by Stephen Price
Riding his ancient, ten-speed bike along King Street in Toronto, my brother managed to catch its narrow front wheel in a streetcar track, causing the bike to lurch and hurl him in front of a streetcar travelling in the other direction.
The Toronto Police Department called me to inform us of Avro’s death. The woman’s tone betrayed bad news and I sensed what it was going to be.
“Is this Benjamin Strunk?” she asked
“Yes,” I told her.
“I’m afraid I have bad news,” she said.
Avro listed me as the emergency contact on the application for the room he let in the house of Brigid Navarro, where he lived for seven years prior to the accident. He used the number of our parents’ motel. He could only have guessed I would still be living there.
There was no identification on him when he was killed and it was three days later, when his landlord reported him missing, that they were able to match his name with the body. Brigid had to go downtown to the morgue to identify Avro. She took her husband, Clayton, and her other tenant, Ángel, with her. It must have been quite the field trip. The agent in charge of enforcing pandemic restrictions at the morgue likely took one look at Brigid dragging her entourage along and determined that the fight was worth more than he was paid.
My parents’ motel squats in the fork of two secondary highways that meet at Clemency, Ontario. Driving west along the secondary highways that split our town, the choices are the 42 and plough further west across the Canadian Shield or the 70 and dip south around Lake Superior. Or pull into our parking lot and spend the night. I was born and raised and have lived my whole life here and cannot remember the No Vacancy sign ever being lit. No one makes a holiday of Clemency but the motel is a place to stay when the road gets long and the eyelids heavy. People die on their journeys thinking they can make it a little bit further to the next town, one that is bigger with a choice of hotels that have pools and continental breakfasts. We don’t have those. But if a traveler stops here for the night, he’ll make it home.
I am 30 years old and rarely leave for longer than a few nights. I help with maintenance and some bookkeeping, but there is not much to do these days. My father is not sure we are going to survive. Clemency is something of a ghost town since Clemency Rope pulled up stakes and moved to Northern Saskatchewan to take advantage of cheaper taxation and break the union. Shops and restaurants have faded and disappeared the way images in dreams start to dissolve after waking.
It has been a long time since Avro left, but my parents both used to harbour hope that he would make his way back, pull in and his journey would end.
I didn’t care if I never saw him again.
The motel has two levels and is u-shaped, the front facing the vertex of the two highways and the back looking out on the forest one hundred yards away that stretches down to a violent river, broken up by large boulders that funnel the water through narrow passages. Some forty-five years ago when my father bought the motel, and Clemency Rope still delivered twine, cable and cord all over the world, he erected a weathervane purchased from a local blacksmith. He wanted to place it out front, but my mother hated it, and he was forced to stand it out back. It is still there. It stands ten feet tall, with the cardinal directions welded onto thin, iron pipes at the end. Spinning on top is a swimming mermaid, looking as if she has escaped her captors and is fleeing to freedom. Alone in my room, when I can hear her creaking as she rotates on the top of the pole, I think of Avro. I used to think that I could never forgive him. Now I wonder if he ever forgave me.
My brother wrote a story about two lovers who become unstuck and separated in time and space. They drift through alternate worlds and timelines like chutes on a waterslide, trying desperately to find a way back to each other. Once in a while they seize a chance to cross over. Every time they connect, they attempt everything they can to stay together, but are inevitably torn apart. Each destination is a treacherous place. Whenever they meet, they are never the same person.
The title of the story is “Pilgrimage”. The characters’ names are Eric and Layla.
He had notepads full of sketches, poems, stories and observations. Stacks of them filled a shelf in the small room he rented from Brigid off the corner of Adelaide and Jarvis Streets. It was a miracle I came across the story at all. “Pilgrimage” is terrible. Everything in those notebooks is terrible.
The electron diffusion region pulled hard at Layla. She clung to Eric with all her strength, but her grip dragged across his back. Her arms were like elastic bands, stretched to the point of snapping. Her beautiful, luxuriant hair was pulled straight back, flapping like seaweed caught in a mighty current. As powerful as Eric was, his muscles shook from the strain. He just did not have the strength to hold on.
She lifted her head to kiss him, but just as their lips connected, Layla was gone, pulled into the EDR. It sealed shut.
