Things Go Flying (2 page)

But more often, getting the boys moving was like shifting wet earth. And now Harold was getting harder to shift too.

At least Dylan had come in—she'd know that careless slam of the door anywhere, those bounding, optimistic leaps up the stairs—and the shower in the bathroom at the end of the hall was running. Audrey slipped off her housecoat and prepared to step into her freshly pressed skirt. But first, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom she shared with Harold. It was unjust, Audrey thought, that when a woman reached a certain age, her shins began to look like kindling, and her thighs like pillows. Well, she wasn't quite there yet. She'd put on weight, especially around the hips, but in the right clothes, she still looked presentable. She was still an attractive woman. And she'd produced two truly and equally handsome boys, her one real achievement.

She stepped into her skirt and put on her good pearl earrings. It was time to go get Harold. He needed roughly fifteen minutes to shave and dress on a regular day; today he might need twenty-three.

• • •

J
OHN WASN'T APPRECIABLY
different from other seventeen-year-old boys. He thought about girls a lot and about sex almost constantly. He treated his cell phone as an extension of himself.

He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, and he didn't give it a lot of thought. He lived moment to moment, trusting to luck or to his parents to make things work out for him.

Now, as he was dressing for the funeral, he heard a tap at his bedroom door and turned, expecting to see his mother checking on his progress. But it was his father who nudged open his door and stood there, strangely hollow-eyed. John found he couldn't look at him. He bent down and pretended to straighten a dark sock.

“What?” John said. He tried to sound dismissive without sounding like he was looking for a fight. He had to get the inflection exactly right to pull it off; it was tricky.

When his father didn't answer, John worried that he'd blown it. The adrenaline started and he looked up guardedly, wishing his father would go away. He didn't want to deal with his father's grief, or whatever it was.

But then he heard his mother's voice from farther down the hall, calling, “Harold? Time to get dressed.”

Harold turned his head to look down the hall, and John, observing his dad's profile, thought,
he looks old.
Then, gratefully,
good timing, Mom.

His father turned back to him and said, “Never mind,” and left to do as Audrey told him.

Harold was no less relieved than John was that they'd been interrupted. He'd only wanted to tell his son that he appreciated his coming with them to the funeral, but lately, everything between them had smacked of a power struggle, and he'd feared John would see his attempt as patronizing.

“I've laid your clothes out on the bed,” Audrey told him, unnecessarily, as she moved past him in the hall to stick her head into John's room.

Suddenly Harold felt like he was a sheep, that they were all sheep, being herded to who knew where by an extremely efficient border collie.

• • •

“W
HEN I GET
my G1, you have to let me drive all the time,” Dylan said from the backseat of the mid-sized sedan that was their sole family vehicle.

“As if,” John said, driving a little too fast and with a little too much flourish, but not quite fast enough or with sufficient flourish to make an issue of it, Audrey decided. Besides which, they were running almost ten minutes late due to the fact, unforeseen by her, that they would have to get gas.

That was John's fault. He'd used the car last. She couldn't be expected to keep track of everything.

Family car rides could be stressful for Audrey. The forced proximity created its own tension, there was John's driving—and then there was everyone else on the road. This was Toronto, after all, on a Saturday afternoon, and half the drivers out there were pissed off about something. And the other half were late, like them.

“Turn here,” Audrey said, pointing to the entrance to the funeral home. But the parking lot was already full. They had to cruise around the block, and it was another excruciating five minutes as John stubbornly tried to parallel park on the street, although he hadn't got the hang of it yet, and the space was tight, and other drivers honked at him, impatient to get by in both directions.

Doggedly, he kept trying, face tight with concentration, pulling the nose of the car up alongside again, trying to get the angle right, cutting it too shallow, then overcorrecting and cutting it too deep— holding up traffic—and turning red while Dylan sniggered from the backseat.

John pulled aggressively up alongside again and made another attempt.

