Every Little Thing (5 page)

He thought about taking an axe to the boat, in a juvenile fit of rage, to vent his anger and loss, but mainly to hear the violent sound of destruction; to drown out all the quietness around him. He felt like he should be crying and pissed off and putting a fist through something, because
that
was reaction. To bust his knuckles off something, to cry, to watch the blood spill, to yell. But he just sat there, at a loss for how to cope, and it never felt like reaction.

He blamed his mother, for making them all go up there that weekend. Because this wouldn't have happened. She'd blame him: the drinking, no life jackets. The decision to go out fishing that morning. And they'd both be right.

EVERYTHING
OLD AND NEW

NO ONE SPOKE the whole ride home. The stereo wasn't on and no one was reading. There was only the sound of rolling tires, and after so long,Cohen could hear friction at work: the rubber tires pulling at the road to thrust the car forward. And at the Irving station: the clugging sound of gas filling the tank. There was never silence, just the kinds of background noise he'd normally not notice—like the sound of his father's breathing or the wind whistling through the window—and it all emphasized the absence of Ryan. Cohen couldn't turn his head to the empty seat beside him; turning and not seeing Ryan was like seeing a ghost. So he stared out his window the whole way home: his eyes riding along the tops of trees, squinting into the sun.

When Cohen's father pulled onto his street to drop him off, he saw Allie and her father unloading a pile of stuff from a pickup truck parked parallel to the curb. They were laying stuff on the sidewalk: a floor lamp, a coffee table, some boxed appliances with yellow Walmart tape across them. A toaster. They'd stopped and stood still when Cohen and his father opened their car doors and stepped out in unison.

They knew and Cohen knew they knew. They had the wet gloss of sympathy in their squinted eyes. They were too eager to make eye contact. It was in Allie's upside-down smile—her lips puffed out from her face. Matt shook his head back and forth, slowly,
Unbelievable
. It was a city with less than a hundred thousand people in it, so Ryan's death had been all over the local news: it was front page in the papers and it got a ten-minute spot on the five o'clock prime time.
Local boy, drowned. Family getaway gone wrong
. They sensationalized it and oversentimentalized it.
Will never attend university. Will never marry. By all accounts, a big-hearted kid, the class clown even teachers cheered on
. But they didn't. They'd suspended him once, earlier that year, for the pranks. And one newspaper had gotten his name wrong, called him Bryan Davies.

Matt and Allie were carrying a coffee table, Matt on one end, Allie on the other, and they didn't lay it down when Matt opened his mouth to speak.

“We've heard, Gord, and we're devastated.”

Cohen's mother opened her door,muttering that she wanted her purse out of the trunk. “I have a full casserole in the oven and there's only the two of us.” Matt nodded at Allie, and took a look at his watch. “Really. It'll be ready in ten minutes. You guys—”

His mother had been rooting through the trunk for her purse and then she dropped a bag onto the driveway; the whack of it hitting the pavement had cut Matt off. She'd made a quick, frightened sound, like she'd been stung by a wasp, and they all looked at the bag, Ryan's bag, on the black pavement. A black bookbag, white straps. A Canadian flag sewn onto the strap and Cohen could remember the day his mother had sewn it on— before Ryan's grade nine trip to Greece. She'd stuck her finger and said
fuck
and Cohen had rarely heard her swear at that point.

Cohen stepped towards the bag, scooped it up off the driveway, and slung it over his shoulder. “I...I packed up his stuff. So you wouldn't have to.”

She looked away from the bag, ignored Cohen. “That's very nice of you, to offer us some supper, Matt, but we've already eaten.”A lie, and Cohen was starving, his stomach dancing at the thought of supper. She turned to his father, “Can you f-find my purse,Gordon?”She sat back in the car with her lower lip bit between teeth.

Matt, again to his father, “Gordon, let's cut to the chase. This is devastating...with Ryan. And we're here for you. I'll drop over that bite to eat at six, okay? I know where you live, if you haven't moved.” Matt turned to Cohen, his eyes waiting for eye contact, “And Allie'll bring a plate over to you, okay, bud?”

His father's voice was lifeless and unintentionally insincere, “That's very kind of you, Matt.”

