The Best Thing for You (10 page)

Drainage ditches bisect what used to be the back lawn; it’s rumpled as a rug now, creased and flipped back. The yard is a lot of bumps. I’m thinking it looks worse than when they started. Pushing aside some tarpaulins protecting the glass, I go into the
greenhouse, a stuffy orange ten-by-ten space, and remove a Coke can and a
MMM
arvellous
MMM
uffins bag of cigarette butts. I can’t imagine why they take their lunch in here unless it’s not to be seen. But why?

A few days ago I suggested the thing about the holly. The older one said, “That your boy out front?” We could hear basketball sounds – spaced slaps, the backboard rattle. It was a rhythm.

He knew.
I said sharply, “Why?”

His eyes shifted. “Glossy green sprigs tucked around the house at Christmastime. Sure, I’m seeing it. You know the little cute berries are poisonous?”

The assistant, shovel in hand, stood slack-shouldered, slack-mouthed, as though what we were talking about changed everything.

Now, late-September sun sparks off the mud, tangles in the trees. I look for a conspicuous place to leave the can and the bag. Maybe it’s not so bad: five evergreen bushes, roots balled in burlap, line the fence we share with Brill. You see a bird here, every once in a while, a pigeon, wings snapping the air with a sound like laundry. Eventually it’ll all heal over. Newness and all that, new green growth.

I drop the garbage in a wheelbarrow and pace over to the black-curtained French doors to Liam’s office. I tick on the glass with a knuckle. “Open,” Liam calls. I slide the door but there’s a new wrinkle: a sofa barring my way. As usual my husband is watching a movie. I let myself slide over the back of the sofa, landing with my spine on the seat and my feet in the air. I could have managed better but there’s mud on my sneakers and the sofa looks new.

“This is not good.” I stare at my feet in the air. “In my condition.”

“You have a condition?”

“Officially.”

“Well,” Liam says. I can’t see him – I’m upside down, I’m in the sun, and he’s not. “You going to close that door?” I kick my shoes off and close it with a sock foot, sliding us both back into the dark. “Come here.”

I go stand behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. He puts his hands on my hands and we watch his movie together for a while. Gangsters are planning a heist; they talk fast and mean. In the background a pretty moll fixes drinks and slips a baby revolver, a gunlet, in her garter when no one’s looking. She has a white face and black lips – the movie is black and white. Liam uses the remote to squiggle through a few scenes. We watch an interview between the moll and a detective, him struggling to light a cigarette, her looking bored. Liam freezes the frame on her heart-shaped face. “Livia Claire,” he says.

On an impulse, I reach down between his legs. He’s hard.

“Where’d that sofa come from?” I ask.

“Bought it,” he says, swallowing. It’s a futon on a pine frame, with a black cotton cover on the mattress. “Lately I want to nap.”

“Tell me she’s dead.”

“If she weren’t, she’d be older than my granny. It’s 1941 in there.”

We watch a little more. “I’d question your placement,” I say finally. “If you’re ever planning to use that door again as, you know, a door.”

“Never.” I wander over for my shoes and try to tug straight some diagonal creases in the futon cover. “Leave it.”

From the bookcase I collect a dirty coffee mug and the lifestyle section of this morning’s paper. “You jerk off in here, don’t you?” I gesture with the shoes, but he doesn’t answer. “Just like old times. I’m telling Ty about the baby, okay?”

He shrugs.

I find Ty up in his room with some kid I’ve never seen before. Ty’s sitting on the floor and the new boy’s ape-limbed all over the bed. The window is wide open.

“This is Carl,” Ty says. “He’s the one who hit me in the face.”

“Don’t like you, Carl,” I say.

“It’s all right, Kate. We worked it out.”

Ty giggles. After a second I place it: the meat-voice of the late-night phone calls.

“Tyler, sweetie, it’s almost time for you to go watch your favourite shows, okay?” I say.

Carl tells me he loves my T-shirt.

“Get your fucking shoes off the quilt.” Downstairs the doorbell rings. “And put those cigarettes out!”

On the doorstep are Officer Stevens and another officer, taller, a man. “Dr. Clary, is Tyler home?” Officer Stevens asks.

“Hi,” I say.

Their cruiser is parked in the driveway.

“He’s home,” I say. “Will you wait just a minute?”

“We have a few more questions. We’re going to need him at the station.”

Liam looks up when I come into his den. “I can’t stand this,” he says. “I’m unhappy. We need to talk.”

I tell him police are here, and go upstairs for Ty. “Carl, I’m afraid something has come up and I’m going to have to ask you to leave now,” I say. “Ty, shoes.”

“It was me smoking, not Ty,” Carl says.

“Officer Stevens is here,” I tell Ty. “Carl,
now.
” I pause on the stairs, wondering if I have time to change out of the skull T-shirt.

“What the fuck did you do, man?” I hear Carl ask Ty, laughing.

Downstairs, the officers have stepped into the hall. They step aside to let Carl pass. “Hi,” he mumbles, leaving.

“Hello there!” the male officer says.

Liam hurries in, telling us the lawyer will meet us at the station.

Outside, Brill is belly-up to the fence separating our properties. He’s seen the cruiser, the uniformed officers: he can look now, he can take his time. The male officer has his hand on Ty’s shoulder. None of us says anything.

