Critical Injuries (30 page)

“No, I'm fine. I'm happy you're here.”

“Should I have told you before?”

“Probably not. This was a good time. I'm more in the mood now than I might have been.”

That blank dark wall comes closer by the second, and what happens in the event of collision? Alix packs up her Serenity dresses and attends jail visiting hours, Isla supposes, and Jamie heads off to school. Madeleine clings to Bert, Lyle mourns and moves on. More weathered, perhaps, and certainly wearier, but he's done it before.

While James leans back in his Rocky-mountain recliner and nips at his Scotch and says, “That's too bad. That's a shame.” And maybe thinks, “She should have believed, she should have been loyal, she should have stood by me, no matter what.”

If she had, everything would be different. For one thing, she wouldn't have been buying ice cream with Lyle, and her sighs would have had a much different quality, not to mention intent. She could have become quite a martyr to contempt and loathing by now.

Instead she has had another life: caressing and arguing with Lyle, picking up and putting down books, flowers, towels, doing laundries and dishes, cooking meals and eating them across the kitchen table from each other, curling on sofas and beds and in front of the fireplace, apart or together, weeding gardens, mowing lawns, bringing in wood, taking out trash, all of that, on and on.

And then she stepped lightly, unwarned, off that porch. She was even laughing, so was Lyle, as she climbed into the truck. Why didn't they consider what a treat it would be to sit on their own sweeping porch, feet propped side by side on their own spindled railing, looking out over their own shadowed land, eating their own ice cream in the dusk and congratulating themselves on being able to hope for much the same for the next thirty years?

That's the moment that needs rewinding, right there. Not an earlier one.

“Thank you,” she tells Jamie, so emphatically that he looks slightly puzzled by the cause for large gratitude.

“I'm kind of relieved it's okay.”

“I know. But it is.”

“Then,” and he stands, “I'm going to take off too now. Maybe by the next time I see you, I'll have some courses lined up. Or exams. Something figured out, anyway.” He bends, like Madeleine, like Alix, presses his lips briefly to her forehead. Eyes closed, she tries to memorize the impression. “It's going to go fine, Mum. You be well, and don't worry.” And he is gone.

People bring their own gifts. Like a birthday: big surprises, and a few bright things of value.

Not least of them, hope that her children's lives have been saved. They will fail now and then, their hearts may get broken by one thing or another, but they should be immunized against their own worst, deepest illnesses. Having gotten the most dangerous out of the way, they can now be more alert than most people to the true, bone-deep confusions and threshings they're capable of. No small knowledge, that.

If, if, if she gets her body back, that possibility which is too dazzling to dwell on, so bright she can't open her eyes to it, but if — she must try to remember this sharpness, compression, vitality of impression. Like Alix's lips, Jamie's lips, Madeleine's hand. Because it's easy to forget; in much the way she forgets how a floor felt under her feet, or how her wrists could turn in the simple, taken-for-granted moment of writing a list, pulling a weed from the garden, touching a hand, or a thigh — all of that vague and theoretical now.

Also remarkable. Imagine being able to do those things!

Imagine skin. The state of organs, bones, muscles, nerves, may be more perilous and probably should be more worrisome, but it's skin that seems to her most miraculous, and therefore most lost. What can she do if she cannot touch and cannot be touched?

Now here is Lyle's skin, rough and stubbled and anxious, here are his palms and fingertips on her hair, tender comfort, there is that narrow mouth, and also behind it the hidden, solacing tongue. But she cannot remember exactly his skin. She has lost and forgotten the nerve-ends and deep ragged breaths of desire.

“Hi,” he says. “Pretty soon, huh? You scared?”

The others come with their various answers, assurances, pledges, assessments, promises; Lyle brings the question. This is part of his skin, knowing that this good question has to be put into the air.

Scared? Oh yes: fireworks of terror, landmines of fear, chaotic suspense. Is
suspense
too mild, does it apply only to bad thrillers and pulse-racing flicks? No, suspense is the pure dry ice of not knowing. Heart-stopping. “I am terrified. And I don't even know what to hope for.”

