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by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  It was now June and I was tired of my penance.

  Why did I call it penance? Because my mother was so ashamed of my illness, when she sent me away to recover it felt like she was punishing me. So: penance.

  Penance was hard. I missed the sunshine, I missed my room, I missed my house, I missed walking on High Street, San Fernando. I missed Akilah. I did not miss school. And I didn’t miss my mother as much as I should. Every time I thought of her I remembered the sour and hurt expression on her face when I was in hospital. She didn’t believe that my illness was real. She felt it was a personal indictment of her and my upbringing. It was clinical depression. I tried to tell her, the doctor tried to tell her, Aunt Jillian tried to tell her. Depression is an illness. It had nothing to do with her. It was inside me, like some kind of code in my basic programming. My operating software told my body and my mind that I was unhappy. It didn’t matter if she was a good mother or not.

  I was still walking, alone because of my penance. Akilah was still on Skype, too, her quiet, sure voice talking to me, telling me, “Don’t worry, chick. You will get there, you will not get lost, you will find the bus station, you will catch a bus, you will get home.” She broke off, mumbling, “And Mummy will kill me if I don’t go back inside.”

  Sure enough, I heard sharp high heels clicking on the other side of the call. “Akilah! Get off that phone! What have I said about leaving church to talk to your friends?” Aunty Patsy’s stern voice brooked no discussion.

  “Got to go!” Akilah whispered, swiftly sending me a kiss and a wink before ending the call.

  I clutched my phone in a sweaty hand. Akilah was gone, but her voice had helped; I could breathe again. The road wasn’t so terrifying anymore.

  The summer flowers outside each house on this road were brighter than I would have imagined when I was living in the Caribbean. I had always thought of Canada—or any temperate place, actually—as dull and somehow less colorful than home. I had been surprised to see that the blossoms could be as red, as yellow, and as blue as the flowers in my own yard in Trinidad. Not caring to learn the names of the flora I wouldn’t be around much longer, I called these Canadian blooms by their sizes, shapes, and colors: the big pink one, the small blue one, the orange one with the dizzy, swirling petals. The wind had more success with them than with my wiry, tight curls. Those flowers danced in it, their little heads nodding and twisting in the strong breeze.

  All the houses I passed were similar, though. Once, before I got the courage to take the bus at all, I tried walking straight home from the city. Twenty-four blocks didn’t seem like much—and it only took about fifteen minutes by car to get from the heart of town to my aunt’s house, so I figured I would be fine. Uh-uh. It was long. In fact, in my mind I called it the Day of the Longest Walk. I walked for three hours and just kept counting corners and counting corners until in frustration I stopped a little kid and asked where Second Street was.

  Turned out I was standing on it, right by Aunty Jillian’s house. The houses all looked exactly the same to me, and I simply hadn’t recognized hers. But there it was: a small, brownish-white cottage surrounded by a perfect, jewel-green lawn and tubs of summer blooms, separated from its neighbors by hedges and chain-link fencing. On one side of the house was a black-doored garage with a car inside; another car was parked outside in the driveway. Aunt Jillian had a couple of garden gnomes cavorting in a Japanese-looking grotto she had made of rocks and stones, some dark-green perennial shrub, and pieces of driftwood she had collected on the grayish sand of Vessigny Beach, where she used to go with my mom and their parents when they were small. It was not a shrine, but she tended this grotto carefully, raking it and keeping it looking really nice, washing down the garden gnomes until they shone, even though she constantly made fun of them. I imagined they had secret lives like the singing gnomes in a movie I liked when I was a kid.

  On the Day of the Longest Walk, I had been confused, too, because of perspective. I’d never seen Jillian and Julie’s house from that angle. I had always driven up into the garage in the passenger seat of their car, and entered the house through the side door in the garage. Nobody used the front door at all, I noticed. Seemed it was only there for decoration. People entered from the deck via the kitchen. From the garage, a side door led to the hallway between the formal living room and the rest of the house. The front door was seldom touched, except by Julie during her Saturday-morning cleaning rampages, when every bit of brass and glass in the house was polished till it gleamed like new. The front door was formal and austere, like the living room into which it opened, and perhaps nobody wanted that feeling of formality to be sullied with ordinary dirt and finger smudges.

