Every Little Thing (15 page)

Those men were only doing their job,Cohen knew that, but it seemed indignant and heartless of them to open a body bag and expose a man in that condition. To show a cracked shell of a man to a person who had loved that man. Even a photograph, to have shown Cohen a photograph instead of the real thing.

HIDDEN
SHOULDERS

COHEN'S MOTHER, NOT Cohen, played grief counsellor to Allie, and it didn't go unnoticed. Every time she'd start crying, his mother was there with a hug or some hands through her hair.
Tea? Can I make you some lunch?
One day in the kitchen, out of Allie's earshot, she asked Cohen what was wrong. She could tell something beyond Matt's death was bothering him. He shrugged his shoulders,
Nothing.
She eyed him judgmentally about that. There were two or three loose ends at work for Allie to deal with, before she could take some time off, and somehow, his mother found a way to sort that out for her too.

His mother had dealt with the funeral arrangements as well, because Cohen said he couldn't. She never questioned it. She nodded her head,
Leave it with me.
But part of him wanted her to pry, ask why, force a confession, draw the words from him.
He had cancer, that wasn't an accident, and he shouldn't be dead.

The night of Matt's wake, he sat with his father at a small, two-seat table. He wanted to tell his father what he'd done, or helped get done, but he didn't. The hesitation, his wanting to tell his father, distracted him from being there for Allie. He wanted to tell his father, and he wanted his father's face to look appalled. He wanted his father to turn on him. Or he wanted someone to understand and reassure him that it was Matt's decision to make. That he'd made it, lied, and it was horrible of Matt to have wrecked Cohen like that, as part of his sick plan.

Matt's suicide had been too much to keep in, but now that days had passed, too much to share as well. The day of the funeral, as they lowered Matt into the dirt, Cohen cried harder than anyone. Too hard. And people stared.

They got in bed that night, and Allie knitted herself into him. Their body heat warmed the sheets as a window let in a shatterably crisp air. She cried hard once, but it was enough to soak the pillow, so they flipped it. He ran the backs of his knuckles up and down her ribs, and it soothed both of them. When he'd stop, she'd arch her back,
Don't stop
. Morning came and they did not go to work. Noon came, and they did not get up to eat lunch.

But months passed, and Allie healed far faster and better than Matt would have predicted. Her reaction to Matt dying so suudenly left Cohen wondering if Matt had been right about the sudden accident being easier on Allie than the weight of a prolonged, painful goodbye—watching her father bleed and vomit and hurt. Needing more help than she could give him.

In the months after his death, Allie would mourn her father, often, but she'd cry like he'd been a beautiful man she'd never forget, not like her life was missing something now, or there was a hole in her world she kept stepping in. She'd welcome the fond memories as they came to her. She'd pause for them. Re-live them. When they came, she might close her eyes to feel more there with him. Matt's death had cracked a fissure in her, but only in a way that let more life in. She took nothing for granted now: the taste of honey—not sugar—in her morning tea; the feel of an extra ten bucks for a more expensive pair of pajamas.

It was Cohen who found himself restless at nights, watching infomercials at 3 a. m. or spacing out at work. One night he watched back to back infomercials about the same set of kitchen knives until he could repeat the lines along with the blonde-haired bimbo selling them. Trying to sleep was fruitless, so he'd spare Allie the tossing and turning. For weeks, his dreams were about him missing something: Christmas dinner, the first day of school, stopping Matt's truck. And his brother was in his dreams more than ever. One night, he dreamt he was staring over the cliff at Matt's truck, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ryan walking along the guardrail as if it was a tightrope: his arms straight out like airplane wings to keep his balance. He knew that if he looked at Ryan, Ryan would tell him that Allie was in the truck with Matt.

Everyone at work noticed the black U under each of his eyes, but said nothing. Most of them shot sideways glances at him with pity in their eyes; some with worry and one with disdain,
Get over it
. He'd pour a coffee in the lunchroom or slice open the sternum of a dead bird at the dissection table, and he'd notice the sixth sense: someone watching him on the sly.

