Extraordinary

Three

Eighteen floors down from Sally’s apartment, a car alarm went off in the parking lot. Honk, honk, honk, honk. We both listened to it involuntarily. Then it suddenly stopped and the room again filled with silence, a more profound silence, it seemed, both of us privately aware of where we were and why we were there. In only a few hours, we had grown so enthralled with each other’s company that the third person in the room had disappeared.

“I wrote the note,” she said.

“What’s it say?”

“Just to call the police before coming into the apartment.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t want to make any troubles for you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Just stick it to the door when you leave.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Sally?”

“It’s not complicated,” she said evenly, and I had the feeling she had said this before, but only to herself, in preparation for this very conversation. “I’m not depressed, the world isn’t grey, I don’t want to punish people, it’s just that this”—she gestured toward her body in the green dressing gown—“has become less and less manageable. I don’t want to go into physical details, but you understand. And it’s only going to get worse. And soon—not tomorrow or even next year, soon though—I won’t have even this much control over what happens to me. And then there’s you,” she added softly.

“What about me?”

“One of these days, you might go away. Or you might change your mind.”

“And?”

“And then I wouldn’t have anyone to help me.”

“Is there no one else?”

“I can’t imagine there would be. Could you?”

“How did you know I wouldn’t tell someone?” I said.

She was looking right at me now. She waited a moment. “Because I know what you’re like. Because enough is enough.”

The phone rang.

“Do you want to get that?”

But she didn’t answer. She had retreated into herself, and I suddenly had the feeling she was thinking about her son, Kyle. But I didn’t want to bring him up. Not tonight. She seemed to read my thoughts, though, and taking a deep, involuntary breath as one does before beginning a task that has been done before but needs to be done again, she began. “About six months after my accident, I got a letter from my ex-husband, Bruce. Chloe and I had moved back to the house in San Miguel. I was in a wheelchair, but managing.”

The phone stopped ringing.

“It was a disturbing but not a surprising letter, something I had expected for some time. Kyle, who was seventeen, had gotten himself into trouble. Teenage trouble. But from the lugubrious and self-satisfied tones of his father’s letter, you’d have thought it was murder. None of which would have happened, it implied, if I hadn’t whored off to Mexico.”

“Did he use that expression?”

“No.” Pause. “That’s mine.”

“Go on.”

“Kyle and a couple of his goony friends from the neighbourhood got drunk one night at some girl’s house—her parents were away—and broke into their own school. Their own school. They wandered around the halls, trashed a few lockers, pissed in the water fountain, smashed a mirror in the girls’ washroom and then drifted downstairs into the basement. There, at the far end of the school, they found themselves in the music room. The door was unlocked. Inside, they came across five electric guitars that had been rented for an upcoming student performance. Somebody said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ So they stole the guitars, slipping out the tradesmen’s entrance.

“Bruce was out of town, working with a highway crew up near Lake Athabasca, so they took their loot back to his house. Kyle was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid, and when he woke up hungover the next morning, he realized that he was in real trouble, that he had to do something to fix it.

“His friends had stayed overnight, but they were morons—Kyle’s friends generally were—and when he asked them for help, they sat with their fingers up their asses and then buggered off. So there was Kyle, with five stolen guitars heating up his bedroom like a hothouse.

“What do you do? He came up with an idea. He found the vice-principal’s number in the phone book and called him at home. He claimed that a buddy of his—he couldn’t name him—had gotten drunk, broken into the school and stolen some stuff. Now, in a fit of remorse, he wanted to return them, with Kyle as the intermediary. Could this be arranged discreetly?

“The VP said sure. But when Kyle arrived in a taxi half an hour later, the five guitars stacked like corpses in the back seat, he found two plainclothes detectives waiting for him on the front steps of the school. They took him downstairs into the music room and grilled him. No windows, just the two cops, the vice-principal, and Kyle reeking of gin. A cop with a shiny, fleshy face started things off. It was pretty obvious, he said, that Kyle was a prankster who’d gone on a toot. He could smell it from here. But there was no way that his so-called ‘buddy’ had got these guitars out the door, up an embankment, across a playing field all on his own. Not unless he was ‘a fucking octopus.’

