As a Thief in the Night (20 page)

"I'll see you at the court house, Ezra."
 

Keeping his eyes closed, he felt the shadows shift behind him. His parents had left.

The three of them were moved, in police cars again, to the Windsor Court House, where they would be arraigned. Ezra and Alex were put in a cell with about seven or eight other boys.  Adam Nayeve was eighteen, so he was incarcerated with the men.

The other boys in the cell looked like they had been in the same clothes for days. Their hair stuck up in all directions from the night before, and some of them were still asleep on the concrete benches along the walls. Ezra did not speak with them, but Alex did. He compared crimes with the others and hinted at the possibility of revenge against people that had crossed him. Once more Ezra looked carefully for some sign that Alex knew who had given the police his name, or that he was implying that he intended to exact this revenge on him, but there was none. No one had told him.

One of the boys walked up to the big steel door and slammed his fist against it. A big cop with a shaved head came and opened it. "What is it?"

"I want to speak to my lawyer."

"No."

"I need to talk to her about my other charges before I go into court."

"Step away from the door." The cop hammered the boy hard in the chest with his fist, and the boy staggered backwards. "Don't touch the door again." 

They were put in another cage just outside the courtroom. Adam was moved too, and Ezra could see him in the crowded cell across from them. All of the men looked bigger and crueler than Adam, and Ezra felt sorry because Adam had known the least, and was the most innocent, and still his consequence, as an adult, would be the most severe. He would not have gone if Ezra hadn't.
 

The public defender, a young and almost pretty woman dressed in pants and a blazer, instructed them as to what was about to happen in court. First the charges would be read. They were charged with break, enter, and theft. Did they understand that? Yes. Then, because none of them had any previous charges, conditions would be set for their release. They would have to agree out loud to the conditions. "Okay," she said, as if one more thing could be crossed off her 'to do' list, and then quickly disappeared out the door and back into the courtroom.

They went into the courtroom and took their seats in the prisoner's box. A piece of plexi-glass separated them from the public. On the other side he saw Gord and Elsie sitting together.  He looked at them quickly then looked away because he couldn't bear it. Elsie was still crying; her cheeks were red and stained with her tears. Alex's mother was there too, but his father was not. Pastor Mark sat beside her instead. His face was serious but not angry, and Ezra could not understand why he was there. Perhaps as the victim of their theft—or at least the earthly representative of their victim—he had to give information about the crime.

But Pastor Mark was not there as any sort of victim. He had already forgiven them.

After they had agreed to the conditions for their release—a curfew, not to associate with each other, $5,000 bond, and a promise to appear in court as required—they were led out of the room by a bailiff. Ezra, Gord, and Elsie were led to an office where papers were signed and where a few of Ezra's things, those that would not be entered into evidence, were returned to him.

The morning was cold and sunny. Without speaking, Ezra got into the van with his aunt. They sat inside, very still, and nothing was said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw she had begun to cry again. He felt he might drown in her disappointment and sadness before they arrived home. It was several minutes before she finally spoke.

"Are you hungry Ezra?" Her voice cracked a little. He looked at her painfully, but she kept her eyes focused on the road.

"Uh, yeah," he answered. She drove on without saying anything else. After a few minutes she pulled into the McDonald's drive-thru.

"What do you want to eat?"

"I don't know. Whatever," he said quietly.

She ordered him some food and a drink, paid for it, and then headed back towards Belle River on the highway.

"I don't know what to say to you, Ezra," she said as if she had finally summoned enough resolve to deal with him.

"I don't know either," he answered meekly.

"What have you done to us?"

He started to cry. "Something awful! Something so awful," he said, his voice breaking.

"Kids make mistakes, Ezra, but this...a church. People gave their money to that church, people who live around us, people that I know. And the statue in the office, the police said it was you who destroyed it."

He sobbed loudly, crying into his hands. "Who do you know there?" he asked stupidly, as if her not being able to name anyone would have made things better.

"I work with Mrs. Carraway. How am I going to face her at work again? My boy stole money from her church, money she gave to it. And you destroyed an image of Christ."

"You should send me away."

"Don't be stupid. You can't run away from this. You know that, don't you?"

"I know, I know," he sobbed. "What am I going to do?"

"I don't know what you're going to do."
  The word "you" as opposed to "we" made him more certain than ever before that he was now an orphan.

