There’s a knock—always a knock. “You’ll be late for school, Faye,” my mother says.
Downstairs, my father looks up from the paper and pokes me in the ribs. “You look like hell. Must be all that partying.”
I know I must try and play along, but I’m still breathless from the mountain air. “Ha-ha,” I manage before I’m saved by the buzz of my phone.
C came out this am. Dad walked out 15 min ago. Mom not talking. C looks like ghost. Keep u updated…Em/Liang
“So Faye says she’s interested in Russia,” my mother says. “Maybe we could do the Near East this fall.”
“That was Emma,” I say. “Colm came out this morning.”
“Came out as in came out of the closet?” my mother asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Came out as in he’s gay.”
My father smacks his paper in triumph. “I could’ve told you that years ago. Didn’t I say that? That kid was always so meticulously groomed. No matter where we were, not a hair out of place.”
My mother crosses her arms like an angry schoolteacher.
“Christ, that poor kid. Lu and Billy will disown him.”
I watch my father smugly congratulating himself, my mother passing judgment from her righteous perch, and suddenly I hate them both. Colm seemed like any other kid to me, but of course no one is as perceptive as those two, no one as accepting. Sure, Lu and Billy have been back to China three times to donate money and build infrastructure for those who need it most, but who cares about such religious piffles?
“They actually seem to be working it out,” I say. “Emma’s relieved it’s out there. She says God is mysterious.”
My father looks slightly deflated. “Yeah? Well, there’s hope for all of us if ol’ Lu and Bill are loosening up in their old age.”
“Emma’s not always the most reliable source,” my mother says. “She can talk herself into anything.”
I pour myself some orange juice and try not to puke up the pulp. “I’m just telling you what she said.”
“Poor Colm,” she says again, as if she’s given him a second thought in years.
The next day, Celeste and my mother ambush me after school. Though Carson’s days are numbered, he’s there too, grinning his million-dollar smile like I’ve just been pranked on TV. He’s the kind of guy who’s used to things coming easily, but when his heart breaks, that easy grin will never be the same.
Before I know it, Carson is gone and Celeste and my mother are on either side of me, close enough to bump my bony hips, and we’re moving along the sidewalk as if in a six-legged race. After a stretch of days well above freezing, mild enough to flood basements, a cold front has moved in. In April, after the melt, no one has the heart to go back to full winter gear, and I’m almost grateful for the body warmth.
My mother stubs her toe on a crack in the cement and pretends it didn’t hurt. “We’re going to the coffee shop,” she says.
“Why?” I ask.
“So you can’t hide in your room,” Celeste says. She’s rubbing against me in a way that would make many a high-school boy very happy.
“Do I have a choice?” I ask.
“No,” Celeste says.
It’s crowded, so we end up in the corner near the bathroom. Celeste orders a hot chocolate, hold the whipped cream. I stick with ice water, in protest. My mother sets her towering cup of brewed black coffee in the middle of the table and reaches into her sensible faux-leather reporter’s briefcase. She pulls out a piece of paper and clasps it in her hand as if it’s some top-secret message. Celeste warms her fingers on her mug and avoids eye contact.
“Faye, hon,” my mother says, “we’re here because we need you to talk to us.”
I take a sip of water. My mother is not one for endearments like “sweetie” or “honey.”
“O-kay,” I say slowly.
“We love you,” she says. “And we’re worried. You’re not yourself. We need you to talk to us so we can help.”
She places the ultrasound of the Little Alien on the table. “Tina found this on your closet floor yesterday when she was vacuuming.”
It takes me a moment to process this—Tina is the housekeeper. I stupidly didn’t put the Little Alien back where it belongs, hidden in the pristine box, and Tina with the buckteeth and thick Spanish accent found it and then gave it to my mother.
Celeste continues to treat her beverage like a mini hand-warmer. “What gives?” she asks. “What’s going on with you?”
“What do you want me to say?” I ask.
