Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  But I noticed Jack. Everybody noticed Jack. He had a giant aura about him, if that doesn’t sound too spacey. He wasn’t that tall, maybe a touch under six feet. And he was big – very big. Could bench-press more than any other guy in the gym, but didn’t brag about it. Did pull-ups without seeming to get fatigued, and handstand push-ups. Which, for a man of his size, was pretty impressive. He wasn’t one of those bodybuilder types, trying to get all their muscles cut so you could slice a tomato with them, and dropping body fat down to three percent to compete in tournaments. Jack was all about power.

  He approached me first, but it wasn’t a pickup. He’d noticed that I was lifting heavy for a woman with my build. I’m an ectomorph, naturally lean, with more of a runner’s body. And I didn’t use a spotter, because I felt like I wanted to be macho. Stupid, and Jack told me so. He showed me some new routines, split-sets that I hadn’t done yet, or periodization. Boring if you’re not a lifter.

  We hung out at the same times, and just naturally worked out together. Jack didn’t talk much, but when he did, I liked what he had to say. Dry, understated humor. I found myself thinking that he would fit right in with the quirky Clearys, except for the fact that he was fit, when people my sibs and I brought home tended more to the nice-and-nerdy.

  I was the one to ask him out. It took all my nerve to do it, but at the end of one sweaty set, I said, “Let’s go out for dinner.” Just like that. Having been, I am ashamed to admit, one of those women who are used to being pursued, it took a lot of chutzpah to say those words.

  “I can’t, Danny,” was all he said. After I finished blushing, we continued working out, and it was another month before I said anything personal. I asked him if he had a woman.

  “No,” he said, and told me to put another ten pounds on my bar, to not be such a sissy. Strike two. Hey, I was just asking. Exchanging human interaction with a friendly acquaintance.

  That winter, there were a series of muggings in the area of our gym, young gangs of teenagers swarming people coming out of bars or out of the subway, robbing, and often beating them. It was heavily publicized, but I didn’t feel touched by it. Besides, I felt like Superwoman, with all the working out. But Jack took to walking me home, because I lived about four dark blocks from the gym, and we almost always worked out at night. One night I said something cocky about almost wishing some snot-nose kids would try to steal my bag. Blah, blah. Big talk.

  “Shut up, Danny,” Jack said quietly. “Don’t wish that. You’re one woman, and there are whole groups of those kids. And you might be strong, but you don’t know how to fight worth a damn, I bet.”

  “So teach me,” I said. Those were the words that sealed the deal with Jack and me. And really, changed my life forever.

  The first time Jack took me to a boxing gym, I loved it. He showed me how to throw a punch, hit a heavy bag, how to move. I felt like a moron, of course, because I was used to being good at things physically, and this was a whole new skill set. But punching something full force, once I knew how to do it without getting hurt? Pure adrenaline. He helped me get my wrists and forearms stronger, so that I could hit harder. Soon, I was skipping some of my weight training sessions so I could go and train at the boxing gym with Jack. And even though Jack and I were still only buddies – and buddies who didn’t talk about our personal lives – I stopped dating and concentrated on this and only this. Plus the clients and two-day temp jobs I would do to make money. I didn’t live high off the hog. My apartment was rent-controlled, I read my books from the library, and I never ate out.

  Without telling me, Jack entered me into a small match with one of the few other women who worked out there. Layla, her name was, and I remember joking with her that she’d better not be as good as Laila Ali. Layla just smiled and told me that she was going to “clean my clock.” I laughed, because I had never heard anyone actually use that expression, and I’ve always been overjoyed when I hear something like that used in a serious context. Blame the Cleary sense of humor.

  But Layla, not being a Cleary, didn’t think my laughter was so funny, and what was supposed to have been a little training match with the newbie, for her, became a real fight. Within seconds, I took a right hook across the side of my face. Despite the face guards we wore, it made me go down and see stars.

  And got my blood pumping. Rage slammed through my brain. Even though I knew that hitting me was her objective, and that we were in a ring and therefore it wasn’t a sucker punch, I saw red. I was back up. And I went at her. And at her. I got her against the ropes and kept hitting until Jack pulled me off her. He was trying not to smile, I could tell.

