The Best Thing for You (2 page)

“Okay.” I point to reception. “Dawn?”

“Sorry,” she says, hustling back. “Paul Malone.”

“Who found him?” We’re busy now.

“In the parking lot behind Silver Video. At Eighth Avenue?” I nod. It’s our local. I have a card for Silver Video in my wallet. “Employee locking up. Said he’d been in the store an hour and a half before, returning videos, wanting to chat. Apparently he’s a regular.”

“What was he doing round the back?”

“I guess getting the crap kicked out of him.”

We send Paul Malone off for X-rays and a scan, an orderly wheeling him. He’s awake this whole time. He’s cleaned up and we’ve got painkillers in him but his face is looking worse, puffy and darkening.

“Who would do that?” I say, watching him go, and Dawn says, “Lord, I know.”

I pick up his jacket, a navy blue shell from Coast Meridian Sports. It’s pretty scuffed up, and square in the back is a footprint, so clear you can see the pattern on the sole – Nikes.

Dawn spans her hand next to the print.

After about twenty minutes his people start coming. By this
time I’ve got a baby. I’m telling the parents, your baby eats talc, your baby’s going to vomit talc. Keep the lid on the talc. They’re nodding.

“Doctor,” Dawn says.

I shake hands with a white-haired woman, the supervisor of Paul Malone’s group home. I explain about the tape on his ribs, the jaw, the nose, which will need surgery but not immediately. No apparent brain damage or internal damage, although he’s going to have pain talking and especially urinating. I explain he might not recognize her right now, with the Demerol, and we’d like him to stay at least until tomorrow for observation.

She asks for a list of his medications, goes and takes a look at him, then sits down in the waiting area and starts making notes.

A family with food poisoning – shellfish. Even the two-year-old had clams. I would never give my two-year-old clams. The next time I look over, there’s a weedy man with a honey-coloured moustache sitting next to the supervisor. They’re conferring, I would say. He goes over and makes a call at the pay phone, referring to some papers she’s given him. Then he tips her a little salute and leaves.

It’s about three a.m. “Pastry?” says Julie at Reception, when she sees me heading for the double doors with my water bottle, and holds out a plate.

I take my break outside, in the dark cool, like a smoker. I chomp my Danish and suck my water. The sliding doors sigh and two people come out, the supervisor and another woman. They don’t see me. The supervisor lights up. When she sucks, her cheeks go black in the white fluorescence from the
EMERGENCY
sign over the doors. They wander off the grooved rubber mat and the doors sigh closed. They sit on the edge of a box planter.

“I’m guessing kids,” the new woman says. “Teenagers.”

I bite my Danish quietly. It’s good.

The supervisor taps ash, looks away. “He shouldn’t have been out so late on his own. The videos were overdue. The night staff told him, first thing tomorrow morning, you go take those videos back. I guess he was trying to get the job done. Nice warm summer evening and all.”

“Elaine, I’m not blaming you, I guess,” the woman says. “But I just think someone has to take responsibility here. He could be dead.”

The supervisor tucks her cigarette into the bark chips in the planter behind her. “Let’s go back in.”

“Somebody’s at fault,” the woman says.

The rest of my shift is medium busy. It’s the weekend, so we get a few extra drunken stupidities, nothing major. In a quiet moment I pick up Paul Malone’s jacket again and look at the footprint on the back. I’m thinking,
teenagers.
The print is kind of small.

“See what I mean?” Dawn says.

Pink light, filtered through the smoked-glass doors, hits the floor in an orange pool. It glows fiercer and fiercer until it disappears – sun’s up. Julie’s phones are ringing silently, red lights winking and twitching, fibrillating.

I take a last look at Paul Malone. His face is purple, lip stitched, jaw wrapped. He watches me move around the bed. The woman from outside sits beside him, holding his hand. Someone’s put a hearing aid back in his ear.

“Is this your sister?” I say, and he nods.

Six a.m. I go home.

The neighbourhood is bathed in summer dawn, the trees are weighed down with it like syrup. In this light even the cars are tender and lovely, although the damp salt cool off the ocean, tangible blocks up from the beach at night, is already fizzing dry
under the blue heat of the sky. And people hate our neighbourhood, elsewhere in the city, hate it, they talk about us on the radio call-in shows because our old trees are saved at extra expense during road repair, because Charity Eagle thrives when other hospitals are closing, because this is where the lawyers live. Liam and I shouldn’t be here, even with our incomes. There was a blip in the market, a window, and we jumped; otherwise we’d be bitching it out in the suburbs and hating us too. In fact, most of our good friends, people we went to university with, live elsewhere. In fact, we only know one lawyer, and she is shy.

