Believing Cedric (19 page)

The suspicion that there was sexual abuse taking place at the bed and breakfast worked in the way that suspicions do, clinging to clumsy phrases and glances, to the words that were being so carefully left unsaid. It was, of course, the family's one real son, who had limitless access to empty rooms, unseen corners, and moments in a day to take advantage of his foster sisters. The suspicion was finally verified with Steven's own ears while he was changing the sheets in one of the rooms and heard an unnatural scuffle in one of the adjoining suites. He pressed his head up against the wall, heard a rhythmic whimper that, the closer he listened to it, only became more subdued, more painful, more ugly. He stepped away from the peach-painted gyprock, staring at it. It occurred to him that, were he a hero, like the ones in the movies—Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Roger Moore—he would have kicked open the door, pulled the man off, punched him out. Saved the day. But a hero he was not. He didn't even have the mettle to tell anyone about it.

And he hated to admit it, he really did, but he also didn't want his summer to end just yet, which is exactly what would happen when the police came round. As it stood, things were good for him there. It was a nice place, a place where he felt something inside of him shifting, changing form, maybe even mending. Yeah, sure, sure it was all fringed with a fifth and sordid defilement. But wasn't everything? And for once, finally, it had nothing to do with him. He was out of the loop. And was only making a conscious decision to refrain from stepping into it.

Steven skirted the times and places where the abuse took place, and it continued much as it had before he'd sussed it out. Sitting at his spot by the lake, black flies eventually gave way to mosquitoes, to horse flies, to acid flies. To nights with a cool edge, where stars punctured a crisp dark, and geese trumpeted by in invisible formations, sounding closer than they really were. Until, at last, when one of the teenagers being raped ran away, was picked up by the police, and told all, it came to an end.

The hammer dropped quickly. And as the evidence mounted, Child Services thought it best to—at least temporarily—close down the foster home. The police arrived as the transport, in order to interview the remaining foster children, ensuring they build a solid case before they all dispersed to other homes. When Steven saw the officers strolling toward the dock, he felt something stormlike rising in his chest again, jumped to his feet, and fled.

He ran first along the lakeshore, then into the forest, crashing through the undergrowth, over rose-hued outcroppings of Canadian Shield, hollows of bunchberry and horsetail, stands of aspen that shivered above him, until he realized he'd gotten himself a bit lost, the trees dead-ending where sentinel snags rose out of a wide marsh that spread out around him. At first he'd thought to walk through it, part the sedges, and end up on the other side, but as soon as he walked into the reeds he found himself stepping onto a ground that was veiled and unnaturally soft, which had him rethinking the idea. He turned back and found a bed of moss that was as soft as the padding on the floor in The Quiet Room, where a lump of exposed granite offered him a spot to catch his breath. He sat down, looked around.

There were some cattails jutting out of the marsh's edge, most of them having gone to seed, their brown velvet splitting along a seam that seemed to bleed out with a kind of downy cotton. He noticed the fall colours standing out against the browns and greys of the wetland, a yellow leaf caught in the sepia culms, a brush-dab of maroon, a fist of rust. There were also birds, he realized, twittering and chirring in the rushes in front of him, hidden. He wondered what they looked like. He wished they would fly, wished he could see them in the whorled cloud of their beating wings.

Then he heard the police in the distance, quashing through the sphagnum behind him, getting closer, following the path of his broken branches, the logs he'd folded over, grass he'd trampled. He knew he was only postponing the inevitable. But he also knew that he would remember this. This place. His time by the lake. The feeling that he was slowly, slowly, becoming connected to something. Something worth submersing himself inside, surrendering to. Something bigger than him. And what he liked most about this “something” was that it didn't require a name. The only thing it required was countryside, and silence.

Steven was eventually taken to another group home in Toronto, where he put on a nice face, said his pleases and thank-yous for two days, and, after dinner one night, found a small window to slip out of. He had five months before turning eighteen, at which time he would no longer be a “crown ward of the state,” a pawn that could be displaced at any time, according to the whims of people who didn't know him or his history. Twenty weeks to lay low and avoid the police, with the understanding that he was becoming less a priority to them with every day that passed. And with that in mind, he had a plan.

