Trail of Crumbs

by Lisa J. Lawrence

  Copyright © 2019 Lisa J. Lawrence

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lawrence, Lisa J., 1975–, author

  Trail of crumbs / Lisa J. Lawrence.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-2121-7 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-2122-4 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4598-2123-1 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.A9266T73 2019 jC813'.6 C2018-904898-0

  C2018-904899-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954142

  Simultaneously published in Canada and the United States in 2019

  Summary: In this young adult novel, Greta and her twin brother are abandoned by their father and stepmother, and Greta struggles with the confusion and shame she feels after being raped.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Sarah N. Harvey

  Cover illustration by Sofía Bonati

  Cover design by Teresa Bubela

  Author photo by Michael Lawrence

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  22 21 20 19 • 4 3 2 1

  Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions that feature multi user, simultaneous access to our books that are easy for your students to read. For more information, please contact digital@orcabook.com.

  http://ivaluecanadianstories.ca/

  To Fast Eddie (LMW), for thirty-three years of shenanigans and approximately 1,200 boxes of Kraft Dinner, and to all the Gretas of the world, wherever you are in your journey

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AN EXCERPT FROM “RODENT”

  ONE

  ONE

  Greta always thought of Patty as a person of gaps—gaps between her teeth and her skinny thighs, gaps in logic. When Patty laughed, it reminded Greta exactly of a barking seal. But she wasn’t laughing now. She was lecturing Ash and Greta on how much toilet paper they’d gone through in a week, like they had single-handedly used it all themselves.

  “I shouldn’t be buying this all the time,” Patty said, glaring back and forth between them.

  “Then stop using it yourself.” Ash shrugged, tapping his fingers on the tabletop. “In some parts of the world, they just use their hands.”

  “Hey!” Patty shouted. “I don’t need your lip! Get a job and start pulling your weight.”

  “Maybe I will,” Ash said, pushing past her. “Then I can move out.”

  “Good idea!” she yelled through the empty doorway.

  “Or why don’t you get a job,” Ash said, “so you can move out instead.”

  During Patty’s flurry of cursing, Greta let herself out the front door, climbing the steps of the concrete stairwell cave. Across the street their neighbor vacuumed the interior of his yellow Volvo, both doors hanging open. He straightened and waved to Greta. He was tall and pale with a nest of ginger hair. Slightly buggy eyes and an open face. Greta recognized him from Ash’s English class. He watched her as if she might stop and talk. She walked faster, checking over her shoulder to make sure he hadn’t followed her.

  Greta circled the block a few times, crunching the brittle ice of unshoveled walks. Snow heaped in knee-high dunes on either side. Bleak January afternoon, like the sun never fully rose. Before going back inside, she listened at the bottom of the steps. All quiet.

  No one in the living room. Greta tapped on her brother’s door—technically the storage room—and opened it when he didn’t answer.

  He lay on a rumpled single mattress, staring at a bare bulb dangling from a wire. The back wall was covered with wide, rough shelves—the kind you’d put boxes or canned goods on. Ash had piled a few books there, but the shelves sat mostly empty. No windows. She sat on the bed next to him.

  “Why did Dad marry her?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “So he wouldn’t have to think anymore,” Ash said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He propped himself up on an elbow to face her. “If Patty knows everything and decides everything, what does Roger have to worry about?” Ash had started calling their father by his first name a few years back. It drove Patty crazy.

  Greta thought about this, how lost their father had been after their mom died. She nodded. It made sense. Patty—dictator of a country too tired to retaliate. “Time for a coup?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Don’t think it’ll work.”

  Ash was right. There was no military in this country. Just one despot and a few unarmed civilians.

  Their dad called a family meeting when he got home from work. “Patty says there’s been some disrespect,” he said.

  They sat in a circle around the kitchen table, which was practically in the living room. The basement suite squeezed all the furniture into the same space. Roger pinched his eyebrows together and tried to look stern, but Greta noticed his jowls—the loose skin trembling around his jaw as he spoke. His blue eyes watered, and she could see his scalp through his thinning gray-blond hair. He looked old.

  Patty nodded smugly. She stopped to give a wheezing cough and resumed nodding. Greta, distracted by the bobbing of Patty’s yellowish perm, forgot to answer. Ash glowered at Roger and Patty across the table.

  “Yes,” Ash said, clearing his throat, “I’d like to lodge a complaint against Patty for interfering with how I wipe myself.”

  “Ash…” Roger warned.

  “You see?” Patty said. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. Thank you, Ash, for illustrating my point. Roger…”

  Roger held up his hands in a time-out.

  “Let me know when Patty gives you your balls back, Roger,” Ash said, pushing away from the table and walking to his storage closet. The door, hanging crooked in its frame, only made a thunk when he tried to slam it.

