by Jamie Zeppa
Dawn began to wake up at three in the morning and had a hard time going back to sleep. Sometimes she trembled with cold, no matter how many extra quilts she piled on, and even during the day, a chill lay over her. Normally she would tell Vera, who would slap a mustard plaster on her chest, but Vera was busy with appointments and pill bottles, and anyway, Dawn didn’t think a mustard plaster would help. She didn’t know what would help.
She fell asleep in math class. It wasn’t really sleep, only a grey, watery substitute, but Miss Minelli kept her after school, and by the time she let her go, Dawn had missed the school bus and had to drag herself to the city terminal on Queen Street. People were walking around with their faces tilted upwards and their jackets tied around their waists, but even in the direct spring sunlight Dawn still felt cold and sick.
She stopped in front of what had been the Yellow Brick Road, then Gary’s Pizza, now Coming Soon, Consumers Distributing. The building had new white stucco walls and large glass doors, and inside, workers in navy overalls were installing racks where the circular bar had been. She would want to tell Jimmy when she got home, but he never wanted to talk about the past. “What do we have to reminisce about?” he once asked. “ ‘Remember the time Geraldine punched a hole in the wall?’ ‘Remember the time I ate hash brownies and had to have my stomach pumped?’ ”
Dawn said, “But there’s so much we don’t know. Like what happened to Vincent. Remember Vincent, who was with us when we lost Geraldine’s money in the snow? Where did Del Cherniak go? And whose brownies were they?”
Jimmy said, “Who cares? Knowing doesn’t change anything.”
Then why was she standing on the sidewalk, wondering if a strip of Emerald City or scrap of mural remained inside the soon-to-be Consumers Distributing? Maybe a worker was in the women’s bathroom right now, looking up at the starry ceiling and wondering what that was all about. She could tell him, “That was for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. This was my dad’s club, the likes of which this town had never before seen.” Except he wouldn’t really care, because who was she to him? He’d just repaint the ceiling and then go out and have a smoke in the parking lot.
The building next door had a new paint job as well. The storefront was now orange, and the large window was lined inside with a translucent white curtain. In the bottom corner, a familiar-looking yellow sun radiated long, curly arms to the far edges of the glass. On the door, the word “Lighthouse” danced in black letters. Below, a neatly handwritten sign said, Peace. Freedom. Counselling. Come in, friend.
Her hand grew a mind of its own. It reached out and opened the door. Inside the big room, mismatched chairs lined the walls, and the air was heavy with a sweet smell Dawn could not identify. Underneath that, she could smell paint.
“Hello?” she called. She had expected a desk, a rack of brochures, a receptionist. Do you have an appointment? At the back of the room was an orange plaid sofa and a closed door. From behind the door, Dawn could hear a kind of chanting or singing, she couldn’t tell which, in short rising, falling lines. Then the singing stopped and a bell rang, and chairs scraped over a wooden floor. She considered running out to the sidewalk, but it was too late. The door opened, and a guy with loose blond shoulder-length curls came out. When he saw her, he beamed. “Hey!” he said. “Hi!”
Dawn glanced over her shoulder to see who he was talking to, then blushed.
“I’m Justin,” he said. “Welcome to Lighthouse.”
She started to explain that she had just been walking by, but something caught in her throat and she started coughing. Hard. Her face flamed and her eyes watered. Justin disappeared into the back room, and Dawn put her arm over her mouth and coughed into her sleeve. Every time she thought she was finished, a deeper cough rattled up from the bottom of her lungs. Her chest began to burn.
Two girls appeared. They took her by the arms and led her over to the sofa. “It’s okay,” they said. “Just breathe.” Dawn tried, but she could only cough.
Justin reappeared and handed Dawn a glass of water. “It’s the paint fumes,” he said. “Everyone’s been coughing.”
One of the girls handed her a tissue. Dawn wiped her eyes. They were bent over her, looking at her with concern. She tried to say “Sorry” and “Thank you,” but the coughing started again. “It’s okay,” one of the girls said. “Don’t try to stop it. Let it come.”
The girls sat on either side of her, stroking her arms and patting her shoulders. Justin pulled a chair around in front of her and sat with the tissue box in his hands.
