by Annabel Lyon
“Tea, coffee?” I count heads.
“Kate,” Liam says.
“We weren’t there,” I say. “There may have been reasons. We don’t know how it happened, what he did or what they did. But I agree with May. If the parents are good people, the children will be good people. Good kids will not get involved in things like that, and I believe that. A kid who’s been good all his life does not suddenly turn on a man with Down syndrome just because there’s an opportunity. You look at the kid who did this, you look at all the circumstances of his life, and you’ll find a straight path back from this act to other acts, to the upbringing, to the parents. I’m talking about patterns of behaviour, established predictable patterns. A thing like that doesn’t come out of a vacuum.”
Jupiter’s waving his hand even as I’m talking. “Chicken and egg, fate!” he says, getting ready to argue.
“Down syndrome,” May repeats. “Was that on the news?”
“Daddy, please,” Ty says.
“Come here,” I say. He comes over to where I’m scraping bits into the garbage disposal. “Are you really doing homework up there?” He shrugs. Liam is pouring the rest of the wine, saying something to May, who’s smiling again. I lower my voice: “Borneo?”
“I was making conversation.”
I walk him to the foot of the stairs, my arm on his shoulders. “Quit pissing him off.”
He touches his face again. “He’s pissing me off.” But sick, not insolent, is how he looks.
“I’ll tell you something,” I say. “When you came home from school looking like that? He started crying. After you went to bed.”
Ty doesn’t say anything.
“He loves you so much,” I say.
“Ty,” Liam calls. Startled, he flinches.
The kitchen smells of coffee now, that bracing, roast smell, and I see Liam has ferreted a bottle of liqueur from the cupboard under the food processor where we keep the kirsch and other undrinkables we seem to have acquired over the years.
“Sit,” Liam tells Ty, holding the bottle up against the light and tilting it. Liquid rolls thickly inside. May and Jupiter look content enough but there’s an edge to Liam I’m not liking. “We need to work on your conversation skills,” he says. “You can start by telling us about your real, actual homework.”
“How about he just goes and does his real, actual homework?” I say. I haven’t let go of Ty’s shoulder.
Liam puts the bottle down.
“I have a biology lab,” Ty says quickly. “We’re doing a genetics unit and the parts of the cell. You want me to tell you the parts of the cell?”
May and Jupiter have gone still.
“Yes,” Liam says.
“No,” I say. I put both my hands on his shoulders and turn him to face me, so he can’t see his father. “I want you to go upstairs now and finish off what you’re doing. I’ll bring you your dessert up in a little while. And not so loud with the music, we’re trying to hear ourselves think down here.” I give my eyes a Nixon-flick towards our guests, hoping he’ll pick up on it.
“Good night, Mrs. Chan, Mr. Chan,” he says. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Good night,” they say. Their voices sound small and quiet.
“Go,” I say. I turn him away and give him a push towards the stairs, a little harder than I mean to. He goes.
“What you see here is a difference of parenting styles,” Liam says when the sound of Ty’s light step on the stairs has disappeared. “On the one hand, I’m trying to raise our son to be a moderately decent human being. On the other hand, Kate here doesn’t care what he turns into so long as she gets to be the good cop. Brandy?”
Jupiter quickly lifts a flat palm, dismissing the bottle. May, blushing, shakes her head. I see them exchange a glance, see Jupiter straighten up in his chair, preparatory to leaving. I know if they go now there’ll be a rent between May and me that no amount of bubble tea and friendliness will repair. “Coffee, dessert,” I say, eyebrows raised, nodding encouragement, trying to make it a question and a statement at the same time.
May looks at Jupiter. “I would love a coffee,” he says. “Could I just use your bathroom?”
I lead him out of the kitchen and down the hall. “Should we go?” he says, when we’re out of earshot. I like how he does it – unembarrassed, matter-of-fact. His manner makes it easier to respond in kind.
