by Jamie Zeppa
Something was wrong with the game, though, and it took Laura a while to figure it out. The problem was that every gain had to be countered by a small loss. The game advanced, but without conclusion. How long could it go on before it lost its flavour?
When Laura tried to explain, Sue Ellen said, “We’re on the verge of defeating them once and for all. That’s the whole point.”
But when they won, the game would be over, so defeating the Boys for good could not be the point. The point, Laura thought, was not to win but to be caught. At least, that’s how they played it at Laura’s school: when a boy chased you, of course you ran, but if he didn’t catch you, you might as well have not been pursued at all.
Sue Ellen was good at war, but she hadn’t read the books Laura’s mother kept in the top drawer of her night table, bulging paperbacks written by women named Violet and Evangeline, with titles like Love Asunder and Rogue Heart. Also, and worse, the Shells didn’t have a television and there was no theatre in Sunnyside, so Sue Ellen had seen almost no movies. Maybe that was why she didn’t know what came next. Hostilities were always followed by contact, danger by rescue, separation by reunion. In a proper story, everything ended with love.
Laura had even worked out the perfect beginning: on a reconnaissance mission, she would be waylaid and taken into Boys Land, where Michael Pierce would hold her hostage. Sue Ellen would try to rescue her, but she, too, would be captured. They would be held in separate cells and have to tap messages through the walls. Some Boys would become their allies. Michael Pierce himself might even fall in love with one of them. (She would not tell Sue Ellen this part just yet.) Hundreds of possibilities would open up; they could play forever.
They were sitting outside Headquarters when she laid it out for Sue Ellen. The sun was hot and sharp on her bare arms, and she could almost feel the rough rope against her wrists. (She did not tell Sue Ellen the details, how she would kick and punch her captors and how Michael Pierce would stare at her, astonished. “You fight like a Boy,” he would say, and she would spit in contempt, which would make him laugh. He had black hair and piercing blue eyes, and wore a buckskin jacket and a knife in his belt.)
Sue Ellen thought about this. “We could raid their Headquarters when they’re all out spying. Break in, get information, get out.”
Laura said, “I guess.”
Sue Ellen narrowed her eyes. “I mean, it’s not like you want to be captured, right?”
“No,” Laura lied. “No!”
“Well, it sounds like it,” Sue Ellen said. She was clearly annoyed. “I have to go home. I’m supposed to remind my dad about his deadline.”
When Laura caught up with her, she was standing at the hedge between their properties. Mr. Shell and her mother were sitting at the picnic table on the Shells’ veranda, and from the hedge, it looked like they were holding hands, but then she saw they were just playing cards. “Dad!” Sue Ellen yelled. “Deadline!” Her father waved at her, drew another card and slapped his forehead in despair. Laura’s mother’s laugh rippled out towards them.
Sue Ellen scowled. “My father has to work, you know. He can’t work if she’s over there every day.”
Laura said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean his work!” Sue Ellen said loudly. “He has to write!”
But Laura meant it wasn’t her mother’s idea to go over; it was Mr. Shell who invited her. Laura’s mother was just being neighbourly.
That night Laura was woken by low voices and for a moment, she thought the Boys had really come. But it was her mother and Mr. Shell, talking on the other side of the hedge. Laura sat up and pressed her face against the screen, but she couldn’t see anything. She opened her mouth, a technique Sue Ellen had taught her, and then she could hear: “Oh, yes, do that.” “This is crazy.” “Shh, shh.” “Oh my god, I love you.” “I love you.” “No, don’t, you’ll wake the whole …” “Shhhh.”
After a while, Laura lay back down and pulled the blankets over her head. Her mother and Sue Ellen’s father were … in love? How could it even be true? Laura’s mother always said, “The moment I laid eyes on Richard, I knew he was the one for me.” But assuming it was true, then what? Would her mother and Sue Ellen’s father have to get married? That would mean a divorce, which Laura’s mother said she didn’t believe in (and that was in reference to Marilyn Monroe—Laura wasn’t sure if regular people could get divorced). But they would have to divorce in order to marry; she didn’t know how else it would make sense. It would still be awful, though, even if it made sense, because what would happen to her father? And to Mrs. Shell? (Maybe her father and Mrs. Shell would get married? No. That was probably going too far.)
