We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  I’m not the same as I was, I say. I’m different now. My knuckles white on the rail. Her hand warm on my back. But it’s good, you know? I’m good. Like I understand things I didn’t understand before.

  Like what things?

  Like big things. Like what’s important. Like what really matters. I glance at her. She’s frowning, her mouth all tight. And I need for you not to worry about me.

  Okay.

  Promise me.

  What?

  Promise me you won’t worry.

  Okay.

  Say it.

  Jesus, all right. I promise not to worry.

  I need you to let me figure things out by myself.

  Okay, Finn.

  After that, she doesn’t say anything for what feels like a really long time, and I just keep holding on to the bed and then she leans in, so her face is close to mine—look at me—and our eyes are hooked in deep in that place where it’s impossible to lie and she says, I love you. I love you so much. And I know this is hard but you’re going to be fine. And then she picks up my backpack. The dark green Herschel one I use for school. Come on, she says. Let’s get out of here.

  It’s a minute before my hand comes up off of the rail. I take a few steps and then I stop and glance down and my mom sees this, she sees this and she bends down and does up my shoes—loop, swoop, pull, loop, swoop, pull like she taught me when I was still a little two-handed kid. Then she opens the door and I walk out into what is now my life.

  —

  MY LIFE. I’m not ten steps out of the room when it pulls back and smacks me in the head. My mom’s beside me when Cathy hustles out from behind the nurses’ station with a Ziploc bag in her hand.

  You sure didn’t have much with you when you were admitted. She gives the bag a bit of a swing. Sandwich-sized, my name in Sharpie ink on the side. Nearly empty except for something looped and folded at the bottom. A slim black velvet snake.

  I grab the bag and jam it into my pocket, rush for the elevator, forget the way my toes are screaming in my shoes, forget the way my mom is gawking.

  I jab the button on the wall. My mom hustles over, my backpack hanging off her arm. She hikes it up onto her shoulder. She’s carrying everything, the backpack, the amputee literature, the neon-blue jacket that probably saved my life—my dad told me the story.

  I grab the jacket.

  Thanks, my mom says, trying to make eye contact. I watch the numbers light up over the doors. I’m crushing the feathers in the jacket, squeezing out all the air.

  Are you—?

  Don’t.

  What was—?

  Nothing.

  My mother sighs. The elevator bings. We step inside. Even with all my gear, my mom manages to wave at the nurse.

  I’ll be in touch, Cathy calls.

  July twenty-third. I have it on my calendar, my mom says before the doors slide closed.

  My stomach floats as the elevator drops and a deep electric funny-bone pain shoots through my hand and on into my fingers, but I don’t even look down. I ignore the burn in my nowhere hand. And the velvet ribbon riding so close to my hip.

  Since the weather’s warmed up, tonight like most nights, Michael grabs the baseball bat from the front hall closet—abnormally tidy thanks to Mia’s recent decluttering binge. He grips the neck lightly as he strolls up Springfield Avenue, in shorts and a T-shirt. Mid June and every tree’s in leaf, every garden a waft of pollen and perfume. Ahead, one of the neighbours wrestles a sprinkler into place on his lawn. Last year Michael would have stopped to talk drainage, potholes, speculated on the havoc being wreaked on the sewer pipes by the roots of Randolph’s giant tree. Tonight he nods curtly—he has no interest in answering questions about Finn or his new stay-at-home-dad routine—and marches past, the swing of the bat matching the casual back and forth of his arm.

  At the river, spring’s bursting, blossoming, blooming sex scent is undercut by a swampy reek. Belly-bloated, eyeless fish, a gelatinous muck of decaying plants and sticks and candy wrappers, one broken-jawed beaver—winter’s slaughtered stew rots along the bank, marking the high tide of the spring runoff. A pair of black swans, released every year in late spring and recaptured each fall, paddles into a scruff of cattails, skittering up a cloud of gnats. Michael turns away from the stench and the bugs, the phony birds paid for with his precious tax dollars, the glimpse of strip mall on the far side of the water, and shifts the bat to his other hand.

