I leaned forward beside her, hands on my knees, and looked inside. It was perfect, I thought excitedly. The branches formed a shelter big enough for me to stand up in. I ducked inside and sat with my back to the tree’s trunk.
“Yeah. I could almost live in here!”
Mom smiled. “You see? It’s just like being in the wilderness. I was even thinking I could bring some things in for you, maybe a blanket and some pots and pans, and you could make it into your little house to play in whenever you want. What do you think?”
“Groovy! Maybe even some real dishes and stuff?”
“Of course, darling. We’ll find some at the thrift store.”
True to her word, Mom took me on a shopping trip that very afternoon. We lugged everything back to the park, and then I ran around putting everything out while Mom smoked a joint on the ground beside me.
“Can we come back here tomorrow?” I asked just before we left.
“Sweetheart. We can come here every day!”
I DON’T THINK MOM introduced me to the tree fort with the intention of it becoming my babysitter, but that’s the way it worked out. At first it was always the two of us, playing together and pretending it was our own little house. Then one day, she said she had to meet someone in the picnic area, and would I be okay playing on my own for a while?
“Meet who?” I asked.
“Just a friend. You don’t know him.”
Him. Of course. I nodded without looking up, knowing she would be within shouting distance. After a few minutes I barely noticed she was gone, and a little while later she was back again.
A few days after that, Mom sat beside me with her hands under her chin. “So I was thinking,” she began. “I should go and visit Karl, and it’ll probably be really boring for you. Wouldn’t you rather stay here and play?”
“No,” I said, throwing a handful of dirt into my pot.
“Are you sure? I won’t be long. I just know you’ll have way more fun here.”
I didn’t answer. The thought of going to the hospital or to Mrs. Hofler’s house wasn’t very exciting, but neither was the thought of being on my own. “How long will it take?” I asked finally.
“Not long, just an hour or so. I’ll be back before you know it.”
I shrugged.
“Okay,” she said after a minute, and leaned in to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. “See you soon, my love.”
I kept my head down while I stirred spruce needles into my pot. As long as I didn’t see her feet walking away from me, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t cry.
MY TREE FORT QUICKLY became the center of my new world. Every couple of days, Mom would bring me there and play for a few minutes, and then she would leave. I never watched her go. Instead I would kneel on the ground, decorating my mud cakes and mixing my leaf salads. I usually brought Suzie Doll for company, and I always had Papa Dick’s roach clip in my pocket. After I finished cooking, I’d hang the roach clip from a branch and lie on my blanket looking up at it, pretending I was in the wilderness. The shrieks of the park’s children floated to my ears, and sometimes I imagined them crashing through the trees, finding my secret place and taking it for themselves. It never happened, and Mom always came back to me. I never asked where she went. Somehow, I understood that she needed this time away from me.
But every day, I wondered when Karl would get better.
I SAT ON MY bed, watching my mother pace back and forth. Every few minutes she stopped and looked at the telephone, then began walking again. Outside our window, the last rays of sun had just given way to darkness.
“Why don’t you go to bed, Mommy?” I asked finally.
She stopped and scratched at her arm. “I can’t. I . . .”
“Why not?”
She tugged at her hair and then sat down beside me.
“Listen,” she said, taking my hand. Her eyes looked funny, kind of like the eyes I had seen on a rabbit once just before Papa Dick shot it. “I need to go somewhere, but I can’t leave you here. How would you feel about coming with me?”
“Where?”
“To a party.”
“A party?” I shook my head firmly. “No. I don’t want to.”
“Sweetheart, it’ll be fun. There’ll be music, and food . . . just this once, okay? Please? It’s not that far, we can even walk there.”
I crossed my arms stubbornly. Mom fidgeted a little more, then she leaned down and scooped me up. When she set me on the sidewalk outside, I let my legs collapse and I crumpled to the ground, but when she started to walk away from me I stood up, dusted my knees off and followed. I thought she would have been happy that I came with her, but she still seemed nervous and jumpy.
Half an hour later, we arrived at a house with booming music. Even from the sidewalk, I could smell pot smoke. Mom took my hand and pulled me through the front door. It was packed. People yelled to be heard, the Eagles blared, drinks sloshed, food spilled, cigarettes glowed and pot smoke billowed. I looked around for other kids, but there weren’t any. I clung to Mom’s side while she circled the room. She led me to a table loaded with mismatched serving dishes.
“Are you hungry?” she shouted above the noise, plucking a tortilla chip from a platter of browning guacamole.
I shook my head. After a while, we made our way into the living room and sat beside a man on a torn sofa. He had tanned skin and a mustache that grew like a weed across his face. He smiled at me and mouthed some words, but I couldn’t hear him. I climbed into Mom’s lap and turned my face into her chest. I didn’t like how her and the man’s knees were touching, or how their shoulders were rubbing together.
“Cea,” Mom yelled into my ear. “This is Sebastian. He wanted to meet you. Say hi.”
