Tweaked (16 page)

Two days later, I buy a sub sandwich after getting off the bus at the mall. I walk home and sit down in front of the
TV
to eat it. The news is on and there is a story of some guy who had stolen a car at the Capilano Shopping Center and led the police on a high-speed chase earlier in the day. The car was a red Honda Civic, and it belonged to a woman with two little kids. She'd stopped for five minutes, she said, to run into the drug store to pick up some cough medicine for one of her kids. There is a video clip of her standing in the rain in the parking lot. She has a baby in her arms, and a kid with a runny nose is clinging to her jeans.

An hour after the woman reported her car missing, the cops spotted it heading east along the Upper Levels
Highway toward the Second Narrows Bridge. When they turned on the siren, the driver picked up speed. He led them across the bridge, at 150 kilometers an hour, and along the freeway. More police cars and a police helicopter joined the chase. The guy was nearing the west end of the Port Mann Bridge when the cops blew his tires and blocked him in. Surrounded by five police cruisers and with six guns pointed at his head, he was ordered out of the car. Despite the order, his head fell forward against the steering wheel, and he didn't open the door.

The reporter explains that the reason for this was because in the seconds before the police got out of their cars, he swallowed something which was later identified as a large amount of drugs. Why he did it was a mystery. It didn't make sense that he would try to hide the fact that he was carrying drugs, considering the trouble he was already in. One officer guessed that he wanted a last hit before he was arrested. He'd seen it before.

When he didn't move, the cops opened the door and pulled him out of the car. He was still conscious. They slammed him to the ground. The footage they show on
TV
is of the guy lying on his stomach on the shoulder of the highway, surrounded by police officers, one of them cinching handcuffs on his wrists, which are clasped behind his back. The guy's face is not visible
in the shot. His takedown looked pretty violent, but adrenaline was running high and all the police knew was that he'd stolen a car and was running from them. They had no idea who he was, what he'd done, or if he was carrying a weapon.

The film clip ends and the reporter goes on to say that minutes after he was apprehended the thief went into cardiac arrest. His eyes rolled back in his head and he stopped breathing. The same cops that had cuffed him so tightly, pumped hard on his chest in an effort to keep him alive. An ambulance was called, and he was rushed to the hospital. They tried to get his heart beating regularly again, but it took some time. He was now in critical condition in intensive care. His name cannot be released until the family has been notified, and then an investigation will be completed. The reporter moves on to the next story. I turn off the
TV
and finish my sandwich.

I hadn't seen his face. I had only seen his body lying in the gravel on the shoulder of the highway through the legs of a dozen cops, but I knew it was Chase.

Three hours later, Detective Keppler knocks on our front door. He takes Mom and Dad to the hospital. The doctors tell them that the lack of oxygen when Chase went into cardiac arrest has caused irreversible damage to his already severely drug-damaged organs. Only time will tell how much.

When I ask Dad if Chase is going to live, he says, “We won't know anything for sure, not for a few days.”

My parents spend every hour of the next two days at the hospital. I don't want to see Chase. I can't explain why. When they do come home, Dad is in a fog, although somehow calmer than I have seen him in a long time, maybe because he knows where Chase is. Mom is a total wreck. She is furious with the police for being so rough. Despite the doctors telling her that the bruises on his head are old bruises, that they were not the result of his arrest, she blames the police for the way he looks.

My mother's parents fly in from Ontario. They didn't know Chase had taken off or that Richard Cross had died. They didn't know the house was up for sale or that Mom and Dad had all but split up. Everything about the way we have been living is news to them, and they are appalled. I really don't need their constant moans of disbelief as they discover some new aspect of our dysfunctional lives. I am already quite aware of how abnormal we have become.

When I do visit Chase, it's on the morning of the third day that he's in the hospital. It's before anyone else has arrived. Dad knows I'm going. He has told me I should go soon because things are not looking good. I guess I've been putting it off because I still feel so angry at him. I resent him for everything he's done and
has put us through. I wanted to get over that a bit first, so if he does happen to regain consciousness when I'm in the room, the first thing I do won't be to punch him out. But I am scared I won't be able to stop myself.

Dad stops me before I leave the house. “I want to warn you, Gordie. He doesn't look anything like he used to. He's very thin. The drugs and his life on the street have been hard on him. I'm telling you just in case you expect him to look like your brother used to. I don't want you to be too shocked.”

Chase looks exactly like he did when he'd come into the hardware store except for the yellow-green bruises on his temple, the marks on his wrists left by the handcuffs and the road burn on his face. He is, in fact, a wasted and battered shell of something that was once human. I expect to feel a lot more than I do when I lay eyes on him, but I don't feel much of anything at all.

Mostly I am overwhelmed with sadness and anger. It's all just such a waste. Everything and everyone connected to Chase is broken. And I wonder, why did he have to go running out of the store when I was trying to help him? Why did he choose those two scumbags over me?

