VINCENT O’REILLY
MAY 13, 2002
SOMETIMES Vincent felt the uncontrollable eagerness under his skin as clearly as if he was at the starting line in a race, just waiting for the gun to fire. Every part of him straining forwards, pushing, waiting to explode out of the blocks. And at the same time, he was always left with the feeling that the gun would never fire.
He knew nothing good would come of waiting.
Twenty-one years old, and Vincent spent every night anticipating the morning and every morning, waiting for something to finally happen.
And every morning, it felt like he was having the same conversation.
“Why do you have to go? And where do you think you’re going to be, anyway?” his mother would ask. Hearing the questions never failed to almost completely empty his mind. The answers that looked so simple in his room, while he was staring up at the same ceiling he had always known, sounded both complicated and hollow in the daylight, and after explaining them a few times he almost couldn’t force the words out anymore.
It was simple, if anyone was willing to really listen. Here was a trap, and the only way to spring it was to find a place somewhere away.
“I’ll find something, Mom. I’ll find something every bit as good as I’m going to find here.” Vincent imagined that he said the words with his chin pushed out, as if he were the one picking the fight every time.
“But you’re not even looking for a job here.”
There was a desperate, reaching tone to her voice, a high note at the end, that rattled around while the early spring sunshine was belting in through the window and lighting the table and the toast. Vincent’s father was already up and gone to work, close enough to retirement that it seemed like he was trying even harder, turning it on because the finish line was almost in sight. Vincent had grown, but the world inside the house hadn’t changed. Vincent was reasonably sure he was stronger than his father now, but there was no way that Keith O’Reilly would give up even an inch of the power he held in the house: his arms might not be as strong, but his voice was harder and sharper and louder, and he was more frustrated, his edicts on what would happen in the house, and when, even more hard-edged. And his mother just took it—that always surprised Vincent, because she had been the disciplinarian all through school. Sometimes a flash of frustration would light her face, but mostly she went along, even as Vincent bridled.
And Vincent couldn’t explain that he didn’t even want to look in this city, that the whole purpose was the getting away, that a job in St. John’s would just be another anchor, another thing that would stretch out a sticky cable and fasten him tight in a place he no longer felt he should be. That each new string just made the spiderweb stronger, and that any job, anywhere else, would be preferable to being given even one more reason to stay.
Because staying now had a feeling like forever to it.
Vincent felt tied to the chains of the everyday, unable to reach for anything. How do you explain to your mother that when she makes toast for you every morning, it is like she is trying to keep you prisoner?
After he finished eating, Vincent left the house and walked down one shoulder of the city until he reached Forest Road. Past the penitentiary, along the edge of the lake, and then he turned off and headed up towards the bare knob of rock above Quidi Vidi village. There was no real path to the top of the rock, a dome that arched a hundred feet or more above the water with plenty of sheer rock on the sides, but there were breaks in the low spruce running up the sides of the hill, and occasional wide fans of washout where the angle of the incline had brought water down the hill fast enough to strip away the thin sepia clay. It was possible to climb up there, using occasional handholds and footholds of purplish puddingstone, a rock made out of some long-forgotten and petrified river bottom now tilted unnaturally up to the vertical by tectonics, the gritty sandstone packed full with a leaven of round stones like raisins in bread. Even though it had been warm, there were still thick pads of ice on the edges of the parts he was trying to climb, ice that was rounded and sweating with melt, but ice just the same.
Every now and then a breeze would blow across the sheltered snow and ice under the branches, and it would come out from under the edges of the trees like a low, cold breath on his skin, unsettling enough that he would look over his shoulder to make sure he was alone.
The higher he went, the more the ground cover thinned out, falling away to lower and lower bushes, stick-thin blueberry with the fat buds that would soon be leaves, rhodera with its waxy leaves browned from the winter but still smelling faintly of their August rush of faux eucalyptus. Without any cover, the ice vanished, leaving the flattened bushes behind it. There were yards of partridgeberry curled up in snow-flattened coils and wormed, complex patterns, and when Vincent finally reached the top of the hill, his breath regular and heavy, there was nothing left that was higher than ankle-deep, except for one low alder thicket and the grey shoulders of rock shrugging up through the ground. The tops of the rocks were white where the seagulls liked to stand, and there were small collections of bones—chicken scraps, the occasional T-bone—the gulls had brought up to the top so they could strip off remnants of meat without disturbance.
The sun was warm on Vincent’s shoulders, and he was high enough up that the elevation entirely flattened out the waves on the sea below, the peaks and valleys of the rough water erased except for the pale scars of the whitecaps, and even they seemed to have no more depth than an eyebrow has on a face.
It was far enough along in the year that the sun felt like it had finally decided to start working seriously, and the water reflected chips of sunlight back at Vincent in bright semaphore. He had to shade his eyes while he watched a red and white Coast Guard vessel chew its way towards the harbour.
If he turned around, Vincent knew that he could point directly towards the house, back behind the low roll of Signal Hill, his arm straight and unerring as any compass even though he couldn’t see a single patch of the flat roof. And when he thought about that, knowing exactly how something was—trusting where it was, maybe—without actually seeing it, Vincent thought it might be the perfect explanation for why he was sure he would have no choice but to leave.
But how do you explain to your mother that if you’re able to point out the house where you grew up, you know you’re too close to home?