Inside (10 page)

This went on for a year, then another. He didn’t meet the rest of Martine’s family, though her parents lived in Montreal North and her sister not five streets away. Somehow, without any conversation, certain rules had been established. Weekends only, even in summer—except in August, when they went on vacation together in Maine, where Mitch and Mathieu played Frisbee on the beach and jumped in the waves.

He wondered, every so often, why he tolerated these conditions, and always reached the same conclusions. First, as strange as the situation was, there was no doubt that it was better—a thousand times better—than living on his own had been. Second, he believed, though he never articulated this to Martine, that if he hung on and stuck around, eventually he would be more than her son’s companion and her weekend comfort. He would be indispensable. He was counting on that.

Thomasie Reeves came back a week later. In the interim, Mitch had been settling into the duplex; he had bought groceries and stocked the kitchen, and gone for walks around town to let people know who he was and how long he’d be staying. He was welcomed with uncommon grace, tinged with reserve; it was clear that they were used to seeing people like him come and go.

Johnny, he learned, was prone to long absences and sudden reappearances. Mitch would go three days without seeing him, only to wake up one morning and find him frying eggs in the kitchen, asking Mitch to join him, talking a mile a minute about some woman he’d been with the night before. Sometimes he brought the woman back home, and in the morning Mitch would see her sleepily pulling on her shoes in the living room, acknowledging him with an awkward, hungover wave. He hadn’t had a roommate since he was nineteen, but in fact he was glad for some activity in the house, a sense of life going on around him. A couple of times he stayed up late with Johnny, who told hilarious anecdotes about his relatives in Newfoundland, so long and involved that Mitch couldn’t remember them very well the next day. Johnny was a performer, a teller of tales, and the fact that he had no interest in other people, and never asked him what his life back in Montreal was like, suited Mitch perfectly.

He still hadn’t talked to Martine. He’d left several messages, and she’d called once—at a time when she must have known he’d be tied up in appointments—saying that everything was fine, she was glad he had made it safely, and there was nothing to worry about. But things were unraveling—that much was obvious. Less so was how he felt about it. Mainly he was glad to have this much distance between himself and the difficulties of home. He tried not to worry too much about Mathieu; he was opinionated, aggressive, and in his own way emotional, but not much given to abstractions. Which is to say that while he was attached to Mitch, he wouldn’t miss him when he wasn’t around. At least, Mitch didn’t think he would.

He asked around at the clinic about Thomasie Reeves, and everyone shook their heads and talked about how sad that case was but didn’t say anything more. Every conversation about it trailed off into silence. One free afternoon, he went to the library and asked a librarian
about the incident. She sighed and said, “Gloria Reeves,” directing him to the newspaper accounts. The little girl, Karen, had been three years old, and they’d found her curled up inside her mother’s coat, pressed against her chest. The paper ran a photo of the family lined up on a couch, with Karen sitting in her mother’s lap and Thomasie beside them, all three of them wearing white turtlenecks and wool sweaters, a Christmas tree in the background.

A few days later, Thomasie appeared in Mitch’s doorway. He was wearing the same outfit as last time, and his lips were just as chapped.

“Come in, sit down,” Mitch said calmly. “How’s it going?”

“My mom’s worse,” the boy said. “She’s like in a coma or something. I think she doesn’t want to wake up.”

“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” Mitch said.

“It seems that way to me,” the kid said.

“What do the doctors say?”

Thomasie seemed not to register the question, intent instead on telling Mitch what he’d come to say. “They said I should stop visiting her so much. That maybe I should go stay with my dad.”

Mitch wasn’t sure why anybody would tell a kid to stop coming to the hospital, but maybe getting out of town for a while wasn’t such a terrible idea. “What about that?” he said. “Going down south for a little bit.”

Thomasie rolled up the sleeve of his windbreaker and held out his forearm, where there was a whorl of white scar tissue, raised and bumpy, in the crook of his elbow. “My father,” he said.

Mitch’s heart sank. “Did you tell any—”

The boy was shaking his head. “That’s family business,” he said.

