Hellgoing (15 page)

“That's why I want to spare you,” he said.

“But, Hart, that's not —”

“Two times,” said Hart. “Only two. It was not — it was just two times. And both times drugs were involved. Never when he was straight. If it had been ongoing, if it had been systematic — we wouldn't have a relationship right now. It's important to understand my family has been torn apart by substance abuse, honey. I mean even before Wilf — going back to my grandparents and beyond. We're all broken vessels.”

Hart told her his father had been clean for seventeen years. What Kim needed to understand was that Hart and Wilf had gone through everything already — confession, counselling, tears, apologies. The “journey,” as he called it. But Kim was starting at the beginning, he explained; that's what made it hard for her. It was a journey Kim had just begun to undertake.

She wanted to say, But maybe I haven't yet, though, Hart.

“When we get back home,” said Hart, “I would love it if you'd come to counselling with me, honey.”

THEY WOULD CAMP
at Ucluelet and they would surf and the next day they'd see Wilf.

There was no time for conversation the day of their surfing lesson, an experience that was somehow exhilarating and tedious all at once. When Hart first proposed it, she'd imagined the California stereotype, soaring atop the waves in a bikini, but the water was apparently never warm on this coast, not even at the height of summer. She and Hart were zipped from head to toe in two-inch-thick elephant-skins of neoprene — they even had the option to wear hoods, an option Kim accepted. She pulled it over her head and faced the ocean, feeling weirdly safe, like a swaddled baby must — all tucked in.

“Body condom,” exclaimed Hart, pulling out his phone to take a picture.

Once the instructor had taught them the basics, the whole day was paddling out past the breakers and waiting for a wave, then catching the wave and trying to stand up on the board, which Hart achieved immediately and Kim did not do once. But the ride itself was thrilling, even lying flat, and here was another cliché that broke over her with sudden, vivid reality — catching a wave.
Catch a wave, and you're sitting on top of the world.
It was true — it was a rush. Aging, adulthood, it was all about the eventual comprehension that people repeated what seemed like tired bullshit at you over and over again in life until it finally sunk in.

After a while Kim kept getting sloshed off her surfboard. She was trying to get out past the breakers as before, but a swell would always rise up and slosh her into the water, where she'd roll around like a crab before yanking the board back to her with the tether around her ankle and managing to hoist herself up onto it again. She couldn't figure out what was happening, what had changed, until the instructor shouted to her and pointed at the shore. Getting there seemed to take forever. She'd been paddling around in the waves for over two hours, she realized — just mindlessly paddling to get out past the breakers and waiting for a wave, then doing it all over again, countless times, one wave after another. She was exhausted and hadn't known.

THEY MURMURED TO
each other in their sleeping bags. Kim almost wished they weren't camping so close to the ocean. After the surfing, all she could see when she closed her eyes were waves rushing forward from the horizon. She could still feel them beneath her, moving, and she braced instinctively as she lay there, engaged her core muscles the way the instructor had taught. The same thing was happening to Hart. As they'd start to doze, the motion of the waves would jerk them awake. On top of all that, there was the sound of the ocean, the actual ocean as opposed to the hallucinatory one, constant in their ears.

“Guh!” said Hart, jerking awake beside her. “Did you feel that?”

Kim started to giggle, punchy with fatigue. “Go to sleep, Hart.”

“I'm so tired, and they keep waking me up.”

“I know.”

“I'm getting seasick.”

“I know.”

“We didn't even have sex today!” Hart moaned. Then fell asleep with a soft gasp.

They had not had sex that day because there was no time to have sex, there was no time to talk, there had been no time to do anything but surf, and once the surfing was over they were spent.

Addicts are manipulators
, she remembered Hart saying about Wilf.

Drifting off as she dodged the imaginary waves, it occurred to Kim that Hart would have known the effect the yoga retreat would have on her too — he'd been on it himself several times before. The gentle way her knot of rage came loose — he would have predicted it. Hart had taught yoga himself for a while, and Lionel, the instructor at the retreat, was a close, personal friend. Like practically everyone who came into contact with Hart became a close, personal friend.

Hart had been busy keeping her busy this whole time, keeping her loose and flexible, spending all her energy so that there would be nothing left to fuel her outrage and disgust on the day she met his father.

At the yoga retreat, as she crouched with her head against the mat, she had visualized — at the suggestion of Lionel — her heart opening up like a flower. Now she visualized it closing up again.

