Still Standing

Chapter 1: Boyfriends, Bus Stops, and Babies-2

Bryson smiled. “Thank. f*****g. God.”

Richard clenched both fists, and adrenaline spiked through Bryson’s blood. His heartbeat skipped when Richard stepped forward. None of it was fear, though. If anything, he was waiting for Richard to strike. What an albatross that would be around the man’s pretentious, perfectly muscled neck, the time he got so mad he hit his disabled ex.

Bryson sucked in a breath that was more laugh than anything else. “Go on. I dare you. Not only will I relish every single embellishment I tell of this little event, Dicky, but I will end this thing by quite literally having you dragged through the front door by Gus. You and I both know he’s only a tap on that intercom away.” Gus had been his parent’s houseman for a long time, so it wouldn’t be the first time Gus had muscled something in or out of the house for them. It would, however, be the first time that thing was one of Bryson’s former boyfriends. “Come on. Please? I’m kind of looking forward to the drama.”

Smiling, probably looking like the cat that caught the canary, Bryson leaned against the window, not quite confident he could get himself all the way down on the seat without giving Richard something to mock. He didn’t have to stay there long, though. Richard spun on his heel and stormed out of the living room.

Bryson considered buzzing Gus to make sure Richard had actually left, but the squealing tires out front of the house made it obvious.

With a grunt of effort, he sat on the window seat and waited for the pain to subside. He watched the empty street, as if Richard’s departing tires had left fire trails and it was his duty to make sure they burned themselves out. Then, when both the street and his hip were calm, he flicked his gaze down to the posh little bus stop shelter. They weren’t all that clean or sparkly. In truth, most fared far worse. Like many larger cities in the southern half of Canada, the city of St. Catharines had operated public transportation for its constituents since around the turn of the twentieth century. In the final years of the 1800s, it was nothing more than horse drawn carriages and electric rail, but by the 1930s, bus transportation was running throughout downtown. The shelters of today’s world, with their weather-defying roofs and walls and their partitioned, easily wiped benches, were recent, though. Back in the nineties, even the nicest bus stops were nothing more than wood benches on a concrete pad with a sign.

It was on one of those benches, at one of those bus stops, on Monday, November 19th in 1990, where Bryson’s story started. At least, the part of his story that he knew, anyway. And the part that Bryson knew, he knew very, very well as he’d spent most of the entire eighteenth year of life researching it and interviewing everyone who would talk to him.

It began while the sun was still low enough in the sky that the man who was brought in for questioning by the city police knew it was morning-ish but also close to noon-ish. Shaggy Phil (who couldn’t remember what his full name used to be and who had no ID on him at the time) saw a dark-coloured car pull up to the bus stop on the corner of Glenridge and Westchester. Unfortunately, the concept of a make, model, or license plate number was also lost to poor Shaggy, who, according to the officer who wrote up Shaggy’s interview, would have been lucky to remember the name of the city on whose streets he resided. Shaggy had recalled that a tall, thin man got out of the car with a duffle bag, walked to the bus stop, and set the bag on the bench. He then sat beside it and the car drove off.

Normally, none of this would matter too much to Shaggy, and it probably would have slipped his mind like most things did, but he had been hungry and debating whether he should approach the man and beg for some pocket change. That could go very badly for him, especially with men, as he’d learned many times in the past. Women tended to hand him change just to get rid of him, while men occasionally handed him shoving matches that resulted in broken noses, ripped-up knees, or twisted ankles.

So, he’d watched, and he’d waited, and he’d debated, and when the man stood up several long minutes later and walked away, Shaggy Phil’s already piqued interest multiplied—the man had left behind the duffle bag.

Shaggy didn’t approach it right away. He’d told the officer that he “kinda meandered on over” so that nobody would know what he was up to. He didn’t pick up the bag, convinced it was some kind of trick or maybe even a bomb, as “these things were in the news all the time and he knew it because he could still read and that ought not to surprise anyone.” He didn’t find lunch when he peeked in the bag, though. He didn’t find a wallet or even a spare sweater. He saw a baby. The baby’s eyes were open, but Shaggy was quick to point out that didn’t mean the little thing was alive. That was it for Shaggy Phil. He wanted “nothing to do with nobody doing nothing to no baby.”

