by Gillian Chan
Paddy remained silent, but as I pulled him up, he mimed slitting his throat. I suppose he felt he had to save face that way, but he didn’t scare me then, not one bit.
Luce watched us for a moment, but when I slumped back into my chair and Paddy sauntered off and turned on the TV, she contented herself with saying, “No roughhousing, okay?” just to let us know that she didn’t buy our story, but wasn’t going to press it any further.
Needless to say, Adam was all over me, thanking me, pulling out the photograph that had started the whole incident. I didn’t have any choice but to look at it as he thrust it onto my book. It showed a much younger Adam, no older than, say, four, with a woman who was clutching him like her life depended on it. She looked pretty ordinary to me, maybe a little old-fashioned in her dress, but it was her eyes that were scary. She wasn’t looking at whoever was taking the photograph like you normally do, but was staring fixedly at Adam. It reminded me of the way our cat used to stare at birds when it was stalking them in the garden.
“That’s my mummy.” Adam twittered away like I’d never heard him talk about her before. “She always protected me, made sure nothing bad happened to me, because there are a lot of bad things that could happen.” He edged closer, almost draping himself over me. “She said it was us against the world.” He smiled, but within a few seconds the smile faltered. “I wish she hadn’t gone away.”
I shrugged him off and shifted position.
“Was your mummy like that? Did she go away, too? Do you miss her?” He battered me with questions, and it felt like stones were being thrown at me. I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t even want to think about them.
Adam was too locked into his mummy monologue to notice that I was trying to move away, to close him down.
“Shut up, okay! I don’t give a fuck about your mummy!” I added a push, not a hard one, but one I hoped would get my message across.
Adam looked horrified but he didn’t stop. Now, it was a stream of “I am so sorry, Mike. I’ll stop. I promise I’ll stop. Don’t be cross with me. Please don’t be cross.” He wouldn’t shut up, not even when I got up and headed out of the room to go upstairs. He trailed along behind me, and it struck me that these apologies sounded like things he’d said many times before, which left me wondering just how wonderful his mother actually had been. Even after I slammed the door in his face when I reached the room I shared with Jacob, I could still hear him outside. I had wondered before why Adam was in Medlar House and not a foster home, or even adopted. I could kinda see why now: he wasn’t exactly normal. The fact that he was just not cute probably had something to do with it, too. He was, to be blunt, an ugly kid. Not ugly like me: my scar took things to a whole different level. He was thin, and somehow his features were too big for his face. He had one of those red, wet-looking mouths that always hung slightly open.
In general, though, I saw more of Chaz than anyone else. As I’ve mentioned, he was a talker. Wherever he was, whoever he was with, he would start chatting away, innocuous stuff, or so it seemed: the weather, a film he’d seen, the TV program you might be watching. He was good: you’d start by answering simple, trivial questions and before you knew it, he’d got you into the heavy stuff, the stuff you didn’t really want to talk about—and believe me, we all had that shit. If you were a sneaky bastard like me, you listened when he got the others going. I learned some useful stuff that way.
Jacob and I were the only ones who were resistant to Chaz’s gentle interrogations. I kind of liked Chaz, as much as I like anyone, so I didn’t just blank him totally. I’d answer the easy stuff, but if he tried to probe I was really good at changing the subject. I was obvious about it, and it became a kind of game between the two of us. Jacob, though, he was like a stone. He would nod or shake his head if Chaz asked him a question like, “Do you want something to eat?” but anything else got no reaction at all. At times, he would gaze at a spot just to Chaz’s right, just staring. I always wondered why Chaz didn’t react: Jacob almost looked as if he could see someone or something there and was listening intently. It was creepiest when his expression changed and he would look sad or smile. Always, though, he was silent, schtum, mute.
Without ever having heard Jacob speak, I had no way of knowing whether that voice on my first night was his. I wanted to think it was, even though he had appeared to be so soundly asleep, because if it wasn’t . . . I shuddered just thinking about it.
