by Jenny Manzer
“Nico, don’t swear,” he sighed, and I noticed he looked tired. What he really meant was “Can’t you call me Dad?”
I threw on army pants, a gray-green long john–style top. As I ran through the hall past the kitchen, he held out a silver travel mug.
“Coffee, milk, sugar,” he said. In his other hand, he produced a small plastic bag that held a bagel from Mount Royal, this place up the street that made real Montreal bagels, or so it was said. I had never been to Montreal.
Still stunned from being yanked awake, I took the bagel and the mug and carried them to the front door.
“Have a good last day of school,” Verne said, and then hugged me, careful not to spill the coffee. A little clasp, as if I had a small fire on my pectorals that needed extinguishing. “I might be late, but I’ll see you tonight.”
I mumbled thanks, yanked my green slicker down from its hook, and started running, not bothering to shut the front door. I remembered that Obe, who usually kept me on track, had an early dentist appointment. The only people I saw as I ran were a guy with a shaved head walking a Mastiff and an East Indian fellow ambling along with his cane. A few elderly people roamed the neighborhood, most in some state of disrepair. Many of the street people used jury-rigged old wheelchairs, and more than once I had ended up pushing one around for a couple of blocks, to help out.
I thought these things as I flew through the streets on my way to school, past the strange urban farm with its big orange school bus covered in graffiti and the fetid stench of manure. I heard the chorus of Nirvana’s “Breed” as my feet slammed the pavement. I used to think they were saying “Giselle,” like a girl’s name, but it was really “she said” repeated.
Perhaps it was fatigue, but when I got to school to hand in my essay with four minutes to spare, I felt tears pricking the corners of my eyes. I unscrewed the lid of the coffee and took a sip. It hadn’t spilled. I crammed a hunk of sweet cinnamon bagel into my mouth and walked to the steps of my old, enormous school.
And then I was done. I knew that January would arrive, and classes would start up, but I felt so light on my way home, as if I were stuffed with cotton candy. I would miss sneaking glances at Bryan for a couple of weeks, but my excitement over Seattle trampled that feeling.
I had made it to Christmas break without killing myself, and for grade 9 that was pretty good. Obe had a meeting of his tae kwon do club, so I didn’t wait. I jogged partway home, splashing in every cold, deep puddle. My big toe protruded from my shoe like some alien baby; that probably meant I was growing again. I had only one night to wait until Seattle. I needed to pack and to sort my sketches, because Aunt Gillian wanted to see some; she always did. I kind of liked the one I had done of Obe. All my figures had their jaws thrust out and spidery arms like fishing line, as if they couldn’t carry any weight. As if they just bobbed along.
The front door was stuck again. When I forced it open with my hip, I remembered that Verne would be late. Sometimes when I was alone, I would turn on all the lights in the house, and the television or the radio, but that evening I went straight to the attic. I pulled down the ladder, and it unfolded like a skeleton. The attic still scared me, but somehow I felt that I could concentrate there.
The attic was lit by only one bald white light, so once up the ladder I switched on my flashlight to inspect the boxes. I spotted my gray backpack right away and tossed it down the stairs. Whump. I’d gotten it the year before as a birthday-Christmas combo present for a camping trip we’d planned but canceled because someone at Verne’s work got sick and we needed the extra money.
I collected a stack of drawings I had left scattered on the floor and chose four to take along to Aunt Gillian. I was ready to descend back into the real world, down the ladder, when a faded brown cardboard box caught my eye. It had been pushed out from the shadows when I’d been moving around Grandma Irene’s boxes looking for our winter hats and mittens. Up close, I saw Annalee’s summer clothes scrawled in marker. I touched the letters, then pulled my hand back, as if I’d received an electric shock. When I was eleven, I had once used a steak knife to pry out a lamp plug stuck in an outlet. I had wanted to listen to my cassette player. I remembered feeling the electricity enter my hand and run up my arm before I dropped the knife to the floor. The knife was singed black, so I hid it in the backyard. I spent a lot of time making stupid mistakes and then trying to hide them.
