His ego made me gag. Sitting there at the end of my bed, looking like he just rose from the dead, and he's telling me how good looking and intelligent he is. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? A cadaver would have a better chance of selling a car than you.”
He didn't say anything; he was totally fascinated by the pen. I knew he could go on geeking like that for hours. If I left him until noon, he'd still be sitting there tracing the pattern with the pen.
“You're an ass,” I told him. “Get out of my room.”
Over the next three months, Chase came and went, lying about where he was going and where he'd been.
Stuff started disappearing from the house: small electronics and jewelry, Dad's watches. At first, Chase denied taking these things. He'd turn the conversation around, trying to place the blame on us for misplacing them. He'd get so worked up denying it that we'd drop it. It got to the point that not a word that came out of his mouth was believable or made any sense. Then, one night he was caught stealing a dvd player from a car at the neighborhood shopping center. He was fined, given a conditional sentence and sent back to rehab again.
When he got out a month later, Dad arranged for Chase to stock shelves in a small grocery store. Mr. Pelltiere, a longtime friend of Dad's, managed the store and he agreed to do Dad the favor. Chase blew it within two weeks. Ryan and Harris started hanging around. The stuff Chase was supposed to be shelving went missing. Customers complained about the weird behavior and strange appearance of the stock boy in aisle eight.
Life became a nightmare for all of us after that. Chase came and went as he pleased. Dad would confront him when he could pin him down. He'd lay it all out: Chase had to get work or he was out of the house. He couldn't keep taking advantage, using the house to shower and eat when he crashed and finally couldn't stand his own stink. Chase would sit there, nodding in agreement that yes, he was wasting his life,
blowing every chance he got and that he'd better shape up. But he didn't hear any of it. He didn't hear them and he sure didn't listen to me.
But experience had taught me that there was nothing to be gained in trying to reason with a drug addict, whether he's high or craving the next hit, which were the only times I ever saw him. Not that I didn't try. But I could think of no other way to make him listen. We were only a year apart in age, but we were so very different. When it came right down to it, we'd had little in common since we were too small to be left on our own, when we were jointly referred to as “the boys.”
Chase lost fifty pounds off his five-foot-ten-inch frame. He broke out in “speed bumps”âsores that oozed gross stuff as his body tried to get rid of the noxious chemicals. He'd scratch and pick at them even as you talked to him, never allowing them to heal. One of his bottom teeth came loose and fell outâhe didn't seem to notice. Mom and Dad argued day and night, and I was sure they were ready to split up.
Then, six months before the assault on Richard Cross, we got a call from Grandma, Dad's mother, in the middle of the night. Chase was marching through her house waving a knife, strung out, demanding money. She had none in the house. Dad jumped in the car while I kept her on the phone.
Grandma was scared and confused. “Gordie,” she said, “what's happened to him? I've never seen anybody act like this.”
It was all I could do not to drive over and punch Chase out. I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince her that it had nothing to do with her, or any of us. She should know that, she was a nurse. This is what drug addicts do: they demand, they bully, they take.
“Yes,” she said, crying.
“What's he doing now, Grandma?”
“I can't see him. I'm in the bedroom.”
I pictured Grandma huddled in her room, alone in the house with Chase. It was an image so not like her. She was normally tough and independent. She'd carried on working at a clinic another ten years after Grandpa had died suddenly, managing the house and huge garden and still insisting on cooking all the holiday dinners herself.
“I think he's going through the kitchen drawers. What's he looking for?”
“Something he can sell. Just let him. Stay where you are, Grandma. But if he does come in there demanding something, give him your old
TV
âthe one in the storage room.”
“But it doesn't work.”
“He doesn't know that. Just let him take it. Dad will be there right away.”
“Oh, Gordie. I'm so frightened for him. Oh, thank goodness,” she sighed with relief, “your Dad is here.”
I hung up when the dial tone sounded.
