Eleanor Rigby (16 page)

There’s too much sun.
The sun shines whenever and- wherever it likes. Night is old
fashioned.

WHERE is the correct path?

if time had to begin then it has to end at some point, too.
what if God exists but he doesn’t really like people very much?

We never discussed these notes. I’m not even sure if Jeremy knew I kept them, or if he thought I’d tossed them away. After he began working and taking his medication, his visions vanished, and I wanted these paper scraps as proof that there still existed this other Jeremy inside of him who pondered such things. I mean, if he gave me the word, I’d have been right back there on the highway again, crawling toward the west.

Life is hard. We all need something to believe in, even if it’s cockamamie. I’d never thought much about belief one way or the other until Jeremy entered my life. His visions marked the first signs of an awakening within myself. Poor Jeremy had spent his childhood being bandied from family to family like a porn novel in a summer camp. It was hard for him to put his faith in any idea larger than his immediate world. We’d ended up marooned on the same beach. Curiously, one definition of health is that you have the same disease as all of your neighbours; in this sense, he and I were the picture of health.

Was I falling in love with my son? It must sound like it, but no. However, I
was
realizing that I loved him very much indeed.

*    *    *

When Jeremy collapsed, he hit his head on a planter that held a ficus tree. There was no blood, and he was only out for about thirty seconds, but I thought I should take him to Emergency.

He didn’t like the fuss we made about him in the office, and in the car he was silent, angry at me for speaking with Kayla. I said, “I can see your point. It might seem like I was going behind your back, but I was only doing what any mother would do.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Almost nothing. Is there something I should know?”

We were on Marine Drive headed east. The car was dirty, and light catching the dirt made it hard to see what lay ahead.

“Pull over.”

I did. I turned off the engine. I asked him, “What’s up?”

“When I was thirteen, there was this one family I was with for maybe three months. They were great. Sunday was like Thursday with them. They didn’t believe in anything but cars and skiing and schnauzer dogs. We went to restaurants all the time and they gave me ten bucks a week as allowance, with no lectures or anything.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I woke up one night and I was in between them on their bed. I went mental, and ran down to the RCMP detachment office in my underwear. It was December and I froze, but they didn’t drive me back to the house. I have a hunch I wasn’t the first kid to run away.”

“Okay.”

“I can tell you more.”

“Okay.”

It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting. And so Jeremy continued, mimicking some long-gone foster parent, “
What’s faith unless you constantly expose it to challenges? What are your own ideas if they can be so easily eaten by the ideas of others?

“If I’ve come away with anything, it’s that the moment foster parents start asking about your soul, you’re toast. The moment you start challenging their ideas, you’re gone. They’ll always talk about surrender, but it’s never really to God—they want you to surrender to
them.
Most of those foster people?—they’re just scamming some soiled nickels from the government.”

“It can’t be that bad. I mean—” It was thoughtless of me to interrupt, but if he minded, he didn’t show it.

“When you’re tired is when you’re at your weakest. When you’re tired is when they strike. Not tired in your soul, but just tired from a day of chopping wood or chain-sawing blackberry thickets, and maybe after you’ve drunk half a mickey of rye and tried to forget the family that came before the one you’re with now. It’s after dinnertime, and there’s nothing on TV, so you’re up in your room wishing there was a song able to describe your life on the radio, and you’re cursing the aurora borealis for interfering with radio waves from real places like Spokane or Vancouver or Seattle. And then suddenly there’s a knock on the door—assuming they’re that polite, or maybe crafty enough to use politeness as a tactic. So you open the door and in they walk, maybe angry, or maybe filled with fake concern, but somehow they manage to end up on your bed, and somehow, no matter how you position your body, they end up being too close to you.
I’m your custodian—trust me—and if you don’t trust me, just go with it, because choice isn’t an option for you, is it? I’ve seen your record.
So you fight for yourself as much as you can for your age and size.”

“Jeremy, I don’t know how much more of this I ought to be hearing.”

“You’re the one who called Kayla.”

“That’s not fair. I wanted to find out more about your MS.”

“I’m so tired of people seeing me as a walking disease.”

“I don’t see you that way.”

Each car that passed made my Honda jiggle. I didn’t know what to say, and then suddenly I did. “You’re mad at me for putting you up for adoption in the first place.”

Silence.

“Jeremy, I was sixteen.”

Silence.

“If I could redo it, I would. I don’t know what else to say.”

We drove past a bunch of teenagers holding a car wash for breast cancer research. They seemed to me to be younger than children, Oompah-loompahs. Muppets. Imps.