It’s almost like I’m crying, Dawn thought.
The two girls, Annette and Cassie, looked like sisters, with the same auburn hair pulled back into complicated braids that reminded Dawn of pastry, but they weren’t related. Annette had crinkly eyes. “You gave me a pamphlet,” Dawn said, and Annette said, “At the mall? I remember you.” Perry had a scraggly ginger beard and invisible eyelashes and was studying forestry at college. Dawn thought they were all twenty or twenty-one, except for Krista, who seemed older, maybe even thirty. “We’ve just finished a session,” she told Dawn. She had straight ash blond hair to her shoulders, a pale, serious face and small, unwavering blue eyes. Her voice was low and clear and cool. “Why don’t you stay and have tea?”
Dawn didn’t drink tea, but they were all so nice that she said yes, and besides, she was starting to feel better. The tea was not the thick, brown, bitter stuff Vera drank, but clear and golden and faintly sweet all on its own, without sugar. It was called Radiance. “It assists in opening the third eye,” Cassie said. “It comes from India.”
They didn’t explain what a session was, and didn’t ask her why she had come in, which gave her no opening to ask about counselling. They asked where she went to school and what she was taking and what she had for homework, and when she said math and made a face, Perry said, “Let me see. I’m good at math.”
He looked at her homework and saw immediately what she was doing wrong. “Here,” he said. “Write x + 2 here. Then this becomes –4.”
Annette and Cassie said their hair was in a French braid and offered to do hers, so Dawn sat in a chair while Cassie worked on her hair and Perry went through her homework on the floor, and the others laughed and talked, springing up from their seats like grasshoppers to pour each other tea. They reminded Dawn of the Waltons: they all had apple cheeks and clear skin. Maybe it was the tea, she thought.
“Oh, let Dawn have it!” Annette said when Justin called out from the back room that there was still a sandwich left from lunch, and he waltzed out with the plate balanced on top of his head and presented it to her with a bow and a flourish. The late-afternoon sun came in through the white curtain, and Dawn sipped her tea and felt warm for the first time in a long time.
“Come back tomorrow,” Krista said. “We can take you through the pre-steps.”
“Pre-steps?”
Justin touched her arm. “Preliminary steps. To join Lighthouse,” he said. “We’d love to have you, Dawn.”
“Thank you!” Dawn said, but then she remembered: tomorrow was a chemo day. She had to be home to start dinner. And keep an eye on Jimmy. “Tomorrow I can’t,” she said. “Maybe Thursday—no, wait.” They waited, their faces kind and patient. “My grandfather’s sick,” she explained, and they all murmured soothingly and understood completely.
“Here,” Krista said, pressing a card into her palm. “When he’s better, call us. We’ll be here.”
On the bus, Dawn traced the embossed sun on the card. She could still feel the imprint of Justin’s touch on her arm. By the time she got home, the imprint had faded and she was cold all over again.
PROGNOSIS UNKNOWN
When the final round of chemo finished in November, the garden was nothing but pale, broken stalks and wet black leaves, and Frank was almost translucent. Maybe it was because the chemicals had bleached his insides, or maybe it was because there was so little left of him that the light shone straight through. He said the prognosis
was unknown. “The doctors said we just have to wait and see.”
Vera said they could finally get back to normal now that they didn’t have to run down to the hospital every other week, but “prognosis unknown” didn’t sound like the road to normal to Dawn.
Plus, she was still worried about Jimmy. Last year, he had been eager to tell her what he was trying and what it was like. Pot: everything was much more interesting, you could climb into an idea and stay there for hours. Acid: time stopped, spaces stretched and contracted, then all the colours came out. Some pills Tony Danko got from a guy in Sudbury: floating in a little golden boat surrounded by mist, and nothing could touch you, nothing would ever bother you again.
Finally, Dawn told him he’d better stop. “Stop, Jimmy. Stop, or else—”
“Or else what?”
“I don’t know what, just stop, Jimmy, I mean it!”
