by Carrie Mac
“I’ll sleep on the air bed. It’s comfortable. I didn’t even want a new bed.”
“Well, we got you one. And I’m still waiting for some sign of gratitude.”
“I can’t sleep on it, Dad.”
“Maeve.”
“Dad.”
“Maeve! It’s perfectly good.”
And then Claire was beside him, a hand on his arm. “What’s going on?”
“She won’t sleep in the bed. She says it’s dirty.”
“I cleaned it,” Claire said. “Both sides.”
“This one looks like blood.” I pointed.
“Just stains,” Dad said. “That doesn’t mean that it isn’t clean.”
“It’s really comfortable,” Claire said.
“What’s wrong?” Corbin said.
“Maeve doesn’t like the bed,” Dad said.
They started jumping again. “We’ll have it!”
“See?” Claire said. “Great springs. Good bones.”
Claire made the bed and Dad told me the air bed wasn’t available. When it was time to go to sleep and everyone had gone upstairs, I slept on the floor, well away from the dirty mattress. Which was where Dad found me the next morning. With a sigh, he hauled the mattress to the alley and pinned a sign to it: Perfectly good. Her Highness wants something better. No bedbugs. And he drew a picture of a scowling princess, which was supposed to be me, I guess. Crown and all.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
Next he brought home a bed from work. An iron bed frame and a brand-new mattress that had only been used for seven hours.
“By one of the three bears,” he said. “The big one, I think. He was hardly in it at all.”
By three bears he meant actors from the TV show he was working on. The story line put a modern spin on fairy tales. A girl moves to a town and strange things happen and then she realizes that she’s living in a bizarre parallel world where there are dragons in the supermarket and trolls using the ATM and evil witches who want her dead. It was scarier than it sounds.
“Seven hours?”
“Maybe less,” Dad said. “Listen, Maeve. We don’t have the money to buy you a new one, and props gave this one to me for a really, really good price.”
“How much?”
“Beer.”
“Beer?” I waited for him to say more. To explain. “You went into a liquor store?”
His expression shifted.
“Yes, I went into a liquor store.” He turned to leave the room. “It’s not like there’s an alarm at the front door that keeps out certain people.”
“Maybe there should be,” I said under my breath.
“I’m the parent here. Not you. And I’m in charge of my sobriety. I’m in charge of staying clean. Not you. So mind your own business. And enjoy your new bed.” He left, and then returned a moment later to add, “I’m going to build blocks to raise it up. We need to store a few things underneath.”
“Sure.” I sat on the edge of the new-not-new bed. “Thanks, Dad.”
“I almost forgot.” He came back into the room and took down a shopping bag from the closet. “Claire bought you this.” New sheets, robin’s-egg blue, with pillowcases to match. They were as soft as any of Dan’s. Dan loved linens. People sleep better on delicious fabrics, he said. Truly.
“They’re beautiful.” Our sheets at home were so old that I could see the pattern of my mattress through them.
Dad set his hand on my head and kept it there—heavy and warm—for long enough that I started to wonder when the moment would end. But then he lifted his hand away and kissed my head where his hand had been and left the room, closing the door behind him.
“When you come in the summer, to stay, your little room will look amazing.”
My little six-month space.
Before I made the bed, I crawled around it on all fours, examining the crevices along the piping—that’s where you’ll find the bugs—and then I made the bed and pushed it into the empty closet that was going to be my very own, micro-tiny room-not-room. My own space—albeit infinitesimally small—not a blow-up bed that squeaked and creaked and leaked in the middle of the room.
While I was back in Port Townsend, Claire and the boys painted the closet to match the sheets and hung white fairy lights along the ceiling. Claire put up a curtain rod for butter-yellow curtains with tiny white polka dots. She emailed me a picture when she and the boys were done. The subject said, Look! PRIVACY. Which was cute, considering the curtains—replacing the bifold doors—were nearly sheer.
