We All Love the Beautiful Girls

by Joanne Proulx

  The zipper on Finn’s jacket gives way in jerky bursts. Michael slips his hand inside and his soul explodes with the small warmth at Finn’s chest. He slides his hand in deeper, presses his palm flat and hard against his son’s ribs. Michael holds himself motionless—the world suspended, time stretched thin—and offers himself up, offers up anything, everything, in exchange for one beat of this heart.

  —

  “MIA.” A HAND on her shoulder. “Wake up.”

  A small circle of light, the bedside lamp, darkness beyond—still night. She lets her eyes slip thankfully closed.

  “Mia.” Michael. His hand gripping her shoulder. “Wake up.”

  She squints against the light. Michael. In his hat and coat. “Where are you going?”

  “Get up,” he says. “Get dressed.”

  The clock on the bedside table glows 4:37. She remembers Stanley. Peter. Does this have something to do with Peter? Her head is swimmy with sleep. It is Michael’s boots that finally hold her attention, the snow melting onto the carpet beneath them. He has worn his Sorels upstairs.

  She pushes herself off the warm mattress. The down comforter falls away. Even in winter, they sleep with the window open; the air in the room is chill.

  “Michael…” She is afraid to say it. “Where’s Finn?”

  “Get up,” he says. “Get dressed.”

  In the car Michael tells her what happened. She’s heard stories like it before. Drug addicts, the homeless, passing out in the snow. Stories that have nothing to do with her or her family. When Michael finishes, he loops back and repeats the whole thing again, almost word for word, so she’s heard it twice by the time they pull into Emergency. The important thing, he stresses as he parks the Jeep, the important thing is that the paramedics found a heartbeat. Slowed by the cold, like patients cooled before surgery, but beating, his heart had been beating. Mia does not find this reassuring. Of course Finn’s heart was beating. How could it not be beating?

  There is no wait. The triage nurse checks her screen and informs them that Finley Slate has been taken directly to the trauma bay. They push through a pair of heavy swinging doors. Utilitarian grey. Michael reaches for Mia’s hand but she pulls away. She cannot be touched. He cannot touch her.

  A balding doctor in green scrubs leads them to a windowless waiting room. Fluorescent overheads cast a cold, clinical light. The room is empty except for a row of back-to-back vinyl chairs and one depleted vending machine, its empty corkscrews gleaming. The doctor talks, he tells them things.

  Mia interrupts. “Can we see him?”

  The man frowns, shakes his head. The mask dangling from one ear swings. He is wearing running shoes. White. There’s a circle of blood on one toe, a single drop. Is it Finn’s? Michael hadn’t said anything about him bleeding. She wishes she’d brought her camera, that she was holding it in her hands. She tilts her head, changes the angle on the triangle—Doc Martens, Sorels, white sneakers—centres it on the glossy red dot. She blinks the triptych of footwear into memory, a snapshot of fear at ground level.

  Two nurses pass in the hall, leaning into each other, whispering. One of them throws back her head, her laughter loud and guttural, a harsh foreign language. Mia focuses on the doctor. Superficial injuries, he says, and she exhales. Temperature-controlled mattress. Warm saline administered intravenously. To prevent blood rushing from his core to his extremities. A risk of ventricular fibrillation. The shutting down of vital organs.

  A slight flicker in the doctor’s eyes is the only acknowledgment that Mia has placed a hand on his arm. “We need to see him,” she says, squeezing his wash-softened sleeve. “Please let us know when we can see our son.”

  —

  MICHAEL GIVES MIA’S BOOT a gentle knock. “No socks.”

  She peers into her Doc Martens. Beneath her calf-length tights, a gap of pale skin.

  The doctor has been gone for thirteen minutes. Mia is sitting in the chair beside Michael, facing the looted vending machine—three packages of Ritz crackers and cheese, one Mounds chocolate bar. On the wall, a big clock ticks, its second hand jumpy.

  “I’ve got some in the car. In my ski bag,” Michael says. “I’ll go get them.” He stands. “It’s something I can do.”

  From behind, he looks almost normal pushing through the grey swinging doors. Left alone, she tracks the second hand’s stilted migration around the face of the clock and stares through the glass of the vending machine at the menacing metal spirals.

