What They Wanted (40 page)

He didn’t look up as I sat beside him. I whispered his name. I whispered it again, as he hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked to the sound of my voice. I touched his arm. It felt as though it were me now, drawing him out of some closet, some locked-away place.

A muscle throbbed in his jaw. He swallowed hard, then nodded as though he’d been waiting for my arrival. “Push has everything arranged,” he said, his voice hoarse like a rusty hinge. “You’ll have a driver—he’ll take you around in the morning. The hospital. Your mother will want to see him.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then drove his fingers roughly through his hair. “He’ll take you to the airport after. The driver. It’s all arranged. Push arranged everything.” He fell silent, his eyes fastened onto a mound of baggage by the door—Chris’s knapsack, his sleeping bag. My knapsack and sleeping bag were there as well, and a couple of other bags. One of them had a jacket laid atop of it, Trapp’s jacket.

His shadow stained the blackest of nights.

“He didn’t report the kick,” I said coldly. “To Push. It was his job to report to Push.”

Ben looked at me, his eyes bleary. He was still drinking, I could smell it. “If it’s fault you’re looking for, then make it mine—and I wish you could,” he ended harshly. “I wish you could make it mine. Or Trapp’s. I wish I could give you that. But you don’t believe it. You rather the fault was yours.

“Guilt,” he mumbled into my silence and lifted his head towards the room where Mother was sleeping. “More than you wanting the guilt for this one, Sylvie.” He lapsed into silence then, his eyes falling inward onto himself. “Should’ve gotten you out,” he mumbled. “Should’ve gotten you both out.”

“I can hear Gran now,” I whispered. “She’d say none of us can rightly claim it—for there’s no knowing where one thing leaves off and another begins. Or if we can even look at things that way.”

He rubbed his eyes again, rubbed his temples, pulling his hands down over his face. “You thought I jumped, didn’t you. You thought I jumped. Left him behind.”

I stared mutely at Chris’s sleeping bag.

“You didn’t say it, but I heard you think it. I didn’t jump without looking for him, I’m a stun fuck, but I looked for him—thought he’d gone to the doghouse—thought I seen him heading for the doghouse, grab a sandwich—he must’ve been down, he must’ve been already down!” He gripped his knees with his hands and I leaned towards him, laying my forehead against his chilled fingers.

“You loved him,” I said. “I know you loved him.”

He pulled me against his chest, cradling me, cradling me hard. “Not just him, not just him that I love,” he muffled into my hair. “When I told you about Trapp, it was the biggest thing—yesterday it was the biggest thing, I know it means nothing to you now, it means nothing to me now, but yesterday it was the biggest thing, I needed you to know me, to understand—”

“I do, I do understand, why do you say it means nothing?” I drew back, looking at his face, at the dark beneath his eyes, almost bruised from repeatedly burrowing his face into the heels of his hands.

“He’s left the camp,” he said. “He’s took only his truck. He’s took it on. You know the weight of that.”

And then I understood. He was leaving. He was leaving again. He was going for Trapp.

I drew my knees to my breasts, covering myself.

“There’s no one,” he said listlessly. “He’s got no one. He’s only got me—and he’s out there somewhere—he’s out there lost somewhere. Sylvie!” He grasped my arm as I lowered my forehead onto my knees with a groan of dejection. “Sylvie, what would you have me do?”

I looked at him. I snorted. “You saved his ass, what more will he have you do? You saved the rig, too—it was his job, but you saved it, him—you saved all of them—” My voice choked, it choked on a quiver of fear. “You can’t leave me,” I whimpered. “He’ll come home, he’ll just come home after a while.”

He didn’t speak. He hadn’t heard me. My words were tiny, he hadn’t heard them, for I’d spoken them in a whisper; the little-girl whisper that I used talking to Mother once in the quiet of my bedroom after I’d near frightened her to death in the abandoned house, and was then afraid of what I’d done, was afraid of my mother’s fear, that my mother would leave me, that my mother would go into the graveyard with her three little dears who were once little girls like me and sink into their graves alongside of them and never come back.

