ALL GOOD SONS 4-5

 I was only going to post my short stories here, but a few people seemed to like the first three chapters I posted last week of my last novel, All Good Sons, so I've decided to serialise it. To be honest, it's the novel that most troubled me upon release, maybe because it focuses a lot more on domestic horror, which isn't really my wheelhouse. My fiance said I was crazy to think this way when I read him a few chapters aloud the other day, so maybe I'm being too critical of myself. 

CHAPTER 4

Lenore and I had rarely seen each other since she moved in with Mom, so the day she left for college was more like a reunion than a farewell, albeit it a fairly distant one. Every school she applied to accepted her but, taking my mother’s sage advice, she chose to attend the one that was farthest away.

‘Why England? You hate winter.’

Lenore took a picture of her boyfriend from her dresser and put it in her bag.

‘I acclimatized myself to the cold a long time ago.’

This was a comment for which I could think of no adequate rebuttal.

‘You don’t know anybody over there; won’t you be lonely?’

‘Eric will be there and even when he isn’t, at least around seven thousand other people I’ll be alone with noise.’

She reached for a picture of our little family that was taken by my mother during a rare moment of mutual happiness, reconsidered, and left it where it was.

‘I’ll call you when I get there. Make sure the machine’s on.’

CHAPTER 5

Now I knew the who and the where and the how, but getting to the why was becoming more and more like getting a straight story from a cast of unreliable narrators in a thousand page novel in which the last ten pages were torn out. I hadn’t done a singing gig since the weekend before prom - it’s a little difficult to croon about dreaming a little dream and sound convincing while simultaneously living out your biggest nightmare - but there was no other way I could justify taking two weeks off to both my bosses. I dropped in on Grey before I left. I’d visited him three times a week for just over two years, and nothing would make me abandon him; not even avenging him. I ran the comb through his rapidly darkening dirty blonde hair.

‘We can do that,’ smiled Grey’s afternoon nurse.

‘I know.’

I lathered up his face with shaving cream. ‘You know you’re looking more and more like your Dad each day, Christ help us.’

I ran his favourite razor slowly along his jaw and continued voicing my train of thought. There was no way I was letting the fact that he couldn’t answer back stop us from chatting like we used to.

‘Still haven’t figured out why this happened to you yet, but I will.’

I didn’t tell him about Pierre. Grey didn’t need to hear that. He had a habit of taking on everybody else’s guilt, even when he was little. Allowing a blow-by-blow account of the death of his best friend to filter through to that windowless world in which he was temporarily residing would be doling out more punishment for yet another crime he didn’t commit. Nobody was going to hurt my boy again, least of all me. The punishment I was willing to carry out for my own satisfaction? That was another matter entirely.

The last time I rode in a van to a gig, I was six months pregnant and surrounded by Neanderthals who smelled like a tannery. This time around, I was traveling with my own band and, although these guys smelled a lot better and the rowdiest they got was when someone ran a successful campaign in Call Of Duty, I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to, so I spent the ride to Boston comparing what little I’d apparently known about Tyler Haynes to the information Pierre had given me. I’d never seen Tyler without a permanent, dopey smile on his face but his nickname, The Professor, was not an ironic one. While Tyler lacked the everyday smarts that helped one remember to put on a jacket when it was snowing, and prevented one from swallowing that mysterious pill one found on the floor - he possessed a hunger for knowledge that put his friends to shame.

I remember coming home from grocery shopping one Saturday morning to find him sitting on my porch, waiting for Grey to drag his ass out of bed and let him in. He was fourteen years old at the time, and the book he had his nose wedged in was The Odyssey. I was a reader, and I’d tackled my fair share of literary classics and lived to tell the tale, but even the bravest of bookworms had been stumped by this house brick.

‘Enjoying it?’ I smiled.

Tyler marked his page and closed the book.

‘Hi, Miss Perris. Yeah.’

‘I tried reading it a couple of years ago; couldn’t get past the language.’

‘But that’s the best part.’

