Payback (7 page)

“I don't twig either, Annie.”

Aunt Maeve's got a snack waiting for us as usual — raw veggies, cheese, Melba toast.

Annie says, “I'm sick of raw broccoli and
cauliflower, Aunt Maeve.” She turns to me, groaning. “Wouldn't you love a Chocolate Kimberley right this very minute, Charley? Or a slice of Fogarty's pepperoni pizza?”

“Well, there are no Chocolate Kimberleys in Vancouver,” Aunt Maeve says. “And this is Finch's, not Fogarty's, so you'd better deal with it. Broccoli's better for you. anyway. You're a growing girl. You need veggies and fruit at your age, not cookies and pizza.”

Aunt Maeve is extra strict since Ma died, and she takes looking after us pretty seriously.

I hurry up the stairs to my room — not the one with the Lance Armstrong poster and
The Scream
but the one in Aunt Maeve's with the picture of the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin holy water font and nightlight.

I don't want to talk to Aunt Maeve. Don't want to talk to anyone, period.

I throw myself on the bed and stare at the ceiling and think about Benny leaping to his death off a bridge deck far above the swirling gray sea.

I remember how he looked at me just before he pulled the fire alarm.

I could have saved him. I could have gone to the counselor or the principal. I could have stuck up for him against Sammy and Rebar and the others.

I'm destroyed.

It's like I pushed him off the bridge.

It's the second week of November and the snow on the mountains is early, everyone says.

Saturday morning I pedal my Hammer up the switchback road to the snowline on Mount Seymour.

I pretend I'm Lance Armstrong. I've broken away from the peleton and my team-mates and I'm dancing on the pedals as I zoom up the Col du Galibier.

I don't make it to the parking lot at the top of Seymour because of the snow. So I stop, pull on an old hoodie and ride back down, braking before the curves, taking it slow and easy in case there's black ice on the road.

My weekend hotdog routine has become deadly dull. I know it, even though I do my best to pretend it's show-time and I'm the hottest hotdog in town.

Sunday, a little girl stands watching me. She's about six. Her mother wants to move on but the little girl refuses to budge, pulling on her ma's arm. I turn on the music.

After I finish my dance the little girl says, “That was stupid. I hate you!”

Her mother finally pulls her away, and I watch them walking off down the mall.

Harvey pops his head out and yells, “I'm watching you, Callaghan. I'm watching you!”

••••

When me and Annie get home from school we're happy to see Da's Chevy in the driveway. When Ma was there for us it didn't matter so much that Da was away. But now things are different. Aunt Maeve is our second ma and Crazy Uncle Rufus is our second da, but it just isn't the same as having your own folks waiting for you when you get home.

Da's whistling as he bakes a casserole for dinner. Da likes to cook. He stops for the few seconds it takes for Annie's usual bear hug and dance, and then he goes back to it, talking as he works.

“How's things, kids? How's school? You glad to see your old man?”

Annie becomes a chatterbox. “A boy from Charley's school killed himself.”

“No! Really?” He looks at me. “Who was he, Charley?”

“Benny Mason. Eighth grader.”

“You knew him, Charley?”

Shrug. “He was in a couple of my classes.”

“What happened? How did he kill himself?”

“He jumped off the Lions Gate Bridge,” Annie says.

Da stops working at the kitchen counter and turns to face us, mouth open in astonishment.

“The Lions Gate Bridge! Jeez! Pardon me. Why'd he do a thing like that?” He stares at me in astonishment. “What was his problem, Charley?”

My throat seizes up something fierce. I cough to clear it and then I say, “Bullying. He killed himself because he couldn't take all the bullying. That's what they're all saying.”

Da frowns. “God rest his soul, the poor lad.”

He turns back to his work at the counter, still asking questions about Benny Mason, but I slide away
and escape upstairs to my room and lie on my bed and look at my picture of Ma on the chest.

It was taken soon after I was born. She's holding me in her arms. Ma looks young.

