The Best Thing for You (14 page)

“No,” he whispers, and looks from Liam’s face to mine, back and forth, to see if this is the right answer.

“Maybe a different school isn’t such a bad idea,” Liam says later. We’re sitting in the living room, in the dark.

“There’s Larkin. Larkin’s a French immersion school.”

“French is good,” Liam says. We hear something get pushed through our mail slot. “I’m thinking also, it might be good for him to wear a uniform. I had to wear a uniform.”

“You went to a parochial school.”

He points at me. “There’s St. Thomas.”

“Ty isn’t Catholic.”

Liam looks at the wall.

I get up to see what was just delivered. It’s an old newspaper clipping, one of the first:
SECOND
CHARGE
IN
SILVER
VIDEO
BEATING
. It’s neatly snipped, a three-column box with a single-column tail. Ty’s name, of course, isn’t mentioned in it. I take it to Liam and click the halogen lamp next to him, which turns the front windows black. One glance – we have it in the file – and he’s going for the front door.

Outside, of course, no one – just the street, the houses, the familiar spread. “Goddamn it,” he says. “Isobel said no one would find out his name. T.C., she said.”

“Kids.”

We’re both shaken. He crumples the clipping in his fist and takes it to the kitchen. When he steps on the garbage canister pedal the lid pops up and he drops it in. “I could
make
him into a Catholic pretty damn quick,” he says.

The phone rings. I grab it and bark, “Hello?”

“Is Ty there?” Through the tinny reverb of a cellphone I recognize Carl.

“No, he’s not,” I say.

“Shoot,” Carl says. “Aw, shucks. Darn.”

I hang up.

“Aren’t you lucky?” I tell Ty the next morning. We’re in the car. “Other kids walk to school with their actual feet.”

He says, “All
right.
”

I overtake a dawdling fish-silver Saab. I tell him his father
might ask him to go to Mass on Sunday and he should at least consider it, for his father. He says he doesn’t remember how.

“You do too remember how.” He asks me to let him out, but we’re still two blocks from the school so I say no. “I want to watch you enter the building.”

“Mom!”

I park across the street from the front entrance, around the corner from the basketball courts. Kids are sitting on the steps, smoking. The girls greet each other with hugs and wan smiles; the boys’ eyes dart. Everybody looks tired. “This is where I’ll pick you up. You’re sure the library’s open until six?”

He says, “I hate this.”

“Dr. Gross is a busy and expensive man. Your appointment is at six-fifteen. Keep me waiting and I’ll come inside to look for you. Kiss your mother.” And because he’s still a child and doesn’t always recognize sarcasm, he does.

They hear the car door slam; pale faces turn. Do they draw themselves up? At this distance I can’t tell. Ty threads on through the scrum of them. A girl with long swinging yellow hair turns her back as he passes, but what does this mean? It’s a catwalk spin, surely – showing her clothes to her friends, jiving and teetering on her platforms. She’s just a lollipop. I’m hauling on the wheel, pulling out, when I glance over one more time to see one of the step-sitters swing around and plant a foot square in the centre of his back, sending him sprawling up the last couple of stairs. Around him kids start to applaud. Ty doesn’t turn around; he picks himself up and carries on through the doors, out of sight.

Fear takes me like love, heart pounding, dry mouth. I go to work.

“Doctor,” May says. She hands me a file and says, “Number seven.” She looks harassed.

“Where’s Calvin?”

“He called in sick.”

“Bastard. Who?” I gesture towards the examining room.

“Mr. Resnick.”

I say, “Fuck,” and she looks away. I say, “Sorry,” but the damage is done.

Mr. Resnick registers me with his pale blue eyes. “Are you going to charge me?”

“What?” I say, rattled. “Charge you with what?”

“Charge me money.”

I grab my stethoscope and advance like a monster. “Open your shirt.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flutters at his throat.

“I need to examine you. I need you to co-operate with me right now. Goddamn it,” I add reasonably.

“You’re not having very good luck with that one, are you?” the receptionist says a minute later. I’ve followed him out to the lobby but stopped there, had to let him go. He’s gone so fast the silk trees are swaying and swiping the windows.

“I think he’s afraid of me.”

“He asked for you when he made the appointment.”

She’s fat and calm, this receptionist. Every smile is a light question.

“I have to leave early today,” I tell her. “I promised my son something. Say, five-forty?”

“Hokey-pokey,” she says, consulting the big book. “No problemo. How old is the little guy?”

I don’t hesitate. “Six.”

“Aw.”

“Yep,” I say, turning back to my office.

