Hey Nostradamus! Part 8

Linda wrote me some time after we moved away; the letter is one of the few items I've kept across the years. It was mailed to my old address and forwarded to my aunt's house. It read:

Dear Jason, I'm deeply ashamed that I've not contacted you before this. In the midst of losing Cheryl, we were vulnerable and chose to listen to strangers and not our own hearts. At the time when you needed comfort and support the most, we turned away from you, and it's something Lloyd, Chris and I face every day in the mirror. I don't ask your forgiveness, but I do request your understanding.

It's been a few months since October 4, but it feels like ten years. I've quit my job and, in theory, I'm supposed to be overseeing the Cheryl Anway Trust, but all I do is wake up, dress myself, drink some coffee and drive down to this office s.p.a.ce we've rented on Clyde Avenue.

There's not much for me to do here. Cheryl's Youth Alive! friends take care of the Trust's every function - handling cash, cheques and credit card receipts, sending thank-you notes, manning the phones, filling out tax forms, and so on. It's a busy place, but I don't fit in. I wish I could derive some sort of consolation from the Trust's success, but I don't, and they all work so hard - they've got b.u.mper stickers, bracelets and postcards, and, for what it's worth, a ghostwriter will soon be doing a book about Cheryl's life which may or may not help other young people or their parents. It won't help me. I shouldn't be telling you this - this letter may never even find you - but nothing in the past months has brought me any solace, and how could it? In the last year of her life, my daughter was no longer my daughter. She was somebody else. I have no idea who it was who died in the shooting. What sort of mother would say that about her child?

I've just had one of those moments. Maybe you've had them, too - a moment when the distance and perspective I think I've put between me and Cheryl's shooting dissolves, and I'm right back on October 4 again - and then suddenly it's months later and I'm a middle-aged woman sitting in a rainy suburb on a weekday, and her daughter is dead for no reason, and she never knew her daughter at all. Her daughter chose something else; Cheryl chose something else over me and what our family offered, and she did it with smiles for everybody, but with condescension. And what am I to do? There is nothing I can do. Some man or woman is going to write Cheryl's life story, and they're going to ask me questions and I won't have a thing to say.

I don't know if I'm angry with Cheryl or angry at the universe. Do you get angry, Jason? Do you? Do you ever just want to take your car out onto the highway and gun the engine as fast as you can and then close your eyes and see what happens?

Lloyd and Chris are taking things much better than I am. I'm lucky in that regard. Chris is young - he'll heal.

There will be scars, but he'll make it through okay. We have no idea what to do with him and school. He's having a hard time readjusting at Delbrook, which they've just reopened - they bulldozed the cafeteria and built a new one in just four weeks. We might have to send him to a private school, which we can't afford. That's for another letter.

Jason, I apologize. You don't need this on top of everything else, but then maybe you do.

Maybe you need to know that there was someone else out there who loved the girl beneath the perfect smile, the girl who, to my mind, foolishly prayed for suffering so she could play at martyrdom. Jason, there's no one to talk to about this. All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.

I beg your forgiveness, wherever you are. Please write or phone or visit if you can. Please think of me kindly and know that is how I think of you,

Yours, Linda Anway A letter from Mr. Anway came three days later:

Dear Jason, Linda tells me she has written to you, and in so doing she has shamed me. How can I thank you for your bravery on that horrible morning? You saved the lives of so many children without thought of your own safety. I drove down to your house earlier today, but it had been sold quite a while ago. There was no forwarding address for you, but I'm hoping Canada Post will track down your family with this letter.

Linda hasn't been herself since October 4. How could she be? I don't know what she wrote in her letter, but please take into account that we've both been running on empty for months now. That I didn't recognize the media's smear job of your fine nature is a stain I will take to the grave.

I asked if she had described the funeral for you, and she hadn't. So I will. It was Tuesday, the eleventh of October, a week after the shooting. I had thought the week would allow things to cool down, but instead things s...o...b..lled, and have never stopped s...o...b..lling.

We opted to have a graveside ceremony only. This was a tactical decision made by Linda and me. The people from Youth Alive! wanted to run the show, with no regard for our wishes. We figured they'd be having events of their own soon enough (we were right) and we wanted something that was entirely ours, and more intimate. This was a mistake.

For traffic and crowd control reasons, the police had asked that we not have a cortege drive to the cemetery, but that we meet the coffin there. We thought they were overreacting, but we went along with their suggestion: another bad idea, as it turned out. By two in the afternoon there were hundreds of cars parked on the sides of the road around the cemetery. The RCMP escorted us in, and the cemetery was overrun with (the papers reported) about two thousand people. My skin crawled. That's a cliche, but now I know what it means - like a slug crawling down the small of your back.