IN THE MORNING
Hart had his guitar out — Kim could just make out “Blackbird” above the surf. Hart once said it was his favourite Beatles song because it took him forever, when he was a teenager, to get the hang of the weird chord progression — so learning it had been a triumph. (Kim had the same experience with “Blackbird” growing up—practically everyone who played guitar did—but she didn't say this to Hart.) During the retreat, Kim had made Hart hide the guitar in the trunk of the Cube because she couldn't bear the prospect of being cajoled into all-night campfire singalongs with the other yogis. She loved singing with Hart but she hated the kind of songs that normal people liked — the kind where everybody knew the words. That whiny, condescending Cat Stevens song, for example.
I'll always remember you like a child, girl.
People sitting around firepits could never get enough of it. And she didn't like it when people who didn't know how to sing sang. This seemed like madness to Hart, who was always looking for a gig—paid or unpaid—because “you never know who's in the audience, honey.” Hart played for anyone, anytime. He prided himself on knowing every campfire favourite and would often say he “hadn't got the job done” if people didn't sing along.

She crawled out of the tent and said, “Can't do it, Hart,” when he looked up at her. He pulled the strap over his head and put the guitar aside.

“It won't even be a meal. It's just a couple of hours for tea, honey.”

“I can't be in the same room with him.”

“He's my dad, honey.”

“I mean, it makes me sick, Hart.”

Hart caved in like he had a cramp. He just sat like that and it took Kim a few minutes to understand how much she'd hurt his feelings.

SHE SHOOK HIS
hand. She sat across the table from him.

His girlfriend was only one year older than Kim.

They drank tea, herbal, and the girlfriend served gluten-­free cookies sweetened with agave syrup, which Hart nonetheless declined.

Wilf had clean, shaggy hair, silvery blond, and looked to be in incredible shape for a man his age. He had moved to Ucluelet for the surfing, he told her. He worked as a chef at the resort in Tofino before retiring just a couple of years ago. He had met his girlfriend, Cedar, there, where she still worked, managing the restaurant.

“Do you like storms?” Cedar asked Kim.

“Do I like storms?” Kim repeated.

“Watching storms? The dining room at the inn is the best place to watch storms on the entire coast. You guys should stop in for a drink if the weather takes a turn.” Kim wondered if Cedar was being diplomatic about their finances in suggesting they go to the restaurant for a drink and not dinner.

Wilf had all his guitars mounted on one wall of the living room. As his ex-wife had plants, so Wilf had guitars.

Eight hours north, in cougar-stalked Port Alice, Kim had thought that Brenda and Arlo resembled Hart — that they were stunted versions of him, shrunken by their terrible, terrified lives.

But it turned out she had imagined that. Hart resembled his father or no one. When Wilf crossed the room for an embrace, no one's head ended up in anyone's chest — they were precisely the same height, with the same ropey, over-toned limbs. The same shameless rooster's chest.

She went to use the bathroom just as everyone was moving outside onto the patio. Cedar stayed in the kitchen to clear away the cups. The window was open in the bathroom, and Hart and his father stood almost directly beneath it.

“Have a seat,” she heard Wilf say to Hart.

Now they are alone together, thought Kim. Now they are going to say something alone together.

But they talked about her instead.

“Nice girl,” said Wilf.

“She really is.”

“A bit older, eh?”

“A few years.”

“What's that like?”

“It's what I need right now,” said Hart.

Kim sat holding a wad of tissue in one fist. The fist was in the air, like she was showing it to someone.

“But it's going well?” said Wilf after a moment or two.

“Yes, Wilf. It's going really well. That's why we're here.”

“Well, I just worry about you,” said Wilf. “I would hate to see you get hurt.”

THEY DROVE BACK
to the campground after stopping at the grocery store for dinner supplies, and then they had sex in the parking lot, in the Nissan Cube. Then they carried the groceries to their campsite, set everything up to cook, but instead went into the tent and had sex again. After dinner they went for a walk and after twenty minutes Hart pulled her onto the sand.

“Jesus Christ, Hart,” said Kim.

He giggled into the waistband of her pants.

At one point during all this, Kim was thinking, What are you trying to make up for?

And she was thinking, He knows what I heard today.

And she was thinking, Distraction.

And at another point she thought, Fine; whatever. Whatever I can get.

