The Best Thing for You (6 page)

“Usually I see a man.”

“Do you have a regular doctor?” I ask.

“Usually I see a man.”

“At this clinic?”

“This clinic, the other clinic. I can’t afford to pay.”

“That’s all right,” I say. “How old are you, Mr. Resnick?”

“Today’s my birthday.”

“Well!” I say. I ask him if he knows the year he was born.

“Nineteen-thirty,” he says. “I’m a Jew.” I ask him about feeling breathless. He says, “I feel like a paper bag.”

“Do you smoke?”

“Cigarettes.” He shrugs. “I like cigarettes.”

“Are you on any medications right now?” He doesn’t answer. “Do you have pain?” I ask. “Or just discomfort?”

“Did my landlady phone you?”

“No, sir,” I say. “Can you show me if it hurts anywhere?”

“I’m not sure.” He stands up. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

I say, “Well, but you’re here now.” I reach around for my stethoscope.

“No.” He backs away from me. I put the stethoscope down. “I never even got married,” he says.

I look at his hands and take a deep breath. “I’m glad you came here today,” I say slowly, trying to make eye contact the way you’re supposed to. “It’s good to come see a doctor when something feels wrong. You did the right thing.”

“You’re not a doctor,” he says.

“There’s my certificate.” I point to the wall.

“Did my landlady phone you?”

“Sit down, Mr. Resnick,” I say firmly. He opens the examining room door. “Mr. Resnick.”

“Goodbye,” he says loudly.

I follow him a little ways down the empty hall. “Excuse me,
excuse me,” he says. He turns left and I hear him tell the receptionist, “I don’t have to pay this time.”

“You come back and see us again, Mr. Resnick,” the receptionist says.

The examining room, when I return to it, is tainted with a rancid piss-and-gravy smell I’m afraid will get into my clothes and hair.

Outside, textbook Indian summer: taut blue sky, leaves crisping, but blood-warm, bathwater-warm. Something about the staff parking lot pleases me intensely: altitude, maybe. You can’t quite see the inlet but you can see the open sky above it and the mountains, eye-level, on the opposite shore. My Jetta is parked between Dr. Gagnon’s Lincoln Continental and a little cartoon Mazda, red as lips, all rounded and low. I throw my jacket and bag into the back seat and punch the radio – news. I punch some more. One of Ty’s stations – lustful, lustily amped teenagers – will do me for the ride home. I think about calling Liam again but decide I can get there as quick as calling. I wonder where Mr. Resnick lives, because he surely doesn’t come from this neighbourhood unless someone’s letting him fester in a basement.

When I pull up to the house, I see Liam standing in the drive with his jacket on. Before I can cut the engine he’s getting in the passenger side, strapping in. “Finally,” he says.

“What?”

“Drive, please,” he says. So I back us back into the street. “Where do you want to go?”

“Me?” I say. “Where do I want to go? I don’t want to go. What’s going on?”

“Can I turn this off?” He means my radio. He reaches for the dash but hesitates. We listen to the rest of the song, some serious
bewailing and bemoaning and guitar-wrangling, before he kills it. “Like that,” he says grudgingly.

“We’re old,” I remind him.

“Know where I was today?”

It’s a sunny day. I’ll play straight man. “Class?”

“First I was in class. Yes. This morning I was in class. This afternoon I was in a police station with your son while they interviewed him.”

“
My
son.”

“Me, the police, our lawyer, and your son in a room with wire on the windows. I wanted to kill him.”

On the avenue, I parallel park in front of the
phô
place. “Where is he?”

“In his room.”

“You sent him to his room?”

“Too right,” Liam says.

“He didn’t do anything.” No reaction. “Hey.”

“He’s scaring the hell out of me,” Liam says softly.

I’m trying to box the information as he gives it to me, break it down into manageable pieces. “Ty’s okay?”

“They went to his school to get him. Ah, hell, Ty’s fine, only his classmates are going to know pretty soon if they don’t already, and then their parents will know, and so on, and so on. You know how it goes.”

“There’s nothing to know.”

“Yeah, but. That shit gets twisted.”

“This lawyer, this was the lawyer Isobel recommended?”

“Are we getting
phô
?” Liam says.

We go in. I hold up two fingers. “Two beef,” I tell the girl at the counter.