“So he must have had some help. Kyle’s help. So why didn’t Kyle just come clean and help everyone ‘straighten this out’ so they could close the book on it. No harm done. Just kids being kids.

“But Kyle, having already been lied to once that day by the vice-principal, wasn’t buying. He stuck to his story. He didn’t know what happened, didn’t know how they got the guitars out of the school, he was just there doing a favour.

“Consulting a notebook, the fleshy cop said, ‘It says here a Hammond organ was stolen as well.’

“‘There was no organ,’ Kyle said.

“‘Are you sure?’

“Kyle didn’t see the trap. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

“‘Well,’ the cop said, ‘if you weren’t there, how would you know that an organ wasn’t stolen too?’

“His partner stepped in. ‘Listen, fuckweed, if I don’t have the name of the thief on this piece of paper in thirty seconds, I will charge you with grand theft, possession of stolen property, intent to traffic, and you will, I promise, go to jail.’ He gave him a good poke in the chest with his finger just to show he meant business.

“‘Arrest me, then,’ Kyle said. ‘Arrest me and fuck you.’”

“He said that?”

“That’s what he said he said.”

“Ballsy little guy.”

“The police must have thought so too, because they let him go. For the moment. The fleshy cop said, ‘I’m going to give you twenty-four hours, Kyle. Then I’m going to come to your house, and I’m going to arrest you in front of your parents and your neighbours. I’m going to put you in handcuffs, and I’m going to take you to jail.’

“His partner said, ‘You ever hear of grand theft, you little fuck? That’s theft over a thousand dollars. You’re in the big leagues now. You can thank your buddies for letting you take it in the ass for them. Because that’s where you’re headed. You know how long a kid like you will last in jail?’”

I’d forgotten what a skilful mimic Sally could be. She didn’t do it very often; it wasn’t her style, too attention-getting a number for her. But as a child, those times I saw her do it, saw her cut loose some night and “do” a neighbour talking to herself while gardening or our soused uncle saying good night but not leaving, I’d find myself staring at her as if I were watching a chair levitate.

She went on. “Kyle went home. He didn’t tell his father, nor did he sleep that night, not a wink, just a tumble of awful imaginings. Exactly twenty-four hours later, he sat by the front door with his night kit packed—pyjamas, hairbrush, toothpaste, toothbrush—and waited to be taken to what he imagined was some kind of Russian gulag.

“The appointed hour arrived. Five o’clock. Then five-fifteen. Then six o’clock. Kyle walked down to the sidewalk and peered up and down the street. Nothing. No one. They never came.

“But after, he refused to go back to school. To any school. That’s what Bruce’s letter was about. He suggested that Kyle come down to Mexico and live with me. Asked me to take some time to think about it. I didn’t need time. But I pretended to, pretended that I had reservations: the wheelchair, not being up on crutches yet and so on. In fact, what I didn’t want was for Bruce to realize how thrilled I was to have both my children down there with me. I thought if he even smelt it, something would go tight in his chest and he’d snatch it away. But I don’t know. Maybe I was doing him a disservice. Now that he’s gone, he seems like less of an asshole and more a product of growing up in a small town.

“A few weeks later, Kyle arrived on the afternoon bus. It was spring now, the days very hot. Freddie Steigman and Chloe went down to the depot to pick him up. On the way home, Freddie read him the riot act. He said, ‘You have no idea what trouble is like until you’ve been on the inside of a Mexican jail.’

“It must have been three or four nights later when Kyle and an American kid went into a cantina and drank a half-dozen rounds of mescal. Around midnight, they dropped in on a girl they’d met that morning. But the girl’s father answered the door and, seeing that they were drunk, sent them packing. Here the story gets fuzzy. Kyle always claimed his friend did it, his friend said Kyle did it, but somebody threw a brick through the girl’s window. The police were called. They picked up the two boys in a cantina down the street. At four o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door. There was Kyle. They’d roughed him up a bit. He had a black eye and a loose front tooth. Luckily, he had mentioned Freddie Steigman’s name.