  Just across River Road, the Kellys’ garage doors are open, the ass end of their luxury fleet gleamingly on display. The family might not be great at lawn care—grass so long it’s falling over—or looking after other people’s kids, but they sure know how to do cars. The fins on the butter-yellow Caddy shine like sci-fi rockets, and in that same box of light, the Porsche also looks very well tended.

  Michael leaves the Kellys’ and crosses a foursquare of soccer pitches, one off limits on account of a snapping turtle who laid her eggs between its goalposts, where the grass has been worn down to sandy soil. A sturdy circle of chicken wire surrounds the nest, and a posted note warns people to stay back.

  He skirts the field, sticking close to the water. Three old Asian men fishing off the rocky bank grin and bob their heads as Michael passes. What they catch, he has no idea. He wouldn’t eat anything out of that water. Sewer runoff. People pollution. Dead beavers.

  One of the old men, in rubber boots and a white bucket hat, nods at his bat. “Baseball!” he calls out happily.

  “Fishing!” Michael calls back and keeps right on moving.

  Ahead, past the playing fields, a high concrete overpass ferries six lanes of traffic across the river. The overpass divides Old Aberdeen into east side and west. The western slice of the island is smaller, but more prestigious. Big properties. Big houses. Peter lives on a wooded acreage that backs onto the water. Although it’s a detour, some nights Michael passes by before looping home—just to check the place out. Thus far he’s resisted the cliché of taking his bat to the Conrad mailbox at the end of the laneway, although he has taken a leak on its post.

  Beneath the overpass the air is cool, the rush of traffic muted, and most of the concrete, the supports, the abutments, the wing walls, is bright with paint. The city has declared the bridge a graffiti-friendly zone, and as long as the “art” doesn’t creep onto the upper level, the city leaves the kids and their spray cans alone. The walls are covered with tags—bulging, blocky, head-high letters geometrically puzzled together and bordered in black. These stylized signatures quickly come and go, but the epic intergalactic battle scene between bubble-helmeted warrior apes that dominates the upper half of the abutment has been there since last fall, as has the metallic grenade, big as a watermelon that threatens the bridge’s main support column.

  Tonight, there are only a couple of kids smoking weed down by the water, getting inspired or getting lazy. They see Michael see them and do nothing to hide the spliff.

  “Yo,” says one kid in a wife-beater and jean shorts so long and baggy he looks like he’s wearing a skirt. Behind him, the water broils; the river, narrowed and shallow, runs fast under the bridge. In August, when the water’s low, rocks puncture its surface, rounded down over thousands of years, but fixed, unmoved by the hard drag of the current.

  Michael gives the boys a stiff wave, clutching tight to his bat. “Just checking out the work,” he says, nodding appreciatively at the surrounding blur of colour. He wonders what they’d say if they knew that his company, his former company—which he doesn’t miss, the only thing he misses is the paycheque—made a third of their annual revenues cleaning graffiti off banks and bus stops and apartment blocks and park benches and boxcars and the underside of bridges.

  The boy throws wide his arms. “Everyone’s welcome at the gallery, man,” he says, and the other boy snickers.

  “Wanna puff?” The boy leans in to take a toke, an ember sparking in the dusk.

  Michael has always loved the smell of pot, and it reaches him now, t
he sweet, musky scent. For a second he thinks about strolling over, putting the joint to his lips, pulling the smoke in deep, holding it, holding it, until his lungs burn and his brain loosens and his body starts to relax. Over the years he’s smoked on and off, with Peter, Peter’s stash, but it’s always been a casual thing, never a claws-into-him habit.

  “No…yeah, thanks. I’m just going to hit a few balls.” Michael waggles his bat and taps the bulge in the side pocket of his cargo shorts, knocking a ball lightly against his knee. “Okay, then. Cheers,” he says. “Cheerio.” A word he’s never used in his life.

  Both boys bend at the waist and laugh.

