What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  Teddy took me by the hand. We were buzzed, but not out of our gourds. I think we both knew what was coming. We were both excited and we were both scared, but it felt inevitable and crucial. Like a thing we couldn’t stop. I’m not sure what good caution would have done us, anyway, just like I’m not sure what good it’s doing me now.

  All the bedrooms were occupied, including his, so we went out to his van, which was parked under some trees alongside the house, and he started it up and ran the heat to take the chill off, and then we lay the blankets out and I undressed for him, on my knees, and he undressed, and we kissed, and then I lay down, and he was on top of me, and we did it. Just like that. It was both harder and easier than I expected it to be. It wasn’t roses, but it wasn’t all thorns, either. I was scared, but so was he, and his hands told me that he loved me.

  After, we wrapped up in the blankets and lay there, and when the chill came back he started the van to get the heater running. I kissed him and smelled the sweaty, earthy scent of him, and the traces of dampness that I knew to be from the Kanes’ old farmhouse. When somebody banged on the side of the van a while later we quickly dressed and then went back into the party one at a time, me first, as though it mattered to anyone what we’d been doing out there. We drank more beer and shared a joint and sang along when Bobby Culter and Danny Deeth got out their guitars and played “Heart of Gold” in the family room.

  I lost Teddy for a while there. He drifted out of the room and I assumed he was taking care of something, or someone, but I think now he must have gone out to his dad’s workshop. When he came back he had a green nylon backpack, and his plaid coat and big work boots on. He told me and a few other people there was going to be a light show outside. He had this big, beautiful smile on his face. I found my coat and shoes and he led me by the hand, outside, down the porch steps, and into the cold night.

  He went across the lawn, which stretched out to the side and back of the house, and down a tractor path, muddy and rough. I was trying to keep up with him while jumping puddles, leaping from one grassy spot to another. It was cloudy and cold, but the night air was just barely lit up with that kind of pre-winter glowing. Teddy had a Maglite that he shone ahead of us. There were a bunch of people following us: some of the stoners, Cassie, Rodney. Mike Stronick was there, a kind of a popular kid, a big name, and he shouted “Hey, Kane, this better be good,” in a way that made you know that Ted had moved up a rung on the social ladder by having the party.

  The path led by the edge of one of the fields the Kanes leased out for hay, and then down a bank toward the road. There was a shallow stream there, and big metal culvert where it went under the road. Near the mouth of it Ted stopped and set his bag down. Everyone kind of congregated there, maybe fifteen kids. He zipped the bag open and handed another Maglite to Mike. He dug a handful of Roman candles out, about four or five of those little cardboard tubes, and he walked toward the stream and propped his own light on some rocks, pointing down into the culvert. Then he stepped into the stream. It was just a few inches deep, and he stepped carefully out into the middle of it, and farther into the dark metal tube, which was ten or twelve feet tall at its highest point.

  With a plastic lighter he started lighting the Roman candles and holding them at his belt, letting the little fizzing balls pop out of the tube and shoot into the culvert. They looked beautiful, little balls of light rocketing through the air, flashing across the corrugated metal sides of the tunnel, throwing Ted’s shadow everywhere. They made a wonderful noise in there, too, like POPshewwwwww. Cassie was standing on the bank, talking to Lisa Gooden, I remember.

  I walked down to watch Ted. He lit another tube and they went pop-pop, and the little sparks landed in the film of water and died. Mike Stronick, holding his Maglite over his head like a floodlight, had come closer to watch, along with another boy named Phil Boyle. When that tube was done they stood talking a minute. Phil was smoking a cigarette. Then Ted walked out of the stream and over to me and he said, “How are you, Sammy?” and I said, “Good, Teddy.” “Good,” he said, and then, “I love you, Sammy.” He put his arm around my waist and he kissed me, and smiled. Then he went over to the backpack once more, and he pulled out a cluster of three short, red cardboard tubes, wrapped together with masking tape, with smaller charges of some kind stuffed in the middle. A single wick stuck out of the side of one of the tubes.

