Six
Reece
Diana was probably right.
Mom wouldn’t have wanted to wait for me. She’d have grabbed a cab or an Uber and raced home, and if that was what she’d done
I suppose I couldn’t blame her.
The only other place I could think she might have gone would be my brother’s, but why head there when she didn’t yet know,
with certainty, what had transpired on the home front? Maybe my failure to answer her question about whether Dad was dead
as much as told her he was. Maybe she wanted to get to Holden’s place so that they could face the bad news together.
She’d always been more protective of him than of me. Maybe protective was the wrong word. Where Holden was concerned, Mom was more anxious, more fretful. Holden was the family land mine. Take
one wrong step and he might go off.
How to put this. Holden had been, for as long as I could remember, the “problem child.” Of the three men in my mother’s life—Dad,
Holden, and me—it was Holden she’d always worried about most, and not without reason, I suppose. As he came into his teens,
he became disruptive, troubled. Drinking at fourteen, and it wasn’t long before he moved on to more serious stuff. In my later
teens, I’d done my share of drinking and had episodes of getting high, like plenty of dumbass kids, but Holden was more hardcore,
trying just about everything by the time he was twenty.
He’d been in and out of rehab between his early twenties and now more times than I’d had my teeth cleaned.
Every time he’d come out, there’d be renewed hope on the part of my parents that this was the time it would stick, and it would, for varying periods of time.
But they were always waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing today might be the day he’d be back to sticking a needle in his arm, doing a line, smoking meth from a crack pipe, looking for any way he could to stop the pain.
Not the physical kind, but emotional. Holden’s private demons were exactly that.
Locked away. No matter how hard I might have pried over the years, he kept things to himself.
Even when Holden was getting top-notch care at Sharnwood, Mom fretted about how it reflected on Dad and her. More than once
I heard her speculate that Holden’s counselors had probably concluded that his parents were all to blame, that they’d fucked
him up somehow.
Dad wondered if maybe that wasn’t true.
He was as concerned about him as Mom was, maybe more, but it was different with him. His concern was driven largely by guilt.
He’d come to believe Holden’s addiction problems were some kind of karma, a cosmic retribution for the work my father had
done for Wiffel-Smith, the pharmaceutical giant.
You may have heard about them.
There was a time when you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing a commercial from Wiffel-Smith, whose corporate headquarters
could be found in the suburban sprawl northwest of Toronto, but whose primary market was south of the border. They hawked
their remedies for everything from restless leg syndrome to bowel disorders on all the major networks, but their most famous,
or infamous, as it turned out, was Oxy-Mirac, a so-called miracle (hence its name) pill to treat chronic pain. The miracle
turned out to be miraculously addictive. It was abused by countless thousands, all with help from dodgy doctors willing to
write prescriptions in return for perks and kickbacks from the company. A great many of those who got hooked on Oxy-Mirac
only beat the habit by dying.
Dad was one of their top salespeople back in the late ’90s, traveling all across North America.
While the Wiffel-Smith higher-ups and marketing geniuses were willfully blind to the international crisis they were creating—or could see what they were doing and just didn’t care, seduced by making hundreds of millions of dollars—Dad was clear-eyed enough to see there would one day be a reckoning.
He didn’t want to be around when that happened, so he quit, and sold all the shares he and Mom had put into the company when they were at their highest point.
Quitting may have eased his conscience some, but his windfall was tainted. He used that stock money to launch a successful
consulting enterprise, but I knew it haunted him that his later successes were built on the money he’d made from the suffering
of others.
Holden, he had come to believe, was payback.
Dad and Mom, over the years, had spent tens of thousands trying to get Holden clean—much of it at the Sharnwood Clinic right
here in Yorkton Hill—and while I couldn’t fault them for wanting to do everything they could to help him, their actions had
often been a source of friction between Diana and me.
“They spend a fortune trying to set your brother straight, but they don’t have a dime for you,” she’d said. And pretty recently, too, since I’d lost my job.
“It’s not like they’re giving him money to buy a Corvette,” I’d countered.
“No, it’s more like they’re throwing it into the wind or setting it on fire for all the good it does.”
