“I see.”
Again he drove his fist into his leg. Not hard enough. You could never hit yourself hard enough to do damage or make it hurt anything like enough to drive out the other pain. His fingers stung now and his joints felt etched with nerve endings; in his leg, a dumb nothing of an ache.
“She probably just doesn’t know when to call you. You know, like when to be sure Dad isn’t around or whatever . . .”
“They could talk. Wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
“Sure. But I don’t think that’s exactly what she has in mind right now. It isn’t really in the cards, as they say.”
“Too bad!”
Devon sighed audibly. “Anyway . . .” He’d said it like their East Coast grandfather, ann-a-way—another family joke of long standing.
“Gotta go already?”
“Yeah, actually, I should. Tons of studying here. And I’ve already been on like an hour with Pop.”
“Twenty minutes!”
“How about you?”
“How about me what?”
“Studying?”
“Please. These classes here are so undergeared, you would not believe, dude. If I have to open a book before the end of the term, I’ll be really surprised. Honors math we’re still talking about parallelograms and polyhedrons. Last week in history class, some dufus actually asked how Julius Caesar got his name from a salad. I kid you not.”
“Smoking a little too much of the salad himself.”
“No doubt.”
“So get Dad to pass you up to grade eleven.”
“Uh . . . think I’ll just stick with the stupids, thanks.”
“Well, I gotta study here. You go on back to your movie or your Facebook or whatever it is you waste your time on these days.”
“I’m not wasting time, Devon.”
“Well, that’s good. Better than I could say at your age. Do me a favor, though?”
“What’s that.”
“Eat some LEMONS. Eat some good juicy lemons and ORANGES. And then suck on some of those ester C lozenge things. Ain’t worth killing yourself over a little art project. Believe me . . .”
“It’s not a little art project.”
“Have it your way.”
“But wait. You didn’t—did Dad say anything to you about, you know?”
“What?”
“You know, did you talk to Dad at all about the whole . . .”
“Relax, bro. Your little secret’s safe with me. I didn’t say a word.”
“OK. Same goes for here, then. I guess.”
“I don’t follow. Same what?”
“Your secret.”
“You mean the new tats and—wait. Are you blackmailing me, Thomas?”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“Because for a second I thought that’s what I was hearing.”
Silence.
“Ciao, fratello.”
“OK, Devon. Bye.”
Sunlight hot on every stone . . . sometimes he could see his way right into it and remember all his original inspiration: man-faced seals, two of them, riding the inner trough of a wave, the older one chin-to-chest, back-swimming, younger one following, tail weaving in and out of water. Father and son. Flash of light in the lifting water between them, brilliant, hot as the sun-hot stones ashore—and at the crest of the next wave, the white longboat, gunner at the prow, gun raised. The older seal knows what’s next even before the puff of gun smoke and delayed report of the gun. He doesn’t dive to safety through the wave or look away from the gunner’s eyes. Oh but you will be sorry, he wants to tell the gunner. You would kill your own wife’s only son. But he has no language for it, no man speech anymore. Only knowledge.
Franklin had been aiming for this moment, the final death scene, final wave, for as long as he’d been compiling the poems leading up to it: birth of the selkie changeling in blood and seawater; man eyes peering from a seal-whiskered face; and later, the poems of his shape-shifting to come ashore—rounded black seal eyes in a man-whiskered face, drunk as only a human can be and air-swimming, bar to bar, touch of sweet nighttime on him everywhere; seduction of the land mother in a firelit laundry room; firelight on the stone hearth and sheets; more blood; departure, and then the return to land seven years later, again man-formed, fur hidden in a heap under a rock, to purchase his son with a bag of gold and foretell for her their deaths (his own and his son’s) at the hand of her future husband. When he could, when he believed, he flew straight in: his own transmutations of icy Albertan prairie, white prairie light, oil fields, distant Rocky Mountains and cottonwoods, into poetry—into seals and men and seal-men in the waters off the northernmost coast of England, and the imagined underwater selkie kingdom of Sule Skerry—all of it cohering in lines and words he understood about as well as he did his own blood circulation. Other times, it was drudgery. Swimming against a tide of ill-matched words and worlds. Lines that didn’t breathe or scan right, iambs and spondees sticking through line breaks isolated and treacherous as shoals. Almost like he didn’t know the first thing about putting two words side by side—almost like he didn’t speak the language. Always it was a game, seeing his way back into it. Always, he was losing. And then getting it right again. He trusted neither instinct, not the one that said Quit now, nor the one that said Go on.
