2

Four months later: September

His name was Robot. With the visor down across the fiery ball of the sun, the view before him was a dark block of car ceiling, a light stripe of sun, a dark bar of visor, the scrolling blue-black tarmac of the highway, the dust-covered dashboard. Out the passenger window, the gravel shoulder, the rising and falling levels of the ditch, the approaching and receding trees. Farm fields and swamps. Layers of cloud and sky, the closer parts moving across those farther away.

So much open space. Mile after mile of highway with the green of summer still in the grass and trees.

It was a ninety-minute drive, and Melhart tried to engage him in conversation as she drove, but he felt himself tightening up in anticipation of getting home. He gave her a few one-word replies at first, but found he could not loosen his voice to say more.

He’d already said plenty to Melhart today, or at least in front of her. She had been at the final meeting before his release. He’d spent a year getting ready for this day, and Melhart had checked in on him a lot in that time. She’d been part of the team of professional people, including his worker at the youth criminal detention centre, and several teachers, who’d helped him put a plan together. A reintegration plan. A plan for how to go back to his old life.

It was called a plan, but now that he’d been released, he realized it was not really a plan at all. It was just a three-item list. A list of three things for him to focus on when he was free again. Playing music. Teaching music. Going to school.

There had been an okay electric guitar at the Springtown Youth Detention Centre. A Samick strat he’d found at the back of a storage room. It had played well enough after he’d cleaned it up, put a new set of Slinkys on it, and frigged around with the intonation. So he’d kept his chops up over the last year. Improved them, really.

Any guitar he’d played for any length of time was bound to feel like a friend, and it had been hard that morning to put the strat down for the last time. But his mind was focused on his own guitar, the Les Paul in his bedroom that he had not seen in a year. He looked down at his hands as the countryside near Hubtown flashed past the car windows and pictured the guitar there, the pickups gleaming.

They entered the town from a highway exit Robot had rarely used, drove through the little industrial area on the outskirts, between the highway and the residential downtown neighbourhood where he lived. Even with the windows in the car wound the whole way up, several distinct industrial smells were discernible, one at a time, as the car passed through them: the raw sour scent of the feed silos high in the back of his sinuses, motor oil and petrochemicals from some factory-looking building behind a fence, then finally the strongest and worst smell of all, the burnt and rotting smell of boiled animals from the rendering plant.

“I haven’t been to Hubtown in a while,” Tracey Melhart said. “But the smell is certainly bringing back some memories.” She allowed herself a little chuckle at the town’s expense, then looked wryly across the front seat at Robot. She was a broad-faced lady with a big smile that he found calming.

“Hubtown,” said Robot. “Come for the stink, stay for the stink.”

So much was flooding into him as the car entered his neighbourhood and rolled quietly down the few blocks to Lemon Street: flashes of faces, echoes of voices.

As they got near the spot where Travis Cody Mancomb died, Robot closed his eyes. He was going to have to walk past here every day on the way to school, but he could not face it right now.

Melhart parked the car parallel to the curb on Lemon Street and applied the parking brake against the steep grade of the hill. Robot opened his eyes, took in a breath through his nose, and let it out slowly, so that he could feel the air passing through the back of his throat. He looked at the boxy three-storey house where his mother rented a flat. Where he’d lived before they sent him away for murder. For manslaughter. A rush of fear flooded through him and he struggled to keep his breath even, to hide his fear from Tracey Melhart.

“Let me come in with you,” Melhart said. She made a move to open the driver’s door.

Robot shook his head so slightly he realized Melhart may not have caught it, then did it again. “Thanks for everything,” he said. “This is going to work or not work based on what I do myself.”

Melhart placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll work,” she said. But her tone revealed that this was what she hoped to be true, not what she believed.

He reached into the back seat and picked up the boxy brown and gold sports bag that contained everything from his year of serving time. A few pairs of socks, some boxer briefs, three pairs of jeans, T-shirts, hoodie. His winter coat was folded up at the bottom. A book called Man’s Search for Meaning which he’d read twice and that his teacher said he could have. His shitty old iPod Nano was zipped into a side pocket. The eight gigs of music on there was everything he’d listened to for a year.

“You have my cell number,” Melhart said. There was no way she did not see fear in his eyes. “You have an appointment for next week, with a counsellor. Our office will contact you with details. But you can call me any time before that. Call ten minutes from now if you think you have to. If you want to. I’ll be driving, but I’ll pull over and pick up.”

“Thanks,” Robot said. He nudged the car door closed and turned to face the rest of his life.

