looking at the actual trial in another couple of months. The system is not fast but juveniles have priority. If something opens up it could be as soon as one month.”
Ty tightens his shoulders in his jacket. It’s not a shrug any more.
“Now, Tyler,” he says, smiling, and for the next twenty minutes or so Liam and I watch him extract details from our son, getting the events of that evening lined up like dominoes. Ty mumbles syllables, he won’t make eye contact, but what he says is credible enough. Jason went out; he stayed back, feigning tiredness, so he could watch naked girls on the Internet. He’s not sure of times. He didn’t see or speak to anyone else in the house while Jason was out. When Jason got back, they went down to the rec room and watched the movie he had rented,
Anaconda.
The lawyer takes notes. Liam takes notes. I’m thinking about a phone call I got last night, after Ty was in bed. When I answered the piece of meat at the other end hesitated. I heard him say, “No, man, it’s his mom.” Then, to me, “He’s got my math homework, right?”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“No, yeah, he does. Is he there?”
“Do you shave?”
“Course I fucking shave, fuck,” he said. I hung up.
Now this Joe Leith says, “That’s us.” He means we’re done.
I ask him if I will have to testify since I was the first person to examine the victim. Ty and Liam look awed – they had forgotten.
“Nah,” Joe Leith says. “Written reports are all they’ll want. Just as well, eh? We don’t need the whole family up there.”
In the elevator, on the way down, I ask Ty where he’d like to go for lunch. He grunts.
“Skip it,” Liam says.
“Well, I want lunch,” I say. “Maybe I should have asked Joe Sumo up there. Maybe he would have had lunch with me.”
“So, so, go back,” Liam says. He looks slapped.
“I could, I might,” I say. “Costs me nothing.”
“Shut up,” Ty says, grabbing his head, choking on tears. “Could you both just shut up?”
When Ty was a baby, we shared a house with some of Liam’s film-school friends. I was still in pre-med. Liam had taken a year off to work nights as a security guard so we could live. We barely saw each other, barely knew each other, and Ty, this little scrap in a soft blanket, was already wearing us down. Occasionally the film students liked to watch themselves babysit: they would eat Cheesies in front of the TV , taking turns cuddling the little guy and holding him up so he could watch
Taxi
reruns with them while Liam and I went out to a real movie and Chinese food afterwards, staring warily at each other across plates of guy ding and won ton, under the paper lanterns. I have to say it was a bad time. Tyler was a good baby, sucking your fingers and peeping when he was hungry; but I had only recently taken the safety pins out of my ears, and Liam was beginning to refer cynically to his unfinished Master’s thesis, and for a timewe behaved like animals, fucking and hissing at each other, and feeding the baby in silence, trying to shield him from the toxic thing we had for each other. For a time, too, Liam moved back to Nova Scotia. When he came back he re-matriculated, got a job as a teaching assistant, found, painted, and furnished a one-bedroom apartment, marched me down to City Hall for a marriage licence, and enlisted Ty in the University’s daycare program. There were still problems: Liam’s family, for instance – mother and aunts and a couple of brothers – who knew me by reputation and a few photographs Liam had unwisely shown them, who continued to phone at odd hours, their mosquito voices whining down the phone. There were my own attitudes – towards school, assorted authorities, my new in-laws, the world – which I could not shed as quickly as my old clothes. There was Liam, who at times still seemed as repelled by me as he was attracted, staring at me like he was trying to bore holes, like he was trying to understand why he
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