The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  Fear takes me like love, heart pounding, dry mouth. I go to work.

  “Doctor,” May says. She hands me a file and says, “Number seven.” She looks harassed.

  “Where’s Calvin?”

  “He called in sick.”

  “Bastard. Who?” I gesture towards the examining room.

  “Mr. Resnick.”

  I say, “Fuck,” and she looks away. I say, “Sorry,” but the damage is done.

  Mr. Resnick registers me with his pale blue eyes. “Are you going to charge me?”

  “What?” I say, rattled. “Charge you with what?”

  “Charge me money.”

  I grab my stethoscope and advance like a monster. “Open your shirt.”

  “It’s all right.” His hand flutters at his throat.

  “I need to examine you. I need you to co-operate with me right now. Goddamn it,” I add reasonably.

  “You’re not having very good luck with that one, are you?” the receptionist says a minute later. I’ve followed him out to the lobby but stopped there, had to let him go. He’s gone so fast the silk trees are swaying and swiping the windows.

  “I think he’s afraid of me.”

  “He asked for you when he made the appointment.”

  She’s fat and calm, this receptionist. Every smile is a light question.

  “I have to leave early today,” I tell her. “I promised my son something. Say, five-forty?”

  “Hokey-pokey,” she says, consulting the big book. “No problemo. How old is the little guy?”

  I don’t hesitate. “Six.”

  “Aw.”

  “Yep,” I say, turning back to my office.

  I’m sitting in the therapist’s grey-and-teak reception area, sixteenth floor, waiting while he talks to my son. I’ve read a National Geographic article on St. Anselm’s deer and a brochure on talking to your children about schizophrenia. I have a flaming corkscrew of a headache. On the drive over I had told him I saw what happened on the school steps and he said, “Good for you.” I put my hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it away. We didn’t speak after that. In the underground parking lot he tried his first full-on mutiny, refusing to remove his seat belt.

  “Get out of the car,” I said, slowly and deliberately, as though I was talking to Mr. Resnick. And then, as though I was Mr. Resnick: “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car.” He did, too, exploding into motion – belt whipped, door slammed – as though suddenly he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. He ignored me all the way to the elevator, and, as the doors began to close, darted out, leaving me alone in my slowly, deliberately ascending cage. By the time the doors opened he was already at the nurse’s desk, still ignoring me, coolly giving his name and particulars. He had taken the stairs. I felt smug, knowing he still lacked the confidence to defy me outright, but frightened too at his willingness even to pretend to leave me behind.

  Now, when he emerges, we’re both elaborately casual. He yawns and stretches. I toss my magazines behind me, nonchalantly slopping up the pile. I touch his hair briefly, warily, a question he can ignore if he wants, and – remarkably – win a frail smile.

  In the car on the way home, Ty volunteers that he likes Dr. Gross, he’d like to see him again. He seems drained, head on the headrest, breathing through his mouth, but he looks at me when he talks, which he hasn’t been doing lately.

  “What if we all went to see him together, you and me and your Dad?”

  “First, me,” Ty says.

  I try not to look at him. I look at him. He’s calm, staring at the sky, or the green glare strip on the windshield.

  “I’ve already made an appointment,” he says. “I can figure out how to get there on the bus.”

  “Crush me,” I say. I’m afraid to say more, to ask what happened in there, afraid I’ve dreamt up this amenable little boy I just barely remember from what seems like a lifetime ago.

  When we pull into the driveway, Liam is painting the front of the house. In his everyday black clothes he’s slapping blue paint on the blue siding, stroking savagely. When he sees us he flinches, speeds up.

  “Please go inside,” I tell Ty. I cross the grass to Liam and confirm what I thought I saw, a blurt of red, tail of a graffito, which Liam is erasing with the wet blue. “What did it say?” I ask.

  He won’t tell me. Instead, after supper, he proposes taking Ty to stay with his mother in the Maritimes for a week. “Someone is gunning for us,” he says, looking at his hands.

