Chapter 1

                It was Tuesday, December 23^rd, and Jeff Halladay was standing amidst an angry, disgruntled mob ready to kill and dismember the first poor sucker that crossed the line.  This was not a matter of principle or social unrest: this was Christmas shopping.  Jeff was one of several dozen crammed into MusicSource, a CD and Movie store located in the mall between the luggage store and a hairstylist.  Jeff had woken up that morning realizing it was only three days until Christmas, and then at lunch it had occurred to him that he had forgotten what day Christmas actually was, and he only had two.

                The mob was chaotic and frustrated and Jeff was feeling no different, desperately searching the racks for an inoffensive adult contemporary CD for his grandmother.   In need, he turned to one of the staff, already looking a bit haggard and pushed to the brink, and asked, “Do you have any Celine Dion?”  It would be hard to encapsulate the exact level of shame and indignity with which he posed the question to the red-haired, freckled man roughly his own age, already looking overheated and tired from a long day of running through the aisles seeking CDs for people.

                “Yeah, yeah” the redhead sighed, “The section’s over here.”

                Jeff felt a great wave of relief as he was led to an unpopulated corner of the crowded store and shown a section divider card labelled “Celine Dion,” but the pocket was empty.

                Panicked, Jeff began to demand, “Okay, what about Paul Anka?  What about Sinatra?  What about Buble?!”  He was on the verge of grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking vigorously to illustrate his dire need, but managed to restrain himself.

                “It’s all there--” the man began to say, but the sections for all of Jeff’s grandmother’s favourite artists had all been picked clean of CDs she didn’t already own.  He felt himself overwhelmed by a minor panic related to holiday shopping.

Jeff demanded, “This can’t be it!  This is nothing!  What is this, this is bullshit!  You’ve got to have more.  There’s got to be more in the back.  I need this, get me more!  You son of a b***h!”

The redheaded employee, being rather on edge himself, would probably have been within his rights to lay Jeff out with a right fist there and then, but managed to restrain himself.  Speaking calmly and rationally, he looked his customer in the eye and told him, “I’ve got a few other customers to look after right now, would you please wait a moment and I’ll see if I can find you something?”

“Sure, good, whatever, thanks,” Jeff huffed with irritation.  As the redhead walked off, Jeff thought how badly he’d like to wring his pale little ginger neck, how impossible it seemed that he should be stuck here, in a suburban mall in his hometown doing his last-minute Christmas shopping with the lowest of the low in society, which to Jeff was just about everyone else and especially uptight, worthless store employees like the redhead.  He was in hell, his own personal hell, and the radio was playing Boney M’s Christmas CD. He could feel himself being criticized by the employee’s eyes, just for wanting to buy his grandma a nice CD.  He fantasized about himself eviscerating the employee for returning empty-handed while attempting not to listen to the Christmas music pumping through the store.  For a minute he just stood there, muttering “F*****g Christmas, f*****g Christmas, f*****g Christmas...” until he saw a familiar face approaching from the cash register.

“Jeff Halladay!” she said sweetly, invitingly.  She was making her way to the back of the store wearing the same employee shirt as the redhead and carrying a cash float, her dark hair flowing down her shoulders, her t-shirt sleeves just short enough to reveal the rose tattoo on her elbow, the stem of which winds its way up her forearm.

“Lindsay!” he smiled.  She was the first welcoming thing he’d seen since he got into town.  He wanted to tell her so, but all he could do was say her name in a dopily admiring way. He felt embarrassed for his own smile.

“It’s good to see you,” she patted his chest, “Doing a little last-minute shopping, are ya?”

“Looks that way,” he sighed, “I mean, now I know what prison is like.   I mean, holy s**t.  Some lady nearly choked me with my own scarf just to get on the escalator before me.”

“Oh yeah?” she grinned, “You should try working here.  Trust me, we’re nothing to these people but vending machines with mouths.”

“And in your case,” he said in an attempt to be charming, “A nice set of tits.”

It was such an incredibly inappropriate remark she had to laugh, “You’re a dick, but thanks.  Listen, we should get a drink while you’re in town.  I’ve gotta cash off now, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot of shopping to do.”

