Yesterday

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  ALSO BY C. K. KELLY MARTIN

  I Know It’s Over

  The Lighter Side of Life and Death

  My Beating Teenage Heart

  One Lonely Degree

  Copyright © 2012 C. K. Kelly Martin

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Martin, C. K. Kelly

  Yesterday / C.K. Kelly Martin.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-66846-0

  I. Title.

  PS8626.A76922Y48 2012 jC813′.6 C2012-902374-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket art: photograph of cityscape © Konishkichen Artwork/Flickr Select/Getty Images; photograph of girl © Rich Legg/Vetta/Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my mom and dad, who took my brother and me down to Philadelphia for Live Aid in 1985 because they knew how important the music was to us. Thanks for always getting it!

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice.

  —The Smiths, “Reel Around the Fountain”

  He who controls the present controls the past.

  He who controls the past controls the future.

  —George Orwell

  PROLOGUE

  When I’ve wailed for so long and so hard that my throat is in shreds and my fingernails ripped and fingertips bloody from clawing at the door, I collapse in front of it curled up like a dead cat I saw on an otherwise spotless sidewalk as a child once. The cat’s fur was matted with dried streaks of deep red but mercifully its eyes were shut. Its fetal position posture looked like a cruel joke—a feeble attempt to shield itself from a threat it couldn’t outrun and couldn’t fight.

  I’d never seen anything as grisly in real life, and Joanna, my minder and my parents’ house servant, pulled me swiftly away from it with one hand, her other cupped to the side of my face in an attempt to obscure my view. But you can’t unsee something once you’ve seen it. Not without a memory wipe anyway.

  Joanna wouldn’t remember that dead cat anymore but I haven’t forgotten. I remember more than most people, it seems. Like that Latham hasn’t stopped being my brother just because he’s sick. The biologists will find a cure for him and the others any day now, and I can’t believe my father, with all his power and influence, could allow his only son to be taken from him—from us—to be extinguished forever.

  Latham was right. My father isn’t any good. He only pretended and I was too naive and weak to want to see through his act. Until now.

  The anger churning inside me raises me to my knees again, my fingers scraping the bloodied door of my bedroom as I shout, in a voice as hoarse and unforgiving as your worst memory, “Murderer. Latham’s blood is on your hands.”

  I tried begging my father for hours before this. Daddy, don’t let them do it. Make them hold on to Latham until there’s a cure.

  There’s always a cure.…

  You said you wouldn’t ever let anything hurt us. You boasted that this was the best country in the world and that you were almost as powerful as the president herself.

  But no matter how I pleaded or railed, my father and mother stayed mute downstairs. Their silence was deafening. It screamed that I was the only one who believes there’s nothing more important than saving Latham. The one who doesn’t merely remember more than most people, but knows more than the majority of them too.

  Sometimes I know things before they happen. For all the biologists’ knowledge, that’s something they can’t fully explain, and as I sink to the ground again, shrieking that I hate my father and mother with all my heart and that they should hate themselves for this too, I see, in a secret sliver of my mind, the SecRos coming for me, dispassionate and unrelenting.

  My parents must have sent for them and they’ll be here soon.

  Any minute now.

  I scramble to my feet, exhausted but frantic, and scan the room for some means of escape or at least something to defend myself with. There’s nothing … nothing. My parents already have me on lockdown, a force field encasing my bedroom. I might as well be trapped inside a steel box with only my bare fists to defend myself against unyielding machines.

  I was never someone who worried about the SecRos’ strength and what it can steal from those of us who are flesh and blood; I believed they existed to keep us safe and were only following orders that someone else would have to obey in their place. It turns out that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, but not about Latham. How can he and the others possibly be any threat if they’re locked away? He only needs more time. Surely an antidote must be nearly within reach.

  But there’s no time for my conjecture now either. I do the only thing I can think of to conceal myself—I tear one of the sheets from my bed and fix the quilt over it. Then I slide underneath my bed clutching the sheet and wait for the SecRos to arrive.

  First, there’s a knock. From the other side of the door my father says in a reedy voice, “This is for your own good, Freya. No one’s going to hurt you, I promise. Please trust me on that much.”

  I don’t reply. The time of talking things over was finished the second he let them take my brother.

  I hear the door swing open and see my father’s shoes from my place under the bed, then the black boots of the SecRos entering my bedroom. I don’t have the luxury of a moment’s hesitation, I’m hauling myself forward in a flash, out from under the bed, my wounded fingers gripping the sheet. I toss it out ahead of me, unfurling it like a picnic blanket in an old-time movie, only higher and more furiously.