“The next day, I made my decision, and I’ve been living with the consequences of it since then. I packed up his little suitcase and put him on a bus back to the airport. I’ve often thought about it—maybe I should have kept him. But I was too vulnerable, too weak to deal with a six-foot-tall teenager crashing around town and getting in trouble and maybe, just maybe, getting us all thrown out of the country. Was I a coward? Was I using the wheelchair as an excuse to not deal with a troubled—and more to the point, troublesome—teenager? Did I abandon my son? Was I playing the ostrich when I sent him back to his father? Am I responsible for what happened afterwards?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“It doesn’t change anything anyway. Things went the way they went.”

“And how was that?”

“You know the answer to that,” she said flatly.

“Yes, but how did they get there?”

“Kyle got a job in Toronto looking after senior citizens in a Jewish retirement home. He’d take them out for walks, wheel them around the block in their wheelchairs, talk to them on the bench in front of the home and read their granddaughters’ letters aloud to them.

“He was a prince, everyone loved him—until they discovered he was stealing their medication. Librium, Valium, Seconal, Mandrax, Dilaudid, even cough medicine—anything he could find. They were seniors. Have you ever seen the medicine cabinet of a senior?”

“Yes, I have, in fact.”

“Then you know. The pickings are good.

“The police were called in. They installed a hidden camera in the bathroom of one of the most frequently hit rooms, and waited. Sure enough, while Mrs. Cornblum was downstairs enjoying Shabbat dinner with her son and her grandchildren, Kyle was systematically going through the prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet. All on film. The police turned up at his house with a search warrant. They found jewellery, a necklace, even a silver pocket watch, very old and valuable, which had been stolen that same morning. A few pills, but not many. Kyle had taken them or sold them.

“The judge was a softie and handed down a conditional discharge. Kyle walked out of the courthouse with a slap on the wrist. Bruce threw him out. He flopped here and there, always with these losers. Kyle had a knack for attracting dumb-guy groupies. A string of arrests followed: shoplifting, breaking into cars, selling phony prescription pads, phone scams. One time he even got caught for stealing purses from cars in a cemetery parking lot while their occupants were paying graveside respects.”

“A perfect little scumball.”

Sally frowned; it hurt her to hear that. You can say bad things about your own child, but you don’t want someone else doing it.

“Sally, I apologize. I was just getting into the spirit of things.”

She went on. “He landed in the hospital a few times. A furniture mover caught him breaking into his rig, this big-bellied, thick-armed ape who made his living driving to Mississippi and back on three hundred cigarettes and a handful of Dexedrine. Wrong guy to rob. Wrong guy to get caught robbing. He found Kyle sitting behind the wheel trying to snap off his ham radio. Kyle got so frightened he threw himself over a ramp. But it was a drop of two storeys. He broke his arm in four places. The truck driver took his time getting down to him, then gave him a couple of boots, one in the kidneys, one in the face, and left him lying in the street.”

“Nice life.”

“That February, he had a Methedrine overdose, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. All this got back to me in Mexico. I was torn: stay or go home. But go home and do what? Hobbling around on crutches. Shouting from the sidelines. At some point, you’re reduced to being an impotent cheerleader for your children’s lives. Or is that just more bullshit? I don’t know. I still don’t.

“I began to prepare myself for his death. I began to imagine how the phone would ring one night, or maybe Bruce’s hangdog face would appear at my door in Mexico. I knew it was coming. It was the Jerry Malloy business that brought me home.”

“You haven’t mentioned him.”

“Jerry Malloy? That was the clincher.” She leaned her elbow on the chair arm; it slipped off; she settled it back again, using her other hand to hold it. She began. “One night around midnight, Kyle turned up at Marek Grunbaum’s house. Remember him? The Polish guy—”

“—with the beautiful pink handkerchief.”

