Critical Injuries

by Joan Barfoot

  The funny thing is, he wound up spending more time in jail than his father did. James was only actually in for six months when all was said and done. Of course, he also lost the business, although for financial reasons, not on the face of it for strictly legal or moral ones. Whereas Jamie spent more than a year behind bars, and according to Lyle was lucky, at that. It was very bad: selling, not just absorbing into his own body, drugs named crack, Ecstasy, and cocaine; with hints, too, of heroin. Isla’s boy, skulking through a decayed underworld of needles and spoons, trembling and vomit, filthy rooms, dangerous alleys, this time peddling his baggies of costly pleasures, his parallel universes of cravings, longings, desires. His quest for relief, if not joy, gone entirely sour.

  “Did you know he was dealing?” she asked Alix.

  “No, just using again. But you knew that, too.”

  Isla still can’t remember much about Alix from then, except that she was unobtrusive and worked hard and did well. That must have been when her transparency was developing, that eerie knack she has for vanishing so that other people look right through her. It’s in her skin now, that transparency. In those wide, fervent eyes.

  Who would believe so much misfortune?

  Mrs. Lot, probably. Mrs. Job.

  Lyle found Jamie the most experienced, best lawyer he could; sat sturdily in the courtroom with Isla as she listened to the grim information of her son’s secret life; let her grip his hand hard as she watched Jamie’s body ripple with fear, hearing a two-year sentence, to be followed by three years’ probation; allowed her to weep in his arms for something that had nothing to do with him, was neither his fault nor his problem. That good man. Who said, “Stop beating yourself up, I don’t think there was a damn thing more you could have done to stop him, or help him. That’s not how it works.” Isla could not believe him, of course; but she did believe in his dogged kindness. His loyalty.

  In prison, much happened for which Jamie was ill-prepared. Sometimes she heard of these things at the time, sometimes not until later. There will be some matters, she supposes, she has never heard, never will hear. But in the course of the fourteen months he actually served, he beat and was beaten, he was bruised, cut, broken and God knows what unspeakable else. He also, she was told by his jailers, his captors, hammered his own head into walls, sweated into sheets, vomited across floors. He spent a number of days in the infirmary for one reason and another, including fevers and chills. She was told that in the early days he sometimes thrashed so violently he had to be bundled into restraints. She saw him, when she visited, when he was capable of her visits, becoming paler and more gaunt, and sometimes he was damaged in obvious ways: a cut lip, a bruised eye.

  Then he began filling out again. His eyes cleared, a pinkness budded in his skin. “I’m working out,” he told her proudly. “I’m clean,” he whispered shyly. “You can believe me this time.” It seemed true, looked true. Who did this for him? Someone; not her.

  Again because of Lyle’s efforts, and because of a particular employment program for promising former offenders, Jamie works — his first and only actual job! At his age! — for a florist. In this most gentle of pursuits, he handles orders and shipping and some of the paperwork. He does not arrange or care for the flowers and plants, since that requires particular talents and knowledge. He says the smells can get overwhelmingly sweet, even nauseating, but he has learned some things about flowers, some of their names, for example. He likes the people he works with, he says, and also the regularity of the money, although not the amount. “I tell you,” he says, “this business of going straight is really hard on the wallet.” Which is a joke, but also true.

  This is the sort of job a twenty-year-old might be doing part-time to cover tuition, or rent, not a twenty-five-year-old grown-up. He has some vague notion of someday working with people in trouble; addicts, most likely. When he first mentioned this, Isla asked, stupidly, “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “You mean, being around druggies?” They laughed, but yes, that’s what she meant. Temptations are tricky, redemption hard to be sure of.

  She says now, out of nowhere, to the worried-looking young man leaning over her, trying to smile with his bent-up, little-boy mouth, “I am so proud of you.” A simple, true, hard thing, and she is astonished when his eyes rise up, spill over, with tears. Oh.

