The Journey Prize Stories 24 (21 page)

We would be leaving the only home I had known. The new house, on Dunvegan Drive, was not far from the Jubilee Road boat launch where Uncle Lorne and I strayed that June afternoon. It was a split-level modern place with brown wall-to-wall carpeting, white-painted rail banisters, up-to-date plastic windows. And it was big – the finished basement had five rooms of its own. There us kids were given a rec room big enough for the TV, the now fully extended Ping-Pong table, and the old living room stereo, an all-in-one Clairtone console. Carolyn had come home with the
Band on the Run
album and one evening I was staring mesmerized at the spinning green apple of the record label, the headphones fully on my ears, when the ceiling lights flashed on and off – a phenomenon I connected with Bonnie’s presence in the doorway behind me. “What are you
doing
?” I asked, talking over the music in my ears and indicating by my tone that I was moments away from all-out rage.

With tired officiousness, Bonnie mentioned that I had to come upstairs for another family meeting.

“Another family meeting?” I took off the headphones. “What’s it for?”

Bonnie exited the rec room. “Didn’t you hear? Mom’s leaving Dad again.”

“Who said that?”

Bonnie started up the stairs. “Because she wants to start her life over. She’s leaving. You really didn’t know, did you?”

I sat beside Faith and Katie in the spare living room, all of us on chairs pulled from the dining room. My youngest sisters’ legs were not long enough to reach the floor, and their flipflops swung hysterically back and forth as they tried to keep from crying, though their faces were already wet with tears. The meeting was notable for their efforts to choke away their sobs, my parents chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, and the serious monologue that issued from my father as he informed the family that he and our mother would be separating in the next few days, explaining that she would be moving to Toronto for an unspecified period of time. I stared at the systems of cigarette smoke as they rose and dissolved into the corners of the ceiling. Apart from numb surges of sympathy for my father, I wasn’t sure what to feel, but I remember thinking it was repulsively inappropriate that Uncle Lorne was not present. He had lived with us for eight years, as long as Faith had been alive, and, yes, he had misbehaved, but he had been grounded for it, and to decide not to include him in such a family meeting seemed irresponsible and insensitive and just
wrong
. At that moment, as if only a little behind cue, Uncle Lorne pulled open the side door. All of us in the living room went silent and for a few moments we listened to Uncle Lorne move about the new house. There was the sound of two brief nasal sniffs and the
noise of him sorting through the most recently re-routed mail, before he went still, having heard Faith and Katie’s sniveling.

My father called to him. “Lorne, would you come in here a minute?”

Uncle Lorne stepped into our proceedings, shared a glance with my mother, and then, as if acknowledging a pre-existing understanding, simply shook his head and turned around and glided back out the side door.

