by Todd Babiak
“What if the banks say no to Mom?”
Edward shook his head.
“The house?”
“Leveraged up.”
There were no customers until Randall and Garrett showed up together just after twelve thirty to order far too much food—out of charity. Randall was in the same suit he had worn before, even though there were grease smudges on his neck and about his ears. They joined Edward and Hugo at the table nearest the washroom, and everyone was introduced.
“So, you’re babysitting?” said Randall.
“Something like that,” said Toby.
“Just for the afternoon?”
“No.”
“Who’s his mom again?”
Toby couldn’t bring himself to explain as Hugo stared at him. “A friend. She’s on vacation.”
“A friend?”
Toby tried to change the subject. Since he was in Dollard, with some extra time, maybe they could start up a Benjamin Disraeli Society. Meetings, a lecture series, fashion shows. It seemed a shame, his expertise going to waste.
“That’s a thought,” said Garrett. “I’ve always liked fashion shows.”
“What sort of friend?” said Randall.
Edward placed his palms on the table. “He slept with a wacko Québécoise, and she abandoned her kid with him. That’s pretty much it, right?”
“Thank you, Dad.”
“No way!”
Garrett elbowed Randall, changed the subject. “The legal secretary couldn’t find a precedent for an overturned decision on an insurance payout. They’re pretty careful, those insurance companies.”
To avoid an emotional scene, Karen had neglected to tell Edward that the insurance company had decided to withhold payment on the car. The bank price of the Old-smobile was seven thousand dollars, which Edward had already characterized as out-and-out thievery. Now even that wasn’t coming.
“There’s been a decision?”
“Mom found out this morning.”
“And she didn’t tell me? Why?”
“It’s not confirmed.”
“Garrett’s secretary knows and I don’t know? It’s my car.”
“Can we speak about this in the back, Dad, or maybe in the washroom?”
“I’m embarrassing you.”
“Dad.”
“Oh, I’m embarrassing you again, in front of your precious friends. I’m so sorry.”
Garrett and Randall investigated their hot dogs with exceptional concentration.
“Who else knows?”
“No one.”
“The Moroccan neighbours, surely they know. The mayor?”
“This is inappropriate.”
Edward opened a ketchup package and threw it at Toby’s face. It hit him in the cheek, but very little, if any, of the sauce escaped. So Edward opened a second package, squeezed some of the ketchup out, and daubed Toby’s forehead. The ketchup was warm and fragrant. “How about that? Is that appropriate?”
For the first time since Toby met him, Hugo smiled.
“Who else knows?”
Randall slid the metal napkin dispenser across the table.
“Steve Bancroft, does he know? Maybe that’s where your mom goes when she’s off to the ‘bank.’” He made air quotations. “They sneak into the back seat of a sedan at the car dealership in Pointe-Claire.”
Toby banged his fist on the table. “Enough.”
Hugo started to cry.
Edward stared at the opposite wall for some time, kissed the boy on the top of the head, and walked out of the store, leaving his new suede jacket behind. No one remaining at the table looked at anyone else. Toby stood up, went after him. On the sidewalk, he called out. He apologized. Edward walked determinedly, his hands in his pockets, toward Centennial Park.
Toby returned to studied silence in the shop. In the washroom, he splashed the ketchup off his face and tried to avoid looking in the mirror.
“That was my fault,” said Garrett, when Toby returned to the table.
“Nonsense.”
“If the police and fire departments are testifying against you, and the evidence can’t be examined by a third-party expert, there’s pretty much no chance. Besides, the insurance companies will spend triple the amount of the settlement on legal costs, just to crush you.”
“But you’re Garrett Newman.”
“And I get stress nosebleeds. I would advise strongly against the legal route.”
Toby pulled a grape juice from the cooler and diluted it with water for the boy. Everyone seemed content to make him the centre of attention for another ten minutes.
“You can probably stop wearing the suit now,” Garrett said to Randall, as they walked toward the door. “Toby wouldn’t be horrified by your coveralls. Would you?”
Toby declined to answer.
The afternoon faded. He phoned the property management company and learned that the apartment in Pie-IX had been leased to one Carla Bruni. Her forwarding address was No. 1, Palais de l’Elysée. He phoned home, to be sure Edward had not wandered on to the autoroute. At three o’clock, Toby changed the boy’s diaper without touching fecal matter or gagging, and celebrated with an Orangina. By three thirty, every book had been read, every game played. Hugo crawled up on Edward’s suede jacket, behind the counter, and took a forty-five-minute nap.
Toby was about to toss the remaining dogs in the garbage and shut down early when a gang of teenagers arrived. School had let out. A rush ensued. Hugo stood behind the counter, timid before the teenagers bursting with cusses and cackles and headlocks. Toby appreciated the ubiquity of the phrase And I was, like…
By five, he had sold twenty-one hot dogs. The boy would be hungry soon, and Toby was not willing to give him another hunk of processed meat and white bread. He called home again and asked Karen if he could shut down early.
“You might as well,” she said.
