Critical Injuries (20 page)

His gratitude, too. “And,” he says, turning slightly so he can just glimpse her, “thank you.”

That's better. That's closer.

Everybody stands up. A cop appears to lead Roddy away again. Roddy, looking back at the emptying courtroom, sees his grandmother and dad regarding him helplessly, the exact expressions that would be unbearable if they were the people he was looking for, but he's watching the girl. She's following her mother's husband, her stepfather, he supposes. She doesn't look back, but surely the way she moves, the certainty of her spine, the firmness of her feet, the transparency and sway of her dress, even, tell him that maybe after all, she heard, not so much his words but his intentions. The way he's the only one, he figures, who had a clue about hers.

He'd be okay, if he could keep looking at her. No need to talk, although he'd like it if she did because her words mean something.
Starglow
, he says to himself, then adds
Alix
, but out loud so the cop says, “What?” and he feels sort of like a fool, but not really.

It's not that any of what just happened makes sense; more that it doesn't. Riding back in the van, he feels, not happy, but nearly peaceful. He keeps his eyes closed, to concentrate on how she looked to him, standing beside him, holding him hard with her eyes. That hair, that thin body, those words she spoke that he cannot remember, except for knowing that while they were being said, he felt strong, and almost sure of something. And how his skin felt like it was lifting right off his body.

Catapults and Boiling Oil

“You awake, Mum?” Well no, she was not. But because this is Jamie's voice, and because this is exactly what he used to do, creeping to her side of the bed some mornings when he was little, she rouses herself. This is like swimming through peanut butter. “Hi,” he says. “How you feeling?”

She feels helpless, that's how. She feels dependent and doomed and despairing and tethered to heaven knows what apparatus and incapacities. She feels rage flaring hotter and faster than any goddamn internal flame Alix could dream of. That's how she feels, what does he think? “Okay,” she says. “Tired.”

“I thought you'd want to know Grandma and Bert are on their way back. Or will be soon.” They are? She thought they'd agreed to leave Madeleine and Bert in happy ignorance as long as possible, off on their much-planned, much-anticipated month-long holiday on one of those tiny and obscure Caribbean islands that are particularly hard to get to. Once there, also difficult to get away from, especially if you're old, and have a dicky heart, as Bert does, and are on an organized, inflexible charter, as they are. Why get them upset when they're far away and when there's nothing they can do? That's what Isla believes she, Lyle, Jamie, and Alix decided. So what's changed, and why?

Although it's true, it would be awfully nice to have a mother right now.

Madeleine is seventy-four, Bert seventy-six, so the worry before they left was that some emergency would crop up with one of them and they'd be stuck without convenient or adequate help. “Stop fussing,” Madeleine said. “We'll be fine, and if we're not, look what a beautiful place it is for a funeral.” Madeleine has become vastly light-hearted in recent years, an advertisement for a certain kind of old age.

She deserves better than this. Of course, so does Isla.

Madeleine and Bert have been together far longer than Madeleine and Isla's father were married. When Isla married James, while James's mother and Madeleine wept, it was Bert who gave her away. He's a nice man. Kind. He is small, plump and has been balding slowly, slowly, for several decades. Isla assumes that her mother, if she has hankerings and cravings, must have quite different ones from her own. This is not something they've particularly discussed, although they've smiled together about Bert's fondness for stripes, and his pale stubby legs when he wears shorts, and the way his eyes crinkle closed when someone else sneezes, an endearing, odd habit. When Madeleine says, “He's a good man,” Isla understands this has a very large, encompassing meaning. In the absence of pieces of paper and formal vows, Madeleine and he seem to jog along happily together, affectionately. They still touch each other often, randomly, on the shoulder, the knee, elsewhere. Bert appears to regard Isla and her difficult children and her unfortunate history as a set of awkward luggage that travels with Madeleine and has to be taken into account in the larger interests of devotion.

If they quarrel or have confusions, any chaos, they keep it to themselves. Since they've both retired, they've been on journeys through parts of Europe and much of North America. These days they tend to go on organized tours, although, since Madeleine has also learned to do things like scuba dive, safety doesn't seem one of her most compelling concerns. Bert, too, has become more adventurous, or at least willingly follows Madeleine into the sea, despite his jittery heart. Apparently everyone was wrong to worry about something bad happening to one of them on their journey. Also there appears to be no point at which mothers get to retire. However old they get, however far beyond reach they travel, they're always vulnerable to the call, to being hauled back.