She was awake most of the night trying to figure it all out. One thing she knew for sure: she could not tell Sue Ellen. But she told her anyway, almost immediately, while they were out on first patrol the next morning. She finished by saying, “But it’s okay, Sue Ellen, because don’t you see? We’ll be sisters.” But Sue Ellen’s eyes turned to stone. She said, “What are you talking about” and threw down her bow and arrow. Then she disappeared into the bush.
Laura sat on the mossy concrete steps, wishing she could disappear into another dimension, or at least back into last night (she would cover her ears, she would bury her head, she would not wake up). She sat there until the sun was high overhead and she was light-headed with hunger. When she got home, her mother was packing. “Go say goodbye to your little friend,” she said. Her voice was flinty, but she cleared her throat and it softened. “We have to get back. I’m worried about your father.”
Laura walked along the border of Girls Land, but without Sue Ellen, it was just a thin path through the bush. She cut straight through Boys Land territory and got into the car, and they were back in the city by lunchtime.
At home, Laura’s father had moved from his armchair to the bed. That fall, he moved to the hospital, the first of many extended visits, and Laura’s mother got a job in a doctor’s office. By herself, Laura was free to play the game the way she had wanted to. The Boys came at night, all stealth and speed and strength; they lifted her out of bed and carried her over the border, deep into Boys Land, into the very chambers of Michael Pierce. He touched her hair and told her she was his now, and nothing could change that. The force of his declaration made her weep with gratitude. This was what she had wanted all along.
But once she was his, the game fizzled out. She tried to imagine what would come next; logically, they would get married and have children, but somehow, this storyline never took her very far. It was a constant mystery, why there was nothing left to play after the declaration, that moment of shattering happiness so perfect it shattered happiness itself.
SIGNS
She lifted her head from the pillow and in the gloom saw the empty crib. Her mother-in-law must have taken the baby downstairs. Her little girl was already down there, in a booster seat at the kitchen table, with a pink plastic bowl of animal crackers and her little white juice cup. Her mother-in-law would be shaking her head, her lips pressed thin, thinking, What kind of mother? What kind of mother goes to bed right after she wakes up and comes unravelled at the sound of her own baby’s cries? No kind of mother. That’s the kind she was, hiding up here in the dark tower with no prince on the lawn below calling her name to break the spell. She fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table and cried out at the sight of herself in the oval mirror across the room: an old woman stared back, her scalp showing through her thin white hair, her face yellowed and mottled with age. A hundred years had passed.
Well, what did you expect? her mother-in-law said from the other side of the door. You said let you sleep, so we let you sleep.
“Where is the baby?” she called out, but no one answered. The light in the room was dissolving, and she fell back through the depths to where there might be a hatch, a portal that would open onto a different life or carry her backwards through time to the Turning Point so that she could turn and turn away.
; She had been eighteen when she wished for Dean Turner. That afternoon, in the cafeteria at Eaton’s, with a storm of tears about to overtake her, she had closed her eyes and prayed, “Please give me a sign.”
She meant a sign that she would not cry today, would not take after her father, was destined for love and happiness and dreams that came true and did not run out abruptly like the end of a movie reel flapping noisily on the projector. “Let something happen,” she pleaded silently.
She opened her eyes: her mother was gone, and Dean was sitting in her place.
Somewhere inside her, the course of time shifted. A turning point.
Light came off him when he talked. Sparks, she wasn’t sure from where: his dark eyes, maybe, or his teeth, which were very white. When he smiled, a dimple formed on one side of his mouth, like he was about to tell her something he shouldn’t. He talked like people in movies, the words spooling out so fast that, in the beginning, she was always a half-sentence behind. He raised his hand and a waitress appeared with a plate of french fries. He leaned back and draped his arms over the back of the booth. He had broad shoulders and long fingers. Who are you? she thought, and just at that moment, he stuck his hand across the table and introduced himself. “Dean Turner,” he said. He was from the City of Northerly Bore, also known as Sault Ste. Marie. He was staying at the Royal York Hotel. He was adopted.
