What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  One night, recently, I was home alone with Dorothy when the power went out. It was a Thursday night and Marie was away on business, up north in Timmins, talking to a room full of hunters about moose and how many they should be allowed to shoot. She was due home that night. Dottie and I had just spent an hour on the couch reading storybooks and I was about to cook her some pasta, with olives and capers and heaps of Parmesan cheese, her favourite dinner. But before I could put on a pot of water the lights went out and the house fell silent, and that hum, the thing below and around us which is imperceptible except in its absence, was suddenly gone. Late February, already dark outside; my spirits sank. I went to the cupboard for candles, then found the flashlights. I fed Dorothy cold ham and tomato slices from the fridge and I made myself a ham sandwich. There were five tealights on the table and two pillar candles on the counter. They cast flickering circles of orangey light on the ceiling. Just as I was finishing my sandwich Dorothy grew bored with the remnants of her dinner, dismounted her chair, and began to walk up the wall behind me.

  “Dottie, no,” I pleaded. My heart felt as though it too had lost power.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said excitedly, and in a moment she was on the ceiling, dancing around in the eddies of candlelight, clapping, laughing demonically. I hung my head in my hands, wondered if there was a chance that my child was the devil. With the tiny flames only barely cutting the darkness it seemed halfway possible, and it was too much for me on this shitty, powerless Thursday night in February. Damn me, I thought, and I began to weep. Dorothy sang fragments of the Sesame Street theme.

  In time I managed to get her down—or rather, once she’d tired of shredding my nerves she decided to join me on the conventional plane. Soon power was restored, and I got her to sleep without further heartache. When Marie arrived home around 11:30 I was already four beers in and well on my way to getting decently drunk. A bad idea, I grant you, when you’re home alone with a dependent, but since we live just a couple of blocks from the hospital I felt like I was playing the odds. Marie, who’d flown from Timmins to Toronto and then taken a coach from there to Peterborough, decided to join me in my diminished state, so I went to the garage for a couple more bottles.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Ah, you know,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, twisting the cap, “I know.”

  And now, days later, as I sit writing this in my basement office—a dark, cozy room stuffed floor to ceiling with books, baseball souvenirs, and jazz records—the two great loves of my life are upstairs, the one trying to coax the other to sleep. It’s quiet, which suggests success. No howls of protest filter down my way, no frantic footsteps, vertical or otherwise. Peace settles over our modest house, and our little handful drifts in a sea of dreams. And I have a moment to wonder: Is it simply the intensity of our love for Dorothy which raises her above the earth? Because we ask the same question that all parents ask: Surely it can’t be possible to love a child more? So have we loved so hard that we have created a force capable of lifting her delicate frame even as no hands touch her? Then my wondering brings me someplace darker, as I tend to go, and I come to this: What if we have another child, a little sister or brother for our wunderkind, and that child turns out to be normal, unremarkable in that he or she is, like us, completely bound by gravity’s pull? Could we find it in ourselves to overlook that? Would we love that child as much as we love Dorothy?

  A STUNT LIKE THAT

  My mother worked at Sears with a woman named Deb Schenkel. They sold appliances. Deb Schenkel smoked and she had a son, Glen, who smoked too. I mention this because my parents saw it as a kind of class division—people who smoked, people who didn’t. They didn’t.

  It’s hard to make friends as an adult, and usually not worth the trouble. My father understood that. My mother, though, would try, again and again. She set her sights on Deb Schenkel, though I couldn’t tell you why, or what made Mom think that could work. I think Deb probably used to be pretty—you could still kind of see it—but then her husband left and she was stuck raising Glen and everything kind of went to hell. Mom must have felt sorry for her.

  This was right around the time I wrecked my bike. I’d begged my folks for a red BMX, saved my paper route money and birthday cash, and they finally agreed to chip in to get the thing. I spent most of that summer going up to Steve Grienke’s parents’ cottage, an hour up the river. Jason, Steve’s older brother, could drive, so we’d throw our bikes in the back of his big brown van and head up there. We’d drink beer and ride our bikes off a ramp and flip into the water.

  So this one time I took off funny from the ramp and landed sideways, and the force of it twisted the handlebars and pulled the chain off. We decided the bike was worthless then, so we wrecked it. Swung it around and bashed it off trees, soaked the seat in lighter fluid and lit it up, slashed the tires with a hunting knife. It was one of those things you do when you’re fifteen and it’s summer and you’re a little drunk before lunch.

  “What in the hell were you thinking?” my father asked me. “I’m serious. List for me the thoughts that were running through your head.”

  “Their brains don’t work the way ours do. I’m not saying this for effect,” my mother said. “It’s the truth.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I have trouble with that,” Dad said.

  They said all of this right in front of me, like I wasn’t even there.

  I was their only child, of course, so they needed to believe that I’d only been following the lead of the evil Grienke brothers. If I only had better friends, I’d stay on the straight and narrow. That, I think, is part of why Mom pushed so hard on the Deb thing. She thought she and Dad would have someone to drink spritzers with, and I’d have Glen.

