Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  Yeah, dad, Sebastion said, somewhat snide as he pulled a blanket across him. Everybody knows those paintings were important. But nobody ever knows why. Then everyone starts to forget the reason for their value—just that they were significant. The names of the artists are the first thing to go.

  But his response was empty. He noticed that Oliver’s eyes were closed. He had already passed out.

  Oliver only ever smacked his son once. In the era of Sebastion’s early teen years, they yelled at each other all the time when they were in the same room; the shouting matches were a constant for a few years. But hand to flesh only happened the one time. It was a strike that echoed for years, though. Maybe because it was just once. If it had happened all the time, maybe neither one of them would have placed as much significance on it.

  But they did. Both of them did.

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  For me? He did it for me? That made no sense.

  The two men drew apart from one another for a long time—perhaps as fathers and sons do when the younger gets to that stage in his life. Sebastion was always out during the latter half of high school—always with Vivian and Captain Jack, though Jack wouldn’t find himself with that nick name for a few years yet. And then for the first half of university he was out with Jackson alone tearing up the town—sowing his oats, as some might say. The latter half of his time at York was with Caeli, velvety green-eyed Caeli.

  In the strangest possible sense fourth grade astrocytoma brought Oliver and his son to a spot neither thought they would ever see after Sadie let the front door bang shut behind her. Sebastion spent that summer feeding the man, bathing him, making sure to fix his tie for work every morning with Oliver there to watch. Despite the fact that he wasn’t sure Oliver even knew who he was—or could necessarily hear or understand him—he read from the business section to him every evening around supper time. In a sick turn of logic, one could say they had never spent so much time together.

  But, true. He couldn’t have kept paying Merridew for Sebastion’s sake. There was no sense in that. Sebastion couldn’t remember the last time Oliver had done anything for him. But Oliver had stopped writing the checks so he had either come to his senses or had confronted the bastard. He had done something, because the last check was dated nine years earlier.

  Why had Sebastion even cared then? It was over while he was still ranting in Viv’s back bedroom with a brush in his hand, convinced he knew everything. Water under the bridge. Shouldn’t it have been treated as so? He never went hungry, never lacked for anything he ever needed or wanted. His childhood, in monetary terms, was all that anyone could hope to afford for their progeny.

  But yet he stood out there on the edge of a limb, took Fish’s carefully acquired photo properties, snagged secretly from his father’s stash of perhaps other noteworthy photographic collections, and he tried to get some manner of revenge.

  Payback? Did he seek reimbursement? Some kind of explicit dollar-to-dollar equivalent? He didn’t think so. He knew he had been pulled downwards into that world of pennies and decimals, but he also knew that he still didn’t place much credence in it. By virtue of being his father’s son and by virtue of living in the kind of world he did, he knew that money was important, but he also knew that it had its respectful limitations. He did not go after John Merridew for money.

  He felt spent. His brain was used up and squandered. He felt like he could not even think about the reasons. He wanted to scream about them, wanted to scream at Oliver, but had nothing left in him. So he sat there, on the edge of the bed, next to his father who still had that puke-bile running out of his mouth, who still smelled of his own urine. His fists had tightened again around that stained collar. The anger was still present and he felt suddenly like he had an outlet for it. For a moment his father was back in that room; he couldn’t hide behind that stiff, tight skin on his head, or those pinkish scars that still bled sometimes and needed to be swabbed with disinfectant. He looked into the man’s eyes and saw someone he could be mad at. Merridew wasn’t here. But Oliver was. Oliver who made her go. Oliver, the man who drove Sadie out that front door with a bang to never return.

  Weak, feeling like the energy had seeped out of his pores and run down to his bare feet, Sebastion looked into his father’s eyes. His heart was pulsing in his chest like a clock with misaligned innards might; it always did that when he was overtired. Did it for me...That’s shit, Dad, and you know that.

  Still present—remarkably present—Oliver blinked. I know now more than ever. Seb. Boy. I know. But I didn’t then. Not like I do now. But I do. I do now.

