I am waiting for Lydia-Rose. It’s been a week since I ran away and neither she nor Miranda has spoken to me since. I’ve been sleeping on the neighbor’s couch like an unwanted houseguest, until, as Miranda put it, we can “reach an agreement.”
“Hey, you!” Lydia-Rose says, too gaily, and I understand instantly that although she’s agreed to meet here, she hasn’t even begun to forgive me. She stamps her sneakers on the café’s welcome mat and undoes the top two buttons of her coat. She has on a fedora and jeans with a patch on the knee. I want to tell her about Matthew and Gregor and Cole, but I pinch my lips together instead—Shut up, shut up!—and take her in my arms. She smells like Miranda’s pumpkin bread, her breath like gummy sours.
“Shannon.” She says it dark, deeply, and puts her cold face on mine. She is almost a foot taller than me, and we hug awkwardly. She pulls away and snaps one of my suspenders. “You wear these every day or what?”
“Sure.”
I sit on the beat-up couch and wait while she gets herself a hot chocolate. Her backpack is half open. I peer at the neat stack of notebooks and paperback novels inside, their dust jackets covered in parcel paper so they don’t get ruined. After a brief infatuation with performance art, she has decided she wants to study literature.
“I’m reading this book right now that you’d love,” she says to me politely, as if we’ve only just met. The mug of hot chocolate steams in her hand. She takes a sip and a big gob of whipping cream clings to her lip. “About a locksmith who breaks into people’s houses.”
“Sounds great.”
Lydia-Rose leans back into the couch and crosses her legs. She looks goofy in the hat, with her long, narrow nose and dark, deep-set eyes. Now if she’d only learn to pluck her eyebrows; they’re big and unruly. She takes off the hat and puts it on my head, and her hair sticks up in tufts. “You skipped today.”
“I know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I can’t go to school anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” I point at her lip, and she wipes off the foam with her forearm. “I don’t want to hear any more about Trotsky, and I don’t want to speak French.”
I try to explain to her that I am anti-intellectual. Every time anyone wants to “analyze” anything, I feel a kind of rage. I detest abstract discussion of any kind and find my eyes rolling around in my head when anyone wants to talk about why we exist, or what is art, or life’s meaning, which people often do. It seems to me as if people want to talk about this sort of thing all the time.
I wait for Lydia-Rose to smile, but she doesn’t.
“No, listen, I’m serious. I’m not like you. It’s hard to read with my eye the way it is, the words go all blurry after a couple of lines. If I could see, I’d get my pilot’s license, and then I’d learn to shoot a gun and drive an eighteen-wheeler. All I want is to be able to tell one tree from another, and if a bird flies by, I want to know what kind of bird it is. That’s all I want to know. There’s no point in me going to school.”
“Okay, Shannon.” Her face falls a bit, and she fiddles with her cuticles. “You need to apologize to Mom.”
“I will.”
“Not on your time. On her time. Now.” She takes a big sip of hot chocolate and winces when it burns her mouth. “You can’t just run away and expect everything to be all right.”
“I don’t expect that.”
She puts her mug between her knees and stares into it as she talks. “We stayed up all night waiting for you. We even took the bus downtown and walked around, asking people if they’d seen you. We walked around so long we missed the last bus home and Mom said, To hell with it, we’ll walk down, maybe we’ll run into you that way. She was so scared she was shaking. Do you know that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not sorry, is the point. I can see it. We walked home and it took forever and I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet, and Mom called the police again when we got home and at some point I fell asleep in the living room and when I woke up Mom was gone and I waited up for her and she got in at dawn, she’d gone downtown again, she spent the fucking middle of the night asking fucking drug dealers and fuck-offs if they’d seen you, my fucking mom, all right?”
“All right.”
“She got home and we made coffee and she was fucking shaking from being out all night in the cold—and then she went right back out again and knocked on all the neighbors’ doors—”
“It wasn’t exactly a picnic for me either—I just mean—I didn’t run away and then have some kind of amazing time—”
“We went through your things to see if there was anything—I don’t know—a note, something that would help us find you,” she says. “Mom couldn’t stop crying. It was awful to see.”
