It was spring, and the island of Iona was a chaos of greens and blues. The waters shone so clear and silver it hurt Johnny’s eyes to look, and the machair grasslands spread along the coastline and up the hills before giving way to great thickets of smoky rocks, riotous patches of pennywort and roseroot. They walked the beach at Martyrs Bay and fed Corran bread and cheese, and an apple Johnny had brought in his jacket pocket. Toole produced a Yorkie bar, and they split it into four. They went into the abbey of St. Columba and Sharon said a prayer—for fate, she said. For good fate.
Then Sharon and Toole didn’t want to climb, but Johnny took Corran and they hiked their way up, up, up, across a rough, scraping hill toward a high plateau from which they could see almost the entire island of Iona and great rocky Mull to the east. Johnny pointed west, out across the sea.
“Florida,” he said to Corran. “America. It’s right over there.”
“I can’t see it,” Corran said.
“It’s a bit of a ways,” Johnny admitted. “But it’s there. It’s where I’ll be for a bit, aye? And I’ll come to see you soon. And you’ll come over there, too.”
“On a boat?”
“On an airplane.”
“With Mum?”
“Sure,” Johnny said.
Corran looked at him somberly. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.
“Och, now,” Johnny said. He felt his throat closing. He put his hand on Corran’s head.
“Will you come back?” Corran said.
“I will,” Johnny said.
“Back to stay?”
“Aye, lad.”
Corran’s face was flushed pink and damp with sweat, though the winds atop the hill were bitter cold. He’d worked so hard to get to the top, that little bairn, so stubborn, his little legs so sturdy. He wouldn’t let Johnny carry him. He made it all the way—I can do it by myself—then stood on the tallest rock and shouted, and Johnny had never seen anything as beautiful as that sovereign little boy. Nobody else had a boy like that.
On the way back down Corran finally relented, and Johnny picked him up and carried him as they descended the steep rocks. But of course, the descent was the easy part, not like the breathless climbing on the way up. That was always the way with Corran. Mr. Independent. He’d never give you the satisfaction of helping him when he most needed it.
The other part of it, though, was that he’d always been such a sensitive kid. Emotional. Easy to rattle. And more and more distant as he moved from the sloppy, clinging affection of young childhood into a standoffish and awkward adolescence. Once, when Corran came to Florida for a visit and it was time for him to go back to Glasgow, Johnny brought him to the airport to put him on the plane. How old was the boy that time? Early teens, somewhere in there. Not too long after 9/11; the airport was a somber scene. They were early for the flight, so they were killing time in the terminal, eating ice cream and looking at the gadgets in the mezzanine shops. They called to check in with Sharon, who would be there to pick Corran up when the flight landed. After a while, bored, they sat down in a row of rocking chairs and watched the passengers lining up to be checked in.
“Did ye have a good time?” Johnny said.
“Aye,” Corran said.
“When ye coming back, Christmas?”
“Nah,” Corran said. “Mum’s for Christmas.”
“Spring break, then.”
“I guess.”
There was a piano in the center of the mezzanine, a lovely old grand. Corran went over and plinked at a couple of the keys. An old man in a black suit arrived. He smiled at Corran, set a tip jar on the piano, and sat down at the bench. Corran came back and sat with Johnny to listen. The old man played a few standards; he was going for smiles: “The Girl from Ipanema,”
“Heart and Soul.” Corran watched his hands. A few travelers dropped money into the tip jar. Then the pianist paused and sat up straighter. He rested his fingers on the keys and began something slow, mournful. Johnny thought he knew the song, but it took him a few seconds to place it.
“The Moonlight Sonata,” he said. “Beethoven.” Corran nodded. Johnny tried to recall what he knew about Beethoven: deaf, alcoholic, tormented. Quite a résumé. Sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, maybe. But what a bargain that was for the rest of us, he thought. He wished he could tell Beethoven. You lost your soul, but you gave us this music, this heartbreaking masterpiece. Thanks, mate. We owe you one. Johnny closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them he was surprised to see his son was crying.
“What is it, Corry?” he said, alarmed.
Corran pointed to the piano. “This song,” he said.
“Is it too sad, kidda? Do you want to go walk around now?”
