Nothing but Life

by Brent van Staalduinen

  It occurs to me that I’d be fine with staying right here. Now is about the time when you’d ask if the other person would like to sit down on the bench. Maybe carry on the conversation until the sun sets. Or forever. But the ever-present abrasion of my safety vest reminds me that I’m not in the park for fun. How do you tell someone that you can’t stay? Such a simple thing. And yet. Mia’s gone quiet. A slight breeze feathers the loose hairs, and she tucks them under her hat with an absent, habitual gesture. She looks long across the park. Relaxed. Like she’s looking at a good kind of future. Not making it any easier for me to walk away.

  “Now that’s a woman on a mission,” she says.

  I follow her look. Mom is striding across the grass toward us. She’s in her workshop clothes: stained jeans and tattered UBC sweatshirt and bandana headscarf. The only thing missing is her tool belt, which is full of pliers and solder and other metalworking things. She was born with fair skin, but right now her face looks as white as printer paper, ninety-two bright. I’ve never seen her walk so fast.

  “We need to go,” she says when she arrives, slightly out of breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Gramma Jan’s at the hospital.”

  “When? How? For what?”

  “Chest pain.” Mom exhales quick, exasperated, almost like a growl. “She actually drove herself, then called me. Took Viv’s car. Stubborn, stubborn woman!”

  “Gramma can drive?”

  “She can, but shouldn’t. I’ll tell you more on the way.”

  “Okay. But my backpack is by the field house.”

  “You can get it later.”

  “I was going to get my water bottle to refill it over lunch, but Mia came, and …”

  I don’t finish the sentence, distracted by the surprise I see on Mom’s face when she looks at Mia. Like she hasn’t seen her, though Mia has been standing right here the whole time.

  “Mom, this is, uh …”

  I can’t pluck her name from my brain. I know it. I swear I know it. Really. But she steps forward without a blink of hesitation, her hand extended, and she smiles at Mom. And suddenly I’m aware that no matter what, I’ll always be a little in awe of her. Clear as mud for sure.

  “I’m Mia, Mrs. Sims. Mia Al-Ansour.”

  “Oh! I’m Victoria. Vicky, actually. Just Vicky. Not Mrs. Sims. I was never a missus. I kept my name.”

  Mom stops, apparently aware that she might be rambling. Gives me a look. Pleased as sunrise for me, in the middle of everything. Mortifying, all of it. Obviously because it’s my mom looking at Mia like she can actually see grandchildren in the shape of her. But also the timing. Poor Gramma Jan. But mostly because, well, Mia. And me. Or not me. The risks and chances I haven’t glimpsed yet.

  “Mom? Gramma Jan?”

  “Right. You’re set? Let’s go. Nice to meet you, Mia.”

  “You too.”

  I give Mia a little wave as we leave, unable to say much more. As we walk across the park, I catch Mom giving me another look, this time with a hint of frustration making lines around her mouth. Well, I know that look. I call it “Boy, Are We Going to Talk About This Later.”

  METALLIC

  Mom usually drives her old Corolla easy, like it’ll fall apart at any moment, but today she’s treating it like it’s a stubborn pack animal that needs to be tamed. Whipping the steering wheel around corners. Mashing the gas pedal to the floor. Crunching the gearshift into place. She’s had the car a long time — it’s the only car I’ve ever seen her drive. Its poor little engine screams a few too many times for my liking. I imagine car bits flying off with every bump. Wheel covers. Mirrors. The veteran licence plates Mom insisted on that annoyed Jesse because it made him visible to others. I don’t dare ask about Gramma Jan and driving; I won’t be the reason Mom wraps us around a telephone pole. We arrive at the hospital and she zooms into the luxury parking lot at the front of the building. Ordinarily she’d circle wider and wider until she found free parking on the street, even if it meant we’d have to walk a few blocks.

  “My mother is here somewhere,” she says to the nurse at the desk. “Can you tell me —”

  “Last name?” the woman says without looking up, her voice a monotone mix of exhaustion and practised boredom.

  “Sims.”

