Toby Read online

  Toby continued to look down at his father, and at the oxygen mask clouding and unclouding.

  “One of the paramedics told me.” The doctor squeezed his arm. “It’s no small thing.”

  “What the hell is she talking about?”

  The doctor tsked, shook her head. “Your son didn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what? Tell me what?”

  “Toby pulled his father, your husband, from a burning car.”

  Karen did not respond. She had made her feelings clear on the drive to the hospital.

  The doctor led them down a long hallway to a consultation room with safari-themed wallpaper and a large wooden IKEA box of forlorn toys. A toilet flushed nearby, only faintly muffled by drywall. A uniformed policeman with a goatee sat in a swollen leather chair across from a matching chesterfield, flipping through an issue of L’actualité. Céline Dion’s polar bear of a husband was on the cover. Edward’s charred blue jeans and flannel shirt had been stuffed into two clear plastic bags, which sat at the policeman’s feet like little dogs. Everyone shook hands, and the doctor congratulated Toby again for pulling his father out of a roaring fire, for risking his life. She stood for a moment in silent tribute, as though waiting for the final notes of the national anthem to finish, then excused herself.

  Toby focused on the fountain of black hairs bursting from each of the detective sergeant’s nostrils. The questions were neutral, at first. Edward’s work, his age, what he had been doing that night.

  He cleared his throat, the detective sergeant, and changed his tone. “Had Monsieur Mushinsky been acting at all oddly?”

  Karen sat upright in her wheelchair. “That is an insult.”

  “Pardon me, Madame.”

  “Pardon you? Pardon you? I know what you’re suggesting and it’s…” She slapped Toby’s arm. “Shit, help me out. The snowman. He’s the what snowman?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Come on, Toby. Not terrible, but really terrible.” Karen reached up, in apparent desperation, to her hair. She had been endowed with thick, curly blond hair that in recent years had blended delicately with strands of grey. It was tangled from the pillow. Vanity struck her, and she hunted in her purse for a makeup mirror as Toby and the detective sergeant waited. “The snowman…he’s the blank snowman.”

  “Frosty?”

  “No. Christ, Toby.”

  “Abominable?” said the detective sergeant.

  “Abominable! It’s abominable what you’re suggesting, Monsieur.”

  “An investigator must ask questions.”

  “Who dropped my husband off, in the middle of the night, in his car, and…” Karen found the mirror, opened it, and considered her reflection. “Who? Goddamn it. He could have been killed.”

  The detective sergeant allowed several moments of silence. Toby was afraid to touch his mother.

  “I have been on the force many years now, Madame.” The detective sergeant spoke quietly and evenly. “Seventeen years. And I have never seen—”

  “The last I spoke to him was before he went off to his meeting. I hope you’ll be speaking to his ‘friends’ in the Optimist Club. They’re boors. You can write that down. They take advantage of his good nature.”

  “He was his normal self, then? Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing whatsoever.” She struggled with “whatsoever.” Karen wore satsuma perfume oil. This scent, and the residue of Old Port cigarillo smoke on her clothes, battled for supremacy in the consultation room. “He listens to the oldies station. A Joni Mitchell song comes on. He loves it too much to turn it off, maddening habit, and parks and waits for the song to finish. Closes his eyes. The engine’s running.”

  The detective sergeant had stopped taking notes. “And?”

  “He revs the engine, in his sleep. And something goes, I don’t know, haywire. You’re the investigator. Investigate, why don’t you. That Optimist Club, begin there. Maybe he knew something.”

  The detective sergeant turned to Toby. “You were at a formal event tonight?” He swished his index finger from bow tie to handkerchief.

  “Not formal, no.” Formal would require a dinner jacket, entirely different footwear, and a bow tie devoid of whimsy. “I was at a restaurant.”

  “And what do you do, Toby?”

  He was midway through the first sentence of his explanation when the detective sergeant stopped him. “Of course. Of course! I was wondering where I’d seen you before. You’re that man.”

  “Yes.”

  “You do those things.”