He hunted in his pockets for Antoinette’s number. They were building a particle accelerator in Switzerland that could manufacture black holes. Surely there was a way to have an evening of clandestine sex with a Costco cashier without coming into contact with her cold sore. He could not find the number.
“What am I looking for?”
“What are you looking for, Hugo. You.”
“You.”
“You’re me, you see. Or I. I’m you, to you, who is me.”
Hugo removed his apron. “I am you.”
“No, no, no. You are I. I and me.”
“You are I.”
Nine
Nahla had learned that the child in her womb had been conceived with a genetic disorder called Edwards syndrome, or Trisomy 18. She and her husband were opposed to abortion. The remainder of her pregnancy was to be spent waiting for a monumentally disabled, or dead, child to be born. She never did come back to Le Chien Chaud.
On the thirty-first of October, both Toby and Hugo dressed as ninjas. Hugo’s costume was superior; it was an elaborate hand-me-down from Randall’s son, Dakota, complete with a plastic sword and a pouch of three rubber throwing stars. Some innovations were introduced to the store. Toby bought a giant tin of hot peppers. but no one used them. He offered veggie dogs and sold one, to Garrett, who felt sorry for him and told him so. The diaper change lost its pique. No one from any television station anywhere in North America replied to any of his queries. The condo sold for sixteen thousand dollars more than he had paid for it, even though he had invested fifty thousand in the kitchen and bathroom. The espresso machine now resided with Toby on rue Collingwood. November arrived with snow, more snow, and some marathon sessions with a shovel in front of the store. Then the rain came and washed it all away. Business increased marginally. Then more snow, and a melt. A salty, filthy sludge bubbled and foamed along the gutters. For a month and a half, days passed into days, and none of them seemed quite right for bringing Hugo to a child welfare office.
Now that he was finished with the parenting books, Toby turned to informal language classes during the
substantial quiet periods at Le Chien Chaud. From time to time, Hugo would become cranky and impatient—tired, hungry, mysteriously moody—and refuse to recognize English. But by the end of November he was speaking his second language in full sentences, without an accent. His vocabulary remained stunted, so he occasionally spoke Franglais—“Honey comes d’une abeille”—with such sincerity that Toby wanted to take a bite out of him.
The route from the failing hot dog shop to his parents’ house on rue Collingwood took Toby and Hugo past the fire station, on Sunnydale. One cold night at the end of November, as Dollard twinkled with electric snowflakes and menorahs, Toby pulled into the parking lot and shut off the Chevette. Edward was not just marching out into cold streets without his jacket anymore; he was talking to himself, crying spontaneously, waking up in the middle of the night a sweaty madman, uncertain of who he was and where he lived. Then, for several days or a week he would be exactly as he had been most of his life: calm, stable, funny, kind.
Toby carried Hugo to the doors of the fire station, cozying up to the boy, head to head as they walked, as neither of them had hats or mittens. They stopped for a moment to admire the cardboard Santa in the window.
“Do you have an appointment?”
Toby did not have an appointment, but this was Dollard. How many fires could there be? The chief was on a conference call, it turned out, so Toby and Hugo sat in the waiting area and read the TV Hebdo together. Two women with the northern dialect of the Saguenay decorated a sad-looking artificial white pine and talked about the premier’s hair. The chief arrived, in a fire department uniform, and introduced himself, in English, as Chief Max.
“I watched your show many times, and I know Edward.”
“My father’s the reason for my visit.”
“I had assumed. And is this your son?”
Toby had grown tired of these conversations. “No, actually.”
“No?”
“Your name is Hugo,” said Hugo.
Toby’s most robust failure: he could not crack the pronoun mystery.
“I’m caring for him. He’s not mine.” Every morning now, Hugo woke him up by calling out “You’re awake now!” Toby had purchased a monitor so he could hear the boy from his bedroom in the basement. He would creep upstairs and into the darkness of the boy’s room, pull him out from under the covers. Hugo would lie on Toby’s chest, warm and docile, and discuss in a froggy voice the night’s sleep, any dreams he might have had, and strategic plans for the day—playing, jumping, sliding, eating.
“He looks like your son.”
They followed Chief Max through a heavy set of doors and into a large office with a view of boulevard des Sources to the west. Hugo wanted to sit in his own chair, so Toby set him up as the chief opened a file and cleared his throat. There were owls everywhere in the room, stuffed and ceramic. Photographs. Representational art owls, including a legitimate sculpture on a small pewter stand.
“Owls,” said Hugo.
Chief Max, apparently pleased not to speak of Edward Mushinsky for another minute or two, described a love of owls that had begun when he was not much older than Hugo. An owl obsession. The cohesion of an owl obsession lasting from age four to age sixty-four transformed Toby’s anxieties about his father into a general mortification about death. Once, a lifetime had seemed lengthy.
“I guess you want to know, in detail, how we came to our decision about the fire.”
“Want” was not the right word.
“You’re a family member. I will assume you have your father’s permission.”
“I don’t.”
Max flared his nostrils. “This is important. It’s important, I think, what I can tell you about your father. If you have his permission.”
“All right.”
“Edward was with his friends in the Optimist Club. We’ve spoken to them. He was troubled on the night in question, and drinking. Desperate thoughts were articulated.”
