Pain & Wastings

by Carrie Mac

  Holly waits in line behind the other paramedics to talk to the triage nurse, who looks down her glasses at each of them like a librarian. Holly’s chatting with the paramedic in front of her. We saw him a couple of times yesterday. They’re laughing and smiling. I lean against the shelving that holds every size and kind of disposable glove you could ever want. Part of me wants to march over there and ask Holly how she knew my mom well enough to know my middle name. I should just get it over with. The rest of me wants to phone Chandra up right now and tell her I’ll take juvie over this excruciating trip down memory lane anytime. If she asks my reason, I’ll say, “It’s psychological, Chandra. Get it?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Kelly tries again with the questions that night, but her approach is better. It’s after dinner, and we’re in the basement, playing pool. Tyrone came down too, but he’s sitting on the washing machine in the corner, in the dark, doing his schizo thing. I don’t like hanging out with him, and especially not lately, when my own sanity is in question, but I’m not like Stinky, who’s always telling Tyrone to piss off. So long as he keeps his crazies to himself, I don’t mind him.

  “I am really interested, Ethan.” Kelly lines up her shot. “Maybe I want to be a paramedic, how do you know?”

  I bounce my pool cue on my shoe and bite back the scathing remarks I could fire at her. She reads my silence and straightens up without making the shot. “At least I can say I’m trying to stay clean this time. I really am.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t.”

  “Didn’t say so.” She bends to take the shot, revealing that wedge at the small of her back that is so sexy on a girl. Harvir calls it the ink spot because so many girls get tattoos there. She has one too, a buxom angel kneeling, or it might be a fairy. Either way, she has wings stretching out to the dimples above each butt cheek. I feel myself getting hard. This is bad. I step closer to the table to hide the evidence.

  Kelly draws back her elbow, pulling her hand along the thicker part of the cue. “But I get it.” She pops the shot, sending the ball straight into the pocket. When Kelly first came three months ago, we all learned very quickly not to bet against her at pool. She’s by far the shark of the house.

  “Okay,” I say. “What do you want to know?”

  She backs away from the table and props herself up with her cue. She juts one hip out just a little. Why didn’t I ever think she was hot before? Why now? And why right this very minute? I try to buy myself some time and distraction by indulging her little Q & A.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Everything, I guess.”

  I start to tell her about the guy we picked up in his car, down by the shipyards, who tried to shoot himself in the head but only managed to take off his ear.

  “Holly had me look for it, in case they could sew it back on.” It’s safe to line up my shot now, thankfully. “But there was only bits, like hamburger, and a lobe.”

  “Did it have an earring?”

  “Yeah, actually it did.” It was a clear shot, but I miss anyway. “A gold stud.”

  “What’d you do with it?”

  “The lobe?”

  “The earring.”

  “You want to know what I did with the earring?” I smile at her. She grins back. She’s wearing a short black skirt that sits low on her hips, and a tight black tank top. I’ve always thought she had great tits, perfect firm little handfuls, but tonight they look especially enticing. I glance down at her fuzzy rabbit slippers, hoping those will take my mind off other things. “I tell you I was rooting around this guy’s car for his ear, and you want to know what I did with the earring?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You’d make a great paramedic, Kelly.”

  Her grin widens to show her teeth, mostly rotten from all the meth she’s done and the sugar it makes you crave. There goes any risk for another hard-on. “You think?”

  “Sure.” I slide right into the safe territory as she circles the table, assessing the game. “You’re not squeamish, and you have a sick sense of humor and a weird fascination with stuff like what they do with the jewelry from blown-off body parts.”

  “Thanks, Ethan. That might just be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” She calls the shot and then nails it, sending two balls into opposite corner pockets. “So, what’d you do with the earring?”

  Tyrone skulks by us and up the stairs without a word. I tell Kelly that we rinsed the lobe— earring still in place—with saline and wrapped it in gauze in case they could do anything with the tissue at the hospital.

  “Huh.” She’s propping herself up with her cue again. I eye the table, shopping for the easiest shot. “I would’ve stolen it,” she says.

  Chapter Twelve

  I get to sleep in the next day because Holly and John work the nightshift next. Holly told me to sleep in as late as I could or get up early and have a nap before I have to meet them at 6:00 PM. I choose the sleep-in option and manage not to wake up until almost noon. The house is quiet as I get into the shower. After, I put my pajama bottoms on, thinking I’ll get dressed when I have to go. I collect my “uniform” and some other laundry from the heap I’m building on Harvir’s bed—seeing as he’s not around to object—and head down to the basement. The pool table is neatly racked up and waiting for a new game. Kelly always leaves it like that when she finishes playing.

  I put the laundry in and go back up to find something to eat. Kelly is sitting at the kitchen table, doing the crossword that comes in the paper. She looks up. “Thought you might want some company.”

  I am suddenly acutely aware of the seven chest hairs I was so proud of until this very moment. I shuffle into a chair, wishing I’d put on a T-shirt.

  “I have a plan.” Kelly sets aside the paper and lays her hands on the table. “We can go hang out downtown until you have to be at the station. I can get us into the movie theater for free.”

