Middle of Nowhere

by Caroline Adderson

  “What about Mr. Munro?” she asked. “What did he say when you showed up?”

  “He jumped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. I didn’t knock, just sort of fell inside. He dragged me over to the stove and stripped the Stanfields off me. Then he forced some of the stuff from his flask down my throat because I was shivering so hard and crying that I was dying and so was Mrs. Burt. When he finally sorted it out, he called for help. He had a short-wave radio.”

  After I defrosted, Mr. Munro gave me some funny-smelling too-big clothes to put on and we set off in the canoe back to Mrs. Burt’s place, with me huddled in a blanket in the bottom.

  It seemed so quiet on the lake, like all the sounds had frozen except for Mr. Munro’s paddle swishing through the water. When the droning started in the distance, I looked up. The first thing I thought was that it had been a while since I’d seen a dragonfly. Here came one now, the biggest ever, getting huger. Mr. Munro stopped paddling and both of us ducked as the plane sailed right over our heads and landed in the middle of the lake.

  “It was a floatplane,” I told Marianne.

  I knew she hadn’t been listening. It was the end of the story anyway, so I asked, “Is Mrs. Burt going to be okay?”

  Marianne frowned. “She’ll recover from the stroke. How did you find out about your mother?”

  “The pilot told me. The paramedics brought Mrs. Burt out of the cabin on a stretcher and put her in the plane. When Artie and I got in, the pilot said, ‘Looks like we found the two fellas everybody’s been searching for.’ He was the one who told us Mom was okay.”

  “It must have been a terrible shock.”

  “I guess, but I just started jabbing Artie and saying, ‘See? See?’ Because I knew she wouldn’t take off again. I just knew it. She promised.”

  That last night we saw Mom, she got off the bus at her usual stop, three blocks from the gas station. She crossed the street near the stop like she did every night she worked at Pay-N-Save.

  Except that night she never made it to the other side. Two cars were racing each other down the empty street but only one stopped. The other went through the red light and hit her. Both cars took off. When the ambulance got there, they found an unconscious woman in the road with no I.D. One leg was completely smashed. For almost two weeks she was in a coma.

  When she finally woke up, the first thing she said was, “Where are my kids?”

  Room service knocked and a waiter in a shirt and tie delivered my lunch on a tray. The milk was in a wine glass, the cloth napkin folded in a fan. There was a silver dome over the plate, which he lifted off, sort of bowing at the same time. Grilled cheese sandwich, French fries, coleslaw, a miniature pickle.

  I ate the pickle. Then I offered Marianne some fries.

  She shook her head. “Go ahead. Please. Eat.”

  She watched, but it didn’t seem to make her happy. I felt self-conscious and wiped my mouth with the napkin. She must have realized she was staring because she picked up the book about King Arthur I’d brought and started leafing through it.

  “Is it a good book?” she asked.

  “Pretty good. I’m just reading about chivalry. I thought the knights only had to slay monsters or find the Holy Grail, but they also had to swear to be kind and patient and have good manners. Stuff like that. They’re like the rules Mr. Bryant gave us at the beginning of school last year. He was asking us to be knights, but I didn’t know it.”

  She smiled and set the book beside the tray.

  “How’s the sandwich?”

  “It’s good,” I told her. “But Mrs. Burt’s are way better.”

  When I said that, Marianne started to cry.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  She went to the bathroom for a minute, then came back drying her eyes with a tissue.

  “You must have been worried about your mother, too,” I said. “Where did you think she’d gone?”

  “Not to the cabin. She wouldn’t ever go back after Clyde drowned. Of course, I never connected her to you and your brother, even though it was in the news. But afterward I remembered something. When my mother didn’t answer the phone for a week, I flew out. I saw Artie’s drawing on her fridge. The one of her with the walker and the rainbow shooting out the hose. I looked at it and thought, She doesn’t know any kids. She doesn’t even like kids. She doesn’t like anybody.”

  “She loves Artie,” I said. “And he loves her.”

  “Then there’s another good deed you did without even knowing it,” Marianne said. “Some people are so angry at themselves that they won’t let anyone get close. It really says something about you and your brother that she let you love her.”

  “Artie. Not me. She mostly made me mad.”

  Marianne laughed, not a ha-ha laugh. A helpless one. Then she told me something really sad.

  “She’s a dropout, too, you know. She never finished high school. She ran off into the woods after my dad. He wouldn’t have married her if she hadn’t. That’s how she ended up cooking in the camp. All those mean things she said about your mother? She was really saying them about herself.”

  That shocked me. I sat for a minute trying to believe it.