  At school Glen was usually alone in the corner of the soccer field, eating lunch from a paper bag. Once I saw him having a boat race with twigs. I hadn’t seen anybody do that since grade school. He was the kind of kid you figured liked to hurt animals.

  Mom said, “Glen seems nice, doesn’t he?” We were having Tuesday spaghetti, me, Mom, Dad.

  “I guess,” I said. “I don’t really know him.”

  “His interests seem…” she said, “diverse.”

  “I don’t know, he seems a bit weird, if you ask me,” said Dad, then looked at me. I wanted to laugh but didn’t want him to know I agreed with him about anything, so I just twirled some more noodles onto my fork.

  “I don’t think that’s fair, honey,” she said.

  “Weird or not, if he doesn’t wreck your bike, I say go for it. New best friend,” said Dad, his gold Century 21 blazer draped over the back of his chair.

  My mother smiled at me. “It’s good to make friends.”

  They dragged me over there one Sunday afternoon in June. Their whole house smelled like cigarette smoke. Summer was heating up and Deb had just had their in-ground opened up, so I was told to bring my trunks. I hated that: trunks. I said, “I’ll bring my bathing suit.”

  Glen came upstairs. He said, “Hey.”

  I said, “Hey.”

  He asked me if I wanted to watch some movies.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess.”

  We headed downstairs and I could see by my Mom’s face that as far as she was concerned Glen and I had just become best friends. She was kind of glowing.

  Glen had a stack of gun magazines on his bedside table in his basement bedroom. It was always dark down there. There was a poster of cars, a Soviet tank, and three blonde women in ridiculous swimsuits. He had a VCR, too, and his video stash included action movies, motocross crashes, and a half a dozen porno tapes he’d stolen from one of Deb’s ex-boyfriends.

  We watched Cyborg, which was pretty bad. I didn’t get the whole story because Glen kept fast-forwarding to “the fight parts.”

  “They need to get to Atlanta, but everybody’s trying to kill them,” he said, trying to sketch the plot for me, remote in hand, scanning the tape. It
didn’t make much sense to me.

  “There’s a part where you can see the main girl’s tits, too,” he said.

  “Really?” I said, maybe a bit too quickly.

  He talked a lot about guns, and said he’d stolen the Cyborg tape from Zellers. He knew martial arts, and could kill a man with one kick.

  “No way,” I said.

  He was wearing camouflaged pants and a red T-shirt with a yellow Ferrari on it. He had another T-shirt, black, with a fighter jet, and a blue sweatshirt. That was all I ever saw him wear.

  The poolside party raged upstairs. My parents had brought over a jug of wine and Deb made it into sangria. They polished that off and Dad told some dirty jokes before passing out. Mom drove us home.

  Not long after that they took Deb out to an Italian place. The plan was to leave me at the Schenkels’ with Glen, which made no sense to me. Who was in charge? Two fifteen-year-olds do not equal one adult. I had the sense that something fucked up was going to happen.

  As Dad swung the Topaz into Deb’s driveway, Mom said, “This’ll be great. You and Glen will have a chance to play.” I was thinking, when you’re fifteen you don’t play, you hang out.

  Deb opened the door wearing a black crocheted top, underneath which you could clearly see her black bra and pale torso. Tight black pants, and patent heels, big hair, hoop earrings. I was like, Wow. Dad reacted like that, too. He shot me a look behind Mom’s back.

  “Hello, Deb,” Mom said.

  “Let yourselves in,” Deb said through the screen door. “I can’t touch anything. My nails are drying.” She flapped her hands and then blew on her nails. “Glen’s in his room if you want to go down, Marky.”

  What do you say to that? What I said was: “Alright.”

  They left, saying they’d be back no later than ten (Mom), and don’t do anything stupid (Dad), and there was some pop in the fridge and chips in the cupboard (Deb).

  “Have fun,” they all said.

  We went swimming, which was fine. Glen did cannonballs off the top of the slide. I kept waiting for him to brain himself on the deck, but no luck. We ate chips and called it dinner before watching Cyborg again. Glen showed me the scrambled pay-TV stations that showed softcore movies on Saturday nights. We watched the wavy screen for a while and listened to the dialogue. I thought I saw a nipple at one point. The music was really bad, and then the moaning started. I didn’t know the first thing about sex, but it sounded fake.

  “That’s exactly how I’d give it to her,” Glen said.

  “For sure.”

  “Want to listen to some music?”

  “Okay.”

  He put on a tape by Ministry. “This fucking rules,” he said. He danced a bit, stomping around in a circle, pumping his fists. He looked stupid, but seemed happy. I was embarrassed, and I think maybe that was because I knew I couldn’t do what he was doing. Glen turned off the overhead light and switched on a lamp with a red bulb in it.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Listen to more music?”

  He put on Pigface and turned it up too loud.

  “Check this out,” he shouted, and then pulled his cock out of his pants. “Let’s see yours.” I hesitated, because it was weird. But I guess I figured what the hell. Or maybe I figured it would be more weird not to do it, if that makes sense. Finally I said to myself, Who would he tell? He didn’t talk to anybody at school. So I pulled mine out, and they both dangled there, about the same size, limp, veiny as shrimp. He stared at mine. I stared at his.

