We watch the timer on the stove while the stew simmers, and he tells me bits of his life: a retired decathlete, a brief marriage to a kayak instructor, his days now filled teaching weight training at the Y. “I’m there every morning anyway,” he says and picks at his beard. “You know, it’s still weird. Every morning when I pull up, I think of you being there.” I let him talk on and on. I can tell he doesn’t have kids. If he did he’d say a lot of nonsense about love and hardship and the troubled girls of the world.
He tears up pieces of iceberg lettuce into a plastic bowl and slices a tomato, sets a bottle of ranch dressing on the table. A few years after I was born, he says, he moved into town and has been here ever since. He puts a little bowl of plain potato chips in front of me and tells me to eat.
“When I was sixteen,” he says, “I thought I’d like to play in the pro leagues. You a sports fan?”
“My eye’s not so good.”
“Well then.” He starts to bend down to inspect my face, then thinks better of it and scans the countertop. “I swear I put that oven mitt down here just a second ago.”
“It’s in your hand.”
“Thanks.”
He stirs the stew with a wooden spoon and offers me another glass of ginger ale, but I have to go to the bathroom and wander out of the kitchen and down the hallway. It’s a small house with a living room in the front and bedroom to the side. The bathroom is at the back of the bedroom, separated by a sliding door. It’s tiny, with a plastic shower stall. I stand for a minute in Vaughn’s bedroom and inspect. His bed has maroon sheets and a navy blue comforter balled up at the foot of it. A paperback copy of Neuromancer lies on one of the pillows, along with a tiny headlamp, and the bedside table is stacked with some outdoor magazine called Explore. He has a cheap-looking lamp in the corner with no bulb in it, and there are cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. He must not notice this or the thin coat of dust on the white venetian blinds. I separate the blinds and look out the window. A small stretch of wild lawn separates Vaughn’s house from his neighbor’s, a yellow stucco number with boarded-up windows. A couple of rusty-looking bicycles lean against the side of the neighbor’s house, along with the innards of an old lawn mower, a couple of wooden doors, and a splintered mirror in a moldy gilt frame. A stack of planter boxes tower precariously beside the mirror, one of them sprouting some kind of wild-looking, ivy-like plant. I close the blinds and look under Vaughn’s bed. A DVD of Trainspotting, a couple of dust bunnies, the vacuum attachment for hardwood floors. Nothing weird, thank God. He has a little TV across from the bed, balanced on top of a dresser. It, too, needs to be dusted. The ceiling is low, the walls the color of putty. In most ways, it is a depressing room and doesn’t give much away about its occupant.
The bathroom is livelier. Vaughn shaves with a Mach-3 disposable razor and uses Barbasol Beard Buster shaving cream. He washes his hair with Head & Shoulders and there’s a little tube of some gross-looking anti-itch cream that I don’t wish to inspect further. The walls are covered in workout routines cut out of magazines and secured with Scotch tape.
Vaughn’s hand towels smell like Tide, and there’s a brand-new bar of Ivory soap resting on the side of the sink. I’m so hungry I could eat it. I wish it were a piece of white cake. Balancing in a glass beside the soap is a toothbrush so big that I can’t imagine cramming it into my mouth. The bristles are splayed from months—years?—of use. The floor needs to be mopped, I guess, but it isn’t too bad. The mirror needs a good Windexing, and I search under the sink for some but there’s only toilet paper, a crank flashlight, and a stick of Old Spice deodorant. I think after dinner I’m going to ask Vaughn if I can stay with him for a while. I’ll clean the house and mow the little strip of lawn. I can sleep in a sleeping bag on the couch, and we’ll just work out some kind of schedule for the bathroom—shouldn’t be hard, especially if he’s out of the house and at the Y every morning. I could probably get a job at the mall. I took a food safety course at school, so I could work at the souvlaki place or Mrs. Vanelli’s pizza. There’s so much fast food around here. There’s a good Chinese place around the corner, too. East Garden or something. Wonder if Vaughn likes Chinese. I bet he does. There are two gas stations down the street and the new Thrifty Foods and a Zellers store, and it’s a little noisy being right here on Hillside, but I can buy some earplugs tomorrow, and I’ll buy some for Vaughn as well. His brother can teach us the tango.
