Heroes (7 page)

Surprising himself, not knowing he was going to say it until he did, “But it's not his fault,” Bayle said.

Samson and Duceeder turned around in their seats.

“I mean, if the Bunton Center's unsafe, he was just doing his job writing about it, right?”

Duceeder scowled, Samson actually smiled, if a little sadly; both men looked back down at the ice.

Well,
it's true,
Bayle thought. Right?

“Y
OU MUST
be the hockey guy my aunt was talking about. Welcome to Shitsville, U.S.A.”

Envisioning an early night preceded by a diligent attempt to make sense of some of what he'd managed to jot down during the game, an admittedly sluggish but hard-hitting four to one Warriors' victory — including two bloody fights, both draws, between the Warriors' Dipper and the league's other premier enforcer, Wichita's Bladon — Bayle asked the teenager staffing the front desk of The Range if there were any coffee or pop machines in the building. His first live hockey game in years had put Bayle in the mood for a cup of hot chocolate.

“Pop? You mean, like, soda? Yeah, down the hall to your left, right past the lounge.” Before Bayle could move away, however: “Hey, wait a minute, almost forgot, this came for you. No charge.” Bayle looked at the sheet of shiny paper and exhaled hard through his nostrils. It was a fax from Smith, his thesis advisor. A thousand miles away, he thought, and he still manages to be in your face. Bayle folded the page in two and stuck it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Later.

“So who won?”

“What?” Bayle said, looking up.

“The game. Who won?”

“We did. I mean the Warriors. Four-one.”

“Go team.”

“You follow hockey?” Bayle asked.

“Nah. I'm more of a — what would you call it? — individualist in my sporting tastes.” A crooked grin to go along with his black leather jacket and Metallica t-shirt coloured the remark slightly enigmatic. Bayle, however, refused to ruminate; Bayle wanted a cup of hot chocolate.

“You hitting the sack? It's not even eleven. Not going to take in all the sights and sounds the big city has to offer?”

“I think I saw just about all I needed to see today,” Bayle said.

“Yeah, you got that right.”

“So what's with all the heavy safety precautions then, all the security signs on everybody's lawn?”

“Drugs, so they say,” Ron answered.

“Drugs?”

“So they say.”

“You mean like drug trading, gang violence, that sort of thing?”

“The only logical career choice for any energetic young American entrepreneur from the wrong side of the tracks with no silver spoon stuck in his mouth and who doesn't want to work at Burger King for minimum wage his entire life. So they say.”

Bayle waited for further clarification. None apparently forthcoming, he said goodnight and headed down the hallway looking for the coffee machine. The boy called out after him:

“Right on. You too. Have a good one. And if you need anything, just, like, you know, let me know. Anything. You know?”

The coffee machine offered regular and cappuccino, two special blends, Swiss mocha, a non-alcoholic Irish coffee, something called “Premium Blend,” Earl Grey, Orange Pekoe, and English Breakfast teas, but no hot chocolate. Maybe it's a Canadian thing, Bayle thought.

Hot-chocolateless, he opened the door to his room. He put his coffee on the nightstand and lengthwise on the bed flipped through his notepad. Quickly learning here nothing he hadn't already seen and known three hours before first hand, he picked up one of the informational files Jane had instructed the
Toronto Living
research department to put together for him. Three quarters of an hour later Bayle put the folder back on the nightstand.

Although admittedly slightly depressing to learn that the number of Canadian professional hockey franchises was steadily diminishing each year and that every day new teams seemed to be popping up in unlikely American cities like Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta — all due to a woefully weak Canadian dollar and the huge tax breaks many booming American cities were willing to hand out to sports
franchises — Bayle knew that none of what he read should be allowed to affect him all that much. Empiricus dictum number one: Freedom from disturbance means suspension of judgement. If, like clean water, raw timber, and maple syrup, Canada's game was becoming just one more Canadian export steadily seeping south, well, then, Empiricus dictum number one. When all else fails, Empiricus dictum number one.

