“Fine,” he said. “You want to stop? Great. Let’s just stop. There. Done. We’ve stopped. Okay?”
Silence.
“We both know how that’s going to turn out,” she said. “We both know how it always turns out.”
“Well then what the FUCK do you want?” he yelled at her. “Stop drinking! Don’t stop drinking! Make up your mind, for the love of Christ!”
Silence again. Then, “I have, Bill,” she said. “I have.”
THE FLOOR
I opened my eyes and I was seventeen, and my father bled before me.
The house was quiet, except for the low-throated humming of the furnace blowing slightly warmer air into the room. Outside, the wind abated. The trees no longer tapped at the window.
What did you do? they asked and their branches rattled like bones.
My father lay on the floor. His face was matted with blood. His breathing was ragged. His cigarette, discarded, smouldered under the table.
I pulled him to a sitting position and leaned him against the cupboard under the sink.
I looked him in the eye. “My mother never left me,” I said.
He didn’t reply. He just licked his lips and looked away. I pulled his face back to me.
“Look at me,” I said, and he did. “My mother never left me,” I repeated.
“No,” he whispered. “She never left because of you, Freddy.” Blood trickled from his right ear. “Your mother left me,” he said. “Not you.”
My throat felt like it was closing. “She left because of you?”
He nodded slowly. “I was certain she was coming back. She always did. Maybe she was gathering the courage to leave me, I don’t know.” He looked away. “But she always stayed because of you. She always left because of me.”
“Did you make her angry?” I asked.
“Sometimes.” He shook his head. “Other times she made me angry. But it wasn’t anything horrible. People make each other angry all the time. Then they get over it. We just stopped loving each other.”
“Mom never made me angry,” I said.
“She never did, Freddy,” he answered. He reached to the table, pulled a cigarette from the open pack, lifted it to his lips, and lit it. His fingers trembled. He took a drag, coughed, and flicked the ashes on the floor.
“No one ever makes you mad, Freddy,” he said. He smiled slightly. “Until now, I guess. But that’s it. You can handle people. And that’s a blessing I wish we all had.”
He sat and smoked his cigarette. I watched the smoke rise from the burning tip. I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me she was dead?”
He stubbed out the cigarette. “I did, Freddy,” he said. “I’ve told you so many times.”
Then a memory.
—
I opened my eyes and people moved slowly, single file, eyes downcast. A song by U2 played softly in the background. A song she sometimes danced to in the living room.
I want to run, I thought. I want to hide.
I sat on the aisle chair of the first row and people shuffled by. Some of them touched my shoulder, because that’s all they knew how to do.
“She’s in a better place,” someone said.
I brushed his hand away. “I don’t know you.”
My father sat to my right, wearing a black blazer, black tie, white dress shirt. His hands were clasped together in his lap, flexing. Clenching until they were white. Releasing until they were red.
I turned to him. “Where’s Mom?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. After a moment, I turned away and stared straight ahead.
There were flowers on the coffin. Orchids.
—
I opened my eyes and I was seventeen one more time, and my father leaned against the kitchen wall and coughed. He spit out blood.
“I used to tell you all the time, Freddy,” he said. “It never took root. A few days later, you would come back and say, ‘Where’s Mom?’ I’d tell you all over again. Sometimes that’s all I needed to do. Other times, it drove you berserk and you’d start throwing things.
“And then one day, after a few years, I told you she left us,” he said softly, looking down. “It wasn’t planned. It just came out. But after that, you stopped asking where she was. You didn’t have your tantrums. After that, you seemed to accept where we were.”
“Where were we?”
“We were left behind,” he said. “We were alone together. You and me.”
I stood up.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore. Just you.”
LINDA STILES AFTER TEN YEARS
I opened my eyes, and Linda Stiles stood inside her door, the chain still on.
“Why are you back here, Freddy?” she asked
“I know something about John Stiles,” I said.
“That’s very nice,” she sighed. “Go home.”
She began closing the door, but I quickly said, “He wasn’t leaving you.”
She stopped and stared at me for a moment. The wind pushed the rain against my back.
“What are you talking about?” she said.
“He was driving my mom to a shelter. He was taking her there because she was leaving my father.”
She continued to stare at me. Her eyes wide. “Why didn’t John tell me that?” she said quietly. Her fingers rubbed against the side of the door.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He never told me.”
“Then what did he tell you?”
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “He told me to put on my seat belt.”
“Ten years,” she said slowly, distantly. “For ten years, I’ve lived with that. Did you know that, Freddy? Ever since the day he died, I thought he was taking Saskia and leaving me. Did you know that?”
I said nothing.
“For ten years,” she said softly.