"I know I'm just like him."

"Like who?"

"My father."

She sat with the word for a minute. "That's a lousy excuse, Ezra. Don't try to use that so that you don't have to take responsibility for what you did."

"I'm not. It's true."

She slapped him across the face. "Don't say another word! You are your mother's child.  And she would be ashamed of you."

Choking, he thought that he might throw up. "I've ruined it. I've ruined it," he yelled at himself. Elsie had to resist trying to comfort him. They came to a stop at the end of the driveway.
  She took her key out of the ignition and picked up her purse. "You just may have," she said, her back turned toward him. Then she walked inside the house and left him alone in the van.

When he finally came inside, exhausted and numb, he went directly to his bedroom. It felt foreign and strange to him, the way one's house does when one has been away from it for a long time. He picked up a few of his things, a football trophy he had won in Walpurgis, some comic books, and then sat on his bed and looked them over. He felt very tired. Elsie knocked on his door and he opened it.

"I want you to clean up your room."

"Okay."

"And change your sheets. Olyvia and Sarah and the kids are coming tomorrow for the weekend."

"Why?" he asked, sure for a second that it had something to do with what he had done.

"For Easter Ezra. It's Easter weekend."

"Oh, right... Are George and Ted coming?" he asked, trying to keep her with him a moment longer.

"George is coming; Ted isn't."

"Why not?"

"He and Olyvia broke up," she said, and left him alone again.

Ezra lay back on his bed. He thought about Elsie's dead little boy lying much like he was at that moment, but in a coffin, under the ground in the Walpurgis cemetery. Brother, make your tomb my own. Lost child, steal my breath and seat.

E
lsie said grace for Easter dinner. His eyes were closed but he was sure everyone else's were open and on him. He felt them burn into him with a sort of mocking voyeurism that wondered, with the same type of pleasure the masses derived at public hangings, if his legs would give out, or the earth would swallow him, at the mention of words like 'blessing', 'bounty', and 'gifts'. He imagined pointing fingers and cast stones pushing him back into the corner until he collapsed in twisted and endless repentance. No one spoke of what he had done, but they all knew, and Ezra felt the keen daggers of their knowledge. Elsie had probably told them on one of those long phone conversations she always had with her sisters in the evenings.

Added to the problem of his arrest was the tension over Olyvia and Ted's split. Elsie had just heard about it the previous week. It was not so much that she was worried for Olyvia, who she knew had the emotional fortitude to bounce back from almost any fall, though she did feel badly for her, but it was more her vines and the house that she was worried about. Ted had taken well to the work, even had his own interest and pleasure in it as a physical counterpoint to his work in the theatre. Now Olyvia was on her own, and Elsie knew her well enough to know she would do whatever she had to in order to move on, even if that meant disappearing again. Would she and Gord still be able to pay the mortgage? Would it still be there for her to return to? She was not happy in their new home, and Ezra's recent crisis had only added to her dislike of the small town. She could not allow the distant light that Walpurgis still provided her to be extinguished.

However, when Olyvia and Sarah arrived, and the three of them were together again, all of that went away. Gord watched as Elsie's two sisters, despite their differences in disposition, opinion, and path, went to work on this new trauma as if they were gifted nurses applying the balm of shared blood to a wound, or seamstresses weaving comforting new thread into a tear in the quilt that made up the past. Everything petty between them vanished and was set aside in the name of family. 

Sarah brushed Ezra's hair back when she saw him and kissed his forehead. Her hand and lips said: From here we move on. Olyvia sat beside him on the couch while dinner was being prepared. She asked him questions that had nothing to do with what had happened, questions about football and girls and movies. When she got up to help she took his hand and squeezed it and the soft pressure was made of warmth and knowing. Elsie looked upon the comfort that her sisters provided him from a distance, approved of it, felt gratitude for it, but would play no part in making him feel better. Not yet. This was something he was going to have to sit in for a while, a struggle he was going to have to make his own, a cut he was going to have to feel, before she would do anything to ease his pain.

By these and other signs Ezra saw that Sarah and Olyvia knew about the church theft. But the efforts his aunts made to help him only stung him all the more because he was undeserving of them. Ezra knew that his family saw this as a single act of misjudgment. They believed he had been led astray by Alex's charisma and that he, son of their lost and loved sister, had blindly, and maybe innocently, followed the older boy. They knew nothing of him!

