Critical Injuries (9 page)

At any rate Alix cannot make it sound reasonable to Isla. Alix has waved her thin, long-fingered hands vaguely, widened her absorbing eyes under that riveting fall of red hair, and spoken of universal powers and forces, a community of support, purpose, and love. But what is that purpose? What kind of love? For three years now, Isla has half-expected a phone call, a knock on the door, a stranger's voice announcing that Alix has been discovered, toes pointed to heaven, dead in a hopeful migration to salvation on a far better, kindlier, more golden planet.

Something like that.

Alix is twenty-two. She is too old to believe in stupid shit, and she is far too young to die.

How the hell did this happen to those sweet, clever, most adorable babies, toddlers, children? A family weakness, perhaps. A grave need that may exist in anyone, but in them happened to be precisely located and drilled into, bringing forth gushers of trouble. James happened, he tapped those gushers in his children's tenderest, wariest, clumsiest years. Oh, Isla could kill him, she really could.

Why didn't she, then, when she had the chance? With a little effort she could have tracked him down and killed him any number of times in the past decade or so. Easy to say she could kill him now, when she so clearly can't. Well, mothers don't have time for murder, do they? Nor would it have exactly improved the situation.

Now that she can no longer rise, at least for the time being, to any occasion of theirs, it will be interesting to see if they rise to this occasion of hers, these two young people, her babies, who have sought oblivion, or salvation, in some strange and terrible places.

Maybe mere escape is what they've been after. She wouldn't mind a touch of that herself. A touch of anything, for that matter.

Ready or not, here they are. “Mum.” Alix is abruptly leaning over her, huge-eyed with fear, skin translucent with pity. “Oh Mum.”

Or maybe her skin is translucent with hunger. She has always been thin, but now looks gaunt. That son of a bitch Master Ambrose, is he starving Isla's daughter? Alix's fly-about hair sweeps her cheeks and whips the air. Its flamboyance is her own, its shoulder-blade length however, part of the uniform of female corps members, intended to reflect, presumably, serenity. The rest of the uniform is a brown cottony garment, loose and nearly transparent. A strange, lost, yearning soul looks out of those large eyes, Isla thinks. When Alix moves, stepping forward to lean over her mother, stepping back to make way for her brother, the word
waft
comes to mind.

Jamie's eyes are brittle, his features fixed and difficult to read. “Ma! What the hell did you think you were doing, getting yourself shot like that?” Oh, she sees. He has set out to be hearty, jocular; as if an injection of gusto into the room could raise her up, hoist her back onto her feet; like Jesus, if he'd performed his Lazarus miracle using only his own zest and energy.

Jamie was a little boy who ran everywhere, all the time. As soon as he found his toddler-legs he was off: tearing around furniture, tottering through rooms, climbing stairs, nipping through screen doors, pelting across lawns and down sidewalks. Isla ran and ran after him, catching him up, clutching some movable part of him, hauling him home.

Was he running towards some desire or away from something that scared him? Asleep, his little legs moved under the sheets like a dreaming puppy's, his little arms flailed. He had nightmares and woke crying. What images could so distress a boy she could swear had no waking experience of fear? Isla lay beside him, holding him until he grew calm and fell back into sleep. Sometimes she fell asleep herself and in the morning James would be irritable. “You'll spoil him,” he said. “You'll make him soft.”

If only she had.

“He's just a little boy. He only wants comfort. There's no such thing as spoiling a little boy who wants comfort.” In the contest between a husband's desires and the needs of a child, no question arose in her mind. Although it took some time to realize that it was, as James saw it, or failed to see it, a contest. Who would dream such a thing of a grown man? Not Isla.

Jamie ran and ran and grew hard rather than soft. His plump cheeks pared themselves to the bone, and his large, long-lashed eyes grew even larger, more like Alix's, in his narrowing, less and less innocent face. Now he is firm-bodied, and probably good-looking, although that's a difficult thing for a mother to discern about a son. He still has those lashes, which women must love. Both her children are immensely attractive and appealing from this angle, looking up slant-wise, even though Alix is so thin and Jamie so hard. Neither of them looks entirely like their father, nor entirely like her, nor quite like each other. She's glad there's no major resemblance to James, and doesn't care if that's because her features and James's got mixed and combined in new ways so that hers were lost, too.

