A Thousand Shades of Blue

by Robin Stevenson

  I’d never left Ontario, except for a couple of vacations in Florida and one trip to the Calgary Stampede when I was seven.

  “And then—into the Atlantic?” Tim asked.

  “You got it.” Dad glanced at Mom. “Wel , actual y there is an inland waterway. The icw—Intra-Coastal Waterway, it’s called.”

  Mom leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “It’s a bunch of connected rivers and canals and lakes that goes all the way down to Florida. So we don’t actual y have to do much sailing on the open ocean at al .”

  “We want to cross over to the Bahamas by early December.” Dad had a big grin on his face. He didn’t seem to have noticed that neither Tim nor I was jumping up and down with excitement.

  Tim started to pick at his fingernails. “How long would we be gone for?” he asked.

  Dad cleared his throat. “About a year.”

  I just sat and stared at him. Then I turned to Mom.

  “What about school? I can’t miss a whole year.” I couldn’t get my head around this at all. A year away from Jen and 12

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  all my friends? A year stuck on a boat with my family?

  “You and Tim can do your courses by correspondence,”

  Mom said. “We’ll arrange everything before we go.”

  “My family spent a year in New Zealand when I was sixteen,” Dad says. “I didn’t want to go, but you know what? It was one of the best things my parents ever did for me.”

  I stared at them both. “You can’t be serious. There is no way I’m doing this.”

  Mom ignored me. “It’ll be nice for us all to have more time together,” she said.

  That’s my mom—denial in action. I swear, sometimes I think she’s living on a different planet.

  13

  Three

  The thing that upset me most about the whole trip idea was the pretense that somehow they were doing this for us. For our family. As if a family is something other than the people who make it up. As if it could be good for the family to do something that half the people in the family didn’t want to do. Okay, Mom hadn’t admitted that she didn’t want to, but she’d never liked sailing much. She always got seasick. And Tim was so desperate to believe that we were a happy family that he’d have gone along with anything. But I definitely didn’t want to go.

  As for Emma? Wel , of course no one had even bothered to ask her what she thought. When I brought up the subject with my parents, they didn’t say anything. They just looked at each other, all uneasy and dishonest.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly feeling anxious. Tim was watching me, his green eyes half-hidden by his glasses and his floppy hair.

  Mom put down her coffee mug. “Honey, Emma’s not coming with us.”

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  A Thousand Shades of Blue

  I stared at them both. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “It’d be hard for her,” Mom said. “Unsettling.”

  I pictured Emma’s wide blue eyes, her goofy pink-gummed smile and slightly crooked teeth. She’d been doing great lately. But I had a head full of jagged memories: Emma banging her head against the bedroom wal , Emma biting her fingers until they bled, Emma ripping up my best sketches because I wouldn’t let her use my new char-coal pencils. I pushed the memories aside.

  “Did you even ask her? Did anyone even bother to ask her if she’d like to come?”

  The answer was obvious in the way they exchanged glances.

  “This whole thing about doing a trip for the family is a load of crap if part of the family isn’t even included.”

  I stood up. The sunlight was streaming in, and Mom, Dad and Tim were dark silhouettes against the kitchen window.

  “Count. Me. Out.”

  I didn’t want to go anyway. A few weeks, maybe. A whole freaking year? Missing all of grade eleven, leaving my friends, being stuck with my parents and Tim the Nerd? No thank you. And leaving Emma for that long?

  I couldn’t even believe they were considering it.

  Z

  It had been less than a year since Emma moved out.

  I always visited her after school on Tuesdays. Tuesday was our special day.

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  The Tuesday after Mom and Dad told us about the sailing trip, I told Mom I didn’t want to go to the group home. I knew about the trip and Emma didn’t, and I couldn’t stand the thought of lying to her.

  Mom was making coffee, still in her housecoat. She was quiet for a moment; then she put on her reasonable voice. You know when parents get that reasonable voice going that they are about to say something that isn’t real y reasonable at al .

  “Rach, there’s no point in telling her yet. She’ll just get upset.”

  “Maybe if it’s so upsetting for her, we shouldn’t be doing it. Did you think about that, Mom? That maybe if you feel you have to lie about it, you might be doing something wrong?”

  She looked away from me and brushed at some coffee grounds on the counter. “If we tell her about the trip now, she’ll be upset right up until we leave.”

  “Yeah, then you’d have to deal with it.” I leaned my elbows on the table. “Much better to spring it on her at the last minute and let the staff deal with her being total y freaked out when no one visits for a year.”

  “It won’t be a whole year,” Mom protested. “I’ll fly home to see her at least twice.”

  “I’m sure that’ll take care of everything,” I said. “Two visits in a year. She’ll just be getting used to being abandoned, and then you’ll come back for a few days and do it all over again.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. Her mouth was 16

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  a hard thin line. Finally she put both hands flat on the counter and without even looking at me, she said,

  “We’re doing this for you, you know. You and Tim, but mostly you.”

