Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  “It’s oppressive,” I said, trying out a word I’d heard Claudia use.

  “What is?”

  “How much you love us.”

  Mom set down her clay cup, one that Dad had made. “Do you have any idea what motherhood is like? It’s like taking an endless multiple-choice exam, and none of the available answers are correct.” She added, “Your father never understood that.”

  I’d never taken a multiple-choice exam. My homework still consisted of memorizing how to spell difficult words, like friend and people. Mom was always forgetting how young I was.

  “Claudia Sky!” she yelled toward the other room. “Get back here, young lady! We need to talk about that stuff in your hair!” Then, quietly, to me, “How was that?”

  “Great.” My pencil was completely tangled in my hair and I wondered if I’d have to cut it out. “Very convincing.”

  DAD WENT AS FAR AWAY as he could on fifty dollars. He took the Greyhound up-island, as far north as it would go. Then, from a payphone, he called us. Had my mom answered the phone, he probably would have spoken triumphantly: “I’m in Port Hardy. I bet you don’t even know where that is.”

  Instead, because I thought it might be a boy calling for Claudia, I ran to the phone, almost tripped over the cord, and grabbed it before anyone else could. The sound of my young voice over the line really did him in. “I’m in Port Hardy,” he said. “I bet you don’t even know where that is.” Then he burst into tears.

  “Hold on, okay?” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and screamed, “Mom! It’s Dad! He’s crying again!”

  She took the phone from me. “Where are you? Port what? I don’t even know where that is.”

  When she got off the phone with Dad, she called her sisters, her friends at the veggie co-op, and her Amnesty letter-writing group. That was one thing Claudia hated about The Separation: she’d lost her tyranny of the telephone. Mom was always talking to her sisters, women friends, and anyone else who was up for a little schadenfreude. Even her friend who lived in a tree stump in Beacon Hill Park found a way to call.

  “Breaking news,” Mom said each time someone phoned that night. “He’s now sleeping in a bus depot in Port Hardy. I bet you don’t even know where that is.”

  CLAUDIA’S TEENAGE REBELLION was awkward, an adolescent flail. In her twenties, she came to understand how to really get to our parents, and her techniques became much more sophisticated. But when I was eleven, I didn’t understand how young and stupid she was, so I copied everything she did. I ripped my jeans the way she ripped hers. I coloured my hair with markers from school, so that my head looked and smelled like blueberries. I made mixtapes and listened to them until they unravelled. I took the music seriously—more seriously, it turned out, than Claudia ever did. It started as imitation, but in the end, it stuck.

  “ON A SCALE OF ONE TO TEN, how much do you think your father and I have messed you girls up?” This was the kind of question Mom started asking over dinner. “A moderate amount? Or more than average?”

  “You’re so weird, Mom.” Claudia brushed her fork over the quinoa on her plate.

  “Yeah.” I tried to copy Claudia’s nonchalance, her way of averting her eyes from our mother’s. “You’re weird.”

  “We always tried to make sure you were happy.” Mom covered her face with her hands. “We tried so hard.”

  It was sweet of Mom to worry, but I knew that, for Claudia, The Separation had its advantages. She had been the only one of her friends who lived in a two-parent home, and that had embarrassed her. And, bonus: she’d been able to fake tears—my parents are getting divorced, etc., etc.—to get out of gym class.

  There was one thing I liked about it too. It meant that, every month, Claudia and I got to visit our dad in Port Hardy. This was farther from home than I’d ever been, and I loved the bus trip. On the first Friday of each month we caught the Greyhound at 5:45 in the morning. Claudia liked it because it meant we got to miss a day of school. I liked it because it meant a whole day—ten hours, including stops—with Claudia.

  THE BUS HAD GREY SEATS with little footrests that flipped down, and wide windows that didn’t open. Claudia and I always took a seat close to the back, because we knew from riding the school bus that this was where the cool kids sat. My sister always took the window seat and put the armrest down between us.