My fingers rested on the box. I was touching something my mother had touched. I knew the box couldn’t have been there all this time. I had combed the house for traces of her. I had even gone through a Harriet the Spy–inspired phase in which I thought that I would unearth the mystery of her disappearance and we would be happily reunited.
Verne had never been a suspect in my mother’s disappearance since he had what appeared to be an airtight alibi—he’d been working at the mall. The security cameras had captured not only my father (watching him watching people) but also an altercation at the Toys“R”Us between two customers who wanted the same Game Boy. Instead of focusing on Verne, the authorities’ main question seemed to be “What kind of woman would leave a four-year-old alone?” What kind of woman? I didn’t know.
I did know: a desperate woman. I had left that part out of the story. She did leave me alone, just for a few minutes, or maybe a few hours. The story goes that she had called a neighbor friend over to babysit. The woman had been late. My mother decided she couldn’t wait any longer and left me alone. She had somewhere to be, apparently. I guard that part of the story and try not to think about it, or I’d go crazy and dig up the backyard looking for that steak knife I buried out there when I nearly electrocuted myself.
Sometimes I thought they didn’t look hard for her because she’d called that babysitter. It made her seem like a young mother trying to opt out of her life, ditch her kid. I must have told the police she’d said she was coming back, right? I was interviewed, apparently, but I don’t remember it. That part has fallen through the change purse. Maybe they wrote her off as a bad mother who didn’t want to be found. That was another one of my theories.
My palm lay flat on the box. The cardboard was weathered and soft, like the top of an old person’s hand. There was a strip of packing tape lashed across it. The writing was in green marker. Were her clothes inside? Would they smell like her? A sob welled up in my chest like a balloon. I tore the packing tape off. The sound was ragged against the cotton-ball silence of the attic. Why had this been kept from me?
I thrust my hand into the box, like testing the depth of a black lake by diving in headfirst. Instead of the soft cotton of sundresses I felt hard, sharp, plastic. I dragged the box under the light. It was filled with CDs and cassettes. The first one I pulled out was R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People. There were dozens of them: more R.E.M., Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, 13 Engines, the Lowest of the Low, Dinosaur Jr., Neil Young, and more Neil Young. My mother was more of a music fanatic than I ever could have imagined.
At the very bottom, I found the Nirvana, as if she had packed their albums first. There was a CD of Nevermind (the naked baby swimming toward a dollar bill), a cassette of Bleach, and a CD of In Utero. There was also a cassette of Incesticide, a kind of greatest hits album I had not acquired yet but that included my favorite song, “Sliver.” I began to cry as I read the album titles, and then I slapped the floor with my hand. Why had no one told me? I banged the floor so hard that pink insulation rained down from the attic ceiling, and even as I cried, I thought that it looked like cherry blossoms crashing to earth.
You see people on the news after some disaster has struck them, a hurricane or a fire, and they’re walking around the rubble of their home, picking through the wreckage. They’re wearing sweatshirts and jeans. They shuffle. They cry. They hold each other. My world had been overturned, but I was too angry to have anyone hold me. It was as if bees were swarming under my skin. I dragged the box to the top of the ladder, then lowered myself, pulling the box down one step at a time. It mad
e a sound like a peg leg in a ghost story: thump, shush, thump, shush. I hoisted the box up, bracing it against my shoulder. I carried it to my room and slid it into the closet, heaping old clothes on top.
The sight of my old Brownie outfit hanging there enraged me. The Brownie pack had met in a church hall, and I had gotten kicked out for going into the boys’ bathroom on a dare. There were no boys in the building at the time, but the leader, a humorless woman with eyebrows like hyphens, told Verne I had to go. I was a bad influence, the Brown Owl told him, while Verne stood there in silence. He was still in his security guard uniform, and the irony was probably not lost on anyone. Guess what? The boys’ bathroom was nothing great. There were urinals and tidy sinks (because no boys had been there recently) and a towel dispenser, and that was that. The Brown Owl knew I had no mother. She saw my crooked pigtails that looked as if they’d been fashioned by someone wearing boxing gloves.