  I pushed my chair away from the table, its legs screeching against the gray linoleum. “Don’t give me that.”“I’m serious, Rachel.” She hesitated. “We’re worried about you.”

  “We? We? You and who else?”

  “Your father and I.”

  “Right.” I snorted. “Wel , if you’re so concerned about me, you can do me a favor and forget the whole idea.”

  She went quiet again. Her hair was all sticking up on one side, dirty blond bed head, the same color mine would be if I didn’t dye it. She kept trying to smooth it down, patting it like it was an animal curled up on her head. Final y she gave a long sigh. “You seem so angry all the time. Since Emma left…I don’t know. I can’t talk to you anymore.

  I thought, maybe, if we had more time together…”

  I swallowed hard. Mom had no idea why I’d had such a crappy year, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to tell her.

  I stood up. “So hold me hostage on the boat for a year.

  That should help.” As I walked out the door, I turned and fired one last shot. “And don’t try to make it my fault that you’re abandoning Emma. You’ve probably wanted to do that for years.”

  As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back. Mom looked like I’d slapped her.

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  Besides, Mom would have taken care of Emma forever.

  Dad was the one who had pushed for her to move out.

  “It’s developmental y appropriate for children to move out when they reach young adulthood,” he used to argue.

  Never mind that Emma hadn’t done anything developmental y appropriate since the accident.

  Mom would shake her head. “I don’t think she’s ready.

  I don’t want her to feel like she’s a failure if it doesn’t work out.”

  “Failure is a stepping-stone to success,” Dad would say.

  That’s Dad—the King of Clichés. I agreed with him though, for once. Not so much for Emma’s sake as for the rest of us. Emma couldn’t be left alone in the
house, not even for five minutes. She does stuff without thinking, on impulse, and has no judgement about what’s a good idea or what’s safe. She has seizures too, even with all the meds she’s on. And when she doesn’t get her way, she gets pretty out of control. Disinhibition, the doctors call it. We just call it Emma’s temper.

  One time, when I was maybe twelve or so, I was screaming at her because she’d had this mammoth fit of rage and broken something of mine—I don’t even remember what now. She broke a lot of stuff. Anyway, Dad pulled me aside and told me to get a grip. A few days later, he took me to see a social worker at the hospital. She tried to explain some stuff about head injuries to me and even showed me the ct scans of Emma’s brain. You could see this black area where bleeding had basical y destroyed part of her frontal lobe.

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  So I got that it wasn’t her fault. But understanding that didn’t make her any easier to deal with, and as we got older, I had to look after her more and more often. When Mom and Dad made the decision about her moving out, I was sad, sort of, but I was relieved too. I know how selfish that sounds, but that’s how I felt.

  I just wanted a more normal life.

  Mom tried to act like she was in agreement with Dad’s plan: My parents have always been big on presenting a united front in between the fights. But when Em left, Mom kind of fell apart. She sort of stopped talking, and Dad started spending even more time at his office.

  So much for my dream of a normal life.

  Z

  I ended up going to see Emma that night anyway. She had a big calendar in her room, to help her keep track of what was happening every day. On every Tuesday it said RAE-RAE

  in big green letters. She always bragged to the staff, telling them every week that her little sister was coming to see her.

  It wasn’t easy to let someone like that down.

  Though Mom and Dad didn’t seem to be having any trouble with it.

  Emma was waiting near the front door. “Rae-Rae!” She threw her arms around me and squished her face into my shoulder.

  “Hey, Em.” I grinned at her. She’d had a haircut—

  someone had given her bangs and cut her long hair to just 19

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  above the shoulders. Mom would flip. She hated it when the staff made any decisions without consulting her. “Nice hairdo,” I told her.

  She touched her hair self-consciously. “Kel y did it.”

  “Looks good. So, what have you been doing? Were you working today?” Emma goes to a sheltered workshop where they make weird-looking teddy bears that get sold to raise money for the hospital.

  “No, I’m sick,” she said.

  She didn’t look sick. Sometimes she just doesn’t want to go, and the staff don’t push it too much.

  “Come see what I made,” Emma said. She tugged on my arm, pulled me down the hall into her room and pointed at a painting pinned to her wal .

  “It’s beautiful. Real y great.” I looked past the orange and blue swirls to the photo col age I’d made her when she moved out: old pictures of the three of us as little kids, of Dad looking young with a mustache and blue jeans, of Mom in short skirts and sunglasses. Those pictures reminded me of what I’d figured out about Emma’s accident. It was the main reason I’d had such a crap year, but I hadn’t told anyone.

  I didn’t even want to think about it.

  The group home’s glossy white paint was all scuffed up from the bumps of wheelchairs through narrow door frames. Schedules and medication charts were taped to the kitchen walls, and there were child safety locks on cupboards. It looked okay from outside—just like a regular brick house—and it had only six residents, all brain-20

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  injured adults. Emma was the youngest and the only one who didn’t use a wheelchair. She could walk okay, though her muscles are tight and she kind of walks on her toes.