  I can’t speak for Claudia—she’s still mysterious to me—but I can be almost sure that what we both loved most about those trips was the freedom. It’s true that we were limited. Really, how much cool stuff can you do on a bus? When all you had was the ten bucks that your mom had given you to buy lunch? But still, when the door was sealed shut, we were fully separated from our parents—and this hardly ever happened, since school was full of parental replacements. That bus was our territory. Who cares that its seats made me lose all feeling in my ass? Or that the air that shot from the vents above our heads smelled like old carpets? Or that the sun poured in the windows and made us sweat? Our only responsibility was to call our parents from Campbell River, because they both insisted, separately, that we check in. Other than that, we could do or eat or say whatever we wanted. For ten hours, between Victoria and Port Hardy, we travelled fast, suspended above the road and outside supervision.

  Of course, it turned out that when we were left on our own, we didn’t usually feel like doing anything wild. I’d read adventure novels—Mom’s old Trixie Beldens, or a Famous Five. Claudia would arrange herself so her sneakers were against the seat in front of her. She always brought a pillow, which she propped against the window. She listened to her Walkman and either slept or pretended to sleep. And I sat beside her, which was my favourite part. For once, she couldn’t kick me out of her room, slam the door, or tell me to go somewhere and die.

  THERE WAS ONE BUS TRIP that was different. It was September, and it would be our last trip up-island, but we didn’t know that yet.

  Things started out wrong: after Mom dropped us at the depot, Claudia waited until she had driven away—so I couldn’t run and tell on her—then insisted that we sit in separate seats. As we dragged our backpacks through the parking lot toward our bus, Claudia said, “I’m not sitting beside you. I feel like being by myself.”

  “Yeah, right. Mom says some guy will sit beside us and fondle us if we don’t stick together.”

  “Oh my God.” Claudia stepped onto the bus and showed the driver her ticket. “You’re such a crybaby.”

  Another thing that went wrong was that the last seats of the bus were already taken by people who were obviously cooler than us. So Claudia chose a seat in the middle. She sat near the window, and put her legs up so I couldn’t sit down. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “You’re not sitting here.”

  I sat directly behind her. “You’re such a bitch.” I spoke through the space between the back of her seat and the window. “I hope you do get fondled.”

  IN PORT HARDY, our dad moved from place to place, and finally ended up renting a room in a house where people like him—people without luck or money—ended up. It was a big, crumbling house by the water. The wind coming off the ocean was so loud that when Claudia and I stayed there, I couldn’t sleep at night. There was a smokehouse in the back, but Dad didn’t know how to use it and had almost burned it down accidentally. After that, the other tenants teased him by calling him White Man, even though most of them were white too.

  Living there for less than a year had aged our dad. Maybe it was all that wind battering his skin. His hair was always tangled, and he wore clothes I’d never seen before: fraying plaid shirts, jeans that were too big for him, rubber boots.

  He spent a lot of time with one of his neighbours, a woman named Laura. She had a tattoo of an eagle on her back and a baby named Roger that she carried in a Snugli. She was pretty, with shiny dark hair and a round face. I liked her because she gave us jujubes and other petroleum products that we weren’t allowed to eat at home. Claudia liked her because Laura shared her makeup. And she would let us take
turns holding Roger, teaching us the right way to carry him. His soft baby breathing even calmed Claudia’s hormonal rages.

  Mom was convinced that Laura was Dad’s girlfriend, but I was never sure. I think Laura just felt sorry for him, and for us. But when Mom found out about her, her hands and her voice got shaky. With a new urgency, she phoned everyone she knew.

  “Breaking news,” she said. “He’s now dating Pocahontas.” She paused. “Not that I don’t respect the Salish people and their culture.”

  Then she inhaled and exhaled, deeply and calmly, the way she’d learned to do from a book.

  ONE GOOD THING about being separated from Claudia was that I got a window seat. I was able to look out at deer munching broom on the side of the road. I saw birds in their flight. I had views of the vast and untamed ocean.

