by Aaron Dries
Turkey, vegetables, gluten-free pie and wine. She was already a glass-and-a-half deep and her tongue was starting to redden. Her girlfriends would be arriving within the hour. Light music was playing from the living room radio; the lights were dimmed, creating the illusion that nothing was wrong.
Claire placed a pot in the sink and began to fill it with water.
She thought about how Noah’s suicide had affected everyone, stretching far beyond the family. She received letters postmarked from every pocket of the country, hundreds of flowers with small cards signed: “An understanding parent”, each message written by a controlled hand, unlike her own. It stunned her to think that people she didn’t know could feel so much empathy, as though they were a part of her grief and confusion. Her guilt.
Claire looked down at the pot, it was overflowing. She yanked the plug out of the drain. Sucking sounds.
Despite good intentions, Claire found as much comfort in the letters and flowers as she found in statistics—very little. Suicide was the third highest cause of death in teenagers. Girls think about suicide twice as much as boys, but boys die of suicide four times more than girls. Ninety-five percent of people who kill themselves have a psychological disorder. Depression. Bipolar. More meaningless facts, more reasons for Claire to hate herself. Statistics didn’t help.
Does the hurt ever go away? She was beginning to think it wouldn’t.
Claire wished she could tell her son that he was loved beyond belief and that the pain he felt was not the worst he would experience. That his pain was a rite of passage we all must go through. She often wondered what kind of mother didn’t see the warning signs; it was her job to notice. But then again, the police found no answers. They had failed at their jobs too. Like the statistics and the flowers, there was no comfort in this either.
Claire held the dishcloth against her breasts, her face dotted with steam from the boiling potatoes. She liked the bubbling sound.
It gets better.
If she closed her eyes, she could imagine Noah hugging her in a way he hadn’t done for at least two years before his death. He had been irritable in those final twelve months. This she had acknowledged and addressed. Claire wondered what more she could have done. There were no repeated failures at school. Noah’s teacher had mentioned occasional lapses of attention…but that was normal, wasn’t it?
Claire threw down the rag and stirred the pot. Something dinged and went unnoticed.
She kept in contact with the families of the few friends Noah had for a while, which helped in the beginning. But there was little of him in their faces. Every anniversary—the birthdays, Christmas—was torture. She couldn’t walk two feet without stumbling over some stupid reminder. It was as though their house were booby-trapped with trip-wires that exploded memories when triggered. And these memories did nothing but reconfirm that Noah was dead, and that when he died, two important parts of her life went with him: the parts that enjoyed company and the parts of her with ‘gumption’, as her mother would call it.
Cowardly Lion, she thought.
The Wizard of Oz had been Noah’s favorite movie as a kid—they’d rented it so often that the owner of the video store had given them the old tattered VHS tape to keep. She remembered every line.
She began to busy herself with dinner again, but the thoughts kept coming and coming.
Every expectation had been mutilated.
Winged monkeys tearing open The Scarecrow’s limbs. Hay flying everywhere. That scene had always frightened Noah. It frightened her, too.
She hugged her arms and shook her head. There were times when she hated her son for his final, selfish act. Breaking things helped. Vases made nice crashing sounds. Suicide had ended Noah’s pain but it was the catalyst for her own. When she thought like this, she remembered how young he was and tried to think about how alone he must have felt.
Claire poured herself a glass of water, but that wasn’t enough. She bent over the sink, holding back her hair with one hand and drank straight from the faucet. She felt so bloated it hurt. Claire left the kitchen and slumped into a chair in the living room.
Everything was clean and in its right place with no dust to be found. There were magazines on the coffee table but she had no idea where they had come from. Perhaps her mother had dropped them off. The book she had bought sat unread on a chair.
The four women sat around the table surrounded by dirty dishes and wineglasses. They were laughing—a foreign sound in Claire’s apartment.
There was a lot of conversation bouncing about but Claire added little, preferring to sit and instead absorb the warmth they gave off. It was hard to not envy their happiness.
“I don’t know what it is about ninety-nine percent of the women in movies now but I just can’t stand them!” said one friend, tall and short-haired. “They’re either stupid, or bimbos or they’re the kooky kind. I should like those ones but I still can’t. They’re all ‘yeah, I’m rockin’ and alternative but I still get off buying shoes and the whole Prince Charming thing’. Ugh, barf.”
“You nailed it,” said another. “But I’m pretty choosy with what I watch now. You’ll laugh but it’s like this: what I watch totally dictates the outcome of my day, like my mood. I tend to steer clear of anything that’s going to make me sad or scared. But the shit of it is that it’s really hard to find anything that isn’t. Even some commercials on television are like a kick in the ribs. Except for Law and Order, I heart Law and Order.”
“Oh, I get you,” said the third friend, finishing her wine. “I can only do movies if they have the whole Merchant Ivory thing going on. Crazy, huh? Oh! And everything I watch has got to have animals in it somewhere. I watched a great documentary on elephants the other day. Tore my soul apart. Jesus. So that’s me. My ideal night at the movies: a Merchant Ivory film about elephants-”
“With some sort of legal battle third act twist.”
