Nothing but Life

by Brent van Staalduinen

  I wait for him to say something else in his real, right-now voice, but all I hear is the wind and the trees. I wait a long time. I must look like an idiot. Kid in an orange safety vest, standing ridiculously still in the middle of a dirt hiking trail, garbage-sticker in one hand and black plastic bag in the other, staring at the tree canopy. Excitement, anticipation, and disappointment moving across his face like the clouds he can barely see.

  Jesse always says I need to work on my poker face. “Two things,” he’ll say. Two things is another Jesse favourite. Keeps a point or an argument simple and easy to break down. “One, people respond better to a little mystery. Two, never give anything away — if they can’t know how you feel or what you’re thinking, you get the advantage.” I always lose the battle for the poker face. Jesse has it down, I can tell you, especially away from home. No road rage or snapping or anger from him, no matter what. Even when he has every reason to rage.

  Mom loves that about him. I’ve seen her watching him as he talks to me, his face calm even when I’ve screwed up bad. I’ll be a mess of knotted ropes inside or as furious as boiling water and he’ll remain as still as anything. Mom used to get this little smile when she watched him or talked about him to me. She still does, sometimes. Way less than she used to.

  “Jesse?” My voice is low. Even though I’m not talking to myself, saying it out loud is a risk. No one else would understand. Pat, especially. But I still do it — I want to hear more. “Is it really you?”

  Nothing.

  I wait another minute or so, then put my head down and get back to the garbage. A faded candy wrapper here, a cigarette butt there. There’s enough to get into a kind of dirty, distracting rhythm. I wonder if Sean would let me listen to music while I work. I could use Jesse’s old MP3 player that Mom uses for yoga, which can’t connect to the internet. It only has a few hundred songs on it, all of Jesse’s music. She has an iPhone, too, and she listens to streaming music and podcasts on that while she’s working in her studio. But the little yellow music player always comes out for her workouts.

  The afternoon passes quickly. Just me and the trash and a hundred questions about that voice I heard. Or thought I heard. The rain never materializes.

  DEPENDENT

  I have this dream where we stay in the classroom and Jesse finds me. There’s no talking or shooting. He stands in the doorway and looks at me with his rifle at port arms, an army term he taught me. Held in front, muzzle up. Used in ceremony but nowhere else. Formal. Impractical. He’s dressed in his standard jeans and T-shirt, but his face is a mess of camouflage greasepaint. Darker shades on the high points, lighter on the low, which confuses perception and detail. He taught me that, too. The kids in my class are screaming and running to the back. I stay in my desk because I want to hear what he has to say. That’s when I wake up. I don’t scream like you see in the movies, so no one comes running. I’m always alone when I open my eyes.

  I used to get the dream every night. At first, I tried to keep it to myself. Mom would try to make a joke of it and call me “zombie” in the morning, but I could tell she was worried. Eventually, I told her. For her and me. You can only hold so much for so long. She said I should wake her up, but I never do. No need to have two of us tired in the morning. Two zombies. Since moving to Hamilton, I only get it once in a while, but Mom always knows when I do. Like today.

  “Did you see Jesse again last night?”

  I nod and reach for the cereal.

  “Same dream?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No thanks.”

  She gives me a long look but doesn’t press. She sips her tea, the little tag swinging with the movement, and goes back to her iPad. She only drinks green tea flavoured by burnt rice. “Nokcha,” she calls it. Orders it online from Korea. Says she got hooked on the stuff in Gwangju when she babysat kindergarten ESL students for a year after university. It just smells like burning to me, though.

  I’m annoyed she doesn’t want to know more. Usually I’d be fine with it, but today I want her to stop looking at the iPad and tell me it’s not healthy to bottle things up. “We’re a sharing family,” she likes to say. Or used to. We’re both a lot quieter these days. Her with her business, the online store where she sells stainless-steel art and jewellery she makes in the basement studio. Me with my nightmares and school troubles.

