North to Benjamin Page 14

  “Daddy was a money guy. He always wore a three-piece suit. He had schemes, land deals, shopping centers, apartment buildings. Sometimes we lived in huge houses in Rosedale, and sometimes it was a rental in Scarborough where the toilet never got fixed. At least twice we lost all our furniture. I swear it was the same guys in the same truck from the same company who showed up to haul everything away. I went to three different private schools, and I think there’s still outstanding debt beside my name, probably at all of them. Daddy had girls, too. I won’t call them women. I remember walking down Yonge Street once when I was a teenager. I was skipping classes, and Daddy was skipping out with some girl who looked like a hooker, heels to here and a dress not much longer than a T-shirt. He never saw me, though I walked by him, practically stuck my tongue out. And one time when I took up with a so-called banker friend of his—well, I won’t tell you about that, not my finest hour. Daddy blew a gasket over that when he found out. It was like—‘Well, he’s no better than I am!’ which was somewhat the point.”

  All the time she was talking, she was still looking at the horizon, at ghosts far, far off. But now she steadied her gaze at Edgar. “You see me. You’ve seen me at my worst. You’ve seen me more or less getting through. I’m sorry. I probably should have just given you up for adoption, but how could I, when you came out, with those big dark eyes like you knew everything already? I’m sorry I’m a screwup, but you know, I read somewhere that maybe we choose our parents, maybe it’s our own fault what family we get born into.” She drilled her eyes into him. “You know my daddy’s middle name was Edgar, don’t you?”

  He hadn’t known that. His grandfather had died before Edgar was born.

  “Yeah, well, I wanted him, from his seat in hell, to understand that I at least could grow someone worthy of who he might have been. And here you are. My gift to the world.” She looked around at all the ice and snow like she really wanted a drink.

  Edgar shifted. It was hard to know what to say. Finally she rubbed her legs. “I was too hot when I sat down, but now I’m cooling off. Did you get some good pictures?”

  Edgar took one then of her looking at him, full of this strange moment, and he showed her. The screen was dull in the daylight, but even so she liked his shots of the sun glinting off the ice and snow, of Dawson huddled in the distance, of Benjamin black against the silvery light. The one of her—well, she said her hair wasn’t right.

  But she gave him a hug anyway; she crushed him within an inch of being able to breathe. “If I hadn’t had you, I’d probably be in my grave by now,” she choked out, and her tears flooded, almost unbearably, in warm wet sobs against his cheek.

  They got cold, they turned to leave, and then they were heading back across the frozen Yukon, the light hitting the hills to fill his eyes, to flush him with a strange vibration. (The hills themselves suddenly seemed to be both black and white as before, snow and ice dotted with trees and rocks, but also bathed in gold—trembling, hand-painted.) Benjamin stopped too. Who knew what he could see? Maybe he smelled the soak of it, the tremble. Maybe to him it was an orchestra blast or like lying down in a shaded meadow of soft grass.

  Edgar’s body felt full of gold somehow—not the metal but the sense, the throb of it. Clean air, pure light, a whole rugged landscape suddenly showing itself, like an enormous moon emerging from behind a wall of clouds.

  Those hills had been there all along. He’d taken pictures. He’d already appreciated the way they looked.

  But this was like breathing for the first time.

  (Was it because his mother loved him? She truly did in her broken way, and so surely all the wrong things happening were going to be all right?)

  This was like opening his eyes.

  “Edgar!” his mother called. She was far away again, looking back at him. “What are you doing? Hurry up! I’m freezing!”

  He was looking. Just looking. With his whole self.

  He raised his camera and knew he was not going to capture it, not a fraction of it. He couldn’t describe it at all.

  “Edgar!”

  Already the light was changing. He would have to move. He had the feeling he was going to remember this moment inside his body somehow.

  Remember what?

  The prick of his toes in his boots getting cold.

  The sense of his grandfather, a man Edgar had never even seen a picture of but whose name he shared, smiling hard at the world he wanted to charm.

  His mother’s smoke.

  Benjamin still, true, silent.

