A doctor stood in front of some Venetian louvre blinds. She was clearly impatient, and her head was haloed by the dozens of hair wisps that had escaped hours ago from her bun. “I’m Valerie, Dr. Tyson. I’m the duty doctor. This guy here related to you?”
Constable Chung nodded toward the man on the bed—a handsome guy, early twenties, large, fair skin, with dark, slightly curly hair and just enough of my family’s head shape to quash any doubts about who he was. This was him. This is who he turned out to be.
I walked over and touched his hand. This woke him up, and he started: “It’s you.”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He sat up and looked around the room. “Wait—something kind of weird happened here.”
“What?”
“I think I was dead.”
What was he talking about? “As far as I could tell, you were only asleep.”
“No. I was dead. I know I was.”
I looked at Dr. Tyson, who said, “Technically, Jeremy, you were dead, for maybe a minute or so when you first came in this morning.” She looked at me. “Around five.”
I was surprised. “He was dead?”
“We used the paddles on him.” She made a hand gesture like a defibrillator.
I looked back at Jeremy, who seemed disturbed. “I didn’t see the light—you know—that light you’re supposed to see when you die. I just saw a blob of darkness, and I was being pulled into it.”
None of us in the room knew what to say to this, so Dr. Tyson used medical science to stabilize the mood, to make it clinical. “We found traces of cocaine and Rohypnol in your system. That might account for anything unusual you may have seen.”
Jeremy was mad now. “May have seen? I was being pulled down, down into the earth. I wasn’t going up into any light. There was no light for me.”
I took hold of his hand, which was freezing cold. The bracelet looked more like a dog tag than jewellery. “Jeremy, look at me,” I said, saying his name out loud for the first time. “How long have you been wearing this bracelet on your wrist?”
“Four years.”
“Four years?”
“And a bit.”
“And you didn’t call me?”
“No, but don’t take it that way. I didn’t call because you’ve always been my hope—the ace up my sleeve.”
“But you don’t know me. How can you say that?”
“I know enough about you.”
“How?” I couldn’t imagine what this must’ve sounded like to Dr. Tyson and Constable Chung.
Jeremy said, “I did legwork.”
“How do you mean?”
“I, well, I sort of followed you around.”
“You what?”
“Relax—it’s not scary like it sounds.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No. You’re looking at it the wrong way.”
“What’s the right way?”
“The right way is this: I’ve been with so many screwed-up foster families in my life that before I went to meet my real family, I wanted to make sure you weren’t a psychopath like the rest of them.”
This struck me as a pretty good reason. It also shut me up.
“I know where you work and where the rest of the family is. All that stuff. The basics.”
I said nothing; he had every right to be wary. Constable Chung coughed. Dr. Tyson hadn’t left; overworked or not, this was truly something.
Jeremy said, “Liz—Mom. You like to think of yourself as a rock—that you’re tough and nobody can hurt you, but you’re wrong there.” He stopped. I had the strange notion that something in his head had just melted and made a stain of some kind. “I think I’m fading here,” he said, and closed his eyes.
Dr. Tyson checked his pulse, looked at me and the cop, and told us he should probably sleep awhile.
“Can I stay here?” I asked.
“Sure.”
Jeremy was instantly asleep, and what could I do but sit there silently, now holding the chilly hand of my own son? On a chair I saw a pile of silly-looking mesh stockings and black lingerie. Constable Chung saw me looking and said, “Uh, we found him in those, and he was all made up. The nurse cleaned him up.”
I recalled the body I saw when I was twelve, the blackberries; the body clothed in something abnormal; the creosote stink of railway trestles.
Taking a look at my face, the doctor volunteered, “I think it was actually a costume for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They do midnight screenings at the Ridge Theatre. I used to go to them back when they were happening the first time around.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked her.
“This time, yes. Next time—maybe. The time after that? Who knows?”
Unarguable logic. Jeremy’s hand was warming up. I looked at Chung and he shrugged. “You’ve never met your own son?”
“No.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. I mean, I knew he—Jeremy—was out there, but not…” But not what? But not this beautiful man here in front of me.
“How old is he?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty?”
The hiss of oxygen in the tube beneath my son’s nose—it took me back to Rome. It carried me back two decades to the night where fat, plain, Canadian me stood in the rain on a rooftop near the Colosseum. I was sixteen, and it was the era of acid rain—a subject that seems long forgotten now. The skies of Europe showered battery acid back then. I remembered looking out over the Colosseum and its neighbourhood, under a pigeon-feather grey sky, quite late on a weeknight, all traffic noises gone. The acid rain was falling on the city’s marble and travertine monuments, and I imagined I could hear them hiss and crackle under the acid, dissolving more in one year than they had in a thousand, history melting away before my eyes. And this was the oxygen ventilator’s noise.
I moved in closer to Jeremy and kissed him on the cheek.
That I had wanted to travel anywhere, let alone Rome, had sent a shock through the family dinner table. To most ears a Latin class excursion sounds like the pinnacle of dullness. Not quite so. The class actually had a somewhat dark mix of students, a blend of linguistic geeks, rebellious sons of literary parents, and cool-headed girls with their efficient eyes focused on being MDs one day. It was the only fun class I ever had.
Leslie, recently graduated and in and out of home at whim, was our family’s traveller—a ten-day tour of southern England in ninth grade and three weeks in Nova Scotia as a B & B chambermaid the summer after she graduated, both trips drenched in sex and scandal.
“Rome?” said Father. “That’s yesterday’s world. Go to Tomorrow. Go to Houston—San Diego—Atlanta.” Father was only interested in making new things. To him, a fifteenth-century church would be nothing more than a shell on a beach.
“You’re too young to go anywhere,” said Mother.