When Benny first stopped working, Inky would follow him from room to room, his toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. If Benny sat down, Inky would bring him things — a tennis ball, shoe, hairbrush. Later, when Benny began spending long hours on the living room sofa, Inky became more selective. Over the course of an hour the dog emptied Cooper’s closet of stuffed animals, carrying them downstairs one by one. Isabella watched, fascinated, as Inky placed a teddy bear at Benny’s feet, a kangaroo on his stomach, nudged a parrot against his neck.
Then, shortly after Benny’s first chemotherapy treatment, Inky began defecating in the house, as though it were a way of protesting Benny’s illness. Sometimes rising at night and stumbling to the bathroom, Isabella was greeted by the aroma of a fresh deposit hidden somewhere in the dark outskirts of her house. No amount of scolding from any of them seemed to affect Inky. Although he stood with drooping head and bent submissive ears, he was unable to mend his ways.
A year earlier Isabella had been passing through the dining room whose large bay windows looked out onto the park, and glanced out to see Cooper and another boy following a male jogger. Even from that distance, she suspected her son of harassing the jogger, whose halting gait and stiffly turning torso indicated a frenzied aggravation. Cooper was holding something out towards the man and they were running side by side, while the other boy held back, bent double with laughter. Isabella struggled to believe her son was a well-mannered, prudent boy, that whatever he was saying to this man was entirely reasonable, but the next moment the man had extended his arm to deliver a pseudo karate chop to Cooper’s neck. Cooper stopped and the friend caught up with him. Isabella recognized the object in Cooper’s hand. The camcorder.
It had taken several days to view all the DVDs. While Cooper was at school and Benny away on business, and after several calls to Future Shop where the camcorder had been purchased, Isabella had all the cables correctly plugged in and all the buttons set to the right settings. When she first saw her own body, or her body from the neck down, walk across the screen, she didn’t recognize herself. The images were clear and sharp but the colours untrue. Her green linen skirt looked blue and hopelessly wrinkled — well, that was linen for you.
Her own voice asked, “For heaven’s sake, Benny, don’t you think I know when I’ve had enough wine?”
Watching this, Isabella’s stomach turned. Had she really said that? Really used that tone?
Then the screen blurred as the images spun and there was Cooper’s elfish face in close-up, dreadfully white and lacking freckles, whispering, “This is Cooper Martin bringing you another family fight.”
Where had he been? Under a table?
She should have turned it off, but she was riveted with apprehension, with the shock of seeing an innocuous past — much of what she saw was boring — brought back to her. Disembodied figures were followed and forgotten, Inky’s nostrils thoroughly explored, the contents of several flushing toilets observed to their end. She saw her own face occasionally in detail and wondered, was she truly so unlovely?
The time flashed in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, 1:26 am, but Isabella would have known it was night by Cooper’s blue pajamas slopping above his naked feet as he occasionally peered through the camera to find his way down the stairs. There was the jerking wall and all its family portraits, a window, the kitchen door, some murmuring and then a view of the kitchen table. There was Cooper’s clipped breathing and Benny’s voice in conversation, but only the kitchen table. It was simple enough: Benny was making plans to meet someone. He used the name Heather, and then he said sweetheart, as in, Now sweetheart, I’ll be on time but will you? and it was 1:32 in the morning. Still, all she could see was the kitchen table.
The next day Isabella finished watching the DVDs. Towards the end she came to the jogger, who was asked by her son, “How’s it going, uh? Don’t want to get fat, do we?” Isabella had not recognized the man — a small miracle.
*
After hauling Inky out of the house, Isabella gathered up the dog shit with a plastic bag and collected the largest of the broken camcorder pieces. Then she pulled the vacuum hose from the wall inlet and ran it over the hall rug and bottom of the stairs. When she got to a small log of desiccated dog shit tucked behind the leg of the table in the hall, she plowed ahead and sucked it up. She knew that, for the next several weeks, using the vacuum would result in the scent of dog shit filling the house. But these were reckless, uncharted times.
As soon as she turned the vacuum off, she became aware of Cooper shouting and throwing things around up in his room. More than his camcorder would be broken by the end of this day. She was wondering how Benny was standing the noise when he emerged from their bedroom and began making his way down the stairs. He wouldn’t look at her.
“Hungry?” she asked when he reached the bottom step and she realized he was neither going to stop nor speak to her.
He was walking away, into the family room.
“Grilled cheese?”
It was the challenge in her voice that stopped him, though he didn’t turn. “I can see it now,” he said. “I’m going to get blamed for this.”
“You didn’t need to destroy them all,” she said to his back. “Do you want something to eat? I was planning on going out.”
“Hey, don’t let me interfere with your plans, Isabella.”
In the kitchen she buttered two slices of bread and sliced the cheddar into thin sheets, the way Benny liked it. She felt lousy and wanted to pinpoint the feeling somehow, so she could erase it. She placed the sandwich in a frying pan, then dashed upstairs.
Cooper was on his bed, motionless. Most of his skateboarding and mountain biking posters had been torn from the walls. Books were off the shelves and the fish tank water looked muddy and unsettled. The bed itself had been stripped, the sheets and blankets dragged halfway across the floor.
