She flicked the appliance back on. She knew exactly what was driving her to vacuum the expensive Persian rug in the living room over and over again. She’d cleaned the entire house yesterday, area rugs included; any more vacuuming and the thing would be shredded. Suddenly, she turned off the vacuum cleaner, dropped to her knees, and studied the pile of the carpet closely. Then she sat back on her heels and made a mental list—she didn’t feel she could safely write these things down.
Dylan was on drugs.
Dylan was having sex.
Dylan was probably stealing from her.
Dylan was fifteen.
And, Dylan might be—probably was—Tom Grossman’s biological son. Which was no doubt why she found it so easy to believe that he was doing drugs, having sex, and stealing money.
There. That was about it. Except that John was drinking under age, which, relatively speaking, didn’t seem like such a big deal. And Harold was not himself. Otherwise, things were just hunky dory.
Audrey got up and went outside onto the front porch and looked impatiently up and down the street for Ellen.
Buying this house—a two-storey, red brick semi with a shared drive on a prime Riverdale street shaded with old maples, near the park—had been the best decision she and Harold had ever made; the property had tripled in value. Now it was almost paid off. It was small, but they’d finished the basement to get more living space as the boys had grown, and they’d remodelled the kitchen. Now, standing on the wooden porch, admiring the attractive, well-maintained houses, front porches, and gardens of her neighbours, Audrey remembered how she’d cried when the city had come and chopped down the century-old maple tree on their front lawn. First, a man had come and nailed a metal tag on it to show that it was condemned. Two weeks later, she’d come home from a day of shopping and all that was left was a fresh stump, pale and bleeding sawdust. Harold stood the boys on it and took their picture. A few days later the chipper had come along and ground up the stump, and eventually the city had replaced it with a tall, thin sapling—free of charge—which Audrey had derisively called their “hockey stick tree.” But that had been several years ago, and at least it no longer looked like a hockey stick. She glanced at her wristwatch. Ellen would be here. She always ran late. And there she was, slowly nosing down the street in her SUV, looking for parking.
Audrey stood on the porch and watched as Ellen parked and then came up the sidewalk toward her. Ellen was well put together by anyone’s standards. She used a clothing consultant—which, she argued, saved her time on shopping and really didn’t cost that much more—while Audrey tended to wear the same sort of things—jeans and attractive but unremarkable tops—year in and year out. Today Ellen was wearing smart black trousers, pointy-toed boots, and a flattering cashmere sweater in a cranberry shade—evidently with a first-rate bra underneath. Audrey and Ellen were both in their mid forties, but Ellen still went to the gym three times a week, tinted her brown hair with a brighter colour, and was generally better preserved, especially around the eyes. This didn’t bother Audrey too much, because Ellen had been divorced; things had a way of evening out. Ellen had three children, two boys and a girl in the middle, and she’d suffered her share of setbacks. Audrey knew she could trust her.
Audrey had forgiven Ellen for that time when Ellen, in the profound dislocation of her divorce, had had too much to drink and had inexplicably thrown herself at Harold. He’d turned her down flat, and Audrey was certain she’d never done it again.
“So, what’s the emergency,” Ellen asked, following Audrey into the kitchen where Audrey turned on the faucet to fill the coffee pot. From her tone of voice, Audrey could tell Ellen wasn’t expecting anything serious.
“Harold’s having a breakdown, for starters.”
Ellen raised her eyebrows, surprised. “You’re kidding,” Ellen said.
Audrey shook her head. “Well, you know he’s seemed kind of depressed lately. Now the doctor says he’s having anxiety attacks.” Audrey was prone to exaggeration, and she exaggerated a little now, for, as far as she knew, there had only been one anxiety attack. She recounted a little melodramatically how he’d passed out at the funeral, but left out the bit about the chest compressions. “And,” she continued, while Ellen was digesting this, “I think Dylan is stealing.”
This got Ellen’s attention. She’d had similar problems with her eldest. “What’s he stealing?” Ellen asked. This was an area in which she had some experience.
“Money.”
“Oh,” said Ellen, uneasily. They both knew that Ellen’s son Terry had only stolen a bike and a skateboard; stealing money seemed more serious somehow.
“We had over a thousand dollars in our joint account two days ago. Now it’s empty. Dylan is the only one besides me who knew the pin number. I asked him to get some money out for me last week.”
“That’s bad,” said Ellen.
“It gets worse,” Audrey said. “I searched his room today” (she could tell Ellen this, but not Harold; Ellen didn’t even flinch) “and you won’t believe what I found.”
“What?” Ellen was leaning forward, concern gathering in the centre of her face, which had the effect of showing her age.
“Condoms, for one thing.”
Ellen nodded. “That’s inevitable, you know.”
“He’s fifteen.”
Ellen leaned in closer, as if for emphasis. “They’re going to have sex. Be glad he’s using condoms.”
Audrey frowned. “And drugs.”
“Oh no.”
Audrey nodded. “What should I do? I can’t tell Harold—he’s not supposed to have any stress.”
“You have to tell him.”
