I used some of the change to phone our parents, since Claudia seemed to have forgotten that we were supposed to do that.
When Mom picked up, she said, “Is that you, Juney-looney?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great—you’re ahead of schedule.”
“Yeah.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you have lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you have?”
“Sandwiches.”
When I called our dad, he said, “Hey, June-bug!” He spoke in his ultra-happy voice, the one he used when he was trying to convince us that he was ultra-happy in his new life. “You in C.R.?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re ahead of schedule!”
“I know.”
“Is your sister behaving?”
Through the bus depot’s dirty window, I could see Claudia and Mark. They sat in a sunny part of the parking lot. She’d taken off her hoodie and wore just her Converse, jeans, and a black tank top. One of the straps had slipped off her shoulder, and Mark kept looking at it. And she kept looking up at him, through her purple bangs.
“No,” I said.
Dad laughed. “You keep her in line, then. You lay down the law.”
For the rest of the stop, I leaned against the payphone and watched my sister and Mark. They talked and laughed as they shared fries and a cigarette. If our parents had found out, Claudia would have been so dead. It was one thing to smoke weed that the neighbours grew. But to support the big tobacco companies was out of the question.
WHEN THEY GOT BACK ON THE BUS, they acted awkward, like strangers. All the way to Sayward they didn’t talk. Mark slept with his face turned toward my sister. If I had leaned forward, I would have smelled his cigarette breath coming at me from between their seats. He’d taken off his toque and exposed his blond hair. I don’t know what my sister liked about him. Maybe it was that he looked as vulnerable as a baby: pale skin, wet lips, fly-away hair.
She listened to her Walkman, and I could hear the tape rewind, play, rewind again. I wanted to ask her which song she was listening to, but I didn’t dare. I tried to read my book, but it seemed boring and childish now that I’d seen the kind of book I could be reading.
As we passed Woss, Mark woke up from what I imagined to be dreams about fondling my sister. He jerked awake, and his twitch made him and my sister laugh. Just like that, they were friends again. They started swapping party stories.
I’d had no idea that Claudia had ever been drunk. Our parents had always said that they didn’t mind if we experimented with alcohol as long as we did it in their house. They’d rather we tried that kind of thing at home, where they knew we were safe. Every time they said this, Claudia crossed her arms. “I don’t drink anyway,” she’d say. “I’m pretty much straight-edge.”
But she had some good stories. About throwing up off a balcony. About passing out then waking up beside her friend’s hamster cage with the hamster kicking wood chips into her face. About eating mushrooms and walking down Government Street to watch the tourists’ faces melt. After a while, I realized that her stories sounded familiar. They belonged to our parents.
“That’s fucked.” Mark laughed. “That’s awesome.”
He told about the times he dropped acid, went skinny-dipping in Duncan, and lost a pair of shoes in Vancouver. Then he said, “We should hang out sometime. How long are you in Hardy for?”
“Just the weekend.”
“Maybe you and your friends could come down and party with us.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Or you could just get off with me at the McNeill stop today and the two of us could hang out tonight.”
“Really?”
He said this after we’d passed Nimpkish. This far north, it was visibly colder. Some muddy snow was scattered along the side of the highway. It looked like it had been left behind, forgotten, though it must have been the first snowfall of the year. We were ten minutes away from Mark’s stop, from the town on the edge of the ocean where he lived, from the place where I was going to be separated from my sister forever.
“You could stay at my place for the night. It looks out over the water. You’d like it.”
“I don’t know. My friend’s sort of expecting me.”
“You can call her. And I’ll give you a ride up to Port Hardy tomorrow.”
Claudia must have understood how easy it would be to go with him. She knew she’d get away with it because I’d never betray her. I’d tell Dad that she’d stayed in Victoria for an extra day, for volleyball practice or something, and that she’d arrive tomorrow. Dad was so disoriented and absent lately that he’d believe anything.
“You have a car?” she said. “That’s really cool.”
I didn’t say a word. I didn’t even kick the back of her seat to remind her of me, of us, of the secret and unspoken pact we’d had since we were too young to speak. A pact to stick together, to be sisters, no matter how much we hated each other. I didn’t say anything because part of me wanted her to do it. I wanted to see that it could be done. I wanted to watch my sister grab her backpack and strut away. I wanted to watch her hop off the bus and into the arms of a wild stranger, or anyone else she chose. I wanted to know that separation was possible. That we could cut ties, break free.
“I can’t,” she said. “My friend would shit. We’ve had these plans for practically forever.”
