Garren’s fingers creep up the back of his neck. For a couple of seconds I wonder whether he’s stopped speaking to me entirely. Then he says, “You mean now? I don’t know. It seems like you want to be the one to call the shots so why don’t you tell me?”
He’s still angry. It makes me want to fight him again because it’s not like I’m doing any of this for fun. I control myself and stare out the window into the pitch-black tunnels we’re hurtling through. Garren’s the only person I can depend on; I shouldn’t argue with him.
“I don’t think we should go back to the house yet,” he adds before a full-fledged silence can take hold between us a second time. “It’s Saturday night—there’ll be more people coming and going, a bigger chance neighbors could spot us heading into the house and if that happens we’re screwed. We’re better off killing a couple of hours somewhere that we can keep a low profile or blend into a crowd.” He drops one of his hands to his thigh and trains his eyes on mine. “So where do you want to go?”
He says that like he really wants to know, almost like the dream Garren, and the feelings I had for him in my sleep bleed through to my consciousness in a way that I’ve been resisting for the past two days. There’s no time to feel like that about anyone. I push the feelings down under my ribs along with the panic and irritation.
“If you know of a theater, the movies could be a good place to hide out for a few hours,” I reply. Once we make it inside no one will be able to recognize us in the dark.
Garren nods and says he knows a couple of places close by. We end up in a line for the Market Square Theatre on Front Street. Being stationary in such a public place makes me edgy. The subway itself seemed womblike in comparison; maybe we should’ve just ridden it until closing time.
As we near the ticket booth I scan for a pay phone and notice one about thirty feet away, by a city trash can. Garren sees my eyes land on the phone booth and reads my mind. “Go do it if you want to that much,” he says resignedly. “I’ll get the tickets.”
I rush towards the phone booth where my fingers fly through the yellow pages. Someone’s torn the pages S through Z out of the book. Fortunately, I don’t need them and I sink a quarter into the phone and call the first hypnotherapy number listed. It rings eight times before I hang up and try the next three numbers with the same result. Being a Saturday night, naturally most of the offices would be closed and I begin searching for listings that don’t have the name “clinic,” “center” or “doctor” attached to them. Someone who’s in business for themselves would be more likely to pick up the phone on a Saturday night.
On my fifth try, to a woman named Barbara Trower, I finally hear the sound of a human voice. When I explain that I need help remembering parts of my life Barbara Trower declares that it sounds like a case for a therapist and that she doesn’t deal in trauma. My spirits plummet. I tell her I don’t have any reason to believe there’s been any abuse but she apologetically declines and advises that I seek a professional recommendation from my doctor.
The next three numbers go unanswered and I’m on my ninth attempt, to someone named Lou Bianchi, when Garren raps against the phone booth with his knuckles and flashes me the movie tickets. I notice they’re for The Breakfast Club, that movie I heard about on the radio.
“Lou Bianchi,” the man on the other end of the line chimes.
I hold up a finger to Garren, then turn my back to him to concentrate on Lou Bianchi. If he’s as principled as Barbara Trower, telling him the truth won’t help me, so I say, in a calm but melancholy voice, that my twin sister died when I was almost five and that my memories of her have faded with age. The loss could be regarded as a kind of trauma too but at least Lou Bianchi won’t suspect I’ve been abused.
“I want to remember our time together,” I plead. “I’ve tried to do it on my own but I can’t. There’s nothing left of her in my conscious mind. Can you help me? I don’t care how much it costs.”
“I charge everyone the same amount,” Lou says evenly. “It’s forty-five dollars a session.”
“And do you think you could help me? I want to do this as soon as possible—tomorrow if you could.” I feel Garren’s stare on my spine and will Lou Bianchi to say yes.
“Oh, no, not tomorrow. I don’t see clients on the weekends. Family time, you understand. But I can squeeze you in on Monday afternoon. One o’clock?”
“One o’clock,” I agree, pretending to write down his address as he offers directions.
