By three in the afternoon, when I usually sit in the shade somewhere and scarf down a couple of granola bars, the section of the park I’m focusing on today is spotless. Not a bit of garbage anywhere. But I’m not moving on. Mia’s house backs onto the far side. Her family lives in a row of townhomes, the only ones in the neighbourhood. There are at least five separate occasions where I resolve to walk right into her small backyard and knock on her patio door. Immediately followed by five panicked ones where it doesn’t happen.
So now I’m moving up and down the same stretch of treeline, visible from her place, actually pretending to stab things in the brush and put them in my garbage bag. Which remains almost empty, pathetically wrapping itself around my leg with every puff of wind. As limp and formless as my own resolve. I’m embarrassed for myself. Yet can I stop? No.
It’s almost a relief to hear Gal’s horrible singing. He’ll see me and want to check on my progress. Anything to interrupt this ridiculous little play I’m directing and starring in. He emerges at a trailhead a short way down, stops, and heads in my direction. He looks at the ground and at my spike and at my bag, but no change comes across his features. You can’t say his face is expressionless — his scars are a riot of expression.
He nods at the bandage on my arm. “The rash is not so severe. I am surprised. You fell into so much poison ivy.”
I’d become comfortable with the itch, almost a constant crackling static in the background. But now it flares. I rub it through the bandage. “I was lucky, I guess.”
“This is not luck.”
This being everything that happened around the PI incident, of course. But there’s no need to say anything further about it. I just nod.
“That boy, Pat, the one who pissed on you —”
“What about him?”
“He has been around more. I have had to tell him to leave a few times.”
I don’t know how I feel about Gal doing that. Fighting this battle for me. “Own your own shit, kid,” Jesse says. “One, no one can shoulder it for you. Two, it feels good to be responsible.” I remember asking him when to look for help. Jesse told me to try to do things myself but that if I needed to, I could ask him or someone trustworthy. I asked how a person knows if someone can be trusted. “I have no idea,” he said. “Some you can, some you can’t. Like I said, own your own shit. Remember that. Although if your mom ever asks, I said stuff, right?”
“I can take care of him,” I say to Gal.
Gal’s eyebrow rises. Questioning. Doubting. “I do not think that this boy has much respect for anyone. Be careful.”
“I will.”
He nods and takes a step away, as though he’s heading back into the woods to carry on his walk, but then he stops. Scans the ground, the underbrush at the edge of the woods. Looks at me and across at the fence behind Mia’s place and back at me again. The tiniest of smiles breaks on his face, his scars easing.
“This section of the park is very tidy,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“I would offer to go and tell her you are here, but I think you might like to do this yourself.”
As though on cue, Mia appears, stepping out through her sliding glass door and walking across the small yard. Sees Gal and me. Waves. Unlatches the gate and walks across the grass. Flip-flops, ragged cut-off shorts, and a dark tank top. Everything loose. Functional. Yet showing off her muscles, too. I like that she doesn’t hide who she is.
“Salaam ’alaikum,” she says to Gal when she arrives.
“Wa’alaikum a’salaam.”
They have a quick exchange in Arabic, rapid fire, back and forth. I’m the awkward spectator with nothing to say. Maybe not even present. I stand and listen, mute, as awkward as a third leg and foot facing the other direction. Mia says something that makes Gal chuckle, and I want to jump in and yell that I’m here, pay attention to me, I’m not pathetic. Gal waves and heads off, singing, his voice fading as he enters the woods at the next trailhead down from the one he emerged from. Leaving me and Mia to stand in silence.
I’m here. Please come.
The word Jesse doesn’t say is now. He doesn’t have to. Now is everything. I have this sense that there are no moments other than now, if you think about it. The past is done and mostly sucks. You can’t guarantee a future. You can make plans and save and hoard, but you might never get to use any of it. So what’s left? Only the right-nows you try to use as best you can.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About how I acted at your party. I can —”
“No, I’m sorry. I totally put you on the spot.”