  Beyond the overpass, Michael veers away from the water. Through a field of wheaty grasses, he follows a narrow footpath to the dark dirt of a baseball diamond. Except for the path, there’s no obvious access to the diamond, no parking lot, no paved pedestrian entry. The diamond is rarely tended by the city and is too remote and in too rough a shape to be used for any kind of league play. The outfield has been recently cut, but the lights are aslant, the padlocked equipment shed at a kinky angle, the chain-link backstop pouchy and sagging at the top.

  Michael stands in the dirt of home plate, and with the bat resting on his shoulder, works a ball from his pocket. Small as an orange in his hand, the ball’s leather is yellowed and its stitching frayed. He tosses it into the air, sights it, swings. A solid crack and the ball flies straight over second base before landing well out in centre field. Michael pulls another ball, this one a softball, from his other pocket. He catches it low, pops it up, and its whiteness disappears into the darkening sky. Michael follows its vanished arc, imagines the ball’s split-second hang at the apogee, its inevitable fall back to earth.

  Satisfyingly, it lands right where he expects it, ten feet beyond third base, just inside the foul line. Michael doesn’t mind hunting down the balls. It gets him moving. Extends his time out of the house. If he were home, he might be watching Finn struggle to use a spoon or tie his shoes. If he were home, he might be channel surfing, a bleakness settling in, unable to concentrate, getting exhausted from working the remote. Or he might have fallen asleep in front of the TV and be having the nightmare again, wake up terrorized, his fingers still searching for a pulse on his dead cold son. Being out is definitely better. And retrieving balls from cool grass sure beats sitting in some slick lawyer’s office being told just how royally your best buddy has screwed you over while the guy doing all the talking ogles your beautiful wife. Or watching said beautiful wife “tidying up the house”—stuffing clothes and sheets and pots and dishes and practically every other thing they’ve bought and paid for over the last twenty years into bulging green garbage bags that she drops off on her daily run to Value Village. Michael takes little comfort in the fact that she hasn’t yet ransacked her shoe collection or dared touch his side of the closet. He doesn’t know what she’s doing. Making a point? Embracing minimalism? Shedding the skin of their old life?

  In the kitchen that morning, she’d turned her head when he tried to kiss her. When they do have sex, which has become a rarity over the last few months, it is more a battering apart than a coming together. Michael fucking her hard from behind and finishing quickly. It’s the only way she’ll allow it.

  She thinks he should be looking for work. He, however, wants the whole shitshow with Peter straightened out before he starts calling up contacts. He needs a solid story in place, one that casts Peter as the asshole rip-off artist, while leaving no room for anyone to question his dupability, his credentials or his value to their organization. This is something Mia doesn’t seem to understand. When he does start looking again, he cannot appear weak.

  Michael picks the hardball from the damp grass in the outfield. He likes the fit of the ball in his hand, how securely his fingers grip it. He likes the feel of the old bat too, its weight, the smooth, polished handle. He played a ton of pickup as a kid and early on he’d bought his son a glove. They’d thrown the ball around in the backyard, but Finn had always been pretty half-hearted about it. He preferred hockey, he preferred skateboarding, soccer, pretty much any sport in which Michael lacked expertise.

  He jogs back to home plate and picks up his bat. Hits the balls, retrieves them, again and again, meditation via mindless, repetitive motion, the rush of distant traffic on the overpass, the burble of the river all calming background noise.

  He’s just set the bat down when a ball whizzes past his head and slams into the backstop with a metallic whomp.

  “Yo, Cheerio!”

  Michael turns just in time to shoot out his hand as the other ball flies at him. The hardball hammers his palm and fingers, dense cork and cowhide, soft flesh and slim bone.

  The boy with the baggy shorts shuffles across the infield, churning up a low cloud of dust.

  “I didn’t see you,” Michael says. He fights off the urge to drop the ball and massage his hand.

  “Sorry, man,” the kid says. “Fucking dark out here.” He grabs Michael’s old Louisville Slugger off the backstop and in the next instant is pounding the lock that secures the shed. The padlock holds but the screws mounting the hardware pull away from the rotting door frame. The kid works the hinge loose, takes one step back, flashes Michael a grin, then kicks open the door.

