Kicking the Sky (33 page)

I couldn’t look at him.

“I get lonely,” James said, collecting himself before walking over to me. He took in a deep breath and straightened himself up. He cupped my cheek and with his rough thumb he stroked my bottom lip. “It’s the only life I know.” I could feel the nervousness between my legs.

“You understand?”

“Don’t touch me.”

James let go. I thought of Adam, what he said about not letting fear get in the way.

“I gotta go before—” I shifted, about to get up.

“Everything is kind of safe for you, isn’t it?” He said
safe
as if it was a bad word. “You don’t want your life to be about that, do you?” He lit a cigarette, pinching it between his fingers so that his hand curled. “Come with us, Antonio.”

I didn’t say anything at first. All the words I had expected to use were jammed in my head.

“I came to say goodbye.” I got up and took a few steps toward the garage door. He strode across the garage to block me.

“I’ll leave when I’m ready,” James said. The goose pimples crawled up my arms and back. I shuddered. He hugged me tight, his chest next to mine.

“I know your secret,” James whispered, squeezing tighter. I couldn’t breathe. “We’re the same, Antonio.”

“Let go!” I pushed him—hard enough that he fell against the metal door. He looked much older just then. “I’m
nothing
like you,” I said.

I woke up to the sound of my mother buffing the kitchen floor and the smell of lemon paste in the air. There were times Terri and I would come down wearing fresh tube socks and we
would slip and slide with the radio on full blast. That would never happen now, I thought, as I grabbed the paper from the veranda, my bare feet stinging on cold concrete. I ran upstairs, dove into the pocket of my still-warm bed.

The front page of the
Toronto Star
ran a story on the verdicts in the trial, but the headline had already been dwarfed by other news, about how fast the Concorde was, Prime Minister Trudeau’s defence of a fifty-thousand-dollar campaign blitz with public money, how the little guy was facing insurance hikes, and how seal hunt protestors from the U.S. had turned violent. All we got was a little paragraph buried in the middle of the paper, no bigger than a stamp.

I heard a light rapping on my bedroom door. “Can I come in?” My mother’s muffled voice sounded uncertain.

“Okay,” I said, a little confused by her need for permission.

My mother stepped into the room wearing her hospital uniform and her Dr. Scholl’s shoes. She wore the same outfit every Saturday when cleaning the house. But something was different about her. At first I thought she had her hair tied back, but when she got closer I realized she had chopped off her long hair.

“Mãe!”

“Do you like?” She cupped her hand behind her head and raised it a couple of times. She was playing it up but I could tell she wasn’t too sure it had been a good choice.

“You look nice,” I said. “But isn’t Dad going to freak out?” My father had always loved my mother’s long, wavy hair. He had said once it was the thing that made him fall in love with her. I tried to bury the image of her washing her hair in the basement, my father behind her.

“It’s my hair,” she said, a bit shakily. “If your father doesn’t like it he can find himself another wife.” She began to giggle and plopped herself onto my bed like a schoolgirl. “I heard you talking in your sleep this morning. You were calling out names. Some of them I didn’t know. Adam? Baby Mary? Who are these people, Antonio? Are you in danger?”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m okay.” I turned the newspaper over, hoping she’d change the topic.

But she flipped it back to the page I had been reading, and a look of satisfaction washed over her. “God bless!” she said. She repeated the words, then turned quiet and distant.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Funny,” she said, hugging herself as if a gust of wind had blown into the room. “It’s what I came to ask you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Because so many things have happened.”

“I’m fine.”

“I need to ask you something, Antonio. It’s about Agnes’s baby.”

I dug my face into my pillow, but soon the sobs came. Her hand made small circles on my back.

“Look at me,” she said, calmly. “Is that who Baby Mary is?”

I nodded, breathed deeply into the pillow, let it soak up my tears and snot.

“Filho, it happened and you can’t change that. I just want to make sure you’re okay. It’s not fair you were put in that position. You need to know it’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You’re a strong boy, I know. I’m proud of you. I trust you. There was so much I didn’t want to say because not saying it made things easier. I know that’s not right now.”

I lifted my head from my pillow.

“He’s gone, Mãe.”

She had shifted herself on my bed and now sat on the corner, looking up to the ceiling as if in prayer.

“Did he hurt you?” she said.

“Never, Mãe,” I said, and the colour returned to her face.

My mother’s body softened. “Antonio, I don’t want you to be afraid of life.” Her lips trembled, even after she said the words.

I sauntered to my window and looked down onto Palmerston Avenue. Some of the neighbours were outside scrubbing down their front walkways and sidewalks. A few people had begun to chase the suds and chemicals with a hose, washing the dirt onto the road where it all would collect and then pour down the sewer.

R
AYS OF SUNSHINE
streamed in through the kitchen window. A small patch appeared on the floor. I walked into it, closed my eyes, and let my body melt into the warmness. I figured nothing and no one would be able to hurt me in the force field I had stepped into.
The Little Prince
was tucked in my back pocket. I had been reading a section from it every day. I thought of Adam and his gift. I liked the words and the way the Little Prince just dropped out of nowhere; how he lived on a planet hardly any bigger than he was and how his only real pleasure was to sit and watch the sun set. My body tingled the way I thought it would if I was getting beamed up, like on
Star Trek
, my entire being dissolving into confetti.

