by Sheree Fitch
“I remember,” she sighed, and moved beneath me, “and I remember,” she said and thrust back. “Our matchmaker.”
“Kind of,” I agreed, trying not to groan.
“Do you think she knows about us?” Skye asked then, tickling my face with a strand of her hair.
“No! Teddy’s the only one who knows far as I know. But let’s forget about all of them, okay? Remember where we are. What we were doing.” My breath was jagged.
Skye nodded and melted back into my arms.
f
By the time I’d shovelled, salted and scraped my way to the last house on my Wednesday afternoon list—Shep’s, by the way—it was dusk and the rain had turned to spitting snow. Up and down the narrow side streets winding up from the harbour and village centre of Poplar Hills, people flicked on their back porch lights. Think of a set of giant dentures wired with lights. That’s what the town would look like from a plane.
My last stop, as I said, was Shep’s. I usually lucked out and she drove in while I was finishing up her front steps. “Well, look at the sorry mess on my doorstep,” she’d say. More often than not, she’d ask me in for hot chocolate and cookies, an offer a snow-shovelling guy’s not about to refuse. Sometimes, I made a fire while Shep put on her space cadet woojie-woojie gongs and monk-humming meditation music and lit a candle or two. Drippy hippy shit. Other times, she’d tune in to the classical radio channel. Opera even. Made the hair stand up on the back of my neck—all those jeezlus high-pitched voices. Chalk scraping sideways on a blackboard. I preferred the gong music, but in any case, her cookies were the best and I wasn’t about to complain about her taste in music or odd little rituals.
I wished then Shep would hurry up and get the hell home. I’d ask her advice, I thought. I would. Did she maybe have a clue where Skye’d gone? Would she maybe know her aunt’s name in Halifax? I was feeling sick to my stomach by then. I spit into the wind, stopped shoveling, took off my gloves and checked to see if I had any messages. There was one: “J–!” From Skye’s cell number!
“Skye! Skye u there????” I texted, then dialed. Nothing. And what the hell kind of message was that? Damn. Still, still, shit! I’d made contact. My spirits actually lifted as I started to work. It was a relief to step inside her garage, good to get in out of the wind. Even then, the cold wrapped around my bones and went right through me. I thought of Herc and being back by the fire—considered for half a nanosecond maybe I should just wait it all out.
No! Go go go go. Get there! Voices swirled in my head. Louder and louder. Suddenly it was like I was trapped in a cement tunnel or aqueduct and the smell of burning hair started up. I felt myself sliding. I was so close to the edge of losing control. I counted backwards from ten and looked around. Ten, nine, eight—
Shep’s garage was as tidy as she was. I sniffed around a bit. I mean that literally, right? Deep breath. To my sensitive nose the garage smelled of:
1) paint—old paint and trace of V arsol
2) caked earth on clay pots
3) mustiness from rain-soaked rotting wooden window frames
4) the sweet smell of old mice turd
Didn’t I tell you? Quite the nasal gift I’ve got. Still, underneath and in between all those other smells, there it was, more burning hair. I tried to focus. There was a shelving unit along one wall. All items labelled and stored in colour-coordinated rubber containers next to her old car. Her car.
Groping my way between one side of the shed and Shep’s old Volvo, I yanked the metal handle of the driver’s door. It was locked. But what was I doing? What was I thinking?
Wait, my father had advised me. “Wait until I’m home and we’ll talk through this further, okay?” The bus, I said to myself, there’s the bus.
But I kept going AWOB. Absent without a brain. Burble burble, underwater, like I was watching myself through an aquarium screen. Jake Upshore, the action-less hero in a warped slow-mo video game. Yes, a full-blown panic attack was settling in.
Once, I tried to explain these panic attacks and impulse moments to Shep. She only nodded.
“Like being on a cliff with the ground all spongy underneath my feet,” I said. “Ready to fall.”
“Maybe it’s your body just telling you to breathe, to slow down,” she suggested.
Well, slow wasn’t going to cut it in this situation the way I figured it. As for breathing, I kept panting like Herc on a hot day in summer. My heart boomed through my chest again. I counted backwards, and when that did not work, I recited these lines:
One who acts before he thinks is like a drunk who spills his drinks.
