by Joan Barfoot
There’s the spirit.
But the spirit only. Without awful, hot-headed drugs, he wouldn’t hurt anyone, would he? He has surely done penance and moreover been healed — still, who is he to call another young criminal peckerhead, prick?
At his worst moments he didn’t have a gun. At his worst moments he was no Roddy.
Lyle steps forward, puts a hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “No,” he says calmly, “the police either have him or will have him. Everybody knows who it was, there’s no secret about it. So we’ll just leave it in the hands of the cops and concentrate on your mother.” This is exactly right, of course. Lyle knows both the importance and the techniques of defusing. There is something to be said for Jamie’s loyal, vengeful passion, however, and something passionately desirable missing from Lyle. “We’re all upset and angry, but the only thing that really counts is your mother, we have to keep focused on whatever helps her, makes her strong.” He is wise. She is fortunate.
Well, sort of fortunate.
Count on Alix for the unexpected. Suddenly she is responding as if Lyle has spoken some kind of revelation, beaming down at Isla with eerie radiance. “Yes,” she says, “exactly.” She looks — can it be? — happy. As if Lyle has reminded her of something good that had slipped her mind.
Much slips what passes at the moment for Alix’s mind. At least Jamie is recovered from his affection, his desire, his evident need for drugs with awesome, horrifying names. At least he has been successfully frightened and punished and loved into a sturdier, if less vivid, less rollicking, less desperate frame of mind. But Alix — she has hooked herself to belief, faith, an addiction that may be even harder to kick.
This is what Isla means about Job, doom, fate, luck.
Lyle finds it hopeful that they can still get through to Alix, at least in certain specific, physical ways, and in a sense he is right. A good sign, for instance, that he could get word to her about Isla, and that Alix has been able to come here. The Serenity Corps may be a cult, as in Isla’s view it certainly is, but so far it hasn’t quite managed to amputate families from followers.
It’s three years since Isla and Lyle first heard the name “Master Ambrose,” three years of hardly understanding a goddamn word the girl says. “Ah, don’t sweat it,” is Jamie’s advice, “It’s just a stupid patch. I came out of mine, she’ll come out of hers.” But Jamie might remember that he did not escape his stupid patch either undamaged or solely under his own steam. It’s not as if he suddenly decided the jig was up and he had to get clean, all on his own. Or that it was easy, and did not involve not only lawyers and jail time and suffering, but his own sweat and vomit. All that.
When Alix announced herself pledged to Master Ambrose, Isla drove straight to the Serenity farm, seventy or so kilometres north, well out of the way and hardly promising for even Serenity’s subsistence farming and gardening. Alix said, with her awful new expression of bliss, “It’s about loyalty to each other. A whole community of people dedicated to the same end. Really dedicated. Because once you have serenity, you’ve achieved life’s highest goal. But it’s complicated, so it’s necessary to pursue it together. Well, maybe not necessary, exactly, but it’s the best way because everybody helps keep everybody else focused on serenity all the time, whatever we’re doing.”
Alix came to the unmarked farm gate to meet Isla. “Please be nice, Mother,” she said, “I know it’s strange to you, but try to see it the way we do.” She looked nervous and proud both, introducing Isla and Master Ambrose, who was waiting, brown-garmented and smiling plumply, in a garden. “I regret,” he said, “that we do not invite outsiders indoors. The quest for serenity is carefully undertaken, and we cannot have the balances of our community’s home disrupted in any way.” He offered her tea, though. She refused.
Once there, she wasn’t sure why she’d come, except to see the place. It would not help her cause with Alix to leap at the man’s throat, which is mainly what she wanted to do. “Starglow, you know,” he told her, smug bastard, “has never been truly a child in your life. Her spirit is ancient, she is a very old soul.”
How dared he?
He went on in that way, Alix’s eyes on him wide and adoring. “You evil little toad,” Isla wanted to say, and something melodramatic like “Unhand my daughter.” But Alix, she could see, was not inclined to be unhanded. She was entranced, bewitched, beguiled, suckered. And so Isla drove away speechless. She and Alix did not embrace when she left. Alix stepped back from Isla’s arms and said, “I’m sorry, but I feel your anger and it’s too soon for me to come too close to anyone not in touch with serenity. I’m not strong enough in my own serenity yet.”