It hadn't taken long for Allie's confusion about Cohen's distance and state of mind to fester into resentment. Some nights he'd wake up, and she'd be back on to him, like they each owned halves of the bed and she was sticking to hers. She'd confronted him one night.
Are you even listening?
They were in a restaurant. She'd started crying when a friend of her father's came to ask her about her father. How he was making out. If he was retired yet. She told the man her father had died in a car accident, punctuating her story with a few sobs and tears, and when the man walked away, she said, earnestly,
I need you, more than ever, and you're miles and miles away.

FOR YEARS, THE favourite part of his job had been the once-a-week hike when he took a batch of kids along a trail and showed them the natural world. His stories, his lectures, they'd peel back a curtain and expose all the wonder that was hidden in the forest. He liked seeing facts fire off like popcorn in their skulls; the newsflash jangling around their brains and lighting up their eyes. Even something as simple as how every bird's beak is tailored perfectly to what it eats: the hook of a hawk's bill that lets it tear through flesh; the scissor-shaped beak of a crossbill, so it can pluck seeds from pine cones; the needle-like bill of a hummingbird, so it can act like a syringe and draw the nectar from a flower. The nectar that other birds, with shorter bills, couldn't reach.

He'd start the conversation by saying, “If you were a plant and you didn't want anyone stealing your berries, what's one way you could stop people from eating your berries?” and then they'd understand why some plants had poisonous berries. He'd tell them all about how some plants
wanted
their berries eaten, so they could spread their seeds farther across the forest, and they'd always laugh at his bears-and-blueberries example. He'd kick at a blueberry bush in front of them all and say, “The bear eats the berries here,” and then he'd point off in the distance, “and then he has to poop later, so he poops out blueberry seeds a hundred yards away. The bear gets a meal,” he'd rub his belly, “and the blueberries get their seeds dispersed!”They'd all laugh at the story because they were young enough that poop was a funny word. And he played that up, the way he said poop.

But in the weeks since Matt died, he hadn't told that story. He just kept a watchful eye around patches of deadly nightshade and made sure everyone knew the plant with the purple and yellow flowers was poisonous. He didn't even tell them its name until a copper-headed kid asked, and then he felt horrible. Stopped, explained. Told them that nightshade was a distant relative of the potato.
Like a cousin?
The copper-headed kid said.
Yeah, like a cousin. A lot of the same family traits. Plants are kind of related the same way you and your aunts, uncles, cousins, and parents are. Some more closely than others.

It went on like that for weeks until one day a kid, Lacie Decker, got a blister. Her parents had bought her brand new hiking shoes, and they were a size too small. Lacie had tugged at his pinky finger and said,
I think I've got a blister. Like my dad gets from hauling up lobster pots in the summer. He says fuck when he gets them!

He smiled at Lacie, bent down on one knee, and tapped his lap, offering it up as a bench. He made a big, funny ordeal about plucking off her shoe and taking a look—he plugged his nose and said
Pew!
and she giggled and said her feet don't stink, and he said
Try telling my nose that
, and she laughed again. She had little cookie-crumb freckles drawn out by a day in the sun. She had a blazing smile and a laugh like only a kid can have and blonde hair that turned white whenever the sun was in it. And she did have a blister. The size of a dime on her heel. He offered his back, tapping at a shoulder, “Hop on! Free ride on the Cohen-mobile. C'mon.”

He piggybacked her, and they had their own private conversation.

“Mr. Davies!What's your favourite kind of bird!”

“Ducks! Any kind, all of them!What's
yours
?”

“I don't know yet. I like polka dots!” She stuck her socked foot up in the air and pointed at the red and white circles all over it. “What's the most polka-dotted bird in Canada? That'll be my favourite!”

“When we get back to the Avian-Dome, I'll show you some pictures of a northern flicker. It's a kind of woodpecker. Its chest is
covered
in polka dots!”He tapped his fingers all over her shins, polka-dotting them as he said
polka dots
. “We have them here in our province. So you can keep an eye out for them or even put out a feeder with their favourite grub.”

“Okay!”

