by Trevor Cole
At the door, he did the only thing he could think of. He handed Kyle a business card with his office number and asked him to put it in his wallet. The inadequacy of this effort made him sick.
In the first days after Kyle had told them about his plan to spend a year as a water treatment technician at a Canadian Forces base camp in Afghanistan, and then in the months after Kyle had left, Gerald’s main concern, after his concern for Kyle, had been for Vicki. He sensed, though there was no way of knowing, that a mother’s attachment to her son rendered her somehow fragile and therefore vulnerable in the event of some all-too-imaginable misfortune. And he was worried about that for her sake, and for his own. Because after twenty-one years of marriage and a quarter century in the workforce, Gerald was becoming attuned to the limits of what he knew to be his character; it was obvious to him that he was a man incapable of dealing effectively with calamity or any of its serious repercussions. And so there was a moment, after he’d received the news of the “off-camp event,” when he had considered its implications. And one of them had to do with Vicki, and whether he’d be up to managing whatever there would be to manage, re: her.
“Mr. Woodlore?”
Gerald looked away from the window and the motionless plane to see that the man from the departures area had left his counter and was headed toward him.
“Excuse me, sir. You’re Kyle Woodlore’s father, correct?”
“Yes.”
The man came right up to him and leaned in close enough for Gerald to detect the lunch-remnant smell of onions. “You’re asked to go out onto the tarmac to meet a COF-AP manager by the name of” – the man checked a scribbled note in his hand – “Michael Oberly.”
“Oberly.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Mr. Oberly will explain, sir.”
Gerald headed out the incomer’s door.
“Mind that you keep wide of the wings, sir.”
The sudden preponderance of sirs, like machine-gun fire at his feet, sent him hop-walking toward the plane. And as he made it into cool air, and sunlight that seemed absurdly bright, Gerald watched a mobile staircase being wheeled up to the rear door of the plane. By the time he was halfway there, the door had popped open and a white-haired man in a flapping blue wind-breaker had started down the steps.
One of the grounds crew started waving and pointing and shouting over the whine of the turbines and it made no sense to Gerald until he realized he was being told again to keep clear of the wing. And so he had to divert from his arrow’s path toward Oberly and go wide, wide – each extra step a delay – around an invisible no-tread zone, as if the threat to him from above was greater than any other.
He met Oberly at the base of the stairs.
“My son,” he said.
“You’re Mr. Woodlore?”
“What’s happened? Where’s Kyle?”
Oberly held up his hands; his arms seemed to be an incorrect length for his body. “I’m sorry, sir, can you confirm that you are Mr. Gerald Woodlore?”
“Yes!” Gerald pulled out his driver’s license and held it for Oberly to see.
“All right then, well, your son has been involved in a situation on this airplane.” Oberly gathered in his hands and zipped up his windbreaker.
“Is he hurt?”
“He is not hurt. But we have had some difficulty getting the situation under control.”
Gerald was beginning to eye the metal stairs behind Oberly. “What situation? What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Woodlore, I need your full attention on this matter.”
Gerald took a step sideways. The COF-AP man moved to block him. “Why won’t you let me see my son?”
“We are bringing him off the airplane.” Oberly had small grey deep-set eyes, an acorn-sized nose, and thatches of white bramble for eyebrows. The sun sparkled, the air swirled and smelled of fuel. Gerald took in everything. If he needed to recall the facts of the day he was delayed in seeing his son, he would be able to do it. “I wanted you to come out here, Mr. Woodlore, so that Kyle could see you immediately, and so that you could take him directly to your car. You have a car here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I do not want him going into the terminal. I want our official liability for your son to end and I want you to take responsibility from this point.” Oberly jabbed down with an index finger. “Is that understood?”
“Yes.”
“You can take him around through there.” Oberly pointed toward a gate to the side of the building, leading to the parking lot.
“But what’s happened?” Gerald pleaded. “What happened over there?”
The whirling air on the tarmac kept pushing Oberly’s hair onto his forehead and he seemed to be getting frustrated. He pushed it back again as someone appeared at the door above, a burly man wearing glasses and military fatigues who came out and leaned over the stairs.
“All set?” he called.
Oberly held up a forestalling hand; his arm, as it lifted, seemed to unfurl in sections. “I can’t tell you about what happened over there, sir. As soon as it’s approved, but not until. That’s the way the military works. There are procedures and they will be followed.”
Gerald stared up at the soldier on the stairs, and at Oberly, and tried to imagine his son among these men, or others like them. He reached out and touched Oberly’s elbow. “Give me something.”
The COF-AP manager squinted and his face twitched a bit. He looked suddenly to the ground, and then seemed to gather Gerald with an arm and move him off to the side, as if to make their conversation more private, though there’d been no one close enough to hear. When he spoke, his voice was no more than a murmur. “I’m not an expert, sir, but it’s my understanding that when young people are in a state of …” He hesitated and Gerald watched Oberly’s mouth shape itself around a word. “… when they’re in a state of, uh, grieving –”
“Grieving. Someone’s been –”
Oberly talked over him. “When they’re in that state, sir, they can – sometimes – become, uh, erratic. In their behaviour.”
