Critical Injuries (13 page)

“I won't.”

She was fairly proud of herself, felt she'd demonstrated in this exchange some of the professional skills she would need. Naturally she was disappointed in James; not only because he was so opposed, but because he was so objectionable, not to mention transparent, about it. When he began touching her breasts in bed that night, they wound up making love with unusual, forceful, nearly angry and equal passion. It felt very good.

So did the work. Starting off writing bits of ad copy, she found an unexpected talent for adjectives: words like
vital
and
discerning
. She developed a gift for verbs, too, although verbs turned out to be of less consequence in advertisements, at least in print, and might even be absent altogether. She told James, “It feels as if I'm exercising a part of my brain I didn't even know was there. I mean really exercising, like jogging or lifting weights.”

James was not Martin's only client. Nor was he his biggest one. When Martin set out on his own, he drew some clients of his former agency with him, and worked hard to get more. Isla watched him and imagined this helped her understand better how James's very busy days went. Martin scrutinized Isla's work and often told her she would have to start over. Every Friday, over a long lunch, they talked about clients, bounced slogans and presentation ideas off each other. It was very satisfying when sales charts sparked upwards as a result, presumably, of certain campaigns. Two heads did work better than one. Martin, the artist, covered napkins with little drawings, showing her shapes and plots and how words might fit into and around them. He said clients found her easy to talk to, and clever, and quick, but with a comforting appeal. “Will you be mad if I say maternal?”

She did not, of course, attend any meetings between Martin and James. It seemed to her that James was now not unhappy that she was occupied in ways that interested her, and that she came home as lively and as tired as he did, and with stories to tell, entertaining information to offer — was, in short, not a drain or a particular strain on him. There was money in it to boot, which might not matter to him but, somewhat to her surprise, did matter to her. Nor did the kids seem to mind. She'd read somewhere that the successful raising of children amounted to gracefully encouraging a long succession of farewells. At first she had found the idea inexpressibly sad, saw herself having her heart perpetually torn, waving an endless bye-bye.

Madeleine said, “Your father would have adored these children, it would have made him so happy, how well you've all done.” How had Madeleine borne losing her husband? Isla sometimes looked at James as he watched the late TV news, or as he lay sleeping, and wondered how she would feel if he vanished. She thought she would miss his boldness and determination and impatience. Certain habits. A warmth in the bed. The knowledge there was something, someone, to fall back on if need be.

Between Bert and her job, Madeleine was too busy, but James's parents would have taken over Jamie and Alix's spare-time care, if Isla had considered that wise. “Why have a babysitter when you have us?” James's mother asked, and there was no good, kind answer. Isla said, “I know, and it's very generous of you to offer, but we want them to have a place nearby to go to after school, and anyway Mavis has a houseful of kids and that's good for them.” Mavis, who lived down the street, was large and red-faced and ate a great many chocolates, which as an addiction was preferable to most other things, a sort of jolly attachment to sweetness. Isla thought Mavis looked like someone who enjoyed kids, embraced them, but wouldn't hurt or ruin them. There were no such guarantees with James's parents who had, after all, raised James, who had turned around and pushed his father aside.

Isla saw that she no longer regarded this as admirable, or inevitable. She supposed she saw these matters now as a parent might, not as a child; as someone vulnerable, not as natural victor.

Nevertheless, ten-year-old Jamie was in Mavis's care the late afternoon he and a bunch of kids were tearing around Mavis's back yard and he tripped. Mavis called Isla from the hospital emergency department. “He'll be okay but it was close. You'll want to come.”

Martin just said, “Go.”

She thought she would try to reach James from the hospital, saving time.

Mavis was holding a restless, upset seven-year-old Alix, and trying also to keep a grip on her own eight-year-old Tim when Isla raced into the waiting room. “I told them not to run with sticks in their hands,” Mavis said, “but they did anyway, I guess. He tripped. He's got a pretty bad gash on his forehead, but it missed his eye as far as I could tell. I think they're just putting in stitches right now. I'm sorry, Isla. I told them not to run with those sticks. They were pretending they were guns.”

