Away From Everywhere (13 page)

They sat there for hours that night. After the initial forty-five minutes of silence, Alex finally spoke, “I am only going to say this once, Owen, for the rest of our lives. I promise. But I do need to have said it, for my own sake, and

I am sorry …but you could've stayed in the car. You could've stayed in the car, Owen.” His bottom lip twitched as he repeated himself.

Owen didn't respond. He couldn't. And Abbie didn't interject, because it was true. And if Alex was going to say it only once, then fair enough.

THE FELLING

THEIR MOTHER DIED IN HER coma, not long after the accident. Neither brother could remember exactly how long, those few days were a long blur of inseparable hours, but it was less than a week. Owen was sitting right there beside her when that distinctive, sustained beep howled from the machines leading in and out of her.

Owen was watching the rain on the window, watching raindrops flutter across the pane and connect to each other and fall away. The sound came out of the machine like hands wrapping themselves around his throat, suffocating him and holding him in place, stopping time – until a barrage of doctors and nurses stormed into the room and pushed him aside. They ravaged his mother's body with a defibrillator: her body jolted up off the bed with each futile shock. Her arms tensed and contorted; her fingers looked like they were snapping out of their joints. The commotion of people yelling over each other and the medical equipment and the weather on the window: it all blended together into one sonic assault on Owen, ripping the tears from his eyes and sucking the air from his lungs. The sounds echoed and bounced off the walls as he stumbled backwards out of the room – until his back hit the wall of the hallway. He slid down the wall, cracked his tailbone on the floor, and closed his eyes. The pressure of his shutting lids thrust a stream of tears down his face. He covered his ears and shrieked as if he was witnessing her murder.

The floor was cold and white, with flecks of black and grey. Stars of reflected fluorescent light flickered on the linoleum floor and disappeared into the shadows of people walking by. He stared at them blankly, in a way that told nurses and passersby not to bother him, to leave him there, undisturbed. No condolences would matter. He closed his eyes and pictured his mother, just a few nights earlier, laying her chicken and rice casserole in the oven, shutting the door with her hip, and laughing into the phone about some comment Abbie had made. She covered her mouth when she laughed, and tucked her chin into her chest, like a shy and nervous kid. It was the only time she ever looked defenseless, or at ease with the world.

A clamour of footsteps came towards him; he saw a flurry of feet rush past him, green scrubs falling onto an assortment of white and black shoes. He didn't have to look up to see and know: she existed only in memory now.

When he opened his eyes and looked up, Alex was sitting on a bench down the hallway, watching him. They stared at each other. They blinked, and people walked through their fields of vision, but their eyes stayed locked on each other. There were no words, but the familiarity and shared distress were vital, so they just stared at each other, one waiting for the other to say this was all too unreal to be real. And then Owen shot up and ran down the hallway like he could outrun the moment. Leave it all behind. He crashed through the hospital door and dove into the first empty cab he saw. He'd take Abbie the news of his mother, and then the rest of his life would be a mystery.

He felt like he had abandoned Alex in that hospital, but he knew one of them had to un-pause life. One of them had to break that stare and make it all real. Taking off like that was the only way he could do it. To leave his mother and to be near Abbie in as short a period of time as possible.

It wasn't an ideal courtship, but his mother's fate brought Owen and Abbie together. Abbie was twenty-two with the demeanor and wisdom of a caring, fifty-year-old mother. Owen needed that. He needed the soothing tone in her voice, and that hand on his knee as they talked. It smoothed the roughness off the reality of the words. It planed off their sharpness so they'd pierce a little less.
Dead. Alone. Guilt.

“Jim Croaker did this to your mother,
not
you.”

Abbie lived alone, and let the brothers spend all the time they needed in her apartment, cooking for them, driving them wherever they needed to be, helping them pack the last of their stuff up at their mother's. Abbie packed most of Owen's stuff for him, and chatted with Alex as she did so, to distract him while Owen aimlessly wandered the house. He was acting without thinking. He stuck a foot in his mother's fluffy black slipper, lifted bottles of hair products off her dresser to sniff them, their lilac scent stinging his nose. He lay in his bed, one last time. He opened a cupboard door in the kitchen and just stared at the pile of bone china they never once ate off. Why was it there? A never-used wedding gift?

They were staying with their father's parents now, and their grandfather was looking after all their mother's affairs: the will, the fate of their home, the car. Their mother had waived life insurance, and the brothers only now understood how much she had struggled financially. They'd falsely assumed she was receiving financial assitance from the government for their father's being institutionalized. If she was, there was no record of it.

Their grandfather had no legal title to their house, so the bank repossessed it, sold it, in a down market, and after paying off her credit card debts and outstanding loans, Owen and Alex were left with close to four thousand each. Not even enough for a university degree.

Owen and Abbie were eating supper one night when Alex knocked three grim, spaced knocks on the door. She let him in and took his jacket.“Quit knocking, Alex. It's never locked, just come on in, okay?” She spilled some pasta onto a plate for Alex, and excused herself to go read in her room. As she spun from the table, the waft of her hair had a warming, sedative effect on Owen.