A police cruiser is parked in our driveway. As I pull up alongside it backs into the street. The officer waves at me before he drives away. Moustache, sunglasses. He looks like a prick.

“Fuck was
that
,” I say to no one. My heart is beating. I put the car away. In the house, I go straight up to Ty’s room, but he’s not there. His weights are lined up under his Steve Nash poster, his plaid sheets are on his bed, his computer is on his desk, but he’s not in any of his places. I can’t see his shoes.

I go to our bedroom. Liam’s in bed, asleep, naked. The note on my night table says,
Kid’s sleeping over at Jason’s.

The room is white, light-swollen, awake.

“How was work?” Liam says. So he’s awake too, just not moving. I sit beside him on the bed and tell him about the very first one, the one I lost, the MI.

“Again?”

“Heart attack. He was hanging on when they brought him in, but there was nothing we could do. I wish those guys would die at home sometimes.”

“With their martinis and their chicken-fried steaks and their hippo guts and their stressful stockbroking careers.”

“All of that,” I say. “Why was there a police cruiser in the driveway just now?”

The phone rings. “What the hell?” Liam says. “It’s not even seven. If that’s Ty wanting to be picked up, tell him he’s on his own.”

I let the machine down in the kitchen take it. “Liam.”

“We’re having words when he gets home, anyway. The pair of them took off last night without telling me. Then he phones from Jason’s, by the way Dad, I’m staying here tonight. Not asking, notice, telling.
And
they left me the dishes, which as we all know is women’s and small boys’ work.”

“What time was this?” I say. “Approximately.”

“It’s that Jason, I think.” He’s up on an elbow now. “There’s something kind of morose about that kid.”

“Liam.”

“Ty’s a bright boy,” my husband says, sitting up. He’s getting excited. “He should have bright friends. That Jason gets on my nerves. I want to sock him.”

“No you don’t want to sock him.”

He cups my face in his hands and looks at my hair. “Yes, I honestly do.” He makes a fist, draws it back, slow-mo, lets his knuckles kiss my jaw in a pretend right hook. “Bam! Like that. And that T-shirt.”

I bite my lip.

“He’s repugnant. A sniggering, repugnant little boy.”

“Which you never were.”

“I was a prince,” Liam says. “My son is a prince. The lower life forms, we’re not accountable.”

“Liam, why were the police here?”

“I’m just coming to that.” He stares at me for a minute before saying, “Nope. Can’t think of anything funny. Was there really a cruiser in the driveway?”

“There really, really was.”

“Let’s have a baby,” Liam says.

We get into position. Then I say, “What if there’s something wrong with it?”

He hesitates over me. “You mean, like, it turns out closer to the Jason-end of the spectrum?”

“I mean, like, a condition, a deformity or a – syndrome, of some sort.”

“That’s horrible,” Liam says. “We’re making love and you’re thinking about things like that? I guess it could be a racist bigot and a psychopath too. Why do you want to think these things? Do you want to jinx us?”

I tell him my idea about the flagstones. “That’s more like it,” he says. We stop talking and start enjoying ourselves. “Be noisy,” he says. “Kid’s out of the house. Be noisy.”

As he ruts away I tell myself I’m not, not, not going to worry about a child that isn’t my child. I should know better than to try to peek behind the scenery: it always snaps back before my eyes have time to adjust, and I’m left with the props and the big lights and the goody-goody goodness of my life. I have the house, the job, the world with the bright, neat-edged colours of a cartoon. My blood twinkles in my healthy veins. My husband is a prince. My son is a prince. The prick in the cruiser was just turning around.

After he comes, gasping and shuddering like he’s wounded, I send him down for orange juice. “Newspaper, bagels!” I add. I want to eat, but I also want to be asleep before the landscapers arrive or I’ll just lie there listening, needing to supervise. Lying on my back, knees up, I think of the war soup going on inside me, hopefully. “Girl,” I say, poking myself in the belly. “Hey you. We want a girl.”

