Over Our Heads
Copyright © 2014 Andrea Thompson
Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
We gratefully 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 Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund.
Over Our Heads is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Cover artwork / design: Val Fullard
eBook development: WildElement.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thompson, Andrea, 1967–, author
Over our heads : a novel / by Andrea Thompson.
isbn 978-1-77133-130-2 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8589.H4748O94 2014 C813’.54 C2014-905024-0
FSC IF POSSIBLE HERE
Printed and bound in Canada
Inanna Publications and Education Inc.
210 Founders College, York University
4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765
Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca
Over Our Heads
a novel by
Andrea Thompson
INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA
For Mary and Bill McDougall
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
–Henry David Thoreau
The sun had set and the moon was rising over our heads.
–Virginia Woolf
Nothing ever lasts. It all gets torn to shreds.
If something’s everlasting, it’s over our heads.
–Jon Brion
1.
LOOKED AT FROM THE SKY, the house doesn’t seem special at all. From a plane, flying over on a clear day, all one notices is its proximity to the vast expanse of green that spreads north from the lake. From overhead, High Park looks huge but misplaced, unlike Central Park, with its sprawl of trees feeding the heart of the city. In Toronto, the heart is off to one side, like in a human body.
The park makes it easy to find home from above, though. How many miles above the city would one need to be before the park became a blur, the streets next to it indistinguishable? It doesn’t matter because we’re not moving further away. We’re moving closer.
Parkside Drive runs north and south, along the eastern boarder of High Park, from Bloor Street to Lakeshore Boulevard. Down at the south end, running east off Parkside is Garden Avenue, and two houses in is Indian Road. Number 66 is on the corner where the two streets meet. That’s what they’re called, Indian and Garden – no kidding. It’s only later, after getting some perspective on the whole story that these names begin to seem implausible. But that’s what living is like, isn’t it? The details that seem the least likely, the most improbable, the coincidences that no one can believe – this is what life is made of.
At the end, looking back, the story of a single lifetime appears perfectly orchestrated, even if while one lives it, it all seems so random and chaotic. That might be one reason why so many young people find it hard to believe in something greater than themselves – God or a higher power, or whatever you want to call it. The young have yet to see a near completed work. How could they fathom the intelligence of the designer who created it? The old, now they are the ones who get to see how life weaves a story together. Call it destiny, fate, providence, or don’t call it anything at all. Even the atheists, when pressed on their deathbeds, will admit to witnessing some sort of uncanny progression of events during the unfolding of their lives – even if there is no God, and it’s just us behind the wheel. Almost all of us notice, as we get older, an intricate, synchronistic beauty – even with all the tedium, anxiety, heartbreak and suffering. There are some who live out their time on earth without ever noticing the design of their life. It’s a shame, though, not to notice. There is so much to see if one keeps one’s eyes open.
The house on the corner, for instance. Viewed in terms of its potential market value, or how its upkeep reflects its owner’s proclivity to “keep up with the Joneses,” it might simply seem a run-down mess. But in terms of structure and integrity of shape and design, nothing can stop number 66 from being beautiful. Not the peeling paint or dangling eaves or the weeds that over-run the garden with giddy abandon.
Most of the other houses on the street are that old stately turn of the century reddish-brown brick. Not number 66. It is made of rock and mortar. Sure, there is likely brick underneath somewhere, but the face of the house is a collage of grey, brown and beige stones varying in size from an apple to a cantaloupe. This makes the house bumpy on the outside instead of smooth, or at least flat, like a brick house. It also makes people want to run their hands over the stone to feel its texture. The house calls out to passersby without them knowing. It stands on the corner, teasing, tempting. Touch me, touch me, touch me, it says. Come home.
2.
THE FIRST PLACE EMMA REMEMBERED living was by the ocean. Salt was always on her lips, and sand was always all over her face, in her hair. At night, the waves pulsed a wet sloshing heartbeat through her dreams. Some days, the sun would shine on the big white-headed birds that disappeared over treetops. There were whales that moaned in the distance, and rain that beat down on the roof of the tent. Emma remembered the smell of camp stove in the morning, of sweaty bodies and suntan lotion in the afternoon, of singing and laughter in the dark.
Everyone left Emma alone when she lived by the ocean. This was good when her belly was full, and they put her in the shade or inside the tent if it was raining. But sometimes it wasn’t so good to be alone. Sometimes they forgot important things, like taking the poo away or giving her a bottle of milk. Emma tried telling them, but nobody heard her at first, because she didn’t know how to make her thoughts move outside her head. She realized that her mouth sounds could make them listen, but they still couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell them. She knew because when she spoke, they replied with tickling giggly noises or soft purring noises that didn’t mean anything at all.
