Smoke and Mirrors Page 6

  With Tanya showing some interest in me — she always remained friendly with me even when the homework was over — other girls would at least talk to me now. They asked my opinion about the latest reality-based TV shows. I almost never watched TV except for old Star Trek reruns or rented DVDs like The Matrix or Blade Runner.

  My opinion on the latest TV crap thrust on the mindless proletariat? “It’s hard to pick a favourite,” I would say. And then I would smile a kind of warm, vacant smile and I would give good eye contact. That was Andrea’s idea. “Give them eye contact. Hold it until they turn away first.”

  Phew. Simple little manoeuvre. But it worked. I didn’t stare. I didn’t ogle the way the other members of my male half of the population like to do. I didn’t try to overpower them with my penetrating gaze. I just gave good eye contact. It took some practice in front of the mirror to get it right.

  “And say their names,” Andrea further advised. See you later, Jennifer. Hi, Candace. Yo, Venetia.

  “Say nice things about their clothes or hair,” she continued.

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “It doesn’t feel like me.”

  Well, I did try it on Tanya when I thought Andrea wasn’t around, although I never really knew for sure when she was around. Tanya liked the compliments. Oddly enough, she seemed to be happiest when I told her that I liked her shoes. “Great shoes,” I said.

  “You like them?” she said enthusiastically.

  “I love them.”

  The shoes looked like average girl footwear. I was slipping over to the dark side.

  After homework one day in the library, I walked Tanya home — one small step for mankind. Before I said goodbye, I gave her the full range of compliments. After I left Tanya and began walking home, there was Andrea.

  “It’s really important to her, you know?”

  “What is?”

  “Footwear.” She wasn’t smiling.

  It was two weeks into the new improved me. “You taught me everything I know. It’s really quite amazing. I’ve graduated from class dweeb to social respectability. I guess this is how you were supposed to help me.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  I suddenly remembered my discussion with Lydia. “What’s your sign anyway?”

  “My what?”

  “Your astrological sign.”

  “Capricorn. Why?”

  “Just curious, I guess.” Lydia had been right.

  Then, as I looked at her, I realized something was wrong. While I had been changing, Andrea had been changing, too. At first she had been fun to be around. Now she was serious. And elusive. She appeared less often. Did I detect that she seemed to have less ... colour? A kind of pallor.

  “I really like your hair,” I said.

  “Idiot.” But she liked the compliment.

  I was giving eye contact. Andrea had often deflected my questions about her, and I had assumed that I should quit asking. But we’d known each other a long time — two weeks seemed like a long time — and she knew everything about me, even the embarrassing stuff, and I knew nothing about her. “Do you have, um, parents?” I asked.

  Something changed drastically in her eyes. I felt that weird sensation of her moving away from me even though her feet were not going anywhere. “Okay, forget it. I won’t ask. But someday I hope you’ll tell me about you. Who you are. Where you’re from.”

  She took a step closer. “I’m worried that I might be losing you,” she blurted out.

  “Losing me. How?” I asked.

  But I heard a car stop just then behind me. I turned and saw it was a police car. Andrea was gone.

  A boy standing on the sidewalk having an intent conversation with a hedge sometimes prompts a lawman to make an inquiry.

  “I’m in a school play. I was just practising,” I explained.

  He was a young officer with one of these lawn-mower haircuts. He had a kind of pudginess to the sides of his head, a soft layer of fat that was all too obvious thanks to the close-cropped hair. I was thinking I’d seen cops like him before, that maybe he was a clone. But I didn’t ask.

  “You live around here?”

  “I’m just walking home. From school. It’s a long walk, but I like the exercise.”

  He was still sizing me up. Drug freak? Stone head? Potential terrorist?

  “You want a ride home?” he asked, testing me. “Sure,” I answered, thinking this was probably better than making him more suspicious.

  “Hop in.”

  It was not exactly as expected. I was sitting in the back like a criminal with the wire mesh between the front seat and the back. The radio was squawking. There was a rifle attached to the dashboard. I wasn’t usually a paranoid guy, but this was making me nervous. From this angle, buddy with the Lawnboy hair and the puffy fat sides looked rather like an alien. I wondered if they were finally abducting me.

  “You follow baseball?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said, knowing that some men didn’t trust kids who had no interest in sports. I was one of those kids.

  “I’m a Red Sox fan,” he said, offering me a piece of gum through the wire mesh. I took the gum, having passed some kind of test.

  “Yankees,” I said. “I’m a huge Yankees fan.”

  “I always hated the Yankees.”

  “They’re that kind of team. You either love ’em or you hate ’em.”

  He laughed and shook his head. I had cracked the code. I was okay. I’d either get dropped off at my house or the cop car would make a vertical liftoff and we’d go directly to the mother ship.

  He stopped in front of my house. “Sit tight, kid. I have to open the door from the outside.”