That’s where we left it, unspoken, knowing in our hearts that exploring the issue much further would yield no bonuses, that to go further would be to go only downhill—at least for the time being.

We drove on to the hospital, Jeremy with his hand out the window, making it swoop up and down in the breeze.

*    *    *

An X-ray revealed no damage, and we were both relieved simply to go home and graze the cupboards for dinner. As an added bonus, we discovered an episode of
Law & Order
that neither of us had seen, and were well engrossed in it when there was a knock on the door. We made a face at each other, meaning,
Should we open it?
I decided I’d better, and when I did, I found Liam in the hallway.

“Hi, Liz. Can I come in?”

“Uh, sure.”

We walked into the living room. “Jeremy, this is The Dw—
Liam
, my boss.”

Liam sat down. “What’s the show you’re watching?”

“Law & Order.”

“Never seen it.”

“It’s newish.”

The thing about a favourite show is that it has the capacity to obliterate all real-world action short of nuclear war. Liam knew Jeremy and I were emotionally unavailable until it ended. When it did, Liam said, “Liz, I hear Jeremy had a bit of a fall today.”

Jeremy cut in, “I’m fine.”

“We went to Emergency, and X-rays showed no damage.”

“That’s good.”

Jeremy was mischievous and turned to Liam and said, “So, are you two an item?”

“No. I just came to see if you were okay.”

“I said I was fine.”

“He’s fine, Liam.”

“That’s good, then.”

Liam didn’t make any gesture to leave, and as I’d never had guests before, I didn’t have any idea how to get them to leave. “Would you like a coffee?”

“Please. That’d be nice.”

I went to make it in the kitchen. A spate of pointed silence finally forced Liam’s hand. “I’m just coming back from choir practice.”

“Hmm. Really?”

Jeremy said, “Mom’s a really good singer.”

Liam looked at me. “Really now?”

My stomach did the
let’s karaoke!
lunge. “Jeremy, I can’t sing.”

“Yes you can. I know you can, because I’m a good singer, and genetically you need two good singers to make a kid who can also sing.” He turned to Liam. “It’s a fact. Mom hides her light under a bushel.”

Singing scares me. I only ever do it in the car, otherwise someone might hear me. Someone might know how I’m feeling inside. I’ll somehow bungle it. I’d spent a lifetime concealing my ability, even to the point of standing mute during “Happy Birthdays” over the years.

Liam said, “Liz—sing something for us.”

“The neighbours might hear.”

“Mom, do you even know who your neighbours are?”

I didn’t—I still don’t. Mine is not that kind of building. “It doesn’t matter. I still don’t want them to hear me.”

Liam said, “Sing the solo version of the Flower Duet.”

“Liam, that song is done to death. British Airways has wrecked it for me.”

“Mom, if you sing, I’ll sing something too. But you have to sing first.”

How could I resist hearing my own son sing? “Oh God, very well.” I realized I hadn’t sung in ages. Singing voices vanish as quickly as a bodybuilder’s triceps in the absence of training. I walked to the sink, poured a quick glass of water and contemplated the song to come, “Viens, Malika,” from Delibes’s
Lakmé.
It’s a good song, a classical staple that is to the highbrow world what the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” is to AM radio.

I came back into the room. “Remember, you two requested this.” I spent the next minute pumping out the song’s most signature portion, sad and lovely. I rather surprised myself. The two men clapped. I sat down and motioned Jeremy to stand.

He didn’t need a glass of water. He readied himself, and then frightening almost-but-not-quite-musical sounds came from his lungs. Buzz saws? Bees? I thought it was a seizure of some kind, and was halfway off my seat before he motioned me to sit. He went on for maybe half a minute.

There was a pause. I asked, “Jeremy, what was that?”

“That was your song sung backwards.”

I said, “You’re kidding.”

“No, not kidding at all. Want another?”

“How did you ever learn to do that?”

“I never would have known I could do it except that, when I was eleven, one of my foster brothers and I would play records backwards to look for satanic messages. The adults thought it was very devout of us.”

“Liz, can you sing backwards too?” Liam asked.

“No.”

Liam asked me if I had a tape recorder. I had one left over from the
1980
s, and I went to fish it out of the cupboard. I’d liked it because it was so easy to stop and start. I used it for voice practice in the old days, when I was a bit braver about singing.

I came back in. “I can rig it to play backwards if I fiddle with these two switches for a second.” I prepared the machine.

“What song do you want me to do?” Jeremy asked.

Liam, AM to the core, said, “Try this.” He sang “The Wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald,”
emoting with his hands an Italian
mio cuore.
It was painful.