by Daniel Perry
“So what did you say?”
Suspicious. Still blaming me.
“I said that whatever happened, we’d do it together. His contract was just a year — so what if it was at his old high school? — and I was getting calls for sub work in London. It was experience, and before long we’d take it somewhere else: Toronto, or Hamilton if we had to, or even England or somewhere. There was no rush.”
Brian raises a hand to his mouth. He nibbles a thumbnail.
“So he was okay? Last time you saw him?”
I exhale.
“He was really upset that everyone he had known was either a burnout or long gone, hung over every day on the line at Ritter or never to be heard from again. He said, ‘Oldest friend and best friend aren’t synonyms.’”
Brian shifts on the bed. I pin him with my eyes.
“Yes. He mentioned your name.”
“I’m sure he did,” Brian says. “I saw him that night, too.”
“What?”
BRIAN
I SHOULDN’T HAVE told her. Really. It’s the last thing she needs. And now, if we don’t get past it, we’ll never get this speech done.
“I was on course at Wolseley,” I say. “I came to visit my parents. We ordered Chinese, and afterward I went out to Brewskie’s with Wade and Stella ... do you know my sister?”
Paula stamps her foot. I’d better cut to the chase.
“I don’t know when he got to the bar, but Mike was stinking drunk when I saw him. Did he have anything at home?”
“Two beers.”
“I didn’t notice him until he got loud, when Willy cut him off. I guess he’d been there a while ...”
“So you ...?”
“So I went over and talked him down. I told him I’d walk him home.”
Paula’s lips quiver.
“You walked home with him?”
It spreads to her whole face.
“Why didn’t he get home?”
I feel the sweat gathering, moist beneath my watch. I unclasp it and set it on the bed.
“We had an argument.”
She grits her teeth.
“I was trying to help.”
“Big mistake when he gets talking about Ray,” she says, scoffing. “God, Brian. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Maybe seeing him will help everyone move on.’”
“That wouldn’t have made it better.”
“No.” I don’t mean to laugh. “You’re right.”
Paula scowls.
“He said I was missing the point — that I was just another army asshole like Ray and that it must be nice to always have it all figured out. He was really angry. He didn’t understand why Ray would abandon them but man up for someone else.”
“And then?”
“And then he got quiet for a minute. We just looked at each other. He said, ‘I don’t get it. You and I both got out of here, but I messed it up. You’ll drive to London tomorrow and get on a plane back to wherever the hell you live now, and once you’re gone, this place will swallow me whole.’”
Paula sinks in the chair.
“Anything else?”
“He took a swing at me.”
“Did you hit him back?”
“He was so drunk.” I smile. “It wasn’t much of a punch.”
She doesn’t find it funny.
“I just said, ‘Fine, Mike. Get yourself home,’ and turned around. I left him on Main Street. I guess he carried on ... past your house and out of town ... and when he got to the — ”
Paula’s face goes white.
“No.” She shakes her head. “You must have said something else. Come on. What did you say?”
Fuck. Well. I’ve come this far.
“I told him that I wished I hadn’t run into him. After he tried to hit me. And that maybe we’d be better off just remembering how things were when we were kids.” I put my head in my hands. That’s all I want to say, but I feel her hot glare. It draws the rest out of me. “He said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ And for what it’s worth, he was pretty calm.”
She squints, perplexed.
“I asked if he was all right to get back,” I say, but the next part clangs in my brain. “He said, ‘Sure thing.’ And then he said ... ‘Goodbye.’”
I feel my jaw relax, and the first tears run onto my cheeks. I don’t look at her. I just croak, “I’m so sorry.”
PAULA
WELL, WHAT DO you know? I thought. Brian is human.
When he started to cry I sat down on the bed, and immediately, he keeled over. His head landed in my lap.
“Oh my God. Oh, God. It’s my fault,” he moaned, tears on my jeans and his chest heaving. “I killed him!”
I took him by the shoulders.
“No, you didn’t.”
He sniffed. “Mike jumped because even his oldest friend walked out on him.”
Melodramatic, and wrong.
“Brian, you said you just wanted to remember being kids. Right?”
He sat up and put his hands to his eyes, correcting the aberration, this sudden show of emotion. He stretched his cheeks as he wiped them. He nodded.
“I think he decided to be a kid again,” I said.
Brian dried his nose on his khaki sleeve.
“It was a mistake,” I said. “It wasn’t suicide.”
Brian clenched his fists.
“What’s it matter?” he snarled. “Everyone’s decided already.”
“Not everyone.”
I took the notebook from the desk and flipped to the very back, where a newer pen had marked the yellow pages.
“I remember summer afternoons with Brian,” I read aloud. “We’re not friends anymore, which I feel bad about, but — ”
I looked at Brian. He held his breath.
“ — now, with everything that’s happened, that’s all I want to keep. The rest of it has faded, been thrown under a blanket. I can’t make sense of it. Most of it, I can’t even remember. All I have now are those days, laying our towels on the banks, daring each other and jumping.”