  People do get restored.

  She might, too.

  “Where are Alix and Lyle?”

  Now he looks uncomfortable. “In court. The guy who, you know, shot you is up again today. Pleading guilty, I think.”

  Well, so he should. So he must.

  All this may be quite a shock for him, too. Although not necessarily. He could be just evil.

  “How about Martin?” Because wouldn’t he want to see her?

  “He tried, but they won’t let anybody in yet but family.” But Martin is family: a sturdy, benevolent brother. He was loyal to her when some clients at first shied away, as she’d expected. She herself saw James as a sort of Chernobyl of moral contamination; or, maybe, some clients saw what he did as unremarkable, his misfortune lying only in being caught, in which case they would be dodging the contamination of misfortune. “Fuck ’em,” said Martin, that man of few but useful words.

  He’d helped her pack too, when she moved herself and Jamie and Alix into the duplex. He hugged her close, bought her a drink, when she finally confided the existence of Lyle; and although she couldn’t quite sympathize, she was as loyal to him when his life blew up. His wife learned about his lover; his lover learned his wife was pregnant. “Christ, Isla, they’ve both left me! My kids, too, she’s taken the kids.” This was real anguish, and for that she did sympathize. She wasn’t sure what he’d expected to happen, though; she supposed he’d somehow expected nothing to happen, couldn’t picture anything happening. It was a point of view she had learned a good deal about. She fed him, gave him drinks, listened. That’s what he’d done for her, which made it, not exactly a debt to repay, but something with a value she understood.

  Recently Martin’s been hinting he wouldn’t mind selling the agency, or the large part of it that’s his to sell. “I’d kind of like to take the money and run. Do some travelling, reward myself before it’s too late. I get tired, you know, trying to keep up. So many changes.” She hadn’t figured out what she thought about this, but now needs to tell him to yes, sell, run off, indulge himself, do anything his good heart desires. Because this is not a matter of snip-snap and she’s striding as if nothing has happened back into her life.

  Her fiercest desire right now is to run screaming out of her own skin, her own life.

  She can’t even kill herself. She can’t even lift a finger to do that much. Who would help her?

  Jamie says, “But if you want to see Martin, we’ll try to figure out a way, don’t worry.” How assured, how confident this young man sounds. Her cleaned-up, capable son. Maybe Alix, too, can be saved. Not, of course, through Serenity Corps, not as someone named Starglow. Alix has something, though. She knows something about faith, even if it’s blind, dumb, stupid faith, and where did that come from? In the aftermath of her father, not to mention her brother, not to mention, maybe, even her mother, how was it she could come, so quietly, so surreptitiously, to believe anything at all?

  A self-satisfied, self-assured stranger must have looked good to her. A Master Ambrose, preaching serenity, what could be more appealing? Who, choosing between the tender, broken-hearted story of an Alix and the peaceful, floating, weightless, and transparent possibilities of a Starglow, would not choose to be Starglow? Ditching a whole sorry past. Opting for a whole unknown, silvery future.

  Now she and Lyle have gone off to court together. That’s nice, although they’re probably not exactly having a meeting of minds. And Madeleine’s someplace on water, in air. Everyone’s gathering in some new formation, for some new purpose.

 
Her son is silently holding her hand, or at least that’s what he appears to be doing, and is staring rather bleakly off into space; or out a window for all she can tell.

  She hears a sound from herself like a laugh, and Jamie looks down at her sharply. She’s remembering, though, that in those first dreadful weeks after James, she longed, wished, desired desperately, not to be able to feel. And then something similar, again, after Jamie himself. And now she has achieved her longing, her wish, her desire; except of course what she meant was, she wanted not to be able to feel her feelings. That had nothing to do with her body. This is fulfilment not only far too late, but also twisted in the extreme.