  And those hills plunging down to the frozen river, now with fingers of gold—the sense of how light never stayed the same—filling him, filling him.

  With what?

  LOVE

  MS. LAJOIE WAS WAITING AT the house when they got back, leaning against their front door, reading a book. How long had she been there? Her cheeks did not seem overly red. She seemed perfectly contented in her parka, in her fur-and-leather boots that disappeared beneath the hem of her long coat. “I was hoping we could get a chance to talk, the three of us,” she said.

  “What, you don’t think Benjamin should be part of this meeting?” Edgar’s mother said.

  Ms. Lajoie actually looked down at the dog as if Edgar’s mother might have been serious. But Benjamin was exhausted, barely standing after being out too long. What was he going to say, anyway? “No tragedy, barking like a dog”?

  “Come on in. We’re freezing!” Edgar’s mother said.

  Edgar took Benjamin downstairs and waited as the old dog circled, circled, then lay down. He didn’t seem too cold, just ready to close his eyes. Maybe he would dream of the light on those hills, of whatever it was that filled a body.

  Upstairs again, in the kitchen with tea water on the boil, Ms. Lajoie said, “I am so, so sorry for what happened today. I don’t know how Jason got hold of a dog collar. It should never have ended up around Edgar’s neck. And Edgar should never have been subjected to so much pressure in the principal’s office to speak and to be a certain way. Please accept my apologies on behalf of the school and the whole community.” Her eyes levered between Edgar’s and his mother’s. His mother’s face was pale, blank.

  Finally his mother said, “Edgar never has mixed well on the playground, and sometimes he doesn’t fit in just because of who he is. I know he’s not normal.” She shifted her gaze to Edgar. “You’ve got me for a mom, for one. That’s a huge handicap right there. It’s a wonder you didn’t start barking right out of the gate.”

  Edgar’s mother poured tea for Ms. Lajoie and herself, and mixed hot chocolate for Edgar, making a show, it seemed to Edgar, of being a mother. Ms. Lajoie blew on her mug and leaned across the table toward Edgar. “So you haven’t always had this problem, Edgar?”

  “Good God, no!” Edgar’s mother said. “He was fine when we were in Toronto. It’s only since we got here. But I haven’t been able to provide much stability. We came here to start over. There were some issues—”

  Ms. Lajoie stayed quiet, but Edgar’s mother didn’t say anything more. The pad and pen were right there still on the table in front of Edgar. She was going to ask him—

  “What can I do, Edgar, to make you feel safe and comfortable in the classroom?” Ms. Lajoie asked.

  If he waited—

  “He’s never had this trouble before,” Edgar’s mother said again. “But elsewhere, other things. He’s just not normal. Are you, Edgar?” She smiled in her too-bright way. “Normal doesn’t work in our family. But other teachers have just let him read in the back of the class. There’s a word—what am I looking for, Edgar?” She bumped the pad closer to him.

  Autodidact, Edgar wrote.

  “That’s it. He teaches himself. You could test him if you want. He’s off the charts for some things. I read to him way too much when he was too young to protest, I guess. Do you remember, Edgar, all the reading we did together?”

  He remembered the sting of her cigarette smoke when he sat on her knee, the loveliness of her voi
ce, the colors on the page when there were pictures.

  “I remember when he was in grade four, he was supposed to do a project on—what was it, Edgar? Water, I think. Properties and what it’s used for. Instead you wrote this whole philosophical thing—”

  Ms. Lajoie kept switching her dark, lovely eyes between Edgar and his mother. Her skin smelled sharp all of a sudden, as if—

  “What grade is Edgar supposed to be in?” Ms. Lajoie asked.

  As if her blood had picked up an electric current of doubt.

  “Technically grade six,” Edgar’s mother said. “But in Toronto he was working in the seven–eight curriculum.”

  Both women now were looking too hard at Edgar.

  “What grade did you tell them, Edgar?” his mother asked finally.

  Edgar felt his shoulders shrugging.

  “I teach grade four,” Ms. Lajoie said.

  “Physically, I know,” Edgar’s mother said, “he looks a lot younger. But he’ll be twelve this summer.”