The deal is, I ride in the back seat with Ty, and Liam will follow in the Jetta.

“It’s a mistake,” I tell Joe Leith. “Will you please look at him? He’s a child. It’s a dirty mistake.”

It’s after; we’re in the car. They’ve charged him. They’ve
charged
him.

“Like I told you,” Joe Leith says. He’s an outline to me – a voice and some thick lines. He’s got no face. “They’re trying to flush out the undergrowth. It’s what they do.”

He says he can make the charge go away. He says, give him a couple of days. “They’ve got no substance,” he keeps saying, waving his white hands. “It’s all very thin.”

“They can’t raise him, can they?” Liam asks.

I look at him, can’t look at him.

“Not at all,” the lawyer says soothingly.

Liam has the papers. When you get charged, there are papers. I say, “Raise him?”

“To adult court.”

Joe Leith is centring the knot of his tie with three fingers and a thumb, firming it up.

“Raise him?” I repeat. “You’ve already got the fucking jargon?”

“Isobel brought it up. I’m just telling you what Isobel said.”

“Isobel,” I say.

“How is dear Isobel?” Joe Leith says.

When we get home we have a fight with yelling. After a while Ty goes to his room. Liam and I end up in our bedroom with his laptop, trying to figure out if this web site our son claims to have been cruising that night is real.

“Slow,” Liam says impatiently as we wait to get on-line. It’s after-dinner homework time, high-use time. The connection fails and fails again. There’s spit on the windows, the first of the fall rains. We hear the modem crush. “Read me that site.”

“I don’t have it.”

“In the Information,” he says. “The sheets, the sheets.” I hand him the papers from the police. He turns the pages back gingerly, my husband, afraid to make a crease at the staple.

“That witness only saw Jason up close,” I remind him, but in my speaking voice this time. “It’s Jason’s word against Ty’s. I know who I believe.” I read off the name of the site, something that sounds innocuous enough. He types it with all his fingers, like a pro. “Got it?”

“Got it.” Liam hunches, then leans back. “Christ, this is going to take forever.”

I look over his shoulder. So far the site is scaffolding, a lot of empty boxes with ripped corners and tricolour balls. The computer grinds, working on it.

“Graphics,” Liam says.

“I can’t.” I look away.

I can hear him breathing while he waits. I lie down on the bed.

“You fucker.” Liam hits a key. “Lost the connection.”

“It exists. How much more do you need?”

He fires up the modem again. I leaf through the papers. “How are you doing?” he says grudgingly. It’s the first time he’s asked, the first kind word of the evening.

“We’re fine,” I say.

“Isobel says it would be illegal for the media to report his name. She says in the court documents they’ll refer to him as T.C.”

I’m reading.

“Kate.”

“T.C.”

“Here.”

He’s got the site. I stand at his elbow while he jumps us through a few screens.

“Mammal,” I say, pointing.

After a few more screens, Liam clicks on “Go,” clicks on “Home.” The image of the three entwined girls is replaced by our preferred home page, a site maintained by a local
TV
station, with its familiar layout of advertising logos on scrolling banners, search engine, weather (a cloud with digitally sprinkling rain), sports stats, and news headlines:
SECOND
TEEN
CHARGED
IN
ASSAULT
.

“Oh, no,” Liam says, surprised. “No.”

I take the mouse and click on the headline. “ ’Police are releasing few details,” ’ I read. “ ’They confirm that a second fourteen-year-old has now been charged in last month’s vicious attack on a mentally handicapped man in a video store parking lot. The trial is set for November.” ’

Liam makes a breathy noise, a laugh or a gasp.

“That’s commendably fucking prompt,” I say.

We stare at the little words, which by rights ought to be as private as our own blood.

“Don’t let’s tell him about this tonight,” Liam says suddenly. “It’s going to be everywhere tomorrow. Let him get one more night of rest before it all starts.”

I think,
This is love?

“Maybe we should pull him out of school,” I say.

“We’re not pulling him out of school.”

“What do we do now?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Wait.”

He says he wants to sleep in his office for a while.

The next morning, Ty won’t go to school. He won’t get up.

“You know we almost named you Gordon?” I tell him. I’m sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at the neatness of the sun, the orderly rows of glow between the blind slats. Ty’s curled away from me, facing the wall. “It was some stupid idea of your Dad’s. Look at me, I’m talking to you.”

“Go away,” he says.

“So the plan is I phone your school and say, Ty’s going to be absent today because he’s facing a criminal charge and he needs some quiet time? Something like that?”

“I keep throwing up.”

I look around. “Where?”

“Last night.”

I put the back of my hand on his forehead. “Were you there?” I say suddenly.

He looks at me, horrified.

I stand up. “I’m going to work now,” I tell him. “I love you, but I am so sick of this. You look after yourself today.”

By lunchtime I’m also sick of everyone at work, of May and Dr. Gagnon and the nice receptionist and all the sneezy, achy people waiting in Reception like a lot of weeping sores. I decide to take my lunch out into the air, walk away from them for forty-five minutes or so, find a pocket of park and a bench under a pine tree with a view of the sea – me, my soup Thermos, my water bottle, my red pepper and my banana. Calvin follows me.