The Placebo Effect (10 page)

“We're moving?”

“Yes, you've—well I have, in your name, put a bid in on a house out in the Junction.”

“Is that in the city?”

“Town extends west of Christie, Decker. Not your usual stompin' grounds, but still in this city. Time to expand your horizons, Kemo Sabe.”

Decker was, as usual, impressed by Eddie's effortless mixing of metaphors and almost complete bypassing of the rules of spoken English. “Fine. But where is the Junction?”

“Where Dundas Avenue is north of Bloor Street.”

“Dundas Avenue is south of Bloor Street.”

“Not out in the Junction, it ain't. You'll love it out there. Slaughterhouses up the road; hotdog Tuesday is really somethin'; used appliance shops and no liquor. It's a dry part of town—very good pizza, though, and great used bookshops. And oh yeah, a twenty-four-hour taxidermy shop.”

“Just in case I need something stuffed in the middle of the night?”

“Precisely. You never know when you'll need their services.”

“Are there schools out there for Seth?”

Eddie looked away. Seth was Decker's almost constantly silent son. Decker had done his best to get Seth as much care as he could, but the boy took his mother's death so hard that what little chatter had come from him before ceased almost entirely after her passing. “Yeah, there are schools, and one or two of them even teach in English.”

“They're mostly French immersion schools?”

“French? Are you kidding? Ukrainians and Poles don't spend much time speaking French. Shit, few of them really speak English. Not like the Estonians.”

“What's an Estonian?”

“Remember the Hanseatic League?”

“Didn't they win last year's all-star game?”

“More ha-ha-ha. The ignoramus is so funny.”

“So what about Estonians?”

“They're tall and very blond. Your type, as I recall. And they speak a very refined English.”

Decker took a step away. “Sarah hasn't been…”

Eddie interrupted, his voice hard. “For you she died the minute she was diagnosed with ALS—at least be honest about that.”

Decker nodded. It was a difficult thing for him to admit, even to himself. A truth as solid as a horizon line. And her death hadn't changed that. She had been sick for so long that he assumed that when she finally died he would feel some kind of relief, a burden set down, but he found himself constantly migrating to his son's bedroom and watching the boy sleep.

He remembered nights when Seth, as a child, had sat bolt upright and pointed at his feet, screaming, “Buggy bite my foot!” Decker would calm him, then watch as he lay back—eyes wide open—fast asleep. After Sarah's death he knew no way to comfort Seth—and the boy still slept with his eyes wide open.

Once the perfunctory funeral was over he took Seth as far away as he could manage; Kruger Park in South Africa is pretty damned far away. But not far enough. Seth's silence intensified, and moments of real violence erupted out of that silence, so that much of the trip was conducted in a steely, resolute fury, which the boy expressed in a series of unfortunate ways and places.

At the amazingly expensive Djuma private game reserve, Seth slipped out of their cabin one night, crept into the open-air bar and smashed every bottle and glass he could find. Decker had awoken in the night and not finding Seth immediately had called the main lodge. Two trackers arrived at his door with rifles at the ready. It was dangerous to be out at night, as the camp was in the midst of an area rife with lions and Cape buffalo. They finally found Seth asleep in one of the bar's wicker chairs, his hands blooded with shards of broken glass. When Decker later asked the boy about it, Seth denied breaking anything, despite the fact that it was obvious that he had. Because Decker cared about him, he couldn't definitively tell if the boy was telling the truth—it was one of the absolute limitations of his gift.

When they got back home Eddie stepped in and was as good with Seth as he had been with Sarah, and Decker tentatively reentered the single world.

It surprised him how many of his ex-students suddenly found their way back to his class. Susan and Samantha from Vancouver; Kristin from Victoria; Catherine and Maureen from the city. All in their late thirties, unattached and seemingly anxious to take class—then hang out afterward.

But he sidestepped their advances and committed himself to expanding his acting studio and his lucrative sideline in truth telling. But he kept his worlds separate—no one from one world knew the people in the other. Decker liked it that way. No—it was the way it had to be.

