Believing Cedric (15 page)

Seeing the frightened look on Julie's face, Helena shot a quick glance toward the living room, where the Saturday morning cartoons were still safely blaring. She found herself wishing her husband were there. Why did he never drop by anymore in the middle of the day, with his transparent detective work, his jealousy, looking for clues of the illicit lovers that Helena had never had? Not that she was afraid for her safety (she doubted this odious man would lash out with his wife and daughter right at his side), but she could feel that his resentment was seething. Everyone could, including the little girl, who now looked like she was about to cry, gawking at her father, tuning in to his hostility.

“Now this is interesting,” Cedric said, having found (or not found) another clause in the lease. He laughed, shook his head, and took a step toward Helena. Julie reached out with her only free hand, Melissa in the other arm, and held on to his elbow, as if to restrain him. He responded to this by wrenching his arm free.

Helena straightened.

Melissa started to cry. Everyone turned to her.

“Oh just great,” Cedric said, tossing the lease back onto the table. “Do you see what you've done, you stupid cow? Do you see that?” He gestured at Melissa, now wailing in Julie's arms. Julie, an appalled look on her face, headed for the door, opening it wide and stepping out into the blowing snow, leaving it ajar behind her.

“Just fuckin' great.”

Helena looked Cedric over disgustedly, finally slipping off the end of her tether. “Ande gamisoy, uh! Esy eksogamo tekno! You! You go out of my house! Now, you
katharma
! Out!” She pointed. “Go!”

Kóstas and Yórgos quickly appeared in the living room doorway but stopped there, not moving, watching the scene unfold. A clip of classical music played from the cartoon behind them.

Cedric headed to the door, looking more in pursuit of his wife and daughter than someone obeying the order to vacate. He spoke to Helena over his shoulder, “Anyway, don't forget to hit us up for the paint job. And a new bathtub too while you're at it. You'll make a bundle on us, don't you worry.” He stepped outside and gently closed the door.

“Julie,” Helena heard him call. “Wait. Just a second. Hey, I said
wait
!”

Helena had followed closely behind him, and she locked the deadbolt as soon as she was within reach, then stood on her toes to peer through the peephole. She saw no sign of Julie and the little girl out in the street. Just Cedric, standing alone on the sidewalk, rubbing his forehead and looking around the neighbourhood like he was lost. Eventually, he hunched his shoulders, pulled the collar of his coat up over his neck, and walked out of sight.

“Ma?” asked Yórgos to his mother's back. “Who was that guy? I mean, what . . . was that all about?”

Helena returned to the kitchen table and picked up the lease papers. She noticed her hands were shaking. She filed the forms neatly into the drawer where they belonged and remained standing there in front of it, the drawer still open. “Notheen,” she answered. “That was about notheen. Just some stoopid katharma, thinks he knows everytheen.”

The television in the other room filled the silence that followed with the beginning of a commercial break, a man's voice like an auctioneer's, rapidly endorsing the “All-New-Hot-Wheels-Ultra-Hots, in stores everywhere.”

She closed the drawer and turned to her sons. “Honest,” she was speaking in Greek again. “Just some guy who's going crazy. That's all. Nothing more.”

She walked to the sink, turned on the tap. “Nothing more.”

