Extraordinary

Jerry Malloy, the boy who made broomsticks, chose rehab. And to punish him for his crimes, they put him in with my son.

“Kyle was everything that Jerry imagined a city boy would be: slick and quick with a put-down, always on the hustle. He was smitten. For his part, Kyle knew he had fallen on a live one and treated Jerry like a goofy sheepdog. Had him doing his chores, cleaning the toilet, making the beds—the things you do in rehab to reacquaint yourself with regular life. Kyle wasn’t interested in regular life.

“Three or four weeks in, I got a call from Bruce. It turned out that Kyle had smuggled two grams of Lebanese hash into the centre. He’d bought them on the street with Marek’s twenty dollars. Smuggled them past security in the loose portion of his shoe sole, grinning and joking with the guard. It must have been the excitement of it all, making a fool of everybody, that explained Kyle’s wild wave to Marek as he went in.

“And then one night, after everyone had gone to sleep on his floor, he stole out of bed, recovered the hashish and offered a drag to Jerry. Within three hours, they were caught breaking into the meat fridge in the basement, but not before Kyle had turned on a young amphetamine addict from Stratford and a sixty-eight-year- old alcoholic. Within the space of a few hours, Kyle had undone months and months of rehabilitation.

“It was an act of such egregious irresponsibility that the centre gave up on him. You can fix an addict, but you can’t fix an asshole. Both of them got kicked out, Kyle and Jerry. Then, poof, they vanished. For a couple of weeks, no one heard from them. Maybe they went to Jerry’s hometown. I don’t know. No one heard from Kyle— not his father, not his friends, not me, no one. So how what happened next happened isn’t entirely clear. But you can guess the broad strokes: Kyle had found a mark and wrung him like a washcloth for everything he could get.

“Before too long, probably at Kyle’s suggestion, Jerry stole his uncle’s pickup truck. He must have figured he was in a movie, two bandits on the run. They turned up at a local dog pound, adopted a mongrel and began to wind their way across Canada. They were heading to Vancouver. Somebody had told them it was like Florida there, warm temperatures, pretty girls—they’d get a job on a fishing boat and sail to China. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“They went up around the Great Lakes into Manitoba. Stealing gas when they needed it. Shoplifting here and there, mostly smash-and-grab. A farm family reported that a couple of young guys, one with chipped front teeth, stayed with them for several days, stole their grandson’s coin collection and moved on. The people who were kind to Kyle were people, he figured, who had targets on their backs, suckers who were saying, ‘Here, fuck me, I’m stupid.’

“Jerry turned a trick in a truck stop outside Winnipeg, let some guy blow him in the back of his rig, and that got them another seventy-five dollars. They made it as far as the outskirts of a town just across the Alberta border. They were driving at night. Kyle was. He fell asleep, the truck left the road, rolled down an embankment, turned over three or four times, killed Jerry and killed the dog. The police picked up Kyle half a mile away, hitchhiking.”

Here Sally cocked her head as if she were trying to recall something, a gesture I remembered from my childhood. “Chloe and I gave up the house in San Miguel a little while after. The town was haunted for me, like a before-and-after photograph. And when Freddie died (his cleaning lady found him on his bed in a blue linen jacket: he must have lain down for a moment to catch his breath and never gotten up again, dear Freddie), there was nothing to keep me there.

“I rented an apartment at the edge of Forest Hill Village. The poor part. Still, it was comforting to be neighbours to so many Mercedes and pretty gardens. It was an old-style brick building in slight disrepair, with lead windows. Remember those? Kyle was back in Toronto too. He wanted to move in with us. At first, I said no. Absolutely not.

“There were tears, of course, then accusations. I’d deserted him in Mexico, left him with a harsh father. Had loved Chloe more than him. While he was talking, I had, for the first time ever, a sensation in my body that I was dealing with a pathological liar. A liar whose charm and intelligence had become a sort of lubricant for getting whatever he was trying to get. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m saying for the first time it occurred to me that for my beloved son Kyle, language, the words that you actually use, was simply a kind of camouflage that allowed him to be a predator without seeming to be a predator. Even his tears seemed self-serving. As though he was lying, knew he was lying, but didn’t care. Was only concerned with the success of the performance.”

“But you loved him.”

“Yes. Everything just flew out the window in his presence, and I’d think, He’s so fabulous. I kept thinking, This is circumstantial. But then I’d overhear him on the phone and I’d think, Who is this? Is this a mask? Where is the little boy who was scared of ghost stories, and who was so shy at summer camp that he was scared to ask where the toilets were?”

“Did it occur to you that he was crazy or an addict?”

“It occurred to me he was a little pig with his nose in the trough. A shameless, self-gratifying bag of appetites. And that once he understood this—that that was how the world was coming to see him—his vanity would stop him.”

“Makes sense.”

“Only on paper. Only on paper. I took him out to dinner. Taxis, crutches, the whole business. I wanted to be somewhere fresh with him, somewhere that didn’t smell like my apartment. I asked him when was the last time he was happy. He lied at first, gave me some fiction he thought I wanted to hear. I stopped him. I said, ‘Stop lying to me. It’s killing me. It’s killing us.’

“So he said with this goofy grin, ‘Breaking into a car, I suppose. Well, not exactly breaking in, but that moment when you look in the window, see something you like, look up and down the street, the coast is clear, and then you do it.’

“I asked if he was saying that to shock me. It wasn’t the criminality of it that was so distressing, it was the vulgarity, the sheer vulgarity of it, and the strange gleam of pleasure that he got in his eyes when he said it. He looked… feral. I said, ‘Was that really the last time you were happy?’

“He thought for a moment and he said, ‘Yeah, it really was, Mom.’

“‘Don’t you want to change your life?’ I said. ‘No, not really.’ I asked him if he thought he was going to live to be an old man. He said he didn’t think about it much. I said, ‘What do you think about, Kyle, when you wake up at four o’clock in the morning and you’re in some dirty little rooming house with needles on the table and bloodstains on the wall?’

“He seemed perplexed by the question, and I realized that something had shut down in him. That his fine intelligence had dimmed, and, I suspected, dimmed irretrievably. It was hard to admit it, but I wasn’t sitting in a restaurant with a skeletal young man whose wit used to make even the police do a double take. I was having dinner instead with a common, dull-witted television watcher. A chronic television watcher. Getting high, watching television, breaking into cars, getting high, watching television. That was it. That was his whole life.”

“You must have grown to loathe him.”

“No, no, I never did. Not for long, anyway. I couldn’t help feeling that there was a magic key out there, that if I could just find it and put it in the lock, the door would open and everything would change.”

“And?”

“Mothers are fools for their sons. I let him move in. I couldn’t leave him wandering the streets—I was afraid he’d get killed. He had known intuitively which nerves to pluck, especially that business about sending him home from Mexico. He camped out on my couch, making up his bed in the morning. For a while it worked. Chloe went to school; I took a Spanish course. I was hoping one day maybe I could go back to Mexico—somewhere else, though. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Gay towns are always the safest towns in foreign countries. I’d spent most of my money, so I was living on a disability pension.”

“Why didn’t you go back to making your wall hangings?”

She looked at the winking whale, at the red seagulls drifting over the lagoon. “I tried, but somehow the air had just gone out of it. I couldn’t do the drawing or the cutting. I’d have had to hire someone to do it, and that seemed like paying someone to collect stamps for you. But we were making out fine.”

She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: