by Annabel Lyon
“I just want to watch this next one,” the woman says.
Jason is led in from a side door. I haven’t seen him since the night we took wine to his parents’ house. He wears leather shoes, dark dress pants, and a dark shirt buttoned up all the way, but no tie. He notices us right away, can’t not – the courtroom is not much bigger than a school classroom. I see him nod at Ty, next to me, who bobs his head. Shame? Liam’s seen, too; on my other side, he nudges me, but I’m not ready to react. Jason and his lawyer stand while the clerk reads the name of their file, and sit with their backs to us while the judge reads the charge and then the verdict. Jason’s lawyer talks a bit about Jason’s grades and behaviour at school – apparently he was having troubles – and about his little personality generally, and then the judge hands down his sentence: a year in juvenile detention. Jason doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look up as he’s led back out the way he came in. Ty, beside me, exhales.
“All rise,” the clerk says, and then it’s time for lunch. Just like that.
“Mr. Leith,” Crown says to Joe Sumo. We follow them out of the courtroom along with the general throng. The Parmenters are nowhere to be seen. We watch the two men walk a little ways up the hall together, then shake hands. Crown hurries away while our lawyer comes stepping back to us, a costly peacock. “He’s dropping the charge against Tyler. You’ll get formal notification tomorrow the latest.”
“That kid was psycho,” the K-Y girl is saying, a few feet away.
“I’m just phoning your Dad.” The woman pulls a cellphone from one zippered pocket and bends over to dial, stretching the shiny fabric of her pants over her hams.
“I’m not talking to him,” the girl says. “I don’t want lunch. I hate the cafeteria here.”
“Did I say you had to talk to him?” the woman says.
“You’re not smiling!” Joe Sumo tells Ty.
“It’s grotesque.”
“But good, for us.”
“Great for us.”
“Animal, though. Jason.”
“I know who you meant.”
We’re giddy as moonlight here in the backyard in the sliding late afternoon sun, still trying to process it all.
“That’s basically it,” Liam keeps saying. “Right? For us?”
I start picking dead needles off the cedar deck. “It’s excellent,” I tell him. “It’s the bluebird of good news.”
“We’re lucky, though, hey. If you think we let Ty play with him all summer long.”
“We weren’t to know.”
“But that’s basically it, now, isn’t it?” Liam says.
Behind us we hear the latch. Ty steps through the kitchen door, carrying a mug of something hot.
“Hi, baby,” I say. “Is that my tea?” He hands me the mug. I tip him my gathered handful of sticky needles. “Smell,” I say, but he dumps them on the ground.
“Come here, son,” Liam says. “I’m sure that was the worst of it, today.”
Ty looks at the greenhouse. “I’m sure.”
“What?” I follow his gaze.
The tarpaulin-sheathed door opens from the inside and the landscapers come out, blinking. The younger one won’t look at us. The older one does a double take, a cartoon stagger. “Folks!” he says.
“Son of a bitch,” Liam says.
I say, “You’re still here?”
“Well, I guess so,” he says, setting a boot up on my deck like we’re the trespassers.
Getting ready for bed, I can’t relax. I walk around the bedroom, picking things up and putting them down, while Liam uses the ensuite bathroom. He keeps wandering out to check on me – brushing his teeth, popping floss. I do sit-ups, feet hooked under the end of the bed, then remember not to. “Adrenaline,” I explain. The faucet rushes. I mumble, “Psycho.”
“Do you sleep at night?” Liam’s voice is muffled. “I have trouble.”
I hesitate. I decide to say something, to listen to the sound of the words. It’s a curious, strict feeling. “He could still be lying.”
Liam doesn’t answer. I wait, on my back, until I hear the toilet flush, the bedroom door open, and his padding footsteps on the stairs, heading down to the dorm room he’s made of his office.
This time, a note, a missive I skim but can’t bring myself to read. I shred it and take the pieces into the staff washroom, where I flush them down the nice clean toilet. The bits of paper swirl and dissolve like sugar candy.
