Authors: Joan Thomas
Noah bends over his lock and Aiden calls, “Just leave it. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Okay, thanks.” He walks across the lawn, pulling off his helmet and wiping his face with his forearm. His hair’s in dark, wet furrows. “Sylvie inside?”
“Yup.” He’s shielding the joint in his right hand, dangling it by his chair. “She’s up in her room.”
Noah stands on the patio, helmet in hand. He’s wearing those ridiculous barefoot sandals. It’s unclear whether he wants to talk or just doesn’t have the social skills to get away from them.
“She’ll be glad to see you,” Aiden says, to move him along. “Just go right on up.”
“Okay, thanks,” Noah says. He crosses the deck and walks into the house, protected by diplomatic immunity. The only thing Aiden and Liz have agreed on in the past few days is never to talk to Noah about what Maggie is up to.
“That went well,” Liz says when the door closes behind him.
Aiden plucks the joint out of his burning fingers and lifts it to his face with his left hand. It’s awkward and unsatisfying, like jerking off with the wrong hand. “Whatever,” he says, exhaling a hot little pip of smoke. “His dad is George Oliphant.”
The sun hasn’t moved since he sat down. There it hangs, five inches above the Callaghans’ garage roof, toying with the possibility of not setting at all. Pulling rude colour from everything … Liz’s red wheelbarrow, the fluorescent lawn.
“We had a social worker here all afternoon,” Liz says. “I forced her to take two bags of baby clothes when she left. She didn’t want them. She didn’t want to be bothered taking them over to the foster home, but I’m trying to stay in their faces. I sent some things our little girl hasn’t grown into yet. I hated doing that.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“But she told Sylvie they could go and see the baby tomorrow. Sylvie and Noah.”
“At the foster home?”
“They have to go to the
CFS
office on Stafford and visit with her there. Under supervision.”
“How about us? Don’t we get to see her?”
She shakes her head.
“Well, this is nuts. All this waiting for the other shoe to drop. There must be something we can do.” He drops his roach to the deck, grinds it under his sandal. And he feels weary to the bone of the whole fucking mess, which, if his experience with clients fighting over kids is any indication, is certain to lurch from bad to worse, crushing all good will and common sense in its path. He moves in his chair, prying the skin of his thighs out of the mesh, and then, realizing how thirsty he is, gets up and goes to the kitchen.
Back at the door, he stands with an icy bottle of Keith’s in hand and looks out at Liz in her deck chair, and a sense of estrangement descends forcefully upon him. She fed this dispute with her absurd rivalry with Maggie. In the set of her thin shoulders he sees a narrowness he abhors. Her aspirations and her narrowness – they’re part of the same thing in a way he can’t explain, and suddenly they both appal him. He steps back onto the deck, snapping the cap off his beer, and in that moment a path gleams before him. You always have choices.
He sits down. “You know, it just occurred to me … Maggie’s asking to look after the baby. What if we just agreed? Would
CFS
be open to it? Because in one sense she’s right: that little girl would be better off with her other grandma than with a total stranger.” The idea blossoms into its full, splendid shape in his mind as he talks, but he’s careful to keep his voice neutral. “Noah would be there on his days off. Sylvie could probably visit.”
Through her sunglasses Liz’s eyes are hooded, as though words entirely fail her. “Liz,” he says, “it was a shitty thing for Maggie to do, no argument about that. But she must have been freaked out by what happened at the lake. I think she’s fundamentally a good
person. She’s warm, she’s competent – she’s raised two wonderful kids. And she loves that little girl. If we asked for this we’d be showing that we have the best interests of the baby at heart. It’s a wisdom of Solomon kind of thing.”
She finally speaks, hardly moving her mouth, as though her jaw is locked. “Aiden, that is so fucking stupid, I can’t even respond.”
He tips his head back and takes a drink. “It goes against the grain, I agree. But think about it. It’s like unilateral disarmament. You do one generous thing, you make a gesture of reason and goodwill, and it breaks an impasse.” Her chin lifts; she won’t look at him. “Anyway,” he says, “I’d like to propose this to the social worker, see what she thinks. Or Sylvie could raise it if she’s open to it. What would you think if I talked to Sylvie about it?” This courtesy is bullshit and he knows it. He’s going to take this forward. You can only give up so much before you are lost altogether.