Now there was a framed poster at one end: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.
As if it were that easy. As if that was all a person ever needed to do. The British government commissioned that poster as war propaganda in World War II. Sure, keep calm, everybody, while your street is bombed and bits of your children end up where your kitchen used to be. Keep calm while Hitler packs all those innocent people and families into train cars and sends them to their deaths. Keep calm as you fight over a tiny ration of sugar and the U-boats blow your husband’s ship to smithereens.
I lifted the poster off the hook and leaned it against the wall. I had no intention of looking at that thing every time I was lying in bed. I hated that saying on posters; I hated it on pencil cases; I hated it on mugs and T-shirts and tea towels. I hated all the ways people had changed it. Keep calm and fill in the blank. Even Dan had one. KEEP CALM AND RIDE UNICORNS.
The poster was just as offensive where it was now. I turned it so I couldn’t see it, but it was still there, nagging at me. I tried to slide it under the bed, but there was no room because of the boxes and boxes of fabric scraps and tubs and tubes of paint and stacks of blank or abandoned canvases, and rolls of wrapping paper and two different irons, and the ironing board, and a broken easel Dad said he was going to fix, and another easel that he didn’t like but used as a spare when he was working on more than two paintings. All of that had been stuffed into the closet before Claire and Dad gave it to me, and now it was stuffed under the bed. They couldn’t afford to give me that space, but they did anyway. Which was so generous of them. I could’ve been on that leaky air bed forever.
If I took down the stupid poster, Claire would notice right away. She’d be hurt, but she’d say that she wasn’t.
And it was just a stupid poster.
She didn’t mean any harm by it. She wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic when she put it up there. She was being sweet and nice and thoughtful and supportive. I did need to keep calm and carry on. I knew that. However, to have a poster ordering me to do it every time I fell asleep or woke up was unbearable. But to hurt Claire’s feelings was worse.
I hung it back up, but above my head, so I wouldn’t see it unless I made a point of looking at it. I’d tell Claire that I wanted to draw something for the other wall. Maybe even paint a mural. She would be okay with that. She was always saying that I needed to take my art more seriously, because I was talented. You’re so talented, Maeve. You have no idea. Just like your dad. You just do, and it comes easily. You have no idea how lucky you are.
Upstairs, I heard my dad walking from the living room to the kitchen and back. And then Joel Plaskett on the stereo. The creak of the couch. Two clunks, which would be him kicking off his boots. He didn’t get to listen to his music very often. The twins preferred stuff that Dad referred to as “kiddie-pop barf,” which was a little harsh. But he was more entitled to an opinion than most, I figured. Until I was five he’d been a professional musician.
The Railway Kings were almost famous. They filled small stadiums. Their songs got a lot of play on the radio. There were posters and T-shirts and autographed set lists. They had groupies—mostly underage pot-smoking waifs wafting patchouli and hummus, but groupies nonetheless. The Railway Kings had an image: part hobo, part hillbilly, part rock and roll. And it worked. They got people dancing. So much so that they had a “dust-kicker” clause in their contract for all the outdoor festivals they played. The organizers had to spray the ground i
n front of the stage with water before they started their set; otherwise, Dad said, his throat would be on fire for days after and he’d have to drink gallons of hot lemon juice with honey. As if that was what he was drinking. Sure.
That’s how he met Claire—a waif, but not a flake. She waited by the tour bus one night, a warm and starry night, the way he told it, and when Dad saw her through the window, he brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses and they took a walk in the field behind the bus. She never went home, he said, because he was her new home. Claire told a much longer version, but the gist was the same.
One of Dad’s ex-bandmates came over for supper once, and when I’d gone to bed, he ribbed them about the night they met.
Come on, did you even make it to the bus that first time, Claire? By my recollection it was backstage.
The details don’t matter, Claire said quietly. Either way, it was love at first sight.
