The Dead Are More Visible (17 page)

“But you must have known it wasn’t true before the rest of us,” Laurel tells him, looking drawn and cross in the kitchen’s guttering fluorescent light. Almost three a.m. They stand over the sink washing up, the clack of glass and the slopping of water a bland, comforting counterpoint to the hard talk they’ve been having. “I mean, you always were a smart kid for your age. Always in such a hurry to grow up.”

“Sure,” he says, trying to gauge her tone, “so I knew it wasn’t a meteorite. Fine. I knew that and a lot more. But where did it get me? All those facts, I mean. The
hurry
.” He looks down into the ticking suds, embarrassed.

Her voice softens a little. “Well, you’ll find something soon, I’m sure you will. And Sheila’s work’s secure, I’ll bet.”

“No shortage of work these days for addiction counsellors.”

“Anyway, it’s a recession. You said yourself that a lot of the colleges—”

“I’m doing fine,” he says. “Listen, I’m sorry.”

“It’s three in the morning, you don’t usually drink, you’re entitled to feel a bit sorry for yourself.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

“Not just that. I mean for bringing up what happened. But I’ve been … you can see I’ve been mulling it over for years and I guess …”

“It’s all right.” She shoves her towel-wrapped fingers into the last glass to swab it dry. “I just wish we remembered things the same. I remember a bit of the hospital after, and the shrinks, and you and Dad coming to visit—you brought me adult books every time, remember? Instead of magazines? But going down to the basement, the rope—I haven’t blocked any of that out, Merrick, it’s just clearer all the time.” She swabs harder now, insistent, the glass getting streaked and cloudy with specks of lint. “And you weren’t there, Merrick. You really were not. You think I could have forgotten that?”

She grinds the glass into the crammed dish rack.

“Fuck, none of you were ever there, that was the whole problem.”

“Laurel.”

“You came down with Mom at the end. Just when I was pulling it off. You both just … stood there, gawking, then she screamed and ran over and she held me. For once in her fucking life.”

“But I was there the whole time—I was right there! People remember things differently when—”

“They remember things
wrong
,” she cries with something of her old fire, and behind her new glasses her eyes roll like a teenager’s.

“Laurel, listen.”

“And I
was
lying when I said I knew you’d jumped, not slipped. On the cliff. You’re grown up now, you can handle it. It’s a small thing anyway. But I knew you slipped all along, I just wanted to make you feel better.”

He twists out the stopper and the sink gives a throttled gargling and empties faster than any sink he’s ever seen. A spattered, sudsy jumble of cutlery breaks surface, bones on the floor of a drained lake. (When he was in high school a construction firm had finally drained the quarry, revealing oil drums, dumpsters, gutted TVs, bicycles, several cars, thousands of beer bottles and the weed-green skeleton of an unknown man. They had built a large shopping mall over the top, at ground level, and turned the pit beneath it into an underground car park, where Merrick, in town last spring for an unsuccessful interview, parked and bought flowers for his parents’ graves.)

“Mine’s always plugged,” he says, putting his watch back on.

“What?”

“My sink.”

After a few seconds she turns to him, her glasses fogged over.

“I’m sorry I said those things. I didn’t mean it, Merr, I’m sorry, I’m just so wiped out these days, and …”

“Forget it.”

“The kids tell me I’m biting everyone’s head off.”

Briskly, lightly, so as not to embarrass her, he sets his hands on her stooped shoulders and kisses the dulled freckles on her cheek. The hair at her temples, once fire-coloured, has cooled to ashen. Or is that tempered to steel? She’s wearing their mother’s old Sunday earrings, small crosses of white gold.

“Laurel?” He speaks softly, hugs her and rubs her bowed back as it begins to quiver, then shake. “It’s all right, Laur. Go ahead, I don’t mind. Go get some rest.” She pulls her head back from his shoulder and he can see her face: she’s laughing, actually, although her eyes are full.

“It did look so damn funny when you went off, you know. With that stupid hat on your head and those big sunglasses.”

He doesn’t remember a hat.

