From then on whenever Irwin expressed an interest in trying anything that cost money, Lynne would say, “What about the drum set? Don’t think I’m sponsoring your every whim. I’m not made of money.” He stopped expressing interest in anything for fear that she might think it was a whim he wanted her to sponsor. She sold the drums for a quarter of what she paid for them. It was around this time she started getting angry all the time and talking about his hormones hitting. “It’s the hormones hitting,” she’d say whenever they had a disagreement. He avoided her by lurking on Facebook, watching happy lives. For extra income Lynne rented Harriet’s room and complained to Irwin about what inconsiderate slobs the boarders were. She blamed Trent for their financial difficulties. “If that asshole hadn’t quit the bank, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Mr. Shotlander pokes his finger in his ear and wipes the wax on his polyester trousers. “It’s good to play an instrument. Good for the soul.”
“What happened to your trumpet?”
“Didn’t have the pipes for it anymore. Gave it to my son.”
“Does he play it?”
“Heck, no. Kids never do what you want them to.”
Getting Harriet’s room ready to rent took weeks. Lynne insisted on doing it alone. She would go in after work with an empty box and sit on the bed. An hour later Irwin would find her still on the bed, gripping the empty box so tightly her sweaty fingers left prints on the cardboard. He offered to help but every time he tried to put something in the box Lynne would say, “Not that.”
“What then?”
“I’m getting there, Irwin. Don’t rush me.”
She threw out the glue gun but let him take Harry’s artwork. He hammered nails into his walls and hung up her scary paintings. After six weeks Lynne filled three boxes with clothes and two boxes with art books Harry had bought at yard sales. She stacked them by the front door where they remained for another three weeks. Finally she called the Diabetes Association to pick them up. The boxes were heavy and Irwin had to carry them one by one to the lobby. Lynne taped them closed and ordered him not to open them. He sat beside them until the truck arrived. The scraggly haired driver grabbed the boxes and shoved them into the truck. Irwin wanted to ask him to be more careful but was too afraid. As the truck drove away, Irwin felt Harry dying all over again. Mr. Chubak and Mr. Shotlander called him over and fed him Cracker Jacks, but he choked on a kernel and couldn’t stop sobbing. Mr. Chubak took him upstairs to Lynne, who was smoking on the balcony and put her arm around Irwin. The cigarette smoke nauseated him and he went to his room to try to feel Harry in the paintings. Laying his hands over the paint swirls, whorls and daubs, he felt nothing. After a while Lynne came in and hugged him. She felt bony and smelled of cigarettes.
Lynne taped two other boxes closed and wrote HARRIET in black marker on them. She put them in a corner of her bedroom. She has instructed Irwin to vacuum the tops of the boxes when he does the broadloom.
“Too bad about that little girl,” Mr. Shotlander says, looking at the front page of the Mirror.
“What little girl?”
“A three-year-old got hit by a garbage truck. An eyewitness said the driver was so shocked when he got out of the cab his legs went rubbery. It’s these one-man-operated trucks, I’m telling you. He can’t see a dang thing driving that hulk all by himself. This wouldn’t have happened in the days you had guys hanging off the trucks.” Mr. Shotlander often talks about things that wouldn’t have happened in the days before cell phones, self-serve registers, ATMs, voicemail and online everything. It makes Irwin pine for the simplicity of those days.
“My son got laid off again. How do you like that? They told him he wasn’t a good fit. What is he, a shoe?”
Mr. Shotlander was an electrician and advised his son to learn a trade. Now he advises Irwin to learn a trade. “Nobody can manage without plumbers and electricians.” Irwin would learn a trade if he could, but he can’t learn anything. His mother winces when she looks at his report card.
“Have you heard anything from Mr. Zilberschmuck?” Irwin asks. They wheeled him out strapped to a gurney last week. Mr. Zilberschmuck insisted on finishing his JD and a cigarillo before they put him in the medical transportation van. “Till we meet again,” he said to the other seniors, who avoided his eyes. In Irwin’s experience, the ones wheeled out almost never return.
