Hope’s face fell. She took in the broken shell of a person that sat in front of her and she crumbled. She clutched me, held me close, and I felt her body shake with sobs.
I heard another car door slam. Mom. She sank down beside us, gripping me.
Not letting go.
Hope
Broken,
My brother sits beside me
Twisted and used, both of us.
Tangled together
We will find our way
Jumping over
Remnants of our lives,
Making a new path
Together.
Eric
There are things I never saw before. The way the snow piles on branches of trees, threatening to spill off in a gust of wind. How the sky glows with colour in the morning and how snow sparkles in the moonlight. I catch myself noticing these things, like out-of-body visions, and shake my head. I’m no poet, not like Hope, but part of me wants to capture those moments, savour them.
All of this I see through the window of my room. I stare out of it for hours, letting my mind drift. Twenty-eight days in a hospital, sixty-seven days and counting as an outpatient, and I still crave the high meth gave me, gritting my teeth sometimes for the want of it. Some days, I miss it like a friend who’s died, mourning its absence. And other days, I fly into rages, ranting against what it did to me. I don’t remember the ugly days and nights of withdrawal in the hospital, and I won’t let Mom tell me about them. It’s all just a fog of pain now, a black hole I don’t ever want to go back into.
Mom rented an apartment in the city. Close to Hope and close to the hospital. A furnished place, nothing in it feels like ours. We’re just placeholders, waiting in limbo until I get back to normal. Normal: a finish line that’s always out of reach. Richard drives in on weekends. It’s hard for him to look at me sometimes. I see him holding his fork tightly at dinner, angrily chewing his food and biting back comments. Mom says he’ll come around, but it takes times to forgive.
And forever to forget, I want to add.
I’m trying to move on, face what happened, but the meth left me with paranoia. I hear noises in the night and every time I leave the apartment, I look behind me, convinced I’m being followed. People from my past pop up in unexpected places: closets, cupboards, frozen-food aisles of grocery stores. My breath comes fast and my rational self explains them away. But always, there’s hunger for something to take away the fear.
Through the thin walls of the apartment, I hear Mom on the phone. Her voice rises and falls in an unnatural cadence. “Eric!” she calls. “Eric!” Her voice is urgent. I peel myself off the bed and open the door. She’s there, the phone held out to me. “The police want to talk to you.”
I take it. The receiver is still warm with her breath. It’s Officer Donaldson. He skips the pleasantries. “Eric, we need you to come down and answer some questions.”
“Why?” I ask. And in my head, Again?
I’d already made my statements, admitted to the pharmacy break-in. I was out on bail for it. The sentence would come later, when the case went to trial. “Does my lawyer need to come too?”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “It’s not about the break-in.”
After I’d made my confession, I’d told the cops about Coach Williams and what he’d done to me. It took hours piecing it all together. Mom had sat beside me, sobbing, clutching her chest like her heart was breaking.
“It’s about the other case. We’ve had someone else come forward.”
His voice thuds in my head. “About—about Coach Williams?” I stutter.
“Yes. I can’t give you any details, but we’d like to ask you a few questions.”
I nod dumbly and hand the phone back to Mom. She’d work out the details. The nightmare that I’d lived wasn’t just mine. There was another one, maybe more. The reality made it hard to breathe.
Mom’s eyes were wet, the pain on her face as fresh as the night I’d told her everything, sitting outside his house. Shame isn’t a weight or something that gets worn. It’s elastic, stretching and strangling anything in its reach. But slowly, slowly, the noose was being loosened.
Each day would get better. I had to believe that.
Hope
The girls were in the common room watching a movie. Huddled together on the couch and in chairs, their shrieks and giggles reached me in my dorm room. Ravenhurst was a different place now that Lizzie was gone. We weren’t prisoners to her threats, gossip, and backstabbing. Once she left, the poison she’d spread had disappeared, dissipating like a foul smell.
Emily and Vivian tried to make amends, but it was hard for me to forgive them. They’d been complicit in Lizzie’s schemes, standing beside her as she sent texts and emails pretending to be Devon. They’d watched as she sent the photos and done nothing to stop her.
But, they’d told Ms. Harrison and the investigators the truth when they were questioned, confessing their guilt. Lizzie was the only one of them to get expelled. There were no excuses for what she’d done.
Normally, I would have joined the girls in the common room, nestling into the space Cassie had saved for me, but I couldn’t tonight. Mom and Eric were coming to pick me up. Dad would arrive later and we’d spend the weekend together at the apartment. Some moments were stilted and full of regret and anger, but at other times, wisps of the family we used to be came back, flitting around us. Giving us hope for what we could be.
A new crop of poems decorated my walls. They weren’t hidden against door frames or gouged into the wooden bed frame. I left them out in plain view.
There are no
Empty chairs
At the table.
We sit,
All of us,
Bursting with life.
Our presence a shout
For the joy of it.
Through the window, I saw two figures walking across the parking lot towards school. Eric, lanky and stooped compared to the hockey player he once was, and Mom, her frizzy mass of hair poking out from under her toque. As they walked, their boots left a trail in the fresh snow.
Every day, Eric got stronger. A light shone in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in a long time. A wave of hopefulness washed over me. We would never be the people we once were. Our lives had been twisted. Diverted. But, we were finding our way back to each other. My fractured family would heal.
Acknowledgements
Some authors make writing look effortless—as if novels leap from their fingers to appear fully formed on their computer screens. Sadly, I am not one of them. My stories come out kicking and screaming and have to be beaten into submission. Finding Hope began as a very different story, but through many, many (many!) rewrites, ended up being the one that made its way into this book. Thank you to my agent, Harry Endrulat, for his faith in the original Finding Hope and for the gentle nudge that sacrificed 40,000 words to make it better. Thank you also to my sister, Nancy Chappell-Pollack, and wonderful friend Cindy Kochanski, for generously giving their time to read and comment on early drafts.
One of the most enjoyable parts of seeing this book come to print has been working with the stellar crew at Dundurn. Thank you to Jennifer Gallinger and Laura Boyle for their artistic talents. A special thanks to Carrie Gleason, Kathryn Lane, and freelance editor Natalie Meditsky for their editorial guidance.
As always, to my husband Sheldon and my boys, James and Thomas, thank you! Writing is a slightly tortuous endeavour, but sharing the journey with them makes it worthwhile.
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Copyright © Colleen Nelson, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copy editor: Natalie Meditsky
Design: Jennifer Gallinger
Cover design: Laura Boyle
Cover image: © Ungureanu Alexandra/123rf.com
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Nelson, Colleen author
Finding Hope / Colleen Nelson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3245-2 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3246-9 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-3247-6 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8627.E555F56 2016 jC813’.6 C2015-904577-0
C2015-904578-9
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
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