Your Constant Star

by Brenda Hasiuk

  I poke at my layer of flab even though it hurts—nothing but blubber. For a minute, I think of picking up the phone and calling Lara, but I decide it’s not worth it. She would only blab on about the kid being an Aries or a Gemini or whatever the hell sign the middle of May is, and I would hate myself for being such a suck.

  Lara went through a phase when she thought every single dream she had must mean something important. I was eleven, held hostage because Ray was going through bankruptcy and not up for even a visit, and even then, I knew she was blowing smoke. Because I’m not stupid. I don’t believe in all that New Age shit, don’t believe in anything except my instincts.

  Thirty-five weeks doesn’t seem like a long time, but it is. There were months of the Little Alien tossing around my cookies, then more months of him bearing down on my every move, of jabs that stole my sleep and kickstarted my dreams, that reminded me he was still there, that he still needed me.

  Then just like that, he is gone and I’m light as air again, a helium balloon that some kid lost at a birthday party. I know this feeling well, which is good, because my instincts will know exactly what to do.

  Denise will come. She will be motherly or businesslike, a buddy or a fellow screw-up, depending on her mood. I will not renege on my contract. I will ask not to see Helen and Will again. Because, unlike Mannie, I am not stupid. I will let the Little Alien take off to its home planet, that gingerbread house in Wildwood where flowers poke up through the snow and people call their kid Olivier without sounding like assholes. I will remember that even though school was a joke, I’ve learned a few things.

  I will hail a cab, and it won’t matter as much that it smells like bad aftershave and stinky feet, because I am alone again.

  Ray will pay the cabbie and say, Look who the cat dragged in.

  He will talk a hard line, tell me I have to start in the kitchen, work my way up, just like he did. But he will let me waitress, give me the best tables even though it pisses off his staff, start grooming me because everyone else has bailed and I’m all he has.

  I can already see him sitting there in his office, tilting back in the leather chair that looks like a first-class plane seat. He’ll look me over, take note of the flab around the belly.

  So, it’s my girl, he’ll say. You look pretty good. Are you good?

  He’ll say it loud and cheery, in a way that makes it seem like he cares.

  PART THREE

  Mannie

  EIGHT

  If there’s one thing I learned from my foster mother, Betty, it’s that legal papers don’t mean shit, especially if you had no choice but to sign. One look at those old First Nations, treaties and it doesn’t take a genius to know someone is getting screwed. So I don’t just sit around with a piano tied to my ass, as Betty liked to say.

  I light up a joint and call the number I nabbed from Bev’s phone. I don’t hang up this time. “Is this Faye?”

  It takes a second. “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Mannie,” I say. “We met before.”

  “Have you been calling me?” she asks. “Like, for a while? Have you been calling my cell?”

  I consider the choices—yes or no, admit or deny. But she doesn’t give me a chance.

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What do you want, Mannie?”

  “I need to see my kid,” I say.

  I get nothing. It sounds like she’s outside, walking somewhere. Someone else is talking, and the birds are finally back in town for the summer, chirp, chirp, chirping.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Can you call back in ten minutes?”

  She obviously wants to blow someone off before we talk, so I give her twelve, just to be safe. It’s enough to relax a little, get a bit of a buzz on, which is good. When I call again, it’s like she’s in an echo chamber—a bathroom maybe, or a stairwell.

  “Where’s Bev?” she asks. “Does she know about this?”

  I take a drag, stay nice and calm. “She’s at Ray’s. She won’t talk to me.”

  I get nothing again. “Was it a boy or a girl?” I ask. “I bet you know.”

  There’s a long pause, and the quiet is creepy, like a sound vacuum. “A boy,” she says. “Olivier.”

  I can’t help it. I start laughing. “Seriously? Does Ray know? He’d think that was so faggy. He’d fricking hate it.”

  Even as I’m saying this, I know I’m messing things up. I take another drag, get a grip. “Yeah, see, the thing is, I need to see it.”

