Things Go Flying (6 page)

“Maybe you need some professional advice here,” Ellen said, awkwardly.

“Maybe.” Audrey drank her coffee, ate five Oreos, and decided to keep her indiscretion with Tom to herself. She couldn't tell Ellen that she was assuming the worst about Dylan was because she knew his father.

• • •

H
AROLD HAD A
thing about telephone solicitation. It was a waste of his time, an invasion of his privacy, and an insult to his intelligence. He particularly disliked getting the same pitch—about, for example, home alarm systems that were
absolutely free—
over and over again. Once, he'd changed the message on his answering machine to say:
You've reached the Walker residence and we don't need an alarm system, we don't have any old clothes for cerebral palsy, and if you're selling something, or doing a survey, please hang up now. Otherwise, leave a message.
But this hadn't helped much, he'd eventually realized, because telemarketers didn't bother listening to
your
message anyway—they wanted you live, preferably with a mouth full of dinner.

So, when he returned to his desk after a meeting at the end of the day and listened to his voice mail one last time as he packed up to leave the office, he didn't think twice. When he heard the message:
This is Patricia from Credit International. It's urgent. Call me back right away,
he deleted it without another thought. He'd never heard of Credit International. They had to be selling something, no doubt another pre-approved credit card. He turned out the light, closed his office door, took the elevator down to the main lobby, and emerged outside, briefly, before descending underground to catch the subway, joining the swelling ranks of other government workers heading numbly home at the end of the day.

While he waited on the platform for his train, Harold tried to remember what it felt like to be seventeen and failed, utterly. Although he thought that this was probably a shortcoming in him as a parent—one of many—he told himself that what
he
had felt at seventeen was undoubtedly so completely different from what a kid would feel today anyway, that it didn't matter that he couldn't remember it.

Now, on the crowded rush-hour subway train, standing sandwiched between two taller men—Harold was the beefy part of the sandwich— breathing covertly through his mouth, his thoughts drifted to Tom's funeral. He'd been trying not to think about it, because ever since the funeral, he'd been terrified that he might have another panic attack, in even more humiliating circumstances. Like at work. To the point where he'd thought about lying to Dr. Goldfarb about another attack so that he could get the anti-anxiety drugs that Dr. Goldfarb had mentioned but then had so callously and cavalierly withheld.

Harold was an amateur when it came to introspection; he hadn't had much practice. So when he now tried to pinpoint what had triggered the anxiety attack—in the hope that he could avoid another one—he started with the obvious question.
Did he fear death?

He remembered feeling increasingly uneasy on his reluctant approach to the coffin. He remembered looking at Tom's face—at death personified—and the immediate, awful, all-consuming sensation of panic. Just before he went down, he thought he'd seen an expression on Tom's face—what it was, he couldn't now remember—and anyway, he assured himself, that had to be a pure trick of the imagination.

Obviously, Harold decided, it had to be the fear of death that had brought on the anxiety attack. He would soon be the age his father was when he had died, and that probably had something to do with it. He didn't think he needed to look any deeper than that. If he didn't have to go to any more funerals, he'd probably be fine.

Harold was relieved to have figured it out so quickly, and relieved also because the fear of death was a general one, shared by everyone, and not something particular to him. Also, it was something he could do absolutely nothing about, other than resolving to not think about it.

If he did have another anxiety attack, he would definitely go see Dr. Goldfarb.

• • •

D
YLAN WAS SHOOTING
baskets against the shed in the shared drive when John, who'd managed to make it to his afternoon classes, got home from school.

“Hey, loser,” Dylan said.

John ignored him. He was waiting for the day, which was surely coming, when Dylan would screw up and provide the entertainment.

John went in the house and found his mother in the kitchen cooking lasagna, his dad's favourite, which was a good sign. Despite his mother's promise to help him with his father, John was anxious. His entire short-term future was at stake.

