Be Ready for the Lightning, page 9
If I had made a mark on my leg and didn’t want Ted to see, I would buy him extra drinks that night, those nights, to try to get him drunker than usual. It felt wrong, even sort of evil, because it was pretty clear by then that Ted wasn’t just a guy who liked to drink—he had a problem. But I never felt guilty.
If he saw anything, he never said anything. Maybe men just don’t want to comment on girls’ thighs, regardless. Danger zone. Maybe he thought it was some female thing that happened naturally. He was an only child; he didn’t have sisters.
I was constantly worried about Conrad, but the upside of that time in our mid-twenties was that now I had Ted, after so many years of wanting him, of looking at old photos, rereading old postcards, of picturing him while having sex with the boyfriends I’d humoured through university. Neither Ted nor I followed Annie onto Facebook, so I hadn’t had a scroll of digital images to keep me going the way Annie had for all her ex-boyfriends. I’d never liked being in photos, and the idea of people from high school or middle school critiquing my face from the comfort of their homes horrified me. When I asked Ted why he didn’t join, he grinned and said he’d prefer to do the looking up if any looking up was happening, that social media meant no clean endings. I tried not to guess how many clean endings Ted’s return to Vancouver had caused.
Annie told me I was a pushover for taking him back after all those years. I didn’t care, though. Pride didn’t matter much to me. Why was it supposed to be a good thing to lose what you want but keep your pride? All I saw in that was the losing. “He won’t respect you,” she said, but I didn’t see the big deal in that either. Respect and pride had never kept anyone safe.
I got accepted to the master’s programme in Audiology at UBC and dropped down to part time at work. The programme was demanding and took up so much of my time and energy that I didn’t have much left for anything else. I couldn’t afford to help with Conrad’s rent anymore, not even with all the peanut butter sandwiches in the world. I told him I had to stop. He was angry at first, when I told him I’d been doing it. Conrad, who was never angry at me.
“Did I ask you to do that?” he said. “Did I ask you to stick your nose in?”
And for one freezing cold second, I was afraid of him. All he had done was tense up, he hadn’t even moved, just his muscles gathering under his skin. I guess my face gave away the fear that flashed through me, because Conrad turned away and sat down hard on a kitchen chair.
“You don’t have much of a poker face,” he said with a forced grin. Then he hung his head.
I didn’t know how to apologize. For thinking, even if it was just a quick animal instinct, that he would ever hurt me.
I could see the back of his neck, while he sat there with his head down. His hair needed to be cut, long black flames of it against his skin. There were no marks on that skin, on the back of his neck—no scars, no bruises, no damage. It hurt to look at.
Sometimes it felt like Conrad was my boyfriend more than Ted was. Not in a sick way, like I wanted to sleep with him. But when I was patching him up, we were so weirdly close. We weren’t the type of siblings to touch each other much otherwise. I might put my feet on him, while we were watching TV, but as kids, we never play-fought, never rolled around like puppies, the way some siblings do.
So in those moments when I was disinfecting his scrapes and holding ice packs on parts he couldn’t reach, we were in an odd, undefined category, almost like I was mothering him. But we had spent too much time hiding his black eyes and bruises from our parents, too much time conspiring against them together, for me to feel maternal.
When he looked up, his crooked nose cast a little shadow on his cheek from the late-afternoon light.
“Connie,” I said, but he shrugged in a way that stopped me from saying more.
“I found a new place,” he said. “To play. Good guys. I think it’ll be good. And I’m paying you back every penny, with interest.”
And I said, “That’s good. A new place is good.”
—
About the time that I stopped paying Conrad’s rent, I stopped doing the things I had been doing for Ted since he came back to Vancouver—buying his soap for him, doing his dishes, folding his T-shirts and making sure I knew where his odd socks were, so that when their partners finally showed up, I could tuck them together again. I’d tried hard to make myself useful. I didn’t know how to do Al’s version of love, with the poetry and commitment and long looks, but I wanted to show Ted I loved him, and those small, utilitarian things were my only ideas. When I realized he wasn’t leaving again, though, I became lazy about it. The longer he stayed, the less panicked and worshipful my love was. I think it was a relief to him, too—I got the impression he’d been worshipped enough and just wanted to relax.
