Chapter
ARCHIE’S FINGERS WRAP around his iPhone; his eyes fixate on its screen. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Noooooo!” His wail reverberates, stretching and elongating into infinitely silent raging grief. His hand convulses around the plastic edges of the iPhone; the dull pain doesn’t register, though it propels him into motion. He swivels on his heel. He walks down the street. At the corner, he steps off the curb and speeds up to beat a car turning left into the street he’s just walked out of. His legs lengthen their stride. One, two, one, two, his boots eat up the concrete as he blindly heads towards he doesn’t know where. Anywhere but this knowledge he’d blinded himself to.
Ping.
He raises his iPhone automatically and reads the terse message on the lock screen: “Where are you?”
He doesn’t know. He has no answer. Archie quickens his steps. He drops his left arm, the one with the hand holding the iPhone, and swings his arms into a counter-metronome to his legs. Archie weaves in and out between slower walkers. He speeds past business men. He hurtles past women running for the bus, their heels clacking on the sidewalk, his boots thumping past them. The sharp bitterness of the women’s hot coffees, clutched in their hands, reaches for his nostrils. He bends his arms, curls his fingers, his iPhone disappearing into his left fist, and starts jogging. His strides lengthen. He springs into a run.
He races along the street, not touching anyone as he aims for the gaps between them, their faces and bodies blurring past through his tear-infested eyes. The traffic light before him turns amber, and he speeds up, his lungs gasping to fuel his exertion. Psychic pain drives him across the intersection. Horns blare an angry symphony. Indicator lights blink bullying yellow near his churning legs. Heavily perfumed women rush to use him as a barrier against impatient cars turning right to beat the light change. Archie notices nothing.
He reaches the other side and bolts down the sidewalk.
His iPhone buzzes and pings inside his fist. He doesn’t read it. He can’t stop to read the messages. He knows they’re from Andrew and David. They’ve read her message, too. Maybe they were there. Didn’t David say Andrew was taking her home? Or maybe they had taken her home. He can’t remember. He doesn’t want to remember. Yet Archie’s mind reaches backwards into their conversations. What did they do? Did they leave her there by herself? Did anyone know about the horrors Nadine saw? Why didn’t she tell Andrew? They all told him everything.
No, they didn’t.
I didn’t until today. Not everything, Archie admits, momentarily slowing his gait.
Today, for the first time since he’d come to Canada, he’d told them of the righteous shoot. He’d only hinted at it before now. But Nadine…Nadine had been a member of the platoon long before him. Then he thinks, she was a senior member. She had authority. Authority can’t show weakness, can’t disobey orders. She’d been transferred.
Nadine’s shame burns into his shame and flares into a united flame of accusations popping into his mind like evil popcorn—they weren’t strong enough, they were weak and self-involved, they’d served their countries, they were heroes, they deserved the balloons and yellow ribbons tied to trees in his old neighbourhood to proclaim their hero status. Heroes can’t be weak; their strength can never flag. Civilians expect them to soldier on.
His lips twist into a self-loathing grimace.
“You’re weak! Buck up and get on with your life,” Stephen’s words spear his mind, the memory mushrooming into reality, exploding shame and guilt and pain all over his brain. Nadine must be weak, too, but she wasn’t. Isn’t! No, she can’t be dead. But she is. She shot herself. The Sig announces its heft from deep in its conceal carry in his left pocket. The grip is one short move away from his hand.
He skids to a stop at University Avenue. Windows in the tall buildings that line the wide avenue are lit up in squares and rectangles of artificial joy. Cars, trucks, SUVs, vans, and bicycles stream south and north in their divided multi-lanes. Knots of pedestrians wait at each corner for the all-red part of the light cycle to turn green in one direction and red in another. He checks the street signs. He’s at Queen Street. The light for Queen turns green, and he runs across. But when his booted right foot slams onto the midway meridian, Archie pauses. To his right, soars the airman and the memorial to the war dead. He looks south. Rectangles of green in the meridian’s sunken space puncture the stone paving. Benches facing east and west wait for people needing rest. Planter boxes sprout tall amber grasses, and an obelisk stands waiting for him. He crosses Queen from meridian to meridian, oblivious to honks and cars swerving around him, their brakes juddering, and the gasps of people still crossing University Avenue behind him.