So, how did I pass the time and what was my routine?
The basics were school, establishing my dominance, stirring things up, and Jacob watching, although how I carried them out varied.
When Chaz was around, I was a good boy—well, on the surface anyway—contenting myself with little digs here and there. Matt was always an easy target: a whispered word about the sexual habits of his mother (as I said, being a good eavesdropper has its advantages) could cause him to melt down quite spectacularly. To alleviate his anger he would go pick on the little kids, especially Adam, and I would sit back, watch the fallout, and know that no one was paying attention to me at all, which is a good thing when you’re naturally the noticeable one.
When it was lovely Luce in charge, I could afford to be a little less subtle; this was the time I threw my weight around a fair bit. Paddy and I were in a pissing contest to see who could call the shots. In every one of these places, there’s always one kid who’s the boss. Paddy had been cock of the walk until I came along and started to challenge his leadership. After the incident with Adam, he glared even harder at me when we crossed paths, and I could see him just waiting for a chance to get at me in some way.
And then there was Jacob. The kid fascinated me. I found myself studying him, trying to work out what was going on in his head. As I’ve mentioned, he never spoke. I never tried to make him when we were alone in our room. There was no point. It seemed like he drifted through his days, just going through the motions, but I suspected that there was more purpose to it than was apparent.
I kept a kind of mental portfolio, a list of what I had learned about him either from Chaz or by watching him. It was pretty meager in the beginning. I knew his name, Jacob Mueller, and that he was fourteen, although physically he could have passed for ten. He was scrawny, but not weak. I had seen him stripped down and he had muscles, so it was more that he looked undernourished. He had dirty blond hair, those shiny brown eyes, and yellowish teeth that looked like no dentist had ever been near them. It was hard to assess his intelligence, but I was certain he didn’t belong in the special education classes at school. There was this keen, thoughtful quality to his watchfulness at the times when he wasn’t overloaded and had shut down. No one had come forward to claim him, but he had been badly beaten when he was found. Although he didn’t speak, he made his likes and dislikes pretty clear. His food had to be simple, nothing mixed up or spicy. Water and milk were the only things he would drink. He never watched TV, and if he was in the room and it was on, he always positioned himself so that he couldn’t see the screen at all. He didn’t seem to like modern fasteners like zips or Velcro, which I thought was taking things a little far, but Luce had even found him pants with a button fly. I had noticed that he didn’t seem to like traveling in the van, and at first I had put it down to the bullying he got, but I realized it was deeper than that: more often than not he screwed his eyes shut as soon as the engine started and didn’t open them again until it was turned off.
It didn’t look as if he did much in the way of leisure activities. I never saw him pick up a book or a newspaper. At school, I presumed that he did whatever he was told to do in the classroom, but I was just guessing. At Medlar House, he would just find some place to sit until we were allowed to go to our rooms, where he would lie on his bed in the same position, always: flat on his back, arms by his sides, legs stretched straight out. When he was downstairs just sitting around, sometimes his eyes were closed, but mostly he was watching what was going on. He never
obviously stared, but once I started watching for it, I saw that he did this weird thing of looking behind or just to the side of a person, like they had a companion only he could see. He watched Adam a lot. If anyone looked at him, though, he would instantly look away at something else. Occasionally he had the Jacob equivalent of a hissy fit, “overloads” as Chaz called them. These could be prompted by a particularly bad day at school, for example. From what I could see, Jacob was the chosen whipping boy for just about every bad-ass kid in the school and some who weren’t and should have known better. I saw him kicked, hit, spit on, and shoved inside lockers, and that was just in public places. I’m sure worse went on where no one could see. He never did anything in return, but I think he was pretty adept at finding safe bolt-holes. I had the feeling that whenever he could he hid out somewhere around the gym. More than once, I had seen him coming from that direction, and it was most definitely not where the special ed department was. Something out of the ordinary routine could cause an overload, too. Halloween blew his mind: the costumes really freaked him out, and he went limp when Luce took his arm and tried to guide him toward a pile of outfits and props to choose something. I was having no part of it either, so didn’t go out with the others, even ignoring Paddy’s comment that I didn’t need a costume: I could go as I was, ha ha! We didn’t get many trick-or-treaters—Medlar House obviously had a reputation—but there were some brave souls who risked it, and the ringing of the doorbell finished Jacob off. He ended up catatonic behind the TV, just as I had seen him on the day I arrived. When he got in this state, Chaz was the only person who was able to get him out of it. He’d just talk to him, saying nothing very important, just being there, until Jacob felt it was safe to rejoin the world once more.
