“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, relax. It means Kent ought to have married someone closer to his own heart.”
I huffed.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Jason. It always looked bad on you. Kent needed a more devoted wife.”
I was floored. “Devoted?”
“You’re being obtuse. Barb could never fully surrender to Kent. And without surrender, she could never be a true wife.”
I fidgeted with his water decanter, which seemed to be made of pink pencil eraser material. Why does everything in a hospital have to be not just ugly, but evocative of quick, premature and painful death? I said, “Barb has a personality.”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t.”
“She’s the mother of your two grandchildren.”
“I’m not an idiot, Jason.”
“How could you have gone and said something so insensitive last night-suggesting that one of the kids might not even have a soul. Are you really as mindlessly cruel as you seem?”
“The modern world creates complex moral issues.”
“Twins are not complex moral issues. Twins are twins.”
“I read the papers and watch the news, Jason. I see what’s going on.”
I changed the subject. “How long are you in here?”
“Maybe five days.” He coughed, and it evidently hurt. Good.
“Are you sleeping okay?”
“Last night like a baby.”
A mood swept over me, and as with any important question in life, the asking felt unreal, like it came from another person’s mouth: “How come you accused me of murder, Dad?”
Silence.
“Well?”
Still no reply.
I said, “I didn’t come in here planning to ask you this. But now that I have, I’m not leaving until you give me a reply.”
He coughed.
“Now don’t you play the little old man with me. Answer me.”
My father turned his face away, so I walked to the head of the bed, squatted down and grabbed his head, forcing him to lock eyes with me. “Hi, Dad. I asked you a question, and I think you owe me an answer. Whaddya say, huh?”
His expression wasn’t hate and it wasn’t love. “I didn’t accuse you of murder.”
“Really now?”
“I merely pointed out that you had murder in your heart, and that you chose to act on that murderous impulse. Take from that what you will.”
“That’s all?”
“Your mother, as you’ll recall, stopped the dialogue at that point.”
“Mom stood up for me.”
“You really don’t understand, do you?”
“What-there’s something to understand here?”
My father said, “You were perfect.”
“I was what?”
“Your soul was perfect. If you’d died in the cafeteria, you’d have gone directly to heaven. But instead you chose murder, and now you’ll never be totally sure of where you’re headed.”
“You honestly believe this?”
“I’ll always believe it.”
I let go of his head. The guy in the next bed was rousing. My father said, “Jason?” but I was already through the door. From his cracked and bruised chest he yelled the words, “All I ever wanted for you was the Kingdom.”
He’d stuck his saber through my gut. He’d done his job.
It’s around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
Back to the massacre.
Two weeks after the attack, videocassettes were mailed to the school’s principal, to the local TV news programs and to the police. They had been made by the three gunmen using a Beta cam they’d rented from the school’s A/V crib. It pretty much laid out what they were going to do, how they were going to do it, and why-the generic sort of alienation we’ve all become too familiar with during the 1990s.
You’d have thought these tapes would have cleared me completely, but no. Someone had to arrange for the tapes to be mailed, and someone had to be filming these three losers spouting their crap: it was a hand-held camera. So even when I was cleared, in the public mind I was never spotlessly cleared. There was never any doubt with the police and RCMP, thank God, but let me tell you, once people get a nutty idea in their head, it’s there for good. And to this day, whoever shot the video and mailed the dubs remains a mystery.
A few celebrities emerged from the massacre, the first being me, semi-redeemed after two weeks of exhaustive investigation revealed my obvious innocence. But of course, for the only two weeks that really mattered, I was demonized.
The second celebrity-and the biggest-was Cheryl. When she wrote GOD IS NOWHERE/GOD IS NOW HERE, she’d finished with GOD IS NOW HERE, which was taken for a miracle, something I find a bit of a stretch.
The third celebrity was Jeremy Kyriakis, the gun boy who repented and was then vaporized for doing so.
During the weeks I spent in motel rooms, I often had nothing to do except reread the papers and watch TV while I exceeded my daily allotment of sedatives and thought of Cheryl, about our secret life together and-I can’t express what it felt like to be trashed for two weeks while at the same time Jeremy Kyriakis was being offered as poster boy for the it’s-never-too-late strain of religious thinking. It was Jeremy who took out most of the kids by the snack machines-and shot off Demi Harshawe’s foot, too-as well as producing most of the trophy case casualties, but he repented and so he was forgiven and lionized.
In the third week after the massacre, Kent returned to Alberta and we moved back into the house. Now I was a semi-hero, but at that point screw everybody. On the first Monday, around 9:15 in the morning, just after the soaps had started on TV, Mom asked if I was going to go back to school. I said no, and she said, “I figured so. I’m going to sell the house. It’s in my name.”
