The Dead Are More Visible

by Steven Heighton

  When she leapt off the barstool it seemed some invisible thing had shoved her, because the set of her face and body and even the last twitch before the fall all seemed to be resisting it—yet she did fall, and when the short noose jerked her with a tight, shuddering bounce, her legs started scissoring, a child in a tantrum, trying to kick away the stool or to climb back on. The stool toppled over. There was an echoing crash upstairs. Laurel’s hands clutched spastically at the pink rope tightening around her neck. Her pale face reddened, her eyes bulged, the trembling jump rope strained to its limit.

  For seconds he had been frozen like up on the precipice but now, again, something shoved him out of the grip of fear, or whatever it was that held him. He was halfway to her, calling “Laurel, Laurel, please!” when he realized the rope was still stretching, like a piece of licorice pulled apart, his sister slowly descending to the floor.

  The glass slipped from his hand and smashed at his feet. Their mother was yelling from the head of the stairs. Laurel was lighting on her toes, clawing at the rope still squeezing her neck, glaring as he threw himself at her and gripped her around the belly to lift her and ease the choking, and a vision came of the two of them in the quarry, underwater, Laurel buoying him up through tunnels of turquoise light until they breached in a shock of sunlight and spray, he gulped at the air, she towed him coughing back to shore … Merrick heard her gasp. He looked up and she was scowling down as if to say, Let go of me, you moron, get this fucking jump rope off my neck.

  Their mother loomed before them, a drink in one hand, pawing at her glasses with the other as if to clear a lens and discredit this hellish scene: her delinquent daughter half hanged beside the shattered barstool and her sunglassed ten-year-old drunk, cut open, kneeling in glass like shards of ice, as if he’d just hauled her up out of a hole in the river.

  The last guests are gone and Merrick and Laurel clean up. She’s quiet now, tired, it seems, and sad. Partly it’s Kevin. For fifteen years he has been a solid part of their small galaxy of family and friends, a satellite of stable orbit, and now abruptly his orbit has changed and carried him off in a way that violates all the old logic, old laws.

  Merrick is thinking of things in this way because of his own teaching and because talk of that day at the quarry has reminded him of something the whole school believed then. Mr. Leung notwithstanding, it was a well-known fact that the quarry had been formed thousands of years before by a meteorite: a great flaming boulder billowing clouds of smoke had shrieked down through the atmosphere and stamped itself into the limestone, leaving behind a crater, scorched cliffs, a deep glacial-green socket of water that had spilled in from the river two miles off.

  “But you must have known it wasn’t true before the rest of us,” Laurel tells him, looking drawn and cross in the kitchen’s guttering fluorescent light. Almost three a.m. They stand over the sink washing up, the clack of glass and the slopping of water a bland, comforting counterpoint to the hard talk they’ve been having. “I mean, you always were a smart kid for your age. Always in such a hurry to grow up.”

  “Sure,” he says, trying to gauge her tone, “so I knew it wasn’t a meteorite. Fine. I knew that and a lot more. But where did it get me? All those facts, I mean. The hurry.” He looks down into the ticking suds, embarrassed.

  Her voice softens a little. “Well, you’ll find something soon, I’m sure you will. And Sheila’s work’s secure, I’ll bet.”

  “No shortage of work these days for addiction counsellors.”

  “Anyway, it’s a recession. You said yourself that a lot of the colleges—”

  “I’m doing fine,” he says. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s three in the morning, you don’t usually drink, you’re entitled to feel a bit sorry for yourself.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Not just that. I mean for bringing up what happened. But I’ve been … you can see I’ve been mulling it over for years and I guess …”

  “It’s all right.” She shoves her towel-wrapped fingers into the last glass to swab it dry. “I just wish we remembered things the same. I remember a bit of the hospital after, and the shrinks, and you and Dad coming to visit—you brought me adult books every time, remember? Instead of magazines? But going down to the basement, the rope—I haven’t blocked any of that out, Merrick, it’s just clearer all the time.” She swabs harder now, insistent, the glass getting streaked and cloudy with specks of lint. “And you weren’t there, Merrick. You really were not. You think I could have forgotten that?”

