Flannery Page 8

  The dancing was going to start soon. Marty looked at his watch. There was a four-piece band on the lawn and they were warming up. The sax sounded like a bawling moose. Marty was drunk, which meant he had to stare at his watch a long time before he could compute the hour. He finally said he didn’t know if there was time for Tyrone.

  I’ve been at this all afternoon, Marty said. It’s time for me to get myself a real drink.

  Tyrone didn’t answer. They were just looking at each other. Tyrone on the dock, Marty on the seat of the boat, looking up. Marty had been Tyrone’s stepfather for five years, but maybe this was the first time they were recognizing the hopelessness of the situation. Marty drained his beer, tossing the bottle into the bushes.

  A short one, he said. You’ll have to get it on the first try. I’ve had enough of this.

  And finally, they were out there.

  Marty let the engine idle as Tyrone got his skis into position. A cloud of blue smoke hung in the air.

  Every move Marty made was deliberate and slow. He’d finished off a half-dozen in the boat.

  The bottom edge of the sun was very close to the rim of the lake. The sky was flamingo-feathered. Tyrone was floating behind the boat, not saying anything at all.

  Marty revved the engine and the boat flew. The rope pinged out of the water in a straight line and water drops flew out in a misty spray.

  I watched Tyrone rise out of the white wake. The nose of the boat spanked down hard.

  Marty increased the speed. He seemed to be going too fast on purpose.

  But Tyrone was up. He was bent forward with his bum sticking out and then he was leaning way back, like he was trying with all his might to stop the runaway boat in its tracks. Then he nearly fell face first, his knees in big shackles of foam, and then he was straight up again.

  They roared around the other side of the lake. They flew past the wharf where I was jumping and clapping and when Tyrone was passing me, he lifted one hand off the wooden bar and waved at me.

  I could see the thrill of it and how audacious to let go with one hand, the fastest wave you ever saw, and he slammed his hand back down on the bar and his whole body crumpled, one ski lifting off the water, wonky and boneless, bent and tipping, left, right, and then he was up straight again.

  He righted himself. He was still up.

  Marty had seen Tyrone’s little wave to me. He did a double take. That wave must have enraged him.

  Marty cut the speed, letting the boat slow down so the rope went slack, and Tyrone was sinking down to his knees, almost down to his waist, and once he was good and low in the water, Marty thrust the boat into full speed again, and it jerked Tyrone so hard his body flicked like a whip and his skis smacked down on the hard surface and bounced up over and over.

  The sun was so low that its reflection was a perfect bright red circle on the water’s surface and as the boat swung around, the circle was smashed into a thousand pieces that skittered away from each other and then floated back together, making the perfect circle again.

  Tyrone was still up. It was as though his hands were welded to the wooden bar.

  It seemed there was nothing Marty could do to ditch this ten-year-old kid.

  Was this when I fell in love? Was it that little wave?

  He was a head taller than everybody else in our class, just a couple of months older than some of us, and the loneliest person I had ever met. A prankster, begging for attention. His freckles. His curls. The space between his front teeth. He just believed if he worked hard enough at it, people would see what a great kid he was. He needed them to see it.

  I think I was his only friend.

  Marty and Tyrone had hated each other pretty much from the beginning.

  I’m still trying to figure out the reason Marty hated Tyrone.

  Why Tyrone hated Marty was easy. Tyrone hated Marty because Marty had told Tyrone to chew with his mouth closed.

  I don’t want to see what you’re chewing, what are you, a little pig? That’s what Marty said. He said it front of me and he said it in front of Jordan who was over for lunch too and Chad Yates-O’Neill. And Marty mimicked Tyrone, and we all giggled, because somehow Marty had managed to look just like Tyrone.

  The man’s face had turned into a boy’s, and it was a magic trick and there were gobs of peanut butter and bread tumbling around in Marty’s mouth like clothes in a dryer, and some fell out on his plate.

  We giggled. But I regretted that giggle pretty fast because Tyrone had clapped his hand over his own mouth and he was blushing.

