The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Then the reality of the present came crashing ashore. Andrew, who had applied to Stanford for graduate school, got a letter of acceptance. A scholarship even. A ticket some three thousand miles away. This piece of apparently good news, this integral square in their plans for the future, arrived carrying an ominous stench.

  In lieu of words, Emma started doing strange things like throwing textbooks at him and, once, a pot full of chili. Rather than react, Andrew withdrew. He used expressions like “acting out” and Emma looked at him with narrow, cat-like eyes as he spoke with all the disapproval of a school principal. His dispassionate reasoning was like gasoline on her fire and she screamed at him in the hope of waking his soul. Nothing. No sign of heart, either angry or forgiving. No emotion whatsoever—Where’s your feeling? you bastard. It’s all ambition with you, and no soul.

  Blue, on the other hand, was all soul and no ambition. He kept dreaming over and over that Niagara Falls was drying up, throwing less and less water over its shoulder every year. He had tried to warn people but no one would listen. Worst of all, Emma laughed and told him that waterfalls only ceased when people had given up crying—when it had become so futile that there was no more point to letting go. He left the couch and stood for hours under the great wall of spray. He stood there at least once a day that winter, convinced that every day there was less and less water. He stretched out his tongue and he was sure he tasted salt. Tears, he thought, thinking of what Emma had said. But it can’t be. If the fresh water turns to salt, we’re all ruined. But if we stop crying, the water will dry up all together. Either way, we’re sunk.

  Over the winter, things calmed to a dull roar. Blue’s eardrums were numb from the sound of falling water and the only thing he could hear was the call of the wild.

  On Valentine’s Day he decided to look for love. He went to the butterfly conservatory, where he hadn’t been since he was a child. The woman behind the counter looked at the boy who was six foot two and two hundred pounds and hesitated as she handed him his change. She looked at him like she was afraid he would open his mouth and spit a room full of rat poison, or pull an Uzi out of his biker jacket and hold her hostage while he let all the butterflies go free.

  He wanted to reassure her. Tell her he loved butterflies, and only wanted to stand among them. Perhaps he would sketch some of them in his sketchbook later like he had done when he was a child. “I used to come here with my dad when I was a kid,” he tried to explain. But it was too late, he’d been defeated by the threatened look in her eyes, and rather than enjoy his moments beyond the turnstile, he looked down at the ground in a room full of fluttering wings.

  The truck seemed to be the only good thing in his life at that moment. It toughened him to sit inside steel casing, it made a man out of him when he drove. But his days as a tow-truck driver had been numbered from the start. There was a lot less cruising for chicks with a cup of coffee gripped between his thighs and a lot more arguing with people in suits than he had bargained for. He thought tow-truck drivers were cool until he realized they were only cool to themselves. Everybody else treated them like scum. Like piranhas. He wasn’t quite ready to be universally despised.

  He stared through glass at a crusty row of chrysalises hanging on for life. He watched a new butterfly box her way out of her prehistoric sarcophagus, emerge a hesitant, slippery beauty. He saw freedom, and resolved then and there to make like a monarch and migrate. Emma had done it. His trip might be the end of him, but he didn’t care. What mattered was direction.

  Trespassing

  Over roast pork in a dark, wood-panelled dining room on Easter Sunday, Annelisa was frothing at the mouth over Andrew’s acceptance to Stanford. Her baby boy had a brilliant future ahead of him. “I’m so proud of you,” she repeated.

  Andrew blushed in silence, and Emma audibly wrestled a piece of pork fat between her teeth. Nothing felt right. Not the meat in her mouth, not the pictures on the walls, not Andrew beside her, not the words coming from Annelisa’s mouth. All the pieces were the same but they just didn’t seem to add up the way they once had.

  She could see Annelisa was gearing up for one of those nauseating rides where she determined everyone’s lives according to her own fantasies. I see where Andrew gets his ambition, Emma thought for the thousandth time, as Annelisa turned to her daughter, mapping out her life for her as well. She was keen to see Rebecca go to med school. Probably hoped she’d become a brain surgeon. Emma watched Rebecca as she arranged the peas on her plate in a straight line and sent telepathic messages to the potatoes on her plate. Go away, Emma could hear her saying. I don’t eat you. I don’t eat much at all. Emma kept watching as Rebecca’s pupils darted back and forth and Annelisa persisted: question after suggestion after question.