  Her left side drags a bit, but she manages.

  Mom said this residence was real y good and that we were lucky to get Emma placed here. Even after a year, though, Emma was always asking when she could come back home. To be honest, this place didn’t feel like a home to me either. It made me antsy.

  “Let’s go to the coffee shop, hey?” I tilted my head and smiled at Em’s skinny face.

  “I want French fries.”

  “Sure.”

  “And ketchup.”

  “You bet.” We had French fries and ketchup every Tuesday.

  Em clutched my arm, and we walked out together.

  Guilt was eating a hole in my stomach. I couldn’t imagine telling her we were all going to go off sailing without her.

  She had no idea how long a year was. Fifty-two Tuesdays on her calendar with no visits. Fifty-two Sundays that she wouldn’t be coming home for dinner.

  I couldn’t believe we were going to do this to her.

  21

  Four

  A few days before we left, I poked my head into Tim’s room. “Done packing?”

  He shook his head, looking even more worried than usual. Huge piles of books were spread out all over his floor.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sorting.”

  Tim’s room was wall-to-wall books—alphabetized, categorized and organized in a typical y neurotic Tim-like fashion. “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Trying to decide what books to bring.”

  He had a box of large Ziploc bags sitting beside him and had begun to put books into them. History books.

  Tim’s obsessed with history.

  He saw me staring and picked up a bag defensively.

  “Water damage,” he said. “In case the air on the boat is too damp.”

  “You are one strange kid,” I said to him. “This is a holiday, you know. Normal people read Stephen King 22

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  or John Grisham. Not…” I picked up the nearest book.

  “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

  Tim grabbed it back. “So read Stephen King,” he said.

  “If being normal is so important to you.”

  It’s not important to me, I wanted to tell him. It’s important to the rest of the world. I could just picture him wandering through the crowded hal way at school, nose in a book, shoulder blades poking out like bird wings under his thin plaid shirt. He’d get pulverized.

  Sometimes I thought Tim was more like a little old man than a twelve-year-old boy. Boys his age were supposed to be obsessed with girls, hide Playboy magazines under their beds, tell fart jokes and play team sports. They were supposed to practice saying the entire alphabet in one belch and be generally loud and annoying. Well, I guess Tim had the annoying part down, and I had caught him looking at a Victoria’s Secret catalog once, but that was about it. The only remotely normal thing he did was rollerblading, but even that was a joke. He was hopeless at it. He would wobble up and down our driveway, waving his arms like he was trying to fly.

  Dad, our resident expert on child development, didn’t seem to have noticed that Tim was a freak. Apparently neither Tim nor I were quite screwed up enough to hold his interest. I think Dad must have been around more when we were younger. There are family photographs of me riding on his shoulders and of him reading stories to me and Emma. When I look at them, I feel all weird and 23

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  sort of depressed—like I lost something important, and can’t even remember having it.

  I don’t know if it was the accident that changed things, but as far back as I can remember, he’s spent most of his time at the office. When he was home, he’d be busy reading the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychology, or writing articles on self-esteem, resiliency and healthy attachment.

  If he spoke to us at al , it was usual y just to tell us to keep our voices down.

  Z

  We left one evening in late August. Everyone came down to the dock to wave us off. Well—not everyone. Emma was
n’t there: too upsetting for her, Mom and Dad said.

  Too upsetting for them, more like.

  Everyone else was there though. Jen and a bunch of my other friends, boaters from our marina, some of the social workers and psychologists from the children’s mental health clinic where Dad works and a ton of Mom’s friends.

  Jen pulled me aside. “Shit,” she said for the thou-sandth time. “This sucks. Seriously. You can’t go away for a whole year.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “We had so many plans for next year. I mean, grade eleven is supposed to be the best. You’re gonna miss so much.”

  “Tell me about it.” My chest was all tight and achy.

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  “God, I’m going to miss you,” she whispered. She pushed the neatly coiled dock line with the toe of her sneaker.

  “I’ll miss you too.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll be too busy partying with gorgeous boys on sunny beaches.”

  I giggled. “Shh. Don’t tell my parents.” I made a face.

  “Don’t forget about me, okay?”

  “Not a chance. You better stay in touch, Rachel. I mean it.” I’d had a huge fight with Dad about bringing a laptop.

  He’d said he wanted to “get away from al that,” like there was some great virtue in being out of touch with the rest of the world. Mom had been on my side—it would have made taking correspondence courses way easier, for one thing—but we’d lost. “I’ll e-mail whenever I can,” I told Jen. “I promise.”

  She hesitated; then she grabbed me and gave me an awkward hug. “Look, you can always come back and stay with me. You know. If things don’t work out.”

  Mom was watching us. My parents don’t trust Jen, mainly because she lived in a group home for a while last year. Dad’s a total hypocrite. If Jen were one of his clients, he’d rattle on about the resilience and courage of what he calls “youth with challenges.” But since she’s my friend, she’s just a bad influence.

  “Rachel? Can you join the rest of us?” Dad beckoned.