“Oh, but that's obvious, don't you think? Because we can work with life. As long as you're alive, we can always figure out ways to do that.”

Not only the good question, the good answer, as well. Is he not frightened now of vast promises, though?

“How about you?”

“Am I scared? Jesus yes, I've been petrified since the second I heard that shot. I don't think there's been a moment since then I haven't been scared. Even in my sleep. Even my dreams are scary.” They've had so little time to themselves, just the two of them, and perhaps too much of it has been spent being more brave than honest. He is a man whose inclination is to act, to fix, to do something or other that changes any impossible circumstance. “Also, very fucking angry. You?”

“I was. I may be again, but right now it seems dangerous. More likely to harm me than anyone else.”

“You talked to Alix.”

“Yes. She startled me.”

“What did you think?”

“Of her plans? I couldn't be happier she's leaving that wretched cult. I don't know how to feel about what she thinks she sees in that boy. Except I guess,” and she grins up at Lyle, “one of us should be researching forgiveness, and she's certainly the most promising candidate.” He smiles too, and reaches out to stroke her hair again. No flinch this time. “What do you dream?” she asks. She has not been dreaming, herself, as far as she knows; although it's possible that with the drugs, she may have hallucinated now and again.

“You really want to know? A lot of times I dream about being paralyzed. Is that tasteless? Does it offend you? I dream about trying to move, run, fight, escape, all that. Then I wake up drenched. I think that's because of the helplessness. And then I wonder how you can bear it.”

“I can't.”

She could not, she thinks, have said just that to anyone else.

“Not much longer. Hang in a little bit longer.”

Yes. But then what? “You know, if you didn't hang in yourself, I wouldn't blame you. If it all got too hard.”

How startling, shocking, the sudden sound of full, head-back laughter, a great gorgeous, joyous Lyle-whoop she hasn't heard for quite a while now. “What, you mean if I did a bolt, you wouldn't blame me? Oh, Isla, that is such bullshit. You shouldn't even try to bullshit me that way.”

She laughs, too; at least makes her small gaspy sound of amusement.

“Okay, no bullshit: eight blessed years. Thank you.”

“Me, too. But also nicely flawed, those years, don't you think? We don't want rosy glows.”

“Certainly not. No rosy glows.”

“So no bullshit, no rosy glows, I want to tell you, I want you to know, I can't imagine my life without you. I'm so goddamn glad I met you. Just that. And I didn't expect it, so it's even more of a miracle.”

Exactly. Her, too. That stupid, careless kid. Taking potshots at miracles, blowing holes right through love.

“So now you know I'm not bolting, you know what I'd like?”

“What?”

“I'd like to stay here. Just talk through the night. Maybe fall asleep in the chair. Hold your hand — I know, I know, you can't feel it, but I can — and just talk. And not talk. Till the cows come home.”

“Or the orderlies come.”

“Same thing.”

“A last night together?”

“No, just a night. I don't know about you, but I don't want my dreams, and I don't feel like one of those godawful wide-awake dark nights of the soul. I just want to hang out with you. But if you want to be on your own, just tell me, no bullshit.”

Well, he's right, she might have wanted to be alone, to get her own house in order; but it's unlikely there's any tidy packing up and neat preparing for the unimaginable and ungovernable.

Who knew it would come down to hours, then minutes, then — what?

“I'd like that.” She looks up into his wounded, anxious, kind eyes. “I don't know what would have become of me without you, and I can't think of a better companion for any night, but this night in particular.”

She thinks it's possible their shared, large and small, brutal and beautiful and ordinary events, put into words and stories offered up to the darkness, could grow by morning into a sturdy, protecting, safe shelter. That whatever happens then, tonight they can make something from all their eight years of bits and pieces, discarded, forgotten or cherished or only dreamed of, or still hoped for. Each word a brick. “Do you remember rain?” she begins. Because rain takes them back to the start.

