The Fearsome Particles (35 page)

He never heard Doremond’s answer.

T
he way was miraculously clear, as if the whole city, instead of trying to get an early start on the traffic, had decided to put in a full day’s work. Or maybe it was just his instincts that enabled Gerald to weave from the express lanes to the collectors and back again, avoiding every possible delay. He didn’t even need to turn on the radio.

Gooseberry B&B was housed in a large white-brick split-level sitting on the edge of a small park that overlooked Lake Ontario. He would have missed it except for a discreet, gooseberry-shaped sign the size of a mailbox at the end of a broad drive with three cars. As he ran between them up to the house a
small, elegant woman in her sixties, wearing a dress of lavender silk, opened the door, her dark eyes full of worry.

“You are Mr. Woodlore?”

“Yes!”

“Thank you please come,” she said, straining to keep to a whisper. “He is upstairs, he saw you drive in.”

She pushed open the screen door for Gerald and turned to hurry ahead of him across a tiled foyer and up a set of wide, carpeted stairs.

“This is the way for my guests,” she whispered, gripping the railing with a veiny hand and climbing as fast as she could. As he started to pass her she gave him a pained smile. “Your son is no trouble. He pays every day in cash.”

He reached the top before she did and found himself helpless in a warren of closed doors.

“This one!” she said, pointing as her small, urgent steps took her to a door halfway down the hall. “This is for my son’s computer.”

Gerald tried the brass knob and found it locked. “Kyle, it’s Dad!” he shouted. “Let me in!”

“No,” yelled Kyle from the other side.

“Come on! We’ve got to get that hand looked at.”

“Stay the fuck out.”

His son’s voice sounded weak. He sounded in pain. Gerald joggled the knob again and turned to the woman. “Do you have a key?”

Her dark eyes filled with apology. “No, this is my son’s room. He has a key, but he is working in the taxicab.” She lifted a purposeful finger. “I will call him. He may be able to come.”
She waggled her finger like a banner in the air as she hurried along the carpeted hall and back down the stairs.

Gerald pounded on the door. “Kyle! Son! You have to let me in.”

There was a pause. Then he heard: “I don’t have to do anything, Dad.”

This was no way to negotiate. He had to try something different. “I don’t understand, son, I don’t get it. Why don’t you want to see a doctor?”

He waited.

“Kyle!”

The silence stretched, and standing in this stranger’s house, under a dim ceiling fixture, on a thick, champagne-coloured carpet, Gerald thought of all the times he’d failed to act boldly even when he’d suspected boldness was required. All the times he’d been afraid to reach for what he hoped for, even when it was his responsibility. “A man of action,” Doremond had sneered, and rightly so. But Gerald knew that behind the wooden door his son was in danger, and if he was ever to find the will to do what was necessary, it was now.

“Kyle,” said Gerald, “move away from the door.”

“My son,” called the woman as she climbed back up the stairs. “He is not far away. He is coming.”

He heaved his shoulder into the wood.

“Don’t!” called Kyle.

He backed up a step, trembling as much from the shock of action as from the impact itself, and slammed into the door again. The blow jarred his jaw and made him dizzy, but he could tell the wood was giving.

“Stay out,” yelled Kyle, sounding far away. “I don’t want you here!”

His heart thudding, his thoughts hectic, Gerald pressed up against the opposite wall to give himself the room to build momentum, and as he did he saw the woman in the lavender dress standing at the head of the stairs, her hand across her mouth as if she were witnessing a horror. A man breaking in on his child.

“I only want to help him,” he said. He turned again toward the door.

“Just leave me alone,” Kyle moaned.

Something about that voice made Gerald hesitate. Something about its frailty and its remoteness sucked the certainty he’d conjured out of him. His sudden, brief surge of will dissipated, and in its place came fear.

He found that he understood that feeling. Its familiarity calmed him. He knelt onto the carpet in front of the door.

“Kyle,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. “I’m not coming in.”

