“I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. But—”
“But what?”
“It’s just—”
Great. Now he’d made her cry.
“Christ, Abby,” he said. “Forget it, okay?”
The next morning he called in sick to work and stayed in bed.
Todd flew up to him and tried to climb onto his shoulder, but he batted her away. “Leave me alone, buddy.”
The bird flew into the kitchen and he heard a thud, then a sound like marbles scattering—she had spilled or broken something in a fit of hurt feelings. Eddie felt like he had a hangover and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the crow was on the mattress. Black feathers, black beak, black feet. She dropped something from her mouth. A Corn Pop.
“I’m not hungry, Todd.”
But the bird made a disapproving tsk-tsk sound, then picked up the cereal in her beak. She used one of her long toes to scrape at his face—“Screw off,” he said, and she dropped the Corn Pop into his open mouth.
Then she flew back to the kitchen, returned with more cereal, and he gave in this time. Opened his mouth and let her feed him. Her beak knocked his teeth and he tasted her bad, wild breath.
What the hell was he doing? Tara was right—there was something fucked up about him, something not normal.
“Go away.” He swatted at the crow. “You can’t be here.” Which was what police officers and business owners and even librarians used to say to him. But the bird stayed, hopped closer.
“You can’t be here.” He slapped at her, his hand brushing her feathered face, and she croaked and stumbled on the mattress. Huddled and shivered like she was cold. “Come on, Todd.” He climbed out of bed, picked her up, threw her toward the open window. “Get out.”
But she flew back toward him, kept loving him like an idiot. So he smacked her for real this time, bent her wing feathers. “I said, get out.” He slammed his fists against the wall, stamped his feet, and she puffed out her neck feathers, thrashed away from him. “Get out!” he screamed. “Out!” She shrieked and shrieked, circling his head—he heard the frantic flap of her wings. He swung with his fists and she slammed into the wall. Dropped to the floor.
Her wings beat the floorboards. Her eyes were open.
“Oh, Jesus.” He fell to his knees. “Todd.”
He crawled toward her and picked her up. She was so light—Abby had explained that the bones were hollow, and he pictured them made of delicate glass pipes. He’d fucked up; he’d fucked up. She seemed smaller, shrunken, and he held her to his heart.
“No,” he said. “No.”
Her quick, ragged heartbeat. Her crumpled feathers.
He couldn’t even do this. Couldn’t even care for a street bird. What would he tell Abby? That he was sorry. So sorry.
She shuddered in his hand. Then made a low, tuneless sound, like she was asking a question. And he tried not to cry, tried not to keen. Tried to quiet himself so she could listen for an answer, so she could find her way. He touched the bird’s broken wing-feathers, settled her against his chest, and hoped this would calm her. Hoped she’d forgive him. Hoped she was listening to tectonic shifts, or meteors, or the hush of rain before it falls.
Flight
She took the ferry, then three buses, to get into Vancouver. On the third, she fell asleep with her head against the window, the stop-start rhythm of the bus lulling her into dreams. She woke to a screeching sound and opened her eyes expecting to see people wounded, screaming. But the other passengers read newspapers or talked into their phones or slept with their heads tilted back, mouths open.
The guy next to her pointed to the window. Outside, the sky was moving like a wave of black water. Crows. They cawed and roiled overhead.
“They do that every night.” The guy’s hair hung to his eyes and his teeth were edged in black. “Roost overnight in Burnaby and come to town during the day. They commute.”
She pressed her face to the window and her breath fogged the glass.
“Did you know crows can find their way home from anywhere? They’re smarter than we are.” The guy turned to her. “You new here?”
“Yeah.”
“From where?”
When she was younger she used to tell people she was an alien from Pluto. “From the island. Victoria.”
“Nice.” When he smiled, there were so many lines around his eyes that his face looked like a cracked window. “Welcome.”
Last week she’d met a man at the mall, got into his car—a silver Acura—and went down on him while her best friend, Marina, waited nearby. The man was tall, wore too much gel in his hair, and had teeth that were glaringly white. He’d approached them in the food court while she and Marina were dipping fries into a chocolate milkshake.