The call from Devon had thrown him out, of course. Happily. He was always glad for a call from his son, never considering it a bona fide “interruption.” If Thomas had inherited all of Jane’s mysterious gloom, coupled with his own tendency to prefer, above anything else, hours alone lost in worlds of his own imagining, Devon had gotten both the more socially functional, calculating, outgoing, and observant self Franklin brought to his own teaching job and most of Jane’s analytical, technical smarts. All Devon didn’t have of their sunnier attributes was her music. She was gloom illuminated by and interpenetrated with string sound. Thomas was gloom, period. Fascinating gloom. Devon was . . . something else. He was almost like a kid from a TV show; sometimes, he was that perfectly, surprisingly apt in every social setting. A stranger. An (at times) overly energized, athletic stranger.
Parts of what Devon had said to him now remained stuck in his head, forming a subcurrent of argumentation just beneath the poetry as he sat trying to hear his way back in. One thing in particular, which had to do with Jane and a catchphrase of hers he’d been almost surprised to hear coming from Devon: Time to face facts, Dad. Shit or get off the pot, don’t you think? What it meant was, he and Jane had been talking about him. Of course. But what it also meant was that he had to examine, again, in response, his own rationales for not serving her with divorce papers until Thomas was out of the house. She, of course, was free at any time to file. He wasn’t sure how he’d respond if she did, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t. It just didn’t make enough difference to her, one way or the other, no loss or gain, no contested custody, and she wasn’t one to waste time and money on inessential legal paperwork. Aside from needing to protect Thomas, stay in Canada, and keep the door open for her return, and aside from the fact that making their separation final and legal might involve more officially sharing with her his cash-out on their house in Calgary, he also knew that as long as he was still attached to the idea of a reconciliation (and he was), if he served her with divorce papers, it would be (a) only because he felt forced into doing so by her, or, worse, (b) because he was playing for a reaction from her (i.e., reconciliation). Once Thomas was grown and out of the house, if nothing had changed in the interim, then would be the time to serve. But Devon saw things otherwise. You’re stuck, Dad. File first; get over it later. Thomas can deal. He hadn’t said it in those words exactly, but Franklin knew him well enough to know it was how he saw things, what he meant. You need to move on already. As long as you hang on to a dead marriage, how can you go forward in your life? But I am going forward. I’m in a new house, new job. I’m working, writing. I’ve got prospects. Having hope is not the same thing as hanging on. But, Dad, in t
his case it kind of is. Time to face facts. Time to shit or get off the pot, I say. . . .
He glanced at his watch—9:40. Bedtime anyway. Saved his files, shut down. Pushed back from the desk chair and stood stretching a moment before heading out of the room and up the darkened hallway.
One foot on the staircase, he froze. Heard the exhaust fan running in the downstairs washroom and saw the bar of light shining beneath its closed door; again, the thing that had stopped him—the unmistakable sound you didn’t ever want to identify but always had to, instantly: puking. Throat clearing. Curses. Private, repercussive coughs bursting against toilet porcelain, and more retching. Instinctively, until you were a parent and learned the care associated with it, learned the other response of needing immediately to go in and find out what was wrong, help if you could, you wanted to run. Still, there were the warring impulses in him: one, to swallow back his own bile and head upstairs fast, pretending not to have noticed; the other, to go in, see what he could do. And even as he was registering all of this, he was already halfway to the washroom door.
Deep breath. Hand on the doorknob, testing, twisting to see if it was locked. “Thomas?” He rapped once, hard, and again. “Thomas?” He pulled the door open. “Hey, T—everything all right in here? I thought . . .”
The boy was on the floor, legs around the toilet and arms outflung as if he were embracing it, head back. Sink water still ran and there was a guttering noise as the toilet drained, so he was spared that much anyway. No stink, no puke to look at or clean up.
“Kiddo?” In spite of himself, he sniffed after the smell.