What is lost is gone, gone, gone
So Reason first
Then, carry on.
The strategy horseshit can work sometimes. At least temporarily. My good sense did take over. Shep would be there soon, I figured. Slowly, repeating the words gone gone gone, I backed away from the car, rummaged through the shelves and found one open bag of salt from the last storm, heaved it over my shoulder, grabbed another one under my arm and barged back out into the blast of wind. The whole time I salted I tried to keep my mind off the plan that insisted on taking shape inside my head like a puzzle being pieced together. My troublemaking head, I scolded myself. My demon voice.
It doesn’t matter how I get to the city as long as I get there and fast, I told myself, and felt instant relief.
So yeah, there it was. I made my next unfortunate decision. The solution was right under my nose.
Back in the shed, I marched directly to the second shelf on the left and reached up. In a clay pot, inside a cardboard box that said “Rose Fertilizer,” I knew there was a small black tin with a bluish flower painted on it. Inside that tin box was an extra set of keys to Shep’s old Volvo.
I took the keys, zipped them into my side pant leg pocket. As I was rearranging the pots back in place when lights flashed in the garage. I figured it was Shep pulling in. I peered out.
A police cruiser idled. When the driver’s door opened, I slunk to the opposite end of the garage, crouched low and held my breath. The car door slammed. Footsteps echoed as buddy approached the shed. A wedge of light from a high-powered flashlight funnelled in.
Before I could move again, the shed door barked and opened, and a copper was there, standing in the frame of the garage doorway, reminding me for all the world of a black bear on the prowl. Old Grizzle from my childhood nightmares. “Freeze,” he growled. There was no need. I was already frozen in place. I recognized the voice. Standing before me was none other than Sergeant Dalton Derucci.
g
As I’ve already said, me and Skye’s father didn’t exactly have a buddy thing going on. Let me put it this way: right then, I wanted to go to a happy place. I really did. Sunflowers. Rainbows. There was no LaLaLand to go to. No exit.
Derucci’s voice boomed through me and I figured life as I knew it was soon going to be over. As he lumbered across the shed towards me, I almost hurled.
“Sir—?”
Grabbing my coat collar, Old Man Derucci, distinguished officer of the law, yanked me up off my feet like I was a Rottweiler on a choke chain. I yelped.
“You—you—” The guy vibrated with anger. “Caught you red-handed, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t know,” I began. “Honest, sir.”
“You wouldn’t know honest if it up and bit you in the face. Stealing this time, I’d guess, break and entry, eh?”
“Steal?” I squeaked out. Jeez, did the guy have X-ray vision? Was he some kind of geedee mind-reader?
Whatever else he was, he was certainly big. Think Goliath. Yeah, Sergeant Derucci was a big, square man. Square of head and square-shouldered and even his eyes looked like cubes just then, bulging out of his rectangle of a Frankenstein head.
“And you can forget about starting any fire,” he barked, and then the guy went ballistic on me. I couldn’t answer him because he’d cut off my oxygen supply. Was I already braindamaged? Had I heard him right? Maybe he was going to make
it look like he had to shoot me and kill me right then and there. Self-defence. The murder would have been so easy. All Derucci had to do was shove me up against the garage wall, drive me against one of the exposed spikes, get me through the heart. Erghhh ahhhch. New word: Impaled. Translate: Skewered. Jake Kebabbed.
“Sergeant Derucci, I’m not stealing! As for Skye…we never meant to. I mean…I love your daughter. I’d marry her in a second if that’s what she wanted.” I heard myself saying this like I was having an out-of-body experience. Sometimes you say stupid things in a crisis. Or maybe the true things. Or you just mess your pants. I’m glad at that moment I only dribbled words.
“Skye?” Derucci snarled, but he released his grip and took a step away from me. A real sad-sack look came on his face then. He scrubbed his hands over his eyes.
With as much dignity as I could muster under the circumstances, I straightened the collar of my coat.