  “You need to work on your jabs,” was all he said for a while.

  I was euphoric. It was the proudest moment of my life. Jack fed me half a roast beef sandwich and some water in the change room, which we had to ourselves. I was literally jumping up and down with excitement. I wanted to do it again tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Even though my jaw was pretty sore from that first punch.

  Jack sat quietly listening to my elation. “Looks like you’re a fighter,” he said. “I think we should go further, and I don’t mean with boxing. I mean, we should teach you some other martial arts. Like Krav Maga would be good for you, that’s Israeli, or ju-jitsu…” I had stopped listening. Jack said I was a fighter.

  And with adrenaline still pumping through my system, I kissed him. “I do want to go further,” I said, when I let him up for air. I think he understood what I meant. And after holding my shoulders and looking at me for a minute, he decided to come around.

  So we went further. In every way there is to go further. He taught me everything to know about fighting, which was a lot. And I taught him how to have fun with life. Not to take things so seriously.

  Our wedding, four months later, was City Hall all the way. Two strangers as witnesses, and I didn’t even tell the family until it was all over. Jack became my life, and while I was dying for everybody to meet him, I wanted him to myself.

  It wasn’t until after we got married that I really learned about him. How he was raised in foster care, but he didn’t like to talk about that. At twenty he’d gone looking for his real family, and found them; he could see from one look into the squalid living room how things were. The people who had made him were still together.

  He saw a man who was his double, but twenty years older, sitting in a living room that stank of cigarette smoke and sweat. A huge paunch hung over his belt, and he hadn’t shaved in a while. Jack’s birth mother, on the other hand, was obviously soused, and just as obviously being beaten around on a regular basis. She had bruises yellowing around one eye, and the remains of a fat lip. And when she brought Jack in a beer, she was holding her arm at an odd angle. Jack knew it was broken. Recently. And hadn’t been set.

  Jack got up off the couch, politely took the beer from the woman called Doreen who wanted him to call her Mom, and escorted her back to the kitchen. He picked up the phone and called 911. Doreen was apparently too far gone down the rye bottle to realize that he’d done it, but Mitchell, his birth father, was not. He came charging into the kitchen, yelling at Jack to mind his own goddamned business, how he should have drowned the baby at birth. He took a swing at Jack, but Jack ducked. And belted his father a good one in his gut.

  Jack wasn’t really a fighter yet, but somebody who plays hockey and wrestles tends to know how to handle themselves.

  Jack stood over his father, who was lying on the floor, in the throes of a heart attack. The minute and a half of excitement and exertion, plus the punch, had finished what a lifetime of bad living had led to.

  When the cops and ambulance came, it was obvious what was up. Doreen was sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the kitchen, rocking back and forth and trying to hold her rye bottle with her broken arm. Jack told them the truth, and they believed him. One look at Doreen told them all they needed to know. He walked out of that house, he said, knowing that if he had any of that man’s genes, which he obviously had, then he sho
uldn’t be allowed to be near women. Jack had already figured out, in sports, that he had strength, but he also knew that he had a tendency to violence when provoked. He didn’t want to lose control of himself. Ever.

  Which is why it took me so long to get him to see me. But once he saw me fight, he said he knew that we were actually soul mates. He recognized things in me that he saw in himself. It was rare, he said, to find these qualities in women. He wanted to teach me to take care of myself, so that I would never, ever wind up anybody’s victim.

  We were happy, for a long time. We married when I was twenty-five, and my late twenties were for the most part, the happiest time of my life.

  Jack started boxing and wrestling more seriously, and he took to it like, well, like I did to crack later. He was a few years older than me, and was finishing his Ph.D. in mathematics and his thesis involved the Computer Science department and had something to do with Artificial Intelligence. He won some big award in the department. I met a couple of his colleagues at school; happy, nerdy types. I liked them, but Jack and I were happy alone together. But they all told me that Jack was in for something big one day. “Very big,” one guy said to me, one of Jack’s mentors. “He has the capability to develop systems that change the world.” Yeah, yeah, I thought. Those nerds with Asperger’s – gotta love them, but they were always so hyped on their own intelligence.

