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  I was a poor witness to what happened next. My face was pressed down and away from Francis right from the beginning, but I could hear beside me the struggle, a sharp slap, the hollow sound of something heavy on flesh, breath pushed violently out of lungs and mouth. I was put in cuffs and lifted into a seated position. I sensed Francis was near to me, and I had to crane my neck to see him, also sitting upright with cuffed hands behind him. He had a bloody scrape on his cheekbone, and that seemed to be the worst of it. I tried silently to get him to meet my eyes, but he wouldn’t.

  “Francis,” I whispered to him.

  “Shut up,” said a cop.

  “Francis,” I whispered a bit louder.

  “I told you shut the fuck up.”

  We were lucky. Eventually, without any word from us, it was reasoned that we weren’t directly involved. We were released from our cuffs and asked to sit on the side of the street. Over the next hour, we watched a train of emergency vehicles heading towards our building. Cop cars, a fire truck, three ambulances, two news vans.

  Another police car stopped beside us, and an older cop with a shaven head got out to talk with the other officers. The older cop listened to the two who had cuffed us, and as he did he drew out a first and then a second stick of gum from a package and chewed. He looked completely uninterested in Francis and me, and only after listening for a good amount of time did he crouch down, breathing peppermint on us. He was offered latex gloves by one of the other cops, but he shook his head and used his bare hand to very gently coax Francis’s head towards the street light so he could look at the scrape on his cheekbone. My brother jerked his face away. The cop stood and chewed for a second longer.

  “Okay,” he said, “We’re taking you home.”

  —

  It had become almost unrecognizable. Our neighbourhood now a crime scene cast hard in the clashing brightness of emergency. Cop cars with flashing lights were parked up and down the street, on empty lots and in the soft grass of courtyards, leaving long muddy tire tracks. There were two, three, four ambulances, and also the news vehicles with satellite dishes and milling reporters with microphones under bright TV lights. Illuminated, the buildings I had known all my life were changed. The stucco of a low-rise looked like the sole of an unwashed child; the rust on the balcony railings and fire exits of an apartment tower looked ugly and contagious, a bubbling rash. Even the ordinary clothes that people hung to dry on laundry lines suddenly looked suspicious. Conspiracies in the open hanging of slacks and saris, in headless baby jumpers.

  So many of our neighbours had gathered to watch, some on their balconies, others on the bright stages of courtyards and taped-off streets. A man cradled a child who wouldn’t sleep. A small girl held her mom’s hand, and a group of younger kids normally buzzing with annoying energy looked silently upon the scene. I’d grown up among these people. I knew their faces and family names. The Cumberbatches and Rampersads and Nowaks. They had blank expressions on their faces. Maybe from the intensity of the light, maybe because they wanted to give nothing away of themselves to others. But most looked the way you do when you’re being studied unfavourably. When you’re being watched but also trying to see.

  But it was Mother who now sticks most in my head. As the cops walked us home, she was standing on the porch, still wearing her blue cleaner’s uniform. She watched both of us approaching with the cops, but especially her eldest son, who, on this night of violence, was somehow unable to meet her eyes.

  “Ma’am?” asked the cop. “Are you the mother?”

  She nodded and listened but looked beyond the cops to the audience of staring neighbours. The combination of sweat and glare made her face shine like a mask, and she looked a bit like an actor who’d stumbled accidentally onto a stage and who now, too late, had to figure out her role.

  TWO

  For the past ten years, I’ve been careful with Mother. I’ve kept to a minimum all discomforting talk about the past. I’ve given away things belonging to Francis that might remind and disturb. His concert shirts and sneakers. His Blue Jays cap with its faint dried stain of sweat upon the brim.

