Extraordinary

“Just stick it to the door when you leave.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Sally?”

“It’s not complicated,” she said evenly, and I had the feeling she had said this before, but only to herself, in preparation for this very conversation. “I’m not depressed, the world isn’t grey, I don’t want to punish people, it’s just that this”—she gestured toward her body in the green dressing gown—“has become less and less manageable. I don’t want to go into physical details, but you understand. And it’s only going to get worse. And soon—not tomorrow or even next year, soon though—I won’t have even this much control over what happens to me. And then there’s you,” she added softly.

“What about me?”

“One of these days, you might go away. Or you might change your mind.”

“And?”

“And then I wouldn’t have anyone to help me.”

“Is there no one else?”

“I can’t imagine there would be. Could you?”

“How did you know I wouldn’t tell someone?” I said.

She was looking right at me now. She waited a moment. “Because I know what you’re like. Because enough is enough.”

The phone rang.

“Do you want to get that?”

But she didn’t answer. She had retreated into herself, and I suddenly had the feeling she was thinking about her son, Kyle. But I didn’t want to bring him up. Not tonight. She seemed to read my thoughts, though, and taking a deep, involuntary breath as one does before beginning a task that has been done before but needs to be done again, she began. “About six months after my accident, I got a letter from my ex-husband, Bruce. Chloe and I had moved back to the house in San Miguel. I was in a wheelchair, but managing.”

The phone stopped ringing.

“It was a disturbing but not a surprising letter, something I had expected for some time. Kyle, who was seventeen, had gotten himself into trouble. Teenage trouble. But from the lugubrious and self-satisfied tones of his father’s letter, you’d have thought it was murder. None of which would have happened, it implied, if I hadn’t whored off to Mexico.”

“Did he use that expression?”

“No.” Pause. “That’s mine.”

“Go on.”

“Kyle and a couple of his goony friends from the neighbourhood got drunk one night at some girl’s house— her parents were away—and broke into their own school. Their own school. They wandered around the halls, trashed a few lockers, pissed in the water fountain, smashed a mirror in the girls’ washroom and then drifted downstairs into the basement. There, at the far end of the school, they found themselves in the music room. The door was unlocked. Inside, they came across five electric guitars that had been rented for an upcoming student performance. Somebody said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ So they stole the guitars, slipping out the tradesmen’s entrance.

“Bruce was out of town, working with a highway crew up near Lake Athabasca, so they took their loot back to his house. Kyle was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid, and when he woke up hungover the next morning, he realized that he was in real trouble, that he had to do something to fix it.

“His friends had stayed overnight, but they were morons—Kyle’s friends generally were—and when he asked them for help, they sat with their fingers up their asses and then buggered off. So there was Kyle, with five stolen guitars heating up his bedroom like a hothouse.

“What do you do? He came up with an idea. He found the vice-principal’s number in the phone book and called him at home. He claimed that a buddy of his—he couldn’t name him—had gotten drunk, broken into the school and stolen some stuff. Now, in a fit of remorse, he wanted to return them, with Kyle as the intermediary. Could this be arranged discreetly?

“The VP said sure. But when Kyle arrived in a taxi half an hour later, the five guitars stacked like corpses in the back seat, he found two plainclothes detectives waiting for him on the front steps of the school. They took him downstairs into the music room and grilled him. No windows, just the two cops, the vice-principal, and Kyle reeking of gin. A cop with a shiny, fleshy face started things off. It was pretty obvious, he said, that Kyle was a prankster who’d gone on a toot. He could smell it from here. But there was no way that his so-called ‘buddy’ had got these guitars out the door, up an embankment, across a playing field all on his own. Not unless he was ‘a fucking octopus.’

“So he must have had some help. Kyle’s help. So why didn’t Kyle just come clean and help everyone ‘straighten this out’ so they could close the book on it. No harm done. Just kids being kids.

“But Kyle, having already been lied to once that day by the vice-principal, wasn’t buying. He stuck to his story. He didn’t know what happened, didn’t know how they got the guitars out of the school, he was just there doing a favour.

“Consulting a notebook, the fleshy cop said, ‘It says here a Hammond organ was stolen as well.’

“‘There was no organ,’ Kyle said.

“‘Are you sure?’

“Kyle didn’t see the trap. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

“‘Well,’ the cop said, ‘if you weren’t there, how would you know that an organ wasn’t stolen too?’

“His partner stepped in. ‘Listen, fuckweed, if I don’t have the name of the thief on this piece of paper in thirty seconds, I will charge you with grand theft, possession of stolen property, intent to traffic, and you will, I promise, go to jail.’ He gave him a good poke in the chest with his finger just to show he meant business.

“‘Arrest me, then,’ Kyle said. ‘Arrest me and fuck you.’”

“He said that?”

“That’s what he said he said.”

“Ballsy little guy.”

“The police must have thought so too, because they let him go. For the moment. The fleshy cop said, ‘I’m going to give you twenty-four hours, Kyle. Then I’m going to come to your house, and I’m going to arrest you in front of your parents and your neighbours. I’m going to put you in handcuffs, and I’m going to take you to jail.’

“His partner said, ‘You ever hear of grand theft, you little fuck? That’s theft over a thousand dollars. You’re in the big leagues now. You can thank your buddies for letting you take it in the ass for them. Because that’s where you’re headed. You know how long a kid like you will last in jail?’”

I’d forgotten what a skilful mimic Sally could be. She didn’t do it very often; it wasn’t her style, too attention-getting a number for her. But as a child, those times I saw her do it, saw her cut loose some night and “do” a neighbour talking to herself while gardening or our soused uncle saying good night but not leaving, I’d find myself staring at her as if I were watching a chair levitate.

She went on. “Kyle went home. He didn’t tell his father, nor did he sleep that night, not a wink, just a tumble of awful imaginings. Exactly twenty-four hours later, he sat by the front door with his night kit packed—pyjamas, hairbrush, toothpaste, toothbrush—and waited to be taken to what he imagined was some kind of Russian gulag.

“The appointed hour arrived. Five o’clock. Then five-fifteen. Then six o’clock. Kyle walked down to the sidewalk and peered up and down the street. Nothing. No one. They never came.

“But after, he refused to go back to school. To any school. That’s what Bruce’s letter was about. He suggested that Kyle come down to Mexico and live with me. Asked me to take some time to think about it. I didn’t need time. But I pretended to, pretended that I had reservations: the wheelchair, not being up on crutches yet and so on. In fact, what I didn’t want was for Bruce to realize how thrilled I was to have both my children down there with me. I thought if he even smelt it, something would go tight in his chest and he’d snatch it away. But I don’t know. Maybe I was doing him a disservice. Now that he’s gone, he seems like less of an asshole and more a product of growing up in a small town.