Inukshuk (11 page)

He glanced at his watch—9:40. Bedtime anyway. Saved his files, shut down. Pushed back from the desk chair and stood stretching a moment before heading out of the room and up the darkened hallway.

One foot on the staircase, he froze. Heard the exhaust fan running in the downstairs washroom and saw the bar of light shining beneath its closed door; again, the thing that had stopped him—the
unmistakable sound you didn't ever want to identify but always had to, instantly: puking. Throat clearing. Curses. Private, repercussive coughs bursting against toilet porcelain, and more retching. Instinctively, until you were a parent and learned the care associated with it, learned the other response of needing immediately to go in and find out what was wrong, help if you could, you wanted to run. Still, there were the warring impulses in him: one, to swallow back his own bile and head upstairs fast, pretending not to have noticed; the other, to go in, see what he could do. And even as he was registering all of this, he was already halfway to the washroom door.

Deep breath. Hand on the doorknob, testing, twisting to see if it was locked. “Thomas?” He rapped once, hard, and again. “Thomas?” He pulled the door open. “Hey, T—everything all right in here? I thought . . .”

The boy was on the floor, legs around the toilet and arms outflung as if he were embracing it, head back. Sink water still ran and there was a guttering noise as the toilet drained, so he was spared that much anyway. No stink, no puke to look at or clean up.

“Kiddo?” In spite of himself, he sniffed after the smell.

“Yes, Dad.”

“I asked if everything was all right in here.” From this angle, he could see that the boy had never changed out of his mauled underwear. The elastic waistband had entirely separated from the shredded rest of the briefs and rode, solo, midway up his back. “Are you OK?”

“Fine. Yes, I'm fine. Think I must have eaten something. I wasn't feeling so hot. But”—and like that, he was pulling himself upright, stooping to unwind a massive wad of toilet paper from the roll (Franklin almost didn't stop himself in time—
Hey, hey, easy there!
) and wiping down the rim of the toilet, the underside of the seat, slapping down the seat and lid, flushing again—“it seems to be passing.” Fist touching his upper lip a moment, he faced Franklin. “Yeah, I'm fine now, I think.” Shrugged. “I don't know what it was.”

“Well, I do.”

“What?”

“It's that crazy diet you're on, whatever it is.”

“What diet?”

“How should I know? You tell me
what diet
. No fruit, no yogurt, no trail mix, no lettuce, no orange juice, raisin bran . . .” Some of these items he counted on his fingers, as if that would make his case more convincing; held the fingers in the open palm of his opposing hand, and then abruptly found he'd run out. Sushi, he remembered. One of Thomas's old-time favorites. “No sushi,” he added, but didn't use a finger for it. “I mean, you've
never
been particular about food. Ever. Why all of a sudden? What are you trying to accomplish here? Is it like some special grade-ten form of self-torture through dietary self-abnegation?
What
?”

Again the irritating shrug. “Tastes change.”

“
Tastes change!
Jesus.” He sighed. Scrubbed an open hand over his forehead and then pressed the heels of both hands to his eyes. Released them, sighed again, more explosively, and leaned to the doorjamb. “Are you turning bulimic on me?”

“Do I look bulimic?”

“No. Christ.”

“If you don't mind . . . I'd like to go upstairs now. Brush my teeth. If you don't have anything more to say, that is. It's not the most pleasant aftertaste, you know.”

“Of course. But Thomas. Look. If there's something, if there's ever anything we need to talk about, you know—right?—you know we can just talk about it. No fuss, no trouble.”

“Sure.”

And as they moved around each other, Franklin raised his arms to draw the boy in for an embrace. “Come on,” he said. Felt Thomas's arms go limply around his own back, the light reciprocative pressure of his forearms, and at precisely the same moment his own arms dropped, the pressure vanishing. Stood back a step to see him and to observe, not for the first time, that Thomas was actually an inch or two taller than he was now, and had precisely his mother's eyes.

“It's been a hard couple years, OK? I know that. Hard times for all of us, Mom leaving, moving here, Devon starting at university, all of it. It's normal enough to stress about stuff and have a few bad days
here and there, but the worst thing, the last thing you ever want to do about any of that is pretend it isn't real. Pretending it isn't happening or isn't a . . . problem, that's psychotic. That's where you get into actual, real trouble.”

