Break in Case of Emergency

by Brian Francis

  Dedication

  For Sergio, my lighthouse

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Goodman Dairy Farm, 1992

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The day I lost my mom, I turned left instead of right. If I had listened to her instructions, if I had turned right, she would still be here.

  That morning, I knew something was wrong. While I was eating my breakfast, my mom said she wasn’t going to work.

  “The women of Tilden and their fat feet can wait.” She pulled her frayed pink robe tighter around her. “I am unwell.”

  I looked down at my bowl of Cheerios. My mom didn’t have the sniffles or a fever. She didn’t have a headache or a sore throat. But I knew what she meant. There was a storm brewing inside her head, inside the walls of our two-bedroom apartment. My school wasn’t far from where we lived, so I told my mom that she didn’t need to pick me up at the end of the day like she always did. It would be easier. For both of us.

  “I can walk home with Trisha,” I said.

  “What if Trisha isn’t at school today?” she asked.

  “Then I can walk home on my own. I’m ten now. That’s old enough.”

  This felt like both a lie and the truth.

  “Maybe you are,” my mom said, but she wasn’t looking at me. Instead, she was studying Henry, our goldfish, who kept rising up and diving down, over and over again. “Don’t stop, Toby. Come straight home. Or I’ll worry.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t stop.”

  But when the end of the day came, I didn’t say anything to Trisha about walking home. I slipped my arms through the straps of my backpack and pretended it was just another day.

  “Do you want to come over this weekend?” Trisha asked as we walked out. “My mom wants to teach me how to knit, but if you come, I’ll say you’re allergic to yarn.”

  “I don’t think I can,” I said. “I’m supposed to visit my grandparents.”

  “Did I tell you my grandmother had her vagina taken out when she turned sixty?”

  “Yes,” I said. Sometimes it felt like Trisha said these kinds of things just to shock me. Or maybe to shock herself. Maybe I was easier to shock back then.

  “Mike says they took it out through her belly button,” Trisha said. “But have you ever heard anything so stupid? And how would he know? He doesn’t have a vagina.”

  I said goodbye to Trisha at the edge of the schoolyard and then I walked toward the parking lot like I did every day, pretending to look for my mom’s silver car and her blank face staring out from the windshield. I walked through the parking lot and kept going in the direction of our apartment. When I got to the corner of Kathleen and East, I should’ve turned right and gone down Kathleen, which would’ve led to my apartment building, to my front door, to my mom. But I didn’t turn right. Instead, I stopped and looked down our street.

  It was October and the branches were letting go of their leaves. They tumbled through the air like hopeless birds. I wanted to forget, even for a moment, about my life. Just for one day. So I swung my body around and started to walk down East Street.

  I went to Greer’s, a variety store in a plaza that had a drugstore (where my mom would pick up her medication) and a bank and a restaurant called the Horse’s Feather that no one ever seemed to eat at except old people and “confirmed bachelors,” as my mom would say. Halloween was around the corner and Greer’s went all out. The air smelled like waxed teeth and makeup. There were vinyl vampire capes with cardboard collars and foam clown noses and pieces of rubber made to look like scars and open wounds. Costumes hung from the ceiling like bodies with no bones. There were masks, too, staring back from their hollowed-out eyes, small slits between spray-painted lips so that a person could breathe.

  I had wanted to be a gypsy that year. I had a picture in my head of what I’d look like in my makeup and head scarf and big, gold hoop earrings. My ears weren’t pierced, but Trisha said we could take care of that with a safety pin and a candle.

  “Why a candle?” I asked.

  “You hold the pin in the candle’s flame to sterilize it,” Trisha said. “Safety first, Toby. Oh, and we’ll need ice. Lots and lots of ice.”

  But my mom had said no, that I was going to be a pirate because she saw it in a magazine and I could put Vaseline on my face and smear coffee grinds onto my cheeks.

  “I’ll even make you a hook out of a coat hanger and tinfoil,” she said as she sliced open a package of ground beef.

  As if that would change things.

  I didn’t want to be a stupid pirate. I didn’t want to put coffee on my face. And I didn’t trust my mom to do a good job with the hook. But I also knew I couldn’t say anything. If there was one thing I had to do every day, it was to make sure I didn’t say or do anything that would upset my mom. When she got upset, when the dark thoughts started running around inside her head like angry squirrels, the entire world turned upside down. It was my job to keep things right-side up.

  I wanted to be a gypsy that Halloween because I wanted to be beautiful that year. I wanted to see what was possible.

  “I think a gypsy would be easier,” I said. “And you wouldn’t have to waste all that coffee.”

  My mom said she’d think about it and turned around to fry the ground beef. But the answer, to me, was already clear.

  So I went to Greer’s to see if they had any girl pirate costumes. That’s what I told myself, anyway. But the real reason was that I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t know what my mom would be like when I got there. If the voices would have taken over. When that happened, they were the only voices my mom listened to.