There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl's grave area, and that was good, but what made me furious was that the Youth Alive! people had brought hundreds of black felt markers, and pa.s.sed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl's casket was densely covered both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter's casket like a yearbook. Maybe I was mad because I'd chosen the casket in Cheryl's favorite shade of white, slightly pearly, and I'd been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to the inevitable. I suppose it's cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you.

Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.

Before Cheryl's funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would prepare us for Cheryl's, but no, there's nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too preachy for my taste.

I'm still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I'd always thought her conversion was too extreme, and so did Linda. Linda says you've had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I'm with you all the way in thinking that they're slightly creepy. And it was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It's because I listened to them, and not my own heart, that I'm sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having invited you over to our home ages ago.

This letter has become difficult to write, and it's through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I wish I'd taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl's coffin. Why didn't I? What foolish pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl's Alive! friends look forward to the grave the same way Chris and Cheryl used to look forward to Disney World. I can't share in this excitement, probably because I'm about thirty years closer to death than they are. They keep referring to Cheryl and her notebook with G.o.d IS NOW HERE as some sort of miracle, and this I can't understand. It's like a twelve-year-old girl plucking daisy petals. He loves me, be loves me not. It doesn't feel miraculous to me. But the kids down at the Trust office talk about miracles all the time, and this, too, baffles me. They're always asking for miracles, and finding them everywhere. Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in G.o.d - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

I wish we'd rented a boat and gone out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca and beached on some island and taken Cheryl into some woods, located a nice meadow, and buried her there among the wild daisies and ferns. Then I would feel she's at some kind of peace. But her grave now?

I went up there yesterday and it was a mound of flowers and teddy bears and letters. And in the rain they'd all melted together, and it shouted confusion and rage and anger at me, which is what one ought to feel after such a heinous crime; but graves are for peace, not for rage.

Wherever this letter finds you, I hope it finds you well and at peace, or something like it.

When you return to North Van, might I ask you and your family over for dinner? It's the very least we could do.

Yours fondly, Lloyd Anway

This arrived two days after Mr. Anway's letter:

Jason, I just caught my dad mailing you a letter. He tried to hide it between some bills, and when I pushed him, he told me that Mom had also written you, which wigged me out completely. I can all too well imagine the crock of lies he fed you. Mom, too. You need to know that everything they tell you, everything, is outright c.r.a.p. From the word go, they've hated you.

After it happened, they took all the photos of you in Cheryl's bedroom and scratched out your face. There would be whole evenings when Cheryl's hypocritical preacher pals would sit in our living room and totally trash you with Mom and Dad. They reduced you to a scab lying on a floor beneath a toilet being carried away by beetles bit by bit. Man, they were brutal, and they were extra brutal when they talked about, or rather talked around, s.e.x. I mean, let's face it, the two of you were an item, but the Alive!oids made it sound like rape, and that it was your sole job in life to corrupt Cheryl. And once they'd tied the noose for you, they'd lay into how you always seemed like the kind of guy who'd plan, and a.s.sist in murdering a whole school just to kill the girl he'd worked so hard to corrupt. I mean, get real. Some nights I had to leave the house. Most nights, actually.

Mitch.e.l.l Van Waters, Jeremy Kyriakis and Duncan Boyle were in my grade, and they were such total wipeouts that people could barely remember they existed. They'd come into English cla.s.s in these beat-up black leather jackets, acting like they were big-shot political guys starting a revolution, and they'd sit there writing lyrics from Skinny Puppy on their cargo pants with felt pens and Liquid Paper. I remember watching Mitch.e.l.l and Duncan having a wicked sc.r.a.p with hunting knives down by the portables, all because Duncan brought a six-sided dice, not a twelve-sided dice, for one of those role-playing games they were into. In social studies, Duncan brought in a solid-state panel from a TV set and spent the cla.s.s in the last row writing hex symbols all over it, but they were fake symbols he was inventing, which looked a lot like the pictures of crop circles he'd photocopied for cla.s.s the year before. And they wondered why n.o.body paid them any attention? They were messes, and there was no way you and they even breathed from the same atmosphere. So when they said you were connected to them? I think not.

I was thinking about you and October 4. You've seen the TV stuff like everyone else, but you left the scene and I don't think you ever came back, and maybe you don't know what it was like to have been there.

I was in PE, and during the cla.s.s jog up the mountain, my friend Mike and I cut out and went down Queens Avenue to smoke. It was a beautiful day. Why waste it with a bunch of jocks?