“No I don’t. Not right now, anyway. What if he did have a heart attack?” She gripped her smiley-face mug miserably. Could he still have a heart attack if the doctor said his heart was in good shape? “Do you think I should confront Dylan? About the pills?”
“What kind of pills are they?”
“How the hell should I know?” Audrey thought for a minute and added, “They’re white, with the letter E stamped on them.”
“Ecstasy!” Ellen said triumphantly, sounding like a contestant on a quiz show.
“What’s that?”
“Umm—I don’t know exactly, but I don’t think it’s that bad. Not like crack or heroin. It’s more like a party drug, that kind of thing.”
The two women sat, not speaking for a minute.
“Got any cookies?” asked Ellen.
“Sure.” Audrey got up and grabbed a bag of Oreos off the counter. “And now his latest thing is he wants to be an actor.” She snorted. “He wants our consent to get an agent.”
“You can’t let him! All those child actors are messed up on drugs.”
“Of course I’m not going to let him! He’s smart enough to be a doctor! He just doesn’t apply himself.”
They sipped their coffees, munched cookies.
“Maybe he’s stealing money to pay for drugs,” Ellen said.
Strangely, this had not yet occurred to Audrey, who was still stuck on the electronics thing. This possibility, which made such sense, raised her stress level visibly.
“Maybe you need some professional advice here,” Ellen said, awkwardly.
“Maybe.” Audrey drank her coffee, ate five Oreos, and decided to keep her indiscretion with Tom to herself. She couldn’t tell Ellen that she was assuming the worst about Dylan was because she knew his father.
• • •
HAROLD HAD A thing about telephone solicitation. It was a waste of his time, an invasion of his privacy, and an insult to his intelligence. He particularly disliked getting the same pitch—about, for example, home alarm systems that were absolutely free—over and over again. Once, he’d changed the message on his answering machine to say: You’ve reached the Walker residence and we don’t need an alarm system, we don’t have any old clothes for cerebral palsy, and if you’re selling something, or doing a survey, please hang up now. Otherwis
e, leave a message. But this hadn’t helped much, he’d eventually realized, because telemarketers didn’t bother listening to your message anyway—they wanted you live, preferably with a mouth full of dinner.
So, when he returned to his desk after a meeting at the end of the day and listened to his voice mail one last time as he packed up to leave the office, he didn’t think twice. When he heard the message: This is Patricia from Credit International. It’s urgent. Call me back right away, he deleted it without another thought. He’d never heard of Credit International. They had to be selling something, no doubt another pre-approved credit card. He turned out the light, closed his office door, took the elevator down to the main lobby, and emerged outside, briefly, before descending underground to catch the subway, joining the swelling ranks of other government workers heading numbly home at the end of the day.
While he waited on the platform for his train, Harold tried to remember what it felt like to be seventeen and failed, utterly. Although he thought that this was probably a shortcoming in him as a parent—one of many—he told himself that what he had felt at seventeen was undoubtedly so completely different from what a kid would feel today anyway, that it didn’t matter that he couldn’t remember it.
Now, on the crowded rush-hour subway train, standing sandwiched between two taller men—Harold was the beefy part of the sandwich— breathing covertly through his mouth, his thoughts drifted to Tom’s funeral. He’d been trying not to think about it, because ever since the funeral, he’d been terrified that he might have another panic attack, in even more humiliating circumstances. Like at work. To the point where he’d thought about lying to Dr. Goldfarb about another attack so that he could get the anti-anxiety drugs that Dr. Goldfarb had mentioned but then had so callously and cavalierly withheld.
Harold was an amateur when it came to introspection; he hadn’t had much practice. So when he now tried to pinpoint what had triggered the anxiety attack—in the hope that he could avoid another one—he started with the obvious question. Did he fear death?
He remembered feeling increasingly uneasy on his reluctant approach to the coffin. He remembered looking at Tom’s face—at death personified—and the immediate, awful, all-consuming sensation of panic. Just before he went down, he thought he’d seen an expression on Tom’s face—what it was, he couldn’t now remember—and anyway, he assured himself, that had to be a pure trick of the imagination.
Obviously, Harold decided, it had to be the fear of death that had brought on the anxiety attack. He would soon be the age his father was when he had died, and that probably had something to do with it. He didn’t think he needed to look any deeper than that. If he didn’t have to go to any more funerals, he’d probably be fine.
Harold was relieved to have figured it out so quickly, and relieved also because the fear of death was a general one, shared by everyone, and not something particular to him. Also, it was something he could do absolutely nothing about, other than resolving to not think about it.
If he did have another anxiety attack, he would definitely go see Dr. Goldfarb.
• • •
DYLAN WAS SHOOTING baskets against the shed in the shared drive when John, who’d managed to make it to his afternoon classes, got home from school.
“Hey, loser,” Dylan said.
John ignored him. He was waiting for the day, which was surely coming, when Dylan would screw up and provide the entertainment.
John went in the house and found his mother in the kitchen cooking lasagna, his dad’s favourite, which was a good sign. Despite his mother’s promise to help him with his father, John was anxious. His entire short-term future was at stake.
