Boy Lost in Wild

by Brenda Hasiuk

  With a little spying, I learn Ping has begun wasting a lot of time playing computer solitaire. I learn that when Ling thinks she’s alone, she does the same funky dance as soon as her earbuds are in. I learn that Sing goes through expensive hair gel as fast as his vitamin water and seems totally oblivious to Gordon smiling at him from across the room.

  Sometimes I even write these things down in a spiral-bound notebook because when I was a kid, they called me sensitive but as I got older, they started throwing around “obsessive-compulsive.”

  Dear Frida: Gordon says “The West End” like he lives in London instead of a two-bit prairie ’burb. Ping is left-handed and almost certainly the one who snores. Ling doesn’t make her bed but spends approximately twenty minutes making her hair look like she just woke up. Sing knows more English than he lets on. Shyness? Lechery?

  My dad never mentioned the big O-C, just said I took things too hard. Like the time our town lost Lonnie Harper to high tide and I refused to go anywhere near the water for over a year. I kept thinking of his squinchy little Harper face, his big Harper ears, his dumb ol’ Harper bravado daring to brave the waves until swoosh, he was gone, swallowed up by the icy water as if he’d never existed, like the Harper clan had never had a little boy about my age, with a quarter-sized birthmark, red as raw meat, on his right cheek.

  “You gotta come back on the boat with me sometime,” my dad said. “Getting a babysitter is getting expensive.” But I was a kid and didn’t give two shits about his business. Let someone else take the tourists out into the Bay so they could squeal at the beluga whale families who swam by in a flash of white streaks, beautiful and fleeting enough to taunt us. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t let him fill the bathtub past three inches.

  Maybe that’s why when I stopped going to school, my dad could barely bring himself to care. When my best friend William moved south in grade five, I cried every morning for months, refused to eat any of his favourite foods, saved up my allowance for a flight to Winnipeg for so long that dear William pretty much forgot who I was. When my friend Amber’s dad got transferred to Nunavut, I played Sim City every night, from seven until ten-thirty, for approximately a year.

  After a while, my dad must’ve grown complacent with my extremes, couldn’t be bothered to get his panties all in a knot over the inevitable.

  “Jesus, Ken,” my mother once said. “Sometimes it’s like I have to poke you with a stick to see if you’re alive.”

  Dear Frida: Ping chews her nails and spits them wherever. Ling burps little dainty burps after she eats and no one seems to notice but me. Maybe Sing does notice Gordon’s puppy-dog smiles. Maybe Dad is more extreme than he thinks: who else is so stubbornly, relentlessly, obsessively contented?

  After two weeks in Little China, my mother comes by to take me out to lunch, her pick, of course. Gordon must’ve told her I wasn’t leaving the house.

  “So, hon, you ready for next week? We should go shopping, get you some new jeans.”

  The sushi place is way across the tracks in the North End of town, which I’m sure my mother believes makes the food extra authentic. It’s decorated in Japanese kitsch, and some kind of dreary lute music is wafting in through hidden speakers. I can’t be bothered to feign enthusiasm. “That would be nice.”

  “Come on, Jasmine,” my mother says. “Don’t be like that. You’re here, let’s have some fun.”

  “What?” I ask. “I said it would be nice.”

  She holds up her hands as if surrendering, waves them around. She is thin, looks good for her age, but the skin beneath her biceps has gone slack and flabby. “Okay, okay. Let’s have a nice lunch.”

  “Dad’s coming down tomorrow,” I say.

  The theatrics are over. Her thin lips tighten into a smile and I recognize the lipstick—she’d sent me Positively Plum with a brief note: Thought you might like to try this—it suits our colouring. She laughs, but her eyes don’t even crinkle at the corners. “What did you do to drag him down here?”

  My dad has never liked to fly, says it feels unnatural to him, so he’ll take the all-day train to Thompson, then rent a car and drive all night to Winnipeg. I shrug, like a cheeky teenager on TV who’s denying all responsibility. “He’s just coming.”

  “I worry, you know,” she says. “I worry he’s made you into too much of a homebody. I have no regrets except that.”