“Not at all,” I say, reaching in for the light and stepping out of his way at the same time. “I’m sorry about that back there. Ty’s always been a great kid, great grades, nice friends, cleans his room, you name it, and suddenly these past few weeks it’s just been one headache after another. It’s just – caused a few tensions, lately. It’s just karma, right? I guess now we have to pay for all those years of him eating his vegetables and so on.”
“I like the alien abduction theory.” Jupiter squeezes past me so that now we’ve traded spots – him in the doorway, me in the hall. He lowers his voice to a cheesy intense whisper and wiggles his fingers by his ears to be spooky. “That’s not really your kid out there.”
“That’s not really my husband out there. This isn’t really me, for that matter. We must sound pathological to you.”
He does a double take and a smile, and puts one hand on the door. “You seem like slamming parents to me, Kate. I know May thinks the world of you.”
“But?”
He grabs his belt and does a little collapse at the knees with a frazzled look on his face.
“Go,” I say, laughing, turning away. “I’m the good cop. I’m not stopping you.”
In the kitchen, May and Liam are talking about the clinic.
“It’s a problem,” May is saying. “Salaries here just aren’t competitive with the States. It’s almost impossible to keep new nurses in the country.”
“You stayed, though, for instance.” Liam doesn’t look at me.
“My family is here, my life.” May smiles up at me when I hold a cup of coffee out to her. Liam’s I set down in front of him.
“I wouldn’t have minded the opportunity to travel,” Liam says, staring at his cup without touching it. “San Francisco, Saint Petersburg. At certain points it would have been extremely beneficial to my career. I found having a family quite limiting, in fact.”
“Financially,” May says, frowning and nodding at the same time, trying to understand.
“That too,” Liam says.
“Thanks so much,” I say, as though this is just another of our routines, as though this is a line he’s used before and I’m not rocking, reeling hurt.
“Calvin’s travelled a lot, I think,” May tells me. “Thailand, Vietnam. Did you know he’s a Buddhist?”
I nod gravely. “You can just tell.”
“Tell what?” Jupiter’s in the doorway, pulling at his cuffs. He gestures I shouldn’t get up, he’ll help himself to coffee.
“Calvin, at work,” May says. “I told you about him. He’s kind of cute, too, in a sad sort of way.” She giggles. Jupiter rolls his eyes and puts his hands round May’s neck like he’s going to strangle her. Then he sits down and sips his coffee.
“Kate’s fitting in, then, at the new job,” Liam says. “Everybody loves Kate, as usual.”
May giggles again, inadvertently, then stops, like she’s stopped a bottle of bubbles. She’s not stupid, she has radar. She glances at Jupiter again and this time it’s not a question. He holds up his cup for a fraction of a second which I take to mean, I know. Just let me finish this.
Liam must have seen the signals too, for he puts the brandy bottle away and makes some more conversation about nursing shortages and government cutbacks, but May and Jupiter are wary and within a few minutes they’re on their feet pleading an early morning. We hug, and the men shake hands again, and May says, “See you Monday.”
“They don’t even work weekends, I’m pretty sure,” I tell Liam when we’ve closed the door behind them.
“Lucky them,” he says.
We spe
nd some time in the kitchen cleaning up. Silence makes the house feel like a decompression tank down under water. Liam starts taking chairs out into the hallway so he can sweep. “Let’s move the fridge,” I suggest. We grapple the fridge out of its nook until we can see the precise dimensions of its absence: a square patch of dust and a couple of Cheerios.
“May has a crush on this Calvin guy from your work, wouldn’t you say?” Liam says. “Did she talk about anything else all evening? I can’t remember.”
“He likes her too,” I say. What the hell. “He tries to hide it but he can’t. It’s kind of endearing.”
“Poor Jupiter.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s always worse for the husband, isn’t it? So limiting.”
He gives me a look from the old days: misery. Then: “I’m going to Mass tomorrow.”
“Oh, great,” I say.
“I have to do something.”
I cap the Pine-Sol with a sponge and flip the bottle upside down, then back. Kneeling in the gap between fridge and wall, I make passes over the floor. The dust collects on the sponge in black lines. The linoleum shines wetly. The fumes are the best.
