Optimists Die First

by Susin Nielsen

  “This group,” Jacob said after the others had left. “It’s like a twisted version of The Breakfast Club. Koula’s like a scarier Ally Sheedy. I’m like a cheerier Judd Nelson. You’re the Molly Ringwald character, only more uptight.” Before I could respond, he took out his phone. “Can I have your number?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can book a time to work on our assignment. What’s your last name?”

  “De Wilde.”

  He laughed. I didn’t. “Seriously?”

  “It’s Belgian. And I don’t see what’s so funny, Jacob Schlomo Cohen.”

  “It’s just that you’re so De Not. De Cautious would have suited you better.” He slipped his sweater back over his head. “Hey,” he said, his voice muffled by the wool, “can you help me get this on?”

  I saw my out and hurried away.

  Maxine visited me in the night. She wanted me to read her Where the Wild Things Are. “The night Max wore her wolf suit,” I began, changing the pronoun. She leaned against me, her thumb in her mouth, hair brushing my cheek. This is what happiness feels like, I thought. I breathed her in. She smelled like salt and peaches.

  And pancakes. Why pancakes?

  I opened my eyes. Ferdinand was on my pillow, inches from my face, purring. I could hear clattering from the kitchen. Suddenly the pancake smell made sense.

  Maxine had been gone for two years and three months. In another year she’d be dead longer than she’d been alive. But in my dreams she was still so real. Waking from them was always a crushing letdown. Like someone had put lead weights on my chest.

  Dad poked his head into my room. He was in his ratty terry-cloth bathrobe, a gift from my mom on their first-year anniversary. “Calling all tall people, breakfast is served!” Dad likes to joke that he and I are “vertically gifted.” He is six foot four. My mom is a mere five foot five. I land right between the two of them.

  I forced myself to smile. “There in a minute.”

  Saturday mornings, my dad is at his best. We don’t see much of him during the week because he works a lot, way more than he did when Maxine was alive. But Saturday mornings, he steps up his game. So I forced my sadness inward and climbed out of bed, determined to step up my game, too.

  I padded into the kitchen in my penguin onesie. Mom was already at the table, wearing her plaid pajama bottoms and her WHAT WOULD ALICE MUNRO DO? T-shirt. She was drinking a mug of coffee and reading the news on her iPad. Stanley was on her lap. “Hey, Tula,” she said. I bent down and gave her a hug.

  Dad joined us at the table, a plate of pancakes in one hand, a bowl of diced fruit in the other.

  “Great pancakes,” I said, digging in.

  “Thanks. I put blueberries in them.”

  “Maxine loved blueberries,” Mom said. “Remember she called them boo-bears?” Dad’s neck stiffened, so I jumped in.

  “How were things at work this week?”

  “Good,” he said. “Busy.”

  “Good.”

  “And you? School?”

  “Good.”

  Silence. Dad stood up. “My feet are cold. Be right back.”

  After he’d left the room, Mom said, “I almost forgot. You’ll never guess who I ran into outside the SkyTrain station yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “Rachel’s mom.”

  My stomach lurched.

  “She said she wished you girls would try to work things out—”

  Dad reappeared in the doorway. When he spoke, his voice was eerily calm. “There is a turd in my slipper.”

  I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence. But Anne of Green Gables is a chronic stealth pooper. If she’s unhappy—and a lot of things seem to make her unhappy—she will leave a turd under a cushion, or a blanket, or the couch.

  “Just tip it into the toilet and flush it,” said Mom.

  I knew this was the wrong answer. Dad’s jaw clenched. “Here you go again. Showing a complete lack of regard for the humans living here—”

  “I’ll clean it up!” I leapt up from the table. I got rid of the poop and tossed Dad’s slippers into the laundry. Then I cleared up and washed all the dishes even though Dad said he could do it, and I vacuumed up all the clumps of cat fur in the living room. I sprayed all surfaces with antibacterial spray and changed the litter boxes. It was part of my strategy: think ahead to things my parents might argue about, and try to fix them before they did.

  There were days when trying to act like a normal family was exhausting.