Sometimes they gave her too much food, and it was like a thunderstorm inside that made her belly jump and kick. Sometimes her bum was burning fire, and there was only ocean to put it out and the ocean was gasoline. Sometimes they were gone, gone, gone, even when they were right there sitting with her. Gone inside the coughing smoke or sticky water that made them crazy and sleepy and falling down.
None of them was mother. They were dumb strangers who forgot and pretended and said words that meant nothing.
One of the big white-headed birds said so in words that went right into Emma’s brain. He told her to suck the salt off her thumb when she was hungry, and to watch him fly when they left her alone too long. So she did. She stared and stared until she went dizzy, then she closed her eyes and wasn’t Emma anymore. She was a white-headed bird instead, flying and swooping and looking for a mouse, rabbit, snake, or fish. She spotted one and dove down, knowing nothing could stop her. Soon, her belly would be full. The bird would talk and talk inside her head, and Emma would swoop and search and listen until the sun went down.
The second place Emma remembered living wasn’t the
second place at all. She lived somewhere before that, between the ocean and the new life. Later, the social workers would tell her that while she was still a baby living near the ocean, someone reported her to the authorities. They took her to the hospital, got her hydrated, and healed her diaper rash, but they couldn’t find her mother, so she was taken into custody.
She was in two other homes before they finally got her settled into the house on Columbia Street. Emma didn’t remember anything from this in-between time. When she tried, all she could come up with was a memory of being in a car with a man and a woman, and the car stopping because there was something in the middle of the road. The man got out, picked up the thing and brought it to Emma to see.
“It’s a turtle,” the woman in the car said.
Emma remembered looking at it, and touching the warm, hard shell.
3.
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING. Rachel drove the Benz west along the Lakeshore, toward the Boulevard Club – exclusive haven for the Toronto elite, where she had briefly been a member. The membership was a waste of money, and she knew it at the time, but it was a ridiculous girlhood dream she had felt compelled to fulfill. Since the first time she had seen the expensive cars and well-dressed members that came and went from the club, Rachel had vowed to one day be able to afford to buy a Mercedes and join the ranks of the shore-side select. She had planned to achieve this goal by becoming a famous scientist; however, in the end she had taken a different route to success. A career as a senior actuary for a multi-national insurance company, and a deft combination of long-term and short-term investments, had delivered much the same fiscal results. The fame – a folly of youth, she realized – was non-essential.
Rachel passed the entrance to the Boulevard Club without a second glance. The few times she had attended, she had found the facilities to be impeccable, but still, after a year in the prestigious ranks, Rachel had decided not to renew. Paying for a club she rarely used as a way to celebrate the financial status she’d earned through years of hard work seemed, in the end, to cheapen her accomplishments. The car, however, was different. The car was also practical. It had an excellent safety rating.
Rachel turned the Benz off the Lakeshore and onto Parkside Drive, holding her breath as she passed under the bridges for the Queensway, Gardiner expressway and CN rail-line. The bridges were low-hanging combinations of steel girders and concrete, and in constant need of repair. When she was a child, Rachel had imagined that one day the old bridges would collapse, leaving crushed cars and corpses in their wake. Although that had yet to occur, Rachel had been awakened on more than one occasion by the sound of metal crumpling against reinforced concrete, as some dozy truck driver who hadn’t seen the signs, accidentally smashed his semi right into the side of the first bridge after turning off the Lakeshore. Once, a driver barely made it under, only to become wedged halfway through. It took six tow trucks three hours to finally pull the rig back out. Structurally, the bridges were disasters waiting to happen.
Driving up Parkside, Rachel watched the lake recede behind her in the rearview mirror. When she was in elementary school, she used to pretend that she was doing astronomical research in a remote northern observatory during her summer vacations. It had been simple to imagine that when she was a kid, sitting out on the dock at Sunnyside beach with her dad at night, listening to him name constellations, peering at the stars through his telescope. In those days, Rachel used to convince herself that the lights in the distance were from some fish cannery or rural lakeside resort. Then they started building the CN tower, and the horizon began declaring its urbanism like an exclamation point. There was no pretending after that. Everything had changed that year anyway, so the loss of her northern observatory fantasy was of little consequence.
Rachel drove up Parkside, past Garden Avenue, turned right on Wright Avenue and then right again, onto Indian Road. The huge old oaks and maples had formed their annual canopy, and the wisteria was in full bloom. Spring came early in this part of the city; the combination of the oxygen-rich trees of High Park and the updraft from Lake Ontario made the area relatively temperate. According to her grandmother, the whole neighbourhood had once been considered cottage country, with upscale summerhouses for the urban Hog Town well-to-do. Apparently, Sunnyside was first built to be an amusement park, complete with a roller-coaster, roller-skating rink and bandstand, intended to lure city dwellers out to the western frontier.
