Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  “Let’s forget it then,” I said.

  She patted my chest — ouch — and stood. “We’d better not. But I will for now if you’ll just crack an old smile for me.”

  It hurt, but I cracked one.

  “You call that a smile?” But she was light-hearted and moving off.

  “It’s this.” And like a magic trick I produced the Jew’s harp from underneath the covers, where it had been pricking me like hell.

  She gawked, then squinted recognition. “I won’t ask where you pulled that out of.” She was turning to the door.

  “Hey, wait a second. I was just thinking, we should get that gas fireplace you’ve lusted after for years.”

  “That’s what you’ve been thinking?” Her steely look could have riveted me to that sick bed forever.

  “When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep… I remember. I love you.”

  She stood still and stared. Her look softened, she smiled. Turning away, with some difficulty: “I have to get back home to —”

  “Owen! How’s Owen? Where’s Owen?” I alarmed myself that I’d not asked after my son till then.

  With her hand on the door handle she looked back, smirking lightly, tipped back her head: “I thought you’d never ask, Dr. Thorpe… That’s some memory you’ve got there.”

  “It’s just that…well, I …”

  “I was referring to the Yeats, dear. Owen’s been up here a lot. He’s been worried sick. But you know Owen, he just doesn’t show it. Or he has his own way of showing what he feels, like someone else I know and love. Once we knew you were out of danger yesterday, he went out and got a tattoo.”

  “He what?” That really hurt.

  “Don’t look so pained, he’s the last of his friends to get one, even the young girls. I wasn’t to tell, it’s a homecoming surprise for you, so act surprised.”

  “A surprise for me? I don’t get it? Wait, don’t go!”

  “You’ll see,” she sang. “And don’t be critical.”

  “C’mon, you can’t just leave me like —”

  “I’ve left your clothes on the dresser, overnight bag in the bathroom. Rest. We’ll be back to pick you up later this afternoon. Art said we can have you back at five-thirty.”

  “But —”

  She raised her right hand and gave me the Stan Laurel wave, and left.

  Chapter 22

  I awoke alone. Outside was dim and inside dimmer, though it was only five. I made it to the bathroom like some old tar negotiating the deck of a tossing ship. I tried water without the straw, my hand trembling as I brought the glass tumbler to my mouth. I splashed my face, brushed my teeth twice and rinsed repeatedly. I still tasted something rotten.

  I looked a shocker: a blue-and-green badge on my cheekbone where Kevin had belted me, and my chin bruised black, with a raw strip like fiery gills laddering my Adam’s apple. I needed a shave badly, but flinched at the thought of anything harder than water touching my face. How had Shawn and Veronica kept themselves from screaming? Must be they’d had time to adjust while I was unconscious.

  My body was still a coherent pain. I shucked off the hospital gown and dressed, which hurt. I sniffed my armpit: deodorant? Had Veronica washed my body?… Yes. I checked the room and found nothing else of mine. Were my dirty clothes police evidence?… No: Veronica had collected them.

  I moved about gingerly, shuffling and pacing the floor for exercise, needing to rest less and less on the edge of the bed. But I would not leave the room till I could walk from wall to wall five times without looking like a doddering old man.

  At 5:20 I looked into the hallway, saw no one. I recognized the top floor of CHEO, where the executive administrative offices were protected from the real business of the hospital. My room was not for patients but for the sleep of late-working execs (which explains the dangerous glass tumblers). I moved into the hallway and headed for the elevator, whose doors whooshed open before I could turn away. A blue pinstriped suit pulled up short. I recognized him but didn’t know his name.

  He stood still, his face following me like a searchlight as I stepped into the elevator. “Dr. Thorpe, good to see you’re up and about! Wow, that’s some …”

  He had to call through the closing doors: “Hey, great work on helping crack those crimes connected to the Market Slasher case! First the arsenic poisoning and now this! I trust we’re not going to lose you to the police!”

  I smiled to myself and it hurt like hell: so that’s how the twisted tale’s being spun by CHEO’s crack PR team.