When I walk back into the kitchen, Vaughn is doing calf raises and flipping through a cookbook. “Looking at my biceps routine, I bet.” He smirks at me and I blush; obviously I’ve been gone a little too long. The stew is bubbling in the pot, and there’s a big part of me that wants to stop time and just eat the whole thing myself.
“I always wanted to be a dancer,” I say.
“Nothin’ to it.”
Vaughn sets a bowl in front of me filled to the brim with beef stew, a pile of potatoes and carrots heaped on top. We put huge amounts of salad on our plates. His cutlery is flimsy and the plates are chipped. We toast our mugs of ginger ale, and I wonder why he doesn’t drink. Recovered alcoholic? I look at the deep lines around his eyes and decide there’s something there—in his past. Something hasn’t gone the way it was supposed to. Halfway through dinner he gets up to answer the phone, and when he hangs up he tells me that Blaze isn’t coming—got held up at work.
“It’s this woman he’s seeing.” He nods at me. “Can I ask where you live?”
“On Grant Street.”
“In Fernwood?”
“Yeah.”
“And who you living with?”
“It’s not the greatest situation anymore.” I tell him all about Miranda. About Lydia-Rose. I tell him about the Ministry of Children and Family Development, about the initials H.C. I tell him the story of my running away. I tell him that Miranda is the best person I’ve ever known, the most selfless, the most loving. But I want to find my real parents. I tell Vaughn that this business of placing kids in other people’s homes is a nice idea and all, but I think we’d all be better off with our own families in the end.
“Don’t know that I agree with you there. You don’t know anything about your real family.”
“That’s why I’m here—to find out.”
Vaughn puts down his fork. “Now, I need to tell you something and I want you to not freak out until I’m done.” He gets up from his chair and, hands shaking again, leans against the kitchen counter. “I want to tell you something about people.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Not everybody makes it. Life doesn’t work out for everybody, despite what your teachers and such might tell you. People want to encourage you at your age, and there’s some dignity to that, but there’s a falsehood to it, too, Shannon. Most things are, in some sense, predetermined.”
“Okay.” I feel like I’m back with Mickey. Please don’t be insane. Why does everybody have to be insane?
“I’m not about to say that what she did was right. But you look okay. You look healthy, and if you’ll pardon my language, you don’t look all effed up. I see what girls look like around here. Your mother, Shannon—”
The neighbors’ wind chimes are clanking in the wind, and we both pause a minute and listen to the sound.
“I’ve seen things,” he says finally, “I wasn’t supposed to see.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I say, my eyes betraying me. They fill with tears and I fight them, wipe them furiously from my eyes.
“Easy now,” he says. He pulls his chair around the side of the table and puts his hand tentatively on mine. “Most people have good and bad in them. Like yin and yang, all right?”
“All right.” I look at his earnest face, his scraggly red beard, his goofy T-shirt. “If you saw my mom again—would you know it was her?”
He puts a giant forkful of stew in his mouth, and I watch him chew. “I didn’t really see your mom’s face,” he says finally. The light is fading, and he checks his watch. “Shouldn’t you be gettin
g home?”
“Dunno. Do you have a car?”
“Not anymore.”
“Are you busy tomorrow?”
“Work until three.”
“Would you go to the ministry with me? Maybe if you come with me—maybe if we explain the whole situation—Madeleine will help me a little more. We can take the bus.”
“Shannon, I want to go back to something I was saying earlier—”
“About it not working out for everyone. I remember. I don’t need her to be a good person. But I have to know.”
“Grant Street’s not that far. You can borrow my bike—I’ve got two anyway—it’s getting late now.”
“Is that the right thing to do?”
“It is. Listen, things get clearer as you get older. Hop on my bike. I’ll get you my helmet. Tomorrow we’ll go to the ministry together. Okay? Come by the Y around three.”
“Okay.”