Well.
But who wouldn’t like to be told their soul is quite old and therefore, by extension, quite wise? A nice compliment, Isla could see the appeal, but — consider the source: a man who, if nothing else, had a choice of any name at all and chose Ambrose, which said something about him, but what? Besides that when it came to beauty and euphony, he had a tin ear?
Isla’s first journey was pointless and later ones no more successful. The unbudgeable Alix continues to speak of Master Ambrose in the tones Isla imagines Jamie might have used to speak of his drugs, if he had felt able at the time to talk about that most fervent and focused attachment. Alix also speaks of things like internal flames burning radiantly. “The depth,” she has remarked, “the pure knowing.” In Master Ambrose’s eyes, Alix apparently sees redemption and love, purity and peace and salvation. Isla sees a voracious, glittering appetite for young souls. She doesn’t want to think about the appetite she assumes for young bodies.
She is prejudiced, of course. Just as she was prejudiced against whoever first fed Jamie drugs.
Now here’s this young woman beaming like a lunatic over the bed rails. The fact is, Alix at twenty-two calls herself Starglow and has given herself over to a load of spiritual junk. Isla could slap her silly. She could grab and shake and embrace her until the poor little thin lost thing felt her mother’s goddamn love right into her nerve endings and bones. For Christ’s sake!
Unable to do any of this, Isla tries to return her daughter’s blissful beam with the severest frown she can conjure.
Apparently it is unsuccessful, or insufficient.
“Let me tell you what happened,” Alix says. “When Lyle called and told me about all this.” She waves her hand over Isla, meaning, Isla supposes, “all this.”
“I was so upset. It was an awful shock, and so sad.” So it was, so it is; not most for Alix, not least for Isla. Still Isla is, after all, touched. She pictures Alix weeping, pulling at that glorious hair, making a great, grieving scene among people to whom virtue evidently involves never caring enough to make a scene.
She tries to apply an expression of willing benevolence, but then Alix goes on to say, “And then I thought, what have I learned from Serenity if I get upset so easily?”
Easily! Isla’s mouth, she believes, falls open.
“Anyway, somebody must have gone for Master Ambrose. And he came! He came right to me. And he spoke to me, took me aside, and that’s such an honour, you know.” Alix glistens as if she expects Isla to appreciate what a big moment it must have been. Well, no doubt. To her.
“And he took me to the Calm Room, just the two of us.” Good lord, what’s the calm room? And what would be the names of the Serenity Corps’s other rooms? “He sat down with me and held my hands and told me to sit quietly for as long as it took, breathe in and out, count my breaths. That’s an exercise for beginners, really, so I was almost upset again, that he thought I was just a beginner, but then when I did it, it worked, I got a grip on myself, just like when I really was a beginner.”
Is she trying to tell Isla something? About origins, maybe?
“So we sat for a while with me breathing and looking into his eyes, and finally he nodded and asked me what happened. So
I told him and said you were paralyzed and, you know, that you’re not old enough to just have to lie there, here, for the rest of your life, forever.”
As if there might be an age when such a thing wouldn’t matter?
The rest of it — the rest of it, Isla will refuse to absorb.
“I said I had to come because, you know, you’re my mother.” Oh, triumph! “I mean, mostly we’re supposed to overcome attachments like that, so we’re sort of attached and unattached at the same time, for everything the same way. I was kind of scared he’d be disappointed in me, but he was really nice. Well, I mean he’s always nice, but he just nodded like he understood. About being attached after all. Because you’re my mum.”
Now she has tears in her eyes. So, oddly, does Isla. Hearing Alix use the word mum in that intimate tone, that’s one reason. The other is rage: that people, anyone, her own child, could imagine that overcoming attachment, or becoming attached and unattached to the same degree, or feeling attached or unattached in the same way for everything, or anything, could be a goal, or any kind of achievement.