  Tamara discharged me. For once neither of us wisecracked and for the first time her ebony sheen didn’t strike me as strange, but familiar and welcome. We just looked at each other and I knew she knew everything. It surprised me only mildly that I didn’t mind.

  Still no Owen, only Shawn accompanied Veronica. Excited Shawn kept badgering me about coming to her school to give a talk on playground safety and — wink wink — meet with her new club. She was shushed by Veronica and sat back glumly in the rear seat with her arms crossed tightly on her chest. Veronica drove with a smile on her face that made the Mona Lisa look like Oprah. I couldn’t smile normally yet. It hurt too much. What had I been doing with my face when I’d thought I was smiling at them from my hospital bed?

  When we pulled into our driveway, Jack and Trixie were standing in theirs and pretending to be messing around with Jake. To their credit, they merely called hello and welcome home. I thought, Welcome home to you too, Trixie. But that was Jack’s bed of nails to lie on.

  Jake broke away and came scuttling across the patch of yard between us, with neither parent moving to stop him, of course (they could well have nudged him). Veronica intercepted him, running interference not for me but for Shawn.

  I said, “Just a minute,” and stepped around her to meet Jake. I slipped the Jew’s harp from my pocket and handed it to him.

  Without a word Jake inserted it correctly and struck the trigger. His eyes widened. He struck again and varied the tone, struck again and again. He commenced a kind of rocking jig and danced towards his parents, who were smiling widely. Veronica laughed and Shawn chimed in, me too, laughing together for the first time in a long time. Jack and Trixie each put arms on Jake and turned towards their home.

  So the old wives’ tale has truth: some Down’s kids do have musical aptitude. And Bob’s Jew’s harp had served again as the perfect distraction. What more did Doubting Lorne need to see and be touched by? There was music and magic in that Jew’s harp!

  We turned into our house, our never-so-welcome home sweet home, as welcoming as when we’d brought our babies into it. Veronica and Shawn moved a couple of steps along the front hall and, most strangely, turned back to me, smiling in weird expectation.

  Owen’s bedroom door opened and I watched his hairy legs descend the stairs. When he reached the bottom, I stepped forward with arms spread to hug him, as I’d hugged Shawn, though I’d not hugged Owen in a long time.

  With his dark face open but unsmiling he stuck out his hand and said in an affected baritone, “Welcome home, Father.”

  We all laughed nervously.

  I took his hand and looked at him with what I hoped was radiant paternal love. His eyes widened as he took in my face: “It’s really great…to see…ya. Wow!”

  Veronica said, “Oh come on, Owen. Give your dad a hug.”

  He gave her a smirk and swung back to me with a bemused frown. I was still holding his hand, so I pulled him forward and hugged him, patting his back like I was giving comfort. He remained stiff as a tree trunk.

  “Ow,” he said. “Watch the upper arm, you’re not the only injured party here, you know.”

  “Show him!” Shawn squealed.

  I stood back and acted
my curious best: “Show me what?”

  “Owen got a tattoo yesterday even when you told him he never could!”

  He snapped at her — “You be quiet!” — suddenly losing about five years. Which he reclaimed as he turned back to me.

  “He did, did he?” I drawled. “Taking advantage of the old man’s incapacity, eh? Let’s have a look. What is it, a pierced heart with Dad on it?”

  He wasn’t moving. I never knew what it was with him. And me with him, I guess.

  Veronica stepped fussily between us and turned Owen a full quarter clockwise. He was like a passive runaway brought before the judge. She pushed up the left sleeve of his black T-shirt.

  And there it was, executed in sky blue, earthen black and blood red: the caduceus.

  I was knocked back. I leaned forward, brought my face closer, raised a finger and touched it lightly. It still looked a painful, raw wound.

  Veronica beamed at me: “Isn’t it a beauty?”

  It was, and it wasn’t, of course.

