Toby (2 page)

“Let’s at least admit, before we roll over, that it’s an insult to you, to me, and to our heritage.”

“Ed. Ed, I’m pleading here. We don’t have a heritage.”

“I’ll tell them Mushinsky or nothing, Dad.”

“Oh, this is just fantastic.” Karen walked into the kitchen and tossed her milky cloth into the sink with a slap.

“Ménard.” Edward Mushinsky finished his champagne in two gulps and said it again, “Ménard,” as though he were saying “Intifada.”

In Emergency, the ill lay asleep or moaning lightly on stretchers in the old hallway, and in the examination rooms there were grunts and flashes of torn flesh that Toby hoped had nothing to do with his father. The floor was built around an island of nurses. They had nearly completed a revolution around the island before his mother, wearing red flannel pyjama pants with white bunnies on them, rubber boots, and a puffy black winter jacket, declared she needed to sit down.

Toby unfolded a wheelchair and eased Karen into it. They reached a windowless rectangular room with eight beds. Edward Mushinsky was in the corner, asleep with an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. A blanket covered his torso. His arms and legs were bare, and glistened with a clear gel that had been slathered over blisters and colourful sores. His face, neck, and hands were swollen and, in the fluorescent light, dead grey.

“You said he was okay, Toby.”

“He seemed okay.”

“You said he was for sure okay.”

“He’s just sleeping.”

Karen hopped up out of the wheelchair and said, into her hand, “Someone’s going to prison for this.”

“No.”

“Attempted murder. This shall not stand.”

“Mom.”

“You want me to be quiet?
They
want me to be quiet.”

“Who?”

Karen bowed over her husband. Her hands were open to him and quivered as though Edward were the fire.

“I wouldn’t touch him just yet.” A short, wide-eyed doctor introduced herself, and Toby immediately forgot her name. Her shirt was too large, and she wore an unfashionably wide, clown-like tie under her green scrubs. She explained about his sedative and the burns; the nasty-looking ones were third-degree, on his shins and arms, a spot on his head. Most of the others were second-and first-degree. He had taken in a lot of smoke. A room was being prepared for him on the burn ward, but she could not say how long he would remain in Emergency. He would be perfectly fine, in time. The doctor placed her hand on Toby’s arm, just above his elbow. “What you did was very courageous.”

Toby continued to look down at his father, and at the oxygen mask clouding and unclouding.

“One of the paramedics told me.” The doctor squeezed his arm. “It’s no small thing.”

“What the hell is she talking about?”

The doctor tsked, shook her head. “Your son didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what? Tell me what?”

“Toby pulled his father, your husband, from a burning car.”

Karen did not respond. She had made her feelings clear on the drive to the hospital.

The doctor led them down a long hallway to a consultation room with safari-themed wallpaper and a large wooden IKEA box of forlorn toys. A toilet flushed nearby, only faintly muffled
by drywall. A uniformed policeman with a goatee sat in a swollen leather chair across from a matching chesterfield, flipping through an issue of
L’actualité.
Céline Dion’s polar bear of a husband was on the cover. Edward’s charred blue jeans and flannel shirt had been stuffed into two clear plastic bags, which sat at the policeman’s feet like little dogs. Everyone shook hands, and the doctor congratulated Toby again for pulling his father out of a roaring fire, for risking his life. She stood for a moment in silent tribute, as though waiting for the final notes of the national anthem to finish, then excused herself.

Toby focused on the fountain of black hairs bursting from each of the detective sergeant’s nostrils. The questions were neutral, at first. Edward’s work, his age, what he had been doing that night.

He cleared his throat, the detective sergeant, and changed his tone. “Had Monsieur Mushinsky been acting at all oddly?”

Karen sat upright in her wheelchair. “That is an insult.”

“Pardon me, Madame.”

“Pardon you? Pardon you? I know what you’re suggesting and it’s…” She slapped Toby’s arm. “Shit, help me out. The snowman. He’s the
what
snowman?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Come on, Toby. Not terrible, but really terrible.” Karen reached up, in apparent desperation, to her hair. She had been endowed with thick, curly blond hair that in recent years had blended delicately with strands of grey. It was tangled from the pillow. Vanity struck her, and she hunted in her purse for a makeup mirror as Toby and the detective sergeant waited. “The snowman…he’s the
blank
snowman.”

