by Melanie Mah
“What are you guys still doing here?” I say. “It’s fucking freezing!”
“Talking about you,” the Hutterite says when I’m close enough.
“Really,” I say, looking around for Kay. “It’s true: I do have a tail.”
“My kind of girl,” he fake-whispers to Maddy and Bryce.
I raise my voice to the people left. “Has anyone seen Kay Berringer? Girl with the coiled up hair?” I draw circles with my finger by my head like I’m crazy.
A few people look up. Some shake their heads and shift a bit.
“It’d be really, really good if someone knew where she was,” I say. “You know, in case something bad’s happening to her?”
Silence.
“Okay, well, g’night, guys,” I say to Maddy and Bryce. I start heading for the bush to piss. Movement behind me: the Hutterite. I keep walking.
“Hey,” he says, catching up. “Were you gonna look for your friend? ’Cause —”
“I’m guessing she’ll turn up. But thanks.” My guard’s up.
“It’s good of you to be concerned.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll keep an eye out. Hey, maybe I’m being a little forward here, but … can I give you my number?”
I turn at him. Why, I almost say.
“If you say no, I’ll just keep asking,” he says, holding out a slip of paper.
I don’t want it. Be a good person. He wants you to take it. So I do. “Thanks.”
I keep walking, but five seconds later, hear his voice behind me: “So I guess I should expect a call in, what, a couple of days, tops?”
I turn to him, then tilt my head up as if it were set in motion by the enormous force of my rolling eyes. My gaze arcs off, making stops at Orion, Andromeda, the Pleiades. I rubberneck all the way to the edge of the clearing, then walk into the woods, pick through for a place to pee, and squat. The sound of my piss in the snow, some wind in the trees, and clap-ping — clapping? A rhythmic shifting nearby. I look over. One big jostling shape, part standing, part pushed up against a tree. Slap slap.
We’re in the middle of the woods where who knows what can hide, and I’m scared, even after I find a path, even after I find a road. Death is more likely at night. Some things are just too much. Some people’s singing voices, the looks of strangers’ faces when they cry, the sounds you make when you’re doing it.
Clack. Behind me. What the? Crunk crunk. My shoes on gravel. It’d be great if you could will yourself not to make any sounds at all. Black sky, moon and hundreds of stars, pine trees as far as you can see. It would all be beautiful if I weren’t so scared. I walk, panicked, till I find the clearing and Kay’s car.
A little while later, she shows up. My eyes closed, my breathing slow, I nestle into my seat. We pull out, make the whole trip backwards. Field, rutted path, gravel road, highway. I keep my eyes closed but I can tell where we are from the feel of the road, and a couple of times I sneak a peek at her. Kay’s eyes point straight ahead, her hands are sure on the wheel. White skin — like, actually white — with short braids hanging down like a 1920s fringe cap, and she’s frowning the way you do when you don’t think anyone’s watching. Frowns take less energy. We pull into town, streetlights through my eyelids. We turn, turn again. The third turn is illegal, across the solid line that runs down Main. She parks in front of my house.
I make a show of waking up, opening my eyes. “What time is it?” I ask. The clock says 2:57. 2+5=7. I yawn. “Y’ave fun?”
“Yeah,” she says, lightly.
“Cool. See you Monday?”
She nods and I get out, walk up the sidewalk steps, get my key. The lock clacks open, a familiar sound. One big step and I’m inside, a familiar smell. Dust, food, my mom’s natural baby scent. I’m safe. Kay’s headlights arc away as she backs out. I wave, turn, and climb the stairs.
7
*
I DREAM I write the saddest story in the world. I write it all in the library based on stuff I learn from the encyclopedia and Time Magazine. It’s so sad and funny that lexicographers have to make up a new term to describe it, and a Hollywood producer calls and asks me to adapt it for him. The film is not a commercial success, not critically acclaimed, either, but one girl in Tallahassee with cotton-candy pink hair watches it, likes it, and writes me a letter. I don’t remember what it says.