  She should have paid better attention not only to this hospital’s many fundraising campaigns for its various medical miracles, but also to stories of grief in general. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of those, it’s not as if a hundred of them don’t land on the doorstep every day. It’s entirely possible that some victims of torture, say, actually pray for nerves that can no longer flicker or twitch or respond, can no longer be touched by the electric impulse, the wire, the brand. She should know if there are people somewhere, in some circumstance, who would consider her blessed. She should also know if there are people who would rise to this circumstance, and how they would do that. She is, in the scheme of things, too ordinary for this. Extraordinary events regularly occur to ordinary people, and what are they supposed to do then? How do they learn, on the fly, what to do?

  She is too small in spirit for this one. She is exhausted. She is insufficient to the task. Lyle and Alix are just coming through the door, looming up beside Jamie, as she says, “Help me.”

  She has almost never heard herself say that before. Isn’t that odd. What kind of person is it, who hardly ever says “Help me”? They look startled, too.

  Well, how do they imagine she feels? Dependent, surely, and doomed and despairing. Terrified, really. “Help me,” she says again, but even she has no idea how they might do that. She would like to feel sorry and tender towards their bewilderment, all that concern on their loved and individual faces, their no doubt genuine desire to do as she asks and help her, really help her, but how can they? Moreover, any one of them can turn around, walk away. They have that choice, and she couldn’t stop them.

  She has to close her eyes because it would be really bad, too cruel, if they could see how much, right this minute, she hates her beautiful, reliable Lyle, her tough, weak-willed Jamie, her soft-hearted, soft-headed, gossamer Alix. There’s a goddamn internal flame, if anybody’s looking for one.

  Still. “Help me,” she cries, her eyes flying open again, trying to demand, hoping to insist, but willing, right this moment, to beg.

  A Clear, Steady Gaze

  She’s here again, on this day of his sentencing. Coming through that courtroom side door with four other young, anxious prisoners, Roddy scans the room and yes, finds her, third row back. Looking just the way she did a week ago. Same dress, even.

  His terror subsides, although does not vanish. The suspense of her presence, or absence, that caused his hands to tremble, is relieved, but there is still the suspense of his future, as it will be defined by the judge. None of this is in his control. But then, look what he did before, when he did have control; or believed that he did.

  His grandmother and his dad are out there, too, watching him come in with the others, looking nervous and sad, even though he’s caused so much grief, and shamed his grandmother, and made his dad angry. He nods to them, and smiles, as best he can. His grandmother smiles back, his dad nods. But after that, and he knows this is weird as well as amazing, his eyes need to swerve back to the girl.

  The picture he’s tried to hold of her in his mind’s eye this past week is perfectly true.

  There were moments of doubt. He was afraid, a little, that he’d made too much of her, had made her, for one thing, too beautiful; but no, there’s that pale, pale skin, like she’s not even really from earth. Grave eyes that see right into him, through him.

  Maybe it would be too thrilling to be any closer, some kind of shock; but if he could touch her skin, put just his fingertips on her breasts, if she would let him do that, and if she would take his head between her hands and lay it to rest on her lap and look down at him with those steady eyes while he looked back up into them — maybe that would be everything. He feels it could happen. Everything has already shifted, it’s all unpredictable, so how can he know what’s possible and what is not? Look at her, looking at him. What does she see?

  It sounds almost crazy, even inside his own head, but it’s still true: he has fallen, toppled, plunged into some kind of love.

  He doesn’t think this can be what people mean when they talk about love. If other people felt this, the whole world would be lit, the air everywhere would be radiant.

  He can get through this.

  Oh. He hadn’t realized he wasn’t sure about that.

  He sits very straight on the bench, much straighter than the four others. He isn’t tall, he isn’t large, but he can take up space here, he can be significant. Although in her eyes he’d be significant, love or not. He forgets.