“Kyle looked like a zombie: ragged clothes, grey skin, yellow eyeballs. He smelt, too. His feet were rotting from some untreated infection. Marek made him take his clothes off in the hallway, all of them, and then led him naked upstairs to the shower, disinfecting his footsteps with an aerosol can of Lysol as he went. His three kids peeking from their bedrooms. ‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ A few days later, he drove him to a rehab centre downtown. On the way there, Kyle asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. A birthday present for his father. He had a con man’s charm, Kyle did. He looked Marek in the eyes and said, ‘You got to let me make this up to my dad.’

“He disappeared into the mid-afternoon traffic with the twenty dollars. Nearly half an hour later, after Marek had circled the block twice and gotten a ticket, he spotted Kyle on the sidewalk. He got back into the car, claiming he couldn’t find anything nice. But could he keep the money? Within a day or two, he’d be allowed out for half-hour walks in the neighbourhood—he’d buy a present then.

“By now, Marek just wanted him out of the car. So he agreed. He pulled up in front of the clinic, a big white house on a leafy street. He waited to make sure Kyle went in. Kyle skipped up the main stairs, made a theatrical production of pushing the buzzer, and, just as he went in, spun around and gave Marek a grin and a big wave, as if this was all a screech, just too much fun for words.

“They lodged Kyle with a boy named Jerry Malloy. Jerry had grown up in one of those small northern towns where teenage boys sit in front of the pizza parlour at midnight on a Saturday night, daydreaming about the life they’ve read about in heavy metal magazines. You know those kids?”

“I sure do.”

“You see them in all small towns. You can smell the boredom coming off them. They usually get arrested for breaking into somebody’s cottage, knock up the girl at the grocery store, put on forty pounds, spend their lives working at the marina or the planing mill. I have a great deal of compassion for those children.” Sally looked toward the window, and in a moment continued. “But not Jerry. Jerry saw himself as a cut above the rest. No marina for him. He quit school in grade ten and moved to Toronto, where he got a job making broom handles in a factory.

“It wasn’t long before big-city life just dazzled the wits right out of him. Especially the drugs, of course, first pot, then Methedrine—”

“Nasty business, that Methedrine.”

“—then whatever he could get his big farm-boy fingers around. It was all good, all part of an adventure that put another square on the checkerboard between him and the boys in front of the pizza parlour back home.

“Whacked on sleeping pills one day, he stole a car that had been double-parked with the engine running. He drove it the wrong way down a one-way street, spotted a police van (which was empty, by the way), panicked and smacked into a fire hydrant. Totalled the car. Knocked himself out cold. Chipped his front teeth on the driver’s wheel.

“The judge, realizing he was dealing with a moron, gave Jerry a choice: jail or rehab. To his misfortune, Jerry Malloy, the boy who made broomsticks, chose rehab. And to punish him for his crimes, they put him in with my son.

“Kyle was everything that Jerry imagined a city boy would be: slick and quick with a put-down, always on the hustle. He was smitten. For his part, Kyle knew he had fallen on a live one and treated Jerry like a goofy sheepdog. Had him doing his chores, cleaning the toilet, making the beds—the things you do in rehab to reacquaint yourself with regular life. Kyle wasn’t interested in regular life.

“Three or four weeks in, I got a call from Bruce. It turned out that Kyle had smuggled two grams of Lebanese hash into the centre. He’d bought them on the street with Marek’s twenty dollars. Smuggled them past security in the loose portion of his shoe sole, grinning and joking with the guard. It must have been the excitement of it all, making a fool of everybody, that explained Kyle’s wild wave to Marek as he went in.

“And then one night, after everyone had gone to sleep on his floor, he stole out of bed, recovered the hashish and offered a drag to Jerry. Within three hours, they were caught breaking into the meat fridge in the basement, but not before Kyle had turned on a young amphetamine addict from Stratford and a sixty-eight-year-old alcoholic. Within the space of a few hours, Kyle had undone months and months of rehabilitation.