I don’t remember how Liam and I met. One night at a party I realized I’d seen him around before, and that’s the night I remember, looking at his face and thinking, Him again.
When he started phoning a few days later, I said no. He didn’t look like anything to me.
For a while I sang and screamed with this band. We all lived together in a house in Jericho, not far from the University, and it was exhausting. We would get home at two or three, haul the gear in, and everyone else would go to bed while I tried to stay up and eke out another hour of study. We had cash floating in and out of our pockets and people were scared of us because of what we did to ourselves, but for a smart girl trying to hang on to a scholarship it was not a good way of going around in the world. Had I been less cranky and pissed off I might have been lonely; but people spitting at me in the street and ignoring me in shops and trying not to sit next to me in buses and lecture halls made me believe I was better alone.
Shaving half my head did not deter Liam, though. Curses and spit did not deter Liam. Can you picture how it was? Him down there in the street and me up in my room, wondering when he would give up and go away? And then when I started to let him in? Oh, we had ourselves a romance for a while, sparks flying everywhere. We were young.
“I’m flattered, I am.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Cut it out,” I say, as though he’s my son.
Banquettes of blood-coloured vinyl, white paper napkins in tarnished chrome dispensers, tiny round tables like dinner plates on poles, jolting hot cups of coffee in a cool whitewash of early November sun. Morning sickness past, the smell of coffee is a balm again. The café I’ve chosen for this sun-up showdown used to be a favourite of mine, my old study hangout before Ty, before Liam. They were nice to me here, quiet me with my textbooks, even in all my finery. It’s been sold a couple of times since and gone upscale, in that rather self-conscious, retro-funk fashion that passes for cutting edge these days – clapper lights in the bathrooms, so witty – but it still beats the hell out of Starbucks.
“What I don’t get,” Calvin says, “is how you went from being a girl in a punk band to –” He waves his hands, pulling in my clothes, my hair, my car, my practice, my life.
“A yuppie,” I suggest. “Acquisitive. Consumer-oriented. A sellout.”
“Regular,” he says.
Calvin’s pre-work clothes are skate shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt advertising some band I’ve never heard of. He looks sleepy, and hunches over his coffee like it needs protecting. He also watches me the way Ty used to when he was a baby, unable to take his eyes off my smallest movement. It’s unnerving. That he knows nothing of the troubles of the past few weeks, of Liam, of Ty, makes this all the more unreal, inconsequential, a game I can play any way I want. Still, I try to do right.
“The devil came to me at the crossroads at midnight,” I say. “What do you want me to say? I had a child. After that, sometimes a safety pin is just a safety pin.”
“You’ve used that line before.”
I have, too. I try again. “Things changed. I had more responsibilities and less time to do my hair in the morning.”
He tilts his head to one side. “Why can you only tell it like a joke?”
Because it seemed like a joke, I want to say. Putting on civvies and going about without turning a single head, as though someone had come down with a giant eraser and just scrubbed me out. Because of how easy it was to become a child again, with a child of my own; how easy it was just to give up and fit in, and how good I was at it. Because if y
ou don’t laugh you’ll surely cry. “What do you want from me, exactly?”
He looks surprised. He looks around the coffee shop, as though some crucial new information that changes everything might be written on the walls. He looks back at my face. “This,” he says, as though it’s obvious.
Morning, coffee, talk. Us together. “Calvin,” I say. My voice is nicer than I mean it to be. He nods. “You have to stop with the little notes and gifts and things. It’s too much right now.”
He asks politely if that might change later.
“Really, really not.”
Outside, traffic is picking up. I take a last sip of coffee and reach behind me for the coat I’ve arranged over the back of my chair. My watch says 7:38, past time to be leaving. I hold out my arm to show him, but he’s still staring at my face like something’s written there.
“You should see us at home,” I say. “You’d see how normal we are. We’re so normal it’s sickening.”
He reaches over to brush my cheek with his fingertips. I lean back, out of reach.
“The punk girl,” I tell him. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“Partly.”
