by Lori Weber
“Don’t be surprised if nobody talks to you,” Diane had warned me on the way to the arena the night I’d met Dutchie, back in November. I’d looked at her, puzzled. “Nobody knows you yet,” she’d explained, making me feel like I’d have to be introduced limb by limb, so as not to scare anyone.
The arena was so cold you could see your breath when you spoke and every word bounced back to hit you in the face. It was where everyone hung out in the winter, sitting on long metal benches that froze your bum, or walking round, stopping to blow fog and print your name on the Plexiglass. It was so different from the back alleys and paths along the water that Jack and I had always played in, pretending we were Samuel de Champlain, the founder of our city. When we were kids, the Saint Lawrence River became the Mississippi and our back lane became Louisiana, which we’d claimed for the king of France.
That night, against all of Diane’s predictions, Dutchie came over and talked to me.
“I like your T-shirt,” he said, pinching the material around John Lennon’s face and pulling me closer.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering if this meant we should kiss.
“Where’d you live before?” he asked.
“Verdun.”
“Huh?” It was clear he’d never heard of it.
“Did you like it there?”
“It was okay,” I said, lying. How would it make me look if I told him I loved it there, that I still woke up every morning missing it?
Dutchie lives in a stone house with a two-car garage that is bigger than our town house and a sunk-in pool in the shape of a large kidney bean. There was nothing like that in Verdun.
I’ve been going out with Dutchie for six months now and he still doesn’t know anything about Jack. We don’t really talk much. When I’m at his place, I mostly watch him and his friends gaming or playing pool. I sit on the sofa under the high-powered speakers that are mounted on the wall. Dutchie ripped off the fronts to expose the tweeters and woofers. If I sit under them long enough, my heart syncopates with the beat of the hip-hop bass and I feel as if I too am mounted on the wall, looking down at the pool table. Sometimes, Dutchie will hand me the pool cue and let me take a turn. I always miss and then he slaps my bum, which makes his friends laugh. When they play video games on Dutchie’s massive TV that practically takes up the whole back wall, they get so into the action they almost forget I exist, I sit so still and quiet.
THE NEXT MORNING the assault was on page two of The Gazette. The article didn’t mention the fact that Jack was one of the newspaper’s delivery boys and that he’d been beaten while working. His route ran along Champlain, parallel to the aqueduct. He was spotted by a man walking his dog at about 7 a.m. Did the editor think the connection was bad for publicity? And if so, was it because of the violence, or because Jack might be gay?
My mother clipped the article and kept rereading it, sniffling into her tissue. I read it only once, holding it at arm’s length and scanning the black lines quickly. Because of his age, Jack’s name was omitted. They said the victim, who was recovering in the Verdun Hospital, had a severe stutter. I knew Jack’s stutter, his machine-gun like repetition of consonants, but I also knew that he only stuttered when people made him nervous, like the kids who made guns of their fingers and imitated him; or my father, who was always angry around Jack.
“You’ll have to go over and keep your aunt company this afternoon, Jody,” my mom said as she washed the breakfast dishes. So far, she had completely ignored the built-in dishwasher, no matter how many times my father told her to try it.
“Why me?”
“Because one of us should be there. It will make the place seem less empty.”
“But why can’t you go?”
“Because,” my mom replied, leaving it at that. I knew the reason. Neither of us had ever taken the two long bus rides and one short metro ride to Verdun from Dollard. My mom had hardly left the house on her own since we moved. So, it would have to be me.
While I was at my aunt’s, two policemen came in to search Jack’s room.
“We’re trying to find the culprits. Maybe someone threatened him before and he wrote about it or something,” one of them said in a heavy French accent. We listened as they opened and shut drawers, pulled books off shelves, books about birds and fish mostly. I knew the insides of Jack’s room as well as my own.
Half an hour later they emerged, empty-handed. My aunt, who had spent the whole time twisting a polka-dotted scarf round and round her neck, held back tears as their broad leather shoulders knocked her pictures crooked in the hallway.
“Who would want to hurt Jack?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. It was probably strangers, just random violence,” I said, taking her hand. I swallowed a lump in my throat. I had hurt Jack too, by abandoning him. Now that I was back there, I knew it. I could feel it in the walls.
When my aunt left for the hospital, I returned home. I didn’t want to see Jack in that condition. Besides, he was still out of it and wouldn’t have known I was there. That was my excuse for the next month, even when my mother did finally go see Jack, when my father agreed to take her.
Eventually Jack’s wounds healed. He never did lose the eye or any fingers to frostbite. But his head hadn’t recovered. In January, he was sent to the Douglas Mental Hospital to mend. I couldn’t believe he was now inside the big brown hospital that sat beside the river. Jack and I used to cycle past it all the time. We’d stop to watch the attendants, all dressed in white, pushing patients around the wide green lawn in their wheelchairs. How could Jack be one of them?
But he was. And that’s where he’s been for the last four months, until today.
MY AUNT HAS finally come out of her room. Her hair is twisted up in a bun, her body squeezed into a two-piece suit, a flower brooch bursting on the left lapel. The bow of a white blouse is tied tightly under her chin, the loops dangling down her chest. She walks to the center of the room and spins, pivoting on one high-heeled shoe.