Marina was more experienced, but she had a boyfriend who skateboarded and kept rats as pets, and she didn’t want to cheat on him. “The secret is, don’t use your teeth,” Marina whispered as they followed the man out to the parking lot.
“Got it. No teeth.”
Then Marina grabbed her sleeve. “Are you sure? Maybe we should just go.”
But they were already at the car and the man had unlocked it with his key-chain fob. It was the same make of car her parents drove and that seemed reassuring, like he must be an okay guy if he drove that car.
The outside of the Acura was clean, but inside the floor was sticky against her bare knees—probably spilled pop or coffee. The parking brake dug into her ribs and she kept her eyes closed. It seemed to take hours. A couple of times she scraped him with her teeth.
Then he finished, uttered a wet groan, and gave her $40. She climbed out of the car, aware of Marina’s wide eyes on her. “What happened?” said her friend. “Are you okay? What happened?”
She untangled her hair with her fingers, shook her head. Her legs felt shaky. “Gross,” she said. “Super gross.” Then she made a barfing sound so Marina would laugh. “I need a juice or something.”
Some secrets stay with you, like when that weird Mormon kid in grade four showed her the scars on his arm. They were behind the school, in a gully that became soggy and waterlogged each winter. He’d lifted his sleeve to show thick red crosshatched marks. She reached out and touched them and that’s when he ran away. “Leave me alone!” he screamed, as though she were the one who’d hurt him.
But this man in an Acura—this was over as soon as she stepped from the car. She linked arms with Marina and went into the mall. Bought an Orangina and matching glittery halter tops. Then she put the rest of the money—she still had almost $20 left over—in the pocket of her jeans. She didn’t touch it, but knew it was there, a secret against her hip.
And now she had no friends, no plans, and the $20 was nearly gone—she’d spent half of it on a ferry ticket. So when the guy on the bus asked, “Where you headed?” she shrugged her shoulders. And when he said, “You hungry?” she realized she was. She was sixteen and always starving.
He pulled the cord above her head to ring the bell, and they got off at the next stop. It was raining, the drops falling down the neck of her hoodie. The guy took her to a restaurant in Chinatown where everything was a shade of red: the booths, the plasticized tablecloths, the menus, the sweet-and-sour sauce. He pulled out a chair for her. “The spring rolls here are fucking awesome,” he said.
His name was Eddie and he was thirteen years older than she was, but he didn’t know that. He thought her name was Rachel and that she was twenty-four years old. That’s what it said on the ID she carried in her bag and that’s what she told him. “Rachel.” A dreamy look on his face. “That’s a pretty name.”
He looked older than twenty-nine but acted younger, and she wondered if he too was lying about his age. But then he told her, over spring rolls and steamed rice and ginger chicken, that he was a recovered addict, that there were whole years he couldn’t remember. Chunks of time had been scooped out of his life like ice cream.
&
nbsp; “Addicted to what?”
“Heroin. Morphine.” He sounded both ashamed and pleased. “I smoked a lot of crack.”
“That explains your teeth?”
“Shit.” He laughed. “I’m getting my teeth fixed. That’s a promise. I work for Telus now and they have a dental plan.”
“You install phones?”
“Phones. Cable. Internet. It’s awesome. What about you?”
“I’m a hairstylist.” Delivering a lie so smoothly sent a warm feeling to her stomach, like when she and Marina passed a bottle of vodka back and forth.
“Cool,” he said. “So you cut hair and stuff?”
She held up a piece of her own hair, which she hated—it was a boring brown and her mother had recently forbidden her to bleach it. “Cuts, dyes, perms.” This wasn’t entirely untrue. Last week she’d cut her own bangs and now they sat short and uneven on her forehead.
“I like talking to you, Rachel,” he said. “I like looking at you too.”
Earlier that morning she’d woken to the smell of cinnamon from the kitchen. Her dad was making oatmeal and had added apples and walnuts to it, like he did every morning.