  After that Tyrone kept his lips pressed together in a funny way whenever he chewed. Almost like he was trying to watch his own lips. Lips that were pressed very tight together in a small hard line.

  And Tyrone’s mom had just sat there not saying anything.

  It had been a moment when she might have taken her son’s side against a stranger who stank up their house with a cologne so strong it made everybody’s eyes water, and who insisted on being served first at the supper table, and who took over Tyrone’s video games, saying, Hand over that controller, and whose silence, when the garbage wasn’t put out on time, felt like a weather system.

  And meanwhile, in school, none of the boys would sit with Tyrone in the lunchroom because they said it was gross how his food showed when he was chewing, even though he now chewed with his lips pressed tight and very slowly, and only a single bite before he threw his sandwich out. Or he just unwrapped the Saran off his sandwich and didn’t touch it at all.

  But the boys made fun of him anyway and he had to go sit with the girls. They just barely put up with him.

  He’d do annoying things. He tipped Tamara Gordon’s pudding cup over her head and he had to go to the principal for that. The office called his home for an emergency meeting.

  I was called to the office as a witness because I’d been at the table. Tamara was already there. She had washed her hair in the nurse’s room but it was still wet. So were Tyrone and the vice principal, Ms. Kearsey, and one of the women who served in the cafeteria, still in her hairnet and white plastic apron.

  And Marty was there doing all the talking. He informed us that Tyrone was exactly the same way at home, that he, Marty, and Tyrone’s mother didn’t know what to do with him, but he, Marty, would make a promise to Tamara and to everyone else present that there would be no Xbox for Tyrone for the rest of the year.

  In fact, he was going to be throwing the Xbox out the second-story window as soon as they got home. He wanted very much to see how Tyrone would like that.

  There’d be no nothing, according to Marty. For the rest of the year. No allowance and no soccer and no art lessons. No nothing.

  Marty said that Tyrone’s mother was too soft. That was the problem. Tyrone got away with murder because of his mother. What he needed was a good smack.

  But you can’t do that anymore, Marty said. That makes too much sense.

  Tamara said, I’m not even sure it was Tyrone.

  But you said just a moment ago that Tyrone emptied your chocolate pudding over your head, said Ms. Kearsey.

  It wasn’t even him, Tamara said. Of course she knew it was. But Marty had frightened us all.

  Who was it, then? the vice principal asked.

  I didn’t see, she said.

  Somebody saw, Marty said. Somebody bloody well saw.

  The cafeteria woman said she was just a volunteer.

  The vice principal asked Tyrone and me to leave the office.

  I’ll have a word with Tyrone’s father alone, she said.

  Stepfather, Tyrone and Marty corrected her, in unison.

  But for some reason Tyrone was immune to Marty’s hatred that day out on the waterskis.

  His body was like a lightning bolt of joy. He couldn’t believe how good he was at keeping his balance.

  Neither could Marty.

  Miranda has her faults. She gives me peanuts and kiwis for lunch even though you’re not allowed to bring them into school because som
e people have allergies and will blow up like balloons and clutch at their throats with both hands and writhe on the floor until their heads explode and they die, if they get even a faint whiff of a peanut or kiwi. When I explained this to Miranda she said, Oh, for God’s sake, it’s just a little kiwi, take it.

  She didn’t give me piano lessons even though Felix gets karate lessons, and she can’t buy the grade-twelve biology textbook that is, as I may have mentioned, required.

  But I had been shielded from a particular truth that was coming over me there on the grassy bank of the lake, watching Tyrone waterski when I was nine years old.

  Adults could be evil.

  Evil was something Miranda had made sure, up until then, I knew nothing about.

  It was a lie by omission.

  Miranda had a lot of boyfriends, but every one of them was kind to me. Every one of them offered to cut my steak, or they carried me on their shoulders. Every one of them was the kind of guy that daubed blue icing on the end of my nose if we had a birthday cake from Sobeys, which you could get cheap if it had somebody else’s name on it written in icing and it hadn’t been picked up or if it was three days old. We’ve had cakes that said Happy Birthday Declan or Raoul or Jasprit, or Keira or Fiona or Sally or Molly.