“Do I look all right?” she asks and we all nod in unison, even though I think she looks like a high school principal.
I’m wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Every now and then I peek inside my top, amazed at the sight of my cleavage. Sometimes I slip a finger inside and measure its depth. I do this when no one is looking, like while I’m lying on Dutchie’s sofa, the sound of pool balls clicking beside me. I wonder what Jack will think when he sees me. I have a sudden flash of the other kids chanting “Jodie and Jackie sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” when they saw me and Jack together.
Dutchie and I have kissed, but not much more than that. We came close last week. I was helping him count his father’s gold. Dutchie’s father sells gold charms that come in little plastic bags with ziplock tops. Dutchie wears a replica of everything he owns around his neck: a pool cue, a guitar, a car, a dog. When he started going out with me he added a gold girl.
As I counted, I wondered if the thought of stealing had ever occurred to Dutchie. He and his friends liked to talk tough. They told stories of shoplifting electronic stuff by ripping off the barcodes. And they were always bragging about the million ways they had defied their parents. Their big, daring thrill was to smoke up in the basement then raid Dutchie’s fridge upstairs. At times like these, when they were telling their lame stories, I often felt like spilling the beans about Jack. I bet none of them had a cousin who had actually been beaten up to the point of collapse. Or been the subject of a police investigation, one that still hadn’t produced any results.
That day, something about the way Dutchie was counting the bags began to annoy me. I could see him in thirty years, counting bags the same way, his belly a bit fatter but his face still wearing the same smug expression. I don’t think Dutchie was even aware of how lucky he was that he’d never have to worry about money. His father was just going to pass the whole business on to him. I thought about Jack and how he worried about where he’d get the money to study to be a vet. He knew it would be tough for his mother
, who was a secretary in a small company.
“You could make a lot of money on one of these bags,” I blurted out. “Are you ever tempted?”
“You’re sick,” Dutchie replied, looking at me like I’d just dropped to earth from another planet.
“Sorry,” I said, rolling my eyes when he turned away.
Dutchie quit counting bags and sprawled out on the sofa to strum his guitar, jerking his head as though he were on stage. I was suddenly aware of the fact that we were alone for a change. I thought something should happen. Jack and I used to walk along the bushes that border the river late at night, collecting bottles. Once we stumbled on a naked couple, their limbs locked around each other like pretzels. We both turned red and pretended we hadn’t seen anything.
I reached out to touch Dutchie’s hair, digging my fingers into the long curls. He sat up, kind of startled, staring at me. Then I put my hand around his neck and pulled him towards me. We kissed, slowly at first, and then a bit faster, Dutchie’s tongue pushing shyly into my mouth. But when I stretched out to lie down beside him, my foot caught his guitar, knocking it to the floor.
Dutchie jumped up and grabbed it, hugging it to his chest and running his fingers along the strings of the neck. A knob came off in his hands.
“Shit.”
“Sorry,” I said, straightening up. I just couldn’t get anything right in this neighborhood. I had crossed another unseen border.
“Never mind,” Dutchie said, replacing the guitar on its stand. “I guess I better give you a lift home.”
At my house, I jumped out of the car without saying goodbye and slammed the door. I walked up the driveway, my hand inside my jacket pocket, fingering two gold dice.
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK and Jack is still not here. My stomach is grumbling with anxiety. I’ve tried to picture this scene a million times, Jack walking in, me running to him. But in my mind we’re always alone. I ask Jack to forgive me for not going to visit him. I try to explain why I couldn’t. The two neighborhoods were so far apart. Somehow, I couldn’t make my way back between them. And besides, from what I’d overheard my mother say on the phone, he wasn’t the same Jack anymore. She and my aunt talked about drugs and weight gain and all kinds of things that I couldn’t associate with Jack, and that I was afraid to see.
Suddenly, footsteps sound on the inside stairs that lead up to the second-floor. Does Jack still own a key, I wonder, or did they strip away all his personal belongings, like they do to patients in movies? A fist knocks on the door and we all sit still, looking from one to the other. My aunt is back in her bedroom, changing again.
“I’ll get it,” my father says, rising. My hands are shaking in my lap.
Jack stands in the doorway. He has grown so tall and broad that he almost fills it. He steps inside and scans the room quickly, taking in the balloons and streamers. A slight smile curls the corner of his lips, as if he knew his mother would go overboard.
“Hello, Jack.” My father hesitates, then shakes Jack’s hand, the way he would an adult. Jack nods hello. My mother is standing now, reaching up on tippy toes to plant a kiss on Jack’s cheek. Then she disappears down the hall. When she comes back my aunt is behind her, stepping shyly, like a child who is being introduced to a room full of adults.
Jack holds out his hand.
“Hello, Mom,” he says. My aunt steps forward and they clasp hands and kiss cheeks.
Soon we’re all seated with drinks. Jack sits beside my father on the sofa, balanced on the edge, bent forwards with his elbows on his knees. We make small talk about the weather. Nobody mentions the hospital. My aunt, who has changed into a yellow dress, asks whether the living-room looks different? Jack looks around and shakes his head. My aunt jumps up to point out a new shelf with flowery ornaments sitting on it.
