Critical Injuries
Page 31
“Nah, I was too startled to be hurt.” Yes, that shock of things happening: a useful, momentary anaesthetic. She knows.
“But listen, you want to get yourself up here and start getting ready? They’ll be coming along one of these hours.”
To celebrate her coming home. Martin, and Lyle’s sons, as well as Jamie and Alix, Madeleine and Bert. Lyle mowed the lawns, and hired a cleaning person to whip the inside into shape, and a caterer is bringing food, although there should only be nine or ten people, depending on whether Lyle’s boys bring companions along. No doubt there will come a time when Isla will have figured out how to whip around the house, the kitchen, so competently and smoothly that with her and Lyle working together like the old days, a meal for ten will be a minor effort. Probably her only difficulty cleaning the house will become dusting the higher shelves. She will learn to trim low-slung shrubs, pick long-stemmed flowers. She and Lyle will find new rhythms for working and playing around here together.
But not today.
She likes that he doesn’t offer to push her chair up the ramp. He doesn’t hover like someone assuming she’s gone either stupid or incompetent. To be honest, Madeleine hovers a little too much. Maybe it’s finally age catching up. Maybe it’s that Isla’s her daughter. Still, she is coming early to help Isla get dressed. Isla will, of course, be wearing a long, camouflaging, summery dress, one of the new ones that now mainly make up her wardrobe, this one beige with a pattern of small blue and yellow flowers, more elegant than some of the others. It’s a style that comes close to Alix’s old Serenity Corps outfits. Too bad Alix got rid of them, they might have been useful.
Jamie is supposed to be giving Alix a ride today, since she is far too poor to have a car. He has become so reliable that he risks sliding into a solidity that is almost alarming. Her children, Isla thinks, are not good at half measures, although since she has found she so much resents half measures herself, she can hardly be critical.
Alix is another story. Naturally. She appears to have flown from serenity straight into chaos. This is not exactly true, of course. Where she has gone is from the Serenity Corps into two-rooms-plus-bath in the depths of the city; from fresh air to grime; from a loopy spiritual quest to a loopy social one. But there again, that is just Isla’s frivolous take on the subject. Her real and serious one is more respectful, if also leery.
Her children have taken up solemn pursuits. Jamie is studying, for the next three or four years, psychology, sociology, and various workings of the actual physical brain. No more flowers for him. He is pursuing his notion of working with drug addicts, but it now seems unlikely he would relapse, even in very bad company. And Alix, wispy Alix no longer wears transparent dresses, and has redirected her attentions from old criminals to young ones. Which is to say, from the nasty Master Ambrose to the nasty kid who shot Isla.
And those like him.
Isla tries to avoid thinking along the lines of frying pans, fires. Too easy, for one thing. Probably wrong, for another. Alix has found a voice and it turns out to be quite a determined, even loud one. As when it rang out one night on the TV news, in front of the government buildings, loudly protesting, along with an exceptionally scruffy-looking bunch of supporters, the closing of a particular service for law-challenged youth. “Look at that,” Lyle said, leaning forward in Isla’s rehab centre room. “Isn’t that Alix?” So it was.
She visited that boy, Rod, every other weekend. “I’m trying to understand him,” she explained; which Isla thought, but did not say, would have to be quite a project, understanding the young man who had shot her mother. “I know it sounds awful to say, but he’s really kind of sweet in a way. He doesn’t know anything.” As if those were the same things. Naturally she met other people in the course of visiting him: families of young criminals, their girlfriends, some of the young criminals themselves, Rod’s pals, presumably. “I want to know how these things happen,” she said. And became shrewd, in her transparent way: “Because it’s terrible, what happened to you. We should find ways to keep it from happening to anyone else.”
Well, it didn’t just happen, did it? Alix’s sweet Roddy pulled a trigger, hardly a passive event. But yes, it would be a good thing if other sweet boys didn’t pull further triggers on anyone else.
Alix earns a small living working in a youth job centre, finding training and work for the troubled. She also volunteers at a drop-in centre for street kids, although as Isla understands it, the boy who shot her was very far from being a street kid, was as close as damnit to being a bumpkin. She gives speeches in high schools and, for that matter, on street corners and in front of government buildings. She has become passionate on the subject of nipping crime in the bud.
“Because,” she says, “if you’re young, it can all look so bleak. Not enough jobs, too many stupid jobs, not much of a future. They need dreams. They need to want something for themselves, and a lot of times nobody really helps them find it. They need hope.”
Yes. Well. In that, they would not be alone.
Is it significant that Isla’s children have not, either of them, directed themselves towards the problems of the crippled, the paralyzed, those on the receiving ends of addicted or dream-deprived bullets?
It’s alarming, even unnerving, how radically and swiftly Alix can shift her attentions. She didn’t even return to the Serenity Corps farm to pack up the rest of her things, just because, she said, “there’s nothing there that’s important now.”
“Is your Master Ambrose angry?” Isla asked. She rather hoped that he was. But Alix seemed puzzled.