“It was an act of such egregious irresponsibility that the centre gave up on him. You can fix an addict, but you can’t fix an asshole. Both of them got kicked out, Kyle and Jerry. Then, poof, they vanished. For a couple of weeks, no one heard from them. Maybe they went to Jerry’s hometown. I don’t know. No one heard from Kyle—not his father, not his friends, not me, no one. So how what happened next happened isn’t entirely clear. But you can guess the broad strokes: Kyle had found a mark and wrung him like a washcloth for everything he could get.

“Before too long, probably at Kyle’s suggestion, Jerry stole his uncle’s pickup truck. He must have figured he was in a movie, two bandits on the run. They turned up at a local dog pound, adopted a mongrel and began to wind their way across Canada. They were heading to Vancouver. Somebody had told them it was like Florida there, warm temperatures, pretty girls—they’d get a job on a fishing boat and sail to China. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“They went up around the Great Lakes into Manitoba. Stealing gas when they needed it. Shoplifting here and there, mostly smash-and-grab. A farm family reported that a couple of young guys, one with chipped front teeth, stayed with them for several days, stole their grandson’s coin collection and moved on. The people who were kind to Kyle were people, he figured, who had targets on their backs, suckers who were saying, ‘Here, fuck me, I’m stupid.’

“Jerry turned a trick in a truck stop outside Winnipeg, let some guy blow him in the back of his rig, and that got them another seventy-five dollars. They made it as far as the outskirts of a town just across the Alberta border. They were driving at night. Kyle was. He fell asleep, the truck left the road, rolled down an embankment, turned over three or four times, killed Jerry and killed the dog. The police picked up Kyle half a mile away, hitchhiking.”

Here Sally cocked her head as if she were trying to recall something, a gesture I remembered from my childhood. “Chloe and I gave up the house in San Miguel a little while after. The town was haunted for me, like a before-and-after photograph. And when Freddie died (his cleaning lady found him on his bed in a blue linen jacket: he must have lain down for a moment to catch his breath and never gotten up again, dear Freddie), there was nothing to keep me there.

“I rented an apartment at the edge of Forest Hill Village. The poor part. Still, it was comforting to be neighbours to so many Mercedes and pretty gardens. It was an old-style brick building in slight disrepair, with lead windows. Remember those? Kyle was back in Toronto too. He wanted to move in with us. At first, I said no. Absolutely not.

“There were tears, of course, then accusations. I’d deserted him in Mexico, left him with a harsh father. Had loved Chloe more than him. While he was talking, I had, for the first time ever, a sensation in my body that I was dealing with a pathological liar. A liar whose charm and intelligence had become a sort of lubricant for getting whatever he was trying to get. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying for the first time it occurred to me that for my beloved son Kyle, language, the words that you actually use, was simply a kind of camouflage that allowed him to be a predator without seeming to be a predator. Even his tears seemed self-serving. As though he was lying, knew he was lying, but didn’t care. Was only concerned with the success of the performance.”

“But you loved him.”

“Yes. Everything just flew out the window in his presence, and I’d think, He’s so fabulous. I kept thinking, This is circumstantial. But then I’d overhear him on the phone and I’d think, Who is this? Is this a mask? Where is the little boy who was scared of ghost stories, and who was so shy at summer camp that he was scared to ask where the toilets were?”

“Did it occur to you that he was crazy or an addict?”

“It occurred to me he was a little pig with his nose in the trough. A shameless, self-gratifying bag of appetites. And that once he understood this—that that was how the world was coming to see him—his vanity would stop him.”

“Makes sense.”

“Only on paper. Only on paper. I took him out to dinner. Taxis, crutches, the whole business. I wanted to be somewhere fresh with him, somewhere that didn’t smell like my apartment. I asked him when was the last time he was happy. He lied at first, gave me some fiction he thought I wanted to hear. I stopped him. I said, ‘Stop lying to me. It’s killing me. It’s killing us.’

“So he said with this goofy grin, ‘Breaking into a car, I suppose. Well, not exactly breaking in, but that moment when you look in the window, see something you like, look up and down the street, the coast is clear, and then you do it.’