He was going to save as much money as was possible for a petty criminal, and with it, he was going to go back out there, into the woods. Somewhere up north, or anywhere really, as long as it was by a lake. He'd find a spot and get himself set up there, look for a place to live, pay rent, and all the other things you had to pay for. (He wasn't sure how this worked either: electricity, heating, water—did you have to pay for water if you lived on a lake?) Then he'd find a job, cutting wood or something, building brackets to store canoes, cleaning fish—whatever. Because now he knew that there was actually work to do “out there,” had seen it with his own eyes, whole communities of people with jobs, houses, and vehicles, people who lived entire lifetimes in these places. His plan was, simply, to become one of them. And he wasn't naive about it. He understood that, to get there, he'd have to fight more than they'd had to. But the way he saw it, if he could pull himself back from the vacuum of the psychiatric system, he could pull himself out of the inner city as well. Yeah. Of course he could.

He remembered the dealers on the Boardwalk in Regent Park, how they carried around fisted wads of twenty-dollar bills, how his cousin Kipp kept a roll of red fifties down the front of his pants, with one or two halos of brown hundreds layered between them, like the rings in a tree that denoted an exceptional season. After all this time, those spools of money were still the largest he'd ever seen, had access to. And it was just the kind of money he needed to make now.

So Steven found himself walking in the general direction of his old home, passing haunts that had changed, and haunts that had not. It was 1984, the name of a famous book, he'd heard, about authoritarian figures watching you as unwaveringly as the camera in The Quiet Room, as the ghost cars that cruised the perimeter of the Boardwalk. And because this was his first night
AWOL
, when more than ever, the surveying eyes of Toronto would be on the lookout for him, he decided to take to the back alleys.

Steven loved alleyways, loved how they were made up of the parts of people's lives that were most hidden, most indicative, most real. The only cars that were parked in them either gleaming-new or corroding-old, tiny mouths of rust around wheel wells flaking open like cold sores; televisions with imploded cathode-ray tubes and screens a spiderweb grey, spun around the point of impact; broken umbrellas pressed flat on the ground, tattered and bat-winged into a sprawl like the fossil of a pterodactyl stretching out into mudstone; and brick walls frosted with the acrylic of vandalism, graffitists with their strange hierarchy and one-upmanship, spray paint cancelling certain designs while others were left expressly untouched, framed by signatures and symbols encroaching with tentative caution.

Steven crossed Parliament and into Regent Park and had soon found someone he recognized to bring him up-to-date. He learned that his aunt and uncle had moved away (probably for the best, as he'd intended on pounding at their door the first time he passed by, giving them an earful, maybe more). Of the two cousins he revered most in the household, Natalie—of past Sunshine Girl fame—had become a prostitute and rumoured heroin addict, while Kipp, quite the reverse, was cleaner than ever and had ambitiously moved up in the world. Leaving his small-time dealings and corner-store robberies behind, he'd gained himself the reputation as the savviest mover of handguns in underground Toronto. By Regent Park standards, he was rich.

Kipp was glad to see him, reaching up to ruffle his hair when he opened the door, pulling him inside. As they caught up and reminisced, they were both careful not to broach the topic of his aunt or uncle or the fact that Steven had been committed after they'd outwardly rejected him, beginning a long list of tribulations that also went unmentioned. References to the past were kept nostalgic and fleeting. Besides, the present was much more interesting. And as if reading Steven's mind, Kipp handed him a bottle of Moosehead, walked to the window to steal a look outside, and started talking about the entrepreneurial mood in the streets, how, these days, and in only the last few months, the opportunity to make big,
big
money had sprung up out of nowhere. Steven chuckled, pried the cap off his beer, and listened like a fox to a rodent under the snow.

It had come in from Los Angeles, and had swept across the continent as fast as cars could drive. It was a drug that hit hard, didn't last long, and every first-time buyer became an instant regular customer. It was essentially cocaine, but instead of needing a laboratory, dangerous reactions, and chemists to produce it, anyone with access to coca bushes, baking soda, and water could do the trick. The water inside caused it to sizzle and “crack” when you lit it, hence lending it the name that most people had adopted. And as long as you didn't screw up like his sister Maya, he'd warned, and start smoking it yourself, you could be a rich man in no time. Kipp weighed out the look on Steven's face, then picked up the phone. “I know a guy who just got a ton of the shit. Start you out.” He dialled a number, ear to the receiver, stole another glance through the window. “Hey, Stevie,” he said before the person on the other end had answered. “Need a place to stay till y'get settled?”

