Safe Harbour

by Christina Kilbourne

  “I do apologize, again. I’ll call you as soon as it comes back in.”

  Erica delivers her final line sweetly, trying her best to prevent a full-blown escalation. But the man doesn’t end the conversation politely just because Erica has displayed impeccable manners, and she adjusts her reading glasses nervously. He mutters and harrumphs under his breath before zipping up his jacket and heading toward the glass doors.

  Or maybe that isn’t how their conversation goes at all, but it’s what my guilty mind scripts just the same.

  I shift the pack on my back and approach the counter. Erica glances up when she sees me standing in front of her, then does one of those double-take kind of looks where you can’t believe what you’re seeing is really there.

  “Harbour,” she says brightly, but with a hint of a question. Her eyes scan my face and travel down to my waist. I know how different I look from the last time she saw me.

  “You got your hair cut.”

  I step forward until I can feel the hard counter press against my body. At the same time I put my hand to the back of my head. I’m still not used to short hair.

  “Yeah. A couple of weeks ago. It’s already grown in a bit.”

  “It looks very stylish.”

  “Thanks. It wasn’t intentional, at first.”

  The air is charged with an awkward silence and I worry she’s not going to say anything else. But then she takes a deep breath.

  “I haven’t seen you in ages. Do you have Tuff with you?”

  Of course she remembered to ask about Tuff, I think. So much has happened to me since I last saw her, it feels as though I have a million things to share. But to her, I’m just another regular passing through the lobby.

  “I left him home today. It’s not very nice out.”

  Together we glance out the glass doors at the grey day and blowing snow.

  “But he’s well?”

  “Yeah, he’s great.”

  This time I rush to fill the gap in our conversation before it turns awkward. “I brought you something.”

  I swing my backpack onto the counter and rummage in the front pocket. After a moment I pull out an envelope and hand it to her. She examines it longer than I expect her to, which makes me squirm. I shift from one leg to another.

  “It’s a piece of mail,” I prompt finally. “With my name and address on it. And the postal code, which you’ll be happy to know I’ve finally committed to memory.”

  The expression on Erica’s face is hard to decipher when she looks up. Is she happy, or suspicious? She blinks like maybe her eyes are playing tricks on her. But she doesn’t speak.

  “I’m surprised, too,” I suggest, not knowing what else to say, or how much. I’m sure a thousand questions are brawling inside her head.

  She studies me for a moment before saying, “So we can get you a permanent card!”

  “Yes, at last.” I want to apologize for the delay, and thank her for always being so kind to me, but something keeps me from stumbling headlong into a tricky explanation.

  Erica turns to the computer and begins to type. She uses the mouse to click several boxes, then types some more, using the envelope as a guide.

  “I have something else for you,” I say, reaching into my backpack again.

  I hand her Paramahansa Yogananda’s translation of The Bhagavad Gita.

  “It’s a new copy. The other one got damaged. I’m sorry.”

  Erica takes the book and places it on the counter. Her hand lingers on it protectively, as if there’s something sacred about it, or in it.

  “Thanks for replacing it. It will take us a week or so to get it into circulation, but there’s a hold on it. So your timing is great.”

  “Someone else wants to read Yogananda?”

  “Yes. Me, actually.” She blushes slightly.

  “Did you read his autobiography?”

  “I did. And I enjoyed it very much, thanks to you and your dad.”

  I smile to myself when I think about the repercussions of Dad’s reading list, how his influence is rippling out into the world even though he’s no longer in it. I think about how even the smallest of his ideas might go on forever like a wave that travels across an entire ocean before bouncing off a rocky shore. The thought brings me comfort and I remind myself to visit it again later, perhaps as I lie in the dark waiting for sleep to come.

  “How is your reading list coming along?” Erica asks before walking to the far end of the counter. She returns with an apology for interrupting our conversation.

  “Actually, I’ve given it up.”