Yeah? You were both so shit-faced I bet you could hardly see at all. I bet your nose was full of it, right, Billy? We whooped it up back then, hey? He was laughing, but he was the only one. Good times, right?
And then Dad’s voice, low and angry. Some scuffling, and then the door slammed. I never saw that guy again.
Keep calm and carry on.
That fucking poster. It was calling my name even though I wasn’t looking at it. I scooted to the edge of the bed and stared at Dad’s easel instead. He was painting a pair of dogs: a pug and a German shepherd. They were wearing crowns and had long velvet capes, none of which were in the photo he was working from. I crossed the room for a closer look. The customer’s email was tacked to the wall beside the easel. She wanted Queenie and Prince to be painted in full royal attire. I was surprised that Dad would agree to paint something that looked so ridiculous. But there was the estimate, paper-clipped to the photo he was working from. He was charging double what he normally would. That made me smile. It was a shitty painting, and he knew it.
Shelves of paint pots, jars of paintbrushes and gesso, racks of finished paintings and half-finished paintings. Claire’s workbench with the sewing machine at one end and a row of clear plastic drawers with bits of cloth all sorted by color. Since I’d been here last, Claire had reorganized the drawers to be a rainbow of colors. Gay pride. Sweet of her. She meant well. She always meant well.
—
This would be my home for the next six months.
One hundred and eighty-two sleeps. Four thousand three hundred and sixty-eight hours and some change.
And seventy-five days until the first day of school.
Claire had already registered me at Britannia High, the same school that had sent eleven kids to the hospital the year before, because of a suicide pact they were trying to carry out in the senior girls’ bathroom with bottles of vodka and pills. The same school where Owen had found a dirty needle at the edge of the soccer field where the boys’ junior soccer team practiced. The school in the background of the YouTube video, the one of the kid getting his face kicked in by four other kids, and a whole bunch of kids crowding around, cheering them on.
Don’t think about school.
Mom would be leaving for Haiti in four days.
Ninety-eight hours, to be exact.
I miss you. I can’t do this. It hurts. I want to go home. Please don’t go.
There was no text back. I held my phone in my hands and waited and waited and waited. I wanted to know I could reach her, even when she was so far away. I wanted to know that she was hearing me. But she wasn’t, even though she’d said she would. She was with Raymond, and not thinking about me at all. I was sure.
There would be no keeping calm and carrying on. There would be panic, and reeling backward. Which would be fine if it took me home. All the way home. To my real home in the woods, with the garden all around, and the woodstove. I liked starting the fire on cold mornings. Usually.
He’d come to Port Townsend to visit Dan, his younger brother, as in younger by almost twenty years. All it took was a couple of dinner parties and one bonfire with marshmallows and homemade wine before he invited Mom to join him in Haiti, where his charity had an immunization clinic. The flames reached up hot and orange into the black night, and I laughed. Actually laughed, until I heard my mom tell Raymond that she’d think about it. She poured more wine into his glass and then put her hand on his leg and slid it up just a bit and told him that she’d think about it.
For a moment, in the shadows beside the fire, I thought she was serious. But then Raymond left, and she never mentioned it, because it was a stupid idea. I was in Port Townsend, and so was Mom’s job with the town, and her garden, and her friends, and her car, and her house, and all of her life, all in Port Townsend. Not Haiti.
But then Raymond came back a few weeks later, and Mom went to pick him up at the airport, not Dan. And that was when I started to really worry. They’d been emailing, which I hadn’t known about until I checked the computer while Mom was on her way to get him. It started out all nice-to-meet-you, but by the most recent ones he was calling her sweetheart and she was calling him love, and in the very last email—sent just before Mom got into the car and drove away—she told him that she knew of a little park on the way back. She told him no one ever went there, and that there was a corner of the parking lot that would be perfect for a “proper hello.”
