Your Constant Star

by Brenda Hasiuk

  You can’t just cut people off like that.

  A giant white cast pokes through the doorway, followed by a tiny black-haired girl in a wheelchair. The left side of the small face is bruised, a giant purple hickey, and there’s a red gash above the nose, crisscrossed with Frankenstein stitches. She’s wearing a yellow hoodie that’s so big, it looks like it’s eaten her hands. Her body has shrunk even more, but her eyes are the same black.

  Glossy Plum puts the wheelchair in Park and struts away like she’s done her good deed for the day.

  “You look terrible,” Faye says.

  I can’t imagine what those black eyes see, and I don’t want to. I focus on the gray-green swirls along the zipper of her hoodie, which look like snakes, or flower stems, or both. “You look small.”

  She rubs the cast with the sleeve of her hoodie, as if her leg can feel it. “Story of my life.”

  Twice—we’ve been in a car together twice. The first time, she helped me, and we got high in Betty’s truck. The second time, I almost killed her. “You should hate me,” I say.

  She acts like she hasn’t heard me. She looks at her hidden hands, and I study the flowering snakes. “I need to talk about it,” she says. “I keep seeing the headlights in that giant wall of windows. It is so beautiful, but then the noise wakes me up. Crashing through a house is so loud, and then I hear her screaming and him yelling.”

  I’m confused. “Do you mean Bev?”

  She shakes her head like I’m purposely trying to be stupid. “No. Did you know he was sleeping on the couch? We stopped inches from the guy’s sleeping body, and the woman thought he was dead. But he was passed out, and she kept screaming, ‘You’ve killed him!’”

  I know what Bev would say. I almost killed some rich, drunk sugar daddy in his house of glass. But Bev is long gone, and the lawyers are circling with their fat briefcases, asking me to remember details. Chinese Faye is here with her eight-ball eyes, asking me to…what?

  She goes quiet, stares at me until I have no choice but to look back. I remember what I have to tell her. “Your folks, they told me you’d testify against Bev. That she egged me on.”

  The staring contest goes on. “Why would you do that for me?” I ask.

  She blinks, once, twice. The contest continues. “Because it’s true.”

  She says it like it’s that simple, like nothing matters more than the truth, not anything, not even love. Mr. Mass Every Sunday told me he loved my madre at first sight, but what fricking difference did it make? He bailed at the first whiff of danger.

  Betty, though, she knew what had been done to her people. She knew what injustice was. But she knew what loyalty was too. She didn’t turn on us, no matter what we did.

  “Tell them everything,” I say. “I don’t care. But not that. Bev was along for the ride. Okay?”

  “You want me to lie?”

  “You leave that part out,” I say.

  “You’ll go to jail,” she says.

  How do I make her understand? Where does she think I have to go? “I was trying to save her,” I say. “That’s all I was doing.”

  Her parents appear in the doorway, loaded down with dying flowers and Get Well balloons that are starting to droop. Stretch is wearing red plaid shorts and Butch’s hair is a ball of fuzz. They look like the saddest-ass clowns that ever existed.

  “Please,” I say. “It’s all I got.”

  She nods. “Okay.”

  I begin to miss my drugged-up haze—Warren would’ve done anything for the cocktails at Glossy Plum’s party of pain. But they give me less and less and start hounding me back to life. Time to pee, Mannie, up you get. Try putting these pegs in the holes—do your best. This is Anthony from Legal Aid. Pleas. Dates. Terms.

  They try to keep me awake during the day so I’ll sleep at night, so the calendar will mean something again. Only the hounding—do this, get the old legs moving, try that, it’s important for assessment, your record ain’t great, are you prepared to—it wears me down until the need to nap drowns them out. I’m suddenly under water, and their words are garbled and far away. It’s nothing like the nothingness of the pain meds. It goes in fits and starts, like I have to come up for air every few minutes, sleep without rest.

  Fat Cat has just forced me to sit up in a chair, the vinyl kind that sticks to bare skin, when Faye comes again, wheeling her leg in first. Her face is less purple and her hair has been combed somehow to almost cover the gash.

  For over a week, my only visitors have been Anthony, Mr. Charity-Case Lawyer, with the yellow fingernails and unibrow, and Cheryl, the chinless therapist with tests dressed up like games. “What are you doing here?” I ask Faye.

  “I made them bring me,” she says, as if I should know who them is.

  I check to make sure my robe is closed, because Fat Cat barely registers as a woman and sometimes I get sloppy. This Faye, adopted Chinese Faye, she doesn’t turn me on, but I don’t want her to leave.

  “What’s your lawyer saying?” she asks. “How long?”