“We’re on to something here, we should be like, writing this down! Want another glass, Claire?”
The telephone rang in the living room. She hadn’t been listening—daydreaming instead of searching through the carpet fibers for vase fragments. Nothing her friends were saying seemed to relate to her. Claire had spent all day wanting company and now that her friends were here she wanted nothing more than to be left alone.
“Yeah, pour me a glass. Be right back.”
She shouldn’t have accepted the offer for more booze. Her stomach was churning. Claire crossed the room and snatched up the cordless phone. “Hello,” she said, massaging her upper arm.
There was no reply. Just breathing.
Claire was near the window. The blinds were open and the rain was running down the glass. The street lamp outside was blinking on and off, throwing intermittent water shadows over her face. “Hello?” she repeated, more firm this time.
Nothing.
She pulled the phone from her face and looked at the caller ID display. It was a private number. Something told her to hang up and walk away, but she ignored that something. Claire wasn’t afraid of the silence, and besides, it wasn’t silent.
There was the breathing. The sighs.
“Marshall?” she asked, holding the phone so tight it hurt.
There were high-pitched cackles from the kitchen table. Glasses clinked in a toast.
“I’m sorry I called, Claire,” her ex-husband said.
The line went dead.
Chapter Twenty-Four
November Third, 2012
The radiator groaned. It was hot and humid in Marshall’s apartment. All of the windows were closed and wind thrashed against the building. The television was switched on but the volume had been muted; there was only white noise. A molding block of cheese lay on a cutting board in the kitchen, a rind-covered knife sat beside it. Feathers were strewn across the living room floor, swirling around the bent fork. A gashed open pillow. Marshall had stabbed at it for five minutes straight, a dirty sock in his mouth to muffle his crying.
Marshall was on his bed, eyes burning and his nose red raw. He hadn’t showered in two days. Had eaten only once. The outline of his rib cage was so well defined it cast shadows in the dim light.
The computer was on; the screen saver slid past. The USB stick was still in the hard drive. It hummed.
The telephone was ringing and the answering machine picked up the call. A small red light started to flash. Click. Beep.
“Yo, Mars,” said the voice. “It’s Ringo. We’ve tried your cell a bunch of times. We need those edits finished ASAP. You’ve dropped off the face of the planet. We need you, man. Hashi is royally pissed that you haven’t returned his calls. Look, just give us a buzz when you get this.”
The message tally now read eight.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Marshall stepped outside for the first time in five days. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sky was grey but the clouds held their water. He was wearing his sunglasses, the glare was just too much. He stood on the front step, his shaking hands buried in his pockets. In the garden near the door there was a decomposing jack-o-lantern, swarming with cockroaches. He could hear them chewing through the rancid, orange sludge.
The apartment complex on the corner of Oak and King Edward looked incongruous with its surroundings. To the right there was a much larger and more impressive building and a children’s hospital on the left. There was always the sound of passing helicopters, crashing cars at the intersection. Crows sat in the branches of the trees and along the power lines.
He crossed the road to the bus shelter on the other side. Behind it was the school. The hedge where he had seen his son.
He wasn’t expecting the bus for another fifteen minutes but it felt good to be outside. His skin was soft and flushed after his hour-long shower; it felt good to be in the open air. He was leaving behind a clean apartment, tidy from top to bottom. He’d tossed away the things he’d broken.
The contents of the USB amounted to a single MS Word document. Just one. It wasn’t much to look at, the small dog-eared page symbol on the screen—it was almost innocuous. The content however… That was different story.
Different doesn’t cut it, Marshall thought. Different doesn’t come even close. He’d printed off all eighteen pages of the document and left them on the kitchen counter. He put the spray bottle of Windex that he’d used during his cleaning fit on the top page to keep the pile in place.
Or shackled, Marshall thought, in place. As though the pages were a prowler some father had caught outside his daughter’s window, knocked out with a baseball bat and tied to the stairs. Shackled to the stairs, whilst waiting for the police.
But Marshall hadn’t called the police. Not yet.
The document consisted of cut-and-paste articles, conversations and emails. Were someone to come along and glance over the pages they might throw them into the trash, because at first look, they didn’t seem to amount to much—just random excerpts, bodies of text in different fonts. But were that person to stop and read what was there, sorting for the narrative behind the mess, they might grow cold, or frightened. They would feel ashamed for ever contemplating throwing the pages away. They may even start throwing things, ripping open pillows. They might not eat for days on end, or cry until their nose bled.
Eighteen pages of answers.
Eighteen pages of questions.
Marshall watched the people on the street. They walked with the confidence that their children were who they said they were, that their children would never do the things that other children did. The naughty kids. The weak ones. These people held themselves as though they were impervious to tragedy.
The bus pulled up near him, he stepped aboard and took a seat. Marshall watched the windows fog up, revealing handprints and finger graffiti. Everything smelt like wet dog. The people around him stared off into their private nowheres.
Eighteen pages.
Eighteen seething pages.
