Thalo Blue (6 page)

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In a group of boys Zeb would have always been the one at the rear, tagging along, looking back or around to see what the others were missing. If they giggled and shouted, he peered at traffic. If they leaped and whooped, he stared at treetops.

He loved to draw. From the moment he discovered his new moniker—the one which made his mother worry that things would be difficult for him—he was always drawing pictures. All manner of visuals sprang from his imagination and his masterpieces hung in the office, the downstairs den, and on the white-faced refrigerator droning alongside the gas stove. Each of them had a dazzling array of color: blues, greens, purples, reds and pinks. And they all had a set of three letters in the bottom corner: Zeb. The Z was always blue. The e was always green and the b was always purple. Sebastion hummed tunes while he drew. Some of them repeated themselves, but some were completely new each and every time he sat down to draw. Sadie never recognized any of them from the radio or television.

At five, he sat in the dining room half of the kitchen-dining split at the large oak table. It was a beautiful, thick, full-bodied table. Splendid and old, it had been Oliver’s grandmother’s who passed it to Rita before Oliver got it when Rita and Teddy’s estate had been divvied up. Oliver loved that table. It had been immaculately restored by his parents and his care for it, as with everything, went well beyond average. It always had two tablecloths on it, a padded one with cotton on the interior and vinyl on the exterior to protect the delicate finish, and a cloth one over that which could be changed to reflect the season or a specific decorum that Sadie had in mind.

On this day, though, Sadie had both cloths off the table. It sat uncharacteristically naked while the two covers, the padded one with the vinyl face, and this season’s white and blue stripy, hung on the line outside. They both flapped vigorously in the stiff spring breeze, against a backdrop of the oak tree’s lowest bough, sprouting with dots of vibrant green.

She had set two hand-knit wool placemats under Zeb’s drawings, but as she disappeared into the back office to open some of the week’s mail, he decided that the softness of the wool beneath his sheet of paper made it hard for the crayons to really press down properly. So he pulled the problem-causing placemats out from under his drawing and threw them promptly on the floor.

It was when he finished his drawing that the real issue began. In front of him was a beautiful picture of a pristine lake surrounded by trees, far more like the lake and trees of an older boy’s drawing, where the lake had waters of different shades and the trees had implied leaves from scribbles that seemed to separate and become countless individuals. As usual, Zeb picked up his electric blue crayon to begin signing his name, something his father had taught him. “All great artists sign their work.”

The crayon slipped on the smooth surface of the bare table, and its waxy coating went clean off the edge of the paper. It smudged a dark and shiny line, thickly down to the edge of the table near Zeb’s tummy where it stopped. He looked at it and immediately fell in love with the sheen of it. It caught the light far differently than the crayon did when it was on a plain sheet of white paper. It was brilliant; a new shade of blue had been invented and Zeb was giddy. Fifteen years later, he would be sitting in a psychology seminar at university and would answer a series of questions during a student presentation. One question, about his favorite color, garnered sniggers from the girls, and thus contempt from the boys. The answer that made them laugh was, “My favorite color is indigo blue crayon smeared on my father’s oak table in the dining half of our kitchen. He’d tell you that was his least favorite color.”

Zeb spent the next fifteen minutes or so discovering all the neat ways his blue crayon could improve the kitchen table. He drew in several directions, up and down, forward and back. The light caught each wax stroke a little differently and he was fascinated by it.

Oliver arrived home from work about sixteen minutes into Zeb’s fun and immediately began a rant. He lunged into the room and grabbed Zeb’s crayon bearing arm. He shook his son violently at the sight of his ruined table, screamed at the boy. “What were you thinking—Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” He launched a million furious questions at Zeb and Zeb couldn’t look at him in the face. Everything was a wash of yellow, bright lemon yellow, like one of his longest crayons. He didn’t like that crayon, couldn’t explain why, but the color made him sick. And now it was overlaid across his father’s face, and even across the table where beautiful blue streaks had been only a minute before. Now they looked green. Tears formed in his eyes, streamed down his cheeks, and his father continued to yell.

“LOOK at me when I’m talking to you.”