Mitch sat there gathering his thoughts. When he was here last time, Thomasie must have been one of those little kids he’d seen running around, apparently joyful. And his father, whom Mitch didn’t remember, would’ve been a teenager with a family, playing basketball in the local league before going home to take out his anger on the children he’d had too soon. Mitch had been inside a number of homes in Iqaluit, and met people who’d drawn close together despite having no jobs or money, who cared for their families and sheltered relatives in need of help, who scraped together enough to buy school supplies for
their kids. He’d also seen homes that weren’t so lucky, where things had gotten out of control. All it took was one haywire generation and sometimes there was no coming back from that—especially for the kids. Thomasie’s home must have been one of those, but it was pretty rare to come out of a place like that as well spoken and personable as he was, and rarer still to appeal to someone like Mitch for help. To have the wherewithal, or the desperation.

“Could you tell the doctors I don’t have to go?” Thomasie was saying. “Maybe you could talk to them.”

“Why?” Mitch said. The question came out sounding unkind, even cruel, but he just didn’t know what the boy hoped he could accomplish. He instantly felt ashamed, with Thomasie’s bright black eyes searching his face for a response. “All right,” he said.

The boy nodded, then abruptly ran out of the room, maybe afraid that if he stayed too long Mitch might change his mind.

There was a lull before Mitch’s next appointment, and he looked out the window, thinking, his gaze fixed on nothing. There was a febrile quality to the boy, a stoppered intensity no doubt born of grief. Mitch knew he was walking into an explosive situation, something almost impossible to handle easily or well, and it gave him the same sense of excitement and danger another person might find in hang gliding or drugs. In falling in love with the wrong person. In falling in love with the right person.

He sat daydreaming of Martine and Mathieu in happier times, the long weekends of dinosaur trivia and Frisbee playing. He missed them, but his longing had less to do with geography than with his demonstrated ability, in spite of all his best intentions, to fuck things up. They still hadn’t spoken. She was punishing him for leaving, and for everything that had happened before he left. It was like they were having a conversation. His leaving and her not calling when he was reachable were
remarks
, just as surely as if they’d been talking it through. In this back-and-forth, it was only a question of who would budge first—and he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be Martine.

Mitch had been with them for over two years when it happened. It was March, with winter still holding on tight and squeezing out one
snowstorm after another, as if trying to build to some grand finale. Mitch’s coworkers took turns going on vacation to Florida or the Bahamas, returning five days later with sunburns and airs of grim disappointment that winter hadn’t given up and vanished while they were out of town. But Mathieu loved snow and playing in the park and never seemed to feel the cold, even when his lips were turning blue and his teeth were chattering. When Martine told him it was time to come in, he would tremble with rage, as if she were robbing him of his most precious possession, then slip loose and run away. And when she finally caught up with him he’d flail his fists, hitting her wherever he could, and Mitch could tell that it hurt her both emotionally and physically. Afterward, when she finally got him home and in bed, she would be exhausted. Mitch brought her tea and stroked her hair, and sometimes held her while she cried.

With him, Mathieu was calmer. He had moved on from dinosaurs to particle physics, and to Mitch he seemed like a genius. He could explain the principles of nuclear fission for an hour, describing its various complexities, and it didn’t matter whether Mitch responded or not. If, however, he left the room, Mathieu would get upset, so he took to reading the newspaper in the boy’s room while these lectures were delivered.

This wasn’t a perfect life; he knew it wasn’t what Martine had once imagined; but it had its own warmth and pulse and pleasures.

Then, one Saturday, the three of them went to the Biodome, an indoor zoo that featured four different habitats, with corresponding flora and fauna, and visitors could walk from one to the next, trading tropical humidity for frigid Arctic air. As ever, Martine was hoping that this new experience might open Mathieu up, move him beyond physics. And at first, things went well. After the cold outside, the warm, wet air made them feel like they were on holiday. They walked through the rain forest, glimpsing birds high above in the trees and enormous capybaras in the streams below. Mathieu held Martine’s hand without complaint. Then he spotted something in the thick leaves overhead—a tamarin monkey, scampering, just barely visible, its golden-brown fur flashing against the trunk of a tree. Mathieu wanted to touch it, to play with it, for his mother to buy it for him and take it home with them. Martine patiently explained that the
monkey wasn’t a pet or for sale, that it was happy in this rain forest but wouldn’t be in their apartment, which was too cold and didn’t have any trees.