“No more. All gone. Normal, normal, normal.”
“Never,” he says, with that look I thrive on – nervous, hopeful, hurt.
“Nobody needs therapy,” Liam says.
I’m in my office at the clinic. He’s in his office at the University. I picture him with his feet on his desk, looking down over the quad, shoulder-holding the phone while he plays with his letter opener or flips paper clips.
“He’s fine,” he says.
“He wouldn’t get out of bed again this morning. Then, when I get back from lunch, there’s a message on my machine from the assistant principal saying he’s done no homework for any of his classes since school started. She says she understands he’s been unwell for the past week, but maybe we could have a meeting to arrange for drop-off and pickup of assignments until the leg is healed.”
“The leg.”
“The leg, yeah. He’s been cutting for the past week. Where does he go?”
Calvin walks by my open door, hesitates. Since our talk in the café, god help us, we’ve made a game of it. I make my hand into a gun and hold it sideways, the sexy way they do in the movies now, palm to floor, and point it at him. He grabs his heart and staggers away.
“I want Ty to have a couple of sessions. Maybe after that the three of us –”
“No fucking way.”
“– therapy. I thought you said you were unhappy.”
“Unhappy. Not unstable.”
On my desk are Bakelite photo cubes from a swish store called Industry. I have Ty in the green one and Liam in the blue one. And they’re tiny, tiny. “What do you want, then?”
“Jesus,” he says.
He goes to different places, he says. Sometimes the mall, sometimes the beach. Sometimes Granville Street. Granville Street is CD stores and cinemas, but further down it’s also arcades and sex shops and teens in pyjamas begging for smack money. We are aghast. We say, “Granville Street?”
“Mostly the beach,” Ty says.
Each of us has staked out a piece of kitchen turf: Liam is pacing in front of the stove, Ty leans against the fridge, I’m sitting at the table squaring up papers and magazines. We’re maintaining a certain distance. I got a referral through the office, went ahead and made the appointment with a therapist, and that’s what’s keeping me calm, numb. I watch my hands sorting and leafing, setting aside some flyers I want to look at later. I’m very capable.
“Sorry,” Ty says.
Liam asks him what he’s sorry for.
“Forget it,” Ty says.
“No, I want to know,” Liam says. “For skipping school or lying to everyone or what? It couldn’t be about that beating, because you weren’t involved in that, were you? Were you?”
Ty says quickly, “About skipping school. But everyone knows about it at school. Everyone knows why Jason isn’t there, why he isn’t coming back. Can I go to a different school?”
“You may not,” Liam says.
“How does everybody know?” I ask. Ty shrugs. “No, not good enough,” I say.
“I don’t know how they know. I don’t have friends any more. They – nobody will talk to me.”
“I knew this would happen,” Liam says.
“What about Brad and Matt?” Liam rolls his eyes like I’m changing the subject. Ty doesn’t answer. “Come here.” Ty pushes off from the fridge and comes to sit beside me. I reach over and pretend to pick a piece of lint from his hair, an excuse to touch. “If they know about Jason, they know you weren’t involved. Right? They know you weren’t there. I don’t understand – no, baby, look at me. I don’t understand why people would treat you this way. Are you maybe exaggerating a little?”
“No!” he says.
“I mean, I can see it’s probably awkward. I can see that. You were his friend, the police came to the school. But it’s over now, isn’t it? And if it’s over, if there’s no more to it than that, doesn’t that mean some of this must just be in your head?”
Ty closes his eyes.
“Your mother asked you a question,” Liam says.
“It’s not in my head.”
“Then why would your best friends treat you the way you say?”
The question hangs in the air like something sharp and shiny suspended from a string, turning slowly, allowing us to consider all its angles. Why, indeed?
“Son,” Liam says.
Ty opens his eyes.
“I think it might be in your head,” I say. “I think you might be feeling some things you don’t really know how to talk about right now that are making you want to avoid your friends at school.”
“No, Mom,” Ty says again, but I keep going.