She looked me in the eye. Strangely, it didn’t hurt.
“Where’s Saskia?” I asked her.
THE WEB
What are you doing?
i’m waiting
Do you want to know something?
yes
I’m going somewhere.
are you going swinging
No.
are you going for ice cream
No.
where are you going
where are you going
I’ll take you there.
—
There is a web between people. The strands are the bonds that they make with each other. The stronger the love for another, the stronger the bond and the stronger the thread.
Two people with a strong bond have an advantage over those without one. The closer they are together, the more they love each other, the more they understand each other. The more they understand each other, the more they can read each other.
The bond allows them a new level of communication, because they can read the language of each other’s bodies. Where once there were only two eyes, now there are four.
The bonds of a culture are the threads of the metaphorical web that people build among themselves. It locks them into a community. Sometimes a bond will weaken and disappear. Sometimes it will grow anew with someone else. Sometimes it will stay, locked there forever, like a limb on an oak tree.
The strands of the web tell the story of the family. The strands of the web define the family.
I have no strands.
People who say they feel no love tend to be overly dramatic. The inability to feel love is a developmental delay at best and a pathological condition at worst. You’re either delayed or a sociopath.
Love is a set of physical characteristics: a racing heart, a nervous tightness in the pit of the stomach. An ever-present sense of anticipation. People in love feel the same general physical symptoms. I have felt those symptoms in the same combination. Therefore, I am “capable” of love.
There is a difference, I believe. Most people are unable to distinguish love from symptom, so they call it love. I am unable to distinguish symptom from love, so I ca
ll it symptom.
SASKIA SWINGING
I stood at the edge of the park at the end of the field, under a tree. The air was still, and the rain gone. Clouds above were thinning, and the promise of blue elbowed between them.
I saw Saskia at the far end of the field, sitting on a swing. She rocked, kicking at the cedar chips that blanketed the playground.
I texted her.
Did you know?
i dont know
I remember.
you remember?
I remember. I remember the car accident.
She lifted up her phone and put it back down in her lap. She lifted it up again and put it in her pocket.
You were in the back seat. We were in the back seat.
She took her phone from her pocket. I could hear her grunting, as if she was trying to say something she had no idea how to say.
At last she texted me back.
i said daddy wake up
I know.
he was mad at me
i kicked his seat
He wasn’t mad at you.
he wasn’t mad at me?
He only wanted you to stop kicking his seat.
dad i will never kick your seat again
He knows.
he knows?
He loves you.
From across the park, she laughed out loud.
It’s time for me to go.
are you going?
Yes.
Tell me you want me to come with you.
No. Stay with your mom.
Okay.
But we can swing, if you want.
Squeak.
I walked out from under the trees.
THE BUTCHER’S
I opened my eyes. The Butcher stood behind the counter, his head tilted to the side. I stood in the middle of his store, my hands at my side.
“Well, well,” he said. “If it ain’t the cat, and if the cat ain’t dragged itself in.”
“I’m not a cat,” I said to him.
He wiped his hands on his apron. “Ain’t seen you since months. Where you been?”
“I got stuff.”
He nodded. “Is that a fact?”
“Hey, Dad, we need to order more gloves,” said Jack, walking out from the back, carrying a bucket. When he saw me, he came to a complete stop.
His father looked between the two of us. The only sound was the ticking clock above the counter.
“Well, this is awkward,” the Butcher said softly and turned away from us.
Jack sniffed. He set the bucket down.
“So,” he said.
“So,” I repeated back to him.
“Did you graduate?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m enrolled at Douglas Technical College. I start in September.”
“Not bad, not bad.” He looked around. “I’m taking some time off. Help around the shop.”
“You were runner-up in the Golden Gloves.”
His eyebrows went up. “You been stalking me, Freddy?”
I shook my head. “I googled you. I was your sparring partner. I have a specific interest.”
He smiled, and his shoulders relaxed. “Sounds like something you would do.”
“You know,” said the Butcher, “I recorded Ali versus Norton last week. Maybe you might want to come and watch it with us, Freddy?”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can,” he said gently.
“No. I have to meet a friend. She’s waiting for me.”
Jack laughed. “A girl. You dog.”
“I’m not a dog.”
“I know.” He nodded. “I know.”
Silence. The Butcher turned away again and began wiping the counter.
“I could come tomorrow,” I offered.
The Butcher looked at Jack, who looked at him, then at me.
“Sure. We’ve even got beer.”
“I don’t like beer.”
“You like beer when you sit with us,” he said.
“Okay.”
Another silence.
“I need a job,” I told Jack.
Jack looked at his father. “We do need someone to clean up in the evening.”
His father nodded. “That we do,” he said. “That we do.”
