by Annabel Lyon
I’m reading.
“Kate.”
“T.C.”
“Here.”
He’s got the site. I stand at his elbow while he jumps us through a few screens.
“Mammal,” I say, pointing.
After a few more screens, Liam clicks on “Go,” clicks on “Home.” The image of the three entwined girls is replaced by our preferred home page, a site maintained by a local TV station, with its familiar layout of advertising logos on scrolling banners, search engine, weather (a cloud with digitally sprinkling rain), sports stats, and news headlines: SECOND TEEN CHARGED IN ASSAULT.
“Oh, no,” Liam says, surprised. “No.”
I take the mouse and click on the headline. “ ’Police are releasing few details,” ’ I read. “ ’They confirm that a second fourteen-year-old has now been charged in last month’s vicious attack on a mentally handicapped man in a video store parking lot. The trial is set for November.” ’
Liam makes a breathy noise, a laugh or a gasp.
“That’s commendably fucking prompt,” I say.
We stare at the little words, which by rights ought to be as private as our own blood.
“Don’t let’s tell him about this tonight,” Liam says suddenly. “It’s going to be everywhere tomorrow. Let him get one more night of rest before it all starts.”
I think, This is love?
“Maybe we should pull him out of school,” I say.
“We’re not pulling him out of school.”
“What do we do now?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Wait.”
He says he wants to sleep in his office for a while.
The next morning, Ty won’t go to school. He won’t get up.
“You know we almost named you Gordon?” I tell him. I’m sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at the neatness of the sun, the orderly rows of glow between the blind slats. Ty’s curled away from me, facing the wall. “It was some stupid idea of your Dad’s. Look at me, I’m talking to you.”
“Go away,” he says.
“So the plan is I phone your school and say, Ty’s going to be absent today because he’s facing a criminal charge and he needs some quiet time? Something like that?”
“I keep throwing up.”
I look around. “Where?”
“Last night.”
I put the back of my hand on his forehead. “Were you there?” I say suddenly.
He looks at me, horrified.
I stand up. “I’m going to work now,” I tell him. “I love you, but I am so sick of this. You look after yourself today.”
By lunchtime I’m also sick of everyone at work, of May and Dr. Gagnon and the nice receptionist and all the sneezy, achy people waiting in Reception like a lot of weeping sores. I decide to take my lunch out into the air, walk away from them for forty-five minutes or so, find a pocket of park and a bench under a pine tree with a view of the sea – me, my soup Thermos, my water bottle, my red pepper and my banana. Calvin follows me.
“Go away,” I tell him.
Insufferable is the silence between us. I eat while he stares at the sea.
“You are poison,” he says finally. “You’re a goddamn toxin in my system. I don’t even like you all that much. You’re not a good or decent person. You don’t care about your patients. You condescend to May. You torture me. Are you really pregnant?”
“Yep.”
“Get rid of it,” he says. “Oh, please. Oh, god.”
“No.”
“Are you laughing?” he asks. “This amuses you?” I screw the Thermos cup back on the Thermos and tuck the banana peel through the Thermos handle. “I didn’t choose this,” he says.
“You’re okay, Calvin,” I tell him. “You’re going to be fine.”
He gives me a look of hot, ragged hatred. I look at my watch.
“Five minutes,” he says, so I sit there for five more minutes, looking at the view, bouncing my Thermos on my knee, and then I go back to work.
We take to clipping articles from the papers, Liam and I, after our son has gone to bed, dating them, and keeping them in a file called “Parmenter.” Over the next couple of weeks we collect a dozen such articles from local and city papers, even a couple of smug Letters to the Editor (“Perhaps now our revered politicians will emerge from their labyrinthine circumlocutions around what has become the one premier issue of our time, television and copycat violence –”). Nothing so far in the nationals.
“Who writes these, you know what I’m saying?” Liam says one night.
He uses scissors. I use an X-Acto knife and a breadboard. I say, “Nobody. Tea drinkers.”