I climbed up onto the roof of my garage to look out over the backyards and laneway, all the rooftops. I stood tall, letting the spring sun warm my face. My father had knotted the hose through the chain-link fence that separated our yard from the neighbours’. The hose had been turned on to a fine mist that dusted the vegetable garden, away from where the fat robins dipped their heads into our lawn, throwing wriggling worms down their gullets. Not even a year since I had last pressed my head into the bulge in the screen-window mesh to see my mother climb onto the worm-picker. My mother saw me up on the roof and forced a smile. “Get down from there, Antonio,” she said, gathering sheets from the clotheslines
like she was squishing clouds. I could trace the worry in her face. Her whole body gave off a low-level hum of danger and only I could hear it. I heard the harmony of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” coming from an upstairs room. Through her open window I could see my sister twirling in her tube top, a towel draped over the windowsill. She practised every day. When she saw me on the rooftop she leaned out her window and yelled “Mãe, he’s going to break his neck.” She smiled as she said it. Through everything, especially when Edite returned home, Terri continued to be tough and strong and I knew she’d always be there for me. We never talked about all the people we had lost; that’s just not the way my family was.

“Antonio!” my father yelled from two backyards over. He stood beside my uncles, who were in the middle of lifting the fig tree from out of its sleeping hole. “Ajuda! We need one more man.”

The sun was strong, made me feel like God was everywhere, watching everything. I skipped over the rooftops, my feet feeling confident and assured.

I returned to the ground and stood next to my father. I was almost as tall as he was. The hair on his arms were speckled with dirt. My father placed his hand on the nape of my neck, guided me into position. My uncles—Clemente, David, and Luis—coiled rope around their wrists and handed me my own rope. With a collective tug—
um, dois, três
—the fig tree, its branches stuffed with pink insulation and newspaper, rose from its sleep. The root ball descended deeper into the soil and the crown rose, floating like cotton candy amidst a cloud of dust and dirt. Their dirty hands pounded
my back and the small tumblers of wine passed among us to be shared. I looked at my father, his face thin and tired but his eyes beaming.

The air was warm. I dusted off the handlebars and wiped the seat of my Chopper with my palm. I thought of Ricky’s letter tucked in my tube sock—I had read it over a hundred times.
When I wake up in the morning my mother makes my bed, and the best part is she makes breakfast. For me
. I mounted my bike and rode out into the laneway. My kneecaps hit the handlebars. I got off. I stood next to my bike and stared up to the top of the lane. I noticed some old men sitting in their lawn chairs in the laneway—smoking, spitting, and talking. It was when I saw James’s garage door wide open and a man stirring inside that the wind was kicked out of me. I waited for my breathing to return before walking my bike up the laneway.

“A bloody mess, this is.”

“Mr. Serjeant. You’re back,” I said.

“Call me Paul,” he said. “Came back early, seems running a pub on a beach isn’t as easy as it looks.”

The walls of the once whitewashed garage were spattered with paint—blue, green, yellow, the kinds of colours people in my neighbourhood painted their houses. James had thrown cans of it against the walls; in some spots it had run down to pool and dry on the floor. He’d smeared the paint with his hands and fingers. In places I could see his handprints. Daubs and splashes of pure colour made the room feel alive. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Why would anyone do this? I’m going to have to clean up this bloody mess. Paint over it.” He took off his cap and
scratched the red band on his forehead. “You didn’t know the bloke who rented my garage, did you?”

“Not really,” I said. I hopped on my bike and pedalled up the laneway.

I would like to thank the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and Diaspora Dialogues for their support with my research and with this manuscript. To the Toronto Public Library and all the librarians who supported my research, particularly, the
Toronto Star
’s database,
Pages from the Past
, which allowed me to travel back in time—thank you. I am deeply grateful to everyone I interviewed—too many to be named here—who lent their insights into their respective communities during that fateful summer in 1977.

This book is a work of fiction, inspired by the real-life event surrounding the 1977 murder of Emanuel Jaques. Research, relationships, and family histories have collectively inspired this story. I have taken liberties with places and people depicted in this book to frame a narrative. Also, I have simplified the reproduction of Azorean dialect that was part of my childhood—of my world. My gratitude to José Abreu Ferreira and Onésimo T. Almeida for helping me re-create the orality of speech. If there are any inaccuracies, they are my own. Thanks to Jane Rosenman, who had faith in me. Thank you to Andra Miller at Algonquin, for taking ownership of this book and for her precise editing.

I also would like to thank my trusted early readers for their presence, friendship, and support during the writing of this book: Susan Mockler, Bernie Grzyb, James Papoutsis, Rekha Lakra, Susan Shuter, Sheila Murray, and Jann Stefoff. I’m grateful to my friends and
colleagues for feedback and advice as this story evolved. I owe special thanks to my agent, Denise Bukowski, who read the manuscript through its various stages and who never wavered in offering valuable criticism.

A thank you to my publishing family—Doubleday Canada—for being there during the most difficult times in writing this book. Thanks to Maya Mavjee, for giving this book a home early on, and to Kristin Cochrane, who championed it to the end. To Scott Richardson, thank you for turning my words into beautiful images. To Scott Sellers, who believed in and understood this story from the very beginning, thank you. To the rest of the Doubleday team—Lynn Henry, Susan Burns, Martha Leonard, Zoë Maslow, Nicola Makoway, Shaun Oakey, I appreciate all that you’ve done through the journey. I’d like to offer a special thanks to Martha Kanya-Forstner—for her tender insights, fine editing, and unfailing calm amidst the storm. This novel is the product of our work.

As always, I thank my wife, Stephanie, for her patience, encouragement, and wonderful understanding of my story. To my sons, Julian, Oliver, Simon, you will one day understand how much you inspire me.

Anthony De Sa grew up in Toronto’s Portuguese community. His short fiction has been published in several North American literary magazines.
Barnacle Love
, Anthony’s first book, was critically acclaimed and became a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2009 Toronto Book Award. Anthony graduated from University of Toronto and did his post-graduate work at Queen’s University. He attended the Humber School for Writers and Ryerson University. He teaches creative writing and is currently a teacher-librarian at Michael Power/St. Joseph High School. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three sons.