Hippie House (27 page)

Jimmy must have been disappointed, but he didn't convey it in his voice. “Yeah, sure, whatever you want.” He drew a finger through the thin layer of road dust on the hood of his father's new car.

I had stopped to admire the car on my way back from the workshop. As Eric disappeared through the kitchen door, I found myself apologizing on his behalf.

“He's not himself,” I started to explain. “I'm sorry he wasn't more excited about your new car, Jimmy.”

“Hey, don't worry about it. I only thought it might help take his mind off it, that's all.” Jimmy opened the car door. “Man, I can't even imagine having to deal with what he saw. I don't know how he's kept it in as long as he did. I mean, it's not like he saw it in a movie or something. And then there's this whole thing with Malcolm on top of it. That's been a real drag too.”

Jimmy must have seen the worry on my face. “Don't worry, Emma, he'll get over it. It's just going to take some time that's all. And Malcolm, well, he'll turn up, I'm sure of it. He always has.” He smiled a little. “I don't suppose you want to come to the movie with me?”

It was cold and I pulled my sweater a little closer around me. I hadn't even thought to put on a coat when I'd run up to talk to Dad in the workshop. I shrugged. Eric sure didn't do anything fun with me anymore. “Yeah, I would like to go. I'll get my coat.”

Jimmy was in an up mood and it was great to be around someone fun for a few hours. He couldn't sit still when the Stones
were performing onscreen. He drummed continually on the back of the seat in front of him. He had drummed all through “Sympathy For the Devil” when he suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked, “When did you grow up?”

I didn't know the answer. But I was glad he'd noticed.

“I mean, didn't you use to be a kid?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I was. But I got my braces off.”

He laughed. “Oh well, that must be it.” He turned back to the screen and began drumming again. He stopped briefly. “Did you wear braces? I never noticed.”

Eric was sitting at his desk with his chemistry books spread before him, making a paper-clip chain, when I arrived home. His lab notebook was open to a fresh white page. Nothing but the number one had been written in the margin. It appeared that was all he'd accomplished in the nearly three hours I'd been gone.

“You missed a good movie,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that's the way it goes.” He weaved another paper clip onto the end of the two-foot chain.

Wandering over to his desk, I glanced at the chapter assignment in his textbook. There were fifteen questions. “Wow, you keep this pace up and you might be finished by Christmas.” When he didn't say anything, I slumped into the big chair. I thought it was time I said something. Somebody had to. So I told Eric that he should get a grip and not disappoint his friends. “Jimmy's a nice guy. He's only trying to help. Look, I know you're worried about Malcolm, and what you saw is probably impossible to get over, but everybody's trying to help. Maybe you could just try.”

Eric looked over to where I sat in the chair. I had his attention. I leaned forward.

“You're going to have to get over it sometime. You can't just stop doing things forever. I mean, don't you miss flying? And playing your guitar? And by the way, when Dad gets sick of
doing your chores for you, I sure don't want to get stuck having to do them too. I don't have a clue how to change a spark plug. And besides,” I studied my hands, “it would really wreck my nails.” I sat back.

Eric didn't reply.

“Hey, do you know what Jimmy asked me?”

He picked up his pencil and returned to his lab book. “No, what did Jimmy ask you?”

“He asked me when I grew up.”

Eric jotted down a chemistry formula. “He doesn't know you still can't sleep without a night-light.”

Okay, it wasn't much—but it was the best shot he'd thrown my way in some time.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me and half this town. Anyway, it's only a little light. And you'd better not tell him.”

Eric finally managed a half smile. He assured me that it really wasn't such a big deal.

T
HAT FALL WAS THE FIRST TIME
in my memory we didn't eat Thanksgiving dinner together. Eric was invited to the Fritzes' along with Jimmy—and because the family was still unsure where Malcolm was or if he was all right, Eric didn't want to disappoint them. Carl was gearing up for the skating season. He spent the long weekend working overtime at the arena, where he stocked the concession booth and helped Mr. Dikkers ready the ice. And Mom was so busy preparing the Halloween display for the craft store that, amazingly, Thanksgiving seemed to almost slip her mind.