  Just when it looked to Emma like Rebecca was going to blow, Russell interjected and said, “Just give her time.”

  Emma waited for Annelisa’s reaction. Watched and waited as Annelisa’s knuckles turned white. “Time?” she shouted at Russell. “You sound just like her father.”

  Confused, Emma slumped back in her chair. She stared at Annelisa; she looked around the table at all their faces as if she were looking through a one-way mirror. Through the glass, their features were distorted and enormous, all big hair and big teeth and pupils stuck on overdrive. They looked ugly, foreign. Foreign was her father’s word, although she’d never understood his meaning of it before. Emma had heard him use it against people she thought looked exactly like him. But perhaps this is the way Oliver saw himself in the world. Like he was the last surviving member of a species roaming around a planet populated with otherworldly pretence.

  She stared out the kitchen window. She saw Oliver there, lurking in the vegetable garden, feet hovering just above the spot where lettuce would eventually grow. He rolled his eyes and Emma was relieved. At least somebody, even a deadbeat dad hanging over a vegetable patch, understood. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.

  “You know what, Annelisa …” Emma began saying, much to Andrew’s horror. “I don’t think you give a shit about anyone’s welfare or happiness. All you care about is superficial markers of status: credentials, class, material stuff. You’d like Rebecca to be a doctor even if she was prescribing herself a thousand laxatives every day.” Emma touched her lower lip. She wondered if Oliver had actually said the words: poked his head through the kitchen window and blurted them out.

  “Emma! How dare you. When we’ve given you a home.”

  “I’m not an orphan,” Emma said defensively. “I do have parents. I do come from somewhere,” she said.

  “Andrew?” she said later.

  “Yes,” he replied, his tone terse. He still hadn’t forgiven her for her dinnertime outburst.

  “Russell isn’t Rebecca’s father?”

  “He’s our stepfather.”

  “So he isn’t your father either?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

  “Because it’s irrelevant.”

  Irrelevant? The truth was, the more she saw, the more she realized they weren’t a family at all. It was all an illusion and Emma had bought it wholesale. What’s that thing they say about castles in the sand? she wondered, as she stared at the ceiling. Does it mean that one swift kick from a bully on the beach can destroy everything you think you have? Does it mean that without cement foundations your house is likely to crumble?

  “You know, Andrew,” she eventually began to speak. “You just can’t keep building a skyscraper without scaffolding, especially when people are questioning whether the whole building was ill-conceived and structurally unsound in the first place.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. My dad lost all sense of the third dimension—perhaps I wasn’t even born with it.”

  “You don’t make any sense to me any more,” he said in frustration.

  “Did I ever really?”

  “If y
ou are so hell bent on ruining things, Emma, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Ruining,” she muttered to herself. “I make ruins.”

  Waking up alone in the dull morning light she packed a duffel bag full of clothes and books. She tiptoed out of the house for fear that the whole building was going to come crashing down on top of her. There were footsteps in the vegetable garden. The prints of well-worn running shoes. She stepped in, bare-soled and angry, and looked through the dirty kitchen window for one last time. She had just enough sense left to put the rock in her hand back down.

  West

  All men seemed to be heading west. Andrew off to California, and now Blue, who’d announced he was sick of living in a hell hole, was going to travel across the country in search of somewhere or something better.

  He never said he was going looking for his father. Elaine didn’t know it, Emma might have been able to guess, but even Blue wasn’t sure if that was the motivation. What he felt was scattered. He hadn’t given up on his father at all. He’d just lost him. He’d stayed away for too long, and Oliver had disappeared. He’d gone searching and come up with nothing. In the coffee shop he’d asked the regular customers, asked them again and again, asked them until one of them finally gave him an answer. Truth or lie, it didn’t matter, it was an answer he was after.