  Her face falls and I feel a surge of alarm when her expression changes.

  “Don’t worry. I’m still doing lots of reading — for school.”

  Erica’s face brightens. “You’re in school!”

  “I’m going to an alternative learning centre. I didn’t think I’d fit into a regular high school. Too much structure. Too many rules. Just not me.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I do. I’m taking a course in religious studies. Right now we’re on Islam. It’s fascinating.”

  “You’ll certainly have a head start when you get to Hinduism.” Erica’s voice is light and musical when she says this, so melodic that I don’t want the sound to ever end.

  “I’m taking English, too. We just finished 1984.”

  “So you do have plenty of reading to keep you busy.”

  I nod. “I’ll never stop reading.”

  “I hope that means I’ll still get to see plenty of you,” she says and hands me a plastic card the size of my old credit card.

  “Definitely,” I say. “You have a great section on world religions.”

  I tuck the card into the front pocket of my backpack, zip it up and turn to go. My next destination is the shelter.

  “It was good seeing you again, Erica.”

  “You too. Stay warm.”

  I’ve taken a few steps across the lobby when she calls out, “Don’t lose that card.”

  I glance over my shoulder to flash her a smile and in that moment catch a look of happy wonder dart across her face, a look as fleeting as a fish moving among the shadows of a sunlit reef.

  Seeing Lise is still a highlight of my day, and I approach the shelter with a warm sense of anticipation. Joyce pops her head through the door of her office when she hears me walk inside. It’s the end of the day, so a busy time. Some people are coming back after a long cold afternoon and others are popping outside for a cigarette. The door groans open behind me and I feel a cool draft on the back of my legs.

  “Harbour Mandrayke,” Joyce says energetically when she sees me. “What a nice surprise.”

  I’m always amazed by how welcome Joyce can make a person feel with so few words.

  “Is Lise here?” I ask and step farther inside so people can get past me.

  “She is. She got back a few minutes ago.”

  I pull off my winter hat and shove it in my pocket, then undo my jacket so I don’t overheat on my way up the stairs.

  “Is it okay if I go up?”

  Joyce nods and shields her eyes before stepping back into her office. Technically non-residents aren’t supposed to wander around the shelter, but Joyce has a way of turning a blind eye where Lise is concerned. Apparently I fall into the “see no evil” category.

  The door to Lise’s room is slightly ajar. I knock lightly and walk in at the same time. Lise looks up from where she’s sitting on her bed and closes a Smart Serve workbook over her fingers. I peel off my jacket and park my butt on the bed across from her.

  “How’d it go today?”

  She sighs. “I think it went okay. For someone like you, it’d be a no-brainer. But school was never my thing.”

  She no longer has long, dark dreadlocks framing her face. Instead she has short hair, like mine. She teases that we look like a couple of dudes, but I think she looks prettier, and more mainstream, without them. She’s also lightened up her eye makeup and left the rings out
of her eyebrow. She looks like she could be a model for H&M or Forever 21, or something.

  “Still, you think you passed?”

  “I have to get an eighty. So I dunno.”

  “What if you don’t pass?”

  “I can take the test again.”

  “I’m sure you passed, but if you didn’t, I can help you study before you do it again.”

  “Thanks,” she says. She tosses the workbook onto the end of her bed. “How was your day at brainiac school?”

  “It’s not brainiac school,” I protest. “It’s just a regular school with fewer rules.”

  Lise and I have had the same conversation at least ten times in the past week.

  “Oh, come on. You know you’re one of those intellectual elites.”

  I laugh. “Nice try. My entire education has been based on the whims of my father. So while I might know a lot about the engine of a Porsche 911, I have no knowledge of art history.”

  “At least you know art history is a thing,” she points out stubbornly.

  I pick up a pen off the table between the beds and throw it at her.

  “You have to get over your victim complex,” I say, smiling.

  “You have to get over yourself, ” she teases, lobbing the pen back at me.

