Critical Injuries

by Joan Barfoot

  “I think we’ve all learned things today,” she said, and took the desolate Jamie into her own arms. “It was a hard one, wasn’t it, honey?”

  At work the next day Martin asked, “Everything turn out okay?” and Isla nodded. He had four kids of his own, and said, “Shit happens, doesn’t it? It’s fucking scary, not being able to keep them out of harm’s way all the time.” That about summed it up.

  Jamie and Alix kept on changing. This, it seemed, was how a parent learned to keep saying farewell, waving goodbye. One year, one season, one day, Jamie was loud and clumsy, so that every time he moved it seemed something toppled off a table or fell from a wall, and the next moment he was quiet, precise in his movements, his body held tight into itself even when he was running. He got a pimple on his chin, his voice cracked and changed, he was clumsy again, but quiet again also, speaking in short and often sullen bursts. There was a rhythm to this, Isla supposed. The main thing to know about this rhythm was that nothing lasted forever.

  Alix was confident, flying high on her father’s shoulders, then for a while unsure and timid. She had a large and loud array of best friends, giggling helplessly in the basement, screaming in small-girl hysterical pleasure, and then she could spend whole glum weekends on the sofa, sunk in private sorrows she wouldn’t discuss.

  Each of them, although never in any coordinated way, ricocheted off joy, swivelled into sadness, plunged into mute irritability, bounced up again into joy. There wasn’t much to assume about either of them, not a lot to hold onto. Isla thought Jamie might be more consistently thoughtful and possibly even more kind and responsible. Alix she took to be turning into someone fairly tender-hearted but also indulged into assuming that whatever she desired would triumph. In their different ways, she thought they would finally be people she’d be happy to know, by and large.

  So much hope, so much investment, so much love — she would die before she would let anything bad happen to either of them. Jamie had the faint but discernible white permanent scar on his forehead to prove how close disaster could come in a moment of recklessness, heedlessness. “We’re lucky,” James said sometimes, and she would reach out to touch wood, and wish he’d keep quiet.

  She wondered if he ever contemplated his children looking at him and saying something like “Old man. Get out of the way.” She supposed not. If he did, he would surely be wary of them, and suspicious.

  His own father had been taken quite by surprise.

  James had ten stores, and now and then there was a ripple as he cruised close to the edge of going too far. Even if he hadn’t talked about what was happening, she thought she knew when one of those times was at hand. His jaw muscles clenched harder and more often, and he got impatient not only with her, and sometimes Jamie, but even with Alix. When he was very snappish, she understood they might be on the verge of losing everything.

  Except they couldn’t lose everything, because there was her work, as well. With savings and a relatively small loan she bought into a partnership with Martin. They hired more staff. Like James, they were flying, although comparatively low to the ground. She and Martin mainly saw each other only at work. They each had other concerns, other demands on them, but she thought they liked and trusted each other and certainly they worked well together. It probably helped that otherwise they didn’t appeal to each other. And that there was no slowing down. And that they had to keep learning, and also making things, campaigns and ideas, where nothing had existed before. They were successful, and that created its own adrenalin, a precious excitement. Isla felt blessed and indulged by all this that had fallen, really, into her lap: Madeleine’s word, serendipitous.

  It didn’t always look as if James had much fun. That strokeable jaw of his grew heavier, his long thighs thicker. He would never be fat, but he did have a belly he didn’t always hold in. The nice way of seeing this was that he had the appearance of a man of substance.

  She was changing too, had a pudgy ease to her own belly unless she was careful, and definite lines around her eyes and the sides of her mouth. She was getting the occasional grey hair amidst the mainly dark red, but didn’t plan to do anything about that unless it began coming in streaky and strange. She joined a fitness club and got up a half hour earlier to make time for a quick workout. Two childbirths had broadened her hips somewhat, but that was like a badge, or a medal, she thought, and not unattractive.

