Sarah Court (21 page)

“You never stop loving someone. Entirely.”

“So she could come back. We could live in the
same house.”

“You shouldn’t pin much hope on that.”

Early that morning I wake. Down the hall: the
tap-tap
of a keyboard.

I catch my son bathed in the glow of his monitor.
No cape or eyepatch. A normal ten-year-old. The
gutted remains of a clock radio are spread about his
desk.

“Go away, Daddy.”

He doesn’t even look at me. Eyes on the computer
screen.

“Who are you talking to?”

He spreads his hands over the screen. This angry
tickling sets up inside my bones. I take his wrists.
One of his fists comes free and strikes me. I pull him
off the chair. Drag him into the hall.

“Is it her? Is it? I told you to stop talking to
whoever the hell this is.”

He swivels his wrists as though I’ve hurt them.
Perhaps I have.

“I hate you.”

I sit at his computer. I’m struck by the orderly
layout of his disassembled clock radio. The LCD
display, circuit board, and plastic casing laid out
in obscurely geometric patterns. Screws collected
in a pill bottle scrounged from my medicine chest:
Reminyl, which I take. It’s usually prescribed to
Alzheimer’s sufferers to address short-term memory
deficiencies.

Microsoft Messenger is running. Sadie’s screenshot
is of a cute girl in pigtails. Chatroom semaphore
renders much of the conversation unintelligible:
lolz, rotflmao, kpc. Sadie is discussing a new
nightgown. How snugly it fits. I scroll up and am
shocked, terrified, to find a conversation about my
wife, myself. Our split.

Sadie:
dillie? dillie-sweetie? u there?

Dylan:
THIS IS DYLAN’S FATHER

After thirty seconds or so, words start to scrawl
across the screen.

Sadie:
hey mr. dillie. i know all about u.

Dylan:
ARE YOU A PERVY OLD FART? I COULD
CALL THE POLICE

Sadie:
. . . lol . . . i’m a cute giiiirl . . . i like to snuggle
. . .

Dylan:
MY SON SAYS YOU ARE FRIENDS WITH
EVERYONE IN HIS CLASS

Sadie:
dillie-baby told u that? such a sweetie-petey!
Dylan:
DYLAN’S TOLD ME LOTS

Sadie:
. . . lol . . . no he has not . . . dillie hates u, mr.
dillie . . . like poison hates u . . .

Dylan:
STAY AWAY FROM MY KID YOU STUPID
FUCKER

Sadie:
awwww, threatening a pretty wittle giiiirl . . .

Dylan:
HAVE YOU ARRESTED CREEP STAY AWAY

Sadie:
ur not the boss of me . . .

[USER SADIE HAS LOGGED OFF]

There is part of me that struggles to believe this
is even happening. Another part is wondering what,
exactly, is happening. I print off the conversation.

Dylan’s sitting cross-legged in the hall where the
walls meet, faced away from me. He rocks forward
until his skull touches the wall. I don’t know if he’s
crying but if so it’s silently. I want to hug him yet am
furious for reasons I can’t articulate. There is a cold
fierce tickle inside my bones.

Niagara Regional Police HQ
is a labyrinth of
pastel green hallways, solid-core walls, and turretmounted video cameras. I’m buzzed through a steelplated door buttressed by bulletproof glass into a
bullpen furnished in outdated Dragnet motif.

Danny Mulligan meets me at the coffee urn. He
fills two cups. “You pay your taxes, right?” he asks
before handing me one.

He leads me to his desk. His Laura Secord
letterman jacket is hung over his chair.

“You still talk to Abby Saberhagen?” he asks.

“You and her dated back when, hey?”

He wiggles his ring finger. “Spoken for, now.”

And Abby cries herself to sleep over that.

“Dan—”

“Lieutenant Mulligan.”

“Right, Lieutenant. About Dylan.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Try Juvie services. Or
Scared Straight.”

“No, it’s . . . he’s being harassed. Stalked.
Something.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Talk to the principal.”

“Cassie, too.”

“Cassie’s involved?”

“I think so. They’ve got this friend. Dylan calls
her a friend, anyway. An online friend. He’s never
met her. Nobody has.”

“And
Cassie’s
involved?”

“All that with the cellphone—this person, young
girl or so she says, put them up to it. She’s computer
friends with everyone in class.”

