A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  He thought about calling a friend but then realized he’d actually have to tell someone else the story. How Maya left quickly, without argument or discussion, after the office Christmas party—at which she treated him coolly, and rather strangely, but not like someone she was about to abandon. How he came home and found the house empty and cold, the lights off and the heat turned low (even in her exit, she was fastidious), and it wasn’t until he received the tersely worded text half an hour later that he had any idea what had happened. He’s pretty sure that Shelley’s appearance at the party was the reason, but he’s still in the dark about Maya’s motive.

  Since leaving, she’d refused to answer any of his calls or emails—had refused even to acknowledge him the morning he waited, in complete desperation, outside her office building. Eventually she appeared, looking wonderful, he thought, in a new shearling coat, collar turned against the wind, blonde hair swept up into a tidy knot, tiny ears pink with cold. He’d staggered up to her raggedly, in the manner of the sick or insane, a cup of coffee clutched in his raw hands for warmth, and had spoken her name low and at close range. She’d turned and looked at him, quite pointedly, as if she had no idea who he was. There was not even a glimmer of recognition. It was as if her memory had been erased, or she had been expecting his appearance and had steeled herself against him. Whatever the case, she gave him a single unreadable glance and then swished into the revolving doors, leaving him standing there in the cold. He considered following her but then had visions of raised voices, flying hands, commotions and security guards. Real life, he reminded himself, does not operate according to the rules of a romantic comedy.

  Every day for weeks now he’s dragged himself from bed, head thumping from another night of restless, broken sleep, to drink a pot of black coffee in the increasingly disturbing spectre of his kitchen. There is, he realizes with a chill, a part of him that wants to see just how far it will go. Will he become one of those people who have to be rescued from under a pile of newspapers and pizza boxes by paramedics and a TV crew from the Lifetime network? In a feeble attempt to guard against this possibility, he pours the floating bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Fish down the garbage disposal and flicks the switch beside the sink.

  At least Christmas is over. What a horror that was. At first he thought the worst thing would be to spend it alone in the house semi-drunk, as he’d planned to. Maybe check into a railroad motel just to complete the vision of despair. So when Maya called him up on Christmas Eve morning and offered to bring the twins around for the day, he’d jumped at the chance. Now the memory of them both running to him—squealing with delight, then looking back uncertainly at their mother—makes him almost physically ill. Maya arrived at the house in the same black shearling, the one he didn’t recognize, covered with a skim of snow from the walk from the car to the front step. He asked her to come in but she refused with a thin smile that hardened to neutral as soon as the twins disappeared into the house.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” he said.

  “You hoped wrong. There’s nothing to talk about.” She handed him an enormous bag of presents, all of them wrapped and rib-boned and looking jolly. “I assume you have a tree?”

  “Sure,” he lied, his heart sinking because now he definitely couldn’t persuade her to come in. She would see the state of the place and take the kids back again.

  He looked at the bag and noticed a gift tag with his name on it. “You got me something,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, I did.”

  They stood there in silence.

  “I should have got you something,” he said finally. “I was afraid you’d refuse it.”

  “And I would have, so you were right.”

  Nick looks uncertainly at the parcel with his name on it. “Should I refuse this?”

  “No, Nick. It’s all yours.” She nodded and took a step back, letting the screen door swing toward him to bring the conversation to a close. “I’ll be back tomorrow at noon, so please have them in their coats and boots, okay?”

  And with that she got in her car and drove off into the blizzard.

  Christmas Eve with the twins was not the comfort he’d hoped for. He’d forgotten, somehow, that he was there to entertain them, not the other way around. It was all he could do to keep the cartoons blaring and the fish sticks and curly fries in the oven. After a few hours of TV and kiddie computer games (Maya had relaxed the screen ban in this time of crisis), Isla and Foster began to squabble from boredom and restlessness, so he gave them their presents a day early in hopes of mollifying them in the hours before bed. It didn’t work. As if sensing his lack of patience, they ripped through the lovingly wrapped packages from their mother and resumed their moans and low-level discontent. They seemed like small, angry people irritated by their own skin, perpetually on the verge of crying, creating endless tiny conflicts over nothing. Watching them fight over the last curly fry, Nick had a horrible vision of them as spoilt, jaded and perpetually unhappy children of divorce. They are mirroring the misery I have created, he thought. A few wretched hours later, once they were in bed and finally unconscious, he sat at the kitchen counter and poured himself three fingers of Scotch.

