by Joan Barfoot
“Well,” she says cheerfully, “this is awkward, isn’t it? What do you suppose we should talk about?” If Alix has by any chance committed an act of deliberate cruelty today, it’s no mystery where she picked up that keen, slicing skill.
“I don’t know.” Like a twelve-year-old, he looks at his feet. Which he must suddenly become aware are kicking back and forth. Which he must realize hers cannot do, so in mid-swing he stops.
“Why did you come?”
“Alix, I guess. She said I should. I didn’t,” and he glances up with a wild look in his eyes, “want to.” Obviously not. But if he is looking wildly to Isla for some sort of maternal reassurance, he’s banging into a rocky-hard bosom here.
“Then I expect we’re even. No one but Alix was keen on you coming, either. Ordinarily of course I wouldn’t say that to a guest, but I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you. I don’t suppose there’s too many things we need to dance politely around, you and I, the way we maybe would with other people.”
Probably he would be grateful for any dance of politeness that was offered. So there’s that hope dashed. The funny thing is, what she said turns out to have its own sort of truth: this boy is actually someone from whom she needs to have very few privacies. They have, the two of them, seen each other in each other’s rawest form. Removing clothes, exposing histories, is nothing next to that moment in Goldie’s.
“But now that you are here, against everyone’s better judgement including yours and mine, what do you think we should talk about?” He shrugs, helpless, lost. Well then. “I know, how about how we’ve each spent the past year? You tell me all about jail, then I’ll tell you all about the hospital. I bet they’re not so different in some ways. I mean, that you can’t do what you want in either place. Mind you, I still can’t and evidently never will. How about you?”
Too cruel? She didn’t exactly mean to make tears come to his eyes. She thought he’d be tougher. He had a gun, after all. He shot her, didn’t he?
She thought she’d be tougher, too. Maybe this is what Alix meant: that in person, right up close, he is no monstrosity.
Then who will haunt her, what looming figure can she call on, who can she reliably regard as a representative of doom grand and powerful enough to have cost her her legs, crucial movement, necessary sensation? This boy? His insignificance, his meekness, his frank fear, altogether make her doom seem small, her suffering minor, her struggles paltry. What an insult, what a blow.
Is this what Alix found, too? And so did she set out to build him up, make him larger, help him grow into a role he has already played? This is a worthwhile project, if so. Isla’s sly, clever child.
“Tell me,” she asks, perhaps too open-endedly, “how you feel. I mean, besides scared and not wanting to be here.”
“Well,” he says, taking a moment to consider, or maybe just to wonder what answer she’s looking for, “I feel sorry.” He raises his head again, small dull eyes still glittering with tears. “I’m sorry.”
“About what? Getting caught? Going to jail? Trying to rob an ice-cream store? Screwing it up? Shooting me? You feel sorry for yourself, or for me, or what?”
His voice quavers. Heightened fear, if he’s smart. “Everything, I guess. That it happened. I didn’t mean it, any of it. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Me neither,” she agrees. “I couldn’t believe it, either. Still can’t, really. Although here you are, and here I am, and we did have that, what shall we call it, that encounter together, you and I. I guess we have to believe it. Do you think about that moment much? I do. I can’t tell you how many thousands of times I’ve gone over and over it. Every time, quite a shock. How about you?”
“Oh yes,” he breathes. Now he’s regarding her with some strange kind of hope. Peculiar young fellow. “I think, just a little difference, that’s all it would’ve taken. I never even ever shot a gun before. So how could I have hit something that one time?”
“Not something. Someone. Me, in fact.” Oh dear, that sharp tongue of hers. “So you’re not one of those boys who goes hunting all the time, with their fathers, say?”
“No. He goes with his friends. Not me, I never even shot a bird or a rabbit! I like animals, I had a dog, or my grandmother did, except he died when I was away. The only dead animals I ever had anything to do with were already dead when I found them.”
