“Jerry turned a trick in a truck stop outside Winnipeg, let some guy blow him in the back of his rig, and that got them another seventy-five dollars. They made it as far as the outskirts of a town just across the Alberta border. They were driving at night. Kyle was. He fell asleep, the truck left the road, rolled down an embankment, turned over three or four times, killed Jerry and killed the dog. The police picked up Kyle half a mile away, hitchhiking.”
Here Sally cocked her head as if she were trying to recall something, a gesture I remembered from my childhood. “Chloe and I gave up the house in San Miguel a little while after. The town was haunted for me, like a before-and-after photograph. And when Freddie died (his cleaning lady found him on his bed in a blue linen jacket: he must have lain down for a moment to catch his breath and never gotten up again, dear Freddie), there was nothing to keep me there.
“I rented an apartment at the edge of Forest Hill Village. The poor part. Still, it was comforting to be neighbours to so many Mercedes and pretty gardens. It was an old-style brick building in slight disrepair, with lead windows. Remember those? Kyle was back in Toronto too. He wanted to move in with us. At first, I said no. Absolutely not.
“There were tears, of course, then accusations. I’d deserted him in Mexico, left him with a harsh father. Had loved Chloe more than him. While he was talking, I had, for the first time ever, a sensation in my body that I was dealing with a pathological liar. A liar whose charm and intelligence had become a sort of lubricant for getting whatever he was trying to get. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying for the first time it occurred to me that for my beloved son Kyle, language, the words that you actually use, was simply a kind of camouflage that allowed him to be a predator without seeming to be a predator. Even his tears seemed self-serving. As though he was lying, knew he was lying, but didn’t care. Was only concerned with the success of the performance.”
“But you loved him.”
“Yes. Everything just flew out the window in his presence, and I’d think, He’s so fabulous. I kept thinking, This is circumstantial. But then I’d overhear him on the phone and I’d think, Who is this? Is this a mask? Where is the little boy who was scared of ghost stories, and who was so shy at summer camp that he was scared to ask where the toilets were?”
“Did it occur to you that he was crazy or an addict?”
“It occurred to me he was a little pig with his nose in the trough. A shameless, self-gratifying bag of appetites. And that once he understood this—that that was how the world was coming to see him—his vanity would stop him.”
“Makes sense.”
“Only on paper. Only on paper. I took him out to dinner. Taxis, crutches, the whole business. I wanted to be somewhere fresh with him, somewhere that didn’t smell like my apartment. I asked him when was the last time he was happy. He lied at first, gave me some fiction he thought I wanted to hear. I stopped him. I said, ‘Stop lying to me. It’s killing me. It’s killing us.’
“So he said with this goofy grin, ‘Breaking into a car, I suppose. Well, not exactly breaking in, but that moment when you look in the window, see something you like, look up and down the street, the coast is clear, and then you do it.’
“I asked if he was saying that to shock me. It wasn’t the criminality of it that was so distressing, it was the vulgarity, the sheer vulgarity of it, and the strange gleam of pleasure that he got in his eyes when he said it. He looked . . . feral. I said, ‘Was that really the last time you were happy?’
“He thought for a moment and he said, ‘Yeah, it really was, Mom.’
“‘Don’t you want to change your life?’ I said. ‘No, not really.’ I asked him if he thought he was going to live to be an old man. He said he didn’t think about it much. I said, ‘What do you think about, Kyle, when you wake up at four o’clock in the morning and you’re in some dirty little rooming house with needles on the table and bloodstains on the wall?’
“He seemed perplexed by the question, and I realized that something had shut down in him. That his fine intelligence had dimmed, and, I suspected, dimmed irretrievably. It was hard to admit it, but I wasn’t sitting in a restaurant with a skeletal young man whose wit used to make even the police do a double take. I was having dinner instead with a common, dull-witted television watcher. A chronic television watcher. Getting high, watching television, breaking into cars, getting high, watching television. That was it. That was his whole life.”
“You must have grown to loathe him.”
“No, no, I never did. Not for long, anyway. I couldn’t help feeling that there was a magic key out there, that if I could just find it and put it in the lock, the door would open and everything would change.”
“And?”
“Mothers are fools for their sons. I let him move in. I couldn’t leave him wandering the streets—I was afraid he’d get killed. He had known intuitively which nerves to pluck, especially that business about sending him home from Mexico. He camped out on my couch, making up his bed in the morning. For a while it worked. Chloe went to school; I took a Spanish course. I was hoping one day maybe I could go back to Mexico—somewhere else, though. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Gay towns are always the safest towns in foreign countries. I’d spent most of my money, so I was living on a disability pension.”
“Why didn’t you go back to making your wall hangings?”
She looked at the winking whale, at the red seagulls drifting over the lagoon. “I tried, but somehow the air had just gone out of it. I couldn’t do the drawing or the cutting. I’d have had to hire someone to do it, and that seemed like paying someone to collect stamps for you. But we were making out fine.”