Archie reaches the other side and lopes down the four steps to the sunken space. He follows the paving stone path on its east side and halts in front of the sloping statue to look up at the man gazing north towards the Pink Palace aka the provincial legislature. Andrew had taken him around the St. George campus of the University of Toronto in his first summer in Toronto and included a small history lesson on the adjacent Pink Palace. Archie turns his back on the sight and reads the name under the man sculpted in black stone: Adam Beck.
It means nothing to him.
The sculpted man stands above a stone aqueduct that slopes down towards Archie; a river should be running towards him, but it’s dry. Rain drops dot Archie’s head. A wind flaps the brim of his Tilley hat. His iPhone pings again, and he uncurls his fingers and reads the message. He holds down the Home button and tells Siri to reply: “I’m at the man in black stone, dried up.” Siri sends it, and he powers off his iPhone. He slides it into his pants pocket. He doesn’t want it near his heart.
Calmness descends like a muffling blanket over the howling chaos inside him. He looks around at the cars with their headlights haloing in the rain-darkness, their brake lights popping red. Pedestrians clump together, their chatter melting into tires hissing on the wet road. Garlic wafts on the damp air towards him from the high-up high-end restaurants south of him. No one lingers in the place he’s in. A cyclist’s bell rings, and Archie swerves his eyes south to see cyclists burning rubber west on Richmond across University Avenue. The rain drops increase. They pitter against his skin, and he blinks away the wet. The wind lifts the brim of his hat and strains to rip his hat off. Rain drums faster as the gust disappears. Archie turns his face toward the seamless grey above, and rain dilutes the salt on his face.
Archie walks, head up, eyes forward, along the east side of Adam Beck. He stops as he draws level to the back side of the statue. Dead hydrangeas bob their sepia heads as the wind skitters yellow and red leaves along the stone path. Short trees with their pretty lacework of branches dance in the gusts that blow on and off, their leaves flapping, straining to fly off their wood. The rain picks up as he looks to the west and spots a small alcove inside the back of the statue. It has three steps inside it. Archie surveils the area. No one is paying attention to him.
He deliberately makes his way to the centre back of the statue as he slides his right hand underneath his jacket to reach for the grip of his Sig in its conceal carry case.
The concrete glows whitely in the rain that pummels his hat. Another gust blows up and rips a flurry of leaves from their branch homes; rain plasters them on the ground at his feet. Archie almost skids on their slick surface. He catches his footing and tracks carefully to ensure he doesn’t slide again. Small petals dot the grill that runs up to the base of the mottled grey stone base and the three steps that lead up to the three steps inside the alcove. The hydrangeas in their long bed gyrate wildly in the rising storm.
A shout reaches Archie’s ears, but he doesn’t understand it. His feet propel him up the stone steps as he extracts his Sig. This time, he knows where his broken heart is. It’s not in the normal anatomical place, as he’d learnt the first time he was hospitalized. Even though the bullet had grazed him and his shot ignored as a suicide attempt, the surgeon had joked that if he was aiming for his heart, he wouldn’t have found it because it was in the wrong place. He used the surgeon’s careless joking to mask his interrogation of where it was. This time, he won’t fail. He’ll stop the pain that clogs his throat and eyes and nose, that crushes his heart with grief that grinds all thinking, all movement, that burns his stomach and tenses his arms into striations of deep aches.
A hand grabs his shoulder as rain lashes his face. The hand whips him around, and he’s looking straight into Andrew’s eyes. “Archie!” Andrew’s mouth mimes against the gale’s roaring.
Archie shakes his head and pulls his shoulder out of Andrew’s grasp. Archie steps back and hits a massive human wall. He skips up a step to his left and holds his Sig down. He doesn’t want to shoot Andrew or David. It’s David behind him, he’s sure. He can sense David’s familiar energy. He knows how they feel.
“Archie. We couldn’t save Nadine. But we can save you.”
Archie shakes his head, flinging drops from his hair into the rain, and turns himself to face south, to put both men into his line of sight. David is on his right, Andrew on his left. The pungency of sweat emanates from David. It envelopes Andrew’s ubiquitous clean soap smell. Archie steps up a step, backwards. He’s at the top of the grey stone steps.