  She grinds the glass into the crammed dish rack.

  “Fuck, none of you were ever there, that was the whole problem.”

  “Laurel.”

  “You came down with Mom at the end. Just when I was pulling it off. You both just … stood there, gawking, then she screamed and ran over and she held me. For once in her fucking life.”

  “But I was there the whole time—I was right there! People remember things differently when—”

  “They remember things wrong,” she cries with something of her old fire, and behind her new glasses her eyes roll like a teenager’s.

  “Laurel, listen.”

  “And I was lying when I said I knew you’d jumped, not slipped. On the cliff. You’re grown up now, you can handle it. It’s a small thing anyway. But I knew you slipped all along, I just wanted to make you feel better.”

  He twists out the stopper and the sink gives a throttled gargling and empties faster than any sink he’s ever seen. A spattered, sudsy jumble of cutlery breaks surface, bones on the floor of a drained lake. (When he was in high school a construction firm had finally drained the quarry, revealing oil drums, dumpsters, gutted TVs, bicycles, several cars, thousands of beer bottles and the weed-green skeleton of an unknown man. They had built a large shopping mall over the top, at ground level, and turned the pit beneath it into an underground car park, where Merrick, in town last spring for an unsuccessful interview, parked and bought flowers for his parents’ graves.)

  “Mine’s always plugged,” he says, putting his watch back on.

  “What?”

  “My sink.”

  After a few seconds she turns to him, her glasses fogged over.

  “I’m sorry I said those things. I didn’t mean it, Merr, I’m sorry, I’m just so wiped out these days, and …”

  “Forget it.”

  “The kids tell me I’m biting everyone’s head off.”

  Briskly, lightly, so as not to embarrass her, he sets his hands on her stooped shoulders and kisses the dulled freckles on her cheek. The hair at her temples, once fire-coloured, has cooled to ashen. Or is that tempered to steel? She’s wearing their mother’s old Sunday earrings, small crosses of white gold.

  “Laurel?” He speaks softly, hugs her and rubs her bowed back as it begins to quiver, then shake. “It’s all right, Laur. Go ahead, I don’t mind. Go get some rest.” She pulls her head back from his shoulder and he can see her face: she’s laughing, actually, although her eyes are full.

  “It did look so damn funny when you went off, you know. With that stupid hat on your head and those big sunglasses.”

  He doesn’t remember a hat.

  As Merrick puts the last of the good glasses away in their box—checking each by raising it to the light, as if focusing a small scope on a heavenly body—he notices the set is incomplete, two missing, and he starts up the narrow hallway toward the living room to find them. A ragged, somehow elderly snoring already ripples from Laurel’s room. He pauses, socks aglow, by the yawning full-moon nightlight between his nephews’ doors and thinks of Sheila, how good it will be to get back to their place in Toronto tomorrow night and make love and sleep beside her again and how bad it will be the next day when they start fighting again about family, how she wants one urgently and he’s still afraid. “There’s no work out there,” he’ll say again, though they both know that’s not really it. And she’ll tell him again in her best counsellor’s voice that a fear of children is a fear
of growing up.

  Maybe the glasses are in one of the boy’s rooms, but he won’t stumble in and wake them the way his own parents used to, searching for their lost drinks how many years ago. Like Laurel he is different from them, he has learned something; there is, he believes, some progress in time. He’ll go on up the hall into the living room and check there, then out the sliding doors into the cool yard the way his parents did more and more in their last years, searching. He still has occasional dreams of them shuffling like sleepwalkers, miles out from the house and the city and years beyond all houses, over dunes along the moonlit beach, wading out to vanish at a bend in the river, or silhouetted, hand in hand, on the cliffs above the drop.

  [ JOURNEYMEN ]

  Cutler was running alone, as he preferred to run these days, on the gorgeous, lethally hilly trail he called the Monster. He’d named it after a challenging rollercoaster he’d ridden years before with his younger child, Mattie. The boy, six years old, had been speechless with delighted terror, his mouth gaping, eyes squinted, auburn ringlets blown back almost straight as he shrank into Cutler’s ribcage and Cutler held him tighter by the second—partly a response to his own vertigo and fear.