“Good idea.”
There was a pause. “We should probably move away for a while. Maybe to my sister’s place in New Brunswick. And change your hair like they do on crime shows. Find a job. Try and put time between you and the past few weeks.”
I made some forays into the world, but wherever I went I caused a psychic ripple that made me uncomfortable. At the Capilano Mall, one woman began crying and hugging me, and wouldn’t let go, and when I finally got her off me, she’d left a phone number in my hand. Downtown I was spotted by a group of these dead Goth girls, who followed me everywhere, touching the sidewalk where my feet had just been as if their palms could receive heat from the act. As for school-related activities like sports, they were off the menu, too. Nobody ever phoned to apologize for abandoning me. The principal showed up on Tuesday-the For Sale sign was already on the lawn by then-and there were still eggs and spray-painted threats and curses all over the house’s walls. Mom let him in, asked if he’d like some coffee and settled him at the kitchen table with a cup, and then she and I went through the carport door and drove down to Park Royal to shop for carry-on baggage. When we got back a few hours later he was gone.
A week later I was out in the front yard with a wire brush, dishwashing soap and a hose, trying to scrape away the egg stains; the proteins and oils had soaked into the wood, and scrubbing was turning out to be pointless. A minivan full of charismatic Youth Alive! robots pulled into the driveway. There were four of them, led by the intrusive jerk Matt. They were wearing these weird, desexed jeans that somehow only Alive!ers seemed to own. They all had suntans, too, and I remembered an old brochure: “Tans come from the sun, and the sun is fun, and Youth Alive!, while being a serious organization charged with the care of youth, is also a fun, sunny, lively kind of group, too.”
I had nothing to say to these guys, and ignored them as my father might ignore a pickup truck full of satanists listening to rock music being played backward.
Matt said, “Taking it easy, huh? We thought we’d come visit. You’re not back in school.”
&
nbsp; I carried on scrubbing the house with steel wool.
“It’s been a rough few weeks for all of us.”
I looked at them. “Please leave.”
“But, Jason, we just got here.”
“Leave.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t be…”
I blasted them with the garden hose. They stood their ground: “You’re upset. That’s natural,” Matt said.
“Do any of you have any idea what traitorous scum you are?”
“Traitors? We were merely helping the RCMP.”
“I learned about all of your help, thank you.”
In spite of the hose, the foursome advanced. Were they going to kidnap me or group hug me? Lay their bronzed fingers on my head and pronounce me whole and returned to the flock?
Then a shot was fired-and two more-by my mother from the second floor. She was making craters in the lawn with Reg’s .410. She blasted out the minivan’s lights. “You heard Jason. Leave. Now.”
They did, and for whatever reason, the cops never showed up.
Word of Mom and the gun must have kept away quite a few potential visitors. There were a few press people; a few family friends who’d vanished during those first two weeks; some Alive! girls leaving baked goods, cards and flowers on the doorstep, all of which I unwrapped and threw into the juniper shrubs for the raccoons. In any event, we never let anybody through our front door; within a month, the house was sold and we’d moved to my aunt’s place in Moncton, New Brunswick.
My brain feels sludgy. It’s late, but Joyce is always up for a good walk.
Just in the door. A warm, dry night out, my favorite kind of weather, and so rare here. During Joyce’s walk I saw a car like the one Cheryl’s mother, Linda, used to drive-a LeBaron with wood siding. The model looked good for the first week it was out, but a decade of sun and salt and frost have made it resemble the kind of car people in movies drive after a nuclear war.
Linda wrote me some time after we moved away; the letter is one of the few items I’ve kept across the years. It was mailed to my old address and forwarded to my aunt’s house. It read:
Dear Jason,
I’m deeply ashamed that I’ve not contacted you before this. In the midst of losing Cheryl, we were vulnerable and chose to listen to strangers and not our own hearts. At the time when you needed comfort and support the most, we turned away from you, and it’s something Lloyd, Chris and I face every day in the mirror. I don’t ask your forgiveness, but I do request your understanding.
It’s been a few months since October 4, but it feels like ten years. I’ve quit my job and, in theory, I’m supposed to be overseeing the Cheryl Anway Trust, but all I do is wake up, dress myself, drink some coffee and drive down to this office space we’ve rented on Clyde Avenue. There’s not much for me to do here. Cheryl’s Youth Alive! friends take care of the Trust’s every function-handling cash, cheques and credit card receipts, sending thank-you notes, manning the phones, filling out tax forms, and so on. It’s a busy place, but I don’t fit in. I wish I could derive some sort of consolation from the Trust’s success, but I don’t, and they all work so hard-they’ve got bumper stickers, bracelets and postcards, and, for what it’s worth, a ghostwriter will soon be doing a book about Cheryl’s life which may or may not help other young people or their parents. It won’t help me. I shouldn’t be telling you this-this letter may never even find you-but nothing in the past months has brought me any solace, and how could it? In the last year of her life, my daughter was no longer my daughter. She was somebody else. I have no idea who it was who died in the shooting. What sort of mother would say that about her child?