It is pretty well all like that. If Eric loved Layla so much, why did he not just go with her? That was my first question. But there was a greater mystery. Eric Clapton was my favourite guitar player when I was a teenager. Layla is one of his most famous songs.
Kisses can be symbols of betrayal.
About fifty yards past the motel, along the 42, just after the Thanks for Visiting Clemency sign, an abandoned lot lays hidden from the highway by a curve of black willow trees intertwined to block the view. Everyone living in Clemency knows it’s there. It is a flat, rocky space, with tufts of wild spear grass sprouting up from the grey earth. Andrew Doughty and his cronies used to hang out there and shoot guns into the forest that borders the drop to the river. The ring of cinderblocks that they gathered together to sit on and drink beer and smoke pot is still there.
If I were to choose one moment in time that started everything, it would be a day in late October when I was 18 and Avro was 20 and winter threatened but had not yet arrived. He and I were in one of the back rooms on the second floor, replacing a washer on a dripping faucet when we heard a pop followed immediately by a loud clang that made my skin peel away. We both whipped around to see the mermaid weathervane spinning furiously and could hear the unmistakable chortle of Andrew Doughty’s minions. Avro left the room and stood outside the door to look over at the abandoned lot.
“Jesus, Avro,” I said. “Get back here.”
Before I could finish my sentence, another shot rang out and the mermaid went for another ride. From inside the room, I watched my brother start to walk in Doughty’s direction.
“Avro,” I said again. “Don’t be crazy.”
He did not retreat so I ventured to the doorway and stuck my head out. Andrew Doughty stood at the edge of the lot, wearing only a white t-shirt and jeans, cradling his rifle across his chest and watching Avro descend the stairs. The two were about the same height, but my brother had a hefty build. Doughty was wiry. The muscles in his arms reminded me of tree roots that erupt through hardened ground, and he never seemed to be at ease but always coiled and ready to spring. His father was one of the foremen at Clemency Rope. He got his son a job there one summer but was forced to fire him. Doughty was smoking a joint in the plant and when his father told him to get rid of it, he slugged him. He dropped his own father with a sucker punch right in front of the subordinates. Doughty was nobody a person went out of their way to engage with, but there was Avro walking straight at him. Knowing I would be about as threatening as an ice cube in a bathtub, I still could not let him go alone so ran to catch up.
His two toadies, Richie Slaughter and Jess Blanchard, stood behind Doughty and off to the side, mocking grins plastered to their faces. Those two shared a brain cell and one of them always forgot it at home.
Avro stopped in front of Doughty and the two of them said nothing to each other, but only locked glares.
“What do you losers want?” Blanchard said and sniggered moronically.
“Yeah,” Slaughter chimed in with his own doltish sneer. “Losers.”
Neither Avro nor Doughty acknowledged them. I was close to begging my brother to leave when Doughty spoke.
“S’up, Avro,” he said.
“You could hurt someone. Even kill them.”
“I hit your little mermaid twice. Seventy-five yards. You think that was an accident? I don’t miss. I hit what I aim at.”
“The bullet could fly off anywhere.”
“Yeah, ricochet’s a bitch,” Doughty answered.
Slaughter and Blanchard chuckled idiotically.
“Real sorry to hear about your girlfriend,” Doughty said.
Avro said nothing for what was probably only a few seconds, but might as well have been an eternity. “She wasn’t my girlfriend,” he said.
Doughty gripped his rifle with one hand and pointed it at the motel. “I can’t help but wonder if you had something to do with it,” he said. “Like you took her into one of those empty rooms and gave it to her so hard she stopped breathing. Like you’re more man than I thought you was.”
That really got Dopey and Dopier going. They gave each other high fives as if they had accomplished something. I thought I was going to puke all over Doughty’s shoes.
After another long pause, Avro simply repeated, “She wasn’t my girlfriend.”
As if just noticing I was there, Doughty looked down at me and said, “How’s it going, Rock Star? Sure looking forward to the day I see you on stage in front of thousands of people.”
I did not respond, but only peered up at Avro. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Sorry about the mermaid,” Doughty said, looking back at my brother.
“Shoot somewhere else,” Avro said and turned away to start walking back to the motel. His face was granite.
“Forget about it,” I said to him. “It’s Doughty. That’s just what he does.”
It was as if I weren’t there and he had already decided what he was going to do.
