Thalo Blue

by Jason McIntyre

  She clacked the second loop of the cuffs around the stove’s handle, where a tea towel dropped to the linoleum. The Druid fell to the floor, banging against the front surface of the fridge with a thump. The fall forced his braced leg to bend, something it shouldn’t have done. There was a crunch and his face became even more reddened, a scrunched up ball of suffering. He howled again, a long bay of torture, and his yells collapsed along with his wind to become a harsh mix of pained muttering and vulgarity. He reached out towards Malin who by now had her wits reclaimed and her lungs filled with mostly hospitable air. But his left arm, the one without the cast, was unable to come forward and grab hold of her. It was chained to the stove. She wanted to say something witty about that but was badly out of breath and could still taste the exhaust in her throat and her nose. She needed to get out of that house. She moved back from him, out of the kitchen, pulling two sets of keys from their homes on a hook by the telephone’s empty bracket.

  He wailed in frustration.

  She told him to get his fingers out of his eyes. If he didn’t it would only make it worse.

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  Barely sound, Zeb and Malin found themselves in the backyard, safe and panting. He was freezing cold, kneeling in the crunchy snow, and she had finally warmed up. The throb at the base of his neck had returned but it felt unusually good. Lengthening shadows held a tint of cayenne but he didn’t shrink back from them. From her pants pocket she nabbed the cell phone and hit the two necessary numbers to call the police.

  With waning voice, he said that she hadn’t kept her promise.

  She said that she knew that but that he wouldn’t have let her go otherwise. She was right. As he started to regain his breath, sucking in the cold and ill-temperate oxygen and nitrogen from the yard, they fell into each other. It was an embrace that signaled the understanding of how seriously bad the situation had been. They both fought back tears and would not let go of the other.

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  The sun in the sky shone canted shafts just as a late afternoon in January should allow. The world was alive and well outside the walls of the dark garage, just on the other side of a time when it seemed like that world had shriveled up and abandoned Zeb and Malin. Only a few minutes past the ordeal, the two stood in the front yard. They had placed Zeb’s case of clothes and painting supplies in the trunk of the Ci coupe which was idling in front of the house. All of its windows were open and the sunroof was a gaping wound staring towards the sky. The rental sat behind it also still running. The garage doors stood open, both of them like giant wooden hands playing peek-a-boo, askew on the snow and ice of the drive.

  She was insisting that he go. He was telling her that he should stay. From the house they could still hear the wails of the Druid and it made a nasty shiver run down the middle of Zeb’s back. It would do no good, she was telling him. This was her area of expertise, not his. He needed to go. And as the police cars rounded the curve in the distance, silent but with red and blues flashing, he finally agreed. Staying here to answer questions, going back to the hospital to get checked out again, for both of them it was pointless. She needed to get Fairweather into custody and then she would find him at Charlemagne Lake. He needed to begin again. As soon as possible.

  It all felt like a distant recollection made falsely grandiose by the passing of time. Illogical and meaningless, like it had not unfolded this way at all. How do you react? What do you say to someone beside whom you have just stared down the inevitability of death? What do you do when your life is held in a grain of sand for the second time? He wanted to make sure she would be all right. That was what came to mind first. And she gave him a look that said if either of them was going to be just fine it would be her.

  Somewhat reluctantly, as the two cruisers made their way closer, he conceded. He got into his father’s car. And he drove off.

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  Return to your life, the doctor had said. Recovery can be quick but healing takes more. Return to your life.

  And Zeb intended to do just that.

  Underneath the tang of lingering car exhaust, he smelled exhilaration. Though everyone was gone, he felt alive. Like standing at the gates of hell once hadn’t been enough of a wake-up call. Zeb had needed to do it twice. Everyone he had ever counted on in his life was simply gone. But he wasn’t. He was here—wherever here was. Malin had helped see to that. He wondered, in a brief second, what he would have ever done without her inside this very car just a short time earlier. And what he would have done without her there in the hospital when he came back to earth. There was feeling in every extremity now. That kind of vivaciousness you sense after a long run across an open field on a glorious day. He had been tested and it was clear to every sensory receptor, both physical and non, that he was a thriving, existing being. He was the living. And he was never happier for that than he was this moment.

  In the Ci’s rearview mirror he saw a smooth, crystalline vision of Malin talking with the officers as they materialized from inside the cruisers. Behind her was the profile of his house. It sat back on its haunches casually, knowingly. Relaxed. Composed. Though he would see it again—soon even. With a contractor, maybe, to sort out new doors and windows, some carpet. To clean it out, to walk through it perhaps with a realtor, and discuss its features: the cramped yet useable garage; the kitchen-dining split where meals and sociability could share a moment; the dividing line of the basement stairs.

