“Making us look guilty — oh, his poor mother, they’re going. Stuck with a bad son like that. Like he done something wrong!”
Sylvie would just shake her head and blow her nose, so I spoke up.
“Gord? I’m going to kill you.”
“Now now now now now,” my lawyer, Trisha, would interrupt at around this point.
“Just let me handle this, son. You’re under a lot of stress.”
“No, I’m serious, I’ll kill you Gord.”
“OK!” said Trisha, clapping her hands together, smiling her face-eating Marie Osmond smile. “We stop this. We change the subject now.”
“She stays out of the courtroom,” proclaimed Gord, pointing at Sylvie. “She’s ruining everything.”
This coming from the man whose outbursts had nearly got him kicked out of the courtroom twice already that morning.
“The crying mother does not stay out of the courtroom,” explained Trish — Trisha had astounded me throughout this process in her dealings with Gord. The enormous, face-eating smile acted as a bulwark against every “dumb bitch” he could chuck her way. “The crying mother is the only sympathy vote we get, fellas.”
I looked at Sylvie tiny in her chair, clicking her rosary beads between white fingers with shredded fingernails, and I thought someone should go over there and comfort her. Or else someone should’ve just scooped her up and carried her out of there — some flannel-wearing Canadianized Superman — dump her in the woods in Northern Ontario, give her a gun, something to shoot. Put her back in hip waders and let her evolve into the backwoods amazon she was always meant to be.
I never thought it should be me, however — clearly I was not the superhero for Sylvie. I’d turned out to be as big a downward drag as Gord — maybe bigger. For all his daily shouts and insults, Gord had never reduced her to puddles before — not even close. With Gord, she shook her head, rolled her eyes and assured me “He never really talks to me like that,” usually after he’d just finished talking to her like that. But the puddles? The puddles were new. The puddles were for and by yours truly. You could say I was the author of the puddles.
So no. It never occurred to me to shift out of my rigid, fist-clenching gonna-kill-Gord carriage and put my arms around my mother. I was a contagion, after all. I was a destructive force. I was an injurer of men’s brains.
I later learned that once Croft stopped crying, he developed epilepsy. Also, he had no idea who I was throughout the trial. He didn’t remember anything from before his skull hit the pavement. I think the memories came back a little later, but at the trial, he was a blank slate, an innocent. And in this state of purity (the kind of literal born-again status that my church later had me convinced even a Great Contagion could achieve if I just bashed my head against the pavement of Christ’s love long enough), Croft had gone from being a badass with an angelic quality to a sheer, full-potency angel — a weeping one at that.
It did not help my case.
But then, what could?
Somewhere in there, my sixteenth birthday happened.
07/05/09, 12:37 a.m.
The night was preparing, in that slow, summertime way, to spread itself against the sky — the sun smeared like a broken egg yolk along the horizon. And I knew the world had flipped itself over like an all-beef patty, done on one side, when I heard the sound Croft’s head made when it struck the pavement. Okay, the sound was bad, but the truth is, I knew it was pretty much game over the minute I felt my fist invade his skull. In the name of getting-it-over-with/avoiding-knife-punctures, I had decided I would have to knock Croft out. This was something I had never attempted in all the nights of parking-lot punk-grappling previous to this. Usually, these sessions mostly involved peeling guys off me and shoving them into the sides of cars. I hadn’t realized it up until the moment I hit Croft, but those fights hadn’t been fights at all. They’d been play. We’d been like kids brandishing lightsabers at one another in the schoolyard. We’d been getting our exercise.
And I realized those fights were nothing so immediately, so assuredly, because of the experience of my fist smashing into someone’s face — an experience I’d never had before. Because of the way it made me feel, instinctively, on some kind of primal, sub-literate level: Poor Croft! Poor Croft’s