Corran shook his head. He was trying to stop crying, and he was failing. He turned away so Johnny couldn’t see his face. Johnny put his hand lightly on his son’s shoulder, but Corran shrugged it off, and Johnny didn’t touch him again. They sat until the piano player finished the sonata. Then Corran wiped his eyes and stood up.
“God damn it,” he said. “I wish I could play piano like that.”
“That’s terrible language, lad,” Johnny said. He stifled a smile. “Don’t let your mum hear that kind of mouth.”
“I better go,” Corran said. Johnny put a five in the pianist’s tip jar, and they walked over to the security checkpoint. This was new. No more walking the lad to the gate. Johnny handed Corran his boarding pass.
“Keep it safe now,” he said.
“I know.”
“Mum will be there when you land.”
“I know.”
Johnny felt an impulse to hug him, but just then Corran moved toward the checkpoint. “I’m going, then,” Corran said. He looked up at Johnny. “Don’t tell Mum I cried.”
“I won’t.”
“Ta.”
Corran hitched his backpack up on one thin shoulder. Johnny stood at the barricade and watched until Corran had cleared security and rounded the corner to the gate, but the boy didn’t look back. That afternoon Johnny sent Sharon a check. “For piano lessons,” he wrote on the card, “if he wants them.”
Ah, Corran. Beautiful lad. The best you could ever want. Just, well … unfocused. Clattering. Loose around the edges. Got to be a teenager, turned into a bit of a drinker, got caught a few times with quid-bags of weed, and ended up with a blot on his record. But it was typical stuff, nothing half the kids in Glesga hadn’t done. Maybe they all should have come down harder on him—Johnny and Sharon and Toole and Pauline. Or, God, maybe they should have gone easier on him. Who knew? Corran blew off college after one semester, even though Johnny was standing by with the checkbook. And although he stuck with the piano lessons for several years, he eventually quit those too and started knocking around the city ska scene; he played keyboards in a couple of bands but never made any money at it. Then he worked as a phone monkey in a call center for a while, then a stint as a bin lorry driver and another as a line cook in a chip shop. Ah, Corran. A bit of a disappointment, but nothing to break your heart over, in retrospect. Nothing to complain about, come to think of it.
Until he found heroin.
Johnny had to work hard not to think too much about the past decade of Corran’s life, but every time he made a payment on the equity loan that had paid for the bulk of Corran’s third rehab, a ball of fury surfaced in his throat. He knew Sharon and Toole lost money, too. Corran had nearly bankrupted them all. And for what? Subhuman flophouses and poison-filled syringes and the company of jitter-eyed junkies breathing death from every pore. Measured suicide, that’s what Corran was committing. A year, and then another year. And then ten years. The whole thing was a horror show of epic proportions, and there came a time when Johnny—who had initially tuned in to the broadcast freighted with adrenaline and hope (“We’ll get you well! We’ll beat this, Corry!”) but who, as time went by, had felt his resolve gradually transmuted to the impotence and lung-crushing despair peculiar to parents of drug addicts—simp
ly couldn’t watch it anymore.
Last Christmas had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Johnny paid for his son to come over for the holiday, but when Corran arrived he was in a bad way: edgy and sullen, back on the junk, no doubt about it. Most days he slept until noon and woke up cagey, brittle. He went for long walks and came back smelling of weed. He borrowed Pauline’s Prius and ran it out of gas in two days. Ran it out of gas! How do you run a Prius out of gas? Johnny could not fathom where he was going.
Pauline was patient. Johnny thought she was being intentionally naïve. “He’s just at odds,” she said. “He’ll settle in. Don’t ride him, Johnny. The poor kid. Give him a break.”
“He’s not a kid, Pauline. He’s a badly behaved adult. He’s an addict, and he’s using again, I can feel it.” Pauline bit her lip and went to Publix. She dropped a near-mint on groceries and spent hours in the kitchen making everything Corran liked best: baked Brie, chicken parmigiana, Caesar salad, sun tea, Toll House cookies. “We’ll just love him up and he’ll bounce right back,” she said brightly. They set the table and waited. Johnny texted Corran. U hre for dinner? Two hours later, when the food was put away and the table cleared, a text came back: Don’t wait for me.