This is so stringently celibate and sterile a notion, and at the same time so radically promiscuous, and must require such a corkscrewing and compressing of emotion and thought that it has to be crippling. So this is how Master Ambrose keeps his followers: he leeches onto them when they’re casting about, sadly or desperately, for safety and peace for their hearts, then gives them impossible ways to achieve safety and peace.
He must take them for everything they’ve got; by which Isla does not mean money.
Did she not quite know this before? Whatever Alix has said about the Serenity Corps, Master Ambrose, it must have been caught in the net of Isla’s own failure. Because when Alix spoke of love and support and community, it was as if she’d never experienced such amazements before. Quite a blow.
There may be some virtue, although a very bitter virtue, in having to lie here and listen.
“He said he understood, and that sometimes it was important to learn more about the quality of attachments by acting on them. So I could come.” Could? That fat bastard needed to give Alix permission?
Jamie says, “For God’s sake, Alix, who gives a shit? This isn’t about you and your goofy friends, it’s about Mother.” There was a time he and Alix were close. Maybe they still are, in their ways. Maybe only a brother — certainly not a mother — can say things like that.
Alix shakes her head, making her hair fly up slightly. “Starglow. And I know it’s about Mum. That’s one reason I’m here. Because of what Master Ambrose said, about why it might be so wonderful that this happened.”
Master Ambrose and Alix have rendered Isla speechless again. She is having some trouble breathing. Something in the nearby machinery is changing its tune also, starting to stutter. “Oh fuck,” Jamie says.
“No, really. Listen. When he started talking, it all began to make sense. Of course I should have known it would, I’m just not advanced enough to know for myself, but I keep learning and getting better at figuring things out because sometimes you just need to hear something said and you know it’s the truth, and next time you can get closer to that on your own.”
Next time. There’s a happy thought. Isla is catching her breath again, the machinery is resuming its rhythm. Was that a dangerous moment? Does she have to take special care? Does she, for instance, have to coolly count breaths in the interests of sustaining serenity?
“He said this doesn’t need to be awful. That it’s actually a huge opportunity and a person can be blessed, really, by sorrow or trouble. And how if you can’t move, it can make you go into yourself instead and find the truths of the spirit. Because to feel the eternal flame of true serenity, a person needs to be still, and here you are, set in the midst of stillness even though I know you don’t mean to be, but you are, and you could use it, not be hurt or damaged, that it’s not awful but a possibility, you see?”
Alix has made herself breathless. No wonder. This might be funny if Alix were somebody else’s daughter, raised a fool by some other person. How does that young fellow’s, that freckled shooter’s, that Roddy’s mother feel at the moment? As if her child, too, is no one she knows, has gone far beyond foreignness, become truly alien? Here are these clasped white hands, this intense face with its familiar features, this expanse of sweet daughterly skin Isla has touched and caressed and bandaged and marvelled at, and it has become something else altogether.
Even Master Ambrose must have a mother. A peculiar outcome for her, as well, a son of such strange, compelling needs and such resulting strange, compelling powers. But perhaps it’s no surprise, perhaps he learned what he knows at his mother’s knee. Perhaps she is evangelical in her own ways. It’s hard to imagine Master Ambrose’s mother.
“He said stillness, however you achieve it, is necessary for lighting the flame of serenity. In a way, you’re luckier than me because I keep trying and trying and I haven’t been still enough yet, I’ve never quite got there. So if you look at it that way, this is really a blessing because here you are, you walked right into it.”
“Alix,” Jamie says. He is tugging her arm now, trying to move her, remove her. “For Christ’s sake.”
“No, really.” She pulls free. They used to wrestle in the living room and out on the lawn when they were little, when he was maybe eight and she was five, nine and six, ten and seven. Then they stopped. They became, maybe, more conscious of bodies, differences, awkwardnesses. “It’s important. What he said, it’s so perfect and right. I’m not evolved enough to explain it very well, but he said if I could remember his words, because he reached the other side ages ago, anyway, he said that could help pull you over to the other side, too. So honestly, Mum, all this could be incredibly lucky. Being touched by the flame without even trying, that’s really something.”