  I took a Frankenstein mask down from its hook and tried it on. There was a hand mirror tied to a long string and I held it up in front of me. The eyes looking back were still mine, but the face wasn’t. It made me feel better to not be recognizable, to know that I could be someone else, someone besides Toby Goodman, the girl who lived in apartment 211 with her mom, Heather, and a goldfish named Henry.

  The girl who wanted to hide, even though she never could.

  “Those masks aren’t for trying on,” the woman behind the counter said. “That’s how germs get
spread, you know.”

  I put the mask back on its hook and bought a pair of red wax lips. The woman put them into a paper bag and gave me my change.

  “Don’t eat the lips,” she said. “They’ll constipate you.”

  I said okay, even though I’d never even think to eat wax.

  By the time I got home, my mom was dead.

  Chapter 1

  Goodman Dairy Farm, 1992

  C’mon, girls! Giddy up. Giddy up now.”

  I wake to the sound of Grandpa Frank’s voice every morning, along with a dull, rhythmic thudding. His plastic bucket and wooden spoon.

  “C’mon now. Get up.”

  The girls are lazy this morning. Now that it’s late June, they don’t want to come into the barn for their morning milking. It will be like this until the cold weather comes.

  “Get up, you stupid things! For the love of Christ!”

  The kitchen window screeches open.

  “Keep up that hollerin’ and you’ll wake the entire county!”

  Grandma Kay.

  “Won’t be me who wakes up the county,” Grandpa Frank yells back. “You’re doing just fine on your own. And you left them bedsheets on the line overnight again. Now they’re going to smell like cow shit.”

  “If anything around here smells like cow shit . . .” The window slams shut.

  I look up at the pink-glass light shade on my ceiling with the little Raggedy Anns. Grandma Kay bought it for me when I first moved to the farmhouse five years ago. They had turned the sewing room into a bedroom for me. Painted the walls lilac. Grandma Kay made curtains with a butterfly pattern. They even brought in a little table to set Henry’s fishbowl on, although he died not long after. All traces of my life with my mom officially disappeared. My grandparents had tried, as best they could, to make me feel welcome. But no amount of paint was going to cover everything. Some cracks always push through, no matter how many coats you apply.

  The light shade is embarrassing. I’m fifteen years old now. But I can’t tell Grandma Kay to replace it. It would hurt her, and that’s the last thing I want to do, even though I always end up hurting everyone, whether I mean to or not.

  I won’t be able to get out of bed today. Every day is harder, like my pyjamas and bedsheets are made of Velcro. Even putting one foot on the floor seems impossible. But I have to get up. I can’t let my grandparents suspect anything. I have to be very careful these next few days, how I go about things. I can’t make anyone—my grandparents, Trisha, Mr. Whitlock—suspicious in any way.

  There’s a light rap at my door.

  “Toby, time to get up,” Grandma Kay says.

  I won’t be able to do it, I tell myself. Another day, making small talk at the breakfast table, trying to focus at school, listening to Trisha go on about her latest crush. I can’t keep pretending to care, to be in the same world as everyone else. To keep up the lie.

  My only comfort is that the lie will soon be over.

  “I’m up,” I say.

  “You don’t sound up,” Grandma Kay says. “You sound horizontal. Don’t make me come in there. Unless you want me to sic your grandpa and his bucket on you.”

  I pull the quilt back. It’s a lead apron. “I’m up,” I say, this time more loudly.

  One foot on the floor, Toby. Just get one foot on the floor.

  I grasp my thigh between my hands and move my leg off the side of the bed. The wood floor is cool beneath my foot. Then I take the other leg in my hands and swing it over the edge as well. I’m lying here, twisted, half on the bed and half off, still staring at the Raggedy Anns.

  “Giddy up, girls. Giddy up!”

  Somehow, I manage to haul myself up. I slowly walk over to my bedroom door. My bathrobe hangs from a hook. It’s pink. Grandma Kay gave it to me for my birthday last year. She didn’t know my mom had a pink bathrobe as well.

  Open the door, Toby.

  I can’t.

  Open the door.

  No. I won’t do it.

  If you don’t open the door, they’ll find out what you’ve got planned. And then everything will be ruined.

  I can’t.

  Open the door.

  It’s always this way. I’m afraid of what’s on the other side. Sadness. Black sludge. The world. My hand reaches for the handle. I feel like I’m going to throw up.

  Open. The. Door.

  what stays shut stays hidden

  Open the—

  what’s hidden can’t hurt

  —door!

  I close my eyes and twist the handle. It feels like every bone in my arm is breaking, snapping and splintering. Pencils in a vice.

  I hear the cracking.

  Just a few more days, I remind myself.

  Chapter 2

  The first thing that greets me when I enter the kitchen is Grandma Kay’s butt, flat and wide, the seams of her jeans pulled tight.

  “Cleaning the baseboards,” she says before I can ask. “I took a good look at them this morning and realized how filthy they were. A farmhouse is impossible to keep clean. The outside is always coming inside.”

