Nothing but Life

by Brent van Staalduinen

  Mom comes back into the kitchen as they make it to the hallway door, a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She has jotted a few notes down on a piece of paper that she pushes into Aunt Viv’s hand. She faces her mother and sister and tells them to take care of me. To watch out for me. She goes quiet. So do they.

  A series of short knocks on the door fills the space. Everyone looks at it. Mom shifts, adjusting the strap of her bag. More silence. And another series of knocks, louder this time. Mom calls out that she’s on her way and she’ll just be a minute.

  “You should get going,” Aunt Viv says. “Call whenever you need to.”

  “I will.”

  Gramma Jan sighs. Loud. “I don’t know what to say to you, Victoria. I’m so tired.”

  “Me too, Mom.”

  “Just come home when you can. This is home now.”

  Mom breathes deep and folds Gramma Jan into a tentative hug. Like holding a butterfly. But Gramma Jan drops her cane and grabs her daughter hard. Fierce. Long. Whispers something into Mom’s ear I can’t make out. Mom nods. Aunt Viv comes in and joins them. Full eyes everywhere. I feel like I’m witnessing history.

  Mom wipes a tear away and smiles at her mother. Eyes narrowed. Tells Gramma Jan not to die while she’s away. Says she might need her around for what happens next. Gramma Jan laughs, quick and harsh, like it’s all she can manage, and says something in her failing voice about hell freezing over and wild horses and unfinished business. Aunt Viv picks the cane up from the hardwood floor and helps Gramma Jan into the bedroom down the hall.

  I walk Mom out. The reporters are gone for the night. No cameras flash. No questions are machine-gunned at us. The driver, a tall, lanky guy with bad skin, wearing an ill-fitting shirt and rental-company tie, offers to carry her bag. She refuses. Of course she does. But she does link her arm in mine and hold tight, like my weight can keep us grounded.

  At the car, she tosses the bag into the back seat and faces me. She gives me a hug and I return it because that’s what you do. But I wait for her to let go first. She’s holding so tight and long and has her face buried in my neck. I realize she hasn’t held on to me like this since the hospital released me to her after Windsor. So much of the blood covering me ended up on her that she had to throw out her clothes, too.

  She tells me how sorry she is for all of this. How proud she is of me. Which is awkward because she’s been amazing, but now doesn’t seem like the time to argue. And finally, she tells me she’ll say goodbye to Jesse for me. Because she knows, somehow, that I didn’t get to.

  PART III

  EVERYWHERE

  POTENTIAL

  Mom’s been in Windsor for more than a week. Jesse is holding on longer than anyone predicted. I don’t know how to feel about that. “Death is a part of life,” he said to me once. “No sense in dwelling on it. We all end up in the same place. Pushing up daisies. The great dirt nap, ha ha.” But even as he spoke, I could tell that his eyes didn’t believe the words. And now the lie is clearer. Death is more than a part of our lives. It’s a twisted blood relative who refuses to leave. Maybe ever.

  The cordless handset rests beside me on the side step. Still warm from my nightly phone call with Mom. She calls after supper to fill me in on the day’s happenings. Tonight we didn’t have much to talk about. The medical staff is monitoring Jesse. The reporters saw Mom arrive and made her part of the story for a day or two. Her lawyer threatened legal action, so the hospital got better at keeping the reporters away from the ward. But they’ve been waiting outside the building less and less often anyhow — Mom hasn’t commented and Jesse hasn’t died, so there’s nothing to feed their fading appetites. Tonight, without the scrutiny, Mom sounded more at ease, a little more like herself.

  Mia sits next to me. She arrived while I was on the phone. She hands me a glass of lemonade with mint, a gift from her mother. Everyone knows about me and Windsor now. There are gifts. Letters. Emails. Floral bouquets. Boxes of candy. Anonymous casseroles appearing on our doorstep. Mia’s mom keeps a small thermos in the fridge filled with the lemonade for Mia to bring over every night. Her dad in the dark about it. A mom’s tiny, sympathetic rebellion.

  Mia one-arms me closer so she can kiss my cheek. Her lips are warm. “How’s your mom?”

  “Tired.”

  “I bet.”

  “Waiting for Jesse to …” I stop. I still can’t say it. “Uh, waiting is hard enough, but this thing with Gramma Jan is stressing her out.”

  There was an episode this afternoon. Over the past few days, Gramma Jan’s pain has been getting worse and worse. She refuses to take anything stronger than Tylenol, and the pain affects her balance and her ability to make good decisions. When I got home from the park there was an ambulance parked beside the house. Lights off, the paramedics moving around in no great hurry. Just another call to an elderly person’s home for just another fall. Gramma Jan was inside the vehicle, strapped to the gurney and pissed about it. There wasn’t time for many details, but Aunt Viv said there’d been a bad fall and a blackout and a long period where Gramma Jan didn’t remember who she was.

  Their departure has left another hole in the house. I sat by myself for a long time before messaging Mia on my iPod and asking her to come over.

  “Any news from Vivian?”

  “No.”

  “She’s tough, your grandma.”

  “She is.”

  We sit in silence. I sip the lemonade and feel the tartness and sweetness competing on my taste buds. The high of the mint at the back of my mouth. Delicious and foreign and slightly subversive.

  “And Jesse?”

  I shrug. “The same.”

  “How? Aren’t all his —”

  “He’s going, but no one can say when.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Mom sounds like she wants this settled. Me too, kind of. And not.”

  “Yeah.”

