“This should be a private conversation,” the organizer said.
Afterwards, as people filed out, someone handed you a therapist’s card and you wanted to shove it down their throat. You’ve talked until words are meaningless. Give the fucking therapist’s card to that woman. Make her go to anger management. Make her go to a retreat with former students and face the harm she’s done.
She called you intractable back then. Said you deserved worse. You got a cough and they sent you away like a problem dog needing to be put down. They sent you to the preventorium.
That place.
That place.
Hell is a hospital where you are the rat. Where your body is encased in plaster so you can’t fight, can’t move. Your world begins and ends at the mercy of people who think you are a rat. Hell is the Trickster who rescues you, then leaves you, leaves you, leaves you, and when you finally leave him, he comes back pretending to be your son, Wade, and, when you discover his trickery, expects you to forgive like an angel when you are a rat. Your daughters hate you and you know they’re right. You are unforgivable because you are a rat.
Hell is thinking your grandson is not your grandson but your ex-lover in disguise, torturing you again for leaving him. You waited for Wee’git to jump out—surprise! He didn’t seem to understand that every piece of your soul was flayed.
You drove him away, you drove them all away, and Agnetha, Agnetha, Agnetha. Your sister. She’s refusing chemo this time, says she can’t go through it again, and the lupus is slowly shutting her down. Soon there’ll be no more phone calls that last for hours, no more laughing, gossipy moments.
Look at your handsome grandson. So earnest. Regret is like a scalpel slicing through pus.
The first letter he wrote you was so carefully printed, little smudges where Jared had taken an eraser and corrected a wrong vowel. The shock of it. God is real, God is real, God is not a small sadist who takes pleasure in your subjugation. God is your grandson writing you a letter to tell you he hopes you are okay even after you were an absolute rat.
You beckon him to you now and you lay your hands on his chest and call on the heavenly host, God, the Creator, to burn the hex from its nest, a ball of hate that frays when it is touched with light. Heal him. Free him from the evil that wants to twist him to its will.
Your heart is an old safe. You pry the rusty doors open, fearing it is empty, but your love is still there and you set it free.
25
QUI VEUT NOYER SON CHIEN L’ACCUSE DE LA RAGE
Jared woke face down on his bedroom floor. His grandmother slept in his bed, mouth open, her bottom denture sliding to the left, giving her a crazed, crooked look. Her power hummed like a radiator with an occasional clank. The tunnels in the walls around him shone like lit paths. How had he never seen them before? He couldn’t sense Aiden anywhere. The entire apartment building was empty of ghosts.
He could see the outline of where the portal had been. Faint, sparkling threads led from him through the floor. He couldn’t touch them, couldn’t pull his friends back from the pocket universe that was and wasn’t in the floor. The world there was juxtaposed with this world. Here, but not.
When he went out on the balcony, he saw Bob high in the sky, hovering over him. In the distance, towards West Vancouver, Jared could hear Sophia, her deep thrum now more like bubbling lava.
Sophia, he thought. I’m sorry.
Her attention was instant, a crawling sensation like fire ants marching under his skin.
Trickster, she thought.
She was alone in a funeral parlour looking down at what was left of Philip Martin’s face. A whistle in the air, high and sweet, grew louder as the invisible thing came close and then faded as it flew away.
Philip, Sophia thought, touching his hand.
She was Sophia, but not. Something inside her thought, Even through the embalming fluid, you can smell the flesh.
He told Sophia, I didn’t mean to get Dad killed.
He wasn’t your father, Sophia said.
He still remembered the woman who took him to the movies on her Vespa, her perfect hair and her knowing smile inspiring complete strangers to buy them popcorn. Spider-Man. They’d seen Spider-Man and she’d put her fur cape down to cushion the booster seat and handed him a bucket of popcorn the size of his head.
She gave him a memory: A coy wolf tearing off his human skin to run from you faster. Invisible things whistled overhead. Something slammed into the coy wolf and the back of his head blossomed red, a metallic taste of copper in your mouth as you sank your teeth into him.
We ate everyone that ate Philip, she thought. Now we want Jwasins, their leader.
I want to talk to Sophia.
Her mutts said only you can bring her back. Only you know where she is.
Sophia, can you hear me?
She doesn’t want to talk to you.
I love you, Sophia. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I—
She doesn’t care, the thing in Sophia said. Bring us Jwasins or we’ll stand by and watch the ogress’s new pack kill everyone you love. They know where your mother is.
Suddenly, he was alone in his head, stunned.
—
Time passed yet no time passed. Jared saw himself sitting on his bedroom floor. Wee’git in his raven form groomed a feather on a branch beside him. Jared didn’t even remember leaving his body, but now he perched beside his father on a branch with a perfect view of Mave’s apartment.
We should leave, Wee’git thought.
What’s happened to Sophia?
Nothing good.
Could Sophia take the ogress?
Yes, Wee’git thought. And then, in the state she’s in, she’d kill your psy— mother and then you. Sophia’s your nuclear option. Jared, get back in your own body and