There is always somebody worse off than you, my aunt Gillian says. And she should know. In Seattle, she saw all the down-and-out people with no health insurance filling the emergency waiting room with their festering skin infections and dripping noses and cramps from unwanted pregnancies. Verne loved me as best he could. I had a house to live in, my own bedroom, a decent school, and my friend Obe. But I had needed that music.
Kurt Cobain was once asked why Nirvana always smashed their guitars. He said it was a good excuse for not having to do an encore. On Nevermind they placed a hidden track after “Something in the Way.” It is called “Endless, Nameless,” but you have to sit quietly and wait in the silence before it will begin.
I listened to the tapes on my old cassette player and then I listened to the CDs. I played the Breeders’ “Last Splash” three times. I had never heard Harvest before, so I played “Heart of Gold” over and over until Verne knocked on my door, a polite tap like a saleslady wondering how the swimsuit fit. I lifted my headphones up.
“I’m sleeping. Go away.”
I heard him pause at the door. I felt a snarl of pain in my stomach.
“Okay, Nico. Good night.” Then a sad mumble: “I love you.”
Sure you do, I thought. That’s why you drove my mother away and hid her music from me. He was a liar, but I couldn’t waste time screaming at him. I had a ferry to catch the next day and a backpack to fill. And I had dozens of albums to crowd into my brain.
When I was little, I liked drawing princesses with balloon skirts. I used to lie awake and fantasize about my mother coming home. I still had faith in happy endings. I used to dream that I’d wake up and see her by my bed. She’d be looking over me with such love, such concern. “I’m sorry, Nicola, I never meant to leave you,” she’d say.
As I got older, I had nightmares about her. I became aware of people wondering about me—my teachers, my aunt, Obe’s mother. How I was doing. By then it seemed certain to them: Annalee would never be found. She was born in Yorkshire, England, to older parents who’d thought they would never have children. They moved to Canada when she was five, first to Alberta, where her father was an engineer, then later to Vancouver, for retirement. Her parents died a few months apart when Annalee was just eighteen. They couldn’t bear to live without each other. So there was someone in my family capable of deep, demonstrative feelings, which was a relief. I sometimes wondered how I would be different if I had known my grandparents, if they could have provided the blueprint that I seemed to be missing.
Over the years, I had stopped dreaming of my mother. She became a flicker of a curtain, an idea as unformed as egg white. I’d seen pictures. I’d heard stories. But now I had her music. I might never sleep again.
By morning, I was ready. I had a backpack jammed with my mother’s CDs, my CD player, and a wad of flannel shirts, leggings, a second-hand dress, layers of fleece. I slid in my sketchbook. It was only eight-thirty a.m. My ferry to Seattle didn’t leave until six p.m. I’d have to avoid Verne for a whole day. I was set to meet Obe to say goodbye. By the time I was back from Seattle, he and his mother would be in Winnipeg visiting Obe’s grandparents. Obe went there a couple of times a year. He always came back with strange stories, like how the city has a special night for people to cruise around and show off their cars. I think he liked the feeling of having a full family around him, four people, and who could blame him? It was how things were meant to be—all the booths in restaurants were for four. In some ways two can be the loneliest number.
Sometimes when I started thinking this way I’d feel as if I’d swallowed a burr and couldn’t breathe. What if something terrible had happened to my mother? What if she was afraid and alone? Other times, I hoped she’d just hated me and was happy with a new family somewhere. I thought about her every day, of course, perhaps every hour. I couldn’t help it. I had seen therapists over the years and was supposed to have coping tools, ways of organizing my thoughts, like a traffic cop trying to prevent collisions and accidents. But since I never caused any trouble, I’d mostly been left alone.
I sat on the carpet, clenching my fists. Then I stood up to make my bed. I would be gone a while.
An hour later, I willed myself to go into the kitchen. My eyes darted to the table, where there was a glass of juice, and I could tell from the deep orange hue that it was the pricey stuff, not from concentrate. French toast sizzled in a pan, the bread making a sighing sound, as if the browning process were painful. I could see three little veggie sausages snuggled up to the french toast. Verne was bent over the frying pan. He wore slouchy gray cargo pants, a turtleneck, a fleece vest. He’d dated a woman a while back, a bank teller, who got him to buy some newer, more youthful clothes. The clothes stuck, but the lady didn’t.