  I got rid of these items not to deny my mother the chance to remember her son but to allow us both the time and space to reckon with loss. When Francis was first gone, Mother was unable to work or move. But in the past couple years she’s grown increasingly independent. She helps me cook and keep house. She has a part-time position as a cleaner at the community centre, a job that covers only a small part of our household expenses but does not require of her long hours travelling. She is the proof that those who have suffered enormous loss can also endure. She is rarely the still and staring woman before a television Aisha spotted earlier tonight. Although she does have her moments.

  A few weeks ago, she left the house dressed in neat clothes appropriate for the cold weather, the right shoes and a warm hat. She wasn’t gone for too long, perhaps only two or three hours, just long enough for me to begin worrying. But when she returned, I understood. She was struggling with grocery bags containing dried peas, herbs, spice powders, a cloth bag of rice, leafy greens sticking out the tops. It wasn’t the heat-and-serve sort of stuff that I’ve admittedly too often fed her, but ingredients that you’d buy at the cluster of Sri Lankan, Filipino, and West Indian grocers a few blocks west, food you actually had to spend time preparing. And then I suddenly remembered the date. At midnight it would be Francis’s birthday.

  “I am going to cook,” she said.

  I helped her unpack the bags. Dasheen and soursop and bodi, names I had learned imperfectly throughout my childhood, in the same way I learned that “pears” are not really pears at all but avocados and that “figs” are green bananas and “breadfruit” is not bread or fruit. Mother had not cooked for a very long time, but when she got to work, she entered an old and patient rhythm, putting lentils to soak, chopping vegetables, roasting spices. She did it all with a fluency I’d thought she’d lost. There were moments of drift, though. A staring spell as a pot of rice boiled over, and then as garlic in a pan smoked and bittered. She peeled a cabbage but then continued removing leaves until nothing was left, just her panicked eyes and empty trembling hands.

  “Oh,” she said softly.

  “It’s all right, Mother.”

  “Oh dear.”

  In the end, some ingredients were left untouched, but what she had prepared was good. Rice cooked with beans and small cubes of meat with bones. A stew of bright red lentils. A dish of pale vegetables cooked slow into a deep orange richness. She set the table using the good napkins and cutlery, and I kept quiet when she set a third plate, a third glass of water with a drop of lemon juice. We ate, and we later watched the evening news, and we afterwards each went to our bedrooms for what I hoped would be a decent rest.

  I was awakened by sounds from the dark living room. I stepped out of my room, not exactly worried about an intruder but filled, all the same, with fear. I found Mother in the kitchen, sitting on the floor and whispering into the phone. She was spelling out a name. “F-R-A-N-C-I-S,” she explained. “Please help me reach him.” She noticed me and pulled the receiver away from her ear, and I could hear the annoyed operator asking for a last name. Mother gently hung up the phone and stood before speaking.

  “I understand,” she told me. “I know he is gone.”

  I believed her. I knew that only for a moment, on the edge of sleep, my mother imagined there was a country code she could dial, a toll she could pay.

  —

  Our neighbours in the Park have witnessed spells like these too. Instances when Mother seems to drift or stare or wander into the past. Some of our neighbours have memories of the events that began with the shootings that hot summer. But new people are always arriving in the Park. And they often come under challenging circumstances, from the Caribbean, from South Asia and Africa and the Middle East, from places like Jaffna and Mogadishu. For these newer neighbours, there is always a story connected to Mother and me, a story made all the more frig
htening through each inventive retelling among neighbours. It is a story, effectively vague, of a young man deeply “troubled,” and of a younger brother carrying “history,” and of a mother showing now the creep of “madness.”

  Some of our neighbours avoid us outright. They offer tight hellos when we pass, and hurried footsteps if we happen to be walking in the same direction. They lean their heads together to whisper. But there are also many kind gestures. To this very day, trays of food will sometimes appear at our front door. A pilau with okra, a stew chicken unmistakably Caribbean. Sometimes the dishes are at first less familiar: a bowl of pakoras or a dish of seasoned rice marinated and wrapped in leaves. Most often, they are dropped off anonymously, placed in the kind of disposable foil trays that signal clearly that they do not need to be returned. But, occasionally, food will be delivered in Corning Ware that will have to be retrieved, and when it is there will sometimes be inquiries about the state of my mother. And this is how, only a week ago, I answered the door, yet again, to Mrs. Henry.