Diana wasn’t as cold as that might make her sound. She was sympathetic, to a point, where Holden was concerned. And when he
wasn’t in the throes of some addiction, she liked him. Holden was a likable guy. He was funny. (He was an excellent mimic
and did dead-on impressions of our parents he was smart enough not to perform in front of them.) He took an interest in others,
and if you were moving from one house to another, he was the first one there helping to lift boxes or maneuver a couch down
a flight of stairs as long as there was pizza and beer. Especially beer.
He cared about those less fortunate than himself, and there were times when it was hard to find someone who fell into that category.
But once when I was with him in the heart of the city, he struck up a conversation with a homeless guy, his hand outstretched looking for change.
I kept on walking, because I’m the kind of asshole who often pretends those people are invisible.
When Holden caught up to me, I noticed he was no longer wearing his jacket, and I inquired.
“He was cold,” Holden said.
Like our father, Holden had always taken an interest in Gage, right from the time he was a baby. He reveled in his role as
uncle. And Gage loved him in return, although if I’m being honest, we didn’t encourage the relationship, and I felt my own
guilt over that. You didn’t want your son hanging around with an addict—current or recovering—even if he was the kid’s uncle.
It had been a source of friction with Gage, who accused Diana and me of not being supportive, that Holden couldn’t help being
the way he was, and we should be ashamed for not understanding that.
That stung. The truth has a way of doing that.
Gage saw in Holden the qualities we sometimes overlooked. That concern for people who were down and out. An interest in the
broader world when he wasn’t under the influence. When Gage, an aspiring idealist, learned Holden was taking part in a rally
to fight a Yorkton Hill decision to let a developer build on parkland, Gage not only wanted to join him, he questioned why
we weren’t coming too.
“You think he’s a bad influence,” Gage once said to us, “but he’s made me care about things that matter.”
If only Holden could be that Holden all the time.
For all those reasons and more, I thought Mom might be headed his way. But it was worth checking first to see if she’d gone
home. I took from my pocket the card that Detective McCabe had given me. I entered the number of her cell.
“McCabe,” she said upon answering.
“It’s Reece Chartwell.”
“Who said you could leave? Where are you?”
“I found out something.”
“I’ve got two officers I’d like to write up because you—”
“My mother’s alive.”
I guess I was expecting some sign she was shocked. But instead, she said, in a calm voice, “I know. How is it you know?”
I wanted to ask her the same thing but decided to answer her first. “She phoned me, said she’d been trying to reach Dad and
couldn’t. How’d you find out?”
“Get back here.”
Questions worked one way with her. “Has my mom shown up there?”
“No.”
“I told her I’d pick her up—she was at a lunch with friends—but she left before I got there. Thought she might have gone back
to the house.”
“No,” McCabe said again. Pissed. “I want you here. Now.” Her tone softened. “Look, Mr. Chartwell, I know this is all a shock,
that maybe you think you have more important things to do, but your presence here is needed.”
“Soon,” I said. “If she shows, call me.” She didn’t need to ask my number. I was now in her call history.
“Mr. Chartwell, I’m serious. Get back—”
I ended the call.
Holden lived on Bakerton Street, in one of Yorkton Hill’s less flashy neighborhoods in the west end. Yorkton Hill had its
reputation as one of the country’s wealthier towns, but not everyone lived in a house like my parents’. There were still plenty
of people here who didn’t commute into the city on a daily basis, people who lived and worked right here, many of them in
older parts of town that hadn’t yet been remade into fancy enclaves where every house came with a Wolf stove and a Sub-Zero
fridge. That’s where Holden lived, in a simple, one-story, two-bedroom home that, if it could speak, wouldn’t have said no
to a new roof and a fresh coat of paint. He rented, paying his landlord with the occasional odd jobs he got. Last I’d heard,
he was helping out a guy who put up drywall. You gave Holden a task, he could do it, so long as he wasn’t on one of his downswings.
While Holden’s part of town had a different feel than ours, which was more of a transition neighborhood, it wasn’t far. A
five-minute drive, an hour’s walk. I parked on the street when I saw his old blue Honda CR-V sitting beside the house and
walked slowly to the front door. As I knocked, I thought I heard a banging noise, like someone slamming the back door of the
place. I took a few steps to peer around the corner to see whether my brother had seen me coming and decided he didn’t want