  —

  When we were around ten years old, Rachel and I went through a Laura Ingalls Wilder phase. We devoured all the books in the Little House on the Prairie set. We wished we could be a part of that family. For a while our crafting got seriously farmstead; we stitched a lot of wall samplers and made loads of beeswax candles. And we constantly bugged our parents to take us to Fort Langley so we could see how the pioneers lived.

  We even made bonnets. And wore them.

  But while I loved Ma and Pa Ingalls, I knew my own parents were pretty cool too. They’d both gotten master’s degrees from University of British Columbia, where they met. Mom’s was in children’s literature, Dad’s in musicology. After they graduated, people weren’t exactly beating down the door to hire them. So they took what little savings they had and opened a used bookstore/recordshop in Kitsilano.

  That was the year before I was born, around the time people were starting to order their books online or download them to e-readers, and years after anyone bought records or even owned record players. But Mom searched for first editions, and Dad bought stock at yard sales and flea markets for dirt cheap since so many people were trying to get rid of the stuff he was trying to sell.

  For a while, they did okay. They created a niche market for collectors. They saved enough to put a down payment on the Comox Street apartment. My childhood was full of books and music and crafting and laughter, and if you ask me, that is a childhood worth having. “We aren’t rich in money, but we’re rich in love,” Mom liked to say.

  By the time Mom discovered she was pregnant with Maxine, things had taken a turn. They still had their die-hard customers, but it was harder to compete with online shopping. Then their landlord announced that he’d sold the whole block to a developer. Two years later the mom-and-pop shops were all gone, replaced with condos and chain stores. Dad took a job at an insurance firm. Mom started working at the bookstore in Burnaby. They filled our apartment and storage locker with leftover stock.

  But Mom still read to me every night, Dad still played his music all the time, and we danced like goofballs, first the three of us, then the four of us.

  Then Maxine died, and Dad stopped playing his records. We sold the apartment on Comox because none of us could stand being there. Scene of the crime and all that.

  We moved into the Arcadia. Just the three of us and our invisible zeppelin full of grief.

  Maxine’s death had shown me that dangers lurk around every corner. So even if my grief and guilt made it hard for me to get out of bed, I knew I needed to do what I could to keep my parents together and safe. And I had to keep myself safe, too, even if I sometimes wished I was dead.

  Because I’m it.

  I’m the only child my parents have left.

  —

  Shortly after breakfast Dad got dressed in his jeans and beloved Nina Simone T-shirt and left for the office. “A lot of extra paperwork.” As always.

  I headed out a while later, shopping list in hand. “You’re taking on all the household chores as a way of doing penance,” Carol Polachuk had said in one of our last sessions, looking pleased with herself. Like I could possibly think that running errands and scrubbing toilets could make up for killing my sister.

  It was a rare sunny January day, so I didn’t go directly to the supermarket. Instead I took a long walk through the West End. I did a mental count of the transgressions I saw:

  4 jaywalkers.

  9 cyclists without helmets.

 
15 people listening to music on headphones, oblivious to their surroundings.

  6 people texting while walking, 1 of whom almost got hit by a bus.

  8 drivers talking on cell phones, in spite of the fact that it is AGAINST THE LAW.

  2 of said drivers barreling right through a crosswalk while a pedestrian was waiting to cross.

  Either they were stupid, or they were optimists. Most likely both. “I will outlive you all,” I muttered under my breath.

  —

  I walked all the way to Burrard and Georgia, looping around the Vancouver Art Gallery, and heading back along Alberni. Michael’s Arts and Crafts was up ahead. I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it.

  That store had been my and Rachel’s mecca. We would spend entire Saturday mornings roaming the aisles, finding materials to make Ugly dolls, friendship bracelets, earrings, felt slippers, and Scrabble tile coasters. Then we’d go back to my place or hers and spend all weekend together, crafting, reading, and gossiping.

  Now weekends dragged on forever.

  I’d tried to compose an email to her recently. Dear Rachel: I’m so sorry for everything. I miss you like stink. Please, can we talk? But I couldn’t bring myself to hit Send. I deleted it.