  My head aches, as if that thin layer of skin and muscle around my ears is trying to crawl away. Once upon a time, a fine government-funded cocktail took care of such things. “Probably one to three.”

  “It was in the paper again. About the charges this time.”

  The paper. She’s talking about the newspaper, and I wonder if Bev knows. She’d like that we made headlines, not like her sister’s sorry death, but busting ’er up in a blaze of glory. “Who reads the newspaper anymore?” I ask.

  “My mother works there,” she says.

  So Butchy is a reporter who cries without sound. “She the one who brought you all that stuff, the flowers and everything?”

  She smiles like I’ve said something funny and shakes her shiny black hair. “I have a friend out east with an itchy typing finger. She heard I was in an accident and told a bunch of people we know.”

  “You got a lot of friends,” I say.

  She shrugs. “They don’t know the whole story.”

  Yes, the whole story, extra, extra, read all about it—stolen car, smashed mansion, previous charges, reckless endangerment. She can be wild. She just needs a little bit of encouragement.

  “Have you heard from Bev?”

  Her black eyes stare. Are all Chinese so expressionless, so hard to read? “No,” she says. “But so far the media is painting Bev and me as unwilling passengers.”

  Mission accomplished, I think. May the force be with you.

  “No one else was seriously hurt,” she says. “They should’ve been, but they weren’t. Maybe you’re well named, Emmanuel. One paramedic called it a miracle.”

  I laugh, really laugh, until the pain makes it hard to breathe. It’s awhile before I can talk. “My madre believes in miracles, and she’s locked up.”

  She looks away, like she’s afraid the crazies might be catching. Then she hands me a beat-up piece of paper with something written on it: She calls him the Little Alien.

  “Turn it over,” she says. “It’s Olivier’s ultrasound picture.”

  All I see at first is a tiny black-and-white bug, but then I look closer and start to make out arms, and a head, and a backbone—maybe a foot. “She called him the Little Alien?”

  She pretends she doesn’t hear me. “You did the right thing,” she says. “You know that, right? I’m not leaving until you know that.”

  But I’m already long gone. I’m in the car, on the way to Keeseekoowenin. They’re shoulder to shoulder, three smelly brothers in the backseat, but I won the toss and ride up front with Betty, resting my stinky runners on a giant watermelon in the foot well. The sun is high and the sky is light, squinty blue. Like usual, there’re the crazy little birds that land in the middle of the highway. They’re red-winged blackbirds, even I know that, because they’re all black until they take off and you see each wing tip is red as blood.

  Two birds sit there for no reason until it seems the front wheels are within inches of them, and then they s
woop out from under us, take off, up, up, up.

  I spin around to watch them plunk themselves on the high wire of a telephone pole, and it’s like they’re laughing down at us all sandwiched in Betty’s smelly truck. That’s me, I think. A bird on a wire.

  Jesus, Bev would say. A bird on a wire? Could it get more fricking cliché?

  Faye touches my arm. Like father, like daughter. “What did you say?”

  I said I don’t care if it’s cliché. It helps me sleep.

  EPILOGUE

  Faye

  They don’t like it, but they wait patiently for my explanation. My parents let me out of the house to visit a repeat offender, as many times as I ask—they take me there and bring me back. They swallow their disappointment, seem happy just to have me with them, back from the brink.

  Celeste arrives with a new haircut, career-girl short. “So spill it,” she says.

  I know from my mother that Carson is history. His feelings got hurt too easily, he sulked—a muscular, well-coordinated baby. “God, Celeste,” I say. “Why do you care so much?”

  She pulls at her shorn locks, bangs her head against an invisible wall. “Because I thought we were friends.”

  It was really that simple for good ol’ practical Celeste—because friends stick by each other. I’ll have to introduce her to Mannie, the most loyal person I know.

  “Okay,” I say. “I know. I’m sorry, Celeste.”

  She grabs the hem of the Chinese robe, rubs it absently between her fingers as if to comfort herself. The tip of her nose and rims of her eyes are turning pink, the closest she gets to crying. At the end of sad movies, I call it the pinkie effect.

  I hand her a pen to sign my cast. “Don’t give up on me, okay?”

  She snorts, shakes her head. “Your mom would hunt me down. She loves me more than she loves you.”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  So Celeste is still Celeste—and Emma is still Emma. While I’m in the hospital, Emma texts me updates. Her parents are still not speaking to Colm, but he’s moving to Toronto soon. One day she’s buying Kiki, another disturbingly detailed Asian doll; another, she’s pre-reading her pre-med textbooks. But always, she’s that dutiful, fearless Chinese daughter.

  On the day my cast comes off, Sasha appears in the midst of a series of forgettable email ads for cell phones and cello camp.