He spent eleven nights out of fourteen at our house, so I doubted that he’d come to see Dan at all, really. They weren’t going to tell me that he was sleeping over, so the first morning was a surprise. I hadn’t slept very well, because I could not get rid of the image of Mom and Raymond going at it in the back of the car, with the seats folded down and that old grimy blanket spread out. So I got up earlier than usual, rather than lie in bed thinking about it. It was cold, so I was kneeling by the woodstove, blowing on the kindling, when I heard a man’s cough and looked up to see Raymond padding into the kitchen, entirely nude.
But he didn’t see me. I tried to close the stove door as quietly as I could, hoping that he’d just get a glass of water or whatever and go back to Mom’s room. But the door creaked, and he heard that and spun around, and I fell back and knocked over the side table by the couch, which sent the ceramic lamp to the floor, where it broke into a million little pieces.
“Maeve!” Raymond grabbed the dish towel and covered himself. He scurried behind the cover of the kitchen island. “I certainly didn’t see you there. Uh, good morning.”
“Morning.” I stood up, very reluctantly, and then bolted down the hall, hoping that we could just pretend that we hadn’t seen each other at all. But then Mom came out of her bedroom, pulling her robe on as she did.
“What’s going on?” She saw me, and she saw Raymond, and at first her face went pale. “Well, shit.”
“I got up to make you coffee,” Raymond said. “I was going to bring it to you before I went back to Dan’s.”
“You’re naked.”
“Sorry.” Raymond shrugged. “Really sorry.”
And then her face turned red and she got mad. “I have a teenage daughter, Raymond!” She steered me back into my room. “This is totally unacceptable, Maeve. I am so sorry. I should’ve told you that he was staying over. It was a bad idea not to, and I apologize. Give us a minute.”
“Gladly.” I shut the door and leaned against it, willing myself not to throw up. I’d seen three penises in my life up to that point: my dad’s and the twins’. Raymond’s made four. I’d been way too close to Raymond’s old-man dick, all shriveled and wobbly and with great big sagging balls. It had practically been in my face. But worse than that—as if old-man penises weren’t bad enough—I was upset about what his penis being there meant in the first place. My mom was going. And she wasn’t just going in order to be helpful. To be charitable. For the greater good. No. She was going. As in, off in the direction of Raymond. Away from me.
—
Sometimes I still thought of the car parked in that empty lot.
I knew that park. Mom and
I almost always stopped there on the way to Seattle.
Cedar trees swaying above. The little creek with soft loam and giant ferns on either side. The bear-proof garbage cans beside the trail. The outhouses. Sitting on the big rocks and eating salami sandwiches and oranges we’d brought with us and looking at the sky to see who would spot the first eagle. That’s what I used to think about that place.
But not after reading that email. When I thought of it, I couldn’t make myself think about the other things. The nicer things. I could only imagine Mom and Raymond having sex in the car, like a couple of desperate teenagers fumbling and humping and getting tangled in seat belts and each other. And then, when they were finished and had put their clothes back on, he’d get out and put the used condom in the trash. The bear-proof trash beside the trail. The one I’d put so many orange peels in.
I hated thinking about it. And I never wanted to. But if you imagine something once, it becomes a part of you. This was what made living hard. The fact that life happened all the time, in ways that I fully did not approve of, and then it just came pushing in and I couldn’t stop it, and that was how I ended up tossing and turning on a bed in the closet at my dad’s house while Mom and Raymond were fast asleep—or worse—in a big bed in his house in some random neighborhood in Chicago.
I could go back to the bus station in the morning. It wasn’t like anyone would stop me. I could go before anyone else was up. I could go now. I could tell Dad and Claire that I was going for a walk. The letter Mom wrote for the border officials—granting me permission for cross-border travel—was dated for the whole time she’d be in Haiti, just in case. I could call Claire and Dad when I got home. And what would Dad do? Come get me? Force me to come back to Vancouver with him? Or would he let me stay with Dan? If I could convince him? And besides, he quit high school and left home when he was my age, and he was playing with the Railway Kings by the time he was nineteen.