Mr. Shotlander shakes his head. “The place just isn’t the same without the old lothario.” He sips his Coke. He keeps forgetting to go to the barber and his tufted white hair is matted at the back. “It’s only a matter of time, Irwin. For all of us.” He eases himself off the couch and rummages in the kitchen. “Where’s that dang sister of yours? I’m right out of chips.”
Irwin delivers Mrs. Chipchase’s Mirror, and she invites him in for fig bars and milk. She is working on another jigsaw puzzle of a cathedral. She and Irwin have been doing puzzles together for years. She taught him how to pick out the straight-edged pieces first, to find the corners and to build up the four sides. She taught him to sort the colours next, and to construct areas of the picture. They use the image on the box for guidance, although Mrs. Chipchase admitted that the die-hard puzzlers consider this cheating.
“Well,” Mrs. Chipchase says, “I can’t see by the colours anymore. I’ve done all the bright ones, let’s go by the shapes now.”
Near the end of a puzzle, Irwin inevitably panics, convinced that certain pieces are missing. Some blue sky with a wisp of cloud, or a piece of tree, that should occupy a space can’t be found. Mrs. Chipchase tells him not to worry, that the piece must be somewhere, but anxiety tackles him and he falls down on all fours and scours the floor. Sometimes he goes so far as to empty a vacuum cleaner bag. Mrs. Chipchase suggests he count the pieces and the spaces to make sure there aren’t any missing. Irwin loses track and has to start over. When he determines that there is the right number of pieces for the spaces, he feels unusually calm knowing that somehow, some way they will finish the puzzle. Mrs. Chipchase always lets him fit in the final piece. As he presses it into the picture, savouring the soft click, an unfamiliar sense of accomplishment settles over him.
When Irwin asked Mrs. Chipchase if Harriet did puzzles with her, she said, “No, dear. Your sweet sister moved too fast for puzzles.”
“Why did she move too fast?”
“She was looking for something.”
“What?”
Mrs. Chipchase sipped her tea. “Love and approval.”
“I loved and approved her.”
“I’m sure you did, dear, but I don’t think she felt safe.”
“Why not?” Irwin knows that Gennedy hit Harry once, but lots of parents hit their kids. “Why didn’t she feel safe?”
Mrs. Chipchase stared at her Persian rug. “Many, many people don’t feel safe, Irwin. Even in their own homes.”
“You feel safe in your own home, don’t you?”
“I do now, dear.”
Irwin doesn’t feel safe in his own home with his mother all jagged edges, smoking and angry, and Sydney strutting around, changing eye colour and cursing her ex-boyfriends and their slutty hags. When he breaks through the membrane he will leave home, find Harry and stop her from falling.
Twenty-one
Lynne and Sydney are on the couch drinking wine again. When Sydney first moved in, Lynne complained to Irwin that she was a souse. Then Sydney started offering Lynne a glass of wine. Sydney would be sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through a People magazine, commenting on how fat and ugly the actresses looked in their candid shots, and she’d point to the bottle and say to Lynne, “Help yourself. It’s a nice little Riesling. Have a taste.” Lynne would pour herself a glass, take a sip and say, “It is nice.” Sydney never calls wine wine, it’s always a Riesling or a Merlot or a Shiraz. Lynne told Irwin she doesn’t know how Sydney can afford it, but she drinks her wine anyway. “Syd and me are
just having a little vino,” she’ll say to Irwin. He’ll sit with them and watch Sydney’s rolls and curves shift under her shiny workout gear. After a couple of glasses, they’ll forget he’s there and talk loudly about what peasants people are.
“Is that my baby boy?” Lynne calls. “Come here, peanut, give us a hug.”
She grabs his hand and pulls him onto the couch between them. She smells of wine. “Did you hear about that little girl who got run over? What a tragedy. Oh my lord, you have to be so careful, sweet pea.”
“I’m fourteen. She was three.”
“Could happen to anybody,” Sydney says. “Those trucks are humongous.”