  Formalities or not, I wished I were there already, and yet I was still walking. I turned a corner, counting streets laterally this time. I knew the street names by heart now, and ran through them in my head as if I were afraid someday I’d be walking by and someone would have secretly changed them in the night just to confuse me. In my mind I called their names as I passed them: Evergreen, Fir, Pine, Aspen—names of trees I didn’t know from home at all, trees I wouldn’t recognize by sight. Then the bus station came into view.

  Two cops idly watched me approach. They were wearing summer uniforms of short sleeves and short pants, and looked with obvious amusement at my over-padded appearance. I smiled uncomfortably at them and clenched my fists tighter in the pockets of my coat. It was a strange contradiction: I hated how nobody talked to me, but at the same time I didn’t really want anybody to talk to me, either. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d say in return. Or maybe I was afraid I’d just turn into a puddle of shame and terror right at their feet. Who knew?

  Plus, they were cops. Canada is neighbors with America, and I briefly thought of the black people who’d been shot by law enforcement for doing absolutely nothing but what I was doing—walking. Even that wasn’t the same as in Trinidad, where police in jeeps pulled up on young black kids in the street to hassle them, rough them up, scare them, as a matter of course. But they didn’t shoot them. I was wary, to say the least.

  The taller of the two, a very young blond guy with thick legs, grinned back at my nervous smile. As soon as I was within earshot he asked, “Are you sure you’re warm enough?” His question caught me off guard.

  “Yes, thanks,” I said, bowing my head and trying to avoid him, in case this seeming friendliness was some kind of trick.

  It didn’t work. Hearing my Caribbean accent, he immediately did what many white Canadians I’d met had done: he asked, “Where are you from?”

  “Trinidad,” I told him, before scuttling into the sheltered booth of the commuter queue, yearning to get my chilled bones out of the wind and escape from this disturbingly interested policeman.

  I quickly warmed up, keeping my eye on the cops on the corner. My heart was still racing, but my palms weren’t as sweaty, and my breathing was calming down. I looked at my little watch, which my mother had given me three years ago when I sat for my secondary school entrance exam. A useful present, as you couldn’t take the exam with a cell phone as your timer. My mother didn’t give me many gifts just because. They were always practical, sensible: a new church dress, new sneakers for school, a longtime fountain pen. This watch had a plain steel band and plain white face, the picture of utilitarianism. It made me think of her. It made me a little sad.

  The hands on the watch said I had another ten minutes until the next bus would arrive. The bus service on this line ran every twenty minutes, waiting for no one a minute past the schedule. A shocking realization for me at first—to read the schedule and find that the buses actually would be there at nine-twenty if they said they would be; at home, no such thing had ever happened in the government bus service. As far as I had known, buses arrived and departed when their drivers felt like it, end of story. Schedules, if they existed, were mere suggestions, rather than rules. Like the majority of people,
I took a kind of minibus we called a maxi-taxi, and those ran whenever they liked, any time of day or night.

  But here, the bus drivers were always on-time, serious professionals, saying goodmorningma’am or goodeveningsir or whatever to every single person who came in. Miraculously, they asked nobody how their grandson was doing in school, or how their diabetes—in Trinidad we call it sugar—was treating them, or how their macomere was keeping. It didn’t matter that I saw the same driver more often than not; their tone didn’t change when they said goodmorningmiss every single morning and goodafternoonmiss every single evening.

  Standing in the windbreak, I could see the boyish-looking cop staring at me still, and even though I turned away to look in the other direction, I had a feeling he would soon amble my way to make small talk. So said, so done, and he came over, swinging his arms and rhythmically catching his fists together in front as he did. I could feel my heart miss a beat with nervous fear. The gray and yellow of his uniform was different from what I expected of a policeman’s; the jaunty yellow stripe was, I felt, unnecessarily frivolous, like a party hat on a pig. In my country the police are not friendly. They do not stop to chat or old talk with anybody, especially teenage girls. My anxiety rocketed with his every step.

