my room this whole time enjoying the play of sunlight across my bed sheets or something, and wasn’t it fortuitous that I was now awake so we could chat. And because my town is small, he was familiar to me, so I politely said hello.
“Your lawyer Trisha introduced us a while back,” said Owen Findlay. “Do you remember?”
I didn’t. Didn’t matter. Owen was from that point on a daily fixture in the lives of Gord and me. He had apparently been appointed to welcome my mother and me to the Youth Centre that day, had been waiting for us, all set to guide us through some paperwork, offer a bit of a tour and — his particular area of expertise — be reassuring. The more I got to know Owen, later, the more I wished Sylvie could have lived just long enough to meet him, to see what a sweet guy he was, to hear his reassurances about the way my life would unfold in the following months. I think she’d had no idea what was in store for me — how could she? Juvenile detention was a phenomenon beyond her realm of being. I think she must have been imagining prison tattoos, forced gay sex, eventual heroin addiction — that’s the only thing that can account for the way she lost it in the car. If only she could have been greeted at the door by Owen’s open, well-shaved face, sniffed the humble waft of Ivory soap that hung about him, seen the calming way he had of rocking on his heels, hands-in-pockets, in his science-teacher loafers and cords.
But in the car it had been a frenzy. She managed to hold on to the wheel but her demeanour was that of a bee that had flown in through the car window just as it was being rolled up and now was trapped and slamming its body against the glass in ever-increasing alarm. The conversation became pure adrenalin — neither of us quite knew what we were saying, or what the other one was talking about. My mother and I, we had never spoken like this before. It was always Gord I shouted and railed at, and he who did the shouting and railing in return. Sylvie and I usually turned to each other for relief — for a little peace and quiet once Hurricane Gord had finished raging.
She had pretty much liquefied the moment we pulled out of the driveway, when only moments before she’d been entirely in control. She had explained to Gord he would not be coming along on the drive to deliver me to my punishment for having brained Mick Croft, and Gord, surprisingly, hadn’t kicked up too much of a fuss. Sylvie made her case in theological terms. Like any good Catholic, Gord could only bow before the inviolable bond of the Madonna and child, so when Sylvie explained things on that level — we need to talk mother to son — he had little choice but to nod and flick on the TV. Gord had exhausted himself in the courtroom anyway, and now that the verdict had come down and Trish had refused to hand over the judge’s home phone number and/or address, he didn’t quite know what to do next. My father’s wrath, and the immense, inexhaustible supply of energy he always drew from it, was, for the first time I’d ever witnessed, spent.
She even kissed him on the top of his prickly head before we left, which troubled me because my parents usually took such care to not go near each other, at least when I was around.
She was being, I think now, very careful.
But at the first stop sign we came to, she let go, braking the car and collapsing across the steering wheel as if gone boneless.
I remember her telling me, “You don’t have to be this. You could be anything.”
“Be what, be what?” I was saying, freaked out because of the way she was crying — great whooping sobs that convulsed her entire body. And I had done that to her. It was because of me.
“Don’t have to be what? I don’t know what I am, let alone what I’m supposed to be.”
“What they’re going to try to make you be now. What your father tries to make you be.”
“I never wanted to be that anyway,” I shouted.
“I know what you are,” Sylvie shouted back.
“No you don’t,” I continued to shout (and, warning: it gets very teenage here). “Everybody