  Settled. Weird to say the word, much less think about its meaning. Feels like fantasy. Way out there. Glimpsed only in my imagination. That thing other people get to have while not realizing they have it at all.

  “What’s this?” Mia moves the cordless phone and picks up the envelope pinned underneath. The phone a paperweight to keep the letter from blowing away. She runs a finger over the printed crest and return address of the youth-court division. Looks at me. “May I?”

  I nod. “Sean dropped it off today in the park.”

  She slides the carefully folded paper from the torn envelope. Reads it. It’s only a couple of paragraphs.

  “So you have a date for the hearing,” she says.

  “A week before school starts.”

  “Are you worried?”

  “Not really. Sean says he’s already spoken to the judge. He thinks she’ll add more hours of service rather than escalate.”

  “Good. I’m not ready for prison romance.”

  “Ha ha.”

  Mia folds the letter and gently, precisely, slides the paper into the envelope. I watch her hands as she returns the letter to its spot on the cement. You couldn’t call her hands delicate or graceful, but they’re perfectly steady. Surgical. She sees me looking, laughs, and does a pantomime of a hand-model presenting a piece of jewellery, a bracelet maybe. I can almost see diamonds there, ablaze in the setting sun. She leans in, her arms sliding around my middle, and rests her head against my shoulder. We watch the sun fall toward the horizon. I have her warmth on one side and the failing summer evening’s coolness on the other. I shiver.

  Mia asks, “Should we go inside?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me get you a blanket or something. You’re a popsicle.”

  “Okay.”

  She gets up, opens the door, and disappears into the house. A cicada in a nearby tree starts trilling. The sound goes on for a minute or so before weakening in a long, steady decline. And silence again. Odd to hear one this late in the day. Or at this temperature. Usually they do their best to deafen me from the trees only on t
he hottest afternoons. Mia returns with the fleece throw blanket from the family room sofa and wraps us both up in it.

  I start talking. Again. I’ve been doing that more and more since Mom left. I tell myself I’m not going to, but Mia sits or walks with me and out everything comes. Maybe tonight it’s the blanket’s sudden warmth that does it, loosening me up like injured tissue. I don’t know. But my memories come out in a jumbled mess. Details I’ve never told anyone. About questions I’ll never get the answers to. About Windsor and Ethan and the blood and the sounds I still hear when I close my eyes or try to fall asleep. About best friends who die afraid and alone and so horribly that you don’t want to make any more friends because they can be taken so easily. About Gramma Jan, how there are a thousand kinds of cancer we have to worry about. About school and fear and life and how nothing is certain until it is.

  I feel like there should be millions of tears, but my voice never breaks, not once. Because of Mia. At some point I realize she hasn’t said a word but has reached out and taken my hand, has pulled it onto her lap, and is now holding it with both of her own. Her wrestling hands, so unbelievably warm and calloused and strong. I think about how a friend can hold another friend together. About how good that is. How necessary.

  Beside me on the step, the cordless phone begins to ring, echoing along the sidewalk and down the street. NO CALLER ID is splashed bold across the amber screen. It feels like a long time before I pick it up, but it’s probably not. Maybe a second or two. But so many thoughts fill that instant. About what happens next. What might get said. It could be nothing at all, everyday talk that won’t change a thing. It could deliver the unexpected, where miracles happen or where everything threatens to fall apart. Or it could be the call I’m expecting, that simple and final piece of information that tells me it’s time to move on. That it’s all right to heal. Maybe even to forgive.

  So.

  I lift the handset and push the Talk button. I clear my throat to make sure I have a voice for this part. I want to be heard.

  “Hello?”

  At the other end of the line, there’s a voice I know and love and trust. Low. Calm. Telling me there’s news.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First, to everyone who has been touched by gun violence, to the survivors, victims, and their heartbroken loved ones, I am grateful for the courage and grace you’ve shown in sharing your stories. Thank you for trusting us with your memories and pain and rage, and for somehow still daring to hope.

  Thank you again to Rachel Spence, Scott Fraser, and the rest of the team at Dundurn for bringing me into the family. Special thanks to Jenny, Susan, Sophie, and Babs for their laser-applied specialties. It’s a pleasure to work with such a dedicated and professional crew, and my work couldn’t be in better hands.

  A million thanks to Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who graciously allowed me to borrow a few lines of her sublime and devastating poem “26” for my epigraph and title. Also thanks to writers extraordinaire Karen Bass, Amanda Leduc, Roz Nay, and Anne Valente, who read this novel and said some really nice things. Buy and read their books, everyone: you will be challenged and changed for the better. And, of course, much love to all my writer friends, who inspire and push me to write better.

  And what a privilege and honour it is to live and write in a country where literature is honoured and valued! I’m thankful for everyone who loves and supports the arts, but Valhalla exists for those who support public funding. Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, whose granting programs have given me and so many other scribes the financial space to create.

  Thank you, Cootes Paradise, Churchill Park, and Westdale.

  To those who serve, have served, and will serve their country: thank you. We send, you go, and too often it costs everything. We see you. What you’ve done matters. We need to do more for you.

  Finally, to my people. To God, who makes it all possible. To the saints at HPL and SJE. To my family, immediate and in-law and extended, for all your support; I am spoiled for love. To my girls, Nora and Alida, for making me care even more about what’s to come, and for giving me a reason to keep telling my stories. You are safe and loved, and I know you’ll strive for a world where every child can feel the same. To Rosalee, my amazing wife, first reader, and the mother of our girls, you are so much in everything I do and every word I write I can’t even begin to define how much you mean to me. Fifteen years, my Left. Imagine that. Here’s to a whole bunch more.