  “So, what brings you to Edmonton? Are you visiting or do you live here?”

  Was he going to arrest me for truancy? Was he going to search me for drugs? Would he try to deport me as an illegal alien, even though I had my tourist visa? I started to sweat again, the silk lining of my coat sticking to my sweaty palms. I was terrified he was going to ask to see my passport. Oh, the crap that ran through my head. Man, I thought again, having a panic disorder sucks.

  “Visiting,” I squeaked. “Just seeing my aunts.”

  “Oh? A holiday before you start college, huh?”

  “College?” I snapped my head around to look him in the eye despite my agitation and blurted, “I’m only fourteen!”

  I could see him take a mental step back as his eyes opened wide and his cheeks grew bright pink. “Uh, I need to check in with my partner. You get home safely, eh?” He quickly ambled back to the other cop. I didn’t know what had happened, or why. I already found humans a mysterious species and I was an expert at saying the wrong thing in any situation. Ordinarily the idea that I’d said the wrong thing to a policeman, of all people, would leave me rigid with panic. But suddenly, I was too exhausted from the panic attack I was already having to notice anything but relief that he was gone. I stood alone at the familiar bus stop, my pounding heart slowing its race.

  One of the purring buses in the small bullpen of the station suddenly emitted a little burst of wind, a sharp mechanical fart, and rumbled awake. It drove up and I anxiously checked my schedule once more. I was at the right queue. When the bus reached me the door opened with a gasp. The number was written plain as day on the front, and I recognized the driver. Still, I got on and asked him, “Is this the Eighteen?”

  “Yup, goodafternoonmiss,” he said, nodding his familiar head with an impersonal smile. I paid the fare, lurched to a seat in the middle of the bus, and sat down gratefully on the cold, slippery vinyl. Another mechanical breaking of wind and we were off.

  I counted the streets again, and then I was home. Not home home, I thought with a little wave of longing. Was this what tabanca was like? I’d never been in love before, much less lovesick. But I pushed the thought down. I’d worry about it later. Home at Jillian and Julie’s house was good enough for now. I reached up, pulled the stop cord, and got out when the bus rolled to a halt. The stop was a half-block from the house, but it was close enough that I hardly had to think about where I was anymore. My anxieties drove off with the bus, for now. I felt immediate relief. My brain switched back on again. And finally, the penny dropped: the boyish cop had been flirting with me before he heard my age.

  journal session 1

  Dr. Khan made me start this journal after I met with him for the first time. He said, “Write about who you are. Be honest. What’s behind that pretty face?”

  Honestly? I’ve never thought of myself as pretty. As a kid I was not the one you’d look at and say, “Oh, what a little angel!” or anything like that. My little face in baby pictures was too serious, and I grew up to be the kind of child adults admire because I am smart and well-read, rather than because of how I look. I am tall and skinny, with dark brown skin and big black eyes that Akilah says make me look older than I am. Though I am shy, I have a good vocabulary, and when I used big words, like I normally did, adults acted like it was a trick I could do, as if I were some kind of monkey dancing on a chain or a dog doing flips on command.

  Adults always said to each other: She’s so articulate! They would say it right over my head, as if I wasn’t even in the room. And really, sometimes I wasn’t. It came to be that I didn’t really care what they said anymore. I was doing my thing, talking or writing or reading or whatever, and they would be admiring me like I was a fish in a bowl. And I didn’t care, I just swam around in my dirty water and sucked up the stale food and my own pee—metaphorically speaking, of course—and everything was cool. Only, everything wasn’t cool.

  I was really, really unhappy, like I had this big hole in my belly between my heart and my stomach and I couldn’t fill it with food or with TV or books or anything and I just felt sad, all the time, all the time, all the time.

