All the Broken Things (28 page)

There was an Airstream trailer to his right—whatever its vendor sold, it was closed, the shiny aluminum awning shuttered tight—and to his left, the faux portico of a popcorn concession. A young boy was staring up at him.

“You see a guy in an old-fashioned black hat?” Bo asked, but the kid shook his head.

The boy shot a thumb at one of the trailers. “You know when this thing is supposed to open?”

It was the Blow-Off, the spectacle that pulled the crowd out of the tent so they could shove more people through the entrance. The trailer had a sign tucked into riveted brackets, positioned so that it loomed up into a kind of arch over the exit. On it was painted a worn image in greens—a hideous tiara-wearing toad.

“I don’t know,” said Bo. “I never come out this way.”

“I’ve already seen it four times.”

“Is it any good?”

“Naw,” the kid said. “I just figure I should get my money’s worth, is all.”

“I guess you could complain,” said Bo, and then he turned back into the ten-in-one to put Bear back to work. He would have her dancing and riding that trike until their shift ended, and then he’d find Max.

H
E SOUGHT
M
AX AND
O
RANGE
late into the night and got up early to look some more. Nothing, no Max.

Bear had been cooped up in her cage so long she was stir-crazy. She made it up the ramp with the tutu and the trike but as soon as her first live fight started, she cuffed Bo so broadly across the face, the hit spun him around before he fell. He hadn’t expected it, and his ears were ringing, but he could hear Gerry yelling at her. Bo was too stunned to tell Gerry to quiet down. Bear had never responded well to loud noises, so screaming at her wouldn’t help. He wondered if she was just feeding off his energy. His sweat mixed with the filth she’d brought in on her paws and rained down his face. Bear sat in centre ring licking between her stubby claws, cleaning herself, the tulle of her tutu twisted, ridiculous. Hanging from her, it seemed a bit of an insult.

He pressed his index finger to his mouth to signal to Gerry to shut up. “I’m okay,” he muttered. Then, “Bear!”

People flanked the ring on all sides, pressed in tight, in ways they never could at the small agricultural fairs. Seats on all sides rose bleacher-style, made the space feel compressed. They would have to deal with sweat flung at them, the spittle of bear, that ungodly stink, and the flies.

Bo could see in Bear’s eyes that the swat had been unintentional. She had had no idea of her strength in that moment. He pulled a dog treat from under the elastic waist of his trunks and palmed it so no one would see, wanting her to rise up on her back legs as they had practised. She did, and they lunged at one another—also practised.

“Good girl,” he whispered, and when they went into a hug, he pinched spots on her he knew she liked. Maybe she was ticklish, but when he tugged at the fur around her muzzle and under her arms, she would roll over and play dead, a great party trick. She did this now, tulle rising to reveal her great underbelly.

“There, there!” he called out. The crowd loved it.

She swung her head back and forth, peering upside down at the people, curious, then at Bo, and then she flipped, in a way that gave Bo time to pretend he hadn’t seen it coming. He walked the edge of the ring like he didn’t know a thing.

The crowd’s groans of fear warned him of some imminent danger, but he played dumb. “What?” he yelled, like he couldn’t understand, Bear ambling behind him, swinging her head, her tight high roars wafting up to the rafters.

The rest of the show went smoothly. Bear pinned him tight in a corner with one flat paw upon his chest and shoved her head sideways into his neck. The referee came in for the count. Then they pranced her about, sat her on her little stool, and held aloft a root beer. The crowd loved this.

On the way back to their tent, Bear dawdled behind him so that she could scoop her snout under his bottom and try to upend him.

“Hey!” Bo said to her, and laughed. In the end, he stopped to give remedial training. He had her sit, lie down, stay. Bear, chastened, dipped her head and let it sink to the grass, apologizing. She flicked her tiny eyes in ways that made him fall in love with her again. “You’re terrible,” he said, and let her bound the rest of the way to the tent.

