The broken places, p.35
The Broken Places, page 35
“Joe! Oh God, I’ve been trying and trying to get through.”
“Me too. How — ?” Joe sounds far away. “I’m on the west lawn of the house. Maybe there’s reception here. Or maybe they finally got some of the cell towers —”
“Joe, this has to be fast. The connection could go anytime.”
“I know. Where are you?”
Joe sounds strange. Like he’s been to the dentist and his mouth is still frozen.
“I’m on the mountain. I don’t know, two-thirds down? Threequarters? I’m all right. I’m — Well, one leg’s smashed up. It’s not great but I can make it. What about you?”
Nothing but the sound of breathing.
“Joe? You there? I’ve been so worried about you.”
“Uh-huh. I’m fine. Just fine.”
“Still at the waterfront place?”
“Yeah. Could be here awhile. If you’re safe, you’re supposed to stay where you are. That’s what they’re telling people.”
“Oh, God, I saw yesterday, from Eagle Bluffs. I saw the whole city. It’s — Jesus, it’s bad.”
“Tell me about it. I’m in the middle of it, right?”
Joe sounds so strange. Like his mouth isn’t moving right and . . . frankly, like he’s pissed off.
And? Wouldn’t you be?
The last day comes back into focus: the fight yesterday morning, the things he said to Joe. Love you.
“Joe, at home yesterday, it was awful. I need to explain.”
“No. Not now.”
“Yes now.”
“No! I don’t want — Wait, I can’t hear you, Kiki. You’re cutting out.” Kyle’s reception is crystal clear. “Long as you’re okay, that’s great,” Joe says quickly. “Let’s just—”
“Joe, I haven’t been honest with you. Not for a long time.”
“Shut up, okay? Just shut up. This is not the time.”
“It is the time. It’s got to be now. Who knows what’s going to happen?”
“No! Don’t say it!”
“Joe, I am so sorry. For everything. We’ll get home, both of us, and I’ll tell you everything —”
Joe inhales sharply. “Look, you’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you. I’m going to hang up.”
“No, don’t! Joe, listen to me. I am going to get off this mountain and I am going to make it home and I am going to tell you—”
Joe is shouting now. “Shut up, shut up, just shut up!”
“No, you have to —”
“I won’t! I love you! Don’t you get it? You’re everything to me, you’re my whole life.” Joe is crying, sobbing. He has never heard Joe cry. “You can’t break up with me now, you can’t—”
“Oh, Joe.” How can he get it so wrong? “Come on. I’m not breaking up with you. I love you. Please, please forgive me. I’ve been such an asshole. You’re the only thing that matters to me, the only thing —”
The line goes dead.
Kyle stares at the device he has willed for over a day to connect him with his lover. He is shaking. What just happened?
Will Joe call back? He sounded so upset, so . . . hurt. Wasn’t he glad they were talking? Wasn’t he relieved?
He knows.
Kyle hits redial. Nothing. A squirrel hops from branch to branch overhead, the scratching an eerie echo off the trees.
He knows. You’re a weak-ass liar, and he knows it all.
Tries again. Nothing. Stares at his phone, waiting.
At least Joe is okay. At least he’s not injured.
Now that the squirrel has gone, the forest is silent. Not a rustle in the trees, no rush of distant water. It’s been hours since he crossed the last creek and dragged his water bottle through the spouting wet.
The phone sits in his sweaty palm. Did he really just talk to Joe or was it some elaborate hallucination? The injured climber in that movie they went to, while he was hauling himself toward camp, saw and heard things that weren’t there. Has the pain quit nibbling the edges of Kyle’s sanity and taken a chomp from its core?
The phone battery. It’s gone down, only thirty percent left now, proof that the call was real. It was Joe. It was Joe’s voice and he is okay.
And Joe loves him. Joe loves him and that’s all Kyle needs to know. He’s been a fuck-up, a selfish, horrible person, and yet he is everything to Joe, he is Joe’s life. Joe said so. It means Joe will forgive him.
It starts, familiar as his own heartbeat: the circus drumline that has accompanied him for hours.