“I want to go to confession,” he says.
“Why?” I take another shot of Pine-Sol on the sponge and hand it to him. “Now what have you done?”
Drainage ditches bisect what used to be the back lawn; it’s rumpled as a rug now, creased and flipped back. The yard is a lot of bumps. I’m thinking it looks worse than when they started. Pushing aside some tarpaulins protecting the glass, I go into the greenhouse, a stuffy orange ten-by-ten space, and remove a Coke can and a MMMarvellous MMMuffins bag of cigarette butts. I can’t imagine why they take their lunch in here unless it’s not to be seen. But why?
A few days ago I suggested the thing about the holly. The older one said, “That your boy out front?” We could hear basketball sounds – spaced slaps, the backboard rattle. It was a rhythm.
He knew. I said sharply, “Why?”
His eyes shifted. “Glossy green sprigs tucked around the house at Christmastime. Sure, I’m seeing it. You know the little cute berries are poisonous?”
The assistant, shovel in hand, stood slack-shouldered, slack-mouthed, as though what we were talking about changed everything.
Now, late-September sun sparks off the mud, tangles in the trees. I look for a conspicuous place to leave the can and the bag. Maybe it’s not so bad: five evergreen bushes, roots balled in burlap, line the fence we share with Brill. You see a bird here, every once in a while, a pigeon, wings snapping the air with a sound like laundry. Eventually it’ll all heal over. Newness and all that, new green growth.
I drop the garbage in a wheelbarrow and pace over to the black-curtained French doors to Liam’s office. I tick on the glass with a knuckle. “Open,” Liam calls. I slide the door but there’s a new wrinkle: a sofa barring my way. As usual my husband is watching a movie. I let myself slide over the back of the sofa, landing with my spine on the seat and my feet in the air. I could have managed better but there’s mud on my sneakers and the sofa looks new.
“This is not good.” I stare at my feet in the air. “In my condition.”
“You have a condition?”
“Officially.”
“Well,” Liam says. I can’t see him – I’m upside down, I’m in the sun, and he’s not. “You going to close that door?” I kick my shoes off and close it with a sock foot, sliding us both back into the dark. “Come here.”
I go stand behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He puts his hands on my hands and we watch his movie together for a while. Gangsters are planning a heist; they talk fast and mean. In the background a pretty moll fixes drinks and slips a baby revolver, a gunlet, in her garter when no one’s looking. She has a white face and black lips – the movie is black and white. Liam uses the remote to squiggle through a few scenes. We watch an interview between the moll and a detective, him struggling to light a cigarette, her looking bored. Liam freezes the frame on her heart-shaped face. “Livia Claire,” he says.
On an impulse, I reach down between his legs. He’s hard.
“Where’d that sofa come from?” I ask.
“Bought it,” he says, swallowing. It’s a futon on a pine frame, with a black cotton cover on the mattress. “Lately I want to nap.”
“Tell me she’s dead.”
“If she weren’t, she’d be older than my granny. It’s 1941 in there.”
We watch a little more. “I’d question your placement,” I say finally. “If you’re ever planning to use that door again as, you know, a door.”
“Never.” I wander over for my shoes and try to tug straight some diagonal creases in the futon cover. “Leave it.”
From the bookcase I collect a dirty coffee mug and the lifestyle section of this morning’s paper. “You jerk off in here, don’t you?” I gesture with the shoes, but he doesn’t answer. “Just like old times. I’m telling Ty about the baby, okay?”
He shrugs.
I find Ty up in his room with some kid I’ve never seen before. Ty’s sitting on the floor and the new boy’s ape-limbed all over the bed. The window is wide open.
“This is Carl,” Ty says. “He’s the one who hit me in the face.”
“Don’t like you, Carl,” I say.
“It’s all right, Kate. We worked it out.”
Ty giggles. After a second I place it: the meat-voice of the late-night phone calls.
“Tyler, sweetie, it’s almost time for you to go watch your favourite shows, okay?” I say.
Carl tells me he loves my T-shirt.
