by Joan Barfoot
“No, it’s not that kind of sickness, either. Honestly, Roddy, it really is that she gets too happy sometimes and then she gets way too downhearted. You know that yourself, I know you do. But it’s hard to fix because the doctors don’t understand as much as they do when it’s just something in the body that’s not right.”
Wouldn’t it make his mother happy to see him?
Didn’t she miss him?
“Where’s your mother?” kids at school asked.
“In the hospital. She’s sick.” They treated him nicer, like they were impressed. Teachers, too, nobody got impatient when he didn’t know the answer to an arithmetic question or stumbled when he was reading out loud in class. He kind of liked that part of it, and tried to keep looking brave.
From the drawer of the dining room sideboard where photos were kept, he sneaked a couple of pictures: one of her and him in the park, the other of her and him and his dad in front of the Christmas tree. He hid them under his sweater until he could get upstairs and stick them under his mattress. After that he could take them out all he wanted, as long as his dad and grandmother were safely downstairs. He wasn’t sure why having them close should be a secret, but it was. He stared and stared at her face. She was laughing in both of the photographs, and when she laughed, her mouth was the biggest part of her face. He wondered if he took the pictures because he might forget exactly what she looked like. He hoped not.
“Does Dad see her?” he asked. “Doesn’t she want to see me?”
He was pretty sure the answers would be yes and yes of course, and so they were. “Your father has been twice,” his grandmother said, “but she’s still quite sick so they don’t really think it’s a good idea. And yes, of course, she wants to see you, she misses you, but she’s not ready for visits.”
Who was the they? There were people he didn’t even know who got to say not just what he did, and his mother did, but what his dad did, too. They must be very big and important. If he didn’t know them, how could he know if they were good people, or if they really cared, or if they were doing awful things to her? Like on TV when important people did bad things to other people for no special reason.
“Will she come home sometime?” he asked in despair. He no longer imagined tomorrow, but he wanted to know a day would arrive and there she’d be, carrying a suitcase because she’d have needed a lot of stuff to stay away for so long, and she’d be laughing on the doorstep, swooping her arms around him, her mouth the biggest part of her face.
“Well, they’re certainly trying. They’re trying more new medicines, so we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.” He hadn’t expected that. He wouldn’t have asked if he’d imagined getting an uncertain answer like that.
He came home from school and there was a for sale sign on the lawn. His father said, “Roddy, we’ve decided we need to make a few changes.” His grandmother hugged him and said, “You know, poor Buster, I’ve left him far too long with the neighbours. He’ll be so happy to see us again.” She said, “You can take anything of your own that you want. Whatever makes you feel right at home.”
It was a matter of money, his dad explained. He’d be selling the house and a lot of their things because there were new bills he hadn’t expected and there was still a big mortgage on this place. “What’s a mortgage?” was what Roddy thought to ask then, at the moment.
The sort of thing he asked later was “Can’t Grandma sell her house and move here?” and “But what about Mum? What if she comes and we’re not here any more?” Flatly, clearly, helplessly and pointlessly, he said, over and over, “I don’t want to,” and “I’m not going,” and “You can’t make me.” But of course they could.
All that kicking and screaming the day they moved, it felt good. It felt like something useful and helpful, like if his mother did it, it would cheer her right up. His grandmother held her big arms around him and would have kept them there except he kicked at her and wrenched free. “Don’t worry,” she told his dad, “I’m fine. You can’t expect him not to be upset. He’s best left alone for the time being.”
His dad hauled in boxes and lamps, a couple of chairs, stuff like that, and it piled up in his grandmother’s little front hall. His grandmother took his father a beer and said, “Just leave it all for a while,” and “I know it’s been hard for you, but oh my, I am glad to be back in my own house.”
After a while there were smells from the kitchen. They had supper, and then Roddy went off to bed, in his new room at the top of the house, with the blue nightlight casting a faint, reflecting light upwards. He lay on his new bed, furious until the moment, he guessed, he fell asleep.
The next day he made his first, best, real friends: Buster, who woke him up bouncing onto his bed, and Mike, who turned up at the door with his mother.
Other than that, well, this is a small town and people know things. So they knew why he and his dad moved in with his grandmother. When he started school, it was different from his other one. Like, people looked at him weird, like they were waiting for him to do something strange. One bold kid, who was in fourth grade, marched up the first day at recess and poked a finger into his chest and said, “Your mother’s nuts. Bet you’re nuts, too.” A bunch of littler kids started chanting, “Nuts, nuts, your mother is nuts,” and running in a circle around Roddy, reaching out as they ran, touching him and dodging away, screaming as if he was dangerous and they were real brave.
He had a choice of things to do. What he did was grab the grade four kid who was standing around watching what he’d started, and take a hard, fast shot at him. He aimed at the nose and didn’t miss. Blood, gushers of it, made the circle stop dancing. A howl made everyone silent.