“I didn’t do anything,” Cooper shouted when he saw her, pounding his naked mattress. “He did that for no reason!”
Cooper and Benny’s relationship had been faltering for a while. Isabella did not question their inability to understand one another — one sick and the other a boy — yet when their arguments arose, the premonition came over her that her son’s experiences with bad luck and unhappiness might be difficult to survive. She was noticing the rusty stains on Cooper’s mattress, curious about their age and the likelihood of them being blood-related, when the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen. She rushed back down the stairs, imagining Benny in the family room, his hands over his ears and his jaw clenched.
The kitchen was filling with smoke. The sandwich, though still spongy and cool on the upper surface, was black on the bottom. She ignored the thought circulating at the back of her mind that she might want to take a deep breath and count to ten. Instead, she thought that if the rest of the family could throw things, so could she. She grabbed the pan and ran down the hall and into the family room. She yanked open the window and flung the pan out into the backyard. Fleetingly, she thought of Inky, but he was nowhere in sight.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here, ” Benny began, trying to joke, but Isabella left the room before he could finish his sentence. She thought of the Avalon Nature Club lecture, but refused to look at her watch. Inside her head there was a funny sensation, ping ping, like both a sound and tiny movement inside her head. She wondered if it was the seed of insanity.
She began again: buttering the bread, slicing the cheese. She worked slowly, growing calmer, and eventually found herself appalled by what she had done. Had any of the neighbours seen the pan come flying out of the house? Might they see it yet? A small frying pan with its cargo of burned bread and cheese? She returned to the family room and approached the window slowly, afraid to face the consequences of her savage behaviour. Behind her, she heard Benny rise from the sofa. When she turned to him, he was grinning. He approached her and put an arm around her, and everything that was wrong fell away from her.
She
understood, suddenly, her reluctance all this time to destroy the DVDs. Now that it was done, it seemed they were one step closer to erasing the family they had been, for better or for worse. As though Benny had erased memory: an autumn afternoon gone dusky in the park, a skim of snow across the yard in early winter, the powerful light of summer shooting through the house like an arrow. Happiness, disappointment, sorrow. Erased.
Inky was finishing off the sandwich. Isabella didn’t see how he could avoid burning his tongue.
“Do you think Cooper knows?” Benny asked.
Of course he did. “I’ve no idea.”
“I couldn’t watch them all.”
“I did,” she whispered.
“You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You shouldn’t have destroyed them all.”
“But he was spying on me!”
“Benny.”
“I’m sorry.”
Was he sorry for breaking the camcorder and DVDs, or for betraying her, or both? She’d take the apology, regardless. She leaned against him and just for a moment, before he braced himself to support her, she felt him bend away from her weight.
“You’re so familiar,” Benny said, holding her close now.
They watched Inky lick the pan clean.
“Go on to your meeting, Izzie.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s already started.”
“Go on.”
That night, just before going to bed, Isabella asked Inky if he wanted to go out. He turned his eyes up at her sheepishly, his grey muzzle an inch from the carpet, and thumped his tail twice. He put a great deal of effort into rising, but made little headway.
“Never mind,” Isabella said, giving up. “Stay.”
When she awoke in the night she immediately smelled dog shit. Without turning on the lights she descended the stairs to the kitchen, got a plastic bag and gathered up the mess in the dark, for the first time admitting it was time to put the dog down. When she fell back to sleep she dreamed she and Benny were ascending a crisp, multi-levelled building. White light was everywhere. People were milling about and, like Benny, were dressed in white gowns. She was leading him up, level by level. Everything was set, she had made the appointment, the decision had been made. Then Benny turned to her and said sadly, “Goodbye, Inky.”
Chapter Twelve
“Izzie? Izzie?”
“Coming.”
“I was thinking about those boys.”
“What boys?”
Benny opened his eyes. The rims looked dry and sore. He was having a bad morning and Isabella wanted to take him to the hospital. He kept saying they should wait a while yet and see. He spoke thickly. “Sorry. You weren’t there.”
“What boys?”
“They drowned. They were fooling around on the ice.”
“Where?” She touched his sleeve. “Benny?”
He opened his eyes again to look at her, then closed them. “You’d never forget it. I’m glad you weren’t there.”
Isabella lifted her gaze from her husband’s body and stared out across the park at the brown leaves of the oak trees. She imagined the tap-tap papery sound produced by the collision of dead leaves and rain.
“Sit up now so we can brush your teeth.”
“Just past the turnoff to Isaac’s Harbour, there’s a new coffee shop that overlooks a small bight.”
She nodded, helping him sit. His pajama legs were hiked up to his knees, but he didn’t seem to notice. As she tugged them down, she felt her eyes fill. His ankles and feet were swollen. He didn’t notice that either. She handed him his toothbrush and a cup of water. The cup immediately teetered in his hand and some of the water sloshed out, but she had a towel folded over his lap. She took back the cup and held it for him.
“I knew I was sick then,” he said, looking sideways at the toothbrush in his hand as though endeavoring to identify its use. “But I didn’t really believe it.” He stopped. “What?”