She’d already packed her backpack—taken out her school-books and replaced them with her Discman, her one-eyed bear, and extra socks. She put on her jeans, her hoodie, her wooden earrings. The $20 was still in her pocket—the bill had rubbed against her body for two weeks and now seemed as soft as her own skin. In social studies she’d used a pen to draw a dollar sign on her hand. Forty dollars for my mouth, she wanted to say, every time she smiled.
She passed through the kitchen. “I’m not hungry.”
“No way, monkey,” said her dad. “You have to eat something.”
How do you look your dad in the eye when he had the same haircut as the man in the Acura? Now every man she saw had that haircut: her teachers, her soccer coach, even the Chinese guy who owned Al’s Corner Store but whose name, it turned out, wasn’t Al.
She sat at the table and her father set down a bowl of oatmeal—it looked like baby food—and she thought she might be sick.
“Hurry up,” said her mother, pouring herself coffee—she never had to eat breakfast. She wore her blue RN uniform and clunky white sneakers that squeaked as she walked. “You need to be out the door in eight minutes, sweetie.”
Sometimes it felt like a mistake, like she’d stumbled into her parents’ lives in place of another, better girl. And that was likely true. She was the result of $30,000 in fertility treatments, her life started in a petri dish. Other zygotes in the dish didn’t survive, but her cells had replicated. And now her parents rented an apartment on Quadra Street because they’d spent their down payment acquiring her. Had she been worth it? She wished she were prettier or had a talent or a knack for kindness. She wished, for her mom’s sake, that she were tidier. She wanted to come from nowhere, to owe nothing. To rise up like Adam from the dirt on the ground.
But even Adam had a parent. Even he was beholden.
She ate a few bites of the oatmeal, then scraped the rest into the garbage. She wanted to hug her parents, but was afraid she’d cry, afraid she’d worry them. “ ’Bye!” she screamed as she threw on her backpack and stepped out the door.
She walked to school but didn’t go inside the building. She wanted to ask Marina to come with her: Let’s go to Vancouver. I’m fucking serious. But Marina was obsessed with her boyfriend and wouldn’t have left for even a day. So she walked down Cook Street, then Pandora, and at Douglas waited for the bus. It took practically a hundred years to get to the ferry terminal and she missed the eleven o’clock boat. “It’s a two-hour wait, hon,” said the woman behind the glass. The woman reminded her of her mother.
“That’s okay,” she said. Then she used that twenty dollars, money born of her own flesh, to buy a ticket for the next sailing.
When she reached Vancouver, she called home from a pay phone and left a message to say she was staying over at Marina’s. Then she phoned her best friend’s house and Marina’s little sister answered. “Is Marina there?”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Kiki, you know it’s me.”
“Marina’s busy. Ryan’s over.”
“Put her on anyway.”
“Where were you today?” said Marina when she finally picked up the phone. “You missed the shittiest gym class ever. Dodge-fucking-ball.”
“I’m in Vancouver.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Yeah. I am.”
“How did you get there?”
“I flapped my arms and flew. What do you think? I took the ferry.”
“Are you serious?” Was that admiration in Marina’s voice? “Why?”
“I told my parents I was staying at your place. So if they call, just say I’m in the bathroom or something.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You are coming back, right?”
“Oh, my god.” She looked around the ferry terminal, at the empty benches, the freshly mopped floor. “You should have come with me. This city is so wicked.”
Eddie paid for dinner. As they left the restaurant, he touched the small of her back. “Do you want to come over? I want you to come over.”
What did she owe him? He’d bought her dinner; he’d been nice. She let him hold her hand as they walked down East Pender and they didn’t talk until they reached his building. He led her up two flights of stairs and stopped outside a door with a chipped paint job. “My place isn’t much, okay?” he said. “But it’s not forever.”
When he unlocked and opened the door, there was a big, panting dog on the other side. A Rottweiler with a string of drool hanging from its mouth. “Jake, this is Rachel. Rachel, meet Jake.” Then Eddie got down on the floor and let the dog lick every inch of his face. This guy was too open, she thought, too bighearted.
