by Joan Barfoot
Madeleine slept, without difficulty, in Isla and James’s old room. Isla had moved across the hall into what had been James’s home office. She remembered when she’d thought of the house as a fortress of sorts, and had considered that a good thing. Now it really was a fortress, it really did contain them all. They might as well have kept pots of boiling oil on the windowsills, catapults at the doors.
Bert came around often to see Madeleine. Martin came also, a special kindness since it meant neglecting both wife and lover. He brought along work discussions and decisions, and if Isla didn’t want to get out of bed, he went upstairs and hauled her down. They went over contracts and campaigns, spreading papers out on the coffee table. He said, “Whenever you’re ready, come back.”
Jamie was often out, and at home stayed unnervingly adamant in his silence. Not unlike Isla herself. She touched him, tried to touch him, but could not feel that she reached him. She saw the wariness in his light footsteps, and possibly furtiveness. She said, “Talk to me,” and also “Listen to me,” but he would do neither; or could not. She imagined that like her, he was quietly, internally, absorbing various blows. Assessing trustworthiness, too. He was taking care of himself in his own way, and it wasn’t so different from hers, after all. Alix, on the other hand, took to hanging around in the living room. Suddenly younger, more like a nine- than a twelve-year-old, she sat on the sofa in pink flannel pajamas with Bert and Madeleine, watching TV while Isla and Martin worked haphazardly nearby with their campaigns and contracts. Sometimes it was possible to look around and see all this as a cozy scene. Not entirely a family scene, but an awfully cozy one.
Except Isla could no longer believe what she saw. If James could surprise her, and if she could then even startle herself, surely anything could rear up shockingly out of anyone. Bert might be any damn psychopath beneath those striped shirts. That she knew Martin had serious secrets meant he knew how to be clever with lies. Obviously her judgement was skewed. What she thought she saw wasn’t necessarily close to what was right in front of her face. This felt insane. Just thinking the word insane felt slightly insane, daringly and dangerously real.
What had walked handcuffed with James out the door, she decided, was not, obviously, her life, but what she’d understood of her life. Life being not merely circumstances, but decades of putting together puzzles, information, clues, pieces of knowledge and observation, sensations, tones of voice, smells and colours, everything, into something that added up to what could be relied on, what was true, if not for everyone, at least, at very least, for herself. “How could he?” she cried to Madeleine, and didn’t mean how he could press himself on young girls, but how he could not just tell lies, wicked enough, but actually, himself, be a lie.
Madeleine got very angry then, voice pitched low, a sure sign. Her mouth was tight, her darkened red hair, much like Isla’s but dyed now, looked dishevelled, as if earlier she had been running her fingers through it. Her hands were flat on the kitchen table and she was standing, leaning into them hard. “Isla. You listen to me. People like us can’t recognize people like him and we shouldn’t be able to. It doesn’t mean we’re stupid or foolish, it means we’re hopeful and good. You hold onto that, and don’t ever doubt it. You will not let him ruin that. You will not.” She was pretty magnificent. And she made being trusting and hopeful sound like virtues, not stupidities, without entertaining the third possibility, that they were both.
She was a mother, of course. And look at James’s mother, her defence of her misunderstood, betrayed, mistreated boy. “Maybe,” Isla said. “In the long run. I just don’t see a long run at the moment.”
“Well, I do. Now go have a shower. You look like hell. The kids’ll be home soon, and I want you cleaned up and dressed. Then get organized to go back to work. Martin’s been saying to get back when you’re ready, but at this rate you’re making yourself less ready, not more. You’re right if you think some people won’t know how to look at you, or what to say, but any longer and you’ll be making everything worse. Including yourself.” This was harsh, and unmaternally abrupt. In her alarm, Isla turned sulky. Evidently it showed. “You’re not a teenager,” Madeleine said, “so don’t stick that lip out at me.” Oh God, she was! She was frowning at her mother and sticking out her bottom lip! Which began to quiver. When the kids came through the door, she and Madeleine were still laughing.
