Critical Injuries (23 page)

That this worked both ways was not exactly a comfort.

So was one supposed to try to fill in all those blanks, sketch word-pictures of all the multiple joys of half a lifetime, as well as the griefs, the greatest of which he was now recounting in his spare way? Or should one better just recite the facts, the chronology of events, leaving emotion where it perhaps ought to be for people like them: all in the future, in their own hands?

Naturally it was important that she know how he'd cared for and about his dead wife. Because that was a whole large lost part of his life, and also because if he hadn't, what would that say about him? She wouldn't have wanted to find herself in the country for an isolated weekend with a man with a cold, easy-come, easy-go heart.

At least they were just into their forties, not their seventies or sixties or even their fifties. That much less to have to outline, describe, explain. God knew what people did who met up in nursing homes, although perhaps they had an unusual amount of patience and spare time for recounting.

She rearranged her features along, she hoped, the lines of solemn attentiveness. What did Lyle see in her face as he spoke of his dying, dead wife, his two grieving sons whom Isla hadn't yet met, as he hadn't yet met Jamie and Alix, the ups and final down of his own personal, particular crisis? Warmth, she tried to adjust for. Empathy. Sympathy. All that was real enough, perfectly genuine, but having to attend to a display of reality, she noticed, rather took the silky edge off true sentiments.

“One thing about death,” he went on, popping open another beer, “it really hauls you up short.” Isla imagined it would, for sure, although death was by no means the only event that could do that. “I didn't think I was in the wrong life, exactly, I like being a lawyer a lot, and I love my boys, and I was proud how they got through everything, even those tough years when teenagers can go off the rails in the best situation, which we were not in, the three of us, anyway, obviously I wasn't going to give up any of that. At the same time, the boys would be leaving and moving into their own lives. Sandy and I'd had a sort of picture of a future when that happened, and it wasn't that it didn't suit me, too, as long as she was going to be the other part of it, but once she wasn't, it was out of the question. It wasn't me, just on my own.”

He paused. So Isla had to say, “What was it that turned out not to be you? What had your plans been?” Honestly, she was happy to ask. These were clues, as well as distant lost dreams.

“Oh, we'd figured that as soon as the boys were settled in university, we'd both take a year off from work and hit the road. We talked about places we'd travelled to and wanted to see again, like, I don't know, Paris for me, and some awful little hotel in some awful little country in Africa for Sandy, and places neither of us had ever been but wanted to go to, like maybe India, China. We were going to take a year and a whack of our money doing that, and then we figured we could do it again every few years.

“But you know, to be honest I'd have liked travelling with Sandy, I think, because she was pretty adventurous and curious and damn near fearless as well, so it would have been a new way of seeing for me, I figured, even the places I'd already been. But without her, I'd only have been thinking about how much better it'd have been with her, and I'd have been miserable for a whole lot of reasons, not least that I'm not, myself, a happy traveller.”

This surprised Isla. For some reason she'd assumed that a man who looked like her picture of a cowboy, at least at that moment, which was to say a lanky sort of fellow in blue jeans, might have cowboy-like qualities. A range-traveller, a roamer, and perhaps, just to complete the picture, even a laconic one. It was also disorienting that his dead wife was coming to life in ways that did not reflect her notion of someone named Sandy, someone safely unmysterious, which Isla had maybe mistaken for safely unremarkable.

Imagine being a person of whom it was said that she died with all the grace she could muster. Isla imagined desperate resistance, a distinct and helpless shortage of anything remotely like grace.

At the late end of that first day, warming up in the living room from the chill of the evening, Lyle stroked Isla's neck, her arms, her throat. Her fingers were tentatively on the bones of his stranger's spine. She was the one who said, “Let's go to bed,” and he nodded.

What she remembers most vividly from those earliest days is her surprised, startling pleasure. She thought then it had to be rooted in the freedom of knowing nothing depended on this, because nothing was required or would come of it. Some weeks later, though, she realized if that were ever true, it no longer was. Familiarity was breeding delights she had not previously imagined herself capable of. Playfulness, the notion of letting go, romping. Simple enjoyment, it turned out, was serious business.

When he said, finally, very quietly, “Tell me about your husband,” they were in bed. Her bed this time, the kids once again with Madeleine. He'd waited a long time to ask this. Perhaps the thought of her former husband had entered his head now because he supposed he was lying between sheets she had previously shared with James. This was not the case, of course. All that bedding was long gone; into the trash, not to the poor, because she'd felt strongly at the time that no one so poor they needed charity sheets deserved the additional corrosion of James's presence in them, however faint. His impression remained; like the Shroud of Turin, only not.

“It's not a nice story.”

“That's okay. At our ages, we have lots of not-nice stories.”

Not like that one. She had her hand on his chest, and felt his breathing and heartbeat speed up, then slow, then speed and then slow. It was a good story to tell lying down in dim light and not looking at him. “I see,” he said at last. “That's pretty bad. Now it makes more sense why you don't trust me. It'd be strange if you did trust me, after all that.”

At which point, of course, and after all that, she began trusting him.

He seemed, extraordinary man, to adapt himself to her history. He has made a point of being a man who phones if he's going to be late, who doesn't make plans he won't keep, who as far as she can see takes care not to tell lies; who is cautious about any possible interpretations of betrayal, except for that one time: sitting in the truck, waiting for her outside Goldie's.

Who rescues her son, as best he can, and would no doubt rescue her daughter, too, if anyone could figure out how to do that.

Jamie, released from six terrible weeks of very expensive rehabilitation, hung around more, and sometimes had conversations, serious-looking ones, with Lyle, the two of them sitting stretched out on lawn chairs, Isla's side-by-side men, a beer each between them. She didn't ask what they talked about; Lyle didn't say. Another demonstration of rectitude.