“Hey, I’m grateful for the dinner company. And I’m happy to help you find your mom. Listen, I’m over the moon that you’re okay. All right? You have no idea what this is like for me, you showing up at my door. Do you know that? Huh? Look at you. You turned out great, I can see it. You’re great. And there’s something else, too—you’ve got some kind of crazed animal inside you. I can see it. Am I right? I know it’s there. But just take my bike, go back to your family—they are your family, Shannon—and I’ll help you out. But tell Miranda what you’re up to. Do you want to hurt her like this? You said yourself she’s the nicest person you know. Don’t hurt the nicest person you know.”
When I get to the town house, Lydia-Rose is taking notes while she watches an art-house film for a project she’s doing on video art. There are a lot of penises. She doesn’t say anything to me when I first walk in. We sit on the couch together, looking at the penises. She’s eating Wasa bread, Winkie begging at her feet, and her pajama pants are covered in crumbs. Penises, she writes in her notebook. She looks at me.
“You’re back,” she says. She turns the mute on, and we watch a man who looks like an albino, the film sped up so his eyes flicker.
I start to tell her about Vaughn and stop. I don’t want her to know. I want to keep certain things a secret. “Is Miranda upstairs?”
Lydia-Rose nods. “What’s with the helmet?” she says.
“Found it.” I look at myself in the hall mirror. In Vaughn’s white helmet, I look like a stormtrooper.
I pad up the stairs to Miranda’s room and knock on her door. This is something we’re still not supposed to do—even now, her room is off-limits. But I stand there anyway and knock.
“Shannon.” She’s wearing a pale-pink housecoat. Some kind of thick cream is smeared under her eyes. She looks at me, looks at the helmet. “I was really angry before,” she says. “I was just so angry.”
“I want to apologize.” I look at her face and she blinks softly.
“You should,” she says. She steps back and lets me into the room, and we sit on the Little Mermaid comforter together, which is by now so faded and threadbare that I find it embarrassing. I want to buy her a new one—and I will. As soon as I have enough money, I will.
She reaches into the pocket of her housecoat, takes out a cigarette, and lights it. “Don’t tell Lydia-Rose I’m smoking again.”
“I’m sorry for running away.”
She inhales deeply and puts her ashes into a coffee tin. Minty cigarette smoke fills the room, and she stands up and opens the window.
“Shannon,” she says. “I want you to know that you’ll always be my daughter.”
And so I start to tell her everything—I don’t leave out one bit. I tell her about the nice old couple, Belle and Hugh, who dropped me off at the bus station; about Matthew and his smelly trench coat, his long curly hair; about getting the bread out of the dumpster and Gregor’s apartment and Cole; about how I was too scared to go to the youth shelter and stayed up all night in the doorway of the homeless shelter on Burrard; about spitting the little square of acid into my hand.
What I don’t tell her about is my visit to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, about Madeleine, about Vaughn. About wanting to find my mother. Already it seems to me that to survive you have to keep a part of yourself hidden from everyone you know. Something has to be yours and yours alone.
“I wonder,” she says. “I wonder if you remember this at all.” She picks up her cigarette pack as if she’s going to light another one, but then sets it down. “When you were five years old, that horrible man you used to live with—”
“Julian.”
“Julian. He waited for you one day outside of your day care. He made you get in his car.”
“I remember.”
“Your sister ran and told one of the women who worked there. I still remember her name. Krystal. Lydia-Rose ran to her and told her you’d gotten in the car of some strange man. Krystal didn’t even stop to call the police; she just took off running until she got to Julian’s car and tried to open the door to get to you, but he drove off. The police found the car by Gonzales Beach. You were hurt pretty bad, sweetheart. It was so awful.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” I say. “I remember being in his car and then you coming and picking me up and carrying me away.”
Miranda pauses a minute, and we look at each other. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see you until later, at the hospital. It would have been a police officer who would have carried you out of the car.”
I search my thoughts for this, but I can’t find it. I still see Miranda’s face, all sweaty, crying, lifting me out of the car. The feel of her soft sweater. Looking back at Julian’s face. That’s all I can see.
“This is important,” she says. “Maybe not right now, but in your lifetime. There are men in this world who are so damaged that they become evil.” She looks at me. “I just don’t want you to ever encounter another man like him again.” She finally tilts the pack of cigarettes and slides one out, taps it against her leg, and lights it. “Damaged men are dangerous,” she says to me.