  The SecRos are fast but they’ve probably never had anyone throw anything as ridiculous as a sheet at them before, and while the two of them are untangling themselves, as my father numbly watches, I sprint out the open doorway and into the arms of a third SecRo. His hands clamp on to my arms; he swings me into the air like I’m no heavier than the sheet his fellow Ros had to fight their way out from under. My fists pound at his arms, my fingers scraping at his sleeves and underneath to the flesh that isn’t really flesh. I ki
ck his pelvis—hard enough, I’m sure, to bring a human male to his knees. The SecRo feels no pain. He stares blankly into my eyes and then past me, to my father.

  “Instructions, sir?” the SecRo asks as my limbs flail.

  “Just go,” my father commands. “Take them now. Escorting them to the destination is your highest priority, you understand?”

  “We understand,” the SecRos reply in unison.

  The SecRo who has ahold of me marches through the upper hallway, flanked by the other two SecRos, one ahead of us now and one behind. Downstairs my mother joins us, her face waxy and her hair lank. “Where are they taking me?” I ask, ready to beg one last time. “Don’t let them take me, Mom.”

  “Us,” my mother corrects. “They’re taking us.”

  Us?

  “Evacuation,” she continues as the SecRo carts me outdoors into the rain, my mother a step behind us. “Stop struggling and save your energy, Freya.”

  I watch her climb willingly into the military vehicle parked in front of the 152-year-old house she has always professed to love but doesn’t stop to look back at. The first SecRo climbs in after her, and the one holding me passes me inside, where the waiting SecRo grips my arms. They ache in a way that tells me the SecRos’ tenacious hold is leaving bruises, not that they’d care about that—bruises heal quickly, and they’re under orders.

  “What do you mean?” I ask my mother.

  “The Toxo,” she says listlessly. “They expect it to spread quickly.”

  Then they aren’t close to a cure after all. There’s no chance for Latham. Maybe what was left of him has already been extinguished. I begin to cry again, silently this time, as we pull away from the house. I stare at the upper window that was Latham’s for our whole lives and suddenly I spy something else in that secret sliver of my brain, something my mother hasn’t told me yet. A dark void that stretches beyond the edges of my existence.

  “Where are they taking us?” I ask, my voice breaking in exhaustion. Dread erupts onto my skin in the form of goose bumps. “What’s happening?”

  Too late. It’s already done. I didn’t see the needle coming and now the SecRo is pulling it out of my arm, its former contents swimming into my bloodstream.

  Tired.

  No. Hold up your head. Don’t give in.

  So tired.

  Latham’s swimming inside my head now too. Remember me, he whispers, his voice strangled but his eyes still his own.

  I will, Latham. I promise.

  I close my eyes, unable to feel my body any longer. There’s nothing but the two of us, Latham and me, and the promise I make him again and again as I slip away from consciousness and towards the void that will seek to strip me of everything I am in the name of salvation.

  ONE

  When I wake up I have a pounding headache behind my eyes just like I’ve had every morning lately. At first my eyelids refuse to open fully, and when they do the weak winter light wafting through my window burns my retinas. My brain feels sluggish and confused as I take in my surroundings: the white chest of drawers and matching mirror across from my bed; a collection of freshly laundered clothes folded neatly on top of the dresser, waiting for me to put them away; and a wooden desk with an open fashion magazine lying across it. Sometimes it takes me ten seconds or so to remember where I am and what’s brought me here … and as soon as I remember I want to forget again.

  My mom says the headache’s probably a remnant from the bad flu we all caught flying back from New Zealand, but the other day I overheard her friend Nancy whisper, as the two of them peeled potatoes in the kitchen, that it could be a grief headache. The kind that strikes when you suddenly lose your father to a gas explosion and the three-quarters of you left in the family have to move back to a place you barely remember.

  Today is unlike the other days since we’ve been back because today I start school here. A Canadian high school with regular Canadian kids whose fathers didn’t die in explosions in a foreign country.

  I’ve gone to school in Hong Kong, Argentina, Spain and most recently New Zealand, but Canada—the country where I was born—is the one that feels alien. When my grandfather hugged us each in turn at the airport, murmuring “Welcome home,” I felt as though I was in the arms of a stranger. His watery blue eyes, hawklike nose and lined forehead looked just how I remembered, yet he was different in a way I couldn’t pinpoint. And it wasn’t only him. Everything was different—more dynamic and distinct than the images in my head. Crisp. Limitless.

  The shock, probably. The shock and the grief. I’m not myself.

  I squint as I kick off the bedcovers, knowing that the headache will dull once I’ve eaten something. While I’m dragging myself down to the kitchen, the voices of my mother and ten-year-old sister flit towards me.