I dream I’m driving in the country, with Ty or someone else, some other guy, and the sun is coming in. We go down high-ways and through rutted fields and there’s music and birds — so many birds — and I love him. We stop in a field and I play the ukulele, I’m wearing this beautiful dress even though I never wear dresses, and there’s food. Garlic mashed potatoes and apricots and key lime pie and fried chicken made from chicken plucked from trees so no one had to die.
I dream that Trina shows up at the back door with suitcases. Blue, red, white, green stickers on them from different coun-tries. I’m home, she says. We go upstairs, through my bedroom closet, to another world where we can do what we want, since we’re still technically in Spring Hills.
And then I wake up. Saturday morning. I open the door — bright light — and my mom’s in the hall with the dresser drawers open. tv on in behind.
“Jo sun,” I say. “What are you doing?” Nothing in the drawers but pictures, awards, and report cards, old purses, coins, and bugs. My mom’s not one for housework.
She doesn’t say, but I see when I get closer. Pictures of Trina. She’s put them in the drawer. Trina with my dad at the car, her in a cap and gown, him in a suit, happy on graduation day. Trina and me on the rollercoaster at West Ed, her flirting with the camera, me wincing, eyes and mouth squeezed shut like I just sucked on a lemon. An early party picture, her and friends. Kirk’s there, too, on the edge of the group.
“What are you doing?” I repeat.
Scattered in with pictures of Trina: Young Reggie with a bowl haircut, no smile, holding an award. A somewhat recent one of Gene, his arms wrapping twice around my grandma, a crazy love look on his face. A close-up of Stef and my dad at the lake, giant smiles, life vests over t-shirts. She taught him how to fish, maybe even that day.
My mom closes the drawer and shuffles away. The only photos up now are of me and my parents, a couple of bad ones I haven’t seen in years. Me with buckteeth and a home haircut. A picture I drew in Grade Eight art class of Mr. Berkson’s house.
“You know she’s not dead, right?”
My mom looks back at me. Sad eyes, a cold sore on her droopy mouth. In her hand, the remote, the volume going up.
“Well, she’s not,” I say louder, pulling down the ugly pictures and replacing them with ones of Trina from the drawer. I follow my mom to kitchen. “I don’t know how you do that,” I say.
She puts fruit in the blender. Apple, watermelon, grapefruit. The tv on way too loud.
“Well? Say something.”
She bites the end of a banana, peels it, puts it in. My dad comes into the kitchen, the toilet still flushing. Orange hunting vest over an old cowboy shirt.
Me to my dad: “Nei yao mo sai sao?” Did you wash your hands? And to my mom: “Why do you eat that? Don’t you care about how it tastes?”
“Yeah!” my dad says, washing his hands. Contempt in his voice.
She pushes a button on the blender. On tv, two men in suits shaking hands, flags and more suits in behind.
“Watermelon, grapefruit, apple, and banana,” I say. That’s fucking gross. “Why don’t you put in some honey?”
My dad takes something from the toaster, starts to assemble bacon sandwiches. My mom spoons fruit paste the same colour as raw chicken into a bowl. Did she hear me?
“Want some honey?”
She’s rinsing out the blender.
“Mom. Do. You. Want. Some. Honey.”
She starts walking away.
“Mom!”
“Talk talk talk talk talk,” my dad sneers, turning to me. He cuts his sandwich without looking, I wince, but he doesn’
t hurt himself. “I hate you. Always talk! Think you smart, you so goddamn dumb.”
“Fuck you,” I say, and go down to the store.
The whole first hour of work I think of how I could screw him over by doing a bad job, show him how stupid I really am, but all the customers wanting something bring me back. It’s a game. There are at least four times as many customers as there are people working here. The goal is to serve them all. Family businesses are team efforts. You run extra hard, you can go without lunch, close late if you have to. You do up the pants of some fat guy who acts like he can’t figure out button-fly when all he wants is your hands near his crotch. It’s okay because everyone else, your entire family, is running, too. I sell a pair of boots. My mom, at the counter, gives me the thumbs up. Go Wongs. Lunch, then a busy afternoon. Some lady tries on twenty pairs of jeans and doesn’t buy a single one. A big shipment of shirts comes in. I sell seven pairs of shoes in three hours. I go up and down the hollow basement stairs, my head pounding — a hangover, I guess.