  I walked to Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. It had been one of Maxine’s favorite spots. She loved feeding the ducks and sticking her ladybug boots into the shallow water.

  A lot of people were out enjoying the sunshine, but I still slipped my keys between my knuckles before I joined the dirt path around the lagoon. I found an empty bench and sat down. I let myself cry. Sometimes the pain was physical, like someone had driven over me with a steamroller and left me flattened like in a cartoon.

  After an hour or so I got up and continued along the path. A man was sitting on a bench up ahead. It looked like my dad.

  It was my dad. He was gazing into the middle distance. I was pretty sure he’d chosen this spot for the same reason I had.

  “Dad. Hi.”

  His eyes took a moment to focus. “Oh. Hi.”

  “I thought you were at work.”

  “I was. Just thought I’d get in a walk before heading home.”

  I moved his briefcase so I could sit beside him. It was surprisingly light, like it was a prop. Like maybe he hadn’t been at the office at all.

  Instinctively I slipped my mittened hand into his. He squeezed it tight for a moment.

  Then he let go.

  He never says it. He doesn’t have to.

  I know he blames me.

  —

  Dad helped me shop. We got back to the Arcadia about an hour later. He pushed the button for the elevator. I headed for the stairs. “You should walk up with me.”

  “I’ve told you before, I’m not enabling your phobias.”

  “They are not phobias! Google elevator deaths. You’ll never get in an elevator again.”

  “Which is why I won’t Google it.” He took the bags from me as the elevator arrived. I ran up the stairs two at a time, trying to beat him. But he was already opening our apartment door when I emerged from the stairwell, out of breath.

  Mom shot into the foyer when she heard us. “Petula! I was just about to text you.”

  “Why?”

  She tilted her head toward the living room. “You have company. The boy you’re doing the English assignment with?”

  No. Nonononononono.

  She added in a whisper, “He’s awfully cute!”

  “So, tell us about this assignment,” Mom said as she handed Jacob a plate of No Name brand cookies. Her voice was higher-pitched than usual. Overeager. It made me cringe. As did the fact that she was still in her pajama bottoms and WHAT WOULD ALICE MUNRO DO? T-shirt. Meaning, she hadn’t changed. Meaning, she still wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Jacob wore another sweater; he had quite the collection. This one looked like a Cowichan design, in browns and off-whites, with two bears on the front. He grabbed two cookies with his good hand, just as Anne of Green Gables leapt onto his lap. “We have to adapt a scene from Wuthering Heights into another format,” he said. “Like a screenplay, or a song.” He started manipulating his bionic arm for the cat.

  Mom glanced at his arm but said nothing. “Wuthering Heights is one of Petula’s favorites.” She looked at me, willing me to join the conversation.

  But I couldn’t. I was seeing our apartment through Jacob’s eyes. Our furniture, a mishmash of antiques that had belonged to my mom’s grandparents, took up a lot of floor space. Most of it was worn and tattered, destroyed by years of kids and cat claws. The carpet was strewn with toy mice and tufts of fur, even though I’d vacuumed that morning. Two different cat gyms, plus Dad’s records, Mom’s books, family photos, and a bunch of my old crafts, meant there was little room left for humans. I stared at my feet. To add insult to injury, there was a hole in my left sock. Not only did my toenails need clipping, there was a hair growing out of the knuckle of my big toe.

  Dad joined us from the kitchen, carrying a tray. He passed out tea in mismatched mugs. Of course Jacob had to get the one that read WORLD’S BEST FARTHER. “It’s so nice to meet one of Petula’s friends.”

  “It really is,” said Mom. “She never brings friends home these days.”

  Thank you, Mom! Thank you so much! Of course I didn’t bring home friends. I didn’t have any. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have brought them here. I knew how we looked to the outside world. The last “friend” to visit had been a girl in my grade named Brittany. Mr. Watley had asked her to bring me some schoolwork when I’d been home sick. Mom had been fostering a litter of kittens, so we’d had eight cats, an unusually high number. Brittany had told everyone at school that our apartment smelled bad and that we had enough cats to be on an episode of Animal Hoarders.