Unsurprisingly, Ted was fine and bought his own soap, scrubbed his own dishes, and threw out his odd socks and then their mates when they turned up. His cruise ship savings had run out, and he started teaching guitar classes at a community centre and at the houses of Point Grey teenagers. He kept playing shows and amassed a small local following, occasionally opening for other, more popular acts in medium-sized bars. He got his old violin out of his grandmother’s basement and added that to the private lessons he offered. The parents of his students, the mothers, called him at odd hours and asked him inane questions, like, what was that restaurant he’d mentioned, the one with the grilled octopus, or whether he knew someone who could put a fallen eavestrough back up. I pretended to find these calls funny, when he told me about them, and mostly I did.
And when a worse call came, a call about Conrad, it was Ted who went to the police station, so I wouldn’t have to.
When Conrad was finally sent to jail, I went sweaty and still, watching in my head horrible and cliché movies of him starting fights in a gravelly exercise yard and being beaten to death, over and over. Ted was the one who dealt with the lawyer and sending packages and worked out the papers for visiting. My parents were away on a cruise, something they had begun to do frequently. When they got back, Ted caught them up, and they thanked him and shook his hand, as if he had found their basement flooded in their absence and dealt with it. My mother bought a nice coffeemaker and gave it to Ted as a thank you.
I learned to make fancy drinks in it, and Ted and I would drink them in his sunny, messy apartment in our underwear on Sunday mornings, while Ted showed me photos of all the places he’d been, awkwardly shuffling past photos of women, until finally I said, “It was six years, Ted. It’s not like I was home with a rosary the entire time.”
We went on short driving vacations, when we could find a couple of free nights between Ted’s shows and my classes. We drove down into Washington and Oregon or to Indian Arm or Golden Ears Provincial Park and went hiking, and on the way home, Ted would look out his window at the ocean or into the trees, his eyes only half on the road. I felt old then, old as the earth.
I was tired all the time. School was demanding, and I was almost out of my depth even with constant studying. I was happy, too, happy beside Ted. Happy to go to class and to work and to adore Ted and eat in restaurants with him and go to the Pacific National Exhibition and hope he would say something romantic at the top of the Ferris wheel. We even went to the ballet, though I didn’t much like it, in the end.
I wouldn’t admit it, but I was relieved to be free from Conrad for awhile. After a few weeks, it already seemed strange to me how fine I’d been with his life, how it hadn’t bothered me to get his blood on me, how it had never grossed me out.
It was borrowed time, and I tried to enjoy it as much as possible, like a vacation. I had no idea when it would end, only that it would, that Conrad would be released, and I tried not to think about it. I watched Ted play shows, and he would say, “This one is for my special girl, V,” and it never got old. He held my hand when we crossed the street. We went to movies. Once, when we were two of only four people in a matinee, I noticed Ted’s knee was bouncing; he was tapping the rhythm of the 20th Century Fox opening music with his heel. I put my hand on his thigh, added my drumming fingers. Without speaking, we tapped out a call-and-answer in time to the notes booming from the speakers. We both grinned but didn’t look at each other. Didn’t need to. And if even in such a moment of perfect understanding the sad spectre of Conrad arose, neither of us mentioned it.
—
Conrad was released after eight months. It was a summary conviction for assault causing bodily harm, for a fight at the poker table. It was Conrad’s bad luck that a cop came in to bust the owner and stumbled onto the fight. If it hadn’t been for the assault charge at eighteen, and the one after that that had made him miss the Tragically Hip concert, he probably would have gotten off with probation. But now he had a real record. There were no more strikes left—if he got arrested again, things would be much worse. He went back to his tidy Gastown apartment and switched to playing poker online.