“Get your fucking shoes off the quilt.” Downstairs the doorbell rings. “And put those cigarettes out!”
On the doorstep are Officer Stevens and another officer, taller, a man. “Dr. Clary, is Tyler home?” Officer Stevens asks.
“Hi,” I say.
Their cruiser is parked in the driveway.
“He’s home,” I say. “Will you wait just a minute?”
“We have a few more questions. We’re going to need him at the station.”
Liam looks up when I come into his den. “I can’t stand this,” he says. “I’m unhappy. We need to talk.”
I tell him police are here, and go upstairs for Ty. “Carl, I’m afraid something has come up and I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” I say. “Ty, shoes.”
“It was me smoking, not Ty,” Carl says.
“Officer Stevens is here,” I tell Ty. “Carl, now.” I pause on the stairs, wondering if I have time to change out of the skull T-shirt.
“What the fuck did you do, man?” I hear Carl ask Ty, laughing.
Downstairs, the officers have stepped into the hall. They step aside to let Carl pass. “Hi,” he mumbles, leaving.
“Hello there!” the male officer says.
Liam hurries in, telling us the lawyer will meet us at the station.
Outside, Brill is belly-up to the fence separating our properties. He’s seen the cruiser, the uniformed officers: he can look now, he can take his time. The male officer has his hand on Ty’s shoulder. None of us says anything.
The deal is, I ride in the back seat with Ty, and Liam will follow in the Jetta.
“It’s a mistake,” I tell Joe Leith. “Will you please look at him? He’s a child. It’s a dirty mistake.”
It’s after; we’re in the car. They’ve charged him. They’ve charged him.
“Like I told you,” Joe Leith says. He’s an outline to me – a voice and some thick lines. He’s got no face. “They’re trying to flush out the undergrowth. It’s what they do.”
He says he can make the charge go away. He says, give him a couple of days. “They’ve got no substance,” he keeps saying, waving his white hands. “It’s all very thin.”
“They can’t raise him, can they?” Liam asks.
I look at him, can’t look at him.
“Not at all,” the lawyer says soothingly.
Liam has the papers. When you get
charged, there are papers. I say, “Raise him?”
“To adult court.”
Joe Leith is centring the knot of his tie with three fingers and a thumb, firming it up.
“Raise him?” I repeat. “You’ve already got the fucking jargon?”
“Isobel brought it up. I’m just telling you what Isobel said.”
“Isobel,” I say.
“How is dear Isobel?” Joe Leith says.
When we get home we have a fight with yelling. After a while Ty goes to his room. Liam and I end up in our bedroom with his laptop, trying to figure out if this web site our son claims to have been cruising that night is real.
“Slow,” Liam says impatiently as we wait to get on-line. It’s after-dinner homework time, high-use time. The connection fails and fails again. There’s spit on the windows, the first of the fall rains. We hear the modem crush. “Read me that site.”
“I don’t have it.”
“In the Information,” he says. “The sheets, the sheets.” I hand him the papers from the police. He turns the pages back gingerly, my husband, afraid to make a crease at the staple.
“That witness only saw Jason up close,” I remind him, but in my speaking voice this time. “It’s Jason’s word against Ty’s. I know who I believe.” I read off the name of the site, something that sounds innocuous enough. He types it with all his fingers, like a pro. “Got it?”
“Got it.” Liam hunches, then leans back. “Christ, this is going to take forever.”
I look over his shoulder. So far the site is scaffolding, a lot of empty boxes with ripped corners and tricolour balls. The computer grinds, working on it.
“Graphics,” Liam says.
“I can’t.” I look away.
I can hear him breathing while he waits. I lie down on the bed.
“You fucker.” Liam hits a key. “Lost the connection.”
“It exists. How much more do you need?”
He fires up the modem again. I leaf through the papers. “How are you doing?” he says grudgingly. It’s the first time he’s asked, the first kind word of the evening.
“We’re fine,” I say.
“Isobel says it would be illegal for the media to report his name. She says in the court documents they’ll refer to him as T.C.”