  “I think I heard him talkin’ about goin’ out west,” a construction worker with a harelip had said. “But the guy’s nuts. Always mumbling about something or other.”

  The spectre of Oliver hung haunting in the West, because it had to hang somewhere, and Blue didn’t know which way to turn. Some cat named Fucked Up had grabbed a hold of the end of his ball of yarn and was tearing through the streets of the city leaving him thin and stretched to his limits. He felt like lime-green thread lying on cold pavement. Pointless wool spaghetti. No sauce and not enough for a meal.

  As he was boarding the bus, Elaine handed her son a bagged lunch like he was a kid going off to summer camp. It was a sad peanut-butter gesture—a tragic miscalculation.

  “See ya later,” he said, with a wave over his shoulder as he boarded the bus.

  “Call when you get there, won’t you?” Elaine pleaded.

  “Yeah, yeah, Mum. Don’t fuss,” Blue responded.

  Although she was relieved he was going, doing something other than sitting on the couch as he had for the past several months, she was worried about him. It wasn’t easy having an angry young man living under the same roof, punching holes in the walls, plastering over them, and then punching holes in them again. He was looking more and more like his father every day and God knows that wasn’t a sight she wanted to see every night when she got home from work. But he’d stopped talking altogether lately, and that was what worried her most.

  A week before, he had walked in at dinnertime and simply announced that he was moving to Banff. Elaine, nearly choking on a Brussels sprout, had said, “If that’s what you want to do, Blue. But you do realize it can get awfully cold, don’t you?”

  “At least I’ll be able to get a fucking job there. Better prospects than this shit hole,” he had said.

  “Tell Em she can keep my truck for me. Drive it out and see me when she gets back—that is, if she ever gets back,” he had said the day before he left, tossing Elaine the keys. “But tell her not to drive it like a girl, okay?”

  “Are you going to tell your sister you’re leaving?”

  “I don’t really think she’ll give a shit,” he replied.

  Feeling guilty, he did call her later that evening though. “Em, I’m thinking about going out west for a while. Making some money, getting the fuck out of this place.”

  “But for how long?” she asked, her heart sinking.

  “Dunno.”

  “Won’t you be lonely?” she said sadly. “I mean, I would be lonely.”

  “I’m used to it. Doesn’t matter where you are.”

  “I guess so. But at least you’ve got family, people who know you here,” she tried, grasping at straws.

  “Right,” he said, making no effort to mask the sarcasm.

  She knew he was right: they were not much of a family, and she’d hardly been much of a sister to him of late. “And what about Dad?” she asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Have you given up on him?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Just wondering. I mean if you go, he won’t know where to find you if he chooses to show up again.”

  “Thought you didn’t give a shit.”

  “Just taking inventory, I guess. I don’t know who’s here and who isn’t anymore.”

  “I’ve gone looking, but I can’t find him.” Blue didn’t say he sensed this absence was different, but Emma could hear it in his voice. Up until that point she’d always expected that they would eventually hear from Oliver again. That he would call Blue from a payphone somewhere and say, “Lou! Come and have a steak with your old man.” Or call Emma and say, “Telephone banking, that’s where it’s at, Emma,” and ask her whether she’d finished her useless degree yet. In Blue’s voice, though, she heard the possibility that this time he might have disappeared for good.

  Emma hated to admit it to herself, but the thought of oceans and worlds between her and Oliver offered some relief. Maybe he’s even dead, she thought, swallowing guilt.

  “Will you write to me?” she asked Blue.

  “I’m not much of a correspondent, Em. But I’ll read if you write.”

  “But how will I know if you get my letters if you don’t write back?”

  “Booly boo,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” she nodded. She’d have to listen to him in a previous tongue. A language they’d shared before words were intelligible; one they used now when words didn’t make enough sense. “Aren’t you going to miss me?” she asked hopefully.

  He didn’t know quite how to respond. He had, after all, been missing her for years.

