by Alix Ohlin
Mitch stood up, not sure what to do now. From the back of the apartment, Martine was yelling about cold air coming in and she came down the hall to investigate, smelling of perfume and cigarettes, her hair in a bun at the base of her neck. When she saw Mitch, she stopped short.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were the pizza man. That was probably confusing for Mathieu.” It was impossible to miss the tone of reproach.
“I apologize,” Mitch said. “I didn’t know you had a son.” He wondered where the child had been the other night.
She looked at him blankly, her hands twisting in whatever task she’d just been performing—folding clothes, maybe, or washing dishes. Her glasses were slipping down her nose.
“I brought you some dinner,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I guess you have pizza coming, but … well, I brought a roasted lamb shank, new potatoes, and salad. And a bottle of wine.” He gestured at the cooler at his feet. “I thought, it’s Friday night, and you might not feel like cooking … ”
It seemed she wasn’t going to say anything. No wonder her kid didn’t talk. She was even biting her lip just as he had.
From some back corner of the apartment came an unholy shriek and the angry tumble of furniture falling over. Martine turned and ran back down the hall, and after a moment he could hear her murmuring and her son’s outbursts calming, finally quieting, like waves diminishing as they lapped against the shore.
He stood in the hallway, winter’s cold hands grabbing his back, feeling like more of a jackass than he had in his entire life. After a few minutes he wrote his phone number on a piece of paper, wedged it under the lid of the cooler, and called out, “Well, I’ll be going now. Good-bye!”
There was no answer.
When he woke up, in Iqaluit, he called home, but there was no answer. It was Saturday, and Martine was probably out with Mathieu at the zoo or the museum. She had a mania for activities. She wanted Mathieu to be well rounded and hoped that if she constantly exposed him to a variety of events he might pick up something new instead of remaining the lightly autistic, science-obsessed boy he was. No advice on this matter would be tolerated. He left a message, and went to find the clinic. It was cool and windy, the sky a range of grays from charcoal to steel to pearl. But it was also summer, and on the hard-scrabble soil were the miniature blooms of dwarf daisies and Arctic poppies, with light-green lichen spreading delicately over the rocks. He felt the gorgeous pleasure of being away. No matter what happened here, for good or bad, it wasn’t home, and there was a luxurious freedom in that.
At the clinic, after introducing himself to the nurse on duty, he was shown to his desk and given a roster of appointments that began immediately. People had been backed up for weeks while they waited for his rotation to start—the last person, apparently, had had some kind of meltdown and returned to Toronto with a full month on the clock—and they were scheduled thickly, one every twenty minutes. In the nurse’s brief description of this last counselor, Mitch heard a clear contempt for fragile southerners, but as she spoke he only nodded, feeling confident and ready to get to work and prove himself. He knew from experience that at least half of these patients wouldn’t show up. They’d forget, or change their minds, or had never intended to come in the first place; they’d gone along with the idea to be polite, because a judge or doctor had recommended it, but that didn’t mean they truly consented. They just didn’t want to be rude and say no.
So he had some free time. He looked out his office window at the parking lot, where a few birds were pecking at trash that had spilled from a garbage can’s overflow, and at something that looked suspiciously like a pool of vomit. Behind him there was a knock, and he turned around to see a young man, seventeen or so, standing in the doorway. He was very skinny, with dark eyes, floppy black hair, and lips so dark they looked painted. His red windbreaker was streaked with dirt.
“Hey,” Mitch said. “Can I help you?”
The kid licked his chapped lips. “They sent me here,” he said.
“Who sent you?”
“The people down the hall,” the kid said.
“Which people?”
The boy’s answer to this was an inconclusive shrug. Mitch gestured toward a chair and asked what his name was.
“Thomasie.”
The boy sat down. With his round face and high cheekbones he was handsome, the hair falling over his eyes giving him a movie-idol look.
“Thomasie what?”