“Frosty?”

“No. Christ, Toby.”

“Abominable?” said the detective sergeant.

“Abominable! It’s
abominable
what you’re suggesting, Monsieur.”

“An investigator must ask questions.”

“Who dropped my husband off, in the middle of the night, in his car, and…” Karen found the mirror, opened it, and considered her reflection. “Who? Goddamn it. He could have been killed.”

The detective sergeant allowed several moments of silence. Toby was afraid to touch his mother.

“I have been on the force many years now, Madame.” The detective sergeant spoke quietly and evenly. “Seventeen years. And I have never seen—”

“The last I spoke to him was before he went off to his meeting. I hope you’ll be speaking to his ‘friends’ in the Optimist Club. They’re boors. You can write that down. They take advantage of his good nature.”

“He was his normal self, then? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing whatsoever.” She struggled with “whatsoever.” Karen wore satsuma perfume oil. This scent, and the residue of Old Port cigarillo smoke on her clothes, battled for supremacy in the consultation room. “He listens to the oldies station. A Joni Mitchell song comes on. He loves it too much to turn it off, maddening habit, and parks and waits for the song to finish. Closes his eyes. The engine’s running.”

The detective sergeant had stopped taking notes. “And?”

“He revs the engine, in his sleep. And something goes, I don’t know, haywire. You’re the investigator. Investigate,
why don’t you. That Optimist Club, begin there. Maybe he
knew something
.”

The detective sergeant turned to Toby. “You were at a formal event tonight?” He swished his index finger from bow tie to handkerchief.

“Not formal, no.” Formal would require a dinner jacket, entirely different footwear, and a bow tie devoid of whimsy. “I was at a restaurant.”

“And what do you do, Toby?”

He was midway through the first sentence of his explanation when the detective sergeant stopped him. “Of course. Of course! I was wondering where I’d seen you before. You’re
that man
.”

“Yes.”

“You do those things.”

“Those things, yes.”

“How to be polite.”

“
Toby a Gentleman.
”

“Last week I didn’t stand up when the wife stood up from the table, at this Greek restaurant. It used to be okay, you know? We live in Saint-Henri! And so—”

Karen, fully awake now, cleared her throat. “What are you doing with my husband’s clothes?”

“Lab analysis. As you say, investigating. It’s pretty standard.”

“Why ‘pretty’ standard?”

“Sometimes a thing makes sense. Sometimes it does not.”

Her breaths, slightly rasped, quickened. “My husband burned up in a fire, Monsieur, a horrible, accidental fire. That is, unless one of those Optimist freaks—”

The detective sergeant slipped his notepad into the pocket of his polyester shirt and stood up. “I am sorry for
your husband’s suffering, and for yours. If I have any more questions I’ll phone you.” The detective sergeant pulled two cards out of the same shirt pocket and gave one to each of them. He lifted an eyebrow and asked if he might speak to Toby in private for a moment.

“Divide and conquer,” said Karen, just loud enough for the policeman to hear.

Toby followed the detective sergeant into the adjacent examining room. The bed was dishevelled, and next to it there was a puddle of clear liquid on the white tile floor. The man pulled out a third business card. “Could I trouble you for an autograph, for the wife?”

In the black leather satchel he carried, Toby kept a number of four-by-six black-and-white photographs in a protective case. He pulled one out. “What’s her name?”

“Angie. No, write
Angela.
I’m sorry about this. But it’ll make her so darn happy.”

Toby wrote what he always wrote.

“All the best.” The detective sergeant inspected the photo, sighed. “Thank you.”

“Without viewers, we are nothing.”

“When you pulled your dad out of the fire, Toby, did he say anything?”

“He was unconscious.”

The detective sergeant held eye contact. “
Évidemment,
” he said, and wished Toby and his parents
all the best.

A series of announcements, barely audible and entirely incomprehensible, filled the ward. Charred bits of his father’s shoes, and his father, had passed to the cuffs of Toby’s white shirt and, when he inspected it closely, the Boss. If he had run to the driver’s-side door and opened it forcefully, manfully,
the fire might have at that instant entered the engine. His new suit, and his entire bloodline, would have been eliminated. There was a pain in his chest, above and below his heart. It was almost three. He could not remain. His heart hurt. The air was thin, contaminated, his lungs filled with melted plastic and now this—this place. Super-bacteria, bird and swine influenza, tuberculosis, norovirus. A clown doctor.

