The Best Thing for You (13 page)

This time, a note, a missive I skim but can’t bring myself to read. I shred it and take the pieces into the staff washroom, where I flush them down the nice clean toilet. The bits of paper swirl and dissolve like sugar candy.

I don’t remember how Liam and I met. One night at a party I realized I’d seen him around before, and that’s the night I remember, looking at his face and thinking,
Him again.

When he started phoning a few days later, I said no. He didn’t look like anything to me.

For a while I sang and screamed with this band. We all lived together in a house in Jericho, not far from the University, and it was exhausting. We would get home at two or three, haul the gear in, and everyone else would go to bed while I tried to stay up and eke out another hour of study. We had cash floating in and out of our pockets and people were scared of us because of what we did to ourselves, but for a smart girl trying to hang on to a scholarship it was not a good way of going around in the world. Had I been less cranky and pissed off I might have been lonely; but people spitting at me in the street and ignoring me in shops and trying not to sit next to me in buses and lecture halls made me believe I was better alone.

Shaving half my head did not deter Liam, though. Curses and spit did not deter Liam. Can you picture how it was? Him down
there in the street and me up in my room, wondering when he would give up and go away? And then when I started to let him in? Oh, we had ourselves a romance for a while, sparks flying everywhere. We were young.

“I’m flattered, I am.”

He rolls his eyes.

“Cut it out,” I say, as though he’s my son.

Banquettes of blood-coloured vinyl, white paper napkins in tarnished chrome dispensers, tiny round tables like dinner plates on poles, jolting hot cups of coffee in a cool whitewash of early November sun. Morning sickness past, the smell of coffee is a balm again. The café I’ve chosen for this sun-up showdown used to be a favourite of mine, my old study hangout before Ty, before Liam. They were nice to me here, quiet me with my textbooks, even in all my finery. It’s been sold a couple of times since and gone upscale, in that rather self-conscious, retro-funk fashion that passes for cutting edge these days – clapper lights in the bathrooms, so witty – but it still beats the hell out of Starbucks.

“What I don’t get,” Calvin says, “is how you went from being a girl in a punk band to –” He waves his hands, pulling in my clothes, my hair, my car, my practice, my life.

“A yuppie,” I suggest. “Acquisitive. Consumer-oriented. A sellout.”

“Regular,” he says.

Calvin’s pre-work clothes are skate shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt advertising some band I’ve never heard of. He looks sleepy, and hunches over his coffee like it needs protecting. He also watches me the way Ty used to when he was a baby, unable to take his
eyes off my smallest movement. It’s unnerving. That he knows nothing of the troubles of the past few weeks, of Liam, of Ty, makes this all the more unreal, inconsequential, a game I can play any way I want. Still, I try to do right.

“The devil came to me at the crossroads at midnight,” I say. “What do you want me to say? I had a child. After that, sometimes a safety pin is just a safety pin.”

“You’ve used that line before.”

I have, too. I try again. “Things changed. I had more responsibilities and less time to do my hair in the morning.”

He tilts his head to one side. “Why can you only tell it like a joke?”

Because it seemed like a joke, I want to say. Putting on civvies and going about without turning a single head, as though someone had come down with a giant eraser and just scrubbed me out. Because of how easy it was to become a child again, with a child of my own; how easy it was just to give up and fit in, and how good I was at it. Because if you don’t laugh you’ll surely cry. “What do you want from me, exactly?”

He looks surprised. He looks around the coffee shop, as though some crucial new information that changes everything might be written on the walls. He looks back at my face. “This,” he says, as though it’s obvious.

Morning, coffee, talk. Us together. “Calvin,” I say. My voice is nicer than I mean it to be. He nods. “You have to stop with the little notes and gifts and things. It’s too much right now.”

He asks politely if that might change later.

“Really, really not.”

Outside, traffic is picking up. I take a last sip of coffee and reach behind me for the coat I’ve arranged over the back of my chair. My watch says 7:38, past time to be leaving. I hold out
my arm to show him, but he’s still staring at my face like something’s written there.

“You should see us at home,” I say. “You’d see how normal we are. We’re so normal it’s sickening.”

He reaches over to brush my cheek with his fingertips. I lean back, out of reach.

“The punk girl,” I tell him. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Partly.”

“No more. All gone. Normal, normal, normal.”

“Never,” he says, with that look I thrive on – nervous, hopeful, hurt.

“Nobody
needs
therapy,” Liam says.

I’m in my office at the clinic. He’s in his office at the University. I picture him with his feet on his desk, looking down over the quad, shoulder-holding the phone while he plays with his letter opener or flips paper clips.