Jamie must see something to this effect in Isla's face. “Well, we decided she had to know, Mum. We couldn't hold off any longer, she'd kill us.” Does Isla not have a voice any more? But oh, to see Madeleine suddenly appear at her bedside, the way people do appear suddenly — there are tears in her eyes again. Heavens, she's sentimental. At any rate, moody.

When Jamie and Alix were little, Isla would have run into fire or traffic for them. Well, she still would, although now she'd be wondering why they didn't know better than to get themselves caught in a fire or traffic. This is the trickle-down effect of maternity: that Isla wouldn't dream of saving herself at the expense of Jamie or Alix; that Madeleine would trade places with Isla in a heartbeat.

Those are hypothetical choices, obviously. In some families, that would be a good thing; not every parent is steadfast.

Isla would trade places with some other mother's son, though, she'd change places in a second with that little asshole who shot her.

Oh, now she remembers what she was going to ask Jamie: about the drugs. How he truly and deep-down managed to kick the desire for that deep slide into creamy darkness. His other universe.

“How are they getting here?”

“Lyle says they're floating home on a big raft of money. But really, a little private plane” — poor Bert — “and then some kind of boat, and a plane to Miami, but there's a layover, anyway it's going to take forever and it's pretty complicated, but they should be on their way soon. Lyle worked it out.” Madeleine will be desperate.

Back when Jamie was fifteen, and in the process of growing tall as well as lean, he still could be caught with the open, sometimes clumsy, sometimes yearning expressions of childhood on his face. He'd said once he might like to teach, but it was hard to imagine him as a teacher; a man of authority; any man. “There's time,” Isla had told him, because she'd thought that there was. “You can do anything you decide you want to do.” She should have rephrased that. She meant it in happy ways, as in a world of good possibilities open to him. She didn't consider the awful ones.

His father thought he, too, could do whatever he decided he wanted to do. She hadn't considered that, either, although soon after that conversation with Jamie, was compelled to. Now, standing over her hospital bed, Jamie has that expression again, that open, clumsy, yearning one. Only now he is a man. Some things are not retrievable.

Here is this other strange thing: that she longs to put her arms around him, but is already forgetting how it is to feel her feet on the ground, or shake her head, or put her arms around anyone. She is forgetting air and motion and solidity. How odd, surely, to lose track so quickly; at the same time, to want so ferociously what's been lost track of.

She wants her mother. Madeleine can't fix this; nobody can ever fix anything for somebody else, really, that's one of the hard lessons of being a grown-up, not a child. But she can be a fiercely sturdy, dependable presence.

The police and James's lawyer were right: his crimes were of interest, not huge interest but quite enough, to the newspapers. There was his name, the name of his business, its many locations. He had a wife, it was noted, and two adolescent children, who of course were not named. Not being named did them little good. Everyone who knew them knew who they were.

Mavis brought cheeses and cold meats to the door. A few other neighbours and friends dropped by or phoned. Isla felt pathetically grateful; but what on earth could anyone say? “I'm sorry” covered a great deal of ground: sorry for, sorry about, sorry altogether. Then what?

For the first few, worst weeks, Madeleine took leave from her job and moved in. She cooked and played cards and handled the phone, screening messages, some of them very ugly. In this way she was able to tell them James was staying, as a condition of bail, with his parents. Isla tried, although not very hard, to imagine what it was like in that household, the shamed, ruined son back in the nest.

She also wondered if James tried to imagine what it was like in the home where she and Jamie and Alix still had to live; but of course he did. He telephoned too, a few times. When Madeleine asked if anyone wanted to speak with him, no one would. Alix looked at Jamie, then followed his suit. Isla thought Alix looked as if she wanted to talk with her father, and wondered if she should intervene, but did not.

Sometimes, passing Jamie's bedroom door, she heard his voice in long phone conversations with Bethany. Isla, still struck nearly dumb herself, wondered what he had to say, what he confided. She had new admiration for Bethany, who must listen so well. She wondered about Bethany's parents' views.

Madeleine arranged for Jamie and Alix to switch schools. She said, meaning well, “No one will know you. You'll have a fresh start.”