Eric scooped up Layla with his massive arms and started to run in the direction of the EDR he had just left. There was not much time. She was spent and could not get there on her own. As he ran, trying hard to keep her from bouncing around in his arms, she lifted up her head. She smiled at him weakly. “Save yourself,” she said.
“Don’t talk,” he told her.
Each trip through a different timeline changed her. It did the same to him. But this one was way different. She looked hollow and her voice indicated that the horror would be with her forever. He would do anything for her, but he doubted that there was anything he could do for her now.
The police gave me the landlord’s phone number. Brigid Navarro was abrupt. When I told her who I was and that I needed some time to sort out the details all she said was,
“He’s paid up to the end of next month, but it would be nice to get his stuff out of there as soon as possible.”
There was no mention of a refund for the next month.
There was not much point in all of us heading down. Pandemic restrictions meant only one person could claim the body. I abandoned my parents to grieve the loss of their oldest, the prodigal son who never made it home, and boarded a half-empty bus at Clemency that made stops in North Bay, Huntsville and Orillia before pulling into Coach Terminal in Toronto on Bay Street. The bus left at 5:20 in the morning and I arrived in front of Brigid Navarro’s house at 4:00 in the afternoon. It was battleship grey with a white porch and the front screen door was wood, pristine, without a chip in the frame. It was an old house, but immaculately kept.
Brigid was dressed in jeans with a black, collared shirt bordered with white studs around the cuffs and tracing an arc across the chest. Her hair was ashen and long and kept back in a ponytail. She easily had twenty-five years on me, but did not fit the stereotype of the elderly woman running a boarding house. Skinny and tall, she looked like there was no fight she had ever backed down from.
She opened the door and said, “Ben.”
“Yes.”
She stepped back and held the door for me to pass, offering no condolences, instead asking, “You got a place to stay?”
“I came straight here. I thought I should take a look at his stuff first.”
“You might as well stay here,” she said. “He’s paid up to the end of next month.”
It seemed odd, slightly discomfiting to sleep in the room that my brother could no longer stay in because he was dead, but not spending money was appealing.
“I think I’ll take you up on that,” I said to Brigid.
“This way,” she said and started up the stairs and I followed.
Avro’s room was the last one at the end of the upstairs hall and I was taken aback at the lack of possessions. A single bed was nudged up against one wall and on the other was the shelf crammed with Avro’s notebooks and loose papers. Inside a doorless closet hung a few shirts and a winter coat. A small dresser stood underneath the window.
“I’m not staying long,” I told her. “Everything will be out of here by the end of the week.”
If Brigid was grateful for my swift attention to my brother’s property, she did not show it. She headed for the door. “You’ll probably want to rest. Dinner is at 6:30,” she said. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. “Your brother told me you’re a musician.”
“That’s right.”
“A guitar player.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll get along well with my husband,” she told me. “He’s a guitar player, too. Played in bands all over this country.”
“Really. Is he still playing?”
“No,” she said. “He’s retired. You’ll see him at dinner.”
She closed the door and left me alone in the airless room to sort through all that my brother had left behind. It was not much. I stumbled across “Pilgrimage” and lay down to read it, but fell asleep muddling through the convoluted adventures of the tragic lovers who were unable to spend more than a few moments together in the same channel of time.
Eric was shocked at how much Layla had aged. She looked beaten, her skin resembling wet paper ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. He stroked her face and she came to life.
But rather than greeting him with a sentimental response, she said, in a coarse whisper that reminded Eric of crunching tinfoil, “This place is killing me. I’ve only been here two days.”
He gathered her up in his arms. She was a withered sack, unable to even raise her arm to wrap it around his neck.
Eric realized that he was starting to stiffen in his spine and hips. He, too, was aging rapidly. If he did not find an electron diffusion region soon, they would both die of old age here. In this timeline they had the lifespans of mosquitoes.
Avro fell in love with Lois Unterschultz when she was 16 years old and he was 18. Daryl Unterschultz and his daughter moved to our failing town to take over the local hardware store, an enterprise that would prove disastrous. The former owners put their place on the market after Clemency Rope left because they could see there was no way for their little shop, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of washers and bolts and boxes of replacement faucets, to compete. Most people drove the 40 minutes from Clemency to the Lowes in Timmins where the selection was better and something as simple as an aluminum sink didn’t have to be special ordered. The former owners probably could not believe their luck when Daryl Unterschultz contacted their realtor expressing an interest in Clemency Hardware. They took his first offer and were never seen again.
