Toby (27 page)

“He wants to apologize,” she said.

This was incorrect. Yet Toby did apologize, making excuses for his behaviour: sadness, hypoglycemia, confusion, wine, the early stages of a stomach ache.

Steve Bancroft explained his compromise decision. And that night, after some goat cheese and crackers, several more glasses of spectacular Spanish wine, and a bottle of G.H. Mumm with his mother and the man who would be his mother’s lover, Toby slept on Hugo’s sheets and dreamed that he was still there.

At the top of the mountain,
deep inside and far from any worn path, was a secret place, an African jungle, Sherwood Forest, a place of danger and liberation: a boy’s paradise. In the warm months, before Toby grew too old to appreciate its magic, Edward Mushinsky would take his son up the mountain, and together they would walk, looking over their shoulders to be sure no one had followed.

Other boys could visit, maps could be drawn, but only if these initiates were brave enough, and true. The secret place was the site of an unofficial stone and concrete monument, built in honour of someone’s brother killed in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, decorated with a large iron soldier and amateur stone statues of a bear, a lion, trolls and dwarves and dragons, all of it less than ten feet away from one of the best climbing trees in the history of the maple.

At Catherine’s apartment on New Year’s Day, Toby waited at the kitchen table for the boy to wake up. Unaccustomed to his new nap schedule and apparently keen to
ignore Toby’s directives, Catherine had not put him down until almost two o’clock. She sat across from Toby, the white teapot a crystal ball between them. He had presented Steve Bancroft’s compromise.

“Is there anything you won’t steal from me?”

“Are you interested or not?”

Catherine had been in France, and that afternoon she looked French. Tight jeans, a red shirt that fit her properly, a silk scarf. The bruise under her eye had faded somewhat. “I should sue you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Maybe I should wait a few years, until you are rich and famous in New York, and then I will sue you.”

“It’s a house, with a yard, and a real salary.”

“Thief.”

Toby shrugged and poured more tea, organic roasted green, his gift, for Catherine and for him; since learning of the job in New York, he had begun to spend freely with his credit card. Two of the reproductions of Georges Brassens concert posters that had been in her living room were gone now, the rectangles behind them whiter than the rest of the wall. The Chevette was at Randall’s garage, so Toby had taken his mother’s Corolla; he had stuffed in three boxes of toys, two green garbage bags of clothes, and the animal/space art from Hugo’s bedroom. The clothes and toys lay on the chesterfield. Catherine had pretended to be annoyed that her son now had a better wardrobe than she did.

The first rumbling from Hugo’s room was sweet deliverance from Catherine and the tea. They jumped up and jostled each other on their routes to the messy-haired boy sitting up in his bed. Both of them knelt on the striped carpet in
the semi-darkness, waiting for him to shake the sleep away. Hugo wiped his eyes. “What am I doing?” he said.

“What are
you
doing?” they said, in unison.

Toby parked the Corolla illegally in the backyard swimming pool enclave of Outremont, exactly where Edward used to park. It was cloudy, and it would not be long before the December darkness arrived, so they walked quickly. The wind roared through the upper branches of a cedar stand, and some snow fell on them.

Toby discovered the entrance to his secret forest and knelt down before the boy. “You must never, never tell your mom what you are about to see.”

Just-three, it turned out, was considerably too young for this sort of thing. Hugo cried and attempted to run away. It took ten minutes of calm pleading in the flat, dying light, in both official languages, to convince Hugo to leave the worn path and enter the little forest.

“You want to go now,” said Hugo, just as the memorial became visible. Toby carried him the rest of the way.

It was covered with graffiti. All of the small statues had been ruined. Spray paint, layers of it, already faded and chipped, covered everything that had not been destroyed. A lesser artist had grafted a bolt to what had been the lost soldier, the dead brother, leaving him with an enormous boner. Liturgical Québécois curse words had been scratched into the rock. It was yet more proof that God was either an imbecile or did not exist.

Crucial branches were missing from the climbing tree,
ravaged by an ice storm. Toby scanned the forest floor for hypodermic needles and used condoms, then put Hugo down.

“You’re hungry. You want a snack.”

Toby had forgotten the granola bar and water bottle in the Corolla, a twenty-minute walk away. He gamely tried to interest the boy in what remained but Hugo did not see the dragon in the dragon. Painted and smashed, none of the creatures resembled what they had been made to represent.