  She asks, “Ready for today?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m glad you’re doing this.”

  “This?”

  “Cleaning the park. Staying close to home. It’ll be appreciated.”

  The word digs at me. Appreciated? How? By who? Churchill Park is huge — I’ll never clean it all. A place can look spotless until you’re responsible for it. Until you have to pay attention to how little people really care about beauty. Each day takes forever, and I pick up a thousand pounds of garbage, but no one will notice.

  “It’s not like I have a choice,” I say.

  “No, but the judge did. There are homes and facilities.”

  “I wish she’d put me there.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I hate the park.”

  “It could be wor—”

  I stand and slam my hands on the counter. My cereal bowl jumps, the spoon clattering onto the counter, the milk and cereal splashing, forming a soggy constellation. Mom jumps, too. “How, Mom? How could it be worse?”

  “Dills …”

  “I’m alone all day. There’s the heat, the bugs, the garbage — there’s so much of it. And I’m on full display. At least at one of those other places, I could be out of sight.”

  “Doing nothing. Getting —”

  “Keeping my dignity.”

  Mom lets out a slow breath. Her eyes widen a little. I see real hurt there. She folds her arms. “There’s no dignity in those places.”

  “I just —”

  “Stop, Dills! Be quiet and listen to me.”

  The sudden sharpness in her voice makes me sit down again. Mom almost never interrupts like this. “Sometimes all we have is our ability to listen,” she likes to say. She takes another deep breath.

  “I’ve never told you this, but I spent some time in one of those facilities.”

  “Wait, what? You?”

  “Yeah, me. I was a little older than you are now. Some friends and I stole a car and drove into a minivan full of kids.”

  “But —”

  “I was driving. No one was killed, but people got hurt.”

  I kind of hear her tell me the rest, but it doesn’t sink in fully. I manage to absorb a few details, like how she and her friends found a car with keys in it, how it was supposed to be a joyride and not a theft. How she bore the weight of the crime because she was driving, so she was sent away for a few months to a juvenile facility. “Juvie,” she calls it. Prison for young people. She was incarcerated in a girls’ wing with drug pushers, thieves, and murderers. There were fights and injuries and threats and a hundred sleepless nights. But she’s sitting in front of me. No criminal, just Mom.

  “What happened afterwards?”

  “I came home.”

  “So Gramma Jan and Aunt Viv …”

  “We don’t talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I got to come home, kiddo. Because I had help to get back into my studies, because I lived with people who cheered for and loved me, I was able to get past it.”

  “Couldn’t I do the same?”

  “I have no doubt you could. But nothing good happened in there. And boys’ juvie is much worse. You can’t help but change.”

  “You changed?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I used to love loud places, concerts, crowds, protests. I was always the one at the microphone.”

  I can’t imagine her like that. She’s all about quiet reflection, listening, thinking twice before speaking. She loves to protest — or she used to, before Windsor — but
for her that has always meant writing op-eds and essays for the newspapers, magazines, the little hand-stapled zines she collects. Climate change. Gender parity. Marriage equality. Gun reform. Since moving to Hamilton, though, she’s been so subdued. Limiting her anger to the insensitive things the local paper sees fit to print. Small rants over the dinner table.

  “Is that why you do what you do? Sitting in your workshop making things?”

  “Partially, but —”

  “So you’re a criminal.”

  Mom smiles. “No more than you’ll be, after the summer. Juvie records are sealed, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “I love making my art. And it sells, too, which allows me to support our family, which is especially important now that —”

  “Now that Jesse’s out of the picture.”

  Wow. I can see the physical pain on Mom’s face as I say it. Another barb out before I can stop it. I think, Out of the picture? Come on, Dills, that wasn’t fair at all. “Sorry, Mom, that was —”

  She holds up a hand. “It’s okay. You’re not wrong. The army pension scheme is a nightmare at the best of times, but let’s just say they’re not sure what to do with him.”

  “But you can access our accounts from here, right?”