  He said to Mike Stronick, “I call this baby Big Mama.” It was kind of sweet to see, because he was trying so hard to impress Mike.

  “Right on,” said Mike. Then Ted walked into the culvert. He bent down and switched off his light.

  “Turn yours off, too, Stronick,” he said, and Mike did. Then Ted stepped carefully again into the stream. He got his lighter out of his pocket and fiddled with it a bit. I didn’t know what he was intending to do. He couldn’t lay the package down, because of the water on the floor of the culvert. I think he was trying to time it so that he could throw it just before it went off and have it explode in the air. He stood there, like he was rehearsing it in his mind.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s gonna be loud!” We all cheered.

  His back was to me. He was lighting the thing, and then he was just standing there, looking down. He laughed. I remember that. He laughed nervously. And then it went off.

  In a moment, of course, I realized what had happened. I fell to my knees and bent over, holding my stomach. There was a smell of dampness and of the blast, smoky, and of something else, something rawer, wetter. Was that the smell of Ted’s insides? I remember wondering that. Then, almost right away, there was so much going on, people running, people screaming. A police car arrived at the house at some point, and then an ambulance. I don’t really know what happened next, the order of it. Cassie was holding me and Mike Stronick was crying, running into the culvert and back out, screaming. Somebody had to grab him and hold onto him.

  My mother caught me crying once, about Ted. I don’t know how long after he died, but long enough that she thought I shouldn’t be crying about it anymore. And do you know what she said to me? She said, “At least you didn’t have to watch him walk away.”

  There was a period, maybe a month or six weeks after Teddy’s death, when I couldn’t think of him without throwing up. I thought I might be pregnant, that my teenage beau’s flesh and blood legacy might be growing inside of me. But it passed. There was no baby in there. There was only the rest of my life, growing problems like limbs. Illnesses and bad habits and fear.

  He was gone, and all the boys left here seemed even more stupid and coarse in his absence. They’d run the hallways like hooligan kings and most of them must’ve known that they’d never get out of this town. Their dads didn’t; why would they be different? The girls would marry them and have their babies. The boys would give the girls headaches and garages full of empties. They’d die still working on the line at Springer. This is the default relationship in this town. Unsmiling women and men who are always laughing loudly, sloppily.

  Even my parents’ relationship worked that way, more or less. Dad was decent enough, underneath it all, but he wasn’t good for much around the house. My mother, a patient island of stability, held it all together. Her apparent strength is the thing I have spent my adult life trying to live up to. Alongside that I’ve tried to bury the pain of watching Ted Kane blow himself up in a drainage culvert while doing a stupid trick. I haven’t really succeeded at either.

  I gave myself time to try and believe that it would have been different with Ted. That he was different, and that his goodness and our love would make things better for us. But I guess everybody starts off believing that, don’t they?

  After the funeral, part of me thought I should just leave Cavanagh. I still wonder if I should have.

  We used to look at our parents and laugh, but we laughed to keep from crying. Everything they did seemed so boring, so sad. We said it would be different for us. But I go on living it, and not changing it, because that’s what I’ve always do
ne. It blows like a hurricane right over me and I just hang on.

  I’m aproned and ponytailed, with dry hands and crow’s feet. I’ve seen better days, but I can’t remember most of them. I have two daughters, just like my mother, but the similarities really end there. She didn’t hide like I do. She didn’t cry in front of her kids as often as I do. I don’t know what we, as parents, are supposed to do with these weaknesses. Whether we’re supposed to contain them and refuse to show them to our children, or if the backstage stuff will give them some comfort in knowing we’re all kind of struggling, so it’s okay for them to feel that way too. I can say that I started out thinking I’d be impenetrable, and I may even have had a few good years where I looked that way to them, but after a while I got too tired for the act, and just started letting the rough edges show. It made me feel very much that I was not my mother. It made me admire her more, but also to feel sad for what she must have felt, and what I did not know. For all the ways we don’t know one another.

  I think of how I felt those few times my mother allowed her cracks to show even the tiniest bit. The only time I ever saw her throw up, into a kidney-shaped steel bowl, while lying in a hospital bed. The maybe two or three times I saw her cry. The one time I saw her lose her temper with my father over money.

