look.
"I have to go now, my husband is home," and he was pretty sure shewasn't married, but he said good bye and hung up the phone.
He looked at his solemn brothers now and they looked at him.
"When are you going home?" he said, and Edward looked satisfied and Fredlooked a little disappointed and George looked like he wanted to throwhimself in front of a subway, and his bottom lip began to tremble.
"It was Ed's game," he said. "The Davey game, it was his." He pointed afinger. "You know, I'm not like them. I can be on my own. I'm what*they* need, they're not what *I* need."
The other two stared at their fat bellies in the direction of their fatfeet. Andrew had never heard George say this, had never even suspectedthat this thought lurked in his heart, but now that it was out on thetable, it seemed like a pretty obvious fact to have taken note of. Allthings being equal, things weren't equal. He was cold and numb.
"That's a really terrible thing to say, George," is what he said.
"That's easy for you to say," is what George said. "You are here, youare in the *world*. It's easy for you to say that we should be happywith things the way they are."
George turned on his heel and put his head down and bulled out the door,slamming it behind him so that the mail slot rattled and the glass shookand a stack of nice melamine cafeteria trays fell off a shelf andclattered to the ground.
He didn't come back that night. He didn't come back the next day. Ed andFred held their grumbling tummies and chewed at the insides of theirplump cheeks and sat on the unsold Danish Modern sofa in the shop andfreaked out the few customers that drifted in and then drifted out.
"This is worse than last time," Ed said, licking his lips and staring atthe donut that Albert refused to feel guilty about eating in front ofthem.
"Last time?" he said, not missing Felix's quick warning glare at Ed,even though Ed appeared to.
"He went away for a whole day, just disappeared into town. When he cameback, he said that he'd needed some away time. That he'd had an amazingday on his own. That he wanted to come and see you and that he'd do itwhether we wanted to come or not."
"Ah," Alvin said, understanding then how the three had come to bestaying with him. He wondered how long they'd last without the middle,without the ability to eat. He remembered holding the infant Eddie inhis arms, the boy light and hollowed out. He remembered holding thethree boys at once, heavy as a bowling ball. "Ah," he said. "I'll haveto have a word with him."
#
When Greg came home, Alan was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa,holding his head up with one hand. Eli and Fred snored uneasily in hisbed, breathing heavily through their noses.
"Hey," he said as he came through the door, scuffing at the lock withhis key for a minute or two first. He was rumpled and dirty, streakedwith grime on his jawline and hair hanging limp and greasy over hisforehead.
"Greg," Alan said, nodding, straightening out his spine and listening toit pop.
"I'm back," George said, looking down at his sneakers, which squishedwith grey water that oozed over his carpet. Art didn't say anything,just sat pat and waited, the way he did sometimes when con artists cameinto the shop with some kind of scam that they wanted him to play alongwith.
It worked the same with George. After a hard stare at his shoes, heshook his head and began to defend himself, revealing the things that heknew were indefensible. "I had to do it, I just had to. I couldn't livein that cave, with that thing, anymore. I couldn't live inside those twoanymore. I'm going crazy. There's a whole world out here and every day Iget farther away from it. I get weirder. I just wanted to be normal.
"I just wanted to be like you.
"They stopped letting me into the clubs after I ran out of money, andthey kicked me out of the cafés. I tried to ride the subway all night,but they threw me off at the end of the line, so I ended up digging atransfer out of a trash can and taking an all-night bus back downtown.
"No one looked at me twice that whole time, except to make sure that Iwas gone. I walked back here from Eglinton."
That was five miles away, a good forty minute walk in the night and thecold and the dark. Greg pried off his sneakers with his toes and thenpulled off his grey, squelching socks. "I couldn't find anyone who'd letme use the toilet," he said, and Alan saw the stain on his pants.
He stood up and took Greg by the cold hand, as he had when they wereboth boys, and said, "It's all right, Gord. We'll get you cleaned up andchanged and put you to bed, okay? Just put your stuff in the hamper inthe bathroom and I'll find you a change of clothes and make a couplesandwiches, all right?"
And just as easy as that, George's spirit was tamed. He came out of theshower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam foundfor him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam'sbed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they werereassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal withraisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto.
"I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?" Alan said as hepoured himself a coffee.
They looked up at him. Ed's eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut.
"And you'll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks,okay?"
Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put apurple ten on top of it. "For the taxi to the Greyhound station," headded.
#
They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around theapartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases offhis bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasingthe signs of their stay.
"Well," he said at length. "I should get going to the shop."
"Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could closehis lips again.
"Right," Adam said. "Well."
They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair,already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood andcracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pocketsabsently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.
"Well," Adam said.
They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesturethat left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited eventhough -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them verypatiently indeed.
And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless sparekeys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.
#
What I found in the cave,
(he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the tasteof vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping rundown the hillside)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of howhard to squeeze, whether to caress)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been therefor what he'd seen and heard)
What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Herskeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Herred hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over hersmall skull like a halo.
He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at theexact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered withrags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles ofshit here and there.
The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brotherBradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn'tfind him under there.
Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. EvenDavey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone,except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the unevenfloor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had rundry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guanoand gunk sliming her basket.
I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that
I-- I --
I found that I couldn't see in the dark anymore. I'd never had amoment's pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly,the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountainat all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and Ifell twice and hurt my head, here --
(he touched the goose egg he'd raised on his forehead)
and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn't sound rightand I couldn't hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stoodthere with them in my arms --
(his hand came back bloody and he wiped it absently on the grass andMimi took hold of it)
Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I'd never