But the yellow, and the raised voice, was too great to bear. He pulled his arm away from his father’s grip and ran past him, stumbled against the kitchen counter and fell across the front of the stove. To steady himself he reached up towards the white enameled top edge, and his hand caught the arm of a pot of boiling water which was steaming and churning on a front burner.

Sadie liked her kitchen stove; it was from Hardwick’s Century Series. It was gas and that meant it heated a pot in no time so she didn’t have to wait on things too long when Oliver was in a mood or ready supper at that precise moment. But she didn’t like how it would never keep a low heat on something. It was either a fairly high flame or none at all, only emanating a sickly smell of gas. She joked that it was her “Hardwick Turn of the Century model.”

Sadie had been getting ready to make strawberry preserves, held over in the freezer from last fall, when she had run out of decent-sized jars. The new glass mason jars she had gotten, their lids and rubber rings, lined the cupboard. When Zeb tried to steady himself, the boiling pot on the Hardwick’s burner was upset and Zeb turned his eyes to it in time to see the lip of it come against his inner arm. Most of the boiling water fell in a splash against the front of the fridge, but a few stray drops hit his hand and his face. Those weren’t serious, but his arm was a searing mess from that pot’s lip, one which made him cry out in a childish scream. The yellow he saw immediately dissolved to a bright flash of carrot-orange. The intensity of that color made him nearly as sick with pain as did the burn on his arm. The tears came in a flurry and his dad, Oliver, was as startled as he was. Sadie bolted to the room, filled with shock and confusion. They both rushed to him.

By the time the three of them reached the emergency room, with Zeb’s arm wrapped in a tea towel, the pain was considerably worse. In the back seat of the Beemer wagon, with Sadie holding him, he bawled most of the way. Partly because of the pain and partly because that sick orange color wouldn’t leave. It had not faded either and instead became almost an opaque sheet lying over everything. His mommy’s face was barely recognizable behind the color and it seemed to transform the whole world. His cheeks were red, his eyes red too, and his hair sat in sweaty strands across his forehead. The blistered welt oozed with pale yellow pus and stood out brightly on his arm, about six inches long. He finally lay panting in the back seat with his mom’s arms around him as Oliver sped up the emergency ramp at the hospital.

Yellow, it seemed, washed over things when he got ancy, when something wasn’t quite right, or the threat of something horrible loomed. But orange. Orange was Zeb’s default color for pain.

III. Disquiet Philosophy

When Zeb was thirteen, he started seeing his Aunt Sicily quite regularly. That year Oliver the crow continued to make appearances every night at the window, Zeb brought a friend home after school for the first time, and Oliver,
his father
, began making it abundantly clear that the nick name, the one his mother had given him, should be outgrown.

Jackson Cavanaugh, in the same grade as Zeb, was the son of Dick and Frances Cavanaugh who had made a small fortune with a wholesale company that sold imported cheeses. They lived in a giant house in Vaughan’s more northerly crooks and bends and when Jackson referred to them—Zeb thought this the neatest—he never called them mom and dad. Instead, to him, and thusly to the rest of the boys at school, they became The King and The Queen of Cheese. “The Queen went to her bridge game last night with the ladies from the auxiliary club, came home drunk on sherry, and The King had a fit on her, then proceeded to slap her upside the head till she cried.” Jackson seemed to understand money, that having a lot of it didn’t fix people’s problems, sometimes even amplified them. And Zeb liked that understanding. It was a perception about things beyond most people’s awareness, a separation from most people, and a realization that we are divided from the things in our lives. Jackson didn’t seem to inherit the stuck up attitude of the King and Queen of Cheese, nor of the other kids at St. Vincent’s, the private school which he attended. And Zeb found himself naturally more pleased with his friend’s greater earthiness. Well, Jackson wasn’t earthy. But he was as earthy as could be found in that little world.

On this day, the boys, both still in their uniforms, came into the kitchen for a snack, then went to the living room to turn on the television. Jackson immediately snatched up a photo of Zeb’s parents taken years earlier, the one which sat on a shelf above books about Greek mythology and Egyptian history, and a few statuettes. “This your mom? She’s a total babe.”