An unpalatable image. She tries to set that one aside. “Then why? What were you looking for? I was at Goldie’s for ice cream, but what were you doing there? With a gun? What was your purpose?”
“We had a plan. We needed money to go away, get an apartment, that kind of thing. I thought it’d be easy. The plan was so clear.” He speaks in bursts now, like a gun. “I wasn’t supposed to use it, except for a fake shot. So it’d look like a real robbery. And then you came in. Just when I was going to do that. Shoot into the wall. So I had the gun up and you startled me. And, I don’t know, it just happened. It just happened.”
Isla knows, and he slowly realizes, what he has told her: that it was a plan, that there was a we, that some gunshot cover was needed to make it look like a real robbery. “Oh geez,” he says. “I was so careful,” and she understands that what he means has nothing to do with firearm safety, but with having been so careful about protecting his friend.
“Yes,” she says, “you certainly were. He should be very grateful. I suppose in many circumstances loyalty is a virtue. Not in this instance in my view, but often. I can see how you might have made that mistake.”
“What will you do?” Puppet-like, his limbs have gone limp and dangly. As if only loyalty, the only good thing he had to say for himself, has been holding him up.
“I don’t know.” She isn’t lying; she really doesn’t know. “I’ll have to think about it. It was a very terrible crime. And as you see,” she gestures towards her legs, “it still is. And will remain.”
“I know. Oh, God. But,” deep breath, “I’m the one pulled the trigger.”
“Believe me, I’m aware of that. But would I be right that on your own, you would not have been standing in Goldie’s, or anywhere else, that day with a gun?”
Yes, she can see he understands that that’s true. Is it good news or bad for him? Does it imply some kind of innocence on his part or some kind of gutlessness? He has been for the past year an armed robber, a gunman. That must feel quite different from hapless follower. Not quite a dupe but certainly a fall guy. “Well, no,” he says. “But I was.” Now it’s her turn to interpret ambiguity: is he insisting on ownership of his big, bold, bad deed, or claiming penitence all for himself?
She can’t believe she’s even wondering this. That she has the slightest interest in these tiny details of his criminal concerns. “You shot me,” she says in wonder. “Does that stagger you? It still staggers me. Or it would if I could stagger.” Time for him to begin learning about dicey verbs. He flinches as if she’d just slapped him. “Does it?” she asks again, more gently; more, in a way, companionably.
“I guess,” he says slowly, “I’d give anything for you to be fixed. You too, I guess. You must hate me.” This does not sound like one of those occasions when something like “You must hate me” is spoken in the interests of hearing the other person say, “Oh, no, not at all, of course not.” It sounds like a fact. Which it must be.
But hatred is huge and requires a huge object, surely. And there is nothing about this boy that is big. The gun was big, and so was the moment, but he is not. “I don’t, you know,” she says, just as slowly as he. “I hate what you did, but that’s a slightly different matter.” How much does an eighteen-year-old understand about these distinctions? Also, does he understand the difference between his saying this was something that happened, and her saying it was something he did to her? “And I’m very angry, as you can probably tell.” She sees him glance past her and turning slightly, sees Alix, with Madelein
e and Bert, watching them from the garden. The conversation out there seems to have calmed down. Alix nods towards the two of them on the porch: telling them what, that they’re doing all right? Alix has no idea. None at all.
“I am, too,” he says unexpectedly. And looks as surprised as if that’s a new thought to him, as well.
“You’re angry?”
“Yeah, well, I did one stupid thing, and everything got wrecked. One minute, if I could have it back, it’d make all the difference. But I can’t, so yeah, I’m mad. I mean, at myself. Everything. You know what I mean?”
He has been hitting his fists on his knees to the beat of his words. His expression is, oh, filled with regret, real anguish, true self-loathing. And some horror, too, at this array of awful sentiments. Has he not said them before? He seems to display, anyway, the particular shock of hearing them for the first time in the air. “Honest to God, I’d kill myself if I could only start over.” His voice veers upwards. “I could kill myself anyway.”