  “So long as it doesn’t involve either of us giving anyone a blow job, I’m in.” And then I realize what I’ve just said, and that if it involved her giving me a blow job, I wouldn’t mind at all. Of course, my cheeks go very, very red. I leap up from the table and fling open the fridge and stick my head in there, pretending to look for something to eat until it passes.

  “No.” Kelly is suddenly beside me at the fridge. She puts a hand on my bare back. I swear that single touch is sending hot flashes to every available synapse, and it takes everything I’ve got not to shove her to the floor and get on with what I was dreaming about half the night. “No blow jobs. What’re you looking for?”

  “Something for breakfast.”

  “Never mind Marshall’s whole wheat toast and natural peanut butter.” She pats my back and then straightens. “I’ll take you out for breakfast.”

  I am all too eager to get out of the house and into the safety of the day. We get on the bus and take two seats side by side, which I can honestly say I haven’t done since I was a kid and my mom made me sit beside her. We don’t talk much on the bus. We’ve never hung out outside of Harbor House, so maybe she’s as weirded out about it as I am. In the heart of the Downtown Eastside, with the downtown core and its high-rise gloss and efficient bustle only ten blocks away, she pulls the cord for the bus to stop.

  “What’s here?” I say with venom.

  She grabs my hand and pulls me out of the seat. “Only the best breakfast in the city.”

  We cross the street against traffic in the middle of the block, like everyone else does down here, and walk another half a block until we’re standing in front of the Ovaltine Café. I’m not sure what we’re doing is a date or just two wards of the state killing time, but because it might be a date, I don’t want to be a freak and tell her I don’t go to the Ovaltine. Not anymore. In fact, I haven’t set foot in it since that day ten years ago.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Where your mom?” the grandmotherly Chinese lady who runs the Ovaltine asks me. She had just rushed out onto the street and stopped
me, clamping her hand on my bare shoulder. “Why you alone? Where Ella?” I’m in my pajamas... the ones with the fire trucks and Dalmatian dogs. This lady always scares me. She’s nice to me, always telling me to call her Popo, but she has long red nails and arching penciled eyebrows and a wart that makes her look like a witch. My mom’s name is not Ella. She only calls herself that on the street, after Ella Fitzgerald. “Fitzgerald was going to be your middle name,” she sometimes tells me when we’re listening to her singing. “Or Ella, if you were a girl.” Sometimes the songs are cheerful, but sometimes they are sad. The Chinese lady shakes my shoulder. “You too young to be out by yourself. You come in. I give you hot chocolate, okay?”

  “Ethan?” Kelly is pumping my hand like we’re a couple of businessmen meeting for the first time. “Hey!”

  “Yeah?”

  “You totally spaced out.”

  I swallow the lump of panic in my throat. It’s just a dingy old café. I glance up at the neon sign. I used to love seeing it when I was really little, after my mom and I came back from visiting her brother in Wetaskiwin. The Greyhound would drive right past it on the way to the station. Sometimes they’d let us off on this corner, if the driver was nice, but usually he’d make us ride all the way to the station, and then we’d have to walk back. If it was open, we’d go in for hot chocolate and a plate of fries.

  I shove aside the past and boldly push open the door and let Kelly go in ahead of me. The same Chinese lady greets us with a frown. I know it’s her. Older, but still with the fingernails and freaky penciled eyebrows. She doesn’t look at me, just shuffles past us, dropping off menus on her way.

  “I love the pancakes here,” Kelly’s saying. I try to focus on her voice. The woman comes back and fills our mugs with lukewarm coffee.

  “You order food too,” she barks. “Not just coffee.”

  We both order the pancakes, which seems to satisfy her. She brings the bill with the food and then takes her seat at the front booth, opens her Chinese paper and lights a cigarette.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After breakfast we walk along Hastings toward the movie theater at the far edge of the Downtown Eastside.

  “You don’t like pancakes?” Kelly says, sauntering past two drug dealers right up in each other’s face, screaming at the top of their lungs, fists clenched. When I was a little kid living down here, that stuff didn’t bother me either, but now it makes me nervous. “You hardly touched them.”

  “I wasn’t as hungry as I thought,” I mutter. Instinctively I put my hand around Kelly’s waist and pull her a little closer as a knot of junkies slither by, all jerky motions and full of twitch.

  “Hey.” She removes my hand. “I can take care of myself, thanks.”

  So I guess this isn’t a date.

  “Sure.” I stick my hands in my pockets to avoid touching her again. “But if something happens, who do you think has to defend your honor?”

  “My honor?” She fixes me with a sideways look. “My honor?”

  “I’m no psychic...” I look her up and down, raising my eyebrows at her slip of a sundress and knee-high boots with the heels that make her almost as tall as me, and she is a short little bit of a girl when she’s barefoot. “But even I can predict someone’s going to want a piece of you down here, whether they have to pay for it or not.”

  “Really. Huh.” Kelly plants her hands on her hips and stops in her tracks. “Look, Ethan, you might’ve grown up in this hellhole, but I’ve spent my fair share of time down here too. I know a thing or two about surviving, so don’t go thinking you’re going to be my knight in shining armor, because, frankly, I doubt you could ‘defend my honor’ without getting yourself killed.”

