He looked awful - bloodless, white and unshaven - but certainly alert. "Here"s your stuff . . . the hospital asked me to get it."
"Thank you."
Silence.
He asked, "Did you have trouble finding anything?"
"No. Not at all. Your place is pretty orderly."
"I try and run a tight ship."
I shivered when I thought of his hot dusty lightless hallway, his mummified TV set, his kitchen cupboards laden with tins and packets and boxes of rationlike food, and his cheapskate lifestyle, in which not tipping some poor waitress is viewed more as a way of honoring G.o.d than of being a miser with one foot in the grave. I held out the bag. "Here you go."
"Put it on the window ledge."
I did this. "What did the doctor say?"
"Two cracked ribs and bruising like all get-out. Maybe some cardio trauma, which is why they"re keeping me here."
"You feel okay?"
"It hurts to breathe."
Silence.
I said, "Well, I ought to go, then."
"No. Don"t. Sit on the chair there."
The guy in the other bed was snoring. I wondered what on earth to say after a decade of silence.
"It was a nice memorial. Barb sure gets excited."
"Kent should never have married her."
"Barb? Why not?"
"No respect. Not for her elders."
"Meaning you."
"Yes, meaning me."
"You actually think you deserve respect after what you said to her?"
He rolled his eyes. "From your perspective - from the way you look at the world, no."
"What"s that supposed to mean?"
"It means, relax. It means Kent ought to have married someone closer to his own heart."
I huffed.
"Don"t play dumb with me, Jason. It always looked bad on you. Kent needed a more devoted wife."
I was floored. "Devoted?"
"You"re being obtuse. Barb could never fully surrender to Kent. And without surrender, she could never be a true wife."
I fidgeted with his water decanter, which seemed to be made of pink pencil eraser material. Why does everything in a hospital have to be not just ugly, but evocative of quick, premature and painful death? I said, "Barb has a personality."
"I"m not saying she doesn"t."
"She"s the mother of your two grandchildren."
"I"m not an idiot, Jason."
"How could you have gone and said something so insensitive last night - suggesting that one of the kids might not even have a soul. Are you really as mindlessly cruel as you seem?"
"The modern world creates complex moral issues."
"Twins are not complex moral issues. Twins are twins."
"I read the papers and watch the news, Jason. I see what"s going on."
I changed the subject. "How long are you in here?"
"Maybe five days." He coughed, and it evidently hurt. Good.
"Are you sleeping okay?"
"Last night like a baby."
A mood swept over me, and as with any important question in life, the asking felt unreal, like it came from another person"s mouth: "How come you accused me of murder, Dad?"
Silence.
"Well?"
Still no reply.
I said, "I didn"t come in here planning to ask you this. But now that I have, I"m not leaving until you give me a reply."
He coughed.
"Now don"t you play the little old man with me. Answer me."
My father turned his face away, so I walked to the head of the bed, squatted down and grabbed his head, forcing him to lock eyes with me. "Hi, Dad. I asked you a question, and I think you owe me an answer. Whaddya say, huh?"
His expression wasn"t hate and it wasn"t love. "I didn"t accuse you of murder."
"Really now?"
"I merely pointed out that you had murder in your heart, and that you chose to act on that murderous impulse. Take from that what you will."
"That"s all?"
"Your mother, as you"ll recall, stopped the dialogue at that point."
"Mom stood up for me."
"You really don"t understand, do you?"
"What - there"s something to understand here?"
My father said, "You were perfect."
"I was what?"
"Your soul was perfect. If you"d died in the cafeteria, you"d have gone directly to heaven. But instead you chose murder, and now you"ll never be totally sure of where you"re headed."
"You honestly believe this?"
"I"ll always believe it."
I let go of his head. The guy in the next bed was rousing. My father said, "Jason?" but I was already through the door. From his cracked and bruised chest he yelled the words, "All I ever wanted for you was the Kingdom."
He"d stuck his saber through my gut. He"d done his job.
It"s around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
Back to the ma.s.sacre.
Two weeks after the attack, videoca.s.settes were mailed to the school"s princ.i.p.al, to the local TV news programs and to the police. They had been made by the three gunmen using a Beta cam they"d rented from the school"s A/V crib. It pretty much laid out what they were going to do, how they were going to do it, and why - the generic sort of alienation we"ve all become too familiar with during the 1990s.
You"d have thought these tapes would have cleared me completely, but no. Someone had to arrange for the tapes to be mailed, and someone had to be filming these three losers spouting their c.r.a.p: it was a hand-held camera. So even when I was cleared, in the public mind I was never spotlessly cleared. There was never any doubt with the police and RCMP, thank G.o.d, but let me tell you, once people get a nutty idea in their head, it"s there for good. And to this day, whoever shot the video and mailed the dubs remains a mystery.