Does Alix have any idea what she has on her hands? And what she has done? Also, does Isla?
“I know,” Isla says quietly. “I’ve thought of that, too.” So she has. He must know she is not patronizing him. “You know, for a while, in the hospital, I was totally paralyzed. No feeling, not my arms and hands, not my legs and feet, nothing. Couldn’t move, couldn’t feel. Unspeakably strange state to be in, so helpless. There were times I believed that I would probably need to die. Except that wasn’t happening by itself, and I couldn’t think anyone was going to help me and I had no means to make it happen myself. I was so furious, and in such despair.” Of course he has to hear this as reproach; but also, perhaps, as an experience she, too, knows a good deal about, one, she supposes, they have in common.
It would be terrible to be him. To know what he has ruined, all by himself. And he is only eighteen. He must want to tear his head off his shoulders.
“Now, as you see, things are better in many ways. Only my legs are lost, although that is a great deal to lose. The strange thing is that I sometimes feel real pain in them, but that’s all, only pain, nothing good. It’s not that they’ll ever be any use to me. But now, I could kill myself. It’s no longer out of my reach. And I’ll tell you something nobody else knows: after the surgery, I did reach to do it. I held knives, I held pills right in my hands, considering it. It’s tempting, isn’t it? Just to reach out and do it? But,” her voice hardens, “as you see, I haven’t. All those possibilities, and I still haven’t done it. Although,” a quick, sharp smile, “you never know about tomorrow. At least I don’t.”
He is leaning forward now, elbows on knees, hunched and close and looking up into her face. “Why not? Why didn’t you?”
She can’t lie. But also she cannot be as careless and unwitting about this young man as Alix.
“Because it was very hard to get here. Even this far, it was too hard an effort to waste. Also, these people.” She gestures vaguely, but doesn’t take her eyes off his. If she lets go he will fall, she knows he will fall.
“These people here, how could I do that to them? There’ve been times that didn’t matter, but mainly it does. My children, well, you know Alix, at least. And my husband. You probably don’t know this, or maybe you do, but we haven’t been together so many years, and I was finally very happy, very safe. So right now, although I suppose I may decide differently at some point, I couldn’t punish him that way. On the other hand I don’t want to be his burden, either. I don’t want him weighed down.”
This, surely, is beyond an eighteen-year-old. Or none of his business. But he is listening carefully, carefully. As Alix says: he seems to crave filling up.
“But you know, my children are young and my husband’s a capable man. They’d survive. My mother, though — well, you see her over there in the garden. She’s been a rock for me, and sometimes she’s saved me, in a few disasters you know nothing about.” Or does he? Hard to say what he and Alix may have discussed. “Aside from anyone else, I couldn’t do that to her. It would be like killing her, too. She’s my mother, so....” She shrugs.
“My mother,” he says softly, “left me. Or she got taken away, I don’t know, I was little. I guess she was sick. Then after a few years, she jumped off a bridge.” Hostility rises sharply between them, the thick consistency of her suspicion: is he seeking her sympathy? Giving some half-assed explanation for having gone off the rails? Repeating a dreary perception from jailhouse therapy? “I guess my grandma would mind a lot, though. And my dad. I guess I didn’t think too much about that, how they’d feel. Like, if I killed myself.”
Yes, she recognizes this: the self-absorption of the victim, the carelessness of the damned. “But you’re not going to. And neither am I. Having come this far.” That’s like a bargain, a pledge.
“I guess not. I don’t know what to do. I’ve found the bridge, though. I tried to imagine.”
She sees the men, Lyle and Jamie and Martin, edging around the corner of the house. Looking towards the porch, gauging events and their place in them, deciding in some soft way to detour to the garden to join Madeleine and Alix and Bert. Robert and William are no doubt getting tired of hurling horseshoes around. Everyone is behaving with considerable delicacy, it seems to her. Or fear. Or confusion. At any rate, they are behaving well, and with respect for mysterious events they’re not part of. She is a very lucky woman, although in a remarkably unlucky way.