I look at the picture a lot. When I look in the mirror I can see that I look a lot like her. Same red hair, same mouth, except in this picture she's got a faraway look in her green eyes, like she sees something no one else can see.

Maybe that's the way I look, too, when I'm...

“Daydreaming again, Charley?”

“Hi, Ma.”

“Your da is proud of you, Charley. And he loves you. You mustn't be afraid to talk to him when things bother you.”

Did I mention that Ma drops in now and then to offer a word or two and cheer me up?

Well, she does. I didn't like to mention it earlier for fear I'd be thought barking mad, but she's here again now, standing in the doorway wearing her gray track suit. Her hair is untidy, the red curls blown by the wind, like she just got back from her jog.

“I want us all to be back home together in
Dublin, Ma. With things the way they used to be. I don't like it here without you.”

“I'm still here, Charley. I haven't left you. I will always be with you. As for Vancouver, it's a grand place. Don't you just love the mountains and the trees? And the air? You've got to give it a chance, Charley.”

“I miss Dublin. I miss my old pals and the old neighborhood. I miss walking up the Liffey Quays and Temple Bar and Grafton Street and across the O'Connell Street Bridge and lying in the grass in St. Stephen's Green and —”

“I know you do, Charley. But sometimes we have to leave things behind. You will get to love it here, I promise.”

“I never heard back from Fiona. You remember Fiona? I wrote —”

“Ach, don't worry your head over the little madam. There'll soon be plenty of nice girls for you. Another couple of years and they'll all be falling over themselves for you to notice them.”

I look at my posters on the wall of
The Scream
and of Lance Armstrong racing his bike in the Tour de France.

Lance is from Texas. Texans are tough. Lance was once very sick with the same kind of disease Ma had. It could've killed him but he beat it and came back from it to win the Tour de France seven times in a row, something no one has ever done before.

The Tour is the toughest sporting event in the world. After Ma, Lance is my number one hero, the toughest Texan of all, not just because he won the Tour de France so many times, but because he fought the disease every inch of the way so he could be a champion, never giving up, and training on his bike when he could hardly walk ten steps.

I wish I could be like Lance Armstrong instead of the way I am. Lance is the kind of feller who would speak up if he saw discrimination or injustice.

“Ma —”

But she's gone.

When Annie comes into my room to tell me dinner will be ready in a few minutes, she asks me why I'm crying.

“I'm not crying,” I tell her.

But I am. Annie lies down beside me and presses her head to my shoulder and puts her skinny arms around me.

The memorial service for Benny Mason takes place early in the morning outside a small chapel near the waterfront a week after his death.

The day is bright. A low fog hangs over the inlet. The tops of the distant city towers on the opposite shore rise out of the fog, and they look like the way they paint heaven in holy pictures.

There's a big turnout of kids from the school but I don't see Sammy or Rebar. The air smells sharp and cold. Frost glistens on the grass.

The TV fellers are here with their cameras. The story of Benny's death has been in all the papers and on the telly.

Annie is in school, but Aunt Maeve is here and a bunch of people from the neighborhood. There's an important-looking short fat man in a black overcoat who I later find out is on the city council. Attila the
Hundle isn't here but Mrs. Wood is, and also Mr. Estereicher.

It's not hard to spot Benny's ma. Mrs. Mason is wearing a long dark coat, a black hat with a veil that hides her face, and black gloves. She stands with her feet together, black shoes, at attention almost.

Clutching the folds of her coat with one hand is a little boy. Benny's brother, I guess — dark hair, big dark eyes, dressed neatly in a windbreaker. He doesn't look like Benny.

Then I notice Ma. She's standing back from Mrs. Mason. She's wearing her “good” brown wool skirt and the black leather jacket, the one she bought in Dublin which she hardly ever wore.

She sees me look across at her, and she smiles and waves at me.

I'm sorry I've come to the service. It feels like they all know the truth about me. Their eyes say it all.
Look, there's Charley Callaghan. It turns out that he knew all along about the bullying and he never said anything.

I do my best to shrink my skinny frame behind Aunt Maeve's plump figure whenever a camera swings in my direction.