As Merrick puts the last of the good glasses away in their box—checking each by raising it to the light, as if focusing a small scope on a heavenly body—he notices the set is incomplete, two missing, and he starts up the narrow hallway toward the living room to find them. A ragged, somehow elderly snoring already ripples from Laurel’s room. He pauses, socks aglow, by the yawning full-moon nightlight between his nephews’ doors and thinks of Sheila, how good it will be to get back to their place in Toronto tomorrow night and make love and sleep beside her again and how bad it
will be the next day when they start fighting again about family, how she wants one urgently and he’s still afraid. “There’s no work out there,” he’ll say again, though they both know that’s not really it. And she’ll tell him again in her best counsellor’s voice that a fear of children is a fear of growing up.

Maybe the glasses are in one of the boy’s rooms, but he won’t stumble in and wake them the way his own parents used to, searching for their lost drinks how many years ago. Like Laurel he
is
different from them, he has learned something; there is, he believes, some progress in time. He’ll go on up the hall into the living room and check there, then out the sliding doors into the cool yard the way his parents did more and more in their last years, searching. He still has occasional dreams of them shuffling like sleepwalkers, miles out from the house and the city and years beyond all houses, over dunes along the moonlit beach, wading out to vanish at a bend in the river, or silhouetted, hand in hand, on the cliffs above the drop.

[ JOURNEYMEN ]

Cutler was running alone, as he preferred to run these days, on the gorgeous, lethally hilly trail he called the Monster. He’d named it after a challenging rollercoaster he’d ridden years before with his younger child, Mattie. The boy, six years old, had been speechless with delighted terror, his mouth gaping, eyes squinted, auburn ringlets blown back almost straight as he shrank into Cutler’s ribcage and Cutler held him tighter by the second—partly a response to his own vertigo and fear.

The Monster was Cutler’s favourite trail and one that Mattie, in his mid to late teens, had often run with him. An adolescent boy’s fountain of fresh hormones can do as much to strengthen him as training can, and so Mattie had gained ground on Cutler in rapid, regular spikes of improvement, until he was the faster—though
never by very much. The boy hadn’t inherited Cutler’s exceptional talent. He hadn’t been deeded Cutler’s drive, either, and on the whole Cutler thought that a very good thing. A sweet kid, adored by girls from kindergarten until college, protected by his male friends, he took after his gentle, dreamy mother, with her wide-set grey eyes and slow, unguarded smiles that seemed to hint at some private wisdom unavailable to the manic outer world. So as the boy’s third-, fourth- or fifth-place ribbons accumulated, he’d accepted their verdict in his usual easy-natured way: he would never be more than a respectable club or varsity athlete. This equanimity was another thing Cutler had loved about him. It’s a myth, he thought, that competitive parents all want their children to take after them and then grow up to exceed them, to summit the Alp-like ambitions the parents themselves never quite attained. The last thing Cutler had wanted was to see Mattie and his older sister, Esme, driving themselves as he’d once driven himself.

The erosive current of time and circumstance had worn down his own urge to perfect and prevail, athletically, socially, professionally; Cutler had simplified into a more or less peaceful man. Unfortunately Esme was displaying most of her father’s former symptoms (minus, thank God, the self-destructiveness). Since toddlerhood she’d done so. She was now an economics professor at Cornell, and Grace and Cutler saw her only in the summer and at Christmas. She’d married a lawyer, a self-proclaimed libertarian (he was always
proclaiming it) who, despite having graduated in Canada from government-subsidized schools into a profession where he was grossing over two hundred thousand a year, saw personal taxation as institutionalized piracy, a sort of fiscal terrorism inflicted by the lazy and covetous on the successful. Grace made artful dinnertime detours around Trevor’s positions, but Cutler—an exception to the general rule that men grow less progressive with age—was apt to crash into them head-on. And hours later Grace, in bed beside him, her ear on his collarbone and her soft white hair fanned out on his chest, would whisper, “He’s our
son
now, Cutler, you need to try harder.” And he would nod and breathe and slowly exhale and for Grace’s sake he would not burst out, “Our
son?
Grace, Grace! Mattie was our only son.”