Two days later, the doctors tell my parents that Chase is brain dead. There is no electrical activity in his brain and there never will be again. They suggest that my parents should consider disconnecting Chase from the life support system.

I don't go to the hospital on the day it is disconnected. Instead I wander aimlessly around the house, walking from one room to the next, wondering if I'll feel anything the moment he dies. Later, when Dad tells me the approximate time, I realize that I hadn't. I then go into my room, and for the first time since he'd been in the hospital, I sit down on my bed and bawl.

It is now the middle of October. Our house sold at the end of August. It was bought by a young family with two little girls. The deal was that the buyers would meet the full asking price if we could be out by October first. The real estate agent was excited to have made the sale. She told Dad one of the first things the new family was going to do was change the color of the bedrooms in the basement. The ones, she'd said, that you'd painted for your boys.

Dad and I are now living in a two-bedroom walk-up apartment behind the local mall. He didn't want to move too far away from where I'd grown up, for my sake. He didn't want to make too many changes too quickly, particularly in my last year of high school. With everything else that has happened, he didn't want me to get stressed-out. In the end, he could have hung on to the house, since there would be no large fees owing to lawyers, but he thought it best that we try for a fresh start.

Dad has about one good day out of seven. Well, even that one is not really all that good, it's just not as bad as all the rest. He cries a lot. But he's doing better than during the first month after Chase died, when he didn't have any good days at all. Grandma and Aunt Gail have us over for supper a couple of times a week, so at least he's eating.

I'm not really sure how Mom is coping. My grandparents took her back to Ontario, where they are trying to help her out. She phoned twice this week, which I see as a good sign. The second time, after she'd finished speaking with Dad, she asked him to put me on the line. She wanted to know how our gig in Deep Cove went. I was impressed that she had even remembered that I'd told her we had a gig, which could mean she's starting to think of things other than what has happened over the last two years.

I try hard to stay positive and focus on my own life, like Detective Keppler told me to do, but it's not always easy. At the weirdest times I get flashes of things that happened in the past two years. Like yesterday when I was doing my homework and an image of Richard Cross's little girl came into my head. I saw her being pulled across the lobby of the hospital and the unicorn flying out of her hand. I saw her mother walking with determination.

But the flashback I get most often is about the day Chase came into the store. If he'd only stayed with me, things could have turned out so differently. I've followed that image through and played it out differently. I've imagined that he does stay with me and waits for the cops to arrive. He still goes to jail in my vision, but he's also still alive. But that didn't happen, and I can't change it. I gave him a choice, and he took the one I never thought he would.

Once in a while, I drop in to Ms. Larson's office. She asked me if I would, so she could help make sure I don't lose focus at school. When I told her about what happened in the hardware store that day she said, “Just think about that for a minute. Yes, you gave him a choice. But who made the choices that put Chase at the hardware store?”

“I guess Chase did.”

“Yes, and when you look back at everything that's happened, who was making the choices all along?”

I got the point.

“Gordie, everyone did what they could to get him on the right track. But when it comes right down to it, we are the navigators of our own lives.”

I am reminded of what she said when I bump into Ryan Linscott at the shopping mall. His mother had so many plans for him. Ryan is standing outside the
drug store, waiting for someone while I am headed into the store to pick up a couple of things for Dad. He doesn't strike me as looking all that good, but I figure it will take some time to put the weight back on and maybe even longer to bring some life back into his vacant eyes.

“Hey, Ryan,” I say. “Good to see you.”

He turns. I don't think he recognizes me at first.

“Gord Jessup,” I remind him.

“Oh, yeah, hey, Gordie.” A look comes across his face like he's straining to remember something but he can't think of what it is.

“I hear you're working at the grocery store.”

Ryan shakes his head. “Nah, not anymore. I gave that up. I'll get back to it, though. I've just got too many other things going on right now.”

I nod. “How are you doing anyway?”

Ryan's eyes drift away from me. “Not bad. I'm doing okay.” Suddenly remembering what he'd been straining for, he looks back to me. “Oh man, I was really sorry to hear about Chase. What a crappy way to end up.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks. But you're doing good. I'm glad to hear it.”

“Yeah,” he says. And then in a familiar move, he rubs his nose with the back of his hand. “I'm doing all right.”

I open the door to the drug store. I am about to go in when Ryan calls my name again.

“Gordie?”

I turn. “What's up?”

“Hey, I wouldn't normally ask, but I'm a little hard up right now. Could you loan me twenty bucks?”

KATHERINE HOLUBITSKY's
first novel,
Alone at Ninety Foot
(Orca), won the CLA Book of the Year for Young Adults and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award. Since then, she has written
Last Summer in Agatha, The Hippie House, The Mountain that Walked
and
The Big Snapper,
all published by Orca. Katherine lives in Edmonton, Alberta, with her husband.