It was difficult to pinpoint when the document assembly had been started, but the messenger and email excerpts were, at least, in consecutive order. Marshall guessed they dated back two years before to Noah’s death. At the very least. And they hadn’t been written on the family computer, which had been stripped and examined by investigators and detectives prior to the trial. None of the websites Noah had visited and cut-and-pasted from—frequently, it would seem—had appeared on their history reports. Marshall would have remembered these sites. Names like these stood out in an inventory.
The only histories that police had ripped from the saved MSN databases on the family hard-drive belonged to him, and the majority of those were either work related, or nerdy conversations with film fanatics in the US. Claire didn’t even have an MSN account—and neither had Noah, to his knowledge. The contents of the USB however, suggested otherwise.
The more Marshall thought about it the more concrete his suspicions grew. Noah’s discussions and searches hadn’t been conducted on the home computer, and he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to use one of the school PC’s. No, his son had done all this in his many hours alone at the library.
Chapter Twenty-Six
There was a photograph of a boy Noah’s age. A dark eye peered out from a neat swish of fringe. The boy was flushed and plump, well fed. Despite the stern expression and the crestfallen look, somebody loved and cared for this kid. The boy wore a shy smile and stared straight into the camera. It looked like a school photograph, the background was a decorative blue wash; he wore a uniform. Marshall could tell the photograph was a scanned image from a creased, pre-existing print, not a digital printout.
Below this the first of the conversations had been deposited.
HelveticaBoy: Do u see it?
NeedaArk11: Yep. Goin 2 save it.
HelveticaBoy: Good. Do I look how u thought I would?
NeedaArk11: kinda. How olds it
HelveticaBoy: Taken last year.
Marshall watched the buildings swishing by outside the window. Everything was running together. He didn’t want to close his eyes because when he did he saw HelveticaBoy’s face staring back at him.
HelveticaBoy: what u mean ur feeling sad?
NeedaArk11: I just feel that way sometimes. Don’t u?
HelveticaBoy: Yeah sure I do. But its usually bcos of my dad. Parents never love you like they say they do. Like sometimes my dad says he likes me but I know hes lying. You ever think that bout ur dad?
NeedaArk11: I duno.
HelveticaBoy: Does ur dad ever hit you?
NeedaArk11: No.
HelveticaBoy: Trust me. All dads want to hit their kids. Me and all my friends know this.
NeedaArk11: I duno. Maybe. Why does ur dad hit u?
HelveticaBoy: Cause im ugly.
NeedaArk11: But ur not ugly. U look normal.
HelveticaBoy: Do people think ur ugly?
NeedaArk11: N. I don’t think so. But im short. I hate that. Everyone in my class is bigger than me. I get picked on sumtimes.
HelveticaBoy: Because ur small?
NeedaArk11: y.
HelveticaBoy: well u r kind of small. Its ok tho. Im small 2. sometimes its better 2 just let them say what they want. U can talk to me about anything. Right?
NeedaArk11: Yeah! Ur like my best friend now. Im so lucky to have met you. Its like a miracle or sumthin.
HelveticaBoy: im ur only friend. That’s the way I want it. If I was there we could do the blood brothers thing? Do you know that? Like they do in the movies.
NeedaArk11: N. what is it?
HelveticaBoy: U cut ur hand and I cut my hand and then we shake hands and switch blood. Would u do that with me?
NeedaArk11: Yes. But only with u.
HelveticaBoy: Because were best friends.
NeedaArk11: y.
Marshall clenched his fists together. He could see the veins through his skin. Cold air chilled the small of his back and he tried to push himself deep into the cushion of the bus seat, but he couldn’t go far enough. The cold slipped
in no matter how hard he tried to avoid it.
He wondered about the emotion behind the screen, behind the words. It wasn’t like reading prose, rather a transcript, with no indication of pace. It was hard to empathize because he couldn’t feel the emotion. Marshall was accustomed to fitting random pieces of information together in the search for sequential sense—after all, that was an editor’s job. The collected conversations almost read like a screenplay—
Stop it, Marshall said to himself. His whole body was shaking. A woman opposite him on the bus turned her head in his direction, trying to hide her curiosity. She peered at him over her magazine. The look was as cold as the pain in his back.
Marshall calmed, even feigned a smile. Just settle down. Don’t dumb it down, Mars—you start thinking of this as a movie and you’ll lose hold of your feelings. You’ll go all numb. You can’t afford to do that, buddy.
The document called out to him again and he steered his thoughts back towards it.
Marshall wished he could tell the pauses between HelveticaBoy’s questions and NeedaArk11’s responses. For how long did Noah chew on the stranger’s words before answering? How long did it take for things to change? When did the HelveticaBoy change their relationship from something supportive to something—
Say it, Mars. Own it.
To Marshall, there was no greater crime than the manipulation, or abuse, of children. He now felt he could say it. Own it.
From something supportive to something evil.
The more Marshall read the more he could see the plotting in HelveticaBoy’s words. HelveticaBoy had been very patient. There were undefined lapses in times between the conversation excerpts, making the cogs in the plan more evident. When Marshall first read the document, he wanted to shake his laptop. He wanted to shake his son.