Away From Everywhere (32 page)

“Yeah, well, in my father's case, I guess it was a need to feel more relevant in his field. Last going off he thought he was working for some top-secret newsp–”

“Oh, I don't know about that. I s'pose we'll never know. Any of us. All we can ever do is assume things about each other, boss, we can never really know each other. Because I think we wake up as a different person every day, based on what happened in all the days before the one in which we are living. You know what I mean? We're an ever-changing product of yesterdays, not rigid, static people. At any given moment who we are can change. Hell, to a degree, every new person you meet changes you, every conversation. So, I don't think anybody knows anybody.”A few seconds of silence.“I don't think anybody knows themself, either.”He laughed. They both did.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, letting that mutually agreed upon statement bond them. Clyde caught Owen staring at a bottle of scotch and a look of acknowledgement was exchanged. A lot was said in that look, a lot more than either of them was willing to say, yet. Clyde had clearly seen a dark past in Owen, and to have seen it so quickly and so easily could only mean he had one of his own.

“Anyway, we can talk anytime, Owen, but I got to head over to Clarenville before dark and pick up a few things at the Walmart. I don't trust my eyes in the dark anymore.”

He shot up out of his chair, pressing a wrinkle out of his pants. “Clyde Noseworthy is the name, and you know where I live if you need anything, or have any problems with the truck.”

Turning towards the window. “My eldest son, Bradley, he bought me a new one.”He pointed out the window at a new white Ford pickup. “He lives up in Alberta now, like half of us Newfoundlanders, I s'pose. He's an electrician. Anyway, the tank should be full in your new truck, Owen. We can square up about the damned paperwork next week sometime. It's been nice meeting you and chatting a little. I don't know how long you're staying, and I know better than to ask a man about more than he's offering, but isolation is good for nobody, your father taught me that much, so if you get bored or need something while you're here, a cup of sugar or a game of pool, we're neighbours and I'd love to chat.”

He followed Owen to the porch.“Don't ever assume an old, lonely widower doesn't want to hear about it!”

The town talked of Roger Collins, still, as some kind of legend. It distorted Owen's view and knowledge of his father, but it was all good, all praise, and that made up for Owen's declaring him a hypocrite earlier, when he saw that picture of him and Alex and remembered his father's words.
Life isn't about finding the answers to your questions, it's about not needing them.
The man this town described sounded like the kind of man who would utter those words to his children, and mean it.

He put his supper in the oven: a bag of McCain French fries. He hadn't taken the truck over to Clarenville for groceries yet. Leaving them to cook, he headed for his father's office, with hesitation in his step, afraid he'd find a room full of “coded flyers,” or something even worse. He flicked on the light and leaned on the door frame. He took the room in; it looked exactly as he remembered it: red walls, white borders, and an absolute mess, yet neurotically organized. There were piles of papers and boxes everywhere, but similar things were bunched meticulously together. He had to choose his steps carefully to walk through the room, or he'd trip over one of the stacks. There were piles of his father's publications, piles of old, yellowed newspaper articles he liked, piles of literary journals, piles of photo albums, two “miscellaneous” piles, and a pile of his father's prose.

You wrote too?

To scour this room was to learn about Roger Collins, the man, not “Dad.” He made his way through the maze imposed by the stacked piles of paper, and sat at his father's desk. It was a mahogany desk, covered in a thick film of grey dust. Owen sat and looked around the room, out the window. He traced
Roger
into the dust with his finger, not realizing he was doing so until he was rounding the top of the second r. There was nothing on the desk except for a monstrous, ancient, army-green typewriter. There was one piece of yellowed paper tucked into the typewriter, bowing back down over its keys. He tore it free from the grip of the typewriter and read what his father last typed. What were essentially his father's last written words:
If I could go back in time, what would I take to this day and what would I leave behind? What would I take to this day, and why?

Owen nodded, he would borrow it. He would start his new novel with that as an opening line. The new novel he'd been trying to start since Hannah died.

The desk had two drawers, each locked and the key nowhere to be found, so he ran out back to the shed, still remembering the combination to the lock, 3-6-9, and got a crowbar. The aged locks snapped with surprising ease: the crowbar seemed like overkill, like using a hammer to crack an egg, and he laughed at himself. In the first drawer, he found two time capsules. One labeled,
Owen, ten years old
, the other,
Alex, ten years old.

Ten years old, before the world had terrorized them and broke their big, red hearts, back when they were who they were and not who they are. Time capsules from a time when they were their truest selves: unmoulded and omnipotent. There was a picture inside each capsule. A photo of each brother at ten years old, taken at the very desk Owen was sitting at. There was a Memorex cassette tape in each one too, but he stared, dumbfounded, at those two pictures. The innocent, mischievous looks on their faces, like nothing could go wrong, bedheaded in matching Spiderman pajamas. Like life was all laughter and games of tag and being able to hang upside-down on the monkey bars longer than your brother. He studied the smiles on their faces, the gloss in their eyes. He hadn't realized how much the world had beaten out of him and his brother until he saw those two photographs.