Bayle went into the washroom and plucked out and put in their disinfected white plastic place his contact lenses. On his way back to bed he pulled to one side the window curtain and paused to let affect the full effect of a rear parking lot-lit pastiche of beam swirls and pulsing light spots, an overflowing tub of electric honey being glub glub generously dumped all over the nighttime black world, the entire wonderfully incomprehensible sighted sensation a woefully near-sighted man's sole compensation for never being able to lie down for even a quick nap without having to first remove from his eyes two pieces of water-permeable thin plastic. (Guilt-free, fullblown irrationality: a crystal-clear sceptic's sweet-treat of refreshing confusion for the brain.) Of course, Patty had always been the exact opposite.

When eleventh-grader Bayle got his first pair of glasses and told his sister not with awe but just because it was true how weird it was to now see things he hadn't even known were there before and how much clearer everything else looked, Patty had immediately insisted that she wanted glasses just like Peter, that she wanted to see all the things that she hadn't been seeing up to then too. Bayle's parents tried their best to explain to their eleven-year-old daughter just how lucky she was that she didn't need to wear glasses, that her eyes were beautiful just like they were, and wasn't she glad that she didn't have to wear anything that might keep everyone from seeing just how beautiful they really were?

But Patty wasn't buying. Sulked and sulked for weeks. Sat on the floor a foot and a half away from the television screen watching cartoons hoping for failing eyesight. Bayle would
silently pass by the livingroom on the way from his bedroom to the bathroom and push his new glasses up the bridge of his nose and hope that somehow his little sister got what she wanted. But it wasn't to be. Patty had been cursed with perfect vision.

M
ID-SUMMER
'95,
the summer after Bayle's first year of aspiring doctorhood, and a rare Sunday dinner at the Bayle home with Peter back from the city, just before Patty refused to leave her room altogether and before Bayle's mother decided her daughter's recent case of the blahs was something more than just another one of her temperamental daughter's many moods and got her a nine a.m. appointment with Dr. McKay, their family doctor, Patty never managed to keep.

Bayle hung his suit jacket up behind the kitchen door and kissed his mother on the cheek and asked where Patty was.

Overseeing several bubbling pots on the stovetop and without turning around, “Where else?” his mother said.

“It's just Patty, mum,” Bayle said. “She'll snap out of it. She always does.”

Since his father's death three years before, it had fallen upon Bayle to absorb the majority of his mother's exasperation over the emotional Ferris wheel of Patty's highs and lows. The beeping red light on his answering machine usually meant a Patty update from Etobicoke from his mother. Lately, his machine had been awful busy.

“Maybe you can get her out of her funk, Peter,” his mother said, poking her fork into a pot of rolling, boiling potatoes. “I don't know what's left for me to say to that girl. Eighteen years old and with three different universities offering her full scholarships and your sister has to be coaxed into eating her meals and to wash her hair once in awhile. I tell you, I'm glad your father's not around to witness this. A man like like him who had to work for everything he ever got in his life would have just killed for the opportunities you and your sister have had handed to you. And don't fool yourself. There are plenty of other kids out there just as smart as Patty who would take her spot at those schools in a minute. Those universities aren't going to wait on her answer forever, you know.”

Bayle nodded.

Granted, Patty could be a handful, but their mother was no picnic either. According to her, all that Patty really needed to do to keep herself on track was to settle down with a hardworking union man like her and Bayle's dear old dad, get a house of her own in Etobicoke to call her own and fix up and look after, and start pumping out three or four future Ontario Hydro workers. That would keep her busy. That would keep her head out of the clouds.

“I guess I'll go see how Patty's doing,” Bayle said. He waited for a response. His mother kept lifting and replacing steaming pot tops.

“That macaroni and cheese sure smells good,” Bayle offered.

Turning around from the stove, oven-mitted hand on her hip, “It's brocolli quiche,” his mother said.

“Well, it sure smells good anyway.”

“Tell your sister that,” his mother said.