And maybe she can tell, because at his words she gets up and walks into the house. Though it’s so abrupt, the way she leaves without a single word or glance or gesture, that his brain comes up with the possibility that she might have forgotten something on the stove, or she heard the phone ring.
But of course she doesn’t come back. The sun finally capitulates and sinks towards the garage. A dove starts to mourn on the power-line transformer. Wendy comes out onto her deck and stands talking on her phone, staring vacantly at Aiden. She catches herself and waves a little apology, and turns back inside, still talking. Behind him the house hums, cooling itself. Their house, which he holds as insubstantial as a Bedouin tent.
He sits as the sun slides without fanfare into the garage roof, dragging the sky down with it, and then he’s out of beer. Liz is in the kitchen, wearing a white cotton nightie he doesn’t remember having seen before. She’s prying the lid off the yogurt, one of
her blue sleeping pills gripped between her thumb and forefinger. Those pills are so bitter she takes them with a spoonful of yogurt to protect her tastebuds.
Below the counter, the dishwasher throbs warmly. “Leave me alone, Aiden,” Liz says. By then he’s got his beer and he’s halfway out the door.
Darkness has blanked out the yard, mosquitoes fret near his ears. But the night’s far from over, he’s just getting started, sprawled in his deck chair, his feet in their worn sandals braced on the grey boards. Who do you wish you were, Aiden? That man who lost all his words, the one who mistook his wife for a hat.
Lights bob up the lane – three lights in an uneven row – and sink like a
UFO
landing. The security bulb on the garage leaps into action, revealing three guys down on all fours on the grass. They’ve got miner’s lamps strapped to their foreheads. It’s night crawlers they’re after, flooded out of their tunnels by the rain – they’re picking night crawlers to sell for bait.
“Do you mind?” one of them calls.
“Be my guest,” he says.
The beams of their lamps swing earthward. Writhing worms dangle from their fingers, gleaming in the light.
They move on up the lane and the security light goes out. Aiden has to resist the impulse to follow them. Then Defrag is in his mind, his white forehead clamped into a steel halo. All the hours he spent trying to establish common ground with Defrag, trying to get him to join a group. So misguided. It’s toxic to Defrag, being with people as afraid as he is.
He polishes off his beer and opens another. Then the young scientist is on the deck, the splendid hope of a terrified world, searching in his pocket for the key to his bike lock.
“You didn’t lock it, son. I’ve been keeping an eye on it.” He gets up. “Listen,” he says, “can you stay for a beer?”
“Oh.” Noah lifts his head. “Okay. Thanks.”
“So,” Aiden says when they’re both settled with an open beer in hand. “Sylvie gone to bed?”
“Yep.”
“How long you in town for?”
“Today and tomorrow.”
A siren pelts up Portage Avenue. The Doppler effect kicks in. Noah raises his eyes. “It’s a year ago tonight. That Sylvie and I met, at the lake.”
“Well, congratulations.”
“Yeah, well.” He grins wryly.
They sit, listening to the insect hum of the streetlight in the back lane. “Has Sylvie talked to you? About what happened?”
“You mean when she was lost? The guy who picked her up?”
“Yeah.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
Noah pauses for a minute, no doubt trying to sort out his loyalties. “He was a Mexican migrant worker from a chicken farm in Northwestern Ontario. She said he was a really nice guy. It was his idea to drop her at the hospital in Kenora. He was up by the lake checking on a job. His job in Ontario is running out and he’s going to have to leave Canada, so he’s trying hard to find something else.”
“So he spoke English?”
“Yeah, I guess. Enough.”
“Why didn’t she just tell the police that?”
“Because he wasn’t supposed to have the truck. His boss sent him to Kenora to pick something up, and he drove into Manitoba
to check out that job. He was rushing to get back before he got in too much trouble. She was scared she would get him deported.”
“Huh, the way that girl thinks. So she didn’t tell him she’d left the baby in the car?”
“No.”
“You must have asked her why.”
“I guess it was just hard for her to face what she thought had happened. But she’s getting things figured out now.”
Aiden takes a long pull of his beer. “What about you? You going back to Toronto this fall?”
“I’ve been studying at Guelph, actually. And probably not.”
“What is it you’re taking again?”
“I’m doing a master’s in environmental microbiology and biotechnology.”
