Break in Case of Emergency

by Brian Francis

  The restaurant was called Tops and their speciality was hot dogs served with a sweet chili sauce. We each ordered one and the chili dogs came in red plastic baskets with noisy paper and crinkled fries that were thick and hot and the colour of butter. I remember there was a pressed-tin ceiling above us and pendant lights like glowing peppermints and an air conditioner wedged in the tiny window above the door. My mom had her gloves on, the light blue ones, my favourite. They had a small pearl button that fastened at the wrist. My mom had many pairs of gloves. She wore them all the time, even indoors and in the summer. The gloves made her look like a church lady, even though she wasn’t religious. She wore the gloves because she didn’t like her hands. Or, I mean, the veins in her hands. Sometimes she’d say they were worms crawling beneath her skin, and she’d scratch them until her hands were raw and red and bleeding. Then she’d have to rub them with the special cream she got from Mr. Whitlock, the pharmacist.

  I remember it was a nice fall day. Sunny with pulled-apart clouds. The kind of day that made you think summer was back. But it wasn’t. You’d feel the chill the minute you stepped out of the sun and into the shadows.

  The hot dog tasted weird to me. I was used to ketchup. There were these little seeds in the chili sauce that popped in my mouth when I bit down.

  My mom said she used to come to Tops as a teenager.

  “Feels like ages ago,” she said, dipping a french fry into a puddle of ketchup. “That was in the seventies. I wore bell-bottoms. Does that make me sound old? I don’t look old, do I, Toby? I’m only twenty-five, after all.”

  I shook my head. I thought my mom was the prettiest mom in the world. She had shoulder-length brown hair, and I loved her freckles. We used to lie on the couch together and I’d count them, my fingertip touching each one as I went along. I kept eating my hot dog, even though I didn’t want to. I knew I’d ruin the day if I didn’t. The sun would slip behind a cloud and all the leaves would blow away and the sidewalks would be bare except for black dots of gum.

  After the waitress took away our baskets, my mom looked at me and sighed. “I think it’s time. But I’m not sure. I can never be sure.”

  “Time to go?” I asked.

  “No.” My mom reached over and grabbed my hand. Her glove was smooth against my skin. “Time I told you about your father, Toby.”

  My face went hot. There was a seed inside my mouth, and I started to roll it around and around with my tongue.

  “You need to know,” my mom said, reaching into her purse. “Every girl needs to know about her father.” She pulled out a white square and gently unfolded it, as if she were pulling back the petals of a flower. I could just make out the faint lines of handwriting, like ribbons, on the other side of the paper.

  “This is a letter he wrote to me,” my mom said. “Just after he moved away.” She cleared her throat and began to read.

  Dearest Heather. How for art thou? Is your hair up or down? I liked it best down. Bone straight. I was always envious. I look as though a hairy octopus has fallen asleep on my head. Are you sane, dear Heather? Are you keeping the voices at bay or are they keeping you at bay? It’s a fine, fragile line. Myself, I’m all ground up like hard dust. This business will kill me if I let it. So much falling down and getting back up. But I must never doubt myself. I need to return a hero. I want them to see me, Heather. As I am. All I want is a parade in my honour. Oh, and a key to the city. Is that too much to ask? Will you come and visit? I’ll pick you up in a limousine. We’ll throw banana peels at people from the windows and demand the driver drive fast. I can smell the burning rubber now. Write soon.

  All my love, Arthur

  “That,” my mom said with a soft sigh that made the paper flutter and seem like it was about to fly away, “is your father. And one day, when he stops being a child, he’ll come back to us. And we can be a family.”

  I went back to Tops not too long ago. The tin ceiling was still there. But the pendant lights were gone. The air conditioner wasn’t there either. It’s an antique store now.

  Everything inside is from another time.

  Chapter 3

  Could you ever date someone with a colostomy bag?”

  Trisha and I are sitting in the cafeteria. The voices of the other students around us sound to me like garbage can lids banging against each other. I’m picking at the remnants of a half-baked oatmeal cookie. It’s one of the cafeteria specialities, which tells you how crappy the rest of the food is. The only reason anyone gets them is because they’re so big.

  “What’s a colostomy bag?” I ask.

  Trisha rolls her eyes. “Oh my God, Toby. You’re so rural. You’ve never heard of a colostomy bag? When you can’t poop, there’s a tube attached to your stomach and instead of crap coming out your butt, it comes out the tube and into a bag that’s taped to your abdomen.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I say. Now I have a good reason to not finish my cookie.

  “Could I date someone with one?” Trisha asks. She’s not looking at me but at some point beyond my shoulder. “Could I love him so much that I wouldn’t care if he had a colostomy bag?”

  “Why do you think these things?”

  “Because you don’t know who you are until someone takes his shirt off and there’s a Ziploc bag full of poop taped to his stomach. It’s a test, Toby. To see how good and true you are. How unconditional your love is. For example, could I love someone who had murdered another person, even if it was in self-defence? Could I love someone who had no legs, just stumps? Could I love someone who had a cleft palate? Kissing, though. Just imagine.”