“Your grandfather used to go to the Palais Royale every Friday night –it was the place to be back then,” Rachel’s grandmother said every time they passed the old building. “You should have seen him in his Zoot suit, Rach, with his hair all slicked back. He took me to see the Duke there once. All the girls were jealous – a sold out show and all.” Rachel would nod during these reminiscences, not wanting to interrupt. Grandma only talked about Grandpa that way when Wanda wasn’t around.
That was childhood Grandma – wise, save-the-day Grandma. Grown up Grandma was another story. Slowly over the years, Rachel had watched her grandmother’s superhero powers weaken, until she had become like a child, and Rachel had become the adult, left to care for a distant, and increasingly stubborn old woman who was unwilling to admit that her body was failing her. Rachel had begun testing her memory, asking her grandmother what day it was or what she ate for breakfast. Once, she even she showed Grandma a picture of her grandfather, and asked if she knew who he was. But that just set her off.
“My mind is just fine, Rachel!” She yelled. “Now, leave me alone.” Rachel was used to it. Ever since Emma had shown up when they were kids, Rachel had become the bad cop. The new Wanda.
Rachel pulled the black car up to the house on Indian Road.
Grandma was gone.
It was predictable that it would happen, that her grandmother would die. She had been a very old woman, living alone in a mausoleum of a house full of clutter – clutter that would now need to be removed. Rachel would do the removing of course, along with Emma, who had come back from Vancouver just in time to say goodbye, and ensure that Rachel never got the chance to. Emma had been staying with her old boyfriend, Lester who had a place near Kensington Market. Lester, a man who had briefly, unfathomably, also taken over Rachel’s heart and apartment with his sexy, tragic, narcissistic, bohemian voodoo. Emma was en route from his place at that moment, coming to meet Rachel at the house. Emma was back, and there was going to be trouble. Rachel could feel it coming like a thunderstorm.
The house looked pitifully old. All the homes on the street had been constructed at the turn of the century. Not this new century, not the one that had begun with the great non-event of Y2K – but the other century, the one we now have enough distance from to romanticize. They had been built as country estates, but now, at least half of these grand houses had been converted into multiplexes. Still, the area hadn’t totally gone downhill yet. Not like Parkdale. The lawns were still trimmed, flowerbeds still attended to. The houses retained the grandeur. Most of them, anyway.
Indian Road. What a terrible name for a street. If city planners could have seen ahead and known the future would render the name politically incorrect, they likely would have thought twice. Instead, they went on an Indian-a-thon: Indian Road, Indian Grove, Indian Road Crescent, Indian Valley Crescent, and Indian Trail. It was excessive. Apparently the proliferation of similar names was explained by an old trading trail that ran through High Park. Still, the repetition and lack of variety was unfathomable, and slightly perverse, considering the fate of the Aboriginal people that originally lived on the land beneath the street signs. It also made the probability that your pizza would wind up blocks away skyrocket to an unnecessarily high level. City planners of the day had not foreseen the future of take-out food either. Hindsight. The only way to see clearly.
4.
WHEN EMMA WAS FOUR YEARS OLD and had learned to talk so people understood her, she was taken to the old wood house on Columbia Street. Inside the hous
e, a giraffe lady and a bear man were waiting. Emma went inside, and they took her to a kitchen that smelled like burnt toast.
The giraffe lady was skinny, with blond hair piled up to the sky and sparkly green powder on her eyelids. The bear man was big and hairy and smelled like dirty feet. They told her she lived in Foster’s home now, and that they were Foster’s parents. Emma wondered who Foster was, and why his parents gave him a whole house, but didn’t ask. The lady and the man didn’t give her answers to any of these important questions. Instead, they told her that the giraffe lady’s name was Mamma Shirley, and the bear man’s name was Jack.
“Just Jack,” he said, giving Mamma Shirley a dirty look. “She’s not your real mother either, so don’t go kidding yourself. And I’m not your father. I’m Jack. Just Jack.”
There was another kid in the house too. His name was Jamie Francis. He was ten-and-a-half. Emma could tell right off that he wasn’t going to bother her. He had his own room and was mostly busy teaching himself how to play “American Pie” on his guitar. “I’m going to be a big star when I grow up,” he said. “Not sure yet what I’ll be famous at. I might be a rock star like Elton John, or maybe have my own TV show, like Flip Wilson. I haven’t decided yet.”
Jamie Francis had a round haircut that Mamma Shirley made by putting a bowl on his head. He also said funny words like “brolly” and “rubbish” instead of “umbrella” and “garbage.” It wasn’t his fault. He was from England. Jamie Francis told Emma that when he was a teenager, he was going to run away and live with a family like the Partridges where everyone could play a musical instrument.
“I just have to get the chords right for ‘American Pie’ and then I’m going to learn ‘Come On Get Happy’.” He told Emma he had a picture of David Cassidy under his bed, and when he practiced in his room, he opened it up and sang to him. Emma didn’t say anything at all, but Jamie Francis didn’t care. He talked to her like he was alone, not like she was someone.
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