Dylan was still shooting baskets against the shed when Harold got home from work. Harold stopped for a moment before going inside. “How was school?”

“Fine.”

They had this exchange—or something very similar—every day. It was completely meaningless.

Harold went inside and found Audrey in the kitchen. He made sure that John was out of earshot, downstairs playing games on the computer. Still, he closed the door that led down to the basement. He and Audrey needed to discuss what to do about John. They had to present a united front.

Harold was afraid of doing the wrong thing. He supposed John should be grounded, the only real question being for how long. Personally, he hated keeping the kids around by force—it made them even more passive-aggressive than usual. Whether John would ever drive the car again, Harold supposed, depended mostly on what was going to happen with the insurance, which was at the moment unclear. Beyond that, Harold was open to suggestion. Now that his initial wrath was subsiding, he just wanted to do the right thing.

“Did you talk to Ellen today?” Harold didn't have the greatest faith in Ellen's judgment, but he knew she'd had some problems with her kids and they'd got through them somehow.

“Yes, she came over.”

“Did she have anything to suggest about John?”

Audrey realized that she'd forgotten to mention this particular problem when Ellen was over.

“Mmm,” Audrey said, tasting the lasagna, thinking fast. “Oh, you know, the usual. We should probably ground him for a while.” Though she didn't want John sulking around the house either.

Harold nodded, a little disappointed.

“And he can get along without the car,” Audrey said.

“Just what I was thinking,” Harold agreed.

“And I think a stern warning about the drinking.”

“Of course.”

“You can do that,” Audrey said, but then lowered her voice and articulated exactly what Harold feared. “But don't overdo it. Don't lose your temper, like you did last night. If we push him too hard, he might take it out on us and go out drinking again.”

“Right,” Harold agreed, biting his lower lip at how complicated it all was.

“And no backsliding. We tell him our position and that's that.”

When they sat down to dinner a few minutes later, the mood craftily set with fragrant lasagna and garlic bread, Audrey looked with pained love upon her husband and her two handsome boys and thought that all might still be well, with a little luck. But then John blurted out—just as Harold was lifting that first delicious forkful of lasagna to his mouth—“I'm sorry about the car, Dad. Really.”

Harold put his fork down, the food untouched, looked squarely at his son, and said—less severely than he wanted to, but more severely than Audrey would have liked—“Sorry won't pay what this is going to cost!”

There was an awkward silence; only Dylan had begun to eat. Their supper was getting cold.

“But it wasn't even my fault.” The protesting note had crept into John's voice, threatening to blow everything wide open.

Audrey shot John a warning look. “Why don't we eat?”

John, although relieved to have his apology off his chest, felt that his father had not met him halfway.

Audrey said, “Your father and I have decided that you'll be grounded.”

John sat still; of course he'd expected this. “For how long?” he asked.

Audrey drew a blank. She looked at Harold. Harold looked at her.
Why hadn't they decided this beforehand?

John sensed his parents' disarray. “How about two weeks?” John suggested humbly, crossing his fingers under the table.

Harold felt Audrey looking at him. The usual was one week, so he supposed that John's suggesting two weeks indicated that he had at least some idea of the severity of the situation. To Harold, two weeks of being grounded seemed a trifling punishment for such a grievous fault, but there was really so little available in their parental arsenal to haul out. Finally, he nodded. Any more than two weeks would be too hard on all of them.

“Fine,” said Audrey. “But you're not driving the car again until we say so.”

John picked up his fork, contrite. Audrey helped herself to the garlic bread. She tilted an eyebrow at Harold—it was time for his reprimand about the drinking.

Harold, not as prepared as he ought to have been, put down his knife and fork, looked John severely in the eye, and said, “And we had better not catch you drinking like that again—
or else
.”

Audrey frowned at him and Harold watched his idle threat glance off John's forehead and sail away into the wild blue yonder.

