Critical Injuries (10 page)

“And he took me to the Calm Room, just the two of us.” Good lord, what's the calm room? And what would be the names of the Serenity Corps's other rooms? “He sat down with me and held my hands and told me to sit quietly for as long as it took, breathe in and out, count my breaths. That's an exercise for beginners, really, so I was almost upset again, that he thought I was just a beginner, but then when I did it, it worked, I got a grip on myself, just like when I really was a beginner.”

Is she trying to tell Isla something? About origins, maybe?

“So we sat for a while with me breathing and looking into his eyes, and finally he nodded and asked me what happened. So I told him and said you were paralyzed and, you know, that you're not old enough to just have to lie there, here, for the rest of your life, forever.”

As if there might be an age when such a thing wouldn't matter?

The rest of it — the rest of it, Isla will refuse to absorb.

“I said I had to come because, you know, you're my mother.” Oh, triumph! “I mean, mostly we're supposed to overcome attachments like that, so we're sort of attached and unattached at the same time, for everything the same way. I was kind of scared he'd be disappointed in me, but he was really nice. Well, I mean he's always nice, but he just nodded like he understood. About being attached after all. Because you're my mum.”

Now she has tears in her eyes. So, oddly, does Isla. Hearing Alix use the word
mum
in that intimate tone, that's one reason. The other is rage: that people, anyone, her own child, could imagine that overcoming attachment, or becoming attached and unattached to the same degree, or feeling attached or unattached in the same way for everything, or anything, could be a goal, or any kind of achievement.

This is so stringently celibate and sterile a notion, and at the same time so radically promiscuous, and must require such a corkscrewing and compressing of emotion and thought that it has to be crippling. So this is how Master Ambrose keeps his followers: he leeches onto them when they're casting about, sadly or desperately, for safety and peace for their hearts, then gives them impossible ways to achieve safety and peace.

He must take them for everything they've got; by which Isla does not mean money.

Did she not quite know this before? Whatever Alix has said about the Serenity Corps, Master Ambrose, it must have been caught in the net of Isla's own failure. Because when Alix spoke of
love
and
support
and
community
, it was as if she'd never experienced such amazements before. Quite a blow.

There may be some virtue, although a very bitter virtue, in having to lie here and listen.

“He said he understood, and that sometimes it was important to learn more about the quality of attachments by acting on them. So I could come.” Could? That fat bastard needed to give Alix permission?

Jamie says, “For God's sake, Alix, who gives a shit? This isn't about you and your goofy friends, it's about Mother.” There was a time he and Alix were close. Maybe they still are, in their ways. Maybe only a brother — certainly not a mother — can say things like that.

Alix shakes her head, making her hair fly up slightly. “Starglow. And I know it's about Mum. That's one reason I'm here. Because of what Master Ambrose said, about why it might be so wonderful that this happened.”

Master Ambrose and Alix have rendered Isla speechless again. She is having some trouble breathing. Something in the nearby machinery is changing its tune also, starting to stutter. “Oh fuck,” Jamie says.

“No, really. Listen. When he started talking, it all began to make sense. Of course I should have known it would, I'm just not advanced enough to know for myself, but I keep learning and getting better at figuring things out because sometimes you just need to hear something said and you know it's the truth, and next time you can get closer to that on your own.”

Next time. There's a happy thought. Isla is catching her breath again, the machinery is resuming its rhythm. Was that a dangerous moment? Does she have to take special care? Does she, for instance, have to coolly count breaths in the interests of sustaining serenity?

“He said this doesn't need to be awful. That it's actually a huge opportunity and a person can be blessed, really, by sorrow or trouble. And how if you can't move, it can make you go into yourself instead and find the truths of the spirit. Because to feel the eternal flame of true serenity, a person needs to be still, and here you are, set in the midst of stillness even though I know you don't mean to be, but you are, and you could use it, not be hurt or damaged, that it's not awful but a possibility, you see?”

Alix has made herself breathless. No wonder. This might be funny if Alix were somebody else's daughter, raised a fool by some other person. How does that young fellow's, that freckled shooter's, that Roddy's mother feel at the moment? As if her child, too, is no one she knows, has gone far beyond foreignness, become truly alien? Here are these clasped white hands, this intense face with its familiar features, this expanse of sweet daughterly skin Isla has touched and caressed and bandaged and marvelled at, and it has become something else altogether.

