by Annabel Lyon
“On the playing field at recess. Someone went after him pretty much every day. That day was just a little worse. I wasn’t even watching, it was going on in the background kind of thing. I was sitting with my friends talking about the Canucks or whatever. I only remember because the rumour was he went to hospital after. He was back in school the next day, though. I’m saying that was one tough kid. And his name just came back to me, how’s this for weirdness: Taylor. Okay?”
“High schools don’t have recess.”
“You’re right, they don’t,” Liam says. “What am I thinking of?”
My stomach gurgles. “That child ate food in our house.”
We lie quietly for a while under the constellations. I get the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt and then I’m stumped. For a while my ignorance frustrates me, but then I think: I’m urban. Is there any reason why I should know these things?
“Well,” Liam says, and waits.
“I was going to take him shopping tomorrow.”
“Well, do that,” he says.
“Are we hungry?”
“We are. Wow. Now that you say it, I realize.”
“Kind of like the Young Offenders Act.”
The day is pretty much over. Our voices are the only voices around.
“Maybe do the shopping in the afternoon,” Liam says. “I forgot to mention, Isobel figures they’ll probably drop by in the morning.”
“They.”
“They, them. You know who I mean.”
We hear the front door and Ty’s step on the porch. I can’t see him, but he must be looking down at us. “Hey, you guys are lying on the lawn,” he says.
“I already told you to go to bed,” I say. “They’re coming for you in the morning.”
“Did you come out here to lecture us on deviant behaviour?” Liam says.
We hear the door close behind him.
“I think I’ve handled this pretty well so far,” Liam says.
Isobel is right. The next morning I breakfast on toast and water and ibuprofen, and then I tidy up the dining room. I move both laptops, clear the table, dust. At eight-thirty I take a mug of hot milky coffee up to Ty’s room. He wakes up all at once, alarmed. “Isn’t it Labour Day?” he asks.
I sit beside him on the bed while he drinks his coffee. His room smells a little – strong, but not bad. For my eyes, my head this morning, the filtered light is just right. I just want to sit here and look at him for a while.
“Hi, Mom,” he says after about five minutes.
I go back down to the kitchen and put out his breakfast: whole-grain cereal and an orange. This way, if anyone asks what he ate this morning, it will be something normal.
Last night we had a salad before we went to bed. I lay on my back too long, in the shoals of consciousness, drifting in and out of nightmares. Fully awake again by four, I spent the next couple of hours rehearsing my defence of my family: We’ve always been more like three adults than parents and child. When Ty was a toddler he used to give his toys away. We’ve never hit him, ever. Everything I recalled seemed incriminating. Beside me, Liam slept. “How can you sleep?” I demanded once, aloud.
Now my mouth is dry and I promise myself ice cream, soon, later. I follow the muffled sound of gunshot and tires to Liam’s office – movie posters and coffee air. One wall is painted black to deaden reflection on the big-screen TV. French doors swathed in double layers of black cotton lead into the backyard. Unshaved, Liam sits at his desk, making notes. His eyes flick from the screen to his pad to me. Utterly unrecognizable is the movie to me, as most of them are: black and white, I would say forties, which is odd since he pretends to be over film noir. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Raymond Chandler but lately everything with him is Russia, Russia, Russia. I wonder what he’s thinking.
“Livia Claire.” He points at the screen.
I look, but it’s a big Irish cop in a trench coat setting his gun down to light a cigarette.
“Shit,” Liam says. “Lemme rewind.”
“Have you eaten?”
He’s prodding at the remote. “I want you to see this.” He looks up, catches my eye. “You want them to think we’re sitting here waiting for them?”
“Why not?”
He turns the TV off – a tick, mild static crush – gone. “I had an apple.”
“How do you suppose it started?”
He flips his spiral-bound notebook closed with one hand. “Maybe some protein and coffee.”
“Listen,” I say. “I’m trying to get my mind around this. What happened in that parking lot? How did it start? Maybe they bumped into each other and it turned into a shoving match?”
He looks at me. “Shoving match.”
“Jason must be so – angry, about something.”
