Inukshuk (18 page)

“You
are
a druggie! Thomas, you have to leave now. My dad would so kill me.”

“How's he going to find out?”

“Because I'll tell him, and then he'll call the cops!”

“Why would you do that?”

Her mouth opened, but no words came. Behind her, the microwave dinged, and Thomas observed, looking through the radiation-proof glass of the oven door, that both of their hot chocolates were silently boiling over, foam steadily streaming down the sides of the mugs, though the oven had switched itself off. “Jill . . .” he began. She was closer suddenly, eyes lowered, reaching for his hand. He shoved the pills into a back pocket and reached to draw her in, opening his arms, but she dodged him. Sidestepped and took hold of his hand.

“Thomas! What
happened
to your
hand
?”

“Practicing hockey moves, like I said. It's nothing. Sometimes you get a little carried away. People get hurt.”

“
That's
not nothing.”

“You should see the other guy.”

“Shut
up
.”

He nodded. “I tell myself that all the time. Half the time, my every
other waking thought is that I should just shut up, or go jump off a bridge. Doesn't seem to work. I—”

“Would you please be quiet for one second? I've got to think what to do.”

“Nothing at all. You don't have to do a thing.”

“Give me those pills.”

“No.”

“
Give
them to me
now
.”

“No. Why?”

“Because I said! I need to see . . .”

This time she didn't resist or sidestep him, though for a moment she continued the pretext of trying to get at the pill bottle. There was the usual sweet smell of her shampoo and lip gloss, lotion or whatever else she wore, and the faint hot-cold pressure of her breath against his neck, then her arms going around his waist and the familiar insistent weight of her against him. He closed his eyes not to see it—not to notice up close the same light fuzz that covered the rest of her face, but stiffer-seeming, blanched and stranded against the alien purple skin. Felt her lips on his chin, teeth grazing the corner of his mouth and then right against his mouth, lips pursed, lightly sucking, tongue probing the fronts of his teeth. By habit, he turned so that if his eyes did happen to open, he'd be looking at the other cheek, the good one; spun with her once and again, but she wouldn't let him have the angle he wanted. She pushed back and kept pushing until he was against the kitchen counter again. OK, he thought, fine, and slid his hands in under the bottom of her shirt, inching from her hips to her rib cage, then higher, until he touched the lower straps of her bra, at which point, as always, her arms clamped down, blocking access. The pain bridging from the back of his bruised hand up his arm was a good thing, he told himself: a warranted rebuke and good contrasting physical sensation by which to distance himself and keep control.
Down beast! Tame the monster!
as Devon would say.

She tipped back, staring right at him. “Look at it,” she said, nodding. “Touch it.”

“Do what?”

“You know what I'm saying! Get your hands out of my shirt and quit pretending. Touch it.”

“Your . . .”

“Yes.”

“But . . .”

“No
buts,
Thomas.”

He'd been about to point out that he'd touched her birthmark plenty of times before and that she'd always been the one to make him stop, when it dawned on him that without her explicit invitation or instructions to do so, it was almost like it had never actually happened. This was different. A lead opening onto a fresh inlet going who knew where.

He held his palm flat to her cheek and neck. “OK,” he said. “Then the pills?” He noted as he had before that there was really nothing discernibly different to the touch. Just skin. A slight puffiness or serration at the edges of the birthmark. Nothing else.

“You and your pills.”

“Pills for Jills.” He kept his palm flat against her. “See? I'm not pretending.” He smiled and said nothing further because he knew (he had no idea how) that any remark or observation or attempt to relate what he actually experienced touching her would offend her. If he said it was nothing, something, the same, different, special, made her beautiful, didn't make her beautiful, anything, he would be understood as insulting and his words turned against him.

She closed her eyes. “You have no idea how strange this feels.”

“No,” he said. “Maybe.”

“It's like my head is buzzing.”

“That sounds OK.”

“And hot.”

“Better.”

She placed her hand over his and after a moment, searching his eyes, he understood that she meant to direct him further. “There's more,” she said, and with that she pushed his hand into the front of her shirt. Reached around to release her bra strap. “But first ... since you've been so insistent. Go ahead.” He kept his eyes on hers. Didn't
look down or question her. He stared until he felt he might be seeing her face whole for once, not as if a corner of it had been bitten or peeled to the side: a whole shape, though partially darkened. The waxing moon on a clear night. “Have you ever . . .” she began.

He shook his head. Knew better than to lie. “First. And you?”

She nodded. “What do you think?”

Again, he knew he couldn't or shouldn't try to describe all of what he actually thought: weird, pillowy-soft excess of flesh, not like anything he'd ever felt before, the skin on top so smooth and delicate, it hardly seemed real or human, actually, more like the inside of a balloon or the way he'd imagine a baby bird might feel, and yet for whatever reason all of it so perfectly, exactly matched to what he most craved about her and about girls generally. “Nice,” he said. “It's really, really nice.” And then weirder still, the skin was changing, poking up into the palm of his hand. “Should I stop?”

She shook her head. “If you want.” Closed her eyes. “No.”

“So, that's good?”

She nodded. Eyes still closed. “It must be. Sure.”

He wasn't certain if there was more he was supposed to do.
Feeling up
a girl had always seemed to him, by its name alone, to indicate something more active on the boy's part, like squeezing or rubbing, but he couldn't connect anything like that with a genuine desire on his part.
Pinch her nipples till she pees herself
, Devon had said once, but he was pretty sure he was only kidding, or else deliberately passing on bad intelligence. He didn't
feel
like squeezing and pinching; Jill was so alien and fragile-seeming, his only real impulse was to be sure he didn't hurt her—didn't do something inadvertent to screw it all up. Far easier, he thought, to lie on the basement floor with her, knowing where he was and wasn't allowed to go,
canoodling,
and not worrying about all this strangeness.