At least there's no coffin, thank God, and there's no hole dug in the earth. I went to a funeral once, in Dublin. It was a relative of Da's, a distant cousin, and everyone lined up to look at the dead man lying in his coffin.

I didn't line up. There was no way I wanted to see a dead guy.

So I was especially afraid of being forced to look inside a coffin at Benny's drowned face. I couldn't have stood that.

I've been having nightmares about it.

The minister is speaking. He is a big man with a big stomach, pregnant with holy piety my da always says if he sees a priest or minister with a big belly.

I look for Ma but she's gone.

The minister is saying a bunch of nice things about Benny, like what a good son he was and what a good brother and all that kind of stuff, but how would he know? Nobody knew Benny — not the minister, not Benny's mother, not me. Nobody knew him. If they did, then why didn't they stop him from jumping?

He reads some passages from his book.

My eyes keep coming back to Benny's ma. Mrs. Mason stands very still.

Is she staring at me from behind that veil? Does she know?

The reading seems to go on forever. I can't wait for the service to be over.

I feel Ma's hand on my arm. She looks nice in her black jacket.

“Hi, Ma. Did I tell you?”

“Tell me what, Charley?”

“About Benny. The name-calling, the bullying. I didn't speak up. Aren't you terrible ashamed of me?”

“I'm never ashamed of you, Charley.”

The minister finishes reading and that's it. The end of the service. No other people come forward to speak.

I turn again to speak to Ma, but she's gone.

••••

The nightmares crucify me. Benny's drowned face with its staring eyes. As I struggle to get away, Benny reaches out to grab me and that's when I wake in a sweat, gasping for breath, bed covers tangled about my legs.

Last night when Benny reached out to grab me he had no eyes, only baby crabs crawling out of the empty sockets.

Deadly.

Today I'm skipping school. Da's away and I have the house all to myself.

Did I mention how I sometimes lie down in Ma's closet with the light out and the door partly closed? And breathe the smell of her? And did I mention that her jackets and coats have got strands of her hair on the lapels and collars?

Anyway, that's what I do this afternoon after riding the trails on the lower slopes of Cypress Mountain for a couple of hours. I fall asleep in the closet and when I wake up it's almost three o'clock and I've got to rush over to the school to pick up Annie, and then take her with me to Aunt Maeve's.

Ever since the memorial service I keep seeing Mrs. Mason, standing at attention in the grounds of
the chapel, with Benny's kid brother clutching her dress. I can't get them out of my mind.

I found out where she lives. So later, while Annie is scarfing down her after-school snack, I dodge out the back and jump on my bike and less than five minutes later I'm standing on the street across from Benny Mason's house.

I stay for several minutes, sitting astride my bike, noticing the details of the house. Weathered gray cedar siding, gray cedar fence interrupted by a collapsed gate, gray sagging porch, untidy rat's nest of a front yard wild with dead thistles and long grass, empty driveway.

Everything about the place looks gray and rundown except for three windows with bright red curtains.

The house has no basement. I don't see anything of the ma or the little boy. The place looks empty except for the curtains.

I head back to Aunt Maeve's place.

Nobody missed me.

Crazy Uncle Rufus says grace, never quite the same. “For what we are about to receive, Lord —
Maeve's wild coho salmon and green salad, even though she knows I detest salad and don't have a very high opinion of fish either, wild or tame, but she's a good woman, as You know, and she does the best she can with this poor excuse of a husband and these two lovely children, preparing nutritious repasts for us, the likes of which would tempt the palates of Ireland's ancient kings and poets — may we all be truly thankful. Amen.”

“Amen,” we answer, even though me and Annie don't understand half of what he says.

As soon as dinner is over I say I'm going to my room to do homework. By now it's pretty dark outside but I sneak out and jump on my bike again and zoom back to the Mason house. Driveway still empty, so probably no car, unless it's one of the ones parked in the street, which seems unlikely when you have a whole driveway. Light shines from behind the curtains.