The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (32 page)

“And where's Isabel?” Blue asks him.

“She's in jail for murder.”

“She killed someone?”

“Yeah, me,” he nods. He seems to be serious.

He hears story after story. Meets hundreds and hundreds of ghosts. Everybody has a story, a past life, it seems. Everyone's dying to
tell someone. But none of the men he meets ever ask him what his story is. Only Amy asks him questions. Asks him every night how the day went, where he went, what he saw, how he felt. He doesn't know whether he is speaking truth or lies: the stories are all getting tangled, lives are crossing like bad wires.

Blue calls Emma from Jolie's apartment. He tells her he's been visiting the homeless shelters, carrying around Oliver's picture. Emma knows the photo, it's more than fifteen years old, but she supposes it doesn't really matter because she really doubts Blue is going to be able to find him.

“Em, why don't you come out here for Christmas?” Blue asks her. “It's really beautiful, and you've never even been west of Niagara Falls. Imagine, if I find Dad by then, it'll be like a family reunion.”

“Blue, I, uh … kind of already have plans for Christmas,” she stammers. “I'm going to spend it with Nina.” Elaine wouldn't be around, she was planning on going to Cuba with some new boyfriend. Even if this weren't true, Emma's not sure if she could stand the heartbreak of witnessing Blue's fantasy come to an end.

“Nina?” Blue asks.

“Blue”—she hesitates and swallows—“we're kinda seeing each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like it sounds.”

He falls silent.

“Blue?” she prompts.

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he says plainly.

“Well, I mean, so what do you think?”

“About what exactly?”

“Well, about me being in love with a woman?”

“Dunno. What do you want me to say, Emma?”

“Just something, I mean, anything.”

“It's a little unnatural. Kinda creepy,” he says, his voice shuddering.

“It's not so unnatural.”

“Sure it is. I mean, how would you feel if I called you up and told you I was a fag?”

“I wouldn't mind at all.”

“Well, that's because you're a lesbian!”

They're getting nowhere.

“I'll pass you to Amy now, she wants to say hi. Just be careful, Em, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, although she's not sure what, in particular, she is supposed to be careful about.

“Gay bashers,” explains Amy. “He worries about you. Now he'll worry about you even more.”

“But I'm kind of worried about him,” Emma replies. “Amy? Does he really think he's going to find our father?”

“Seems to need to at the moment,” she replies.

But what's he thinking? A family reunion? Does he think he's going to find Oliver, and that if he does, he'll say something like, “Glad you could make it home for Christmas, son. Call up your sister and we'll roast a bird in the oven and celebrate.” A dead pigeon on the hot tin roof of a car maybe. That he'll say, “Thought you might like this, Lou. Picked up a little Christmas present in the L.A. airport for you last year,” and hand him a tightly wrapped shiny package containing a portable CD player.

“Ah, thanks, Dad. How'dya know this is exactly what I wanted?”

“I know my boy,” Dad would blush. “Now give your old man a hug.”

Whatever he's looking for, he's not going to find it, Emma thinks. Least of all a hug from Oliver.

Blue goes for a drink that night with Amy and Jolie at the bar around the corner. Amy and Jolie talk about the guy Jolie's dating. “I just don't get it,” Jolie sighs, exasperated. “Some kind of different internal clock or something,” she says, speaking as if men are a different species. She turns to Blue to ask him his opinion. Blue is sullen and withdrawn that night, and he doesn't appear to hear her. After his ninth bottle of beer he says he's going for a walk.

“Let me come with you,” Amy says, but he's not in the mood for a romantic stroll. He wants to pound his boots against pavement and thunder his way around the block. He wants to punch holes in the thick air and mutter profanities to himself.

When he leaves the bar, he is ready to kill. His fucking sister. He's been protecting her all her life—all the sordid truths he has had to absorb in order to spare her pain. She has no idea. No fucking idea at all. Someone had to take care of the two of them. Someone had to become tough.