I’m speechless. Blinded. I was going to tell Mia that I can see her however she wants me to see her. In secret. Out loud. Whatever. Because I think Jesse would be pissed at me if he knew how easily I’d shrugged off this opportunity. His voice telling me without telling me to buck the hell up and to hold what I can. But Mia headed me off with her own apology, and now my words — any words at all — have resettled into the strange places they inhabit in my brain.
“I met your aunt,” she says.
“Wait, what?”
“Vivian. She’s cool. We had coffee this morning. Well, she had coffee. I had milk. Coffee’s gross.”
“I don’t understand. Why w—”
“She said she wanted to meet me.”
“How did she find you?”
“She knocked on our front door. Didn’t you tell her where I live?”
I shake my head. “I mentioned your name. She must’ve googled you.”
Now it’s Mia’s turn to shake her head. “We’re not listed, Dills. My parents keep themselves private. Especially after 9/11 and all the crap happening in the States. And that information isn’t anywhere on my social media.”
And I can’t respond to that. I might be used to Aunt Viv’s mysterious online ways but only from a distance. Apart. You can trust the space. Not now, though. As I said the word google, I knew it was a weak version of what Aunt Viv is capable of. She doesn’t need Google. But it’s odd that she’s taking such an interest in me and in Mia. Aunt Viv and I have never been that close.
Mia watches me thinking. “We made small talk. She said she was an online-security consultant.”
“She’s much more than that.”
“Hacker?”
“She hates the word, but yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Mia looks at the ground, falling into her own thoughts. I think about how exposed she and her family are. She must be realizing the same thing.
Well, I did that. My stupid open mouth. I have to make this right. I have to help. “I’m sorry.”
But a change happens. She looks up again, and in the piercing darkness of her brown eyes I can see a new clarity. New strength. No, wait. Not new. More. More of the abundant wonder stuff she is already made of. In a blink, she has weighed all the pluses and minuses and has made her decisions and has made my urge to help, to fix, irrelevant. Not needed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“It does, Mia. She shouldn’t have hacked you.”
“She won’t hurt us. I like her. I think I can trust her.”
“Still, it —”
Mia lays her hand on my forearm and my voice cuts itself off. There’s a strong weight there. Warm. Nice. I’m glad it’s a cool day, that my skin is sweat-free and clean so her hand won’t slip off. I want to live right here for as long as I can. Soak her in. Her warmth and —
“She told me about Windsor High.”
Aw, man, those words. From her, they’re bullets. I’ve been shot through. Two military rounds piercing my body at 3,251 feet per second, 5.56 millimeter caliber, tungsten core, tumbling. All the now and truth and warmth that have filled me up for the past few minutes gush out of me. A trickle at the entrance wound in front, a torrent from the fist-sized exit wound in my back. I’ve seen those wounds. The blood and bone and bits of flesh that spray out of them, the horrific mess left behind.
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Mia’s mouth is moving. She’s concerned. Asking if I’m all right. But I can’t hear. There’s a roaring in my ear, a hundred assault rifles on full auto. Drowning out the screams that are immediately behind.
I should have run sooner. Hidden. Behind the librarian’s desk. That bookcase. The tables and chairs and catalogue computers. The witness stand. The judge’s dais. A tree. Anything.
My legs feel weak. I guess that makes sense. I thought I’d kept it all in, protected, bandaged tight as I heal. But for some reason, Mia’s knowing has torn the dressings off and I’m bleeding out. It feels like all that’s left is to sink down and wait for it all to end.
Mia raises her hands to my face and kisses me. Not the awkward but tender, swirling, blush-of-romance kind of first kiss, but the who-you-trust-to-save-your-life kind. Firm, dry, strong, and brief. Long enough for my feet and legs and body to understand that they can support me after all. And her arms around me in a long embrace. She could hold me up if she needed to. She is that strong.