THE HOME OF THE TROLLS
My mind continues to race.
—
I was there. That night. I was right behind her when she died.
I was in the back seat, and my last memory is a fleeting thought, the instant before the car slammed into a truck, stopped at the train crossing. The collision ploughed the truck into the train’s path, and it was carried down the track. The car I was in took the truck’s place in line. Tick-tick-ticking.
At the moment of impact, there was a thought. It faded away even after everything went black. The thought was this: my mother, in the front seat, has blocked the flying glass.
If you asked me what was the last thing I remember about that night, I would answer this: I remember thinking that my mother was protecting me. I remember her scream, the stuttering of the car as John Stiles stood with all his force on the brake pedal, the spray of glass and a thundering noise as I was thrown forward against my seat belt. Then I remember my eyes closed, and I saw nothing, and heard nothing.
But I remember one last thought, still lingering, that she had, once again, protected me.
—
My mother wore lilac perfume. It smelled purple. When I nestled against her, watching TV, her scent enveloped me like smoke around a campfire. Sometimes, if I pass someone in the hall at school who is wearing my mother’s perfume, I stop and become alarmed. I feel her presence with me, as if she were right behind me.
I have long since given up turning around to see if she is there.
—
After the night when I remembered, Linda Stiles visited my father only once. She came in the evening, and they sat in the kitchen and drank. They thought I was in my room. I was on the stairs.
“Did you know?” she asked him.
“About where they were going? No. I didn’t.”
The clink of ice cubes. The clunk of a bottle on the table.
She sighed. “The thing is, I’ve lived ten years, Bill. Ten years thinking he left me. Thinking that he didn’t leave because of Saskia. Thinking that he left because he couldn’t take life with me. And he took Saskia with him.”
“I spent ten years thinking the other way,” he said and laughed softly. “I guess we’re trading each other’s story.”
When she left, my father didn’t get up from the table to see her out. I was sitting on the stairs that led down to the front door.
“Hello, Freddy,” she said. “You’re looking well.”
“Am I?” I asked.
—
Listen: There is no evidence of life after death and, therefore, no reason to believe in life after death.
There is no evidence of God’s existence, but that doesn’t mean the world isn’t consistent with Him. Because it is. The things you expect in a God-filled world are here: unexplained events, good triumphant over evil, prayers answered, and other astonishing happenings.
In science, it’s called stochastic. In religion, it’s called a miracle. Regardless of the label, it’s still there. These things happening in this world.
There is no evidence that my mother is anywhere but buried in the ground. There is no evidence that my mother still exists on some other spiritual plane.
But my need to justify the existence of God is clear. If there is no God, I will never see my mother again. If there is a God, I will see her again.
This is sufficient. This is enough to believe.
All of this is important. It is my justification. It is the only thing that keeps the threads about my mother to a minimum.
We’re going to go now, the threads say.
I know the perfect place to leave you, I tell them.
—
I open my eyes and I am sitting with Saskia Stiles.
We are in the forest behind my old house, high up the mountainside. We are sitting at the foot of the cliffs, under an overhang, looking across the valley as the rain falls around us.
In my left pant pocket is my father’s talisman. I took it when I left. He doesn’t need it anymore, but I do.
On my lap is my old friend, The Twentieth Century in Review, and I am flipping the pages back and forth, back and forth.
Saskia takes her phone from her purse.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
“I’m dry,” I say. “Are you dry?”
I’m dry.
We sit together, and I feel our shoulders touching. They have been touching for a few minutes.
I’ve just noticed this.
She continues to type text messages. I sit and listen to her tap at her phone, and I count twelve text messages sent. At last. At last I have to ask.
“Who gets those messages?”
She pauses, hunched over her phone.
God.
I don’t respond. An earlier version of me may have pointed out that she didn’t have God’s contact information.
Then she sends another message to God.
“What did you say to him?”
She pauses again and looks up, out across the valley. The mist is rising from the ground, and the mountains in the distance are dissolving in white.
“What did you say to him?” I ask again.
She looks at me. “Amen,” she says.
And she leans in to me, until she is close enough to me that I feel her light breath tickle my upper lip. She is looking directly at me, straight into my eyes.
I tumble into their blue.
Her eyes close.
High above, thunderclaps rolled across the sky. Up the side of the mountain, I hear the clamouring crashes as trees bend and snap, the trolls slowly walking down the mountain.
And it’s okay.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Listen: These are the people who form the chain.
I know that this book would never have been written if it weren’t for my wife, Joanna. She was the first person who made me want to be more than I was. She was the first person who made me want to finish this book, because she was the first person I wanted to read it.
Do You Think This Is Strange? Page 22
