The Best Thing for You

by Annabel Lyon

  “Wow,” I say. “I guess we should be proud of him. That’s pretty together.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the Dean tomorrow.”

  With my chopsticks I transfer a piece of beef from my cup to his. “Sounds like they were trying to scare him, coming to the school.” Together we watch a Camry parallel park in the space which has opened up in front of us. Eyeing us, she takes her time. The phô place is hopping now, takeout mostly. “Was Officer Stevens there?”

  “Yes.” Liam slurps up some noodles. “It was just like when she came to the house, all the same questions.”

  “That’s good,” I say, meaning it as a question.

  “The lawyer thinks we’re not done. I made us an appointment for the day after tomorrow.”

  “Have you paid him yet?”

  “Some.”

  “Some,” I repeat. I re-lid my soup, prop it between Liam’s knees, and start the car. “Can we go home now?”

  “Seat belt.”

  I hesitate. “You don’t think he was there, do you?”

  He shakes his head.

  At home, I knock on Ty’s door. “Minute!” he says.

  “No, now.” He opens the door, a little flushed. “Am I bothering you?”

  “Can I come out now?”

  Instead, I go in and look around. Bed rumpled but made. Window open so things are smelling good, better. On the computer, his screensaver – a multicoloured, gyrating webbing, expanding and contracting like something vaguely undersea – tells me he hasn’t been on in at least five minutes unless he’s changed the settings I fixed for him when we last upgraded, three months ago. I give the mouse a flick to see what he’s doing and get an empty page of Word.

  He’s watching me from the doorway. “Way to infringe my privacy, Mom.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “You have.” He makes a face. “You smell spicy. Did you bring me any?”

  “No.” I figure he was masturbating. “How was your field trip today?”

  He flushes.

  “Come for a run?”

  Amazingly, without hesitating, he says, “I gotta change.”

  Downstairs I find Liam surveying his office. “Something’s missing,” he says.

  “Air?”

  “A sofa.” I tell him Ty and I are going out for a bit. “Take your time,” he says.

  Ty’s waiting for me in his basketball gear. He waits while I lock the front door and tie the key to my shoe. So far we’ve run together maybe half a dozen times this year. He’s got good intentions and a good clean form, fast, but my endurance pisses him off, discourages him, so I say, “I just want a small one today,” and hope I’m not too obvious.

  The beach is crowded with strollers and runners, good citizens released from work, bankers in singlets, girls with their girlfriends and dogs. Ty and I, I’m thinking, make a nice pair, a nice picture: healthy lifestyle, healthy relationship, nice clothes, smooth. The business with the police gives us an urgency, an aristocracy the people around us lack. We pass them like cattle.

  “Scary day?” I ask.

  He waggles a hand.

  “Talk. If you can’t talk, you’re going too fast.”

  “I wasn’t scared.”

  “Was Jason at school today?”

  He’s speeding up. “No.”

  “Was anybody talking about him? Like, asking where he was?”

  “No.” I point to the next fountain, meaning: let’s make for that. “Mom, Jason’s not very popular. Kids wouldn’t really be curious about where he is. They wouldn’t notice.”

  “Are you?”

  “Curious?”

  “Popular.”

  He’s matching me, stride for stride. He’s growing up. “I’m all right.”

  “What does that mean, all right?”

  A clot-calved biker is filling his water bottle at the fountain with one hand, talking into a cellphone. We prowl, waiting. When he’s finished we take turns. The water is icy. Ty gargles.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I’m extremely popular.” Then, startling both of us, “I’m the love god.” The biker, who in his Mao-collared spandex shirt had retreated to lean against a nearby tree, grins and toasts my son with his water bottle.

  “Hail,” I say.

  “Were you popular in high school?” We start back, loping gently now. It’s the kind of question that makes me suspicious. I can see wanting to change the subject after that love god crack, but it’s a little too sitcom for him, too sweetly earnest. Though perhaps it’s no different from me enjoying the image of the pair of us, imagining people must look at us running together and smile. And today can’t have been a good day, by high-school standards: he drew attention, which is never good. So I try.