My stomach lurches. My shoe box. My mother’s sweatshirt. It horrifies me to think of them unfolding it, their eyes moving over my photographs, the weight of my Swiss Army Knife in their hands.
“Don’t go through my stuff,” I whisper, but Lydia-Rose acts like she doesn’t hear me.
“Do you know what it was like,” she is saying, “to finally get a call from the police and have them tell us that you were on the mainland? Mom just started screaming. And then suddenly there you are, stepping out of a cop car, reeking of cigarettes. Looking like absolute shit.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry I made you guys so worried. Sometimes I don’t want to be cooped up in that town house.”
“Okay. Be a fuckup then.” Lydia-Rose buttons up her coat and takes the fedora off my head. “And don’t bother coming home if you’re going to be this new fuckup version of yourself.”
“I’m not a fuckup.”
“Then come home and apologize to Mom. Everything we’ve done for you.”
“I didn’t ask to be a part of your family.”
“I didn’t ask for you to be a part of our family either. You ever stop and think about what it’s been like for me? I lost my mom to you.”
“That’s not true.”
“We were happier when it was just us. I know this. I begged—I fucking begged her—to take you back.”
“That isn’t my fault.”
“Just come home and apologize to Mom.”
“But I’m not sorry.”
“What are you so angry about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Figure it out. Figure it out and let us know. I’ll be at home.”
Through the glass window of the café, I watch her walk down the street. She has her head down as if she’s crying. But I don’t want to think about her and her feelings. I’ve got enough swirling around inside me. She’ll be fine. She and Miranda. I want to hate them. I do. It would be easier. I want to hate them so much that the earth will open up and they’ll sink down into its fiery center. I want to hate them so much that they’ll die. But they’re not bad people and never have been. How do you become a part of someone else’s family? You don’t, and you never do.
The Ministry of Children and Family Development is right beside the highway. I’m tired and grouchy from being on the bus to get here. In the waiting room are two worn-in couches, a coffee table with the Times-Colonist strewn over it, and a plastic rack filled with pamphlets on methadone, depression, and trauma. The walls are lined with posters advertising upcoming counseling seminars and support-group meetings. There’s a shelf in one corner stacked high with loaves of bread. A sign reads, Help yourself: but please, two bags per person. Thanx. In another corner is a box of children’s clothing. Only one bag of clothing per person from this donation box.
“I want to tell you something, honey.” The social worker’s name is Madeleine. She has a pale-pink complexion and blond hair that’s been dyed dark brown. She wears a sleeveless navy blue dress with a white bow on the front and cheap white pumps. Her upper arms have a lazy, bloated quality to them that I associate with upper-middle-class women who do things like eat cake batter straight out of the mixing bow
l. Her office is right off the waiting room and is the size of a bathroom stall. A half-eaten tuna fish sandwich sits on a square of wax paper on her desk. Her trash bin is full of protein bar wrappers. “A low percentage of abandoned children have successful reunions.”
I stare at her, hard. She peers into my bad eye like she’s searching for something.
“I want to find my mother.”
She types for a minute on an old piece-of-shit IBM desktop. “I remember reading about you. I was just a teenager at the time.”
Her eyes darken as she reads whatever is on the screen. She swivels a bit in her chair, and I stare at her feet. A ratty-looking Band-Aid is stretched across her heel. She’s barelegged and her legs are thick and spidered with tiny varicose veins. I can’t decide whether she’s attractive. Her face is pleasant enough, boring but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I wonder why she’s so dressed up. The office is dingy and lit by flickering fluorescents. Her keyboard is covered with a thin film of grime.
“I want to be honest and realistic with you.” She puts out her hand as if I’m supposed to take it. “Abandoned children don’t have the same hope for a reunion as those whose parents have put them up for adoption. Often”—her voice wavers, and she takes a sip from a bottle of flavored mineral water—“the place they were found becomes their only contact with who they are.”