  Our dairy farm has fifty cows, a half-dozen hens and an old, dandruff-ridden border collie named Ladybug who mainly just walks in circles because she’s senile.

  “Surrounded by too many females,” Grandpa Frank often says, and I feel bad for him because it’s true, although the hired hands are all men. Well, except for Mike. He’s not really a man. Not at seventeen. Even though he’d say otherwise. The milking gets done twice a day, rain or shine, 365 days a year. Even Christmas Day. When I first came to the farm, Grandpa Frank said that was the only day of the year the cows produced eggnog.

  Our dairy farm is small compared to some of the others in the area. I know we don’t make much money, even though my grandparents don’t talk about it. But it’s the little things I notice. The sighs when Grandpa Frank does his paperwork. And how Grandma Kay never buys any new clothes, even though she says she doesn’t need any.

  “The cows don’t care what I look like.”

  As I watch her, down on all fours, her worn jeans, her running shoes with the broken laces tied and re-tied, I can’t help but wonder if this is the life she imagined for herself when she was my age, when she was young and full of dreams. Not that all young people have dreams. Some of us can’t even imagine what our dreams would be.

  “What did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked her once.

  She paused for a long time, her mouth scrunched over to one side. “I don’t know,” she eventually said. “I’m not sure I ever thought about it, and no one ever asked me. I used to play the piano. I was pretty good, all things considered. I had a flair for musicality, you could say.”

  There’s a Lesage piano, the colour of milk chocolate, in the living room. Grandma Kay never plays it. It’s nothing more than a piece of furniture, a place for her to prop my embarrassing school photographs or her copper trinkets or the nativity scene at Christmas time, which she always sets on a layer of cotton batten.

  “Why didn’t you pursue music?” I asked.

  “No money in that,” she said and swatted the air. “And I wasn’t good enough. Not enough to make someone of myself.”

  “You should still play.”

  “With these knobby things?” She held up her hands. “I can’t even open a jar of pickles without calling in the Armed Forces.” She sighed in a way that made me instantly sad. “There were a lot of plans in those days. But things don’t always go the way you want them to. I was very young when I got married. The first time, anyway. I picked love over music, or what I thought was love. And love limits a girl’s options.”

  Babies limit a girl’s options too, I thought. My mom had me when she was only eighteen.

  I watch as Grandma Kay dips a brush into a small bucket and brings it back out, drops of sudsy water hitting the linoleum floor.

  “Do you need help?” I ask.

  “No, you’ve got school,” she says. “You don’t have time to
deal with my foolish whims. But can you give an old gal a hand getting back up? I need to get breakfast ready for the crew.”

  As I take her extended hand, I realize I can’t remember the last time I touched her.

  “You’re not old, Grandma. You’re only fifty-eight.”

  “Fifty-eight going on ninety-four,” she says. Her eyes scan my face and body. “Have you lost weight, Toby?”

  I look down. “No.”

  “It sure looks like it to me. You’re not on any diet, are you? You know how I feel about that.”

  “I’m not dieting.”

  “It’s a good thing I made a big lunch for you today.”

  “I’m not bringing my lunch. Trisha passed her history exam, remember? I said if she did, I’d buy her lunch in the cafeteria.”

  “You likely did. But I forget everything if it’s not written on a piece of paper and stapled to my forehead.”

  “How could you read it then?”

  “That’s what mirrors are for, smarty-pants. Anyway, Trisha is lucky to have a friend as kind and supportive as you, Toby.”

  She smiles at me, and for a moment I realize how what I’m planning will affect her. She’ll blame herself at first. But she’ll be fine. She’ll understand why it had to happen. Why I had no choice. And why both of my grandparents are better off. Without the burden of me. She’ll convert my bedroom back into her sewing room. I can almost hear the whirr of the sewing machine.

  “There’s toast and peanut butter on the plate over there,” she says. “Don’t even think about not eating it. Have a glass of orange juice too.”

  “No time for juice,” I say, taking the toast. I won’t eat it. I’ll give it to Ladybug. “Remember that I’m babysitting for the Whitlocks tonight. Grandpa will need to give me a ride. I’m supposed to be there for 7 p.m.”

  “Right,” Grandma Kay says. “I knew that.”

  We both know she’s lying.

  I grab my knapsack and head out the side door. I see Mike then, just outside the barn. I know that he sees me too, but it’s awkward, so we both pretend the other is invisible. It’s easier that way.

  * * *

  Most of my memories of my mom are like snapshots or mini movies about our lives before she died. I remember when she first told me about my father. I was seven. We had gone for chili dogs in downtown Tilden. We didn’t go out to eat very much on account of my mom not making much money working in the shoe department at Sears. I’m not sure if it was a special occasion, but it wasn’t my birthday or hers. Maybe she took me out because she wanted to tell me about my father in public. Maybe she felt safer with other people around. I don’t know, and she’s not here to answer my questions. Which means I’m left to figure out puzzles, only I’m always working with the wrong pieces.