the one free afternoon i'd had in

ages and thought i'd spend it

answering her tireless pestering

taking her by the hand into

the backyard to look for

something to do

dog days

toronto

syrupy heat

gooeing the tar between the

cracks like charcoal bubblegum

so I lugged the pool we bought

for her out of the shed

the one I wouldn't have

dreamt of having as a child

and she stood there

in her bathing suit

six and already shy

covering her sex

while i filled the

plastic with every

floating toy in production

water rippling at her ankles

glistening in a barbie-doll pink

and all she could do

was watch me

the hose drooping

from my hands

in a pout as

low as

hers

Melissa stood in front of the spray-painted train, thinking, thinking about the immensity of where and how we fit into it all, what we're forced to dwarf ourselves in measurement against—it's almost natural that such an overwhelmingness manifests itself physically, inspires something tangible, like graffiti, something left behind for the wayfarer to read, see, witness. Even if it's simply to say. “I was here. We were here. Once.” Wasn't that why people scratched their initials and names into newly paved slabs of cement, brandishing sticks to etch out letters and dates, children squatting down to push their palms flat into the congealing mud, why travellers, merchants, and crusaders of antiquity inscribed other cultures' holy buildings and landmarks? They were all saying the same thing really. They were saying, quietly, soberly: “We weren't important. We weren't someone whom you would normally remember, someone who altered a heroic past or a courageous future. And why didn't we? Well, it turned out to be much, much bigger than us, so big that we couldn't. But we could change this wall, this train, this rock, this bathroom stall. Maybe even with something aesthetic or poetic, something thought-provoking, challenging, something that we drew or wrote in protest, disgust, dissent—or maybe, maybe it was just something. But something that was ours. Exactly ours. Put down in precisely the size and colour we intended it to be. It's not much, of course, but it was born solely from our choice to leave it behind. This, here, is our paltry stain that we've chosen over sterility, our tiny peripheral shout over silence.”

Steven was walking toward the bright lights of a gas station at Pearldale and Finch, his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, one of them fingering the blade of a knife. He knew that a switchblade would have been more formidable, dramatic, and so probably more effective, but an old folding penknife—with its pin so caked with grime that he'd struggled to open it—was all he could find rummaging through the drawers of the house he'd woken up in. Which meant it would have to do. He saw an expensive-looking car pull up to one of the pumps, a chubby man get out of it, unlock his gas-tank cover, and hinge it open. He was blond, dressed in pricey casualwear, and looking around a little uneasily, probably feeling more than a touch out of place, as if his low-fuel light had just flickered while on his way out of town, up the 400, heading to cottage country, ready to spend a day and a half at his own personal plot of furbished boreal shoreline, with its dock and covered boat, with its weathervane mounted onto the apex of his boathouse, for aesthetical purposes only. The man looked critically at the grease on the pump and hose, put the nozzle into the hole, and twisted around to watch the digits of the pump flitter into higher values.

Steven Greig had a mother somewhere, a mother that had given birth to three children, from three different fathers. The oldest of her children, a girl, had been promptly whisked out of the delivery room and adopted at birth. Steven imagined her sometimes, sure she was living a well-adjusted life somewhere else in Canada, somewhere green and kind. After her, Steven's mother had a boy, who was also taken out of earshot before he'd cried for the first time, and was probably then rewarded the same fate, jumping through the sprinklers in some architecturally controlled neighbourhood in Ontario or British Columbia, a neighbourhood that was, again he imagined, green and kind. But on the afternoon that Steven came into the world, things were different. His grandmother happened to be in the same hospital, on the same day.

She'd accidentally learned, by means of an overly helpful assistant at the registry, that her very own daughter was in the hospital as well, and in the natal wing no less. Not having seen her in more than five years, she thought the coincidence providential, in the same way it was providential that she was in the process of turning over a new leaf—swore to it, honest to goodness, once and for all—and had been straight and sober for almost three days consecutive, following the bleak news about her liver, and a few lumps that were awaiting removal and testing. After wheeling her
IV
pole through several fluorescent and disinfected corridors, she learned that she was a grandmother for the very first time (having never heard a word of the grandson and granddaughter who'd preceded Steven). She demanded to see him, this newborn, her blood. The disinclined hospital staff checked records, papers, legalities, murmured to one another behind high counters, and finally assented. She picked him up, rocked him, stuck her pinkie into his mouth, cooed. She had a great idea.

A month after she'd taken him home, her concerned neighbours had called the police so many times to complain about the child's incessant, brutal, and—the most pressing reason for the phone calls—noisy neglect that Steven could legally be taken out of her custody. However, as he was officially under the care of a blood relative, Child Services was obliged to contact other genealogical connections in hopes of finding another, better suited, family member who might be interested in taking him in. His aunt, who had eight children of her own, and was living in the largest low-income housing project in North America, Regent Park, in inner-city Toronto, reluctantly agreed, in the diminishing hope of receiving more—and maybe even, for once, adequate—child support cheques.