The last thing I do before I leave the phone booth is tear the entire hypnotherapy page out of the yellow pages. Then I open the door to meet Garren, hoping to God that he’ll understand about the extra day and that making that judgment call for myself won’t cost our lives.
THIRTEEN
On-screen a teenage redhead is applying lipstick by sticking the tube in her cleavage and then lowering her head to her blouse. The girl reminds me of one of Nicolette’s friends and the second I find myself thinking that, I miss Sir John A. MacDonald High School with a passion, even the stupid parts of it like how everybody hung out in tribes and there was a permanent draft in our English classroom. I miss the morning Derrick and I hung out at the museum together and the day Christine dyed my hair. I miss kidding around with Kyle about Greek myths and how he told me he liked my hair, even though I’d turned him down just the week before.
I wish I’d paid more attention to all of them and I wonder, if I hadn’t seen Garren outside the museum ten days ago, could I eventually have been happy in my new life? It’s a traitorous thing to consider—being happy with a falsity when my father’s been murdered—and I only think it for a moment.
Next to me Garren is quiet, facing the movie screen but not really absorbing the images. I know what he’s thinking without having to ask because I’m thinking most of the same things. That the life we thought we had is in the past. We’ll never see our mothers again. We won’t be able to graduate or get degrees. I’m not sure how we’ll even feed ourselves.
On top of that he’s unhappy about the extra day’s wait to leave town. He didn’t protest when I told him about the Monday afternoon appointment I’d made with Lou Bianchi and that almost made me feel worse than if he had, like he’s either given up on some level or is planning to run off without me during the middle of the night.
By the time the credits have rolled and we’re stepping into the darkness again I’m so anxious to know which scenario I’m dealing with that I come straight out and ask Garren whether he’s going to wait for me or if he thinks his chances are better alone. The city light we’re passing under illuminates his shock. His pupils shine like faraway stars as he says, “If I told you I wouldn’t wait, would you come with me tomorrow?”
I want to say yes but I can’t. “Where?” I ask.
“We should avoid the border—we’re missing persons. So east or west.” He shrugs. “Take your pick.”
I haven’t answered the original question and Garren angles himself away from me and adds, “You do know we ultimately have to go, right? What if this guy can’t tell you anything on Monday? Are you going to shut down on me and go into denial? Because I swear I won’t wait then. If this guy has nothing to say to you I’m not going to sit around while you call up all the hypnotherapists in the yellow pages. This is it.”
“I know.” I nod heavily, my chin pulled close to my chest. “I know.”
Garren tugs up his collar and turns back towards me. “Okay.” He nods too. Then he looks at me like there’s something else, something more. It’s gone so quickly that I have to wonder if I imagined it.
We hop on the subway and ride it back up to Lawrence. The house on Cranbrooke Avenue is the closest thing we have to home now and as we approach it I wheel around on the sidewalk to check whether there’s anyone around to see us step inside. A lone man in a red hooded jacket is ambling along in our wake and I link my arm through Garren’s and pull him closer to warn him that we can’t go in.
We cross the street, my arm
still wrapped around Garren’s like we’re a couple, and slow our pace until the man’s well ahead of us and Cranbrooke Avenue is empty again. Alone on the street, Garren and I make a dash for the house. Inside, we keep running, up the stairs and into the twins’ room where we stare along the avenue wondering if anyone witnessed our return. It’s at least twenty minutes before we begin to feel comfortable.
My stomach begins to grumble as we wait. It reminds me that I’ve only had a waffle, fruit cup and movie popcorn to eat all day long. I tell Garren that I’m going downstairs to eat some instant noodles and peanut butter because if the police show up I don’t want to be arrested on an empty stomach.
“Gourmet combo, instant noodles and peanut butter,” he remarks, smiling for the first time tonight.
“Yeah, I might even splurge and have some crackers,” I joke.