Even Master Ambrose must have a mother. A peculiar outcome for her, as well, a son of such strange, compelling needs and such resulting strange, compelling powers. But perhaps it's no surprise, perhaps he learned what he knows at his mother's knee. Perhaps she is evangelical in her own ways. It's hard to imagine Master Ambrose's mother.

“He said stillness, however you achieve it, is necessary for lighting the flame of serenity. In a way, you're luckier than me because I keep trying and trying and I haven't been still enough yet, I've never quite got there. So if you look at it that way, this is really a blessing because here you are, you walked right into it.”

“Alix,” Jamie says. He is tugging her arm now, trying to move her, remove her. “For Christ's sake.”

“No, really.” She pulls free. They used to wrestle in the living room and out on the lawn when they were little, when he was maybe eight and she was five, nine and six, ten and seven. Then they stopped. They became, maybe, more conscious of bodies, differences, awkwardnesses. “It's important. What he said, it's so perfect and right. I'm not evolved enough to explain it very well, but he said if I could remember his words, because he reached the other side ages ago, anyway, he said that could help pull you over to the other side, too. So honestly, Mum, all this could be incredibly lucky. Being touched by the flame without even trying, that's really something.”

It sure is. There's quite a silence. Because, Isla supposes, there is really nothing to say to this particular, relatively innocent, insanity.

Finally good Lyle steps forward. He puts his large hands, with their long and talented fingers, on Alix's shoulders. “I think,” he says fairly gently, “that might be enough. Your mother needs to rest as much as she can. Why don't the three of us take a break, go for coffee?” A break? As if Isla is hard work, difficult to endure, like coal mining or building a railway? But why pick at Lyle? He's not the one going on about how lucky she is to be touched by the flames of paralysis.

He and Jamie are exchanging glances behind Alix's back. They must be close, in their way. Isla wonders if Jamie ever feels angry with Lyle, just for knowing so much? It's hard not to be rescued, but it must be difficult in other ways to have been rescued.

“But,” Alix tries to insist, “this is the moment.”

“I think perhaps not,” says Lyle, and turns her more firmly away.

“Mum,” Alix cries. This is familiar: Alix the toddler who's tripped over a curb, banging her round perfect knees; Alix the little girl who's fallen off her two-wheeler, scraping a tender elbow and gashing a smooth, straight, vitamin-enriched leg; Alix the teenager gape-mouthed with grief for her father, her brother, herself. All those Alixes crying out, “Mum.”

Isla breathes in and breathes out, counts the breaths up to ten, and then again. An exercise for beginners? All right. And something to be grateful for and attentive to because she so easily might not be breathing, but for a centimetre here, a centimetre there? That's really something.

“You go with Lyle, sweetie,” she says, “and I'll count my breaths for a while. It's a nice peaceful sort of thing to do, isn't it?”

Look at that careful, tentative smile, look at that leap of hope in the eyes, that tremble of gratitude — so large a return for something so small. How did Alix learn hope, where did she learn about yearning?

Jamie bends over Isla again. “Sorry. I didn't know how to make her stop. But poor kid, eh? You rest and forget all that shit. We'll see you later.” He touches, or appears to touch, her right hand, or something down there past her vision. She guesses he doesn't quite have the hang of things yet; that she really can't feel a thing.

One night, long after James, and after meeting, but before marrying, Lyle, when it was just Isla, Jamie, and Alix together in that spare rented duplex she'd moved them into, and while Isla was loading the dishwasher after a dinner her children had only picked at, Alix came howling downstairs, hurtling into the kitchen, throwing herself into a chair, throwing her head down onto her arms.

Because she had walked in on Jamie, in the bathroom, with a syringe, a small trail of blood trickling where he'd tried, and failed, to shoot up. Isla was loading the dishwasher at the same moment Jamie was loading his arm. That's how little she knew, how out of touch she was then. Isla heard him yell, “Get the fuck out of here,” dropped a plate, and then Alix was there, weeping at the kitchen table.

The shattered plate, the weeping Alix, Jamie upstairs with a needle going into his arm — Isla called Lyle. That must have been the first time she ever called him for help. And he came.

By dawn many phone calls had been made and Jamie was bundled into Lyle's car, speeding towards a private rehab centre thanks to Lyle's contacts. By dawn Alix was finally asleep upstairs in her room, and Isla had crashed downstairs on the couch. Maybe she should have stayed awake. Maybe she should have kept Alix awake, kept them both talking and breathing, talking and breathing until something was clear enough. Maybe she has made a habit of losing steam at critical moments, sleeping through turning points. That wasn't the first time.