“He doesn’t get angry.” Oh, really. “He’ll know I’ve found my serenity my own way. And I know I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. He understands working through to the end of attachment.”
Isla doubted it. She doubted abandonment was what Master Ambrose had in mind. “Good for you,” she said drily. “Good for him.” Alix, poor dumb bunny, looked pleased.
But she’s not a poor dumb bunny at all, she’s just stuck with a large, still-flailing heart. Isla worries about both Alix and Jamie, out there with dangerous, desperate people. They may not know quite how dangerous it is, neither of them having had a moment like Isla’s in Goldie’s; that delicate pas de deux of violence she danced with Roddy, Alix’s young friend, her project, her cause.
Today’s gathering was Jamie and Alix’s idea: a celebration of their mother’s various triumphs. Isla remembers a time when it was possible for celebrations to be unambiguous, but she has been so much the centre of attention the past year, unhappy attention, that its charms are now slight. The gesture itself, though, this business of a number of people making plans and arrangements so that they can be together in the same place at the same time on her behalf — that’s really quite touching. Even Martin, who did go travelling after they sold the agency, and only got back from India a couple of days ago, will be here. Everyone will have stories to tell, it won’t be a gathering dedicated entirely to congratulating and cosseting Isla.
She has another picture in mind. Many hours from now, she expects to look around the table, when everybody’s leaning back in their chairs and there’s a clutter of dirty dishes and spills, and dusk has descended and all the faces are shaded and shadowed, replete and relaxed, and be happy for this event. That it contains most of what’s counted so far in her life.
Except for James, of course, and she can certainly live with his absence.
Otherwise, everyone who counts will be here. It’ll be another memory-keeper sort of picture; like the one she had of sitting on this porch in the heat and light of the day, also come true.
How remarkable it is, looking forward to certain moments, anticipating with some hope certain events. She smiles at Lyle. “You’re right, it’s time. I’ll just roll in and start getting ready. Mother should be here soon.”
She can wheel right into the shower in the ne
w downstairs bathroom, lift herself onto the shower seat, push the chair out although careful to keep it in reach, work the taps, shampoo her own hair; and she can do all this in private, with only the power of her own arms, a luxury she wouldn’t even have noticed a year ago.
This is the sort of thing she needs to hold sharp in her mind. Not gratitude; but a respectful nod to partial blessings.
She hears the phone ring while she’s in the shower. It remains odd to feel hot water pouring over half of her body, but only see it pouring over the rest. As if the rest of her belongs to somebody else.
Lyle comes to the door when she turns off the shower. “That was Alix. She’d like you to call her.” His face is grim and displeased.
“Isn’t she coming?” Instantly Isla sees a hole in the dinner-table picture she’s made. Things falling apart.
“No, I expect she’ll be here. But she does need to talk to you. And I’ll just say right now, I’m not happy about it, but it’s up to you.” Whatever it is. When Lyle doesn’t pass on messages, it generally means he doesn’t want to be in the middle of something. He punches out Alix’s number and hands the phone over.
“Mum,” Alix says, and it turns out she also has a picture in mind, but one that’s radically different from Isla’s.
Only Alix would dream up such a breathtaking notion. Literally, for a moment or two, Isla can’t breathe. “I know it’d be hard, Mum, but you’re good at doing hard things. And I think you’re good at doing good things, too.” As transparent as her Serenity dresses — how foolhardy Alix is, what strange expectations she has, what hopelessly unrealistic demands. A couple of Christians strolling stupidly, ignorantly, into a coliseum of lions.
Which has its appeals.
She takes the deepest breath she can manage, given that her chest still rattles ominously and is not what it once was. “I think, actually, that saying it’d be hard doesn’t quite capture it. And I think you vastly overrate my goodness.” Perhaps Alix is still, optimistic child, in search of the ideal, perfect mother. Which she is obviously not going to get; and which anyway she’s too old for. “You do seem,” Isla says slowly, “to be expecting a great deal from me.”
“Not expecting. I wish you could bring yourself to do it, but it’s completely up to you, I understand that, and sure, you can totally disagree. You’re the one who knows how you feel, all I have are impressions and an idea or two. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important. For everybody, I mean, not just you.”
Lyle has gone quietly away. Isla can hear him in the kitchen, taking plates from the cupboards. She can help set the table, if he will just put plates and cutlery, a few at a time, into her lap. She can wheel around and around the dining room table, setting out knives, forks, spoons, wine glasses, napkins.
Sandra, he said long ago, died with as much grace as she could manage. Isla remembers that; and she remembers believing that would be beyond her. That she would struggle, and cause damage. That if dying with grace meant being reconciled, she would fall sadly short.
Has Lyle found it hard to live with a woman who doesn’t manage her own heart in ungrudging ways? He’s held Isla while she wept, and he has wept as well; he has listened gravely to her rage and has joined her in it. He has been remarkably restrained about how devastatingly his own hopes, plans, and pictures have been ruined. This is not at all the life he had in mind, a clumsy ramp cluttering his porch, a wife who can no more be his partner than she could be Martin’s. Except Martin could fly away.