  “What now, Mr. and Mrs. Fish?” he’d asked the happy couple, then still swirling in their mindless loops. He felt the whisky begin to blossom out from his chest and spread to his cheeks and forehead, pleasantly numbing him, putting distance between him and the pain. Maybe Maya was just going through a temporary bout of madness, much like his own period of discontent a few months back—at least this is how he’d come to think of it. He reminded himself how close he had been to leaving her, and how differently he felt now. People really can change. They can even pretend to change, and somehow in the pretending real change occurs. He knows this because it’s happened to him. He remembers reading somewhere that character and habit are essentially the same thing. If you persistently act like a responsible person, you will eventually become one because your actions will meld with your being. The mask shapes the face. You are what you do. This is what happened to Nick. He evolved into the man he was pretending to be. For a few glorious weeks, the inside and the outside of his life matched, and he thought he could run with it.

  As he is thinking these things, his eyes slide over the sticky, milk-splashed counter to the last wrapped gift, the one with his name on it. It’s a thin, rectangular parcel, meticulously bound in fine tissue paper dotted with sleigh bells and holly. A silver ribbon, curled at the ends, pulls it all together. Nick pictures Maya sliding the ribbon over a pair of scissors to get the curl just right—something he has seen her do dozens, if not hundreds, of times but has not fully appreciated until this moment. I married a woman who curls ribbons, he thinks, hot tears springing to his eyes. He opens the card. On the front there is a photograph of a kitten in a Santa hat, and inside it says, simply, “For Nick.” A bit cool, he thinks, wishing for “love” or at least an “xo,” but any communication is progress. Throwing back the final swig of Scotch for courage, he rips the present open.

  Inside are three things. The first is the familiar yellow folder, the one he gave to Gray labelled “Wakefield Family Assets.” The second is Gray’s note, the one guesstimating the asset breakdown for the split he couldn’t face. The third is from Maya—a petition for divorce.

  CHAPTER 18

  Statement of Claim

  Victoria Ottoline Everton Heathfield

  and

  Jacob Michael Brooks

  TO THE DEFENDANT: A LEGAL PROCEEDING HAS BEEN COMMENCED AGAINST YOU by the Plaintiff. The Claim made against you is set out in the following pages.

  IF YOU WISH TO DEFEND THIS PROCEEDING, you or a lawyer acting for you must prepare a Statement of Defence in Form 18A prescribed by the Rules of Civil Procedure, serve it on the Plaintiff’s lawyer or, where the Plaintiff does not have a lawyer, serve it on the Plaintiff and file it, with proof of service, in this court office WITHIN TWENTY DAYS after this Statement of Claim is served
on you.

  The Plaintiff claims:

  The Defendant has breached the terms of their divorce agreement, which granted shared custody of their son, Baxter James Heathfield Brooks (referred to hereinafter as “Baxter”), and in which he promised to “co-parent kindly, openly and cooperatively.”

  In September of this year, shortly after Baxter started attending preschool, the Plaintiff noticed a change in her son. He became bad-tempered and angry, and would call her “nasty” and say, “I’m going to poo on your head.” When she asked him where he got such ideas, he would say, “Daddy told me to.”

  The Plaintiff was distressed and took Baxter to see a play therapist (see attached report), as well as several other mental health specialists (see attached social worker report and child psychologist report), and she determined that her young and impressionable son was having his mind poisoned against her by her ex-husband, who is and remains bitter, following the fallout from the divorce.