Salvation, like anything else, mainly comes, she imagines, in small measures like this. She also imagines he's holding her hand, which she expects is a fine thing to be doing, and would feel astonishing.

Belles Lettres

Not a whole lot of mail comes to people in jail, but some of what does come is juicy. Darryl gets letters from some girl in his old neighbourhood and at night in their cell, reads them out loud to Roddy. “Man,” he says, “you know, she's only fourteen? Like, she was maybe eleven, she didn't even have tits or anything last time I saw her, and listen to this.” He rhymes off a couple of paragraphs that have to do with different things she and Dare could do with her breasts. “Christ, they gotta be huge,” Dare says. Roddy gets hard just listening to how she imagines Dare could put himself between them and come. He also remembers, though, on his first night, Dare talking about the previous cellmate who jerked off six times a night. Except he hears Dare himself jerking off later, when they're supposed to be sleeping.

Sex is weird in here. Some other kind of stuff goes on, he guesses it's bound to, but otherwise it's mainly guys blowing off steam, like Dare, or Roddy for that matter, in the middle of the night, or getting all glaze-eyed in the steam of the showers, soaping themselves up and off right in front of everybody, and then everybody whoops and makes jokes, because there's no room for privacy anyway.

Well, Roddy too. There's a kind of getting used to things. Also there's no stopping it, or himself.

If everything hadn't gone wrong, if Goldie's had worked, if they'd taken off finally, him and Mike, and found that glassy two-bedroom place in a city high-rise, and gone prowling like they talked about, it could have been happening for real: real breasts, real thighs, real skin, real other, glorious, foreign places. He'd be unstoppable. He is unstoppable. He's seventeen, for Christ's sake.

At least Darryl used to know, or has at least met, that one girl who writes him. He and some other guys get letters from total strangers, too, sexy invitations, but also with questions, and often promises. The funny thing is, the ones who get letters from girls they don't know are the ones who've done the worst crimes: murder, rape, 'way worse than Roddy. If it wasn't for Dare, he probably wouldn't even know that. Most of those guys are tough, or appear to be, and they don't talk much except to each other, and they're watched pretty carefully anyway, and a few of them spend a lot of time completely alone, because they're either dangerous or plain bad, hard to say.

It's just that Dare's been here a while, and he's one of them in a way, and he does tell Roddy things sometimes. If they weren't in the same cell, he probably wouldn't have anything to do with Roddy. Armed robbery isn't a big deal here. Although actually shooting somebody counts for something. Roddy's in a strange kind of position, sort of in the middle of things but cautiously, as much as he can manage, also off to one side.

He's for sure not a rapist, and he's not a murderer even if he came close, and he can't figure out why anybody'd write to somebody who was, especially if they didn't know them. Dare shrugs. “Takes all kinds. Some of them, you know, they'll come in handy later on.”

When guys get out, he means. Roddy gathers that some of these girls are offering everything. “They sound kind of dumb,” he ventures.

“Well, yeah.” Dare speaks as if Roddy's stupid himself.

Then there are volunteers, who aren't stupid, most of them, but — who goes into a jail on purpose? Some of them are hard to put up with because they're all filled up with virtue and want to pass it on, it feels like, to the wicked. Well, maybe that's not fair, but it's how it feels when they sit down in the rec hall without being asked and interrupt TV or whatever to talk about courses, or careers, or some self-improvement program or religion they've got a bug about, or to give different kinds of advice, or ask really rude questions, like about guys' families and crimes and “How do you
feel
about this,” or “How did it
feel
when you did that?” The other kind of volunteers may say the same sorts of things, but they've got a different look in their eyes. Like they want something back besides virtue.