  “What did it say?”

  He smoothes the cloth of his pants.

  I reach under my sweatshirt to pull my T-shirt straight. It’s got rucked up on one shoulder. “Kids.”

  “Again.”

  “But maybe not directed specifically at Ty, though. Could just be vandalism, some random –”

  Liam’s shaking and shaking his head, brushing down his sleeves now. “I walked up and down the block. Our house was the only one. Plus, the clipping.”

  “Okay, the clipping,” I say. “Fine. But Nova Scotia? What about me?”

  “I was thinking maybe we could all use a bit of a break from each other.”

  He won’t meet my eye after he says this, and I’m left studying his face, his person. He looked a little Christly, once upon a time, my husband, with the longish hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and all that hunger. Now, though, he just looks tired. He looks like what he is, I guess: pretty cool for a professor, which isn’t the same thing as cool itself, despite what he thinks; not old, not young, definitely a four-square citizen with a couple of cars and a mortgage, with a dental plan and a teenager, with cares.

  “You’ve never really told me about your book,” I say.

  He looks away.

  “The little Irish starlet,” I say. “The one you have the thing for.”

  He checks to see if I’m being sarcastic. I’m not.

  “She died young,” he says. “Lived a pretty wild life. She made some very odd films.”

  “What is it about her?”

  He looks at me then, and doesn’t look away.

  “You know we still haven’t told Ty about the baby?”

  “When we get back,” he says.

  In the lunchroom, May is quick to move her bag from the chair next to her to the floor. I’m grateful. When I ask politely what she’s eating she says, “Are you all right?” I open my mouth to say something else. “Tired,” I hear myself say. “I’m tired.”

  “You look it.”

  I don’t mention the baby because I haven’t told Dr. Gagnon yet. I do allude to Ty and his ongoing troubles at school, though I omit the therapist and the graffiti. I mention his and Liam’s impending trip to the Maritimes. Her smooth brow wrinkles with concern. By the end of lunch she is patting my hand and inviting me over for supper while my men are away.

  “Who’s going away?” Calvin asks, joining us.

  I explain again. May, I notice, has immediately withdrawn into herself, tidying up her lunch remains, saying little.

  “She has a crush on you,” I tell Calvin after she excuses herself, leaving us alone.

  He says, “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t kill you to be nicer to her.”

  We smile, then, can’t help it, because we are something like friends now, and understand each other.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey. Would you help me with something?”

  The next morning there’s a knock on the door. Liam is in his den; Ty is sitting on the carpet with a pile of padlocks and rings of tiny keys, trying to find fits. Their suitcases are in the hall. I pause to heft one and yank my bicep. “What the hell?”

  Ty doesn’t look up. “Dad’s movies.”

  On the doorstep, Brill. “I have a right to know what’s going on,” he says.

  “Liam,” I call over my shoulder.

  “Never mind trying to scare me. I am getting craziness about you people in the mailbox
with my mail, warnings, okay? Also there are messages on the front of your house.”

  “Again?”

  We walk down into the yard. Liam’s paint job has dried thin and the words show through.

  “No, that’s from before,” I explain.

  “What’s that boy done? I’ve seen the police in your driveway. Is he a danger?” I take a step towards him and he jerks back. “I consider that a threat,” he says.

  “Good. Get the fuck out of my yard.”

  “You rude woman. We have a right to know. We’ve had a meeting.”

  “What meeting? Who?”

  “You’ve got to use a thinner on that.” He backs away, pointing at the siding. “Don’t you even know that? You people are bringing down the neighbourhood. We know what he did.”

  “That was you,” I say, pointing at the house. Now we’re both pointing at the house.

  Liam appears on the porch, shoeless, holding his coffee mug.

  “It was not,” Brill says.

  “Morning, neighbour!” Liam calls.

  “What meeting?” I say.

  “You people are cheap,” Brill says.