A few celebrities emerged from the ma.s.sacre, the first being me, semi-redeemed after two weeks of exhaustive investigation revealed my obvious innocence. But of course, for the only two weeks that really mattered, I was demonized.
The second celebrity - and the biggest - was Cheryl. When she wrote G.o.d IS NOWHERE/G.o.d IS NOW HERE, she"d finished with G.o.d IS NOW HERE, which was taken for a miracle, something I find a bit of a stretch.
The third celebrity was Jeremy Kyriakis, the gun boy who repented and was then vaporized for doing so.
During the weeks I spent in motel rooms, I often had nothing to do except reread the papers and watch TV while I exceeded my daily allotment of sedatives and thought of Cheryl, about our secret life together and - I can"t express what it felt like to be trashed for two weeks while at the same time Jeremy Kyriakis was being offered as poster boy for the it"s-never-too-late strain of religious thinking. It was Jeremy who took out most of the kids by the snack machines - and shot off Demi Harshawe"s foot, too - as well as producing most of the trophy case casualties, but he repented and so he was forgiven and lionized.
In the third week after the ma.s.sacre, Kent returned to Alberta and we moved back into the house.
Now I was a semi-hero, but at that point screw everybody. On the first Monday, around 9:15 in the morning, just after the soaps had started on TV, Mom asked if I was going to go back to school. I said no, and she said, "I figured so. I"m going to sell the house. It"s in my name."
"Good idea."
There was a pause. "We should probably move away for a while. Maybe to my sister"s place in New Brunswick. And change your hair like they do on crime shows. Find a job. Try and put time between you and the past few weeks."
I made some forays into the world, but wherever I went I caused a psychic ripple that made me uncomfortable. At the Capilano Mall, one woman began crying and hugging me, and wouldn"t let go, and when I finally got her off me, she"d left a phone number in my hand. Downtown I was spotted by a group of these dead Goth girls, who followed me everywhere, touching the sidewalk where my feet had just been as if their palms could receive heat from the act. As for school- related activities like sports, they were off the menu, too. n.o.body ever phoned to apologize for abandoning me. The princ.i.p.al showed up on Tuesday - the For Sale sign was already on the lawn by then - and there were still eggs and spray-painted threats and curses all over the house"s walls.
Mom let him in, asked if he"d like some coffee and settled him at the kitchen table with a cup, and then she and I went through the carport door and drove down to Park Royal to shop for carry-on baggage. When we got back a few hours later he was gone. A week later I was out in the front yard with a wire brush, dishwashing soap and a hose, trying to sc.r.a.pe away the egg stains; the proteins and oils had soaked into the wood, and scrubbing was turning out to be pointless. A minivan full of charismatic Youth Alive! robots pulled into the driveway. There were four of them, led by the intrusive jerk Matt. They were wearing these weird, des.e.xed jeans that somehow only Alive!ers seemed to own. They all had suntans, too, and I remembered an old brochure: "Tans come from the sun, and the sun is fun, and Youth Alive!, while being a serious organization charged with the care of youth, is also a fun, sunny, lively kind of group, too."
I had nothing to say to these guys, and ignored them as my father might ignore a pickup truck full of satanists listening to rock music being played backward.
Matt said, "Taking it easy, huh? We thought we"d come visit. You"re not back in school."
I carried on scrubbing the house with steel wool.
"It"s been a rough few weeks for all of us."
I looked at them. "Please leave."
"But, Jason, we just got here."
"Leave."
"Oh, come on, you can"t be ..."
I blasted them with the garden hose. They stood their ground: "You"re upset. That"s natural," Matt said.
"Do any of you have any idea what traitorous sc.u.m you are?"
"Traitors? We were merely helping the RCMP."
"I learned about all of your help, thank you."
In spite of the hose, the foursome advanced. Were they going to kidnap me or group hug me? Lay their bronzed fingers on my head and p.r.o.nounce me whole and returned to the flock?
Then a shot was fired - and two more - by my mother from the second floor. She was making craters in the lawn with Reg"s .410. She blasted out the minivan"s lights. "You heard Jason.
Leave. Now."
They did, and for whatever reason, the cops never showed up.
Word of Mom and the gun must have kept away quite a few potential visitors. There were a few press people; a few family friends who"d vanished during those first two weeks; some Alive! girls leaving baked goods, cards and flowers on the doorstep, all of which I unwrapped and threw into the juniper shrubs for the racc.o.o.ns. In any event, we never let anybody through our front door; within a month, the house was sold and we"d moved to my aunt"s place in Moncton, New Brunswick.
My brain feels sludgy. It"s late, but Joyce is always up for a good walk.
Just in the door. A warm, dry night out, my favorite kind of weather, and so rare here. During Joyce"s walk I saw a car like the one Cheryl"s mother, Linda, used to drive - a LeBaron with wood siding. The model looked good for the first week it was out, but a decade of sun and salt and frost have made it resemble the kind of car people in movies drive after a nuclear war.