Fiction

Andrew Boden

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Leonard nodded.  “It was cancer.  Dad died of lung cancer.”

“You see how tangled up, everything is?  How impractical you’re being here is?”

Sumana, the nurse Leonard had spoken to earlier, went behind the curtain, to the patient on the other side of the room, and said, “Mister Dhillon, I’m changing your catheter bag now.  No more practical jokes, okay?”

“Mister Dhillon is in a terrible way,” Scanlon said.  “A thirty-year-old man a car crash turned back into a child.  His family never comes.  I’ve never seen — I don’t remember them.  He moans at night.  He cries out in words I don’t understand.  I go sit with him, sometimes at 3 a.m.  When I could still read, I read to him from this newspaper in English for Indo-Canadians.  Last week, I couldn’t make sense of the letters on the page.  The nurse said it was in Punjabi.  It was a different paper.  Isn’t that funny, Leonard?  Everything I read now has turned into Punjabi.  The baseball scores are the cricket scores.  Now I just take his hand and tell him everything is going to be okay.  God will take care of you.  The God of all of us.”

Leonard’s nausea came as a cold, dizzying wave.  “Did you touch him?” he asked.

“I held his hand.”

“But he’s a child again?”

Scanlon’s voice rose.  “I confessed to the prison chaplain.”

“Did you touch yourself?”

Scanlon looked up at the ceiling.  His eyes went blank.  “I thought you played left wing.  I remember you played left wing opposite that other boy — the one with ears that seemed to sprout from his neck.”

“Did you — ?”

He’d raised his voice too high.  Sumana came around the curtain. “Is everything alright, Mister Scanlon?”

“My nephew get’s excited about hockey.  There’s a lockout, isn’t there?  Bettman and Goodenow at each other’s throats.”

“Bettman and Fehr,” corrected Leonard.  He smiled to convince Sumana that everything was all right, that his insides were calm.  “Goodenow was seven years ago.”

Scanlon looked again as if he’d just found himself in a dark forest.  Alone.  Pursued.

“Your social worker will be here in ten minutes,” said Sumana.

“You’re very kind.”  When the nurse left the room, Scanlon said,  “Go to my night table and take out the notebook.”

Leonard didn’t move from his seat.

“It’s all I have.  It’s all I will have.  Please.”

Leonard yanked open the drawer on Scanlon’s few things. A pen.  A leather-bound Bible.  Readings glasses.  Scanlon’s amethyst rosary, which had once belonged to a Quebecois Jesuit.   A black notebook.

“Open to the last page with notes on it.  Around the middle.  And read me the date.”

“October 7, 2012.  The day I — you — arrived in Vancouver General.  A month ago.”

“My social worker has been looking for a facility for me for a month.  Could you write that on the next line and date it?”

“Why don’t you?”

“What do you want from me, Leonard?  God has already forgiven me.  Turn to the front of the book.  That’s the date He did.  It’s there, even when I won’t be fully here — it’s always going to be there.”

Leonard wanted to vomit.  He sank into the chair.  “The kid with the funny ears was David Lundell.  He played right wing.  Kevin Biletsky played left wing.  I always played centre.  The NHL scouts said I was the next Ray Ferraro.  On track to beat his WHL record — most goals in a season.  It was my second season with the Kamloops Blazers.  But I’d started drinking then.  I couldn’t forget.  I blacked out maybe three, four times a week. I just couldn’t forget.  I’d give anything to trade places with you now.”

“March 12th, 1994.  I still remember that night.  I’ll always remember that night.  What does it say there?”

“Nothing.”

“Leonard, what does it say?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It says something very important.”

Leonard hurled the book at the wall beside Scanlon.

“God has forgiven me for them.  That’s what it says. Them.  All of you.  Eight or nine or however many.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s too late.  I’m forgiven — forgiven.  Kevin.”

His mother asked him where he was and Leonard didn’t know what to say.  He’d not slept in — he looked at his watch.  The second hand had frozen to the three.  God, he was tired tired tired of time.  How he lurched through it in a lengthening ellipse, forward until back, flung, again and again, on his only past.  Now there was candlelight.  A wreath of fir boughs.  A mumbled prayer.  Tingling warmth radiated outward from deep in his belly.  He gripped the steering wheel of the Thunderbird with his free hand.  He shouldn’t have come to Vancouver.  He had to go or he’d leave himself as he did again and again in the Rectory — float as a cloud of pure awareness above what he thought was himself, his ruptured mind now and his shuddering boy’s body then — and then and then and then.  You can watch, but never intervene.  It was his dead father’s voice, forceful, loud and cold.  It was the second Sunday of Advent 1978, in Scanlon’s private quarters.  He was eleven and —

“Leonard?”

He peered through the raindrops on the windshield.  He saw the sign for the hospital entrance light up on the darkening street.  He said that he was in Vancouver, in her car.  No, he hadn’t had a drink; he hadn’t slept.  He was looking in on a dying friend.  An emergency.  He’d heard about it in the Wal-Mart parking lot from — he grabbed at a name that wasn’t Mrs. Trozzo’s. “Tonya Luke told me,” he said.

“You’re with Ken St. Jerome?”

“He died years ago.”  The afternoon rain came down in gobs on the Thunderbird’s windshield.  If he mentioned Scanlon, he’d send his mother back into the hospital.  The trial’s coverage on the front page of the Daily Townsman in 1989 had put her in the psych unit for two weeks.  “You wouldn’t know this guy.”

“Did you get mushroom soup?  It was on the list.”

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2 Comments

Tessa Wright August 17, 2016 at 4:45 am

Powerful stuff! A thoughtful perspective on a challenging topic.

Reply
Brandon Neal August 20, 2016 at 5:45 pm

Really love this story! It took me back to the Catholic school I went to as a kid, the priest there… oh man!

Reply

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