My mother’s eyes are turning hamster pink. I try and remember the last time she cried—probably not since last year, when she saw the rows upon rows of metal cribs at Emma’s jazzed-up orphanage. “I don’t know, Faye. You tell us. Just talk to us.” She pushes the sonogram across the table to me, just like Bev did. Why does everyone keep doing that? I want to ask. I don’t even want it.
“We need to talk about this, Faye,” she says.
I don’t want her to cry here, outside the toilet-paperless bathroom of a crowded coffee shop, but it’s too late. “What’s the big deal?” I ask. “I found it. It was in a recycling bin at the library. I’d printed some stuff off that I didn’t need and when I went to recycle it, there it was. It kind of weirded me out. Who would throw that away?”
My mother flips the image over. “It’s been written on.”
“I know,” I say. “Somebody wrote on it.”
Celeste picks it up and studies it like her eyesight isn’t perfect 20/20. “Isn’t this your printing?”
It strikes me that Celeste is here because my mother needs her. Because the big no-nonsense reporter who holds her own with the boys can’t handle this on her own.
She’s only tough when the drama doesn’t involve her.
“No,” I say, “it’s not. I told you. I found it. Somebody else wrote on it.”
It dawns on me that they think I might be pregnant, that “my problem” might be something as obvious as that. “I can assure you, it’s not mine. Unless you believe in the virgin birth.”
My mother presses her lips together, which at least gives them a little color. “Please understand, hon. We’re not accusing you of anything. We just want to know what’s going on. We want to be here for you.”
Part of me wants to crawl into her wide Polish lap and let her tell me stories about her blue-collar childhood. About the boys playing cowboys and Indians who tied the littlest one up and made him eat a rotten tomato. About her brother fishing a bike out of the creek and fixing it up to look like new. About how she cried and cried because her Sleepy Head rag doll never opened her eyes and so her baba had to draw eyeballs over the lids.
“I know,” I say. “I know that. I just need a little space these days.”
Celeste fishes an ice cube out of my glass and pops it into her mouth. She does these kinds of things because she and her sister share everything, but I want to choke her until it pops back out.
“Okay, but since when do you want to go to Russia?” she asks.
Her words are garbled because of the ice. I pull my glass toward me, so close I’m almost cuddling it. “Excuse me?”
“Your mom says you’re talking about going to Russia.”
Of all the little secrets I’m keeping, the thought of my best friend finding out about Sasha makes me the craziest. How crazy is that? “So?” I say. “What do you care? There’s lots of places I want to go.”
Celeste puts both elbows on the table, as if readying herself for an arm wrestle. “Okay, but the thing is, Faye, you’ve been kind of a bitch, and that’s not like you. You’re just being so weird.”
I sit across a wobbly table from these two people I both love and hate, and I don’t know what to tell them. I cannot explain myself, as if telling enough little lies can spin a web large enough to hold you in its grasp, dumb and unreachable.
All I know for certain is that I will do as Bev Novak has asked, because she and I have unfinished business and, as a tri
ed-and-true OCD freak, I must see it through to the end.
And as specks of hard April snow begin to bounce off the window, all I can think about is that it would be real spring in Southern China right now, which is good, considering some dirt-poor field hand or dirt-poor field hand turned exploited factory worker is probably abandoning a baby girl outside a train station or beside a stall of muddy yams.
Even if it’s warm out, the baby will be dressed in many layers, and if she is not wailing for her life yet, she will be very soon.
PART TWO
Bev
FIVE
I get to the coffee shop ten minutes early, because to get what you want, it’s a little about luck and a lot about positioning. You have to be in the right place at the right time to seize the day.
I sit on one of the velvety purple couches that Lara would’ve flipped over during her color soothes the soul phase. I pick the far corner, so Faye will know this is serious—no running out so easily. When she called yesterday, she sounded a little unsure. She said the housekeeper found the ultrasound of the Little Alien and asked if it was Faye’s, which totally cracked me up, even though Faye most definitely was not laughing. But we’re down to the nitty-gritty now. She is either into this or she isn’t.