Images of his other secrets and transgressions, ones his family could not have even guessed at, paraded themselves before the horrified eye of his memory. The temptation to scream it all out, to give the Jekyll of his tale a voice with which to expiate his evil, to brand himself once and for all with all the hot iron of his guilt, seized his breaking heart. Get it all out and be done with it! Unloose the knots of lies you have tied with your cunning! Ezra had to resist the urge to throw himself down on the couch and writhe in his agony. His body wanted to twist violently, to tear at his surroundings, to throw itself about as if by a tormentor in some righteous punishment ritual.
  At least that would have satisfied his sense of justice. But he did none of these things. Instead he sat frozen, like some haunted soul in Dante's ninth circle, Judecca, at war with himself, waiting to sit down to Easter dinner with those who had been fooled into loving him.

After dinner he watched a movie with the children while the adults had tea and coffee in the living room. Layne, Little Marty, and Rebecca all sat with him in the back. It was a long rectangular space at the back of the house, part of an addition that had been done at some point as a sort of summer room. There was no heating so space heaters had to be used during the cold. He looked round the room at his little brother and cousins. All of them sat peacefully, immersed in what was happening on the screen. He envied them and thought of all those nights that he had watched movies when they had first moved to Belle River. He had been peaceful then too, but it was a peace that he had always taken for granted, a possession he had never realized was his. Now he longed for that peace, like a treasure he had lost, just as through disease and injury we become conscious of the jewel of health, a precious stone we shut our eyes to until circumstance takes it from us.
 

After everyone else had gone to sleep Elsie and Olyvia did the dishes together. They stood beside one another at the sink and Olyvia hummed to herself while Elsie dried. For a long time they did not talk and Elsie only listened to the soothing sound of the running water and her sister's voice.

"You're playing again Lyv?" Elsie asked, finally easing out of the silence between them.

"Yes.  Twice a week with the Walpurgis orchestra, right by Parnassos actually."

"Why now?"

"Because I hear it in myself again."

"The violin?"

"No, music."

"It doesn't get in the way of your work at the theatre?"

"No," she paused and gathered herself, as if she were about to get to the point. "I don't want you to worry about the house, Elsie. I can take care of it on my own."

"I know."

"Good."

"What are you guys working on?"

"Who?"

"The orchestra, I mean."

"Oh, a piece played by Leon Fleisher written by Ravel, 'Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.'"

"For the Left Hand?"

"Fleisher lost the use of his right hand because of nerve damage. He plays the whole thing with his left."

"Do you still love music, Lyv?"

"I do."

"That's good. You're lucky."

They finished the dishes. Olyvia turned off the water but the tap still dripped and she tried to turn each faucet tighter.

"It's okay," Elsie said, "it always drips." She hung the checkered cloth she had been using on the front of the stove and sat down at the kitchen table. "And how are you doing with everything else, Lyv?"

"You mean since Ted left?"

"Yeah," Elsie said gently.

"I'm okay."

"Really?"

"Really. These people can't hurt me the way they used to."

"You don't have to be strong in front of me. I know what you thought this one meant for you."

"I did think that. But I'm not trying to be strong because I feel like I have to. I've
become
strong."

"When?" Elsie asked. She thought of everything that had happened that weekend, and felt weak.

"During hundreds of nights of loneliness and doubt and heartbreak that no one will ever guess at."

"And now? What will you do now?"

"Take care of your vines until you come back to them."

"You're sure? I mean, and there's nothing critical in this, there's no one else?"

"No, there's just me."

"And you're okay with that?"

"I am. I feel like I've finally grown into my own skin, like I've found the ground my feet belong on."

"I'm glad Lyv, I really am." Elsie hugged her sister and told her that she loved her. "Remind me to give you some money before you leave," she said, after she let go.

"For what?"

"Flowers. I was hoping you could pick up some flowers and put them on his grave for me.
  Spring is coming."

"Sure, I'll remind you."

Elsie walked off to bed and Olyvia watched her disappear up the darkened stairs and into her bedroom.