Throughout the month of October, the dining room table was covered with a heap of orange crepe paper and black felt. Silhouettes of witches and white floss for spider webs cluttered the buffet. On the Monday morning of the long weekend, I stuck my head in the doorway. “Do you want me to help you clear the table?”

“Huh?” A little bleary-eyed, Mom looked up from the outline of the ghost she was tracing. “Sorry, dear. What did you ask?”

“For Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Do you want me to help you move all that stuff?”

“Thanksgiving?” She surveyed the mess on the table. “That won't be necessary. There will only be the three of us. I was going to make a chicken, and I think we'll eat in the kitchen. We'll use the stoneware and the regular silverware tonight.”

The regular silverware? On Thanksgiving? I seriously wondered if my mother was ill. I thought I'd better ask my father. I wandered up to the workshop, where Dad was building shelves for the seniors' home. He had just said goodbye to Mr. Fraser, who waved to me as he drove down the lane. Dad didn't answer right away when I asked him about Mom. He appeared preoccupied as he continued pounding nails. I asked if there was something wrong with him.

“Oh, no, sorry. It's just that Mr. Fraser's still keen on mining gold in Costa Rica. I guess I've never been much of a gambler. I'd like to see the prospector's reports, that's all. What was it you asked me, Emma?”

I sat on a stump in front of the roaring stove. I patted old Halley and again put the question to him regarding my mother.

To my surprise, he laughed. “Your mother's fine, Emma. She's just enjoying her new job.”

“Enjoying? She worries over the tiniest little detail, and she spends so much time on it, it's like she's forgotten about us.”

“People enjoy things differently.”

I clapped my hands over Halley's ears to protect them from the momentary scream of the electric saw.

“And she hasn't forgotten about us, she's only been side-tracked—we're still very much on her mind.” Dad smiled. “Trust me on this.”

There was a cold snap at the beginning of November. On my way down the lane one morning I passed my mother's rose garden. It was as if the roses had been hit by the plague during the night; the heads of the flowers now drooped and the leaves had turned limp and black. Waiting for the bus, I lost the feeling in my toes despite continually stamping my feet. They didn't thaw until I got to school when, slowly, during math, a hot, tingly sensation told me they were coming back to life.

During the lunch hour we stood in the smoking area, chatting as usual. A brisk wind stung my cheeks and reddened my ears. To keep warm, I clutched my arms to my chest. I didn't know how Doug McCrae could just stand there with a cigarette wagging from his lips, wearing only a T-shirt and leather vest, acting like it was the middle of July.

It was unusually quiet walking up the lane after school. I looked toward the pond where the surface was undisturbed. I realized my father must have rounded up the ducks and geese and paraded them into the barn for the winter while I was at school that day.

At dinner I noticed that Eric's hands were already rough and chapped.

“You should wear gloves,” I told him.

“You tell me that every year.”

“So why don't you? I don't get it with you guys—what's so cool about not wearing gloves?”

“It has nothing to do with being cool. They get in my way, that's all.”

Eric was watching the news while I did my homework in front of the television after supper. The telephone rang. Mom called Eric into the kitchen. It was Miles with the news that Malcolm had been found. He had been discovered in a park in Toronto early that morning. He'd been wearing only a light shirt with a T-shirt beneath it, jeans, and sandals with socks the night before
when he'd lain down on a bench to sleep. The temperature had plummeted and Malcolm had died of exposure overnight.

I suppose, looking back, it was the news Eric had been waiting for. He knew it was coming, he just wasn't sure of the particulars, but there it was.

I spent the evening with Megan while Mom and Dad drove Eric to see Miles and offer Mr. and Mrs. Fritz their support.

“Wow,” Megan said when I arrived. I followed her up to her room, where she sank into a chair. “This is so hard to believe. A person can die just like that? I mean, that easily? A big guy like Malcolm? Just by lying down and falling asleep when it's cold? Poor Malcolm. Poor Miles. His poor parents. What's with this place anyway? It's like we're jinxed. They should make a horror movie out of us. This just sucks so bad.”