“Love you,” Isla says as they leave. She means all three of them. Lyle comes back to her bedside, gives a thumbs-up. He is kind, he is good, there's no way not to keep knowing that.

One thing for sure, Alix and Jamie aren't the children middle-class mothers, ex-wives and wives, vice-presidents and part owners of their own clever, creative concerns anticipate having. If women like Isla expect extremes in their children, it must be extremes of goodness or brilliance. They anticipate sturdiness, capability, security, confidence, all the natural results of their own good intentions and without severe penalties for their failures. They certainly do not expect to raise children with psychic holes in their sides large and open enough to stick whole fists into.

Breathe carefully, breathe slowly and count.

A nurse hustles in. Everyone who works here is always in a hurry. Lucky them. “Good, you're on your own. We want you to rest, so I'm going to give you something to help you sleep, all right?” As if a woman who can neither feel nor move has a choice.

At least in this circumstance another needle causes no pain. Does that count as looking, in some Alix-approved way, on the bright side?

How strange it would be to believe in something, anything, the way Alix does. What kind of blind leap would it require? Because of her work, Isla knows a good deal about theories of belief, but that's really only to do with methods of persuasion, not faith. Faith is peculiar. Faith is beyond her.

How about hope, then?

How about sleep? Her vision is blurring, a strange but appealing, cozy, warm blanket of peace descending over every skittering thought in her head. Maybe like Jamie during those terrible years. Except he grew thin and wild, he shook and trembled with his violent desire to be tranquil. Isla, perceiving remotely how easing and enfolding and protecting this feels, and how a person might never want to emerge, thinks that Jamie must, after all, have been brave and even quite strong to crawl out. She must remember to ask him about that. She thinks, “Oh, this is nice, no wonder he loved it so much,” and slips quietly, darkly, under again.

Winging It

Roddy can't believe he cried. In front of people. Men. He hasn't cried since they told him about his mother, and then okay, he did, but in his own room, alone. Partly for her, or what he remembered of her; but mainly for the too-lateness of everything: her finding him, him finding her, them explaining and saying things. Her being, then, permanently all the way up, finally happy. What was no longer possible.

When he was little, he supposes he cried sometimes. He must have with her, little kids do. Then a few times with his grandmother, but that was more when he did something like fall off his bike, like the time he busted his arm flying over a curb. Not when it was just hurt feelings, and never in front of another guy, like a vice-principal, or even, maybe especially, Mike. Not his dad, either. It would have made his dad awkward if he had to do something, or say something, about Roddy in tears.

Now he's fallen all to shit in front of two cops and a lawyer. Like he's a baby. When shit, what he is, is an armed robber, think of that!

“I'm an armed robber,” he thinks, imagining that will make him swell and grow tall in his chair; but
armed robber
is a way bigger thing than he ever set out to be. Another thing he didn't think of before: the words. They are serious and large, and he isn't either serious or large.

Mike was large, and he sure sounded serious in the planning, but then, so did Roddy, and neither of them meant it to be as serious as it's turned out. Roddy here. That woman. And Mike — where is he? “Your friend,” says the bigger cop as if he's listening to the inside of Roddy's head, “your buddy in crime, he's just down the hall, in case you're interested. Also if you're interested, he's saying he had nothing to do with all this, it was your idea, your fuck-up. What do you think about that?”

What Roddy thinks is “No.” Then, “Can that be true?”

Mike's been his friend forever. They even got teased about it one time last year. “Faggots,” said a guy whose dad was a soldier who'd just retired and moved to town off a military base. The new guy'd grown up on military bases. Maybe that made him stupid. Hardly anybody ever messed with them, especially with Mike due to his size, but Roddy, too, because he could go in low and hard and mean when he had to. Mike started getting major big, not only tall but bulking up, too, when he was about fourteen, and Roddy already knew, for want of size, to be fast, so — they're a team. Mike whipped around and decked the guy, a clean right-hand punch. When the guy got up, Roddy head-butted his gut. Roddy and Mike touched fists in the air. Because they're not faggots, they're buddies, like the cop said except not with that edge the way the cop said it.

They look after each other. They know some stuff.

They both got suspended. Two weeks that time. “You have to learn to ignore some people,” Roddy's grandmother pleaded. “Just don't react. Walk away.” But she didn't know what she was talking about. If he just walked away, he'd be fucked. Mike said his parents went on about maybe not letting him and Roddy hang out any more. Like, Mike said, they could decide who anybody hung out with.