  We go inside. “What meeting?” I say. I hammer my fist on the wall facing Brill’s house. “What warning? What messages? What meeting, you Nazi?”

  Ty says, “Mom.”

  “Shut up, Kate, just shut up for a change,” Liam says.

  “Daddy,” Ty says.

  We yell, “What?”

  He looks at each of us in turn. “I phoned the fucking airport the way you fucking showed me,” he says. “The fucking plane’s on time.”

  The landscapers, the landscapers.

  By now the situation is this: the evergreens are in. The terrace is in. The paving stones are down. You can walk a little walk from the kitchen door past the place for the herb garden to the greenhouse door and your feet need not touch God’s green earth. The guys have unswaddled the greenhouse. Now, my own men days gone, it is time to pay them.

  “Thank you for choosing Green Garden Landscapers,” the older one says. As far as I can tell, he and his assistant are Green Garden Landscapers. “We came in a little over budget, but I think you’ll see that’s because of the marble.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, writing a cheque against the side of the house. “It’s very handsome.”

  “I bet you’ll be glad to see life returning to normal after all this palaver.”

  He has the tan, the squint, the inscrutability of all outdoors. He could be as old as my father. He’s sent his assistant to wait in the truck, in the passenger seat, where I can see him staring fixedly at the front of our house.

  “What do you mean by that?” I ask softly.

  He doesn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t hear me. We walk around front, him gently waving my cheque as though to dry the ink. You can see the clean blue patch on the weathered blue of the house, under the front windows where the graffiti was, and where I’ve been adding coats to Liam’s paint job in the days since they’ve been away.

  “Been doing some painting, there, I see,” the older one says.

  I say, “A little.”

  “Spot work.” He folds my cheque twice and puts it in the pocket of his overalls. “Covering up a bad spot.”

  “Something like that.”

  He hesitates, my landscaper. Then he says, “It’s that big one, isn’t it. That friend of your son. I saw him one time shoving things through the mailboxes around here. He the one giving you the trouble?”

  “Yes,” I say fervently.

  “You know the one I mean?”

  I nod.

  He nods too, looking towards the horizon, like he’s bored already.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “I don’t like to rat on a kid,” he says. I half expect him to pluck a blade of grass to stick in his mouth while we talk. “On the one hand, boys will be boys. On the other hand, some boys grow up faster than others. You’re nice people. Your son is a nice boy. You’ve been looking pretty spooked.”

  “No,” I say.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” He looks straight into my face, briefly, and says, “Good luck.” Then he gets into his truck.

  “What do you mean by that?” I say again, but he’s started the engine, he’s driving away. The assistant raises his arm through the open window in a wave – a single, decisive movement – and they’re gone, these naïfs, my well-wishers, racks of tools bumping and rattling like something donkey-drawn, like they’re off on their way back to another time.

  That night, I do what I should have done at the start: I hole up in Ty’s room and look.

  He’s made the bed, so I start there. I strip it, unsack the pillow, mound the linen in the hall in a colourful punky-smelling pile; throw open the window to give the air a rinsing. The night sucks at the blind, making a light clatter against the sill. It’s raining. I sit on the bare mattress, elbows on knees, feet braced, and consider. My intention is to take the place apart, brick by shingle, as it were, poke a flashlight into the dark places in his baby head and see what he thinks he’s been hiding there. He’s still mine, I keep thinking; he still belongs to me. Who does he think he is?

  Who does he think he is? I go to the computer first, putty-coloured CPU tucked inside the desk leg. I kick it a couple of times, trying to cross my legs in his child-assed swivel chair. My first bring-it-home discovery, then, about my son: he’s smaller than I am. I make a mental note to buy him a new chair for Christmas.