  “I feel hot,” Olivia complains. “Maybe I shouldn’t go today. What if I’m still contagious?”

  My mother humors Olivia and stretches her palm along her forehead as I shuffle into the kitchen. “You’re not hot,” she replies, her gaze flicking over to me. “You’ll be fine. It’s probably just new-school jitters.”

  Olivia glances my way too, her spoon poised to slip back into her cereal. Her top teeth scrape over her bottom lip as she dips her spoon into her cornflakes and slowly stirs. “I’m not nervous. I just don’t want to go.”

  I don’t want to go either.

  I want to devour last night’s cold pizza leftovers and then lie in front of the TV watching Three’s Company, Leave It to Beaver or whatever dumb repeat I can find. All day long. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  “Morning, Freya,” my mother says.

  I squeeze past her and dig into the fridge for last night’s dinner. “Morning,” I mumble to the refrigerator shelves.

  “They’re behind the margarine and under the bacon,” my mother advises.

  And they are. I pinch the Saran Wrap–covered slices between my fingers and let the fridge door swing shut. Then I plop myself into the seat next to Olivia’s, although she’s junked up my table space with her pencil case and assorted school stuff. I could sit in my father’s place, which is junk-free, but nobody except Nancy or my grandfather has used his seat since he died. This isn’t even the same table that we had in New Zealand, but still Olivia, Mom and I always leave a chair for my dad.

  If he were here now he’d be rushing around with a mug of coffee, looking for his car keys and throwing on his blazer. You’d think a diplomat would be more organized but my father was always in danger of being late. He was brilliant, though. One of the smartest people you’d ever meet. Everyone said so.

  I shove Olivia’s school junk aside and cram cold pizza into my mouth with the speed of someone who expects to have it snatched from her hand. My mother shakes her head at me and says, “You’re going to choke on that if you don’t slow down.”

  I thought sadness normally killed appetite but for me it’s been the opposite. There are three things I can’t get enough of lately: sleep, food, television.

  I roll my eyes at my mother and chew noisily but with forced slowness. Today’s also a first for her—her first day at the new administrative job Nancy fixed her up with at Sheridan College—but my mother doesn’t seem nervous, only muted, like a washed-out version of the person she was when my father was alive. That’s the grief too, and one of the most unsettling things about it is that it drags you into a fog that makes the past seem like something you saw in a movie and the present nearly as fictional.

  I don’t feel like I belong in my own life. Not the one here with Olivia and my mom but not the old one in New Zealand either. My father’s death has hollowed me out inside.

  No matter how I happen to feel about things, though, I have to go to school. After breakfast Mom drives Olivia to hers on the way to work but since mine is only a couple of blocks away and begins fifteen minutes later I have to walk.

  Fresh snow is falling as I trek away from my house and it makes the otherwise bland suburban neighborhood look almost pretty. I gue
ss I should be cold, jumping from New Zealand summer to Canadian winter, but I really don’t mind. My lungs like the cool air. It feels clean.

  In minutes I’m at Sir John A. MacDonald High School, stalling at the main entrance with a single snowy binder under my arm because I still don’t want to go in. If I thought I’d get away with it I’d double back to the house, root through the kitchen cupboards for something else to eat and then lie on the couch for so long that I’d begin to grow moss. It’s not that I don’t want to go to school specifically; it’s that I don’t want to have to do much of anything.

  As I’m hesitating at the door, watching bored-looking teenagers file inside, a blond boy in a blue coat and red winter hat does a double take and stops next to me. “Are you coming in?” he asks with a smile that reveals his braces.

  I shrug and trail him to the door. He goes first but holds it open for me. “Thanks,” I tell him, and I guess I must look disoriented because he says, “So, new student?”

  “That obvious, huh?” I pull off my gloves and try to smile.

  The boy cocks his head. “Do you know what room you’re heading to?”

  “One fourteen.”

  “Easy,” he proclaims, yanking off his hat. “It’s right beside the music room. I can show you.”

  I follow the boy down the hall, around the corner and up a second hallway and when we arrive at 114 I stare down at my boots and coat realizing I should’ve stopped to put them in the locker they assigned me when my mother got me signed up for school last week.

  I tell the boy this, frustration rolling around in the back of my throat, but he patiently offers to take me to my locker too. The narrow sameness of the hallways (off-white walls punctuated by row after row of faded green lockers) makes me feel vaguely claustrophobic—I preferred it outside in the open air, though I guess I’ll get used to it. School is school. At my locker (which is midway between the gymnasium and the guidance office) I thank the boy again and he says, “No problem” and then, “What grade are you in anyway?”