The New Normal

by Ashley Little

  The evening sky was a magenta banner over Shuswap Lake as we drove past a place called Blind Bay. The rolling hills were golden pink, and the setting sun reflecting off the water turned the lake into liquid fire. Dad was asleep again and Roy was scanning the radio stations. The only one coming in clearly had a preacher going on about an afterlife of eternal damnation. I snapped it off.

  “So…” Roy said.

  “So?”

  “You hungry?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “No.”

  “I need to stop for gas pretty soon.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll stop in Kamloops.”

  “Fine.”

  “What do you think they call people from Kamloops?”

  “I don’t know. Kamloopians?”

  “What do you think they call people from Kamloops who work in orchards?”

  “No idea.”

  “Fruit loops!” He laughed and slapped the steering wheel with glee.

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “Yeah!”

  I snickered. “You’re such a geek.”

  “I know, but it suits me, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I do.” I reached over and rubbed my hand over his soft black hair. I let it linger at his hairline and gave his neck a few gentle squeezes. Then I folded my hands in my lap.

  A pale crescent moon popped out between the low mountains. My dad snored quietly in the backseat, his mouth hanging slightly open. I pushed my seat back and let my eyes rest for a few minutes.

  When I opened them again, the car was stopped and Roy was gone. A fierce panic rose up in me, but I forced it down. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that we were parked at a gas station. Dad was sleeping soundly, so I let him be and went inside, locking the car doors behind me. A grizzled man with a gray beard stood behind the till, and he eyed me up and down as I entered. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. Kamloops was cold.

  “Good evening, Miss,” he said in a cigarette-stained voice.

  “Hi.”

  I didn’t see Roy anywhere, and the wave of panic threatened to surge again. I walked to the cooler to pick out a drink. There was no one else in the store, and I could feel Graybeard’s eyes on me. I grabbed a chocolate milk and went to the counter.

  “From Alberta, eh?” he said.

  “Um, yeah, is it that obvious?” I looked down at my clothes.

  “Nah, your plates, sweetie.” He nodded toward the Tercel.

  “Oh, right.”

  He scanned the chocolate milk and squinted out the window. “Wild rose country, eh?”

  “That’s what they say.” I shrugged.

  “Knew a wild Rose once myself, hehe.” He smiled widely, displaying black holes where his canine teeth should have been.

  “Ha.”

  Roy walked out of the men’s room then, and I was so relieved my knees felt weak. He took a Coke from the cooler and came up to the counter, setting it down beside the milk. “And the gas,” he said.

  “This your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Roy said, sliding his arm around my waist like it belonged there.

  And then a funny thing happened that I can’t describe exactly, except to say it was sort of like an egg inside me cracked open, but instead of a little yellow yolk inside, it was a big gushy-girly-giddy-happy-go-lucky-warm-fuzzy yolk. And I stood up a little straighter and probably wore a dopey grin as I paid Graybeard.

  “Lucky guy.” He winked at Roy as we left the store.

  We got onto the Coquihalla Highway, and I kept stealing little looks at Roy when headlights illuminated his face. He wore an expression of contentment, the right side of his mouth turned up a little higher than the left when he looked over at me.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” I turned and stared straight ahead, a grin stretching my lips despite my attempts to keep a straight face.

  “Are you okay?”

  “For the most part, yeah.”

  “Good.”

  I found a radio station that wasn’t too fuzzy. It was mostly crappy soft rock, but at least it was something. I could just make out the black shapes of mountains silhouetted against the night sky, and I wished I could see the scenery instead of neon signs.

  “If you could have any superpower, what would you want to have?” I asked Roy.

  “Hm, that’s a tough one.”

  I nodded.

  “I think I would want the ability to read people’s minds.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “So I would know what other people were thinking about, and I could predict their next moves.”

  “I would never want to be able to read everyone’s thoughts. I think it would be scary.”

  “It probably would be, but it would be useful too.”

  “Give me one example of how it would be so useful.”

  “Well, like, say I was driving down the highway at night, in the middle of butt-nowhere, BC, and there was some dude approaching me in the oncoming lane.”

  Cars zoomed past us at lightning speeds. I shifted in my seat. My left foot was asleep and my back hurt from sitting all day. “Yeah?”

  “I could see his thoughts, right? So I would know that he wasn’t watching the road or paying attention to driving at all. I’d know if he was drifting off to sleep or thinking about cheating on his wife or whatever, so I could pull off to the shoulder until he passed instead of being in imminent danger by being on the road with him.”

  “So wouldn’t it be a better use of your superpower choice to be able to instantly regrow your organs and skin in case you got hurt?”

  “Maybe, but what about the other people in the car with me?” He turned to look at me, then adjusted the rearview mirror to check on my sleeping father.

  “Well, I guess they’d be screwed.”

  “Pretty much. What power would you want?” he asked.