  In the brief, long week between pleading guilty and today, he has learned some things for sure:

  That he cannot count on mercy, because even though what he did was so quick, only a few seconds, it was also large, with awful results. He can’t imagine a length of time that’s right for balancing out those two things;

  That even when a place is very busy and noisy and possibly dangerous, and contains a multitude of questions that are supposed to be answered and many hours are totally filled, there are spaces of unavoidable time when pictures rear up. Too often, but not always, it’s the moment in Goldie’s, those seconds that won’t be undone no matter how many times he has to see them unfold. Or sometimes the pictures are of his grandmother’s house, the stone walkway in from the street to its grey-stuccoed homeliness, and going through the aluminum front door and up the mottled yellowy-browny carpeted stairs to his own room, with his own muddled colours and his own pictures of intricate, transformable creatures pinned to the walls, and his own life that isn’t his any more, like he’s dead now, or gone off to be reincarnated a new way;

  That going to sleep isn’t safe. Sleep can easily be more troubling than being awake. Because he’s been having dreams, awful ones about his mother, as bad as when he was a kid, after he and his dad moved. This week, even the dreams that start out good, with his mother playing with him maybe, or hugging him, the two of them happy, and young too, turn bad, so that when he wakes up he’s scared he hasn’t been just crying out in the dream, but for real. Last night, his mother was paralyzed. She couldn’t even speak. And where she was paralyzed was on the top railing, crouched there, of what looked like a bridge, although he couldn’t make out anything besides the railing, no expressway or railroad or river below. She was wearing something glittery, a gown, or maybe it was her skin under moonlight. She looked at him. She was asking him with her eyes to do something, asking him to help her. He couldn’t tell, and she couldn’t say, whether she wanted him to lift her down or push her off. He would have to decide, because he had to do something, it was night, and cold and she couldn’t help herself so he had to. He thought, in the dream, “My mother.” She was familiar and helpless and frightened, strange and, mainly, sad. He was trying in the dream to understand what he should do: push or pull. What he did was reach out in the gentlest of ways and give her the gentlest of pushes so that down, down she went, vanishing soundlessly into the darkness.

  Jesus. He woke weeping. And cold. And hoping that in his sleep, he’d made as little sound as his mother had in the dream. He wiped tears from his eyes, from his cheeks.

  Then he set out to restore, in the dream’s place, the details, each feature and shape, shift and shade, of the steadying, salvaging figure he saw, who saw him, for the first time a week ago.
And now he can see that that vision is real and true because here it is, in this room, a few feet away: that one bright thing to hang onto, that one lighted face.

  What does she see with those pure eyes resting on him? Ordinarily he doesn’t like being stared at. Well, he’s not all that attractive. This is different, though. Her eyes don’t stop at his skin, or even his bones.

  If he could hear her speak again in that airy voice, what might she say? Since matters of guilt or anger don’t seem to concern her, he doesn’t think she would say, “I forgive you.” Those would be words to do with the past. She sounded before like someone more interested in the future.

  Well, there could be romantic and loving words. Those would be nice, but possibly too large a miracle, too unlikely for words.

  Something simpler, then, and more possible. “I like you, Rod.” Or “It’s my belief you’re a good person.”

  She’s on her own today, no lean stepfather, contemptuous lawyer, loving husband, bearing his unbearable details into this high-ceilinged room. Could she be here on his behalf, on behalf of the whole family of that woman, her mother, the whirling lady in the wrinkled blue suit? Or is it how it seems, that she’s here to look at Roddy with her own thoughtfulness? The room doesn’t feel real, it’s like he’s in another dream but this time somebody else’s. Like he could just float right away. All of this, every part of it, his light-headedness and the powers of her clear, steady gaze, would sound crazy, he knows that. But that just makes it more like what she said last week when he was in court, that it didn’t look like anybody understood, except him.

  When his name finally gets called, just like last time he has to go sit beside Ed Conrad, stand up for the judge, sit down, try to listen. She’s there behind him, though. He doesn’t know what name to call her even in his thoughts. Starglow feels sort of right, Alix more real.