I probably would not have been anyone’s choice for a roommate for Jacob if the place hadn’t been full when I arrived. I got the sense that Chaz and Luce kept a very close eye the first week or so I was there to see how I would behave. I think it helped when I rousted Paddy a little when he went after Jacob. I didn’t mean to do it. It was instinctive. One day, Paddy tripped Jacob in the hallway and then went in to kick him, trying to make it look like he was losing his own balance. I grabbed Paddy’s arm, pulling it back as if I was helping him stay upright.
“Whoa, careful there, bud!” I said. “Don’t want you falling, too.” I held him tight, and I know that anyone watching—and there were people watching: Chaz, Lucy, and Adam among them, Adam’s mouth hanging open in shock that I’d dare to take on Paddy—would see the pressure I was exerting on Paddy’s arm. It gave Jacob time to scramble to his feet and move away fast.
After that, and when I showed no sign of doing anything but leaving Jacob be, they relaxed, so much so that when one kid left Medlar when his grandparents came to rescue him, they didn’t even move me out of our room, which would have allowed Jacob to return to solitary splendor. Hell, maybe they figured that it was good to have someone in there with him. I was protection if anyone else tried anything and, in the best of all possible worlds (which you and I know doesn’t exist), I might even prove to be the breakthrough in getting him to communicate. Of course, I could be fooling myself, and the real reason that we were roommates was that they thought no one else could stomach me.
One thing I had noticed was that I wasn’t having nightmares. Not since that first night had I woken up screaming, my sheets sodden with sweat, the feeling of desolate helplessness filling me up. I didn’t know what to make of this. Part of me hoped it was a sign that maybe my mind was working through things. Shrink speak. Oh, I’ve seen plenty of those since Jon died. None of them did any good. I didn’t expect them to: nothing they could say or get me to do would change the fact that Danny killed Jon.
Things changed the day my mother came to visit. I was angry. I hate seeing her, but they never let me refuse to do it, because she’s my only living relative or some such crap reason. She doesn’t really want to come. She’s scared of me. That and the fact that she couldn’t control me is why I’m not living with her anymore, not that I’d want to anyway. Social workers and shrinks, they have all told me that I blame her for what happened and that I’ll get over it when I can think more rationally. They are right and wrong. I do blame her, that’s for sure, but I’m not going to get over it, not ever.
She’s always been a pushover for a certain type of guy. Even our dad, who died when I was six, fit the mold: a bit of a wild guy who’s kind of shady in his dealings with the law; a drinker, because she can toss them back, too; a guy who’s quick with his fists, because that shows he cares enough to be jealous; and, although she would never admit to this, one who’s quite happy to live off her. I figure she thinks this is the only way she’ll keep a guy. In the looks department, I take after my mom: neither of us would ever win a beauty contest. When she met Danny at the local bar, he was working as a bouncer there but he told her he had dreams of being a singer. She fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and it was less than three weeks later that he had moved in and she’d taken a second job so she could help him fulfill his dreams. I think she envisioned him spending his days penning mournful country and western ditties, one of which would make their fortune. Ha! He spent the day watching TV, smoking and drinking, and occasionally surfing the Internet for porn. It was obvious to everyone but her that he was a complete waster. He resented the hell out of Jon and me because we were a drain, as he saw it, on both Mom’s time and her finances. If I hadn’t been there, he probably would have taken it out on Jon, but he knew that I’d never let him do that.