Steven's first memory was one of contentment and self-worth. He and his cousin were walking to a corner store (he used this term “cousin” because of its blanketed convenience; though he'd never actually sat down and calculated his relation to the people he lived with, whether they were step-cousins, first, second, third, half-cousins, or no relation whatsoever, he referred to them all, simply, as “cousins”), and as they were walking, this particular cousin, Kipp, was shrewdly and subtly pointing out policemen along the way. He was teaching Steven to look for the cars with OPP written on the side, or the unmarked sedans that parked like slinking (though always well-buffed and Armor-Alled) ghosts in the backdrop, the only vehicles that had two men sitting casually inside them, as if having nothing better to do with their days and nights than chat in the comfort of a Buick, nonchalantly raising a pair of binoculars to their eyes every once in a while. His cousin also pointed out the neighbourhood snitches, who had been blackmailed into collaborating with those very men in the sedans. He made sure that Steven could identify them all. “Hey, Stevie, see these guys over there, on your right? No, no, your other right, bud—yeah, that's it, good man. See those guys there? Snitches. Fuckin' snitches. The whole group've 'em. Gottem? Good. Good man.” At seven years old, Steven appreciated very much being called a man. He was important. Already.

Sometimes they would go out after dark and stop just before the door of a tiny store that had closed for the night, his cousin crouching down on his haunches, talking softly into Steven's face. “Okay, little buddy, here's what's gonna happen: I'm gonna go inside and get us some treats, okay? So if you see anyone coming, any cops or snitches, or anyone else who looks pissed off, I want you to knock on the glass, like this.” He wormed a knuckle between the bars on the door, tapped three times. “Okay?”

Steven would comply gravely, understanding.

“Good.” His cousin would stand and take a few steps towards the back of the building but would often stop, hesitate, then bend down again to ask what kind of treat, exactly, he wanted from inside.

Steven was the ninth child in the house; five boys, three girls, two rooms. He understood that he was living with his aunt and uncle instead of his parents, but didn't know why, and already knew better not to ask. His aunt and uncle weren't happy people at the best of times, but questions of any sort, about school, clothes, milk, eggs, seemed to reliably set them off into a frustrated rant that often spiralled into rage; the mayhem of nine children weaving skittishly between them, trying to get out of the house, or, if it was winter, trying to get away into the farthest corner; someone getting slapped in the head as he or she passed, another shoved onto the ground, bouncing against the drum-clang of the stove. There were only two people in the house that could talk back and deal with the consequences: Kipp, who, at sixteen, had already found several ways to make his own money, and Natalie, whose glamorous air came from her well-earning job as a stripper and the near super-idol status she'd attained at having been a Sunshine Girl on the third page of
The Toronto Sun
(the picture of which Steven had her sign). Everyone else had to make themselves as small as they could when it came down to it, or run.

The first time Steven saw someone shot, he was ten years old. He had a friend who lived across the way, at Sackville and Gerrard, whose house he would sleep over at, sometimes for days at a time, no questions asked. His friend's mother was bedridden with pulmonary emphysema, which amounted to the house being reigned by her teenaged sons; the walls lined with calligraphy, illustrations, and graffiti by anyone who could wield a felt pen and was struck with the inclination, dishes festering in a sink that was perpetually backed up with an orange and oily scum, and adolescents sitting on a sofa they'd dragged into the kitchen, passing around a box of artificially sweetened and coloured cereal through a mist of narcotic smoke, threads and clouds of hashish, pot, and sometimes something else that was mildly sweet or mildly sour. He and his friend were standing outside when it happened. A young man with a bulky jacket was pacing in front of the house, as if waiting, as if wanting to talk with someone inside, but was uncomfortable with entering. One of the boys from in the house stepped into the doorway for no apparent reason, saw the young man with the bulky jacket, and stiffened, terrified, hands out on the doorframe on either side of him. Steven was watching his reaction, so didn't see the gun, just heard the staccato
bam
, and watched his body fold onto the porch, limp and lifeless. He remembers hearing the other boy sprinting away, and the sugary smell of burnt gunpowder.