“ESL students,” he says. “ ’Dear sir, I wish to register my utmost outrage at a system who fosters the pernicious scourge of peer violence between our children –” ’
“Here’s one. This woman’s a homemaker. As she watches her little ones get ready for school, shrugging on their little knapsacks –”
“Fuck me, poetry,” Liam says.
“– she worries about what’s waiting for them out there in the world. She knows she cannot be with them every step of the way, but she also knows that she has filled them with the great tide of her love which they will carry in them always as a talisman against evil.”
“Her point?”
“People should stay home.” I scan the remainder of the article. “People should just stay home with their stay-at-home mothers and feel the great tide of love sloshing around inside them all day.”
“Maybe we don’t need all of these.”
“The lawyer said.”
“I tell you what,” my husband says. “The amount we’re paying him, he should be doing this.”
“We can afford it.” I square some pages, fold them away for the blue bag.
“I can’t afford it. I’ve got tenure review coming up in a few months. Imagine if this gets out.”
I say, “Yeah, imagine.”
“Which reminds me,” he says, ignoring me and talking to me at the same time. “Faculty party next Thursday, okay?”
I say, “No, not okay.”
“You have to come. Other spouses come. We have to act normal.”
“In case of what?”
“Exactly.” He slaps the file closed like it’s settled.
“Last order of business,” Dr. Gagnon says. “The parking lot.”
Everybody groans. Dr. Gagnon grins and shows us his fists – asymmetrical, like a boxer. Around me doctors are starting to push back their chairs and collect their papers. It’s the clinic’s monthly administrative meeting, my first. “Whoa, whoa!” Dr. Gagnon says.
“Cut it out, Paul,” says Dr. Silver, a curly-haired blonde my age, tough and tiny as a gymnast. “We did this last year. You lost.” She’s gone.
“What did we do last year?” I ask my neighbour, Dr. Li.
“Voted not to expand the parking lot.”
“This is not about trees,” Dr. Gagnon is saying. “This is about access.”
“This is about sap on your Lincoln,” someone says.
“I like the parking lot,” I tell Dr. Li.
“Dr. Clary likes the parking lot,” Dr. Li says. Everybody looks at me.
“The view,” I say quickly, but they’re staring too long. Most of them don’t know me, have probably never heard words from my mouth before, but still. The next thing I know the meeting’s over and Dr. Gagnon’s asking me for a word. We go to his office. “Am I in trouble?”
“How’re things working out for you so far?”
I tell him fine.
“Everything okay with the staff?”
“Is there a problem?” I’m thinking, if he knows about Ty, if they all know, he should come out and say it. He shouldn’t do it like this.
“On the contrary.” He raises his eyebrows. “Your nurses love you.”
“About the parking lot?” I say, but he laughs and waves me off, waves me right out of his office. I understand the issue isn’t dead but I’m not a
player here, not yet. He’ll use me when I’m useful. In the hall I close my eyes, exhale, open my eyes. What does he know?
“Keep in touch, Doctor?” he calls after me.
“I never know what to wear to these things.”
“That,” Liam says.
I’ve got clothes all over the bed. In my underwear I’m standing, hands on hips, surveying all my worldly goods here on the bed. I hold a skirt hanger to my waist, trying to picture myself in the article – a little flippy wool job, almost a skating skirt. “I must have bought this,” I say.
“Wear what you wore this morning.”
I almost could, too – the sharp black suit, the bracelet, the black shoes. Only this has become my outfit for visiting the lawyer’s, and I don’t want to be reminded. “There’s going to be drinks, right?”
“The Dean will be there, the tenure committee,” Liam says.
“Yes, Mom.”
On the way up to campus we drop Ty at Isobel’s. He doesn’t especially like it. He says, “Suddenly I need a babysitter?”
We tell him Isobel needs help moving some boxes.