It’s putting Danny first that I will never forgive her for, the way she didn’t care what was happening to us as long as she had a man in her bed, one that she could boast about to her lush friends.
Jon was worth a hundred Dannys.
Even when he was nine, you knew that Jon was special. He was a straight A student, but not nerdy. He was sporty and popular, too. He could have been anything he wanted to be, and he would have been amazing at whatever he chose. For most people he won’t ever be anything but a grainy photograph in a newspaper—a statistic, just another kid killed by his mother’s abusive lover. I worry that if I don’t keep hating, don’t keep remembering all that Jon could have been, it will be like he never existed.
Mom doesn’t think of that Jon. She has two contradictory Jons in her head. One is the martyred angel in heaven. That one is good because he gets her sympathy, but that Jon could have come off a greeting card; he’s beautiful, perfect, and unreal. The other Jon is one she secretly hates because he is the reason Danny isn’t with her anymore.
I never learn. I should just go with the flow, answer her politely, and get the visit over so that we can forget about each other for another six months.
When she came in that day, I noticed that she’s starting to look older. It requires more makeup to cover the wrinkles. She’d put on weight, too. Her clothes no longer fit well, the buttons on her blouse gaping slightly, a roll of fat visible at her waist.
“Mike,” she said, her voice sweet, little-girly. “How you doing, baby?”
“Okay.”
“They treating you well?” She asks what she thinks she’s supposed to, but she’s not interested in what I have to say. When Children’s Aid first took me from our house way back when, I hated my foster-care placement so much that I would beg her to take me home with her when she visited, even though I hated being with her, too. I’d promise to be good, but she’d just sigh and say, “Don’t be like that, honey.” I was such a mess then that I wasn’t thinking straight.
The pattern’s always the same with her visits. She asks trite questions and I grunt. When that’s gone on for a while, she starts to sniffle, then the tears come. She weeps for poor angel Jon, and maybe for ugly scarred Mutt (perhaps I kid myself about that), but mostly the tears are for herself, if she was truly honest.
I can’t help it, I always bite and say something about Danny. This time, though, she said the t
hing that means I can never forgive her.
“Aw, Mutt, you both knew what Danny was like when he got a little merry, that his temper could get the better of him. You boys should have known better than to mess around, and Jon was nine, old enough to know that you don’t run around playing hide-and-seek.”
You’d think she’d want nothing to do with a guy who killed one of her sons and disfigured the other, but she writes to him. Can you believe that? I think she visits him, too. She hasn’t said, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
“He killed your son! How can you make excuses for the bastard?” I had to fight to stay sitting down. I wanted to hit something, break something, just to relieve the anger that was boiling inside me. She sat there crying, repeating how sorry he was for what he’d done, how he couldn’t control himself when he was drunk, that Jon should have known not to provoke him.
I lost it then. I stood up and with both hands upended the table we’d been sitting at, shattering the teapot and mugs. My hands formed fists and I had to fight to keep them at my sides. Words were forcing their way out in a roaring bellow as I repeated over and over, “Jon was fucking nine years old. All he did was knock over Danny’s glass of whisky.”
I couldn’t stop. I wanted to fill the room with noise, bludgeon her with words to make her realize what Danny was like. She cowered away from me, huddling in a corner of the room.
I had never felt such anger, and it swallowed me whole. I really don’t remember much after that. Luce told me that she and Chaz had to manhandle me to my room, that Chaz forced me to lie down and sat with me until I fell asleep. Luce said it took her almost an hour to calm my mother down. I don’t remember anything until it was dark, the whole house was quiet, and I was suddenly awake, chilled with sweat and the memory of Jon’s angry eyes staring at me. The dream was back.