“Why is he like this?” Johnny said.
“I don’t know,” Pauline said.
“What does he need?”
“I don’t know.”
Then an iPad went missing. Then a silver vase that had been sitting on the mantel for years. They might not have noticed it was gone but for the empty circle left in the dust. Then Johnny thought he noticed twenties disappearing from his wallet. On Christmas Eve, Pauline returned from running on the beach and couldn’t find her wedding ring, an antique art deco band with a cluster of sapphires encircling a single diamond. As a young man, Johnny had saved for more than a year to buy it. He remembered the first time she put it on, how her hand shook, how she looked at him, astounded at the weight not just of the ring but of the gesture. When she started running she developed the habit of leaving the ring in a Spode ramekin on her bedside table. To save it from the sweat and sunscreen, she said. That afternoon, Pauline turned the bedroom and the house upside down, but the ring was gone, and Corran was nowhere to be found. He didn’t come back to the house until the next morning, in fact. Christmas. His eyes were red and darting. His limbs shook. He denied taking the ring.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said to Johnny. “I’m not an asshole, you asshole.”
Johnny said something back; he couldn’t even remember what, and then within seconds they were shouting, following each other through the house and dragging the argument with them until it was nothing but tattered, raw despair. Before the row was over, Corran threw a punch, and Johnny returned it. To this day, his hand ached with the memory. Corran’s lip bled a bright rose on the Berber hall runner. Johnny’s cheek throbbed. General San Jose was yapping hysterically from under the dining room table, and Pauline was weeping. “Stop it,” she was saying. “Please stop.”
Corran was kneeling awkwardly on the floor in the hallway. He got up and went to the kitchen. Johnny followed. He watched Corran fill a plastic bag with ice and press it against his mouth with a trembling hand. He wouldn’t look at Johnny. He was mumbling something into the plastic bag.
“Speak up,” Johnny said. “I can’t hear you.”
Corran lowered the bag and looked at his father.
“I said I didn’t take Pauline’s ring, and if you don’t believe me, you’re a shitty excuse for a father.”
“You’re a drug addict. And a liar. And I don’t believe you.”
“Fuck you.” Corran put the ice back up to his lip and turned to exit the kitchen, but Johnny stepped in front of him.
“I want you on the next flight out,” Johnny said to his son. “I want you gone.” He called a taxi and then spent a fortune to have Corran’s reservation changed, getting him a seat on an afternoon departure to Glasgow. Christmas Day. The last he’d seen of his son had been the back of Corran’s disheveled head disappearing into a dented Bold City Taxi.
Clean, Pauline kept telling him. Sharon had sent an email. Corran is clean. And Johnny was supposed to believe this, evidently, and believe that even if it was true today, right this minute, it would be true an hour from now, or a day from now, or a week from now. And there was more news: Corran had taken up with an old girlfriend, who’d appeared on his doorstep one day with a baby that she claimed was his. Johnny thought this was something that happened only in movies. And what does Corran do? He marries the girl! The baby’s name was Lucy, a detail Johnny wished he didn’t know. And Corran had a job evidently, steady work on an oil rig off Aberdeenshire. For weeks at a time, he left his wife and the baby in a little shore-side flat and became a cog in a cold metal machine tethered to a well in the North Sea, halfway to Norway, a helicopter ride from the mainland. Top of the list of the most dangerous jobs in the world, where every day was a day closer to sure injury. Or disappearance. Or death.
Cleaned up his act for real, Pauline said. Well, Johnny hoped it was true. It was now late October. Johnny hadn’t spoken to Corran in nearly a year. I want you gone, he’d said to his son. And poof. Corran disappeared.
The silence brought Johnny back. The MRI pings had stopped, and he found himself shivering uncontrollably in the cold radiology room, the flimsy gown mere gauze against his skin. Kevin came in to release him from the coil. Johnny dressed and rejoined Pauline.
“How was that?” she said.
“Delightful,” he said. “Even had a little nap in there.” He was surprised to see that she looked like she’d been crying.
“You all right?” he said. She nodded.
“I’m fine, Pauline,” he said. “Stop worrying.”