At dinner, Madeleine had her own announcement. “You know, I do like being around every day. Besides being my family, which means you’re excellent by definition, I’d think you were all fine, admirable people if I didn’t know you from Adam.” The kids had stopped eating, Isla noticed. They were looking at their grandmother warily, as if waiting for the disagreeable shoe to drop. They too, Isla saw, no longer took their own goodness for granted, nor perhaps anyone else’s.
“It’s tempting to stay, but I think I’d be wiser to hold that for my dotage when I have to ask one of you to look after me.” They all smiled. “For now, though, we’d each do better to get on with our own lives. You two,” looking at Jamie and Alix, “are settled in school, and your mother’s about to go back to work, and I’m missing my own job and my house. Now Alix,” because she’d spotted the uprush of tears, “I know it’s hard, but you’re going to be fine now.” She’d brought tears to her own eyes. Isla touched her arm. “Now, that’s enough from me. Think how chatty I’m going to be by the time one of you has to take me in.”
“You can come live with me, Grandma.” Tender Alix. “I’d always look after you.”
“I’m sure you would, honey. Let’s just hope for your sake it doesn’t come to that any time soon.”
Jamie was silent, as usual. As usual, he went out as soon as they rose from the table. “You’ll have to keep an eye on him,” Madeleine told Isla as they loaded the dishwasher.
“I think he talks to Bethany. I hear him on the phone sometimes. But you’re right, of course, I’m keeping an eye.”
That didn’t go so well, did it, that business of keeping an eye?
Because here, hovering above her, is what has become of that boy. Ten years on he is a man, although still a young man, with grave depths in his own dark eyes. Somewhere in there is a world of lost possibilities. There is also knowledge he shouldn’t need to have of terrible acts, some done by him, some to him.
For a while, when she thought he was going out most evenings to meet Bethany, he was. Then he wasn’t. It was some time, though, before Isla knew he was finding places, underpasses and alleys, strange rooms and apartments, where it was possible to find substances that could make him feel better. Or feel nothing. Feel, anyway, as he much later described it, as if he were flying through some other universe, a bright and kaleidoscopic and painless one. It was difficult to stay there, though, and he had to try harder and harder to get to where the colours were rich and the action was fast and there were no troubles of any kind, none at all.
It didn’t take long for this to happen. Apparently it doesn’t take long, if a person’s determined enough. Also if a person’s determined enough — like James, too, she supposed — it’s possible to keep certain flaws, vices, deficits, private for quite a while.
Of course Jamie was troubled, she knew that. So was Alix, so was she. Being troubled was normal, as far as Isla could see, and if Jamie’s marks plunged, it was hardly surprising. Although Alix’s didn’t, Alix’s shot higher, and she bent with great focus over her homework and projects. Isla herself had difficulty concentrating at work, and wasn’t amazed when Jamie had a similar problem. The one who amazed her was Alix.
“I’d like to move,” Isla told them one night over dinner. “What would you think of getting another place altogether? Rent something, till we sort ourselves out?” She tried to sound casual, as if they were really deciding, but her own heart, frankly, was set. There weren’t many unhaunted spaces left for her in that house — a chair here, a corner there — and they were
tiny and kept getting tinier. She felt that was perhaps melodramatic, but on the other hand, what exactly, at that point, was not melodramatic?
Jamie said, “Yeah, sure, whatever. I don’t care.” Alix looked confused and on the verge of protest, but said only, “Would we have to change schools again?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
Alix sighed. “Then okay, I guess.”
A lot of losses; but when she moved the three of them into a rented duplex, a shiny and compact, renovated, surely temporary place close to downtown, she was thinking it would be better for them, too, a neighbourhood where no one had seen anyone taken away in handcuffs, placed in the back seat of a cruiser, vanishing from view but not from a community of curious minds.
