Every Little Thing (27 page)

“Relax! It's eight thirty in the morning and the man sleeps until noon! It seemed like the right time to run out. I'm doing my best not to leave him alone, but I do need to occasionally pop into work—”

“Sorry. God. I'm so sorry.”

“I got up and over here early, so he'd still be asleep while I was out.”

“Look, I'll get a cab. You picking me up is…too weird.”

“Is it?”

“I still need to get my luggage, maybe some breakfast. See you ten-ish.”

She hung up. He took the phone away from his face and stared at it, shook his head, put it back in his pocket.

He purposefully walked towards the front exit, so he'd pass the kids and try and gauge this Jenny girl's character. He poked his head in the door and looked around, but Zack wasn't in there. Just Erykah, Bryan, Kaytee, and Jennah. No one spelled their name normal anymore. Jenny saw him and approached him.

She had a voice like she'd just sucked in a blast of helium. “Hi! Are you…one of the parents?” A ginger, five foot five. Freckles thicker than cookie crumbs.

“No. I'm Cohen Davies.” He extended his hand and she shook it. “I work here. I used to do the afterschool program, actually.” She had tiny hands. So tiny he had to leave two fingers out of the handshake.

“Oh.” She said it in a way that meant she knew exactly why he'd said
used to
. “Well! Nice to meet you! I better get back to the kids! Such a handful! These aren't natural curls!” She laughed and pointed to her hair,“I'mjust that rattled!”She couldn't do more than three words without an exclamation mark slowing things down.

“Yes, take care, Jenny.” He looked down and saw she was wearing real moccasins. Instead of waving, she flashed a quick peace sign.

He was walking towards the front exit when he heard Zack calling out to him, running, like he'd spotted Santa out of season. “Mr. Davies! Mr. Davies! Hi! Hi, Mr. Davies! Hi!” and he wasn't going to stop greeting Cohen until they were face to face.

Cohen bent down to get on Zack's level and stuck his hand up for a high five, but Zack came in with a bear hug. His two little arms like sticks around Cohen's neck. A reek of cheap gummy candies. “Want one?” and he stuck out a bag full of shark-shaped candies. Their spongy white bellies looked like a different texture than the gummy blue tops.

“No thanks, buddy. I don't want a blue tongue like you've got there!”

“I know! I was just looking at it in the mirror. I like having a blue tongue! It's cool. Did you know that there's blue octopuses?”

“Is there? I don't know much about octopuses.”

“I know something you didn't know!”

“You're getting smart, buddy!”

“Mr. Davies?”

“You know you can call me Cohen, right? We're friends, aren't we?”

“I like saying Mr. Davies.”

“Okay, that's fine too, whatever you like,Mr. Janes.”

“Why'd you leave daycare teaching? Was it because I eavesdropped on you and Dad that night? I'm sorry. Dad told me listening in on other people's chats is a bad thing to do. I didn't know. I promise I didn't know—”

“No, buddy, no! That had nothing to do with it, okay? Say yes. Say you understand that that had nothing to with it.”

And Zack's little head was bouncing up and down like a dropped ball as he said, “Okay, good. But I was just going to ask you if you wanted to be my best friend. Then you stopped being our afterschool teacher.” He shrugged his shoulders, a little embarrassed at the statement. “Jenny is okay.”

“Did you hear us that night, though, your dad and me?”

“No. Just muffles, but Dad sounded mad at you.”

“He wasn't. Okay?The traffic was really loud, so we had to shout to hear each other over the traffic, that's all. And, about daycare, my boss needs me doing other things now, that's all.”

“Forever?”

Jenny came out of nowhere. “
There
you are,Zack Janes! I was getting worried!What did I say about going to the bathroom and not coming
right back
? You don't want me to have to wait outside the door, do you? You're a big boy, aren't you?”

Cohen butted in, “It was my fault, really. I distracted him. Sorry.”

“No, no! This little boy is a wanderer, aren't you? Always off playing by himself somewhere, this one!”

Cohen got up and stuck his hand out for Zack to take, and Jenny shot him a look. “C'mon then, let's get back.” Zack took Cohen's hand. They got back to the room, and Zack hugged Cohen's left leg goodbye then scurried off to the toy chest.

