Away From Everywhere (35 page)

“So, what are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“About being locked out of your B&B?”

“Good question. What would you do if you were me? Sleep down on the beach there, or go knocking on her door and feel like a wild bitch for the rest of your stay in this little town?”

He was drunk, and everyone and everything about this town seemed harmless, especially her. So he spoke without thinking of how it sounded.“Well, I'm living in that red house there.” He flung an arm in its general direction. He was so drunk that the sudden shifting of his weight almost toppled him over.“I'm going to pass out in my bed, instantly, and I guess it would be harmless if you took the couch.”

Her jaw dropped, and right away he felt like she'd misinterpreted his invitation. He waited for the harsh decline.

“And here I was thinking you'd never ask! Only in Newfoundland, right?”

“And with the right dose of alcohol.”

“Yeah.”She laughed and held out her hand for him to help her up off the stump. “The only way this works is if we get rid of the awkward right here and now. I have no intentions of sleeping with you…or…otherwise being with you in any way. Okay? Now you say the same thing. That's how this works, Owen Collins.”

He hadn't told her his last name yet.

“And I want you to know, as a matter of personal intergrity, that this is an act of circumstance. Me going back to your house. This is not something I'd normally do. But I am having the kind of month where I just don't give a fuck. You understand this, right? And you still haven't reassured me you aren't going to try and pull anything with me.”

He wanted to joke and say,
Is that why you were making eyes at me all night? You needed somewhere to sleep?

It all seemed so surreal, drunk and lulled by a 3 a.m.fatigue. Living in Port Blandford. Heading “home”with this Emily girl. And he was so inexplicably desperate to connect with her. He liked not having to worry that she'd judge him for the state of his house. They were both in that town for reasons similar enough that she wouldn't care about the unwashed dishes and unswept floors. The grey lines of dirt running along the baseboards.

When he got back to the house, he couldn't find an extra blanket and pillow to offer her, so he just tore the pillows and comforter off of his own bed and brought them out for her. He'd just ball up his sweater and use it as a pillow. He'd slept on worse in similar drunken states in the past.

When he walked back out to the living room, she was sitting on the couch and staring into the fireplace.

“So.” She pointed at the black mass in the unlit fireplace. “What book was so bad you had to burn it?”

“It wasn't a book. Long story. It was a journal, Hannah's journal.”

“
My
Hannah, the girl you think I look like? You didn't like what she had to say?”

“Yeah. Something like that. And you don't look
too much
like Hannah, it's just that something about you reminds me of her.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“What did she have to say?”

He laughed. The way she was asking was friendly, not nosy, not annoying or too forward.

“And if you don't mind me asking, why the limp? An injury?”

“Well…how interested would you be if I told you the limp and the burnt journal were related?”

“Very. I'd say pop the popcorn and tell me the story! Or, better yet, we can substitute that bottle of wine over there for the popcorn.”

He laughed as he lit the fireplace. “And what do I get out of it, besides the pleasure of entertaining you?”

“Well, let's face it. We're the new cats in town, just visitors, and we don't feel like telling our stories to everyone else. So why don't we have a lay-it-on-the-line, brutally honest relationship with each other?We're perfect strangers, and that makes us perfect shrinks for each other. Consider me a pair of curious ears and nothing more. I won't know all the people you're talking about, so I won't be biased, and I won't know the other sides of the stories you tell me. It's kind of perfect, isn't it? Consider me a sponge, lay it all on me, try and shed some of that weight on your shoulders. Or is it guilt?What do you think?Want to abuse this situation, make the most of our acquaintance for the next week?”

And he did. He told her everything. And she did too. All she left out was why she needed only a week, or maybe less, to deal with all her problems, whereas Owen was there “indefinitely” to deal with his. They never interrupted each other's stories, not once, and sympathies were exchanged in looks that said more than words ever could have anyway. Their giant shadows shrouded the walls, dancing in concert with the fire's flames, and accentuated their ample hand gestures. By the time they were done, the sun had come up and the same Sigur Ros album had replayed four times. The fire burned out around 4 a.m., and they'd polished off two bottles of wine. She preferred white, but drank his reds without complaining too much about the tannic snap of them.