  Her eyes focus on me. “Did you wash your hair today?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “It’s looking a bit greasy. You might want to consider switching conditioners. My mom buys this expensive brand and forbids me from using it. But I never listen to her.”

  Trisha runs her hand along the side of her hair. She has red hair, like Mike, only she straightens it every day.

  “Otherwise I’d look like Orphan friggin’ Annie.”

  I watch as her eyes scan the cafeteria. Unlike me, Trisha has other friends. Normal friends, like Angela and Claire. She only spends time with me because we’ve known each other for so long. And she feels sorry for me. Her mom does too. Whenever I’m over there, Mrs. Richardson looks at me like I’m a flower with a bent stem. The Richardsons live a few blocks away from my old apartment building. Sometimes it’s hard to visit them, because it feels like I’m visiting a part of my life where I’m not welcome. It’s too complicated to explain.

  I remember the first time I slept over at Trisha’s after my mom died. She took a carton of eggs out of the fridge. I told her I wasn’t hungry. She said they weren’t for eating.

  We walked to the park behind her house. There was a swing set and metal slide that our thighs would stick to in the summer and a creaky see-saw that no one ever went on. Behind this were the tennis courts, which is where Trisha took me.

  “Here,” she said, handing me the eggs. “Throw these against the wall.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “It will be good for you,” she said. “I’d be really angry if my mom died.”

  “I’m not angry,” I said. In truth, I didn’t know how to feel. It was easier to feel nothing. Five years later, it still is.

  “How do you know until you throw an egg?”

  I was scared at first—and it was a waste of an egg—but I did it. I remember the sound of the splat as the egg slammed against the wall. It felt good in a way I couldn’t describe. Just to destroy something. She kept handing me the eggs and I kept throwing them, each one a little harder than the last. Finally, I threw the last egg. The wall was a mess of egg guts and shells. I was panting and sweating. And tired.

  “Do you feel better?” Trisha asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good. Let’s go back to my house and make popcorn.”

  So, while Trisha has been a good friend to me, eggs or not, I know that
if my mom hadn’t died, Trisha and I wouldn’t be friends. Not that I wouldn’t want to be friends with her, but it’d be the other way around. I’m not good at being friends with anyone.

  “Toby?”

  I look up from my cookie and realize Trisha has been saying my name.

  “What?”

  She leans across the table. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You seem a little down lately.” Her eyes scan my hair again, which I know is greasy and should be combed. There are lots of things about me that should be another way.

  I could tell Trisha how I really feel, my plans, what I’m going to do. The words are right there, a cloud in my mouth. All I’d have to do is open my lips just a little bit and let the words slip out and fill the space between us.

  I’m ending it, Trisha.

  But I know I can’t. I can’t let Trisha know because then she’d try to stop me. Her poor, sad little friend. Her charity case. She wouldn’t understand how it would be better for her without me in the cafeteria. She’d be able to sit with her other friends and not feel guilty. I can almost hear Trisha laughing, tossing back her conditioned hair.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just stressed out. I have a couple of exams coming up.”

  “We should get high,” Trisha says. “I’m totally ready to explore my marijuana years. I could steal some from Mike. He keeps a stash in his night table. Along with those drawings.” She shudders.

  Trisha told me once that she found a pile of pornographic pictures that Mike had drawn. Mike never mentioned anything about drawing to me, pornographic or not. Why wouldn’t he tell me he drew? What other things was he keeping a secret from me?

  “They were all women with gigantic tits and wearing superhero costumes,” she said. “The costumes were so tight, you could see everything. I mean everything.” Trisha said the word like it had fourteen syllables.

  That’s another thing I can’t tell Trisha. About what happened between me and her brother. She’d never speak to me again.

  “I’ll pass on the pot,” I say.

  “You really need to break out more,” Trisha says over a yawn. “You’re in this box, Toby. You worry about school, you worry about your marks, about your grandparents. I mean, when do you do something that makes no sense? When would you ever do something completely irrational?”

  If she only knew.

  “But thanks again for lunch,” she says. “And for helping me study for my history exam. I’d fail everything if it wasn’t for you.”

  I feel a sudden rush of emotion. I’ll miss Trisha. She’s been a good friend to me. Better than I’ve ever been to her.

  “I think you’d still love him,” I say quietly.

  “Who?”

  “The guy with the colostomy bag. You’re not the type of person who’d walk away from someone just because there’s something weird about them.”

  I keep my eyes down so Trisha can’t see the swell of my tears.

  Chapter 4

  That day, in the restaurant, after the waitress had taken away the empty plastic baskets and my mom had put the letter my father had written back inside the secret folds of her purse, she lit a cigarette.

  “You should’ve had two parents at home,” she said, looking up at the glowing pendants. “And I tried, Toby. God, did I try. But you can only try for so long before your head starts to hurt from banging it against the wall.”

  I searched my mom’s forehead for bumps. I was too young then to understand figures of speech.

  “But even if you don’t have a normal family,” my mom said, “you are loved all the same. By me, by Grandma Kay and Grandpa Frank. And even though you’ve never met him, your father loves you too, Toby. I know he does.”