Lois and I were in grade 10 together and Avro was in Grade 12. I was becoming a pretty hot guitar player by that time, and I would invite her over thinking I could impress her with some of my riffs and licks and how I had figured out classic rock songs note-for-note, but my fleet fingers plucking out Cause We Ended As Lovers captured only a passing interest from her. She only ever wanted to talk to Avro, who was old-fashioned decent, and she would follow him about the motel as he completed his maintenance. He had nothing but the utmost respect for her and refused to date Lois until she was 18. I think she found that engaging, but it was not a certainty that she was going to be alive on her eighteenth birthday. Cystic fibrosis had left her lungs scarred and mucous filled. She coughed relentlessly and through every fit, Avro silently rubbed her back. He never said a word until she finished and then would just carry on the conversation from where they had left off as if nothing had happened. His compassion was artful.
Daryl Unterschultz moved to Clemency hoping that a simpler life away from the smog of Toronto would help Lois, but he was always a heartbeat away from bankruptcy. One month before Lois’s eighteenth birthday, he closed up the shop to take his daughter back to Toronto for a lung transplant. They never returned. Lois died of a post-operative infection and a month later Avro was gone. Clemency Hardware stayed boarded up until it was torn down.
Thoughts muggy from the late nap, I staggered down the stairs just in time for dinner. Another man, about my age, already sat at the table with a heaping plateful of food. He was overweight, not very tall and when he saw me, he stood abruptly and charged at me, his arms out, his face stricken with grief. Before I could escape, he had me belted in a constricting hug, his head buried into my chest. My arms were cinched tight against my body.
From the kitchen, Brigid said, “Meet Ángel. He’s from Mexico. He has limited English. And when I say limited, I mean virtually non-existent.”
Ángel looked up at me and spoke rapidly in Spanish, his face wet with tears. I heard my brother’s name.
“Do you speak Spanish?” I asked Brigid.
“Taco. Burrito. Fajita. That’s about it,” she said.
It was safe to assume that Ángel was offering condolences about my brother, so I smiled down at him and said, “Thank you.”
He nodded, released me and hung his head. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt and returned to his spot at the dinner table where he began to shovel the food into his mouth.
“Get a plate and help yourself,” Brigid said. I looked over at her and that’s when I saw the man in the wheelchair. “This is Clayton, my husband.”
Clayton was able to move his eyes to look at me, but not much more. He had some slight movement in his fingers and he made a low grunt.
“He says hello,” Brigid said.
“Hi,” I said.
There was no way Clayton was able to eat any of the food that Brigid had prepared. He was at the stage of his disease where he received sustenance through a feeding tube that Brigid tended to with familiarity and ease. Over the next couple of days, I would learn that Brigid took care of Clayton almost exclusively. Once in a while Ángel watched over her husband while she went to the grocery store or ran some other errands, but she took on most tasks without complaint. Clayton could turn his head a couple of centimetres to the left and jiggle the index and middle fingers of his left hand. A computer was attached to his wheelchair that he was able to control with the movement of his eyes.
“You play guitar?” was the first thing he asked me. The question came out of his computer and was spoken in that monotone, choppy fashion of manufactured speech.
“Yes,” I said, not really sure how to continue a conversation.
“Speak to Clayton, please,” Brigid said.
I did not answer, but my expression must have conveyed my confusion.
“Speak to Clayton, please,” she repeated. “You spoke to the computer.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
I fixed my gaze unnaturally on Clayton’s slackened face as if welded there by an invisible force. “I play in some clubs around the area. Folk festivals, that sort of thing,” I continued, ensuring that I did not look away. “I got a few CDs.”
“Nobody buys music, anymore,” Clayton said and even through the robotic tone of the computer, I could sense his disgust.
“Don’t I know it,” I said and my neck was actually starting to stiffen and ache, for it took him a long time to respond, but I refused to look away until I knew the conversation was over. “I stream music, but there’s no money in that.”
“Everybody wants something for nothing,” Brigid added.
“Too right,” I said, still keeping my eyes fixed on Clayton. “Playing live was the only way I could make a living and since the pandemic—”
I shrugged and gestured with my hands, holding the palms up to indicate surrender.
“It sucks,” Clayton said. “You should look at my guitars.”