  Artie and Mom came back soon after that. I jumped up to answer the door, grabbing Mom before she even stepped into the room.

  Artie and I can’t stop touching her now. We’re afraid she’ll get lost again if we don’t hold onto her. If we don’t touch her and smell her special lotion smell and play with her hair, which she got cut short when she was in the hospital. I can tell it sometimes hurts her to be pulled this way and that, like a stuffed toy we’re fighting over, but she never complains. I think she’s afraid of losing us again, too.

  I helped her over to the chair. Artie held her other hand and dragged along the cane. As far as Artie is concerned, that cane — chrome just like the walker! — is the good thing that I promised would come out of all this. It’s his horse and his sword and his magic wand. As soon as Mom’s leg heals from this last operation, she’ll walk fine and won’t need it anymore.

  Marianne put the room service tray in the hall and sat on the bed to watch us. Mom had the ring box, all mummied now with masking tape.

  “Curtis?” she said. “I would never have thought to look there.”

  “Did they let you in the bedroom?”

  “Yes, but they had a dresser standing right over the place.”

  She let Artie rip the tape off and lift the lid off the box. Then she took the note, unfolded and read it. She smiled and passed it to Marianne. While Marianne read it, Mom got Artie’s tooth out of her wallet and put it in the ring box with mine. She snapped it closed. The sound was like everything clicking into place.

  “Can I see it?” Marianne asked Artie. “The nice space where your tooth was.”

  He showed her, poking his pink tongue in and out of the hole.

  The plan was that after Mom and Artie came back with the tooth, we were all going to visit Mrs. Burt. But Marianne wanted to talk to us first. She said sorry for about the thousandth time for what happened. Even though she was a lawyer, she wasn’t getting involved. If the police pressed charges, they would be serious. Unlawful confinement, for one, she said.

  Artie asked what that was. I told him it was sort of like kidnapping.

  “Who did Mrs. Burt kidnap?” Artie asked.

  Marianne didn’t smile. “She kidnapped you and Curtis, Artie.”

  “She did not!”

  “She asked us if we wanted to go,” I said. “We said yes.”

  Then Marianne told us that Mrs. Burt hadn’t been honest with us. She knew what had happened to Mom. The police told her the day she went over to our building. She took us away on false pretenses and she didn’t take us back when I asked.
/>   “Why wouldn’t she tell us?” I asked.

  Marianne sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to put her in a home?” Artie asked.

  “She’ll be lucky to go to a home. She could go to jail,” Marianne said.

  It took a moment for Artie to understand. When he did, he flung himself on the hotel floor, kicking and shrieking. Marianne drew back on the bed and stared at him, as though she’d never seen anything as horrible as a kid pitching a fit. After a minute, Mom reached for her cane and pressed the tip into Artie’s stomach.

  “That’s enough,” she said and, just like that, Artie stopped. It was like she pressed his Off button. He blinked up at her from the floor, then crawled into her lap and whimpered.

  Mom turned to Marianne. “We really don’t want charges laid. Look at my kids. They were probably better off than in foster care.”

  “It was fun!” Artie cried. “Except for the squirrels! We rode in three taxis and the Bel Air, and a floatplane! We got to pee outside!”

  Marianne turned to me. “Curtis, you feel differently, don’t you?”

  Maybe I did, but now, after telling the whole story, so much of it seemed wonderful. Except for missing Mom, it was the best summer I ever had. Besides, I didn’t think she really meant to kidnap us.

  “She was trying to help us,” I said. “We were helping each other out.”

  IN THE HOSPITAL, Artie dressed up as a knight with a towel from the hotel over his shoulders. But Mrs. Burt wouldn’t see us. Marianne kept marching to the nursing station and demanding that they let her in. I would have hopped to it because she was pretty scary when she was acting like a lawyer.

  The food cart was going around. Mom and Artie went to find a bathroom, and Marianne was trying to reach the doctor on her cellphone.

  I told the man pushing the cart, “Tell the lady in Room 12 F that Artie wants to see her.” If that didn’t work, we might as well go home.

  The man went in and came out. He asked, “Are you Curtis?”

  “Yes.”

  “She says you can go in.” I made him come over and tell it to the nurses so that I wouldn’t get in trouble.

  Mrs. Burt looked even worse than she had in the cabin that last morning. Old and shrunk up in the bed, no cap, a needle taped in her arm.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s me, Sir Curtis.”

  Nothing.

  “Mrs. Burt. I know you’re not sleeping because your eyes are all scrunched up.”

  She opened them to glare at me. I smiled. Because if she was glaring, she must be getting better. But she still wouldn’t talk. I wondered if she could. Mom said that sometimes you can’t after a stroke.

