Away From Everywhere (5 page)

I feel a little vile for being such a bitch about it at first. If anything, things are a little livelier around here lately, and the kids have really taken to him, and that seems good for him.
Even Alex says so. I think Alex himself is surprised at how benign Owen's presence is in the house. He just sits in his room, writing away on that little black laptop of his, about a nun nursing a junkie back to health, but the junkie is showing the nurse how she's as much a slave to her religion as he is to his smack. How they are both “just filling holes dug by modern life.” Something like that.

He is in that room more than he is out of it, and when he is out of it I don't mind the company. Truth is, lately anyway, I get lonely in my big but empty house. Lately the only conversation I have is with my daughters, four and five years old, and I've got a lot more to share with people than cookies and fairytales. I want someone to see what I'm doing in the garden. I want someone to talk books and movies with. Alex is never home and has time for nothing but work. He doesn't care about having something constantly in bloom in the garden, or all of my new books, or what the kids and me did today. “Oh, that's good, honey.” That's all he ever says: “Oh, that's good, honey.”He can't even feign an interest. I mean, who says “oh” when they are interested? Nobody! They burst right into their response, so excited there's no time for any “ohs.” But not Alex.

“Hey, Alex, I took the kids to the mall today.”

“Oh, that's good, honey.”

Is it too much to say, “Which mall? Did they have fun?What did you buy? Did you get any ice cream for them?” I could scream at Alex for every “oh” he utters. I might start. I will start. I will warn him. Three chances and then the screaming starts. The uttering of threats.

Owen is good company. He has lived in St. John's since I've known Alex, so Owen and I have only met a handful of times, and every time, we've been in a rush or a crowded room, like at the wedding. With him involved in the wedding, nothing could have gone wrong, I remember that much. I caught him checking with the kitchen staff on special food orders, and prepping the emcee for his speech. Before the reception I saw him double-checking that there were enough disposable cameras for every table and asking everyone if they had signed the guest book.

Owen is the kind of guy you get to know instantly because he is open like the ocean and curious like a kid, and I swear no one has wanted to know every detail of my life like he does. I guess it's because he's a writer, maybe, so I am some character and he can't know me until he gets my “backstory” and notices all my defining characteristics, like what I take in my coffee, and how I hold the cup, and if I am scared that the first sip is going to burn my tongue.

Point being, I am enjoying the company, I'm showering in it.
I'm making plans for the first time in far too long, feeling like a chicken freed from the coop and other such lame similes. I mean, Jesus, a trip to the beach, why was that once a silly thought? Now all it takes is a sunny day and Owen is loading the kids and me into my car and driving us to the beach, or the park, or even camping – we are going camping on the long
weekend! There is something so charming about Owen, he is like watching fire burn. He taught the girls how to make marshmallow-roasting sticks without hurting themselves yesterday, and it was inexplicably captivating to hear him speak, and move, and laugh. Callie says Owen is her new best friend, and Lucia's teacher has asked me who this Owen guy is she's been talking so much about lately. I told Owen that and his smile nearly split his cheeks open!

I think Owen is enjoying his stay with us too. The picket-fenced home, the kids. I think he wants the life his brother has in many ways. He's great with the kids. It'll be a shame if he never has his own family. A real and true shame. He asks Callie and Lucia what they want, and no matter how ridiculous the request, he'll grant it, even if it means being wildly imaginative and building a tree house having no idea what he's doing. He did it though, the tree house. Alex only ever talked about calling someone to come build the tree house. Owen though, the girls asked for it and three weeks later it was built, rubber-tire swing attached and all. He built it on one condition: they listen to their mother more. He fell off the unstable ladder twice, busted a thumbnail open with the hammer, and everything he touched for a full week made him flinch on account of the splinters, but he didn't care. Like I said: father material. He even crawls up there with the kids at night and tells them moderately scary ghost stories before bed. The fresh air knocks the girls out; they've never fallen asleep so easily. I thank him for that every night, and every night he shrugs it off and reassures me he enjoys it as much as the girls do. He says it's the fresh air that knocks the girls out, he says that's how his mother wore him and Alex out.
It's odd, Alex never talks of their mother, but Owen never shuts up about her. Alex actually leaves the room when Owen shares a story of their mother. I like his stories. About his mother, about anything. He's experiencing this world in a way so different from his brother.