Silence.

“I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

“Good.”

Gerald pressed his palm against wood that would stay unbroken. “But Kyle,” he said, “can you do something for me?” After a second his son said, “What?”

“Can you tell me what’s important about the hand? Can you explain to me why you don’t want to get it fixed?”

For a long time Kyle said nothing. And though Gerald listened hard through his own ragged breathing for any sound or movement behind the door, none came. It was only when he’d begun to think that his son had fallen unconscious that he heard him say, in a voice so much like a child’s, “You wouldn’t understand. It just has to stay this way.”

“But you’ll lose the use of it, son!”

“I don’t care,” Kyle said. “I want it to stay like this.”

“Okay,” said Gerald, his mind still working. “But son, your hand is infected. The lady here says you were cold, and I think that means the infection is spreading. If it isn’t treated, it could get very bad. Are you listening? You could go into shock. You could get gangrene.” He thought of his son slipping out the window before he could reach him, lying in an alley somewhere, his flesh going putrid. “And if that happens the doctors” – if they could even find him, if they weren’t too late – “the doctors would have to cut off your hand to save your life. And you wouldn’t be able to stop them. Do you hear me? Nothing you could do.”

He waited for that to sink in.

“So Kyle,” he said, and took a breath. “Here’s what I’m willing to do.” All of the years Gerald had spent in want of faith, all the boyish possibility he’d squandered imposing his need for certainty and control, the ease with which he’d surrendered his son’s right to risk, to err, to be trusted – the essential nature that had guided him so long, and so woefully – all of it echoed for Gerald as he knelt on the carpet, in this stranger’s house, where his son had sought refuge. He didn’t understand what he was
about to do, not entirely, but that was all right. He realized it was time to take a chance. To let go. And hope for the best.

He closed his eyes and laid his spinning head against the cream-painted door. “Kyle, I’m willing to take you to the hospital, and tell the doctors to treat the infection, but not the hand.”

He remembered, as he waited for his son to answer, the September day when Kyle turned four. It was a lucid day, summery and so bright the sun seemed to rise from the sidewalks. And because of this, and the specialness of the day, and the fact that as he passed them on his way to work the maples on their street were still green, Gerald had contracted the idea of playing catch with his son in the yard. His own father –always too busy, or too angry, or too drunk – had never done that with Gerald, and Gerald would not have his son say the same. Through meetings, lunch, and a two-hour conference call with Edmonton, he’d kept a loop running in his mind, the coming scene of him tossing his son the ball, getting him to throw it back, and tossing it to him again. It wasn’t a rubber ball he imagined his son catching, but a serious ball. A softball. Kyle was four now, so he had the necessary coordination.

He’d left work as early as he could and stopped on the way home to buy the softball he needed (leather, with red stitching) and a small boy’s baseball glove. And when he arrived home he found his son happily playing in the kitchen, and learned that Kyle didn’t want to come outside. Gerald showed him the ball, showed him the glove, and still Kyle was unmoved. But Gerald had been looking forward to this for so long, was so infected with his idea, that he took Kyle by the hand and led him out onto the lawn. He pushed the baseball glove onto his son’s left hand,
and crouched down a few paces away. Then he tossed the ball the way he’d imagined he would, in a parabola that was crisp and true, and the ball sailed through the air, through Kyle’s reaching hands, and crushed his four-year-old lip.

“Do you hear me?” Gerald leaned against the door. “They’ll give you antibiotics to take the swelling down and get the infection out of your system. But they won’t set the bones. They won’t do anything else to fix the hand, if that’s what you want.”

And after the blood had been cleaned from Kyle’s mouth and the ice had been applied, it was Gerald’s face Vicki had had to wipe dry, his head she’d had to hold to her chest. Because in the replays in his mind, of what actually happened, he could see that his son was never ready to catch, his hands were not close enough together. And yet with all the will in the world he could not, in his mind, keep himself from throwing the ball.