“This is your suspect?”

“Right. Sadie.”

“Sadie who?”

“Sadie-the-perverted-old-man-posing-as-a-girlstalking-my-son.”

“I’ll stop you right there. It may actually
be
a
young girl. Infatuation isn’t a crime.”

“What if it’s an adult? This person has . . . has
infiltrated our kids’ class.”

“Nick, I’m backlogged. Got a case where a baby
was almost drowned in the toilet at Wal-Mart. I’ve
got a pursuable lead on that. Sort of.”

“Mine’s not?”

“Technically, anything’s pursuable. If you have
the manpower.” He sips coffee. Skins his lips from
teeth as if he’d slugged down a shot of gutrot mezcal.
“Listen, I’ll contact Missus Trupholme. We can sit
down with the class and talk about the dangers of
Internet predation.”

When he can’t find any scrap paper on his desk,
Mulligan rummages his blazer pocket, finds a foldedover leaflet and absently writes his home number on
its bare white back. He hands it over to me.

He says: “How’s Dylan?”

“Your girl’s a bombthrower.”

“Takes after her old man.”

“Nick,
it’s your father.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Just come over.”

Rain fell earlier tonight. Shredded silver mist
rolls up the streets to form halos around streetlights.

I’d driven Dylan to Toronto for the weekend. He ran
to his mother under the candy-striped overhang of
her new condominium complex. I stayed in the car.

Sarah Court. Two lights burning: one in an upper
window of Mama Russell’s house, the other in my
father’s kitchen. His face is furred with a three-day
beard. His skin hangs in doglike folds around his
jawbone. He’s drinking peach zinfandel from a box.

“I went into the hospital today,” he says. “Surgery
review board. To revoke my license. I scanned the
incoming patient list. Abigail Burger. Emergency
admission. You’d better drive.”

On the way to the hospital my father’s popping
the passenger door ashtray open, closed, open again.
The booze fumes coming off him are positively
kinetic.

“Remember taking me to the LCBO on my
thirteenth birthday?” I say, because he’s in a selfpitying mood and that’s when I prefer to needle him.

“I never. Your birthday? Never, Nick.”

“Dragged me in on the way to mini-putt. They
were out of your brand of gin.
Whersh the damn
Tankeraaaay
. . .”

“Uh-huh, in that stupid lush voice. As if I’ve ever
spoken that way. Ever.”

“Were you drinking before that procedure?”

He avoids the question.

“You know, bail may be set at a million. I’d put
the house up. Think your mother’d put hers up, too?”
“Why the hell would she?”

“For old times’ sake.”

“What about trial costs?”

“That’s me off to Brazil. Non-extradition policy.”
“Skip bail and Mom loses her house.”

“I wasn’t serious.”

We cut across the parkway. Over the guardrail
stands the brickwork of textile mills turned into
low-rent apartments. A ladder of red pinpricks where
tenants smoke on fire escapes.

“I took your mom to a cocktail party once. She
didn’t know anyone and held it against me. I went off
to find a drink. She’s chatting up some guy. Guy says,
‘Your husband, what’s he do?’ and your mother says,
‘Oh, he’s a sonofabitch,’ and the guy says, ‘Whatever
pays the bills.’ Ha!”

We get to the hospital. The elevator rises to
a white-walled ward sharing the floor with the
neonatal clinic and the Norris wing. Fletcher Burger
sits on a chair in the hall. At first I think he’s drunk.
But it must be shock. The man’s groggy with it.

“At the gym,” he tells us. “The weight bar fell on
her . . . her throat.”

Abigail’s on a hospital bed in a paper hospital
gown. Veins snake down her arms and trail under
plaster casts. A throat incision barbed with catgut.

“Warmup lift.” Fletcher rubs his thumbs over his
fingertips. “I don’t know how but her arm broke.”

“Tracheal stent,” Dad says. “How long before they
opened her airway?”

“Brain scan showed black spots, is all I know. Her
eyes. Frank, they turned
red
.”