He stows the phone in his pack, fumbling, his motor coordination worse than ever. He returns all his weight to the walking stick. Pain snaps its jaws at him — the raw meat scrape of his palm, the rub of his blistered feet, the gargantuan agony of his leg. But with the pain comes a flare of elation.
Joe.
Bring on the pain. He deserves every second of it and he will take it. And if it eases, he will ask for more. Because Kyle knows that if he can power through the pain and get himself off this mountain, Joe will forgive him. The tattoo of pain, the rhythm of the drum, and now Joe’s name echoing every beat, the strong syllable — Joe — they are the thrust he needs to keep moving.
He hops once, twice, three times, then slumps. The old hop-four, slump is gone; he can’t go more than three without a rest. It doesn’t matter. It may take many more hours, it may take days, but he is going home.
A raven lifts off from a Douglas fir, its caw filling the sky as it wheels and turns down the mountain, toward the city, toward Joe. The raven’s sky is Kyle’s sky, and it is Joe’s sky too. They are only a bird flight apart.
He takes another hop. Grimaces, smiles. The two expressions feel the same.
Home.
* * *
In the great room earlier, bathed in morning sun and taking stock of his situation, Stedman had resolved to get it together: to shake off his paralysis, rein in his wandering mind, and take charge. Since then, other than dismissing the soldiers, he has spent the better part of four hours — as best he can determine, his watch having stopped yesterday and the ormolu masterpiece lying in shards — shut away in his office.
It is not a retreat or a withdrawal, he reminds himself; it is a strategy session. He is not a hundred percent, his edges are blurry, but he has identified his priorities. Now he must rank them, formulate a plan, break it into steps, and do what it takes to execute those steps going forward.
God, planning takes time. So much time. He’s never been good at the details. Anything micro level — that’s Charlotte’s domain.
Whenever he thinks of her now, his thoughts float like whispers. She’s not coming back.
Why does that idea keep niggling him? Of course she’s coming back. He needs her. Sidney needs her. And Charlotte needs them. Surely.
She’s never happy anymore.
Yesterday in the kitchen she was so stressed, the hurricane on the verge of blowing. You could almost imagine her walking out.
And never coming back.
It crawls further over him, the sensation that’s been visiting since yesterday, more frequently now that he turned the soldiers away and saw the contempt on Sidney’s face. It’s not a feeling so much as a vision. A premonition.
It’s here this minute, right beside him. Now on top of him. God, it’s bleak. A celestial palm holding him down. The press, the weight, of all he has lost: his wife, his daughter’s respect, Merck, the sale of his shares, the freedom that crooked its finger only yesterday, the drive up the highway in his sweet MGB. His old life, before it got huge. A simpler happiness. Another child. A kinder love.
He closes his eyes, runs a hand over his face, finds the place on his jaw where it hurts most. Presses it, hard.
Focus, he tells himself. Take charge, for yourself and for Sidney. No more orders from the hired man. He may be gay but he’s an asshole. He stole your money, your decisions, your little girl.
No more. Whatever needs doing, Stedman will do it himself. Starting with the electricity.
He leans back in his chair and takes in the harbour view, so different from Montreal, where there was so much to hate: the sign wars, the bone-cold winters, the supercilious francophones who detested anglos like him. He was in the city for one reason: the MBA tuition was the lowest in the country, so between his savings from part-time jobs and the sums his mother put aside, he could scrape by. What he hated most about Montreal, even after he met Charlotte and his future turned gold, were the random power outages. He never told Charlotte, who even then mocked all weaknesses, how their shadowy apartment unnerved him, its refrigerator mute, its radiators cold. Telling her would mean dredging up memories better buried. How his mother, partway through frying sausages or boiling potatoes when the stove shut off, would pause, then say they’d be having a picnic again for dinner, crackers and peanut butter and jam, and wouldn’t that be fun? In summer it was fun, but in winter, when the thermometer plunged low, there was no adventure to be had. He and Tim huddled close on those nights, the two of them in thick flannel pyjamas, their twin beds pushed together and topped with every blanket in the house, Stedman’s father nowhere to be found, the reason the bills had not been paid.