“Nico, I made you breakfast—are you hungry?” He looked hopeful. He’d gotten in late the night before, maybe eleven-thirty, which meant he’d been covering a few hours for someone. We always needed the extra money. It was a special breakfast, I could tell. There was a carton of out-of-season strawberries on the counter.
“No, not hungry. Just coffee,” I said, to hurt him. I was starving.
“Come on, Nico, we didn’t get to have dinner together. I’ll fix you up a café au lait, just how you like it.”
Verne sugarcoated the fact that I was fifteen and addicted to caffeine with the idea that my coffee was mostly milk.
“I’m going to miss you, Nico,” he said, bustling around the tiny kitchen. The linoleum was black-and-white squares that looked like a chessboard. It was cracked, but our landlord never got around to replacing it. The guy just never got his shit together.
“I found the boxes, Verne,” I blurted out. “You knew how much I wanted to know about her. Why did you keep her albums from me?”
“Nico, let me explain,” he said, putting a mug of coffee on the table. He sighed. Tears filled his eyes. He took a deep breath.
“Your mother,” he began. “I, she…”
“What?” I wasn’t in the mood to be patient. I had waited eleven years.
“She used to listen to those songs, back in the day, those grunge songs. It seemed to always make her sad.”
“Make her sad?” Music didn’t usually make you sad, did it? Music was like food.
“I don’t know,” said Verne, shrugging, looking helpless, two shades redder than usual. “I didn’t want you to be unhappy, the way she was, listening to that—Nico, I just wanted you to be happy.”
“Where were they?”
“At Grandma Irene’s house. I put them there until I decided what to do. Then we moved them here when she went to—”
“The home.”
“Right, the retirement community.”
“I have to go meet Obe now,” I said, blinking at the kitchen as if I were in a sandstorm. I could barely walk out of that room, the one I had crawled through as a baby, where I had tried my first solid food.
“Right, Nico,” he said. The french toast, dusted with powdered sugar, sat on a plate.
“I’ll come back before I leave,” I said. And I wanted to leave
forever.
When Obe answered his front door, he nearly dropped the math text he was holding. “Nico, what’s wrong?”
I hadn’t zipped up my jacket, so I was shivering.
“Your lips are turning purple,” he said, pulling me into the hallway so he could shut the door.
“I found a box,” I said. “My mother’s.”
“Oh. Take off your jacket. I’ll get you one of my mom’s sweaters,” he said. I was wearing the Sonic Youth T-shirt.
We sat in Obe’s bright yellow kitchen. His mother had sewn a tablecloth with a print of yellow tulips to match. I thought it was cool that his mother could sew. She said she learned to make herself skirts and blouses because she couldn’t afford nice clothes otherwise. Nadia had hemmed some pants for me a number of times. I would miss her when I went away.
Obe put the kettle on for hot chocolate. I rambled on. Obe listened.
“Does your mom have any Baileys?” I asked.
“I’m not giving you Baileys, Nico. You’re crazy enough right now.”
Obe and I strategically pilfered from our respective parents’ small supplies of alcohol. We had not yet been caught. I had developed a taste for Baileys Irish Cream. In fact, I sometimes joked about my imaginary friend named Bailey.
“Wow, Nico,” he said. “Did you know your mom was that into music? She must have been really awesome.” Then he gave me a look, sorry he’d said it. She was the cool mom that I would never know.
“Yeah,” I said. “Her record collection was amazing.” I was going to say more, but I felt all the energy drain from my body. I had been up all night. I thought about telling Obe that we’d listen to them together when I got back, but I didn’t want to share them, not even with him. And I wasn’t sure I’d return.
“I’m trying not to hate Verne.”
“Don’t. Hate him, I mean,” said Obe. He’d had experience in hating fathers. “Verne meant well. He wanted to protect you.”