Garren moves away from the window. I can still make out his smile in the moonlight. “I’m coming with you to make sure you don’t polish off the entire box.”
It’s a relief to be kidding around with him again. I feel the tension of the last couple days begin to invert, turning me giddy. “Just try to stop me,” I say. “I’m thinking of breaking out the Kool-Aid too. Pickles. Cereal. A complete feast.”
Garren laughs as we step into the hallway, each of us armed with a flashlight. “We should order pizza. Then we’ll find out if anyone on this street really takes the words ‘neighborhood watch’ seriously.”
“It could be worth it if we got to finish the pizza first.” I’m grinning so wide that it seems as though my cheeks could snap like a rubber band and go boomeranging around the room.
Down in the kitchen I pull the pickles out of the fridge first. I chomp into one as Garren and I construct imaginary pizza orders. His all have pepperoni on them but he doesn’t like anchovies or pineapple, which I’m fanatical about, and when I find out he doesn’t like olives either I declare, “Okay, there’s absolute proof we’re not related because my mom, dad and I are all olive fiends.”
“What about your sister?” Garren asks. He’s taken out the Cheez Whiz and is smearing a stack of crackers with glowing orange.
I consider that for several seconds. Olivia loves chocolate (doesn’t everyone?), scrambled eggs, pierogies, baked beans, mashed potatoes, bananas, pears and grapes, but as for olives, I can’t remember one way or the other. I’ve supposedly known her for her entire life, yet olives have never come up. “I don’t know. You’d think I would but …”
Garren pauses, poised to tackle another cracker. “That doesn’t mean anything, you know. It’s normal not to remember every single thing about someone.”
“But not normal to forget whether you’ve done certain things or not.” I explain about not knowing whether I’ve ever been on skates and while I’m telling Garren that, my thoughts fly to that night at the party with Seth and how his kiss felt brand-new.
Meanwhile Garren’s girlfriend, Janette, lives just down this very street—could at this precise moment be sitting at home wondering why he hasn’t been in touch. He’s said so many times that he doesn’t feel the same disconnect with his past that I do; it’s impossible for me to bring up the subject again. I plug in the kettle to boil water for my noodles and lean back against the counter, finishing off another pickle.
My mouth tingles from the pickle tanginess but the unspoken question won’t disappear: Does what he has with Janette feel more real than his relationships with his old girlfriends? The question loops around in my head until I erupt and say the nearest thing I can. “Your girlfriend’s so close. Are you tempted to go to her for help?” I don’t mean to sound like I’m pushing him over there to get us more money and I immediately add, “Not that I think you should go to her. It just must be hard to resist.”
Garren lowers himself into a chair and pops a cheesy cracker between his lips. After much noisy chewing he says, “I’ve thought about it but I don’t want to put her in any danger. And we’ve only known each other a few weeks. Not long enough for me to go to her with something out of control like this.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, although there weren’t any crumbs on him in the first place. “What about you? Is there someone you wish you could call?”
“A couple of friends I made at school but they probably wouldn’t be able to help much and Henry’s people could be watching them.” I wish I could tell Christine what’s happened to me in the past two days. She’d hardly be able to believe it but I think she’d want to help. Like I told Garren, there wouldn’t be much she could do for me but she’d want to all the same. Derrick too, probably.
When it comes down to it the two of them feel like the only real friends I’ve ever had. In comparison Alison and my other Kiwi friends seem like cardboard cutouts or figments of my imagination.
I sit down at the table across from Garren and nab one of his crackers. “I know you think my memory thing is bullshit, like, some psychological issue or something, but it’s not. It’s related to all of this. I don’t know how yet. I just need some help figuring it out.”
Garren pitches another cracker into his mouth and leans back in his chair. I watch him swallow and listen to him say, “I don’t think you’re crazy. Maybe your memory issues do tie in with everything else—I don’t know—I guess it could make sense. I just don’t want you to think seeing this guy on Monday’s going to lead to some huge lightbulb moment that makes all this other stuff disappear. You heard Doctor Byrne—we have to make tracks. Put as much distance between us and this place as possible.”