Did James not consider that sort of upheaval before hurling himself on the young bosoms of his employees? Two more came forward. More charges were laid. The list became too complicated to keep track of, and anyway at a certain point, the specifics were hardly what mattered. He would plead not guilty, Madeleine said, having talked to his mother. Stephen Godwin would argue that in the case of the younger girls nothing had happened, and that with the older ones anything that had happened was voluntary, even welcomed. “Consensual” was the word he intended to rely on, evidently. “The idea seems to be,” Madeleine reported, “that they'll withdraw rather than go through a trial.” His mother, she said, had arrived at the firm view that James was innocent of everything except, maybe, impure thoughts. That being so, she was very angry with Isla: for weakness, for faithlessness. “So I told her,” Madeleine said, “that I didn't care to hear that sort of nonsense and if that was all she had to talk about, she shouldn't call back. I'm sorry if that was the wrong thing to do. But it's bad enough the woman's delusional, I won't have her insulting you while she's at it.”

A couple of times, very late at night, the phone rang and without thinking Isla picked up her bedside extension. “Isla, don't hang up. I need to talk to you.” She was tempted. She thought she had a great deal to say, but once started, where would she stop? And it sounded as if he intended her only to listen. And he failed to say, “Please.”

Mainly she decided words weren't big enough, or complicated enough, or maybe years in advertising had simplified her vocabulary so it wasn't adequate now for anything as complex as her feelings.
Betrayed
didn't come close, nor did
rage
, really. Wounded to the point of staggering, flailing unspeakability? Something like that. She couldn't get warm, and also could barely make herself move, spent hours curled in her bed, under blankets. She supposed this was grief. She hadn't imagined anything so painfully heart-stopping was possible.

So it wasn't so much that she had nothing to say to him, or too much, but that she couldn't begin to say what she meant; and so she hung up without speaking.

In time, though, something else became noticeable. It was that, when she did manage to pull herself out of bed, it felt as if she'd lost a good deal of weight. It took a while to know what this was: that some part of her, a tiny corner of her heart, was lightened, was almost grateful for the clarity of his crimes.

Because what he had done was so pure, so decisive, it spared her a more grinding departure, the one she'd vaguely foreseen a few years down the road when she would want to leave him, for no good or obvious reason. Now pinned, nailed, guilty, he had relieved her of her own hard decisions. The upheaval of common habits, the absence of certain sounds, those were disorienting sorrows; but waking up one morning she found herself smiling, and then again, on another morning. This said nothing good about her. It said much that was unpleasant to learn. She supposed it meant that while their betrayals, their general heedlessness of each other, were different in detail, they were equivalent in scope. A difficult conclusion, but there it was, true anyway.

None of this meant the shock didn't still nearly knock her flat every electric time she pictured him in storerooms and offices, bending over young girls. Of course there were questions: like, why? And whether there are prescriptions for love, and acting out love, and fatal symptoms of the endings of love and all the gnarled and convoluted ways of reaching the endings of love. Also, does love matter? If so, why? These questions counted both enormously and not at all, which she would not previously have thought reasonable or possible, but which was both.

Madeleine slept, without difficulty, in Isla and James's old room. Isla had moved across the hall into what had been James's home office. She remembered when she'd thought of the house as a fortress of sorts, and had considered that a good thing. Now it really was a fortress, it really did contain them all. They might as well have kept pots of boiling oil on the windowsills, catapults at the doors.

Bert came around often to see Madeleine. Martin came also, a special kindness since it meant neglecting both wife and lover. He brought along work discussions and decisions, and if Isla didn't want to get out of bed, he went upstairs and hauled her down. They went over contracts and campaigns, spreading papers out on the coffee table. He said, “Whenever you're ready, come back.”

Jamie was often out, and at home stayed unnervingly adamant in his silence. Not unlike Isla herself. She touched him, tried to touch him, but could not feel that she reached him. She saw the wariness in his light footsteps, and possibly furtiveness. She said, “Talk to me,” and also “Listen to me,” but he would do neither; or could not. She imagined that like her, he was quietly, internally, absorbing various blows. Assessing trustworthiness, too. He was taking care of himself in his own way, and it wasn't so different from hers, after all. Alix, on the other hand, took to hanging around in the living room. Suddenly younger, more like a nine- than a twelve-year-old, she sat on the sofa in pink flannel pajamas with Bert and Madeleine, watching TV while Isla and Martin worked haphazardly nearby with their campaigns and contracts. Sometimes it was possible to look around and see all this as a cozy scene. Not entirely a family scene, but an awfully cozy one.