The Sky Is Falling (11 page)

“That's why I shop there.”

When she opened the cupboard under the sink to get at the compost, I took advantage of the moment to stash a box of dish detergent. “Hold still,” she said, pulling something out of my hair. She showed me what it was. “What have you been doing?”

“Buying groceries with sticks and grass in my hair,” I said.

“Flower petals, too, by the looks of it.”

I jammed the blocks of ice cream in the freezer then went to the bathroom to check how bad I looked. A paper didn't just disappear. I'd left it there that morning face down on the table. We have a key hidden in a spot so obvious no thief would bother looking. Rachel knows about it, so why didn't she use it? Then I remembered, belatedly, that she receives the newspaper herself every morning and listens to the CBC all day long, and I sank down on the edge of the bathtub and cried into a towel. I was crying out of gratitude. For her tact. For everything she's ever done for me.

Every year around this time, I have to grapple with these memories and feelings. Spring is difficult. Spring is a challenge.

Joe Jr.'s door was closed. I don't usually go in without his permission, but now I tapped on the door and opened it with the intention of looking for the lost paper. Surprise! Joe Jr. curled up in bed with the iPod clutched in his fist. Sometimes when I look at him I see every stage of his life in superimposition, the culmination of a whole person, not just the disinterested grunter he is so often now. It's almost overwhelming. I closed the door again.

In the kitchen Rachel asked, “What's wrong, Jane?”

“Joe Jr.'s home.”

She frowned. “I rang the doorbell.”

“He's plugged in.”

She nodded. “Is he sick?”

“Oh, God. I hope not.”

“Well, don't fret. Joe will have a look at him.”

This is the kind of brave talk you get out of people who eat wild mushrooms. Every time he gets sick, I think he's going to die. Of course, I didn't know if Joe Jr. was sick.
I
felt sick thinking there might have been something about me in the paper. Since I hadn't actually read the article myself yet, I couldn't be sure, but I doubted it. Then I remembered the recycling (belatedly again) and stepped out onto the back deck. Opened the blue bag, and yes! There it was, the prodigal
Vancouver Sun
, at the very top, all the sections intact. I was losing my mind. I glanced at the headline again—
Opposition Mounts to Iraq War
—but when I flipped the paper over to see their long-ago faces, to read what was being said about Sonia and Pete now, the article was gone.

Strips of newsprint border hanging down like the empty arms of cut-out dolls.

“Tea,” Rachel called.

I stuffed the paper back in the bag and staggered in, trying not to show my shock. Joe Jr. must have cut it out. But why? He's never expressed an interest in current events.

Rachel was at the table, watching me through the steam of her raised mug, waiting for me to sit. “Jane? Are you all right?” “Yes.” I sat and stared out the window until the magnolia gradually came into focus, giving me something to say. “You asked what I did today. I went to Queen Elizabeth Park to look at the trees.”

“How nice. The cherries are blooming.”

Apparently there are hundreds of different varieties in Vancouver. She named about a hundred of them, also several kinds of plum, but I was barely listening. I was hoping, desperately, that it wasn't Joe Jr. who had cut the article out, but who else could it have been?

“What were you looking at?” Rachel asked.

“What? Oh. They were very—cloud-like.”

“Pink?”

“Yes.”

“Fragrant?”

“Mildly. I didn't notice at first.”

“I wonder if they were the whatsits. Akebono.” She turned her head and spring suddenly arrived on her face, full bloom. “Ho ho! Here's the guy who wouldn't answer his grannie's feeble knocks!”

Joe Jr. stood in the doorway, scratching, gelled spikes relaxed, flattened by the nap. I was at his side in a second, feeling his forehead, checking his piercings—the rings in his eyebrow, the stud under his lip—for telltale redness. “What are you doing home?” I asked.

“I skipped,” he said, yawning.

“You're not sick?”

“I was bored.” He shrugged me off and made for his grandmother, who was waiting with arms wide, ready to fling around his waist. She tolerated the noogie then smoothed her hair back in place. “I rang the doorbell,” she teased. “You left me sitting in the cold.”

Joe Jr. pulled away and began to pogo violently and strum the air. “Da, da, da! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! I rang the doorbell! You left me sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold! Sitting in the cold!” His muse tried not to look horrified. Then, abruptly, he turned back into a boy. “I have to write that down, Gran.”

“Are you serious, you skipped?” I asked because, now that he didn't have meningitis, I was annoyed.

He'd already transferred his transient attention from Rachel to the fridge and, finding the fresh package of smoked meat in the drawer, began pushing it breadlessly into his mouth. “It was boring.”

“So?”

He turned to his grandmother. “Are you going to stay and hear us practise?”

“I could.”

“Is Simon coming over?” I asked, suddenly worried about the paper again. “Because there's something I'd like to talk to you about before he comes.”

Joe Jr. shot me a glance, which seemed both significant and calculated not to be. I would have to tell him, I knew it then. More meat went in his mouth and when there wasn't enough left in the package to make a decent sandwich, he tossed it back in the drawer. Instead of answering me, he said, “Gran, did Mom tell you I started the cello?”

“What?” Rachel turned to me for confirmation.

“It's true,” I said.

“I'll show it to you.” He beckoned to her and Rachel got up and followed Joe Jr. out of the room.

“After that,” I called to Joe Jr., “I need to talk to you.”

We've never told him about the trouble I got into when I was young. I didn't want him to know his mother has a criminal record, despite the fact that the actual conviction is not very impressive. I didn't want him to be ashamed of me, or someone at school to find out. I would never, ever want him to be ostracized.