An orderly wheeled Edward away, to his room on the burn ward. He passed and they could not touch him. Toby blew a kiss and Karen embraced her son, slapping him on the back of the head.

“Now do you see? Now do you finally
see?
” There was only a hint of moisture in her eyes when they parted. It would not take exhaustive research for the detective sergeant to discover she had made a false statement; prison would not suit his mother’s temperament. “It’s my fault.”

“How, Mom?”

“And
you.
Mr. Hero. If you’d been there, instead of celebrating the bow tie. Which looks pretty stupid.”

“You want me to stay?”

Karen took a step back, as though Toby had pushed her. “You’re going?”

“Tomorrow…no, today is the election. I’ll be up till midnight, on camera. Dad’s sleeping.” Toby stopped rationalizing, because Karen had stopped listening. They stood in a wide corridor, at the entrance to the room where Edward had been. Five patients remained. Three were asleep, hooked up to machines. One man, an old man in a sweatsuit, sat on the edge of his bed and wheezed through his open mouth. “I’ll come back.”

She stared into the room, at the old man in the sweatsuit. He slouched, his pale neck drooped. He gripped a metal
pole with wheels, a bag of fluid hanging from it like a giant plum. His lips were enormous. Karen’s pyjamas were half-tucked into her rubber boots. “What am I supposed to do now? What do you do when this happens? Shouldn’t someone be telling me?”

Toby tried to pull her in for a hug, but she resisted and walked slowly back to the consultation room. Giraffes and elephant cartoons decorated the upper third of the wall, faded by time and surely by sadness. Toby nearly jogged to his mother, to help her onto the chesterfield, to apologize some more. But a toxic, painful soup bubbled in his lungs. He would not say goodbye twice; in a week or two everything would be back to normal, and they would no longer visit or think of hospitals. Toby would buy his mother a scarf at Holt Renfrew, where he received a significant discount.

An orderly was in the examination room where Toby had signed his photograph, mopping up the puddle. The reassuring scent of chlorine. Like Karen, he wore rubber boots, this small man from a less prosperous corner of Asia.

The moment Toby passed from the hospital into the cool, wet, early autumn air of Montreal, his breathing improved. His heart untangled. He jogged to his car, which shone mightily. The rain had left tiny spots of dust on the door panels, but they were invisible in the streetlight. Toby had just picked up a pair of lambskin driving gloves, tight and deliciously brown, and he squeezed the leather steering wheel until they squeaked. He squeaked the day away.

He drove south to the Faubourg Ste-Catherine for spiritual renewal. A twelve-foot Toby leaned over the city in his grey Prada, a black vest and tie, with that winning yet predatory rise in his upper lip. “You own this town,”
the photographer from Chicago had said as he snapped the pictures. “You own it. This town wants to fuck you.” The billboard-and-bus campaign had coincided with the season launch, and Toby knew that one cold morning—if not tomorrow, the next day or the next—his colossal selves would be replaced by an enticement to savour rotisserie chicken. Tonight, the billboard over the Faubourg was his cross on the mount. No matter what might happen to him or to his family and friends—fire or flood or lawsuit—he could always retreat into the cozy celebrity quarter of Greater Anglophone Montreal. Biweekly notices in the alternative press, Web chatter, awkward eye contact, and whispers in malls that he would pretend not to notice, in restaurants and nightclubs, the sidewalks of Saint-Laurent: his angels of encouragement.

A few blocks north, Sherbrooke Street was deserted but for a man on the steps of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, clothed in layers and layers of grey, rocking forward and back like a madrassa student. Toby’s chest went infuriatingly tight again, and the air inside the car transformed from leather to melted plastic, seared skin. He pulled into the narrow roundabout at the grand entrance to McGill, exited the car, and told himself it was good, it was healthy, it was right, he was strong. He paced on the concrete, in shallow, shining puddles, his shoes clacking in the night. “I am good. I am healthy. I am right. I am strong.” These were games he played with himself before he went on camera, to avoid stumbling over words—confidence games. Healthy, right, strong. Then, as though he had stood up too quickly, stars and the scent of blood in his mouth. He bent over, willed it away. He leaned on a stone column and retched, slid down it.