He nods his head.
“I was so scared, I didn’t want to ask. I just started to cry the closer we got to the hospital, and by the time we got to the underground parking, I was really bawling. She never did tell me he died—I just knew. When we went up to the room, Bradley wasn’t in it. I remember being upset because I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. They wouldn’t let me. I remember my mom squatted on the floor in the corner, under the window, her head buried in her knees. She didn’t move for a long time. Even when I came to hug her, she didn’t lift her head. Her body just jerked and jerked and trembled, and her breathing was so heavy, and her reaction made me so, so …” I stare at the table for a while before I can find the right word. “… terrified. More terrified than knowing Bradley was gone. I remember holding on to her, hunched awkwardly over her shoulder and back, and then at some point I must have let go, because I remember being down in the cafeteria with my auntie eating macaroni and cheese.
“It was night when we went back to the room. Bradley’s bags were packed. His father, Stewart, who used to come around to see him every other weekend, was there. I think he was the one loading the car with Bradley’s stuff. And my mom was sitting now, on the bench she used to sleep on. And she looked at me with the most hollow, dead face. And I’ll never forget that look, because I can still see it in her eyes. It’s like since that day she’s been a different person. Half dead. Half alive. Like nothing was ever important anymore, including me.” I pause and then lay the index card flat on the table. “I guess our family sort of died that day too,” I add, staring down at the card.
“Mmmmm,” Eric says, as if he’s eaten something yummy. “That’s powerful, Melissa. Thanks for sharing that.”
I look at him. “No problem.” I pick the card up again and put it at the end of the box.
He continues, “I’m sorry you had to go through such pain when you were so young.And losing your brother—that’s just not fair.”
I nod my head. “Yeah. It’s okay. It was a long time ago,” I say, ’cause I want him to shut up now because I feel like I’m going to cry.
Eric goes on to say a few more things, about mourning, losing a family member, holding on to memories—stuff I easily tune out. Blah blah blah. It’s only the last bit that I really listen to: “Seeing a parent, someone who protects you, as vulnerable or distressed can be earth-shattering to a child. Sometimes it can crack open that protective shell you’ve had surrounding you and hatch you into real life too quickly.”
I like the way he said it. I’ve seen broken eggs with mangy, unformed birds inside them on TV. Hatched into real life. That’s good. That’s exactly how I felt. Like my shell was suddenly whacked against an edge and out I spilled, little bits of wet feather and bones, not yet ready for the life I was about to be flung into. I nod my head again. “Yeah. After that happened, things pretty much sucked.”
Eric puts his hands together as we wrap up. “Well, on that positive note, shall we end it?” he says sarcastically.
I laugh a little.
“I’m just looking at the time now. It’s been over seventy-five minutes,” he explains.
I turn my head to the clock on the wall. “Whoa. That went fast.”
I’m in a good mood when I leave. I don’t know why, since what we talked about was so depressing. It’s times like these that make me realize that Eric knows what he’s doing after all. I can talk about seemingly random stuff and somehow he puts it all together, and in the end I feel a little better, without having a clue why or how.
Twenty-One
Zeus’s punishment of Sisyphus at first seems comparatively kind and gentle. It didn’t involve fire or serpents or destruction. While Gods and mortals battled it out around him, people getting murdered and kidnapped and beheaded, there was Sisyphus, bound to his quiet task of rolling the rock up the hill.
He just kept trying.
Up, up, up.
Until it was time to go down, down, down.
Uncle Freestyle says that when the sun rises, the hungry lion knows he must catch the slowest gazelle or starve. When the gazelle rises, he knows he must run fast to escape the lion. Whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun rises, you better be running.
Go to school
Do my homework
Pass my tests
Take on more work hours
Eat
Be nice to people
Stop chemicals
This is my list of goals that my teacher, Ms. Dally, made me do.
