Read Online Away From Everywhere by Chad Pelley - Free Book Online Page B

in–”
    She laughed, broke free of the embrace, and gave him a soft, playful slap in the face.
    She asked about the tower, Cabot Tower, that sat atop Signal Hill, and she wondered why Alex ever left this place.
    â€œCan we get in there? It looks like a … castle , doesn’t it?”
    â€œYeah, we can go up after supper. Have you ever had saltwater taffy? Is that a Newfoundland thing? They sell it there.”
    They were hand in hand in the open, walking back to their rental car, no longer needing to hide their love. That day at Fort Amherst, they knew, was a day in a life that could’ve been, if they could just summon the courage to consummate their love, and shatter Alex Collins like glass.

    Owen thought of St. John’s for the rest of the day: the ever-changing mural ads on the cement walls of the LSPU hall, and the way the city had seemed so much more alive with Hannah there by his side. She was the tourist, but in showing her his hometown, he was appreciating it all more than ever. She brought out all the features of the place: the unique architecture of the buildings, the carved turrets of the courthouse onWater Street, and the coarse grain in the rock of its walls.
    Then he thought of his father, locked away in a mental ward at theWaterford Hospital across from Bowring Park – a park where they had picnicked and fed ducks twenty-five years ago, before his father got sick. He remembered his father handing him a loaf of bread and guiding him towards the ducks one day.
    â€œYou’re everything beautiful this world can be, my son.”
    Owen was getting too old for those compliments, too old to be at a park with his father, and yet his hand still felt so big on Owen’s back that day, and so god-like. Now his father was just a body suspended between life and death, like a corpse perpetually waiting for CPR or a body bag, kept alive by a coin-sized lump in his brainstem that kept his heart beating and convinced his catatonic body to breathe.
    By the end of grade ten, Owen’s father had fully surrendered to schizophrenia. He went delusional, then catatonic: a raving lunatic and then a body in a rocking chair that wouldn’t have the instinct to flee a burning room; a man seeing people to a man with no use for eyes. It was an unbearable, life-altering year for Owen and Alex, every day of it, especially since the biggest turmoil in any of their friends’ families that year was that their mother wouldn’t extend their curfew.
    It was the week his father was finally and indefinitely committed that Owen started writing. His first short story was about a man in a coma; it was a contemplation on the distinction between being human and being mere flesh and bone. How being alive means being connected to others, invisibly, and nothing more. It won the junior division for fiction in the provincial Arts & Letters competition. He and his mother went to visitTheWaterford that same week, and he told his unresponsive father all about it. He left a copy of the story with his father that day, just in case he snapped out of it for five minutes. He waited until his mother had turned her back and headed towards the door, and then he laid it on his father’s lap so his mother wouldn’t see his pathetic attempt at sharing this joy with his father.
    Initially his father stayed at home, medicated and more or less house-bound. It was the strange utterances his father made, particularly in the shower every morning, that startled Owen the most. He’d string unassociated words together, almost singing them, and laughing to himself.“I amnot the alien who smoked the last Jeremy!”“Candy eater eighty, sixty-seven.” The doctors called these “word salads,” and said they were one of the defining symptoms of schizophrenia. Word salads : the title sounded so unprofessional, so unreal. More so than his father’s delusions and hallucinations.
    One morning, two weeks