Stedman’s father. Sober, he was the hardest worker you’d ever meet. On a tear he was another creature entirely: unreliable, short-tempered, forgetful, absent. Waste of skin is how Stedman sums up the old man, though it’s a private assessment. To Charlotte and her mother, and to the media during his meteoric rise, he has recounted the same well-composed story of a working-class upbringing (he never says poor) and an unpredictable father (he never says drunk). To do otherwise would be to court pity, which is the last thing he wants. Tayne Stedman, CEO and Chief Innovator of GlobalTech Communications, is a self-made man. He has dined with two prime ministers and one US president. He has headed up boards and national councils, founded a global think-tank on cross-cultural pollination. Bill Gates’s direct number is in his phone. He has built a glittering life, one he will not tarnish with spots of bygone woe.
You done good, he tells himself each day. He is nothing like the old man. He loves his little girl and he will make sure she knows it.
Focus, he instructs himself. The plan. Go online, connect with his people, find Charlotte.
She’s long gone.
No. He will find her. He is a man of action, and he will reclaim what is his. He will show them — his daughter, his wife, himself — that no matter what has happened out there, their world has not shattered.
SIXTEEN
* * *
The world watched Vancouver, eyes glued then averted then drawn back to the giddying horror: the precisely calibrated city, glass highrise centre ringed by ocean and mountains, tolerant blending of cultures and colours, perfect mix of society and solitude, of American-style capitalism and Europeanstyle socialism, a model metropolis ranked among the world’s cleanest, safest, greenest, wealthiest, healthiest — unseated by the fierce swat of nature’s hand.
Once the earth stilled, the looting began. First on the Downtown Eastside where the rougher element, the indigent and the addled and the addicted, shouldered their way into unstaffed corner stores to load up on cigarettes and Pepsi, chocolate and mouthwash. Then the lawlessness spread. What produce remained in the markets’ sidewalk displays disappeared, a few oranges here, a cabbage there. Soon liquor stores in Surrey and Burnaby were raided; drugstores too. Hooting, cheering teens snatched running shoes and tablets, set fire to trash bins. On Robson, plate-glass windows shattered and burly men scooped out Coach bags and Jimmy Choo shoes. Across the Lower Mainland a homeopathic recklessness set in, as if the only response to destruction was to counter with more of the same.
* * *
THE WORLD IS WATCHING THEM, says Joe, relaying the news from the neighbour’s radio and the injured highrise residents now staying next door. Twenty-four hours after the forty-five seconds that upended the region, global media are consumed with the Vancouver tragedy. Rescue efforts are unfolding. Canadian troops have been joined by US militia, and more are on standby. The numbers of dead and injured are climbing, yet there is no room for them in the hospitals left undamaged. Community centres, arenas, school gyms, and churches have turned into treatment centres and morgues, but are filling faster than they can be set up. Fires rage, fuelled by ruptured gas lines. The sulphur piles in Port Moody are blazing, spewing out an unbreathable chemical fog. The looting continues. Even the tony Whole Foods market on Marine Drive, scant blocks from this house, has been broken into. People — what people? asks Miss Dodie, but Joe can only shrug — are running off with goji berries and tamari almonds, organic arugula and floral wreaths.
The news is appalling, yet in the minds of the castaways gathered in Stedman’s sun-bathed great room — except for Miss Dodie, whose thoughts run an unusual course — it is also inevitable. Each one of them, even Sidney, who has been forced by the school system to read literature, recognizes the stuff of tragedy: the mighty have fallen, society is crumbling, order has given way to chaos. Of course the world is watching. The world is riveted.
They, in turn, watch each other, these shaken, sequestered souls, fearful of what might come, barely comprehending what has passed.
Anna watches Miss Dodie, out of duty and also concern. The old woman cannot get up to much trouble, confined as she is to the sofa, though earlier she tottered to the bathroom surprisingly quickly, with Anna’s help. Extreme vigilance may be unwarranted, but Anna is nonetheless worried about her lady. Miss Dodie misses home, and these unfamiliar surroundings and people are straining her few mental resources. The woman’s wistful expression stirs Anna’s heart.
