And then he would be here, and they would be together.
Forever.
Three Days Gone
Martin was there in the park the day his brother Andrew disappeared. The newspapers all said so, and he was there in the grainy television footage, still in his baseball uniform, all gawky planes and obtuse angles. He was there. Everyone knew, but no one seemed to remember.
Everyone knew exactly what Andrew had been wearing. Everyone could picture him in their minds, although no one had actually seen him in the green pants and the blue Spider-Man t-shirt. Everyone had that last image of Andrew seared into their minds.
In disappearing, Andrew had come to life, had become a permanent fixture in the minds and hearts and souls of an entire community. An entire city. An entire province.
By not having vanished, by being around, Martin seemed to disappear.
The videotape footage is difficult to watch: hyper-saturated with colour, blurry and seemingly out of focus. It’s a result of age and expectation: in its day, the camera would have been state of the art.
The date code in the corner of the footage reads 5.25.86.
The voice off-camera is quiet and kind, handling him with the softest of kid gloves. It’s a television interview, but it hardly matters: when the police talked to him, they asked the same questions, and used the same gentle tones.
“And then what happened?”
In the video, Martin is skinny, his narrow face puffed and red from crying. His baseball uniform is grey, and has the logo of a local grocery store on the chest. He’s wearing his ball cap, but he has it pushed back on his head.
“I went up to bat.” He stammers a little when he talks, and his voice is thick with crying. “It was a double.” For a moment he seems proud.
“Did you see your brother?”
He nods his head slowly. “He was at the fence, watching me, as I walked up to the plate.”
“And then what happened?”
“Billy . . . Bill Carpenter . . . he was up next. He got a homer. I scored a run. . . .” His voice drifts off.
“Did you see Andrew, after that?”
He shakes his head, not even trying to speak.
“Did you see anything unusual in the park? Did you see anyone who seemed unusual? Anyone who you thought . . . Anyone who seemed out of place?”
Martin shakes his head again.
The gesture is a lie. He knows that if he opens his mouth to try to answer, he will give everything away.
It’s a long road, Martin thought to himself. A long road that brings you home.
The face in the mirror was no longer that of the boy in the videotape. The boy, broken and fragile, was still in there, buried deeply, but there was little to give him away.
Martin Corbett was no longer what anyone would call skinny. His body was tight and compact, wiry and strong. His face was lean and hard, his eyes small. He seemed to carry himself with a fraught tension, a tightly coiled force barely contained by the blue shirt, the jeans.
“I’m gonna go out,” he had told his mother a few minutes before.
She had looked at him, alarmed. “Are you sure?”
She was sitting at the kitchen table, a copy of the morning paper in front of her, open to the story about the anniversary of Andrew’s disappearance. It was short, and buried near the back of the B section. Twenty-first anniversaries didn’t seem to carry a lot of significance.
“I’m sure.”
She reached for the glass in front of her before realizing—or remembering—that it was empty. “You know what—”
He cut her off. “I know the rules. No bars. No pubs. No drinking. No drugs.” He tried to smile, tried not to notice how desperately she was looking at that empty glass. Trying not to look like she was looking. “I just need to get out of the house for a while, go for a walk or something. I’ve been cooped up here all day.”
He didn’t mention that it had been her that had done the cooping, insisting that they spend the afternoon looking at the photo albums, talking about Andrew. “Sharing.” An afternoon of painful memories, punctuated by her regular trips to the kitchen for glasses of orange juice that, as the day wore on, grew increasingly pale.
“If I don’t get out for a bit, I’ll go crazy. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful. I won’t get into any trouble.”
Neither of them believed this entirely, but it was just one of the polite fictions they both observed.
She didn’t even wait until he had closed the bathroom door before she was back at the fridge. She opened the freezer first, the neck of the vodka bottle kissing gently against the rim of the tumbler.
After the game, Martin had gone looking for his brother. At first, it had been impossible to see anything with everyone milling around: players whooping and shouting and running, line-ups at the concession stand, parents waiting to pick up their kids.
After a while, though, it had started to thin out. Martin couldn’t find Andrew anywhere.
He didn’t panic as he walked over to another area of the park, to the playground where Andrew spent most of his time, giggling down the slide or spinning on the roundabout.
He wasn’t there.
Martin didn’t panic as he walked back to the apartment. Andrew had probably just got bored and gone home: it had happened before. There would be hell to pay for Martin if that’s what had happened.
It wasn’t: Andrew wasn’t at home.
But Martin didn’t panic. Not even when his mother pushed the baby into his arms and ran out of the house, back to the park to look for her younger son. Not when she came back, flushed and red and choking back tears, reaching for the telephone to call the police.
Martin didn’t panic until three days had passed. And by then it was far, far too late.
Did you see anyone unusual? Anyone you thought . . .