  So I started chattering like Artie. I told her Artie wanted to see her, and my mom wanted to thank her for taking care of us and feeding us. When I told her Marianne was there, too, Mrs. Burt scrunched her eyes up tighter and turned her head on the pillow.

  “Why are you acting like this, Mrs. Burt? Marianne came all this way to see you.”

  Mrs. Burt turned her head straight on the pillow, but kept squinching.

  “Why are you doing that with your eyes?” I asked.

  Of course she could talk, I realized then. She’d told the food cart man to let me in. So I stopped talking, too. I just sat in the chair studying all the medical stuff in the room, the buttons and tubes and the plastic bag hanging from the pole that was dripping something into her arm.

  Who would give up first? Me, probably. But I was wrong.

  “I’m trying to die,” Mrs. Burt said after a couple of minutes. Her voice sounded slurred and strange. She could only talk out of one side of her mouth. “I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “You can’t kill yourself with your eyes,” I said.

  “I’m using my will. I have a very strong will.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to jail, Mrs. Burt,” I said.

  “I am. I took you boys on purpose.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us they’d found her?”

  “They said she was all smashed up. She wouldn’t have been able to look after you. Social Services would have got you anyway and I knew you didn’t want to go with them.”

  “So you were trying to help us.”

  She grunted.

  “That doesn’t sound like kidnapping. That sounds like . . . absconding.”

  “No. Because I didn’t give you the choice. I kept the truth from you. You gave me a postcard for your mother. I never mailed it.”

  Maybe I should have been mad when she told me that, but I wasn’t. Mom was back. Everything had worked out. Also, I felt sorry for her because she only waved one arm as she talked. The other lay on the bed like it was sleeping.

  How would she manage when she got out of the hospital?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked after a minute.

  I was thinking that she would probably have to go into a home after all.

  Unless.

  Unless we helped her. I thought we could. Help her. But I didn’t say it yet.

  I smiled. “You should let Marianne come in.”

  “I can’t!” she cried.

  “Why not?”

  The arm that could move reached for me, then dropped back on the bed like it was embarrassed.

  “You were so good. Marianne was like that, too.”

  “Then why don’t you tell her?”

  Mrs. Burt clamped her eyes tight again.

  I stood up.

  “I’m going to let them in,” I said. I didn’t wait for her to answer.

  Artie flew in the door in his cape the moment it opened, but stopped when he saw Mrs. Burt in the bed. She smiled at him from one side of her mouth. Then she looked up timidly at Mom and Marianne.

  Marianne came over and took her hand. I think Mrs. Burt was going to say something, that she was sorry, maybe even that she loved her. I’m pretty sure, because it was written in all the lines on her face, except just then Artie rushed forward and offered to pat her back.

  Mrs. Burt began to cry.

  “Artie, my gas is gone. Ever since the stroke, it went. They say my arm will be able to move again if I do the therapy, but my gas might never come back.”

  We all laughed. We couldn’t help it. Then Artie patted her back anyway.

  She needed it.

  She needed us.

  Acknowledgments

  A gargantuan thank-you to Shelley Tanaka for helping to make this novel a readable story and to Jackie Kaiser for finding it such a happy home. The inspiration for the lake in the middle of nowhere is Big Quarry Lake on Nelson Island, British Columbia. I am grateful to my generous in-laws, Joan and Graham Sweeney, for allowing us to holiday on Nelson Island every year. And, of course, nothing would be possible without Bruce and Patrick.

  About the Author

  Caroline Adderson is the author of several award-winning books for adults and children. Her works of adult fiction (Bad Imaginings, A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice, Pleased to Meet You and The Sky Is Falling) have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She is a three-time CBC Literary Award winner, two-time winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for her body of work.

  Caroline’s children’s books include I, Bruno (nominated for the Chocolate Lily and Shining Willow book awards), Very Serious Children (winner of the Diamond Willow Award and shortlisted for the Rocky Mountain Book Award) and the Jasper John Dooley series.

  She lives in Vancouver with her husband and son.

  About the Publisher

  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of chil
dren’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.

  Many of our books tell the stories of people whose voices are not always heard in this age of global publishing by media conglomerates. Books by the First Peoples of this hemisphere have always been a special interest, as have those of others who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible. Since 1998 we have been publishing works by people of Latin American origin living in the Americas both in English and in Spanish under our Libros Tigrillo imprint.

  We believe that by reflecting intensely individual experiences, our books are of universal interest. The fact that our authors are published around the world attests to this and to their quality. Even more important, our books are read and loved by children all over the globe.