When Chase saw Dad's car, he took off out the back door. Dad brought Grandma home to stay with us that night. The whole thing of Chase showing up, drugged out and demanding money, scared her so much she put her house up for sale within a week. Not just because of Chase, she insisted, but because of rising crime in the city in general.
We didn't see Chase again for two weeks. Dad had already emptied his room and moved all his stuff to the garage when he showed up like nothing had happened. He wandered into the front hall on a Sunday morning.
“What are you doing here?” Dad demanded.
“I'm hungry,” he said. “I need a place to sleep.”
“Well, you're not doing it here. You can collect your things, they're in the garage. You're not coming back here, Chase.”
It was a really tough thing for Dad to do. Mom had gone into her bedroom, where she was crying. Through all their arguing, they'd agreed it was the only way he might come around. Maybe they were just encouraging his habit by giving him a place to stay. Maybe if they let him really hit bottom it would make him realize what he'd become and he'd ask for help.
Dad allowed Mom to make Chase a sandwich; then he watched him put a few things in a backpack before he left. It was a harsh moment. For Mom and Dad, I knew it was probably beyond their imagination that after years of school and family holidays, Christmases, soccer games and birthdays, this was the way one of their children would leave home.
A few days later, Chase entered the house when no one was home and stole Dad's camera. My parents became paranoid about going anywhere, in case Chase broke in again. He continued to show up a couple of times a week wanting money. For groceries, he told Mom. He was so withered and gaunt she couldn't help herself. Chase would leave with sixty or seventy dollars, and always, the empty promise that he would clean up. Because Chase often showed up in the middle of the night, Mom began leaving money under the doormat so he wouldn't wake up Dad.
Chase had become a huge financial drain. I asked Mom why she kept giving him money. She knew where it was going.
“He's my son, Gordie. I don't know what else to do. I hope at least some of it goes to feed him.”
Three times she gave him the first month's rent on a bachelor apartment. Three times it went up his nose. One morning we got a call from the hospital. Chase had blacked out in a parking lot, fallen down and hit
his head. Someone had called the police, and he was now in the psychiatric ward at the hospital. But by the time Mom and Dad got there he had walked.
He showed up at the nursing home where Mom worked, scaring the pants off the old folks. He embarrassed Dad by wandering into a class he was teaching. He stood at the back of the room, his bug eyes staring blankly, his spastic movements distracting everyone until Dad excused himself. He took him out in the hall, gave him fifty dollars and told him never to show up at his work again. It didn't stop him, because all that ever mattered to Chase was that he got his next fix.
Less than a month before Chase knocked Richard Cross on the head, I came home from school to find Mom sitting at the kitchen table puzzling over the statement from a credit card she'd never owned. The bill was for five thousand dollarsâthe card was maxed out. The invoice included motel rooms, taxi rides, some groceries, but mostly cash withdrawalsâa couple of hundred dollars at a time. Chase had applied for the card in Mom's name, using documents and bank receipts he had found around the house.
Mom and Dad were stunned at the amount of money they owed and the depth of Chase's betrayal. Most amazing to me was that Chase still possessed the mental faculties to sneak into the house and put something like that together. After that, Dad had the locks changed.
A few days later, Mom locked herself in the washroom where she wouldn't have to hear Chase on the other side of the front door, his key useless, mumbling that he was hungry and had nowhere to go.
But even when he was out of the house, Chase never left my parents' minds. All their energy went into thinking about him, why he was the way he was, and how they could get him to change.
I didn't know how to deal with it anymore. I was angry at them for falling for all his lies. And yes, I was angry at them for ignoring me and anything I did, in favor of catering to the self-centered whims of a meth head. But it was watching the emotional roller coaster he had them on that was the worst. The possibility that he might stick it out after rehabâactually do something with his lifeâfollowed by the inevitable letdown the first time he showed up stoned. I didn't know how many highs and lows they could take before they also dissolved.