“Yes, Dad.”
“I asked if everything was all right in here.” From this angle, he could see that the boy had never changed out of his mauled underwear. The elastic waistband had entirely separated from the shredded rest of the briefs and rode, solo, midway up his back. “Are you OK?”
“Fine. Yes, I’m fine. Think I must have eaten something. I wasn’t feeling so hot. But”—and like that, he was pulling himself upright, stooping to unwind a massive wad of toilet paper from the roll (Franklin almost didn’t stop himself in time—Hey, hey, easy there!) and wiping down the rim of the toilet, the underside of the seat, slapping down the seat and lid, flushing again—“it seems to be passing.” Fist touching his upper lip a moment, he faced Franklin. “Yeah, I’m fine now, I think.” Shrugged. “I don’t know what it was.”
“Well, I do.”
“What?”
“It’s that crazy diet you’re on, whatever it is.”
“What diet?”
“How should I know? You tell me what diet. No fruit, no yogurt, no trail mix, no lettuce, no orange juice, raisin bran . . .” Some of these items he counted on his fingers, as if that would make his case more convincing; held the fingers in the open palm of his opposing hand, and then abruptly found he’d run out. Sushi, he remembered. One of Thomas’s old-time favorites. “No sushi,” he added, but didn’t use a finger for it. “I mean, you’ve never been particular about food. Ever. Why all of a sudden? What are you trying to accomplish here? Is it like some special grade-ten form of self-torture through dietary self-abnegation? What?”
Again the irritating shrug. “Tastes change.”
“Tastes change! Jesus.” He sighed. Scrubbed an open hand over his forehead and then pressed the heels of both hands to his eyes. Released them, sighed again, more explosively, and leaned to the doorjamb. “Are you turning bulimic on me?”
“Do I look bulimic?”
“No. Christ.”
“If you don’t mind . . . I’d like to go upstairs now. Brush my teeth. If you don’t have anything more to say, that is. It’s not the most pleasant aftertaste, you know.”
“Of course. But Thomas. Look. If there’s something, if there’s ever anything we need to talk about, you know—right?—you know we can just talk about it. No fuss, no trouble.”
“Sure.”
And as they moved around each other, Franklin raised his arms to draw the boy in for an embrace. “Come on,” he said. Felt Thomas’s arms go limply around his own back, the light reciprocative pressure of his forearms, and at precisely the same moment his own arms dropped, the pressure vanishing. Stood back a step to see him and to observe, not for the first time, that Thomas was actually an inch or two taller than he was now, and had precisely his mother’s eyes.
“It’s been a hard couple years, OK? I know that. Hard times for all of us, Mom leaving, moving here, Devon starting at university, all of it. It’s normal enough to stress about stuff and have a few bad days here and there, but the worst thing, the last thing you ever want to do about any of that is pretend it isn’t real. Pretending it isn’t happening or isn’t a . . . problem, that’s psychotic. That’s where you get into actual, real trouble.”
Thomas nodded. He was entering his other mode now, a new one Franklin was coming to recognize more and more lately but for which he had not yet devised strategies to cope—his disengaged but attentively listening-son mode. The eyes were open and trained on Franklin, the mouth relaxed, no smirk, no smart back talk. In every outward respect, he gave the appearance of earnest young man hearing and accepting words of wisdom from parent. Seemed, actually, to have become suddenly years younger in the process. Meanwhile, Franklin was pretty sure nothing, or at least very little, of what he was saying was actually getting through. He wondered if Thomas even heard him.
“But we’ve been over all this already, right?”
Thomas nodded.
“Talk. Talk is good.”
Again the nod.
“To bed with you, then. Tomorrow’s a new day.”
“Must’ve been like some bad jerky from the Jerky Shack or something. I don’t know. Maybe something I ate at school.”
“Sure. Could be.”
Inexplicably, the boy seemed stuck in place now. Something was holding him; Franklin had no idea what, but it forced him to reconsider everything. Maybe he really was listening.
“OK?”
Thomas nodded some more and cleared his throat. “But . . .” he began. “So did Devon tell you?”
“Tell me. . . . You mean his grand scheme to drive the ice roads north for a tête-à-tête with your mère in, where was it, Norman Wells? Someplace like that?”