I didn’t understand why she said that, just like I didn’t understand why our dad came home a couple of months later. Maybe Laura got sick of him, or he was tired of being so poor, or he missed us, or he missed the way Mom swayed heavily through the house in her hemp skirts. He would leave again over the years, and Mom would leave him too—whenever they craved some entertainment—but they always came home.
I didn’t understand, but I was relieved.
“Okay. That’s cool. That makes sense.” Mark sounded genuinely disappointed, as though he actually liked my sister. “But maybe I could give you my number? In case you change your mind?”
“Sure. Yeah. I could call you.”
Mark wrote on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. “It was awesome meeting you.”
“You too.” Claudia put the paper in the back pocket of her jeans, and I felt her movement in my knees, which were propped against her seat. “Thanks.”
What I did understand, later but still way before Claudia did, was that it was impossible. That we could never break free. No matter what we did, we could never separate them from us. Our bodies were built by the lentils and flax they’d fed us. Their bone structure lingered in our faces. Their humour and neuroses were planted deep in our brains, and we’d inherited their voices, their sayings, their stories. They were our parents. Even when Claudia’s rebellion was complete—when she ditched the punk scene and left that territory to me, when she started wearing brand names and married a stockbroker—even then, they forgave her and loved her and got really high at her wedding.
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS before we left for Port Hardy, Claudia listened to Nomeansno in her room and I sat at the kitchen table, using my pastels to draw a picture of Sid Vicious. Mom was in the kitchen too, rolling her evening joint. And I knew that, twelve hours away, Dad was doing the exact same thing.
“Juniper?” said Mom. “Why don’t you come sit on my lap?”
I looked up from Sid’s pretty snarl. “Because I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“Mom, it’s gross. I’m not a baby anymore.”
“I know that.” Mom lit the joint and I heard the paper crackle as it burned. “I’m just sad tonight, I guess.”
The truth was that I did want to sit on her lap. I still liked the way she smelled, of tea and smoke and lemongrass shampoo. And I liked the way she ran her fingers through my hair. It felt soft and ticklish and usually put me into a trance.
“I’ll sit on your lap for ten seconds,” I said. “As long as
you promise not to tell Claudia.”
Mom smiled in this way that made me think that maybe, in secret, my sister still liked to sit on her lap. Maybe Claudia liked the hair thing too.
“Okay,” said Mom. “Promise.”
WHEN MARK GOT OFF THE BUS, I tossed my backpack over onto his seat and said “’Scuse me” to the woman beside me, who had almost finished her novel.
I sat where Mark had been, and the seat was still warm from his body. For a second I almost understood my sister—why she might want to be close to him, or someone like him. Then I said, “He was so ugly.”
“Fuck you.”
Claudia put on her earphones, adjusted her pillow, and closed her eyes. I sat beside her, and I was hugely, oppressively happy. She was my sister and I loved her. I stole one of the buds from her ear, stuck it in my own, and Joey “Shithead” Keithley yelled at us as the afternoon sun poured through the window. I leaned against Claudia as though she was a pillow. “Get off me,” she said, out of habit, without meaning it. I rested my face against her bare arm, and the moisture of our skin stuck us together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU TO THE EDITORS OF The 2006 Bridport Prize Anthology, Event Magazine, and PRISM International, where stories from this collection have appeared.
I want to thank my family for their encouragement, and I need to specially mention Pauline Willis, Gary Willis, Graham Hunter, and Charis Wahl for their invaluable help with this manuscript. Many thanks to my friends, especially those fellow writers who generously read earlier drafts of these stories: Marjorie Celona, Amanda Leduc, Garth Martens, Aaron Shepard, Jeanne Shoemaker, and Sarah Taggart. Thank you also to Trevor Williams and to the extraordinary Pichu Kalyniuk for their help along the way. I also want to thank my roomies, Manusha Janakiram, Tamiko McLean, and David McLean, for being such good company during the time I wrote many of these stories, and for not minding when I spread my manuscripts all over the living room floor.
I’m indebted to the faculty and my peers in the University of Victoria’s English and Writing departments. I’m also grateful to the staff at Munro’s Books, who are more like family than co-workers. I especially want to thank Jim Munro, whose enthusiasm for and practical encouragement of my work have been extraordinary. Lastly, I want to thank everyone at Penguin (Canada), especially my editors, Jennifer Notman and Nicole Winstanley, for their belief in these stories, and their help in making them as polished as possible.
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