Away From Everywhere (8 page)

To rid her of curiosity about St. John's, after months of overhearing her and Owen talking about the place,Alex bought her and Owen tickets. She was ecstatic about the weekend trip, and Owen was ecstatic to have her to himself for two full days. Alex couldn't go, he was on call Saturday night, but Lillian could watch the kids.

She'd insisted on the window seat, and Owen remembered looking over her shoulder and noticing how slowly the clouds drifted past the window, like the plane was barely moving, like time was grinding to a halt. He looked up from his novel from time to time to watch her watching the clouds. When a mass of green appeared in a bigger mass of endless blue, her eyes widened. “Is that it,Owen? Is that Newfoundland?”

She poked her finger at the window. When she took it away, her fingerprint was there: a series of perfect, un-smudged, concentric circles. There was something infinite about it, something so exclusively Hannah.

“Is it? Is that Newfoundland?” She nodded this time, instead of poking at the glass.

He leaned over her and felt her warmth, her body beneath him, and shrugged his shoulders. He was smiling. As always when she spoke, he was inexplicably smiling. This effortless effect on him was what he now missed the most: the soul-filling warmth of being next to her.

It was only natural that a woman like Hannah would love St. John's. Everything about the town was so charming to her, especially the people, and the fact that cars yielded to pedestrians, and that young men held doors. It was the bright colours of the rowhouses that struck her the most, and how vivid and alive the town was, despite the grey, fog-shrouded skies. They made her fill her camera on her first night there.

“Why are the colours so vibrant? Why are the houses attached? It's like God spilled a bag of gumdrops all over this city and they all melted together!”

It wasn't a question so much as a statement.

On their first day there,Owen took her to the old battered cannon shelters beneath the Fort Amherst lighthouse. The fog siren frightened her into his arms every time it blared. They could be together like that in public now, and it strengthened their love. More than they had expected it to. There was a loner minke whale. She tried ten times to photograph the whale, but came up short every time and ended up with ten pictures of water and nothing more.

“Here, you try!” She handed him the camera and stood behind him to watch the screen as he lined up the photo. He caught the whale on the first try. Nothing glorious or worth framing, but enough to satisfy her. Enough to show the kids when she got home. She had one hand on his shoulder, the other tucked into his coat pocket on the opposite side. She nodded when he showed her. “Try one more.”

But the whale never resurfaced.

He turned to hand her the camera. Saw her sun-reddened cheeks, and the smile on her face looked so right, so impossibly perfect. One second of her time, every word she spoke, the feel of her skin on his, how the curve of her body fit into his. It was all too perfect, so perfect that he couldn't hate himself for loving her. When he wrapped his arms around her that day, he sank into a better world: she was a porthole to something more. But as he looked at her standing there, her hands tucked into the pockets of her hip flannel skirt, her body arced into the direction of the wind – he knew he could never have her. Not like he wanted to. He could never make a wife and mother of her. Their love would have to be secondary to
her
marriage; it would have to be ephemeral, “wrong.” He wanted his own children, a wife, a life. Things she could never grant him.

“Are you okay?”She slung her arms around him and rocked him sideways, dancing slowly to the sound of the waves and seagulls. She combed his thin hair back into place with her hand.

“I don't feel guilty anymore, Hannah. And I love you.”

They said nothing for a while. They were in love but no one had used those three words yet. So he made light of the situation, but meant every word. “I love this water bottle, just because you've touched it and sipped from it. I love the air in our hotel room, because maybe you've breathed it in–”

She laughed, broke free of the embrace, and gave him a soft, playful slap in the face.

She asked about the tower, Cabot Tower, that sat atop Signal Hill, and she wondered why Alex ever left this place.

“Can we get in there? It looks like a …
castle
, doesn't it?”

“Yeah, we can go up after supper. Have you ever had saltwater taffy? Is that a Newfoundland thing? They sell it there.”

They were hand in hand in the open, walking back to their rental car, no longer needing to hide their love. That day at Fort Amherst, they knew, was a day in a life that could've been, if they could just summon the courage to consummate their love, and shatter Alex Collins like glass.

Owen thought of St. John's for the rest of the day: the ever-changing mural ads on the cement walls of the LSPU hall, and the way the city had seemed so much more alive with Hannah there by his side. She was the tourist, but in showing her his hometown, he was appreciating it all more than ever. She brought out all the features of the place: the unique architecture of the buildings, the carved turrets of the courthouse onWater Street, and the coarse grain in the rock of its walls.

Then he thought of his father, locked away in a mental ward at theWaterford Hospital across from Bowring Park – a park where they had picnicked and fed ducks twenty-five years ago, before his father got sick. He remembered his father handing him a loaf of bread and guiding him towards the ducks one day.

“You're everything beautiful this world can be, my son.”

Owen was getting too old for those compliments, too old to be at a park with his father, and yet his hand still felt so big on Owen's back that day, and so god-like. Now his father was just a body suspended between life and death, like a corpse perpetually waiting for CPR or a body bag, kept alive by a coin-sized lump in his brainstem that kept his heart beating and convinced his catatonic body to breathe.