“Vivian told me about your stepdad, too. About what he did.”
I take a deep breath, exhale into her shoulder. Where to begin? Maybe with the obvious. My obvious, anyhow. “I can’t hate him, Mia. Everyone else does, but I can’t.”
“You don’t have to. No one can know him like you do.”
“That’s so it. Exactly.”
“She says he talks to you.”
I pull back and look at her. To gauge her expression. Her belief. But her expression is as full of that wonder stuff as before. Wow.
“And you’re going to go see him.”
“Vivian told you that, too?”
A nod. “I can go with you. We could leave any time.”
“I want to, but I can’t just go.” I explain about buses and unaccompanied minors, the expense of other options, the dangers of hitchhiking. The practical barriers. My ankle monitor. I don’t explain about all the other things, the intangibles centred in my head and heart, that might be keeping me here even more.
“We’ll figure it out,” Mia says.
“I could get in a lot of trouble. You, too.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“You could ask your mom.”
“No way. She’s dealing with enough as it is. Plus, I think her car died.”
“Vivian?”
I shake my head and tell her about Aunt Viv’s fear of roads, how she can’t leave the city.
“Oh.”
We briefly fall silent before Mia’s face opens up, bright as that first bit of eastern sun rising over the trees in the morning. “I know who can drive us.”
“Who?”
A smile. Teeth as white as trust. “I got this, Mr. Wendell.”
“You have it all worked out.”
“I am owed a big favour, as they say.”
Her tone is formal and serious, though her eyes are bright. I open my mouth to ask the obvious next question, but close it again almost immediately. As they say. You never know who they are, and yet saying it so often makes it a kind of truth. Especially when it’s said by someone like Mia.
“All right, then, Ms. Al-Ansour,” I say. “You have my encouragement to pursue this line of inquiry.”
“Excellent. I will begin post-haste.”
“That is acceptable.”
“To me, also.”
We laugh, the seriousness and formality feeling somehow right. If I could lift myself like a drone ten thousand feet into the sky, all of Churchill Park laid out below me, I’d see that we’re standing precisely, impossibly in the centre of it. Surrounded by grass and trees and swamp. Lots of places to hide. Lots of places to bleed out all alone. But right now, my feet fixed to the earth, it’s the place we just happen to be standing, and I have no idea about midpoints and geography and signs. Just that, for the first time in a long time, wholeness doesn’t seem so alien. Maybe the dressing hasn’t been torn off. Maybe it needed to be loosened. To gauge the healing. To let the air in for a little while.
PART II
THERE
GO
By the time we pull back onto the highway, the sun is below the horizon. We left Hamilton four hours ago but one hour out the rear left tire blew. It took five minutes for Gal to figure out that his spare was flat and almost three hours for the roadside service guy to find us. He was a greasy dude, perving Mia out as he filled and mounted the spare, like she might be ripe enough to squeeze. Gal got in his face, the service truck’s flashing yellow lights turning his scars into a strobe-lit horror show. The guy left in a hurry, barely glancing at the cash Gal put in his hand. The original tire was a lost cause, like a shredded rubber corpse. We almost left it on the gravel shoulder, but Gal and I shared a look and put it in the trunk. One less piece of garbage for someone else to pick up.
“That took way too long,” I say from the back seat.
“It is what it is,” Gal says, and falls silent.
Gal unintentionally using Jesse’s words. It is what it is, kid. Lots of things can’t be explained. And don’t need to be. They just are. You wonder how such sayings get passed between different groups of people.
Full dark comes quickly. Our headlights throw a small pool of brightness on the highway ahead. Out here there are no streetlights, so the highway is mostly dark, apart from tail lights on our side of the road and meteor headlights passing the other way.
Please, kid.
I’m coming, Jesse. Finally, I’m coming.