“He's a sweet kid. I see you two really hit it off?”

“He reminds me of my brother, actually. And he's a firecracker, bright.”Cohen motioned to say goodbye and nice to meet you, but she said, “Very sad about Zack though.”

“What's that?”

“His health.”

“Yeah, the fainting you mean?” And here was his chance to pry. She nodded yes, and he said, “It was still a new thing when I was told about it. Are things any better or worse?”

“As of this week, the doctors have him taken out of gym class until they figure out what's happening. I've got to keep an eye on him, make sure he's not up to much. His episodes are linked with physical exertion, every time. They've ruled out all the epilepsies, low iron, the basic stuff. They think it's a physical exertion thing. Poor little guy. They had him in an MRI machine last week, and he was crying his eyes out. Claustrophobic, I guess. He told me it was like
being trapped in a tiny rocketship so small you can't move your legs and arms
, and he mimicked the banging noises the machines made. This week, he's had a barrage of EEGs and EKGs.”

He couldn't talk to Zack's father or to Clarence about Zack's health, but chatty Jenny Lane would do the trick. So he laid his second hand atop their shaking hands, and patted her hand too affectionately. Like,
Hey, let's talk again soon.

Jenny walked on, and Cohen watched Zack bang two dinosaurs together; the Tyrannosaurus winning the battle. He thought of Jamie sending Zack off to Florida. And he thought of adoption again. Since the night Jamie had burnt his hand and shared his story of adopting Zack, Cohen couldn't stop thinking about adoption as the way to fill the hole in his life. To catch up. To find meaning, purpose. But the waitlist was unreasonable. The criteria. The fact he was unmarried wouldn't help. He'd want a newborn, and those had the longest waitlists. There were codes your house had to meet—impossible codes normal parents weren't subjected to, and the renovations were beyond him. Yet he'd logged into that website a few times. Bookmarked it.

ALLIE WALKED IN the front door like a mother who hadn't seen her kids in a month. She flung the screen door open so hard it gonged off the outside of the house. And then she smacked a knee off the porch doorframe. She bent over to rub out the pain, but didn't stop walking forward. Cohen had been sitting in a chair, at the kitchen table, peering through a microscope at a petri dish full of insect larvae and pond matter. Tweezers in one hand, a pencil in another. He looked up and saw her rubbing her knee, but coming towards him in long strides.

She was wearing a form-fitting, form-enhancing black dress, and the first thing he remembered when he saw her was how much he liked to run his hands over that body when they kissed. She stuck her head in the kitchen, craned her neck left and right—her ponytail playing catch up with the movement of her head—and asked, “Where is he?”

He remembered her hair as being black, and yet it was brown, light brown, the colour of dry soil. “Lee's in bed. He sleeps until, like, noon. I never know if I should make him breakfast or lunch when he gets up. So I compromise and make something brunchy.”

She nodded, not really listening, and sat across the table from him. “I guess I'll let him sleep then. So, how are you? Been a while,” she said, laughing. She took an apple out of a fruit bowl Cohen had pushed to the edge of the table and bit into it. “I'm
starving
.”

“How I am is a long story. Kind of a boring one. You?”

She brought the apple back to her mouth. Chomped into it. “What's all this anyway?”She swept her apple-holding hand over the microscope, the bags of pond water, and the photos of freshwater invertebrates.

“Work.”

“Duh.”

“Fish research. Via insect larvae. I'm off birds for a while. Long story, again, pretty boring. My life's pretty boring lately. I've been picking dead snails and larvae out of petri dishes, counting them, and in between that, I've been getting harassed by that surly man who used to be Lee. Meanwhile, some of us are off in Montreal, sauntering around from deli to bakery, buying nice dresses like that one.” He nodded to her black dress and she smiled.

Crunching her jaw into the apple, “Thanks!,” she said, standing up to model it. “Kinda had to buy it, right? But seriously, why are there bags of bug-filled pond water and gross photos on the table?” She got up off the chair, scooped up the fruit bowl. “I don't want this bowl of fruit next to dead bugs for some reason.” She walked it over to the kitchen counter.