  “I think I would want the ability to see into the future,” I said.

  “Don’t you think that would get boring though? You would never have any surprises.”

  “Yeah, but I would always be prepared for what was coming next.”

  Suddenly my dad stuck his face up front and sucked at his teeth. “Are we there yet?”

  Roy jumped a little, then laughed. “No, not quite yet, Mr. Robinson.”

  Dad stared at Roy in the rearview mirror for a long moment. “Call me David.”

  I turned around. “We just went through Merritt.”

  “Well, I can feel my back teeth floating, so you had better pull over, toot sweet.”

  Roy laughed and pulled over at the next rest stop. All of us got out. I felt pins and needles in my legs, and I did some jumping jacks to get the blood pumping back to them.

  When we were back in the car, Roy tried and failed to cover up a big yawn.

  “How are you doing up there, Roy?” Dad asked.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Robinson…uh…David, I’m getting kind of tired.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve never driven this far before, and, well, you know…”

  “Sure, sure. I understand. No problem, we’ll get a hotel in the next town. It will be cheaper than spending the night in Vancouver anyway. What’s the next town we’ll be coming up to?”

  I turned on the interior light of the car. “That would be…Hope,” I said, tracing the snaky red line of the highway in the map book.

  “Good a place to stay as any.”

  By the time we dragged ourselves into the Hope Hotel, all three of us were completely exhausted.

  “We need a room, please,�
� Dad said. “With three beds.”

  “All I have left is a single room and a double room,” said the lady behind the counter. She had unnaturally bright red hair and cakey, overdone makeup.

  Dad narrowed his eyes at Roy and me. Then he stared hard at Roy. Roy became really interested in picking a piece of lint off his shirt. “All right,” Dad sighed. “I guess that will have to do.” He paid for the rooms, then turned to us. “You kids hungry?”

  “Yeah,” we answered in unison.

  “Do you have room service?” Dad asked Strawberry Shortcake.

  “No,” She snickered.

  “Oh. Do you think maybe you could order us a pizza then?”

  Her plastery face softened. “Sure, honey. I can do that. What do you want on it?”

  After we’d eaten, Roy said goodnight to me and Dad. He hugged me extra tight and whispered in my ear, “I’ll leave my door unlocked for you.” Then he walked down the hall to his room. My heart fluttered inside my chest, and I had to cover my grin with my hand so Dad wouldn’t see.

  Dad lay on the bed, flicking through TV channels. “You go ahead and shower up first.”

  “Okay.”

  I showered and dressed for bed. When I came out of the bathroom, Dad was snoring loudly. I turned off the TV and the lights and crawled under the covers. I waited for about ten minutes to make sure he was asleep, then tiptoed out the door and went to Roy’s room.

  I knocked on the door.

  “Come in.” He cleared his throat.

  I stepped inside. He was watching TV.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “What are you watching?”

  “I think it’s a fishing show.” He laughed.

  I laughed too

  “Come on in. It’s pretty funny, actually.” He patted a spot on the bed beside him.

  The room smelled faintly of urine, the ceiling had water stains, and the double bed had a horrible floral-print bedspread. The springs creaked as I sat down. Roy set up some pillows behind him and stretched out on the bed, and I did the same. The show was kind of funny, but I couldn’t stop yawning.

  “You tired?” Roy asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I could sleep.”

  I smiled.

  He switched off the TV and the bedside light. He was closing the blinds as I slipped under the covers. I lay in the dark with my eyes half open, listening to him undo his belt buckle and watching as he folded his clothes neatly and placed them on the chair. Then Roy slid under the sheets next to me. We both lay on our backs, watching shadows dance across the ceiling. The noise of traffic from the highway below almost sounded like waves rolling in.

  I turned over onto my side, my back to Roy. He draped his arm across my belly and scooted closer so the front of his body pressed up against my back. He held me, and I let him.

  In the morning he was still wrapped around me, and I felt a warm glow mushrooming inside my chest. I closed my eyes and wondered how much longer we could stay like this. Then Roy began to shift behind me and I sighed, because he was awake and the spell was broken.

  He kissed me on the shoulder. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  “Morning,” I groaned.

  He pulled on my shoulder to roll me over, and then, propped on one arm, he leaned in and kissed me.

  Even though we both had morning breath and sleep boogers in our eyes, we made out right there in the hotel bed. I didn’t even have anything covering my head. It was bald as an egg, my head more naked than naked, and here I was being kissed and caressed by my boyfriend. It was fantastic.

  We were interrupted way too soon by a rap on the door.

  “Tamar! Are you in there? Time to get going, guys!” Dad sounded impatient but not furious, and for that I was grateful.

  Roy kept kissing me, and I had to push him away to talk. “Okay! We’ll be right there!”