“The beauty of the situation,” he says, “is that I don’t have to think about Jason, because he’s not my kid.”
“Our son’s best friend does this Nazi thing and you’re not curious?” I glance down at the carpet, a low, honey-coloured weave, and think: must vacuum.
“I don’t share your fascination with deviance, no.”
That word, again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Forget it.”
“I should have known this would be my fault.”
Liam says, “Absolutely. I distinctly remember saying that.”
“You implied.”
“I suggested,” he says, closing his eyes in a show of saintly patience, “that, with your past, you might have more insight into the situation than me.”
“Jesus Christ. I was politically engaged, once upon a time, which is more than you can say about yourself.”
“You had green hair.” He’s smiling, not nicely.
“Why that so endlessly amuses you, I will never understand.” The room feels warm, as though someone has been nudging up the thermostat, notch by stealthy notch.
“All I’m saying is, the rebelliousness, he doesn’t get it from me,” Liam says.
I could push on at this point. I can see the ghost of the conversation stretching out into the future, all the old insults and accusations. Instead, I try to pretend this isn’t about us. I reset, rewind, take it from the top. I say, “Our son’s best friend does this Nazi thing and you’re not even curious?”
“See, that’s an excellent word to describe it – Nazi,” Liam says. “Because it captures the two essential elements of the act. First, it’s sick. It’s fucking nasty.” He stands up, rests the heels of his hands on the edge of his desk, and leans forward, like he needs to stretch his back. “Second, I don’t get it. You don’t get it. But the thing is, that’s fine, that’s all right, because we’re not supposed to get it. If we could get inside that kind of thinking and understand where it comes from, we’d be Nazis too. It’s inherently incomprehensible to the person of average, I mean not even above-average, average, or even slightly below-average morality. So no, I’m not curious. Plus, I’ve already told you what I thought of Jason. Something not right there all along, I mean, we’ve had this discussion, right? But the key is, whatever it is, it’s inaccessible to me. I was thinking about this last night,” he confesses.
“So you were thinking about it.”
“I analyzed it. I didn’t torture myself.”
“Well, words.” I wave them off. “I analyzed it too, okay? Did you notice how much older than us the Parmenters were?”
Liam shrugs.
“And Jason is an only child?”
He looks out the window. He does bored.
“I’ll bet there’s some stuff there if you scratch the surface, abuse or serious unhappiness at a minimum. Mrs. Parmenter, remember how she looked so fragile? Remember how Ty said she went to bed so early? I wonder if she works. I’ll bet you anything it all comes back to her.”
“As I keep saying, I have no desire to scratch the surface. I lust for coffee and peanuts.”
“Ew.”
“Yep.” He rubs his hands together with relish. “Ty up?”
“
I think.” He follows me out to the kitchen. Ty’s breakfast is still sitting there; above our heads we can hear the shower rain. “We haven’t really told him what to expect.”
“Do we know what to expect?”
I J-cloth some clean counters, thinking. “Some discomfort,” I say finally.
Liam’s already deep into yesterday’s newspaper.
I pour him coffee, make myself decaffeinated black tea. It’s my day off. After a few minutes Ty comes down in jeans and last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival T-shirt. Bare feet, damp head. Hesitating: “I had a shower.”
Liam turns a page without looking up. “Magic.”
Still, the tea is helping. I watch him sit opposite his father and start to eat, our cub. The cereal spoon looks too big for his mouth. He’s a young fourteen, thin and smart and good, so far sneaking under the radar of the girls at school, but not for much longer, I suspect. He’s started talking about basketball tryouts. He’s started talking about coming running with me, and the cross-country team, and clothes. He’s coming into his father’s height and looks; another year and he’ll slay them. An error of judgment is all you can accuse him of here, and it won’t stick. This little thing won’t show on his resume.
“They’re here.” I watch out the window as the cruiser pulls up the middle of the driveway and stops, blocking both sides of the garage. I wait to see the cop from two weeks ago get out, the prick with the moustache and sunglasses, but nothing happens. I tell Ty to run upstairs and put some socks on. I tell Liam, “You should have shaved.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “We’re all fine.”