  That sentient oak towered overhead, with a thousand outstretched and pleading arms. They curled across each other in the flat plane of his backward vision as would dark streamers suddenly frozen in a torrent of wind and ice. He said goodbye then. And he realized that what he had been doing was saying goodbye for the last twenty-five years.

  Getting past things was easy when there was finally something visible on the other side of them.

  Nevermore is what’s in store.

  His life still ran warm in his veins.

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  Three: THE SOUND AND THE VALUE;

  Drawing Blue Velvet Curtains

  The universe appears to conspire on our behalf.

  But it does so unknown to us.

  -Drawing Lines in the Sand:

  A Way of Life,

  DAVID R. G. LANGTREE

  The only time I feel lost is when I stand on the edge of where I know I’m supposed to be; we all have to step out of ourselves at some point.

  -THE BOOK OF THE DEAD,

  September 24

  Thirteen was a mixed age for Zeb. Nine dealt the biggest blow but thirteen offered the widest range of them. That year found Jackson, his first real friendship. That year he saw his dead aunt lying in a phantom motel room on the other side of his midnight window. And that year, he discovered a heap of old yellowing photographs that made Sadie all the more beautiful in his memory.

  And then there was the thing with his dad. Entirely dissimilar to what happened with that burn on his arm a few years before, this time Oliver wound up and hit the boy. This time there was no mistaking it. This time he drew back his open hand and let it come forward against Zeb’s cheek and jaw.

  The horrific look in him then, one which made it apparent how unhinged he had actually been in the last four years, bled away. And he only stared with sadness at his equally sad son who then ran off bawling to the solitude of his multi-colored walls and his blue bedspread. The boy stayed there for three full days, only creeping out at intervals when Oliver was at work, to take food from the kitchen back to his room where no wooden fan spun on the ceiling above his bed.

  I. Lamentation Sky

  Sebastion Redfield tore away from the city under an electric blue sky. The motor hummed solidly and without compromise. And the roadway was not as slick as he might have imagined it would be. The tires of the silver steed gripped it and made the exit seem simple. On the in-dash CD: Manic Street Preachers chanting Intravenous Agnostic from the Know Your Enemy album.

  Ahead, the strip lay uncoiling, and overhead the s
ky blazed with a fierce coolness. The sun, knowledgeable, sat in a flat pane of Thalo blue. Thalo mixed with Cerulean.

  The night previous, Zeb had stumbled onto a hotel bed, kicking off shoes. The shock of what had happened in his garage, perhaps sharing some space with all the other atrocities, vied to take control. Even with the windows rolled up again, the sunroof sealed tight and the Ci’s heater pumping warmth on every extremity, he was shivering by the time twenty minutes of road had been swallowed. The impending night made it seem like a full drive north to Charlemagne Lake, no matter how much it felt like he needed to go, would not happen that soon.

  His body was filled with aching again. The tender skin of his bruises stood in less horrific hues but they throbbed. And so he downed more pills.

  That pain eased as he stood in the room’s shower, letting the warmth comfort. And he crawled into one of two double-sized beds, though he had only paid an off-season rate for a one bed room. But he could not get warm. His eyelids were pulled in on themselves, and he curled with knees nearly at his chin. The shivers would not stop.

  Into the hot shower he went again. But to no avail. He pulled the blankets and sheets from the other bed on top of himself and finally found sleep.

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  Just before he drifted, while still in that hazy half-alive, half-held-in-dreams portion, he caught glimpse of himself. It was a shard of glass reflecting his pupil, reflecting his eyebrow and part of his cheek. As though he had been standing before a mirror that shattered and sent pieces of itself outward. The glimpse was that moment before the staggered and jagged sections of reflective glass would have struck his face, digging into him.

  His mind cycled towards those real moments when he had been faced with himself, those moments in time when he had stood in front of reality-inducing mirrors.

  There was the scruffy view in a hospital bathroom when he traced pieces of his father’s face in his own. There was tonight’s at the hotel, a brief and unholy look as the steam rose from the sink and threatened to wash the look of his face completely away in white.

  And then there was that time back at Caeli’s attic. It was warm in her room under the roof, but the tick-tick-tick of those branches had awoken him. Beside, still soundly content and closed to the world of the awake, Caels breathed gently, her bare arm a warm bar across Sebastion’s chest. The ticking would have driven him mad in that moment, had he not gotten up and gone down the hall to the bathroom. He reached in and switched on the light. The swoosh-rush of the opening door caused the blinds to tap on the sash. The window had been left open and the tile floor was cold on his bare soles. He squinted against the white walls and white tub and white mouldings as he relieved himself and then leaned on the deep sink basin, staring uncontrollably into the water-speckled mirror.

  It was a clear moment, his eyes no longer stinging from the sudden light. It was concise and quiet. The edges of that face where crisp and defined. But he wanted to ask that person in the mirror, wanted to reach through the panel and grab him by the scruff of his throat and say, “How are you going to spend your life?”