Thomas nodded.
“Well, yes, he did. And it’s probably about time. You should, as well. Go with him if you want.”
“As if.”
“As if what?”
“Never mind.”
Thomas pushed past him and went wordlessly up the stairs.
“What?”
“Night, Dad.”
Occasionally, as now, it hit him, what the kid must be up against. He’d grown three sizes or more since Jane had left, and had recently begun shaving every couple of weeks; there was a new slouch in his shoulders, a digressive sideways tilt in the way he climbed the stairs, like a boy so dead set on avoiding all notice, you couldn’t help but stare, noting, too, how angry and hurt . . . how separate from the world he seemed to hold himself. Most of the time, Franklin could stay focused enough on his own concerns not to realize; when he did, it was almost too much to bear. Truth was, if Jane were here now, she would not be able to give Thomas what he must need from her emotionally—too much had been lost already, too much time passed, and Jane was . . . well, Jane. Thomas was better off not understanding that and not knowing Jane’s limitations, though he was decidedly not better off without her. And to counter all of this, there wasn’t a whole lot Franklin could do, other than to keep things going. Keep things normal—as normal-seeming as possible.
“Good night,” he called after Thomas. “Love you.”
NEXT SHOULD COME THE RELIEF. It always followed. Scraped gut, sore throat, horrible taste in his mouth, burning nose and sinuses and then . . . a little light-headedness and temporarily all the twisted fucked-up badness of everything going wrong all the time just gone. Purged, cauterized in physical sensation, physical tension, whatever, but g
one. It was a trade-off, one thing for the other, and always pretty much worked . . . only, this time it hadn’t. Because again, looking at himself in the mirror over the upstairs washroom sink, scrubbing and scrubbing with the toothbrush, all he could see was how wrong it all was and how everything ought to be different. Kill the clean black swoop of hair over his forehead, the cornflower blue eyes from his mother, the straight, clean chin and jawline from her as well, fresh bloom of young pink blood under the surface. Kill it, rupture it, make it go away. Break open the gums with suppurating sores. Grow the teeth down and crooked, distorted as fangs. Swell shut the eyes with sores and blacken the cheeks with broken capillaries. Crack the lips. Why? For the first time, it hit him, the real truth of the matter: Because I fucking hate myself to death is why. But why? This, he wasn’t so sure of. Did it matter? He’d caved and eaten half a fruit leather after all—that was one thing. Stupid. So, he had no resolve: He was a failure where anything relating to self-discipline or self-control was concerned. A failure, period. But that wasn’t it, wasn’t the real bottom-line thing causing the self-hatred, because . . . he wasn’t sure. He just knew it wasn’t. And anyway, it hadn’t worked this time, purging. Still, he was stuck in the same old outlines, same old routines. Still himself. No relief. Maybe because his father had stopped him before he was really done.
He spat and swirled the pink-green-white glob of foamed toothpaste and blood down the lavatory drain with water. Drank and spat again and let the water run a moment longer. Grimaced a last time at his reflection and held up a fist as if he’d shatter the glass, then turned and went abruptly back out of the room.
Edmund Hoar was all wrong, too, in the boat drawings. Of course. Too pretty, too much like Jeremy Malloy, too clean and healthy. No blackened cheeks and sores. No rotten fanglike teeth. Maybe the other drawings, the new ones, Hoar with Franklin, were salvageable. But the boat drawings? He flipped to them to be sure and leaned closer to make out his own garbled writing, the hand marks and fingerprints smudging lines between frames, the crooked and misspelled words. Felt around in his bedsheets for a pencil and started fixing things, rubbing out lines, changing words, grinding the pencil into the page to broaden away prettiness, pressing harder, harder until he felt the paper almost give once or twice. Stood back a second to see if it was better, and abruptly stabbed the pencil down straight through Hoar’s eyes and forehead, ripping a zigzag rent through the page and snapping the pencil in half in his hand. The blunted half still in his hand, he stabbed again a few more times into the pages, without much effect, and then threw it pinging across the room, followed immediately by the notebook, whose pages riffled and caught air before spinning and plummeting, sliding out of sight under his desk.
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