Darren Effect (19 page)

It had been over a year since Isabella had made the same discovery in Cooper's DVDs, and yet in all that time she had said nothing to either Cooper or Benny. She had allowed them to sit plain as day on a shelf in her son's room, almost as though she were hoping a different wife would arrive and deal with them. When early one evening the camcorder was retired — Benny standing on the second floor landing in his pajamas and throwing it down the stairwell — she was relieved, despite her
recollection that it cost nearly eight hundred dollars — a birthday gift for Cooper that Benny had been unable to resist.

She was just on her way out the door to the Avalon Nature Club lecture where it was her custom to sit by herself in the dark watching the nature slides and listening to the speakers above the whirr of the slide projector. Tonight someone was bringing in penguin decoys and talking about using them to elicit aggressive behaviour in other birds.

She was wearing new silk mules. She had looked down and watched the camcorder — it seemed surprisingly light — come bursting apart like a cheap, plastic toy around her. Bits split and shot away, while the green strap that had once wrapped around the back of her son's hand landed on the toe of one of her new shoes.

Cooper stood across the stairwell from his father, leaning too far out over the banister, screaming at him. Isabella considered the impossible odds of catching her son should he fall. Now Benny was snapping each DVD in half before furiously casting the pieces over the landing. Meanwhile, Inky was shuffling along the downstairs hall towards her, stumbling when he reached the edge of the rug. He sniffed the broken camcorder, defecated, then sat down, panting. The odour of dog shit rose quickly. Benny put his hand over his mouth and disappeared back into his bedroom.

Isabella knew it was unlikely she would get to the lecture that night. A gentle resentment began to fall over her. She hunted down Inky and grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out to the backyard, a large fenced-in space that had once satisfied him, but being abandoned there now elicited terror in the dog.

When Benny first stopped working, Inky would follow him from room to room, his toenails clicking on the hardwood floor. If Benny sat down, Inky would bring him things — a tennis ball, shoe, hairbrush. Later, when Benny began spending long hours on the living room sofa, Inky became more selective. Over the course of an hour the dog emptied Cooper's closet of stuffed animals, carrying them downstairs one by one. Isabella watched,
fascinated, as Inky placed a teddy bear at Benny's feet, a kangaroo on his stomach, nudged a parrot against his neck.

Then, shortly after Benny's first chemotherapy treatment, Inky began defecating in the house, as though it were a way of protesting Benny's illness. Sometimes rising at night and stumbling to the bathroom, Isabella was greeted by the aroma of a fresh deposit hidden somewhere in the dark outskirts of her house. No amount of scolding from any of them seemed to affect Inky. Although he stood with drooping head and bent submissive ears, he was unable to mend his ways.

A year earlier Isabella had been passing through the dining room whose large bay windows looked out onto the park, and glanced out to see Cooper and another boy following a male jogger. Even from that distance, she suspected her son of harassing the jogger, whose halting gait and stiffly turning torso indicated a frenzied aggravation. Cooper was holding something out towards the man and they were running side by side, while the other boy held back, bent double with laughter. Isabella struggled to believe her son was a well-mannered, prudent boy, that whatever he was saying to this man was entirely reasonable, but the next moment the man had extended his arm to deliver a pseudo karate chop to Cooper's neck. Cooper stopped and the friend caught up with him. Isabella recognized the object in Cooper's hand. The camcorder.

It had taken several days to view all the DVDs. While Cooper was at school and Benny away on business, and after several calls to Future Shop where the camcorder had been purchased, Isabella had all the cables correctly plugged in and all the buttons set to the right settings. When she first saw her own body, or her body from the neck down, walk across the screen, she didn't recognize herself. The images were clear and sharp but the colours untrue. Her green linen skirt looked blue and hopelessly wrinkled — well, that was linen for you.

Her own voice asked, “For heaven's sake, Benny, don't you think I know when I've had enough wine?”

Watching this, Isabella's stomach turned. Had she really said that? Really used that tone?