  I must have always been that way. I remember that when I was really small, maybe like five or six years old, I picked up a knife to stab my mother after she scolded me for some reason or the other. She denies this story, by the way. She says it never happened. But I remember the weight of the blade in my hand. I remember the rage and pain I felt because she had made me angry, and I remember thinking if I could hit her hard hard hard she would stop hurting me. And I remember too that she took the knife away and spanked me before I was sent to bed. I woke up later feeling, not for the first time and not for the last, that big pit.

  The hole was bigger than me, sometimes, and when I woke up that day, the day after I tried to stab my mother, the hole was there, big and yawning and evil and hard and ugly. I hated myself for what I had done and I wished I had tried to kill myself with that big shiny knife instead of my mother.

  It was just one of the things that weighed on me all the time, one of the things that made me feel I wasn’t good enough. School was another.

  When I was home home I went to an ordinary school. Just like the thousand-and-something other kids at my school, I wore a uniform that was ugly and designed to make me feel unimportant and sheeplike; no individuality allowed. My school wasn’t especially big, or special, just a district school with ordinary teachers teaching ordinary subjects like English and maths and social studies and stuff like that.

  Akilah and I had been friends from the first day of kindergarten. We were the brightest kids in every class. Everybody thought we’d both go from primary school to secondary school together. But we didn’t. When we both sat that Secondary Entrance Assessment, only one of us did well. Akilah went to a prestigious convent school where they taught French, not just English and Spanish. They taught Add-Maths. They won national scholarships. They didn’t teach technical drawing or woodwork or clothing and textiles, no practical trades at all; it wasn’t that kind of school. Mine was exactly the opposite.

  I was bored most of the time. Every year was the same thing. I’d read the books twice before the start of the term, and knew all the information and more because I went to the little library in town with my mother after school and looked up everything I wanted to know before it could come up in school. I read about women’s rights, the Black Power movement, the Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance…you name it, I’ve read it. The librarians smiled benignly at me every time I walked into the library with a stack of books fatter than I was myself. I was all they dreamed of: a bookish girl who would sit quietly, and methodically read the titles they had o
n the fiction shelves and then start working through the Dewey decimal system of nonfiction. It was a very small library, though, and it didn’t take me long to make my way through every book I was even vaguely interested in.

  Everybody thought I was smart.

  Everybody, except me.

  Though I had read all this stuff I wasn’t conscious that I knew anything, and I’d always thought of myself as kind of stupid. It didn’t help that I had an anxiety disorder that made me freak out every time I took a test. Like the numbers on the buses, everything I knew flew right out of my head when I got anxious. Anxiety started as a little scared butterfly in the pit of my stomach and eventually grew into a giant, sweeping moth that destroyed my ability to focus and recall what I knew. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d failed exams about things I could recite backward and forward.

  The last test I sat at my old school was about earth science. I knew all about clouds and fronts and the tides—but not one useful fact stayed in my head during that test. Of course, I failed. I thought back to that test and kicked myself because I knew all the answers. Somehow I couldn’t convince my brain that I did, not when the test was actually going on.

  Honestly, I don’t understand why this stuff happened to me. Why couldn’t I just take a stupid test? Why did I feel so bad, ugly, and stupid all the time? Why was everything about me just…wrong?

  Take for instance my hair. For most of my life I wore my hair in short plaits, which my mother impatiently put in and took out on alternate weekends, averaging about three hours each time she did them fresh. My hair wasn’t long enough to reach my shoulders, and in my country that’s saying something. Mom always says a woman’s hair is her glory and if she has good grass growing up there, it’s an asset. I never did see the point. So what if some dead cuticle pushes out longer rather than shorter? Who cares? A few months ago I cut it all off, without consulting my mother, and she hit the roof. But I liked it better that way, almost clinging to my head, so short. You look like a boy, my mother said, but I didn’t care. It was my hair, and if I wanted to cut it right off I would. I’d never missed it, not even when the cold Edmonton breeze kissed my scalp under my new shorter cut.