Short for Chameleon

by Vicki Grant

  Yes. Would you mind telling her that I’m sorry I ever met her?

  I never said that, but I’d thought it. I thought about how much I missed her too, and about funny things I wanted to tell her or news I’d like to pass along about Dad or Suraj or Janie’s new daycare, but I never did.

  It had been really hard, especially when all the stuff kept coming out about Schmidt. For a while there, it looked like our brilliant blackmail scheme had helped him more than hurt him. Giving all that money to the Albertina Legge Small Business Award just made him look like the best guy ever and he milked it for all it was worth. There were ads everywhere about that stupid award. Who even remembered his restaurant being covered in health department stickers anymore? I kept thinking Albertina would be so mad if she knew. I was worried she was going to come back and haunt me.

  I was really bummed out about it, so next visit to the prison, I told Dalton the whole story. It was just to get it off my chest, really, but he went, “Hmmm,” like he knew something and I went, “Yeah?”

  Turns out there was a guy in the next cell doing time for exotic animal smuggling who owed Dalton a favour. (I didn’t ask why. Some things are better not to know.) A little more digging and some help from Ryan in the cop shop and, well, I’ll be! Schmidt apparently also has a taste for the rare Chinese giant salamander. We don’t have anything on him yet, but Ryan’s confident we will. (Note to eaters of endangered animals: never mess with a guy in canine patrol. Or anyone scared of Albertina’s ghost, for that matter.)

  I was dying to tell Raylene, but no way I’d leave that in a message. Instead I just said, “No, thank you,” and her grandmother said, “All right, then” and we both said bye and hung up.

  Her grandmother had short, grey hair and baggy jeans and a mauve sweatshirt with a cow on it. She put up her hand when she saw me walking up the driveway, but that was as close as she came to waving.

  “Cam, I guess,” she said when I said hello. She wiped her hand on her pant leg and held it out to shake. She wasn’t very big.

  “Mrs. Sutherland,” I said and shook it.

  “Call me Jean. She’s this way.”

  She led me to the house. It was yellow with brown trim and more or less what you’d think a farmhouse would look like. A pointed roof, a covered porch, a shovel leaning by the front window.

  “Go on in. I’ve got some chores to see to. There’s cake I made on the table if she forgets to mention it.” She opened the door and hollered, “Hannah! He’s here.”

  I stood on the doorstep.

  She flicked her hand at me like get going, then she kind of mumbled something. I think she said, “It’ll be okay,” but she’d turned and walked away before I could be sure.

  The kitchen was clean and bright and neat, but sort of crowded, as if nothing ever got thrown away. Lot of old people get like that.

  I studied the chicken-shaped salt and pepper shakers on the back of the stove because I didn’t know what else to do, then I heard the floorboards creak and I looked up and there she was.

  No glasses. An inch of dark roots in her silver hair. The same plaid shirt but a different tank top.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Reverse skunk.”

  “What?”

  Pointing at her head. “My hair. The way it’s growing in.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a joke, so I just nodded. She smiled and I realized she’d meant for me to laugh, but it was too late for that now.

  “Sit down?”

  “Sure.” I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. She sat.

  “Pound cake?” She pushed the plate towards me. Everyone was trying to get me to eat these days. “Nan’s specialty.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  She nodded. I nodded. Then she said, “Really?”

  “What?”

  “You’re fine?”

  I looked at the yellow stars on the tablecloth. What was I supposed to say to that?

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m a wreck. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I screwed everything up, Cam, and I really miss you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

  She held up her hands and her lips kind of trembled, but she didn’t say anything.

  “No,” I said. “Stop doing that. You tell me. I came all this way. You tell me. Fair’s fair.”

  She broke off a piece of cake and tore it up into smaller and smaller crumbs until finally she said, “Okay. How much do you know?”

  “Some.”

  I told her what Reverend Muncaster said about the car crash and the custody battle. She went, “Yeah, yeah,” until I was through, then she said, “But here’s the thing. I didn’t know any of that. I grew up thinking my mother got pregnant by some guy she barely knew, then she had me, then she died, and that was that. I lived here all alone my whole life with just my Nan and Grandpa. They’d lost their only kid and there was no one else around. I went to school every morning, and every afternoon the bus would drop me off at the very last stop and I’d trudge up the hill and spend the rest of the day with the cows and the goats and my two sad old grandparents.

  “And that was fine, really. I mean it. Even after Grandpa died, I still had Nan. She’s not the most lively conversationalist but she’s always been good to me. Loved me like crazy. So, I mean, it wasn’t like I was abused or anything. It was just really lonely. My whole life, I had this feeling as if my best friend had just dumped me. As if I’d had someone in my life who’d made me happy but they’d left me and now I didn’t know what to do with myself except be sad. I remember saying something like that to Nan when I was little and, of course, everyone figured I was talking about my mother. That’s what I’d always figured too.

