“You’ll have to go down,” Audrey said, looking at him.
Harold looked down at himself, dressed only in his boxers, as if hoping that would be excuse enough to avoid whatever was waiting for him on the porch.
Now someone was leaning on a horn—at one o’clock in the morning. Harold and Audrey looked out the window again. The tow-truck’s engine had revved to life. Its headlights flashed on. The driver gave a couple more short bursts on the horn and then took off down the street with a squeal. Lights went on in Mrs. Kushner’s house directly across the street.
Harold hurried out of the bedroom and down the stairs without stopping to put on his bathrobe, Audrey right behind him in her nightie. Harold reached the front door first and peered out the window at the top, but couldn’t see anything. Suspiciously, he unlocked and opened the door, and John, who’d been seated propped up against it, eased forward and landed at Harold’s bare feet.
Audrey gasped.
Harold sniffed. “He’s hammered.”
Audrey unwisely put on the overhead light before Harold was able to shift John’s inert body sufficiently out of the way to close the front door. John was long-limbed and heavier than he looked. Harold had to bend and grunt and drag and manoeuver in his underwear. At last, panting with exertion, Harold stepped over him and went to shut the front door—and saw that Mrs. Kushner across the street was watching the whole thing from her living room window. Scowling, Harold slammed the door.
“Was that absolutely necessary?” Audrey sniped at him. Harold was about to defend himself, but Audrey had already forgotten him and was bending over John checking him anxiously all over for damage. John was sprawled out on the floor at an angle, the top of his head pointing toward the living room couch, his long legs stretching into the vestibule, his feet blending in with all the other shoes jumbled there. Finding no obvious injuries, Audrey began to lightly tap his pale cheeks, trying to revive him. But she was far too tentative, in Harold’s opinion, to get the job done.
“Let me,” Harold said abruptly, remembering his university days. Remembering also that his son was under the legal drinking age, that there was no sign of his car anywhere, and that his son had been dropped off by someone driving a tow-truck.
Harold bent over John and began slapping his cheeks with a greater sense of purpose. It was at this point that Dylan, watching unnoticed from the top of the stairs, said, “What’s going on?”
“None of your business,” Harold said roughly, not looking up. “Go back to bed.”
Of course Dylan came down the stairs, his curiosity being stronger than his fear of authority.
Audrey looked up at Dylan and said, “Your brother isn’t feeling well.”
Dylan came over in his pajamas, took one look and snorted. “He’s pissed.”
“Watch your language,” Audrey said crossly.
John groaned and opened his eyes. All three of them looked down at him. Audrey grabbed a pillow off the nearby couch and propped his head up with it.
John had never seen his father from this perspective before—the scowling face bending over him was familiar, but the naked, hairy chest, the belly hanging over the polka-dot boxers, this was new and unpleasant and indicated that all was not as it should be. A bout of nausea swept over him, along with a near total recall of the night’s earlier events. The sickening impact as he barged into the back of the taxi. The momentary disbelief, sitting in his dad’s car wishing it wasn’t true, while the cab driver got out and came at him swearing and waving his arms at him through the window. John had been afraid to get out of the car. That’s when Roy had swooped up in his shiny black tow-truck and taken charge. Told the cab driver to settle down, and just like that, he’d backed off. John hadn’t got out of the car until the police arrived, and then he hadn’t understood why the cab driver was making such a big deal—his taxi was totally fine. The police had charged him. It was horrible; he’d felt like a criminal. He knew his dad would kill him.
John turned his head pathetically to the side, toward his mother, and closed his eyes again.
“Where’s my car?” Harold demanded.
“You weren’t driving like this?” Audrey gasped, horrified.
John, through the nausea, sensed an opportunity. He opened his eyes a little—just enough to gauge her reaction. “Mom, I would never drink and drive,” he slurred virtuously.
“Thank God,” Audrey said.
John figured groggily that no matter what he told her now, it would be all right.
“We’ll talk about this in the morning,” Audrey said.
