Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  So went the notice in the paper, which I read along the way. All I could think of were other places I would’ve preferred to be, like school, or even the dentist.

  It was an almost inappropriately beautiful late-July morning. Low twenties, a few clouds, hardly a breeze. Felt like it shoulda been grey and pouring.

  “second reading: aloysius mooney.”

  There it was in the black-and-white handout, so it must be true.

  I was escorted to one of the front “reserved” pews to sit with other Mass participants, passing strangers whom I assumed were Rodney’s cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents that I’d never seen before in my life.

  I sat there on the hard, laminated bench literally twiddling my thumbs, no more comfortable in my suit than Rodney had looked in his.

  Our school choir, accompanied by two guitar strummers, began the familiar strains of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as everyone stood. The casket was wheeled past us, followed by Rodney’s unsteady mother.

  I never did see his father.

  And just like that, it was my turn.

  I made it onto the altar without tripping over my cuffed dress pants and stepped up onto the little wooden box that had already been pulled out for me to line up with the microphone. Even the big book had been opened to the assigned page, ready for recitation.

  “A reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes . . .

  There is an appointed time for everything,

  and a time for every affair under the heavens.

  A time to be born, and a time to die;

  a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.

  A time to kill, and a time to heal;

  a time to tear down, and a time to build.

  A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

  a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

  A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them;

  a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.

  A time to seek, and a time to lose;

  a time to keep, and a time to cast away.

  A time to rend, and a time to sew;

  a time to be silent, and a time to speak. . . .”

  That last line stopped me in my tracks, and I hesitated for the length of time it took to read it back to myself.

  I’d read the entire passage once through the night before, mainly on the lookout for odd words that might trip me up. It was the Bible, after all. But that line hadn’t fazed me at all until now.

  I could sense the audience discomfort building as I gathered my thoughts in awkward silence.

  I looked up from the book and out at everyone for the first time.

  It was now or never.

  “It says there’s a time to be silent, but a time to speak, too. And I really want to speak about my friend, Rodney, ’cause I’ll never get another chance to do it in front of him.”

  I fully expected someone to come over and gently escort me off the altar, but no one did.

  So I continued.

  “The last time I saw him was at the Janeway a few months ago.

  “I was half scared to go because Rodney was a bit of a hardcase and I didn’t know what was gonna happen. At least I was already at the hospital!

  “We joked about that.”

  The smattering of reserved chuckles encouraged me to go on.

  “But my mother said it would be the right thing to do. And she was right. Dad says Mom’s always right, even when she’s wrong.

  “So, we sat in the cafeteria together for a while, joking about that, talking about school and how we both hated it. How we both loved fries with gravy and ketchup, and how some days he wanted so bad to play hockey, but other days he didn’t want to do anything.

  “Rodney, you were a great hockey player, and I think you would’ve made the NHL. I always thought that but never told ya. Well, now ya knows, buddy. Even if you did almost smother me along with everyone else when we won.”

  Maybe too much inside info on that one, I thought. I paused to gather my thoughts.

  “Anyway, we were really getting along there, at the Janeway, where we hadn’t really before. It was kinda too good to be true. And I was like, this is the best I’ve ever seen ya. And I meant it as a compliment, right? But he was like, whaddaya mean? And I was like, well, ya don’t look sick at all.”

  Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I heard gasps in the crowd.

  I continued.

  “And I’ll never forget . . . he got pretty mad and told me you don’t have to look sick to be sick.”

  I saw people nodding in reluctant agreement with lips pursed.

  “And I guess that’s true, because here we are. But how was I supposed to know that you would—I just wish I’d known, or you told me more, or . . .”

  Until that point the only emotion I’d felt was the fear of making a mistake. But now the sudden force of a good cry was building again.

  Through eyes blurred by tears I could see Mom making her way to the altar, and to my side.

  She gave me a hug and gently rubbed her hand up and down my back.

  “It’s okay, darling,” she whispered. “You did good. Really good.”

  “I wanna finish it,” I told her.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, looked back at the big open book to find my place, and took in a deep breath.

  “A time to love, and a time to hate;

  a time of war, and a time of peace.

  What advantage has the worker from his toil?

  I have considered the task that God has appointed for us to be busied about . . .”

  I was struggling along through intermittent sobs and sniffles, but the dam finally broke and it all came out.

  My mom took over, pulling me in close for comfort.

  “He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without our ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done. Amen.”

  We walked back to my seat together, stopping next to the pew.

  “I wanna go up, okay?” I said, motioning to the balcony.

  “Um, okay,” she said, as I continued to the back of the church by myself.

  I pushed through the closed doors and out into the sanctuary of the empty vestibule.