But he had only stopped telling her what he was taking, and she knew it was something, because his eyes were often red or glazed, and he disappeared for hours at a time. She had found no more bottles at the creek, but she couldn’t stop looking. She checked the toy box, his hockey bag, the back of an old TV set in the basement. She searched his room when he was out. Between the bureau and the wall, she found an oblong blue pill, exactly like the ones Frank had been taking. It might have fallen out of Vera’s pocket. She couldn’t believe that Jimmy would take Frank’s medicine. She couldn’t believe the pill had fallen out of Vera’s pocket, either. Nothing ever fell out of Vera’s pockets. She decided to have a talk with Jimmy, but only when the time was right.
One Sunday after the first snowfall, they took their skis out and made long trails up and down the frozen creek. At the rock, they sat side by side, making patterns in the snow with their poles. Now, Dawn thought, but she blurted out the wrong words, and Jimmy turned on her in a fury.
“Jimmy, are you still doing drugs?” he repeated in a nasty, mincing voice. “Oh my gaaaawd! Drugs are so baaaaaaaad.”
“Well, are you?”
“Fuck off, Dawn.” He grabbed his poles and skied to the bend in the creek before turning around. “Just fuck off and leave me alone,” he yelled. Then he disappeared around the corner.
She took that as a yes.
The other sign they were not on the road back to normal was that Dawn couldn’t sleep, even though she was as tired as it was possible to be, and every day, she got more tired than that. Sometimes, she would turn off the light and sleep would start lapping against her, soft and warm and ordinary, but then it changed without warning into a deep, icy, black hole and she would have to tear herself away and turn on the light. If she fell into that hole, she would never wake up and never get out. One night, she jolted awake and felt an evil presence hovering in the dark just above her bed. Her thoughts flew to The Exorcist, which Vera hadn’t let her watch, but which her friends had related to her, scene by vile, shocking scene. She lay awake, saturated with cold, dark panic. In the morning, she was afraid to look at herself in the oval mirror above the oak dresser in case she saw a face that was not hers. Sleepiness began to overtake her at school, but even when she kept her eyes open, the lessons came pelting towards her and then bounced off harmlessly. She was falling behind in several classes, and if she didn’t keep her grade thirteen marks up, she wouldn’t get into university, an idea she had discussed at length with Laura. Her grandparents wanted her to go to Algoma University, where she wouldn’t have to throw away money on residence fees and where they could keep an eye on her. But Laura said she needed to leave the Soo to get a good education, and she needed a good education so she could be independent and lead her own life and never have to rely on anyone (i.e., a man) to support her. In fact, Laura had already set up a savings account for Dawn to go away to school. She showed Dawn the bank book. “Four thousand dollars?” Dawn said, her eyes widening. Laura nodded happily. “I’ve started one for Jimmy, too. All you need to do is keep your marks up.” The problem was, every time Dawn sat down to do her homework, she was overcome by a mixture of prickly dread and sleepiness. They cancelled each other out, leaving her in a cloud until Vera called her to go start dinner. The other problem was, she was either possessed by the devil or going crazy, neither of which was helpful in remembering the timeline of the French Revolution.
All her life she had wanted to get back to normal: to live in a house where no one had secrets or cancer, to eat dinner every night with parents who had not deserted her, then go to bed without surges of terror and sleep soundly until morning.
At the bottom of a page of math homework, she wrote,
Frank was not frank,
Vera was severe,
Jimmy jimmied open a bottle of pills
And it was always darkest
Before the Dawn.
Then she forgot it was there and handed it in. Luckily, the teacher didn’t notice. But still: not normal.
One Friday after supper, the phone rang and it was Tony Danko. “Your brother’s here and he’s pretty fucked up,” he told Dawn. “You better come and get him.”
Dawn looked over at Vera, who was sewing a button back on to Frank’s cardigan. “On page 52,” she said. “The diagram of the paramecium?”
“The fuck?” Tony said. “You hear me?”
Dawn’s face burned, but she continued, “You have to label it.” Vera got up to get more thread, and Dawn said softly, “I’ll be right there.”