Still, those were the months, weeks, days, and long evenings when she must have failed them, each of them; the hinge period when, if she’d been wiser, or slightly more sane, she could, possibly, have tilted them one better way or another. When they were very little, hurtling boisterously, screeching and laughing down slides, she was a good mother who stood at the bottom and caught them; but when they were truly sliding, she missed and they slipped right through her hands.
The therapist — well, that was one obvious thing to do — the therapist told Isla it was hard to extract information from either Alix or Jamie. “They seem withdrawn,” she said, “although it’s very important they open up, especially with regard to their father. This sort of event could be permanently damaging.” Well, no shit. But Isla didn’t want to talk about James, either. Her sympathies were with her children. Jamie finally dug in his heels and refused more appointments, and Alix, as usual by then, followed his lead.
He did not, however, allow Alix to follow him out on his evenings. Isla asked where he was going, what he was doing, who he was meeting since it was no longer Bethany; a loss that must have given him much more to mourn, although he refused to say what happened, just shrugged and insisted, “No big deal,” even though it had to be. “It’s private,” he said. “My own business.” It was, Isla thought, as if he blamed her, not his father, for all the chaos and sorrow. Well, she was on hand, present and blameable.
“Guys from school,” he said he was meeting. “New buddies. We hang out.” He was restless and irritable, but why would he not be?
Each of them had a birthday. Two birthdays. Two Christmases. James telephoned on each occasion from wherever he was, which was only briefly in jail. His sentence, the legal part of it anyway, was scarcely harsh, although he seemed to feel that losing his family had been excessive. The second year, Jamie and Alix each spoke with him briefly, came away angry in Jamie’s case, sad in Alix’s. If it was a rule that one parent should never speak ill of the other, Isla was lost for words, but she tried. “He loves you, you know. That never changes.” She wasn’t sure that was true. Who could speak for someone like James? She said, “Everybody does stupid things in their lives, some are just stupider than others. And you know, people change, people learn.” Certainly she had, if not in notably benign ways.
“Would you see him?” Jamie asked.
“Good God, no, but it’s different for you, he’s your father.”
Jamie turned away. “Thanks for reminding me.”
He was seventeen, that hard age, although he seemed hard in blank, opaque ways she couldn’t see through, even though like staring at glass brick, she could now and then make out his shadow, his shape. “I can’t tell,” she said to Madeleine, “how much is a stage and how much I should be really worried about. And then what I could do in any case, when he hardly speaks; and he’s nearly a grown-up, he has to be his own person. Whatever that is.” In all ways he bore less and less resemblance to the glinting little Jamie, her formerly familiar boy.
“I don’t know either. You weren’t easy at that age yourself.” Really? Isla didn’t recall being difficult. That seemed reassuring. “I never dreamed,” Madeleine said later. “I never once dreamed it was more than it seemed. Extreme, maybe, but basically ordinary, given the circumstances. I’m so sorry.”
If nothing else, Jamie was fortunate that Lyle came into the picture. That awful night Alix caught Jamie shooting up in the bathroom and Lyle found a rehab centre and drove Jamie away, into the night, to be helped, although that time only briefly — what a blessing Lyle was.
If there are awful, unintended surprises, bolts of sheet lightning striking innocent living rooms, there are miracles, too. Salvation, redemption, whatever the words are for these things, take various forms. Isla and Lyle ran into each other, literally ran into each other, at the revolving door of a downtown hotel restaurant. A cliché, an encounter out of a silly movie, him waving back towards someone at the desk, her rummaging, head down, in her purse for her car keys, each of them leaving separate lunches with separate clients where they’d been discussing separate kinds of business. What would she have done, how would events have unfolded, if that moment had not occurred?
For one thing, she wouldn’t be lying here paralyzed.