  “I was a brainy girl,” I say. “My friends were not the trendiest, but I wasn’t lonely either. We went to dances and stuff. Is that what you mean?”

  “What about Dad?”

  “Dad and I didn’t go to the same high school. We met in university. You know that.”

  “I know. I mean, was he popular?”

  “Listen to me carefully,” I say. “Your father was a geek and I took pity on him. Anything he tells you different is an evil lie.”

  “Did you have other boyfriends than him?”

  “Zillions.”

  “Did you really have green hair?”

  I sigh. “You know I did. Long ago in a land far, far away, when I was very angry about things like greed and insincerity and classical music and world hunger.”

  “Mom Vicious,” Ty says.

  “I was very big on breaking the bonds of convention. I was very big on destroying illusion in all its manifestations. The illusion of good manners, the illusion of capitalism, the illusion of responsibility to an irresponsible government, the illusion of beauty –”

  “But you became a doctor.”

  I poke him in the arm. “Stop listening to your dad so much, okay? The two are not incompatible. I cared about people and about making the world a better place. That’s what I did care about. I was extremely young. Do you know the origins of Velcro?”

  He doesn’t. I tell him. “Is that true?” he says.

  “How come, at the police station, you called your dad and not me?”

  He hesitates. Then: “Your job is more important.”

  And he’s right, though I can’t say so. “Walk,” I instruct. We’re back in the streets, approaching home. “Do you worry about people liking you?”

  “Dad says Jason is sick,” he says instead of answering. “Is that what you think too?”

  “As a doctor, you mean?” He nods. “What do you think I’m going to say?”

  “You’d need to examine him?”

  “Well, that,” I say. “What do you think?”

  He presses his thumb several times against the side of his index finger, as though pointing a remote at my head, and says, “Click. Click.” This is family code for when someone changes the subject.

  “I don’t understand what he did,” I say to placate him. “I don’t want to judge him before I’ve tried to understand. I don’t think calling someone sick is a good excuse for ignoring his behaviour or dismissing it. Maybe there are some categories of people who are just hopeless, but the thing is, it’s really difficult to know for sure who they are. It’s not, you know, printed on their faces, usually. Sometimes you have to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

  We’re standing in the front yard, vaguely stretching. I stand on one leg and grab my ankle behind me, pulling to work my quad. Ty says softly, “Is that why you believe me?”

  “Who doesn’t believe you?” I say sharply.

  He shrugs and for the second time in years I see him bite hard, trying not to crumple. “I don’t know.”

  “Dad believes you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ty, he does.”

  “Okay.”

  “He gets mad when he gets surpri
sed, that’s all.” When he doesn’t say anything I touch his arm. “What are you thinking?”

  Really, really quietly he says, “I’m so hungry right now.”

  We’re in the kitchen grating low-fat cheese on multi-grain toast when Liam comes to tell us the police charged someone this afternoon with the beating, but they can’t release the accused’s name because he’s underage. So far he’s the only suspect.

  “So,” I say. “Jesus. I guess they phoned?”

  Liam tells Ty, “Just now, on the TV news.”

  Later, after we’ve both showered and Ty’s gone to bed, I find Liam in the garage breaking his new coffee box down for the recycling. We keep a neat garage, generally – lit, swept, lawn chairs hung up on nails, stainless-steel garden tools arrayed on the funky-functional storage modules, space to walk entirely around each car, just like in a magazine – but Liam is struggling, making a mess. There are Styrofoam chips in a spray on the floor around him, and the box he’s simultaneously pushing and pulling at will just not give. The box’s guts – more foam moulding and assorted plastic, snow-white twist-ties, a booklet or two – are strewn in widening disorder as he shuffles around, kicking at them, trying different tactics with the box. He tries holding it down by his knees for leverage, then up by his chest for power. He pulls and pulls. He stops, takes a deep breath, and wings the box at my car with a shout of frustration. It bounces off and lands on its side, back by his feet. The passing breeze of it has sent a few more of the foam peanuts skittling away under the car. He stands with his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his nose.