She couldn’t even imagine telling it: how he appeared out of nowhere, an adopted boy who travelled on his own and shed sparks when he talked. He had come to Toronto to find his mother, he said, and now, after all his travels and travails, he didn’t want to meet her, as crazy, as batty, as loop-de-loop loopy as that sounded.
“Nuts-and-bolts screwy,” Laura agreed, and his eyes glinted.
“Whacky-shack whacky.”
Except she knew what he meant. She always yearned to see her father, right up until they got to the visitors’ room and the door opened, when her yearning suddenly spiked and transformed into its opposite, because the person who came through was not her father. He looked like her father, but he was clearly a stand-in. He was gaunt, and his lips were badly chapped, and even though she held her breath as he leaned in to kiss her cheek, she could smell sour sweat and metal and something unspeakable. Her real father had gone somewhere, and even the stand-in was waiting for him to come back: he kept asking them the time and looking back at the door that led to the ward. Sometimes it was just easier to miss someone.
Dean Turner was looking at her so intently she felt she was dissolving into him. He touched the back of her hand, and a long, powerful quaver went through her. This happened to other people, she thought—in books and movies—and now it was happening to her.
“Come with me,” he said, and she went, just like that. He took her arm and they strolled through the store, stopping in the luggage department so Dean could tell the clerk they were going to Timbuktu on their honeymoon, and was this material heat- and dust- and camel- resistant? In electronics, they looked for the largest, loudest TV ever made as a hundredth birthday present for their half-blind, half-deaf great-grandmother. At the glove counter, they needed sunglasses because Laura, the daughter of someone who could not be named, was being followed by (“Don’t look”) that guy in the black coat by the stairwell. In front of the mirror in ladies’ wear, Dean lifted a strand of her hair and said her mother was wrong: it wasn’t mousy, it was burnished.
Then he checked his watch and announced that he was taking Laura to dinner. “What’s the best restaurant in Toronto?”
Laura didn’t know. They only ever went to cafeterias and diners. “But wherever it is, we aren’t dressed right.” He was wearing grey pants, a white shirt, black loafers. She was wearing the pleated navy skirt and blue boat-necked sweater she always wore to the hospital. “We look fine for Eaton’s,” she said. “But you’d need a jacket. And I’m wearing these,” she said, kicking up her foot so he could see her white sneakers. “We won’t even get in the door.”
“Is that so?” Dean narrowed his eyes and wriggled his eyebrows at the same time.
“Yes, it is,” she said, giggling. “Why? What are you going to do?”
In the men’s section, he walked straight to a rack and lifted a dark grey jacket off a hanger, just as if it were his. He slipped it on, and they stood side by side in front of the mirror. She lifted the tag on the sleeve and gasped.
“Italian wool,” he said, and she rubbed the material between her fingers. “Finest in the world.”
The salesman wanted to pack it in a box but Dean said he would wear it. “Next stop, shoes,” he told Laura.
She looked down at his feet, but he shook his head. “Not for me,” he said.
“I don’t have any money,” she said.
“I know,” he said. He grabbed her hand and they ran back upstairs.
“These,” he said, picking up a pair of black patent leather pumps with a thin strap high across the instep.
“You can’t buy shoes for me, Dean.”
“Why not?”
Laura thought about what her mother would say if she came home in these shoes. If she knew that Laura was running around Eaton’s with a guy she’d just met in the cafeteria. She shook her head.
“Okay,” Dean said. “We won’t get them. But try them on. Just to see how they look.” The clerk who had been hovering took the shoe into a back room and came out with a box.
She peeled off her socks and slipped her feet in, rising up on the heel to become a tall and slender Laura. “Do you like them?” he asked.
“I love them.”
She walked over to a mirror and twisted her burnished hair into a chignon. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked like someone else.
Dean appeared behind her. “Beautiful,” he said, and her face went even pinker. Dean handed her a cardboard box. “For your old shoes,” he said.