Lynne drinks more wine. “Can you imagine being the driver? I mean, how’s he supposed to recover from that?”
“Drugs,” Sydney says. “They’ll send him for PTSD counselling and he’ll end up on SSRIs that make his eyeballs vibrate and give him diarrhea. For real, it happened to a friend of mine.” Sydney has many friends who have things happen to them.
“Imagine the child’s poor mother.” Lynne holds Irwin tight against her ribs. “So how was your day, angel?” When she drinks vino, she acts loving then suddenly attacks him about something he was supposed to do. She leaves to-do lists for him, and when he forgets something she says, “It was on the list. How could you miss it? What’s the matter with you?” His hands start to shake and Lynne says she’s sorry, it’s just she’s under a lot of pressure at the bank.
She sweeps hair out of his eyes. “How was dinner with your dad?”
“Okay.”
“Did he have any new over-priced bike accessories?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Entre nous,” Lynne says, because speaking French is another thing she does liquored up, “Irwin’s father is the cheapest prick of all time, except where his bikes are concerned. I keep hoping he’ll get cancer or something, or at least go bald. He’s always biking in wine country and going to tastings. You’d think he’d have the decency to get a prostate problem.”
“That happened to a friend of mine.” Sydney’s eyes are emerald green tonight. “He was a total bikeaholic. It scrunched his balls and his prostate got swollen.”
“Cancer?”
“Some bladder thing. He had stones in his bladder.”
“Did it kill him?”
“No. He pissed rocks for a while. I think he was bi. Anyway, he had a kid who turned out to be trans and had his balls cut off and his penis made into a vagina. Now he has to take female hormones for life.”
Irwin shifts slightly away from his mother and closer to Sydney. She smells of the perfume she carries in her purse. Every morning, before she leaves for LA Fitness, she sprays her neck and cleavage with the perfume. Irwin thinks it smells flowery, but Lynne says it makes her gag and they should declare the apartment a fragrance-free zone.
“I think that’s criminal,” Lynne says. “I mean, what kind of doctors do those operations?”
“Rich ones. It costs twenty thousand to get a penis turned into a vagina. Guess how much to turn a pussy into a dick?”
Lynne snorts. She only snorts when she’s drinking vino. “Fifty grand?”
“A hundred.”
“Oh my lord, who wants a penis anyway? Seriously, who needs the old twig and berries hanging around?” They both cackle. They’ve forgotten that Irwin’s there. He leans a little closer to Sydney. Moist heat radiates off her, and her thigh presses against his as she reaches for the bottle on the coffee table. He feels his penis at half-mast and covers it with a seat cushion.
“Our masseur at LA Fitness is turning into a woman.” Sydney tops up their glasses. “He’s getting boobs, and the facial hair’s fading away. Don’t know how the desperate housewives are going to feel about George turning into Georgette.”
“Is he hot?”
“Kind of androgynous, which pleases the boys and the girls because in their minds he could go either way. Only one way to go with boobs.” Sydney shakes her breasts, grazing Irwin. He can see her nipples through her sports bra. His groin throbs and his penis pushes against the cushion. When he slinks off the couch and into his bedroom, they don’t even notice.
After he thinks they’ve gone to bed, he gets up to find something to eat, but Sydney’s at the kitchen table with her laptop. “Hey, junior. Couldn’t sleep?”
“I haven’t really tried yet.”
“Don’t try, that’s the secret. Check out this peasant.” On the screen a man wearing a goalie mask and bikini briefs points to his crotch.
“Is that one of your exes?”
“How did you guess.”
“You deserve better than that.”
“Thank you, Irwin. I couldn’t agree more.” She’s in her bathrobe but not wearing lenses or makeup and has that washed-out look about her. “Your mother took that little girl getting killed really hard. I’m a little worried about her, to be honest. I’ve never seen her cry before.”
“She was crying?”
“Yeah, I think because it made her think of your sister.”
“Which one?”
“The one that died.”
“What did she say about her?”
“Just that she misses her and all that.”
“Did she say her name?”
“Harriet.”