“That would be great,” I said and was saved by Ángel who, dropped his fork and covered his face with his hands and sobbed.
“Ángel feels things deeply,” Brigid explained.
All I could think to do was rub his back. Shame built in me as if constructed by a bricklayer, each solid block fit into place with mortar to set and become permanent. This stout man, incapable of articulating his grief to me, displayed far more despair than I at the loss of my brother. And then there was Clayton, unable to make even the most basic movement, still passionate about music and his guitars. It was easy to see how Avro felt at home there.
Eric tread water, rotating his head from side to side, panicking. Layla had been there longer than he and she was not as strong. What was this world? A place submerged in water? A log happened to float by and he got one arm over it and heaved himself onto it. From there he had a better vantage point. Within seconds he saw her face, bobbing above the surface but sinking fast.
Doughty did not need a summer job. His father had only hoped that some honest labour might turn him around. As with most small towns, drugs and alcohol were a problem and the source of that problem in Clemency was Andrew Doughty. A redheaded, bearded young man driving a Mercedes 450SLC pulled into our motel late at night about once a month. My father was always happy to see him, confirmation that running a reliable establishment guaranteed return business. He never questioned how a young man around Avro’s age drove a car worth six figures and left the next morning in the same direction from which he had come, back towards Toronto. It never seemed odd to him that Clemency was the man’s final destination.
But Avro and I knew why he was there and so did most of Clemency.
Two days after Avro’s confrontation in the abandoned lot with Doughty, the man pulled in to our motel. The next morning, he was gone and that afternoon the RCMP raided Richie Slaughter’s house, seizing bricks of weed, cocaine and baggies of barbiturates and taking Slaughter off in handcuffs to spend some time as a guest of the government in Sault Ste. Marie. Everyone knew who he was holding for.
Only an idiot wouldn’t be able to figure out who tipped them off and Andrew Doughty was no idiot.
After dinner and clean up, Brigid took me down the hall to show me Clayton’s guitar room. It was much more than I had expected.
The entrance was a sliding door and inside the humidity was regulated. She pushed a button on the side and the door glided open with a gentle whoosh. We stepped in and it effortlessly closed behind us. The air was moist and smelled of sandalwood and recessed lights in the ceiling gave off a soft glow. I did not actually count how many guitars there were, but there had to be at least fifty of them. Electric, acoustic, classical, dobros. There were even two ukuleles, a mandolin and a banjo. They hung off hooks that were staggered in diamond patterns along all four walls, in a wide array of colours from sparkling silver to a deep walnut. Several leaned in stands on the floor.
Brigid pointed at a Fender Telecaster, still in its case, and said, “That just arrived. He found it a couple weeks back. 1957.”
It had a blonde finish with a black pickguard and was in spotless condition. “Do you play?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s not about playing anymore. Pick it up. Take it for a spin.”
“No,” I said, holding up my right hand. “I play right-handed. Like Paul McCartney.”
“Right. Avro told me that,” she said. “Jimi Hendrix just played upside down.”
I laughed. “I’m no Jimi Hendrix,” I told her and then decided to ask. “How much did Avro tell you?”
“Enough,” she said. “I know you had to reteach yourself.”
She pointed to a cocoa-coloured Gibson acoustic on the wall.
“I picked that up for him in a pawn shop in Black Diamond, Alberta eight years ago,” she said. “Owner was selling it for $300. I thought the guy didn’t know what he had. I brought it back to Clayton and it turns out there are two cracks in the back and it won’t stay in tune. I guess the guy knew exactly what he had.”
“Lots of crooks in the guitar world,” I said.
“It was a stupid purchase for all sorts of reasons,” she said. “I left him. When he got diagnosed with ALS, I left him. I was so mad at him for getting sick. He had just quit going on the road and we were finally going to be together.”
I have found that when I don’t know what to say, it is best to say nothing. The ceiling lights made the white studs on her shirt glitter and her white hair glow.
“He had to know,” she continued. “That’s why he quit the road. He knew something was wrong. It wasn’t to spend more time with me in our twilight years. Don’t fall in love with musicians.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“Good. Do the world a favour and keep it that way,” Brigid said and let out a caustic chuckle. “I was so mad at him I ran away. I had to forgive him for getting sick before I could take care of him and there was no way I was going to forgive him without knowing what it was going to be like to be without him. I bought him the guitar because I needed him to forgive me.”