Kevin came out to the waiting room with a chart. “Go on up to Dr. Tosh’s office,” he said. “He can access the scans in our system.”
“What did you see?” Johnny said.
“I’m not qualified to read the scans, my man,” Kevin was scrawling something on the front of the chart. “Dr. Tosh will talk to you. He’s the boss. He is the brain master.” He handed Johnny the chart and smiled.
They took the elevator to the fifth floor and were escorted back to the office of one Dr. Russell Tosh. When they walked into the office Johnny discovered that his new neurologist was a paraplegic. It was startling. The doctor beetled out from behind his desk in a motorized wheelchair with his hand extended.
“The MacKinnons!” he exclaimed. “Come in, come in, come in. Have a seat. You been down getting your pictures made, right? I’ll pull them on up here in the system in just a minute. Come in, have a seat.”
Johnny and Pauline shook his hand. There was a leather sofa against one wall and, with the way Tosh was moving the wheelchair back and forth in front of them, Johnny felt they were being herded toward it, so they sat. Tosh dragged a laptop on a stand over toward the sofa and sat fiddling with it. “Gonna pull up these scans here, folks. Just take a minute,” he said.
Johnny couldn’t help feeling there was something unsettling about a doctor who couldn’t walk, some erosion of authenticity, like a singing teacher who couldn’t sing or a chef who couldn’t eat. To correct for his own ridiculous prejudice, he allowed himself to instead imagine the cause of Tosh’s confinement: a spinal cord injury, perhaps. Car crash, a Mercedes, no doubt. Or a mishap on the steeplechase, a thoroughbred horse balking at the fence and throwing Tosh over the rails.
But after a few moments, Johnny found himself growing comfortable with Dr. Tosh—with his strident cheerfulness and his outsized drawl. (Texas, was it? Yes. Definitely Texas.) The doctor hadn’t stopped chattering since they’d walked into the room. He was fussing at the computer still, something about the scans not showing up in the system yet.
“You know,” Tosh was saying. “The old days, you just had somebody walk up the stairs and hand you the films, you hear me? Now it’s all this email and server crap and what-all. And here we sit. Waiting f
or pictures.” He rolled his eyes and looked at Pauline. “You know?”
“I know,” Pauline said.
Johnny got up and paced around the office, which, it was beginning to dawn on him, looked more like a shrine to the Rolling Stones than a physician’s office. Framed Stones albums adorned the walls, along with a collage of what looked to be hundreds of concert ticket stubs. A lip-and-tongue paperweight rested atop a stack of medical journals. There was even a guitar signed by Keith Richards mounted on one wall.
“So, you’re not yourself, is that right, Mr. MacKinnon?” Tosh said. “I hear you had a seizure this morning. That’s not too good, is it?”
“Not a seizure,” Johnny said. “I just passed out for a minute.”
Tosh tipped his head to the side. “You pass out often?”
“No,” Johnny answered.
“I think he eats too many bananas,” Pauline offered.
“Beg pardon?” Tosh said.
“Bananas. He eats them all the time. I read somewhere that you can build up too much potassium. Every time I look at him, he’s standing there eating a banana.”
“It’s not the bananas,” Johnny said. “Bananas are healthy.”
“Not the way you eat them.” Pauline looked at Tosh. “I mean, you should see it,” she said. “Constantly. Bananas.”
Tosh took a cell phone from his pocket and called down to radiology. “No scans up here yet, friend,” he said into the phone. “Mr. MacKinnon. Can you put a hustle on those? I got these nice people sitting here waiting.” He hung up and sighed. “Not like the old days, Mr. MacKinnon,” he said.
“Call me Johnny,” Johnny said. No reason not to be friendly. “You play?” he said, pointing to the Keith Richards guitar on the wall.
“Nah,” Tosh said.
“This looks like an expensive hobby,” Johnny said. He gestured around the room.
“You have no idea,” Tosh said. “My wife is ready to leave me. Do you know that last year alone I spent nearly fifteen thousand dollars following the Stones? I keep thinking each tour will be their last, you know? I did the entire West Coast with them, from Seattle to San Diego. Every bit of my vacation time.” He said this proudly, then paused as though waiting for Johnny’s response.
The Ice House Page 4