  “Can you make it hard?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  We lay on our backs on the cold linoleum floor of his basement bedroom side-by-side. Our penises flopped out of our pants. We talked about what we’d like to do with them, and who we wished would touch them. We passed an hour that way. The red light burned into my eyes and the music throbbed. Then Glen grabbed himself and I worried that he was about to try something, but he just tucked his dick back into his pants, zipped, and stood up.

  “You wanna smoke?”

  “I guess,” I said, and I put myself away and followed him upstairs into Deb’s bedroom. He dug a pack out of her top drawer, where I could see black lace things.

  “Emergency stash,” he said. We went up onto the roof, out the bathroom window and onto the warm shingles.

  “Watch this,” he said, then walked to the corner of the roof and started pissing over the side. I could see the arc disappearing into the night, hear it ringing off the rocks in the garden below.

  We were smoking on the roof when they arrived. I don’t know why we didn’t try to duck inside as the car came around the corner. I heard it and felt dead certain it was theirs. But I took my cues from Glen and he didn’t move, he just kept smoking. In that moment I thought, He’s not afraid of his mother. And I wondered what that would feel like, to be beyond their reach.

  As we drove home my father said to me, “Smoking, Mark? Of all the stupid things.” Then he said: “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, you’ll be out on your duff so fast.”

  Then we were quiet. I just kept thinking that if Dad knew all of it, about Glen’s dick, that I’d shown mine, he’d kill me right there. But I felt worse for my mother, who sat quietly in the front seat looking at the dashboard. I knew my parents wouldn’t be seeing Deb Schenkel anymore. I thought that was a sad thing, because maybe they’d have turned out to be good friends. And I hated to think I’d ruined that.

  It was about a year later that Mom died of the pancreatic cancer she would’ve already had that night. My father became unreachable. He stopped talking to me for a while, nothing beyond “Hello” and “Go to bed.”

  At the funeral I started thinking of Glen, for some reason. Neither he nor Deb were there, but I remembered the way my mother looked that night in the front seat of the car. Her shoulders were slumped and her head bowed. It made me sad to picture her in a brown pleather coat, the glow of streetlights moving by. It still makes me sad to remember, to imagine what she must have been feeling. Then—you know how your mind runs away on you—I started picturing Glen’s pecker. And right away I said to myself: What a terrible thing to think about at your mother’s funeral.

  THE MARYS

  Mary 7 wakes us with bad news. Someone’s at the perimeter, she says. I think it’s them.

  You rehearse and you rehearse and then the real thing is upon you. I jump from the bed and run to check the CCTV on the laptop in the kitchen. There’s something there, along the northern fence and at the east gate. Smudges upon the small screen, but most definitely them. Dark, menacing shadows. I switch to the night vision but it isn’t working. There is interference.

  I had always expected them to come from the sky.

  Here we go, I say. The trials are upon us, I say. You all know what to do. We snap to with a military precision. I indulge in a moment of pride over what I have wrought. Such order amid chaos.

  The children above the age of five all know their roles. Most of them look like me. The boys generally get my proud chin, the girls my cheekbones, steely eyes. They are clean and their clothes are neat. They are respectful and demure. Well-raised children. I will be careful here not to take too much credit; I let the women take care of most of the caregiving. This isn’t some Old Testament doctrinal thing on my part, more a matter of knowing what you’re good at and what you aren’t.

  In the first few moments of action my wives all move to their stations. For each person here there is a station, a responsibility, an area of expertise that they are expected to know backward and forward, a thing they are ready to die for, if it should prove necessary. An example being Mary 7, my newest wife. She keeps the dogs, trains them, feeds them. In a situation such as this it will be her responsibility to know how long to keep them penned, and when it will be time to release them to their fate, their gnashing teeth in search of waiting flesh on their way down to hell.

  The younger children are he
rded toward the secure nursery. On his way by, Mary 4’s youngest stops at my feet and tugs on my pant leg. Hi, he says, stretching his arm up. This means high five. He wants a high five. I smile and hold my hand just above his curly-haired head and let him slap my palm. Yay, he says, then falls back in line. The boy is sweet but has a cruel streak in him that makes me wish you could arm a two-year-old. He’d protect us all, I’m sure of it. He’s never as attentive as when he’s watching some of the other children at their video games. We have five Xbox consoles, but I only let them play the shooter games. Somebody told me the US Army uses them for training. Well if they don’t they should, I said.

  The first Mary would have been the only and the last, had she stayed. That woman had all a man desires and requires, save devotion, apparently. Save belief. But there was enough good in her, enough of a mix of the earthly and the potentially divine to linger with a man until his dying day and then beyond. I met the second Mary a day after the original left, in line at the Safeway, and her eyes told me she needed something to cling to. Come with me, I said, and she did. Shorter than the first Mary, sturdy but not stocky. She bore me my second and third sons. Her family came sniffing but she herself told them there was no place for them here.