It was better money than he'd ever hoped for. Supply could barely keep up with demand, and people naturally trusted him, many of them remembering his face and name from the days he'd run errands for Kipp. He soon acquired the reputation of being a “smart kid,” someone who steered clear of the hard stuff and had a commercial edge, someone who was either going to become a formidable presence in Regent or find a way out of it.

By the time his eighteenth birthday came around, he had a coil of bills so thick he'd stopped counting them, roughly dividing it into thirds, carrying two on his body and stashing one in his room at Kipp's place. However, as good as things were going for him, the scene had its drawbacks. Crack was everywhere, and everyone was smoking it, a constant burnt-candy smell wafting between the walls and blocks of the housing complex, puffs of sweet-plastic smoke rising from corners where kids were crouching in the dark, glass pipes hovering close to their lips, having just bought a “twenty” from him. Twenty bucks for a half-gram enveloped in Saran Wrap, ripped away and lit up every few minutes to maintain the effect, which would, at most, last a half-hour, only to find them strung out, open-mouthed, and frantically looking for more. Or ways to get more.

He sometimes traded it for sex but was famously choosy with whom he made this arrangement. One of the girls he slept with surprised him one bright winter afternoon with yet another drawback. She'd just heard his family name for the first time. “Steven Greig, eh?” She looked him over impishly. “How much you wanna bet I know all about the first time you got laid,” hands on a set of bony hips, “Steven Greig.”

“Yeah?” he said with little interest really, reaching into his pocket and producing a “forty” for her, as agreed. She told him how she knew Kirsti Farley, how they'd become good friends after he “left” the neighbourhood. Kirsti had talked fondly of him, said they'd both been at the wading pool when someone got shot there, that they ran away and hid together, said she'd lost her virginity to him before either of them had hair below the beltline.

Steven nodded, asked how she was doing now, where she was, in Canada, the world.

She rubbed her cheek, “Well . . . last time I saw her she was talking shit. Smokin' lots and had, like, this great idea to like,
pretend
to hook. You know? Like, agree on a price with the guy, get the cash beforehand, as usual, but then, like, pull a knife or something, tell the guy to get out of his car, then drive a few miles away, and like, dump it and walk off. Said she did it once, and it worked like a charm, so . . .” she finished, seemed about to leave, find a warm corner to smoke in.

“And?” Steven asked, holding on to her arm.

“And nothing.” A shrug. “Haven't seen her since.” She pulled her arm out of Steven's grip and walked away, across an empty courtyard, over compressed snow and fairy rings of dog urine. He watched her knock on a door, exchange a few words with the fat man who opened it, and disappear inside.

It got him thinking, all these unhappy endings. Maybe it was time to go, take what he'd managed to save and run. Make do. Make it make do. Because, though he'd always known that the world in the inner city was in a state of constant and varying decay, it occurred to him for the first time that, possibly, he had no choice but to decay a little along with it. Maybe the easier money was to make, the more, somehow, it cost.

That night, he promised himself he'd leave in a week or two. Swore to it, honest to goodness, once and for all. But then came the evening he was walking back from the Boardwalk, turned a corner, heard a thump, felt nothing, no pain, no panic, just a slow and slothful writhing to wake up, lying face down on a frigid sidewalk with the biggest headache of his life. His pants were still undone, and he didn't have to feel for the hidden wads of cash on his body to know they were gone. Furious, he almost told Kipp about it. But in the end refrained, knowing that, if he did,
someone
, somewhere, would have been shot, probably killed. No, he had to keep looking ahead, far ahead. And he had to stay focused on that place—wherever it was—that place with a lake by its side. So, with a strained and less-than-stoical resolve, he used the last third of his savings to buy as much “cornbread” as he could get his hands on. Then got back to work.