  The Plaintiff believes this denigration is tantamount to a form of child abuse, as it “confuses Baxter and makes him unhappy.” She is loath to see a small child’s loyalties tested by divorce and wants her son to have as happy, secure and stable a life as possible. So long as the Defendant persists in denigrating the Plaintiff in a manner that is emotionally abusive to their son, this is impossible.

  BACKGROUND

  The Plaintiff and the Defendant were together for eight years and married for four. The Plaintiff describes it as a difficult relationship in which she tried to make peace and the Defendant “was consistently distant and resentful of her family’s money and success.” The Defendant’s anger, she says, was mostly centred on his bitterness about her privileged upbringing and his resentment of her father, a successful entrepreneur. After the Plaintiff had her son, she felt compelled to provide him with a more stable home and resolved to leave the Defendant. Once she had done so she felt things were better, but after their divorce settlement—in which the Plaintiff, a full-time homemaker, was awarded the family house and support payments—she felt things begin to sour. This period of difficulty culminated in her husband’s alleged campaign of denigration and abuse, where Baxter is concerned.

  REMEDIES

  The Plaintiff asks that:

  The court amend the custodial portion of the divorce agreement, granting her sole custody of Baxter so she can provide him with a fit and stable home, free from abuse, denigration or conflict, and in which he will feel secure, confident and loved.

  She be granted sole discretion over every major aspect of Baxter’s life, including education, health care, nutrition and extracurricular activities and lessons.

  The Defendant be granted a thirty-six-hour window of access (Saturday morning to Sunday evening), every other weekend until Baxter reaches the age of consent.

  Maya takes a breath and then bends down and rests her forehead on the cool, varnished cherrywood of her desk. She is tired. More tired than she has ever been. She tries to remember what she felt like in the sleepless days and nights after the twins were born (a time she can only remember as a colour—a fleshy, bewildering pink). She must have been tired then, but it was a different sort of exhaustion, one buoyed by hormones and a sense of powerful, goddess-like accomplishment (two people had just come out of her, after all). Today, six weeks after leaving her husband and hours before her first big hearing, she is tired in an entirely different sort of way. She is scooped out, empty, like a dried-out and discarded corn husk. There is nothing left where her old self used to be. And yet as she lies there, bent over her keyboard, breathing in the clinical smell of toner and carpet cleaner, she knows what she has to do. She takes a deep breath in, gets up, puts on her coat and leaves.

  Twenty minutes later she is at the courthouse. The hearing isn’t for half an hour, but she has booked a private room to meet with the client first. When she gets there, Jacob Brooks is already waiting. “Thank you,” he says with a slight bow, as if he wasn’t sure she would come, despite having prepaid her court fee of $17,000. She carefully pushes the money from her mind.

  She hands him the counterclaim—which simply asks that the custodial arrangement be left as is for Baxter’s welfare—and watches Brooks quietly absorb it. He doesn’t smile, but she can see his relief in reading his own case laid out clearly and reasonably before him. “Mr. Brooks is a model citizen and a loving father who never asked his ex-wife for anything apart from joint custody of their son.” Maya sometimes suspects that half the job of a lawyer is to offer solace in the form of such documents.

  Brooks closes the file and shuts his eyes for a moment before looking up and out the window. Although he is calm and immaculate in his slim navy suit, Maya can feel the anxiety radiating from his body in waves.

  “What a mess I’ve made,” he says finally.

  Maya shakes her head. “Not you, her. You didn’t bring this case. And what was your option but to fight? You’ve got to remember that there are some things worth fighting for in life, and this is definitely one of them.”

  He nods and clears his throat to indicate he’s ready to begin.

  “Now remember, when the judge asks you to speak, try to keep your comments focused on Baxter’s well-being, rather than your ex-wife’s faults,” Maya says.

  Brooks dips his head to say yes, he understands. She wishes she could promise him natural justice, rather than the official kind to which he will be subjected.

  A clerk calls their number and in they go.

  The judge, a burly, white-haired man in his fifties with a yellowing Santa’s beard, calls the hearing to order and then asks, in that brusque, half-irritated way that almost all judges have, “So what exactly is going on here?”