“I hate change,” I whispered. “I hate how things are all the time shifting, like Chris’s lines, going from one thing to another, to another. Ohh, my,” I choked on a sob and it was just then, sitting there alongside of Ben, with my mother sleeping in the other room and Chrissy laid out in some morgue across town, I saw that as much as I revered Chris’s lines I feared them too. I feared those waves curling into fish, into nets, into our father, into the stars. As much as I loved them, drew comfort from their foretelling of another place, a nicer place for those three little dears than a dark, ugly grave, I was frightened of how life can be here by morning, gone by evening, and as I sat there crumpled beside Ben, I desired to make things concrete around me, like one of his bricks, like one of Ben’s damn stupid bricks.

“He’ll come home, Ben. He’ll just come home.”

“No. He won’t. He’ll not feel worthy.” He pulled back, tugging at my arm for me to face him. “He’s running, what you would’ve done. Your mother came and got you. I’ve got to go get him. I’m not thought out like you—that little boy—I can’t just turf him out—I’ve got to see him through, somehow—don’t even know what I mean by that, please.” He held me in place as I tried to pull away. “Wait, just wait—”He faltered. He let go of me, cradling his face into his hands, fingertips rubbing harshly at his temples as though erasing some stain, some spot of dirt grained into his skin. He took my arm again. “Don’t go yet, just wait, just—sit beside me, I hate to go, I don’t want to go, I love it when you talk, I love it when you sit beside me talking, I don’t know how I’ll do this without you there—” He paused for breath, and was talking again, “I’ve got to find him, and then I’m coming home. I’m coming home soon as I find him—here, this is yours, this is so yours,” and he pressed a book into my hand, a sketch pad— Chris’s sketch pad. He pressed it into my hand, already opened, already folded back.

Tears bubbled out of his eyes. “It was on his bed, it was opened and on his bed, it’s his last thing that he drew.” He kissed my cheek, my mouth. He pressed his forehead against mine and grasped my hand, pressing it to his lips. “Don’t hate me,” he whispered, and then he was on his feet, pulling his coat so hard off the chair that the chair toppled over. Hooking Trapp’s knapsack over his shoulder, he bolted for the door, taking a glance towards Mother’s room before letting himself quietly outside.

I sat huddling into my knees, waiting, thinking perhaps he’d come back. After a moment I rose and went to the window. Darkness crowded the sparse light thrown off by the street lamps. The sidewalks were emptied of people, a few parked cars alongside the curb. I hurt from where I was clutching the wired spine of the sketch pad against my chest. Chris’s sketch pad. His last sketch. I turned to the light and held it before me, tracing his lines with my eyes.

It was a night sketch of our father sitting in his boat. He was sitting with his back to me, his face held towards the huge expanse of darkened sky. But his hair was light in colour, and longish, curled around his collar—it was him, Chris. It was both Chris and Dad. It was his dream. The both of them sitting as one in the boat, the water rippling beneath them as they held up a paddle, looking expectantly towards that other, more ancient sea, darkling amidst its stars. And there, in the upper left-hand corner, was an exaggerated star. I knew it at once. Proud evening star. And somewhere quite near, but invisible to see, its virgin moon.

My hands trembled. Did he know? Did he know it was his last day? My mind flashed back to the argument I’d had with him that time in the car, driving to the hospital to see our father, and I had demanded of him why he hadn’t left home yet. I remembered how upset he became, and how I had felt fear in him, that same fear as when we were youngsters hiding behind the house from some unknown force of fate. Had it been built inside of him, somewhere, this knowing of his fate?

My hands shook as I flipped through his other, more recent drawings: Billy the beaver scrolling into a dam, into a forest; Billy scrolling into a pond and the pond into grass. I flipped to another page, another image, and caught my breath. It was a drawing of three head lice on the palm of a hand. The hand was without definition, simply the lines creasing its centre and three large lice sitting there, unshaded. White. I gave a cry. I clutched the book tight to my heart, leaning weakly against the window.