  The girls don’t listen to me and neither does their dad. I feel like we always listened to my mom, though she might remember it differently.

  I look at myself in the mirror now and I wonder, How did these heavy, frowning eyebrows become the dominant feature of my face? I used to have a cute nose that people noticed. But then I think, Fair enough; I do disapprove. I’m tired and I disapprove.

  I’d be lying if I told you that I don’t find myself thinking of Ted, and of the end of Ted, about five or six nights a week. It always seems to be there, that night, and those hours leading up to it. As memories go it’s not a pleasant one, but it’s familiar and for that reason comfortable, in a way, if that makes sense. It’s like somebody mean or unkind who I see everyday on my way to work, someone I don’t know, but I’d still feel sadness if she wasn’t there.

  I’m thankful that the thoughts and dreams aren’t always the same. That’d be maddening, I think. Instead they change and shift, like a hundred variations on the same theme. Sometimes I focus on what we did an hour before he lit that fuse, and try to tell myself they aren’t connected. Sometimes I try to remember the scene after it went off. Other times I try to think about what it must have been like to be him. Did it hurt?

  And yes, sometimes I like to imagine that he was thinking of me just before he went up. Maybe picturing me singing to him. It’s stupid, I know. Poor Teddy, he wouldn’t even have had time to think.

  He missed all the hard stuff. It started soon after he died and it hasn’t stopped since. I thought that if I bent to it, I could weather it like my mother did. But I’ve been bending to it for eleven years now. In Rodney, I married my own father: present, but not really. I married every boy this town has ever produced. I married the whole goddamn town of Cavanagh. And I don’t know how much longer I can bend.

  On hot nights I’ll take a cold bottle of beer to bed, lay on top of the sheets and below the open window, and I’ll read magazines until I finish that beer and fall asleep. I’ll probably have the bed to myself. Most nights Rod doesn’t make it any further than the couch. Some nights he does, though. Not often, but every now and then. He’ll find me in the bedroom lying on top of the sheets with my magazine and my beer. He’ll say something he considers tender. Then he’ll undo his belt and take off his pants, and he’ll just start in like I’m not even there, like I’m a mannequin. So I act like one. I let him do what he wants, mostly, which really isn’t much. Rodney doesn’t have a whole lot of imagination. It takes just a few minutes. I say some things, make a few sounds. But mostly I lie there with my eyes closed. I lie there and I bite my lip, and I try to think of when it felt good. I think of newness and excitement. I think of bending without breaking, but I also think of a time when I wanted to break, to be broken without bringing the entire world crashing down. I think of a beige van. Water balloons and cigarettes. I think of an exploding boy, and how, awful as it sounds, maybe I am thankful that he never had the chance to walk away.

  DARK BLUE

  Donnie’s dark blue F-150, lifted, all kinds of chrome and extras. Your sneaker on the running board as you hauled yourself up, passenger side, a waft of cigarette and rum and cologne as you swung into the seat. Beneath a sunset the colour of week-old bruises Donnie was leaning over from the driver’s seat, offering a hand, but you didn’t take it. A gentleman, you thought, but laughed to yourself. There are no gentlemen here. You weren’t old, but you were old enough to know that.

  “The only thing worse than the town boys are the ones out there,” your grammy once said, nodding toward the perfect Manitoulin darkness, but what were you supposed to do with that?

  So you got in Donnie’s dark blue F-150.

  Everything was still ahead of you. You were fifteen and newly reckless. You were fifteen and hopeful. You were fifteen and you thought you were ready.

  When you got in Donnie’s truck your dad was still alive, your mom wasn’t sick. You didn’t have little Mitchell and an empty spot in your bed in the shape of Chris, the boy’s father. You hadn’t taken a string of awful and demeaning jobs, hadn’t been kissed by your manager at Wendy’s, hadn’t yet thought, “Why not just this once?” over and over. You hadn’t nearly succumbed to anaphylaxis after being stung by the wasp hiding inside your can of Mountain Dew. You hadn’t shaved your head, or dyed your hair purple-black, or chopped it off with the kitchen shears while standing before the bathroom mirror, crying. You hadn’t yet sat on the bathroom floor staring at the cabinet, wondering whether to open it or just go to bed and sleep for a week.