I’m counting on a lightbulb moment—Garren’s right about that. I’m tired of living in darkness, both literally and figuratively. “We’ll leave Monday no matter what,” I promise for the second time. Between now and my appointment there’s a day and a half to kill. I don’t know what we’d do without this house. “Can we stay here that long? Do you know when the owners are due back from vacation?”
Garren says he thinks they left last weekend so we should still be all right today and tomorrow. Hearing myself refer to the family as the owners seems both ungrateful and odd. I feel as though I should at least know the last name of the people whose home I’ve shared and after I finish my noodles, I begin searching through drawers and scanning shelves, trying to find it. The company invoices we ran across yesterday referenced far too many names to be useful.
I don’t think Garren really cares who the owners are but he helps me look. He’s the one who finds an old MasterCard bill addressed to Paula Resnik crumpled up in the powder room garbage. So, the Resnik house, that’s where we spent last night and where we’ll remain until we leave for Lou Bianchi’s place on Monday afternoon.
We’ve decided it’s safest not to risk coming and going again until we have to. Everything we need is right here anyway and late into the night Garren and I retreat to the same rooms we opted for yesterday. I lie in bed, surrounded by the kids’ toys, thinking about my mother. My heart refuses to believe we’ll never see each other again. There’s only so much I can handle at one time.
I need to know that she’ll be okay and I reach out with my mind, trying to find her the way I saw the men coming for us at Henry’s house. It’s no use. The only things I see are memories from the last few weeks. Us making Hamburger Helper together. Her sitting on the side of my bed holding out a glass of orange juice for me.
I fall asleep thinking about her and when I wake up on Sunday most of the morning’s already over. Garren and I watch TV all afternoon until the sun begins to set. It feels like a luxury and in between extremely serious discussions about where we should go (Garren thinks Vancouver, which makes good sense to me because it’s about as far away as we can get without crossing a border or falling off the continent) and how we’ll manage to get there (is it better to steal a succession of cars or unload a wad of cash from some unfortunate person and use it to take the train cross country and can we really be having this conversation?) we try to make ourselves feel more normal by talking about regular things like
our opinions of the various music videos and TV shows we’re watching. Garren likes U2 and Kate Bush and hates Madonna, Duran Duran and Wham! I tell him that my friends at school are sort of music snobs who mainly listen to new wave and that I’ve kind of turned into one myself. Garren says he could guess that from looking at me—not so much now because I’m wearing Paula’s bank-teller clothes—but when I first came to his house. We’re both sitting on the Resniks’ leather couch, with our feet on the coffee table, and Garren tilts his head and adds, “Maybe it’s because I’ve only seen you in real life with dark hair but it looks more like the real you than when you were blond in the picture.”
It feels more like the real me so that’s good to hear, especially from him. But after Garren says it, I can’t take my eyes off him. I’m frozen. Staring at his green eyes with my heart in my mouth as Johnny Rotten hollers out the lyrics to “This Is Not a Love Song” on the TV.
I fidget as I tear my gaze away. Pretend I was thinking something else. Then I say, “It’ll be dark soon. I’m going to have another look around the house and see if there’s anything we missed.” We’ll each need to pack a bag of clothes to bring with us tomorrow and whatever food we can carry. Most of all, we need more cash or things we could sell. Paula Resnik’s jewelry.
Garren lets me go and later I hear him thumping around the house searching for buried treasure just like I am. We end up with a collection of watches, a Waterford crystal mantelpiece clock, and masses of glimmering earrings, bracelets, rings and necklaces from Paula’s jewelry box (because neither of us can discern what’s valuable or not). The only money left is in the twins’ room and it’s just piggybank change, which we leave alone. Garren says there’s a carton of cigarettes under the bed in the spare room that we should be able to sell too.
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