I dismissed this at the time as a kid trying to prove himself - albeit in a less traditional manner than the usual breaking into Dad’s liquor cabinet and drinking until he vomited - but kids who are brave enough to put their intelligence on display for all the world to see are very often suppressing the courage to do something else. In Tyler’s case, it was his ability to make even the smallest of decisions without knowing the general consensus first. I’d often witnessed arguments between the boys over which wrestler was the greatest or what movie they were going to see (and probably stop everyone else in the theatre from seeing), and never once did I see Tyler put in his vote first. He may very well have been the smartest kid in the room but when it came to putting in his two cents, Tyler waited until the pot was jingling with everyone else’s change. He was a sweet kid, but so was Grey and, as vile as it may seem, I capitalized on this lack of character by asking another favor of Daryl.

‘Jesus!’ Given the circumstances, I thought Daryl took the news quite well. ‘It ain’t like we spanked this guy with a paddle, Vi.’

‘I feel just as shitty about it as you do…shittier, actually.’

‘Have you talked to any of them?’

‘One.’

‘I’ve done some fucked-up stuff, but tuning up kids ain’t one of them.’

‘They’re not kids any more,’ I said, ‘and you can’t fix a dead motor.’

‘Are you telling me…?’

‘I didn’t do it intentionally.’

‘I say this as your friend and as the man who would kiss a moving train for you: you don’t want this life.’

‘The only life I’m thinking about is Grey’s. Are you gonna help me, or not?’

‘You know I will.’

He did help me, with zero reservations but for the fact that he didn’t like where I was headed. I wasn’t concerned with any direction but dead straight ahead, and the only way I was going to get there was by ripping off all my mirrors and speeding away with the single-minded tunnel vision that was required. Contrary to appearances, Daryl’s connections extended well beyond the gear heads and thugs one normally associated with his lifestyle, and one such associate was a nineteen-year-old computer hacker named Charles Lowrey who, lovely as he was, would probably never have crossed paths with Grey had they known each other; it wasn’t as though Grey cared enough about school to have a guy like Charles fudge his grades.

I did have Charles look into the academic records of another young man I knew. Remembering (vaguely) the social schedule of college kids, I slipped the flier for our gig under his dorm room door at five a.m, which was the perfect time for a woman in her thirties to roam the halls, given that more than half the residents were probably just rolling over by then. I wrote a note on the front. It was short, succinct, and guaranteed to get his attention.

My gig finishes at twelve-thirty. Table 12 will be waiting. Don’t disappoint me.

Twenty-year-old testosterone aside, most guys would’ve been more than a little creeped out at the notion of some strange chick tracking down their living quarters and slipping a note under their door like a stalker in the night but this was Tyler; he’d never heard an order he could refuse. It did occur to me, briefly, that he may have grown an inch or two of backbone during his time away from home, and I had a contingency plan at the ready just in case. Thankfully, he turned out to be just as predictable as I remembered.

The band and I were almost through with our second set, and I was on the second chorus of a Pat Bennettar song to which several of the audience members were probably conceived when Tyler finally walked in. The only unusual thing about his appearance was significant: the boy I knew would never have gone out on the town without the company of a murder of crows with much bigger beaks than his. Maybe the Tyler I knew really was standing upright these days.

Then he sat at his table, just as I hit the high note at the bridge before the third chorus, and his bug-eyed expression when he looked toward the stage and saw me said two things:

She knows

and

She knows I’m scared shitless.

I also knew that, despite the fact that every instinct in his body was probably screaming at him to flee, he wasn’t going anywhere. I’d seen that look of defeat before. I was a consensus of one and, without uttering a word, I’d spoken too loudly and too clearly for his cowardly little heart to ignore me.

I turned to the band and gave the order.

‘Eighteen.’

I unwittingly introduced Tyler to the rock prince of darkness when I let him and the rest of Grey’s friends rifle through my record collection one rainy Saturday afternoon. A storm had taken out the TV antenna and our phone line, so an assortment of Jurassic Rock was the only thing on hand to amuse a house full of bored grade-schoolers.