“I found him behind the Nesters’,” he said. “Practically starving.”
“Do you always take in strays?”
“Yeah, I guess. Last year I even lived with a crow.”
“Like, a bird?”
He smiled up at her from the floor. “Jake likes you,” he said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “I can tell.”
This morning she’d woken up to her dad making oatmeal, and now she was in a stranger’s apartment, drinking whiskey. She and Eddie shared the same cup, passing it back and forth. They sat on a couch with mismatched pillows and, worried she’d be cold, Eddie covered her shoulders with a threadbare quilt of corduroy, fleece, and smooth gold satin squares.
“My mom made it for me when I was born,” he said, running his hand over the faded patchwork. “Even when I was fucked up all the time I made sure not to lose it. And to wash it by hand. The stitching is really fragile.”
He didn’t touch her, but he stared at her, his eyes glassy. She expected his weight against her, his sweaty palms on her skin. Instead he flipped his hair from his eyes and said, “Hey, you should give me a haircut.”
“What?”
“Yeah, why not? I was gonna get it cut anyway.”
“I don’t have my stuff with me,” she said. “I need my own scissors and clips and stuff.”
“No excuses.” He got up unsteadily from the couch and went to the kitchen, then came back with a pair of scissors. “Come on.” He held her hand and pulled her into the bathroom.
He took off his shirt, exposing the knotty muscles of his arms, his soft middle, and a piercing in his right nipple that looked red and new.
“No, I’ve had it for years,” he said when she asked about it. “It just never healed right ’cause I did it myself.”
He knelt in front of her. She draped a towel over his shoulders and made a big show of asking what style he wanted, talking about his hair’s texture, the thickness of the follicles. She was proud of the word follicles. Then she scrubbed his head in a bathroom sink streaked with rust. His wet hair was soft between her fingers, the water warm
on her hands.
She started cutting, hoping for the best. She didn’t want to take too much off, didn’t want him to look like that guy in the Acura. Hair fell to the floor in wet tufts that skidded around her socked feet. She tried not to look at herself in the mirror. Her vision was blurry and she kept seeing her parents’ faces reflected in her own. Her dad’s almost-green eyes. Her mom’s thick eyebrows and the shadow of veins below her skin.
When she was finished, she rubbed Eddie’s head with the towel, ostensibly to dry his hair, but mostly to mess it up so he wouldn’t notice how uneven the cut was. The left side was too short, patches nearly gone above his ear.
“There,” she said when she was finished. “Done.”
He stood up and examined himself, turning his head from side to side. He gave a low whistle. “Jesus Christ.” He found her eyes in the mirror. “Are you drunk or something?”
“What?”
“This haircut.” He turned toward her, and she was eye-level with his piercing—dried blood clung to edges of the metal. “What the hell?”
He must know now that she wasn’t a hairdresser, that she wasn’t Rachel. And who was he? What was he capable of?
“Sorry.” She put her hand on the counter to steady herself. “I fucked up.”
“Hey.” He gripped her shoulder. “Are you gonna cry? Do not cry.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I don’t—”
He turned back to the mirror. “Whatever. It’s no big deal.” He gave a wink, as though playing a trick on himself. “Good thing I’m so handsome.”
She woke with a fly buzzing above her face. She was fully clothed, on a fold-out couch, under a frayed quilt. She batted the fly away. Where was she?
Then the dog came over and ran his long tongue up her arm. Of course: the ferry, the bus, the haircut. She remembered very little—whole hours had been wiped away as if by an eraser—but she remembered stumbling to the bathroom, saying, I don’t feel well. Remembered that Eddie had tucked her in on the couch, under this quilt.
Now he was in the kitchen—she heard eggs popping in the pan. He’d opened the window, maybe so the smell of cooking oil wouldn’t linger in the apartment. She heard the sound of crows crossing the city.
The Dark and Other Love Stories Page 17