  She began to imagine, a decade or so into the future, both kids grown and gone, herself and James left mainly to their own devices. She thought that would not be a particularly passionate or dramatic or freshly involving stage, but would likely be perfectly tolerable. It would then be a matter of whether tolerable was enough, and she suspected that when the time came, she would decide it was not. They quarrelled, sometimes as nastily as when he’d objected to her starting work, but mainly about the normal gratings of regular life: what dates suited them both for vacations, who would attend parents’ night at the school. She figured they were partners, not unlike she and Martin although less scrupulous and polite, and in a far different sort of enterprise.

  When the kids were grown and gone, she would turn her attention to other possibilities. Meanwhile she and James still now and then turned to each other in bed, and each said on these occasions, “I love you,” which on her part was no longer true, at least not in the old, loyal, reliant, encompassing way. He was there. That was one of the virtues of her theory of the gate, being gated: they were both simply there.

  Martin began an affair with one of their clients. Because it involved a client, although also maybe because he couldn’t keep such exciting news to himself, he told Isla. She said, “Be careful,” meaning not only because it could hurt their company if it went badly, but because Martin liked his family and was not the sort of man who would enjoy discomfort over any long haul. Discomfort, of course, being quite different from excitement. Isla considered whether having an affair might add a vivid subplot to her own life. His romance was making Martin quite sparky and youthful. But she couldn’t think who to have an affair with who wouldn’t be more effort than he was worth, or more dangerous. Not to mention, when could she fit such a momentous thing into her schedule?

  Anyway, disloyalty didn’t interest her, even if Martin’s pink, electric rejuvenation was an illuminating sort of advertisement for its benefits.

  Sex, thoughts of sex — maybe, on good days, of love — must have been particularly in the atmosphere, a congestion of hormones, budding and renewed, troubling the vision, distorting the air, creating waves of heat, causing hallucinations of oasis on the horizon. All that sort of steaminess, breathlessness. Not just Martin. Not merely Isla’s own speculations, which anyway were nothing near real desires. Whatever Jamie was pursuing at fifteen, perhaps only hopes, he was pursuing for the most part out of the house, tremulously and tentatively in love for the first time, with a wiry, thin-chested, sharp-eyed, and soft-tongued girl named Bethany, who joined them for dinner sometimes, or to do homework at the dining room table with Jamie, but who did not often meet Isla’s eyes. It was difficult, and unwise, to imagine her little running boy having sex, but she had to suppose that even if he and Bethany were not, he would be wanting to, trying to. There was a sharp sort of reek to him, some alteration of his chemistries, which he couldn’t seem to camouflage or control.

  Alix, at twelve, was getting ideas of her own. Isla hadn’t put them there. The requisite discussion of biology, attraction, affection, had of course provided Alix with no new information. How could it? Isla would have liked to make clearer to her that there was more to it than strokeable jaws and long thighs, but heard her own voice soften and thought she was not entirely credible on the subject. “I know that,” Alix said with weary tolerance. Maybe she did. She did not, however, know enough to follow Jamie’s example out of the house.

  James was home. Dinner was over. Jamie was out somewhere with Bethany. Alix was in the basement w
ith Tim, Mavis’s boy, with whom she had played more or less since the day Isla went off to work. They’d played house, computer games, and soccer together, had had spats and tussles and giggling secrets together. “That’s the way to grow up,” Isla had thought, watching them. “So there’s nothing so mysterious you lose your head for no good reason.” Between being friends with Tim and sharing a bathroom with Jamie, she didn’t think Alix could have too many odd or unrealistic notions about the attractions of males.

  Evidently she was wrong.

  She heard a roar from under her feet. By the time she’d reached the bottom of the basement stairs James was hauling narrow, pale Tim out from under the pool table with such ferocity, gripping his poor thin arm that Tim’s head cracked on the underside of the table. Alix was still under there. “What’s going on?” Isla called, although she could see what was going on, and only intended to break the moment, break James’s grip.