“There's a few government-funded folks throwing nitrogen and phosphorus into a lake. All these bags are samples, from the last six years, of the bottom of that lake. I've gotta count and compare the number of larvae to see if fertilizing the pond increases the number, size, and diversity of larvae. Because trout and salmon feed on these things. Another guy is summarizing the number and size of fish caught in the fertilized and not fertilized lakes, to see if more fertilizer equals more insect larvae and, in turn, if more insect larvae equals more and bigger fish in the fertilized pond. It's for fish farms, I guess.”

“Riveting,” she said. “And what's the deal? Fish galore?”

“By the bucket. Backfires though, because loons have caught on that this pond is a jackpot. They're eating the shit out of the fish.”

“Maybe,” she said, as if truly contemplating it, “Maybe I missed this vicarious scientific experience you gave me. I mean, who doesn't want their kitchen full of snails and insect larvae and pond water?”She picked a bag up and peered into it. “
G'ah!
What are these spidery-looking ones?”

“Dragonfly larvae.”

“Really?”

“Yes.
Cordulia
,mostly.”

She laid the bag down, grabbed the kettle off the stove, and started filling it. “Cup of tea, Cohen? So you can catch me up on Lee before you go?”

He turned in his chair to face her, “That's the thing. I'mall set up here, and I don't mind staying for another while. I love it out here in Grayton. Fuck the city. Next door to me now, there's a dozen obnoxious kids. Theymust've pooled their mommies'money and bought the house next door. They're out on their patio ‘til two or three every night. There's crushed beer cans in my yard half the time, and they've got horrible taste in music. I'm happier here, and Clarence is more than fine with me staying on this project, working out of here, until I'm done counting these dead bugs.”

“Oh my God, really?”She abandoned the kettle for a minute and sat back at the table, excited. “Because I have to go to Toronto on the twelfth. Just for two days, but still, I don't want him left alone until I figure everything out. One of those live-in nurses or whatever they're called or a home maybe.”

“Yeah, really. I'm all set up. I'm on vacation, in my head.”

“Lee's...deterioration has gone on too long now, and he's too blind, let alone the rest of it, to look after himself. I don't know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I've been stopping in here to cook him most meals because I'm not sure that he eats otherwise. There's never any dishes or signs of him having eaten. I ask him about it and he gets testy. I've gotten too used to it. To the way he is. And he's been getting worse, but slowly enough for me to adapt, you know? He's not okay to be living alone. The doctor telling you he needs to be in a home was a wake-up call.”

She picked up another bag of pond water and peered into it. “Keith said he'd like it a lot more if I didn't move in here while I figure out Lee's long-term care. Keith thinks Lee's
crazy
and that
crazy people are dangerous
.”She walked over to the cupboards to get two mugs for their tea. “Are you sure you don't mind? Because—
Jesus, shit
!” She'd opened a cupboard door and a stack of glasses fell out, shattering all over the counter and the floor like bombs going off. He looked over, and she had the edge of a cut finger in her mouth; one foot laid on top of the other foot, like a ballerina, and broken glass encircling her. The way the sunlight refracted in it made the glass look like a ring of fire. “Um. Help.” She was frightened, cute, laughing.

“Okay, don't move.”

“Obviously! Broom's next to the fridge.”

“Got it.”

He looked back to her and saw a small drop of blood at her heel. “There's some under my foot!”

He ran out to the porch and she yelled, “Where are you going?”

“Don't move!” and he wrestled on a pair of Lee's too-tight steel-toed boots. Only the first half of his feet would fit into them, so he came back into the kitchen tippy-toeing in clunky boots, walking like a man with broken knees.

Her panicked face relaxed a second to laugh at him. “What are you doing, you fool?”

He came towards her, glass crunching under his feet. He swept the countertop behind her with a dishtowel. Little clinks as glass rained down to the floor. “Okay, put your arms out.”

“What?”

He motioned with his arms. “Make a T shape.”

“
What
?”

“Be a scarecrow. I'm going to pick you up and sit you on the countertop.”She stuck her arms out,made aT of her body. “Okay, keep your arms stiff or you'll just slide back down onto the glass. Ready?”