The cassette tapes were thirty-minute interviews their father had conducted with each of his sons. He sat in front of the stereo in the living room and he lay down on a large, brown, oval rug, stared at the white ceiling, and learned all about who he
was
. The tape was intended to capture who he wanted to be when he grew up, but as he listened to it, it had the opposite effect. It was a tape of who he wanted to be again. A kid who saw the beauty in a sunny day, who played dinkies with Alex, and that was enough. To find a simple joy in feeding a red squirrel with his father there, and his brother right beside him.

“So,Owen, tell me. What do you want to be when you are my age?”

“Um, what did Alex say?”

(laughter)

“He said he wanted to be rich, like your Uncle Ross.”

“Oh. Well. I want to be a hero. Can I be a hero?”

“That's up to you, my son, and remember that. But tell me, what kind of hero do you want to be?”

“You know, a hero, someone who saves the people other people hurt.”

“That's nice, so maybe a doctor or a police officer?”

“No. I don't want a job. When I grow up I am just going to get a cheque book like Mom's. I won't need a job then. I'll just pay for everything with cheques.” then. I'll just pay for everything with cheques.”

(laughter)

“I'll let you think it's that simple for now, kiddo.”

By the time he finished listening to both the tapes, an hour had passed. The fries he'd put in the oven and forgot about burned black and set off the fire alarm, right in the middle of Alex's interview. His father asked Alex why he loved his brother.

“Because he is always there, we are always together, so if one of us gets hurt, like when I fell off my bike last night, he'll help me. When I got lost at the museum during last week's field trip,Owen was the one who found me, remember? That's why it's good to have a twin, you're never alone when you get hurt or lost. You don't have to wait for the bus alone, and he's good at the parts of video games that I can't figure out. Most people only see their best friends at school. Mine is always around, and always will be.”

Owen made some toast, because the fries had burnt and all he had in the house were fries, bread, tea, and butter. He took it into his father's office to open that second drawer. There was nothing in it except a wooden jewelry box about the size of a carton of eggs. He shook it. He slid the lid off and hauled out a note from Cassie, Clyde's wife, the woman his father had taught to read and write. The note thanked him for much more than the English lessons and was signed,
Love Cassie.

Love.

Beneath the note, there was a strip of joined, black and white photos, those strips of four photos from old photo booths in shopping malls. In the first photo, they were caught off guard and ill-prepared for the flash of the camera. His father was just about to sit – looking behind him with a hand on the seat – and Cassie was standing, still taking off her jacket. In the second photo they were laughing at themselves for missing that first photo opportunity – their faces side-on and their mouths wide with laughter. Her hand was on his father's knee in a way that suggested she was familiar with his body, that she'd wandered its landscape in a darkened room enough to know his body with her eyes closed. In the third picture they smiled and faced the camera, their heads resting together. This one was their attempt at a nice photo of the two of them. She was wearing the same blue-and-white dress she had on in that photo on Clyde's mantle. In the fourth photo they were kissing, their faces pressed together in a way that suggested they knew exactly how to kiss each other, that they'd been together enough to know exactly how the other one liked it.

On the back of those photos, his father had penned a message:
Here's to loving someone so much there is no such thing as time anymore. Just when we are together and when we are not.

Owen was speechless. A little pissed off, and, surprisingly, a little touched at his father's sincerity. At least Clyde wasn't his brother. Maybe that's all it was: justification of what he'd done with Hannah. Like father, like son. Breathing a little slower, he dropped the photos back into the box and closed it, thieved of even more of his sense of family.
So that was your big project up here, was it, Dad? Another man's wife?

And then he remembered Clyde saying that Cassie died shortly before his father went mad. His father lost his mind shortly after Cassie died. So he had to wonder,Was her death a contributing factor to his father giving in to schizophrenia? Was it the death of his father's beloved mistress, a woman Owen knew nothing about, that finally sent his father over the edge? His Port Blandford life was the life he ran off to, to escape his reality, to escape his life in the city. This was the place where he was happiest, where a whole town talked of him as an ethereal saint. When Cassie died, he lost all that. He had nothing but a wife who never understood him, two children who actively avoided spending time with him, and now he had nowhere to run off to. All he had was his profession, and then his newspaper failed. It was a glorified, simplified explanation, but it helped Owen understand things a little more. Or he let it explain things a little more.

He gazed out the window. The view out the window from his father's office was the rusted swing set and the grown-over sandbox he and Alex once loved. They used to dump sand in each other's hair because they liked the sensation of picking the sand out of their scalps. Alex said it was like scratching fly bites.

A MOTHER, NOT A LOVER

December 4th, 2008,
Fumbling Towards Farewell.

Love might be beautiful, but it's a vicious sort of beauty.
Vicious in that it forces you to act. Possesses you. You can't ignore it. Not for sure anyway. Not always, or for convenience or wedding vows or a clean conscience. Yet we try and entangle love with all the laws of morality, even though morality shatters like glass when love swings a fist. We've all done something we shouldn't have in the relationship department, or we at least thought about it and deprived ourselves, and that is really no better.