by Alan Cumyn
“I mean, it was a horrible way to meet someone. I wish you had brought her to dinner first or something. I have asked you many times if you’re seeing someone. I know we’re a bit chaotic as a family, but —”
“I wasn’t seeing her!” Stan said. “We just got together. It’s all really new!”
That shut her up. Stan waited, but he couldn’t continue to be a corpse. He shifted to look at her. Shades of gray in the darkness.
Something in the bed was still slimy from . . .
“How new is it?” she asked finally and pressed a little closer. Her hand was going to touch the slimy part . . .
Stan sat up completely in a protective posture.
“Just today. We just started everything today. When you walked in . . .”
“Oh,” she said. “Just today?” It was as if she was sitting in the den with the three remotes, indiscriminately pushing buttons.
“You walked in on us!” Probably everyone was lined up on the stairs listening.
“How do you know that she’s pregnant?” his mother asked.
“I just know! I’m Ron’s son, all right? I’ve got this —”
“Did she tell you that she’s pregnant?”
“She didn’t have to! I didn’t use any protection, I didn’t think . . .”
Slime, slime still on the bed. It was disgusting. Stan couldn’t ignore it anymore. He wiped his hand against something unusual . . .
“What’s that?” his mother asked.
It was slimy. But it was also slippery and sort of like a —
“It’s a condom,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s . . .”
Slippery in his fingers.
“Huge!” she said.
Stan dropped the thing. It looked big enough to . . .
“I thought you said you didn’t use protection?” His mother didn’t seem to know where to put her eyes.
“It’s a girl’s . . .”
“A what?”
“A girl’s condom,” he said. He’d seen pictures of them. In health.
“Janine wore this?”
God. How could he not . . .
The thing lay there like a squishy plastic bag.
“Anyway, if you just made love this afternoon, there’s no way she could know that she’s pregnant. No way. And if she wore this . . .”
She was brilliant, Stan thought, and it all slid from him — the brick factory, the lung dust, the shitty apartment, the hard weld of his jaw —
Everything flooded.
“Oh, Stanley.”
Flooded into his mother’s arms. He felt himself shaking against her chest, weeping like a baby. She held him and stroked his hair.
“Oh, my baby,” she said in a whisper. “You’re only sixteen. It’s all right. You don’t have to know everything.”
How could he miss-see so many things? How could he go through the whole sweaty passion of it and not even know?
“I think you should bring her to dinner. When everything has settled.”
“Are you and Gary going to . . .” He could barely talk. He was just weeping and breathing.
“We’ll talk about it. I have to find work now.”
Weeping and breathing. She smelled good, his mother. In the face of his unbearable stupidity . . . he didn’t want to let go.
“It’s all right. I think it’s good,” he whispered. Footsteps on the creaking stairs melting away. All of them. The drama was over for now.
Stan held her and held her until the world calmed down.
26
A jump shot starts in the soles of the feet and travels, like a wave, up through the ankles, shins, knees, thighs . . . through the hips and up the spine and out the arm and fingertips. It happens before thought travels through the brain. The ball spins nightward . . .
. . . toward the hoop in the back alley, where the beautiful girl slithers up and over the fence and emerges from the darkness before the ball clangs against the rim.
“I got your package,” Janine said.
She was wearing the plaid shirt and jeans he’d returned. He could see the shirt under the opening of her leather jacket. She had the coolest clothes. She filled them out a lot better than he had.
Stan grabbed the rebound and dribbled twice, spun the ball in off the backboard, dribbled to the foul-line crack, sank a jumper, sped in before the ball could even touch the ground . . .
“You wanted to see me,” she said.
She had her hands on her hips. Even in the dull light she shone like the most brilliant beauty ever to set foot on an improvised back-alley basketball and martial arts court.
It wasn’t quite raining and it wasn’t quite snowing. The air seemed full of the turning of the season.
“One bare breast above the blanket,” he said. “One soft sigh on the shadowed wall. And dreamy early-morning breathing, eyelids drawn, face so fair, real as real though you’re not there.”
She didn’t move.
“I am real, and I am here,” she said finally.
“It’s not finished yet,” he said.
“Is it a poem? Is it for me?”
“I need to kiss you again.”
“What for? Research?”
She would not smile at her own joke. He got the flowers then from the shadows. That seniors’ residence garden had a good selection. It was almost winter anyway. He brought them to her.
“I don’t really like flowers,” she said.
“I thought all girls liked flowers.”
He could see her breath. That’s how cold it was getting. Not that he felt any of it. She sniffed the flowers even though she didn’t like them.
“My mom does, though. She’ll carry them with her all over the house.”
Their noses were almost touching. He had to crane his neck upwards.
“I’m a troublemaker,” she said.
They stood in the cold, dull light for the longest time, just heating up the whole world.
“You are a troublemaker,” he said finally. He wasn’t going to make the first move. They stood nose to nose attracting one another. Her lips parted a little bit. He could smell her . . . was that lipstick?
Something fell in the tiny space between their nose tips. A snowflake?
Hours could go by like this. Eternities. Just breathing the same air.
“Your mother must hate me,” she said.
“My mother has asked you to dinner,” he replied. “I have to warn you, the family is infested with liars and fools. But you have to come.”
She could . . . she could just stand there breathing and keeping her lips half a thought away. He leaned in slightly but got no closer.
“I’m not my father,” he said then.
She didn’t ask what he meant. They didn’t need to talk really. Slowly Stan began to get the sense that two people standing like this, so close together, with so much between them . . .
Maybe better not to say it. To just let the world fall to bits around them in the most delicious ways.
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa in the preparation of this manuscript. Thanks, too, to Shelley Tanaka for fitting both her considerable heart and head under her editorial hat in steering me through various drafts, and to my friends and colleagues at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, especially Louise Hawes, whose brilliant lecture on desire set this story in motion. Many thanks as well to publisher Patsy Aldana, my agent Ellen Levine and to other friends and family, whose comments and suggestions were so helpful.
About the Author
ALAN CUMYN is the author of many acclaimed novels for both children and adults. The Secret Life of Owen Skye won the Mr. Christie’s Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Ruth Schwartz Award and the Pacific Northwest Libraries Association Young Reader’s Choice Award. After Sylvia was nominated for the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, and Dea
r Sylvia was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award. Alan is also a two-time winner of the Ottawa Book Award, and his novel The Famished Lover was longlisted for the Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Alan teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He lives in Ottawa.
About the Publisher
GROUNDWOOD BOOKS, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.
Many of our books tell the stories of people whose voices are not always heard in this age of global publishing by media conglomerates. Books by the First Peoples of this hemisphere have always been a special interest, as have those of others who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible. Since 1998 we have been publishing works by people of Latin American origin living in the Americas both in English and in Spanish under our Libros Tigrillo imprint.
We believe that by reflecting intensely individual experiences, our books are of universal interest. The fact that our authors are published around the world attests to this and to their quality. Even more important, our books are read and loved by children all over the globe.
Table of Contents
Cover
Openers
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2
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7
8
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10
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26
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