“What did you just say about my daughter?” Derucci asked. His voice was hoarse and tired and sad. The raging man who had been about to kill me only seconds before had disappeared. He looked almost pathetic.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” he repeated. He was breathing hard, too. I noticed circles under his eyes. Horseshoe-shaped bruises pressed into his skin, like maybe he hadn’t slept much the night before.
For the first time in my life in front of a police officer, I wanted to do the right thing. Tell the truth. Whole truth.
Nothing but the flickin’ TRUTH. Take responsibility.
“Skye never told me she was pregnant, sir. I…”
“What. Are. You. Talking. About?” At first I thought he was playing dumb, and then it dawned on me that maybe Derucci didn’t know I was the father. Duh. Until I’d gone and opened up my big fat stuuuu-hoo-pid mouth and told him, that is.
h
“Skye?” I said weakly. “Word got out she’s pregnant, sir. And we know she’s gone to the city for an abortion. I’ll take total responsibility, sir. But I’m not the reason she’s having the abortion. She never said a word. They just left and—” I stopped, seeing the sudden crazed look on Derucci’s face. Crazed. Dumbfounded, flabbergasted, deranged. (The thesaurus ran out of words to describe the expression on the guy’s face.) From shock and dismay to a wave of understanding when he let it sink in that I was the guy who’d got his daughter pregnant. Skye had obviously tried to protect me, I realized. A little too late.
Derucci moved towards me again. I took a defensive stance and hoped my brush knee, snake creeps low martial arts move would work if I had to get away.
There was no need. Sergeant Derucci lowered his head and his shoulders slumped forward. When he looked up again his eyes were slits. He actually smiled at me in a beaten-down, hangdog kind of way. It took him a long time to talk.
“Well, well, you of all the boys at Poplar Hills High,” he muttered. “I…I thought it was…Brett Manderson. He was the one always hanging around. But you—!” And he snapped again, lunged, caught me off guard and had me in a choke hold tighter than before. “You fooled me, all right, but that’s neither here nor there, now,” Derucci said, and as if getting control, he shoved me away. Still, he kept ranting at me.
“Look, I don’t agree with what she and her mother are doing. But…they didn’t consult me really—so…so…you’re to shut up about it all, too. I’m disgraced. My daughter’s a whore.”
At that, I hauled off and socked him. “She is not!” I killed my knuckles on his bulletproof vest. “OW!” I bit my lip in pain.
Derucci’s laughter mocked me and stung more than my knuckles. “I could flatten you, tough guy, so don’t even try to take me on,” he said.
I lowered my arm.
Derucci straightened, brushing off his shoulders like he had dandruff or something.
“So she hasn’t contacted you?”
“Nope.”
“No?”
“No, sir.” I wasn’t about to tell him about the diary.
“Good. So let her be, yes, you stay away from her—do you hear? Now I know it’s you, better not to have the bastard anyhow. Bad seed,” he spat out. “Aren’t you from some kind of mutant clan?” His breath smelled like sour milk.
“I’ve got Scottish-German-Welsh and way back Acadian-Mi’kmaq roots ancestry,” I replied. “Besides, shake anyone’s family tree hard enough and a few nuts are sure to fall out.” Did I seriously think the try-a-little-humour strategy would defuse the situation just then? Wrong.
“Let her be, do you hear?” Derucci yelled again, reaching for my throat. I eyed the pitchfork behind Derucci’s head, picturing how good it would look through his heart.
There was a click. Light flooded into the garage.
“What’s going on in here?”
It was Shep. One hand on her hip, her silver hair flying around her like a crooked kind of halo.
i
One more time in my life, Phoebe Shepherd came to my rescue. Sergeant Derucci and me stood there like two kids caught with our hands in a cookie jar. We lied, of course. I covered for Sergeant Derucci, and Sergeant Derucci said he’d seen a light in the garage, and when he saw it was me he assumed the worst. There’d been a report of a false fire alarm at school that day and he had, after all, been the arresting officer when, according to him, I almost burned down the school a few years previous. That was a gross exaggeration. “Once a rotten egg, always a rotten egg” is the way he put it. Shep asked him to leave. At once. He looked scolded. I wanted to stick out my tongue and say nah nah nah nah nah, but I shut up. Derucci glared at both me and Shep and stormed off.