When it’s quiet, I try to start on homework, but then my mom comes and hovers around me, eating from her bowl of fruit paste, trying to get the dirt on last night. It’s awkward. We’re not close, she’s not the mothering kind, and not subtle. “What time you come home last night?” she asks. “Did you smoke? Did you drink? Did you do drug?” With every question comes a bit of nervous laughter.
I can’t keep a straight face either. Her cold sore. I can’t stop looking at it. We all have them, but my mom’s are always coming to the surface. Must be stress. My dad tells us to burn them off with hot rice.
What if I tell her? Mom, I got wasted last night. It was fun. The guy I like was there, but I didn’t talk to him. Later on, people were having sex in the woods. I tell her I didn’t do anything crazy, but that’s not enough. She wants details. She’s playful about it, too, her hands on my arm, her voice melodramatic on purpose. What was she like when she was young?
“What does it matter if I did? As long as I was safe, and as long as I can work today …”
“Aiyaa!”
“I didn’t say I did anything.”
“I can tell.”
It’s like her cold sore’s talking. “Tell what?” I say.
“If you did.”
“So did I?”
She doesn’t say anything. She probably doesn’t know.
I ask if I can take a break and she says yeah, peels a twenty off the roll in her pocket, doesn’t ask when I’ll be home. I go past my dad, who’s making coffee, and up the back steps out to the alley. The steel door shuts behind me. Warm wind, a chinook, the smell of wet pavement. Little piles of melting snow. Cars make shrik shrik sounds as they go by.
I grab my trike from the shed. Weird-looking thing, same as what a kid rides — two wheels in the back, one out front — but five times bigger. I walk it to the top of the alley then ride on the sidewalk. It’s a struggle in the wind and over patches of ice. Someone honks. Biking for transportation is not a thing people do. I think of Ty. Why didn’t I talk to him?
My mom must think Trina’s dead, putting her pictures away like that. What if we all die when we’re eighteen? If so, I’ve got seven months, maybe more, maybe less if I’m extra unlucky. Still enough time to travel, or at least live in a city. But what if I’ll only die if I leave? Is it worth living here for the next one, two, five, ten, twenty, eighty years? How long could I do it? Is it possible to die of unhappiness? And what if I’m no safer in town?
Cars go by. I’m on the street now, passing houses from the seventies, a trailer park, fields. I pull in to Pudgee’s, chain my trike to a sign a hundred feet away. Imagine eighty years more of biking there for a slush and beef jerky, eighty years of dust and the railroad tracks and the thin strip of mountains on the horizon. It’s mildly pretty here, more tantalizing and disappointing than anything, like a sign that says There’s more to life, if only you leave — these mountains are ones you could climb.
The tracks right here. Ten paces. How much more should I tempt fate? I step onto them. It’s exciting and scary, and there’s so much wrong with my life. I start walking, my eyes on the ground. Fifty feet in front of me, the track crosses the river valley before turning and disappearing into the trees. How long would it take for a train to cross that gap? The ground under the bridge tapers off, and forty feet down, the Clearwater River runs fast over rocks. All around me, trees are nodding in the wind, and I start to run, sloppily. I’m a kid again, chasing Trina and Gene as they go off to buy snacks or try on jeans or just hang out. Wait for me! Wait! Gene making fun of the way I run, me ashamed but laughing a little bit, too, and glad to be included in the joke. I find a rhythm. Blood pounding in my ears, breath catching in my throat. In elementary, this nerdy Jesus freak John Stevenson ran everywhere. To and from home, between classes. I see now why he ran.
Halfway across the river, though, I’m wheezing. I say I’m a partial asthmatic when all I really am is out of shape. Hands on my knees, I kick gravel through the ties and watch it fall. It’s a long drop, the water hard as cement from this height. I trot out to the lookout point, wood planks and a tall guardrail offset from the tracks. Across the way another bridge, the green one, where people have spraypainted Grad ’80, Grad ’86, and Grad ’97 — Trina’s year — in white.
Trina. Stef. The river. Them in it. I turn around.
