Watcher

by Valerie Sherrard

  I think maybe she was depressed and couldn’t drag herself out of the slump. When she wasn’t at someone else’s place she slept a lot, right in the middle of the day and everything. Maybe it was a way of escaping her own life.

  Tack’s mother wasn’t anything like mine. She kept her place spotless, but she also ruled her boys like a drill sergeant, and she always had something critical to say to them. It seemed like she didn’t even like her own kids, the way she was always telling them they were lazy and stupid and wouldn’t amount to anything. Like your father, she’d say. She slapped them sometimes, too, right across the side of the head.

  I found it weird how they just all took it. Not one of them talked back, or tried to stop her from hitting them when she went that far.

  My mother did slam me up against the wall once, when I was younger. We were having a fight about something — I don’t remember what — and all of a sudden she just grabbed me and pushed me, with my T-shirt clumped in her fist.

  Then she kind of hissed at me, which is the best way I can describe it, and told me she was the boss, and as long as I was living in her house, I’d follow her rules. I was so mad I wanted to punch her right in the face, but she was acting like something possessed, which scared me, too, so I backed down. I guess she thought she won something that day.

  Of course, that was a long time ago and there have been some changes since then.

  chapter eleven

  I wasn’t crazy about having Lynn around again — not full-time anyway — but I have to admit there were some good things about it. The big one was that she liked to cook. She was also a way better housekeeper than Mom. It was almost like cooking and cleaning were her twisted little way of rebelling — and not being like her mother.

  Even when Lynn would just drop by to visit, she’d almost always wash a floor or scrub the bathroom or something. She’d tell me useful stuff, too, like how to get a stain out of a shirt or how to cook things right. I never used to cook meat even if there was some in the freezer, because it always turned out dry and tough as leather. But, thanks to Lynn, I learned to do a fairly decent job cooking most basic things.

  On the other hand, she liked to talk. Not normal conversations, which might have been all right, but relationship stuff, like how guys and girls feel and think differently and stuff. It’s all idiotic if you ask me. I used to think if she said one more “meaningful” thing to me, I was going to lose it completely.

  I didn’t think it would last long, though, so I tried to be patient and put up with her, especially since I heard her crying quietly to herself a few times. Even so, I had to fight the urge to flee whenever she got that certain look on her face and asked me if we could talk.

  I’ve learned from experience that when a female — and it doesn’t matter if it’s your sister or mother or girlfriend, it’s all the same — says “We need to talk,” what she really means is “let’s discuss your shortcomings,” or, in a slight variation, “let’s discuss the shortcomings of all males.” Lynn wasn’t complaining about me, exactly. I was more a stand-in for Conor (he’s actually a good guy and I never understood what he saw in my sister) and kind of a representative for males in general.

  Her rants got really tiresome after about five minutes and she could go on for hours, mostly repeating herself in what I’m sure she thought were new and insightful ways. I didn’t totally avoid her, but I admit I spent more time than usual at Tack’s place, or just kicking around.

  After the first few days it looked like maybe she really wasn’t going back with Conor. He called a couple of times and even came over once, but they just ended up fighting. By the next weekend I’d resigned myself to the idea that she’d be around for a while. Still, I kept hoping that they’d put it back together eventually. Until Saturday, that is.

  Tack was on his way over, so when there was a knock at the door, I just hollered “c’mon in” like usual. The door opened and this dude stepped in, only it wasn’t Tack or anyone else I knew.

  I thought he had the wrong place but then Lynn came hurrying along from down the hall and went up to him with a big smile and kissed him. It was just on the cheek but it still shocked me to see it. I mean, she’d been with Conor since she was barely seventeen. How could she be about to go out on a date with this other guy so soon after they split? In fact, when did she even have time to meet someone else?

  “Oh,” she said, seeing me staring at them, “this is my brother, Porter.” She sounded like she was apologizing. “And, this is Daryl.”

  “Hey! How ya doing?” he said. He gave a slow, one-motion wave, like a salute in the middle of the air. Probably thought it was cool. Made him look like an idiot.

  “Yeah, hi,” I mumbled and turned back toward the TV.

  Tack arrived just then and Lynn launched into another introduction. Tack was a little friendlier than I’d been, though he seemed puzzled.

  “Well, we’re off,” Lynn said cheerfully, like she wasn’t doing a single thing wrong.

  “Great meeting you guys,” Daryl added.

  I ignored him and asked Lynn what she wanted me to tell her boyfriend if he called.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, but her voice wavered just a bit.

  “Who was that?” Tack asked me as soon as they’d left.

  “I don’t know or care,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” He dropped it. “So, you ready to go?”

  We’d made plans to hang out at Pockets. It was kind of a fallback for us when we had nothing else to do because it was cheap. Two bucks a game if you were playing but you could just hang out and watch if you wanted.

  Tack and I were both average players, so whether or not we shot a game depended on who was around. Some girls were impressed if you had a cool attitude and a cue in your hand. But a few were slick and accurate on the felt themselves and you didn’t want to be shooting in front of them.