  Nothing.

  “I need to see him, Faye.”

  “You have to talk to Bev about that,” she says.

  When I first saw Bev’s little uptight Chinese friend, I thought of what Betty used to say about my case worker: “Someone’s got to pull that stick out of her ass.”

  “Did you hear what I said? She won’t talk to me. She won’t come to the phone. Ray says he’s getting a restraining order, but he doesn’t know shit about the law.”

  “I haven’t talked to her either,” Faye says. “Not since the hospital.”

  “Come on,” I say. “Don’t be a bitch. Do you know where my kid is?”

  “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

  “Bullshit,” I say. “You know.”

  “You both signed an agreement,” she says. “You can’t just show up at their door.”

  She so knows. “I don’t want to go to any door. I just want to have a look.”

  Nothing.

  “Do you know the street? Just tell me the street.”

  “I can’t remember,” she says. “And it doesn’t matter. There’s a written agreement that you both signed.”

  I laugh again, because I can’t believe this shit. Betty is rolling in her grave because she can’t believe it either. “That’s my boy,” I say. “I just want to see where he lives. That’s all, man.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I need to go.”

  “I’ll call back,” I say. “Maybe you’ll remember.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Call back.” Like she’ll say just about anything to get rid of me.

  I give her two days. I’m so sure she won’t pick up that the TV is still blaring when she does. It takes me a bit to find the remote and turn down the lame cop show and its sirens. I take it as a good sign that she doesn’t hang up.

  “What do you want from me?” she asks.

  “So you’ve been to their house,” I say. “You must’ve been.”

  Nothing.

  “We don’t need an address. I got a truck. You could just sort of show me the way. Just so I could see it. You know, the place where my kid is gonna grow up.”

  Then, just like that, she caves, like whatever loyalty she had to Bev was a house of cards.

  It’s stinking warm for the last week of May, and I wonder if my kid has air-conditioning in his place. My madre was from Argentina, and she said the Canadian prairies had no real spring—one day it was winter and the next it was summer. She may have been crazy about most things, but now and then she had a point.

  Betty’s rusty red beater smells as bad as it looks, and for a minute I wonder whether little River Heights Faye will even get in when I pick her up. The duct tape on the passenger seat has worn away, leaving nothing but stringy glue and a gaping wound that looks like it should be oozing guts. The clock and the stereo have some wiring issues I haven’t bothered to fix. Even the dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror is looking a little tired, a few feathers and a couple of beads lost god-knows-where. Maybe Betty misses it and so her ghost comes in the night, taking it back bit by bit.

  But I’m already late and Warren was in my face demanding cash as I went out the door and there’s nothing I can do about the truck anyway. She either gets in or she doesn’t.

  I pull up in front of the hair salon with the giant scissors out front. She’s huddled under the awning, deep in the corner behind the sign, like it’s freezing out or she doesn’t want to be seen. As soon as she spies me, though, she darts out and jumps in the cab.


  She does up her seat belt and tries to close the glove compartment.

  “The latch is tricky,” I say. “This thing is a piece of shit, but I got my reasons for keeping her on the road.”

  She gives up. Luckily, her legs are so short that the gaping compartment door doesn’t even graze her knees. Her calves are hairless, like mine. “No wonder you like to think you’re an Abo,” Bev said once. “Just like them, you’re as silky smooth as a little girl.” Bev had plenty of soft blond down in all the right places.

  I forget to signal as I pull out, and some asshole honks.

  If Faye notices, she doesn’t show it. She looks straight ahead, all business. “Do you know the overpass on Pembina?”

  “No sweat,” I say.

  She’s so quiet, I can’t stand it. She looks so small there beside me, so solemn, that if I were a cop, I’d pull us over as a possible pedophile and his victim.

  “So what did Bev tell you about me?” I ask. “Did she say anything?”