It should be easy, but I don’t know how normal kids do it. Do they try hard in school for the good marks? For the praise from their parents? Or because of the guilt? Do they attend classes because they actually like it? When they sit down to do homework, is that all they see in front of them—their homework? I just don’t get it.
I try to be normal. I clean off the kitchen table before dinner, sharpen my pencil, and open up my textbook. My eyes stare at the page. It’s torture. School work is part of some alien world. There’s no intensity in it. It’s just “doing.”And I’d rather be high or answer the phone or fight with my mother. There’s this whole chaotic world swirling in my mind while I stare at these tidy textbook pages and try to learn about soil profiles and dangling participles and factoring equations and Je suis, Tu es, Il est. And I just can’t bring myself to that clean, linedpaper calm. It’s like standing in the middle of a hurricane and someone passes you a book and asks you to recite poetry. And you’re just, like, what the fuck? I can’t do this now. Don’t you see what’s happening around us?
I try. I really, really try.
I spend two weeks going to school and I work on the weekends. I only smoke dope—no chemicals, drinking, pills, or coke. I take extra shifts at the clinic so that when Ally calls, I tell her I’m too tired to go out.
But being sober all the time is boring. That’s just a plain fact. So is chilling at home. There are only so many movies you can watch, books you can read, only so many times you can listen to music, before you just feel like you’re rotting away. And when you get bored, it’s like falling into this sucking, trapping black hole that swallowed all the shit you usually successfully avoided thinking about when you’re busy or stoned. And then you’re stuck down inside all that guck, and it’s awful.
So I try to keep out of that hole by doing sober things. I decorate my bedroom wall with magazine photos, creating a huge floor-to-ceiling collage. I finish a book almost every two days. And I decide to get an early start at making the animals’ Christmas toys for work. Christmas is my favourite time to be at the clinic. It’s also a good way to get out of spending all day cooped up with my mom and Crystal and Freestyle and whatever assorted boyfriend my mother has at the time. I have a good excuse to leave the apartment for a few hours in the afternoon, and when I come back everyone is so drunk they barely notice my return. I started the tradition two years ago, when I began volunteering. I make little presents for every animal that has to stay in the hospital, whether they are sick or just abandoned by their families who’ve gone on fancy vacations. And on Christmas Day I borrow Freestyle’s stupid Santa hat, jingle some bells, and go cage to cage to give each animal its gift.
I can’t predict exactly how many dogs, cats, rabbits, and whatnot there will be, so I start my sketch ideas in October and make at least ten toys by December so I have enough time for the last-minute bird or guinea pig toy. This year I decide that cats will get sock gifts. Giovanni gives me a plastic bag full of his old socks and I mess up the living room for a week, making “sneaky peaky serpents.” I put two jingly rubber cat toy balls at either end and tie them in place. I also tuck a little catnip inside, just to keep them interested. Then I sew on two buttons at each end, like taunting eyes, and I attach a long red twisting pipe cleaner for a tongue.
Making the toys keeps me busy for about a week. But then I’m bored again and the thoughts come flooding in, about Michael, or about my mom, or about us not having enough money and why the fuck I’m so an
gry all the time, and I’m so close to just opening the kitchen cupboard and starting on a bottle of vodka.
I’m so pathetically antsy that I go to a movie with Rachel ’cause I know I won’t get into trouble with her. She’s been asking me to go out a few times, mentioning we should do something after work. We get along well enough. We have some laughs. So finally I mention this movie and we make plans to go after our Friday shift. We drive in her fancy white Mini and I feel like royalty, not having to take the bus.
Rachel is giggly and bubbly and so publicly happy it’s embarrassing. Nauseating, really. She makes such a point of having fun that I don’t want to have fun. I don’t know what it is. It’s as if being around someone really happy just makes me more mad. She takes my arm in hers as we go up the escalator. She texts her friends a thousand times. She insists on playing a game of pinball. She’s not nerdy or naive. She’s just … I don’t know. Clean?