  Both women fell silent. The kitchen clock echoed in Edgar’s eardrums.

  “How did you end up in a grade-four class, Edgar?” Ms. Lajoie asked.

  Edgar twiddled the pen. He clicked it uncomfortably. I liked it when I was in grade four, he wrote finally.

  He waited. Ms. Lajoie had a vein in her neck, like a pale blue river beneath the milky white surface. Throb, throb.

  “If we moved him to seven–eight,” Ms. Lajoie said—then she turned to Edgar. “If we moved you to the grade seven-eight class, Edgar, you’d be in with Caroline, but with Jason, too, and maybe we don’t want that. Any class you go into—”

  I have the right class now, he wrote. You are the best teacher for me.

  “But now that I know that you’re actually eleven years old—” Ms. Lajoie said.

  I love you, Edgar wrote.

  “Edgar!” His mother took the pad away, as if she could cause Ms. Lajoie to unread the statement. “Sometimes he suffers from an excess of honesty,” his mother said.

  Ms. Lajoie looked at her fingernails: short, shaped, clean.

  It was true: he loved Ms. Lajoie, just as he loved his old teacher, Ms. Nordstrom, too, even though he would never see her again. And he loved Caroline, he loved Victoria, and Benjamin. He loved the hillside in that light. . . .

  Could she see all that in the way he was looking at her?

  “I can let you stay for now,” she said. “We’ll figure out a course of reading. Maybe when you feel safer, you’ll find your voice again.”

  ROAST

  THE LATENESS OF THE AFTERNOON turned into evening, and Ms. Lajoie had not left, so Edgar’s mother invited her for dinner. By that time Ceese had dropped by with pot roast that Jason’s mother had cooked after talking some more with her son. Ceese said she was too embarrassed to bring it herself, she felt so awful for what Jason had done to Edgar. So Ceese stayed for dinner too, and Caroline came with an apple cobbler she had made all by herself, and she wanted Edgar to know she was personally going to beat up Jason unless he stopped being such a dork.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Ms. Lajoie said at the table when extra chairs had been found (the cobbler was delicious with ice cream; it made Edgar’s throat feel velvety), “but I had a cousin once in Calgary who barked like a dog for a time. We thought he was going to need special treatment. Lasted all summer, I think, but he grew out of it. He’s an accountant now.”

  “I had a cousin who used to sniff fence posts like a dog,” Ceese said. They were all smiling now. It was not serious. The evening had come to feel like a party.

  I wish I had a cousin, Edgar wrote.

  “All the dogs in Dawson are your cousins!” Ceese said, and—maybe it was coincidence—in the distance several dogs started barking. The kitchen fell silent. Then Edgar’s mother exploded in laughter the way that she could, and everyone else followed.

  Ceese and Edgar’s mother, Edgar’s mother and Ceese. They barely looked at each other, but when they did, the coffeepot boiled, the window pane started a low, electric trembling.

  Ms. Lajoie whispered close to Edgar—loud enough for everyone to hear, “You know, you could run a fair business in this town telling people what their dogs really think of them.”

  “Don’t say that!” Edgar’s mother blurted. “Edgar’s too honest already! We’d be run out of town in hours!”

  It was odd to hear everyone, to understand so well what they were all saying, and yet to stay silent. Or at least it was odd for Edgar to be allowed to simply sit and watch people talk about him.

  Word spread. Maybe Ceese contacted his friends, but suddenly others began to show up because a party was happening. Some were from the party on the first night at Ceese and Caroline’s, and some Edgar didn’t recognize. He waited for Victoria to come through the door, for her to sit on the sofa with her arm around Ceese’s big shoulders, because then it would be real—Edgar’s mother could change, and just let Ceese go. But Victoria did not arrive, and instead his mother was drinking beer after beer, standing against the living room wall, with her socked foot on the sofa arm where Ceese’s large hands naturally started to rub, and she did not even change her conversation.

  That was how easy it was to steal him.

  More people came; there was music. An angular miner named Jake started barking at Edgar. He said exactly, “Ruff-ruff. Ruff-ruff-ruff!” and then stared at Edgar, grinning stupidly, waiting for a reply. Ms. Lajoie excused herself, but not before she took Edgar aside and said, “You will be safe in my classroom. I don’t want you to worry about a thing.”