  Every one of the boyfriends showed up with Miranda on Sports Day, sitting with her on the patchwork quilt with the picnic basket. They all did the egg-on-the-spoon race, on my team, and tied one leg to mine for the three-legged race and ended up on the parents’ side of tug of war when it was the parents against the teachers.

  Every one of them made me a part of the conversation. They asked me what I thought. They used big words, and they explained the big words. They told me about politics and explained what elections were, even though I yawned the whole way through the explanations, and sometimes actually and truly fell asleep.

  Here’s the word that explains my relationship with every one of Miranda’s many boyfriends: cahoots.

  I was in cahoots with them.

  Never in cahoots against Miranda, not really. But we pretended. Yes, I’ll read you another chapter, but don’t tell Miranda. Yes, you can put that broccoli in the garbage, but wait until your mother turns her back. Stage whispers, with Miranda right there in the room pretending not to hear. Or if they were babysitting me: Quick, before your mother gets home, let’s get these dishes cleaned up, it’ll be a surprise.

  But sitting on the edge of the lake as the sun was setting, with my toes kicking through the water and Tyrone skimming along behind the boat, watching Tyrone so full of happiness, and his stepdad at the helm, I realized something. Marty was evil.

  On the last spin around, the boat turned hard and Marty told Tyrone to let go of the rope. He yelled it at him. His voice hoarse and angry.

  Let go, he yelled.

  Tyrone was coming for the wharf too fast. Maybe his stepdad really did think it would be cool for Tyrone to have a dry landing. That’s what he said later. Kid was doing so well out there, Marty shouted at Tyrone’s mother, he’s a goddamn natural.

  The truth is, my mother was in love with Hank at that wedding. Of course I didn’t understand that in quite those words.

  Use your words. I didn’t use those words back then. I was nine.

  In love.

  All I knew was that Hank used to sleep over. Hank had been around the house for what seemed like an eternity, but it was actually only three years. I had experienced peanut butter and honey for the first time because of Hank. And tie-dyed T-shirts, because we did that on the back deck. And I’d acquired a taste for curry and olives (not at the same time).

  He’d read me to sleep sometimes. He started coming around after Charlotte’s Web, which was a short-lived guy named Dave, the boyfriend before Hank, but was there for Harriet the Spy.

  And he let me cuddle into him on the couch when Miranda had to work late waitressing, and he carried me out of the taxi if they were coming home from parties and once a drop of rain fell on my forehead and woke me up and I was wrapped in my Mickey Mouse blanket and Hank was smelling like Hank and Miranda was paying the driver and they were tipsy and she caught up with us and leaned in for a kiss in the red taillights of the taxi and my head was squished between their chests.

  Hank was only around for three years but it felt like everything I’d ever known, except for Charlotte’s Web Dave, who was also nice. But Dave wasn’t love.

  Hank was love for Miranda.

  Real honest, go-for-it, live-it, be-in-it, give-everything-to-it love.

  Miranda and Hank broke up around the time the second Harry Potter came out, because he wanted to go to law school in Nova Scotia and he couldn’t “do long distance,” he said, and Miranda wouldn’t go with him because I was in school, and four months later Hank was marrying someone else.

  Someone who had no kids and who could go with him to Nova Scotia and who was also accepted to law school and who had dark hair and big eyes and wore the pearl engagement ring belonging to Hank’s great-grandmother which Hank had previously given to Miranda but which Miranda had given back because they were breaking up and she’d used butter to slide it off because her fingers were swollen which should have told stupid Hank something.

  The sun was almost completely down as Tyrone came plowing toward the dock on the waterskis, and it made a final dark-orange flare on the dark water.

  I was feeling funny because I’d had too much sun. Not since the words “You may now kiss the bride” had anyone asked me where my hat was or if I had on sunscreen. All day it seemed the adults were not themselves. Nobody paid any attention to me. Nobody counted how many glasses of Orange Crush I had or told me to wash my face.

