The woman walked over to me and stretched out her hand. “Cole,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.” She was beautiful, though she had the same wet carpet smell. She wore an ankle-length leather coat and tight red pants with a snakeskin pattern.
“Shannon.” I tried to make it sound edgier. I wished I were wearing black boots and some eyeliner. I wanted to find a way to tell her about the star on my calf.
“You Matt’s girl?” She didn’t wait for my response, spun around, and punched Matthew in the arm. “She looks a bit like Kurt Cobain’s kid, huh?” she said, and they both looked over at me. I could tell Matthew didn’t like her. He shrugged her off, took another swig of Jim Beam. Gregor was rooting around in the chest of drawers again. He walked over to the couch, grabbed Cole, and pulled her down on his lap. He stuck out his tongue and made a big show of wagging it around. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he said, wagging it at us. A little square of white paper was stuck to the end. He motioned for Cole and Matthew to open their mouths and placed one of the little squares on their tongues, too. Matthew came over to me, a little section of foil on his finger.
“You’ll never forget your first time,” he said, and knelt in front of me. “Time goes by so slowly.” He raised his finger to my mouth, and I opened it hesitantly. He leaned in and kissed me gently, and I smelled the wet carpet smell so deeply that I felt as though my entire nose was stuffed with it. His breath was smoky and sweet from the booze. “I like you,” he said.
“I like you, too.” And, to some extent, it was true. I looked at his eyes, a pale, vibrant blue flecked with little black lines, like a piece of broken turquoise. He had high cheekbones and a strong jaw lined with stubble. I understood that he was a good-looking man. I understood that I was not the kind of girl he would usually be with. He placed the white square on my tongue and kissed me again, even more gently this time, as though he were scared to. He pulsated to the music, slid his trench coat back from his shoulders, and took off his sweat-stained shirt. His chest was smooth and almost hairless, deeply muscled and taut, with huge blue veins running across his stomach and arms like vines. I told him I had to go the bathroom.
“Down the hall,” he said, unbuckling his pants.
Cole was straddling Gregor. He held her butt in his hands. She had taken off her shirt, and I could see the back of her black satin bra. It rode high on her back, like it didn’t fit right. Her skin was pocked with acne scars and looked greasy and pale. I shut the door behind me and spat the white square of paper into my hand. I hoped it wouldn’t already be in my bloodstream. I could hear the music through the door and then the sound of someone walking toward it, likely Matthew coming to look for me, and I ran. I ran as fast as I could, down the stinky hallway and the filthy staircase and out into the horrible dark street. The temperature had dropped and I hugged myself, rubbed my bare shoulders, and wished I’d brought a sweatshirt—it had been so warm when I’d left home. My shoelaces were untied but I didn’t want to stop. I ran past a tattoo parlor and a hash bar and a Chinese takeout joint and a smelly little grocery store and a Pita Pit, until I was in the front of the huge blinking marquee of a movie theater, a long line of people waiting to see the shows. I had a bus pass in my pocket but I didn’t think it would work on the buses here and I didn’t want to ask. I thought about Winkie, probably waiting up for me, and felt a deep pang of shame. I looked at the people in line for the movie and I hated them. I could tell they had never been unhappy.
To kill time, I rode the train. I climbed up onto the platform and pushed through the crowd of bodies until I found a seat. My hands settled in my lap, and the train shot out of the station like a mad dog unleashed.
I took the ferry back with two policemen, who bought me French fries with gravy. They let me browse in the gift shop for a couple of minutes, and I pocketed one of those pens where a whale floats back and forth when you tilt it the right way. The ferry ride lasted a year. Everyone stared at the cops, then at me, and then looked away.
I sat between them, wrapped in a wool blanket. I was still cold from the night before. Matthew hadn’t told me that the Burrard Street shelter would only take you if you were over eighteen. I pleaded with the guy who seemed to be in charge of the operation, but he said I’d have to go to the youth shelter downtown. He wrote the address on the back of a brochure about HIV and drew a crude little map. He was gruff, unfriendly. He wore faded jeans and white running shoes, a little silver cross around his neck.