“Yeah, I only have... everyone left to shop for.”

“Ooh, good luck with that.  Here, let me give you my number.  You got a pen?”  Jeff dug through his jacket pocket and produced a neon green clicky pen with the logo for ZipCar, the car sharing service used at his university.  He handed it to Lindsay; she wrote her number on his forearm and passed it back to him.  “I’ll see ya later.  Tomorrow maybe?”

“Definitely!” he said, getting unreasonably excited.  She brushed her hand over his elbow as she passed by and he watched her walk into the back room.  He watched her hips sway in the tight black jeans she wore and felt a desire to follow her back there.

He was mostly getting gift cards for the rest of his family �" they probably wouldn’t approve of a poor student like him spending money on extravagant gifts anyway �" but for his grandmother, he desperately needed that CD.  He was never a particularly good grandson, and he distinctly remembered breaking her Celine Dion CD when he was 11, playing Frisbee with it (it was more or less an intentional attempt to break it �" this was around the time Titanic was popular) and thought that this gesture would cheer her up, as she occasionally brought the story out at family gatherings to embarrass Jeff.  It was something of a tradition, in fact, when he brought a new girlfriend home, to make him look as bad as possible, and this was her contribution.  Now, Grandma Louise was spending this Christmas in the hospital, and as it was very likely to be one of her last, he saw this mission as crucial. If he didn’t come up with something meaningful to bring her, he knew he would never live it down in his mother and aunt’s eyes.  Getting shoulder-shoved by self-absorbed shoppers, he stood still amidst the chaos and went back to his murder fantasies while waiting for the redheaded employee to return. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket, indicating a text message:

It was from his mother: “At hospital.  Grandma died.  Go right home, will bring pizza.”

                Jeff stood there staring at the boldness of it all: “Grandma died.”  Right there in pixelated truth.  It hit him with abrupt force: didn’t people used to be more tactful about stuff like this? He regretted ever teaching his mother how to work the phone.

At that moment, the redheaded employee he wanted to murder out of irritation �" who was probably far more overworked than Jeff could imagine �" returned, brandishing a Best of Celine Dion.

“Had to scour the store to get it, but here you are, my good man, our very last.”

“Oh, uh... you can take it back now. I don’t need it anymore.”

With that, Jeff pushed his way through the crowd on his way out of the store.  The gift cards could wait.

 

Jeff took the bus back to his mother’s place.  There was a small bit of snow on the ground �" less than you’d think considering it was well into December in Canada �" and the windows on the bus were fogged from the inside.  He leaned his head against the wall of the bus, staring out into the darkness occasionally punctuated by the bright, distorted colour of Christmas lights on passing houses, drawing a little cartoon cat with enormous, thick whiskers in the window with his finger.  To try to avoid thinking too hard about life and death, he began to think about the last time he was really happy.

That wasn’t too hard of a memory to conjure up: it was maybe an hour earlier.  He had just gotten on the train to take him from the city where he went to school, to the suburbs, where he grew up.  The ride would take about 40 minutes.  As soon as he sat down, he looked across the aisle and saw a gorgeous looking woman in a business suit.  She had long, sandy blonde hair, a freckle above her lip, and a magazine tucked under her arm.  In looks, she was well out of Jeff’s league, but on first sight Jeff radiated a confidence that compensated for that.  He noticed her glance in his direction; nothing unusual. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw her glance his way again and again, until a message was relayed between the two of them and he looked up at her. She gave him the eye.  He gave it right back.  He glanced at her from the points of her shoes, up her long legs, to the hem of her skirt, her thin waist, the curve of her chest and the edge of her lips.  She watched him eye her.  He raised his eyebrow in curiosity.  She nodded in assurance.  He couldn’t guess her motivation, but it was not overly important to him. He tilted his head in the direction of the restroom.  She nodded once in agreement.  She stood up, straightened the pleat in her skirt, and slipped into the washroom.  He looked around.  It appeared nobody in the train car was really watching.  He stood up and knocked once on the door with his hand on the unlocked latch.  He opened it and let himself in.

