Hey Nostradamus! (14 page)

A week later I was out in the front yard with a wire brush, dishwashing soap and a hose, trying to scrape away the egg stains; the proteins and oils had soaked into the wood, and scrubbing was turning out to be pointless. A minivan full of charismatic
Youth Alive!
robots pulled into the driveway. There were four of them, led by the intrusive jerk Matt. They were wearing these weird, desexed jeans that somehow only
Alive!
ers seemed to own. They all had suntans, too, and I remembered an old brochure: “Tans come from the sun, and the sun is fun, and
Youth Alive!
, while being a serious organization charged with the care of youth, is also a fun, sunny, lively kind of group, too.”

I had nothing to say to these guys, and ignored them as my father might ignore a pickup truck full of satanists listening to rock music being played backward.

Matt said, “Taking it easy, huh? We thought we'd come visit. You're not back in school.”

I carried on scrubbing the house with steel wool.

“It's been a rough few weeks for all of us.”

I looked at them. “Please leave.”

“But, Jason, we just got here.”

“Leave.”

“Oh, come on, you can't be…”

I blasted them with the garden hose. They stood their ground: “You're upset. That's natural,” Matt said.

“Do any of you have any idea what traitorous scum you are?”

“Traitors? We were merely helping the RCMP.”

“I learned about all of your help, thank you.”

In spite of the hose, the foursome advanced. Were they going to kidnap me or group hug me? Lay their bronzed fingers on my head and pronounce me whole and returned to the flock?

Then a shot was fired-and two more-by my mother from the second floor. She was making craters in the lawn with Reg's .410. She blasted out the minivan's lights. “You heard Jason. Leave. Now.”

They did, and for whatever reason, the cops never showed up.

Word of Mom and the gun must have kept away quite a few potential visitors. There were a few press people; a few family friends who'd vanished during those first two weeks; some
Alive!
girls leaving baked goods, cards and flowers on the doorstep, all of which I unwrapped and threw into the juniper shrubs for the raccoons. In any event, we never let anybody through our front door; within a month, the house was sold and we'd moved to my aunt's place in Moncton, New Brunswick.

My brain feels sludgy. It's late, but Joyce is always up for a good walk.

 

 

Just in the door. A warm, dry night out, my favorite kind of weather, and so rare here. During Joyce's walk I saw a car like the one Cheryl's mother, Linda, used to drive-a LeBaron with wood siding. The model looked good for the first week it was out, but a decade of sun and salt and
frost have made it resemble the kind of car people in movies drive after a nuclear war.

Linda wrote me some time after we moved away; the letter is one of the few items I've kept across the years. It was mailed to my old address and forwarded to my aunt's house. It read:

 

Dear Jason,

I'm deeply ashamed that I've not contacted you before this. In the midst of losing Cheryl, we were vulnerable and chose to listen to strangers and not our own hearts. At the time when you needed comfort and support the most, we turned away from you, and it's something Lloyd, Chris and I face every day in the mirror. I don't ask your forgiveness, but I do request your understanding.

It's been a few months since October 4, but it feels like ten years. I've quit my job and, in theory, I'm supposed to be overseeing the Cheryl Anway Trust, but all I do is wake up, dress myself, drink some coffee and drive down to this office space we've rented on Clyde Avenue. There's not much for me to do here. Cheryl's
Youth Alive!
friends take care of the Trust's every function-handling cash, cheques and credit card receipts, sending thank-you notes, manning the phones, filling out tax forms, and so on. It's a busy place, but I don't fit in. I wish I could derive some sort of consolation from the Trust's success, but I don't, and they all work so hard-they've got bumper stickers, bracelets and postcards, and, for what it's worth, a ghostwriter will soon be doing a book about Cheryl's
life which may or may not help other young people or their parents. It won't help me. I shouldn't be telling you this-this letter may never even find you-but nothing in the past months has brought me any solace, and how could it? In the last year of her life, my daughter was no longer my daughter. She was somebody else. I have no idea who it was who died in the shooting. What sort of mother would say that about her child?