His fucking sister. He had stood between her and his angry drunken father—the buffer between Emma and the man who squatted on the floor and threatened to kill Andrew. The man who frequented prostitutes and molested children when he couldn't pay. When his father said that Emma was an arrogant cunt, he defended her and took blows to the head. She was trying to create a new life for herself, and even though Andrew was a wimp and the rest of his family was a bunch of stuck-up snobs, Blue wanted her to believe that she could.

His fucking sister. After all that, she goes and turns out to be a dyke. He wonders why the hell she wants to fuck it up and make it so
complicated. He's worried she's going to get her head bashed in by a bunch of homo haters. He's tried to make life smoother for her, but she insists on complicating it. Nobody wants to be gay. He knows that.

“Don't be such a pansy,” his father used to say. “I'll show you what you'll get if you're a fairy,” he said, making a crude gesture with a broom handle and biting his lower lip. Blue's sure he only ever cried once after that fateful day at McDonald's and that was when they asked him in hospital if he'd been having anal intercourse. They thought he was a fucking faggot and he wanted to kill them. He hasn't let anybody make him cry since—hasn't let anybody touch him either. It's not surprising he grew from small and scared into large and scary. His leather, his tattoos. He's built an armour of ink around his body and soul and fallen in love with a woman a third of his size. No one would dare call him a faggot now.

When he crashes into bed late that night he reeks of beer and rain. “What's eating you?” Amy mumbles, stroking his forehead.

He's silent. Doesn't want to talk. Eating me? he thinks. Something like arsenic. What if I told you the truth, Amy? That sometimes I am so angry I could kill. That I love you, but loving you doesn't change the fact that my dad's somewhere out here wandering around with my intestines in one of his hands. Dragging my guts through the streets. That Emma seems to think she can get off scot-free. Walk away, call herself Oksana, or Mrs. Franklin, or a lesbian, and leave it all behind. Leave me to search. Leave me to take care of it all.

“Don't worry, Amy,” he says, pulling her into his shoulder.

He lies wide awake much of that night with his tiny bird of a girlfriend breathing erratically in his arm. He sees her eyelids flutter like a butterfly, and wonders if she dreams of animals. Through the open window, he picks
up a familial scent. It's lingering there in the damp streets of Vancouver, Oliver's out there somewhere, he can smell it in the air.

In the morning he follows the scent straight to the Salvation Army.

“No luck yet, eh?” the same staff member he encountered the day before says to him at the door.

“Nah,” says Blue, shaking his head.

“Well, I'm keeping an eye out for you. In the buildup to Christmas you get lots of new faces. Worms crawl out of the woodwork. It's a hard time. Even the ones whose memories are totally shot seem to get upset by the season. He could turn up yet.”

“Yeah, I've just got this feeling …”

“Instinct's a good thing,” the man nods. “Sometimes it's all you have to go on. You stayin' for lunch? It's a special day. We've got beauty contestants serving today.”

“You've got what?”

“Delegates from the Miss Pacific Rim contest are here today to rack up some good karma points.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

“That's sort of perverted.”

“It's a hoot. We get a kick out of it and they feel holier than thou.”

They walk into the dining hall where Miss Fiji and Miss Vancouver are standing behind the metal food wagon in full goodwill ambassador regalia. They are wearing their Miss So-and-so banners over their matching sweaters and full C-cups, and ladling stew into green plastic bowls. Miss Siberia is on doughnut duty, and Miss Japan stands at the end, pouring coffee.

A group of dazed and oblivious men stand in line and hold out their trays, taking little notice of the temporary change in staff. Blue
and the staff worker take a place at the end of the line. Blue reaches into the box for a plain doughnut.

“I'll get that for you,” says Miss Siberia, pushing his hand away.

“I can do it myself,” Blue says, annoyed.

“We're here to help you today,” she coos.

“No,” he shakes his head. “You don't get it. I don't need your help. I'm only here because my buddy invited me.” His explanation falls on deaf ears, though. “You don't seriously think I'm like these guys,” he says, nodding over his shoulder.

“Hey, take it easy,” the staff guy behind him says, putting a hand on his arm.