For a long time Olyvia sat by herself at the kitchen table looking out the window into the night. Finally she got up, turned off the lights, and as silent as a ghost snuck up the stairs and peaked inside the door at her sleeping nieces and nephews. The even sounds of their breath was the only thing she could hear. None tossed or turned or looked to be in the grips of dreams that disturbed their rest. Ezra was asleep on his side, on a bed against the far wall. Olyvia carefully stepped over Little Marty and Sarah, who were sprawled on the floor inside their sleeping bags. She knelt by the boy's bed. Ezra did not wake or stir, even when she gently placed her hand on his head. "Don't listen to them, Ezra," she whispered, running her hand slowly through his hair.
  "Don't listen. Sin boldly! We must sin to overcome ourselves, to evolve into that which we were meant to be. To transcend our sins, to become greater than them, is worth more than all the timid holiness they preach."

The weeks that followed were very difficult for him. On the Tuesday that followed Easter Monday there was a story in the Windsor newspaper.
  The headline read:

NOTHING HOLY FOR THIEVES

Under the headline there was a picture of a cop with a dog. The article said that the dog had tracked them down and that the canine unit had solved the crime. Ezra had never seen the dog or heard mention of it. But the rest was there.

Two young offenders, and an adult, eighteen year old Adam Nayeve, were charged early in the morning on Good Friday with break, enter, and theft. The three were arrested in connection with a break-in at Calvary Pentecostal Assembly in Belle River. Over three thousand dollars in church tithes was stolen and a valuable idol of Jesus Christ was destroyed. Church members spoke to the Star regarding the offence and...

The paper could not name them and did not have to. It was no secret to everyone at school who the young offenders were. The story had spread through the halls early that morning, before he had arrived. Ezra had not wanted to go, but Gord and Elsie had forced him. All day students walked past him in the halls with their hands behind their backs, as if they were bound. Others threw themselves against the wall and spread their arms and legs to be searched.

It often happens that the young criminal, among certain numbers of his peers, enjoys a degree of prestige when his crimes are published. But Ezra's crime had an element of the absurd that robbed it of its integrity. He walked around the school, his jester's cap on his head, and weathered the laughter and the occasional look of disgust. In English class he sat beside Tracy Sanichuk who was tall and thin with brown hair and fine features, and very beautiful. They were reading Macbeth and he had faked his way through most of it. After they finished reading out loud, Mrs. Perry put them to work.

"Is it true Ezra?" Tracy asked him.

"Is what true?"

"What everyone is saying, about you and Alex and the church."

"Yes."

"Ezra, what were you thinking?" Her words were hard.

"I don't know."

"What did you guys do, break a window or something? It wasn't one of the stained glass ones, was it?" she asked, as if breaking a stained glass window would have been the height of sacrilege.

"No, the door was open. We cut a hole in the wall to get into the office," he offered. She covered her mouth with her hand and her pretty brown eyes opened a little wider.

"I don't even know how someone could do something like that."

He had no answer for her.

As soon as the bell rang he walked directly to his locker and gathered his things. He had to get out of there. Walking down the stairwell, among a noisy crowd of other students, he saw Nick Carraway coming up the other way. Nick's parents had no doubt condemned Ezra to the devil's care and forbidden their son to ever speak with him again. Ezra had been afraid that Nick would hate him, that he would see his act as an act against his family, and against their friendship. His stomach turned, and he wanted to go back the other way, but it was too late, he had already seen him. But none of what Ezra feared was on Nick's face as he approached him.  Instead, he smiled at him and smacked him playfully on the shoulder. "Hi Ezra," he said with a smile. It was not a smile of shared mischief, but one of understanding and forgiveness.

"Hey Nick."

"Are you okay?" his friend asked, pausing for a moment and holding up everyone behind him.

"Yeah, I'm okay."

"Good. I'll see you tomorrow," Nick said with easy words. Then he bounded nimbly up the rest of the steps.

Ezra smiled, and the smile felt strange on his face. It felt like the muscles in it had been cramped with sorrow for much longer than a few days. For a moment he was filled with his friend's small gesture and it occurred to him, for the first time, that perhaps all was not lost. He still had a friend. With that small and infinitely noble act, Ezra felt as Oscar Wilde must have when, condemned as a pervert and sinner, he left the courtroom bankrupt and disgraced and, from among the taunting masses, Robbie Ross stepped out of the crowd and took his hat off to him.