I’ve just had one of those moments. Maybe you’ve had them, too-a moment when the distance and perspective I think I’ve put between me and Cheryl’s shooting dissolves, and I’m right back on October 4 again-and then suddenly it’s months later and I’m a middle-aged woman sitting in a rainy suburb on a weekday, and her daughter is dead for no reason, and she never knew her daughter at all. Her daughter chose something else; Cheryl chose something else over me and what our family offered, and she did it with smiles for everybody, but with condescension. And what am I to do? There is nothing I can do. Some man or woman is going to write Cheryl’s life story, and they’re going to ask me questions and I won’t have a thing to say.
I don’t know if I’m angry with Cheryl or angry at the universe. Do you get angry, Jason? Do you? Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?
Lloyd and Chris are taking things much better than I am. I’m lucky in that regard. Chris is young-he’ll heal. There will be scars, but he’ll make it through okay. We have no idea what to do with him and school. He’s having a hard time readjusting at Delbrook, which they’ve just reopened-they bulldozed the cafeteria and built a new one in just four weeks. We might have to send him to a private school, which we can’t afford. That’s for another letter.
Jason, I apologize. You don’t need this on top of everything else, but then maybe you do. Maybe you need to know that there was someone else out there who loved the girl beneath the perfect smile, the girl who, to my mind, foolishly prayed for suffering so she could play at martyrdom. Jason, there’s no one to talk to about this. All systems have failed me. In five minutes I’ll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.
I beg your forgiveness, wherever you are. Please write or phone or visit if you can. Please think of me kindly and know that is how I think of you,
Yours,
Linda Anway
A letter from Mr. Anway came three days later:
Dear Jason,
Linda tells me she has written to you, and in so doing she has shamed me. How can I thank you for your bravery on that horrible morning? You saved the lives of so many children without thought of your own safety. I drove down to your house earlier today, but it had been sold quite a while ago. There was no forwarding address for you, but I’m hoping Canada Post will track down your family with this letter.
Linda hasn’t been herself since October 4. How could she be? I don’t know what she wrote in her letter, but please take into account that we’ve both been running on empty for months now. That I didn’t recognize the media’s smear job of your fine nature is a stain I will take to the grave.
I asked if she had described the funeral for you, and she hadn’t. So I will. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of October, a week after the shooting. I had thought the week would allow things to cool down, but instead things snowballed, and have never stopped snowballing.
We opted to have a graveside ceremony only. This was a tactical decision made by Linda and me. The people from Youth Alive! wanted to run the show, with no regard for our wishes. We figured they’d be having events of their own soon enough (we were right) and we wanted something that was entirely ours, and more intimate. This was a mistake.
For traffic and crowd control reasons, the police had asked that we not have a cortége drive to the cemetery, but that we meet the coffin there. We thought they were overreacting, but we went along with their suggestion: another bad idea, as it turned out. By two in the afternoon there were hundreds of cars parked on the sides of the road around the cemetery. The RCMP escorted us in, and the cemetery was overrun with (the papers reported) about two thousand people. My skin crawled. That’s a cliché, but now I know what it means-like a slug crawling down the small of your back.
There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl’s grave area, and that was good, but what made me furious was that the Youth Alive! people had brought hundreds of black felt markers, and passed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl’s casket was densely covered both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter’s casket like a yearbook. Maybe
I was mad because I’d chosen the casket in Cheryl’s favorite shade of white, slightly pearly, and I’d been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to the inevitable. I suppose it’s cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you. Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.
Before Cheryl’s funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would prepare us for Cheryl’s, but no, there’s nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too preachy for my taste.
I’m still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I’d always thought her conversion was too extreme, and so did Linda. Linda says you’ve had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I’m with you all the way in thinking that they’re slightly creepy. And it was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It’s because I listened to them, and not my own heart, that I’m sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having invited you over to our home ages ago.
This letter has become difficult to write, and it’s through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I wish I’d taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl’s coffin. Why didn’t I? What foolish pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl’s Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney World. I can’t share in this excitement, probably because I’m about thirty years closer to death than they are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook with GOD IS NOW HERE as some sort of miracle, and this I can’t understand. It’s like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, he loves me not. It doesn’t feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They’re always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God-I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we’re also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.