  “Those things, yes.”

  “How to be polite.”

  “Toby a Gentleman.”

  “Last week I didn’t stand up when the wife stood up from the table, at this Greek restaurant. It used to be okay, you know? We live in Saint-Henri! And so—”

  Karen, fully awake now, cleared her throat. “What are you doing with my husband’s clothes?”

  “Lab analysis. As you say, investigating. It’s pretty standard.”

  “Why ‘pretty’ standard?”

  “Sometimes a thing makes sense. Sometimes it does not.”

  Her breaths, slightly rasped, quickened. “My husband burned up in a fire, Monsieur, a horrible, accidental fire. That is, unless one of those Optimist freaks—”

  The detective sergeant slipped his notepad into the pocket of his polyester shirt and stood up. “I am sorry for your husband’s suffering, and for yours. If I have any more questions I’ll phone you.” The detective sergeant pulled two cards out of the same shirt pocket and gave one to each of them. He lifted an eyebrow and asked if he might speak to Toby in private for a moment.

  “Divide and conquer,” said Karen, just loud enough for the policeman to hear.

  Toby followed the detective sergeant into the adjacent examining room. The bed was dishevelled, and next to it there was a puddle of clear liquid on the white tile floor. The man pulled out a third business card. “Could I trouble you for an autograph, for the wife?”

  In the black leather satchel he carried, Toby kept a number of four-by-six black-and-white photographs in a protective case. He pulled one out. “What’s her name?”

  “Angie. No, write Angela. I’m sorry about this. But it’ll make her so darn happy.”

  Toby wrote what he always wrote.

  “All the best.” The detective sergeant inspected the photo, sighed. “Thank you.”

  “Without viewers, we are nothing.”

  “When you pulled your dad out of the fire, Toby, did he say anything?”

  “He was unconscious.”

  The detective sergeant held eye contact. “Évidemment,” he said, and wished Toby and his parents all the best.

  A series of announcements, barely audible and entirely incomprehensible, filled the ward. Charred bits of his father’s shoes, and his father, had passed to the cuffs of Toby’s white shirt and, when he inspected it closely, the Boss. If he had run to the driver’s-side door and opened it forcefully, manfully, the fire might have at that instant entered the engine. His new suit, and his entire bloodline, would have been eliminated. There was a pain in his chest, above and below his heart. It was almost three. He could not remain. His heart hurt. The air was thin, contaminated, his lungs filled with melted plastic and now this—this place. Super-bacteria, bird and swine influenza, tuberculosis, norovirus. A clown doctor.

  An orderly wheeled Edward away, to his room on the burn ward. He passed and they could not touch him. Toby blew a kiss and Karen embraced her son, slapping him on the back of the head.

  “Now do you see? Now do you finally see?” There was only a hint of moisture in her eyes when they parted. It would not take exhaustive research for the detective sergeant to discover she had made a false statement; prison would not suit his mother’s temperament. “It’s my fault.”

  “How, Mom?”

  “And you. Mr. Hero. If you’d been there, instead of celebrating the bow tie. Which looks pretty stupid.�
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  “You want me to stay?”

  Karen took a step back, as though Toby had pushed her. “You’re going?”

  “Tomorrow…no, today is the election. I’ll be up till midnight, on camera. Dad’s sleeping.” Toby stopped rationalizing, because Karen had stopped listening. They stood in a wide corridor, at the entrance to the room where Edward had been. Five patients remained. Three were asleep, hooked up to machines. One man, an old man in a sweatsuit, sat on the edge of his bed and wheezed through his open mouth. “I’ll come back.”

  She stared into the room, at the old man in the sweatsuit. He slouched, his pale neck drooped. He gripped a metal pole with wheels, a bag of fluid hanging from it like a giant plum. His lips were enormous. Karen’s pyjamas were half-tucked into her rubber boots. “What am I supposed to do now? What do you do when this happens? Shouldn’t someone be telling me?”