  I turn to go silently back into the house but my foot dings against one of three or four rustic-style aluminum pails I use to store my spring bulbs in. He turns to look at me.

  “You have to pop the tape,” I say.

  He looks like he’s afraid to move, like whatever action he intends will be expressed as violence, which he can only prevent by standing absolutely still. I make myself go over, pick up the box, score a break in the packing tape with my fingernail, and flatten the box with a quick pull.

  “You have to pop the tape,” I say again.

  “Kate,” he says. I can see he’s working up to something so I stand there for a long time, waiting for him to let it out. But all he comes up with is, “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  He won’t say. I put my arms around him, tentatively, put my head on his shoulder. He hangs on pretty hard. I rub his back and stare at the box on the ground, which shows a crisp photograph of a full pot of translucent, chocolate-coloured coffee. It could make you cry, the steam alone is as delicate as art. The writing is in Italian.

  “Come to bed,” I say.

  I make a move to step backwards but he doesn’t let me go. We stand like that for a few more minutes. He swallows, once, but I can hear his breathing slow.

  “Come to bed,” I say again.

  “Soon,” he promises, letting go this time.

  It is midnight before I stop trying to stay awake, waiting for him.

  Isobel’s great criminal lawyer works on the thirty-first floor of one of the glass bank towers downtown. His firm is green leather and brushed bronze, Supreme Court Reports, art. I think I recognize a Jasper Johns in the lobby. I nudge Liam. He and Ty, in ties, look identically miserable.

  “On the other hand, lots of people have interpreted the number eight,” Liam says.

  “Our retainer is insuring that.”

  “Nah, that’s just a print,” Isobel’s great lawyer says, startling us. He came from somewhere behind. “Your retainer keeps me in golf clubs.” We shake hands. I know his name to be Joe Leith. He doesn’t look like Sam Spade, too neat and tall, but I like that he’s a prick, at least. At least he doesn’t have one milky eye and fingerprints on his glasses and nervousness. I had a bad experience once.

  His office is around a couple of Persian-carpeted corners. Secretaries with Dictaphones word-process in softly-lit nooks opposite their bosses’ doorways. I tell Ty to stand up straight. In the office, Joe Leith touches the back of a couple of chairs, meaning for us, before crossing behind his desk and seating himself. Liam sits right down and wings his spiral-bound pad open with one hand, the way he does. I hesitate, studying a poster next to the guy’s professional diplomas: a Japanese silkscreen of a sumo wrestler, robed, with that pixie hair. It says, “Sumo Bashô 1998.”

  “I love,” Joe Leith says, following my gaze.

  Ty, too, is standing, waiting for me. He sits when I do.

  “You know there’s a witness, right?” This Joe Leith has a file open in front of him now. “This is how they identified Jason Parmenter. This individual, the video-store clerk, claims he looks out the window and sees some kids roughhousing in the parking lot. He can’t see them too clearly, doesn’t think anything of it. Then one of the kids comes in to rent a movie. But, later, when the police come calling, he can check the computer –”

  “What an idiot,” Liam says.

  We all look at him. I can tell he was criticizing it like a movie. I know him.

  “Jason, I mean,” Liam says.

  “The good news is, our clerk cannot identify the exact number of individuals he saw in the parking lot,” Joe Leith continues. “However, he thinks more than two. The only one he can describe is the little one, who came into the store.”

  “This would be Jason.”

  He bows to me, a sitting bow. “This would be Jason.”

  “Well, so, good.”

  “So, now. If Tyler is charged,” he says, “and personally, if I were the Crown, I would charge him, you’re going to have a first appearance in a few days.”

  “What do you mean, you would charge him?” Liam demands.