“I don’t like bullshitting him, but I don’t like leaving him alone either,” Liam says. “And Isobel doesn’t have TV, which is amazing. I think he could use a quiet evening to think about Monday.” Monday, Jason’s trial.
“Those were some pretty tough questions this morning,” I say. “I thought lawyers weren’t supposed to do that. Coach the witness.” I feel stupid saying the phrase.
“He didn’t tell him what to say.”
I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. “You don’t want to talk about this, do you?”
“See, only because I’m driving.”
He parks at a meter near the Fine Arts department. The wind is pushing leaves down the street. It’s gone cold. A nearby tree is red. “Witness for the prosecution,” I say, now that we’re out of the car.
He gives me a look.
“Fall,” I say, pointing. I’m thinking: six weeks already.
“You’re here!” Cheryl, the departmental secretary, says when she sees us. She seems surprised, concerned.
“Shouldn’t we be?” Liam asks.
She makes her eyes go big.
“Hi, Cheryl,” I say, and she grabs me in a hug. We have never hugged.
“You look –” Instead of a third word, she makes a big gesture.
“Fat? I look fat?” I whisper, as Liam steers me away, into the common room. We nod and smile. People are turning toward us. “Let’s get out of here.”
Liam is smiling. “You are paranoid,” he murmurs.
“Dr. Clary.” A great tall man puts his hand on my husband’s arm, staying us. He means Liam, but I don’t laugh – practise. “I’ve been going through your grant application. We should talk.” He says this darkly, peremptorily, like an actor doing a surgeon. This is the Dean. I smile ten thousand watts and excuse myself to the makeshift bar.
An hour and a half later, this:
“Sudan, Mauritania,” a bearded man is saying. “I’m saying, slavery in our time! I’m saying, right now! But will people believe it? Until someone goes in there with a camera?”
My group shakes heads.
“Y’all hear about that beating a ways back, outside that video store?” Where has this Texas accent come from? How did it get in my mouth?
“You mean that thing back in the summer?” someone says. “Should you be sitting down?”
“No, why?” I say.
“This world,” someone says. “Slavery, Jesus.”
“Video is over,” someone else says.
Everyone starts talking at once and gesturing with cheese. I go find Liam. “Bad,” he says, taking the wineglass from my hand. He’s flushed; instead of putting my glass down he drinks from it. “The Dean thinks he can get me funding for my book.”
His book? “That’s great, honey,” I say. But he’s barely looking at me. Restlessly he scans the room, bounces in his shoes.
“I think we should both be there on Monday,” I say loudly. “For Ty’s sake.”
He smiles again. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he murmurs. “Of course we’ll be there. Can we talk about this later?”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
“Liam,” someone says. “How’s the little book coming? On the little starlet?”
“Brian,” Liam says, shaking his hand.
They call this work.
“Katherine, you look amazing,” this man, this stranger, says, and he hugs me too. “My sister had the same procedure a couple of years ago and she’s fine.”
“Okay, what is going on?” I ask Liam in the hall.
Ty, when we collect him, is in a mutinous mood. “You told her,” he accuses us. He means Isobel.
“Did you talk about it?” I ask, because my Liam is driving.
“I knew it,” Ty says. “She was being nice to me.”
“And normally, god knows, she’s very mean.”
“Who else knows?”
“Look, idiot,” I say. “We had to get a lawyer somewhere. Isobel referred us. Should we have picked one out of the phone book? You know what happens when you pick them out of the phone book?”
“You’re going to tell me,” he says, so then I don’t. Instead I ask Liam about his little starlet.
“You know,” he says meaningfully.
When we get home he goes straight into his office and shuts the door. We hear the TV go on, the now-familiar screech of tires and sting of music signalling the start of that movie again. I tell Ty to get the hell into bed.
“Sieg heil,” he says, and I slap him.
We stare at each other, sharing disbelief. He reaches for, but doesn’t quite touch, the reddening mark of my hand on his cheek.