Brian reached for the notebook.
“Let me see that,” he said.
I pulled back and shielded it with my body.
“I can’t believe — ”
“Run with what you have.”
“You think that’s best?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You’re talking about the good parts, when you were in high school, and you never suggest that he killed himself.”
Brian stared off.
“I should have read the whole thing.”
“You already had your mind made up.”
He inhaled and gathered himself, looking first out the window.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And then, ever the taskmaster, he stood up. He looked at the watch on the bed.
“Okay,” he said. “Your turn. What will you say tomorrow?”
I took my speech from the desk — three pages, typed the night before.
“I know that he didn’t want to die,” I said. “This is just a terrible twist of fate.” A useful cliché, and now, the big finish, like the public speaking people teach: “He had always written, but he was starting to work at it — going back to his old journals and editing them, making something someone else could read. It was magical: he was excited, for once.
“Awakening. That’s how I’ll remember Mike.”
I looked up from my papers. I hadn’t cried at all.
“It’s good,” Brian said.
We knew what to expect before we finished writing. People had lined up out the funeral home door for visitation, so Susan moved the service to the Currie High School gym. In the folding chairs now are Mike’s extended family members and the other teachers with their students. In the back are a lot of those small-town types, who met Mike maybe once, maybe when he was ten, but who still can’t imagine not being here.
“He was only twenty-nine,” they whisper. “Such a shame.”
; I sit onstage behind the open curtain, between an industrial-sized trash can and Brian’s empty chair, watching him sing his mechanical song. He says his speech word for word and never looks down — even better than he did in the mirror yesterday. I notice Jessie Mueller in the back row in her skating jacket, eyes locked on Brian the whole time. When he steps away from the podium, each silent second tamps the crowd, and when he’s finally out of sight he exhales. It betrays the weight it carries.
The minister takes Brian’s place. He leans over the microphone. “And now, I’d like to call on Michael’s girlfriend, Paula Wells.” Jessie hurriedly sidesteps out of her row toward the exit. I stand and inhale. Brian flashes a miniature thumbs up. It’s corny but he means it. I edge between him and a cage of red dodge-balls, but then I turn back to the trash can. I drop my speech in. From my skirt pocket, I pull out a page I ripped from the green notebook.
“Paula, no,” Brian whispers. “You don’t know what he wanted to leave out.”
On stage I rest the paper under the lamp in front of me. I look at the title, The Jade Nightingale, and the beginning, which he had shown to only me. I take a deep breath and I form the words, but when I open my mouth all that comes out is a sob. I drop my head into my arms on the wood.
Brian taps his watch backstage.
Nine more minutes.
My throaty gasp echoes through the speakers. It rattles the walls.
Nobody Looks That Young Here
TAXIS CART THE fresh faces toward the university, and the people left behind are the ones from around here, obstacles on the way to the exit: a maintenance guy in pale brown holding an extra large Tim’s cup; a ticket collector gathering her jacket; an older pot-bellied man in plaid looking at the ceiling, expressionless while his wife clutches their teenage son to her cat sweater.
The boy was me, twenty-eight years ago, saying, “I’ll be fine, it’s not even far,” then striding to the platform without looking back. I’m nearly fifty now, but in London I still sit on the hard blue seats and wait for a ride from my parents. The mid-morning train carries either students or my kind: adopted Torontonians home for an afternoon funeral. I’ve missed quite a few since I left Currie Township, but this time I can’t stay away.
I READ ABOUT Mike Carrion online, in the London Free Press obits. Nobody calls me when people die anymore. His surviving aunt, Claire, was with my brother, Scott, when we were teenagers, and I remember Susan, too, leaving school when the kid was born; she came back briefly the next year before she gave up entirely. I had never seen him before his photo was in the paper: farmer tan, burnt nose, sandy hair messed from swimming, on a Thai beach with a pretty brunette, Mike ♥ Paula toe-etched in the sand. Paula’s grin shone compared to Mike’s featherweight grimace, a smile that reminded me of my own at that age.
ON THE TRAIN, when I tried to predict Susan’s state, I settled on some mix of catatonic and numb. I didn’t even consider drunk. Before the ceremony she spots me on the fringe of the Currie High School gym. Under her greying straw hair her age-puckered mouth forms an O. Behind her glasses the crinkles multiply. She hurries toward me.
“What are you — ,” she says, “it’s great to see you, Dave,” and she wraps me in a vodka-scented hug, closer than it should be. It’s as though she presumed me dead. I shouldn’t have come. I’m upstaging the kid.
When she finally lets go, she says, “I can’t believe you came all the way from Toronto.”
“It’s not that f — ”
She hugs me again.
“Thank you,” she says.