“The hell we will—he’s not getting off that easy!” Harold snorted. “I want to know what the hell he’s been up to—and what happened to my car!”
“This is going to be good,” Dylan said.
“Don’t be a smartass,” Audrey snapped.
“Give me a hand dragging him into the kitchen,” Harold said to Dylan. “Make yourself useful.”
They each grabbed an arm and dragged John, unresisting—while Audrey hovered, as if directing traffic—across the hardwood floor through the dining room to the kitchen at the back of the house, where they heaved him into a chair at the kitchen table, and then stood back looking at him. Harold was breathing heavily from the exertion.
John slumped in the chair and felt sorry for himself. It was hard to defend yourself when you were piss drunk and about to puke. He tried to concentrate on not throwing up, sitting on the kitchen chair with his head supported in his hands, his elbows on the table, while his mother bustled around making coffee, his dad and his younger brother stared at him, and an ominous familial silence built to a crescendo.
John watched through half-closed eyes as his mother put out coffee in mugs—for everyone but Dylan—and the four of them sat in various postures around the kitchen table. Only Dylan was relaxed, lounging in his chair in his pajamas in his usual pose, one arm hooked around the back of the chair. His mother looked small and worried and birdlike in her blue nightie, her hands curved around her smiley-face coffee mug as if holding on for dear life. His dad sat rigid with anger—somehow this was still possible in spite of the soft, embarrassing, exposed flab. At least the polka-dot boxers were out of sight beneath the table, but on the other hand, this gave rise to the disturbing illusion that his father was naked. John hadn’t even taken his jacket off. It was all he could do now to keep his bile down and his eyes open.
John felt like he was on trial, and that he was considered guilty until proven otherwise. This was just like the reverse onus they’d learned about in grade twelve law class, and though he hadn’t had an opinion about it then, now, thinking about it, he did feel a reverse onus was unjust, at least in his case. After all, what had started it all—that bump into the back of the taxi—hadn’t really been his fault.
But he hadn’t helped his case any by coming home pissed. It must have been the dope—otherwise he’d never have been stupid enough to go drinking with Roy, no matter how grateful he felt—but he couldn’t tell his parents that.
Now Dylan was making obvious, dog-like sniffing noises around his jacket and smirking, wise to him. If Dylan said anything about the dope he’d kill him.
“It’s not really my fault,” John began, after his mother had got half a cup of strong coffee into him. She’d put out a bag of cookies, too, but these were ignored by everyone but Dylan.
“Here we go,” said Harold.
“I was just driving along and this cab pulls out in front of me and then stops all of a sudden to pick somebody up. Of course I hit him— anybody would have.” John was feeling indignant now, and even in his relatively weak state he managed to speak with the absolute and righteous conviction of the wrongly accused teenager. “The cop said they always have to charge the one behind, even if the one in front is actually at fault.” Repeating this now, John felt again—fiercely—the injustice of his position.
“You were charged?” Harold said, exquisitely alert.
“Well, yeah. Like I s
aid, the cop said they always have to charge the one behind—”
“BULLSHIT,” Harold roared, thumping the table, making the coffee mugs and spoons jump. “That’s just bullshit!”
John felt himself go paler. He was feeling almost sober now, and wide awake, but the nausea wasn’t going away.
“Settle down,” Audrey cautioned Harold.
“What were you charged with?”
“I’m not sure,” John prevaricated. “Honestly, I barely touched the guy, it was just a tap—”
“Let me see it,” Harold said.
“What?” The autobody shop was closed; it was the middle of the night.
“The ticket, for Christ’s sake.”
John groped in his jacket and handed the yellow ticket over, feeling afraid but with enough pluck left to say, resentfully, “It’s not fair. The taxi didn’t have a scratch.”
All present watched as Harold silently read the ticket and began nodding his head up and down, as if it all made perfect sense. John thought he might have to run to the bathroom any minute. Harold handed the ticket over to Audrey, who squinted at it.
“So, where’s my car?”