  It turned out that I got bored of that pretty quick. By the time we hit Ladysmith, it was all I could do not to lean over Claudia’s seat and start smacking her head with my book.

  The only reason I didn’t do that was because there was a stranger beside me—an overweight woman with a winter coat, despite the fact that it was hot in the bus. She sat next to me, purse on the floor, coat spread over her legs like a blanket. She turned on the little light above her seat and started to read a novel.

  The book’s cover had a picture of a dark man in a feather headdress, holding a pale woman in his muscular arms. The woman looked like she’d swooned or died or had low blood sugar. Her eighteenth-century dress was slipping off one shoulder. The man in the headdress looked like some of the guys my dad hung out with at the Legion, except a lot less hunched and exhausted. He had huge pecs and there was a forest behind him. I could tell from the cover and the tag line—In the wilderness of New America, she found a wild stranger—that this book was full of sex. From Victoria to Nanaimo, I kept trying to read over the fat woman’s shoulder.

  EACH VISIT TO OUR DAD’S was pretty much the same. After we arrived on Friday night, he’d take us to the Legion. All the guys there recognized us and said, “Hey, little ladies. How are the princesses this evening?” They asked us about school and we told them stories. Usually Claudia and I invented some adventure about the bus trip, some fantastic thing that involved several near-death experiences.

  Then, on Saturday, Dad always wanted us to do something in nature. We went hiking or fishing, and after, we’d usually hang out with Laura and Roger. And at least once over the weekend, Dad would cry.

  Usually, it started like this: “Do you girls want me to come home? I mean, if you do, then I will. You know I love you like crazy. Just say the word.”

  Sure we wanted him to come home. But we’d been raised to let people go on their own journeys, to allow others to grow and change. So we just stood there with our hands dangling at our sides. Anyway, we figured that Dad would sort it out on his own, since he was our dad, since he was a grown-up.

  “If you want to come home,” I said, “why don’t you just say so?”

  “That’s very sweet, June. But life is more complicated than that.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  That’s when the tears started. “I just need to know that you girls are okay.” He knelt down so he was at our level. “I hate to think of you being harmed by The Separation. I hate to think that my children have been damaged.”

  “Hey!” I said, suddenly remembering a message I was supposed to pass on. “Mom says you should pay for therapy for us.”

  “She said what?”

  “Dad, you’re the one who’s damaged if you think I’m still a child.” Claudia was good at ending these sorts of conversations. She understood something that our parents didn’t get: that they could never really damage us. That we transcended them, lived outside of them. They were them and we were us. We had our own concerns: Claudia had her period and boys who called her on the phone, and I was growing out my hair and memorizing the lyrics from 13 Flavours of Doom. What our parents didn’t understand was that we were busy.

  WHEN WE STOPPED IN NANAIMO, a stranger got on and sat beside Claudia. He must have been a young guy, but he seemed old to me at the time. I could easily tell a ten-year-old from an eleven-year-old, but everyone over twenty seemed vague and dangerous. He carried a backpack and wore a toque. He said, “Is anyone sitting here?”

  Claudia said, “Nope. Go for it,” despite the fact that I should have been sitting there, that I was her sister, that I was stuck next to a woman who wouldn’t share her sexy book.

  Mark put his backpack on the shelf above the seat and sat down beside Claudia. I knew his name because, once he was seated, he turned to my sister and said, “How’s it going? I’m Mark.”

  He asked my sister where she was headed and she said, “Port Hardy,” which was the truth. Then she added, “To visit some friends,” which was a lie.

  Mark said that he was going to Port McNeill, the stop before hers. “I work in Nanaimo. But I go back to Port on weekends.”

  “Cool,” said my sister, as though it really was. “What do you do? When you work?”

  “Construction. I’m an industrial welder. You?”

  “That’s so cool.” Claudia sounded fascinated, intrigued, amazed—I’d never heard her exhibit so much interest in anything in my life. “I don’t really work. I’m a student.”