Outside the hospital wind shears across Lake
Ontario around every angle this town was built
upon. Wires of dread twist through me. My oldest
friend. My prom date. Guess I thought we’d marry.
Even when I was married—and loved my wife,
truly—I felt I could have as easily been with Abby.
But my son never would’ve been born in that
scenario. A son, maybe, but not Dylan: the exact
genetic prerequisites wouldn’t have been present.
Plus I’d end up with Fletcher Burger as a father-inlaw. One self-obsessed man rampaging through my
life was enough.

I leave my father with Fletcher and walk along
to the Queenston Motel. A smorgasbord of ravaged
faces and sclerotic livers. The lonesome thoughts
of the patrons pinball round the dank air, glancing,
rebounding, horrified at themselves. An old man eats
a submarine sandwich the way you do a cob of corn:
he looks like an iguana with a dragonfly clamped
in its jaws. Another guy wears a leather vest with
nothing on underneath. So insanely over-tanned his
skin is purple. This leathery turnip of a head. The
woman between them wears a hot pink tube top.
Twin C-section scars grace her midriff, inverted ‘T’s
overlapping like photographic negatives aligned offkilter.

I order a greyhound. My wife’s drink. The
bartender gives me something that tastes like
liquefied Band Aids. “Summer of ’69” starts up on
the Rockola jukebox. Pink Tube Top gets up on the
sad postage-stamp of a dance floor. Breaks out that
old Molly-Ringwald-circa
Sixteen-Candles
, shouldersforward-shoulders-back-slow-motion-running-inplace move. “Yeeow!” goes The Dragonfly. “Yip-yipyee!” goes Leatherhead and he slither-slides up there
with her. Now they’re doing some spastic’s version
of the Macarena. Now I recall why I don’t drink: it
curdles my benevolent worldview.

The Hot Nuts machine is empty. There are no
fucking hot nuts in the Hot Nuts machine. The red
heat lamp is beating on a glass cube.

“Turn off the fucking Hot Nuts machine,” I tell
the bartender. “Some dumb bastard’s liable to burn
himself on the glass.”

The barkeep lays a hand on the bartop. Large,
scarred, knuckles crushed flat. A mean-ass scar
descends from his ear to the dead centre of his chin:
a chinstrap welded to his flesh. Am I going to scrap
over a Hot Nuts machine? I’ve fought for less. Fortyodd times in gyms and clubs, a greyhound racetrack,
the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese’s. All to show for
it a periodic openmouthed vacancy in my memory.
My father said I fought with absolutely no regard
for my welfare. A man who had made peace with his
forever-after. But you have to acquaint yourself with
the notion, before even scuffing your ring boots in
the rosin, that not only will you be hurt—there’s
no honest way you came out of any fight unhurt—
but that you’ll be hurt badly and repeatedly by an
opponent who, in the hothouse of that ring, hates
you. You cannot batter another human being into
unconsciousness unless you harbour some hatred.
The second hardest part of boxing is accepting
your need to suffer. The hardest part is welcoming
that necessary hatred into your heart. I’d stepped
between the ropes never believing I could have a
wife, a boy, people upon whom I was depended. I can’t
fight knowing how any punch—even one thrown by
a spud-fisted bartender—could be the one to bust
that all apart.

The cab drops me off a block from home. I’m so
dehydrated that I steal up to the side of a house,
twist the spigot on the garden hose and suck at stale
plastic-y water like a poisoned dog. At home I’m
nearly drunk enough to call my wife,
ex
, but it’s late
and Dylan is there. I don’t want to be
that
father.

I’m absentmindedly rooting through my pockets
when I turn up that leaflet with Danny Mulligan’s
number on the back. I turn it over. On the front is a
naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over
her nipples. A larger pink star over her crotch.

What the fuck? What the fuck.

“Sixty-Nine Cent Phone Fantasies,” the operator
greets me. “Our titillation experts are sweet and
sexy, dom, sub, Black, Asian, naughty nurses, hirsute,
leather lovelies, Daddy’s little girls, fat-n-sassy,
whips and chains, kinky, mincing, slutty secretaries,
southern dandies—”

“Fine,” I say. “That one.”

. . . click . . .
buzz
. . .

“How y’all doing this faahn evenin’?”

“I’m . . . Jesus, are you a guy?”

“That’s not what you asked for?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to specify.”

“I talk to whoever switchboard patches through,
man.”

“Well. Everyone’s got to make a living.”

“All with little mouths to feed.”