The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (64 page)

“Money,” Wayne J. said, biting off the word.

“Can you elucidate?” Hilda asked.

He eased himself back into his chair. “Justine had promised to give some money to Culhane House – it’s a prisoners’ support group some of us started up for cons and ex-cons.

“Culhane House, as in Claire Culhane?” I asked.

He gave me a sidelong glance. “She was another classy lady,” he said. “Justine suggested the name.” He turned back to Hilda. “Prisoners’ rights aren’t exactly a hot ticket now. Most people seem to think the only choice society should
give a con is permanent incarceration or the end of a rope.”

“But Madame Justice Blackwell believed there were more humane alternatives,” Hilda said.

Wayne J. shrugged. “You could say that, but I wouldn’t. I think for Justine it was more a practical thing.”

“Practical in what way?” asked Hilda.

“Like in the way that, most of the time, prisons just don’t do what solid citizens want them to do. All prisons are good for is pissing away lives and pissing away money. You can make semi-good people bad in prison, and you can make bad people worse, but you never make anybody better. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hilda. They may be hellholes, but I’ve never seen a prison yet that made anybody scared to come back. Every time I hear some expert running off at the mouth about that three strikes and you’re out crap, I want to laugh. The only guy who’s scared of going to prison is a guy who’s never been there. Any ex-con knows that he might as well be in prison as anywhere else. Justine finally figured that there was a cheaper, better alternative to prison, and she was prepared to use her chequebook so that other people could figure it out too.”

“But she withdrew her offer of financial support,” Hilda said.

Wayne J. gripped the arms of his chair. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed how big his hands were. They were huge, and they were taut with the effort to maintain control. “God damn it, she didn’t withdraw the offer,” he said furiously. “She just decided to fucking reconsider.”

The rage in his voice was a shock; so were his eyes, which had darkened terrifyingly. The Old Spice and the self-deprecating chuckle had lulled me, but there was no disputing the fact that only an act of will was preventing the man in front of me from springing out of my grandmother’s chair and
smashing everything in sight. My grandmother would have said I had been six kinds of fool to invite Wayne J. Waters into my house, and she would have been right. I began to run through strategies to get him out of the house. Just when I’d decided that none seemed workable, the storm passed.

Wayne J. hung his head in an attitude of abject apology. “Sorry about the language, ladies,” he said. “It’s just that there were so many people pushing Justine to ‘withdraw’ her offer. Miss McCourt, I don’t know if she had a chance to tell you this the other night, but since Justine decided to support Culhane House, people have been lining up to tell her how crazy she is –
was.”
He made a fist with one hand and pounded it repeatedly into the palm of his other hand. It was the same gesture he’d made when no one answered the door the day he went to Justine’s house on Leopold Crescent. “They tried to tell her she was losing it because she was getting old, but she wasn’t losing it, she was finding it.” He looked at me. His eyes were black and mesmerizing. “Does that make sense?”

Almost against my will, I found myself agreeing. “Yes,” I said. “It makes sense.”

“Good,” he said. “Because no matter what people said, Justine was with the people at Culhane House 110 per cent.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Absolutely trustworthy,” I said.

He didn’t blink. “Except for that last night, absolutely.”

When Wayne J. left, I followed him out. I’d decided to skip the meeting at the Faculty Club and concentrate my efforts on getting to the university in time for my first class. I backed the Volvo down the driveway, but as I turned onto the street, Wayne J. came over. I cranked down my window.

“I forgot to say thanks,” he said.

“For what?”

“For letting me into your house. A lot of ladies wouldn’t have had the balls.” He realized what he’d said and grimaced. “Whoa,” he said, “that didn’t come out right.”

“I took it as a compliment,” I said.

He touched an imaginary cap. “That’s how I meant it.”

I got to the university just in time to run to the Political Science office to check my mail and pick up my class lists. Rosalie Norman, our departmental administrative assistant, was lying in wait. She was dressed in her inevitable twin sweater set, this time the colour of dried mustard. As it had been every morning since I’d come to work at the university, Rosalie’s greeting was minatory.