Whatever shittiness he’d had to cope with at Springtown, the building itself was pretty okay. The interior was sterile and institutional. But sterile was clean. His mom’s shitty rental flat, on a bad block of Lemon Street, was dingy and in poor repair. The large, seventies-style wooden siding looked disproportionate on this hundred-year-old building: a newer, misplaced retrofit that had long gone old. There were uneven spots where shingles had come loose and hung crookedly. In many places, the white paint had chalked off down to the bare woodgrain. And the landscape-width dimensions of the windows did not suit the exterior walls that had once had portrait-dimension windows in them.

There was a cracked and heaved concrete walkway, choking on nettles and dandelion greens at every gap. The lawn was a couple of postage stamps on either side of the walkway, asprout with ugly, broad-leafed weeds that shaded an underlayer of unheeded-looking soil, light brown in colour and hard-packed smooth to shininess in the places it showed between the scraggly plants. A bone-thin, drug-addled woman in a floral dress and cardigan sat on a lopsided folding camp chair beside the large concrete slab that served as a front step and landing. Her knees were together, her feet were apart, her head dropped almost to the level of the knees, her straw-like brown-blond hair cascaded down in a curtain from the top of her neck.

At the sound of Tracey Melhart’s car pulling away, the woman sat up and leaned against the backrest of her chair. Her cheeks were hollow, her face sunken in over missing teeth. She winced hard, and with her eyes closed, felt around her torso and legs until she came up with a soiled-looking green and gold water bottle with a squirt-style lid. With her head back and her eyes still closed, she squirted liquid into her mouth. Her whole body convulsed twice, as though she would vomit. Then her head flopped forward again. This time she continued to fold forward until her forehead came to rest on her knees.

Robot was sure he’d never seen this woman before. But he had enough experience with people in advanced stages of addiction to know that this might be an unrecognizable version of someone who used to be familiar to him.

This is how people go missing, he thought. Thinking of his own situation now, and not that of the woman near the door. This is how people disappear. Their support worker or parole officer, or whoever, drops them off at a door like this, they take a quick glance at the life they’re returning to, then they run the hell in the other direction.

He stood frozen in place at the curb, both his hands in fists. He turned a slow 360 degrees and took in his old neighbourhood, the lower end of Lemon Street. The many homes in various colours and states of repair. The steep hill that led to the top of the street and a whole other neighbourhood, one of newer, nicer, owner-lived-in houses. The deep green of the big park was visible in a fringe of treeline over the roofs. The apartment building across the street, the one everyone in town called The Old Hotel, was rickety and ratchet, with makeshift additions and four kinds of siding. A big piece of wooden clapboarding hung from an eave, rotten at the hanging end, coming to a ragged, soft-looking point. He wondered who was living there now. Matt Sutcliffe, who worked with him at Jordan’s Music, had had a one-room studio apartment there last year. On the third floor. There was a tiny balcony on the park side, with just enough room for two small kitchen chairs on it. Maybe he could stay there instead of his mother’s house. Maybe he could steal a blanket off a clothesline somewhere and spend a few nights sleeping rough in the park. He’d done that drunk and without the benefit of planning a few times before. But that had always been in the high days of summer. And even then he’d woken up at dawn, soaked with icy dew-water, shivering, his muscles so contracted with cold he’d found himself wondering whether someone had kicked the shit out of him in the night.

The woman in the folding chair had slumped back into her seat when Robot turned to face the front door of his mother’s building. She was so motionless he wondered if she might have died just then. She was someone else’s responsibility if she had. He had his own problems.

The front door of the building opened into a grubby little alcove. There was a grey, short-napped carpet on the floor, worn to frayed yarn and dirty plywood in several places. The smell filled his head like a mouthful of dirt. There were three doors in the alcove, like a parable about choice. The walls were misapplied plaster, cracked and unrepaired, painted a gloss white that had long since faded dull grey. The door of his mother’s flat was on the left. Four panels and a brass knob. It was unlocked and, because she would have known this was his release day, the place had been cleared of liquor bottles. None in the front room, the side hall, or the kitchen. But Robot could tell that things were bad. The place was desperately empty.

The smell of alcohol was layered, several smells on top of each other. The top layers were the apartment’s smells, the layers of newer and older booze that built up in a place where an alcoholic lived. Congealed puddles of spilled rum on the floor. Stray millilitres from the bottoms of empties cast aside without their tops. The smell that rose from a kitchen sink when so much booze had been carelessly slopped down it. But the underlying layer was the smell of partially metabolized liquor as it oozed from the body of a living drunk. When a person had repeatedly soaked herself with alcohol, year after year until the cleansing organs in the gut got tired, the stuff just came out through the skin, converted slightly to an oily musk.