UNDONE

OWEN AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING feeling like a lion was biting into his wounded knee. It felt like there was glass under his skin, and he scratched at it, helpless to do anything with all the pain but clutch it between two hands. For five long minutes he thought maybe it was glass, that they'd left some in there by accident during the surgery. He'd seen things on the news about doctors leaving just about everything in their patients: towels, tools, gloves. A shard of glass seemed entirely plausible. Stumbling back into consciousness, he accepted that there were screws in his bones now.

He thought of the shard of glass in Alex's back, the one that Hannah had written about, and he thought about all that glass in the car that night, the sound of it smashing and changing everything, as it spilled into the car between them. He thought of how it massacred her beautiful, angelic face. The disjointed eyebrow. Then he thought about Emily on his couch.
How did that happen? Did it really happen?Was I that drunk?

He dressed and checked his reflection in a mirror to make himself somewhat presentable. The more he contended with his bedhead, the worse it got. The hair on the left side of his head was as flat as a wall; the hair on the other side of his head spiked out at a ninety degree angle. He ventured out to offer her breakfast, knowing he'd first warn her that the B&B would likely have more to offer in the way of a decent meal. A quick little joke might be a good start to the day, considering the topics of their conversations the night before. He tugged his pajama pants around so his bulge was less noticeable, or maybe the lack of a bulge, then decided to change into a pair of jeans and pull on a respectable shirt.

But when he got out to the living room, the pillow he'd given her was resting on top of a perfectly folded blanket, and she was gone. She was pretty vulnerable and laying it all out there, maybe she left upset? Maybe she was an early riser, and, sober, felt weird on a stranger's couch. Maybe she left to get some food or had somewhere to be. He'd swing by her B&B later to check in on her. His pang of hunger demanded his immediate attention. He still hadn't made that trip to Clarenville for groceries, so all he had was that same loaf of bread, and as he reached for it, he feared it would be spotted green with dots of mould.

Her story had taken as long to tell as his.

“My shrink always told me that's just the way it is. We will spend our adult lives as we spent our childhood. And I'd say, ‘So what then? I'll spend my adult life getting fucked? Feeling useless, used, and not in control?'‘Well, yes,'he said,‘unless you get a lot more receptive to this therapy …'”

When she poured a glass of wine, she poured her glass as full as Owen did, and drank it just as fast.

“As if that's my problem. My being skeptical of my uptight shrink's tactics. A man who seems like he's barely lived a life but thinks he can understand everyone else's. He acts like I'm a puzzle put together all wrong, and if I'd just let him, he could undo me and put me back together all right. It's bullshit! Putting me back together would require cutting out half my memories, and he can't do that. So I skipped my session this week, and came out here to Port Blandford with a new plan for myself.”

She never did share that
plan
with him. They had agreed not to interrupt each other with contrived condolences, or fruitless words of wisdom.

“The thing is, for me to feel better, I would need to go back in time to undo things, not just talk about things. It kind of makes psychotherapy a sham, at least in my case. I'm sure there are some people out there who doctors mentally rewire with cognitive therapy, but I'm not one of them. Not statistically.”

There was a long pause, a hesitation. She looked at him to gauge his level of interest before moving on.

“I may seem fine to you, Owen, but you only think you know me, and I can guarantee you I will wake up tonight crying and screaming and kicking my legs, as if my father was invisible and in this living room with me. That invisibility makes him, and my past, inescapable. Helplessly inescapable. The constant presence of the past in my life makes life a constant struggle.”

Their stories were different, but it was like he was talking to himself.

“I survived it all though. I escaped my childhood, at least physically, and I saw having my own child as a way to start again. A clean slate, all mine to fill out. I figured being a mother granted me a new identity, a new life, a new role, and the responsibilities would drone out the depression, the memories, the night terrors. It worked, to some degree, but ironically, I felt even more robbed of my own childhood every time I cradled Andrew, lovingly in my arms, because I knew I would give him everything. I could and would do anything to keep him safe, and as a kid I never had that. I had a mother, bedridden from gross obesity, and a vicious mule of a father.
Don't scream, don't wake your mother or you won't get your supper.
Not that my mother would've cared if she knew. She was too embittered by her condition. Her rage-filled eyes,God! She just stared at people, no words, and watchedTV twenty-four seven, but not really even paying attention. Just gazing at the TV like a complete idiot. A completely apathetic idiot. At some point, I couldn't even bring myself to look at her anymore. She looked at people as if it were all their fault. Like I deserved that cloak of unhappiness she saw me in, because she was in it too.”