Every moment since Ryan's death felt crystalline and ready to shatter. Cohen looked at Allie, and when their eyes met, she didn't look away like he thought she would. She didn't look at a loss for words or like she felt awkward about all the dramatic tension. Instead she held his gaze, held all the weight in his body, and she kept her eyes in his until he looked away from her, back to his bag in the trunk.

A reporter, microphone in hand, no older than thirty, stepped out of a car that had been sitting across the street. She was pressing her blue plaid skirt with one hand and motioning to a reluctant cameraman with the other. Cohen saw his father pretend not to notice her as he thrust his suitcases back into the trunk and jumped into his car.

Cohen dashed to his front door because it was enough to be silently dealing with it for now. Talking about it, with her, with this woman, this
stranger
, was just too much. Too real. But it was too late; she had her metal-mesh-topped microphone in his face. “Cohen? Cohen Davies?”

His mother was rolling her window down, screaming, “Get that microphone away from him, you soulless wretch!” but his father was backing out of the driveway like he couldn't handle it. Like he'd been through enough. And it was the first time in Cohen's life that his father hadn't been there for him. It was the first time his father had let him down, and those were two separate shocks. And now here this woman was, with her microphone in his face, and the camera was rolling.

She had a look on her face like there was something Cohen should say. And she wanted to be the one who got it on film. She had a look on her face like there were words for this, and he owed them to the world.

Cohen opened his mouth, mindlessly, like some reflex would puppeteer his mouth and do the talking for him. Give her what she wanted to make her go away. He never heard Matt coming, but saw his hand grabbing the guy's camera, pulling it out of his hand. The woman was shocked. “Sir!”

Matt walked over to their car, camera in hand, tugged at the handle of a locked back door, and walked around to the passenger seat. He threw the camera in through a rolled-down window.

“Get the fuck off this street. Now.”

HE DIDN'T KNOW where he was headed, didn't even think about it until he rolled up to a stop sign and watched two sisters playing hopscotch in their driveway. What he needed wasn't time alone. He lived alone. What he wanted was to blare out the silence, to drown out life's background noise; the noises he'd only noticed since Ryan died: wind, ticking clocks, his own breathing. He wanted a bar with a band that could make his ears ring with just one, loud sound.

It was getting dark and he headed for The Avian-Dome because he worked there, had a key, and knew the passcode for the alarm: 8889. There was access to the roof and it seemed like the right place to go. The roof was flat, but its coarseness had been scuffed soft by the pacing of staff over so many years. A stone wall fenced it in, making a patio of the rooftop. There was a duck pond at the back, close enough for staff to throw feed over the edge into the pond. There was a picnic table, but he laid in the centre of the roof, stared up at the starless sky. Blue was bleeding into black, so the cloudless sky was a temporary and tender purple. A bruise-coloured blanket covering the world. He stuck in earphones, pressed play, closed his eyes.

By the fourth or the fifth song, he heard a knocking, weak but deliberate; unmistakably knuckles on glass. Startled, he hopped up, tearing his headphones out, hauling wildly at the cords dangling at his chest. He thought of hiding and didn't know why or what from. He looked over the side of the wall: no police cars or his boss's blue sedan with the dented passenger door. He walked to the front of the building, peered down, and it was Allie. Knocking. Waiting a few seconds. Knocking. Tugging at the door handles. Tucking some hair behind an ear. She looked at her car like maybe she should leave or maybe she should try one more time. And then she looked up, almost as surprised as he was, like she wasn't really expecting to find him, and definitely not up on the roof.

“Um. Hi!” She laughed and reeled it in, no room for laughter in the situation. The building was only two storeys high, but she had to raise her voice a little. “Listen. I can go back home, if you want. It's up to you.”

He stared down at her. His eyes feeling heavy enough to fall out of their sockets. “I asked Dad to go after you, but he said men need time alone. That's bullshit. So I followed you here. I don't know. I just...I followed you.”She shrugged one shoulder, looked from his eyes to the door, like
Are you going to let me in?