  She sees no contradiction in critiquing Dad’s parenting, even though she gave up custody ages ago. A small town is a good place to grow up, she likes to say. Just ask me, or Gordon, or your dad. The three of us had a childhood you only read about in storybooks these days. She can talk herself into just about anything, beelining out of the North pretty much right after Gordon, leaving Dad and the “village” to raise me, conveniently settling into a one-bedroom place, then thinking she did me some kind of favour by leaving me up in Churchill. That she still has some kind of say.

  What makes it worse, or maybe better, I don’t know, is that I’m convinced she loves me. And no matter what I do, she will still love me, would come to the courtroom after I’d murdered somebody, hold up a sign that said MY BABY IS INNOCENT! It’s just the day-to-day she can’t handle, the hands-on nuts and bolts of being there for someone.

  When the waitress comes, my mother asks me what kind of bubble tea I want. She squeezes my hand across the table, like she knows she’s crossed some kind of line. “Tell me about the babysitting you were doing. Gordon tells me they were from Greenland or something.”

  I have no memory of telling Gordon about Ari and Frida, but who knows. I may have mentioned something because he has a way of wheedling things out of you. He’s such a people-person, so friendly, so interested, and so dangerous, because you never know what he’ll share or with whom.

  “Iceland,” I say.

  My mother does not release my hand. “That’s right. Iceland. Tell me about them.”

  Frida wears the kind of sheer bras that let your nipples peak through.

  Ari smells like firewood and electrical tape.

  I take a long, leisurely sip of mango tea and give her the facts, the straight facts, so help me god.

  I tell her a documentary crew came in April, almost too late in the season to get any decent footage of the aurora borealis. Ari was the sound technician, Frida was his wife, a textile artist, and Elizabet was their adorable fat baby, eighteen months old, just starting to walk because of her heft. They rented the place across the street for a couple of months. I helped them out.

  Feel this wool, Frida says, dig your fingers right in, Jasmine. I lugged it here because I can’t live without it. Everything I make must have this, this odd mixture of rough softness. This wool, so sweet-smelling when it’s dry, turns quite vile when it’s wet. I love it and I hate it, and that’s why I love it.

  “So you earned yourself some money,” my mother says. “That must’ve felt good.”

  I know she’s striving not to bring up my truancy, trying to make this a nice lunch. I don’t tell her that Ari and Frida could barely feed themselves and Elizabet, never mind hire a nanny. I don’t tell her that Frida means fair and beautiful and that Ari means eagle.

  Look at her eat, Jasmine, Ari says. Look at my rosy girl eat with such joy. We should all feel such joy, huh? Watch her, and don’t forget such joy.

  I nod at my mother, pretend I’m too busy sucking the dregs of the bubble tea.

  “Is your dad coming to see you at Gordon’s?” she asks.

  She likes to insinuate that my dad is a racist homophobe. All I know is that my dad never mentions anyone’s sexuality—hetero, homo, bi, two-spirited, or trans—and hasn’t spoken to Gordon in years. All I know is that even if my dad tells the odd racist joke, he has two friends in town and one of them is Dene. It’s like opposites attracted with my parents, and it was great, until it wasn’t. For years, in Swan River, better known as The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Manitoba, Gordon, Ken, and Sandra were the Fab Three, always together. Until Gordon decided he needed to
be somewhere he could let his fag flag fly. Until my dad decided his temperament was better suited to the Polar Bear Capital of the World. Until my mother decided she needed to follow her dream and become the executive assistant to a mid-size university’s dean of arts.

  I remove my sweaty hand from beneath hers. “I guess so.”

  I made fresh buns, Frida says. Come over and eat some. Ari is always happier with young people. He likes to play the sage.

  You like my beard? Ari asks. I see you looking. You want to touch it? Elizabet yanks away, don’t worry. It took two years to be like this, a golden grizzly man. It’s so fine I worry that one night Frida will shave me in my sleep and steal it for her art.

  A group of all-ages Japanese, probably an extended family, file into the restaurant and a big black dog nearly follows them. The grandma closes the door in his furry face and the kids giggle to each other. My mother refreshes her Positively Plum and looks around for our waitress. “Oh, did I tell you about the young man who spoke at our AGM?”