I’d forgotten about that dream of his. I’d never told him what Gran told me once about white lice in dreams. I’d been but a girl when I dreamt of them, and they weren’t white, they were brown, tiny and brown, and had fallen from my hair onto my scribbler. “That’s a good dream, Dolly,” said Gran as she searched frantically through my hair the following morning, “for it’s the white lice in dreams that foretells death.”

Another memory seized me. It was before we left Cooney Arm, and he’d drawn a planet with three moons. Said he dreamt it. I saw pretty much the same picture later in a textbook after we left Cooney Arm. I remember this feeling of—of surprise, at first, that Chris could draw such a thing without first knowing it. And then awe. Because it pointed me towards something, those images that came without thought, that came out of nowhere, and yet somewhere, because, as the old thinkers said, nothing can come from nothing.

Clutching tighter to the sketch pad I laughed, tears wetting my face. I needn’t have feared Chris standing gutted on a wharf like Father with his rotting boat and stage after the fish had gone. The thing Chris created lived in my hands, his breath upon my face. He had found that heavenly room, he’d never been without it. It had housed him in his flesh as I bungled unseeingly into walls of my own construct. It was housing him now as I stood there, understanding his lines. The thought came to me that undoubtedly we are but shadows, our thoughts shifting like clouds, never returning to what they once were, always searching for elsewhere. And yet some things are more solid than rock. He, my brother, was a one true love in my life. And his death, as was his birth, a wealth I would forever feed upon. Another thought struck me, that I need never fear how Chris’s lines transmute from one thing to another, for we are too like them, we are never born and we never die, like the waters in a flooded riverbank, simply finding different channels along which to flow.

Ben appeared on the sidewalk below, Trapp’s knapsack hanging limply from his hand, a slight shiver from the cool night air tensing his shoulders. He stood still as stone inside the light of a street lamp, the black of his curls glimmering like onyx. A cab cruised by, easing to a stop beside him. He raised his eyes to where I was watching him. I willed him to turn from the cab, to walk back in through the doors of the hotel, to come back to me. But I knew he wouldn’t. He was wearing his resolute look again, his eyes piteous, pleading once again for understanding.

Without intent I slowly shook my head. His eyes fell. He opened the cab door and stood aside, as though expecting someone to hop in before him. Then he lowered himself onto the seat, a figure of such loneliness that my heart ached for him as it ached for my own loneliness. As it ached for my mother, who was surely lying awake in her room, lost in the quiet of her own thoughts. As no doubt Gran was ruminating through her own aged mind right now, perhaps rocking for comfort in her rocker, the soft yellow light from her lamp shrouding her shoulders. And Dad. Was he not hunching over his spot at the table, gripping a hot mug of tea whilst his eyes searched through the oncoming waves for reason? Kyle, I knew, would be in the woodshed, his elbows propped on his knees, chewing the sides of his thumbnail whilst his eyes chewed through bits of rind unfurling from the birch junks, struggling to see what Chris might see, but thwarted by his own unlearned self.

Without bidding, my thoughts went to Trapp. Took nothing but his truck. Most likely nose-deep in another ditch, with only his self to blame and his tortured thoughts for company. A twinge of pity stirred in the shrunken sphere of my heart, and I regretted shaking my head to Ben’s imploring look begging for understanding, for sympathy for Trapp. For in the end we are all but solitary souls, seeking little more from the moment than the right to be in it, and the right to be understood.

The cab carrying Ben sped off down the road. I remembered back to a talk with Myrah, bemoaning the huge want I felt in my heart and was always trying to fill with romantic love. Watching Ben speed off in the cab, I waited for that feeling to again consume me. Curiously, my heart felt too full of other things now, and I wondered if it would ever feel want in quite the same way again. For I knew now that it was never a need for someone that I felt but simply a desire to return home, to that room Chris always felt in his heart, the one that fed him contentment, no matter which wharf or rock he sat upon.

A cough, or perhaps a cry, a soft cry sounded from my mother’s room. Holding Chris’s sketch to my heart, I hurried to her bedside.

EPILOGUE