“Erratic.”
“In their thinking.”
Gerald, with jet fuel perfuming the bright, wild air around him, tried to grip the two motes of information he’d just been given, erraticness, and the other. “Kyle,” he said, “is acting erratically.”
Oberly nodded. “One thing, his work habits slipped. Tasks weren’t being completed. We’d find him in the kitchen tent playing cards for money, any hour of the day. We tried talking to him. Tried fining him. Didn’t work. He was a different kid. We gave it some time but after a while we thought it best to get him back to his family. This sort of thing, we’re not really equipped.”
The large soldier high at the door banged the side of the stairs. “Mike?”
Oberly signalled come with a wave. There was motion on the stairs above him and Gerald looked up as his son appeared. He was smiling. He seemed healthy. His hands were tied behind his back.
Oberly jerked the zipper of his windbreaker as high as it could go and gave Gerald an apologetic look. “He went a little berserk on the plane.”
TWO
1
For a week, until she cornered him by the photocopier, Gerald had been tenacious in avoiding Sandy Beale. He had more than enough flux in his life at the moment and to him, since the aborted meeting in his office, Sandy Beale had come to represent “crazy change.” You could have asked Gerald to entertain all sorts of accelerated efforts and focused initiatives on behalf of Spent Materials and he would have been happy to do it, any hour of any day. But to “crazy change” Gerald said, “No thank you.”
Then Sandy rounded the corner of the photocopier station and happened upon Gerald making copies of the latest Materials Girl column in Sheet and Screen, in which the Girl (actually a fifty-something woman wearing the sort of maniacally happy expression Gerald associated with bake sales) offered a helpful
checklist of measures for combating humidity in metal fabrication systems. He had intended to deposit copies of the “Put the Clamp on Damp” article in the mail slots of his three shift supervisors with an eye to minimizing the inventory losses that Spent suffered due to unchecked corrosion every summer, and then he planned a follow-up meeting featuring some fairly pointed questions a few days later. But all of that blew from Gerald’s head when Sandy stamped around the corner clutching a black folder and came to a sudden, hair-flying halt.
“Well, hello there!”
“Hi, Sandy, I’m just about done.” Gerald yanked out his copies and then, realizing there were only two, positioned a hand down by the output tray to receive the third. He had his body tilted forward, his face toward the hall, he was exit-ready. No one in Sandy’s position would think to waylay an executive so postured.
“I’ve been hoping we’d meet.”
Gerald was forced to glance up. “Have you?” By now the copy should have fallen into his hand. He should have been gone. By now.
“I think it’s jammed,” said Sandy, as the copier gave a sigh.
He straightened and looked at the panel of lights. Where all should have been green, one was yellow. “Well, it’s not important. I’ll get it later.” He started to leave.
“Wait!”
“Yes?”
Her eyes ballooned at him. “You’re not going to leave it jammed are you?”
“Actually, I –” He pointed vaguely down the hall.
She squinted. “What’s that on your neck?”
He touched the skin above his collar. “We have a cat. I have to go.”
“That looks nasty. She must not like you.” Sandy grinned. “I assume it’s a she.”
Gerald, backing his way down the hall, shrugged. “It’s not our cat.”
He made it as far as the framed poster for the International Window-Fittings Conference (hosted by Spent Materials Inc., 1989) when Sandy raised her hand and dangled an index finger over the copier like mistletoe. “I don’t know how to fix this,” she crooned.
Gerald felt his desire to flee crumble under duty’s oppression. He reversed course and walked back to the copier with head bowed. It was unbelievable, really, the bind he’d gotten himself into; he doubted anyone would even read this humidity column.
As he swung open the copier’s flimsy door and reached in amongst the inner workings, Sandy laid her folder on the top of the machine and lifted out a typed sheet. She rattled it at Gerald as he was bent over. “This is what I wanted to talk to you about. I thought, while I was waiting, I’d get everything down on paper.”
“Your crazy idea?”
She rose up on her toes. “My crazy, earth-shattering idea.”
“You were going to make copies of it?”
“Well” – her expression turned pert – “I was anticipating your enthusiastic approval and I was getting ready for the meeting with Bishop.”
He pulled the offending sheet from the copier’s entrails and tossed it, crumpled, into the recycling bin. “Jumping ahead a bit maybe.” As he smudged black toner dust off his hand, he assessed his options and the punishments each entailed. He could hear Sandy out for a few minutes and bear the pain of her disappointment when he said no, or he could let her go around him and drag Bishop into a headache he didn’t need. He considered that there might be value too in being seen to be open to new ideas, and that this might serve to instil a little useful fear in Trick, whom he judged to be floating these days like a goose on a warm thermal breeze. “Why don’t you come to my office after five and we’ll talk about it,” he said, then punched the reset button and pulled his issue of Sheet and Screen from the glass. “There you go.”
“Five-fifteen?”
“Make it six.”
