anything wrong. Besides being gone less frequently, she’d kept out of the limelight, even turned over her responsibilities to a younger graduate student, one without kids, who could devote more time to the aesthetic concerns of urban renewal, keeping all the mom and pop stores in business. Chelsea met the officer out on the walk I think to shield me from whatever embarrassment his visit may entail so I was surprised when both came up to the front door and entered it. It wasn’t until I heard his footsteps receding up the stairs that I realized he wasn’t here for my mother at all. He was after Mr. Garvey.
“I think you’d better call your mother,” Chelsea said.
That night, we made plans. When Mom came home, she hugged me and put her hands on both side of my face and looked into my eyes. No one wanted to fill me in on the details. I knew our renter was gone, evicted by the law in as sudden a fashion as I could imagine. There were headlines on the news. Chelsea told me that I shouldn’t suppress what had happened to me and that Garvey should have his dick cut off. The conviction wasn’t certain yet but enough evidence had accumulated that the qualifiers “alleged” and “suspected” rang hollow. I would have to tell his story my own way.
“We can go back to Canada if you want,” Mom said.
“You have exams coming up.”
Her cell rang and she clicked the headset open and she walked into the other room. She sniffled and rubbed her eyes and then did it again and again. I unzipped my backpack and got out my schoolbooks and turned to my math homework. Word problems. #1. There were 20 pigs. 2 had one eye, 5 had no teeth, and 3 had no tail. How many pigs had no defects? #2. If there are 789 people in one area, how many are in 5 areas? #3. Holly got a 48% a 53% and 100% on her tests. What was her average score?
I knew what the questions wanted me to answer. 20-2-5-3=10. 789 x 5=3,945. (48+53+100) / 3=67. But I thought, what if? What if some of the pigs had more than one defect? Or what if there were different numbers of people in the other areas? And who aces a test and then fails the others so miserably? So many things masquerading as certainty, shielded by the numbers. My father was dead. My mother still paced in the living room. Her voice warbled. She closed the phone, snapped it shut and smoothed her eyes with her fingers.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” she said.
Garvey had always wanted to compose Jazz but he never could imagine the notes. Composition for him was a hobby, something he did in his spare time: rearrange, play with scales. He was like a boy with a new set of Legos trying to follow the pictures to make a turreted castle. But he was always drawn to the looser form of Jazz, like a bass who had always wanted to sing tenor. There was just so much more you could do.
Garvey was grateful to the sheriff that he didn’t make him wear handcuffs to the car. Looking at him, the sheriff must have known that Garvey wasn’t the kind of man who would bolt. Or who knew Jujitsu or carried weapons. Maybe he’d been to one of his recitals, a Bach aficionado in plainclothes. Did cops listen to music in their cars?
“I’m sure this is a mistake,” Garvey said.
“You don’t have to say anything Mr. Garvey. Probably shouldn’t.”
Sitting in the patrol car, Garvey felt like he was in a taxi. Same sequestered space, same puke-resistant slick vinyl seats. This wasn’t where he was supposed to end up.
The sheriff’s radio squawked and Garvey tried to make out the voices through the static. They were talking about him. Suspect. Custody. Station. Enough to piece together the coming sequence of events. But there was part of him that wanted verbal confirmation from the source.
“Excuse me,” Garvey said from the back seat. “Excuse me. Would you mind if I make a phone call?”
The sheriff put the headset back in the squawk box and rummaged through his pockets for Garvey’s cell phone. He held it up between his thumb and forefinger and turned around.
“It’s going to take that little girl all her life to sort this thing out,” The sheriff said. “Go ahead. Make your phone call.”
Garvey scrolled through his contacts until he got to his divorce lawyer, a man who knew him better than just about anyone. There was a time when Garvey didn’t have a lawyer. If he’d been arrested then, before everything happened, he would have to ask for the Yellow Pages or look up a friend who knew somebody before he’d be able to make the call. He only hoped his lawyer could come up with the words to tell his story carefully, put it all together in a deliberate and thoughtful way. This once Garvey was sure. There was no room to improvise.
This is Garvey the way he wanted to be: a man wrongfully accused, victim of circumstance. I’ve killed the young version of myself, the body who dies as you read her, limp and lifeless in the first paragraph. It’s only near the end that my stories merge, the man captured for the crime I’ve tried to suppress. Don’t feel slighted. It’s me. I live with the story’s absences: the trips to counsellors and psychiatrists, our gradual migration back to Canada. I won’t apologize for what’s there, no matter how unreliable it may be. But there is one absence that I want on the page.
Let me tell you about my father.
He was a man who worked in an office building that looked like a mirrored Rubik’s cube. He wore khaki slacks and button-down shirts with a different tie for every day of the week. I didn’t know what he did, just that it had something to do with computers and communication and that he never talked about it when he came through the door of our townhouse because when he did it! Was! Time! To! Play! He taught me to do puzzles by finding all the corners and the straight-edged pieces first and for my birthday he bought me a size 1 soccer ball with the red logo of some European team on it. He read books to me when I was sleepy and I’d perk up, that last burst of energy to hear him do the voices of each character, nasal, or in falsetto, or a low growl for wolves or dinosaurs, before falling asleep in the soft space between his shoulder and his chest. He sipped his coffee in the morning and when he took off his glasses there were marks on either side of his nose where the silicone nose pads dimpled the skin. Sometimes we listened to music, mostly old CDs from his high-school days, and we danced and I reached up my hands so he would swing me around in an arc until I was dizzy. When I rode on his shoulders I grabbed tufts of his hair and when he took me on bike rides he always asked, where do you want to go? We did activities with construction paper and glue sticks with glitter and multi-colored puff balls and pipe cleaners. We baked cookies and made waffles and popped popcorn and slathered our vegetables with butter. And at night, just before bed, he puckered and I gave him a peck, a quick touching of lips, and I put my arms around his neck and patted his back and told him good night, papa, have a good sleep, and he said yes, you too, bye now, and then I lay in bed with my hands tucked under my pillow, closed my eyes, and dreamed my childhood dreams.
The Invisible Invisible Man
Fred had flux on his fingers. It was lead-free, self-cleaning, from a red-and-white tin the size of a can of shoe polish. He’d tried the brush that came with the kit but the clumps had refused to spread out the way he wanted them to. It was cold. Pipe-freezing cold. He needed his fingers to warm the metal, so the flux would go on smooth.
Fred pushed a coupling into place and eased open the gas torch. He lit the flame with a lighter. Bits of solder stuck in the nozzle like tiny silver fillings. The blue flame was lopsided and he hoped it burned hot enough. He angled the torch down at the mess of copper he’d constructed on the basement ground, propped up on old pipes with their inch-long gashes where the metal had flowered open from the ice. The blue flame split at the ¾-inch tee joint and wrapped around either side like a tiny pair of ethereal tongs. Then