That might have been it for Bryson. Had it been a couple of days earlier, when the high was seventeen degrees Celsius and the low only twelve degrees, or a couple of days later when things were back up in the seven to fourteen degree range, things might have remained fairly comfortable in the duffle bag on that bench. On the nineteenth, though, autumn had not only stepped away from its post, it had left the door open and winter had come creeping in. The low that day was negative five Cesius. So, four blocks and an unknown time later when Shaggy was reaching into a garbage bin for the half sandwich that he’d seen someone drop in there, and he realised that his bare fingertips were awfully cold, he had a sudden and unusual nag of conscience.

That was where Emma May Fields became a brief but important part of little Bryson’s story.

Emma May had been living on the St. Catharines streets for the better part of her adult life. She’d lost three children in that time. One to the system, one while it was still inside her, and one to the cold when she’d snuck it out of the hospital, convinced (no doubt rightfully so) that she was about to lose it to the system like she’d lost her first. She was exactly the right person for Shaggy Phil to tell about the surprise inside the duffle. She hurried to the bus stop as fast as her old legs could carry her and she did check to make sure that baby was still breathing. It was. At that point, Emma May didn’t know quite what to do, but she knew that she had to do something. Even though she knew nobody was going to trust a half-crazy, dark-skinned, old woman who looked as dirty as she smelled, she gathered up all the courage she could find and walked across the street to the little cottage houses that faced the bus stop. She started banging on the first door she found.

Mrs. Anne Watkins had no time for the homeless people that hung around the ravine or the bus stop. They were unsightly and they stole, and she was convinced that they would ravage her property value. Mrs. Watkins wasn’t a member of one of the families participating in the gentrification of the ancient, adorable cottages on the street. She had been there from the beginning and was holding on to the property tooth and nail, no matter how much they raised her taxes. She was doing that mainly by mortgaging the property value over and over again. In her opinion, it wasn’t a foolish idea at all. She had no children to leave the property to, her husband had one foot in the grave, and the bank would get its due if something ever happened to her. Property values would, after all, continue to increase…if the city could keep away the lowlifes that seemed to be coming out of nowhere and not moving on. So, when one of them came banging on her door, squawking something about “poor little babies,” she did what anyone in her position did when they saw someone not as well-off or with the same colour skin that she had. Mrs. Watkins called the police.

When the police showed up and finally convinced Emma May that it was okay to talk to them, they decided they needed to call the bomb squad before they could approach the baby. That was when Officer Charles Wright became part of the story.

It was after four in the afternoon by that point, and as far as the police could figure, the baby had been there for hours. It hadn’t cried. If the child had moved at all, the movements had been so slight that the duffle hadn’t even wiggled. He or she had to be starving, freezing, and wet—yet hadn’t raised so much as a single whine. Why? How?

Officer Wright had seven kids of his own, those seven kids had ten of their own between them, and he knew a thing or two about babies by this point. One of those things was that a quiet baby was either a content baby or a very sick baby. And there was no way in Hades that this particular baby could be content. On that day, he was already eight years past the first possible date of his retirement, and two weeks into knowing that he had lung cancer. He told Bryson (many years later, which made him a very small percentage of long-term survivors) that in the space of about four seconds he decided two things—if the chief decided to fire him over what he was about to do, so be it; and if he blew himself to bits over it, well, it would probably be a lot easier way to die than the alternative. He walked right up to little Bryson, pulled him out of that duffle bag, and the whole street blew a collective sigh of relief when the two of them didn’t end up as confetti. It didn’t take a surgeon for anyone with a clear view of the baby to know something was wrong, though. Feet and legs, even on a little bowlegged babe, didn’t bend the ways these ones did.

And even then, dangling there, with his twisted little legs and feet, not even half dressed in that negative five degree cold, with his empty tummy and a rather bleak future ahead of him, Bryson didn’t make a peep.

The following morning, the city newspaper ran the story about the baby with the broken ankles and the twisted legs that were, as quoted by the attending doctor, “not twisted by God, either,” but the story was already bouncing around the city like a rubber ball.

Mrs. Anne Watkins told her book club all about it during their annual pre-holiday supper. Rachel, Karen, Susan, and Emily Smith were all immensely proud of Anne for the part she’d played in bringing that baby safely into the arms of people who could care for it.

Emily Smith, upon leaving the book club that evening, called up Hope Matthews, who couldn’t wait to tell everyone at the fundraiser her husband was hosting that night, although she couldn’t quite remember what this one was for. Either way, she had just got herself a brand new Halston gown and it, along with this story, was going to make her the belle of the ball.