  Tubby, the owner (who was actually frightfully thin) was an all right guy. He had rules and stuff but they were fair, and he only charged a buck for fountain pop.

  We checked our funds and found that between us we had a little over seven dollars. Most of it was Tack’s — he earned a bit here and there by doing odd jobs for a few people in his building. I usually found a way to pick up a few bucks, too, cleaning cars mostly, but there hadn’t been much going on that week.

  Didn’t matter. We always threw in together. It evened out in the long run.

  So, we were walking along and I was drifting a bit, thinking about this and that, when Tack alerted me to the fact that The Watcher was coming up behind us. I tried to catch a glimpse of him in a store window but in the dark with all the lights on inside and out, the reflection was too hazy.

  “Take a right at the corner,” I whispered to Tack.

  We did, and walked half a block out of our way before turning back. The guy had disappeared.

  “He must have realized we were on to him,” I said, disappointed. I’d envisioned walking a ways down the street and then doing an about-face and going back like we’d forgotten something or changed our minds or whatever. In that case, The Watcher would have had no choice but to keep going, and giving him the slip would have been a cinch.

  I’d thought that would be good practice for when I put my plan into place and turned things around — started watching him instead. Before I could get behind him, I’d need to figure out a few ways to throw him off when he was following me.

  I figured Tack had done something that tipped him off this time. No big deal. It would be easier when I was on my own.

  I’d been thinking about it a lot and I was just about ready to get started. In the meantime, the pool hall waited, and I had a particular reason for wanting to get there.

  chapter twelve

  It looked like Tack and I might finally make it to Pockets after our detour, though we’d had another “offer” on the way when we ran into a couple of guys from school — Jake and Lee. They were heading to a party at Tiffany Rutledge’s pla
ce and they stopped to ask if we wanted to crash it.

  “She’s like, unveiling her new piercing tonight,” Lee said. He looked like he might hang out his tongue and start panting any second. I didn’t personally have much interest in finding out what part of her body Tiffany had decided to stick a hole in this time. Besides, Lavender Dean was supposed to be at Pockets and running into her was hardly ever the worst thing in the world.

  We told them thanks but we already had plans.

  “Cool,” Lee said. He grinned like we were sharing a joke.

  “You got any smoke, man?” Jake asked unsteadily. By the look of them they’d already been into something a lot stronger than weed, but these two never seem to think they’re high enough.

  We told them we didn’t and they left, making their way along the street in stumbles and lurches, which amused them to no end. I wondered, if it hadn’t been for Daniels, whether I’d be in the same shape they were. It wasn’t all that long ago that I made a regular habit of spending evenings floating along with that half-disembodied feeling.

  No denying it — the pull is still there at times. The old urge to disconnect. It had seemed like a kind of freedom, except that had turned out to be an illusion.

  I never saw it that way until I got probation — and Daniels. There were so many things that changed for me that year. It used to get to me, the way he seemed to see things. He was forever making casual observations, only they were almost always dead-on. It was as if he could see right into my brain.

  “You think anything you’ve gone through is unique?” he asked once. “Like no one else has ever lain on their bed and fought for breath over the crushing weight on their chest? You think it’s anger or hurt or something else, but what it really is, is want. All the stuff that fate hasn’t given you. What swells up in a person that way is hardly ever what is, but what isn’t. We can deal with the garbage that gets dumped on us — we learn how to handle that. But we never learn to stop wanting the things that are missing.”

  “Did you feel that way when you were my age?” I asked, sure he’d tell me we weren’t there to talk about him.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, surprising me. “Like I said, you can get used to almost anything. So if your father comes in falling down drunk, roaring and breaking things in the middle of the night, you find ways to get through it. What’s harder to deal with — or forgive — are the things that just aren’t there. Someone to help you lace up your skates, shoot some hoops, teach you to skip rocks, go camping. All the everyday stuff.”

  Later on, when we’d moved past that and got to the place where we could really talk — and probably when I was more ready to hear him — then he seemed to mostly listen.

  He was different. When I first met him I’d thought he was just a lazy slacker who couldn’t be bothered to do his job. Truth was, he was tuned in enough to know what to say and when. Mostly, he heard more than any other adult I’ve ever known.

  In my experience, most of the time, no one’s listening or paying attention — not enough to hear any of the stuff that really matters. It’s like most people watcher won’t look too close in case they find out something they don’t like, because that might disturb the nice order of things.

  Like the year that Krystal Smithton OD’d on smack. She was with some friends, and word on the street was they took care of a few things before calling 911 — as if the emergency people were going to stop and search the place.

  There were a few stories about what happened, but whatever the truth was, Krystal didn’t make it. Maybe she would have if they’d called right away and maybe it was already too late for her by the time anyone noticed she wasn’t just spaced out.

