She looked out the sliding doors. "I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun."
"I"ll come join you."
"No. You go."
"Joyce can stay with you tonight."
Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA, and in the end, I"m not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce"s need to be needed, and I let them be.
It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the roads were as clean as any in a video game. On the highway, the airborne pollen made the air look saliva syrupy, yet it felt like warm sand blowing on my arm. It struck me that this was exactly the way the weather was the night Kent was killed.
As I headed toward Exit 2, it also struck me that I would have to pa.s.s Exit 5 on the way to Barb"s house. I rounded the corner, and there was my father, kneeling on the roadside in a wrinkled (I noticed even at seventy miles an hour) sinless black suit. My father: born of a Fraser Valley Mennonite family of daffodil farmers who apparently weren"t strict enough for him, so he forged his own religious path, marching purse-lipped through the 1970s, so lonely and screwed up he probably nearly gave himself cancer from stress. He met my mother, who worked in a Nuffy"s Donuts franchise in the same minimall as the insurance firm that employed him, calculating the likelihood and time of death of strangers. Mom was a suburban child from the flats of Richmond, now Vancouver"s motherland of Tudor condominium units. Her shift at the donut shop overlapped Dad"s by three hours. I know that at first she found Dad"s pa.s.sion and apparent clarity attractive - Mother Nature is cruel indeed - and I imagine my father found my mother a blank canvas onto which he could spew his gunk.
I pulled over to watch him pray. This was about as interested as I"d been in praying since 1988. I could barely see my father"s white Taurus parked back from the highway, on a street in the adjoining suburb, beside a small stand of Scotch broom. The absence of any other car on the highway made his presence seem like that of a soul in pilgrimage. That poor dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He"d scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life.
He"s a lonely, bitter, prideful crank, and I really have to laugh when I consider the irony that I"ve become, of course, the exact same thing. Memo to Mother Nature: Thanks.
From the high school"s parking lot I was driven home sitting on a tarp in the police cruiser"s rear seat, no sirens. When I walked in the door off the kitchen, my mother shrieked. I could see a Kahlua bottle by the cheese grater, so I knew she was already looped; I"m sure the cops knew right away, too. Mom hadn"t been watching TV or listening to the radio, so my appearance at the kitchen door, laminated with a deep maroon muck, had to have been a shock. I just wanted to get the stuff off me, so I kissed her, said I was fine and allowed the cops to bring her up-to-date. In the slipstream of the sedative injection I"d been given back in the parking lot I felt clear-minded and calm. Far too calm. As I was changing out of my bloodied clothes, what pa.s.sed through my mind was -of all things - curiosity as to how my mother filled her days. I had no idea. She had no job and was stranded amid the mountainside"s suburban j.a.panese weeping maples and mossy roofs. Greater minds have gone mad from the level of boredom she endured. By the time I was seventeen, her once communicative Reg conversed solely with a G.o.d so demanding that of all the people on Earth, only he - and possibly Kent - had any chance of making heaven. Just a few years ago my mother said to me during a lunch, "Just imagine how it must feel to know that your family won"t be going to heaven with you - I mean, truly believing that. We"re ghosts to him. We might as well be dead."
As I disrobed for the shower, flecks of blood flittered onto the bathroom"s gold linoleum. I bundled up my clothes and tossed them out the window onto the back patio, where, I learned later, racc.o.o.ns pilfered them in the night. I showered, and my thoughts were almost totally focused on how cool and sensible the medic"s injection had made me. I could have piloted and landed a 747 on that stuff. And with a newly minted junkie"s bloodless logic, I was already trying to figure out how soon I could locate more, and at least I had something else to focus on besides Cheryl"s death.
When I walked back into the living room, the TV was on. Mom was transfixed, and the RCMP officers were on walkie-talkies, the phone - you name it. Mom grabbed my hand and wouldn"t let me go, and I saw for the first time the helicopter and news service images that trail me to this day, images I have yet to fully digest. My mother"s grip was so hard that I noticed my fingers turning white. I still wonder how things might have gone without that delicious injection.
"We need to ask your son some questions, ma"am."
Reg walked in from the carport door just then. "Son?"
"I"m okay, Dad."
He looked at me, and his face seemed - for reasons that will become evident soon enough - annoyed. "Well then. Good. Mrs. Elliot at the school said you"d been taken away unhurt."
An officer said, "We have to question your son, sir."
Mom wailed, "Cheryl"s dead . . ."
"Why do you need to question Jason?"
"Procedure, sir."
"Jason, why are they questioning you?"
"You tell me."
Mom said, "Didn"t you hear me?"