  The Monster was Cutler’s favourite trail and one that Mattie, in his mid to late teens, had often run with him. An adolescent boy’s fountain of fresh hormones can do as much to strengthen him as training can, and so Mattie had gained ground on Cutler in rapid, regular spikes of improvement, until he was the faster—though never by very much. The boy hadn’t inherited Cutler’s exceptional talent. He hadn’t been deeded Cutler’s drive, either, and on the whole Cutler thought that a very good thing. A sweet kid, adored by girls from kindergarten until college, protected by his male friends, he took after his gentle, dreamy mother, with her wide-set grey eyes and slow, unguarded smiles that seemed to hint at some private wisdom unavailable to the manic outer world. So as the boy’s third-, fourth-or fifth-place ribbons accumulated, he’d accepted their verdict in his usual easy-natured way: he would never be more than a respectable club or varsity athlete. This equanimity was another thing Cutler had loved about him. It’s a myth, he thought, that competitive parents all want their children to take after them and then grow up to exceed them, to summit the Alp-like ambitions the parents themselves never quite attained. The last thing Cutler had wanted was to see Mattie and his older sister, Esme, driving themselves as he’d once driven himself.

  The erosive current of time and circumstance had worn down his own urge to perfect and prevail, athletically, socially, professionally; Cutler had simplified into a more or less peaceful man. Unfortunately Esme was displaying most of her father’s former symptoms (minus, thank God, the self-destructiveness). Since toddlerhood she’d done so. She was now an economics professor at Cornell, and Grace and Cutler saw her only in the summer and at Christmas. She’d married a lawyer, a self-proclaimed libertarian (he was always proclaiming it) who, despite having graduated in Canada from government-subsidized schools into a profession where he was grossing over two hundred thousand a year, saw personal taxation as institutionalized piracy, a sort of fiscal terrorism inflicted by the lazy and covetous on the successful. Grace made artful dinnertime detours around Trevor’s positions, but Cutler—an exception to the general rule that men grow less progressive with age—was apt to crash into them head-on. And hours later Grace, in bed beside him, her ear on his collarbone and her soft white hair fanned out on his chest, would whisper, “He’s our son now, Cutler, you need to try harder.” And he would nod and breathe and slowly exhale and for Grace’s sake he would not burst out, “Our son? Grace, Grace! Mattie was our only son.”

  Cutler was not surprised to be feeling good on the trail, despite his rotten day in the clinic. He’d been running for forty years and had long since quit trying to detect correlations between how he felt during the day and his running performance at the end of it. Some of his best runs had come on afternoons when he’d had to choose between lugging his aching limbs out onto the trail or returning to bed for a nap. In his twenties, at university and medical school, aiming for Olympic glory and falling not far short, the chief problem had been almost daily, crushing hangovers. In his thirties—too late for the sake of his Olympic goals—he’d quit drinking and married and then the marriage itself had become the stressor. Though he’d been drawn to Grace Holland’s calm, almost tranquillized demeanour, once legally bound to it he’d panicked, flailed about, as if compelled to heave from a tossing lifeboat the very ballast that keeps it from tipping. He guessed now that those had been the death throes of his old self. They went on for an operatically long time, Grace waiting him out with a quiet, cast-iron stubbornness. Over a stretch of some years, he spent many nights alone on the pullout in his study, reading professional journals or running magazines and hearing his daughter sleeping in the next room. In retrospect, even her unconscious breathing had a rushed and restless quality, as though she was always champing for tomorrow to arrive.

  By Cutler’s forties the marriage had settled, its molten materials cooled and stabilized. They had the children and a house and his clinical office on the edge of Wakefield, at the gateway to his beloved trails. By that point, any day-end fatigue he experienced had more to do with mid-life’s interlocking demands, especially those of his thriving practice as a sports doctor combined with his volunteer coaching (and his family—but that went without saying). Still, at five p.m. he almost always chose the trails instead of his office couch.