‘Jeez…how old IS your Mom?’ Nash muttered.

‘For your information, that record came out when I was three, and Grey’s dad bought it for me when I was sixteen. How old do you think I am?’

‘Twenty-five,’ he snickered. Apparently, this was equivalent to octogenarian status in the eyes of a ten-year-old. Little did the cheeky bastard know he’d guessed wrong and given me two extra years. All of the boys snickered at the selection before them, some more politely than others, but they all agreed that the long-haired, white voodoo ghouls whose faces graced the cover of Love It To Death were a cut above the rest in a scary-cool kind of way. Only Grey and Tyler were still listening by the end, and the track about the eighteen year old having an existential crisis struck a chord with both of them, so much so that it became their unofficial anthem. It was playing full blast on the stereo in the limo when Grey left the house for the last time. The two of them just about gave me a heart attack, standing on the back seat as the car reversed down our practically vertical driveway with their heads sticking out of the sunroof, yowling along to a song of which they were only just beginning to understand the meaning.

Looking out at all the bright young things now, I tried imagining Grey partying with them. It would’ve been just like him to come up for the weekend to visit Tyler, spot a group of naïve girls and charm every one of them with wit that would knock any self-respecting Ivy-leaguer on his ass.

‘This is for all the freshmen in the room, some fresher than others, if memory serves.’

The majority of the audience members laughed. That was what was so cool about college kids; even if they didn’t get your jokes, they laughed anyway for fear of looking dumb. I sang the song with more zeal than I usually would, emulating the vigour of a performance by two eighteen-year-olds with nothing (yet) to lose. I didn’t look into Tyler’s eyes once for the entirety of the song because there was no need. When the song was over and the crowd had finished whooping and saluting with their two dollar beers, I announced we were taking a break and went over to Tyler’s table. He shot up out of his seat like he was standing to attention, terrified not to appear friendly and polite but equally terrified of what I would say.

I approached him with no qualms because I was confident that most of the bar patrons wouldn’t remember me, given their varying stages of inebriation, and even if they or the skeleton staff on duty were to be interviewed, the only information the police would net by performing a background check on a singer named Naomi Ellen Cohen was that she died in bed on the twenty-ninth of July, nineteen seventy four. I smiled and gave him a lingering hug. He froze, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

‘You’re a fan,’ I breathed in his ear. ‘You saw me sing at The Potato Farm on your eighteenth birthday and you were so stoked when you found out I was in town that you shot over here.’

The gig at The Potato Farm, a newly renovated Irish pub patronized largely by rockers and yuppies was my last, and the reason I knew Tyler would remember it was because I overheard him begging the other boys to go at the time. None of them did, naturally, because watching your buddy’s mom strut around a stage while clad in leather was, like, eeeew.

I sat down, and gestured for him to do the same. When he did, I reached out and took his hand.

‘We’re going to have a conversation, and you are going to smile, and nod, and look enraptured, ‘got it?’

‘Got it,’ he said, smiling.

‘Good.’ I let go of his hand. ‘I know my son wasn’t knocked into a coma by a biker. The reason I know this is because you aren’t the first person I’ve spoken to.’

Tyler swallowed.

‘Pierre wasn’t the brightest Crayola in the box, but he was smart enough to know when to talk.’

Tyler’s mouth was set in a smile that made him look like he was suffering a stroke. For all I knew, he could’ve been.

‘I take it you heard.’ I took his hand again and patted it. ‘You’re going to die eventually, whether you do it by pissing and raving in senior purgatory or by having your bowel redesigned by a dude named Tank is completely up to you.’

‘Oh God…’

I took the skin between his first and middle fingers and pinched.

‘Tell me what happened, and why, and keep smiling lest I pinch something else.’

It had been Ozzie’s idea, and Nash had been the details man. Ozzie had been in love, (or at least a teenage facsimile of it), with Lulu since seventh grade, as had most of them, so he was displeased to say the least when Grey won her heart. All the boys were a little injured, in the butt-hurt kind of way, but Ozzie took a double hit – one to the heart, the other several degrees south. When he went to Nash for advice on how to avenge this latter blow, Nash was only too happy to oblige.