Dad ignored Mom, and by extension, Cheryl. "What does my son have to do with any of this?"
"He was right there in the cafeteria," said one cop. "If he hadn"t thrown that rock, who knows how many more fatalities there might have been."
"Rock?"
"Yes. Your son"s quick thinking - "
The other cop cut in, "That boulder killed the main gunman."
"Gunman? He was fifteen, tops."
Dad turned to me. "You killed a boy today?"
A cop said, "He"s a hero, sir."
"Jason, did you kill a boy today?"
"Uh-huh."
"Did you intend to kill him?"
"Yeah, I did. Would you rather have had him shoot me?"
"That"s not what I asked you. I asked if you intended to kill him."
"Mr. Klaasen," the first cop said. "Perhaps you don"t understand, your son"s actions saved the lives of dozens of students." Reg looked at him. "What I understand is that my son experienced murder in his heart and chose not to rise above that impulse. I understand that my son is a murderer."
While he was saying this, the TV screen was displaying the death and injury statistics. The cops didn"t know how to respond to Reg"s - my father"s - alien logic. I looked over at my mother, who was by no means a slight woman. I saw her grab one of a pair of ma.s.sive lava rock lamps, shockingly ugly and astoundingly heavy. Mom picked up the lamp by its tapered top, and with all her force whapped it sidelong into Reg"s right kneecap, shattering it into twenty-nine fragments that required a marathon eighteen-hour surgery and seven t.i.tanium pins to rectify - and here"s the good part: the dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d had to wait two days for his operation because all the orthopedic surgeons were busy fixing ma.s.sacre victims. Ha!
My mom, bless her, kicked into full operatic mode: "Crawl to your G.o.d, you arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d.
See if your G.o.d doesn"t look at the slime trail you leave behind you and throw you to the buzzards. You heartless, sad little man. You don"t even have a soul. You killed it years ago. I want you to die. You got that? I want you to die."
An ambulance was summoned to squire my screaming father to emergency. The police never officially reported the incident, nor did Reg. But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother"s heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.
Third, upon discharge a few weeks later, he was coolly shipped off to his sister"s daffodil ranch in the most extreme eastern agricultural reaches of the city, in Aga.s.siz, a soggy and spooky chunk of property surrounded by straggly alders, blackberry brambles, dense firs, pit bulls, h.e.l.l"s Angels drug labs and an untold number of bodies buried in unmarked graves.
But my parents never got divorced. Dad always paid support and . . . who knows what ever really goes on inside a relationship. Dad probably felt guilty for wrecking Mom"s life. No. that would imply feeling on his part.
I arrived at Barb"s house a bit on the late side. The attendees were mostly Kent"s friends - friends who"d seemed old to me in high school and who always will. Folding wooden chairs were arranged on the back lawn, none of them level; the forest, after decades of lying in wait, was silently sucking the old ranch house and the moss-clogged lawn back into the planet. The twins (that would be you, my nephews) and a few other babies were in the TV room, being as quiet and gentle as their pious parents, as they were serenaded by a tape of soothing nature sounds: waves lapping a Cozumel beach; birds of the Guyana rain forest; rain falling in an Alaskan fjord.
Kent"s friends had all been hardcore Youth Alive!ers who"d never strayed, who became dentists and accountants and moved to Lynn Valley along with most of the city"s Kents. I"d seen none of them in the year since Kent"s funeral. I knew they"d all enjoy a righteous tingle from any confirmation of my life"s downwardly sloping line. My slapped-together ensemble delivered the goods.
"Hey, Barb."
"Finally, somebody from your family shows up."
"Mom can"t make it. One guess why. Reg is praying up by Exit 5. I imagine he"ll creak his way here soon enough."
"Lovely."
I poured myself a gla.s.s of red wine; piety mercifully ended at the bar with this crowd.
Barb was never involved with Youth Alive!, and because of this, had always felt like an outsider in the Kent set. As I looked out at all the healthy teeth and hair on the patio, I realized how sad and insufficient any memorial service would be. I missed Kent. Badly. "Was the service your idea, Barb?"
"Yes, but not this big Hollywood production. They"re trying to set me up with some guy in the group. It"s so clinical and mechanical." She looked out onto the lawn. "They"re pretty efficient. I have to hand that to them. All I had to do was open the door and look wounded."
"Charitable."
"Stick a potato in it. Your job, by the way, is to continue being the doomed loser brother. It shouldn"t be a stretch."
"And your job?"
"Stoic widow who at least has two kids as a souvenir."