  I must have a stupid look on my face, because she explains. “Our annual general meeting. It’s a lunch at the convention centre.”

  I remember now. She’s gotten all charitable, but not doling out soup and coffee at a church kitchen or anything. She’s representing the university on some big charity’s board of directors.

  “Anyway, you should’ve seen this inner-city kid who goes to a youth drop-in centre get up in front of a thousand people, every who’s who in the city. Life handed him nothing and there he was, bringing the mayor to his feet.”

  “Sounds great,” I say.

  “Be nice,” she says. “This has been nice, no? A nice lunch?”

  “I said it was great,” I say.

  Dear Frida: My mother believes I’m going to emerge from all this like some kind of conquering heroine—better, stronger, with many important lessons learned. But I bet you any money she’d lock her car doors if she saw that triumphant young man on the street.

  I wake up to Gordon lecturing the three —Ings. Last night, he apparently saw them crossing the street against the light, right into traffic.

  “I know back home you must do that, but drivers expect it, because there’s no other way. But here, we have crosswalks, we have lights to guide who goes when. Drivers don’t expect you to risk your life just to get to the other side.” He sounds shaken up. For the first time, I wonder if Gordon ever feels bad that he didn’t have kids. He lived with this guy Samuel for a few years, until Samuel left to do his doctoral thesis in Montreal and didn’t invite Gordon along.

  Dear Frida: Every morning, the —Ings watch Gordon doing tai chi in the yard. They all laugh their little “e-soos me” laughs but only Ping cups her hand over her mouth, as usual.

  I go get some juice from the fridge, still in my ratty sleep T-shirt that says I Hate Mondays.

  “Look who decided to join the land of the living,” Gordon says.

  The —Ings e-soos themselves, chastised and repentant, beg off to do whatever dutiful Asian hipsters do when they leave the house and head into traffic.

  Gordon drapes his arm around me, kisses the top of my head. “You okay, kid? You ready to head back to school? Tell your god-fairy what’s on your mind.”

  Did you know, Jasmine, Frida says, we Icelanders, we have the purest genetic makeup of any nation on earth. We’re all interbred. Ari and I, we’re probably cousins back somewhere not too far.

  Jasmine. I love this name on you, Ari says. Your parents, so young, not ready to settle for Canadian names. They must have thought it sounded like the East, so different, so romantic. It’s kitsch, you know, but I love it.

  I spin from beneath Gordon’s arm, pretend I hate him treating me like a baby. “Just enjoying your hospitality,” I say. “You could’ve been a chef in another life.”

  “Your dad almost went to cooking school, you know,” Gordon says. “He worked short order while we were in school. But then he moved to the tundra, where humans are not meant to live because food does not grow there.”

  “What about the Inuit?” I ask.

  He puts his hands on his hips, Queen of the queens. “You want to eat blubber? And don’t change the subject. We’re talking about you.”

  He tells me that he understands, he really does, I’m having a tough time, it’s a tough age, but I’ll see, I’m no longer stuck in the big chill, the world will open before me in a few weeks. There’ll be new sights, new people, new interests. A new start.

  I know he’s right, that it’s a crying shame Gordon will never have kids of his own. I know my dad will re-enter civilization, will wander around the campus with me, will want to show me how much he cares. I know my mother will take me shopping, whip out her gold credit card, ask me if I’m having a good time.

  But after Gordon leaves for yoga, I lie around the empty house beneath the towering trees, hating every member of the Fab Three, waiting for the —Ings to return, waiting for something to distract me from my dread.

  The pot is empty, the film is quit, Ari says. What do the dancing lights care about our lack of money? What do the stars care about our little problems? We’ll go back to our bankrupt country and nurse our wounds with bread and homemade whiskey.

  When I think of this place, Jasmine, I will always think of you, and the smiling whales, Frida says. Those whales, they look so white, so stupidly innocent, but really, they are smart. Whales are smart. You, Jasmine, you are young, you’ve seen so little, but you are smart. You and the whales, Jasmine.

  Ja, Ja, Elizabet says. Ja, come.