  Still turned aside, he spoke to the wall opposite: “Uh, you kept mumbling it when you were, like, passed out the second night. I’d thought you were, like, raving. Can you see us? Can you see us? But one time Dr. Foster came in, he told me what it meant. Like, how it started with the Olympics and the god Hermes and all that. Dr. Foster thought it was a great idea for me to get one as a tattoo. He said it would, like, send positive energy to you, wherever you were, like.”

  For Owen, that was a Speech from the Throne. I found my voice, if a wholly wrong voice. “Right, only that’s what the Maharishi told the Beatles when Brian Epstein died, like, half a century ago.”

  He frowned hard at the wall: “What? Who? The Beatles again?” He reached for his sleeve, shaking his head: “I knew you’d say something like that.” He turned, stuck his face in mine: “But it worked, didn’t it, you’re home and alive?”

  Veronica held him back from going upstairs. He didn’t struggle and she made an imploring face at me. So I hurried: “Okay, okay, sorry. Where’d you copy it from?”

  Wearing his stoic face, he was talking to the stairway wall this time: “They had a bunch of pictures at the tattoo parlour.”

  “Parlour?” I just couldn’t help myself.

  He twisted his sore arm from Veronica’s light hold and pushed down the sleeve, was turning to the stairs.

  I caught his forearm, he winced, and I hurried again: “No, wait, that was just my usual stupid joke. I like it, I really do. Let’s have another look.”

  I pulled him toward me, he resisted lightly. I pushed up the sleeve and, cupping his upper arm so high that my hand was lodged in his hot and hairy pit, took a really good look. The winged standard always made me think of a fallen angel more than something hermetic. In Owen’s version, two red-and-black diamond-patterned snakes twine a dark pole beneath two blue wings to flick tongues at each other. The caduceus had centred a lot of my “big” thinking, what I would call my philosophy, for most of my mature life. I loved that it was the symbol of my profession and that its full meaning would remain as mysterious as the eternal dance of yin and yang. Although I’d explicitly forbidden Owen many times from disfiguring himself with tattoos, I found myself fine with the idea that the caduceus now branded my son.

  I said as best I could, “No joke, it’s a…well, I think it’s a beauty. Maybe we should all, the whole family, get one.”

  Veronica chimed in two syllables, “Lo-orne?”

  “I’m serious.” The joking father who cried serious, or half-serious anyway.

  “Like I care.” He was climbing the stairs, but turned after only two: “Hey, was it you snuck that Abbey Road into my player?”

  “Guilty, son, I apologize.”

  He was higher up now, if sounding closer: “When they all, like, jam out at the end, it’s like they’re talking to each other in a whole new language. That really the Beatles?”

  I called, “What about ‘Oh! Darling’?”

  Nearing his room he loudly and ironically sang the opening of “Octopus’s Garden.”

  I smiled at smiling Veronica: “He was smiling heading up, you couldn’t see.”

  She smile-frowned: “To tell you the truth, I think the tattoo looks awful. Does it look infected to you?”

  I gazed up the dim stairs: “Probably still too soon to tell. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  I’d not noticed Shawn leave for the family room, though I recognized the gong and tinkling bells that began Wy Knots. Veronica looked up the empty stairway after Owen, then gave me her oh-well smirk. I was suddenly dead tired.

  She saw my weariness, kissed my tender cheek: “Go lie down for a spell. I’ll keep your supper for whenever you come down. Chicken soup!” She laughed as lightly as Wy’s tinkling bells.

  I obeyed. I didn’t drift off right away, perhaps because I’d slept so much lately or from the nervous excitement of being home and Owen’s tattoo and all. I stared at the stippled ceiling and thought about the brief visit I’d made at CHEO before meeting Veronica outside the Discharge pod. More a reconnoitring than a visit.

  The Catholic privacy room had been empty. In the wall mural I could detect no crack running up from the little girl’s proffered lily through Jesus’ robe and on up through the ceiling. Maybe the crack had opened only briefly and closed, the concrete shifting in cooling temperatures as wood breathes? I would not check my parking spot in the underground garage where I’d first hit the wall with Veronica’s Golf. Anyway, I couldn’t remember whether I’d actually seen a crack down there or envisioned it later. I was fine with that too.