Then the screen blurred as the images spun and there was Cooper's elfish face in close-up, dreadfully white and lacking freckles, whispering, “This is Cooper Martin bringing you another family fight.”

Where had he been? Under a table?

She should have turned it off, but she was riveted with apprehension, with the shock of seeing an innocuous past — much of what she saw was boring — brought back to her. Disembodied figures were followed and forgotten, Inky's nostrils thoroughly explored, the contents of several flushing toilets observed to their end. She saw her own face occasionally in detail and wondered, was she truly so unlovely?

The time flashed in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, 1:26 am, but Isabella would have known it was night by Cooper's blue pajamas slopping above his naked feet as he occasionally peered through the camera to find his way down the stairs. There was the jerking wall and all its family portraits, a window, the kitchen door, some murmuring and then a view of the kitchen table. There was Cooper's clipped breathing and Benny's voice in conversation, but only the kitchen table. It was simple enough: Benny was making plans to meet someone. He used the name
Heather
, and then he said
sweetheart
, as in,
Now sweetheart, I'll be on time but will you?
and it was 1:32 in the morning. Still, all she could see was the kitchen table.

The next day Isabella finished watching the DVDs. Towards the end she came to the jogger, who was asked by her son, “How's it going, uh? Don't want to get fat, do we?” Isabella had not recognized the man — a small miracle.

*

After hauling Inky out of the house, Isabella gathered up the dog shit with a plastic bag and collected the largest of the broken camcorder pieces. Then she pulled the vacuum hose from the wall inlet and ran it over the hall rug and bottom of the stairs. When she got to a small log of desiccated dog shit tucked behind the leg of the table in the hall, she plowed ahead and sucked it up. She knew that, for the next several weeks, using the vacuum would result in the scent of dog shit filling the house. But these were reckless, uncharted times.

As soon as she turned the vacuum off, she became aware of Cooper shouting and throwing things around up in his room. More than his camcorder would be broken by the end of this day. She was wondering how Benny was standing the noise when he emerged from their bedroom and began making his way down the stairs. He wouldn't look at her.

“Hungry?” she asked when he reached the bottom step and she realized he was neither going to stop nor speak to her.

He was walking away, into the family room.

“Grilled cheese?”

It was the challenge in her voice that stopped him, though he didn't turn. “I can see it now,” he said. “I'm going to get blamed for this.”

“You didn't need to destroy them all,” she said to his back. “Do you want something to eat? I was planning on going out.”

“Hey, don't let me interfere with your plans, Isabella.”

In the kitchen she buttered two slices of bread and sliced the cheddar into thin sheets, the way Benny liked it. She felt lousy and wanted to pinpoint the feeling somehow, so she could erase it. She placed the sandwich in a frying pan, then dashed upstairs.

Cooper was on his bed, motionless. Most of his skateboarding and mountain biking posters had been torn from the walls. Books were off the shelves and the fish tank water looked
muddy and unsettled. The bed itself had been stripped, the sheets and blankets dragged halfway across the floor.

“I didn't
do
anything,” Cooper shouted when he saw her, pounding his naked mattress. “He did that for
no reason
!”

Cooper and Benny's relationship had been faltering for a while. Isabella did not question their inability to understand one another — one sick and the other a boy — yet when their arguments arose, the premonition came over her that her son's experiences with bad luck and unhappiness might be difficult to survive. She was noticing the rusty stains on Cooper's mattress, curious about their age and the likelihood of them being blood-related, when the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen. She rushed back down the stairs, imagining Benny in the family room, his hands over his ears and his jaw clenched.

The kitchen was filling with smoke. The sandwich, though still spongy and cool on the upper surface, was black on the bottom. She ignored the thought circulating at the back of her mind that she might want to take a deep breath and count to ten. Instead, she thought that if the rest of the family could throw things, so could she. She grabbed the pan and ran down the hall and into the family room. She yanked open the window and flung the pan out into the backyard. Fleetingly, she thought of Inky, but he was nowhere in sight.

