Yesterday

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  For the next while I patrol the street in this way. Drifting up one side of the road and then coasting down the other, avoiding the eyes of the pedestrians who stroll past but keeping a vigilant watch on the mystery guy’s house. Only when two red-haired children, a skinny boy and rosy-cheeked girl who must be walking home from school, zip past me do I think about the time and where I’m supposed to be.

  It’s ten minutes to three and the Sir John A. MacDonald buses were scheduled to leave the museum at 2:30. I’ve missed my ride home.

  I’ve missed the bus to Brampton and I’ve been trekking around Toronto with a raging case of temporary insanity. No, temporary would mean it was over with, and I still don’t want to leave Walmer Road. I’ve pulled just far enough out from the spell I’ve been under to realize I have to go. No matter what I think I know, I can’t pace the sidewalk outside his door forever.

  I point one final stare at the boy’s house before retracing my steps back to Spadina and then Bloor Street. The museum hasn’t gone anywhere. Neither has the hotdog vendor. However, the school buses are nowhere in sight.

  I slink guiltily into the museum lobby, pondering my situation. I’m too old to embarrass myself by approaching the museum staff like a lost seven-year-old but there’s only one location I know how to find from here and that knowledge won’t help me now.

  My fingers fumble for a quarter in my pocket. Then I scan the lobby for a pay phone and dial home. Olivia’s usually only in the house alone for about fifteen minutes after school and I hope she doesn’t freak out when she hears I won’t be there soon.

  Initially I figure my mom will have to pick me up once she’s finished work but by the time Olivia picks up on the third ring I have a better idea and after explaining about missing the bus I ask her for my grandfather’s phone number. His and Nancy’s numbers are both stuck to the front of our refrigerator and when Olivia comes back on the line to recite his number I tell her to make sure the front door’s locked and not to open it for anyone.

  “I won’t,” she says. “Do you have Mom’s work number in case Grandpa isn’t home?”

  She gives me that number too. I scribble it down but it turns out I don’t need it; my grandfather’s at the museum to pick me up within twenty minutes. He smiles at me, making his wrinkles pop, as he ambles into the lobby with a long red scarf wrapped around his neck and says, “You’re lucky you caught me at home. I just got in from Cooke’s place.”

  His friend Cooke is in bad health and so is Cooke’s wife. My grandfather spends lots of time helping them out—running them over to church, doctor’s visits and the grocery store. Nearly every time we see my grandfather he makes some mention of Cooke.

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” I tell him. “I thought I might have to wait for Mom.”

  “Glad to do it,” my grandfather says heartily. “But how’d you manage to miss the bus? Isn’t the school supposed to keep track of you while you’re on a field trip?”

  “I was in the bathroom,” I lie. “I wasn’t feeling well. I guess someone screwed up the head count.”

  My grandfather purses his lips, his eyebrows pointy with suspicion. “Are you having more of those headaches?”

  I’m a step ahead of my grandfather, ready with another lie. “No—not that. Women’s stuff.”

  This is a surefire way to steer my grandfather away from the topic of headaches and another visit to Doctor Byrne. Men my grandfather’s age generally don’t like to hear about periods.

  A quizzical look, which I interpret as discomfort, clouds his face. “Let’s get you home before it snows again, Freya,” he declares. “The forecast says there’ll be quite a bit of it tonight.”

  We trudge out of the lobby together and towards my grandfather’s car nestled at the curbside, my thoughts back on Walmer Road with the boy who’s a complete stranger to me yet feels so much more familiar than my flesh-and-blood grandfather.

  FOUR

  What I want to do is sit quietly by myself and churn it all over in my mind until I figure it out. Peel back the layers and unravel the core mystery of what happened today. The dark-haired boy haunts me in the car trip with my grandfather and once we’re home he haunts me throughout my mom’s rant about the school being neglectful and irresponsible in abandoning me at the museum. When my mother says she’ll call tomorrow and let them know leaving me in Toronto to fend for myself was totally unacceptable, I don’t argue. It would’ve been worse if one of the trip supervisors had noticed my absence on the bus, begun a search (how would I account for leaving the museum?) and raised the alarm. If any of that had happened they’d have alerted my mother, so it seems I fell through the cracks. Their neglect was my good fortune.

  My grandfather leaves before dinner, wanting to beat the snow, and when my mother, Olivia and I are eating lamb at the table later, the phone rings, breaking the silence. My mom reaches for it, her cheeks flaring as if she’s expecting to hear a school official on the other end and is eager to tear a strip off them. Mom’s anger is usually subtler than my father’s but I instinctively suck in my cheeks, like I’ve tasted something sour. Tension prickles under my skin.

  Then my mother presses the receiver to her ear and I begin to relax as I watch her face soften. “I’ll have her call you back if that’s all right,” she says into the phone. “We’re just in the middle of dinner.”

  She hangs up, announcing, “That was Christine for you, Freya.”

  I thank her as the boy from earlier keeps blinking his green eyes inside my head, trying to tell me something I should already know.