  You have to understand Mrs. Henry. She is one of the many certified Mothers of the neighbourhood, a force, a stern uplifter of fallen individuals, especially of those parents afflicted with troublesome, wayward children. She is an elder at a nearby Pentecostal church, and she lets you know this immediately. She works most mornings at a factory that cans fish, but she wears a hat and proper full-length dress to travel there. She has three jobs, she will announce, and also a boy who sings in a choir, and none of this is special, she will tell you. This is how she was raised in the West Indies, a place she invokes against the iniquity and salacious immorality afflicting Scarborough and its youth. She is the perfect embodiment of law and respectability, dark-faced and smelling righteously of Limacol cologne, peppermint breath mints, and coconut oil pomade.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Henry,” I said.

  You always say “good evening” to a woman like Mrs. Henry. You don’t try “hello” or, worse yet, “hi,” and no child of this neighbourhood, however foolish or harden, would ever risk anything like a “sup?” But to my proper greeting Mrs. Henry barely responded. She asked about her serving dish, and I gave it to her, washed. She asked if I had kept the fry fish out of the fridge until it cooled “lest it sweat,” and I said I had, lying. I thanked her sincerely, and then, remembering my manners, suggested that she come in for tea. She gave me the look that I have often seen on the faces of neighbours. That awkward look of smell that might accompany a sense, from the air, that something lies unburied. She gave me another look too, something softer, perhaps pity.

  “Another time,” she said.

  I do not blame my neighbours for avoiding Mother and me. They carry their own histories and their own hopes of genuine arrival. They are marked by language and religion and skin, and their jobs are often temporary and fragile. And if, for these very reasons, they sometimes display to Mother the everyday acts of kindness and generosity that come out of a deep sense of vulnerability, they also understand the costs of stigmatization, and how certain stories cling stinking to the flesh. Some neighbours, I’ve heard, have taken up the old practice of writing fake addresses on job applications, out of fear that acknowledging a connection to the Park will further jeopardize their already complicated lives.

  But this is all right with me. I don’t want others in my life. I don’t want houseguests or questioning conversations. I certainly don’t want more drama for Mother. Ten years has not, in fact, been yet enough time to fully recover. Though now, we do have a guest in our home.

  —

  Tonight, at least, I have avoided any needless confrontation. For the actual arrival of Aisha to our home has turned out to be less trying than I thought it would. After she spoke Francis’s name, I nodded and then all but abandoned her in my room to settle in for the night. I joined Mother in the living room watching television, her eyes focused somewhere beyond the lit screen, until the beginnings of an infomercial for sunglasses, and she rose and went to her bedroom, and I was able to stretch out on the couch. Since then, I have been kept awake by the hiss of passing cars.

  And now, on the edge of sleep, the shootings return to me with an attack of panic and wild vertigo. The living room drapes pulsing with coloured emergency lights. It takes a few seconds to recognize that these lights are from a snowplow and road salter making their way down the avenue.

  —

  I’m suddenly awake and squinting against the daylight coming in through the living room window. Mother is in the kitchen in her bathrobe, somehow having not woken me as she prepared her breakfast. But now there is another mystery. I check the house and Aisha is gone, although her backpack remains in the bedroom. How could she have slipped past and out the door without disturbing me?

  When I return to the living room, Mother has her own questions.

  “That girl,” she begins, “in your bed…”

  “She’s just a friend, Mother. Aisha. She was a neighbour, remember? She lived in unit two with her father. She was smart in school.”

  “She was the scholarship girl,” Mother says, nodding. “What does she do now?”

  “I’m not too sure.”

  “You’re not too sure?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Her jeans are very tight.”

  “They’re not that tight, Mother. Look, her father…He died not long ago. And so I invited her to spend some time here.”