  She is gazing at my forearms as I drive. Bev used to lie in bed and trace my veins, say they looked like little rivers on a map. Faye looks away as if I’ve just said this out loud. “Not much. She said you were really into the idea of being a daddy.”

  I get out a sad-looking pack of gum from my pocket and wave it at her. There’s two left, but she shakes her head. I drive with my wrists as I unwrap a piece, and she watches my arms again.

  “I was just wondering,” I say, “because Ray is a piece of goddamn work. He thinks I’m not good enough for his precious baby, but he’s fine with getting rid of his own grandkid. He doesn’t really give a shit about Bev. He just wants to tell her what to do.”

  Faye grabs the gum pack off my thigh and takes the last piece. Bev always says, “All women reserve the right to change their minds, so get used to it.” I guess she’s right.

  “I don’t know much about him,” she says. “But he seemed like a pretty distant father.”

  I smack the steering wheel, then hit the brakes a little hard at an amber light. We’re finally getting somewhere. “Exactly. Distant and dominating. That’s Ray.”

  Faye chews mostly with her front teeth, as if she thinks her molars would be too big and mean up against that little stick of gum.

  “Do you think I can get her back?” I ask.

  She shrugs, a little kid who’s just been asked, Who did this? “I have no idea. Like I said, I haven’t even spoken to her since the hospital.”

  No matter how hard I try, I can’t get a read on her. She helped Bev give up my kid, and now she’s here, helping me. So where does that get me with little Chinese Faye? Nowhere.

  I turn left at the private girls’ school, where they’re outside practicing field hockey with their pushed-down knee socks and pushed-up tits.

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” I say. “I have my rights.”

  We get to Pembina, head through the underpass with its lame-ass South End grafitti. A DIY frame shop comes up on our left. “This look familiar?” I ask.

  She nods. “Turn left here.”

  I’m in the wrong lane and have to get over quick. Another asshole honks, and Faye closes her eyes for a second, then gives a little wave to the other driver. We head into a maze of tree-lined streets, past houses with pastelstucco fronts and nothing but dandelions for lawns.

  “This Wildwood,” I say. “How far east does it go?”

  She shrugs again, as if she has no idea which direction east is. If women don’t know something, it’s just because we don’t give a shit. Another one of Bev’s sayings.

  “All the way to the river,” Faye says.

  All the way to the end of the road, a dead end—doesn’t get much simpler than that. She points left, then left again. “Stop. That one there, with the bright-red door.”

  I hit the brakes but still have to put the truck in reverse, back up maybe fifteen feet. It’s right across the street from the river, a house from a storybook. The doorway is an arch, and the windows are not flat but jut out in threes, like you could build a seat in them and while away your livelong day. A tree full of tiny pink flowers reaches over the front porch like a giant arm. Outside in the driveway, there’s a highend khaki stroller, but otherwise, there’s no sign of life.

  “It’s a charming house,” Faye says, so quietly I can hardly hear her. It’s like she’s forgotten I’m there and is talking to herself. “Those chokecherry petals on the grass—they look like pink snow.”

  I nod. “Do you think they’re home?”

  More shrugging, and I begin to wonder if this is a thing with her—a tiny body in a big hoodie trying to shrug herself down until she disappears, like a turtle.

  “They left stuff in the yard,” I say. “Who goes out and just leaves stuff there?”

  “Maybe they think it’s a safe neighborhood,” she says.

  I reach across to the glove compartment and fish out a joint. Some old parking tickets and a pair of broken sunglasses slide onto the floor, but she pretends not to notice.

  My lighter is on its last legs and it takes three tries to get her going. Words cannot express how much I need the hit, and within seconds, I’m no longer about to scream bloody murder at uptight turtle Faye.

  “That’s stupid,” I say. “No place is that safe.”

  I offer her a puff, just to be polite, not because I think she’ll take it. But it’s like with the gum. She holds up her hand at first—no way, no thanks—then ends up taking it anyway. She holds it very dainty, her fingers making a perfect little a-okay sign, and doesn’t cough as much as I expected. She takes three hits, squinting her black eyes as she exhales, like when she decides to do something, she does it right.