While Rachel was in the bedroom with Joe Jr. and the cello, I made burritos. Joe Jr. was using the bow now, hitting about
50
percent of the notes (enough accuracy to plunge me into melancholy). And I remembered our terrible cooking, Dieter alternating between spaghetti and payloaded chili. Nutritional yeast dumped over everything like yellow snow. Sonia, preparing for a time when food would be scarce, always served an approximation of bread and water. Pete was the most creative, a liberal spicer. Once I came into the kitchen when he was cooking and saw a half-dozen garlic cloves stripped and lined up on the cutting board. “Smash, smash, smash the state!” He brought down the knife, scraped the chunks into the pot. One lone survivor, having leapt to safety, quivered on the counter. Pete popped it in his mouth.

The doorbell rang. I went to answer it and found Simon slouching on our mat, a six-foot-tall reminder of how like the newborn stage these teen years are—parents blind to the repul-siveness of the age except in other people's offspring.
Go Away
indeed! Simon had an Adam's apple now; it looked like he was gagging on a Russian word. There were the inevitable wires too, pumping in the jangle, and his teeth serving a three-year sentence in a metal cage. Compared with Joe Jr., Simon has taken self-skewering to a whole new level with actual grommets in his lobes I could see the light of day through. Yet when I opened the door,
he
took a step back, right off the mat, when, rightly, it should have been me recoiling from him. Under all the acne, I definitely perceived a flush.

“Hello, Simon.”

He did that darty thing with his eyes, sniffed, made an utterance. Hi, I presumed.

“Joey's in his room,” I said, standing back to let the guitar case through.

He's not so bad. He actually reminds me of Joe years ago. And he took his boots off, which, considering the laces, was a major concession, though I wasn't prepared to wait. “Go on in when you're finished,” I told him, assuming he could read lips.

I went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later I glanced up from grating cheese and saw him in the doorway, staring. “He's in his room!” I added hand gestures.

Right after Joe got home and washed his hands, literally and metaphorically, of the day's suffering, we sat down to dinner. I never got the chance to ask Joe or Joe Jr. about the article.

“Joey! Simon!”

They looked up—startled, innocent, already helping themselves—and seeing Joe's signal, jerked the earbuds out by the wires.

“So how was everybody's day?” He turned to me and kissed my cheek. “How was your day, my darling? What happened at school, boys?”

“Nothing,” they chorused.

I tattled. “Joe Jr. says he skipped a class. He came home and slept instead.”

“It was boring,” Joe Jr. said.

Joe turned to me. “I think that's reasonable.”

“Joey played the cello for me,” said Rachel. “I never thought I'd live to hear someone in this family playing Bach.”

“Was that Bach?” Joe Jr. asked, looking pleased with himself.

I noticed how Simon kept glancing at me from across the table. I could see right in his mouth as he chewed, beans stuck on his braces, mud on a wire fence. When I met his eye: dart, dart. Normally Joe Jr.'s friends ignore me. When I come into the room they immediately mute themselves, except for the yelps when they punch each other, or the snickers. They hardly look at me, not the way Simon kept looking at me now. How to describe it? With
interest
.

And a horrible thought came to me. Joe Jr.
did
have the article. He had it and he'd shown it to Simon.

Joe: “Boys? What do you think of this? The Streptococci?”

Thumbs down from Joe Jr. “Nobody'll get it.”

“What is it?” Simon asked.

“Then how about The Cankers?”

“I thought we were going to be The Cretins,” Simon said. “Like? One, two, three, four, Cretins wanna hop some more?”

“Jane has a problem with The Cretins. She doesn't think it's very nice.”

“I like The Joes,” I said.

The boys groaned.

“Think of it as a tribute. Joey Shithead. Joe Strummer. Joey Ramone. Joey Normal and the Fuck Ups.”

Rachel frowned. “What's all this nasty talk about?”

“We need a name. We're, like, a punk band, Gran.”

“You're like one or you are one?”

“Dad's getting us a real gig.”

“I'm working on it,” Joe said. “I still have connections, Ma.”

“Though half of them are lawyers now,” I pointed out. “You remember Molly? She's a lawyer.”

Rachel: “How about The Tone Deaf? Are you playing the cello in this band, Joey?”

“No, that's for school. No one else was playing it. Mom told me that story so I thought I'd try it.”

“What story?” I asked.

“You were reading that book. About the guy who brings his crazy friend home and is embarrassed because his dad plays the cello.”

“You mean
Fathers and Sons
?”

I'm the odd reader out in this family. The Joes have no use for books; they live for the music I mostly tune out. I was so touched that my son had actually paid attention to something I cared about that tears came to my eyes. Quickly, I wiped them with my napkin because crying is a hundred times worse than playing the cello, even old Kirsanov knew that. Joe rose from the table and went into the kitchen to get dessert, trading a concerned glance with his mother on the way. Then I really felt foolish, because I knew for certain that they all knew what had happened to that article. They all knew and I didn't. I was the cretin.

The apple crumble hit the trivet; the boys attacked. Joe set the ice cream down beside it and I remembered that Russian word, the one I'd imagined bulging in Simon's throat.
Morozhenoye
. I got up to put the tea on. When I got back to the table Simon was saying, “There's, like, a demonstration.” He glanced at me, ears reddening around the peepholes. “You should come.” He seemed to be saying this to me specifically. Inviting
me
.

“
I
should?” I asked.

The colour spread from his perforated lobes. “You all should,” he said. “It's totally illegal, their being in Iraq.”

“Where's the demonstration?” I asked.

“At the Art Gallery. It would be awesome if you came.”