I turned my head away. A minute later, I looked back and the man was still smiling at me. He had the whitest teeth I had ever seen, even brighter than the white shirt and matching bell-bottoms he was wearing. He leaned toward me and put his mouth by my ear. “. . . Michelle’s daughter” was all I heard, but it wasn’t what he said that caught my attention; it was how he smelled. It was the same smell I noticed on Mom when she picked me up from my tree fort. I glanced at the man’s face again. I was pretty sure his eyes were brown, but they looked as if they were all pupils and no color.
He leaned in to me again. “Cea,” he said, louder this time. “It’s nice to meet you. You’re a beautiful little girl, just like your mom said.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling a little friendlier.
“Cea, do you know what?”
I shook my head, and he gave a little laugh.
“I am very, very stoned right now. I hope I remember this tomorrow.”
He laughed even harder, so I turned away from him and put my arms around Mom’s neck. The music was deafening. On the floor beside us, a woman was holding a wine cork behind her friend’s earlobe and sticking a needle through it. Another woman in a yellow caftan came by with a piece of hash on a blackened butter knife. The man with the white teeth lit his lighter under the knife and took a long hit.
“Mommy,” I said. “Can we go now?”
She looked disappointed. “You’re not having fun?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I want to go to bed.”
“Not yet, sweetie, I still need to talk to Sebastian some more.”
“But why can’t I sleep here?”
She shrugged, and then shouted something into the man’s ear. “Okay,” she said to me. “Let’s go find you a place to lie down.”
The man trailed his fingers along her arm as she stood up, and Mom let him. She carried me through the crowd and down the stairs to a bedroom in the basement, where she plunked me on the bed and pulled the covers over me.
“I’ll come back and check on you in an hour. Okay?”
“Mommy, who was that man?”
She smiled. “Sebastian? He’s nice, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at my hands, pulling the blanket under my chin.
I could feel her staring down at me, and then she bent and kissed my head.
“Just a friend. Sleep tight.”
I rolled over to face the wall. The music still boomed down here, mixed with stoned laughter and chatter, but at least it was a little quieter. I slipped my hand into my pocket and brought out Papa Dick’s roach clip, then curled it into my fist. Eventually, I slept.
PERHAPS MY MOTHER DID check in on me as promised, but I wasn’t awake to remember it. What I do remember is waking up hours later to a still, quiet house. I looked around, trying to remember where I was, and after a moment it came to me. Oh yes, the party. Mom. Where are you?
I swung my feet onto the floor and switched on the bedside lamp. Light flooded a room containing mismatched bedding, a poster of Raquel Welch taped to the wall and a half-empty whisky bottle on a bookshelf. I stood up, walked to the door and turned the handle. It wouldn’t budge.
At first, I was confused. I grabbed the handle with both hands and twisted it with all my might. And that’s when the fear set in, because there was no mistaking it: I had been locked in.
Tears pricked at my eyes. Making a fist, I pounded on the door as hard as I could. “Mommy! Mom!” I waited, but there was nothing. I backed away and sat on the bed with rubbery legs. Outside the window, the sky was black. I cried until my tears turned to hiccups, and eventually lay back and fell asleep. When I woke up again, the sky was starting to lighten. I got up and tried the door again, then went back to bed and lay still, trying to calm the beating of my heart. What if she never came back?
I was half asleep when she finally did. There was the rattle of a key in the lock and then there she was, standing in the doorway like the dream I had had of her countless times that night. Her face was red and puffy from crying, and she looked so different that it took me a moment to recognize her. She walked over to me and stretched her body out beside mine.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said into my back.
We lay there for a long time, not talking.
“Was this one of those times you couldn’t be my mommy?” I finally whispered.
She didn’t reply, but the tears soaking through my shirt told me the answer. I held her hand and stared at the wall, thinking that when I had my own little girl someday, I would never ever leave her alone even for a minute, for as long as I lived.
AFTER THE NIGHT MOM locked me in, she stopped leaving me when we went to the tree fort. Instead, she sat staring into the distance while I played. She put on a smile when I looked at her, but it seemed almost like my real mother was hiding behind some other lady’s face. I wanted to ask her if she was going to see the man with the white teeth again, but I was afraid to remind her of him.
One day while we were playing, she picked up Suzie Doll and put her in her lap. “I have something to tell you,” she said.
“Okay. What?”
“It’s . . .” She glanced away, then took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. “Remember that time you asked me why I never get pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, sometimes it happens even if you don’t plan it.”
“Oh. You mean like when you had me?”
“Um . . . yes.” She smiled a little sadly. “Well . . . it’s happened again. I’m going to have a baby.”
My heart jumped. “You mean . . . I’m going to have a baby sister?”
“Or brother, yes.”
I stared at her belly, which looked no different than it had the day before. “But there’s no bump,” I said, pointing.
“I know. It takes a while to stick out. And I’m only a few weeks along. I thought I was just late, but . . .”
“What about the diagram?”
She smiled again. “You mean diaphragm?”
“Yeah. Why didn’t it keep the sperm out?”
“I just . . . sometimes I forget to use it.” She rubbed her hand over her face, and I saw that there were tears in her eyes.
“Mommy, aren’t you glad?”
“I’m . . . it’s going to take me some time to get used to the idea, that’s all.”
I took Suzie Doll from her and fed her a bottle. “Is Karl going to be happy about it?”