I’m sitting in the therapist’s grey-and-teak reception area, sixteenth floor, waiting while he talks to my son. I’ve read a
National Geographic
article on St. Anselm’s deer and a brochure on talking to your children about schizophrenia. I have a flaming corkscrew of a headache. On the drive over I had told him I saw what happened on the school steps and he said, “Good for you.” I put my hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it away. We didn’t speak after that. In the underground parking lot he tried his first full-on mutiny, refusing to remove his seat belt.

“Get out of the car,” I said, slowly and deliberately, as though I was talking to Mr. Resnick. And then, as though I
was
Mr. Resnick: “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the car.” He did, too, exploding into motion – belt whipped, door slammed – as though suddenly he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. He ignored me all the way to the elevator, and, as the doors began to close, darted out, leaving me alone in my slowly, deliberately ascending cage. By the time the doors opened he was already at the nurse’s desk, still ignoring me, coolly giving his name and particulars. He had taken the stairs. I felt smug, knowing he still lacked the confidence to defy me outright, but frightened too at his willingness even to pretend to leave me behind.

Now, when he emerges, we’re both elaborately casual. He yawns and stretches. I toss my magazines behind me, nonchalantly slopping up the pile. I touch his hair briefly, warily, a question he can ignore if he wants, and – remarkably – win a frail smile.

In the car on the way home, Ty volunteers that he likes Dr. Gross, he’d like to see him again. He seems drained, head on the headrest, breathing through his mouth, but he looks at me when he talks, which he hasn’t been doing lately.

“What if we all went to see him together, you and me and your Dad?”

“First, me,” Ty says.

I try not to look at him. I look at him. He’s calm, staring at the sky, or the green glare strip on the windshield.

“I’ve already made an appointment,” he says. “I can figure out how to get there on the bus.”

“Crush me,” I say. I’m afraid to say more, to ask what happened in there, afraid I’ve dreamt up this amenable little boy I just barely remember from what seems like a lifetime ago.

When we pull into the driveway, Liam is painting the front of the house. In his everyday black clothes he’s slapping blue paint on the blue siding, stroking savagely. When he sees us he flinches, speeds up.

“Please go inside,” I tell Ty. I cross the grass to Liam and confirm what I thought I saw, a blurt of red, tail of a graffito, which Liam is erasing with the wet blue. “What did it say?” I ask.

He won’t tell me. Instead, after supper, he proposes taking Ty to stay with his mother in the Maritimes for a week. “Someone is gunning for us,” he says, looking at his hands.

“What did it say?”

He smoothes the cloth of his pants.

I reach under my sweatshirt to pull my T-shirt straight. It’s got rucked up on one shoulder. “Kids.”

“Again.”

“But maybe not directed specifically at Ty, though. Could just be vandalism, some random –”

Liam’s shaking and shaking his head, brushing down his sleeves now. “I walked up and down the block. Our house was the only one. Plus, the clipping.”

“Okay, the clipping,” I say. “Fine. But Nova Scotia? What about me?”

“I was thinking maybe we could all use a bit of a break from each other.”

He won’t meet my eye after he says this, and I’m left studying his face, his person. He looked a little Christly, once upon a time, my husband, with the longish hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and all that hunger. Now, though, he just looks tired. He looks like what he is, I guess: pretty cool for a professor, which isn’t the same thing as cool itself, despite what he thinks; not old, not young, definitely a four-square citizen with a couple of cars and a mortgage, with a dental plan and a teenager, with cares.

“You’ve never really told me about your book,” I say.

He looks away.

“The little Irish starlet,” I say. “The one you have the thing for.”

He checks to see if I’m being sarcastic. I’m not.

“She died young,” he says. “Lived a pretty wild life. She made some very odd films.”

“What is it about her?”

He looks at me then, and doesn’t look away.

“You know we still haven’t told Ty about the baby?”

“When we get back,” he says.

In the lunchroom, May is quick to move her bag from the chair next to her to the floor. I’m grateful. When I ask politely what she’s eating she says, “Are you all right?” I open my mouth to say something else. “Tired,” I hear myself say. “I’m tired.”

“You look it.”

I don’t mention the baby because I haven’t told Dr. Gagnon yet. I do allude to Ty and his ongoing troubles at school, though I omit the therapist and the graffiti. I mention his and Liam’s impending trip to the Maritimes. Her smooth brow wrinkles with concern. By the end of lunch she is patting my
hand and inviting me over for supper while my men are away.

“Who’s going away?” Calvin asks, joining us.

I explain again. May, I notice, has immediately withdrawn into herself, tidying up her lunch remains, saying little.

“She has a crush on you,” I tell Calvin after she excuses herself, leaving us alone.

He says, “I don’t think so.”

“Well, it wouldn’t kill you to be nicer to her.”

We smile, then, can’t help it, because we are something like friends now, and understand each other.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey. Would you help me with something?”