“Reeves. That was my dad’s name. He’s down in Sarnia. That’s where he’s at.”
“And your mom?”
“Yeah,” the kid said, giving him a weird, furtive look.
While they were talking, Mitch flipped through his files and his calendar, but there was nothing under “Reeves.” The boy sat opposite him, balancing his elbows on his knees, his expression either hooded or blank. Glancing out the window at the parking lot, he began gnawing on a fingernail, pulling it off gently, bit by bit, then examining it and flicking it to the floor.
“So tell me what brings you here,” Mitch said.
Thomasie smiled without humor or gratitude; he seemed shrunk beneath the protective hull of his jacket. Mitch had the feeling he was being judged, that if he said the wrong thing the kid might jump up and sprint out of there. So he waited. The silence between them grew thick, and neither appeared willing to break it.
Thomasie shook a cigarette out of a pack in his pocket, tapped it against the palm of his hand, stuck it behind his ear, then cleared his throat. When he finally looked at Mitch, his expression was strangely sincere and earnest, guileless. “You’re new,” he said.
“That’s right. I just got here. Although I was here once before.”
Thomasie nodded. “Yeah, my dad remembered you from when you were here before. He played in the basketball thing you did. We don’t have basketball right now. We got a guy doing like an adventure club or something? But mostly kids stay home and play video games.”
Another silence. Mitch tried to remember a kid named Reeves, but he hadn’t known most of their last names—they were a mass of adolescent energy and short attention spans, and he’d spent each session trying to incite enough enthusiasm that they’d care about the game but not so much they’d get into fights. He was dismayed to realize, now, that he probably didn’t remember many first names, either.
“So what can I do for you?” he finally said.
Thomasie smiled again, and the bland, empty secrecy of those smiles was starting to get on Mitch’s nerves. He rubbed his temples, telling himself to be patient. He was feeling last night’s whiskey a bit.
“Everybody around here knows about it,” the kid said. “I thought maybe you did too.”
He paused expectantly, but Mitch had no file and hadn’t been following the news from up here. He shook his head slightly, and Thomasie looked down at the floor. Clearly he’d hoped to be spared having to tell the whole story.
“My mom, she’s in the hospital,” he said. “Been there a while now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mitch said. When the kid didn’t go on, he added, “What happened?”
“She was out partying one night and she was walking home from her friend’s house with my little sister. Anyway, there was a storm, and she didn’t make it home.”
“What do you mean, she didn’t make it home?”
Thomasie bit off another shred of fingernail before answering. His right knee was jiggling, practically jack-hammering. “She passed out in the snow,” he said, in the quiet, almost affectless manner common to many Inuit, his intonation so flat that it took Mitch a moment to grasp the horror of where this was going. “When she woke up the world was white. That’s what she said. My little sister died. They might send my mum to jail, but right now she’s still in the hospital. She lost most of her eyesight, that’s why the world was so white. They don’t know what happened to her eyes. She also lost some fingers and toes, but that don’t bothe
r her as much as the eyes. The world was white. It’s weird she says that, because it was dark when she woke up. It was still winter, and anyways, she was blind.”
“I’m so sorry,” Mitch said, and the kid nodded. He had spoken calmly, without tears or anger, his fidgeting and nail-biting the only signs of emotion. The office door was still open, and Mitch could hear steps and voices outside. Someone with a scheduled appointment was waiting in the hallway.
Thomasie leaned back, as if spent, and sucked on his bloody fingernail. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more.
“What was your sister’s name?” Mitch said.
The boy’s attention strayed to his shoes, which he examined closely for some time. “Karen,” he finally said. Another pause. Then, still looking at his shoes: “I dream about her sometimes. She’s alone in the snow. It’s like she’s in heaven—except not really, ’cause she’s cold and uncomfortable. She keeps asking me to come see her, and I try, but I can’t get to her. Then I wake up.”
Mitch nodded. “You wish you could have helped her and your mom.”