Convincing the others to participate had been relatively easy, and the secret behind their success was one rudimentary human principle: some people needed different kinds of convincing than others. All it took to coerce Pierre into inflicting grievous bodily harm upon his best friend was threatening to do the same to somebody else.

‘They told him they’d kill you. I heard them. They made him choose, and he chose you. It’s no surprise, really; he always thought of you as his second Mom.’

I swallowed a dull ache in my throat. It would keep.

‘How’d they get to you?’

Tyler stared down at the table. ‘Remember Miss Ritchie?’

‘The English teacher?’

Tyler nodded. ‘I’m the reason she was fired.’

‘I thought they caught her stealing from the social fund?’

‘I took that money on a dare, and I kept taking it, even after Principle Reid started marking the bills.’

‘Shall I hazard a guess as to the identity of the darer?’

He nodded again. ‘I carried it around for a month. I couldn’t take it home, in case my Mom found it. Then they did a locker search and…’

‘And you panicked.’

‘Nash grabbed it and shoved it in Miss Ritchie’s purse, then he ran down the hall past her and knocked her down – accidentally, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Everything fell out, right in front of everybody. Nash showed me a picture he’d taken inside my locker the next day, told me if ever he needed a favour, he’d let me know.’

‘And this was the favour. How did he get Lulu on board?’

Lulu was a deceptively jealous girl. She’d never batted an eye when Grey chatted to other girls – whether those girls were above or below her on the social ladder – and she didn’t look twice when he gave these same girls consolatory hugs or congratulatory kisses on the cheek but dancing, it turned out, was the final frontier. Tyler sowed the seeds of discontent when she came out of the ladies room.

‘Hannah Lynch looks nice.’

‘Amazing what a couple of boxes of Kleenex can do.’

‘You don’t like her?’

‘She’s okay.’

‘Grey sure does.’

Lulu shrugged. ‘Grey likes everybody.’

‘You know his treble clef earring? She gave it to him. It matches the one on her bracelet.’

Used to receiving gifts from anonymous admirers, Grey had put the earring on when he found it in his locker without bothering to learn the identity of the giver, which was lucky for Tyler. Lulu had no idea that Hannah’s participation had been bought with a secret that had been perfect blackmail fodder but that Tyler was, for some reason, unwilling to share with me. It spoke volumes as to the kind of person he was; fair, decent, kind. It also confirmed for me that he had a weakness.

At the sight of Hannah Lynch playing with Grey’s earring, flicking his earlobe back and forth with her index finger, Lulu’s feelings boiled over. She charged at Grey, ripped the treble clef from his earlobe, and threw it in Hannah’s face.

‘You like music so much, here’s some bells.’ She clapped Grey’s ears, hard, and when Hannah was stupid enough to try to inspect the damage, Lulu went full riot girl on her. She grabbed a hank of Hannah’s lovely black hair and used it to yank her head back so that Hannah was forced to look her in the eye.

‘Since when do singers act like groupies?’

She spat in Hannah’s face and shoved her down.

‘Whore.’

She stormed out of the reception room, followed closely by Tyler and, following in the footsteps of every other eighteen-year-old guy who ever pissed off his girl, Grey waited a few minutes before going after her. This gave Ozzie time to wend his way into her fragile little heart – much as she could be said to have one. Tyler said she was “Crying pretty hard” when Ozzie comforted her, and I could just picture him gently gripping her heaving shoulders and laying on the firm-but-kind charm that no one but an eighteen-year-old girl could have fallen for.

‘It’s not the first time he’s done this.’

I pictured Lulu’s face, the look of bewilderment slowly turning to anger.

‘You’re a liar!’

I pictured Lulu beating at Ozzie’s chest with her bony little fists, wailing at him. I didn’t have to picture what came next, because Tyler told me, beat for beat. Ozzie tightened his grip on Lulu’s shoulders and pushed her up against a wall, holding her there so she would get the full measure of his meaning.