Alex has warned me not to pry about Owen's past, to avoid the questions that require the past tense to answer. I see no dark past in Owen though, and I don't understand how Owen could have a dark past and Alex not. They are brothers, but whatever, Alex exaggerates and has a God complex. Everyone is below him. He is a great man, my husband, but…nothing I haven't written about before. Besides, I think people like Owen are simply too hard to understand, so we lump them in with all the other lost causes. People act a certain way for a reason, and it is the reasons we should judge, not the people. Sometimes a person's life just gets off track, that simple. Owen is the sweetest man I have ever met. Period. He is refreshing. He is that guy who would run to the top of a burning building to save a little girl's cat, hamster even. It makes the drinking sad, not dishonourable. He opened up to me once. He said he wasn't running from anything, and he wasn't being a slob. He was just trying to feel alive, and the drinking, before it got out of hand, helped him feel more alive. I don't know what he means by that, by “feeling more alive,” because I've never known a guy so in touch with life. So emotionally responsive to it.

Ever since Alex bought this cabin he's been saying how much Owen would love it up there. They must have been really close growing up, they speak so fondly of each other. It's sad about their mother and father, but I think all that brought them closer together at least.

We're about halfway there. I figured I'd crack open this journal I started last winter out of boredom, because I hate these horrible audiobook CDs Alex buys to listen to when we drive out here. He says it's an intellectual thing, “beats the radio,”
but deep down I think he does it to avoid the awkward silence.
Ten minutes into the drive and we run out of conversation, and that first ten minutes is usually just him talking about some patient of his. Then forty minutes of silence. Nothing pronounces the death of a marriage like silence. It's not that I
don't love him, and I know he loves me. But. But there is a thin line between familiarity and sterility, and a thinner line between neglect and the excuses he uses.

In any case, I know that's why we have these short story CDs, because Alex doesn't care for fiction, and I know that if I asked him something about one of these stories later on he'd remember nothing. He isn't even listening. He just looks out the window at all the young beauties in their twenties.
Their daring wardrobes that a thirty-four-year-old like myself cannot wear without rolling everyone's eyes. Their innocent laughter and eager sexual appetites I cannot match. Their flashy accessories and technological appendages: iPods and cell phones and…God, I'd love to be that stunning, oblivious, wild twenty-one-year-old again. I think everyone dies at thirty; thirty to eighty is just one last long breath. I mean by thirty we've filled our future with far too many wishes to ever come true. Growing up we are naive and concoct a far too perfect future for ourselves, so it's only natural that as adults we are a little let down. The world is not the place all those childhood fairytales promised us. All lovers are not like Barbie and Ken, and now I want to burn those fucking dolls for lying to me! (lol.)They painted far too beautiful a picture to ever live up to.

Sometimes I hate myself for babbling and rambling like this.
What a shame, I'd at least like a solid reason to hate myself.
Not just a long, vague list. It only seems healthy that if you are going to hate yourself, you should know why. You should be able to justify it.

Why do we hide from the truth when it shows its ugly face everywhere?Why close our eyes to it? For ourselves or for others? The truth is, and today I'll finally admit it, I am bored with my life. I am afraid this is it. I am terrified. I am trapped in a life that took years to build. I built it so solidly, so
confidently, that it is like a cage around me now. The marriage vows and the mortgage payments and the family album filled with nostalgic photos. Melancholy is my new shadow. If it weren't for Callie and Lucia, I don't know. I'd probably burn it all down. I realized I was stuck in this monotonous life long before Alex bought these stupid audio CDs. About a year ago we stopped kissing. It feels weird to kiss now. That's when you know it's over. Couples go on fucking long after the love is dead, that's primitive. But a good kiss is how we tell someone all the things we love about them that words could never convey. When we can no longer kiss our lover with passion, we are admitting – in a blaring silence – it is over.

But knowing a relationship is over, and letting go and moving on, these are two very different things. Chalk and cheese, black and white, day and night, pleasure and pain. Birth and death.