I stare at the tuna fish. The air in the office is hot and stale. There’s a report on her desk, and I stare at its first line. If you crack open the shell of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, 10,000 foster children will spill out, each child requiring a specific type of care.
“Shannon,” she says, in a voice more forceful than before, “it’s likely your mother was homeless. On drugs. Sick with AIDS. A victim of incest or rape. In an abusive relationship or mentally ill.” She coughs into her elbow and pushes her hair behind her ears. “Sometimes, Shannon, it’s better not to know.”
I hear someone enter the waiting room and moments later the high-pitched ding of a desk bell.
“What I can do,” she says, “is make a photocopy of the newspaper article for you—about when and where you were first found.” She waits for my reaction, but there isn’t one. I’m so disappointed that I feel almost dead. “Okay, then,” she says. “Give me a second.”
She leaves the office, her heels somehow squeaking like tennis shoes every time she takes a step. And only then do I understand what is possible. The computer’s screen is tilted in my direction, displaying my file.
My full name appears at the top of the screen, my date of birth, social insurance number, my designation as “special needs.” Complications from being born prematurely, the file reads. Vision impairment. Evidence of a learning disability. Emotional and behavioral problems. “Developmental delays” in growth and speech. It says I tested positive for drugs at birth and spent the first few months of my life in neonatal intensive care. It says I didn’t have any hair on my head until I was two.
When I scroll down, I see a list of all the foster homes I have lived in. A woman named Anna in a six-bed house in Royal Oak, her status listed as level three, whatever that means; Julian and Moira; Par and Raquelle. Another name is listed, too, after Anna’s—someone named Linda McIntosh. I do not remember this. When I click on Julian’s and Moira’s names, the screen takes me to a page that requires a password. I search the perimeter of Madeleine’s desk but don’t find one. The same thing happens when I click on Par and Raquelle. I write down everyone’s full names on a couple of pink Post-its and stuff them into my backpack.
At the bottom of the page is a postscript: Letter from H.C., William Head.
Nothing happens when I click on it.
I look up, and Madeleine is standing in the doorway. She holds the photocopied newspaper article in her hand. In her navy blue dress and white heels, she looks as if she’s stepped right out of the fifties. She looks as if she’s waiting for a sailor to debark from a ship.
Another social worker walks out of an office and peers in at us. Madeleine shakes her head at me, motions gently for me to return to my chair. “I’m afraid this is all I can do for you right now, Shannon.”
I take the newspaper article. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.
“The act of abandoning a child changes everything,” she says. “There’s nothing more I can do to help you.”
“Okay. Thanks.” I wave to Madeleine as I walk out the door and then stand for what feels like forever at the bus stop. I feel bad about making fun of her. Am I a bad person? I think about this almost every day. Would I know if I was?
Outside of the Mac’s on Cook and Pandora, I flip through the phone book until I find Julian’s name. There it is. He still lives on Olive Street. Raquelle’s name is listed, too. She’s still in the same apartment. I barely remember her. I remember being left alone a lot. I remember watching a little boy stick a penny up his bum. I don’t think I’ll call her. Anna—I don’t remember her at all. There was that girl who wet the bed. I’d like to see her again. But who knows what her name was? Anyway, Anna’s not listed. And neither is this Linda McIntosh. Who the hell was she? It’s like there’s a black curtain hung over a part of my brain and it’s too heavy to slip off and see what’s underneath. Fuck it, who cares.
Letter from H.C., William Head.
This, though, is interesting. William Head is a prison in Metchosin. I know this because my drama teacher took us to see a play out there one time. The prisoners have a little theater. We watched their performance of Endgame. The guy who shuttled us from the prison entrance to the theater told us he was in for murder. He was in his eighties.