Decker looked up as Eddie placed a mug of steaming tea in front of him. An old doll was lying on the counter across from him. “You collecting?”

Eddie looked back and said, “They're the next big thing. Baseball cards, Beanie Babies, bobbleheads and now old dolls.” He picked up the “well loved” thing. Decker was too tired to notice how carefully Eddie handled the doll as he put it on the counter. “How was Cleveland?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” Decker reached in his shoulder bag and tossed twenty thousand dollars in loose bills on the table. “That's the money for Seth—you'll make sure…”

“It gets to him—yeah. Of that you can be sure. So how was Cleveland?”

There was something odd about the way Eddie posed the question, as if it was an evasion: “look there—don't look here.” But Decker couldn't be sure. “Fine. Orlando was taking candy from a baby. Cleveland was revolting.”

“And Pittsburgh?”

Dangerous
, Decker thought and made a mental note to hide the USB key he still had in his pocket.

“Pittsburgh, Decker?”

Decker just shrugged. “Okay.”

“Good,” Eddie said, then without a segue asked, “So what happened to your house?”

“It burned down.”

“To the ground?”

“Isn't that where things usually burn down to?”

“Good point.”

Decker pushed the tea aside. He never liked tea. “Eddie, I want to get hold of Seth.” Eddie looked away and took a small stoppered test tube from a cookie jar beside the stovetop. Decker assumed it was a fine Vancouver Island grass bud. “Eddie, I know you know how to get in touch with Seth. You're the only one here he gives a damn about.”

Eddie smoothed out a rolling paper as he said, “He doesn't want to talk to you, Decker.”

“I know that. But I need to talk to him now.”

“Why? The fire?”

“With the house gone, how will he get in touch with me?”

“When's the last time he tried to get in touch with you?”

“It's been some time now.”

“Could you be any more vague, Decker? He's your son and you don't even remember when you heard from him last. That's sick, man, sick.” Eddie expertly adhered two rolling papers together, shook the bud out of the test tube, then crumpled the top of it onto the rolling papers.

Decker understood that with Eddie's valiant, but failed battle to get access to his daughter, his own distance from Seth must appear incomprehensible. All he could say was, “He hates me, Eddie.”

“Ain't that the truth.”

Decker thought about that. A truth: my son hates me.

“Look—if you can get in touch with him, tell him I'd love to hear from him.”

“Get an untraceable cell phone, give me the number, I'll get it to Seth.”

Decker gently closed his eyes. Nothing—no lines, no squares, nothing. He couldn't tell whether Eddie was telling him the truth or not. Never had been able to—he cared about Eddie. No, more than that. He needed Eddie to keep him centred—maybe even to
keep him safe. Certainly to give him some perspective on how he was living his life.

“Look, Decker, if he wants to talk to you, he'll call. He's nineteen; he makes his own decisions. He'll be the only one with the number, so if that phone rings, it'll be him.”

“Wouldn't it be easier if you just gave me his phone number?”

Eddie took a deep drag, stood and crossed to the doll on the counter. He pushed back its bristly hair and said, “It would, but then I'd have betrayed your son's trust—and I'm a lot of things, Decker, but I'm not a betrayer.”

Decker had never heard anyone, outside of an acting exercise, use that word in a sentence before. He nodded and pulled on his coat.

“Where are you going?” Eddie asked.

Decker almost said, “Home,” but stopped himself and said, “I don't know.”

Eddie said, “Use my bedroom tonight. I'll sleep in the guest room.”

Decker nodded. He was on the sick edge of overtired. He dropped his coat to the floor and headed toward Eddie's room—his feet seemingly heavier than the six-inch-wide old floorboards upon which they trod.

“Hey!”

Decker turned back to Eddie just in time to catch the football Eddie lobbed at him.

“Tomorrow's another day.”

For a moment Decker tried to figure out if Eddie was quoting the musical
Annie
or Scarlett O'Hara from
Gone with the Wind.
Then he didn't care.