Because attentiveness is her habit, Anna also watches Joe. His swollen mouth tells the news, but his mind is elsewhere. From the beginning he has taken charge and watched over them, calm and helpful and practical. He has made the decisions and done most of the work. He is the only sensible adult here besides herself. But now, back from the neighbour’s, he seems preoccupied. Whether he is worried or in pain from his beating or simply distracted, she cannot tell. Do not despair, Anna wants to whisper to him. The worst has happened. It will only get better.
Sidney would watch her father, hoping for a sign that he is on top of things, getting a handle on this disaster, acting like a caring human being instead of a cold-hearted tyrant, except that Stedman is still barricaded in his office. In the room he calls his own, its Brazilian cherry floor mercifully steady and perfectly aligned, surrounded by furniture that he selected, not Charlotte, he surveys the totems on his magnificent desk — photos of himself with world leaders, the Governor General’s Innovation Award, books on chaos theory and disruptive innovation — and reviews the steps that will restore his power.
Because she cannot watch her father, Sidney watches Anna, in the slant-eyed, undetectable way she mastered in middle school when she first understood that survival depends on observing without being observed. Fingering the medallion Joe gave her, on a cheap chain around her neck, she tries to read the nurse’s rigid, anxious face. Something is bobbing near the surface there, something that troubled Anna earlier, in Sidney’s bedroom. She has a secret, this quiet alcoholic with the accent, a secret besides her drinking. Sidney — out of curiosity? sympathy? kinship? — wishes she knew what it was.
Miss Dodie, awkwardly installed on the strange leather sofa, a cushion supporting her lower back, knee throbbing like a heroine’s heart, runs through all the unimaginable things that have happened — an earthquake! like in Japan and other parts of the world that she cannot name but where the people are small and brown; and a sleepover! in a stranger’s restaurant, but my, it’s dirty, all the smashed objects and spilled wine and no woman here to keep it clean, yet it’s on the ocean and there is fruit, though nothing actually delicious, like bacon — and she is watching a creature (a Steller’s jay, but she does not recall the name) that preens and poses outside, just beyond the glass doors that open onto the patio and the sea-facing lawn. The bird looks cheerful. It may be the uptuft on its head, a feathered paintbrush that flicks a short, quick stroke on the sky each time the jay twitches. The sight pulls Miss Dodie’s thoughts away from the restaurateur’s lengthy account of the news to her late husband’s penis, which kinked up like that thing’s plumage, full of life and perky. She misses him, her Marty, despite the lies and infidelities, the drinking and the roaming, the foreign orifices he felt compelled to enter with that upturned penis. She rubs the wrinkled finger where her love should be. Whose skin is that, so loose and papery? But she knows. It is her skin, her finger, and the ring is lost. That much of yesterday she remembers. They walked by the sea and saw that thing . . . that insect, like the one outside now — a bird! With its neck grotesquely wide. Then the swellnecked thing stole her ring and ate it up. She glares at the Steller’s jay, which appears to her no longer jaunty but malevolent. Sooner or later, whether husband or bird, one’s true nature surfaces. Everyone is a fuckster in the end.
The jay intently watches the glass, but sees nothing beyond its own reflection. The sight is admirable, for the jay is healthy and in the prime of life, but of fleeting interest. The bird hop-hops farther onto the lawn, drawing closer to the sea, which is ruled by other birds. Cocks its head, assesses. The world is still full of strange noises. The insects remain plentiful, as if shaken to the earth’s surface. The air is worse. Thick and particle-laden. Waiting.
Joe watches the women, three generations of them in the great room, and sees that they depend on him. The old bag will never get off the sofa without his help, injured as he may be. Anna needs the news he brings. When will it be safe to drive, she wants to know. And she needs his silence to keep her addiction safe. Sidney needs his reassurance. What do we do next, the girl keeps asking him. Her father is still missing in action — just as well, because her celebrity dad is a clueless good-for-nothing hothead. Stedman, whose house is now safeguarded and whose daughter is cared for, has relied on Joe the most, and will be the last to admit it.