She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: it gave me him, his company. He had been such a bright, perceptive little boy, so clever about his friends, his parents, even himself. How to put it? It was so sad. He belonged to that group, that maddening group of people who are capable of unsparing self-analysis but incapable of controlling the same impulses they talk so brilliantly about. But I loved him, and I kept waiting for him to happen on the right key for the right lock. And for a while, it looked like he just might.”
“And?”
“He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Got a terrific sponsor—a middle-aged businessman who phoned him every night. He got a job in a warehouse. Marek got it for him. He did it for me, yes, but he believed in the magic key too. Except his was a bit different. His was the brutality of hard work. That Eastern European thing. And for a long time, maybe six months,it worked.
“Kyle got himself another girlfriend. Japanese this time. Women always liked him. It was a blessing and a curse. They always wanted to save him. Including his mother. All of us believing in the magic key. One month went by; three months; six months. I could feel a belt loosening around my chest. And then, one summer morning on the way to work, he walked by a neighbourhood bar—I even remember the name, the Moonstone—and he went in.
“He must have walked by that bar, God, I don’t know, a hundred times? But that day he went in. They were just setting up. He put money down on the bar and asked for a beer. The bartender asked him what he wanted. Kyle said, ‘You choose something.’ Unusual request. That’s why later, when the guy talked to the police, he remembered Kyle.”
A door opened just down the corridor from Sally’s apartment. Music briefly issued onto the flowered carpet. “Come on,” a young woman’s voice said, “this was your idea, now come on.” A dog collar rattled by the door, followed by an excited bark. “Shhh.”
“Next thing we know, Kyle calls into work, says he’s sick. Not a word to his sponsor, naturally. He knew the guy wouldn’t buy it. Sometime around noon, Kyle ends up in a ravine with a couple of guys. The ravine right under the subway bridge that leads to GreekTown. They drink their way along the Danforth, walking out on a few bills, stop in to see one of the gu
y’s girlfriends who works in a health spa and borrow some money from her. Somebody sells them an eight ball, crack and heroin.
“They come back across town and end up in that private school on Avenue Road. What’s it called? The one you went to?”
“Upper Canada College.”
“They bust into lockers looking for something to steal. They figure, because it’s a private school, all these rich kids have got to be keeping bags of loose cash in their lockers. A security guy hears them, they throw a pair of soccer boots at him and hightail it out of the school. They run across a cricket pitch where there’s a game on, all these guys in white flannels and cricket bats. By the time the police arrive, they’ve disappeared over a side fence and are hiding out in a backyard in Forest Hill. An hour later, the police get a call from a woman who says there are three naked guys swimming in her pool. They get away again.
“Two days later, a cop sees an illegally parked car with no plates on it. He opens the door. It’s my baby inside. Kyle. All by himself. They figured he died somewhere else and they dumped the body in a stolen car and walked away. In his pocket—and this always breaks my heart—is a city map, all the places he’s been over the past few days, this long arc through the city heading back to his apartment. Inscribed on the map were the words, I am on a voyage of mysterious intent. He was like a fish swimming upstream. He thought he was going home, but he wasn’t. He was getting ready to die. And he did.”
We sat in the silence for a moment; her refrigerator came on with a hum. She said, “I’ve thought about this a lot, and the truth is, I think he knew he couldn’t manage more than six months of ‘being good,’ and the alternative wasn’t possible either.”
Somewhere in the wall behind me, a metal pipe clanked.
“But why do you suppose he chose that morning to go into the bar? Why not the day before? Why not the day after? You lose a child, you keep wondering about those little things. As though, if I could find an answer, I could somehow make it not have happened. Which is absurd, I know. But still, I can’t seem to leave it alone.”
I said nothing.
She turned her dark eyes to me. “How could his sister be his sister and he be him?”
“What do you mean?”
“They slept in the same bedroom, they had the same parents, the same amount of love, the same things for breakfast. They used the same words, they spoke with the same speech rhythms. They liked the same TV shows. They disliked the same songs on the radio. They were like a little unit moving around the house together when they were small. How could they be so similar in so many ways and yet, in that small corner of their personalities where they were unalike, be so unalike, and have that same unlikeness be the deciding factor in the course of their lives? Why wouldn’t it be the other things, the other qualities, that set the course? Can you explain this to me?”
“I can’t.”
“It’s the same with you and your brother, Jake. You hate each other.”
I said, “I haven’t talked to Jake for years. Have you?”
“Sometimes. Rarely.”
“What’s he like?” I asked, my voice rising half an octave, as though my body, independent of my will, was preparing to defend itself, as though the time between now and our last ugly confrontations had been reduced to a matter of days, not years.
“Unhappy. So unhappy. He’s quite categorical about it. He says, ‘I’m not going to be happy until I’m fifty.’”
“Why fifty?”
