by Dani Couture
When Ferd came out of his room, she motioned him to her lap. “Come here,” she said.
He hadn’t sat in her lap in years, but quickly climbed up into her comforting arms. His eyes were unfocused and pooling. Gaetan stood behind them, his hands gripping her shoulders, making bloodless impressions in her already pale skin. His head above hers and hers above Ferd’s. A totem pole of grief.
It was difficult to grieve when there was no body. It was not just the closure of being able to see the body, to trust what the authorities had already told you: that your loved one is dead. It was the practicalities. Should I buy a casket? Who do I have to call? Do you need a grave stone to mark the grave if the grave is empty? What should the inscription read?
Wish you were here.
Algoma tried to concentrate on the service instead. She was at least sure of that, what needed to be done. There needed to be a proper service, if not for her, for everyone else.
The first item: a photo. She needed a photo of Leo to have enlarged, so that it could be posted at the front of the church on an easel like they had done for the young private who had died overseas. The soldier had stepped onto an IED and his remains, what could be collected, had been shipped back to Canada—first to Trenton, then Toronto, then home. An impossibly long trip for the family. Algoma had attended the service. Several hundred weeping faces, only some she recognized. They had kept the casket closed while the priest spoke of service, acceptance and deliverance. Algoma still had the funeral card folded in her wallet.
She went into her bedroom and pulled out two family photo albums from the top shelf in her closet. Both albums had been sale purchases. She had immediately made herself like the tacky album covers because she was saving a dollar off each. The first cover was a Vaselined-lense shot of a fawn sitting in a field of dandelions. The second was of a young woman kneeling down at the base of a tree, her hands pressed together in prayer, her dewy face in perfect relaxation. Algoma sat on the floor and flipped through the thick pages of the album. The protective plastic covering on each sheet crackled under her touch. It didn’t take long for her to realize that there were no appropriate photos. Famously camera shy, Leo was always half out of the frame or had one hand obscuring his face in the last second before the flash popped. The only photos where he was in frame were when he was fishing or hunting. Leo and a wide variety of dead animals. Speckled trout, hares, partridge, pike, and pickerel. Algoma traced a finger along the edge of a photo of Ferd. He was leaning against the family car with his arms crossed over his narrow chest. He had the cool air of a twenty-five-year-old stuck in a miniature body. His face partially obscured by shadow and turned so the side of his neck where Leo’s birthmark would have been wasn’t visible. It was perfect. She carefully pulled back the plastic covering and peeled the photo off the page.
Who would know?
Ferd stared at a photo of his own face at the front of the church. Unsettled, he shifted in his seat, but said nothing. While he was sure someone had made a mistake, he didn’t want to upset his mother by pointing it out. The entire service, he thought, was ridiculous. All the effort and incense for someone who wasn’t dead. He’d woken up that morning convinced his brother was alive—he could feel it. Or more accurately, he couldn’t feel Leo’s absence. They would feel ridiculous when Leo came home. He stifled a laugh.
“We’re gathered here today by loss,” the priest said. He paused deeply between sentences so each one seemed more profound. “But we’ve always been together.”
“Beloved son,” Ferd read off a blue ribbon that stretched across the centre of an impossibly large wreath of white carnations. White carnations were his mother’s favourite flower, not his brother’s. Leo had loved Orange Hawkweed, a bright orange and yellow flower that grew alongside gravel roads and in meadows. The prickly stems that said don’t pick. In his mother’s next life, he hoped she’d come back and choose a different flower. Something harder to find. She made it too easy for people to show their love—even he knew that. Too cheap. A twelve-for-ten-dollar bouquet.
Anemone.
He would try to remember to tell her after the service that her favourite flowers should be anemones. His teacher had received them on her birthday last year and made the entire class repeat after her. Anemone.
Ferd untucked his dress shirt and unbuttoned the bottom button, his way of reminding himself that he had something to remember. He fidgeted in his seat and absently flipped through the pages of the battered hymn book while the priest droned on about mourning, God’s open arms, eternal happiness, whatever. Ferd thought that the priest in his long robes, threaded with gold, looked like a magician as he waved his hands over the child-sized white casket.
“I have to bury something,” Ferd had heard his mother argue with his father two days before.
It was like burying an empty time capsule. Nothing for future explorers and archaeologists to find hundreds of years from now when they unearthed the casket. Ferd laughed. He wished he could see their faces when they popped open the lid and found nothing at all. Maybe some dried out flowers, faded silk.
A blonde altar boy with rosacea swung the incense ball.
“Abracadabra,” Ferd said. “Poof, he’s gone.” He clapped his hands together and immediately felt the sharp jab of his mother’s elbow in his ribs and his father’s eyes on him.
“Have you no respect for your brother?” Gaetan hissed.
Ferd realized that his parent’s expectations were no longer split in half between him and his brother, that everything he did or did not do would be magnified. He was an only child by default, at least for now. He looked around at the other mourners seated in the church and tried to pick out the other only children. Tabitha. Jean-Marie. David. Lise. There weren’t many. The service droned on as family members took turns speaking about Leo’s love of nature: “So vibrant, so full of life.” Ferd rolled his eyes. They needed a thesaurus instead of a bible. Already he could picture making fun of the service with Leo when he returned. He’d have to remember to tell him that Aunt Danielle called him “a boy who had succeeded in being a part of the nature he loved so much.” It was like Leo had been turned to mud or a log. Ferd undid another button on the shirt his mother had carefully ironed the night before.