• • •

A
FTER SUPPER, HAROLD
escaped into the living room, ensconced himself in his La-Z-Boy, and closed his eyes. He wanted a respite from his worries; he didn't want to think about how he'd just mishandled the John situation. And he wanted to avoid Audrey, who no doubt would have something to say to him about it.

He was starting to doze, head back and legs up on the footrest, when Audrey, cleaning up in the kitchen, dropped a plate on the floor, smashing it to smithereens. Harold leapt out of his chair. Instantly, he was up on the balls of his feet and poised to run out of the house, his heart pummelling his chest.

“Shit!” he heard Audrey say. Which is just what his mother always said.

Audrey appeared at the kitchen doorway. “It's okay. Don't get up. I've got it covered.”

Harold slowly climbed back into his chair and waited for his heart rate and breathing to go back to normal, for the adrenaline flooding his veins to recede. But the smashing plate had catapulted him right back into his unhappy past, to one striking night, when he and his mother were sitting at the kitchen table finishing up their supper.

His mum had shifted her eyes to stare at a china teacup on the counter with an expression of such intensity that Harold stopped chewing. Then the cup flung itself against a cupboard and shattered.

“Shit!” his mother said.

Harold was terrified.

His mother calmly surveyed the damage and then turned to him and said, “Don't worry, most spirits are harmless.” As she swept up the broken china, she added, “I can't say I'm surprised—the same thing happened to my Scottish aunts when they were about my age.”

Harold had never met the Scottish aunts, and after that he didn't want to.

They'd lived in one of those tall, narrow, nineteenth-century Victorian houses in Cabbagetown. Harold could actually walk from where he now lived to Riverdale Park, cross over the pedestrian bridge that spanned the Don Valley Parkway, walk up the steep hill and through Riverdale Farm and come out at the park at the other end—the very same one he'd played in as a child. From there, it was just a couple of short blocks to the house he'd grown up in. He never made that walk, but he could if he wanted to.

Harold thought he could remember being a happy kid once, but after his father died, at the breakfast table over his bacon and eggs, things had changed. There wasn't enough money, and his mother had been forced to take in boarders, and to cook and clean all day. That was bad enough, but after a couple of years of this, when he was about nine years old, his mother's “gift” had arrived, announcing itself that fateful night. Not long after, she began to make a little extra money as a medium. She let it be known through word of mouth that she was willing to contact “the other side” in her own home, for those wishing to communicate with lost loved ones, and Harold's life had changed forever.

His mother really could reach the dead. Harold had seen it with his own eyes. One evening, early in her new career, an older couple had come in—her clients usually seemed to be older, because, Harold assumed, they knew more dead people—and Harold, against his mother's orders, and in spite of his own timidity, had snuck down to the landing and tried to hear what was going on behind the closed double doors of the front room. He heard his mother's murmuring voice, and then she began to moan, and he had to see.

He crept down the staircase and put his eye to the keyhole. The room was dark except for the flickering light of a single candle burning on the mantelpiece. The tall, narrow windows were heavily curtained in dark velvet, shutting out the light from the street. In the centre of the room was a round mahogany table, with four high-backed chairs around it. Three of the chairs were occupied, and his mother was leaning slightly forward, reaching across the table and grasping one hand of the man and one hand of the woman on either side of her. The man and woman also held hands, so that the three of them created a circle.

His mother's eyes were closed, and she was moaning as if in pain, while the other two stared at her. The woman looked eagerly expectant, fearfully hopeful; the man looked as if he were having second thoughts, especially as Harold's mother's moans became louder and her head began to roll around on her neck. The man leaned back in his chair as far as he could, as if to distance himself from the proceedings. Harold's mother's eyes began to flutter beneath her closed eyelids; it was a disturbing sight, and Harold almost turned and ran. But then his mother began to speak, and he found he couldn't move. Because it wasn't her own voice that came out of her mouth—it was the voice of a man in the prime of life, deep and confident, a trifle impatient, and it said, “What do you want, Ma?”