  I check his files, school work mostly, letters to his grandparents from Christmases past, and a list of web addresses salted away for when we let him get Internet access in his bedroom. It’s inevitable, only a matter of time. He wants NBA.com, Sports Illustrated, Mars-Hubble (bless him). The unsavouries I’m sure he’s got memorized. I go back to the bed and heft the mattress – nothing. But under the bed, now, are some items. Not a trove, but it’s a start. For instance, a stuffed dog. For instance, liquorice Twizzlers: red, my flavour. They’re a little stale but gummy sweet, just like I remember. Also a pair of corduroy pants, almost new, which (I guess) didn’t make it past the fashion masters at school, but which (he knows) won’t make it past his mom to the Sally Ann either. I add them to the pile in the hall, then change my mind and put them back so neither of us will have to explain. A broken telephone he liked to play with as a tyke (I intuit a sturdy, Boys’ Own resolve to fix it one day with tweezers and string and use it to lobby us for his own line); some sci-fi paperbacks with textured foil covers, guys in robes staring up at three moons. But no drugs, bloodied clothes, neo-Nazi paraphernalia, girlie magazines, cigarettes even. In his pencil kit, a single wrapped prophylactic; but the district nurse could have passed these out at school. In fact, didn’t I read something about this in the local paper, some Condoms in the Classroom fuss? Isn’t this a standard part of their kit now? I leave it in there with his Pink Pearl eraser and his Extra-Fine Black Felt Tips. I start to wonder if my son is maybe a bit of a prig.

  Downstairs the doorbell rings once, a quick shot, like I ought to know.

  “So, here I am,” Calvin says.

  He’s big, this Calvin, with that big dog shagginess, the sad eyes and the rare grin. When I don’t say anything he looks crushed: the slumping shoulders, the hung head. The sex would probably be terrific. But he doesn’t frighten me, and that’s a grave deficit; it guts the temptation, leaving a sweet shell with nothing inside.

  “This was wrong, wasn’t it,” he says. “I should leave, shouldn’t I.”

  I squint at him. “When you were a teenager, where did you hide stuff?”

  He gives me a look not unlike Jupiter’s frazzled look in the bathroom doorway.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, and let him in. I click on the outside porch light, illuminating the long panes on either side of the door.

  He looks around like he’s memorizing. He lifts his hand like he’s going to touch me, then lets it drop. “Where did you hide things, when you were a teenager?”

>   “In my head.”

  The next thing I know, I’m telling him the whole thing – the beating, the Parmenters, the police, the lawyer, the therapist, the graffiti, even Brill. I’m even telling him how Brill has rallied the neighbours against us. I’ve wanted him, I realize, this Calvin, this big shaggy dog; I’ve wanted him right from the beginning, for just this. The relief is like surfacing.

  “Let’s see his room,” Calvin says calmly. So far, I haven’t let him past the hall.

  I point automatically. “Shoes.”

  Upstairs he toes the pile of laundry in the hall. Ty’s room is cooler than the rest of the house, cold actually. When I turn back from closing the window he’s sitting on the bed. I say, “No way.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he says, shaking his head. He goes and kneels in front of the desk and runs his hand along the underside of the single drawer. Then he opens the cupboard door and starts feeling around inside Ty’s old sneakers.

  “Ew,” I say.

  “We count on that,” Calvin explains, handing me back a crumpled pack of Players.

  “Well, that’s not so bad.”

  I sit on the bed, holding the cigarettes, watching him work his way through the room. I can see he’s taking more care than I did, trying to leave things looking unruffled. He pokes his finger into the rind of a deflated basketball, shakes it, then puts it back the way it lay. “Basketball player, huh?”

  I flip-flop my hand.

  “Not a skateboard punk like his mom?” Grinning.

  I look down at the skulls on my biceps. “I’ve got to stop wearing this.”

  “Suits you.” He comes out of the cupboard. “I bet you were a scary kid.”

  I shrug. “Lonely. Like everyone. It was fun finding a tribe.”

  “I was a jock,” he says from the dresser. “In high school, I dated a cheerleader. But she refused to sleep with me and I became very morose. Does your son have a girlfriend?”