“Pulp?” Liam calls. “Or no? Kate?” But it’s pleasant to ignore him, lying here and thinking I know where Ty’s mobile is, elephants rounding to Brahms, and his little suits. I kept
everything. I’m letting consciousness go, moment to moment, like pruning out a handful of helium balloons. Red is a good colour for a baby’s room, I’m thinking, brass elephants, candles, a carved wood chest. Darkness and textures, a warm cave. I’m going in.

The next few days pass as some days will, water through glass pipes. The beating makes a small worrisome item on the local news as a probable hate crime, then goes under. The landscapers bring us stone samples, big as pizzas, which we do gravely consider. Marble is not out of the question. Ty seems sleepy, out of it, which I attribute to a late-summer growth spurt, a little too much computer, the imminence of school. Still, we manage to have the following conversation:

At the hospital are painters, men responsible for the term “hospital green.” When I ask, they tell me it’s known in the trade as “herb.” And I like it, wet or dry – the world being made new for Labour Day, the sticky creak of wet paint coming off the roller. I discuss with Administration certain possibilities, a shifting of shifts, to which they proclaim themselves open. There’s a spot in the out-patient clinic next door, which I covet, and I let them know. We look each other in the eye, Administration and I, and neither of us has to blink. I go days at the clinic.

Late afternoon, Sunday before Monday before school, me still a little groggy from the turnaround, there’s a message on the answering machine from the Parmenters, Jason’s parents. Would we go round this evening and bring Ty? Liam phones back three times to confirm but all he gets is tape.

“I doubt it’s supper or they’d have said supper,” I say. “Let’s take a bottle of wine. If they feed us, great. If not, takeout.”

“Can we eat in the car?” Liam says.

We’ve been having an awful lot of sex lately. We’re both feeling a little puffy with it, a little silly and bruised.

“Ty!” Liam shouts, even though he’s right here, leaning in the doorway like we’ve taken his crutches. “Who are these people? Are these Merlot people or Chardonnay people? What exactly are we dealing with here, son?”

Ty shrugs. When I take his chin in my hand to make him look at me he scowls. “What?” I say.

He mumbles about not wanting to go.

“Well, hell,” Liam says. “I’m just going so I can throw spit-balls at Jason. Your mom’s just going so she can administer CPR if people start choking on their own boredom. You know? Maybe they’ll let us watch
TV
. How bad can it be?”

I say, “Did you and Jason have a fight?”

Ty inarticulates.

“Enunciate or I’ll belt you,” Liam says.

He doesn’t smile. “Can I have a shower?”

Shocked, we stare. He looks miserable.

“Yes, god,” we say, and he turns away.

At ten past seven we’re heading up the garden path. It’s not a great house, pretty bad house, in fact. Stucco, rusted railings, crap for grass. “Uh-oh,” I say softly to Liam, nodding at a tea-like stain spreading from the eaves to the front window.

“In and out,” Liam responds under his breath. “One, two –”

“Mom,” Ty says.

The door opens. “Hel-
lo
!” we say.

It’s just barely possible to imagine Jason ever replicating the big piece of meat that is his dad. He’s got a gut and hands like beefs, but also his son’s hair, that same straw-blond I associate with virgin farmboys. Without a word he gestures us into the house, while managing not to take the wine (a decent enough Cabernet). Ty trails. In the living room are Jason, who stares
sullenly at the floor and doesn’t look up when we come in, and Jason’s mom, who’s obviously been crying.

I grab for Ty, to protect him from the big man behind us.

“Have you seen the evening news?” the big man says, and then I see he’s been crying too. His eyes are red and he’s biting down so hard he can barely talk. “Our boys have something to tell us.” Except that isn’t exactly what he says. He says, “The evening newsh.” He says, “Shomething to tell ush.”

“We haven’t seen the news,” Liam says idiotically, yielding, it seems to me, some pretty basic ground. But I look at Ty and Ty is crying. He hasn’t cried in years, that I’ve seen. He’s had no call.

“Liam,” I say sharply, the way I speak to my nurses sometimes, and everyone looks at me. I look at Jason’s dad, Mr. Parmenter. I look him in the eye. “Say what you’ve got to say.”

“It wasn’t me,” Ty says.

“It was the two of them together,” Mr. Parmenter says. Mrs. Parmenter opens her mouth and cries soundlessly. “We’re going to the police,” Mr. Parmenter says.