The Fearsome Particles (32 page)

“No!”

Oh, lord, these
no’s
and
not’s
were making him queasy. It was probable he was going to throw up. “It could be infected,” he whimpered. “The bones … need to be set.”

“Don’t worry,” said Kyle, full of anger, contempt. “I ran it under the tap.”

It was then Gerald heard the clack of heels on hardwood, and he knew he had to stand and get to the door. “Vicki,” he called out, “don’t come in.” He stumbled across the carpet she’d chosen. “Please …”

She peeked in the doorway as if unsure whether to intrude. When she came in and saw him flopping about, her eyes brightened as if she might laugh. He found his footing just as she looked over his shoulder, as she coughed and crumpled as though she’d been punched.

What parents they were, Gerald thought as he went to her. In a moment of crisis they couldn’t even stay on their feet.

E
verybody was freaking out so much – Dad running around, Mom sort of catatonic – I decided I had to get out of there. As soon as Dad was busy trying to carry Mom into their bedroom and make sure she was all right, I grabbed a sweater and eased down the stairs and out the back door. I thought for a second about taking the cat with me, but that just seemed like too much to deal with.

My hand hurt like hell, of course. The fact that it was useless didn’t bother me, but if I let it hang at my side the throbbing was so intense it got hard to see for all the sparks in my eyes. It took me a while to figure out that if I kept it above my waist, the hand stopped feeling like it was going to explode. So as I walked to a street where I knew I could get a cab, making sure to take the back lanes and cutting through some properties so Dad couldn’t follow, I held my hand up over my heart, like I felt really deeply about something. And I wrapped it in the sweater so people wouldn’t stare.

When I was finally able to get a cab, I asked the driver, a dark-eyed young guy who looked almost Pashtun, to take me to a hotel with Internet service.

“They all got that,” said the cabbie, looking at me in the rear-view mirror. “You got a computer?”

I looked around the back seat. Under my armpits. “No.”

“Then you have to use the business centre.” The cabbie seemed to study me through the mirror. “They might not let you, though.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a kid.” The cabbie grinned. “They might think you want to use it for porn or something.” He shrugged as he made a turn. “Which, you know, I’m not saying is bad. People should do what they want.” He looked back at me again. “So, any place in particular you’re thinking of?”

I shook my head.

“Someplace cheap though.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I still had money in my account, and the military was paying my full salary until the end of my
COF-AP
contract.

“You have some way to pay? Credit card?”

I still had my wallet with about three hundred dollars in my back pocket – the guys at the casino were probably so excited about the eighteen thousand in cash they forgot to look for it. I took it out and held it up for him.

The cabbie bobbed his head from side to side. “Okay,” he said. “I know where.”

We drove for a few blocks. Sat at red lights that wouldn’t turn. The cabbie must have had his air conditioning on high
because I was starting to shiver. When I unwrapped the sweater and pulled it on he looked back again. “Whoa, you hurt yourself or something?”

I laid my hand in my lap, out of view. “It’s all right.”

“What’s it, like, cut or something? You need to see a doctor?”

“No.”

“What did you do to it?”

He was bugging me, so I just stared out the window. If Legg had been in the same situation, he would’ve probably told the driver to fuck off. But that wasn’t necessarily one of his better qualities. I looked up at the driver. “Are you from Afghanistan?”

He laughed as if I’d said something funny. “I’m from Oakville,” he said. “My parents, though, they’re from Iran originally.”

“Have you ever heard of the
gudiparan?”

The driver looked back at me through the mirror. “No, I never heard of that. What is it?”

I stared out the window again and pulled the sweater tighter. “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

G
erald was a good husband. Not exceptional. Not award-winning on a grand scale. But better than most, Vicki suspected. And she found the realization warming, even after twenty-odd years, despite the events it had taken to make her see. Over the weekend, practically every hour, he’d come into the bedroom to check on how she was doing and to give her reports, though at first she hadn’t been fully able to respond. Why that had been so still wasn’t entirely clear, but it was as if a heavy blanket had been laid over her, and everything that had once come easily – speaking, thinking, getting out of bed – seemed suddenly to require a preposterous effort. She was in the clutch of some sort of anxiety crisis, Gerald said he’d been told. It was connected to the pains and shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, and what she needed was quiet and rest and calm. And Gerald’s presence, after what she’d seen in Kyle’s room, had helped a great deal. Surprisingly so. That was something she wanted to tell him, now that she was feeling very much better.