  How could you love someone and never meet them, I wondered? How could my father love me without knowing me? Without knowing what my favourite food was? How could he love me without even knowing the colour of my hair?

  The waitress came by and refilled my mom’s coffee cup. I shifted in my seat. She wasn’t supposed to drink too much coffee. It made her nervous. We hadn’t been to the pharmacy lately. I hoped she had enough pills. When the waitress walked away, my mom inhaled deeply and leaned back in her chair.

  “He. Was. Magic.”

  I felt something cover me when my mom said those words. Something settled over my head. Not a cloud. It was finer. A cloth that sparkled, but one that was heavy all the same. I felt it brush the top of my head and I knew that it would stay there forever, that it would always be there, hanging over me, whether I wanted it to be there or not.

  “Where did you meet him?” I asked.

  “In grade nine,” she said, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray. “He performed in a talent show. Your father is a singer. I still remember what he wore. He came on stage wearing this hat, a plaid sort of thing, what a golfer might wear, and a denim pantsuit. It was 1973, after all, but it was still brave, in that high school. Clogs too.” My mom laughed. “Oh, God. Those clogs! They were ridiculous. You could hear him coming a mile away. Clomp! Clomp! Clomp! He wore them to make himself taller. His eyes too, Toby. Emerald green and fringed with lashes that would make any girl envious. You have his eyes, you know.”

  My fingers lightly touched the skin around my eyes. I had never really paid attention to them before. Now there was something special about them. They were my father’s eyes.

  “He sang ‘Delta Dawn’ by Helen Reddy that day,” my mom said. “I was mesmerized the whole time. I’d never heard anything like that voice. It was so pure. Not what you’d expect from a boy. But not a girl’s voice either. It was gloriously in the middle. Like what an angel would sound like.”

  I saw someone with wings. A white robe. This was my father.

  “He had a way of holding you with his voice. Cradled. It’s hard for me to explain, but it was like his voice grabbed onto me, my heart and all my pain and made me forget everything that was wrong about me. When he sang his final notes he stretched his arms out, like he was trying to grab the curtains on either side of the stage, and threw his head back. I remember his Adam’s apple, poking out from the white skin of his neck. It seemed like such a vulnerable spot on a boy.”

  “Did he win the talent show?” I asked.

  My mom shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. “Of course not. You think people living in this city celebrate difference? They only reward the familiar, what talks like them and acts like them and thinks like them. It made me sick. Arthur was a bright light in a pile of darkness and no one, except for me, appreciated that. That’s why he had to move away after high school. I hate Tilden for that. These people.” Her eyes scanned the tables around us. “They ruined my life.”

  We were the only ones in the restaurant.

  * * *

  “What time do you need me to pick you up?” Grandpa Frank asks me. We’re sitting at a red light on the outskirts of Tilden. I keep playing with the truck’s radio, trying to find a song I like, but it’s impossible.

  “You don’t need to pick me up,” I say. “Mr. Whitlock will drive me home.”

  “Didn’t you say they were going to a party?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I best pick you up, in that case.”

  “Mr. Whitlock isn’t an alcoholic. He’s a pharmacist.”

  “Alcoholics take on all shapes and sizes.”

  I glance over at Grandpa Frank. His baseball hat is perched high on his head. It reads, “I Didn’t Wake Up Grumpy This Morning. I Let Her Sleep.” He’s had it for years. Grandma Kay threw it in the garbage once, but Grandpa Frank fished it out.

  “Your grandma has the humour of a wart,” he said.

  Grandpa Frank is Grandma Kay’s second husband. Her first husband, Jack, abandoned her when my mom was a little girl. We never talk about Grandma Kay’s first husband, just like we never talk about my mom. Being in a family is learning how to not talk about certain things.

  Even though Gran
dpa Frank isn’t my blood relative, I still think of him that way. He’s the only grandpa I’ve ever known. I don’t know anything about my father’s side of the family, although they must be living here, in Tilden. Do they know about me? Do they know I even exist? They probably don’t care. Just like my father. Even when my mom died, I never heard from him. He pretends like I was never born. What did I do that was so wrong? Why didn’t he ever want to get to know me?

  “Frank was a good man for stepping in like he did,” Grandma Kay said once. “A woman with a small child is a tough sell on the best of days. So I give him credit for that. Many men would’ve turned and run the other way.”

  “You smell alcohol on that pharmacist’s breath, you call me, okay?” Grandpa Frank says. “I’ll be there lickety-split.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  * * *

  Mrs. Whitlock tells me there’s a German chocolate cake on the counter and to help myself.

  “But nothing for April and June after eight o’clock. And no eating in the living room.” She wags a finger at them, but the girls aren’t listening. They’re too absorbed in a television show that’s all studio laughter and rubbery people tripping over furniture.

  “If the Whitlocks ever have a boy,” Trisha asked once, “are they going to call him November?”

  “We should be home before midnight,” Mr. Whitlock says.

  He’s wearing a nice shirt. Light blue. I think most men look good in light blue. Mr. Whitlock has broad shoulders too. And large hands. His hair is combed back, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look more handsome.