“Hot chocolate?” Shep asked me. “You look frozen to the bone.” I couldn’t look her in the eye. “I gotta go,” I mumbled.
Shep raised her eyebrows. “Anything you need to talk about?”
“No!” I snapped back. “Nothing! Leave me the hell alone.” I raised the shovel over my head and slammed it against the wall of the shed.
Shep raised her hand to her throat. I banged out the door.
All the way back home, I saw Shep with that scared, hurt look on her face, and I pictured her reaching for her broom and sweeping furiously. Not that it changes anything, but I felt sick at yelling like that at her. Anger hangovers, Dad calls them. I’ve had my share of both kinds and I can tell you, it’s the anger hangovers I hate the most.
When I stopped outside the grocery store, I dry-heaved three times. I couldn’t go in. Again, there I was on videotape, looking like maybe I was drunk and sick. Crazed. I ran on. A few minutes later, I popped into Raoul’s convenience store.
“Jake!” It was Mrs. Hempleby, Dylan’s mother. Mrs. H. cupped her hand under my chin like I was still seven.
“Jake, honey, how are you?” I wondered if she’d heard the rumours about Skye leaving town.
“Great, Mrs. H., how’s it goin’?” I said. “Here, I’ll get that for you.” I reached up and got the bag of food she was after. We were in the snack and pet food aisle. I felt pretty silly her hanging on to me like that. I was just there to get some dog food.
“It’s goin’ okay, Jake dear,” she said, searching my face as if for some explanation about her runaway son. She always did this. I found it hard to look at her for very long on account of that. Mrs. Hempleby’s got this greyness about her now, pouches of sadness under her eyes. She used to have a laugh like someone was always tickling her. So now, because I know she knows that I know about Dylan, I feel real sorry for her.
I bought dog food and left soon as I could and all the way home I wondered, Do folks always say they are great and fine to each other when they aren’t? Is anything ever what it seems to be?
When I got back home, Herc wasn’t at his usual perch waiting for me.
“Herc,” I yelled. “Hey, buddy!” An answering woof came from downstairs.
Now here is one of the unexplained weirdnesses in my story that might cause some people to be suspicious. I swear on my
mother’s grave, this is the God’s honest truth.
Herc was downstairs, all right, by the fire, where I’d left the pages of Skye’s diary scattered about.
When I walked into the room he wagged his tail and started whining. In between his paws was a sheet of looseleaf crinkled up in a ball. It made me think of those flowers made out of tissue you see at proms or on cars when folks get married.
“What’s up, Herc?” I said. He picked up the paper snowball, gently holding it in his jaws, and dropped it into my outstretched hand.
I smoothed it out. Like I said, cursive writing is like Chinese to me. I went to my father’s desk and found the magnifying glass he used for his stamp collection. I don’t mind admitting it took me a while and it wasn’t comforting reading.
I’m not sure how much longer I can keep it hidden. I’m feeling crazy. Crazy. Sick. Confused. Angry. Scared. Sad. What an actor, I think—being able to fake things, like putting on a happy normal face, like pretending everything is okay when it’s so not. Like la-de-da, life goes on on the outside when inside everything’s so bad. If I tell, I’m wondering what will people think? Who would I tell anyhow? Is there anyone I can trust enough to tell? That’s just pathetic that even my closest friends I can’t bring myself to tell. Holding it in makes me feel like I’m climbing walls. Maybe Aunt Stel—I think she might suspect anyhow. And Jake. Jake. Jake. Jake. There’s the sound of “ache” in his name already. I think he’d go ballistic—I think he’d maybe even get violent when he found out. I think it’s just too much and he never needs to know. But I can’t wait much longer. A decision has to be made soon. I’m going to tell my mother that. She’s got to know the time has come. I mean it.
j
Word by word by word, I pieced the paragraph together as Herc sat by my side. This entry was dated March. Maybe as recent as last week. There had to be more.