Inside the train washroom, a receptacle made for one with the sound of a tank of water sloshing around under their feet, the two strangers began to kiss, pawing at each other, letting loose while their bodies collided, tossed this way and that by the force of the train pulling them along.  She panted with pleasure as he stroked his left hand up her side, planting his right hand on her a*s and she fiddled with his belt as their lips remained in contact.  She grunted, unwilling to speak or converse or ask his name, and he was far from eager to wreck the spell by making their personalities known.  All he wanted to know was the taste of her lips, hands getting comfortable in intimate places, tongues twisting around each other. Then there was a knock at the door. 

It was the train authority, checking for ticket fraud.  They knew people occasionally tried to hide in the restroom. Slowly, they let the door open and peeked out, embarrassed to be caught in the act, but thankfully clothed.  Jeff quickly produced his ticket for confirmation, but the woman just looked back and forth from him to the train officer and winced, “Ooh, this is awkward.”

She was hauled off to get her information taken down for proper ticketing.  The mood was just a little ruined after that and he declined to get her number, as if she would’ve wanted to give it. Generally speaking, the train authorities don’t like people getting freaky in the restrooms, but since the two were both mostly-clothed, there was no sense in dragging Jeff into the fray. In the time it took Jeff to remember up to this point in the story, the bus arrived at his stop.  He stepped off and buried his hands in his jacket pocket as he walked toward his mom’s house.

He got to the front door to find it still locked.  All the lights were off, inside and out.  He tried putting more force on the doorknob, in case it was just frozen shut or something, but to no avail.  And he didn’t have a habit of carrying a key to his mom’s house.  The backdoor would be locked as well.

Luckily, he had a backup plan, which had served him well all through high school.  His ground-level bedroom had a window that slid open easily from the outside, and could be climbed through with a ladder kept in the shed.  He walked around back and executed this plan flawlessly, right down to the familiar patch of unused floor under the window and the shelf he always used to steady himself.  Admittedly, this manoeuvre left him a lot sorer than he remembered, as when he snagged his foot on the windowsill and had to catch himself before falling face first to the floor.

Wouldn’t have been the first time.

Successfully having broken into his mother’s own house, he turned the light on in his room and looked around it like a living photo album from his late teenage years.  There were piles of CDs waiting for him on shelves, discarded old albums he saw no point in dragging along with him when he moved to the city since their contents all existed on his laptop.  He slung his backpack to the same familiar corner of his bed, where he usually kicked it off to the edge to the floor at the end of the day.  The sheets were made more neatly than their natural teenager-inhabited state would’ve been.  There were not as many random articles of clothing on the floor �" some, after all this time, but only unimportant sweat-caked t-shirts from the summer before university, old linens, a pair of jeans he decided didn’t fit anymore, and the occasional Cosby sweater, gifts from Grandma Louise.  A pair of shoes peeked out from under the bed, and what was behind that was too horrifying to contemplate. 

On the wall was a swimsuit calendar, representing the teenage desire (which is really just the lifelong desire) to be surrounded by breasts all the time.  A blonde in a yellow bikini held her hands behind her head to let her large b***s fall gracefully into her bikini top, with the edges just visible so that you could imagine �" not see, but really imagine �" their bare selves.  She was on her knees on a sandy beach, the blue sky and surf was out of focus in the background, or maybe it was just a backdrop.  She had intense desire in her blue, blue eyes, or at least a decent imitation.  Along the bottom of her knees were the words “August 2006.”  She was frozen in time.  Jeff peeked uninterestedly at the next page.  September was a gorgeous brunette with her hands at her sides and her shoulders squeezed together, bending forward just so slightly that her cleavage looked like the most magnificent valley.  Unfortunately, Jeff had taken off early that year, so she never got a chance to show her stuff.  Her eyes seemed to plead, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”  Jeff decided to let her free and flipped the page up to let her stay.

Aside from that, it was just a bunch of dusty old crap he didn’t even have much use for in his high school years, an old globe, some used textbooks he never returned, a vacant guitar stand he no longer needed.  What he didn’t notice was the slight, slight, imperceptible indent on the mattress.  It was the imprint of his mother’s bum, where she’d sit on the bed every so often, and just breathe in the stuffy remnants of her son’s air.  She didn’t clean the place, she didn’t throw out anything that hadn’t been real garbage, she didn’t nose around to try to find any left-behind drugs; she just sat in there and wondered about him.  But he couldn’t know this, and she wouldn’t want him to.