“Way to go,” Dylan scoffed as John soundly bumped the parked car behind.

“Fuck off.” It was a warm, sunny, late September day, and John was sweating in his new dark suit.

“Hey,” Harold said, galvanized by the bad language.

John's temper began to get the better of him, and he hit the bumper of the car in front, too.

“Jesus!” Harold said.

“Good enough,” Audrey said, opening her passenger side door. It was probably three feet to the sidewalk. Dylan opened his too, and said, “That's okay, we can walk to the curb from here.”

Why couldn't Dylan ever leave it alone?
Audrey thought.

“You're
so
original,” John said, trying to be scathing. But he was miserable, slamming the car door, shrugging self-consciously inside his damp suit. Suddenly, he crossed the street and walked rapidly away, down the residential block toward the funeral home, without looking back.

What a good-looking boy, Audrey thought, watching him go.

“What the hell is he doing?” Harold said.

He'd wanted his sons to come to the funeral. He was proud of them. They were his sons. There would probably be people here he hadn't seen in years. But if John were going to embarrass him, it would have been better if he'd stayed at home.

“Did you have to be such a smartass?” Audrey said to Dylan, as the three of them crossed the street and began walking down the sidewalk behind John, who was now far ahead.

Harold said, “How many other families come in the same car to a funeral and arrive separately?”

But it began to look like Harold was putting too positive a spin on things. With disbelief, they watched John reach the main road, but instead of turning to his right toward the funeral home, or waiting for them, he jay-walked across traffic and carried on up the street.

He'd blown them off.
Harold couldn't believe it. The three of them stopped at the corner, watching John, Harold with his mouth hanging halfway open.

“He'll come back,” Audrey said, wanting to comfort Harold, but realizing as she said it that she had no idea what their son was going to do. To her intense annoyance, Dylan looked impressed.

• • •

J
OHN HAD NO
idea what he was going to do either. Propelled by embarrassment, fury, and the need to distance himself from his unbearable, denigrating family, John kept going.

He wanted to make a point. He wasn't exactly sure of the point he wanted to make, just that he desperately needed to make a point, and he couldn't think of any other way to make it than by taking off.

He wouldn't look back to see if they'd sent Dylan after him; it was beneath his dignity. If Dylan came after him, he'd tell him where to go.

After a few minutes, his pace slowed. Calmer now, he stopped at a light to cross and waited.

The light changed. A car stopped in front of him so abruptly that the back end of it bounced. It was dark, sleek, and obviously very expensive—so clean he could see his reflection in it—and it was blocking his way.

John was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets and realizing how dark and moody and sexy he must look, because the blonde girl sitting alone in the backseat of the car, and now directly opposite him, gave him a bold once-over, hiked up her black dress to about crotch level, crossed her exquisite legs, and mimed a sexy kiss.

From where he stood, John got a good look at what the girl had to offer. He smiled. She smiled back.

Suddenly, life was pretty good.

The light changed and the luxurious vehicle purred away, the girl's parents oblivious in the front seat. John stood where he was and watched the car go down the street. The girl didn't look back. John could swear that, in the distance, he saw them pull into the driveway of the funeral home.

• • •

I
T WAS AN
open casket; Harold saw that right away. He made a mental note to be sure to tell Audrey that he himself did not want an open casket, when the time came. Harold didn't want to look. But no matter how much you didn't want to look, an open casket
made
you look.

Harold hated funerals. Funerals made him even more self-conscious than usual. Audrey was better at this sort of thing, although even Audrey, he noticed, was looking unusually stiff. She kept shooting little glances over at Tom's widow, Adele, and their three almost-grown children, and looking quickly away if Adele glanced in their direction. Well, he didn't want to talk to her either—it was bound to be awkward, and Harold loathed awkwardness—although he supposed they wouldn't be able to avoid it.