Roddy got sent home for two days. On his very first day, he got sent home. “Don’t take any crap,” was his father’s advice, which was Roddy’s idea, too. His grandmother only looked worried. After that he learned to walk with a sort of roll to his hips, his legs widened, eyes narrowed. It seemed to work. Nobody messed with him much. There was Mike, too, and that helped, the two of them a team, pretty much.
He and Mike have spent a lot of time together, roaming around, exploring in town and also out here in the country. Sometimes they’ve got tired and dropped their bikes in a ditch and wandered into a field, and crashed for a while, lying side by side with their hands behind their heads, chewing over some event or idea and looking up into the sky.
A lot of good times. Roddy has often come out here on his own, too. Mike isn’t so interested in some of the things that fascinate Roddy. Like watching the purpose and intention of bees, or the progress of a snail traversing the length of his arm, or an ant tugging another insect larger than itself back to its community, for the whole community to devour — this sort of thing he could spend a lot of time on. Because up close, none of these creatures were disgusting or weird. They were amazing. Antennas and hairy legs waved, dark faceted eyes kept watch for danger and prey. One might have a blood-red body, another an iridescent green shimmer. The best were the ones that over time and through stages became some completely other thing. Something that crawled or slithered wound up with wings. Tails fell away. Skins changed their colours. Dead things were ruffled, disturbed, distressed by last moments.
At home he used razor blades to slice pictures of tiny shelled and segmented and many-legged and antennaed creatures from library books, carefully, carefully, so that absences were not apparent. Also, sometimes, from books he and Mike shoplifted. He loves his room at the top of the house, where the ceilings slant and if he sits straight up in bed he bumps his head. He took those radiant photographs from the books and hung them low on the walls. Some of them unfold in strips showing the shifts of the most special creatures from earthbound to aerial life.
His dad called them ugly. Mike said, “Gross,” but that’s because in the photographs they’re blown up so big. His grandmother said it was nice Roddy had such a
n interest, and maybe he’d be a biologist or some other kind of scientist someday.
He liked the small grey desk for doing homework that his grandmother said was his grandfather’s when he was young, and the adjustable light that leaned over it. Once he wasn’t so angry, he liked that his grandmother told him, “This is all yours, Roddy. You can do whatever you like with it,” so a couple of years ago when he painted the walls black, she didn’t say anything. He thought the pictures would look more dramatic, and anyway he liked the idea of it feeling like night in there all the time. His grandmother didn’t say anything either when he saw the room looked awful, and totally depressing, and started trying to paint over it yellow, with mixed and muddled results.
His poor grandmother. She wasn’t planning on having her son and his son move in with her and never move out again, and looking after them like nobody ever grew up and went away. His dad never says much, even to her. He and Roddy still have some kind of language, though. Passing by, he pats Roddy’s shoulder, skids his hand across the top of Roddy’s head. Or, “All right!” he yells if they’re watching hockey and there’s a smart pass, or a goal, and he and Roddy grin at each other. Roddy figures that inside, they’re shaking hands then, giving high-fives, pounding each other on the back.
Words don’t matter so much anyway. His grandmother says it’s what people do that counts. His dad works and watches hockey, and his grandmother bakes and tells Roddy to eat up so he won’t be so skinny, and neither of them can be totally trusted. And his mum buggers off. Really, absolutely buggers off.
When Roddy was fourteen, in the summer between public and high school, they finally told him. “You’re old enough,” his dad said. Maybe his grandmother insisted. Roddy still bugged her sometimes, still had the idea he could go find his mother because when he thought about her, or pulled out those two old photographs, he knew she had to be wondering what had happened to him and was even probably looking for him and feeling bad. At night, when all the lights were out and he could lie in bed looking into the top branches of the tree on his grandmother’s front lawn, he sometimes pictured his mother roaming dark streets, looking in windows, buttonholing strangers, in search of her son. He could even make himself sob briefly, picturing that.
Also there was something he’d wanted to tell her, to maybe save her, although he could no longer totally remember what it was, any more than he could truthfully remember what she looked like, beyond those two happy snapshots. Still, even if she’d changed as much as he had, and he guessed his dad too, he’d know her if he saw her. Would she know him? If it was a movie she would.
Anyway, none of that happened. Instead, after supper one night his dad said, “You’re old enough,” and he and Roddy’s grandmother stared at him for a few seconds as if they were deciding if that was true.
In the city there was a particular bridge. There were lots of bridges, over rivers and railways, but this one arced high over an expressway instead of over anything soft, like water. It was where people went when they were very sure they wanted to die.
Roddy’s mother was very sure.
More than a year before they told him, she had been very sure.
“I’m sorry, son,” his dad said. “Oh, Roddy dear,” his grandmother said.
“It was,” his father continued, although Roddy wasn’t hearing so clearly now, had whole other words and pictures going on in his head, “nobody’s fault. They couldn’t find quite the right drugs, or she wouldn’t always keep taking them, and I guess she just got to feeling too bad to go on. It’s something in the body, to do with the chemicals in it, it seems.”
“Things were just out of whack,” his grandmother added.