I went out to the car and brought in a canvas duffel bag filled with some presents for the two of you, but your mother got mad at me for spoiling you, a battle that will never stop, because I"ll never stop spoiling you. I went in to see you in your cribs - chubby, a bit of curly hair, Kent"s smile, which is actually my mother"s smile. I gave you each some animal puppets and entertained you with them for a while.
Out on the patio, I shook a few hands and tried not to look like a doomed loser. Kent"s friends were using the technically friendly Youth Alive! conversation strategy with me. Example: "That"s great, Jason, Gina and I were thinking of redoing the guest bathroom, weren"t we, Gina?"
"Oh yeah. We really were. We ought to take down your phone number."
"We"ll get it from you after the service."
"Great."
After a few minutes of this, Gary, Kent"s best friend, tinkled his gla.s.s and the group sat down. On easels up front were color photocopy enlargements of Kent"s life: Kent white-water rafting; Kent at a cigar party; Kent playing Frisbee golf; Kent and Barb lunching in a Cabo San Lucas patio bistro; Kent at his stag party, pretending to drink a yard-long gla.s.s of beer. Each of these photos emphasized the absence of similar photos in my own life.
Gary began giving a speech, which I tuned out, and when it felt as if it was nearing the end, I heard a click behind me: Reg trying to open the latch on the living room"s sliding doors. Barb got up, offered a terse h.e.l.lo, brought him down onto the lawn and gave him a chair. We all remembered Kent for a silent minute, which was hard for me. Kent"s death meant that there were more Jasons in the world than there were Kents, an imbalance I don"t like. I"m not sure whether I"m any good for the world.
I sprang up when the minute of silence ended, and dashed to the bar in the kitchen. There was nothing hard there, just wine; chugging was in order, so I poured most of a bottle of white into a twenty-ounce Aladdin souvenir plastic drinking cup, then downed it like Gatorade after a soccer game. Barb saw me do this and spoke in a sarcastic d.i.c.k and Jane tone: "Gosh, Jason - you must be very thirsty."
"Yes, I am, Barb." She let it go. Outside, all of Kent"s friends were doing Dad duty, fine by me. I asked Barb if she ever spoke with Reg these days.
"No."
"Never?"
"Never."
I decided to be naughty. "You should try."
"Why on earth would I want to do that?"
"Jesus, Barb. It"s Kent"s memorial. You have to do something." This was not strictly true, but I"d pushed a guilt b.u.t.ton.
"You"re right."
She went outside and joined a trio of Kent"s friends with Reg. I stood nearby so I could hear their conversation.
Barb said, "Reg, I"m glad you could come."
"Thank you for inviting me."
Barb turned to Kent"s friends. "What were you guys talking about?"
"Cloning."
Barb said, "This Dolly-the-sheep thing must be raising a few eyebrows."
One friend, whose name was Brian, said, "You better believe it." He asked my father, "Reg, do you think a clone would have the same soul as its parent, or perhaps have a new one?"
"A clone with a soul?" Dad rubbed his chin. "No. I don"t think it would be possible for a clone to have a soul."
"No soul? But it would be a living human being. How could it not . . . ?"
"It would be a monster."
Another friend, Riley, cut in here: "But then what about your twin grandsons? They"re identical, so when the embryo splits, technically, one nephew is the clone of the other. You think that one of them has a soul and one doesn"t?"
Barb, trying to lighten things, said, "Talk about monsters - if I miss feeding time by even three minutes, then I become Ripley, and they become the Alien."
Reg wrecked this attempt at cheeriness. He"d obviously been thinking hard, his face sober like a bust of Abraham Lincoln. "Yes," he said, "I think you might have to consider the possibility that one of the boys might not have a soul."
Silence. All the real smiles turned fake.
"You"re joking," said Riley.
"Joking? About the human soul? Never."
Barb turned abruptly and walked away. The three guys stood there looking at Reg. Then Barb returned with one of the wooden folding chairs, holding it sideways like a tennis racket.
"You evil, evil b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Never ever come back to this house, ever."
"Barb?"
"Go now. Because I"ll break you in two. I will."
"Is this really - "
"Don"t go meek on me now, you s.a.d.i.s.tic b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
I"d seen this side of Barb before and knew she would push this situation way further if she wanted to. Riley made some gesture to stand between her and my father. I went over to Barb and tried removing the chair from her grip, but she clutched it using every sinew she"d developed as captain of the girls" field hockey team.
"Barb. No."
"You heard what he said."
"He"s not worth the effort."
"He should die for the things he"s done to people. Someone has to stop him."
I looked at my father, into his eye slits, and knew that nothing had changed, that he had no real understanding of what he"d done to deserve this. I would have poured the remains of my wine on him, but that would have been a waste.