Thomasie shrugged. “I been at the hospital so much, with my mom, they told me to come see you.”
“I’m glad you did,” Mitch said. “So let’s set up some appointments.”
“You got any drugs?” the boy said. “I don’t sleep good.”
Mitch flushed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“My friend got some pills when his dad died.”
Mitch sat back. “I’d like to help you,” he said, and Thomasie looked up. “We can work with a psychiatrist on some treatment options. But mainly, you and me, we’ll just be talking, working through some of the stuff that’s happened.”
The boy was already standing. “Okay,” he said, in a monotone that implied neither agreement nor refusal. Before Mitch could ask him to wait, he loped out, his sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. Then a middle-aged man came in complaining that he shouldn’t have to be here just because he and his wife had “one goddamn fight.” Mitch had to focus on calming him down, and soon grew absorbed by this new story, this new crisis. But his eye caught a flash of red out of the window—Thomasie Reeves’s windbreaker, bright against the drab gray parking lot as he strode quickly away, his head down against the wind.
The rest of the day passed normally, with addiction counseling, unemployment sagas, eviction nightmares. These he was used to. He knew how to help people break such stories down into their composite elements and start to reconfigure them. He saw his job as gently prying their fingers from their own throats. A long time ago, as a young man, he had thought of himself as a savior, and this was the fervor he had passed on to Grace. Now he believed in small, specific steps and broad-based statistical results. He wasn’t as enthused about his work as he once was, but he was more confident in his ability to execute, and he slept better at night.
At six he finished up and walked through the clinic toward the exit. It was a quiet, dark place, with green corridors and an overworked, lethargic-looking staff that paid him no attention, but he didn’t mind. Nor did it bother him to step out into a bright June evening so brisk that he shivered. He had gotten away.
After his disastrous visit to her apartment, he thought he’d never see Martine again. The bachelor life he had grown used to now seemed pathetic, and a sense of futility draped itself over him, wrapping its suffocating arms around his neck. From now on he would be alone.
Then she called.
This time, they met in the middle of the day and took Mathieu to a movie and then to the park. An unexpected thing happened. Mitch had liked Martine—in the fizzy, hopelessly insecure way you like someone who’s out of your league, and clearly slumming in your league for just one night—but he fell in love with her son. And it was reciprocated. The kid had Asperger’s, it seemed; he was a dinosaur expert and could recite encyclopedia entries about them from memory. He told Mitch all about the T. rex and “the land before time,” apparently the dinosaur era. And as Mitch listened to this beautiful, robotic child, he felt his heart cracking like ice cubes in warm water. By the end of the afternoon, Mathieu was holding his hand and lecturing him about velociraptors.
Martine, for her part, was amazed. “This never happens,” she said, sounding almost offended.
“Can we take him home?” Mitch heard Mathieu say to her in French. “I want to play with him.”
Martine said, “He’s not a toy, my love.”
The kid just looked at her blankly. Other than dinosaurs, it was hard to know what he thought about anything. Mitch could only imagine the heartbreak of this for Martine, who constantly threw him lines, hoping their hooks would catch and she could reel him in. Mitch wanted to say that of course he’d go home with them, but the memory of his first encounter with the boy prevented him from speaking.
“Ask him yourself,” Martine finally said.
“You come with me?” Mathieu said to him instantly. He had yet to call Mitch by name or to acknowledge that he was an adult. He treated him like a cross between an audience and a companion.
“Yes, I’d like to come with you,” Mitch said, then glanced over at Martine, expecting to see gratitude and appreciation on her face. Instead, she looked irritated and a little concerned. She held out her hand to her son, who ignored it and took Mitch’s. Thus unified, thus fractured, they went home.
Over the next few months, Mitch’s relationship with the boy deepened into ferocious, passionate intensity. They spent every weekend together. He took Mathieu to Parc Lafontaine, to the planetarium, played with him, read Tintin to him. Martine wasn’t keen on school-night visits, so midweek he’d find himself in a reverie of longing, wondering what Mathieu was doing at that very moment, picturing his blond head asleep on his red flannel pillow.