“I'm going to go out on a limb here, ” Benny began, trying to joke, but Isabella left the room before he could finish his sentence. She thought of the Avalon Nature Club lecture, but refused to look at her watch. Inside her head there was a funny sensation,
ping ping
, like both a sound and tiny movement inside her head. She wondered if it was the seed of insanity.

She began again: buttering the bread, slicing the cheese. She worked slowly, growing calmer, and eventually found herself appalled by what she had done. Had any of the neighbours seen the pan come flying out of the house? Might they see it yet? A small frying pan with its cargo of burned bread and cheese? She returned to the family room and approached the window slowly, afraid to face the consequences of her savage behaviour. Behind
her, she heard Benny rise from the sofa. When she turned to him, he was grinning. He approached her and put an arm around her, and everything that was wrong fell away from her.

She understood, suddenly, her reluctance all this time to destroy the DVDs. Now that it was done, it seemed they were one step closer to erasing the family they had been, for better or for worse. As though Benny had erased memory: an autumn afternoon gone dusky in the park, a skim of snow across the yard in early winter, the powerful light of summer shooting through the house like an arrow. Happiness, disappointment, sorrow. Erased.

Inky was finishing off the sandwich. Isabella didn't see how he could avoid burning his tongue.

“Do you think Cooper knows?” Benny asked.

Of course he did. “I've no idea.”

“I couldn't watch them all.”

“I did,” she whispered.

“You did? Why didn't you tell me?”

“You shouldn't have destroyed them all.”

“But he was spying on me!”

“Benny.”

“I'm sorry.”

Was he sorry for breaking the camcorder and DVDs, or for betraying her, or both? She'd take the apology, regardless. She leaned against him and just for a moment, before he braced himself to support her, she felt him bend away from her weight.

“You're so familiar,” Benny said, holding her close now.

They watched Inky lick the pan clean.

“Go on to your meeting, Izzie.”

She looked at her watch. “It's already started.”

“Go on.”

That night, just before going to bed, Isabella asked Inky if he wanted to go out. He turned his eyes up at her sheepishly, his grey muzzle an inch from the carpet, and thumped his tail
twice. He put a great deal of effort into rising, but made little headway.

“Never mind,” Isabella said, giving up. “Stay.”

When she awoke in the night she immediately smelled dog shit. Without turning on the lights she descended the stairs to the kitchen, got a plastic bag and gathered up the mess in the dark, for the first time admitting it was time to put the dog down. When she fell back to sleep she dreamed she and Benny were ascending a crisp, multi-levelled building. White light was everywhere. People were milling about and, like Benny, were dressed in white gowns. She was leading him up, level by level. Everything was set, she had made the appointment, the decision had been made. Then Benny turned to her and said sadly, “Goodbye, Inky.”

“Izzie? Izzie?”

“Coming.”

“I was thinking about those boys.”

“What boys?”

Benny opened his eyes. The rims looked dry and sore. He was having a bad morning and Isabella wanted to take him to the hospital. He kept saying they should wait a while yet and see. He spoke thickly. “Sorry. You weren't there.”

“What boys?”

“They drowned. They were fooling around on the ice.”

“Where?” She touched his sleeve. “Benny?”

He opened his eyes again to look at her, then closed them. “You'd never forget it. I'm glad you weren't there.”

Isabella lifted her gaze from her husband's body and stared out across the park at the brown leaves of the oak trees. She imagined the tap-tap papery sound produced by the collision of dead leaves and rain.

“Sit up now so we can brush your teeth.”

“Just past the turnoff to Isaac's Harbour, there's a new coffee shop that overlooks a small bight.”

She nodded, helping him sit. His pajama legs were hiked up
to his knees, but he didn't seem to notice. As she tugged them down, she felt her eyes fill. His ankles and feet were swollen. He didn't notice that either. She handed him his toothbrush and a cup of water. The cup immediately teetered in his hand and some of the water sloshed out, but she had a towel folded over his lap. She took back the cup and held it for him.