“Nice, Mom.” Jack smiles.
He hasn’t really looked at me yet, only quickly, once or twice. Whenever he does I feel my face flush.
“Well, I think I’ll go for a walk and stretch my legs,” Jack says suddenly. His stutter has disappeared.
At the door he looks back at me. “Wanna come?”
We turn automatically down the old lane.
“The crazy man still living in the nuthouse?” Jack asks, winking. The crazy man’s yard separates Jack’s building from my old one. In the summer we used to sneak over the fence and climb the bony-branched crabapple tree to pluck the rocky green fruit. Once, I slipped a pair under my T-shirt and pretended they were breasts and Jack blushed.
I shrug. The way he says “nuthouse” kind of embarrasses me, considering where he’s just come from.
“You’re looking good.” Jack smiles down on me.
“Thanks,” I say, shrugging and blushing. There’s so much I want to know, but Jack’s good humor throws me off.
“You’ve changed,” I say. Jack grins, as if to say he knows.
“So have you,” Jack says.
“I have?” I respond, startled.
“You got a boyfriend?” Jack asks. I meant to keep Dutchie hidden, to keep him on his side of the city, tucked in his square house on the neat street far from the water.
“Yeah,” I answer, although Dutchie and I haven’t spoken since the night I injured his precious instrument.
Jack nods, as though he had expected this. I want to know where it shows on me. I try to picture myself, holding up a mental mirror. I suppose Dutchie is my proof, but he’s not here. The gold dice in my pocket are the only things connecting me to him.
“Hey. Think we could still fit in there?” Jack points to the narrow space between two garages where we used to hide as kids.
“I don’t know, but we could try.” I once got stuck inside when some kids stuffed cardboard ripped from a refrigerator box in behind me. I couldn’t even see the strip of light that was the opening. Jack kept calling “It’s okay, I’ll get you out” as he pulled out the strips of cardboard like plaster from a cast.
Jack takes my hand and leads me inside the dim space. Our bodies whisk the walls, but we fit.
“Far enough,” Jack says. He squeezes his shoulders together and turns to face me. He is outline, shadow; the whites of his eyes are lights. “See, we still fit,” he says.
We stare at each other as our eyes grow accustomed to the dark.
“You must be curious,” Jack whispers, reading my thoughts. I nod. “There’s nothing much to tell,” Jack says. Nothing much, only four months in the looney-bin by the river, living under the same roof as the funny-eyed people. And before that, the beating. I see his body lying by the water, curled like a question mark. And the ugly word, fag, above him.
“It’s over. It’s already just a blur, really. I just want to look forward, now that I’m better.”
My year is suddenly a blur too. The new neighborhood, the new school, all the new people vanished in this moment with Jack.
“I’m sorry I never came to see you, Jack.”
“Oh, forget it. I understand. I wouldn’t want to go there either, if I didn’t have to. So, how are things?”
Things. That’s what Dutchie and Diane seem like now.
“I don’t know. I guess I’m doing okay. I’m not too crazy about the new neighborhood. It’s different, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” Jack agrees with a sigh that tells me he really does know. I guess his whole life will be different now, after what he’s gone through. He’ll never again be the person he was before the beating.
“Hey, are you crying?” Jack bends near my face.
Warm tears are trickling into my mouth. There is an ache in my arms and down my chest, as though something that was once there has gone and left nothing but burning skin. The last time I felt understood was here, in this lane, with Jack. Just before moving, I told Jack how much I didn’t want to go, and he told me it would all work out and that he’d come visit me often. But then …
Jack bends down and puts his arms tightly around me, pulling me close. This is what I remember about Jack, always f
eeling good and safe with him, like I was home.
When we separate, Jack says, “Let’s get out of here.” It’s too dark to see his expression.
Back out in the lane, even in the dim May light, I can see how much Jack has changed. The gentle brown eyes are still the same, but his face is sharper. It hits me suddenly that Jack has grown up. If I hadn’t moved, and if he hadn’t had a breakdown, we probably wouldn’t still be playing the same old games anyway.
“You okay?” Jack asks, taking my hand again.
“Yeah,” I hesitate. We’re almost back at his house and I still feel I don’t know anything about him. It’s funny how I had pictured Jack coming to rescue me from the new neighborhood. Now I know that won’t happen. But I also know that I won’t go back to sitting and watching Dutchie, to blending in with the wallpaper, to letting him ignore me except for when he needs me to score points with his friends.
“I guess we should get back now. You know, parents?” Jack says, screwing up his eyebrows.
“You go ahead,” I say. “I just have to do something.”
“Okay. Are you sure you’re all right?” Jack asks.
“I’m okay. Really. I just want to do something first, then I’ll be up.”
When Jack is gone, I turn and walk towards the aqueduct. It’s dark, only the street lights from neighboring roads light the path. But I don’t need light. I would know the path blindfolded. I stop on the small footbridge where Jack must have been attacked. I hook my leg over the middle bar. Dutchie’s dice are cold tiny ice cubes in my hand. I shake them then release them into the air, high over the silver water.