“In an autobody shop,” John said sullenly.
“How much damage?”
“They think it’s a write-off,” John mumbled, in despair now. He couldn’t help thinking how differently this might have gone if he’d been lying in a hospital bed for this conversation. As it was, nobody, not even his mother, had said anything gratifying about him not being hurt.
“Way to go,” Dylan said.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, from his desk at work, Harold called the insurance company, trying to get a sense of the repercussions of John’s accident while carefully avoiding all mention, for now, of the careless driving charge. He arranged for a rental car and dealt with the autobody shop that had his car about the estimate. It all went fairly smoothly, and Harold felt that at least he was doing something useful.
But when it came to dealing with his son, things were less straightforward. What was the right thing to do when your seventeen-year-old trashed your car, fled responsibility by drinking himself into a stupor in the company of a sleazy tow-truck driver, and turned up unconscious on the porch at one in the morning?
If he and Audrey were to do the wrong thing now, handle this badly, John might spiral into a life of irresponsibility, waste, and degradation. And it would be all their fault.
What did other parents do?
He had no idea. He wasn’t in the habit of confiding in anyone about anything. Audrey, on the other hand, had girlfriends she’d have shared this with by now. Maybe they would have some useful advice.
The telephone on Harold’s desk rang and he picked it up. It was the insurance adjuster again. Now they wanted him to have the car towed from where it was to one of their approved autobody shops to have the estimate done, and if warranted, have the vehicle repaired. This detail had somehow not been mentioned in their earlier conversation, before Harold had called the autobody shop. The adjuster gave him a list of three approved autobody shops in his area to choose from, and Harold wrote them all down. He looked them over, noted the closest one, and picked up the phone again. He sighed, annoyed at the complication, and thought nothing’s ever easy.
• • •
THAT MORNING, AUDREY took advantage of the opportunity to methodically search Dylan’s room. Harold was at work, Dylan had gone to school, and John was sleeping it off in his own bedroom.
Audrey felt a little guilty about this—about letting John sleep in and miss school; she felt instinctively that it wasn’t the kind of thing that the leading child-rearing experts would recommend. She probably should have had him up and out of the house, and made him function through his day sick as a dog. That’s what Harold would have done, but she simply didn’t have the heart. Besides, when John eventually got up, she would have a chance to speak with him alone.
She felt a little less guilty about searching Dylan’s room. She had long ago decided that secrets—which were similar to and closely related to lies—had to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Was the secret or lie, as the case may be, serving the greater good? That was the test. And here, she had probable cause to believe that Dylan had misused her bank card. And, rather than wrongly accuse him—and destroy that trust that she had spent an entire lifetime establishing—she thought she’d better be sure of her facts. And so she was rummaging stealthily through Dylan’s dresser drawers, and in his closet, and under his mattress—and discovering the pornographic magazines (which she’d expected), and the condoms (which shook her badly), and the little white pills with the E stamped on them.
Audrey sat on the side of Dylan’s bed—he was only fifteen—stunned by what she’d found. There was no sign of anything expensive and electronic that might have been purchased illicitly with her missing money. But the evidence of what Dylan was really all about—it wasn’t just basketball and talking to girls on the phone, then—was strewn all around her on the bed.
Too late, she heard John up and stumbling down the hall toward the bathroom. Which would take him right past Dylan’s open door and Audrey herself, sitting on Dylan’s bed with her cache of—
Why hadn’t she closed the door?
Audrey froze, certain she was about to be caught in one of the more compromising positions of her life. But she needn’t have worried. John barrelled past her, bent over, and then she heard his awful, wrenching vomiting.
If he missed, I’ll kill him, Audrey thought.
• • •
AT LEAST JOHN had no need to fake remorse; this was the real thing. He hung listlessly over the toilet, considering his situation.
He’d be grounded for sure, for who knew how long. He’d probably never be allowed to drive the car again—which would mean a significant loss of status, not to mention quality of life. It occurred to him that he might be made to pay for the damage by getting a part-time job. There went everything. A part-time job would mean a further significant loss of status, not to mention quality of life.