Mom stayed quiet for a long time. “I don’t know,” she said after a while. “I guess we’ll find out when I tell him. Until then, let’s keep this to ourselves, okay? It’ll be our little secret.”
Me with my beloved Suzie Doll.
THINGS CHANGED AFTER MOM told me she was pregnant. We only went to the tree fort once or twice because she said she was too tired, and besides, she had lost her taste for pot. Instead, she started spending a lot of time in the bathroom throwing up. Her boobs were sore, she complained, and for the first time ever, I saw her wear a bra.
“Did you tell Karl yet?” I asked her every day when she came home from the hospital, but she always shook her head.
She never got the chance. One night, I was awoken by loud moaning. I turned on the lamp and walked to the bathroom, where the sound was coming from. Mom was sitting naked on the toilet with her head hanging between her legs.
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
She jerked her head up. “It’s—there’s a lot of blood. I think I’m having a miscarriage—”
“What’s a miscarriage?”
She let her head hang down again. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ve lost the baby.”
Mom put her face in her hands and cried, and I knew there was nothing in the world I could do to change any of it.
MY MOTHER WAS TWENTY-THREE when her second and last baby left her womb that night. Ten days later, and nearly four months after Karl first entered the hospital, he was released.
The day before he was supposed to come home, Mom had given me the lowdown. She hadn’t bothered to tell Karl about the baby, she told me, because she was sure it would have just upset him. But she had told Karl she wanted us to leave Mrs. Hofler’s house as soon as possible, and had even packed our bags. I nodded slowly, looking around our basement room. This had been my home for the past three months. A house filled with rooms I had barely set foot in, a perfect rose garden in the front yard, as normal as I ever could have hoped for. And yet my tree fort in the park had felt more like home than these four walls ever had.
Karl showed up in a taxicab the next day. Mom and I waited for him on the front porch, watched as he paid the driver. First his long legs swung out of the car, then his right hand, holding a cane. He planted the cane on the sidewalk and pulled himself to his feet, then walked up the front steps. Mom ran to hug him and dissolved into tears. After a few minutes, Karl pulled away from her and stood looking at us. Mom had lost weight, and she had dark circles under her eyes. I knew I looked pale and ragged from too many days spent in either a basement room or a tree fort worrying about my family. Karl patted Mom on the back and made his way to the front door, where Mrs. Hofler was hanging back.
“What is this, a horse show? I’ve never seen so many long faces in one place,” Karl said, stepping inside. “Hello, Mother.”
“Karl.” She nodded curtly. “Lunch will be ready shortly. You can wash up in the bathroom.”
Karl laughed and shook his head. “No, I think it’s high time we blew the friendly Hotel Hofler.” He pulled Mom toward him and thumped his cane on the floor. “Michelle, go and get yours and Cea’s stuff. What this family needs is a vacation, and I’ve got the perfect place in mind.”
Part Three
Pieces
Chapter Seventeen
Karl’s idea of a vacation turned out to be seventy-five miles southeast of Nanaimo on one of the Gulf Islands, an area known as a haven for draft dodgers and grow-oppers. And in the beginning, it almost did feel like we were on holiday. Karl used his workman’s compensation funds to rent us a cottage nearly as wonderful as the one in Celista, and I spent my afternoons collecting clams and oysters from the beach below.
Me at age seven. This was taken on the beach below the cottage that we lived in when we first arrived in
the Gulf Islands.
I started Grade One at the tiny island school and let Karl pretend to be Santa Claus on our roof that Christmas. I remember smiling a lot in those days, showing off my missing front teeth for Karl’s new camera and standing on a stool to wash the dinner dishes while he and Mom smoked their evening joint. I remember the thrill of being invited to a classmate’s pool party, even though I couldn’t swim and spent most of the party playing with an inchworm on my fingertip. I recall inviting a girlfriend over to play for the very first time, and begging Mom not to smoke pot that day so my friend couldn’t tell her parents on us. I spent hours in my bedroom, sewing tiny clothes for the Barbie I still dreamed of one day owning. I was happy, and life was as good as I’d ever known it to be.
I never knew what the last straw was, or who decided to end it. But just six months after we moved to the island, Mom and Karl called it quits. One rainy January day, I came home from school to find Mom sitting alone in the living room. She stubbed out her cigarette and opened her arms to me when I came through the door.
“We’re moving,” she said softly into my hair. “Just you and me.”
And that was it, the quiet ending to Mom and Karl’s chaotic two-year affair.
I remember that the room felt too cold when she told me the news, but I don’t recall if I ever said goodbye to Karl. The next day, Mom and I moved in with a friend of hers, a single mother who lived with her two young sons in a one-room guesthouse. Mom and I slept on the floor and cooked our meals on the outdoor fire pit.
About a month later, I saw Karl standing at my school fence at recess one day. I walked over to him and grinned, lacing my fingers through the chain-metal between us. His face looked as familiar as the old snow boots I pulled on for school each day.
“Small Fry,” he said, smiling down at me. “I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay here. You like your teacher?”
North of Normal- A memoir of my wilderness childhood, my unusual family, and how I survived both Page 17