They're almost always women, not men, and what's that about? The guards don't like the two days a week the volunteers come in, they get all tensed up, which Roddy guesses makes sense considering what could happen if one of the volunteers, or one of the guys, made a wrong move. What the volunteers, who get some training and are screened before they're allowed in, are supposed to do is talk about futures, and give some kind of idea of normal life in a normal world, and maybe help out with schoolwork. Mainly they don't, as far as Roddy can see. Mostly they're not very pretty, either, or very young.

They can't possibly know that after they leave, the guards are angrier and more impatient than other days, and the guys laugh and make jokes. Like Dare says, if you can zero in on the right kind of volunteer, just like the right kind of letter-writer, and feed her the right kind of line, life's suddenly easier because there's gifts coming in like money or clothing or food, although not in some underhand way, everything's supposed to get approved before it's passed on. “You gotta do it,” Dare encourages, “you gotta be able to, like, trade shit and have something to offer. And anyway.”

And anyway, it's something to do, like a game. In return for various promises, and besides real and useful things in their hands, guys pick women to write letters to, and win plenty of promises back: offers of jobs for when they get out, or of places to stay, or of protection or safe-keeping, or even of love.

“What a joke,” Dare says.

He also says, “Get in there, make a move. It's easy. Just make like you've had a lot of bad times and you want to change everything from now on, and watch what happens. They all want to save somebody. You should be a good guy, give them a chance. Shit, at least then you'd get mail.” Because of course nothing comes to Roddy, not even magazines. He guesses he could subscribe to something. And he could do what Dare says, get hooked up with somebody outside. He knows Dare's right, that it's easy. That doesn't mean he knows how to do it.

Then he does get mail. One slim envelope for him among three for Darryl, dropped off in their cell at the end of a day, as mail is regularly delivered, a high point for Dare, anyway, often enough a prelude to his semi-private night-time delights.

Roddy doesn't recognize the handwriting on his, so maybe it's starting to happen: some strange woman writing.

But “Dear son,” it begins. Well, no reason he'd recognize his dad's handwriting, why would he? Nobody he knows of writes letters. This one's real short, all scrawled on one page. “Dear son, I'll be driving up to see you with your grandmother one of these days pretty soon, but thought I'd drop you a line. Guess we've had a few wrong turns along the way, I don't know, but I'm sorry about everything, anyhow. When you get out, maybe we could go someplace the two of us for a few days. You could think about where. I'm sorry how things worked out, hope you're doing okay where you are. You're a smart kid, and not bad, just made a bad mistake. Anyhow, I'll be seeing you soon, but think about plans. Just wanted to send a line or two along to say, Good wishes and all best to you, Dad.”

Not exactly a big outpouring of sentiment.

But also, it really is. For his dad to write a letter at all is amazing. Roddy reads it over and over, looking for clues, hunting for meaning or tenderness or some clear intention even between lines, before he tucks it inside the front of his math text. It's like every sentence says something different. One doesn't totally lead to another. Never mind. The point is, his dad meant to say something, a shock all by itself.

Would Roddy want to go someplace with his dad? Imagine the silences, and what would they do with so many hours? He doesn't think his dad really means it anyway, or wouldn't if the time ever came. He's just, like, putting his hand out, kind of offering to shake.

When his dad comes to visit, maybe they'll talk about it; although more likely not.

“Got a chick going there?” Dare asks, raising his eyes from a page of one of his own letters.

“My dad.”

“Bummer. Listen to this, it's from Kitty. ‘I can come on a dime, so anything you want, it'll be fine with me. I remember how you always went around looking so cool. So anything, I mean it. Use your imagination.' Jesus Christ.” Dare looks up. “Fourteen's illegal, isn't it?”

“Doesn't sound like she cares.”

“Yeah, but I might. No, I wouldn't. Fourteen sounds prime.”

But if she's so prime, how come she writes hot letters to a guy in jail for knifing somebody to death? Even if, before, she was a little kid with a crush, now wouldn't she look at Dare's hands on her and wonder at what they've done? Even Roddy can look at them and picture them thrusting, blood-splashed, and he's sure not planning to have them anywhere on his body.