  I had to get a handle on this whole outward emotion/crying thing. I had no trouble keeping it together when they told me he’d almost died months earlier from the pills.

  I guess that was it, though. There was no “almost” this time.

  That was also before he and I had the heart-to-heart at the Janeway, which had exposed a vulnerability in him—and me—that I wasn’t expecting or even knew could exist.

  There was no question I felt like a close friend, maybe his only friend after that. Some friend, I thought.

  I looked up the stairs leading to the balcony, the sun’s rays projecting a kaleidoscope of colours onto the wall through the stained glass images. And then I left.

  17

  I hadn’t considered any of the consequences of hightailing it without telling anyone. It just seemed like the natural thing to do, skipping out as I always did on the last half of Mass and hanging out in the park till it was over. The tipoff was the sudden flood of westbound traffic along Waterford Bridge Road.

  It was also the first time I’d been in the park since he died.

  The way I saw it, I had to pass that tree sooner or later, so what better day? And sure, I might also admit to a little morbid curiosity, having had some history with death and near-death experiences.

  It was a pretty typical summer Monday in the park: new moms pushing strollers, pairs of retirees shootin’ the breeze, arms slung over the backs of duck-pond benches, kids at camp or jus
t up to no good. Except it wasn’t typical at all.

  Something horrible had just happened here. It had been three days and all the signs of frantic activity were still there: grass torn up or pressed down all around the big innocent maple, large and small splinters from a partially detached branch, a single blue surgical glove—intended for but just missing the green city garbage can it lay next to—and a knot of orphaned yellow police tape still tied to the fence.

  And beyond that, obstructive drivers slowing to have a gawk at where it all went down. I prayed it didn’t look anything like this when Rodney’s mother inevitably came to see. I picked up as much of the mess as I could and tossed it in the garbage.

  I decided that was enough for today and continued on up the path which ran parallel to the road, leading me past my own blast-from-the-past on a very similar type of beautiful day almost a decade earlier.

  That hazardous shard of rock was still right there, denoting where I was standing when I found him. I passed it five, maybe ten times a week yet never gave it a third thought until today.

  I tried positioning myself in the exact same spot in an attempt to recreate the moment, staring at the same pool of water, waiting for the shriek from the babysitter.

  At that second, as if by cruel and uncanny design, the halting screech of tires on pavement almost tricked me into believing it was her again.

  “It’s a crosswalk, ya know!” I heard a woman yell from up on the road.

  That, along with other approaching voices and footsteps of park-goers, prompted me to cut short my stop.

  I headed back up the path, out of the park, across Waterford Bridge, and resumed the trek home.

  I was only slightly startled by the short hello “barmp” from our station wagon as it pulled over just ahead of me. No one was mad, just relieved that I was okay and hadn’t gone and done “something foolish.”

  “Are you okay? Did you want to go to the cemetery?” Mom asked through the front passenger window.

  “No. I just wanna walk.”

  “Okay. See you at home.”

  I almost accepted the offer only because the hard leather edges of my new black dress shoes were killing my ankles. I decided I’d take them off instead, as I’d already done with my stifling tie and blazer, and hoof it through the freshly cut grass of the Mental Field.

  As expected, there was no one else around other than the guy on the tractor that was pulling the mulcher, taking corners with the precision of a Zamboni driver and constantly checking behind to ensure he never missed a spot.

  I’m not sure he even noticed me, let alone thought to kick me out.

  I had to put my new shoes back on to climb over the fence, lest I cut my feet in the coarse little metal triangles.

  No one bothered me as I came through the front door and went straight up to my room, eager to change my clothes and be by myself.

  I stared out my bedroom window a long time, shifting gaze from the Mental to the roof of Rodney’s house, which was all I could ever see of it from there.

  It suddenly occurred to me that he’d actually lived closer to the place than me all these years. Not that it really mattered. Encyclopedia Britannica had already debunked my silly theory that the closer you lived to it, the more susceptible you were to going nuts.

  It wasn’t the same, Dad said in blunt news speak, as getting brain cancer from living next to a hydro substation all your life.

  That was comforting—I guess.

  Still, it was impossible not to wonder whether I could ever bring myself to do what Rodney had done. Superficially, the juvenile in me envied him for all the pressures and expectations he didn’t have to worry about anymore.

  But that was really the only upside that I could see, which told me I couldn’t possibly comprehend what he was going through. To choose the end over life. What kind of life, I guess.

  As sad and hopeless as I felt after the locker incident, the daily grind of bully-evasion, or the worry and fret after the fire, checking out never occurred to me. I would’ve been too chicken to go through with it anyway. Probably would hurt more than the dentist, too.

