Critical Injuries (37 page)

“But you haven't held up any stores or robbed any people.”

“No!” He looks shocked. “Oh, no.”

“Why not? You're not very good at it yet, I'd have thought you might have come out of jail figuring you needed more practice.” It's so easy to make him shrink. She can scarcely believe she feels badly, but she does. “Sorry,” she says, and can't believe she has also apologized to this young criminal whom she has brooded on, pictured and fantasized vengeance on, for a year.

What happened to the woman eager to scar, keen to draw blood?

Oh, she's still here. She may well always be here. Only, this particular target is a poor thing.

“I guess,” he says cautiously, “you should say whatever you want. I mean, if it was me I'd want to kill me, for sure. But I don't know what to say. Like,
sorry
isn't much. It's probably not anything. But I can't fix it. So I don't know what to do.” This emerges as a cry of sorts. He really is at a loss. Because of course he really is right. And they are going in circles. They are stumped, because there is no answer to her lost legs, his lost heart.

“Would you feel better if I shot you?” she asks kindly. “Just winged you, disabled you, fair's fair, fifty-fifty, eye-for-an-eye, legs-for-legs?”

For a moment, about as long as the moment in Goldie's only perfectly still, no turning, no twisting, he just looks at her. And then a smile begins to flicker at the corners of her mouth. Then at the corners of his, too.

They're not exactly laughing. They are not exactly twinned souls. Nor are they twinned exactly by circumstance, nor has she ceased regretting his existence. As, possibly, he regrets hers. But it's far more than she could have imagined.

In this moment, this glimpse, the terrible bitterness of punishment, the onerous weight of revenge has lifted to make a space for — what? The word for this might, she thinks, after all be
grace
. She is not sure what that is, the entirety of what it is supposed to embrace and encompass, but it is the word that comes to her: she feels, briefly, graced.

She is astonished in fact, quite bowled over, by her own, not precisely benevolence — she neither expects nor wants to become a benevolent person — but by a fervency not to cause harm. Not necessarily to create light, but not to bring down darkness, either.

Grace is not sustainable in any perpetual, permanent way, at least not by her. It's hydroponic, not rooted, but it's something to know. And to cultivate. How does a person cultivate grace?

Like anything else, she guesses. Like the exercises to strengthen her chest, back, and arms: by repetition, through practice, by doing the same thing over and over to the very edge, and sometimes over the brink, of difficulty and pain.

She reaches out to touch Roddy's knee. Not from affection, and not with forgiveness, but because, however clumsily and inadvertently, he has given her this.

Lyle is now leaning against the far corner of the porch, speaking quietly with Martin and Jamie. “Is it time for another round?” she calls out to him. And, “Come on back, everyone. You should all meet Rod properly.” By which she means, she guesses, in conversation of sorts: stumbling questions, awkward answers, a ritual of acquaintanceship made onerous and possibly terrible by the weight of grudge, mistrust, dislike, fear, resentment, ineptness and, it must be said, very deep anger.

Which is in fact more or less how it goes. Voices are strained and unfamiliar and scarcely relaxed, but like the good hostess she steers them towards each other, drawing links and points of common interest beyond the obvious one, which is herself, and drawing them apart when voices grow sharp. She tells Jamie that Rod passed his Grade 12 in jail and has an interest in the outdoors. She tells Rod that Jamie too went back to school, and for a time worked for a florist.

She tells Robert and William that Rod's mother also died when he was young, and tells Rod that they are, between them, an eminent scientist and an eminent practitioner of public opinion. She tells Martin that Rod's dream was to move from small town to city, and tells Rod that Martin's desires have become more universal, and that he has recently returned from a journey to India. There are many possibilities, she is trying to say. A true multitude of outcomes.

She tells Madeleine that Rod grew up mainly in his grandmother's home, and tells Rod that if it hadn't been for Madeleine, she doesn't know what would have become of her, or for that matter of Jamie and Alix, in some very bad times. She tells Bert that Rod's father sounds like a man of few words, and tells Rod that Bert is as well, but that his words are always intended to support and give solace.

Much of this amounts to quite a creative conversational stretch. But having done her best, she leaves them to it.

Solace
is an interesting notion. It returns to mind as dinner is ending some hours later, as soiled dishes and napkins litter the table, the candles burn down, the flowers wilt and droop low. On one side of the long table, Jamie and Martin are at the moment in low-voiced conversation, and William and Robert, book-ending Bert and Madeleine on the other side, each bend inwards, towards the old couple, all nodding in some shared amusement. Alix is beside Rod, who is beside Jamie, a bold configuration that in the course of the meal, before Jamie turned away towards Martin, became, if not warm, at least cordial, and for a while even animated as Jamie and Rod compared jails, guards they met, views of police officers and of their individual lawyers. Isla heard Jamie say, “I was lucky,” and so, she thinks, he was.

She and Lyle are at the head of the table, side by side although her chair takes up more space than his. Beneath the cloth, they touch hands. She has no large faith this affection, however deep at the moment, can now last them another one, two, three decades, but right now, they touch hands.

Right now the day ends as she pictured it ending: in dim light, after good food and drink, in this company, in this house. The day also ends, because of that slim figure between Jamie and Alix, utterly differently from the way she imagined.

She sees she was longing for not only revenge but, more vastly, for consolation. But she is incurable in too many ways, and so is grievously, fundamentally, inconsolable.

This is a moment, however. And a moment, as she learned swinging through the front door of Goldie's, can be very long, very large.

There is endurance, that hard, unbending oak of a word, and within endurance there are these sturdy two-legged moments, strange and nearly sensual, of joy. This joy, rare and unfamiliar, is not compensation, not by any means; but it is, in the end, and at least momentarily, consolation.

And this, she imagines, hearing the voices rise and fall around her like music, like water, might be grace: a consoling joy, flickering like candles, embedded in endurance, flaring now and again into a brief picture. Like this.