Away From Everywhere (21 page)

“I'm not the one fucked up. My life is well on track.”

Owen slung his head down. “I'm not talking about your life. I'm talking about you. And let's not shit ourselves about why you're a doctor.”

“Whatever. I was only trying to help when I called. I've got to go now.”The commitment had left his voice.

“I know, and I appreciate it, okay? It's nice to hear from you. It is. And I'm melodramatic, and I know it, and I'm sorry. But I'm never going to understand you, you'll never understand me, and we're both going to try and make sense of this life in our own different ways, okay?”

“Yeah, I gotta go. This is not why I called. And good luck finding some
meaning
in life when you are so goddamn bitter and drunk all the time. I refuse to reason with you when you're this drunk and depressing. Talk later, Owen, take care. And you can be the next one to call. And make sure you're sober, too. You woke Hannah when you called last week, and hung up without saying a word. What was that all about? And you woke the kids. It was 2 a.m. here. I mean
God!
I fucken golf and ski with
her
sister, but what are you to Hannah? My creepy brother?”

He slammed the phone down.

Three weeks later, his telephone was disconnected and there were two unopened disconnect warnings on his coffee table from Newfoundland Power.

He only ever woke up because of the dog. Holden would prod Owen with his snout every morning for food. Cold, wet streaks across his forehead. Owen could forget about the occasional supper, but Holden wouldn't let noon come around without insisting on a full bowl of food. He fed him well to make up for being such a bad owner. If he barbecued steak, Holden got the better of the two. It was the guilt he felt over the dog that made him aware of his drinking problem. Some nights Holden would just sit there and watch Owen. He had a strange posture: he'd tilt his head diagonally and just stare into him, his eyes prying for a reason why Owen was ignoring him. Sometimes Owen would get overwhelmed with guilt and stop what he was doing and take Holden for a walk, drunk, his landlady peering out the window at him as he stumbled down the street with the dog, talking to it more than a civilized sober man would, not avoiding traffic like a sane person would. His relationship with the woman got awkward. She lived below him and they got along great at first. After seeing him like that though, she clearly stopped feeling comfortable around him. She pretended to be looking for something in her purse whenever they crossed paths, or she'd look down at her toes when he gave her his rent. She'd watch him from the window whenever he took the dog out back, and if Owen looked back at her, she'd quickly fling the curtain shut and hide behind it. The curtains were red, with brighter red circles all over them. They made a slow-motion ripple when she pulled them shut, and then she peeked out more subtly when he turned back around. So he stopped throwing an extra burger on the grill for her, and he stopped having the driveway shovelled for her when she got home from work. He couldn't stand to look at her, the shame, the acknowledgement that alcohol had consumed him like that.

He eventually gave the dog away too, feeling that Holden was the kind of dog who wagged his tail too much to live alone with an alcoholic. He deserved some family with a kid to maul him all day long, and a fit soccer mom to take him out for a daily jog.

He was surprised at how much he missed Holden. The ball of warmth jumping on and off his bed at night, or curled up at his feet as he wrote. Or even just the excuse to get out of the house. Without the company of his dog, however, he found himself calling Alex more – in the mornings though, when Alex would be around but Owen was still sober. It had gotten to the point where they were talking only five or six times a year. Throughout his bout with alcoholism, it made life easier on Owen that Alex was okay, “happy,” successful. Having a brother so far ahead in life somehow made him feel a little less behind. And if his father ever did snap out of it, he'd have at least one kid worth boasting about.

One night, sleepless, the room spinning, he crawled out of bed, stumbled down the hall to the living room, and watched a documentary on haunted homes. He went to bed with the notion that it was possible his mother was a ghost he couldn't see, watching him. She'd be frowning, crying, shattered by it all. He thought about putting her out of her misery.

Alex tried one last time. No interventions, no guilting him into it, no clichéd motivational
you-could-be-so-much-more
speeches. He flew home and stuck by Owen's side, unshedable as a shadow, until it got unbearable and Owen broke down and started pouring the drinks, which gave Alex the chance to give him that judgmental look. Alex asked him out to breakfast, and Owen had to acknowledge he'd be too hungover to enjoy himself. He asked Owen to a movie one night, and the first thing Owen thought was that he was usually drunk by the time a late movie started. Too drunk to go stumbling through the cinemas in the dark.

He hated it the most when Alex would come over, look around his apartment, and look at him without saying a thing. It was the looks in people's eyes more than their words that got through to him. The look in Alex's eyes that night when he dropped Owen back home and watched him drop his keys trying to open the front door.

When the weekend was over, Alex pleaded with Owen to come back up to Nova Scotia with him. Owen refused. They settled on a deal. Owen would mail Alex his AA chips, to prove he was attending meetings regularly and getting better. And for the next year he did just that. Except he bought the chips off eBay, stuck them in an envelope, and never once went to a meeting. He marked on a calender when to send each chip – 30 days sober, 60 days, 90 days …the anniversary chip.

HEAR ME, WITHOUT WORDS

August 30th, 2008,
Beside him and alone in the world.

There were a million moments this could've happened between Owen and me. What made today the moment?