But then he was able to calm himself on that score. He didn’t think his mother would let him get a job, even if his dad wanted him to. She’d be too worried about him keeping up his grades. He was a solid B student, which is what you were called when you got marginally more Bs than Cs, and his parents hadn’t given up on their dream of his getting a degree, even if it wasn’t from the University of Toronto, from which they had both graduated, and which he didn’t have a hope in hell of getting into. Personally, he was hoping to go somewhere far from home, so he could have a really good time.
John dry-heaved once more into the toilet bowl and when that spasm was over, and feeling more miserable than he’d ever felt in his life, he was struck with another, paralyzing thought: When Dylan got his G1, life wouldn’t be worth living.
He was pondering this awful fact when his mother appeared from out of nowhere and stood looking at him from the bathroom doorway. He wiped the back of his hand against his mouth.
“We should talk,” she said.
“Now?” John groaned, hugging the toilet with both arms again. Why did throwing up make your face sweat like this? Even he couldn’t stand his own smell—a mixture of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and vomit. And though he’d tucked the rubber-backed fluffy bath mat under his knees when the hard ceramic floor had become too uncomfortable, his knees still hurt like hell. But his mother ignored his implicit plea to be left alone.
“This is important,” Audrey said grimly.
“I told you everything last night. Honest,” John said plaintively, not looking up from the toilet bowl. And he had told them everything, about Roy and the bars, about everything but the pot. And that was for their own protection; he was pretty sure the mention of drugs would send them both right over the edge into overreaction mode.
“I know. Just—let me handle your father.” John lifted his face from the toilet bowl with an effort and looked at her. “Can you do tha
t?” she said.
“Sure,” he gasped weakly. Really, he just wanted to lie down on the bathroom floor and die.
“Sure isn’t good enough,” she said. “You’d better be on your very best behaviour from now on, or nothing I can do will be much help.”
John tried nodding, a shipwrecked boy in a lifeboat spotting salvation on the horizon.
“You could start by apologizing to him when he gets home, which, in case you haven’t noticed, you haven’t actually done yet.”
John kept nodding, even though it was making him dizzy. She was using her I mean business voice, but even in his present sorry state, John could tell her heart wasn’t really in it; it seemed like her mind was already somewhere else.
“Clean the toilet bowl when you’re finished. And then you can go to school.”
CHAPTER THREE
Audrey was vacuuming the carpet and wondering what was wrong with Harold, wondering what was at the bottom of his lethargy, his apparent depression, and this latest worry—his panic attack. She supposed it could be a middle-age thing, a recognition of his own mortality. She’d seen the spreadsheet Harold had created on the computer tracking his various cholesterol levels over the last few years. Harold’s father had died at forty-nine of a heart attack. And now Harold had to deal with Tom’s equally sudden and premature death too, from the same cause. But although she felt sympathetic to Harold, she was a little annoyed with him too, because if that was it, if that’s all it was, he really didn’t have that much to worry about. The doctor had checked his heart, and it was fine. The doctor should know. Just because Harold’s father had died young, and his one-time best friend had died young, it didn’t mean that Harold was going to die anytime soon.
She, on the other hand, had real problems, and vacuuming helped her think.
She turned the machine off for a minute to rest and surveyed the living room. She had gradually, as they could afford it, made the house over. Harold, for example, had brought an old vinyl La-Z-Boy chair into the marriage, which had sat stubbornly in the corner of the living room in front of the window from the time they’d bought the house. It had taken years, but she’d finally won Harold over and replaced it with a new La-Z-Boy chair, an attractive model she could live with, in luxurious brown leather—you couldn’t even tell it was a La-Z-Boy! She could remember her excitement as she’d pored over the brochure—her excitement at the prospect of finally throwing out something ugly that she’d had to look at for years. They’d saved up for the area rug. It had cost more than they could really afford, but would, with proper care, last forever.