  I envision him in the old brick house with the pale blue trim and try to imagine what he might be doing there this very second. His parents could be home from work now. He might be eating dinner with them. Will he be hungry despite the hotdog he inhaled, practically in one piece, earlier? Is he in high school like me or has he already graduated? What does he do with his spare time? What does he want to be? Does he ever think about mass extinction?

  Do I know him like I think I do? How is that possible?

  Nothing concrete happened today—I didn’t even speak to the boy—but just seeing him has changed things and I’m so swept up in him that I almost forget about returning Christine’s call. It’s my mother who reminds me when I pass her in the upstairs hallway just before eight o’clock.

  “What happened to you at the museum?” Christine wants to know once I have her on the phone. “You never came back. Are you ditching us like you ditched Seth?”

  “Of course not.” It never occurred to me that she and Derrick might think I didn’t want to hang out with them at the museum. Since the three of us were assigned different buses I guess they didn’t have a clue I wasn’t on mine when it left.

  “Just kidding,” Christine claims. “So what did happen?”

  I tell her that I fell asleep in the cafeteria and that I must have some kind of twenty-four-hour bug because I still feel sort of groggy. As I’m explaining about missing the bus I hear a female voice in the background mumble something about popcorn. “In a few minutes, Mom,” Christine replies. “I’m on the phone.”

  “How is your mom anyway?” I’m glad to have the focus off me but that’s not the only reason I’m asking. I really do want Christine to feel like we can talk. Behind those concerns a large portion of my brain is still obsessing about the guy on Walmer Road and I tighten my grip on the phone and begin pacing my room, restless like a caged thing.

  Christine hesitates. “She’s okay.” Christine drops her voice to a feathery whisper. “She … it was just a panic attack. She’s been under a lot of stress because she …”

  I stop walking and give Christine my full attention.

  “She … lost her job last summer.”

  People never know the right thing to say when they hear I lost my father and I don’t know the right thing now but at least Christine’s mother is still around. “I’m glad she’s all right,” I venture. “So … you two are watching a movie? I heard her say some
thing about popcorn.” From what I do know of Christine she wouldn’t want me to feel sorry for her.

  Christine’s tone brightens. “She’s a total popcorn nut. If she has to go more than two nights in a row without it she has to rush out to the supermarket. But anyway, we were just going to watch MacGyver.”

  That sounds nice and I smile into the phone. “Okay, well, I don’t want to make you miss it.”

  “See you tomorrow, then?” Christine asks, because after all, I’m supposed to be sick.

  “Oh. Yeah. I think I’ll be better by then. See you tomorrow.”

  As I hang up I feel an odd flutter of satisfaction in the pit of my stomach. Christine trusts me. But it’s not long before I’m lost in thoughts of the boy on Walmer Road again. If anyone could read my mind I’d be embarrassed. To have trailed a strange boy home and then prowled around his street is beyond simple crush behavior. The rational side of me knows that as well as anyone else would but the other side won’t give way—today it’s in charge.

  As the night wears on I climb into bed where I toss and turn for hours, sleepless, before opening my drapes to stare at the moon overhead. The very same moon that presided over rampaging dinosaurs millions of years ago.

  My mind begins to melt with thoughts of mass extinction, just as it did at the museum earlier. I sweat through my pajama top and have to change into a T-shirt.

  When I curl up in a ball under the covers again, the image of the green-eyed boy feels like comfort. Like home. Calmed, I drift into a dream that feels every bit as real as the majority of my waking life.

  In the dream the world is a different place but the moon is the same, as close to eternal as any of us can comprehend.

  In the dream I live in an old house—a mansion filled with unexplainable objects that I don’t question. Not all of the people within my dreamworld are human. But everywhere, the air is rife with fear and uncertainty.

  In this dream place, which is here but not here, I stare through a looking glass at a tall boy with dirty-blond hair. He’s a close friend or maybe even family, someone I’ve always known. He’s protected me, consoled me. He’s someone I can’t do without but I can’t reach him. The looking glass serves as a fence—it keeps us apart.

  He’s not himself. He snarls at me through the glass, gnashing his teeth as he lunges.

  He detests me. The fire inside him wants to destroy everything. It hates without end and that should scare me but it only makes me sad.

  I’m inconsolable at the thought of living in the world without him. I need him back.

  When I wake up I’m crying like a child. Sobs rack my body and I can’t catch my breath. The noise is loud enough that I’m afraid it will wake my mother or Olivia and I grab my pillow and weep into it. For the blond boy from my dream. For everything my heart feels it’s lost.

  The pain seems bottomless and in my mind, like a looping sound track, I hear the words of Winston Churchill: “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

  On Thursday morning I’m exhausted and my mother has to wake me up three times. On the third occasion she has a glass of orange juice with her and sits on the side of my bed watching me drink it to be sure I’m really getting up.

  My stomach hurts with last night’s sadness but the intensity of feeling that the dream prompted in me is a mystery like so many other things are lately. I’m no longer heartsick, only tired and achy the way children get when they’re coming down from a tantrum or crying jag.

  Downstairs, Olivia stares at me from behind a box of Cocoa Puffs. “They plowed the road already so we have to go to school after all,” she complains.

  “That sucks,” I mumble, although I’d forgotten that last night my mother mentioned classes might be canceled.