“But she thinks I'm one of these homeless guys,” Blue says.

“So what if she does? What does it matter?”

“I just don't want to be mistaken for something I'm not,” he says. Being mistaken brings him one step closer to being there. He wants to find Oliver; he doesn't want to walk in his shoes.

Nina comes to Toronto most weekends now—long weekends, which last from Thursday night to Monday morning—and continues to work alongside Emma. They're growing, both the birds—Nina's from the ground up, Emma's down the length of the lab table. At night, Nina listens to her, teases her as she waxes on passionately about the distal region of the emu's pelvis.

“Sounds sexy,” says Nina, slipping her long legs into the bath. They sit there with their knees to their chests, Nina's back against the drain, her head against the hot tap.

“You lezzies just about done in there?” Ruthie says, knocking on the door. “D'you forget this is a communal bathroom?”

Nina toasts Emma as quietly as possible with the rim of her wineglass. Passes her the soap. “You reek of bleach,” she says. “Hurry up. The old man's waiting.”

They have a ritual now, the three of them. On Saturday nights, Emma and Nina get cleaned up after a day in the lab and join Professor Savage back at his old house on Markham Street. They share a bottle of wine while they wash the week's dishes in his
kitchen, and when the kitchen is clean, they cook for him.

“Nothing too fancy, now,” he calls from the sofa in the living room, although he's mentioned more than once today that he wouldn't mind a little portobello mushroom sauce with his steak. That's Nina's fault. She buys expensive and exotic vegetables at Longos and tells him organic is better for his sperm count. He finds that very convincing and often asks for a second helping of arugula.

Nina and Professor Savage swap stories about various wars—so convincing you'd think she'd lived through the whole century. They are stories passed down to her from her grandpa, a man whose wife only married him because he promised her he'd buy her a refrigerator. “What do I want with a useless ring?” she had apparently said when he appeared at her parents' doorstep on bent knee. “Offer me one of those newfangled appliances, though, and I'll say ‘I do' faster than you can say ‘Spit'!”

She got the fridge before she got electricity. When electricity arrived in their part of the country, she thought it must be a sign of the Second Coming. She believed the fridge had the power of granting eternal life: hence the five-year-old butter, which Nina still fondly remembers as something like Stilton for country hicks.

Emma is determined to have the emu standing for the Christmas party. She wishes it could wear a tux and pass around a tray of hors d'oeuvres. Nina's welded a stand for the bird, measured it perfectly, so all that remains is to lift the entire thing off the table and lower it down gently into its cradle—its manger, Emma wants to call it. She lets Nina and Professor Savage do the honours while she stands back and watches, her hands covering her heart in her mouth. She holds her breath. They count to three, lift the bird slightly, and suddenly, there she is,
winged and upright, flying for a moment, bounding across the outback, smiling, and then coming back down to earth to land in her manger. As soon as her bones touch the metal stand, Emma lets out a huge sigh and bursts into tears.

“Honey!” says Nina, her face a collage of pride and compassion.

“Oh!” says Professor Savage, not knowing what to do, not understanding girls and why they always cry at moments like this. “My dear. It's okay. It's perfectly intact. It's … beautiful, Emma.”

She continues sobbing and Professor Savage reaches into his pocket for an ink-stained handkerchief. “You'll have to come and get it, dear,” he says, one hand still on the emu's neck.

Emma laughs and reaches out to take it. Nina is adjusting the emu's spine, balancing it's wings. “It is so beautiful,” she says, standing back. “You did it, Emma. You really did it.”

Emma can't quite believe it's true. She did do it. “Look at that,” she says, pointing at her bird and laughing.

Professor Savage shuffles off to the corner of the room and Nina kisses Emma with all the pride of someone who completely understands what it is to take the risk of creating something life-like out of the discarded and forgotten.

A flood of things comes clattering out of a cupboard as Professor Savage yanks so hard at a door that he pulls it off its rusting hinges.

“Melville? Are you okay?” Emma asks, separating herself from Nina.