  The nurse manipulates her keyboard and mouse. The computer screen glows blue on her face, dull blue stars glinting in her glasses. There’s a waiting room full of sick people behind us. Lots of drawn faces and subdued voices. The nurse doesn’t seem to care about any of it. She actually sighs, like she’s the one holding the worries of the patients in her tired arms. Mom stares daggers at her, both of her hands on the counter like she might hurdle over it and reduce the nurse to her component elements.

  Finally, the nurse looks up. There must be something in Mom’s face she recognizes, because her eyes widen for an instant and her expression softens a bit. As she gives us the floor and room number, I’m thinking that she’ll never know how much she owes that glimpse of compassion. People have been torn apart for lesser offences than indifference. I can barely keep up with Mom as she bolts down the hallway toward the elevators.

  We find the room.

  If my mom is a force, Gramma Jan is ten times that. Torn jeans and college T-shirts and baseball hats. No job too demanding. Handy with a hammer and wrench. A garden that’s afraid of her. But all of that seems like a memory. Gramma Jan looks like she’s weighed down on her bed by wires and pads and sensors. Her face as pale as the hospital gown she’s been forced to wear. Her skin is an atlas of veins and spots and wrinkles I’ve never noticed before. She lies there at the mercy of medicine and all those unanswered questions. I guess I’ve never thought of her as old. Right now I can’t help but think of her as anything else, and it feels wrong.

  Her eyes, though. They burn as brightly as ever. She looks like she could spit. “Bastards won’t even give me a goddamn glass of water,” she says.

  That’s more like her.

  “Mom, language,” my mom says, but there’s nothing behind it. Her voice drops and she moves to her mother’s bedside. The equipment could be barbed wire, it’s so scary, and all she can do is place a hand on Gramma Jan’s arm. And take deep breaths. Try to, anyhow. It’s hard to breathe deep when worry thins the air like it does.

  “Shit, Vicky, don’t be like that.”

  “‘Shit, Vicky?’ That’s what I get?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Gramma Jan says.

  Mom snorts. “I called Viv. She’ll be here soon. She’s grabbing an Uber.”

  “I told you I didn’t want you to come.”

  “Stop acting like we could possibly stay away. Besides, you stole her car, Mom.”

  “I borrowed it.”

  “Good luck explaining that to her.”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “And you?” Mom asks. “How —”

  “This is all a damn embarrassing mess, is what it is.”

  Mom goes quiet. Not satisfied with Gramma Jan’s response but not wanting to push too hard. Gramma Jan doesn’t say anything more, either. There’s not much more they can say, and the silence isn’t too awkward. A comfortable tension, if there’s such a thing. Like they’re reflecting each other in a cracked mirror.

  Most of the time you never have reason to see it. Sickness brings it forward. Injury. Death. The last time I saw it was in the ER where they brought us after the shooting. Lots of families momentarily aligned. Divorced parents walking in hand in hand. Working moms and dads, feeling guilty for being so far away, wandering around with their phones in hand, calling names. Everyone shocked at the blood everywhere. Mom, too. The paramedics had bundled me into an ambulance. All that blood and you can’t blame them for thinking I’d been hurt. Blood has a smell, did you know that? Kind of metallic. I could smell it on myself, soaked into my clothes from when I slipped and fell beside Ethan, who died with a lib
rary book in his hand. And from Dakota, whose leg bled more than I thought possible.

  “Hey, Dills, since you’re here against orders anyhow, how about a hug and a kiss?” Gramma Jan says.

  I try to smile as I move next to the bed. There’s a hug of sorts. As awkward and cardboard as it was yesterday with Aunt Viv, but more so because I don’t want to hurt Gramma. Who’s scared, though she’s trying to be brave. Fear has a smell, too. I smelled it while I was waiting for Mom in the Windsor ER hallway where they’d put all the kids who’d been cleared and were waiting to be released by the police back to their parents. Under the blood smell. Fear is sour.