None of these arguments made sense to him.
“Singe! Singe!”
he screamed, and Mitch wondered if Mathieu not only wanted the monkey but somehow identified with it, seeing himself up there, loose and wild and uncontained.

Around them families scurried away, eager to distance themselves from the howling boy, lest his behavior prove contagious. Mitch tried to distract him by talking about the snakes in the next room, but that didn’t work. Then he made the worst mistake of all, a gesture he replayed in his mind for weeks to come: he took hold of his shoulder, hoping to steer him toward a new attraction and change the scene. But Mathieu screamed even louder, wrenched himself free, and darted away. When Martine reached out to catch him, he pushed back—in a fit like this he was curiously strong—and knocked her right over the railing behind them, onto a steep, rocky slope. Unable to break her fall, she slipped and then rolled on her side, her hands grasping at air, down to the bottom. People were yelling and pointing, and Mitch instinctively grabbed Mathieu. When the boy tried to pull away, Mitch yanked his arm and heard—over the commotion of the crowd and the upset chattering of the monkeys—the soft pop of his shoulder dislocating.

Mathieu’s pretty face went white with shock and pain, and then he fainted.

Later, in the hospital, they popped Mathieu’s arm back into joint and bandaged Martine’s sprained ankle. Despite the relatively minor injuries, all of this took hours, and Martine refused to leave Mathieu alone with Mitch, who told her, over and over, “I’m so sorry, it was an accident.”

Each time she just shook her head, as if trying to clear her ears, without saying a word. She didn’t tell him to go, and by the end of the night he realized why. Because of her sprained right ankle, she needed him to drive them home. She was very practical, Martine.
When they reached the apartment, she said, “I think we need to be alone tonight,” and he walked back to his place in what turned into an ice storm, the freezing rain pelting his coat.

Though he called Martine the next day to apologize yet again, and swore he wouldn’t let the incident dislodge him from their lives, things did change; cracks soon filtered across the surface of a situation that had been delicate to begin with. But they weren’t the cracks he’d anticipated.

The next weekend, he went over to cook them dinner. He hadn’t seen Martine, but they had spoken on the phone, their conversations scattered and filled with pauses that she blamed on the pain relievers she was taking for her ankle. When he showed up, it was Mathieu who came to the door. In Mitch’s thoughts the boy had loomed larger, stronger, and more demonic, and it was a shock to see how fragile he was, so clearly a child.

“Hey,” he said.

“Je peux faire un ruban de Möbius. Venez voir,”
Mathieu said, turning around and walking back to his room as if nothing had ever happened. Mitch watched him twist the strip of paper for a while, the accompanying recitation high-pitched and breathless, and then said, “I’m going to say hi to your mother for a minute.” Mathieu didn’t respond, though he stopped talking, his small hands still turning the paper around.

In the kitchen Martine was drinking what looked to be, given her violet smile, a third or fourth glass of wine. She waved at him sloppily, hopping around to set the table. As he leaned over to kiss her cheek, she banged her hip against a chair and said, “Ow. Shit.”

That was their hello.

He told her to sit down while he made the pasta Bolognese, and she sat there chattering about their follow-up visits to the doctors and funny things Mathieu had said about her sprained ankle—a performance so untypical that it filled him with dread, and he sank into silence when she called Mathieu to the table. She kept it up all during dinner, joking with Mathieu and tousling his hair until he solemnly
told her to stop. After five bites he asked to be excused, and she let him go. She didn’t eat much either.

Mitch washed the dishes and prepared to leave, the sorrow of endings pressing down on his heart. He felt sure he would never see any of it again: the tiny, cozy kitchen with its tomato-red walls, Martine’s handwriting on refrigerator-hung lists, Mathieu’s science books stacked on the counter.