Martin had just lathered up his face when there was a soft knocking at the door. Too soft to be his mother, who usually pounded.
“Come in,” he said, flicking the plastic sleeve off a disposable razor.
Tessa opened the door a crack and slid into the bathroom. “Mom’s hard at it,” she said, once the door was safely closed again.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to notice,” he said, rinsing the razor under the hot water.
Tessa snorted. “Right. Like all the neighbourhood bums don’t just wait for her to put the garbage out so they can get the bottles.”
“And buy bottles of their own,” he said. “The alcoholic circle of life.”
She smiled. She was a pretty girl when she smiled. Martin didn’t think it happened that often.
“It’s hard,” Tessa said, after a long moment. “Seeing her like this.”
Martin shrugged. “It’s the anniversary. You know how she gets.”
Tessa shook her head. “It’s getting worse. It used to be just the anniversary. Christmas. Andy’s birthday. But lately . . .”
“What do you know about it?” he snapped. “You don’t even live in the city anymore. You’ve got school. Your own apartment. Your own life.”
“Who do you think she calls in the middle of the night, so pissed she can barely dial? It’s sure as hell not you. Did they even allow you to get phone calls?”
He ignored the comment, watched the grey, stubbly shaving foam slip into the drain. “She calls?”
Tessa nodded. “Three or four times a week.”
“What does she talk about?”
Tessa raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
“Right. Of course.”
“Does she ever talk about anything else?”
Not as long as Martin could remember. “Is there anything in particular?”
“The usual stuff. How she was a terrible mother. How she spent too much time with me. How she never should have trusted you.”
“The usual stuff,” he echoed.
“Yeah. She’s been talking about you a lot lately. Since you told her you were coming home.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She saw that he was waiting for something more. “More of the same. She talked a lot about you getting out. A lot about The Day. What you did. How you reacted.”
“How I reacted?”
Tessa shrugged. “She said it was weird. Like you didn’t react at all to him being gone. Like you weren’t worried. At all. Like—” She stopped herself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He took a last swipe with the razor. “Seriously. What?”
“It’s just . . . she said at one point, one night when she was so hammered I could barely understand what she was saying, she said that she wondered, sometimes. . . . Given everything that happened after, she wondered—”
“She thought I had something to do with it.”
Tessa looked at him, then nodded slowly. “Or that you knew more than you were saying.”
“Right,” he said, rubbing his hand lightly over the slick wet of his face, feeling for roughness.
“I don’t think she meant—”
“Oh, she meant it all right,” he said, still touching his face. He thought of adding “And she’s not far wrong,” but he didn’t.
Martin and Andrew had always been close, closer than most brothers. Even with four years separating them, they stuck together. All the moves, the new apartments, the new kids in the neighbourhood; they stood together in the face of the seemingly unending changes.
After four new schools in less than four years, it looked like Victoria might become something resembling a hometown for the boys. Their mother had a new boyfriend, a new job. They moved into an apartment near downtown, and there was little of the usual feeling of impermanence, their tendency to live out of boxes and bags that had dogged their last few places. Their mother put pictures up on the walls; her boyfriend bought her a new rocking chair.
Martin and Andrew walked to and from school together, and in the afternoons Martin looked after his little brother until their mother got home from work. They spent the time playing on their old Atari, or watching the Fun-a-Rama cartoons on channel twelve. When their mother asked what they had been up to, they would both answer “Homework.”
And then she got pregnant with Tessa and everything changed.
Her boyfriend claimed to be happy, but Martin and Andrew came home from school one afternoon to find his stuff gone from the apartment, and no sign of him. They had waited in silence for their mother to get home—no games, no cartoons today.
She didn’t say anything, stepped into her bedroom and closed the door. Martin made mac and cheese for dinner.
They moved to a smaller apartment. A new school. No pictures on the walls.
After Tessa was born, it was like they had lost their mother. She didn’t go to work anymore, and seemed to spend her days in the rocking chair, holding the new baby.
They would come home from school and she would flinch at the closing of the apartment door, at the sound of their voices.
When Andrew turned on the television, she would say, “Don’t you have homework to do?”
He glanced at Martin. “It’s done already.”
The sound of cartoons filled the small room, and their mother pressed her eyes shut, as if in pain.
“Why don’t you both go play in your room? Or, Martin, why don’t you take your brother outside for a little while? Maybe the playground at the end of the block? Just ’til dinner time?”
“But I’ve got—” He was about to say “homework,” but the expression on his mother’s face seemed to hold no patience, no understanding. “Come on,” he said to his brother, thinking about the TV shows he’d have to miss to finish his schoolwork after dinner.
After a few afternoons like that, they stopped even coming home after school. They’d hang out in the schoolyard or park with the kids who happened to be hanging around, waiting out the hours until the moment when the group seemed to dissipate all at once, responding to some unheard dinner call.
