Extraordinary

“A few weeks later, Kyle arrived on the afternoon bus. It was spring now, the days very hot. Freddie Steigman and Chloe went down to the depot to pick him up. On the way home, Freddie read him the riot act. He said, ‘You have no idea what trouble is like until you’ve been on the inside of a Mexican jail.’

“It must have been three or four nights later when Kyle and an American kid went into a cantina and drank a half-dozen rounds of mescal. Around midnight, they dropped in on a girl they’d met that morning. But the girl’s father answered the door and, seeing that they were drunk, sent them packing. Here the story gets fuzzy. Kyle always claimed his friend did it, his friend said Kyle did it, but somebody threw a brick through the girl’s window. The police were called. They picked up the two boys in a cantina down the street. At four o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door. There was Kyle. They’d roughed him up a bit. He had a black eye and a loose front tooth. Luckily, he had mentioned Freddie Steigman’s name.

“The next day, I made my decision, and I’ve been living with the consequences of it since then. I packed up his little suitcase and put him on a bus back to the airport. I’ve often thought about it—maybe I should have kept him. But I was too vulnerable, too weak to deal with a six-foot-tall teenager crashing around town and getting in trouble and maybe, just maybe, getting us all thrown out of the country. Was I a coward? Was I using the wheelchair as an excuse to not deal with a troubled—and more to the point, troublesome—teenager? Did I abandon my son? Was I playing the ostrich when I sent him back to his father? Am I responsible for what happened afterwards?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“It doesn’t change anything anyway. Things went the way they went.”

“And how was that?”

“You know the answer to that,” she said flatly.

“Yes, but how did they get there?”

“Kyle got a job in Toronto looking after senior citizens in a Jewish retirement home. He’d take them out for walks, wheel them around the block in their wheelchairs, talk to them on the bench in front of the home and read their granddaughters’ letters aloud to them.

“He was a prince, everyone loved him—until they discovered he was stealing their medication. Librium, Valium, Seconal, Mandrax, Dilaudid, even cough medicine—anything he could find. They were seniors. Have you ever seen the medicine cabinet of a senior?”

“Yes, I have, in fact.”

“Then you know. The pickings are good.

“The police were called in. They installed a hidden camera in the bathroom of one of the most frequently hit rooms, and waited. Sure enough, while Mrs. Cornblum was downstairs enjoying Shabbat dinner with her son and her grandchildren, Kyle was systematically going through the prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet. All on film. The police turned up at his house with a search warrant. They found jewellery, a necklace, even a silver pocket watch, very old and valuable, which had been stolen that same morning. A few pills, but not many. Kyle had taken them or sold them.

“The judge was a softie and handed down a conditional discharge. Kyle walked out of the courthouse with a slap on the wrist. Bruce threw him out. He flopped here and there, always with these losers. Kyle had a knack for attracting dumb-guy groupies. A string of arrests followed: shoplifting, breaking into cars, selling phony prescription pads, phone scams. One time he even got caught for stealing purses from cars in a cemetery parking lot while their occupants were paying graveside respects.”

“A perfect little scumball.”

Sally frowned; it hurt her to hear that. You can say bad things about your own child, but you don’t want someone else doing it.

“Sally, I apologize. I was just getting into the spirit of things.”

She went on. “He landed in the hospital a few times. A furniture mover caught him breaking into his rig, this big-bellied, thick-armed ape who made his living driving to Mississippi and back on three hundred cigarettes and a handful of Dexedrine. Wrong guy to rob. Wrong guy to get caught robbing. He found Kyle sitting behind the wheel trying to snap off his ham radio. Kyle got so frightened he threw himself over a ramp. But it was a drop of two storeys. He broke his arm in four places. The truck driver took his time getting down to him, then gave him a couple of boots, one in the kidneys, one in the face, and left him lying in the street.”

“Nice life.”

“That February, he had a Methedrine overdose, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. All this got back to me in Mexico. I was torn: stay or go home. But go home and do what? Hobbling around on crutches. Shouting from the sidelines. At some point, you’re reduced to being an impotent cheerleader for your children’s lives. Or is that just more bullshit? I don’t know. I still don’t.

“I began to prepare myself for his death. I began to imagine how the phone would ring one night, or maybe Bruce’s hangdog face would appear at my door in Mexico. I knew it was coming. It was the Jerry Malloy business that brought me home.”

“You haven’t mentioned him.”

“Jerry Malloy? That was the clincher.” She leaned her elbow on the chair arm; it slipped off; she settled it back again, using her other hand to hold it. She began. “One night around midnight, Kyle turned up at Marek Grunbaum’s house. Remember him? The Polish guy—”

“—with the beautiful pink handkerchief.”

“Kyle looked like a zombie: ragged clothes, grey skin, yellow eyeballs. He smelt, too. His feet were rotting from some untreated infection. Marek made him take his clothes off in the hallway, all of them, and then led him naked upstairs to the shower, disinfecting his footsteps with an aerosol can of Lysol as he went. His three kids peeking from their bedrooms. ‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ A few days later, he drove him to a rehab centre downtown. On the way there, Kyle asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. A birthday present for his father. He had a con man’s charm, Kyle did. He looked Marek in the eyes and said, ‘You got to let me make this up to my dad.’

“He disappeared into the mid-afternoon traffic with the twenty dollars. Nearly half an hour later, after Marek had circled the block twice and gotten a ticket, he spotted Kyle on the sidewalk. He got back into the car, claiming he couldn’t find anything nice. But could he keep the money? Within a day or two, he’d be allowed out for half-hour walks in the neighbourhood—he’d buy a present then.

“By now, Marek just wanted him out of the car. So he agreed. He pulled up in front of the clinic, a big white house on a leafy street. He waited to make sure Kyle went in. Kyle skipped up the main stairs, made a theatrical production of pushing the buzzer, and, just as he went in, spun around and gave Marek a grin and a big wave, as if this was all a screech, just too much fun for words.

“They lodged Kyle with a boy named Jerry Malloy. Jerry had grown up in one of those small northern towns where teenage boys sit in front of the pizza parlour at midnight on a Saturday night, daydreaming about the life they’ve read about in heavy metal magazines. You know those kids?”

“I sure do.”

“You see them in all small towns. You can smell the boredom coming off them. They usually get arrested for breaking into somebody’s cottage, knock up the girl at the grocery store, put on forty pounds, spend their lives working at the marina or the planing mill. I have a great deal of compassion for those children.” Sally looked toward the window, and in a moment continued. “But not Jerry. Jerry saw himself as a cut above the rest. No marina for him. He quit school in grade ten and moved to Toronto, where he got a job making broom handles in a factory.

“It wasn’t long before big-city life just dazzled the wits right out of him. Especially the drugs, of course, first pot, then Methedrine—”

“Nasty business, that Methedrine.”

“—then whatever he could get his big farm-boy fingers around. It was all good, all part of an adventure that put another square on the checkerboard between him and the boys in front of the pizza parlour back home.

“Whacked on sleeping pills one day, he stole a car that had been double-parked with the engine running. He drove it the wrong way down a one-way street, spotted a police van (which was empty, by the way), panicked and smacked into a fire hydrant. Totalled the car. Knocked himself out cold. Chipped his front teeth on the driver’s wheel.

“The judge, realizing he was dealing with a moron, gave Jerry a choice: jail or rehab. To his misfortune,