“She is not. Shut up.
Ass
.” Zeb said back to him, thinking it was nearly the sickest thing he had ever heard from Jack.
Ass
, that was one he learned from Oliver who used it when he was on the phone talking to what he called an ‘underling’. If the underling did something wrong, Oliver was liable to call him an ass.

Jackson’s retort was something akin to
no big deal
. “Whatever,” he said. “What’s on?”

The beauty of that age is that things can be dropped as easily as they were brought up. But Zeb thought about what Jackson had said long after Jackson had let it slide away. They had been hanging out since the year before, and along with his greater understanding of bigger things like money, Jackson had a bit more depth than most of the kids in other areas too, Zeb thought. Such depth was the only reason he ever spent time with him, to be honest. Well, there was the mural. Both of them were in charge of it. That, and Jackson could maneuver a pencil well enough to produce pieces of art that looked like photographs, which always set Zeb into awe. Jackson could talk about several different things—not just about the car he was going to get when he turned sixteen or which girl at St. Catherine’s would be the easiest to ‘get’. But that didn’t stop him from saying sick things every once in a while, sick things that might have come from the mouths of Jarred Bergen and Riley Fischer, or maybe Simon Caulder and Rudy Dunlop—or any of the other guys Zeb knew.

Even though he had pushed it out of his head—thinking this was really just one of the few pale things to come out of Jackson Cavanaugh’s mouth—he saw Sicily the following night anyway. It was the first time, the most vibrant, but it was not the last. And it wasn’t a dream either; Zeb was fully awake for it. Zeb never had dreams. In his whole life he had never woke with a dream in his mind, had never sat bolt upright in bed after a nightmare, had never drifted to a state of wakefulness with the sight of anything splendid still in his mind. He just did not dream. And that never changed.

Oliver the crow had been sitting on his usual tree branch by the window, cocking and tilting his head, cawing a few times but not obtrusively. The picture of Sicily just came to Zeb, overlaid itself on top of the window frame and its contents, in front of the shiny black feathers of the crow. It became like a new room, on the other side of his window, as if it had always been there, but was only visible now. It had a depth and a capacity; it was really there. His point of view drifted closer to the sill, and he could gradually see more of that phantom place.

She was lying on a bed in that room, on her back, long white legs spread haphazardly on an angle, one arm dangling from the mattress like a long exposed root. Her dark hair was messy, strewn out from her skull which lolled sideways at the head corner of the bed. Her upturned ankles made unkempt dimples in the fabric beneath her at the bed’s foot. She was fully naked and under her was a wrinkled and messy brown and orange bedspread on top of the sagging motel mattress. As Zeb approached, he realized the whole room was shades of gold, brown and orange: the curtains, the carpet, even some towels lying on a wooden chair in the corner.

It felt like the scene was one he had stepped into, like he had passed through his bedroom window without even a whisper of breath across the glass and was able to take silent steps closer and closer, alongside the bed towards his aunt’s face, where her eyes were closed gently. As Zeb got painfully closer, he realized she was heavily made up. Fuchsia and blues were smeared on her porcelain face. The makeup looked like it had been wet and smeared deliberately. Her mascara was thick and black at her eyes and it ran down her cheekbones in thin, crooked, gray lines. And there were bruises and welts on her neck, shoulders and arms. Her head lay sideways, one cheek pressed against the orange material beneath... He approached and put out a hand, gently probing the tight air around her. The edges became blurry, fuzzy, blackened. Her eyes cracked open, locked on him, and the arm that hung from the edge of the bed extended and reached out for him—

The crow’s wings flapped violently, in a generous arc, immediately replacing Sicily and that flaccid motel mattress. The two scenes, real and unreal, dissolved together in a flash that startled Zeb. He was alone in his dark room, the door drawn closed, letting only a crack of light seep from the hall and fall across him as he lay in his bed. He realized he was sweating. At his window Oliver the crow was gone and the fading blues and dark shades of night were all he could see again. The golds and browns of that other room, the one with the naked girl, were gone. Zeb closed his eyes then, tried to tame his galloping heart, and tried to shake the image of her reaching for him from his mind.