By now they were uncorking their second bottle of wine, and the fire was dimming. The intensity of the stories they were sharing made it okay for them to sit on opposite ends of the same couch, toes touching, because a little physical contact helped them unload those weighty memories.

“The contrast between how I raised my son, and how
I
was raised, made me realize how I was denied the purpose of childhood: to feel like the world is infinite and assembled just for your happiness. For at least a few short years, children should be allowed to think that they can take what they want from the world. As a kid, I was only ever trying to escape my life, trying so hard to ignore the perfect lives of all the other kids that it wore me out. I entered adulthood too exhausted to handle it.”

Entering adulthood too exhausted too handle it.
She was exactly what he was hoping she was when he saw her sitting all alone on that barstool. And so uncannily similar to Hannah that he felt he knew her. Knew things he couldn't possibly know, like she probably brushed her teeth too hard and wore slippers around her house. Expensive, functional ones.

“When Andrew was born, I was reborn with him. When they passed him to me in the hospital, he looked at me with an instant, unconditional love and need for me. I knew that I was going to be the door through which he walked into the world, and I promised us both that I was going to lead him into the best world possible. No matter what. Because Andrew was going to be how I found meaning in my life. He gave me exactly what the world had taken away from me. Love is amazing like that, maternal love anyway. Love creates something that never existed before, a new world to live in. It makes the past a little less present.”

The smile left her face. Her tone changed. She curled up into a tighter ball.

“Seven months ago, when Andrew was three weeks into the fourth year of his life, I was dying a scarf for a co-worker. I work in retail, but earn most of my money on the side making textile art, scarves and bags, whatever. I was just putting on a surgeon's mask and opening a bottle of dye when the phone rang. I thought of letting it ring, but I never, and now that single decision, that one irrelevant phone call, cost me my life. Tragedies are so much harder to accept when we can pinpoint the exact moment where it all could have been avoided. Normally, I'd have just let it ring, but I was expecting a call from the girl I was making the scarf for. It wasn't her on the phone though, it was another co-worker, Jocelyn. I hate Jocelyn, and I always have. She's a desperate, lonely annoyance, and she calls me to talk because she has no one else in her life. It's always boy trouble. She wonders why she can't keep a man, why they all only use her for one-night stands, and then tells me all about her wild sexual escapades, as if I cared about her disgusting, elaborate details. I had music on, Brian Borcherdt, so I didn't hear the first few rings, and had to make a mad dash to the phone. In doing so, I'd left the baby gate opened, and Andrew … he … wandered into my studio, so silently, as I talked on the phone. I'd left the bottle of dye on the floor, within his reach. It was MX 808 Crimson Red. I can see that label in my head: the tacky red-and-yellow butterfly cartoon and the comic sans font. I see it every day. I cry tears that feel more like fire than water. The dye was in a small bottle, about the size of pill bottle, and full of dried, concentrated, toxic dye crystals. He ingested the whole bottle. When I found him, his saliva was running red, like blood, all over his shirt. I knew exactly what went wrong. Indirectly, I'd killed my son. They pumped his little stomach. They stuck tubes down his nose and throat as I watched, but it was too late, his body had absorbed it. I read afterwards that what I should've done before rushing him to the hospital was make him throw it all up. It could have saved his life. Apparently, most poisons get thrown up before they are absorbed into the body. Most, but not this one. Not the one I was using that day, the one and only time I left that gate to my toxic studio open. Now, every day, it's just too much without him. It's just hour after hour of guilt and loneliness. I hear noises at night, and know it
isn't
just Andrew stirring about. And losing a child, so young and so unexpectedly, is losing everything but your heartbeat and instinct to breathe.”