Once, briefly, the subject of their father was obsessively interesting. Perhaps it still is, but he doesn't come up in family conversation; certainly not since Lyle. Do they ever talk to him? Surely not. They must talk
about
him, though. He is hardly an entirely scrubbable stain. There's no erasing someone, and anyway, like good dogs kids keep hoping for love.

“Careless of me, yes,” she says to Jamie, hoping she's smiling and that her eyes show some reassuring merriment. “But it's going to be fine. Lyle must have told you.”

“Yeah,” Jamie nods. “Where's the peckerhead that did it? Is he busted?”

He would mean the boy. Jamie bends over her, uneasily gentle, dodging, she supposes, whatever apparatus she's attached to. But determined to embrace her; that's nice, that's brave. His arms go around where her body must be, and his cheek is laid next to hers. Her son, her weak-willed, desiring Jamie who for a time, at least, didn't know what he desired and chose the wrong things.

Oh, she has produced a tear! Can feel it rolling down her skin, into the pillow!

Jamie's breath, so close, is slightly stale; unantiseptic, which is oddly refreshing. “If the cops haven't got him, I'm going to. I'll take the prick out.”

There's the spirit.

But the spirit only. Without awful, hot-headed drugs, he wouldn't hurt anyone, would he? He has surely done penance and moreover been healed — still, who is he to call another young criminal
peckerhead
,
prick
?

At his worst moments he didn't have a gun. At his worst moments he was no Roddy.

Lyle steps forward, puts a hand on Jamie's shoulder. “No,” he says calmly, “the police either have him or will have him. Everybody knows who it was, there's no secret about it. So we'll just leave it in the hands of the cops and concentrate on your mother.” This is exactly right, of course. Lyle knows both the importance and the techniques of defusing. There is something to be said for Jamie's loyal, vengeful passion, however, and something passionately desirable missing from Lyle. “We're all upset and angry, but the only thing that really counts is your mother, we have to keep focused on whatever helps her, makes her strong.” He is wise. She is fortunate.

Well, sort of fortunate.

Count on Alix for the unexpected. Suddenly she is responding as if Lyle has spoken some kind of revelation, beaming down at Isla with eerie radiance. “Yes,” she says, “exactly.” She looks — can it be? — happy. As if Lyle has reminded her of something good that had slipped her mind.

Much slips what passes at the moment for Alix's mind. At least Jamie is recovered from his affection, his desire, his evident need for drugs with awesome, horrifying names. At least he has been successfully frightened and punished and loved into a sturdier, if less vivid, less rollicking, less desperate frame of mind. But Alix — she has hooked herself to belief, faith, an addiction that may be even harder to kick.

This is what Isla means about Job, doom, fate, luck.

Lyle finds it hopeful that they can still get through to Alix, at least in certain specific, physical ways, and in a sense he is right. A good sign, for instance, that he could get word to her about Isla, and that Alix has been able to come here. The Serenity Corps may be a cult, as in Isla's view it certainly is, but so far it hasn't quite managed to amputate families from followers.

It's three years since Isla and Lyle first heard the name “Master Ambrose,” three years of hardly understanding a goddamn word the girl says. “Ah, don't sweat it,” is Jamie's advice, “It's just a stupid patch. I came out of mine, she'll come out of hers.” But Jamie might remember that he did not escape his stupid patch either undamaged or solely under his own steam. It's not as if he suddenly decided the jig was up and he had to get clean, all on his own. Or that it was easy, and did not involve not only lawyers and jail time and suffering, but his own sweat and vomit. All that.