  I got out. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.

  “Forget the Yankees. They’ve had their day. It’s over.”

  “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Good luck with the play. What’s it called? Maybe I’ll come see it.”

  Crap. I couldn’t think for a second, tried hard to remember what the school play was. “Macbeth,” I said.

  “Right.”

  Both cars were in the driveway. And it was only four-thirty. Not a good sign. I felt a small pool of dread growing in my chest. Had the game of golf been outlawed? Had the real estate market gone flat? I looked around the yard to see if Andrea might have followed me, but the yard was empty. The grass had been clipped immaculately by the landscaping people. Flowers bloomed with great intent. A newspaper was rolled up and sitting on the walkway.

  CHAPTER NINE

  My mother and my father were sitting at the kitchen table. My plan was to say hi and retreat to my room. Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to be part of it. They looked very sullen.

  “Simon, we need to talk to you,” my mother said, her voice sounding shaky.

  “Sit down with us, would you?” my father added, trying to sound like he was in control.

  If ever there was a good time to escape from reality, this was it. But I didn’t have any easy way out.

  I sat down reluctantly. I guessed that they had finally figured out I wasn’t taking my medication.

  “Simon, you know your mother and I don’t always get along,” my dad began.

  “We have very different personalities,” my mom said.

  “We’ve tried to work things out over the years ...”

  “For your sake,” Dad said, bringing me into the equation. “But we feel that we’ve hit a point where staying together is not a good thing for any of us.”

  “It’s called a trial separation,” my mom stated flatly and then looked around the room as if she was searching for something, but it was just a matter of avoiding looking at me. I looked away from her as well and was shocked to see Andrea standing by the refrigerator. My mother seemed to be looking right at her. Andrea indicated I should not react. Why was she here? Why now?

  My father loosened his tie. “I’m moving out, but your mother is staying here. Maybe you and I can go to the beach this weekend.” He had nev
er offered this before. “Maybe we can spend some quality time together.”

  “We’re sorry to have to put you through all this. You must have been able to see it was coming.”

  I felt numb. I couldn’t wrestle any words out of my mouth. I looked over at Andrea — who appeared so frightened. I peered into her eyes, deep into them, and it scared me.

  “Simon, why are you staring like that? Talk to me please,” my mom said.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me what you feel.”

  I sat quietly, looked away from all of them, and stared down at the newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. The words seemed to be rearranging themselves on the page. I was angry and frightened. Both. Angry at them for doing this to me. They weren’t like the best parents in the world but they were my parents and they’d always been around. They had always tried to do what they thought was best for me. I was not number one on their list of priorities but at least I had been on the list somewhere. They had done their duty. And I knew they had always cared as much as they were capable of caring. But now this.

  As if to shift the blame away from them, my father changed the subject, the bastard. “We’ve had a couple of calls from school — about your behaviour. Incidents of talking to yourself.”

  This wasn’t fair. My old man was about to bail out on his family, bail out on me, and now he was going to talk to me about acting weird in school.

  “I know this is not the best time to bring it up — we haven’t sat down to talk together for a while. But have you been taking your medication?”

  Oh, so it did come out after all. Andrea was pacing back and forth. I think she was having a hard time being here in this house, in the midst of this kind of situation.

  “I’ve been doing just fine. I take my pills,” I lied.

  “We just needed to know for sure,” my dad said.

  “We are concerned about your well-being.” Very formal. Very professional.

  I took a deep breath. A strange bit of calm came over me then as if I could channel the anger and the hurt I was feeling and keep it contained in one part of my brain. I will get through this, I told myself. Watching Andrea pace back and forth making nervous gestures with her hands, it suddenly occurred to me that this was all somehow worse for her than for me. She would approach the back door and then turn around and come back towards us. She held out her hand as if to turn the door handle but then reversed herself and came towards me with that look of fear in her eyes. This whole scene was doing something awful to her.

  I got up and walked to the door, opened it. Andrea came towards me, paused, then put her head down and walked outside. “I’m so sorry,” she said, barely audible. And then she ran.

  “Simon?”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I just needed some air.” Looking out at our front yard — the flowers, the green leaves of the trees — I had this funny realization of how much I loved that front yard. Even the grass. I loved the grass. But it was more than that. I loved this, my home. Despite all the arguing, despite the usual parental hassles. Despite everything, this was my home. And now all that was going to change forever. My parents would separate. I would see my father rarely. He was always terrible at keeping father-to-son promises. He would get even worse at it, I was sure.

  And my mother. She had often talked about moving to a condo. How long before she would want to sell the house — this one where I grew up?

  “I’m going to my room now,” I told them.

  “We’re sorry about all this,” my mom said.

  My dad put his hands up like he was trying to shape something in the air in front of him. He wanted to say something that would make me feel better, but he knew the English language had no words that could help him here. “I’m going to pack some of my things,” my father said. “Maybe you and I can go out for pizza, Simon, before I take off.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said.

