Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

He spreads his hands over the screen. This angry tickling sets up inside my bones. I take his wrists. One of his fists comes free and strikes me. I pull him off the chair. Drag him into the hall.

“Is it her? Is it? I told you to stop talking to whoever the hell this is.”

He swivels his wrists as though I’ve hurt them. Perhaps I have.

“I hate you.”

I sit at his computer. I’m struck by the orderly layout of his disassembled clock radio. The LCD display, circuit board, and plastic casing laid out in obscurely geometric patterns. Screws collected in a pill bottle scrounged from my medicine chest: Reminyl, which I take. It’s usually prescribed to Alzheimer’s sufferers to address short-term memory deficiencies.

Microsoft Messenger is running. Sadie’s screenshot is of a cute girl in pigtails. Chatroom semaphore renders much of the conversation unintelligible: lolz, rotflmao, kpc. Sadie is discussing a new nightgown. How snugly it fits. I scroll up and am shocked, terrified, to find a conversation about my wife, myself. Our split.

Sadie: dillie? dillie-sweetie? u there?

Dylan: THIS IS DYLAN’S FATHER

After thirty seconds or so, words start to scrawl across the screen.

Sadie: hey mr. dillie. i know all about u.

Dylan: ARE YOU A PERVY OLD FART? I COULD CALL THE POLICE

Sadie: … lol… i’m a cute giiiirl… i like to snuggle…

Dylan: MY SON SAYS YOU ARE FRIENDS WITH EVERYONE IN HIS CLASS

Sadie: dillie-baby told u that? such a sweetie-petey! Dylan: DYLAN’S TOLD ME LOTS

Sadie: … lol… no he has not… dillie hates u, mr. dillie… like poison hates u…

Dylan: STAY AWAY FROM MY KID YOU STUPID FUCKER

Sadie: awwww, threatening a pretty wittle giiiirl…

Dylan: HAVE YOU ARRESTED CREEP STAY AWAY

Sadie: ur not the boss of me…

[USER SADIE HAS LOGGED OFF]

There is part of me that struggles to believe this is even happening. Another part is wondering what, exactly, is happening. I print off the conversation.

Dylan’s sitting cross-legged in the hall where the walls meet, faced away from me. He rocks forward until his skull touches the wall. I don’t know if he’s crying but if so it’s silently. I want to hug him yet am furious for reasons I can’t articulate. There is a cold fierce tickle inside my bones.

Niagara Regional Police HQis a labyrinth of pastel green hallways, solid-core walls, and turretmounted video cameras. I’m buzzed through a steelplated door buttressed by bulletproof glass into a bullpen furnished in outdated Dragnet motif.

Danny Mulligan meets me at the coffee urn. He fills two cups. “You pay your taxes, right?” he asks before handing me one.

He leads me to his desk. His Laura Secord letterman jacket is hung over his chair.

“You still talk to Abby Saberhagen?” he asks.

“You and her dated back when, hey?”

He wiggles his ring finger. “Spoken for, now.”

And Abby cries herself to sleep over that.

“Dan—”

“Lieutenant Mulligan.”

“Right, Lieutenant. About Dylan.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Try Juvie services. Or Scared Straight.”

“No, it’s… he’s being harassed. Stalked. Something.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Talk to the principal.”

“Cassie, too.”

“Cassie’s involved?”

“I think so. They’ve got this friend. Dylan calls her a friend, anyway. An online friend. He’s never met her. Nobody has.”

“And Cassie’s involved?”

“All that with the cellphone — this person, young girl or so she says, put them up to it. She’s computer friends with everyone in class.”

“This is your suspect?”

“Right. Sadie.”

“Sadie who?”

“Sadie-the-perverted-old-man-posing-as-a-girlstalking-my-son.”

“I’ll stop you right there. It may actually be a young girl. Infatuation isn’t a crime.”

“What if it’s an adult? This person has… has infiltrated our kids’ class.”

“Nick, I’m backlogged. Got a case where a baby was almost drowned in the toilet at Wal-Mart. I’ve got a pursuable lead on that. Sort of.”

“Mine’s not?”

“Technically, anything’s pursuable. If you have the manpower.” He sips coffee. Skins his lips from teeth as if he’d slugged down a shot of gutrot mezcal. “Listen, I’ll contact Missus Trupholme. We can sit down with the class and talk about the dangers of Internet predation.”

When he can’t find any scrap paper on his desk, Mulligan rummages his blazer pocket, finds a foldedover leaflet and absently writes his home number on its bare white back. He hands it over to me.

He says: “How’s Dylan?”

“Your girl’s a bombthrower.”

“Takes after her old man.”

“Nick,it’s your father.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Just come over.”

Rain fell earlier tonight. Shredded silver mist rolls up the streets to form halos around streetlights.

I’d driven Dylan to Toronto for the weekend. He ran to his mother under the candy-striped overhang of her new condominium complex. I stayed in the car.

Sarah Court. Two lights burning: one in an upper window of Mama Russell’s house, the other in my father’s kitchen. His face is furred with a three-day beard. His skin hangs in doglike folds around his jawbone. He’s drinking peach zinfandel from a box.

“I went into the hospital today,” he says. “Surgery review board. To revoke my license. I scanned the incoming patient list. Abigail Burger. Emergency admission. You’d better drive.”

On the way to the hospital my father’s popping the passenger door ashtray open, closed, open again. The booze fumes coming off him are positively kinetic.

“Remember taking me to the LCBO on my thirteenth birthday?” I say, because he’s in a selfpitying mood and that’s when I prefer to needle him.

“I never. Your birthday? Never, Nick.”

“Dragged me in on the way to mini-putt. They were out of your brand of gin. Whersh the damn Tankeraaaay …”

“Uh-huh, in that stupid lush voice. As if I’ve ever spoken that way. Ever.”

“Were you drinking before that procedure?”

He avoids the question.

“You know, bail may be set at a million. I’d put the house up. Think your mother’d put hers up, too?” “Why the hell would she?”

“For old times’ sake.”

“What about trial costs?”

“That’s me off to Brazil. Non-extradition policy.” “Skip bail and Mom loses her house.”

“I wasn’t serious.”

We cut across the parkway. Over the guardrail stands the brickwork of textile mills turned into low-rent apartments. A ladder of red pinpricks where tenants smoke on fire escapes.

“I took your mom to a cocktail party once. She didn’t know anyone and held it against me. I went off to find a drink. She’s chatting up some guy. Guy says, ‘Your husband, what’s he do?’ and your mother says, ‘Oh, he’s a sonofabitch,’ and the guy says, ‘Whatever pays the bills.’ Ha!”

We get to the hospital. The elevator rises to a white-walled ward sharing the floor with the neonatal clinic and the Norris wing. Fletcher Burger sits on a chair in the hall. At first I think he’s drunk. But it must be shock. The man’s groggy with it.

“At the gym,” he tells us. “The weight bar fell on her… her throat.”

Abigail’s on a hospital bed in a paper hospital gown. Veins snake down her arms and trail under plaster casts. A throat incision barbed with catgut.

“Warmup lift.” Fletcher rubs his thumbs over his fingertips. “I don’t know how but her arm broke.”