In their room, he crated her, something he thought she’d come to understand was for her sake. “You’re a star, Bear,” he said to her before he left again to look for Max.

B
O WANDERED THROUGH
the tent city and the labyrinth of caravans, knocking on doors. He did this for an hour and was about to give up when Max opened the door of the trailer Bo had been hammering at.

“Hold up, kid.”

“Max.”

“I was resting, kid. I have a bit of a migraine too.” It was true he was red-eyed, dishevelled.

“Where is she?” Bo was already pushing into the trailer.

“What gives you the right—?”

“What doesn’t?”

Max kept his arm extended and shoved hard to keep Bo back. It was like an act. Bo scrambling, trying to take a swing but just windmilling the air.

“Calm down, so as we can talk,” Max said. “I know you hate me. I get that. But you don’t know the whole story. You want to talk man to man?”

He wore a dressing gown over his trousers. Black patent leather shoes poked out under the cuffs—the man dressed like it was 1940, like he was a gentleman. Bo knew better.

The trailer was a different one from before, newer, brighter, bigger, but the same framed freaks were on the walls, the oddities and stage shots. He looked around for the glossy of Orange but did not see it. Max held the door open, the dressing gown flapping wide to reveal his muscled chest. He rewrapped the silken gown and then rummaged in a pile of paper on the counter on the other side of the door. He pulled out a small envelope that looked like it had seen better days. He handed this to Bo.

“What is it?”

“She would have wanted you to see it.”

The air around the envelope seemed to shimmer with energy. “She” was his mother, his dead mother, who had hung herself in spite of how much she should have known he needed her. Bo’s cheeks twitched like little creatures were crawling under his skin. He wanted to drive his body through Max’s to get to the other side of this bad feeling.
But even as the thought crossed his mind, the fight went out of him, like a thick hard wind. He watched his own hand reach out and take the envelope.

He wasn’t sure he could read what was inside it and then he wasn’t sure he couldn’t. The glue on the envelope had never been licked and had turned brittle and yellow. How long does that take? he wondered. Or maybe it had been old and brittle even before she’d tucked her note inside. It contained only a scrap torn off some larger piece of paper.

It read:
I’m done. Tell Bo I loved him. Rose
.

In pencil, as if it wasn’t important enough for ink. Bo read it and then reread it, but there was no clue, no subtext, no way to read it except how it was meant to be read—
I am done
. How simple to be able to write that and then act upon it, as if the thought manifested the action directly. As if there weren’t other people to consider. As if he meant nothing to her.

Bo looked up and there was Max shaking his head, his eyes so screwed up, it took a moment before Bo realized he was crying.

“I loved her,” Max said. “I made promises to her. That Sister be kept inside. Heavens, what a promise to have to make. I don’t make such a promise lightly.”

Bo thought if Max had loved Rose, she would not have killed herself. He watched Max raise his palms to his face.

“Sure,” Bo said. “The world’s a stage.”

And Max snarled, “This is not theatre.” Then softened, pleading, “Look, why don’t you just come in. It’s private, and we can talk.”

Bo thought that he would sooner drop dead than step foot in this man’s home, but his legs carried him up the little aluminum pop-out stairs and over the threshold. The trailer smelled of floor cleaner—citrus and detergent, of his mother when she had worked at the hospital.

Max poured something amber into a glass tumbler and handed it to Bo. “Twelve-year-old single malt.” Then he poured one for himself.

“Okay,” said Bo. He’d never had a drink in his life. He smelled moss and earth and sour, and sipped the fire of it. It was like smoked grass going down.

After a time the quiet got weird, a kind of strangling quiet, and then Max said, “She was sick on and off all summer. We got married, you know?” And here he raised an eyebrow, as if to ask what Bo might think of this. “I loved her.”

“She drank,” said Bo, looking at his own glass. He wondered whether his mother really had married Max.