  From the depths of his giant front pocket, he fishes out a cell phone and follows its rectangle of light into the freshly vandalized shed. The high clatter of wood, something hits the floor with a thud. The kid yells but Michael can’t make out the words. From inside the shed comes a spring-loaded snap, and a high electric whine sizzles overhead. A second later, the infield blooms with light, the night-damp dirt coming up a warm, earthy red. The corners of the outfield remain shadowed and the light over left field flickers epileptically, but the rest of the field glows a rich stadium green.

  The kid stands in the doorway, obviously pleased with himself, and Michael smiles back. The kid’s teeth are surprisingly straight and white, but between the bottom of his shorts and his puffy red high-tops, he looks underfed—like Finn—his shins like sticks stripped of their protective bark.

  “If you think that’s sick,” the boy says, “you’ll wanna check this out.”

  It takes forever for Mia and Michael to escape the Thompson Art Centre’s underground lot. Trapped in a labyrinth of idling vehicles and concrete posts, Michael lays on the horn whenever a car from another tributary tries to edge in. With every blast, Mia stiffens but withholds comment. And she closes the vents too late, the air in the Jeep already foul with exhaust by the time they exit the garage into a warm, drizzly night.

  They follow Queen Elizabeth Drive, two lanes of rain-glossed asphalt winding alongside the walled waters of the canal. The lighting’s bad, the street overhung by leafy branches, so the drive home feels needlessly dangerous; long stretches of shadowy darkness between streetlights, slick pavement, and Michael driving too fast.

  Mia taps a knuckle on her window and stares out at the houses blurring past. On this side of the canal, closer to downtown, the homes are still tall, red brick Victorians, but they sit tightly together, most with barely enough room for an adult to squeeze through to the backyard. Some of the bigger homes have been converted to apartments, and the occasional high-rise condo towers over its neighbours. There’s been talk of increasing density and allowing bigger developments in Old Aberdeen, but thus far the residents, well organized, well educated, and well versed in municipal bylaws and zoning restrictions, have fought down every proposal, Mia amongst the vocal throng. At the bank, she’d lent to plenty of real estate developers—all greed and no graciousness, monetizing every square inch of space they could lay their hands on, neighbourhood charm nothing but a selling point in their glossy sales brochures.

  “You like the show?” Michael asks.

  A modern dance, lithe, shape-shifting beings from the East, a huge column of rain centre stage, bodies wet and churning, a company of perfectly fingered hands, not a broken nail in sight, let alone a misshapen limb.


  “It should have been simpler,” Mia says. “More dance, less production. That rain.”

  “I enjoyed it.”

  He didn’t. He’d been squirming in his seat, seemingly desperate to get away, although he’d stayed put during the intermission, no doubt to avoid the slim possibility of running into one of his old business buddies in the lobby. God forbid he work up the courage to tell some macho modern dance enthusiast the truth about what happened at Conrad or inquire about a job.

  Michael fiddles with the wipers, clears a sheen of fog from the windshield. “I don’t understand what’s taking so long.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “I know they said Finn needs time to adjust to his new body image, body pattern, whatever, but I thought the earlier he got a prosthesis, the better. Didn’t the surgeon also say that?”

  “Yes.” They’ve been over this.

  “So next appointment go with him.”

  And over this. Michael hounding her to intervene, to fix it, to make Finn get a prosthesis. God knows what he’d do if he found out about the twenty-five hundred dollars they owe for the one that went missing. “Finn doesn’t want me talking to his psychologist. I don’t even know if that’s allowed. He’s nearly eighteen,” she says. “I’m trying to pull back a little.”

  Michael gapes at her. “You think this is the right time to pull back?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I do.” She stabs at the button to lower her window, finally remembering to clear the taint of exhaust. A cool mist drifts into the car as they whiz through the city. Despite the wet conditions, packs of die-hard joggers, the odd cyclist, take advantage of the pathway bordering the canal. Mia hasn’t exercised in months. A city of half a million people and all of it almost perfectly flat. She should outfit herself in Spandex and take up cycling…or join Michael at his ratty old diamond, lose herself in the sweet release of smacking a ball with a bat.