The apartment was relatively clean. The floors had been swept. The kitchen had been mopped. But it was spare. It contained less than half of what it had a year ago. In the living room, the TV was gone. The stereo he had saved up for and bought himself: gone. The turntable, the cassette deck, the CD player with the jack for an aux cord. The cabinet on which the stereo had sat was still against the wall, a fading imprint of dust still visible where the components and the speakers had been. The vinyl records were gone, too. And the CDs. He had not had many of either. He had never been a collector. But he knew there was no point looking for them. They’d been in crates beside the window. She’d Kijijied it all. Panic rose in his chest. He dropped his bag on the floor and swivelled in multiple directions as though about to begin a frantic search. But he stopped himself. The couch was gone. But the matching loveseat remained. He needed to brace himself for the worst. He plopped into the loveseat and with a few hard twisting shoves of his feet, he turned it to face the bedrooms. Two matching doors. Behind the one on his left, his mother lay asleep. Or rather, drunk asleep. The sour smell of her living decay was everywhere. The door on his right led to his own room. He did not care what else was missing from that room. Not his bed. Not his clothing. If the guitar was gone, he did not know what he might do. He’d already killed someone, though he had not meant to. What would he do if the guitar was gone? He was too old for Springtown now. It would be adult prison.

Through his mother’s bedroom door he heard her deep drunken breaths. The sound sawed its way into his mind.

That instrument was everything to him.

He stood up from the loveseat. He closed his eyes and put out his hand for the doorknob as he stepped blindly forward. The door swung back on its hinges with an empty creak.

He opened his eyes on stark, dark squares: walls, floor. A mattress. He crossed to the window that looked out on the lane and the neighbour lady’s driveway. Her sons were playing ball hockey against the backdrop of the garage door. He could see them through the slats of the venetian blind. He’d made enough movement to catch their attention. They looked over at him and their eyes widened with shock and excitement. He raised a hand to wave, but the two boys looked at each other in surprise and ran around to their back door. Through the closed up window, he heard “(something something) out of jail!” as they fled.

With the room lit, he turned and sat on the edge of what was left of his bed: a mattress only, where once there had been a steel frame, box spring, and headboard.

He’d left the guitar in its hardshell case in the corner opposite the window; beside it had been the Peavey tube amp, the closest he could afford to a Fender. For the last twelve months he’d pictured the two items sitting there, awaiting his return. Like a photo in his mind, they were the last things he’d looked at before leaving to serve his sentence at the end of last summer.

He knew he did not have to search further. The guitar and amp were gone. Sold on Kijiji. His mother had sold their good laptop for a bottle several years back. Once it was gone, she accessed the internet from the library. Robot had to secretly adopt an old Acer with one broken hinge from a guy who taught mandolin at Jordan’s Music, where he himself taught guitar. He’d slid it between his bed and the wall when it wasn’t in use, to keep his mother from selling it. Now even that was gone.

He lay back on his bed. He wanted to smash out the window and throw the bed through it. He wanted to kick his bedroom door until it broke. He wanted to find whatever alcohol she had hidden, and he wanted to go into her room and drown her in it, force it down her throat until she was dead.

A sudden thought came to him and he leapt from the mattress. The hundred dollars! He’d almost forgotten. Just before going to Springtown, he’d sold his pedals: a Boss distortion, a Boss tuner, and a Dunlop wah. He’d listed them as an inseparable unit on Kijiji and sold them for a hundred and fifty dollars, a complete steal of a price that he knew he could get someone to agree to quickly. Fifty dollars he’d brought with him to Springtown, cash in his pocket. The other hundred he’d put in an envelope and hidden on the shelf above the closet in his room. With nothing left in the room he could stand on, he rushed to the kitchen and brought back a chair. He ran a hand across the front of the shelf, but there was nothing there. Once he climbed onto the chair, he saw the envelope immediately, thumb-tacked to the drywall on the left side of the closet above the shelf.

He pulled the envelope loose, ripped off the end, and counted out five twenties from inside it before slipping them into the front pocket of his jeans. Hiding that hundred dollars was one of the smartest things he’d ever done. He’d thought a full year ahead and made a plan, something he had not even remembered having done when his anger management teacher at Springtown asked him to make a list of things he felt proud of.