By the end of grade ten, Owen's father had fully surrendered to schizophrenia. He went delusional, then catatonic: a raving lunatic and then a body in a rocking chair that wouldn't have the instinct to flee a burning room; a man seeing people to a man with no use for eyes. It was an unbearable, life-altering year for Owen and Alex, every day of it, especially since the biggest turmoil in any of their friends' families that year was that their mother wouldn't extend their curfew.

It was the week his father was finally and indefinitely committed that Owen started writing. His first short story was about a man in a coma; it was a contemplation on the distinction between being human and being mere flesh and bone. How being alive means being connected to others, invisibly, and nothing more. It won the junior division for fiction in the provincial Arts & Letters competition. He and his mother went to visitTheWaterford that same week, and he told his unresponsive father all about it. He left a copy of the story with his father that day, just in case he
snapped out of it
for five minutes. He waited until his mother had turned her back and headed towards the door, and then he laid it on his father's lap so his mother wouldn't see his pathetic attempt at sharing this joy with his father.

Initially his father stayed at home, medicated and more or less house-bound. It was the strange utterances his father made, particularly in the shower every morning, that startled Owen the most. He'd string unassociated words together, almost singing them, and laughing to himself.“I amnot the alien who smoked the last Jeremy!”“Candy eater eighty, sixty-seven.” The doctors called these “word salads,” and said they were one of the defining symptoms of schizophrenia.
Word salads
: the title sounded so unprofessional, so unreal. More so than his father's delusions and hallucinations.

One morning, two weeks after his father was diagnosed, they were all eating breakfast together. His mother and Alex had finished up quickly so they could get in the shower before Owen. It was just the two of them at the table, quietly sipping too-sweet tea and crunching burnt toast. Neither of them was comfortable with the idea of schizophrenia just yet.

Nothing triggered it – no loud noise, no sudden movements – but his father jumped up from his chair, slung an arm above his head, pursed his lips, and started into a word salad. Something about it frightened Owen out of the kitchen and into his parents' bedroom. He dove down onto their waterbed, lifted slowly up and down by the wave, and felt nauseated by the guilt. He felt like he'd just betrayed and embarrassed his father. He held his body still, as if he could pause life, maybe rewind it. He came back to the kitchen with his social studies textbook, pretending he'd only bolted from the room to get the book.

“I've got a final today.”He flashed the book. It fell out of his sweaty adolescent hand and crashed onto the floor, buckling the hardcover corner.

His father nodded, knowingly.“I'm sorry about that,Owen. I dunno. I thought it might be funny…I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders and slumped his head. “My pills aren't magic, okay?”

Prior to his father's illness,Owen had never viewed his parents as a couple. He saw them only as two parents, living together, whose sole function was to raise and support their children. It took watching them fall apart, layer after layer, to see them as a couple who had loved each other. A couple who had loved each other in a way that one couldn't persist without the other.

The wall between the laundry room and his parents' bedroom was paper thin; he could've poked a finger through it. One night he heard them talking as he searched for his pajamas in a ball of clothes in the dryer.

“It's the pills, Claire. I'm into this, but I'm just …not … it's a side effect, it's not me…just keep going, here…just keep going, like this.”

“It's okay, Roger.” A pause. She must've rolled over. “Just get some sleep, we can always try again, the next time you feel ready.”

“I can stop taking the pills for a few days and–”

“Roger, don't you even
think
of it! I'm going to watch you swallow every pill now, like you're a fucken baby, d'you hear me? Just go to sleep!”

A slight whimpering then, like she was trying to hold it in, but couldn't.

It was the first time Owen had heard his mother yell at his father and it might have been the first time he'd heard her swear. So who was she now? She'd stopped folding towels and putting them in the hall closet; he was fishing his pajamas and tomorrow's outfit out of the dryer.

As he snuck out of the laundry room that night, he thought of the time his father was committed. Alex, who had taken to spying on his father, caught him outside and looking in a neighbour's window one night at 2 a.m., and ran to get his mother out of bed. Alex woke Owen and they watched the scene from their bedroom window like a movie. Their mother ran outside in her blue-and-white nightgown, looking frantic and disheveled, and for the first time: old. She wept madly, wiping tears away with the flattened palms of her hands as she raced towards him. Owen read it as a mix of fear and sadness. Like she knew in that moment what she had been ignoring about her husband those last few weeks. They watched her run up behind their father, who was going through the neighbour's garbage cans, and haul him back into the house. She dragged him inside; she managed to overpower him as he fought back, livid that she was sabotaging his secret lead. He claimed the neighbour was the kingpin of a nationwide sex slave trade. That he'd been working on the story for weeks now, and his employer was expecting a final draft.

Their neighbour at the time was a seventy-eight-year-old widow named Elsie. She was so innocent, so bored with life, that she made pies and cookies for Owen and Alex on a regular basis. Dropping them over, and coming back for the Tupperware, was an excuse for social interaction.

His mother burst back into the porch, dragging their father by the shoulder like a misbehaving kid. The door bounced off the wall and hit their father as they came back into the house. The black nylon of his jacket was balled up in her hand. Owen listened in on his parents from the hallway and heard his mother shove their father down onto the couch. She was standing above him, arms folded, waiting for an explanation. They were yelling, then calm, and then yelling. Owen and Alex hid in the bathroom when they heard their parents coming down the hall towards their father's office.