  “Oh, yeah? At the college?”

  I could feel Claudia’s elation in the air. I could almost inhale it. She might have told the truth: that she was only fourteen and attended Vic High. But the purple bangs and the makeup had paid off, and she was going to cash in. “Kind of,” she said. “At the university.”

  “Sweet.”

  “Yeah. It’s all right.”

  Then they didn’t talk for about twenty minutes. Mark didn’t get out a book or anything, and I imagined that he was sitting there with his legs spread wide, staring at the seat in front of him.

  When we’d passed Wellington, my sister took out her Walkman and Mark said, “What are you listening to?”

  “D.O.A. They’re this band from Vancouver.” Mark didn’t say anything, so my sister, her voice full of hope, asked, “What kind of music do you like?”

  “I like tons of stuff. I listen to pretty much everything.”

  And it became official: I hated him. I was only eleven, and my musical snobbery was in its embryo stage, but still I knew a fraud when I heard one. Everything. The only people who claim to listen to everything are the ones who know nothing, who are happy to swallow whatever the radio feeds them.

  “Totally,” said my Judas of a sister. “Me too.”

  CLAUDIA AND MARK talked for the next three hours. She let him listen to her tapes and gave him the kind of musical education some people pay money for. He told her how his girlfriend had cheated on him when she went on a three-week tour of Europe, and Claudia seemed to feel real sympathy for him. “That totally sucks.”

  He said that, since the breakup, he’d just focused on work. “You’re pretty much the first girl I’ve talked to since then.”

  He showed her pictures of his two dogs, and at one point they both held up their hands to compare them. Next to his workman’s hands, Claudia’s looked like they belonged to a child. Which they did.

  Between Bowser and Courtenay, I couldn’t hear what they were saying because they started talking more quietly. I couldn’t make out words, but I could hear their soft voices and Claudia’s laughter. They leaned close to each other, and in the space between their seats, I could see that their heads almost touched.

  WHEN WE HIT CAMPBELL RIVER, where we had a forty-minute stop, they acted like best friends. They got off the bus together and my sister didn’t wait for me, didn’t even turn around to look at me.

  I followed her into the depot’s bathroom, which had only two stalls, an empty soap dispenser, and an overflowing garbage. Names and life stories had been penned onto the walls, and usually Claudia and I hung out in there and made fun of people who wrote things like Linds B. wuz here and I wanna do Kris 4ever.

/>   “Thanks for waiting.” I kicked the door of the stall Claudia was in, but she didn’t say anything back. I heard her peeing, and I said, “That guy you were talking to was such a loser.”

  Claudia flushed the toilet and came out of the stall. She didn’t answer me or look at me. She turned on the faucet and ran water over her hands.

  “And the woman beside me is so fat. And she’s reading this sickening book.”

  “Shut up!” Claudia slammed her wet hand against the mirror, against the image of her own face. “Who cares? Who cares if she’s fat? Who cares what she’s reading?”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “You are. I don’t want you to talk to me anymore.”

  “I have to talk to you. Mom gave you the money, and I’m hungry.”

  “Here.” Claudia took a five-dollar bill from her pocket and threw it at me. “Take this and leave me alone. Don’t look at me. Don’t breathe on me. And every time you want to talk to me, just remind yourself that you don’t even know me.”

  USUALLY, IN CAMPBELL RIVER, we bought chips and pop from the vending machine and ate them while sitting on the depot’s row of plastic seats. We weren’t used to carbonated beverages, so they made us hyperactive and strange. We jumped from seat to seat, and competed to see who could jump the farthest. Claudia always won because she could leap over four seats at a time. I’d been hoping to break her record.

  But instead, I sat in one of those seats alone. The hard plastic dug into my neck. I bought a bag of chips and ate them by myself. Actually, I didn’t eat them. I licked the dill pickle flavour off them and left them in a wet pile on the seat beside me. But even that was no fun without my sister to tell me I was disgusting.