I walk into Mac’s and get a hot chocolate, which is syrupy and gross, so I give it to a man playing the trumpet outside and we talk for a while. I like him. He’s always around, playing that crappy old trumpet. He has curly hair, lots of it, piled on his head like a wig, but today he’s wearing an orange toque. He tells me his name is Mickey.
“Mickey,” I say. “Got a cigarette?”
He looks at me like I’m nuts. The guys around here have not seen this new side of me. He rolls me one, lights it with a dog-eared pack of matches, takes a big long puff, and hands it to me.
“Tastes weird.”
“Might be some hash mixed in there,” he says and winks. He’s got watery eyes and a deeply lined face and he’s short, five-four max. I like short people, short men. So, fine, I’ll smoke this cigarette. I’ll smoke this hash. We lean up against the big glass window of Mac’s, and he picks up his trumpet and blows into it some more.
“I went to the mainland,” I tell him. I tell him my trip did nothing to curb my restlessness. I tell him I am still so curious. I want to feel to the fullest extent.
He rests his trumpet against his thigh and turns to me. “With eyes like those, you need to be outdoors. Maybe you ride horses? Yes? No? You should be at the ocean definitely.”
“Okay, Mickey.” My way of dealing with people who make no sense is just to agree. Works every time.
Some dudes drive up blasting hip-hop, and I bob my head to the music for a minute. They say hey to Mickey and come out of Mac’s a minute later with bags of potato chips and Slurpees, then peel away.
A shitty-looking car pulls up and parks so close to our feet that Mickey calls out, “Hey, man.” The car is red with a white top, but it’s so rusted out that there are holes in the chassis. The engine sounds like it’s dying when it kicks off. The driver’s door squeals when it opens and a shriveled little man steps out and pushes it shut with his hip. He’s got a puffy face and a white beard. He looks a hundred years old, and it takes him forever to get to the entrance. When he comes back out, there are two packs of cigarettes in his hands. He tosses one into Mickey’s trumpet case. It takes the old guy a couple of tries to start the car.
“Mickey, Mickey, give me a real smoke.” The hash joint is gross, and I’ve let Mickey smoke most of it anyway. I don’t feel anything except my heart beating too fast and
too loud.
“I can hear your heart,” he says to me, and we look at each other for a minute. My chest thumps up and down. My hands have started to sweat. “Close your eyes for a second, Shannon. Say good-bye to yourself for a day.”
I close my eyes. The concrete feels like it’s tipping. I’m worried I’ll slide into the street. With my eyes open, I can control the feeling. It’s easy to describe: it’s like a minute ago I was living in the world, and now I’m watching a movie of it. The frame rate has slowed. I’m at twenty-four frames per second while everyone else is seeing life flicker-free. That’s all. That’s all there is to being high.
Mickey rests his head against the window and shuts his eyes. His fingers are working the pistons of the trumpet. He puts it to his lips and then rests it on his thigh, as if he’s forgotten he was going to play. I don’t know how much time goes by. An hour? Three? I watch the street. I wish I could float through the city, in between the lampposts and curving under ledges. I want to reach with an outstretched hand. I want to open all the windows. I think there are angels in this city. They are in the windows with the lights left on.
There’s a poster for a band shellacked to a telephone pole. Blue City, it says, and I wonder which city is blue. Little children, little dogs, little bicycles go racing by as we sit outside Mac’s. I close my eyes and dream of my father. He is a man who stands eye to eye with me. He is barrel-chested and his skin looks weird, as though he’s suddenly developed acne. In the dream he answers the door in a pair of cargo shorts, a muscle shirt that gapes below his underarms, and worn-out tube socks that have slipped beyond his feet and gathered in front of his toes so that they look like giant, half-on condoms.
My mother’s hair is matted and cut just above her shoulders, which she says she had to do because it is so damaged. It is a weird color, a botched dye job. She is sunburned from swimming, her skin all broken out, and she is wearing a Harley-Davidson tank top and army fatigues, a bunch of her tattoos visible. She has a little white dog that spends the whole dream running around with a stuffed snake in its mouth.
Y: A Novel Page 14