So could Lyle. He hasn’t, but he could.
Oh. She hadn’t quite realized the extent of her doubt.
“But surely,” she says to Alix, “he’s already said no?”
“Leave that to me. It’s you I’m interested in. I mean, wanting the best for you.”
Isla sighs. This will not be the day she expected. The picture she had in mind is going to turn out differently than the one she was longing for. On the other hand, she does realize that of all people, she should not be surprised by this.
Her at the Wheel
Roddy is fussing with his tie, which he can’t seem to get knotted right. His fingers have gone kind of spastic, and since he’s never had much to do with ties anyway, he keeps screwing up, undoing it, starting all over.
Before he began messing with it, it was a very nice dark blue silky-but-not-silk tie with tiny white flying things, like seagulls. Alix got it for him because she says he’ll feel better if he looks right. “I know it sounds stupid, but clothes really can make a person feel stronger inside,” which is one of the things she says she learned from the dresses she and the other girl members of the Serenity Corps used to wear. “I could look around and see I belonged, wherever we were, out on the streets or at the farm. Like, I wasn’t alone. We were all in it together.”
Different, then, from a jail uniform. Everybody dressing the same there didn’t mean everybody belonged, or felt together with each other. “But,” Alix says, “it’s about whether it’s your choice or not. For me it was.” Whatever. The Serenity Corps sounds weird to him, but he supposes she’s right, it must have been her own choice. And it must have had something to do with making her into who she is: strong, clear, generous and, well, sweet is the word he thinks of, but not in some phony, sickening way. Sweet like honestly good.
He owes Alix. He owes Alix everything. There she was, every other Sunday, waiting in the visitors’ room with her wide-open expression, her eyes willing to absorb anything that came her way. She saved him. Not because she said anything in particular that made some big difference, but that she kept turning up, looking willing to hear whatever he had to say. Who could deny somebody like that? Somebody who so obviously could be hurt, being open-eyed and willing, but who didn’t expect to be hurt, but who would not be especially surprised to be hurt.
For the first while, he didn’t know how to talk, what he should say, what she wanted to hear. So she talked, instead. She told him true stories. She told him about her father, which was the worst one. Well, the worst except for her mother, but she didn’t need to tell him that one. She told him also about her brother, who had trouble with drugs for a while. “He was in jail, too,” she said. “But I wasn’t allowed to visit him. I was too young.”
The strange and also best thing was that she didn’t really say how any of this made her feel, she just recounted events. Even forgiveness didn’t come into it. That was another part of her sitting across from him: that forgiveness didn’t come into it.
In counselling and the group therapy sessions, everybody was supposed to go on about how stuff made them feel, and as things went along, also whether they were sorry. The stories some guys had! The kind of things somebody like him never ran into, like fathers who beat them, not like his dad just moving silently through the house; like mothers who locked them out of their apartments while they had sex with strange men for money, and who didn’t, like his, just throw themselves in the dead of night off a high bridge.
He stayed quiet as much as he could during those sessions not, as he’d supposed, out of an ambition to keep himself to himself and therefore safe. More from embarrassment at the paltriness of his story, shame at his crime’s small foolish motives.
Some people really do suffer. Now Alix, hauling him into both her life and her work, isn’t going to let him forget.
When she visited, she talked about the Serenity Corps, and how she met Master Ambrose and a whole group of them downtown here one day, just a few blocks from where her place is now, as a matter of fact, and how their faces appeared to her, and the ways they moved. “They looked so peaceful and certain. As if they knew. Or as if they knew how to go about knowing. It was very powerful to see them together. And him in the centre. He looked wise, you know? Not loving, because that’s not really part of serenity. More as if he understood the depths of contentment. Being in place. Well, it’s hard to explain.”
“Do you like being called Starglow?” He was curious about that. He liked the way she called him Rod, but that was different, that was still his real name.
“Oh, yes, I’m keeping that. Because you know how stars are so far away, and there’s so many of them, and on a clear night you can look up into the sky and feel so small that you think that truly, nothing much counts? Everything that happens is tiny, it’s just a speck, less than a speck, in the universe, and either that makes you feel kind of bad because obviously you don’t matter at all, or you’re relieved because every speck counts but you’re not the whole thing, you’re not what everything spins around? Like that, anyway. I thought Starglow was so cool and far off, it had light, but distance, too. So yes, I like being Starglow. It reminds me. Makes me mindful.”
Mindful is a word Alix likes.
You might think that feeling like a speck in the cosmos, even a good speck, would make someone watch things happen in a remote sort of way. He has learned this is not the case. Alix takes her speck very seriously. When she wants something, like today, it doesn’t look like much is allowed to get in the way.
She’s getting dressed right now, too. She’ll be wearing a long, light cotton dress, not so different from the Serenity Corps dress he first saw her in, long ago on that amazing court day, except it’s a pale blue with a pattern of tiny white flowers, sort of like the seagulls or whatever they are on his tie. She’s got jeans now, and T-shirts, regular clothes, but for good, she still mostly wears drifty long dresses.