He didn't remember the rest of his short walk to Eddie's room or crawling beneath the comforter—or where the hell the football had gotten to.

The tears—for his failures with his son—those he remembered.

WHEN DECKER AWOKE, HE DIDN'T KNOW WHERE HE WAS
. Then he heard Eddie humming in the kitchen. A lullaby of some sort. He put on some clothes Eddie had left out for him, had a cup of coffee and was at the bank on Bloor West a half hour after it opened.

After an appropriate amount of folderol he opened his safe-deposit box. He was about to put the remaining $16,290 into it, then decided against it. He extracted his house insurance policy and returned the safe-deposit box to the diffident, evidently put-upon teller.

Back at Eddie's he refused to let himself dwell on the fire. He was going to deal with this just as he dealt with other problems he'd encountered: he'd put it into his past as quickly as possible and commit himself to work—if not to forget, at least to move on. He placed a call to his insurance company.

As he listened to a mutilation of a Van Morrison classic his head filled up with junk. “Beneath the spreading chestnut tree…” bits of doggerel, moments of slanting light that blinked him toward perception then vanished as he turned toward them. A one-legged young black man, toque topped, on crutches crosses a bridge; a Zambian Irish man in Swaziland, cattle meandering the marketplace, gas pumps and a toilet with a key. Brother Malcolm at Chartres asking, “So, Decker, are you staying?” A small bricked-in doorway at the side of the apse that took his breath from him. Single trees on the topmost edge of mountains. And rocks daring
a climber to mount their heights—to what? Hope—like the one-legged man—walking toward hope.

He was about to hang up, thinking he was so scattered that he couldn't deal with this, when someone picked up.

“Can I help you?” The voice on the phone could have cut cheddar at forty paces.

Decker told the receptionist about his house.
So coldly
, he thought. As if he were talking about someone else's home.

He was put on hold for just under five minutes and finally an agent picked up. She took his information—the second time this phone call he'd offered up this data—and told him that an assessor would arrive within the week. Then she added, “I'm sorry for your loss.”

Decker said, “Excuse me?”

“I said, sir, that I am sorry for your loss.”

The words didn't make sense to him. Decker understood that she was offering condolences, but houses don't die. They burn or are sold or fall apart. People die. Feelings die. Suddenly he ached to talk to his son. If only he knew where he was. Somewhere out west. As far away from here as he could get and still stay in Canada.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

Decker wondered about that. He knew he was probably in some sort of shock or post-traumatic something or other, but he said, “Yes. Yes I am. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

“Do?”

“Until the assessor arrives. What do I do?”

“See if there's anything that can be retrieved from the fire. Then continue your life—that's my suggestion.”

And that's what Decker tried to do.

It had begun to rain—predictably, it would. As he walked west toward what used to be his home the rain pelted the few remaining leaves from the trees. Fall was ending and the ugly season was approaching. He felt it more than saw it.

There's something skulking about the Junction in the rain. Something hunched, hidden. The proliferation of Protestant and Catholic churches along the short stretch of Annette Street along with the half-dozen storefront Pentecostal holy-roller outlets a mere hundred yards north on Dundas bespeak a truth that Decker had always believed: that there was something complicated that needed to be kept in check out here.

It was what gave him the idea for a Ken Burns–style documentary that he'd sold to Trish Spence's production company. The working title was
At the Junction.

He'd begun to research the idea by attending a meeting of the Masonic Temple on Annette beside the old library—business attire please. Instantly a queasiness came over him as these well-dressed old Torontonians turned back the clock to the good old days when there were no Caribbeans or South Asians or Jews in their city.

Across Jane Street—known throughout the metropolitan area as a “bad” street, bad meaning Jamaican—is yet another secret of the Junction: Baby Point. A wealthy enclave that if you didn't know it was there, you would never find it. In the midst of the multimillion-dollar older homes is a private park with four tennis courts and a lawn bowling green. Like so many wealthy people, they had managed a private club on public land—ah, so very old Toronto that.