“So,” she draws herself up as straight as she can, signalling to them that she’s all right and to this boy that they are now somewhat changing the subject, “if you’re not going to kill yourself, what are you going to do? What are your prospects? Will you be going back at some point to live at your grandmother’s?” This is of interest to her. She doesn’t want to be running into him, as it were, on the streets at unexpected, haphazard moments.
“I don’t think so. Everybody knows. They’d look at me.” One of the circles of hell, no doubt. They look at Isla, too, rolling around in her wheelchair. She is not entirely happy that people are much friendlier now, feeling free to bend over her and fall into conversations about things like weather, shopping chores, even community events that might interest her. Nothing about being crippled, they are far too polite; or uncomfortable. Still, only a couple have spoken to her slowly and loudly as if she’s gone deaf and stupid, not legless. She supposes that says something marginally good.
It’s a hard way, though, as she has remarked to Lyle, to get accepted. Standing up, walking about, it could have taken decades.
“Alix has been helping me. I got my Grade 12 inside.” He stumbles slightly over inside. “So I guess I’ll get some kind of job. She says it won’t be much to start off, even though my marks were pretty good. Probably in fast-food or some kind of a store.” He should hope, then, that he never finds himself facing a kid with a gun. “I wouldn’t mind landscaping, she’s mentioned that, too. I used to mow lawns and do garden work for people. I like being outdoors.”
“Yes, me too. Before all this, what did you have in mind doing?” Well, how would she have answered that at seventeen, eighteen? Some vague notion about words, about advertising, she remembers, not exactly a goal or a prospect or a plan, just an idea. Because by then she had James in mind, too, that older young man, full of promise.
Oh dear, those are tears again. And she has upset the boy, now regarding her anxiously. She shakes her head. “Never mind. Just something I thought of. Go on.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t have any big ideas. I guess if I’d had better marks then, I could have thought about college, but I wasn’t paying much attention to school. Anyway, I don’t think there was enough money for that. But inside, we did different tests about what we’d be good at, maybe, and mine said I could think about working with plants, or animals, or numbers, something like that.” Too bad Jamie abandoned that florist shop; he might have handed his job right over to Rod
.
“Alix has all these college books, you know, where they list courses? She says that’s what I should think about in the long run, but that I’d need to save up the money. It’s different from how I thought.” How chatty he’s becoming. “All we thought about before was getting a good apartment and having a really good time.”
With money from Goldie’s. Did they expect so much from the till of one ice-cream store? Luxury and freedom both? What infants, what hopeless hopefuls.
“It’s not like that, though.”
“No, I don’t imagine it is.” Isla, of course, has no way to visit Alix’s place. She can hardly climb narrow staircases. But as Alix describes it, it’s considerably less than luxurious. Alix, involved in her ill-paid good works, seems to feel those good works require a certain rigour in her environment. But at least she is earning her way, and without any uniformed, doe-eyed panhandling on behalf of the ghastly Master Ambrose. She seems to have the right idea, mainly, as long as she doesn’t lapse into extremity or martyrdom, always a risk, apparently, with Alix.
“I like exploring. I used to do that around here, but now I’m where I would have grown up if my mother hadn’t got sick, so it’s kind of interesting to see how it might have been there, if that hadn’t happened. Like, all the stuff I would’ve known already. I’d kind of like to find some people who knew her. I found the bridge okay, but I don’t know anybody yet who knew her.” Isla is finding this confiding a little annoying. Has she slid in his fearful esteem? Does he now regard her as just a friendly, stationary woman he can talk to?
“But you haven’t held up any stores or robbed any people.”
“No!” He looks shocked. “Oh, no.”
“Why not? You’re not very good at it yet, I’d have thought you might have come out of jail figuring you needed more practice.” It’s so easy to make him shrink. She can scarcely believe she feels badly, but she does. “Sorry,” she says, and can’t believe she has also apologized to this young criminal whom she has brooded on, pictured and fantasized vengeance on, for a year.