  The really pathetic thing was how her parents blamed everyone else. Even after they’d been shown all the track marks, they refused to believe she’d been a druggie. They hung on to the idea that she’d been peer-pressured into using, and talked about her death like it was a murder.

  I hadn’t known Krystal, except from school, but I knew she’d been a stoner since around grade six — and that she’d moved up quickly from weed and had made her way to heroin the year before she died. Word was that she’d done whatever she had to do to make sure she could fix, and she’d been beaten up a couple of times although I don’t know the details. So, how could it have been that her own parents hadn’t known she was a doper? I’d have known within two minutes if I’d just met her for the first time.

  My mother would never have missed all of the signs Krystal’s folks missed. But back when I was smoking bud, she never once noticed anything different. Or, if she did, she never brought it up, and I think she would have if she’d realized. Come to think of it, we never talked about drugs — not really.

  Oh, she gave me the speech once. Drugs are bad. Drugs will hurt you. Only losers use drugs. It was like having someone read to me from a grade one lesson book. “See kids use drugs. See kids drop out of school. Don’t, kids, don’t!”

  Tack’s mother had a different approach. Her approach with him was: “I ever catch you using drugs and I will kick your sorry butt all over the city of Toronto and back.” Tack could do a wicked imitation of that when he was stoned. We’d laugh ourselves sick.

  But Daniels knew the score. He talked to me on a level playing field, too, once I’d cleaned up. Lots of times I found myself saying things I hadn’t even known were in my head and some of them were pretty weird. Surprisingly, when we were talking, no matter what I told him, he never acted like the big P.O., if you know what I mean. And that made me tell him more — almost like I was trying to force him to react, to show his disapproval, to judge me. Only, he never did.

  One day I found myself telling him the whole story about the bong.

  “So this bong,” he said, “what was it that made you want it so much?”

  “Uh, it looked …” I hesitated, half embarrassed. “I know this sounds stupid, but it looked wise.”

  “Like it had answers?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Feeling stupid, I added, “It’s not like I asked it questions or anything.”

  “But you have questions.”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I guess they do. Say you could ask the bong one thing and it would answer you, what would you ask?”

  I laughed and shook my head. “I dunno, man. That’s hard to say.”

  “Because you can’t pick the right question or because there are too many?”

  “Probably both.” I noticed that Daniels had drifted, and could see that he was thinking about what he’d just asked me.

  “What about you,” I said. “What would you ask?”

  He seemed to think it over, and I thought something flashed across his eyes, like he’d decided, but then he just turned his hands palms up and shrugged.

  “You’re right,” he said. “That’s a tough one.”

  Other times we just talked about school and sports and general stuff. Then, one day, when we were wrapping things up, he said, “So, I guess you’ve probably done the math. But in case you haven’t, this is it. Your year is up. This is our last appointment.”

  “I’m not on probation anymore?” My mouth had a hard time getting around the words.

  “Nope.” He stretched a hand out. “You did all right, kid.”

  I shook his hand and squared my jaw. “Well, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “You have my number. Feel free to call if you run into any problems I can help with,” he said. “Otherwise, good luck and all that. You’re going to do okay … you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I stood up.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing.” He reached down beside him and picked up a book. He passed it across the desk.

  “This is for you.”

  I looked at the book. I read the title out loud. “A Prayer for Owen Meany.”

  “It’s my favourite John Irving novel,” he said. “I thought you might like it.”

  I held it up like I was showing it to him. “I�
��ll definitely read it. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  We said “So, all right then” and “Take care,” and a couple of things like that — the words you say when you can’t say the real stuff.

  Then I left his office for the last time.

  All the way home I kept looking at the book, glancing down to where it was tucked between my arm and chest. It was — believe it or not — the first time anyone had ever given me a book.

  The front cover displayed a picture of one of those things for making women’s clothes. I read the back cover and wasn’t sure I’d much like the story. It didn’t sound very exciting.

  But I knew I’d read it right away.

  chapter thirteen

  Strains of the latest Nickleback CD met us before we reached the door at Pockets. Tubby played mostly Canadian groups and tunes — a pretty decent mix of new stuff and the classics. Lately he’d been playing a lot of Nickleback, Roman Dane, and old Bryan Adams.

  We ambled over to where Tubby was sitting and said hello to him.

  “Hey, how are you guys tonight?” He reached under the counter, pulled out a package of Nicorette gum and popped a piece into his mouth. Tubby quits smoking about once a month.

  “Good. You?”

  “Can’t complain.” He chewed vigorously, not like they show on TV — bite, bite, stop. “And no one would listen if I did.”

  That didn’t call for an answer, so we ordered a couple of Pepsis and then sauntered over to the tables.

  They were all occupied. We plunked down on a long bench along the right wall. I tried to see if Lavender was around, without making it obvious that I was looking.

  “Think we should put up for a game?” Tack asked.

  I’d made a point of looking over the players at each table, which was also a good way to see who was around without seeming to. The place was busier than usual but I didn’t see Lavender anywhere.