“To go?”

I look at Liam. “You want soup in the car?”

“To go,” Liam says.

The girl, in a crisp white man’s shirt, writes it on a pad. “Ten minute,” she says. We sit on chairs of straight-backed cherrywood laminate to wait, our backs to the window, arms touching.

“When did you tell him he could come out of his room?”

“When we get back.”

“Liam.”

“He has the computer. He’ll be fine.”

The girl withdraws into the depths of the empty restaurant, leaving us alone. Steamy heat reaches us from the kitchens, fogging the windows and seeming to nourish a palm in the corner beside Liam’s chair, so big its trunk grows sideways where it hits the ceiling. I’m sleepy in here, I’m starving. Minutes melt. My husband, legs crossed, wrists crossed over his lap, has his eyes closed. He opens them when he feels me staring at him.

“Why didn’t anybody call me?” I ask.

“I left you a message.”

I explain about that. “I meant the police. Presumably it’s our right to be there. Why did they call you and not me?”

“Apparently they did what Ty asked them to.”

“Oh,” I say.

On the counter is a bowl of mints. Liam gets up, takes one, sits back down, and pulls on the plastic-wrapper ears with both hands. The candy falls into his lap. With his right hand he puts the candy in his mouth. His left, holding the wrapper, trails beside the chair. He lets the wrapper fall to the floor.

“Why didn’t he want me?” I ask.

“Hello, your order,” the girl says, coming back with two big Styrofoam tubs. “Ten ninety-five.” She pulls two plastic-wrapped packages from under the counter, which from past experience we know to contain paper napkins, plastic spoons, and balsa chopsticks. “You want a bag?”

Counting coins, I dismiss the bag.

“So, is hot.” She blows on her fingers and gives Liam a smile.

In the car we bite open the packages, snap separate the chopsticks. Rush hour and the street is lined with parked and moving cars. A sport-utility vehicle hovers, seeing us sitting, but we wave him on: we aren’t leaving yet. He fingers us. Our tubs of soup are lidded with more plastic, like coffee cup lids but bigger. We toss them on the dash. Liam dives straight in with his chopsticks and extracts a tongue-shaped piece of pink meat, while I spoon. I say, “This lawyer.”

“I phoned him on my way to the station. He told me we should sit tight until he got there, I should tell the police we had a lawyer on the way.”

“Did they seem surprised at that?”

“I don’t think so. Ty and I sat in somebody’s office while we waited. He told me the assistant principal pulled him out of English class and walked him to his locker for his jacket and when they got to the office there was a cop waiting there. The cop drove him to the station and told him he could phone whoever he needed to before giving his statement. He phoned me.”

“Thank god you were there.” I spoon-slice some noodles. “You could have been in class.”

“I
was
in class. Ty told the departmental secretary it was an emergency and not to hang up the phone until she found me. She called Campus Security. I had to tell a hundred and fifty first years to go home.”

“Wow,” I say. “I guess we should be proud of him. That’s pretty together.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell the Dean tomorrow.”

With my chopsticks I transfer a piece of beef from my cup to
his. “Sounds like they were trying to scare him, coming to the school.” Together we watch a Camry parallel park in the space which has opened up in front of us. Eyeing us, she takes her time. The
phô
place is hopping now, takeout mostly. “Was Officer Stevens there?”

“Yes.” Liam slurps up some noodles. “It was just like when she came to the house, all the same questions.”

“That’s good,” I say, meaning it as a question.

“The lawyer thinks we’re not done. I made us an appointment for the day after tomorrow.”

“Have you paid him yet?”

“Some.”

“Some,” I repeat. I re-lid my soup, prop it between Liam’s knees, and start the car. “Can we go home now?”

“Seat belt.”

I hesitate. “You don’t think he was there, do you?”

He shakes his head.

At home, I knock on Ty’s door. “Minute!” he says.

“No, now.” He opens the door, a little flushed. “Am I bothering you?”

“Can I come out now?”

Instead, I go in and look around. Bed rumpled but made. Window open so things are smelling good, better. On the computer, his screensaver – a multicoloured, gyrating webbing, expanding and contracting like something vaguely undersea – tells me he hasn’t been on in at least five minutes unless he’s changed the settings I fixed for him when we last upgraded, three months ago. I give the mouse a flick to see what he’s doing and get an empty page of Word.