“Oh, sorry,” and he’d grabbed her elbow, unnecessarily steadying her. She was at the same time saying, “Oh, sorry,” to him. They’d smiled, then both laughed. Two years after James, helplessly worried about Jamie and his vague but apparent troubles, stupidly oblivious to the dangers of Alix, still struggling to keep her mind on her work, Isla was not in a mood for much laughter. She was smiling mainly out of aesthetic pleasure: his ranginess, jutting bones, deep eyes. Not handsome, exactly, but someone who looked as if he had a real life. It was raining quite hard, and neither of them had a coat or umbrella. Lyle said, “Want to wait this out in the bar?” and she said, “Okay, let me just make one call,” and there the afternoon went.
It went, though, fairly impersonally. He talked about cases, and she thanked God he wasn’t a lawyer who specialized in gross and grubby crimes, such as employee-molesting. She chatted about slogans and ways to bring, say, a brand of disposable diapers onto the market. “A rather saturated market, at that,” she said, and he found that funnier than maybe it warranted.
“You could use that,” he said, “in a loopy sort of campaign,” and she thought, yes, she could, and wrote it down, and did use it and some other light-hearted lines and eventually the campaign won her and Martin an award for its off-key, bad-joke approach to disposable diapers. “It must be fun,” Lyle said, “to be able to play with words. I don’t get to do that. There’s not much playfulness in a courtroom.”
She knew that, but had no intention of mentioning how she knew.
When the rain stopped, they both looked at their watches. Outside, they shook hands. Isla realized she was walking away in sprightlier fashion than she was used to. “That was nice,” was what she thought.
A couple of days later, he called her at work. “I know it’s not raining, but I’ve been trying to think of some other reason you might like another drink with me and I couldn’t come up with any good one except I’d like to, would you?”
That time they talked about children, his far more than hers. Teenaged daughter and son, tough ages, that’s pretty much all she had to say right then about Jamie and Alix. Lyle was happy talking about William and Robert, a few years older than her two, and already in university. Imagine that, she thought, fairly bitterly.
Certainly they didn’t talk about marriage, their marriages. Just his, “Widowed,” her, “Divorced,” his “Sandy,” her “James,” his “cancer,” her silent shrug.
They went to a couple of movies, had drinks afterwards, discussed plots and characters. She saw no reason to invite him to her home, that rented duplex. In fact it was rather pleasing to keep him to herself: a private sort of treat, as unaffected and untouched by her real life as her real life was unaffected and untouched by him. He said, “You don’t talk about yourself much, do you?” but he didn’t seem to require an answer, or a reason. It was restful to be in the company of a man who made a
n observation, not, apparently, a judgement.
They toasted his legal triumphs. When he won a case in which he had defended a drug company and its officers who’d been charged with deliberately permitting, encouraging, gaining from the massive overseas distribution of medications long past their expiry dates, she was slightly taken aback. She herself was obviously capable of misleading, with catchy lines and one-minute plots, but still — she wanted to think of Lyle as someone to admire, and to be glad to know. “What sort of case wouldn’t you take?” she asked. “Who would you refuse to defend?” presuming an existence of lines, just inquiring where they might lie.
“Hitler,” he sidestepped, grinning at her. “You?”
“Stalin. Pol Pot.”
“Well then,” and he’d lifted his glass, “at least we know we have standards.” And made it into a joke, perhaps just as well.
He said, after a few weeks of these easy dinners, movies, drinks, conversations, “You know, I’d like you to see my place. I think you’d enjoy it. Why don’t you come out for a weekend, just hang around eating and drinking and staring at nice stuff that isn’t made of cement?”
Well, why not? She thought he was attractive and clever and good, easy company. She also thought that if it wouldn’t get too much in the way of life itself, she wouldn’t at all mind seeing his thighs, touching his ribs. Things build up. Trust and even affection don’t always have much to do with desire. “If you think we’d come back still friends,” she said, “I’d like that.”
Somewhat cryptic, she supposed. How was he expected to know what she meant? He laughed and said, “Why wouldn’t we?”