I tried to find the youth shelter. I did try.
I walked down Nelson, past a group of First Nations teenagers standing outside a supermarket, undeterred by this awful classical music blaring from speakers in the awning. They all wore red jackets and bandanas. Two of the boys held each other at arm’s length by the collars of their coats—I’m gonna fuckin’, I’m gonna fuckin’, don’t you push me, man, don’t you fuckin’—and two of the girls tried to break it up by kicking the boys’ shins. I knew they were just punks, but they frightened me all the same. It was all over the news: there had been 128 shootings in the city since January. The shootings didn’t happen downtown very often, but still, I kept looking behind me, ready to run.
Granville Street was packed with people, all with that wet carpet smell. The closer I got to Hastings, the more people there were. I pushed them off when they stumbled into me. I stopped and bummed a smoke off a couple of tourists who were staring dumbly at a man sitting on a wooden pallet in the doorway of a twenty-four-hour café, a river of piss streaming out under his feet.
I walked up Hastings, past the Royal Bank and Birks Jewellers. The sidewalks were all torn up by construction, so I walked on the road. It didn’t feel as dangerous anymore. There were fewer people around. Everything was made out of concrete. I’d never seen a cityscape so gray. It was colder and damper down here—closer to the water. A Blenz Coffee; a Mr. Big & Tall. And then I was past the skyscrapers and it was just little old buildings, an art college, a record store. The offices of the B.C. Marijuana Party. The New Amsterdam Café, a big pot leaf over the awning; a war memorial. I made it past Cambie Street, and the city came alive. It was midnight, but there were almost as many people on the street as there’d been on Robson. Victory Food Market; Asia Imports. Pawnshop after pawnshop. Everything was boarded up except for an all-night grocery store with bars on the windows. About thirty people were gathered in front of it, shuffling around, taking turns going inside. I watched a man, scrawny, tall, and hunchbacked, with a bearded face and eyes buried deep in their sockets. I watched two women, one short and First Nations, a scraggly ponytail clinging to her back like seaweed, the other pink-skinned with terrible dope sores, her stringy hair pulled taut from her face and yanked into a mean little bun. I stared at the women, but they did not look at me. I’d never seen people like them before. The street smelled like piss, and I marched forward, one foot in front of the other, trying to walk with purpose. Trying not to look scared. I could do this. I was as much a freak as anyone else. In some ways I felt good walking down this street of broken faces. I stood at the edge of a park and watched a man shoot heroin into his neck. I let myself have the thought that I might find my mother on a street like this one day. I let myself have the thought that I might be on a street like this one day. And then it was all hotels, their lobbies stuffed with men, and abandoned shopping carts filled high with empty bottles and rough wool blankets and plastic bags, and a laundromat, and a check-cashing business, and after that everything was just empty, just blocks of boarded-up and painted-over storefronts, the windows barred or covered with flyers or broken. I shivered and looked around. A few people—men or women I couldn’t tell—were asleep in doorways. There was pigeon shit everywhere, and when I looked down I saw a hypodermic needle at my feet and a bright-pink condom wrapper, a bloody handkerchief, and someone’s old tennis shoe.
It started to rain, and I walked under the awnings as much as possible to avoid the rain and the splash of the city buses as they shot by. I thought about Matthew in tha
t shitty room with no bathroom and no bed, the square of paper on his tongue, him wagging it at me.
“Weed?” A man motioned to me from an alleyway. A group of men had gathered under a fire escape, taking turns getting head from a woman in white jeans. I stood and watched for a minute. One of the men slipped a bill into the woman’s hand and she limped down the alley, away from the group. I had walked all the way to Chinatown.
What’s to say? I walked as fast as I could back to the Burrard Street shelter and crouched in the doorway until it was morning.