On the way back, I see someone coming towards me. Some kid, probably. Or kids? It’s hard to see that far. What’s a train look like from that distance? A hundred feet. Trees. Walk faster. You don’t wanna be hit by a train. Yeah. And I don’t want to trip and fall off the railroad, either.
This person’s still coming. How much money do I have? What can I use as a weapon? Keys. My little Leatherman with tweezers and a toothpick. Birds fly by, birds chirp in the woods. Something moves in the trees. No train. This person is skinny, dark hair. Trina? But how’d she know I was here? She wouldn’t, or would she? Walking on the train bridge is just like me. Is it Ty? No, but wouldn’t that be awkward? Maybe they’re here to kill me. Don’t be paranoid. They could push me off, or do it some other way, no witnesses.
I start walking fast, back to the lookout. Adrenaline rising through my body. A person can lift a car with enough adrenaline. I could sit to lower my centre of gravity, make it harder to push me off, but that’s just asking for trouble. Instead I lean against the rail like I’m taking in the view. I open my Leatherman to the knife, then put it back in my pocket, still gripping it.
The person stops a couple of feet away and leans, too. “It’s nice,” he says. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.”
I turn to look. It’s the Hutterite guy from last night, wearing old man pants and a thick grey-blue cardigan over a t-shirt with a whale on it.
“Didn’t think I’d see anyone here,” I say.
“There’s always another weirdo,” he says. “How ya feelin’?”
“Huh?”
“The party.”
“Okay. Tough day at work. You? D’y’ave fun?”
“It was fine. Not something I do very much.”
“Square.”
“You were pretty wasted.”
“Life is short. I gotta go.” I turn to leave. “Sorry to be abrupt.”
“Some people called you Dead Girl. Last night.”
“The nerve!” I say, start walking to my bike backwards on the track. One, two, three …
He follows me. I’ve never seen grey eyes before. “Sounds like you’ve got an interesting story,” he says.
“I’m a regular Oliver Twist.” Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, don’t trip.
“You’re an orphan working in a factory during the Industrial Revolution?”
“Something like that. Sadder and less sad.”
“How about we grab a coffee and you tell me all about it?”
“Why are you here?”
“My mom met my dad at bingo in 1978. She liked him right away.”
“Very funny,” I say. “I meant w
hy walk here. You don’t live here. Aren’t you from … I don’t know.” Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Thirty feet down, twenty feet to go. I’m still walking backwards.
His eyes shift. “Eckville. I’m killing time.”
Killing.
“My mom lives here,” he says.
“Without you.”
“Yeah. I live with my dad.”
“You don’t seemed thrilled by that. What, you don’t like him? Or her?”
“I want to have coffee, not give my whole life story.”
“So don’t.” We reach land, my trike. I unlock it. “Guess I’ll see you around.”
“What?”
“You don’t wanna talk, you want one-sided sharing. Don’t waste my fucking time.”
“Okay, yeah. I can dish out questions, but sometimes I can’t take ’em. Is that what you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything.” I get on my trike.
“Come on,” he says.
“Come on what?” Why am I so mad?
“I like my mom, okay?” It takes effort for him to say. “I don’t like my dad.”
I shrug. “Whatever.”
“So,” he says, “the Leonids happen tonight. Supposed to be great this year. Reports from Asia are showing lots of fireballs.”
The Leonids. “Really. You’re what, some kind of brainiac?”
“Just a guy with a telescope. I’ve seen pretty much all the ‘ids’ for the past five years.”
“All the ‘ids’?”
“Leonids, Perseids, Geminids, Quadrantids, Lyrids, Orionids. It makes for a busy social life. You’ve got a pretty smile. Can I buy you a coffee yet?”
I’m not sure why I say yes. I guess because the back and forth is fun.
We go to Marlene’s, keep it light over bowls of broccoli and cheddar soup. I say nothing about my siblings, he says nothing about his mom and dad. We have things in common. Of course we do. His name is Conrad. We’re both nerds who like science and books. While he’s telling me about the Rafflesia, this flower in Malaysia that straddles the line between plant and fungus, I check my watch and see two hours have gone by in what felt like five minutes. I wait for him to finish talking, then say, “I’m sorry but I have to go. My dad is gonna kill me.”