  Ceese told Caroline it was time to leave, but then Edgar’s mother touched his neck as she was heading into the kitchen for another drink, and he stayed on.

  When did people start talking about the pictures? Edgar didn’t know. But at some point someone was showing a picture he’d found on a street corner of a woman’s purse, and wasn’t the same purse right here—Stephanie’s? And then someone else had a picture of Chief Isaac, and were these Stephanie’s boots, too?

  His mother was in the kitchen. She was getting another drink. Edgar waited for the explosion, but maybe she was feeling too good to know it must’ve been him. . . .

  “Edgar,” she said finally, when the picture of her empty sweater was in her hand and she could not avoid it. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Don’t be too hard on the boy,” Ceese said. His eyes seemed to be saying, Let’s all just skate past this trouble here, whatever it is.

  “I don’t understand. Why did you take these pictures of my boots? My lipstick? And then scatter them around?”

  He’d gone too far, too far. He had no way to say he was sorry.

  “Let’s just drop it,” Ceese said softly. Everyone was around. They were all listening. The party was at a standstill.

  “He already dropped it. He dropped pictures of my things all over town. Why? Edgar, why?”

  She was looking like she really wanted an answer.

  Edgar was roasting, roasting. He bit his lip.

  Everything passes. Even this moment. When all the breath is frozen in the room.

  “If I wasn’t drunk . . . ,” she said finally in a little voice, the thought trailing off into nothing.

  The party did not end there. More people arrived carrying bottles, and cases of bottles. Then it was as if everything were forgotten. Edgar fell asleep in his bed listening to his mother singing sweetly in the living room, above the noise of the crowd, something about angels, angels in the harbor. The house smelled of bodies, of warmth, of cigarettes and other smoke, of adults opening themselves the way they could sometimes, unpeeling almost.

  He drifted in and out of sleep. The bear was close, smell-able but out of earshot. Soon, when the bear was asleep, Edgar would get up and help his mother to her own bed. She did not always make it there herself. Edgar had watched Ceese accept her socked foot, had seen his face when she had touched his neck, when he was trying to get her past being furious and sad. He was a funn
y man, bighearted. He might not—probably would not—be able to keep himself from all the coming knots. If only the bear weren’t breathing so loudly! But soon, soon Edgar would get up and release Ceese. That’s what he would do, release Ceese from having to lead Edgar’s mother to her own bedroom.

  Maybe . . . maybe soon.

  (He could hear his mother’s voice, sometimes, and then he couldn’t. And the bear stank like it would never, ever leave, so when . . . when would be the precise, exact time to move?)

  Edgar was walking again along the ice, the ice and snow. The river played a longing song underfoot. He didn’t have this camera. The hills would not be bathed in gold, but maybe the moon . . .

  (He was only dreaming. The feeling would not be the same. What he had now was an echo of the very best moment of this afternoon. That was what a memory was, a ripple on water, longing for stillness. He had to be ready to appear beside his mother, at just . . .

  . . . the right

  . . . time.)

  Still.

  Still.

  Benjamin farted. It wasn’t the bear, not the bear at all . . . and the world was still, which meant . . . maybe it was too late.

  Nighttime, soft steps. The darkness was filled with the smells of the dead party. Edgar was late, late, too late. He knew it in his own socked feet. As soon as his mother had lifted her toes to the sofa arm beside where Ceese had been sitting . . . as soon as she had touched his waiting neck . . . and Ceese had spoken up so that she wouldn’t explode everything over Edgar’s strange pictures . . .

  (And they were strange. He could see that now. He could be a strange person sometimes. So could anyone. But how would anyone else know that the pictures were smells, smells on the roadside that told the news about Edgar’s mother, who she really was? And yet the pictures had been found. Some part of the news was getting out.)

  Quiet. Bottles on the bookshelves. Glasses on the floor, some tipped. Cigarette smoke hanging. Maybe . . . maybe she was passed out on the sofa.