They were doing this thing where she'd squeeze his shoulders and then he'd squeeze her dangling ankles, and then she'd squeeze his shoulders and he'd squeeze her ankles. She'd laugh every time.

“Mr. Davies!What's the animal you're the most scared of?”

“Scorpions!They've got pincers, poison,
and
a dagger-tail.
And
they've got a hard body, like a crab's, so you can't just squat them. What's
yours
?”

She laughed about the playful way he kept saying
What's yours
, like it made her feel special that he'd asked, and sounded so interested in her answers.

“I don't like spiders,” she said. “They got too many legs and they suck your blood out!” She made a wet slurping noise, pretending she was sucking blood, and he laughed at the effort she'd put into it. “Both of those are creepy facts! Are spiders scary, Mr. Davies?”

“Why don't you ask the one on your leg?”

She panicked and flailed her legs like she was running on air. She was bucking around on his back so much that he'd almost dropped her. “Right there!” he said, and he pinched her leg, and she honked out a frightened laugh.

Walking back to the Avian-Dome, with Lacie on his back, he'd felt like he wanted one of these himself: a little Lacie Decker of his own. Him and Allie. It would
fix
things somehow. To co-own something with untied shoelaces and a lunchbox and endless questions that needed answers. A child would be somewhere to pour the better aspects of themselves and see what grew. Allie's child; he loved the idea of her as a mother. She had all the right traits, and a child would make them shine in her. He wanted to see her belly balloon, and he wanted to see her eight months pregnant and struggling with her shoes: her feet fattening up and her belly too big to see over. The two of them, needing each other again. And someone needing them too. The way Matt had. The way a kid would. He wanted to see Allie, flying a rubber spoon towards their daughter's mouth like an airplane, and know they were building a life together.

He got home that night, and there was a look on Allie's face like he'd brought someone home with him: a new puppy or the man she'd been missing. There was a way she greeted him in the porch some days, a way her arm bent into a hook and caught him around the neck, for leverage, to half-hug him, and kiss his forehead. But on this day she stepped back and looked at him. She pointed to the couch and said, “Take a load off, Co-Co. I'm making your mother's Pad Thai recipe. Call you when it's ready.”

“Did you just call me Co-Co?”

She shrugged her shoulders like,
Yeah, I dunno where that one came from.

“My little Co-Cohen-nut,” she said, calling out from the kitchen.

He laughed as he spread out over the sofa. “I've got a new favourite kid at work, again.”

It wasn't solely the ghost of Matt's death that had been haunting their relationship. Not exclusively. His death and the toll it took had only exposed the fact their relationship wasn't as solid as they thought. Five or six years together and they'd started taking each other for granted. They were in need of renovation. Of meeting again as strangers.

ALLIE HAD ACCEPTED a job offer, as a Chief Environmental Impact Assessment Officer with a brand new firm. “Chief Environmental Impact Assessment Officer, hey?” Cohen said to her jokingly, “Maybe you should tack five or six more words onto your job title and be the first person, ever, whose job title runs two lines on their business card?”

Her new office was halfway out to Grayton, forty minutes away, and she had to be there for 8:30. Their little morning routine of leaving for work together, after coffee and a crossword, was gone. For years they'd rotated, daily, who got in the shower first. Now it was always her. There was no more time for him to slip into the shower and surprise her anymore, to feed the hunger in his hands for her soapy body. Tactile bliss: sometimes he couldn't help himself. She'd never objected. But now she'd bat him away like a buzzing insect.

It was Cohen who had to start taking public transit to work, so she could take the car. There was a witchy-looking kid with wild eyes on the bus who smelled like a cat's litter box, and she was sitting closer and closer to Cohen every day. Smiling at him, too long, after saying hello, with her gunky, yellow, wooden-peg teeth. Frizzy hair and dirty jeans.

In an ongoing joke, Cohen threatened Allie he'd leave her for the witchy busgirl if they didn't get a second car. She laughed about that, but one night, out of character, she'd reminded him he'd “make way more money working directly for the government, you know,” if he'd kept his eye out for a job.