  Patty started shouting, and Roger lowered his head into his hands.

  “Can I go now? I’ve got homework,” Greta lied. No one was listening anyway.

  She got up from the table and went to her room. It wasn’t much bigger than Ash’s closet, but at least it actually was a bedroom, with a window, a bed off the floor and a dresser. At some point someone had painted the walls
a deep burgundy, but all the dents and gashes revealed a sickly yellow underneath. It’s temporary. She told herself that every time she noticed the basement swallow any sunlight, every time a fungus-shaped frost crept up the inside of the windows, every time she saw Ash staring up at the bare bulb in the storage room. Temporary.

  They hadn’t even discussed who got the bedroom. That was the worst part. Roger and Patty had just dropped her boxes in here during the last move. “I guess I’ll take this… room,” Ash had said, eyeing the storage space. “I’m sure it’s up to code.”

  Patty gave him a look and said, “Suck it up, Buttercup.”

  No one came out and said it, but in the country run by Dictator Patty, Ash was a fast-food worker or possibly homeless. What he got he was expected to accept without complaint. Roger was, at best, a spineless government advisor. Greta was probably a small-business owner, struggling to get by, whining about taxes.

  She could still hear them with the door closed. How did Ash do that? Patty got mad at Ash. Roger got mad at Ash, and Ash got Patty mad at Roger and walked away without a scratch.

  Greta picked up her phone and ran her thumb over the screen with a crack in one corner, wanting to text someone. Rachel? No. Definitely not. It annoyed her that the impulse still lingered. She and Ash shared the phone, but Ash had basically given it to her. “I don’t have anyone to call,” he’d said. Greta always saw him alone at school, if she saw him at all. When she invited him to hang out with her, he just shook his head and disappeared. For twins in the same grade, they rarely crossed paths. Ash had a way of doing that—disappearing into shadows, corners, storage closets. She envied that about him.

  When Roger and Patty went quiet, Greta eased the door open a crack. She could see their heads still bent together at the table. The last thing Greta wanted was to be called back to finish the toilet-paper conversation. Every time Patty opened her mouth, Greta felt more misery heaped on the pile. It was the last thing she needed. She took a soft step into the hallway, toward the open bathroom door. Then froze.

  “…can’t just leave…” Roger whispered.

  “Not forever. Of course not.”

  Roger shook his head.

  The words just leave paralyzed Greta. What did he mean? Coming from her father’s mouth, those words didn’t make sense—a foreign language.

  “How are they ever going to learn responsibility?” Patty asked.

  “They’re still in school!” Roger’s voice rose to near-normal, and Patty shushed him. Greta darted back to her bedroom, flicking off the light but leaving the door open.

  “I worked all through high school,” Patty said. “I know the value of a dollar.”

  “It doesn’t seem right.” He sounded tired.

  “Well, this isn’t right either—mooching off you, expecting everything on a silver platter. How are we ever going to get into a house while we’re dragging all this around?”

  Greta almost snorted out loud. Dragging this around—two heavy rocks. And the silver platter? After their mom died, when Greta and Ash were eight, it had been a steady downward spiral to this—a damp basement suite with a yellow-permed scarecrow. Greta remembered how Roger, after the funeral, had been home with them, sleeping a lot. After a few months he’d tried going back to driving truck, leaving them with his sister, Aunt Lori, for weeks at a time. Then he’d gotten a DUI and lost that job. He’d sold their house, and they had stayed with Aunt Lori for a while. The following year they had moved two—three?—more times, now a blur of stark walls and industrial carpets. Then to the condo on the north side, and Roger started driving again.

  That’s when he met Patty, and there was a sense that life was firm again. Greta opened her eyes in the morning and knew where she would sleep that night, and the next. Patty worked in a restaurant and brought them warm pizza every Friday night. They took trips to the park, with ice-cream cones from McDonald’s. For their tenth birthdays, Patty bought Ash a remote-controlled car, and Greta a red dress. It was the first new dress she’d gotten in two years.

  Roger and Patty got married later that year, and then the fighting started. Patty quit her job at the restaurant “to look after the kids.” Only she wasn’t usually up when they left for school and wasn’t around when they got home. She called family meetings about the chores Greta and Ash didn’t get done or didn’t do well enough. For seven years Greta had watched the lines grow deeper on her father’s face, his hair thin across his scalp. Any suggestion, from anyone, that Patty get a job provoked a tirade about how no one appreciated all her hard work around the house. Greta wasn’t sure exactly what Patty did besides opening bills and shouting about them.