PART TWO
TO THE WALL

THE OTHER KID

OUTSIDE HIS WINDOW, OWEN LISTENED in on two kids building a snowman. They were arguing about what to use for a nose – a rock or a carrot – and contemplating the gender, the name.

“Bill!”

“No! It's a girl!”

“No it's not!”

“Yes it is,
stupid!
”

One kid was calculated, practical, instructed the other how to best pack the snow. The other was more concerned with the name, what kind of hat they'd use, how long the snowman would last. Lillian's dog ran along the fence, barking at the children.

He crawled out of bed, just past eleven, wondering what his aunt truly thought of him: a man with no job, a man who sleeps with his brother's wife, a grown man waking at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to go and nothing to do. A man stranded in his aunt's house, a thousand kilometers from home. Whatever home meant. He was a burden, but Lillian would never say so.
I'm enjoying the company, dear. It's a pretty big
house to be all alone in. And you need somewhere to rest up, someone to look after you til you get that cast off, right?

It was too obviously a lie. He had nowhere to go, no money to get him there. Not acknowledging that, dancing around it, made him feel even more rueful.

She had breakfast made for him, eggs and bacon between burnt toast, with a side of hash browns greened with fresh herbs, and she'd left the coffee pot on even though he'd told her she brews her coffee too strong for his liking.
No thanks, Lilly, that stuff is going to punch holes in your kidneys…You know, Lilly, tar is cheaper than coffee beans…
She'd laugh then, like maybe she did enjoy his company.

Lillian was outside with the dog, urging it to relieve itself so they could go back inside. He peered out the window and saw her topping up her bird feeders. He felt like another bird to her, but something big and ugly, like a vulture, which only she would take in and care for. He put the food on a plate and hurried back to his room to read more of Hannah's diary. As he read, he chewed and sipped and wiped crumbs from its pages. He tried, with a butter knife and then the tip of a pen, to dig up some bits of toast from the crease between its pages. There were lines he read twice. Pages he dog-eared to go back and read later.

He laid her journal down on the edge of his night table and tuned back into the neighbour's kids talking about the snowman. They were fighting now. One wanted to topple it, and the other threatened her not to. They reminded him of himself and Alex at that age. Such opposites, and yet so close. To any set of outside eyes they were nothing alike: Alex was the school president,Owen was the class clown, and they were right. But this was to their advantage: it meant that what one didn't know, the other did. It also forced them to dig so deep into each other for common ground that the roots of their bond were that much deeper.

He thought of school days with his brother. How they'd sit in the back seat of their father's rusted red station wagon and listen to him scraping ice away from the windows. The sound was so loud it was as if the noise was coming out of their heads, not into them, and they had to raise their voices to talk to each other. Each day, as their father's face appeared from behind the ice, a little distorted by the wet windshield, he'd shake a fist and make some corny joke about how they'd never offer to help him clean off the car.
Not even if a hurricane was stormin' up behind us!

Instead, they sat in the back seat exchanging homework. At the time, the biggest advantage of being fraternal twins was that they were both in the same grade and had all the same homework. Anything non-subjective, like math or geology, they split down the middle and exchanged their answers in the back seat of that car. It halved their workload and freed up more time for them to play video games together. What one of them couldn't get past in one of those games, the other could. They never fought over the controller, they shared it as fit. Owen could still see those nights now, their dark bedroom lit only by the surreal glare of the TV screen, the walls alive with all the colours and motions of a kaleidoscope. Alex always sat up on the edge of the bed in blue pajamas, kicking both legs straight up in the air and holding them there each time the game got intense. And Owen could still see the inside of that car they sat in every morning: the navy blue upholstery, dulled and rendered bumpy by age, and the cigarette burn in the passenger seat. Yellowed cotton poked up from it like an upside-down icicle. His father always jammed it back down with his forefinger, and got mad when their mother plucked it out and threw it away.
It'll be empty in no time if you keep at that!
He could still smell the ninety-nine-cent pine tree air freshener his father put there when they were in grade six. It was still in the car when they were in junior high, hanging from the rearview mirror and blowing parallel to it whenever someone rolled down a window.