I feel like a coward for waiting this long. Taking a three-hour trip seems like such a simple thing. When you have your own resources, it’s simple. When you have the time, it’s simple. When you’re not chained to the legal system by a sentence and an ankle monitor, it’s simple. Yet, when you can have a million excuses but not a single reason that stands up against the reality that you haven’t made the effort, it doesn’t feel so simple. That you haven’t cared enough, maybe. Or that deep down, you have reservations. Complicated reservations.
Gal hums to himself, as off-tune as always, content to drive his Kia hatchback twenty below the highway maximum. On cruise control. The tire guy warned against driving the doughnut spare faster than this, but Gal is in no hurry anyhow. Unlike me. I want to yell at him to speed up. Obviously, I don’t. He’s driving, after all. Willingly. And he waved away my weak offer to pay for the tire change, clearly sensing that finding the cash would be a challenge.
Mia did this. This trip. This chance to answer some of my questions. The edge of her face lights up and dims with every car passing by in the other direction. I didn’t fight too hard back in Hamilton when she called shotgun. The view of her may be the only thing keeping me from screaming that everything is taking too damn long.
“The highway is quiet,” Gal says after a while.
“It’s Friday night,” Mia replies. “And we’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Not nowhere,” I say. “We’re near London. Jesse and I stopped here once.”
He called London “a sleepy college town,” like the words explained everything. We stopped at a twenty-four-hour supermarket in the northern suburbs to buy some food for our hike into the woodlands nearby, and there were two sleepy students buying snacks in the checkout ahead of us. Not paying attention to the cashier. Jesse snapped at them to wake the hell up. There was an uncharacteristic edge to Jesse’s voice. Maybe because he never went to college and wonders if he should have. He’s so smart, so he could have, but he likes to talk about the home he made in the military, too. His army family. Mom talks about me going to college like it’s a given thing, but Jesse doesn’t participate in those discussions. “Education’s important,” he says, “but it’s not school that makes a man who he is. Just keep your choices intact.”
“Who is Jesse?” Gal asks.
“Wendell’s stepdad.”
“Is he the reason we are sneaking from Hamilton on a Friday night?”
I tap Mia on the shoulder. “You didn’t tell him?”
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br /> “He knows where we’re going. The rest of the story is yours.”
“He must owe you a heck of a favour.”
“Well, that’s his story to tell, too. If he wants.”
“This little drive will not begin to repay it.” Gal says this like he’s making a proclamation of some kind.
“Gal, I told you, this’ll be enough,” Mia says.
Gal makes that sucking sound behind his teeth again and she goes quiet. But in the car’s low light, I can see she’s smiling. All this history. Inside jokes and stories. I want to tell them to spit it out, that keeping secrets in front of others is rude, but that’s not very diplomatic, is it? Or realistic. We keep all sorts of secrets from each other.
We drive in silence for a few more minutes before Gal sighs and glances at me in the rear-view. “You have seen my scars?”
“Of course he has. They’re impossible to miss!”
Gal doesn’t answer Mia’s outburst, but glances at me again and then brings his eyes back to the front. Waits for me to answer. Making space. A kind of permission.
“I didn’t want to be rude,” I say.
Mia has told me some, of course, but I’m not sure whether Gal knows. Better to keep that to myself. Gal sighs again and expands on the version Mia told me. His national service in Israel. Stationed in a settlement near Hebron but shifted to Ramallah after a couple of Israeli soldiers were murdered there. The complications of control and violent suppression. A rocket attack and an unexploded warhead going off as he placed warning tape around it. Fragments all over his upper body, some of which are still there. Shrapnel. Jesse kept a jar on the dresser in the master bedroom in Windsor with a few shards of metal they took out of him after he got hit on one of his tours. Gal didn’t keep his. The surgeries and rehabilitation and a desperate need to leave his country were reminders enough of what happened. Aside from the fragments in his body — the ones he’ll carry forever. Or at least to the grave, where they won’t decompose with his body. Like Ethan’s braces.
Nothing but Life Page 13