“I asked if he was saying that to shock me. It wasn’t the criminality of it that was so distressing, it was the vulgarity, the sheer vulgarity of it, and the strange gleam of pleasure that he got in his eyes when he said it. He looked… feral. I said, ‘Was that really the last time you were happy?’

“He thought for a moment and he said, ‘Yeah, it really was, Mom.’

“‘Don’t you want to change your life?’ I said. ‘No, not really.’ I asked him if he thought he was going to live to be an old man. He said he didn’t think about it much. I said, ‘What do you think about, Kyle, when you wake up at four o’clock in the morning and you’re in some dirty little rooming house with needles on the table and bloodstains on the wall?’

“He seemed perplexed by the question, and I realized that something had shut down in him. That his fine intelligence had dimmed, and, I suspected, dimmed irretrievably. It was hard to admit it, but I wasn’t sitting in a restaurant with a skeletal young man whose wit used to make even the police do a double take. I was having dinner instead with a common, dull-witted television watcher. A chronic television watcher. Getting high, watching television, breaking into cars, getting high, watching television. That was it. That was his whole life.”

“You must have grown to loathe him.”

“No, no, I never did. Not for long, anyway. I couldn’t help feeling that there was a magic key out there, that if I could just find it and put it in the lock, the door would open and everything would change.”

“And?”

“Mothers are fools for their sons. I let him move in. I couldn’t leave him wandering the streets—I was afraid he’d get killed. He had known intuitively which nerves to pluck, especially that business about sending him home from Mexico. He camped out on my couch, making up his bed in the morning. For a while it worked. Chloe went to school; I took a Spanish course. I was hoping one day maybe I could go back to Mexico—somewhere else, though. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Gay towns are always the safest towns in foreign countries. I’d spent most of my money, so I was living on a disability pension.”

“Why didn’t you go back to making your wall hangings?”

She looked at the winking whale, at the red seagulls drifting over the lagoon. “I tried, but somehow the air had just gone out of it. I couldn’t do the drawing or the cutting. I’d have had to hire someone to do it, and that seemed like paying someone to collect stamps for you. But we were making out fine.”

She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: it gave me him, his company. He had been such a bright, perceptive little boy, so clever about his friends, his parents, even himself. How to put it? It was so sad. He belonged to that group, that maddening group of people who are capable of unsparing self-analysis but incapable of controlling the same impulses they talk so brilliantly about. But I loved him, and I kept waiting for him to happen on the right key for the right lock. And for a while, it looked like he just might.”

“And?”

“He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Got a terrific sponsor—a middle-aged businessman who phoned him every night. He got a job in a warehouse. Marek got it for him. He did it for me, yes, but he believed in the magic key too. Except his was a bit different. His was the brutality of hard work. That Eastern European thing. And for a long time, maybe six months,it worked.

“Kyle got himself another girlfriend. Japanese this time. Women always liked him. It was a blessing and a curse. They always wanted to save him. Including his mother. All of us believing in the magic key. One month went by; three months; six months. I could feel a belt loosening around my chest. And then, one summer morning on the way to work, he walked by a neighbourhood bar—I even remember the name, the Moonstone—and he went in.

“He must have walked by that bar, God, I don’t know, a hundred times? But that day he went in. They were just setting up. He put money down on the bar and asked for a beer. The bartender asked him what he wanted. Kyle said, ‘You choose something.’ Unusual request. That’s why later, when the guy talked to the police, he remembered Kyle.”

A door opened just down the corridor from Sally’s apartment. Music briefly issued onto the flowered carpet. “Come on,” a young woman’s voice said, “this was your idea, now come on.” A dog collar rattled by the door, followed by an excited bark. “Shhh.”

“Next thing we know, Kyle calls into work, says he’s sick. Not a word to his sponsor, naturally. He knew the guy wouldn’t buy it. Sometime around noon, Kyle ends up in a ravine with a couple of guys. The ravine right under the subway bridge that leads to GreekTown. They drink their way along the Danforth, walking out on a few bills, stop in to see one of the guy’s girlfriends who works in a health spa and borrow some money from her. Somebody sells them an eight ball, crack and heroin.