The doorbell rings. “Should we act surprised?”
Liam says no. “We’re not guilty.”
“Do we say we’ve talked to a lawyer already?”
“No. If we get a lawyer, it isn’t going to be Isobel, so talking to her doesn’t count.”
“But maybe we should ask to have a lawyer here, now, for this. Although I guess they’ll tell us if we need one?”
Liam smiles – faintly, sad. “So trusting.”
The doorbell rings again. “They can’t take him anywhere without us, can they?”
He touches his jaw. I feel it against my own fingertips: sandpaper. “I don’t know.”
We answer the door together. The officer is a Chinese woman named Veronica Stevens. We take her into the dining room and introduce her to Ty, who has this moment appeared in socks and shoes, hair combed, T-shirt tucked into his pants. Liam explains about the “bizarre scene” with the Parmenters the night before. “So we’ve been expecting someone since last night,” Liam says. “Of course, we’re glad you’re doing your job.”
“Uh-huh,” she says.
While she questions Ty, I try to imagine her aiming a gun. She’s a solid little thing, good skin, looks calm. She’s probably a crack shot. “What was that web site?” she’s asking.
“What?” Ty says.
Somewhere nearby a lawn mower starts up. She pushes a pen and a slip of paper across the table to him. “Why don’t you write it down for me, okay, buddy?”
Flushing a little, he writes, folds the paper, and hands it back to her. She opens it, reads it, and tucks it in her notebook. “All right then!” she says.
We all stand up.
“Here’s my card,” she says. “You might want to get in touch with us again. We might want to get in touch with you.”
“Yeah?” Liam says.
“Yeah, probably.” We see her to the door. “Beautiful day!”
“It’s a good one,” Liam says.
“We’re going to need him to come in for a formal statement. We’re doing pretty good so far, though. Hey, is that a bay laurel?”
I say, “Yes, it is.”
“I’m trying to grow one of those,” she says.
Next door, Brill is mowing and watching us. The three of us watch Veronica Stevens get into her car and drive away. No one waves. Brill stands there idling, without the toupée he wears to the investment firm where he works, chewing some kind of little cigar. When she’s gone, he cuts the motor. “You folks have a break-in?”
“Nothing like that,” Liam says.
“Some kind of trouble?”
“Isn’t your grass already pretty short for mowing?”
“Don’t get snotty with me, Mick.” Brill has already complained to us twice about the noise from the landscapers, whereas I’ve sunk bamboo kebab skewers amongst the delphs to stop his cats shitting in my beds, so this is a pretty typical exchange. Still. “That brat of yours been shoplifting?”
“Ignore.” I pull Liam inside, closing the door.
“Shoplifting, yeah, shoplifting,” Liam says.
“You need anything?”
High noon and Liam is back in the black room with his movie. I’m key-fingered, key-twirling, ready to take Ty on our annual last-minute school-shopping excursion. Normal is how I’m going to act, I’ve decided. Frozen yogurt, maybe a T-shirt for me; binders, jeans, socks, diskettes, dividers, sweaters, and what-all for him. Without looking at me Liam says, “Colombian Dark Roast and a quarter of espresso.”
“Coffee is the rust of the human body,” I tell him. “It eats out your insides.”
He doesn’t smile, instead looks moody, worried. I decide it’s the talking- to we gave Ty after Officer Stevens left. Primarily we dealt with the not coming forward after it was reported on TV, although we also touched on Jason-avoidance at school and elsewhere. “Yeah, I know,” Ty said humbly. While I tactfully went upstairs to make the beds, Liam riffed a little on the exploitation of women in the context of pornographic web sites, and then we were done. I came back down, hugged him, and we sent him off for half an hour of recuperative MuchMusic so we could debrief before shopping.
“Just don’t be too nice to him,” Liam says now. “We want him to learn a lesson from this.”
“I’ll buy him ugly clothes. I’ll push him into walls and stuff, in the stores.” But he still doesn’t smile. “I was thinking, why don’t we all watch a movie together tonight? So he knows he’s not alone and we love him.”