  Donnie hadn’t yet treated you to a twenty-minute monologue about his dark blue F-150, its custom features, about that fact that he’d had it specially ferried in, about the interior fabric they don’t sell in Canada but which he managed to have imported from the States, while the scrubby ditches flew by in the headlights’ sweep of the darkening September night. Donnie hadn’t yet asked you what grade you were in because he forgot. Donnie hadn’t yet said, “Mrs. Fillion? I had her!” He hadn’t yet made you laugh with his imitation of her.

  When you climbed into Donnie’s truck he hadn’t yet disarmed you with his low chuckle, the one that made him seem older and wiser even than his twenty-one years, his job and his stubble and his very own dark blue F-150.

  You hadn’t seen your boy in an oxygen tent. You hadn’t seen the inside of an ambulance. You hadn’t seen the inside of a bar. When you got in his truck you hadn’t yet really seen the mess we all make of our lives.

  “Give ‘em enough rope,” your grammy used to say.

  When you put your Adidas on the running board and hoisted yourself up and into the passenger seat of Donnie’s dark blue F-150 you hadn’t yet been asked for a blowjob by your nursing school ethics instructor. You hadn’t yet dropped out of nursing school. You had yet to drop out of the veterinary assistant program at Cambrian. You had yet to lose a cat named Shorty to liver failure, and another named Mischief to old age, and a black lab named Ben to your dad’s carelessness with a GMC V-8 engine suspended from a block and tackle. You hadn’t heard hogs at the slaughter from outside Chris’s family’s barn. You hadn’t washed the blood out of a man’s jeans. You hadn’t scrubbed his fingernails.

  When you got into Donnie’s truck you hadn’t yet dealt with the complications of he said versus she said, or didn’t say, or what your best friend Karen would believe in the face of what Donnie was saying, how he described to his friends what had happened. You had yet to tell Karen, “He just misunderstood. I wasn’t clear.” No local women had yet called you awful things as you passed them in the aisle at the Foodland when you just came in to pick up some bread and yogurt.

  When you stepped up into that truck, and swung that heavy dark blue
door shut, and tucked your hair behind your ear, and said, “Hey,” you hadn’t yet been overcome by his cologne. You hadn’t laughed when he said, “I frigging love this song,” as “Since U Been Gone” came on the radio. You hadn’t yet felt a bit bad afterwards when it seemed that he might have been serious. When you got in that truck you had not yet been driven out of Providence Bay and into the scrubby nowhere in-island, and down a logging road to a pretty spot he knew, where the last of the sunset would be amazing, and then the stars would be so bright. You hadn’t yet sat in the deepening dark as the engine clicked and Donnie told you about his mother and how her family had owned the land upon which you sat but had to sell, so that was why he didn’t feel bad about trespassing. You had never heard him say, “Nobody can tell me I shouldn’t be here.” You had not yet, before stepping into that truck, ever been kissed by a boy, let alone a man, though others, including Karen, found this impossible to believe.

  You hadn’t yet stared out his truck window and up into the place where the sun dying over Lake Huron met the descending dark, a meeting held in a line so perfect looking it appeared drawn onto the sky by a careful hand, and been surprised when Donnie leaned in to kiss your cheek and then your neck and then grabbed your arm. You hadn’t yet thought, “Oh god, not this.” You hadn’t yet said, “Donnie, I don’t think,” and then let your voice trail. Then, “I don’t think we should.” Then, “No.” You hadn’t yet thought clearly to yourself that closing your eyes would likely make it pass more quickly. You hadn’t yet surprised yourself by wishing that the radio had been on to give you something else to think about until he was done. You hadn’t noted the stink of his breath and the small sound made by the truck’s suspension. Donnie hadn’t yet driven you home and touched your hair and kissed your cheek and said, “Thank you, thank you.”