  It was like the deadened body, all wrinkled and leathery, pink and scarred and worn, was channeling someone else. As though, for that brief statement of understanding—the only time since Sebastion had stood on the creaking last stair—Oliver was back inside that dead thing where he used to live.

  Sebastion looked at him, saw him as the stiff, dead root out of which everything bad and hateful grew. Something had caused her to leave and the pale man, all taught skin and scars, there in that bed was it: the reason. The resentment had been with him since the beginning, but now there was a label for it. Daniela.

  Goddammit, Dad, Sebastion said, the tears coming back, his face flushed and burning. How could you do what you did...? His voice came out weak but there was a biting contempt in it. His fists were still holding his father’s shirt collar and they had tightened again.

  —Don’t you disrespect me. Oliver’s eyes were set on his son’s. His look was still his. He was still there for a moment.

  —How could you, Dad?—

  —I know you stole those pictures—

  —how could you—

  —I know you took ‘em. The ones of your mother—

  Sebastion’s fists loosened. What?

  Oliver’s eyes weren’t glassy again, but he was despondent. The pictures, he said again. I know you took ‘em. The ones of your mother. Go get your mother—You have ‘em. And I want to tell her you have ‘em. He was yelling now, GO GET YOUR MOTHER! I WANT TO TELL HER WHAT YOU TOOK!

  And Sebastion became irate with that. What did you say?

  Go get your mother.

  You don’t say anything about her! You don’t GET to. You have NO RIGHT! Sebastion yelled.

  —Go get your mother—

  Shut UP! You son of a bitch. SHUT UP! Sebastion was screaming now. In his head, he saw the meaty flesh of his dad’s brain, a hunk of steak, scoured by that marble-white of fat. His voice was discordant, it reverberated up the stairs, and another whiff of urine tarnished his nostrils. He had pushed his face in close—their noses were nearly touching and the glare in Oliver’s eyes was still shining, as though spots of oil from a dropper had fallen to their surfaces.

  —Go get your mother. Go get your mother—

  Sebastion exploded up from the edge of the bed. He pushed his fingers backwards through his hair and screamed. SHUT UP! He spun around and stormed towards the stairs, covering his ears, crossing the pane of light that spilled from the kitchen.

  Oliver was yelling now too, louder and louder, GOGETYOURMOTHER! GOGETYOURMOTHER! GOGETYOURMOTHER!

  Rubbing his hands in his tearing eyes, Sebastion whirled back around, back to his father’s bed again. He came at him. And he pressed his hands across his father’s mouth, silencing him.

  Sebastion didn’t know he was screaming. His voice was parched and cracking and his eyes squinted shut. He pressed down on the man’s mouth and nose and his arms shook with force. His elbows threatened to buckle. Between the screams, there were mangled, stifled grunts from him. Hair, what was left of it surrounding the pink and white tonsure where jagged seams ran, vibrated behind and above the face where his hands pressed. Spittle burst in small spots onto that face and onto a set of eyes, still his father’s, staring up at him. In silence. There was no flailing. No sighing, moaning or wailing.

  There was no struggle.

  Only staring.

  Moments passed.

&
nbsp; In a stinking stain of his own piss, Oliver Redfield was dead.

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  The Thief stood inside the hospital room door, with his fingers pressing gingerly on the stainless steel knob behind him. He was balancing tenderly on his left foot while the right—the one with the brace—had only a little of his body weight on it. The door stood open a crack and its knob had a small stain of greasy condensation where his thumb had rested less than a second before. He was staring wide-eyed at a fully-made bed of pale green sheets, a similar green privacy curtain pulled open and another bed beyond that, with sheets somewhat disheveled. It was nearer to the window. Beyond the glass of that window it was dark and he saw a piece of himself in reflection. A touch of warm color came from overhead where a fixture glowed with yellow light. It had an orange tint and made a close-to-inaudible hum. If the Thief had been at death’s door, like so many other times, he would have heard that hum much louder. On those nights pain was more real. Sound came with a greater intensity. Everything was more.