I WEDGE INTO the back row with the farm boy second cousins: a grey-suited kicker among a black-clad offensive line. From the stage Paula eulogizes, or tries to, breaking down and rushing off, which sends a wave of hushed chatter through the crowd. I’m sure most people have come just to hear what Susan will say, but she doesn’t leave the front row where she sniffles softly. A bare arm strokes her back from a sleeveless black dress next to her. I’m not listening to the minister when he reclaims the podium; the arm is lightly muscled, the dress sleek. The brown hair almost to the waist is without a hint of silver. Nobody looks that young here.
But is Claire back for the funeral, or back back?
Of course she stays facing forward, neck rod-straight, and she follows along with the hymn and Psalm 23, keeping hold of her sister through the service’s final words, a reminder about coffee and sandwiches at Currie Presbyterian after interment. The pamphlets say internment. And Mike was an English teacher. His former colleagues rise first and shepherd students back to class, leaving a small contingent for the trip to River Road Cemetery, which is closer than ever this spring to washing into the Waubnakee with the melting snow.
I scan the gym for someone I can ask for a ride. I recognize a few faces, but I’d have to make them recognize me, Bill and Gloria’s not-so-prodigal son who left town after that awful accident. The idiot who tried to re-open the movie theatre. I linger just long enough to get a view of the family. Susan sags into the black dress and I finally see Claire’s smooth face. It closes its eyes and moves its lips, whispering. The eyes meet mine when they reopen. The manicured brows rise. The mouth forms a faint smile, then Dave, and the left hand sweeps subtly toward the double doors — a sort of See you at the cemetery that I answer with a small nod. I disappear into the herd between gym and cafeteria and exit to the student parking lot, a path to Main Street I thought I’d never take again. The storefronts are boarded up like they were when I left town.
I sit on a brand-new bench when I reach the old train station, the object of the Save Our Heritage plaque in front of it. The black roof and grey trusses and dulling white trim have been painted pale brown, and dark green, and cream. Young shrubs have been planted out front. Still, no train has stopped here in twenty years. I watch the hearse and cars behind it head out Main Street toward the township, then I wait a while before I start a slow walk to the church.
IT’S THIRTY-ONE YEARS since my last visit to Currie Presbyterian — more if you don’t count Christmas Eves — but the platters are served by the same church ladies, in their eighties now but going strong, until, until, until. As always, tables are in three long rows — it wouldn’t matter whether it was a wedding, the Harvest Supper or a wake — and the sandwiches are still made with Price-Mart white bread and canned tuna or egg salad from a tub. The coffee is dishwatery as ever. The floor made of musty wooden slats seems more worn than I remember, but it might just be the contrast with the renovated back wall, where a new white vestibule and wide door lead to a just-built ramp. Mike’s family walks up it, led by swaying Susan, who Paula supports with a forearm. A younger woman follows who must be Mike’s sister, Nancy, then Claire. The black dress is finally a little rumpled.
“Dave,” she says. “Nice of you to come.”
I look down.
“Well, it’s not about me.”
“Or me,” she says, tilting her head toward Susan. She exhales and a silence sets in. “Still in Toronto?” she finally asks.
I’ve never been much for small talk, but sometimes ...
“Yeah. You?”
She shakes her head.
“I moved back when Mom was dying.” Little smile. “Five years ago, I guess.”
“I’d never have thought — ”
“I know, right?” She stifles a laugh — this is a funeral, after all. “Me, who tore out of here, never to be seen again ...”
“That’s two of us,” I say.
“So what do you do now?”
I look past her.
“I’ve been at TD Bank since I was twenty-five,” I say. “I’ve done pretty much everything you can do there, but I’ll never get promoted any higher, because — ”
Stop. It’s boring.
“What about you?” I ask.
“Teacher,” she says. “Elementary. Off today, obviously.”
“Married?”
“I was. He wouldn’t move with me.” She looks away for a second. “You?”
“Two boys.”
I glance around the room.
“Did they come?”
She looks away from me.
“They’ve never really known their cousins.”
“Still ...”
“Still.”
Over Claire’s shoulder, I see Susan lean into Nancy, burying her head in the dirty blond hair on the thick shoulder.
I ask, “How’s she holding up?” even though I know the answer.
“Not well. She’s been drinking a lot.”
“And his father ...?”
She shakes her head again.
“No one’s seen Ray since the 80s. He phoned Mike, though.”
I don’t know what to say.
“The night of the accident,” she adds. “I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”
I nod and try to think of something.
She blurts: “Everyone’s blaming Ray.”
Silence again.
“How’s Scott?” she asks.
“Still in Calgary ...” I say, stalling a second. “He used to tell me I should look you up, when you were still in Toronto.” Here goes. “I’m sorry I never did.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she says. She looks away and so do I. Already the lunchers are starting to disperse; a sandwich and coffee and then back to the field, or in a lot of cases Ritter, where the afternoon shift will start soon. Dishes clatter and we turn to the sound. Susan is falling and taking a white tablecloth with her, scattering date squares and vegetables with ranch dip on the floor.
“Oh, God,” Claire says, and rushes off to her sister.