We buy popcorn and drinks and sit in the back row. She immediately puts her feet up on the back of the seat in front of her, and when the lady to the left complains about it, she doesn’t take them off, which surprises me. Impresses me, I suppose.
While we wait for the previews, Rachel insists on giving me a hand massage. She’s taking a shiatsu course at her mother’s wellness centre and says it’s her homework to practise two hours of massage on people this week. I will be her last fifteen minutes. I reluctantly give her my hand. It seems a little strange, two girls holding hands. It’s like we’re lesbians or something. But I don’t say anything, because in these situations it’s more embarrassing to admit it’s embarrassing. And in the end it’s actually pretty good, and I feel myself relax into the seat a little more. My hand becomes this floppy, boneless mush that she prods and pulls and pokes, and I laugh a little to myself, because if one of my friends saw me now, they’d piss themselves laughing.
At the end of the night, she drops me off at a convenience store a few blocks away from my home because I don’t want her to see where I live. It’s partly because I don’t want her to get all clingy and show up unannounced, and also because I don’t want her to see my crappy apartment. In her chipper voice she tells me she had fun and that we should do it again. I say, “Yeah.” But I’m just so happy to get out of the car because I find her totally boring. And I can’t imagine living like this forever: not partying, just going to movies and living life sober.
Twenty-Two
My mom has been trying to turn things around too. She has a new boyfriend named Scott. Current boyfriend, that is. As in, tonight. This one seems okay. He’s a Suit. That’s what she calls him. Which already puts him miles ahead of any man she’s ever brought around here. He’s an accountant at the firm where she’s been temping. Just got divorced. Probably on the rebound with my mom, but that’s okay. As long as they’re not assholes and don’t play stepfather, I’m fine. And as long as they make my mom happy, I couldn’t really care less.
After only three weeks of dating, Scott takes my mom and me away for the weekend to a resort in the country. I sit in the back of his BMW SUV and watch a DVD on the screen hanging from the roof, while my mom keeps going on about the brilliant colour of the fall leaves, like she’s seventy years old and this is her first trip out of her home in years. It’s like she’s never seen a tree before.
We stay in our very own little house, with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a deck. It overlooks the lake. The bathrooms have fancy soaps and shampoos and lotions. My room has its own personal balcony.
“Look at the reflection of the leaves in the water!” I shout from the deck, sounding now like my mom. But it truly is amazing, that watery fire of red and orange and yellow.
We are this instant little family. The Suit’s family. We’re like dolls he’s playing house with. My mom and I go along with this pretend world ’cause we both know it won’t last. We go hiking, mountain biking, and swimming in the indoor pool. My mom and I get facials at the spa while Scott plays squash with some guy. We get dressed up for dinner and walk to the dining room, where we have the fanciest, most expensive meal ever.
I excuse myself to go to the washroom but instead go outside for a quick smoke. When I return, Scott and my mom have ordered another bottle of wine and I get the feeling I should cut out. As I walk back to the table, I see them as if they were any other normal couple in the lodge. My mom looks nice in her black dress and all made up. And Scott, well, he looks like Scott, the way any man in a suit would look.
“I’m gonna go back to the house,” I say, standing by the table instead of sitting down. I like saying that word, “house.”
“What are you going to do?” my mom asks.
“I don’t know. Sit by the water. Watch a movie. There’s a pool table below the restaurant.”
“Okay. Have fun, Hon. There’s stuff in the fridge. But don’t drink the beer. Maybe two, but no more. I’m going to count—”
“She shouldn’t be drinking beer,” Scott interjects, but then is silenced by my mom’s evil glare.
“Relax,” I say to both of them. “I don’t want the beer. I don’t even like beer.”
Scott reaches into his pocket and gives me twenty bucks, but I’m embarrassed to take it.
“What does she need that for?” my mom asks, as if she’s embarrassed too.
“I don’t know. Maybe something from the candy machine.”
“If he wants to give it to me, I’ll take it,” I say, stuffing the money in my pocket and glaring at my mom. It feels good to finally have someone on my side. It feels right.