  He heard the sound of rushing water from behind a second closed door off to the side of where he stood. He eased the main one behind him closed. It clicked shut.

  When he heard the sound of running water die out he took a step towards the bathroom door with his good leg. With his left hand he withdrew from their hiding place in his sling one of two syringes he had lifted from the ambulance supply room earlier that day. He held it fervently with a steady tenure.

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  When Sebastion had told these things to Malin, they came out, not cold, but distant—nearly as though he had been talking about someone else’s life. Someone else’s father. But now, standing under the hot stream from his hospital room shower, it was so close to him. There were tears blending with the water on his face and he had to pull the curtain open and step out immediately—an eerie sense of claustrophobia had gripped him. With the squeal of metal shower curtain rings against the metal rod above his head, water sprayed outwards onto tile, mirror, and floor. He reached back in and cranked the two faucet handles closed. The water ended. Moisture hung in the air.

  He pulled on his robe which had been hanging on the back of the door and he swiped a sleeve of it across the steamy, spotted mirror above the sink to reveal a smear of his reflection. Then he reached for the door handle.

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  Down the empty hall from Sebastion’s room, Malin had just turned right at the nurse’s station after the bell in the elevator had dinged and the doors had slipped open. It was late, and she was the only one roaming this floor, the only one riding the elevator. At the station, only one attendant was on duty; she sat with her back to the hallway. She was still holding that tan book against her chest, this time together with her stack of folders and other papers. As she took her first broad steps past the station, the combined corners of the book and the papers pushed against the white plastic visitor’s badge held at the collar of her blouse. It threatened to unclasp. She was still thinking about Oliver Redfield—that she had known how the man had died long before Sebastion had told her the details. And that she had steered his recollections, like a practicing psychologist might have guided a patient towards an inevitable breakthrough. Or worse, a giant and unavoidable setback. The autopsy report and the hospital records from the Outlook Bay center were among the papers she held, so she had known for days. The grief—she had felt the suppressed grief in Sebastion’s voice—was a washed away kind. Like the tide had rolled out on any feeling he had left for his father and the only thing to linger was wet sand and a few broken sea shells. He spoke about it like he might have described the wood-grain surface of his desktop at work, or the points of a particularly straightforward investment portfolio, or like Pinkertt, the police sergeant, who had described the events of Farkukh’s attack on Sebastion at his house that morning. The assault, he had called it. Cold and distant like that: the assault. Just the same, Sebastion had described his father’s last night like he hadn’t been there. It seemed, oddly, to fit. And she couldn’t explain to herself exactly why.

  She felt closer than she had that whole week to trusting her instincts—believing what she thought she knew from the start. What she thought she had known before. Thinking about how far she had come with Sebastion, she supposed, she readjusted the clasp on the visitor’s badge, and decided that she should tell some truth of her own.

  Looking up from the clasp, down to the end of the hall where every second fluorescent fixture had now been shut off, she caught glimpse of what looked like a dark shoe heel passing from the hall into Sebastion’s room.

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  On the other side of the heavy bathroom door, a hand—that of Jewels Fairweather’s—rested on the cold metal handle.

  Inside, Sebastion’s hand came down on it too. But his bare foot had come down onto a wet spot on the tile floor, causing him to slip forward. It was an awkward, stiff movement and his hand tightened on the door latch, locking it in place with his reflex force. He fell downward, his legs slipping out from underneath him, but his other arm shot out to the wall and it, combined with the tensile force of the other on the handle kept him from falling completely. The stretch of his body, particularly the shoulder and pectoral that had been torn by the bullet, seared with a blast of pain bolting out to his fingertips and down to his stomach. He cried out.

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  In the instant between Sebastion’s hand coming to rest on the door handle and the guttural cry that escaped him with the near-fall a moment later, Malin had opened the main door of the room and had stepped inside to see the back of Jewels Fairweather, though she didn’t know it was him from her angle.

