Emma watched him, thinking two things almost at the same time. One was that Lester said “son of a gun,” which was sort of funny, and made him sound like an old man. The other was that she hoped there was nothing really wrong with him, and how terrible it would be to find him after all this time, only to have him drop dead right in front of her.
“Don’t talk. Just give yourself a minute first, okay.”
Lester nodded his head, and they both smiled. It was just like old times, Emma telling Lester what to do and Lester trusting Emma enough to comply without thinking. Finally Lester caught his breath.
“I was supposed to be on the field today. I go to Riverdale now, eh? But the coach pulled me. Said I had to take it easy,” Lester said.
“Oh, too bad that you didn’t get to play,” Emma said.
“Ah, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit. I’d rather be out somewhere taking pictures. Photography. That’s what I really like. But my stupid-ass foster dad makes me play football. Turns out I’m good at it. I try to win for the team. They’re good guys. I’m not here for me, that’s for sure.”
“Why does your foster dad want you to play football?” Emma tried to imagine Lester living anywhere other than Columbia Street.
“He thinks that athletics are the only way I’ll get into university. I’m like his pet fucking project. I think that’s why he adopted me after his wife died. She used to be my foster mom. She was amazing.” Lester stopped for minute, like he wasn’t going to say anymore, but then changed his mind. “He didn’t know what to do with himself, and I became his distraction. Then he got the job out here, and he decided that we’d start a new life where I’d get to live out all his high school fantasies.” Lester laughed, shaking his head. “He’s not all bad though, and I kinda feel bad for him about losing his wife. Marie, that was her name.”
Lester sat down on the bench next to Emma. He kept his eyes down for a moment, then looked up and out over the field.
“I don’t have the heart to tell him I hate football, but as soon as I graduate, I’m outta here. Forget this school crap. I’m going to go shoot pictures for National Geographic.”
Emma didn’t know what to say. There were too many questions, too many stories to tell, too much time to make up for. Not enough words.
“Hey, how did it go with your birth mom? How did you end up here?” Lester asked Emma, sitting down in the bleachers next to her.
“Well, after I left Foster’s, it was weird at first,” she said. “I remember it was the middle of the day when I left the house that last time. The social worker told Mamma Shirley that they would come to get me after dinner, but my birthmother came by herself instead. You guys were all at school, and the doorbell rings and it was this lady, and her and Just Jack sat together in the kitchen drinking beer all afternoon. I thought she was one of his friends at first, but it turned out it was Wanda. That’s her name. I never called her Mom or anything.” Emma stopped, and looked at Lester before continuing. What if he had changed? What if he was mean now, or made fun of her?
“What else, Emma?” he asked, his voice gentle.
“Well, after I left with her, I realized that she was like this total stranger, but then like someone I knew too. I’d look at her face, and it was like I could see parts of my own face in there with hers. It was really strange, that and the way Wanda was like a bunch of different people all rolled into one. Sometimes she’d be like a normal grown up, and then sometimes she’d act like a little kid and say stuff that didn’t make any sense. We went to live in this house in Kitsilano by the beach with a bunch of hippies. I was the only kid. Talk about feeling like a pet. Nobody had jobs or hardly ever even bothered to wear shoes. And they all smoked pot a lot, and played drums in a big circle in the backyard.” As Emma spoke, she realized that it was the first time she had ever told anyone about those days with Wanda. It was also the first time anyone ever asked. “Then we came here, and went to live with Wanda’s mother and Rachel. That’s her daughter. My half-sister. She’s head of the stupid student council. Wanda stuck around for a while, and then she just took off and left us with Grandma. I have a brother too, Sam, but he moved out.”
“What a trip,” Lester said. “The house in Kitsilano sounds kinda cool. Too bad you guys had to leave BC.”
“Yeah, I guess sometimes it was okay there,” Emma confessed. “But then you never knew when dinner would be, or even if there would be enough food sometimes. I remember us running out of stuff a lot. And a couple of times they turned all the electricity off because nobody paid the bill. It reminded me of when I was really little, the bits of memories I have about the time before I went to Foster’s. I remember feeling scared then too. It wasn’t all good.”
“Wow,” Lester repeated, grabbing at his chest again.
“Lester you gotta get that looked at okay? Like by a doctor.”
“It’s fine. I get hit all the time,” Lester said.
Emma had a bad feeling about the look on Lester’s face. There was something about the way the light around him wavered every time the pain seemed to hit.
“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me that if you don’t feel better by the time you get home today that you’ll get your foster dad or somebody to take you to a doctor.”
Lester looked up into Emma’s eyes, and she saw the same look of love, fear and gratitude that she remembered seeing on his face when they were both little kids. Only this time, there was that darkness around his eyes that made Emma wonder what else had happened to him all this time they had been apart.
“I promise, Emma,” he said. “If I don’t feel better, I’ll go.”
After making his promise, Emma took a pen and paper from her bag so the two could exchange phone numbers.
Lester called Emma the next day after school. As soon as the phone rang, she knew it would be him.
“You saved my life,” Lester’s voice was solemn on the other end of the line.
“What do you mean?” Emma asked, only briefly noting that neither of them had even said hello.