“Where is Lydia-Rose’s father?” I ask, and she searches the air in front of her, seeing something from her past.
“Gone,” she says, and puts her hand over mine. She looks tired suddenly, and I know not to ask her any more questions about it. I suppose she’ll sit down with Lydia-Rose one day and tell her everything there is to know.
“Why don’t your sisters ever visit?”
She unclips the bicycle helmet and takes it off my head, and I let her comb out my hair. It is snarled and greasy, and I let my head drop to my chest while she untangles it, her fingers endlessly patient, one hand grasping the snarl and the other tugging through it with the comb so that it doesn’t hurt as much. She combs, then takes a puff of her cigarette, combs again.
“They used to,” she says. “We used to see each other all the time.”
“What happened?”
“One of my sisters died, honey. Years ago.”
“How old were you?”
She puts the comb down. “Twenty or so.”
“And Sharon?”
“Sharon and I don’t speak anymore.”
I think about the letters I found under her bed. A real cunt of a woman. “What happened between you and Sharon?”
“She’s mentally ill. She’s not right in the head. Some people think that should excuse her behavior, but I don’t think so. I think we’re accountable for what we do, no matter what.”
“What did she do?”
“She hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It would take forever to explain.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s just not talk about it.”
Crows are screaming outside, and I remember when Miranda and I once went to the library and researched what their different calls meant. The crows outside are doing our favorite call—it’s as if they’re laughing madly. Before we knew that crows were making this sound, Lydia-Rose and I c
alled them the Jackass Birds. We pictured them as maniacal beasts, roaring their heads off.
“It’s the Jackass Bird,” I say to Miranda.
“Always.”
I sit up and face her. “Can I still live here?”
The skin around her eyes is shiny from the eye cream. She dabs at it and then wipes her finger on her housecoat. “I want you to go to school,” she says. “You think I don’t know you tear up your attendance reports?” She fixes me with a look as if she’s about to slap me, but then her whole face softens. “You’re not as sneaky as you think you are. Go to school. This is my only condition.”
We shake hands. I feel bad about not telling her about Vaughn, but it’s fleeting, and when I go back downstairs and Lydia-Rose is already asleep, I climb into my bed and think about how after school tomorrow I’m going to jump on his bike, ride to the Y, and then we’re going to go to the ministry together, and at that moment I feel so excited about my life I can hardly stand it.
XIV.
quinn watches the taillights from his bedroom window, two red dots disappearing into the night. He can’t sleep. He’s been up for hours. He is still awake when Yula, Dominic, and Harrison pull back into the driveway and stumble out, drunk and stoned and shouting. The motion lights flick on as they make their way down the gravel path to the cabin. The two men have to hold Yula up, her feet dragging on the ground. He watches them open the door, and Harrison slips and falls to his knees before wrenching himself up and inside. He watches them struggle to get his pregnant daughter through the door. What a horrible mess. He realizes his grandson has been alone all this time. He shakes his head, feels a sudden anger rise in his chest. He takes two sleeping pills and lies in his bed, awake, until the sun comes up. He watches the sun rise, fingers his pill bottle, wonders if he should take two more and sleep through the day.
When he wakes again, it is late afternoon. Why hasn’t Yula woken him with his lunch? He gets out of bed and moves to the window, angry, his head heavy with sedatives and sleep, his left hand tingling with numbness. The Meteor is gone again. He tries to recall his dream—something about a train? He searches for the ending in his mind but can only see the colors, the red and blue of the subway station, and then they, too, fade away. He holds his arm to his chest, rubbing it against his pajama top. Each day he prays for his hand to come back to life. Sometimes he thinks it’s just a matter of thinking hard enough about it, of willing it to rejoin the nervous system of his body. As he stands by the window, he visualizes the hand opening and closing. He stares at the hand and wills it to move, but it hangs limply off his useless arm. Some days he wants to go outside and chop it off with an axe. He hates having something dead hanging off his body. Today maybe. Today maybe he will chop off his hand. Make his daughter take him to the hospital in her hungover and repulsive state. What was she thinking? Was this all his doing? Is she weak, or has he broken her? The blame shifts around inside of him like sand.
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