“It helps to let me know ahead of time if you’re not going to show up for a meeting. That way I don’t order extra at the Faculty Club.”

Wayne J. Waters might have seen me as a lady with balls, but dealing with Rosalie always unmanned me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Something came up at home. I hope you were able to find someone to eat my bran muffin.” I looked down at my class list for Political Science 110. There were 212 students registered, twice as many as usual. I held it out to her. “Rosalie, something’s wrong with this list.”

She didn’t even favour it with a glance. Instead, she tapped her watch. “Well, you’re going to work it out yourself. When a person decides to come late, she can’t expect the rest of us to pick up the pieces.”

The day continued to run smoothly. My hope that the problem on my list was clerical rather than actual was dashed as soon as I walked into my classroom. More than two hundred students were jammed into a space with desks for a hundred. A computer glitch had timetabled two sections of Political Science 110 together, and by the time I had separated the classes, half the period was over. In the afternoon,
my senior class informed me sulkily that their text wasn’t in the bookstore. When I got back to my office, the telephone was ringing, but it rang its last as I unlocked the door. I checked my voice mail. My first two callers invited me to start-up meetings of organizations I had no intention of joining; my third caller was Alex, asking a favour. He had been phoning Eli’s school all day, but hadn’t been able to connect with Eli’s teacher. Now he had a meeting that would run all afternoon, and he wondered if I could get in touch with the school and fill them in. I hung up the phone and grabbed my briefcase. Suddenly I had a legitimate excuse to get out of the office early, and I snatched it.

Gerry Acoose Collegiate was an inner-city experiment: an old secondary school that the community had convinced the Board of Education to give over to those who believed First Nations’ kids might thrive on a curriculum that reflected their cultural history and an attendance policy that took into account the realities of adolescent life in the city’s core. As I pulled up in front of the school, I thought about the new-model cars that lined the streets near my son Angus’s south-end high school.

The students at Gerry Acoose weren’t kids whose parents handed them the keys to a Nova on their sixteenth birthday. These young people had seen a lot more of life than the shining-eyed innocents who clutched Club Monaco book-bags in the back-to-school ads. Among other innovations, G.A.C. had a program for teen mothers, and as I waded through the students lounging on the front steps, I passed a number of girls, barely into puberty themselves, who were clutching babies. The only student who reacted to my presence was a whippet-thin boy with shoulder-length hair, worn in the traditional way. He gave me a half-smile, which encouraged me enough to ask him for directions to the principal’s office.

The halls of the school were filled with student art: some good; some not so good. On the wall outside the gymnasium, there was a life-sized painting of a white buffalo that was absolutely breathtaking. I thought of Eli’s spray-painted horses; this looked like a place where they might find a home. The principal wasn’t in his office, but the school secretary, a motherly woman in a flowered dress, pink cardigan, and sensible shoes, checked the computer and directed me to Eli’s homeroom.

At the back of Room 10
C
, a young woman in bluejeans and a T-shirt was stapling a poster of an aboriginal man in a white lab coat to the bulletin board. She didn’t look old enough to be the one in charge of the staple-gun.

I coughed to get the woman’s attention, but she didn’t respond. Finally, I said, “I’m looking for the homeroom teacher.”

“You’re looking
at
the homeroom teacher,” she said, without turning. “Hang on. I’ll be right with you.”

As I waited for her to finish, I glanced around. It was a pleasant room, filled with that gentle hazy light that comes when afternoon sun filters through chalk dust. There was a hint of sweetgrass in the air, a starblanket against the far wall, and a bank of computers in front of the windows. Posters brightened the other walls: a hockey player, a powwow dancer, an actor, a playwright, and an orchestra conductor – all aboriginal.

When Eli’s teacher turned and saw me, her face was as impassive as those of the kids outside. “I’m Anita Greyeyes,” she said, not smiling. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to tell you why Eli Kequahtooway wasn’t in class today,” I said.