The place is full, and the girl behind the counter, who looks like she’s auditioning for the role of “fat Goth chick,” glares at me now and then. At one point, I say loudly, “I’m waiting for someone,” but this doesn’t make a difference because that’s the thing with people these days—they have no respect. On the bus, it’s not the girls who get up for you when they see you’re pregnant, it’s the guys. Which is why I fricking hate the bus. Some people have respect, and some are lazy bastards, and you never know which one is going to be mouth-breathing beside you.
Maybe I should’ve told Denise the social worker that was my number-one criteria: anybody raising my kid has to teach them respect. Only I know what she would’ve said. She would’ve looked at me with that oh-so-patient, acne-scarred face of hers and said, Okay, respect. What do you mean by that, Bev? Maybe you could elaborate. And I would’ve said something like Respect, Denise. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Do you need to look it up?
When I was a kid, Ray used to call me his “chubby little diva,” which he thought was very funny, but these days, it seems about right, since I’m getting rounder by the minute and almost everything pisses me off. Like how from the minute we met, Denise rubbed me the wrong way.
“You can’t just place an ad,” she said. “There’s a process. If you trust me, we can do this in a way that works for everyone.”
It’s like she thought I was retarded, and I almost lost it. “You thought I was serious? I just wrote that to lighten things up a bit. I’m not stupid. Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid.”
Then she backpedaled like crazy, told me how she’d been a teen mother too, that she’d made a lot of mistakes and only got her social-work degree after attending the school of hard knocks, blah, blah, blah. All that effort, I wanted to say, and still a beauty-school dye job. How much do they pay you down at Family Services?
A red jacket flashes by the window, and I know it’s Mannie. I can tell by the way the jacket’s flapping in the wind, trailing after him like a cape. I swear he leaves it unzipped so I will give him shit and tell him to do it up because “it’s cold, moron.”
I slouch down a little, even though it’s pointless. It won’t keep him from finding me, and it’ll only shift the stabbing pain from my lower back to my right butt cheek.
“He seems to be standing tall as a little soldier right on your sciatic nerve,” the doctor had said when I last saw him. “Maybe with a little massage, he’ll shift on around.” There was something about the way he said it, Mr. Casual and Collected, that made me want to scratch his face off. It seems you’ve lost an arm, he could’ve been saying. Here, have this tissue—maybe it’ll stop the bleeding.
The little bell above the door tinkles, and Mannie looks around like some cowboy entering a saloon. When he sees me, he puts on his Mr. Tough Guy look, his lips set into a little pout, his eyes small. The closer he gets, the smaller the eyes get and the bigger the pout, but I try not to laugh, because it would only get him worked up.
“What, did you follow me here?” I ask.
He stands over me, feet apart, arms crossed. His nose is running, and he’s wearing too much body spray. “What was I supposed to do?”
I lean forward, and my tailbone feels like I just sat on a cactus. I want to sucker punch Mannie in the balls, but I know that will ruin everything. I remain Ms. Casual and Collected. “You could stop following me around.”
“You don’t tell me nothing,” he says. “What am I supposed to do?”
I lean back and gasp as a porcupine slides down my right leg.
“It still hurts?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It still hurts. And it’s not ‘nothing.’ It’s ‘anything.’ ‘You don’t tell me anything.’”
Mannie starts to rock back and forth, like he always does when I correct him—it’s like his weird-ass version of a nod.
“Whatever,” he says. “Don’t change the subject, Bev. What do you want me to do?”
It reminds me of when Ray first found out Mannie and I were together. I’d only been back in Winnipeg a few months, but I could already tell that Ray and me in his tiny condo was not going to work. When he’d sat me down, I thought he was going to tell me I had to go back to Lara in Vancouver.