They were late, but the service had not yet begun. The organ music swelled dramatically, the room was stuffy with breathing bodies, gaudy with funeral flowers. People were still filing up to the front, peering at the corpse, and moving on. It made Harold think of a graduation ceremony.

Audrey joined the line, pulling Harold with her discreetly by the hand. Dylan she permitted to fade silently away. Unlike Harold, she wanted to look. She needed to look, because she couldn't believe Tom was dead. He'd been alive four days ago, when she'd seen him in Home Depot. And Tom had always been larger than life—she simply couldn't imagine him dead. She had to see for herself.

He'd been so good for Harold, once. And now he was gone again—gone for good.

Harold, making his way slowly up to the coffin, tried diligently to think about something else. It would be awful to show emotion; he hated to draw any kind of attention to himself.

They shuffled slowly forward and as they approached the front, as Harold stepped up to the coffin and saw Tom—definitely looking older, but somehow not looking dead, in spite of everything—Harold felt that sudden weirdness again, the same alarming palpitation of the heart, the difficulty breathing, the pooling of his blood in his feet. The world started to go black, as if from the outside in.

The last thing he remembered, before he keeled over and struck his head on the hard ebony casket, was the look of regret on Tom's once-loved face.

• • •

D
YLAN HAD OBSERVED
all of this with great interest. With nothing else to do while he waited for his parents to file past the coffin, he'd studied them closely. He liked to watch people, particularly in situations of stress, to see how they would react. Someday, he was going to make a lot of money in the movies. Even at fifteen, he knew he had the looks and the confidence. All he needed was the craft, and he didn't think there was really that much to it, other than being a keen observer and thinking yourself into someone else's shoes. He'd been reading up on method acting, and he thought it was something he could do. He just had to sign with an agent, and then he'd be on his way. But his mother was being completely unreasonable. Whenever he brought it up, she got kind of hysterical.

From the sidelines, he'd observed his mother's face as she looked down at the dead man. There was something interesting there, something unreadable. It certainly wasn't indifference, which he'd kind of expected, given that he'd never heard of this guy till he died. Dylan wondered what, exactly, his mother was feeling.

Next, he watched his dad shuffle up to the coffin and look down at the corpse. He saw his dad turn a funny colour; his face contorted, and he started croaking in what Dylan thought was grief—and then he wasn't so sure.

Dylan took an involuntary step forward as his dad swayed and then collapsed, knocking himself out on the coffin.

• • •

A
UDREY HAD TURNED
away from the casket—tanned, healthy skin against creamy white satin—when she heard a funny gurgling sound coming from Harold behind her. When she turned back to look, she knew instantly that something was wrong. Harold was an odd, worrying colour, and he seemed to be hyperventilating as he stared at the corpse.

They shouldn't have come, Audrey realized at once. She should have persuaded Harold not to attend—she knew how much he hated funerals. The noise Harold was making became louder. It was an involuntary, struggling, personal, embarrassing sound, and Audrey was mortified. People started to look.

It was true what they said about slow motion, Audrey realized. She watched, stupefied, as Harold weaved unsteadily on planted feet and then pitched forward and to the right, striking his head on the side of the casket on his way to the floor.

Everyone within close range took a silent step back to give him room. Other than that, for a moment, no one did anything but stare in surprise. Then Audrey let out a yelp and things started to happen.

The slow motion thing was over, and now everything was happening so fast that Audrey wasn't really taking it all in. Someone called out for a doctor, and a number of middle-aged men quickly stepped up. Audrey remembered anxiously that Tom had been a gynecologist. Remembered it anxiously because by now, she was convinced that Harold had had a heart attack, a massive cardiac arrest, that he was being taken from her, and she wasn't prepared for this at all.

They laid Harold out on his back below the casket, his head at Tom's feet. His jacket was opened, his tie was removed, and his shirt unbuttoned; there was interest, definitely, but no one was doing chest compressions like on TV.
Why the hell not? Were they all gynecologists?