We got to talking with these three girls from the grade below us who were headed to the Safeway deli down at Westview. Then we heard some shots. Funny, I'd never heard a real gun fired in my life, but I knew exactly what it was. So did Mike. We heard a siren, some more shots and - I bet you didn't know this, but that first siren wasn't for ma.s.sacre victims, it was for that guy you hammered down by the shop cla.s.ses. Anyway, the five of us decided to walk up the hill, and the shots continued and then the SWAT team, the Navy SEALS, James Bond, and, I don't know, Charlie's Angels, all arrived at once. And all of the students pouring out of the school? Their heads looked like Sugar Crisp being poured from a box. Everybody was running as fast as they could, but they were all trying to look back, too, and so they were wiping out all over. By the time we neared the front of the school, they were hauling out bodies and, well, no need to go into that. We were moved up to the top of the hill, but we could tell exactly who had blood on them and who was being treated. I saw you, and you were covered in blood, but you were walking, so I a.s.sumed you were okay. And then I suddenly had a chill and I knew Cheryl was dead. I think ESP is BS, but that's what I felt.

The rest of the day was a war zone. All of the parents began showing up from work and home, and they'd leave their cars parked wherever with the engines still running and the doors open. Once family members hooked up, the RCMP moved them up and onto the football field, and so the parking lot became the place for an ever-shrinking number of parents without children. Mom and Dad showed up, and around 3:30 we heard the news about Cheryl. Our brains were so fried by that point that it didn't even make sense. Mrs. Wong from next door drove us to the hospital in Dad's car. There was no way he could drive. Her two kids were in the caf but were unhurt. She'd have driven us to Antarctica if we'd asked.

The hospital was another scene altogether - dead and mended bodies rolling around like shopping carts in a supermarket. I don't even know why they or we stuck around. It was kind of pointless by then. I mean, we knew Cheryl was lost even before we arrived. We were so messed up.

When it turned dark out, I was still in my gym clothes from PE cla.s.s. Somebody, I don't remember who, gave me a windbreaker, and it was as I was zipping it up that I heard the first rumor about YOU, there in the hospital lobby. The rumors didn't even start small. Right from the outset YOU were the mastermind, and when Mom and Dad found out, Mom went hysterical, and they had to give her a barbiturate, which is like this elephant pill from the 1950s. Dad took something, too, and for the first week they were floating on these things.

Mom still is. I can always tell when it's time for her next dose, because her breathing goes all choppy. They really were out of their minds that you were to blame. I tried sticking up for you, and nearly got excommunicated from the family. And what did you ever do to those Alive!oids? They were brutal about you.

But I was going to say that when it was announced at the end of the second week that you were innocent of all charges, Mom went even crazier, and dragged Dad down with her. They refused to believe the RCMP's report. The you-know-whos had done a real number on the two of them.

Anyway, this is the longest letter I've ever written, and the most focused I've been since October 4. You've moved or split town or something - good for you. Lucky you. Can I come escape to wherever you are?

Be strong, buddy, Chris

Through a Starbucks window I'm watching a sunset the color of children's aspirin as I crash-land on two clonazepams. I paid twenty bucks a pop for them from some Persian brat in his daddy's BMW, down at the corner of Fourth and Lonsdale - just blocks away from Mom's place.

G.o.d. Now I do feel like I'm prepping for an anger management cla.s.s. But there's no cla.s.s, and if you're still doing what I'm doing at my age, then a cla.s.s isn't what you need. Money, maybe?

Kent got drunk as a log at his wedding, and while I was dancing with a bridesmaid, and he with Barb, he looped past me, stuck his face into mine, and with a hot breath of champagne, chicken breast and vegetable medley said, "You'll never be rich because you don't like rich people." And then he whirled off. And he was right: I don't like rich people, with their built-in towel racks that need a heating system that comes from Scotland -Scotland! - with their double-door refrigerators with nonmagnetic surfaces to discourage the use of fridge magnets, and with their Queen Charlotte Islands red cedar shoe closets that smell like saunas.

Here's what I did wrong: I installed the built-in towel racks on the wrong side of the bath, and Les went mental on me because the owner won't surrender the weekly payment until it's done properly. I care but I don't care, but then Les is furious with the universe because his kid has a cataract, so I do care, but then at the same time, for G.o.d's sake, it's just a towel rack for some guy who, for whatever reason, needs to get his jollies with a warm towel every morning. So in the end, it's not possible to care - it's just towels. If Rich Guy uses one towel a day for a decade, it's still going to cost him over eighty cents a towel.

$3,000.00 = 82.