Anita Greyeyes moved to the desk at the front of the room and motioned me to the chair opposite hers. “Are you his social worker?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m a friend. Of Eli and of his uncle.” As
I explained the situation, Anita Greyeyes’ gaze never left my face.

When I finished, she said, “What’s Eli’s prognosis?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But, Ms. Greyeyes, he’s very bright and he has a close relationship with his uncle. We’re hopeful.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “I take it that your relationship with his uncle is also close.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Any chance that’s the problem?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”

Anita Greyeyes went to a table near the window that was loaded with texts. I watched as she chose a selection for Eli. She had small hands, blunt-fingered and efficient. As she recorded the titles in a record book, her precision-cut black hair fell forward against her cheekbones. She wrote assignments out in a small spiral notebook, put it on top of the books, and slid the stack to me. I noticed that one of the books was Eden Robinson’s
Traplines
.

I picked it up. “Good choice,” I said.

Anita Greyeyes didn’t respond. “If it looks as if Eli’s absence is going to be long-term, come back and we’ll work something out.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I was just about out the door when she called to me. “Tell Eli that there’s no shame in what he’s going through.”

“I will.”

She was leaning forward, hands on the desk. “And tell him that it may be hard to believe right now, but life will get better.” She paused. “I know because I’ve been there.”

“I’ll tell him.” I offered a smile, but she didn’t return it. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

I was in the garden, making a desultory pass at propping up my tomato plants, when Taylor got home from school. She
burst through the back door with Bruce and Benny in hot pursuit. She kissed me, bent to nuzzle her boys, as she had taken to calling them, and began her monologue. By the time I’d threaded the last yellowing leaf through the tomato cage, the salient facts had emerged: there were two new girls in the class and one new boy. The Grade 2 teacher’s name was Ms. Jane Anweiler, and she had silver earrings that were shaped like dinosaurs. Ms. Anweiler also had a Polaroid camera with which she had taken pictures of everybody in the class. The pictures were mounted on a bulletin board outside the classroom, under a sign reading:
WELCOME TO THE HOME OF THE GRADE
2
ALL-STARS!!!
The letters were made out of baseball bats except for the O’s, which were baseballs. Taylor would be allowed to sit beside her best friend, Jess, as long as she remembered not to talk. The Lakeview School year was, it seemed, off to a dazzling start.

Angus didn’t get home from school till dinner time. I was making a salad when he came into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of juice, and started to leave.

“Hang on,” I said. “Whatever happened to ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Hello and how are you?”

“Fine,” I said, “but you look a little down. Back-to-school blues?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “School’s okay. Actually more than okay. It looks like it’s going to be a good year.”

“So why the long face?”

“I went down to the hospital to see Eli.”

“Was he still mad at you about what happened at the game.”

My son’s face was perplexed. “No. When I got there, Eli was the same as he’d been before. I thought he was just ignoring what happened, and for a while I went along with him. Then I decided it would be better if we talked about it.”
Angus put his glass down and came over to me. “Mum, Eli doesn’t remember what happened at the game. He doesn’t remember anything from the time he took off till he saw his shrink yesterday.”

“That’s twenty-four hours.”

“I know. So does Eli. He’s really psyched about this. Mum, could you go see him?”

“Do you think it would help? Eli has never been exactly easy with me.”

“It’d help. He likes you. I think he just kind of resented you.”

“Because of my relationship with Alex?”

Angus frowned. “I never thought it was that. I always thought it was just that you were our mum and, every time he saw you, it reminded him of what he didn’t have.”

That night, after supper, Taylor and I drove to the hospital with the books and assignments Anita Greyeyes had given me. I was tense as we approached Eli’s room, but he seemed genuinely pleased to see us. Physically, he was an immensely appealing boy: graceful, with the brooding good looks of a youth in an El Greco painting. He tried a smile of welcome, then stood aside so we could walk through the doorway. He was wearing brand-name sandals, khaki shorts, and a pressed white T-shirt, an absolutely normal sixteen-year-old boy, but one of his slender wrists was ringed with a hospital I
D
band, and his brown eyes were troubled.