“He’s fine,” he says.

“He wouldn’t get out of bed again this morning. Then, when I get back from lunch, there’s a message on my machine from the assistant principal saying he’s done no homework for any of his classes since school started. She says she understands he’s been unwell for the past week, but maybe we could have a meeting to arrange for drop-off and pickup of assignments until the leg is healed.”

“The leg.”

“The leg, yeah. He’s been cutting for the past
week.
Where does he go?”

Calvin walks by my open door, hesitates. Since our talk in the café, god help us, we’ve made a game of it. I make my hand into a gun and hold it sideways, the sexy way they do in the movies
now, palm to floor, and point it at him. He grabs his heart and staggers away.

“I want Ty to have a couple of sessions. Maybe after that the three of us –”

“No fucking way.”

“– therapy. I thought you said you were unhappy.”

“Unhappy. Not unstable.”

On my desk are Bakelite photo cubes from a swish store called Industry. I have Ty in the green one and Liam in the blue one. And they’re tiny, tiny. “What
do
you want, then?”

“Jesus,” he says.

He goes to different places, he says. Sometimes the mall, sometimes the beach. Sometimes Granville Street. Granville Street is
CD
stores and cinemas, but further down it’s also arcades and sex shops and teens in pyjamas begging for smack money. We are aghast. We say, “Granville Street?”

“Mostly the beach,” Ty says.

Each of us has staked out a piece of kitchen turf: Liam is pacing in front of the stove, Ty leans against the fridge, I’m sitting at the table squaring up papers and magazines. We’re maintaining a certain distance. I got a referral through the office, went ahead and made the appointment with a therapist, and that’s what’s keeping me calm, numb. I watch my hands sorting and leafing, setting aside some flyers I want to look at later. I’m very capable.

“Sorry,” Ty says.

Liam asks him what he’s sorry for.

“Forget it,” Ty says.

“No, I want to know,” Liam says. “For skipping school or lying to everyone or what? It couldn’t be about that beating, because you weren’t involved in that, were you? Were you?”

Ty says quickly, “About skipping school. But everyone knows about it at school. Everyone knows why Jason isn’t there, why he isn’t coming back. Can I go to a different school?”

“You may not,” Liam says.

“How does everybody know?” I ask. Ty shrugs. “No, not good enough,” I say.

“I don’t know how they know. I don’t have friends any more. They – nobody will talk to me.”

“I knew this would happen,” Liam says.

“What about Brad and Matt?” Liam rolls his eyes like I’m changing the subject. Ty doesn’t answer. “Come here.” Ty pushes off from the fridge and comes to sit beside me. I reach over and pretend to pick a piece of lint from his hair, an excuse to touch. “If they know about Jason, they know you weren’t involved. Right? They know you weren’t there. I don’t understand – no, baby, look at me. I don’t understand why people would treat you this way. Are you maybe exaggerating a little?”

“No!” he says.

“I mean, I can see it’s probably awkward. I can see that. You were his friend, the police came to the school. But it’s over now, isn’t it? And if it’s over, if there’s no more to it than that, doesn’t that mean some of this must just be in your head?”

Ty closes his eyes.

“Your mother asked you a question,” Liam says.

“It’s not in my head.”

“Then why would your best friends treat you the way you say?”

The question hangs in the air like something sharp and shiny suspended from a string, turning slowly, allowing us to consider all its angles. Why, indeed?

“Son,” Liam says.

Ty opens his eyes.

“I think it might be in your head,” I say. “I think you might be
feeling some things you don’t really know how to talk about right now that are making you want to avoid your friends at school.”

“No, Mom,” Ty says again, but I keep going.

“Maybe it would be easier to talk to someone other than us. What do you think?” And in my best soothing voice I tell him about the therapist.

He says, “No way.”

“Son,” Liam says again.

“No freaking way. No fucking way.”

“You,” Liam says, pointing a finger at him.

I start talking again about the therapist.

“Shut up,” Ty says, and starts flipping through a Safeway flyer on the table in front of him.

I grab his chin and jerk his head around, forcing him to look at me. “You lied to me.”

“I said sorry.”

“No,” I say. “You lied to
me.
That is more important and bad than anything you may or may not have done to anybody else, ever. I didn’t fuck my life up having you so you could spend your fourteen-year-old days pissing around the beach feeling sorry for yourself. If you have something you want to say, say it. Otherwise you’re going to school tomorrow and you’re going to the therapist after that and you’re going to get back on that fucking honour roll. Do you have something you want to say?”