“No. Just to cope. We all do that,” said Max, gesturing at the tumblers. “She’d been sick a long time. But she hid her illness from you. She didn’t want to worry you, you see.”

And Bo stared at the man. The sorrow, or the act of it, had given Max a purged look—he seemed goodly all
of a sudden, even if Bo knew better. He spoke without thinking.

“She abandoned Orange to you,” Bo said.

Max grimaced. “She thought you’d be better off without the burden.”

“Orange is my sister.” Bo slammed his palms down on the Formica table. But he had forgotten about her in the forest of High Park, he hadn’t searched for her.

“Oh, hush,” said Max. “Listen, people make all kinds of choices.”

“She made a bad choice.”

“Bo, she was—Listen, what made your sister like she is, the dioxins, they came from your father
and
your mother.”

“Shut up!”

“Thao wasn’t a drunk.”

“Yes, she was.”

“No. She was dying. I brought her to doctors all over the place, and they couldn’t do a thing for her. They wanted her to stay in hospital, to die there. I didn’t let that happen. She loved me and we got married. It’s very simple, Bo. You’ve a very thick skull, but it’s really very easy to understand. It’s like her letter says. She was done.” And then he thumbed a small photograph from his wallet, of his mother and Max, arm in arm leaning against the trailer, smiling. It was so rare to see his mother smile.

“She was beautiful, Bo.”

Anger coursed through Bo’s chest and up behind his
eyes—it was unbearable. “She could have told me,” he said, swallowing air, trying to slow it. He would spurt tears soon, he knew.

Max watched him struggle with it. And there was this between them, shooting back and forth in the space of the trailer. Their unspoken thoughts just hung dead everywhere.

Bo looked around for the letter, which he had let drop. Max saw it, picked it up and tucked it under the Scotch.

Max finally said, “There was no medicine that could cure her. It was hard to watch and be so—helpless.” And then Max told Bo what Rose had never told him. “She had sores,” Max said. “They gave her horrible pain,” he said. “She wanted to protect you.”

Bo wanted to get up and find someone to fight, to hit until he felt better, but it was too late. He was sobbing, blubbering that he needed his sister, and where was she?

“She’s been sick for the last few days,” said Max. “But of course you should see her.” And then he brought Bo past the kitchenette and the toilet, pushed a door with curved corners open, and there she was, sleeping, sheets and covers nesting her so that he could hardly see even the pink of her skin: Orange.

She was here, safe. There was very little space around the bed, six inches at the most, and as Bo edged closer to her, his knees banged the bed frame. She breathed; he could see her body rise and fall. He wanted her to wake
and see him, wanted to snuggle into her. He wanted to wake her.

“Does she still hit and bite?” he asked, looking up at Max in the doorway.

“Sometimes,” Max said.

Bo sat on the edge of the bed. He heard the door close and looked up to see that Max had gone. It was a while before Orange woke up. She did not start when she saw him. She pushed the covers off with her feet, her body all sweaty, red with fever, the flame of sores along her torso.

“Orange,” he said, and she shook her head. And filling the unspeakable space between them—their mother, Max, time, Bear—she began to move her hands, making strange shapes with her stubby fingers. Bo watched, baffled. She signed for a very long time, forever, and he did not understand any of it. Where was the Orange who threw herself into walls? Where was his sister bashing her face, her fists? Bo got up and pushed the bedroom door open.

“Max!”

Max stood up, beaming. “She can talk a bit. With her hands. She’s learning fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“American Sign Language.”

“For deaf people?”

“She’s much happier now she can communicate.”

“I’ll take her to my tent. I’ll look after her now.” He
wanted her with him so badly, knew Max wouldn’t like this, but still.

“Well, it’s like this, kid,” Max said, shaking his head. He took a sip from his tumbler to postpone the next bit. “When I made that last promise to your mother, I meant it. I told her I would look after Orange. I swore on my heart and on my own mother’s grave I’d keep her safe. You wouldn’t want to make me a liar, now, would you?”