Missing Chldren
Page 27
Dear God, have I latently been mourning my lost youth? Is that, then, what this has been all about?… Okay, why not? I’ll be mourning for the Lorne Thorpes that were and never were till the day I die. Poor multiple Alice, she never got the chance.
I say to the road ahead, “It always helps to know you’re only a decade behind me.” Which at forty-seven she’s as good as.
“No regrets. I was thirty when I…when we had Owen. It took us seven years to know that one wasn’t enough, then a whole year for this old lady to get pregnant again. Remember that rigmarole? We were like breeding livestock.”
“I’ve suffered worse, old girl.”
Before she removes her hand, we smile briefly at each other, unsentimentally, no moist eyes. Just a mutual hope for what lies ahead. Soon we will regularly be hearing about the deaths of friends. Already two acquaintances of mine have died recently, one of late-detected prostate cancer in his early fifties and the other of a brain tumour at fifty-six. Both ugly deaths. I could be next. I will be, of course, eventually. Again, as Bob Browne (deceased) said.
We pass from the weary green of the desiccated woods to the wide open space of the soccer fields. A new cream-coloured field house with a big stained-glass window in the image of a soccer ball sits in the middle of some dozen pitches. It looks like a modest little church where the soccer moms go to pray, not for victory but that everyone has fun and no one gets hurt. If their prayers are answered, soccer will become the children’s sport of North America.
I slow for the thickening crowd and reduce further to a funereal pace. Veronica lowers her window to the sounds of children shouting and their parents shouting at them, urging them on only to do their best. She smiles to herself and I can’t read her like I used to. I think I like that.
She says, “Soccer moms compete like mad to appear non-competitive, competition being such a bad thing. But children read hypocrisy quicker than they text.”
My dear. “Not child beauty pageant moms. They’re like fucking gladiators.”
Things will never be the same again. But then, things never are. A daily sky can shift continuously, dramatically, and nothing has changed but the changeable weather. The night sky looks the same for thousands of years, yet it’s an explosion at a fireworks factory out there. Shawn was returned to us this time, but in no time she and Owen will be gone for good. Or we’ll be leaving them.
For a moment I wish like a shooting-star-wishing child that, old as we are, we could have another baby. I feel such a heaviness of heart knowing we cannot, as I do at those sudden weird reminders that my mother has been dead for years. Life can so easily seem just one bad cosmic joke. Some distracting fun. Then the fun’s over, thank you, Kevin.
For the present, though, climbing the same old hill into Troutstream, to entertain my wife I sing: “I don’t know why you say hello, Troutstream, I say good…bye …”
Just ahead on the left, where the curving road rises most steeply, I spot the Tanzanian Marathoner shuffling along, doing his falling forever forward bit. I lower the window, sip the cool air and hold it. A joke is always risky, a gamble that fewer and fewer are willing to make in these grim times… Fuck that. I exhale. What’s the point in living at all if you haven’t the conviction of your own experiences? Otherwise, just find another hole in another wasted playground, pack it in this time.
“Hey, you look like you could use a lift!”
Without slowing (he jogs so slowly as it is, he could hardly slow further without coming to a stop), he brushes me off with a flapping right hand.
“C’mon, friend,” I persist, “that left knee of yours has been waving the white flag for years!”
He squints angrily as I continue to pace him. The car behind honks. I glance in the rear-view but see only the new mirror. Veronica is pinching the dashboard with both hands, as she does on winter roads. She says my name in a hush, but not insistently.
The Tanzanian Marathoner — Ben Singh Cahir is his name, as I was reminded by Shawn, a retired computer engineer originally from Cork, Ireland (of all places), as I’d learned long ago from Jack Kilborn — Ben smiles a smile of recognition only a lifetime of North American dental care can deliver.
“No, no thanks, Dr. Thorpe.” No Peter Sellers East Indian accent, as I always did him for our family dinner theatre, knowing full well that he wasn’t an Indian immigrant; if anything, I now detected a lovely Irish lilt. “I think I can just make it to your place under my own steam. You might open a beer for me!” Huffing and puffing away, he’s not kidding about the effort, but joking nonetheless. Good man, Ben!
“It’s Lorne. And consider it done, Ben. Seriously now, I’ll have two cold ones open and waiting at our front stoop! You’ve earned it, old man!”
In my excitement I hit the accelerator — the car jumps, there’s a thump behind followed by a groaning from Veronica. I drive off glancing in the rear-view to see simultaneously the back of her head and startled eyes in the new mirror with its silvery stretch mark.
“Guess what cra-acked?” she sings.
“Shit… Ah well, all the better, we’re still hanging it.”
“What? No way… Oh, you’re joking.”
“Me, joking?”
“You are.”
“Like shit I am!”
About the Author
Gerald Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up in Canada. Missing Children is his fifth book of fiction, the third set in the Ottawa suburb of Troutstream, and preceded by the acclaimed novels Troutstream (1995) and Exotic Dancers (2001). He has also authored two books of non-fiction, edited a number of books, and published many short stories and essays and reviews. He has been the recipient of a number of awards for his writing, including the gold award for short fiction in Canada’s National Magazine Awards. He teaches at the University of Ottawa.