“We will need to find a mechanic,” Gal says.
“I just want to go,” I say.
“The spare will not make it all the way back to Hamilton.”
Mia pulls out her phone. Opens Google Maps for a nearby mechanic. They argue about near or far, small mechanic or franchised tire specialist. Gal only trusts the independents. Mia says that speed is important and also that the franchise will probably have the tire in stock. Gal reluctantly concedes the point. Mia turns and gives me an impish thumbs-up. Smug victory. I try to smile back. I probably look like a gargoyle. They decide on a place out in the suburbs.
As we drive, I pull out my burner phone to text Aunt Viv.
— all done
— And?
— it was weird
— I bet
— everything ok at home?
There is a brief pause. It feels like forever before her text arrives.
— Dills, your mom was beside herself last night so I told her. I know I said I wouldn’t but I had to
— told her what?
— Everything
I begin and delete a dozen replies. Between the hospital media ambush and now worrying about Mom, what’s happened seems too big for texting. I should call Aunt Viv. But I’d have Gal and Mia listening on my end, and I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it. I should definitely call Mom. The acid heat of guilt rises in my gut and I don’t know what to do with it.
— ?????
Aunt Viv is impatient as I type and delete and type and delete. Probably wondering if I’m writing a novel. She deserves more. Mom deserves a hell of a lot more. And yet I’m not there.
— we’ll be home in a few hours
As soon as I hit Send I power off the phone. I hope she’s not too pissed about my lack of response. I hope she’s staying close to Mom.
I slide the phone into my pocket and look out my side, watching the traffic get lighter as the city thins into its outskirts. Gal and Mia are chatting in Arabic now, punctuated by brief laughs and groans. Reliving the hospital in a language I can’t understand. I don’t mind, though. I let the now familiar but unknowable sounds wash over me and lean my head against the window. The safety glass is warm from the sun. I close my eyes and try to make sense of what’s happened as the highlight reel of the trip and my summer and everything rushes past my eyelids.
LOVELY
I don’t know I’m sleeping until potholes in the tire place’s parking lot knock my head against the window and wake me up.
LIGHTNING TIRE & LUBE
while u wait!!
A compromise. An independent tire specialist. I almost smile.
“Hey, Dills,” Mia says.
“Hey.”
“You sacked out pretty hard.”
“I guess I needed it.”
The lot is empty. There’s a small sign between the service bays that tells us to park there and honk the horn, so we do. The garage door trundles up on its guides and a small, wiry guy walks to the driver’s-side door, wiping his hands on a rag. His skin is so brown, it’s almost black. Stained red hat. Navy-blue coveralls that look bright next to his skin. Stitched to the chest is a white Lightning Tire & Lube patch fringed in red.
“Leave the keys in the ignition. Oil change is twenty minutes or so. You can wait in the waiting room.”
“No oil change,” Gal says. “We need a new tire. We are running on the spare.”
“No problem, sir. That’ll be a bit longer, maybe thirty minutes.” He kneels and checks out the spare on the back left and scans the rest. “You’ll want to change both right and left in the back, though, if not all four.”
They go back and forth about brands and styles and prices. Gal settling on a mid-range pair of all-seasons for the rear that sound so expensive to me. I again have the empty urge to offer repayment, but this time say nothing. Gal holds out a hand, which the guy takes, looking pleased at the formality of a handshake to seal the deal.
He says, “I’ll put the new ones on the front, rotate the others to the back. Okay?”
“You can do all of this in thirty minutes?”
He flashes a smile. “Twice, if I had to.”
“All right.”
We all step out of the car and the guy slides in, moves the seat forward a few inches, puts the car into gear, and zips into the bay. Like it’s all one motion. No hesitation. No brake lights until the car stops in its spot above the mount.
The waiting room is a small rectangular space. The front window of the store is to our back as we enter. A TV blares high in the corner, angled toward the chairs lining two of the walls. A table under the window warms in the dusty sun, bearing the weight of a space-age espresso machine, an untidy spread of old magazines, and a wobbly rack of pamphlets and promotional material. A customer service counter divides the space between us and the service area. The door behind the counter is propped open for air movement, letting in the sounds of air tools and metal working metal. Just past the smell of oil and hydraulics and metal is the burnt smell of old coffee.
A young woman, maybe university age, sits behind the counter, clicking around on the computer there. She doesn’t look up as we enter. A single other customer, a tanned man in a camouflage T-shirt, sits in a far chair. A matching ball cap pushes down on his impossibly blond hair, which sticks out like a scarecrow fringe. Though he’s sitting, I can tell he’s a big guy. He looks folded into the chair like clothing into too-small luggage. His eyes are glued to the TV. Some twenty-four-hour news channel, a clash of traffic cams and anchors and news tickers and weather icons. Every element screaming, Look at me! It hurts my eyes, so I sit in one of the free chairs and look at the framed tire posters hung wherever there’s a few square feet of wall space. Mia sits next to me, Gal in the next chair down.