One cop was a stubby guy with a shiny bald head. He introduced himself as Officer Lucchi. The other guy had a silver goatee and hair the color of cigarette ash. His hairy wrists peeked out from the sleeves of his uniform and he wore a gold chain around his neck. His name was Officer Hoffman.
They sat on either side of me, drinking coffee out of paper cups. I pretended to be asleep. The door to the outside deck blew open, and Officer Hoffman took a breath of the crisp ocean air.
“Good day for a cigar,” he said.
Officer Lucchi fiddled with an elastic band, stretching and snapping it between his fingers. They talked about their kids. Lucchi said he had three boys, all in their teens.
“And I looked at him and said, ‘Don’t pretend like I don’t remember where you said you were going tonight,’” he was saying. “‘You telling me I have amnesia?’”
Hoffman shook his head. “I’ve got easy kids.”
A mosquito was buzzing around Lucchi’s leg, and his hand swooped down on it, triumphant. “Fucker,” he said. He put the elastic band in his pocket. An announcement came on that we were nearing Swartz Bay. It was time to go.
I curled up in the back of the police car and listened to them talk. Lucchi said he was going to Ottawa for a week to visit an old girlfriend.
“Want me to look after your wife while you’re gone?” Hoffman said.
“Fuck you,” said Lucchi.
“Wrap it up, all right?” Hoffman said, and the two men laughed. “Seriously, man, wrap it up. You don’t know what’s going around these days.”
When we turned onto Grant Street, Miranda and Lydia-Rose were waiting in front of the town house, hands on hips. Lydia-Rose looked at me with hate in her eyes. Her hair was wild, uncombed. She put her arm around her mother, as though she were protecting her from me.
For the first time, Miranda looked old. Her eyes were dark and heavy, the skin on her face slightly gray. She swayed a bit as she stood there, as if it was taking every muscle in her body to keep her upright.
The police took one last gloomy glimpse at us and disappeared around the corner. I watched their taillights; I watched a squirrel run up a big tree. When there was nothing left to look at, I faced Miranda. I had never seen her look so tired.
“Go inside,” she told Lydia-Rose, pushing her toward the town house.
I fiddled with the strap of my suspenders, looked at my sneakers, and waited for her to speak.
Instead she stepped toward me and put her hands on my shoulders, then pulled me in. She held me like this for a long time, my head on her shoulder.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No.”
“I don’t want you in the house right now,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to come inside.”
I tried to pull away, but she held me tightly. “I think,” she said, “it’s time we found alternative living arrangements.”
“But—”
“I’m too angry,” she said, “to have you in my house.”
I struggled against her, but she didn’t budge. I felt the strength of her arms for the first time, the result of years of physical labor.
“Do you know that I had everyone on the block out looking for you? I had to call every one of them just now and tell them you were fine. Tell them you were being brought home by the police.”
“Where do you want me to go?”
I heard her swallow, and then her words came out slowly and precisely, as if this was something she’d been rehearsing for a long time. She told me that one of our neighbors had offered to let me stay with her for a little while, a woman who used to babysit me. She’s a nice woman, Miranda said, and could use some help around the house. “She’ll be nicer to you than I’d be right now.”
“How long do I have to stay with her?”
“Until you’re ready to be a part of our family again.”
“But I never—”
She took a labored breath and kissed my cheek. “A few days. That’s all. Just let me cool off.”
She released me finally, and we stood eye-to-eye. I said the cruelest thing I could think of to say. “You’re not my mother.”
She told me to wait on the sidewalk while she got my things.
“We’re at a real fork in the road here, Shannon,” she said.
Part Two
X.
eugene is curled in a ball in the middle of Yula and Harrison’s bed when they finally get back from Dallas Road. He is wearing Harrison’s Cowichan sweater and silver oven mitts on his hands. It has been hours and hours since they left, and the cabin is dark and damp with cold. Yula switches on the lamp by the side of the bed and puts her hand on the child’s forehead. It is hot and dry to the touch. Dominic stands in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. He is a huge man with a shaved head and white-blond eyebrows, eyelashes, and patchy facial hair, which make him look as though his face has been dusted with glitter. He has tiny eyes, one blue, one brown, and leathery hands with bitten fingernails. My mother feels his eyes on her and finds him repulsive.