  Then Roy pounced on me and kissed me again like he was drowning and I was oxygen.

  seventeen

  We went to breakfast at a greasy spoon across the street. Dad looked at me with question marks in his eyes, but I avoided his gaze and stared out at the gently sloping mountains that were every shade of green.

  In the car, we were already picking up Vancouver radio stations. The music was good, and the drive didn’t seem so hard anymore. We bypassed Vancouver proper and went straight to the ferry terminal, where we boarded the tiny foot-passenger ferry to Stellar’s Island at eleven o’clock. A tinny recorded announcement told us that our sailing time would be approximately seventy-five minutes and that, should we need them, there were life jackets under our seats. I pulled off my seat cover to check. There was nothing there but a dark empty space, some cobwebs and a gum wrapper. It was not reassuring.

  Roy and I left Dad sprawled out across three seats with the newspaper and went outside to the upper deck. Staring out over the vastness of the Pacific, the faint purple shadows of distant mountains shimmering on the horizon, I wondered how it was possible that I had lived in Alberta all my life and never ventured into the neighboring province of British Columbia. It made me want to see all of BC, all of Canada, all of the world! Who knew there was so much beauty outside of Kananaskis Country and the badlands of Drumheller?

  Roy and I walked around the upper deck, holding hands. Seagulls floated overhead on invisible air currents, suspended in time and space. The waves glittered ultramarine in the sun, and at that moment, I was happy. I really was.

  After we docked, we got a cab to the hospital. The woman at reception told us Mom was in stable condition and could be discharged that day. Dad and I went to see her, leaving Roy in the waiting room flipping through Popular Science.

  My mom was propped up in bed and watching a nature documentary about lions. “Tamar! David!” She opened her arms wide, scattering the crackers on her lap.

  I ran to her and buried my face in her chest. A sudden, violent sobbing overtook me. I was not prepared for it, and I could not stop. It was like there was some agonized alien creature living inside me that had chosen this moment to burst forth onto the pale-blue hospital bedsheets.

  My dad limped over and ran his hand over my back. “Shh, it’s okay now, we’re all okay now.” He smoothed my mom’s hair away from her face, and when I saw him look at her, I knew it was true.

  I straightened up and composed myself. I remembered why we were here. My mom had a dark purple hoofprint in the center of her forehead. But she was alive, and she wasn’t brain-dead or brainwashed or anything else we had been afraid to think about on the drive here. Her hair was longer than when I’d last seen her, and there were new silver strands around her face. There was a clarity in her eyes that I hadn’t seen for a long time.

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah, honey?”

  “I missed you.”

  She smiled, and the corners of her eyes crinkled up. Her eyes were shining with tears as she pulled me close to her again. “I missed you too, baby.”

  “Let’s go home,” Dad said.

  Everyone was pretty quiet on the drive back to Calgary. Mom and Dad dozed in the backseat, and Roy and I listened to music and talk radio. Roy had to stop for a coffee every few hours. He insisted on getting us back to Calgary that night.

  “I know I can get us there—it’s only another five hours,” he said, passing an RV.

  “It doesn’t matter, Roy. We can stop anytime. It’s okay if we don’t get back tonight,” Dad said.

  “I wish you could drive,” Roy said to me.

  “Me too,” I sighed.

  “Do you want to try?”

  I looked at his face, lit up every few seconds by passing headlights. “Are you serious? We’re on the number one! I’ve only ever scooted around in parking lots before. I can’t do this. No. No way.”
r />   “No problem. Just checking, that’s all.”

  I snorted.

  “Maybe I could take you out a few times when we’re back, get you comfortable on the road. You have your learner’s license, don’t you?”

  “I was just about to take my test when my sisters…”

  “Oh.”

  “So I never got it.”

  “That’s…too bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think your parents will ever let you drive?”

  “It’s highly doubtful.”

  “Damn.”

  “Double damn.”

  He laughed and so did I. He looked over at me. “You’re even prettier when you laugh, you know that?”

  “Eyes on the road, Roy!” Dad piped up from the backseat, suddenly awake.

  Both of us blushed, and I rolled my eyes. Roy squinted into the brights of an oncoming truck.

  I stayed awake the whole trip to make sure Roy didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. We finally got back to Calgary around four o’clock in the morning.

  Dad thanked Roy profusely and slipped him a wad of bills. At first Roy tried to refuse, but Dad forced the cash into his hand. Then Mom and Dad helped each other into our house and left Roy and me standing in the driveway.

  “Thank you so much, for everything,” I said. “You’re so…”

  “What?”

  “Great. You’re so great. Thank you.”

  “Hey, no sweat. It was fun. We’ll do it again sometime.”

  I laughed.

  “Maybe just the two of us though.”

  “Okay.”

  “Go check out some Vancouver apartments.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why not?”

  I couldn’t stop smiling.

  Then Roy reached for me and pulled me in close. We kissed, and it was warm and soft and delicious. The streetlights buzzed above us, and I felt something inside me melting.