  “Then, four months ago or something, Nan and I were in town getting groceries and this lady came up to us. She went, ‘This must be Hannah,’ so I smiled and did this how-do-you-do thing and I could see Nan start to look all anxious. I put the cornstarch in our cart and was about to get something else when I hear the lady go, ‘Jean,’ really serious. ‘I’m so sorry about your grandson.’

  “Grandson. It was like the word had this power. I was suddenly alert and all, I don’t know, jangly. The lady must have known she’d said something she shouldn’t’ve. She went pink and Nan started babbling and kind of brushed her off and grabbed our cart, and next thing you know, she’d motored us out of there.

  “I asked Nan about it, but she just kept saying, ‘Marg’s crazy,’ and tried to change the subject, but I knew she was lying. When the lady’d said ‘grandson,’ I felt this thing. I can’t explain it very well, but it was as if I remembered a whole other part of me. It was like hearing a song you used to like but forgot you even knew.

  “I couldn’t let it drop. I just kept at Nan until she finally admitted it.

  “I was shocked. Stunned. That’s the only way to describe it. I’d had a twin named Jacob Ray Gooderham and he’d lived two towns over his whole life, and I never even knew he was alive until he was dead. He’d probably been just as lonely as me. We maybe could have helped each other. Talked. Been friends. Fought. I don’t know. Worst thing was I kept thinking maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself if we’d had each other.

  “I was so mad I just sort of snapped. I waited until Nan went to bed, then I stole four hundred bucks from her cookie tin. I hitchhiked into town. Cut my hair, dyed it, bought myself a pair of fake glasses so no one would notice my wonky eye, and got as far away as I could go. I ended up at the St. Cuthbert’s Youth Shelter. It was just going to be a stopover, but then I found your card in the church parking lot and it seemed kind of like a miracle. You know, like, maybe I could have a family after all.

  “Then I met you and Albertina and that seemed like more miracles. This, you know, cute boy who made me laugh and some lady who was going to fight for what’s right no matter what? I felt like this was the place I was supposed to be my whole life.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” That st
ill really bugged me.

  She looked out the window, bit her lip, and shrugged. “I didn’t trust you. Sorry. I don’t mean to insult you. I didn’t trust anybody. I kept on planning to tell you, then chickening out. I knew if the police found me, they’d take me back here and I didn’t ever want to come back here. I was still so mad. I wanted to get away.”

  She swallowed. “I hope you didn’t get in trouble. I’m really, really sorry I dragged you into this.”

  She looked down at her hands and rubbed the crumbs off her fingers, one by one.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  CHAPTER 47

  There’s no coverage at the farm, so we can’t email.

  She doesn’t have a cell, so we can’t text.

  The farm’s two and a half hours away, and, at least until her court hearing, Raylene’s not going anywhere. Dalton gave me another limo drive there for my birthday, but the guy’s only making six dollars and ninety cents a day in the prison workshop. I can’t be hitting him up for drives all the time, and there’s no bus service, so we can’t visit.

  We call sometimes, but the only phone they have is in the kitchen and it’s actually nailed to the wall, so half the time her grandmother’s around and we have to talk in code. (That’s kind of fun but somewhat limiting.)

  So we write.

  Like, actual letters. In envelopes. With the return address in one corner and some old dead guy scowling at us from the stamp in the other.

  I like it.

  I like seeing my name on the envelope and knowing that she wrote it. That her hand touched the pen that touched the paper that I was touching.

  I like the words she writes and the words she scratches out and wondering why she changed her mind about them.

  I like hearing about the farm and Nan and the sheep getting fleece rot and the goat getting blackleg and her court-appointed youth officer actually flossing his teeth during their last meeting.

  I like the little pieces of her plaid shirt that she puts in every letter because they smell just like her and because it’s time she got rid of that shirt anyway.

  I like how she signs every letter sealed with a kiss because it reminds me of standing out behind the barn with the goat watching and the chickens ignoring us and her body pressed up against me, and her hands around my neck, and her lips.

  But what I like most of all about Raylene is that when I’m with her, I’m actually me.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my fabulous agent, Fiona Kenshole, for her enthusiasm, her hard work, her keen insights, and her lovely plummy accent. She makes even the need for major rewrites sound good.

  Thanks to HarperCollins’s wonderfully astute editor Suzanne Sutherland, for finding the stories and characters I’d missed in Short for Chameleon. It’s a much better book because of her.

  Thanks to the brilliant illustrator Kyle Metcalf for the gorgeous, engaging, and slightly mysterious cover. It’s by far my favourite ever.

  Thanks to the talented and gracious Teresa Toten for taking the time out of her whirlwind world tour as a bestselling, award-winning writer to not only read my book but to provide the kind review. She’s as good a friend as she is an author, and that’s saying something.

  And thanks, too, to whoever wrote that little article hidden away in some magazine at my doctor’s office about Japan’s real-life rent-a-relative agencies. I owe you one.

  COPYRIGHT

  Short for Chameleon

  Copyright © 2017 by Vicki Grant.

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by HarperTrophyCanada™, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition: March 2017 EPub ISBN: 9781443448994

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  ISBN 978-1-44344-898-7

  LSC/H 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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