  But then Jack slowly started to change, in alarming ways. He started whispering to me in bed at night about a shadowy cult-like group who tracked his movements. At first, I was terrified, alarmed. He had worked on some super-secret stuff when he was doing his Ph.D., and up until now I had no reason to disbelieve anything Jack had to say, about anything. I became a little frightened, for both of us. I shredded everything that might have any of our details, and became much more aware of my surroundings when we were out. I even went online looking at spyware, trying to see what equipment was out there for people who might want to do Jack harm.

  But then things changed.

  If we were in a restaurant, he started to believe that people at the next table were taping our conversation, even when they had been seated having dinner before we arrived, and we hadn’t planned on going to that restaurant. I began to see that his fears were delusional, that he was paranoid in a very frightening way. He would come home and tell me that somebody was following him. He developed extreme road rage when he was driving. It scared me. He scared me. Sometimes, if I tried to reason him out of his delusions, he would put his face nose-to-nose with mine and yell at the top of his voice, enumerating the details of his conspiracy theory. It was so frustrating for him if I didn’t believe him that I tried to. I tried to see logic in his assertions. After all, he was so much smarter than I was, right? He was Jack. He was all-powerful.

  Eventually, I took him to the hospital, when he agreed that something was wrong. He thought he was clinically depressed because he had taken to spending days in bed, unable to get up. The doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia.

  That’s when our world collapsed. They put him on Haldol, an antipsychotic, plus Zoloft and Ativan. A dangerous mixture for him, as it turned out, and he became much worse. Bad enough that I was seriously concerned for my own safety, should he decide that I was the enemy. Then, through a year of trial and error, he was on lithium and Ativan, for when he got anxious.

  Through all of this, we were both still fighting. For both of us, it released a lot of aggression. On other people. I wouldn’t let him do any real fights, worried about the effects of his drugs and what he could do, or have done to him, but he sparred all the time and worked hours every day on developing his body. And so did I, but I found myself leaning toward defensive fighting. I didn’t want to tap into my own rage; I had seen his. And I figured that if he kept going the way he was, I might need to defend myself against him one day.

  Eventually, it all became too much. Some of the family came to visit, and Jack decided that Skipper’s wife Marie – an elementary school teacher – worked for the CIA, and he banned her from the house. He wouldn’t let me use the phone for days at a time. He would cry and beg me to help him, but he had stopped taking the lithium, and refused to go back on it. He had to be sharp, he said, when They came calling for him. He became obsessed with the cult or group that he believed were following him, some organization that bled people of their money and then bled them of their lives. Jack thought he was on their hit-list. He was sure of it. He changed our phone number to an unlisted one and insisted we move.

  After one long, harrowing night, during which I saw that Jack was even starting to think that my calm attempts at reasoning with him made me the enemy, I packed up some things and moved in with a friend. He left me alone for a while, then called twenty, thirty times in a row, crying, begging me to come back. I did.

  It took six months of this, before I was worn down enough to actually leave for good. Jack was in the process of getting rich quick in the meantime. Despite, or perhaps because of, what was going on in his head, he could sit at his computer and work for twenty hours writing code. Odd behaviour in geniuses has long been accepted, I learned. And the rate of this kind of mental illness is much higher in the higher-I.Q. brackets.

  “At least I don’t have to worry about getting it,” I joked to Darren on the phone.

  I didn’t take much money from Jack in the separation, other than monthly support for a few years. His own lawyer thought that was crazy, with what Jack was worth by then. But taking away the only person in the world Jack trusted – myself – I couldn’t take away his money too.

  I spent the first six months crying. Then I dusted myself off and began my new life as a barfly, then addict. My new lifestyle consisted of doing vast quantities of drugs and watching movies for thirty-six hours at a stretch. I liked it. Nobody bothered me. And on crack, the only problem you have is finding more crack, and the money to buy it with. Makes life very, very simple. And after my years with Jack, simple was what I needed. Wanted.