“Brush your teeth. You’ll feel better.”
He obediently bowed his head, popped the toothbrush into his mouth and began vigorously to brush his teeth. His method of rinsing, which dated long before his illness and which Isabella found slightly revolting, involved dunking the brush into the cup of water over and over while brushing. She slid a small basin below the cup to catch the spill. When he was finished the basin was full of bloody, pasty water. His gums were suffering badly under the assault of medications. The doctor had told her there wasn’t much that could be done about it.
“Don’t lie back down yet, Benny. We need to change your pajamas.”
“I went back that night. After I dropped you off and had my supper with Isabella and Cooper. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“Shhh, let’s get this off you.”
“I went back.”
She had purchased him new cotton pajamas because he’d lost so much weight, but they’d become snug after the first wash. As she buttoned them up, she said, “You’re busting right out of these, John Wayne.”
He looked at her and grinned, distracted from his story. He lay back down, keeping his eyes on her, and said, “What’s a man gotta do around here to get a woman?” She laughed. The accent was not bad, given everything.
Then he closed his eyes, tired again. She went out to empty the basin and bring back clean water for his face. As soon as she returned and sat down beside him, he opened his eyes and said, “I know it’s you, Isabella. For a minute I was confused, but I know it’s you. I know I’m in my house. In my bed. I know.”
“That’s okay.” She had to whisper. If she spoke any louder her voice would crack. She stared at a teddy bear sticking out from under the bed.
“I want to tell you about it.”
“All right.”
“The place was mobbed,” he said, then stopped and didn’t speak for several minutes. She wondered if he had forgotten where he was again. Then he raised a hand and studied it as he spoke. It was a new habit of his, as though keeping an eye on his own flesh helped him think.
“People were everywhere, crying, hanging onto each other. The wind had turned around and the ice was moving off. People had flashlights, shining them on the water. He had the rope in his hand. Then a wave came and I never saw him again. A person doesn’t last long in that water.”
Recently he’d become more and more talkative, any time of day or night. She found it made her restless.
“They shot up flares and people saw something at the surface. But it wasn’t a body. I never heard what it was. The next day they found both boys, close by. Caught up in seaweed.”
Isabella stroked his arm over the pajama sleeve. “I’m going to give your face a nice wash now.”
“We waited for him to come out from under. We waited. When I first got there I could only see his coat floating above him — a blue ski jacket. It was all so ordinary.”
“While the water is still warm.”
“Are you listening to me? I couldn’t tell you, Isabella. The boy’s eyes were brown, he looked right at me. He looked so cold, but there was that moment, before he was pulled under, when we both thought I’d rescue him.”
She remembered. Just last spring. It was on the news for a while. Two boys on the ice. They should have known better. There had been a number of witnesses.
“You want to forget something like that, but it only goes away for a short time, then circles back to you. He reminded me of a friend of Cooper’s. I think they moved away. A pleasantlooking kid. Peter something.”
“Peter Hoddinott,” Isabella whispered, imagining Benny and those boys. She dunked the washcloth into the water, then wrung it out.
“As long as Cooper doesn’t do anything stupid,” Benny said, “he’ll be all set.”
When Isabella was thirteen, she was asked to babysit for two children she didn’t know. They were friends of friends who were in a bind. Although Isabella had already done a fair amount of babysitting, it was usually in her own neighbourhood and for families sh
e knew.
The younger was still a baby. The mother said over the phone she would be asleep when Isabella arrived. She was an easy baby and never woke in the night. They also had an eight-year-old son, Benjamin. He was not allowed to eat anything sweet. He’s sort of allergic to sugar, the mother explained. He’ll get really excited if he has sweets. After the parents left, Isabella had a look through their kitchen cupboards and refrigerator. She saw it would be an easy rule to enforce since there weren’t any cookies or cakes or ice cream. Nothing that would be considered sweet anywhere in the house.
It was summer and Benjamin was permitted to play outside until eight, when Isabella had been told he should be called in. Bedtime was at nine. Every once in a while, Isabella went to a window or stepped out on the back deck to search for him in his blue-and-white striped shirt, just making sure he was there. She didn’t want to leave the house because it would be irresponsible to leave an infant, even one that was sleeping.
At ten to eight she called over to him. He ignored her shouts at first. She heard the other children stop and tell him he was being called in, and eventually he strolled over. She had liked him when she’d been introduced to him by his father. He was small but sturdy and had pretty eyes and a cute way of grinning at her. But she had called for him about ten times and was beginning to distrust him.
She told him it was time to get washed up for bed.
“What’s your name again?” he asked, not budging.
“Izzie.”
“That’s so funny.”
“It’s a nickname. My full name is Isabella. I’m named after my aunt who was killed.”
“You sound like my teacher from last year.”
Isabella frowned. Her mother was after saying a million times she’d make a terrific teacher.
“Can I have a snack?”
“You can have fruit. Apple or banana. Or toast.”
“Toast and a cup of tea. Please.”
“Are you allowed tea?”
“Sure.” They studied each other. His little grin was charming.
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