One night when I came to meet him there, to go to one of Ted’s shows nearby, I asked him how it was, playing online. I never asked him about jail, and he didn’t volunteer anything. We carried on as if nothing had happened, but I was finding it harder to dredge up the tenderness for him that used to be at my fingertips.
“Well, I’m actually making money. It’s kind of crazy, actually.” He picked at his teeth. One of the incisors was false now, a detail Ted had supplied. You could tell which one, because his real one was still too sharp, but the fake one was perfect. “Bit lonely, though. I’m going to have to find some way to get out of the house more.”
“Maybe a course or something?”
“Maybe,” said Conrad.
He went to leave and I reminded him to take his jacket. He stood there for a moment, saying “Uhh” with his eyebrows knit together. So I opened the closet for him, and Conrad said, “Jesus, I know my jacket is in the fucking closet—what’s the rush?”
He was flustered as he put it on, and we clattered down the stairs into the rain.
We were late. Ted was already on stage when we got there. I bought us each a beer, and we joined the small crowd on the dance floor in front of the stage. Ted was singing a song I knew, an old one he’d sent home on tape early in his cruise ship days, with the line “There’s no more going home, cuz a part of home’s in her and she’s gone, gone, gone.” I didn’t think it was his best song, but he liked playing it, all sad eyes and smiles while he sang it.
Ted was an inverse showman, more introverted on stage than he was in real life. He hardly ever bantered between songs and closed his eyes half the time he was singing. His voice was loud and a bit high, at the upper end of tenor with little vibrato, a ’70s and ’90s voice that was no longer in style.
He had retained not just his high-school swagger but the promise beneath it that made each woman think there was something magical about her when combined with him, that somehow erased the evidence that we all thought this, and therefore it couldn’t be true. Even or perhaps especially when utterly wasted and completely despairing, there was a magnetic warmth to him, a good-humoured aura. The other side of the coin was carelessness, but this seemed unimportant. His warmth was irresistible.
He finished the song about the girl who was home, who was not me, and grinned into the microphone, saying, “Thanks, thanks, everyone.”
As he was hitting a high-ish note in the chorus of the next song, Annie shouldered in beside me and mimed that she needed me to come with her. She was late, and at the tone of her voice, I handed Conrad my beer and followed her into the grimy, graffiti-covered bathroom.
“Okay,” said Annie. “This is big.”
She’d been offered a better position, a much better position, at her company’s San Francisco office. She was taking it. She would leave in a month but give me two months’ rent, so I could find another roommate or a new place. Three months, if I wanted. They were offering her a shitload of money—and when could we go out to celebrate?
“Oh,” I said.
A crease appeared between Annie’s eyebrows. “Aren’t you happy for me? Why do you even care? I’ve hardly seen you since David Byrne out there got home.”
“Of course I’m happy for you. I’m just going to miss you.”
“We can’t all just stay here forever, Veda. Things change.”
“I know they do. I’m sorry, I was just surprised. I’m so, so happy for you.” And I kissed and hugged her, gave an excited little scream. “California!” I said. “Amazing!”
Annie smiled and led me back to the dance floor. Ted strummed a final chord, and the crowd started applauding, and I downed a last sip of beer, leaving the bottle empty, and everything ended at once.
ELEVEN
Time is passing on the bus, which should give everyone a chance to think, to plan, to figure out how this is going to end in real life, which can’t be with everyone dying. But people have already died. What couldn’t happen has already happened. And that makes it impossible to puzzle through it, to invent a solution. We’re caught in a paradox. We can’t die on a regular day on a regular bus, because we’re regular people, and that’s something that happens on the news, in the movies, in faraway places. And yet we are certainly going to.
The shooter has been silent for some time, after the negotiator called on the large man’s cell phone. He stands with his gun raised, facing us, looking alert and calm. One of his white socks is scrunched down, the other still pulled up. The hair on his legs is golden. He still looks handsome, sweet-faced.