I've just had one of those moments. Maybe you've had them, too-a moment when the distance and perspective I think I've put between me and Cheryl's shooting dissolves, and I'm right back on October 4 again-and then suddenly it's months later and I'm a middle-aged woman sitting in a rainy suburb on a weekday, and her daughter is dead for no reason, and she never knew her daughter at all. Her daughter chose something else; Cheryl chose something else over me and what our family offered, and she did it with smiles for everybody, but with condescension. And what am I to do? There is nothing I can do. Some man or woman is going to write Cheryl's life story, and they're going to ask me questions and I won't have a thing to say.

I don't know if I'm angry with Cheryl or angry at the universe. Do you get angry, Jason? Do you? Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

Lloyd and Chris are taking things much better than I am. I'm lucky in that regard. Chris is young-he'll heal.
There will be scars, but he'll make it through okay. We have no idea what to do with him and school. He's having a hard time readjusting at Delbrook, which they've just reopened-they bulldozed the cafeteria and built a new one in just four weeks. We might have to send him to a private school, which we can't afford. That's for another letter.

Jason, I apologize. You don't need this on top of everything else, but then maybe you
do
. Maybe you need to know that there was someone else out there who loved the girl beneath the perfect smile, the girl who, to my mind, foolishly prayed for suffering so she could play at martyrdom. Jason, there's no one to talk to about this. All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

I beg your forgiveness, wherever you are. Please write or phone or visit if you can. Please think of me kindly and know that is how I think of you,

Yours,
Linda Anway

 

A letter from Mr. Anway came three days later:

 

Dear Jason,

Linda tells me she has written to you, and in so doing she has shamed me. How can I thank you for your bravery on that horrible morning? You saved the lives of so many children without thought of your own
safety. I drove down to your house earlier today, but it had been sold quite a while ago. There was no forwarding address for you, but I'm hoping Canada Post will track down your family with this letter.

Linda hasn't been herself since October 4. How could she be? I don't know what she wrote in her letter, but please take into account that we've both been running on empty for months now. That I didn't recognize the media's smear job of your fine nature is a stain I will take to the grave.

I asked if she had described the funeral for you, and she hadn't. So I will. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of October, a week after the shooting. I had thought the week would allow things to cool down, but instead things snowballed, and have never stopped snowballing.

We opted to have a graveside ceremony only. This was a tactical decision made by Linda and me. The people from
Youth Alive!
wanted to run the show, with no regard for our wishes. We figured they'd be having events of their own soon enough (we were right) and we wanted something that was entirely ours, and more intimate. This was a mistake.

For traffic and crowd control reasons, the police had asked that we not have a cortége drive to the cemetery, but that we meet the coffin there. We thought they were overreacting, but we went along with their suggestion: another bad idea, as it turned out. By two in the afternoon there were hundreds of cars parked on the sides of the road around the cemetery. The RCMP escorted us in, and the cemetery was overrun with (the
papers reported) about two thousand people. My skin crawled. That's a cliché, but now I know what it means-like a slug crawling down the small of your back.

There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl's grave area, and that was good, but what made me furious was that the
Youth Alive!
people had brought hundreds of black felt markers, and passed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl's casket was densely covered both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter's casket like a yearbook. Maybe I was mad because I'd chosen the casket in Cheryl's favorite shade of white, slightly pearly, and I'd been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to the inevitable. I suppose it's cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you. Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.

Before Cheryl's funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would prepare us for Cheryl's, but no, there's nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too preachy for my taste.

I'm still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I'd always thought her conversion was too extreme, and so did Linda. Linda says you've had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I'm with you all the way in thinking that they're slightly creepy. And it
was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It's because I listened to them, and not my own heart, that I'm sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having invited you over to our home ages ago.

This letter has become difficult to write, and it's through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I wish I'd taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl's coffin. Why didn't I? What foolish pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl's
Alive!
friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook with
GOD IS NOW HERE
as some sort of miracle, and this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals.
He loves me, he loves me not
. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God-I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now? I went up there yesterday and it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime; but graves are for peace, not for rage.

Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it. When you return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.

Yours fondly,
Lloyd Anway

 

This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:

 

Jason,

I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him, he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you,
everything
, is outright crap. From the word go, they've hated you. After it happened, they took all the photos of you in Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's hypocritical preacher
pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they were
brutal
, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked
around
, sex. I mean, let's face it, the two of you were an item, but the
Alive!
oids made it sound like rape, and that it was your sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and assist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get
real
. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.