But Jamie slipped away. Began going out more and more often, came in late, grew grey-skinned again. “He's using,” she said to Lyle, not as a question.

“I expect so.”

“I'm not going back into rehab,” Jamie said flatly when she confronted him. “I'm fine, honest. I learned a good lesson, believe me. I'm not using, I swear.” Little liar, pants on fire. She was investigating other programs and possibilities, seeking more expert advice when the phone rang and when she answered it was Jamie, with the smallest of voices. Charged with trafficking. Asking for help.

The funny thing is, he wound up spending more time in jail than his father did. James was only actually in for six months when all was said and done. Of course, he also lost the business, although for financial reasons, not on the face of it for strictly legal or moral ones. Whereas Jamie spent more than a year behind bars, and according to Lyle was lucky, at that. It was very bad: selling, not just absorbing into his own body, drugs named crack, Ecstasy, and cocaine; with hints, too, of heroin. Isla's boy, skulking through a decayed underworld of needles and spoons, trembling and vomit, filthy rooms, dangerous alleys, this time peddling his baggies of costly pleasures, his parallel universes of cravings, longings, desires. His quest for relief, if not joy, gone entirely sour.

“Did you know he was dealing?” she asked Alix.

“No, just using again. But you knew that, too.”

Isla still can't remember much about Alix from then, except that she was unobtrusive and worked hard and did well. That must have been when her transparency was developing, that eerie knack she has for vanishing so that other people look right through her. It's in her skin now, that transparency. In those wide, fervent eyes.

Who would believe so much misfortune?

Mrs. Lot, probably. Mrs. Job.

Lyle found Jamie the most experienced, best lawyer he could; sat sturdily in the courtroom with Isla as she listened to the grim information of her son's secret life; let her grip his hand hard as she watched Jamie's body ripple with fear, hearing a two-year sentence, to be followed by three years' probation; allowed her to weep in his arms for something that had nothing to do with him, was neither his fault nor his problem. That good man. Who said, “Stop beating yourself up, I don't think there was a damn thing more you could have done to stop him, or help him. That's not how it works.” Isla could not believe him, of course; but she did believe in his dogged kindness. His loyalty.

In prison, much happened for which Jamie was ill-prepared. Sometimes she heard of these things at the time, sometimes not until later. There will be some matters, she supposes, she has never heard, never will hear. But in the course of the fourteen months he actually served, he beat and was beaten, he was bruised, cut, broken and God knows what unspeakable else. He also, she was told by his jailers, his captors, hammered his own head into walls, sweated into sheets, vomited across floors. He spent a number of days in the infirmary for one reason and another, including fevers and chills. She was told that in the early days he sometimes thrashed so violently he had to be bundled into restraints. She saw him, when she visited, when he was capable of her visits, becoming paler and more gaunt, and sometimes he was damaged in obvious ways: a cut lip, a bruised eye.

Then he began filling out again. His eyes cleared, a pinkness budded in his skin. “I'm working out,” he told her proudly. “I'm clean,” he whispered shyly. “You can believe me this time.” It seemed true, looked true. Who did this for him? Someone; not her.

Again because of Lyle's efforts, and because of a particular employment program for promising former offenders, Jamie works — his first and only actual job! At his age! — for a florist. In this most gentle of pursuits, he handles orders and shipping and some of the paperwork. He does not arrange or care for the flowers and plants, since that requires particular talents and knowledge. He says the smells can get overwhelmingly sweet, even nauseating, but he has learned some things about flowers, some of their names, for example. He likes the people he works with, he says, and also the regularity of the money, although not the amount. “I tell you,” he says, “this business of going straight is really hard on the wallet.” Which is a joke, but also true.

This is the sort of job a twenty-year-old might be doing part-time to cover tuition, or rent, not a twenty-five-year-old grown-up. He has some vague notion of someday working with people in trouble; addicts, most likely. When he first mentioned this, Isla asked, stupidly, “Isn't that dangerous?”

“You mean, being around druggies?” They laughed, but yes, that's what she meant. Temptations are tricky, redemption hard to be sure of.

She says now, out of nowhere, to the worried-looking young man leaning over her, trying to smile with his bent-up, little-boy mouth, “I am so proud of you.” A simple, true, hard thing, and she is astonished when his eyes rise up, spill over, with tears. Oh.

People do get restored.

She might, too.

“Where are Alix and Lyle?”

Now he looks uncomfortable. “In court. The guy who, you know, shot you is up again today. Pleading guilty, I think.”

Well, so he should. So he must.

All this may be quite a shock for him, too. Although not necessarily. He could be just evil.

“How about Martin?” Because wouldn't he want to see her?

“He tried, but they won't let anybody in yet but family.” But Martin
is
family: a sturdy, benevolent brother. He was loyal to her when some clients at first shied away, as she'd expected. She herself saw James as a sort of Chernobyl of moral contamination; or, maybe, some clients saw what he did as unremarkable, his misfortune lying only in being caught, in which case they would be dodging the contamination of misfortune. “Fuck 'em,” said Martin, that man of few but useful words.

He'd helped her pack too, when she moved herself and Jamie and Alix into the duplex. He hugged her close, bought her a drink, when she finally confided the existence of Lyle; and although she couldn't quite sympathize, she was as loyal to him when his life blew up. His wife learned about his lover; his lover learned his wife was pregnant. “Christ, Isla, they've both left me! My kids, too, she's taken the kids.” This was real anguish, and for that she did sympathize. She wasn't sure what he'd expected to happen, though; she supposed he'd somehow expected nothing to happen, couldn't picture anything happening. It was a point of view she had learned a good deal about. She fed him, gave him drinks, listened. That's what he'd done for her, which made it, not exactly a debt to repay, but something with a value she understood.