From his office, Gerald called Vicki’s cell phone. She wasn’t answering, most likely because she was setting up the house on Lightenham and had stored her purse under a sink somewhere. Why she didn’t keep the cell on her belt or in a pocket so that people could reach her when they needed her was a great, impenetrable mystery to Gerald. “Vicki,” he said when her voice mail kicked in, “hope things are going okay over there. I’m just letting you know that I have a meeting at six, which shouldn’t go too long, and so I should be home around seven. As long as the traffic cooperates.” He was about to hang up but brought the phone back. “By the way, I am sorry about this morning.”
It had been bothering Gerald most of the day – to be accurate, since 11 a.m. – that he had, in the night, set Vicki’s bedside clock to the correct time. This was his admittedly petty response to being woken, from the best sleep he’d had since Kyle’s return, by an attack from one of his wife’s more savage toenails, which had dug a finger-length gouge out of his left calf. It was a wound so deep he couldn’t let it wait until morning, although part of him had wanted the satisfaction of showing her the blood on the sheets. While he’d padded into the ensuite and repaired himself with a generous daubing of liquid bandage, he’d let his mind run with a visual loop that had him flinging off the duvet before Vicki’s horrified gaze to reveal a Godfatheresque level of gore. (See? See? his expression would say. He wouldn’t even need to speak. See? See? and she would shrink back, ashamed.) By the time he was finished painting over the damage, he’d come to feel that he’d shortchanged himself somehow, that it wasn’t required of him to be so saint-like in letting Vicki sleep through yet another of her assaults. She was like one of those split-personality murderers, the evil done by the bad side while the good side lived on, oblivious and guilt-free. He’d decided it was time she suffered some consequence for her crimes, and that he should enjoy some taste of revenge. So for several minutes, in the darkness, he’d fumbled around with Vicki’s three-thousand-dollar antique carriage clock until he’d figured out how to slide off the glass front, and then he’d eased the minute hand back until it showed 2:58, the time it was supposed to show. And when, at eight in the morning, Hella had called to find out where Vicki was – because the moving trucks were waiting outside the warehouse – Vicki, looking at her clock and realizing that it was not 7:35 a.m. as she’d thought but actually 8 a.m., had glanced over at Gerald, who was in the midst of knotting his tie, and adopted such a withering nonchalance that he’d felt completely cheated. It was at this point that he’d hoisted his trouser leg and ripped down his sock to reveal the divot in his leg and shouted, “Look at this. This is your work right here!” as she made her way out of the bedroom, and the house.
He’d been fuming about it until an hour before lunch, when Bishop had stopped by Gerald’s office to ask if he knew anything about the medical system in Denver. Susan had called, he explained, to say that the doctors in Cincinnati were recommending she see some specialists there, and Bishop was wondering whether Gerald had any views.
BISHOP: Good people down there in Denver, Gerald, do you think? I’m sure they wouldn’t recommend it otherwise. But it makes you wonder what Denver doctors might know that Cincinnati doctors don’t. I mean, does medical knowledge really float around like that, settling in some places and not in others? I guess I’m supposed to accept that it does, but why the hell should it? Don’t all doctors have a duty to be good?
Gerald had been determined to listen intently for as long as Bishop wanted to lean against his filing cabinet and talk, ignoring his phone, going so far as to slide his left wrist, his watch wrist, into the crevice between his leg and his chair, so that he wouldn’t glance at it inadvertently. And when Bishop was done talking, and put a hand out to lightly brush the back of the chair sitting in front of Gerald’s desk with the air of a man who wanted some advice, Gerald had told him that he’d heard good things about the hospitals and the specialists in Denver, very good things (though he’d heard nothing at all). He told Bishop that if the Cincinnati doctors wanted Susan to see specialists in Denver, then that was the best thing for her, and he knew she’d be better off because of it. And Bishop had brightened considerably at this and then turned the atten
tion around (because he was a gracious man and it was what gracious men did) to ask how Gerald’s own family was; how was Vicki, how was young Kyle?
And Gerald had lied and said, “Fine, Bishop. Great. Thanks for asking.”
And he’d been thinking about his lie ever since.
It wasn’t as if he knew, for a fact, that his wife and his son were not fine and great; they might have been either or both of those good things, and as his own mother had often said (in a whisper, while in the den his lumber merchant father sat in a whisky-scented plume of ire and spat at newspaper pictures of the mayor), there was nothing wrong in hoping for the best. But in truth, he couldn’t be sure. Since Kyle had returned, Vicki had become hard to read. For years, Gerald had happily relied on Vicki’s certainty about things, such as her environment, the things she bought and touched and admired, or chose to disdain. Certain tile borders, for instance, or a particular kind of cabinetry, or a seldom-seen relative he might have fretted over regarding an invitation to Easter dinner (because his cousin Sonia and her husband were coming and therefore shouldn’t he include Sonia’s husband’s sister Gini?). What Gerald experienced as small, gripping agonies of decision troubled Vicki not at all. (No, was the answer on Gini, because the last time they had invited her to a family event, she’d brought a man who opened their fridge and helped himself to pickles, then laughed about it in the aftermath. So, no.)