Andrew yells through the rain blowing horizontally and vertically and diagonally against them like a moving waterfall with sources above and beside them. Archie cannot hear Andrew. The headlights of the cars zooming towards them on their east side reflect pinwheels of white light on the storm-blackened road. Wipers furiously whip in semi-circular arcs, back and forth, back and forth, fountaining rain off windshields in futile attempts to clean the glass shields of obscuring rivulets and lakes. But the three cannot see the road, and the drivers cannot see him. He lifts his pistol, which absorbs the rain reflecting light from the windows and streetlights and passing cars. The pistol’s matte black disappears it into the statue’s shadowy alcove. Sky water streams down Andrew’s face. Archie no longer feels Nature’s storm. His spirit has left; his mind recedes from human life; his heart strains to keep beating against the force of his father’s derision, his twin’s contempt, his wife’s impatience, his grandfather’s suicide. Brains litter the grille in front of him, brains comprising tiny, round, dead petals from the dead dancing flowers hedging the grille on both sides towards the green-covered fountains and the trees that stand guard on either side of this quiet space inside the madding rush of people and their busy lives.
Archie is outside their busy lives. He is outside ordinary life. He is not strong enough, for Nadine wasn’t strong enough, nor could Pawpaw face a slow death.
Archie had died that day in New Mexico, although his body remained alive. Years later, his will impelled him to escape north to Toronto, in a last-ditch effort to reclaim his life. But running away doesn’t work. Archie steps further back into the alcove. The sharp top edge of the first step knifes the back of his calves. Hard metal digs into his chest, slightly left of his sternum.
A roar of pain, desperation, anger, horror penetrates his hearing: “Archie, no!”
Archie blinks. The roar has a strange sound to it. He blinks against the rain spraying off the brim of his hat and sees David’s mouth open, his eyes blinking hard against the blinding water the sky is hurtling down on them and the wind is swirling all around them. David’s mouth opens wide. His vocal cords catch breath and bellow out sound. “No! Archie. No! We will help you live. Lean on us, Archie. Lean on us. We will hold you up.”
Shock stills Archie’s hand, his finger goes rigid against the trigger.
David steps forwards; Andrew doesn’t move a millimetre. David lifts his right hand: “Please give me the gun, Archie. Lean on us, Archie.” David is yelling, yet Archie can hardly hear him over the maelstrom. Suddenly, the wind drops to nothing. The hydrangeas still themselves. The rain eases, and David’s yell is loud in the sudden silence: “Don’t shoot, Archie. Lean on me!”
Archie’s arm drops, his forefinger falls off the trigger, his hand almost releases his Sig. David reaches for it, his right hand coming up towards where the pistol hangs from Archie’s slack fingers. Archie lifts his head sharply and tightens his grip on the weapon in one swift movement. Andrew lifts his palm in a slight gesture, almost hidden from Archie’s view. David roots to the spot. He speaks to Archie, looking directly into the shadows of Archie’s eye sockets. His hoarse voice bumps over his words like a car on an unused gravel road, but he doesn’t waver: “We will carry you for as long as you need us to. We will talk to you every day. We will eat with you. We will feed you. We will walk with you. We will sit in silence with you. Unlike Job’s friends, we are your friends. We are never too busy for you. We didn’t see Nadine’s pain. She hid it too well from us. And we—“ David chokes. He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. David surges on. “I lie. It was us. We didn’t want to see. She was strong because she felt she had to be. She knew she had to be. She lost her life because she was wrong and right. But you don’t have to be silent and strong. We didn’t tell her she didn’t have to be strong; we accepted what we wanted to see.” David gulps. Snot streams out his nose into his mouth as the last of the rain drains off his face. “But we see you, Archie, clearly. Your veneer of health has been ripped away, and we have no excuse not to see your pain. You can be weak with us, and it’s okay. Maybe your family, the VA, your old friends, they needed you to be strong, needed you to be normal, couldn’t be real with you. But we can. We’re not afraid of you or your feelings. Life is about us being there for each other. We will not be so busy that you need to lean on yourself. From this day on, we’re going to walk with you in your pain. You can be weak with us, Archie, and it’s okay. Why do we exist if not to carry each other when we hurt?”
The trio stand like statues. Archie stares at David pleading with him with unpracticed voice and worried, warm eyes while he leans towards Archie in the darkness between the artificial streetlights. Andrew guards them both.
David says softly, rawly: “Please.”