When they were young, everybody in their families used to say it was nice they were friends and a good thing they had each other to hang out with. Nobody minded, everybody figured they were safe and taken care of if they were together, and didn't worry when they took off exploring, prowled country roads, picked up beer bottles to turn in for money, or even found dead birds to bring home and poke at, take apart, and then bury. Could Mike really be just down the hall now, telling other cops he's totally innocent and it was all Roddy's idea, nothing to do with him? That part was in the script, that it was nothing to do with him, but he was supposed to say the guy was a stranger with a tattoo on one arm, a mole on the back of his hand. Roddy's name wasn't going to come up at all, no reason it would.

“They'll check me out,” Mike said, and Roddy nodded. They watched TV, they saw movies, they knew that much. “But there's no way to connect me. They can suspect me, I guess, for a while, but they won't get anywhere.”

Roddy would be long gone, the money under his bed, the gun back in its rack in his basement. “What about that we're friends, though?” Roddy wondered. “If they check you out, won't they do me, too?”

“So what? They won't look very hard. They come to your door and you're all yawning, just getting up.” The script called for Roddy, hearing the news, to ask worried questions about his friend Mike: was he okay, was he hurt, did anything bad happen to him? “Nothing to it. Just what you'd say if it was true anyway.” This was also part of their rehearsals, Mike playing cops, Roddy expressing concern for his pal.

Wasted, all wasted. They're really winging it now.

They've had those punch-ups together, they've swum and biked and smoked up together, gone to movies and dances and for that matter shoplifted together. CDs, mainly. Nature books, for Roddy's pictures of tiny, beautiful creatures. They hang out with other people too, sometimes, but always at the root of it, it's the two of them, and maybe it started just because Mike and his mother were the first on the doorstep when Roddy and his dad came to town, but that doesn't matter. Those moments just happen. Good and bad moments, Roddy is beginning to see.

So if Mike ratted him out, that'd be pretty incredible.

If Mike ratted him out, it'd mean Roddy couldn't trust anyone. He'd have to look at everything in some different way.

He probably has to do that anyway.

When he and his dad moved to town, and Mike and his mother came to the door, how come Mike wanted to be friends? How was it he didn't already have friends? Roddy knows why he took to Mike, but how come it worked the other way, too?

“So what do you think about that?” the cop who isn't so big is asking. “Your buddy saying the whole thing was you, and he's as surprised as everyone else. You know what he says? He says he's real upset because you took advantage of him having that job. That you knew there was money because he mentioned it, just talking to you like a friend would. And also, by the way, that he took the gun away from you. Which also, by the way, the husband of the woman you shot can confirm.”

Mike did take the gun, Roddy has a recollection of Mike lifting it out of his hands. But it wasn't the way the cop makes it sound, like they wrestled for it, like Mike was doing some brave thing.
The woman you shot.

Imagine if
armed robber
isn't all he is, imagine if there's worse words for him.

There were her eyes. There was blood.

There was that guy in the doorway. He must be the husband, who saw Mike take the gun away.

Even with the rough, red and black striped blanket they've brought him, he shivers.

What the cop says Mike's been saying, it's what somebody desperate to get clear likely would say: that Roddy took advantage, that Mike was surprised as anyone else.

They didn't rehearse for getting caught, that's the trouble. Getting caught didn't seem possible. But it would make an awful kind of sense if Mike laid the whole thing on him. Because Roddy's already fucked, and Mike can still save himself.

He shrugs. “Whatever,” he says.

The younger cop turns red and slams his fist on the table between them. Roddy and his lawyer both jump. He imagines good-cop, bad-cop, everybody knows that routine, but can somebody make his own face go red on purpose? “You little punk, what do you mean,
whatever
? This is deeper shit than you've ever imagined, so don't give me
whatever
, you little asshole.”

“Hey, hold on,” says Roddy's lawyer. “You can't talk to him that way.”

“The fuck I can't. Listen,” and he leans forward over the table, with his skin all tight and a vein in his neck popping, which it doesn't seem possible he could make happen if he wasn't truly angry, “you know how much money you were going to be getting? Three hundred and forty-two bucks. Guess that's a lot of popcorn and dope for a punk like you, but for three hundred and forty-two bucks, which you didn't even get, you shot somebody. How about that?”