  Her words, You can’t be in he—, were interrupted by Sebastion’s bellow, and she took the remaining three steps towards Fairweather. He, clutching one arm in a sling with the other and still limping from the metal brace at his leg, did his best to step out of her way.

  She opened the door and found Sebastion in his robe, hair wet and hanging in his eyes. He was on his knees and clutching his bad arm with his good hand. His other hand was held in front of his face, looking like the overturned root of a dead tree.

  Ohmygod, Sebastion!

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  Thief wanted to take them both that second. But that wouldn’t work. And he knew it too well. Was in fact, nearly sick by knowing it so easily and quickly. By the time he had been startled from behind, the situation had already broken down and it couldn’t be solved with brute force this time. He had two syringes of epi tucked in the sling but they simply weren’t enough to fix anything. In addition, one of his arms was useless, held in the cage of a cast, and the clamp on his leg didn’t allow for faultless mobility. Jewels’ strength was not entirely useless all of a sudden, but it was hindered. A far sight from a perfect scenario when the psychologist arrived. He wanted to stab her then and there—but he checked his temper. And his impatience.

  So he stood hopeless and helpless, hunched at the shoulders, while the doctor helped Zeb from his knees to his feet; the boy’s face was red and he was fighting tears. They passed him, the doctor and the boy, and went to the farthest bed where he eased down on to it, still oohing and ahing from an apparent spill. Damn. If only I’d been here sooner. Before the doctor. Maybe she can be gotten rid of yet—

  But then, he found himself looking at the face of Katie Becks where the doctor had been only a breath before—she had a pasted stream of blood on the part in her blonde hair and down her forehead. Both her eyes were blackened and hollow, like sunken wells; her look was empty—

  You love me Jewels, she said to him, flatly.

  —He shook his head a little, almost as if he could toss the vision of Katie loose and let it fall away. He tried to breathe deep—a soothing inhalation that might bring about a forced sense of peace—but the air caught stiffly in his lungs as he came against the will of the gauze wound tight around his ribs, invisible under his white uniform shirt. Malin looked up at him then—it really was the doctor, and not Katie—fro
m her spot beside Zeb. He finally piped up, sounding disparate. “—Uh. Why don’t you go get a nurse? I’ll stay with him—“

  The color in Sebastion’s face was fading a little from the intensity of a moment earlier. She grabbed an empty water glass from the nightstand and headed back towards the bathroom, presumably to fill it. “What are you even doing here? Visiting hours are over. You would know that.”

  Stammering, like Jewels might have—or was the stammering even intentional?—he said, “I-I-I’m the ambulance tech. I-I just wanted to c-come by and make sure everything was going to be okay. Mr. Redfield, I’m sorry. I came at a bad time...”

  Sebastion, blinked back a tear from the flare in his shoulder and chest, then looked up at the man at his doorway. “No, no, don’t worry about it. Just one of those things. I’m going to be fine. What’s your name?”

  The Thief stepped further into the room, forward into the shallow circle of light from the fixture above, still with shoulders hunched. “Julius Fairweather.”

  Malin returned from the bathroom with a full glass of jostling water and a handful of pain capsules. Sebastion said to Fairweather, “Well...uh. Julius. You saved my life, then, didn’t you? You and the police. You got down there on your knees with me and got me back...I—I honestly can’t think of anything I could possibly say to express my thanks. I heard about the driver you were working with, the one who died. Terrible. I’m so sorry.”

  Thief, still doing his best, felt a lump in the back of his throat. His eyebrows scrunched and he swallowed. “Thanks, uh, Mr. Redfield. I, uh...” Malin looked at him in a curious way. He brought his thumb and forefinger up to his eyes and pressed them there, like he was having difficulty. He got emotional then, but it wasn’t for Marlon Smithee. Like Jewels so many times before, he was having a panic attack—brought on by the sight of Katie Becks in his head. The room felt like it was spinning and he thought he could feel a warm finger pressing into the center of his chin.