“What’s this I hear about you and the kid in the kitchen?”
He’d been trying to quit smoking and was going through a lot of gum. He chewed with his mouth open, like he meant business.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Sit here by myself knitting you socks? How am I supposed to meet people?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Go to the gym, go to school. You’re the one who wanted to do the correspondence thing. Shouldn’t kids your age be with other kids your age?”
“You hired him,” I said, “and he is my age.”
He opened a new piece of gum and spat the old one into the wrapper. I was pretty sure he was putting on this concerned-dad charade for some new woman in the picture, and I was right.
“Don’t change the subject,” he said. “This is about you. You got to keep your eye on the ball. You’re not a baby anymore.”
You got that right, I should’ve said. All your babies are grown up, and we’ve all seen the concerned-dad act.
Mannie keeps rocking now, and the waft of his body spray starts to make me feel queasy. I lean forward even though it hurts like a bitch and grab his shoulder. “Stop that or I might hurl.”
He wedges himself in beside me, puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes softly, like we’re at the hospital and someone just died. “You still feeling sick? I thought that was getting better.”
I drag myself out from under him. If having the Little Alien hurts worse than what I’m feeling right now, then I will die on the delivery table and Ray will no longer have to worry about whether I’ve got my eye on the ball.
The bell over the door tinkles again, and I know without looking that it must be Faye. Now and then, for no reason, I can tell what’s going to happen—sort of a second sight. Like, even when I was ten, I knew Lara would not get over Ray anytime soon, even though she pretended every minute of every day that she was. And last year, I knew Ray was seeing health-nut Charlotte even though he never told me about her until he decided not to invest in her kickboxing studio.
But having a little second sight doesn’t mean you can just sit back and relax—far from it. I have to suck up the jabs and think fast, because Mannie is here, his dumb, tough face turned all sucky and concerned, and there’s nothing I can do. There’s no time to get rid of him.
He inches over. “Bev?”
Faye spots us and it’s all I can do not to shove him away. “Yeah. Yes. I just need to breathe here without any stink, okay? I just need a little space to breathe
.”
When I look up, Faye is standing a few feet away, staring at us with her cool, black eyes. She’s wearing a brown hoodie with extra-long sleeves, but I can see she’s picking at her fingers. I remember her doing that whenever she got nervous. I’d say something wild like “Let’s write messages with our own blood,” and Faye would pick, pick, pick. Or Ray would tell me to tell Lara to either put on some lipstick or go back to bed, and Faye would pick, pick, pick.
Mannie doesn’t budge. “Can I help you?”
Part of me wants to slam my fist into his thigh, give him the ten-minute charley horse that one of my half brothers taught me. But part of me wants to laugh, because Mannie the Hero is almost as ridiculous as Mannie the Cowboy.
“This is Faye,” I say. “My friend.”
Mannie gets up and the shift in the couch almost makes me howl bloody murder. He leans across the coffee table as far as he can without falling over and offers his hand. “Mannie here. Any friend of Bev’s is a friend of mine.”
Faye stops fidgeting to shake politely. Fat Goth Girl comes up behind her with a dingy wet cloth covered in flu virus. “You guys going to order anything?”
Mannie looks down at me, and I look up at Faye.
“I have a card,” she says. “What do you want?”
Fat Goth turns away as if we’re not worth her time. You dress like a vampire, I want to say, but I bet you go home to your mommy every night. She’s probably a realestate agent, and you borrow her silver sedan to get to your shitty, pocket-change little gig.
“I don’t do hot drinks,” Mannie says. “I need something cold, with a kick to it.”
Faye starts to pick again. It’s hard enough to think these days without Mannie being so Mannie. I tell myself to focus. My game legs may be wobbly, but they haven’t given out yet. “No, this time it’s on me,” I say.
Faye pulls the card out of her pocket. “No, really. I’ve still got lots left on this. What do you want?”
Your Constant Star Page 6