Bayle said he'd relay the message.

By themselves briefly before dinner and right through every second of it, Patty chin-in-hand indifferent to her brother, her mother, the food on her plate, and every scrap of conversation encouragingly volleyed her way — all to a degree Bayle had never witnessed before. Since the recent collapse of her nearly two-year-long Catholic kick (a new record for continued fixation), Patty had been aloof the few times Bayle had spoken to her and not too good at returning his occasional calls, but that was, he'd thought, just a part of her usual post-engrossed state.

But three months after she'd donated her rainbow-of-a-closet full of variously coloured rosaries and the complete works of Thomas Merton to the Salvation Army and resolutely gone to bed at four in the afternoon on the day of her Grade 13 graduation from Lorreto's, no new things of earth-shaking importance spilled from Patty's lips that Bayle and everyone else within earshot just
had
to know about, none of the usual nervous signs of giddily revving up for the inevitable next Big Thing evidently revving.

And with hands, Bayle couldn't help but notice, as flawlessly white as her face remained stonily blank. Blank and thin. Just as beautiful as before — maybe even more so for the deep, soul-searching saucers of eyes that now dominated her face and seemed to look not so much at him as through him — but thin. Bayle was watching his sister disappear. He shovelled down his vanilla ice cream with canned peaches in heavy syrup on top for dessert in record time.

Patty could tell he was ready to bolt. She sat up straight in
her chair and pushed around with newly found energy the food on her untouched plate, even managing to put down a few mmmm-mmmm-good swallows as she hurled every ounce of her energy and attention Bayle's way like a possessed used-car salesman pumped up on one too many cups of coffee and with an end-of-the-year monster bonus on the line if he can move just one more of these new beauties off the lot by the end of the afternoon.

“I know U of T has the biggest faculty and the most famous alumni and they're offering a full tuition waiver and the most scholarship money and of course I'd be close to you downtown and that would be great but Kingston is so old and beautiful and Queen's has the second highest number of Ontario highschool scholars in their freshman class and then there's UBC and it
would
be kind of neat to just pack up and move out somewhere you've never been before and start a brand new life you know what I mean? What do you think I should do, Peter? They're all sort of breathing down my neck. The next move is mine. I really do have to make a decision soon.”

Bayle's mother grinned over her own ice cream like a delighted new lobotomy recipient, thrilled at her too-thin and too-quiet daughter's suddenly miraculous return to the living. Between this and Patty's sudden chatty liveliness that bordered on the out and out hysterical Bayle could only wipe his mouth with a paper napkin and go for his coat. Can't stay, no, thanks, really, really have got to go. Mountains of laundry await. Mountains.

Patty bobbed up from her chair.

“Just give me a second to clean up a bit and grab some library books that should have been returned downtown ages ago and I'll go back with you,” she said. “There are some books that you can only get at Robarts that I've been meaning to check out for awhile now.” She stuck a limp green bean in her mouth and skipped off down the hall before Bayle could open his, or his happily astonished mother close hers.

Bayle's mother ambushed him at the back door.

“Be patient with her, Peter,” she said. “This is the first
time your sister's shown any interest in going anywhere or doing anything besides sleeping all day in I don't know how long. But don't baby her, though. She's a smart girl. She won't stand for that. But be encouraging. If she wants to talk, let her talk. If she doesn't, that's fine, too. But don't treat her like one of those sick kids they send off to Florida for their last wish, either. Don't give her a reason to feel sorry for herself. If you ask me, that's half the problem right there.”

“Half of whose problem?” Patty said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. Standing there in faded blue jeans and her favourite Property of U of T Athletics sweatshirt Peter had bought for her for her sixteenth birthday, a stack of library books plastic-bagged and tucked neatly underneath one arm, her long blond hair tied into a no-nonsense ponytail with a piece of blue cloth, she almost looked like Patty of old ready to rush right off with
important things to do,
ready to chase down the intricacies of this season's once-and-for-all obsession.