When Alix announced herself pledged to Master Ambrose, Isla drove straight to the Serenity farm, seventy or so kilometres north, well out of the way and hardly promising for even Serenity's subsistence farming and gardening. Alix said, with her awful new expression of bliss, “It's about loyalty to each other. A whole community of people dedicated to the same end. Really dedicated. Because once you have serenity, you've achieved life's highest goal. But it's complicated, so it's necessary to pursue it together. Well, maybe not necessary, exactly, but it's the best way because everybody helps keep everybody else focused on serenity all the time, whatever we're doing.”

Alix came to the unmarked farm gate to meet Isla. “Please be nice, Mother,” she said, “I know it's strange to you, but try to see it the way we do.” She looked nervous and proud both, introducing Isla and Master Ambrose, who was waiting, brown-garmented and smiling plumply, in a garden. “I regret,” he said, “that we do not invite outsiders indoors. The quest for serenity is carefully undertaken, and we cannot have the balances of our community's home disrupted in any way.” He offered her tea, though. She refused.

Once there, she wasn't sure why she'd come, except to see the place. It would not help her cause with Alix to leap at the man's throat, which is mainly what she wanted to do. “Starglow, you know,” he told her, smug bastard, “has never been truly a child in your life. Her spirit is ancient, she is a very old soul.”

How dared he?

He went on in that way, Alix's eyes on him wide and adoring. “You evil little toad,” Isla wanted to say, and something melodramatic like “Unhand my daughter.” But Alix, she could see, was not inclined to be unhanded. She was entranced, bewitched, beguiled, suckered. And so Isla drove away speechless. She and Alix did not embrace when she left. Alix stepped back from Isla's arms and said, “I'm sorry, but I feel your anger and it's too soon for me to come too close to anyone not in touch with serenity. I'm not strong enough in my own serenity yet.”

Well.

But who wouldn't like to be told their soul is quite old and therefore, by extension, quite wise? A nice compliment, Isla could see the appeal, but — consider the source: a man who, if nothing else, had a choice of any name at all and chose Ambrose, which said something about him, but what? Besides that when it came to beauty and euphony, he had a tin ear?

Isla's first journey was pointless and later ones no more successful. The unbudgeable Alix continues to speak of Master Ambrose in the tones Isla imagines Jamie might have used to speak of his drugs, if he had felt able at the time to talk about that most fervent and focused attachment. Alix also speaks of things like internal flames burning radiantly. “The depth,” she has remarked, “the pure knowing.” In Master Ambrose's eyes, Alix apparently sees redemption and love, purity and peace and salvation. Isla sees a voracious, glittering appetite for young souls. She doesn't want to think about the appetite she assumes for young bodies.

She is prejudiced, of course. Just as she was prejudiced against whoever first fed Jamie drugs.

Now here's this young woman beaming like a lunatic over the bed rails. The fact is, Alix at twenty-two calls herself Starglow and has given herself over to a load of spiritual junk. Isla could slap her silly. She could grab and shake and embrace her until the poor little thin lost thing felt her mother's goddamn love right into her nerve endings and bones. For Christ's sake!

Unable to do any of this, Isla tries to return her daughter's blissful beam with the severest frown she can conjure.

Apparently it is unsuccessful, or insufficient.

“Let me tell you what happened,” Alix says. “When Lyle called and told me about all this.” She waves her hand over Isla, meaning, Isla supposes, “all this.”

“I was so upset. It was an awful shock, and so sad.” So it was, so it is; not most for Alix, not least for Isla. Still Isla is, after all, touched. She pictures Alix weeping, pulling at that glorious hair, making a great, grieving scene among people to whom virtue evidently involves never caring enough to make a scene.

She tries to apply an expression of willing benevolence, but then Alix goes on to say, “And then I thought, what have I learned from Serenity if I get upset so easily?”

Easily! Isla's mouth, she believes, falls open.

“Anyway, somebody must have gone for Master Ambrose. And he came! He came right to me. And he spoke to me, took me aside, and that's such an honour, you know.” Alix glistens as if she expects Isla to appreciate what a big moment it must have been. Well, no doubt. To her.