“Hey,” Aiden says, rallying, thinking of all the questions he’d like to put to a guy in this particular field of study, though the mellow alertness he counts on with weed has been hijacked in the last few minutes by a crude, heavy inebriation. “You used to be into electricity. And then you moved to biology.”
“Yeah, I went through a lot of stages. But it’s
microbiology
I’m studying, actually.”
“Maybe you discovered electric eels, ha ha,” Aiden says, too thick-limbed to swerve from the joke he was setting up. “Well, I’ve been through a few stages myself. I was a youth care worker for a long time. It’s a futile job, given the way troubled kids move in and out of the system – you get very good at playing pool. And then I did graduate work in English, I wrote a dissertation on a nineteenth-century British poet that is as yet undefeated – well, undefended, most people would put it – and then I did the master’s in counselling and set up a practice. Liz is mad at me because I’ve never been much of a provider. She won’t say so, but she is. But we’re as rich
as I can stand being. I can’t deal with the consumerist throughput, I feel guilty enough. And I like what I’m doing. It’s political, in its own way.”
“Political?”
I share your values, man, Aiden wants to say, but he’s not quite that wasted. A black shape darts in the dark sky, impossibly fast. It’s a bat, hunting. “Well, you know, for example, I have a lot of female clients who shop constantly. It’s all about trying to fill emotional needs in inappropriate ways. I had a client who thought she was entitled to sleep with her own son, for Christ’s sake. So, how’re you going to remake the world except one person at a time?”
Noah’s answer is lost on Aiden. The kid’s a low talker.
“Yeah, well,” Aiden says, staring into the darkened yard. “As if we have that much time. I realize that. And it’s a Western privilege, psychotherapy. I get that too. How many self-actualized capitalists does it take to change a light bulb?” He laughs alone, and a huge surge of grief washes over him, that this too, the work he loves, which has so much of the good and true in it, should have to go by the way. “But do you have a better idea?” he says. “Ralph Nader – think about him for a sec. The fate of the world hung on that dude’s ideals.” He’s launching into his rant on the first Bush election, the egregious theft of the White House from Al Gore, when Noah cuts him off.
“You feel guilty?” he asks. “Is that what you said?”
“Come on, man, that’s like asking me if I breathe. I’m white. I’m male. I drive. ‘I eat, I fuck,’ to quote one of my clients. I live off the avails of capitalism. I bought low and I’ll sell high. Don’t you? Feel guilty?”
“Not really,” Noah says. “It’s just, like, a problem we have to solve.” Aiden can’t see his face now, just the shape of his head lit up by the light falling from the kitchen window. “I think the industrial
economies will collapse for sure. And I’m not really afraid of that.” He tosses back his hair in a way he has. “Capitalism, it’s a bad system. For almost everybody, and for the planet. But the Earth has had massive extinctions before, and each one was followed by a huge explosion in evolution. So there’ll be new forms.”
“True enough,” Aiden says. “In a couple hundred million years. Something reptilian, maybe. So I guess that’s fine, then. Why be scared? Why be sad?”
He tries to swing his left foot up to his right knee, but his leg feels too bloated to bend. It’s the air, the moist air – in his torpor he’s soaking it in like a sponge. “Noah,” he says, planting his foot back on the deck. “Sparky. In our house we used to play this little game. Say there are two kinds of people in the world. Tell me which side of a particular question they fall on and I’ll know everything I need to know about them. So Liz starts it. She says, ‘Do they have a real Christmas tree or a fake?’ Or she’ll have some question about whether they make their own vinaigrette. By then Sylvie’s all outraged. She jumps in and asks, ‘Are they full or are they hungry? Do they have clean drinking water or are their children dying of dysentery?’ So, I’m curious. Say there are two kinds of people in the world. What divides them, in your mind?”
“I don’t like to divide the world into two kinds of people,” the guy says evenly.
Oh, fuck you, Aiden thinks. He drains his beer and bubbles burn the back of his throat. Fuck you, Sparky. Fuck your perfection. Your teeth innocent of fillings. Your self-esteem that’s been nurtured like a household pet. Fuck your risible five-toe sandals made of biofeedback rubber. He sets the empty bottle on the deck and shuffles back into the kitchen to the fridge. There’s some fancy imports on the bottom shelf, and he schleps the cardboard six-pack out to the deck.