Hearing Sydney say “Harriet” startles Irwin, as though she’d been speaking a foreign language then suddenly used an English word. “I haven’t heard her say my sister’s name in years.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s too painful for her. It sure opened the floodgates.”
Irwin hasn’t seen his mother cry since Harriet’s fall. Before that she cried at his bedside during various hospital stays. He knew she thought he was asleep and would peek at her through partially closed lids.
“That’s awesome that she donated her organs,” Sydney says.
“What?”
“Yikes, maybe she doesn’t want you to know.”
“I knew,” Irwin says, although he didn’t.
“I really admire organ donors. I wish I had the guts to sign mine away, but something creeps me out about the whole deal. I mean, like, what if they put your heart in some peasant who abuses his wife and kids or something? It’s not like they check character references. Someone needs a heart, they go on a list, a match is found and bingo, in it goes. Could be a pedo for all they care. They fix him up and he’s back on the street messing with little kids. I’d do it if I could choose the recipient. That happened to a friend of mine.”
“What?”
“Oh she had this baby with a heart problem and there was another couple with a baby who had something wrong with her brain, like, she was a vegetable. So they gave her heart to my friend’s baby. It was awesome. Their video went viral.”
The thought of Harriet’s heart in someone else’s body causes the dense, dark clouds to close in on Irwin.
Sydney swishes wine around in her glass. “It’s a bummer she has to take heavy duty drugs all her life though.”
“Why does she have to take drugs?”
“To stop her body from rejecting the heart. That’s the part I can’t get my head around. I mean, if the recipients have to take heavy-duty drugs that make the rest of their body sick, something’s weird about the whole deal.”
“Which of Harriet’s organs were donated?”
“I didn’t ask. How did she look at the end?”
“Asleep. She had casts.”
“Okay, so probably her internal organs were intact, like the liver and kidneys. They probably took all kinds of stuff out of her. They can even transplant faces and eyes now. It’s pretty amazing. Look,” she turns the laptop towards Irwin. “That’s my friend’s kid. She’s nine.” The child stares into the camera with an anxious smile. “Modern medicine at its finest.”
The gir
l looks bloated and pale and has dark circles under her eyes. She has fooled death and knows she should not be alive.
Irwin hurries to the bathroom and vomits into the toilet. He returns to the kitchen because he can’t be alone with visions of Harry chopped up. He saw a movie about a corporation that sold organs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the recipients couldn’t come up with the money after ninety days, the corporation sent repo men with knives after them to cut out the organs so the corporation could sell them all over again. After the repo men cut out the organs, they dropped them into Ziploc bags. Irwin can’t stop seeing Harriet’s organs cut out and dropped into Ziploc bags.
Sydney turns her laptop towards him again. “What do you make of this guy?”
“He looks okay.”
“He just joined LA Fitness and asked me out. He’s a computer programmer. Looks nerdy but you never know what’s downstairs with those guys.”
“What else did my mother say?”
“About what?”
“Harriet.”
“Oh, just that she never really understood her and blames herself for her death. Which is pretty self-destructive. I told her there’s no reason parents should understand their children. My parents don’t understand me and I’m not planning to kill myself. It’s like, let go already. Your kids aren’t you, and you’re not always going to like them, get over it.”
“She said she didn’t like Harriet?”
“Not exactly, but it’s pretty clear they weren’t close. I mean, she’s never talked about her before. Just that little girl getting killed brought it on.”
“What on?”
“Her talking about Harriet.”
“What else did she say?”
“Okay, this is getting a little weird. I mean, maybe you should talk to her about it.”
“If she cried, that means she misses her.”
Sydney closes her laptop. “I’m calling it a night. You should too.”
He sits on her chair, warm from her ass, and tries to enter his alternate universe. Forbes says what might be preventing him from breaking through the membrane is particles of matter clinging to three-dimensional spaces. It bugs Irwin that clinging particles are stopping him from entering, or even observing, his AU—particles he can’t even see and therefore can’t do anything about. It’s not like he can Dustbuster them.
On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light Page 28