Thomas nodded. He was entering his other mode now, a new one Franklin was coming to recognize more and more lately but for which he had not yet devised strategies to cope—his disengaged but attentively listening-son mode. The eyes were open and trained on Franklin, the mouth relaxed, no smirk, no smart back talk. In every outward respect, he gave the appearance of
earnest young man hearing and accepting words of wisdom from parent
. Seemed, actually, to have become suddenly years younger in the process. Meanwhile, Franklin was pretty sure nothing, or at least very little, of what he was saying was actually getting through. He wondered if Thomas even heard him.

“But we've been over all this already, right?”

Thomas nodded.

“Talk. Talk is good.”

Again the nod.

“To bed with you, then. Tomorrow's a new day.”

“Must've been like some bad jerky from the Jerky Shack or something. I don't know. Maybe something I ate at school.”

“Sure. Could be.”

Inexplicably, the boy seemed stuck in place now. Something was holding him; Franklin had no idea what, but it forced him to reconsider everything. Maybe he really
was
listening.

“OK?”

Thomas nodded some more and cleared his throat. “But . . .” he began. “So did Devon tell you?”

“Tell me. . . . You mean his grand scheme to drive the ice roads north for a tête-à-tête with your
mère
in, where was it, Norman Wells? Someplace like that?”

Thomas nodded.

“Well, yes, he did. And it's probably about time. You should, as well. Go with him if you want.”

“As if.”

“As if what?”

“Never mind.”

Thomas pushed past him and went wordlessly up the stairs.

“What?”

“Night, Dad.”

Occasionally, as now, it hit him, what the kid must be up against. He'd grown three sizes or more since Jane had left, and had recently begun shaving every couple of weeks; there was a new slouch in his shoulders, a digressive sideways tilt in the way he climbed the stairs, like a boy so dead set on avoiding all notice, you couldn't help but stare, noting, too, how angry and hurt . . . how separate from the world he seemed to hold himself. Most of the time, Franklin could stay focused enough on his own concerns not to realize; when he did, it was almost too much to bear. Truth was, if Jane were here now, she would not be able to give Thomas what he must need from her emotionally—too much had been lost already, too much time passed, and Jane was . . . well, Jane. Thomas was better off not understanding that and not knowing Jane's limitations, though he was decidedly
not
better off without her. And to counter all of this, there wasn't a whole lot Franklin could do, other than to keep things going. Keep things normal—as normal-seeming as possible.

“Good night,” he called after Thomas. “Love you.”

 

 

NEXT SHOULD COME THE RELIEF. It always followed. Scraped gut, sore throat, horrible taste in his mouth, burning nose and sinuses and then . . . a little light-headedness and temporarily all the twisted fucked-up badness of everything going wrong all the time just
gone
. Purged, cauterized in physical sensation, physical tension, whatever, but
gone
. It was a trade-off, one thing for the other, and always pretty much worked . . . only, this time it hadn't. Because again, looking at himself in the mirror over the upstairs washroom sink, scrubbing and scrubbing with the toothbrush, all he could see was how wrong it all was and how everything ought to be different. Kill the clean
black swoop of hair over his forehead, the cornflower blue eyes from his mother, the straight, clean chin and jawline from her as well, fresh bloom of young pink blood under the surface. Kill it, rupture it, make it go away. Break open the gums with suppurating sores. Grow the teeth down and crooked, distorted as fangs. Swell shut the eyes with sores and blacken the cheeks with broken capillaries. Crack the lips. Why? For the first time, it hit him, the real truth of the matter:
Because I fucking hate myself to death is why
. But why? This, he wasn't so sure of. Did it matter? He'd caved and eaten half a fruit leather after all—that was one thing. Stupid. So, he had no resolve: He was a failure where anything relating to self-discipline or self-control was concerned. A failure, period. But that wasn't it, wasn't the real bottom-line thing causing the self-hatred, because . . . he wasn't sure. He just knew it wasn't. And anyway, it hadn't worked this time, purging. Still, he was stuck in the same old outlines, same old routines. Still himself. No relief. Maybe because his father had stopped him before he was really done.