  When the realization came that he was about to start talking to himself, he had snapped off the light, headed back to Caels, and nestled in beside her. The ticking had not ended but he slept through it that night.

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  Morning came to the hotel, came to Zeb. And after spitting long sticky streaks of copper-colored phlegm—his lungs’ residuals from an afternoon spent in the gnawing tank of motorcycle exhaust—into the toilet, he made two phone calls. One was to a realtor whose name he remembered from a calendar that hung in dad’s study. The other was to Felix Wagener, the general custodian who lived in Edan, near the lake house. Wagener, for a small stipend from their owners, looked after many of the older cottages on the north shore during the winter to ensure that no roofs or power lines had collapsed in a storm.

  Felix, surprised to hear from young Redfield, particularly at that time of year, ensured Zeb that the power was up and that the gravel lane out to his parents’ cabin was cleared of snow.

  And so, with the distress of the previous day’s events still in his head, but draining away steadily, he peeled himself away from the hold of the city again. This time with supremacy in his hands and over the steering wheel.

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  On the stereo now was a mix disc: Skyscraper by Sigur Ros, Mofo by U2, Everlong by Foo Fighters, The Cedar Room by the Doves, Out of This World and Where the Birds Always Sing by The Cure. Among others. Mostly bands his father had likely never even heard of.

  Splayed across the windshield, precision was a sharp and branded image. For the first moment in a long while, Zeb had a sense of purpose again. He blasted beyond the limits of the metropolis and, as the speedometer climbed and waggled, his vision, behind a pair of dark lenses—a set of shades he found in the glove box—was unhindered.

  It was perhaps that lucidity which called to mind things grave and unfortunate from long before. And not so long before.

  His father’s gaping eyes were there, piercing and denied behind the mask of his own hands. The sound of the front door in Vaughan banged on its outline. Merridew’s fingers were splayed on a sheet of paper. And that firecracker whip exploding twice in his face came again.

  The unthinkable had been done. He had stepped past an ordeal that would have killed him. What his mother called his Gift from God had spared him a certain end after he thought the gift had turned its back on him. He had been at that precipice, the opening of a sheer drop into what Caeli believed to be that final, great abyss. And he had stumbled away from it, intact.

  By the time Zeb was almost through Pink Floyd’s the Wall album, his speed had dipped and the sheer-sightedness had brought about a deep and much-needed cleansing. He had to pull all the way over to the shoulder and climb from the car. Into the marginal dip of snow and straggled weeds he threw up.

  Oliver and Sadie were both gone.

  And for the first time, he grieved for that.

  For them only. Not for himself.

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  Oliver had died on a Monday. The twenty-second morning of September, the wee small hours of it.

  The hands that had pressed the life out of him came for a million reasons and they came for none. It wasn’t that Oliver’s anger caused his only son to be burned at the age of five. It wasn’t that he had hit him across the face later with an open hand in a similar rage, or that he had quietly ridiculed Zeb for things that may have been his own fault. But it was. It really was. It was all of those things and it was none of them.

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  A little longer than three years after Zeb had read his poem, “Tick-Tock,” to a classroom of snickering fifth graders, a classroom where the intern Miss Rimbauer and Mrs. Woods had an exchange about Zeb’s situation, he drew a picture which got him into trouble. The drawing, done with charcoal during his Practical Understanding of Visual Art class, showed his aunt Sicily, whom he had never met, and she looked strikingly like his mother, Sadie. The realism of the drawing was probably the most affecting part of it; it certainly disturbed the teacher of that class. And it was far superior to the talent displayed by most thirteen year olds. Lifelike, as if held in the stillness of a snapshot, Sicily’s face of scorching eyes and burgeoning mouth, bloomed with shapely welts and shaded bruises. Her stare was haunting and her condition looked harsh and serious in the black and white of the smudgy charcoal. So haunting and so serious that Zeb was sent to have a chat with the St. Vincent’s guidance counselor so she could make an assessment.

  Following that, a childcare worker was sent to the house in Vaughan. A chat with Oliver came next. Oliver, astonished and outraged at the subverting accusations, assured the worker that he had never laid a hand on his son or his wife. The childcare professional went away, but insisted that Zeb get the care of a licensed therapist, or other measures would be taken. For the safety of Sebastion, she assured, for the safety of Sebastion.

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&
nbsp; Zeb got home from school at six-fifteen. After watching basketball practice and working on the mural for two hours or so, a bunch of the guys on the team, Zeb and Jackson included, went to Harlequin’s, a smoky pizza parlour with a pub on its other side.

  By the time he got home, he wasn’t hungry any more and wondered if Oliver would be getting home at his usual time—well past eight—or if he would be there reading the paper at the supper table, pissed that the boy was so late and had missed the rare meal he had cooked.