I ran to him and found him on Jubilee Road smoking a cigarette in front of a telephone pole, his chin bobbing in time to his imaginary music. In his left hand he held a packaged envelope from Passaic, New Jersey. “Whose race you running now, Grub?” he asked, smiling, contemplating me with amused affection. He carefully slid the comic books out of the package, showing me the newest team-up issue of the Justice League and the Justice Society. “
Crisis on Earth-X
, Grub,” he said, reading the issue’s title and presenting me with my copy. The story was about a mix of superheroes sent through a dimensional transporter to an alternate world where the Nazis, having won that earth’s Second World War, control everybody with a mind control ray. It was a bit much for me to absorb all at once and I asked to look at Uncle Lorne’s comics. Spying the distinctive checker-top of Silver Age DC comics, I realized with an excited jump that his new acquisitions finished a run of
Justice League
and that my uncle, Lorne Anthony Wheeler, was now in possession of a perfect, unbroken consecutive sequence of the
Justice League of America
from November 1960 to the present moment. There were rumours of two cousins in Dartmouth who had amassed a whole run, and a brother-and-sister team in Cape Breton who had all but the first three issues,
but those were achievements shared between two people. Uncle Lorne had done it on his own, as he moved from city to city to city, as he’d moved from his own family to ours. A collection started when he was seven years old, with a purchase at a Lawtons Drug Store in Truro, was now inviolably complete as of August 26, 1974. I asked about his plans – to complete another title? To put his
Justice Leagues
in a vault? “Negatory, Grubster,” said Uncle Lorne, pushing his still-lit cigarette into a wrinkle in the telephone pole. He moved his gaze to look across the North West Arm, contemplating the far horizon, before speaking to me in a tired voice, suggestive of the Boris the Spider diversion, but more as if he really
were
tired. “I don’t think so. Time to exit the Batcave. Time to leave before the planet explodes. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“What happened that summer?” my sister Faith would ask me many years later. “We were like the perfect frigging family. Mom and Dad’s friends were shocked. Weren’t you? I remember Mom saying she felt Dad was just checking things off. ‘Get a law degree? Check. Get a job? Check. Get married and have kids? Check.’ But without stopping to think what it would mean to her. I’m not sure that justifies running off with what’s-his-nuts who played Jesus in
Godspell
. That lunatic in the Winnebago. But do you know I have not seen Uncle Lorne since the day of the family meeting? Since that summer? He didn’t come to Carolyn’s wedding, did he? My God, do you blame him? Why would he? What a sin, the poor thing. It falls apart with Nanny and Dompa and he gets fobbed off on us. It falls apart with Mom and Dad and what’s he going to do? Live
with Aunt
Kate
? The poor bastard.” Faith’s choice of words was not consciously literal, and however treasonous it might have been to suggest in childhood, later evidence would point to such an assessment – that someone else beside Dompa was Uncle Lorne’s father. What were Uncle Lorne’s secret origins? I never knew. Even my father, keeper of a hundred of the city’s secrets, may not have known. Uncle Lorne makes a cameo appearance in a Super 8 movie of Katie’s fifth birthday. In that footage, he runs beside the birthday cake to smile absurdly into the camera, squinting from the incandescent camera light, but holding his smile in close-up, setting both sets of teeth together before prankishly kissing Katie and withdrawing offscreen. He must have been eighteen at the time and you could tell how, in his adolescent years, his features had elongated – eyes slanting, eyebrows darkening on the crest above his nose – charismatically vampiric. He always had for me the dash and darkness of a nocturnal superhero like Deadman or Nightwing or Dr. Fate. It was only when this birthday film was transferred to video twenty years later that I saw with adult eyes, when he withdrew into the shadows, just how shy, how recessive, how Asperger’s-y, how
nervous
eighteen-year-old Uncle Lorne really was.

What happened to my parents’ marriage was happening everywhere. Divorce, a social state prohibited the generation before, rushed toward its 1970s statistical zenith. Many families were dissolving – there were crises on infinite earths – but this did not exactly reassure me. After reporting to a bearded pediatric psychiatrist who asked rather over-placidly which parent I
wanted to live with – and me not being able to answer – I lapsed into a surly, uncomprehending funk. Everything seemed in disarray and, as we began the exercise of unpacking in the new house on Dunvegan, I was noticing omissions. There was a yellow water pistol that had not made the move, a number of
Laugh-in
stickers, and, most ridiculously, Uncle Lorne’s entire comic book collection. “We moved everything,” Bonnie informed me. “Carolyn said the old house is finished. There’s nothing left but garbage.”

“It’s
not
garbage –”

“If it was in a box, Aubrey, it got moved. Did you check the basement? Why do you even care? They’re just Mom’s brother’s old comics.”

I began to explain the reasons why this collection was significant but, for whatever reason, my ideas came out all at once – emotional, jumbled, and, in anticipation of Bonnie’s disapproval, abruptly defensive.

She regarded me with a mix of puzzlement and disdain. “I feel sorry for you,” she said, gradually, shaking her head. “You’re just like him – weird. You’re going to be just like him – weird and alone with no friends and pathetic, loser.”