  They had moved into the basement suite over the summer, after being slapped with a three-hundred-dollar-a-month rent increase at the north-side condo. “Three hundred dollars more, for one bathroom and carpets from the seventies?” Patty had howled. For once Greta hadn’t disagreed. Then her dad had found the basement suite on the west end, and he and Patty talked about living cheaply to save up for their own house. They moved just in time for Greta and Ash to start their last year of school at West Edmonton High. It was either that or an hour-and-a-half bus ride each way to their old school.

  “We’re moving in our graduating year?” Greta had complained, but only out of duty. One of her best friends had moved to Kelowna in June and hadn’t called or texted since, and the other had drifted into a different group. Greta felt exposed—the last bird in the nest.

  So this was their silver platter. Greta took a deep breath to stop herself from bursting through the door and throat-punching Patty. Six months from graduation, and Patty had decided they needed to learn responsibility. This from the woman who hadn’t worked a day in seven years.

  “I’ve given up a lot to join this family and play mother to those kids,” Patty continued, “and they don’t appreciate a single thing.” Roger started to say something, but she cut him off. “It’s time for you to choose, Roger. I won’t be made homeless by those two.” She pushed back her chair and stomped away. Greta, with no time to shut her door, dodged into the dark.

  After Patty slammed into her bedroom, Greta watched her father at the table. He hunched over as if a weight pressed down on him. Then anger devoured any pity she felt. Why didn’t he stand up to Patty? Would he actually consider leaving them? A solid assurance moved over her, then a sense of relief that Patty might actually be the one to go.

  But by the time she finished in the bathroom and crawled into bed, the feeling of assurance had thinning spots. Then it became so transparent that Greta couldn’t sleep, terror standing just behind it—in eight years, Dictator Patty had never, ever lost a battle.

  Greta hardly slept. With every creak, she pictured Roger and Patty sneaking out, dragging luggage behind them. Once she even crept from bed and flung the door open, only to find a dark, empty hallway. Then she noticed the noise was coming from above, their landlord walking across the floor of the upstairs suite. She stood with her head against Ash’s door, not sure if she should wake him. A draft moved over her legs, as if a window was open somewhere. Was she overreacting? Had she misunderstood? She crawled back under the blankets, waiting for her alarm.

  When morning came—still black in January—Greta listened for the clatter of Roger and Patty in the kitchen. She could piece together their conversation by Patty’s voice alone, clear above any kitchen appliance, including the blender. Nothing about leaving.

  She waited until she heard Ash’s door open. “Ash,” Greta hissed as he headed for the bathroom. “Come here!”

  He blinked, drowsy. “What?”

  “Get in here.” She dragged him through her door and eased it shut. While he stood there, his eyebrows pressed the wrong way from sleeping, she told him what she’d heard the night before. With every word, she felt more stupid. “What do you think that means?” She looked away to avoid his deadpan stare.

  Ash didn’t answer for a minute. Then, “Are you sure?”

  “Well, y
es. No. I think so,” she said. “I heard it. But does it mean what I think it does?”

  “Dad leave us?” He let out a long breath. “How—?” He stopped and shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t.”

  It’s what she wanted to hear, but the dismissal was irritating. “Fine,” she said, pushing him toward the door, “but don’t be surprised if we come home one day and he’s gone.”

  Ash walked to the bathroom without looking back.

  In biology class Greta found herself watching the back of Rachel’s long black layers. Every few minutes, Rachel ran her fingers through her hair, an absentminded compulsion. Greta remembered her doing the same when they’d watched Matt and Dylan’s basketball games, especially when the score was close. Rachel’s elbow would bump Greta’s shoulder, her fingers working through those long strands again and again.

  Rachel. Every time Greta saw her, she fought the urge to either slap her or apologize. Greta had had it all and lost it. And Rachel was there for the whole thing. Two more weeks in this term. Greta couldn’t take any more sick days and still pass her classes. Two more weeks, then exams, then something new. Please, something new.

  TWO

  It felt weird walking home without Ash. Greta had hovered outside his math classroom while he finished an exam, before finally giving up and catching a bus alone. An old woman with a knitted scarf sat next to her, and Greta felt a breeze every time the woman coughed. Greta pictured her white blood cells rushing to meet the invasion. But at least the woman got the seat and not the college-age guy standing next to them in the aisle, glancing in her direction. Greta knew how carefully she’d have to hold her body if he sat next to her, so her thigh and arm wouldn’t bump against his. She zipped her parka higher and tucked her chin inside.

  As the bus rolled toward her stop, Greta rang the bell, stood and dodged to avoid brushing against him as she moved closer to the exit. On the sidewalk she paused, waiting to see his shadow behind her. He didn’t get off. She exhaled. The air stilled for a moment, the cold fresh in her chest after the drafty heat of the bus, which made her body sweat while her feet went numb. Then the wind whipped her, stinging her eyes.