  “I would charge your son because it might be enough to make him confess, if he was there, and if he wasn’t or if I can’t get sufficient evidence I can just drop the charges later. Costs me nothing. If he’s charged and it sticks, you’re looking at the actual trial in another couple of months. The system is not fast but juveniles have priority. If something opens up it could be as soon as one month.”

  Ty tightens his shoulders in his jacket. It’s not a shrug any more.

  “Now, Tyler,” he says, smiling, and for the next twenty minutes or so Liam and I watch him extract details from our son, getting the events of that evening lined up like dominoes. Ty mumbles syllables, he won’t make eye contact, but what he says is credible enough. Jason went out; he stayed back, feigning tiredness, so he could watch naked girls on the Internet. He’s not sure of times. He didn’t see or speak to anyone else in the house while Jason was out. When Jason got back, they went down to the rec room and watched the movie he had rented, Anaconda.

  The lawyer takes notes. Liam takes notes. I’m thinking about a phone call I got last night, after Ty was in bed. When I answered the piece of meat at the other end hesitated. I heard him say, “No, man, it’s his mom.” Then, to me, “He’s got my math homework, right?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “No, yeah, he does. Is he there?”

  “Do you shave?”

  “Course I fucking shave, fuck,” he said. I hung up.

  Now this Joe Leith says, “That’s us.” He means we’re done.

  I ask him if I will have to testify since I was the first person to examine the victim. Ty and Liam look awed – they had forgotten.

  “Nah,” Joe Leith says. “Written reports are all they’ll want. Just as well, eh? We don’t need the whole family up there.”

  In the elevator, on the way down, I ask Ty where he’d like to go for lunch. He grunts.

  “Skip it,” Liam says.

  “Well, I want lunch,” I say. “Maybe I should have asked Joe Sumo up there. Maybe he would have had lunch with me.”

  “So, so, go back,” Liam says. He looks slapped.

  “I could, I might,” I say. “Costs me nothing.”

  “Shut up,” Ty says, grabbing his head, choking on tears. “Could you both just sh
ut up?”

  When Ty was a baby, we shared a house with some of Liam’s film-school friends. I was still in pre-med. Liam had taken a year off to work nights as a security guard so we could live. We barely saw each other, barely knew each other, and Ty, this little scrap in a soft blanket, was already wearing us down. Occasionally the film students liked to watch themselves babysit: they would eat Cheesies in front of the TV, taking turns cuddling the little guy and holding him up so he could watch Taxi reruns with them while Liam and I went out to a real movie and Chinese food afterwards, staring warily at each other across plates of guy ding and won ton, under the paper lanterns. I have to say it was a bad time. Tyler was a good baby, sucking your fingers and peeping when he was hungry; but I had only recently taken the safety pins out of my ears, and Liam was beginning to refer cynically to his unfinished Master’s thesis, and for a time we behaved like animals, fucking and hissing at each other, and feeding the baby in silence, trying to shield him from the toxic thing we had for each other. For a time, too, Liam moved back to Nova Scotia. When he came back he re-matriculated, got a job as a teaching assistant, found, painted, and furnished a one-bedroom apartment, marched me down to City Hall for a marriage licence, and enlisted Ty in the University’s daycare program. There were still problems: Liam’s family, for instance – mother and aunts and a couple of brothers – who knew me by reputation and a few photographs Liam had unwisely shown them, who continued to phone at odd hours, their mosquito voices whining down the phone. There were my own attitudes – towards school, assorted authorities, my new in-laws, the world – which I could not shed as quickly as my old clothes. There was Liam, who at times still seemed as repelled by me as he was attracted, staring at me like he was trying to bore holes, like he was trying to understand why he couldn’t let me go, while I raged and taunted and still tried (in my new, whole Levi’s and happy cotton sweaters, bizarrely brunette, child on my hip) to shock us down below the surface of things, to some reality that was not, in my estimation, a big shiny lie.

  But we were trying, and you could say that was the important thing.