  I duck so that the pen hits the wall. Then, to humour her, I spill some details about my day. “I have an essay to write by next week. Like a thousand words. I’ve never written an essay before. But the teacher spent a bit of time with me today explaining what I need to do.”

  “You don’t know how good you had it, not having to write essays before.”

  “To be honest, I kinda always wanted to go to school. I’m looking forward to this.”

  Lise rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything sarcastic, so I continue.

  “And anyway, you’re the one always dissing my dad for not being a good parent.”

  The tone in the room shifts. Suddenly the ceiling seems higher, the temperature cooler. Lise looks down at her lap, then back at me.

  “I’m sorry for all the bad things I said about him. I didn’t mean any of them. I’m sure he was a great guy. Like, he made you and you’re all right. So how bad could he have been? Right?” She pauses, then adds in a quieter voice, “I’m sorry I won’t get to meet him.”

  “No more cooking in the galley,” I say brightly, trying to lighten the mood.

  “No more peeing in the head,” she counters.

  I smile sadly. “So much for our plans to go out to Toronto Island on Starlight.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll make new plans. Like with Aunt Jackie. But I think I would have liked him.”

  “You would have. Definitely. Especially on his good days. The other days, well, he was hard to handle sometimes.”

  Lise raises her eyebrows. It’s an exaggerated expression meant to signal her surprise. “Talk about progress. Your counsellor would be proud. You’ve never admitted that before. At least not to me.”

  “It’s strange. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, panicking because I’ve remembered for, like, the thousandth time that I’m never going to see him again. And every day when I wake up I have to readjust to the fact that he had a mental illness, that there was no plan to blow up the world stored in a microchip under Tuff’s skin. It’s like every day I’m a bit more deprogrammed. But that makes me sad, too. Like, will I ever know what was real and what wasn’t? It makes me question everything I’ve ever known. Sometimes it sinks me. I feel like I’m in the ocean holding on to a hundred-pound ball of lead. But sometimes I don’t care at all. When I boil it all down, he was still him. I loved him, despite some chemical misfire in his brain.”

  “He must have loved you, too, to be able to send you up here alone. Especially when he knew how much he needed you.”

  “Exactly. He had a strange way of showing it sometimes, but being my dad was the most important thing to him.”

  Lise lies back and studies the ceiling. “You know, you’re kind of lucky. I mean, not completely lucky, obviously. But some kids never have anyone who cares that much. I mean, I didn’t have anyone — like an adult — until I met Joyce.”

  “I definitely have stuff to be thankful for,” I murmur. “I couldn’t have imagined saying that two weeks ago, but things can change so fast. In a single instant. A flash.”

  The echo of footfalls and subdued greetings fill the hallway as people head to the showers or to the kitchen for dinner. I see their shadows flash across the doorway, but I don’t look up to see who it is. The mood in Lise’s room contrasts most of the other rooms in the shelter. Lise and I are happy, and together we’re making plans for our futures.

  “I should go. If you don’t shower soon you’ll miss the hot water. And Aunt Jackie will be expecting me.”

  Lise sits up and swings her legs onto the floor in one fluid motion. “See ya tomorrow?”

  “You know it. Text me your test results when you get them.”

  “Let me know if you need any help with your essay.” Lise laughs.

  By the time I hit the street again, the temperature has dropped and the night sky has unfolded its dark cloak over the city. Over and over I’m startled by how early darkness arrives in winter and how much colder it feels at night. I pull up my hood and tuck my face into my scarf. The snow is falling fast and turning the overhead streetlights into shimmering yellow orbs. It’s a mesmerizing illusion that I stop and watch even though it means people have to step around me on the sidewalk. Understanding at last how cold winter really can get in Canada, I refuse to let myself play the “what if” game and instead focus on “what is.”