Of course he can look at his own hands and wonder at them, too.

What people, parts of people, can do: be loyal to a friend, for instance, and kind to a dog, and wide open to the beauties of bugs and wildlife and air, and deadly, near-deadly, with a knife or a gun. Cut off the small bad parts, like a bruised apple, and what's left is just ordinary, not remarkable, mainly good.

Darryl is here for a bad hand, Roddy for one faulty finger. Not fair. Not the whole story.

Another day, same hour and way, after breakfast, after classes, after lunch, after kitchen duty, after shower, after woodworking, after dinner (meat patties, peas, potatoes peeled and cut by his very own hands), after an hour in rec hall watching a game show, the kind that tests the desire to get the answer first and sometimes works out that way, after getting herded with the others back to the cells for, supposed to be, an hour or two of homework and studying or whatever — then the mail comes, with another letter for Roddy.

Something more from his dad? No, it's a different handwriting on the plain white envelope, which has no return address. Not his grandmother's, either, he knows hers from shopping lists, notes for school, notes left on the kitchen table telling him where she is, reminding him about this and that. Maybe Mike. That'd be amazing. What would he have to say? He's sorry? He's got plans to bust Roddy out? He's grateful, and hopes Roddy will still be his friend?

Roddy's nervous about opening it, excited as well.

“Dear Rod,” he finds inside, on a sheet of plain white paper like the envelope, but typed, not like the envelope. It doesn't look personal. And it isn't from Mike.

“I hope you remember me. I was in court with my stepfather when you pleaded guilty, and then by myself when you were sentenced. You may remember I spoke. I don't know what's a fair sentence, but I hope you are doing well with what you were given.

“Anyway, I thought both times when I saw you in court that I would like to meet you. Don't worry that I want to yell at you or be angry or anything. I don't. I just thought we might find some good things to talk about. So I would like to visit you. Are you surprised? I thought I could come Sunday the 18th, what do you think? I hope you will think it's all right, but I'll understand if you don't. It might seem like a strange idea, but I've thought about it and I don't think it's so strange, and I hope if you think about it, you'll decide it's all right. If I don't hear from you, I will come during visitors' hours on that day. If you don't want me to, please let me know, you can call collect, here's my number.”

It's signed, “All my best, Alix,” then in brackets afterwards, “Starglow.”

He stares and stares at the thing. Is it real? Is she?

Her words look to him, like her eyes, calm, cool, and deep. He doesn't know what good things they could talk about. What did she see in him? What does she want?

Is it anything like what he could want?

Probably not.

He reads and reads this letter, sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched, scrutinizing, oblivious to Darryl a few feet away on his own bed, with his own mail. Roddy tries to see into each word, tries to put her gentle, absorbing tones from the courtroom to the tune of the few paragraphs in his hands.

He likes that she calls him Rod. He wonders what the
Starglow
is about.

He wonders what he could possibly say to her; besides
I'm sorry
, which he has already said, and doesn't change anything, and couldn't possibly be her purpose for coming here anyway. She says she isn't angry and does not want to yell. Perhaps she'll do all the talking and he can just listen, just look, just fall back into her eyes.

What is she expecting to see? What if she takes all that trouble and time to come all the way up here, and go through the hassles of visiting, the search, the metal detectors, the guards' eyes that are somehow both wary and bored, and finally sits down across from him and looks at him and thinks, “Oh no, this was a mistake. This was a waste of my time. This isn't what I thought I remembered.”

There was something, though. He believed it, and if she saw it too, it has to be true.

Imagine not saying anything about her mother, imagine seeing past that! Maybe she can see past anything, then.

Sunday the eighteenth. From nothing, from just getting by, to one plain white sheet of paper, to a real girl, woman, coming to see him — this is no one to make fun of and nothing to laugh about. Or to use. He won't be talking about her with Darryl, for sure, or anyone else. This is like magic. Nobody'd believe it. They'd look for the joke, or the trick.