“I won’t let them, son.” He listened, and swallowed through the rock in his throat. “I won’t let them.”

From somewhere downstairs came the sound of a door opening, and a man’s voice. “Mom?”

“My son,” whispered the woman. “He has the key!”

Gerald held up a hand to warn them off. “Kyle,” he called. “Someone is here with a key for this door. But I’m not going to use it. All right? No one is going to come in. If you want to save the hand, if you want to keep it the way it is, then you have to come out of the room. It’s up to you. And I promise not to try to force you into something. I promise not to do anything.”

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and waited.

“That’s the bargain,” he said.

When finally, after hours that might have been minutes, he heard the sound of movement from inside the room, he stood up and backed away from the door. At the edge of his vision he saw the woman and her son, below her on the steps, with the key, and he gestured for them to get back downstairs, out of sight.

From behind the door he heard the soft groan of a floorboard giving, and the catch of a lock being released. Then slowly the brass knob turned, the door began to open, and Gerald saw his child come into view.

His eyes were black with mistrust, and still some indecision. As he inched forward, through the doorway, Gerald didn’t move. Not to touch his son’s face, not to hold him, save him, not even when he saw his swollen hand, and the scarlet streaks running up his arm.

“You promised,” said Kyle, as a warning to his father.

“Don’t worry, son,” he said. Though it killed him. “Don’t worry,” Gerald said. “I won’t help you.”

A
week later, on a clear-skied May morning, Lorie Campeau arrived on the front steps of 93 Breere Crescent. When Gerald opened the door he found her beaming and holding a small white box tied with a gold elastic string.

“Mom’s all set,” Lorie announced. “We’ve got her into a really wonderful retirement home with a view of the mountains. She’s going to be so happy there.” Smiling, Lorie shook her head as if to express how quite incredible her mother’s good fortune was. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you so much for taking care of Sprinkles while we were gone. I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.” She handed Gerald the white box and tapped it with a fingernail. “That’s marzipan from Victoria. It’s one of my favourite things and I wanted you to have some.” Her eyes crinkled up with thanks for a moment, and then gradually went smooth. She cleared her throat and leaned slightly to peek around the sides of Gerald’s form in the doorway.

“Sprinkles?” said Gerald, blinking against the daylight.

The woman on his front step hesitated for a moment. “Oh, that’s right!” she exclaimed. “We hadn’t named it when we left. Well, it’s so sweet. While we were there in the hospital, waiting for Mom to come out of surgery, Jewels came up with the name Sprinkles. And she would not be deterred.” Lorie tilted her head and rolled her eyes, a face of good-natured parental tolerance. Then she brought her hands together lightly. “So.”

“There’s no cat named Sprinkles here,” said Gerald. “Our cat’s name is Rumsfeld.”

He handed the box of marzipan back to Lorie Campeau, and softly closed the door.

For their support during the writing of this book, I owe thanks to the following: My wife, Krista, for all she does to keep me real; the Canada Council for funding assistance; my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for her love of craft and her trustworthy ear; Nicole Winstanley, who launched the boat with such verve, and captain Bruce and the crew at Westwood, who kept it on course.

I’m grateful to the military and civilian personnel I met and played poker with in several Canadian Forces camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina for offering a glimpse into life on an armed forces base. Thanks also to Major Richard Sneddon, Captain Mike Mailleux, and particularly journalist Les Perreaux, for sharing their Afghanistan experiences. Most of the details of water treatment in a hostile environment I learned from John H. Schnieders, a specialist in the chemistry and microbiology of potable water. My understanding of staging owes much to the time I spent researching the world of luxury real estate for
Report on Business Magazine
. I also found
Miller’s International Antiques Price Guide
a valuable resource.

Finally, I owe belated thanks to Patricia Best, for seeing the writer in me, and to my mother, Hilda Mason, for offering unflagging encouragement and modeling a work ethic second to none.