“They come back across town and end up in that private school on Avenue Road. What’s it called? The one you went to?”

“Upper Canada College.”

“They bust into lockers looking for something to steal. They figure, because it’s a private school, all these rich kids have got to be keeping bags of loose cash in their lockers. A security guy hears them, they throw a pair of soccer boots at him and hightail it out of the school. They run across a cricket pitch where there’s a game on, all these guys in white flannels and cricket bats. By the time the police arrive, they’ve disappeared over a side fence and are hiding out in a backyard in Forest Hill. An hour later, the police get a call from a woman who says there are three naked guys swimming in her pool. They get away again.

“Two days later, a cop sees an illegally parked car with no plates on it. He opens the door. It’s my baby inside. Kyle. All by himself. They figured he died somewhere else and they dumped the body in a stolen car and walked away. In his pocket—and this always breaks my heart—is a city map, all the places he’s been over the past few days, this long arc through the city heading back to his apartment. Inscribed on the map were the words, I am on a voyage of mysterious intent. He was like a fish swimming upstream. He thought he was going home, but he wasn’t. He was getting ready to die. And he did.”

We sat in the silence for a moment; her refrigerator came on with a hum. She said, “I’ve thought about this a lot, and the truth is, I think he knew he couldn’t manage more than six months of ‘being good,’ and the alternative wasn’t possible either.”

Somewhere in the wall behind me, a metal pipe clanked.

“But why do you suppose he chose that morning to go into the bar? Why not the day before? Why not the day after? You lose a child, you keep wondering about those little things. As though, if I could find an answer, I could somehow make it not have happened. Which is absurd, I know. But still, I can’t seem to leave it alone.”

I said nothing.

She turned her dark eyes to me. “How could his sister be his sister and he be him?”

“What do you mean?”

“They slept in the same bedroom, they had the same parents, the same amount of love, the same things for breakfast. They used the same words, they spoke with the same speech rhythms. They liked the same TV shows. They disliked the same songs on the radio. They were like a little unit moving around the house together when they were small. How could they be so similar in so many ways and yet, in that small corner of their personalities where they were unalike, be so unalike, and have that same unlikeness be the deciding factor in the course of their lives? Why wouldn’t it be the other things, the other qualities, that set the course? Can you explain this to me?”

“I can’t.”

“It’s the same with you and your brother, Jake. You hate each other.”

I said, “I haven’t talked to Jake for years. Have you?”

“Sometimes. Rarely.”

“What’s he like?” I asked, my voice rising half an octave, as though my body, independent of my will, was preparing to defend itself, as though the time between now and our last ugly confrontations had been reduced to a matter of days, not years.

“Unhappy. So unhappy. He’s quite categorical about it. He says, ‘I’m not going to be happy until I’m fifty.’”

“Why fifty?”

“I don’t know. He just said it.”

After a moment, I said, “What am I like?”

“At your best?”

“Let’s start there.”

“Here. You’re here. And all that that—implies.”

“At my worst?” I thought, Let’s get it over with.

She shook her head. “You’re here. That’s what matters.”

The elevator doors opened down the hall. Voices passed the door.

“It’s late,” she said. “I wonder who they are. I wonder where they’re coming from.”

The candle sputtered.

“Am I safe to ask you something?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Will you regret this? Will you drive through this neighbourhood some night twenty years from now and regret this?”

“It doesn’t matter. Not tonight.”

“It’s hard to imagine you in twenty years,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine you a day older than tonight.”

“Why did you ask me if it was safe?” I said.

“Because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

“Please, Sally.” I could feel my eyes watering.

“What?” she said suddenly.

“Please say whatever you want.”

The phone rang again. Purr, purr. I raised my eyebrows at Sally. She shook her head. She knew who it was, I thought, but didn’t want to tell me. Finally, it went silent. And again the room seemed preternaturally quiet.

She said, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll be here when I get back?”

“Yes.”