“Maybe it would be easier to talk to someone other than us. What do you think?” And in my best soothing voice I tell him about the therapist.
He says, “No way.”
“Son,” Liam says again.
“No freaking way. No fucking way.”
“You,” Liam says, pointing a finger at him.
I start talking again about the therapist.
“Shut up,” Ty says, and starts flipping through a Safeway flyer on the table in front of him.
I grab his chin and jerk his head around, forcing him to look at me. “You lied to me.”
“I said sorry.”
“No,” I say. “You lied to me. That is more important and bad than anything you may or may not have done to anybody else, ever. I didn’t fuck my life up having you so you could spend your fourteen-year-old days pissing around the beach feeling sorry for yourself. If you have something you want to say, say it. Otherwise you’re going to school tomorrow and you’re going to the therapist after that and you’re going to get back on that fucking honour roll. Do you have something you want to say?”
“No,” he whispers, and looks from Liam’s face to mine, back and forth, to see if this is the right answer.
“Maybe a different school isn’t such a bad idea,” Liam says later. We’re sitting in the living room, in the dark.
“There’s Larkin. Larkin’s a French immersion school.”
“French is good,” Liam says. We hear something get pushed through our mail slot. “I’m thinking also, it might be good for him to wear a uniform. I had to wear a uniform.”
“You went to a parochial school.”
He points at me. “There’s St. Thomas.”
“Ty isn’t Catholic.”
Liam looks at the wall.
I get up to see what was just delivered. It’s an old newspaper clipping, one of the first: SECOND CHARGE IN SILVER VIDEO BEATING. It’s neatly snipped, a three-column box with a single-column tail. Ty’s name, of course, isn’t mentioned in it. I take it to Liam and click the halogen lamp next to him, which turns the front windows black. One glance – we have it in the file – and he’s going for the front door.
/> Outside, of course, no one – just the street, the houses, the familiar spread. “Goddamn it,” he says. “Isobel said no one would find out his name. T.C., she said.”
“Kids.”
We’re both shaken. He crumples the clipping in his fist and takes it to the kitchen. When he steps on the garbage canister pedal the lid pops up and he drops it in. “I could make him into a Catholic pretty damn quick,” he says.
The phone rings. I grab it and bark, “Hello?”
“Is Ty there?” Through the tinny reverb of a cellphone I recognize Carl.
“No, he’s not,” I say.
“Shoot,” Carl says. “Aw, shucks. Darn.”
I hang up.
“Aren’t you lucky?” I tell Ty the next morning. We’re in the car. “Other kids walk to school with their actual feet.”
He says, “All right.”
I overtake a dawdling fish-silver Saab. I tell him his father might ask him to go to Mass on Sunday and he should at least consider it, for his father. He says he doesn’t remember how.
“You do too remember how.” He asks me to let him out, but we’re still two blocks from the school so I say no. “I want to watch you enter the building.”
“Mom!”
I park across the street from the front entrance, around the corner from the basketball courts. Kids are sitting on the steps, smoking. The girls greet each other with hugs and wan smiles; the boys’ eyes dart. Everybody looks tired. “This is where I’ll pick you up. You’re sure the library’s open until six?”
He says, “I hate this.”
“Dr. Gross is a busy and expensive man. Your appointment is at six-fifteen. Keep me waiting and I’ll come inside to look for you. Kiss your mother.” And because he’s still a child and doesn’t always recognize sarcasm, he does.
They hear the car door slam; pale faces turn. Do they draw themselves up? At this distance I can’t tell. Ty threads on through the scrum of them. A girl with long swinging yellow hair turns her back as he passes, but what does this mean? It’s a catwalk spin, surely – showing her clothes to her friends, jiving and teetering on her platforms. She’s just a lollipop. I’m hauling on the wheel, pulling out, when I glance over one more time to see one of the step-sitters swing around and plant a foot square in the centre of his back, sending him sprawling up the last couple of stairs. Around him kids start to applaud. Ty doesn’t turn around; he picks himself up and carries on through the doors, out of sight.