I think about Jesse. It’s the pause that lets it happen. The waiting. Gal closes his eyes, patient as a park bench. Mia has her phone out and is scrolling through email or something. So normal. I feel normal, too, and that makes me uncomfortable. I’ve taken in the wasting body of my stepdad, a guy I’ve defended and puzzled over for months, but I don’t feel anything. I’ve said goodbye, but it doesn’t seem like a farewell. No telling how much longer he’ll live, so my visit and my words are probably meaningless. Like a handful of water poured into a Cootes Paradise creek in the hopes of freshening Lake Ontario, absorbed long before reaching the marsh, much less the lake beyond. I’ll never know.
I pull out my phone and power it on to send a text to Aunt Viv about the delay, but decide not to. What’s thirty minutes when she doesn’t know our specifics anyhow? The phone’s screen brightens and urges me to swipe in. I wait for Aunt Viv’s delayed texts to arrive, but there’s nothing. Maybe she understands why I didn’t respond. But if she told Mom everything, there’s no reason not to have given Mom this number. I should see a cascade of worry in the register, red letters and numbers for every missed call. I should see it now and I should’ve seen it when I texted before. The little voicemail icon bold and red with a number that signals Mom’s level of concern.
But, no. No numbers, no cascade.
What should I do with that? Put the phone away? Stick to the plan? Realize that there’s nothing to be gained from a phone call where all you can do is inevitably break the connection? There’s a certain logic to that. A certain attractiveness, too, in holding on to some measure of control. I tell myself to power down again, but my fingers don’t listen. They’re working on my heart’s instructions. Call your mom. Now. Driven by an image of a mother so heartbroken and betrayed she can’t text or call her only child. I watch my fingers do the touchscreen dance across the familiar numbers and the phone is up and there’s a ringing sound and a pickup click interrupting the second ring.
I wait for the voice. The hello. Nothing.
“Mom?”
Is there a hissing on the line, or is it my mind filling in the lack of response from her?
“It’s Dills.”
Still nothing.
/> “Say something, Mom. Please.”
“Are you safe?”
“Yeah. I’m with Gal and Mia and we blew a tire yesterday and we’re getting it changed somewhere out in the —”
“Stop.”
“Mom?”
“That’s enough.”
“I saw him. I saw Jesse.”
There’s a deep, brief moan on the other end of the line.
“He looked so different. He —”
“Please stop. I can’t. Not now. I’m glad you’re safe. But, Dills, I just can’t.”
And the click on the other end of the line is so final and dreadful that it must have filled the room. Gal and the other guy haven’t moved. I lower the phone and look at Mia. She’s watching me but not saying anything. I hear myself saying that I called my mom as if Mia didn’t already hear everything on my side. That she hung up.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” I say.
“It’s a lot to process.”
“I need to get out of here. Walk, maybe.”
We rise from our seats, pocket our phones, and step toward the door.
“Do not go too far, please,” Gal says as we pass, not moving, eyes still shut tight.
Mia and I reply in unison that we won’t. We glance at each other and walk out, the cheerful bells above the door signalling our arrival back into the world. Like we’ve been delivered by reindeer and sleigh. I swear they didn’t ring when we came in.
Mia sets her phone’s timer to ten minutes, a signal to turn around. I love that. It’s the kind of detail only she could bring into the situation. I hear myself ribbing her about it. As another diversion from the strangeness of the day, I suppose. She’s a good sport about it and gives back as well as she gets. Better, in fact. We’re actually laughing when her alarm sounds.
“Thanks,” I say. “I needed this.”
“Me, too. I’m glad to be here, but it’s quite a ride.”
We turn and walk for a few steps. I breathe deep and shake my head. “I’m worried about Mom. She sounded so shattered by this. What if —”
Mia stops me with a kiss. She literally steps in front of me and halts my forward momentum with her hands on my shoulders. Gentle but with that bear strength behind them. She rises on her toes and plants her lips on mine, firm and warm and dry. My body is suddenly drawing in all the inertia from every car that passes, the sun, the turning of the planet. I want to wrap her up in me and carry the kiss to where kisses like that always suggest you go. But she breaks away and drops down to her heels, her eyes sparking. She moves a single finger to her lips like she wants to gauge the heat there. I haven’t even moved my arms from their dumb place at my side.
“You’re lovely,” she says.
“Oh. Uh, thanks.”
“You should’ve seen your face when you talked about your mom. Sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Sometimes I think she won’t make it through all of this.”
Mia shakes her head, looking at me with a kind of wonder. “You survived the shooting — I can’t imagine what you’ve had to carry — but you’re more worried about her. Call me cheesy and Hallmark, but with you on her team I think she’ll do fine.”
“I have to tell her about Jesse. She won’t be ready.”
“You’re a good son, Dills. Wow.”
“Aside from running away and not telling her.”
“Sure. And the LoJack and breaking the conditions of your sentencing.”
“Right. And those.”
We grin, shaking our heads at the impossibility of everything, and resume walking. On the way out, we watched the landscape change, from the tire place nestled among low strip malls, industrial buildings, gas stations, and fast-food joints, to the faceless rows of identical houses that surround us now. New pavement. Tiny trees and brand-new sod, the edges browning. Big SUVs in every driveway.