  Until now.

  * * *

  “And that, Dave – if that’s even your real name – is what I know about Jack MacRae,” I said. “I could tell you more personal things, but I don’t think that would help.”

  “So he doesn’t trust easily, or fall in love easily,” Dave said, looking at me. He touched his nose gingerly. I could tell it wasn’t broken, but it probably wasn’t feeling so hot, either.

  I shrugged. How could I answer that? How easily does anyone fall in love?

  “Do you think he could be with Jeanette?” Dave asked. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, as though he hated asking personal questions. Odd, for a guy who did this for a living, and only hours ago had had a gun on me.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I didn’t even know about his foster family; he barely mentioned them. But if he’s harming those boys in any way…” I looked out the window, looked at the clouds. “No. Jack loves those boys.”

  I was trying to make my voice normal. Thinking about Jack was one of the reasons I had started doing drugs in the first place. This wasn’t helping.

  “Do you think he could be a danger to others? I mean, outside a staged fight?” Dave asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said. “If confronted, he could be a wild animal.”

  “In my experience,” I continued carefully, “Jack wanted people to be able to protect themselves. He was a huge righter of wrongs, in his book.” I paused for a second, then looked at Dave. “But I haven’t seen him in nearly three years. I don’t know what’s happened to his brain. I don’t know what kind of drug cocktails they’ve got him on now, or if he’s running around without any meds.”

  “What about the boys, Danny? If he has the boys?”

  “Children fall under Jack’s wing of protection. If he has them, which I doubt, but if he does, then they are absolutely safe.”

  “But if he believes that we are the enemy coming to get the kids?”

  “Then watch out us,” I answered. We sat in si
lence for a minute, thinking about this.

  “Is he proficient with firearms?” Dave asked.

  “He wasn’t when I knew him,” I answered. “But again…”

  “Yeah. Three years.”

  “Well,” Dave said, “I know you can still fight.”

  “That was one thing. Lola was a sitting duck,” I said.

  “A sitting duck who was very quickly reaching for a gun,” Dave said. “And what about me? I had a gun on you one minute, and the next?” He pointed at his face.

  “I can probably still handle myself okay,” I said slowly. “But I haven’t trained in years now. I don’t have muscle left, or speed, not really. And against Jack?” I waved my hand.

  “Unless he trusts you again,” Dave said.

  “And if he doesn’t, you had better give me that gun and some refresher lessons. Or you are going to have another dead Cleary on your hands.”

  I got up to go to the washroom and do a couple of lines of coke, which was now nearly gone. When I got back to my seat I looked out the windows, and watched the lights of Toronto as we approached landing.

  18

  The plane landed at the small airport on Toronto Island. A quick ferry ride to downtown Toronto, where another car would be waiting to take us to my apartment. No waiting for luggage, no lineups for customs. It was clearly the only way to fly.

  Note to self: buy a private plane.

  Neither Dave nor I had any bags. Or any jackets, for that matter. I was still in the sleeveless sundress I had bought in Palm Springs early in the day, what seemed like weeks ago, and Dave in his thin white t-shirt and jeans. I wanted to brush my teeth so badly it was nearly crowding out grief and crack cravings, and I knew I needed a bit of sleep before hunting for Jack and Jeanette. I only had my purse, and I only noticed Dave had a wallet when he checked it on the ferry back to the terminal at the foot of Bathurst Street.

  “You’re going to need clothes,” I said. Gene had a few things at my place, and he and Dave were of a similar size, but I wasn’t sure I was quite forgiving enough to be offering him clothes. And it was cold in Toronto, but not bitter cold. Just regular, brisk autumn cold, the kind that makes you want to hug your jacket around yourself as you rush down the street. The kind of evening where you break out the gloves. Dave and I stood in line for a taxi, shivering, but it wasn’t long until we were sailing up Avenue Road towards my apartment. As we cruised through the quiet neighborhoods on the way to mine, there were leaves that had blown into the street, all set now and turning into mulch.