As for Kyle, Gerald had insisted the whole weekend that he was fine. And when she’d asked about his hand, and what could possibly have happened, and for heaven’s sake what was being
done
, he’d been very firm. It was all under control; she was not to worry – that, Gerald had said with a half smile, was his job. And at the time, without the energy to argue, she’d chosen to believe that what Gerald meant was that Kyle was receiving treatment and getting well.

But now that she was here in his room, sitting on the edge of his bed, now that she saw the touches of dried blood on his duvet, which Rosary had neglected to launder, she could sense that Gerald had not been telling her the whole truth. That he had been trying to protect her from facts she had a right to know. And so she was angry at Gerald and needed to tell him that too. She would have to make it as clear to him as it was to her that, when it came to painful truths about their children, mothers should not be protected.

The spring light coming into the room, through the leaded glass windows, gave everything in it an elevated glow. The encyclopaedias and textbooks, the pieces of furniture she’d selected over the years, the Persian carpet in reds and golds – all these things seemed strangely vivid, as if she’d never seen them before. From the bed she looked up at the antiquated periodic tables she’d given to Kyle when he was much younger, when his growing love of science seemed to define him the way hockey or video games or practical jokes served to define other boys, in a kind of characteristic shorthand that was useful in any conversation that began “My son. …” She remembered how pleased she was to be able to give him these old musty tables, framed and
flattened under glass, which showed only the elements that were known and understood at a time when science hardly knew how to look.

Then she pulled Kyle’s duvet in bunches into her lap. She drew her fingertips across the coin-sized stains, and bent to press them against her cheek, and lips.

Somewhere in the room, she remembered, there was a plastic model of a man, with transparent skin that revealed all his inner workings. When Kyle was nine it seemed nothing could make him happier than painting the veins and arteries, the liver and lungs, giving shape to what was inside. It was surely proof, Vicki and Gerald had agreed, that he was a doctor, a researcher, some kind of scientist in the making, and it had stood on his desk, with pride of place, ever since. But now she couldn’t see the transparent man there or on any of the shelves.

It became very important to find the transparent man. And after some minutes spent shifting boxes and searching among the detritus of Kyle’s closet, Vicki saw its veined plastic legs peeking out at her. The man had fallen or been thrown into a corner and become buried under an accumulation of old shoes and books.

When she pulled it out, the sudden thrill she’d felt at recovering it fled. Although its organs were intact, one of its fragile outstretched arms was broken off at the shoulder. And despite falling to her hands and knees and pawing for the missing piece through paper clips and balls of dust, it wasn’t to be found. So, for a time, until the sainted light in the room had dimmed, Vicki sat on the floor of Kyle’s closet, holding the transparent man to her chest, and the shirts and pants hanging from above absorbed
the sound of her unrestrained weeping for the man and his lost plastic arm.

A
call late on that Monday afternoon determined that Hella was not at home, and she still had Vicki’s car. So after she’d washed the dust and salt from her face in the ensuite, and dressed for what was left of the day, Vicki ordered a taxi to take her to the warehouse. With the twisting chain of rush hour traffic headed in the opposite direction, it was an easy drive downtown along the sweeping road that tracked the edge of the ravine, and she was able to roll down the window and let the breeze swirl through the cab until it tossed the driver’s fine hair and fluttered the pages of the clipboard beside him. He turned it over on the seat without a word.

As the cab pulled into the alley next to the warehouse entrance, she saw her car parked across the street, where it was sure to get a ticket, and she allowed herself a sigh at Hella’s lack of care. After she paid the $12.80 fare with a twenty-dollar bill, insisting the driver keep the rest, she went to the car and found it unlocked, with assorted sticky Popsicle wrappers on the back seat. She set down the large fabric bag she was carrying, opened the door, and gathered them up, one by one.