Brigid stared at that guitar the whole time she spoke, and I’ve since wondered how many conversations she had with Avro about regret and reconciliation.
“The night before he died, Avro and I were trying to remember the name of a song. You know how a tune sometimes gets stuck in your head and you can’t figure it out?” she said and then sang, “I’ve been a long time that I’ve wandered through the people that I’ve known.”
“Northern Sky. Nick Drake.”
She snapped her fingers and shook her index finger at me. “That’s it,” she said and laughed. “He had no doubt you’d know. Said you’re encyclopedic when it comes to classic rock. I told him to phone you to find out. I’m guessing he never did.”
“No,” I said. How different everything might have been if he had.
“You know what I miss the most?”
“What?”
“Kissing,” she said. “He can’t kiss me anymore. Some days all I need to get through the day is a kiss. But I might as well wish for him to play me Northern Sky on a pawn-shop guitar.”
I lacked the vocabulary that could reward her honesty. I do not have Avro’s capacity for compassion nor his endless well of kindness.
“We’re going on a road trip tomorrow,” she said and turned to press the button that opened the sliding door. It gave way with a gentle hiss.
“Where to?” I asked and stepped back into the coolness of the hallway.
“We’re going to take Ángel to work,” she said. “And then we’re going to deal with your brother’s remains.”
Late in the day that Doughty changed my life, I returned from an audition in Sudbury. A band had advertised for a guitar player, so I went and tried out. They were probably looking for someone 21 or older because they wanted to play in bars in the States, but we jammed a long time and I got the feeling that they were going to offer me the job. I never found out.
When I pulled back into the motel, it was around 4:30 in the afternoon and the twilight was setting in. It was one of those days when it would snow for a bit and then start again. It was beginning to snow more heavily just as I got home.
As I started to get my gear out of the trunk, a voice called to me from the other side of the motel.
“Hey, rock star.”
I could just make out Jess Blanchard hidden around the corner. “What?” I said.
“’Drew’s got his sights on you,” he said. “You can come with me, or he can drop you where you stand right now. You know he can do it.”
I hesitated then slammed the trunk shut and headed in Blanchard’s direction as he walked off towards the abandoned lot.
I did not wear winter boots to the audition and the snow was starting to get deep. I followed behind Blanchard and my sneakers soaked through. I remember thinking to myself that Blanchard had his brain cell with him because he was wearing boots. He led me to a clearing in the black willow trees next to the 42 where Doughty was waiting for us. The light was dimming quickly. He stood just like he had the day he took two shots at the mermaid, with his rifle cradled across his chest, but this time he had one foot up on a cinderblock that they must have carried in there. Another cinderblock was next to it, but this one rested on two ropes that stretched out from beneath it. I did not wait to see what they had planned. I turned to run, but my shoes were heavy and wet and I slipped to the ground. Blanchard was on me, grabbing me by my left arm and dragging me back. I struggled and yanked, but I was not strong enough to get away and could get no purchase. When he got me to where Doughty stood, he slapped my arm on top of the cinderblock. Doughty stepped up on top, forcing my arm to be still while Blanchard took the ropes and tied them around my wrist and elbow. When he was finished, I could not move my arm and my left hand rested just on the edge of the block.
I screamed and begged, told them I would do whatever they wanted, but nothing was going to stop them. Blanchard hoisted up the other cinderblock and with both hands held it up high.
“Let ‘er rip,” Doughty said and Blanchard let go.
It dropped directly onto my hand and I felt something snap. I wish I could say that I showed some grit, but I cried and pleaded. Again, I told them that I would give them whatever they wanted, but what they were doing right then was what they wanted. In the fading light, I could see blood and my little finger was twisted to one side off the edge of the block. Blanchard picked up the other block again but this time didn’t just drop it on my hand. He threw it down.
With the traffic on the highway and being buried in the copse of black willows, my voice must have been muffled and nobody was able to hear my screams. My throat hurt for days afterwards.
While I sobbed after the second one, Doughty stood over me and said, “Your brother owes me 45 large. Let him know you’re just the beginning.”
They dropped the block on my hand three more times before releasing me. After untying the ropes, Blanchard grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and the belt of my pants and heaved me out of the black willows. I have no recollection of how I managed to get back to the motel, but it was Avro who found me sitting in the snow with my back up against the mermaid weathervane, howling and bracing my arm against my belly the way a mother would hold a dying child.