Sally got up on her crutches. I put my hand under her armpit—it was warm—and steadied her. “Okay?” I said.

She stared down at the carpet. Or her slippers, I couldn’t tell which. “Yep,” she said, breathing in on the word the way people sometimes speak in the country, the way her grandmother spoke.

Out the window, I could see the flickering red lights of a plane slowly descending into the city. “I didn’t think planes landed this late,” I said, but Sally was already in the bathroom.

After a while, I found myself thinking about my older brother, Jake, how he had gotten off to such a promising start: a good student, a teacher’s favourite, a hit with girls, captain of the track and field team—even had his picture in the newspaper one spring day under the caption, jake gillings champion prospect! There he was in his whites with a trophy gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

Champion prospect indeed. I had so admired him! Watching him on the football field—his hands on his hips, watching the players move and shift just before the snap, reading the play—or making his way down the school corridor with a cluster of A-list friends, their jackets open, ties loosened, I felt as though I was observing a more successful model of myself. Better-looking (he looked like Kris Kristofferson), a better soccer player, better at backgammon, better at water skiing, better at Ping-Pong, even a better dancer at parties. Just better, better, better. And believe it or not, I basked in it. It gave me a charge, as they used to say, to be connected to him, to have people say, “Oh, that’s Jake’s little brother.”

But something happened to him in university. It was as though someone switched off the lights in the house and they never came back on: an unfinished degree, boarding houses, failed projects, disappointing travels, uneasy girlfriends, Eastern religions, a string of psychiatrists (who invariably, after three or four months’ treatment, turned into “assholes”). I saw him once in a restaurant. He was screaming at a waitress. I hadn’t known he was there until suddenly there was a commotion, smashing plates, an overturned table, an ashen manager hurrying across the floor. Where did it come from, this fury? This capacity to abandon himself to such a public display of childlike rage? A grown-up throwing a tantrum. Had some long-haired, cowboy boot–wearing sixties psychiatrist counselled him to “get in touch with his anger”? And poor Jake had got it wrong?

Why had he turned on me, who adored him? Why had he fucked my German girlfriend in my bed and made sure I heard about it? Why does he still, according to my cousin, rant at the drop of a hat about our long-dead parents, how they ruined his life? Can the dead ruin our lives? Can their talons be that long? Don’t we win by dint of just being here?

And why had he turned on himself like that? This peculiar resignation to not being happy till he was fifty? Tonight, as I’m writing this, I wonder about him: He’s out there in the city somewhere. But doing what? Thinking what? He must be, I don’t know, sixty-three, sixty-four.

Are you happy yet, Jake? Are you?

One moment we had been such brothers, dancing side by side to the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” with a pair of sisters at a summer dance. And now this? What happened? Jake and Kyle. Chloe and I. What the fuck happened?

Something else: I noticed that night in the restaurant that he was dressed identically to me—black corduroys, brown leather jacket, crew-neck sweater and white running shoes. So odd: two aging schoolboys who hadn’t spoken in years wearing the same clothes. That means something, I know—but what?

Sally emerged from the bathroom and settled back down in her chair. “What were you thinking about?” she said.

“Jake and Kyle. Kyle and Jake.”

She moved her crutches to the side. “You know what I want? After I’m gone, I want you to have a little party for me. Not right away. Nothing maudlin. But a birthday party. A party with lots of wine and candles. Martinis, too.”

“Sure.”

“I want to be in cheerful company and not be alone.”

“Okay, then.”

“And there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a silver canister in my bedroom. On the dresser.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

“Do you know what’s in it?”

“No.”

“Those are Kyle’s ashes. I was supposed to do something or other with them, but I couldn’t stand any of the ideas. I couldn’t stand, to be honest, to be so finally parted from him.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“When you leave here, tonight, tomorrow, whenever, I want you to take the ashes with you. I can’t stand the idea of people poking through my affairs, opening the lid, going, ‘What’s this?,’ maybe flushing it down the toilet or packing it up in a cardboard box and sending it to Chloe in California.”