Dylan was still shooting baskets against the shed when Harold got home from work. Harold stopped for a moment before going inside. “How was school?”
“Fine.”
They had this exchange—or something very similar—every day. It was completely meaningless.
Harold went inside and found Audrey in the kitchen. He made sure that John was out of earshot, downstairs playing games on the computer. Still, he closed the door that led down to the basement. He and Audrey needed to discuss what to do about John. They had to present a united front.
Harold was afraid of doing the wrong thing. He supposed John should be grounded, the only real question being for how long. Personally, he hated keeping the kids around by force—it made them even more passive-aggressive than usual. Whether John would ever drive the car again, Harold supposed, depended mostly on what was going to happen with the insurance, which was at the moment unclear. Beyond that, Harold was open to suggestion. Now that his initial wrath was subsiding, he just wanted to do the right thing.
“Did you talk to Ellen today?” Harold didn’t have the greatest faith in Ellen’s judgment, but he knew she’d had some problems with her kids and they’d got through them somehow.
“Yes, she came over.”
“Did she have anything to suggest about John?”
Audrey realized that she’d forgotten to mention this particular problem when Ellen was over.
“Mmm,” Audrey said, tasting the lasagna, thinking fast. “Oh, you know, the usual. We should probably ground him for a while.” Though she didn’t want John sulking around the house either.
Harold nodded, a little disappointed.
“And he can get along without the car,” Audrey said.
“Just what I was thinking,” Harold agreed.
“And I think a stern warning about the drinking.”
“Of course.”
“You can do that,” Audrey said, but then lowered her voice and articulated exactly what Harold feared. “But don’t overdo it. Don’t lose your temper, like you did last night. If we push him too hard, he might take it out on us and go out drinking again.”
“Right,” Harold agreed, biting his lower lip at how complicated it all was.
“And no backsliding. We tell him our position and that’s that.”
When they sat down to dinner a few minutes later, the mood craftily set with fragrant lasagna and garlic bread, Audrey looked with pained love upon her husband and her two handsome boys and thought that all might still be well, with a little luck. But then John blurted out—just as Harold was lifting that first delicious forkful of lasagna to his mouth—“I’m sorry about the car, Dad. Really.”
Harold put his fork down, the food untouched, looked squarely at his son, and said—less severely than he wanted to, but more severely than Audrey would have liked—“Sorry won’t pay what this is going to cost!”
There was an awkward silence; only Dylan had begun to eat. Their supper was getting cold.
“But it wasn’t even my fault.” The protesting note had crept into John’s voice, threatening to blow everything wide open.
Audrey shot John a warning look. “Why don’t we eat?”
John, although relieved to have his apology off his chest, felt that his father had not met him halfway.
Audrey said, “Your father and I have decided that you’ll be grounded.”
John sat still; of course he’d expected this. “For how long?” he asked.
Audrey drew a blank. She looked at Harold. Harold looked at her. Why hadn’t they decided this beforehand?
John sensed his parents’ disarray. “How about two weeks?” John suggested humbly, crossing his fingers under the table.
Harold felt Audrey looking at him. The usual was one week, so he supposed that John’s suggesting two weeks indicated that he had at least some idea of the severity of the situation. To Harold, two weeks of being grounded seemed a trifling punishment for such a grievous fault, but there was really so little available in their parental arsenal to haul out. Finally, he nodded. Any more than two weeks would be too hard on all of them.
“Fine,” said Audrey. “But you’re not driving the car again until we say so.”
John picked up his fork, contrite. Audrey helped herself to the garlic bread. She tilted an eyebrow at Harold—it w
as time for his reprimand about the drinking.
Harold, not as prepared as he ought to have been, put down his knife and fork, looked John severely in the eye, and said, “And we had better not catch you drinking like that again—or else.”
Audrey frowned at him and Harold watched his idle threat glance off John’s forehead and sail away into the wild blue yonder.
• • •
AFTER SUPPER, HAROLD escaped into the living room, ensconced himself in his La-Z-Boy, and closed his eyes. He wanted a respite from his worries; he didn’t want to think about how he’d just mishandled the John situation. And he wanted to avoid Audrey, who no doubt would have something to say to him about it.
He was starting to doze, head back and legs up on the footrest, when Audrey, cleaning up in the kitchen, dropped a plate on the floor, smashing it to smithereens. Harold leapt out of his chair. Instantly, he was up on the balls of his feet and poised to run out of the house, his heart pummelling his chest.
“Shit!” he heard Audrey say. Which is just what his mother always said.
Audrey appeared at the kitchen doorway. “It’s okay. Don’t get up. I’ve got it covered.”
Harold slowly climbed back into his chair and waited for his heart rate and breathing to go back to normal, for the adrenaline flooding his veins to recede. But the smashing plate had catapulted him right back into his unhappy past, to one striking night, when he and his mother were sitting at the kitchen table finishing up their supper.
His mum had shifted her eyes to stare at a china teacup on the counter with an expression of such intensity that Harold stopped chewing. Then the cup flung itself against a cupboard and shattered.