  And just like that, I’m back in that hallway, sitting on the floor with everyone else who has been deemed well enough to wait. My friend Maddie and I have given up our chairs because even though none of us have been injured too badly, it seems like everyone else needs them more than we do. There’s a sling here, a bandage there, and a lot of bloodstains on all our clothes. Turning dark and kind of brown. We’re tagged with our names. There’s a cop with a clipboard who checks ID when parents come in for their kids. I think we’re all crying. It’s cold. The smells of blood and fear fill my nose. Metallic. Sour.

  Wait. I can hear voices. Mom’s. And Gramma Jan’s.

  “Dills? Are you okay?” Mom asks.

  “I think so?”

  Now I’m in a hospital room with my mother and grandmother, who’s had some kind of heart thing. It’s bad. Must be. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so much stuff on her. Wires and pads and clips. The little green and orange and red lights of all the equipment, the fluttering readout screens, the whiteness of the bed and gowns and the open window. I’m all right. But I can still smell that fear. And not only from Gramma Jan. It’s everywhere, in the air of the hospital. And it’s coming from me again. Why does the room seem all shimmery, like I’m looking at it through water?

  I’m here. Come see me.

  Jesse’s voice. Right next to me, as real in this room as it has been in the park. Is he here? Can he be? Then there’s a sudden blackness and I feel myself falling. I don’t feel where the fall ends, though.

  SCARS

  Voices. Familiar ones, I think. But they’re all muddy and lost in a swimming darkness made worse by the fact that my eyes won’t open. I want them to. Why won’t they? Wait. Maybe it’s not completely dark. There’s a distant redness, like when you shine a flashlight through your hand.

  I feel rested. Like I’ve slept a full night through and am waking up when my mind and body are perfectly ready. What a strange thought to have, given that I don’t seem to be in control of either mind or body. And I don’t remember dreaming, which is new. No dreams, good or bad. When I was a kid I used to have the wildest, most fantastic dreams. Space adventures and ten-headed creatures and heroics. But they were often gone in the morning, even though I wanted to hold on to them. Now I just have the kind of dreams you’re glad to forget in the morning, if you can. I remember too many. Dreams of Jesse’s rifle and his camouflaged face. Also ones that feature gunfire or blood or the screams of the other kids. “Memory dreams,” I call them. I think the universe makes you remember those.

  “Dills.”

  That voice is less muddy. Am I waking up? Was I sleeping, or something else?

  “Dills, open your eyes.”

  It’s Mom. I can tell because there’s the tiniest gravel in the back of her voice. Like she smoked for a while and quit, but not before the hurt took hold. Or maybe the fumes from all the welding and soldering she does in her workshop have seared her vocal cords. I’m glad she’s here. It makes it okay to try again to open my eyes.

  More light. Flashes. A room that’s kind of bright, kind of not. Oh, right. Hospital. Window blinds. Equipment and screens, tiny lights and numbers. Lots of the off-white plastic that everything in hospitals seems to be made of. Mom’s face. And Aunt Viv.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi yourself,” Mom says.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted. How are you feeling?”

  I want to say that I feel great, rested, ready to jump out of bed, but I’m not sure how Mom will take that. There’s concern in her eyes. And parents have expectations. “Not bad,” I say. “Uh, maybe a bit confused.”

  “Really? You did hit your head on the way down.” She looks more concerned now. Parents and expectations and a constant fear of concussions.

  Time to downplay. Reassure. Parents can be needy, too. “No, not that kind of confused. I’m wondering what happened.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “My name is Wendell Bartholomew Sims. I’m fifteen years old. I live in Hamilton. I come from a long line of Sims, son of Victoria, grandson of Jan, nephew of Vivian. I’m a criminal mastermind wearing a LoJack —”

  “Okay, okay, we get it,” Aunt Viv says, rolling her eyes. “Smartass.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Dills, I won’t —”

  “Mom, chill, okay? I’m good.”

  “Can you blame me?” Mom asks. “You blacked out, dropped like a stone. Gramma Jan’s bed broke your fall, and …”

  She stops and points at my forehead. Ah. That explains the strange tightness I feel on my brow, above my left eye. I lift a hand — which feels remarkably heavy, given that it’s mine and I’ve been moving it my whole life — and feel the bandage there. A distant, slight pain behind the dressing. A tightness.

  “Stitches?” I ask.