  It takes Michael six and a half minutes to return with the socks. They are somehow warm. When she asks, he tells her he tucked them under his shirt on his way back from the car.

  Finn’s smile—radiant and smug and slightly stoned—is driving Michael nuts. He knows the boy’s on morphine, but still, he seems particularly spaced out. When the nurse comes to change his dressings—wetting layer after layer of bandages with sterile water before peeling them away from his feet, his hand, his wrist, bandages stewed with dead flesh, every colour of blood and pus—Finn turns toward the window and closes his eyes, but that dopey smile never wavers. Not even when Cathy—it’s Cathy on night four of this hell—plump, freckled, with a butt so broad it stress-tests the limits of her polyester uniform, starts debriding the wounds. Debriding—using surgical tweezers to tear chunks of necrotic tissue from Finn’s toes. Michael feels every goddamn tug.

  Superficial injuries my ass, he thinks. When he works up the nerve to glance at Finn’s feet, he experiences a moment of vertigo, feels like he’s staring into the eye of a swirling comet, a deep spin of pulpy flesh. And the shocking bluntness that now ends Finn’s right arm? Every time Michael looks at it, bandaged or otherwise, he imagines the drop of a guillotine, the swing of a machete, the thunk of an axe; the whole thing leaves him breathless and weak-kneed. Superficial injuries? Christ. What the hell is superficial about losing part of yourself?

  Michael flinches every time Cathy pokes her needle-nose tweezers in too deep, pricking the heart of a wound, pale pink tissue once protected, now exposed, nothing holding in from out. From his chair by the window, the sour odour that creeps toward him as the bandages come off—it’s as if some small creature has died in Finn’s bed—conjures up the package of rotting chicken Michael once found, slipped from a shopping bag into the trunk of Mia’s car, parked in the driveway for the better part of a hot summer week while they’d been up at Peter and Helen’s cottage. He’d had to replace the carpeting in the trunk and have the whole car detailed, but even then the smell of death hung on, and he sold the vehicle the following winter, when the odour was tempered by cold.

  “Dad.”

  Michael jumps. Christ, have I been muttering? He can’t be sure. But it doesn’t really matter. He knows what Finn’s seeing: him in the chair, tense, miserable, face shrouded and tight, a cut-out of his own father twenty years prior, hunched over his dinner plate after a day when nothing had gone right at work and everyone else at the table quiet, knowing enough to let him alone.

  Michael runs finger and thumb along his brow, stretching out the lines, trying to wipe the darkness away with a shaky hand.

  “You should go home and get some sleep,” Finn says.

  “Don’t worry about me. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  Cathy looks up from rewrapping Finn’s foot, the toes blistered and swollen to three times their regular size. “I’ll be here for a while,” she says.

  “I know,” Michael says. “That’s why I’m staying.”

  “Dad.”

  Cathy is frozen mid-wrap, holding the length of bandage taut and high. On her left hand, above the gauzy white tether, a diamond shines. Her lips are pinched into a scowl, one eyebrow has flown up, but after trading stares with Michael, she lowers her eyes—perhaps she also grew up with an angry old man—and resumes looping the bandage around Finn’s foot, moving up the sole, closing in on the blistered toes.

  “You want me to go?” Michael says to Finn. “I’ll go.”

  “I don’t want
you to go. It’s just…well, I know this stuff bugs you. And I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine?” Michael is up out of the chair, striding to the bed, gripping the side rail. “Look at your foot,” he says. “Does it look fine to you? Do those toes look fine?”

  Finn’s eyes do not leave his father’s. His smile flickers but does not fade. The smell is sharper near the bed, thicker, mouldy cheese and rotting meat; Michael wants to give the bed, and in it his injured, amputated son, a good rattle, but instead he turns to the nurse.

  “Why the hell aren’t you wearing gloves?”

  “I’m allergic to latex.” She blushes. “I’ve got an exception.”

  “And you think that ring’s a good idea? You think that’s hygienic?”

  She nervously spins the small stone around with her thumb, vanishing the diamond into the palm of her hand. “I just got engaged.”

  “So you get engaged and my son gets a superbug?”

  “I wash up between pa—”

  “Is that the gold standard around here? Give that ring a little splash and on to the next poor sucker?”