  “I can, but I haven’t.”

  “Why not? Aren’t we still his dependents?”

  “Yes.”

  “So …”

  “I’m still processing things, too. I’m not sure I want his money anymore.”

  “He was sick, Mom. Is sick.”

  She exhales and nods. Falls silent. She stares into her teacup, where the green leaves and brown grains of rice will be sitting at the bottom, soggy and swollen. I’m quiet, too. I think about families and how we give everything to each other, even when we don’t mean to. About the box cutter and Mom’s misadventures, how she paid for her crimes. About what she might still be paying for. About how I’m paying for mine. About Jesse and family and influences and the possibility that hurting others might be part of us. In our DNA and bones.

  MIA

  Every day feels as long as all of human history, yet before I know it, I’m a few weeks into my sentence. Slow days passing fast. A strange, blurry mess of time.

  I hear Jesse a lot. Not the imaginary Jesse I used to talk to, but the new voice, all his, that seems right next to me. It happens more frequently now, sometimes four or five times a day. I don’t know what to do with it.

  I’m here. Come see me.

  I’ve stopped talking out loud to him, though. Two things. First, it feels weird to have the same conversations with him — me talking, him responding in my mind — when his real voice might drop into my day at any time. Second, it keeps Pat away. Without ammunition, he faded quick. I see him from a distance sometimes. He looks bored.

  I’ve tried to tell Mom about Jesse talking to me, but I always bail out. She’s so quiet these days. Like every day we’re away from Windsor moves us farther away, even though we’re still in Hamilton. She’s so pissed at him but misses him, too, I can tell. And she worries. Every day, she calls her lawyer in Windsor, who has power of attorney and can receive updates so Mom doesn’t have to call the hospital. She’ll walk out onto the sidewalk with her phone and pace the width of our property. Voice low. Talking about the man who’s legally her spouse, though there’s no paperwork to prove it. Apart from army pension cheques he picked up from a post office box somewhere, he never got mail. Everything else was in her name.

  I was four months old when Jesse made his vows to Mom. She loves to talk about how Jesse retired from the army and drove from Fort Bragg to Hamilton in a single push as soon as his discharge paperwork was finalized. How he managed to find a tiny tuxedo for me to wear to the church. How cold the church was because it was January and the middle of the week when the building didn’t need to be heated. How you couldn’t see my tux because of all the blankets. How perfect the service was, though there were only six of us: Mom, me, Jesse, Gramma Jan, Aunt Viv, and the pastor. How they didn’t actually get married, because Mom didn’t believe in the institution, but the pastor was a family friend who let them trade vows and “forgot” to file the marriage licence. How Gramma Jan and Aunt Viv showed up even though they both thought the relationship was impulsive — a new mom with some nameless other guy’s baby in her tummy hooking up with a wounded warrior. Not fitting the mould of what families hope for. I don’t know who my bio-dad is. That’s Mom’s and Jesse’s term for the guy who got her pregnant and bailed.

  All sorts of gaps, it feels like. The hole of not knowing. The canyon of pain and questions we’re going through now. The space between our name and Jesse’s, which I’m thankful for. Enough to keep mostly everyone from making the connection. Once the police ID’d him in the hospital, there were warrants for all his records and they found us quickly. Our names appear in detective reports and court documents and more than a few of the little notebooks investigators write in. After it became clear we had nothing to do with what Jesse had done, for the most part they left us alone. They kept our secret. Mom’s been so careful about it.

  Today, Jesse’s voice doesn’t arrive until the afternoon. I’m out by the splash pad, which is surrounded by playing fields. On hot days, it seems like every exhausted parent in the neighbourhood brings their kids here. Crowds of squealing, crying, laughing, running, falling kids. But the temperature has dropped before tonight’s predicted storm, so there’s no one around. A good day to pick up garbage. No one to recognize me. No one to ask what I’m doing.

  I’m here. Come see me.