“You don’t even have to mist the shirt,” he’d tried to joke. She had been crying so hard that her tears had spilled onto the ironing board.
“Go to your room,” she’d said. “Just go to your room and get into bed. You don’t even know what you’re saying.”
Ferd wondered if there was a different category for only children who were only children because their siblings had died. Listening in on his parents’ card games when they had friends over, he felt he’d learned all he needed to know about life and death. From his bedroom, he could hear everything: cards slapped down, pots of quarters won, the fridge door being opened and shut. Tongues loosened with wine and beer, personal histories spilling out. He learned that not all babies lived through childbirth. Or some did, but with problems that would take them within the first year. There existed caskets even smaller than Leo’s. Everything did not always go as planned. Old age was a privilege, not a right.
Those nights standing at his bedroom door Ferd had wondered if the parents told their next child, the one that lived, that they were not the first. Not the only. A permanent replacement. He liked knowing that he had entered the world with a friend. His parents, through no conscious effort of their own, had ensured that he would never be lonely. At least in the beginning.
“In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, amen,” the priest finished. He walked down among the pews holding people’s hands, handing them tissues that he pulled out from the voluminous folds of his hassock. He held Ferd’s hands especially tight.
“Yes, yes, he’s with the holy son now.”
Son. Algoma looked at her remaining son with c
onfusion. Was he smiling? He sat there, legs splayed open, feet dangling, shirt partially unbuttoned, staring blankly at the front of the church.
“You’re in shock,” she whispered, but his eyes did not meet hers. He was somewhere else entirely.
______________
1:48 p.m. 25°C. No wind.
Attempt to cook an egg on a parked car: failure.
“Leo!”
A lanky redhead stood in the middle of the street, her dirty hands cupped around her mouth. She yelled again: “I’m only going to give you one more chance, Leo. It’s your turn.”
The hairs on the back of Ferd’s neck stood up. Though he’d told the girl his name was Leo, he kept forgetting to respond when she spoke to him. He didn’t know why he had given her his brother’s name, but he liked the way it sounded when she said it. As if Leo would turn the corner and show up at any second.
“Just give me a minute, will you?” Ferd finished writing a note to his brother, which he slipped down the sewer before running over to the girl.
“What were you doing over there?” Beth asked.
“Nothing,” Ferd said.
Beth’s mouth twitched with suspicion, but she didn’t pursue further questioning. “Whatever.”
Even though Beth and Ferd were the same age, Beth was taller, which gave her ultimate authority. She was balancing on a tar-filled crack in the road, her sun-burnt toes dug deep into the black bubble gum.
“It’s your turn,” she repeated, exasperated. “Here.” Her face was tight and serious. She stepped off the crack slowly and carefully, as if removing herself from a landmine. A light breeze ruffled her long curly hair, which was threaded with bits of twigs and leaves. An afternoon of roughhousing with the boys.
The crack in the street reached from one side to the other. Ferd took off his running shoes and socks and took Beth’s place in the tar. The warm tar felt oddly familiar—like flesh—as it closed around his toes. The mid-afternoon sun bore down on his head. He thought he could smell burnt hair.
The crack was central to the game the kids had been playing all afternoon. At all times, someone had to have their toes pushed into the tar to keep the street together. If the crack was abandoned, the street would split apart and suck in everything around it. The fate of the world rested on the shoulders of six kids from Le Pin. The tar lodged under their toenails would be there for days.
“Don’t move, Leo,” Beth commanded breathlessly as she hopped by on one foot. “We’re counting on you.” She thumped her chest with a fist to emphasize her point.
Ferd wondered how long he would have to stand there; that particular rule of the game had not been established. He had already been standing in the tar twice as long as Beth had. None of the other kids strayed close enough for him to ask. They flew about like sparrows, flitting and chirping rules they made up as they went along.
“You can’t touch his arm with your hands, only your feet.”
“No shadows!”
“Three handfuls of grass for one stone.”
“You have to roll over first.”
“Rip the leaf in four.”
“Jump ten times, shadow-stepper!”
That morning, Ferd had biked to the south side of town where the kids went to a different school. A parallel universe of latchkeys and Popsicles. He had trolled the tree-lined streets for unfamiliar faces. On a slow roll, he had passed mailboxes with last names he didn’t recognize; a shirtless man polishing his car, the driver’s door left open, stereo blaring AC/DC; a lawnmower abandoned on a half-cut lawn, the orange extension cord snaking into the open garage; an elderly woman in thick black support hose sweeping her already clean sidewalk. Most of the front lawns were empty. Bursts of laughter and shrieks tinkled from backyards. Ferd could smell the barbecued meat and he could almost taste the tall glasses of lemonade he imagined accompanied it.