  In the light of day my rational side has grown marginally stronger, or maybe it’s only that I’m too sleepy to cling to thoughts of the green-eyed boy with the same tenacity that I did last night. If it was thoughts of him that made me dream the frighteningly vivid way I did, then I need to find a way to mentally put him aside.

  I don’t want to land in that dark place again. The sense of loss was too much to take. It didn’t feel like a dream.

  The blond boy was as familiar to me in my dreamworld as the green-eyed guy seemed to me downtown yesterday but what am I supposed to do with that kind of craziness? Is it the kind of break with reality that could’ve been caused by the shock of my father’s death? Or could a brain tumor be loosening my grip on the real world and dragging me into fantasy?

  I swallow cold cereal and stare blearily at my sister who seems to be adjusting to life in Canada with much more ease than I am. I wait until my mother’s left the kitchen before asking, “Olivia, do you like it here?”

  “It’s okay,” my sister replies with her mouth full. “Do you like it?”

  “I don’t know. It feels different … strange.”

  “Because we were away for so long,” Olivia says sensibly. She brushes her dark bangs off her face and picks up her cereal bowl to drink down the leftover milk. Since Olivia’s six years younger than me we’re not as close as we might have been otherwise but aside from my mother, she’s the only one who’s been through these changes along with me and I don’t want to worry my mom by bringing any of this up to her.

  “I know,” I begin. “But it doesn’t feel as if it’s only because we’ve been living in other countries. Does it ever sort of seem like …” I search for the right words. “Like what’s happening now is more authentic than the way our lives used to be?”

  Olivia sets down her bowl, her eyes sparking with confusion. “What do you mean?”

  My toes jerk against the floor beneath my feet. “Say with Grandpa, right? We saw him on visits home and he came to see us in Auckland but when you think of that—your New Zealand memories of him—does he feel like the same person?”

  Olivia gapes at me as if I’ve either lost my mind or she’s hopelessly misunderstood me but I’ve gone too far to back down. “And your friends in Auckland,” I continue, “the kids you went to school with there—do they seem as complicated and”—I flex the fingers of my right hand, grasping for an idea just beyond reach—“genuine as the kids you go to school with now?”

  Olivia swats at her bangs again and pokes her tongue inside her cheek. “Canadian kids are just different,” she says slowly. “We’re not used to them yet.” She pushes her empty cereal bowl forward a couple of inches and then slides it back towards her. “But Grandpa is the same as he always was. Remember the time he let me drive the boat?” She smiles brightly.

  “I do,” I say. It was just over a year ago but it feels like longer. My dad was busy with work and my grandfather had rented a boat and taken my mom, Olivia and me for a day trip. We were out on the water, about a half hour away from the ramp at Kawakawa Bay, and Olivia was so excited by the speed and the sight of the frothy waves the boat was leaving in its wake that my grandfather asked my mother whether it would be all right to let Olivia take the wheel for a while. Surprisingly, my mother agreed and Olivia turned solemn at the helm, steering good and straight, like she’d done it countless times before. My grandfather let her remain at the helm for at least ten minutes before taking over again.

  I see the pride Olivia felt that day reflected in her face now. “Maybe we can get Grandpa to rent a boat here sometime this summer,” I suggest. “Explore Lake Ontario.”

  I wish I could remember that day in the same way that Olivia’s eyes tell me she can. I remember the fact of it but the memory itself is sterile. Just images, sounds and a transcript of events that didn’t leave any deeper an imprint on me than the latest episode of Knots Landing.

  “Don’t you like Grandpa?” Olivia asks, unwilling to be distracted from my original questions.

  “Of course I do. I think … nothing feels the same after Dad. I can’t
explain it.”

  Olivia sets both her hands on the table, wriggles her fingers and peers worriedly down at them.

  I clear my throat and say, “I miss him. I miss New Zealand. I miss the way everything used to be.” This is far from the whole truth but I don’t want to make my sister anxious. If she’s doing okay, I’m glad for it. “I think it’s just going to take some time for me to settle in here.”

  I yawn like I’m bored with the topic and ready to put it behind us. Then I take our dirty dishes over to the sink and wash them so my mother won’t have to, as if that will make up for the weird things going on inside my head. I wipe down the kitchen counter too and even make my bed, which is something I rarely do, if I can trust my memory at all.

  As pointless as it seems, at school I try to keep my mind on what my various teachers are jotting sloppily down on their blackboards but during English there’s a knock at the classroom door and the vice principal’s standing there in a white shirt and blue tie, asking to speak to me. He apologizes for “what transpired at the museum” as I think to myself that he doesn’t know the half of it.

  At lunch Christine and Derrick want to know if I’m feeling better. I say I’m back to normal but I end up listening to them more than I talk and as the three of us are streaming out of the cafeteria at the end of the period, I find myself within arm’s length of Seth. He pretends I’m invisible and speeds up, breaking away from me.

  It’s how I’d probably act if our situations were reversed so it doesn’t come as a shock but what does surprise me is that at the end of the day one of the guys Nicolette introduced me to at Corey’s party is leaning against my locker scratching at the knee of his black jeans.