Things with Martine were, understandably, a little strange. They hardly spent any time alone. They never went out to dinner or a movie, and he didn’t meet any of her friends. But he stepped into her home life, drawing himself inside the bubble of her apartment, her weekends, her kitchen table. After Mathieu went to bed, the two of them would talk—mostly about the child—while doing the dishes or drinking a glass of wine. They went to bed together, but a lot of the time they just went to sleep, Martine curled up against him with a hand on his shoulder or hip. Tired from a long week, she wanted to be held and comforted as she drifted off. When they did have sex, it was ritualized, purposeful, and quick—which was not the same as unsatisfying. There was a deep comfort in the dullness of it that he could never have anticipated. Sometimes she asked him to stay with Mathieu while she took a bath and read a magazine. It was as if they had skipped dating and gone straight to the long-married stage.
This went on for a year, then another. He didn’t meet the rest of Martine’s family, though her parents lived in Montreal North and her sister not five streets away. Somehow, without any conversation, certain rules had been established. Weekends only, even in summer—except in August, when they went on vacation together in Maine, where Mitch and Mathieu played Frisbee on the beach and jumped in the waves.
He wondered, every so often, why he tolerated these conditions, and always reached the same conclusions. First, as strange as the situation was, there was no doubt that it was better—a thousand times better—than living on his own had been. Second, he believed, though he never articulated this to Martine, that if he hung on and stuck around, eventually he would be more than her son’s companion and her weekend comfort. He would be indispensable. He was counting on that.
Thomasie Reeves came back a week later. In the interim, Mitch had been settling into the duplex; he had bought groceries and stocked the kitchen, and gone for walks around town to let people know who he was and how long he’d be staying. He was welcomed with uncommon grace, tinged with reserve; it was clear that they were used to seeing people like him come and go.
Johnny, he learned, was prone to long absences and sudden reappearances. Mitch would go three days without seeing him, only to wake up on
e morning and find him frying eggs in the kitchen, asking Mitch to join him, talking a mile a minute about some woman he’d been with the night before. Sometimes he brought the woman back home, and in the morning Mitch would see her sleepily pulling on her shoes in the living room, acknowledging him with an awkward, hungover wave. He hadn’t had a roommate since he was nineteen, but in fact he was glad for some activity in the house, a sense of life going on around him. A couple of times he stayed up late with Johnny, who told hilarious anecdotes about his relatives in Newfoundland, so long and involved that Mitch couldn’t remember them very well the next day. Johnny was a performer, a teller of tales, and the fact that he had no interest in other people, and never asked him what his life back in Montreal was like, suited Mitch perfectly.
He still hadn’t talked to Martine. He’d left several messages, and she’d called once—at a time when she must have known he’d be tied up in appointments—saying that everything was fine, she was glad he had made it safely, and there was nothing to worry about. But things were unraveling—that much was obvious. Less so was how he felt about it. Mainly he was glad to have this much distance between himself and the difficulties of home. He tried not to worry too much about Mathieu; he was opinionated, aggressive, and in his own way emotional, but not much given to abstractions. Which is to say that while he was attached to Mitch, he wouldn’t miss him when he wasn’t around. At least, Mitch didn’t think he would.
He asked around at the clinic about Thomasie Reeves, and everyone shook their heads and talked about how sad that case was but didn’t say anything more. Every conversation about it trailed off into silence. One free afternoon, he went to the library and asked a librarian about the incident. She sighed and said, “Gloria Reeves,” directing him to the newspaper accounts. The little girl, Karen, had been three years old, and they’d found her curled up inside her mother’s coat, pressed against her chest. The paper ran a photo of the family lined up on a couch, with Karen sitting in her mother’s lap and Thomasie beside them, all three of them wearing white turtlenecks and wool sweaters, a Christmas tree in the background.