After a stop at a corner convenience store, he had encountered a pack of kids on 12th Avenue. They had just been released from microwaved pizza lunches on Corel plates and juice boxes sucked dry into hourglass shapes. They had sprinted full tilt from their homes, inmates released from life sentences. Wild-eyed, they had come to halt around his bike. He was immediately, wordlessly, absorbed into their afternoon.
The last summer that Leo had been alive, he and Ferd had gone into the woods every day and never encountered another kid, let alone a pack. Every night, they prepared backpacks full of everything they thought they could possibly need: granola bars, matches, comic books, snare wire. With their mother’s approval, they left the house in the morning and didn’t return until the street lights flickered on, their bags emptied and filled again with forest fare.
“Now you have to sing the birthday song backwards,” yelled Tracey, the smallest girl of the group. Her nose was flat and round like a crushed blueberry and she was missing both of her front teeth.
Toe-deep in tar, Ferd began to feel dizzy from the heat, but he didn’t dare move. Beth’s eyes were always on him, and he could tell that she was someone who wouldn’t take mutiny with grace. He licked his parched lips, squared his shoulders, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He could do it. He dug his toes in deeper. They were depending on Leo.
The game had changed. Ferd watched from the street, his T-shirt slick with sweat, the back of his neck hot to touch.
“You’re the bear and you’re the boy,” instructed Beth.
Ben and Michel walked to the nearest lawn and lay down on the freshly mowed grass. Michel made breaststroke motions while Ben dog paddled in place behind him. Even from the street, Ferd could hear Michel’s heavy breaths, Ben’s grunts and growls.
“Swim faster,” Beth yelled. “He’s going to get you! He’s going to tear you apart with his teeth.” Michel screamed when Ben grabbed onto his ankle and dragged him closer.
It hit Ferd. They were reenacting what they had heard about Leo. He stepped off the crack. The world fell apart, everything sucked into his anger. “You’re wrong,” he hissed. “It’s all wrong.”
Ben stopped air swimming. He was sweating. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s all wrong.” Ferd’s ears and neck were bright red, but he couldn’t find the right words.
“You’re ruining everything,” Beth shrieked, her previous calm shattered.
“Leo was chasing the bear,” Ferd said. “The bear wasn’t chasing him.”
The kids looked at Ferd like he was a ghost. The two boys stood up. For the first time that day, Beth’s voice sounded unsure: “What did you say?”
Ferd pumped his legs as fast as he could, blasting past stop signs, weaving in between cars, coming close to hitting people crossing the street. He stopped for nothing. With each block he peddled through, he shed a small piece of Leo. By the time he arrived home he was entirely himself—Ferdinand. He threw down his bike at the end of the driveway and stood there. His mother was standing in the living room talking on the phone. She didn’t see him. He could see the half-moon silhouette of her pregnant belly and it soothed him. His breathing slowed. Soon, he could stop living for two.
______________
10:21 a.m. 33°C. No wind.
Large purple bruise spreading around the IV needle.
“Name.”
“Gaetan.”
“Last Name.”
“Beaudoin.”
“Date of birth.”
“What happened?”
“Primary physician?”
“Where am I?”
“Emergency contact?”
“Who?”
“Emergency contact?” the nurse repeated.
Gaetan’s mind drew a blank. There was no one he could call. And even if he did, he didn’t know what he would tell them. He looked at the nurse who sat patiently beside him as she waited for him to figure out his situation.
Who was important. She tapped her clean white runner against his bed like a metronome.
“You were beaten,” she offered. “You’re lucky to be alive.” Her hair was the same colour as Algoma’s.
“So—” Gaetan started.
“So, we fixed you,” the nurse said. “The police still want to talk to you. I’ll call them and let them know you’re conscious now.”
Gaetan reached up and felt a turban of gauze wrapped around his head.
“Quite a gash,” the nurse said. “You’ll feel that one for a couple of weeks.”
Gaetan looked down at the rest of his body, noting every bruise and bandage and the cast on his left arm. He lifted up his right hand and looked at the IV line. “What happened?” he asked.
The nurse put down her clipboard. “You were robbed and beaten, hon. Simple as that.”
When Gaetan tried to remove the IV line from his hand, the nurse slapped his leg. “No,” she barked. She picked up her clipboard and wrote something down. “You’ll need to stay for another day or so. Do you have someone to watch you when you go home? Someone to help you out?”
Gaetan thought about his apartment. He hadn’t vacuumed since he’d moved in. Had he picked up the mail yesterday? There were dirty dishes piled in the sink and he was out of toilet paper. “Yes,” he said.
The nurse nodded. “Do you want me to call them for you? What’s the number?”
“No. I’ll use the phone here,” Gaetan lied. “I’d just like some privacy. Is that alright?”
The nurse nodded and looked at her watch. “I’ll be back later so we can fill this out, okay?”
“Sure,” he said. As soon as she left, he shut his eyes. His last memory was of eating in a restaurant in Chinatown, how the bell rang every time someone went in or out.
A phone rang. Startled, Gaetan bolted up in his bed, his heart pounding. His panic lessened when he realized the phone wasn’t for him. It was for one of the other patients in his room. His breathing slowed back to normal. While he dreaded the idea of his phone ringing, in a way, he desperately hoped it would.