  Eyes downcast, Cathy and Finn study their own chosen corners of the room.

  As the door swings shut behind Michael, a whoosh of air escapes the room, and with it Finn’s apology to the nurse. Sorry about that…you can leave it on, I don’t care. And before he even reaches the nurses’ station, he wants to go back, to make amends, to be a better man, a better father, to say the things he cannot say. He punches the button on the wall, summoning the elevator, frustrated it hasn’t already arrived.

  Mia nudges pale eggs and two rigid strips of bacon around Finn’s plate, guessing at what he might eat. Five days in the hospital and he is noticeably thinner, a boy who had no extra pounds to lose. Yesterday, he had plain toast for breakfast and sipped on a cup of soup at lunch, leaving the spoon untouched.

  When Mia looks up from the plate, Finn is staring at her hand. She scrambles it away, curls her fist in her lap and smiles weakly, embarrassed by the grace of her movements, the ease with which she can manoeuvre a fork.

  “Where do you think it is?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “My hand.”

  Her spine stiffens. “Your hand?”

  “Yeah. Where do you think it is?” His smile is too big for this conversation, his eyes too bright, so she is careful with her reply.

  “I don’t know, Finn. Where do you think it is?”

  “Somewhere kind of beautiful,” he says. “Like at the top of a mountain or something.”

  Mia had spoken with the doctors before the amputation. She knows all about incinerators and ash, vacuum-sealed biohazard bags lumpy with knobs of knucklebone, industrial green dumpsters with weighty tamper-proof lids.

  “Remember that bowl at Blackcomb?”

  “Yeah…I do.” They were the first ones up after the avalanche blasting had finished. The three of them trekking the narrow pass, skis over their shoulders, reaching the summit to stand exuberant on the lip of the back bowl, above the timberline, the world spread before them, cast in a fresh, new white. The air cold and thin, the sunstruck snow cupped deep in the valley beneath them, their futures fated, uncut and powder-perfect. Michael had her camera in his backpack. The light was tricky, but still she got some good shots.

  “I think it’s somewhere like that.” Finn radiates an expectant high-wire energy, a fragile joy that seems somehow wrong on the face of an injured seventeen-year-old boy. He looks so vulnerable in his hospital bed, so torn wide open, yet so glorious. Like one of those religious nuts you can almost believe in, Mia thinks, a soul recently converted.

  “Or you know,” Finn says, “chilling at the cottage.”

  Peter and Helen’s cottage. The lake a hoop of silvery blue, waves lapping the dock, making a splish-splashy music. The soft bump of the boat tied alongside, a flit of dragonflies, the lonesome call of a loon. Mia closes her eyes and a sigh escapes her, a tidal rise and fall of her chest.

  “On the dock,” she says, trying out the words. “On one of the recliners.”

  “Exactly.” Finn nods. “Like, just taking a breather.”

  The recliners are old and weatherworn: once-red cushions faded to pink, wooden frames softened to a seaside grey. And Finn’s hand, his beautiful, long-fingered hand, there, on one of the cushions. This is what he is asking of her. To seal the wrist cleanly shut so there are no raw edges. To reimagine the skin not reddish black like it was that night when Michael and Mia were finally allowed in to see him. On the cushion, the skin is lightly tanned, the nails clean from a weekend of swimming. She knows that hand so well, has held it in hers on a thousand trips across a thousand streets and on into a hundred different parks. She has washed it, dried it, pushed back its cuticles to reveal rising moons of white. Wrestled the thumb with her own. Positioned the fingers correctly along the handle of a spoon, the shaft of a pencil, the strings of a guitar, so her son could eat, draw, play music.

  His lost hand on the chair. The skin is still boyish but its size and strength are that of a man. It’s too small on the long cushion, there is not enough of it, of him, but otherwise the picture feels okay—the first thing in days that has.

  Mia reaches past the uneaten food and lifts Finn’s other hand from the sheet.

  “You okay?” she asks. “Not hitting the morphine a little too hard?”

  “I’m good, Mom.”

  “Really?” A flutter in her chest. His answer feels impossible.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m fine.”

  She rests her head lightly on his good hand, his only hand—suddenly exhausted, she’s barely slept in days—and lets him hold her up for a while.