“I did what you said. By the time I got home, the pain was worse, so I got my foster dad to take me to the hospital. You know what the doctor said?”
Emma shook her head.
“They did an X-ray, and told me that if I hadn’t come in when I did, I wouldn’t have been able to breathe at all after a while. I had a collapsed lung. Can you friggin’ believe it? They had to put a tube in my chest to suck out all the extra air. They say I have to stay in at least one more day.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Emma said
“I’m glad I listened to you. I thought it would just go away. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead right now. You knew it was bad, didn’t you?”
Emma nodded.
“And you know what, Emma?” Lester continued. “Maybe four years ago I wouldn’t have minded dying, when I was in the last place, the place after Foster’s house, before I met my dad. But now … I mean, my dad now is a bit of a control freak and everything, but for the last three years…” Lester’s voice cracked. Emma didn’t have to see him to know there were tears in his eyes. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been happy, but for the first time I’ve felt, you know, normal.”
“Yeah, I get that, Lester. The last place was bad eh? I think I know what you mean.”
“I don’t really think you do, Emma, but that’s okay. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Lester laughed. “Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. But what I do know for sure is that I’m glad I’m not dead.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead too,” Emma said, hoping he would hear the smile in her voice.
“Thanks, Emma. For everything. I’ll call you again soon okay?”
“Okay,” Emma said, and then added, “I’ll be here,” but it was too late. The line had gone dead.
30.
LESTER WAS TALKING AGAIN. Tal
king, talking, talking, talking. The talking never stopped. And it was pointless, long, and meandering. At least when he was still doing coke he’d sleep for days at a time, but it had been weeks since he’d been clean, and he was getting restless. Rachel just hoped that he waited until she finished her paper before he decided to break up with her. She didn’t have time for the distraction; she had a GPA to keep up. The competition at the University of Toronto was fierce, and without a full scholarship, there was no way Rachel would be able to afford the luxury of her own place.
The pieces of her new futon bed-frame lay scattered on the floor. The mattress was flat on the ground, waiting for its home.
“You know this whole futon thing is just marketing, don’t you,” he said. “Futons. I mean who ever heard of futons ten years ago? Nobody, that’s who. And you know why? Because they’re crap. Total shit to sleep on. They’re fluffy for about a week, and then, if you sweat on them like once, it’s like sleeping on a camping mat.”
“Yes, okay Lester,” Rachel said, reading the instructions, or at least trying to. Her eyes saw the words, and tried to send their meaning to her brain, but she couldn’t think, not with Lester’s voice booming as he paced the floor behind her. Of course, the futon had been her idea. And, of course, she had been the one to pay for it. “I’ll get you back, Rach,” is all he had said. Rachel had never asked when that would be. She’d known better. She had known, when he showed up at her apartment that day that if she took him in, she’d be paying his way. She’d known she’d have to take care of him. Feed him. Keep him like a pet. But he had kept his part of the bargain. He had gone to detox. So far, he’d kept his promises.
“Not that I have anything against camping mats. I went all over Thailand sleeping on one of those things. You know there’s something very healthy about sleeping on the ground, Rachel. Sleeping under the stars in a little two-person pop up tent. That’s all I had for three months, just whatever could fit into my backpack. I thought Emma was going to come too.” Lester stopped pacing, and flopped down on the futon.
Rachel tried to turn her ears off and focus. She tried to pretend Lester was speaking a foreign language, but it didn’t work; his words still somehow found their way into her brain. Emma. Emma again. No matter where he started, Lester always made his way back to Emma.
He shifted from lying on his back, to his side, propping himself up on his elbow to face Rachel, where she sat hunched over the instruction sheet. The assorted screws and bolts were arranged neatly on top of the square plastic bags they came in, bags that Rachel had sliced open with an X-acto knife.
“I mean she never said for sure she’d come with me,” Lester continued. “But I just figured she’d be willing to get away for like at least a few weeks. But no, it was always the band. The fucking band. You know what, Rachel?” Lester said, his voice begging her to turn and face him. She refused and focused on the instructions.
“They’re not even that good. I mean, Jamie Francis, he’s half-decent on the guitar, I’ll give him that, but Emma. Well, her songs don’t really make any sense. It’s just Emma talk you know. Emma talk from Emma land, and she thinks she’s being all enlightening and everything, but really, nobody besides me knows what the fuck she’s talking about. Not that I’d ever tell her that, mind you. You know how sensitive she is. So, no, I was just the dutiful boyfriend. Lester, can you drive me to my gig? Lester, can you run home and pick up my lyrics sheets? I mean, fuck, lyrics sheets! What the fuck? When is the last time you saw the lead singer of a punk band read their lyrics from a piece of paper? But no, she’d just say that it was fusion. That’s what she called it. And that name? Koko and the Talking Apes? I mean, what the fuck kind of name for a band is that?”