  Bitch.

  “I like your apartment, Mr. and Mrs. De Wilde,” Jacob said. “It’s very homey. Lived-in.” I was sure he meant it as an insult.

  “Please, call us Virginia and Andreas,” said my dad.

  “Who’s the record collector?”

  “Me. It’s old stock. We used to own a secondhand book-and-record shop.”

  “Wow. Cool.”

  “It was cool,” Dad agreed, sipping his tea. “While it lasted.”

  “Jacob, are you new at Princess Margaret?” asked Mom.

  He nodded. “We moved here from Toronto last month. My parents got job transfers.” Alice and Stanley wandered in, followed by Ferdinand. Ferdinand leapt onto my mom’s lap. I could see Jacob doing a mental head count. “How many cats do you have?”

  “Currently? Six,” Mom replied. Shoot me now. “I volunteer for the Vancouver Feline Rescue Association. So, four have pretty much become permanently ours, and the other two I’m fostering until we can find them forever homes.”

  Dad smiled tightly. “She’s like Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie, but with cats instead of kids.”

  “I wish I could take one,” Jacob said. “But my mom’s allergic.”

  “What’s your theory, Jacob?” Dad continued. “Just how many cats does one woman need before she becomes a certified crazy cat lady?”

  Mom gave an equally tight smile. “I prefer to think of myself as a caring human being. Not a concept that’s readily understood by some.”

  Jacob shifted uncomfortably in his seat and I died a small death. I could just imagine the stories he’d tell at school on Monday.

  Dad looked at his watch. “Oops, got to go. Your mom and I have an appointment at two.” Thank God he didn’t mention it was with their marriage counselor.

  They stood up. I turned to Jacob. “Let’s get this over with.” The sooner we got to it, the sooner he would leave.

  —

  “You couldn’t have called first?” I asked as we entered my room.

  “How? You wouldn’t give me your number. I had no choice but to come over. Your last name’s listed in the building directory.”

  I moved to close my door, but he stopped me. “Leave it open. Please.”
I gave him a puzzled look. “I don’t like feeling closed in.”

  “You’re claustrophobic?”

  “Sort of.” He perched on my bed and glanced around my room. “Wow. You’re kind of a pig.”

  My face burned. My room is the one place where I feel I can totally let down my guard. I think of it less as messy and more as controlled chaos. But as I glanced around, I could see Jacob had a point. Dirty clothes were strewn across my floor. My bed, with its colorful homemade quilt and needlepoint throw cushions, was unmade. The cats had tipped over my tower of books, again. My old crafts—a sock monkey, three dream catchers, macramé hangings—were gathering dust. A lone poster—CRAFTERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS—given to me by the Girl Formerly Known as My Best Friend on my thirteenth birthday, was peeling off the wall.

  Worst of all, my oldest, saddest pair of granny underpants was lying right near his feet. “Come sit at my desk.” Once he’d moved, I kicked the underpants under my bed.

  I powered up my desktop computer, a hand-me-down from my dad. Anne of Green Gables, who had taken a liking to Jacob, wandered in and jumped onto his lap again, kneading her paws into his sweater.

  “What kind of adaptation should we do?” I asked.

  “How about a screenplay?”

  “Any particular scene you want to choose?”

  “You pick.”

  “Um. Maybe the third chapter?”

  “Remind me what happens.”

  “Lockwood is reluctantly given a room at Wuthering Heights for the night and the ghost of Catherine comes to the window.”

  “It’s a ghost story?”

  “Not really. I mean, yes, there’s a ghost—” I stopped. “Have you read the book?”

  “No.”

  “Have you started the book?”

  “No.”

  “Do you read at all?”

  “To be honest? Not a lot.”

  “Oh my God!” I blurted. “You are such a Cretan!”

  His lips curled slightly. “I believe you mean cretin. If I were a Cretan, I’d be from the island of Crete. I may not read a lot, but it doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

  My face felt like it was on fire. Cretin was one of those words I’d only seen written down. I’d never heard it said aloud.