Before this, the worst thing I ever did was vandalize a car. That ended badly, as you’d expect – getting caught, going to court with the sweating, stuttering, milky-eyed phone-book lawyer, facing my parents – but the core truth was it was fun and I’d have done it again. The car belonged to Liam’s aunt, though I didn’t know that at the time; I thought it was Liam’s car. Nor did I know that she lived with Liam (or rather he with her); that she was watching me through the window, phone in hand, blue lights already on their way, while I tried to let Liam know how I felt about him pursuing me. Love was a disease I was immune to, for a while anyway.
“Just so you know,” I tell Ty. “Your father’s been telling people I had a biopsy, to account for all the work he’s having to miss, because of you.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he says. He’s crying, again.
Stuffed in the bike courier bag I use as a purse, in my office at the clinic at the end of another endless day, these gifts: the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue CD of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and a travel-size vial of chewable Gravol. No card, no note, no mystery either.
Sunday night, end of the line. Rain hemorrhages. In our basement, what the Parmenters call the rec room, a window no bigger than a shoebox lurks near the ceiling. A watery black eye: rainwater makes sheets and swags of unclarity on the glass. Beyond I can see the wavering lines of the iron grille we bolted over the window after a rash of neighbourhood break-ins last summer, but not the low-down, grass-in-your-face, cat’s-eye view of the garden you get during the day. The garden is gone, the street is gone, the city is gone, and it is just the three of us, alone together in this cave carved out of the empty black stuff of night. Dark-red tones I had chosen for a colour scheme down here, and grouped before the single flickering light of the TV we could be prehistorics before a flickering fire, holed up in the false, ruddy safety of our den. We have adopted the following attitudes: myself at one end of the sofa, Liam lying with his feet on my lap, Ty between us on the floor, leaning half against the sofa, half against my leg. The movie is a soother of Liam’s, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake with the sound turned low. A few hours ago we told Ty we loved him. Then, not knowing what else to do, we suggested movies. He as
ked for popcorn, but the bowl sits full and untouched on the chair he abandoned to sit nearer to us. Now, touching, we are still and separate as three photographs. The rain rains, the movie moves, and the hours roll away like weights that kept our lives from blowing away. The trial starts tomorrow.
The plan was that we would meet Joe Sumo in the courthouse cafeteria, but where we find him is in the underground parkade, jogging toward us, waving his cellphone.
“Good morning!” he calls, his voicing echoing off the cars and concrete. “I’m glad I caught you. Jason’s going to plead guilty. No trial, that means. For us that’s the bluebird of good news, or whatever. I just got the call. They’ll go straight to sentencing. You can watch, if you like.”
We ride upstairs in the elevator, the four of us, three of us dead numb. He explains Jason finally admitted to the beating, an hour ago, only, and if anyone was with him he wasn’t saying. Joe Sumo speculates there will be some psychiatric testing. When we step out into the courthouse lobby, he excuses himself to catch up with some character in a black robe and white dickie who greets him like a cowboy, pretending to draw guns from his belt and fire. They laugh.
I can’t breathe right. I say, “Let’s go home,” and my voice is loud in my ears.
Liam shrugs. It’s Ty who says, “I want to see.”
From a distance, Joe Sumo points us toward the right room and makes some hand signals meaning he’ll catch up with us inside.
Waiting for the judge to hand down his verdict, we watch him deal with a girl caught shoplifting K-Y jelly from Wal-Mart.
“What I’m going to do now, I’m going to suspend your sentence,” he says. “What that means is, I’m not going to punish you. Everything you’ve had to go through with the store security and then coming to see me here, I know this has been pretty embarrassing for you and I think that’s enough. I think you’re not going to be stealing again, right? Contraceptives or what have you?”
“Will this go on my record?” the girl asks.
“Yes,” the judge says.
When they’re finished, the girl comes and sits right in front of Liam and me, next to a tousle-haired woman in an Adidas warm-up jacket and matching tearaways. “Wake up, Mom,” the girl says. “Time to go.”