“Look, look.” Toby climbed the tree until he reached the level where the branches had been stripped away. “Look at me.”

To Hugo, who had no memories of this place, it was just another spooky and desecrated corner of the city—as charming as a downtown alley. Toby worried, in the end, that the soldier’s erection would haunt the boy into his teen years.

There was a smooth indentation in the big rock where, in Toby’s day, children had left offerings of marbles, Super-Balls, candy necklaces, Silly Putty, and Lik-m-aid. Toby climbed down the tree and introduced Hugo to what Edward had called a portal into a better world, with prettier weather, no war, and very few class distinctions. This, apparently, was why the children had left candies and toys: to convince the pagan gatekeeper that they were true of heart. On one of his first trips here, Toby had swiped a Matchbox Camaro from the collection of offerings. Each visit, Edward would make a big show of trying to open the “door,” but Toby knew he was not true of heart. Just as his father had explained it to him, he told Hugo about the portal. He didn’t want to give Hugo a complex about winter or discuss war or socioeconomic disparity, so he just said it was a door to Cuba, where they had beaches and marlins.

Toby pulled out the sandwich bag of unpopped corn he had gathered from the corners of the blue recliner. “My dad left these.”

“My dad,” said Hugo.

“Your dad.”

“Your dad.”

“Yes, Hugo. That is exactly how you say it.”

“Your dad, Poney.”

“My dad.”

The sky, and the temple of secrets and wonders, turned a shade darker. Toby pressed on the portal and it did not budge. All the time and opportunity he had wasted—bong hits in university, shopping trips to malls in downtown Toronto—when he might have struggled to know his father. Toby decided to make it easy on Hugo by expressing himself thoroughly and honestly, the dad-and-boy mysteries continually unfurled, but Hugo was shivering and staring numbly into the distance. Snowflakes hung from his eyelashes. Toby emptied the bag of unpopped kernels.

“What are you doing?”

“Good pronoun, Hugo. Excellent. I’m enormously proud.”

And Toby prayed, though not to any person or being or imbecile in particular. He did not ask for anything, not protection or even wisdom. With one hand he held the boy close. He pressed the other on Edward’s kernels and concentrated, as hard as he could, until Hugo squirmed out of his grasp and declared, firmly, that he was starving.

Rituals did not come naturally to Toby. It took some work to convince himself that he had not just littered.

Hugo refused to walk, so Toby carried him. He had to change arms every minute or so. At the boundary of the park,
on the concrete path, they came upon a dead squirrel next to a shrub. It had been freshly killed by something—a park vehicle, perhaps. Hugo insisted that Toby put him down, and he inspected the animal carefully without getting too close. Even in snow, the blood had dried on the animal’s ears. It lay on its back, looking up at Hugo, its mouth open just slightly. Toby lacked the training and insight to discuss the fate of the squirrel with Hugo. He did not want to tell the truth, and he did not want to lie.

There were no questions. From the squirrel to the Corolla, a five-minute walk, Hugo said nothing. He did not complain about the snow or whine about his hunger. At the car, Hugo looked Toby in the eye and said, in English, with a tone of finality, “That squirrel wants his mommy.”

Toby plopped Hugo into the Westchester, gave him a granola bar, and tightened the strap. The snow settled on the windshield. Snow in New York would be much wetter, and it wouldn’t stick around as long. It would last about as long as Hugo’s memories of him. Toby did not want the cold, wet boy to finish eating. He wanted to stay like this, trapped in his mother’s car in Outremont, until they came for him.

Back in Pie-IX, Toby was reluctant to take Hugo inside, even though the boy desperately needed a warm bath and dry clothes. First, they ran and slid on the sidewalk. Then he cajoled the boy to walk ten paces away and run toward him for a hug. And again, and again,
encore une fois.
After what was probably the fifteenth hug, Catherine appeared in the snow.

Toby held the boy.

“Inside.” Catherine kneeled down and Hugo ran to her. She looked up at Toby over the boy’s shoulder. Mother and son walked hand in hand up the sidewalk, into the building.

“Where did you go, my darling?”

“To the mountain. No mommies.”

It took Toby an hour and a half to get to Dollard, as there was fresh snow on the roads and he had joined the five o’clock traffic. The signs on the Chien Chaud had already come down, and the arts and entertainment pages of
La Presse
covered the windows of the Dollard location.