“I can go or I can stay, but I wasn't going to sit home wondering if you were alone or with someone or okay or not. I can go back home or you can let me up there with you. You can tell me anything. How it happened, how it wouldn't have happened if a million things had gone differently. Whatever. Because trust me, it helps just to speak and shout and cry and burst wide open, it does. I won't tell you everything is going to be okay because it's not. Or we won't talk about Ryan at all. We can just hang out. I've got a book. I have a few books, one for you too if you want to just sit around and read.” She tapped her purse as a question mark. “I took a few novels out of a box. Before I left. We can just sit and read a little?”

He liked that she'd come. How she was new and unpredictable and how that kept his mind divided between thoughts of Ryan and thoughts of her and what she might say next.

She looked in through the glass doors with binoculared hands over her eyes. “Or you can give me a tour of this—”

“Hang on a second.” He walked away from the wall, out of her sight, whispered
Fuck
, shook his head, kicked his Discman across the roof. He hated himself for not being cold enough to ask her to leave or to shut the fuck up about Ryan. He hated the part of himself that was glad she'd come. It was Ryan's death he wanted to feel overwhelmed by, and pinned under, and the way she could lift him out from under that weight made him feel cheap, guilty. As if mourning meant feeling pain as intensely as he could, all alone, not sharing it with a stranger.

He peered back down over the wall. “Give me a second. I'll be right down.” He went towards the door, but swung back around. “Do you wanna to come up here, you mean, or go somewhere else?” She clutched her chest; he'd startled her. She looked a little anxious, like
What am I doing here, what do I say to the guy now?

“Up to you, Cohen, but...I like the idea of being up on that roof tonight. I bet it's...pretty?” She shook her head, like
What a stupid thing to say.
She had a shy smile she was trying to fight off.

He descended the stairs, walked across the open foyer, the claps of his feet echoing off the tile floor. He pulled open the door and she tucked some hair behind her ears and smiled shyly again. “What
is
this place anyway?” And he filled her in as they walked towards the door that led to the roof—that the mandate was all about protecting, promoting, and preserving the avian wildlife of Atlantic Canada, and that the three theatres were simulated ecosystems. He put a hand on one and said he'd personally stuffed all the auks in the puffin and razorbill display.

She was stutter-stepping, amazed by the place, a child-like awe about her. He liked that. He liked that all the stuff had caught her attention, and how she could be that interested in birds hanging from wires. He'd always equated intelligence, or intellect, with curiosity.

He reached behind him, turned a volume dial on bust, and pressed play on one of the displays to scare her. She jumped backwards, kicking into a number four, like a flamingo standing in water, and a booming voice, speaking over the sound of waves, and cawing birds, explained the mating habits and diet of the Atlantic Puffin,
Fratercula arctica
. She slapped him on the chest for it, for scaring her, as she walked past him and up the stairs.

She'd jumped again at the gunshot sound of the steel door slamming shut behind them in the stairwell. She'd clung to him, instinctively out of fright, and apologized for scaring so easily. He liked the softness of her voice in his ears, her body pressed into his elbow. He tapped in the keycode. 8889.

She burst out onto the roof, spun around once in a circle, like she wanted to say
My God, it's beautiful up here!
but those words would seem too cheery. She turned and leaned into the front of the building, palms flat against the wall. Looking at the city, from that distance, the streetlights looked like sticks with stars on their ends. She walked to the back of the building, cupped her hands to her mouth. “Oh My God!” She flung her purse on the picnic table. “Look at all the fucking cute ducks!”

Watching her was perfect. Minus the fear of awkward silences or forced conversations, like
it wasn't your fault, you know
. Because it was, and he'd want her gone if she even insinuated that it wasn't, in some trite conversation. He just wanted to watch her watching the ducks. Maybe tell her there's a barrel of feed in the stairwell and that, sometimes, the ducks come up on the roof.

So he surprised himself when the words came out. “Ryan was drunk, Allie. He was drunk, and eighteen, and I was drinking, and I never even
thought
about life jackets until he was dead. He was drunk, and that's why he had to piss, and that's why his legs fucked up, and that's why he's dead. Because he was drunk, and I might have been too, and I thought life jackets were a fucking joke, for people who can't swim, you know? Because he could swim?Who can't swim? But. A life jacket. He would've floated. I would've found my brother.”