  Dear Frida: Do you hate me?

  I go over the facts, just the facts, so help me god.

  Frida left first, flew down to the artists’ festival on the rocky shores of Lake Winnipeg that remind Icelanders of home. She took Elizabet because people are more likely to buy art when they see a chubby mouth to feed. She kissed me goodbye on both cheeks, made me promise that we would stay in each other’s orbits. Elizabet played shy, like she knew I would be a stranger soon enough. Ari stayed to finish up, to vacuum-pack giant bags of Frida’s fabric for transport.

  The next day, or the next, I don’t know, Ari called me over just before bed, said he’d made vinarterta, Iceland’s claim to fame in the dessert world. My dad had a migraine, was already cradled in the drugged-up nothingness of sleep.

  You know me, I’m not a sweets man, Ari said, but I make an exception for this. Isn’t it beautiful? Layers upon layers upon layers, like it has lived a long life but remains fresh and delicious.

  It was so quiet, just the two of us, without Elizabet’s pot-banging and key-jangling and look-at-me! screeches. Without Frida skating around in her woollen socks, fussing over me and the baby and Ari. We sat on the floor, on a sheepskin rug that still smelled a little of Elizabet pee. He opened a beer, not my dad’s choice, some kind of lager that’s almost black. He poured me half into a plastic cup and held up his own. Here’s to warm friends in cold places.

  I wondered if he lay in bed at night dreaming up the things he’d say the next day. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt, blue and red to match his eyes and lips, and grey long johns. His bare feet were smooth and perfectly sized, with little tufts of strawberry blond hair on top of each one. He cocked his head and smiled at me. Here’s to the woman you will one day be. I wish I would know her.

  What happened next is not entirely clear. All I know is that I began to cry and I’m not a crier. No one in my family is. But there I was, heaving for breath, letting out deep Elizabet-like wails, and then there I was, snotting into Ari’s soft, strawberry blond chest, and then his hands were on my cheeks and we were rocking, and then my fingers were in his beard and his tongue was in my mouth.

  It’s okay, little one. Frida wouldn’t mind, you know. We aren’t possessive.

  I imagined I was Frida and let myself go. My breasts were as round as hers, my skin as clear and rosy. I let myself be comforted, the tears kissed away, let new things happen, come what may. I let myself be Frida,
let myself be joyful, just for once, joyful first.

  The next day, Mr. Fullham, the principal, passed me in the hallway. “How are you, Jaz? You’ve made friends with the Icelanders, eh? The wife saw you coming from their place last night. The baby wouldn’t sleep so she took him for a drive. It was pretty late.”

  I don’t go back—not to school, and not across the street. At one point, I stand at my bedroom window and watch Ari packing a truck parked out front. He waves, like nothing has happened, his usual jovial, welcoming self. I panic and pull the curtain closed.

  Dear Frida: Should I be ashamed?

  That was back in April, before any sign of the spring thaw. And nearly a whole summer has passed since Ali and Frida buggered off, but it’s like they’re preserved in my mind, fresh as ever.

  The day my father arrives in town, we go for burgers at VJ’s Drive-Inn. Then that afternoon, between the beat-up recycling bins and generous potholes of Gordon’s back lane, the Fab Three suddenly find themselves together again for the first time in forever.

  My father drops me off just after my mother has arrived. She’s standing outside her hybrid hatchback and squinting into the fall sun. Gordon is raking up the first dead leaves in the backyard, the ones that have decided they’ve had enough, they know what’s coming, no use hanging on. I get out and stand awkwardly between the two cars.

  “Ready to go?” my mother asks. “Have you eaten?”

  To my surprise, my dad gets out, too, stretching as if the economy rental car is too small and he needs to stretch his legs. Gordon stands at attention with the rake.

  “Those are some trees,” my dad says.

  Gordon smiles, as if my dad has just told him he looks better than ever. “Older than the house.”

  “Have you had lunch, Jaz?” my mother asks.

  I try to imagine them as teenagers, the Fab Three, killing time together in the middle of nowhere. But I can’t do it. Only they know, these three middle-aged people, and they’re not talking.