Randall and Garrett were in the auto shop, drinking beer, Randall in overalls and Garrett in a grey suit, loosened tie, blue-black bags under his eyes. There was a small television in the corner, with rabbit ears. The local CBC news was wrapping up.

“How is she, doctor?”

“She’s gonna pull through.” Randall gestured toward the aromatic garage, where the Chevette sat among other unfortunates. “But there isn’t much life in her. That engine—”

“Don’t tell me. I can’t take it.”

They sat on hard plastic chairs with tall bottles of Maudite. It was a cozy inside joke. In high school, the first time they got drunk together it was on Maudite, a doubly rebellious act as it was not just beer, but Satan’s separatist beer.

One of Garrett’s wealthy local clients was being sued over a land dispute. The Maudite break represented his first moment away from the file, apart from a few hours’ sleep here and there, since the holidays began. He spoke slowly and precisely, and when he wasn’t speaking, his mouth remained open. Toby worried drool would sneak out.

“I put off turkey and cheap wine,” Garrett said, “but when this case pays out, in February I hope, we’re heading south.”

The men looked at each other several times, and Toby asked if anything was up. Randall shrugged. “He told me he told you.”

“About what?”

One giant index finger pointed at Garrett, the other at himself. “And we have something to tell you. We’re telling you first.”

“We’re gonna make it official,” said Garrett.

“For the kids’ sake,” said Randall. “Stability and that stuff. So they know it isn’t just sex or whatever.”

As a child, Toby had often stood in his backyard, looking up at the stars. The idea of an endless universe, endless and timeless, was impossible to comprehend. He had always assumed that when he grew to be a man, he would stop enjoying cartoons and start understanding endlessness and timelessness. But it had not worked out that way.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
continued to move him, and he still didn’t get the universe. It was equally difficult to fathom Randall and Garrett having sex, let alone getting married. The word, sure, even the ceremony, but the rest of it—shopping trips, dinnertime, parenthood, weekends at the family cabin, Disneyland, good-night kisses—did not scan.

“Congratulations.”

“You think it’s crazy?” said Garrett.

“It’s gorgeous.”

Randall delivered a speech he had clearly been mentally rehearsing for some time. Marriage was a flawed institution. “Me and Tracy are Exhibit A!” But if he and Garrett wanted
to be a family, wanted to care for Dakota and Savannah, wanted to have a loving and caring and responsible relationship, what better way? Besides, the party would be in Puerto Vallarta.

“So who asked whom?”

Garrett pointed to Randall. “Negro got on one knee.”

“We have to wait until the divorce is all settled up.”

They hugged and clinked their Maudites and sat in contemplative silence. Toby considered the dusty racks of snacks: gum, potato chips, chocolate bars. Their chairs were arranged in a triangle, as though they were contestants in a game show.

“You all right?” said Garrett. “All packed up?”

“I can’t take much with me. Clothes. My laptop.”

“Where will you live?”

“A temporary apartment in the Upper East Side.”

“That sounds so New York!” said Randall.

“I don’t have to worry about babysitters and daycare and parks and schools anymore. So that’ll be awesome.”

Randall crossed his arms. “Bullshit.”

“What’s bullshit?”

“You’ll be miserable.”

“Are you on H?” Garrett leaned over and cuffed Randall.

Randall finished his Maudite and snarled. The last sip of a Maudite had been nasty in high school, and it was nasty today. “If you ask me, you have two options. We kidnap Hugo and smuggle his little ass down to the Lower East Side.”

“Upper.”

“Or. Or you stay here. You stay with the boy.”

“You know I can’t.”

Randall stood up and walked close. He stood before Toby, transferring his weight from one foot to the other like
he had to pee. “You can’t give up the kid.”

“She’s the mom and I’m not the dad. Legally—”

“I don’t care about legally.”

“Sit down, Rand, and shut up,” said Garrett.

“You’ll regret it forever. You will.”

“It’s the job of my dreams. I’ll be—”

“Toby, I liked your show when it was on. I learned about clothes, and being good, and not spitting so much, and using a capital
I
in e-mails. Lots of little things. But still, it’s…Garrett, what’s that word for surfacey?”

“Superficial?”

“You’re smart. You’re handsome. You’re talented. If all the people like you in the world didn’t do fashion and celebrity shows and reality TV, imagine. Just imagine the shit we could do. There’d be solar panels everywhere. No poverty. What about the fucking Gaza Strip?”