‘This is what he does, Lu, he plays with women like they’re his fuckin’ toys then he throws them in the garbage and you’re next.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘You’re NEXT! So let’s teach him a lesson.’

Tyler told me Nash had smiled as he said this, but the malevolent grin Tyler described wasn’t nearly as twisted as the one that was flashing before my eyes.

‘Don’t let him get away with this, Lu,’ said Tyler. He nudged Pierre, who at that moment must’ve looked like he wished he was any place else in the world.

‘Yeah, come on, Lu,’ said Pierre. Only Tyler noticed a tear run down his cheek before he swatted it away.

Nash took Lulu by the hand and led her behind the building, motioning for Tyler and Ozzie to follow. Once there, he let her in on the plan his deceptively quick mind had just come up with. Lulu only looked slightly more convinced by the time he’d finished. It was Ozzie who finally turned her.

‘It’ll be okay, Lu. He needs to learn. We’ll all go down to the beach after prom, just like we planned.’

Grey came outside, calling for her.

‘Just tell him you’re sorry.’

Ozzie put his arm around Lulu’s shoulder and led her back around to the front of the building, whispering last second instructions into her ear. Pierre clapped Grey on the back when he saw the others coming.

‘Go, dude.’ he smiled.

Grey held out his arms, and Lulu ran into them.

‘I’m sorry!’

Then they all got into the limo and went down to the beach, where my son learned the hard way that fear makes better soldiers than courage. I wondered if Pierre cried the whole time. Tyler was crying now.

‘Save it,’ I smiled. ‘Unless you want everybody here to know you’re a wimp.’

Tyler quickly cuffed away his tears like he had dust in his eyes. I pitied him. A little. I took his hand.

‘I was a bad kid, Honey. I crept in and out of my fair share of places. I could crawl into your dorm window…’ I tousled his hair playfully. ‘…make a Pez dispenser out of your throat and be halfway home before your room mate woke up.’

I sat back.

‘Hell, I could slice off your balls while you were stress masturbating and leave you in a pool of your own bloody cum if I wanted to, but I won’t.’

I leaned in. ‘That would be a pardon. I want you to live with your filthy fuckin’ shame for the rest of your mediocre existence so that whenever you’re laying wide awake at night in a crappy house next to some woman who tricked you into knocking her up and made you feel like shit for it, whenever your twenty-one-year-old boss is ragging on you for being lazy, whenever your rotten kids are telling all their friends what an asshole their dad is, that’s when you’ll think back to the time you were faced with the most important decision of your life, and you did what everybody else wanted.’

I went back to the stage and started my next set.

There was mail waiting for me when I got home. I opened it all without thinking, hungry for bills, parking fines, jury duty notice, or other such mundane communications with which I hoped to be bombarded for a few months, at least. They would busy my mind until the next stop on my justice tour. The last thing I opened was a letter from my daughter.

Hi Mom,

I don’t know why I’m bothering to write you when you won’t even talk to me on the phone, but I need your advice. Eric asked me to marry him, and I don’t know what to say. He asked me last week, and I figured he was just keyed-up from finishing mid-terms so I told him to ask me again when he had a clear head and was absolutely sure it was what he really wanted. He asked me over breakfast two days ago, and he was as sincere as I’ve ever seen him, so I said yes. The problem is, now I don’t know if I meant it. He’s sweet, and he’s funny, and he’s smart, and I’m pretty sure he’d die for me but, damn me to Hell, I don’t think I love him. I mean, I did love him, back in high school, but that was going-steady love, not the real thing. You and I never talked about this kind of stuff, and whether that was because it would’ve made you uncomfortable or because I probably would’ve rejected you isn’t important right now. For once, I need us to act like mother and daughter. We’ve set the date for the week after graduation next year. Please help me.

Lenore

She was being dramatic, as usual. Eric was a nice guy who’d scrub up well enough to make a presentable groom, and Lenore would make a pretty summer bride. I pictured the day and I smiled. Grey would’ve looked marvelous in a tux.

I folded up the letter and put it on the hall table.