There are two tiny patches of light on the sleeve of his coat from where the spray paint doesn’t perfectly cover the windows. These dusty patches suddenly bloom bright white; everywhere that light leaks into the bus is instantly, painfully bright. The front of the bus, with the unpainted driver’s window, is on fire with light. I don’t know what’s going on, but a woman behind me says “Floodlights,” in a voice so quiet it is hardly a voice. Everything else seems darker by comparison, with the shards of light coming through the gaps in the paint, and where a sudden bright spot bleaches the skin of my clenched fist, I think I feel it burning
Somehow this is the scariest part. That the people outside, the only people who might help, including the man on the radio with his nice voice, are reduced to tiny geometric patches of light as a plea for the man with the gun to let us go.
The police negotiator’s voice comes over the radio again. “Hi, Peter,” he says. “Ajay here. They’ve turned on the lights out here.”
He could be mentioning that the streetlamps have come on, from his tone. I wonder if it is nighttime. I don’t know how long we’ve been stopped. Maybe it’s been an hour, or two. Maybe only a few minutes.
“I really want to help you, but I need to know what you need. If you’ll talk to me for a little while, I think we can figure this out together.”
The negotiator waits briefly for a response to this, and when he gets none, he goes on. He sounds like someone who reads books to children, warm and very clear.
“There are a lot of people in there, Peter. We could make everything a bit simpler, if you send some of those people out to me. I know you need to keep some with you, but since I’m talking to you in good faith, maybe you can show me that you’re listening by sending some people outside? They might need something to eat or drink, and they’re probably scared. And then I can help you with whatever you need.”
The shooter says to us, “Someone come down here.” No one moves. He says, “I want you to pick up the radio for me. So I can answer him.” Still no one moves.
Then a woman of about forty moves through the crowd from somewhere near the back and walks the length of the bus. She is visibly shaking. As she passes me, she farts, a small noise. She keeps walking, and when she is near the shooter, he shifts around to allow her to get to the driver’s barrier but without her being behind him. He keeps the gun trained on her and stays well enough back that he can’t be seen from outside through the gaps in the paint. The woman reaches around the barrier and pulls the mouthpiece for the radio on its curled, black cord from in front of the driver. She holds it out to the shooter.
“Pull it farther,” he says, and she does, stretching it as far as it can go, straight back from the dashboard, around the barrier. “Hand it to me,” he says.
They are close together now. The gun is pointed at her face. She passes the radio console, careful not to let it recoil.
“I think you have to press down that button on top,” she says, and he says, “Thank you.”
Then she backs away from him, down the aisle. She reaches behind her to find the edges of the seats to avoid bumping into them, not taking her eyes off him. When she reaches the stairs to the back of the bus, the people in front of me pull her up, so many people pulling her that she is lifted off her feet, up the steps. I put a hand on her too, though no more help is needed.
The shooter holds the radio up to his mouth. “Hello,” he says.
“Peter. Thanks so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it. Listen, I think you’re in a hard situation, but there’s no reason we can’t resolve things without anybody getting hurt, including you. We can talk this out and get things all cleared up. Why don’t you let me know what you want from me, and I’ll do my best to make it happen.”
Peter presses the button to speak again. “I don’t want anything,” he says. “I’m not here to take. I’m here to help. You’re interrupting. I don’t want to be mean, and I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I have to tell you that if anybody opens any part of the bus, I will have to shoot people, because the important thing is to get everyone where they need to go. Everyone will be happy, but you’re interrupting. Please don’t do any tricks. Please turn off the lights.”
“I think it’s really good that you want to help people, Peter. I want to be helpful too. But you won’t help anyone by shooting them. You’ll hurt them. I can tell you are a good person and don’t want to hurt people. I’m not going to use any tricks, and I’m going to ask them if they can turn off the lights. I think that’s a fair thing to ask. I’m going to do my best to get them to turn off the lights for you, okay?”
