Vigil

By Noah Cain

Seb,

I see you there sleeping and all I can think about is how you'd find shapes in the chips that we ate on those nights where it was just you and me. You’d hold each one between your thumb and index finger and make the noise of what you imagined it to be. A race car. A polar bear. A plane. Such focus. In this house. On that couch. Waiting for mom to get home.

Not sure if you know, but she’s dead. You were too far gone to bring it up. I got to get some sleep. Work in the AM. Likely be gone when you wake up. Stick around. Help yourself to whatever.

Talk tonight.
 
 —Charles
 
Couldn’t sleep. Back at the kitchen table. Watching you on the couch. Thinking back.

Fucking Mitch. It wasn’t more than a month after Mom realized she was pregnant that he left. Didn't want to do the father dance over again, I guess.

It’s weird what you remember. We had this calendar that showed the size of a baby at the different weeks. You were around a plum when that went down.

Mom cried a lot after he left, and then got used to it. Her stomach grew. Sometimes I’d find her in the kitchen smoking out the open window. She'd smile and say, "Got me, Chaz," and offer me a drag and we’d pass it back and forth throwing around baby names.

I quit football. She needed me around. When I stopped showing up to practices, Coach pulled me out of math class and asked me what happened to my Tiger pride, trying to make me feel guilty or something. "Fuck Tiger pride," I told him, which got me suspended three days.

Mom didn’t care. Said that guy had always been an asshole anyway. On my first day off, I dug my old crib out from behind the furnace. The hardware was taped to one of the legs in an old Ziploc bag and I used a butter knife to put it together in her bedroom. Eventually you moved into my room in the basement, which we shared until I moved out west. That was a hard day.

Near the end, at the hospital, I sat in a chair in the corner while she told your story to the spiritual care guy at her bedside. Wrong friends. Those automated calls from the school. Drinking. Drugs. How she had no clue what to do. How she’d get home from work to a basement full of drunk teenagers. Pot smoke and beer bottles everywhere. Then meth. Then a deadbolt on the bedroom door.

It’s on me in a way. I’d been out at Fort Mac a couple years at that point. Kinda sensed things were going downhill, but didn’t know for sure. Didn’t want to know maybe. It was so easy not to think about it. I had it in my head when I moved out there that it was a temporary thing. That I’d save up enough money to take four months off and bum around New Zealand. See the scenery from Lord of the Rings. Try surfing. But I hardly saved a thing. What money I had left over after making the payments on the lifted F-150 I bought to fit in, I blew partying on my weeks off in Calgary.

Homesick after a bender that ended up being pretty fucking rough, I called Mom about Christmas. Mitch answered. I hung up and didn’t call again.

You were fifteen then. Never met him. That was his decision. And then there he is. Leeching like he always did. Eating your food. Sitting on our couch. Sleeping in Mom’s bed. She shouldn’t have let him. She should have called me. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have fucked off.

A few months later (I was pretty low at this point), I saw our old home phone number pop up on call display. I let it ring through. In the message, she was crying, telling me to call her.

She had woken up to the cops pounding at the door and flashing blue and red light. Someone walking their dog noticed Mitch on the steps in a pool of blood and called it in. You were gone. That was the last anyone heard of you.

I quit my job and moved home. Mom died a few months later, a couple months ago now. It’s called sepsis that killed her. An infection in the blood. It had already taken hold by the time I got here. They took her hands and feet to stop the spread. Nothing helped.

The funeral was nice. Wish you could have heard those stories. Of what she was like before. I’ll tell you but it won’t be the same.

I gotta go to work. I’ll be home tonight. Lay low. There’s lots to figure out. Long ways to go. Help yourself to whatever.

Stick around.
 
 —Charles
 
PS There hasn’t been a day without you in my mind.

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Noah Cain is a multimodal artist, critic, and school counsellor. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, EVENT, and Yolk Literary. Find him online at noahjcain.com