  In his mid-fifties he began spending less time at the clinic. He and Grace, who’d taken early retirement from her middle-school teaching job, started going on actual holidays, an indulgence he’d once been too focused and fidgety to enjoy. Now, if he was weary at four thirty or five p.m., he was tempted to assign it not to stress but to age, the way his friends did. In fact, though, he was still running strongly and seldom missed a day, despite having suffered some minor attrition of the usual connective tissues, as well as a loss of pliancy and spring-loading in the Achilles and calf caused by years of wearing shoes with raised heels, the great biomechanical blunder of the Western world, he now saw. Cutler was fifty-eight—a ripe age for that first culling, through stroke, heart disease, or cancer, of a substantial minority of his demographic—but age wasn’t the real problem. The problem was the sadness that would hemorrhage through him at times, generally toward day’s end and especially in the autumn, when the prima donna leaves of the Gatineau hills showcased their dying in rich yellows, ambers, reds.

  They’d lost Mattie in November, four years before, and now all the weeks from the equinox until Christmas were touched and tainted with the loss. The boy had been running at dusk in Montreal, a city he was in love with and where he lived with his fiancée, Elise, who had not been running with him that day, thank God. At a busy intersection near Parc Mont Royal, a Humvee bearing the logo of a classic rock radio station had turned right blindly, its driver chatting on a cellphone, and hurled Mattie out of the crosswalk into the side of a bus shelter. It was as if the kid had been thrown by a train, according to a witness quoted in one news report that Cutler wished he had never read—though of course, being Cutler, he had read and clipped or printed them all and filed them away with his old compulsive diligence.

  Some friends were surprised that, after the way his son had been killed, Cutler still ran. He would explain that the running made him feel closer to Mattie. It was another way he chose to remember the boy—and, despite his friends’ advice, he felt sure there could never be too much remembering. Too much grieving, maybe, but grief and remembrance were not the same thing. Mattie, too, had loved these woods; rerunning their routes now, through the dense plexus of the trails, was like retracing neural pathways where memories of the boy were inerasably stored.

  What he didn’t tell his friends was that he had to keep running—that more than ever he was a junkie hooked on the body’s hormonal narcotics, the serotonin, the endorphins, the THC-like compounds secreted through exercise. Those substance
s had not been enough to keep him from falling off the wagon after the funeral, but the running did help him quit again, after a full year of renewed drinking.

  Cutler sped into one of his favourite turns, a ninety-degree elbow through a stand of hemlocks. Their cool citrusy scent—a sharp change from the burnt, toasty odour of fallen hardwood leaves—cleared his head. Years’ worth of needles were compressed level and firm underfoot. He leaned in on the turn like a skater. It felt good as always. Running could be like dance, like play, once you didn’t have to fret about the mechanics or entry-level fatigue.

  He rounded the corner and a view opened ahead and below: the trail widening as it fell away through a stand of mature sugar maples. Come March, stripped to the bone, they would be tapped, spiled and slung with aluminum sap pails; for now, the October sun electrified their dense foliage. The downhill stretch here was stony, runnelled with washouts, but from the base of the grade ran a smooth, flat straightaway—a perfect sprinter’s lane—to an unrailed wooden bridge over a creek.

  Cutler was halfway down the slope when he noticed two things at once: at the base of the hill, a couple with a toddler were emerging from the sugar wood onto the trail, while from behind Cutler came the sound of what must be a mountain bike thumping over the first few ruts as it began the descent. The family spread across the trail below, parents on the outside, the child between them holding their hands and dawdling, setting the pace. From behind Cutler the aggressive slamming bore down while he himself gained on the trio. Normally by now he would have coughed or kicked a stone aside to alert them of his near-silent approach, but he figured they must hear the cyclist. In his gut a premonitory flitter, which was odd—he’d often negotiated little rush hours of walkers, runners and cyclists, jaunty hikers with ski poles, overly sociable dogs. Somehow this felt different. The cyclist was closing fast and the family hardly moving. Cutler’s brain computed likely conjunctions. He glanced back—a risky measure while trotting downhill over loose washboard—and got a flash of the cyclist a few metres back, half-braking now, the chassis of his bike thudding over the ruts as he steered wide. A weight-room physique sealed into one of those space-age black bodysuits, wraparound sunglasses like heat shields, a road racer’s comet-shaped helmet. Clenched lips set off with fashionable stubble.