It sure is. There’s quite a silence. Because, Isla supposes, there is really nothing to say to this particular, relatively innocent, insanity.
Finally good Lyle steps forward. He puts his large hands, with their long and talented fingers, on Alix’s shoulders. “I think,” he says fairly gently, “that might be enough. Your mother needs to rest as much as she can. Why don’t the three of us take a break, go for coffee?” A break? As if Isla is hard work, difficult to endure, like coal mining or building a railway? But why pick at Lyle? He’s not the one going on about how lucky she is to be touched by the flames of paralysis.
He and Jamie are exchanging glances behind Alix’s back. They must be close, in their way. Isla wonders if Jamie ever feels angry with Lyle, just for knowing so much? It’s hard not to be rescued, but it must be difficult in other ways to have been rescued.
“But,” Alix tries to insist, “this is the moment.”
“I think perhaps not,” says Lyle, and turns her more firmly away.
“Mum,” Alix cries. This is familiar: Alix the toddler who’s tripped over a curb, banging her round perfect knees; Alix the little girl who’s fallen off her two-wheeler, scraping a tender elbow and gashing a smooth, straight, vitamin-enriched leg; Alix the teenager gape-mouthed with grief for her father, her brother, herself. All those Alixes crying out, “Mum.”
Isla breathes in and breathes out, counts the breaths up to ten, and then again. An exercise for beginners? All right. And something to be grateful for and attentive to because she so easily might not be breathing, but for a centimetre here, a centimetre there? That’s really something.
“You go with Lyle, sweetie,” she says, “and I’ll count my breaths for a while. It’s a nice peaceful sort of thing to do, isn’t it?”
Look at that careful, tentative smile, look at that leap of hope in the eyes, that tremble of gratitude — so large a return for something so small. How did Alix learn hope, where did she learn about yearning?
Jamie bends over Isla again. “Sorry. I didn’t know how to make her stop. But p
oor kid, eh? You rest and forget all that shit. We’ll see you later.” He touches, or appears to touch, her right hand, or something down there past her vision. She guesses he doesn’t quite have the hang of things yet; that she really can’t feel a thing.
One night, long after James, and after meeting, but before marrying, Lyle, when it was just Isla, Jamie, and Alix together in that spare rented duplex she’d moved them into, and while Isla was loading the dishwasher after a dinner her children had only picked at, Alix came howling downstairs, hurtling into the kitchen, throwing herself into a chair, throwing her head down onto her arms.
Because she had walked in on Jamie, in the bathroom, with a syringe, a small trail of blood trickling where he’d tried, and failed, to shoot up. Isla was loading the dishwasher at the same moment Jamie was loading his arm. That’s how little she knew, how out of touch she was then. Isla heard him yell, “Get the fuck out of here,” dropped a plate, and then Alix was there, weeping at the kitchen table.
The shattered plate, the weeping Alix, Jamie upstairs with a needle going into his arm — Isla called Lyle. That must have been the first time she ever called him for help. And he came.
By dawn many phone calls had been made and Jamie was bundled into Lyle’s car, speeding towards a private rehab centre thanks to Lyle’s contacts. By dawn Alix was finally asleep upstairs in her room, and Isla had crashed downstairs on the couch. Maybe she should have stayed awake. Maybe she should have kept Alix awake, kept them both talking and breathing, talking and breathing until something was clear enough. Maybe she has made a habit of losing steam at critical moments, sleeping through turning points. That wasn’t the first time.
“Love you,” Isla says as they leave. She means all three of them. Lyle comes back to her bedside, gives a thumbs-up. He is kind, he is good, there’s no way not to keep knowing that.
One thing for sure, Alix and Jamie aren’t the children middle-class mothers, ex-wives and wives, vice-presidents and part owners of their own clever, creative concerns anticipate having. If women like Isla expect extremes in their children, it must be extremes of goodness or brilliance. They anticipate sturdiness, capability, security, confidence, all the natural results of their own good intentions and without severe penalties for their failures. They certainly do not expect to raise children with psychic holes in their sides large and open enough to stick whole fists into.