He’s watching me from the doorway. “Way to infringe my privacy, Mom.”

“Have you eaten?”

“You have.” He makes a face. “You smell spicy. Did you bring me any?”

“No.” I figure he was masturbating. “How was your field trip today?”

He flushes.

“Come for a run?”

Amazingly, without hesitating, he says, “I gotta change.”

Downstairs I find Liam surveying his office. “Something’s missing,” he says.

“Air?”

“A sofa.” I tell him Ty and I are going out for a bit. “Take your time,” he says.

Ty’s waiting for me in his basketball gear. He waits while I lock the front door and tie the key to my shoe. So far we’ve run together maybe half a dozen times this year. He’s got good intentions and a good clean form, fast, but my endurance pisses him off, discourages him, so I say, “I just want a small one today,” and hope I’m not too obvious.

The beach is crowded with strollers and runners, good citizens released from work, bankers in singlets, girls with their girlfriends and dogs. Ty and I, I’m thinking, make a nice pair, a nice picture: healthy lifestyle, healthy relationship, nice clothes, smooth. The business with the police gives us an urgency, an aristocracy the people around us lack. We pass them like cattle.

“Scary day?” I ask.

He waggles a hand.

“Talk. If you can’t talk, you’re going too fast.”

“I wasn’t scared.”

“Was Jason at school today?”

He’s speeding up. “No.”

“Was anybody talking about him? Like, asking where he was?”

“No.” I point to the next fountain, meaning: let’s make for that. “Mom, Jason’s not very popular. Kids wouldn’t really be curious about where he is. They wouldn’t notice.”

“Are you?”

“Curious?”

“Popular.”

He’s matching me, stride for stride. He’s growing up. “I’m all right.”

“What does that mean, all right?”

A clot-calved biker is filling his water bottle at the fountain with one hand, talking into a cellphone. We prowl, waiting. When he’s finished we take turns. The water is icy. Ty gargles.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m extremely popular.” Then, startling both of us, “I’m the love god.” The biker, who in his Mao-collared spandex shirt had retreated to lean against a nearby tree, grins and toasts my son with his water bottle.

“Hail,” I say.

“Were you popular in high school?” We start back, loping gently now. It’s the kind of question that makes me suspicious. I can see wanting to change the subject after that love god crack, but it’s a little too sitcom for him, too sweetly earnest. Though perhaps it’s no different from me enjoying the image of the pair of us, imagining people must look at us running together and smile. And today can’t have been a good day, by high-school standards: he drew attention, which is never good. So I try.

“I was a brainy girl,” I say. “My friends were not the trendiest, but I wasn’t lonely either. We went to dances and stuff. Is that what you mean?”

“What about Dad?”

“Dad and I didn’t go to the same high school. We met in university. You know that.”

“I know. I mean, was he popular?”

“Listen to me carefully,” I say. “Your father was a geek and I took pity on him. Anything he tells you different is an evil lie.”

“Did you have other boyfriends than him?”

“Zillions.”

“Did you really have green hair?”

I sigh. “You know I did. Long ago in a land far, far away, when I was very angry about things like greed and insincerity and classical music and world hunger.”

“Mom Vicious,” Ty says.

“I was very big on breaking the bonds of convention. I was very big on destroying illusion in all its manifestations. The illusion of good manners, the illusion of capitalism, the illusion of responsibility to an irresponsible government, the illusion of beauty –”

“But you became a doctor.”

I poke him in the arm. “Stop listening to your dad so much, okay? The two are not incompatible. I cared about people and about making the world a better place. That’s what I
did
care about. I was extremely young. Do you know the origins of Velcro?”

He doesn’t. I tell him. “Is that true?” he says.

“How come, at the police station, you called your dad and not me?”

He hesitates. Then: “Your job is more important.”

And he’s right, though I can’t say so. “Walk,” I instruct. We’re back in the streets, approaching home. “Do you worry about people liking you?”

“Dad says Jason is sick,” he says instead of answering. “Is that what you think too?”

“As a doctor, you mean?” He nods. “What do you think I’m going to say?”

“You’d need to examine him?”

“Well, that,” I say. “What do you think?”