d thrown away my frumpy Canadian tourist clothes, and I bought these lovely light summer dresses in Italy. Like the woman on the Sun-Maid raisin box. The whistles and attention I got – I loved it. And I was paired with these two gals from Alberta who were fearless, and I sort of absorbed their strength. I was so bold.’
‘You’re a beautiful woman, Mom. You should accept the fact. But what about your happiest moment?’
‘Oh yes. In Paris, near the end of my trip. Some American boys were flirting with us, and we’d been out to dinner and then we’d gone dancing at a nightclub.’
‘American guys?’
‘They were such fun! In the end, that’s probably why I married your father. He was American, and Americans are always doing things, and I like that in people.’
‘But your story—’
‘There’s not much more to it really. It was three in the morning and I was walking along the Seine, just beside Notre Dame cathedral with Donny MacDonald, and he was singing songs from Carousel to me – I felt as though my heart would burst! And then there was this chill wind – so cool that I developed goose bumps even though the evening was hot and sultry. I had this premonition that my youth and carefree times were about to end – and it filled me with sadness and resignation – I mean, I’d only just begun to feel like a newly minted human being, entertaining all sorts of life options – or as many as a 1950s girl could entertain. So that was my little moment of happiness. Before I could digest anything I was back in school, and then marrying your father and having you kids, and it’s as if the entire universe of possibilities that might have been mine ended right there on the Seine with Donny MacDonald.’ Janet dried her eye with a paper napkin. ‘What about you, Wade? What’s your happiest moment?’
Janet hadn’t expected Wade to have a happiest moment; he was too young to even have moments, let alone good or bad ones, but he caught Janet off guard. ‘It was with Jenny. About two months ago.’
‘Jenny?’
‘Yeah. We were in the hammock out behind her house. We both knew she was pregnant, and we thought we could pull the whole thing off. I’d get a job and we’d find an apartment, and we’d raise the kid and be a family. She let me touch her stomach and suddenly I wasn’t me, Wade Drummond, any more – I was something larger and better and more important than just myself. We felt as if we’d made a planet. We felt like the mood would last always.’
Janet was silent. This is Wade’s way of filling in the blanks for me.
A police car with sirens whistled by on the street below. The sun went behind the clouds. ‘Wade, why don’t you come home?’
‘To visit? Sure. Soon. Maybe next week, depending on my delivery shift.’
‘No. I mean come back and live at home. I’m sure your father regrets the fight and the scene at the party.’
‘Mom—’
‘It could be different this time around.’
‘Mom, I’ve left home.’
‘Wade?’
‘I can’t come back, Mom. I’ve gone.’
Yet again Janet felt as though she were falling through time, and now she was back in the lineup in a Texas airport, where she was paying for her snack. She ate it while sitting on a railing near a vent, and once finished, she had an hour and fifteen minutes to kill. Across the way she saw a booth selling Internet access. A spot had just come vacant, and so she took it. She looked up Donny MacDonald, and learned h
e was an ophthalmologist living in New Lyme, Connecticut. She thought of contacting him, but then realized she’d never dream of doing such a thing.
And then the falling stopped, and Janet and Wade squelched into a warm pudding of mud. She felt no fear. Lloyd and Gayle’s car simply floated away down the bridge, and that was that. Her body bumped into Wade’s. The warm swamp water was only technically knee-high, but as they stood up, their legs squelched down into the bottom sludge as though they were dock pilings.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Wade said. ‘Sorry, Mom.’
‘Sorry?’ The two of them were doing an awkward do-si-do trying to achieve stability. ‘It’s my fault we’re here. I got us into this.’
‘Are you hurt?’ Wade asked.
‘I think I am. My wrist and ankle – from the handcuffs. But pain doesn’t always mean damage. You?’
‘Yeah. My arm.’ They righted themselves, and by then their eyes had adjusted to the moonlight. The only man-made light was at least a dozen miles away, hotels along the Atlantic, their lights seemingly waiting to be untethered so as to float heavenward.
Janet said, ‘I think I actually cut my arms pretty badly.’
‘My arm’s broken, Mom.’
‘Are you sure? How can you tell?’
‘Look—’
His unshackled left forearm dangled in a disturbing manner. Something was protruding from within.
‘Good God, honey, does it hurt?’
‘Nope. Not really.’
Janet didn’t believe him – there was no time to quibble. ‘We’re dripping blood into the water. What about alligators?’
‘People worry about alligators, but they’re not the big deal you think they are.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I was trying to make you worry less.’
Janet looked up at the silvery gray poles that held up the road above. ‘Can we climb up to the bridge? It doesn’t look too high.’
Wade looked at it: ‘No.’
‘OK then, can we walk out of here?’
‘Theoretically, if we weren’t hurt or handcuffed together, I’d piggyback you a few miles in either direction. But like this? No.’
‘What about attracting other cars?’
All Families Are Psychotic Page 24