That hundred dollars would not buy him back his Les Paul. It would not put a down payment on a similar guitar. It was not even enough money to feel like an incentive to save more money to go with it. But it was one good thing.

He lay back on the mattress, his right hand over the place at the front of his pants where the money was. The silence of the apartment rose up around him. And into that silence seeped the grotesque sound of his mother’s drunken breath. It rose up and faded off in waves. The Les Paul was gone. The amp was gone. He should have been playing right now, cranking the volume on the amp until the sound forced his drunken mother awake and the neighbours came pounding at the door.

He was trying to muster the same compassion that he would have liked others to extend to him—something else he’d learned in anger management. In the room in which every missing object was a direct and knowing act of betrayal,it was so easy to see his mother only as she appeared to him: irresponsible, uncaring, selfish, pathetic, out of control. But how must she see herself? How did it feel to be her and to be doing this to herself and to her own son?

She had been by his side for every minute of his hearing. And she’d been sober for it, as far as he could tell. She’d testified on his behalf before sentencing, and had wept ferociously when his own lawyer asked her to assess what kind of mother she had been.

It took a few minutes of lying on the mattress, a mix of complex emotions flooding through him, before Robot could summon the courage to go into his mother’s bedroom. He stood at the door with his hand on the doorknob for an extra second or two, and when he finally opened it, there was a fetid smell of unwashed bedding, stale vomit, and alcohol sweat. He’d washed out the largest water tumbler he could find in the kitchen, dropped a couple of uneven ice cubes into it from the poorly-balanced tray in the freezer. He managed to find a shrivelled lemon wedge in the fridge and it had yielded a few drops of juice after he’d rinsed it under the tap.

He knew what it was like to be cared for. His mother had taught him that when he was little, before alcohol had made her goodness so hard to see. And he entered her bedroom now the same way she had once entered his. He tiptoed his way to the bedside, a mattress on the floor, like his own. The smells in the room were strong enough that he did not think he could tolerate them long. He left the door behind him open and wound the window all the way out. Within seconds the air in the room had replenished itself. In the half-light that came through the closed venetian blind, his mother’s face was bony and grey. Her hair was a shock of grey and black wires, dipped at the ends in chestnut brown where her home colouring kit had all but grown out.

The closer he got to her face, the more she smelled of tooth decay. She stirred and moaned as he sat on the edge of the mattress. Her lips moved to speak before her eyes were fully open, but her mouth was so dry, nothing came out but a couple of pasty glicks.

“Here, Ma. Sit up. I brought you some water with lemon in it.” He held her under her bony arm as she came up onto her elbows. She put both hands out for the water, but Robot did not dare let go the glass. He doubted she had the strength to hold it. The bitter lemon sent a shiver through her that seemed to wake her significantly, and she came straight up now with her back against the wall, put out both hands again for the glass, and when he passed it to her, she downed it at a gulp. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she took in a deep, satisfied breath.

“Robert?” He took the glass from her and she put her hands to his cheeks and held his face to examine it. Her fingers were thin as twigs and all of her rings were gone: engagement ring, wedding band, even the little silver ring with her first initial that her grandmother had given her as a child.

“Robert! You’re home!”

“It’s my release day, Ma.”

“I tried to clean the place up. Did that social worker come inside?”

“I turned eighteen. They’re like Dracula now, Ma. They can’t come in unless we invite them.”

Suddenly his mother came to fully and sat straight up. “You didn’t go into your room yet, did you, Robert?”

“Well, I did, Ma.”

She covered her face with her hands. And though she clamped her jaw and tightened her lips against it, she began to sob, quietly at first, but in short order she was bawling. “I’m sorry, Robert. I know how important the guitar was to you. We’ll get it back. We’ll get you a new one. We’ll get you a better one.” His mother slumped sideways on the bed and sobbed hard for several minutes until she fell back to sleep.

He patted her sinewy back between the shoulder blades and pulled the blanket back up to her shoulders. He clenched his fists hard, squeezed his eyes shut, and walked deliberately but unsteadily out of his mother’s bedroom as a rush of bodily rage went through him.

He was out beyond the reaches of self-control, but another moment and the crazy thoughts and impulses would pass. When he got back to the living room with the closed door between himself and his mother, the rage evaporated more quickly. This was only what he’d expected to find when he got home. He plopped onto the loveseat and stared at the dust-layered stand where the stereo had been.

In the middle of a dust-free square, there was a chip of plastic, a bit bigger than a toonie and shaped like a map of South America. He recognized it as a fragment of the turntable’s dust cover. When he leaned forward and picked it up, there was something underneath.