The brothers sat on Abbie's couch all night, talking themselves through it all. It was a bright purple couch, covered in white cat hair, in a small living room. On her black walls, she'd painted a white cityscape mural with birds on telephone wires and buildings crowding each other. Owen found the room soothing; Alex found it strange. There was an old mahogany grandfather clock in the corner. Its tocking sound accentuated the somber silence. It made the tears heavier, fuller. They sat sharing stories and memories, sometimes with twenty long minutes of silence between conversations.

“I like howMom covered her mouth when she laughed, as if laughter were as rude as belching.”

A few minutes later. “I always laughed at how stern her voice sounded when she yelled at the characters in her favourite movies, you know? Like …do you remember how she'd flail her arms around and jump out of her seat and slap at the coffee table?” Alex got off the couch to imitate her and laugh. He wiped a tear with the back of his hand and sat back down.

“Yeah. Dad hated it, hey?”

“Yeah.”Alex said it skeptically, like he wasn't sure, and after a minute of silence, “Sometimes I don't really remember Dad, you know what I mean?”

“That's why I still go and vis–”

“That's not what I mean! I mean, how he
was
, you know? I don't want to forget Mom like that. That's all. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, but, I think the fact that we can sit here and talk about her like this, it's a good thing. She made time for a movie a day. She laughed weird. At least she was a woman we can sit here and describe and reminisce over for days on end. I think we're lucky there. She can never cease to exist because we'll always be able to recollect her, you know? It's not the same with Dad. He was always so … I don't know. He was such an enigma.”

“A what?”

“A mystery, unknowable.”

“Or crazy.”

Alex laughed, Owen didn't. And an hour later Alex fell asleep on the couch, too stubborn and proud to come right out and say he wanted to be with his brother that night. As much as Alex had always needed camaraderie, he never could admit it, not even to Owen.

They slept sitting up on Abbie's couch that night, with their hands on their laps and their heads tilted to the left as if their necks were cracked. They looked slain. They looked unconditionally devoted to each other, the way a tree depends on its roots. They had the synergy of soil and rain: trivial apart, but together they nourished something bigger than themselves.

Abbie woke at 2 a.m. and covered them with her only comforter. She woke Owen by accident doing so, and sat back on the coffee table to watch him come to. Eyes squinted, lips licking his mouth free from the seal of sleep. “What … is…is everything okay? It's okay we're here, right?”He nodded to his brother.

She didn't have to answer that, and looked a little offended he'd asked. She stood up and looked down at Owen and his brother as if she admired them as much as she pitied them.

“This is rough,Owen, but at least you two have each other. I can tell, just from looking at you, that nothing will ever tear you two apart. Get some sleep. I'll be back home by twelve tomorrow, if you two need a ride anywhere. Okay?”

She sprang up off the coffee table to walk away as Owen nodded. He tugged his legs up onto a cushion and laid his head down onto the arm of the couch. “Thanks, Abbie. Seriously. You've been–”

She put a finger to her lips. “Don't wake your brother. Get some sleep.”

Her feet made no sound as she walked away. He loved her for it. He loved her. He could taste that love in the meals she made him, and feel it in the way she put that blanket over him.

Their father had never been close with his parents, so to Owen, his grandparents were just two more strange faces around the table at Christmas dinner. He was only close to his mother's parents, but
her
father was long dead, and her mother was lost to Alzheimer's, and just as helpless and alone as Owen.

His grandparents were strict, devout members of a small, esoteric, and extreme Christian denomination. They were contemptuous of anyone not living
God's way
. Their condemnation immediately fell upon Abbie, and formed an instant source of tension between Owen and his grandfather.

“She's an outcast is what she is, and I don't want her callin' and I don't want her comin' over. I'll cut the phone lines and bolt the doors shut before I has a neighbour seeing us associatin'with the likes of her. You hear me, boy? Her and her blessed tattoos and her hair all coloured like that.”

“What, three little birds on her arm and a streak of red in her hai–”

“And she was makin'a heathen out of your mother, last goin' off. Yes, she was. Them goin' out every night of the week. Had her dressin' like a reckless tramp too, she did.”

A few weeks after the brothers had moved in, Owen's grandfather found him in the basement digging through old boxes that belonged to his father. They were filled with yearbooks, hockey cards, pictures of high school crushes in cheap plastic frames, Beatles and Bob Marley records. He was opening a box full of his father's high school newspapers when his grandfather charged across the room and kicked the box back into the closet.

“Shouldn't you be at work, boy?”

“I quit my job when…you know…because of Mom, so–”

“Yet your brother's at work today, right?”

“Yeah…but he's back to work for show, because he's afraid people might think all this makes his life look even more screwed up and–”

“And there'll be no mention of that father of yours in my house, are we clear on that? Stop rootin' through all his stuff. I ought to burn all this is what …but your grandmother won't allow it. That's where the man got his weak heartedness, his mother, not me!”

The way his grandfather stood there above him – Owen wanted to hit him the way he wanted to hit Jim Croaker. He wanted to transfer the undealt rage.