  Blue gave his mother a peace sign from behind the green glass of the bus window. He saw her clasp her arms across her waist and start to cry. She looked sad, his mother, she looked tragic. He couldn’t stand to see it. He gave her a final nod, stuck his Walkman on, threw his coat over his head, inhaled the stale smell of tobacco from the lining of his coat, and closed his eyes.

  As Elaine watched the bus pull away, she replayed the sickening memory of having abandoned her children long ago. She didn’t often give in to guilt, but here in the moment of seeing her child leave her behind, sadness overwhelmed her. She had put Emma and Blue on a bus together when they were small, hung signs around their necks, and left it up to fate and someone else’s driving to get them to their destination.

  In the most horrible chamber of her heart, she had wondered whether they would even make it to Niagara Falls. She had entertained the thought that perhaps she and Oliver would arrive in their new city to discover that they were still on their honeymoon; that the past several years had just been some awful nightmare. In that imagined reality, Oliver would be meaningfully and lucratively employed, and she would be writing some bound-to-be best seller and baking bread to soothe her soul between chapters. Children would only be a concept: a nice, theoretical subject they occasionally discussed over some civilized meal and a bottle of wine.

  In that moment, years ago, she had wished her children unborn. Now they were leaving her. She deserved it, she supposed, but she could nevertheless feel her heart breaking as she was left to stand alone. A husband who had betrayed her and lost his mind, or perhaps the other way around. A daughter who had packed her bags as a teenager, adopted a new family and a whole new idea of herself. And now her son, a troubled, high school dropout, leaving on a bus for somewhere simply because it was anywhere but there. She was the only one who hadn’t moved.

  In that moment in the bus terminal, Elaine was more aware than ever that she was indeed their mother. She had spawned likeness: she had produced two more aliens in the world.

  Blue dreamt his way to Lake Super
ior. Dreamt of white mountains. He was shouting across a valley at a tiny figure standing at the summit of the next peak. “Dad? It’s time to come down now,” he shouted. “You’ve been there long enough.” But the figure didn’t move. “Are you stuck or something?” he continued. “Do you want me to come and get you?”

  At that, the figure started to run. He slipped on a patch of ice and went crashing down the far side of the mountain. Blue knew there was no way he could have survived that fall, but when the figure disappeared from sight he started to run down the side of the mountain to rescue him. He would keep running, running through centuries of snow, until he found the body.

  Despite himself, Blue started scratching a letter to Emma on the back of a paper bag. She’d said, “I’m going to miss you,” and the words had stayed lodged in his stomach. It only looked like he was the one leaving, really, she’d gone long ago. There was more, so much more he could have said.

  He stuffed his mind with straw for two days as they crossed the Prairies. He thought of himself as a silo standing solitary on the horizon. The light in his head didn’t switch on again until they stopped at the bus station in Calgary, where he stepped off the bus for a cigarette. Disembarking, he looked around furtively: this was the epicentre of Oliver’s new world, he could feel it in his bowels. This was the West, where business was booming, all concrete and cars and signs pointing toward “New Communities” where houses spawned other houses and crept up hills overnight without regard for geography or humanity. He bought a stamp and mailed the letter to Emma that he’d laboured over despite himself. He had his first shit in a thousand miles, pulled his cap down over his eyes, and boarded the bus again.

  The mountains rose up higher and higher on either side of him, funnelling him into bittersweet thoughts of life when there was only one road ahead. He remembered the rarest of days. Oliver had taken Emma and Blue on a spontaneous outing one fall afternoon when the leaves had started to become crunchy underfoot. Together they had picked a bushel of McIntosh apples on a farm at the base of the Niagara Escarpment. The two of them had watched in amazement as Oliver stood against a tree and ate an entire apple, including the core. He spat the seeds out and said, “This is the only part you can’t eat. They’ll get lodged in your appendix and sprout roots.” They believed him: pictured tree branches growing out of his ears. Thought of the appendix as fertile ground for rooting badness. Blue thought that’s why his math teacher died of cancer. He remembers her sitting behind her desk one day and eating an entire orange, including the peel. “She has tumours,” they said later, and he pictured her face buckling in response to the orange grove growing under the surface of her skin.