Quite immediately I formed an interior resolution that Bonnie would have to be considered absolutely irrelevant if I wanted to preserve any of my own ideas about my life – and, in response to her last statement, I simply made for the side-door and pushed it open.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “You can’t be like this if you live with us!”

I did not answer and, stepping outside, I swung the door shut so it cracked the door’s peek-through window. From
inside the house Bonnie asked again where I was going and, already sprinting away, I screamed that I was going to the store to get her a Fresca – to get everyone in the world a fucking Fresca –
that’s
where I was going. But I ran without knowing where I was going. I was passing by the Camp Hill cemetery before I realized – as some maple seeds helicoptered into my eyes – that the late summer evening had darkened into night. For some minutes my mind had been empty of self-awareness and turning the corner on Summer Street I eased into a single-pointed, euphoric state where I was, finally and simply and transcendently, running my own race. I arrived at our Tower Road house as the last hints of colour vanished from the sky. I went to the back door, where Chris Cody often banged to be let in, and turned my key in the old Otis lock. I stood a few moments in the back porch, my clothes damp with sweat, listening for cues to other occupants. Curiously, recalling the Marie Celeste moment of a month before, a plate of dinner had been left on a double boiler but, as I could quickly see, the water had boiled dry and the meal was crusted and cracked and sticking to the plate. I turned off the burner and opened the unplugged refrigerator – four tins of Coca-Cola, a shrivelled carrot, a mouldy jar of Dijon mustard.

I took a Coke, closed the fridge, and walked to the front hall. There was a trace of Mr. Clean in the air – a faint and bitter smell that made the few straggly details all the more hopeless, remote. The rooms were bare but here and there were a few abandoned expressions of our family. A plastic container of Kaopectate, a chalky medicine Carolyn used to swig during exams, stood like a forgotten sentry on the front stairs. The fallen leaves of the departed ficus plant, whitened, dried,
dead, trampled into the shag carpeting of the living room. At the end of the hallway, a mimeograph from Katie’s kindergarten forgotten on the floor. I picked up the page and saw it was a spelling test that once had been folded into a paper fortune teller. Katie had made some effort to decorate it using a blue Flair marker. But all the verve of the home, all the dreams and desires, all the hopes and fears of all the years, of course all of that was gone. The Tower Road house was now some anonymous structure – hardwood floors, stained carpets, mottled walls where late Mrs. Abbot’s silkscreens had hung. Turning from the living room, I opened the basement door and descended the stairs two steps at a time, calling out for Uncle Lorne. In the centre of his room, a fluorescent black light tube was stuffed in a metal garbage can along with a pillow, a broken model of a gunboat, and his mauve Duo-Tang folder. I took a moment to open and drink my Coke, feeling the taste from the tin, the sense of disturbed dust in the air of the basement. Then I dropped the can into the garbage and retrieved the Duo-Tang. Across from each entry, in Uncle Lorne’s expert and miniature handwriting, was a dollar value for each comic book. At the bottom of each page was a tally and, flipping to the end, a grand total for the entire collection, the circled figure of thirty-four hundred dollars. He would not use any of this money for the motorcycle – the Abbots, free-minded Americans, would give him that as a gift – and he spent very little as he motorcycled along the Trans-Canada, sleeping in campsites, staying with the Oldrings in Vermont, and a cousin in Calgary. The purple of the Duo-Tang and the blue marker on Katie’s fortune teller paper I found very calming, in the way that the colour combination of lilac and blue can calm you
when your family is falling apart and you have no control over your future, and the colours recalled to me my experience of “Band on the Run” and so the song returned unbidden inside me, complete, continuous, the soundtrack to a few more moments of my summer, and in the upstairs hallway I found a blue mattress, diagonal on an empty floor, and fell on it, face down, my hands under my hips, and lay there, exhausted, sweat evaporating from my forehead, soon falling asleep, knowing I was absolutely alone for the first time in my life.