  Previously I’d paid no attention to the mural’s title, which scrolled above in a Gothic script banner held in the beaks of bluebirds:

  An odd use of the word, that “suffers.” No suffering the big grown-ups for Jesus when he’s taking a break. He preferred children and whores and thieves, and losers for apostles. But give us a break too, suffering J, suffer us successful middle-class, middle-aged men and women of Troutstream. (Okay: late middle-aged.) We’re dying out here in the ’burbs…if slowly.

  L’Envoi:

  The SUV to Troutstream

  We are returning from Place D’Orleans Mall in our spanking new Ford Escape, with an unsecured big mirror in the back seat partially blocking the rear view. We’ve had a gas fireplace installed in the family room and it needed something above it. We agreed on the traditional golden-framed mirror. As we make the tricky left turn onto Izaak Walton Road against heavy traffic, Veronica reaches into the back seat as if calming a dog or soothing a child. We are soon slowed behind Mann Quarry’s regular convoy of dump trucks, even on a Sunday, and by families streaming to the Sharks Tank soccer fields, themselves driving slowly or strolling the road’s gravel shoulders from distant parking spots.

  On this way into Troutstream the tendency is to keep eyes right, away from the pandemonium of the quarry with its gigantic racket, low clouds of stone dust and growing cones of gravel. We approach the entrance to the Troutstream Toboggan Hill, and we both look glum but say nothing. Until reaching the soccer fields, the area on the right is wooded with umpteenth-generation maple and poplar and spindly birch. Now, at this season, the cool end of a hot September after a tropical summer, the woods appears weary of its green leaves, as if dreaming of earth tones and the deep sleep of winter.

  Veronica catches me looking and says, “Keep your eyes on the road, dear. There’re lots of soccer kids around.”

  She returns to the view. “As it slides past, it’s like a Monet painting. Did you know he would paint the same haystack over and over in different lights?”

  She’s showing off. Once, mere weeks ago, I’d have made some crack to ridicule her affectation. Did you forget your contacts? Or perhaps a groaner in a Maurice Chevalier accent: Sairtannly zee painteengs would be worth bo-coo de moe-nee.

  Now I say, “The very same hay
stack? But I don’t think you can look at the same haystack twice.”

  “That’s the point. And that’s Heraclitus, who said you can’t step into the same stream twice.”

  “Or drive into the same Troutstream?”

  She laughs the unreserved laugh that makes me love her. And says, “But you’re right, of course. Haystack, stream, Troutstream. Everything is changing always and forever, and thank God it is.”

  God. Singular. There’s a sea change.

  I risk it. “Ever notice in first-blush spring, the whole woods radiates a green nimbus just above the actual trees? It looks like the feel of a newborn’s skin, more the idea of green than the thing itself.”

  “Gotcha, Shakespeare. Shit. Sorry, that was uncalled for. That’s actually pretty good. Maybe you’ve been a poet all along pretending to be a scientist.”

  I keep my face to the road: “Sometimes I don’t know what I am anymore.”

  “You’ll get over it.” She turns again to her side window and says more quietly, “We will.”

  “We will,” I echo.

  “And happy belated birthday, darling.”

  With a sigh she turns and this time reaches her left hand to the nape of my neck. Nice. I was feeling a chill there. I’d turned sixty in the middle of it all, though no one celebrated, understandably. I was on the threshold of old age, the “new fifty” or forty or whatever be damned. Bob Browne was right: I’d missed my time-lapsed middle age still thinking I was young. I imagine many do. The Age of Delusion, if that’s not already been every age for us deluded boomers, from the decade of the ’50s onwards. We would never be dying slowly, no, not us, babbling our protests all the way to the grave, as though life was just another talk show, a rehearsal for some “revolution.” We would be Nature’s conquerors — the very first immortals! The cosmos would just have to make an exception for us.