Mia and I walk back to the tire place, talking quietly, just loud enough to hear each other over Saturday traffic, a pair of teenagers no one looks twice at.
RECOGNITION
When we get back, the car has been backed out of the bay and is idling in the lot. Inside, Gal is leaning against the counter, signing the work order. The mechanic stands behind the young woman at the desk with keys in hand, ready to hand them over. Without taking her eyes from her computer screen, she slides the credit card terminal over to Gal, who pays by chip and secret number.
The mechanic drops the keys into Gal’s hands. “You serve?”
Gal turns his good ear toward the guy. “I am sorry?”
“The pattern of your scars. Sprayed. Like from a blast.”
“Oh. Yes. A long time ago.”
“The Sandbox?”
“I am sorry?”
“Iraq? Afghanistan?”
“No. Israel.”
The guy nods. “Panjwaii for me. Bunch of us came back with scars like that.”
Gal nods, looking unsure what to say.
I do, though. You pick that up when you spend enough time with a vet in public. “Thanks for your service.”
Jesse didn’t talk about it except when the Corolla’s veteran plates got noticed. Strangers pumping his hand or slapping him on the shoulder and repeating those words. He’d ask for the bill at a restaurant or arrive at the counter of the coffee shop only to find that the order had been paid for. Little handwritten notes, always anonymous. “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE.”
“It’s embarrassing as hell, Dills. But awesome too, you know? It means something.” Mom would get the same thing when she was out and about, always gently making sure that Jesse’s name got mentioned. Turn the conversation back to what he gave. Lots of people shaking their heads and telling her that she served as much as anyone. Mom embarrassed by that, too, of course.
The man’s eyebrows go up and he smiles. “You’re welcome. Thanks for saying that.”
Jesse always said “you’re welcome” and “thank you,” too. “Good manners are currency you can spend, kiddo,” he’d tell me.
I feel Mia’s hand on my shoulder. I follow her eyes to the TV on the wall. It’s still muted. Bizarre watching such a familiar scene unfold like a silent film. Amid the tickers and scrolling text, the live-action frame is showing the scene in the hospital. Shaky, handheld footage. I watch myself come around the corner with the nurse who called the media. Sarah bustles me into the observation room, the camera bumping and shaking as the door slides shut. The scene cuts back to the moment I come around the corner, slowing down and zooming in, pausing on my grainy, video-stilled face. “WENDELL SIMS, SON OF WINDSOR SHOOTER.” Cut back to the studio, where an anchor is speaking to the camera, serious. I imagine phrases like moments ago and exclusive and saw it here first. My last school photo hovers over her shoulder. Younger, chubbier, but still me.
“Shit,” I say.
“Yep,” Mia replies.
“I wonder who gave them that pic?”
I look over at the other customer, who’s watching the TV, his face slack and passive. Something clicks. He sits upright and looks over at us. Back at the TV. At us. TV. He hikes his camouflage cap up on his forehead. In a nanosecond he has his phone out and he’s typing. Then he’s calling someone and watching us intently. I can almost hear the phone connecting on the other end, the news station’s receptionist answering, asking how she can direct his call.
Gal’s watching all of it, too. He shakes his head and says we should go. As we get into the car, the guy appears in the shop’s window, now speaking into his phone. So this is what conspicuous feels like. People know you. They stare at you like they have something invested in what you do. Who you are. As we drive away, I get the tiniest glimpse of what it has taken for Mom to keep me safe and anonymous. And I feel shame that I might’ve made all those efforts and worries mean nothing.
SIEGE
The trip back to Hamilton feels quicker than the trip out. Gal pushes the car up past the limit, but there’s something more to it. Like time has compressed. An hour in, w
e pull into a service centre to fuel up and take care of some basic human needs. We’re almost surprised by the need to stop. The events of the morning pushing aside the urge to pee, the pang of hunger. We get our bagels and drinks to go, Gal sipping his coffee as he pulls back onto the highway, moaning about bad coffee and how sofas aren’t meant for sleeping. Mia and I pass a large hot chocolate back and forth, each sip cooler than the last. I take a single bite of my bagel before spitting it out and wrapping the whole mess back in its bag.
The rest of the drive is uninterrupted. No one says much. Too much worrying about what might come next. In my case, I think about the reporters and video and my new notoriety. Mom’s too, probably. And I try to imagine how I might apologize for the unforgivable.
And then we’re home, driving up the main neighbourhood road and turning onto my street. Gal stops as soon as my house comes into view. Four or five shiny white vans, emblazoned with call letters and bright graphics, are parked around the house. Two of them have satellite dishes transmitting to the sky. I see a familiar blue car parked by the side door. Walters. Knowing that we only use the side door to go in and out of our house. First to arrive, I’m sure. An edge on the competition.
“That was fast,” Mia says.
“Once they had my name …”
I don’t finish. No need to. Simple web searches and public records and you’d land on Sims in minutes.
Nothing but Life Page 17
