Page 14 of A Life Chosen

Rayan opened one of the cupboards, half expecting it to be empty. Instead, he found shelves of neatly stacked packets, jars, and cans. It didn’t take him long to find the scotch, displayed in a glass cabinet with a wide selection of liquor bottles in varying shapes and sizes. He took down the bottle and fished a small tumbler from the adjacent drawer.

In the living room, Mathias sat on the sofa, his shirt left on the floor. Rayan placed the scotch and the tumbler down on the coffee table. Then he threw off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and went to raid the hallway bathroom cabinet. When he returned with supplies, he found the glass abandoned, his boss opting to drink straight from the bottle.

Rayan sat next to him and started to clean his arm, gently exposing the cut beneath the blood. He felt a wave of relief. It wasn’t as bad as he’d initially thought. “Make sure Martin has a look at this,” he cautioned as he finished sterilizing the wound and began on the bandage.

“Count yourself lucky it’s not worse,” Mathias admonished him.

“Don’t fuck with an armed junkie,” Rayan retorted, pulling tight on the fabric. “Makes my job harder.”

His capo snickered, raising the bottle to his lips.

Busying himself with taping the end of the bandage in place, Rayan spoke to his hands. “Something on your mind?”

Mathias swallowed, pausing. “Do you know your father?”

Rayan glanced up, not sure what had brought this on. They’d left one night when he was a child, and Rayan hadn’t seen his father since. The man hadn’t even shown up in court after his mother died. He remembered the social worker using the termchild abandonmentas he and his brother sat on a hard wooden bench in front of the judge, the starch on his borrowed button-down shirt making his neckitch. All these years, he’d never felt the urge to find him. No doubt, he was still living in the old weather-beaten house where Rayan had grown up.

“I don’t have a father,” he said after a moment.

“Easier that way.”

Rayan saw a sliver of the man slip past the impenetrable exterior. So they were alike in that way. It made sense. One didn’t get into this business on the merits of a happy childhood. He became aware of the warmth of Mathias’s skin beneath his fingers and the quickening of his own pulse. But his capo was looking past him, thoughts elsewhere.

When Rayan came back from putting everything away, Mathias was stretched out on the couch, eyes closed, his bandaged arm resting on his bare chest. He paused, startled to find himself with an uninterrupted view of the man. He was usually careful, snatching glimpses here and there. He’d always found Mathias painfully beautiful. Even more so when he was like this—unguarded, sedate.

Rayan walked down the hall in search of a blanket. He’d been inside Mathias’s penthouse a few times but only in passing. It resembled a showroom, as though no one really lived there. No photos, no papers strewn about, no unopened mail. Rayan stopped in front of the open bedroom door. The bed was made, nightstands clear of clutter. He stepped into the room and opened the wardrobe. Lines of perfectly pressed clothes hung from floor-to-ceiling racks. A stand displayed a small collection of Rolex watches. It smelled of Mathias. Of his cologne, his scent. Rayan closed the wardrobe and grabbed the throw blanket from the end of the bed. He made his way back to the living room.

Careful not to wake him, Rayan draped the blanket over his sleeping form. In the dim light of the room, Mathias’s face tilted toward him. The hard lines had softened. Those disapproving lips were parted, his hair mussed and tumbling across his forehead. Before he could stop himself, Rayan reached out and brushed the pad of his thumb against Mathias’s temple. His fingers itched to run through the man’s thick dark hair. Rayan pulled his hand back as though stung, his heart pounding with a paralyzing fear. Careless. He could not afford to be this careless.

After picking up his jacket from the back of the sofa, Rayan let himself out, locking the door behind him.

Like a curse, Mathias’s question conjured unwelcome thoughts of the past. They surfaced—snatches of memory Rayan had worked hard to bury. Back at hisapartment he found himself unable to sleep. He lay in bed, fighting the pull of the clock on his nightstand. Recognizing the futility of willing himself to sleep, he sat up, flicking on the light. He opened the battered copy ofTerre des hommeshe kept by his bedside but found himself reading the same sentence over again. It was too late to be this distracted. The book, usually enough to coax his mind to consider the possibility of sleep, was closed to him. Since he’d first begun to decipher words on a page, books had been his comfort, his Ambien. He couldn’t recall who’d taught him to read—school had been an extravagance, a joy denied at every opportunity. He figured, like most things, he’d simply taught himself.

Rayan remembered little from his childhood—he hesitated to even call it a childhood. His mother, a Lebanese refugee, and his father, an older Quebecois army veteran, were mismatched from the start. To this day, he could not understand why they’d married and why they’d had him and his older brother, Tahir. It must have stemmed from a shared decision to cling to the other as protection from life’s uncertainty. They were both cut off from their families, she by circumstance, he by choice.