Harrison is on his knees in the living room, sifting through the cigar box he keeps under the couch for the little baggie of cocaine that his brother gave him the day before. The boy was hungry. One of the kitchen chairs is pushed up against the counter and his dirty footprints are on the countertop, his handprints on the cupboards. An empty bag of marshmallows is on the floor and the fridge is open, a couple of moldy oranges in the bottom of the crisper. There are cans of soup and tuna fish, but the boy is too young to know how to use a can opener. He has found and eaten the crumbs from a bag of potato chips in the trash. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom is open, two empty bottles of grape- and cherry-flavored cough syrup on the floor.
Yula runs her hand down Eugene’s cheek and sees the cold pool of vomit under his chin that has seeped through the sheets and onto the mattress. She hears my father emptying the contents of the cigar box onto the floor and then cursing, the soft crackle of Dominic’s cigarette burning down. The bedsprings creak under her weight. In another few hours it will be dawn. She can hear the rush of the creek below the cabin, a raccoon rummaging through their trash can. Dominic pinches out his cigarette and puts the butt in his shirt pocket. He stands in the doorway and wrings his big hands. “He’ll be fine. He’ll be all right,” he says.
When the boy begins to vomit again, each of them takes a turn cradling him in the bathtub. The vomit bubbles out of Eugene’s mouth like sea foam. Later, the bedroom fills with blue light and the morning arrives. Yula holds her son in the corner of the bedroom, the Cowichan sweater over both of them like a blanket, the oven mitts hours ago thrown on the floor. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her, repositions her son so his weight isn’t on her belly. She cradles him as best she can. She is furious with Harrison for getting her high—furious with herself for leaving her son for so long—and has shut the door. Eugene is breathing in little gasps. His heart pounds against her body as she holds him. She wants to call the hospital, but she is too stoned. She will give herself an hour to come down, and then she will call. She is tired, but she knows she cannot let herself fall asleep. He’ll be okay, won’t he? Yes, she thinks, he’s just sick from the cough syrup.
Outside, in the living room, Dominic and Harrison sit on the couch and watch the sunrise out the window. They pass a bottle of beer between them. Dominic has switched on the space heater, and it glows red in the middle of the room, filling the air with a h
igh-pitched buzz. Other than the bedroom, the cabin is one big room, living room bleeding into kitchen. The furniture is cheap, found one weekend at the Sally Ann, dragged down the narrow gravel pathway, then set down and kicked across the scuffed wood floors. For a long time the cabin has had a ladybug infestation. It started with one, three, sixteen, twenty per windowsill, thirty in one corner. For a while, Yula scooped them into Tupperware containers and ushered them into the yard. Harrison puts his finger next to a cluster of them on the windowsill. They startle; their little metal bodies break apart and fly. He traces over an outline of a heart on the fogged-up kitchen window and stares at the dented, rusty classic car in the driveway.
XI.
back on the island, I stand in Caffè Fantastico on King Street and admire a poorly done watercolor of a fishing boat at dawn. I have skipped school and spent the better part of the morning leering at things I don’t like about this city: the narrow sidewalks, the ceaselessly beeping traffic lights for the blind, the bronze plaques everywhere blabbing about some historical event, some site made important once by a man whose name I ought to know. The playground across from the café for disabled children is only half finished: I watch a few construction workers hammer down the wide ramps and railings for wheelchair navigation and fasten giant plastic geometric shapes in bright colors with giant plastic screws.
I order a coffee, and the girl behind the counter starts telling me about the date she went on last week. She hasn’t heard from the guy since. “And that was Sunday,” she’s saying. “Now it’s Wednesday.”
“Yep,” I say, and I take my mug to a worn-out looking couch at the back of the café and slip off my raggy old duffle coat—it’s September, but it’s already freezing.
Y: A Novel Page 13