  I will, I think. Well, I’ve decided to try, anyhow — it’s a long way to Windsor. Longer still on my own. I haven’t worked out the details. There are so many.

  I get a good pace going by the splash pad. Out in the open you can walk and stab and keep moving while you work. In the bushes around the park, it feels like you could fill ten bags and not travel more than a few feet. Trash under every bramble. The poison ivy you want to ignore, but you still have to clear under it.

  It’s a calm day, too, like the cooler temps convinced the wind to stay away. So I hear Gal singing before I see him. He walks in a strange way, his head turned to the left to take advantage of his good right ear. It always looks like he’s about to run into something. He never does, though. And he sings with every step. Low, sad songs in his language. I’ve never seen him walking without some song keeping him company. Always brutally out of tune, I assume because of the ear thing.

  I never know when I’ll see him. He goes all over the park, usually carrying a backpack holding whatever tools he’ll need for the small repair jobs he does. Rebolting a trail sign to its post. Repainting a playground fixture. That kind of thing. But today he doesn’t have the backpack. He’s just walking. Sometimes he does that, too. Walks and sings all day, and I’ll see him popping in and out of the trailheads at the edge of the grassy areas. He seems to like his job.

  I see him stop by the hedges at the far end of the field. The hedges are the remnants of an old living maze. Cedar, I think. Hundred-year-old bushes, with thick, gnarled trunks. Lots of dark hiding spots. There’s a faded tourist sign nearby that suggests the park used to be popular with visitors to Hamilton. Grainy black-and-white pictures of people strolling in the park. Women with parasols. Men in top hats.

  The woods have mostly reclaimed the area. If you walk through the trees, you can still see the rusted iron framework from the tropical gardens and crumbled stone foundations from mystery buildings. The only remaining feature still in operation is the aviary, a loud, smelly place filled with parakeets, peacocks, all sorts of rainbow birds.

  Gal ducks into the hedge and disappears. I haven’t worked up the nerve to go in myself, the twisted bushes a bit too mysterious for me. You don’t find good things in hidden places like that. There will be lots of garbage. Broken bottles. Beer cans. Used condoms. All sorts of discarded objects from the stoners and love-drunk teenagers who probably hang out there.
>
  So it’s weird that Gal would go in. Now I’m curious. I pull out my watch, an ancient silver thing with a cloudy face. I actually have to wind it up every morning. It was Gene’s. Gramma Jan said I could use it for the summer since I can’t have my iPod with me. It has no band so I keep it in my pocket, a short length of braided paracord acting as a lanyard. Jesse gave me a roll of the skinny green rope and taught me how to braid. Box braid. Running. Trilobite. Herringbone. Cobra. “Once you have paracord around, you’ll always find a need for it,” he said. “You can use it for anything. Lanyards, laundry lines, belts, you name it.” He was right. I’d made a cobra-pattern bracelet for myself the night before the shooting and had it on my wrist when Jesse came into the library. I unravelled it and used it as a tourniquet on my classmate Dakota. On her leg, which one of the bullets almost destroyed. It worked, but her other injuries were too serious and she died anyway.

  The watch’s blurred hands tell me that it’s almost noon, so I walk to a nearby rubbish bin and drop my bag in, stick my picker-upper in the ground, and walk over to the hedges. I can hear Gal’s voice as I get close. Then a girl’s voice. Both speaking another language. Arabic, I think. Gal says something and the girl laughs. I can smell weed smoke, too. I stop. Shit. There are reasons guys and girls meet in the dark to smoke up. But I hear Gal calling out my name from inside, and I’m busted. Awkward.

  “I’m heading home for lunch. I —”

  “No, no, please come in,” Gal says.

  “Uh, that’s okay.”

  “Please. I insist.”

  “I don’t think … I don’t need to …”

  “Do not be shy. Come.”

  The girl says something too low for me to hear. Gal laughs. She giggles.

  Well. If it wasn’t awkward before, it sure as heck is now. I start to walk away.