  Hank, though, had picked me up and kissed me on the forehead. Of course I was too big for that.

  I’d seen him getting ready. He was wearing a tuxedo and standing before a full-length mirror, absorbed in the carnation he was putting in his lapel. Sticking in the pin. His mouth drawn down in a frown.

  I’d seen Miranda pat his chest earlier with her patent-leather clutch. She tapped him with it. She asked if he’d still change her spark plugs now and then.

  He just said her name. He said it softly, but he waved her purse away from the spot where it had come to rest on the accordion pleats of his white, white shirt.

  I’d come upon him fixing his carnation in front of the mirror just before the actual ceremony. Everyone else was outside sitting on the white chairs in the hard heat, lined up in rows on the brilliant green lawn, but I’d gone through the back door because we’d been sitting there so long in the sun I felt funny and I needed to go to the bathroom.

  There he was in the last bedroom just before the bathroom, and he saw me in the mirror behind him, leaning on the doorframe. He turned and grabbed me up in his arms and hugged me. I almost screamed because he was hurting my sunburn so much. He kissed my forehead and I couldn’t move because of the burn and also because I wanted him to hug me. One of my gumshoes fell off. He set me down on the floor and I stood for a moment just looking into his eyes. I was trying to say something with my eyes. I was trying to say, Don’t you care about us? I thought you loved us. And, You’re hurting my mother’s feelings.

  Hank pointed to my collar and said, You spilled something on your shirt. Is that ketchup?

  When I looked down, he chucked me under the nose. I fell for it every time.

  Very funny, I said. And then I felt tears coming and it made me mad to cry in front of Hank and I hissed at him, You look stupid in that suit. It’s too small for you.

  I grabbed up the gumshoe that had fallen off when he hugged me and I stormed down the hall to the bathroom, trying for some funny reason to look dignified and grown up, except I was hobbling along because I was only wearing one shoe.

  Miranda was wearing a floaty chiffon number that day, loose at the waist, and she wasn’t crying a bit. She also wasn’t drinking. There were children everywhere and the cake was really something.

  It had five tiers and the
little plastic bride and groom dolls were on surfboards in white bathing suits, because Hank’s new in-laws were giving them a honeymoon in Hawaii for a wedding present.

  Maybe that was the icing on the cake for Miranda, because she couldn’t travel with Hank when they were together because she had me and I had school and she was broke and her mother had died young and left her nothing in the way of an inheritance and her father, like my own, had never made an appearance.

  I had the feeling Hank had left Miranda because he couldn’t face the responsibility of me. Who wants to take on somebody else’s kid? Miranda had a big student loan and a degree in fine art and not a whole lot of prospects, financially speaking.

  Personally, I thought she had blown his mind for a while because she was an artist, because she was dazzling in her numbers night and day, because she knew someone who was growing poems in a laboratory with mold cultures and scientific equipment, because she could throw a pot on a pottery wheel and she could throw a party where everybody came and sang in the kitchen until dawn, with banjos and ukuleles and bodhrans and bells and the spoons and guitars, shouting about politics and all the kids charged the adults money to use the bathroom and we made a fortune and the adults went skinny-dipping in the Bannerman Park pool at dawn.

  But something had given Hank a fright. He had been accepted at Dalhousie for law and gave up auto repair. Then he was spending time with this woman whose parents were a retired politician and a judge and who had lots of money and who had also been accepted to Dal. The woman was kind of crisp at the edges, with ironed straight hair and tailored suits and new hiking gear, and she somehow made Miranda look shabby and frayed.

  Beside that woman, Miranda’s glamor dimmed and maybe she just looked poor to Hank. Poor and rundown. I heard him shouting one night that it had been a nice dream, but that’s all it was, dreaming.

  I had no idea what he could mean. It frightened me and I pinched myself just to make sure I was awake. I pinched myself to make sure I existed.

  Did he think that not having money made people unreal?