He spat and swirled the pink-green-white glob of foamed toothpaste and blood down the lavatory drain with water. Drank and spat again and let the water run a moment longer. Grimaced a last time at his reflection and held up a fist as if he'd shatter the glass, then turned and went abruptly back out of the room.

Edmund Hoar was all wrong, too, in the boat drawings. Of course. Too pretty, too much like Jeremy Malloy, too clean and healthy. No blackened cheeks and sores. No rotten fanglike teeth. Maybe the other drawings, the new ones, Hoar with Franklin, were salvageable. But the boat drawings? He flipped to them to be sure and leaned closer to make out his own garbled writing, the hand marks and fingerprints smudging lines between frames, the crooked and misspelled words. Felt around in his bedsheets for a pencil and started fixing things, rubbing out lines, changing words, grinding the pencil into the page to broaden away prettiness, pressing harder, harder until he felt the paper almost give once or twice. Stood back a second to see if it was better, and abruptly stabbed the pencil down straight through Hoar's eyes and forehead, ripping a zigzag rent through the
page and snapping the pencil in half in his hand. The blunted half still in his hand, he stabbed again a few more times into the pages, without much effect, and then threw it pinging across the room, followed immediately by the notebook, whose pages riffled and caught air before spinning and plummeting, sliding out of sight under his desk.

“Fuck you all,” he said. Dug notebooks, knapsack, papers, pencils, everything in a pile off his bed onto the floor, then stripped and slid between the sheets. Lights out. Lay faceup and cold, eyes open until they stung, staring through the dark and waiting for the men to come. He could still halfway make out his map of Peel Sound, Victoria Strait—the open inlet gleaming bare and white as a breast and the Sharpie-drawn line, two
x
's for the frozen-in ships, draping down it like a broken necklace.

 

 

THE EVENING DRIFT: check doors were locked, lower thermostat, turn lights out, freshen food and water for the cat. Line up shoes in mated pairs by the front door. Hang Thomas's coat, fallen or just dumped there on the floor. Now he wasn't tired. Jarred into full wakefulness by the business with Thomas. He was even vaguely hungry.

Back in the kitchen, he noted with some annoyance that Thomas had not started the dishwasher as asked. Of course not. Reflected, filling the soap cup and shoving the door closed, dialing the cycle to START, that Jane or no Jane, the whole bathroom episode—the puking and evasive talk afterward—all of it was so familiar: Always there was
something
in Thomas's personal life, some variant of psychic stress or trauma, some illness or other debilitation, physical or emotional, or both, overriding what you might ordinarily expect from a kid his age. Excusing him. Was it
real
? Yes. Always real and often medically documented. Every era of the boy's life, in some ways, was marked and made discrete from the previous ones by what had compromised (complicated?) him and what no longer did. Now it was the diet and the Franklin obsession. Before that, it was Thomas's refusing to put down his camera. Everything, from morning to night,
seen from behind the buffer of his DVR, VCR, or the Super 8. Easy enough to understand: He'd needed some way to protect himself—Jane's withdrawing, Devon's getting ready to leave home, Franklin's own retreats into poetry, work, preoccupation with Moira. Before the cameraman phase . . . sleepwalking, bed wetting, milk allergies, hives, fevers that came and went. The list went on.

He peered idly into the refrigerator, not hungry really, or not hungry enough anyway to select any one item he craved. Mentally, he blotted out the foods he knew Thomas would never touch—actually, he wasn't altogether clear, but he could make a pretty good guess: juice, lettuce, yogurt, tomatoes, canned peaches, milk, carrots. Whatever. He slapped the door shut and stood back.

His phone was vibrating on the kitchen counter. Odd how attuned you could become to such a meaningless, unlikely cue—the mooing buzz of electronic circuitry encased in plastic, rattling in a half spin there on the Formica. Enslaved by it. And the anticipation, uniquely, sharply hopeful, as he lifted and flipped open the top; glint of blue light on his fingers and the message there on the screen.
New Text Message! View Now?
Well, of course. He clicked it open. From Moira:
All well son home!!! death sentence administered. drinks stime soon? xoX M.