“Like what?”
“Thoughts of ending it.”
“Ending what?”
“He left the Baton Rouge after an argument with one of his mates about whether individuals have any control over their own destinies. This is, I gather, a central tenet of the Optimist Club. There was talk of conspiracies, mind control, the American government. Your father quit the club when his ideas were not accepted, and left the restaurant. He stopped at the Ultramar, purchased a jerry can and filled it. Now, that is the last piece of corroborated evidence we have. However, we do have the science. Our investigation of the car showed that the fire started on the surface of the vehicle, with a flammable liquid. There was gasoline on Edward’s pants.”
“It makes no sense, Monsieur Max.”
“Max is good enough. My family name is Gagné.” He slipped a card over the desk.
The chief, clearly a father, stood up and fetched three stuffed owls for Hugo just as he began to squirm in his chair. Toby had come to argue with the chief, to demand a more thorough analysis of the fire and a new assessment for the insurance company. Now he sat before the man with nothing more to say.
“This is not good news,” said the chief.
“No, sir.”
“We were in Kinsmen together. Like I said, I know your father. This is not your father.”
Toby was briefly filled with the happy possibility that Edward had been replaced. His real father was being held in a shed somewhere on L’Île-Bizard and only needed rescuing.
“There’s really no need to fret about it, Toby.”
“Really no,” said Hugo.
“All your dad needs is a pill of some sort. This is, by far, the best time in history to have a mental illness. Let me tell you a little story.” Max launched into an informal motivational speech, filled with clichés and bons mots about picking ourselves up and getting right back in the game, turning lemons into lemonade, and putting family first. It led, cleverly, to the Lord. Night had fallen and Toby was eager to get the boy home for dinner. Proselytizing had always made him uneasy, as though the defects and deficiencies of his heart were suddenly open, readable, wanting. Max continued to offer advice, encouragement, and the great solace of our Lord and Saviour as Toby carried the boy outside and fastened him in his car seat. It took five minutes to terminate the conversation in the parking lot, and even then, as Toby started the Chevette, he opened the window to hear Max’s final piece of wisdom, drawn from Scripture. “‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, / So are my ways higher than your ways / And my thoughts than your thoughts.’”
“So I shouldn’t bother thinking?”
Max brought a finger to his lips and paused. “No, no. Just be comforted by the knowledge that someone out there is thinking more effectively, and magically, and just for you.”
“Thanks again, Max.”
“No, thank you.”
Rush hour in Dollard was a half-hour affair, from four thirty to five o’clock, as the bureaucrats and clerks flooded in from the autoroute and plugged boulevard des Sources. It was now after six, and the streets and avenues of his hometown, lit blue and yellow and red by the neon signs of the mall, were nearly deserted but for a late-model SUV and a couple of German cars, lawyers who had stayed late. There was still time to become a lawyer. Hugo babbled to himself in the Westchester, about owls. The word in French was so much more fun to say, with built-in onomatopoeia. Hibou. Un hiboooo.
Toby wanted to chat about owls, but he was faintly nauseated. The more he tried not to think about his thin, failed, burned-up, loony father, the more he thought about him. A general capacity for illness, as he understood it, was inherited; this gurgle in his stomach and vague pain in and about the left side of his chest promised tragedy. If he survived the gurgling—leaky bowel syndrome—and the chest pain—rotten lung—he could expect, in the vicinity of his sixtieth birthday, to start eating his toenails and arguing with Benjamin Disraeli in the middle of boulevard de Maisonneuve.
The house on rue Collingwood was alight when they
arrived. Hugo had left the subject of owls behind and now turned his attention to pooping. He stopped on the brown front lawn and closed his eyes, concentrated.
“You want to poop on the potty?”
“No.”
“You’re pooping right now. Let’s go on the potty.”
“No, no, no.”
“Right now, let’s try.”
“You don’t want to!”
Toby picked him up, bent over and mid-grunt, and carried him up the steps.
“There he is!” Edward opened the screen door, silhouetted by the light inside. “Come here, Hugo. I have something to show you.”
“He’s going to use the potty, Dad.”
“No!”
The boy wiggled fiercely until Toby lowered him to the platform of the concrete steps. He jumped into Edward’s arms. “Édouard.”
“Whoops. I think someone went and availed himself.”
“I’ll change him.”
“You sure? I can do it, or your mom can.”
“He’s my guy.”
Toby had intended to hug his haunted father immediately upon seeing him, to declare his unconditional love and a commitment to the spirit of understanding. Instead, he pulled Hugo out of Edward’s arms and marched straight into his bedroom. Hugo looked at a book about hippos while Toby wiped him down and took defensive measures against rogue urine. Millions of middle-class men in their thirties had normal fathers. Right now, they were gathered in the dining rooms and restaurants of America, in blue jeans and pressed shirts, sipping wine and arguing about politics, stunned in the warmth of their drunkenness by how like their handsome and accomplished fathers they really were.
Without a sound, Karen appeared in the doorway.
“Were you at the bank again today?”
“How much more can I debase myself in front of account managers who skateboard?”