He left his room and moved down the hallway toward the front living room. He found the lights and the remote and sat on the couch to flip through the channels. Even though they had a cable box and he could use the guide menu, he liked the randomness of glimpsing every station. Here a new episode of The Bachelor, there a TV movie for kids, here a documentary on World War 2, there an ad for a new movie with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. On channel 31, there was a beautiful girl saying something, and he was interested to see what it was, but the scene cut away to a road. He stayed on that channel in case the girl came back. A voiceover narrated:

“When she was 24, Jocelyn Weiland was at rock bottom. She was drug-addicted, unemployed, directionless, and cut off from her family. One night, she was speeding down the Atlanta highway, on her way home from a party, driving drunk, when she was in a head-on collision. When she recovered, Jocelyn discovered she had the ability to see into others’ souls.”

The pretty girl, Jocelyn Weiland, returned, “It isn’t that I read minds or see the future, but I have predicted--”

Click. Jeff switched it over to a rerun of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Suddenly, he heard a purring. The family dog had died earlier in the year and was hastily replaced with a kitten. Jeff didn’t consider it a healthy transition. The kitten leapt from out of nowhere and settled on his lap. The kitten’s purring rumbled against the hunger if Jeff’s own stomach. After another moment, he heard the jingling of keys in the doorknob. He craned his neck toward the entrance, expectantly.

In came his mother and Aunt Kay, dressed in warm winter coats. His mom stopped in the doorway to the living room, “Ah, there you are! Did you put any food out for the cat?”

“No, you didn’t tell me to do that. Where’s the food?”

“No, I guess I didn’t, I just thought you might go ahead and do it.”

“He’s not my cat,” Jeff answered back, “You said you’d bring pizza.”

“He’s the family cat, Jeff, I would hope you’d at least want to help out while we’re all busy.”

“When’s the funeral? Also, you said you were bringing dinner home.”

“We couldn’t book a service until the 27^th, with it being the holidays and all, but we did manage to arrange a viewing for tomorrow night, which will give us one less thing to do on the Saturday.”

It wasn’t that Jeff had any particular plans, but he groaned at the fact that his entire time in town would be taken up with funerals and family gatherings. He looked down at his forearm and saw the now-slightly-worn ink of Lindsay’s phone number.

“And dinner?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “We got so busy trying to put this funeral together--”

“--You should’ve heard what the Pastor wanted to charge us!” Aunt Kay interjected from the other room.

“�"Well it took so long we decided we could just heat up some leftovers.”

This irritated Jeff more than anything else so far. “Leftovers?! How does that make sense? You could’ve just ordered the pizza and brought it home.”

“We were thinking of you, you probably don’t have a lot of home-cooked meals lately.  And, we thought it would be such a hassle to order the pizza and wait for them to make it--”

“But now I’m waiting for you to make it, and I’ve been waiting this whole time!”

“Jeff, don’t shout.”

“But... f**k! What are we even having?”

“There’s a few pork chops left from last night. I think there’s probably enough for the three of us...”

Jeff shot his mother a look that said “Well, Goddamnit anyway.” He shoved the cat off his lap and grabbed the phone. “I’m ordering the f****n’ pizza.”

“Jeff, don’t do that,” his mother said, “We’re making the pork chops now, they’re already on,” this was what Aunt Kay had been doing in the kitchen, “You can have pizza anytime.”

“No, f**k that,” Jeff said as the phone rang. He ordered a large pepperoni.

“I’m not paying for it,” his mother said bitterly.

“Fine, whatever.” Jeff went back to being hungry and angry on the couch as the end credits for Fresh Prince ran. Twenty-one minutes later, he was sitting in his room by himself eating a whole pizza on his bed and watching YouTube videos on his laptop and drinking his mom’s beer. This was his minor form of rebellion.

He really did feel like a teenager again.

He fell asleep five beers into the night, at 2 AM, after finally placing a call to Lindsay. He got her voicemail. He had no idea what he said to her, even while he was leaving the message.