We were swimming again. He had turned around and I was getting dressed. I let myself go. I gave into that voice that's been screaming the truth at me for weeks now: we belong together, no matter what. No matter what that means. No matter how that screws everything up.

I walked towards him. He heard the rocks rustle beneath my feet and he tensed up, curious. To relax him I lied. I told him to be still, there was a wasp in his hair. I kept walking towards him. I pressed my bare breasts against the warm curves of his back. I slid my fingers under the elastic of his shorts and filled my hand with it, felt it throbbing into life.
Limp softness replaced by a rigid stiffness so quickly it meant he'd been waiting months for this. Forever maybe. With the other hand I circled his nipples as I kissed his neck, tasted the sun there, the summer's heat. He tore his shorts off and it slapped off my thigh as he turned to face me, and I laughed about it. Nervous, I guess. Elated. We were naked and alone and possessed by each other's bodies, wild with action and movement. His hands cupped the back of my neck, and he pulled me towards him. He had a thumb on my cheek, his hands in my hair. The lightness passing between us. The lightning. Indescribable really. Like my tingling lips were all of me. Like I'd never been so sensitive, my sense of touch so alive. It was so right, so perfect; there was no room for guilt.
Just pleasure. Ecstatic pleasure.

At the wharf, with just the shade of fragrant evergreens to clothe us, it happened. Water dripped from our hair as our hands explored every inch of each other's bodies. Fingers behind the crooks of bent knees, and roaming hands wanting it all at once. We rolled through pine needles and pebbles, and settled against the splinters and warmth of the sun-soaked wharf, and it was the best sex I've ever had, if only because of the wait, the passion, the build-up. Hell, the view, the sound of the water slapping off the wharf, the look in his eyes, how he looked at me. Like he could cry about how beautiful it all felt. Like he knew it would all end and it saddened him to think about it.

The only guilt I have is the guilt of feeling no guilt. It was too right, too perfect to feel guilty over.

The rest of the day felt equally comfortable and uncomfortable.
At night the alcohol helped remove the discomfort of the day's actions. He joked about me being an enabler, and we made love again. We made love, we didn't just fuck. How is it possible for two brothers to approach a woman so differently?
Alex makes me feel like a sex-toy, but Owen is selfless and knowledgeable and brings some passion to the table that his brother never had. My God! I can compare brothers: who's bigger, better, cleaner, nicer to look at and work with. What
does that make me? And now I've felt him shuddering there against me, in those precious last few seconds. So vulnerable and all mine.

It's been so long since I've seen another one of those things, let alone handled one. But something took over and knew just what to do and…look at me! Glowing with a splinter in my thigh! How can I have a sense of humour with this? I am so very schoolgirl giddy right now. There are so few people who can do that to a grown woman. For years I've felt so unseen.
But tonight Owen was all eyes and I was everything he saw.
He is the dream a girl crawls into bed and waits for.

He's made a little girl of me. Like the thrill of it all is too much for me and I have to share it, to dole it out to other girls, as we scream and shriek and lock hands about it all.

I can't tell him I love him because those are words for a husband, not a mantress. That's what I'll call him, my mantress, because I don't know what the term is for the male equivalent of a mistress. He is asleep beside me as I write this, so beautifully defeated by life. I want to know how he got that star-shaped scar on his side; I'll ask him when he wakes. For now I'll just wonder, I'll just imagine the imperfect life this perfect man has lived. Whatever hell he has endured has given him character, if that's any consolation.

Owen cowers from life. He has given up on life, on everything, without having tried a thing. Why? Everything he writes is so goddamn sad. He keeps talking about his past but never his future. He keeps talking about “getting away from everything,” but the sad thing is he has nothing to run from. No one and nothing. So what is it you are running from, Owen?

Actually, come to think of it, what he says he wants is to be “away from everywhere,” whatever that means. I don't think
he knows even what he means by that, and I think that's his problem. Owen is brilliant, and could have anything he wanted, yet he is forever with his back to what he is looking for, running from it. Heading “away from everywhere.” I worry sometimes. The way he thinks is mesmerizing, but often equally frightening. He can isolate himself from the world and exist in his own.

I held back on saying what I felt lying next to Owen tonight.
I held back because statements lose emphasis if you say them too often. I don't have to tell him I love him anyway. What our bodies shouted to each other tonight was more than words could ever convey. For some things there are no words, just actions that say it all and more.

Touch me,

Without hands See me,

Without eyes, without light, in the dark

Hear me,
Without words.

FROM NOTHING TO NOWHERE

IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT when he got to the bottom of his last bottle of wine. He threw the empty into his recycling bin and cringed while it was in mid-air, expecting a shatter. There wasn't one. He checked every cupboard twice for another bottle, opening each door slowly, as if that increased the odds. Rarely, in his last few years of alcoholism, did he not have another bottle to go open, but he couldn't even get that right anymore. Especially now that he wanted out. Now that he was trying to sip cola or brew coffee instead – sick of the hangover, the subdued ambition, the pointlessness of everyday life. The absence of passion he couldn't even get from writing, because he couldn't even write anymore.