Layla had nothing left to lose. That’s what made her so dangerous. Time had only his ego and that was no competition to someone who had lost everything. She had tracked him down into the woods that she had so many times wound her way through, being whipped by spiny branches and tripping over bulging roots, in attempts to find a passage that allowed her to be with Eric. What Time had not counted on was that now she knew these woods intimately. There was no hiding from her. Time did not know that he had run out of time. She combed through the trees and brush for hours, but was shocked to find him in the open on the edge of the forest that overlooked the river. He had his back to her when she approached. That’s how arrogant he was. He never imagined that he could be defeated.
“Face me,” she said to him.
He turned and presented her with his most conceited smile. “Layla,” he said. “What do you think you’re going to do? Kill me? You can’t kill time.”
“Bring Eric back to me,” she said.
“Not my job,” Time answered. “You need to search for him and hold on to him once you find him.”
“You’ll just rip us apart again.”
Time laughed and shrugged. “That is a distinct possibility,” he said.
She spied a vine hanging from a branch just behind him. It was the clement vine that was particular to this part of the forest. She knew how durable and strong it was. Time had not counted on the knowledge she would gain while he played his ruthless game with the two lovers. Layla lunged at him and he laughed at her as she clawed at his body and landed blows on his chest and face, but she knew that all she had to do was force him back a few steps. It was hard and she nearly surrendered. She reminded herself that she had lost everything and gave a final hard push, her legs digging into the soil and Time stumbled back a bit.
“Feisty, Layla,” he said and was about to add to his taunt when she leapt up, snagged the vine and wrapped it around his neck. Panic bulged from his eyes. He scratched at the vine, but now Layla had the upper hand. She pulled it tighter and tighter. Time squirmed and flailed, but before long he went limp in her clutch. She released him and Time fell lifeless to the earth.
She was so exhausted she could not weep. Layla knew she would never see Eric again. But at least time would only go in a straight line now for both of them.
I was mute with rage. It was months before I said more than a few guttural grunts to anyone and by then Avro was gone. Whenever my brother reached out, I shut him down.
I should have chosen for Doughty to shoot me. Or run. Or anything other than what I did do. That’s what I would say now.
In the years since the attack, I have only regained 60% of mobility in my left hand. Enough to do some rudimentary finger-picking. Learning to play with my right hand was not like starting over, but it wasn’t easy. Nor was it natural.
While I was in hospital, Doughty was found hanging from a tree in the forest that borders the cliff that drops to the river. He had been badly beaten. Everyone assumed the dealers he bought all his drugs from caught up to him and punished him for being so careless with their inventory, but now I’m not so sure.
Brigid’s van was customized to hold Clayton’s wheelchair. The hatch opened and a ramp came out to allow him to drive up into the back where his wheels were then clamped to the floor. Ángel sat in the middle row, his backpack stuffed with snacks and his lunch on the seat next to him. I rode in the passenger seat. Brigid manipulated Toronto traffic effortlessly, weaving from one lane to the next, squeezing into spaces barely big enough to fit her bulky vehicle.
We drove along King Street, and she pointed out to me where the accident had happened with as much indifference as a tour guide and then zipped past, slipping into the next lane and dashing around the corner. When I saw the spot, I was unsettled at what a freak accident it was. It was such a narrow gap for the wheel to slide into.
Ángel wept.
“It’s okay,” Clayton said with his computer. “It’s okay.”
“Gracias,” Ángel replied and sniveled. He started to eat his lunch.
Brigid pulled over in front of a restaurant and Ángel unbuckled himself, slid the passenger door open and leapt out. “Gracias,” he repeated, but I was not paying attention to him. The name of the place was called Lois’ and through the front window I could see a cash register at the end of a long counter and standing behind it was Daryl Unterschultz. He was ringing in an order and talking to some customers.
It was a narrow establishment with about five tables against the opposite wall to the counter.
“Avro worked here, too,” Brigid said. “Do you want to go in and say hi?”
“No. Maybe later,” I said. “Maybe later.”
Brigid pulled back into traffic.
“Brigid,” I said as I watched Lois’ shrink in the side view mirror.
“Yes.”
“Forgiveness is an untunable guitar with cracks in it.”
She did not respond, but I am sure she understood.
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