Just before they went to sleep, Hart said, “I would like it if you went off the pill.”

Kim said, “If something like that ever happened to one of my brothers? They'd kill him. They'd just get a gun and they'd fucking kill him, Hart.”

Hart didn't move. Kim had blindsided him, and she was happy. He believed he had wrung this sort of thing — this
attitude
— out of her with healthy activity and sex, sunshine and ocean air. He thought he could cure her and she was showing him he hadn't.

IN THE MORNING,
he was up ahead of her again, making coffee. She heard him tuning the guitar and decided to sleep in and make him wait. Eventually he began to sing, and the longer she lay in her sleeping bag, the louder he got. He began dedicating all the songs to her.

Wake up, little Kimmie, wake up!

Soul of a Kimmie was created below!

Kiiiiimieee. You're breakin my heart!

Eventually he flung open the flap of the tent and sat in the opening with his guitar, belting “Dear Prudence.”

Dear Prudence! Open up your eyes!

Dear Prudence! See the sunny skies!

She thought: When I open my eyes, I bet you he'll be naked.

Hart was naked. The sun streamed in behind him.

MR. HOPE

I
remember Mr. Hope from when he brought the boy with an eyeball falling out to be gawked at by our Grade One class. The two of them stood up there side by side, saying nothing for a good while as the life seeped out of us — our childish noise becoming less and less. I don't know about the rest of Grade One but, personally, I had been riding high up until that moment. Earlier that same day, for example, I had discovered I could read inside my head. Everyone else in my class could only read out loud, and not even very well. When the teacher told them: Now read quietly, to yourself, they would start to whisper the words, mouths in motion. Only I knew what she meant. I gasped:
Teacher, look!
And held up the book to my face and said nothing.

I'm saying that up until the moment Mr. Hope strolled into our class with the mangled boy, school had been fine for me. It was exciting. I'd discovered that I was smarter than almost everyone else. I followed instructions better. I knew what the teacher was talking about — I always caught on. I was good, also, at being obedient. When the teacher left the classroom for whatever reason teachers sometimes left, I didn't go ape like the rest of my class. I just sat there in the chaos, contemplating whether or not I should tell on the others upon the teacher's return, rolling the power around in my mind like a marble in my mouth.

“This is Teddy,” grunted Mr. Hope after a long time of standing up there with the boy. Then he let there be even more silence, as we took the newly identified Teddy in and allowed this alien idea to settle over us. The idea that an eye, on a person, could come out.

Mr. Hope was our school's vice-principal. Over the years I have come to know a handful of men like him, but this was my first encounter with such a man. My mind, which I had lately been so proud of, grappled with him; tried to feel its way around him and settle on something — some kind of soft spot — that would allow it to relax.

“Teddy,” said Mr. Hope, his voice like a very low horn, “was hit in the eye by a rock.”

He was monstrous to me. Not Teddy, whose face my gaze had bounced off once and refused to come back to, but Mr. Hope. Monstrous because he was doing this to us, but also in the way older grown-ups often are to the very young. Mr. Hope's eyes were unspeakably blue. He was shaped something like the letter D. A pot-belly would have been okay. My dad had one of those and it was okay. But Mr. Hope was all belly, all outward thrust. And his skin seemed to hang off his face the way Teddy's eyeball hung from its socket.

“A rock thrown in the schoolyard,” said Mr. Hope.

You think I am breaking Mr. Hope's dialogue up for stylistic effect, but this is a pretty accurate rendering of the pace at which he addressed us. He flopped one pronouncement down after another, always pausing to let whatever he'd said just sit there stinking for a moment like a fresh carcass. I'd never experienced someone using silence that way before. People who speak to five-year-olds typically speak fast, never letting there be silence, casting the line again and again in the hopes of hooking their tiny, elusive attention spans.

Here was the crux of my dilemma when I was five years old — here's how the problem presented itself:

Is this a nice man? Or is it a mean man?

“This is what can happen,” said Mr. Hope. “If you throw a rock in the schoolyard.” He glared around at us, like every child in the room was likely carrying such a rock — in our pockets; our hearts.

You'd think there would have been crying. But I don't remember any crying.