  I spent the rest of the day on our back veranda, gluing together C-3PO and R2-D2 from my new Star Wars model set, given to me as a pre-birthday cheer-up gift a week before the big day. A welcome distraction, I will admit. You could also win stuff, like cash or a Coke, but you had to cut off the jagged-edged bottoms of the cans with an opener and return them to the store.

  There was one other thing I was getting for my birthday that I wasn’t supposed to know about but did. A potentially fatal distraction.

  How they ever thought they could hide a mini-bike behind our furnace for any length of time was beyond me. The conspicuous brown tarp only drew attention to the little second-hand Honda 50 underneath.

  It had been propped up with a wooden for sale sign on a neighbour’s lawn for weeks with no takers. It was an observation I may have made on occasion. Or whenever we drove by. Which was a lot. Like, every day. Twice, maybe three times.

  So while I know they were excited for me, I’m sure there was also an element of “just to shut him up,” too.

  I lauded myself for the intestinal fortitude not to pull it out for a closer look, but I knew that wouldn’t last.

  I just couldn’t wait.

  So it was that I executed the plan commencing at zero five hundred hours the next morning, three days before my birthday, no less.

  No one would’ve been startled or surprised that I was up and around at that hour on a Saturday, no matter the season. I turned on some cartoons, left on low to medium volume, and down to the basement I went.

  I somehow managed to extricate the bike with minimal noise from the maze of high and low bridges in and around the furnace. If only I’d applied some of that focus and concentration in school, or for good rather than evil.

  The situation was such that there was only one legal way to get a mini-bike into the Mental Field from our house. You had to walk it down that damn sidewalk, engine off.

  Or you could sit sidesaddle while whizzing along the wide, grassy slope between the fence and said sidewalk, revving for effect all the way to the bottom where the fence ended, and gambling that a cop car wouldn’t turn the corner.

  Flying up and down that wide-open field, at that solitary hour in the morning, not a soul or car in sight—there was nothing like it. I dared experiment with a few jumps and wheelies on the ramp-hill leading from the lower to upper tier. And when I’d had enough of that, I just coasted around the huge expanse that, until now, I’d only traversed on foot.

  Jeans and T-shirt weather at six in the morning with a light fog burning off. It was almost too perfect. But definitely too visible as it got brighter.

  I had no idea how much gas was in the thing, but I ventured beyond the field, up through that bee- and wasp-infested path leading to the old sanatorium. The bike sounded even cooler up there as the baffled exhaust echoed through the narrow alleys between the dozen or so single-storey wooden buildings.

  I dreaded the thought of another cringing ride through the thorny bee-wasp-fest, opting instead for the chained-off emergency route that could also get me back to where I began. But man, was it ever steep.

  I was halfway to the bottom when I panicked and realized I wouldn’t be able to stop or even slow my momentum. I’d badly underestimated the strength needed to squeeze the only brakes on the handlebars and was now officially out of control, wobbling side to side.

  My only options were the rocky gully to my right or ducking under the chain barrier that was now less than ten feet in front of me and closing.

  I chose the latter and paid the price.

  All I recall is being clotheslined by that rusty old chain for one full revolution and landing flat and hard on my back and head.

  18


  I can’t begin to count or thank the number of lucky stars that aligned for me that morning.

  For two, maybe three minutes I was out cold.

  Given the stupid, jackass nature of the entire stunt, I stunned even myself for having taken the time to strap on the helmet that came with the bike. That the big, black, oversized shell somehow stayed on to save my head from the crack against the pavement was just a fluke.

  I could certainly rule out divine intervention, under the circumstances.

  It took me another couple of minutes to get oriented after I came around, finally getting a visual on the mini-bike, which had carried on another twenty feet or so by itself before striking a curb and falling on its side, still running.

  It was so early on a Saturday that no one seemed to witness what must’ve been a pretty dramatic and acrobatic flip, crash, and burn.

  Well, almost no one.

  I was kneeling and resting back on my haunches, gingerly dabbing the swelling scrapes around my neck to gauge blood loss, of which there was crazy little.

  Then something caught my peripheral.

  After just a few seconds I could tell it was him, just by his gait. His voice confirmed it.

  “You got a real problem stayin’ upright,” he laughed.

  Every time we’d had a run-in I was either on my back, on my stomach, or on my knees. If he was a serial diddler, he was showing impressive restraint.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. Thanks for the concern,” I responded with equal flippancy.

  The shock of his appearance after months of absence would just have to take a back seat to the daze I was still in following my near-death mishap.

  “What, the field ain’t enough space for ya? What are ya doin’ down here on that thing anyway? Or should I say off it.”

  Ha, ha, ha. So funny I forgot to laugh.

  He never seemed to answer any of my questions, so why should I answer his?