  I kick through the snow on my way to Cabbagetown. Now that I have a warm bed every night, I’ve discovered something magical about a new snowfall. I’ve noticed how a thick blanket of snow muffles the harsh sounds of the city and covers the imperfections until everything feels close and safe. Perhaps my childhood fantasy to build a snowman and go tobogganing wasn’t foolish after all.

  It’s not a long walk from the shelter, but long enough that a flush of happiness washes over me when I turn onto Amelia Street. I open the white picket gate and step through. The house is glowing with yellow light. It spills out of every window and brightens the snow in the front yard. Music comes from inside and I stop for a moment to watch Aunt Jackie through the window. She’s curled up on the couch with Tuff and Bean, reading a book and sipping a mug of what I expect is ginger tea. That’s my family, I think. This is the home Dad sent me to find.

  CHAPTER 18

  FROM ABOVE, MIAMI looks surreal. It looks like a toy. A circuit board. I know the geography of the waterways the way I knew the veins on Dad’s hands or the wrinkles around his eyes when he squinted into the sun. I know what it’s like to pull up alongside the immense cruise ships and feel like a speck of dirt floating on the water, and yet, from above, through the small square window against which I am pressing my forehead, the same ships look like decorations on a cake. It’s hard to reconcile the two realities and merge them into one truth. Is it a massive hunk of metal and material excess or a tiny piece of a board game?

  Hit and sunk.

  “He’s really dead,” I mutter half to myself and half to the world at large. Even though I’ve known for weeks, somehow this trip to Miami is making it real.

  Aunt Jackie reaches over and squeezes my hand.

  “Starlight was my whole world once. Now she’s like one of those tiny pieces of debris floating on the water down there.”

  “From down there we’re just a speck, too. A speck in the sky.”

  Aunt Jackie’s reminder has a strange effect. It makes my world flip upside down. I think of all the times I stretched out on the bow of Starlight and watched planes fly overhead. I spent hours tracking jets across the blue sky. As a small child, I wondered what it would be like to be in one, what I would be able to see, if I’d be afraid of the height or of falling out of the plane and tumbling to the ground. And now I’ve re
versed roles. I’m looking down. I’m among the clouds for the first time in my life, staring down at my father’s grave.

  “I’m afraid to see Starlight,” I admit finally, though I’m sure it’s not much of a revelation to Aunt Jackie. “I’m afraid to see what happened to her.”

  “Let’s not think about it today. Tonight we’ll get to our room and relax. Tomorrow we can take as it comes.”

  I love the way Aunt Jackie breaks big problems into small chunks. She orders the world in a way that makes it seem safe and manageable. Dad didn’t do that. If anything, his approach fragmented the world, took big pieces and created smaller and smaller shards that never quite fit back together to make anything whole. I didn’t see that at the time, but I do now. Every day another gear fits into place and a new part of the machine turns.

  A stewardess rolls the drink cart up to our seats and locks the wheels. She hands each of us a package of snack crackers and offers us a drink. Aunt Jackie orders a Coke and I order an orange juice.

  “Should I be nervous about meeting my step-uncle?”

  “Not at all. He’s a great guy. I met him a few times when I was down visiting your mom.”

  “I found him hard to talk to. Maybe it was the shock of hearing me on the other end of the phone after so many years. How did he sound to you?”

  “Surprised. Relieved. And maybe a little bit guilty, too, I think, that he didn’t do more to find you. He’s worried about how you coped alone with your dad all those years.”

  “Dad took good care of me,” I say a little defensively, then pause to consider the truth of this statement. I sip my juice. “There were some weird things, sometimes, I guess. But mostly I had an amazing childhood.”

  Aunt Jackie smirks at me and shakes her head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that you talk like you’re an adult when you’re only fourteen. You have lots of childhood left.”

  I can’t help but smile back and hope she’s right, but part of me knows I haven’t been a child in years. And I’m okay with that.

  Aunt Jackie leans forward and rummages in her purse. When she sits back up, she hands me a small rectangular parcel.