All the people I had encountered in my five years of living had, up to that point, been nice. Men were nice. Women were nice. Some children weren't nice, but children didn't count — who cared about children? School was nice. School was still new; I loved it. Everyone to do with school had immediately become my family in my mind. My pillowy teacher, whom I adored so much I actually prayed to her at night. The principal, who drove a pickup truck (this startled me when I learned of it because I'd thought the principal would be driven to school in a limousine). The librarian, the crossing-guard. The canteen lady and the janitor — who I assumed, for some reason, were married. I packed all these people away in my heart. They would be, I decided, mine.

But whose was Mr. Hope?

He substituted in our class sometimes, over the next couple of years. Some days we'd come to school and our sweet-faced grandma-teachers would be gone, replaced by Mr. Hope with some colourless sweater pulled over his D, the collar of a dress shirt always poking out from underneath. Also corduroy pants that bagged in the seat, where there existed no actual buttocks that I could discern. This was the uniform of Mr. Hope.

He was the only man who ever taught us, and he presided over classes in the same way he introduced us to Teddy. He'd grunt a pronouncement, glare blue fury until he could be sure it had sunk in, then move on to the next tenet of the lesson.

By Grade Three I had arrived at the cautious determination to love him as I did all the other grown-ups in my life. Mr. Hope, I'd decided, was also mine. If only for the sake of consistency.

He always called me Greta. Greta was not my name. Greta was a girl whose name had been in the register on the first day of Grade Two, but who failed to ever materialize in our class. Who is Greta? Everyone wondered. It was a weird name. We were a school of Lisas and Cathys and Heathers where the girls were concerned. So we were instantly curious about her. Greta's name sat there in the register, disembodied, but after the second week our teacher stopped calling for her and we stopped speculating. Then Mr. Hope substituted one day and called her name.

We all jumped, because we'd forgotten about Greta. Our curiosity was rekindled at once — Greta! We'd almost let her disappear! I think I must have jumped more than anyone else, because Mr. Hope pinned me with his terrible eyes.

“Greta?” he said.

“Shelly,” I replied. The whole class gulped a breath. I heard the whoosh of it and did the same, understanding why. Because I had contradicted Mr. Hope. I hadn't even given it a second thought, I just opened my mouth and pronounced him wrong.

He was scowling; but he was always scowling, that was his face. He blinked at me once, scowled less, then nodded.

“Greta-Shelly,” he said, turning back to the register.

Something happened then. Our relationship, clicking into place.

By Grade Four, I had become enormous. I came back from summer vacation taller than everyone else, boys as well as girls. It angered and disoriented me and I wanted to show them. I wanted to throw my weight around.

I didn't feel like the smartest person in the world anymore — that had gone away. Everyone else in my class knew how to tell time and I couldn't yet. I just wasn't interested. It didn't seem like something I'd ever need. Then one day my teacher, who up until then I had dutifully loved, discovered this. She stopped what she was doing and brought me up to the front of the class and made me face the clock. “You'll learn this now,” she said. “Because it's easy. It's just too easy for you not to learn. Right, class?” All the other students watched me for lack of anything else to do. Every time the teacher asked me if I understood, I told her no. “Shelly,” she said. “You do so. You do so know the multiples of five.” I told her no.

At lunchtime, I would roll into the schoolyard like a tank, kids fleeing in my wake. I was looking for either David Culligan or Andre LaPointe. David Culligan had too many freckles and Andre LaPointe was French. They were natural targets. At the same time, however, I had to be wary of Michael Elleman. Michael Elleman, like almost everyone else, was smaller than me, but he had recently acquired a big friend with white-blond hair named Bernie.

Michael Elleman humiliated me every day with declarations of love. He would pucker his lips, I would bolt, and Michael would give chase. I kicked him in the stomach one recess after he'd managed to corner me in the stairwell, and after that he started showing up, lips still very much puckered, but with his new friend Bernie acting as a kind of romantic enforcer.

So every day, once we were let free from school, my goal was two-pronged: stomp either David Culligan or Andre LaPointe; avoid Michael Elleman and Bernie.

Life had turned itself into war sometime around the end of Grade Three. I sat around hating my older brother much of the time, wondering how I could ever learn to hurt and insult him as effortlessly as he did me. Not long after he entered Grade Six he'd stopped being my friend. He only played with me when he had no boys to play with. When he played with me, he would sit on my head or chase me around with his hockey stick screaming, “Slapshot! Slapshot!” I had no stick to pick up in my own defence. I threw a jar of blackberry jam at him, which exploded onto the walls, floor and drapes. Every night my parents would hear me screaming from the downstairs TV room, “I'll kill you! I'll kill you!”