  —

  TOO IMPATIENT TO wait for the elevators, which are always packed and slow, Michael undoes his coat and finds the nearest stairwell. He climbs at a steady pace, one that complements the logic of his thoughts and the slap of his boots on the stairs. Today, he has to cool it. Stop getting mad. His footsteps echo off the concrete walls. He lightens his step, bends his knees, works his ankles so the echo softens.

  Outside Finn’s room, he pauses. Through the small window in the door, its glass cross-hatched by wire, he can see Mia pulled up close to Finn’s bed. The dopey smile doesn’t seem to faze her. They are talking easily, but seriously, something Michael can’t seem to manage with anyone at the moment. She lifts Finn’s hand from the bed and leans her forehead to it. Another thing Michael can’t manage. He can’t remember even touching his son since the night in the Kellys’ backyard.

  He can almost feel the weight of Mia’s head on Finn’s arm. Their elbows press into the mattress as if into his own chest. They prop each other up, a shelter of flesh and bone. Staring through the small square of wire-strung glass, Michael swallows down the saliva that’s collected in his throat, swallows down his fear and his frustration and the sense that he’s missing out on something so big it’s beyond him.

  “Are you going in?”

  Michael jumps. Cathy, the nurse with the ring, is standing in the hallway behind him, unsmiling, avoiding eye contact, a pleated paper cup of pills in her hand.

  “No,” he says, flustered at having been caught at the window like some pervy peeping Tom. “Not yet.”

  “Can you let me by, then?”

  —

  MAYBE IT’S THE night noise of the hospital or the swing of the door that wakes me up. Or maybe I just feel her watching me. All the lights are off, the window black, but it doesn’t matter. I can see her perfectly. Standing by the bed. We stare at each other for what feels like a really long time. I can’t even begin to explain the catastrofuck I am inside. She paralyzes me by taking off her jacket. Her green polyester Metro shirt. Her jeans. Nothing on underneath. Legs like columns of summer tan, a neat strip of pubic hair.

  She pulls back the covers and slides in beside me. Presses her hand to the middle of my chest. I’m pretty sure she can feel my heart ricocheting off my ribs.

  Relax, she says
, I’m almost a nurse. Then Sorry, she whispers, resting her forehead against my shoulder. I’m so, so sorry. We stay like this, her hand on my chest, her head on my shoulder and me unable to speak, until really slowly she climbs on top of me, her legs straddling my hips. This is what we do, I tell myself. This is what we always do. But I can feel her being careful of my injured parts.

  When she kisses me I don’t stop her. Even with the rotting stench and the oozing bandages, her tongue moving in and out of my mouth, a soft collision of teeth, kisses like slippery fingers, long and wet they undo me, until finally, finally, I put my hand on her back, low down, in the hollow.

  Touching her makes me shake.

  When she slides my dick inside her, I don’t move at all, except for the shaking, shaking away flesh-and-bone defences, shivering me down to rawness, to truth, to her on top of me saying, shh, shh, don’t cry, Finn, don’t cry, and I don’t, can’t, say anything, can’t tell her shut up, to stop, to leave me alone, to leave him, to come every night, to never leave me.

  I hold the arm motionless on the mattress, pretend-forgotten, exiled from all action. Finally I just close my eyes. Make myself over as one perfect hand on the small of Jess’s back, a dick moving inside her and then the shaking stops, and she is all there, she is all mine, and she’s the one shaking, shaking and shimmering over me like some crazy-gorgeous dream of before.

  —

  AFTERWARDS I TELL HER. That night? In Eli’s backyard? It felt like it does when I’m with you. She turns her head away when I say it, so I don’t say anything about love or sacrifice.

  The papers Stanley left on the kitchen table are now stacked on Mia’s desk, a whitewashed antique table, drawerless, impractical, but pretty. Her office is the same: a converted second-floor sun porch with drafty wraparound windows. Six months a year Mia has to wear fingerless gloves to even work out there. Since renting the studio she uses the office infrequently, to pay bills, to do their income taxes each spring. Today, the snow-covered branches of the old maple brush up against the windows, transforming the room into a glittering winter tree fort, a contender for one of the beautiful places a boy might leave a hand.