Isla's mistake. She wouldn't let him have a toy gun, felt those awful computer games were bad enough, and stupidly hadn't foreseen that Jamie would then just conjure make-believe weapons. “Not your fault,” she told Mavis, because although it was, it also could as easily have happened in her own yard. “Settle down, Alix, please, you're not helping.”

Jamie had eighteen stitches. His entire forehead was a swollen, discoloured, angry-looking wound. This all came as a big surprise to James when he got home, since in the hospital panic she'd forgotten, after all, to call him; a difficult omission to account for. “Jesus, Isla,” he said, and to Jamie, “That'll teach you not to be careless and do what you're told. There's a reason for rules. Maybe you'll pay better attention next time.” He folded Alix into his lap. “You won't be so silly, will you?” he asked, and she shook her head solemnly. Gratified, Isla thought. A little creepy.

“I think we've all learned things today,” she said, and took the desolate Jamie into her own arms. “It was a hard one, wasn't it, honey?”

At work the next day Martin asked, “Everything turn out okay?” and Isla nodded. He had four kids of his own, and said, “Shit happens, doesn't it? It's fucking scary, not being able to keep them out of harm's way all the time.” That about summed it up.

Jamie and Alix kept on changing. This, it seemed, was how a parent learned to keep saying farewell, waving goodbye. One year, one season, one day, Jamie was loud and clumsy, so that every time he moved it seemed something toppled off a table or fell from a wall, and the next moment he was quiet, precise in his movements, his body held tight into itself even when he was running. He got a pimple on his chin, his voice cracked and changed, he was clumsy again, but quiet again also, speaking in short and often sullen bursts. There was a rhythm to this, Isla supposed. The main thing to know about this rhythm was that nothing lasted forever.

Alix was confident, flying high on her father's shoulders, then for a while unsure and timid. She had a large and loud array of best friends, giggling helplessly in the basement, screaming in small-girl hysterical pleasure, and then she could spend whole glum weekends on the sofa, sunk in private sorrows she wouldn't discuss.

Each of them, although never in any coordinated way, ricocheted off joy, swivelled into sadness, plunged into mute irritability, bounced up again into joy. There wasn't much to assume about either of them, not a lot to hold onto. Isla thought Jamie might be more consistently thoughtful and possibly even more kind and responsible. Alix she took to be turning into someone fairly tender-hearted but also indulged into assuming that whatever she desired would triumph. In their different ways, she thought they would finally be people she'd be happy to know, by and large.

So much hope, so much investment, so much love — she would die before she would let anything bad happen to either of them. Jamie had the faint but discernible white permanent scar on his forehead to prove how close disaster could come in a moment of recklessness, heedlessness. “We're lucky,” James said sometimes, and she would reach out to touch wood, and wish he'd keep quiet.

She wondered if he ever contemplated his children looking at him and saying something like “Old man. Get out of the way.” She supposed not. If he did, he would surely be wary of them, and suspicious.

His own father had been taken quite by surprise.

James had ten stores, and now and then there was a ripple as he cruised close to the edge of going too far. Even if he hadn't talked about what was happening, she thought she knew when one of those times was at hand. His jaw muscles clenched harder and more often, and he got impatient not only with her, and sometimes Jamie, but even with Alix. When he was very snappish, she understood they might be on the verge of losing everything.

Except they couldn't lose everything, because there was her work, as well. With savings and a relatively small loan she bought into a partnership with Martin. They hired more staff. Like James, they were flying, although comparatively low to the ground. She and Martin mainly saw each other only at work. They each had other concerns, other demands on them, but she thought they liked and trusted each other and certainly they worked well together. It probably helped that otherwise they didn't appeal to each other. And that there was no slowing down. And that they had to keep learning, and also making things, campaigns and ideas, where nothing had existed before. They were successful, and that created its own adrenalin, a precious excitement. Isla felt blessed and indulged by all this that had fallen, really, into her lap: Madeleine's word,
serendipitous
.