Cutler was not surprised to be feeling good on the trail, despite his rotten day in the clinic. He’d been running for forty years and had long since quit trying to detect correlations between how he felt during the day and his running performance at the end of it. Some of his best runs had come on afternoons when he’d had to choose between lugging his aching limbs out onto the trail or returning to bed for a nap. In his twenties, at university and medical school, aiming for Olympic glory and falling not far short, the chief problem had been almost daily, crushing hangovers. In his thirties—too late for the sake of his Olympic goals—he’d quit drinking and married and then the marriage itself had become the
stressor. Though he’d been drawn to Grace Holland’s calm, almost tranquillized demeanour, once legally bound to it he’d panicked, flailed about, as if compelled to heave from a tossing lifeboat the very ballast that keeps it from tipping. He guessed now that those had been the death throes of his old self. They went on for an operatically long time, Grace waiting him out with a quiet, cast-iron stubbornness. Over a stretch of some years, he spent many nights alone on the pullout in his study, reading professional journals or running magazines and hearing his daughter sleeping in the next room. In retrospect, even her unconscious breathing had a rushed and restless quality, as though she was always champing for tomorrow to arrive.

By Cutler’s forties the marriage had settled, its molten materials cooled and stabilized. They had the children and a house and his clinical office on the edge of Wakefield, at the gateway to his beloved trails. By that point, any day-end fatigue he experienced had more to do with mid-life’s interlocking demands, especially those of his thriving practice as a sports doctor combined with his volunteer coaching (and his family—but that went without saying). Still, at five p.m. he almost always chose the trails instead of his office couch.

In his mid-fifties he began spending less time at the clinic. He and Grace, who’d taken early retirement from her middle-school teaching job, started going on actual holidays, an indulgence he’d once been too
focused and fidgety to enjoy. Now, if he was weary at four thirty or five p.m., he was tempted to assign it not to stress but to age, the way his friends did. In fact, though, he was still running strongly and seldom missed a day, despite having suffered some minor attrition of the usual connective tissues, as well as a loss of pliancy and spring-loading in the Achilles and calf caused by years of wearing shoes with raised heels, the great biomechanical blunder of the Western world, he now saw. Cutler was fifty-eight—a ripe age for that first culling, through stroke, heart disease, or cancer, of a substantial minority of his demographic—but age wasn’t the real problem. The problem was the sadness that would hemorrhage through him at times, generally toward day’s end and especially in the autumn, when the prima donna leaves of the Gatineau hills showcased their dying in rich yellows, ambers, reds.

They’d lost Mattie in November, four years before, and now all the weeks from the equinox until Christmas were touched and tainted with the loss. The boy had been running at dusk in Montreal, a city he was in love with and where he lived with his fiancée, Elise, who had not been running with him that day, thank God. At a busy intersection near Parc Mont Royal, a Humvee bearing the logo of a classic rock radio station had turned right blindly, its driver chatting on a cellphone, and hurled Mattie out of the crosswalk into the side of a bus shelter. It was as if the kid had been thrown by a train, according to a witness quoted in one news
report that Cutler wished he had never read—though of course, being Cutler, he had read and clipped or printed them all and filed them away with his old compulsive diligence.

Some friends were surprised that, after the way his son had been killed, Cutler still ran. He would explain that the running made him feel closer to Mattie. It was another way he chose to remember the boy—and, despite his friends’ advice, he felt sure there could never be too much remembering. Too much
grieving
, maybe, but grief and remembrance were not the same thing. Mattie, too, had loved these woods; rerunning their routes now, through the dense plexus of the trails, was like retracing neural pathways where memories of the boy were inerasably stored.

What he didn’t tell his friends was that he
had
to keep running—that more than ever he was a junkie hooked on the body’s hormonal narcotics, the serotonin, the endorphins, the THC-like compounds secreted through exercise. Those substances had not been enough to keep him from falling off the wagon after the funeral, but the running did help him quit again, after a full year of renewed drinking.

Cutler sped into one of his favourite turns, a ninety-degree elbow through a stand of hemlocks. Their cool citrusy scent—a sharp change from the burnt, toasty odour of fallen hardwood leaves—cleared his head. Years’ worth of needles were compressed level and firm underfoot. He leaned in on the turn like a skater. It felt
good as always. Running could be like dance, like play, once you didn’t have to fret about the mechanics or entry-level fatigue.