Rayan learned quickly that he had no love for his father. If André Nadeau had taught him one thing, it was how to hide. Whether to escape a fierce beating or conceal the parts of himself he knew were different.

As soon as he was able, he began to shape the person he was based on everything his father wasn’t. He clung to his mother and would have done anything to see her happy. His brother, on the other hand, took on their father’s life lessons as his own. Rayan’s last memory of the man was the night they’d left, his mother glancing over her shoulder as they walked quickly from the house, a boy in each hand. Their father looked on from the doorway, illuminated in the dark. A silent, fearsome figure.

She didn’t know how to drive, so they walked the two and a half miles to the bus stop. Several years later, living in a small apartment they couldn’t afford, she locked herself in the bathroom and never came out. His brother went in when the custodian arrived to force the door. Fortunately, he’d spared Rayan the details.

Rayan flipped to the front of the book and traced the inscription with his fingers. Made by his mother’s hesitant hand, it was all that was left of her. She’d struggled with her adopted language but had written it carefully regardless, the French words stilted, sentimental, except for the final line, her profession of love, which she inscribed boldly inal-abjadiyah, the Arabic script. His mother, who had given all her love but received so little in return, could only express itin her native tongue.

After her death, he and Tahir had spent a couple of years bouncing around in state care—group homes, the odd foster family. They never stayed long. In the popularity contest that was child placement, two teenage boys weren’t exactly in high demand. It was his brother who convinced him they were better off on their own. That was when home became the streets of Montreal. For a while, they got by on the kindness of strangers, the unhoused community rallying around them, showing them the ropes and where to make a couple of bucks panhandling. But it soon became clear they would need more to survive. They started stealing cars, roaming through the city, careful not to hit the same neighborhoods too often. Rayan learned to drive in a stolen car, a shiny white SUV with black leather seats. They would drive around like they were other people, better people, and leave the cars with a man in Brossard who paid them a small fee for their trouble. Sometimes they stole other things as well.

It didn’t take long for Tahir to get into the hard stuff. It was surprising how easily it flowed through the streets. Guys who couldn’t afford a sandwich somehow had enough for a hit. The carjacking didn’t cut it anymore, and Tahir began running for his dealer, a man named Jean Bastien. Rayan managed to avoid getting formally involved yet was often pulled in by association. Trailing his brother as he ping-ponged around town, going from soaring highs to crushing lows. By this time, Rayan had perfected his camouflage, hiding behind a mask that changed shape depending on who was peering in. He benefitted from his brother’s affiliation, but it pained him to admit how much like his father Tahir had become. Rayan knew it was only a matter of time before something happened. There’d been the occasional run-in with police, but the wrath of street politics licked at their heels, especially when Tahir, flush with growing authority, began stealing from Bastien. Loyalty, which had tied the brothers together, started to fray. Tahir grew erratic, paranoid, no longer recognizable.

Rayan closed the book and turned off the light. He lay in the dark, flexing his fists. They were already starting to stiffen. There would be bruises in the morning. He closed his eyes and realized his heart was racing. It wasn’t mention of his father that had brought the past back in high definition. It was the junkie he’d beaten into the pavement.

On a day when his brother had been tasked with delivering a cut to Bastien’s mob associate, Tahir had taken off with the money. It didn’t take long for the dealer to find him. Tahir had made it as far as the port’s southernmost container terminal. Bastien took Rayan along as collateral. Deserted on a Sunday, the terminal was a wide expanse of concrete that ran along the Saint Lawrence River, dotted withshipping containers in stacks of twos. Parked at the end of a dirt track off the main road, Rayan could see the swell of the river through the maze of freight, swollen with spring snowmelt. While Bastien’s lackeys dragged Tahir to where he and the dealer stood waiting, a black car pulled up, and two men in suits stepped out. Rayan hadn’t seen many mafiosi in his time, but there was no mistaking that these men were with the family.

“It’s a bad week when I have to see your face twice,” the taller of the two said to Bastien. He was young and well-built with hardened features set in a scowl.

Bastien reached to pick up the scuffed sports bag one of his men had dropped at his feet. Rayan recognized the bag—it was Tahir’s. He looked over at his brother, whose arms were pinned behind his back. His face was bloody. If he’d seen Rayan, he didn’t show it.

“Apologies. We ran into a minor problem. You’ll find something extra in there for your trouble.” Bastien handed the bag over to the man’s partner, who set it down on the hood of the car and began counting. There was a blur of movement as Tahir broke free and began to sprint. Without hesitation, Bastien pulled his piece from the waistband of his jeans.

Akhi…Was it thought or said? Rayan only recalled the taste of the word in his mouth, never to be spoken again. There were two shots. The second tore through his brother’s chest, and he fell to the ground, unmoving.

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