  For a moment longer, while the boy steadied himself on his feet, James held on. When he let go, it was so that he had both hands free to start swatting at Tim, open-handed blows to Tim’s dancing, dodging head. Tim, looking unfamiliar in this dimly lit drama, was hampered by loosened, unfastened pants. He ducked under one of James’s flailing hands, gripped the material at his waist, made a run for it. Panicked and solely intent on escape, he brushed past Isla and pounded up the stairs, out the front door, away.

  Alix was unfolding herself from under the pool table in far more leisurely fashion. James was panting. Alix regarded her father calmly, her red hair standing out in the light like a fiery angel’s. Her little green plaid shirt, her worn favourite, was untucked and hung partly open. She didn’t even have breasts yet! What, if Tim were groping her, had he been groping?

  James was trembling. When he yelled, all his words ran together in Isla’s ears. They may have done likewise with Alix, who watched him gravely, steadily, not moving or speaking, until he wound down. Then she nodded, stepped around him, stepped around Isla, climbed the stairs, went silently to her room. Isla, who couldn’t think of a word to say, also turned and went back upstairs. She listened to James, still in the basement, pounding his fists on this and that, and pacing. She was astonished by his heat, by his rage, but she was far more amazed by Alix.

  Later, in bed, still in a fury, James said, “Do something. And keep that kid out of this house.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. They’ve been friends a long time. That wouldn’t work.”

  “Well, make something work. Did you see what they were doing?”

  She sighed. “They’re exploring. We do have to speak with her, but you know, this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of hormones ahead. And you could talk to her too, I mean without yelling and getting upset. It’s not just my job.”

  Truthfully, she didn’t know what she could say to Alix. What unnerved her was not Alix’s lust but that gentle, remote expression as she regarded her father. She had looked as unfamiliar as a stranger right then. She’d looked untouchable.

  If Tim could touch her, good luck to him, Isla thought, which made her giggle, so that James turned in bed to look at her. “There’s nothing funny about it,” he snapped.

  She guessed there probably wasn’t. “I’m just trying to remember what it was like to be twelve. Pretty confusing, as I recall. You feel caught in the middle then. Between one thing and another.”

  “They did not look confused to me.”

  Well, his daughter hadn’t. Poor Tim, though. “I expect he was terrorized enough to keep his hands to himself for some time. And everything else, too.” She heard herself giggle again, and again James looked at her sharply. “But Alix wasn’t exactly cowering, was she? That was an unusual kind of look she was giving you.” Isla heard in her voice a tinge of satisfaction, and what was that about? “I guess it is something to try to sort out, but James, you can’t just tell me to deal with it.”

  He shifted unhappily. “I only thought, you’re both female, you’d know how to talk to her about that sort of thing.”

  “About sex? Lust? What? I have done that. Maybe what she hasn’t heard is a man. What Tim might have had in mind, and what she needs to look out for in the future. Maybe she needs that little chat.”

  But then all their lives turned over, and whatever Isla had thought Alix might have needed to look out for in the future became something quite different. As it did for herself, for Jamie and, not least by any means, for James.

  How had he managed? Had his brain not felt explosive? Filled to bursting with his composted, degraded little privacies? What a masterpiece of will, to carry on his regular life, expanding his business, fretting over its large and small matters, eating their dinners, occasionally taking their children to movies, occasionally supervising their homework, occasionally turning to Isla in their bed, giving no signs, no hints at all.

  He said, eventually, that it was a separate, and small, part of his life. Perhaps so, to him, although that he could see it that way was in itself what? Very ill.

  Besides being a separate and small part of his life, it was criminal. That wasn’t even to mention that it was wicked, immoral — all those words that didn’t too often come up in their household, or in most households in general as far as she knew. He must have known that, would have had to be monstrously stupid not to.

  That was the third time in her life she had anything to do with the cops.

  And this is what she means about how stupid seventeen-year-olds are.

  They’re so stupid they get hankerings, cravings, for men who wind up, years later, like James.