When she got to Tony Danko’s, Jimmy was lying on the sofa in the rec room, staring at the ceiling. He blinked when Dawn talked to him but didn’t move his head. Tony Danko said he would drive them home, but Dawn said to take them to Riverview Drive. It took twenty minutes to sit Jimmy up and put his coat on and half-drag him into the car. They got out at the park outside Laura’s apartment and sat on a bench facing the building. “We’ll just sit here until you feel better,” Dawn told Jimmy. Jimmy said he was coming down, but Dawn thought he was still going up. “Less go home,” he slurred.
“In a minute,” Dawn said.
“This Laura’s? Why’re we at Laura’s?” Jimmy tried to sit up straight.
Dawn said shh, she was trying to think, but now Jimmy wanted to talk. “ ’Member the first time we came here?” he said.
“I remember.”
Jimmy said, “An’ I spilled grape juice on the carpet ‘n’ she got so pissed?”
“She wasn’t pissed, Jimmy,” Dawn said.
“Oh my god, Dawn, you are so …” His head flopped over and he swallowed the rest of his words. She reached over and moved his head so that it looked less uncomfortable. A car crunched quietly over snow somewhere behind them, and overhead, the sky glittered with stars.
Jimmy lifted his head and mumbled, “It’s what kids do. They spill their fuckin’ juice.”
Dawn patted his arm. “It’s okay, Jimmy. She wasn’t mad at you.”
“Well, fuck her if she was. Why’d we have to go there, anyway? One Saturday. Why only one Saturday?”
Dawn didn’t know. The arrangement was for the first Saturday of the month, from nine until five. Vera said it was what was proposed and what was agreed to, and Dawn had never thought to ask who had proposed and who agreed. Their whole lives had been a series of arrangements she hadn’t agreed to. People made decisions, and even when they told you why, you didn’t really understand. You just said, “Oh, okay,” and went to get your jacket.
“Dawn,” Jimmy said. “I wanna go home.”
To distract him, she asked him what he had taken.
He said half a twenty-sixer of vodka and then the pills.
“Why did you take them both?” Dawn asked. Why wasn’t it enough to be drunk or high? Why was it never enough until it was too much? “Where do you get the money?” she asked.
“Allowance,” Jimmy said. “I’m cold.”
“We can’t go home yet,” Dawn said. “It’s only 8:30. Grandma and Grandpa will still be up.” Even if Frank weren’t still recovering from the chemo with an unknown prognosis, she
couldn’t bring Jimmy home like this. Frank and Vera hated alcohol, but they became hysterical at the mere mention of drugs. All drugs came under the category of Dope, and all Dope was lethal. If you didn’t die of an overdose on the spot, you would end up killing a little old lady for her handbag. Her grandparents would be beside themselves if they saw Jimmy like this. She needed a different kind of grown-up.
“Stay here,” Dawn told Jimmy. “I’m just going to the pay phone over there.” Across the street, she placed the icy receiver against her ear and dialled Laura’s number. The story came out jumbled, but at least Laura got the basics. She said, “Dawn, honey, that’s terrible. I’ll call you a taxi right away. He needs to be in bed.”
“I can’t take him home,” Dawn said, exasperated. She had just gone through all that. “That’s why I brought him here.”
“But I can’t do anything for him that your grandparents wouldn’t do,” Laura said. “And they need to know he was drinking. In case it happens again.”
“Again?” It came out too loud. The start of a shriek. Across the street, Jimmy slumped over and then curled up on the bench. “It happens all the time,” Dawn said. Her voice was full of holes, and the holes were filling up with tears.
“Well, that’s what I mean. They have to know. I mean, what can I do for him? He doesn’t live with me. I can’t ground him.”
“Can’t he just stay for a while, until he’s sober enough to go home?”
“I can’t have him here, Dawn. Your grandmother would have a fit. Plus, I have people from the foundation coming here for dinner in less than an hour.”
When she got back to the bench, Jimmy lifted his head. “Dawn, I’m so tired. I gotta lie down.”
“You are lying down.”
“I mean in a bed.”
“Soon,” she promised.
In an apartment on the other side of the building, facing the river, her mother would be arranging a platter of vegetables and dip. She would be wearing a silver-grey dress and putting out black and white coasters.