Roddy was thinking again of that mysterious they, who got to decide things about other people and try things on them and then, finally, fail. If he ever met them, he hoped he’d be quicker and luckier than his mother. “How come,” he asked, “you never said?”
His dad looked down at his hands, his fingers spread out flat on the dining room table. “It didn’t seem necessary, right at the time. We wanted you to get through public school without being upset, but now, like I say, you’re old enough. Going into high school, it’s time to know these sorts of things.”
“I know it’s very sad, Roddy,” his grandmother said. “Your mother was a fine, bright woman, and she was so happy with you, oh, you have no idea. When you were born, she kept holding up your wee hands and making people admire your fingers. She thought you were perfect. And so you were. And she was a very good mother. Well, you remember how much she cared for you. This other thing, though, she just couldn’t beat it. She tried so hard for your sake and your father’s, and she hated it when she felt bad. I remember her saying that when it was coming on, it was like somebody pulling a big black cloth over her head that she couldn’t get off. What I mean is, she would have given anything to keep on being able to look after you, and she did the very best she could. Do you understand?”
No.
“Yes,” he said. Then, “Did she have a funeral?”
His dad looked uncomfortable. “Yes, there was one.”
“Did you go?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?” turning to his grandmother.
“Yes. There weren’t many people who still knew her well enough to pay their respects but yes, your dad and I went together.”
“Where was I?”
“It was a school day.”
It had been some ordinary day, then. And behind his back, without giving away anything, his dad and grandmother had sneaked off to his mother’s funeral. That was almost more shocking than anything else, that they could do that, hide it, carry it off so he never even guessed they’d been someplace important. Roddy stood. “Okay,” he said.
He went to his room and lay on his bed, on his back, very still. He was something other than angry that night, but he couldn’t put words to it.
He put pictures, though. He saw her figure, small and distant and wearing a coat, walking slowly, slowly, in the darkness. He saw a high bridge, deserted at night. Way below, on the expressway, which wouldn’t be deserted at any hour, day or night, headlights followed each other one after the next. The rough sounds of speeding motors and tires rose upwards.
He saw her lean against the ironwork of the side of the bridge, listening to the rough sounds, watching the headlights sweep by beneath. She would think — what?
That all those headlights meant people with places they needed and wanted to go, with or towards people they needed and wanted to see, maybe that’s what she’d think. While she was up there in the dark on the bridge all alone.
Maybe she missed her son. He imagined that, too, although also considered that maybe her son was the farthest thing from her mind; that maybe she’d forgotten her son. Her heart, anyway, was heavy as lead. Maybe it was so heavy she could hardly climb up the iron bridge fretwork. Maybe it was so heavy she thought it would smash easily when she hit bottom. Maybe to her that sounded best.
He saw her falling, like a dummy, like a mannequin, like a person who does stunts for a living. But he couldn’t imagine her heart. He wondered what her last thought would have been, flying downwards. Maybe, “Oh no.” Maybe, “Finally.”
Now, lying on his back in the tall grain, staring up into the starred, darkening sky, and into the remote, watchful faces of two German shepherds who show no signs now of malevolence, listening to pounding boots coming closer through disturbed, rustling grass and words being called out between male voices in cautious tones, Roddy thinks, “Oh no.”
He has done everything he could. Even if nothing worked and this moment arrived anyway, he did everything he could think of. “All a person can do is their best,” his grandmother likes to say, although she would not have meant anything like this.
So in that way he also thinks, “Finally.”
It’s
a funny thing, though. Roddy supposes this moment of lying here watched by two dogs and a thousand stars, and with probably a million insects and other small things unseen and unfelt underneath, is real. He guesses it’s a very particular, suspended moment between one thing and another entirely different thing. The funny, surprising thing, though, is that suddenly it feels good now, being suspended between one thing and another like this. Kind of weightless and free, like being in space.
He’s not cold any more, either.
It’s amazing, how totally contented he is with this moment. Perfectly satisfied. This is so new, and so fine, he wouldn’t mind at all if it just went on and on, forever. He sighs, he smiles upwards, he would say he is nearly, right this second, happy.
All the Time in the World
As Lyle starts so reluctantly recounting the missing event, Isla finally sees it unfolding. Although not in his words, or his way. “Hop in,” Lyle says, and in she hops. He does a little number on her thighs: “tickling the ivory,” he calls this. It still, after several years of doing so, delights her to climb into his old dented green pick-up, so large and high, sturdy and workmanlike. The ruts and potholes of the laneway are easier on the truck’s tough suspension than on their cars, although inside it, humans tend to bounce around. Isla feels like quite a tiny person in the truck, with its wide seats and distant floor, as if she’s a kid briefly reliving childhood; although not her own childhood.
The laneway ends at a busy county highway, and sometimes it takes a while to pull onto it. It’s always a wonder that there’s this rush of life so close to the house and yet also so distant. People come to visit, and even if it’s not their first time they’re likely to remark at some point, with flattering astonishment, “You’d never know this was here! It feels like a whole different world.”