  Other seventeen-year-olds are so stupid that to blot out fathers like James, they absorb terrible shit into their bodies, or begin undetectable journeys towards some ridiculous, unfathomable faith.

  Or they’re so stupid they shoot people without actually, necessarily, meaning to.

  They’re so stupid, she thinks, it’s almost necessary to feel sorry for them. They are defenceless in their stupidity, and arrogant in it, too. They know nothing about being thirty-nine-year-old mothers doing their best to get accustomed to humiliation and horror, or forty-nine-year-old women getting accustomed to joy, and they care nothing, either.

  They are damaged and dangerous.

  They need embracing, they need to be held tight and restrained. They need to be kept out of harm’s way until the danger is past. They are haphazard and foolish and need looking after. Isla obviously failed to accomplish this duty. Other people, strangers to her, have obviously failed also, and now here she is, after another encounter with cops, knowing precisely the full and desperate results of these failures.

  Pretty Good Punishment

  Roddy’d have thought being in jail would be mainly sitting around without much to do but watch his back, but not so. It’s abrupt and startling and loud, but it sure isn’t slack. It also isn’t a jail, exactly, but a detention centre. As Ed Conrad, the lawyer his dad found, explains it, some people serve short sentences here, the ones convicted of fairly minor, relatively harmless crimes like break and enter; not like attempted murder, armed robbery. But others are like Roddy, being held for court appearances on charges they haven’t been found guilty of, at least not yet. Either they can’t get bail or they don’t have enough money for it. Roddy’s probably in both boats: bail’s been denied, but even if it wasn’t, Ed Conrad said it could be something like ten thousand dollars, or even more, maybe twenty, or fifty, and there’s no way his grandmother or his dad could come up with so much. If they would; and maybe they wouldn’t.

  This is his third day. There’s a system here for organizing the day and also for organizing the future, even if nobody knows yet what or how long the next part of his future will be. It’s amazing, how an act that’s extraordinary to Roddy gets absorbed like it’s normal into a process that’s already worked out. Like he’s one car on an assembly line, getting put together
like every other car with just a few individual options.

  The only time something doesn’t seem to be happening is at night and even then it’s not totally quiet, and lights are left burning. He has nightmares. Every morning so far he’s wakened up shaken and scared; like in a movie where somebody’s doing something like going up a dark staircase and you know there’s something awful just waiting and you want to yell out, “No! Don’t! Be careful! Turn back!” but the person keeps going up anyway, and something bad happens. That sort of nightmare.

  But even waking up shaken, he isn’t confused. Since the very first morning here, he’s known right off where he is. Well, it’d be hard to get confused in a small bare grey room with a metal cot, a little sink, and a lidless crapper; totally different from his ceiling-sloped room at home, with its pictures pinned to the walls and his own deep bed where he should be, with a bag of money tucked away underneath. That other, parallel life he had in mind.

  Things happen in sleep, he guesses. Like moving overnight from one world to another. Life from before is already so much a memory it’s like it’s somebody else’s memory. The present is unstable and the future for sure is unknown, but the past — it’s some other place and person altogether. Which is so weird it makes him light-headed.

  There’s more to it, though, this knowing right away, before he even has his eyes open. Maybe it’s air, maybe sound, maybe light. Or maybe it’s believing deep down that where he is, is where he belongs.

  How can Mike stand being out there, free, knowing he must be in the wrong place? But maybe Mike doesn’t know that. He likely has other things on his mind.

  He wasn’t in court when Roddy was. That was the first morning. Other people showed up, Roddy’s grandmother and his dad, Ed Conrad of course, but not Mike.

  Roddy got driven there in a van with a few other guys and a couple of guards; cops, he guessed. There wasn’t much talking. He didn’t know anybody. The courthouse, where he’d never been before, is next to the regional government building and looks like a regular office except up on the second floor, where he got taken, it’s separated into two big courtrooms plus a bunch of smaller rooms. He saw his lawyer in one of them with some other guys and a couple of women, laughing.