  To Faye…Last time I sent to you, I was very blue. My mother married a new husband and I felt like here held no promise. My country is beautiful and shitty, both at same time. Your country, Canada, not China, I would call nice. Nice. I have baby part-sister now, which is so so strange, but she is very funny. I teach her how to do the thing with the tongue you call raspberry in Canada, with food in her mouth.

  I am learning art from my neighbor, who does the graphic books. I have lots of imaginings, and now I must get to work or that’s all they will stay. I hope maybe I come see you again sometime. You play cello for me and I weep, because I’m so good at the blues. Sincerely, Sasha.

  So Sasha is back from the brink too, no thanks to me. All those months I waited to hear from him and when he broadcast that SOS over cyberspace, I didn’t even answer. All I can do now is send him a video of me playing my latest favorite, a wild, in-your-face tune by some Czech/German busker my father heard in the Toronto subway station. He bought one of the guy’s CDs out of a cardboard box and added it to my playlist in the hospital.

  Yesterday, I put my best headphones on Mannie and cranked it. I’m not sure he knew what to make of it, a cello going more freaky badass than any hip-hop sample, but he listened until I had to go.

  When I got home, I pulled down the worn box from my closet, the one I nearly slept with for months of my childhood. I opened its fragile lid and held the tiny knit vest to my face. It smelled nothing like Sasha’s sweatshirt but like a mix of old wool and harsh detergent and something else, starchy as rice.

  It’s yellow, with a slightly cross-eyed duck stitched on the chest. The pants are knit too, a gray-green that must’ve sagged horribly beneath a diaper.

  “Most Chinese infant wear has a hole in the bum,” my mother said. “They toilet train by just letting their kids relieve themselves in the middle of the sidewalk.”

  But the orphanage had humored foreign parents, supplied brand-name disposables, tried to dress us in cute outfits for meeting day. My shirt is soft white cotton with a yellow happy face in the middle, the kind that was popular in the sixties. When I was small, these clothes were my baby pictures, my one physical link to my beginnings. I searched them for clues, studied every seam, every button, but in the end, that’s all there was, all they were—a collection of threads meant to keep me warm in the Chinese heat.

  Now I know the clothes are a nice souvenir of a happy day, nothing more. I know the girls at the moon gate are just a lovely picture that caught my fancy during a god-awful summer vacation. I know I will never really solve my own mystery any more than I will solve the mystery of Bev Novak.

  I know I have no idea, nor will I ever, if my birth mother is among the statistics of all the women in China who drink poison. Was my mother stoic or screaming as I entered the world? That woman, the one who bundled me up and left me alone in a bustling market—was she a believer, like Mannie? Does she believe that I’m okay? All I have to go on is me, and I am still young. Am I a believer?

  I remember one morning during our family pilgrimage to China, I woke up early in the hotel room. It was barely dawn, but I could hear a delicate sound, like the tinkle of toasting wine glasses. I went to the window, where everything was filtered by a soft sheet of mist or smog. Down in the courtyard, maybe six floors below, there was a man. He was neither young nor old, surrounded by cages on wooden crates, and he was cooing as softly as a new father. Each time he released a latch, a dove with chimes around its ankles would take flight, tinkling its ascent through the manicured trees to the rooftops, out of sight. To this day, it’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t be sure it wasn’t a dream.

  Because in the memory, or the dream, my father is awake, sitting up in bed, watching me.

  “How can this place be so beautiful and so awful?” I asked.

  He stretched his arms behind his head, revealed the ridiculous tuft of reddish hair under his armpits, already pleased with what he’s about to pontificate. “Well, maybe what’s most beautiful and what’s most brutal are just two halves of the same whole.”

  It sounds like the kind of cryptic thing he might say, just to play the professor, but I can’t be sure. I do know what Celeste would say about it: You know what you need, Faye? You need to chill out. You need a massage. You need some nice heavy petting, a little tongue in the ear.

  So okay, I also know this: Some people are lost, maybe for good, but others are found.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much thanks to all those parents who have written so eloquently about adopting their daughters from China. Thanks also to Arthur Slade for his wise advice, to my editor, Sarah Harvey, for being so fantastic at her job, and to my own parents, for raising me so happy ho-hum.

  BRENDA HASIUK is an award-winning short-fiction writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her first novel, Where the Rocks Say Your Name, was nominated for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. She lives in Winnipeg, the coldest major city on earth, with her husband, author Duncan Thornton, and loves to answer email from readers because otherwise she’d be on Kijiji, buying used stuff she doesn’t need. You can reach her at bhasiuk@shaw.ca.

 

 

 
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