  Toby tried to pull her in for a hug, but she resisted and walked slowly back to the consultation room. Giraffes and elephant cartoons decorated the upper third of the wall, faded by time and surely by sadness. Toby nearly jogged to his mother, to help her onto the chesterfield, to apologize some more. But a toxic, painful soup bubbled in his lungs. He would not say goodbye twice; in a week or two everything would be back to normal, and they would no longer visit or think of hospitals. Toby would buy his mother a scarf at Holt Renfrew, where he received a significant discount.

  An orderly was in the examination room where Toby had signed his photograph, mopping up the puddle. The reassuring scent of chlorine. Like Karen, he wore rubber boots, this small man from a less prosperous corner of Asia.

  The moment Toby passed from the hospital into the cool, wet, early autumn air of Montreal, his breathing improved. His heart untangled. He jogged to his car, which shone mightily. The rain had left tiny spots of dust on the door panels, but they were invisible in the streetlight. Toby had just picked up a pair of lambskin driving gloves, tight and deliciously brown, and he squeezed the leather steering wheel until they squeaked. He squeaked the day away.

  He drove south to the Faubourg Ste-Catherine for spiritual renewal. A twelve-foot Toby leaned over the city in his grey Prada, a black vest and tie, with that winning yet predatory rise in his upper lip. “You own this town,” the photographer from Chicago had said as he snapped the pictures. “You own it. This town wants to fuck you.” The billboard-and-bus campaign had coincided with the season launch, and Toby knew that one cold morning—if not tomorrow, the next day or the next—his colossal selves would be replaced by an enticement to savour rotisserie chicken. Tonight, the billboard over the Faubourg was his cross on the mount. No matter what might happen to him or to his family and friends—fire or flood or lawsuit—he could always retreat into the cozy celebrity quarter of Greater Anglophone Montreal. Biweekly notices in the alternative press, Web chatter, awkward eye contact, and whispers in malls that he would pretend not to notice, in restaurants and nightclubs, the sidewalks of Saint-Laurent: his angels of encouragement.

  A few blocks north, Sherbrooke Street was deserted but for a man on the steps of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, clothed in layers and layers of grey, rocking forward and back like a madrassa student. Toby’s chest went infuriatingly tight again, and the air inside the car transformed from leather to melted plastic, seared skin. He pulled into the narrow roundabout at the grand entrance to McGill, exited the car, and told himself it was good, it was healthy, it was right, he was strong. He paced on the concrete, in shallow, shining puddles, his shoes clacking in the night. “I am good. I am healthy. I am right. I am strong.” These were games he played with himself before he went on camera, to avoid stumbling over words—confidence games. Healthy, right, strong. Then, as though he had stood up too quickly, stars and the scent of blood in his mouth. He bent over, willed it away. He leaned on a stone column and retched, slid down it.

  There were footsteps, two sets, behind him. Two women, by the rhythm of their heels. He buried his chin in his chest as they passed, so they would not see his face. His eyes throbbed. To be discovered here.

  He lay awake on his organic cotton mattress for more than an hour, unable to escape the driveway and Edward, Edward’s eyes on him. There were two and a half ounces of NyQuil in his medicine cabinet, and at four o’clock, raging against his inability to sleep, he finished the bottle. Still he lay awake, now in drowsy sleeplessness. A series of buyouts and layoffs had eroded the size and integrity of the news team; for election day, he was being temporarily seconded from etiquette to politics. This sort of work required little in the way of cognitive analysis, but late results and victory parties would keep him up. His eyes were liable to darken, and the makeup woman would be too busy with the anchors to daub foundation on him every forty-five minutes.

  Only one person had the authority to ease him into sleep.

  Toby arrived at the semi-detached house on Strathcona Avenue at five thirty. He stood on the carved stone of her front porch in the dark, NyQuil stirring his vision. The heavy blue door framed with ornate bricks, the perfectly clipped apple tree on the little patch of grass in front. Had he really noticed all of it before? Any fruit that remained on the tree had turned. Most had fallen. The aroma of the rotting apples natural, the scent of wealth and abundance. He pulled the key from his satchel, opened the door and stepped inside, removed his shoes on the mat so they would not echo off the tile. He hung his suit and shirt in the cloakroom, and nearly fell in. Steps creaked on the old floor above, from her bedroom to the hall—Alicia in her bare feet. A giant pink bouquet burst from a white vase in the foyer.