  “A few, yeah,” Mom says, frowning.

  “You’ll have a little scar,” Aunt Viv chimes in. “And chicks dig scars.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  For an instant I believe myself. Maybe every guy dreams about getting just the right scar for just the right story for just the right person. But all my recent history flashes forward. Windsor. Hospital. Pat. Box cutter. I wince. My relationship to scars has changed forever.

  “Dills?” Mom asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “Anyway …” I stretch out the word. I’m so aware of their eyes on me. Distract, distract, distract. “How’s Gramma Jan?”

  Mom and Aunt Viv glance at each other, then practically climb over each other to tell me. The docs think Gramma Jan has an arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat. She needs to stay in hospital for a few days for further tests. She insisted that Mom and Aunt Viv go with me to make sure I was all right. I can almost hear her peppering her orders with choice language. There’s more detail, but I tune out their voices and look around. The bed is in a fishbowl room right across from a nurse’s station. Glass on three walls. Curtains on either side of me. In front I can see the top of a woman’s head above the station desk. Ducked down, busy, but positioned to look into the room in a nanosecond if need be. A trauma room. For a kid with a cut forehead. It all seems like monstrous overkill.

  There are bloodstains on my dingy work shirt and shorts. I’m thinking about the physics of how they ended up there, given that I fell and the blood should’ve ended up on the floor, when I see the back of someone stopping at the desk and speaking to the nurse. She looks up and nods at the room behind him and he turns, pocketing his wallet. He must keep his probation officer ID there.

  Sean.

  And he looks annoyed. Not concerned.

  He strides into the room and opens his mouth to speak but stops when he sees Mom and Aunt Viv sitting on the stiff chairs. His eyes lock on to Aunt Viv and his mouth closes, this blank expression taking over his face, like he had a speech all ready to go but the sight of her has forced his brain to reboot itself.

  “Yes?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.

  Her expression is not uncertain in the least. It could cut him into ribbons. Aunt Viv has always had this built-in mistrust of anything institutional. Schools. Courthouses. Churches. She came to my sentencing but steadfastly refused to place a single foot into any of the other buildings associated with my correctional life. “I’m here for you, Dills,” she said, “not Them.” The words coming out like they’d been dipped in sew
age.

  “Well?”

  By the way Aunt Viv is disassembling Sean with her eyes — field-stripping, Jesse would say — it’s clear she views him as the System. Not representing a single portion of it, but embodying the entire thing. There’s no response from Sean. Maybe his lower jaw moves a little? I begin to feel bad for him.

  Mom steps in. “What are you doing here, Sean?”

  Her voice reaches him, and he blinks a few times. You have to do that when you’ve stared at the sun for too long. “Oh, right. I’m here because, uh, Wendell is in breach.”

  “In breach?” Mom asks.

  “Of his sentencing conditions.”

  Aunt Viv folds her arms. “What the hell?”

  “Um, well, he’s geofenced, yeah?”

  Aunt Viv’s left eyebrow rises a bit. “How?”

  “The ankle monitor is GPS-linked, so —”

  “Dynamic or static nodes?”

  “Dynamic, but only from my workstation.”

  “Contextually retargeted, undoubtedly.”

  “In real time, if need be.”

  “Trigger intervals?”

  “Every fifteen minutes.”

  “Pushed.”

  “Of course.”

  Sean holds up his phone and taps open an app. Aunt Viv steps around the bed and stands right beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Their conversation continues as though we aren’t there. Which we aren’t. Not really. They talk so fast, using terms I don’t recognize. It could be their own language. Digitalese, or something. Mom and I give each other a sidelong glance. This conversation has taken a turn toward the surreal. Viv laughs, and Sean lights up like he’s glimpsed something golden. Now it’s my mother’s turn to get grumpy. And my turn to get it. Sean and Aunt Viv are into each other. Flirting. Or some data-stimulated version of it, anyhow.

  Mom snaps her fingers in Aunt Viv’s direction. “Hey! How about coming back down to reality for a moment?”

  “But he —”

  “Sean,” he supplies, helpfully.

  “Right. Sean is e-conduited to the court database. It’s —”