Rachel had begun putting the screws into the appropriate slots. But something was wrong. The legs were uneven. The frame wouldn’t bend into the L shape of a couch. She had done it wrong. Back to the instruction sheet. A into slot B. C into –
“Okay, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea in theory. I mean, okay, the folk music of the sixties, like Bob Dylan and even Joni Mitchell, I mean they were up to something. They wanted to change shit. And punk was trying to do that too. I mean, the whole Sex Pistols, ‘God Save the Queen’ – was revolutionary, sure. But, I mean, it was still the eighties for Chrissake, everyone was listening to Cyndi Lauper and Bananarama the Go-Go’s. Nobody wanted to hear that whole Velvet Underground bummer vibe anymore.
And Emma just doesn’t have the edge to pull off an Exene Cervenka or Lene Lovich kind of persona. It’s not like she’s doing some melodic Laurie Anderson thing, it’s just noise. And Jamie Francis can play. I don’t see why she doesn’t just let him, instead of forcing everyone in the band to do that experimental bullshit. It’s just a lot of wanking-off.”
Lester sat on the edge of the bed, facing Rachel and making gestures that alternated between masturbation and air guitar. Rachel refused to look. “And there she is, singing off-key and jingling that fucking tambourine. And then, all of a sudden, in the middle of the set, like say, just after some really hard-core song, you know? When the energy is going, and the mosh pit is rocking – at that fucking moment, she’d decide to pull out some stupid journal or piece of paper and start reading her poetry. Jamie Francis? You could see he was pissed.” Lester got up off the futon, and sat next to Rachel. He picked up the X-acto knife and began poking the tip into a crack in the hardwood floor.
“Lester, I gotta get this thing together. I have to get back to my paper. I haven’t even started, and it’s due in two weeks.” Rachel looked at him. He dropped the X-acto knife and smiled. He went back to the futon, laid down on his back, and looked at the ceiling.
“Not that I don’t think it’s any good. I do. Especially that one about the beginning of the universe, where she goes all crazy in the end and starts riffing off T. S. Eliot. That one almost works when she does it with the band. You’d like that one Rach, it’s got cosmology in it. I know you dig the stars. I remember when we were back at school you were always up in your room staring off into that telescope. I thought you wanted to be an astronomer. You still have that thing?”
Rachel took a deep breath, and put her hands on her hips. “Listen, Lester, I…”
“I mean as poetry, her writing is pretty good. It just doesn’t work as song lyrics. It’s too cryptic, and besides the structure’s all wrong. None of her pieces even have a chorus. I’m the one who always said that she should write a book,” Lester continued, oblivious. “You know, get her stuff published properly. Why not? She could get a book deal. Have some money coming in. Get her name out there. You know?”
And after the paper was due, there’d be midterms. Paper first, though. If she could get the bloody bed together and put in a good three hours of research before she called it a night, there might be a chance to wrap her head around it in the next week. Then three days to write it, four more to edit. The paper was for Nonlinear Equations. Not her best course. Still, there was hope. If he would just shut up for a minute.
Lester was back to standing now and fixing his hair in the mirror she had hung on the wall above the dresser.
“Do you think I should let it grow? I know you like the clean-cut look, but I think it frames my face better when it’s longer. Ha! Jamie Francis. Back when we all lived at Foster’s – at the house in BC – he used to use a bowl to cut his hair. Going for that whole early Beatles look or something. Emma and I used to laugh!”
Rachel went back to the instructions, but she couldn’t focus. She was thinking about her paper again. Too bad it wasn’t on Shallow Crust Geophysics because then she could use Lester for research. She stifled a laugh, frowned. It was her own fault. It had been her idea to move in together. He’d been all for it, once she tallied up the money he’d save. And she had really wanted to help him get clean and back on his feet. He was a talented photographer and had just started to get some gallery interest when he first tried cocaine. “It was st
upid,” he had told her. “Emma had broken up with me again. She totally cut me off this time. Wouldn’t even take my calls. I just wanted to feel good, you know?” Rachel didn’t usually have such a soft spot for a sob story, but she thought she’d try to help. At first he slept on the couch. That didn’t last long.
But what about her? It’s not like she was taking Liberal Arts or something. She was a fourth year physics student for god’s sakes, with a paper due in less than two weeks, that she hadn’t even started. Instead, there she was, on her knees listening to her sister’s cast-off, newly-ex coke-head boyfriend, giving her a lesson on the best way to present poetry as the love child of Joni Mitchell and Johnny Rotten. How had this happened?
Lester turned from the mirror.
“You got that eh, Rach? I’m going to go have a smoke. I know you don’t want me to smoke inside.”
Then he gave her the smile. The little boy smile. The high-school-cream-her-jeans smile. He knew the effect he had on her. She wondered if he practised in front of the mirror when she wasn’t home.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure Lester. Go. I got it.”
Lester walked over to where she kneeled, oblivious as his bare foot kicked her carefully arranged nuts and bolts toward the wall. He kissed her on the head.
“You know why I love you, Rach?” he asked, standing over her now. “Because you don’t nag. Don’t try to control me. You let me make my own decisions, you know. Like detox. You let it be my idea. Emma always tried to force me to do what she thought I should do. Always thought she knew best. No wonder it never worked with her. I needed a partner, not a mother, you know? But you. You just let me be, Rach. I love you for that,” he said as he turned on his heels and headed out the door.
31.
Over Our Heads Page 20