It didn't always look as if James had much fun. That strokeable jaw of his grew heavier, his long thighs thicker. He would never be fat, but he did have a belly he didn't always hold in. The nice way of seeing this was that he had the appearance of a man of substance.

She was changing too, had a pudgy ease to her own belly unless she was careful, and definite lines around her eyes and the sides of her mouth. She was getting the occasional grey hair amidst the mainly dark red, but didn't plan to do anything about that unless it began coming in streaky and strange. She joined a fitness club and got up a half hour earlier to make time for a quick workout. Two childbirths had broadened her hips somewhat, but that was like a badge, or a medal, she thought, and not unattractive.

She began to imagine, a decade or so into the future, both kids grown and gone, herself and James left mainly to their own devices. She thought that would not be a particularly passionate or dramatic or freshly involving stage, but would likely be perfectly tolerable. It would then be a matter of whether tolerable was enough, and she suspected that when the time came, she would decide it was not. They quarrelled, sometimes as nastily as when he'd objected to her starting work, but mainly about the normal gratings of regular life: what dates suited them both for vacations, who would attend parents' night at the school. She figured they were partners, not unlike she and Martin although less scrupulous and polite, and in a far different sort of enterprise.

When the kids were grown and gone, she would turn her attention to other possibilities. Meanwhile she and James still now and then turned to each other in bed, and each said on these occasions, “I love you,” which on her part was no longer true, at least not in the old, loyal, reliant, encompassing way. He was there. That was one of the virtues of her theory of the gate, being gated: they were both simply there.

Martin began an affair with one of their clients. Because it involved a client, although also maybe because he couldn't keep such exciting news to himself, he told Isla. She said, “Be careful,” meaning not only because it could hurt their company if it went badly, but because Martin liked his family and was not the sort of man who would enjoy discomfort over any long haul. Discomfort, of course, being quite different from excitement. Isla considered whether having an affair might add a vivid subplot to her own life. His romance was making Martin quite sparky and youthful. But she couldn't think who to have an affair with who wouldn't be more effort than he was worth, or more dangerous. Not to mention, when could she fit such a momentous thing into her schedule?

Anyway, disloyalty didn't interest her, even if Martin's pink, electric rejuvenation was an illuminating sort of advertisement for its benefits.

Sex, thoughts of sex — maybe, on good days, of love — must have been particularly in the atmosphere, a congestion of hormones, budding and renewed, troubling the vision, distorting the air, creating waves of heat, causing hallucinations of oasis on the horizon. All that sort of steaminess, breathlessness. Not just Martin. Not merely Isla's own speculations, which anyway were nothing near real desires. Whatever Jamie was pursuing at fifteen, perhaps only hopes, he was pursuing for the most part out of the house, tremulously and tentatively in love for the first time, with a wiry, thin-chested, sharp-eyed, and soft-tongued girl named Bethany, who joined them for dinner sometimes, or to do homework at the dining room table with Jamie, but who did not often meet Isla's eyes. It was difficult, and unwise, to imagine her little running boy having sex, but she had to suppose that even if he and Bethany were not, he would be wanting to, trying to. There was a sharp sort of reek to him, some alteration of his chemistries, which he couldn't seem to camouflage or control.

Alix, at twelve, was getting ideas of her own. Isla hadn't put them there. The requisite discussion of biology, attraction, affection, had of course provided Alix with no new information. How could it? Isla would have liked to make clearer to her that there was more to it than strokeable jaws and long thighs, but heard her own voice soften and thought she was not entirely credible on the subject. “I know that,” Alix said with weary tolerance. Maybe she did. She did not, however, know enough to follow Jamie's example out of the house.