Rather than take the freight elevator to her floor of the building, which would have announced her presence, Vicki walked up the four flights of dimly lit wooden stairs, her shoes falling softly on old iron treads embossed with the name GateHouse Ltd., the long-dead cardboard maker whose plant
the building used to house. As she ascended the last few steps, she was met with the sound of children.

She pulled open the heavy, paint-chipped door.

“Nooooo! Dooon’t!”

Although her view was blocked by the first of two wide warehouse shelving units that spanned two-thirds of the cavernous length and bore the majority of her smaller pieces and boxes of accents, she could tell that the sound was coming from the northwest corner.

“Jeremeee!”

Vicki made her way quietly across the width of the old plank floor, following the path that separated the bulky main-level furnishings (dining room sets, cabinets, upholstered sofas and chairs) from bedroom and auxiliary room pieces. She rounded the end of the first shelving structure and saw at the far end largely what she expected to see.

Hella was there, her thin frame doubled over a slat wood box, searching – for what, Vicki could hardly imagine – and behind her were her three small children: Peter, Jeremy, and Erin. With Hella’s attention diverted, they were down on the floor, playing with Vicki’s small collection of seventy- and eighty-year-old German and British-made toys.

“Jeremeee! Quiiit
it!”

Erin, eight, was happily engaged with examining a Kestner “character” doll and making it dance from knee to knee. A short distance away, Peter, barely five, was making putt-putt noises and attempting to push a yellow-painted tin Dinky van in a continuous path, unmolested. Seven-year-old Jeremy, however,
appeared determined to thwart this effort, by using a 1930s torpedo-shaped Güntherman landspeed-record car, worth approximately eight hundred dollars, to ram the Dinky van repeatedly.

“Jere
meee! Stoooop!”

Vicki had covered half the distance to them when Hella looked up.

“Oh, shit! Kids! Jeremy! Put those toys away. You
know
how I don’t like you playing with Mrs. Woodlore’s things.” Hella left the box she’d been hunting through, skipped around her children – “Now!” she ordered, snapping her fingers – and intercepted Vicki as she approached with a stream of goodwill: “How
are
you? I was really worried. I called your house on Saturday and Mr. Woodlore said you were knocked flat by something. Did you hear about Avis not being able to get into the house? Oh, boy, she was furious. There was something wrong with the locks so she had to get them all changed on Sunday and then she asked me, because we weren’t sure how long you were going to be sick and I didn’t want her bothering you, I said I’d try to finish the boy’s room, you know, just add a few sportsy things? So that’s what I’m doing here. I was looking for football stuff but …” She gave Vicki a desperate smile. “Do you mind?”

Vicki looked past Hella to the children behind her, reluctantly returning the toys to a pile near the box.

“I’m really sorry about that,” insisted Hella. “I know some of those things are expensive but the kids were just going squirrelly waiting for me and I didn’t think they could really hurt anything.”

Jeremy, his head dominated by a thatch of his mother’s dark
hair, was still in the process of putting his toy back where it belonged, the delay caused by the fact that he’d chosen to return the car by kicking it half-heartedly across the floor.

Hella turned to see what Vicki was watching. “Jeremy!” She ran back and hauled him away from the car by his elbow.

Vicki stepped forward and picked up the slender blue Güntherman car. Then she crouched down with it in front of Jeremy.

“Jeremy, you’re such a little monster sometimes,” said Hella. “Say you’re sorry to Mrs. Woodlore.”

Vicki looked up. “It’s all right, Hella. I don’t want an apology.” She lowered her gaze back to the boy. “This is an interesting car, don’t you think, Jeremy? So long and thin.”

His angry eyes wouldn’t connect with hers. He shrugged.

“You don’t have to like it,” Vicki assured him. “Tell me what you really think. Is it sort of old and dumb?”

Jeremy flicked a glance at Vicki. “It’s stupid,” he sneered. “It doesn’t work right. The wheels don’t turn properly.”