I wander downstairs to the “teen room,” where some rich guys my age are playing pool with what looks like their little sisters. The second I appear in the doorway, I regret going down. It’s like this depressing games room with a stupid jukebox playing hip-hop. And the nerdy guys think they’re so cool with their backward caps and boxer shorts sticking out of their jeans that are forty sizes too big for them. I just can’t stand guys my age. They’re so boring. Especially the rich ones who try to look all ghetto. I head to the lake to blaze before going back to the house.
I decide to walk across the sloping lawn spotted with iron post lights, toward the water’s edge and along the beach. I don’t have a good mid-season coat, so I’m just wearing my hoodie over the dress I wore to dinner. There’s an older couple down there, wearing matching puffy sport vests like they’re right out of a Gap ad. They smile at me in a way that no old people ever smile at me in the city. It’s a nice smile. Like a look-atthe-sweet-young-girl-taking-a-stroll-in-the-moonlight smile. Like just because I’m in this ritzy place, suddenly I’m not a punk. And I should be pissed off at how superficial they are, but it feels good to be trusted by a stranger. Almost makes me feel like being trustworthy. Almost.
I continue walking. It’s so black and quiet. It’s a little cold, but not so bad for this time of year. I find a Muskoka chair that’s off on its own. I light my joint and sit, just watching the moon and stars shimmering in the water. A loon calls in the distance. It’s the most romantic place I’ve ever been, and of course all I think about is Michael. I want him here so, so badly. But being at this resort with Scott makes me realize that Michael was more than just a good boyfriend. He was about the life I wanted to have, the one I always dreamed of. A normal life. A house. A family. A career. And so losing Michael is more than just losing someone I love. It’s like losing hope.
I reach up my hand to my mouth, close my eyes, and give it sloppy kisses. It’s a pathetic replacement, but I can almost convince myself I feel him … his warm mouth pulling at my bottom lip, then the top, then both. I want to disappear right into that mouth, first my lips, then my face, then my neck, then all of me. We used to kiss for hours. Sometimes that was all we’d do. Then sometimes his hand would reach down to my belly and up into my shirt. And the next morning my boobs would be full of purple and red hickeys. And I loved those bruised kisses that lingered for days. So all I’d have to do when I missed him was lift open the top of my shirt a
nd look down.
Now I wish he had stained all of me. I wish every kiss he ever gave had left a mark on me forever.
Twenty-Three
I’m lying on a towel on the small beach beside the lake, eating my picnic sandwich and watching my mom and Scott, who are lying on a big towel a few feet away. There are no other guests around. Maybe they think it’s crazy to be on a beach at the end of fall, but it’s a really hot day, warm enough to wear just a long-sleeve shirt. In the morning, my mom joked that it was so hot she wanted to wear her pink bikini. She paraded around the living room in it, saying she’d get her last tan in before the winter comes. I knew she was only doing it to show off her wicked body. She’s thin and curvy in all the right places, while my body is just one fleshy flat line all around the perimeter, like a big rectangle.
I’m relaxed because I just smoked a joint behind the shack where they keep the canoes. I feel like a whole different person, no worries, just loving the heat of the sun on my face. It’s like I’m not even myself, like I’m being filmed for a movie or something. And I’m totally happy, mostly because my mom is happy. It works that way. I wish it didn’t. But I’ve lived long enough to know it’s true.
If I were honest with myself (which is what happens when I’m high), I’d say I really want my mom to marry Scott. It’s selfish, but if it happened, all our problems would go away. We wouldn’t have to worry about money and I wouldn’t have to worry about my mom all the time. Then I could just be a kid and do normal kid things. I think of myself in a bedroom with pink walls. I’d take figure skating lessons. We’d have a family dinner each night and someone would ask me if my homework was done. I’d have real dessert with whipped cream, and a curfew, and I’d study for exams.
Lesley Anne Cowan Page 8