For the first while, their mother would have dinner waiting for them when they got home, Tessa burbling away in her bassinet. It was never very extravagant, but it was hot and filling and the three of them ate sitting together around the table that had followed them from apartment to apartment.
After a while, though, even those moments of togetherness disappeared.
They came into the apartment one evening to find the place cold, and shrouded in shadows. The only sound was the creaking of the rocking chair.
“Mom?” Martin called out.
She didn’t answer, and for a moment he thought she might have fallen asleep. But as he got closer to her he saw that her eyes were open, unfocussed, staring blankly out into the room.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
His voice seemed to surprise her and she blinked several times, coming back to herself. Almost.
“Mom?”
“I—I’m okay. I guess I got a little distracted.” She seemed flustered, confused. Tessa stirred in her arms. “Are you hungry, little girl?” she cooed.
“I’m hungry,” Andrew said, and Martin shot him a look.
Their mother didn’t seem to notice, tugging up her shirt to feed her sister.
Martin waited a long, silent moment. Waited for their mother to say something about dinner, to say anything. To remember that they were there.
“Come on,” he said, when it was clear that no words were going to come. “I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich.”
Andrew’s smile seemed to brighten the room. “I’ll help,” he said.
Tessa followed him from the bathroom into his old bedroom, the one next door to Andy’s room. His mother had turned Martin’s room into a guest room while he was away—it had all the character of a cheap hotel room, with a painting of Jesus centred over the head of the bed. There’s absolutely no trace of me here, Martin had thought to himself when he first walked through the door. Good. He preferred it that way. He didn’t bother to unpack his duffel bag. It was fine to feel like a guest. Better that way, even. He had no desire to come home, despite all that he had said.
“So you’re going out?” Tessa said.
“Yup.” He put his razor and shaving cream on the small dresser, next to his toothbrush and watch.
“Where you goin’?”
“Just for a walk.”
“Are you sure?”
Something in her tone—her blatant disbelief, perhaps—made him look at her face, to see the same doubts there.
“Did Mom send you to ask me that?”
“No,” she said, a little too loudly.
“Right.”
He shook his head.
“Fuck,” he muttered, tugging his t-shirt off, hoping that she would get the message that it was time to give him some privacy. Time to get the hell out.
She didn’t take the hint. “They can do testing any time they want, you know. Unannounced. They just show up. They find out you’ve got anything in your system, you go—”
“Jesus, do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I spent all that time getting out just to get sent back? Shit, if I wanted to get high, prison would be the easiest place to do it.”
He thought he might have been too loud, too strident, but she didn’t flinch. “So where are you going?”
“Like I told Mom, I need some air. I need to get out of here, just for a while.”
He crouched down, fumbled in his duffel bag for a clean black t-shirt. When he straightened up and turned back around, his sister was staring at him, her mouth open, her calm façade a memory.
“What—” She couldn’t even form the question.
He knew what she was going to ask. “The scar?” He turned his h
ead, craning his neck as if trying to look at his own back. “How’s it look? I hear it’s pretty impressive, but I’ve never seen it for myself.”
“How . . .”
“I told them it was self-defence,” he said, then lifted his hands, palms up, as if to shrug. “I would have thought a fourteen-inch wound on my back was pretty compelling evidence.”
If you had asked him, Martin would never have said that he minded looking after his younger brother. It wasn’t just a matter of ‘everyone pitching in and pulling their weight’ as their mother used to say. He genuinely liked spending the time with Andrew. They had a lot of fun, and the explorations and discoveries transformed their few blocks—a rough area surrounding the ugly block of subsidized housing they had moved into—from a strange wasteland into something of a neighbourhood.
He did like that he had baseball to himself, though.
Tuesdays and Thursdays Martin made dinner early, made sure that Andrew ate quickly and got settled into something in his room—something quiet, something that wouldn’t disturb their mother, that wouldn’t wake their sister—before changing into his uniform and running out the door, calling over his shoulder, “I’ve got practice. I’ll be back.”
He was always late to the diamond, but Coach Phillips never said anything about it, just dropped him into whatever drill the team was running.
For a few weeks they just practiced, but once the league started up they played at least three games a week, Tuesday and Thursday nights, and Saturday afternoons.
Martin loved to play. He was a good fielder, and he settled comfortably into shortstop. He had good instincts, and a keen sense for the game as it unfolded, an ability to keep the field and the players in his mind like chess pieces on a board. He was a strong hitter, and his numbers kept him near the top of the league stats.
While this all certainly added to his enthusiasm for the game, they were not the reason for his love of it. What he loved was the chance to be with his friends, to hang out with Billy in the dugout, to be working together to eke out a win. More than anything else, though, he loved being able to disappear into something for a few hours on a spring evening or afternoon, to live entirely in those moments, not thinking about anything else.
Seven Crow Stories Page 11