  “So Bev,” I say, “she didn’t tell me squat about you. You two go way back? You friends as kids?”

  She leans back against the dirty headrest, looks chill for the first time. “Sort of. We were neighbors for a while. She lived across the street from the time we were five until we were eight.”

  The sun appears from behind a cloud, and I blow smoke into its rays. “No shit. You knew Bev way back then? What was she like?”

  She lets her head flop toward me, really looks at me for the first time since she got in the truck. “The same.”

  This makes me laugh, makes me wonder if this girl is at all who I think she is. “So why were you two just sort of friends?”

  She smiles like I’ve made a joke. Her right hand is still in the a-okay position, as if she’s holding her own imaginary joint now. “Did I say that?”

  “Yeah, you said you were sort of friends.”

  She nods, stops smiling. “Well, it was convenient for my parents to have me hang out at Bev’s place all the time.”

  “What, they made you go?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, “no,” but it’s like she’s talking to herself again. “It was just easier if I did. I’m an only child, and I think they were glad I had a friend. It was so easy to say, Sure, go to Bev’s. Isn’t it nice a girl your age moved in? I’ve got a deadline. I’ll be doing the crossword. Whatever. So when Bev finally crossed the line, my parents acted like she was the devil, even though it was just some hair. But it was just their guilt, their own stupid guilt.”

  So all it takes is some good-quality weed and the stick flies out of her ass. She’s just like the rest of them, going on about the same shit girls go on about.

  “Yeah?” I say. “Well, all I know is I’m going to be nothing like my folks. They were useless tits.”

  She finds this hilarious.

  “I’m serious,” I say.

  She holds up her hands in surrender. “I believe you.”

  The perfume of the pink tree outside mixes with the sweet, smooth smell of the joint and turns Betty’s stinking truck not half-bad. Any breeze has gone dead in the big leafy trees. A big dog starts barking like it means business.

  She stares straight ahead. “Were your parents religious?”

  I have to think for a second,
make sure she said what I think she said. There really is no reading this girl. “Religious?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Were they spiritual people? Did they go to church?”

  Here, in front of my kid’s house, the last thing I want to talk about is my crazy madre.

  “My foster mom, Betty,” I say, “she did the sweat and thanked the Creator and shit. She talked about the Circle and the Cycle, how we’re all never-ending. She believed in dreams and said anyone who thought history moved in a straight line was a jackass.”

  Faye gives the dream catcher a little push with her finger, sending it swinging in the still air. “Okay, but Mannie is Spanish, right? Short for Emmanuel?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But nobody ever calls me that.”

  “Right. But Emmanuel means ‘God is with us.’”

  “No shit?” I ask.

  “No shit,” she says. “Our cleaning lady, Tina—her son is named Emmanuel.”

  After that we just sit for a while, like it was with my buddy Nathan, Betty’s youngest, when we were kids and could sit together without saying a single word.

  Then her phone buzzes, and she makes no effort to hide the text. Mom still not talking. Dad sulking. Colm pale and depressed.

  “I have to go,” she says.

  And I pretend I’m happy to take her whenever and wherever she asks, that it’s the least I can do. I pretend that the truck’s relentless stench isn’t creeping back, pretend I don’t care that the stroller in the driveway was fatigue khaki, expensive and ugly, instead of baby blue with maybe little yellow ducks printed on it.

  NINE

  It turns out my kid’s street isn’t a bad place to smoke a joint or two and turn to lead. I get a kind of routine going—wake up when I get too sweaty to sleep, boil two eggs, have a few puffs, head through the drive-thru for an apple cruller, park in the shady spot across the street, under the tree with leaves the size of my head, sit until the guy pulls in the driveway around four thirty. It’s not a bad place to lay low when you owe a lot of people and one of them is your giant roommate.