  He had always been in awe of her family’s money. It was audible in every word she spoke, visible in every wave of her long fingers, yet there wasn’t a flicker of self-consciousness about it. Alicia had never seen the Mushinsky house in Dollard, by design; she genuinely feared that failure and mediocrity were viral. Two housekeepers from the Philippines spent three hours every Friday afternoon scrubbing and polishing away the small messes Alicia allowed herself to make in her five-bedroom house, and she refused to speak to them. She had been raised some blocks up the mountain from here, in a mansion with three full-time staff members: a cook, a housekeeper, and an au pair. Alicia had never had to learn the rules, or pretend, or convince anyone that she was an extraordinary and powerful woman. It was a perfume she could not wash away. And she was his.

  It was dark in her room, and the NyQuil had plucked away at his equilibrium. He slammed into what she called the “Napoleonic bench” at the foot of her bed and apologized.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “It’s not even six, Tobe.”

  “I was at the hospital.”

  Alicia rustled in her sheets and turned on the lamp. Her hair and the bed were disasters. There was no sleep about her eyes. “What happened?”

  He explained to her about the fire, how it had reminded him of the really frightening moments during a circus.

  Alicia said she had never found circuses frightening. “You pulled him out?”

  “I did.”

  “It could have blown up!”

  “I know, right?”

  “And your suit?”

  “There’s some damage on the cuff, and the shirt might be ruined from black stuff. Skin, maybe.”

  “Skin. My God.”

  “I’m a hero.”

  “Do you want to sleep?”

  “I’ve been trying all night.”

  “Get in here, brave boy.”

  A pillow, his pillow, was on the floor. Even Alicia’s room seemed new and strange, as though it had been ransacked by detectives or the mob and put back together carelessly. It was his world, and he trusted it, but someone or something appeared to be moving things around just slightly, to disorient him. His father, his mother, Alicia—and Alicia’s bed had been picked up, shaken vigorously, and replaced.

  Alicia asked no further questions. She wrapped her long legs around his and was soon asleep, a
mist of red wine about her. The sounds of the Victorian house settling were like sneaking footsteps, so much so that Toby was tempted, once or twice, to get up and look around.

  Begging and praying for sleep, willing himself to think about anything but his father and hospitals, had dammed him shut. By the time Alicia’s alarm went off, at seven, the sun was already up and so was Toby—hunting around her medicine cabinet for a headache drug that might also counter the NyQuil. It was a stunning bathroom, larger than his parents’ kitchen, with a Jacuzzi and a multiple-head shower and a bidet, ornate tile work, and leaded windows. A large skylight had been cut into the ceiling. There was an empty bottle of wine on the edge of the tub, and two glasses.

  “Who was over?”

  “What do you mean?” Alicia was making the bed.

  “The wineglasses.”

  “Mom and Dad were here earlier.”

  “In your bathtub?”

  “They couldn’t bathe at home, could they? We had a broken water main down the street.” Alicia walked naked into the bathroom, hands on her head. “Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s not rational to celebrate before election day. We’re going to look like a pack of serial killers.”

  “Television is not rational.”

  “The girls and I, we watched The Secret and drank Prosecco.”

  Toby was accustomed to seeing Alicia naked, but it had been some time, a year or longer, since he had seen her in sunlight.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re gorgeous.”

  Alicia looked in the mirror. “That’s the NyQuil talking.”

  He put his arms around her, her skin still warm from the bed, and kissed her neck. He reached down.

  “No, no, no.”

  “Just half an hour. It’ll make me feel so much better.”

  “There’s this taste in my mouth, like I ate a chipmunk.”

  “I’ll go down on you for as long as you want. I’ll meditate on your sweet spot.”

  “How about tonight, as a reward for our—”