“I don’t know. He just said it.”
After a moment, I said, “What am I like?”
“At your best?”
“Let’s start there.”
“Here. You’re here. And all that that—implies.”
“At my worst?” I thought, Let’s get it over with.
She shook her head. “You’re here. That’s what matters.”
The elevator doors opened down the hall. Voices passed the door.
“It’s late,” she said. “I wonder who they are. I wonder where they’re coming from.”
The candle sputtered.
“Am I safe to ask you something?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Will you regret this? Will you drive through this neighbourhood some night twenty years from now and regret this?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not tonight.”
“It’s hard to imagine you in twenty years,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine you a day older than tonight.”
“Why did you ask me if it was safe?” I said.
“Because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”
“Please, Sally.” I could feel my eyes watering.
“What?” she said suddenly.
“Please say whatever you want.”
The phone rang again. Purr, purr. I raised my eyebrows at Sally. She shook her head. She knew who it was, I thought, but didn’t want to tell me. Finally, it went silent. And again the room seemed preternaturally quiet.
She said, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Can you hang on?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll be here when I get back?”
“Yes.”
Sally got up on her crutches. I put my hand under her armpit—it was warm—and steadied her. “Okay?” I said.
She stared down at the carpet. Or her slippers, I couldn’t tell which. “Yep,” she said, breathing in on the word the way people sometimes speak in the country, the way her grandmother spoke.
Out the window, I could see the flickering red lights of a plane slowly descending into the city. “I didn’t think planes landed this late,” I said, but Sally was already in the bathroom.
After a while, I found myself thinking about my older brother, Jake, how he had gotten off to such a promising start: a good student, a teacher’s favourite, a hit with girls, captain of the track and field team—even had his picture in the newspaper one spring day under the caption, jake gillings champion prospect! There he was in his whites with a trophy gleaming in the late afternoon sun.
Champion prospect indeed. I had so admired him! Watching him on the football field—his hands on his hips, watching the players move and shift just before the snap, reading the play—or making his way down the school corridor with a cluster of A-list friends, their jackets open, ties loosened, I felt as though I was observing a more successful model of myself. Better-looking (he looked like Kris Kristofferson), a better soccer player, better at backgammon, better at water skiing, better at Ping-Pong, even a better dancer at parties. Just better, better, better. And believe it or not, I basked in it. It gave me a charge, as they used to say, to be connected to him, to have people say, “Oh, that’s Jake’s little brother.”
But something happened to him in university. It was as though someone switched off the lights in the house and they never came back on: an unfinished degree, boarding houses, failed projects, disappointing travels, uneasy girlfriends, Eastern religions, a string of psychiatrists (who invariably, after three or four months’ treatment, turned into “assholes”). I saw him once in a restaurant. He was screaming at a waitress. I hadn’t known he was there until suddenly there was a commotion, smashing plates, an overturned table, an ashen manager hurrying across the floor. Where did it come from, this fury? This capacity to abandon himself to such a public display of childlike rage? A grown-up throwing a tantrum. Had some long-haired, cowboy boot–wearing sixties psychiatrist counselled him to “get in touch with his anger”? And poor Jake had got it wrong?
Why had he turned on me, who adored him? Why had he fucked my German girlfriend in my bed and made sure I heard about it? Why does he still, according to my cousin, rant at the drop of a hat about our long-dead parents, how they ruined his life? Can the dead ruin our lives? Can their talons be that long? Don’t we win b
y dint of just being here?
And why had he turned on himself like that? This peculiar resignation to not being happy till he was fifty? Tonight, as I’m writing this, I wonder about him: He’s out there in the city somewhere. But doing what? Thinking what? He must be, I don’t know, sixty-three, sixty-four.
Are you happy yet, Jake? Are you?
One moment we had been such brothers, dancing side by side to the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” with a pair of sisters at a summer dance. And now this? What happened? Jake and Kyle. Chloe and I. What the fuck happened?
Something else: I noticed that night in the restaurant that he was dressed identically to me—black corduroys, brown leather jacket, crew-neck sweater and white running shoes. So odd: two aging schoolboys who hadn’t spoken in years wearing the same clothes. That means something, I know—but what?
Sally emerged from the bathroom and settled back down in her chair. “What were you thinking about?” she said.
“Jake and Kyle. Kyle and Jake.”
She moved her crutches to the side. “You know what I want? After I’m gone, I want you to have a little party for me. Not right away. Nothing maudlin. But a birthday party. A party with lots of wine and candles. Martinis, too.”
“Sure.”
“I want to be in cheerful company and not be alone.”
“Okay, then.”
“And there’s something else.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a silver canister in my bedroom. On the dresser.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it.”
“Do you know what’s in it?”
“No.”
“Those are Kyle’s ashes. I was supposed to do something or other with them, but I couldn’t stand any of the ideas. I couldn’t stand, to be honest, to be so finally parted from him.”
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