Mike had figured there'd be a couple of thousand, maybe more. What happened?

“Guess you didn't know Doreen called in and told the day clerk to take everything in the box so far to the bank. So all you would've got was the take from part of a day. Different from last year, right? Different from what your buddy told you when the two of you were setting this up?”

Roddy stares into his lap. He has nothing to say.

Of course the cop calls her Doreen. Everybody knows everybody in this town. That's probably the biggest reason he and Mike wanted to leave: so they could have lives without everyone knowing. Even the good stuff's hard to take. Having some woman stop him in a store and say something like “Your grandmother tells me you're doing very well in school,” that's the kind of thing makes him and Mike crazy. Or having some guy from her church go past on the street and say “Quite the haircut you got there, young fellow.” Like it's anybody's business if Roddy wants stubble with his scalp shining through. It's a cool look. Sleek. Sort of dangerous. Anyplace else, people might notice, but nobody'd say anything because they wouldn't know him. They wouldn't know his dad or his grandmother, either. He'd be free. Mike, too. Mike says people keep their eyes on them more than they used to in stores, like they know the two of them have a little distraction routine when they shoplift, but aren't doing anything about it, just watching.

Anyway, they don't take anything huge or expensive, never clothes or other kinds of stuff that get bought for them anyway. It's just little things they've ever stolen, well, that and money a couple of times from purses a couple of the rich girls left lying around at school. Not much money, no big deal, although he guesses it would have been if they'd been caught. Which they weren't, although the vice-principal called them separately to the office to ask questions, and phoned their homes to say there might be a problem. For himself, Roddy said to his grandmother and his dad, “I don't know why they'd think it was us. Mr. Dougherty's a jerk anyway, and he doesn't like us, and the girls who lost the money are rich and we're not, so maybe he figures we'd be easy to blame.”

Nobody likes rich people. Nobody cares what happens to them. Mike said, “It's not like they'd miss it,” meaning the rich girls, and also the stores. Even Doreen, if it hadn't all got fucked up, she wouldn't have lost anything. “She's got insurance,” Mike said. “They just pay her back. It's nothing to them.”

All small stuff. A little excitement, kind of a game, nothing really bad, nothing to take very seriously, even though people like Roddy's dad and his grandmother would have taken it seriously, if they'd known. If they'd got caught, his grandmother would have been really embarrassed.

Oh Jesus, he keeps forgetting. Here he sits, and he still can't keep a grip on knowing what's happened.

“Right, then,” says the younger cop, checking the tape recorder, looking hard at Roddy, a real down-to-business expression. “It's your turn to start talking. From about noon. Everything you did. Step by step. If you made a ham sandwich for yourself, we want to hear about it. Down to did you use mustard and was the bread whole wheat or white. Understand? Every goddamn move you made.”

Have they charged him? There's some kind of difference between getting arrested and being charged, but he's not exactly clear what it is, and he can't remember what-all's exactly been said. That's what his dad got the lawyer for, he supposes, to know that kind of thing; except when Roddy looks at him, searching for some kind of clue, the guy just nods. He's serious-looking, middle-aged, thin, not a very good haircut. He doesn't look successful, is what Roddy means.

He also doesn't look glad to have Roddy as a client. He doesn't look sympathetic. He doesn't look as if he likes Roddy, or as if he cares much what happens to him.

Shit, if that's his own lawyer, what about everyone else? He'll never be able to go anyplace in this town ever again. People will whisper, they'll stare, they'll be like the cop who called him a punk. Some of them'll be scared.
Armed robber.

He's lost track again. Like he'll ever be wandering around town any more. It's his grandmother who'll have to do that, and his dad.

And Mike?

Okay, he can go step-by-step through his day. When he gets to about suppertime, eating fast, leaving the table, going up to his room, something will start coming to him, somehow he'll get himself from his room to that field without any detour to Goldie's. Because what can they prove?

Oh. Probably everything. Never mind Mike, there was the guy in the doorway. The husband.

Maybe the woman, too. Oh God, he hopes so.

He looks around wildly, sees only men and grey walls and bright light. No way out, no way in the world. All three men go tense. He can feel their muscles filling up more space in the room.

Think. Think.

Well, he guesses, fuck it.

Mainly, fuck it. Never mind whatever Mike's saying, there's no really good reason to drag anybody else into the shit, Roddy can be that much of a good person. He would like to be something not bad, anyway; something that, even if it's just to himself, says he's not totally bad.