In retracing the last few weeks of his life, the police discovered that Malcolm had been living on the street since the day he wandered off from the music festival. He'd moved around a lot, hitching rides, bumming money for food, sleeping when he had a need to and where he could find a dry spot. Often this was in bus shelters, under bridges or, on milder nights, in a park. Only a couple of times did he check into a shelter, but there were complaints; he kept others awake with the rambling dialogue he carried on with the voices in his head.

People certainly remembered him—with his untamed beard and waist-length hair he would be hard to forget—but he avoided talking directly to them or making friends with others who lived on the street. He had refused help from social workers. He accused them of plotting against him. He knew their plan was to get him alone and interrogate him.

I asked Eric, “About what?”

“I don't know. About whatever. About the mission to Mars or his involvement in the Attica State Prison riot.”

“Malcolm was involved in the Attica prison riot?”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”

It was all a bit surreal, Malcolm's death and the funeral. The service was very large, with a ton of Malcolm's friends, classmates and former teachers filling the church. His mother and father sat at the front, and although their eyes were swollen, they looked composed. I remembered what my mother said Mrs. Fritz had told her the night they'd learned of Malcolm's death. “I felt as though we lost him the day the doctors told us of his illness. And now I've lost my son twice. I never would have believed anything could be as painful as this.”

Several people spoke in memory of Malcolm, but the one I most admired was Miles. I don't know how he held it together to talk about his brother.

“He had to do it,” Eric told me after the service.

I couldn't imagine anyone heartless enough to force him into it. “Why?”

Eric shrugged. “He was his brother.”

“Man,” said Jimmy, shuffling his feet on the sidewalk, “I keep thinking I should call him up. I feel like it's been a long time since I talked to him and I should find out what he's been up to. That guy that was hanging around with us the last few months—that guy wasn't Malcolm. It seems like he's been gone for a really long time.”

The four of us were silent as my father drove home after the reception. It was just too difficult to talk. In the dusk I looked past my emerging reflection in the window and then across the brown stubble fields. I thought of Malcolm standing in the doorway of the Hippie House when they'd first started The Rectifiers and how he was so cool. Megan had such a crush on him—any girl would have jumped at the chance to go out with him back then. Six months later he was sitting at our kitchen table, talking about the mouse running across the floor, the tsunami in Japan and how he was so worried about upsetting the greater scheme of things.

A frightening thought occurred to me—if I had not caught that mouse, if I'd let it go about its business the way Malcolm wanted it to, would things have turned out differently for him?

T
HE FIRST SNOW FELL
during the second week of November, large soft flakes like dandelion seeds floating silently, melting on water and settling on the ground. With them, the weight of a memory—what he found one snowy December day the previous winter—descended on Eric. It seemed such a long time after the fact, but this is what happens—things that are too horrible to think about at the time can come back to you like that.

He didn't remember it in a dream or as a flashback or anything like that. It was the crunch of the snow beneath his boots as he walked back from the barn. It was the whirling snow around him while the rest of the world stood still. It was the silence most of all. Just like on that day. A sudden feeling of doom overwhelmed him, and by the time he had reached the house he was in an unusually anxious state.

Over the next couple of weeks, Eric lost weight, anxiety prevented him from eating. He rarely laughed, and even a smile seemed to cause him pain. I could call him any abusive name I wanted and he made no attempt to retaliate. That would take energy and he seemed to require all he had just to go to school and accomplish the routine things in his life.

It was snowing lightly after school one day when Eric and I arrived home at the same time. The house was empty—Mom was at work and Dad was in the workshop. Halley did not greet us right away, and she was not in her usual spot—the blanket by the kitchen door. We called her name several times but there was no response. I did a quick tour of the main floor while Eric checked upstairs. When we still didn't find her, Eric walked up to the workshop. My father had not seen her since letting her outside after lunch. He was certain he'd let her in again.