  In my room, I took my big pair of sharp, pointed scissors out of my desk and I jabbed the points once into the wooden desktop. Then I sat down on the floor and began going through the pile of newspapers there. Ever since I was little I had been working on what I called my research — clipping and filing articles on space travel, UFOs, weird and unusual stuff happening anywhere on the planet. It was a big pile of papers. I guess recently I’d been losing interest in my little hobby. There had been a couple of UFO sightings up north. Crop circles were back in the news. A new research team was looking for the Loch Ness monster. A story about unusual brain activity in a coma patient. A stain on a wall at a McDonald’s that appeared to be an image of Jesus Christ. And a report by one seemingly reputable astronomer who had discovered a comet on a dead-centre collision course with earth. Impact would take place in ten thousand years, and he said it was a certainty that all life on earth would be destroyed. Now there was something to get my mind off my own worries.

  I wasn’t sure why I was collecting these clippings. I had just been doing it for so long. The UFO file was huge. It seemed completely unfair that so many other people had seen UFOs and aliens and I had not.

  There was a knock at my door. “It’s open.”

  My dad walked in looking like he was guilty of a crime. “Simon,” he said. “This will turn out all right for you, I promise.”

  “Do you really have to do this?”

  “I do. It’s been a long time coming, but your mom and I both know we have to get away from each other. Maybe just for a while.”

  “Or maybe for good?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You guys argue a lot about me, I know. Maybe I’m the one at fault here.”

  “It’s not like that.” My father sat down on the floor, looked at my files of clippings. He opened the one about strange weather phenomena. “Frogs really fall from the sky?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “And fish. They get caught in a tornado or maybe a waterspout. They go way up into the clouds and then they have to come down somewhere.”

  “When I was your age, I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to split atoms or do undersea research. For a while I thought I would be a science officer on a space mission. Man, I had all kinds of dreams.”

  “Why didn’t you go for it?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I did. Sort of. I went to university and took some science courses but wasn’t very good at it. I just couldn’t hack it. I didn’t have what it takes. I got kind of depressed, started drinking, and went further down the tubes. So my father sat me down and said to forget about all this science crap and going to the moon malarky. Get realistic. Get practical. I changed over to business courses and finished university. Then, wham. Just like that I got a job at a bank, then at an investment company. It all just happened. I woke up one morning and had this life. I didn’t know if I even liked it, but I was good at it.”

  “You did okay.”

  “Nah. I blew it. I didn’t see that you were the best thing that happened to me. I let you do most of your growing up on your own.”

  “You were around.”

  He kind of snorted. “Around, yeah. But not there. Not here.”

  “I don’t know what happened between you and Mom.”

  “Your mother changed. She wasn’t always like this.” I nodded. I remember a woman who played games with me, one who sang to me when I was little. She was between jobs then. She sang along with songs on the radio and she sat with me to watch Walt Disney videos and we played games with cards. Penny poker. My mother taught me to play penny poker when I was only seven. And she had taught me chess.

  “Your mother learned to be the way she is — well, she learned it from me.”

  It was the first time I think that my father had ever talked to me like this. Like we were equals. I searched for my own words to say something that would help but couldn’t find any.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Gotta go. Let’s talk soon, though. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  I guess he was packing his stuff and my mother sure d
idn’t want to be in the same room with him when that was happening. So it was her turn. She knocked on my door and came in. It was the official Feel Sorry for Simon Day at my house. She brought with her some more newspapers. “Finding anything interesting?” she asked.

  “Black holes in space. Talking dogs. Another ten-thousand-year-old man found frozen in a glacier. The usual.”

  “I wish things could be different.”

  “I know.” I was feeling numbness in my mind and I was fighting it. A great dark thing was settling over me just then and I wanted to scream at my mother and go vent rage at my father. I heard him walking down the stairs and I started to get up, to go say goodbye to him.

  “Don’t,” my mother said. “Just stay here with me. Just let him leave. Please.”

  I saw Andrea now, by the window. But her back was to me. She was facing the wall and she was shaking. She must have been crying. She was somehow being drawn into my own pain, my own suffering.

  I walked over to my desk and opened the drawer. I took out the plastic vial of prescription pills and held them up for my mother to see. “I haven’t been taking them. For quite a while.”

  “We suspected that. Your teachers have been concerned, and sometimes the way you act ...”

  “I’ve heard you both arguing. About me. About what to do with me.”

  “It’s not just you. It’s a lot of things.”

  “If I start taking the meds again, would you try staying together for a while? Give it another chance?”

  My mother looked puzzled. A decision had been made. Her mind had already been set. Much arguing and their own suffering had brought them to this day and now I wanted to change all that. I opened the twist-off lid of the vial and popped one of the red pills in my mouth. I grabbed a bottle of water from my desk and swallowed.