  The opposing counsel begins to speak on behalf of Uptown Girl, but Maya interrupts.

  “Your Honour, it is abundantly clear that Ms. Heathfield is a vexatious litigant. This is the seventh action she has brought before this court in two years, and my client is simply a committed father who wishes to be a part of his son’s life.”

  The judge swivels his great big bear head and studies Uptown Girl through a pair of bifocals. She’s had her highlights brightened for the occasion and is wrapped in a coat that appears to have been made of thousands of sheared animal tails woven together and dyed purple. Maya notices a well-thumbed copy of The Way sticking out of the top of her handbag.

  “And what does your client have to say to that?” the judge asks Whatshisface, who snaps to attention.

  “My client is here only because she is concerned, as any mother would be, with the welfare of her son, Baxter. It is her opinion—backed by a small team of psychologists and social workers, as we have documented—that he is exhibiting distressing behaviour which is the result not just of his unsettling custodial situation but also of his father’s pernicious influence.”

  The judge’s eyes flick to the other side of the room, where Jacob Brooks sits trembling with badly concealed rage. He is sitting bolt upright and staring straight ahead, hands clenched into white-knuckle fists. Looking at him, Maya feels her stomach flip like a dying fish.

  The judge is churning through documents, sliding papers this way and that across his desk. When a stack falls from the bench in a flutter, Maya jumps up and beats a clerk in handing them back to him. He adjusts his glasses again and sighs.

  “You two,” he says, pointing a thick sausage finger at one side of the court and then the other. “Come here where I can see you both.”

  Maya glances at Uptown Girl, who blinks her watery eyes wide and stands, smoothing down her skirt before clipping up to the bench. Jacob Brooks soon joins her, and they stand there, side by side, both pairs of hands clasped behind their backs like naughty children awaiting punishment.

  The judge closes his file before reluctantly resting his eyes on the couple before him. “What I want to know,” he says slowly, “is what exactly is wrong with you two that you were able to stay together for—what?—eight years and have a child together, but you are incap
able of resolving even the simplest dispute about your son’s future? Why can’t you just … I don’t know, go have a glass of wine and talk it over?”

  Jacob Brooks clears his throat and begins to speak. His voice, to Maya’s surprise, is soft and low, and the judge has to lean in to hear him. “Your Honour, if I may. My ex-wife has made normal relations impossible. She communicates with me only through lawyers and has refused my repeated requests for mediation. She does not have the best interests of our son at heart. She will say or do anything to get what she wants, and in this case that is our son. She will stop at nothing and has the funds to use the court system to her own ends indefinitely.”

  The judge nods. “And you, Ms. Heathfield? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Uptown Girl is silent, and for one hopeful moment, Maya thinks she may be too nervous to speak. Then she sees her shoulders quivering and realizes she is silently weeping—or affecting to weep, because when she speaks her voice is calm and clear.

  “Your Honour, all I want to say is that I love Baxter more than the world and I am simply doing what’s right for him. It’s my belief that any responsible mother in my position would do the same.”

  The judge shifts and settles, allowing his girth to reassemble itself on the bench. He jots down a few notes before scooping the papers before him into a pile in a manner that indicates he has come to a decision.

  “Ms. Heathfield,” he says, looking at Uptown Girl, “I have no doubt you are a loving and responsible mother, but the amount of litigation you have brought before this court is shameful. You need to take responsibility for the marriage you made and deal with your ex-husband in a more humane and adult way. The civil courts are not a family counselling service or a forum for you to play out your interpersonal melodramas. They are here to resolve disputes when private citizens cannot. In light of this, and despite my lack of sympathy for Ms. Heathfield’s crocodile tears, I am amending the original custodial agreement to grant full custody to the mother with fortnightly weekend access visits to the father. I am sorry, Mr. Brooks, but I do not feel that you and Ms. Heathfield have the tools required to successfully co-parent your son. Therefore I must make a difficult decision, but one that I hope will bring a swift conclusion to your endless legal disputes.”