Finding Hope

by Colleen Nelson

  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.

  More Books from Dundurn

  Under the Dusty Moon

  by Suzanne Sutherland

  How do you find your voice when your mom is already famous? Vic Mahler is the only daughter of rocker Micky Wayne, whose band Dusty Moon took the world by storm when Micky herself was only a teenager. Now having settled in Toronto, Micky’s solo caree
r starts to take off after years spent off the road being a mom. When an offer to tour Japan and Europe falls into Micky’s lap, Vic is left to spend the summer in the city without her built-in best friend. Add in a bicycle accident that leaves Vic unable to hold her PlayStation controller, and she may be in for the dullest summer of her life. Fortunately, a sweet stoner boy and a group of feminist video-game makers come along. Can they save the season? And will Vic start to see herself as her own person, away from her mother’s shadow?

  Merit Birds

  Kelley Powell

  2015 Dewey Diva Pick

  Eighteen-year-old Cam Scott is angry. He’s angry about his absent dad, he’s angry about being angry, and he’s angry that he has had to give up his Ottawa basketball team to follow his mom to her new job in Vientiane, Laos. However, Cam’s anger begins to melt under the Southeast Asian sun as he finds friendship with his neighbour, Somchai, and gradually falls in love with Nok, who teaches him about building merit, or karma, by doing good deeds. Tragedy strikes and Cam finds himself falsely accused of a crime. His freedom depends on a person he’s never met, a person who knows that the only way to restore his merit is to confess. The Merit Birds blends action, suspense, and humour in a far-off land where things seem so different, yet deep down are so much the same.

  Throwaway Girl

  Kristine Scarrow

  Andy Burton knows a thing or two about survival. Since she was removed from her mother’s home and placed in foster care when she was nine, she’s had to deal with abuse, hunger, and homelessness. But now that she’s eighteen, she’s about to leave Haywood House, the group home for girls where she’s lived for the past four years, and the closest thing to a real home she’s ever known. Will Andy be able to carve out a better life for herself and find the happiness she is searching for?

  In Search of Sam

  Kristin Butcher

  Raised by her mother, eighteen-year-old Dani Lancaster only had six weeks to get to know her father, Sam, before he lost his battle with cancer. It was long enough to love him, but not long enough to get to know him — especially since Sam didn’t even know himself. Left on the doorstep of an elderly couple when he was just days old, and raised in a series of foster homes, Sam had no idea who his parents were or why they had abandoned him. Dani is determined to find out. With nothing more than an address book, an old letter, and a half-heart pendant to guide her, she sets out on a solo road trip that takes her deep into the foothills, to a long-forgotten town teeming with secrets and hopefully answers.

  Since You’ve Been Gone

  Mary Jennifer Payne

  Is it possible to outrun your past? Fifteen-year-old Edie Fraser and her mother, Sydney, have been trying to do just that for five years. Now, things have gone from bad to worse. Not only has Edie had to move to another new school — she’s in a different country. Sydney promises her that this is their chance at a fresh start, and Edie does her best to adjust to life in London, England, despite being targeted by the school bully. But when Sydney goes out to work the night shift and doesn’t come home, Edie is terrified that the past has finally caught up with them. Alone in a strange country, Edie is afraid to call the police for fear that she’ll be sent back to her abusive father. Determined to find her mother but with no idea where to start, she must now face the most difficult decision of her life.

  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

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Visit us at: Dundurn.com | @dundurnpress | Facebook.com/dundurnpress | Pinterest.com/dundurnpress