David Culligan and Andre LaPointe did not complain to the principal or teachers about my terrorizing them because I was a girl. So I was safe in that regard.

Michael Elleman and Bernie remained a concern.

It was my own fault, getting caught. They took advantage of my weakness: the blank-minded zeal that overtook me one recess after I had successfully nabbed, and was preparing to pound, David Culligan. I had him trapped against the chain-link fence. David had tried to lose me in the trees at the edge of the schoolyard but encountered only fence beyond, and now he was done for.

(I always seem to be telling stories about chain-link fences, it occurs to me now. Maybe because they're a thing belonging to the implicit troublemakers of this world: children and prisoners trying to get out; would-be criminals trying to get in.)

I'd landed a single shot to David's stomach that I instantly felt awful about when someone pulled me backwards by the arms — and next thing I knew Michael
Elleman
was in front of me, mashing his face against mine.

I cried all the way to the school office, and it was Mr. Hope who was waiting there to comfort me.

“Calm down, Greta,” he told me in the low horn of his voice.

I was calming down already. The school office was secret and official, a sanctuary of grown-up rules and swift justice. It smelled like typewriter ribbon and coffee that had been boiled to a tarry stain at the bottom of the pot.

Can I break the rules a moment here? I mean even more than I already have? Because I want to say that now, remembering the school office, I concurrently remember something ten years in the future from that day: I come back to this school at the age of twenty to teach a sexual abuse prevention workshop. It's hard because I still don't quite consider myself a legitimate adult, fit to mix with other grown-ups. On my first day of work, I present myself at the office — this same office, with its very same carpet and hunting-lodge colour scheme — take a big breath before announcing to the secretary: “Hi. I'm Shelly? I'm here to teach sexual abuse.” But once I'm with the children in the classroom — my old classroom, the classroom where I gawked at a boy with his eyeball hanging out — I relax again. I am back in my element. I could almost slip into my old desk and wait for the cafeteria worker to deliver our milk. I remove the puppet from my sexual abuse prevention kit — a parrot named “Good-Touch Gordie” — and the children flock to me, enchanted.
Awk!
I squawk in my parrot voice.
Good touch! Awk! Awk! Bad touch!
And I point at the relevant places on the body chart. The body on the chart has no sex, is neither boy nor girl.

“I didn't want him to kiss me,” I hiccuped at Mr. Hope. “I didn't ask him to. Bernie pinned my arms.”

Mr. Hope was sitting beside me on the black leather couch in the main office. The couch frightened and comforted me all at the same time, because that was where you had to sit when you were called to the office for breaking the rules. But it was also where you sat if you were sick and waiting for your mother to come and take you home. And it was where I was sitting now, beside Mr. Hope, who grunted: “Michael and Bernie will be punished.”

I think about that now — that grunting pronouncement takes my breath away still. Not: I'll speak to Michael and Bernie, or: Michael and Bernie will be getting a good talking-to, don't you worry. No euphemisms. Just the stark invocation of justice.

Were Mr. Hope and I friends? Suddenly I thought of something weird that had happened in Grade Three. It seemed like decades ago, but it was just the year before, back when I still loved everybody. Something strange had happened that day — something was off. Our grandma-teacher had some kind of crisis, needed to leave for the second half of the morning. Mr. Hope came in looking distracted. We were in the middle of making Easter baskets, cutting out countless pieces of coloured paper into egg shapes — we easily could have been kept busy until lunch. But Mr. Hope made us put our baskets aside, gave us to understand that he had come to class not merely to babysit until the bell, but to impart a very special lesson.

He glared at us until we settled, just as he had done in Grade One, and once all the noise and motion had been driven from the room he blinked and scowled and asked us: What is love, people?

Hands shot up. We could play this game — easy. We were children. We knew all about love.

Mr. Hope called on a few of us. He didn't know anybody's names, so he gave us nicknames.

“You: ponytail.”

“Love is when you love your mommy.”

“No. That's not what love is, that's something you do with it. Try again. You: eyebrows.”

“Love is when you feel your heart —”

“I'm not asking for examples of love. When you say ‘love is when this, love is when that,' you people are just giving me examples. Do you know what examples are? Do you understand the difference? If I ask you what is a rock, you don't say: ‘A rock is when you throw a rock and hurt somebody.'”