  I don’t care about her slagging me off, not at all. All I want to know is how she knows I used to live down here.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Harvir. So what?” She starts walking again. “You think you’ve got this whole aloof ‘I’m so tortured you can’t touch me with a ten-foot pole’ thing going on, but you’re no more special or screwed up than the rest of us inmates, Ethan.”

  “What’d he say about it? What’d Harvir tell you?”

  She stops again, turning with a flourish that spins her dress out as if she was a model turning at the end of the runway. “Are you even listening to me?”

  “What’d Harvir say?”

  Other than the art therapist, Harvir is the only one I’ve told the whole story to. He promised he wouldn’t tell anyone, ever. Sure, other people know because the art therapist had to tell the social workers and police, but Harvir is the only other real person I’ve ever told.

  “Just that you lived down here!” Kelly’s shouting now. “You’re being such a freak. What is your problem?”

  He didn’t tell her the rest? He didn’t tell her more? “Is that all he said?”

  “You know what?” Kelly holds up her hands and starts backing away. “Forget the movie. You’re on your own.”

  “Wait!” I shake my head, trying to dislodge the headache that’s digging in deeper. “Kelly, I’m sorry! Wait up!” I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to be left alone down here. Even though I’m taller and stronger than she is, even though I’m the guy and I should be doing the protecting, I don’t want to let her go. I don’t want to be alone. She lets me catch up to her and we keep walking, neither of us saying anything.

  We get smuggled into the theater by her friend, who is a janitor for the shopping complex. When it’s over and we leave, the sunshine of the afternoon is like a slap in the face. Kelly marches back toward Main and Hastings. I decide it’s time for a peace offering.

  “Pain and Wastings,” I tell her as we approach the corner. “That’s what we call it down here.” Before I can correct the we to they, Kelly pipes up.

  “Look.” She roots in her enormous purse for a cigarette. “I’m going to score. I understand if you don’t want to. I know you think I’m just some junkie skank. But there it is. That’s what I’m going to do with the rest of my afternoon, okay?” She pulls out three packs, but they’re all empty. Barely missing a beat, she sidles up to a group of men who are walking hurriedly and speaking Italian, clearly tourists who got dangerously lost trying to get from Chinatown to the harbor.

  They are all young and they are all quite taken by Kelly. Four cigarettes are whipped out. She slips the first one between her lips and lets the man light it for her. Then she takes the other three and tucks them into one of the empty cigarette packs.

  “Gracias,” she purrs. They laugh and start on their way again. She walks with them. They don’t seem to mind. My back goes up. I want to pull her away, but this is Kelly. You don’t mess with her or she might knock you over with her purse and stomp your eye out with one of her high heels.

  She’s not your girlfriend, I tell myself as one of the men puts his arm around her waist, and the balding one lays claim to her shoulders. She looks tiny between them.

  “See you later, Ethan.” She offers a little wave over her shoulder, leaving me utterly alone at the corner of Pain and Wastings.

  “Where you headed, little guy?” I know this man. He is called Clifford and has red hair and is big, just like the big red dog in the picturebooks. This is before the Ovaltine, but the same day, only minutes earlier. I am clumping along with my snow boots on the wrong feet, my bare chest cold. It is fall and sunny, but colder than I expected.

  “I’m getting milk,” I tell him.

  “Where’s your mom?” He leans down. He reaches into his pocket and offers me a caramel, sticky and squished. I know it is safe to take candy from him because Mommy always lets me. I take it and turn my attention to peeling off the wrapper. That takes too long, and I am too hungry and this is the first thing in who knows how long that I’ve been offered to eat. I shove the whole thing in my mouth and take off at a run when I see the hand signal says it’s safe to cross. I want to get away from him before he asks me where my mother is again. “Wait up, Ethan!” Clifford
calls after me. But he has a limp and can’t walk fast, so I’m across the street before he starts after me, and then the light changes and he has to wait.

  I manage to get on a bus out of the Downtown Eastside. I should never have left the house this morning. I’m not sure if I want anyone to be home when I get there or not. Unless it is Harvir. I wish he were there. I wish I had someone to talk to. I’m not mad at him for what he said to Kelly. So long as that’s all he told her.

  When I get off the bus, I spot a penny in the street. I pick it up and make a wish to find Harvir up in our room, reading his East Indian comics and smoking against the rules, aiming the evidence out the window.

  Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe this is the beginning. Before Tyrone moved in, Marshall sat us all down and explained about schizophrenia and what it does to your brain and how it can usually be managed by medication. He told us it often presents in the teenage years but isn’t usually diagnosed until later. He said there is sometimes a family link, which is why Tyrone has the diagnosis already. His mom had it and couldn’t take care of him.

  Did my mom have it? Do I? There’s no way of finding out about her. Her brother died four years ago, and I don’t know how to get in contact with any of the rest of her family, and neither does Chandra. When my mom got really drunk and put on her sad music, full of mournful saxophones and deep bluesy voices, she would sometimes tell me about her dad. He was a musician, but that’s pretty much all I know.