“He knows,” Liam turns back to his notebook.
I touch his shoulder but he shrugs away.
Ty’s waiting in the car. At first he doesn’t want to talk, but after a while he pops back into his old self, maybe a little speeded up. He tells me funny stories about people in other cars and on the sidewalk, what their names are and where they’re going and how they decided what they were going to wear today. It’s a game he’s learned from Liam, who talked just like this – nervous, compulsively funny, painfully afraid of silence – on our first date. “That’s Edgar,” Ty says, nodding at the man in the Lexus next to us at the intersection. “Edgar is eagerly awaiting his mailorder salad spinner to distract him from his marriage.”
“What’s wrong with his marriage?” I zip closed all the windows and put on the air conditioning as a dump truck pulls in front of us.
“Ass,” Ty says to the dump truck. I give him a look. “Ass means donkey. It was in Julius Caesar.”
“What’s wrong with his marriage?”
“His wife is Isis, who is, like, goddess of cats. She’s right over there.” But I’m taking the dump truck and can’t look. “Way to kill us, Mom,” he says, as I scoop around three cars to catch a left on yellow. Someone honks.
“It was yellow!” I say.
“Park close to the doors, like Dad does.” We’re in the mall parking lot now and I join the cruisers. It’s packed. Suddenly Ty wrestles out of his seat belt. “You can let me out here and meet me inside.” I power-lock the doors. “Dictator,” he says. I park in the back lot behind the food court and delivery bays, the mall’s rear end, where the air smells of french fries and garbage, and seagulls pick along the curb. Ty groans.
“You have leg problems?”
“Dad always parks by the doors.”
“That’s part of what makes Dad, Dad,” I say. “I’m Mom.”
Clea
rview Mall tries for festive. At the entrance, a girl on Rollerblades hands us coupons. From the height of her blades she is haughty, freckled. “Hi,” Ty says reflexively, stuffing the coupon in his pocket. When she ignores him, he blushes. Inside are streamers and roaming clowns with whistles. There’s a lineup at the frozen yogurt place.
“Just a minute,” I tell him, but he ignores me. “Ty, what flavour?” I have to raise my voice, he’s moved away.
“Not for me,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Strawberry,” I tell the girl.
“Cone or cup?”
I’ve lost Ty. One hand on the counter to keep my place in line, I’m on my toes trying to see his head amongst the heads. What’s he doing? “Cup, cup, cup,” I say.
After that, she’s slow on purpose. Looking at her, I can’t imagine having a daughter like her, sly-smart to Ty’s dumb-smart, cat to his dog. Her hair is French-braided and clipped with little glitter butterflies, but she’s done her eyes with fuck-me black eyeliner and her mouth looks delicately cruel. Still, paying for my cup of pink, when I inadvertently touch her hand she flinches and I think: there’s someone trapped in there.
“Enjoy your yogurt,” she says.
Following Ty, I pass a toy store, a joke underwear store, a Gap, and a Dream Jeans. The Gap slows me down – they’re doing those fall harvest colours I like, they’re playing the Clash – but then I see my son standing with some other boys, up between Sam’s and the Nike store, so I take my yogurt to a bench to wait him out. I cozy up to the fake palm so I can watch through the fronds without embarrassing him in front of his peers. Every now and then I glance into Dream Jeans like into a tropical fish tank – blond Asian kids in platforms and stripy Wicked Witch of the East socks with skateboards and Tweetie Bird knapsacks – and then back to Ty. The boys with him are tall strangers to me, in enormous jeans with loops of chains and hooded sweatshirts. Next to them, in his sandals and tucked-in T-shirt, Ty looks like a little dork. I wonder how he knows them, what he’s done to earn their respect. I watch them laugh. The bigger one leans forward and shakes both arms from the shoulder, like he’s loosening up for a free throw. He cuffs Ty’s head lightly and they split up, the tall boys into the Nike store, Ty back towards me. Right away when he sees me I hold up my frozen-yogurt cup and say, “I want to finish this and then I want to go to the Gap,” so he won’t think I was spying. He shrugs.