“You can’t buy these for me, Dean.”
“I already did,” he said. He waved at the clerk behind the sales desk; the clerk waved back.
Laura bit her lip. “Okay, let me buy you something now,” she said. “But I only have a dollar.”
“Buy me a pen,” he said, “so I can write you secret messages.” In the stationery department, she bought him a ballpoint pen and he uncapped it and wrote her name and address on the inside of his arm.
They went several blocks, racing, skipping, ducking out of the way of annoyed adults. Everything was funny. A woman told them to act their age, and a police officer asked them if they’d been drinking. They couldn’t stop laughing.
“Here,” Dean said, stopping. They were outside Barberian’s Steak House.
“It looks expensive,” Laura said.
“Exactly,” said Dean.
Inside the wood-panelled room, the maître d’ looked at them crossly, but as soon as Dean started to speak, the man rearranged the expression on his face and listened intently. Laura thought it was all in the way Dean looked at you. His eyes flashed, like he had just taken a picture of you, like he really saw you. And it was the way he talked, of course. He didn’t sound like an adopted boy from Sault Ste. Marie. He sounded like someone famous, someone who lived in California and drove a convertible and had a wallet full of cash. The maître d’ led them to a table at the back. They ate dinner rolls and read the menu while waiters refilled their water goblets. Dean told her about the book he was writing about his life so far. He told her about a trick with a light bulb and a shower of pennies. He told her this was not the first time he had run away. The first time, he had stolen a car. This time, he had stolen a cheque. There. What did she think of him now? She thought he was an unredeemable degenerate, didn’t she?
“I don’t even know what that means!” she exclaimed, laughing, but he was serious. “It means no good. Everybody knows I have bad blood.” He was staring at his empty plate, his face suddenly blank and lightless.
“No,” Laura said, her face growing hot with indignation. “You are the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. I wish
the world was filled with people like you.” He wouldn’t look up at her, so she beamed her thoughts into him. I love you, she told him silently. I just met you, but I love you.
Under the table, he reached for her hand.
The waiter came and lit the candle in the lamp at their table and asked if they were ready to order. Dean waved him away and then called him back and asked for another basket of bread. He said, “I can see the candlelight in your eyes,” and that long, trilling thrill ran through her again. They were finishing their third basket of bread when Dean realized loudly that they were going to miss their train. He stood up abruptly, dropping his napkin to the floor, and signalled frantically. Two waiters helped them collect their things, and Dean pressed a folded bill into one’s palm as he led Laura out.
Dean took her hand and they ran, laughing, down the street. He pulled her under an awning and kissed her. She was alive in every limb and joint and cell, a conduit for something immense and undeniable. The universe was flowing through her, in all its goodness and sadness and craziness, unimpeded and undiluted, and no matter what happened next, it would be the right thing.
He framed her face in his hands and they kissed again. He loves me too, she thought. It was crazy, but it was true.
His face crumpled and he began to weep. “Dean!” she cried out, and then put her arms around him. He pressed his face into her neck. “Laura,” he said, and her entire chest ached at the way his voice wavered. She kissed his ear and his cheek and told him he would find them someday, and even if he never found them, it didn’t matter. She knew who her parents were and mostly she wished she didn’t. He straightened up and wiped his face. She felt powerful; she had brought him back from the edge of the storm, the same way he had brought her back when he appeared across the table at Eaton’s. They walked a bit farther in silence, and then Dean pointed to a crowd of people in front of a windowless brick building. “What’s going on in there?” She wanted to keep walking with him, just the two of them, through the dark streets forever, but he led her through the crowd, down a staircase and into a dim, smoky room. It was a nightclub of some sort, jammed with men in turtlenecks and women in tight pants and sweaters. Laura felt like a kid in her gingham skirt, but Dean seemed to recover a little of his sparkle. When the band came on, the room went completely dark, and Dean reached for Laura’s hand. A single narrow beam of light cut through the room and fell on the neck of a guitar. Another beam caught a raised drumstick. Another splashed a pool of light under the microphone. The singer, dressed completely in black, stepped forward into the pool. Dean looked transfixed.