365 x 10

And in any event, best friends don't fistfight over towels or towel racks - or, if I ruled the world, they wouldn't.

Forget about ruling the world, I can barely get the automatic doors at Save-On-Foods to acknowledge my existence. So I have to take what life sends me. I put a smile on it. I seethe. I leave work a few hours early. I get cranked in a downtown parking lot. I fly high and develop elaborate schemes to elevate human consciousness. I come down. I get cranked again, but I suspect the new amphetamine is cut with milk sugar, so I enjoy it less the second time. I think, Wow, have I really watched two sunrises and two sunsets without having slept? I come down hard. I buy clonazepams from Persian twerps. I sit in a cafe and scribble on pink invoice papers.

Off to Mom's. Got to rescue Joyce.

It's the next morning, or at least McDonald's hasn't switched over to their lunch menu yet. A fast- food breakfast; drops of grease have elevated this morning's pink invoice paper into a stained- gla.s.s doc.u.ment.

My brain feels like a cool, deep lake. Did I really sleep for twelve hours? I'll even make it to work by noon today, which will probably put Les in such a good mood that he'll forget the string of six near-satanic messages he dumped into my answering machine.

Well, nephews, when I went to my mother's place last night after Starbucks, your mother, Barb, was there, leaning on the kitchen counter, and the big discussion was about why Reg is such a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, a subject my mother has given much thought to.

As I walked in the door, they both took one look at me, and Mom said, "You - into the shower right now. When you're finished, change into something from the guest room closet. I've got some cream of cauliflower soup and French bread here. You'll eat some of that, and then you're going right to bed in the guest room. Got it?"

From the bathroom, I heard some of what my mother and your mother were saying.

"Well, you know, the initial attraction was that his family grew daffodils - still grows them. I thought that was so amazing - I thought only good people could grow daffodils."

"What would bad people grow?"

"I don't know. Bats? Mushrooms? Algae? But daffodils -they're the most innocent flower on earth. They're a member of the onion family. Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"Learn something new every day."

"Aren't narcissus the same as daffodils?"

"They are. Most people think they're different. But they're not."

"Wouldn't a narcissus be, well, not quite evil, but not innocent, either - vain?"

"Reg had an answer for that. Do you want to hear it?"

"Tell me."

"He said, 'Who are we to slap the human sin of vanity onto some poor flower that did nothing more than be given a name?'"

"That's kind of nice."

"He also looked at the flowers at our wedding - anthuriums, ginger and birds-of-paradise - he said afterward that he thought they were 's.l.u.tty.'"

"Oh."

The two women watched me enter the kitchen. Neither of them had any illusions. Mom said, "Here's some orange juice. Your system's probably screaming for vitamin C."

"Jesus, Jason. Shave already. You could sharpen a hunting knife on your five o'clock shadow."

Mom placed a soup bowl onto the counter. To them it was nothing, but to me this moment was a brief taste of heaven.

Barb asked my mom, "When did Reg start turning gonzo on you?"

"With religion?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe a year after Kent was born. There was no specific trigger. Jason, honey, use a napkin, I just washed the floor."

"Overnight?"

"No. I remember his face hardening about the same time -his cheek muscles losing slackness. It was probably something to do with serotonin. If I'd secretly dosed his coffee with Wellbutrin or another one of these new drugs, we'd still be a functioning happy couple. But instead he just kept losing it and losing it. By the time the kids started school, we were in separate beds. I was drinking big time by then. He liked it because it kept me in one place, and because when I was drunk, he didn't need to speak to me. Not like I wanted to speak with him."

Cell phone just rang. I have to go. Les says this week's check cleared, so why don't we go have a beer to celebrate? It's 11:00 A.M.

Okay, it's been six days since my last entry in this journal, and I'm going to record what happened as fully as I can remember.

Les and I went for a beer at the Lynwood Inn, a blue-collar place down at the docks beneath the Second Narrows Bridge pilings. I don't know if it was the heat, or that we weren't eating the free chicken wings, but by one o'clock we were blotto, when in walked this wharf rat, Jerry, who I met in court in 1992 - he'd been pulled over in an Isuzu pickup loaded with stolen skis. When the next pitcher of beer arrived, Jerry paid from a big roll of bills. He then said he had a seventeen- foot aluminum boat with an Evinrude SO for sale. It was down on the water and did we want to go for a ride?

The boat was a real sweetheart and dead simple: a hull, an engine, a front windshield and a steering wheel - basically a Honda Civic afloat on the harbor's brilliant gla.s.sy water. . . salt mist and galvanized metal; propeller blades churning in jade green water cut with pale blue smoke.