  “To spend time in your bed,” she mutters.

  “She’s here for the neighbourhood. To see and remember.”

  I know I’ve raised my voice, but I’m battling my own doubts about the point and wisdom of my invitation. I still don’t understand how I could have overslept or why Aisha slipped out from the house, and right now I have other things to do. And so when Mother begins to ask yet again about the woman in her house, I say it in language I don’t normally use with her.

  “She’s here to grieve.”

  She quiets, pinches her bathrobe around her throat. For a moment, I feel almost ashamed to have pressed the point. But when Mother responds, her voice is polite and sincere.

  “The poor thing.”

  —

  I cannot wait for Aisha to return for I am already late for work. I hurriedly pack up some leftover rice and peas for myself and then walk the ten blocks to the Easy Buy, the big discount food superstore that displaced an old strip mall. I have worked at the Easy Buy for five years, but I know that if I miss a shift, or if I arrive too late, I risk future employment. Business has been good at the store, its aisles crowded with shoppers filling their carts. Shifts are increasingly difficult to get, with many more people willing to work than there are positions available.

  The assistant manager, Manny, was raised in the Park not far from my place, although he now lives in what he braggingly calls the “good neighbourhood” of Port Junction. He still has contacts in the Park, though, perhaps family or friends, because he is somehow able to track my daily movements. He knows that I “lurk” around the neighbourhood on walks for no good reason, and that on certain days, if I don’t have a shift, I can be found “idling” in the public library. And through this false sense of familiarity with me, he takes it upon himself to lecture me in front of others in the staff room. He lectures me about the risks of associating with the wrong people. He lectures me about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and saving money and not expecting handouts. It’s about attitude. It’s about possessing the right mindset. The worst is when Manny conducts surprise searches of our lockers for drugs and minor thefts, searches that never result in any finds, and which may or may not be legal in the first place, and which we seem to have no choice but to tolerate. “No worries if you’re not doing anything, right?” he explains. Once he found a library copy of Giovanni’s Room in my locker. He smirked at the photo of the blond man on the cover, and then joked loudly about skids of coconuts and Oreo cookies waiting to be unpacked in the storeroom. “You know,” he explained to one of the newer workers, slapp
ing him on the chest, “coloured on the outside, white on the in?”

  None of my co-workers, all part-time, and many with families, will dare object or show annoyance. And I have to be careful, too. I do my job, but Manny knows full well that I’m in a bind, being forced because of Mother to find work relatively close to home. Also, despite Manny’s warnings about handouts and corruption, he’s all too happy to hire under the table those desperate for half the ordinary pay, while he quietly divides the other half with the manager.

  And so it’s no surprise that today I’m paired with someone new. He’s got grey in his hair but muscles and veins like ropes under his skin. When I say hello he nods but doesn’t answer. For the next while we begin long hours unloading and itemizing frozen produce and boxed and dried and canned goods from dozens of skids. Sugary cereal and fruit drinks and cookies and chips. The work is endless, repetitive, and my arms begin to give out after three hours. My co-worker looks twice my age or more, but he’s strong and he pushes me through the job. At the break, I try speaking to him, but he just nods his head.

  We tough it out into the final hour and finish with already stiffening limbs. I’m beside him, taking my coat from my locker, when I try phrases, hopefully not lewd, in what little I’ve picked up of Tamil and Tagalog.

  “Hablas español?” I try next.

  “Look, bitch. I’m from Mississauga.”

  —

  I walk home in the dark. I’m hunched down against the wind and cold, and there is a needled burning in my spine. A passing car splashes me with slush, soaks me right through even worse than last night with Aisha, and my mind turns bitterly to the woman I’ve invited into my already complicated household. We are struggling, Mother and I, in more ways than one, and we do not need the added weight of more grief, particularly of someone who’s not been stuck at home and in a shit job. Someone with options. Someone who’s managed to get away.