Harris is dead. I hear the news through Jack. Harris died of twenty-seven stab wounds to his legs and chest. When I hear the news, I immediately think he must have been murdered as punishment for not paying his drug debts. But that isn't what happened. The wounds were self-inflicted. Harris was alone in a park after leaving some friends. They said he was tweaking, strung out so bad he was making no sense and hallucinating to the point that he was freaking them all out. He couldn't get rid of the crank bugs crawling all over his skin. Sitting on the grass beneath a streetlamp, Harris attacked them with a penknife, over and over. He'd lost a lot of blood before he was found by a jogger early the next morning; he died before they got him to the hospital.
Chase registers little surprise when I tell him. He may have already known, although I doubt it. He reacts to news of Harris's death with the same generic look of distant comprehension that he reacts to any news these days.
I could have told him the toilet was overflowing for all the emotion he shows. But then, I don't think he truly understands much anymore, not fully. It seems to take him forever to process even the simplest conversation. I really don't know how he can stand itâI'd be scared to death if my brain wasn't working anymore.
On the other hand, he probably didn't have a real deep friendship with Harris. People who become friends because they are both into drugs can't have a whole lot more in common. If they did, if they had real interests or hobbies, they wouldn't be using. But what do I know? It just seems a pretty exclusive club for freaks.
“Thank god, you're not into that stuff anymore,” Mom says, probably hoping it will help convince Chase that he isn't.
Dad is a little more forthright. “That could have been you, Chase.”
“I don't get how you could stab yourself even once,” Jack says on the way home from school. “I mean, intentionally. Okay, maybe once if you're goofing around and it's an accident. But twenty-seven times makes no sense.”
Jack is understandably confused by the whole thing. I, on the other hand, am shocked but I do sort of comprehend. “Think of it as a meltdown. You fill your brain with a toxic mixture of chemicals and crap, and over time, everything starts to short-circuit.”
“Yeah, I guess. But twenty-seven times? He was truly fried.”
Over the next few days, Chase becomes more and more restless. Whether this has anything to do with Harris's death, I'm not certain. I do know it is long past Ratchet's due date for repayment of his loan. I am leaving for work a few days later when he pulls me aside. “Gordie, can you lend me five hundred? Just five hundred.”
Just five hundred. He says it like I can pull it out of my pocket. Like five hundred dollars is loose change. Still, I wonder why he doesn't ask for what he owes. “Why five hundred? I thought you owed two thousand.”
“I do. But if I pay some of what I owe to Ratchet at least I can leave the house. I'll tell him the rest is coming.”
“No way.” I bend down to pull on my shoes. “When I have it, you'll pay the whole thing off at once. And I'm going with you. Don't think I'll just hand you two thousand dollars and watch you walk out the door. I might as well throw it into a strong wind off the Lion's Gate Bridge.”
I step onto the bus. As the doors wheeze shut behind me, I make my way to the back where no one can watch me think. I have to figure out how I can get rid of Chase's debt and get him out of the house and working. It has become crucial, because something else has happened.
Mom has lost her job. They told her at the nursing home that it was because they no longer needed three people in the office. It was more likely because she kept asking for time off. From their point of view, I guess Mom has become about as dependable as Chase.
Mom is trying to remain positive; she says it couldn't have come at a better time. She means considering how she is needed at home. But with the debts Chase has built up, the lawyer's fees, and the house mortgaged for bail money, I know how much they depend on her income. While the bus fills up, I decide I will sell my old Yamaha. I could have traded it in for three hundred dollars when I bought my new bass, but at that time, I'd wanted to keep it. I'm not sure why. I almost never play it now. I guess it was more because it sort of got me started with the band. But now I wonder why I'm hanging on to it. If you get too sentimental about stuff you only end up getting hurt when you eventually lose it. Besides, it wasn't that good to begin with, and I bought it secondhand. With that, the check from my grandparents and what I have in the bank, I can pay Chase's debt. Maybe then he can join the real world and contribute for a change.