“Hey. Shall we?” he asked.

“Sure. You go ahead. I'll be down in a sec.”

But they didn't go anywhere. At first, this surprised him, until he connected it with other endings and leave-takings. She'd say,
Time to go,
and then ten minutes later, fifteen minutes later, still canoodling,
OK, really now you need to leave. Mom'll be home any minute
. In fact, some of their most advanced intimacy had occurred between the time when she'd told him he needed to go and his actual leaving. It was like a weird kind of procrastinating, which somehow opened a breach in time, changing the way time itself passed and allowing in new urgency, new permissiveness and feelings, until all boundaries might break. It almost made sense: If she said one thing, he should probably expect more or less the opposite. For now, she seemed positively rooted to him.

“Let's just stay like this forever,” she said.

“Sure. Let's.”

“Screw everything else.”

“Absolutely.”

And sure enough, as soon as he'd said that, she was leaning away from him, breaking her hold, separating and backing up a few steps. Then, hands on her cheeks: “Oh my fucking God! Our hot chocolate! You didn't say anything. Thomas! Look.” Burned brown milk oozed from the front of the microwave down the counter and dripped in streaks from the cabinets to the floor. “I
hate
that stupid thing, I swear. I'm going to throw it in the garbage right now.”

“Come on,” he said, “it's not your fault—we'll clean up later . . . come on!” and led her by the hand back out and down the hall to the basement family room.

 

 

HE WAS ALONE IN HIS BOOTH at the Pearle's in Okotoks long enough to lose some steam and reconsider the wisdom of what he seemed embarked upon. Long enough to finish a cursory reading of all the Sinclair Ross quizzes and to revisit a familiar set of observations relating to the young person serving him (common verbiage, he knew from the boys, was no longer
waitress
as in his era but the more egalitarian
server
), and Canadian youth culture generally: a kind of 1950s mid-America attitude of small-town vanity or self-importance too easily confusing itself with
freshness,
but with all new pierced and semipunk costuming. That the cut of her top invited
in the eyes (glitter-sprinkled expanse of very muscular and suspiciously suntanned orangey bosom) and that she carried out her job with seeming and ostentatious indifference to this, not as invitation or provocation but as simple
display,
did not convince him, as he suspected most of the props at the restaurant were designed to do, that he was
part of
the place's over-the-top hipness and style, part of some cutting-edge global culinary/social experiment featuring fragrant seared meats, cinematic lighting, and twelve-dollar drinks. Nor did it make him feel completely
excluded
. Invited to spectate. Like a visitor from another planet. Time and again, he caught himself looking up from his stack of papers and staring idly, foot tapping to the scratchy sound track of the night—
I don't want to be your ghost, I don't want to be your ghost
—and not just in hopes of seeing Moira there (fifteen minutes late now, and counting) speaking to the handsome young greeter at the door. This was still
Okotoks
, after all. Not quite nowheresville, but awfully damn close. Who was anyone here fooling?

“Appies while you're waiting?” she asked.

He shook his head and slid his empty beer mug toward her, smiling. Noted the stud in her left nostril—glint of blue-green glass or stone to echo the blue-green glitter in her cleavage—and thought of Devon. All Devon's first requests for nose and lip and eyebrow piercings. No, and no, and no again. But what was it Thomas had hinted at recently regarding Devon? Something to do with a surprise concerning Devon's longtime girlfriend, Charmaine. That they'd broken up? Hardly surprising. That they were engaged to be married? Well, equally, not surprising. He had no idea how that one would turn out. Only knew it made him cringe and feel as if someone was standing on his chest when he heard her name, heard anything about them as a couple, really, almost in the same way Devon's prolonged, addictive dedication to wrestling and track had at times made him wish with all his heart that he could just find the cure—the way to break in, reorganize Devon's brain—anything to make him set his priorities straight. But that had all worked its way out in the end, hadn't it? So Franklin had learned and had, for the
most part, in fact, butted out and tried to quit caring so much what became of Charmaine, the scatterbrained high school girlfriend, or of Devon and Charmaine together. She was all right. So they'd get married and kill each other, or split up and kill themselves in grief. Either way, they'd get over it. Not really his problem anymore. He just hoped whatever it was went down well before kids and before any kind of alimony settlement that might permanently sap Devon's future prospects.

“Another Moose Drool?”

He nodded. “You from around here?”

She shook her head. “Yellowknife.”

“Well, never mind, then. Thought you might know my kid.”

“I did do a year at Douglas High, though. Grade twelve. Ran out of courses up there at Frankl—”

“Really! I know some Douglas teachers quite well.” What was he trying to do? Flirt with a girl his son's age? “Excellent school! Buddy of mine I used to run with . . .”

Moira had slid around the server and seated herself across from him in the booth without his having seen her coming. Faint scent of cold emanating from her as she removed her coat and gloves and, with a rattling of jewelry, the Russian-style white fur hat perched on her head. She leaned toward him over the table, bracelets knocking together. “It's so cold. Warm me up, John! What are you drinking?” Raked aside hair, glancing sideways at the drink list and back at the server. She had applied lipstick for the occasion and looked generally more dolled up or polished than the day before. Eye shadow? He was not actually a good judge of these things, but he sensed more preparation than usual had gone into her appearance, and though it might not mean
sex
positively, he was at least pretty sure it indicated some kind of heightened festive mood into which sex might be incorporated. “Oh, I'll just have whatever he's having. No, I won't, either. Make mine an Irish coffee. No-no-no, what's that other, that wonderful, superlative drink you have here? I'm so sorry. I can never remember.” She flew through pages of the drink menu while the server tipped her order form on a hip and named some favorite
specialty martinis, until suddenly Moira stopped her, pointing. “Yes! That's the one.”